China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, which it considers a rogue province. The United States meanwhile has long maintained a "strategic ambiguity" on the matter, trying to dissuade China from invading the island, while at the same time discouraging Taiwanese leaders from declaring independence.

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After his arraignment in New York, a weary Donald Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, where he made a rambling and disjointed statement. (To call it a “speech” would be too generous.) There was almost nothing notable in it, with one dangerous exception: Trump’s obvious attempt to intimidate the judge presiding over his criminal trial.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Trump indictment is actually quite damning. Ozempic is about to be old news. Angel Reese can shine as brightly as she wants. A Brazen Move

Lawyers are already arguing about the now-unsealed indictment in the Manhattan case against Donald Trump. As a layman, I thought the indictment documents laid out a clear story about Trump’s behavior. But there’s a long way to go before a judge or a jury resolves any of it.

Trump, for his part, didn’t dwell on the case when he returned to his safe space in Florida. He spoke for only about 25 minutes, which is usually just the amount of time it takes him to clear his throat. But in that short time, he talked about everything—and I mean everything.

There were the usual cries of “Russia Russia Russia” and “Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine,” which Trump now tends to repeat as a kind of ritual invocation without context. He went off about the Georgia investigation involving his call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger looking for more votes in the 2020 election, referring to that call as “even more perfect” than the call to Ukraine that helped get him impeached. He railed against the “lunatic” Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the probes into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and called the former investigation the “boxes hoax.” He even went after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which he called “a radical-left troublemaking organization.” If you’ve ever wondered why America is in trouble, you need look no further, apparently, than those unruly Trotskyite archivists.

As usual, Trump’s histrionics would be comical if the stakes were not so high. He is the leader not only of the Republican Party but of a cult of personality that we already know will answer his calls for violence, which is why the most dangerous part of Trump’s litany of complaints last night was his effort to intimidate the family of Juan Merchan, the judge who will preside over his case:

I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign. And a lot of it.

This wasn’t some random neural misfire from the pachinko machine inside Trump’s head. It was part of a campaign that had been launched in the right-wing media ecosystem two days earlier, shortly after Trump arrived in New York.

On the night of April 3, the trashy disinformation site Gateway Pundit (which I refuse to link to here) posted a “bombshell” about Judge Merchan’s daughter, who apparently worked at a company whose clients included the Biden-Harris campaign. The next day, the right-wing site Breitbart (again, I will not bother with a link) picked up the story and quoted from a tweet (now deleted) from Trump’s son Eric. Later, Donald Trump Jr. shared a link to the Breitbart piece—which prominently displayed what appears to be a picture of the judge with his daughter—on Twitter and Truth Social, calling her “yet another connection in this hand picked democrat [sic] show trial.” Junior left the implication hanging there, but when Trump Sr. returned to Florida last night, he connected that final dot, asserting that the judge’s daughter is now personally on Joe Biden’s campaign payroll.

There is no subtlety here. Trump and the people who fashioned this non-story into a “bombshell” knew exactly what they were doing. Making such accusations while spreading the daughter’s picture around the right-wing media swamps is dangerous. But Trump, his failsons, and the family’s various enablers were all sending a message to the judge: You have a lovely daughter, Your Honor, and we know who she is and where she is.

This is a classic move from the authoritarian playbook: If you are threatened by the law, threaten those who administer the law. Menacing judges and prosecutors is something gang members and Mafia goons have occasionally tried over the years, but to their (limited) credit, most crooks aren’t usually this foolish or brazen. Would-be caudillos, however, especially those bolstered by an extremist following, are more willing to roll those dice.

Donald Trump has never faced serious criminal consequences—or, really, any consequences—that he could not smother with enough money. (Losing the 2020 election was likely the first time in his life that large numbers of people disobeyed him, and his current troubles stem from his inability to cope with that realization.) He may yet wriggle out of the criminal charges in Manhattan, but there are likely more to come from Georgia and Washington, D.C.

And yet, Trump is still the choice of millions for the presidency, despite his attacks on the rule of law and the judges who oversee it. We cannot say we have not been warned: The authoritarian rule and personal threats Trump will bring back to the White House were on full display last night in a resort ballroom in Florida.

Related:

Depraved, deranged, and doing real damage The humiliation of Donald Trump Today’s News A large tornado hit southeastern Missouri early this morning, killing at least five people and causing severe damage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Poland, where he is slated to address the many Ukrainians living there. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California, despite threats of retaliation from China. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: America is missing out on the biggest EV boom of all, Emma Marris writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read The Atlantic / Getty

Return of the People Machine

By Saahil Desai

Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F. Kennedy had the People Machine. Using computers that were 250,000 times less powerful than a modern MacBook, Kennedy’s operatives built a simulation of the presidential election, modeling how 480 types of voters would respond to any conceivable twist in the campaign. If JFK made a civil-rights speech in the Deep South, the People Machine could, in the words of its creators, “predict the approximate small fraction of a percent difference that such a speech would make in each state and consequently … pinpoint the state where it could affect the electoral vote.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Don’t indict Trump with this. Did media learn nothing from 2016? Photos: Holy Week processions in Spain Culture Break Nathan Bajar / NYT / Redux

Read. In her new book, Humanly Possible, Sarah Bakewell champions an intellectual tradition that might be just what we need today.

