Category Archives: Donald Trump

When former President Trump hysterically called for shoplifters to be shot in a speech last week before California Republicans, we know who he thinks hes talking about: Black and Brown people. We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft, Trump said. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store. Shot!

It continues more than four decades of Trump unapologetically calling for capital punishment or for the accused to be kneecapped way beyond for what crimes usually call for. Those who have a long memory about Trump will recall his full-page ads in New York newspapers 34 years ago calling for the death penalty in after the Central Park rape that wrongfully sent Black and Brown men to prison.

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Now this, as the former president remains the clear front runner for the Republican nomination to return to the White House. Now, the easy thing here is to keep going about his ongoing efforts to place the political mark of the beast on Black and Brown people. But his fascist rant to bring the full weight of lethal federal law enforcement against shoplifters carries a peculiar irony. Trump is so unhinged, he forgot that most shoplifters are White.

Despite the decades of Black people being profiled in stores as possible shoplifters (and being shot and killed, as was John Crawford in 2014 for holding an unboxed pellet gun in the sporting goods section of a Walmart outside Dayton Ohio), much of the loot that leaks out of stores iare in the backpacks and purses of the least profiled.

According to a 2014 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 77.5 percent of shoplifters are White, significantly above their 59 percent of the national population. Only 8 percent of shoplifters are Black and only another 8 percent are Latino, well below their shares of the national population. That study said, Shoplifting was significantly more common in individuals with at least some college education, among those with individual incomes over $35,000 and family incomes over $70,000.

Going even farther back, a 1986 Washington Post story on shoplifting in the Washington, D.C. area found that while young Black males were routinely put under heavy surveillance in stores, 71 percent of people arrested for shoplifting were from middle- and upper-income brackets. That story said:

If there was a profile of a shoplifter, it might show a woman from a middle-income group, who has either a high school diploma or college degree. In reality, the statistics show that shoplifting cuts across age, educational and income levels. All available evidence suggests, in fact, that young black males, as a group, between the ages of 18 and 25, pose no greater threat as shoplifters than most groups.

In a 2013 interview on National Public Radio, Rutgers University marketing professor Jerome Williams said, About 70 percent of all the shoplifting in this country is done by whites. And in fact, if you look at store shrinkage or loss, most of the loss is done by employees and not by customers. And in some states where weve looked at the data, what we call the modal group thats most likely to shoplift is white women in their 40s and 50s.

When Trump went off about shooting shoplifters, his audience of California Republicans cheered as if a football team scored a touchdown. That was because in that same speech, he referred to California as a dumping ground. Trump has long used the phrase to refer to Mexico dumping its worst elements into the United States.

The crowd clearly assumed that shoplifters in the crosshairs of another Trump White House would be Brown and Black. The data says otherwise. If Trump really means what he says, hes about to mow down a whole lot of White housewives.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a former Boston Globe columnist and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary.

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Donald Trump Says Shoplifters Should be Shot, but Does He Know Who Most Shoplifters Are? - Yahoo News

Though it was lost in the four-year cyclone that was the presidency of Donald Trump, one of his most immoral acts was to pardon soldiers who were accused of committing war crimes by killing unarmed civilians or prisoners. Military leaders, including his own defense secretary and the secretary of the Army, objected, saying it would undermine good order and discipline. Lawlessness can easily beget lawlessness.

But the American system is ill prepared to deter leaders bent on undermining the rule of law. Checks and balances spread powers across the government, but that isnt enough to temper or stop bad-faith actors looking to subvert the law. According to a new article in The Atlantic, Gen. Mark Milley, upon becoming the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2019, found himself in a disconcerting situation: trying, and failing, to teach President Trump the difference between appropriate battlefield aggressiveness on the one hand, and war crimes on the other.

Mr. Trump, as General Milley discovered and many Americans already knew, is a man unencumbered by any moral compass. He goes the way he wants to go, legalities and niceties be damned. Last week in a post on his social network, Mr. Trump argued that General Milleys actions would have once been punishable by death.

Most Americans probably didnt notice his screed. Of those who did and were not alarmed, far too many nodded along in agreement. As Josh Barro said in a Times Opinion round table this week about the former presidents recent comments, Trump is and has been unhinged, and thats priced in to the views that many voters have of him.

It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Trump is running for the presidency on a platform of lawlessness, promising to wield the power of the state against his enemies real or imagined. Today, millions and millions of Americans support him for that reason or despite it.

