The PointConversations and insights about the moment.

There were some initial reports of violent behavior by some police officers toward protesters, though overall the raid did not appear to produce widespread accounts of brutality. But we don’t really know, because the department wouldn’t allow journalists on campus, barricading them blocks away. WKCR, the Columbia student radio station, reported that student journalists were threatened with arrest if they left the Journalism School building to cover the raid.

City officials said Wednesday that 109 people were arrested at Columbia and 173 people at City College, farther uptown in Manhattan.

Adams claimed the department used “precision tactics with minimum amount of force.” But he provided no evidence for his statement that the unrest could be blamed on “outside agitators” and “professionals.”

“There are people who are harmful in trying to radicalize our children, and we cannot ignore this,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

At a news conference Wednesday morning, Police Commissioner Edward Caban held up a large bike chain as proof that outside agitators had been involved in the demonstrations at Columbia.

Given that similar claims were made, often falsely, to discredit activists during the civil rights movement, that kind of language should provoke skepticism. Had Adams and the Police Department allowed journalists to do their jobs, these claims could have been independently vetted.

Thousands of students and others are engaged in mass demonstrations, peaceful and otherwise, over the war in Gaza on campuses across the country. To understand them, the public cannot depend on the police narrative alone.

The brief’s authors do have legitimate concerns about vaccine hesitance, as “23.1 percent of respondents are less likely to accept vaccines for diseases other than Covid-19.” And they’re also worried about the reputation of major health organizations, as “only 63.3 percent reported trusting a hypothetical W.H.O. recommendation to vaccinate” in the event of another pandemic. The United States and other high-income countries are less confident in vaccines than middle-income countries tend to be, which is also a worrying trend.

But overall, the picture for international vaccine acceptance remains pretty good. And even in the United States, “the National Immunization Survey-Child identified no decline overall in routine vaccination coverage associated with the Covid-19 pandemic among children born during 2018-2019.” As ever, the biggest barriers to people getting vaccinated continue to be poverty and lack of access, rather than anti-vaccine fervor.

The Democratic platform emphasized enhanced conventional warfare capability to decrease reliance on the nuclear deterrent. It emphasized “close consultation” with NATO allies, and the first bullet point under “defense policy” began with these words: “Work with our NATO and other allies to ensure our collective security.”

And what of the Republican platform? It warned that “Fragmenting NATO is the immediate objective of the Soviet military buildup and Soviet subversion” and was replete with admonitions to strengthen NATO, including by shoring up its southern flank and concluding new basing agreements. This shared commitment to NATO is a key reason American deterrence persisted through every American presidency during the Cold War.

Republicans and Democrats are not equally serious today. In a new interview, Eric Cortellessa of Time magazine asked Trump about his pledge to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to countries that he believes don’t meet NATO military spending targets. Trump doubled down.

“Yeah, when I said that, I said it with great meaning,” he said, “because I want them to pay. I want them to pay up. That was said as a point of negotiation. I said, Look, if you’re not going to pay, then you’re on your own. And I mean that.”

Americans should want Europeans to pay more for their own defense. That was a component of the Democrats’ 1984 platform, and the NATO target of 2 percent of G.D.P. military spending was negotiated under Barack Obama. But to provide Vladimir Putin with targets of opportunity based on temporary military spending levels is to shatter NATO itself.

Speaker Mike Johnson’s deal with Biden to provide additional funding for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel gives me hope that the Republican Party can find its footing again, but so long as Trump is the nominee, the voters face a choice between a strategy and a temper tantrum. They should choose accordingly.

Davidson first became acquainted with Cohen in 2011 when dirty.com, a website that traffics in dirt about celebrities, posted an item about Donald Trump having a fling with a porn star named Stormy Daniels, and Davidson called Cohen.

“Before I could barely get my name out, I was met with a hostile barrage of insults and allegations that went on for quite a while,” Davidson testified. “He was just screaming. He believed Stormy Daniels was behind the story.” In fact, Davidson got the item taken down.

Much of Davidson’s testimony involved McDougal, whose hush-money deal was a kind of a dress rehearsal for the alleged crime, which is Trump and Cohen covering up the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For a time, American Media Inc., the owner of The National Enquirer, was in competition with ABC News for McDougal’s story, which led to a memorable moment in court. Davidson claimed a group of women he derided in a text as “the estrogen mafia” wanted her to tell her story to ABC News.

“We had it all set. We picked the date, camera crews, makeup,” Brian Ross, the ABC News correspondent, told me this afternoon by phone. “Then she called and said, ‘My family doesn’t want me to do it.’” Ross thinks the real reason this explosive story didn’t come out was that ABC News, which doesn’t pay for stories, became leverage: “In retrospect, they were using us to get to Trump for the money.”

After American Media paid off McDougal, David Pecker, the former publisher, backed out of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels.

