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From Vox
Why Iranian women are risking everything by burning their hijabs -
A picture obtained by AFP shows a demonstrator raising their arms and making the victory sign during a protest in Tehran for Mahsa Amini, on September 19, 2022. | AFP via Getty Images
Iran is in revolt.
It was not an isolated incident of police violence in Iran. But the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last week has captured the country’s attention.
Amini was visiting the capital of Tehran, coming from the Kurdish province in the country’s northwest, and Iran’sso-calledmorality police detained her, allegedly for wearing the mandatory headscarf improperly. Several hours after entering police custody, she was in a coma. She died two days later. Iranian police claimed she died after a stroke and suffering cardiac arrest, but witnesses say she died after sustaining blows to the head, and shocking photos that spread online of Amini intubated in a hospital have galvanized the nation.
Protesters have since taken to the streets in more than 50 cities across Iran. Authorities reportedly have killed as many as 36 people during demonstrations. The government has also restricted the internet, so the complete picture may not be available. But the growing arrests of human rights defenders, activists, and journalists are particularly troubling.
Demonstrators have defied the repressive government regularly in the past several years, often expressing economic grievances. Women have been central to Iranian politics of resistance since the 1979 revolution, and before. What’s different about these protests is the diversity of people out on the streets and the widespread nature of Iranian resistance, in cities big and small.
The government may weather the emerging movement. Or Amini’s tragedy could prove to be Iran’s Mohamed Bouazizi — the Tunisian street-seller who self-immolated in December 2010 and helped catalyze the mass protests across the Middle East and North Africa that came to be the Arab Spring.
The protests have also provoked an outpouring of anger and sympathy from artists inside and outside of Iran.
Across the country, protesters are chanting, “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Those words have resonated deeply because they’re affirmative and unifying, says University of Sussex professor Kamran Matin. “This triangular slogan is uniting different strands of discontent in Iran,” he told me. “This slogan has united every section of Iranian society which has some sort of grievance against the government.”
Why Iranian women are burning headscarves
In response to Amini’s death, Iranians are demanding an end to mandatory hijab laws and burning the scarves in powerful displays of refusal. In Tehran, they have been chanting, “We don’t want forced hijab.”
That’s connected to the police’s purported reason for detaining Amini, but the act of protest carries multiple meanings. Negar Mottahedeh, a professor of gender and feminist studies at Duke University, likened the images of Iranian women burning their headscarves to the bra-burning of the 1960s. Bra-burning meant many things at once: an expression of feminism and liberation, but also a broader rejection of the Vietnam War and of capitalism. Similarly, the images from demonstrations across Iran over the last week object to compulsory veiling and the morality police, but also against a paranoid, controlling state that has sought to police women’s bodies.
Getty Images
People gather in protest against the death of Mahsa Amini along the streets on September 19, 2022, in Tehran, Iran.
The so-called morality police, an independent unit that has been around since 1979, don’t only enforce headscarves but a variety of regulations, including mixed-gender gatherings and prohibitions against drinking alcohol. During the late 1990s when Mohammad Khatami was president, Iran instituted a number of reforms, but his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reversed these. The current president, Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative, has maintained such restrictions and emboldened officials to clamp down. Authorities in Iran take it upon themselves to interpret the codes, and enforcement can be arbitrary and violent.
Human rights researchers note that the morality police in the past few months have resorted to violence more frequently.
Even if the protests don’t immediately result in transformative change, they’ve forever changed the debate on compulsory hijab in Iran, says Tara Sepehri Far, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “There’s no going back,” she told me. “Yes, police can pretend this never happened. But it did happen. Women took off their headscarves, walked down the street, and the debate has moved forward.”
The boldness of Iranian women in the face of a police state has been one of the enduring dynamics of the country’s street politics. “From the very beginning of the revolution in 1979, women were at the forefront. They were walking shoulder to shoulder with men in front of tanks and guns, and they were seeking a different kind of government, an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist government,” Mottahedeh told me.
