In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, both Facebook and Twitter decided to suspend lame-duck President Donald Trump from their platforms. He had encouraged violence, the sites reasoned; the megaphone was taken away, albeit temporarily. To many Americans horrified by the attack, the decisions were a relief. But for some conservatives, it marked an escalation in a different kind of assault: It was, to them, a clear sign of Big Tech’s anti-conservative bias.

That same year, Florida and Texas passed bills to restrict social-media platforms’ ability to take down certain kinds of content. (Each is described in this congressional briefing.) In particular, they intend to make political “deplatforming” illegal, a move that would have ostensibly prevented the removal of Trump from Facebook and Twitter. The constitutionality of these laws has since been challenged in lawsuits—the tech platforms maintain that they have a First Amendment right to moderate content posted by their users. As the separate cases wound their way through the court system, federal judges (all of whom were nominated by Republican presidents) were divided on the laws’ legality. And now they’re going to the Supreme Court.

On Friday, the Court announced it would be putting these cases on its docket. The resulting decisions could be profound: “This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet,” Alan Rozenshtein, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a senior editor at Lawfare, told me. At stake are tricky questions about how the First Amendment should apply in an age of giant, powerful social-media platforms. Right now, these platforms have the right to moderate the posts that appear on them; they can, for instance, ban someone for hate speech at their own discretion. Restricting their ability to pull down posts would cause, as Rozenshtein put it, “a mess.” The decisions could reshape online expression as we currently know it.

[Read: Is this the beginning of the end of the internet?]

Whether or not these particular laws are struck down is not what’s actually important here, Rozenshtein argues. “What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.” Whatever they decide will set legal precedents for how we think about free speech when so much of our lives take place on the web. Rozenshtein and I caught up on the phone to discuss why these cases are so interesting—and why the decision might not fall cleanly along political lines.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How did we get here?

Alan Rozenshtein: If you ask the companies and digital-civil-society folks, we got here because the crazy MAGA Republicans need something to do with their days, and they don’t have any actual policy proposals. So they just engage in culture-war politics, and they have fastened on Silicon Valley social-media companies as the latest boogeyman. If you ask conservatives, they’re going to say, “Big Tech is running amok. The liberals have been warning us about unchecked corporate power for years, and maybe they had a point.” This really came to a head when, in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, major social-media platforms threw Donald Trump, the president of the United States, off of their platforms.

Nyce: Based on what we know about the Court, do we have any theories about how they’re going to rule?

Rozenshtein: I do think it is very likely that the Texas law will be struck down. It is very broad and almost impossible to implement. But I think there will be some votes to uphold the Florida law. There may be votes from the conservatives, especially Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, but you might also get some support from some folks on the left, in particular Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor—not because they believe conservatives are being discriminated against, but because they themselves have a lot of skepticism of private power and big companies.

But what’s actually important is not whether these laws are struck down or not. What’s much, much more important is what the Court says in striking down those laws—how the Court describes the First Amendment protections.

Nyce: What are the important things for Americans to consider at this moment?

Rozenshtein: This would be—I think this is without exaggeration—the most important Supreme Court case ever when it comes to the internet.

The Supreme Court in 1997 issued a very famous case called Reno v. ACLU. And this was a constitutional case about what was called the Communications Decency Act. This was a law that purported to impose criminal penalties on internet companies and platforms that transmitted indecent content to minors. So this is part of the big internet-pornography scare of the mid-’90s. The Court said this violates the First Amendment because to comply with this law, platforms are going to have to censor massive, massive, massive amounts of information. And that’s really bad. And Reno v. ACLU has always been considered the kind of Magna Carta of internet–First Amendment cases, because it recognized the First Amendment is really foundational and really important. The Court has recognized this in various forms since then. But, in the intervening almost 30 years, it’s never squarely taken on a case that deals with First Amendment issues on the internet so, so profoundly.

Even if the Court strikes these laws down, if it does not also issue very strong language about how platforms can moderate—that the moderation decisions of platforms are almost per se outside the reach of government regulation under the First Amendment—this will not be the end of this. Whether it’s Texas or Florida or some blue state that has its own concerns about content moderation of progressive causes, we will continue to see laws like this.

This is just the beginning of a new phase in American history where, rightly, it is recognized that because these platforms are so important, they should be the subject of government regulation. For the next decade, we’ll be dealing with all sorts of court challenges. And I think this is as it should be. This is the age of Big Tech. This is not the end of the conversation about the First Amendment, the internet, and government regulation over big platforms. It’s actually the beginning of the conversation.

Nyce: This could really influence the way that Americans experience social media.

Rozenshtein: Oh, it absolutely could, in very unpredictable ways. If you believe the state governments, they’re fighting for internet freedom, for the freedom of users to be able to use these platforms, even if users express unfriendly or unfashionable views. But if you listen to the platforms and most of the tech-policy and digital-civil-society crowd, they’re the ones fighting for internet freedom, because they think that the companies have a First Amendment right to decide what’s on the platforms, and that the platforms only function because companies aggressively moderate.

Even if the conservative states are arguing in good faith, this could backfire catastrophically. Because if you limit what companies can do to take down harmful or toxic content, you’re not going to end up with a freer speech environment. You’re going to end up with a mess.

He is also accused of stealing tax return details of "thousands" of the US's "wealthiest individuals".

Today’s Republican Party has made a turn toward foreign-policy isolationism or, less pejoratively, realism and restraint. After Donald Trump shattered the GOP’s omertà about the disastrous Iraq War—a “big fat mistake,” he called it in 2016—Republicans quickly learned to decry “endless wars” and, often quite sensibly, argue for shrinking America’s global military footprint. During the 2020 election, Trump’s supporters touted his refusal to start any new wars while in office (though he got very close).

When it comes to America’s southern neighbor, however, Republicans have grown more hawkish. Party leaders, including members of Congress and presidential candidates, now regularly advocate for direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico to attack drug cartels manufacturing the deadly fentanyl flooding into America. “Building the wall is not enough,” Vivek Ramaswamy said at Wednesday night’s GOP-primary debate. The best defense is now a good offense.

The strategic stupidity of any potential U.S. military intervention in Mexico is difficult to overstate. The calls for such an intervention are also deeply ironic: Even as Trump’s epigones inveigh against the possibility of an “endless war” in Ukraine similar to those in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are reprising the arguments, tools, and rhetoric of the global War on Terror that many of them belatedly turned against.

The War on Terror was a disaster, devastating countries and leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead and millions of refugees adrift. A botched U.S. attack on Mexico, America’s largest trading partner, could create a failed state on the 2,000-mile U.S. southern border, an outcome that would be far, far worse for the United States. The toll of the U.S. fentanyl epidemic is staggering: More than 100,000 Americans died of an overdose in 2022. But a unilateral military “solution” holds the potential, if not the near certainty, of causing far more death and destruction than any drug.

[Read: ‘Every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber’]

Trump, not surprisingly, sowed the seeds for this new jingoism. After launching his presidential campaign in 2015 with an infamous verbal attack against Mexican migrants, in office he mused about shooting missiles at Mexican fentanyl labs, according to the memoir of his then–defense secretary, Mark Esper. “No one would know it was us,” Trump assured a stunned Esper.

Fast-forward to last month, at this election cycle’s first Republican presidential debate: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pledged to launch Special Operations raids into Mexico on his first day in office. His rivals for the nomination have issued similar promises to wage war against the cartels—in the form of drone strikes, blockades, and military raids. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley breezily promised at this week’s debate to “send in our Special Operations” to Mexico. Republican senators and representatives have introduced bills to classify fentanyl as a chemical weapon, designate Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and authorize the use of military force in Mexico.

If you’re inclined to dismiss this saber-rattling as primary-season bluster, don’t be so sure. Pundits and voters seem to be falling in line behind the politicians. The conservative commentator Ben Domenech recently said that he is “close to becoming a single issue voter” on the issue of attacking Mexico (he’s for it). A recent poll found that as many GOP voters consider Mexico an enemy of the United States as an ally, a marked shift from just a few years ago.

The parallels to the War on Terror aren’t exact—no prominent Republican has advocated a full-scale invasion and occupation of Mexico, at least not yet. But the rhetorical similarities are hard to ignore. America’s tragic interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan began with politicians inflating threats; seeking to militarize complex international problems; and promising clean, swift, decisive military victories. The language regarding Mexico today is eerily similar. The Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld recently assured his viewers that a unilateral attack on Mexico would “be over in minutes.” The labeling of Mexican cartel leaders as “terrorists” sidelines even the most basic analysis of the costs and consequences of a potential war. Just like in Iraq, a war on Mexico would be a war of choice, with American moral culpability for whatever furies it unleashes.

[David Frum: The new Republican litmus test is very dangerous]

It’s worth remembering that the war in Afghanistan included a failed counter-drug campaign. In my time there as a Marine lieutenant a decade ago, U.S. troops engaged in erratic, futile attempts to interrupt opium-poppy cultivation. Partnered with Afghanistan’s version of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, my company wasted days fruitlessly searching motorcycles at checkpoints on dusty village trails, finding no drugs. On one occasion, I was ordered to confiscate farmers’ wooden poppy scorers, simple finger-mounted tools used to harvest opium; at a cost of maybe a penny a piece, they were immediately replaced. U.S. planes bombed 200 Afghan drug labs during the occupation. Yet opium production skyrocketed—Afghanistan produced more than 80 percent of the global supply of the drug in the last years of the war.

