Lou Basenese, chief market strategist at Public Ventures LLC, spoke with Quartz for the latest installment of our “Smart Investing” video series.

Read more...

An impartial 12-person jury is needed for his first criminal trial - dozens have already been excused.

Shares of Trump Media & Technology Group, the company behind former President Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, fell sharply again Tuesday after it announced that it’s launching a streaming platform.

Read more...

“I JUST STORMED OUT OF BIDEN’S KANGAROO COURT!” Donald Trump wrote in an email to supporters late yesterday afternoon, shortly after the end of the first day of his trial on charges of hiding hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign.

The statement led off a fundraising appeal, and it was, somewhat predictably, a lie. Trump had walked out of the courtroom when the proceeding ended, made a few comments to reporters, and left.

In historical terms, what happened in the Manhattan courtroom was momentous: the start of the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president. But in particulars, it was as dull as any other typical day in court. Judge Juan Merchan heard a series of motions from lawyers, ruling more often in favor of the prosecution but occasionally in favor of the defense, and punting other motions to later. Dozens of potential jurors filed through the court and answered a lengthy questionnaire, part of a selection process that could take weeks.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Donald Trump—a guide]

It was, in other words, a snooze fest—perhaps literally in Trump’s case. As reporters watching the proceeding in the courtroom and in an overflow room said, he appeared to nod off at one point early on.

The usual cliché for such widely divergent accounts is to call this a “split-screen moment.” But the trial is not televised, so the only screen is the one outside the court. That’s lucky for Trump, and not only because his impromptu nap wasn’t captured on tape for the nation to watch. The absence of any video evidence allows Trump to project the story he wants onto the trial.

So, inside Merchan’s courtroom, things went by in normal fashion. Neither Trump nor his lawyers said anything about it being a kangaroo court or election interference, as he has alleged elsewhere. (Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche did complain about his client being required to be present. “You don’t think you should be here at all right now?” Merchan asked; Blanche affirmed.) Trump didn’t deliver any of the outbursts that got him scolded by Justice Arthur Engoron, in his civil-fraud trial, or Judge Lewis Kaplan, in the defamation suits against him, though it’s probably just a matter of time.

[David A. Graham: ‘Control your client’]

But his supporters won’t know any of that, because they won’t be reading the live updates from The New York Times or CNN or The Washington Post. They’ll be getting their news from Truth Social or Trump campaign emails or the MAGA media machine. Even if Trump isn’t righteously jousting with the judge and being persecuted by the Soros machine, he can tell his base that he is. Even better, he can talk a good game without doing things that might risk judicial sanctions.

Later yesterday, Trump logged on to Truth Social and delivered something in the form of anguished plea. “Who will explain for me, to my wonderful son, Barron, who is a GREAT Student at a fantastic School, that his Dad will likely not be allowed to attend his Graduation Ceremony, something that we have been talking about for years, because a seriously Conflicted and Corrupt New York State Judge wants me in Criminal Court on a bogus ‘Biden Case’ which, according to virtually all Legal Scholars and Pundits, has no merit, and should NEVER have been brought,” Trump wrote.

[Read: Trump’s shoot-the-moon legal strategy]

This was not, in fact, what Merchan said. The judge had simply deferred ruling on whether Trump could be absent until later in the trial. But if reality doesn’t make for a good story—or a useful political bludgeon—then it’s easy for Trump to make up a better one.

The Iranian attack on Israel has heightened the fierce cross-pressures shaping President Joe Biden’s conflicted approach to the war in Gaza.

Throughout Israel’s military engagement, Biden has struggled to square his historic inclination to support Israel almost unreservedly with growing hostility in his party toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. For months, Biden has been escalating his criticism of Netanyahu, but once the Iran attack began, the president snapped back to his instinct to rally behind Israel.

The barrage of missiles and drones that Iran fired at Israel on Saturday may have a similar short-term effect on slowing what has been a steady increase in congressional Democrats urging Biden to suspend offensive weapons sales to Israel until it fundamentally changes its strategy in Gaza. Yet, unless Israel and Iran descend into a full-scale confrontation, last weekend’s hostilities are not likely to end that pressure. That’s especially so because some of the same Democrats critical of Israel’s behavior in Gaza also believe the Jewish state was misguided to launch the air strike on senior officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Syria that precipitated the current exchange.

If the Iranian threat tilts Biden back toward his instinct to lock arms with Israel, it will widen the breach between him and the increasing number of Democrats who want a more fundamental break in U.S. support for the Gaza war.

