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      Trump’s Candidacy: Evaluated by 11 Opinion Writers

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      As Republican candidates enter the race for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination, Times columnists, Opinion writers and others will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Donald Trump, the former president. More

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      Will Trump’s Indictment Bar Him From Running for President in 2024?

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      The second indictment of former President Donald J. Trump — this time over his hoarding of sensitive government documents — adds to the unusual questions raised by the spectacle of someone running for president while facing charges.The indictment — and any conviction — would not bar Mr. Trump from running.Nevertheless, it would be extraordinary for a person who is under indictment, let alone convicted of a felony, to be a major party nominee.There are only a few historical examples of somewhat serious candidates who even come close. They include the unsuccessful run in the 2016 Republican primary by Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, after he was indicted on charges of abuse of power (the charges were dismissed months after he dropped out of the race), and the 1920 run by Eugene V. Debs as the Socialist Party nominee while he sat in prison for an Espionage Act conviction.If Mr. Trump were to be elected president while a felony case against him was pending or after any conviction, many complications would ensue.The Justice Department has in the past taken the position that even indicting a president while in office would be unconstitutional because it would interfere with the president’s ability to perform duties as head of the executive branch. Mr. Trump would surely try to get the case dismissed on that basis. There is no definitive Supreme Court ruling because the issue has never arisen before.Notably, in 1997, the Supreme Court allowed a federal lawsuit against President Bill Clinton to proceed while he was in office. That was a civil case, however — not a criminal one. Mr. Trump also faces a state case, an indictment in Manhattan in April, where he is accused of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment.Even more extraordinary complications would arise were Mr. Trump to be convicted and incarcerated and yet elected anyway. One possibility is that he could win a federal court order requiring his release from prison as a result of a constitutional challenge. Another is that upon the commencement of his second term, he could be immediately removed from office under the 25th Amendment as “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” More

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      Trump’s Indictment: Given What We Know, Not Charging Him Would Be the Greater Scandal

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      Donald Trump has been indicted. Again. And this time, it appears richly deserved, even if one includes special considerations related to the unique recent history of public officials mishandling classified documents.Before we dive into the details of the case, it’s important to restate the general principles that should govern any prosecution decision. The first principle, as I’ve argued, is that no person is above the law. That’s, of course, easy to say in the abstract, but perhaps a better way to frame it is that Trump’s status as a former president means that he should be treated no better and — crucially — no worse than ordinary American citizens.“No better” means that Trump should face charges if, for example, I would face charges under similar facts. It really is that straightforward.“No worse” means don’t stretch the law to indict the man. That may have been the case in March, when the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, indicted Trump on charges related to hush-money payments made to the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels. As I explained at some length, there are real questions as to the legal sufficiency of Bragg’s complaint, including whether federal law pre-empts his state charges. It does not appear to be an easy case to make.But in the case of the new indictment by the special counsel, Jack Smith, “no worse” comes with an additional twist. Trump’s case is not the first high-profile instance of a senior public official mishandling classified information. Hillary Clinton comes to mind, and while the Department of Justice might be able to prosecute Trump under facts similar to those in Clinton’s case, it should not. I can think of few things that would damage the legitimacy of the American criminal justice system more than for the department to impose a double standard on Republican and Democratic presidential contenders.So in addition to evaluating the relevant law, the Justice Department should apply the same standard to Trump as it did to Clinton, the standard articulated by the F.B.I. director at the time, James Comey, in his public statement announcing that the bureau would not recommend prosecution.As Comey said of Clinton’s storing classified information on a private server, “There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”But Comey declined to recommend prosecution because he said he couldn’t find evidence that the Justice Department had prosecuted any case under similar facts: “All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct or indications of disloyalty to the United States or efforts to obstruct justice.”That’s the Comey test: no prosecution absent evidence of one or more of the factors above. I disagreed with the decision at the time and still disagree. I’m a former Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, an Army lawyer who helped investigate classified information breaches when I served in Iraq, and I feel confident that I would have faced military charges under similar facts.But once the Comey test was articulated, it should be evenly applied. And thus the critical question for the political legitimacy — and not just legal sufficiency — of the indictment is whether there is evidence of intentionality or obstruction in the Trump case that was absent in Clinton’s. (This is the same question that should be asked of the mishandling of classified documents by Joe Biden and Mike Pence.)As of Thursday night, we had not yet seen the indictment, so there is a chance my assessment will change. But a review of the publicly available evidence indicates that Trump’s conduct likely does meet the Comey test. There is evidence of intentionality and obstruction.Justice Department court filings related to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant make a series of damning claims against Trump. According to the department, in 2021 the National Archives and Records Administration corresponded with Trump’s team, hoping to obtain the “transfer of what it perceived were missing records from his administration.” In January 2022, Trump provided the archives with 15 boxes of records. When it reviewed the documents, it found 184 with classification markings and 25 marked “top secret,” including some with extraordinary “H.C.S.” and “S.I.” markings. “H.C.S.” indicates classified information “derived from clandestine human sources; “S.I.” indicates information “derived from the monitoring of foreign communications signals by other than the intended recipients.” In other words, these documents were quite sensitive.The inclusion of this information among the files in question caused the National Archives to contact the Justice Department, which promptly began efforts to determine if Trump retained any additional classified information. As the department told a federal court, the “F.B.I. developed evidence” that “dozens of additional boxes” remained at Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago and they were “also likely to contain classified information.”The Justice Department then obtained a grand jury subpoena demanding “any and all” records in Trump’s possession that contained classification markings. What happened next is what makes this case quite serious for Trump. On June 3, 2022, the Trump legal team provided a small batch of files to department officials and included a sworn certification letter indicating that Trump’s custodian of records had conducted a “diligent search” to locate any documents responsive to the subpoena and that the custodian had produced all such documents.According to the Justice Department, this certification was not accurate. While the Trump team produced 38 additional documents bearing classification markings (including 17 marked “top secret”) in its subpoena response, the department believed that there were still more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Its filing states that “the F.B.I. uncovered multiple sources of evidence” indicating that the response to the grand jury subpoena was “incomplete.” Even worse, “the government also developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed” from their storage area and “that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”This is the evidence that precipitated the grant of a search warrant, and on Aug. 8 the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago. It claims that search uncovered more than 100 additional classified records, “including information classified at the highest levels.”These claims alone — if proved at trial — already provide evidence of intentionality and obstruction. Close observers of the case will note that I have not included an analysis of numerous news reports indicating that Trump engaged in even more egregious conduct, including ones that he was caught on a recording discussing a highly sensitive document detailing military plans for confronting Iran.Before we see the indictment, we know only the broad brushstrokes of the possible claims. But those brushstrokes paint a picture of intentionality and obstruction, including allegations of efforts to conceal and remove documents and the false certification of a complete response to the grand jury subpoena.Times news reports indicate that Trump is facing charges that include retaining national defense information, obstruction of justice, false statements, contempt of court and conspiracy. Each of those charges is substantiated even by the partial information we currently possess. The available evidence indicates that Trump’s conduct meets both the legal test for prosecution and the more lenient Comey test applied to Clinton.To say that the Trump indictment is credible is not the same thing as saying that he is guilty. We possess only partial information, and he has not yet mounted his legal defense. But for now, the evidence seems sufficient to support an indictment. Indeed, given what we know now, not charging Trump would be the greater scandal. It would place presidents outside the rule of federal law and declare to the American public that its presidents enjoy something akin to a royal privilege. But this is a republic, not a monarchy, and it is right to make Donald Trump answer for the crimes he is accused of.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump Lawyer Resigns From Defense Team in Special Counsel Inquiries

