Reaching the United States was a harrowing ordeal. Silva, 25, her husband and their then-7-year-old daughter braved the treacherous jungles of Panama’s Darien Gap, traveled the length of Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande and then turned themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol in Brownsville, Texas. Seeking asylum, they received a work permit last year and found jobs in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

“My plan is to help my family that much need the money and to grow economically here,” Silva said.

Her story amounts to far more than one family’s arduous quest for a better life. The millions of jobs that Silva and other new immigrant arrivals have been filling in the United States appear to solve a riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year:

How has the economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to fight inflation — normally a recipe for a recession?

Increasingly, the answer appears to be immigrants — whether living in the United States legally or not. The influx of foreign-born adults vastly raised the supply of available workers after a U.S. labor shortage had left many companies unable to fill jobs.

More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings. The availability of immigrant workers eased the pressure on companies to sharply raise wages and to then pass on their higher labor costs to their customers via higher prices that feed inflation. Though U.S. inflation remains elevated, it has plummeted from its levels of two years ago.

“There’s been something of a mystery — how are we continuing to get such extraordinary strong job growth with inflation still continuing to come down?’’ said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “The immigration numbers being higher than what we had thought — that really does pretty much solve that puzzle.’’

While helping fuel economic growth, immigrants also lie at the heart of an incendiary election-year debate over the control of the nation’s Southern border. In his bid to return to the White House, Donald Trump has attacked migrants in often-degrading terms, characterizing them as dangerous criminals who are “poisoning the blood” of America and frequently invoking falsehoods about migration. Trump has vowed to finish building a border wall and to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Whether he or President Joe Biden wins the election could determine whether the influx of immigrants, and their key role in propelling the economy, will endure.

The boom in immigration caught almost everyone by surprise. In 2019, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated that net immigration — arrivals minus departures — would equal about 1 million in 2023. The actual number, the CBO said in a January update, was more than triple that estimate: 3.3 million.

Thousands of employers desperately needed the new arrivals. The economy — and consumer spending — had roared back from the pandemic recession. Companies were struggling to hire enough workers to keep up with customer orders.

The problem was compounded by demographic changes: The number of native-born Americans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — was dropping because so many of them had aged out of that category and were nearing or entering retirement. This group’s numbers have shrunk by 770,000 since February 2020, just before COVID-19 slammed the economy.

Filling the gap has been a wave of immigrants. Over the past four years, the number of prime-age workers who either have a job or are looking for one has surged by 2.8 million. And nearly all those new labor force entrants — 2.7 million, or 96% of them — were born outside the United States. Immigrants last year accounted for a record 18.6% of the labor force, according to the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis of government data.

And employers welcomed the help.

Consider Jan Gautam, CEO of the lodging company Interessant Hotels & Resort Management in Orlando, Florida, who said he can’t find American-born workers to take jobs cleaning rooms and doing laundry in his 44 hotels. Of Interessant’s 3,500 workers, he said, 85% are immigrants.

“Without employees, you are broken,” said Gautam, himself an immigrant from India who started working in restaurants as a dishwasher and now owns his own company.

“If you want boost the economy,” he said, “it definitely needs to have more immigrants coming out to this country.”

Or consider the workforce of the Flood Brothers farm in Maine’s “dairy capital’’ of Clinton. Foreign-born workers make up fully half the farm’s staff of nearly 50, feeding the cows, tending crops and helping collect the milk — 18,000 gallons each day.

“We cannot do it without them,” said Jenni Tilton-Flood, a partner in the operation.

For every unemployed person in Maine, after all, there are two job openings, on average.

“We would not have an economy, in Maine or in the U.S. if we did not have highly skilled labor that comes from outside of this country,” Tilton-Flood said in a phone interview with The Associated Press from her farm.

“Without immigrants — both new asylum-seekers as well as our long-term immigrant contributors — we would not be able to do the work that we do,” she said. “Every single thing that affects the American economy is driven by and will only be saved by accepting immigrant labor.”

A study by Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson, economists at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, has concluded that over the past two years, new immigrants raised the economy’s supply of workers and allowed the United States to generate jobs without overheating and accelerating inflation.

In the past, economists typically estimated that America’s employers could add no more than 60,000 to 100,000 jobs a month without overheating the economy and igniting inflation. But when Edelberg and Watson included the immigration surge in their calculations, they found that monthly job growth could be roughly twice as high this year — 160,000 to 200,000 — without exerting upward pressure on inflation.

“There are significantly more people working in the country,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last week in a speech at Stanford University. Largely because of the immigrant influx, Powell said, “it’s a bigger economy but not a tighter one. Really an unexpected and an unusual thing.’’

Trump has repeatedly attacked Biden’s immigration policy over the surge in migrants at the Southern border. Only about 27% of the 3.3 million foreigners who entered the United States last year did so through as “lawful permanent residents’’ or on temporary visas, according to Edelberg and Watson’s analysis. The rest — 2.4 million — either came illegally, overstayed their visas, are awaiting immigration court proceedings or are on a parole program that lets them stay temporarily and sometimes work in the country.

“So there you have it,’’ Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director who is president of the conservative American Action Forum, wrote in February. “The way to solve an inflation crisis is to endure an immigration crisis.”

Many economists suggest that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy in several ways. They take generally undesirable, low-paying but essential jobs that most U.S.-born Americans won’t, like caring for children, the sick and the elderly. And they can boost the country’s innovation and productivity because they are more likely to start their own businesses and obtain patents.

Ernie Tedeschi, a visiting fellow at Georgetown University’s Psaros Center and a former Biden economic adviser, calculates that the burst of immigration has accounted for about a fifth of the economy’s growth over the past four years.

