Since China first sent giant pandas to the National Zoo following the normalizing of ties with the U.S. in 1972, the iconic bears have been a sign of friendship between the two nations. But the number of giant pandas at U.S. zoos has dwindled as tensions between Washington and Beijing rose in recent years. D.C.’s last three pandas â Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and their cub, Xiao Qi Ji â returned to China in November per the terms of the zoo’s loan agreement with the Chinese government. A return was uncertain.
Now, the many new bears China has pledged to send to the U.S. in recent months are a promising sign for “panda diplomacy.” Diplomatic goodwill was on full display during the National Zoo announcement, where Chinese ambassador Xie Feng dubbed the duo “our new envoys of friendship.”
đŒ Meet the pandas: Bao Li is a 2-year-old male and the son of Bao Bao, the female panda born at the zoo in 2013, and the grandson of Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, the two pandas who left the zoo last year. He’ll be joined by Qing Bao, a 2-year-old female.
Bao Li and Qing Bao were chosen for their promising genetic match. But there’s no rush to reproduce. “We’ll have a few years just to enjoy these two, and then people can start asking about cubs,” Smith tells Axios. The average age for cub-bearing starts between 5 and 7.
Reproduction is still important, but it isn’t the #1 priority in this new phase of the program. “We had to crack the code on how giant pandas reproduce â that box is checked,” Smith tells Axios. She says a new focus is habitat health â studying bamboo forests and regrowth â and diseases and issues impacting the animals’ health. The conservation program has helped the species move off the endangered species list to “vulnerable.”
The new homemakers can expect one bougie bear den. Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein’s $9 million panda habitat is getting a $2.5 million facelift â which includes 40 new cameras for a higher-grade PandaCam.
Pandas might be pricey to keep and study, but it’s free to see them at the National Zoo â a big boon for conservation efforts, according to director Smith. “Pandas are the gateway to saving other endangered species,” Smith tells Axios. “You love pandas, but then you might love hellbenders next.”
One of DC’s most important conveyors of conventional wisdom, John Harris of Politico, says something unexpected:
Yes, itâs obviously true that a 34-count felony conviction would be enough to demolish the career of any normal politician.
Yes, itâs obviously true that former president Donald Trump is not a normal politician. His most devoted partisans will only become more so following Thursdayâs guilty verdict. Just as they did after the Access Hollywood tape, the impeachments, the Jan. 6 riot and other examples too abundant to recount or, for many people, even to recall.
But these two obvious truths tend to obscure another one. Trump simply cannot beat President Joe Biden relying solely on the votes of people who think his legal travails are a politically motivated scam, and who cheer Trump not in spite of his transgressions but because of them. Or, more specifically, because they thrill to the outrage and indignation Trump inspires among his adversaries.
There are plenty of such people â enough to power this generationâs most important political movement â but still not enough to win the election. Trumpâs only path to victory is a coalition that includes many Republicans and independents who find him deplorable but think a second Biden term would be even more so.
That is why â even as the full consequences likely will emerge slowly â this week was easily the worst so far this year for Trump and the best for Biden.
This doesnât mean the Manhattan verdict will suddenly transform the race â nothing in Trumpâs history of scandal suggests it will. This doesnât mean huge legions of swing voters will suddenly agree with Bidenâs argument that democracy itself is on the ballot this fall. If someone wasnât buying that up until now, why would a case of document falsification to cover up an alleged sexual indiscretion change their mind?
It does mean that many voters who donât much like Biden received an emphatic, unambiguous reminder of why they donât like Trump. The movement of even a small percentage of voters in closely contested swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin â all must-win for Biden â could echo decisively through the balance of the race.
I’m sure that Republicans will commission some snap polls which say the opposite and many in the Washington establishment will immediately rush to say that Trump is more popular than ever now that he’s a convicted felon. But hopefully this epiphany by Harris is indicative of a bigger phenomenon among the DC cognoscenti. It simply can’t be good that a presidential candidate is an adjudicated criminal. If that’s the case then our culture is totally lost.
