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Robert Menendez has held on to his Senate seat and retained the loyalty of many Democratic colleagues through past scandals. But, given the current political environment and the gravity of the charges he now faces, many fellow Democrats have had enough—and voters might turn on him too.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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Undermining the High Ground

Yesterday afternoon, a couple of hours after pleading not guilty to the charge that he had conspired to act as an agent of a foreign government, Senator Robert Menendez announced that “the government is engaged in primitive hunting, by which the predator chases its prey until it’s exhausted and then kills it. This tactic won’t work.”

The senior senator from New Jersey’s plea—and subsequent defiant statement—came just a few weeks after he pleaded not guilty to three separate counts of corruption. Menendez and his wife, Nadine, were accused of accepting bribes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping the government of Egypt and several businessmen. The original indictment was quite dramatic, peppered with talk of more than $500,000 of stashed-away cash and photos of gold bars found in his New Jersey home. Within hours of Menendez’s indictment, several state leaders, including the governor, called on him to step down. But Menendez is fighting hard against the allegations, even as colleagues turn on him.

Menendez has positioned himself as a victim, and has invoked identity politics in trying to defend himself. “It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat,” he said shortly after his initial indictment was announced. He has also accused “those behind this campaign” of smearing him as part of their political agenda: “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said in a statement last month. “Menendez has been using explicitly Trump-y talking points in his defense,” my colleague David Graham, who has covered the Menendez charges, told me.

The Menendez imbroglio puts the Democrats in a difficult position. The party has enjoyed some moral high ground as Donald Trump faces various criminal indictments. But having a member of their own party facing such galling corruption charges—and saying in his own defense that, essentially, the deep state is out to get him—may not only undermine that high ground, David said. It may weaken Democrats’ case against Trump’s own statements about being the victim of deep-state machinations, and it could damage voters’ faith in the Democratic Party.

This is not Menendez’s first time facing federal bribery charges: In 2015, he was accused of receiving gifts and some $750,000 in campaign donations from a Florida eye doctor. Those charges resulted in a hung jury, and ultimately the judge declared a mistrial. Menendez was able to maintain his seat through the turmoil, and he denied any wrongdoing. His colleagues, by and large, stood by him. But this time, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called on Menendez to resign almost immediately after his indictment, and other state Democratic leaders soon followed. Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey who has called Menendez a mentor and friend, urged his colleague to step down a few days after the indictment. Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, has reportedly confronted Menendez in the halls of Congress (or, more precisely, on an escalator) to tell him to resign. More than half of Senate Democrats have called on Menendez to resign, though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been more reserved. “The Senator has made it clear that he is innocent and will not resign from his position as the senior U.S. Senator for New Jersey,” Robert Julien, a spokesperson for Mendendez’s office, told me in an email.

Part of the reason that many of Menendez’s colleagues are turning against him this time, David explained, has to do with the relative severity of the charges. Bribery charges are never a great look, but the charges Menendez currently faces cut to the core of his committee work in the Senate, accusing him of using his position as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to work on behalf of a foreign power.

The calculations are likely political too: The last time Menendez faced bribery charges, Republican Chris Christie was the governor of New Jersey. If Menendez had given up his seat, Christie could have appointed a Republican in his place. Now the state has a Democratic governor in Murphy, who would presumably appoint a Democrat to replace him, David explained. Even so, Democrats are anxious about introducing uncertainty when they have such a razor-thin majority over Republicans in the Senate. Democrats have become more and more obsessed with beating their Republican opponents. That fixation on winning comes at a cost, David said: “If you are so focused on beating Republicans that you’re willing to look past corruption allegations, you ultimately undermine yourself, even if you can win the next election.”

But whether Menendez can actually win his next election is still a major question. He is a savvy backroom fighter, David explained, which has helped him stay in power in the cutthroat world of New Jersey politics. “There’s lots of backstabbing in ways that are totally legal, but not necessarily savory,” he said. Menendez has hung on through turbulence, but whether he can make it through this scandal intact will be, in part, up to the courts. It will also be up to voters.

Menendez’s trial is scheduled to begin on May 6, about a month before the primary race for his Senate seat. So far, Menendez has made no public indication that he won’t run for reelection. But his odds are not looking promising. He is being trounced in polls by Andrew Kim, a member of the House of Representatives who announced his campaign for Menendez’s seat the day after the senator was indicted. Menendez is innocent until proven guilty, but his constituents might just be ready to move on.

Related:

Bob Menendez never should have been senator this long in the first place. The case against Bob Menendez (From 2015)

Today’s News

A third former Trump-campaign lawyer, Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election-interference case. Israel escalated attacks on targets in Gaza, including a refugee camp. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said that more than 700 people were killed in a 24-hour period. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has dropped out of the Speaker of the House race, just hours after becoming the nominee.

Evening Read

Fryderyk Gabowicz / picture-alliance / dpa / AP

Britney Finally Tells Her Story. It’s Dark.

