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Comstock died in 1915, and the Comstock Act, the notorious anti-obscenity law used to indict the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, ban books by D.H. Lawrence and arrest people by the thousands, turned 150 last month. Had this anniversary fallen five or 10 years ago, it barely would have been worth noting, except perhaps to marvel at how far we’d come from an era when a fanatical censor like Comstock wielded national political power. “The Comstock Act represented, in its day, the pinnacle of Victorian prudery, the high-water mark of a strict and rigid formal code,” wrote the law professors Joanna Grossman and Lawrence Friedman. Until very recently, it seemed a relic.
Yet suddenly, the prurient sanctimony that George Bernard Shaw called “Comstockery” is running rampant in America. As if inspired by Comstock’s horror of “literary poison” and “evil reading,” states are outdoing one another in draconian censorship. In March, Oklahoma’s Senate passed a bill that, among other things, bans from public libraries all content with a “predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex.” Amy Werbel, the author of “Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock,” described how Comstock tried to suppress photographs of cross-dressing women. More than a century later, Tennessee has banned drag performances on public property, with more states likely to follow.
And now, thanks to a rogue judge in Texas, the Comstock Act itself could be partly reimposed on America. Though the act had been dormant for decades and Congress did away with its prohibitions on birth control in 1971, it was never fully repealed. And with Roe v. Wade gone, the Christian right has sought to make use of it. The Comstock Act was central to the case brought by a coalition of anti-abortion groups in Texas seeking to have Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, part of the regimen used in medication abortion, invalidated. And it is central to the anti-abortion screed of an opinion by Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, the judge, appointed by Donald Trump, who on Friday ruled in their favor.
It’s true that, as Kacsmaryk noted, the Comstock Act bars mailing “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” The law imposes a five-year maximum prison sentence for first offenses and up to 10 years for subsequent ones. That’s why, almost as soon as the Supreme Court tossed out Roe, social conservatives started clamoring for the Comstock Act to be enforced against medication abortion. When 20 Republican attorneys general wrote to Walgreens and CVS warning them against distributing abortion pills, they invoked the Comstock Act.
Many legal scholars see this invocation of the Comstock Act as legally dubious. As David S. Cohen, Greer Donley and Rachel Rebouché explain in the draft of a forthcoming article, circuit court cases in the 1930s found that the Comstock Act applies only to materials meant to be used unlawfully. But for judges hellbent on banning abortion, as we’ve seen, precedent doesn’t mean much. “The Comstock Act plainly forecloses mail-order abortion in the present,” wrote Kacsmaryk. He added, “Defendants cannot immunize the illegality of their actions by pointing to a small window in the past where those actions might have been legal.”
On Friday a Washington State judge issued an opinion directly contradicting Kacsmaryk’s and ordering the F.D.A. to continue to make mifepristone available. The dispute now is likely headed to the Supreme Court. The emphasis on Comstock in Kacsmaryk’s decision, tweeted the legal scholar Mary Ziegler, could appeal to “self-proclaimed textualists” on the Supreme Court like Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who emphasize the ordinary meaning of words in a statute, outside the context of legislative intent or history.
Such a reading of the Comstock Act could do far more than prohibit patients from getting mifepristone by mail. “Absent the narrowing construction applied by the federal circuit courts, the law’s plain terms could effectively ban all abortion nationwide because almost every pill, instrument or other item used in an abortion clinic or by a virtual abortion provider moves through the mail or an express carrier at some point,” wrote Cohen, Donley and Rebouché.
There is something head-spinning about how quickly Comstock’s spirit of punitive repression has settled on a country where, not long ago, social liberalism seemed largely triumphant, with the rapid acceptance of gay marriage, the growing visibility of trans people and over-the-counter access to emergency contraception. The notion that it’s the government’s job to protect people from vice appeared increasingly passé as states legalized marijuana and gambling. It’s true that even before the end of Roe, conservatives had a lot of success rolling back reproductive rights in red states. But just a year ago, the idea of a judge using the Comstock Act to halt medication abortion nationwide would have seemed hysterical.