For those of you who don’t want to sit through 45 minutes of this lunatic rambling, here are some morning-after highlights.
Trump: Put him in jail twice. He is 77 years old. Normally, I would say that's an old guy. But I don't feel 77. Nobody ever says that about me. I would like them to say, we have to have a little sorrow for this man because they just don't say that about me. pic.twitter.com/wy7uw7P9DD
Trump: We have people sitting in schools with languages where very few people have even heard of these languages. It is not like Spanish or French or Russian. pic.twitter.com/YHcUroQaKh
Trump: I wanted to testify. The theory is, you never testify. As soon as you testify, anybody, if it were George Washington, don't testify, because they will get you on something you said slightly wrong and they sue you for perjury. pic.twitter.com/DeY4W3AyMD
Many people testify in their own defense. A normal man running for president at the same time he is being tried for 34 felonies would almost certainly want to do it in order to prove his innocence. No, that’s not required in a court of law but you’d think someone in his situation would have felt it necessary to do that if nothing else to appear fearless and strong. But he knows his people and they apparently prefer a sniveling whiner.
CNN: Donald Trump is making this 2024 campaign all about him and not about you. That's precisely what he did at this rambling… don't even know what to call it, just a venting session before cameras? He was going on and on for 45 minutes. It was surprisingly incoherent,⊠pic.twitter.com/rqhFTHiVkz
The right wingers are having themselves a good old-fashioned cry today. Or, more accurately, a full-blown tantrum. It’s just astonishing.
Fascinating to hear the GOP Speaker of the House admit to having private conversations with multiple justices who expressed concern to him about Trumpâs conviction. Iâm sure those justices will recuse from any eventual appeal to avoid sitting on a case theyâve pre-judged. https://t.co/ZbGVZP7qYi
This is my favorite take on that by Philip Bump. He asks Republicans a question I wish everyone would ask:
“Iâm running because far too often, we have two standards of justice â one for the rich and powerful and connected, and another for everyone else,â Bragg said in a video announcing his bid. âWe must follow the facts wherever they lead, regardless of how influential the person under investigation is.â
In the years since, the idea that there are two standards of justice has been embraced by Braggâs most prominent target: former president Trump. In Trumpâs formulation, the issue isnât that people in positions of influence are getting away with crimes. Instead, itâs that he â and theoretical others on the right â are being unfairly targeted by an out-of-control criminal justice system.
Itâs an argument that holds enormous sway with Trumpâs base of support and the broader right-wing media bubble that surrounds it. It is also an obvious extension of Trumpâs long-standing rejection of any criticism, any investigation into him or his family. With Trumpâs conviction on 34 felony counts in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday, though, it would behoove Trump supporters and Republicans more broadly to consider an alternative view of that outcome and the other indictments Trump faces: They are a function not of some indirect effort to damage him politically but, instead, of the criminal justice system responding to violations of the law.
It would be beneficial to America if more Trump supporters entertained the idea that maybe he actually did something wrong.
No kidding. But that’s not going to happen. This MAGA GOP has a very unique populist philosophy. They believe that their (alleged) billionaire leader is being persecuted by a system that’s rigged against people like him.
Bump points out that this eternal whine is an umbrella that conveniently covers all of Trump’s misdeeds.
For America, though? For America, this rhetoric is dire. There is lots of objective evidence suggesting that Trump is not uniquely targeted by his political opponents but, instead, uniquely dishonest among American presidents and uniquely vulnerable to criminal prosecution. This was the argument made by special counsel Jack Smith in combating Trumpâs argument that he had immunity from criminal prosecution for things he did as president: Trumpâs actions were not comparable with past actions by American presidents.
