Heat wave expected

Long-duration heat wave expected to bring dangerous conditions to California

By Amy Graff

A heat wave that’s being called “anomalous” and “potentially dangerous” by the National Weather Service is expected to bring sizzling temperatures and a high risk of wildfires in California starting Tuesday and continuing for several days, including over the July Fourth holiday.

“This level of heat could pose a danger to the public if proper heat safety is not followed,” the agency wrote in its forecast.

The most notable factor that is expected to contribute to the severity of this event is its long duration, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said in his heat wave forecast broadcast over YouTube on Monday.

“This is not going to be a couple of days where it’s really hot, and then the sea breeze kicks in, and it’s cooler,” Swain said. “This could last for a full week at peak intensity in some places, and perhaps even longer. Across some parts of the northern interior part of California, it may continue, essentially, through mid-July. … Today is July 1. That would be 10-plus days from now. So this is a this is a pretty big-deal event.”

Case in point: Redding, which sits on the top of the Sacramento Valley, is forecast to see temperatures over 110 degrees over at least nine days, with a peak temperature of 117 degrees expected Friday, according to the weather service.

While some locations are unlikely to break all-time record highs in this event, Swain said it’s more likely that several spots could see records broken in terms of duration of afternoon high temperatures in excess of, say, 100 degrees, even 110 degrees. 

The exceptional heat that could break daily records across multiple days is expected across inland portions of the state in an area stretching from the lower deserts of Southern California to the Antelope Valley, across the San Joaquin Valley, through the Sacramento Valley and the coastal mountains ringing it, and into the Sierra foothills, Swain said. 

Coastal areas — locations directly on the ocean and about 20 miles inland from it — are expected to be spared the extreme heat. Downtown San Francisco is forecast to see the peak of the heat wave Wednesday, with a high of 86, and Los Angeles is predicted to record the highest temperature of the event Friday, with a reading of 91, according to the weather service.

“This is not going to be the kind of heat wave that brings 105-degree temperatures to the beaches in San Francisco or LA,” Swain said. “That’s a different kind of heat wave — and that very likely will not happen with this one. So we’re not talking about, you know, downtown San Francisco seeing an all-time record high or anything like that. It should be much warmer than average and actually quite warm to even hot, even along the immediate coast for a few days. It will be notably warm with an absence of a marine layer, but the real problem is going to be across inland areas.” 

While the daytime highs in inland areas are going to be attention-grabbing, the overnight lows could be more concerning in many areas, especially in the Central Valley and the foothills ringing the valley. “In places that could see temperatures of 100 to 110-plus for a very long duration, overnight minimum temperatures might not drop below 70 degrees in many of these places, and in some parts of the foothills not below 80 degrees,” Swain said. “So we may actually see 150 to 170 consecutive hours of temperatures above 80 to 85 degrees in the foothills during this event. It just isn’t going to cool off, even at night.”

With the heat wave looming, the weather service has been issuing a series of excessive heat watches and more excessive heat warnings. The agency is advising people to stay hydrated, to avoid being outside in the middle of the day and to seek out air conditioning. The heat wave is expected to increase the risk of wildfires across the state, and several red flag warnings have also been issued. “Outdoor burning is not recommended,” in areas under the warnings, the agency said.

Talk about being biblical....

What to know about Louisiana's new surgical castration law

Jaclyn Diaz

Louisiana is now the first state to allow surgical castration to be used as a punishment for sex crimes under a new law signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry. This law, which will go into effect Aug. 1, allows judges to order people found guilty of certain sex crimes against minors to undergo surgical castration.

The use of surgical castration as punishment, which is a permanent procedure that involves the surgical removal of the testicles or ovaries ostensibly to stop the production of sex hormones, is rare elsewhere around the world. The Czech Republic, Madagascar and a state in Nigeria have such laws on the books that have been strongly criticized by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations.

Several U.S. states, including Louisiana, as well as other countries have laws allowing for the use of chemical castration — a procedure that uses pharmaceutical drugs to quell the offenders' sex drive — for certain sex crimes.

The passage of this bill in Louisiana has grabbed headlines and caused ripples of consternation among criminal defense lawyers, advocates and medical experts, raising serious concerns around the ethics and constitutionality of the law and questions over whether this punishment would actually make a difference in reducing sex crimes.

“It’s very confusing, in addition to being absolutely unprecedented, and draconian and overkill,” said Gwyneth O’Neill, a New Orleans-based criminal defense attorney and a member of National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

One of the drafters of the bill, Democratic state Rep. Delisha Boyd, told NPR the law will be a strong deterrent for would-be child sex abusers and would protect children.

So, what does the law say?

The law, as written, targets offenders found guilty of aggravated sex crimes, including rape, incest or molestation against a child under 13. The punishment would be brought in certain cases and at a judge’s discretion and the surgery would be completed by a physician. It will also require a court-appointed medical expert to determine whether the offender is the right candidate for the surgery.

An offender could refuse to get the surgery, but would then be sentenced to three to five years of an additional prison sentence without the possibility of getting out early.

The law doesn’t allow anyone under 17 found guilty of certain aggravated sex crimes to receive the punishment.

Boyd says she was inspired to propose this bill after seeing a disturbing article from a local newspaper about a 51-year-old man who was arrested for the alleged rape of a 12 year old. The story revealed that the man was a registered sex offender. In 2007 he had been arrested for allegedly raping a 5 year old.

Boyd said that she believes the criticism she’s received from opponents of the law is from people who haven’t closely read the law and think it forces a prisoner to undergo this procedure.

“Some of the critics say, you know, that's cruel and unusual punishment. Well, I disagree. I think the cruel and usual punishment was the rape of that 5 year old," Boyd said.

The reasons why people commit sex offenses are so much more complicated than something that can be fixed with castration, said Maaike Helmus, an associate professor of School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Helmus' research focuses on offender risk assessment and on men who have committed sexual offenses or intimate partner violence.

“In our minds, it's easy to link castration to the problem that they're exhibiting and think that'll fix it, but it's taking a lot of leaps and logic that are not warranted, and not considering other alternatives,” like the use of medication, she said.

This law is part of the state’s 'tough on crime' efforts

In February, the state legislature held a special session on crime and passed several bills that Landry and lawmakers said would bring justice to crime victims and their families, according to Baton Rouge Public Radio.

The member station reported that the series of tough-on-crime bills passed the session “will likely reshape the landscape of criminal punishment in Louisiana for years to come.”

The bills expanded death penalty methods, effectively eliminated parole for anyone convicted after Aug. 1, lowered the amount of “good time credit” with few exceptions and established harsher penalties for some crimes.

There are concerns over discriminatory application of the law

If it is challenged, O’Neill, the New Orleans-based criminal defense attorney, said it's highly likely the law would be deemed unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

“Surgical castration is generally considered, or was considered, to be sort of like the paradigmatic example of cruel and unusual punishment, because it's a form of physical mutilation. It's barbaric,” she said.

Once it's enacted later this summer, O'Neill fears the law could be applied in a discriminatory way — the same way the death penalty and other criminal justice policies tend to be, she said.

There is research that indicates the U.S. criminal justice system is applied unfairly to people of color, especially Black Americans. Research shows the number of imprisoned Black Americans has decreased 39% since its peak in 2002, according to The Sentencing Project, but remains higher for Black Americans generally. And in Louisiana, along with Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma, the imprisonment rates are nearly 50% above the national average, according to the organization.

O’Neill says the law also uses vague and potentially confusing terms.

The law’s language mandates that a “court appointed medical expert” can decide if a person found guilty of a sex offense should undergo surgical castration. “We don't know who that is, who's going to qualify to be a medical expert," O’Neill said. "There's no guidance about that."

And that introduces risks for defendants, she said.

“I think anytime you have this vague terminology, you're not going to get the most qualified people to make such a determination,” O'Neill said. The law also doesn’t establish the criteria to evaluate whether an offender is an appropriate candidate for this punishment, she said.

“Practically speaking, I think it puts defense attorneys in a very difficult position,” she said.

Could this law impact repeat offenses?

Part of the motivation behind this law was to cut down on the possibility of someone reoffending. But the research on sexual offense recidivism rates is tough to parse. The research on surgical castration and its effect has only been done on people who have voluntarily undergone the procedure out of concern they will harm again, Helmus said.

That impacts the analysis because these are individuals who are already working to not reoffend, she said.

"If you combine different studies, over multiple countries and jurisdictions and different types of settings, five-year sexual recidivism rates are generally expected to be in the range of five to 10%. And lifetime rates are maybe around 15 to 20%,” Helmus said.

But that’s only for cases the public knows about.

