Schiff vs. Trump: The real head-to-head battle defining California's U.S. Senate race

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent filing to the D.C. District Court in the Trump v. United States presidential-immunity case both fleshes out and sharpens the evidence of Donald Trump’s sprawling criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. To understand the filing’s larger significance as well as its limitations, we must first review a bit of recent history.In its shocking decision on July 1 to grant the presidency at least presumed immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority showed once again that it was intent on immunizing one president in particular: Donald Trump. The Court majority’s decision, delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, was explicit. It held, for example, that Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure then–Vice President Mike Pence into voiding the 2020 election results on January 6 constituted “official conduct” from which Trump “is at least presumptively immune from prosecution.” That presumed immunity, the Court contended, would disappear only if the prosecution could convince the courts that bringing the case to trial would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” The Court thus remanded the case back to the D.C. District Court to decide the matter, along with the question of whether Trump is actually immune to the rest of the charges against him. How, though, could the prosecution of a president or former president over an “official act” fail to intrude on presidential authority? Seemingly, anything pertaining to Trump’s contacts with the vice president as he presided in his constitutional role as president of the Senate—as well as Trump’s contacts with the Department of Justice, which the Court also singled out and which the prosecution, significantly, felt compelled to omit from its revised indictment—deserves, as the Court sees it, virtually ironclad protection, a powerful blow against the entire January 6 indictment. Although the sweeping outcome of Trump v. United States took most legal commentators by surprise, its protection of Trump was completely predictable given the Court’s previous conduct regarding the January 6 insurrection. The refusal of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to recuse themselves from any matter related to the insurrection despite their own conflicted positions—Thomas because of his wife’s, Ginni Thomas’s, direct involvement in the subversion; Alito because of his flag-waving support of Trump’s election denials—has received the most public attention about the Court majority’s partisan partiality. But another set of telltale signs becomes apparent after a closer tracking of the Court’s decision making.Almost as soon as the case against Trump came before D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Supreme Court played along with the Trump lawyers’ efforts to delay the trial until after the November 2024 election. First, after Chutkan ruled against Trump’s absolute-immunity claims in December 2023, Special Counsel Smith asked the Supreme Court to expedite matters by hearing the case immediately, not waiting for the U.S. Court of Appeals to rule on Trump’s appeal of Chutkan’s decision. The Supreme Court refused. Two months later, though, when the appeals court ruled against Trump and set a new trial date, the Supreme Court dragged its feet for as long as possible before announcing that it would take up the case after all. It then set the date for oral arguments as late as possible, at the end of April. This meant that even before hearing the case, the Court made it highly unlikely that Trump’s trial would proceed in a timely manner, effectively immunizing Trump until after the election.Although radical in its long-term reconstruction of the American presidency, the ruling more immediately affirmed and extended the Court’s protection of Trump from prosecution. By remanding the case to the D.C. Circuit Court to decide what in the indictment constitutes official (and, therefore, presumably immune) conduct, the justices guaranteed that no trial would occur until after Election Day. After that, meanwhile, should Trump win the election, no trial would occur at all, because he would certainly fire Smith and shut down the proceedings.Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself. In remounting his case, Smith has taken the opportunity to release previously unknown details, some of which he says he doesn’t even plan to present at trial, that underscore the depravity as well as the extent of Trump’s criminal actions. Consider, for example, Smith’s telling of Trump’s reaction to the news from one of his staff, at the height of the violence on January 6, that his tweets attacking Pence had placed Pence’s life in extreme danger. “So what?” Trump reportedly replied. He had clearly intended for his tweets to reach the mob at the Capitol. His nonchalance about the vice president’s life epitomizes the lengths to which he would go to complete his coup d’état.But the real force of Smith’s filing is in its tight presentation of the evidence of a criminal conspiracy in minute detail, dating back to the summer before the 2020 election, when Trump began publicly casting doubts on its legitimacy should he not be declared the winner. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” he told the Republican National Convention in his nomination-acceptance speech in August 2020. From that point forward, Trump was at the center of every effort to keep him in power, even once he was fully aware that he had no grounds to contest Joe Biden’s victory. There were his private operatives sowing chaos at polling places and vote-counting centers, the scheming to declare victory on Election Night before the results were in, the bogus legal challenges, the fake-elector fraud, the plot to deny official certification by Congress on January 6, and finally the insurrection itself. “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” one witness reports Trump saying. “You still have to fight like hell.”The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult. It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage. Concerning specific charges that Trump’s speechmaking contributed to the insurrection, the Court allowed that “there may be contexts in which the President speaks in an unofficial capacity—perhaps as a candidate for office or party leader.” Quoting from an earlier Court decision, the ruling then states that determining these matters would require that the district court undertake “objective analysis of [the] ‘content, form, and context’” of the speeches in question, a “necessarily fact-bound analysis.” Likewise, regarding the allegations apart from Trump’s supposedly official communications and public speeches, the