After a deluge of record-breaking rainfall this week, citizens of the United Arab Emirates and Oman are still trying to return to regular life. The storms forced schools, offices, and businesses to close, transformed the tarmac of Dubai’s international airport into a rippling sea, and killed more than 20 people across both nations. The downpour seemed almost apocalyptic: On Tuesday, the UAE received the amount of rain that usually falls in an entire year.

Early reports of the weather event prompted some speculation that it was worsened by a controversial weather-modification technology. The practice, known as cloud seeding, involves spraying chemical compounds into the air in an effort to wring more rain out of the sky. The United Arab Emirates carries out hundreds of these operations every year in an effort to supplement its water resources in the arid landscape. Exactly how well cloud seeding actually works is an active debate among scientists, but the technique can’t produce rain clouds out of thin air—only enhance what’s already there.  

The consensus, for now, seems to be that cloud seeding is unlikely to have contributed significantly to this week’s historic inundation. (The UAE’s meteorology agency said no seeding missions were conducted before the storm.) But the event raises anew some fundamental questions about interfering with nature. Cloud seeding is a type of geoengineering, a set of technologies aimed deliberately at influencing or altering Earth’s climate systems. The warmer our planet becomes, the more attractive geoengineering seems as a way to slow or endure the effects of climate change—and the less accurately we can predict its effects. Scientists can’t be sure that playing God with the atmosphere won’t cause human suffering, even if it is intended to alleviate it.

In the case of cloud seeding, humans have been playing God for decades. The technique dates back to the 1940s, and has been deployed regularly around the world since to provide relief to regions parched by drought, clear skies ahead of Olympic Games, and give ski resorts an extra inch of snow. Scientists have been studying cloud seeding all along, but they’ve only recently managed to document how the technique might actually work, distinguishing between natural precipitation and precipitation that resulted from human intervention. Experts believe that seeding can squeeze out a small amount of additional precipitation, but it is “notoriously difficult” to determine how well it worked in any particular instance, Janette Lindesay, a climate scientist at Australian National University, told me.

[Read: The chemist who thought he could harness hurricanes]

The basics of cloud seeding are straightforward, Lindesay said: If you want rain, you release chemicals that encourage clouds to produce larger water droplets, which are more likely to reach the ground. If you want to suppress rain, you use chemicals that foster the creation of smaller droplets. But the simplicity belies the complicated science and high stakes of manipulating the atmosphere in the 21st century. The 2020s are becoming defined by a warmer atmosphere capable of holding more moisture, conditions that can lead to more extreme and unprecedented weather events, including intense rainfall. Add in geoengineering, and things can get risky. “We are in territory now where we can’t necessarily rely on past experience and past outcomes to inform us,” Lindesay said, of “what is likely to happen when we intervene.”

As geoengineering goes, cloud seeding is a rather limited technique, with small effects confined to small geographical areas. (That’s part of the case against seeding as a significant contributing factor to this week’s flooding in the Middle East; as Amit Katwala pointed out in Wired this week, parts of the UAE where seeding typically does not occur experienced torrential rain too.) But it can still be fraught. Scientists continue to debate whether cloud seeding in one region can have consequences for another. And at a time when droughts are becoming more common, rain is a precious commodity with geopolitical import. In recent years, Iran has accused the UAE and Israel, which has its own seeding experiments, of stealing rain away.

Reports that cloud seeding caused this week’s flooding were likely erroneous, but the reaction they inspired “represents a healthy kind of skepticism about what happens when we interfere with natural systems,” Laura Kuhl, a public-policy professor at Northeastern University who studies climate adaptation, told me. That’s particularly true, she said, when you consider forms of geoengineering premised on producing large-scale effects. Scientists have proposed injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space, preventing it from reaching Earth’s surface. The resulting aerosols could linger in the stratosphere for years, shifting at the whims of the wind. Similar concerns surround another geoengineering technique that involves spraying salt compounds into the air to brighten clouds, which would in turn bounce sunlight back into space. This month, scientists conducted a secretive test of this technology, the first of its kind in the United States. The field is “moving a lot faster than it used to,” Juan Moreno-Cruz, a climate-policy researcher at the University of Waterloo, told me.

[Read: The very optimistic new argument for dimming the sky]

After further research, some geoengineering techniques may well turn out to be useful ways to mitigate or adapt to climate change. But they can’t address its root cause: the burning of fossil fuels, and failure to reduce greenhouse emissions. Many climate experts see geoengineering as a last resort. As our changing atmosphere continues to dramatically drench some parts of the planet and leave others parched for too long, that last resort might start to seem like a more appealing option—even as the consequences of getting it wrong become ever more dire.

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:

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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.

American society has a confused, contradictory relationship with animals. Many dog owners have no compunction about eating feedlot-raised pigs, animals whose intelligence, sociality, and sentience compare favorably with their shih tzus and beagles. Some cat lovers let their outdoor felines contribute to mass bird murder. A pescatarian might claim that a cod is less capable of suffering than a chicken. Why do some species reside comfortably within our circles of concern, while others squat shivering beyond the firelight, waiting for us to welcome them in?  

In Our Kindred Creatures, their meticulously researched history of the dawn of the animal-rights movement, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy argue that America’s animal attitudes were largely shaped over a period spanning the mid-1860s to the mid-1890s. It was during those decades, Wasik and Murphy write, that many Americans came to realize that animals weren’t mere “objects” but “creatures whose joys and sufferings had to be taken into consideration.”

This moral awakening, described by one contemporaneous journalist as a “new type of goodness,” still influences Americans’ love of certain animals today, and our indifference toward many others. These disparate feelings, Wasik and Murphy suggest, are an inheritance from that late-1800s era. They are also influenced by spatial and psychic proximity: Most people are more likely to care about the well-being of a pet with whom they cohabit than a pig that resides in a slaughterhouse. The future of animal welfare in the United States may depend on whether Americans can expand their concern beyond the boundaries drawn by 19th-century reformers—whether, as Wasik and Murphy put it, we can apply our “reservoirs of pet love” to other, more distant creatures.

[Read: The meat paradox]

Wasik and Murphy’s book often makes for disturbing reading, so unflinchingly does it document humankind’s capacity for cruelty. In the 19th century, horses, ubiquitous beasts of burden in the pre-automotive age, were whipped mercilessly and forced to haul impossibly heavy loads. Medical-school instructors vivisected rabbits in anatomy lessons. High-society women sported fanciful hats adorned with the plumes of egrets, terns, and other birds “slaughtered wholesale for the cause of fashion”; offshore bobbed ships full of live sea turtles flipped on their shell, slowly dying as they waited to become soup. Every day in New York City, stray dogs were rounded up and “killed by drowning in a giant metal box … used to dispatch some sixty to eighty dogs at a time.”

Although Wasik and Murphy make the case that women eventually became central to the animal-rights movement, their account focuses principally on two men who were among its most forceful leaders. One is Henry Bergh, the dyspeptic heir to a shipbuilding fortune who embraced animal welfare after watching a bullfighting exhibition in Spain. Bergh’s approach was a punitive one: Beginning in the 1860s, he cajoled New York’s legislators into passing welfare laws, then, under the auspices of a new organization called the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, delegated agents to enforce those laws in cooperation with local police. His counterpart was George Angell, the president of the Massachusetts SPCA and the son of a Baptist preacher, who founded a newsletter called Our Dumb Animals and packed its pages with treacly poetry and stories written from the perspective of horses. Angell was a skilled rhetorician and salesman: When a compassionate “autobiography of a horse” called Black Beauty was published in the United Kingdom, Angell reprinted it in the U.S. (ignoring its original publisher’s copyright) and marketed it so ardently that one reporter speculated it would outsell the Bible.

Through legal and moral suasion, Bergh, Angell, and their conspirators made rapid progress. They passed laws preventing horse abuse, broke up dog-fighting rings, and nudged the meat industry to adopt less crowded train cars for cattle. In Philadelphia, a reformer named Caroline White opened a humane dog shelter at which strays were “fed a healthy diet of horsemeat, cornmeal, and crisped pork skin.” Those who weren’t adopted were euthanized in a carbon-dioxide chamber, which was thought to be less painful than drowning. Some species, then as now, were easier to promote than others: Bergh’s prosecution of a ship captain for mistreating sea turtles failed when a judge absurdly ruled that turtles were fish, and thus not subject to new welfare laws. Such setbacks notwithstanding, near the end of the 19th century, 39 of the country’s 44 states had adopted laws proscribing animal cruelty.

Although Wasik and Murphy share their subjects’ sympathies, they are admirably clear-eyed about their deficiencies, including some lamentable anti-science sentiments. Wasik and Murphy’s previous book, Rabid, tackled the history of rabies, and Our Kindred Creatures, too, spends time on that dread disease. Rabies, a common and deadly scourge in the 19th century, posed a contradiction to animal advocates. On the one hand, the development of a human rabies vaccine in 1885 was good for dogs: Once pooches were no longer terrifying disease vectors, people could welcome them into their home without reservation. On the other hand, the vaccine’s creation entailed copious animal experimentation, including “cerebral inoculation,” whereby researchers drilled holes in anesthetized animals’ skulls to infect them. Bergh and his allies deemed the rabies vaccine a “hideous monstrosity” and campaigned against its “evils,” seeming to recognize only the cruelties associated with the vaccine, and not its ultimate benefits.

Early welfarists had another blind spot: agriculture. Although Bergh and his allies occasionally waded into livestock advocacy, they railed primarily against abuses they could see: the horse whipped by his rider, the dog kicked by her owner. To Bergh’s mind, such public displays inculcated a culture of cruelism—the notion, as Wasik and Murphy put it, that witnessing meanness had a “coarsening influence on human minds … priming them for further acceptance of cruelty against man and beast alike.”

But a worldview focused on the prevention of visible cruelty proved a poor match for the meat industry. The slaughterhouses and packing plants that sprang up in Chicago in the late 1800s, for instance, concealed the brutality of their slaying methods—cows battered in the head, the occasional still-living pig dunked in boiling water—behind closed factory doors. Humane groups mostly ignored meatpacking’s horrors. The Illinois Humane Society even appointed the meat magnate Philip Armour to its board of directors and wrote him a praiseful obituary that, as Wasik and Murphy write, washed “away the blood of the countless millions of animals so cruelly disassembled in his slaughter factories.”

That cognitive dissonance—“the selective care for certain species and not others”—still afflicts American society. In their afterword, Wasik and Murphy argue that modern Americans, like their 19th-century forebears, need to adopt their own new “goodness,” one that emphasizes a “systems-driven moral thinking.” The misery of sows held captive in feedlots, or the suffering of wild creatures evicted by habitat loss, must become as real and urgent as the pain of chained dogs and starved cats. Meat-loving Americans would do well, Wasik and Murphy write, to reconsider the “patterns of consumption” that have led to the confinement of about 99 million cows and 74 million pigs. They might use their concern for pets as “well-springs from which to love, and to aid, all those distant, unseen animals we know only as abstractions.”

It’s a welcome proposal. Aside from that brief afterword, though, Wasik and Murphy’s book is almost entirely a study of the past. Our Kindred Creatures would have benefited from a more thorough examination of how early animal-welfare campaigns still reverberate—or don’t—today. Does P. T. Barnum’s deplorable treatment of captive beluga whales in the 19th century inform the campaign to free orcas and other cetaceans housed in modern aquariums? How have Indigenous-led efforts to restore bison to North America’s prairies managed to grow from the poisoned soil of 19th-century buffalo massacres? Lingering in the present would have made for a different—and longer—book, but also, perhaps, a more resonant one.

[Read: How P. T. Barnum helped the early days of animal rights]

Our Kindred Creatures also could have spent more time on the evolution of wildlife conservation. At the animal-welfare movement’s outset, some of the same people and groups who inveighed against horse beatings and dog drownings also fought the annihilation of bison and birds. But those causes soon diverged, as scientists and upper-crust sportsmen came to dominate conservation and largely squeezed out the lay crusaders who had launched welfarism. Today, many animal-welfare groups focus on pets and livestock, while organizations such as the National Wildlife Federation and the World Wildlife Fund advocate for their free-roaming brethren. Some scientists seek to reunify conservation and animal rights via the wild-animal-welfare movement, which works to both protect creatures and make their daily lives more pleasant—for example, by studying the effects of light pollution on owls, and by sponsoring research that provides birth control to overpopulated and starving pigeons in urban areas. After more than a century of divergence, animal welfarism and conservation may once more align, potentially to the benefit of the wild creatures whose lives have been immiserated by human activity.

Ultimately, in spite of its accomplishments, the crusade launched by Bergh, Angell, and their peers remains unfinished. As Wasik and Murphy point out, early welfarists were fond of analogies as a rhetorical tool. Some activists even extended the logic of animal rights to protect children from domestic abuse; in one instance the authors write about, Bergh dispatched ASPCA agents to rescue a mistreated child and prosecuted one of the first child-welfare cases on her behalf. If the modern animal-rights movement is to continue racking up victories, more Americans should perhaps think in analogy. If dogs and cats deserve good lives, why not cows, pigs, and chickens? If elephants, tigers, and other large, charismatic mammals are worthy of protection, why not bats, reptiles, insects, and other smaller, less endearing critters? Animals have long been beset by not only human cruelty but also human hypocrisy. What they need now, perhaps, is moral consistency.

In the fall of 2021, Gabriel Arias felt like his body was “rotting from the inside.” He was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer so aggressive that doctors had him hospitalized the day of his biopsy. In cases like his, the ideal treatment is a transplant. Arias’s cancer-prone blood cells needed to be destroyed and replaced with healthy ones taken from the bone marrow or blood of a donor who matched him biologically. Fortunately, doctors found him a match in the volunteer-donor registries—a man in Poland. Unfortunately, Arias’s single match in the entire world was no longer available to donate.

In the past, the road to transplant might have ended here, but a medical advance had dramatically expanded the pool of donors for patients such as Arias. With the right drug, Arias could now get a transplant from his brother, a partial match, or, as he ultimately chose, he could join a clinical trial in which his donor would be a stranger who shared just eight of 10 markers used in bone-marrow transplants. Under this looser standard, Arias’s registry matches multiplied from one to more than 200. “It really is a game changer,” says Steve Devine, the chief medical officer of NMDP, a nonprofit that runs a donor registry. Today, agonizing searches for a matched donor are largely a thing of the past.

The drug powering this breakthrough is actually very old. Cyclophosphamide was first developed in the 1950s for chemotherapy. Fifty years later, researchers at Johns Hopkins began studying whether it could be repurposed to prevent a common and sometimes deadly complication of bone-marrow transplants called graft-versus-host disease, where the donor’s white blood cells—which form the recipient’s new immune system—attack the rest of the body as foreign. The bigger the mismatch between donor and recipient, the more likely this was to happen. Cyclophosphamide worked stunningly well against graft-versus-host disease: The drug cut rates of acute and severe complications by upwards of 80 percent.

Cyclophosphamide has now enabled more patients than ever to get bone-marrow transplants —more than 7,000 last year, according to NMDP. (Bone-marrow transplant is still used as an umbrella term, though many of these procedures now use cells collected from the blood rather than bone marrow, which can be done without surgery. Both versions are also known, more accurately, as hematopoietic or blood stem-cell transplants.) The field has essentially surmounted the problem of matching donors, a major barrier to transplants, Ephraim Fuchs, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Fuchs couldn’t remember the last time a patient failed to get a blood stem-cell transplant because they couldn’t find a donor.

It wasn’t obvious that cyclophosphamide would work so well. “I’m just going to come clean,” Devine told me. “Back in 2003 and 2005, I thought it was crazy.” Derived from a relative of mustard gas, the drug is known to be highly toxic to a variety of blood cells; in fact, doctors had long used it to kill the diseased bone marrow in patients before transplant. Why would you want to give such a drug after transplant, when the new donor cells are still precious and few? It defied a certain logic.

