The PointConversations and insights about the moment.

To be honest, these comments aren’t particularly surprising. Ms. Alito is the wife of a justice who agreed that the country needs to return to “a place of godliness” and has argued that the court’s ruling on marriage equality restricts the free speech rights of religious conservatives. (If that’s really true, somebody should tell her to zip it before she’s jailed for her words.)

They are also emblematic of a broader campaign by the religious right to erase or shame queer culture from public view, often in the form of attempted — and successful — bans on books, flags, drag performances and curriculums. The only thing mildly revealing about Ms. Alito’s comments is that they signal it is still socially acceptable for religious conservatives to demean the queer community in supposedly polite company.

While it is undeniably exhausting that anti-L.G.B.T.Q. sentiments continue to infect members of America’s most powerful institutions, queer people should take heart that even the most benign of our symbols, the rainbow flag, still so bothers those who hate us.

In 1978, Gilbert Baker — an activist who was, as he put it, the “gay Betsy Ross” — and a group of volunteers dyed and stitched the first rainbow Pride flag in the attic of the Gay Community Center in San Francisco. While the flag has undergone many transformations since, the rainbow has endured as a welcome, if sometimes clichéd, Pride symbol.

As the rainbow has frequently been deployed by corporations or “allies” that take little interest in L.G.B.T.Q. equality outside of a boozy June weekend, some queer people may think it has become too watered down to stand as a powerful symbol. But predictable outrage, from the Phyllises and Anitas and Martha-Anns, should remind even the most cynical of us that our symbols often speak far louder than we could alone.

In the face of a rise in attempts to restrict cultural expressions of queer identity, the rainbow is still one of the best tools we have to collectively repudiate those who wish we were ashamed to be alive. We must wave it proudly.

As for you, Martha-Ann, I say happy Pride Month! I’ll be praying for you.

It was only two weeks ago that Republicans were thundering about the outrageous injustice of a different guilty verdict. Funny, I haven’t heard much complaining about this one, even though it involves a “paperwork” offense (boo!) that relates to gun regulations (extra boo!). The only complaints I recall were that Hunter was getting off too easy with a plea deal … until that fell through at the last minute.

On Tuesday, the right-wing naysayers got an actual guilty verdict, and still they tied themselves in knots trying to dismiss its significance. (I’ll save you the trouble: To them, Hunter’s conviction is a coverup for his and his dad’s real crimes. Also, any Biden conviction is de facto legitimate while any Trump conviction is de facto fraudulent.) What the hacks couldn’t erase were the unanimous verdicts of two juries in two jurisdictions. (Not to mention the Justice Department’s upcoming and more serious prosecution of Hunter on tax charges.)

Sure, the system is far from perfect. Rich and powerful people get off all the time; poor people more often don’t. And yet the past two weeks have provided an object lesson in the fair administration of justice, and the seriousness that characterizes criminal trials and jury deliberations. We talk a lot about the presumption of innocence, but that foundational principle derives its meaning only within the context of a society that actually holds its wrongdoers to account.

If the Hunter Biden prosecutions illustrate anything, it is that his father’s administration respects equal justice and the rule of law, so much so that the president stood down even as his own flesh and blood was facing a potential prison term. Can you imagine, for even a fraction of a second, Donald Trump allowing the Justice Department — his Justice Department — to prosecute any of his children? Or that he wouldn’t pre-emptively pardon them, just to be doubly safe?

Of course you can’t, and that is as important a difference as exists between the two candidates for president in 2024.

Roberts refused to take the bait. “Would you want me to be in charge of putting the nation on a more moral path?” he responded. “That’s for people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.” He also disagreed that America is a Christian nation.

This was, of course, the easy and correct answer. Roberts knows that the court’s legitimacy relies entirely on the trust of the American people. You don’t have to wonder if he’s a closet liberal (and he’s far from it) to expect him and his colleagues to approach the nation’s most fraught legal disputes with fairness or at least with respect for the separation of church and state.

Justice Samuel Alito can’t be bothered with such earthly concerns. In response to Windsor’s claim that religious Americans have to keep fighting “to return our country to a place of godliness,” he said, “I agree with you. I agree with you.”

“One side or the other is going to win,” he added.

In one sense, this is no surprise coming from the court’s leading culture warrior. Alito has long made clear his special solicitude for religious claims, whether before the court or on the flagpole outside his house. Still, it should shock us to hear him lay out his worldview so bluntly. It shows an utter lack of regard for the court’s delicate posture of neutrality in the constitutional system and American society.

For a long time, Alito seemed like an outlier on the court, lobbing his sour, grievance-filled dissents from the sidelines. He is now ascendant, writing the lead opinion in the decision striking down the right to abortion and many other precedent-breaking rulings. He is also in good company in the upper reaches of government. Recall that House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, told an interviewer after he got the job, “Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.”

Perhaps we should be grateful that these aspiring theocrats have fully ripped off the mask. Why submit to the sinful compromises demanded by a pluralistic society when you can just impose your (and God’s) will by fiat? In that regard, this is really the Alito court.

So why did Macron panic? Maybe he didn’t. According to French press reports, his decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call for immediate elections was quietly plotted before the European elections as it became evident that Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, a perennial nationalist thorn in the side of French politics, was likely to make big gains under its new star, the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella.

It seems curious that Macron would saddle France with fateful parliamentary elections as it prepares for the Summer Olympics. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, called it “extremely unsettling.” But to dismiss the move as panic, a desperate gamble, is to underestimate Macron, whose sweep to power in 2014 as a 36-year-old wunderkind was deemed a stunning feat.

His Renaissance Party has not been doing well of late, and he apparently concluded that quick elections over the tangible threat of a resurgent right may be the boost he needs. French elections are held in two rounds — these will be on June 30 and July 7 — and Macron hopes that French voters will do what they have often done, which is to vote their gripes in the first round and their reason in the second. He, in any case, will remain president for three more years.

Republicans claim there’s no need for these bills because contraception access is already protected by the 1965 Supreme Court decision known as Griswold v. Connecticut.

“Nobody’s going to overturn Griswold,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. “No way.”

But that’s exactly what many Republicans said about Roe v. Wade before it was tossed aside, and when that happened Justice Clarence Thomas openly called for Griswold to be reconsidered, too. In Hawley’s home state, where abortion is now banned, a bipartisan group of women in the legislature have tried to expand access to birth control by requiring insurance policies to cover a year’s supply. That effort has been blocked by Republicans who say that the contraceptives will cause abortions.

The false connection between abortion and contraception is behind most of the Republican opposition, and as The Washington Post recently reported, surveys show that most Americans don’t understand that emergency contraception agents like Plan B don’t cause abortions. Many right-wing groups like the Idaho Family Policy Center falsely claim that they do. Seventeen states have now blocked efforts to assure a right to birth control, and Donald Trump said last month that he was open to those kinds of state restrictions. (Later, after realizing that was a bad look, he backtracked.)

More voters need to know that Republicans, from the top down, are willing to let states deprive residents of their birth control.

• Late last week, Fox News released a poll showing Biden and Trump even in Virginia (which Biden won 54-44 in 2020) and with Trump only up 4 points in Florida (which isn’t far off 2020, but still seems a little surprisingly close). A very tight result in Virginia in November would most likely reflect big problems elsewhere for Biden. I’m a little skeptical it’s that close, but The Washington Post took a good look at Virginia, and presented a wide range of expert opinions about what might be going on there.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trying to get on the ballot in many states, which might account for a somewhat unusual schedule. (He’s been in Colorado and Tennessee recently.) He will be in New Mexico over the weekend, at an event focused on addiction.

• This is fairly tangential to the presidential race, but Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican congresswoman, faces a primary challenge on Tuesday from a few candidates with the possibility of a runoff if nobody reaches 50 percent. Mace has had a sort of unusual congressional career, veering between criticizing Trump after Jan. 6 to endorsing him (and vice versa); Kevin McCarthy, still incensed that she voted to oust him, has helped her opponent.

• If you’re interested in thinking about affordability and inflation, and then, secondarily, how people are processing these concepts politically, definitely check out Ezra Klein’s latest episode of his Opinion podcast with Annie Lowrey. The two, who are married, go really deep on all of it, including thinking about the economic politics of 2012 and today.

All state laws are different. Delaware, where Hunter got his revolver, recently made some big changes. It will require anyone who buys a gun to first complete a firearm safety training program.

Don’t imagine Hunter would have made it through that one in his addict era. Yet many, many of the people doing the loudest howling about the president’s son are connected with the people who have challenged the reform law in court, arguing that it’s a violation of their civil rights.

