Opinion | Conversations and insights about the moment.

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The court transcript and eyewitness accounts cannot do justice to the entertainment value of Stormy Daniels's testimony in Donald Trump's felony trial on Tuesday.

But those of us inside the courtroom are uncertain of her impact on the case, especially since we haven't yet heard all of what will surely be a long and blistering cross-examination.

The poised, smart and sassy black-clad witness — blond in front and brunette in back, with a big tattoo on her right lower arm — told a story that is familiar to tabloid aficionados but became much more powerful in court.

She spared no juicy details, from exactly and convincingly explaining how she met Trump at a 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe; how he met her in his hotel suite clad in pajamas and she teased him about thinking he was Hugh Hefner; how Trump, sprawled in his boxer shorts on the bed, surprised her when she came out of the bathroom; how they had brief sex, though her mention of "the missionary position" was stricken from the record; how Trump invited her to other events with the lure of a possible appearance on "Celebrity Apprentice" before, more recently, describing her as "Horseface" and a "sleaze bag."

Trump has denied everything except meeting Daniels briefly in Lake Tahoe. After hearing her testimony, it's hard to imagine any jurors believing him.

But that hardly means they bought all of Daniels's testimony. The least credible part came when she claimed that she was not in it for the money, but for "safety" because she had been confronted by a menacing man in a Las Vegas parking lot in the presence of her daughter.

My sense is jurors intuited that she would feel safer if she either signed the nondisclosure agreement, protecting her from threats, or went public with the sexual encounter, which would mean that if something bad happened to her, everyone would know why.

I asked several women in the courtroom how they thought women on the jury would react and opinion was divided, with some saying Daniels came across as self-regarding and untrustworthy. What we all agree on is that juries typically respond to real and assumed messages from the judge.

It helped the defense that Justice Juan Merchan sustained almost all objections to details in her testimony and, when the defense lawyers failed to object, did it for them.

Before the jury was summoned back from its lunch break, the defense made a motion for a mistrial, saying the details were too prejudicial.

But Merchan rejected the motion. He said "some things should probably have been better left unsaid," but in fairness to the prosecution, "the witness was a little hard to control." When he added, "I was surprised that there were not more objections," I imagined steam coming out of Trump's ears.

Even before cross-examination, it was clear Daniels had a lot of questions to answer about how she has exploited her time in the spotlight.

But my guess is that jurors will eventually conclude her testimony was a fun but fundamentally irrelevant part of this trial.

May 7, 2024, 3:16 p.m. ET

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He promised her dinner … but they didn't have dinner. He told her she reminded him of his daughter … then stripped down to his boxers and a T-shirt while she was in the bathroom. He said he could help her career with a spot on his TV show … then scolded her, "I thought you were serious," when she tried to leave.

To be clear, Stormy Daniels has never accused Donald Trump of anything but a payoff. She has maintained that the sex she says they had in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006 was consensual, albeit unenjoyable. But as I sat in the packed overflow room in the criminal courthouse where Trump is being tried and listened to Daniels testify about the sexual encounter she has often joked about, the whole thing sounded a lot darker, and murkier, than it had before.

Daniels took the stand on Tuesday and spoke confidently. She gestured with her hands, at times joking, and at other times she spoke so quickly that the judge had to ask her to slow down. But despite an agreement by the prosecution to not present "salacious" details about the sexual encounter itself, things took a bleak turn when Daniels described what came immediately before and after it.

Trump was not threatening during the sexual encounter, she testified, though he was standing between her and the door. She did not say no to sex with him, but she also didn't consent to him not using a condom. She kept in contact with him after, she said — even going to another hotel room with him another time — because she wanted to expand her career, and he was dangling an opportunity to appear on "The Apprentice."

And yet at times, the words Daniels used to describe the encounter with Trump were reminiscent of so many of the other stories of women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault: She said she "blacked out," then lay naked, staring up at the ceiling. She "felt like the room spun in slow motion," and that the blood left her hands and feet. When it was over, she said, she fumbled with her shoes — gold strappy heels she had trouble fastening because her hands were shaking so hard.

Ultimately she blamed herself: "I just thought, 'Oh my God, what did I misread to get here?'"

May 7, 2024, 1:37 p.m. ET

As a purely legal matter, Donald Trump's hush-money/election interference trial is not about the sex, but a single sexual encounter is at the heart of it. The prosecution made an important decision on Tuesday to highlight that in the most graphic way for the jury.

The district attorney's team called Stormy Daniels, the porn star at the center of this whole imbroglio, to the witness stand to describe the tryst she said she had with Trump in 2006. He denies that happened, but the case is about whether he falsified records to pay her $130,000 to deny it as well.

Daniels has no incriminating bank statements or other business records to offer in support of the key charges against Trump, but in describing her hardscrabble upbringing and detailing a hotel-room sexual encounter with Trump, she has been without doubt the most interesting and engaging witness yet to appear before the jury. Her role appears to be to convince the jury that the sex took place, that it was "traumatizing," and that Trump by implication is a liar, willing to go to great — and illegal — lengths to hide the encounter from the public.

At the same time, having Daniels testify presents real risks to the prosecution. She has been telling her Trump story for more than a decade now, and it's evolved, which opens the door for defense lawyers to challenge her memory or, worse, her honesty.

As her testimony continued through the morning, in fact, it grew more contentious. Justice Juan Merchan became increasingly impatient with the prosecutors, sustaining numerous objections from Trump's lawyers and admonishing Daniels to limit her description of the sexual encounter itself. "Just answer the questions," he said to her. His impatience might rub off on the jury.

This is a common problem for those who prosecute crimes, which are generally not committed by people with redoubtable morals. That character flaw can extend to the people they surround themselves with, some of whom (like Michael Cohen) may be convicted criminals themselves, even as they are needed to deliver the most damning evidence against the defendant.

It's hard to know how the jury will process Daniels's testimony, but at least she managed something few others have — humiliating Trump to his face. "Are you always this rude?" she recalled asking him after dinner at his hotel room. "Like, you don't even know how to have a conversation."

A better summary of the last eight years would be hard to find.

May 7, 2024, 12:21 p.m. ET

Israeli forces have entered Rafah, near the Egyptian border of the Gaza Strip, but we don't yet fully understand whether this is the beginning of a full-scale ground invasion of the city or something more modest. What we do know is that the flow of desperately needed food aid into a territory that is already starving is severely impeded.

The World Food Program warns that there is already a "full-blown famine" in northern Gaza, and children have already died of malnutrition. It's unconscionable that children should be starving as trucks full of food line up outside the border, waiting to enter. Israel's latest move aggravates the crisis.

The Israel Defense Forces seized the Rafah border crossing on Tuesday, halting the transfer of aid through that crossing from Egypt. And another crucial crossing, Kerem Shalom, was closed after a Hamas attack on Sunday killed four soldiers in the area. There are other ways assistance could enter Gaza, but U.N. agencies warned that the closures of these two crucial crossings risk worsening the starvation.

Israel has the right to pursue Hamas fighters who attacked Israeli civilians in a brutal attack on Oct. 7 and to recover its hostages still kept in Gaza. But Israel does not have the right to starve civilians.

