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Are young people turning away from the Democratic Party in 2024? Will turnout be as high as it was last time around? What about the gender gap? Today I’ll do my best to address some pressing questions about how young folks will behave in November. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic:

The bone-marrow-transplant revolution Radio Atlantic: The crucial factor of the Stormy Daniels case Abolish DEI statements, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

The “Realignment” Mirage

What are the youths up to this election cycle? several readers asked me via email last week. Well, lately, they’ve been giving Democrats heart palpitations.

A handful of surveys from late last month suggested that Trump is performing better among young voters than he did in 2020—even, in some cases, better than Joe Biden. Some Democrats are worried about what Politico recently called a “massive electoral realignment.” For decades, Democratic candidates have secured younger voters by big margins. In the 2020 presidential election, for example, voters ages 18–29 broke for Biden by more than 20 points. So if young voters were to turn toward Trump, that would be an enormous deal.

But before Democrats freak out or Trump fans get too excited, let’s all take a nice, deep breath. Several other youth-voter polls from last month showed Biden on par with Trump, and even beating him.

“Following recent polls of young voters has been a bit like reading a choose-your-own adventure book,” Daniel Cox, the director of the nonpartisan Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, told me via email, when I asked him what he makes of the surveys that point to a realignment. “You can craft a completely different narrative,” he says, depending on which poll you see.

These surveys vary so much, in part, because polling young people can be tricky. Getting young people on the phone via the traditional cold-call method is a nightmare, because they don’t tend to answer (I get it: These days it seems like every call is a scam.) Lately, younger voters have been eschewing traditional party labels, and they’ve grown more cynical about the entire political system. These phenomena make it difficult to both identify younger voters by party and to get them to participate in a poll.

It’s unlikely that a total realignment is happening, Cox and other pollsters told me. Let’s not forget which voters we’re dealing with: Young adults today are less religious, more educated, and more likely to identify as LGBTQ than prior generations, Cox noted, which are all characteristics generally associated with left-of-center political views. “It’s hard to see this completely changing over the course of a single campaign.”

A brand-new poll from Harvard throws even more ice-cold water on the “great realignment” theory: Biden leads Trump by 19 points among likely voters under age 30, according to the poll, which was published today and is considered one of the most comprehensive surveys of young voters in the country. Biden is definitely underperforming among young people compared with this point in the 2020 election, when he led by 30 points. But today’s poll showed no hint of a Trump lead.

Instead, the bigger threat to Biden will be third-party-curious young people. In a recent survey of young voters from the nonpartisan polling organization Split Ticket, Biden led Trump by 10 points, and the young voters who did abandon Biden weren’t going to Trump—they were going to independent candidates like RFK Jr.

The real themes to watch in 2024, experts told me, are youth turnout and the growing gender divide.

Young people are less likely to vote than older Americans—that’s true. But the past three national elections have actually had really high young-voter turnout, relative to past cycles. In the 2020 general election, 50 percent of eligible voters under 30 cast a ballot, according to estimates from CIRCLE, a nonpartisan organization that studies youth civic engagement. Will more than 50 percent of eligible young voters show up to the polls again this November? Maybe: About 53 percent of young Americans say they will “definitely be voting,” according to the Harvard poll published today. That’s about the same as it was around this time in 2020, when 54 percent said they’d vote.

But some experts say that matching 2020 levels is a long shot. Biden and Trump are historically unpopular presidential candidates among all age groups. Given that, Lakshya Jain, who helped design the Split Ticket poll, doesn’t think young-voter turnout will be “nearly as high as it was in 2020.” That cycle was special, he says: “a black swan of events” during one of the most tumultuous times in America. The election followed four years of a Trump administration, and the start of a global pandemic. “I see this environment as much more like 2016,” Jain said, when turnout among young people was closer to 40 percent.

The other important trend is gender. More American men than women support Trump—and that gap is growing. Now it seems like the same phenomenon applies to young people. Among likely young women voters, Biden leads Trump by 33 points in the new Harvard poll; among young men, he only leads by six. (In 2020, Biden led young men by 26 points.)

This gender chasm may not actually be reflected in November’s outcome. But that, pollsters say, will be the possible realignment to watch. “It will make the youth vote less Democratic for one,” Cox said. And “a longer-term political gender divide could transform the character of the political parties.”

Related:

Are Gen Z men and women really drifting apart? Generation Z doesn’t remember when America worked (From 2022)

Today’s News

Twelve jurors were sworn in for Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial in New York; the selection of alternate jurors will resume tomorrow. A commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that it is “possible and conceivable” that Iran will reconsider its nuclear policies if Israel attacks Iranian nuclear facilities. In a new package of bills dealing with aid to Israel and Ukraine, the U.S. House revived legislation that would force TikTok’s owner to either sell the social-media platform or face a national ban.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Supercheap electric cars from China or an American industrial renaissance? Pick one, Rogé Karma writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: Helen Keller was funny, smart, and much more complex than many people know, Ellen Cushing writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Investigation Discovery

The Uncomfortable Truth About Child Abuse in Hollywood

By Hannah Giorgis

During Nickelodeon’s golden era, the network captivated young viewers by introducing them to an impressive roster of comedic talent—who happened to be kids, just like them … For nearly two decades, the network dominated not just kids’ programming, but the entire cable-TV landscape.

