We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Trump's NYC hush-money trial: What to watch for
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
This is what we are watching in US Politics this week: Trump's trials.
Former President Trump faces or faced six civil or criminal actions against him in 2024, an election year. Two of which, civil finds that he was already found liable for. He's had to pay significant sums of money. Two of which, a case in Georgia and one in Florida, are very unlikely to start in this year, and one of which could start later this summer, this federal trial against Trump for election interference in Washington, DC. The final trial is set to begin next week. A trial in Manhattan for business records frauds related to hush money payments he made to a woman he was having an affair with before the 2016 election.
The key witness in this trial is Michael Cohen, Trump's former attorney, who Trump's going to try to discredit the testimony of by saying, “He's a liar, he's out for publicity. But the evidence against Trump is pretty damning here. There's almost no, it sure looks like he committed this crime. However, the allegations will have to be proven in court. Trump could win this case and the jury could decide to throw out the corroborating evidence. There's a lot of ways this could still go in Trump's favor. And if it does, that will be a significant win for Trump, because a significant portion of the electorate is telling pollsters today that if Trump is found guilty of a crime before the election, they would be less likely to vote for him.
Trump support drops by about ten percentage points in a New York Times poll from earlier in the year, based on whether or not he's found guilty. And these are really high stakes, drama for Trump. One of the key political inoculates Trump has is that the trial could be over quickly. He also is going to make the case that this is a politically motivated witch hunt and that Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, is out to get him and stop him and undermine him because he's a Democrat. That message is certainly resonating with Republicans. The key question for Trump's election campaign is, “Does that message resonate with independents, or do they continue to see the criminal charges against Trump as being disqualifying?”
The trial starts next week. We'll find out what happens.
“Everything is political” is personal: the NYC migrant crisis
“Do you know,”
Jhon asked me, shivering slightly in the lengthening afternoon shadows of New York’s Penn Station, “do you know if we can stay here – in America?”
Jhon is a wiry 42-year-old construction worker who fled Ecuador a month ago with his wife and four children. The recent surge of narco-violence there had gotten so bad, he said, that the local school switched to virtual classes for the safety of the students and their parents.
Now, after a trying journey by foot, boat, bus, and train, he was standing in the middle of New York City, bewildered but hopeful.
“I just want to work,” he told me. “I don’t want anyone to take care of me or to rely on anyone else. I just want to be able to work.”
But in those early moments, Jhon and his family did need help – to find their way to New York’s intake center for migrants seeking shelter, to learn to navigate the city’s byzantine health and legal systems, to stay on track with their asylum applications.
In that way, he is like many of the more than 170,000 undocumented migrants who have arrived in New York City over the past two years, most of them on buses from Texas.
The city government says it’s struggling to deal with the influx. Mayor Eric Adams has warned that providing services to the migrants will “destroy this city” and cost more than $12 billion. But a small group of grassroots non-profits has stepped up to welcome, orient, and support the new arrivals.
I met Jhon while shadowing Power Malu, an Afro-Puerto Rican activist from New York’s Lower East Side, whose Artists Athletes Activists organization is one of the subjects of a new report I’ve been working on for our TV show “GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.”
Nearly every day and night for almost two years, Power’s been at Gotham’s various bus and train stations, welcoming migrants like Jhon, giving a guiding hand to people who arrive in a city of millions after a journey of months and simply don’t know whom to trust or where to go.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve spent many hours with Power and other activists in New York – like Adama Bah, a formerly undocumented migrant from Guinea who has built the largest Black-oriented migrant services network in the city (a big deal given that migrants from Haiti or West Africa are chronically underserved by systems geared mainly towards Latinos), and Ilze Thielmann, who started a free “store” that gives clothing, strollers, and toiletries to recent migrants.
Along the way, we met people like Igor, a refugee from violence in Burundi who left behind a cushy job as an IT manager and traveled through Mexico on foot with his pregnant wife to get to the US. He finally got asylum several weeks ago.
