Opinion | Even Outside the Courtroom, Trump’s Bombast Is Less Effective (2024)

Pinned

From Hope Hicks, the Tears of Truth

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 p*rn 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.

Good Luck Isn’t Good Enough to Fight Bird Flu

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.

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Georgia Bucks Bail Reform, but at What Cost?

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?

Still No Stag and Not Much Flation

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:

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:

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.

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Protect Journalists, Everywhere

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.

The Tawdry Tabloid World in Which Trump Lived

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.

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Biden Said the Right Thing on Campus Protests. Will It Matter?

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.

Trump’s Contempt for His Court Is So Pervasive It Has Become Routine

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.

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At Last, Washington Realizes the Obvious Truth About Marijuana

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.

Handcuffs and Barricades at Columbia, but No Reporters

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.

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Vaccine Acceptance Is Far More Common Than You Might Think

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.

One Party Has a Serious Foreign Policy. The Other Has a Tantrum.

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.

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Karen McDougal Almost Went on ABC News, but Then Trump’s Team Paid Her

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 p*rn 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.

Iran’s Frightening Message to Its Young People

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.

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Trump Finally Pays a Cash Price for His Threats

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.

Even Outside the Courtroom, Trump’s Bombast Is Less Effective

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.

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.

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The Three Shows I’m Pulling For in the Tony Awards

“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.

Tesla’s Dangerous Course

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.

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For Trump, a Long Day and a Long Week Ahead

• 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.