In a poll released this week, 51 percent of American adults said theyd vote for Mr. Trump over President Biden, including a vast majority of Republicans. And Wednesday nights farcical G.O.P. debate may only increase Mr. Trumps large lead in the primary race.

That advantage over the rest of the Republican field is growing even as prosecutors are finally trying to hold Mr. Trump legally responsible for his misdeeds from the plot to overturn the 2020 election to fraud allegations concerning his real estate empire.

The backlash has been predictable: In the past few months, Mr. Trump has argued that federal laws about classified documents dont apply to him; floated the idea of pardons for his supporters jailed for attacking the Capitol; said that judges with whom he disagrees are unfit to preside over cases against him; and has been accused of threatening to prejudice the jury pool in one case.

A judge decided to shield the identity of jurors for another trial after Trump supporters posted the names, photos and addresses of grand jurors involved in issuing an indictment in that case. Mr. Trump is also pushing for a government shutdown to halt Justice Department investigations, to force a show of loyalty and try to bend our political system to his will even when he is out of office.

All this has accompanied a sharp uptick in the often incoherent statements from the 77-year-old former president, on social media and at his rallies. And while many Americans long ago tuned him out, his most extreme supporters, like Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, have not. In his newsletter, Mr. Gosar recently wrote that General Milley should be hanged.

As the legal cases against Mr. Trump have picked up, so too have threats against law enforcement authorities, judges, elected officials and others, The Times reported this week. The threats, in turn, are prompting protective measures, a legal effort to curb his angry and sometimes incendiary public statements and renewed concern about the potential for an election campaign in which Mr. Trump has promised retribution to produce violence.

Mr. Trumps targets extend to other Republicans. In a biography out next month, Senator Mitt Romney disclosed that he was spending $5,000 per day on security for himself and his family against threats from Trump supporters.

This combustible combination of heated political rhetoric, unhinged conspiracy theories, anti-government sentiment and a militant gun culture have created fertile ground for political violence. The country is not powerless to stop the spread of lawlessness but it requires addressing those precursors to violence.

Many of those elements swirled around a visit by Mr. Trump this week to a gun store in South Carolina that this summer sold an AR-15-style rifle to a man who later carried out a racist mass shooting at a dollar store. During his visit, Mr. Trump hefted a custom Glock handgun with his face etched onto the handle. Though he said he wanted to buy one of the weapons theyre big sellers! it is unclear if he could legally do so since he is under indictment.

Mr. Trumps whims and erratic online missives should not be dismissed as Trump being Trump. Take his call this month for House Republicans to shut down the government. Mr. Trump egged them on, urging them to settle for nothing less than their full slate of demands, including forcing the Justice Department to end its investigations of him. He called it the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.

While a government shutdown wouldnt end the federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump, a Trump presidency could easily do so. After all, there are few moral or legal hurdles left to clear after pardoning war criminals.

There are many nations where citizens live in fear of governments that wield unchecked and arbitrary authority against their enemies, real or imagined. That is the America that Mr. Trump is promising his supporters. When Mr. Trump told supporters I am your retribution, all Americans should take him at his word.

Defeating Mr. Trump at the ballot box is going to require a lot more political courage than it takes to put flashes of honesty in the pages of a memoir. The former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest in a long line of memoirists, declaring in an interview on Tuesday for her new book that Mr. Trump is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.

True enough. Which is why Americans cant wait until January 2025, and another shelf of memoirs, to hear the truth that so many Republicans have long known.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Donald Trumps Campaign of Violence and Lawlessness - The New York Times

There’s a word for a man who is afraid to show up: coward.

Former President Donald Trump is a coward when it comes to debating his primary opponents.

Don’t get me wrong: Sometimes cowards win. For example, the governor of Arizona refused to debate her opponent last year, and she’s the current governor of Arizona. In politics, as in sports, it doesn’t matter if you win by one or by 1 million.

But in politics, especially presidential politics, courage matters.

A rather large part of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was his seeming fearlessness. He was willing to say things that were not poll-tested. In some cases, conventional wisdom held that his comments would prove disastrous for any candidate to utter them, even if they reflected things that many people were thinking.

Trump’s willingness to speak out, even at the possible cost of offending everyone, was endearing in a very weird way. It’s also what made his rallies must-see television.

Trump is no longer a political novice or “just a businessman.” He is now a politician, because that’s what happens when you become president. And the “aw, shucks, I’m new to all this” attitude doesn’t play for him now the same as it did in 2016. As a politician, Trump didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.