A new docuseries argues that at least some of this success came at a great cost. Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV explores troubling allegations of child abuse and other inappropriate on-set behavior during this run at Nickelodeon. The documentary builds on a 2022 Business Insider investigation into programs led by the prolific producer Dan Schneider, and on details from a memoir published earlier that year by the former child star Jennette McCurdy. (McCurdy, who doesn’t identify Schneider by name in her book but describes an abusive showrunner widely believed to be him, was not involved with the documentary.) Over its five episodes, the series offers an important record of how the adults working on these shows—and Hollywood as a whole—repeatedly failed to protect young actors. But Quiet on Set also, perhaps unintentionally, ends up creating a frustratingly tidy narrative that elides some crucial complexities of abuse.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Read. Our Kindred Creatures, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, explores why Americans love certain animals and are indifferent toward many others.

Pace yourself. Scott Jurek ran a 2,189-mile ultramarathon—the full length of the Appalachian Trail, Paul Bisceglio wrote in 2018. What can extreme athletes tell us about human endurance?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In case you haven’t heard, it’s Pop Girl Spring! And tonight is the big night: Taylor Swift is releasing her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. I’m thrilled, because I love a breakup album, and this one promises to be moody and campy in equal measure. (The track list includes songs called “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and “But Daddy I Love Him”!) For a really thoughtful unpacking of the album, I recommend tuning into the Every Single Album podcast from The Ringer, hosted by Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard. They have a preview episode up now, and a new one will be out in a few days.

Even if Taylor isn’t your cup of tea (gasp!), their other episodes covering new music from Beyoncé, Maggie Rogers, and Kacey Musgraves are delightful and informative, too.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In the criminal case now unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom, Donald Trump is accused of having a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels, finding a way to pay her to keep quiet about it, and then disguising those payments as a business expense. The facts are all very tabloid-y. They also took place before the 2016 election, long before January 6 or the “Stop the Steal” movement, or any of the more serious threats to democracy we associate with Trump.

But the Stormy Daniels case has distinct and simple advantages: In the other, more sprawling cases that deal directly with election interference, Trump’s lawyers have been remarkably successful at piling on delay tactics and are unlikely to go to court any time soon. But in the Stormy Daniels trial, the defendant has been summoned, the jury is being selected, witnesses have been called. And the D.A., Alvin Bragg, has honed his argument that the hush-money payments were in fact an attempt to interfere with the election.

In his indictment, Bragg lays out a detailed case for why the former president, in hiding the payments, intended to violate both state and federal election laws. It’s a comparatively indirect case that he has no guarantee of winning. It will not bring legal resolution to the central question of whether Trump interfered in the 2020 election. But it makes the trial much harder to dismiss as just an old grudge about an affair.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer David Graham tests the importance of the Stormy Daniels case with the Al Capone model: Can you most effectively address the most serious question of our political moment with the arguably least serious case? And he explains how, whatever the outcome, Trump might benefit from, and even enjoy, this new form of courtroom campaigning.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Newscaster 1: Donald Trump is facing more legal trouble.

Newscaster 2: He’s now facing four different felony trials as he runs for president.

Newscaster 3: Donald Trump is facing 37 criminal counts over retaining national-defense information.

[Overlapping news audio]

David Graham: It’s been overwhelming covering these cases. At the beginning, it was very exciting and sort of surreal, and then as they piled up, it became really hard to keep track of all of them.

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: This is David Graham, the Atlantic staff writer who’s following all of Trump’s legal entanglements.

You may remember the civil trials Trump faced in Manhattan. Now on appeal, they total over half a billion dollars in judgments.

But Trump also faces criminal charges in four separate cases: one in Florida about classified documents, one in D.C. about attempting to subvert the 2020 election, another about election subversion (that one is in Georgia), and, lastly, the one we are talking about today.

It involves hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. And the main and very important distinction between this case and all the others? Trump’s lawyers have failed to bog it down with infinite delays. It’s actually underway, right now—the first criminal trial of a former president.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And this week, why this one matters.

[Music]

Rosin: So this week is the first time a former president has faced a criminal trial. What’s happening, and how big of a deal is it?

Graham: You know, it’s funny. What’s happening now is just jury selection. So we say the trial has started, but in a lot of ways, the main event is still to come. And this is kind of the dry, boring stuff—but dry, boring stuff that matters so much down the line. But here we are, you know, in this case about Trump paying hush money and whether he covered that up and whether it was an attempt to interfere with the election, as prosecutors say.

Is it a big deal? I mean, it is. It’s so weird. In the Trump era, I feel like, we’re like, Is it a big deal for the former president to be on trial for this particular charge? Which is both a valid question and also kind of a bonkers one. Of course it’s a big deal, but also not as much of a big deal as some of the other things. So I have a hard time calibrating it myself.

Rosin: Well, we can even start more elemental. Is it a big deal that a former president is sitting in the defendant’s chair at a criminal trial? Like, is that alone a big deal? Never mind the substance of the trial, which we will get to.

Graham: I think that is a big deal. And I think it’s a big deal that has been a little—we’ve been already acclimated a little bit to that by him sitting in the defendant’s chair for so many civil trials, and it’s possible to maybe even overlook what a big deal it is just for him to be there.