Critics counter that a surge in immigration can force down pay, particularly for low-income workers, a category that often includes immigrants who have lived in the United States longer. Last month, in the most recent economic report of the president, Biden’s advisers acknowledged that “immigration may place downward pressure on the wages of some low-paid workers” but added that most studies show that the impact on the wages of the U.S.-born is “small.”

Even Edelberg notes that an unexpected wave of immigrants, like the recent one, can overwhelm state and local governments and saddle them with burdensome costs. A more orderly immigration system, she said, would help.

The recent surge “is a somewhat disruptive way of increasing immigration in the United States,” Edelberg said. “I don’t think anybody would have sat down and said: ‘Let’s create optimal immigration policy,’ and this is what they would come up with.”

Holtz-Eakin argued that an immigration cutoff of the kind Trump has vowed to impose, if elected, would result in “much, much slower labor force growth and a return to the sharp tradeoff’’ between containing inflation and maintaining economic growth that the United States has so far managed to avoid.

For now, millions of job vacancies are being filled by immigrants like Mariel Marrero. A political opponent of Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro, Marrero, 32, fled her homeland in 2016 after receiving death threats. She lived in Panama and El Salvador before crossing the U.S. border and applying for asylum.

Her case pending, she received authorization to work in the United States last July. Marrero, who used to work in the archives of the Venezuelan Congress in Caracas, found work selling telephones and then as a sales clerk at a convenience store owned by Venezuelan immigrants.

At first, she lived for free at the house of an uncle. But now she earns enough to pay rent on a two-bedroom house she shares with three other Venezuelans in Doral, Florida, a Miami suburb with a large Venezuelan community. After rent, food, electricity and gasoline, she has enough left over to send $200 a month to her family in Venezuela.

“One hundred percent — this country gives you opportunities,’’ she said.

Marrero has her own American dream:

“I imagine having my own company, my house, helping my family in a more comfortable way.”

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Have a look at some of the numbers, history and lore behind the (not quite) every four year phenom that adds a 29th day to February.

BY THE NUMBERS
The math is mind-boggling in a layperson sort of way and down to fractions of days and minutes. There’s even a leap second occasionally, but there’s no hullabaloo when that happens.

The thing to know is that leap year exists, in large part, to keep the months in sync with annual events, including equinoxes and solstices, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

It’s a correction to counter the fact that Earth’s orbit isn’t precisely 365 days a year. The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says.

Contrary to what some might believe, however, not every four years is a leaper. Adding a leap day every four years would make the calendar longer by more than 44 minutes, according to the National Air & Space Museum.

Later, on a calendar yet to come (we’ll get to it), it was decreed that years divisible by 100 not follow the four-year leap day rule unless they are also divisible by 400, the JPL notes. In the past 500 years, there was no leap day in 1700, 1800 and 1900, but 2000 had one. In the next 500 years, if the practice is followed, there will be no leap day in 2100, 2200, 2300 and 2500.

Still with us?

The next leap years are 2028, 2032 and 2036.

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WITHOUT A LEAP DAY?
Eventually, nothing good in terms of when major events fall, when farmers plant and how seasons align with the sun and the moon.

“Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November,” said Younas Khan, a physics instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas.”

WHO CAME UP WITH LEAP YEAR?
The short answer: It evolved.

Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. They were based on either the phases of the moon or the sun, as various calendars are today. Usually they were “lunisolar,” using both.

Now hop on over to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with major seasonal drift on calendars used in his neck of the woods. They dealt badly with drift by adding months. He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire.

He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE. It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time.

But still, under Julius, there was drift. There were too many leap years! The solar year isn’t precisely 365.25 days! It’s 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients. The Athenian calendar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.

That didn’t work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to “intercalating” an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradually accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said.

The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated further. His Gregorian calendar took effect in the late 16th century. It remains in use today and, clearly, isn’t perfect or there would be no need for leap year. But it was a big improvement, reducing drift to mere seconds.

Why did he step in? Well, Easter. It was coming later in the year over time, and he fretted that events related to Easter like the Pentecost might bump up against pagan festivals. The pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring.

He eliminated some extra days accumulated on the Julian calendar and tweaked the rules on leap day. It’s Pope Gregory and his advisers who came up with the really gnarly math on when there should or shouldn’t be a leap year.

“If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky math involved,” Eakes said.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH LEAP YEAR AND MARRIAGE?
Bizarrely, leap day comes with lore about women popping the marriage question to men. It was mostly benign fun, but it came with a bite that reinforced gender roles.

There’s distant European folklore. One story places the idea of women proposing in fifth century Ireland, with St. Bridget appealing to St. Patrick to offer women the chance to ask men to marry them, according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in the Journal of Family History.

Nobody really knows where it all began.

In 1904, syndicated columnist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, aka Dorothy Dix, summed up the tradition this way: “Of course people will say … that a woman’s leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery.”

The pre-Sadie Hawkins tradition, however serious or tongue-in-cheek, could have empowered women but merely perpetuated stereotypes. The proposals were to happen via postcard, but many such cards turned the tables and poked fun at women instead.

Advertising perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad by the American Industrial Bank and Trust Co. read thusly: “This being Leap Year day, we suggest to every girl that she propose to her father to open a savings account in her name in our own bank.”

There was no breath of independence for women due to leap day.

SHOULD WE PITY THE LEAPLINGS?
Being born in a leap year on a leap day certainly is a talking point. But it can be kind of a pain from a paperwork perspective. Some governments and others requiring forms to be filled out and birthdays to be stated stepped in to declare what date was used by leaplings for such things as drivers licenses, whether Feb. 28 or March 1.

