The Atlantic Daily: Trump’s Real Legal Battle
The state of New York filed charges against the Trump Organization. Donald Trump says he’ll file a lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and others. One effort is legitimate. One is not.
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New York is charging the Trump Organization and one of its top executives. So Donald Trump is suing Facebook—and Facebook’s CEO, and Twitter, and Twitter’s CEO, and Google-owned YouTube, and Google’s CEO—for infringing on his First Amendment rights.
What exactly is he trying to do? My colleague David A. Graham explains: “In the real world, Trump and his company face troubling legal challenges; in his fantasy world, Trump is trying to overshadow those cases with one he’d rather be fighting.”
David offers a nice summary of Trump’s latest legal maneuver. And below, our writers unpack the more serious case at hand: the tax-fraud investigation that Trump’s business and its associates face in New York.
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The tax-fraud lawsuit marks the first glimmer of accountability. But “the case is not a symbol or a metaphor,” Quinta Jurecic argues.
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The Trump Organization is in big trouble. The case may be “politically tinged,” the law professor Daniel Hemel writes. Still, if the allegations prove true, they aren’t just minor infractions, but blatant violations of the law.
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Trump’s statement suggests that he’s preparing for the worst. The former president decried the lawsuit as political, but didn’t issue the standard denial language that public figures tend to put out when accused of tax fraud, David Frum notes.
The news in three sentences:
(1) The president of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated in his private residence. (2) Eric Adams is now favored to be the next mayor of New York City, after winning the city’s Democratic primary. (3) The death toll in the Surfside condo collapse now stands at 46.
One question, answered: When traveling this summer, is it safer to take a plane, train, or bus?
Once you’re fully vaccinated, it doesn’t particularly matter, our deputy managing editor Rachel Gutman reports:
“If you’re vaccinated, you really don’t need to worry about your exposure on an airplane, on a bus, in the subway, or at the office, or anywhere else you go,” Joseph Allen, an associate professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me … No matter what form of public transit you choose, you will be required to wear a mask. If you’re not already accustomed to doing so for hours and hours at a time, you could be in for a rude awakening.
Read on for more travel dos and don’ts.
Tonight’s Atlantic-approved activity:
Read a poem. We recommend “Beloved Park,” by Eileen Myles.
A break from the news:
Maine has a dangerous, small, and very itchy problem.
Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox