Even before Bob Menendez was charged earlier this month with conspiring to act as a foreign agent, dozens of his fellow Democrats were calling on him to resign. Prosecutors say Menendez used his political office to influence American policy at the behest of the Egyptian government. He remains a senator—for now—but the latest indictment, coming after corruption charges last month, further complicates his fate. Last week, Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty to all counts, missed an all-senators classified hearing on Israel—no small indignity for a former chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.

According to the indictment, the senator from New Jersey passed along sensitive information to Egypt, acted as a ghostwriter for its officials, and accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes.” While researching my next book, a history of the foreign-lobbying industry in the United States, I didn’t come across anything quite like these allegations. They appear to be the first time that an elected federal official has been formally accused of acting as an agent of a foreign government.

Menendez has repeatedly professed his innocence and his loyalty to America. After his arraignment earlier this week, he released a statement calling the foreign-agent charge “as outrageous as it is absurd.” His trial is set for May, when Menendez says he’ll be shown to have done nothing wrong.

[Read: Why this time is different for Bob Menendez]

Even if the allegations are disproved, however, they could reshape how America prosecutes and punishes the kind of misconduct that Menendez is charged with. Until recently, the U.S. has largely ignored its best tool for deterring covert foreign agents. The case against Menendez signals an overdue willingness to use it.

Menendez’s alleged behavior might be novel, but we were warned of its possibility centuries ago. The Founding Fathers recognized that, in some ways, America is particularly vulnerable to foreign influence. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers. The danger may be greater today: Underpaid and overworked, U.S. officials are ripe for targeting by foreign powers eager to sway decisions in Washington. History, Hamilton noted, “furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalence of foreign corruption in republican governments.” Why would the U.S. be any different?

For years, these concerns appeared overblown. (Though not entirely: James Wilkinson, who served as the highest-ranking officer of the U.S. Army under each of the first four presidents, was revealed after his death to be an agent of the Spanish monarchy.) Then came the 19th century’s greatest foreign-corruption scandal.

In the late 1860s, Russia’s czarist regime was broke and desperate to sell Alaska, its easternmost province. So the Russian ambassador, Edouard de Stoeckl, secretly hired former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Walker to persuade Washington to buy it. Walker quickly obliged, publicly endorsing the purchase, planting articles in influential newspapers, and allegedly—no hard proof ever emerged—bribing legislators. Within a matter of months, Congress voted to back the purchase. When the details of Stoeckl’s gambit later spilled out, one critic described it as the “biggest lobby swindle ever put up in Washington.”

Walker’s offenses were shocking, but at least he had the decency to leave office before committing them. This sets him apart from the precedent that Menendez has now allegedly established. A more recent case, however, comes close.

In 1999, nearly 50 years after his death, Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York was revealed to have been a Soviet agent. KGB archives showed that Dickstein used his office to grant Soviets access to U.S. passports and, in one instance, to pass information about a Soviet defector who was later found dead in a hotel room.

Unlike other Americans recruited by the Soviet Union, Dickstein did not appear to have communist sympathies. Rather, Dickstein—whom Soviet officials nicknamed “Crook”—seemed interested only in money. “‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name,” Soviet officials wrote. “This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money … a very cunning swindler.” The Soviets eventually cut him loose, complaining that he wasn’t worth the price he demanded. Dickstein was never found out and spent the rest of his life in public office.

[Read: How the Manafort indictment gave bite to a toothless law]

The revelations were all the more surprising because Dickstein played an instrumental role in passing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, America’s best safeguard against people like himself.

In the 1930s, he led a committee that found that Ivy Lee—sometimes called the “father of public relations,” whose clients included the Rockefellers, Woodrow Wilson, and Charles Schwab—covertly advised the Nazis, helping them launder their image in America. At one point, Lee encouraged Joseph Goebbels to cultivate foreign reporters; he told other Nazis to publicly insist that Hitler’s storm troopers were “not armed, not prepared for war.” (One unsigned memo I found in Lee’s archive described Hitler as “an industrious, honest and sincere hard-working individual.”)

Thanks to these and other revelations, Dickstein and the committee played a key role in persuading legislators to pass FARA in 1938, which required anyone representing foreign governments, especially lobbyists, to disclose what they were doing on behalf of their clients. Dickstein is the only known member of Congress to violate the law he helped enshrine.