“We know that not all sex offenses get reported to police for a variety of reasons. And so we know that sexual recidivism rates are to some degree an underestimate, because not everything comes to the attention of police. However, it's hard to know how much that's actually going to affect reoffending rates,” she said.

Ultimately there’s very limited research on the effectiveness of any type of castration with people who've committed sex offenses, Helmus said.

“The whole point of castration is that it is supposed to reduce the sex drive. If you're pursuing castration to reduce sexual offense rates, you're making an assumption that they're committing a sex offense because of a high sex drive or high testosterone rates in the first place," but this is not always the motivation for committing these offenses, Helmus said.

Research indicates that there's no evidence that people who commit sex offenses have higher testosterone in the first place.

“If that's not the reason why they're committing sex offenses, then reducing their testosterone is going to do nothing to reduce that risk,” she said.

Surgical castration also doesn’t mean someone cannot be sexually aroused or, in the case of men, get an erection or ejaculate, Helmus said. Not to mention there is still psychological arousal and urges that are not addressed with this procedure.

“Even if castrated, they can later take medications to reduce or reverse the effects of castration and still be able to increase their sex drive,” she said. “So castration isn't a foolproof way of getting rid of their sex drive. What we know, especially for people who commit sex offenses against children, they don't need an erection to be able to commit many of the types of sex offenses that they commit.”

Boyd still believes that this law could serve as a strong deterrent.

“These predators have to be stopped,” she said. “Even if just one rapist changes his mind about raping a child, I will take that.”

Did you hear the splat when Rudy hit the pavement?

Rudy Giuliani officially disbarred in New York for Trump election interference efforts

By Katelyn Polantz

The New York state Supreme Court on Tuesday disbarred former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani over his part in Donald Trump’s election interference efforts in 2020.

The long-expected disbarment of Trump’s most high-profile lawyer, which is effective immediately, is a major blow to the former public official at a time he faces fallout for spreading lies about the 2020 election. In addition to losing his law license – which is likely to be recognized across the country – Giuliani is in bankruptcy after landing $150 million in debt for defaming two election workers, and faces several other lawsuits against him as well as criminal charges.

“The seriousness of (Giuliani’s) misconduct cannot be overstated,” the court wrote. “(Giuliani) flagrantly misused his prominent position as the personal attorney for former President Trump and his campaign, through which (he) repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious, to the federal court, state lawmakers, the public, the (Attorney Grievance Committee), and this Court concerning the 2020 Presidential election, in which he baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”

Giuliani, the court said, “not only deliberately violated some of the most fundamental tenets of the legal profession, but he also actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 Presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.”

Giuliani previously was suspended from being able to practice law while the New York court considered attorney discipline proceedings against him. In its ruling, the court cited the former Trump attorney’s efforts to overturn the election results in several 2020 battleground states.

A spokesman for Giuliani condemned the disbarment, which had gone through several proceedings before the court’s final decision on Tuesday.

“Members of the legal community who respect the rule of law in this country should immediately come forward and speak out against this politically and ideologically corrupted decision by the New York Bar Association. We will be appealing this objectively flawed decision in hopes that the appellate process will restore integrity into our system of justice,” spokesman Ted Goodman said in a statement.

Giuliani played a key role in several of Trump’s schemes to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He was involved in alleged efforts to put forth fake electors to falsely certify Trump victories in several states, such as Arizona and Georgia, and, as the court noted Tuesday, Giuliani “falsely and dishonestly asserted to the public that people were brought from Camden, New Jersey, to vote illegally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the 2020 presidential election.”

In Georgia, Giuliani is charged with a RICO violation as well as several additional felonies, including soliciting Georgia state lawmakers, making false statements to the Georgia House and Senate and working to put forward fake electors in the state. He is one of several co-conspirators indicted in that case, in which Trump also is a defendant.

He is facing charges related to the election subversion efforts in Arizona and is an unindicted co-conspirator in Trump’s federal election subversion case.

Giuliani has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him.

He cleaned and greased his ass to be ready for prison...

Steve Bannon Swaps His Podcast Studio for a Prison Cell

Gold, phones, meat, and border walls: The War Room was the Home Shopping Network for the MAGA crowd.

TIM MURPHY

It was a Tuesday morning in May and the mood on War Room, Steve Bannon’s twice-daily talk show, was characteristically grim. “The pre-kinetic part of the Third World War is happening,” the thrice-indicted former Trump advisor declared, alleging that the Chinese Communist Party, Qatar, and George Soros were secretly conspiring to seed unrest on college campuses. 

Standing up at his desk in a cramped West Palm Beach studio, dressed in a black button-down shirt over another black shirt, his gray hair swept up dramatically like a paranoid Beethoven, Bannon warned that things were about to get worse. “If you think times are tough now, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said.

But there was some good news for those who stuck around. MyPillow’s Mike Lindell was about to join him. And he was offering a great deal on socks.

When Bannon reported to a federal prison in Connecticut on Monday to serve a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, it brought an end, at least for now, to his tenure as the daily host of one of the most influential programs on the political right. Launched during the first Trump impeachment in 2019, War Room has aired for the last four years on Real America’s Voice, a fledgling right-wing channel that has become a destination for conservatives who are fed up with what Bannon calls the “Murdoch News Network”—Fox News. 

Even as his legal troubles mounted, and even after he called for Anthony Fauci to be beheaded, his show remained a destination for leading Republicans such as Elise Stefanik and Matt Gaetz. It boosted operatives like Caroline Wren, the conservative consultant who helped organize the rally that preceded the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And it gave a platform to the Republicans who drove Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy from power. While Bannon does his time in Danbury, some of those congressional allies are reportedly set to fill in behind his desk.

Bannon billed the program as a running strategy session, with himself in the role of field marshal. But when I tuned in recently, to watch what added up to more than a dozen hours of segments over the course of six days, I was struck by something else. The partnership with Lindell belied the show’s not-so-hidden function. It was a frenzied on-air marketplace, where people, agendas, and products were relentlessly pitched. Bannon was always selling something—and there was often something in it for him. This was MAGA distilled to its essence: the Home Shopping Network from hell.

Despite the fact that the show and its host had the aesthetic of something smuggled out of a fallout shelter, or perhaps because they did, War Room was weirdly captivating. Bannon’s show was governed by a rigid, clipped style guide. The date was always “7 May,” never May 7th. He never used 21st-century nomenclature when he could sound like a 19th-century imperialist: Iranians were “the Persians”; the West Bank was “Judea and Samaria.” He was always going on about “Eurasia.” During the week I tuned in, in the midst of nationwide police crackdowns of campus protests against the Israeli attack on Gaza, Bannon spent a large part of the time insisting that the protests were a form of “irregular warfare.” It was what an AI would talk like if you trained it on Newt Gingrich and back issues of Soldier of Fortune.

The guests, in the War Room format, were largely furniture upon which Bannon could toss his accumulated theories, often simply appending someone’s name at the end of a long rant in lieu of a question. I was constantly encountering names from the past I thought I’d never see again. There was former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who was identified as “Dean, Robertson School of Government Professor” at Pat Robertson’s Regent University. (“A great secretary of state or secretary of defense, we’ll figure it out,” Bannon promised, when she wrapped up.) There was former Virginia Rep. David Brat, War Room’s “tennis pro and philosopher-in-residence,” who once beat Eric Cantor and is now the vice provost for engagement at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

There was no such thing as a minor story in the Bannon-verse. In the case of the campus protests, as with seemingly everything else, Bannon’s working theory was that this was a classic Chinese government tactic to destroy the United States. “This is how Mao and the Cultural Revolution started—with the students,” he told the former Devin Nunes staffer Derek Harvey. It was “a neo-Marxist and a Shariah-supremacist combo platter.” When another guest, billionaire mercenary Erik Prince, confirmed to Bannon that getting teenagers to camp on quads seemed like something Qatar would do, the host demanded that House Republicans hold hearings: “Wouldn’t that be a logical outgrowth of your predicate, sir?”

Every War Room scandal, as I came to understand, required three key ingredients. The first was an act of villainy, usually cooked up by some combination of the “illegitimate Biden regime” and the Chinese Communist Party. The second was an act of cowardice, perpetrated by one or several of “the Murdochs and Fox and the Republican establishment and the donor class and the political operatives and the Frank Luntz pollsters.” Last were heroes—a band of brothers that included Trump, Bannon’s guests, and most importantly, the “War Room posse” itself, as Bannon referred to his audience. “Your confidence has created a reality and that confidence, that optimism, that subjective reality, you’ve made an objective reality,” he said. “Think about that for a minute.” Or try to. 

