Welcome to your weekly slide rule of Winners & Losers. Last week was wild. Charlie Kirk’s memorial turned into an actual white Christian nationalist rally in which Joseph Goebbels was plagiarized. Russell Vought welcomed the potential government shutdown as a way to permanently fire federal workers. Hegseth called every American general to Washington for a rushed and mysterious meeting. ICE continued throwing sobbing women to the ground in furious anger.
We’re keeping an eye on the Hegseth and shutdown stories, which will both continue to play out this week.
But amid all the stories, one was both massively consequential and also under-appreciated: The indictment of James Comey by Trump lackey Lindsey Halligan is one of those controversies that is just complicated enough to lose its immediate impact.
Comey was indicted.
Okay, we might say. But wasn’t Comey kinda flawed, anyway? And did he commit a crime or no?
It’s those kinda tangled-up questions that make this story somewhat less sexy than every American general rushing back to D.C. for an emergency meeting. But an indictment like this, at least in my opinion, will have longer-lasting, more deeply felt impacts on our Democracy than almost anything else that happened (last week).