According to prosecutors, Menendez largely followed Dickstein’s playbook—passing along sensitive information, steering American policy for the benefit of foreign patrons, and accepting staggering amounts of money for his efforts, including in the form of gold bars.

The fact that prosecutors employed FARA to charge Menendez is a welcome development. The legislation was underused for decades, as foreign-lobbying networks—including those targeting sitting officials—flourished. To cite one statistic: Only three FARA-related convictions were secured from 1966 to 2015.

That wasn’t for lack of rule-breaking. A decade ago, Azerbaijan’s dictatorship and its proxies recruited American lobbyists, scholars, nonprofits, and others to promote Azeri interests without disclosing any of their campaigns. Other dictatorships and budding autocracies followed suit. As one 1990 government report found, barely half of registered foreign agents disclosed all of their activities.

When Donald Trump emerged as a political force, FARA experienced something of a renaissance. Although the former president was never accused in court of acting as a foreign agent, some of his closest allies—including his campaign manager Paul Manafort and National Security Adviser Mike Flynn—were convicted on related charges. (Trump later pardoned them both.) But those prosecutions never targeted a sitting official. That honor belongs to Menendez alone.

The renewed interest in FARA has highlighted the ways in which the legislation can be improved. The legal definition of foreign lobbying needs clarifying, and the Department of Justice should be empowered to use civil fines (rather than just criminal penalties) to target covert networks. Effective reforms have been proposed, but they’ve stalled in Congress. As Bloomberg Law reported, one legislator in particular was responsible for thwarting them: Menendez.

If proven guilty, Menendez will come to represent the culmination of the Founders’ fears—perhaps the most “mortifying example” of foreign corruption in U.S. history. But whether or not he’s convicted, Congress could use the attention his case has drawn to strengthen FARA, keep foreign lobbying in check, and give would-be offenders more reason to fear concealing their activities. If the charges against Menendez are a black mark, they can be a turning point too.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

In recent weeks, statements about the Israel-Hamas war have emerged from corporations of all kinds. Predictably, they have not all gone over well.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

​​A speaker without enemies—for now “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba.” The junk is winning.

The Logic of Speaking Out

Since October 7, more than 150 companies have made statements condemning Hamas’s attacks on Israel. A tracker compiled by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a business professor at Yale, shows the wide-ranging nature of the industries represented. Palantir, which works with governments on data and defense projects and has an office in Israel, took out a full-page ad in the The New York Times that said “Palantir stands with Israel.” Salesforce, which has offices in Israel, put out a statement condemning Hamas’s attack and outlining support for employees there. And brands with less obvious connections to the region, such as Major League Baseball, have issued statements as well.

At one time in American history, tech firms and sports leagues would not have been expected to wade into geopolitical issues. For many years, for better or worse, the role of corporations was principally to make money. But over the past decade especially, some employees and customers have started expecting, or even demanding, that companies speak out on social issues. The rise of the social web, and the eagerness among many brands to establish a direct line of communication with consumers, created an environment in which such a dialogue wasn’t just possible but seemed unavoidable. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement continued to grow, many corporations made statements about racial justice (and many, in turn, faced blowback from employees and consumers who saw the statements as insincere). After the fall of Roe v. Wade, corporations generally took a circumspect approach, more commonly issuing statements about what they were doing to help employees access health care than taking a stance on the morality of abortion. Now companies are once again navigating the tricky terrain of public statements as the Israel-Hamas war continues.

A lot of the pressure on corporations to speak out about political or social issues is coming from younger workers who believe that companies should operate with a sense of purpose beyond just making money, Paul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told me. And some are vocal: Employees at Instacart and Procter & Gamble have reportedly complained about their employers’ lack of immediate public statements on the Israel-Hamas war. And some workers are pressuring their employers—including major tech companies, according to a Washington Post report—to issue statements condemning the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, which fewer large corporations have done thus far. (Plenty of companies have issued mealier-mouthed statements falling somewhere in the middle, angering even more people.)

It’s important, Argenti said, for executives to think about why releasing a statement in a fraught moment makes sense for them. Companies that speak out on one issue without truly thinking about why they are doing so may get caught in a challenging loop. “If you don’t have a plan for how you’re thinking about” social issues, “then you have to talk about everything,” Argenti said, adding that speaking without a clear reason can lead to “wishy-washy statements that are just trying to get on the bandwagon … That is a very dangerous place to be, because you’re going to get heat.” There are plenty of good reasons, he argued, for an executive to issue a statement—because of business interests in a region, for example, or to speak out on an issue of great personal importance. But saying something just because everyone else is, because employees are outraged, or because you want to seem like the good guy in a charged moment may well backfire. “Corporations are not political entities that have to speak out on every issue,” he told me.