Maybe we should have seen it coming. Comstock’s power, after all, derived from a reaction to the sexual radicalism that took root in the Gilded Age. (One of his great nemeses was Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist, spiritualist, free-love advocate and presidential candidate.) By the time the Comstock Act was passed, vulcanized rubber, invented in 1839, had allowed for the mass production of rubber condoms and diaphragms. Other forms of birth control were widely sold in pharmacies. Before Comstock had Madame Restell arrested, which apparently drove her to suicide, she was a celebrity abortionist with a mansion across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There’s a dialectic relationship between freedom and reaction.
Werbel described Comstock as representing “antiquated Christian nationalism.” She added, “He just doesn’t change over time. And the world around him does.” Ultimately, she argued, the cruelty of Comstock’s crusade helped spark the creation of the modern civil liberties movement, and she hoped that once again, Americans would rebel against religious authoritarianism. Indeed, the nationwide backlash against abortion bans suggests they already are rebelling. But a lot of people had to suffer before the first iteration of Comstockery subsided, and a lot of people are going to suffer from its rebirth.
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A Taiwanese air force Mirage 2000 fighter jet lands at an air force base in Hsinchu, northern Taiwan, on Sunday. (photo: Jameson Wu/AFP)
Show of force comes after Taiwanese president Tsai met US House speaker McCarthy this week, despite Beijing warning against it
Taiwan’s defence ministry said it was monitoring the movements of China’s missile forces, as the US said it too was on alert.
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent 70 warplanes, including fighter jets, reconnaissance craft and refuellers, into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday morning, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry. It did not provide a map or locations, but said 31 planes had crossed the median line – the de facto border in the Taiwan strait between Taiwan and China.
The PLA had announced the immediate start to three days of drills on Saturday morning. By 7pm that evening it had sent 71 warplanes and eight ships into Taiwan’s ADIZ with almost 60 crossing the median line.
Taiwan’s ministry said the activity had severely violated Indo-Pacific peace and stability, and had a negative effect on international security and economies. It urged other countries to speak out against China’s actions.
Chinese state television reported that multiple units carried out simulated strikes on key targets in Taiwan and the surrounding sea. The Chinese military’s eastern theatre command put out a short animation of the simulated attacks on its WeChat account, showing missiles fired from land, sea and air into Taiwan with two of them exploding in flames as they hit their targets.
A Taiwan security source told Reuters that on Saturday the Chinese drills around the Bashi channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, included simulated attacks on aircraft carrier groups as well as anti-submarine drills.
Last August, after a visit to Taipei by then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, China staged war games around Taiwan including firing missiles into waters close to the island, though it has yet to announce similar drills this time.
Chinese maritime authorities have issued just one notice of a live fire zone, in a small area of water near Pingtan, in the Taiwan strait. The mandatory notice warns air and seacraft to keep clear of the area, which is just a fraction of the areas designated for live fire during last year’s drills.
While in Los Angeles last week, on what was officially billed a transit on her way back from Central America, Tsai met the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, despite Beijing’s warnings against the meeting.
The de facto US embassy in Taiwan said on Sunday that the US was monitoring China’s drills around Taiwan closely and is “comfortable and confident” it has sufficient resources and capabilities regionally to ensure peace and stability.
US channels of communication with China remain open and the US had consistently urged restraint and no change to the status quo, said a spokesperson for the American Institute in Taiwan, which serves as an embassy in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.
Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in favour of Beijing in 1979 but is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.
China, which has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control, says Taiwan is the most important and sensitive issue in its relations with the US, and the topic is a frequent source of tensions.
Beijing considers Tsai a separatist and has rebuffed her repeated calls for talks. Tsai says only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.
China has over the past three years or so stepped up its military pressure against Taiwan, flying regular missions around Taiwan, though not in its territorial airspace or over the island itself.
Chinese state media said the aircraft flown into the ADIZ this weekend were armed with live weapons.
Taiwanese air force jets also typically carry live weapons when they scramble to see off Chinese incursions.
Late on Saturday, Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council, which runs the coast guard, put out footage on its YouTube channel showing one of its ships shadowing a Chinese warship, though it did not give an exact location.