Trumpâs ascent within the Republican Party took advantage of increasing skepticism on the right about American institutions. He ran with that idea, building power in part by ripping it away from the Republican Party, the government and law enforcement. He has helped build enormous hostility to public officials tasked with combating crime for the simple reason that that often means combating him. This means that he has more political capital to undercut federal law enforcement should he return to office and that any further criminal prosecution will be granted the same skepticism as all the others.
This all flows from one failure by Americaâs political right: the refusal to even entertain the idea that Donald Trump broke the law and faces criminal indictment because he broke the law. They have come to terms with his other moral failings, from his affairs to his dishonesty. But Republicans generally refuse to consider that those failings extend further.
100%. I think they are probably afraid that if they let this idea creep into their minds their entire belief system will collapse. Trump is a con man and there is always a resistance to admitting that you might have been conned. But it will happen for some people eventually. Let’s hope it starts happening sooner rather than later.
Russian state-controlled media apparatus closely followed legal troubles of the former U.S. President Donald J. Trump, spicing up most of their coverage with pro-Trump clips from Fox News and Tucker Carlson. Russian propagandists were openly hoping for a hung jury and were visibly disappointed when Trump became a convicted felon on all 34 charges he was facing.
On Friday morning, Dmitry Kulikov, host of Solovyov Live, the self-described âmost patriotic channelâ in Russia, said on-air, âThey wronged our Donald Trump!â Malek Dudakov, a political scientist who specializes in America, said that the hope for a miracleâmeaning a hung juryâwas extinguished. He said, with Russiaâs affectionate middle name usage, âThe miracle did not happen. Our Donald Fredovych was found guilty on all 34 counts.â For that, Dudakov blamed the judge and the jury and baselessly claimed that all of them were prejudiced against Trump. âNow, he is a felon,â he surmised, while also noting that the former presidentâs incarceration as a result of this conviction is unlikely.
Dudakov expressed hope that despite his legal troubles, Trump would still win in the upcoming presidential election. Kulikov and Dudakov jointly echoed Tucker Carlsonâs assertions that their preferred candidate will prevail, âunless desperately panicked Democrats will organize an assassination of Donald Fredovych.â They expressed hope that Bidenânot Trumpâwould die before the elections.
Similar reaction reverberated across Russian media outlets. Appearing on a state TV show 60 Minutes Friday morning, State Duma member Aleksei Zhuravlyov opted to discuss Trumpâs conviction before addressing other bad news Russia is facing, with Western governments broadly signing off on Ukraineâs right to defend itself by striking Russia on its own turf. Zhuravlyov said he would address this âescalationâ later and started with his rant against America for turning Trump into a felon.
Mischaracterizing the prosecution by describing it as âa lawsuit brought by Stormy Daniels,â host Olga Skabeeva chimed in and described Trump as âa former and potentially future U.S. president.â She surmised that the situation is too ridiculous for words and keeps escalating on every front. Skabeeva complained that earlier predictions of a hung jury did not come true, bitterly adding in perfect English, âShit happens.â
Zhuravlyov angrily asserted, âThere are idiots in every country, but this is the only instance where idiots have their own country. This is something new in history.â The state lawmaker complained that in supporting Ukraineâs right to defend itself by striking Russiaâs territory, Americans are not even afraid of the retaliatory nuclear strikes by Russia. Skabeeva scornfully added, âOur universally beloved Donald Trump thinks they can sit it out across the pond.â
Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, found guilty by a jury of his peers in the city in which he was born and raised and lived for the first 70 years of his life. The front page of his former hometown newspaper looked like this today:
Republicans have all rallied in support of the Dear Leader by whining and complaining about the judicial system being used against a political opponent, apparently trying to convince the American people that anyone running for office should be immune from prosecution for their crimes. (That’s pretty rich coming from the crowd that chanted “lock her up” for four solid years.) Needless to say, every one of the lawsuits filed against him and the crimes he is accused of were being very publicly investigated long before he decided to run for president again. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that that’s why he did it. As the LA Times Doyle McManus pointed out back in October of 2021:
As long as heâs running (or even sort of running), Trump can denounce every inquest and subpoena as just another part of a political vendetta. Itâs a way to hold his troops together â and to make every prosecutor think twice.