Technology has made it far easier for leap babies to jot down their Feb. 29 milestones, though there can be glitches in terms of health systems, insurance policies and with other businesses and organization that don’t have that date built in.

There are about 5 million people worldwide who share the leap birthday out of about 8 billion people on the planet. Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, Washington, chooses a rosy attitude about being a leapling. Growing up, she had normal birthday parties each year, but an extra special one when leap years rolled around. Since, as an adult, she marks that non-leap period between Feb. 28 and March 1 with a low-key “whew.”

This year is different.

“It will be the first birthday that I’m going to celebrate with my family in eight years, which is super exciting, because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college,” she said. “It’s a very big year.”

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Myriad baseless rumors emerged on social media — everything from claims that Swift has played a part in Pentagon psychological operations to the idea that she and her two-time Super Bowl champion boyfriend are key assets in a secret plot to help President Joe Biden get reelected in 2024. Another variant: That the Chiefs’ success was rigged as part of the plan for the game on Feb. 11 in Las Vegas.

Political and media figures on the right, including former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, political activist Laura Loomer and One America News Network host Alison Steinberg, have amplified the allegations.

The claims are ludicrous and may well reflect the fear on the right that someone as famous as Swift, whose landmark Eras Tour is the first tour to cross the billion-dollar mark, could indeed influence the presidential race should she urge her legion of fans in one direction.

Pop culture and politics have long been entwined. The entertainment industry has been a deep well of political contributions. And candidates often try to draft on the celebrity of stars to add to their own allure.

The potency of the impact is less clear. In Swift’s case, there is some proof that she can at minimum generate more voter registration.

In September, Swift posted a short message on her Instagram account encouraging her 272 million followers to register to vote. The post led to more than 35,000 registrations on the nonpartisan nonprofit Vote.org.

Swift’s massive fan base gives her a powerful voice. An SSRS poll conducted in October 2023 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults called themselves at least casual fans of the singer, with 8% saying they’re big fans. The poll also found that 8 in 10 U.S. adults said they had heard of her relationship with Kelce and the majority of those familiar with it considered it a real relationship, rather than a publicity stunt.

“Pop culture people identify with this stuff, they pay attention to it. And that’s what moves politics now. It’s attention and identity,” Joel Penney, an associate professor at Montclair State University whose research includes the intersection of politics and pop culture, said. Indeed, Donald Trump’s improbable march to the presidency in 2016 was propelled in part from the celebrity he gained as a reality television star.

But the false claims about Swift are of such an extreme nature that they will test the limits of how potent a conspiracy theory can be. Penney sees the recent deluge of posts aimed at Swift as an attempt to preemptively blunt her impact by discrediting her.

Penney said Swift’s influence could prove a difficult force to contend with, especially if she publicly supports Biden, as she did in the 2020 race.

The attacks on Swift could also galvanize young voters who want to rally around her.

“Young people are fighting their political battles through a language drawn from pop culture,” said Henry Jenkins, a professor at the University of Southern California who also studies politics and pop culture. “That’s what connects them. That’s what they’re engaged with.”

Both Swift and Kelce have made public statements about politics and other issues that put them at odds with the far-right.

Swift broke her long-standing refusal to discuss her political views in 2018 when she announced in an Instagram post that she would be voting for Tennessee’s Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen and Democratic House incumbent Rep. Jim Cooper. She also slammed then-U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, the Republican candidate, citing Blackburn’s opposition to certain LGBTQ+ rights and her vote against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013. Blackburn won election to the Senate.

In 2020, Swift endorsed Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with V Magazine, noting that “under their leadership, I believe America has a chance to start the healing process it so desperately needs.”

Kelce faced criticism in September for appearing in an ad promoting the double dose of the flu and COVID-19 vaccines, as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ad was part of a partnership with Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company that developed a vaccine in response to the pandemic and has since become a common mark for anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists.

Pop culture figures and the industry that surround them have been enmeshed in political campaigns long before the duo some fans refer to as Swelce. Former President Bill Clinton first appeared on MTV during his 1992 campaign while he was still governor of Arkansas. Major stars including Johnny Cash, Mary Tyler Moore and Willie Nelson endorsed former President Jimmy Carter more than 40 years ago when he made his second run for the White House. Ronald Reagan got his start in politics after a career as an actor.

“That question of, does this stuff work in pop culture? It absolutely can,” Penney said. “And it does. And history has shown that.”

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But belief in conspiracy theories isn’t new and it’s quite common, according to decades of surveys.

Psychologists say conspiracy theories survive because humans have a basic need to explain the world around them.

When something challenges people’s understanding, they sometimes fill in the blanks with their best guesses. Or in times of uncertainty, they seek out voices of those who claim to know what’s going on — and that may provide some comfort.

Consider conspiracies about vaccines containing microchips. Such conspiracies speak to concerns about the pace of technology. They gained a lot of traction at an especially uncertain and frightening time, during COVID-19 lockdowns.

These theories can make believers feel like they have insider information about what’s really going on, even if that’s not backed up by facts.

The internet has made it much easier to find and spread these falsehoods. Many websites and personalities have embraced conspiracy theories to home in on that natural human need to attract audiences.

And with so much information online, it’s hard to know what and whom to trust.

The Associated Press undertook an examination of conspiracy theories, speaking to experts in psychology, to people who believe in such theories today and to people who consider themselves reformed theorists.

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The Pantone Color Institute has been governing worldwide color trends since 2000, providing, according to its website, “a universal language of color that enables color-critical decisions through every stage of the workflow for brands and manufacturers.”

That means that, come spring, you can expect to see peach-toned clothing, shoes, home furnishings and wall paints dominating their respective domains as designers scramble to satisfy a trend-hungry public. You’ll also see a plethora of peachy plants at the nursery.

