The Instant Pot is, by all indications, a perfectly good machine—maybe even a great one. The IP, as the device is known to its many devotees, is a kitchen gadget in the most straightforward sense of the term: It’s a classic labor-saver, promising to turn ingredients into family meals while you clean up, tend to your kids, and do all of the other things you could be doing instead of keeping an eye on the stove. Once you get the hang of the electric pressure cooker, it seems to basically deliver on that promise, chugging along gamely through years’ worth of weeknight dinners of pork green chili or chicken tikka masala. Since its debut in 2010, the Instant Pot has sold millions of machines and spent years as a must-have kitchen sensation.

Sure enough, in 2019, when the private-equity firm Cornell Capital bought the gadget’s maker, Instant Brands, and merged it with another kitchenware maker, the combined company was reportedly valued at more than $2 billion. A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday, weighed down by more than $500 million in debt after years of supply-chain chaos and limited success expanding the Instant brand into other categories of household gadgetry. Perhaps counterintuitively, that the Instant Pot remains a useful, widely appreciated gadget is not unrelated to the faltering of its parent company. In fact, it’s central to understanding exactly what went wrong.

The Instant Pot certainly didn’t invent at-home pressure cooking, but it did introduce the concept to lots of Americans, and it did so in a plug-in, set-it-and-forget-it format that wasn’t as intimidating (or as explosion prone) as using a stovetop pressure cooker. If you weren’t sure how much you’d use the pressure-cooking feature, that was fine—the IP billed itself as a “multi-cooker,” and it also slow-cooked, steamed, sautéed, cooked rice, and made yogurt. At the height of its popularity, in the 2010s, you could get a basic model on Amazon for less than $100, so giving it a shot wasn’t much of a risk, even if you ended up using it only occasionally. As the device became more popular, it seemed to generate endless word-of-mouth praise for its ability to generate one-pot dinners, and Facebook groups, websites, and cookbooks sprouted up to teach new users how to get the most out of their machine.

All of this amounted to the kind of public-relations coup that companies are constantly trying and failing to buy for their own new launches. Those failures are not infrequently a result of the products themselves; at this point, it’s very difficult to come up with a novel idea for a consumer good that addresses some kind of real and reasonably common issue. The average American just doesn’t have that many problems left that can plausibly be solved at the level of inexpensive gadgetry. The Instant Pot flourished because the company found a tiny bit of white space in a crowded market, and it sold a machine that did a serviceable job at helping out a particular type of very common home cook: someone who cooks regularly for more than one or two people, more out of necessity than because they find the process creative or relaxing. There was no slick branding exercise foundational to the Instant Pot’s success. The device was the brand. It still is.

Therein lies the problem, or at least one of the problems. A device developed primarily to address a particular food-prep inefficiency has a natural ceiling to its potential market, and when one catches on as quickly and widely as the Instant Pot, it can meet that market ceiling in pretty short order. Arguably, it can exceed it—people who wouldn’t have otherwise seen themselves as Instant Pot owners buy into the hype. Predictably, after a decade of lightning-fast sales in the United States, things seem to be cooling off. Instant Brands does not release detailed sales figures, but from 2020 to 2022, sales of multi-cookers as a product category dropped by half, according to the market-research firm NPD Group. Instant Pots dominate the category. Very few people seem to need or want a second IP within five years of buying a first one. Why would they?

From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.

In the past few decades, the idea that every company should be growing, predictably and boundlessly and forever, has leeched from the technology industry into much of the rest of American business. Recently, it’s become clear that those expectations are probably not sustainable even for companies that have produced era-defining software products. They’re certainly not sustainable when placed on the shoulders of the humble Instant Pot, which, despite being an object with a digital display and a wall plug, was never technologically innovative so much as it was a clever, useful packaging of existing components. This was not at all unclear during the product’s heyday, but private-equity interests tried to moneyball it anyway, as they are wont to do.

When Cornell Capital acquired Instant Brands, in 2019, it merged the company with Correlle Brands, which it already owned and which makes a few lines of kitchenware, including Pyrex. It then began steering the brand into new markets with new products—it tried Instant-branded air fryers, blenders, air filters. None of the new product lines really worked out, because lots of other companies already do a fine job manufacturing and selling those things, and no one really had a reason to choose the Instant Brands version over competitors from Ninja or Vitamix or Honeywell, which specialize in those kinds of products in the way that Instant Brands does the multi-cooker. There was a lot of money, at least while interest rates were low, but there was no second good idea. Of course there wasn’t. Success on the Instant Pot scale is very seldom repeatable. It’s vanishingly rare for it to happen to a consumer-products company even once. But the pressures and expectations of private equity mean that that sort of astronomical success can still result in failure.