The United States, along with Israel and Hamas, bears a measure of responsibility for the crisis. It is the United States that has continued to provide the weapons to prosecute the war and that has provided the diplomatic protection for Israel at the United Nations. The Biden administration is providing both food aid to Gazans and the bombs that fall on them.

Israel's actions also amount to a challenge to the Biden administration, which this week faces a deadline to announce whether it will enforce a law that restricts transfers of arms to countries that block American humanitarian aid. J Street, a liberal advocacy organization, says that more than half the Democratic members of the House and Senate have called for enforcing that law.

When President Biden has applied leverage — by raising the possibility of cutting off the flow of offensive arms — Israel has announced measures to allow more food into Gaza. A central question this week is whether Biden will use his leverage to prevent the starvation in which the United States is complicit.

May 7, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

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The Israeli government's decision to kick Al Jazeera out of Israel says more about the government than the TV network. The Arabic programming on Al Jazeera may often be tendentious and anti-Israeli, but shutting it down further erodes Israel's proud image as a democracy in a neighborhood populated largely by authoritarian or hereditary rulers. And it may well be counterproductive.

Silencing a news outlet, however divisive or hostile it may be, is the trademark of strongman rule. It is a way of declaring that information is the monopoly of the ruler, and it's a favored populist tactic for channeling public anger at moments of national crisis. Al Jazeera has often come under attack from Arab countries, including Egypt and the Gulf States, whose leaders bridled at its reporting — especially during the Arab Spring, when it gave extensive coverage to opposition movements.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accused Al Jazeera of being a security threat by serving as a megaphone for Hamas. But if the network was hostile to the messaging of Netanyahu's right-wing government, it was also one of the very few international networks reporting from within the Gaza Strip, from which foreign media has been barred by Israel. One of the many Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza was Hamza al-Dahdouh, a son of Al Jazeera's Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, who earlier in the war lost another son and his wife, daughter and infant grandson.

Founded in 1996, Al Jazeera is the most popular source of news for much of the Arab world. (A separate English-language service was founded in 2003.) From a purely tactical point of view, having an Al Jazeera bureau in Israel gave Israelis a better shot at getting their message to the Arab world than shutting it down. Over the years, many Israeli officials have been interviewed on Al Jazeera, and the Israeli Army's Arabic spokesman has appeared on the network during the current war.

That link would be especially important now that Israel and Hamas are talking about a cease-fire. With its clout, Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, will be crucial to the reception of any agreement by the Arab world — something Netanyahu was undoubtedly aware of. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the timing of Netanyahu's decision might be "another bid to thwart the deal," for which Qatar has been an important intermediary.

May 6, 2024, 6:39 p.m. ET

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In Donald Trump's felony trial last week, we heard about Hulk Hogan's sex tape, and we watched Hope Hicks cry.

So far this week, we heard all about ledgers, invoices and accounts payable stamps. We watched as a loyal Trump accountant authenticated Allen Weisselberg's handwriting. The same documents with different dates popped up not once or twice but over and over again.

It's deadly boring. But it's deadly to Trump's defense if the jurors can stay awake for it.

With one or two drowsy exceptions, they are. They seem to understand that Trump was indicted on 34 counts — one for each falsified business record — and that they must carefully study Trump's $35,000 monthly checks to Michael Cohen in order to grasp the heart of the prosecution's case.

The documents were validated today by a former senior vice president of the Trump Organization, Jeffrey McConney, and an accounts payable supervisor, Deborah Tarasoff, both of whose legal fees are being paid by the company. Stormy Daniels's sexy testimony, expected as soon as Tuesday, is not nearly as significant to the basic charges as that of these mundane gray-haired bean counters.

Of all the stultifying numbers we heard in the courtroom today, the one that stands out is the $130,000 that Weisselberg, a former chief financial officer of the company, scrawled on a bank document before "grossing it up" (his handwritten description) to $420,000. That was to cover up the fact that $130,000 is the exact amount of money that Cohen wired to Keith Davidson, Daniels's lawyer, to keep his client quiet. As in Watergate, the crime is mostly in the cover-up.

We're awaiting Cohen's testimony that Trump knew that he was reimbursing Cohen $35,000 a month for hush money, not for vague legal services, and thus broke the law. But the circumstantial and documentary evidence precorroborating Cohen — and lessening the impact of his multiple lies — is now piled as high as Trump Tower.

At the end of the day, the judge asked Josh Steinglass of the prosecution team how much longer he expected the D.A.'s case to take. When Steinglass said "very roughly" two weeks — to May 21 — I saw Trump raise and lower his arms in exasperation, like a 6-year-old told to clean up his Legos. Then he went into the hallway and whined to reporters, "I thought they were finished today."

Trump never thought anything of the kind. He's a caged animal (to use his word for immigrants) and wants out ASAP. Good luck with that.

May 6, 2024, 6:00 p.m. ET

On Monday night, a select group of celebrities and fashion designers mounted the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presenting a litany of costumes for the public to devour. The Met Gala is an annual spectacle of celebrity that raises money for the museum's Costume Institute, which works to preserve fashion history.

The night's enduring power can largely be chalked up to the way guests interpret its themed dress code, which changes every year. At its most brilliant, a theme might inspire absurd, campy or daring interpretations by clever designers. At its most exhausting, it inspires famous people to perform vacuous social commentary while attending an event where a ticket reportedly costs as much as $75,000. In either case, the commentary the theme provokes gives the gala its enduring cultural relevance.

This year's theme is "The Garden of Time," based on J.G. Ballard's dystopian short story about a count who, for a time, prevents a mob from destroying his villa and the works of culture it contains. The story is an allegory warning about the consequences of keeping art out of public view. The most generous reading of the story in the context of the Met Gala is probably that the Costume Institute, by giving art to the masses instead of hiding it away in a place only the wealthy inhabit, averts Ballard's dystopia.

But there's also an unfortunate irony in choosing this particular story. Ballard implicitly criticizes the wealthy count's distance from the public, but the gala essentially celebrates the counts among us.

High culture is available to the public largely because the wealthy, charitably, make it so. But the nature of this gala, with its emphasis on extolling the captivating virtues of celebrity, leaves me wondering whether the event's organizers misread the story's critique or were simply blind to it. For a less generous interpretation of the story appears to mock the culture-consuming public.

Consider the greatest threat to the count's rarefied life: the teeming people, described as struggling laborers and soldiers, who unthinkingly defile his cultural artifacts at the end of the story. Is that how the party's organizers see the ordinary museum patrons and tourists who will fill the institute's halls after the cameras are gone?

I hope the organizers simply didn't think hard enough about the implications of their chosen story. But if they did, they would do well to remember that art, even high fashion, endures because a mass audience witnesses and appends meaning to it.

May 6, 2024, 1:12 p.m. ET

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Before summoning the jury on Monday, Justice Juan Merchan directly addressed the defendant, whom he called "Mr." and not President Trump. In a measured and by-the-book tone that showed no hint of his exasperation, Merchan told Donald Trump that he had now found him in contempt of court on a 10th charge. Each carries a $1,000 fine, the most allowed by New York State law.

The judge then warned Trump that if he continued to violate his order, "this court will have to consider a jail sanction."

Merchan told Trump that he was well aware that "you are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well" and that he understood that jailing Trump "would be disruptive to the proceedings." The judge said he also worried about the court officers, corrections officers, Secret Service and other law enforcement personnel who would be involved in the incarceration of a former commander in chief.