As Jonathan Weisman pointed out in The Times, it’s “hard to make much of allegations that Hunter Biden lied about his drug use to purchase a handgun when your party is sponsoring legislation to ease gun-purchasing restrictions for veterans struggling with mental illness, not to mention the case before the Supreme Court that could allow domestic abusers to buy firearms.”

Just saying.

But there was one problem. “You can’t just give these rights away,” said Matias Tarnopolsky, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, in an interview. “There has to be meaning — and money.”

Richard B. Worley — a major donor, board member and former chairman of the orchestra — and his wife, Leslie Ann Miller, said Tarnopolsky came to them with the idea of tying a large donation to the name change. They gave $25 million to keep Anderson’s name on the hall in perpetuity. Verizon’s foundation gave $13 million in 1996 for naming rights in a deal that expired in January.

Worley made his money in investment banking, and Miller is an influential lawyer. They have put their names on museum galleries and endowed professorships. But in this case, Worley said, the couple wanted to honor Anderson’s “grit, her determination and graciousness” in facing down racism. They also hoped a Marian Anderson Hall would draw more support over the long haul from proud Philadelphians. Worley acknowledged that a donation tied to Anderson “doesn’t hurt” their reputation.

“We just thought that it would be preposterous to put our name on,” he added. “Not to mention boring,” Miller said.

The renaming also has a calculated benefit for the orchestra at a time when arts organizations are desperate to broaden their appeal, especially to Black audiences.

And for concertgoers, there is something special about holding a ticket with an artist’s name on it and not that of a captain of industry or a phone company.

But let’s get real. There’s an even more important qualification in play, one that speaks to Trump’s egomaniacal essence: Who’s the champion flatterer?

Is it J.D. Vance? His frequent appearances on television news shows, where he repeats the Trump talking points and lavishly praises the former president, amount not to commentary but to courtship. They’re the oratorical equivalent of batting his eyes.

How about Tim Scott? He set a speed record for the transition from rival to suitor, suspending his own campaign for the Republican presidential nomination one moment and gazing adoringly at Trump the next. His coquettishness peaked on the NBC News show “Meet the Press” in early May, when he repeatedly refused to say whether he’d accept the 2024 election results if Trump lost. He was performing for — or, rather, blowing kisses at — an audience of one.

As recently as two weeks ago, Marco Rubio stood out for not staging a slobbering audition, as Michael C. Bender and Patricia Mazzei noted in an article in The Times. Then came Trump’s felony conviction, which Rubio denounced as furiously and hyperbolically as any other Trump lackey. He seemed to be making up for lost time.

According to news reports, Vance, Scott and Rubio are on a list that also includes Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota (who made a pilgrimage to the Manhattan courthouse where Trump awaited the jury’s verdict), Representatives Byron Donalds and Elise Stefanik, Ben Carson and Senator Tom Cotton. They’re contestants in a sycophancy sweepstakes unlike the selection processes conducted by other presidential nominees over the past decade.

In 2020, Joe Biden of course picked Kamala Harris, who had savaged him on the issue of school busing in a debate only a year earlier. While Vance and Rubio once attacked Trump, that was a long time ago, in a political galaxy far, far away.

They’ve adjusted to a new world, and they understand its rules. To the groveler go the spoils.

The State Legislature should reject this tax outright. It’s regressive and will almost certainly end any chance of reviving congestion pricing. It will put further pain on city residents who already fund a disproportionate share of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s budget compared to suburban voters. Over the past decade, they also helped pay for the $12 billion East Side Access project, which overwhelmingly benefited Long Island residents.

The M.T.A. needs congestion pricing to bond the projects, already underway, that would provide a significant benefit to New York.

Without these funds, the Second Avenue Subway cannot be expanded from 96th Street to Harlem. Plans to build an electric bus fleet, which would improve air quality across the city, are dead until further notice. So is the campaign to make the subway system’s 472 stations accessible to riders with disabilities. About one-third of them are accessible now.

Also at risk are the basic service improvements the M.T.A. has made in recent years, reducing delays by updating ancient signal systems and restoring century-old stations that were literally crumbling beneath the city’s feet.

Canceling these projects just because some Democrats are worried about criticism from Donald Trump is just the kind of timorous, small-minded thinking that has sapped the Democratic Party of big ideas and enthusiasm, and left so many voters in the party’s base unmotivated to head to the polls.

Hochul should have stood up for the interests of her state. She should have stood up for the 5.5 million people who ride the transit system every day, and the businesses who rely on it. She could have reminded Democrats in Washington that the best, boldest public policies, from Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to the former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s smoking ban, have always required political risk.