“You are seriously harming regional peace, stability and security. Please immediately turn around and leave. If you continue to proceed we will take expulsion measures,” a coast guard officer says by radio to the Chinese ship.
Other footage showed a Taiwanese warship, the Di Hua, accompanying the coast guard ship in what the coast guard officer calls a “standoff” with the Chinese warship.
Still, civilian flights around Taiwan, including to Kinmen and Matsu, two groups of Taiwan-controlled islands right next to the Chinese coast, have continued as normal.
In August, civilian air traffic was disrupted after China announced effective no-fly zones in several areas close to Taiwan where it was firing missiles.
Meanwhile the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said in an interview published on Sunday that Europe must not be a “follower” of either the US or China on Taiwan, saying that the bloc risks entanglement in “crises that aren’t ours”.
His comments risk riling Washington and highlight divisions in the European Union over how to approach China, as the US steps up confrontation with its closest rival and Beijing draws closer to Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
“The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans must be followers and adapt ourselves to the American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction,” Macron told media as he returned on Friday from a three-day state visit to Beijing.
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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that the Trump administration ignored court ruling on immigration issues. (photo: REX/Shutterstock)
Democratic New York congresswoman says there is ‘extraordinary precedent’ for Biden to decline to enforce ruling
Those remarks from the Democratic US House member quickly prompted a threat by the Texas Republican congressman Tony Gonzales to defund certain programs under the federal agency which oversees medication approvals if Biden’s administration did as Ocasio-Cortez suggested.
The Biden administration has already said it plans to appeal a Friday ruling from Texas-based federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative appointed by the Donald Trump White House, that blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the drug mifepristone. The FDA approved the drug in 2000, a move that is now being challenged by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group.
In urging the Biden administration to decline to enforce the ruling, Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Trump administration had ignored court rulings on immigration issues. She also pointed out that there was a contradicting ruling from a federal judge in Washington state on Friday which blocked the FDA from taking any action to limit access to the drug, virtually ensuring that the US supreme court would settle the matter at some point.
“There is an extraordinary amount of precedent for this … The Trump administration also did this very thing. This has happened before,” she said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.
“The courts rely on the legitimacy of their rulings. And when they make a mockery of our system, a mockery of our democracy and a mockery of our law, as what we just saw happen in this mifepristone ruling, then I believe that the executive branch, and we know that the executive branch has enforcement discretion, especially in light of a contradicting ruling coming out of Washington.”
CNN host Dana Bash said Ocasio-Cortez was offering a “pretty stunning position” and pressed the congresswoman on whether the Biden administration should ignore the ruling if the US supreme court eventually upheld Kacsmaryk’s decision.
“I think one of the things that we need to examine is the grounds of that ruling,” she said. “But I do not believe that the courts have the authority … over the FDA that [Kacsmaryk] just asserted. And I do believe that it creates a crisis. Should the supreme court do that, it would essentially institute a national abortion ban.”
During a later appearance on State of the Union, Gonzales told Bash that there would be consequences if the Biden administration ignored the ruling.
“The House Republicans have the power of the purse,” Gonzales said. “And if the administration wants to not live up to this ruling, then we’re gonna have a problem. And it may become a point where House Republicans on the appropriations side have to defund FDA programs that don’t make sense.”
Bash also asked the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, whether ignoring the ruling was “off the table”. Becerra declined to say specifically what the administration would do if appellate courts, including the supreme court, upheld the decision.
“Everything is on the table,” he said on CNN. “We want the courts to overturn this reckless decision.”
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Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele speaks during a military ceremony in 2020. (photo: Aphotografia)
The American right is falling in love with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, over his crime crackdown. But he’s also tearing down Salvadoran democracy.
“[J]ust imagine if this happened in any other country, where a government arrested the main opposition candidate,” Bukele wrote. “The United States ability to use ‘democracy’ as foreign policy is gone.”
Such a development would be convenient for Bukele, who has emerged as one of the most prominent — and flamboyant — elected autocrats on the global stage. In the span of roughly a year, the 41-year-old leader has declared a state of emergency, suspended civil rights protections, detained tens of thousands of citizens indefinitely without charge, built a new mega-prison made up of cells that cram 100 people in each, and packed the country’s highest court with his picks — who then promptly changed electoral rules to allow him to run again in 2024.