"The magnitude of that decision is not lost on me," Merchan said. "But at the end of the day, I have a job to do." Trump's offenses, he noted calmly, represented "a direct attack on the rule of law, and I cannot allow that to continue."

As he spoke, the loud clacking of reporters' fingers on their laptop keyboards sounded like the cicadas that will appear this summer.

But jail shouldn't be the only penalty the judge considers. He has wide latitude in imposing sanctions, so why not consider alternative punishment if he reoffends? After all, Trump said last month that it would be his "great honor" to be jailed by this "crooked" judge.

He's bluffing, of course. If he thinks the toilets are "disgusting" in the courthouse, wait till he sees what they're like in the holding cell. And the bed, if you can call it that, is unlikely to be up to Mar-a-Lago standards. His hairdresser would not be allowed into the cell, which could prove inconvenient to Trump when he's released and has his picture taken.

Even so, Trump should not be allowed to use his punishment to play the martyr. A more appropriate sanction would draw on Trump's history of adopting highways and attaching a sign thanking himself for beautifying them.

If Trump again attacks witnesses or the jury, Merchan should assign him to pick up trash in parks on two or three Wednesdays, when court is not in session. (City judges have done this before to contempt offenders.) Parks could be more easily secured by the Secret Service than roads, and that would spare the agents uncomfortable nights outside his cell.

I imagine Trump would need a long trash stick because even after losing some weight, he's still too heavy and out of shape to bend down. The orange man in the orange jumpsuit would need help picking up all of the cigarette butts, Styrofoam coffee cups and old newspapers with headlines about his disgrace.

May 6, 2024, 11:40 a.m. ET

Scientists have figured out an easier way to turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide.

That might seem like a dubious achievement, since carbon dioxide is something we exhale and carbon monoxide is deadly.

But carbon monoxide is an important feedstock for the chemical industry. It can also be made into a fuel. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, while nontoxic, is overheating the planet. So converting carbon dioxide that's captured from smokestacks or the atmosphere into something more useful is a good thing.

In the latest issue of the journal Science, chemists reported the discovery of a potentially cheap and stable catalyst that can efficiently split carbon dioxide (which has two oxygen atoms) into carbon monoxide (one oxygen atom).

The catalyst is based on the element molybdenum, which is a trace element in foods and is available in dietary supplements, so obviously is not dangerous. The catalyst can break down carbon dioxide at about 600 degrees Celsius, as compared with 1,000 degrees Celsius by some other methods under development.

In contrast to some other experimental catalysts based on molybdenum, this one is highly stable (so it doesn't have to be replaced constantly) and highly selective (so it doesn't trigger other reactions, creating less useful byproducts such as methane).

The lead researchers were Milad Ahmadi Khoshooei and Omar Farha of Northwestern University.

If humanity is going to get climate change under control, it will have a little bit to do with economists and politicians and a lot to do with scientists such as Khoshooei and Farha.

May 6, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET

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Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here's what we're looking at this week:

• This week, in Manhattan, Donald Trump's trial will continue. He will also be campaigning, a little unusually, in New Jersey on Saturday, near Cape May.

• Cease-fire talks regarding Israel and Gaza are continuing, and that remains front and center for national politics, particularly for President Biden. Also, as she is doing quite often, Vice President Kamala Harris will be doing a campaign event on Wednesday focused on abortion in Pennsylvania.

• Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she'll try to oust the House speaker, Mike Johnson, this week after he helped pass the foreign aid package last month. Democrats have said they will help him out because he helped pass that package, which would really cement the unusual nature of the Congress we have. It's functionally a coalition government, as Brendan Buck recently wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion.

• Over the weekend, Trump compared the Biden administration to the Gestapo and said Democrats "get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that" during a fund-raiser, as Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher reported.

• Toward the end of Maggie and Shane's article, they report that Trump campaign officials told donors that the 2024 race has only three swing states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But Trump campaign officials also showed donors an "expanded reality" map that included Minnesota and Virginia, neither of which has received much attention this year.

  Their inclusion here could be a couple different things. First, maybe they've polled and really see something in those states; the electoral map can change, as when Democrats won Georgia in 2020. Second, sometimes campaigns will spend money in less apparently competitive states primarily to require opponents to divert resources from a more competitive state.

  But as a note on Virginia: Insofar as Republicans have done better there since 2020, it's probably because people like Glenn Youngkin have been able to balance appealing to voters who do and don't like Trump, while also turning frustrations with public school closings during the pandemic into a revived social conservatism. As time has gone on, though, voter enthusiasm for that social conservatism seems to have waned, as Jamelle Bouie has argued.

• Lastly, Gov. Kristi Noem's book is being released this week, and at this point, it feels like anything could be in it.

May 3, 2024, 5:26 p.m. ET

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Of all the senior aides who have worked for Donald Trump in recent years, it's fair to say Hope Hicks was the most popular. As Trump's surprisingly young communication director during the 2016 campaign and inside the White House, she was — by many accounts — unfailingly professional, polite and composed.

At 3:03 p.m. on Friday, in Trump's felony trial, Hicks lost her composure, crying audibly in the courtroom before a defense attorney just beginning his cross-examination asked for a break. And her tears were gifts to the prosecution.

Here's the context:

A few minutes earlier, Hicks testified that when the payoff to Stormy Daniels became public in 2018, she and President Trump discussed the matter in the White House and Trump told her that Michael Cohen had paid the porn star "out of the kindness of his heart and never told anyone about it."

"I'd say that would be out of character for Michael Cohen," Hicks told the jury. "I didn't know him to be an especially charitable person or selfless person." Cohen was, instead, "The kind of person who seeks credit." Later, under gentle cross-examination from the defense, she said his moniker as "Trump's fixer" came from him. He was a fixer "only because he broke it so that he could fix it."

So Hicks wasn't buying the story the president was selling her about the payment being Cohen's idea. After briefly pleasing the defense by talking about how Trump had asked her to hide the newspapers from his wife so as not to upset her, Hicks said this:

"Mr. Trump's opinion was that it was better to be dealing with it now and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election." In other words, he was more concerned with the effect on the election — the basis for the prosecution — than his wife's reaction.

A couple of minutes later, it sunk in that she was hurting a man who had treated her well, and she began crying. I think she's smart enough to know that this was devastating testimony about the criminal intent at the center of this case. Much of the prosecution's painstakingly assembled evidence has been building to this establishment of motive — from the feverish reaction to the "Access Hollywood" tape (bolstered Friday by Hicks's testimony), to the urgency of Cohen's contacts with Stormy Daniels's lawyer, to the Trump tweets showing him concerned about losing the women's vote in the election just a few days away.

Earlier Friday, The Washington Post reported that, according to Trump aides, Hicks still has warm feelings for her old boss. But they are no longer close. She testified that she hadn't seen Trump in at least 18 months, and both of them conspicuously looked away when she passed three feet to his right when leaving the stand.

Friday afternoon, Hope Hicks did her duty. She put her oath to "tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" over blind loyalty to her old boss — and experienced the pain of doing so.

May 3, 2024, 3:33 p.m. ET

There is good news and bad news about the continuing outbreak of H5N1, or avian influenza, among dairy cattle.

