A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s and ordered him to pay $5m.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

A 30-year-old man behaves erratically on an afternoon New York City subway train. In an aggressive tone, in the midst of an apparent mental-health crisis, he declares, “I don’t have food; I don’t have a drink; I’m fed up. I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” A fellow passenger––a 24-year-old former marine––grabs him and uses a chokehold to restrain him, with assistance from others. Soon after, the 30-year-old, Jordan Neely, dies. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death homicide by compression of the neck. Some witnesses to the incident have spoken to the press, whereas others have yet to do so.

Where do you land on any of the ongoing debates about Jordan Neely, the man who was killed; Daniel Penny, the man who killed him; subsequent protests in New York City; or associated issues such as homelessness, the mental-health system, whether the race of Neely (Black) and Penny (white) are relevant or not, whether Neely’s history of perpetrating violence bears on the altercation, and when it is legitimate, if ever, for bystanders to intervene to preempt a perceived threat?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

National Review editorialized that “Jordan Neely did not deserve to die after a former Marine restrained him by the neck on the F train in Manhattan,” then blamed New York City for his death:

Constrained by outdated law and updated progressive shibboleths, the city’s amply funded institutions had effectively abandoned Neely to his psychosis and his addictions, leaving him on the street to be a danger to himself and others. Neely had been arrested 40 times in recent years, many for minor infractions like turnstile jumping, but more recently for assault. In 2021, he punched a 67-year-old woman in the street, breaking her nose and causing severe facial injuries. He repeatedly bounced in and out of the hands of well-funded institutions in New York: hospitals, mental-health facilities, and shelters. According to the New York Times, “Mr. Neely was on what outreach workers refer to as the ‘Top 50’ list—a roster maintained by the city of the homeless people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment. He was taken to hospitals numerous times, both voluntarily and involuntarily.”

When he was facing charges for his assault, the city’s judicial authorities bent over backward to induce him to take up a 15-month drug-rehab program, even promising to reduce his felony charges. Neely abandoned the facility after 13 days. A warrant was out for his arrest.

We would not be hearing sermonettes about anti-blackness and white supremacy if Jordan Neely had died of an overdose in a shelter or on the street. Or if he had been killed, as dozens of other young homeless people have been killed on the subway in recent years, by a perpetrator of his same skin color. Ocasio Cortez and Bishop Swan would have had nothing to say, because Jordan Neely only became interesting to them when his death could be used to indict whites collectively. It is an attempt to scapegoat the reactionary other for the utter failure of progressive blue-state institutions. It is a disgrace.

The writer John Ganz wants charges filed in the case so a jury can determine guilt or innocence. He writes:

Neely’s life did not matter because he was pleasing to others or a perfect victim. It mattered, full stop. That is why his death must be properly investigated. There can be no one so low as to be beneath the protection of the law. That is an absolute and unquestionable principle of justice. And it’s a trap to try to saint him in death. It basically accepts the premise of those celebrating his killing: that these are the type of facts that could justify and excuse it. One frightening story from Neely’s past will make the whole thing crumble. Neely may have been a kind man, he may have been cruel man, Neely may have been mentally ill, Neely may have been a dangerous criminal, he may have been “socially useful” or “useless”, he may have been all these things at different times in his life: none of that matters. He was a man, not a rabid animal.

I think the public response to Jordan Neely’s killing demonstrates a deep moral rot in our city and country. It shows that sentiments that were once made shameful are now being openly expressed in public. I generally try to stay optimistic and believe people are more good than bad, or at least more docile than ferocious, but if this is where people are at, to the point where even public officials will not speak up properly, then I genuinely fear what comes next.

My colleague Elizabeth Bruenig argues that fear was inextricably linked to the tragic outcome on the subway that day:

Many people feel uncomfortable when confronted with someone in an acute crisis. But certain factors can turn an uncomfortable situation into an intolerable one, such as living in a society where anybody could have a gun, where any agitation can boil over into mass murder. An irate neighbor slaying five people with an AR-15-style rifle after a noise complaint in Texas; an unstable Coast Guard veteran killing one and injuring four while attending an appointment with his mother in an Atlanta hospital. The stakes in any given episode of public agitation or distress or even psychosis aren’t typically all that high; the majority of people having crises at any time represent no risk to anyone (save, perhaps, themselves), but the incessant rat-a-tat of bloody headlines makes people feel—viscerally—that the risks they do encounter are unbearably dangerous.