Salvadoran human rights advocates are sounding the alarm about democracy’s death, and the Biden administration has sanctioned key members of his government.
The response on the American right has been strikingly different. The authoritarian rhetoric, brash right-wing policies, and loud social media presence have captured the imagination of a small but influential group of American conservatives. In the past year, leading figures in MAGA world — including Tucker Carlson, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone — have praised Bukele, and even instructed Americans to learn from his example.
Among the things Bukele’s new right-wing fans like most about him are his harsh criminal justice policies. The Salvadoran murder rate, once one of the highest in the world, has plummeted during Bukele’s time in power (though it should be noted it was already falling before he came into office). The gangs that have long brutalized El Salvador’s civilians, most notably MS-13 and Barrio 18, seem weaker. Polls show that Bukele is stratospherically popular, with independent surveys showing favorability ratings in the 80s and even 90s.
For this, some on the American right — like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — have cheered him on, largely ignoring his attack on the country’s democracy:
Conservative commentators’ praise for Bukele has been even more effusive.
“‘He’s ‘authoritarian’? He’s wielding authority to do good, to get the bad guys and help the good guys. We should be doing that too,” the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said in a late February monologue. “‘Authoritarian’ is just a word that liberals use when conservatives wield political power.”
The conservative attraction to Bukele is primarily concentrated among very online right-wingers like Knowles — not yet approaching the widespread Republican admiration for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. “They’re the useful idiots for Bukele’s worldwide PR campaign,” Daniel DiMartino, a fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute, says of Bukele’s American fans.
But his rising popularity does illustrate the way that the ideas of the post-Trump conservative movement, including its obsession with crime and public disorder, create a very natural on-ramp to outright anti-democratic politics. And it should serve as a warning to liberals.
El Salvador isn’t the only country where an elected authoritarian has become stratospherically popular by launching a crackdown on crime that shreds civil liberties. Attacking liberal rights as a hindrance to enforcing public order is a style of politics that has proven effective around the world, and one that is often bound up with an attack on democracy itself.
Illiberalism has a constituency. Liberals need to take that reality seriously, and not be complacent about liberalism’s popular appeal.
The bitcoin dictator
The American right’s love affair with Bukele started with bitcoin.
After Bukele won El Salvador’s election in 2019, the first president in 30 years who did not hail from either of the country’s two major established parties, he set about turning the country into a haven for cryptocurrency use.
In 2021, this culminated in a law that legalized the use of bitcoin as legal tender. He even proposed building something called “Bitcoin City,” an entire new town shaped like a coin built at the base of a volcano, in order to power bitcoin mining with geothermal energy. He has continued to push crypto even after the crash in November 2022, which did real damage to the Salvadoran government’s balance sheet.
The bitcoin obsession demonstrated that he was extremely, extremely online. His active Twitter account used an image of him with laser beams coming out of his eyes as his profile picture — a common meme, especially in crypto circles, but one that probably would seem odd to his constituents who weren’t scrolling through Twitter and Reddit all day.
Daniel Rothschild, the executive director of the libertarian Mercatus Center, sees this as the origin story of Bukele’s popularity on the American right.
“If you’re locked into the right Twitter circles, he’s been one of those people who has been a consistent presence for the last four years,” Rothschild tells me.
As Bukele’s crypto fan club was growing, his attacks on democracy were becoming more brazen.
In February 2020, Bukele asked the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly — then controlled by opposing parties — to grant him over $100 million to purchase new equipment for the Territorial Control Plan, an anti-gang initiative. When the legislature refused, he sent in military and police forces to occupy the parliament building.
In a speech outside the building, he made the message of the act quite explicit. “If we wanted to press the button [and evict legislators by force], we would press the button,” Bukele told supporters.
About a year later, Bukele’s party won the country’s legislative elections and gained a two-thirds majority in its Parliament. He wasted little time in securing power: In May of 2021, his party voted to remove the country’s attorney general, who was investigating Bukele’s party for corruption and clandestine negotiations with gangs, and all five judges on the Constitutional Court. All were replaced with Bukele allies.