The F.D.A.'s tests have confirmed that raw milk from infected cows has high viral loads but pasteurization successfully inactivates the virus, as expected. Raw, unpasteurized milk products should be avoided.

Dr. Barb Petersen, a veterinarian who takes care of about a dozen cattle farms in Amarillo, Texas, told me she noticed how cats on one farm had died in droves and many cows were getting sick. We discussed the H5N1 outbreak among cats in Poland that I had investigated last year; the symptoms seemed similar to what she was observing: balance and vision problems, extreme fatigue, neurological problems and swift deaths.

It was Dr. Petersen's persistence, not that of the U.S.D.A. or the C.D.C., that solved the mystery of widespread unexplained cow illness in Texas.

When test after test for known pathogens on the growing number of sick cows came back negative, Dr. Petersen sent some samples to a college friend at Iowa State, Dr. Drew Magstadt, who suggested testing for H5N1. Those test results became the first proof that H5N1 was infecting cows.

Dr. Petersen also told me that right when the cows got sick, an unusual number of people also got sick — some with flu symptoms and conjunctivitis, the key symptom in the only known human H5N1 case. She said that many farmworkers were reluctant to get tested and that some received generic flu treatment.

Recently released data confirms that the undetected outbreak had indeed been in progress all winter — peak human flu season. Someone infected with both human and H5N1 influenza is exactly how a human pandemic could start.

A new report on the sole confirmed human H5N1 case reveals that worryingly, the C.D.C. wasn't able to collect specimens from the farm where the infection took place or even get follow-up swabs from the infected person.

The good news is that so far, we've been lucky.

The middling news is that the U.S.D.A., the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. have been more forthcoming recently, but their scientific data sharing is still sluggish and incomplete, and testing is still far less than it should be.

The bad news is that influenza is a fickle virus, and our luck could change in a flash.

May 3, 2024, 1:13 p.m. ET

Two things tend to keep American jails overfull: the vigorous enforcement of low-level violations and the price tag put on the freedom of people who are awaiting trial — known as cash bail. On both counts, the poor are inevitably targeted, since those with means can bail themselves out. Yet in recent years these tendencies have been challenged by campaigners and legislatures across the country, most successfully in Illinois and New Jersey.

Georgia is going in the opposite direction. On Wednesday, Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law that redoubles a hard-knuckled approach to crime, reversing piecemeal reforms primarily put in place during his predecessor's tenure. The law will expand the number and type of offenses for which people must pay bail to maintain their freedom, at a time when some states are turning away from cash bail for those accused of nonviolent crimes, if not abolishing it.

Kemp said the law "will ensure dangerous individuals cannot walk our streets and commit further crimes." Among the crimes that now require cash bail are the purchase of marijuana, unlawful assembly and criminal trespass. Previously, the state mandated bail mostly for violent crimes.

Even as cash bail will become more prevalent in the state, the law ends the role of bail funds and civil-society groups (including Senator Raphael Warnock's church) that pay people's bail. "No more than three cash bonds may be posted per year" by any person or group, the law says.

Bail was already an impediment to the freedom of low-income defendants before the law's passage. In one of Georgia's largest jails, more than 10 percent of detainees were incarcerated simply because they could not pay their bail bonds, according to a 2022 study by the A.C.L.U.

It is also an unfortunate moment for the state to virtually eliminate the repeat posting of bail. Protesters of a police compound under construction near Atlanta, termed Cop City by its opponents, have been arrested in large numbers; bail funds have helped secure their release. The law's mandate that bail be set for people accused of unlawful assembly and criminal trespass (second and subsequent charges) will simplify the work of cracking down on protesters.

Though Georgia already has one of the largest jail populations in the country, the new law will probably pack its jails even tighter. Advocates of criminal justice reform have argued that the era of mass incarceration is coming to a close. Is Georgia an outlier or an omen?

May 3, 2024, 9:38 a.m. ET

The economic news continues to be pretty good, especially compared with the dire forecasts many were making in late 2022. But you might not have gotten that message if you watch financial TV: It's hard to spend 24/7 talking about the economy while saying "not much happened this week." So commentators — and partisan media — seize on every hint of bad news.

And the public is reacting. Google searches for "stagflation" have spiked:

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So here's what you need to know: There's no stag out there, and not much flation.

True, G.D.P. growth came in a bit low in the first quarter. But just about every serious analyst regarded this as statistical noise. More important, as we saw in Friday morning's employment report, the U.S. economy is continuing its remarkable stretch of good job numbers and low unemployment:

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What about inflation? The past few inflation reports have been a bit high, but much of that, again, is probably statistical noise. The New York Fed has a measure that tries to extract the signal from the noise; it basically says that there's nothing to see here:

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Now, there are real and serious debates about inflation going on, but it's important to realize how narrow, how small-bore, these debates are compared with the big arguments we were having a year and a half ago.

Inflation has clearly come way down without a recession, defying the pessimists; I can't help mentioning that Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, got a little snippy about Larry Summers the other day. But are we still on a glide path back to the Fed's target of 2 percent inflation, or are we stalling out around 3 percent?

The Fed seems to think that we're still on that glide path, but it left interest rates unchanged this week, and its statement was carefully hedged, noting that "there has been a lack of further progress" toward 2 percent.

An interesting question is what the Fed will do if inflation remains stalled modestly above its target. After all, 2 percent is a rather arbitrary number (blame New Zealand!). Is it worth risking a recession to squeeze out those last few decimal points?

But that's for the future. For now, you need to hold two thoughts in mind. First, we've had some disappointing inflation data lately. But despite this, we're in a far better place than most analysts even thought possible not long ago.

May 3, 2024, 5:06 a.m. ET

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Friday is World Press Freedom Day, and The Times is lending its pages to amplifying the cause of bringing home the hundreds of missing or jailed journalists across the globe.

"The need for factual and reliable information has never been greater," write The Times's publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, and its executive editor, Joe Kahn, alongside the leaders of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, in an open letter published Friday morning, "but threats to journalists around the world are more prevalent than ever."

Russia has wrongfully detained Evan Gershkovich, a former Times colleague now at The Wall Street Journal, for more than a year. Austin Tice, a schoolmate of mine and freelance journalist for The Washington Post, has been held in Syria for 11 years, his parents allowed very little to no information about his condition. Unfortunately, there are many like them.

Since Oct. 7, at least 97 journalists, the majority of them Palestinians, have been killed amid the Middle East conflict. And Israel continues to deny reliable access to Gaza to facilitate international, independent coverage, as Jodie Ginsberg, the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, recently detailed for Times Opinion.

In addition to Evan's case, the editorial board in March highlighted Vladimir Putin's attempts to suppress critical reporting on his regime, including the plight of Alsu Kurmasheva, a journalist and dual American-Russian citizen. The charges against both are a travesty, as the board says, and the U.S. government should continue to do everything in its power to help.

Of course, sometimes suppression of independent media is more subtle. Consider the smear campaign against Gustavo Gorriti, a storied Peruvian journalist, who now faces charges in an apparent retaliation for reporting on corruption. Or the imprisonment of the Guatemalan journalist José Zamora on what press freedom groups say are false charges meant to muzzle him.