He didn’t have to run for president. There were a whole bunch of Republicans who ran against him in the primaries, ready and willing to take on the job. But Trump needed to run so that he would be able to say to himself and others that all these civil and criminal cases against him aren’t his fault.
The problem for Trump is that reality is finally catching up to him. His Big Lies may be working on his cult following but they don’t work in a court of law where real evidence is presented and ordinary people and experienced jurists are charged with weighing the facts to determine the truth. Trump has lost every single legal proceeding brought against him in the last three years.
The Trump Organization was found guilty of 17 felonies, landing his CFO in jail. He lost two defamation cases brought by E. Jean Carroll. He lost the mammoth New York civil fraud case. And now he’s lost his first criminal trial with a sweeping guilty verdict on all 34 felony counts. The pending cases in DC, Georgia and Florida may not end up being adjudicated before the election but if he loses in November they will likely go ahead and there’s a very good chance he’ll lose those as well (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t decide to fully sacrifice what’s left of its credibility to spare him.)
You would think that a man this rich and powerful would have such good legal representation that state prosecutors and judges would be no match for them. Think about OJ Simpson and his Dream Team. So why is Trump’s team so lame? I think most legal observers would say that it’s because Trump is such a terrible client who demands that his lawyers follow his lead and that’s a very bad way to conduct a defense.
Consider how it’s worked out for him so far. Trump stayed fairly hands off from the first E. Jean Carroll trial which he lost and had to pay Carroll $5 million dollars. He obviously wasn’t happy about that and his lawyer Joe Tacopina abruptly resigned on the eve of the second one. Trump decided to take the case in hand personally and replaced him with his favorite TV lawyer Alina Habba who, along with Trump, had already been sanctioned for almost a million dollars in a case Trump brought against the Clintons which the judge called “completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.” Trump acted out in the courtroom whenever he attended the trial, even flouncing out of the courtroom at one point, and Habba mirrored his behavior, irritating the judge and the jury as well which awarded Carroll $83.3 million dollars, $65 million of which was in punitive damages.
He performed the same rude and disruptive dance in the New York State fraud case, resulting in a gag order and sanctions for violating them. Trump was clearly in charge of that case too even to the extent that Habba pasted on his grim mug shot expression every time she came before the cameras. He clearly believed that his case should be tried as if it was his Truth Social feed. That didn’t work out too well either. He was found liable to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars.
The assumption was that his first criminal trial would be different. He would be required to attend the trial every day it was in session and he’d hired some real lawyers this time. But it was soon obvious that he was still running the show. It wasn’t just that he was outside the courthouse slamming the judge and the prosecutor every single day, which no defense lawyer would think makes a lot of sense. He also got himself sanctioned again for violating his gag order against discussing witnesses, jury members or family members of court employees which was just plain stupid. But It was undeniable that Trump was dictating the way they argued the case as well.
For instance, any lawyer would have said that Trump should just stipulate to the tryst with Stormy Daniels so they could avoid the whole spectacle of her testimony. But Trump insisted that they deny it ever happened. And when she was cross examined by Trump’s attorney, he also obviously wanted them to try to make her look like a liar instead of simply asking her if she knew anything about the records at the Trump organization and when she said no, just letting it go. After all, that’s what the case was about.
By contrast he wouldn’t let them go hard after David Pecker, his buddy who also happens to have a box full of papers that Trump believes might incriminate him in god-only-knows-what. They treated him like he was their witness when, in fact, his testimony was pivotal to the prosecution The same with his former gal friday Hope Hicks. Any lawyer who wasn’t being hamstrung by his client would have tried to shake their testimony.