The proliferation of company statements in recent years might suggest that customers are clamoring for their favorite brands to speak up, too, but it’s not clear that the majority of consumers actually care all that much, especially lately. This year, 41 percent of consumers said that businesses should take a stand on current events, according to a poll from Gallup and Bentley University, down from 48 percent last year. Forrester, a research and analysis firm, saw a dip for the first time in four years in the number of surveyed adults who say they “regularly purchase from brands that align with their personal values.” There are certain issues that consumers tend to think companies should comment on: 55 percent of people said companies should speak up about climate change, the Gallup and Bentley polling found. But just 27 percent of people said that companies should speak up about international conflicts (however, these data were gathered before the Israel-Hamas war began).

Businesses aren’t the only ones making statements—or taking heat for their stances. Universities, celebrities, and even many individuals with large followings on social media have shared public statements on the conflict in recent weeks. Sam Adler-Bell, writing about statement mania in New York magazine, suggested that part of the compulsion to speak out has to do with the sense of helplessness many feel about the war and their own ability to affect its outcome. “When our government is this unresponsive, it makes sense that Americans look closer to home for moral clarity. Powerless to influence actual policy outcomes, we settle for battling over discourse,” he writes.

Corporations exist to make a profit, and they sell goods and services that end up shaping our culture. But their role is also slowly morphing into something more personal—and much wider in scope than it once was. Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor tracking statements, told me that in his view, some of the pressure to speak out may come from the role that business leaders play in a time of deteriorating trust in politicians, media, and the clergy. “CEOs have become pillars of trust in society,” he said. The notion of CEOs as America’s hope for moral leadership may be enough to make skeptics raise an eyebrow, but the decline in public trust is worrying and real.

Even for the corporations whose CEOs are driven primarily by a mission in the public interest, more often than not, opining on issues of global foreign policy is of questionable value. Corporations are already deeply embedded in the political system because of their lobbying power and ability to influence regulations. “That’s enough,” Argenti said. “Do we want them involved in thinking about political issues,” too?

Related:

What conservatives misunderstand about radicalism at universities Beware the language that erases reality.

Today’s News

Mike Johnson was elected speaker of the House with unanimous Republican support. Hurricane Otis made landfall in Mexico as a Category 5 storm. Michael Cohen took the stand again today in Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial after testifying yesterday that the former president instructed him to inflate the value of certain assets.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Zoë Schlanger explores the invisible force keeping carbon in the ground. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers readers’ thoughts on what Israel can learn from America’s 9/11 response.

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Evening Read

The Asahi Shimbun / Getty

What If There’s a Secret Benefit to Getting Asian Glow?

By Katherine J. Wu

At every party, no matter the occasion, my drink of choice is soda water with lime. I have never, not once, been drunk—or even finished a full serving of alcohol. The single time I came close to doing so (thanks to half a serving of mulled wine), my heart rate soared, the room spun, and my face turned stop-sign red … all before I collapsed in front of a college professor at an academic event.

The blame for my alcohol aversion falls fully on my genetics: Like an estimated 500 million other people, most of them of East Asian descent, I carry a genetic mutation called ALDH2*2 that causes me to produce broken versions of an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, preventing my body from properly breaking down the toxic components of alcohol. And so, whenever I drink, all sorts of poisons known as aldehydes build up in my body—a predicament that my face announces to everyone around me.

By one line of evolutionary logic, I and the other sufferers of so-called alcohol flush (also known as Asian glow) shouldn’t exist.

Read the full article.

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Lawyers for Donald Trump tied to undermine Michael Cohen's credibility during high-stakes fraud case.

Louisiana's Mike Johnson won with 220 votes in his favour in the lower chamber of Congress.

When Representative Mike Johnson arrived in Congress in 2017, he received an important piece of advice from a fellow Louisianan, Representative Steve Scalise. “Be careful about your early alliances that you make,” Scalise told Johnson, as the younger Republican recalled in a C-SPAN interview that year. Avoid getting “marginalized or labeled in any way.”

Six years later, Johnson has followed that advice all the way to the House speakership, reaching a post that is second in line to the presidency faster than any other lawmaker in modern congressional history. Staunchly conservative and closely aligned with former President Donald Trump, the 51-year-old former talk-radio host made few headlines and fewer enemies as he climbed the ranks of his party.

