Some experts think the overtly political messaging could run afoul of the Hatch Act, a federal law that places specific limits on the political activities of civil employees of the federal government.
Michael Fallings, a federal-employment attorney and managing partner at the law firm Tully Rinckey, told NPR that such direction from the federal government “could be considered a violation of the Hatch Act.”
“Here, while the reference to Democrats alone likely does not constitute a violation, the explicit blaming of the Democratic Party for the shutdown and ‘reference to radical left’ may constitute a violation,” he told the outlet in a statement.
Donald Sherman, the executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told NBC News that the messaging is likely in violation of the code of conduct for federal employees. “There’s no universe where that is acceptable or advisable under the code of conduct.”
Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group, has filed complaints against the multiple departments who have adapted this messaging including HUD and the SBA, alleging Hatch Act violations. “This is such an obvious violation of the Hatch Act that it raises the question: ‘How on Earth does HUD think they can get away with this?’ Craig Holman, the group’s government-affairs lobbyist, said in a statement.
Speaking at the Dallas press conference, Texas senator Ted Cruz condemned political violence, pointing the finger at politicians’ rhetoric around ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“This is the third shooting in Texas directed at ICE or CBP. This must stop,” he said. “To every politician who is using rhetoric demonizing ICE and demonizing CBP, stop!”
On social media, Vice-President J.D. Vance said he was praying for those injured in the shooting, adding, “The obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop.”
When political commentator Jon Favreau criticized Vance, alleging he was providing a “political take” rather than accurate information, the vice-president responded with an insult:
Vance continued to address the shooting at an unrelated event in North Carolina, claiming that the shooter was a “a violent left-wing extremist.”
“There’s some evidence that we have that’s not yet public, but we know this person was politically motivated,” Vance said.
Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem said the shooting should act as a “wake-up call” to the far left about its rhetoric, claiming ICE officers have been compared to the “Nazi Gestapo” and “slave patrols.”
“The violence and dehumanization of these men and women who are simply enforcing the law must stop,” she wrote on social media.
As people on the internet who know everything already know, everything Trump says or does is a distraction from something else he doesn’t want you to notice. But in this case, the photo op could have been meant to distractTrump from wanting to go on patrol, since White House advisers may have realized that if the president actually hit the D.C. streets looking for crime — particularly if the patrol was in the same low-to-no-crime areas where most of the federal forces are concentrated —he would be forced to recognize there was no need for a takeover at all, and that everything he believed was a lie.
Or maybe the Secret Service reminded Trump if he did try to do an actual D.C. ride-along, there would be no way to protect him from actual D.C. residents.
At Eye on the Storm, meteorologist Jeff Masters notes that Tampa–St. Petersburg has been rated the most vulnerable metropolitan area in the country to storm-surge damage, to the extent that a Category 4 storm that makes landfall just north of the area could do an estimated $230 billion in damage. Adds Masters:
Most of the population in the four-county Tampa Bay region lives along the coast in low-lying areas, about 50 percent of it at an elevation of less than 10 feet. More than 800,000 people live in evacuation zones for a Category 1 hurricane, and 2 million people live in evacuation zones for a Category 5 hurricane, according to the 2010 Statewide Regional Evacuation Study for the Tampa Bay Region. Given that only 46% of the people in the evacuation zones for a Category 1 hurricane evacuated when an evacuation order was given as 2004’s Category 4 Hurricane Charley threatened the region, the potential exists for high loss of life when the next major hurricane hits.
Two weeks ago, Helene didn’t even get all that close, but still walloped the metro area:
Despite its center passing 130 miles (205 km) to the west of Tampa Bay on Sep. 26, Hurricane Helene brought the bay its highest storm surge since record-keeping began in 1947, with water levels 5-8 feet above dry ground. According to local station fox13news.com, damage was heavy in the four-county Tampa Bay region: Pinellas County (home of St. Petersburg) had 28,000 damaged buildings, Pasco County had 9,900, and there were 8,600 in Manatee and Sarasota counties combined. Twelve storm-related deaths occurred in Pinellas County, two in Manatee County, and two in Hillsborough County.
Masters outlined the most troubling possible scenarios for Tampa:
Our five top hurricane-specific forecast models – the HWRF, HMON, HAFS-A, HAFS-B, and COAMPS-TC – have been painting some extremely ugly possible futures for Tampa Bay from Hurricane Milton. At least one run in recent days from all of these models have predicted Milton would achieve Cat 4 or Cat 5 strength on Tuesday or Wednesday. Many of the runs have shown a landfall just north of Tampa Bay, which would maximize the surge in the bay. However, many recent runs of these models have predicted that high wind shear and dry air would combine to disrupt Milton’s core before landfall, causing rapid weakening, with a potential Cat 1 or Cat 2 landfall resulting. Unfortunately, such a rapid weakening would allow the hurricane’s strongest winds to spread out over a larger area, resulting in a damaging surge characteristic of a Cat 3 hurricane affecting a larger portion of the coast. The most devastating scenario for Tampa Bay painted by any of the model runs from 6Z (2 a.m. EDT) Monday was from the new HAFS-B model, which showed Milton hitting as a large Cat 3 with 115 mph (185 km/h) winds just north of Tampa Bay (Fig. 3). Such a storm would likely generate a storm surge in the bay in excess of 10 feet, causing over $10 billion in damage. The HAFS-B model outperformed all the other models for 3-, 4-, and 5-day forecasts last year. …
With the new 6Z Monday runs of the HWRF, HMON, HAFS-A, HAFS-B, COAMPS-TC, GFS, and European models, all painted variations of a dire scenario for Milton for Tampa Bay, showing a landfall just to the north of or over Tampa Bay. The only model showing a best-case scenario for them was the 0Z Monday run of the UKMET model, which depicted a landfall near Fort Myers, about 80 miles south of Tampa Bay.
After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his campaign spent a lot of time in courtrooms and on the airwaves seizing on every rumor or right-wing conspiracy theory about voter fraud to back up his claims he had a right to overturn a “stolen election.” The courts dismissed nearly all of his lawsuits, people laughed at his clownish lawyers, and ultimately his big bid on January 6 to seize the presidency failed.
In his 2024 comeback bid, Trump hasn’t let go of any of those fatuous 2020 claims — and this time he’s dispensed with the toil and trouble of alleging tangible, verifiable violations of election or voting rules. Instead, Trump is relying on vast, sweeping claims of “election interference” that seem to be designed to justify whatever he choses to do if he loses again. Below is a running list.
The claim that has the most merit is that the members of Congress that impeached and tried him for his insurrectionary behavior on January 6, 2021, wanted to stop him from running again. That was indeed their hope in seeking to convict the former president of high crimes and misdemeanors and making him ineligible to serve in that office again. So he’s got a legitimate beef there, aside from the fact that he was, you know, guilty.
When the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack turned to Trump’s role in the Capitol Riot in early 2022, Trump blasted it as designed to frustrate his political plans:
“The Unselect Committee’s sole goal is to try to prevent President Trump, who is leading by large margins in every poll, from running again for president, if I so choose,” Trump said in a statement. “By so doing they are destroying democracy as we know it.”
The Committee nonetheless makes a criminal referral to the Justice Department involving the attempted insurrection, which leads eventually to criminal indictments.
