New York City

The immediate reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has been a run to support the former president from his fellow Republicans, including those who are or soon might be competing with him for the GOP's 2024 nomination. But underlying this unanimity of disgust at the flagrant disregard for historical precedent, and the inflation of glaringly weak charges by Bragg, there is an obvious split in the right's response to this new stage of lawfare against Trump — one which could become more obvious in the coming months. On the one hand, you have the right-of-center Americans who are just plain shocked at this development.

Here are six things to think about ahead of any indictment and arrest of Donald Trump: 1. What is Trump going to be indicted for? Trump may soon be indicted on a campaign finance law violation. This means Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has convinced a grand jury there is enough evidence to charge Trump with the crime (federal prosecutors seem to have long abandoned the cheesy political revenge fantasy). 2. But I thought this was all about Trump having an affair with some porn star? Stormy Daniels allegedly had sex with Trump in 2006, which he denies, and which she and Michael Cohen also once denied. She then took money in 2016 to sign a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, to keep silent.

New York City mayor Eric Adams’s first day in office started with a call to the NYPD. Waiting for the J train to take him from Brooklyn to City Hall, Adams spied three men beginning to tussle. When punches began flying, he dialed 911. He didn’t offer a name until the end of the call: “Adams, Mayor Adams.” The moment, so perfect as to seem choreographed, epitomized Adams’s agenda. Predecessor Bill de Blasio destroyed his credibility with the police department over his eight years in office. Adams, by contrast, was a former NYPD captain who had run on his pedigree, rejected his opponents’ calls to defund the police and promised to revive the plainclothes anti-gun unit disbanded by de Blasio amid the George Floyd protests. The message worked.

Mayor Eric Adams has found himself stuck between a Texas rock and a New York hard place as thousands of illegal immigrants have been bused to the Big Apple by Lone Star State Governor Gregg Abbott in recent months. Now, a decades-old New York City policy called “right to shelter” has Adams's hands tied as he tries to find beds for the city’s new arrivals. The result is a crisis for the homeless shelter system, mostly of the city’s own making. This week, as Gotham began turning away dozens of homeless New Yorkers from its facilities, the Adams administration suggested it was time to revisit the “right to shelter” policy, which guarantees a bed to anyone in New York City who wants one.

The other night, I went to the Vermont State Fair in distinctly downscale Rutland, where my wife and I watched the pig races, ambled through the livestock exhibits, and examined the farm equipment, while enjoying corndogs and the crowd of distinctly overweight Rutlanders. The next day, I was back in my office in midtown Manhattan. A thin man wearing a mask got into the elevator with me and used a cloth to press the elevator button. Then he used the cloth to open the two doors to the street. He was clearly annoyed to have had to share the elevator with a maskless heathen. As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair.

Throughout the Covid shutdowns, I felt like Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction. If you’ve never seen the movie, the only thing you need to know is that a running theme is that the protagonist, hiding out upstate after stealing a lot of money, has got to get back to New York. Even the alias she uses is “New York” spelled backwards (sort of). For nearly two years, every morning I’d wake up thinking, I’ve got to get back to New York. Well, I’m back, and this isn’t what I meant at all. I wanted to be in the city that never sleeps, where I could walk around carefree, even at night, take the subway, and live within a few blocks of every possible convenience. Instead, this happened.

To hear New York mayor Eric Adams tell it, you would think that a crisis has gripped the streets of our nation’s largest city as busloads of illegal immigrants arrive from Texas. Some of the new arrivals, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who wants to send a message about the very real crisis in his state — have been met in person by the mayor. He claims the city is now scrambling to take care of them. It’s a lie. Thus far, Abbott has sent 75, maybe 100 illegal immigrants to New York, a city of 9 million people, a city which, in fact, already has a population of 500,000 illegal migrants. Are we really to believe that a few dozen more from Texas has our system at the breaking point?

On Thursday, a man jumped onstage and tried to kill one of the two candidates running for New York governor. Fortunately, he failed. Even so, the incident was terrifying, not only because it endangered Representative Lee Zeldin but because it underscores two grave problems facing America. One is the failure of our law enforcement system to treat serious crimes seriously, both to deter them and punish the offenders. This failure makes it a misnomer to speak of our “criminal justice” system. It’s not providing justice, and it's not deterring crime, especially violent crime. The second is the danger violence poses to our established constitutional order, beyond its danger to any individual.