With a 220–209 House vote this afternoon, Johnson was able to forge a consensus that eluded three previous aspirants—including his own mentor, Scalise—to replace Kevin McCarthy. He earned unanimous support from Republican members, who stood and applauded when he clinched a majority of the chamber. His victory ends a weeks-long power struggle that immobilized the House as a war started in the Middle East and a government shutdown loomed.

Johnson’s win was as sudden as it was improbable. Early yesterday afternoon, he lost a secret-ballot vote to become the House GOP’s third speaker nominee in as many weeks. But the winner of that tally, Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, faced immediate backlash from social conservatives and Trump allies over his support for same-sex marriage and his 2021 vote to certify Joe Biden’s election as president. More than two dozen Republicans told Emmer that they would not support him in a public floor vote, putting him in the same perilous position as the previous GOP speaker nominee, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. While Emmer was trying to win them over, Trump denounced him as “a globalist RINO.” Emmer’s nomination was dead after just four hours.

[David A. Graham: The House Republicans’s new litmus test]

As the fifth-ranking House GOP leader, Johnson was next in line. Late last night, he captured the nomination in the second round of balloting. His victory was far from unanimous, but rank-and-file Republicans who had initially voted against Johnson, apparently weary after weeks of infighting, decided to support him.

Johnson’s ascent is a product of both the GOP’s ideological conformity and its ongoing loyalty to Trump. His record in the House is no more moderate than Jordan’s, whose preference for antagonism over compromise turned off an ultimately decisive faction of the party. Both Johnson and Jordan served as chairs of the Republican Study Committee—the largest conservative bloc in the House—and played key roles in Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in 2020. Johnson enlisted Republican lawmakers to sign a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to allow state legislatures to effectively nullify the votes of their citizens. Despite Johnson’s involvement, he won the support of at least one Republican, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, who had refused to vote for Jordan, because the Ohioan didn’t acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s win.

For electorally vulnerable House Republicans, Johnson’s relative anonymity was an asset. They rejected Jordan in large part because they feared that his notoriety and uncompromising style would play poorly in their districts. By contrast, Johnson, who heeded Scalise’s advice to avoid being “marginalized or labeled,” comes across as mild-mannered and polite. He could be harder for Democrats to demonize. Johnson is so little known that operatives at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which sent out a flurry of statements criticizing each successive speaker nominee, were still combing through his record and listening to old recordings of his radio show this morning. “Mike Johnson is Jim Jordan in a sports coat,” a spokesperson, Viet Shelton, told me. “Electing him as speaker would represent how the Republican conference has completely given in to the most extreme fringes of their party.”

The next few weeks will test whether the inexperienced Johnson is in over his head, and just how far to the right Johnson is willing to push his party. “You’re going to see this group work like a well-oiled machine,” Johnson, flanked by dozens of his GOP colleagues, assured reporters after securing the nomination last night. He’ll have plenty of doubters. The new speaker will be leading the same five-vote majority that routinely rebuffed McCarthy, forcing him to rely on Democrats to pass high-stakes legislation.

[Read: The real-world consequences of the House speaker fight]

Congress faces a November 17 deadline to avoid a government shutdown—the result of a five-week extension in funding that ultimately cost McCarthy his job. Johnson has circulated a plan to Republicans that suggested he would support another stopgap measure, for either two or five months, to buy time for the House and Senate to negotiate full-year spending bills.

He’ll also confront immediate pressure to act on the Biden administration’s request for more than $100 billion in aid to Israel and Ukraine. Like Jordan, Johnson has supported aid for Israel but has opposed additional Ukraine funding. “We stand with our ally Israel,” Johnson said last night; he made no mention of Ukraine.

If the GOP holds on to its majority next year, Johnson would have a say in whether the House certifies the presidential winner in 2024. When a reporter asked him last night about his role in helping Trump try to overturn the 2020 election, the Republicans around him, unified and jubilant for the first time in weeks, started to jeer. A few members booed the buzzkill in the press corps. “Shut up!” yelled one lawmaker, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina. Johnson, the conservative without enemies, merely shook his head and smiled. “Next question,” he replied. “Next question.”

One paradox of the current House Republican majority, and a sign of the deep cleavages within it, is that having sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election can be both disqualifying and essential to becoming speaker of the House.

