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Thursday, March 30, 2023

How Republicans Are Reacting to the Indictment of Former President Donald Trump

Donald Trump made history on Thursday, becoming the first former U.S. president to be criminally charged, after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him in a case related to paying hush money to former adult movie star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. The news comes as Trump is in the midst of his third campaign for President. In a statement, he called the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level.”

Many of the former President’s fellow Republicans have quickly come to his defense, expressing varying levels of dismay at the indictment, with some even vowing to take official countermeasures however they can.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is believed to be Trump’s main rival for the GOP presidential nomination, lambasted the indictment. “The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct,” DeSantis tweeted, referring to Democratic mega-donor George Soros and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney overseeing the case. “Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent.”

DeSantis added that “Florida will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances.” The Constitution and federal law require states to comply with other state’s extradition requests, though one of Trump’s attorneys told TIME that the former President is expected to turn himself in to be arraigned in New York on Tuesday.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy also backed Trump Thursday night, tweeting that “Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election.” McCarthy added that “the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account.”

A number of Republican members of Congress responded similarly on Twitter:

“This is an attack on every American,” tweeted Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna. “Every single Member of Congress needs to think long and hard about their oath of office. Your next moves will show the world exactly who you are.”

It’s not clear, however, what Congress can do. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia called once again for President Joe Biden’s impeachment, tweeting that “the gloves are off.”

Some Republicans have used the indictment to raise money. “The Deep State thinks this will destroy our movement and keep you quiet,” the National Republican Congressional Committee reportedly sent in a fundraising email that implored recipients to “prove them wrong.”

“After YEARS of sham impeachment attempts, the radical Left is still refusing to give up on their liberally biased vendetta,” reads a fundraising email from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. “Stand with conservatives NOW.”

Speaking to Fox News, Hawley said Congress must call on Attorney General Merrick Garland to question if the Biden administration or “dark money” were involved in the indictment.

Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who just earlier this month said at a political dinner that “history will hold Donald Trump accountable” for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, told CNN on Thursday night that the indictment of a former U.S. President “on a campaign finance issue is an outrage.”

“How does this end?” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said on Fox News on Thursday. “Trump wins in court, and he wins the election. That’s how this ends.”

House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York said in a statement: “Tens of millions of patriotic Americans have never been so energized to exercise their constitutional rights to peacefully organize and VOTE at the ballot box to save our great republic by electing President Donald J. Trump in 2024.”

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, tweeted after the news of the indictment that it’s a “sad day for America.”

Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican representative from Illinois, expressed a similar sentiment, posting on Twitter that “today is a somber day for our nation.” But Kinzinger, who was one of only 10 Republicans to back Trump’s impeachment in 2021, is among the few members of his party who aren’t outraged by the former President’s indictment. “Donald Trump committed many crimes, but this indictment should be a reminder that in America, NO ONE is above the law.”

Don Bacon, a moderate Republican congressman from Nebraska, was more reserved than some of his colleagues. Bacon told Axios that he trusts the legal system: “There’s checks and balances with a jury, judges and appeals. President Trump will be able to make his defense and we’ll all see if this is a partisan prosecution or not.”

Trump has survived years of legal trouble before. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and a key witness to the Manhattan prosecutors, told CNN after the indictment that “this is a long time coming.”



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Why This Indictment Can’t Stop Donald Trump From Being Elected President

Former President Donald Trump was indicted by the Manhattan district attorney on Thursday for his role in paying alleged hush money to a porn star. The move raised a number of legal questions as Trump vies for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination; one of them being—do criminal charges disqualify Trump from being elected president?

The short answer is that even if Trump is convicted, the charges against him won’t disqualify him from the presidency, legal experts tell TIME.

“There is no constitutional bar on a felon running for office,” says Richard Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA Law School. “And given that the U.S. Constitution sets presidential qualifications, it is not clear that states could add to them, such as by barring felons from running for office.”
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Under the constitution, all natural born citizens who are at least 35 years old and have been a resident of the U.S. for 14 years can run for president. There is no legal impediment to Trump continuing his presidential campaign while facing criminal charges—even if he were jailed, legal experts say.

In a statement released Thursday evening, Trump denied wrongdoing and characterized the probe by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as part of a “witch hunt” against him. Earlier this month, Trump told reporters at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that he would “absolutely” stay in the race for president even if he were to be criminally indicted. “I wouldn’t even think about leaving,” he said. “Probably, it’ll enhance my numbers.”

Trump’s campaign and his lawyer Joe Tacopina did not respond to requests for comment Thursday evening.

“It’s simultaneously embarrassing, but also makes him something of a martyr,” says Saikrishna Prakash, a distinguished constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia Law School. Legal experts and political pundits on Thursday evening were rushing to join the conversation about how the indictment might impact Trump’s presidential chances. Some said it could help Trump, thrusting him into the national spotlight as he aims to be the dominant figure of his party. Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, said on Newsmax that a mugshot of Trump could serve as a campaign poster for his campaign. “He will be mugshot and fingerprinted. There’s really no way around that,” he said.

And while Trump is the first former president to be charged with a crime, he’s far from the first presidential candidate to run despite criminal charges. At least two candidates with criminal convictions have even run for president in the past, albeit unsuccessfully. Hasen, of UCLA Law, noted that in 1920 a candidate named Eugene Debs ran for president while in a federal prison in Atlanta as the nominee of the Socialist Party. Debs was convicted of violating the Espionage Act over an anti-war speech, and won more than 3% of the vote nationally. Another convicted presidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche, ran for president in every election between 1976 and 2004. LaRouche, a fringe candidate who embraced conspiracy theories, was convicted of tax and mail fraud in 1988 and ran his 1992 campaign from prison.

But while it might be legally possible for Trump to run for president even if he is convicted, a number of practical hurdles could make campaigning more difficult. For example, if he were to be sentence to jail, Prakash says, that would inhibit his ability to conduct a campaign—but it wouldn’t necessarily inhibit his ability to win. The New York judge assigned to Trump’s case could have the ultimate decision on whether the former president can campaign while under indictment, though it seems unlikely that prosecutors would seek to detain the former president or restrict his campaign travel while the case is pending. In most white-collar crime cases like the one Trump faces, the defendant is immediately released following charges.

“I cannot imagine that Trump would be convicted, and sent to jail, before the 2024 election season is over,” Hasen says.

The legalities become more murky if Trump were to win the presidency while facing impending charges or a conviction. “The Office of Legal Counsel has said you can’t indict or prosecute or punish a sitting president,” Prakash says. “They’ve never had to discuss, to my knowledge, what happens if someone becomes president after being prosecuted or while in jail.”



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Here’s the Latest on Donald Trump’s Indictment by a Manhattan Grand Jury

Former President Donald Trump was criminally indicted on Thursday by a Manhattan grand jury. While the exact charges are not yet known, they reportedly relate to the payment of hush money to a former porn star.

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced Thursday evening that it had reached out to Trump’s team to discuss an arraignment date. Trump called the indictment “political persecution” in a statement, attacking Bragg as a “disgrace” and predicting the decision would hurt Democrats in the 2024 election.

The indictment, which remains under seal, marks the first time in American history that a former President has been criminally charged, and sets up a stunning legal and political test for the nation as Trump once again seeks the presidency.
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Here are the latest updates on the indictment.

Catch up on the case

Trump’s Indictment Drama Showcased His Rivals’ Weakness

Donald Trump Has Been Indicted. Here’s What Happens Next in the Process

Donald Trump Was Just Indicted. Here’s What to Know About the Charges and the Case

Donald Trump Is the First President Ever Criminally Charged. Others Have Come Close Though

Here’s how Trump is responding

Trump is claiming that the prosecution against him is politically motivated in order to hurt his candidacy for President in 2024.

Trump responded to the grand jury’s vote to indict him Thursday in a statement: “This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history. From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, and even before I was sworn in as your President of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats – the enemy of the hard-working men and women of this Country – have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement. You remember it just like I do: Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”

His statement further claimed Bragg had indicted “a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.”

He also wrote on his social media site Truth Social that the indictment is “an attack on our country” and an attack on “free and fair elections.”

“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED [sic] the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican Candidate, by far, for the 2024 Nomination for President,” Trump wrote.

Trump’s responses did not mention his public and well-documented efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.