In 2023, a large number of Trump chickens came home to roost as the former president faced civil and criminal charges on a range of illicit activities, from hush money payments to a porn star just prior to the 2016 election, to mishandling of presidential documents while in the White House, to both federal and stage charges stemming from the events of January 6. He and his supporters quickly found a convenient way to dismiss them all as politically motivated to interfere with his 2024 campaign, which he had announced in November of 2022. The conservative Washington Examiner presented the official MAGA spin:
The story of the 2024 campaign so far is the effort by Democrats and their appointees to use criminal charges and lawsuits to force former President Donald Trump out of the race for a second term in the White House. The name for such an effort is lawfare — that is, “the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder an opponent,” to cite one law dictionary.
Henceforth any progress on these cases — other than dismissal of charges or delays in proceedings — were denounced by Team Trump as illustrations of a Democratic conspiracy stretching from Manhattan to Atlanta to Washington to damage Trump campaign and perhaps put him behind bars before he could complete his triumphant return as president.
For some time MAGA folk have claimed that social media platforms “stole” the 2020 election by “censoring” stories that might have hurt Joe Biden, particularly COVID-19 anti-vaxx fables and the rabbit hole involving Hunter Biden’s laptop. In his recent debate with Tim Walz, J.D. Vance called Big Tech censorship a bigger threat to democracy than the January 6 insurrection. But Trump now has a newer example of this alleged menace aimed at him, as NBC News reported:
Last week, Trump posted without evidence on his social media account that Google is engaged in “blatant interference of elections” — the second time he has recently claimed that it is trying to illegally alter the White House race. Trump claimed in the post that Google manipulated its systems to reveal “bad stories” about him and “good stories” about Vice President Kamala Harris. He said he would “request” the prosecution of Google at the “maximum levels” for what he called “illegal activity,” though neither he nor his campaign offered any specific allegation of criminal conduct.
Tangentially, Trump has accused Kamala Harris of somehow being behind or benefiting from an Iranian hack of some of his campaign data, suggesting she should resign over it.
Trump and his campaign have repeatedly called the maneuver whereby Joe Biden withdrew from the campaign and endorsed Harris as an “unconstitutional coup,” suggesting it illicitly robbed Trump of the opponent he thought he’d face and exposing Democrats’ willingness to do anything to keep the 45th president from returning to office.
A very old canard that Trump deployed in 2016 and occasionally later was that Democrats were stealing elections by opening the border so that non-citizens could vote in huge numbers. There’s never been any evidence of significant non-citizen voting (which is illegal in federal elections, with deportation and imprisonment as penalties), despite constant conservative efforts to look for it. The phantom menace has come back with a vengeance late in this election cycle as Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have promoted the idea that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden are recruiting undocumented immigrants to flood the polls and counteract the big Republican majority among American citizens.
In a revised filing compelled by Trump’s partial victory in the U.S. Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity earlier this year, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has issued a new indictment that provides a few spicy new details of the January 6 disaster but mostly covers old ground. How did Trump react? You guessed it:
Former President Donald Trump called the unsealing of documents in his election interference case by special counsel Jack Smith a “weaponization of the government” during an exclusive interview with NewsNation on Wednesday in Houston, Texas. The Republican nominee was at a private fundraiser when he told NewsNation’s Ali Bradley that Smith is a “deranged person” following the dismissal of his separate classified documents case in July.
“This was a weaponization of the government … and released 30 days before the election,” Trump said of Wednesday’s developments. “My poll numbers have gone up instead of down. It is pure election interference.”
The latest Trump clam is that the alleged inadequacy of his Secret Service detail is a “kind of election interference,” on the theory, I guess, that the tautly stretched protective agency is interfering with his beloved outdoor rallies by encouraging him to utilize smaller and easier-to-secure venues for his ranting and raving events.
It’s a good time to recognize that absolutely anything Trump doesn’t like is going to be called “election interference,” and that the vagueness and impossibility of documenting the effect of this or that Trump grievance is a feature, not a bug. He has clearly made enough claims that the election is rigged against him to justify (at least to the satisfaction his followers) that any course of action he chooses to take if he loses is fully justified, and even righteous.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris may not debate again before Election Day, but their running mates certainly will. On Tuesday night, CBS News will host the one and only vice-presidential debate between Senator J.D. Vance and Governor Tim Walz, and things are bound to get heated — if not weird — between the two Midwesterners. It might even be the first time in American history that two vice-presidential candidates debate the pros and cons of pet cats. Here’s what to know.
When is the debate?
The vice-presidential debate will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, October 1, live from the CBS Broadcast Center in Manhattan. It’s expected to last 90 minutes with two four-minute commercial breaks.
Where can I watch the debate on TV?
It will be broadcast on CBS, as well as simulcast on numerous other networks, including PBS, NBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox News, MSNBC, and more.
CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan will moderate.
Will the candidates’ mics be muted?
The candidates’ microphones will remain on by default — but CBS says it reserves the right to turn them off if needed.
Will the candidates’ statements be fact-checked?
CBS says the moderators won’t be focused on live fact-checking what the candidates say, but it is embedding a QR code, the New York Times points out:
A QR code — the checkerboard-like, black-and-white box that can be scanned by a smartphone — will appear onscreen for long stretches of the CBS telecast. Viewers who scan the code will be directed to the CBS News website, where a squad of about 20 CBS journalists will post fact-checks of the candidates’ remarks in real time. The code will appear only on CBS; viewers who tune in on a different channel will not see it.
Will there be a studio audience?
No. As at this year’s two presidential debates, there will be no live studio audience.
What are the other debate rules?
Per CBS News:
• The topics and questions will not be provided to the candidates in advance, and only the moderators are allowed to ask questions.
• There will be no opening statements, but each candidate will be able to give a two-minute closing statement. After winning a coin toss, Vance elected to deliver his closing statement last.
• The candidates will be given two minutes to answer each question, one minute for rebuttals, and, potentially, one minute each for follow-ups at the moderators’ discretion.
• The candidates will not be allowed to interact with their campaign staff during the two commercial breaks.
• Vance and Walz will be standing at identical lecterns with Walz on the left side of the stage and Vance on the right.
• Props and pre-written notes are forbidden. Each candidate will be given a blank notepad, a pen, and a bottle of water.
Not very much, typically, but it’s at least possible this VP debate could. Unless Harris and Trump both agree to another debate, this will be the last time the campaigns face off directly on prime-time television. It’s a very close race, so swaying even a small number of voters in a key battleground state could make a real difference. And these two particular vice-presidential candidates have each made a surprising amount of national news in recent months. If the past year in politics has taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.
Will Walz or Vance wear a secret earpiece, use AI contact lenses, or be subject to hostile stage lighting?
It’s 2024, so there will undoubtedly be some wild conspiracy theories circulating online soon after the debate, suggesting that one of the candidates was given some unfair advantage via technical wizardry and/or partisan spycraft. It was rigged, someone always says, while pointing to some elaborate subterfuge. But please exercise healthy skepticism when encountering such theories, particularly if shared by a certain very online billionaire.
The first signs of trouble for Adams came on November 2, 2023, with an ominous round of raids targeting people close to City Hall. While he was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a White House meeting with mayors about the migrant crisis, FBI agents were executing search warrants at the homes of three Adams associates, including his chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, for dealings involving the Turkish government.
In New Jersey, agents took cell phones and other materials from the homes of Rana Abbasova, director of protocol in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, and Cenk Öcal, a former Turkish Airlines executive who served on the mayor-elect’s transition committee. Agents left Suggs’s home in Crown Heights with three iPhones, two laptops, and a manila folder labeled “Eric Adams,” the New York Timesreported.
Alerted to the Suggs raid by a staff member, Adams turned around after landing in D.C. and boarded a flight back to New York. He told reporters the following week that he had skipped the migrant summit out of concern for 25-year-old Suggs. On the following Monday, FBI agents approached Adams as he left an event at New York University and confiscated two cell phones and an iPad that were in his possession.