When in the years to come subway delays snarl commutes and harm businesses, Hochul will be to blame. When the city streets continue fill with traffic and the air with smog, Hochul will be to blame.

First, the case for declaring inflation yesterday’s problem is equally strong on both sides of the Atlantic.

This point can be obscured by the fact that we measure consumer prices somewhat differently. Normally the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its own version of Europe’s Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, but the B.L.S. is, at an inconvenient moment, having some kind of technical difficulties. The big difference between Europe’s measure and ours is that theirs doesn’t include “owner’s equivalent rent,” which is most of the shelter cost component of the C.P.I. So we can get a more or less apples-to-apples comparison by using a number the B.L.S. is still releasing, consumer prices excluding shelter:

U.S. inflation has generally led inflation in Europe, both rising and falling sooner, but both cumulative inflation since 2019 and current inflation are similar — maybe somewhat above the long-run target, but central banks are supposed to get ahead of the curve. It’s hard to see any clear reason the Fed and the E.C.B. should be following different paths now.

But who’s right? So far the U.S. economy has remained remarkably strong despite high interest rates. But there are signs of softening in various data. Notably, the ratio of unfilled job openings to the number of unemployed, which was widely cited as evidence of an overheated economy, is now all the way back to its prepandemic level and may be trending lower:

Central banks are supposed to get ahead of the curve. And it looks to me as if the E.C.B. is doing that, but the Fed isn’t.

And true to its brand, MAGA world responded by going absolutely berserk.

“You just ended your campaign,” Chris LaCivita, the Trump minion now effectively running the Republican National Committee, snarled on social media.

The committee’s co-chair, Lara Trump, huffed that Hogan “doesn’t deserve the respect of anyone in the Republican Party at this point, and, quite frankly, anybody in America.” She also declined to say whether the committee would help his campaign after this.

Some Senate Republicans, sensing a possible catastrophe, swiftly called on their party to give Larry the space to be Larry.

Maybe. But as truces go, this one sure seems to be proving flimsier than one-ply toilet paper.

To win in Maryland, Hogan needs to run a near-perfect, drama-free campaign. As always, Trumpworld is going to make that painfully difficult. This is what happens when one’s party gets hijacked by a leader who demands absolute fealty to himself, all other interests be damned.

Starliner’s achievement on Wednesday should be celebrated. It’s a good thing for the country that there’s another American-made spacecraft that can take people into space. But Starliner also feels like the last hurrah of an era of American space that is on its way out.

For decades, aerospace and defense manufacturers like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and United Launch Alliance were the go-to contractors for NASA’s needs. Then, SpaceX crashed the scene, with reusable rockets and cheaper architecture. It superseded the old guard to become the company of choice for much of the U.S. space program. Other newcomers like Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada and Rocket Lab are competing to meet other transportation and hardware needs.

Starliner won’t be able to repair Boeing’s reputation by itself. And it certainly won’t be able to restore the space industry’s old guard to its former glory. In the skies and in space, it seems as if Wednesday’s launch signaled the twilight of one of the most important American success stories of the past century.

The more likely reason, as Politico reported, is that Democratic officials, including the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, are worried that starting the program now could hurt Democratic chances in competitive House races this November.

Congestion pricing has always faced opposition, and now, in an election year, Hochul has apparently lost her political backbone. Instead of knuckling under to the usual critics, she and other Democrats should forcefully defend the concept.

The program was scheduled to go into effect on June 30 and was expected to provide a critical $1 billion revenue stream for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Under the plan, drivers of passenger cars would be charged $15 for entering Manhattan at or south of 60th Street; commercial trucks would be charged more.

That was always going to bring some sticker shock for commuters used to driving into the city from New Jersey or New York City’s suburbs. But it’s sound public policy in New York, a region with a strong public transit system in need of steady investment and used by roughly 5.5 million people every day.

It’s also likely to improve the quality of life in the city, where concerns about air quality, traffic congestion, pedestrian safety and noise have become paramount. Cities around the world, from London to Singapore, adopted similar plans years ago.

To replace the lost revenue stream, Hochul is reportedly considering raising taxes on businesses in New York City instead. That’s a regressive tax that would actually hurt the city’s economy and could risk $15 billion in capital improvement bonds for the transit system.