Mexico would be an even riskier proposition. Start with the obvious: proximity. The direct costs to the United States of the War on Terror were enormous: $8 trillion squandered, more than 7,000 U.S. troops killed in action, tens of thousands wounded. Across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia, hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, were killed in counterinsurgency campaigns and civil wars. Governments were toppled, leaving behind anarchy and nearly 40 million refugees, who have further destabilized the region and its neighbors. But America itself was shielded from the worst effects of its hubris and militarism. Flanked by oceans and friendly neighbors, Americans didn’t have to worry about the conflicts coming home.

Any unilateral U.S. military action in Mexico would risk the collapse of a neighboring country of 130 million people. It could unleash civil war and a humanitarian crisis that would dwarf those in Iraq and Syria. This carnage would not be confined to Mexico. Some of America’s largest and wealthiest cities are a few hours’ drive from the border; nearly 40 million Americans are of Mexican descent, many of them with family members still living across the border. The cartels would not have far to travel to launch retaliatory terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. And the refugee crisis that many Republicans consider the preeminent national-security crisis would worsen.

The United States would also lack one major War on Terror asset: partners. A host of NATO and non-NATO partners contributed troops and resources to the fighting in Afghanistan; none would be willing to participate in an American attack on Mexico. Despite government corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan and dependency on U.S. weapons and technology, soldiers from those countries did the lion’s share of the fighting and dying in the long struggle against insurgents there. But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has publicly rejected U.S. military intervention. One can easily imagine uniformed Mexican soldiers and policemen firing on American troops and aiding the cartels. If the U.S. were to attempt to build competing Mexican militias or proxies in response, it would further fracture the Mexican state.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

If there is an overriding lesson of America’s post-9/11 conflicts, it is that war unleashes a host of unintended consequences. A war of choice seldom respects the goals or limits set by its architects. External military intervention in a country fighting an insurgency—ideological, criminal, or otherwise—is particularly fraught. Foreign troops are far more likely to be an accelerant of violence than a dampener. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, cartel members would be likely to hide out among civilians, infiltrate Mexico’s already compromised security services, and find havens in bordering countries (the United States included). American forces would in turn be susceptible to corruption and infiltration, especially if an intervention were to drag on longer than expected.

Lacking a definable end state, a counter-cartel campaign would likely devolve into a manhunt for a few narco kingpins. Such an operation would be liable to create folk heroes out of brutal drug traffickers, one accidental wedding-party drone strike at a time. Some of the worst men on Earth could become global symbols of resistance to U.S. imperialism, especially if they are able to evade U.S. forces for a decade, as Osama bin Laden did. A U.S.-Mexico conflict would then become an opportunity for other American adversaries. Russia and China would undoubtedly be happy to arm the cartel insurgents, perhaps even overtly. Mexico already hosts more members of the GRU—Russia’s military intelligence—than any other foreign country. American arms and assistance are taking Russian lives in Ukraine, as they did in Afghanistan a generation before. The Russians would welcome an easy opportunity to return the favor.

Since Trump’s ascent in 2016, the most bellicose neoconservatives in the GOP have been ousted, the Republican Party’s views on Russia and China have become muddled, and the Iraq War is now widely accepted as a disaster. But Republicans’ enthusiasm for launching a war on Mexico reveals the shallowness of their conversion. The rise of fentanyl is mostly a demand-side problem. Whatever Republican leaders say about “endless wars,” they’re once again pulling out the military hammer first, then looking for nails.

President Joe Biden has warned that former president Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" movement is a threat to democracy in the US

When news comes out that someone has suffered an email breach, my first instinct is to pity them and practice extreme charity. I don’t remember any emails I wrote a decade ago, but I’m sure there’s something in there appalling enough to sour my relationships with every friend, ex, or co-worker I ever had. Give me your email password, and I will ruin your career.

This week, the careers in jeopardy belong to a handful of Americans and Europeans who were, by the looks of their emails, groomed by the Iranian government to promote conciliatory policies toward Tehran. According to reports by Semafor and Iran International, Iranian foreign-policy bigwigs such as Mohammad Javad Zarif identified think-tank staffers of Iranian origin, sponsored meetings with them, and used the group to coordinate and spread messages helpful to Iran. The emails, which date from 2014, suggest that those in their group—the “Iran Experts Initiative”—reacted to Iranian outreach in a range of ways, including cautious engagement and active coordination. The Iranian government then paid expenses related to this group’s internal meetings; cultivated its members with “access to high-ranking officials and extended invitations to visit Tehran,” according to Iran International; and later gloated over how effectively it had used its experts to propagate the Islamic Republic’s positions.

Graeme Wood: Talk to coldhearted criminals

The government had reason to gloat. It picked excellent prospects, some of whom sucked up to Tehran over email and echoed its negotiating positions publicly. A few of them ended up in and near positions of prominence in the U.S. government through connections to Robert Malley, a veteran Middle East hand in Democratic administrations. Malley, who led Obama teams focusing on the Islamic State, Syria, and Iraq, is known to favor negotiation with unfriendly governments in the region and to scorn the “maximum pressure” approach that replaced nuclear negotiation when Donald Trump entered office. Earlier this year, Malley lost his security clearance for reasons still not explained, and he is on leave from government service. (He did not reply to a request for comment.)