justices enjoined the district court, on remand, to “carefully analyze” those charges “to determine whether they too involve conduct for which the President may be immune from prosecution.” Citing those exact phrases as the Court’s standard of inquiry and proof, Smith then offers evidence that every count in the revised indictment concerns either technically official conduct undeserving of immunity or unofficial conduct involving Trump’s private actions as a candidate and not his official duties as president. These actions include his efforts to pressure state officials, preposterously presented by Trump’s defense attorneys as official inquiries into election integrity. They include his conversations about elector slates, about which the president has no official duties. They also encompass all of his speechmaking about the allegedly crooked election, up to and including his incitement at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse, which was not an official function.Above all, Smith nails down a matter that the Court’s opinion went out of its way to declare “official” and presumably immune: Trump’s efforts to pressure Pence into declining to certify Biden’s win. Although the filing acknowledges that the Court had held that these conversations between Trump and Pence about “their official responsibilities” qualified as “official,” it rebuts the presumption that those discussions therefore qualify as immune. The filing observes that the discussions did not concern Pence’s duties as president of the Senate “writ large,” but only his distinct duties overseeing the certification of a presidential election—a process in which a president, whether or not he is a candidate for reelection, has, by the Framers’ considered design, no official role. Here the logic of Smith’s argument cuts to the quick. By the Court majority’s own standard, as stated in his Trump v. United States decision, the presumption of immunity for official actions would disappear only if a prosecutor could demonstrate that bringing criminal charges against a president or former president would not present “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Because certification of a presidential election, the subject of Trump’s “official” pressuring, involves neither the authority nor the functions of the executive branch, the immunity claims concerning that pressuring are therefore groundless—according to the Court majority’s own logic. The rest of Trump and Pence’s interactions do not even qualify as official, Smith shows. In all of their other postelection, in-person conversations and private phone calls, Trump and Pence were acting not in their capacities as president and vice president but as running mates pondering their electoral prospects, even after Biden had been declared the winner. If, as the Court itself has stated, context is important with regard to speechmaking, so it is important with regard to communications between the top officials of the executive branch. To be sure, Smith allows, Trump and Pence “naturally may have touched upon arguably official responsibilities,” but “the overall context and content of the conversations demonstrate that they were primarily frank exchanges between two candidates on a shared ticket”—strictly unofficial conduct.In all, by recasting the case against Trump in view of the Court’s immunity decision, Smith has drawn upon that very ruling to establish that none of Trump’s actions in connection with January 6 cited in the revised indictment is immune from prosecution. And in doing that, he has further discredited an already discredited Supreme Court.Unfortunately, important as it is with respect to Smith’s specific case, the filing cannot come close to undoing the damage that Trump v. United States has wrought, with its authorization of an authoritarian American regime. The very fact that Smith had to omit from both his revised indictment and his filing Trump’s nefarious but official dealings with the Justice Department, including his brazen hiring and firing of top law-enforcement officials on the basis of who would do his personal bidding, shows how fearsomely the Court’s immunity decision has constrained the special counsel. There was a great deal more criminal behavior by Trump and his co-conspirators, as laid out in detail in the House January 6 committee report, that Smith could not touch because the Court has effectively immunized it as “official” activity under the executive branch’s authority.These limitations show all over again how the Court has given the president absolute license to rule like a tyrant, against which even the ablest special counsel is virtually powerless. Nothing in Smith’s filing alleviates Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s judgment in her forthright dissent in Trump v. United States that the decision empowers the president, acting in his official capacity, to order the assassination of political rivals, to take a bribe in exchange for a pardon, to organize a military coup with impunity: “Immune, immune, immune.” That Smith managed to outsmart the Court as much as he did is a remarkable feat that could have important results—but only if Kamala Harris succeeds in winning the presidency.On the basis of their past decisions, it is reasonable to expect that both the D.C. district court under Judge Chutkan and the U.S. Court of Appeals will rule in favor of Smith. Trump v. United States would then go once again before the Supreme Court. This will certainly happen if Harris wins the election, because a Justice Department under her administration would almost certainly allow Smith to remain to continue prosecution of Trump. What, then, would the Court do? Would it uphold those decisions and throw Trump upon the mercy of a D.C. federal jury? Or would it strike those decisions down, thereby redoubling the disgrace it earned the first time around? The only way the Court can avoid that dilemma is if Trump wins the election, an outcome that its conservative majority would now have all the more reason to desire. But what happens if, as seems highly possible, the election leads to litigation, much as the 2020 election did, only this time the Court is left to make the final decision? Will the Court then intervene as Trump’s enabler once again, installing him as a constitutionally tainted president, allowing him to kill the indictment against him, and to pardon those convicted of violent crimes in the attack on the Capitol whom he calls “hostages”? The Court, in Trump v. United States, claimed that it was protecting the sanctity of the presidency, but if it aids Trump in his attempt to escape justice for his January 6 insurrection, it will further seal its illegitimacy while also sealing MAGA’s triumph—and, with that, the majority of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, will pay a crushing price.