In common places, we meet one another with a particular disposition: We try to avoid friction, signal politeness, and keep the flow of society moving. This works well, so long as everyone participates. But we must also be disposed toward people in the world who cannot just get along—because of mental illness, acute emotional distress, or other reasons beyond or within their control—and how ought we meet them? With compassion, perhaps, or with concern, even worry, but tempered with fellow feeling. Fear, however, chases out these finer emotions, and fear is the disposition we’ve grown accustomed to. Presumably it’s the legitimacy of this fear that persuaded law enforcement to release the 24-year-old killer with no charges so far.

This process, through which mundane uncomfortable situations are transformed into terrifying ordeals by all the incidents of random gun violence that came before, is one means by which a healthy community becomes a violent society.

In his New York Times newsletter, John McWhorter explains the reasons for his own fearfulness on the New York City subway:

The fact that Penny, as of this writing, has not been arrested pending more information seems unconscionable regardless of legal niceties. Based on what is known, it seems obvious that cutting off someone’s oxygen supply for so long would risk killing him—especially following the notorious choking deaths of Eric Garner and, more recently, George Floyd. At the same time, the conversation among political leaders in the news and on social media has largely ignored the experience of legions of subway-riding New Yorkers …

… We must be able to keep in our minds two things. One is that Neely was unjustifiably killed. The other is that the episode, in all of its horror, highlights what New York City subway riders are being asked to endure daily—and that this, too, is not just … About once every week one can expect to be in a car with a person, almost always male, who is actively menacing other passengers. I know these men can’t help it. Many are without homes and not in full control of their faculties. I suspect that they are often lonely and part of what they are doing is seeking some kind of human connection—to be mentally ill can be to find even negative attention a kind of solace compared to no attention at all …

They walk up and down the subway car yelling into individual faces. They stomp. They ball their fists. They curse. These are not just troubled supplicants who occasionally get a little pushy. They are men who make you genuinely afraid that you are about to be assaulted. And in my experience these men are most likely to be directly confrontational with women … Men in a state of potentially violent agitation are now so common on the subway that I am wary of having my daughters, ages 8 and 11, ride with me, especially after an incident when one such man singled us out and I had to quietly instruct my girls to keep their eyes down and not move.

Donald Trump’s ‘Unfortunate’ Behavior

In The Atlantic, David Graham details why jurors may have had an easy time concluding that former President Donald Trump sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll:

On one side was Carroll, whose account of the incident was clear, consistent, and nauseating in its specificity. Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he brushed off the allegation by saying, “She’s not my type.” On the other side was Trump. The former president faced a challenge in defending himself in the case. Much of Carroll’s account matched a modus operandi that at least 26 women who accused Trump of sexual assault have described. Carroll interviewed five of them for a series in The Atlantic in 2020. (Trump denies the allegations.) Trump himself described his approach in the infamous leaked recording from Access Hollywood in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Trump also didn’t bother to show up for the trial, claiming that he wanted to spare New Yorkers the traffic jams his presence would cause ... by failing to show up, he sent a message to the jury that he wasn’t invested in defending himself. Carroll’s lawyers made Trump a presence in the courtroom anyway, playing excerpts from a deposition for the case to devastating effect. In one instance, going straight at Trump’s “not my type” defense, Carroll’s lawyer showed him a photograph of Carroll. Asked to identify her, he mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples, whom Trump had to admit was his type.

More appalling was his discussion of the Access Hollywood tape. Trump, both in the past and in the deposition, wrote that off as “locker room” talk. But he couldn’t bring himself to repudiate or even distance himself from the comments, even now, nearly two decades later. “Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” he said. “True with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked. “Well, that’s what—if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true,” Trump said. “Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”

In the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney writes:

Today’s sexual abuse and defamation verdicts in Trump’s civil trial might be the first time he’s paid any serious price for living his life with total disregard for morality or for other people.

A reader’s coda

Edith felt something was missing from recent roundups of reader emails on trans issues:

There’s a perspective missing from this “debate:” the one that unequivocally sees transness as joy and goodness. Being trans is a wonderful thing. Gender nonconformity makes us into magical creatures that can navigate on both sides and even the edge of the gender coin. It is miraculous and wonderful and needs to be celebrated.