But when Davidson demanded the payment, Cohen began offering a million excuses for why Trump couldn’t pay. “I thought he was trying to kick the can down the road until after the election,” Davidson testified, which will be an important part of the prosecution’s case.

When it was clear Trump wouldn’t pay, Davidson testified that Cohen said, “Goddammit, I’ll just do it myself.” It was then that Cohen set up a dummy corporation to send Davidson the money and began trying to get reimbursed by Trump.

All of the texts and phone calls between Davidson and Cohen are still one step removed from Trump. But they pre-corroborate what Cohen will say “the boss” told him to do, and that is critical.

One of the individuals in Tehran’s cross hairs is Toomaj Salehi, a rapper arrested in October 2022 for releasing songs in support of the protests. Nearly a year ago, Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote in an essay for Times Opinion that Salehi had become an important symbol in Iran for his willingness to stand up to the government — and that he faced serious risk in detention.

Last week, the worst fears of Salehi’s supporters came to pass. Though he had been briefly released from prison in the fall after Iran’s Supreme Court found problems with an earlier ruling against him, he was soon arrested again. And on Wednesday, an Iranian court sentenced Salehi to death for “spreading corruption on the earth,” despite the higher court’s decision.

The development was promptly met with global outrage. A group of United Nations experts and the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, among others, have called for Salehi’s immediate release. Demonstrations in support of him have been held in cities around the world.

Does Iran care what the world thinks? A report on Sunday from an Iranian state news agency lambasted Washington for wading into the issue. It also noted, in its English translation, that the court’s ruling was “preliminary” — and could be appealed and changed to life imprisonment by a higher court.

It’s impossible to say whether those few words could signal that Salehi’s fate may not be sealed. We can hope. In the meantime, the court’s message to Iranians — and to young Iranians in particular — seems terrifyingly clear.

On Tuesday, Merchan ordered Trump to take down the offending posts and warned him that any further violations of the order could result in “an incarceratory sentence.”

As far as I can tell, “incarceratory” was an obscure legal word before this morning. Perhaps Merchan, aware that he was referring to an unprecedented punishment of a former commander in chief, was reaching for something more official sounding than “the pokey.” Regardless, the meaning is perfectly clear: If Trump can’t control himself, he is looking at the real prospect of jail time.

This is, of course, far from the first time the law has faced the dilemma of Donald Trump. Bad-faith allegations of lawfare notwithstanding, the American legal system has been coming for Trump for at least half a century; in 1973 the Nixon Justice Department sued him and his father for racial discrimination in their New York City housing developments. (Naturally, Trump countersued, and the case was settled out of court.)

Yes, $9,000 is couch-cushion change to a man who just enjoyed a multibillion-dollar payday. You could call it hush money, except that it’s unlikely to shut him up.

Still, even small consequences are consequences, especially when accompanied by the threat of more severe ones. Merchan will do everything he can to avoid taking it to that level; he is surely sensitive to the fact that Trump would like nothing more than to be martyred for his cult — not to mention generate a new merchandise stream — by getting himself tossed into Rikers.

Let’s hope we don’t have to confront that scenario. If we do, though, it will be entirely of Trump’s own choosing. Eventually the rule of law must be asserted, because it doesn’t assert itself.

This is humbug. On the first day of the trial, the pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer and Andrew Giuliani, a former White House aide, showed up with a few dozen Trump supporters in tow. They were not “shut down” and the holding area was just by the courthouse, not “far away.”

After that, there were several mornings when there were no Trump supporters outside the courthouse when it opened and only a tiny handful at lunch and after court adjourned. On Tuesday morning, about three dozen showed in the morning. Joe Reilly, a supporter from Greenwich Village wearing a “Never Surrender!” T-shirt, explained the low turnout: “Conservatives have jobs and some are afraid of getting doxxed.” Occasionally, a few MAGA supporters have engaged in annoying shouting matches with anti-Trump activists, who almost always outnumber them.

And it’s not as if there are only a few MAGA voters in this blue region. Staten Island, which Trump carried by 15 points in 2020, is only 15 miles away. I met one Staten Island Trump supporter outside the courthouse who was sorry to learn that it was pointless to set up his Trump souvenir stall outside the courthouse. Not enough demand.

Spectators, some traveling from as far away as Alaska, line up at 6 a.m. for a chance to snag one of a half dozen or so courtroom seats reserved for the public. So far, all of those I’ve chatted with who made it in have disliked Trump except for Bishop Robert Sylvester Shaw of the Holy Cathedral of Prayer in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Shaw, a Black pastor wearing an orange-checkered suit, said he was praying for Trump and hoped “the pressure doesn’t burst [his] pipes.”

It might. Of course it’s much too early to say that Trump, like the Wicked Witch of the West, is melting, but the Winkie Guards are flagging.

