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      USC vetoed a Muslim student’s graduation speech for her pro-Palestinian views. Why? | Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan

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      When Asna Tabassum, a hijab-wearing Muslim, was announced as the valedictorian for the University of Southern California class of 2024, my initial reaction was the thought of my south Asian mother saying, “What are you doing? Why aren’t you valedictorian?” But what followed was pride.Then the university announced last week that it would no longer allow Tabassum to speak at commencement. After pro-Israel groups mischaracterized Tabassum’s pro-Palestinian views as “antisemitic”, the USC administration claimed that security concerns made her speech untenable.“I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred,” Tabassum, a friend of mine, wrote in a statement. “I am surprised that my own university – my home for four years – has abandoned me.”USC has not just abandoned an accomplished student, but also nearly 1,000 Muslims on campus. I happen to be one of them.Right now, the reality of being a Muslim student is intertwined with the university’s decision to rescind Tabassum’s well-earned honour. We were teased by our institution, taunted even, as they refuse to publicly stand by their choice.As a Muslim, the lack of support scares me. My hijab-wearing friends have been called terrorists and spat at; my Palestinian peer has had their car broken into and their Qur’an torn and I am judged for wearing a keffiyeh to class or having a sticker on my laptop that reads “Free Palestine”.When Arab and Muslim students are directly affected, the university’s silence makes its position clear.When the office of the president can release a statement condemning Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, but not one condemning Israel for killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, it makes the university’s position clear.And when the university refuses to publicly support its choice for valedictorian, again the school’s position is clear.Understandably, students and faculty are upset and angry. Last Friday, 11 members of the USC advisory committee on Muslim life resigned “in protest against the university administration’s decision to revoke Asna Tabassum’s valedictory address at commencement”.This committee was convened by the president “to consider a number of tangible solutions to support Muslim students, faculty and staff”. But now, when USC cannot support one student, I doubt it wants to support any of us.This is what it is to be Muslim at a college campus: enraged, scared and robbed of the hope that Tabassum represents. As a student, I placed my trust in this institution that has taught me, but that trust has waned.As a journalist, I am also alarmed. This profession, this institution, and its foundation are based upon the free exchange of ideas and the freedom to share those ideas. The cowardice of hiding behind the veil of “safety concerns” is appalling. Furthermore, California’s Leonard Law stipulates that even private universities like USC are obliged to uphold speech protected by the first amendment.USC seems to not just be above the law, but also hypocritical. Just last semester, the Turkish ambassador and Azerbaijani consul-general were on campus as part of an event hosted by the university during the height of Azerbaijan’s military campaign against the majority-Armenian region of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno Karabakh. The Armenian community on campus was facing tragedy, watching their people being starved and mourning their loss.When students demanded that the university, especially at such a time, rescind its invitation to the delegation, the university refused, arguing that doing so would infringe the delegation’s freedom to speak.The provost’s office sent out an email about USC’s commitment to academic freedom, writing: “These freedoms are outlined within the USC policy on free speech and serve to protect the viewpoints – no matter how controversial or unpopular – of all members of our community.” In response to the protests, the university also increased security for the delegation – an option the university failed to provide Tabassum.Freedom of speech was protected then. Just not now.While the university may have made its decision, the students have made one for themselves too: “Let her speak.” Over 300 students recently marched in solidarity with Tabassum, demanding that the USC administration reinvite the valedictorian to speak at commencement. The university did just the opposite. With a decision that has enraged the class of 2024, USC has instead “released” all its outside speakers from speaking during the main commencement ceremony. This means that keynote speaker Jon M Chu will not be speaking at commencement. Tabassum will not be speaking at commencement. The only person who will be speaking is Carol Folt, USC’s president. And, respectfully, no graduate who has worked tirelessly for four years wants to just hear from the president.Instead of emailing students about this change, the administration simply updated the commencement website and posted an Instagram story.If the aim of the university is to maintain the safety and security of its 65,000 graduation attendees, it may have achieved that. Because, in all fairness, who is going to attend this graduation now, and for what? Graduating students are not represented, they are not excited and right now they are angry – even more so given that many of them never had their high school graduation, due to Covid.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut all of the above is moot at this point. The university has now gone further and announced that it has simply canceled the main stage graduation ceremony – again citing unnamed safety concerns following a day of peaceful protest that only turned violent with the university-sanctioned introduction of law enforcement.But if the university can promptly expel hundreds of non-violent protesters from campus less than 24 hours after their occupation began, how is it possible that the best a university that charges nearly $70,000 per year could do is cancel the entire event?I refuse to believe these choices were about security. From the start, it’s been about restricting Tabassum from speaking. It’s been about USC failing to stand up for its Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students.The university has chosen to be on the wrong side of history. It can start repairing some of the harm done by prioritizing the needs of its students over protecting its president.USC hasn’t listened to its Muslim students, its Arab students or its Palestinian students when we asked for the university to figure out a way to let Asna Tabassum speak safely. By ignoring our voice, as it did Tabassum’s, USC has silenced us all.For this and many other hasty decisions taken by the university these past two weeks, it’s clear what the next decision should be: let Carol Folt go.
      Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan is a journalist and student at the University of Southern California studying international relations and journalism More