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Robert Strange as orc dad Glûg. | Ross Ferguson/Prime Video In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Sauron is pure evil. He is the acolyte of Morgoth, a Satan figure in Tolkien’s mythos. Morgoth creates sun-hating minions, the orcs, during his reign of darkness — hellspawn, in other words, created by a devil figure to do his bidding. These are the villains our protagonists most frequently encounter, and their status as dispensable adversaries serves the function of challenges to be overcome, through trickery or battlefield carnage, so that the One Ring might be destroyed and with it, the spirit of Sauron, who seeks to enslave the peoples of Middle-earth.  The Rings of Power’s second season seems intent on asking: But what about orc personhood? A minor stir was caused in episode three when an orc character named Glûg is shown with an orc wife and orc baby. Glûg is a deputy to Adar, a fallen elf tortured by Morgoth, who’s currently in charge of Mordor, the parcel of land the orcs forcibly took from a population of Men in season one. (Adar and Glûg are invented characters for the show.) In previous episodes, Glûg wants to remain in the orcs’ new home rather than march to war. Later, it dawns on Glûg that perhaps Adar does not care about the orcs, whom Adar calls his “children,” as evidenced by battlefield maneuvers certain to result in high orc casualties.  Having dispensed with the aforementioned storyline of the Men forcibly removed from their homeland, it seems that the writers might be casting about for a new population through which they can examine suffering and oppression, and they landed on orcs. The problems with this approach are manifold.  A war machine does not make for a good metaphor Orcs are canonically bad in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, even if Tolkien pondered their humanity in subsequent writings (more on that later). Here’s how Tolkien introduces them in The Hobbit (“goblins” and “orcs” are synonymous):  Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them.   Under Sauron’s influence in The Lord of the Rings, orcs could charitably be understood as victims — cogs in a war machine — their cruelties the result of Sauron’s own cruelty. Yet even away from the domination of Sauron and left to their own devices, as Bilbo finds them in The Hobbit, they are “cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted.”   Creatures of Satan, naturally bad: At their core, orcs are distinctly unlike humans. This is important because the fantasy genre frequently explores real-world oppression through make-believe people. Not that this was Tolkien’s approach; his style is more mythic than allegorical. It’s the subsequent 60 years of fantasy storytelling that has made use of fantasy populations to explore real-world systems of oppression (mutants in X-Men, orogenes in The Broken Earth trilogy, among many more examples).  But for the metaphor of oppression to work, it has to be rooted in some kind of overlap between the fantasy population and the subjugation of actual people. Real bigotry exercised through government policy is an enduring theme of X-Men’s mutants; orogenes are scapegoated and killed because of the powers they’re born with in The Broken Earth. With orcs, there is no overlap to draw on, no there there. Tolkien — and Morgoth — created them to be agents of evil. The metaphor falls flat when there’s nothing on the other side of it.  The racialization of orcs cannot be wiped away Tolkien’s creations are so influential that it’s easy to assume our modern conceptions of elves, dwarves, and orcs are as he wrote them. But it’s less of a straight line than a branching tree, with Tolkien at the root and evolutions and interpretations branching from a shared lineage. Untangling even the roots can be difficult. There has been much debate about whether Tolkien wrote racist depictions in the orcs and the Men who aligned with Sauron. Though Tolkien describes orcs mostly through their actions, the few recurring visual descriptions include traits such as “swarthy” and “slant eyed.” The oliphaunt-riding Haradrim who join Sauron’s side in the War of the Ring are described as “black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues” with “harsh” sounding language. This is as bad as it gets in the canon proper; the physical characteristic Tolkien seemed most preoccupied with in these stories is stature.  But more emerges in the Legendarium, which is just shorthand for the entirety of Tolkien’s mythmaking, most of which was published posthumously, as well as his letters, which contain the infamous description of orcs as “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” That description may not be found in the published books, but the spirit of the sentiment certainly is, even if it is implicit.  Then there’s what’s explicit: For the most part, Tolkien’s various groups are so specific, and have become so iconically defined, that they are identifiable without race or ethnicity, ripe for The Rings of Power’s colorblind casting. Orcs are conspicuous outliers in this regard, with actors’ skin hidden under thick layers of sickly makeup. This makes it all the easier to project the modern ideas of orcs onto them — the ones that don’t stem from Tolkien at all, but use his creations as fantasy shorthand that, through repetition and time, have turned creatures like orcs into the tropes we recognize today.  Dungeons & Dragons is the most responsible for this; for decades, fantasy storytellers have been playing in Tolkien’s backyard, cherry-picking elements from his fantasy and transforming them into a kind of ethnographic adventure through a fantasyland textured by colonial shades of racism recognizable to players. Dungeons & Dragons taught fantasy fans to understand orcs as a fusion of racist tropes, combining a barbaric other and a vaguely native people of tribes and clans. Players can play as half-orcs with a “sloping forehead, jutting jaw, prominent teeth, and coarse body hair,” which in the official handbook was for years accompanied by a drawing that emphasizes Tolkien’s Asian caricature (the problematic visual depictions are all but excised in the new edition). Tabletop games like Warhammer and many video games have reinforced racist depictions of orcs, and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings didn’t help. Jackson’s Uruk-hai are coded in the “scary Black men” trope, a significant departure from how Tolkien describes them (mostly more sun tolerant and larger than orcs).  