By Spencer Kornhaber

One of the most disturbing parts of Britney Spears’s story has long been the way people talk about her. As soon as the pop star was released from the legal guardianship of her father in November 2021, ending a 13-year ordeal that she has described as torture, some onlookers asked whether one of the most successful women on Earth could handle living as an adult. In barroom chitchat, meandering podcasts, and online comment sections, you can now find people claiming that freeing Britney—allowing her to, for example, choose how she spends her money or what she eats for dinner—was a mistake. They cite alleged evidence of erratic behavior such as the recent video that the 41-year-old Spears posted of herself dancing sexily with prop knives.

Usually such skeptics speak in a conspiratorial tone, indicating that they think of themselves as radical truth-tellers defying the pink-uniformed groupthink of the #FreeBritney movement. But Spears’s new memoir makes clear that this shaming and second-guessing, using the language of care and concern, is deeply conventional. She portrays herself—including with the title The Woman in Me—as battling the media expectation that she remain trapped in girlhood, virginal and helpless.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

A former inhabitant of the Chagos Archipelago—expelled when the U.S. built its military base there in the early 1970s—and his granddaughter in Port Louis, Mauritius. (Tim Dirven / Panos Pictures / Redux)

Read. A new book from Philippe Sands, The Last Colony, tells the story of the Chagossians, an island people who were expelled from their homes by the British and Americans.

Watch. The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+) tries to capture the essence of John le Carré. It’s one of our critics’ 22 most exciting films to watch this season.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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A father-of-four describes rockets flying overhead as he and his family flee to the border with Egypt.

I was born and raised in a war. I spent the first 20 years of my life in Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion. The war was always just a few months older than I was.

I have lost friends and family to war. I have seen my neighbors’ dead bodies. I know how it feels to learn that a bomb blast has damaged your school; to sleep and live with the sounds of gunshots and explosions, the sirens of ambulances and fire trucks; to suddenly flee when your neighborhood is targeted; to seek shelter when nowhere is safe.

I am far from alone in this. Children have always been victims of war—of religious conflict, armed interventions, fights between autocracies and democracies. When war comes, children suffer. That doesn’t mean we should accept their suffering as part of the cost of war. It means that their suffering is horrifyingly common.

[From the September 2022 issue: I smuggled my laptop past the Taliban so I could write this story]

As a child, I was taught how to protect myself, how to find safe spots under tables when my school and home were under attack. My siblings, my friends, and I learned how to run and escape targeted zones. We learned how to protect ourselves when we didn’t have our parents and elders by our side. We knew which time of day our city might be bombed. We avoided taking certain roads, thought to be full of land mines, in the hope that we could keep all of our limbs, unlike our neighbors’ kids. We learned to cover our heads with our hands and lie down if there were explosions. We learned to stay away from the windows of our classrooms. Our day-to-day was a gamble; we had to win every day.

In 2020, Save the Children, an international humanitarian organization, reported that an average of 25 children had been killed or injured in conflicts daily during the preceding 10 years; most of them were from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria—poor nations with broken infrastructure and health-care systems, where millions of children live in nonstandard homes or tents, or on the streets. The First and Second World Wars were devastating for children. In the conflicts of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of children have been killed, wounded, kidnapped, beheaded, raped, recruited by armed forces, or brutally disabled, losing limbs, eyesight, hearing, skin, parts of their face. Girls, in particular, are targets for violence. Many children in war zones experience some mix of anxiety, depression, aggression, behavioral disorders, loneliness, insecurity, and psychosomatic symptoms, and engage in self-harm, according to Save the Children.

I knew war before I was 5 years old. I’ve known its horrors from as far back as I can remember. After two decades of conflict, I fled Afghanistan for America during the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, as the Taliban returned to power. Because of the way the war fell apart, I was separated from my mother, my sister, and many other family members. The trauma is still with me. Even now that I live in a much safer country, I still feel scared.

[Read: The children Russia kidnapped]

My story is the experience of millions of children subject to war. Earlier this year, the United Nations reported that 1,500 children have been killed or injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded the country last year. The Israeli government has not said exactly how many children were among the approximately 1,400 people killed by Hamas on October 7, but we know that many were among the murdered. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described having seen images of a baby “riddled with bullets … young people burned alive in their cars or in their hideaway rooms.” And officials have said that nearly 30 Israeli children are among the more than 200 people believed to have been taken hostage in Gaza. Of the thousands of Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s retaliatory air strikes on Gaza, more than 2,000 have been children, according to officials in Gaza. Approximately half of Gaza’s more than 2 million residents are children, and many of them did not have access to basic food, water, electricity, and medicine even before the war started, because of a blockade by Israel and Egypt. Now many of them lack safe shelter too, and the humanitarian situation is only getting worse.

In the mid-20th century, international humanitarian law was put in place to protect civilians, and in particular children and women, in war. But too often, that means little. I wish there were more laws and other support systems to save children around the world who live in war zones, and the mothers, grandmothers, and sisters who are protecting them.

Children are too young to protect themselves from war. Their trauma is not an individual issue; it is society’s job to keep them safe. When children suffer, we have failed as a society. We cannot save one child by killing another.