Here’s what happens next

Next, Trump will be arraigned in front of a magistrate judge, which usually happens at the courthouse in lower Manhattan. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has contacted Trump’s legal team to negotiate when he will surrender himself.

“This evening we contacted Mr. Trump’s attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.’s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal,” a spokesperson for Bragg said in a statement. “Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected.”

At the initial hearing and arraignment, Trump will be told the charges against him, his rights, and have a chance to name his own lawyer to represent him, or use a court-appointed attorney.

Once he is arraigned, the judge will decide if he is a flight risk or presents a danger, or if he can be released until the trial. This sets in motion the legal process. At a later date, Trump will have a chance to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges. If Trump pleads not guilty, the court will hear pre-trial motions, and court dates will be set for discovery and a trial to begin.

If the preliminary proceedings take as long as other similar cases, the trial may not start until well into 2024, in the heat of the presidential election cycle.

When could we know the charges?

Likely soon.

Trump’s indictment is currently under seal and not yet public. Usually the charges against a defendant are made public at the arraignment or slightly before.

Once the indictment is made public, the country will be able to see exactly what charges Trump faces and a summary of some of the evidence Bragg says has been gathered to back up the charges.



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Why Did the Stormy Daniels Case Lead to Trump’s First Indictment?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicted Donald Trump over an alleged hush money payment during his 2016 presidential campaign. It is the first time in American history that a former president has been indicted.

Bragg’s’s case stems from events that occurred before Trump became President. Yet there are several other investigations underway involving Trump’s behavior after he was inaugurated. Prosecutors in Georgia’s Fulton County are looking into Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win in the state. The former President is also under scrutiny by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith for two separate matters: his handling of classified documents and his actions leading up to the deadly siege of the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.
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Given how many investigators have Trump in their sights, it’s worth asking why the case involving a 2016 payment to an adult film actor Stormy Daniels became the first to land a charge.

The Stormy Daniels case is more than 6 years old. Why is this coming up now?

The case has been kicked around the Manhattan District attorney’s office for years. Alvin Bragg, a 49-year-old career prosecutor, took over the office in January 2021 from Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., whose prosecutors had reportedly been following multiple lines of investigation into Trump and his businesses. Vance did not bring any charges against Trump before he left office. Bragg inherited the ongoing investigations, and ended up moving forward with the Daniels case.

At issue in the case is how the Trump Organization and Trump recorded repaying his fixer Michael Cohen $130,000 for a payment to Daniels to keep quiet just before the 2016 election about an alleged affair with Trump.

Cohen says his reimbursements were falsely recorded in internal records as legal fees when actually the money was a campaign expense to keep Daniels quiet. Cohen has also said that Trump knew about the details of the payment and why it was being made. Trump’s legal team denies this and says that Trump would have paid off Daniels regardless of whether he was running for President.

Trump responded to the grand jury’s vote to indict him on Thursday, writing on his social media site TruthSocial that the indictment is “an attack on our country” and an attack on “free and fair elections,” given that he is a candidate for President. Trump’s response did not mention his public and well-documented efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Trump has faced legal problems for decades. What’s different now?

For nearly 50 years, Trump has tried to sidestep investigations and lawsuits with a simple strategy: delay, deflect, deny and avoid putting anything in writing. The case of the Stormy Daniels payment is challenging that approach.

Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen says that Trump reimbursed him for the hush money payment to Daniels in order to stop her from going public before the election with her account of an alleged affair with Trump. Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea for campaign finance violations in relation to the hush money payment has given prosecutors a clear trail of evidence to follow. The case will test Trump’s decades-long ability to avoid harsh punishments in the court system.

Trump was also largely immune from prosecutions while he was President. Once he left the Oval Office, multiple investigations began to slowly move forward, some of them tied to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election that he had lost.

“The fact that this indictment may involve the least of Trump’s alleged crimes, shouldn’t matter. It has to do with the timing of the work of various grand juries,” says Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, recently told TIME. “The bigger issue is whether the former president is above the law and the answer is, ‘no.’”

Trump is trying to use his status as a 2024 presidential candidate to say that Bragg is targeting him for political reasons. Bragg was the one “breaking the law,” for going after a former President and leading presidential candidate, Trump wrote on Truth Social on March 19, adding that Bragg should be “held accountable” for the “crime of interfering in a presidential election.”