“As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law … I have nothing to hide,” the mayor said afterward, a refrain he used repeatedly, with variations, as the Turkey probe advanced and other investigations materialized.
Another sweep came on September 4. Federal agents conducted early-morning raids at the homes of senior city officials including NYPD commissioner Edward Caban; Deputy Mayor for public safety Philip Banks III; his brother, schools chancellor David Banks; first deputy mayor Sheena Wright, David Banks’s fiancée; and a top mayoral adviser, Timothy Pearson. Caban’s identical twin brother, James, and a younger Banks sibling, Terence, also had phones confiscated.
The coordinated raids came in support of two investigations unrelated to Turkey but run primarily out of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office. One probe is looking into a consulting firm run by Terence Banks, whose fortunes rose when his older brothers joined the Adams administration, and the other is focused on whether James Caban had used his family ties to the police commissioner to gain work for his security business, according to news reports.
Edward Caban resigned ten days after the raid. His brother and the Banks siblings have all denied wrongdoing. David Banks later resigned as schools chancellor.
A few months after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Routh traveled to Kyiv in an attempt to help Ukraine defend itself. Prior to going, he had expressed a willingness to fight and die for the cause. While in Ukraine, he gave an interview about his efforts to Newsweek Romania:
He also spoke with the New York Times in March 2023 about his efforts to recruit fighters. The paper identified him as “a former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina”:
With Legion growth stalling, Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C., is seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. Mr. Routh, who spent several months in Ukraine last year, said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest.
“We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said in an interview from Washington.
It is not clear whether he has succeeded, but one former Afghan soldier said he had been contacted and was interested in fighting if it meant leaving Iran, where he was living illegally.
According to a now suspended Twitter/X account which appeared to belong to Routh, he voted for Trump in 2016, then supported Biden in 2020, after initially supporting Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primaries.
While you were my choice in 2106, I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment and it seems you are getting worse and devolving; are you retarded; I will be glad when you gone
In the last tweet he send with his account, days after the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, Routh asked Kamala Harris to visit the victims of the attack:
You and Biden should visit the injured people in the hospital from the Trump rally and attend the funeral of the murdered fireman. Trump will never do anything for them….show the world what compassion and humanity is all about.
The Timesreports Routh also may have been involved in a previous incident involving a firearm more than two decades ago:
A man with the same name and similar age as Mr. Routh was arrested in 2002 in Greensboro, N.C., after barricading himself inside a building with a fully automatic weapon, according to the Greensboro News & Record newspaper. The newspaper said the man was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and possession of a fully automatic machine gun. It is not clear how the charges were resolved.
Per ABC News, both candidates have agreed to the following:
• There will be no opening statements, and Trump and Harris are not allowed to ask each other questions during the debate.
• Each candidate will only be allowed to have a pen, a pad of paper and a water bottle at their identically sized podiums.
• No props or prewritten notes are allowed, and neither candidate can interact with their staff members during the two commercial breaks.
• The candidates get two minutes for each answer and rebuttal, and one minute for follow-ups, clarifications, and responses to rebuttals.
• At the end of the debate, they will each have two minutes for a closing statement. Trump will go last (he got to choose after winning a pre-debate coin toss).
What we know about the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia
Updated: 5:02 PM EDT Sep 4, 2024
There was a shooting Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Barrow County, Georgia.Here’s what we know and don’t know so far:What we knowThe Barrow County Sheriff’s Office said first responders were called to the scene at around 9:30 a.m. ET Wednesday to a reported active shooting.Georgia Bureau of Investigation said at a press conference that four people were killed, including two students and two teachers. Additionally, nine people were taken to the hospital with injuries.Colt Gray, a 14-year-old student, is the suspected shooter. He is in custody and will be charged with murder, GBI said.The FBI is on the scene.The shooting sent the school into a hard lockdown, evacuating the students to the school’s football stadium.President Joe Biden has been briefed on the situation. Students at the school are being released to their families.Apalachee High School has nearly 1,900 students in grades 9-12. The school is in the city of Winder, about 45 miles northeast of Atlanta. What we don’t knowThe identities of the victims have not been released.It is not known the extent of the injuries of the nine victims in the hospital. A motive is unknown.
The Barrow County Sheriff’s Office said first responders were called to the scene at around 9:30 a.m. ET Wednesday to a reported active shooting.
Georgia Bureau of Investigation said at a press conference that four people were killed, including two students and two teachers. Additionally, nine people were taken to the hospital with injuries.
ColtGray, a 14-year-old student, is the suspected shooter. He is in custody and will be charged with murder, GBI said.
The FBI is on the scene.
The shooting sent the school into a hard lockdown, evacuating the students to the school’s footballstadium.
On July 23, the day after Harris quickly established herself as the Democratic Party’s new presumptive nominee, Trump told reporters that “I haven’t agreed to anything” regarding debating Harris. “I agreed to debate with Joe Biden.”
He insisted he would “absolutely” debate Harris. “I want to debate her, and she’ll be no different because they have the same policies,” he said. “I would be willing to do more than one debate, actually,” he also said.
Trump adviser Jason Miller told Axios on Thursday, July 25, that “a [Trump-Harris] debate will happen” and also called for “multiple debates” — but that “I’m not sure it will be ABC.”
Later that day, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said the campaign would not agree any specifics regarding a debate with Harris until she was officially the Democratic nominee. Cheung’s statement doubled as a multipronged attack on Democrats and Harris, and he echoed the far-fetched speculation on the right that former president Barack Obama didn’t support Harris:
Given the continued political chaos surrounding Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, general election debate details cannot be finalized until Democrats formally decide on their nominee. There is a strong sense by many in the Democrat Party — namely Barack Hussein Obama — that Kamala Harris is a Marxist fraud who cannot beat President Trump, and they are still holding out for someone “better.” Therefore, it would be inappropriate to schedule things with Harris because Democrats very well could still change their minds.
Obama’s endorsement was already imminent at that time and was officially announced on Friday morning.
The answer’s yes, I’ll probably end up debating. I think actually the debate should take place before the votes start getting cast. So the answer’s yes. But I can also make a case for not doing it.
Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The phrase “convicted felon Donald Trump” has a gleeful ring to it for the many Americans rooting against the former president. Unfortunately for that crowd, experts say it was always extremely unlikely that he would leave the courthouse in handcuffs after his guilty verdict, and he’ll almost certainly remain free on bail in the time before sentencing.
The major question on Judge Juan Merchan’s plate now involves the sentence itself. Already, Merchan has approved a sentencing date of July 11, which was agreed to by both the prosecution and defense (and will be just days before the start of the Republican National Convention). Between then and now, Merchan will have to determine if a nonviolent offender with no criminal record, convicted of Class-E felonies — the lowest tier of felonies in New York State — deserves jail time or probation.
After that, the long and arduous appeal process will begin, and it seems unlikely to be resolved before the election in November.
The Washington Post notes several possible scenarios for Trump as he navigates the New York criminal justice system following his conviction, even if he only receives a sentence of probation:
[Trump may now face conditions] he may consider insulting, including a required inmate review by the New York City Department of Probation. The probation office on the 10th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse prepares presentencing reports for judges. There, Trump would be interviewed about his personal history, his mental health and the circumstances that led to his conviction. …
The Class E felony charges are punishable by 16 months to four years in prison. Among the key issues to be determined would be whether Trump faces some form of incarceration, either in a government facility or a private location, or a less-restrictive experience through probation.
If he is sentenced to probation, for example, Trump would be required to clear any out-of-state travel — such as to campaign rallies and fundraisers — with a probation officer. If Trump were to serve home confinement at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., New York authorities would probably have to work with counterparts in Florida to accommodate him, the experts said.