Rosin: Although the penalty in a civil trial is money. The penalty in a criminal trial is a conviction, like an actual criminal conviction. So even on those grounds alone, this seems unprecedented.

Graham: Oh, absolutely. In those cases, what he stood to lose was money. And in this case, he stands to lose potentially his freedom and certainly his clean criminal record, and I think that’s pretty different.

Rosin: Can you give me a brief explanation of the case? What is this case about?

Graham: It is a little bit arcane. Let me see if I can sum it up without missing anything, but also not getting bogged down.

Rosin: And also tabloidy. It’s simultaneously arcane, tabloidy, and important.

Graham: Well, it’s literally tabloidy too. I mean, this involves tabloids. You know, people may remember the case: So, Trump had these sexual liaisons with Stormy Daniels and other women, allegedly. He denies them. But the basic allegation is that Trump paid to keep their stories quiet. This is a complicated maneuver involving these “catch-and-kill” deals, where the National Enquirer would pay for the rights to the story with the express purpose of not running it.

And then money. Trump would also pay them—the money would come from Trump via Michael Cohen, who was then his fixer. And these things were recorded as business expenses. And what the prosecution alleges is that, in fact, this was political: The whole goal here was to keep the public from knowing about these allegations of sexual relationships, and that was an attempt to interfere with the election.

Rosin: So, essentially, it’s two steps. The first step—the first allegation—is business fraud. Like, you’re paying money and covering it up. It’s like an accounting scheme.

Graham: Right.

Rosin: So that in and of itself is a crime, but in the scheme of things not a deeply serious crime. Maybe the reason this takes on a different level of importance is because the prosecutor, the D.A. Alvin Bragg, is trying to link that to a form of election interference.

Graham: Right. And so there have been all these complaints: Well, you know, this case isn’t all that serious. It’s often compared to the classified-documents case in federal court in Florida or the election-subversion case in federal court in Washington, D.C., in an unflattering way. And what Alvin Bragg has tried to say is, No, guys. This is also an election-interference case. Trump was trying to keep the public from learning this information, which would interfere with voters. And so this is just as serious as these other cases. This too is election interference.

And I think that’s maybe more of a moral point than it is about the actual substance of the law. But when we’re thinking about how serious this is, I think a question that people have to think about is, you know, what are the stakes in this case? And that’s the prosecution’s argument.

Rosin: Right. We do have all these complicated cases, like the one in Georgia about election interference. But people see the one in New York as less serious because if he’s convicted there, it would be for bookkeeping and for under half a million dollars.

Graham: Yeah, this is what I call the Al Capone objection. You know, they got Al Capone for tax fraud, not for being a notorious mobster. I don’t know what to say to that, because I think it is true and also not true. Like, you know, let’s be serious. This is not as serious as the election subversion we saw in 2020. But also, you know, if they’re able to prove that he broke the law, then he broke the law.

Rosin: So, can we stick with the Al Capone example for a minute? Because I think it’s, actually, a pretty important way to think about this. I’m not calling our former president a mobster, so just leave that aside for now. It’s just a useful legal metaphor. In cases involving RICO statutes and extremely complicated crimes, like the election-interference cases—they’re unbelievably complicated and, in fact, the president’s legal team has managed to bog them down for months and months and, in some cases, years.

Graham: Right.

Rosin: It seems like, just like Al Capone and tax evasion, here you have a case that, even though less on paper is at stake, it’s straightforward and achievable.

Graham: I think that’s exactly right.

Rosin: And so you do end up getting Al Capone on tax evasion for a reason, because that’s a gettable offense.

Graham: Right.

Rosin: And none of these other cases are likely to move along before the election, right?

Graham: That seems right. You know, we just don’t know. I think the wild card there is what happens in the election-subversion case. The Supreme Court is going to hear that next week. We’ll see how fast they rule. It’s possible that we could see that case moving before the election. But you know, unless they move really fast, I think it’s easy to imagine not.

Rosin: Right. I think the last thing I want to say about this Al Capone metaphor is: So is the idea that if there is cause to hold Trump accountable for not playing by the rules, for any kind of attempt to interfere in democratic elections, this case is the last chance to do it? The only chance to do it?

Graham: It seems that way.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So is that a reason why this case is important? Maybe.

Graham: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. So who’s convinced who now, at the end of this?

Graham: I don’t know. I think over time, I have become more convinced of this case being serious. And part of that is, you know, we heard these challenges early on to the statute of limitations and the application of the law, and there’s still places where Bragg’s team could lose this, but he’s cleared some of those bars, including, notably, the statute of limitations. So I think he’s quietly proven that this case is a little stronger than some of its critics said at the outset, and that has helped to convince me.

Rosin: Let’s get into the implications for the election. What does this mean for his campaign? What does it change for him having to sit in that defendant’s chair for the next few weeks?

Graham: You know, we’ve heard of a whistle-stop campaign or a front-porch campaign, and now he’s running a courtroom campaign.

Rosin: Did you make that up, or does everyone say that?

Graham: I don’t know if someone else has made it up, but I did just come up with it on the spot as far as I know.