“Stereophonic,” written by David Adjmi with several songs by Will Butler, is a genius creation for me, taking us inside a recording studio over several months as a Fleetwood Mac-like band tries to piece together an album. The gorgeous tunefulness and ache of the lyrics feel like love-and-agony put to sheet music. My money is on “Stereophonic” being the rare play that, after being nominated in the Best Score category at the Tonys, wins the award, which usually goes to musicals; Butler’s songs are that good.

The close second in my Best of 2023-24 is “Merrily,” the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical about friends trying to make good on the promise of their youth, in part through the characters’ songwriting. “Merrily” had productions over the years that never quite worked until this one, thanks to the best sister act in theater, Maria Friedman (the show’s director) and Sonia Friedman (one of its producers), and to its stars, Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez, all of whom deserve Tonys for their work.

As for “Hell’s Kitchen,” spend some time with my colleague Michael Paulson’s excellent profile of and recent podcast with Alicia Keys, whose heartfelt songs drive the show.

It’s been a pretty great season on Broadway all around. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sensational play “Appropriate” is a lock for me for the best revival of a play, and I’m pulling for Sarah Paulson’s star turn in that production for best actress in a play. Best actor in a play will come down to choosing among one excellent performance after another. For me, it’s Jeremy Strong (“Enemy of the People”), Leslie Odom Jr. (“Purlie Victorious”) and Michael Stuhlbarg (“Patriots”).

The Tony nominations were announced at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday; the awards ceremony is on June 16.

It adds, “While these features are designed to become more capable over time, the currently enabled features do not make the vehicle autonomous.”

That language defies human nature. What it says is that your Tesla will do the whole job of driving — steer, accelerate, brake and keep an electronic eye out for bikes, dogs and children — but you nevertheless have to pay just as much attention as if you were driving the car yourself.

The advantage is that most of the time, the self-driving car is supposed to drive better than you do and avoid accidents you would have gotten into.

But you must remain fully attentive, so driving will be just as wearisome, stressful and time-consuming as in a dumb old car. Maybe even more, because you’ll be constantly second-guessing the vehicle’s decisions and wondering whether to override it.

That’s not the worst of it. The more you get comfortable with the capabilities of the car, the more your attention is likely to wander, exposing you to a bad accident if the self-driving car fails. Last week the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released a report saying there were at least 29 fatal accidents involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving from January 2018 to August 2023.

Tesla’s stock jumped Monday on news that the Chinese government is about ready to approve the use of supervised Full Self-Driving mode on cars in China. That’s a victory for Tesla. I’m not sure it’s a victory for road safety.

• This is less important, but logistically, this is the first time Trump will be campaigning out of state, midweek during this trial. The Michigan rally is scheduled for the evening, and that’s a pretty long day — especially if you have to be in court, as Trump does, when the trial resumes on Thursday morning. As the spring continues, it will be interesting if that scheduling grind affects how he campaigns in public or has any bearing on his demeanor at the trial.

• A quick path to madness is puzzling over every poll that comes out and trying to reconcile its individual elements. To that end: Over the weekend, CNN released a poll showing Trump up nationally over President Biden. CBS News and YouGov also released polls showing a pretty tight race in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

• Voters of all ages often say inflation has been a problem, but that’s specifically true of young voters in this new and interesting Harvard Youth Poll, in which inflation and housing seem to be notably high concerns. Something I’ve been wondering about is whether one aspect of the softness for Biden in polling of younger voters is connected to how unfamiliar voters under 30 (maybe even under 40) are with more sudden increases in inflation and interest rates.

  The changes in rates and consumer choices by older homeowners also seem to be having an impact on the housing market. Basically I wonder if changes in rates and inflation are just more front and center for younger voters, especially given housing costs in some areas of the country. In the last New York Times/Siena poll, young voters rated Biden’s economic performance particularly poorly.

The prosecution objected, the objection was sustained, and the cross-examination of Pecker was suddenly over. It began strong, went south fast on Thursday and limped to its conclusion shortly after lunch on Friday. Bove had tried to prove that Pecker was a liar and failed.

On Thursday, Bove developed a strong, hard-nosed rhythm and got Pecker to admit that in recent decades tabloids have negotiated “hundreds of thousands” of nondisclosure agreements and so-called source agreements like the ones The Enquirer used with Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model with whom the prosecution says Trump had an affair.

The message to the jury was that the August 2015 arrangement at Trump Tower to kill scandalous stories before they could reach the public, which is central to the prosecution’s case, was just standard operating procedure in the celebrity “journalism” business.

But Bove made two mistakes on Thursday. He badgered Pecker for seeming to be coached, then handed him a document related to Hope Hicks, a former Trump aide, to refresh his memory about testimony that he claimed contradicted what he told the grand jury.