The 1979 revolution overthrew a corrupt, US-backed dictator and brought together a disparate opposition, including leftist and Islamic groups. But the political faction that took power after the revolution succeeded, which still rules today, began to implement religious-based laws that discriminated against women.
Christine Spengler/Sygma via Getty Images
Women in the streets of Iran during the May 1, 1979, demonstration.
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
People hold up a photo of Iranian woman Mahsa Amini as they participate in a protest against Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi outside of the United Nations on September 21, 2022, in New York City.
Mottahedeh emphasizes that many of the initiatives of the country’s first supreme leader, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the immediate post-1979 moment were about controlling women’s bodies, their careers (excluding them from being judges, for example), and their appearance. Back then, some of the first revolts against the revolutionary government were about the right to abortion, the right to divorce, and the right for a wife to have a say about who her husband’s second wife was going to be.
Despite severe restrictions, women have continued to push back. “It’s really important to focus on women’s resistance and resilience inside of Iran, and not see them as victims,” says Sussan Tahmasebi, executive director of the human rights organization Femena. “Iranian women — even though they deal with a lot of discriminatory laws, structural and legal discrimination — they have always taken every opportunity to advance their lives.”
A map showing the extent of the protests in Iran. Importantly, the 2017 and 2019 protests also took place in cities across the country.
What’s new about these protests is that they appear to have drawn individuals from across various classes and social groups. #MahsaAminipic.twitter.com/NxGY6YdHOR
Another important element of the ongoing mobilization relates to Amini’s Kurdish identity. The Iranian government has, over the years, painted Kurdish activists as separatists seeking to delegitimize the Iranian state. But now with demonstrations so dispersed across the country, the Kurdish minority’s prominence in the protests may reflect the fact that Iranians are becoming more sensitive toward the injustices inflicted upon the ethnic and sectarian minorities in the country. The national character of the protests that elevate the life of a young Kurdish woman provides crucial recognition of their plight.
Matin, who studies Iranian and Kurdish politics, noted that the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” originates from Syrian Kurdistan. “The Kurds have always led the way in resistance against what I would describe, even in kind of scientific terms, as a semi-fascist state,” he said.
What’s next for an Iran in revolt
The demonstrations come at a time when the socioeconomic conditions in Iran are extremely tenuous, with a large portion of Iranian society impoverished. This is partly because of the impact of US sanctions over the Iran nuclear program, as well as the broader global economic conditions and the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. The country’s economic troubles are likely to persist without a return to the Iran nuclear deal. Then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the deal in 2018, and obstacles to its revival remain frozen despite diplomacy between the Biden administration, Iran, and world powers, leaving intact intensive economic sanctions on Iran. And without the money to address Iranians’ underlying grievances, the state is likely to flex its strength to deter social unrest.
Ali Vaez, an analyst with International Crisis Group, grew up in Iran and has been taken with the images of boys and girls fighting back against government forces. “These are scenes that were unimaginable 10 years ago, 20 years ago,” he told me. “This is a society that the Islamic Republic clearly is no longer able to control. With repression, they might be able to buy time, but they are not going to be able to address the underlying drivers of these protests.”
It’s impossible to know whether the protests will carry on and grow, as they have in the 2017-18 economic protests or the massive 2009 Green Movement protests, led by a presidential candidate at the time. One thing that’s certain is that protests in Iran are becoming more frequent, says Vaez, which shows the degree of discontent. “We used to see this kind of outburst of public ire once a decade in Iran,” he told me. “Now it’s becoming every other year, basically, and it’s becoming more ferocious, more violent.”
The demonstrations appear to be a spontaneous movement. But a leaderless revolt is also by extension disorganized. That may make it less likely for the movement to grow beyond a street movement into something that can transform Iranian policy and governance.
Two enduring forces also stand in the way of political change: a geriatric supreme leader who is completely averse to change, heading a regime that is willing to deploy brute force against its people. (By coincidence, the protests began the same day as news broke about Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s ill health and as the conservative President Ebrahim Raisi has left the country for the United Nations General Assembly in New York.) The discontent in the state and its crisis of legitimacy has been on display since the low voter turnout in the presidential election won by Raisi last year.