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      ‘A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose’: can Allan Lichtman predict the 2024 election?

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      He has been called the Nostradamus of US presidential elections. Allan Lichtman has correctly predicted the result of nine of the past 10 (and even the one that got away, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). But now he is gearing up for perhaps his greatest challenge: Joe Biden v Donald Trump II.Lichtman is a man of parts. The history professor has been teaching at American University in Washington for half a century. He is a former North American 3,000m steeplechase champion and, at 77 – the same age as Trump – aiming to compete in the next Senior Olympics. In 1981 he appeared on the TV quizshow Tic-Tac-Dough and won $110,000 in cash and prizes.That same year he developed his now famous 13 keys to the White House, a method for predicting presidential election results that every four years tantalises the media, intrigues political operatives and provokes sniping from pollsters. Long before talk of the Steele dossier or Mueller investigation, it all began with a Russian reaching out across the cold war divide.“I’d love to tell you I developed my system by ruining my eyes in the archives, by deep contemplation, but if I were to say that, to quote the late great Richard Nixon, that would be wrong,” Lichtman recalls from a book-crowded office on the AU campus. “Like so many discoveries, it was kind of serendipitous.”View image in fullscreenLichtman was a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena when he met the world’s leading authority in earthquake prediction, Vladimir Keilis-Borok, who had been part of a Soviet delegation that negotiated the limited nuclear test ban treaty with President John F Kennedy in Washington in 1963.Keilis-Borok had fallen in love with American politics and began a collaboration with Lichtman to reconceptualise elections in earthquake terms. That is, as a question of stability (the party holding the White House keeps it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House gets thrown out).They looked at every presidential election since Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860, combining Keilis-Borok’s method recognising patterns associated with stability and earthquakes with Lichtman’s theory that elections are basically votes up or down on the strength and performance of the party that holds the White House.They came up with 13 true/false questions and a decision rule: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. If fewer than six went against it, it would win. These are the 13 keys, as summarised by AU’s website:1. Party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the US House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.2. Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.3. Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.4. Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.5. Short-term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.6. Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.7. Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.8. Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.9. Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.10. Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.11. Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.12. Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.13. Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.Lichtman and Keilis-Borok published a paper in an academic journal, which was spotted by an Associated Press science reporter, leading to a Washington Post article headlined: “Odd couple discovers keys to the White House.” Then, in the Washingtonian magazine in April 1982, Lichtman used the keys to accurately predict that, despite economic recession, low approval ratings and relative old age, Ronald Reagan would win re-election two years later.That led to an invitation to the White House from the presidential aide Lee Atwater, where Lichtman met numerous officials including then vice-president George HW Bush. Atwater asked him what would happen if Reagan did not run for re-election. Lichtman reckoned that a few important keys would be lost, including incumbent charisma.“Without the Gipper, forget it,” Lichtman says. “George Bush is about as charismatic as a New Jersey shopping centre on a Sunday morning. Atwater looks me in the eye, breathes a huge sigh of relief, and says, thank you, Professor Lichtman. And the rest is history.”For the next election, Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis by 18 percentage points in the opinion polls in May 1988, yet Lichtman correctly predicted a Bush victory because he was running on the Reagan inheritance of peace, prosperity, domestic tranquillity and breakthroughs with the Soviet Union.View image in fullscreenThat year Lichtman published a book, The Thirteen Keys to the Presidency. But he was still derided by the punditry establishment. “When I first developed my system and made my predictions, the professional forecasters blasted me because I had committed the ultimate sin of prediction, the sin of subjectivity.“Some of my keys were not just cut and dried and I kept telling them, it’s not subjectivity, it’s judgment. We’re dealing with human systems and historians make judgments all the time, and they’re not random judgments. I define each key very carefully in my book and I have a record.”He adds: “It took 15 to 20 years and the professional forecasting community totally turned around. They realised their big mathematical models didn’t work and the best models combined judgment with more cut-and-dried indicators. And suddenly the keys were the hottest thing in forecasting.”Lichtman was a man in demand. He spoke at forecasting conferences, wrote for academic journals and even gave a talk to the CIA about how to apply the 13 keys to foreign elections. And his crystal ball kept working.