The Rings of Power is a direct descendant of Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s material, but all the cultural understandings of orcs seem to bear on decisions the show’s writers make. The writers seem to feel the responsibility of doing something with orcs, but instead of unpacking any of their baggage, they ignore the uncomfortable connotations in favor of a paste-on oppression narrative. It’s almost as if, because orcs exist in such a distinct category of their own, The Rings of Power seeks to turn the orcs into a racialized population. This results in an oppression utterly devoid of context, so nonspecific as to be nothing. It’s an easy win to be against the concept of oppression; it’s much harder to actually say something about oppression. The reason X-Men, for instance, is interesting is not because oppression just exists, but because the mechanisms of oppression of mutants reveal how similar mechanisms harm real-world people — something that was very much on the mind of its creators during the civil rights era. There’s no story — no interesting story, at least — in “oppression in general is bad.” For orcs’ oppression to mean anything, their suffering needs to be recognizable to us, the mechanisms of their oppression understood. That is to say: There must be an obvious corollary to an actual oppressed population. The writers are gesturing, however tentatively, at comparisons to everyone from Israeli Jews to exploited soldiers with their storylines of “Mordor as the only homeland for orcs” and “Glûg as unwilling conscript.” But perhaps the gestures remain so tentative because going any further into the allegory risks the obviously offensive. Who wants their oppression to be seen through the lens of orcs?  Maybe orcs are vehicles of evil who don’t have babies, and that’s fine  Humanizing orcs was always going to be difficult. But there’s an obvious alternative: In place of writing orcs as any kind of recognizably marginalized population, they could just be evil.  Evil is a powerful force, lurking in the shadows of the night. The malevolent forces of the world hide there; the ghouls who give us nightmares and ill omens and bad luck. Evil is a necessary and primal concept that motivates our most powerful stories (see: the Bible, all myth). Banding together to fight against it is the best unifier there is, in the real world and the world of Middle-earth.  It would seem Tolkien understood this when writing the orcs. Here’s a population of wicked beings, created by Morgoth (again: Satan) and in service of a warlord set on conquering the world and subjecting all its people. Tolkien depicts orcs again and again as killing innocents, enjoying torture, and enacting the sort of casual cruelty you’d expect from villainous minions. The overwhelming story Tolkien tells of orcs is not of a people suffering under a dictator, but the mindless and expendable soldiers Sauron uses to attempt to conquer Middle-earth.  By comparison, he wrote vanishingly little about the systems needed to support all those (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) orcs. Imagine if he had sacrificed the potent locale of Mordor in service of thinking through the problem: Much farmland would be needed to grow crops, but plants can’t grow in a land of shadow where volcanic ash blocks the sun. Tolkien elided this particular bit of mundane world-building, which is good, as it doesn’t sound very interesting to read.  Likewise, how orcs procreate is not discussed anywhere in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but is mentioned almost as an aside in The Silmarillion. This may seem like a technicality, but it’s not. Dig deeply and greedily enough in the Legendarium and you can find a cavern of (sometimes contradictory) world-building that, for good reason, isn’t present in stories of the Ring. A second piece of marginalia supporting orc humanity includes the sentence in a letter, unsent because “it seemed to be taking myself too importantly,” that finds the author discussing the theology of his creation and calling orcs “naturally bad” after nearly writing “irredeemably bad.” Not to put too fine a point on it, but what Tolkien chose to include in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit should be given more weight than what he chose to omit. If Tolkien, a deliberate writer and a devout Catholic, had wanted to get into the moral morass of what orc babies and their attendant loving and nurturing implies, he would have. Given everything that is on the page — the thousands of years of elves, Men, and dwarves and their fractured populations warring, allying, and achieving great feats — one wonders why the writers’ room of The Rings of Power is venturing into orcish territory at all.  It’s a tall order to adapt all that myth into a television show. But we know how it will turn out: In the face of Sauron, an alliance of the free peoples of Middle-earth (most of them, anyway) will put their squabbles aside and fight Sauron’s forces — that is to say, orcs. And if the writers are true to Tolkien, our heroes will have no compunctions about killing many, many, many orcs. If our heroes do have compunctions because there have been several seasons’ worth of orc sociological theory, the writers have a difficult set of questions to answer: What does it mean to humanize cogs in a war machine? How do creatures with minds so weak they bend to the will of Sauron engage in free will? If orcs are more than hellspawn, what are they pointing to and what do they stand in for? These are questions Tolkien struggled with and ultimately didn’t answer. It doesn’t look good for The Rings of Power’s writers’ room.