Now, the Iranian authorities are arresting activists, organizers, and students. “What concerns me is the escalation of the crackdown — they’re going to try to really force the protests to die down,” said Sepehri Far.
Such a brutal response to the mass protests will further expose the brittleness of the Iranian government. “It reflects the total incapacity of a political system to listen to its own population,” Vaez told me. “So there is a clear divide between state and society in the country — there is no doubt about it. But this is a system that still has the will and a fearsome capacity to repress.”
The Mississippi welfare fraud involving Brett Favre, explained -
Former NFL player Brett Favre at University Ridge Golf Club on June 11, 2022, in Madison, Wisconsin. | Patrick McDermott/Getty Images
How a WWE wrestler, corrupt Mississippi officials, and Brett Favre allegedly siphoned money away from poor people.
We live in an age of brazen, ham-handed grift. Have you heard the one involving the retired NFL star, a WWE wrestler, corrupt Southern officials, and the millions in welfare money that they benefited from?
If you’ve heard about this scandal, it’s likely because of the involvement of former Green Bay Packer Brett Favre, specifically the $1 million in federal welfare money he received for talks he apparently did not give and the $5 million he was involved in directing toward construction of a volleyball stadium at the college his daughter attended. Favre’s name is what pushed this from dry newspaper stories in 2020 announcing arrests of local bureaucrats to Stephen A. Smith yelling on ESPN about poverty in Mississippi.
But while Favre’s involvement has brought more attention to the story, it’s unfortunately narrowed the focus to a single ex-athlete, instead of taking in the extraordinarily sprawling web of corruption enveloping the state.
This scandal takes different shapes depending on the vantage from which one looks at it. Close up, it’s a sleazy, almost comically corrupt scheme by a few bureaucrats and nonprofit officials; zoom out and it looks more like an entire state government has become something closer to organized crime; pull back even further and the whole country’s welfare system is implicated, its very structure encouraging heinous misuse and waste even as poor people receive a fraction of what they need.
To understand how the fraud was perpetrated, it’s helpful to have some basic knowledge of how the United States’ alphabet soup of welfare programs works.
TANF — or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families — is the program that replaced AFDC — Aid to Families with Dependent Children — in the welfare reform of 1996. With the aim of “ending welfare as we know it,” TANF ended direct entitlement cash payments to poor families with children and created a block grant to states that they could use toward four statutorily dictated goals:
provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;
end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;
prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and
encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.
In 2022, it’s easy to see the assumptions embedded in the law about poor people, especially poor Black women.
The combined effect of relaxing rules on where money went, adding work requirements, and allowing states to define who qualified as “needy” had an effect that has only accelerated since 1996: fewer poor families receiving benefits. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities releases a “TANF-to-poverty ratio,” which tells you how many families are receiving TANF benefits for every 100 in poverty. The national number in 1996 was 68; it’s currently 21, the lowest ever. This average masks enormous interstate differences: In Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas, just four out of 100 families in poverty receive TANF cash assistance.
As the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service notes, this has not been because of an overall reduction in poverty: “Most of the post-1994 decline in the cash assistance caseload resulted from a reduction in the share of eligible families receiving benefits, rather than a reduction in the number of families meeting states’ definitions of being a needy family.”
The Mississippi welfare scandal has been burbling in the news for a while now, but its true import has never really sunk in beyond policy wonk circles. It’s a vivid illustration of how the welfare reform of 1996 has played out. What happened in Mississippi is less a case of criminal masterminds perpetrating a heist, and closer to walking into a vault that welfare reform left open and unguarded, all while purporting to protect the government from mooching citizens.
The Mississippi welfare fraud up close
At its core, the fraud for which six people so far have faced criminal charges was fairly simple.
John Davis, the director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS), funneled tens of millions of dollars in block-granted TANF money to a nonprofit, Mississippi Community Education Center, under the guise that the nonprofit was performing and subcontracting TANF-allowable activities. To be clear, the act of directing TANF funds to a nonprofit is legal so long as the nonprofit is actually performing tasks that go toward the goals outlined above.