Rosin: That’s good. Courtroom campaignTM.

Graham: He can’t be out holding rallies. He can’t be out doing events. He can’t be out glad-handing. And, you know, this looks like an impediment to him. It may actually be something he likes. He has been holding not that many rallies so far this season. They’re expensive. I think they’re a hassle. He drones on. They’re not necessarily always that successful.

And, you know, he can go to this trial, where there are gonna be dozens and dozens of cameras on the courtroom and on the courthouse when he’s coming in and out. And he’s using that to try to get attention. So he has to run in a different way, but maybe this is actually to his advantage and allows him to sort of create the kind of media spectacle that he loves.

Rosin: Interesting. So it’s to his advantage because, one, it’s a free media spectacle. Like, we’re talking about this. There’s probably hundreds of reporters in New York. He is going to get a lot of coverage. Are there ways that he’s leaning into it, making that part of his message?

Graham: Oh, totally. He is just loving playing the victim. You get this in his fundraising emails. He’s always been sort of a high-volume spammer on emails. But the kinds of emails we’ve seen the last couple months, I think, are a different thing. He talks about miscarriage of justice, and They’re persecuting me, and They’re coming for me because I’m between you and them. And there’s just tons of this stuff. And so there’s both that stuff, and then I think you see him trying to draw the court system into battles that he thinks will benefit him politically.

Rosin: What do you mean?

Graham: Oh, anytime he picks a fight with a judge. So in this case, he’s been going after Juan Merchan, you know, saying his daughter’s a Democratic operative, saying that he can’t be impartial, blah blah blah.

Rosin: So [he’s] trying to portray the justice system—I don’t know if it’s part of the deep state—but as a kind of political cabal organized against him.

Graham: Right. Well, I guess it works in a bunch of ways. Like, one, he’s saying that Alvin Bragg is George Soros’s favorite prosecutor. So he’s saying this is biased, and he’s saying that, you know, this is a Biden prosecution. There’s no evidence that Joe Biden is directing this. In fact, Joe Biden is trying to stay as quiet as possible about this. But that’s what he does.

Then he wants to draw the judge into things. And I think that works in two ways: One, he can argue that the proceeding is totally, you know—it’s a kangaroo court, and they’re out to get him. And then, if he can draw the judge into engaging, maybe he can make that point even more salient.

And so that’s what we saw, I think, in the civil case with Justice Arthur Engoron. He, you know, wanted Engoron, it seemed like, to fine him, to gag him, to say critical things about him. Because then he can say: Look. See, I told you. I told you they were out to get me, and the way he’s behaving proves that they’re out to get me.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, do you have a sense, or has it been reliably polled, how this plays outside with his audience? Because, for example, the mugshot. Like, he’s gotten so much mileage from that mugshot. It’s on a lot of T-shirts.

Graham: I think this works like a lot of Trump rhetoric going back to the 2016 campaign, where it really revs up his base. And you see in the polling, they think he’s being persecuted. They think the justice system is biased. They think that these judges are tools of the Democratic deep state, or whatever.

And on the other hand, it doesn’t do that well with other voters. It’s not winning over many independents. It’s turning some of them off. So, you know, he’s really good at turning up the temperature for the base but often at the expense, potentially, of turning off other people. And I think that’s going to be the case here, too.

Rosin: Interesting. And do we have any idea, in greater detail, how that could play out?

Graham: You know, it seems to be the case that a high-turnout election probably helps Trump. And there’s a lot of people who support Trump but are infrequent voters. And so he really does need to get those people fired up. But, you know, there’s a risk to it on the other side.

Rosin: Right. I see. One other thing I’ve noticed in keeping with this theme, as I’ve seen him on the campaign trail and in rallies the last couple months, is how much he closely identifies all of a sudden with the January 6—as he calls them, “the hostages”—talking about all of them as a group being unfairly persecuted. I feel like that’s coming up more and more in his speeches.

Graham: That’s exactly right. And he’s done that a little bit for a while, but it is becoming, really, a central part of his rallies. He’ll play these recordings of the January 6 choir. He talks about this hostage or sort of martyr attitude, and it’s become the centerpiece of a lot of these rallies.

Rosin: Yeah, and when I’ve seen him do it, I have to say, it feels less, who can know—I’m talking about intent here—less strategic than it is deeply felt and furious. It doesn’t feel like a ploy. It feels angry.

Graham: I think that’s right. I mean, it’s been interesting with a lot of Trump things that started out seeming like shtick and have started to feel like he really believes them, insofar as he believes anything. You know, I think about this with the way he talked about the media. Like, he blasted the media in 2016, and it was nonsense.

He loves the media, and he can’t resist calling reporters. But, over time, I think it curdled into a pretty serious enmity. And I think that’s true of the kind of deep-state rhetoric, and I think it’s true now about the court system. You know, after January 6, there was a certain amount of opportunistic talking about these people.

Rosin: Theatrics.

Graham: Yeah. I mean, and he waffled. He was like, On the one hand, I told them to go home. I called for a peaceful rally. But also, Why are they going after them? And also, Antifa revved this up. And you could see him sort of grasping for what the right messaging was. And as the court system has zeroed in on him, you see him coming around to that sort of hostage rhetoric.