In 2016, when Trump said things that tied the tongues of his primary opponents or even Hillary Clinton, it was both fun and funny. But at a certain point, the president has to be at least a little presidential. So does a former president. Attitude is a poor substitute for substance the second time around.

Trump is far ahead in the polls. The only thing with greater separation between Trump and his competitors are the Republican nominating contests themselves. The argument that Trump doesn’t need to debate because of his current lead is a poor one. Early poll “winners” such as Scott Walker and Howard Dean can tell you how that worked out.

And don’t forget that Trump did skip a 2016 debate. He might have lost the Iowa caucuses as a consequence, as he himself acknowledged afterward.

Trump really isn’t campaigning much at all. He holds occasional rallies, but those aren’t designed to broaden his appeal. They’re mostly just airings of his grievances. Attendees this time around are his devoted faithful, not curious and undecided voters.

And Trump’s currently strong polling in the general election is more a reflection of just how bad at the job President Joe Biden has been. It has nothing to do with the public yearning for Trump or any other Republican.

In the abstract, it is enough right now not to be Biden, especially since Trump isn’t really making much of a case for himself. That won’t remain true for long.

In most of Trump’s campaign speeches and interviews (regardless of the question), he whines about the media and lies about his opponents — mostly Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R). Somehow, DeSantis was closer to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during COVID-19 than Trump, even though DeSantis quickly began to ignore Fauci’s decrees, whereas Trump basically turned over his administration to Fauci.

Lying about someone when they’re not there to refute it is easy. Having that person on stage next to you is a whole different ballgame.

Being on stage means having to answer for contradicting your previous stance on abortion. It means having to answer for Fauci. It means having to answer for dozens of personnel decisions that retroactively became “horrible” because the hires ultimately disagreed with you. It means having to explain totalitarian-sounding declarations about using the presidency to unleash government on your political enemies — even if they deserve it on strictly karmic terms — or attacking the First Amendment.

Most importantly, debating means having to articulate specifics about a vision for the future. Thus far, Trump’s argument seems to be that he deserves to be rewarded for previous deeds. While things were certainly better under Trump than they are now, the presidency is not a thank-you card for deeds you did years ago.

Trump shouldn’t debate, his supporters say, because there’s nowhere for him to go but down. That’s not true, though. He could wipe out everyone else, if he prepared and performed well.

That’s what I think he’s really afraid of.

If he doesn’t show up because the others aren’t “legitimate” contenders, then Biden is empowered to do the same. Legitimacy, after all, is in the eye of the beholder.

Biden doesn’t want to be on stage with Trump for largely the same reasons Trump doesn’t want to be on stage with other Republican candidates. If Trump won’t do it, why would Biden? Then it becomes a campaign of two old men hurling personal insults on social media, which is exactly what Democrats want — a rerun of 2020.

President Trump, man up and debate — if only to show the voters you still can.

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).

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Donald Trump is a coward for not debating tonight - The Hill

I dont think the effort to limit the options for our primary voters has any legs whatsoever, Chris Ager, chair of the state Republican Party, told POLITICO.

Now, the states top legal and election officials are weighing in.

Both the Secretary of States Office and the Attorney Generals Office are aware of public discourse regarding the potential applicability of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the upcoming presidential election cycle, New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella and Secretary of State David Scanlan said in a joint statement on Tuesday, calling out misinformation implying that Scanlans office had already taken a position on the issue.

The statement comes after the Secretary of States Office was bombarded with calls on Monday, according to NBC News, after conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk told listeners that New Hampshire was trying to block Trump from the ballot.

Neither the Secretary of States Office nor the Attorney Generals Office has taken any position regarding the potential applicability of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to the upcoming presidential election cycle, the statement says.

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N.H. attorney general 'carefully reviewing' arguments that could keep Trump off state's ballot - POLITICO

A recording of the Jan. 2, 2021, phone call during which Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to help him find 11,780 votes became public almost immediatelyand was just as quickly compared to the smoking gun tapes that helped bring down the Nixon presidency. Fair enough! With all due respect to storing classified documents in a resort bathroom, telling a local official to invalidate the precise number of votes that would be required to change the outcome of the election is the thing Trump has done with the most pronounced I dont think you can do that feel.