An open letter issued at the time from 100 Latin American civil society organizations warned that “the illegitimate capture of judicial authorities connected to political power and the consequent disappearance of the principle of separation of powers are a dangerous precedent for democracy in the hemisphere.”
This warning proved prescient. In September 2021, the pliant Supreme Court ruled that Bukele could run for reelection despite an explicit ban on a president serving more than one term. Predictably, Bukele later announced that he would be competing in the 2024 presidential contest.
The abolition of term limits has proven to be a consistent predictor of when an elected president in a weak democracy is moving to install himself in power for life. Political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright warned in a 2022 op-ed that Bukele’s behavior could be a “red flag” for democracy in El Salvador, one that typically suggests “a leader’s intention to stay in office by subverting rules established to curb executive power.”
But if you were to read only Bukele’s supporters in the American crypto world, you would be forgiven for getting a different impression of his government. Balaji Srinivasan, a leading crypto figure and anti-woke commentator with nearly 900,000 Twitter followers, repeatedly promoted El Salvador throughout 2021 and 2022 — praising the country as a “freedom jurisdiction” that was offering “strong pushback” against the “wokes,” and crediting Bukele personally for working “to add El Salvador to the ranks of ascending world countries.”
And in the last year or so, Bukele’s profile has only grown.
Tough on crime, tough on freedom
El Salvador has long had one of the world’s highest murder rates. UN data shows that, despite a multi-year decline, the country still had one of the highest global murder rates at the beginning of 2022.
March 25 and 26 of that year were unusually violent even by Salvadoran standards: 76 people were killed in that span, roughly as many as were murdered in the entire month of February 2022. On March 27, Bukele announced a state of emergency (also called a “state of exception”) and a new crackdown on crime. Per the US State Department, the crackdown suspended some of the most basic civil rights in a democratic society.
“Security forces were empowered to arrest anyone suspected of belonging to a gang or providing support to gangs,” the State Department explained in a 2022 report on Salvadoran human rights. “In addition, the state of exception suspended the rights to be informed immediately of the reason for detention, to legal defense during initial investigations, to privacy in conversations and correspondence, and to freedom of association.”
A year into the crackdown, there’s clear evidence that murder rates have continued to decline. But the extent to which Bukele’s crackdown contributed is debatable. Previous harsh crackdowns in El Salvador had temporarily led to declines in gang violence, only for it to pick back up.
Yet experts say there are some reasons to believe this one might be different: Bukele hit the gangs fast at a time when they weren’t prepared for it, potentially creating a leadership vacuum that might make it hard for the organizations to fully recover. It’ll take time to know just how effective it was.
The consequences for human rights, however, have been undeniably dire. Tens of thousands of Salvadoran citizens have been arrested and imprisoned. An October 2022 report from the International Crisis Group found that “El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, at around 2 per cent of the adult population.”
And yet the years of gang violence have been so painful, and so sustained, that many Salvadorans have welcomed the crackdown — hence Bukele’s currently high approval ratings.
The fact that the people approve of his behavior does not make it less autocratic. Latin American dictators often start out with popular support while consolidating power — see Alberto Fujimori in Peru or Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Eliminating basic protections, including rights against unlawful arrest and protections for press freedom, are so dangerous to liberal democracy that they should worry any observer regardless of how popular they might be in the moment.
But his attacks on liberal freedoms are precisely what has earned Bukele a new following on the American right.
It certainly helps that, on Twitter and in public appearances, Bukele has proven himself fluent in American right-wing argot. Take his Tucker Carlson interview, which aired in November 2022. In that conversation, Bukele speaks extensively about bitcoin, but transitions seamlessly into a harangue about the alleged malfeasance of the American liberal elite.
“I’m from El Salvador, a third-world country in Central America, and I myself see cities here [in the US] and say, ‘I wouldn’t live here,’” Bukele told Carlson. “The demise of the US has to come from within. No external enemy can cause this much damage.”