When Hamas terrorists attacked her hometown in Southern Israel, Tali Hadad a kindergarten teacher, leapt into action to save 13 people, including her own wounded son.

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Inside With Jen Psaki/MSNBCDonald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen said the ex-president will use the Armed Forces and the elite Navy SEAL Team Six to “round up” his critics if he is re-elected in November.Trump has repeatedly threatened to prosecute and jail his opponents, including “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” in a post last month on his social media platform Truth Social.“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote on Sept. 7.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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On the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack against Israel, which took approximately 1,200 lives and 250 hostages, a panel of New York Post reporters return to that harrowing day — and Israel’s military response that followed, leading to an estimated 40,000 Gazan deaths and threat of a larger war in the...

Since last October 7, I have averted my eyes from social media at many moments, and not for the obvious reasons—not because a virtual yelling match had reached a painfully high pitch or become a crude display of mental entrenchment. That would be par for the course when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I would turn away, quickly switching tabs, when I was suddenly confronted with a clip from Gaza of a father covered in dust crawling over mounds of rubble and calling out for his buried children, or the sight of a mother kneeling and screaming over a row of tiny, white-shrouded bodies.The emotional intensity of these videos was overwhelming. The clips never told me anything about these Gazans. They only plunged me for a few excruciating seconds into what was surely the most awful moment of these human beings’ lives. The humanity—the fear, the grief, the physical pain—was so raw and uncut that, in my recognition of it, I recoiled.The year since Hamas’s brutal massacre and the carnage wrought by Israel’s response has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its most elemental feature: a demand for recognition. What has been revealed in the aftermath is the desperation of this need. When people put up posters with the faces of Israeli grandparents and babies kidnapped to Gaza, that was a plea for recognition; when others tore them down, that was a denial of that recognition. When my otherwise thoughtful young Israeli relative told me, casually, that she doesn’t feel bad about the deaths of Palestinians, because “they are all guilty, all of them,” that was also a denial of recognition. The horrid debates about whether rape occurred on October 7 were an argument over recognition. There were pleas to be seen and then the purposeful, often malicious refusals to see. And I found this interplay—the desire and the withholding—to be one of the most devastating aspects of this awful year. The grandfather of the Israeli soldier Jordan Bensimon cries over his casket during his funeral on July 22, 2014, in Ashkelon, Israel. (Andrew Burton / Getty) In Isabella Hammad’s new book, Recognizing the Stranger, which consists mostly of a lecture she gave at Columbia University, the novelist explores what it has meant for the Palestinian people to be endlessly seeking this acknowledgment of their humanity. Hammad recounts a story she heard while visiting a kibbutz. She encountered a skittish young soldier named Daniel—he said he was “a ‘little’ colonel”—who was hiding out after having deserted the Israeli army. He told her that, while guarding the Gaza border, he’d spotted a man, completely naked, walking toward him. The man was holding a photograph of a child. Daniel’s instruction was to shoot him in the legs, but he could not do it. Instead, Daniel dropped his weapon and ran.Hammad is both heartened and distressed by this story. It does show how a person can suddenly become visible to another, can reveal themselves and thereby cause minds and behavior to change. But she is troubled by what has to happen to bring this about: “It was, after all, on the little colonel’s horizon that that man in Gaza appeared, walking toward him without his clothes on, literally risking his life to undertake this desperate performance of his humanity, saying, look at me naked, I am a human being, holding up a photograph of a child, who we easily imagine was his own child, killed by Israeli missile fire.”Look at me naked. This performance of humanity, mostly for an outside, adjudicating world, is not just a Palestinian burden—though Hammad presents it as such. Israelis, too, have been desperate to be seen, not as occupiers or settlers, but as people just hoping to live their lives.Along with Hammad’s book, a few others published around the anniversary of October 7 offer first drafts of the history of that day—drafts that take as their starting point the stories of individuals. These are people who woke up one Saturday morning and were soon dodging bullets and grenades, cradling the dead bodies of their husbands and daughters, kneeling before AK-47s and begging to be spared.[Michael A. Cohen: The rape denialists]One Day in October, by Yair Agmon and Oriya Mevorach, is an oral history in the style of the Nobel Prize–winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich. The authors gathered 40 stories, told from the perspective of the survivors about their own experience or that of a killed loved one. The narratives all seem to follow a three-act structure: We meet someone who is wonderfully idiosyncratic; we follow them through the horrors of that day; we learn something of their bravery and decency.This amounts at times to a performance of humanity as desperate as that of the man in Hammad’s story. The victims are idealized, elevated even in their ordinariness, remembered as the most courageous, the kindest, the most beautiful.Netta Epstein was a 22-year-old living in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7. His story is told in One Day in October by his fiancée, Irene Shavit, who describes Epstein as “a real goofball, one of the funniest guys you ever met.” They had planned to go to Epstein’s grandmother’s for breakfast on October 7 because she was making the Yemenite pastry jahnun. Like most of the people on the kibbutzim bordering Gaza, Epstein and Shavit’s drama played out in their safe room, as they struggled to keep the Hamas terrorists out—“We heard them opening the safe room and screaming ‘Where are you! Come out!’ in this heavily accented Hebrew. Then they started throwing grenades at us.” The couple managed to survive two grenades, but the third one rolled too close to them, and Epstein instinctively threw himself on top of it, dying instantly and saving his fiancée. Shavit then lay there for hours, hiding under a bed, with Epstein’s body blocking her from the view of other terrorists who entered the room. She described her thoughts as she waited: “I was there for hours facing Netta, watching him lying there with his gorgeous body, with his sculpted buns—I always teased him that he spent far more time toning his behind than I ever did … What an amazing body; he’s really the most gorgeous guy in the world.”An ideology that recognizes only the pain of Palestinians does not know what to do with this sort of story—painfully sweet in its