Hong Kong, once a rare beacon for press freedom in Asia, is a changed place after China passed its strict national security law in 2020. The newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai and others have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges such as sedition since. As Lai's son wrote in Times Opinion last September, "Authorities in the city are showing the world they no longer tolerate the very things that once made it so great: free speech, the rule of law and a love for liberty."

It's a message that rings painfully loud in far too many places today.

May 2, 2024, 6:31 p.m. ET

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In Donald Trump's felony trial on Thursday, I began thinking of what might be called the Sleazy Lawyer Effect. Does it hurt the credibility of a witness if he sounds too much like a lawyer on the stand?

The defense attorney Emil Bove did a good job cross-examining Keith Davidson, the lawyer who represented both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, in part by making him seem squirrelly.

Davidson came across quite differently from the first big prosecution witness, David Pecker, who seemed to make a relatively good impression by mildly conceding almost everything Bove threw at him. By contrast, Davidson quibbled with Bove's word choices and denied that he even considered the line separating negotiation from extortion. This led him into a trap when Bove confronted him with an F.B.I. sting operation aimed at busting him for extorting Hulk Hogan over sex tapes.

Davidson said, "I don't recall," when asked about incidents he clearly remembered and "I don't see that the two were related" when the jury could easily surmise that the matters at hand were.

I imagine jurors saying to themselves, "Of course this guy used leverage and maybe even extorted Trump before the election." The question is how relevant they'll find that in the jury room.

My guess is that conversations between Davidson and Michael Cohen will loom much larger.

The best one for the defense came from a phone call in December 2016. According to Davidson, a "distraught" and "suicidal" Cohen was crushed to learn that he had not been offered a big job in the Trump administration; he was delusional enough to think he might be attorney general or White House chief of staff.

"Jesus Christ, can you [expletive] believe I'm not going to Washington, after everything I've done for that [expletive] guy?" Cohen said, according to Davidson. "I've saved the guy's ass so many times."

Then Cohen told Davidson: "That guy [Trump] is not even paying me the $130,000 back." This helped Trump's argument that he's innocent and that Cohen is a disappointed office seeker out for revenge.

The best moment for the prosecution came when Davidson quoted Cohen recounting a conversation about hush money in which Trump said, "I hate the fact that we did it."

We'll see if Cohen — who taped many of his calls — has audio of Trump further incriminating himself. Not long before adjournment, a tape related to the plan to pay off Karen McDougal was played in court. On the tape, which the defense is ludicrously trying to imply was doctored, Cohen talks to Trump about needing to set up a company with the help of Allen Weisselberg, the convicted perjurer and former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization who currently resides at Rikers Island.

Fleshed out, this is the kind of evidence that will very likely overcome the jury's understandable disgust with the tawdry, lying, bottom-feeding world of Pecker, Davidson and Cohen — and Trump.

May 2, 2024, 4:54 p.m. ET

Well, I basically agreed with President Biden's remarks today about the campus protests. Which, come to think of it, is probably a bad sign for him.

There was nothing particularly contentious or surprising about the mini-speech. It boiled down to: Peaceful protests, good. Chaos, intimidation and violence, bad.

This is more or less the position several colleges have been spotlighting in recent weeks. It is, admittedly, a bit simplistic, inviting questions about when civil disobedience becomes unacceptably disruptive and at what point uncomfortable speech tips over into threatening. Still, it's a decent foundation for schools trying to muddle through this mess.

That said, it seems unlikely Biden's words will impress much of anyone, and certainly no one already worked up about the situation. Plenty of young people, upset by his policies in Gaza and further upset by the rough response to protesters by some colleges, are likely to see it as a weak dodge.

People freaked out by the upheaval and the chaotic images circulating online may ask: And? What are you going to do about it? (Post-speech, Biden asserted that he does not favor sending in the National Guard.)

And even folks who share Biden's middle-of-the-road view may think: Sensible! But what now?

In part, the president was responding to election-year politics. Republicans have latched onto these protests like a school of lampreys, hammering Democrats as the party of lawlessness and disorder. This makes perfect sense. A first principle of politics is that any issue that unites your team and divides your opposition should be shamelessly exploited.

And so we see Republican campaign attack ads popping up featuring the protests. (Theme: Dems support student loan relief for terrorists!) And Donald Trump musing about whether the students involved would be treated like the Jan. 6 rioters. And, oh yes, the National Republican Congressional Committee has been peddling "F🇺🇸k Hamas" T-shirts.

Way to soothe a volatile situation, guys. Seriously. Top-notch adulting.

Meanwhile, lawmakers from both parties keep showing up on campuses. As if that's going to help matters.

With partisan vitriol on the rise, Biden presumably felt like he needed to say something. Anything. And now he has. Terrific. Box checked.

Now what I'd really like to see is politicians from both teams butt out. The situation is fraught enough. Big-p politics will only make it worse.

May 2, 2024, 3:32 p.m. ET

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Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to talk about the concept of "defining deviancy down." Donald Trump has been a master of doing so — numbing the public to behavior that in a different era would have been considered not just deviant but criminal.

On Tuesday, before the jury filed in, Justice Juan Merchan held Trump in contempt of court on nine counts. In his ruling, he fined him but added that he must consider "whether, in some instances, jail may be a necessary punishment." On Thursday morning, the judge indicated he would probably again hold Trump in contempt on at least one additional count.

Now imagine this had happened to any other American president. We would have seen banner headlines and stop-the-presses coverage. In this case, the contempt citation wasn't even the biggest story of the day from the courtroom. It was a bit overshadowed by the important testimony of Keith Davidson, which continued on Thursday.

Contempt of court is rare, but recently defendants ranging from Roger Stone to Sam Bankman-Fried have been cited for it. In 1969, when I was a 12-year-old Chicagoan following the now-legendary Chicago 7 trial, Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Bobby Seale, the Black Panther co-founder, bound to a chair and gagged for disrupting the courtroom. He sentenced Seale to four years in prison for contempt, a decision overturned on appeal.

Merchan would never do anything that drastic, and not just because Trump's violations of his gag order are taking place outside the courtroom. But the judge made it clear that Trump's conduct is verboten in a criminal trial.

"He spoke about the jury. He said the jury was 95 percent Democrats," Merchan said on Thursday. "The implication was that this is not a fair jury."

Holding Trump in contempt over what he said about Michael Cohen, the key witness, is a tougher call, given Cohen's often profane taunts of Trump on social media. The judge has warned Cohen that he, too, must zip it, and for the past week or so Cohen has.

But Merchan is so concerned about Trump attacking any witness during a trial that he may yet find Trump in contempt for other unprovoked insults directed at Cohen, as he did on Tuesday.

Merchan also said Thursday from the bench that he didn't care as much about Trump saying last week that he hoped the witness David Pecker would be "nice" to him. The judge may not have yet read the full text of Trump's interview with a local TV station. (Merchan was given nearly 500 pages covering various insults.) I found the line — "This is a message to Pecker: Be nice" — to be threatening, but the judge may not agree.

The rest of what the former president of the United States has done to disrupt this trial is apparently deviant enough.

May 2, 2024, 5:07 a.m. ET

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It caused a bit of a sensation in 2014 when the editorial board of The New York Times published a six-part series urging the federal government to stop banning marijuana. Readers responded with more than 15,000 comments, pro and con (mostly pro). TV networks interviewed board members, and the big newspapers and magazines wrote articles about the series. There were cringe-worthy headlines about the editorial page going to pot. Twitter users fantasized about Times opinion writers getting stoned.