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      Timothy Parlatore, who has been defending the former president in the investigations into classified documents and Jan. 6, is leaving as federal prosecutors appear to be nearing decisions about bringing charges.Timothy Parlatore, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump in the federal investigations into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has resigned from the former president’s legal team.In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Parlatore declined to discuss the specific reasons for his departure, but said it was not related to the merits of either inquiry — both of which are being led by a special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Parlatore said that he informed Mr. Trump of his decision directly and that he left the legal team on good terms with the former president.His departure was reported earlier by CNN.Mr. Parlatore’s withdrawal from the twin special counsel cases leaves Mr. Trump a lawyer short at a moment when prosecutors under Mr. Smith seem to be nearing the end of their sprawling grand jury investigations and may be approaching a decision about whether to bring charges.Two other lawyers — James Trusty and John Rowley — will for now continue to take the lead in representing Mr. Trump in both of the cases.Mr. Parlatore informed Mr. Trump’s team on Monday that he anticipated withdrawing, according to a person familiar with the events.Since last summer and until recently, Mr. Parlatore played a key role in Mr. Trump’s attempts to use attorney-client and executive privilege to limit the scope of the testimony provided by a series of witnesses who appeared in front of grand juries hearing evidence in both of the matters.Over and over in sealed filings and at closed-door hearings, Mr. Parlatore and his colleagues sought to assert privilege on behalf of Mr. Trump in the hopes of narrowing testimony from top Trump aides like Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, and former Vice President Mike Pence. But their efforts were almost completely unsuccessful.At one point, Mr. Parlatore himself was subpoenaed to appear in front of the grand jury investigating the documents case. During his appearance, he answered questions about efforts made by Mr. Trump’s legal team to comply with a subpoena issued by the Justice Department last May demanding the return of all classified material in the former president’s possession.Among the things that Mr. Parlatore said he discussed with the grand jury were searches — ordered by a judge in response to a push from the Justice Department — that he oversaw at the end of last year of several properties belonging to Mr. Trump, including Trump Tower in New York; Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.; and a storage site in West Palm Beach, Fla. During the search of the storage site, investigators found at least two more documents with classified markings.Those searches followed a search in August of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida, by the F.B.I., which led to the discovery of more than 100 classified documents that had not been returned in response to the earlier subpoena.Mr. Parlatore was brought on to the legal team by Boris Epshteyn, who had been serving as something of an in-house counsel, hiring and negotiating contracts for lawyers. Mr. Epshteyn has shown a penchant for delivering sunny news to Mr. Trump despite bad circumstances, and for creating a bottleneck for the lawyers in dealing with the client, according to several people familiar with the events.Last month, Mr. Parlatore wrote a letter to Congress asking lawmakers for help in taking the documents investigation away from prosecutors and giving it to the intelligence community — a move that, among other things, would have removed the threat of a criminal indictment against Mr. Trump.The letter also seemed to preview some of Mr. Trump’s potential defenses in the documents case, noting that during his chaotic departure from the White House, aides “quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida.” This hasty process, Mr. Parlatore argued, suggested that “White House institutional processes,” not “intentional decisions by President Trump,” were responsible for sensitive material being hauled away.Last week, Mr. Trump appeared to undercut those assertions on live television, declaring at a CNN town hall event that he knowingly removed government records from the White House and claiming that he was allowed to take anything he wanted with him as his personal property.“I took the documents,” he said at the event. “I’m allowed to.” More

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      Trump’s Bet: Criminal Case Could Help His Campaign, and Vice Versa

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      The former president aims to apply political pressure to prosecutors — while revving up support for his campaign by portraying himself as a victim of Democratic persecution.PALM BEACH, Fla. — At one end of the palatial Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, the former president made his first public comments about his arrest. At the opposite end of the hall — a space illuminated by 16 crystal chandeliers and bigger than four professional basketball courts — were several cardboard boxes stuffed with white campaign T-shirts.The shirts read “I STAND WITH TRUMP,” and had a date printed on them in bold type: 03-30-2023 — the day Mr. Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his role in a hush-money scandal.After Mr. Trump’s indictment, it has become impossible to tell where his legal defense ends and his presidential campaign begins.The blurring of the lines between his White House bid and his mounting court battles is at the center of a high-stakes, norm-shattering bet from Mr. Trump: that he is capable of swaying public opinion to such a degree that he can simultaneously bolster his legal case and gin up enthusiasm — and campaign contributions — from his supporters.His legal calculation, according to aides and allies close to him, is that his pressure campaign against the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, will lead to his acquittal and deter other prosecutors from seeking additional indictments — though some of his lawyers have warned him that’s unlikely.Politically, Mr. Trump’s strategy is to paint himself as a victim of Democratic persecution, generating sympathy and good will to aid his campaign for a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination.Trump supporters outside the Manhattan courthouse where Mr. Trump was arraigned on Tuesday over his role in a hush-money payment.Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times“President Trump isn’t just right to speak this way, he has a duty to use his bully pulpit to expose corrupt and uncontrolled prosecutors,” said Rod R. Blagojevich, a former Democratic governor of Illinois who was imprisoned for corruption until Mr. Trump commuted his sentence in 2020. “I applaud him for it.”Mr. Trump and his allies repeatedly have made baseless accusations of wrongdoing by Mr. Bragg.No one can say for certain whether a recent uptick for Mr. Trump in presidential primary polls has been the result of his braiding of legal and political tactics, or the recent stumbles by his chief potential Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, or some combination of the two.But Mr. Trump’s conflation of his political and legal campaigns has been on display for weeks.His public remarks about his arrest on Tuesday were made from the same stage — surrounded by the same “Make America Great Again” banners and American flags — where he announced his 2024 White House bid nearly five months earlier. One of the lawyers seated near Mr. Trump during his arraignment in the New York courthouse was Boris Epshteyn, who has provided both political and legal advice to the former president and other Republican candidates.At Mr. Trump’s first major rally of the race last month in Texas, his campaign distributed “Witch Hunt” signs for the crowd to wave. The campaign has sent more than three dozen fund-raising appeals to supporters this week — each one referring to Mr. Trump’s legal battles. On Tuesday, one email solicited campaign contributions in return for T-shirts printed with a fake mug shot of the former president and the words “not guilty.” (The authorities in New York opted not to take an actual mug shot.)“Donald Trump has been masterful at blurring the line between his own potential legal and political peril,” said Rob Godfrey, a longtime Republican strategist based in South Carolina. “But now that he faces actual legal peril, it will be fascinating to see how loyal his supporters are, whether they have the same tolerance for chaos he continues to and whether any of his opponents figure out a way to peel anyone away from him.”Mr. Trump has long viewed public opinion as the solution to an increasingly lengthy list of personal dramas, political scandals and legal crises. He used similar tactics as president during the 22-month investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, and his approval rating was virtually unchanged. Mr. Trump’s legal advisers had urged him to create a team outside the White House structure to respond publicly to the Mueller inquiry, but he declined.One of Mr. Trump’s political high-water marks — in terms of re-election polling and fund-raising — came in February 2020, after a Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him in his first impeachment trial.More recently, he has spent months seeking to make state and federal prosecutors investigating his behavior appear indistinguishable from the Democratic and Republican opponents actively trying to stunt his political career.Mr. Trump has proved his skills at using investigations, impeachments and indictments to inflate his campaign coffers (and using a portion of those contributions to pay legal fees). His campaign has claimed to have raised more than $12 million from online contributions during the past week since he was indicted by the grand jury.But his strategy in the hush-money case to mingle his legal troubles with his 2024 presidential campaign carries significant risks and masks, at least for now, potential problems.While the Trump team has celebrated the recent influx of campaign cash, there have been questions about how many more new donors he can tap and whether he can maintain his fund-raising prowess without an immediate crisis to leverage. His only public campaign finance report so far showed a less-than-stellar haul for such a prominent political figure.The bigger question for the former president is how attacks on the court system and law enforcement — on Wednesday he called on his party to defund the F.B.I. and Justice Department in response to his criminal indictment — will help him win back moderate Republicans and independent voters who have abandoned him, and his preferred candidates and causes, for three consecutive election cycles.At Mr. Trump’s first big campaign rally of the 2024 race, in Waco, Texas.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesMr. Trump has used his standing as a former president — and as the front-runner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination — to repeatedly describe the felony charges in New York (and open criminal investigations in Georgia and Washington) as a politically motivated attack aimed at undermining his White House bid.But that message ignores a series of electoral disappointments for Republicans since Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory made him the face of the party. Those defeats — in 2018, 2020 and 2022 — have been largely the result of a Democratic base motivated to vote against him and a significant defection of moderate Republicans turned off by his antics.Additionally, every major investigation focusing on Mr. Trump started well before he announced his third presidential campaign. By