But the document turned out to be unrelated to the question at hand. When alerted by the prosecution, Justice Juan Merchan admonished Bove, “If there wasn’t anything in that document, it’s misleading.”

On Friday morning, Merchan made Bove apologize directly to the jury for suggesting that cooperating witnesses are not allowed to coordinate with prosecutors beforehand and for the document gaffe. It was a humiliating moment for one of Trump’s best lawyers.

Bove recovered his footing a bit and trapped a placid Pecker into admitting again how common The Enquirer’s unsavory methods were in his bottom-dwelling line of work.

But on redirect, Joshua Steinglass steered the prosecution’s case back on track, asking whether the various deals on Trump stories were really all that common.

If there were “hundreds of thousands” of nondisclosure and source agreements, Steinglass asked, “on how many of those N.D.A.s did the C.E.O. coordinate with a candidate for president?”

“That was the only one,” Pecker said, and his original testimony was now largely intact.

If the Biden team is wise, they’ll get the president to repeat the line a few times in the form of a wisecrack, much as they cleverly turned the anti-Biden “Let’s go, Brandon,” taunt into a cool “Dark Brandon” meme. Biden’s announcement Friday that he would be “happy to” debate Donald Trump in the fall might also help allay concerns about his mental acuity — assuming, of course, that he performs reasonably well in a debate.

But the larger problem for the Biden campaign is that perceptions about the president’s physical and mental fitness are hardly baseless. Axios reports that White House aides now surround the president as he walks across the South Lawn to his presidential helicopter — all for the purpose of disguising his shuffling walk. The New York Times has issued a statement calling it “troubling” that the president “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.” One can reasonably speculate as to why the president and his staff would want to avoid such questions.

There was a time in American life when the White House and the press colluded to hide the infirmities or indiscretions of the sitting president: Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, Franklin Roosevelt’s wheelchair, John F. Kennedy’s chronic back pain (and philandering). It’s past time for this White House to accept that that time is over.

“I do feel that I have to,” Goldberg told me in late fall, of her public advocacy. “I feel a primal drive to do every single thing humanly possible to try to save Hersh’s life and the life of the other hostages. And I feel that just sitting and letting other people try to figure this out is absolutely irresponsible for me personally.”

And so last Wednesday, when a Hamas-produced propaganda video with Goldberg-Polin, thin and pale, speaking forcefully in Hebrew against the Israeli government’s bombing campaign and demanding the release of hostages, immediately I thought: Goldberg’s advocacy might, indeed, have kept him alive. His arm was blown off on the day of the attacks, and the amputation is clear — but he did not bleed out or die of infection.

At a time of absolute despair, during a seemingly intractable and brutal conflict, seeing Goldberg-Polin alive made me believe that Goldberg had transcended the inhumanity of the moment. She harnessed the improbable power of parenthood, humanizing not just the plight of her own son but that of every mother drawn into this war.

The fear of space-based nuclear weapons shot into the spotlight this year, when Representative Michael Turner of Ohio, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, cryptically warned of a national security threat. U.S. intelligence officials briefed allies on suspected plans by Russia to possibly launch a nuclear weapon — or dummy — into space. Vladimir Putin denied the reports. But Russia’s veto calls his denial into question.

All of this may be bluster. The effects of the sort of weapon feared by American intelligence officials — a nuclear-capable antisatellite device — would most likely harm Russian assets too. While such a weapon could “add a dangerous capability,” wrote Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, “it would not alter the existing military balance of terror.”

Even so, nuclear threats have fortified Putin since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this year, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that after extensive losses in the war, Russia “will be more reliant on nuclear and counterspace capabilities for strategic deterrence as it works to rebuild its ground force.”

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, he declared that we have failed to rid earth of the scourge of war. “But if we cannot yet achieve this goal here on earth,” he said “we can at least keep the virus from spreading.”

These safeguards were always imperfect, but the veto on Wednesday stands as the latest sign that they are far too fragile for comfort.

The United States and several other countries suspended their funding from UNRWA, and, while other countries, including Germany, the second-largest donor, have since restored their contributions, the U.S. will not resume its funding until March 2025 at the earliest. The State Department has said it is still reviewing the report.

Lazzarini said private donors have made up much of that shortfall, allowing UNRWA to continue its work, but the funding gap remains a significant worry relative to the need.

He has managed to secure the agency’s budget through June, he said, but the second half of the year is uncertain. “I know that we won’t be able to count on the U.S. contribution,” he said. “So obviously it brings the agency closer to the edge of financial collapse.”

There are other U.N. agencies and international aid organizations, including the World Food Program and UNHCR, that could address humanitarian needs in Gaza. But UNRWA serves another function: It provides “state-like” services, paying the salaries for teachers, health workers and other civil servants. To hand over those public services, “we would need a functioning administration,” Lazzarini said, and it is unclear who could assume that responsibility.