It’s also worth noting that Trump’s felony conviction does not bar him from running from president. And he’ll most likely be able to vote in November, since while Florida bars felons convicted in Florida from voting, it respects out-of-state voting restrictions when a felon is convicted elsewhere. New York State bars felons from voting only if they are currently incarcerated, so unless Trump has received a prison sentence and is serving that sentence on Election Day, he’ll probably be able to vote in Florida.
The aurora borealis was once again be visible on Saturday night from some places in the U.S., but the storm wasn’t as intense, so nowhere near as many people could view it as on Friday night.
Current NOAA models show geomagnetic storm activity will initially be less intense Saturday night. By the pre-dawn hours Sunday, however, storm activity may increase markedly, offering early risers a memorable display of the northern lights, especially after around 4 a.m. Eastern. The exact timing of the increase in storminess is very uncertain, though.
The first former president to be charged with a crime, Trump appeared in a Manhattan courtroom last year and pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors allege that in 2016 he personally played a role in Cohen paying Daniels $130,000 to silence her allegation that she and Trump had an affair years earlier. (He has consistently denied her allegation.) Trump is accused of breaking the law by categorizing the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal retainer; prosecutors say Cohen performed no legal services. Trump is charged for each of the records prosecutors say were bogus: checks made out to Cohen, invoices from Cohen, and accounting entries in Trump’s books.
Although once a loyal enforcer for Trump, Cohen now calls him “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” A key witness for the prosecution, he alleges that during the 2016 election, Trump directed him to facilitate a $130,000 payment through a shell company to Daniels in order to suppress her story that she and Trump had sex a decade earlier. He claims that Trump later reimbursed him for the payment, disguising the expense in business records as a retainer for legal services. (Cohen has also said that he played a role in the National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, paying to “catch and kill” model Karen McDougal’s story of her own affair with Trump.)
Cohen’s credibility is expected to come under fire because of his own legal history: In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. That same year, he was also sentenced to three years in federalprison for tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations in connection to the payments made to Daniels and McDougal.
Stephanie Clifford took the stage name Stormy Daniels when she began working as a stripper and kept that name when she transitioned into adult films. In 2006, according to Daniels, she met Trump in Lake Tahoe, where he was hosting a celebrity golf tournament. She alleges that he invited her to dinner in his hotel suite and, after some conversation and Daniels spanking Trump with a copy of Forbes, the two had sex.
In January 2018, after The Wall Street Journal broke the story that Cohen had paid off Daniels, she sued Trump to get out of their nondisclosure agreement. Soon after, she went on 60 Minutes, during which she detailed having sex with Trump and said she only signed the NDA out of concern for her and her family’s safety. Daniels will be allowed to testify after Judge Merchan rejected an attempt from Trump’s legal team to block her testimony.
McDougal is a model and former Playboy Playmate of the Year who has claimed to have had a monthslong affair with Trump back in 2006, when he was newly married to his wife, Melania Trump. In 2016, McDougal was paid $150,000 by American Media, Inc. in exchange for the rights to her story about the affair and for her to stay silent on the subject in the media. AMI never published her story about Trump — a move known as a “catch and kill.” McDougal went on to sue AMI in order to be freed from her contract. She and the company would later reach a settlement, allowing her to speak about her experience with Trump. She is expected to testify during the trial.
David Pecker is the former head of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the infamous National Enquirer. A longtime friend of Trump’s, he frequently used the Enquirer to run unflattering stories about Trump’s rivals, including Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz.
Also during Pecker’s time at AMI, the company often utilized the practice of “catch and kill” — when a publication buys the rights to a potentially damaging story and suppresses the information by declining to publish it. Pecker did this to McDougal and a former doorman at Trump Tower who prosecutors allege was trying to sell a story about a supposed love child of Trump’s. Pecker also communicated with Cohen regarding Daniels’s story. He is expected to testify.
In 2021, voters elected Democrat Alvin Bragg to be the Manhattan district attorney — the first Black person to serve in the role. Last April, Bragg announced that his office had filed felony charges against the former president, becoming the first prosecutor in the nation to indict Trump. To do so, though, Bragg used a novel legal theory to upgrade what is usually a misdemeanor (falsifying business records) to a felony by arguing that the records were changed in order to cover up another crime: in this case, violations of the state’s campaign-finance laws. Bragg’s office alleges Trump tried to hide relevant information about his alleged affair from the voting public prior to the election.
Judge Merchan is presiding over the historic trial, though it’s not his first time dealing with Trump figures. He oversaw the trial of former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg for financial fraud and tax evasion, sentencing him to five months in prison. He is also presiding over the pending trial of Steve Bannon, who is charged with fraud for allegedly bilking donors for a border-wall scheme.
Merchan immigrated to the United States with his family from Colombia when he was 6 years old, growing up in Jackson Heights. After working as a prosecutor in both the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the state attorney general’s office, he was appointed as a Family Court judge in 2006 and to the State Supreme Court three years later.
As he has done with other judges, Trump has attacked Merchan on social media, hurling insults and claiming that he is “corrupt.” Things escalated after Trump targeted Merchan’s daughter, suggesting that the judge is biased owing to his daughter’s work as a Democratic strategist. Merchan revised the gag order he placed on Trump to bar him from talking about his and Bragg’s families in addition to court staff and potential witnesses.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Merchan did not discuss specifics about the case but said that he and his staff want to be sure that they “dispense justice.”
“There’s no agenda here,” he said. “We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.”
One of Trump’s closest aides as president, Hope Hicks first began working for Ivanka in the Trump Organization in 2014 before she became the Trump campaign’s press secretary in 2015. Hicks is expected to testify at the trial as a witness for the prosecution because she communicated with various figures involved in silencing Daniels, including Daniels’s then-lawyer, Keith Davidson, as well as Pecker and Dylan Howard, two AMI executives. The communications started the day after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, which is believed to have sparked the plan to pay Daniels.
In 2023, Trump tapped attorney Todd Blanche to lead his defense in the Manhattan case. A veteran federal prosecutor experienced in white-collar cases, Blanche left his job as a partner at the prominent law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft to defend Trump. He previously represented Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Igor Fruman, an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s, in separate federal cases.
If defending Trump in Manhattan weren’t enough, Blanche is also taking the lead for Trump’s defense in the federal government’s classified-documents case in Florida and is co-counsel for the January 6–related case in Washington, D.C.
After defending the Trump Organization against tax-fraud charges filed by Bragg’s office in 2022, Susan Necheles is working alongside Blanche to defend Trump himself. A veteran defense attorney, she has represented no shortage of notorious clients throughout her career: Pedro Espada Jr., the New York State Senate majority leader found guilty of embezzlement; Clare Bronfman, the Seagram’s heiress in the NXIVM sex-cult case; and Venero Mangano, an underboss for the Genovese crime family known as Benny Eggs.
Donald Trump’s first and potentially only criminal trial before Election Day has begun. He’s returned to his former hometown to be tried by a jury of his peers in Manhattan that will determine whether he broke the law by paying, and subsequently disguising, hush money to Stormy Daniels to protect his reputation in the closing days of the 2016 election. The first-ever such trial for a former president, Trump could be sent to prison if convicted. (Judge Juan Merchan could jail him in the meantime for contempt of court, such as repeatedly violating a gag order.) The stakes could not be higher for the 77-year-old defendant or the country, which faces the possibility that he will end up behind bars or back in the White House or both. Below, our recap of the trial, which we’ll update daily with all the important developments and drama. (And here are the key people involved in the trial.)
