Weekly Recap: May 18th - May 24th
A recap of the big political stories affecting the United States this past week.
The Trump trial experienced a bit of chaos when a defense witness spoke out of turn and ignored proper procedures. The judge ordered the courtroom cleared before reprimanding the witness, after which the trial resumed.
Robert Costello is a lawyer who was an associate of Michael Cohen. Republicans brought him to a House hearing before his testimony at the trial in an attempt to discredit Cohen in the eyes of the public.
Calling Costello turned out to be a mistake for the defense as his abrasive behavior hurt their position, and the prosecution was fully prepared to counter Costello’s claims.
The defense rested soon after the chaos. Despite several promises to do so, Donald Trump never testified.
Closing arguments will begin on Tuesday, and a verdict is expected next week.
As the trial has been working through the final stages, more Republican politicians have made the pilgrimage to the courthouse in order to give their version of the “lawfare, weaponized justice” speech to the cameras lined up outside.
Some were there to stay in Trump's good graces, while others were there to film fundraising videos or social media sound bite clips. None of them claimed Trump was innocent, a statement Republicans have been careful to avoid. Instead, they focused on attempting to discredit the court, the judge, and the case.
In an attempt to distract from and diminish Trump’s legal issues, Republicans spent the week creating a conspiracy theory around the FBI having a standard policy for when the use of deadly force is authorized.
Because this standard policy was included in the paperwork for the operation to collect the stolen classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, MAGA evolved the narrative from a “green light for deadly force” all the way to “an assassination attempt on Trump.”
Besides this policy being standard for all fieldwork, the FBI also coordinated with the Secret Service and picked a day when Trump wasn’t even at Mar-a-Lago, making the conspiracy all the more ridiculous. The same deadly force policy was included when the FBI went to Biden’s residence.
Senate Republicans voted to block the bipartisan border bill for the second time. Even Senator James Lankford, who authored the bill, voted against it the second time around, highlighting how much of a partisan campaign issue the border has become.
Despite Republicans’ continual complaints about the border, border crossings have actually decreased for three months in a row and are less than half of what they were last December.
Given the language used by Republicans, such as demanding that Biden fix the border without a bill passing in Congress, and how prevalent the topic is for GOP campaigns, including Trump, it is unlikely that we will see any genuine attempt at immigration reform this year.
Louisiana signed into law a classification of misoprostol and mifepristone as schedule IV drugs. This makes simple possession of these drugs a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
While mifepristone is only used as an abortion drug, misoprostol is used for additional procedures, including IUD insertions, treating miscarriages, and endometrial biopsies. Given the range of medical uses for misoprostol and the relatively safe nature of the drug, the classification is raising concerns that go beyond the extreme abortion stance.
This classification came as part of a bill that was aimed at creating the crime of coerced criminal abortion for anyone who administers abortion drugs to someone without their consent.
Late in the process, the rescheduling of abortion medication was added to the bill. While there was unanimous support for the bill initially, the drug classification complicated the process, although the bill did pass both chambers and was signed into law.
Louisiana is already one of the most restrictive states in regard to reproductive rights and is now the first state to have criminalized possession of abortion medication.