Hochul and the State Legislature should have found the political courage to stick with what they promised, since this delay (if it’s really a delay and not an end to the program) is a terrible development for New York. They might also recall that congestion pricing was enacted into law in 2019 after it became clear that allowing the city’s aging subway system to collapse was unacceptable to voters and would make the region’s economy grind to a halt.

The legislature doesn’t have to go along with this weak-kneed reversal. Congestion pricing should begin without delay.

On Monday, Sebastien Lai, an outspoken advocate for the freedom of his father, Jimmy Lai, a jailed Hong Kong newspaper publisher and critic of the Chinese Communist Party, took his turn on the stage. Lai, speaking at the Oslo Concert House on Tuesday, told of his father’s arrest in 2020.

A crowd of police came to Jimmy Lai’s apartment and took him away, but not before he turned around to his family and smiled, saying, “There’s no need to be afraid,” his son recounted. Then the police took him to his paper, Apple Daily, and paraded him through the newsroom.

Leonardo Gonzalez, a supermarket worker in Venezuela, was shot dead by security forces during a protest in 2017 while trying to flee. His wife, Olga, ran to the scene, which was near their home. Twenty-one bullets hit the car. “That’s what I counted,” she said. “One of those bullets went through my husband’s back.” In his pockets were four candies, she added. “Those were his weapons.”

Olga Gonzalez became an activist. She relentlessly pushed prosecutors to pursue her husband’s killers, fought bureaucracy, sat through 100 hearings and three trials that ended in convictions and then founded an organization for other families of victims of extrajudicial killings. “His case remains open,” she said.

Zhala Bayramova spoke of the arrest of her father, Gubad Ibadoghlu, on trumped-up charges in Azerbaijan. He was a thorn in the side of the country’s repressive president, Ilham Aliyev. While later passing out leaflets about his case, she told me of her exhausting search for international support to free him from prison — or at least get him medical care.

“I cannot imagine my dad dying,” she said. “We just want our loved ones to be alive.”

The bill, cosponsored by Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz of Queens and State Senator Gustavo Rivera of the Bronx, would allow people who live in New York to seek state licenses as teachers, nurses and other professionals without regard to immigration status.

That’s a common-sense measure in New York. Not only does the state have among the largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the United States, including an estimated 384,000 who are 34 or younger, it also faces looming worker shortages. New York is expected to need an additional 40,000 nurses by 2030. It also needs more teachers. “We have high-skilled folks who are ready to work,” Ms. Cruz told me recently, stating the obvious.

The legislation is also critical to protect the future of thousands of immigrants who came to the United States as children but aren’t so-called Dreamers covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which began under the Obama administration.

This kind of legislation is likely to face opposition from New York Republicans, who have adopted a hard-line approach toward the migrant crisis and early this year introduced legislation that would require state and local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. But Republicans are in the minority in Albany.

If Democrats in Albany are feeling up to it, maybe they can take up the immigrant licensing bill when they return to session in January. If they need extra motivation, they can consider that states including Illinois, California and Colorado have already enacted similar laws. So has New Jersey, the state Gov. Kathy Hochul recently snubbed as simply “west of Manhattan.”

The Trump Department of Justice prosecuted Michael Cohen for his specific role in the same hush-money scheme at issue in Trump’s trial. That case ended with a guilty plea. While it is absolutely true that the Biden Department of Justice didn’t choose to prosecute Trump for his role in the hush-money scheme, it remains rather interesting that the department didn’t charge the principal after it convicted Cohen, the lower-level employee who acted on his behalf.

Neither the Edwards nor the Cohen case definitively establishes the validity of the election-law elements of the case against Trump. Cohen’s guilty plea isn’t a court precedent, and since the Edwards case ended without a conviction, there was never a chance to test the prosecution’s legal theory on appeal.

But if you think that Bragg was completely out on a limb tying Trump’s bookkeeping fraud to a federal campaign finance violation, remember that prosecutors from two different administrations have filed federal cases using the same legal theory. Bragg did not make up his argument. He was riding the coattails of prosecutors who came before him.

At the same time, the debate over the Manhattan hush-money case is playing out at the exact same time as Hunter Biden, the president’s son, is standing trial for serious federal crimes in a case brought by his father’s Department of Justice. That’s a strange way to run a banana republic.

As Border Patrol agents have long said, if asylum seekers were held in humane and family-friendly settings while their asylum claims were reviewed, instead of allowed in, the numbers at the border would quickly drop, since the main reason most come is to work.