On the first day of the trial, Judge Merchan worked to hammer down what would and wouldn’t be allowed in the court proceedings moving forward. Prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office sought a fine against Trump over a social-media post that called potential witnesses Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels “sleaze bags.” On his way into the courtroom, Trump railed against the trial, but he dozed off in his chair. And the jury-selection process got underway, but just barely.
Trump arrived at the courthouse in his motorcade around 9 a.m., stopping in the hallway outside of the courtroom to address reporters. He reiterated his claims that the case against him is unfair and politically motivated, calling it “political persecution” and “an assault on America.”
Trump arrives at court in lower Manhattan on Monday. Photo: Mark Peterson
Judge Merchan denied a motion from Trump’s legal team that called for him to recuse himself. He said that Trump was using a “series of inferences, innuendos, and unsupported speculation” to support his recusal claim. He reiterated his earlier decision that the Access Hollywood tape could not be shown in court, deeming it too prejudicial. Prosecutors are also barred from mentioning the numerous sexual-assault allegations against Trump. However, he ruled that Karen McDougal will be allowed to testify, though the prosecution won’t be allowed to mention her claim that her alleged affair with Trump occurred while his wife, Melania, was pregnant with their son, Barron. The prosecution will also be allowed to enter evidence about the National Enquirer’s past coverage of Trump.
Prosecutors filed a motion, claiming that several of Trump’s social-media posts violated the gag order Merchan set on Trump, which bars him from commenting publicly on potential witnesses, among others — he called Daniels and Cohen “sleaze bags.” Prosecutors are seeking a $1,000 fine per post.
The buzz of pretrial hype wasn’t enough to keep the 77-year-old awake. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman caught Trump appearing to fall asleep at one point during the proceedings, writing, “His head keeps dropping down and his mouth goes slack.”
96 prospective jurors were brought into the courtroom to kick off the jury-selection process, but more than half were quickly sent home after stating they couldn’t be impartial or were unable to serve. By the end of the day’s proceedings, Merchan had only gotten through the questionnaires of nine jurors, and none have been selected for the final panel. The novelty of possibly sitting on this particular jury wasn’t lost on these Manhattanites, some of whom were seen craning their heads to sneak a peek at the defendant. One juror was excused owing to a potential conflict with his son’s wedding in June, prompting congratulations from Merchan. Another who listed clubbing among her hobbies was dismissed after acknowledging she had “strong opinions or firmly held beliefs” about Trump. Another potential juror said his girlfriend worked in finance but admitted that he didn’t know what she did, sparking laughter from the prosecutors. A second group of prospective jurors will get their shot on Tuesday.
Behold the dour glowerer-in-chief:
Photo: MICHAEL NAGLE/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
A kidnapped-Biden truck drove in circles outside court on Monday morning:
Like any other trial, this one begins with the process of selecting a jury, which could take several days. Attorneys for the defense and prosecution will question a large pool of Manhattan residents until they find 12 jurors and six alternates. Judge Merchan drafted a 42-question-long survey for prospective jurors to fill out in order to determine their impartiality. In addition to personal questions, potential jurors are asked about their media diets, whether they’ve volunteered for Trump’s campaign or attended a rally, and if they’ve ever read any books or listened to any podcasts by Michael Cohen, a key witness for prosecutors, or Mark Pomerantz, the attorney who previously worked on the DA’s investigation into Trump. It also asks whether they have been a member of several extremist groups and movements, such as the Proud Boys and antifa.
Merchan previously ruled that jurors will be anonymous and have their identities shielded from the public owing to the risk of “a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment.” Trump, his attorneys, and prosecutors will have access to the jurors’ names and addresses.
From potential witnesses to the judge and attorneys, here’s a quick primer on the big names in the trial.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
The first former president to be charged with a crime, Trump appeared in a Manhattan courtroom last year and pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors allege that in 2016 he personally played a role in Cohen paying Daniels $130,000 to silence her allegation that she and Trump had an affair years earlier. (He has consistently denied her allegation.) Trump is accused of breaking the law by categorizing the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal retainer; prosecutors say Cohen performed no legal services. Trump is charged for each of the records prosecutors say were bogus: checks made out to Cohen, invoices from Cohen, and accounting entries in Trump’s books.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
Although once a loyal enforcer for Trump, Cohen now calls him “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” A key witness for the prosecution, he alleges that during the 2016 election, Trump directed him to facilitate a $130,000 payment through a shell company to Daniels in order to suppress her story that she and Trump had sex a decade earlier. He claims that Trump later reimbursed him for the payment, disguising the expense in business records as a retainer for legal services. (Cohen has also said that he played a role in the National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, paying to “catch and kill” model Karen McDougal’s story of her own affair with Trump.)
Cohen’s credibility is expected to come under fire because of his own legal history: In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. That same year, he was also sentenced to three years in federalprison for tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations in connection to the payments made to Daniels and McDougal.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
Stephanie Clifford took the stage name Stormy Daniels when she began working as a stripper and kept that name when she transitioned into adult films. In 2006, according to Daniels, she met Trump in Lake Tahoe, where he was hosting a celebrity golf tournament. She alleges that he invited her to dinner in his hotel suite and, after some conversation and Daniels spanking Trump with a copy of Forbes, the two had sex.
In January 2018, after The Wall Street Journal broke the story that Cohen had paid off Daniels, she sued Trump to get out of their nondisclosure agreement. Soon after, she went on 60 Minutes, during which she detailed having sex with Trump and said she only signed the NDA out of concern for her and her family’s safety. Daniels will be allowed to testify after Judge Merchan rejected an attempt from Trump’s legal team to block her testimony.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
McDougal is a model and former Playboy Playmate of the Year who has claimed to have had a monthslong affair with Trump back in 2006, when he was newly married to his wife, Melania Trump. In 2016, McDougal was paid $150,000 by American Media, Inc. in exchange for the rights to her story about the affair and for her to stay silent on the subject in the media. AMI never published her story about Trump — a move known as a “catch and kill.” McDougal went on to sue AMI in order to be freed from her contract. She and the company would later reach a settlement, allowing her to speak about her experience with Trump. She is expected to testify during the trial.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
David Pecker is the former head of American Media, Inc., the publisher of the infamous National Enquirer. A longtime friend of Trump’s, he frequently used the Enquirer to run unflattering stories about Trump’s rivals, including Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz.
Also during Pecker’s time at AMI, the company often utilized the practice of “catch and kill” — when a publication buys the rights to a potentially damaging story and suppresses the information by declining to publish it. Pecker did this to McDougal and a former doorman at Trump Tower who prosecutors allege was trying to sell a story about a supposed love child of Trump’s. Pecker also communicated with Cohen regarding Daniels’s story. He is expected to testify.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
In 2021, voters elected Democrat Alvin Bragg to be the Manhattan district attorney — the first Black person to serve in the role. Last April, Bragg announced that his office had filed felony charges against the former president, becoming the first prosecutor in the nation to indict Trump. To do so, though, Bragg used a novel legal theory to upgrade what is usually a misdemeanor (falsifying business records) to a felony by arguing that the records were changed in order to cover up another crime: in this case, violations of the state’s campaign-finance laws. Bragg’s office alleges Trump tried to hide relevant information about his alleged affair from the voting public prior to the election.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Redux
Judge Merchan is presiding over the historic trial, though it’s not his first time dealing with Trump figures. He oversaw the trial of former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg for financial fraud and tax evasion, sentencing him to five months in prison. He is also presiding over the pending trial of Steve Bannon, who is charged with fraud for allegedly bilking donors for a border-wall scheme.