After Jim Jordan of Ohio’s campaign to become speaker flamed out, The Washington Post reported that one reason some colleagues refused to vote for him was his vocal role in trying to prevent the inauguration of Joe Biden. Following Jordan’s exit, nine Republicans announced bids for the role, seven of whom had voted not to certify the 2020 election.

The next GOP nominee, however, was Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who voted in favor of certifying the election. That vote—on a matter for which there was no evidence of fraud and no evidence of theft—helped doom Emmer, who withdrew without even seeing a floor vote. Former President Donald Trump, along with some allies, mobilized to block Emmer, citing his certification vote, criticism of Trump after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and perceived weak defense of Trump amid his 91 felony charges.

[Read: The threat to democracy is coming from inside the U.S. House]

The next man up is Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Some observers speculate that Johnson, the caucus’s fifth choice, might actually manage to obtain the gavel in part because of fatigue: Republicans understand how bad the failure to elect a speaker is, both for governance and for public appearance. Johnson also hasn’t made as many enemies as the prior nominees, in part because he’s only been in Congress since 2016. But Johnson also has cachet in the MAGA fringe of the House and with Trump, because he was, as The New York Times described him last year, “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” to certifying the election.

A certain logic dictates that the leader of the House GOP would be an election denier, because the median GOP member is. In 2021, 139 House Republicans voted not to certify the election, and 109 of them remain in the House out of 221 current total Republicans. Of the GOP members who have been newly elected since, several are election deniers. (One, Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, was even present at the Stop the Steal rally before the riot.) But what is striking is how a failed vote nearly three years ago has become a central issue in the weeks-long speaker fight.

[David A. Graham: The wackadoodle wave]

Kevin McCarthy, the recently deposed speaker, fit the bill, having voted not to certify. But McCarthy is widely viewed as an institutionalist, so his vote garnered him neither much credibility with conservatives nor the condemnation it deserved among some Democratic and mainstream observers. For better or worse, McCarthy’s vote was treated as cynical, insincere politicking. (It didn’t help that he was publicly bullied into signing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court challenging the results in four states.)

But Johnson was not just a member going along with the election denial for political expediency. He was the intellectual force—such as it was—behind one major prong of the denial. Although Johnson is mild-mannered and little-known outside Congress, he’s practically just Jim Jordan with a suit jacket, conservative glasses, and a less hectoring voice.

Johnson, a constitutional lawyer by profession, concocted what he called a “third option” to allow Republicans to challenge the election without endorsing the wildest claims of flipped votes and Venezuelan interventions. Instead, as the Times reported in detail, he argued that the way some states had changed voting procedures in response to the coronavirus pandemic was unconstitutional. Delivered in a careful way, this seemed like a lawyerly argument, but the intended effect was radical: It aimed to have the votes of several key states that voted for Biden simply thrown out, disenfranchising millions of Americans and handing Trump reelection. (The premise was also shaky; the number of votes affected by the changes wouldn’t have flipped the states.)

[Read: ‘We put sharp knives in the hands of children’]

When Texas’s attorney general made a similar argument to the U.S. Supreme Court, Johnson wrote an amicus brief in support of it and rounded up House Republicans to sign it, using an implicit threat: He said that Trump would “be anxiously awaiting the final list” of signers to review. According to the Times, the lawyer for House Republican leaders said that Johnson’s arguments didn’t hold water, but he still managed to get 125 members to sign. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court rejected the argument in December 2020, saying that Texas had no standing to sue.

Having run out of other options, many of the same Republicans decided to vote on January 6 not to certify the election. Johnson put out a phenomenally disingenuous statement explaining that vote, in which he spread claims that undermined faith in elections despite a lack of evidence or legal grounding, all in the name of building faith. “Our extraordinary republic has endured for nearly two and a half centuries based on the consent of the governed,” he and 36 colleagues wrote. “That consent is grounded in the confidence of our people in the legitimacy of our institutions of government. Among our most fundamental institutions is the system of free and fair elections we rely upon, and any erosion in that foundation jeopardizes the stability of our republic.” Johnson also told The New Yorker, apparently with a straight face, that he “genuinely believe[d]” that Trump was challenging the election on principle and not just to stay in power.

Last night, after Johnson was designated the speaker nominee, a reporter asked him about his role in trying to overturn the election. His colleagues jeered at the reporter while Johnson smirked and then said, “Next question.” The dismissiveness is unwarranted, especially when three former lawyers for Trump have pleaded guilty to crimes related to election subversion just in the past week. But Republican members don’t want to talk about the topic, because they know that election denial is not popular with the American people. Within the GOP caucus, however, it’s not just mainstream—it might be a prerequisite for leadership.

