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Michelle Cottle
Opinion Writer
Larry Hogan Committed an Unpardonable Republican Sin
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Republicans were so very pleased with themselves when, in February, Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland, announced his run for the Senate seat being vacated by Ben Cardin, a Democrat. Maryland is a very blue place. But Hogan was a very popular governor — all the more so because he was often critical of the man once again running to be the party’s standard-bearer.
There is no love lost between Hogan and Donald Trump, but the former president was persuaded to stay out of the primary fray by Republicans who argued that Hogan could put Maryland in play, at the very least forcing Democrats to burn resources there. Now the nominee, Hogan has good early poll numbers, and his candidacy has indeed had Democrats reaching for the Xanax. Big score for the red team!
Then came Trump’s felony conviction. True to Hogan’s brand, shortly before the jury announced its verdict, the former governor urged Americans to accept the result, whatever it was, and praised “the rule of law.”
And true to its brand, MAGA world responded by going absolutely berserk.
“You just ended your campaign,” Chris LaCivita, the Trump minion now effectively running the Republican National Committee, snarled on social media.
The committee’s co-chair, Lara Trump, huffed that Hogan “doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point, and, quite frankly, anybody in America.” She also declined to say whether the committee would help his campaign after this.
Some Senate Republicans, sensing a possible catastrophe, swiftly called on their party to give Larry the space to be Larry.
Maybe. But as truces go, this one sure seems to be proving flimsier than one-ply toilet paper.
To win in Maryland, Hogan needs to run a near-perfect, drama-free campaign. As always, Trumpworld is going to make that painfully difficult. This is what happens when one’s party gets hijacked by a leader who demands absolute fealty to himself, all other interests be damned.
June 5, 2024, 4:28 p.m. ET
Neel V. Patel
Opinion Staff Editor
Did Boeing Just Fix Its Very Bad Year?
NASA astronauts jetting off to the International Space Station is standard stuff. But on Wednesday, two astronauts went into space aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft for the first time and are en route to a rendezvous with the space station a little after noon Thursday.
It’s a win for the company’s battered reputation. Never mind the plunge in public trust for the company’s airline division after two Boeing 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 (killing 346), faulty plugs causing an aircraft door to burst open during a fight in January and malfunctioning landing gear affecting a cargo plane in May. Starliner itself has been trapped in development hell in the decade since NASA selected it and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to be the vehicles that send astronauts into space.
SpaceX managed to launch astronauts in the summer of 2020 and has been regularly transporting people to and from the space station since. Starliner’s first demo flight in December 2019 ended in embarrassing failure because of a software glitch. It didn’t take off again until 2022.
Starliner’s achievement on Wednesday should be celebrated. It’s a good thing for the country that there’s another American-made spacecraft that can take people into space. But Starliner also feels like the last hurrah of an era of American space that is on its way out.
For decades, aerospace and defense manufacturers like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and United Launch Alliance were the go-to contractors for NASA’s needs. Then, SpaceX crashed the scene, with reusable rockets and cheaper architecture. It superseded the old guard to become the company of choice for much of the U.S. space program. Other newcomers like Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada and Rocket Lab are competing to meet other transportation and hardware needs.
Starliner won’t be able to repair Boeing’s reputation by itself. And it certainly won’t be able to restore the space industry’s old guard to its former glory. In the skies and in space, it seems as if Wednesday’s launch signaled the twilight of one of the most important American success stories of the past century.
A correction was made on
June 6, 2024
:
An earlier version of this article misstated the month in which the landing gear of an aircraft malfunctioned. It was May, not March.
How we handle corrections
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June 5, 2024, 12:57 p.m. ET
Mara Gay
Editorial Board Member
Gov. Hochul’s Unwarranted Retreat on Congestion Pricing
Americans didn’t need a reason to feel more cynical about politics. But Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has delivered one.
Just weeks before New York was scheduled to finally begin a landmark program, decades in the making, to improve the nation’s largest transit system by charging drivers a premium to enter the busiest part of Manhattan, Hochul, bowing to purely political concerns about the plan, announced on Wednesday that she would indefinitely delay it.
She said she had become concerned that the program could hurt Manhattan’s economic recovery from the pandemic. But Hochul is the one who has been issuing glowing news releases about how New York State has already achieved “full economic recovery,” including Manhattan, and any economic effects of the pricing plan are nothing new, having been hashed out for years.
The more likely reason, as Politico reported, is that Democratic officials, including the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, are worried that starting the program now could hurt Democratic chances in competitive House races this November.