The overall tone of the response was: Wow, if the staid New York Times thinks cannabis should be legal, maybe the federal government will finally loosen up and follow suit. But it didn't. At least not until this week.

Shortly after the series came out, the Obama administration issued a detailed rebuttal, saying we had overlooked the serious problems of addiction and substance abuse that would result from legalization. (Actually, we didn't overlook them; we just disagreed with its assessment.) And that pretty much summed things up for the next 10 years. While 24 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana for recreational use, the federal government never budged from its insistence that pot is a Schedule I drug, subject to abuse on the same level as heroin and LSD. It ranks even higher on the danger list than meth, cocaine and oxycodone.

The editorial board urged the federal government to move marijuana off the Schedule I list, and on Tuesday, a decade later, the Biden administration began the process of doing that. The Justice Department said it would recommend that cannabis be moved to Schedule III, alongside other drugs with a moderate to low potential for abuse and dependence.

That's not the same as legalization, which can be done only by Congress, but it would send a strong message of cultural acceptance and could be of particular benefit to the cannabis industry, which is currently hobbled by financial restrictions related to Schedule I that force it to be a largely cash business. It would also allow important federal research to begin on the substance's effects, and it might prod more states to legalize or decriminalize.

No doubt there's some election-year politics at work here, in a hope to impress younger voters who have serious doubts about President Biden. But that's the way politics is supposed to work. Eventually the logical thing to do becomes the right thing, even if it takes a decade or so.

May 1, 2024, 2:39 p.m. ET

Whatever one's views on the pro-Palestinian demonstrations sweeping the nation's colleges, the decision by the New York Police Department on Tuesday to block journalists from witnessing its raid on Columbia University was a clear infringement of the First Amendment.

Members of the public have a right to know what their law enforcement authorities are doing on American campuses, and they were kept in the dark at a critical moment.

Instead of firsthand accounts by professional or student journalists, Americans had to rely on the accounts of Mayor Eric Adams and police officials, as well as videos posted to social media by the department. Those images showed officers clad in tactical gear entering Hamilton Hall, the Columbia University building that pro-Palestinian activists had been illegally occupying.

There were some initial reports of violent behavior by some police officers toward protesters, though overall the raid did not appear to produce widespread accounts of brutality. But we don't really know, because the department wouldn't allow journalists on campus, barricading them blocks away. WKCR, the Columbia student radio station, reported that student journalists were threatened with arrest if they left the Journalism School building to cover the raid.

City officials said Wednesday that 109 people were arrested at Columbia and 173 people at City College, farther uptown in Manhattan.

Adams claimed the department used "precision tactics with minimum amount of force." But he provided no evidence for his statement that the unrest could be blamed on "outside agitators" and "professionals."

"There are people who are harmful in trying to radicalize our children, and we cannot ignore this," he said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

At a news conference Wednesday morning, Police Commissioner Edward Caban held up a large bike chain as proof that outside agitators had been involved in the demonstrations at Columbia.

Given that similar claims were made, often falsely, to discredit activists during the civil rights movement, that kind of language should provoke skepticism. Had Adams and the Police Department allowed journalists to do their jobs, these claims could have been independently vetted.

Thousands of students and others are engaged in mass demonstrations, peaceful and otherwise, over the war in Gaza on campuses across the country. To understand them, the public cannot depend on the police narrative alone.

May 1, 2024, 10:58 a.m. ET

Because misleading, bad-faith or frankly wrong anti-vaccine material is rampant on the internet, it's easy to assume that a whole lot of people are broadly anti-vaccine. But study after study show that the vast majority of people around the world still trust vaccines — even the Covid-19 vaccine.

The latest evidence of support for widespread vaccine acceptance is from a new brief published in Nature Medicine. The study's authors surveyed 23 high- and middle-income countries on five continents. And the overall picture looks much better than I would have expected: "A total of 60.8 percent expressed being more willing to get vaccinated for diseases other than Covid-19 as a result of their experience during the pandemic." While the willingness to take a Covid booster is down since 2022, it's still at about 72 percent, and the uptake of at least one Covid shot is about 88 percent.

That is quite high for a new vaccine. But the most heartening statistic from this report is that "approximately three-quarters (74.9 percent) of respondents are confident that society collectively will manage the next health crisis better than the Covid-19 pandemic." That is way more optimistic than I would have expected, considering the divisiveness of the past four years. (As for me, I'm not all that confident that society will manage the next health emergency particularly well.)

The brief's authors do have legitimate concerns about vaccine hesitance, as "23.1 percent of respondents are less likely to accept vaccines for diseases other than Covid-19." And they're also worried about the reputation of major health organizations, as "only 63.3 percent reported trusting a hypothetical W.H.O. recommendation to vaccinate" in the event of another pandemic. The United States and other high-income countries are less confident in vaccines than middle-income countries tend to be, which is also a worrying trend.

But overall, the picture for international vaccine acceptance remains pretty good. And even in the United States, "the National Immunization Survey-Child identified no decline overall in routine vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic among children born during 2018-2019." As ever, the biggest barriers to people getting vaccinated continue to be poverty and lack of access, rather than anti-vaccine fervor.

May 1, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

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What if we're on the cusp of a new Cold War, but have only one serious political party?

It's hard to grasp Donald Trump's foreign policy extremism without remembering the Cold War. I distinctly remember the hawk/dove dynamic of the 1980s. The Reagan Republicans were deemed the hawks — pressing for expanded nuclear capabilities and for a much more capable conventional force. The Democrats were the doves. They wanted to emphasize arms control, for example, and strongly criticized the Reagan administration for its alliances with illiberal or authoritarian anti-Soviet regimes.

The differences between the two sides were meaningful, but one thing was certain — both sides were serious. For example, let's take the first election that I closely followed — the 1984 contest between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.

The Democratic platform emphasized enhanced conventional warfare capability to decrease reliance on the nuclear deterrent. It emphasized "close consultation" with NATO allies, and the first bullet point under "defense policy" began with these words: "Work with our NATO and other allies to ensure our collective security."

And what of the Republican platform? It warned that "Fragmenting NATO is the immediate objective of the Soviet military buildup and Soviet subversion" and was replete with admonitions to strengthen NATO, including by shoring up its southern flank and concluding new basing agreements. This shared commitment to NATO is a key reason American deterrence persisted through every American presidency during the Cold War.

Republicans and Democrats are not equally serious today. In a new interview, Eric Cortellessa of Time magazine asked Trump about his pledge to let Russia "do whatever the hell they want" to countries that he believes don't meet NATO military spending targets. Trump doubled down.

"Yeah, when I said that, I said it with great meaning," he said, "because I want them to pay. I want them to pay up. That was said as a point of negotiation. I said, Look, if you're not going to pay, then you're on your own. And I mean that."

Americans should want Europeans to pay more for their own defense. That was a component of the Democrats' 1984 platform, and the NATO target of 2 percent of G.D.P. military spending was negotiated under Barack Obama. But to provide Vladimir Putin with targets of opportunity based on temporary military spending levels is to shatter NATO itself.