Listen to enough of this, as I did, and you will grasp something essential about the movement to which Bannon has so firmly attached himself. MAGA is like a bus with a bomb strapped to it, and if it slows down, it dies. The War Room posse was reared on perpetual combat. Bannon would sometimes recite the casus belli like a catechism, whenever it seemed there was nothing else to say: “Where are your 81 million votes? Where are they? Where are your 81 million votes? Where are they?” The election had to be stolen. Mike Johnson had to be on the verge of a great betrayal. You cannot have a War Room in peacetime—that’s just the logical outgrowth of the predicate. 

And Bannon’s posse needed to stay prepared. Conservative media, particularly TV and radio, has long enjoyed a cozy relationship with its sponsors. Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro pitched brain pills. Glenn Beck sold gold. Sean Hannity sold gold. Rush Limbaugh sold gold. Bannon, of course, sold gold—in fact, he and Shapiro had the same gold guy. But was not another right-wing messaging show periodically interrupted by right-wing ads. The advertisers were often indistinguishable from the programming.

Prince, for instance, was not just there to talk about Qatar and the need to “de-cartelize the Pentagon.” The chyron identified the mercenary mogul and Trump confidante as the founder of Unplugged.com, which is billed as a phone for people mad about Big Tech surveillance. Prince explained that the phone has an operating system that blocks apps from collecting and selling your data, or from turning on your GPS without your permission.

“10,000 just arrived,” he said, holding up a device. “It’ll ship next week.”

The phone market was a competitive space on War Room. “Chris Hoar, it’s a time of turbulence, it’s a Fourth Turning,” Bannon said coming up for air one day. “You’re always here for the audience to come up with new deals, what have you got for us, brother.”

Hoar works for a company that sells satellite phones—a must-have for the civil unrest to come. “Steve, anybody else in the country is gonna charge you $1,000 for this phone,” he said, holding up his own sample. His company was offering it free to the War Room posse, if they signed up for a phone plan.

Most of the products were rooted in the same sense of looming conflict that gave the show its name. Listeners who followed up with Bannon’s precious metals guru, Philip Patrick of Birch Gold, received a free Bannon eBook called The End of the Dollar Empire. Bannon was not selling an abstract notion of financial insecurity; he would flat-out say that the “fecklessness” of the current Republican leadership, and the freezing of Russian assets in American dollars, was going to eventually lead to the end of the US dollar as the default global currency.

“It’s the reason I’m so adamant about the motion to vacate on Johnson,” he told Patrick during an on-air interview.

That sense of impending collapse extended to medical care. “There’s something seriously, seriously wrong—nobody can quite put their finger on it but seriously wrong about the supply chain on medicines and drugs,” he said. “This is more than hurricanes hitting, this is more than cyber, but something seriously wrong.” War Room viewers would know, of course, that the threat posed to medical supply chains by China was a Bannon bugaboo. So it was time to stock up on antibiotics at Jase Medical, a War Room advertiser that sells online antibiotics.

If you have ever looked at Bannon and wondered “what’s his secret?” you were in luck too. “Wanna see how I get jacked up in the morning? Did you like it today? Were these rants good? Did they work?” he asked, after a long complaint about Trump prosecutor Matthew Colangelo. “The reason I’m on fire is Warpath coffee.” 

Coffee, like nicotine and fear, is a bit of a growth area in right-wing circles. So are supplements. “SacredHumanHealth.com for the grass-feed beef liver,” Bannon said, continuing. “Greatest concentration of nutrients known to man. That’s how you start the day: A big pot of coffee and a grass-fed beef liver. So go ahead and do it, that’s a combo platter.” 

The show would just continue like this for several hours every day—one minute you’d have Naomi Wolf talking about how “evildoers” in the media covered up the dangers of vaccines. (“Thank God for the posse, because without you, no one would know what we know,” she said.) The next, ”Katherine O’Neil from Meriweather Farms” would be on the screen to “let the posse know the latest deals” on “old-fashioned franks.” When Bannon started talking, you never really knew if he was going to end with a call to arms or a great deal on meat. But the point, for posse members, was that they both added up to the same thing. They had a man on the inside who could help them bypass or navigate the system, whether it was feckless leaders or price-gouging middlemen. They had his back, and he had theirs. In an earlier episode, according to the Washington Post, Bannon told his audience they would be rewarded by “divine providence” if they patronized MyPillow.

All of this hustling underscored something essential about Bannon. Yes, he believes a lot of this stuff. He did want to overturn the election. He does look like someone who subsists on coffee and beef livers. But it was always a hustle too. He started the show after he found himself in exile, outside the White House inner circle. With War Room, Bannon bought cachet and influence again, and so did his guests. In 2022, New York state indicted Bannon for his alleged involvement in a scheme to siphon funds from a border-wall fundraiser—a cause he promoted on the War Room at the time. As my colleague Dan Friedman has reported, Bannon’s war against the Chinese Communist Party has been incredibly lucrative. The alleged Chinese fraudster Miles Guo paid him more than $1 million, and Guo’s company, Gettr, shelled out $50,000 a month to War Room to promote the social media site. All that raving about a “proto-kinetic war” comes with some major strings attached.

In the context of the show’s militancy, I came to appreciate those moments, several times a day, after Lindell would first appear on screen but before Bannon would let him speak; you never knew what was going to be in stock. And for once, neither Bannon nor Lindell really attempted to connect the product to the message. No one tried to argue that in a societal collapse foot hygiene is the first to go. Lindell had simply bought up the entire stock of Made in the USA socks, and he had done it all for you. 

“These are the best socks I ever wore in my life,” Lindell promised. “I’m telling you there’s nothing better.”

Pairs started at $3.75. Operators were standing by.

Above the Law

The Supreme Court Just Put Trump Above the Law

In handing him a win in his immunity case, the justices obliterated the courts’ ability to rein in presidents.

PEMA LEVY

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that presidents have broad criminal immunity for official acts, effectively placing the presidency beyond the reach of criminal law for the first time in the country’s history. The 6-3 decision along ideological lines sends the federal case over Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election back to the district court to determine whether Trump’s actions fall outside the court’s sweeping new grant of immunity—but the effects will stretch far beyond Trump’s possible trial by fundamentally changing the nature of the presidency and, by extension, American democracy.

In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Republican-appointed justices held that presidents have immunity for official acts. The opinion left to another day whether that immunity is absolute, or whether it can be pierced in some circumstances. Despite the possibility for exceptions, the decision is sweeping and radical.

“The ruling is a bigger win for Trump than many of us had been expecting.”

“Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.”

The case arose out of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s criminal charges against Trump for trying to subvert the election. As a defense, Trump argued that he is immune from prosecution for official acts made while in the White House—a sweeping theory without a basis in the Constitution. The framers, who were adamant that the presidency not resemble the monarchy they had just fought a revolutionary war to escape, purposefully left presidential immunity out of the Constitution. They were explicit that presidents would not be above the law, an assumption that had continued until today: Indeed, President Gerald Ford famously pardoned former President Richard Nixon—a result of the understanding that without doing so, Nixon might face criminal charges.

Before the case reached the Supreme Court, the district court and court of appeals had both rebuffed Trump’s claims. But at oral argument before the high court, several Republican-appointed justices were preoccupied with the idea that ex-presidents would be under siege from prosecutors waging backward-looking, politically motivated cases unless the court granted presidents new levels of immunity. Monday’s decision relies on a related idea that presidents need immunity in order to effectively govern: the framers, the majority argued, envisioned a vigorous executive and immunity would ensure the office’s strength.

“Immunity is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch, and to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution,” Roberts wrote.

In her dissent, Sotomayor argued that majority goes so far as to create not a robust executive but, essentially, a monarch. “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law,” she wrote. In a separate dissent, Jackson warned that the gift of immunity would not engender benevolence: “The seeds of absolute power for Presidents have been planted,” she wrote. “And, without a doubt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The decision will not only significantly delay the special counsel’s trial against Trump for election subversion but likely result in most charges being dropped. Because the decision leaves the door open for prosecution for unofficial acts, the question is whether any of Smith’s charges relate to unprotected conduct. In a concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that she believed at least one charge relating to the scheme to create fake slates of electors should proceed to trial. As to other charges, Roberts ruled that immunity applies “unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.'” That is a high bar—and it’s unclear what criminal prosecution, if any, might clear it.

“Just so everyone understands the radical import of the decision: The Court holds that even when the POTUS clearly—or even *concededly*—abuses his or her office to violate a valid federal law, that POTUS cannot be tried, even after leaving office,” constitutional law expert Marty Lederman wrote online.