Before Saturday’s attack, Biden faced greater division in his own coalition over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war than any other Democratic president has confronted on a foreign-policy choice in decades.

The Democrats who have preceded Biden as president over the past 50 years—Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—all faced discontent within their ranks over key foreign-policy decisions. But many veterans of previous Democratic administrations believe that none of those controversies generated as much sustained discord as Biden is now experiencing on three central fronts: criticism in Congress, disapproval in public-opinion polls, and persistent public protest.

“It’s very powerful when people who don’t ordinarily get involved in foreign policy do,” Ben Rhodes, who served as the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications under Obama, told me. “I don’t remember that happening in my administration or the Clinton administration. But now there has been a coalescence of real core pillars of the Democratic base that are just totally repelled by what is happening and a lack of pressure on Israel to change course. I can’t really think of anything like this.”

The current conflict hasn’t divided Democrats as badly as the second Iraq War, which began in 2003; former Senator Hillary Clinton’s vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq was one reason she lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Obama. But those internecine conflicts centered on how Democrats responded to the decision to launch the war by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

The breadth of public and congressional discontent over this conflict also doesn’t compare to the magnitude of party opposition that developed against Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. But although the current dissent doesn’t approach that historic height, it has exposed Biden to a distant echo of the charge from those years of supporting an unjust war.

Aides in the Biden White House and on his reelection campaign uniformly expressed optimism to me that, despite polls showing growing unease about the war among Democratic partisans, the conflict would not cost the president votes among people otherwise inclined to support him against former President Donald Trump. Not everyone in the party agrees that that optimism is justified. But many Democrats fear that even if Biden’s team is correct for now, the president’s political risks will only grow the longer the war persists.

[Alan Taylor: Gaza on the brink of famine]

“If it stops in three months, there is probably enough time” for Biden to recover, said one senior administration official, who asked for anonymity while discussing internal deliberations. “If it doesn’t stop in six months, we are going to really feel it.”

The fear among party strategists is not so much that Democrats discontented over Biden’s approach to the war, especially young people, will vote for Trump. He is even less likely to impose constraints on Israel, and his top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, has openly threatened to deport pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Instead, the concern is that with many younger voters already unenthusiastic about Biden, his handling of the war will provide them with another reason to choose a third-party candidate or to simply not vote at all. “I think it has complicated Biden’s current standing with young people,” Ben Tulchin, who served as the lead pollster in both of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, told me. “It’s just one more thing he is going to have to mend fences on. The hope is, in six months from now, the temperature gets turned down.”

The discontent among Democrats about the war and Biden’s approach to it is mounting across all three measures of dissent.

The first is in Congress. After the Israeli missile strikes that killed workers from the World Central Kitchen, a group of 56 Democratic House members sent Biden a letter urging him to suspend the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel until an independent investigation into the attack is completed. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a centrist who served as Hillary Clinton’s vice-presidential nominee in 2016, earlier this month also called on Biden to stop the transfer of “bombs and other offensive weapons that can kill and wound civilians and humanitarian aid workers.”

Earlier this year, a group of 19 Democratic senators led by Chris Van Hollen of Maryland filed a bill that could have restricted U.S. military aid to Israel. To defuse the threat, the Biden administration issued a national-security memorandum establishing a new process for assessing whether Israel, and other countries receiving U.S. military aid, are using the weapons in accordance with international law, and also cooperating in the distribution of humanitarian aid provided either directly by the United States or by international organizations it supports. If that report, due on May 8, finds that Israel has failed to meet those standards, it could encourage more Democrats to demand that Biden suspend the transfer of offensive weapons.

“There is growing frustration with the pattern of the president making reasonable requests and demands, and the Netanyahu government mostly ignoring them and doing so with impunity, in the sense that we send more 2,000-pound bombs,” Van Hollen told me. “I think there are a growing number of senators who agree we can make more effective use of all the policy tools at our disposal. Our approach cannot be limited to jawboning Prime Minister Netanyahu.”

In the near term, the Iranian attack may inhibit more Democrats from demanding a suspension of offensive weapon transfers to Israel, such as the F-15-fighter-jet sale to the Jewish state that Biden is lobbying Congress to approve over resistance from some party leaders. (Iran’s assault highlighted the difficulty of distinguishing between offensive and defensive weapons; two squadrons of American F-15s helped intercept the Iranian attack.) But several Democratic opponents of the arms transfers issued statements this weekend reaffirming their position. In one of those, Van Hollen said Sunday that although the U.S. “can and should continue to replenish” the defensive systems Israel employed against the Iranian barrage, “the Biden Administration should use all the levers of its influence to” sway the Israeli decisions on Gaza; that’s clear code for indicating Van Hollen believes Biden should still threaten a suspension of offensive weapon transfers.

