By the end of the first week of his criminal trial, Donald Trump had never looked more frustrated.

Confined to a worn, burgundy leather chair for hours on end — without social media to scroll or a throng of associates to entertain him — the former president listened to average New Yorkers give their opinions of him. He weathered admonishments from the bench. He complained at the courthouse about the temperature in the room (“freezing”) and, on Friday, his gag order (“They’re taking away my constitutional rights to speak — and that includes speaking to you,” he said to reporters).


And when he got time away from the courtroom — posing in front of a wall of potato chip bags at a Harlem bodega (“a beautiful place,” he called it) and dining with the Polish president at Trump Tower — Trump still took to posting online about the trial, grumbling on his day off not only about “Stupid Jimmy Kimmel,” but about the jury selection process.

For the first time in months, despite his many legal entanglements in New York and elsewhere, it was Trump, not his opponent, President Joe Biden, who seemed to have been thrown off balance, constrained by a judge’s schedule and gag orders as he whipsawed between the courtroom and the functions of his campaign.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/20/trump-trial-presidential-campaign-costs-00153446

As Trump’s Republican allies in the United States Congress block military aid that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Kyiv desperately needs to avoid defeat in its war with invading Russian forces, it’s clear the former U.S. president’s ill will toward Ukraine has deep roots.

It was, after all, a phone call with Zelenskyy that led to Trump’s first impeachment in December 2019, after he was accused of seeking to influence the 2020 election by leaning on the Ukrainian leader to investigate current President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

There’s every sign the country is still preying on his mind. When Congress moved this month to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — legislation governing the surveillance of suspected international adversaries — Trump took to social media to object.

“KILL FISA,” he posted on Truth Social. “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS.”
That Trump was likely referring to the wiretapping of his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is unlikely to have gone unnoticed in Ukraine, where officials are watching the U.S. presidential election campaign for signs of what it could mean for their war effort.

https://www.politico.eu/article/why-donald-trump-hates-ukraine-us-congress-kyiv-war/

Rare is the member of Congress who represents a district that voted for the other party’s nominee for President. Gerrymandering has rendered those political survivors harder to find than unicorns while reducing the truly competitive House districts to so few they fit on a single whiteboard in strategists’ offices. But it’s those oddities that draw intrigue and, with that, campaign cash. And looking at the money flowing to those 22 lawmakers, a telling trend emerges that may indicate something important about 2024.

In the first three months of this year, the official campaign committees for the five Democrats who represent districts that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 are outraising the 17 Republicans from Joe Biden-backing districts by a more than two-to-one margin. (An 18th Republican, George Santos, began this Congress as a political unicorn but became an Icarus and ex-House member. His seat is now in Democrats’ hands.)

Every single day of the last three months, these mismatched Democratic lawmakers in the House raised, on average, more than $12,000 in hard dollars for their campaign, according to a new TIME analysis of records filed to the Federal Election Commission this week. (This analysis is ignoring super PACs, joint fundraising efforts with state or national parties, and independent and advocacy groups.) Republicans, who are enduring an incredibly narrow and fractious majority in the House, brought in an average of $5,200 daily for their campaigns in the last quarter. Put bluntly: this doesn’t suggest the most vulnerable Republicans are successfully convincing donors to stock the war chests.

In terms of total dollars that donors have handed over, each of these Democratic lawmakers on average have about a $1 million head start over their Republican counterparts. (Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright’s $280,000 personal loan only explains part of this disparity; Republican Rep. David Schweikert similarly loaned himself about $240,000, and Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, an Oregon Republican, has loaned her campaign more than $880,000.)