The opinion further insulates the president by finding that a president’s official and protected conduct, even when criminal, cannot be introduced as evidence at a trial taking place for prosecutable conduct. The result is that even where this sweeping immunity does not touch, a finding of guilt will be made more difficult. (Barrett did not join this part of the majority’s opinion, writing that “The Constitution does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable.”)

“This is a big part of why the ruling is a bigger win for Trump than many of us had been expecting,” Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck explained. “It’s not just which acts will be immune; it’s how this will hamstring efforts to prosecute even those acts for which there *isn’t* immunity.”

The justices could have decided this matter quickly and narrowly, or declined to take it up all together, and allowed a trial to proceed. Instead, at every stage of the case, the justices indulged Trump’s attempts to slow-walk proceedings. His immunity defense was always as much about pushing the trial date after the election—which would help him win the election and eliminate the case entirely—as it was about mounting a sound legal defense. But the biggest gift to Trump was to give him a nearly complete victory.

The GOP-appointed justices have now helped Trump in two ways. First, he will escape trial for the foreseeable future, as lower courts wrestle with applying Monday’s decision. Second, they have granted the presidency new powers that Trump can take advantage of if he returns to power.

Trump has already made his intentions clear: He will weaponize the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Trump promised last year. Ironically, Trump is promising to bring about the very destruction of DOJ independence that several justices claimed they were worried about during oral argument.

Instead of protecting the president from bogus prosecution, they created more incentives for the president himself to launch such prosecutions—and to ignore virtually every other law as well.

“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune,” Sotomayor warned. “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

You can write all you want, but if they can't read......

“The President Is Now a King”: The Most Blistering Lines From Dissents in the Trump Immunity Case

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.”

DAVID CORN

In response to the Supreme Court’s momentous decision ruling that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for “official” acts, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson issued blistering dissents. They blasted the reasoning of the six conservative justices who essentially created a new power for presidents. Each contended this decision poses a fundamental threat to American democracy and the rule of law.

This is how Sotomayor put it:

The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military dissenting coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Jackson made a similar and distressing point:

Thus, even a hypothetical President who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics, or one who indisputably instigates an unsuccessful coup has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new Presidential accountability model.

They each argued that the conservatives, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, had elevated the presidency to something akin to royalty. Sotomayor wrote:

The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

Here are some of the most impassioned excerpts from their minority opinions:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency.  It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law. Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more.

The Court now confronts a question it has never had to answer in the Nation’s history: Whether a former President enjoys immunity from federal criminal prosecution. The majority thinks he should, and so it invents an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.

Whether described as presumptive or absolute, under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution. That is just as bad as it sounds, and it is baseless. Finally, the majority declares that evidence concerning acts for which the President is immune can play no role in any criminal prosecution against him. . That holding, which will prevent the Government from using a President’s official acts to prove knowledge or intent in prosecuting private offenses, is nonsensical.

The historical evidence that exists on Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution cuts decisively against it. For instance, Alexander Hamilton wrote that former Presidents would be “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” For Hamilton, that was an important distinction between “the king of Great Britain,” who was “sacred and inviolable,” and the “President of the United States,” who “would be amenable to personal punishment and disgrace.”

This historical evidence reinforces that, from the very beginning, the presumption in this Nation has always been that no man is free to flout the criminal law. The majority fails to recognize or grapple with the lack of historical evidence for its new immunity. With nothing on its side of the ledger, the most the majority can do is claim that the historical evidence is a wash.

Our country’s history also points to an established understanding, shared by both Presidents and the Justice Department, that former Presidents are answerable to the criminal law for their official acts… Consider Watergate, for example. After the Watergate tapes revealed President Nixon’s misuse of official power to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of the Watergate burglary, President Ford pardoned Nixon. Both Ford’s pardon and Nixon’s acceptance of the pardon necessarily “rested on the understanding that the former President faced potential criminal liability.”

Today’s Court, however, has replaced a presumption of equality before the law with a presumption that the President is above the law for all of his official acts.

Imagine a President states in an official speech that he intends to stop a political rival from passing legislation that he opposes, no matter what it takes to do so (official act). He then hires a private hitman to murder that political rival (unofficial act). Under the majority’s rule, the murder indictment could include no allegation of the President’s public admission of premeditated intent to support the mens rea of murder. That is a strange result, to say the least.

Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation.

The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military dissenting coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

With that understanding of how our system of accountability for criminal acts ordinarily functions, it becomes much easier to see that the majority’s ruling in this case breaks new and dangerous ground. Departing from the traditional model of individual accountability, the majority has concocted something entirely different: a Presidential accountability model that creates immunity—an exemption from criminal law—applicable only to the most powerful official in our Government.

Thus, even a hypothetical President who admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals or critics, or one who indisputably instigates an unsuccessful coup, has a fair shot at getting immunity under the majority’s new Presidential accountability model.

In the majority’s view, while all other citizens of the United States must do their jobs and live their lives within the confines of criminal prohibitions, the President cannot be made to do so; he must sometimes be exempt from the law’s dictates depending on the character of his conduct. Indeed, the majority holds that the President, unlike anyone else in our country, is comparatively free to engage in criminal acts in furtherance of his official duties.

[T]he Court has unilaterally altered the balance of power between the three coordinate branches of our Government as it relates to the Rule of Law, aggrandizing power in the Judiciary and the Executive, to the detriment of Congress. Second, the majority’s new Presidential accountability model undermines the constraints of the law as a deterrent for future Presidents who might otherwise abuse their power, to the detriment of us all.

After today’s ruling, the President must still “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” yet, when acting in his official capacity, he has no obligation to follow those same laws himself.

If the structural consequences of today’s paradigm shift mark a step in the wrong direction, then the practical consequences are a five-alarm fire that threatens to consume democratic self-governance and the normal operations of our Government. The majority shoos away this possibility. (accusing the dissents of “strik[ing] a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the Court actually does today”). But Justice Sotomayor makes this point plain, and I will not belabor it.

Having now cast the shadow of doubt over when—if ever—a former President will be subject to criminal liability for any criminal conduct he engages in while on duty, the majority incentivizes all future Presidents to cross the line of criminality while in office, knowing that unless they act “manifestly or palpably beyond [their] authority,” ante, they will be presumed above prosecution and punishment alike.

From this day forward, Presidents of tomorrow will be free to exercise the Commander-in-Chief powers, the foreign-affairs powers, and all the vast law enforcement powers enshrined in Article II however they please—including in ways that Congress has deemed criminal and that have potentially grave consequences for the rights and liberties of Americans.

[T]he seeds of absolute power for Presidents have been planted. And, without a doubt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny.” Likewise, “[i]f the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.” I worry that, after today’s ruling, our Nation will reap what this Court has sown.

Stated simply: The Court has now declared for the first time in history that the most powerful official in the United States can (under circumstances yet to be fully determined) become a law unto himself. As we enter this uncharted territory, the People, in their wisdom, will need to remain ever attentive, consistently fulfilling their established role in our constitutional democracy, and thus collectively serving as the ultimate safeguard against any chaos spawned by this Court’s decision.

The majority of my colleagues seems to have put their trust in our Court’s ability to prevent Presidents from becoming Kings through case-by-case application of the indeterminate standards of their new Presidential accountability paradigm. I fear that they are wrong. But, for all oursakes, I hope that they are right. In the meantime, because the risks (and power) the Court has now assumed are intolerable, unwarranted, and plainly antithetical to bedrock constitutional norms, I dissent.

So wrong

How did it go so wrong for Britain’s Conservatives? 

The United Kingdom’s self-inflicted political meltdown, explained.

by Joshua Keating

If you’re looking for electoral suspense, don’t look across the pond. Barring a polling error of world historic proportions, 14 years of Conservative rule will come to an end in the United Kingdom on July 4. The question isn’t whether Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s party will lose, it’s whether anything will be left of them the day after.

Just five years after the Conservatives won their own historic landslide, pollsters are warning that the party faces “electoral extinction.” The current forecast from the Economist predicts the opposition Labour Party will win around 431 seats in the 650 seat parliament, up from the 205 they currently hold. That would be the center-left party’s biggest majority of the post-war era, eclipsing the landslide 1997 election, when the Tony Blair-led party trounced John Major’s Conservatives, ending a 18-year period of Tory dominance. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are projected to fall from 344 seats to just 109. Constituencies that have been loyal Tory bastions for decades are in play.

The party is likely in for a brutal internal battle over its future, with some right-wingers calling for a merger with Trumpian gadfly Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party. Some polls suggest Sunak might become the first ever sitting prime minister to lose his own seat. (Though he fortunately has a $7.2 million mansion in Santa Monica, California to fall back on, which presumably has many seats.)