The symmetry is striking: two lawyers, two different eras of Donald Trump’s career, and two courtrooms in different regions of the country. The lessons from Jenna Ellis and Michael Cohen, however, are the same. Loyalty to Trump is seldom returned, with disastrous results for those who offer it.

In an Atlanta courtroom today, Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Trump, pleaded guilty to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements. She agreed to five years’ probation and will pay restitution and testify in future cases. Ellis is the third lawyer—following Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro—to plead guilty in the past week as part of the wide-reaching racketeering case over attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. But she is the first to make a statement in court as she entered her plea, and what she said was revealing.

“As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion. “If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse.”

[David A. Graham: Another domino falls in Georgia]

Also earlier today, 750 miles north, in Manhattan, Michael Cohen was testifying as the star witness for the New York attorney general’s office in a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump. Like Ellis, Cohen worked as a lawyer for Trump, engaging in actions on the fringes of the law; like Ellis, he is now a convicted felon.

Ellis’s remarks today echoed what Cohen told the House Oversight Committee in February 2019: “I regret the day I said ‘yes’ to Mr. Trump. I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way. I am ashamed of my own failings, and I publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York.”

If Ellis and Cohen are not in good company, they are at least in big company. Over the years, many people have agreed to work for Trump and put their reputations, to say nothing of criminal records, on the line for him. The former president demands near-total fealty, browbeating and punishing allies for any deviations. (Just ask Representative Tom Emmer, who became the GOP’s latest nominee for speaker of the House today, and then almost immediately became the former nominee, after Trump blasted him on his social-media site.) But when these loyal lieutenants need the favor repaid, Trump ghosts them.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Donald Trump—a guide]

This one-way loyalty has burned boldface names and relative nobodies alike. Many of the people who served in Trump’s administration or served as his allies in Congress have found themselves diminished and sometimes legally ensnared. Many of the people convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol have expressed anger at Trump and said they felt hoodwinked by him. He has floated the idea of pardoning them if he regains the presidency. Even if he wins, they should know that his track record of following through is bad.

Trump tried to publicly intimidate Cohen into friendly testimony, but didn’t offer a federal pardon that would have prevented a conviction or spared his former fixer prison time. In Ellis’s case, she complained that Trump wasn’t doing much to help her raise funds for her legal defense, even though she was being targeted for working on his behalf. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said on her podcast last month. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Ellis’s plea deal appears to be especially bad news for Rudy Giuliani, yet another former attorney who debased himself on Trump’s behalf and was then charged in Fulton County. Ellis worked closely with Giuliani, and though she did not mention him by name in her statement in court, she pointedly said she had relied on the wisdom of more experienced attorneys—a possible preview of testimony incriminating Giuliani for his role in the election-subversion push.

[Mark Leibovich: The most pathetic men in America]

Giuliani, ironically enough, has experienced some of the same abandonment that stung Ellis. Giuliani has begged the former president for legal assistance as well as millions in payment for legal services rendered as part of the election schemes, according to The New York Times: “Among those who remain close to Mr. Giuliani, there is bafflement, concern and frustration that the former mayor, who encouraged Mr. Trump to declare victory on election night before all the votes were counted, has received little financial help.” Trump has since agreed to hold a pair of fundraisers on Giuliani’s behalf, but the amounts raised still seem to pale against both what Giuliani believes he is owed by Trump and what he owes to his own lawyers.

The mystery is why people keep agreeing to work for Trump despite the hazards. Cohen at least got rich out of his long employment with Trump. What Ellis thought she was getting is less clear, other than public attention that was tainted with ridicule from the start. Trump does occasionally bestow favors on those who jump on grenades for him. Some of the aides who waded most deeply in the muck for Trump received presidential pardons, including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Steve Bannon.

But these are exceptions. More often, even those who place themselves in grave legal or reputational danger end up facing it alone. “I failed to do my due diligence,” Ellis said today of her legal work for Trump in 2020. She could just as easily have been talking about the personal risks she took when she chose to work for him—despite ample warning about how things were likely to turn out.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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:

What’s the alternative to a ground offensive in Gaza? The great underappreciated driver of climate change A humanist manifesto

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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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.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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