A president on trial

A week after the death of O.J. Simpson, America has a new Trial of the Century — perhaps the first of many.

Jury selection is currently underway in a Manhattan courtroom as presidential candidate Donald Trump faces charges from New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg of faking business records to conceal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels says that she was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in order to not talk publicly about having sex with Trump a decade previously, shortly after his third marriage to…

A week after the death of O.J. Simpson, America has a new Trial of the Century — perhaps the first of many.

Jury selection is currently underway in a Manhattan courtroom as presidential candidate Donald Trump faces charges from New York County district attorney Alvin Bragg of faking business records to conceal payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels says that she was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in order to not talk publicly about having sex with Trump a decade previously, shortly after his third marriage to Melania and the birth of their son Barron. This is the first trial of a former US president.

The events of the first day were largely procedural, with Judge Juan Merchan making various rulings about what types of evidence could be introduced — National Enquirer stories and Karen McDougal testimony yes, Access Hollywood tape no — and whether Trump had violated a gag order to not disparage Merchan, Bragg or their families. This followed Trump falsely claiming that Merchan’s daughter Loren had changed her Twitter/X display picture to one of Trump behind bars — read Jacqueline Sweet’s Spectator story showing that the mugshot account has a different ID number to the judge’s daughter’s here. Proceedings were dull enough that — per the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman — at one point Trump appeared to doze off.

Sweet was on the scene outside the courthouse today and described a “subdued” atmosphere. “The pro-Trump protesters were outnumbered by press thirsty for a story,” she told The Spectator. “Most of the drama was jockeying among media to get into the courtroom and dismay from those who didn’t. Some reporters were saying the overflow was mismanaged.”

–Matt McDonald

On our radar

ABORTION ‘IS KIND OF’ MURDER Comedian Bill Maher admitted on the Friday episode of his show Real Time with Bill Maher that he’s “OK” with “kind of” killing unborn babies because there are too many people in the world.

BIDEN BOOST President Joe Biden’s approval rating ticked up to 43 percent, according to a Financial Times poll, up four points from March and at its highest level since November.

‘HAS TO BE’ TRUMP Former British prime minister Liz Truss endorsed former president Donald Trump on Monday, saying in an interview that President Joe Biden has not been “particularly supportive to the United Kingdom.” Truss spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

HALEY AT HUDSON Former UN ambassador and GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley announced Monday that she will be joining the Hudson Institute, a conservative foreign policy think tank.

NPR faces renewed ‘defund’ campaign

National Public Radio has been dogged by accusations of left-wing bias for years, but a column last week by one of the media outlet’s editors further inflamed the fight over whether NPR should receive government funding. Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for more than two decades, published a piece in the Free Press slamming his employer for losing the trust of the public because of its lack of intellectual diversity and embrace of identity politics.

“There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless — one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line,” Berliner wrote. He pointed out that there were zero Republicans working in editorial positions, which presumably influenced the fact that the outlet dropped the ball on major stories, such as refusing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop or featuring scant coverage of the findings of the Mueller Report, which failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia.

Nonetheless, Berliner urged against defunding NPR in his piece and said he was hopeful that its new CEO, Katherine Maher, would right the ship. But Maher called Berliner’s commentary “disrespectful” and “demeaning” in a message to staff, and critics further pointed out the CEO has a troublesome Twitter history for someone meant to be restoring trust in the institution. In 2020, Maher posted a selfie in a Biden hat as she headed to the polls, justified looting as “not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression” and warned that “white silence is complicity.”

“End NPR getting taxpayer dollars now. Seriously. This is their editor-in-chief,” Fox News contributor Joe Concha tweeted next to a screenshot of a Maher tweet that described having “cis white mobility privilege.”

Former president Donald Trump also called for NPR to lose its government funding. “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM! EDITOR SAID THEY HAVE NO REPUBLICANS, AND IS ONLY USED TO ‘DAMAGE ’” he posted on Truth Social. “THEY ARE A LIBERAL DISINFORMATION MACHINE. NOT ONE DOLLAR!!”

NPR receives less than 1 percent of its budget directly from the federal budget, but 10 percent of its budget comes indirectly from federal, state, and local governments, according to Influence Watch.

-Amber Duke

Who was looking forward to ‘Appliance Week’?

House Republicans were forced to postpone their plans for “Appliance Week” after Iran’s strike on Israel over the weekend. The GOP originally scheduled Appliance Week to focus on a legislative agenda that “defend[s] the freedom to own the right kinds of appliances,” according to Representative Warren Davidson. The House Republican caucus has been vocally opposed to attempts by the Biden administration to crack down on home appliances they don’t consider environmentally friendly; the Energy Department unveiled new rules to limit emissions from gas and electric stoves, required retailers to sell LED lightbulbs in place of incandescent lights, and updated other efficiency standards on washers, dryers, toilets, and more. Some criticized the agenda for being focused on a relatively insignificant issue compared to the border and the economy. Others, such as Cockburn’s colleague Amber Duke, have urged more action to protect consumers from Biden’s “war on life’s simple pleasures.”

The GOP told Fox News to expect a “robust foreign policy week” in lieu of appliance talk, with bills targeting Iran with sanctions and condemning its attack on Israel.

–Cockburn