The call is back in the news this week thanks to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who testified Monday in a Georgia hearing related to the Fulton County district attorneys allegations that he was part of Trumps criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Meadows is seeking to have his case moved from state court to federal court on the grounds that he is being prosecuted for activities that he undertook in his official capacity. Hes hoping that claim could secure him a more favorable jury pool (itd be drawn from the more conservative northern district of Georgia as a whole, rather than just Democratic-leaning Fulton County) or, if the judge in his case is sufficiently convinced that Meadows was legally fulfilling executive-branch duties, an outright dismissal of charges.

According to Vox, the judge who listened to Meadows argument on Monday appeared skeptical. There are many problems with the case, but part of the gist is that White House employees are prohibited by law from attempting to influence the outcome of elections, and Meadows can be shown to have known that. As such, one of the things the former chief of staff argued in court on Monday was that he didnt realize his late 2020 activities were related to partisan campaign efforts to overturn the electioni.e., that he didnt understand the connection between President Donald Trumps interest in vote-counting procedures in Georgia (and Michigan) and candidate Donald Trumps ongoing efforts to reverse the results of voting in those states. From the Washington Post:

On several occasions, Mark Meadows claimed to have no knowledge of the Trump campaigns efforts to contest the election results. On Donald Trumps phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, on Jan. 2, 2021, which Meadows participated in, he said he did not know that three lawyers on the callCleta Mitchell, Kurt Hilbert and Alex Kaufmanhad participated in a campaign lawsuit against Raffensperger.

(Meadows said he didnt remember how Mitchell, a prominent voter-fraud conspiracy theorist with whom hed previously been in contact, had ended up on the Georgia call.)

In addition, when questioned about an Oval Office meeting he attended with Trump and Michigan state lawmakers, Meadows said he didnt know that the campaign was contesting the results in that state.

According to Meadows testimony, he believed at the time that he was advancing the executive branchs interest in accurate and fair elections and helping resolve Trumps concerns about voter fraud in order to eliminate a roadblock to the transfer of powerin other words, that he did not understand, in January 2021, that Donald Trump was involved in election litigation for selfish reasons. (A recent New York Times piece that documents Meadows history of vacantly telling whomever he was talking to exactly what they wanted to hear suggests, troublingly, that this might actually be true.)

Meadows claims are similar to the one that Trump has made about his own behavior in 2020that he believed the election was rigged against him as a matter of objective fact, meaning that his actions were reasonable attempts to secure the correct outcome. In his telling, the smoking gun was in fact a perfect phone call.

This line of reasoning was reintroduced to circulation by right-wing law professor Jonathan Turley on Fox News after the Fulton County indictments were announced:

You know, it makes perfect sense when youre challenging an election to say, You know, I only need around 11,000 votes. So if you do a statewide review, thats not a lot in a state like Georgia. Thats not criminal. Thats making a case for a recount.

Georgia, however, had already completed two recountsone by hand and one by machineby the time that Trump and Meadows spoke with Raffensperger. The fraud allegations the president was pursuing, moreover, were largely if not entirely sourced from random social media accounts and online message boards, and had already been dismissed by his own administrations Department of Justice.

As a legal matter, Trumps contention he truly believed that voting results were rigged has problems. Among them are the concept of willful blindness and Trumps alleged statement that Vice President Mike Pence was being too honest in his response to the election, which would seem to imply an awareness that his own conduct was not honest.

Recall, too, that this trial may be taking place during the presidential campaign. Trump will be defending himself against a smoking gun by arguing, while his closest advisers testify that they could not possibly handle a gun without shooting themselves in the leg, that he believes guns are made out of cheese. And should he convince 12 jurors in Georgia and the District of Columbia that he is an insane person with low-IQ support staff, and secure a not-guilty verdict on the basis of such a triumph, he will then be asking the rest of his fellow citizens to reinstall him as president. It seems like a tall task, but if you think that its impossible, youre probably the kind of person who is still 100 percent sure that the moon is made of rocks.

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Mark Meadows news: The defense of Trump's perfect phone call is really something. - Slate

Much of what is happening in American politics today can be explained by two simple yet seemingly contradictory phenomena: Most partisans believe that the other side is more powerful than their own, while at the same time feeling quite certain that their own team will prevail in the upcoming election.

Just as Democrats view Republicans as wielding outsize influence through dark money, structural advantages in our political system and control of institutions like the Supreme Court, Republicans view themselves as under siege by not just a federal government largely controlled by Democrats but also by the media, the entertainment industry and, increasingly, corporate C-suites.