Is the Daniels case a slam dunk for the prosecution?

It does not look that way, though the shape of the case will become clearer once the indictment is publically released. In order for the Manhattan district attorney to prosecute the case, a court will want to ensure that the alleged crimes fall within Bragg’s jurisdiction. If Bragg can’t show that, a court could reject the case or demand the prosecutor pursue more narrow charges.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has considerable experience filing charges for alleging false business records. But to bring a more serious felony charge in this case, Bragg’s office may need to allege that Trump falsified business records with the intent to conceal a second crime. That second crime in this case may end up being an alleged violation of federal election law.

Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges in 2018 in relation to the hush money payment. It’s an open question as to whether New York state prosecutors have jurisdiction to bring a case that relates to federal election law. In the federal case, Cohen said the payments and coverup were done with an intention to influence the election. Because Cohen pleaded guilty in that case, his claims were never challenged in court, and there are few, if any, precedents.

Bragg’s predecessor Vance reportedly had concerns that relying on federal election law for the second crime could weaken the case, according to The New York Times.

That may be the newly charted territory Bragg is examining, and why charges in that case have taken so long to surface.

What should I know about Alvin Bragg?

Bragg is the first Black man to be elected as Manhattan district attorney in the 220-year history of the office. Previously, he was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and the deputy chief in the state attorney general’s office. While in the state attorney general’s office, Bragg was part of lawsuits against the Donald J. Trump Foundation that ended in a $2 million settlement paid by Trump.

Read more: For Both Donald Trump and Alvin Bragg, the Central Park Jogger Case Was a Turning Point

Bragg grew up in Harlem in upper Manhattan before earning his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. Bragg beat out seven candidates in the Democratic primary for Manhattan District Attorney in 2021, and then easily won in the general election. He campaigned on delivering criminal justice reform policies. When he got to office, he was criticized for a public memo he wrote about his plan to reduce prosecutions. Critics of Bragg’s plan included New York Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell.

What about the other Trump cases Bragg’s office was pursuing?

Bragg has moved forward on a separate Trump-related case, but has not directly charged Trump with a crime in that proceeding. In December 2022, Bragg’s office successfully convicted the Trump Organization of criminal tax fraud and, in January, a court sentenced Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, to five months in prison.

Several weeks into Bragg’s term as district attorney, two prosecutors investigating cases related to Trump resigned over concerns that Bragg was hesitating to press forward with charges against Trump.

Can being a former President and a current presidential candidate protect Trump?

Nope. The Justice Department has a long-standing practice of not charging a sitting President with a crime. That practice was challenged during the Trump administration when Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded there was evidence that Trump had obstructed his investigation but didn’t clearly recommend an indictment.

But a former President, even one who is again a presidential candidate, can face criminal charges just like any other citizen.“There is a feeling that somehow former presidents, because of the high office they used to occupy, should somehow be treated differently,” says the historian Naftali. “The framers never intended that former presidents should have immunity from criminal prosecution; there is no such immunity.”



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Swift Response to the Nashville Shooting Thrusts Uvalde Police Failures Back Into Spotlight

This week marked the second time in 10 months that police officers were called to confront an active shooter armed with assault rifles in an elementary school. But unlike the previous incident at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. last May, when it took police over an hour to stop the shooter, officers at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. on Monday ended the deadly incident in just minutes.

It was a “textbook response” to an active shooting situation, says Ken Trump, president of the consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services. “Get the call, get to the scene quickly, immediately move in, and follow the sound that leads you directly to neutralize the shooter—period,” he says.
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Law enforcement experts and citizens commended the Nashville police department for releasing body camera footage just one day after the shooting, a sharp contrast to the nearly two months it took officials in Uvalde to release video. The videos showed several heavily armed Nashville police officers immediately rushing into the school and sweeping classrooms until they found and killed the suspect. Three young students and three employees were killed.

The shooter was taken down 14 minutes after police were called, prompting comparisons to the police response to the school shooting in Uvalde, in which 77 minutes passed between the arrival of officers and when they ultimately killed the gunman. At one point during the standoff, onlookers begged the police to charge the school. Some parents even tried breaking windows to reunite with their children. 19 students and two teachers were killed in the incident.