But as far back as the 1960s, researchers also noticed that high doses of post-transplant cyclophosphamide could prevent graft-versus-host disease in mice, even if they did not know why. Over the next few decades, scientists working away in labs learned that cyclophosphamide isn’t quite carpet-bombing the blood. It actually spares the stem cells most important to successful transplant. (Blood stem cells differentiate into all the types of red and white blood cells that a patient will need.) Why cyclophosphamide works so well against graft-versus-host disease is still unclear, but the drug also seems to selectively kill white blood cells active in the disease while sparing those that quell the immune system.

By the late ’90s, doctors saw a clear need to expand the search for donors. Bone-marrow transplants are most successful when donor and recipient share the same markers, known as HLA, which are protein tags our cells use to distinguish self from nonself. We inherit HLA markers from our parents, so siblings have about a one-in-four chance of being perfectly matched. As families got smaller in the 20th century, though, the likelihood of a sibling match fell. Donor registries such as NMDP were created to fill the gap, however imperfectly.   

Doctors soon began coalescing around the idea of using family members who were only haploidentical, or half matched, meaning they shared at least five out of 10 HLA markers. Every child is a half match to their parents, and every parent to their child; siblings also have a 50 percent chance of being half matches. But when doctors first tried these transplants, the “outcomes were horrible,” Leo Luznik, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. Patients had frighteningly high rates of graft-versus-host disease, and more than half died within three years.

Based on the lab findings, Luznik, Fuchs, and other colleagues at Johns Hopkins wondered if post-transplant cyclophosphamide could help. The pharmaceutical companies that made it were uninterested in funding any research, Luznik said, because “it was an old, very cheap drug." With government grants, however, the team was able to prove that cyclophosphamide got the rate of graft-versus-disease as low as in matched sibling transplants. By the late 2000s, transplants with half-matched family members were becoming routine.

Still, not every patient will have a sibling or parent or child who can donate. Doctors began wondering if cyclophosphamide could work for unrelated donors too. If only eight of the 10 markers have to be matched, then almost everyone would find a donor, even multiple donors. This was especially important for patients of mixed or non-European ancestry, who have a harder time finding unrelated donors, because people of those backgrounds make up a smaller proportion of registry donors and because they can carry a more diverse set of HLA markers. Two-thirds of white people can find a fully matched registry donor, but that number drops to 23 percent for Black Americans and 41 percent for Asians or Pacific Islanders.

Amelia Johnson, who is half Indian and half Black, was one of the first children to get a transplant from a mismatched unrelated donor in a clinical trial in 2022. Her mom, Salome Sookdieopersad, remembers being told, “You guys need to start recruiting bone-marrow donors to help increase your chances.” When that still didn’t turn up an ideal match, Sookdieopersad prepared to donate to her daughter as a half match. But then Amelia was offered a spot in the clinical trial, and they decided to take it. Transplants with mismatched unrelated donors had already been tried in adults—that was Arias’s trial—and they offered other potential benefits. A younger donor, for example, has younger cells, which fare noticeably better than older ones. Amelia did end up with a bout of graft-versus-host disease; cyclophosphamide lowers the risk but not to zero. Still, the transplant was necessary to save her life, and her mom pointed out that some risk was unavoidable, no matter the type of donor: A friend of Amelia’s got graft-versus-host even with a perfectly matched one. Doctors were able to treat Amelia’s complications, and she returned to school last August. The pediatric trial she was part of is ongoing.

In adults, where more data are available, doctors are already moving ahead with mismatched, unrelated donors. Between this and half-matched family members, patients who once might have had zero donors are now finding themselves with multiple possibilities. Doctors can be choosier too: They can select the youngest donor, for example, or match on characteristics such as blood type. The larger pool of donors also prevents situations like Arias’s, in which a single matched donor who signed up years ago is no longer available, which happens with some regularity. Cyclophosphamide is now routinely used in matched transplants too, because it lowers the risk of graft-versus-host disease even further.

Arias’s mismatched unrelated donor in the trial was an anonymous 22-year-old man who lives somewhere in the United States. When Arias and I spoke last month, it had been almost exactly two years since his transplant. He’s cancer free. He and his wife just welcomed a baby girl. None of this would have likely been possible without the transplant, without the donor, without a 70-year-old drug that had been smartly repurposed.