That is not what was happening in Mississippi. Nancy New, head of the Mississippi Community Education Center, was instead kicking back money to Davis, his friends, and his family while enriching herself and her family as well. (A second nonprofit, the Family Resource Center, was also involved, but none of its personnel have been criminally charged.) On Thursday, Davis pleaded guilty to federal and local charges; New herself pleaded guilty in April.
The civil lawsuit the state filed to try to claw back some of the funds has 38 defendants, each its own lurid mess. It’s impossible to cover even a fraction of the cases here, but a few details alleged in the suitgive a good sense of what was going on:
John Davis’s nephew was paid $400,000 to create “coding academies” for the two nonprofits. He had no experience as a computer programmer and produced nothing.
Davis’s brother-in-law was paid over $600,000 for a nonexistent job and a lease on a nonexistent building.
Marcus Dupree, a former college football phenom, was paid $371,000 to buy a 4,000-square-foot house, with a swimming pool, pavilion, and “adjoining acreage on which Mr. Dupree was to maintain horses.” Dupree claimed in charity filings it would be for “equestrian activities for underprivileged children.”
To capture the full range here: “Illegal Diversions of TANF Funds To Enrich Sports Celebrities” needed its own subheading in the suit.
Many instances of misuse didn’t even end up in the suit. For instance, the Clarion Ledger found $43,000 spent on Bible-inspired children’s books by a Christian singer named Jason Crabb. Auditors later determined this was “indicative of abuse and waste.”
Apart from these cases, Davis, the MDHS director, became very close acquaintances with the DiBiases; sons Ted Jr. and Brett, and father Ted Sr. All are wrestlers, and Ted Sr. in particular was a prominent WWE wrestler.
According to the suit, starting in 2017, huge sums of TANF money began flowing from the two nonprofits. Ted Jr. set up dummy companies “Priceless Ventures” and “Familiae Orientem,” which were paid around$3 million. These payments were marked as “leadership training” and supporting inner city youth for purposes of TANF eligibility. Brett DiBiase’s $160,000 tab for a four-month stay at a luxury drug rehab in California called Rise in Malibu was covered, and TANF money paid for Davis’s first-class flights and accommodations to visit him — all for the ostensible purpose of examining top-notch models in drug treatment to mimic in their own state. Brett also accepted contracts and money for work he was supposedly performing during his rehab stay. Ted Sr., whose nickname as a performer was “The Million Dollar Man,” received $1.7 million in support of his wrestling ministry.
These individual cases, as ridiculous as they sound, add up to staggering sums. In all, the state auditor found at least $77 million misused from 2017 to 2020. Mississippi’s yearly TANF spending has ranged anywhere from $55 million to $104 million in federal TANF funds in recent years.
Zooming out: The Mississippi government’s role
Reporting from Anna Wolfe — the Mississippi Today reporter whose years-long investigation has formed the backbone of the entire story — and others has continued finding strands leading well past Davis.
Then-Gov. Phil Bryant (R) personally texting Brett Favre reassurances is one. Another was the fact that one of those defendants under the “Sports Celebrities” subheading was a college linebacker who is current Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’s “longtime personal trainer and buddy.” He received more than $1 million in TANF money to host three fitness boot camps. Bryant personally intervened to have MDHS help his great-nephew, who allegedly ended up receiving state-funded drug rehabilitation. Nancy New, the nonprofit head, is friends with Bryant’s wife.
And the investigation itself has been less vigorous than the criminal arrests might suggest. The state auditor, Shad White, who had ties to Bryant, had in the view of close observerswaited a strangely long time to report findings to the federal government, which would have an obvious interest in federal money being stolen. An original forensic audit by MDHS in 2021 was clearly hamstrung by someone, with the accounting firm denied access to documents and limited in scope, according to reporting by Mississippi Today. The original lawyer leading the civil suit was fired by the state earlier this year. The depositions of the defendants in that case have been postponed.