[Music]

Rosin: Alright, well, depending on how long jury selection takes, this trial could be a matter of weeks. It could even stretch to a couple of months. After the break, David and I get into the meat of the trial.

[Music]

Rosin: So let’s get into it. How has Trump behaved in the run up to this trial?

Graham: He’s mostly been focused, as far as I can tell, on impugning the prosecutor and impugning the judge. So rather than going after the specifics of the evidence, he’s saying this is a political prosecution, this judge is biased.

And then, of course, [he’s] going after Michael Cohen, who we expect to be the star witness, who was his fixer, who was involved in these payments, lied about the payments to Congress, and was convicted of perjury for that and now has turned against Trump. And he’s saying, This guy can’t be trusted. He’s a convicted perjurer. Which has the benefit of being true.

We don’t see him so much going after the evidence. And part of that, I think, is a question of whether Bragg has evidence up his sleeve that we don’t yet know about. And so that’s one of the things I’m most interested to see: Does he bring something new to bear on this, or is it kind of a rehash of already public information?

Rosin: Right. Now, looking at the case, there are two parts of it, as we talked about. One is proving that the hush-money payments happened, that there was this complicated scheme involving the executives at National Enquirer to kind of shift money around—and Michael Cohen to shift money around, pay Stormy Daniels, and sort of hide that money and make it look like a legitimate payment. There’s so much public-record evidence that that occurred. Right?

Graham: Yeah. Like, the outline, you know—we’re gonna get details, but the outlines of that have been clear since fall 2016, when The Wall Street Journal first reported it.

Rosin: So is the difficult part of the case the second part of the case?

Graham: Yes. It’s tying this to politics and showing these weren’t a business expense, because it’s not against the law to pay someone hush money. It might be unsavory, but it’s not criminal. The question is whether there’s a falsification of business records and if the purpose was for political gain.

Rosin: So what’s in the public record is the existence of hush money. What remains to be proven is falsification of records and tying that falsification of records to election interference.

Graham: Right. And some of that falsification—you know, we have some of that. When Cohen appeared before Congress and perjured himself, some of that information came out. We saw some things that hint at what the case might look like. There have been, I don’t even want to say, like, intimations, but there’s speculation that Bragg has more evidence along those lines to prove that, you know, there was chicanery inside the business and this was a concerted effort. And that is something that we just, you know, we don’t know yet, and I think that will be really interesting to see.

Rosin: For you and others who are watching this case, what counts as a smoking gun? Like, what would be an incredible piece of evidence that the prosecutor could pull out?

Graham: You know, the gold standard would be a recording.

Rosin: And a recording saying what?

Graham: A recording of Trump saying, you know: Hey, Michael. Make sure we pay off Stormy Daniels. And then we’re going to put it in the books this way, so make sure that we do it that way so that nobody knows it’s to keep it out of the election.

Rosin: Right, right. All the way to the word “election.” That’s like the real smoking gun.

Graham: Yeah. You know, failing that, I think they’re going to have to rely a little bit more on witnesses like Cohen to say, This was the purpose, and potentially other executives inside the Trump organization or inside National Enquirer or—you know, or possibly Daniels. I don’t know.

Rosin: So this is a hard case to prove, both elements of it.

Graham: It’s a complicated case. I don’t know how hard it is, but it’s definitely complicated. This is, I think, where the Al Capone metaphor breaks down a little bit because if you’re evading taxes, you’re evading taxes. And it’s a little bit easier to pay that, but this is a multistep process.

And it’s a little bit more complicated. So yeah, it’s elaborate.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Okay. How does this fit, then, into the broader constellation of other Trump cases? Can we do just a very brief rundown of the cases so we know where to place this one and how to think of them all together?

Graham: I mostly tend to think of them in terms of gravity.

Rosin: Okay, so let’s do them in terms of gravity.

Graham: Okay, so I think this is good. I think this is, although for all the reasons we’ve said, totally a relevant case and one that’s important, also the least grave.

Next up, I would say, is the classified-documents case. People became aware of this in August 2022, when the FBI went to Mar-a-Lago to collect these documents. But, as we now know, it was the culmination of a long process where the National Archives recognized they were missing things—like a letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump—and asked Trump to return them. And Trump, allegedly, over a period of months, refused and tried to hide them, claimed he didn’t have them, wouldn’t cooperate with a subpoena to return them.

And that’s, in fact, what he’s charged with here: not so much absconding with these documents but trying to hide from the government that he had them and trying to obstruct them, including documents that were, apparently, really sensitive national-security documents dealing with things like nuclear defense and foreign militaries and who knows what else.

Rosin: So that’s serious for a different reason, not for the reason of election interference.

Graham: Correct.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Next one.

Graham: So we have these two cases that both deal, in one way or another, with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election: the federal case on election interference and the Fulton County election-interference case, in Georgia.

Rosin: And is there another one? Have we covered them? That’s it.

Graham: That is all, for now. (Laughs.)

Rosin: I guess the one thing that allows this one to rise in importance, even if the facts being discussed aren’t as important, is that it’s happening before November. Like, that fact alone makes it important.

Graham: Yeah, exactly. I mean, people have a right to know if the person they’re considering voting for president committed a felony or, for that matter, a serious misdemeanor before they go to the voting booth, if it’s going to happen soon after. And this might be the only chance for them to get that.