“When you watch the body camera footage, you see that the Nashville police officers were more aggressive in how they pursued the attacker,” says Pete Blair, the executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) program at Texas State University. “In Uvalde, they lost momentum badly and didn’t come up with an immediate action plan.”

The Texas Tribune reported last week that officers in Uvalde felt that confronting the gunman would be too dangerous since he was armed with an AR-15, even though some officers were armed with the same rifle. They opted to wait for the arrival of a Border Patrol SWAT team based more than 60 miles away, in opposition to the mainstream police training protocols for active-shooter situations since the Columbine High School mass killing in 1999.

“Law enforcement saw the ramifications of waiting for SWAT when the Columbine shooting happened,” says Steve Smith, a SWAT team leader in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. and the founder of Guardian Defense, an active shooter training program that has helped some 50,000 people prepare for active threats. “Now officers are taught to respond even by themselves. Our skills have sharpened based on incidents that have happened in the past.”

Like the shooter in Uvalde, the Nashville assailant—Audrey Hale—was heavily armed, carrying three guns, two of them assault-type weapons, according to Nashville police.

Metro Nashville Police Officers arrived at the school around 10 minutes after they were called. As Officer Rex Engelbert exited his vehicle, an unidentified woman told him that “the kids are all locked down” in the school but that two children were unaccounted for. She noted that “a bunch of kids” were upstairs, according to the footage released Tuesday.

“Yes ma’am,” Engelbert responded. He was then handed a key to the school and opened the locked entry door. With other officers arriving, Engelbert called out to form a team. “Give me three, let’s get three!” he shouted. “Let’s go! I need three!” Approximately two and a half minutes later, officers tracked the shooter down a hallway, where Hale was standing in front of a wall of glass windows.

“They heard gunfire and immediately ran to that and then took care of this horrible situation,” John Drake, chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said at a Tuesday news briefing. “I was really impressed, with all that was going on—the danger—that somebody took control and said, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!’ and went in.” He added that the shooter fired on responding officers from a second-story window before being killed.

Blair says that law enforcement has been more focused on active shooter response plans in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, with many police departments creating development scripts that lay out how they would handle a similar situation. The decision by Nashville police to release the body camera footage not long after the shooting is just one example of how law enforcement must be more transparent in these situations, he adds.

“It makes it look like you’re covering something up—even if you’re not—by not releasing the video in relatively short order,” Blair says. “Sometimes there can be investigative reasons for not releasing video footage, but in general I think that when the police are upfront and put things out there, even when they make mistakes, that tends to increase public trust.”

Ken Trump, the school safety expert who formerly led school security operations in the Cleveland, Ohio area, says police should move quickly to eliminate the opportunity for misinformation by providing the facts to the public. “The second biggest disaster in Uvalde after the shooting itself was the communications disaster, which by and large broke almost every rule that’s been learned for decades on crisis communications post-incident,” he says.



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The Long-Term Mental Health Needs of Young School Shooting Survivors

Following the Nashville, Tenn., school shooting this week—the third such tragedy in as many months in 2023—one of the many urgent questions confronting the nation revolves around the growing generation of survivors, many of whom are children too young to properly process a traumatic event. When survivors are elementary school students, as the dozens of students at Nashville’s Covenant School are, they won’t necessarily have the language and emotional maturity to express themselves, much less process such trauma.

“Young kids are just beginning to learn how to identify and communicate emotions through language, and to find those words,” says Rachel Masi, a clinical psychologist and director of research at Sandy Hook Promise, a non-profit organization formed to prevent violence against youth.
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Yet, even at young ages, “kids are definitely able to experience trauma and grief,” says Melissa Brymer, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the UCLA-Duke National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, a government-funded network of experts who educate and provide treatment recommendations for managing traumatic stress among children. Reading the different ways that children express those emotions falls to their families and teachers, who might be the first to notice the changes in behavior that are often the most common way younger kids signal that they are struggling.

“When kids don’t have the language to express themselves, they often have physical symptoms such as stomach aches or headaches,” says Masi. “Depression also looks different in children; some might refuse to go to school, or get up in the morning, or even develop increased attachment to their parents or caregiver.”

The question, in such cases, is how can mental health professionals provide the support that these young survivors need?