Speaker Mike Johnson's deal with Biden to provide additional funding for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel gives me hope that the Republican Party can find its footing again, but so long as Trump is the nominee, the voters face a choice between a strategy and a temper tantrum. They should choose accordingly.

April 30, 2024, 6:31 p.m. ET

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Tuesday afternoon's riveting testimony by Keith Davidson, the frustrated Hollywood lawyer who represented both the former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal and the porn star Stormy Daniels, raises an intriguing question:

Will the jury buy testimony from a witness who clearly despises Michael Cohen, the man whose narrative of the case he is bolstering? My bet is it will.

The prosecution used a devastating chain of texts to pre-corroborate Cohen, whose coming testimony is the most important in the case. All afternoon, the prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, used Davidson to give jurors a permission slip to simultaneously distrust Cohen and believe him.

Davidson first became acquainted with Cohen in 2011 when dirty.com, a website that traffics in dirt about celebrities, posted an item about Donald Trump having a fling with a porn star named Stormy Daniels, and Davidson called Cohen.

"Before I could barely get my name out, I was met with a hostile barrage of insults and allegations that went on for quite a while," Davidson testified. "He was just screaming. He believed Stormy Daniels was behind the story." In fact, Davidson got the item taken down.

Much of Davidson's testimony involved McDougal, whose hush-money deal was a kind of a dress rehearsal for the alleged crime, which is Trump and Cohen covering up the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For a time, American Media Inc., the owner of The National Enquirer, was in competition with ABC News for McDougal's story, which led to a memorable moment in court. Davidson claimed a group of women he derided in a text as "the estrogen mafia" wanted her to tell her story to ABC News.

"We had it all set. We picked the date, camera crews, makeup," Brian Ross, the ABC News correspondent, told me this afternoon by phone. "Then she called and said, 'My family doesn't want me to do it.'" Ross thinks the real reason this explosive story didn't come out was that ABC News, which doesn't pay for stories, became leverage: "In retrospect, they were using us to get to Trump for the money."

After American Media paid off McDougal, David Pecker, the former publisher, backed out of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels.

But when Davidson demanded the payment, Cohen began offering a million excuses for why Trump couldn't pay. "I thought he was trying to kick the can down the road until after the election," Davidson testified, which will be an important part of the prosecution's case.

When it was clear Trump wouldn't pay, Davidson testified that Cohen said, "Goddammit, I'll just do it myself." It was then that Cohen set up a dummy corporation to send Davidson the money and began trying to get reimbursed by Trump.

All of the texts and phone calls between Davidson and Cohen are still one step removed from Trump. But they pre-corroborate what Cohen will say "the boss" told him to do, and that is critical.

A correction was made on 

April 30, 2024

: 

A headline with an earlier version of this article misidentified the woman whose account of a relationship with Donald Trump was the subject of competition between two media organizations. She is Karen McDougal, not Stormy Daniels. In addition, because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified one of those media organizations. It is American Media Inc., then the owner of several tabloids, not specifically The National Enquirer.

How we handle corrections

April 30, 2024, 3:39 p.m. ET

People are worried about Iran right now, and rightly so. Its tit-for-tat strikes with Israel this month drew the world uncomfortably close to a regional war, and Tehran's sponsorship of proxy militias across the Middle East raises questions of what peace will look like when the war in Gaza finally does come to an end.

It wasn't so long ago that the world was watching Iran for an entirely different reason: the violent government crackdown on widespread protests that erupted in 2022 after a young woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody, having been accused of violating the hijab law.

But even as the threat of a wider war has loomed ever larger, Tehran's domestic repression didn't stop. On the contrary: In recent weeks, reports have emerged of more women accused of disobeying hijab rules being detained, and the state's clampdown on political dissidents continues.

One of the individuals in Tehran's cross hairs is Toomaj Salehi, a rapper arrested in October 2022 for releasing songs in support of the protests. Nearly a year ago, Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote in an essay for Times Opinion that Salehi had become an important symbol in Iran for his willingness to stand up to the government — and that he faced serious risk in detention.

Last week, the worst fears of Salehi's supporters came to pass. Though he had been briefly released from prison in the fall after Iran's Supreme Court found problems with an earlier ruling against him, he was soon arrested again. And on Wednesday, an Iranian court sentenced Salehi to death for "spreading corruption on the earth," despite the higher court's decision.

The development was promptly met with global outrage. A group of United Nations experts and the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, among others, have called for Salehi's immediate release. Demonstrations in support of him have been held in cities around the world.

Does Iran care what the world thinks? A report on Sunday from an Iranian state news agency lambasted Washington for wading into the issue. It also noted, in its English translation, that the court's ruling was "preliminary" — and could be appealed and changed to life imprisonment by a higher court.

It's impossible to say whether those few words could signal that Salehi's fate may not be sealed. We can hope. In the meantime, the court's message to Iranians — and to young Iranians in particular — seems terrifyingly clear.

April 30, 2024, 1:18 p.m. ET

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And just like that, Donald Trump has been subjected to his first criminal sanction. Was that so hard?

On Tuesday morning, Justice Juan Merchan, the New York judge handling the former president's hush-money trial, held Trump in contempt and fined him $9,000 for nine separate violations of the gag order he imposed and then expanded this month. The order bars Trump from attacking or threatening witnesses, jurors, prosecutors and others connected to the trial.

Incorrigible man-child that he is, Trump ignored the order, posting on Truth Social, his social media site, precisely the sorts of things he was told not to and claiming he was only exercising his First Amendment rights.

On Tuesday, Merchan ordered Trump to take down the offending posts and warned him that any further violations of the order could result in "an incarceratory sentence."

As far as I can tell, "incarceratory" was an obscure legal word before this morning. Perhaps Merchan, aware that he was referring to an unprecedented punishment of a former commander in chief, was reaching for something more official sounding than "the pokey." Regardless, the meaning is perfectly clear: If Trump can't control himself, he is looking at the real prospect of jail time.

This is, of course, far from the first time the law has faced the dilemma of Donald Trump. Bad-faith allegations of lawfare notwithstanding, the American legal system has been coming for Trump for at least half a century; in 1973 the Nixon Justice Department sued him and his father for racial discrimination in their New York City housing developments. (Naturally, Trump countersued, and the case was settled out of court.)

Yes, $9,000 is couch-cushion change to a man who just enjoyed a multibillion-dollar payday. You could call it hush money, except that it's unlikely to shut him up.

Still, even small consequences are consequences, especially when accompanied by the threat of more severe ones. Merchan will do everything he can to avoid taking it to that level; he is surely sensitive to the fact that Trump would like nothing more than to be martyred for his cult — not to mention generate a new merchandise stream — by getting himself tossed into Rikers.

Let's hope we don't have to confront that scenario. If we do, though, it will be entirely of Trump's own choosing. Eventually the rule of law must be asserted, because it doesn't assert itself.

April 30, 2024, 11:10 a.m. ET

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Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Donald Trump is not allowed to spin dials and shout thunderous warnings inside the courtroom, trying to scare people with the power of his voice and visage. Justice Juan Merchan is the first boss he is compelled to obey since his father died, and on Tuesday morning, the judge punished Trump with a fine for violating the rules about intimidating jurors and witnesses.

So Trump is trying to be bombastic outside the room. The results, though, reflect the same deflation of his omnipotence as the wizard experienced when Toto pulled back the curtain.

