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Melania Trump might not return to DC full-time for Trump’s possible second term, according to Axios. The article is predicated on a survey of a “handful of Melania-ologists,” because a spokesperson for Melania didn’t respond to Axios’s request for comment. As the article mentioned: “Melania does what Melania wants” — and Cockburn doesn’t blame her one bit. In February, when asked if Melania would be on the campaign trail much, Donald Trump said: “She was a very successful model, very, very successful, and yet she was a private person. She’s going to be out a lot. Not because she likes doing it, but she likes the results.” The former first lady, however, has not been in attendance at most of Trump’s campaign events.

In the same building where he once descended down a golden elevator and embarked on a campaign that would forever change American politics, this morning Donald Trump lumbered up to the mic in New York City to launch napalm at all his enemies, particularly Judge Juan Merchan, Alvin Bragg and Michael Cohen — who he didn't mention by name, other than calling him a "sleazebag" and saying that he didn't qualify as a "fixer." The idea of a gag order for this man is so ridiculous, I love that they even tried to do it. It was classic Trump: meandering, angry, darkly comic, rhetorical guns blasting away at everyone around him, golden hair blown out and wearing a bright crimson tie as wide as his head.

This is an extremely strange moment for American democracy. Polls suggest that Independent voters — the people who decide American elections — will not vote for a man who is a convicted felon. But now Donald Trump, currently the favorite to win re-election in November, has been found guilty on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records — and nobody knows if that verdict will make him more popular or less. On one hand, Trump has been traduced — thirty-four times over — because a court has decided that, yes, he deliberately altered his financial accounts, possibly for election campaign reasons, back in 2016. He is now a convict. Trump has a murky past. That past has now caught up with him.

Future historians, psephologists, and political analysts, searching for the day and time that Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign imploded beyond recovery, are likely to settle on Thursday May 23, 2024, at approximately 7 p.m. It was then that Trump’s surprising rally in Crotona Park in the South Bronx really got underway. I didn’t hear any actual bells tolling, but if you listened carefully you could discern the mournful obligato that signaled the end of Joe Biden’s hopes in New York — and therefore the country. No Republican has taken New York since Ronald Reagan’s great landslide in 1984. Why then would Trump waste time coming to the South Bronx? Because, to adapt Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A Changin’." Joe Biden won New York in 2020 by twenty-three points.

There’s something in the water in New York’s 3rd district, which continues to pump out interesting candidates for Congress. Of course, we had George Santos. Enough said there. Then after the colorful Santos was expelled from Congress in a historic vote, Republicans nominated Mazi Pilip, an IDF veteran and Ethiopian immigrant, who lost in a special election to Democrat Tom Suozzi, who is... vastly less interesting than his GOP counterparts. But now, Suozzi could face another colorful Republican — Bill Cotter, formerly known as Barstool Sports’s Billy Football, who joined the race a few weeks ago, and has been gathering the requisite number of signatures to appear on the primary ballot in June.