One of Tehran’s targets, Ariane M. Tabatabai, joined the Biden administration’s Iran team with Malley and is now the chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Another, Ali Vaez, formerly worked as an aide to Malley on Iran issues. That is the disturbing upshot to the reports: Witting participants in an Iranian influence operation have been close colleagues with those setting the Biden administration’s Iran policy, or have even served in government and set it themselves.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, dismissed the reports as “an account of things that happened almost a decade ago, most of which involved people that do not currently work for the government.” I assume he meant the U.S. government. Anyway, the accusations are serious and can’t be batted away by the suggestion that 2014 was a long time ago.

One sign of the gravity of these accusations is the unconvincing attempts to minimize them. The commentator Esfandyar Batmanghelidj said opponents of Tehran had smeared the analysts merely because they “maintained dialogue and exchanged views with Iranian officials.” He went on to note Semafor’s links to Qatar and Iran International’s to Iran’s archenemy, Saudi Arabia. The journalist Laura Rozen tweeted that the stories were “McCarthyistic” and targeted blameless analysts “because they try to talk to everybody and because of their Iranian heritage.”

Defending the emails as maintaining “dialogue” so ludicrously misrepresents the accusation that I am forced to conclude that these defenders find the actual accusation indefensible. No one is alarmed that Americans of Iranian descent are talking with Iranian-government officials. What’s alarming is the servile tone of the Iranian American side of that dialogue, and the apparent lack of concern that the Iranian government views them as tools for its political ends. Rozen and Batmanghelidj don’t dispute the emails’ authenticity. Comparing the Iranian influence operation to supposed Qatari and Saudi ones is, in turn, tacit admission that the emails are probably real.

Cultivating a source is fine. But any self-respecting analyst, journalist, or politician wants to be the one cultivating, not the one being cultivated. This mutual back-scratching can erode one’s integrity and independence. That is why the Iranians do it: to turn influential and otherwise smart people into their pets, and eventually condition them to salivate at the issuance of a visa, or an email from Javad Zarif. Responding to these overtures is fine. You can butter up an official (“Your Excellency”), maybe grovel a little for a visa. But the writing itself, and the analysis behind it, must be independent to the point that even the most cynical observer could not accuse you of altering your views to please a subject.

By this standard, some of the reported exchanges between the Iran Experts and their convenor are mortifying. After the report, Vaez, a deputy to Malley, admitted on X (formerly Twitter) that he’d sent a full draft of an op-ed to the Iranian government. “I look forward to your comments and feedback,” his email to the Iranians read. If I sent a source a draft of a story, I would be fired. (I asked The National Interest, where the article appeared, if its policy also forbids sharing drafts. The editor, Jacob Heilbrunn, did not reply.) Sending questions is laudable. Checking facts is standard practice. But a magazine article is not a Wiki whose contributors are also its subjects. Sharing a full draft of an article, whether for approval or just improvement, makes the recipient an unacknowledged co-author.

Vaez later pledged to the Iranian foreign minister to “help you in any way,” by proposing “a public campaign” to promote Iran’s views on its nuclear program. He offered these services “as an Iranian, based on my national and patriotic duty.” Vaez, like his former boss Malley, has written widely about Iran and U.S.-Iran relations, for magazines including this one. (Attempts to reach Vaez through his employer to verify the authenticity of the emails and their context were not answered by the time of publication.)

According to the same reports, Adnan Tabatabai, CEO and founder of the German think tank CARPO, “offered to prepare articles for Iran’s foreign ministry.” “We as a group [could] work on an essay,” he suggested. “It could, for example, be published under a former official’s name.” Tabatabai, the report says, worked as a contractor for Malley’s International Crisis Group. (He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Ariane Tabatabai (who is not related to Adnan) wrote to her contact at the Iranian foreign ministry and asked his advice on whether to work with officials in Saudi Arabia and attend a meeting in Israel. “I would like to ask your opinion too and see if you think I should accept the invitation and go,” she asked Mostafa Zahrani of the foreign ministry. She made clear that she personally “had no inclination to go” to a workshop at Ben-Gurion University, but she thought it might be better if she went, rather than “some Israeli,” such as Emily Landau of Tel Aviv University. Zahrani told Tabatabai to look into Saudi Arabia and avoid Israel. She thanked him for the guidance, and she went to Tehran herself in 2014. In another email to the Iranians, she noted that she had recently published an article arguing that Tehran should be given more leeway to spin up centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

These emails look bad. So would mine, if they came out in a selective leak, and so would yours. But I’m not sure that they would look this bad, or that my excuses would be so weak.