Republicans in particular hold a fatalistic view of the future of the country. In a recent Times poll, 56 percent said they believe we are in danger of failing as a nation. Far from the party of Ronald Reagans Morning in America ad, the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy countered during last weeks debate: Its not morning in America. We live in a dark moment.

Given that many Republicans have such an apocalyptic view of the future, believing that the future of the country hangs in the balance if their party does not win the 2024 election, you might assume that Republicans would prioritize electability as they choose a nominee and seek a safe, steady standard-bearer to face President Biden next November. And you might assume, as many pundits and commentators do, that Republicans would begin to consider that nominating Donald Trump, with all his troubles and legal peril, would be too great a risk.

But the belief that the other party would be simply disastrous for the nation is feeding the deep confidence that ones own side is going to prevail in 2024.

What does this mean for Republicans? It means that G.O.P. voters see Mr. Biden as eminently beatable, and they think most Americans see him as they do. Given that, most Republicans arent looking to be rescued from Donald Trump. The fact is, they really do like him, and at this point they think hes their best shot.

Despite losing the 2020 elections and then experiencing a disappointing 2022 midterm, most Republicans seem confident that their candidate even Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden handily in 2024. They have watched as Mr. Biden has increasingly stumbled, as gas prices have remained high and as Americans have continued to doubt the value of Bidenomics. Many of them believe the pernicious fantasy pushed by Mr. Trump and indulged by too many Republican leaders who should know better that the 2020 election was not actually a loss.

Republican voters see the same polls that I do, showing Mr. Trump effectively tied against Mr. Biden even though commentators tell them that Mr. Trump is electoral poison. And they remember that many of those same voices told them in 2016 that Mr. Trump would never set foot in the White House. In light of those facts, Republicans skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser begins to make more sense.

It didnt have to be this way. In the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterms, which were disappointing for many Republicans, there was a brief moment where it seemed like the party might take a step back, reflect and decide to pursue a new approach with new leadership. In my own polling immediately after the election, I found the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis running even with Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup among likely Republican primary voters, a finding that held throughout the winter. Even voters who consider themselves very conservative gravitated away from Mr. Trump and toward the prospect of an alternative for a time.

But by the end of the spring of 2023, after the indictment of Mr. Trump by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and Mr. DeSantiss rocky entrance into the presidential race, Mr. Trump had not only regained his lead but had also expanded upon it. Quinnipiacs polling of Republican primary voters showed that Mr. Trump held only a six-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in February, but that lead had grown to a whopping 31 points by May.

Any notion that Republicans ought to turn the page, lest they face another electoral defeat, largely evaporated. And the multitude of criminal indictments against Mr. Trump have not shaken the support of Republicans for him, but have instead seemingly galvanized them.

In our focus group of 11 Republican voters in early primary states this month, Times Opinion recruited a range of likely primary voters and caucusgoers to weigh in on the state of the race. They were not universally smitten with Donald Trump; some described him as troubled, arrogant or a train wreck. About half of our participants said they were interested in seeing a strong competitor to Mr. Trump within the party.

But the argument that Donald Trump wont be able to defeat Joe Biden? Not a single participant thought that Mr. Trump or any Republican, really would lose to Mr. Biden. In polling by CBS News, the ability to beat Joe Biden is one of the top qualities Republican primary voters say they are looking for, and they think Mr. Trump is the best poised to deliver on that result. Only 9 percent of likely Republican primary voters think Mr. Trump is a long shot to beat Mr. Biden, and more than six in 10 think Mr. Trump is a sure bet against Mr. Biden. Additionally, only 14 percent of Republican primary voters who are considering a Trump alternative said they were doing so because they worried that Mr. Trump couldnt win.

In an otherwise strong debate performance last week, when Nikki Haley argued that we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America we cant win a general election that way, the reaction from the crowd was decidedly mixed. This isnt to say that such an argument cant become more successful as the primary season goes on, as Mr. Trumps legal woes (and legal bills) continue to mount and as the alternatives to Mr. Trump gain greater exposure.

But for now they think that Mr. Biden is both enormously destructive and eminently beatable. They are undeterred by pleas from party elites who say Mr. Trump is taking the Republican Party to the point of no return.

Republicans both deeply fear a 2024 loss and cant fathom its actually happening. Candidates seeking to defeat Mr. Trump in the primary cant just assume that Republican voters will naturally conclude the stakes are too high to bet it all on Trump. For now, many of those voters think Mr. Trump is the safest bet theyve got.