The Conservatives ended up on the brink of a historic loss the way Hemmingway described going bankrupt: Gradually, and then suddenly. The Tories have been underwater in the polls since late 2021, but Sunak only called this election in late May, likely sensing his party’s prospects were not likely to improve any time soon. That’s a swift, though not exactly painless, end to a political era that radically changed a country and its place in the world. The consensus view is that it has not changed for the better.

A forthcoming book, The Conservative Effect, 2010–2024: 14 Wasted Years?, co-edited by Anthony Seldon, a veteran chronicler and biographer of contemporary British prime ministers, attempts to take stock of the legacy of this period. Seldon is unsparing in his concluding essay, writing, “By 2024, Britain’s standing in the world was lower [compared to 2010], the union was less strong, the country less equal, the population less well protected, growth more sluggish with the outlook poor.” He concludes: “Overall, it is hard to find a comparable period in history of the Conservatives which achieved so little, or which left the country at its conclusion in a more troubling state.”

So how, exactly, did we get here?

14 years, five prime ministers, one Brexit

This 14 year period of Conservative rule is really two different periods: pre- and post-Brexit.

The first period began in 2010, when Prime Minister David Cameron, leading a coalition government consisting of the Conservatives and the centrist Liberal Democrats, moved into 10 Downing Street, ending 13 years of Labour rule under Tony Blair and his dour successor Gordon Brown. Relatively youthful at 44, Cameron, a self-described “liberal conservative,” distinguished himself from previous generations of conservatives with stances like his support for gay marriage and calls for action on climate change.

But his economic policies were anything but moderate. Cameron’s government came into office in the wake of the global financial crisis facing a budget deficit of some $225 billion. In response, the government carried out a program of fiscal consolidation and budget cuts that the UK budget office has described as “one of the biggest deficit reduction programs seen in any advanced economy since World War II.” Public spending fell from around 41 percent of GDP to 35 percent, with deep cuts to social programs, infrastructure and international diplomacy.

Heading into the 2015 election, Cameron was also coming under pressure from the insurgent UK Independence Party, led by Farage, and from his own party’s right-flank, to hold a referendum on whether the UK should remain a member of the European Union. Though Cameron personally opposed withdrawing from the EU, in part to respond to dissidents from his right he vowed that if he won, he would attempt to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU and then hold an “in/out referendum” on whether Britain should stay.

As a short-term political move, it worked out great. The Conservatives won an overall majority in 2015, ending the coalition era. But Cameron was less successful in convincing Brussels to give Britain “special status” within the EU. Cameron won only minor concessions on sovereignty and immigration. There has always been an undercurrent of Euro-skepticism in British politics, but it grew stronger in the 2000s and 2010s. The financial crisis of 2008 and the eurozone debt crisis that followed undermined the appeal of the EU as an economic union. The unprecedented number of migrants who attempted to reach Europe in 2015 reduced support for the EU’s open border policies.

In retrospect, it was a perfect storm for Brexit, but it was still stunning when the country voted 52 to 48 percent in 2016 to leave the EU. Cameron, who had campaigned for the “Remain” side, resigned as prime minister. He was replaced by Theresa May, previously the home secretary and a fellow Remainer, who had the unenviable task of negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the EU while simultaneously presiding over a civil war within her own party over how exactly Brexit should be implemented.

Moderates wanted a “soft Brexit” that would preserve Britain’s access to Europe’s common market. Hardliners wanted a “hard Brexit” that would prioritize ditching EU regulations and controlling immigration. European negotiators in Brussels were not going to let the Brits have both. Further complicating the process was an issue that few anticipated before the referendum: the economic and political status of Northern Ireland — the only part of the UK with a land border with the EU. Finding a way to avoid a hard border across the island of Ireland — a key pillar of the Northern Irish peace process — while also removing the UK as a whole from the EU turned out to be excruciatingly difficult.

May stepped down in 2019, and after an internal party leadership election, was replaced by former London mayor and omnipresent media figure Boris Johnson. Johnson is not exactly known for holding consistent views.

In a 2014 interview for Slate, two years before the Brexit vote, he told me that when it came to the EU, “We may want to change our relationship a bit, but fundamentally we will remain within the European common market.” Just a few years later, he would be one of the most visible and enthusiastic campaigners for “Leave.”

A few months after taking office, Johnson called a national election, campaigning on a pledge to “get Brexit done” — and won a landslide victory. It didn’t hurt that Labour at the time was led by the veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, who had both failed to take a strong stance on Brexit and was beset by accusations of anti-semitism.

Armed with his new large majority, Johnson did something unusual for him: He did what he said he would do, and indeed got Brexit done. Britain formally left the EU on January 31, 2020. Just two years later, however, Johnson left as well, forced to resign over a scandal over allegations that he misled parliament over parties held in his office during Covid-19 lockdowns.

That was followed by the 50-day reign of Prime Minister Liz Truss, which was the shortest in British history — so short, in fact, that she was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce. Truss is mainly remembered for a proposed set of tax cuts so extreme it triggered weeks of panic in global bond markets and the kind of upbraiding from the IMF normally reserved for failed states.

Truss was then replaced by Sunak, who made history as the first prime minister of Asian descent, as well as the youngest one since William Pitt (the Younger, of course) in 1783. Under Sunak, the lingering effects of the pandemic and the shock to energy markets caused by the war in Ukraine have contributed to a cost-of-living crisis that has disproportionately impacted the poorest Britons. Sunak has tried to make the case that the UK economy is turning the corner — and indeed inflation is now starting to ease — but it’s almost certainly too little too late.

The aftermath

To some extent, Sunak’s biggest crime is simply to be in office during a widespread anti-incumbent trend throughout the Western democratic world. He’s deeply unpopular, but not significantly more so than G7 counterparts like France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz.

Defenders of the Conservatives’ time in office will point to the external shocks the party had to contend with, including the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, the Covid pandemic, and the economic impact of the war in Ukraine. But every major economy had to deal with those shocks. Only one country — and one party — chose Brexit.

Disentangling the effects of the withdrawal from other post-2020 shocks isn’t easy, but a recent study from Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), an independent think tank, estimated that the UK’s real GDP is about 2 to 3 percent lower today, compared to a scenario where it stayed in the union. Real income is about 8 to 9 percent lower.

According to the government’s own figures, Britain’s GDP today is only about 1.7 percent higher than it was pre-pandemic, compared to 3.7 percent for the Eurozone and 8.7 percent for the United States.

Ironically, Brexit didn’t even accomplish the goal that motivated many of its supporters to vote for it: Net migration to the UK has actually increased since the withdrawal. Much of the debate around immigration policy has focused on the government’s bizarre and inhumane plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed, as a means of deterring them from trying. But asylum seekers are only about 11 percent of the UK’s immigrants, and half of those are Ukrainians who entered under a specially tailored system and significantly more public support.

The real driver of migration is economic — including the economic needs of Britain itself. As migration researcher Hein de Haas has written, while “Brexit successfully curtailed free inflows of EU workers, it did not eliminate labor shortages that had been driving increasing migration to the UK ever since the 1990s.” Some jobs staffing Britain’s stores and its much-beloved National Health Service have been filled by non-EU migrants instead of European ones; some European migrants who previously traveled back and forth between the UK and the continent have stayed put.

Brexit’s advocates had argued that the benefits of trade with Europe could be offset by a free trade agreement that a new “global Britain,” unshackled from the EU, could pursue. But other than new deals with Australia and New Zealand, progress has been slow on that front. Johnson and Truss both promised a new free trade deal with the United States as a benefit of Brexit, but badly misjudged the changing mood in Washington, where both the Republicans and Democrats have taken a turn toward protectionism. (Credit where it’s due: Johnson did get the US to lift a ban on the imports of British lamb.)

More than 60 percent of British voters, including more than a third of “Leave” voters, now say Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. But the damage is done.

Not-so-global Britain

The reality is that far from broadening Britain’s horizons, Brexit has forced it to confront what it really is: a mid-sized country with a mid-sized economy that has a mid-sized influence on the world.

Asked what role foreign policy and national security have played in this election, Nick Witney, a former British diplomat and defense official now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox, “Not much, because we don't have much of a foreign or defense policy at the moment. And there's going to be no money available to buy ourselves one for a number of years under new government.”

Indeed, for all Johnson’s talk of a “global Britain” recovering its “buccaneering” spirit, the UK cuts a more modest profile on the world stage today than it did when Conservatives took over. London has cut funding to the foreign office, foreign aid, and one of the country’s most significant soft power assets: the BBC. Defense spending has increased since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but the size of the military in terms of manpower has shrunk. A last-ditch campaign proposal by Sunak to mandate national service for 18-year-olds did not go over well.

