Weekly News Roundup - 4/26/24
McConnell's seismic quote about Ukraine aid; a shocking comment from a Columbia student protest leader; St. Vincent is far more interesting than Taylor Swift
Welcome to the 16th weekly news roundup of 2024. The archive for all weekly news roundups is here. If you notice stories or issues you’d like to see mentioned in these roundups, let me know. In 2024, the Border Stalkers Substack is featuring one news update a week, and one book a month, with weekly posts on each book. The book of the month schedule is here.
These weekly dispatches are designed for people who may not have time to do more than glance at the headlines, or who want to stay informed without becoming obsessed by politics and news. These roundups are a targeted way to get a sense of the shape of the past week on the national level. Without such a map, we can be disoriented, not knowing where we have been over the past several days, or where we may be going. But by spending concentrated, limited time thinking about the big picture, we can devote more of our time to where “agency and justice begin and end,” as
put it this week: “on the ground, bodily, in community and real relationships, in flesh and blood.”This week’s note is out late, because today is my last day at Yahoo News. It’s been almost 10 years there, and I’m looking back with extreme gratefulness today. We built something incredibly special and unique over the past several years. I have been really lucky to do one of the best jobs in the world with some of the most decent and kind people I've ever met.
I'm in conversation now with prospective employers in the strategic communications and public affairs space, and am also open for short-term project work until I land somewhere.
It's been an incredible run of so many stories I'm proud of, and two books. But in recent years, my desire to work toward solutions has grown. I'm ready to put my skills and experience to work, helping clients tell their stories and solving their communications and strategy challenges! I’ll have more to share soon about what’s next.
Quote of the Week
"It took me a long time to realize this was unusual in someone, but in his obituary, I wrote that [my father] considered himself an expert in only three things: mathematics, gardening, and the Bible. And on everything else, he was open to suggestion. And that was really his position ... He just assumed, if he met someone, that they knew more than he did on their subjects of choice, and that he should just ask questions, and learn. And my whole childhood was spent listening to my father meet random strangers, figure out what areas they knew more about than he did, and him asking them questions. I thought that was normal. I discovered later that that's not normal.
"He had no insecurities about declaring himself ignorant in an area, even on things he knew a lot about. If he met a theologian, he wouldn't even pretend to know more about them than the Bible. Or gardening, if he thought that you know more about delphiniums than he did, all ears, let's go. It's a kind of extreme version of curiosity ... You also have to have a lot of self confidence, because you have to be completely indifferent to the consequences of letting the world know about what you don't know. You have to not care, right? And my dad was a supremely self confident person ... Most people, the real reason people aren't curious, I think, is not so much that they lack humility, but that they lack confidence. And they're not willing to kind of show themselves to the world as not knowing things."
- Malcolm Gladwell on the No Small Endeavor podcast
Big Stories This Week
Aid for Ukraine crossed the finish line, in a big defeat for the isolationist wing of the Republican party
Hard to overstate how striking this is from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, after the Senate passed aid for Ukraine Tuesday night: "This was a really, really big day for America and for the rest of the world ... When you've been here as long as I have, you've had a few big moments. I don't think I've ever had a bigger one than this in terms of the level of importance to our own country and to our place in the world," McConnell told Politico.
The House and Senate both overwhelmingly passed legislation that had been stalled for months. Along with aid for Ukraine ($61 billion), Israel ($4 billion) and Taiwan ($8 billion), and humanitarian aid for Gaza ($9 billion), a ban on TikTok was also included. But it is unlikely to take effect for at least a year, and could be avoided if the Chinese government-connected parent company sells the social media app to another entity.
The most gripping backstory is how the isolationist wing of the GOP was defeated by others in the Republican party. Isolationism is growing on the right. (It's a frequent companion to populism.) The loudest voices for withdrawing from military involvement in other parts of the world used to be Ron Paul and Rand Paul. Now it's Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Donald Trump himself.
But House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-LA, who opposed $300 million in aid to Ukraine just last fall before he became Speaker, was instrumental in getting this $61 billion aid package past the growing resistance inside his own party. Much of the focus was on his willingness to work with Democrats to pass the bill through the House. But details came out this week about the full-court press — by Johnson, yes, but also by "GOP lawmakers, former cabinet officials, retired military and foreign leaders" according to Politico's Jonathan Martin — to persuade Trump to stick with Johnson and to rebuke Greene and others in the House GOP who wanted to defeat Ukraine aid even if it meant removing Johnson from the speakership.