On the eve of the trial, Trump sent out a fund-raising appeal that said: "If we fail to have a MASSIVE outpouring of peaceful patriotic support — right here, right now — all Hell will break loose." Later, he posted on social media that his hordes of supporters "are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away 'holding areas.'"

This is humbug. On the first day of the trial, the pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer and Andrew Giuliani, a former White House aide, showed up with a few dozen Trump supporters in tow. They were not "shut down" and the holding area was just by the courthouse, not "far away."

After that, there were several mornings when there were no Trump supporters outside the courthouse when it opened and only a tiny handful at lunch and after court adjourned. On Tuesday morning, about three dozen showed in the morning. Joe Reilly, a supporter from Greenwich Village wearing a "Never Surrender!" T-shirt, explained the low turnout: "Conservatives have jobs and some are afraid of getting doxxed." Occasionally, a few MAGA supporters have engaged in annoying shouting matches with anti-Trump activists, who almost always outnumber them.

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And it's not as if there are only a few MAGA voters in this blue region. Staten Island, which Trump carried by 15 points in 2020, is only 15 miles away. I met one Staten Island Trump supporter outside the courthouse who was sorry to learn that it was pointless to set up his Trump souvenir stall outside the courthouse. Not enough demand.

Spectators, some traveling from as far away as Alaska, line up at 6 a.m. for a chance to snag one of a half dozen or so courtroom seats reserved for the public. So far, all of those I've chatted with who made it in have disliked Trump except for Bishop Robert Sylvester Shaw of the Holy Cathedral of Prayer in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Shaw, a Black pastor wearing an orange-checkered suit, said he was praying for Trump and hoped "the pressure doesn't burst [his] pipes."

It might. Of course it's much too early to say that Trump, like the Wicked Witch of the West, is melting, but the Winkie Guards are flagging.

April 30, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

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During my six years as the theater reporter for The Times, there was one part of the job that fascinated me above all others: The deep humanity of musical songwriting, where an alchemy of melody and lyric transports you into the soul of characters and reveals their wants and needs. The musical "Next to Normal" was the best in my book during that period, because the songs so finely and intimately dramatized the struggles tearing at one American family.

What's exciting to me about the current Broadway season — which took center stage on Tuesday morning with the Tony Award nominations for plays and musicals — is that we have three acclaimed shows about the art and craft of songwriting itself, and all its messy, maddening and joyous complexity.

A stream of Tony nominations went to those three shows: The new play "Stereophonic," the musical revival of "Merrily We Roll Along" and the new musical "Hell's Kitchen," all of which are about young people who want to explore their hopes through song — even if it means crashing into hard truths about their own lives.

"Stereophonic," written by David Adjmi with several songs by Will Butler, is a genius creation for me, taking us inside a recording studio over several months as a Fleetwood Mac-like band tries to piece together an album. The gorgeous tunefulness and ache of the lyrics feel like love-and-agony put to sheet music. My money is on "Stereophonic" being the rare play that, after being nominated in the Best Score category at the Tonys, wins the award, which usually goes to musicals; Butler's songs are that good.

The close second in my Best of 2023-24 is "Merrily," the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical about friends trying to make good on the promise of their youth, in part through the characters' songwriting. "Merrily" had productions over the years that never quite worked until this one, thanks to the best sister act in theater, Maria Friedman (the show's director) and Sonia Friedman (one of its producers), and to its stars, Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, all of whom deserve Tonys for their work.

As for "Hell's Kitchen," spend some time with my colleague Michael Paulson's excellent profile of and recent podcast with Alicia Keys, whose heartfelt songs drive the show.

It's been a pretty great season on Broadway all around. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's sensational play "Appropriate" is a lock for me for the best revival of a play, and I'm pulling for Sarah Paulson's star turn in that production for best actress in a play. Best actor in a play will come down to choosing among one excellent performance after another. For me, it's Jeremy Strong ("Enemy of the People"), Leslie Odom Jr. ("Purlie Victorious") and Michael Stuhlbarg ("Patriots").

The Tony nominations were announced at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday; the awards ceremony is on June 16.

April 29, 2024, 5:16 p.m. ET

Elon Musk is steering a dangerous course by promising what he now likes to call "supervised Full Self-Driving" mode for Tesla automobiles.

Dangerous because it obscures who's responsible for driving the car. Is it the vehicle or the driver?

Tesla's website says, "Autopilot and Full Self-Driving capability are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment."

It adds, "While these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous."

That language defies human nature. What it says is that your Tesla will do the whole job of driving — steer, accelerate, brake and keep an electronic eye out for bikes, dogs and children — but you nevertheless have to pay just as much attention as if you were driving the car yourself.

The advantage is that most of the time, the self-driving car is supposed to drive better than you do and avoid accidents you would have gotten into.

But you must remain fully attentive, so driving will be just as wearisome, stressful and time-consuming as in a dumb old car. Maybe even more, because you'll be constantly second-guessing the vehicle's decisions and wondering whether to override it.

That's not the worst of it. The more you get comfortable with the capabilities of the car, the more your attention is likely to wander, exposing you to a bad accident if the self-driving car fails. Last week the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released a report saying there were at least 29 fatal accidents involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving from January 2018 to August 2023.

Tesla's stock jumped Monday on news that the Chinese government is about ready to approve the use of supervised Full Self-Driving mode on cars in China. That's a victory for Tesla. I'm not sure it's a victory for road safety.

April 29, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET

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Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here's what we're looking at this week:

• Donald Trump's Manhattan trial is back on Tuesday, and there will be another hearing about whether he has violated the gag order. Prosecutors are asking for thousands of dollars in fines to punish Trump for his denunciations of witnesses, and the judge could rule at any time. Definitely read Rebecca Roiphe's sharp guest essay Monday morning about how she views what the case is really about.

• On Wednesdays, there's no court, and Trump will be in Wisconsin and Michigan for rallies. Charles Homans took an in-depth look at how dark Trump's campaign speeches have become and argued it's pretty different this time.

• This is less important, but logistically, this is the first time Trump will be campaigning out of state, midweek during this trial. The Michigan rally is scheduled for the evening, and that's a pretty long day — especially if you have to be in court, as Trump does, when the trial resumes on Thursday morning. As the spring continues, it will be interesting if that scheduling grind affects how he campaigns in public or has any bearing on his demeanor at the trial.

• A quick path to madness is puzzling over every poll that comes out and trying to reconcile its individual elements. To that end: Over the weekend, CNN released a poll showing Trump up nationally over President Biden. CBS News and YouGov also released polls showing a pretty tight race in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

• Voters of all ages often say inflation has been a problem, but that's specifically true of young voters in this new and interesting Harvard Youth Poll, in which inflation and housing seem to be notably high concerns. Something I've been wondering about is whether one aspect of the softness for Biden in polling of younger voters is connected to how unfamiliar voters under 30 (maybe even under 40) are with more sudden increases in inflation and interest rates.

  The changes in rates and consumer choices by older homeowners also seem to be having an impact on the housing market. Basically I wonder if changes in rates and inflation are just more front and center for younger voters, especially given housing costs in some areas of the country. In the last New York Times/Siena poll, young voters rated Biden's economic performance particularly poorly.