Trump’s Manhattan saga faces an unprecedented moment
An Insight into the Mysterious Wreath of the Fifth Avenue Building and his Campaign for the Post-WWITHton White House
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In 1971, an Ivy League graduate in his mid-20s rented a studio apartment on Third Avenue and 75th Street in New York City. The window looked out at the water tank in the adjoining building.
“I … tried to divide it up so that it would seem bigger. But no matter what I did, it was still a dark, dingy little apartment. Even so, I loved it,” wrote former President Donald Trump in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” co-authored with Tony Schwartz. I moved to the Upper East Side when I was a kid because I had an apartment in Brooklyn. … I became a city guy, instead of a kid from the boroughs.
Trump was not the last person to fall under the spell of Manhattan, with its fast pace, its soaring towers and its glamorous celebrities. He would build a career, endure divorces and business bankruptcies, become a mythical figure and mount an unlikely campaign for president there.
As with almost everything about the former president, there’s no real precedent for the latest chapter of his story — and no way to tell how it will end.
“It finally happened,” wrote legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers. According to sources, a grand jury in New York indicted Donald Trump on multiple counts after he had been investigated for half a dozen years. Trump fired back, calling the indictment ‘political persecution’ and warned ‘this Witch-Hunt’ will backfire.”
“It should be evident that no one is above the law, and that Trump should be held accountable for his actions in the way that any other citizen would be. These charges represent the first step toward accountability, but the journey will be long and winding.”
If he is elected president in 2024, Rodgers believes Trump will argue that the case against him can be dismissed because the Justice Department was wrong in 2000 when it said that a president can’t be indicted. While on the job.
Honig believed that the first hurdle for Bragg would be a motion to dismiss the charges. Even if he succeeds in that, his prosecutors will need to convince a group of 12 jurors to convict.
In a case where Trump isn’t very popular, you are more likely to get a jury of at least one Trump voter. A judge would tell jurors to put aside their political views and personal beliefs but I have no doubt that they are just as susceptible to bias and incentives as any other person. The bar at trial is higher than in the grand jury.
In the political arena, “there is a distinct possibility that Trump not only survives but also thrives,” wrote Julian Zelizer. “Trump has an uncanny instinct for using moments of peril to his advantage and his political career is built on punching back against the people and institutions he claims are unfairly attacking him. He has fallen back into the well-worn plan of presenting himself as a victim of a corrupt establishment in order to get his supporters behind him.
Henry Olsen of the Washington Post wrote, “Anyone who cares about fairness in our criminal justice system should be queasy that Donald Trump will be prosecuted in one of the country’s most liberal jurisdictions.” By all accounts, this should be a federal case.”
“New York state’s entire judicial process is controlled by Democrats who could lose their positions in party primaries. Alvin Bragg, the district attorney overseeing the case, boasted during his campaign that he had sued Trump or his administration more than 100 times during his tenure in the state attorney general’s office, something he probably did to curry favor with primary voters who loathe Trump. Every New York state judge who decides on a case is elected on a partisan basis. It would take a lot of courage for a judge to apply the law fairly and potentially ignore their voters’ desire for vengeance.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/trumps-manhattan-story-opinion-column-galant/index.html
The Nashville, Tennessee, shooting of a teenage boy and the president of the Covenant school: Trumps manhattan story on the agenda of the 2020 democratic summit
Sorrow, anger and frustration were among the emotions people felt after yet another school shooting last week — this time in Nashville, Tennessee, where three children and three adults were killed at The Covenant School on Monday.
“James and Jennifer Crumbley, who have pleaded not guilty, allegedly neglected cries for help from their son for months and dismissed serious concerns from the school the day before and the morning of the shooting. Yet even as they apparently ignored warning signs, the Crumbleys bought their son a gun and took him to target practice. Fifteen at the time of the mass shooting, their son pleaded guilty in October to terrorism and murder charges.”
The question of how to prevent shootings is raised by this. And they argued that on this front, there is a positive development — a move to hold parents accountable in certain cases:
“The parents of a teenager who shot and killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan in November 2021 are set to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter after an appellate court last week rejected their contention that the charges have no legal justification,” Peterson and Densely observed.
President Joe Biden touted efforts to oppose autocratic governments at last week’s White House democracy summit, co-hosted by Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea and Zambia.
“This makes the premise of the democracy summit ring somewhat hollow because while the Biden administration does an excellent job of trumpeting its commitments to democracy and women’s rights, only a year and a half ago, it cavalierly abandoned 40 million Afghans to the Taliban’s misogynistic theocracy.”
House Republicans are investigating the tumultuous US withdrawal from Afghanistan and there’s a congressionally mandated bipartisan commission examining the entire 20-year war in Afghanistan. “Of course, any examination of the US record in Afghanistan is something of a double-edged sword for Republicans,” Bergen noted, “since it was the Trump administration that signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that set the stage for the total US withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/trumps-manhattan-story-opinion-column-galant/index.html
Love Better: Fixing what is wrong with social media in the wake of Israeli protests and the Israeli parliament’s defeat of the Reform Reform Law
This week’s drama in Israel was an indicator of how protest can have a positive effect on a democracy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s back in office on the strength of an extreme right-wing coalition, has been pressing for an overhaul of the country’s judiciary to place it firmly under the control of the Knesset. “For Netanyahu, the plan was convenient,” wrote Frida Ghitis. Since one of the controversial bills was recently passed, it helped him escape his own legal troubles.