Breeding new plants takes much longer — at least a decade, in most cases — than making new textiles. But make no mistake: Garden centers will be stocking a dizzying array of existing peach-toned plants this spring, and many will be new to us.

Some of my favorites:

ROSES
At Last is a beautiful light-orange shrub rose that checks all the boxes: It’s highly fragrant, low-maintenance, disease-resistant, and blooms from early summer through fall in zones 5-9.

Peach Drift, too, offers disease resistance and repeat blooming from spring through frost, but with a spreading habit. This groundcover rose is ideal for hillsides or open areas in zones 4-11.

SHRUBS
Double Take flowering quince is a long-blooming, low-maintenance, heat- and drought-tolerant spring bloomer with soft peach flowers that grows in zones 5-9. Unlike older varieties, it doesn’t have thorns, so you can work around it and make bouquets without getting pricked.

Suntastic Peach abelia puts forth pretty white flowers all summer long, but the real star of the show is its bright-peach evergreen foliage. As a bonus, it offers superior drought resistance and heat tolerance and is smaller than standard abelias. Grow it in zones 6-10.

Peaches and Cream is a bushy, heat- and drought-resistant Grevillea shrub suited for zones 9-11. Its eye-catching, multi-toned flowers bloom year-round against bright green, dense, dissected foliage.

PERENNIALS
Firefly Peach Sky yarrow flowers emerge peachy and then fade to yellow as they age, creating a kaleidoscope of peach, orange, cream and yellow interest as some flowers in different stages of maturity converge. Thrives in zones 3-8.

Pyromania Hot and Cold, a Kniphofia or red hot poker plant, has spiky flowers that are peachy at their tips and creamy at their base, making for quite the garden conversation piece. They rebloom all summer in zones 5-9 over tall, grassy foliage, and resist drought, salt, deer and rabbits.

Venti Tequila Sunrise dahlia is a showy, vigorous plant that lives up to its name. Peach-toned double flowers with coral tips and yellow bases bloom on mounded plants from early summer through frost. Hardy in-ground in zones 8-10; dig up and store tubers indoors over winter in colder zones.

Fresco Apricot is a striking plant: It’s taller and narrower than most other echinaceas, and its large zinnia-like flowers are a delicious peachy-apricot shade. Expect nearly nonstop blooms from June through October in zones 4-9.

ANNUALS
Celway Salmon cockscomb boasts velvety, spiked flower clusters, each composed of one central plume surrounded by several smaller plumes atop tall, strong stems. The salmon-colored clusters bloom from spring through late summer, and their longevity in bouquets makes them well-suited for the cutting garden.

Vivacia Orange dianthus is a low-growing, creeping plant with grass-like foliage and large, solid, light-orange blooms. Although some cultivars are perennial, this one is categorized as annual.

Superbena Peachy Keen verbena is a vigorous grower that blooms continuously from spring through fall without deadheading. It’s also heat-tolerant and deer-resistant.

Toucan Coral Canna is a dramatic plant with pretty peach flowers and a strong tropical vibe. The long-blooming plant tolerates heat, humidity and drought, and deer tend to avoid it.

Begonia Cocoa Enchanted Sunrise has unusual, dark, chocolate-colored leaves with lime green veins that contrast strikingly with its large, peach-toned flowers. The shade lover is hardy in zones 8-11 and widely treated as an annual elsewhere.

FOLIAGE PLANTS
Northern Exposure Amber coral bells is a low-growing, densely mounded plant with evergreen leaves that performs equally well in full shade as in full sun. Tall, slender stems hold up tiny, bell-shaped, green flowers in late spring for added interest.

Coleus Fancy Feathers Copper is a mounding plant with a whimsical tuft of narrow, yellow-orange and pink leaves that will brighten shady spots, whether in the ground or in a container, as well as your mood.

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Even in 2009, $7.25 was not a lot of money. But in 2024, paying someone $7.25 for an hour of labor is deeply exploitative. A full-time employee working 52 weeks per year will earn just $15,080, well below the poverty line for a family of any size. The real value of the minimum wage is 40% lower than it was in 1970. This is the longest period without an increase since the federal minimum wage was established in 1938. If the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity gains since 1968 — when the value of the minimum wage peaked — it would have reached $23 per hour by 2021.

While some states have adopted higher minimum wages, there are still 20 states where the federal minimum applies. While inflation and a tight labor market have made it harder for employers to hire at the federal minimum, there were still 141,000 people who earned $7.25 per hour in 2022. Hundreds of thousands more report being paid below the minimum. (There are exceptions to the minimum wage for “workers with disabilities, full-time students, youth under age 20 in their first 90 consecutive calendar days of employment,” and others.) While some people assume the typical minimum wage worker is a teenager working part-time, the majority of minimum wage workers are full-time workers over the age of 25.

Raising the minimum wage to $15 would not only benefit workers currently making less than $15, but also many workers earning more than $15. Overall, 40 million workers would benefit from a federal minimum wage increase to $15 — about 25% of the total workforce. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a $15 minimum wage would lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty.

New research shows that increasing the minimum wage does not result in job losses. A September 2023 study published by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment looked at McDonald’s workers in 47 large counties that established a minimum wage of $15 or more by the beginning of 2022. The study found that “the near-doubling of the minimum wage” in these counties actually resulted in “positive employment effects.” The researchers attributed this to “reduced employee separation rates” because workers were more satisfied with their jobs.

Increasing the minimum wage is politically popular, with about two-thirds of Americans supporting an increase to $15 per hour. But repeated efforts to increase the federal minimum wage over the last 15 years have all failed. Powerful lobbying groups have convinced members of Congress to put corporate interests over the will of their constituents.