UNRWA, he said, is open to working with a revitalized Palestinian Authority, a possibility the United States has supported. But until the Palestinian Authority or another governing body takes shape, UNRWA plays a necessary role. Without it, the situation in Gaza after the conflict ends could be dangerously unstable. Six months into this conflict, “the day after” may seem like a distant prospect, but in the meantime, it is in no one’s interest to hobble one of the few remaining stabilizing forces in Gaza.

We’ll never know if Trump’s early-morning threat to Pecker to “be nice” — a clear violation of the judge’s gag order preventing the defendant from discussing witnesses — had anything to do with Pecker’s reference to the bright side of their relationship.

Pecker testified that during the December 2016 visit, Trump told him, “I want to thank you for handling the McDougal situation.” Pecker continued: “He was thanking me for buying them and not publishing any of the stories and helping the way I did.” As a reward, Trump invited Pecker and his wife to a celebratory private dinner at the White House. He attended; his wife begged off.

By this time, Pecker was getting cold feet. He thought the ghostwritten articles McDougal “wrote” for his magazines and her other services for his publications were worth only $25,000, not the $150,000 he said that he, Michael Cohen and Trump had paid to silence her. His company lawyer told him that the shell companies that he and Cohen planned to use for the $125,000 reimbursement from Trump could put him on the wrong side of campaign finance laws.

Sure enough, in 2018 Pecker avoided federal prosecution by admitting, in the words of the agreement with the government, that his company overpaid McDougal to “suppress the model’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.”

Trump wanted Pecker to continue collecting and disposing of trash that might hurt him.

Having felt burned by the McDougal hush-money deal, Pecker didn’t want to get involved in paying off Stormy Daniels. But he did hear Trump rant about it. On the phone, Pecker said, “Trump said we have an agreement with Stormy Daniels that she can’t mention my name and each time she does, she owes us one million.”

Pecker’s testimony about the Playboy model has little direct bearing on the charges against Trump, which involve falsification of business records in the Stormy Daniels payoff. But it set the table for the bounty of evidence to come.

Outside the courtroom, believability has come to be synonymous with numbers — a preponderance of voices, joining together to corroborate an accusation, is how the public determines a single woman can’t be lying. And yet inside the courtroom, sometimes the opposite is true: She said, she said, she said, she said can be ruled inadmissible.

The collective nature of the Weinstein case, and those that followed, seemed to solve a problem that activists had labored over for decades: How do you combat the “he said, she said” nature of these cases? How do you get people to believe that, more often than not, a woman who speaks out is telling the truth?

As it turned out, persuasion came in the form of numbers — both in establishing a pattern and in helping women feel safe to come forward. Yet though Weinstein’s accusers could fill an entire courtroom, and the women who proclaimed #MeToo in their wake could populate a small country, a portion of Weinstein’s appeal rested precisely on the argument that allowing testimony from those other women — specifically, four who testified about his behavior but were not part of the charges — violated a legal precedent that limits evidence about a defendant’s other alleged crimes if it can be prejudicial to a defendant’s presumption of innocence.

Which left me wondering: When are we going to evolve past “he said, she said,” too?

The risk of such prosecutions poses the biggest threat, Alito suggested: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”

As Dreeben correctly responded, that is the literal inversion of the Jan. 6 case, which involves a defeated former president who, after pursuing several legal avenues to challenge the outcome and losing all of them, chose very clearly not to “go off into a peaceful retirement,” but rather tried to overturn the election by illegal and unconstitutional means that resulted in a violent attack on Congress.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was also perplexed by Alito’s upside-down hypothetical, which actively avoided the facts of the case before the court. “A stable democratic society needs the good faith of its public officials, correct?” she asked, adding that the crimes Trump is charged with committing “are the antithesis of democracy” and that his immunity argument cast doubt on the principle “that no man is above the law, either in his official or private acts.”

This is the bottom line, no matter how hard Alito squints and pretends otherwise.

Inflation was a bit more concerning. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation, the cost of personal consumption excluding food and energy, rose at a 3.7 percent annual rate, up from just 2 percent in the previous quarter. On the face of it that looks bad.

But I don’t believe that inflation has really accelerated that much. What we’re probably seeing is mostly statistical noise that understated inflation in late 2023 but is overstating it now.

For one thing, the sheer size of the inflation jump is just implausible. Even in a highly overheated economy, which we don’t seem to see in other data, we wouldn’t expect underlying inflation to rise that fast, which suggests that there’s something funny about the numbers.

Furthermore, if inflation were really exploding, you’d expect to see that explosion reflected not just in official numbers but in “soft” data — surveys of business experiences and expectations. But we don’t. Purchasing managers’ indexes, which generally track official inflation, are still suggesting inflation not much higher than it was before the pandemic:

And business inflation expectations have remained low, just slightly above prepandemic levels:

So this was not a good report, but it shouldn’t change your narrative. The best bet is that we’re still on track for a soft landing.