The capacity of trans folks for wonder is immeasurable.

Provocation of the Week

In Persuasion, the writer William Deresiewicz argues that although AI might put some artists out of business, “it will not—cannot—make good art, great art: true art. Which is to say, original art.”

As he sees it:

AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes. Sometimes they are mistakes, recognized, in retrospect, as happy accidents. That is what originality is, by definition: a low-probability choice, a choice that has never been made.

The African masks in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, to take one of a million examples, were a low-probability choice. So were the footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. So was the 40-second chord at the end of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” So is every new metaphor. Elizabeth Hardwick, who wrote criticism at the pitch of art, was famous for her adjectives: “the clamorous serenity of [Frost’s] old age,” Plath’s “ambitious rage,” the “aggressive simplicity“ of the old New York aristocracy. None of these were probable. There are words, in art, for that which is: derivative, stale, clichéd. Boring.

Low-probability choices are leaps: lateral and unpredictable, associative and idiosyncratic. Where do they come from? Inspiration, we say, a word that explains by not explaining. Inspiration is mysterious (not the same as mystical, though some would say it’s that, as well).

Its nature is obscure. It is neither conscious nor unconscious but instead involves a delicate and frequently elusive interplay between the two. It is serendipitous—like standing in a thunderstorm, said Randall Jarrell, and hoping to be struck by lightning. That is why successful works cannot be replicated even by the artists who create them. Every new one is a voyage of discovery, its destination unforeseeable—the very opposite of creating, as the AIs do, to a set of specifications. “The main thing in beginning a novel,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish.” Quality in art is an emergent property: it arises in the doing, in a dialogic dance between the artist and the work. As the work takes shape, it shows the artist what it wants to be.

That’s all for this week––see you next time.

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George Santos was a young man in a hurry, and when he came from nowhere to win a seat in the U.S. House last November, he must have thought he’d arrived. But an indictment filed yesterday in federal court on Long Island suggests that his actual destination might be not the U.S. Capitol but a more restrictive federal-government facility.

For Santos to be indicted the same day that a jury in Manhattan found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation against the writer E. Jean Carroll is a fitting symmetry. Both men engaged in ceaseless chicanery for years before entering politics, and both found immediate and unexpected success in their first runs for office. But both men are now also wrestling with the realization that although you can get away with a lot in private life, the political spotlight can sometimes light the way for litigants and prosecutors.

The New York Republican representative turned himself in this morning to be booked and arraigned on 14 counts, including wire fraud, theft of public money, and false statements to the House. Prosecutors allege several schemes, all of which are laughably corrupt if true and none of which is particularly sophisticated or stealthy. They say that Santos solicited money from donors that he claimed was intended to support his campaign through a super PAC, but in fact he spent “thousands of dollars of the solicited funds on personal expenses, including luxury designer clothing and credit card payments.”

The indictment also claims that Santos applied for unemployment benefits under the CARES Act, the COVID-stimulus bill signed into law by Trump in March 2020, taking in almost $25,000 even though he had a $120,000 per annum salary at the time. (This week, the House is voting on a bill that Santos co-sponsored to recover fraudulent COVID unemployment benefits. I am not making this up.) And they allege that Santos lied about his salary and compensation in mandatory disclosures for his House campaigns. If convicted, Santos would face a maximum sentence of decades in prison. Santos has previously denied any wrongdoing but has not yet commented since the indictment.

[Read: George Santos, the GOP’s useful liar]

For anyone who has followed Santos’s career with even cursory attention, little of this will come as a surprise. When news of the indictment leaked yesterday, the prevailing question was not how this could have happened but rather which of his many reported scandals was the one that had produced charges (or produced charges first). His entire life story seems to be a series of grifts and cons, beginning with passing bad checks in his native Brazil, continuing through allegations that he stole funds intended for a homeless veteran’s dog and orchestrated an ATM scam in Seattle, and right up to the plainly fishy financial filings for his runs for office.