Listen. The late Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto scored not only films, but the exquisite highs and distressing lows of life.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m forgoing recommendations today except to say that I will be on CNN this evening at 9 p.m. ET to talk about the Trump indictment. I will also be away for the next few days, so I want to wish a happy Passover and a happy Easter to those among you who celebrate. I will, however, take a minute to explain why you’ll hear me wishing a happy Easter to my fellow Orthodox Christians next week. We Orthodox do things a little differently. Mostly, it’s about calendars, but here’s the basic explanation from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America:

Orthodox Pascha frequently occurs later than Western Easter because the Orthodox Church uses inaccurate scientific calculations that rely on the inaccurate Julian Calendar to determine the date of Pascha for each year.

It then gets a lot more complicated: “Because of Christian dependence on unreliable Jewish calculations of the vernal full moon for Passover, and because of the varying Christian traditions … ” Look, the simple answer is that every few years, your Orthodox friends might be celebrating Easter on the same day as everyone else, but usually, our Easter will be about one to four weeks later—so don’t be surprised if you hear us talking about eggs and bunnies (and my Greek grandmother’s lamb recipe) long after everyone else.

Or, as we Orthodox kids used to joke: “What’s the best part of being Orthodox? Half-off Easter candy.”

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Members of a House panel focused on US-China competition are set to meet with leaders from Silicon Valley and Hollywood during a multi-day tour of California beginning today, according to a source close to the committee.

North Carolina Republicans gained a veto-proof supermajority in the state House after a Charlotte-area Democrat announced Wednesday she was switching parties.

Claiming that a single royal couple saved the centuries-old British monarchy might be going a bit far. But King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, by an accident of history and through personal qualities that earned the admiration and support of the British public, may have done just that during some of the most challenging times the country had ever seen. George VI had been crowned King just three years before the outbreak of World War II, and his and Elizabeth’s nerves, perseverance, and courage would be severely tested during the conflict—especially when Britain itself became a battlefield. Nowhere is this more obvious than during the Blitz, when the monarchs broke with protocol and mingled directly with the people. Their actions during those days set the pattern for their leadership during the most critical year of the war.

George VI and his wife, Elizabeth, were unexpected rulers: Only when his older brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, battering the monarchy’s reputation, did the then–Duke of York reluctantly wear the crown. Almost immediately, the new royal couple faced a challenge to the United Kingdom’s very existence. Although eight unnervingly quiet months passed on land after Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, an onslaught from Hitler’s forces was inevitable.

The pace of conflict accelerated in the summer of 1940: Italy went to war with Great Britain and France on June 10, and days later, France formally surrendered to Germany. Britain was now on its own in Europe. The first inkling of the Battle of Britain came at the end of June, with scattered German air attacks on ships and south-coast ports. At the outset, they inflicted little damage. But the bombings intensified over the summer, when the Germans tried to destroy the Royal Air Force and hit factories, airfields, and other defense facilities. A deadly new period of ferocious aerial bombardments began on Saturday, September 7, when Germany shifted from daylight raids aimed at military structures to what would become known as the Blitz, beginning with a 57-day continuous assault on London. It was a savage campaign, carried out mostly at night, to terrorize the citizenry and destroy vital infrastructure.

[Read: The virus and the Blitz]

This article has been excerpted from Sally Bedell Smith’s new book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy.

The second week of September 1940 was a dramatically dangerous one for the King and Queen. A bomb landed next to Buckingham Palace, where it sat unexploded for 48 hours before detonating—the first of nine direct hits on the palace and its grounds between that day and summer 1944. The war had come directly to Britain, and its citizens were now as integral to the country’s defense as its frontline military. The danger from the air meant that everyone—monarch and commoner—was on an equal footing. Nothing symbolized this new dynamic more than the attack on the home of the sovereign.

On the morning of Monday, September 9, George VI spent three hours with Captain Euan Wallace touring bomb-damaged neighborhoods in the East End and south of the Thames. They saw burned-out docks and visited several shelters; in one of them, 50 people had died, including three children whose grieving mother the King comforted. As people removed their belongings from a damaged apartment house, a woman cried out, “Are we downhearted?” “No!” came the hearty reply from her neighbors.