Masi, who was part of the team that worked with the young survivors and families affected by the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, says standard strategies for addressing trauma in adults, such as cognitive behavior therapy, can also be helpful with children, with some modifications. Rather than focusing as heavily on conversations and discussions, for example, she will turn to outlets such as drawing to allow children to express their feelings. Play is another way to help children to express themselves, as is focusing on their physical symptoms.

“I often start with asking what is going on in the child’s body…[like] how they know they are hungry.” says Masi. “They will say their stomach rumbles, or makes sounds. Then I ask how their stomach feels when they are worried or anxious, and they will tell me it feels like they have butterflies in their stomach, or that their feet won’t stay still. I help them understand what their emotional experiences look like in the physical realm, and from there work with them to develop language for what they are feeling so they can start to process their trauma.”

And because children aren’t always able to understand or articulate what they are feeling, the adults in their lives bear a greater responsibility in understanding and looking for signs of struggle. Brymer, who also worked with families from Sandy Hook, says it’s important to provide services not just for the children but also for the adults closest to them, to ensure those adults feel comfortable and equipped to provide the support that the children need. Feeling strong support from their adult caregivers can help children affected by trauma to learn how to trust and feel safe again.

For younger kids that means adults also need to be aware that as their children develop mentally, their understanding and processing of their trauma may also need to evolve. Parents may be able to shield the students at Covenant, for example, from the barrage of news reports and the bodycam footage of law enforcement officers storming their school, but as these children get older and gain more independence and access to social media and the internet, that will change. And seeing their trauma play out again may be challenging for them to manage.

That’s also true of any depiction of violence, and especially gun violence, in our culture, says Brymer. Books, movies, and other entertainment aimed at younger children don’t generally contain many references to violence, but as children mature, they are exposed to increasingly intense violence, not only in almost every form of popular culture they consume, but also through the bloody battles that are part of our history. “There is a sensational aspect to violence and trauma [depicted in our culture] that kids who have experienced real trauma and violence don’t appreciate,” says Brymer. “For them, they’ve seen loved ones killed. So it’s not entertaining. Teachers and parents should be proactive with reading and social content to appreciate what the children can handle at a given moment.”

But there is no playbook for that yet, largely because each child’s experience, and ability to process and cope with a traumatic event, is different. And the understanding of how these interventions are helping children who survive a school shooting, both in the short run, but equally importantly over the long term, still isn’t clear. “We really don’t know yet what effect exposure to such trauma will have on children as they grow up,” says Masi. “I think it does impact whether they see their world as safe or not, but we don’t quite know yet. We are living in it and can only give our best guesses and try to prepare them and help them heal as much as possible.”

Part of that processing and recovery goes beyond what individual children and families can do, and that relies on broader societal and political leadership to enact changes to make places like schools safer. “This generation is frustrated because they feel these things keep happening to them, and nothing happens,” says Masi of the young school shooting survivors who are now grown and have become activists for reform in gun control laws. A critical part of helping young trauma survivors rebuild their trust and sense of safety in society is to see positive actions to prevent violent events such as school shootings from happening again. “As adults, we can do more to create that change, to say that ‘Okay, we hear you and your experience is valid and real; you shouldn’t have to be scared to go to school, and we’re going to change it.’ We can give kids tools to empower themselves, but our communities also need to create change to make things better. The more we can do to create real change, the better for these survivors.”



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Russia Arrests Wall Street Journal Reporter on Spying Charge

Russia’s top security agency arrested an American reporter for the Wall Street Journal on espionage charges, the first time a U.S. correspondent was put behind bars on spying accusations since the Cold War. The newspaper denied the allegations against Evan Gershkovich.

The Federal Security Service said Thursday that Gershkovich was detained in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg while allegedly trying to obtain classified information.

The FSB, which is the top successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, alleged that Gershkovich “was acting on the U.S. orders to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military industrial complex that constitutes a state secret.”
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“The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich,” the newspaper said. “We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”

The arrest comes amid bitter tensions between the West and Moscow over its war in Ukraine and as the Kremlin intensifies its crackdown on opposition activists, independent journalists and civil society groups. The broad government campaign of repression hasn’t been seen since the Soviet era.