Public-opinion polls offer another vivid measure of Democratic discontent over the war and the U.S. approach to it. In a recent national Quinnipiac University poll, almost two-thirds of Democrats said they opposed sending further military aid to Israel. In a CBS News/YouGov national poll released Sunday but conducted before Saturday’s hostilities, most Democrats wanted the U.S. to support Israel if Iran attacked it. But two-thirds of Democrats again opposed weapons transfers to Israel for the war with Hamas, and nearly half said Biden should push Israel to entirely end its military action; another fourth of respondents said he should encourage it to wind down the campaign.

These negative opinions about the war, and Biden’s approach to it, have been especially pronounced among younger voters. That points to a third central measure of dissension within Democratic ranks: widespread campus-based protests. One telling measure of that challenge for Biden came earlier this month, when the president of the University of Michigan issued new policies toughening penalties against disruptive campus protests.

The fact that the leading university in a state that is virtually a must-win for Biden felt compelled to impose new restrictions on protest underscored the intensity of the activism against the Gaza war. Protest “has been pretty persistent since October,” Ali Allam, a University of Michigan sophomore active in the TAHRIR coalition leading the campus protests, told me. “I don’t know very many people who are planning on voting for Biden, because they have seen time and time again, he is a person who says, ‘We’re concerned about the situation,’ and yet he continues to sign off on providing more and more weapons. And that is just not something young people are willing to get behind.”

Michigan is a somewhat unique case because of the state’s large Arab American population, which provides an especially impassioned core for the protest movement. But the student hostility to the war has extended to a broad range of left-leaning younger voters that Democrats count on. In Michigan, for instance, some 80 campus groups are part of the TAHRIR coalition, including organizations representing Black, Latino, Asian, and Jewish students, Allam said. Ben Rhodes, who now co-hosts a popular podcast aimed primarily at liberal young people, Pod Save the World, sees the same trend. “It’s not just Arab and Muslim Americans in Michigan, or foreign-policy lefties,” he told me. “It’s this kind of mainstream of the young part of the Democratic coalition.”

As Biden advisers point out, the other recent Democratic presidents also provoked internal opposition in Congress or in polls to some of their foreign-policy decisions. But it’s difficult to identify an example under Carter, Clinton, or Obama that combined all three of the elements of Democratic discontent Biden is now facing.

Probably the most controversial foreign-policy decision of Carter’s presidency, for instance, was his support for the treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal back to Panama. That produced a heated and lengthy public debate, but the conflict was fought out mostly against conservative Republicans led by Ronald Reagan: In the end, just six Senate Democrats voted against the treaty.

[Graeme Wood: What will Netanyahu do now?]

The principal foreign-policy controversies of Clinton’s presidency revolved around his anguished decisions on whether to intervene in a series of humanitarian crises. After an early military action in Somalia went badly (in the events depicted in the book and movie Black Hawk Down), a chastened Clinton stood aside as a horrific genocide unfolded in Rwanda in 1994. Clinton also wavered for years before launching a bombing campaign with NATO allies in 1995 that ultimately produced the peace treaty that ended the Serbian war in Bosnia. Later, Clinton launched another bombing campaign to end Serbian attacks in Kosovo.

Although neither party, to its shame, exerted any concerted pressure on Clinton to act in Rwanda, he did face congressional demands to more forcefully intervene in the Balkans. Shortly before the 1995 bombing campaign, both the House and the Senate approved legislation essentially renouncing Clinton’s policies in Bosnia, and almost half of Democrats in each chamber voted against him. But the issue did not provoke anything near the public activism now evident on the Israeli war in Gaza, and even in Congress, the issue scrambled both parties. Many Democrats from all of the party’s ideological wings shared Clinton’s caution.

“I don’t think domestic opinion per se affected” Clinton’s choices about the Balkans, James Steinberg, who served as his deputy national security adviser, told me. “There were Democrats and Republicans on both sides of the issue. It was more Clinton’s own feeling about responsibility, leadership, and America’s role in the post–Cold War world.”