Or Brandon, from Venezuela, who braved the treacherous Darién Gap and the constant gauntlets of extortion, kidnapping, and violence in Mexico on his journey to New York, and who now works with Power to welcome others who followed the same route.
Why did my producer Molly Rubin and I pick this subject? Migration is now the top political issue in America. A recent poll showed close to three in 10 voters say border policy is their primary concern, topping the list for the first time since 2019, and outstripping other perennial contenders like “the economy,” “inflation,” or the always exciting “crime.”
But when it comes to the crisis at the southern border and its impact on Northern cities, the gigantic numbers can dull your sense of what is actually happening here: A story about “millions” of migrants crossing the border, or the “billions” of dollars it will cost, is still a story about individual human beings, with names, who have lived stories of tremendous suffering, perseverance, and dedication.
“Everything is political,” we often say at GZERO. And that’s true. But everything political is ultimately personal too. If it’s not, why would it matter at all?
This is one story that Molly and I hope will drive that home. You can check it out here, and let us know what you think.
Learn more about the organizations mentioned in this report:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams
NYC mayor in hot water over Turkey
The mayor of America’s largest city is now ensnared in a scandal involving one of America’s ficklest allies.
Federal agents are currently investigating whether New York Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign violated financing rules during his 2021 run for office – the feds are reportedly focusing on alleged contributions from a Turkish-owned construction company.
The plot thickens: Did Adams, before taking office, pressure local Fire Department officials to rush approvals for a new consulate building in Manhattan that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was eager to unveil during United Nations General Assembly week in 2021? Thus far, Adams hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing.
Adams, a centrist Democrat, is an eccentric former police officer who styles himself, variously, as a homeopath, crimefighter, bon vivant, and rat killer. Elected as the city’s second-ever Black mayor in 2021, he has faced criticism over the city’s sluggish post-pandemic recovery and has clashed with Washington over responsibility for absorbing the more than 100,000 asylum-seekers who have arrived in the city since 2022.
Turkey, of course, is one of Washington’s great frenemies. A NATO member, yes, but one that maintains especially warm ties with Moscow, has attacked US-backed Kurdish fighters in Syria, and has sought to complicate NATO accession for Sweden.
US global power intact, as is NYC; Trump's RNC & tight US election
Watch Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
When I look at the United States, it is certainly true that our ability to lead by example, our ability to say, the Belarus elections are rigged is hard because, you know, we're claiming that our own elections may well be rigged. So, it's harder to lead by example. And we aren't as happy with our institutions. And the post office is having problems, some self-inflicted, in delivering mail. And when you see, you know, 8,000 chicks being sent to a farmer in Maine, and they all show up and they're dead, you're like, "what the hell?" I mean, it's like the DMV, the US Postal System. We should be able to fix that. And the American dream doesn't apply to a lot of Americans in the way that it did 20, 30, 50 years ago. Inequalities, much more structural. All these things are true. But the idea that the US is in inextricable decline just flies on its face against realities of the country.
A few examples: The relevance of the US dollar, its strength is uncontested. There's nothing else close. The Eurozone is getting weaker. And the Chinese are not moving towards internationalizing and floating the RMB. The Japanese yen, certainly not. So, the willingness of international investors to continue to pile money into the United States has been undaunted and undiminished by everything we've seen in the past years, whether you talk about the financial crisis or more recently, the Trump election or most recently the pandemic. The pandemic tells you that the most important companies out there are the tech companies. Brick and mortar are really going to get hurt. And there are a lot of Americans that are getting hurt on the back of that, and particularly a lot of poorer Americans, particularly a lot of minorities in the United States who are getting hurt the hardest. By the way, that's true in all the other major advanced industrial democracies, too.
But the United States has by far the most powerful tech companies out there. That's going to create asymmetrically more power for the United States, more influence, more ability to set the rules and norms. And those rules and norms may not be liked by other countries. They may not be multilaterally and collectively agreed upon, but the power is still there. The United States today is the world's largest energy producer. They're exporting energy around the world. Largest food exporter. These are really important issues that really matter for power around the world. That's before we talk about the American military, the size which I think is too big. I think we spend far too much money on. I think we've got a lot better return for other sorts of investments in US infrastructure and human capital. But the power internationally and what you're able to do with it is certainly clear. So, the idea that the US has a lot of the things that are broken, sure. The idea the US is in decline, is not coming back, is insane.