the time he opened his White House bid in November, Mr. Trump had spent months pushing for an unusually early campaign introduction, a move intended in part to shield him from a stream of damaging revelations emerging from the investigation into his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election.Similarly, Mr. Trump has been using his legal battle to energize his enthusiastic backers and coalesce support in a divided Republican Party. While public opinion polls show Mr. Trump has a wide lead over most other primary contenders and potential rivals, about half of the party remains opposed to his candidacy.In the Mar-a-Lago ballroom on Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s campaign set up the room with a center aisle for the former president and his V.I.P.s to walk to their seats.The aisle resembled something a wedding party might use to make an entrance. But it also appeared to embody the very line that Mr. Trump has sought to blur: Mr. Epshteyn, one of Mr. Trump’s legal counselors, smiled and waved as the crowd cheered his arrival along with several campaign aides and family members.“The only crime that I have committed,” Mr. Trump said a few minutes later from center stage, “is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.” More

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      Defendant Trump Has the G.O.P. Just Where He Wants It

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      It was perhaps inevitable that, with Donald Trump’s historic arraignment taking place in the run-up to Easter Sunday, one of his most zealous disciples, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, would aim to drag Jesus into this mess.The former president “is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested,” the MAGA chaos agent blathered to a conservative news outlet just hours before Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to a hush-money deal with a porn star. “Jesus! Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government!” proclaimed Ms. Greene.As a lapsed Southern Baptist, I’ll leave it to the more devout to debate whether this comparison qualifies as outright blasphemy or is merely idiotic. Regardless, it was a perfect distillation of Mr. Trump’s longstanding political refrain and current legal defense: He is the faultless victim of political persecution — a righteous martyr beset on all sides by America-hating, baby-eating Democrats and Deep Staters. In the Gospel According to the Donald, any bad thing he is ever accused of is just more proof that the forces of evil are out to get the MAGA messiah.It’s a great story if you can sustain it. Unless you’re a Republican presidential hopeful not named Donald Trump, in which case being required to shovel this grade of malarkey to please the base is increasingly awkward — at least for anyone hoping to retain a shred of credibility beyond the hard-core MAGAverse.This uncomfortable reality is actually something for every member of the G.O.P. to think about. Again. Because, if Mr. Trump’s prime-time, post-arraignment remarks on Tuesday were any indication, this is going to be a central theme of his third presidential run — one that promises to relegate everyone else in the party, including those considering a 2024 run themselves, to being minor players in this latest, tawdriest season of “The Trump Show.”Tuesday night was Mr. Trump’s first chance to address the criminal charges against him — his first real opportunity to counterpunch — since the New York indictment came down. Safely back in the gilded cocoon of Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by American flags and supporters sporting red hats and campaign signs, he delivered a half-hour battle cry that was painfully on brand: a greatest hits of his witch-hunt grievances interwoven with his dark take on how the country is “going to hell” without him. As he tells it, “all-out nuclear World War III” is just around the corner. “It can happen! We’re not very far away from it!” He also suggested that the investigation into his squirreling away sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago could somehow lead to his being executed.Precisely the kind of responsible rhetoric one likes to hear from a political leader.It was not one of Mr. Trump’s more compelling speeches. The Mar-a-Lago crowd, while friendly, wasn’t the kind of roaring mass of fans from which Mr. Trump draws energy, and the former president sounded heavily scripted. Even so, the address was impressively offensive in its attacks on the justice system in general and the individuals leading the investigations of Mr. Trump in particular — as well as their families. (Seriously, what was with all the wife bashing?) He sniped about the “racist in reverse” officials out to get him. He went on a bizarre riff about how President Biden had hidden a bunch of documents in Chinatown. And his repeated attacks on the “lunatic” Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigations of Mr. Trump, suggest that whole business is really chafing the former president’s backside.Get ready for more of this magic. As Mr. Trump’s legal troubles heat up, with possibly more indictments to come, these investigations are going to eat at him and distract him. A hefty chunk of his campaign is likely to be an extended whine about his ongoing martyrdom, constantly putting other Republicans in the awkward position of having to defend him. And they won’t really have any choice as he whips his devoted followers into a frenzy over his persecution — and, of course, by extension, theirs.That is certainly what we have seen happening. Republicans have been lining up to trash the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. It was in no way surprising to see Representative Lauren Boebert comparing the indictment of Mr. Trump to the