We begin today with Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker reading of Number 45’s mugshot.

Just look at the impenitent subject: the deep furrow between his eyebrows and the one that contours his cheek seem to want to connect and form a kind of scar in shadow. One thing that the picture makes plain—not for the first time, but in a definitive way that won’t soon be forgotten—is how many of Trump’s cues are cribbed directly and consciously from the cinematic literature of romanticized criminals. Trump’s the kind of guy who thinks Scorsese movies are straightforward celebrations of tough guys on the come-up; here’s how you make it in America if you’ve got enough guff and a high tolerance for trouble. He seems to have styled himself, for a long time now, after the “goodfellas,” let some of their leering rhythms slip into his facial bearing and his speech. (His actual ties to the Mob, which he has denied, in its palsying days in eighties and nineties New York and New Jersey have been a rich field of speculation, but that’s a topic for another day.) This mug shot’s been a long time coming—it is, perhaps, the point toward which the entire asymptote of Trump’s life has bowed. He might be angry in the mug shot; he may well be scared. But he damn sure doesn’t look surprised. Nobody is.

Far from surprise: can there be any doubt that, hours before his surrender, before the camera ever flashed, Trump stood in front of some gold-framed mirror and practiced this lipless pout? He knows better than anybody that his supporters—who still make up the formidable majority of the Republican primary electorate—will take this picture and make it a banner. He’s a gossipy seventy-seven-year-old man who allegedly makes weird, lusty comments about his daughter, dances like a windup toy whenever he hears the song “Macho Man,” and still, in the autumn of his life, needlessly lies about his weight whenever he gets a chance. (In Georgia, when he gave himself up, Trump—whose form was reportedly filled out in advance by aides—was listed as six-three and two hundred and fifteen pounds; if this were true, he’d be the same weight and an inch taller than Lamar Jackson, the über-athletic Baltimore Ravens quarterback, who looks like a contemporary update of Michelangelo’s David.) Still, displaying a pathology that feels libidinal in deep origin, his supporters, throughout the past eight years, have tended to insist on a vision of Trump as a somewhat hunky fighting figure, ready to re-tame the American frontier and take the country back from his enemies on behalf of the “forgotten man.” Trump has incorporated this veneration into his idea of himself, reminding audiences everywhere that he is fighting for them, has been striped by a whip meant for their backs, is on the front line, taking oncoming fire to secure their freedom.

Snopes listed the claim as true! Both claims are now listed as official records now.

Jeffrey Bellin and Adam Gershowitz of Slate write that all of Trump’s various federal and state prosecutors need to avoid any and all violations of the Supreme Court’s Brady rule.

So how do the Trump prosecutors avoid committing a Brady violation? Well, the first step is to know the types of circumstances in which they happen.

Prosecutors commit Brady violations in three common situations: First, some prosecutors intentionally hide evidence. Second, prosecutors commit Brady violations because they don’t understand the law and inadvertently fail to disclose required evidence. Third, prosecutors fail to turn over evidence held by other members of the “prosecution team,” such as police officers who work outside the prosecutor’s office.

The first two scenarios seem unlikely in the Trump cases. The whole world is watching, so it would be absurd for special counsel Jack Smith and the other prosecutors to intentionally hide evidence. And it seems doubtful that these prosecutors, knowing the stakes, would make a legal mistake about their discovery obligations, rather than simply erring on the side of disclosure.

The third scenario—turning over all evidence held by the prosecution team—is the trouble spot. The Brady doctrine provides that prosecutors must turn over evidence not just from their own files but also from the files of everyone on the prosecution team, even if the prosecutors have personally never laid eyes on the evidence.

Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker lot some of the veterans of the Republican clown car that was on stage for last Wednesday night’s debate.

Watching these hopelessly outmatched candidates, I kept thinking back to one of the great lines from last summer’s January 6th hearings in the House of Representatives. Trump’s former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, described how, after the 2020 election, he and others had been part of “Team Normal,” those who tried and failed to convince Trump that he had really lost the election, only to find themselves pushed aside in favor of Team Crazy, whose members, led by Rudy Giuliani, aided and abetted Trump’s lies about the “rigged election.” The Republican debate stage in Milwaukee this week was filled with candidates who came from what passes for Team Normal in today’s G.O.P., figures such as Trump’s former Vice-President, Pence; Trump’s former U.N. Ambassador Haley; and Trump’s former friend and adviser Christie.