This might never have happened had Trump not come out for scrapping the Victorian-era statute, followed by Kari Lake. (Though she’s since flip-flopped again, lamenting the refusal of Arizona’s attorney general to enforce the 1864 ban.)

After the vote, activists were furious at the Republican lawmakers who broke ranks. A few were unhappy with Lake. No one who I spoke to, however, blamed Trump. Several were unaware that Trump opposed the 1864 law.

“I didn’t hear that, no,” said Karen Mountford, a Republican precinct committeeman — Arizona Republicans don’t use gender-neutral titles — wearing a “Trump Girl” T-shirt.

Anthony Kern, a far-right Republican state senator, who was pontificating outside the Capitol about the need to return to America’s Christian foundations, pledged that the three Republicans who voted to scrap the abortion ban would be unseated. Lake, he said, is “wrong on this issue.” But Trump? “I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt because he has been the most pro-life president ever,” said Kern.

Perhaps this flexibility isn’t surprising: later on Wednesday, Kern was indicted by the state, accused of fraud and forgery for his role in Arizona’s fake Trump electors scheme.

In 2016, Christian conservatives argued they had to vote for Trump in order to ban abortion. Eight years later, Trump has become an end in himself; for him and only him, wobbliness on abortion can be overlooked.

Don’t forget about Erie, indeed.

Trump’s problems in the state may stretch beyond purplish suburbia. Haley won more than 20 percent of Republicans in Lancaster County, a dark-red enclave, and pulled double digits in other conservative counties such as Westmoreland and Northumberland.

And keep in mind that Pennsylvania holds closed primaries, in which only registered members of a party can vote in that party’s primaries, so it’s not as though independents or mischief-making Democrats were muddying up the Republican pool.

How many of these Haley Republicans will turn out in the general election to vote for Biden? Or for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Or for no one at all? Impossible to say.

But these are the questions that should be keeping the former president’s people up at night.

“I’m kind of shocked, actually,” she said, “because I thought your own expert had said below that these kinds of cases were covered, and you’re now saying they’re not?” Her comments, accusing Turner of “hedging,” suggested that she didn’t believe the state’s guidance to doctors was clear. She even got Turner to admit that an anti-abortion prosecutor could go after a doctor who made a difficult decision to end a pregnancy.

The overall impression she gave was that she doubted the state’s law superseded federal law on emergency care. Last month, in an even more important case involving the legality of abortion drugs, she also suggested a crackdown on such pills would be an overreach, as long as doctors who oppose abortion would have the right not to prescribe them.

If she and one other conservative justice — possibly John Roberts or Brett Kavanaugh — side with the three liberals on these cases, that could mitigate some of the worst effects of her earlier misjudgment to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The second reason I’ve become more pessimistic is because of what’s happening to the youth vote. NBC News released an interesting poll last weekend finding that interest in this election is lower than in any other presidential election in nearly 20 years. Only 64 percent of Americans said they have a high degree of interest in the election, compared to, say, 77 percent who had high interest in 2020.

But what really leaps out is the numbers for voters ages 18 to 34. Only 36 percent of those voters said they are highly interested.

I imagine that’s partly because it’s difficult to get enthusiastic about candidates who are a half-century older than you. But part of it is also about Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war. Young people are much more critical of Israel than other groups, and there are no candidates representing that point of view.

I think what we’re seeing at Columbia and on other elite campuses is a precursor to what we’re going to see at the Democratic convention in Chicago. In 1968 the clashes between the New Left activists and Mayor Richard Daley’s cops were an early marker of the differences between the more-educated and less-educated classes. They were part of the trend that sent working-class voters to the G.O.P.

If there are similar clashes in Chicago this August, the chaos will reinforce Trump’s core law-and-order message. It will make Biden look weak and hapless. Phrases like “from the river to the sea” will be 2024’s version of “defund the police” — a slogan that appeals to activists but alienates lots of other voters.

The folks in the administration project confidence that their man will prevail. I wish I could share that confidence.

Inside the court, the chairs were uncomfortable. It was so cold that reporters were bundled in heavy coats and scarves. (Trump wasn’t wrong when he complained, “It’s freezing.”) The speckled linoleum floors were drab, the fluorescent lighting was harsh, the rumpled shades were drawn. It was hard to see and hear. The monotony made my eyes droop.

Trump has called the courthouse “an armed camp,” but in reality it has remained open to the public, including spectators who want to attend the trial, like the young man in a beer sweatshirt who, on his way to work, decided to join the press line and peppered a young woman with questions. “Maybe they’ll let me in. I have a blog,” he said confidently. Hours later, I passed him in the hallway.

Court let out early Monday, after the judge explained that an alternate juror had a dental emergency. You could just imagine Trump seething at the thought of his time dictated by a root canal. But I was grateful to leave early — and satisfied that he would be there every day.