Santos got away with his misdeeds, more or less, until he won election to the House. Because he seems ideologically pliable, it’s a good bet that he ran because he sought attention and status, but becoming a high-profile politician brings attention from people that he didn’t want. As a candidate, you might be able to sneak past opposition researchers in a given House district, but his new high profile attracted the scrutiny of journalists and, more ominously, the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.

In this way, his story resembles a shorter, smaller-time imitation of Trump’s. In his life as a real-estate developer, entertainer, and self-promoter, Trump was often ensnared in scandals, but he was able to escape serious scrutiny and personal criminal consequences for them. Trump’s methods were not quite so brazen, though they were sometimes pretty blunt: inflating and deflating the value of assets in different filings, for example, or simply inventing square footage for buildings. For decades, he got away with this, but entering politics brought attention he didn’t want. He faces 34 felony counts in Manhattan, all connected to alleged financial crimes, and the New York attorney general is trying to shut down the Trump Organization altogether. (Trump is also the apparent subject of other criminal probes by the Department of Justice and the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney.)

Santos and Trump each resemble another quintessential New York story: the Mel Brooks classic The Producers, in which two men try to stage a flop musical to turn a quick buck, but are undone when they actually succeed. Trump seemed to mount his presidential run largely as a branding exercise, and he seemed taken aback when he won. Santos, meanwhile, might well have pocketed the donor cash and lived on it quite nicely until he came up with another scheme, if only a Republican wave in New York hadn’t carried him to victory.

Santos is neither the first nor the last person to watch Trump’s quick rise and think, If he can do that, so can I. But although you can imitate Trump, you can’t imitate Trump all the way. Santos has quickly landed himself in far more serious criminal jeopardy than the former president has. Of course, legal troubles have in some ways only fortified Trump’s position, at least among Republican primary voters; since his indictment last month, he has risen in presidential polls. Santos may not be so lucky. He has neither the popular backing nor the sway of Trump, and many Republicans, especially in New York, already have it out for him. But Speaker Kevin McCarthy, negotiating a narrow margin in the House, has said he will not call for Santos’s resignation unless he’s convicted, which could take months. Trying to ride out the scandal would be brazen, but Santos has shown he is nothing if not brazen.

For a moment, it read like a loss. The first question asked on the verdict form in the matter of E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump concerned the writer’s battery allegation against the former president. Had she proved that Trump had raped her? “NO,” came the answer. But the form continued: Had Carroll proved that Trump had sexually abused her? YES. Had she proved that she had been injured as a result of his conduct? YES. The affirmatives accumulated: yes to defamation, to wanton disregard, to false statements, to actual malice.

The outcome was historic, my colleague David A. Graham wrote yesterday. And it was, despite that initial “NO,” a resounding victory for Carroll—and, symbolically, for the many other women who have accused Trump of sexual abuse. (Trump has denied all of their allegations—and has vowed to appeal yesterday’s ruling.) Carroll v. Trump was remarkable not only because it managed to hold the former president accountable, but also because of the way it achieved that victory. Carroll and her team rejected a one-size-fits-all approach to victimhood. They refused to apologize for Carroll’s idiosyncrasy or to allow her story to be reduced to callous tropes. In the process, they made a claim that is both obvious and revolutionary: There is no right way to be assaulted.

[Read: The astonishing E. Jean Carroll verdict]

The initial whiplash of the verdict made for an apt conclusion: Very little about the trial had been typical. It was a civil proceeding whose claims included both battery and defamation. The former claim was possible because of a recent addition to the New York State legal code: the Adult Survivors Act, which provides a year-long window for adult victims of sexual assault to file civil claims despite expired statutes of limitation.

The most significantly atypical aspect of the proceeding, though, was Carroll herself. Sexual-assault trials involve compound cruelties: Claimants are made to rehash their pain in public, turning their allegations into a performance. Idiosyncrasy, in that context—being forgetful, say, or tearful, or angry, or uncertain—can hurt their case. It can suggest inconsistency. It might give a jury a reason to doubt the events being alleged, and to dismiss the story being told as the work of an unreliable narrator.