humanness. There is no room for it. When all one sees is colonized and colonizers, certain experiences register and others do not. The colonized deserve the much-denied recognition of their humanity, especially as they are killed by the tens of thousands. The colonizer, by virtue of his position, is responsible for any terror that might be visited upon him; his suffering, his humanity, can be ignored. The flip side of this thinking can also, of course, be found in Israel, where any loss of an innocent Jewish life is mourned but the deaths of thousands of Palestinian women and children can be dismissed as collateral damage. This parsimoniousness, to characterize it generously, has only heightened the competition for acknowledgment—for proving that “we” are more human than “them.”I give the Haaretz journalist Lee Yaron a lot of credit for cutting through this sad rivalry. In her book, 10/7, which also catalogs the events of the day through those who became victims, she makes a choice not to depict Palestinians. Their history is not hers to tell, she says—“I wait with all humility to read the books of my Palestinian colleagues, which will surely tell the stories of the innocents of Gaza, who suffered and died from my country’s reaction to their leadership’s violence.” What she does is apply reportorial rigor to her own side. Her subjects are just people on the day that will be their last; this is not hagiography. The most relevant thing about them is the fact of their murder. But they are also not anonymous. They each represent one flicker of humanity in this panoramic account. In an afterword, the novelist Joshua Cohen, Yaron’s husband, even compares this work to the memorial books created after the Holocaust “to reclaim the dead, at least some of them, from numeric anonymity and political exploitation.”Yaron’s compendium is relentlessly depressing because of the senselessness and brutality, the death after death. But she manages to escape the need to prove anyone’s worth. They just are. And who they are also represents a wide swath of Israeli society: the young French Israeli woman who had left her infant with her husband for the weekend so she could relax at the Nova dance festival; the elderly Soviet Jewish retirees about to board a van to take them to a spa day at the Dead Sea; a pregnant Bedouin woman on her way to the hospital to give birth; the Nepalese and Thai guest workers hiding behind stacked bags of rice. In these stories, the violence of that day is a rupture in reality, indiscriminate and unforgiving.Humanity reveals itself in the smallest details; it becomes easier to forget the fight to claim the most empathy when the focus is on those qualities of an existence that feel totally familiar and otherwise unremarkable. The work of the Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha is filled with such details. His poems have appeared in many literary publications, including The Atlantic, over the past year, which made his story of being detained by the Israeli army as he and his family were trying to leave Gaza, published in The New Yorker in December, particularly disturbing. Abu Toha’s new book, Forest of Noise, gathers together that recent writing. The best of it describes the everyday experience of a waking nightmare—much of it in Gaza but some from the distance of Egypt, where he is living now. “Under the Rubble” includes some simple exchanges with his young son: My son asks me whether,when we return to Gaza,I could get him a puppy.I say, “I promise, if we can find any.”I ask my son if he wishes to becomea pilot when he grows up.He says he won’t wishto drop bombs on people and houses. The more Abu Toha roots his poems in his reality, in those details, the more drawn I am to them. If this was his own performance of humanity, then it was the subtlest of dances, something like butoh, in which the dancer seems to move a millimeter every second, demanding your full concentration to appreciate how slowly a muscle can extend itself in space. In “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike,” Abu Toha offers nothing more than a list of instructions: “Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children’s fear.” It goes on like this, the banal suddenly profound, the abnormal proximity to death suddenly normal.[Amor Tobin: How my father saved my life on October 7] Children grieve during the funeral on November 11, 2023, of the Faojo family, killed in an Israeli bombing of Rafah in Gaza. (Said Khatib / AFP / Getty) This particular poem reminded me of passages from another October 7 book, Amir Tibon’s The Gates of Gaza, an adapted excerpt of which appeared recently in this magazine. Tibon, also a Haaretz reporter, spent the day trapped with his wife and two young daughters in the safe room of their house in Kibbutz Nahal Oz while their neighbors were shot and their houses set on fire. Tibon alternates between the story of the day—while he was hiding, his father, a retired general in his 60s, made his way to the kibbutz to try to save his son and his family—and the history of the community, which sits about a mile from the border with Gaza.But despite the genuinely heroic story Tibon describes of his father surviving ambushes and gunfights to reach them, my focus kept shifting to the drama of the little girls—Galia, 3 and a half, and Carmel, almost 2—sitting in the darkness of the safe room for 10 hours, the sound of gunfire outside, without food or water or access to a bathroom, and needing to stay absolutely quiet. How did Tibon and his wife keep them busy? Galia wanted an apple; Carmel requested ice cream. At one point after six hours, Carmel toddled around the room in the dark, accidently stepped on something, and started to cry. Tibon and his wife panicked, held her close, and she calmed down, fell asleep; then the parents lost it for the first time that day. “Up until that point, we had both taken pains to maintain our composure, knowing that any signs of distress from either one of us would make the girls even more scared than they already were,” Tibon writes. “But now, all of our carefully restrained emotions came pouring out: the fear, the anger, the remorse.”I mention these fathers and their children not by way of arriving at some facile point about moral equivalence. I’m not trying to collapse the experiences of people on either side of the Gaza border. They are enormously different. But if you’re searching for humanity, you might find it best here in the granularity of experience and emotion, in the desire for safety, in the agony of trying to protect children from harm.In her survey of all the ways Palestinians try to have their humanity recognized, Hammad landed on one that felt the least fraught, the least desperate, to her: to forget that anyone is watching or making a wager or rooting from the outside, to forget the need to show the scars, and amputated limbs, and blood. “I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves,” Hammad writes. I like this too, and I felt most moved, while reading the works of Israelis and Palestinians after this year of death, when they stopped performing for anyone else.It is hard to ever imagine an end to the suffering competition; both groups are too locked into the idea that the recognition they each seek is a scarce commodity, that if one side claims it, the other side loses. But they’re wrong. And this heartbreaking mistake, more than anything else, is what stands in the way of their suffering’s end.