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Opinion | The Thing Is, Most Republicans Really Like Trump - The New York Times

Former President Donald J. Trump immediately vowed to challenge the March 4 start date for his criminal trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, raising questions of whether or how he could try to push back the timing of the case.

I will APPEAL! Mr. Trump wrote on social media shortly after Judge Tanya S. Chutkan issued her order on Monday.

But despite complaining about the date, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, John Lauro, said in court that the defense team would abide by her decision as we must. Mr. Lauro had proposed the trial begin in April 2026, citing the volume of evidence defense lawyers needed to study, while prosecutors had suggested starting in January.

Here is a closer look.

The date comes in the middle of an already crammed calendar for Mr. Trump, who faces an array of criminal cases and civil lawsuits as he seeks the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

In particular, as Mr. Trump noted, the day after the trial would begin is Super Tuesday, when voters in over a dozen states will cast their primary votes. That voting will take place amid the likelihood of negative headlines pegged to the start of the trial, and his ability to travel and hold rallies campaigning for primaries in subsequent weeks is likely to be limited.

Defendants are generally required to be present at their trials. After preliminary matters like jury selection, prosecutors have estimated they will need about four to six weeks to present their case, after which defense lawyers will also have an opportunity to call additional witnesses.

Typically, no, but there are complexities.

First, Mr. Lauro could file a motion asking Judge Chutkan to reconsider the timing and fleshing out his argument that March 4 does not give the defense enough time to adequately prepare.

But if she declines to change it, decisions by a Federal District Court judge over a prospective trial calendar are not usually considered subject to an immediate appeal. Instead, if a claimed problem can be remedied by later overturning any guilty verdict, an appeal raising that issue must wait until after the trial.

Indeed, if the former president is convicted, Mr. Lauro appears to be laying the groundwork for Mr. Trump to argue in an appeal after the trial that the start date violated his constitutional right to have meaningful legal representation. Mr. Lauro told the judge on Monday that the defense team would not be able to provide adequate representation to Mr. Trump if it had to be prepared by March 4. Such a trial date would deny his client the opportunity to have effective assistance of counsel, he added.

But Mr. Trump has another way to ask a higher court to review the calendar before the trial starts. It is called a petition for a writ of mandamus, and while it is not technically considered to be an appeal, legal experts say, it looks very similar.

It is a judicial order to a lower-court judge mandating some action. It functions as a safety release valve, allowing what are essentially early appeals. It is reserved for extraordinary situations where a judge has made a mistake that will cause a defendant irreparable harm, so the normal process of waiting until after any guilty verdict to raise the issue on appeal could not provide a remedy.

Thus, while Mr. Trump would normally have to wait until after the trial to ask a higher court to review Judge Chutkans calendar decision, his defense team could, in theory, try to short-circuit that process by filing a mandamus petition to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit or even directly to the Supreme Court.

No. In general, a mandamus petition is very likely to be denied, legal experts say. Higher courts, reluctant to disrupt the ordinary judicial process, have set a steep bar before they agree to intervene this way.

In a 1999 ruling, for example, the D.C. Circuit said it would not even consider a mandamus petition based on an argument that the trial judge had made a clearly wrong decision since the problem could be addressed later through an ordinary appeal.

As we have seen, any error even a clear one could be corrected on appeal without irreparable harm, the judges wrote.

In a 2004 ruling, the Supreme Court said the right to relief must be clear and indisputable and there must be no other adequate means to obtain it. And even then, it said, a higher court still has discretion to decline issuing such an order if it nevertheless believes that intervening would not be appropriate under the circumstances.

By itself, the objection raised by Mr. Lauro that March 4 will not give Mr. Trumps lawyers adequate time to prepare would almost certainly fall short as a reason for a higher court to intervene early, according to Paul F. Rothstein, a Georgetown University law professor and specialist in criminal procedure.

But Professor Rothstein said it was harder to predict what would happen if Mr. Trumps team also raised an objection the former president has made in his public comments: that the trial date interferes with the election. There is a stronger argument for a claim of irreparable harm since various primaries will be over by the time of a verdict.

Still, there is scant precedent to guide a higher courts decision about whether a trial dates effect on an election is sufficient to consider intervening early. And even if so, he said, it is also uncertain where the higher court might land on whether the public interest is better served by delaying a trial or by letting it go forward so voters can know about a major candidates criminality as soon as possible.

Like so many things with these unprecedented questions that the Trump cases present, the law does not have a definite answer, Prof. Rothstein said.