The Instant Pot, for its part, is not dead. Cornell Capital has brought in a restructuring crew, and the brand’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing allows it to continue doing business while it seeks relief from its debts. The problem is how the debts got there in the first place—in pursuit of growth for its own sake, of increased output with no clear needs that the new output would address. Even if the Instant Pot were the greatest kitchen gadget of all time, it wouldn’t be enough to overcome that faulty financial logic.

Even before last Thursday’s indictment in United States v. Donald Trump, public speculation swirled about whether the former president had taken classified documents not just to  Mar-a-Lago but also to his residence and golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The indictment answered that question with a bang while presenting a new puzzle about why Trump isn’t facing even steeper charges.

According to the Justice Department and a taped recording of the former president, Trump took classified records from Mar-a-Lago to Bedminster, where he showed off the contents of such records to others. The indictment alleges that Trump showed a map to a political ally and also showed a writer and a publisher a secret military plan to attack Iran. These two episodes were arguably the most egregious allegations of criminal wrongdoing mentioned in the indictment; they allege not just the improper retention of our nation’s most highly classified information, but the intentional communication of such information.

But these two allegations raise a question: Why did Special Counsel Jack Smith charge Trump with illegal retention of classified documents but not with dissemination of such materials? And is that decision final, or could dissemination charges still be in the works?

[Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?]

Trump’s Bedminster conduct, as described in the indictment, appears to fit the description of two federal offenses designed to keep America’s national-security secrets safe. One makes it a crime to intentionally communicate national-defense information to people not authorized to receive it, and the other makes it a crime to intentionally disclose classified information to the same. These are more serious crimes than willful retention of such documents, which is done to prevent possible leakage. Deliberate dissemination is the leakage itself.

The Justice Manual, the Department of Justice’s guidebook on criminal procedure, as well as guidance from the attorney general’s office, advises prosecutors to give strong consideration to charges of dissemination before making them. According to the manual, once a determination is made that an indictment is warranted, “the prosecutor must select the most appropriate charges,” and “ordinarily, those charges will include the most serious offense that is encompassed by the defendant’s conduct and that is likely to result in a sustainable conviction.” Attorney General Merrick Garland has indicated that the prosecutor can consider a number of factors in deciding whether to bring the most serious charges.

Smith appears to have taken a cautious, narrow approach. Even though the indictment describes alleged dissemination and disclosure of national-security secrets, the indictment did not charge Trump with those offenses.  

One possible explanation for his decision: venue. The Constitution requires prosecutors to bring charges in the location—or venue—where the alleged criminal conduct took place. Justice Department prosecutors could not necessarily bring charges against Trump in Miami for alleged criminal conduct that occurred in another state, in this case New Jersey. But the absence of such charges in the indictment raises the intriguing possibility of another indictment to come, in a jurisdiction, no less, with a pool of jurors and judges more favorable to the government’s case against Trump.

[Juliette Kayyem: The threat from Trump’s supporters has evolved]

The government could make a solid argument that Florida is, in fact, an appropriate location to bring the charges for dissemination at Bedminster. “Any offense against the United States begun in one district and completed in another,” according to a congressional statute, may be “prosecuted in any district in which such offense was begun, continued, or completed.” Just last year, the Court of Appeals with jurisdiction over Florida applied that statute in an analogous situation, holding that a defendant charged with storing drugs in Alabama and transporting them to Tennessee for distribution could be prosecuted in Alabama for drug distribution.

But perhaps Smith did not want to count on the Supreme Court to recognize Florida as an appropriate venue. Judges have not issued definitive rulings on how the law of venue applies to the national-security statutes under which Trump has been charged. Plus, any creative law student—or judicial clerk fresh out of law school—could find ways to distinguish the conspiracy to possess and sell drugs in another state from the crime of disclosure of classified information. Smith might have reasoned that the government could lose on the issue of venue for any dissemination charges it tried in a Florida court. And that could potentially be fatal to ever bringing those charges even in the place that’s an obvious venue option: New Jersey.