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe predicted that George HW Bush would be a one-term president, even though he was riding high in polls after the Gulf war, causing many leading Democrats to pass on mounting a challenge. Then a call from Little Rock, Arkansas. It was Kay Goss, special assistant to Governor Bill Clinton.“Are you really saying that George Bush can be beaten in 1992?” she asked. Lichtman confirmed that he was saying that. Clinton went on to win the Democratic primary election and beat Bush for the White House. “The Clintons have been big fans of the keys ever since,” Lichtman notes.The one apparent blot on Lichtman’s copybook is the 2000 election, where he predicted victory for the Democratic vice-president Al Gore over George W Bush, the Republican governor of Texas. Gore did win the national popular vote but lost the electoral college by a gossamer-thin margin. Lichtman, however, believes he was right.View image in fullscreen“It was a stolen election. Based on the actual votes, Al Gore should have won going away, except for the discarding of ballots cast by Black voters who were 95% for Gore. I proved this in my report to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. One out of every nine to 10 ballots cast by a Black voter was thrown out, as opposed to one out of 50 cast by a white voter.“Most of those were not so-called hanging chads. They were over-votes because Black people were told punch in Gore and then write in Gore, just to be sure, and those ballots were all discarded. Political scientists have since looked at the election and proved I was right. Al Gore, based on the intent of the voters, should have won by tens of thousands of votes.”He adds: “I contend I was right about 2000 or at a minimum there was no right prediction. You could argue either way. I contend – and a lot of people agree with me – that I’m 10 out of 10. But even if you say I’m nine out of 10, that’s not bad.”Perhaps Lichtman’s most striking prophecy, defying polls, commentators and groupthink, was that Trump – a former reality TV star with no prior political or military experience – would pull off a wildly improbable win over the former secretary of state and first lady Hillary Clinton in 2016. How did he know?View image in fullscreen“The critical sixth key was the contest key: Bernie Sanders’s contest against Clinton. It was an open seat so you lost the incumbency key. The Democrats had done poorly in 2014 so you lost that key. There was no big domestic accomplishment following the Affordable Care Act in the previous term, and no big foreign policy splashy success following the killing of Bin Laden in the first term, so there were just enough keys. It was not an easy call.”After the election, Lichtman received a copy of the Washington Post interview in which he made the prediction. On it was written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.” But in the same call, Lichtman had also prophesied – again accurately – that Trump would one day be impeached.He was right about 2020, too, as Trump struggled to handle the coronavirus pandemic. “The pandemic is what did him in. He congratulated me for predicting him but he didn’t understand the keys. The message of the keys is it’s governance not campaigning that counts and instead of dealing substantively with the pandemic, as we know, he thought he could talk his way out of it and that sank him.”In 2020 Lichtman gave a presentation to the American Political Science Association about the keys as one of three classic models of prediction. In recent months he has delivered keynote addresses at Asian and Brazilian financial conferences, the Oxford Union and JP Morgan. As another election looms, he is not impressed by polls that show Trump leading Biden, prompting a fatalistic mood to take hold in Washington DC and foreign capitals.“They’re mesmerised by the wrong things, which is the polls. First of all, polls six, seven months before an election have zero predictive value. They would have predicted President Michael Dukakis. They would have predicted President Jimmy Carter would have defeated Ronald Reagan, who won in a landslide; Carter was way ahead in some of the early polls.“Not only are polls a snapshot but they are not predictors. They don’t predict anything and there’s no such thing as, ‘if the election were held today’. That’s a meaningless statement.”He is likely to make his pronouncement on the 2024 presidential election in early August. He notes that Biden already has the incumbency key in his favour and, having crushed token challengers in the Democratic primary, has the contest key too. “That’s two keys off the top. That means six more keys would have to fall to predict his defeat. A lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.”View image in fullscreenLichtman gives no weight to running mate picks and has never changed his forecast in the wake of a so-called “October surprise” But no predictive model is entirely immune to a black swan event.Speaking in the week that saw a jury seated for Trump’s criminal trial in New York involving a hush-money payment to a pornographic film performer, Lichtman acknowledges: “Keys are based on history. They’re very robust because they go all the way back retrospectively to 1860 and prospectively to 1984, so they cover enormous changes in our economy, our society, our demography, our politics.“But it’s always possible there could be a cataclysmic enough event outside the scope of the keys that could affect the election and here we do have, for the first time, not just a former president but a major party candidate sitting in a trial and who knows if he’s convicted – and there’s a good chance he will be – how that might scramble things.”Millions of people will be on edge on the night of 5 November. After 40 years of doing this, Lichtman will have one more reason to be anxious. “It’s nerve-racking because there are a lot of people who’d love to see me fail.” And if he does? “I’m human,” he admits. “It doesn’t mean my system’s wrong. Nothing is perfect in the human world.”Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 3-4.15pm ET, join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