The following tweet from Bukele, seemingly an attempt to encourage Americans to emigrate to El Salvador, is another good example. Look at the image’s 1950s trad aesthetic, the way it presents a white family watching an old-timey TV excited about “no fentanyl crisis” and “USD and Bitcoin as legal tenders” in “The New Land of the Free”:
This PR campaign, which includes striking videos showing Bukele’s new mega-prison and mass arrests, has captured the imagination of many on the American New Right and extended MAGA universe.
Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republicans Club, writes, “Americans could ... look to El Salvador, a small but proud nation, as a blueprint for governance and public safety.”
Rod Dreher, one of Viktor Orbán’s biggest boosters in the American media, wrote a piece titled “Nayib Bukele: Serious about Saving Civilization,” in which he argued, “[W]e are going to need a politician like that to de-wokify the US Government and, to the extent that it is legally possible, American society.”
Right-wing Twitter is replete with New Right types praising Bukele’s war on crime. Here’s Jack Posobiec, a conservative influencer with 2 million Twitter followers, calling for Bukele to be named “Man of the Year” and gushing over images of hunched-over and shirtless prisoners:
Here’s Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, praising a video allegedly depicting prisoners being made to destroy gravestones of gang members:
Bukele enthusiastically promotes all of this stuff on his own Twitter feed, either by retweeting it directly or repackaging it into his own propaganda videos. One such video, for example, begins with a series of right-wing American talk show hosts praising Bukele’s crime crackdown in English:
There is no attempt in these encomia to reckon with his attacks on democracy, like literally sending the armed forces into the National Assembly. If the consequences of the crime crackdowns for civil liberty are mentioned, it’s only to dismiss them as the whining of human rights-obsessed liberals who are unable to take crime seriously. They look at his heavy-handed response and abuse of civil liberties as the basic building blocks of a model to be imported to the US.
This “lusting after caudillismo,” as Rothschild put it in an article in the UnPopulist, is what worries him and people on the right like DiMartino. After the Trump experience, they certainly should be worried.
But conservatives aren’t the only ones who should do some soul-searching.
The worry for liberals is that Bukele’s popularity — and the popularity of his brand of illiberalism — is real, as confirmed by international surveys. The crime crackdown is the biggest reason why, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 95 percent of Salvadorans crediting his policies with the reduction in violence.
The Salvadoran strongman is not the only authoritarian-inclined leader in the world to ride illiberal anti-crime politics to popularity. It’s a common pattern in Southeast Asia in particular, a kind of politics that political scientist Tom Pepinsky terms “democracy against disorder.”
This is a mode of politics wherein democratic politicians gain support by promising ultra-harsh, or even illegal, measures against crime and criminality. The key is the elevation of “order above law,” arguing that maintaining social cohesion and safety is a value above the law itself. It’s a political style that has paid dividends for the former leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, as well as politicians in Thailand and Indonesia.
And now it is paying off for Bukele. The American right is watching and taking notes.
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Stormy Daniels, seen in Berlin in 2018. (photo: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters)
The former president paid hush money to an adult film star and a Playboy model and faces looming trials over a rape allegation
It was a “catch and kill” deal, a common tabloid practice in which Pecker would buy potentially damaging stories but not put them in print.
Pecker “also agreed to publish negative stories” about Trump’s competitors. The media this week seized on that passage in the indictment, noting how the Enquirer baselessly linked the father of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Trump’s closest rival for the nomination, to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed John F Kennedy.
Last year, however, a New York Times reporter got to the heart of the matter. In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman says that around the same time as the meeting with Pecker and Cohen, Sam Nunberg, a political adviser, asked Trump for his “biggest concern” about running.
“Trump had a simple reply: ‘The women.’”
Trump now faces 34 counts, all felonies, of falsifying business records with intent to conceal another crime: breaches of campaign finance laws. All the charges relate to the $130,000 Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, the adult film star and director who claims an affair Trump denies, and how Cohen was repaid $420,000 including $50,000 for “another expense” Cohen has said was for rigged polls, another $180,000 to cover taxes and a $60,000 bonus.
But the New York indictment is not the only form of legal jeopardy Trump now faces. As well as state and federal investigations of his election subversion, a federal investigation of his retention of classified records and a civil lawsuit over his business practices, he faces a civil defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape.
Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. One of them, the writer E Jean Carroll, says Trump raped her in a department store changing room in New York in the mid-1990s.
Trump denies the allegation. Carroll has sued him twice: for defamation and for defamation and battery, the latter suit under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law which gave alleged victims of crimes beyond the statute of limitations a year to bring civil claims. In the defamation case, trial has been delayed. The case under the Adult Survivors Act is due to go to trial on 25 April.
To the New York writer Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, there is a some sense of poetic justice in Trump finally facing a legal reckoning in cases arising from his treatment of women.
But, Jong-Fast says: “The thing I’m sort of struck by is, like, how much women continually are dismissed, even in this situation.
“There’s so much talk about the Stormy Daniels case, there was so little talk about actually what happened, right? There was almost nothing about how he was married to his third wife [Melania Trump], and she had just had a child [Barron Trump], and he had this affair. He denies the affair but the affair is pretty much documented.
“That’s as close to truth in Trumpworld as possible. But we’re discussing the nuances of who paid the hush money and whether or not that’s a campaign contribution, and whether that rises to a federal crime.
“That can be argued, but I was surprised at how little focus women had in it. How nobody was talking about like, this is a serial philanderer who has the kind of problems that serial philanderers have.
“The filing talked about how he had paid off this doorman, about the illegitimate child. I guess that may have been not true … but like, you don’t pay off somebody unless you have a sense that this could actually be true.”
As Jong-Fast indicates, the New York indictment detailed two other “catch and kill” deals which prosecutors said also showed “illegal conduct” admitted by Pecker and Cohen but directed by Trump himself.
In late 2015, American Media paid $30,000 to a former Trump World Tower doorman who was trying to sell a story about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock.
In September 2016, Cohen taped Trump talking about a payment to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims an affair Trump also denies.
“So what do we got to pay for this?” Trump asked. “One fifty?”
American Media paid McDougal $150,000 to stay silent.
After Trump won the presidency, the indictment says, American Media “released both the doorman and [McDougal] from their non-disclosure agreements”.
That speaks to the central contention made by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in his charges over the Daniels payment: that Trump concealed it because he feared it could derail his campaign.
According to Bragg’s indictment, in the McDougal case Trump “was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy”. In the case of the doorman, Cohen instructed Pecker “not to release [him] until after the presidential election”. Regarding Daniels, Trump is said to have directed Cohen “to delay making a payment … as long as possible … [because] if they could delay payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public”.
In short, prosecutors contend that Trump did not make and conceal hush-money deals because he wanted to avoid embarrassment or hurting his wife – the argument successfully pursued by John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate who made hush-money payments in 2008 but avoided conviction four years later. The case against Trump is built on the contention he broke state and federal campaign finance laws.
Observers argue over whether Bragg has built a case he can win. Some expect Trump to wriggle off the hook. Others think the first prosecutor to indict a president has a good chance of securing a conviction. In either case, the indictment has brought Trump’s treatment of women back to the national spotlight.
So has Trump himself. As Jong-Fast points out, as the former president this week attacked the judge in New York, who subsequently became subject to threats to his safety, so too Trump went after the judge’s wife and daughter.
“If you see interviews with Stormy Daniels, she has had terrible experiences as a result of her brush with Trump. Even the judge in that case, the judge’s daughter, Trump went after them. You go after Trump, you get it. He’s like a mob boss. That’s just how he does it.”
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Union leaders address thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers and Service Employees International Union 99 members during a rally outside the LAUSD headquarters in Los Angeles on March 21, 2023. (photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP)
The agreement, which was voted on this week, would increase wages by 30% for workers who are paid an average of $25,000 a year, the Local 99 chapter of the Service Employees International Union said Saturday. It also includes a $1,000 bonus for employees who worked during the COVID-19 pandemic and expanded family health care benefits.
The contract still needs to be approved by the school district's Board of Education. The school district said the board could take it up for a vote at a meeting on April 18.
Thousands of workers backed by teachers went on strike last month and rallied outside the school district's headquarters in downtown Los Angeles amid stalled contract talks. The goal was to demand better pay and increased staffing for the bus drivers, cafeteria workers, teachers' aides and other employees represented by the union.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass thanked the school district and union for coming to an agreement in late March following the strike.