Obama faced intermittent discontent among some Democrats over his major foreign-policy choices, including his “surge” of additional military personnel into Afghanistan and his plans for air strikes during the Syrian civil war. But none of these generated sustained resistance across all three of the fronts now challenging Biden. Nor did many Democrats dissent from what was probably Obama’s most controversial foreign-policy move—the treaty he reached during his second term to limit Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. In the end, just four Senate Democrats voted against approving the pact.

The Democratic unity behind the Iran agreement was notable because it came despite an intense lobbying effort against it from AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel group in the U.S., and Netanyahu himself. In an extraordinary intervention into U.S. domestic politics from a foreign leader, Netanyahu, who was also Israel’s prime minister then, delivered a speech to Congress opposing the deal at the invitation of congressional Republicans.

Netanyahu’s long history of aligning closely with U.S. Republicans and conflicting with Democratic presidents meant that few Democrats began the Gaza war with much confidence in him. Many Democrats have also been outraged by Netanyahu’s efforts to eviscerate judicial review of government actions in Israel, which has drawn comparisons to Trump’s efforts to weaken pillars of U.S. democracy. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that just one in 20 Democrats have a favorable impression of Netanyahu.

Biden initially insisted that his best chance to influence Israel’s policies was to wrap Netanyahu in a “bear hug.” But given all this history, many Democrats outside the administration viewed that strategy as doomed from the start.

“The administration’s initial approach seemed to be based on the belief that the best way to maintain influence with the Israeli government was to sympathize with their objectives and be inside the discussion rather than outside the discussion,” said Steinberg, who also served as deputy secretary of state for Obama and is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “But everything that has happened over the past months reinforces the view that, with Netanyahu, that strategy counts for little.”

Over the past several months, as the devastation inside Gaza has mounted and Netanyahu has openly dismissed Biden’s calls for a two-state solution after the fighting, the president has significantly intensified his public criticism of the Israeli prime minister. When I asked the senior administration official whether Netanyahu has exhausted whatever goodwill he possessed when the war began within the administration and with Democrats in Congress, the official replied, “It’s awfully close.”

But Biden has so far refused to match his critical words for Netanyahu with concrete consequences. Administration officials point out that the ongoing arms transfers to Israel are primarily occurring under a long-term arms deal approved during the Obama presidency. And they note that providing Israel with sophisticated weaponry advances U.S. strategic interests in deterring Iran—an argument that gained relevance after Saturday’s Iranian barrage. The October 7 attack also provoked genuine outrage across the American political spectrum and cemented a broad bipartisan conviction that Israel is justified in seeking to disable Hamas.

But many of the national-security experts I spoke with argued that Biden’s reluctance to push harder against Netanyahu also reflects the fact that the president formed his fundamental vision of Israel decades ago, when the country was an underdog besieged by larger neighbors, which is no longer the way many Democrats see the nation. “This is a generational issue, and in Biden’s head, he’s of the kibbutz generation,” Jeremy Rosner, a senior adviser at the National Security Council under Clinton, told me. “I don’t think it was tactical on his part, how he responded, or political; I think it was heartfelt.”

The rising tension with Iran will likely delay a reckoning between Biden and Netanyahu over Gaza. But it will grow only more difficult for Biden to avoid a deeper breach with the Israeli government around the war. For instance, the administration probably won’t be able to avoid sharp criticism of Israel in the May 8 report to Congress. Senator Van Hollen says the report cannot credibly claim that Israel has met the required performance for allowing the distribution of international aid over the duration of the war, even if it is now allowing in more shipments after Biden’s stern phone conversation with Netanyahu about the deaths of the World Central Kitchen workers. “If anybody suggests that the Netanyahu government has met the standard [on facilitating humanitarian aid] for the last many months, it would be hard to have any confidence in that conclusion,” Van Hollen told me.

A larger inflection point is looming over Rafah. Netanyahu has insisted that Israel is still planning a full-scale military operation in the last major Gaza civilian center that it has not invaded; Biden has urged him to instead use only more surgical military missions against Hamas leadership and, in an MSNBC interview last month, called an all-out attack of Rafah a “red line” that Israel should not cross.

Yet in that interview, Biden sent mixed signals about what consequences, if any, he would impose if Netanyahu crossed that line. Likewise, administration officials have remained vague about what penalties, if any, they will impose if they judge that Israel has failed to meet the performance standards mandated in the May 8 report.