Rosin: Right. Although, David, do you think, maybe, we’re putting too much on this case? I feel like we’re maybe overlaying everything we know about January 6 and the 2020 election onto this criminal trial, which is actually about 2016.

Graham: I think that’s exactly right. Because the other cases seem bogged down and because we have seen Trump’s behavior and we saw January 6 and we saw what came before January 6, it’s impossible not to kind of see it in that light. And I think Trump is involved, kind of on the flip side of that, in the same way, because he is making all of these cases to be part of the same supposed conspiracy against him—you know, They’re all out to get him, and each of these is a tendril of that.

And also his argument that he can’t be held legally accountable—in all of these cases, he’s arguing that he shouldn’t be held legally accountable for one reason or another. And so, insofar as he is making it a question about rule of law, I think it’s hard not to also think about it as a sort of basic rule-of-law question from the other side.

Rosin: Yeah, I guess what’s hanging out there—both in the way that he’s delayed these cases and conducted himself in other ways—is: Is he above the law? So that’s the cultural question being tested. It’s not exactly the question that’s being asked by the prosecutor.

Graham: Yeah.

Rosin: Is it a weird, rare advantage that he’s running for president? Because he can just delay cases until he’s in office. I mean, that’s another incredibly unusual thing that we haven’t talked about.

Graham: Yes. So he can delay all of these cases, and then it plays in different ways if he gets reelected. If he gets reelected, he can, basically, instruct the Justice Department to end the two federal cases against him, and that would be that. And, you know, it’s not quite as simple as he picks up a phone, but it’s pretty close to that.

And you hear people threatening, Oh, it would be the Saturday Night Massacre. You would have all these people resigning. And I think what we’ve seen of the Trump team is they would say, And? So what?

It’s a little bit murkier in this case and in the Fulton County case. But you can totally be sure that if he wins, he will then say, I can’t be sitting in court. I can’t be defending these cases. I am the president of the United States, and I am busy doing this, and it’s improper to interfere with this. You’ve got to let me free on these things too, or you have to wait ’til after I’m president, or you name it.

Rosin: Right. So that would be yet another way in which things that were unimaginable X years ago were now perfectly routine.

Graham: Right. I mean, could you imagine, also, if Trump is president but has to be going to a Fulton County courthouse three or four days a week to sit in his trial while also trying to administer the country? I mean, I just can’t imagine how it would work.

Rosin: Yeah. I can’t, but I also couldn’t have imagined that somebody would be conducting a presidential campaign from the defendant’s chair in a courtroom. So lots of things we couldn’t previously imagine.

Well, David, thank you so much for walking us through this trial.

Graham: Oh, my pleasure.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, engineered by Rob Smierciak, and fact-checked by Sam Fentress. Claudine is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?

The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Later research found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.

Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.  

This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”

[Andrew Moseman: The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles]

The president has chosen which end of the bargain he’s willing to take. The Biden administration has left in place a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese vehicles (a measure initiated by Donald Trump), which has kept most Chinese EVs out of the U.S. even as they are selling like crazy in Europe. That probably won’t hold off Chinese EVs forever, which is why the administration is contemplating further restrictions. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” Biden said in a statement in February. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”

One view of this approach is that Biden is choosing to sabotage his own climate goals by cynically pandering to a tiny group of swing voters. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has observed, less than 1 percent of Americans work directly in the auto industry, whereas more than 90 percent of American households have a car.

The Biden administration, unsurprisingly, sees the situation differently. Biden’s team starts from the premise that decarbonizing the U.S. economy will be a decades-long effort requiring sustained political buy-in from the public. Chinese EVs might lower emissions in the short term, but the resulting backlash could help elect Trump and other Republicans intent on rolling back the Biden administration’s hard-won climate achievements. Keeping out Chinese EVs now, in other words, may be necessary to save the planet later.

“We ran this experiment before,” Jennifer Harris, who served as the senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, told me, referring to the first China shock. “We saw whole industries shift overseas, and Trump rode those grievances right to the White House. And last time I checked, he didn’t do much decarbonizing.” Already, Trump is trying to turn Chinese EVs into a wedge issue in the 2024 election; his recent “bloodbath” comments were a reference to what would happen to America if Chinese cars were allowed into the country.

That doesn’t mean the Biden administration is giving up on an electric-vehicle future; it just means that future will need to be built at home instead of imported from abroad. Threading that needle won’t be easy. Apart from Tesla, American automakers still make the bulk of their profits selling gas-powered pickup trucks and SUVs while bleeding money on EVs. (Last year, GM lost $1.7 billion on its EV business; Ford lost $4.7 billion.) Although the generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to speed up the pivot to electric vehicles, U.S. companies—including Tesla—aren’t close to profitably producing EVs nearly as cheaply as China can today.

The most straightforward way to buy time is by imposing further trade restrictions. But doing so effectively requires careful calibration: Expose American automakers to Chinese competition too quickly and they could whither and die, but protect them for too long and they might remain complacent selling expensive gas-guzzling cars instead of transitioning toward cheaper EVs. “The sweet spot is where you prevent a rapid shift of production to China while also holding the auto industry’s feet to the fire,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me.

Separating technocratic analysis of policy objectives from the vicissitudes of politics, however, is easier said than done. Trump recently called for a 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars; Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri recently proposed legislation to raise that to 125 percent. Even congressional Democrats—many of whom are facing close elections in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin—have recently begun pressuring the Biden administration to raise tariffs further.

That isn’t the only way political currents could undermine the transition to electric vehicles. In order to compete with Chinese EVs, American companies must, paradoxically, learn from Chinese battery makers, who have spent decades developing the best EV batteries in the world. The U.S. auto industry knows this, which is why in February of last year Ford announced a partnership with China’s leading battery maker, CATL, to open a factory in Michigan. Ford would pay CATL to, in the words of Ford’s chairman, “help us get up to speed so that we can build these batteries ourselves” and create 2,500 new manufacturing jobs in the process. (Such partnerships are common in the EV industry; Tesla, for instance, partnered with the Japanese company Panasonic to develop its batteries.) Everybody would win: Ford, CATL, American workers, the planet.

But the backlash was swift. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia called the Ford-CATL partnership a “Trojan-horse relationship with the Chinese Communist Party” and vowed to keep similar projects out of his state. House Republicans launched multiple investigations into the deal, claiming that it could pose a national-security risk. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was instrumental in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, has balked at the notion that a partnership with a Chinese company could qualify for the subsidies that that law provides.

[Zoë Schlanger: Joe Biden and Donald Trump have thoughts about your next car]

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Biden administration eventually announced new guidelines that could disqualify the deal, and others like it, from being eligible for some of the IRA’s tax credits and grants—a move that would make it much harder for American car companies to gain the expertise they need to produce better, cheaper EVs. “It’s ironic, really,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Our efforts to cut China out from every part of the supply chain might actually be what prevents us from competing with their EVs.”

Herein lies the Biden administration’s deeper dilemma. Decarbonizing the U.S. while retaining a thriving auto industry requires a delicate balance between tariffs and subsidies, between protection and competition, between beating the Chinese and learning from them. The prevailing sentiment toward China in Washington, however, is neither delicate nor balanced. That America’s leaders are committed to preventing another China shock is commendable. But going too far in the other direction could produce a different kind of avoidable disaster.

Last year was widely hailed as a breakthrough for the American worker. Amid a historically hot labor market, the United Auto Workers and Hollywood writers’ and actors’ guilds launched high-profile strikes that made front-page news and resulted in significant victories. Strikes, organizing efforts, and public support for unions reached heights not seen since the 1960s. Two in three Americans support unions, and 59 percent say they would be in favor of unionizing their own workplace. And Joe Biden supports organized labor more vocally than any other president in recent memory. You could look at all this and say that the U.S. labor movement is stronger than it has been in decades.

But you could just as easily say that worker power in America is as low as it has been in nearly a century. Despite all the headlines and good feeling, a mere 10 percent of American workers belong to unions. In the private sector, the share is just 6 percent. After years of intense media attention and dogged organizing efforts, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s still don’t have a contract, or even the start of negotiations to get one. Union membership is associated with higher earnings, better benefits, stable hours, protection from arbitrary discipline, and more—but most Americans haven’t had the chance to experience these advantages firsthand. In 2023, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, 60 million working people in this country wanted a union but couldn’t get one.  

How can this be? The answer, as I learned during my 25 years working for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, is that the story of organized labor in America is really two stories. On the one hand, established unions—especially those that emerged in the 1930s, when labor protections were at their most robust and expansive—are thriving. On the other hand, workers who want to unionize for the first time can’t get their efforts off the ground.

This is because the legal and policy shifts that hobbled the American labor movement were not primarily aimed at dismantling existing unions, at least not right away. Rather, they were designed to make it difficult to form new ones. Those efforts worked. In 1954, 16 million working people belonged to a union, and they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, nearly as many people are in unions—about 14 million—but they make up only 10 percent of the workforce. In other words, the numerator of unionized workers has held steady even as the denominator of overall jobs in the economy has grown dramatically. And all the support from the public and even the president can’t do much to change that. As hopeful as today’s moment might seem for workers, those hopes will not be realized without reversing the changes that laid unions low in the first place.  

A century ago, an even smaller portion of the workforce belonged to a union than does today, and it showed. Then, as now, income inequality had reached staggering heights. Industrial workplaces of the 1920s were police states, with corporate spy agencies, private armies, and company stores.

The tide shifted in workers’ favor during the Great Depression. In 1935, responding to years of rising labor militancy, Congress passed the Wagner Act, an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. The law gave working people robust rights to form and join labor unions and to take collective action, such as strikes. It created the National Labor Relations Board, tasked with ensuring that employers didn’t violate these rights. And it declared that protecting “the free flow of commerce” also meant protecting the “full freedom” of working people to organize. Overall union membership rose from just 11 percent of the workforce in 1934 to 34 percent in 1945.

[Morgan Ome: What the labor movement can learn from its past]

Then the tide shifted back. After the Congress of Industrial Organizations began organizing multiracial unions in the South, segregationist Southern Democrats, whose votes had been crucial for passing the Wagner Act, joined forces with pro-corporate Republicans to stymie the New Deal labor agenda. This effort culminated in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which stripped key labor protections from the Wagner Act. President Harry Truman denounced the bill as “a shocking piece of legislation” that would “take fundamental rights away from our working people.” But the Senate overrode his veto.