The assumptions fail to account for the fact that people’s reactions to trauma are as variable and unpredictable as people themselves tend to be. And Carroll refused to cede to that ignorant script. On the stand, she was candid about what she could not recall when it came to some details of the attack. She was thoughtful about the shame she’d felt in its aftermath. She acknowledged that one of the reasons she’d accompanied Trump into the dressing room was her belief that the whole thing—she’d get him to try on lingerie, she thought—would make a great story. She talked about getting pushed against the wall, and laughing in response. She talked about rape as an ongoing violation: a momentary act of violence that settled into her romantic life, her professional life, her reputation. She treated her own uniqueness as a crucial element of her credibility.

[Read: ‘I moved on her very heavily’: The E. Jean Carroll interviews]

Trump, given ample opportunity to appear at the trial, declined to do so. Instead, his presence was limited to remarks he’d made during a deposition. In those comments, and in the social-media messages he posted while the trial was taking place, Trump tried to do what he always does when people challenge him: treat those who oppose him as hoaxes incarnate—as ideas, essentially, malleable and monstrous. The reflex can be an effective political strategy, but it is a poor legal one. Carroll countered every effort to dehumanize her with eloquent, insistent humanity.

Throughout the trial, Trump’s primary lawyer, Joe Tacopina, turned disdain into performance art. He invoked misleading tropes—the perfect victim, the woman who should know better—and built his case around Carroll’s lack of conformity to them. Why didn’t she call the police after the attack? Why didn’t she come forward publicly? Why didn’t she scream? Questioning Carroll, Tacopina sneered at her. He disrespected her. He made her cry. He tried to use her individuality against her.

[Read: The most telling moments from the E. Jean Carroll–Donald Trump depositions]

It didn’t work. Carroll, just as she claims to have done in that dressing room, fought back. At every step, she emphasized—politely, patiently, unwaveringly—the foolishness of Tacopina’s line of questioning. She didn’t call the police because she didn’t call the police. She didn’t scream because “I’m not a screamer,” she said. The behavior at issue, she and her team kept reminding the jury, was not hers. It was Trump’s. “He raped me,” Carroll said, “whether I screamed or not.”

Carroll has called herself a member of the “silent generation”—a woman who grew up being told that other people’s abusive behavior is her shame to endure. Her case, all these years in the making, rejected both the silence and the shame. She and the other people who spoke during the trial—her lawyers, her friends, her fellow Trump accusers—told a story that was messy and complicated and intimate and very, very human. And the members of the jury believed it. They believed Carroll, as its narrator. Their belief was unanimous. The woman who refused to act as a perfect victim did not win a perfect verdict. The NO on the rape charge remains. But the verdict, as a whole, is the opposite of silent: big, loud, definitive. Carroll, in her suit, did not specify dollar amounts for the various damages she claimed. It was the members of the jury who were given the task of putting a price on her pain. They chose $5 million. The amount brought a stark resolution to a case that had put so much of its faith in nuance: He assaulted her, the jury decided. And he should pay the price.

After many trials, the judge will dismiss the jurors by thanking them for their time and public service. These words of gratitude are usually a formality, a polite nod to a key feature of our democratic process: defendants’ right, under the Seventh Amendment, to judgment by their peers in “Suits at common law.” Federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan also offered a piece of practical advice to the Manhattan civil jury that had just found former President Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store’s dressing room in 1996: Kaplan told the jurors that they might not want to publicly identify themselves—“not now and not for a long time.” Those words were jarring and yet seemed wise in light of Trump’s habit of directing violence, threats, and general mayhem against the peaceful functioning of our democratic norms.

The judge’s advice sounded less like a legal requirement than like the words of a parent to an older teenager, imparted without any ability to enforce. Kaplan apparently did not give a specific reason for his statement. But he didn’t need to. Everyone knows how things can unfold for people who challenge Trump, and jurors who find against him in court are highly vulnerable to whatever he might do.

Trump’s political legacy is often measured by his policy impact: restrictions on immigration, lower taxes for the rich, conservative Supreme Court justices who deliver on a stridently right-wing agenda. Those changes are significant, but are also largely answerable through the same political process, voting, that made Trump only a one-term president. Trump’s real, enduring legacy is his successful introduction of violence, the threat of violence, and targeted harassment into the dynamics of our political system, as if they were all just a natural extension of democratic disagreement.