The way they got Trump to stand down — to throw aside the likes of Carlson and Vance and Greene — was that they "deployed flattery and played to [Trump's] self-interest," reports Martin. They told him, in essence, that helping Ukraine would help Trump more than helping Russia, if he is reelected. Two days after the House voted to pass the bill, Trump doubled down on his support for Johnson, effectively neutering Greene's attempt to oust Johnson from the speakership. What comes from this reorientation of internal GOP politics is uncertain. But this chapter has shown that when a politician such as Johnson moves from the rank and file to leadership, his priorities are forced to change, and that real world intelligence can persuade politicians to make hard choices.
Campus unrest and conflict over the war in Gaza boiled over into harassment of Jewish students in New York, and aggressive arrest by police of protesters at the University of Texas, Yale and elsewhere, as upheaval spread to more campuses around the country.
Anxiety about growing anti-Semitism clashed with outrage over the continued killing of civilians by the Israeli military. Social media amplified particular incidents that pro-Palestinian protesters said were not representative of their movement, and politicians in Washington seized on the incidents to vilify higher education beyond the terms of the Middle East conflict. The university system has become a punching bag, in particular, for Republicans, at a time when many Americans are fed up with the increasingly astronomical cost of a college education.
On Thursday evening, comments made in January by one of the protest leaders at Columbia surfaced online, in which the student, Khymani James, said: “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” A school spokesman on Friday declined to tell the New York Times if James was facing discipline.
Pro-Palestinian Protests spread to the University of Southern California, Ohio State University, George Washington University, and several other schools.
The Associated Press has an overview of what happened, and where, here.
The porn star hush money criminal trial of Donald Trump began in earnest this week.
After finishing jury selection last week, the court heard opening statements on Monday, amid criticisms from a broad range of legal experts that New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg and his team are bringing charges that rest on flimsy legal footing. “Calling it election interference actually cheapens the term and undermines the deadly serious charges in the real election interference cases," wrote Rick Hasen in an LA Times op-ed I linked to last week. In the New York Times Monday, Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman called the case "an embarrassment of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selective prosecution."
After opening statements, most of the week was taken up with multiple days of testimony from former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. Pecker detailed a meeting he had in 2015 with Trump in which he said he would help Trump by publishing positive front page headlines about him and also said "if I hear anything about women selling stories, I would notify" Trump aide Michael Cohen. Pecker pledged to try to purchase the rights to those stories "so that they would not get published," in a tactic labeled "catch and kill."
The Supreme Court heard arguments about whether Trump can stand trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election, but their slowness in hearing the case may result in a trial never taking place.
The court heard arguments about presidential immunity Thursday, and seemed likely to grant some limitations on when a former president can face criminal trial, but to reject claims by Trump's attorneys that a former president cannot be prosecuted at all. But the high court's decision to wait until now to hear the case, rather than hearing it months ago when special counsel Jack Smith requested them to expedite the case, means there is a good chance it does not take place before the election. That means the public will not see key evidence about Trump's actions after the 2020 election to overturn the result. It also means that if he is reelected this fall, Trump could lean on the Justice Department to shut down the case once he is back in power.
Week in Review
Friday, April 19
Jury selection in Trumps's New York criminal trial is completed, with six alternates chosen. But outside the courthouse, a man sets himself on fire and dies. The New York Times does incredible on the spot reporting that day to tell the first draft story of who this man was, and how he spiraled into depression and paranoia after the death of his mother.
Saturday, April 20
After months of delay, the House passes military aid packages for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, along with humanitarian aid for Gaza, and also approves a measure that would ban Tik Tok in the U.S. if the company's parent company, which is affiliated with the Chinese government, does not sell it. The vote is 360-to-58. The legislation goes to the Senate, where it is expected to pass and be sent to President Biden for his signature into law.
Israeli strikes on Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, kill 22 Palestinians, and 18 of those are children according to local officials. The Israeli military's invasion of Gaza has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 34,000 Palestinians, which local health officials say has been about two-thirds women and children.
Sunday, April 21
Police apprehend a suspect who breaks into the home of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Bass is uninjured.
Monday, April 22
Prosecutors and defense attorneys make opening arguments in Donald Trump's criminal hush money trial in New York. The prosecution alleges that Trump's hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels constituted "election fraud, pure and simple." Defense attorneys cast aspersions on Michael Cohen, a former right hand man for Trump who is now a key witness for the prosecution.