Taft-Hartley marked the beginning of the end of America’s short-lived period of strong organized-labor rights. It allowed states to pass “right to work” laws that let workers free-ride on union benefits without paying dues, which would help keep southern states low-wage and non-union. Taft-Hartley made it a crime for workers to join together across employers in “sympathy strikes” (unlike in Sweden, where postal workers refused last year to deliver license plates as a show of support for striking Tesla workers), or even across workplaces in the same industry. It also included anti-communist provisions that led to a purge of many of the labor movement’s most effective organizers, especially those most successful in promoting multiracial organizing. Taken together, these changes choked off the growth of working-class solidarity that was flourishing in other Western democracies at the time.

Taft-Hartley did not immediately doom the labor movement, however. It was more like a time bomb. Established unions remained strong and popular for decades, boosted by the conventional wisdom that a careful balance between labor and capital was the goose laying the postwar golden eggs. As Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his brother in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

The time bomb finally began to go off in the 1970s, when a confluence of factors—the stagflation crisis, the rise of Milton Friedman–style economic theory, the fracturing of the Democratic coalition—made anti-union policy much more politically viable. And corruption in some unions, laid bare by high-profile congressional hearings, cast doubt on the integrity of unions generally. Richard Nixon appointed pro-corporate justices to the Supreme Court who over the following decades would dilute labor protections even further than Taft-Hartley had. And in 1981, Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic-controller strike, signaling that the federal government would tolerate aggressive union-busting actions by employers. This in turn gave birth to a new “union avoidance” consulting business that taught bosses how to exploit the vulnerabilities that had been injected into labor law. Those vulnerabilities turned out to be extensive.

During the period between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, union organizing was relatively straightforward. Organizers would typically distribute cards to rank-and-file activists, who would collect signatures and return them to the organizers, who would file the signed cards with the NLRB. If a majority of a workplace signed the cards, the NLRB would certify the union. During bargaining, if the company and the union couldn’t reach agreement, the workers had various ways of exerting leverage, including calling a sit-down strike or blocking the employer’s goods from being accepted at other workplaces.

Today, even if a majority of workers sign union cards, the union has to win an NLRB election to be recognized. This process does not much resemble the free and fair elections we vote in every other November. The company can hire anti-union consultants, who will advise doing everything possible to delay that election, giving management time to intensify its lobbying efforts to scare employees out of voting yes. Thanks to Taft-Hartley’s so-called free-speech clause, employers have a broad range of tactics to choose from. For instance, although they are not technically allowed to threaten to close a warehouse if workers unionize, they can “predict” that the warehouse will have to close if the union goes through. They can make employees attend anti-union propaganda meetings during work hours, and they don’t have to let union organizers set foot in the parking lot to respond.

If a union overcomes these obstacles to win majority support, corporate higher-ups, though technically obligated to bargain in good faith, can drag their heels on contract negotiations with few repercussions. This helps explain why the Amazon Labor Union—which was founded in Staten Island in April 2021 and recognized by the NLRB in April 2022— still doesn’t appear close to having a contract. Labor might be regaining its cultural cachet, but after the triumphant vote is complete and the news cameras go away, employers hold almost all the cards.

[Adam Serwer: The Amazon union exposes the emptiness of ‘woke capital’]

This dynamic, rather than economic or technological shifts, is the key reason workers in more recently established industries are not organized. If Uber and Lyft had been invented in the 1930s, there would be a large, powerful Rideshare Drivers’ Union. If movies had been invented in the 2020s, the notion of an actors’ guild or a screenwriters’ union would seem absurd to most people. There is nothing more inherently “unionizable” about one job versus another.

Organized labor could still make a true comeback, one reflected not just in public goodwill but in actual union jobs. The Protecting the Rights to Organize Act, first introduced in 2019, is a comprehensive effort to restore the balance of power in the workplace—repealing much of the Taft-Hartley Act, including its so-called right-to-work provisions and its ban on solidarity actions. The PRO Act passed the House, but stalled in the Senate when a few Democratic senators refused to back filibuster-reform efforts in 2021.  

The PRO Act is a strong bill, and I fought for it during my time as political director of the AFL-CIO. But one of the lessons of the American labor movement is that legal change tends to follow cultural change. Recent trends are encouraging. Biden brags about being the first president to visit a picket line, and Trump, despite having pursued anti-labor policies while president, at least feels the need to try to appear pro-union. At the same time, with less fanfare, the strategic effort to dilute worker power continues apace: Red-state legislatures are rolling back basic labor laws, including those that protect children, and Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have asked the the Supreme Court to declare the NLRB unconstitutional.

The paradox is that it’s hard for labor law to become a top-tier political issue precisely because so few Americans have firsthand experience with union membership, or recognize what they have to gain from resetting the balance of power between workers and corporations. Overcoming that challenge requires recovering the wisdom that created the modern labor movement: that the fate of working people anywhere is the fate of working people everywhere. It happened once, nearly a century ago. The country was a very different place back then. But, for better and for worse, it was also much the same.