Biden has no simple political choices on the conflict. In polling, about one in four Democrats consistently express support for Israel’s conduct of the war—roughly that many in the party, for instance, said in the Quinnipiac poll that they support more military aid to Israel and, in recent Pew Research Center polling, said that they view the Israeli government favorably. Biden might alienate some of those voters if he imposes more constraints on Israel. The veteran Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, the president of the pro-Israel group Democratic Majority for Israel, recently argued to Politico that if Biden took a harder line on the war, he would lose support not only among voters who strongly back the Jewish state but also from others who would view him as weak for reversing direction under political pressure.

Any move to limit arms sales to Israel would also draw intense attacks from Republicans, who seized on the Iranian barrage to denounce the Democratic criticism of Israel over Gaza. “Get behind the Israeli government,” Republican Representative Mike Lawler of New York insisted on CNN while the attack was under way.

Yet the political risks to Biden of staying on his current course are also apparent. Already, a clear majority of the Democratic base disapproves of Israel’s conduct of the war. The number of Democratic voters and elected officials critical of the invasion is likely to grow as the conflict persists—particularly if Israel continues to employ the same harsh tactics. As the senior official told me, the administration expects that “if there isn’t a cease-fire and this thing drags on and there isn’t a dramatic change in the ways the Israelis operate, the erosion” in Democratic support for Biden’s posture toward the war “is going to continue.” Even among independent voters, Israel’s position has dipped into the red: In a recent Gallup survey, independents by a ratio of 2 to 1 disapproved of the Israeli military action, and in Sunday’s CBS News/YouGov poll, the share of independents who said the U.S. should no longer send arms to Israel was nearly as high as the percentage of Democrats.

[Hussein Ibish: The United States and Israel are coming apart]

Biden’s team still holds out hope that, partly because of his tougher tone, Israel will agree to a cease-fire with Hamas that in turn could unlock a broader agreement for normalization of Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia that includes steps toward negotiating a Palestinian state. Such a transformative deal could erase much of the discontent among Democrats about Biden’s approach to the war.

But with Hamas displaying even more resistance than Israel to another cease-fire, such a sequence of events seems very distant. (The unprecedented step of Iran launching attacks from its own territory into Israel might encourage Saudi Arabia and other regional adversaries of Tehran to consider aligning more closely with Israel and the U.S., but the overall increase in regional tensions may not be conducive to an immediate diplomatic breakthrough.) This means the most likely prospect in the coming weeks is for more fighting and more civilian suffering in Gaza that exacerbates the tensions inside the Democratic Party over the war.

“This can get worse,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think people have their heads fully around that, because what’s already happened feels extreme. But if the current status quo continues for another couple of months, where there is an Israeli military operation in Rafah and there are extreme restrictions on aid getting in, we are going to be looking at a much worse situation than we are today.”

If the administration’s months of support for Netanyahu on the Gaza war ultimately costs Biden support in November, then the president’s failure to break from a right-wing aspiring authoritarian in Israel may doom his effort to prevent the return to power of a right-wing aspiring authoritarian in America.

In late March, months into the Free Application for Federal Student Aid–rollout debacle that has thrown millions of students’ college plans into a state of flux, the Department of Education let universities know there was yet another issue. The data that the IRS automatically fed into the form were inconsistent. In some cases, those inconsistencies led to students being awarded more aid than they are eligible for—in other cases, less. The department had begun reprocessing the applications with missing data points that it believed would result in students receiving too little aid—but stopped short of redoing all of the inaccurate forms. Those students whom they expected would receive too much aid, well, they could keep the money.

“The department is essentially saying, Go ahead and award somebody financial aid based on information that is inaccurate. It just completely goes against every instinct that we have as financial-aid administrators,” Jill Desjean, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, told me. “We’re worried about risks. We’re worried about program integrity, we’re worried about taxpayer dollars and being stewards of those funds.” A week later, after fielding the complaints from administrators, the Department of Education said it would reprocess all of the incorrect applications; but if institutions did not want to wait, they could make students aid offers based on the old forms.

Normally, the FAFSA is available at the beginning of October. Students fill it out and send it to Federal Student Aid, an office within the Department of Education. Then, FSA calculates how much federal aid a student can receive (through loans, grants, and work-study programs) and transmits those data to colleges, which then create a student’s financial-aid award letter, which explains to admitted students how much money—federal and from the school itself—they’ll receive to attend that college.