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      How much did #MeToo change for women? Let’s ask Harvey Weinstein today – or Donald Trump | Marina Hyde

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      According to his representatives, former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is still digesting the overturning of his rape conviction by a New York court, but they did come out to say he was “cautiously excited”. Cautiously excited? I’m not sure these are the words I’d alight on to paint a word-picture of a rapist. You might as well say “tentatively aroused”. Then again, as we’re about to discuss, quite a lot of guys don’t particularly have to worry about what they say or do, or how they say or do it. It’s only natural that Harvey should very much want to be one of them again.Speaking of word-pictures, though, how’s this for a vignette of our times? When they heard the news that Weinstein’s conviction had been overturned on Thursday, a whole host of reporters happened to be looking at the exact spot in the exact New York courtroom that he’d sat in when that original judgment had been handed down. This was because they were waiting for Donald Trump to sit in it for Thursday’s proceedings in his hush money trial. Mr Trump, you might recall, is in such a lot of trouble that he is the presumptive Republican nominee and current bookies’ favourite to win the US presidency again, though admittedly he lags behind Weinstein on the sexual assault and misconduct front, given that only 26 women have accused him of it. Ultimately, though, I guess the question is: if #MeToo “went too far”, what would “going just far enough” have looked like?In seeking to answer that question, I’m somehow picturing the Best Picture climax of this year’s Oscars, with lifetime dictator Donald J Trump opening the envelope and calling it for Oppenheimer, before cackling: “I’m kidding with you, Nolan – the award goes to The Passion of the Harvey. Come on up here, all the guys from the Weinstein Company. And, Louis, you did a beautiful job with the role. You can add this one to your latest Grammy.”Or hang on – maybe #MeToo going just far enough would just look like a supreme court justice who is credibly accused of sexual assault deliberating with his colleagues/fellow placemen on whether the president can commit crimes absolutely without consequences, and then them deciding that it’s honestly too hard to decide on for now, thus delaying the guy’s trial for trying to overturn the results of a democratic election. Because that one really happened, also on Thursday.View image in fullscreenNot to flit too giddily between courtrooms, but we should note that despite Thursday’s news, Weinstein’s rape conviction in a Californian court still stands. As for what went wrong with his New York trial, it includes the legal error of the trial judge’s decision to allow testimony from four women who were not directly part of the case in hand. Long story short: unfortunately, simply too many women told the court that Weinstein had sexually assaulted them, which has now rendered his sexual assault trial null and void. The whole thing will have to be run anew, forcing an approved selection of those women to have to testify all over again. And yes – we might all have a number of strong views about those who benefit from the vagaries of the US legal system, but quite often you can’t print those views over this side of the Atlantic because of the vagaries of the UK legal system. Maybe we all get the legal systems we deserve. Except lawyers. You can’t help feeling those guys are the one set of people reaping unjust deserts from the legal system.Anyhow, back to even more of Thursday’s court news coming out of New York, where another judge was also ruling against Trump’s appeal of the $83m defamation verdict in the case brought against him by the writer E Jean Carroll, who alleged he raped her in a department store changing room. Given Trump was in the aforementioned courtroom across town, it’s quite something to be able to say that the day nevertheless still turned out to be a net good one for him, what with the supreme court’s decision not to yet make a decision on whether he can stand trial on charges of conspiring to overthrow the election. Certainly it was news about which he could be cautiously excited.But perhaps not about which he could be completely surprised, given his supreme efforts to bend the court to his will. Only the day before, the court had been hearing the state of Idaho argue for a ban on abortion even in cases where it is required for health-saving care. Trump’s campaign trail rallies see him frequently and repeatedly boast of being the puppet master of the judgment that overthrew Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court judgment that protected federal abortion rights. And he’s arguably right about that, what with having appointed three justices to the court and upset a balance the rest of the world is supposed to regard as fabled. Obviously, Trump’s pride in the achievement means so much more coming from a man who I’d love to joke has probably paid for more abortions than there are compromised supreme court justices, even if legal discussions over retaining that statement in this column are likely to run to more time than it took to write the column.On balance, you couldn’t accuse Thursday of being a great day for Lady Justice – or indeed for lady justice. As it turns out, all the so-called reckonings of the past few years can be unreckoned with far more easily than they were won. The only thing that’s gone “too far” is the pretence that anything went far enough.
      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      US supreme court presses Trump lawyer over immunity from prosecution claim – audio