Merchan immigrated to the United States with his family from Colombia when he was 6 years old, growing up in Jackson Heights. After working as a prosecutor in both the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the state attorney general’s office, he was appointed as a Family Court judge in 2006 and to the State Supreme Court three years later.
As he has done with other judges, Trump has attacked Merchan on social media, hurling insults and claiming that he is “corrupt.” Things escalated after Trump targeted Merchan’s daughter, suggesting that the judge is biased owing to his daughter’s work as a Democratic strategist. Merchan revised the gag order he placed on Trump to bar him from talking about his and Bragg’s families in addition to court staff and potential witnesses.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Merchan did not discuss specifics about the case but said that he and his staff want to be sure that they “dispense justice.”
“There’s no agenda here,” he said. “We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.”
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
One of Trump’s closest aides as president, Hope Hicks first began working for Ivanka in the Trump Organization in 2014 before she became the Trump campaign’s press secretary in 2015. Hicks is expected to testify at the trial as a witness for the prosecution because she communicated with various figures involved in silencing Daniels, including Daniels’s then-lawyer, Keith Davidson, as well as Pecker and Dylan Howard, two AMI executives. The communications started the day after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016, which is believed to have sparked the plan to pay Daniels.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
In 2023, Trump tapped attorney Todd Blanche to lead his defense in the Manhattan case. A veteran federal prosecutor experienced in white-collar cases, Blanche left his job as a partner at the prominent law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft to defend Trump. He previously represented Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Igor Fruman, an associate of Rudy Giuliani’s, in separate federal cases.
If defending Trump in Manhattan weren’t enough, Blanche is also taking the lead for Trump’s defense in the federal government’s classified-documents case in Florida and is co-counsel for the January 6–related case in Washington, D.C.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
After defending the Trump Organization against tax-fraud charges filed by Bragg’s office in 2022, Susan Necheles is working alongside Blanche to defend Trump himself. A veteran defense attorney, she has represented no shortage of notorious clients throughout her career: Pedro Espada Jr., the New York State Senate majority leader found guilty of embezzlement; Clare Bronfman, the Seagram’s heiress in the NXIVM sex-cult case; and Venero Mangano, an underboss for the Genovese crime family known as Benny Eggs.
More than 43 million Americans — one in five adults — collectively owe more than $1.7 trillion in federal and private student loans. In recent years, the idea of the government forgiving federal student debt went from fringe to mainstream with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden using emergency powers during the pandemic and after to ease the financial burden on college graduates, whether in their 20s or 70s. But sorting through the tangle of options, acronyms, requirements, and deadlines for lowering a crippling balance or potentially wiping it clean has become increasingly painful. Successfully navigating through yet another round of new steps in the loan-forgiveness labyrinth, starting this month, means the difference between two starkly different outcomes.
Do it right and you can wind up with manageable, if not zeroed out, monthly payments that free up cash and make your daily financial life far more pleasant. Mess it up and you face the financial equivalent of an ineradicable pantry moth that gnaws away at your long-term savings and a longer-term credit-score blemish that will, among other things, raise the costs of home-buying. Forgiveness generally applies only to loans funded by the federal government, not to private ones made by banks, state agencies, and schools. Still, nearly 93 percent of all student debt, or $1.6 trillion, is federal, so even if you’re exhausted by the options, locking down on the government’s once-in-a-lifetime opportunity now unfolding, if you can, is essential.
For the fourth consecutive year, borrowers ranging from recent college graduates in the workforce to late-career professionals to even retirees have endured whiplash over whether their often crippling debt will be a lifelong ball and chain. In March 2020, President Trump paused loan repayments and interest as the pandemic shuttered the economy. After several extensions under the Biden administration, interest restarted last September and payments resumed for all but the most recent graduates one month later. Borrowers who haven’t been making payments since last October are protected through a September 30 “on-ramp” from having their delinquency reported to credit agencies.
Still, the resumption hasn’t gone well. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in January that borrowers faced long hold times when calling their loan servicer, “significant delays” in processing their applications for income-driven repayment plans, and “inaccurate billing statements.” A survey of 17,000 borrowers by the nonprofit Student Debt Crisis Center released on March 5 found that three in four borrowers were not confident that the information provided by their servicer was complete and accurate.
The setback from the nation’s highest court prompted Biden to shift to what’s called his plan B.
On April 8, Biden announced a sweeping new student-loan-forgiveness plan that aims to help roughly 30 million Americans. This time around, the plan relies on a different law — the Higher Education Act — than the plan that was struck down by the Supreme Court.
The plan, if successful, would offer various forms of relief to five groups of Americans:
Borrowers whose loan balance, because of interest, has exceeded the amount that they were initially loaned The new plan would cancel up to $20,000 in interest for 25 million borrowers who have consistently made their student-loan payments but now owe more than what they originally borrowed because of interest. This would affect individual borrowers who make up to $120,000 or families earning $240,000 or less.
Borrowers who have been in repayment for more than 20 years Biden’s new plan aims to automatically cancel the undergraduate debt of anyone who has been repaying their loans for 20 years (since July 1, 2005) and forgive the graduate-school debt of anyone who has been in repayment for 25 years (since July 1, 2000).
Borrowers experiencing hardship The plan would wipe out the student-loan debt of people experiencing hardship that is affecting their ability to pay off their loans.
Borrowers who attended “low-financial-value programs” like those offered by shady for-profit universities The new plan would also automatically cancel the debt of Americans who took out student loans to attend colleges that have since been stripped of their certification or barred from taking part in the Federal Student Aid program — making degrees earned at those institutions unmarketable.
Borrowers who already qualify for forgiveness but haven’t yet applied The plan would automatically cancel the student-loan debt of 2 million low- and middle-income Americans who are already due forgiveness but have yet to apply for it.
Per the Associated Press, most of the loan cancellation should happen automatically without requiring borrowers to apply for it. However, those seeking a hardship exemption will likely have to apply individually.
The administration’s plan will not go into effect immediately. The New York Times reports that the new regulations will be subject to a public-comment period for several months and could potentially face legal challenges. This newly proposed loan-forgiveness plan stands alone from the SAVE plan, the new repayment program recently introduced by the administration.
In the summer of 2023, Biden launched his Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, an income-driven repayment (IDR) program that can halve or zero out monthly payments. The plan calculates payments based on a borrower’s income and family size — not on their loan balance — and forgives remaining balances after a certain number of years. Borrowers have to sign up for SAVE unless they were already in the government’s Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE) program, in which case they’re automatically enrolled.
Under SAVE, single people earning no more than $32,800 and with no discretionary income see their monthly payment plunge to $0 and get credit for a payment they otherwise would have made — forgiveness in disguise. The same is true for a family of four with an annual income of $67,500. SAVE also forgives any unpaid interest that accrued since your last timely payment. For borrowers earning discretionary income above 225 percent of the federal poverty level (this year, $33,885 for a single person and $70,200 for a family of four), monthly payments are lowered based on that discretionary income, meaning higher earners can also qualify, though the more you make, the less relief you get.
The White House says the typical borrower will see about $12,000 of interest payments waived and upwards of 95 percent of their principal forgiven under the program — a boost that it says creates “sizable potential lifetime wealth benefits.” The typical graduate of a four-year public university will save nearly $2,000 a year.
Last February, SAVE made it possible for people who borrowed no more than $12,000 to see total loan forgiveness in as few as ten years rather than 20 to 25 years. Borrowers with debt above that level see one additional year to forgiveness for each $1,000 borrowed with the maximum time 20 years for undergraduate loans plus another five years for graduate loans. Come July, undergraduate-loan payments under the program drop to 5 percent of discretionary income from 10 percent with payoff within 20 years. Graduate loans fall to 10 percent with payoff in 25 years. Borrowers with both types of loan will pay between 5 to 10 percent of their free income.
