President Biden warns he will stop supplying some weapons if Israel launches a ground operation.

Scapegoating is one of humankind’s primal rituals, dating back to the Book of Leviticus, in which God commanded the prophet Aaron to lay hands on a goat, confess the sins of his tribe, and then send the animal into the desert. Throughout centuries and across cultures, the historian René Girard once argued, warring factions have settled disputes by agreeing upon a figure to collectively blame—a resolution that is ugly and unfair but, more than anything, cathartic.

Perhaps this tradition helps explain what’s been so satisfying about watching two of the 21st century’s most important musicians, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, try to destroy each other. The rap feud that has engulfed public attention in recent weeks has been litigated in breathtaking, twisty-turny songs packed with very 2020s references—to Ozempic, disinformation, AI, Taylor Swift, and elite pedophile rings. These two superstars have leveled accusations so nasty that cancellation, today’s standard punishment for celebrity wrongdoing, hardly seems sufficient. Thus far, the consensus is that Lamar has “won” the war—but in that case, Drake’s defeat is really what’s significant. We’re witnessing the modern implementation of an ancient rite, the desecration of an individual for the moral cleansing of the masses.

The conflict was sparked by what now seems like a quaint dispute: Who’s the greatest rapper? A verse by J. Cole on a Drake song last fall postulated himself, Drake, and Lamar as hip-hop’s “big three.” Earlier this year, Lamar replied with a correction: “It’s just big me,” he rapped in a tone of seething hostility. Cole issued and quickly retracted a reply, but Drake took Lamar’s bait, and the two men began volleying diss tracks. Over eight songs—plus one interlude!—in less than a month, the question of who’s a better rapper has given way to a more profound debate about hip-hop, masculinity, and nothing less than the nature of evil.

Beef is older than rap, but this showdown is new in its scale and velocity. When Jay-Z and Nas scrapped in the early 2000s, they did so at a time when rap was not quite yet synonymous with pop. But in today’s fractured musical ecosystem, the 37-year-old Drake, who has had 13 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and the 36-year-old Lamar, the only rapper to ever win a Pulitzer, have achieved a rare level of name recognition. The most consequential rap beef ever, between Biggie and Tupac, simmered for months and unfolded via physical releases, local radio, and in-person dustups. By contrast, Drake and Lamar are using fast-twitch digital technologies to record tracks at whim, circulate them around the planet instantly, and feed a teeming ecosystem of commentators, remixers, fans, haters, and voyeurs.

This global audience has long been primed for the showdown. Since the early 2010s, Drake and Lamar have reigned as the yin and yang of popular rap: the entertainer and the artist, the hedonist and the monk. Drake has flooded the marketplace with hits, collaborations, and tie-in products. His sound is chameleonic, borrowing unapologetically from far-flung subgenres and scenes, and his lyrical outlook is pettily, proudly self-interested. Lamar, by contrast, expresses himself in carefully honed albums exploring how to live ethically in a fallen world. The Compton native’s music, for all its experimental edge, roots itself in the bounce and attitude of West Coast hip-hop. These two men have long been in a cold war, trading covert lyrical insults that fit with the ideological and aesthetic clash they both seem to represent.

So when Lamar rapped, “I hate the way that you walk, the way that you talk, I hate the way that you dress” on last week’s diss track “Euphoria,” he was harvesting from richly tilled soil. The hatred he spoke of was both visceral and intellectual; the song argued that the mixed-race Drake was insufficiently Black, or at least exploitative and cringey in his performance of Blackness. “It’s not just me,” Lamar rapped, referring to his distaste for Drake and the people he surrounds himself with. “I’m what the culture feelin’.” He was, by this logic, unleashing the pent-up resentment of true rap fans against a man he later labeled a “colonizer.”

Others can debate Lamar’s racial claims, but on some level the attack represents a desperate wish: for Drake, along with all he represents, to be cleanly excised from modern hip-hop culture. The maddening truth for Drake’s critics is that he, in a fundamental way, is modern hip-hop culture—the genre’s sound and social cachet over the past 15 years are inextricable from his success. On the diss track “Not Like Us,” Lamar rapped a list of well-respected artists such as 21 Savage and Young Thug who have lent Drake “false street cred.” This attack cut Drake, but it also called attention to how many rappers have mingled their brands with his. Even for Lamar, the relationship between realness and commercialism isn’t neat: As Drake pointed out in his own diss tracks, Lamar has worked with Maroon 5, Swift, and Drake himself.

[Read: How the Pulitzers chose Kendrick Lamar, according to a juror]

As the feud between the men escalated, a more explosive issue came to the fore: Which of these men is worse to women and children? Lamar’s attacks were blunt, labeling Drake a deadbeat father and a “predator.” He addressed pitying verses to Drake’s young son (whose existence was first publicized in a 2018 diss track by Drake’s rival Pusha T) and to an 11-year-old daughter, whom Drake allegedly has been keeping secret. He also said that Drake leads a crew of “certified pedophiles” that is systematically luring “victims all inside of they home.” Drake, meanwhile, has called attention to rumors that Lamar beat the mother of his child.

None of these claims is verifiable. Drake has denied Lamar’s accusations: “Just for clarity, I feel disgusted, I’m too respected / If I was fucking young girls, I promise I’d have been arrested,” he rapped on “The Heart Part 6.” He also claimed that his camp intentionally leaked the lie that Drake was hiding a daughter in order to cause confusion. As for the claim that Lamar committed domestic violence, the rapper denied it years ago in a radio interview—and, in his recent diss tracks, repeatedly (albeit vaguely) said that Drake is lying about Lamar’s family.

Truth, however, doesn’t really matter in this battle. The PR narrative is clear-cut, classic, and irresistible. People like Drake are “not like us,” as Lamar put it in a track that will have listeners singing along and dancing to lyrics about child trafficking all summer. Lamar has spun a populist narrative in which cultural elites are vampiric abusers from whom regular folks need to hide their daughters. The power of that kind of rhetoric has been well demonstrated in national politics—and has crowd-pleasing appeal at a time when hip-hop titans such as Diddy are facing legal trouble in connection with alleged sex crimes (allegations that he denies). It is easier to say “not like us” than to dwell on the reality that predation happens everywhere in American life, in unfamous communities, workplaces, and homes.

Drake has turned in some of the best rapping of his career over the past few weeks, but the substance of his disses isn’t landing. Many of his attacks draw from Lamar’s own catalog—which is all about how society’s moral corruption is perpetuated not by far-off villains but by our own selves. Lamar’s most recent album, 2022’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, told of his own infidelity, brutality, misogyny, pride, and a bucket of other sins. Drake’s lyrics have invoked those admissions to show that Lamar isn’t a saint, but the problem with this logic is not simply that Lamar has already confessed. It’s that Drake, the more popular artist, is just a more appealing vessel upon which to project communal shame.

Indeed, Drake’s shunning has been a group activity. The feud really kicked off in March when Drake’s frequent collaborators Future and Metro Boomin released two albums full of Drake disses. (The first album featured Lamar’s “it’s just big me” verse.) Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky, and Kanye West have jumped in with their own digs. Each of these figures has his own reasons for beef, but the gist of their attacks has been tonally similar, laced with disgust. Most hilariously—and tellingly—Metro Boomin made a beat with a sped-up chorus about Drake’s alleged plastic surgery, and invited anyone to remix it. Amateurs on TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms have used that beat to recap the very same talking points that Lamar has been using.

“This shit was some good exercise,” Drake muttered, resignedly, in his most recent salvo. If he now retreats from the spotlight for a period, what has been accomplished? Lamar has proved himself to be an even savvier operator than once thought, and the breakneck rudeness of “Euphoria,” “Not Like Us,” and Drake’s “Family Matters” are going to remain a guilty thrill to listen to—but the meat of the dispute between these rappers has hardly been addressed. Surely misogyny and abuse will not disappear from society. Hip-hop probably won’t revert to some purer, more righteous form of itself. Some people may even use this war of words to try to perpetuate the bloodiest tendencies of the genre’s history; yesterday, a drive-by shooter injured one of Drake’s bodyguards, for as-yet-unknown reasons.

The most likely legacy of this battle will be in accelerating the record industry’s strategic use of gossip and metanarrative. Music was once a social, local art form that fostered cultural cohesion; now it’s an on-demand utility that insulates people in their headphones. Commanding mass attention in this era is a difficult task, but the artists who are able to do so—Drake and Lamar, yes, as well as storytellers such as Swift and Olivia Rodrigo—make the internet feel like a village from our distant past. We can send strangers into the desert and feel some absolution, whether we’ve earned it or not.

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Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or a major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.

In all, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. He has already lost a civil suit in New York that could hobble his business empire, as well as a pair of large defamation judgments. Meanwhile, he is the leading Republican candidate in the race to become the next president. Though the timelines for some of the cases are up in the air, he could be in the heat of the campaign at the same time that his legal fate is being decided.

[David A. Graham: The end of Trump Inc.]

Here’s a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, including key dates, an assessment of the gravity of the charges, and expectations about how they could turn out. This guide will be updated regularly as the cases proceed.

New York State: Fraud

In the fall of 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a years-long scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.

When?
Justice Arthur Engoron ruled on February 16 that Trump must pay $355 million plus interest, the calculated size of his ill-gotten gains from fraud. The judge had previously ruled against Trump and his co-defendants in late September 2023, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them.

How grave is the allegation?
Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the hundreds of millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is a little pedestrian. The case was also civil rather than criminal. But although the stakes are lower for the nation, they remain high for Trump: The size of the penalty appears to be larger than Trump can easily pay, and he also faces a three-year ban on operating his company.

What happens now?
Trump has appealed the case. On March 25, the day he was supposed to post bond, an appeals court reduced the amount he must post from more than $464 million to $175 million. He must appeal by this summer.

Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault

Although these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump also faced a pair of defamation suits from the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.

When?
In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation case produced an $83.3 million judgment in January 2024.

How grave was the allegation?
Although these cases didn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, they were a serious matter, and a federal judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has gone underappreciated.

What happens now?
Trump has appealed both cases, and he posted bond for the $83.3 million in March. During the second trial, he also continued to insult Carroll, which may have courted additional defamation suits.

Manhattan: Hush Money

In March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they had had sexual relationships with Trump.

When? The trial began on April 15 and is currently in process. It could last a few more weeks.

How grave is the allegation?
Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad. But many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. Prosecutors contend, however, that Trump aimed to corrupt elections by hiding information from voters. This case feels more minor, in part because other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Though some critics were dismayed that this was the first criminal charge for Trump, it has overcome questions about statute of limitations and legal basis. Prosecutors are hoping a methodical case will convince jurors.

Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents

Jack Smith, a special counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, has charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office. The charges include willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties, where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centers on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

When?
Smith filed charges in June 2023. On May 8, 2024, following several prior delays, Judge Aileen Cannon announced that she was indefinitely postponing the trial until preliminary issues could be resolved. Smith had most recently proposed a July trial. Smith faces a de facto deadline of January 20, 2025, at which point Trump or any Republican president would likely shut down a case.

How grave is the allegation?
These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless very serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide the documents, and lied to the government through his attorneys.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
This may be the most open-and-shut case, and the facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith seems to have drawn a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who has repeatedly ruled favorably for Trump on procedural matters. Some legal commentators have even accused her of “sabotaging” the case.

Fulton County: Election Subversion

In Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.

When?
Willis obtained the indictment in August 2023. The number of people charged makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. Several of them, including Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis, struck plea deals in the fall. Willis has proposed a trial date of August 5, 2024, for the remaining defendants, but that may be delayed.

How grave is the allegation?
More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full breadth of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
Expert views differ. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—such as a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes. Three major plea deals from co-defendants may also ease Willis’s path, but getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge. The case has also been hurt by the revelation of a romantic relationship between Willis and an attorney she hired as a special prosecutor. On March 15, Judge Scott McAfee declined to throw out the indictment, but he sharply castigated Willis.

Department of Justice: Election Subversion

Special Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C.

When?
A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1, 2023. The trial was originally scheduled for March 4 but is now on hold pending a Supreme Court decision on whether the former president should be immune to prosecution. The window for a trial to occur before the election is narrowing quickly. As with the other DOJ case, time is of the essence for Smith, because Trump or any other Republican president could shut down a case upon taking office in January 2025.

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

How grave is the allegation?
This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting an attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.

How plausible is a guilty verdict?
It’s very hard to say. Smith avoided some of the more unconventional potential charges, including aiding insurrection, and everyone watched much of the alleged crime unfold in public in real time, but no precedent exists for a case like this, with a defendant like this.

Additionally …

In more than 30 states, cases were filed over whether Trump should be thrown off the 2024 ballot under a novel legal theory about the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents, including J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic, argued that the former president is ineligible to serve again under a clause that disqualifies anyone who took an oath defending the Constitution and then subsequently participated in a rebellion or an insurrection. They said that Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and his incitement of the January 6 riot meet the criteria.

When?
Authorities in several states ruled that Trump should be removed from the ballot, and the former president appealed to the Supreme Court. The justices ruled unanimously on March 4 that states could not remove Trump from the ballot. The conservative majority (over strenuous liberal objections) also closed the door on a post-election disqualification by Congress without specific legislation.

How grave is the allegation?
In a sense, the claim made here was even graver than the criminal election-subversion cases filed against Trump by the U.S. Department of Justice and in Fulton County, Georgia, because neither of those cases alleges insurrection or rebellion. But the stakes were also much different—rather than criminal conviction, they concern the ability to serve as president.

What happens next?
The question of disqualification seems to now be closed, with Trump set to appear on the ballot in every state.

The musician and producer was known for his work with acts like Nirvana, the Pixies and PJ Harvey.

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Over the past week, I’ve spent several hours scrolling through Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok also owned by ByteDance. Both apps are governed by a central algorithm that recommends videos to users based on their interests and behavior. Here is what I saw one morning in the order it was fed to me: a video of an influencer wearing glittery thigh-high stockings posing for a photo shoot, a livestream broadcast of a girl who appeared to be using editing software that made her breasts look comically enormous, a clip from a samurai-themed video game, a day in the life vlog of a single woman living in Tokyo, and a video of a boxing match between two attractive women wearing sports bras.

The content I watched on Douyin was often maximized for shock value, but it was also frequently funny or insightful. In other words, it largely mirrored what can be found on the American version of TikTok, although notably, I didn’t see political videos or criticism of the Chinese government. What was readily apparent is that Douyin is not the sanitized utopia that some commentators have described. “In China, TikTok has a comparable product that promotes educational videos on math & science to kids. In America, they’re promoting videos on eating Tide Pods,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz wrote on X in March. “China’s version of TikTok celebrates academic achievements, athletic achievements, it’s all science projects,” Joe Rogan said on his podcast in 2022. The venture capitalist Vinod Khosla called TikTok “programmable fentanyl,” while Douyin, he said, amounted to “spinach for Chinese kids.”

These comparisons are grossly exaggerated, and the truth is that kids in China regularly view content on Douyin that may be dangerous or harmful, just as kids around the world do on TikTok and every other large internet platform. But there’s something more perplexing—and, frankly, alarming—about this line of thinking, and the extent to which people have begun to imply that Americans can learn lessons from how the internet is regulated in China, where an oppressive regime regularly blocks foreign-owned apps and censors what information citizens can access on the internet.

“China is much more thoughtful and protective of its young people” when it comes to social media, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said at an event earlier this year. “The fact that China has been far more effective in protecting its children from the excesses of technology should make western legislators think,” the British journalist Camilla Cavendish wrote in the Financial Times around the same time, adding, “We are hardly going to win the battle with China over artificial intelligence, or anything else, if we raise a generation of zombies.”

What rarely gets mentioned in these discussions, however, is the fact that the Chinese government has built the most comprehensive digital surveillance system in the world, which it primarily uses not to protect children, but to squash any form of dissent that may threaten the power of the Chinese Communist Party. “Everybody exists in a censored environment, and so what gets censored for kids is just one step on top of what gets censored for adults,” Jeremy Daum, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and the founder of the site China Law Translate, told me.

[Read: America lost the plot with TikTok]

It should set off warning bells for Americans that many states have explored legislation limiting internet access for minors in ways that mirror what China has done. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to block a controversial law in Texas that would require pornography sites to verify a user’s age with a government-issued ID or other means before they access sexually explicit content. At least half a dozen states have passed similar age-verification laws recently. Related bills—governing not just pornography, but also basic access to social media—are pending in some 30 different states and Puerto Rico, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Although creating obstacles to prevent children from stumbling upon sexual material or signing up for TikTok without their parents’ consent may seem justifiable, the courts have held for decades that forcing adults to verify their age puts an undue burden on the right to access constitutionally protected speech online. Before, we might have expected the Supreme Court to recognize the First Amendment issues at hand and “affirm its previous position that the speech rights of adults outweigh the potential harms to minors,” the journalist Casey Newton recently wrote. “But it’s not clear that we can do so any longer.”

China, however, doesn’t have free-speech concerns, and has spent the past 20 years building and iterating on an elaborate system for confirming the name and age of every internet user, slowly chipping away at the ability to remain anonymous online. The real-name-registration system in the country requires companies to verify the identity of each person who signs up to use a social-media platform or discussion forum. People also need to show a form of identification to purchase a new SIM card, which allows the Chinese government to try to keep track of who is connected to every phone number. Unlike in the U.S., you can’t just walk into a Walgreens in China and pick up an anonymous burner phone. “There is a structural way to verify age that has been embedded in the system for a long time,” Kendra Schaefer, a partner at the research firm Trivium China, told me. “That technical foundation doesn’t exist here.”

The urge to figure out how to protect young people online is, of course, understandable. Many experts worry that children are experiencing profoundly negative side effects from social media, and much of what China has done in this area is part of a sincere attempt to address the same concerns shared by parents everywhere. In this light, it’s tempting to argue that America could also reasonably trade everyone’s digital privacy in exchange for keeping kids safe. But we can look at what has happened in China and see the obvious problem with that logic: It would trap the U.S. in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

Four years ago, Beijing started cracking down on video-game companies, and it now prohibits kids from gaming for more than just three hours most weeks—one hour each on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. But roughly a year after the rules were put in place, nearly a third of youth gamers in China readily admitted that they were still playing for more than three hours each week, including outside the approved time slots, according to a survey by the market-research firm Niko Partners. The findings reflect what any parent already knows to be true: Teenagers figure out how to break the rules.

[Read: Welcome to the TikTok meltdown]

One work-around they relied on is buying SIM cards on the illegal black market that were already linked to the identity of an adult, or they simply got their parents or older siblings to sign in for them. These loopholes prompted major game publishers like Tencent to build stringent facial-recognition systems that could be used to root out underage users. In 2022, Tencent announced that people 55 and older would need to scan their face before playing popular mobile games at night to ensure that their grandchildren weren’t using their phones. Why would the U.S. want to go down a path that has resulted in the need for grandmas to pass a facial-recognition test before they can play Candy Crush?

But critics of TikTok are probably right in saying that educational content is more popular on the Chinese version of the app, though not necessarily because of anything ByteDance has done. Rui Ma, the founder of the technology-investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China, told me that Western commentators often fail to appreciate how intense the culture around academic achievement is in China and the ways that is reflected on social media. Kids who are put under enormous pressure to get good grades, in other words, might be more interested in videos related to studying than their American peers.

“The entire system is already set up to support studying over play, and yet, it is still a very difficult problem for parents to get their kids to stop playing video games and wasting time on the phone,” Ma said. On that count, at least, China and the U.S. see eye to eye.

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