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      US supreme court justices on Thursday questioned a lawyer for Donald Trump about the former president’s claim of immunity from prosecution over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. They posed questions about what happens if a president sells nuclear secrets, takes a bribe or orders a coup or assassination. Trump took his case to the highest court after lower courts rejected his request to be shielded from four election-related criminal charges on the grounds that he was serving as president when he allegedly took the actions that led to the indictment More

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      Trump VP contender Kristi Noem writes of killing dog – and goat – in new book

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      In 1952, as a Republican candidate for vice-president, Richard Nixon famously stirred criticism by admitting receiving a dog, Checkers, as a political gift.In 2012, as the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney was pilloried for tying a dog, Seamus, to the roof of the family car for a cross-country trip.But in 2024 Kristi Noem, a strong contender to be named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has managed to go one further – by admitting killing a dog of her own.“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season.Noem’s book – No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – will be published in the US next month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Like other aspirants to be Trump’s second vice-president who have ventured into print, Noem offers readers a mixture of autobiography, policy prescriptions and political invective aimed at Democrats and other enemies, all of it raw material for speeches on the campaign stump.She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”.Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”.Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”Incredibly, Noem’s tale of slaughter is not finished.Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”In what may prove a contender for the greatest understatement of election year, Noem adds: “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here.” More

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      Is there humour left in the White House? – podcast

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      The annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner returns this Saturday for a night of comedy ‘roasting’ – where the great and the good are ruthlessly mocked in celebration of the freedom of the press.
      In recent years, however, the night has taken on a different tone, with the atmosphere of warm self-deprecation and bipartisan bonhomie replaced by something more scathing and serious.
      This week Jonathan Freedland is joined by Jeff Nussbaum, a former senior speech writer to Joe Biden, to discuss the art of writing gags for presidents and whether there is still space for humour in US politics.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Trump trial reveals details about how the former president thinks about, and exploits, the media

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      The first week of testimony is winding down in former President Donald Trump’s trial in New York City on charges that he falsified business records to cover up hush money payments to an adult film star, in an effort to avoid reporting the payments as campaign-related spending.

      In a discussion that quickly shifted to topics well outside the courtroom itself, The Conversation U.S. spoke with Tim Bakken, a former New York prosecutor and now a legal scholar teaching at West Point, and Karrin Vasby Anderson, a scholar of political communication at Colorado State University, about the week’s events.

      Their focus this week was on how Trump and other politicians interact with the U.S. media, and how their interactions relate to democracy itself.

      Trump’s approach to the media

      Anderson: Testimony in the case so far has indicated that Donald Trump thinks that an appropriate way to control or shape the news cycle is to pay off media professionals. That’s a departure from what politicians typically do, which is to hire media strategists who help them shape their message and their political platform in ways that garner favorable media coverage.

      Trump’s approach is much more transactional. When he was president, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that he took the “unprecedented move” of revoking press passes from members of the White House press corps who covered him unfavorably.

      And some journalists appear to be taking cues from Trump.