Wolfe says there was “a concerted effort by people in charge of this investigation at the beginning to steer the direction away from the governor, to take it as high up as John Davis and Nancy New and stop there.” She goes on to say that “the way that state government is run in Mississippi, people are totally afraid to say anything at any time for fear of losing their jobs.”
But if low-level employees were in a state of fear, elites in the state were not. Text and email communications between these governors, professional athletes, and businessmen show virtually no concern that they could be documenting ongoing crimes.
In addition to the volleyball and speaking money, Brett Favre had around $2 million of TANF dollars routed to Prevacus, a pharmaceutical company he invested in, according to Wolfe’s reporting. Prevacus’s founder and president, Jake VanLandingham, texted Bryant just days after he left office to say, “I’d like to give you a company package for all your help. … We want and need you on our team!!!” to which Bryant responded, “Sounds good. Where would be the best place to meet.”
Favre texted VanLandingham at one point: “This all works out we need to buy her and John Davis surprise him with a vehicle I thought maybe John Davis we could get him a raptor.” [sic] Ted DiBiase Sr., on receiving a particular TANF payment for $250,000 for motivational speaking, forwarded it to his sons saying, “Look what I got today!” This feeling of impunity may be understandable: neither Favre, VanLandingham, Bryant, nor DiBiase Sr. has yet been charged with a crime.
All of this taking of funds comes alongside a deterioration in services; Mississippi saw its predominantly Black capital of Jackson lose usable water for a month and a half. Reeves, the current governor, joked one day after a boil-water advisory was lifted that it was “as always, a great day to not be in Jackson.”
The real welfare fraudsters
Finally, there’s the bleak reality that while Mississippi’s TANF spending is notable for its shamelessness, it’s less of an outlier than you might think.
While Mississippi had a slush fund for personal gain and favors, TANF acts as a slush fund for state governments everywhere. Its structure as a block grant, its lack of oversight, and the paternalistic structures of its 1990s policy goals have allowed states to use the money on almost anything they want, whether filling budget holes or funding lawmakers’ pet projects.
Some of that spending has been in theory defensible, such as money going toward college scholarships or foster care. But many states have used money that could’ve helped poor people on programsthat don’t look much different from Mississippi’s.
A single company in Oklahoma used more than $70 million in TANF money to run adult relationship classes and make pro-marriage ads. Many states divert welfare money to fund “crisis pregnancy centers,” or thinly veiled anti-abortion clinics. Utah cut back cash aid only to have state caseworkers repeatedly tell applicants to seek help from the LDS Church, including non-Mormons who would need to be baptized to receive aid. Many states just don’t spend the money at all, amassing tens of billions of unspent dollars, even during the pandemic.
Experts I talked to were blunt about the program’s failings. Aditi Shrivastava, a senior policy analyst at CBPP, told me simply, “TANF’s focus should be cash assistance.” Heather Hahn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, pointed out that of “the four purposes of TANF, none of them is to reduce poverty. … The ideology of the program is not about reducing poverty.”
The obvious irony is that decades of welfare debates, and TANF’s structure itself, were driven by the often racist and sexist fear that mothers, especially Black mothers, were getting money they didn’t deserve and wasting it. But the kind of staggering organized theft that took place in Mississippi was only possible because of TANF’s giant-pool-of-money design. Shrivastava and Hahn both told me that such fraud would have been nigh-impossible under AFDC’s cash payment system.
One remaining question is why the program hasn’t been reformed or fixed. The answer may be found in these numbers: According to Wolfe, in 1996, 33,000 adults were receiving assistance in Mississippi. Last year, and with at least $77 million gone elsewhere, that number was 208 adults.
In other words, it hasn’t been fixed because it’s performing the way it was designed to.
Are the walls really closing in on Trump this time? -
Former President Donald Trump spoke at the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio on September 17, 2022. | Andrew Spear for The Washington Post via Getty
His legal problems are worsening. But they might not take him down.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: New developments have put Donald Trump in even more serious legal jeopardy.
A new civil fraud lawsuit from the New York attorney general’s office is threatening his business, while his efforts to stall the criminal investigation into whether he mishandled classified information seem to have failed. And a separate investigation into the January 6 attack scrutinizes his associates.
