Justice is served: Weekend reads for June 1, 2024

Trump trials, spelling bee champions, the not-so-empty frontier, and Willie on the border

The decision is in, and the jury in Donald Trump’s criminal hush-money trial found the former president guilty on all 34 felony counts. We’ll have to wait until July 11 for the sentencing, and until November to understand how this might impact the real trial — the upcoming election.

While right-wing critics are already dismissing the conviction as political, the outcome of a witch hunt or a show trial, a lot of coverage from the left has all along been minimizing this case as relatively inconsequential as compared to the federal cases. Those cases are still making their way through the system very slowly (thanks to the delaying tactics of the Supreme Court and Judge Aileen Cannon), and their future is uncertain. The New York case, on the other hand, is very real, and now very conclusive: the former president is a convicted felon

As legal analyst Roger Parloff told us this week, that’s what matters. Gangsters don’t go to prison for gangsterism; they go away for tax evasion, for the technicalities that escaped their attention.

Nobody has a crystal ball, so there’s no way to predict the ultimate legal outcome. And whatever happens, the election’s still upcoming, and Trump will likely remain on the ballot regardless. But as we look ahead, we’ve been reading what some of the most interesting legal thinkers out there have been saying about the Trump case, and we’re sharing some of that context with you this weekend.

In case you missed it

• Economists Diego Känzig and Adrien Bilal told us why their latest calculations mean that solving climate change isn’t just necessary — it’s affordable

• Roger Parloff made the case that what we saw in Trump’s New York criminal trial was the kind of smart prosecution that’s sent organized crime figures to prison in the past. Call it the Al Capone factor.

• A new installment of our podcast is up today, featuring the full audio of our interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan on how her mission to break up monopoly power is a fight for freedom — and to show Americans government can work for them.

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The Trump trials

How corruption stifles freedom

Tackling public cynicism, Steinglass rhetorically asked: “Who cares if Mr. Trump slept with a porn star ten years before the 2016 election?” 

“Plenty of people feel that way, as I said,” Steinglass noted. “But, it’s harder to say that the American people don’t have the right to decide for themselves whether they care or not, that a handful of people sitting in a room can decide what information gets into those voters’ hands.” [Just Security]