“No one talks about ‘global Britain’ anymore,” said Witney. “It’s extraordinary how our horizons have shrunk. If you go back 20 years, there was practically not a sparrow that fell anywhere around the globe where the British didn't feel they would have something to say about it. Nowadays, we are an impoverished and ultimately less ambitious country.”

One very notable exception has been the war in Ukraine, where the UK has been a significant provider of military aid, training, and economic support — often taking a more aggressive stance than the US on providing new weapons systems and capabilities to the Ukrainians. Johnson may be persona non grata in British politics right now, but there are streets named after him in Ukraine.

What’s next?

Probably due in part to the fact that the result hasn’t really been in doubt, the election itself has been heavily dominated by gaffes and scandals, including Sunak’s ill-advised decision to leave D-Day commemorations in France early and the revelations that candidates in both parties have been betting on the election.

It’s also true that compared to figures like Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, or even David Cameron — all of whom came into power in landscape-shifting change elections — current Labour leader Keir Starmer isn’t exactly promising radical change. Starmer has managed to stabilize his party after the politically disastrous Corbyn years, and — perhaps not surprisingly given that he entered the race with a huge lead — has run on a relatively modest policy platform. It’s too modest for some allies, who accuse of him of “limping into No. 10,” while the party has also angered progressives by barring several left-wing candidates, including two women of color, in the run-up to the election.

Though the party opposed Brexit during the referendum, Labour does not plan to try to rejoin the European Union. Ahmet Kaya, an economist with the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, told Vox that wouldn’t really be practical in the near term anyway, and that the focus should be on negotiations with Europe aimed at “reducing the barriers on trade and facilitating some of the free movement of people,” particularly students. Steps like these, he said, could “reduce the overall negative impact of Brexit.”

There’s won’t be a huge shift on foreign policy either. Unlike in the US, support for Ukraine is pretty bipartisan in the UK. In the wake of the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil in 2018 as well a flurry of coverage of how Russian oligarchs have manipulated the British financial system, there’s little pro-Russian sympathy in the UK, though Farage recently caused a media uproar with remarks suggesting NATO was partly to blame for the invasion of Ukraine. Starmer has also taken some criticism from Muslim Labour supporters over being slow to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. This hasn’t mattered much for his election chances, but his choices on this and other contentious issues are going to get a lot tougher when he’s actually in power.

Above all else, Starmer will face the challenge of overcoming the perceptions built up during the past decade. “Brexit has kind of defined how the UK is perceived internationally by many of our partners,” Evie Aspinall, director of the British Foreign Policy Group, told Vox. “We’re seen as a more isolated nation than we were prior to Brexit.”

There are some parallels here with the Biden administration, which came into office promising allies that “America is back” following the isolation of the Trump years. As with the Democrats in 2020, Labour has gone with a broadly popular — if somewhat dull — candidate, whose promise is that he can turn down the political temperature after a period of chaos and upheaval. It may not be enough to get them another 13 or 14 year stint in power, but it’s almost certainly enough to turn the page on July 4.

Exactly......

How Hurricane Beryl became exactly what scientists expected

The storm spun into a Category 4 hurricane in less than 24 hours. It’s a terrifying preview of what the season could bring.

by Umair Irfan

Hurricane Beryl reached Category 5 strength as it tore into the Caribbean on Monday with sustained winds reaching 165 miles per hour, marking the earliest point in the season on record that a tropical storm has reached this intensity. It's now heading toward Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, bringing "life-threatening winds and storm surge," according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm is expected to weaken as it reaches Mexico by the weekend.

As unprecedented as the storm may be, it lines up with what scientists have been predicting.

The Atlantic Ocean has been gathering the raw materials for a raucous hurricane season for months and is now assembling them into major storms. Beryl is the Atlantic’s first big project for 2024.

Ocean surface temperatures are the foundation for hurricanes. The water needs to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer. Typically, the amount of hot water needed to power a major hurricane doesn’t accumulate until later in the summer, but the Atlantic Ocean absorbed a tremendous amount of heat in the past year as the planet heated up to the hottest average temperature on record.

The other major component of hurricanes is the air above the water. Hurricanes thrive when there is minimal wind shear, a phenomenon where winds push in different directions as the altitude changes. They also count on less stability in the layers of temperature and moisture in the atmosphere. “Weak stability (not much density change with altitude) allows easier transport of moist air near the surface to rise in the atmosphere where it can form cumulus clouds that produce heavy rain,” said Michael McPhaden, a hurricane researcher at NOAA, in an email.

This year, the shift from El Niño to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean is driving more of these hurricane-favorable atmospheric conditions over the Atlantic. That’s why forecasters have been warning since May that this summer will bring an above-normal hurricane season, with upward of seven major hurricanes at Category 3 or above.

Beryl also stands out because of how quickly it gathered strength. Meteorologists describe this trait as rapid intensification, where a hurricane’s wind speeds rise by at least 35 miles per hour in 24 hours. Beryl picked up 65 mph between Saturday and Sunday, though still nowhere near as quick as Hurricane Otis, which spun up almost 100 mph in 12 hours last year.

All the while, the climate is changing and worsening some of the most destructive elements of hurricanes. Warmer temperatures are lifting sea levels, so when tropical storms make landfall, they push more water inland. Warmer air also holds onto more moisture, so storms dish out more rain. Hotter water also tends to lead to more rapid intensification.

More people are living in areas vulnerable to cyclones, too, so as these storms spool up, more lives and property are at stake.

However, the people living in some of the most vulnerable areas are taking steps to prepare for future hurricanes. In particular, Caribbean countries have been investing in disaster early warning systems that can identify brewing storms and alert residents to evacuate or seek shelter. The Caribbean warning system received $7 million in funding from the United Nations in May to upgrade disaster alerts and responses across countries in the region. It’s part of a broader $3.1 billion UN push to ensure that all people on Earth are protected by a disaster early warning system by the end of 2027.

But warnings are only the first step. The people receiving the warnings need to be able to act on them. On small, resource-poor islands, the routes to safety are few and fragile. And the threat from Beryl may not end when the storm passes.

Getting relief supplies into afflicted countries is likely to remain a challenge, and the damage from Beryl could leave the Caribbean more vulnerable to the next hurricane that erupts.

Surprising consequences?????

3 surprising consequences of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision

From Trump’s other criminal cases to the powers of the presidency itself, the ruling will have broad ripple effects.

By KYLE CHENEY

The Supreme Court’s ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution for their “official” acts will reverberate far beyond Donald Trump’s criminal case for seeking to subvert the 2020 election.

The panoply of federal and state charges Trump faces in Florida and Georgia, as well as related cases facing some of his closest White House advisers, may turn on how other judges apply the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.

And although the ruling’s most immediate impact is on the federal election case in Washington, the implications for the presidency itself — including for Joe Biden and any successors — are also likely vast.

It’s not just Trump’s D.C. case

Monday’s immunity decision threw an enormous wrench in special counsel Jack Smith’s bid to put Trump on trial for what Smith has described as a criminal conspiracy to overturn Biden’s victory. And Trump is certain to try to harness the ruling to derail his other cases, as well.

In Georgia, where he is similarly charged with trying to corrupt the state’s election results in 2020, Trump has previously tried to shield himself by claiming his conduct is immune from prosecution because he was acting as president. The judge in that case, Scott McAfee, has yet to rule on that effort, and now the Supreme Court may help guide his hand.

The high court left open the question of whether Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials to reverse certified election results can be treated as “official” conduct. So it’s possible the charges against Trump for urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for him to prevail in the state will survive.

In Florida, where Trump is charged with hoarding classified documents in his home after leaving office, Trump has also lodged an immunity claim, contending that his decision to transfer the classified records to Mar-a-Lago in the final days of his presidency renders it protected from prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has not ruled on that motion yet but is now likely to have to contend with at least a limited impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on her case — yet another factor that could slow her already plodding timeline.

“It certainly raises whole new avenues for litigation there,” said Cardozo Law School professor Jessica Roth, a former federal prosecutor. “It certainly adds additional avenues for delay.”

And even in Trump’s New York case — where he was found guilty in May of falsifying records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star — Trump is reportedly floating a longshot bid to reverse his conviction by citing the immunity decision. In a letter that has not been made public, his lawyers asked the judge in that case to toss out the jury verdict, the New York Times reported Monday evening.