It all looks quite bad for him. Then again, for at least five years, much of the media has touted the seriousness of Trump’s legal peril, portraying him as on the verge of a humiliating downfall — only to see him go, in his own words, “Scott Free,” again and again.
So will this time be different? Are the walls really closing in?
It certainly seems like Trump’s threat of facing criminal charges is currently higher than it’s been since he entered politics, due to the classified documents probe, and the fact that he’s no longer an incumbent president with immunity against indictment. The New York civil lawsuit — at least on its face — appears to present a serious threat to his business as well. The suit claims Trump and his employees “violated a host of state criminal laws” and their conduct “plausibly violates federal criminal law,” and New York Attorney General Letitia James said she’d refer her findings to federal prosecutors.
But it’s worth remembering Trump hasn’t been criminally charged with anything yet, and that prosecutorial caution could still prevail. Even if Trump is charged, a potential trial would present further challenges, and if he is convicted, an eventual sentence might not be so harsh. And though he is facing that New York civil suit, a trial there is no sure thing either.
Trump critics hoping he will be removed from politics via indictment or prison may be hoping in vain. If he chooses to run again, it’s likely to be voters who will decide his fate.
What prosecutors will consider before pursuing a Trump indictment or trial
Whatever you believe about the strength of the evidence against Trump in these various investigations, his status as incumbent president meant he couldn’t be indicted during his term, according to long-standing Justice Department policy. And his continued popularity among Republican voters meant that impeachment would end in acquittal (because many Senate Republicans would have been required to convict him). So, from January 2017 to January 2021, the power of his office and the power of his political base protected him.
Since Trump left office, his shield against indictment is gone. And while his political base on the right remains strong, the arena has changed — Republican politicians are no longer the key decision-makers.
Instead, prosecutors have the reins. Various prosecutors — in New York, in Washington, DC, and in Georgia — have scrutinized Trump’s conduct for potential crimes in recent years, looking into his company’s business practices, his attempt to overturn the 2020 election result, and whether he improperly brought classified documents to Mar-a-Lago.
These prosecutors will have to evaluate the strength of the evidence against Trump, assessing whether he indeed did commit crimes and whether they’d likely convince a jury of that at trial. Federal prosecutors will also have to persuade higher-ups like Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Gaming out these prosecutors’ thinking is difficult because we don’t have access to the evidence they’re looking at, or their legal reasoning. For each of the Trump investigations, we don’t know whether they think they’re looking at a clear open-and-shut case of criminality, whether their legal theory is backed by ample precedent or is a bit novel, or whether similar cases tend to be brought in similar situations. (Trump’s attempt to overturn the election has little if any modern precedent in the US, so it’s difficult to even know what to compare it to.)
But for many prosecutors, particularly in the US Justice Department, caution reigns supreme. Pursuing an indictment and trial in a high-profile matter takes a great deal of resources, and presents the risk of embarrassment should the trial end in acquittal. DOJ’s prosecution manual says that government attorneys should not only consider whether they believe the person committed a crime, but also whether “the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.”
So prosecutors typically look for a clear-cut, open-and-shut crime. The classified documents matter might seem like one such crime: Trump had the documents, he should not have taken them, so they might reason he arguably should be charged.
Still, there are many complications that could make the government wary of a potential trial. For one, they want to keep the documents secret. Depending on whether the venue is in Florida (it’s currently unclear where they’d charge it), a jury conviction could be difficult. And while Trump’s arguments about executive privilege might seem like a stretch, this Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in on them just yet.
Note that when former CIA director David Petraeus was investigated for leaking classified material to his biographer, he eventually struck a plea deal for two years of probation and a $100,000 fine. Trump’s conduct is still murky so perhaps it was worse, and he’s unlikely to strike a plea deal like Petraeus did, but Petraeus actually did leak the information and Trump is not known to have done so. If a case were to be brought, and Trump was to be found guilty, he could face similar consequences — or even a less severe punishment.