I covered the weird and historic 2016 campaign. While the celebrity candidate led in many early polls, he was far from a shoo-in for the nomination. Ben Carson was the front-runner for a spell in late 2015, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, and Marco Rubio was briefly seen as the logical young choice for the G.O.P.

Pecker testified that as part of what prosecutors call “the Trump Tower conspiracy,” hatched just before Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, Trump — through Michael Cohen — helped The Enquirer generate phony stories about malpractice by Carson and adultery by Cruz and Rubio (not to mention an article sliming Cruz’s father as connected to John F. Kennedy’s assassination).

No one in the courtroom was laughing at the lurid tabloid headlines when they were introduced into evidence. It seems clear that these bogus stories, too, were part of the corrupt and journalistically disgraceful Trump Tower deal.

Under the terms of the “catch and kill” deal, Pecker was Trump’s “eyes and ears” for stories about dalliances that could harm the candidate. When a Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, shopped a tip that Trump had fathered a child with a Latina maid in Trump’s apartment, Pecker testified that he reported it to Cohen, who was adamant that the story was untrue. Trump would take a DNA test, Cohen told Pecker: “He is German-Irish, and this woman is Hispanic, and that would be impossible.”

Sure enough, Dino the doorman’s story turned out to be false. To protect Trump before the election, Sajudin nonetheless received an unheard-of $30,000 from The Enquirer for his bogus tip. But the contract introduced into evidence required Sajudin to pay $1 million if he talked about it. After the election, he was released from the nondisclosure agreement — more evidence that suggests that “catch and kill” was a prelude to the criminal cover-up of the Stormy Daniels hush-money payment that is the heart of the case.

On Thursday, we’ll hear more about Trump the double cheater: his efforts to silence his mistress Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels. And we’ll see more of the mundane but critical documents that connect the man Pecker described as a “detail-oriented micromanager” to criminal wrongdoing.

But there he was on Tuesday at a community college in Tampa, backed by big blue banners calling for “Reproductive rights” and “Restoring Roe,” fiercely bashing Trump for putting women’s health and lives at risk. “There is one person responsible for this nightmare!” he roared. It was enough to make my heart go pitter-patter.

In his brief remarks, Biden didn’t utter the word “abortion” very often, but he didn’t really need to. Rather, he emphasized the idea that Trump and his party are messing with women’s fundamental rights — and doing so at their peril. And on this point, he appeared to be enjoying himself. The president observed that in overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court “practically dared women to be heard” when Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “Women are not without political or electoral power.” Leaning in close to the mic, he dropped his voice and said, with a chuckle and a gleam in his eye, “No kidding.”

Raising the stakes, Biden warned that conservatives will be coming for people’s contraception and in vitro fertilization treatments next — maybe even same-sex marriage. And then he wrapped things up by urging voters to “teach Donald Trump a valuable lesson: Don’t mess with the women of America! I mean it!”

For a guy with deep moral qualms about abortion, it was an impressive call to arms.

Constant threats and insults against his perceived enemies are Trump’s stock in trade, of course; in the political world, he relies on them like other politicians rely on baby-kissing. It’s coarse and juvenile, but it’s not illegal.

In court, it’s a different matter. There are consequences for behavior like this. “I have never seen a criminal defendant go out and attack the process and the actors in the process while the trial was going on, while a jury was in the box,” Kristy Parker, a former federal prosecutor now with Protect Democracy, told me.

On Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers sought to explain away his posts as protected speech, but surely they know better. So does Justice Merchan, who was clearly out of patience and told them their arguments were “losing all credibility with the court.”

Trump may well come out of this contempt hearing with nothing more than a few thousand dollars in fines and an even sterner warning against similar behavior in the future. But the courts — and the American people — are watching and learning. Trump’s refusal to stop, even pursuant to an explicit court order, tells you all you need to know about the incompatibility of the man and the government he seeks to lead.

That day, Watters posted on Truth Social, “Catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge.” When Trump reposted it, he added: “in order to get on the Trump jury.”

This put the lie to the claim of Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche that Trump was merely responding to political attacks or reposting content, not willfully defying the gag order.

“This goes to the defendant’s willfulness,” the prosecutor Chris Conroy argued to the judge. “He added to it and posted it.” The judge appeared to agree.

Blanche made a lame attempt to explain. “This gag order — we’re trying to comply with it,” he said. “President Trump is being very careful to abide by your rules.”

That’s when the judge said, “Mr. Blanche, you’re losing all credibility with this court.”

Ouch.

But it’s not just abortion. The survey found overwhelming support for leaders who fight to raise the minimum wage, to protect the right to form a union and to make quality child care more affordable — policy descriptions that seem ripped from President Biden’s campaign speeches.