[David A. Graham: The astonishing E. Jean Carroll verdict]

The January 6 insurrection is the most obvious example. Regardless of whether he directed the exact violence on Capitol Hill that day—which delayed, and came dangerously close to denying, the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president—Trump welcomed it. For weeks before, he encouraged a legal strategy of fake electors and promoted false allegations of voter fraud. His plans to remain in office could best be executed if Congress were hindered in performing its constitutional duty. Violence was part of the scheme, because it could buy Trump time to interrupt the proceedings, sow confusion, and perhaps intimidate his noncompliant vice president, Mike Pence, into fleeing the Capitol.  

But the specter of violence was hardly new. From a presidential-campaign announcement that portrayed the U.S. as a victim of Mexican aggression, to a dark inauguration speech that described “American carnage,” to his use of social media to direct outrage toward elected officials and reporters who dared to get in his way, Trump understood how to whip some of his followers into a frenzy. Trump may seem irrational at times, but he is also a sophisticated student of incitement. His verbal technique promotes violence while allowing him plausible deniability. “Be there, will be wild!” he said on Twitter in the run-up to the January 6 riot. His language is intended to make its targets— including not only elected officials and judges but often just civil servants or average citizens—feel uncomfortable, defensive, vulnerable.

Concerns for jurors’ safety are commonplace in criminal trials involving mob figures. Kaplan was presiding over a civil trial. Yet even before the verdict, Trump was using his media platform, Truth Social, to attack the proceedings as a witch hunt. “The greatest witch hunt of all time,” he declared after the verdict. Hunt is an evocative term; it suggests that you are either predator or prey. Without overtly saying so, the judge was telling the jurors in the civil case: Don’t be prey. To allow yourself to be identified might gain you 15 minutes of fame, but the downside could be a whole lot worse. (Ironically, Kaplan was speaking in easily deciphered code, much as Trump does.)

[E. Jean Carroll: “I moved on her very heavily”]

Kaplan surely knows that the Manhattan judge who will oversee a criminal trial against Trump has faced threats. Trump has already promised to appeal Carroll’s victory, so perhaps Kaplan was speaking obliquely to avoid some future challenge to his objectivity. But Kaplan wasn’t being paranoid; he was acting pragmatically and cautiously, and he asked the same of the jurors.

“If you’re one who elects to speak to others and to identify yourselves to others, I direct you not to identify anyone else who sat on this jury,” Kaplan said from the bench. ”Each of you owes that to the other, whatever you decided for yourself.” The jurors have one more public duty: They have a continuing responsibility to protect others and, by extension, the sanctity of a jury trial protected by our Constitution. Because that, like many other processes that enshrine our democracy, is under threat.

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This afternoon, President Joe Biden met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in their first sit-down since February. The meeting produced no breakthroughs on the federal debt ceiling, even as a deadline for default looms in early June. I called my colleague Russell Berman, who has been watching the ongoing stalemate closely, for help creating a short guide to this moment.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The astonishing E. Jean Carroll verdict What could turn Biden’s reelection upside down EVs make parking even more annoying. “What GOP voters have told me since Trump’s indictment” Debt Questions, Answered

Is this 2011 all over again?

This month’s debt-ceiling crisis comes with a dose of déjà vu. As Russell explained last week, the circumstances largely echo the 2011 showdown between congressional Republicans and then-President Barack Obama: A new GOP majority in the House is using the looming threat of a national default—which would likely lead to a stock-market crash and possibly a recession— as leverage to push a first-term Democratic president to agree to spending cuts.

But after talking with Eric Cantor, who in 2011 was the House majority leader deputized to negotiate an agreement with then–Vice President Biden, Russell reported that the crisis we’re in now is worse than that of 12 years ago. He gave me three reasons:

Kevin McCarthy has a lot more to lose than his predecessors did. “Republicans have a much smaller majority in the House this time around,” Russell noted. McCarthy “is operating with much less room to maneuver, given how hard he had to fight just to get the job. There’s an ever-present threat that if he negotiates a bad deal or if he folds in this confrontation, he could be ousted.” One important subject is off the table this time around: Both parties have decided not to negotiate on the major entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security. Russell explained that Republicans are not asking to cut those two major programs, as they did in 2011, due in large part “to the influence of former President Trump,” who endorsed a hands-off approach to the programs to avoid alienating older voters. The removal of these programs from negotiations could make it a bit easier to get to a deal, but it also means that if the GOP gets President Biden to agree to any cuts, they’re likely to be smaller than what the two parties were talking about in 2011. The most meaningful distinction between the 2011 standoff and today’s might also be the simplest: The two parties haven’t even started to negotiate. The deadline for America defaulting on its debt is a bit of a moving target, but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that the country could default as soon as June 1 if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling. At this time in 2011, however, a lot of negotiation had already happened—“because the Obama administration conceded the premise that Republicans were offering, which was that this was something to negotiate over,” Russell said. Today’s meeting was really just the beginning of the conversation—and that’s a late start, with just three weeks until the deadline.