For example, with regard to Trump’s alleged disclosure of U.S. attack plans against Iran, it is possible, based on the publicly available facts, that Trump shared the number of U.S. troops required to attack Iran, but not the actual document outlining the attack plans. That would not make his conduct any less criminal—the law specifically prohibits verbal disclosure of such information, not just documents. But if the alleged crime was verbal communication, that crime arguably did not “commence” in Florida with the physical transportation of boxes to New Jersey.

Another possible explanation for why Smith didn’t charge Trump for the more serious offenses has to do with the range of prison time the defendant could be subject to. A conviction for any of the 31 counts Trump faces under the Espionage Act for retention of national-defense information would already yield the maximum penalty available under the federal sentencing guidelines. That is regardless of whether additional counts for dissemination are included. In evaluating a proper sentence, the judge could still take into account the two alleged instances of dissemination—there is no need for the prosecutors to obtain separate convictions on those counts for that conduct to be considered in the sentencing.

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

The legal uncertainties that surround bringing charges in Florida for dissemination of national-security secrets in Bedminster leaves open the possibility that charges might yet be brought in New Jersey—a backup plan of sorts for Smith. If Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge assigned to the case, were to seek to pocket-veto the charges before her by, say, scheduling the trial for after the 2024 presidential election, the special counsel would be able to sidestep her tactic by proceeding with charges in New Jersey.

In fact, the Miami indictment conspicuously excludes many facts surrounding Trump’s actions in Bedminster: what boxes were taken there, what they contained, how they were kept at the golf club. This silence suggests that there might be more to come from the famously hard-charging Smith and his team of prosecutors, who put together an otherwise highly detailed 49-page indictment.

Smith might still decide against bringing a separate indictment for dissemination, because such a move could be painted as overcharging. The government usually tries to avoid being seen as piling on, at least in such a high-profile matter. But if Cannon acts consistently with her prior Trump-friendly rulings, which were twice found by unanimous panels of conservative appellate judges to be both factually and legally flawed, Smith might go looking for another way to ensure accountability—and another venue where he could do so.

Shortly after announcing his indictment last Thursday, Donald Trump posted a video to Truth Social complaining about persecution. Over the course of four minutes, he claimed multiple times that he’d won his reelection bid, asserted his innocence, called the Russia investigation a plot engineered by Hillary Clinton, and insisted that every investigation into his conduct was “a hoax and a scam.” His speeches over the weekend featured a torrent of false claims.

During his arraignment yesterday, in contrast, the former president said nothing. According to reporters, he sat silently with his arms crossed while his lawyer entered his plea of not guilty. There would be more bombast yet to come at a speech later that evening. But for that brief period in court, the lies ground to a halt.

Trump has built a political juggernaut out of shameless lying. Or perhaps not even lying. It’s practically a cliché at this point to refer to the philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit, which Frankfurt describes as distinct from, and worse than, a lie, in that the bullshitter doesn’t even care whether or not what he’s saying is true. Trump is a consummate bullshitter—but the courtroom is an inhospitable place for that sort of bluster. It’s an environment designed for careful, systematic evaluation of meaning and argument. In court, Trump is no longer on his home turf. In that sense, the Mar-a-Lago indictment represents the latest collision between the legal system and Trump’s insistence on defining the terms of his own reality.

Trump’s own accounts of what happened with the classified documents he allegedly brought to Mar-a-Lago are characteristically fantastical. Often, he says that he declassified them before leaving office—a claim for which there’s no evidence. Sometimes, he insists that his enemies are unjustly persecuting him despite their own supposed record of absconding with sensitive materials. (There’s no evidence that they’ve done so deliberately, much less that they’ve then refused to return them.) Recently, many of his posts on Truth Social about the case have appeared in all capital letters, as if he’s shouting through the computer screen.

The indictment, in contrast, is a quiet, controlled document. It walks through the case against Trump and his aide, Walt Nauta, with brusque efficiency: Trump took government papers that didn’t belong to him; he lied and refused to give them back when the government came calling; and in doing so, he put the country at risk. At times, the indictment punctures Trump’s bluster by using his own words. In one exchange reproduced by Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump tells a staffer that “as president I could have declassified” a document, but “now I can’t”—a direct rebuttal to the many times Trump has claimed in public that he declassified the records in question during his time in office. Elsewhere, the indictment repeats paragraph after paragraph of comments made by Trump during his campaign and presidency, insisting on the importance of protecting classified information. The indictment is a refusal to yield to Trump’s desire to shape the world around whatever truth he happens to like best at the time.