And then there was Robert Costello, the friend-of-Rudy’s who made a complete mess of the case and should never have been called to testify. He ended up making Michael Cohen look as respectable as a monk by comparison. That was almost certainly Trump’s doing after seeing Costello testify before the MAGA Republicans in the House the week before. (His crude, bombastic style was like looking in the mirror.)
Trump’s lead lawyer Todd Blanche appeared on Fox and CNN after the verdict and had nothing but great things to say about Trump. But he did make it crystal clear that Trump was in charge of the case.
He also said that Trump was very much involved with jury selection and told Kaitlan Collins on CNN that they mutually decided that Trump shouldn’t take the stand. Blanche seemed a little bit shell-shocked and is probably exhausted but he pretty much admitted that Trump was running the defense strategy. You have to wonder if he will be with Trump much longer.
All of this just illustrates what we already know. Trump is a domineering bully who doesn’t know how to run anything and won’t listen to anyone, whether it’s a legal defense or the U.S. government. You’d think after losing all these elections, civil cases and now criminal trials Republicans would get it through their heads that this man who calls everything a hoax and a fake, is actually talking about himself.
Watching MSNBC’s Guilty/Not Guilty counter click its way up to 34 Trump guilty verdicts was a moment I won’t forget. I heard about the 9/11 attack in New York from a colleague who’d heard of it in a phone call from home. I thought it must have been an internet rumor. Then I couldn’t even connect to the internet to check. It wasn’t a rumor. Neither was yesterday’s verdict.
BREAKING: Donald Trump found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business documents in New York pic.twitter.com/Yq8LWihvRx
Well, Donald John Trump is a felon 34 times over. His cult is pissed (Reuters):
Supporters of former President Donald Trump, enraged by his conviction on 34 felony counts by a New York jury, flooded pro-Trump websites with calls for riots, revolution and violent retribution.
After Trump became the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime, his supporters responded with dozens of violent online posts, according to a Reuters review of comments on three Trump-aligned websites: the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Patriots.Win and the Gateway Pundit.
Some called for attacks on jurors, the execution of the judge, Justice Juan Merchan, or outright civil war and armed insurrection.
Friends in the Democratic Party last night began receiving threats via phone messages and emails.
Weâre seeing here the latest operation of a foundational rule of the Trump era: If youâre a Trump supporter, you will sooner or later be called to jettison any and every principle you ever purported to hold. Republicans in Donald Trumpâs adopted state of Florida oppose voting by felons. They used their legislative power to gut a state referendum restoring the voting rights of persons convicted of a crime. But as fiercely as Florida Republicans oppose voting by felons, they feel entirely differently about voting for felons. Thatâs now apparently fine, provided the felon is Donald Trump.
Freedom’s just a MAGA word for no principles left to lose.
WASHINGTON â Texas Republicans rallied to former President Donald Trumpâs defense Thursday after a Manhattan jury convicted him on 34 felony charges related to falsifying business records to cover a sex scandal.
âThis was a sham show trial. The Kangaroo Court will never stand on appeal. Americans deserve better than a sitting U.S. President weaponizing our justice system against a political opponentâ all to win an election,â Gov. Greg Abbott said on social media. âWe must FIRE Joe Biden in November.â
Anyone who showed enough curiosity to learn how the somewhat obscure law Trump violated works, and how broadly itâs applied, has known for a long time now that this prosecution was well-predicated. The fact that Trumpâs purpose in forging business documents was to gain an illegal leg-up in the election made the prosecution civically righteous.
Alvin Braggâs liberal critics should acknowledge their mistakes, even if they believe their initial instinct to be skeptical of his case was well-intended.
Other people who should acknowledge their mistakes: The many, many prosecutors, judges, congressmen, and senators who have shown far less courage than Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan, and the 12 jurors who rendered this verdict, knowing it has put them at somewhat greater risk of retribution.