Trump backs House Speaker Mike Johnson's decision to allow a vote on aid to Ukraine, in a blow to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green's threat to try to oust Johnson. "Look, we have a majority of one, OK? It's not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do. I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on NATO when I said NATO has to pay up," Trump says. "I think he’s trying very hard."
Columbia University announces it will hold classes remotely after days of increasingly vitriolic conflict on and just off campus between supporters of Israel and supporters of the Palestinians. Social media video emerges over the weekend of Jewish students being harassed by pro-Palestinian protesters with rhetoric such as, "Go back to Poland," and others who celebrated the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, which killed around 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of 250 or so hostages (around 100 hostages remain in captivity).
Police arrest around 50 people protesting for Palestinians on the campus of Yale University for refusing to take down tents in Beinecke Plaza, as they called on the school to divest itself of any investments it might have in weapons manufacturers.
The Supreme Court hears arguments in a case about whether local governments can punish homeless people for sleeping outside in public spaces.
Jews observe the first day of Passover, an eight-day celebration of the ancient Israelites' escape from captivity in Egypt.
Tuesday, April 23
The Senate, by an overwhelming vote of 79-to-18, passes military aid for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, and humanitarian aid for Gaza, sending the legislation to Biden's desk for his signature. The bill also includes a largely overlooked provision that will ban social media company TikTok in the U.S. 9 to 12 months from now if it is not sold, though that timeline is likely to be extended by lawsuits.
The Republican presidential primary is over, and Nikki Haley dropped out a while ago, but she still wins 17% of the Republican vote in Pennsylvania's primary, a battleground state that will be decisive in the fall election.
The first witness, David Peck, testifies in Trump's Manhattan criminal trial.
The Food and Drug Administration says it has found fragments of bird flu in milk samples, but says that "based on available information, pasteurization is likely to inactivate the virus ... To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe.”
Wednesday, April 24
President Biden signs the bills sending aid to allies and banning TikTok into law.
The Arizona house overturns a total ban on abortion in the state.
House Speaker Mike Johnson gives a speech at Columbia University, and is heckled by students for most of his address. It's a smart way for the Louisiana Republican to quickly gain some credibility within his own party at a moment when he has been pilloried by some on the far right for forging ahead with the Ukraine aid.
Thursday, April 25
The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on whether Donald Trump is legally protected from criminal prosecution for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, based on Trump's claim of presidential immunity.
David Pecker's testimony continues with cross-examination in Trump's trial.
Friday, April 26
President Biden says he would be "happy" to debate Donald Trump in the fall, in an interview with ... Howard Stern.
David Pecker concludes his testimony and the prosecution's second witness, Rhona Graff, is called to the stand. Graff, Trump's former executive assistant, gives brief testimony that concludes the same day.
Interesting Reads
- for Silver Bulletin
Perhaps We Are Here Just to Say, by
for SayableAll Born Screaming by St. Vincent: An Album Review, by Shaad D'Souza for Pitchfork
US banning TikTok? Your key questions answered by The Associated Press
What to Know About the Bird Flu Outbreak in Dairy Cows by Emily Anthes and Apoorva Mandavilli for The New York Times
Resisting our ‘new dark age’ by
for Religion News ServiceThe winner of this Congress? Joe Biden, by Andrew Desiderio, Jake Sherman and John Bresnahan for Punchbowl News
What we know about the shooting of an Uber driver in Ohio and the scam surrounding it, by Ben Finley for The Associated Press
Mike Johnson Steps Into His Power Even As He Might Lose It, by Brendan Buck for The New York Times
Lament for the Declining Art of Editing: Thoughts inspired by Taylor Swift’s 31-song notebook dump, by
for @Thoughts from the MiddlegroundCompany Bosses Draw a Red Line on Office Activists, by Vanessa Fuhrmans, Miles Kruppa, and Lauren Weber for The Wall Street Journal
Haitians scramble to survive, seeking food, water and safety as gang violence chokes the capital, by Danica Coto for The Associated Press
Who Are Key Players in the Trump Manhattan Criminal Trial? by Kate Christobek for The New York Times
Australian police arrest 7 alleged teen extremists linked to stabbing of a bishop in a Sydney church, by Mark Baker and Rod McGuirk for The Associated Press
Meet the Man MAGA America Wakes Up To, by Adam Wren for Politico Magazine
All the best in your work transition Jon. Some organization or set of clients are going to be very fortunate to have you on their side. Praying the last two verses of Psalm 90 for you & your family...