Trump, Smith alleges, ignored laws about the handling of classified materials because he didn’t want them to exist—and when the government came looking, he repeatedly tried to rewrite the facts by hiding additional documents away and encouraging the people around him, including his lawyers, to lie to government investigators. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” he said, according to his lawyer’s notes. “Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?”

Just like Trump’s lies about winning the 2020 election, these suggestions were an effort to reshape reality to his will. By refusing to relinquish control of materials that he could legally access only when president, he was also maintaining the fantasy that he still holds that office by right.

The government, though, was unimpressed. The indictment makes it clear: “At 12:00 p.m. on January 20, 2021, TRUMP ceased to be president.”

For all that Trump loves to file lawsuits against those he claims have wronged him, the courtroom represents a space perhaps uniquely hostile to Trumpian falsehoods. Lawyers can’t lie before a judge or make assertions with no grounding in law or fact. They have to set out the reasoning behind their claims, instead of just insisting that something is correct because they say so. As the philosopher Jeremy Waldron puts it, law represents “a mode of thoughtfulness that allows rival and competing claims to confront and engage with one another in an orderly process … without degenerating into an incoherent shouting match.” It’s hard to think of something less Trumpian.

Already in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, this aspect of the law has limited Trump’s ability to lie. Shortly after the FBI searched the Palm Beach, Florida, estate in August, Trump sued to prevent the Justice Department from accessing the seized materials. He was employing a familiar tactic, buying himself more time by throwing up legal barriers for his opponent to surmount. But in doing so, he also provided the government with a platform to set out its case against him. In a preview of this month’s indictment, the Justice Department responded with a lengthy, devastating account of how Trump and his team repeatedly hindered the government’s efforts to take custody of sensitive information. Trump, meanwhile, had to hold back in court from claiming that he’d declassified the documents in question, as he and his legal team insisted on television and social media. He couldn’t make that argument before a judge, because it wasn’t true.

That was far from the only time the Trump team has arrived in court unable to substantiate the former president’s wild claims. Over the course of efforts to challenge and overturn the 2020 presidential election, lawyers representing the Trump campaign or sympathetic groups made arguments about supposed election irregularities on television and social media that failed to hold up. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” wrote one judge, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.” Many of the lawyers who chose to advance such speculation anyway, including Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, are now facing ethics investigations.

Elsewhere in the legal system, litigants are using defamation law as a tool to undercut the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud; Dominion Voting Systems, for example, was able to secure a hefty settlement from Fox News. “The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” said a Dominion attorney after the settlement was announced. Trump, too, has faced this strategy, in the context of E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil case against him for sexual abuse and defamation after he denied her claim that he’d attacked her in a department-store dressing room.

So United States v. Donald Trump will not be Trump’s first confrontation with what we might call the anti-bullshit properties of the judicial system. It may also not be the last, as Smith continues to investigate Trump’s potential legal culpability for the January 6 insurrection. On the state level, there’s the potential of charges in Georgia for the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election there, as well as the New York State indictment of Trump for coordinating hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels in advance of the 2016 election. It’s tempting to look at that list and see the possibility of a resounding victory over Trump’s blather, a triumph of accountability that insists that facts matter and words mean what they say.

But Trump has a Houdini-like ability to extract himself from legal and political traps. The special counsel had an early stroke of bad luck in the judge appointed to oversee the case—Aileen Cannon, who also oversaw Trump’s lawsuit to hamstring the Justice Department’s investigation last year. Cannon botched that case so thoroughly, upending normal legal principles in service of an outcome favorable to Trump, that the conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit were forced to step in and set things back on track. If Cannon handles the prosecution of Trump like she did his earlier suit, she’ll have an enormous amount of discretion to make the special counsel’s life difficult in prosecuting the case.

The story of Trump’s confrontation with law is also the story of his confrontation with various rule-bound institutions: the Justice Department; two special counsels; judges in black robes; and, during both impeachments, the House and Senate. Cannon’s presence, though, is a reminder that Trump was able to reshape many of those same institutions during his time in office. She is one of many judges appointed by Trump in his successful quest to remake the federal bench. In this respect, there’s an irony in how the courts and the law have been celebrated by some progressives and Trump opponents as a space privileging truth, even as Trump’s alliance with the conservative legal movement has pulled the federal judiciary sharply to the right and precipitated a growing crisis of public trust in the courts.