actions of Mussolini and, yes, Hitler. But one might have expected slightly more from Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely regarded as the biggest threat to Mr. Trump’s 2024 ambitions, than his pathetic vow to refuse to assist any effort to extradite Mr. Trump to New York. Weak, Ron. Very weak.A long-shot candidate or two, like Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, may try to distinguish themselves by not smooching Mr. Trump’s backside so sloppily. But this is a risky path that few contenders seem inclined to tread. Having bowed to Mr. Trump so low and for so long, the party has left itself few, if any, good options for dealing with him now.Anyone looking to lead the G.O.P. beyond its Trump era was already at a disadvantage before the charges. Be it Nikki Haley or Mike Pence or Mr. DeSantis, the political world is busy assessing potential 2024 contenders in Trump terms, obsessing over where they fall on the MAGA spectrum and how delicately they are or are not handling the former president.Team Trump, meanwhile, is happy to play the martyr card for all it’s worth. They have been boasting about using the former president’s legal troubles to fund-raise and sign up volunteers.Any day now, look for the campaign to start hawking bracelets asking: WWDTD? (What would Donald Trump do?) Ms. Greene will surely snap up several. What classier, more tasteful Easter present for the MAGA faithful in one’s life?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump’s Prime-Time Speech From Mar-a-Lago: A Laundry List of Grievances

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      Former President Donald J. Trump, speaking at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday evening hours after his arraignment in New York, cast the case against him as unfair and politically motivated in an unusually short 21-minute speech that focused as much on other grievances and investigations.Standing before his family members, Republican Party officials and allies, Mr. Trump called the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, a “criminal,” claiming without evidence that Mr. Bragg had leaked information from the grand jury. And Mr. Trump also called the judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family.”In the courtroom during his arraignment earlier on Tuesday, Justice Merchan admonished Mr. Trump about his public remarks, urging him to refrain from making statements about the case with “the potential to incite violence and civil unrest.”In his speech, which was carried live by CNN and Fox News, Mr. Trump spent much of his time airing other perceived wrongs against him. He renewed his criticisms of the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago in August, the New York attorney general’s civil investigation into him and his family’s business dealings and the open case in Georgia about his meddling in the 2020 election there.“This is a persecution, not an investigation,” he said of the New York attorney general’s case.Anticipation for Mr. Trump’s remarks had been building all day as cable networks and national media outlets delivered minute-by-minute updates. The former president, meanwhile, declined to speak with reporters in New York and instead saved his remarks for a prime-time address back home in Florida..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.But Mr. Trump seemed to squander his opportunity with a speech that was long on complaints and light on applause lines. Inside the ballroom, the biggest cheer of the night was when he ended his speech by repeating his 2016 campaign motto.His remarks amount to a strategy that has become commonplace for Mr. Trump: blurring the lines between his court battles and political opponents to sway public opinion over his arrest while ginning up enthusiasm — and campaign contributions — from supporters.The ballroom at Mar-a-Lago where Mr. Trump spoke — the same spot where he announced his third White House bid in November — was set up with a wide walkway for Trump allies and relatives to make their entrances. The design also divided the room in a way that made the crowd appear larger than it was. Roughly 350 seats were set up for the audience, which included two of Mr. Trump’s adult children, Tiffany Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, both far-right Republicans.The former president spoke roughly seven hours after he left a Manhattan courthouse, where he pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges that prosecutors brought against him over his role in coordinating hush-money payments to a porn star. He is the first former president to face the prospect of a criminal trial.Mr. Trump has long aimed to paint himself as a target of politically motivated attacks and claimed the charges against him were baseless. Shortly after being indicted by a grand jury last week, he issued a statement calling the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.”His message has resonated with supporters. Since his indictment, Mr. Trump’s poll numbers in the 2024 Republican presidential primary have risen by double digits, even as some longtime supporters have slowed in their rush to defend him. As he was arraigned on Tuesday, a crowd of his supporters gathered in the streets outside the Manhattan courthouse. More

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      Trump’s Indictment and What’s Next