Corporations for exploitative wages

The staunchest resistance to minimum wage increases has often come from Corporate America. In 2021, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – a group that represents virtually every major American corporation – publicly opposed the $15 minimum wage hike, arguing that the “mandate does not reflect a data-driven approach.” Neil Bradley, the executive vice president and chief policy officer of the Chamber, said that “there’s nothing sensible about $15.” The trade group claims it is open to raising the minimum wage in a “thoughtful approach.” But it maintains that a $15 minimum wage is “politically motivated.”

“There’s no reason Congress shouldn’t discuss raising the minimum wage, we just think that the $15 number is a political number that’s not based on a real economic analysis,” Glenn Spencer, the senior vice president of the employment policy division at the Chamber, said.

The National Restaurant Association (NRA) is another fierce opponent of wage increases. As the largest trade group for the food service industry, representing fast-food chains and restaurant operators like McDonald’s and Darden Restaurants, the NRA spends millions at both the federal and state level to block paid sick leave and higher minimum wages. In 2021, the NRA claimed that raising the minimum wage to $15 would “lead to dramatic job cuts,” “hurt small and independent businesses,” and “trigger higher consumer costs,” among other things. Previously, the group has been affiliated with the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.

Most recently, a 2023 New York Times investigation found that the NRA was using food safety classes to fundraise for its legislative efforts. Known as ServSafe, the training program is completed by millions of restaurant workers nationwide, who pay “around $15” to take the class. The NRA acquired the program in 2007 and then “helped lobby states to mandate the kind of training they already provided — producing a flood of paying customers.” Since 2010, “[m]ore than 3.6 million workers have taken this training, providing about $25 million in revenue” to the NRA, the Times reported.

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) has also been vocal against minimum wage increases. The group, which claims to stand up for small businesses, says it “strongly opposes” a $15 per hour minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage to $15, the NFIB claims, would result in “extraordinary damage” and “harmful consequences.” In response, the group says that it’s “ramping up grassroots efforts against current minimum wage hike proposals” and boasts that it has “a track record of defeating federal minimum wage hike efforts.”

Why tipped workers still make $2.13 an hour

The federal minimum wage for workers who receive tips is just $2.13 per hour and was last raised in 1991. The Department of Labor defines a tipped employee as someone who “customarily and regularly receives more than $30 per month in tips.” While the federal tipped minimum wage used to be tied to the federal minimum wage, and was “always at least half [the minimum wage] at the federal level,” in 1996, the NRA succeeded in having the two separated. Since then, it has never been increased.

The federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour is the standard in 16 states. An additional 26 states and the District of Columbia require that employers pay tipped workers a wage higher than $2.13, but still lower than the state’s minimum wage. Only eight states have stopped using the tipped wage, including Alaska, California, Minnesota, and Nevada. In 2022, the New York Times reported that at least 5.5 million workers are estimated to be paid a tipped minimum wage.

Despite the fact that employers of tipped minimum wage workers are required to pay their employees the difference if their salary and tips do not amount to the full minimum wage, the law is often not enforced. A survey conducted by the Department of Labor between 2010 and 2012 of 9,000 full-service restaurants found that “84 percent had violated the subminimum wage system.”

The tipped minimum wage is rooted in racism. Wealthy Americans who traveled to Europe discovered the practice of tipping in the 1850s and 1860s, but most Americans resisted the custom, “deeming it both inherently condescending and classist.” Tipping was not popularized in the United States until after the Civil War, when newly emancipated Black people were hired in restaurant and hospitality jobs, and employers wanted to avoid paying them. According to the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, “tipping was introduced as a way to exploit the labor of former slaves.”

The tipped minimum wage continues to enable the exploitation of workers and disproportionately affects people of color. According to a 2018 report published by the Leadership Conference Education Fund and Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, “[a]lmost 40 percent of people who work for tips are people of color.” An Economic Policy Institute report found that, in 2014, 27.1 percent of Black workers in the restaurant industry lived in poverty, compared to 13.9 percent of white restaurant workers. Studies have also shown that customers tend to discriminate against Black servers and give them lower tips than white servers, even if the quality of the service is the same.

Tipped minimum wage workers are also commonly victims of sexual harassment. A study conducted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported that “1 in 7 sexual harassment charges between 2005 and 2015 were brought by food service and accommodation workers.”

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This article is a contribution of Popular Information, an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism. It was first published on Substack.

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A sitting president tried to overturn an election and his supporters stormed the Capitol to stop the winner from taking power. Supporters of that attack launched a campaign against local election offices, chasing out veteran administrators and pushing conservative states to pass new laws making it harder to vote.

At the same time, the past three years proved that American democracy was resilient.

Former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results failed, blocked by the constitutional system’s checks and balances, and he now faces both federal and state charges for those efforts. Then the voters stepped in. In every presidential battleground state, they rejected all candidates who supported Trump’s stolen election lies and were running for statewide offices that had some oversight of elections.

The election infrastructure in the country performed well, with only scattered disruptions during the 2022 midterms. New voting laws, many of which are technical and incremental, had little discernable impact on actual voting.

“Voters have stepped up to defend our democracy over the past few years,” said Joanna Lydgate, chief executive officer of States United, which tracks those who refuse to believe in the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. “State and local officials have done a tremendous job in protecting our free and fair elections.”

So why all the worry? As Lydgate and anyone else who works in the pro-democracy field quickly notes, the big test — what Lydgate calls “the Super Bowl” — awaits in 2024.

Trump is running for the White House again and has been dominating the Republican primary as the first votes approach. He has called for pardoning those prosecuted for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, continues to insist falsely that the 2020 election was “stolen” and says he will use the federal government to seek revenge on his political enemies.