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats have considered abortion a winning issue and have been eager to talk about it. Emphasizing reproductive rights helped the party achieve victories in the 2022 midterm elections and has generated enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.But some abortions Democrats would rather not discuss: those that occur in the final months of pregnancy. Democrats tend to brush off questions about whether these abortions should be restricted, either by denying that their policies would allow abortions late in pregnancy or by pointing out that these abortions are rare, implying that they are therefore not worth our moral concern.In the recent vice-presidential debate, Tim Walz sidestepped a question about a relatively permissive abortion bill he signed into law in Minnesota. And in the presidential debate before that, when Donald Trump pointed out that Roe had allowed for abortions in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months of a pregnancy, Kamala Harris plainly said, “That’s not true.”[Read: Trump and Vance are calling their abortion ban something new]It’s true that third-trimester abortions are rare. But they do happen. Representatives from the CDC, the pro-abortion-rights Guttmacher Institute, and the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute told me that national data simply aren’t available. But Colorado, which is home to clinics that perform third-trimester abortions, recorded 137 third-trimester abortions in 2023. That’s only one state—eight other states, plus Washington, D.C., have no restrictions on third-trimester abortions. Just a few minutes from my office building in D.C., a clinic offers abortions up to nearly 32 weeks. In nearby Bethesda, Maryland, a clinic performs abortions up to 35 weeks’ gestation.Those who support such expansive abortion laws tend to argue that third-trimester abortions are the result of a devastating medical diagnosis. In many cases that’s true, but it is not always the situation. The D.C. clinic I mentioned above confirmed by phone that it performs abortions for any reason. Data on the reasons women have later abortions are also scarce. But when The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey interviewed a doctor who specializes in late abortions, he estimated that about half of his patients have healthy pregnancies. Of course, some of his patients are in serious distress for other reasons; some are victims of sexual assault, or are teenagers who didn’t realize they were pregnant. This leads to another logical flaw in how the pro-abortion-rights crowd tends to frame its argument.The group complains that people are overly focused on exceedingly rare third-term abortions. But abortions after a pregnancy from rape or incest are also comparatively rare, and abortion-rights supporters still push opponents of abortion to take these rare scenarios into account. Discussions about third-trimester abortions should therefore be fair game as well. Downplaying third-trimester abortions isn’t necessary for Democrats to protect reproductive rights, and could well alienate the plurality of voters best described as abortion moderates. The grim reality of later abortion is simply too much for most Americans to countenance—and reasonable policy makers should listen to them.Most Americans believe that third-trimester abortions should be restricted. If Democrats want a platform that truly reflects majority opinion, they should address the question of what to do about later abortions, and adopt a position that protects abortions in the first trimester while limiting second- and third-trimester abortions to pregnancies with fetal abnormalities or maternal health crises.Democrats keep dancing around the fact that, under Roe, states were not required to restrict later abortions. Under Dobbs, which superseded Roe, they still aren’t; they can choose to ban the procedure or allow the abortions without limits. Of course, the fall of Roe means that more states are banning abortion altogether.[Read: The abortion absolutist]But the fact remains that Americans are broadly uncomfortable with third-trimester abortions. A 2023 Gallup poll found that although more than two-thirds of Americans believe abortion should be legal in the first trimester, just 22 percent think it should be legal in the third. And a 2021 Associated Press poll found that just 8 percent of respondents believe that third-trimester abortions should be legal in all cases.When Democrats hammer home just how rare later abortions are, they’re making an important point: More than 90 percent of American abortions take place in the first trimester. A reasonable platform would adopt the Western European standard, in which abortion is legal for any reason in the first trimester, but later procedures are restricted except in cases of devastating maternal or fetal medical diagnoses. Preserving women’s right to choose does not require Democrats to adopt an extreme position that allows for abortion at any stage of pregnancy, no questions asked.