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      The fallout will be widespread, with ramifications for the 2024 presidential race, policymaking and more.Donald Trump is likely to turn himself in on Tuesday.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesWhat you need to know about Trump’s indictment A Manhattan grand jury has indicted Donald Trump over his role in paying hush money to a porn star, making him the first former president to face criminal charges. It’s a pivotal moment in U.S. politics — there was an audible on-air gasp when Fox News anchors reported the news on Thursday — with ramifications for the 2024 presidential race, policymaking and more.Here are the most important things to note so far.Mr. Trump is likely to turn himself in on Tuesday, which will see the former president be fingerprinted and photographed in a New York State courthouse. (Prosecutors for the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, wanted Trump to surrender on Friday, but were rebuffed by the former president’s lawyers, according to Politico.) Afterward, Mr. Trump would be arraigned and would finally learn the charges against him and be given the chance to enter a plea. The former president has consistently denied all wrongdoing.Mr. Trump and his advisers, who were at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday, were caught off guard by the announcement, believing some news reports that suggested an indictment wouldn’t come for weeks. The former president blasted the news, describing it in all-caps as “an attack on our country the likes of which has never been seen before” on Truth Social, the social network he founded.The case revolves in part around the Trump family business. Charges by the Manhattan district attorney arise from a five-year investigation into a $130,000 payment by the fixer Michael Cohen to the porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016, before the presidential election that year.The Trump Organization reimbursed Mr. Cohen — but in internal documents, company executives falsely recorded the payment as a legal expense and invented a bogus legal retainer with Mr. Cohen to justify them. Falsifying business records is a crime in New York. But to make it a felony charge, prosecutors may tie the crime to a second one: violating election law.The fallout will be wide, and unpredictable. Democrats and Republicans alike used the news to underpin a flurry of fund-raising efforts. (Among them, of course, was Mr. Trump’s own presidential campaign.)It’s unclear how the indictment will affect the 2024 race. Mr. Trump, who can run for president despite facing criminal charges, is leading in early polls. Still, his potential opponents for the Republican nomination — including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president — harshly criticized the move. House Republicans have also flocked to his defense, potentially increasing the chances of gridlock in Washington.But while the charges may give Mr. Trump a boost in the G.O.P. primary, they could also hurt his standing in the general election against President Biden.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING European inflation remains stubbornly high. Consumer prices rose 6.9 percent on an annualized basis across the eurozone in March, below analysts’ forecasts. But core inflation accelerated, a sign that Europe’s cost-of-living crisis is not easing. In the U.S., investors will be watching for data on personal consumption expenditure inflation, set to be released at 8:30 a.m.A Swiss court convicts bankers of helping a Putin ally hide millions. Four officials from the Swiss office of Gazprombank were accused of failing to conduct due diligence on accounts opened by a concert cellist who has been nicknamed “Putin’s wallet.” The case was seen as a test of Switzerland’s willingness to discipline bankers for wrongdoing.More Gulf nations back Jared Kushner’s investment firm. Sovereign funds in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have poured hundreds of millions into Affinity Partners, The Times reports. The revelation underscores efforts by Mr. Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and others in the Trump orbit to profit from close ties they forged with Middle Eastern powers while in the White House.Lawyers for a woman accusing Leon Black of rape ask to quit the case. A lawyer from the Wigdor firm, who had been representing Guzel Ganieva, told a court on Thursday that the attorney-client relationship had broken down and that Ms. Ganieva wanted to represent herself. It’s the latest twist in the lawsuit by Ms. Ganieva, who has said she had an affair with the private equity mogul that turned abusive; Black has denied wrongdoing.Richard Branson’s satellite-launching company is halting operations. Virgin Orbit said that it failed to raise much-needed capital, and would cease business for now and lay off nearly all of its roughly 660 employees. It signals the potential end of the company after it suffered a failed rocket launch in January.A brutal quarter for dealmaking Bankers and lawyers began the year with modest expectations for M.&A. Rising interest rates, concerns about the economy and costly financing had undercut what had been a booming market for deals.But the first three months of 2023 proved to be even more difficult than most would have guessed, as the volume of transactions fell to its lowest level in a decade.About 11,366 deals worth $550.5 billion were announced in the quarter, according to data from Refinitiv. That’s a 22 percent drop in the number of transactions — and a 45 percent plunge by value. That’s bad news for bankers who had been hoping for any improvement from a dismal second half of 2022. (They’ve already had to grapple with another bit of bad news: Wall Street bonuses were down 26 percent last year, according to New York State’s comptroller.)The outlook for improvement isn’t clear. While the Nasdaq is climbing, there’s enough uncertainty and volatility in the market — particularly given concerns around banks — to deter many would-be acquirers from doing risky deals. Then again, three months ago some dealmakers told DealBook that they expected their business to pick up in the middle of 2023.Here’s how the league tables