Earlier this week, a Russian court convicted a single father over social media posts critical of the war in Ukraine and sentenced him to two years in prison while his 13-year-old daughter was sent to an orphanage.

Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since September 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB. He was released without charges 20 days later in a swap for an employee of the Soviet Union’s United Nations mission who was arrested by the FBI.

The FSB didn’t say when the arrest took place. Gershkovich, who covers Russia, Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations as a correspondent in the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau, could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of espionage.

The FSB noted that he had accreditation from the Russian Foreign Ministry to work as a journalist, but ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Gershkovich was using his journalistic credentials as a cover for “activities that have nothing to do with journalism.”

Gershkovich speaks fluent Russian and had previously worked for the French agency Agence France-Presse and The New York Times. His last report from Moscow, published earlier this week, focused on the Russian economy’s slowdown amid Western sanctions imposed when Russian troops invaded Ukraine last year.

Gershkovich’s arrest follows a swap in December, in which WNBA star Brittney Griner was freed after 10 months behind bars in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Another American, Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive, has been imprisoned in Russia since December 2018 on espionage charges that his family and the U.S. government have said are baseless.

Jeanne Cavelier, head of Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk at the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, said Gershkovich was the first foreign journalist who was arrested in Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine.

“It looks like a retaliation measure of Russia against the United States, so we are very alarmed because it is probably a way to intimidate all Western journalists that are trying to investigate aspects of the war on the ground in Russia,” Cavelier she told The Associated Press. “The Western powers should immediately ask for clarifications on the charges, because as far as we know he was just doing his job as a journalist.”

Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev said on the messaging app Telegram that he spoke to Gershkovich before his trip to Yekaterinburg.

“He was preparing for the usual, albeit rather dangerous in current conditions, journalist work,” Kolezev wrote. He said Gershkovich asked him for the contacts of local journalists and officials in the area as he prepared to arrange interviews.



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Dozens Dead and Hundreds Rescued as Search Efforts Continue After Philippine Ferry Fire: What to Know About the Disaster

Search and rescue efforts are still underway Thursday for passengers of a commercial ferry that caught fire in the southern waters of the Philippines, Wednesday evening, killing dozens and injuring many more.

At least 205 passengers and 35 crew members were on board the MV Lady Mary Joy 3 when it went up in flames off the coast of Baluk-Baluk Island in Basilan, an archipelagic province some 580 miles south of the Southeast Asian nation’s capital.

Initial figures the Philippine Coast Guard in Zamboanga gave to TIME say 201 people have been rescued as of Thursday afternoon local time. Provincial Governor Jim Hataman-Salliman told the Associated Press that the death toll has climbed to 31, but differing reports from Coast Guard Commodore Rejard Marfe have only confirmed 28 casualties so far. Authorities believe more people were aboard the ferry than those listed in the manifest, and the search and rescue operation is expected to continue through Friday.
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The passenger ferry left the Zamboanga port at 8:30 p.m. headed for Jolo in the southernmost province of Sulu. Coast guard officials said they received a report of the fire at around 10:40 p.m. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the fire. Arsina Kahing-Nanoh—the mayor of Hadji Muhtamad, the municipality nearest where the ship went ablaze—told CNN Philippines that a rescued passenger said they heard an explosion before the fire. The ship is currently moored in Baluk-Baluk.

The Philippines’ history of accidents at sea

Sea transport in the Philippines is plagued by several issues—from dangerous weather to poor maritime industry regulations to lack of ship maintenance and overcrowding—leaving ships prone to accidents. Latest statistics from the country’s Maritime Industry Authority showed that they investigated 214 accidents at sea in 2021—the most in five years and more than double the number investigated the year before.

In December 1987, the MV Doña Paz, a passenger ferry bound for Manila, collided with an oil tanker carrying 9,000 barrels of combustible petroleum products, sinking the ferry and resulting in more than 4,300 fatalities in one of the world’s deadliest maritime disasters.

A 2011 study of the MV Doña Paz tragedy and other maritime incidents in the country said ships in the Philippines often ply routes with “unpredictable” or “hazardous” travel conditions, often worsened by typhoons. Lack of maritime infrastructure often forces seafarers to rely on “experience and instinct.”

In 2018, the Philippines finalized a 10-year maritime industry development plan—with “the enhancement of maritime safety” among one of its eight key programs.