All three of them built their careers as governors in the pre-Trump Republican Party: Pence and Haley in the reliably red states of Indiana and South Carolina, respectively; Christie in Democratic New Jersey, a point he emphasized—to little avail—in his debate-stage pitch for Republicans to go for a candidate who knows how to win a competitive race in unfriendly territory. But, just like Stepien and the rest of Team Normal, they all eventually sold out to Trump. In this, they represent the very considerable part of the Republican Party that knew supporting Trump was a disaster back in 2016 and, yet, when it came time for the general election and divvying up the spoils of power that followed his unlikely victory, they did it anyway.

If this were a different time, a viewer of Wednesday’s debate might have concluded that it was not a bad night for Team Normal. Haley and Christie delivered several of the more memorable zingers while making impassioned cases for decidedly normal causes, such as supporting Ukraine, a free country aligned with the U.S., over Vladimir Putin’s murderous dictatorship, as Haley put it, or choosing to protect the Constitution over terminating it, as Christie put it. Both took especial glee in going after Ramaswamy, a Trump for the millennial set so automatic in his Trumpier-than-thou responses to any question that Christie lampooned him as a sort of ChatGPT version of a Republican candidate. It was a good dig but also perhaps unintentionally revealing: ChatGPT might very well come up with a Trumpist candidate who sounds a lot like this one.

Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune reports that pressure continues to mount on Texas senators ahead of the impeachment trial of now-suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton’s allies are singling out a half dozen senators for lobbying. A mysterious entity is airing TV ads and sending out mailers targeting certain senators. And an influential establishment group, as well as former Gov. Rick Perry, are urging senators to oppose efforts to effectively stop the trial before it starts.

“Anyone that votes against Ken Paxton in this impeachment is risking their entire political career and we will make sure that is the case,” Jonathan Stickland, who runs the pro-Paxton Defend Texas Liberty PAC, said Thursday in a media appearance.

The high-stakes trial of Texas’ top legal official is scheduled to start Sept. 5. It comes after the House impeached Paxton in May, accusing him of a yearslong pattern of misconduct and lawbreaking centered on his relationship with Nate Paul, an Austin real-estate investor and Paxton campaign donor. Paxton, a Republican in his third term, was immediately suspended from office, and the trial will determine whether he will be permanently removed.

Philipp Sandner of Deutsche Welle looks into how the death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin may impact several wars taking place in Africa.

For Ryan Cummings, Director at Signal Risk, Centre for Strategies and International Studies, it seems that Wagner's operations in Africa will "continue as they have been doing for the past few months or even years in certain contexts."

Cummings told DW that the future of the mercenary group in Africa remains intact. "If you look at the structure of the Wagner group in countries such as the Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan and Libya, there is no immediate indication that there has been a compromise in the relation between the country commanders and the Putin administration."

Even though Prizgozhin is no longer in the picture or commanding Wagner, Cummings stressed that they have continued their operations without significant disruption.

Cummings said he would be very surprised if Russia's President Vladimir Putin were to take control of the Wagner Group. "If anything, there could be some leadership changes at the top of the movement, if that has not already occurred — there might be an assimilation of Wagner:"

Finally today, Juan Arias of El País in English writes about the crisis within Brazil’s military leadership as a result of the failed coup attempt against Brazil’s incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The parliamentary investigations into the failed coup, and the revelations by the Military Police on the plot hatched by Bolsonaro to prevent Lula’s victory, have made the Army high command nervous at the same time as placing the new administration in an uncomfortable position.

It should also be noted that the military leadership is caught between a decline in popular credibility and the need to punish those possibly responsible within the Army for the attempt to overturn the result of the 2022 elections.

This climate of mutual distrust between the government and the military led Lula, on the eve of his international trip for the BRICS meeting in Johannesburg, to convene an urgent meeting with the commanders of the three branches of the Armed Forces. As the columnist Miriam Leitao, who was tortured during the dictatorship, wrote in O Globo: “Only a country in crisis holds a meeting, on a Saturday, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., in the presidential palace between the military commanders and the president.”

Skilled in political and union negotiations, Lula took advantage of the meeting to talk about the budget increase for a military that finds itself at a precipice, as on this occasion, it is not only facing a sharp drop in public opinion, but also the displeasure of Bolsonaro’s followers, as revealed in the polls, for not having adhered to the threatened military coup.

Have the best possible day everyone!