[Read: The confusing information colleges provide students about financial aid]

But for the 2024–25 academic year, the Department of Education introduced a new FAFSA. It has fewer questions and is designed to allow 1.5 million more students access to the maximum Pell Grant a year. Updating the FAFSA took longer than expected, and the form didn’t go online until the end of December. The formula for how much aid students should get was wrong—leading to a nearly $2 billion undercalculation in total. Meanwhile, the department has blown past self-imposed deadlines to fix other issues as they have arisen. This fiasco has left students unsure if they’ll have the money to pay for college, necessitated that institutions change long-set deadlines, and, to some extent, justified Republican lawmakers’ charges of government ineptitude in an election year when Democrats can least afford it.

The new FAFSA rollout did not have to be this way. The Biden administration could have focused on making sure that FAFSA worked, though it would likely have had to punt on other priorities, such as student-debt relief. And that may have made a good deal of sense: After all, changing higher-education regulations and canceling debt won’t help students if they can’t figure out a way to pay for school in the first place. Interviews with several current and former Department of Education officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, as well as a review of public records reveal how the FAFSA-overhaul process was flawed from the beginning, and the ways that the administration’s ambitious agenda, plus a trail of missed deadlines, communication breakdowns, and inadequate funding, have led to a massive disruption in higher education. All of this could have been avoided, but now it must simply be managed.

Ask 100 people, and you will get 100 different explanations for how and why things went wrong with this year’s FAFSA, but they all have a starting point in common.

On December 27, 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act into law. The omnibus package included the biggest legislative tweak to federal financial-aid policy in years. That update was the FAFSA Simplification Act, which would reduce the number of questions on the form from 108 to a maximum of 36. It threw out questions about Selective Service and drug convictions. But the changes were not only about process: The act also expanded the amount of federal aid that hundreds of thousands of students would be eligible to receive.

Career government officials routinely quip that it’s harder to work for Democrats than Republicans because Democrats want to expand the government’s reach and Republicans want to limit it. Staffers I spoke with at Federal Student Aid said the past four years have been proof of the concept. When the Biden administration assumed office, they inherited a healthy workload: overhauling loan servicing, FAFSA simplification, and the return to loan repayment after the pandemic pause. But they also added to those tasks with their own ambitious agenda for the Department of Education generally and the Federal Student Aid office specifically, including student-debt cancellation (a campaign promise) and undoing several Trump-era regulations, such as the borrower-defense-to-repayment and gainful-employment rules.

Yet their plans quickly confronted reality. The Department of Education’s workforce was severely depleted. In the first two years of the Trump administration alone, the department had the highest turnover—13 percent—of any federal agency, according to a Government Executive review. Now that culled workforce was trying to help colleges and students navigate the pandemic. Two sources told me that career staff warned Biden transition officials that they would be walking into a department full of dedicated workers who were, plainly, burned out.

In the early days of the Biden administration, however, there wasn’t much that staff at the department, regardless of seniority, could do to slow the agenda down. Many of the directives about what to pursue—and when—came directly from the White House and the Domestic Policy office. “There are people who’ve been at FSA for nearly 30 years, and they’re like, ‘The amount of White House involvement is totally insane,’” one staffer at the organization told me.

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was confirmed in March 2021, it was already clear that the timeline set out to revamp the FAFSA was too optimistic. Accordingly, department officials asked for additional time to complete the task. In June, Congress granted an additional year extension. But staff members at FSA had argued since early February of that year, in the weeks after the inauguration, that even that would not be enough time. Between the lack of manpower and the complexity of the rebuild, they would need at least two years to update the database, change aid formulas and tweak questions, get public comment, and test their systems to ensure everything was in order before the rollout.

The architects of the FAFSA Simplification Act on Capitol Hill did not expect that the department would overhaul its back-end systems to comply with the law—and several lawmakers have argued that perhaps they didn’t have to, but once the process of rebuilding the system from the ground up began, it was difficult to stop.

“The new FAFSA is, of course, more than a new form,” a senior department official told me. “But it was a complex undertaking on our side that required replacement of more than a dozen computer systems, including some that are older than the parents filling out the form now.” The system’s update was necessary, the official said, to meet the security standards around handling tax data.

Lawmakers were eager to get the new FAFSA online, though, which made securing more time politically difficult. “The FAFSA simplification is two bipartisan pieces of legislation that are important accomplishments that members of Congress were rightly very proud of, and they were eager to see the benefits of FAFSA simplification reach students,” the senior department official told me.  