Now, prosecutors in Georgia and New York are elected Democrats and might be more willing to take risks to go after Trump. But even they might have reasons for caution. A Trump indictment and trial would swallow up everything else their office might do for years to come and become a grueling effort, while they’d personally become a top target of Fox News and the right. Even if that doesn’t give them pause, they could simply decide they don’t have a strong enough case.
Earlier this year, Alvin Bragg, a criminal justice reformer elected as Manhattan’s District Attorney, reportedly expressed doubts about the ongoing investigation into Trump’s business practices he had just taken over, and two prosecutors leading it soon resigned. (Bragg insisted in a statement this week that his office’s Trump investigation was “active and ongoing.”)
On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit in that same investigation, setting up a civil trial with potentially major consequences for the Trump organization. Even there, though, Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney argue that a settlement remains a real possibility, writing, “Pursuing the case through to completion could take years and there’s no guarantee that a judge will agree to grant all the relief the AG asked for.”
Only voters can truly take Trump down
If Trump is eventually criminally charged, it would take some time before a trial. And even if he’s eventually convicted, depending on what the charges actually are, it’s not clear he’d get a particularly harsh sentence.
All of that is to say that, if Trump wants to run for president again in 2024, it seems unlikely that the cases against him could remove him from the political scene entirely. (Some liberals are excited that one penalty for mishandling government documents is disqualification from “from holding any office under the United States,” but many experts believe that is unconstitutional as applied to the presidency, since qualifications for that office are set out in the Constitution.)
Instead, Trump’s political future will likely be determined at the ballot box, if he runs again — in the primary, and the general election.
There is a hope among some Trump skeptics, including in the GOP, that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) will run and prove a potent challenger. Perhaps that could happen, and perhaps Trump’s legal issues will help weaken his standing if GOP voters fear he’ll be an electoral loser.
Still, it’s far from clear how things will play out. As my colleague Zack Beauchamp recently wrote, Trump-esque candidates have done quite well in Republican primaries this year, and Trump continues to lead all national GOP primary polls, usually by large margins.
As for the general election, should Trump make it there, that’s murky too. President Biden recently said his “intention” is to run again but whether that’s a “firm decision” still “remains to be seen.”
He’d be 81 years old by election day, is not popular despite some recent improvement, and if he doesn’t run, it’s unclear which Democrat would succeed him. One might think that surely after January 6, Dobbs, and with criminal investigations hanging over his head, Trump is too damaged to win a general election. But as was demonstrated in 2016, the identity and political strength of the Democratic nominee will matter too.
Investigations and charges could well hurt Trump politically, though his die-hard loyalists will likely stick by him no matter what. But in either the primary and the general election, what would really be needed to beat him is a compelling alternative for voters to flock to instead. That’s the only way the Trump era in politics could really end.
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Ukraine war: Putin not bluffing about nuclear weapons, EU says - The EU’s warning comes after Russia’s president said he could use “all the means available to us”.
What Russia wants from the votes in occupied Ukraine - Russia is losing its war in Ukraine and now four regions are holding self-styled referendums.
Italian election campaign ends as far right bids for power - Political leaders hold rallies ahead of elections on Sunday that could bring Giorgia Meloni to power.
Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann: The cheating row that’s blowing up the chess world - Magnus Carlsen’s apparent accusation against Hans Niemann is the biggest chess scandal in years.
From Ars Technica
Music on the brain: Listening can influence our brain’s activity - The “Mozart effect” isn’t real—but music does affect our mental processes. - link
GeForce GPUs are slowing down after installing the Windows 11 2022 Update - A new version of the GeForce Experience software will fix the issue. - link
NASA seems to be in full “send it” mode for the Artemis I mission - Space agency officials seem OK with leaving the rocket out in a tropical storm. - link
Amazon hires unsafe trucking firms twice as often as peers, WSJ finds - Since 2015, crashes involving Amazon vehicles have killed more than 75 people. - link
39-year-old Radio Shack laptop gets new CPU, keeps original screen - Hobbyist and IEEE editor Stephen Cass upgrades a broken laptop from 1983. - link
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