Congestion pricing has always faced opposition, and now, in an election year, Hochul has apparently lost her political backbone. Instead of knuckling under to the usual critics, she and other Democrats should forcefully defend the concept.
The program was scheduled to go into effect on June 30 and was expected to provide a critical $1 billion revenue stream for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Under the plan, drivers of passenger cars would be charged $15 for entering Manhattan at or south of 60th Street; commercial trucks would be charged more.
That was always going to bring some sticker shock for commuters used to driving into the city from New Jersey or New York City’s suburbs. But it’s sound public policy in New York, a region with a strong public transit system in need of steady investment and used by roughly 5.5 million people every day.
It’s also likely to improve the quality of life in the city, where concerns about air quality, traffic congestion, pedestrian safety and noise have become paramount. Cities around the world, from London to Singapore, adopted similar plans years ago.
To replace the lost revenue stream, Hochul is reportedly considering raising taxes on businesses in New York City instead. That’s a regressive tax that would actually hurt the city’s economy and could risk $15 billion in capital improvement bonds for the transit system.
Hochul and the State Legislature should have found the political courage to stick with what they promised, since this delay (if it’s really a delay and not an end to the program) is a terrible development for New York. They might also recall that congestion pricing was enacted into law in 2019 after it became clear that allowing the city’s aging subway system to collapse was unacceptable to voters and would grind the region’s economy to a halt.
The legislature doesn’t have to go along with this weak-kneed reversal. Congestion pricing should begin without delay.
June 5, 2024, 11:59 a.m. ET
Daniel J. Wakin
Opinion Deputy International Editor, reporting from Oslo
For Victims of Human Rights Violations, Family Matters
In the struggle against oppression, kinship matters deeply.
While plenty of international organizations fight on behalf of political prisoners, it is often spouses and children who are the most galvanizing — and sometimes effective — champions on behalf of individuals crushed by tyranny.
It was an unexpressed theme at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual conference by the Human Rights Foundation that highlights the struggle for democracy and freedom. The three-day conference presented individual stories of bravery and oppression, along with workshops on A.I. deep fakes, spyware protection, how to fight kleptocracies and other practical matters. It has also become a nexus for potential donors and activists.
On Monday, Sebastien Lai, an outspoken advocate for the freedom of his father, Jimmy Lai, a jailed Hong Kong newspaper publisher and critic of the Chinese Communist Party, took his turn on the stage. Lai, speaking at the Oslo Concert House on Tuesday, told of his father’s arrest in 2020.
A crowd of police came to Jimmy Lai’s apartment and took him away, but not before he turned around to his family and smiled, saying, “There’s no need to be afraid,” his son recounted. Then the police took him to his paper, Apple Daily, and paraded him through the newsroom.
Leonardo Gonzalez, a supermarket worker in Venezuela, was shot dead by security forces during a protest in 2017 while trying to flee. His wife, Olga, ran to the scene, which was near their home. Twenty-one bullets hit the car. “That’s what I counted,” she said. “One of those bullets went through my husband’s back.” In his pockets were four candies, she added. “Those were his weapons.”
Olga Gonzalez became an activist. She relentlessly pushed prosecutors to pursue her husband’s killers, fought bureaucracy, sat through 100 hearings and three trials that ended in convictions and then founded an organization for other families of victims of extrajudicial killings. “His case remains open,” she said.
Zhala Bayramova spoke of the arrest of her father, Gubad Ibadoghlu, on trumped-up charges in Azerbaijan. He was a thorn in the side of the country’s repressive president, Ilham Aliyev. While later passing out leaflets about his case, she told me of her exhausting search for international support to free him from prison — or at least get him medical care.
“I cannot imagine my dad dying,” she said. “We just want our loved ones to be alive.”
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June 5, 2024, 5:06 a.m. ET
Mara Gay
Editorial Board Member
Time to End New York’s Barrier to Jobs for Migrants
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Leave it to Albany to let a good idea wither on the vine of political dysfunction.
Among the most flummoxing measures left unresolved by New York lawmakers in the session that ends this week is a bill that would allow undocumented immigrants to take professional licensing exams in New York State, allowing them to work in needed professions.
One might think Democrats in New York, grappling with a migrant crisis in an election year in which immigration is shaping up to be a major issue, would move quickly to pass the bill to help get migrants out of shelters and into jobs. Instead, for the third year in a row, the legislation has gone nowhere.
The bill, cosponsored by Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz of Queens and State Senator Gustavo Rivera of the Bronx, would allow people who live in New York to seek state licenses as teachers, nurses and other professionals without regard to immigration status.