Vaez tweeted that he “shared the draft as a courtesy after [Iranian] officials claimed I had been too harsh on their position in my writing.” Even if sharing a draft were permissible, would he extend the courtesy to Trump officials? “[ICG’s Iran] work has always been informed by the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders,” he claims. I am confident that if you plumbed his inbox, you would find no fan mail addressed to “Your Excellency” Mike Pompeo, offering his devoted and patriotic service. Nor would he soften the blow of criticism of Trump officials (whose Iran policy was built on sanctions and drone strikes) by giving them a “courtesy” peek at his next work.

Roya Hakakian: Ebrahim Raisi has blood on his hands

For once, the Iranians themselves are blameless. As conspiracies go, the one alleged here is mild. They found Westerners of Iranian extraction who did not despise their religious government, as so many Iranian expatriates do. They made a list. They flattered its members and waited to see who welcomed the flattery and reciprocated with offers of service. These techniques paid off splendidly when the Biden administration started appointing the very people Tehran had been grooming. (Vaez was poised to join Malley at State, but the appointment was never made.)

The emails do not demonstrate or suggest that Ariane Tabatabai, now in the Defense Department, or others not in government, became agents of Tehran. The Pentagon says that Tabatabai was “thoroughly and properly vetted” for her current job but refuses to say whether her emails were accurately and fairly quoted. Even if they do not show that she is a security risk, they do show that she and others responded to Tehran’s blandishments and sought its approval. The administration should find staff who know Iran and its leaders, ideally well enough to recognize Zarif by the smell of his cologne or the sound of his footfall. To get that close takes some ingratiation. The method of ingratiation matters, though, and in this case, it stinks.

There’s an expression reporters use, that you’ve “reported yourself out of a story.” That is, you had a hunch or a tip about something, but when you checked the facts, the story didn’t pan out. Sometimes, though, reporters stick to the narrative they’ve decided on in advance, and they don’t let facts get in the way.

The United Auto Workers union is striking for a better contract. The combination of a tight labor market and President Joe Biden’s pro-labor appointees to the National Labor Relations Board has given workers new leverage, leading workers in writers’ rooms, kitchens, and factories to demand more from their employers. This has been broadly beneficial, because many of the gains made by union workers benefit other workers.

Over the past few weeks, there have been whispers that former President Donald Trump would visit the striking UAW workers, with consequent fretting from Democrats in the press that Biden’s overall pro-union record would be overshadowed by photos of Trump on the picket line.

[David A. Graham: The press is giving Trump a free pass, again]

But that didn’t happen. Instead, it was Biden who went to support the striking autoworkers, joining a union picket line—something not even his most pro-union predecessors in the White House had ever done. “You saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble,” Biden told the striking workers Tuesday. “But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It’s a simple proposition.”

A president on the picket line, telling workers they deserved to share in the wealth they had helped create, was a genuinely historic moment. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t do this. It’s shocking that Biden did.

But that wasn’t as interesting for many in the political press as the hypothetical story, the one that didn’t happen: a Republican presidential candidate winning over striking autoworkers by supporting their struggle for a better contract. Trump didn’t do that. In fact, Trump, who governed as a viciously anti-union president even by Republican standards, chose to visit a nonunion shop to give a campaign speech in which he said, “I don’t think you’re picketing for the right thing,” and told them it wouldn’t make “a damn bit of difference” what they got in their contract, because the growth in electric-vehicle manufacturing would put them out of work.

Telling striking workers that they should give up trying to get a better deal is not supporting workers or supporting unions; it is textbook union-busting rhetoric that anyone who has ever been in a union or tried to organize one would recognize. In other words, Trump did not go to Michigan to support striking workers at all. He did what cheap rich guys do every day: He told people who work for a living to be afraid of losing what little they have instead of trying to get what they deserve. This is not comparable to, nor is it even in the same galaxy as, supporting workers on a picket line. It is a poignant metaphor for the emptiness of right-wing populism when it comes to supporting workers—a cosplay populism of superficial “working class” aesthetics that ends up backing the bosses instead of the workers.

The narrative repeated ad nauseam by the political press that Trump was supporting the autoworkers was simply false. Should he reach the White House again, there’s little reason to doubt that his policies and appointments will be as anti-worker and anti-union as they were the first time.

“Just look who Trump put in the courts,” Dave Green, the UAW regional director for Ohio and Indiana, told the Associated Press this week. “Look at his record with the labor relations board. He did nothing to support organized labor except lip service.”

Some narratives, though, are too fun to let go of. So The New York Times reported that Trump was set to “Woo Striking Union Members,” without mentioning that he is appearing at a nonunion shop; The Wall Street Journal likewise left that out. Politico announced that Trump was going to “address striking auto workers,” acknowledging only later in the story that his appearance would be at “a non-union shop.” Many major news outlets did something similar, writing up a Trump campaign event in a way that left the impression that Trump was going to speak with striking autoworkers.