Trump has used increasingly authoritarian rhetoric as he campaigns for the GOP nomination. If he wins, allies have been planning to seed the government with loyalists so the bureaucracy doesn’t hinder Trump’s more controversial plans the way it did during his first term.

It’s gotten to the point that Trump was recently asked by conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt whether he planned to be a dictator: “Not at all,” Trump responded. “No, I’m gonna rule as somebody that’s very popular with the people.”

The 2024 election could cause all sorts of conflict, including scenarios that have notably not materialized despite widespread concern since 2020: violence at the polls, overly aggressive partisan poll watchers or breakdowns in the ballot count.

It seems unlikely, though, that Trump could return to the White House if he loses the election. That’s what he failed to accomplish in 2020, and he’s in a weaker position now.

His strategy then was to use Republican dominance in swing state legislatures, governorships and secretary of state offices to try to send slates of fake electors to Congress even though Democrat Joe Biden won those states and captured the presidency.

Since then, Republicans have lost two of those swing state secretary of state offices — in Arizona and Nevada — as well as the governor’s office in Arizona and control of the state legislatures in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Congress, lawmakers passed a bipartisan bill closing some of the loopholes in the counting of Electoral College votes that Trump tried to exploit to stay in office, making it harder to challenge state certifications on the House floor.

The upshot is it will be far harder for Trump to try to overturn a loss in 2024 than in 2020. The most likely way he returns to the White House is by winning the election outright.

“It’s not to say the risks are gone,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s to say we’ve successfully fought the last war.”

History is full of examples of authoritarians who first came to office by winning a legitimate democratic election. But the risk to democracy of someone legitimately winning an election is different than the risk of a candidate trying to overturn an election loss.

When Trump began to falsely claim he had won the 2020 election and urged Republicans to overrule their states’ voters and send his electors to Congress, every GOP official with the power to do that refused. The Republican leaders of the Michigan Legislature turned down his request to overrule voters. In Georgia, where the presidential ballots were counted three times and affirmed Biden’s win, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger earned Trump’s fury by rejecting him. So did then- Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and the Republican leaders of that state’s legislature.

Some Republicans did try to aid Trump. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led a group of 17 GOP attorneys general in filing a lawsuit urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the election. The high court swiftly dismissed the case. Trump lost all but one of more than 60 lawsuits he and his allies filed in states to overturn the election, sometimes before judges he had appointed.

Then in November 2022, every swing state candidate who backed Trump’s effort to overturn his loss and who was running for a statewide office with a role in elections lost.

“There’s little doubt our democracy has gotten dinged up in a couple of moments of late, but we have decided we like it compared to the alterative,” said Justin Levitt, who served as adviser for democracy and voting rights for two years in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Election deniers have been able to make gains in one area — offices where they simply have to win a Republican primary. That’s meant they have taken power in local governments in many rural areas, often disrupting elections and embracing conspiracy theories or procedures such as hand-counting, which is less reliable and more time-consuming than tabulating thousands of votes on machines.

They also have been able to expand their power within Republican legislative bodies from statehouses to Congress. U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who helped organize a brief supporting the quickly thrown-out lawsuit to overturn Biden’s victory, is now the House speaker.

If Johnson retains his speakership in January 2025, he could be in a position to disrupt certification of a Biden victory. Republicans more willing to subvert democracy also could have greater sway in state legislatures.

Then there’s the view of Trump backers. They report being even more worried about democracy than those who oppose him. Normally members of the party out of power feels like democracy isn’t working as well for them, but Trump’s situation is different. He’s the first president in history to face prosecution and is promoting the narrative that he’s being persecuted by his likely general election opponent.

Trump says the criminal cases and separate attempts to bar him from the ballot under the insurrection clause of the Constitution are a form of election interference.

The Colorado Supreme Court found his role in the Jan. 6 attack was sufficient grounds to remove him from the state’s ballot under the 14th Amendment, a ruling Trump’s campaign said it will appeal soon to the U.S. Supreme Court, where three of his nominees help form the conservative majority. On Thursday, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state struck Trump from that state’s primary ballot, becoming the first election official to take such action. Shenna Bellows suspended her ruling until Maine’s court system rules on the case.

While campaigning, Trump has adopted an “I’m rubber and you’re glue” approach, accusing Biden of being the actual threat to democracy.

A more revealing argument comes from a contention one of the former president’s attorneys made before the Colorado Supreme Court. Scott Gessler, a former Colorado secretary of state, was arguing against attempts by a liberal group to boot Trump from the ballot.

“If the entire nation chooses someone to be president, can that be an insurrection or is that a democratic choice?” Gessler asked.

Gessler was addressing the hypothetical case of a former Confederate winning the White House in the 19th century, but it’s easy to see how this applies to the election before us.

Or, as Levitt said of American democracy: “It is kind of up to us how resilient we make it.”

—

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China has become the world’s biggest importer of beef, and Brazil is China’s biggest supplier, according to United Nations Comtrade data. More beef moves from Brazil to China than between any other two countries.

But the Brazilian cattle industry is a major driver of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Data analysis by The Associated Press and the Rainforest Investigations Network, a nonprofit reporting consortium, found that a little-known American company is among the key suppliers and distributors feeding China’s hunger for beef – and the Amazon deforestation that it fuels.

The world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon plays a critical role in the global climate by absorbing carbon emissions. A new study published this week in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences linked Amazon deforestation to warmer regional temperatures.

Salt Lake City-based Parker-Migliorini International, better known as PMI Foods, has been a major beneficiary of the beef trade between Brazil and China. PMI has shipped more than $1.7 billion in Brazilian beef over the last decade – more than 95% of it to China, according to data from Panjiva, a company that uses customs records to track international trade. Over the last decade, Chinese beef imports have surged sixfold, U.N. Comtrade data shows, and PMI has helped satisfy China’s growing demand.

