Mar-a-Lago

On April 9, Melania Trump held a lone press conference. She showed up in a charcoal suit, delivered a speech and turned to exit, runway style, without pausing. Melania doesn’t take questions from the press. The facts, according to Melania: Jeffrey Epstein had not introduced her to Donald Trump. She met her husband, “by chance, at a New York City party, in 1998.” She and her husband were acquainted with Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein, but this was “common in New York City and Palm Beach.” She had engaged Maxwell in polite “casual correspondence” over email. That was the extent of the relationship. “I am not Epstein’s victim,” she said somberly. White House staff were perplexed. Why had the presser been called?

It required an incredible amount of sophistication to achieve the desired result in Caracas: a dictator detained and transported alive. The mission had been planned and mapped out for months, worked and reworked at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief. No American casualties would be tolerated. Special Forces had been circling and at the ready for weeks. The helicopters were easy targets, so a vital part of the mission was to eliminate Nicolás Maduro’s ground- to-air response beforehand and claim total air superiority.

While celebrating his signature legislative achievement, President Trump managed to wade into another ridiculous controversy this holiday weekend. In a Thursday night speech touting the benefits of the Big Beautiful Bill for family farmers, he said: “No death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker, and in some cases, shylocks and bad people,” Trump said. “They destroyed a lot of families, but we did the opposite.” “Shylock”, of course, refers to the Jewish character from The Merchant of Venice, who demands a pound of human flesh as repayment for a debt.

Former president Donald Trump’s defense team chose to rest in the so-called “hush-money” trial in Manhattan on Tuesday, moving the case forward to closing arguments next week and then jury deliberations. Trump did not end up testifying in his own defense, which he had suggested earlier in the trial he might do. Instead, the defense called only one significant witness: Robert Costello, an attorney and former advisor to Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani. Costello testified that Cohen told him previously that he had nothing incriminating to offer prosecutors about Trump and that he told him “numerous times” Trump did not know anything about payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. A case in point was the chyron that Fox News posted briefly on June 13. That was the day that Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami. The news story featured a split screen. On the left was Joe Biden speaking at an event in Washington for the secretary-general of NATO. On the right was Donald Trump addressing supporters in New Jersey. Underneath ran the unspeakable truth: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” That fresh-breeze-of-truth window was open for a total of twenty-seven seconds. Then it was slammed shut. But that was long enough. Our Guardians on the internet erupted in fury. Fox issued a public apology and canned the veteran producer responsible on the spot.

Donald Trump is the first president in history to be indicted for federal crimes, in this case thirty-seven counts that center on his taking of highly classified materials from the White House to Mar-a-Lago in January 2021. The charges also implicate the former president and a close aide, Waltine Nauta, in a conspiracy to hide the documents in whole or in part from the National Archives, the Department of Justice and his own legal team — and making false statements along those same lines.  Hundreds of documents are of concern, classified at the highest levels with origins at the CIA, NSA and elsewhere in the intelligence community. While leaks and speculation prior to the unsealing of the indictment suggested this was a routine Espionage Act case — i.e.

To this point in the early days of the Republican primary, all the major potshots have been coming from just one candidate, directed at just one other: Donald Trump taking aim repeatedly at Ron DeSantis. Much of the media conversation about this has focused on DeSantis's unwillingness to respond to any of these attacks: a deliberate choice that hasn't lowered the temperature or frequency of Trump's barbs, which now include comparing the Florida conservative to, gasp, Mitt Romney. But consider the possibility that at this moment, both men are making a political mistake. For DeSantis, the risks of non-response are that Trump defines him before he defines himself. Republican primary voters generally know who Ron DeSantis is and have an overwhelmingly positive view of him.

Last September, when 60 Minutes asked Joe Biden what he thought of the August raid at Mar-a-Lago where the FBI found folders of classified documents mixed in with Donald Trump’s personal effects and papers, the president said he was shocked. Biden wanted to know how “anyone could be that irresponsible.” He worried about what sources and methods might have been compromised by his predecessor’s carelessness. Were there agent lists among those purloined records? That bit of political point-scoring has become a petard with which the president has hoist himself. Two months later, Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in his Wilmington home and garage and in his personal office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington.