Shortly after becoming the first former American president to be convicted as a felon, Donald Trump told reporters outside a Manhattan courthouse that the verdict was a “disgrace,” a “rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

There is a simple, foolproof way to predict when Trump will describe something or someone as rigged or corrupt: when he doesn’t get what he wants. Elections he loses are fraudulent, legal decisions that go against him are rigged, and anyone who opposes him is corrupt. In every single instance, Trump is decrying not a corrupt individual or rigged process, but a person or process that is not corrupt or rigged enough to give him the results he seeks.

Trump’s attorneys did not offer much in the way of a defense during the trial, relying instead on a “haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks,” as the former prosecutor Renato Mariotti put it in The New York Times. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up a sexual encounter with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels, in order to prevent news of the incident from breaking during the final, crucial weeks of the 2016 election. As my colleague David A. Graham writes, the payments were made through Michael Cohen, a former Trump operative turned prosecution witness, who paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence. The defense failed to convince the jury that Cohen was not a credible witness to Trump’s crimes despite a past record of dishonesty.

[David A. Graham: Guilty on all counts]

Instead, Trump and his allies spent most of their efforts putting the trial on trial, attacking the presiding judge and the process itself in bombastic press conferences outside the courtroom. Trump was far from being unfairly treated—anyone else engaging in such behavior would have been jailed for contempt; rather, Justice Juan Merchan bent over backwards to overlook his antics. Trump violated gag orders by attacking witnesses and attempting to intimidate Daniels during testimony that “at times seemed to be describing nonconsensual sex,” and attacked the judge’s daughter as a “Rabid Trump Hater.” Yet Merchan told Trump, “The last thing I want to do is put you in jail.” In this trial and others, Trump has received special treatment precisely because he is an important political figure.  

Many political writers originally reacted with disdain to Bragg’s charges, treating them as a sideshow to the much more serious state and federal charges regarding Trump’s alleged theft of classified records and unlawful attempt to seize power after losing the 2020 election. It is true that compared with potentially exposing nuclear secrets to foreign spies and attempting to end American democracy, trying to cover up his encounter with Daniels seems like a much less serious crime. But that cover-up, prosecutors said, was also an attempt to influence an election, and the jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts relatively quickly, after two days of deliberation—a sign of the strength of Bragg’s case and a smoothly run trial. Not every jury gets it right, and not every trial is fair. But few of the Republican objections even contest that Trump did the things he was convicted of doing; they simply amount to demands that Trump be able to commit crimes with impunity, because anything less would be political persecution.

Republican lawmakers have settled on rhetoric attacking the trial itself, alleging that, as House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Democrats cheered as they convicted the leader of the opposing party on ridiculous charges.” That is not what happened. The document-falsification charges Trump faced are relatively common in New York, even if the theory that they could be upped to felonies because of their connection to an attempt to influence a federal election was novel. Trump was convicted, as the Constitution demands, by a jury of his peers in the city where his crimes were committed, in a process Thomas Jefferson described as “the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” The American Founders considered trial by jury one of the core ideals of the American Revolution, in part because royal judges were considered too beholden to the King.

Republicans are attacking the New York trial because that court was seen as insufficiently beholden to their king. That prosecution proceeded relatively smoothly because right-wing judges lacked the ability to sabotage or delay the process. My colleague David Frum wrote that “it says something dark about the American legal system that it cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état.” But the culprit here is not “the American legal system.” Trials for the more serious federal charges against Trump have been delayed by a sustained attack on the rule of law carried out by right-wing legal activists embedded in the judiciary who are committed to postponing any trial long enough for Trump to potentially win an election and then dismiss the charges himself. Put simply, Trump is unlikely to be tried for these more serious charges not because of vague problems with the American legal system, but because a lot of federal judges are Republicans who want the leader of their party to get away with committing federal crimes.

The Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has, as The New York Times reported, “effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.” She “has largely accomplished this by granting a serious hearing to almost every issue—no matter how far-fetched—that Mr. Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.”

The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, of which fully a third of the justices are Trump appointees, has also gone along with Trump’s legal strategy of delaying a trial as long as possible. “In recent years, the Roberts Court has shown greater and greater impatience with criminal defendants’ efforts to forestall punishment,” the law professor Aziz Huq wrote in February, noting that “a general hostility to foot-dragging in criminal cases is a through line in the court’s docket.” Not so with Trump.

“The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Department of Justice and thus could quash the prosecution altogether,” Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman wrote in The Atlantic in March. “The Supreme Court has shamed itself by being a party to this, when the sole issue before the Court is presidential immunity.”

Trump’s legal theory that former presidents are immune to prosecution for crimes committed while in office unless impeached for those crimes is so laughably broad that it would allow a president to assassinate a political rival and then avoid impeachment by threatening to slaughter every lawmaker in Congress. Yet the right-wing justices, sworn to uphold a constitutional order in which no one is above the law, seemed strangely intrigued by this assertion of imperial power during oral arguments earlier this month. Justice Samuel Alito, who has not denied that a flag supporting Trump’s attempted coup was flying outside his house just days after it happened, wondered out loud if prosecuting former presidents who try to overthrow democracy might harm democracy.

The right-wing justices are acting like Republican politicians who believe they are obligated to delay the trial of their party leader as long as possible and potentially prevent it from happening. This is not simply my jaded assessment. Today, Speaker Johnson told Fox News, “I think that the Justices on the Court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight.”

Even if the justices reject Trump’s absurd legal theories, their dawdling may still prevent a trial from taking place before November. This gamesmanship by the justices on behalf of the party that appointed them bears far more resemblance to a corrupt or rigged process than a trial by a jury of one’s peers does. And that’s precisely the issue: In a Manhattan courtroom, facing 12 ordinary American citizens, Trump could not count on right-wing legal elites to skew the proceeding in his favor. Trump is not angry because the Manhattan trial that convicted him was rigged; he is angry because it wasn’t.

One should take a moment to appreciate the absolute failure of the Republican elite, who have repeatedly refused to hold Trump accountable. Twice Trump was impeached by Congress for interfering in American elections—once by trying to blackmail a foreign government into falsely implicating his political rival in a crime, and once for trying to keep himself in power by fraudulent schemes and violence. Both times, Republican senators spared Trump the consequences by acquitting him.

Whether they did so out of fear of Trump and his followers or because they are on board with his authoritarian project, the result is the same: The head of the GOP is a convicted criminal who holds democracy in contempt and whose objective is seizing power in order to keep himself out of prison. Republicans have only themselves to blame for this outcome.

[Read: The twisted logic of Trump’s attacks on judges]

As the writer Osita Nwanevu noted in March, “The only people who've ever held Trump meaningfully accountable over the last nine years have been ordinary Americans and they've spent that entire time being lectured to and berated by elites who've failed to do anything.” This is overbroad—Democrats impeached him twice—but there is something to it nonetheless. Republican senators voted to acquit twice knowing that Trump was guilty. Most Republican politicians and conservative media figures kissed Trump’s filthy ring rather than ruin their career or even defend their family from his degrading insults. Right-wing jurists have adapted their supposedly ironclad judicial philosophies to fit Trumpist imperatives.

The 12 jurors who convicted Donald Trump will not have taxpayer-funded bodyguards for the rest of their life. They are not protected by reverence for their office or by their connections to power or money. They surely understood that by convicting Trump, they could be subject to harassment and violence, much as others who have refused to do Trump’s bidding have been.

Yet those 12 random New Yorkers showed more courage in convicting Donald Trump, knowing that they could be hounded for doing so, than nearly the entire conservative elite has in the past decade. Small wonder that this same elite is so terrified of the possibility of Trump facing another jury of his peers, an American institution that has so far proved itself resistant to Trump’s corrupting influence.

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The courtroom dress code for most witnesses and defendants is modest, quiet attire—clothing that no one will be talking about. But when celebrities and politicians are in the mix, it’s not that simple.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

David Frum: Wrong case, right verdict Harvard’s golden silence The maternal-mortality crisis that didn’t happen

Dressing the Part

When Stormy Daniels walked into court for her first day of testimony in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, she wore a subdued black jumpsuit. At first glance, the simple outfit was an unremarkable choice. But the garment told a story: As the fashion critic Vanessa Friedman noted in The New York Times, that jumpsuit was the same one Daniels wore for her cameo in a satirical 2021 film about Trump selling his soul to the devil.

For most people, appearing in court involves trying not to make a splash. Conventional wisdom says that those involved in trials, whether as a witness or as a defendant, should stick to a default of “sensible, down-to-earth attire—nothing too flashy, obviously expensive or overly sexy,” Richard T. Ford, a law professor at Stanford and the author of Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, told me in an email. Suits, slacks, and blouses are common fare, as are dark colors. But for participants in high-profile cases, the courtroom can serve as a mini stage—a place to express one’s identity or values, or to send a winking message. Earlier this week, Ryan Salame, a former top FTX executive who was just sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, reportedly showed up in court wearing (not for the first time) socks emblazoned with the bitcoin logo—a pointed choice for someone heading to prison for crimes related to his work at a now-infamous cryptocurrency exchange.

Clothing can also shape jurors’ perceptions of a defendant—a truth that is both well documented and, to some extent, enshrined in the laws of the land. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that a defendant cannot be forced to wear prison attire on the stand, because the clothing could lead jurors to presume that the person is guilty. Jurors’ biases related to race, class, and gender can play a real role in how they perceive the people on the stand, and defendants may use clothing and accessories to try to cut against those preconceptions. In 2012, The Washington Post reported on an instance of five Black male defendants wearing nonprescription glasses to court—a tactic recommended by some lawyers as part of what one called a “nerd defense.” The article mentioned a 2008 study that found that students considered fictitious Black male defendants who wore glasses to be more honest and intelligent than those who didn’t; the same did not prove true for white suspects.

Celebrities and politicians—masters of image formation—sometimes use courtroom clothing in more calculated ways, to highlight or paper over elements of their image. “A high-profile trial is a good way to promote a personal brand,” Ford told me. Trump, for example, stuck throughout the trial with his usual uniform of a suit and large, usually red tie, continuing to project his businessman image; the outfit also makes him look, as one writer put it, like the human equivalent of an American flag. Other well-known defendants use their days in court to pivot away from signature looks—when on trial for fraud charges, Elizabeth Holmes ditched her trademark black turtlenecks for collared shirts, and Sam Bankman-Fried traded in cargo shirts and shaggy hair for a suit and clean haircut in court last fall.

When it comes to the courtroom wardrobe, the line between making a statement and appearing inauthentic is thin. By going too far in the latter direction, defendants can actually undermine their credibility. In a setting where believability is paramount, a whiff of fakeness is a problem. Still, the courtroom is a site of performance. As Ford explained to me, “A trial attorney is telling a story.” Those who appear in court are “characters” in that story, “and the attorney wants those characters to dress the part.”

Related:

What it takes to be a trial lawyer if you’re not a man Finding jurors for an unprecedented trial

Today’s News

The Supreme Court unanimously cleared the way for the National Rifle Association to continue to pursue its First Amendment lawsuit against a New York official who encouraged some companies to stop working with the NRA after the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. Chief Justice John Roberts declined to meet with Democratic senators about the issue of Supreme Court ethics and the scandal embroiling Justice Samuel Alito. In Hong Kong, 14 prodemocracy activists were convicted and face prison time for national-security charges. They are part of a group of 47 individuals who were charged in 2021 with conspiracy to commit subversion; 31 people pleaded guilty, and two others were acquitted.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1906, just as today, people loved New York less for its beauty than for its vibrant energy, Conor Friedersdorf writes. Work in Progress: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong, Derek Thompson writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Stop Wasting Your Fridge Space

By Yasmin Tayag

My refrigerator has a chronic real-estate problem. The issue isn’t leftovers; it’s condiments. Jars and bottles have filled the door and taken over the main shelves. There’s so little room between the chili crisp, maple syrup, oyster sauce, gochujang, spicy mustard, several kinds of hot sauce, and numerous other condiments that I’ve started stacking containers. Squeezing in new items is like simultaneously playing Tetris and Jenga. And it’s all because of three little words on their labels: Refrigerate after opening.

But a lot of the time, these instructions seem confusing, if not just unnecessary … Ketchup bottles are a fixture of diner counters, and vessels of chili oil and soy sauce sit out on the tables at Chinese restaurants. So why must they take up valuable fridge space at home?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A devil’s bargain with OpenAI To have or not have children Why it’s nice to know you Photos: An island community displaced by climate change

Culture Break

Pierce Derks / IFC / Shudder

Watch. In a Violent Nature (out now in theaters) is a slasher film from the point of view of the silent predator. It might seem like a purely aesthetic exercise, but its experimentation elevates an all-too-familiar genre, David Sims writes.

Listen. The latest episode of Radio Atlantic features an interview with the drag queen Sasha Velour, who won RuPaul’s Drag Race and now stars in her own HBO reality show, We’re Here.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

Michael Cohen is an admitted liar and a convicted felon who is openly fueled by a thirst for revenge against Donald Trump. That he is so frank about his motives and past may actually make his testimony seem more credible to jurors.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The real meaning of Trump’s “unified Reich” post Reaganomics is on its last legs. The panic over smartphones doesn’t help teens.

Revenge of the Fixer

For the past week in New York, Michael Cohen has been a valuable—and fraught—star witness in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. The defense has tried to portray Cohen, Trump’s ex-lawyer and fixer, as a jilted lackey—which he openly is. To get a sense of his animus toward his ex-boss, look no further than his T-shirt depicting Trump behind bars, his admission in court that he once called Trump a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain,” and his two memoirs—Disloyal and Revenge—that trash the former president for his many transgressions.

Still, Cohen’s openness about his past and his motivations—in part forced by the public and criminal nature of his previous offenses—may actually make him seem more credible to a jury. His argument in court boiled down to: I committed crimes at Trump’s behest—and suffered consequences—because I would have done anything for him. That transparency made him appear like “the agent who was held accountable, whereas the principal has escaped accountability,” James Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email.

In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes that included lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and violating campaign-finance laws by making hush-money payments—one of which went to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. He testified that, during the 2016 election, when she was considering publicizing the story of her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, Trump ordered Cohen to “take care of it.” In turn, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 of his own money, which he claimed was later reimbursed by Trump.

On the stand, Cohen largely remained calm, though he had some shaky moments. He admitted during cross-examination that he had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization, pocketing some of the money earmarked for a tech company. (When a prosecutor later probed him, he said that he had been angry because his bonus was cut.) The defense repeatedly tried to assail Cohen’s credibility—an obvious way to undermine a man who had previously lied under oath. Cohen testified that he had spoken with Trump in October 2016, via Trump’s bodyguard’s phone, about paying off Daniels. Attempting to ding Cohen on the details of the call, the defense insisted that Cohen hadn’t spoken with Trump and had actually discussed a different matter with the bodyguard, but Cohen stood by his testimony. Trump’s lawyers also called into question Cohen’s money-related stake in the trial. Cohen admitted that he has a financial interest in the outcome of the trial, because he writes and podcasts about Trump, but added that an acquittal would be better for him economically because it would give him “more to talk about.”

A common paradox lies at the heart of Trump’s criminal case, Sample told me: “To get at the truth in prosecuting criminal enterprises often requires relying on liars.” In most cases, being a convicted felon would make a witness far less credible. But the fact that Cohen has already served time in prison for admitting to crimes related to hush-money payments actually adds to his credibility as a witness here, Valerie Hans, a professor at Cornell Law School and an expert on juries, told me in an email; jurors won’t have to wonder if Cohen is testifying as part of a plea deal to avoid prison time for those charges.

In contrast to the prosecution’s parade of witnesses, Trump’s defense team presented only two witnesses before resting its case earlier today. (Trump himself did not testify.) One of the witnesses was Robert Costello, a lawyer who once did some legal work for Cohen. He was positioned to be a Cohen-antagonist, and he claimed that Cohen previously told him that Trump “knew nothing” about the hush-money payment to Daniels. But in the process of trying to impugn Cohen, Costello “succeeded in impugning himself,” Sample told me. The judge scolded Costello after he reportedly told the courtroom to “strike” something from the record and continued to speak after objections were sustained. “The circus-like debacle of Costello’s testimony is a microcosm of why the defense called so few witnesses,” Sample explained.

Cohen’s history of fealty to Trump, and his willingness to bully and lie, is well documented. That his past would be an asset may seem strange—but the prosecution is banking on him. After Memorial Day weekend, the jury will convene and begin their deliberations. Their decision to convict or acquit a former president will largely hinge on whether or not they think they can trust the word of Michael Cohen.

Related:

Michael Cohen, mediocre hero Trump’s alternate-reality criminal trial

Today’s News

Trump’s defense rested its case in his New York criminal trial. Closing arguments are set to begin next week. Rudy Giuliani and 10 other Trump allies pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, forgery, and fraud charges in an Arizona criminal case related to their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. One man died and multiple passengers suffered injuries when a Boeing plane flying from London to Singapore encountered severe turbulence; the aircraft plummeted roughly 6,000 feet within the span of five minutes.

Evening Read

Illustration by Nick Little for The Atlantic

The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing

By Tyler Austin Harper

“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships.” Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and executive chair of the dating app Bumble, leans in toward her Bloomberg Live interviewer. “How can we actually teach you how to date?”

When her interviewer, apparently bemused, asks for an example of what this means, Herd launches into a mind-bending disquisition on the future of AI-abetted dating: “Okay, so for example, you could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge, and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup. I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself” …

What Herd provides here is much more than a darkly whimsical peek into a dystopian future of online dating. It’s a window into a future in which people require layer upon layer of algorithmic mediation between them in order to carry out the most basic of human interactions: those involving romance, sex, friendship, comfort, food.

Read the full article.

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The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump Higher education isn’t the enemy. Scientists are very worried about NASA’s Mars plan.

Culture Break

Billie Eilish wears sunglasses and squats in front of a blue gradient background

Listen. Billie Eilish’s new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, sustains a mood of longing that is very now, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Watch. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (out now in theaters) proves that this blockbuster franchise keeps evolving for the better, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Among the many absurd details of the hush-money case are the alliterative, somewhat zippy pseudonyms that Daniels and Cohen apparently used in a nondisclosure agreement. Trump went by “David Dennison,” and Daniels was called “Peggy Peterson.” Earlier in the trial, Keith Davidson, Daniels’s former lawyer, testified that he had come up with the monikers—and that David Dennison was the name of a real person on his high-school hockey team.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.

Not all that long ago, I thought that the trial currently being held in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump would be the last one I’d want to see as the first one tried against the former president. It seemed the least serious of the cases against him. Here’s a man who tried to overthrow American democracy by launching a coup to stay in power. A man who allegedly stole dozens of boxes of classified national-security documents from the White House, some containing secrets about other countries’ nuclear-weapons capabilities, then lied about the documents, concealed them, and obstructed a federal investigation about them.

I thought I would have strongly preferred the cases about those matters to have gone first, particularly the secret-documents case, which substantively would be a lock, were it not for the judge overseeing it. But I feel the need to admit error. The truth is, I’ve come around to the view that People v. Trump is, in at least some ways, the perfect case to put Trump in the dock for the first time, and—I hope, but we’ll see—perhaps prison.

Because this case really captures Donald Trump. The legal commentariat have been engaged in an odd debate about what to call it. “The Stormy Daniels case.” “The hush-money case.” “The porn-star-hush-money case.” (Personally, that’s always been my favorite, and I think it sounds even better in German—Pornostarschweigegeldrechtsfall.) The more legally precise would like it to be known as “the New York business-records-falsification case,” because that’s what the New York penal code says it is. Some high-minded people I know prefer “the New York election-interference prosecution,” because it involves the concealment of a matter that might well have affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.

All these locutions work, but what the case is really about is Trump’s modus operandi—lying. He’s a matryoshka doll of mendacity. He lies, usually lies some more, and then often lies about the lies he’s previously told. He told at least 30,573 lies while president, by The Washington Post’s count. He lies almost whenever he opens his mouth, even when truth would better serve him. To be sure, his other criminal cases involve lies—lies about the 2016 election, lies about the military secrets he stole. But the alleged lies in People v. Trump strike at the core of his moral putrescence—and Trump knows it. They are lies allegedly meant to cover up a tawdry man’s tawdry behavior. The case truly embodies Donald Trump. And for that reason, I think, it deeply disturbs him.

That’s what stood out to me last Thursday as I sat in court watching the second day of the cross-examination of the prosecution’s witness, Stormy Daniels, who had taken the stand to testify that she’d met the defendant at a celebrity golf tournament on the south shore of Lake Tahoe in 2006, that he invited her to his room at Harrah’s hotel and casino there (ostensibly as a prelude to dinner), that she (rather unenthusiastically) acceded to his advance, that they then (rather briefly) had sex, and then that, 10 years later, days before the defendant won the 2016 presidential election, she was paid off by the defendant’s fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, to keep her mouth shut about it all. (Trump denies having had sex with Daniels, and he also denies having falsified records in an effort to suppress reports of the liaison.)

Strictly speaking, Daniels’s testimony wasn’t necessary—particularly the details about the sex. The case is about whether Trump caused the falsification of business records at his business, and whether that falsification was intended to cover up another crime (among other offenses, violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act). Daniels has absolutely nothing to say about the Trump Organization’s business records, and the fact that she was ultimately paid the hush money isn’t in dispute. The sex strictly doesn’t matter: If Daniels and Trump didn’t have sex—as Trump maintains—but the facts alleged by the New York County District Attorney’s Office were otherwise the same and proved, Trump could still be found guilty of a Class E felony under the New York penal law.

But as we have so often seen over the past nine years, Trump’s instinctive, narcissistic mendacity came into self-defeating play once again—this time by making Daniels’s testimony more significant than it had to be. It’s hard to imagine that many sentient, honest human beings could believe Trump’s denials of having congressed with Daniels. Yet Trump continues to insist on denying it—not only in public, but in court. And not only is sex not an element of the crime, but his strongest defense—the one he could actually skate on—will be to argue that there is insufficient evidence that he knew his people were falsifying business records. This defense faces many problems—including that Trump personally signed (on the Resolute desk!) some checks (made out to Cohen) in packets with false backup attached. Still, Trump would have been best off having his lawyers focus their efforts on the question of his knowledge and intent regarding the payments.

As usual, though, this defendant just couldn’t help himself. The prosecution was entitled to put on evidence of the sex to establish Trump’s motive for the payoff and cover-up. The defendant could have had his lawyers not dispute the point, even stipulate to it. What’s the harm? His political supporters stand by him even though he’s already a civilly adjudicated sex offender, so why would they care one whit about what he did consensually for a couple of minutes with an adult-film actor once upon a time in Stateline, Nevada? Had he not insisted on contesting the point, Daniels might not have had to testify, or at least she might have been on and off the stand in a flash. Because, again, what ultimately matters in the case happened mostly in New York City in 2016.

Trump’s insistence on pointlessly contesting Daniels’s veracity entitled the prosecution to draw her account out even more than it otherwise could have—not only to establish a record on why Trump would have been motivated to hush Daniels up (because sex), but to bolster her credibility with detail of her recollection (about sex). As Justice Juan Merchan later told the defense counsel in denying their motion for a mistrial:

Your denial [of a sexual encounter] puts the jury in a position of having to choose who they believe: Donald Trump, who denies there was an encounter, or Stormy Daniels, who claims there was.

Although the People do not have to prove that a sexual encounter actually did occur, they do have the right to rehabilitate Ms. Daniels’ credibility and to corroborate her story, which was immediately attacked [by the defense] on opening statements.

The more specificity Ms. Daniels can provide about the encounter, the more the jury can weigh to determine whether the encounter did occur and, if so, whether they choose to credit Ms. Daniels’ story.

The result, thanks to the defendant, was the introduction of more evidence that made him look like a duplicitous clod. There were limits, to be sure. Merchan warned the prosecutors before Daniels took the stand that “we don’t need to know the details of the intercourse.” (The universe thanks you, Your Honor.) Accordingly, and in contrast with how some characterized it, Daniels’s testimony wound up not being very “graphic.” As the prosecution later pointed out to the court, “there was not a lot of detail elicited” about “the actual sexual encounter,” which was the subject of only a handful of questions put to the witness. Not just that, but the judge also sustained objections or struck testimony on what position Daniels and the defendant were in, whether she touched his skin, and how Daniels, as they coupled, “was staring at the ceiling … trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.”

In the end, the only somewhat lurid detail about the sex that actually got into the record was that the former president (in contrast with performers at her prophylactic-mandatory then-employer, Wicked Pictures), didn’t wear a condom, which concerned her. And that small factoid got in solely because the defense counsel inexplicably failed to object. (The judge later observed, “For the life of me, I don’t know why [the defense counsel Susan] Necheles didn’t object. She had just made about 10 objections, most of which were sustained. Why on earth she wouldn’t object to the mention of a condom, I don’t understand.”)

So the testimony wasn’t all that sexy, in the literal sense. Still, because of the defendant’s denial of what happened that night at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, the testimony ended up being deeply embarrassing to Trump. To bolster Daniels’s credibility, the prosecution’s questioning went into great detail about what led up to the fleeting fornication—essentially, her conversations with Trump beforehand. And that brought out some memorable, and highly believable, testimonial gems that perfectly capture the lowbrow, hyper-self-absorbed 45th president of the United States. There’s Trump telling Daniels, “You remind me of my daughter because she is smart and blond and beautiful.” And him admitting that he and his wife, Melania, “actually don’t even sleep in the same room.”

And there’s him repeatedly interrupting Daniels to talk about—whom else?—himself: “He would ask me questions and then not let me finish the answer. He kept cutting me off, and it was almost like he wanted to one-up me, which was just really hilarious when you think about it.” And there’s how, when the self-consumed future defendant asked, “Have you seen my new magazine?” and pulled out an issue with his face on it, Daniels called him “rude, arrogant, and pompous,” and said, “Someone should spank you with that. That’s the only interest I have in that magazine. Otherwise, I am leaving.” And there’s how, when finally faced with the prospect of Daniels walking out, Trump rolled the magazine up and gave it to her.

In that Nevada hotel room that night, Daniels said, she rose to the challenge:

“I took it from him and said, turn around. And I swatted him.”

Where?

“Right on the butt.”

The alleged spanking hardly could have rent Trump’s rump in 2006. But given his extreme vulnerability to narcissistic injury, the story surely had to have inflicted acute trauma upon his most delicate ego when Daniels told it 18 years later.

We need not speculate. The day before, Merchan had ruled on the district attorney’s third motion to hold Trump in contempt for violations of the court’s gag order, which restricts the defendant’s ability to make public statements attacking witnesses. And for the tenth time, Merchan held Trump in contempt. But more important, Merchan gave the defendant a warning. The legal maximum of a $1,000 fine for each count of contempt, the judge observed, had failed to deter Trump from violating the gag order; “therefore, going forward, this Court will have to consider a jail sanction if recommended.” He addressed the defendant directly, in open court: “The last thing I want to do is to put you in jail … But, at the end of the day, I have a job to do, and part of that job is to protect the dignity of the judicial system and compel respect … So, as much as I do not want to impose a jail sanction … I want you to understand that I will, if necessary and appropriate.”

That was where matters stood the next morning, when Daniels testified about the spanking: Trump was so very close to—perhaps just one more contumacious act away from— incarceration. And yet when he heard Daniels say she had spanked him, he almost landed himself in lockup. Not long after that testimony, the court took its regular midmorning break. The jury was excused, and Merchan immediately called the lawyers to the bench. He told the defense counsel that their obviously “upset” client had been “cursing audibly” and “shaking his head.”

Trump had done that, in particular, the judge said, “when Ms. Daniels was testifying about rolling up the magazine, and … smacking your client.” Quelle surprise.

“That’s contemptuous,” said an angry Merchan. “It has the potential to intimidate the witness.” Even without a gag order, and 10 prior violations of it, swearing at a prosecution witness is the kind of conduct that, before some judges, could quickly land a defendant in jail. Merchan commanded: “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.” And so the lawyers remonstrated with their client during the break. It was all a bit reminiscent of a moment in the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, when, within earshot of the jury, Trump had muttered that the trial was a “witch hunt” and a “con job.” The presiding federal district judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, threatened to eject Trump from the courtroom. “I would love it. I would love it,” Trump responded. To which Judge Kaplan replied, “You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently.”

In Merchan’s courtroom last week, whether Trump could control himself had once again become the question; and once again a judge gave him a break. But the struggle continues, and it’s being waged behind the scenes—largely by Trump’s legal and political teams. Another person battling to maintain his freedom would probably remain focused on that battle, but Trump remains distracted by his petty obsessions and resentments, including of some of the faces he sees in the gallery. A couple of weeks ago, he glared at me. I had smiled at him. He didn’t like that. He also seems to have a particular distaste for the MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell.

Trump’s many grievances pose a problem for him. As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times reported last week, “People close to Mr. Trump have worried about whether long days in the courtroom have had an effect on his mental state.” The care and feeding of a narcissistic sociopath (see my exposition on that subject five years ago here in The Atlantic) and keeping him on a relatively even emotional keel is difficult—and sometimes impossible—even on a good day, and so Trump’s team has resorted to extraordinary measures to soothe him during this trial.

A key player in the current effort is apparently a young aide named Natalie Harp. Her job—no joke, this was in the Times—is to schlep around a portable printer “so she can quickly provide Mr. Trump with hard copies of mood-boosting news articles and social media posts by people praising him.” Last Thursday, after Daniels’s testimony, team Trump apparently found another use for this device. During the lunch break, Trump posted on his Truth Social account pictures of … me … from Election Night 2016. Alas, in one of the shots, I was, confessedly, rather inebriated. I had tears of joy in my eyes, was wearing a “Make America great again” hat, and was hugging my then-wife, the campaign manager whose remarkable talents had astoundingly just elected a buffoon. “Mr. Kellyanne Conway celebrating my Victory in 2016!” Trump’s post read. (Yes, Donald, supporting you was indeed a low moment in my life. Damn, you sure know how to hurt a guy.)

Now, I mention this not (just) because it is insane, hilarious, and involves me, but because it also makes my point about Trump being his own worst enemy. His uncontrollable pique at his plight, a plight caused by his own poor choices, leads him to make even more poor choices—and here, to impose those choices upon not just his political aides but his lawyers to boot.

Which brings us back to Daniels on the stand.

When prosecutors completed their direct examination of her on Tuesday afternoon, the cross-examination by Trump’s most competent lawyer, Susan Necheles, began. A Yale Law School graduate, she’s the one member of Trump’s current legal team who appears to be universally respected, and with good reason. By all accounts, and from my own limited observation, she’s extremely smart, highly experienced—and an excellent cross-examiner. As a woman, moreover, she was the obvious choice to be the one who cross-examined Daniels before a jury. Necheles started doing a disciplined and seemingly effective job of that on Tuesday afternoon. But she didn’t finish the examination, because it was too late in the day. Court adjourned.

The next day was Wednesday, a day off from the trial—the day each week that Merchan handles his other cases. Normally, when even a small hiatus like that occurs during a witness’s cross-examination, that’s a very good thing for the cross-examining side, and a very bad thing for the witness. The cross-examiner gets the chance to go back through the transcript of the witness’s direct testimony, tighten her lines of cross, focus them on the most important points elicited by the other side, and otherwise sharpen her knives.

But that didn’t happen here. When Thursday’s proceedings began, but before the witness returned to the stand, you could see the dynamic: Trump, sitting at counsel table next to poor Necheles, was talking animatedly into her ear, at length. Watching this, I imagined that the defendant had spent the day off stewing about the spanking. It couldn’t have been much fun for his lawyers.

And the result wasn’t good for the defense. Necheles’s resumed cross-examination was bad, not because Necheles was a bad examiner, but because the examination, for a reason we can all take an educated guess about, became overlong, and overdone. It became too argumentative, too focused on badgering the witness and on attacking trivial aspects of her account. At one point, Necheles absurdly engaged in cross-examining Daniels on the geography of the Stateline, Nevada–South Lake Tahoe, California conurbation, the idea apparently being to challenge Daniels on whether she had actually taken a cab around town instead of walking in her high heels.

The cross also forayed into archaic, even nonsensical, slut-shaming. Sure, the witness made a living engaging in sex on camera for money. But does that really mean she shouldn’t have been horrified to see Donald Trump suddenly take off his clothes? And was there any logic at all in seemingly trying to show that the sex the defense said didn’t occur was consensual because Daniels wanted it? The defense’s cross-examination made Daniels appear more sympathetic than any prosecutor’s direct questioning ever could.

Worse yet, it emboldened Daniels. She’s a smart woman—and she’s clearly strong-willed, with a sharp, quick-witted tongue. Normally it’s not a good idea for witnesses, even smart and tough ones—perhaps especially smart and tough ones—to fence with lawyers too much on cross-examination; witnesses tend to lose credibility when they do. But the belabored and argumentative nature of this cross-examination gave Daniels some running room. And she took every inch of it.

At one point, for example, Necheles asked a question about Daniels’s history of writing porn scripts containing “phony stories about sex [that] appear to be real”—obviously implying that Daniels’s story about Trump in the hotel room was fake, like the scripts. Daniels’s devastating retort: “The sex in the films, it’s very much real. Just like what happened in that room.”

At another point, Necheles attacked Daniels for selling merchandise about Trump’s indictment.

Necheles: Again, you’re celebrating the indictment by selling things from your store, right?

Daniels: Not unlike Mr. Trump.

And then, this jewel of an exchange, in which Necheles got zinged once again, and, by unsuccessfully moving to strike the zinger, drew more attention to it:

Necheles: Okay. Even though you tweeted and celebrated about him being indicted, you have no knowledge of what he was indicted for?

Daniels: There was a lot of indictments.

Necheles: Your Honor, I move to strike that.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger: It is responsive, Your Honor.

The court: It’s responsive. Overruled.

I’m pretty sure I saw some of the jurors struggling at times to suppress laughter, as I was. Simply put, Daniels wiped the floor with Necheles. But I don’t blame Necheles. If I had to guess—and I admit I’m speculating here—I’d say that a lot of what Necheles did on Thursday was against her better judgment. To my mind, the cross-examination would have been orders of magnitude better had it been confined mostly to two of the questions Necheles asked toward the end of it: “You know nothing about the business records, right?” “You know nothing about what [the defendant] does or does not know about the business records, right?” At the end of the day, those were the questions that most mattered, to which Daniels’s answers had to be, and were, no, and no. But that testimony got lost in the mix with everything else—thanks to Trump’s easily bruised ego.

One evening in March 2018, I joined some friends at a bar in Washington, D.C., to watch a live broadcast of Anderson Cooper’s interview with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes. For months, we’d all been reading news stories about Daniels’s reported sexual encounter with then-President Donald Trump, along with Trump’s efforts to pay her off in order to cover it up before the 2016 election—and now, finally, we were going to hear from the woman herself. The story itself seemed funny, an absurd dispatch from a faraway, brightly colored world of celebrity gossip.

But once the broadcast started, the story that Daniels told was not funny at all. It sounded, in fact, a great deal like the accounts of many of the women who had been recently sharing their experiences of sexual coercion as part of the #MeToo movement, which had exploded just a few months before, following The New York Times’ reporting on the abuses of the film producer Harvey Weinstein. Daniels hadn’t wanted to sleep with Trump, she told Cooper, but felt that “I had it coming for making a bad decision, for going to someone’s room alone.” Still, she insisted that she was “not a victim.” The atmosphere in the bar remained cheerful, but my “Dark and Stormy Daniels” cocktail no longer seemed quite so amusing an order. I left feeling unsettled.

I remembered that evening this week while following Daniels’s testimony at Trump’s New York trial, where he faces charges over his alleged effort to cover up the hush-money payment made to Daniels in 2016. News coverage of the trial has featured plenty of jokes about the seedy schemes by Trump’s team to quash unflattering stories. And Daniels has seemed happy at times to play her part in the circus, leaning into the character of a brassy Trump-hater. What she described on the stand, though, wasn’t exactly “tawdry” or “salacious,” as some news coverage has suggested. It was something sadder, uglier, and—for many people who have lived in some way in the shadow of sexual violence—more familiar.

Initially, whether the district attorney’s office would call Daniels to testify was unclear. Although she is at the center of the case, she’s also removed from it. Her story is what prosecutors say Trump wanted to silence before the election, but the charges themselves focus on documents allegedly fudged by the Trump Organization after the fact.

This week, though, prosecutors made the call to put Daniels on the stand. She described her experience with Trump in greater detail than she had on 60 Minutes, saying she’d reluctantly agreed to a dinner with Trump and, when she arrived at the hotel, was told to come up to his room—an echo of Weinstein’s tactics. After a long conversation about business—he was interested in the economics of the porn industry, she said, and suggested that she might appear on The Apprentice—she went to the restroom, and emerged to find him stripped down to a T-shirt and boxers. She was shocked: “I felt the room spin in slow motion,” she testified, and remembered thinking, “Oh my God, what did I misread to get here?” She went to leave, and he stood between her and the door. When she went to put on her clothes afterward, she said, her hands were shaking too hard to buckle up her shoes.

[David A. Graham: The Stormy Daniels testimony spotlights Trump’s misogyny]

As she had on 60 Minutes, Daniels emphasized in the courtroom that she viewed the sex as consensual. She also said that she was conscious of the difference in power between herself and Trump: Though she insisted that she hadn’t felt threatened, he was larger than her and standing between her and the bedroom door; his bodyguard was outside; he had dangled the possibility of a role on The Apprentice. Daniels’s insistence that she is not a victim locates the interaction in a queasy, blurred space of complicated sexual interaction that has become more culturally familiar in the years since #MeToo.

What was striking about Daniels’s story was how normal it seemed. Setting aside the identities of the people involved and the hubbub about hush money, elements were reminiscent of an uncertain disclosure that you might hear from a friend over brunch: Something weird happened last night … In a conversation with my colleagues at Lawfare, Claire Meynial, who has been covering the trial for the French magazine Le Point, described watching the focused, serious faces of the women in the press room as Daniels testified.

Particularly brutal was Daniels’s own frustration with herself for having ended up in a situation where Trump expected sex from her. On the stand, she seemed bitter over her own misapprehension that Trump had been interested in having a real conversation about her career aspirations. She had wanted “to be taken seriously as a writer and director” and hoped that appearing on The Apprentice might help get her there. Again, this carries an echo of Harvey Weinstein, and the many women who described their disappointment when they realized that the producer had no real interest in their work but saw them only as an object for abuse.

For all the attention that Daniels’s testimony has received, how much of a difference it will really make to an eventual verdict is not obvious. Though prosecutors seem to have calculated that her story will help build their case, the key questions they must prove to the jury don’t depend on what Daniels says happened to her that evening or whether she’s telling the truth. And there’s a risk that the sometimes-graphic details shared by Daniels might provide Trump with legal arguments with which to appeal any conviction, on the grounds that they could bias the jury against the defendant in a case that doesn’t turn legally on matters of sex. Twice, following Daniels’s testimony, Trump’s legal team moved for a mistrial on these same grounds—motions that the trial judge denied.

On cross-examination, the former president’s lawyer seemed committed to attacking Daniels’s credibility regarding her interactions with Trump. The questions took a shape familiar to anyone who has ever been questioned about their own experience of assault: Shouldn’t you have known that this was what he wanted? You didn’t say no? Aren’t you just making this all up? Daniels fought back, insisting on the truth of what had happened to her. Throughout it all, Trump sat there silently. When Daniels left the courtroom, he looked straight ahead, not turning to watch her go.

The adult-film star's cross-examination continues after a very heated testimony on Tuesday.

Donald Trump has often loved to talk about his sexual prowess. He boasted to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about grabbing women’s crotches nonconsensually. He called the New York Post and begged them to run a headline bragging that Marla Maples, then his girlfriend and later his second wife, considered their relationship the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!” He bragged that he had so much sex that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam.”

But the former president is suddenly shy about sex this week. It’s the third week of his trial in Manhattan on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money paid to a woman who says she had sex with him. That woman is Stormy Daniels, a porn actor and director, and today she testified in the trial, much to Trump’s consternation.

[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s misogyny is on trial in New York]

At the start of proceedings today, Trump’s lawyers fiercely objected to Daniels’s presence—particularly to the danger that she would divulge “any details” of sex between the two. Trump also angrily posted and then deleted a missive on Truth Social about Daniels testifying. (He denies that any sex occurred.) Daniels has indeed been nauseatingly graphic about the encounter in other forums, but a prosecutor assured Judge Juan Merchan that the witness would not describe any “genitalia.”

And she did not, although she did at one point describe the position in which she says they had sex. Trump’s lawyers, and sometimes Merchan, of his own volition, repeatedly objected to prosecutors’ lines of questioning or to Daniels’s answers. The vibes were weird all around. Daniels had to be repeatedly asked to speak more slowly, by both the prosecutor and the judge. Reporters in the courtroom observed that Merchan seemed more on edge than at any other point in the trial so far.

What Daniels described was less graphic and prurient, but perhaps more repulsive and revealing about Trump. My colleague Quinta Jurecic wrote at the outset of the case that the real subject of the trial was Trump’s misogyny, raising the question: “Is this really the kind of man you want to be your president?” The day’s testimony was a window into just what kind of man that is, one dripping with sexual entitlement and presumption.

[David A. Graham: Judge Merchan is out of good options]

Daniels recounted a dinner appointment with Trump in Lake Tahoe in 2006 that she thought was about either socializing or business; it dawned on her too late that the goal for him was sex.

One clear implication from Daniels’s testimony was that for Trump, this was nothing unusual. He simply expected that if a woman was around him, he was getting laid—not without consent, exactly, but not entirely with it, either. There was no conversation, Daniels testified: “I didn’t say anything at all.” After all, as Trump said in the Access Hollywood tape, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” In the same tape, he bitterly recalled hitting on another woman unsuccessfully. The failure rankled because it ran against his usual pattern.

The two met at a golf tournament. Trump’s bodyguard approached her after an introduction and asked if she’d have dinner with Trump. She demurred, profanely, but came around because she wanted to get out of another obligation. Besides, her publicist asked her, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Daniels was directed to meet Trump in his penthouse room. This should have been the first sign of trouble: She said he met her wearing silk or satin pajamas that reminded her of Hugh Hefner. She asked him to get dressed in normal clothes, and he did.

[Read: The cases against Trump—a guide]

Their conversation over dinner sounded, to be blunt, weird. Among the topics were how often Daniels was tested for STDs, and what protocols were for filming (her company always required condoms). In what maybe should have been another warning sign, they also talked about Trump’s sleeping arrangements with his third and current wife, Melania (Daniels said he said they didn’t even sleep in the same room).

At one point, Daniels scolded Trump. “Are you always this rude? Are you always this arrogant and pompous?” she asked. (No one would have to ask today.) “Like you don’t even know how to have a conversation.” But she also testified that unlike many other people, he seemed less interested in the salacious side of the porn business and more curious about the financials. “He was very interested in a lot of the business aspects of it, which I thought was very cool,” she said. “These were very thought-out business questions.”

Eventually, Daniels was ready to head out and went to the bathroom. But when she emerged, she found Trump on the bed, in a T-shirt and boxers. He was between her and the door. She moved to leave, but he blocked her—not in a threatening manner, she said, though she also noted that he was larger than she was and that she was aware of the power dynamic. The next thing she knew, they were having sex.

[Sophie Gilbert: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]

Trump had gotten what he wanted. The two kept in touch for years, with him repeatedly dangling but never delivering on the prospect of Daniels appearing on The Apprentice. She said he never asked her to keep quiet about their hook-up, though she also didn’t discuss it widely, she said, because she was ashamed. It was only later, as Trump was running for president in 2016, that her hush-money deal was arranged.

Last year, my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote that a second Trump presidency would produce four more years of unchecked misogyny. “I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway,” she wrote. “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.” Daniels’s account of her encounter with him showed exactly how that can work. It’s not that Trump bore any malice toward Daniels (that came later); it’s that she mattered to him only as a vehicle to sex.

By now, Trump has gotten a great deal more than he expected or wanted that day in his Tahoe penthouse. Following a lunch break today, his attorneys argued for a mistrial on the basis of Daniels’s answers. Merchan refused but said several times that some things that came up would have been “better left unsaid.” The newly demure defendant would surely agree.

As Daniels testified about her alleged affair with Trump, defence lawyers pushed to declare a mistrial in the case.

President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is an exuberant dictator, a lover of military salutes who is being investigated for crimes against humanity, but he’s not reckless enough to invade neighboring Guyana, is he? Would the leader of a country in an ever-deepening economic crisis risk starting Latin America’s first interstate war this century? Well, maybe.

For a century and a half, Guyana and Venezuela have quarreled over Essequibo, a stretch of the Amazon that both countries claim. Guyana has long governed the territory, but Venezuela also claims sovereignty over it, citing maps drawn in colonial times. Last year, Maduro expressed a sudden enthusiasm for seizing Essequibo that took many Venezuelans by surprise. International conglomerates had discovered lots of oil there, but that was in 2015, and in any case, Venezuela, too, has plenty of oil.

Whatever the reason, the slogan “Essequibo is ours” began appearing all over Venezuela—on posters and bumper stickers, as well as on promotional materials for a state-sponsored music festival in Caracas called Essequibo Fest. The ministry of ecosocialism produced a song with the slogan as its title. Then, in December, Venezuelans were called to vote in a referendum. Did they agree to establish a Venezuelan state in Essequibo and extend Venezuelan citizenship to the territory’s residents? Yes, 90 percent of Venezuelans answered, according to state media. Yes, we do.

[Read: Is Venezuela ‘fixed’?]

The referendum sparked international outrage, and Maduro seemed to back off his plans for conquering Essequibo. But not completely: In late December, he sent thousands of troops to the border for military exercises, and in February, satellite imagery showed that Venezuela had begun construction to improve the roads that would be needed for an invasion. Now Parliament has approved the “Essequibo defense” law, asserting Venezuela’s right to appoint a governor of the territory and forbidding the circulation of maps that fail to include Essequibo as part of Venezuela.

Guyana has called this legislation an “egregious violation of the most fundamental principles of international law.” Latin American presidents issued concerned statements; international organizations echoed them. Now, in what policy makers have dubbed “the most peaceful region in the world,” the Organization of American States fears for “regional peace.” If the border dispute between Venezuela and Guyana is a sleepy volcano, inactive for decades, these may be the first timid signs that it could erupt.

Many a territorial dispute can be traced to the hubris of politicians and their competing dreams of expansion. The story of Essequibo begins with a mediator’s simple vanity.

In Paris, in 1899, in the baroque halls of a foreign ministry where the borders of remote places have often been drawn and negotiated, Fyodor Martens, a Russian diplomat, served as arbiter to settle the borders between Venezuela and Guyana. He led a committee of two Americans, representing Venezuela, and two Englishmen, representing Britain, which was then Guyana’s colonial master.

Both parties had a case. Venezuela had, in its 1777 foundational document, a paper entitling Spain, and hence itself, to Essequibo; but the English had bought Guyana from the Dutch, and even if the borders were poorly defined, England had long controlled the area. Judging by his diary, Martens found the gig tedious and hated the night trains to Paris. He was preoccupied by another project of his, the Brussels Declaration, a convention to codify rules of war. Martens had championed this agreement for decades and even contributed an important clause to it. Hence, he was outraged that the counts of bashi-bazouks, in their “absolutely unlimited” ignorance, had omitted to honor him now that great powers had finally ratified the treaty.

One aspect of the Venezuela-Guyana arbitration did motivate Martens. Usually in a border dispute, one party votes in favor of a proposed solution, the other party votes against, and the mediator breaks the tie. But what if Martens could be the first arbiter to get all the parties to vote in favor? This was his opportunity to achieve unseen levels of international cooperation. He didn’t care who got the better deal but realized the British were implacable. Hence, he told the Americans that he was planning to side with the British, so even if they voted against the borders he was drawing, they would lose 3 to 2. If, however, the Americans voted in favor of his proposed arrangement, Martens would suggest a map that gave a little bit more land to Venezuela.

[Read: Venezuela’s train to nowhere]

“Thanks God, the Anglo-American arbitration tribunal is finally over,” Martens wrote when the borders were set to the benefit of the British—who, he lamented, negotiated like “zhids,” an anti-Semitic slur, and got “the lion’s share and are still dissatisfied.” He also was tired of the Americans, who refused to thank him and walked out upset. But Martens got the unanimity he wanted and went on to have the kind of career that would earn him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. “Hooray!” he wrote in his diary. “This is a great triumph!”

For decades, that was the end of the border issue, and politicians in Caracas forgot all about the fight. People in Essequibo, who already thought themselves more Guyanese than Venezuelan, continued speaking English and playing cricket.

Then, in 1962, Venezuela complained to the United Nations about the unfairness of the arbitrage. Martens, the Venezuelans argued on the basis of a contemporaneous American account, had colluded with the British. The timing of this complaint puzzled observers. “Venezuela’s proclivity for silence,” one scholar noted a few years later, created “a credibility gap on the real reasons for such lengthy spasms of muteness.” Why now?

The Cold War may have had something to do with it. As Guyana neared the year of its independence from Britain, a communist party seemed poised to take power, and the United States feared another Cuba. In a memo to President John F. Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk listed the options to prevent this. One of them: “Encourage Venezuela and possibly Brazil to pursue their territorial claims.”

And so in 1966, a few months before Guyana gained independence, its borders became once again subject to dispute. Diplomats representing both parties met again, this time in Switzerland. The resulting Geneva Agreement stipulated that Venezuela and Guyana had to negotiate borders by 1970, which they didn’t do. The countries can’t even agree on the origin of the word Essequibo: Guyanans think it’s Indigenous, and Venezuelans say it derives from the name of a Spanish explorer.

The disagreements have remained unresolved, but in most minds, Essequibo is and has long been Guyana’s. Most maps, even the CIA’s, say it is. Venezuela’s government has no presence there. Whenever the dispute resurfaced over the following decades, the international media would almost invariably note that Essequibo accounts for two-thirds of the territory of Guyana, suggesting that, yes, it is part of Guyana.

In the Venezuela where I grew up, however, the maps looked different. Since the 1970s, textbooks have emphasized that Essequibo, however remote and foreign it may seem, is the property of Venezuela, that indeed the Venezuelan sun is born in Essequibo, our easternmost region, and that the British cheated us out of it through Martens. On our maps, Essequibo is often colored in a distinct pattern of red and white diagonal stripes and labeled zona en reclamación, a phrase that conveys that the process is ongoing. When I first learned about all of this in school in the 2000s, I remember that my teacher at one point clarified that “people do live there,” and I felt dumb because I’d never thought of the zona en reclamación as a place where people could live. Those red and white diagonal stripes looked so hostile.