look: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and the boutique Centerview Partners led investment banks, with a combined 58 percent of the market. And Sullivan & Cromwell, Wachtell Lipton and Goodwin Procter were the big winners among law firms, with 46 percent market share.Biden wants new rules for lenders The Biden administration on Thursday called on regulators to toughen oversight of America’s midsize banks in the wake of the crisis triggered by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, as policymakers shift from containing the turmoil to figuring out how to prevent it from happening again.Much of the focus was on reviving measures included in the Dodd-Frank law passed in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. These include reapplying stress tests and capital requirements used for the nation’s systemically important banks to midsize lenders, after they were rolled back in 2018 during the Trump administration.Here are the new rules the White House wants to see imposed:Tougher capital requirements and oversight of lenders. At the top of the list is the reinstatement of liquidity requirements (and stress tests on that liquidity) for lenders with $100 billion to $250 billion in assets like SVB and Signature Bank, which also collapsed.Plans for managing a bank failure and annual capital stress tests. The administration sees the need for more rigorous capital-testing measures designed to see if banks “can withstand high interest rates and other stresses.”It appears the White House will go it alone on these proposals. “There’s no need for congressional action in order to authorize the agencies to take any of these steps,” an administration official told journalists.Lobbyists are already pushing back, saying more oversight would drive up costs and hurt the economy. “It would be unfortunate if the response to bad management and delinquent supervision at SVB were additional regulation on all banks,” Greg Baer, the president and C.E.O. of the Bank Policy Institute, said in a statement.Elsewhere in banking:In the hours after Silicon Valley Bank’s failure on March 10, Jamie Dimon, C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, expressed his reluctance to get involved in another banking rescue effort. Dimon changed his position four days later as he and Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, spearheaded a plan for the country’s biggest banks to inject $30 billion in deposits into smaller ailing ones. “If my government asks me to help, I’ll help,” Mr. Dimon, 67, told The Times.“We are definitely working with technology which is going to be incredibly beneficial, but clearly has the potential to cause harm in a deep way.” — Sundar Pichai, C.E.O. of Google, on the need for the tech industry to responsibly develop artificial intelligence tools, like chatbots, before rolling them out commercially.Carl Icahn and Jesus Illumina, the DNA sequencing company, stepped up its fight with the activist investor Carl Icahn on Thursday, pushing back against his efforts to secure three board seats and force it to spin off Grail, a maker of cancer-detection tests that it bought for $8 billion. But it is a reference to Jesus that the company says he made that is garnering much attention.The company said that it had nearly reached a settlement with Mr. Icahn before their fight went public, in a preliminary proxy statement. It added that he had no plan for the company beyond putting his nominees on the board.But Illumina also said Mr. Icahn told its executives that he “would not even support Jesus Christ” as an independent candidate over one of his own nominees because “my guys answer to me.”Experts say Mr. Icahn’s comments could be used against him in future fights. Board members are supposed to act as stewards of a company, not agents for a single investor. “If any disputes along these lines arise for public companies where Icahn has nominees on the board, shareholders are going to use this as exhibit A for allegations that the directors followed Icahn rather than their own judgment,” said Ann Lipton, a professor of law at Tulane University.Mr. Icahn doesn’t seem to care. He said the comments were “taken out of context” and the company broke an agreement to keep negotiations private.“It was a very poor choice of words and he is usually much smarter than that,” said John Coffee, a corporate governance professor at Columbia Law School. “But he can always say that he was misinterpreted and recognizes that directors owe their duties to all the shareholders.”THE SPEED READ DealsBed Bath & Beyond ended a deal to take money from the hedge fund Hudson Bay Capital after reporting another quarter of declining sales, and will instead try to raise $300 million by selling new stock. (WSJ)Apollo Global Management reportedly plans to bid nearly $2.8 billion for the aerospace parts maker Arconic. (Bloomberg)Marshall, the maker of guitar amps favored by Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, will sell itself to Zound, a Swedish speaker maker that it had partnered with. (The Verge)PolicyFinland cleared its last hurdle to joining NATO after Turkey approved its entry into the security alliance. (NYT)The F.T.C. is reportedly investigating America’s largest alcohol distributor over how wine and liquor are priced across the U.S. (Politico)“Lobbyists Begin Chipping Away at Biden’s $80 Billion I.R.S. Overhaul” (NYT)Best of the restNetflix revamped its film division, as the streaming giant prepares to make fewer movies to cut costs. (Bloomberg)“A.I., Brain Scans and Cameras: The Spread of Police Surveillance Tech” (NYT)A jury cleared Gwyneth Paltrow of fault in a 2016 ski crash and awarded her the $1 she had requested in damages. (NYT)“Do We Know How Many People Are Working From Home?” (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More