It’s also worth noting that, once again, Republicans are attempting to stymie Biden in court. Two groups of Republican attorneys general have filed lawsuits to block the SAVE plan, arguing that the plan is illegal and will harm their states in a variety of ways.
People who work full time for a nonprofit (excluding labor unions and political organizations) or a federal, state, local, or tribal government have additional options under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which erases a borrower’s federal student debt after 120 monthly payments over ten years. The program also covers some teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, social workers, U.S. Armed Forces members, and lawyers working for the government, among other low-paying not-for-profit jobs.
The PSLF program has been around since 2007, but was in an administrative quagmire until the Biden administration implemented reforms. Borrowers rejected in earlier years, generally due to the type of repayment plan they are enrolled in, are getting a second look under an Education Department review expected to be completed in July.
As of March 21, 871,000 borrowers have been granted $62.5 billion in relief under PSLF since October 2021. Prior to that, only 7,000 borrowers had ever received forgiveness.
To enroll in PSLF, tell your current loan servicers — either through a phone call or through the government’s PSLF Help Tool — that you plan to apply for PSLF. When using the tool to complete your application, you either choose an IDR or let MOHELA — a Missouri-based company that is the government’s official servicer for PSLF applicants — choose one for you. Loan servicers will transfer your loans to MOHELA.
Even with the Biden administration’s improvements, however, that hasn’t always gone smoothly. The Student Debt Crisis Center has first-person horror stories but also a wealth of helpful links to the various federal programs, along with free web-based workshops, definitions of terms, and helpful Q&A sections. The Education Department, which sanctioned MOHELA last October for sending borrowers delayed or faulty statements, is continuing to monitor the situation.
Under a separate Education Department program, borrowers with federal loans, including privately held FFEL (Federal Family Education), Parent PLUS, Perkins, and HEAL (Health Education Assistance) loans, have until April 30 to apply for a onetime payment adjustment, which could allow them to have their entire debt canceled or receive credits that lower their balances. The process for that involves consolidating your student loans (borrowers typically have multiple loans) into one bunch, then enrolling in a government-run income-driven repayment plan, such as SAVE.
If you are already in an income-driven repayment program but haven’t yet consolidated, or are seeking PSLF, you have until April 30 to consolidate your loans and have any IDR or PSLF payments you previously made count toward forgiveness. That’s known as a “payment count adjustment” — and it will allow more than 3.6 million people who borrowed through the popular William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program to receive at least three years of credit toward loan forgiveness. Many borrowers will see their loans forgiven automatically. But if you miss the April 30 deadline, your payment count towards forgiveness resets to zero once you get a new consolidated loan, meaning you’ll be paying off a higher amount, likely over a longer period of time.
The first step, if you haven’t already, is to gather your loan details — type, servicer, loan amount, and interest amount — and set up a Federal Student Aid account. You’ll need that account to complete your application. And if you don’t know who your loan servicer is, logging into the account will tell you those details.
Here’s what will happen if you consolidate your student loans: Your monthly payment may decrease, but you may have to pay over a longer period of time, which could mean an increase in the total loan-lifetime interest you pay overall. If you have unpaid interest, your consolidated principal balance will include that interest and go up. And the new consolidation loan will typically carry a new interest rate. Studentaid.gov has put together a helpful guide to the various implications. By the way, the consolidation itself is free — there are no annoying fees to worry about.
To get started, go over to the government’s student loan consolidation website and click “Log in to Apply” on the upper right of the screen. The government says, mercifully, that the entire application process for a consolidation loan typically takes less than 30 minutes and doesn’t have to be done in one go — you can save your draft application and come back to it later.
During the process, a prompt on the website will ask you to choose an income-driven repayment plan for your Direct Consolidation loan. Here’s where things get a bit more complicated. Which plan to choose depends on a host of factors, including projected income, family size, and whether you’re including a spouse’s student loans in the consolidation. A helpful and easy-to-use loan simulator lets you plug in your broader financial data, including employment status, health insurance premiums, and tax-deferred retirement savings — if you have a 401(k) or traditional individual retirement account — and compare the options. The government recognizes that life takes twists and turns and thus lets you change repayment plans at any time at no cost.
Sorting all this out can feel overwhelming, but there’s really only one downside. Borrowers who come out free and clear of student debt can find their creditworthiness dented: Somewhat perversely, a closed installment loan, like a student loan, is no longer a line of credit by which on-time payments can boost your score. But at least you’d be free and clear of student debt.
How animals will react to solar eclipses can only give hints of animal behavior because the relatively few studies of the topic are often conflicting. One study in 1560 cited that “birds fell to the ground.” Other studies said birds went to roost, or fell silent, or continued to sing and coo — or flew straight into houses. Dogs either barked or whimpered, or did not bark or whimper.
A study of the 1932 eclipse, which was thought to be the first comprehensive research conducted on the subject and included observations from the public, explained that it received “a good deal of conflicting testimony” from people who had observed mammals. It concluded that several animals showed the strongest responses: squirrels ran into the woods and cattle and sheep headed for their barns.
Meanwhile, we humans might freak out our pets just as much as the sudden darkness does:
Most animals will likely be confused by the darkness and will start their nighttime routines, said Dr. M. Leanne Lilly, a veterinary behaviorist at Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
But the way humans react to the eclipse — looking at the sky, expressing excitement or gathering in a group — could affect domesticated animals, like dogs or cats, because pets can act strangely when their humans are acting strangely, Dr. Lilly said.
“That can make any of our domestic animals feel like things are not as safe and predictable as they are supposed to be,” Dr. Lilly said, adding that any unusual human behavior can disturb pets because they are “domesticated to attend to us.”
“We might be the problem,” she said, with a laugh.
“Most animals will be overall unaffected by the eclipse, but pet owners may notice brief periods of confusion, and dogs and cats may exhibit fear and confusion,” said Dr. Katie Krebs, a veterinarian and professor at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
Pets may hide, howl, pace or pant during the eclipse, Krebs said. As the sky darkens, some pets may start their nighttime routine early. The average indoor dog or cat is likely not going to be affected by the eclipse, said Dr. Rebecca Greenstein, veterinary expert with pet care company Rover.
A 4.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Jersey and New York City on Friday morning, followed by a 4.0 magnitude aftershock in the evening — surprising and confusing area residents not used to seismic phenomena. Below are the latest updates and everything we know about the quake, aftershock, and aftermath.
After their debut, menswear analyst Derek Guy wrote a thread on X speculating on where they might be coming from (“from the soles, I will assume somewhere in a low-cost Asian country,” he claimed) and how much it might cost to manufacture them. He highlighted the fact that the website is offering only preorders for the shoes as one way Trump might profit:
There’s no distributor or retailer, as Trump is selling it directly to consumers. How much did it cost to make this website? Maybe $100? There’s no overstock or inventory to worry about, as everything was sold on pre-order. So, for a shoe that prob costs $20 to make, maybe we can add another $20 for various associated costs. That’s still a 10x markup from cost to retail, with all the profit being pocketed by Trump. This is not at all comparable to how other fashion companies price things.
Some sneakerheads have noted that the shoes look like sneakers you could order from a big China-based marketplace like AliExpress or Temu and simply customize with a T and some American flags.