The presidency itself is changing

The Supreme Court’s opinion extends way beyond Trump. Taken to its extreme conclusion, the court has embraced a constitutional framework that makes it nearly impossible for a president to be held legally accountable for any use of official power, no matter how nefarious — with Congress’ impeachment power being the only recourse.

“Although the Court doesn’t quite say it, the commander in chief power has to be a ‘core’ power by its logic, and so can never be a basis for a criminal prosecution,” noted Aziz Huq, a University of Chicago professor of constitutional law. “This licenses the misuse of … the surveillance and intrusive powers of the national security state.”

The decision to bless nearly all official presidential conduct as immune from prosecutorial scrutiny also has ramifications for Biden. Republicans have repeatedly suggested that their allies in government should consider charging Biden with crimes for actions ranging from his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal to the flow of migrants over the southern border. Those policy considerations would be clearly beyond the reach of prosecutors under the Supreme Court’s analysis.

A potential boon for Trump allies

Though the Supreme Court largely left it to trial judges to determine which of Trump’s specific acts as president were “official” — and therefore immune — the justices made one exception: Trump’s conversations with Justice Department officials about how to deploy the department in service of his bid to stay in power were squarely within his official power as president, the high court declared.

That aspect of the case against Trump has been among the most vividly documented efforts to subvert the results of the election. Trump, according to numerous witnesses — including former acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue — leaned heavily on department leaders to amplify false claims of voter fraud to lend the imprimatur of the government to those allegations. When they resisted, he threatened to appoint a more like-minded ally, then-assistant attorney general Jeff Clark, to lead the department for the final weeks of his presidency.

Clark was charged alongside Trump for his alleged role in the scheme in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis brought a massive racketeering case. He was also charged by Washington bar authorities with a professional ethics violation, which could lead to the suspension or loss of his law license.

But Clark is now calling for both of those cases to be dropped in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s White House chief of staff during the 2020 election efforts and is similarly facing criminal charges, could also try to invoke the immunity decision to derail his own charges.

Lifts block

Emergency order lifts block on parts of student debt relief plan

Education Department officials said the agency had been preparing stopgap measures to comply with the injunction but has directed student loan servicers not to take those steps because they are no longer necessary.

By REBECCA CARBALLO

An appellate court issued an emergency motion lifting the block on part of the Education Department’s student debt relief plan, a victory for the Biden administration in the ongoing legal battle.

In a 2-1 ruling issued on Sunday, Judge David Ebel, a Reagan appointee, and Carolyn McHugh, an Obama appointee, ruled in favor of the emergency order allowing a provision lowering payments to be implemented. Judge Timothy Tymkovich, appointed by George W. Bush, voted against the emergency order in the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Background: Last week, two Obama-appointed federal judges in Missouri and Kansas issued separate preliminary injunctions against different parts of the SAVE Plan. In the Kansas case, a provision of the program was blocked that would allow lower payments starting July 1. Under the SAVE Plan, the cap on payments for undergraduate borrowers was supposed to decrease to 5 percent of their discretionary income, down from 10 percent starting.

That provision will now go forward under the emergency order.

“Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit sided with student loan borrowers across the country who stand to benefit from the SAVE Plan — the most affordable repayment plan in history,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “Borrowers enrolled in the SAVE Plan can still access its considerable benefits, including undergraduate loan payments cut in half, as well as protection against interest accruing if borrowers are making their monthly payments.

Education Department officials said the agency had been preparing stopgap measures to comply with the injunction, but has directed student loan servicers not to take those steps because they are no longer necessary. The Department said last week that it planned to take down the online SAVE application and loan consolidation form, but both of those will now remain online.

Separately, Judge John A. Ross of the Eastern District of Missouri blocked the Education Department from carrying out “any further loan forgiveness for borrowers” under the SAVE program until he decides the full case. The Education Department filed an appeal in that case, but it was denied. The agency has not asked the appeals court for a stay, and no action has been taken blocking Ross’ ruling from taking effect.

The lawsuits challenging the SAVE Plan were filed by Republican-led states.

What’s next: The Education Department announced last week before the emergency order that it would suspend monthly student loan payments and interest for some 3 million borrowers. These borrowers will remain in forbearance for July but will be expected to make their first lower payments in August.

If a borrower’s payments had been put on hold before these court rulings because what they owe was being recalculated, their first monthly payment will be due in August and will reflect the new, lower amount of 5 percent of their income on undergraduate loans.

How fucking stupid....

‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate

The senior team’s management of Biden has grown more strictly controlled as his term has gone on.

By ELI STOKOLS, ELENA SCHNEIDER, JONATHAN LEMIRE and ADAM CANCRYN

Over the course of his presidency, Joe Biden’s small clutch of advisers have built an increasingly protective circle around him, limiting his exposure to the media and outside advice — an effort to manage public perceptions of the oldest person to ever hold the office and tightly control his political operation.

But inside the White House, Biden’s growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate, with the senior team’s management of the president growing more strictly controlled as his term has gone on. During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings they’ll deliver to Biden, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information being presented in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”

The official said, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it.”

The debate, however, was so dismal for Biden that nobody could ignore it. For as furiously as Biden’s advisers have pushed back on concerns about his age, the now 81-year-old president’s halting, soft-spoken and scattered responses to former President Donald Trump, 78, shattered the party’s magical thinking on the subject. That the president’s difficulties came as such a shock was largely the result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon — far away from cameras, questions and more intense public scrutiny.

Even the president’s family, which gathered Sunday at Camp David for a previously scheduled portrait session with photographer Annie Leibovitz and private conversations about where to go from here, was pointing the finger at long-standing members of the senior team: senior adviser Anita Dunn, one of several proponents of the earlier debate, and former chief of staff Ron Klain, who oversaw the week of debate prep at Camp David. But Biden himself told those aides he wasn’t blaming them, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

“The whole planning, preparation was political malpractice,” Democratic megadonor John Morgan said in an interview, laying blame on “the cabal” of the president’s closest aides, including Klain, Dunn and her husband, Biden’s personal lawyer, Bob Bauer. “I think he has a misplaced trust in these three people, and I believe he has from the inception.”

It’s not just those aides. Democrats frustrated with Biden’s insular senior team are well acquainted with the longtime aides who continue to have the president’s ear: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, as well as Ted Kaufman and Klain on the outside. “It’s the same people — he has not changed those people for 40 years,” said one Democratic operative and close adviser to several members of Congress, who blamed the entire group for refusing to shift course even as Biden trailed Trump for months in the polls. “All these guys running the campaign from the White House is not working.”

As a Democratic strategist in a battleground state put it: “The number of people who have access to the president has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. They’ve been digging deeper into the bunker for months now.” And, the strategist said, “the more you get into the bunker, the less you listen to anyone.”

This article was based on interviews with more than two dozen people, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive subject. The White House disputed the characterization of Biden as isolated, asserting that he frequently seeks input from policy and political staff and that briefings often include as many as eight to 10 people. They specifically disputed the claim that Biden is protected from dissenting opinions, noting that it’s been the job of a staff secretary in every administration to make sure the president gets all of the information he needs and nothing extraneous. Senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates denied that briefing materials have been curated to avoid upsetting Biden, calling that suggestion “false.”

But now, after Biden’s abysmal performance in the first debate, even some White House staffers are among a growing group of Democratic lawmakers, fundraisers, operatives and activists who have concluded — with sudden clarity — that the cloistered Biden inner sanctum itself is to blame for their current predicament.

By the time Biden’s campaign proposed two debates with Trump, many White House staffers had no idea it was in the works, according to three administration officials. The plan and quiet negotiations with networks had been especially tightly held by the president’s small inner circle, spread between the West Wing and his Wilmington-based campaign headquarters.

“Everyone was told this was for the best,” said a White House staffer. “Now, it’s the worst possible outcome. And we’re all trying to figure out why the people who know him best and make all the decisions didn’t seem to anticipate that this might happen.”

Following the debate, the pervasive view throughout much of the party is of Biden’s inner circle as an impenetrable group of enablers who deluded themselves about his ability to run again even as they’ve assiduously worked to accommodate his limitations and shield them from view.

For months, that mostly worked. Democrats’ strong 2022 showing, Biden’s top aides claimed, offered validation for his reelection bid, helping shut down credible primary challenges and spurring the Democratic National Committee to reshuffle the early state calendar to Biden’s benefit. When aides to the president suggested he was the best and only candidate who could beat Trump, few pushed back.

“The fact is, there wasn’t an open dialogue about whether he should run except for the people who would benefit from him running,” said a Democratic operative close to the campaign. They described the inner circle, Donilon especially, as convinced “that this was going to be about Trump, not about Biden, and at the end of the day, people just wouldn’t vote for Trump. But here we are, we’re sitting in July, and the race is about Biden, and it’s about a trait you can’t fix.”