Donald Trump isnât just a felon, heâs also a disgrace. Like basically all politicians who get convicted of felonies he should withdraw from politics. If it were a Democratic presidential nominee, his career would be over. It wonât happen, but thatâs what would be proper. Democrats should say so freely.
Because he wonât withdraw from the race, Democrats and the rest of us should follow the logic of his conviction wherever it leads. Trump should be denied classified candidate briefings, just as felons are disqualified from classified clearance. Trump should be denied the right to vote in his home state of Florida, and if Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans try to create a special exception for him, Democrats should challenge it. They should feel free to demand he be punished to the full extent of the law.
Speaking of which, Juan Merchan should give Trump a stiff sentence. Trump behaved lawlessly, the impact of his crimes was vast, and he was extraordinarily contemptuous during trial. However, Merchan went on record to acknowledge that he was reluctant to jail Trump. He should set that aside and treat Trump like any other defendant. If 12 random New Yorkers had the courage to do what they did, he should show similar mettle.
America is a nation built upon the rule of law. The jury has spoken and carefully rendered a decision. Responsible leadership requires the verdict to be respected.
All of America watched in the aftermath of the Great Recession as its architects in the finance industry took home bonuses even as they took back the homes of families to whom they’d sold “No income, no asset” (NINA) loans, a.k.a. “liar loans.” The Department of the Treasury under Barack Obama “foamed the runway” for the banks to prevent hard landings in the crisis. But it left homeowners out in the cold. The Department of Justice looked the other way.
The officials “at the very center of the 2008 crash â former Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and former head of the New York Fed and Obama Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner,” wrote Ryan Cooper in 2018, wanted their successors to have “quiet authoritarian power to make sure financial elites like themselves do not pay for their misdeeds.”
You noticed? So did the rest of us.
The system was rigged, Elizabeth Warren said even before becoming a U.S senator. It wasn’t just conservative panic over shifting demographics and the election of the country’s first Black president that led in 2016 to the election of a chaos agent â Trump â as president. It was the sense that the elite are above the law, as indeed Trump proved his entire life. Why wouldn’t people resent it?
But Trump the huckster promised his aggrieved MAGA shock troops that rather than restore order he would make the rigged system work for Christian white nationalists. He is a crook and a liar, but he’d be their crook and liar. Trump alleged that the 2016 election was rigged even after he won it. He swears to this day that the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden was rigged. It was anger over that supposed rigging that fired up the mob he sent to sack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Movement conservatism, the financial crisis, Russian disinformation and more have worked for decades to erode U.S. public confidence in the country’s basic functions to the point that MAGA Republicans are prepared to cast it all aside. The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, the works. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule, immune and imperious.
What those of us not in Trump’s thrall and with a shred of faith left in America’s promise of equal justice under law was, in successful Trump prosecutions, the restoration of a rule of law that would apply to everyone.
“Donald Trump is a convicted felon. Let that sink in,” is the headline on Jeremy Stahl’s Slate commentary.
DAYS AFTER DOZENS of Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes against displacement camps in Southern Gaza, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wrote âFinish them!â on Israeli artillery shells.
Haley, who recently sputtered in her bid to defeat former President Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, toured a kibbutz ravaged by Hamasâ Oct. 7 attack against Israel in the company of current Knesset member and former U.N. envoy Danny Danon.
âIf you think this will only be in Israel, if we are arrogant enough, this could absolutely happen in America too and this is the moral of this story,â Haley said at one point during the visit.
Danon posted a collage of photos on Tuesday showing Haley writing on an artillery shell. âFinish them! This is what my friend, the former ambassador, Nikki Haley wrote today on a shell during a visit to an artillery post on the northern border,â Danon wrote.
Alongside her chilling note, Haley wrote âAmerica loves Israel!â and autographed the bomb.
“Finish them”
That certainly has the echo of certain “final” kinds of “solutions” doesn’t it?
This is the person we are supposed to see as the “good Republican.” And she is a monster.