Somewhat predictably, the project encountered routine hiccups: Contractors offered deadlines that they failed to meet; staff was delayed in revamping systems written in COBOL, an archaic programming language; and important details were not fully comprehended as political staff—more skilled in policy than implementation—did not understand the severity of the issues. One former political appointee at the department told me that Biden officials stumbled because they were too confident about their ability to solve problems as they arose. “There was this perception that even though we're finding problem after problem after problem, it’s okay because we’re already solving for them in real time,” the appointee said. “They believed they didn’t have to worry about it and they could just keep focusing on other things that were more interesting, because FAFSA simplification was inherited anyway. It created a lack of urgency until it was too late.”

Staffers at FSA agree. “I’ve experienced this where they would be pissed if you don’t offer a solution,” one staffer told me. “So we’d say, ‘Here are a few options to choose from, and most of these options aren’t great, because we’re out of outlets when you don’t have money and you don’t have enough staff.’” But the fact that the options weren’t great, they argued, was lost in translation.

The administration went to Congress, several times over, for additional money for Federal Student Aid. They requested that lawmakers increase the organization’s budget by a third in their 2023 ask, and an additional $620 million in the 2024 budget proposal to ease the return to repayment and update FAFSA. But in each year, the organization was flat-funded. Republicans viewed additional funding as a nonstarter. “This is not a funding issue. This is a management one,” Virginia Foxx, the chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times. And Democrats, although generally inclined to help the administration’s Education Department, were unwilling to allocate the additional funding to FSA at the expense of other budget priorities, particularly because some of the more progressive members would like to move the country away from the current system of the government financing sky-high tuition—a system in which FSA plays a major part.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s other priorities, such as the push for debt cancellation (which was later blocked at the Supreme Court and which the administration has subsequently initiated through other programs, such as the expansion of eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness), required immense resources and attention. The totality of these efforts amounted to a lot for the already overworked FSA staff.

If at one point the FASFA overhaul was neither a money nor a management issue, it is now both, and students will continue to suffer for it.

Last Wednesday, lawmakers vented their frustrations about the process as they held dueling congressional meetings—one with Education Secretary Cardona, another featuring a panel of financial-aid experts. During a hearing about the Biden administration’s budget, Republicans criticized the administration’s focus on other priorities. “The American people want to see you focused on getting students into the classroom, not repaying loans for people who have already been there,” Representative Julia Letlow of Louisiana told Cardona.

Cardona tried to repel those criticisms. “I don’t want you to think they’re not doing FAFSA because they’re working on something else,” he told the panel. “FAFSA has been a priority since day one when we got into these positions, and it will continue to be a priority until we deliver for those students.”

FSA staff members agree that this was not an issue of moving people onto the wrong projects. But they remain upset that the FAFSA problems did not receive the attention they should have. “We have been saying for the last three years that we can’t get all this stuff done, this is too much, the servicers can’t do all of this … and now that the FAFSA is falling apart, there is a little bit more like, ‘Oh shit, maybe FSA wasn’t lying,’” a frustrated staffer told me. Meanwhile, political officials continue to set ambitious deadlines—ones that staffers who are working around the clock are already unsure they’ll be able to meet.

Had this year’s FAFSA rollout gone according to plan, millions of students would already have their aid packages; some students would have already committed to attending college, secure that they could afford it.

By now, the department would have turned its attention to next year. Staffers would already be figuring out how they could make the process smoother. They’d be revising questions, updating the form, and submitting it for public comment. But as they continue to try to amend the form and address the errors for this year, they have put themselves behind the curve.

The best hope is that the FAFSA rollout turns out to be a lot like healthcare.gov: a disaster by any measure at first, but one that eventually did improve an old, broken system. By then, though, some students will have decided against college, some institutions will have struggled with enrollment dips, and faith in government will have taken another hit.

A consortium of television networks yesterday released a joint statement inviting President Joe Biden and his presumptive opponent, Donald Trump, to debate on their platforms: “There is simply no substitute for the candidates debating with each other, and before the American people, their visions for the future of our nation.”

President Biden’s spokesperson should answer like this: “The Constitution is not debatable. The president does not participate in forums with a person under criminal indictment for his attempt to overthrow the Constitution.”

In their letter of invitation, the networks refer to presidential debates as a “competition of ideas.” But one of the two men they’re inviting turned the last election into a competition of violence: Trump tried to seize the presidency by force in 2021.