Two Biden officials disputed that characterization of Donilon’s point of view. One prominent Biden donor in close touch with the White House and campaign was more circumspect: “We’ve all enabled the situation,” they said.

No one has done more to keep the president isolated — and shielded from tough conversations — than his wife, first lady Jill Biden, and sister, Valerie Biden Owens. The president’s determination to spend weekends at home in Wilmington, away from most aides and the formal trappings of the White House, may be the clearest manifestation of Biden’s strong preference for familiarity and privacy.

Most aides who have worked for Biden for any significant length of time share the president’s own resentments about an elite political and media class that has never, in their view, given him his due. And they tend to view Biden’s debate meltdown and the ensuing party-wide freak-out about his candidacy as just another moment of being counted out. Their recent experience — Biden’s 2020 win and the Democrats’ history-defying midterm success in 2022 — has many convinced that he’ll survive this, too.

Yet while the campaign has sought to reassure top donors and activists, there’s been little outreach to Democrats on Capitol Hill, where some front-line members are already being targeted with TV ads casting their support of Biden against his debate performance.

“I think the Biden team is pretty insular and doesn’t really care what anybody says,” said one senior House Democrat, who described a palpable and growing fear among vulnerable Democrats that they may lose because of Biden.

“There’s definitely groupthink,” one Democratic donor-adviser said about Biden’s inner circle. “They’ve known each other a long time. They’re kind of a team of rivals. But they’re not going to challenge him.”

A Democratic operative in frequent communication with the White House and the campaign said suggestions can be quickly dismissed. “If I’m talking to Anita, and I say, ‘what about X?’ She’s quick to say, ‘The president’s not going to do that. No chance.’ It shuts off options, yes, but it also [lets] you move more quickly because they know him so well.”

Another operative painted a similar picture: “They don’t take dissent,” they said. “If you try, then you don’t get invited to the next call, the next meeting.”

White House and campaign aides argued that all presidential administrations or campaigns feature a clutch of top decision-makers, and Biden’s is no different. They also noted that several new faces have been brought in for senior roles, including chief of staff Jeff Zients, campaign chair Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, White House communications director Ben LaBolt, Cedric Richmond, a senior adviser to the DNC, campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodriguez and deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks.

“In every administration, there are individuals who would prefer to spend more time with the president and senior officials,” Bates said in a statement to POLITICO. “President Biden fights hard for families every day, working with a wide range of team members at what he is proud is the most diverse White House ever — and achieving historic results for the American people because of his determination, values, and experience.”

After publication, Bates provided an additional response, casting complaints about a tightly controlled inner circle as “unfair distortions of processes that exist in every administration,” and saying Biden “actively seeks input from a wide range of individuals inside and outside the administration.”

As Biden’s campaign and prominent Democrats have tried to rally around him amid calls for him to end his bid for a second term, they’ve presented various other explanations (the president had a cold) and scapegoats (CNN’s moderators, senior aides) in an effort to shift the focus away from Biden’s diminished presence and inability to formulate clear responses on the fly and without a teleprompter.

“Even really smart people can fall into wishful thinking,” said the Democratic donor adviser. “Any reasonable person watching the debate would have concerns, and dismissing them is, to a lot of people, patronizing.”

Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the Democrat-aligned Center for American Progress, said in an interview that Biden can still win in November and that Democrats broadly are likely to stick with him as long as he’s a candidate. But he also suggested the main campaign team should be more open to criticism and advice from outside the circle.

“Campaigns are really long slogs,” he said. “It’s only natural that you start turning to the people who are in tight ranks with you. But at some point, it’s also natural that you then have enough confidence in what you put together to start opening up a bit and pulling other folks in to be helpful.”

In a way, the defensiveness over Biden’s age is muscle memory at this point. The White House press shop has been merciless about working to kill and water down stories focused on the subject, and aggressively attacking holes in them after they’re published, as was the case last month with a lengthy Wall Street Journal report that leaned on GOP lawmakers for a portrayal of how Biden was “slipping.”

Last June, when Biden tripped and fell while on stage at the Air Force Academy’s commencement ceremony, the White House responded in minutes with an explanation: that he simply tripped on a sandbag. But that incident coincided with noticeable adjustments to protocol aimed at avoiding additional stumbles: the president switching to thick-soled sneakers more often and to using the lower, less wobbly stairs when getting on and off Air Force One. And when conservative outlets fixated on a video of Biden walking away from other leaders at the G7 a few weeks ago to suggest he was disoriented, the White House dismissed the coverage as dishonest and slanted.

But the administration’s accommodations to Biden’s age go far deeper than the press shop’s efforts to push reporters off the spot. From the earliest months of his term, Biden was carefully managed by senior adviser to the first lady Anthony Bernal, deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini, Klain and others. After a campaign spent largely inside his Delaware home, the president remained in a protective bubble at the behest of senior staff and family, who believed it was the best way to manage the president’s health given the ongoing Covid-19 risk and his reelection chances, according to five people familiar but not authorized to publicly discuss internal decisions.

Bernal and Tomasini, in particular, have grown particularly close to the president and first lady. Traveling with the Bidens everywhere they go, the duo often seems to other aides more like an extension of the president’s family than staff — so much so that some aides have joked that “Annie and Anthony will climb into the coffins with [Biden],” according to a person familiar with Biden’s inner circle. Beyond their proximity to the principals, the two aides work closely with White House and campaign staff. They operate as a team and keep a tight grip on the controls, three current and former officials said, often influencing who is in some meetings or on Air Force One flight manifests.

“Covid gave Tomasini and Bernal an opportunity to shield Biden off from the outside world, and it never really changed,” a former administration official said. “It was just understood that only a very small number of aides got face time with him. It is all about how to make the Bidens’ lives easier and safe-guarding their privacy at every [turn].”

At times, Biden himself chafed at the restrictions.

As senator and vice president, he was famous for being readily available for a quote and having off-the-record discussions with reporters. He was known as one of Washington’s most tactile politicians, relishing extended chats with constituents. But suddenly, aides were more nervous about a potential gaffe or senior moment that would dominate headlines, according to the five people familiar with internal decisions. Though he acquiesced to his staff’s suggestions, the president sometimes complained to confidantes about being treated “with kid gloves,” according to two of those people.

Biden’s schedule has also been carefully managed, according to the two people. Very few early morning events are scheduled, and if an evening event was unavoidable, adjustments were made elsewhere to compensate. And while every president’s schedule includes down time on foreign trips, more has often been added to Biden’s itinerary. Earlier this month, he arrived in France a full 24 hours ahead of D-Day anniversary events and spent his first day entirely inside his Paris hotel.

“President Biden takes round-the-world trips that reporters publicly call exhausting and has gone to two active war zones,” said Bates, the senior deputy White House press secretary, who also asserted that Biden “works around the clock and does many evening events.”

The first lady is also deeply protective of her husband’s schedule and stamina. When Biden’s first news conference as president was held in March 2021, it ended up running more than an hour, which was longer than aides had planned, and Biden’s performance faded somewhat near the end. After it was over, Jill Biden vociferously complained to aides, including Klain, that it was allowed to run so long, according to two of the people familiar.

Biden hasn’t done another press conference like that and has subjected himself to fewer sit-down interviews than any of his recent predecessors. Over his first three years in office, he did just one interview with a print reporter; he’s done two more this year. And the White House has also spurned requests from most TV networks, even turning down the traditional Super Bowl pregame interview this year with CBS. The president’s senior advisers have long been convinced that in a fractured media environment, there was far less upside with those interviews because their influence had diminished — and too high a risk.

Those aides didn’t want Biden frequently facing tough questions, preferring him to sit for friendly interviews with podcasters, social media stars and other influencers. Bates noted that Biden has done 43 interviews so far this year and pointed to Biden’s habit of semi-frequently fielding shouted questions from the press as proof of his media availability, though those encounters are less substantive and have also dwindled in recent months.

Biden’s far more energetic appearance at a rally in North Carolina the day after the debate — his explanation about his poor performance and determination to “get back up” and keep fighting are already being featured in a campaign ad — came with the aid of a teleprompter, which the president has also taken to using at some fundraisers. The president’s growing reliance on the prompter isn’t reassuring many donors. But top surrogates, who are rallying behind Biden publicly, are arguing for aides to loosen the reins.

“The answer is not going to be to put the president away,” Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland, told POLITICO during a campaign swing through Wisconsin. “The answer is going to be to continue to have them out there. We continue that, the president’s going to win.”