Why does this keep happening?

How did the U.S. wind up with such consistent debt-ceiling drama anyway? Russell explained that contentious debt-ceiling debates haven’t been the norm for America’s entire history. In fact, 2011 marked a shift away from debt-limit negotiations being anything other than a formality. “What the Republicans did in 2011 set a precedent that the Democrats really hate, in which the debt ceiling is not just automatically raised,” Russell said.

The idea of automatically raising the ceiling makes some sense if you think about what the debt ceiling actually is: “It’s essentially paying for spending that Congress has already authorized and appropriated,” Russell told me. “The common analogy is to the credit-card bill. You don’t really negotiate with your credit-card company over whether you’re going to pay the credit-card bill.”

Especially in the past few years, Democrats have put forth proposals to take these negotiations off the table and change the law, “so that Congress does not have this cudgel that can hold the United States economy hostage to what has been a very polarized, often dysfunctional legislative branch,” Russell said. Some Republicans have even expressed interest in these proposals too.

But until then … what’s next?

Russell walked me through three possible scenarios:

The parties do not reach a deal in the coming weeks, and the country either defaults or gets very close to defaulting on its debt. If that happens, “the stock markets begin to crash, and the political pressure ramps up significantly on both parties,” Russell said. “And that’s where you might see one party blink.” Speaker McCarthy, President Biden, and the two parties just “agree to punt,” as Russell puts it—“to basically say, We’re going to raise the debt ceiling for a short period of time, to buy time for formal negotiations on spending and the budget.” The GOP’s concession would be to raise the debt ceiling without getting any spending cuts, whereas President Biden’s concession would be to say, We’re going to negotiate on this where we had previously said we wouldn’t. The parties reach a deal. What would a deal look like? “The Republicans would like an agreement in which Congress and the president commit to reduce spending over the next two years, in addition to some other issues,” Russell told me. So a deal would include “an agreement on big-picture spending levels, plus maybe one or two other policy issues that aren’t directly related to spending, where the parties can make some progress.” The exact shape that such an agreement would take remains to be seen.

Related:

This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse. The logic behind Biden’s refusal to negotiate the debt ceiling Today’s News Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was arrested. He has accused the country’s military of colluding against him. According to new draft recommendations from a prominent national health panel, women should start receiving mammograms at age 40 instead of age 50. A jury has found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not rape, in the civil case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll. Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic

How to Build (And Destroy) a Social Network

By Charlie Warzel

On a perfect spring day in 2017, I joined a gathering of right-wing internet trolls in Austin, Texas. They’d arranged the meetup to support the Infowars founder and conspiracist Alex Jones during his child-custody trial; I was reporting on all this and ended up in a stilted conversation with a prolific 4chan poster. We realized that we were born only a few miles apart from each other in Ohio, which apparently came as a shock. I thought all you blue checks were from New York City or California, he said with no trace of irony.

That was the first time I’d ever been referred to in the physical world as a “blue check.” Technically, the term meant that I was somebody who’d been verified on Twitter, but it was more familiar to me as a derogatory bit of internet slang. Sometime in the late 2010s, the moniker became a handy stand-in for a large class of mostly left-leaning journalists, celebrities, activists, and other personalities on Twitter. Blue checks were supposedly privileged and out of touch, like the “liberal elites” who preceded them.

Read the full article.

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Read. Caitlin Dickerson’s definitive account of the Trump-administration policy that separated migrant children from their parents, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting yesterday.

Watch. Baby J (streaming on Netflix), a new comedy special in which John Mulaney brilliantly destroys his likable persona.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

The jurors rejected E. Jean Carroll's accusation of rape but upheld her other complaints in the closely watched civil trial following less than three hours ...