Captain Wallace was struck by the King’s interest in talking to “all and sundry.” He “insisted on carrying out the program in full,” Wallace wrote. “It is almost impossible to believe that he is the same man who took the oath before the Privy Council less than four years ago.”

On September 11, George VI returned to the East End, and the Queen joined him for the first time to tour the poor neighborhoods of Camberwell, Lewisham, and Lambeth. “The usual collapsed houses & homeless people who had lost all their belongings,” he recalled. “But here again their fortitude in adversity is amazing.” As the royal couple passed one heavily damaged block of workers’ flats, a small crowd cheered for them and sang, “There’ll always be an England.”

They made an unscheduled stop that underlined the risk of such outings. When the air-raid alarm sounded, a police car sped them to a basement room in the Lewisham Police Station. As the King and Queen entered the dimly lit shelter, uniformed policemen, court officials, and other staff looked at them with disbelief, and then burst into cheers. The royal couple sat down; he lit a cigarette, and they waited to have some tea. Even after the “all clear” sounded, the King insisted on staying. Canteen workers served them biscuits along with tea in thick china cups, and the Queen said it was delicious. Such spontaneous moments would be a regular feature of their wartime tours. As the Queen later recalled, “I think we must have taken refuge in every single police station in London. We were always given a cup of very, very strong tea.”

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) inspect the damage to a cinema building on Baker Street after it was destroyed by Nazi bombing in an air raid over London. (Popperfoto / Getty)

Their insistence on connecting with citizens continued through the attacks. On Friday, September 13th, after narrowly escaping injury and death during another Buckingham Palace bombing, the King and Queen picked themselves up and went out as planned for a tour of damage in East London. One official who accompanied them said that knowledge of the bombing the couple had endured “made their reception even more enthusiastic.” “Their Majesties appeared to be quite unshaken by their experience,” observed The Times of London.

[Read: The Queen Mother’s odd letters]

The appearances were deceptive. Elizabeth told the King’s mother, Queen Mary, that as they walked down an empty street past evacuated houses, London felt like “a dead city.” Through the broken windows, “one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left.” They visited a bombed school that had collapsed on 500 people; 200 were still buried in the ruins. “It does affect me seeing this terrible and senseless destruction,” she wrote. “I think that really I mind it much more than being bombed myself. The people are marvellous and full of fight.”

On Thursday, September 19, George VI and Elizabeth went to Chelsea, Fulham, and Marylebone on the western side of London. The Times noted that they moved freely among the people “with whom they are sharing—and with the same cool tenacity—the peril from the air … Men, women, and children brushed shoulders with Their Majesties as they made their way among scenes of destruction.” In Fulham, George VI and Elizabeth walked with difficulty, hemmed in by the pressure of a crowd in a narrow alley. “Let us give three cheers for our King,” shouted a workman. The response was “thunderous.” Hitler may have been hell-bent on killing the monarch and consort, but he’d failed to anticipate the galvanizing effect of the Buckingham Palace bombings. Churchill told the House of Commons that the attacks “unite the King and Queen to their people by new and sacred bonds of common danger.”

The King noted in his end-of-year reflections that the second half of 1940 “certainly showed the world what we can stand.” The Royal Air Force had demonstrated its superiority over the Luftwaffe, and by early November, the 57-night continuous assault of the Blitz had effectively concluded, though the violence was not yet over. The cost of the total campaign was horrific: More than 1 million homes were destroyed or damaged, and some 20,000 Londoners died. German forces would continue to drop bombs on Britain until March 1945, but the King and Queen’s contact with the people didn’t waver—throughout the war, they came to Buckingham Palace most weeks for appointments and tours of the city’s destroyed neighborhoods. The King found it vital for the pair to circulate widely around Britain regardless of the risks.

[Read: The second Elizabethan age has ended]

In a September 1940 public message delivered as the Blitz was raging, George VI said, “Like so many other people we have now had a personal experience of German barbarity, which only strengthens the resolution of all of us to fight through to final victory.” He told his mother privately that in comforting the bereaved and homeless, he and Elizabeth “both found a new bond with them as Buckingham Palace has been bombed as well as their homes, & nobody is immune from it.” Elizabeth went even further: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.” Their new solidarity and repeated displays of compassion, especially toward those in the poorest neighborhoods, lifted morale. For the King and Queen, showing their vulnerability and humanity was part of a steadfast commitment to duty and service; it also helped shore up the badly damaged reputation and primacy of the monarchy, setting the stage for the rule of their daughter, Elizabeth II, who would become one of the most popular monarchs in British history. Their actions ensured that the nation would continue to revere its once-fragile monarchy—not only through the war but also in the years of austerity that followed.

This article has been excerpted from Sally Bedell Smith’s new book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy.

US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's plan to meet Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has provoked anger in Beijing.