Trump has folded the indictment into his quest for reelection, demanding a chance to deal out retribution against those who have wronged him. Cannon’s role in the courtroom suggests another way to understand the stakes of a second Trump presidency. Given another four years, he’d be able to further refashion institutions in his image—and, in doing so, limit their ability and willingness to hold him to account again.

Donald Trump has long had the power to turn insignificant moments into days-long news events, but on Tuesday he managed something even more difficult: He did the reverse. The former president of the United States was arrested and arraigned on 37 felony charges, and it felt like an anti-climax.

Several factors explain this. The potent and precise indictment, covering Trump’s attempt to conceal highly sensitive national-security documents, was unsealed on Friday, so no new information emerged today. Despite fears of some observers about violence or disruption, Trump came and went from a federal courthouse in Miami without serious incident. Americans have become so accustomed to a circus following Trump everywhere he goes that anything else is a surprise. Television networks aired wall-to-wall coverage of … well, what, exactly? Cameras and recordings weren’t allowed in the courtroom where he was arraigned, and Trump himself was barely seen on his way in and out.

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Moreover, although these charges are more perilous than one filed in Manhattan, this isn’t the first time Trump has been indicted, and the idea that he would face charges—that a major presidential candidate would be facing so many legal troubles—has somehow become the new normal.

That left a Trump speech in New Jersey Tuesday evening as the ostensible marquee event—his first public remarks since he revealed last week that he’d been indicted. Yet this, too, ended up being a bit of a letdown, or at least a misdirection. Trump had lots of fiery rhetoric, but for all the heat, it shed little light on the case: what the legal issues are, or why Trump was so determined not to comply with the federal government’s requests to return records that did not belong to him.

“Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country,” Trump said at the start of his speech, a bold claim that would come as news to any student of history, including graduates of middle-school social-studies classes outside of Florida. Things did not get better, or more factually based, from there. Only a fool would have expected a chastened Trump, and the fool would have been disappointed.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Trump blamed his prosecution on Joe Biden, whom he labeled “the most corrupt president” in U.S. history. There’s no evidence Biden had any role in the case, and the White House has said the president found out about the indictment only after Trump broke the news. Biden has carefully remained mum on the case since, though he no doubt relishes the charges against a rival whom he has criticized as a threat to U.S. democracy.

Trump also attacked Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom he said (without evidence) was “a raging and uncontrolled Trump hater.” Trump added, “I’ve named him ‘Deranged Jack Smith.’” The ad hominem attack demonstrates both how his nickname game has weakened and perhaps also why he struggles to hire and keep attorneys.

But most of the president’s speech skirted any kind of real engagement with the charges against him. His central point was that he had the right to possess the documents he did under the Presidential Records Act, and that as president he had the power to declassify them. These arguments are neither new nor relevant. Trump has used them since the Mar-a-Lago search, though he has provided no evidence for declassification.

[Tom Nichols: The United States v. Donald Trump]

The problem for Trump that his indictment sidesteps these matters. Trump complained that the charges never mentioned the Presidential Records Act, and he is correct: It doesn’t engage with the question of whether he had a right to possess the documents. Instead, all of the charges focus on his actions after a May 2022 subpoena to return them. Once that request was made, he allegedly went to great lengths to hide documents from the federal government and even from his own attorneys, and this is where Smith homed in.

Following Trump’s explanations was also difficult for anyone who isn’t immersed in the right-wing discourse. He served up a conspiratorial word salad, tossing together the Clinton socks case and acid-washing and Burisma. The former president did offer a partial answer to the greatest mystery of the case: Why was Trump so determined to keep the documents?

“Many people have asked me why I had these boxes,” he said. “The answer, besides having every right under the Presidential Records Act, is these boxes were containing all types of personal belongings,” including shirts and shoes. But chaotic storage is no excuse for violation of the law, and it hardly explains his dogged attempts—detailed by his own attorney—to avoid handing over documents such as military attack plans.

Once liable to start speaking and continue for a couple hours, Trump has been more concise in some of his recent speeches. As he wrapped up Tuesday, after just 30 minutes, he complained that the Justice Department had broken an unwritten rule against prosecuting a former president and current presidential candidate. The risks of letting Trump continue to flout the law with impunity arguably outweigh the downsides, but the indictment does carry risks.

“You just don’t, unless it’s really bad,” Trump said. He had unwittingly delivered the most illuminating commentary of the day.