At The Bulwark, self-professed sneakerhead Joe Perticone offered a more detailed analysis. First, he emphasized that “it’s important to understand that the online sneaker market is Grifter City”:
Pure garbage is upsold for insane amounts over the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). This excess value is determined by a number of different factors: scarcity, what’s currently (and fleetingly) considered “cool,” and unpredictable events — for example, the sighting of a celebrity wearing the yet-to-be-released kicks. Scarcity is the only factor that is in any way quantifiable, which is one of the reasons the online sneaker market is so volatile that it makes cryptocurrency look like the S&P 500.
Perticone added that the Trump Sneakers designs “are years behind current sneaker trends”:
To my eye, the [Trump Sneakers] appear to be cheap wholesale shoes with some shiny branding stitched on the sides. They don’t carry the material heft associated with premium sneakers, such as soles made by top-tier Italian producers like Margom or Vibram …
The team behind Trump’s MAGA Stan Smiths appears to have borrowed the design of the shoe from the waning days of the George W. Bush administration: The $399 gold “Never Surrender High-Top Sneakers” are reminiscent of the Adidas high-tops designed by Jeremy Scott and popularized by rapper Lil Wayne during the late 2000s. Meanwhile, Trump’s other two sneakers — a $199 design that comes in red (“T-Red Wave”) or white (“POTUS 45”) — bring to mind the sock-style shoes that have been around for decades but took the sneaker market by storm in recent years thanks to innovative designs by Kanye West.
Watch dealer and influencer Roman Sharf won a pair of the “Never Surrender” gold high-tops with a $9,000 auction bid the same day the sneakers were launched. He later told the New York Times that “they’re still new — they smell like glue.” That is definitely not a good sign. According to sneaker authenticator Rami Almordaah, who spoke with the Los Angeles Times for a story in November about detecting counterfeit sneakers:
Inside the box, Nikes and Jordans have a distinct smell. The fakes have a strong alcohol or a strong glue smell. The real ones have their own distinct smell, and it’s always the same.
So if the Trump sneakers smell like glue, it is possible that they may be no better quality than cheap knockoffs.
Putting the question of quality aside, Roman Sharf got a lot in return for his purchase. “I spent $9,000 for $9 million worth of publicity,” he told Intelligencer, describing the many interviews he has done. After the auction, he also says that Trump invited him and his son to lunch at the Trump International Golf Club. “It was just a conversation between the boys that felt like I was one of the boys, to be fair,” Sharf said.
On Sunday afternoon outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., 25-year-old Air Force service member Aaron Bushnell placed his phone on the ground to set up a livestream. He then stood before the embassy gates and lit himself on fire while shouting “Free Palestine” in a horrific protest against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Below is everything we know about Bushnell, who died from his wounds on Sunday night.
Bushnell was a 25-year-old member of the U.S. Air Force stationed at the Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio and originally from Whitman, Massachusetts. He joined the Air Force as an active-duty member in May 2020 and has since worked in information technology and development operations. In a statement on Monday, the Air Force stated that he was a cyber-defense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Support Squadron.
Bushnell grew up in a religious group on Cape Cod called the Community of Jesus, whose former members have come forward alleging abuse and a rigid social structure. According to a family friend and former Community of Jesus member who spoke with the Washington Post, he was raised in a religious compound in Orleans associated with the group. The friend told the Post that young people in the Community of Jesus often join the military, moving from “one high-control group to another high-control group.”
Friends who spoke with the Post say that while Bushnell was stationed in San Antonio, he was attending events for a socialist organization and delivered food to people on the street. Friends state that his contract with the military was to expire in May and he was looking for a career transition. Following the police killing of George Floyd, they say he had become more open in his objection to the military. “He said that he kind of went from one extreme — the conservative beliefs that he had grown up around — to the opposite, forming his anarchist, anti-imperialist values,” a friend in San Antonio told the New York Times. “And he said it was a very quick shift, and he just said it went from one extreme to the other.” In late 2023, friends say he moved to Ohio as part of a military training program for transitioning out of active duty.
On Sunday, hours before he went to the Israeli embassy, Bushnell texted a friend who shared the message with the Post. “I hope you’ll understand. I love you,” Bushnell wrote. “This doesn’t even make sense, but I feel like I’m going to miss you.” Weeks earlier, Bushnell talked on the phone with the same friend about “their shared identities as anarchists and what kinds of risks and sacrifices were needed to be effective,” according to the Post.
A friend who spoke to the New York Post states that Bushnell spoke to him on the phone on Saturday night. Bushnell said that he had top-security clearance and that he was distressed by what he was seeing in Gaza. “He told me on Saturday that we have troops in those tunnels, that it’s U.S. soldiers participating in the killings,’’ the friend said. “There’s just too many things I don’t know, but I can tell you that the tone of his voice just had something in it that told me he was scared,’’ the friend said. (While the U.S. has special-operations troops in Israel to reportedly identify American hostages, the Biden administration has stated that there will be no American soldiers in Gaza.)
Hours before lighting himself on fire, Bushnell posted a Twitch link on his Facebook page with the caption:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”
The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
Shortly before 1 p.m. on Sunday, Bushnell began his livestream and walked toward the Israeli Embassy with an insulated water bottle full of flammable fluid. “I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he said in his video. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
Bushnell then placed his phone on the ground and walked to the gates of the embassy, where he doused himself in liquid from the bottle. “Free Palestine,” he said, as he struggled to light himself. A law-enforcement officer approached, asking, “Can I help you, sir?” At this point, Bushnell lit himself on fire, screaming, “Free Palestine.”
As Bushnell screamed in pain, a law-enforcement officer off-camera yells at him to “get on the ground.” A second officer yelled at the first: “I don’t need guns, I need fire extinguishers.” By the time D.C. Fire and EMS arrived on the scene, the fire had been put out.
An incident report filed by a Secret Service agent states that they “received a distress call regarding an individual exhibiting signs of mental distress outside the Israeli embassy.” (The Secret Service is responsible for foreign-embassy security.) “Before the Secret Service officers could engage, [Bushnell] doused himself with an unidentified liquid and set himself on fire. The Secret Service officers promptly intervened, extinguishing the flames before the arrival of the fire department. [Bushnell] was subsequently transported to a local hospital due to the burns sustained from the incident. The report states that Bushnell was pronounced dead at 10:06 p.m. on Sunday.”
In the hours before his death, Bushnell emailed several left-leaning websites alerting them to his “highly disturbing” final act. “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people,” read the email, which was forwarded to the BBC.
Bushnell’s video was taken down by Twitch for violating its terms of service, though edited versions blurring out his burning figure are circulating on social media. The Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are investigating the incident along with the Metropolitan Police Department. Prior to his death, he emailed several left-leaning websites, stating that he was “planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
People who knew Bushnell in San Antonio were stunned by his act. At a public vigil for Bushnell in the city on Friday, one told the BBC that “Initially, there was just a lot of shock and sadness, that he felt this was the only action that he could do to bring attention to something that he cared heavily about. It’s hard that he chose these actions, it’s hard to comprehend even from people who sympathise with a ceasefire and the safety of Palestinian people and civilians.”
Bushnell’s act was not the first self-immolation in apparent protest of the Israel-Hamas war. In December, a woman lit herself on fire in front of the Israeli Consulate in Atlanta in what police described as an act of “extreme political protest” over the war. The woman survived but sustained third-degree burns over her entire body and was hospitalized in critical condition. Her identity has not been released by police. A 61-year-old Army veteran who worked as a security guard at the consulate suffered severe burns when he attempted to save the woman.
Since the Vietnam War, self-immolation has been a dramatic but rare act of protest in the U.S. Vigils were held throughout the country on Monday night in memory of Bushnell, including at the Israeli Embassy where he held his final protest.