But the administration ignored that recommendation and — thanks to cynical opposition from Trump — Congress failed to pass a bipartisan proposal that would have helped tackle the problem. Now the problem has gotten so bad that the asylum system itself is basically broken.

The executive order Biden signed on Tuesday allows for expedited deportations in a matter of hours or days, which can be harsh. It is not clear, however, whether the administration has the resources to detain and deport many thousands of people per day, although administration officials say that once the deportations begin, the number who try to come will dwindle. It’s also possible that the administration is banking on the courts striking the order down.

It is not fair, however, to say that Biden is just like Trump now on immigration. Biden has rightly done a lot to expand legal pathways for asylum seekers and other migrants. The asylum claims of people who manage to make an appointment through an online app — roughly 1,500 per day — will continue to be processed.

Those on the left who are sure to criticize this action as a betrayal should reflect on whether their advocacy has sent the Democratic Party down a political blind alley. If we want to protect the right to asylum, we can’t ignore the widespread abuse of that system.

Sheinbaum, 61, and AMLO, 70, both represent a new era of Mexican politics that follows generations of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. AMLO decisively won the presidency in 2018 by promising to break with the corruption that party came to represent — a victory that resonated decades after the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco in which Mexicans confronted one-party rule en masse for the first time. Sheinbaum has presented herself as a member of that resistance, talking proudly about having parents who supported the protests and hosted student leaders at their home.

“She has a populist conviction that history is divided between a subject against its enemies, and democracy consists of the people taking control of institutions,” the Mexican writer and political analyst Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez said in a video interview this year.

That narrative binary defines Sheinbaum’s thinking, outside of AMLO’s shadow. The criticism that she is merely his puppet discounts her own commitment to his party.

But what gave Sheinbaum an early and commanding lead over another woman who was her closest competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, ironically, is her kinship with AMLO, and everything that made him polarizing but popular. She may have claimed a victory for women, but she probably didn’t need feminism to win.

The reasons are many and varied: The Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7 left many Israelis hungry for the eradication of Hamas, cost be damned; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right nationalist government showed little interest in ending the fight, especially as that would most likely lead to the end of his fragile government and leave him facing criminal charges; the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, insisted that the fighting must end before any hostage release or deal with Israel.

At the same time, the war put growing political pressures on Biden. There was always a threat of the conflict spreading to northern Israel and beyond, and the use of American ordnance against civilians in Gaza was feeding a swelling fury among American liberals, Biden’s constituency in a critical election year.

The president acknowledged some of the opposition the full proposal would confront in Israel. Responding to the longing for the destruction of Hamas, he claimed that the organization was no longer capable of an attack like the one on Oct. 7. Aware that some on the Israeli right wanted total victory, he argued that this would not bring hostages home, not bring an “enduring defeat” of Hamas and “not bring Israel lasting security.”

That is the message the president will have to relentlessly drive home over the six weeks the cease-fire is meant to last, if it starts and holds. All the obstacles to peace will still be in place as negotiations turn to a permanent end to hostilities. And Biden admitted that six weeks may not be enough. But for now, any respite is welcome.

As I followed the trial over the last several weeks, and then absorbed the jury’s verdict on Thursday evening, I found myself torn. Trump is a uniquely malign, and uniquely powerful, figure in American life. He mocks the notion of equal justice even as he squeals endlessly about his own mistreatment. He considers himself above the law even as he threatens to wield it against his enemies if given the chance. He poses an extreme danger to the rule of law and the future of democracy that no workaday carjacker could dream of.

And yet if no one is above the law, no one is below it either. Trump can’t be given an unusually strong sentence simply for being a bad president, or an immoral lout, or for any other reason not directly related to the specific crimes in this case and the usual factors judges consider.

Orange-jump-suited liberal fantasies aside, most people convicted of low-level, nonviolent felonies in New York are not sentenced to prison. At the same time, Obus pointed out, several of Trump’s crimes “took place while the defendant was in the White House. You can’t say that about most defendants.” (Trump may yet talk his way into the lockup if he keeps testing the limits of Merchan’s gag order.)

I don’t know the right answer and can’t predict Merchan’s decision. What I do know is that in a healthy country, a nominee for president would not come anywhere near the line of criminality — certainly not so close that reasonable people can debate whether he should spend time behind bars.

This is the situation we are faced with. That this candidate may yet prevail in November is the biggest predicament of all.