As a middleman that has been one of the leading importers of Brazilian beef to China, PMI provides a window into how that growing international trade is driving deforestation.

Holly Gibbs, a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies land use changes linked to the beef industry, says that PMI has contributed to the Amazon’s destruction, because it sources beef from companies that purchase cows raised on deforested land.

Last year, the Brazilian Amazon lost more than 4,000 square miles (10,360 square kilometers) of rainforest, the equivalent of nearly 3,000 soccer fields each day, according to a January report by Imazon, a Brazilian research group that uses satellite monitoring to track deforestation.

More than two-thirds of deforested land in the Brazilian Amazon has been converted to cattle pastures, according to Brazil’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.

PMI gets more of its Brazilian beef from Sao Paulo, Brazil-based meat processing giant JBS SA than from anywhere else. In a series of reports released between 2018 and 2023, Brazilian prosecutors have determined that JBS purchased massive numbers of cattle raised on illegally deforested land. Last December, prosecutors found that JBS had bought more than 85,000 cows from ranches that engaged in illegal deforestation in Pará, one of nine states in the Brazilian Amazon. Their latest report, released October 26, found that JBS had substantially lower but still significant rates of purchases from ranches involved in environmental violations across four Amazon states.

“There’s no doubt that PMI Foods is benefiting from the deforestation of the Amazon,” Gibbs said. “They’re also helping to drive that deforestation by continuing to pay into that system.”

In an email, a PMI spokesperson said that “in a world where famine, malnutrition and acute food insecurity are a global concern, PMI is focused on feeding millions of people all over the world,” including providing meals to refugees.

PMI said it is working to strengthen environmental practices of its beef operations. “While our absolute primary priority is feeding people, we remain committed to continuous improvement of sustainability across the beef value chain,” the spokesperson said.

PMI Foods is a $3 billion global enterprise that buys and sells more than 1.6 billion pounds (725.7 million kilograms) of beef, pork, chicken, seafood and eggs each year. In the last decade, PMI Foods shipped more than $616 million of Brazilian beef from JBS, almost twice as much as from any other supplier, shipping records show.

JBS, in turn, purchased a significant share of its cattle from ranches that were illegally deforested, Brazilian prosecutors have found. These properties accounted for 15% of JBS’s cattle supply in the Amazon state of Pará from 2019 to 2020, according to an audit by prosecutors audit last December. The company’s purchases from properties linked to environmental violations decreased to 6% of its supply across four Amazon states in the following year, prosecutors found in an audit published in October.

JBS has been investigated and fined by Brazilian authorities in connection with its purchases of cattle from illegal farms, but these are separate from the audits, which are focused on improving company practices.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, asserts that it has fixed the problems identified in previous audits by prosecutors. In a statement, JBS said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for illegal deforestation” in its supply chains, and is adopting block chain technology to include vetting of indirect suppliers by 2025.

Yet as recently as last fall, JBS admitted to a large-scale purchase of cattle raised on illegally deforested land. Following an investigation by Repórter Brasil, a contributor to the Rainforest Investigations Network, JBS acknowledged it had illegally bought nearly 9,000 cattle from a rancher whom Brazilian authorities have described as “one of the biggest deforesters in the country.” The rancher, Chaules Volban Pozzebon, is now serving a 70-year prison sentence for offenses including leading a criminal gang.

PMI also buys in large volume from Brazil’s second largest meat processor, Marfrig, which has been dogged as well by reports by environmental groups and news outlets alleging that it purchased cattle from ranches that were involved in illegal deforestation. In February 2022, the Inter-American Development Bank scrapped a $200 million loan to Marfrig amid criticism of the company’s environmental record. In September, the Swiss food multinational Nestlé dropped Marfrig as a beef supplier in Brazil following media reports last year that Marfrig had bought cattle raised on land that was seized from indigenous peoples.

Marfrig said in an email that the ranch cited in last year’s reports was on land that had not yet been designated protected indigenous territory. Marfrig did not face legal penalties in connection with the case. The company said it has a “rigorous livestock sourcing policy” that uses satellite monitoring to avoid suppliers linked to deforestation.

Asked about its leading suppliers, JBS and Marfrig, buying cattle raised on deforested or illegally seized lands, PMI said it requires its suppliers to follow local laws, and depends on government environmental agencies in Brazil and elsewhere to enforce them. “PMI relies on the assurances set forth in the sustainability policies of its suppliers,” a company spokesman said in an email.

For its part, Brazil’s Environment Ministry said independent audits have shown that major meat processors are still buying significant quantities of cattle raised on deforested land through their indirect suppliers.

“The persistence of these cases shows that the companies’ systems are flawed and there is not sufficient effort to avoid illegal purchases,” the ministry said in a statement.

The FBI Investigation
PMI Foods has come under scrutiny from U.S. authorities before for its shipments to China.

Between 2008 and 2011, PMI took in more than $289 million in revenue from illegal beef shipments to China, representing the majority of U.S.-sourced sales to the country, according to a spreadsheet produced by a whistleblower for FBI investigators.

“They were willing to break laws,” whistleblower Brandon Barrick said in an interview in 2022, referring to the time that he worked at PMI. “They were willing to do whatever it took to make a buck for themselves.”

In spring of 2014, PMI pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of making a false statement to U.S. authorities about the destination of its beef exports and paid a $1 million fine.

In an email, PMI said it had put the “entire episode behind us” nine years ago, and emphasized that it pleaded guilty only to making a false statement. “PMI was never charged with a crime for its export operations,” said company attorney Mark Gaylord.

