Comment on If You Want to Understand Trump’s Appeal, Look at John Gotti

Freddie “Khalil” Owens. Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams. Emmanuel Littlejohn. Travis Mullis. Alan Eugene Miller. All five men were executed within one week in five different states, a period political scientist Austin Sarat condemned as “the worst execution spree in three decades.” The most high-profile execution took place on Tuesday when Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, who had maintained his innocence for decades.

When Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on Friday morning, he looked out over a world transformed by almost a year of unabated bombing and tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza. Several delegations walked out of his speech and throngs of people outside protested his presence in the city.  The way the world views Netanyahu, and Israel, has changed.

Surprise, surprise. JD Vance’s self-proclaimed seamless journey from a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016—who called the former president potentially “America’s Hitler”—to a fervent supporter of the man in 2020 may not be the complete story. According to a Friday report from the Washington Post, in February 2020, Vance condemned Trump’s choices during his first term in office in private messages on X.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Tuesday, the youth-led activist group Climate Defiance—which had loudly called for Joe Biden to withdraw his bid for reelection earlier this year—endorsed Kamala Harris for president. But despite that support and soaring enthusiasm from young people after Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, with less than 40 days left until the election, excitement has cooled off among many young voters who are prioritizing climate and calling for stronger commitments from the candidate. After the September 10 debate, some young voters and climate groups were unimpressed by both candidates’ support for oil and gas production, voicing dismay over Harris’ shift to the center on climate. “If Harris wants to win, she needs to be far more progressive than she was tonight,” wrote Gen-Z for Change on X after the debate.

There appears to be a bullet lodged in Tim Sheehy’s right forearm. That is not in dispute. But how and when it got there has become the subject of an ongoing mystery that has dogged the campaign of the former Navy SEAL challenging Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in one of this election cycle’s most high-stakes races. The question of how Sheehy was shot first came up last spring in a Washington Post exposé by Liz Goodwin who reported that Sheehy had said on the campaign trail he has a “bullet stuck” in his right arm from his time serving in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday night, as prosecutors prepared to unveil a five-count criminal indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting and receiving illegal foreign campaign contributions and doing favors for the government of Turkey, the first-term Democrat released a statement accusing investigators of a vast conspiracy of their own. “When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system,” Adams said, in a taped address recorded somewhere in Gracie Mansion, he “put the people of New York before party and politics.” The investigation and subsequent criminal charges, Adams implied, were an act of retribution from on high.