That’s a common-sense measure in New York. Not only does the state have among the largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the United States, including an estimated 384,000 who are 34 or younger, it also faces looming worker shortages. New York is expected to need an additional 40,000 nurses by 2030. It also needs more teachers. “We have high-skilled folks who are ready to work,” Ms. Cruz told me recently, stating the obvious.
The legislation is also critical to protect the future of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children but aren’t so-called Dreamers covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which began under the Obama administration.
This kind of legislation is likely to face opposition from New York Republicans, who have adopted a hard-line approach toward the migrant crisis and early this year introduced legislation that would require state and local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. But Republicans are in the minority in Albany.
If Democrats in Albany are feeling up to it, maybe they can take up the immigrant licensing bill when they return to session in January. If they need extra motivation, they can consider that states including Illinois, California and Colorado have already enacted similar laws. So has New Jersey, the state Gov. Kathy Hochul recently snubbed as simply “west of Manhattan.”
June 4, 2024, 5:11 p.m. ET
David French
Opinion Columnist
Would a Banana Republic Put the President’s Son on Trial?
I’ve long been a skeptic of Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump. As a legal matter, I think it’s the weakest of the four criminal cases against Trump, and there is a very real chance the conviction will be overturned on appeal. At the same time, however, the MAGA argument that Trump’s trial and conviction are somehow proof that America is now a banana republic is absurd.
A case can have weaknesses without being an affront to the rule of law. And in Trump’s case, even the weakest elements are supported by prior prosecutions brought by Democrats and Republicans.
For example, the Obama Department of Justice prosecuted former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards for accepting campaign contributions intended to cover up an affair with a woman named Rielle Hunter. The case ended with an acquittal on one count and a hung jury on five others.
The Trump Department of Justice prosecuted Michael Cohen for his specific role in the same hush-money scheme at issue in Trump’s trial. That case ended with a guilty plea. While it is absolutely true that the Biden Department of Justice didn’t choose to prosecute Trump for his role in the hush-money scheme, it remains rather interesting that the department didn’t charge the principal after it convicted Cohen, the lower-level employee who acted on his behalf.
Neither the Edwards nor the Cohen case definitively establishes the validity of the election-law elements of the case against Trump. Cohen’s guilty plea isn’t a court precedent, and since the Edwards case ended without a conviction, there was never a chance to test the prosecution’s legal theory on appeal.
But if you think that Bragg was completely out on a limb tying Trump’s bookkeeping fraud to a federal campaign finance violation, remember that prosecutors from two different administrations have filed federal cases using the same legal theory. Bragg did not make up his argument. He was riding the coattails of prosecutors who came before him.
At the same time, the debate over the Manhattan hush-money case is playing out at the exact same time as Hunter Biden, the president’s son, is standing trial for serious federal crimes in a case brought by his father’s Department of Justice. That’s a strange way to run a banana republic.
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June 4, 2024, 3:55 p.m. ET
Farah Stockman
Editorial Board Member
Biden’s Crackdown on Migrants Reflects a New Reality for Democrats
There’s no denying that the executive order President Biden signed on Tuesday — significantly curtailing the number of asylum seekers allowed into the country — is a head-spinning reversal for a president who promised to undo Donald Trump’s policies at the border. It’s worth remembering that Biden wasn’t alone on that front. Eight out of 10 Democrats running in the presidential primaries said in 2019 that they would make walking across the border without permission a civil infraction, like a traffic ticket, instead of a criminal offense.
Since then, the welcoming tone and policies of the Biden administration have attracted more migrants from around the world than American voters want to absorb. The number of people crossing the border has more than doubled — from one million in 2018 to 2.5 million in 2023, according to the Migration Policy Institute. As they arrive by the busload in cities like New York, Boston and Chicago, they have strained budgets and social services upon which vulnerable Americans depend.
Welcoming newcomers with dignity is important, but our capacity to do so is not infinite. For that reason, I don’t fault the Biden administration for trying to turn down the spigot. My biggest question is why it took so long.
As Border Patrol agents have long said, if asylum seekers were held in humane and family-friendly settings while their asylum claims were reviewed, instead of allowed in, the numbers at the border would quickly drop, since the main reason most come is to work.
But the administration ignored that recommendation and — thanks to cynical opposition from Trump — Congress failed to pass a bipartisan proposal that would have helped tackle the problem. Now the problem has gotten so bad that the asylum system itself is basically broken.