The idea of empire, in Venezuela, exerts a mighty power over the national psyche. Simón Bolívar is the most revered and recognizable of all statesmen because he liberated us from the Spanish empire. (He also tried to unify a handful of former colonies under his rule, which was very Napoleonic of him.) Part of the reason that Essequibo matters so much to Venezuelans is that we’ve been told it was robbed from us by the British empire. (Never mind that any claim Venezuela had to the land was inherited from Spain, another empire.)

Hugo Chávez, the rambunctious left-wing authoritarian who ruled Venezuela from 1998 until his death in 2013, is perhaps the politician who most exploited the concept of empire, comparing himself to Bolívar often and explicitly, using his sword as a prop during speeches. Chávez promised to free nations from the influence of the U.S. empire. In the 2000s, he appeared to realize the contradiction between professing anti-imperialism and fighting over land with a smaller, weaker neighbor. Cuba’s Fidel Castro, his mentor, had always sided with Guyana in the dispute. In a press conference in Georgetown, Guyana, Chávez said that Venezuela would not be an obstacle to any projects its neighbor wanted to authorize in Essequibo—not quite the same thing as formally giving up the territorial claim, but his words still undermined Venezuela’s legal position. His opponents, and many of his supporters, never forgave him.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: Why I left Venezuela]

Nicolás Maduro, Chavéz’s handpicked successor, is less bothered by any possible contradiction between anti-imperialist rhetoric and expansionist ambitions. In 2015, ExxonMobil discovered that Essequibo sits on enough oil to change Guyana’s destiny—and since then, Maduro has made his territorial views clear. The threatening tone he has taken has made international firms uneasy and slowed down the oil boom.

In 2018, Guyana, backed by ExxonMobil, asked the International Court of Justice to settle the dispute with Venezuela. Guyanese President Irfaan Ali has behaved like a model international citizen, talking a lot about peaceful resolution. Now, over Maduro’s objections, Guyana v. Venezuela is on the docket.

International pundits have interpreted Maduro’s recent antics—the December referendum, the troops by the border—as a ploy to appropriate Guyana’s newfound riches amid Venezuela’s own economic crisis. (Per the headline of a Wall Street Journal column: “Venezuela Covets Guyana’s Oil Fields.”) But Venezuela’s claim to Essequibo, which the legal process in The Hague threatens to end for good, is as much about national pride as about resources. Venezuela’s once-extravagant oil industry seems to have vanished, and Guyana—the world’s fastest-growing economy—looks poised to become the prosperous nation that Venezuela has lost its chance to be. Bad enough for Guyana to exercise control over the area as it long has been doing; far worse to make this control official.

“I don’t know that Maduro cares about Essequibo,” Victor Amaya, a journalist based in Caracas, told me. “But he definitely doesn’t want to be the president that loses Essequibo.”

Maduro also cares about staying in power. This year’s election, not Guyana’s oil, is likely his motivation for the recent “Essequibo is ours” campaign. He announced the referendum around the time of the opposition primary, which got an impressive turnout. The referendum not only provided a good distraction but also had strategic value. As an article in Caracas Chronicles argued, the ruling party wanted to assess how many voters it could mobilize. (The answer was “not a lot”; the AP noted that polling sites were desolate despite the millions of votes reported in state media.)

The referendum also serves as a hedge. One of the questions smartly asked if voters rejected the ICJ’s authority (they do), so whatever the court decides, Maduro can tell his voters it doesn’t matter. The ICJ is imperialistic anyway. So is Guyana, and ExxonMobil. (“Venezuela’s truth will prevail before imperial spoils” is the new party line. “We will take back Essequibo.”) And if, as the July election approaches, Maduro fears a dismal outcome, he can always cancel the vote and declare a state of emergency due to a standoff with Guyana.

Should the international community be worried? Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine reminded the world that every so often, the unimaginable does happen. That’s what an interstate war in South America is: unimaginable. The region’s nations are anomalously peaceful despite their domestic troubles and strong militaries.

In the first days of the Ukraine war, Maduro was one of a few leaders in the Western Hemisphere who sided with Vladimir Putin. Russia and Venezuela share a lively trade of warplanes and weapons, and Maduro is apparently planning a visit to the Kremlin. And yet, many Guyanese and Venezuelan academics I interviewed feel fairly confident that war won’t break out. Ivelaw Griffith, a Guyanese expert on national security in the Caribbean region, told me that Maduro wouldn’t risk it. Other than Russia, Venezuela has no friends. (China has investments in both countries and encouraged the two nations to work it out.) Guyana, by contrast, has the full support of the United States, and the United Kingdom even sent a warship in December. The best roads to Guyana pass through Brazil, and President Lula da Silva has warned Venezuela to keep out. “When Brazil made clear whose side it was on, Maduro did seem to tone it down,” Alí Daniels, a Venezuelan lawyer who directs a human-rights group, told me.

[Read: Not a world war but a world at war]

Andrei Serbin Pont, the Venezuelan head of CRIES, a Latin American and Caribbean think tank, told me that he fears his colleagues are underestimating the risk of war. Serbin Pont lives in Argentina, where the memory of the Falklands War lingers, and he sees many parallels. “Authoritarian regime, internal crisis, sovereignty claim,” he told me; “a military keen to divert attention from the internal crisis by creating an external enemy.” If Maduro senses that his electoral prospects look dire, in other words, he might go ahead and order an invasion, just as Argentina’s General Jorge Videla did. And Brazil’s control of the roads might not even be that big of an obstacle, as Venezuela could invade by sea.

Maduro can gain a lot from creating the impression that the Venezuelan army is getting ready to go to war, whether or not it really is. Henry Ziemer, an analyst at the Center for Strategic International Studies in Washington, D.C, told me he thinks that this might be what’s going on. The uncertainty Venezuela has created has succeeded in paralyzing many aspects of Guyana’s oil industry, and Maduro might hope to get territorial concessions or money in return for staying still. Ziemer suggested that the best analogy might be neither Ukraine-Russia nor the Falklands but something more like the Cuban missile crisis: The Venezuelans could be trying to make their threats as credible as possible without actually proceeding. Hopefully, no rogue soldier will get carried away.

In Essequibo, life has gone on pretty much as before. I asked Euliene Watson, who is in her 50s and lives in an Amerindian reserve in Essequibo, what she thought about the drama between the two countries, and she replied that she doesn’t think about it all. Fitzgerald Yaw, a development-economics professor at the University of Guyana, in Georgetown, told me that only international investors and government officials worry about Venezuela’s territorial claims. The Guyanese have just learned to live with the situation.

And yet, the specter of conflict has manifested in sneaky ways in Essequibo. Many villages use generators, a reminder that the World Bank’s president once walked back from financing a giant hydroelectric project in Essequibo after receiving an ominous letter from Venezuela. In the 1970s, the American cult leader Jim Jones presided over the biggest mass suicide in world history in the jungles of Essequibo. One reason the Guyanese prime minister allowed Jones’s commune to grow so large was that he believed the presence of Americans would deter a Venezuelan military invasion.

The dispute over Essequibo has had the effect not of changing the territory but of making change there difficult. Maybe that’s why many residents I spoke with seemed to feel less angry than resigned. “They’re just there. It’s like my neighbors,” Euliene Watson said of Venezuela. “If they’re good neighbors, you’re happy. If they’re not good neighbors, there’s nothing much you can do about them. How do you live with them?”

The court heard a witness testify to secret recordings of Trump, in which he appears to negotiate the Daniels payment.