      Earlier this week, in a Truth Social post, Trump attributed the following quotation to Fox News host Jesse Watters: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump jury.” The New York Times found that Trump embellished the quote: The words “in order to get on the Trump Jury” were not in Watters’ initial report.

      It’s not surprising that Trump embellished or changed a quotation. What’s really staggering is that after the fact, Watters posted on X the exact statement Trump had made, which was not what Watters had said on air. Essentially, Watters was allowing Trump to be his editor in his coverage and characterization of this case.

      Regardless of how the court decides, I think the average American should be concerned that Trump approaches the free press from a transactional perspective. Trump looks to who he can pay off or threaten or intimidate so they will tell the story he wants.

      Trump’s reaction to criticism

      Bakken: Trump is saying that the media engages in the same kinds of distortions that he engages in when he says, more loudly, things that verge on falsehoods or are falsehoods.

      Uri Berliner, a former editor for NPR, essentially raised the same allegations in a recent online column, concluding that NPR’s coverage is swayed by the personal identities and characteristics of its journalists. In essence, according to Berliner, NPR may distort reality, though in a more subtle way than Trump, by virtue of the journalists it hires, the sources who are quoted by the journalists and the stories the editors decide to cover, to the disadvantage of Trump.

      Trump seems to be responding to what he perceives as the media, including NPR and The Washington Post, calling him names, such as “authoritarian,” including by characterizing his speech as action.

      As a candidate and as a criminal defendant, Trump can point to verifiable facts that signal possible unfairness. For instance, he’s being tried by a jury selected in a jurisdiction where Democrats outnumber Republicans 9 to 1. And the piece about NPR said 87 NPR editors are registered members of the Democratic party and none are Republicans – though at least some are not members of either party.

      Maybe he’s saying it’s as great a threat to democracy to be singled out by the democratic institutions – which are supposed to be seeing both sides – because he’s a dissenter or a communicator who is different from other people.

      Anderson: The concern that I’m raising with the Jesse Watters case is not that it was friendly towards Trump. It’s that Watters changed his reporting to fit Trump’s narrative after Trump misquoted him.

      Trump tweeted something that was a lie: He said “Jesse Watters said ‘XYZ’” and Watters didn’t – Trump added to Watters’ words. That was going to be a problem for Trump because he would have been caught misquoting Watters. So Watters fixed that by going back and matching Trump’s words.

      The bottom line is that Trump has shown a willingness in the course of a campaign and presidency to influence the press in ways that other politicians have not.

      Trying to get the media to give you a friendly news framing is politics as usual. Paying people with secret deals, or by intimidating or punishing journalists, that’s an entirely different thing. Regardless of whether Trump is convicted of a crime this time around, I do believe that this case is illustrative of his relationship with the media and how he thinks about it differently than other people who’ve been president of the United States.

      Donald Trump speaks to the media briefly upon his arrival at court on April 25, 2024.
      Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times via AP, Pool

      Fighting back

      Bakken: In 1996 I ran as a Democratic candidate for Congress in my home district in Wisconsin. I lost in the primary.

      I have some experience in trying to convince somebody in the media to write a favorable article by giving a reporter information.

      I don’t see how treating a friendly reporter more favorably than you treat an unfriendly reporter is any different. You’re advantaging a journalist who shares your point of view and disadvantaging a journalist who does not share your point of view.

      Through deciding what stories to publish, NPR might be doing the same thing that Fox News is doing, except that we didn’t know it until Berliner spoke up. Both internally and publicly, NPR has rejected Berliner’s criticism, but its listeners may have had concerns. Since 2020, the number of weekly NPR listeners plunged from 60 million to 42 million in March 2024, according to The New York Times.

      It seems to me that Trump is fighting back against the press in a way that’s more aggressive than other people’s, but he feels that is his only approach. A lot of people align with him because they feel that disconnection from what they believe are institutions that are no longer fair.

      A difference from the past

      Anderson: My job as I see it, as somebody who is trained in political communication, is not to stump for either side. But I do simply say: When a presidential candidate misquotes a journalist, and then later the journalist posts a second quote that confirms the candidate’s misinformation, that is dangerous, and we should be worried about it. The misquote, by the way, seems to have been influential in one of the jurors stepping down because she was getting bad feedback.

      That’s not normal. It isn’t how most politicians, Republican or Democratic, have dealt with the national media prior to Trump. More