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Can Trump Appeal His Federal Election Trial Date? What to Know. - The New York Times

The first time I encountered Donald Trump was on my TV screen. It was 1994, and it happened in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smiths popular coming-of-age sitcom about class assimilation that ran on NBC for six seasons. There was nothing particularly memorable about the episode or Trumps appearance in ithe played a relatively tame version of himselfbut for much of my early life this was how I made sense of him. As a real estate dealmaker. As a reality TV star. And eventually as 45th president of the United States. Then and now, Trump best communicates through the medium of images.

The latest transmission from his visual onslaught began making rounds on the internet last Thursday, just past the 8 pm Eastern primetime hour, when Georgias Fulton County Jail released his mug shot to the public. It has since been described as one of the most historic images of our time. And rightly so. There is no parallel for it in our visual lexicon. It is, in every sense of the phrase, a Trump original.

Along with 18 codefendantswhich include his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, a DOJ official, a stable of attorneys, a publicist, and a pastorTrump is being charged as the lead actor in a conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election in Georgia, where the law requires a mug shot be taken for a felony offense. Like most images of Trump, this one does not pretend to soften its collision. His grimace is absolute aggressionall venom and intimidation.

On its own, the photograph is nothing to call home about. Were it not infused with so much meaninghis is the first presidential mug shot in historyit would barely register as remarkable. (In fairness, he set the bar pretty high during his presidency. Remember the orb?!) But its aesthetics are classic Trump. The furrowed brows. The chromatic cloud of hair. That unyielding glare, his eyes like darts, in search of a target. The camera struggles to capture proper light, but that feels strangely fitting: His darkness is in full view.

Trump is a savvy counterprogrammer, a showman with a taste for political rebranding. He understands that images endure, the imprint they can leave. He understands that sometimes the image is the message. It's why, in the hours following his release, he used his mug shot as an opportunity to raise funds by posting it on X (formerly Twitter). Never surrender, he tweeted, without a pinch of irony, after surrendering. The photo has raised more than $7 million since last week, according to Politico. This is all part of the Trump allure. The amphitheater of social media is where he excels, as meme and messiah.

Online, Trump exists across an explosive vernacular of media. His identity is a patchwork of zany interview clips, Photoshopped images, and antagonistic sound bites meant to go viral. It is why the story of Donald Trump will always be a story best told in pictures. Pictures that are brash and erratic, unfading and unpredictable. And as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, his mug shot is a picture that demands interrogation. It demands that many of us continue to challenge the image of America he is working to bring back. We should not look away. We can't afford to look away. This time, Trump should not be allowed to so easily evade the lens of reality.

That, more than anything, is what the mug shot makes plain. Whether Georgia district attorney Fanni Willis can make her case or not, the mug shot implies an air of criminality. Some will call that implication into question. Theyll say its unfair. Theyll again label it a witch hunt. For others, it validates what they already believe to be true: In his loss to President Joe Biden, he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and now he must go on trial to prove otherwise. Trump and his codefendants are set to be arraigned next week. The court of public opinion will be watching.

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Donald Trump's Mug Shot Will Be His Most Enduring Meme - WIRED

In a new social media trend, some people on X, formerly known as Twitter, have superimposed their own faces onto former President Donald Trump's mug shot. Juliana Kim hide caption

In a new social media trend, some people on X, formerly known as Twitter, have superimposed their own faces onto former President Donald Trump's mug shot.

When Fulton County Jail released Donald Trump's mug shot last week, the former president not only embraced it but so did some of his supporters.

Hours after the photo was made public, Trump's booking photo was plastered on T-shirts, mugs and koozies. It inspired the latest addition to Trump's campaign. And it even triggered a viral social media challenge where Trump supporters superimposed their face onto his photo.

Typically, mug shots are associated with shame and humiliation. But for Trump and a pocket of his fan base, his mug shot the first ever of an American president was a badge of honor.

"There's nothing like the scale of what's going on a politician of Trump's stature who's using the scandal to such political benefit," said William Howell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago.

Trump, who faces four separate indictments, took his first mug shot on Thursday after surrendering in Atlanta. He faces 13 felony counts in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the state's 2020 presidential election result.

This booking photo provided by Fulton County Sheriff's Office shows former President Donald Trump on Thursday after he surrendered and was booked at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta. AP hide caption

This booking photo provided by Fulton County Sheriff's Office shows former President Donald Trump on Thursday after he surrendered and was booked at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta.

Before the release of Trump's mug shot, police departments and newsrooms had already been debating the ethics around publishing such photos.