For better or worse, Carlos Rodon pitches with full-fledged emotion. 

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty ImagesDonald Trump would seek to defund Planned Parenthood if he wins the election next month, according to his running mate. “On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood, look, I mean our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions,” JD Vance said on Saturday, according to NBC News. “That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around. It will remain a consistent view.”Figures this year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 93.5 percent of abortions in 2021 were carried out either at or before 13 weeks, with less than 6 percent performed between 13 and 20 weeks, and less than 1 percent either at or after 21 weeks.Read more at The Daily Beast.

With the latest advisory from the National Hurricane Center, Milton is forecast to continue to rapidly intensify, reaching Category 4 strength by Tuesday before slightly weakening ahead of landfall in Florida on Wednesday.

“I was actually in the right places at all the right times and that's why I survived. That's why I'm here today," she said.

“I was on the subway, and someone was sitting in front and literally telling me I should kill myself, God hates me, God hates the Jews and some other vivid words about what awful people we are, and we should just kill ourselves,’’ a straphanger said.

Gleyber Torres’ second-half turnaround did not stop with the end of the regular season.

"I'm still living in that day. Oct. 7 is still happening," Or Gat, who happened to be away when terrorists attacked his home and kidnapped his sister and sister-in-law.

Alejandro Arcos' murder came days after the killing of another city official. according to the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

After Game 2 of the NLDS was halted for several minutes because of fans throwing objects on the field, the Padres went on to blow out the Dodgers.