Accidents, however, continue to happen. Seven people died last year after a high-speed Philippine ferry carrying 134 passengers caught fire just as it was about to approach its destination. The fire reportedly came from the engine room.

And just last month, a tanker that capsized off the coast of Oriental Mindoro, some 110 miles south of Manila, caused an oil spill that spread to other parts of the 7,600-island archipelago, threatening local coastal livelihoods and important marine environments.

Philippine Senator Grace Poe filed a bill earlier this month to create a board governing transportation safety. “Even before reparations are done on an incident, another tragedy strikes claiming lives and harming the environment,” she said in a statement Thursday.



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Erdogan’s Political Reign Has Never Been on Shakier Footing

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul when a devastating earthquake hit Izmit in 1999, killing more than 17,000 people and devastating the country’s economy. The government’s shambolic response to the natural disaster created an opportunity for Erdogan to burnish his credentials as a capable and compassionate leader, setting the stage for his election as premier in 2003.

Erdogan has maintained an iron rule ever since, outliving economic downturns, refugee crises, corruption scandals, protests movements, and even a coup attempt. But with the May 14 presidential and parliamentary elections just around the corner, seismic shifts both literal and figurative are threatening to upend the president’s grip on power for the first time in two decades.
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The most obvious challenge to Erdogan’s reelection is his botched response to the earthquakes that rocked Turkey and Syria in February, which claimed over 45,000 lives and internally displaced some two million people across ten provinces. Accounts from the ground broadcast over social media told a story of overwhelming government incompetence, from delayed rescue efforts and assistance to affected areas to misuse of available resources to an inability to quell unrest and establish public order. Many Turkish citizens also blame Erdogan’s consolidation of power and populist policies for allowing shoddy construction to grow unchecked. While the president may be able to weaponize his control of the media and government spending to contain the immediate political fallout, the damage to his credibility as a steady hand is already done.

Read More: How Erdoğan’s Obsession With Power Got in the Way of Turkey’s Earthquake Response

The second and perhaps more significant challenge to Erdogan’s rule is a main opposition bloc that is for the first time in ages united behind a joint presidential candidate, People’s Republican Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Kilicdaroglu has surprised everyone by managing to consolidate much of Turkey’s notoriously fractious opposition under the umbrella of the Nation Alliance, which comprises social-democrat, center-right, right-wing, and Islamist parties, at the same time as he’s expanded support for the bloc.

To have a shot at beating Erdogan, Kilicdaroglu needs to win over the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and its left-wing Labor and Freedom Alliance—the election’s kingmakers—without alienating his biggest coalition partner, the Turkish nationalist and conservative Good Party (IP). This is a tricky balancing act but one he’s proving capable of pulling off. The CHP leader successfully mended his relationship with the IP after a public row over his engagement with the HDP, and the HDP has already signaled its support for Kilicdaroglu by refraining from fielding a candidate of its own.

Recent polls accordingly show Kilicdaroglu leading the president, although neither candidate likely to attain a first-round win. As things stand, the HDP is also likely to hand the anti-Erdogan Nation Alliance a slim majority in parliament. Critically, an opposition victory in the parliamentary elections would boost Kilicdaroglu’s chances in the second round of the presidential contest.

Of course, it’s too early to say whether Kilicdaroglu will be able to hold the coalition together and sustain his momentum. For example, the HDP could make demands that are non-starters for IP such as cabinet posts or regional autonomy, which would undermine opposition unity.

Erdogan is also a skilled politician with ample experience leveraging his bully pulpit. Having already dismantled or hollowed out most independent checks on his power, including the military, the judiciary, and the media, the president will use any means at his disposal—however heavy-handed or anti-democratic—to tilt the scales in his favor. At a minimum, he will ramp up state-financed handouts to buy votes and try to link the HDP with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to paint his chief rival as a terrorist sympathizer. Should he feel cornered enough, he could jail opposition leaders under false pretenses and criminalize dissent. Yet nothing he does at this point is likely to earn the president much genuine support outside of his core voter base—even if fear tactics and repression help him secure another term.

One thing is clear: In the 20 years he’s been in power, Erdogan’s political fortunes have never been on shakier footing.



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