For most people, mug shots are taken during one of the worst days of their lives. Because of the internet, those images can now last forever unless someone pays to get them taken down.

Arrest images are also used disproportionately by race. In a 2021 study, Global Strategy Group found media coverage in the U.S. used mug shots in 45% of cases involving Black defendants while only 8% of cases involving white defendants.

"Folks without power, they're criminalized. They don't have much say about it. But folks who have a lot of power get to redefine that picture," said Mary Angela Bock, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

According to Bock, elected officials have the power and resources to largely be immune to the life-altering effect of mug shots. Take former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. In 2014, Perry was booked and photographed in jail after accusations that he abused his power as governor. But the incident turned into a political rally and later, his super PAC sold T-shirts with his mug shot for $25.

"Politicians know it's not about the picture, it's about the moment. So they can change the meaning of that moment to suit their needs," said Bock, who has conducted research on Perry's mug shot and its aftermath.

Trump has long portrayed himself as an anti-hero an outsider willing to call out the failures and corruption in Washington. To him and some of his supporters, the indictments and mug shot underscore their belief that he has been treated unfairly, according to Howell.

"The narrative he's spinning now is that the justice system has been weaponized against him by his political opponent and the government has been hijacked by people who don't believe in the rule of law," he said.

That's why Howell anticipates Trump's mug shot may help him during his presidential race at least financially. In fact, his campaign has already made money selling merchandise with a fake Trump mug shot.

"He has long held up attacks directed at him as a reason for people within his party to give financially to his cause," Howell said.

On Thursday, Trump posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, for the first time in more than two years to share his mugshot along with the words "NEVER SURRENDER."

Shortly after, some of his supporters followed suit and posted fake mug shots with their own faces on the social media site. Among those who participated was Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

According to Howell, the trend not only represents solidarity, but their level of commitment to Trump, regardless of circumstances.

"This isn't just that they're going to stand with him through fires. It's that the fires are only going to strengthen the bonds between them," he said.

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Trump's mug shot inspires viral trend: supporters creating their own ... - NPR

On the heels of Donald Trump's fourth indictment and amid mounting legal troubles, the former president's family remains unconcerned about the prospect of him having to serve any jail time.

"Everyone knows hes not going to jail. No one is worried," a source tells PEOPLE of Trump's closest family members.

That reportedly includes daughter Ivanka Trump, who has largely stayed silent amid the controversy but isn't hiding away.

"She's all over the place down here, always out and about," the source tells PEOPLE of Ivanka, 41, and her husband Jared Kushner's life in Miami.

"They're definitely not hiding. They live right on the beach," the source adds of the luxury high-rise condominium complex the couple calls home as they continue construction on a nearby $24 million waterfront property. "They seem like they don't have a care in the world."

Ivanka's 29-year-old sister Tiffany who married husband Michael Boulos last November lives in nearby Palm Beach and the two sisters have grown closer in recent years, largely due to the shared memories from their father's time in the White House.

They used to not get along but now theyre bonded over their shared trauma of being the most hated kids in America," the source says. "Going through that experience with their dad as president was awful for them, they hated it. People were so cruel. Especially about Tiffanys looks."

These days, the women are staying out of the political fray, choosing instead to relax in South Florida.

"They want nothing to do with politics this time around, they never want to go through that again. They just want to chill in Miami," the source adds.

Ivanka has publicly announced that she will not be involved with her father's 2024 campaign, issuing a statement the same night he announced his latest campaign.

"I love my father very much," Ivanka said in her statement. "This time around, I am choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family."

She continued: "I do not plan to be involved in politics. While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena."

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And while she's remained largely out of the spotlight since leaving the White House in 2021, Ivanka did speak out after her father's first indictment in March, after prosecutors alleged he paid hush money to adult film starStormy Danielswhile he was the presidential candidate in 2016.

Ivanka broke her silence on the charges via a short message on her Instagram Story, writing: "I love my father, and I love my country. Today, I am pained for both. I appreciate the voices across the political spectrum expressing support and concern."

The former president has been indicted four times since leaving office. The latest charges bring him toa total of 91 criminal countshe's faced this year between four investigations, several of which come with recommended prison time.

Earlier this month, he was indicted in a fourth criminal investigation, for which he is accused of violating the Georgia RICO Act classified a step above felony, as a "serious felony." If convicted, Trump would face a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

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Donald Trump's Family 'Isn't Worried' About Him Going to Jail ... - PEOPLE