"We must continue working together to address our city's high cost of living, to grow opportunity and to support more funding for LA's public schools, which are the most powerful determinant of our city's future," the Democrat said in a statement.
The SEIU said many district support staffers live in poverty because of low pay or limited work hours while struggling with inflation and the high cost of housing in Los Angeles County.
The school district serves more than half a million students in the area, an enrollment size that is second only to the New York City Public Schools system.
Max Arias, the union's executive director, touted the deal as "a major step" to improve pay, hours and benefits for workers who "have been left behind for far too long."
"This contract recognizes the essential work of those who work hard to ensure students can learn in a clean, safe, and supportive environment," Arias said in a statement.
At the time of the strike, Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho had accused the union of refusing to negotiate.
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Tigers at the Ranthambore National Park in Sawai Madhopur, India, in 2015. (photo: Satyajeet Singh Rathore/AP)
ALSO SEE: As Tiger Count Grows, India's Indigenous Demand Land Rights
A conservation effort has worked well enough that there is now talk of sending some tigers to Cambodia to help that nation revive its own wild population.
On Sunday, as India celebrated the 50th anniversary of an intensive conservation effort known as Project Tiger, there was success to report: The tiger population had nearly doubled in the decades since, to 3,167.
The results of the 2022 tiger census, the release of which was delayed because of Covid, showed an increase of about 200 since the last census, in 2018. While the growth was much less than the previous four-year cycle, it was still steady.
“India is the largest tiger range country in the world,” Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, said in releasing the census after a 12-mile safari ride in the forests of the southern state of Karnataka. “These are the results of our conservation culture and people’s involvement.”
Conservation analysts and forest officials say the collapse in tiger numbers in the middle of the 20th century was caused mostly by a rapid expansion of trophy hunting, a practice formerly restricted to the colonial elite. While tiger numbers dwindled drastically, cheetahs disappeared entirely from India.
“The time between independence and 1972 was one of the worst periods for wildlife in India. Tigers were one of the main targets,” said Yadvendradev Jhala, a former dean at Wildlife Institute of India who studied the tigers for nearly two decades. “If Project Tiger had not happened, arguably India may have lost its tigers by now.”
Steps the government took to reverse the decline included introducing anti-poaching measures; relocating villages to expand tiger reserves and buffer areas; and improving those reserves.
When the efforts began, there were nine tiger reserves covering an area of more than 5,405 square miles. Over five decades, that expanded to 53 reserves in 18 states, consisting of 28,958 square miles — about 2.3 percent of India’s total area.
Tigers require space to roam in search of food. An adult male tiger needs a minimum of 27 to 39 square miles.
At the time of independence, India had a human population of about 340 million. That left room for wildlife, with tiger numbers at around 40,000 then. Today, with India’s population nearing 1.4 billion, wildlife experts estimate that India can accommodate from 4,000 to 10,000 tigers.
The rise in both populations puts pressure on managing human-tiger conflict. Such conflict has at times spread panic and fear, stopping villagers from even going out to their fields.
In 2018, in the western state of Maharashtra, a tigress named T1 was shot dead by a professional hunter after several months of pursuit. T1, the local authorities said, had fatally mauled about a dozen people in the state’s Yavatmal district.
And despite careful government watch, tigers still die from causes like poaching, poisoning and electrocution. From 2017 to 2021, India lost 547 tigers, including 154 to causes termed “unnatural.” Eighty-eight of the deaths in that period were attributed to poaching.
But the nation now feels rich enough in tigers to consider sending some abroad. Indian authorities are in discussion with Cambodia to help revive the population there, which was wiped out by poaching and hunting.
In a related effort, India has received 20 cheetahs from African countries over the past year.
While one of the imported cheetahs died because of a medical condition about six months after arrival, another gave birth to four cubs at a national part in central India.
“For decades, cheetahs had disappeared from India. We brought magnificent big cats from Namibia and South Africa,” Mr. Modi said on Sunday. “Few days back in Kuno National Park, four beautiful cubs were born. After 75 years, cheetahs were born on Indian soil. That is a very auspicious start.”
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