The trouble is that a significant number of the respondents didn’t associate these policies with Democrats. In fact, once that partisan affiliation was added, support dropped significantly. Nonetheless, 47 percent of respondents said they would prefer to vote for a Democrat who grew up in a rural area and shared their values over a Republican business executive from the East Coast.

But perhaps the biggest problem the survey uncovered was that large numbers of respondents — especially young voters and people of color — reported that no one from the Democratic Party had reached out to them to offer information or ask for their support.

“It’s really clear that Democrats have a significant work to do to rebuild their brand in rural America, but that investment could pay dividends for Democrats, not just in the future but this year,” Patrick Toomey, a partner at Breakthrough Campaigns, which conducted the survey, told me.

In an election in which a few thousand votes could decide who wins the presidency or controls the Senate, it’s foolish to write off rural America.

In the prosecution’s opening statement, Matthew Colangelo outlined what his team calls the August 2015 “Trump Tower conspiracy” hatched by Trump, Michael Cohen and David Pecker, boss of The National Enquirer, who began his testimony later in the day. Colangelo previewed a large amount of evidence that will corroborate Cohen’s testimony about the falsified business records (including handwritten notes) that will most likely be damaging to Trump.

The worst day for Trump could come when the prosecution plays a September 2016 taped call in which Trump can be heard asking Cohen, “So what do we have to pay for it? 150?” (Meaning $150,000.) The answer was $10,000 more. Colangelo concluded: “It was election fraud. Pure and simple.”

By saying of Trump, “he’s a man, he’s a husband, he’s a father, he’s a person like you and me,” Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney, seemed to be setting up a defense partly based on Trump not wanting the Stormy Daniels story made public in order to protect his family. But Cohen and others are expected to testify that Trump tried to avoid paying the hush money on the theory that it wouldn’t matter if the story came out after the election. So much for shielding Melania.

The Trump lawyers are denying everything — the alleged affairs and the cover-up — which is unlikely to be persuasive. But they may have better luck arguing that for all the prosecution’s talk of conspiracy, that wasn’t a count in the indictment. Blanche’s best line was: “Spoiler alert: There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence this election. It’s called democracy.”

What the jurors don’t know yet and won’t learn until the judge instructs them just before they deliberate is that there is nothing in New York state law requiring prosecutors to prove that Trump broke tax laws, campaign finance laws or conspiracy laws to win a felony conviction. All they need to do is prove that Trump intended to do wrong in these areas.

And by insisting that Trump is completely innocent, his lawyers have made it harder for the jury to convict him of just misdemeanors, not felonies. But it will be a few weeks before the jury understands all of that.

When I asked The Times’s recipe columnist Melissa Clark for a tip, she pointed me to Joan Nathan’s vegan matzo ball soup recipe. It calls for the use of aquafaba — chickpea water — as an egg substitute. (Clark noted that Ashkenazic dietary rules prohibit consuming legumes like chickpeas and soybeans, known as kitniyot, on Passover but Sephardic rules allow it. My mom’s veganism is more observant than her Judaism, however, so it’ll probably be all right.) The inside scoop is that this year my mom is going to use both silken tofu and flaxseed. Next year maybe aquafaba will join the list.

The plethora of options seems fitting for a holiday that celebrates liberation and, thus, relaxation; the need to labor in someone else’s name is gone, and so the labor of love that is the matzo ball can continue unhindered.

The quest for the structurally sound vegan matzo ball always made sense to me as latter-day Passover tradition. Judaism — especially of my family’s assimilated, not-really-observant-at-all kind — never seemed to me to require a logic that made sense independent of its own tradition. Jewish history and practice are rife with coincidences and traditions and loopholes. Why not add failed vegan matzo balls to the list? And who knows? Maybe this year the matzo balls will hold together.

However, while viral persistence is one hypothesized mechanism for long Covid, as far as I knew, only viral remnants — leftover virus pieces that cannot replicate — have been shown, not persistent live whole virus. Further, such remnants haven’t correlated with long Covid symptoms. (Some healthy and sick people have them.)

Patients were abuzz. Was this more unacceptable sluggishness? Was the N.I.H. sitting on crucial unpublished information? Was the N.I.H. director completely out of touch with the research? Had they all misunderstood the science?

I reached out to the N.I.H. The answer turns out to be mundane. Dr. Bertagnolli said she “misspoke” and had “meant to say ‘viral components’ rather than ‘live virus.’” The N.I.H. also confirmed to me such remnants have not yet been shown to correlate with long Covid symptoms.

Viral remnants may still play a role — maybe only some people are sensitive to them — or maybe leftover viral components are common and harmless. The N.I.H. also told me this is “an area of active investigation,” as it should be.

It’s good that Dr. Bertagnolli is so engaged with long Covid, and misspeaking during an interview is human. Hopefully, the institution keeps in mind that suffering patients are hanging on their every word.