[David Frum: The ego has crash-landed]

If Trump had not occupied the presidency at the time of his attempted coup d’état, he would very likely be already serving a lengthy prison term for his alleged crimes against the 2020 election. Earlier this month, a principal figure in the January 6 attack was sentenced to seven years in prison, the latest of many such serious convictions and sentences. Fortunately for Trump, the U.S. justice system is highly cautious, deferential, and slow when dealing with persons of wealth and importance. Although the followers have been punished, the indicted leader of the plot is unlikely to face trial before Election Day 2024. Until tried and convicted, Trump must be regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.

But the political system has eyes of its own. No doubt exists about what Trump did, or why, or what his actions meant. Trump lost an election, then incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. He hoped that the insurrectionists would terrorize, kidnap, or even kill his own vice president in order to stop the ceremony to formalize the victory of Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. By disrupting the ceremony, Trump schemed to cast the election’s result to the House of Representatives, where Republican voting strength might proclaim him president in place of the lawful winner. Many people were badly injured by Trump’s violent plan, and some died as a result.

The single most important question on the ballot for 2024 is: Does any of this matter? Is violence by losers to overturn election results an acceptable tool of politics? Is anti-constitutional violence by election losers just another political issue, like inflation or immigration or foreign policy? The television executives apparently believe that, yes, violence is just another issue. “If there is one thing Americans can agree on during this polarized time,” they write, “it is that the stakes of this election are exceptionally high.”

“The stakes are high” would be a fair way to describe an election like that of 1980, when Americans faced a choice between two very different approaches to taxes and spending. It would be a fair way to describe the 2004 election, when Americans were asked to choose between an early exit from the Iraq War and staying the course. But it seems a morally trivializing way to describe an election in which one of the candidates has been criminally indicted for his part in a conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution.

[Elliot Ackerman: War-gaming for democracy]

Imagine such a presidential debate. “President Biden,” you could hear the moderator say, “we’ll get to Mr. Trump’s alleged violent coup in a moment, but in this segment, we are discussing food prices.”

The role of the television networks here is, unfortunately, not an innocent one. “The stakes of the election are high” is a commencement-address way of phrasing the thought: We are anticipating huge ratings. Trump is box office; everybody knows that—and box office translates into revenues at a time when television is losing them. For TV executives to convince themselves that what is good for their own bottom line is good for the country seems very easy. But good for the country is radically not the case here.

Imagine watching the debate with the sound off—what would you see? Two men, both identified as “president,” standing side by side, receiving equal deference from some of the most famous hosts and anchors on American television. The message: Violence to overthrow an election is not such a big deal. Some Americans disapprove of it; others have different opinions—that’s why we have debates. Coup d’état: tip of the hat? Or wag of the finger?  

For Biden to refuse to rub elbows with Trump won’t make Trump go away, of course. The Confederacy did not go away when Abraham Lincoln refused to concede the title of president to Jefferson Davis. That’s not why Lincoln consistently denied Davis that title. Lincoln understood how demoralizing it would be to Union-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Davis was a president rather than a rebel and an insurrectionist. Biden should understand how demoralizing it would be to democracy-loyal Americans if he accepted the claim that Trump is more than a January 6 defendant.

Biden has engaged in many high-level television debates over the years: vice-presidential debates in 2008 and 2012; debates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1987, 2007, and 2019–20. Biden also debated then-President Trump in the fall of 2020. Biden is and was a capable television communicator, as he demonstrated again in his recent State of the Union address. Biden delivered that address with such force and skill that Trump had to imply that Biden must be relying on performance-enhancing drugs. If Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley had won the Republican nomination in 2024, Biden would, and should, have debated them.

But this is different.

[David Frum: The ruin that a Trump presidency would mean]

Political debates exist to provide voters with relevant information about their electoral choices. The most necessary information that Biden needs to communicate is that Trump is a traitor to the U.S. Constitution. But people will not appreciate something so abnormal if it is habitually characterized as normal.

Many institutions of American life have habits and incentives that lead them to treat Trump’s attempted coup as normal politics. Television and other mass media exhibit worse habits and incentives than most of those institutions. But President Biden does not need to indulge them.

Trump is owed due process in a court of law. He is not owed the courtesies of the office whose oath he betrayed. Biden prefers to keep the temperature of politics low if he can. That’s a good impulse most of the time. But there are occasions when it’s the president’s job to defy the pressure and say no. This debate invitation is one such time.

Donald Trump's unprecedented criminal hush money trial has begun, with the former president reportedly starting to fall asleep at an opening court session.

Monday marked the start of Donald Trump's hush-money trial in New York City. Here's how the day unfolded.

The crisis in the Middle East and the criminal trial of ex-US president Donald Trump lead the papers.