“On Monday, under nearly unbearable pressure, Netanyahu agreed to postpone the overhaul -— which was being rammed through the Knesset — until the next legislative term. The crisis isn’t over.
The breaks suck. So goes the introductory video for a campaign that New Zealand is conducting to help people cope with relationships that have ended. Holly Thomas wrote, “Our behavior doesn’t have to follow suit.”
“The nation’s Love Better campaign … aims to help young people recover from breakups and build resilience. The campaign includes a dedicated phone, text or email helpline run by Youthline, an organization dedicated to supporting people ages 12 to 24.”
It was part of a broader strategy to eliminate family and sexual violence and follows a survey of 1,200 16-24-year-olds who said they had experienced self harm, substance abuse, risky sexual behaviors and violence and coercion following rejection. It is shocking that campaigns like these are not common in other countries. At the very least, it would improve our collective mental health. At most, it might save lives.”
Is Utah leading the way in fixing what is wrong with social media? Kara doesn’t think so. Under new state laws, social media companies have to verify the ages of all users in the state and children must get permission from their parents to have accounts.
“Parents will also be able to access their kids’ accounts, apps won’t be allowed to show children ads, and accounts for kids won’t be able to be used between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. without parental permission.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/02/opinions/trumps-manhattan-story-opinion-column-galant/index.html
The King of Comics: Peter Kirby’s Iron Man and the First Seven Years in the Life of a Comic Artist and his Childhood Grandmaster Stan Lee
It will be gratifying to Moscow that Putin’s words have been spun in the West. Because Russia has already ‘used’ nuclear weapons. They were used extremely well, by trading on empty threats about the potential of nuclear strikes to very effectively deter the West from joining the war against Russia.
A year before the US entered World War II, a gutsy artist and his writing colleague introduced a new superhero, with the debut cover of the new comic showing him punching the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Schwartz wrote that Kirby’s son said “he was fearful and furious at the rise of Nazism in Europe and the US, especially after (British prime minister Neville) Chamberlain’s appeasement and Kristallnacht. He and Simon created their hero in direct response, and Kirby plainly stated, ‘Captain America was myself.’ When he drew him punching Hitler, it was his ‘own anger coming to the surface.’”
Superheros fell out of favor after the war and Kirby wrote and drew other genres of comics. When Stan Lee, by then the editor and head writer at what would soon be named Marvel, asked him to try superheroes again in 1961, the two created together the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther and countless others. This, combined with his artistic innovation, earned Kirby the moniker ‘King of Comics.’ It also made him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.”
The Impact of the 2016 Donald Trump Indictment on the Public Interest and the Views of the Process in the CNN Supercomputing Experiment
The survey indicates that the indictment hasn’t affected views of Trump personally. He has a 34% favorability rating and a 58% unfavorable one, the same as the CNN poll in which 32% held a favorable view of the former president and 63% an unfavorable one. Among Republicans, 72% hold a favorable view in the new poll, similar to the 68% who felt that way in January.
According to CNN, the former president will be charged with more than 30 counts in a sealed indictment, but the charges were not public knowledge at the time of the survey. The investigation relates to a $130,000 payment made by Trump’s then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to Daniels in late October 2016, days before the 2016 presidential election, to silence her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier. Trump denied having an affair. At issue in the investigation is the payment made to Daniels and the Trump Organization’s reimbursement to Cohen.
Some Americans are opposed to the effect the indictment will have on democracy. About three in 10 say the decision strengthens US democracy (31%) and an identical share say it weakens democracy (31%). More than a quarter of people think it has no effect on democracy. Republicans believe it to be weakening democracy. More than 50% of those who believe politics was a factor in the decision to indict say the same thing as more than one third of those who do not. Most Democrats see it as strengthening democracy (55%). Among those who approve of the indictment, 48% say it strengthens democracy and 30% that it has no effect on it.
The poll also finds that Americans split over the investigation launched by House Republicans into Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s handling of the Trump case, with 38% saying they disapprove of the GOP’s efforts to investigate him, 35% saying they approve, and a sizable 27% unsure how they feel about the investigation.
More than 9 in 10 Americans have heard at least a little about the historic indictment, with 51% saying they’ve heard a lot. Democrats are more likely to be tuning in, with 61% saying they heard a lot about the charges, compared to 45% for independents and Republicans.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/03/politics/cnn-poll-trump-indictment/index.html
The Randall-Sundrum investigation reveals a large error in the margin of sampling error for a random sample of 1,048 text messages
A random national sample of 1,048 people were surveyed by text message for the CNN poll on March 31 and April 1 after being recruited using probability-based methods. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. It is larger because of what subgroup it is.
There is an error. This story has been updated to reflect the correct percentage of independents who approve of the indictment of former President Donald Trump.