The executive order Biden signed on Tuesday allows for expedited deportations in a matter of hours or days, which can be harsh. It is not clear, however, whether the administration has the resources to detain and deport many thousands of people per day, although administration officials say that once the deportations begin, the number who try to come will dwindle. It’s also possible that the administration is banking on the courts striking the order down.
It is not fair, however, to say that Biden is just like Trump now on immigration. Biden has rightly done a lot to expand legal pathways for asylum seekers and other migrants. The asylum claims of people who manage to make an appointment through an online app — roughly 1,500 per day — will continue to be processed.
Those on the left who are sure to criticize this action as a betrayal should reflect on whether their advocacy has sent the Democratic Party down a political blind alley. If we want to protect the right to asylum, we can’t ignore the widespread abuse of that system.
June 3, 2024, 4:15 p.m. ET
Julie Ho
Opinion Editorial Assistant
The Incoming Mexican President Remains Linked to Her Predecessor
Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman and the first Jew to be elected president in Mexico, won in a blowout on Sunday. Nearly half of Mexico’s 32 states are also expected to be governed by women. In a country where women die violently at staggering rates, where machismo reigns and antisemitism permeates, Sheinbaum’s rise is a symbol of women’s empowerment.
“I do not arrive alone. We all arrived,” she said in her victory speech, invoking “our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.” But her feminist statements have felt disconnected from the country’s women’s rights movement. That’s in part because her underlying message is less about social progress and more about protecting the Morena party’s promise of progress, as envisioned by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her mentor and predecessor. For all their stylistic differences, what Sheinbaum shares with López Obrador, known as AMLO, is a core populist worldview.
That approach can champion women’s issues, but it often antagonizes women. Even as he has embraced gender parity and women’s rights, AMLO has failed to address the violence against women, and he derides feminists as being conservative and contrary to his leftist agenda.
Sheinbaum, 61, and AMLO, 70, both represent a new era of Mexican politics that follows generations of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. AMLO decisively won the presidency in 2018 by promising to break with the corruption that party came to represent — a victory that resonated decades after the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco in which Mexicans confronted one-party rule en masse for the first time. Sheinbaum has presented herself as a member of that resistance, talking proudly about having parents who supported the protests and hosted student leaders at their home.
“She has a populist conviction that history is divided between a subject against its enemies, and democracy consists of the people taking control of institutions,” the Mexican writer and political analyst Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez said in a video interview this year.
That narrative binary defines Sheinbaum’s thinking, outside of AMLO’s shadow. The criticism that she is merely his puppet discounts her own commitment to his party.
But what gave Sheinbaum an early and commanding lead over another woman who was her closest competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, ironically, is her kinship with AMLO, and everything that made him polarizing but popular. She may have claimed a victory for women, but she probably didn’t need feminism to win.
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June 3, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
Katherine Miller
Opinion Writer and Editor
After the Verdict, Both Campaigns Brace for Its Impact
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Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
President Biden will travel to France this week to meet with President Emmanuel Macron of France but also to speak at an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
In terms of events with real-world consequences that may also have political ones: On Thursday, the Supreme Court will release opinions again, and we await, among others, how the court will rule on a set of Jan. 6-related cases and a set of abortion cases, particularly one that focuses on emergency situations in Idaho.
Hunter Biden’s trial also starts in Delaware on Monday over felony charges related to the purchase of a gun. (The trial over his taxes has been delayed until the fall.)
This week, we’ll probably also continue to get polling of how voters see the Trump verdict. The Trump campaign says it raised wild amounts of money on Thursday and Friday. But the things that power small-dollar fund-raising or reaffirm a politician’s existing support are not always the same things that have broad-based appeal.
Here’s a helpful thread of initial polling results from various firms, which generally found no movement or modest movement in Biden’s direction after Donald Trump’s conviction. Very quickly after the verdict, Echelon Insights did an interesting thing, which was to re-poll the people they’d reached in the months before the verdict (and found modest movement toward Biden). Any movement in polling, as Nate Silver noted — even a 1-point movement if it were sustained — would be notable since the race is close and so little has moved the polls.
What has changed this week is: Trump now has lots of free time. How will he use it? Next weekend, he’ll be in Las Vegas for a rally, though presumably he’ll do something publicly between now and then. How he responds to the verdict, and what he chooses to focus on, might be just as important as the initial reaction from voters. On that front, if you missed this article by Maggie Haberman and Jonah E. Bromwich last week looking at Trump’s embrace of others accused of crimes, it’s worth reading.