New York City, very similar. Right now, New York is not so fun, right? I mean, you know, people aren't going inside to restaurants and they really shouldn't be. And it's very dense. And a lot of wealthy people are in their second and third homes. All of this is true. And yet the level of intellectual attraction, the knowledge economy becoming only much more important, not less. That's really going to hurt second and third tier cities. It's not going to hurt the places where the highest density of knowledge economy workers actually are. And there's no question that people aren't going to need to go to work every day the way they used to post-pandemic. But they will still need to interact personally with their colleagues once, twice, three times a week. So maybe that means the New York metropolitan area gets a little larger. I could easily imagine that Midtown gets hurt and commercial real estate takes a real dump. And you can live farther into, you know, Brooklyn, Bronx, those places get more developed. But that's very different from saying New York City is going to, you know, is on its back foot. I actually think it's exactly the opposite. People that are moving away from first tier global cities are paying no attention to the growth in inequality, the strength of the knowledge economy, the fact that the top 10%, 1%, 0.1% are doing dramatically better on the back of this crisis, as they have over many decades. And that is the principal driver of the top tier global cities in the world of which there aren't as many anymore. London, post-Brexit is more problematic. Hong Kong, post the end of though one state-two systems change from the Chinese government is more problematic. New York City is not. And so, for all of those reasons, I think the it's really early to proclaim New York City is dead. I'm betting very strongly in the other direction. And you guys can put a pin in that.
Also, briefly, just should talk about, you've got the Republican convention starting this evening. We had the DNC last week. They are very different conventions. The Democrats very slickly put together, they knew it was going to be all virtual for all a long time, and so they were able to really plan for it. They put a lot of money into it. They had Hollywood sensibilities. They also had a lot of Hollywood participating. And as a consequence, it was abundantly watchable. It was made for TV and there were a lot of high-profile speeches that went very well. The RNC is clearly going to be very different, is mostly going to be about Trump. Keep in mind, there's a lot more enthusiasm for Trump and there is enthusiasm for Biden. There's a lot broader enthusiasm for the DNC and the Democrats than there is enthusiasm for the Republicans and the RNC. So, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Trump is taking the dominant role and his family at the RNC.
The other thing that's interesting, of course, is it won't be as virtual. It probably won't be anywhere near as slickly put together. It might not work as well on television, but it is going to send more of a message that's about the economy. It's about being in front of people, getting the country working again. That's interesting, not because I think Trump is great on the economy, I actually don't, but he does outperform Biden in the polls on the economy, consistently. It's the only thing he outperforms Biden on. So I thought Biden made a mistake when he said, "I'll listen to the scientists on coronavirus." Yes, definitely say that. But then he said, "and I'll shut the country down if I need to." You don't actually need to shut the country down and Trump is going to use that because that is the strongest argument Trump, who is underwater in the polls right now compared to Biden, has as we move towards November. We look at the next two plus months before this election, and you know, the economy isn't picking up as fast as we'd like it to, but it is picking up.
The coronavirus is still far worse than we would hope to see in the United States. And the total numbers are going to be horrifying, we'll certainly be breaking through 200,000 deaths well before the election, but the number of cases is now coming down, the number of deaths per day is coming down, even the number of positive test results is, in most states in the US now, below the 5% that's recommended for being able to start reopening your economy more quickly. While in many European countries, again, the absolute levels and the numbers per capita of deaths are much, much lower in most countries than in the United States, but the trends are actually now heading in the wrong direction. Particularly in Spain, a number of other countries too.
All of which implies to me that this election is going to get tighter, not farther apart, over the next couple months, barring any Black Swan event. So, we'll see what happens with the RNC. Again, the country's maximally divided. No one's going to agree on any of this stuff. But we'll certainly be covering it.