Many reports led with the suggestion that “current and former union members” would be in the audience, but that’s irrelevant. You could go anywhere in Detroit and find a crowd composed of “current and former union members”—it’s Detroit! The relevant fact is that Trump is not supporting the autoworkers’ efforts to win a contract that allows them their fair share of the wealth they create. What the Trump campaign wanted was ambiguous headlines that might suggest he was supporting workers he was not in fact supporting, so that he could get credit for something he didn’t actually do. And the political press largely obliged, repeatedly muddying the distinction between supporting union workers on strike and having a campaign rally.

[Read: The real issue in the UAW strike]

The Trump campaign is very good at manipulating the media, because it understands that liberal ideological bias is not the primary factor in shaping media coverage. The press, instead, is biased toward having a spectacular or interesting story that people want to read or watch or hear about. If you’re clever, you can manipulate the press into telling the story you want by making it seem fun and exciting, even if the story is incorrect or misleading. Given how easily the Trump campaign got the political press to take the bait here, there’s little question we’re in for a long campaign season in which it does it over and over again.

There’s another saying in journalism that’s supposed to be ironic: “Too good to check.” That’s when you hear something that sounds like a great story and you don’t check whether it’s true, because you want it to be true. You are not supposed to do this. But some narratives, it seems, are just too good to abandon.

Suddenly, it just tumbled out: "Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say."

That was former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s rebuke of businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, easily the best line of Wednesday night’s messy and awkward GOP primary debate. Ramaswamy, for his part, produced his own meme-worthy quote during a heated exchange with Senator Tim Scott: “Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting.”

Such was the onstage energy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum: Chaotic, sloppy, largely substance-free. Seven candidates desperately fought for fresh relevance; none of them came away with it. Rather than pitching themselves as the candidate who can beat former President Donald Trump, these Republicans seemed to be operating most of the time in an alternate universe, in which Trump was absent not just from the stage, but from the race.

Eight years ago, so many candidates were vying for the Republican nomination that the party took to splitting primary debates into two sessions: the main event and the undercard. The latter contest was mocked as the “kids’ table” debate. So far this time around, there’s only one unified debate night. Nevertheless, Trump has such a commanding lead over his challengers that, for the second debate in a row, he hasn’t even bothered to show up and speak. Voters have no reason to believe he’ll be at any of the other contests. Trump counter-programmed last month’s Fox News debate by sitting down for a sympathetic interview with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Michigan, where a powerful union—United Auto Workers—are in the second week of a strike.

All seven candidates who qualified for the debate—individuals with honorifics such as “governor,” “senator,” and “former vice president”—spent the evening arguing at the kids’ table. Barring some sort of medical emergency, Trump seems like the inevitable 2024 GOP nominee. As Michael Scherer of The Washington Post pointed out on X (formerly Twitter), the candidates on stage were collectively polling at 36 percent. If they were to join forces and become one person (think seven Republicans stacked in a trenchcoat), Trump would still be winning by 20 percent.

[Read: A parade of listless vessels ]

How many other ways can you say this? The race is effectively over. So what, then, were they all doing there? A cynic would tell you they’re merely running for second place—for a shot at a cabinet position, maybe even VP.

One candidate decidedly not running for vice president is Former Vice President Mike Pence, who has taken to (gently) attacking his old boss. Nor does former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie seem to want a sidekick or administration gig. Christie has staked his entire campaign on calling out Trump’s sins, and, so far, it’s not working. Earlier on Wednesday, Christie shared a photo of himself at a recent NFL game, with a cringeworthy nod to new Kansas City Chiefs fan Taylor Swift: “I was just a guy in the bleachers on Sunday... but after tonight, Trump will know we are never ever getting back together.”

At the debate, Christie stared directly into the camera like Macho Man Randy Savage, pointer finger and all, to deliver what amounted to a professional wrestling taunt. “Donald, I know you’re watching. You can’t help yourself!” Christie began. “You’re not here tonight because you’re afraid of being on this stage and defending your record. You’re ducking these things, and let me tell you what’s going to happen.”

[Here it comes]

“You keep doing that, no one up here’s gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We’re gonna call you Donald Duck.”

“Alright,” moderator Dana Perino said.

The crowd appeared to laugh, cheer, boo, and groan.

The auto-worker’s strike, and criticisms of the larger American economy, received significant attention at the debate. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum laid the strike “at Joe Biden’s feet.” Pence came ready with a zinger: “Joe Biden doesn’t belong on a picket line, he belongs on the unemployment line.” (Another Pence joke about sleeping with a teacher—his wife—didn’t quite land.)

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, once seen as Trump’s closest rival, stood center stage but spent most of the night struggling to connect as all the candidates intermittently talked over one another. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, perhaps trying to fight back against those who claim he lacks charisma, frequently went on the attack, most notably against Ramaswamy, who, in the previous debate, claimed his rivals were “bought and paid for.” Later, Scott attacked DeSantis for his past controversial comments about race: “There is not a redeeming quality in slavery,” Scott said. But he followed that up a moment later with another sound byte: “America is not a racist country.”

[Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams]

However earnest and honest Scott’s message may be, it was impossible to hear his words without thinking of the man he’s running against. So again: What was everyone doing Wednesday night? In an alternate reality, a red-state candidate like Scott, Haley, or Burgum might cruise to the GOP nomination. In a way, Fox Business, itself, seemed to broadcast tonight’s proceedings in that strange other world. The network kept playing retro Reagan clips as the debate came in and out of commercial breaks. And those ads? One featured South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—not a 2024 presidential candidate, but certainly a potential VP pick—making a pitch for people to move to her sparsely populated state. Another ad argued that the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes would be a boon to Mexican drug cartels. What?

It was all a sideshow. Trump’s team seemed to know it, too. With just over five minutes left in the debate, the former president’s campaign blasted out a statement to reporters from a senior advisor: “Tonight’s GOP debate was as boring and inconsequential as the first debate, and nothing that was said will change the dynamics of the primary contest being dominated by President Trump.” For all of Trump’s lies, he and his acolytes can occasionally be excruciatingly honest.

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Donald Trump is a deals guy. He rode his image as real-estate mogul and a maestro of transactions first to pop-culture stardom, then to the White House. Now a judge has ruled that much of that dealmaking was fraudulent: New York Judge Arthur Engoron found yesterday that Trump and his associates, including his sons Eric and Donald Jr., committed persistent fraud by toggling estimates of property values in order to get insurance and favorable terms on loans. The judge ordered that some of the Trump Organization’s “certificates,” or corporate charters, be canceled, and that a receiver be appointed by the court to dissolve some of its New York companies. This latest blow for Trump puts on record that his mythos of business acumen was largely built on lies.

This ruling on its own hinders some of the Trump Organization’s operations in New York State by cutting off Trump’s control of assets. But really, it is just a first step toward the broader business restrictions on Trump that New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking, Celia Bigoness, a clinical professor of law at Cornell, told me. And to the extent that this ruling shows how the judge feels about James’s suit, first brought against Trump last year, things are not looking great for him. In the trial set to start next week, the judge will determine penalties for the fraud committed: James has requested that those include a $250 million fine and restrictions that prevent the former president and some of his children from running a company in New York ever again. “Trump is synonymous with New York,” Bigoness said. Losing control of his New York businesses and properties would amount to “his home and the place that he has tied himself to shutting him out entirely.” It could also be hugely costly.

This week’s summary judgment is unusual, legal experts told me: The judge essentially determined that it was so clear that Trump had committed fraud that it wasn’t worth wasting time at a trial figuring that part out. Instead, the trial will be used to determine whether Trump’s New York businesses should be further limited as punishment for the fraud—and whether the other demands of James’s suit will be met. It’s somewhat rare for a summary judgment to get to the core of a case like this, and the judge’s decision was distinctly zingy and personal. Responding to Trump’s team’s claims that the suit wasn’t valid, Judge Engoron said that he had already rejected their arguments, and that he was reminded of the “time-loop in the film ‘Groundhog Day.’” In a footnote to his ruling, he quoted a Chico Marx line from Duck Soup: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

In another unusual move, the judge also included individual fines against Trump’s lawyers as part of the ruling, charging each $7,500 for bringing arguments so “frivolous” that they wasted the court’s time. Separately, Trump’s lawyers are trying to sue the judge (a long-shot attempt). Trump, for his part, posted on Truth Social that he had “done business perfectly”; he also called the judge “deranged.” Reached for comment, the Trump attorney Christopher Kise called the decision “outrageous” and “completely disconnected from the facts and governing law.” “President Trump and his family will seek all available appellate remedies to rectify this miscarriage of justice,” he said in an emailed statement. An appeals process from Trump’s camp could extend into the next presidential-election cycle. His team might also attempt to get an emergency stay to prevent the trial from starting next week.

This ruling, and the rest of James’s suit, are circumscribed to New York. Technically, Trump would still be free to spin up new businesses as he sees fit in another state, and he has holdings beyond New York. But even if he could legally incorporate a new business in, say, Florida or Illinois, it might not make financial or brand sense for him. The fallout from this case could wind up being very costly for Trump, so setting up shop elsewhere, although not impossible, could be a major financial hurdle. Plus, “New York is the place Trump wants to do business and has been doing business for forever,” Caroline Polisi, a white-collar defense attorney and lecturer at Columbia Law School, told me.

Yesterday’s ruling may do little to dampen Trump’s appeal among his die-hard fans, who have stuck with him through all manner of scandals, including a running list of criminal indictments. But it could puncture Trump’s persona. My colleague David A. Graham wrote today that the fact that Trump and his co-defendants, including his sons, committed fraud is not surprising. What is surprising, he argued, is that they are facing harsh consequences. “Trump’s political career is based on the myth that he was a great businessman,” David told me. “This ruling cuts straight to the root of that, showing that his business success was built on years of lies.” Indeed, when Letitia James filed suit against Trump last year, she dubbed his behavior the “art of the steal.”

Related:

The end of Trump Inc. It’s just fraud all the way down.

Today’s News

The U.S. soldier Pvt. Travis King, who sprinted across the border into North Korea two months ago, has been released into American custody. The second Republican presidential primary debate will be held in California tonight.   A federal judge struck down a Texas law that drag performers worried would ban shows in the state.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Driverless cars are a tough sell. Conor Friedersdorf compiles reader perspectives on the future of the technology.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI

By Alex Reisner

One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material. But few people outside of companies such as Meta and OpenAI know the full extent of the texts these programs have been trained on.

Some training text comes from Wikipedia and other online writing, but high-quality generative AI requires higher-quality input than is usually found on the internet—that is, it requires the kind found in books. In a lawsuit filed in California last month, the writers Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden allege that Meta violated copyright laws by using their books to train LLaMA, a large language model similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4—an algorithm that can generate text by mimicking the word patterns it finds in sample texts. But neither the lawsuit itself nor the commentary surrounding it has offered a look under the hood: We have not previously known for certain whether LLaMA was trained on Silverman’s, Kadrey’s, or Golden’s books, or any others, for that matter.

In fact, it was. I recently obtained and analyzed a dataset used by Meta to train LLaMA. Its contents more than justify a fundamental aspect of the authors’ allegations: Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Alabama strikes out. The banality of bad-faith science “My books were used to train Meta’s generative AI. Good.”

Culture Break

Courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Read. Libra, a fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, is a paranoid American fable that reads so realistically that it could almost be nonfiction.

Watch. Gareth Edwards’s new movie, The Creator (in theaters September 29), is set in a future where AI has already failed to save the world.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump’s fraud trial is set to go to trial in New York on Oct. 2, but a state supreme court justice dealt the former president a massive blow before the trial even started.

Read more...

“That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”

So wrote Arthur Engoron, a New York State judge, in an unexpected ruling late yesterday that threatens the heart of Donald Trump’s business empire. Engoron was referring in particular to arguments offered by the former president’s attorneys in the case, but his words describe many of the details of the case—such as the valuations of Trump’s properties and even the square footage he claimed they contained, both of which the court found were “clearly” fraudulent. Much of the reputation Trump cultivated as a business mogul was built on lies.

The surprise is not that Trump and his co-defendants, including his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, committed fraud. What is surprising is that he could finally be punished for it—and quite harshly. The scheme that New York Attorney General Letitia James alleged last year was simple. When Trump wanted to lower his taxes, he’d claim a low valuation for a property. When he wanted to get cheap loans, he would inflate the valuation. This allowed him to inflate his claimed net worth each year, which let him obtain loans on better terms by personally guaranteeing them. Evidence of this pattern had already turned up in reporting, especially by WNYC and ProPublica, and James’s case offered much more.

[David A. Graham: It’s just fraud all the way down]

Trump’s lawyers argued, in effect, that because there was no harm, there was no foul: The banks that loaned Trump money ended up making a profit (in part because they could charge higher fees to a customer whose companies had repeatedly gone bankrupt). To Engoron’s fury, Trump’s lawyers kept offering the same defenses even after they’d been thrown out in court. “Defendants’ conduct in reiterating these frivolous arguments is egregious,” he wrote, and fined the attorneys.

More consequentially, he also granted the attorney general’s request to cancel business certificates for Trump and his family. If the ruling stands, Trump could lose control of some of his marquee properties—including Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street, a prized downtown-Manhattan building. “The decision seeks to nationalize one of the most successful corporate empires in the United States and seize control of private property,” Trump’s attorney Christopher M. Kise complained. The ruling doesn’t actually amount to expropriation, as Trump would still own the buildings; he just couldn’t make financial decisions about them. The ruling also wouldn’t spell the end of Trump’s business, but it could force it to stop operating in New York State. (Trump’s properties sprawl across a range of different entities.)

Engoron’s ruling does not close the case out. Instead, it resolves some of the issues and narrows the questions for an upcoming trial, which will determine whether Trump has to pay a fine for overvaluing the properties. James has sought $250 million. This is a very large sum, though easily within Trump’s means if he is the billionaire he says he is.

[David A. Graham: This is not great news for Donald Trump]

The greatest blow to Trump may be reputational and psychological. He has claimed that the case against him is political persecution, and some of his supporters will find that compelling, but being found to be a fraud is no more an advantage than being indicted is. Because Trump has gotten away with this way of operating for decades, his fantasy world came to seem almost real. The idea that a judge might actually punish him seemed remote—both to Trump and to his detractors.

Though the civil case in New York has no direct connection to Trump’s other legal troubles, Engoron’s ruling suggests that the courts are now catching up to a man who has long behaved as though there would never be any consequences for his deceptions. Trump has tried to convince Americans that he won more votes than Joe Biden, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, that he had every right to abscond with classified documents and obstruct the federal government from recovering them, and that he was the greatest president in American history. This is a fantasy world, but the real world has ways of intruding on it.