June 1, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Serge Schmemann
Editorial Board Member
Suddenly, a Real Chance to Halt the Fighting in Gaza
The “comprehensive new proposal” made by Israel for the Gaza war, announced by President Biden on Friday, is essentially a six-week cease-fire that would include the withdrawal of Israeli troops from populated areas of Gaza, the release of most Israeli hostages and a massive relief effort for two million battered, hungry Gazans. The stages beyond that — a permanent end to hostilities, release of all remaining hostages, the reconstruction of Gaza — are left to future negotiations.
That leaves a lot of open questions down the road, all heavily laden with polarized politics, animosities and unknowns. Yet if the plan Biden described on Friday is accepted by Hamas, which looks likely, the cease-fire alone would be a huge achievement for the United States and its mediating partners, Egypt and Qatar — and a desperately needed dollop of food, medicine, shelter and hope for Gazans.
Despite a deafening international outcry against the vast carnage and destruction in Gaza, including heated protests on American campuses and arrest warrants (albeit largely demonstrative) for top Israeli and Hamas leaders from the International Criminal Court, along with considerable pressure from the Biden administration, a cease-fire seemed always just beyond reach.
The reasons are many and varied: The Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7 left many Israelis hungry for the eradication of Hamas, cost be damned; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right nationalist government showed little interest in ending the fight, especially as that would most likely lead to the end of his fragile government and leave him facing criminal charges; the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, insisted that the fighting must end before any hostage release or deal with Israel.
At the same time, the war put growing political pressures on Biden. There was always a threat of the conflict spreading to northern Israel and beyond, and the use of American ordnance against civilians in Gaza was feeding a swelling fury among American liberals, Biden’s constituency in a critical election year.
The president acknowledged some of the opposition the full proposal would confront in Israel. Responding to the longing for the destruction of Hamas, he claimed that the organization was no longer capable of an attack like the one on Oct. 7. Aware that some on the Israeli right wanted total victory, he argued that this would not bring hostages home, not bring an “enduring defeat” of Hamas and “not bring Israel lasting security.”
That is the message the president will have to relentlessly drive home over the six weeks the cease-fire is meant to last, if it starts and holds. All the obstacles to peace will still be in place as negotiations turn to a permanent end to hostilities. And Biden admitted that six weeks may not be enough. But for now, any respite is welcome.
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June 1, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Jesse Wegman
Editorial Board Member
Fantasies Aside, Sentencing Trump Poses a Very Tough Choice
Donald Trump is not your average felon. That creates a devil of a dilemma for Juan Merchan, the New York trial judge who by July 11 must decide on an appropriate sentence for Trump after his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Send him to prison? Fine him, put him on probation, order him to perform 300 hours of community service?
It’s not a straightforward question. Unlike the federal system, New York has no formal sentencing guidelines, but decades of case law help judges weigh several familiar factors — including age, criminal record, and the severity of the offense — in determining the right punishment.
“So much depends on the individual,” Michael J. Obus, who sat on the New York State Supreme Court bench for 28 years, and alongside Merchan for more than a decade, told me. “There’s just no precedent for this particular individual that makes this an easy decision. Everything pulls you in different directions. On the one hand, you’ve got a man who’s 77 years old and is convicted of the lowest-level, Class E felony. On the other hand, he’s been held in contempt 10 times and is not showing any remorse.”
As I followed the trial over the last several weeks, and then absorbed the jury’s verdict on Thursday evening, I found myself torn. Trump is a uniquely malign, and uniquely powerful, figure in American life. He mocks the notion of equal justice even as he squeals endlessly about his own mistreatment. He considers himself above the law even as he threatens to wield it against his enemies if given the chance. He poses an extreme danger to the rule of law and the future of democracy that no workaday carjacker could dream of.
And yet if no one is above the law, no one is below it either. Trump can’t be given an unusually strong sentence simply for being a bad president, or an immoral lout, or for any other reason not directly related to the specific crimes in this case and the usual factors judges consider.
Orange-jump-suited liberal fantasies aside, most people convicted of low-level, nonviolent felonies in New York are not sentenced to prison. At the same time, Obus pointed out, several of Trump’s crimes “took place while the defendant was in the White House. You can’t say that about most defendants.” (Trump may yet talk his way into the lockup if he keeps testing the limits of Merchan’s gag order.)
I don’t know the right answer and can’t predict Merchan’s decision. What I do know is that in a healthy country, a nominee for president would not come anywhere near the line of criminality — certainly not so close that reasonable people can debate whether he should spend time behind bars.
This is the situation we are faced with. That this candidate may yet prevail in November is the biggest predicament of all.