Rise of beef in China
In the last decade, Chinese imports of beef from Brazil have increased from $1.3 billion in 2013 to more than $8 billion in 2022, according to U.N. Comtrade data.

PMI has been a major player in feeding that growing market. As of 2017, the company was the second largest importer of Brazilian beef to China, according to a 2020 report by Trase, a research group that studies commodity supply chains.

As Brazil became China’s biggest supplier, cattle production ramped up. China imposes relatively few environmental demands on its beef importers, meaning suppliers who need land for cattle may be tempted to engage in deforestation, said Gibbs, the University of Wisconsin geography professor.

“Everyone who participates in the trade of products that come from the Amazon has to be able to transparently determine the products’ origin,” Azeredo said.

In response to inquiries about whether it had raised concerns about deforestation with JBS or other suppliers, PMI Foods said it “has discussions with our partners, vendors and suppliers including JBS, about always improving best practices towards the environment and sustainability.”

Middlemen avoid scrutiny
As a middleman rather than a company that raises animals or processes meat, PMI’s role in deforestation has been little examined.

PMI’s reliance on JBS is not unusual among food companies. While a handful of European retailers have dropped JBS beef products in recent years due to deforestation concerns, major American brands such as Kroger and Albertsons, the parent company of Safeway, still purchase its beef.

Albertsons confirmed that it sources beef from JBS, but said it is only a small quantity. Kroger did not respond to inquiries but its online store includes JBS beef products.

JBS, Marfrig and other top beef producers have signed pledges to work against illegal deforestation. But unlike most leading meat processors and commodity traders, PMI has not signed on to agreements to fight deforestation, such as the New York Declaration on Forests, in which endorsers commit to goals including eliminating deforestation by 2030.

Two months after initial inquiries about its environmental policies for this story, PMI said it was joining industry efforts to combat deforestation.

“We are now proud to partner with One Tree Planted, Green Business Bureau and the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef,” the company said last November. Since then it has planted 10,000 trees in the Amazon, the company said, part of a longer-term plan to plant a million trees.

The company has not yet signed a pledge against rainforest destruction, but last month said it was considering making one. “We are open to pledges and currently working on these matters,” the company said.

Gibbs, the University of Wisconsin professor, said that because PMI and other middlemen have such strong purchasing power, they “need to come to the table” to help stop deforestation.

So far meat brokers have been “completely ignored,” she said, allowing beef to reach consumers’ tables without meeting environmental standards strong enough to protect the Amazon.

Azeredo, the Brazilian prosecutor, emphasized that not just meat processors, but all companies in the beef and leather industries share the obligation to avoid suppliers that violate environmental laws.

“The entire industry that buys those animals, that sells leather or meat, must make sure that they don’t allow products from areas of illegal deforestation,” Azeredo said.

—

“As China’s demand for beef goes up, so does the stress on the rainforest,” Gibbs said.

Daniel Azeredo, a Brazilian federal prosecutor who has led crackdowns on illegal deforestation in the beef industry, said companies must ensure that products from the Amazon region do not come from illegally deforested land.

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Conditioned by decades of trials and legal disputes, Trump is now poised to reprise his role as witness under extraordinary circumstances: as a former Republican president fighting to save the real estate empire that vaulted him to stardom and the White House.

Trump is set to testify Monday at his New York civil fraud trial, taking the stand in a deeply personal matter that is central his image as a successful businessman and threatens to cost him control of marquee properties such as Trump Tower. His highly anticipated testimony in the trial of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit follows that of his eldest sons, Trump Organization executives Eric and Donald Trump Jr., who testified last week. His eldest daughter, Ivanka, is set to testify on Wednesday.

As court ended Friday, a state lawyer teased the former president’s appearance. Asked who would be testifying Monday, Andrew Amer told the judge: “The only witness will be Donald J. Trump.”

Trump has testified in court in at least eight trials since 1986, according to an Associated Press review of court records and news coverage. He also has been questioned under oath in more than a dozen depositions and regulatory hearings.

In 1985, he was called to testify before Congress as owner of the USFL’s New Jersey Generals and he testified on behalf of lawyer and friend Roy Cohn at a state disciplinary hearing that led to Cohn’s disbarment. In an early flash of his firebrand persona, in 1986, Trump told New Jersey’s casino commission that plans for highway overpasses near one of his casinos “would be a disaster. It would be a catastrophe.”

Those testimonies, captured in thousands of pages of transcripts and some on videotape, offer clues to the approach Trump is likely to take when he testifies in Manhattan.

They show clear parallels between Trump as a witness and Trump as a president and current candidate for the office. His rhetorical style in legal proceedings over the years bears echoes of his political verve: a mix of ego, charm, defensiveness, aggressiveness, sharp language and deflection. He has been combative and boastful, but sometimes vague and prone to hedging or being dismissive.

Testifying in the USFL’s antitrust lawsuit against the NFL in 1986, Trump denounced allegations that he had spied on NFL officials at one of his hotels, calling the claim “such a false interpretation it’s disgusting.”

In 1988, as he sought to buy Eastern Air Lines’ Northeast shuttle service, Trump turned on the charisma, flashing a wide smile at the judge’s female law clerks and shaking hands with the bailiff during a break in his testimony at a federal court hearing in Washington. Trump testified that his $365 million purchase, later approved, would be a “major boost in morale” for employees.

On the stand in a boxing-related case in 1990, Trump described a Mike Tyson fight he planned for one of his casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, as “one of the greatest rematches you could have.” Accused by two men of cutting them out of a riverboat gambling project, Trump professed ignorance, testifying in 1999: “I was shocked by this whole case. I had no idea who these people were.”

Trump was briefly called to the witness stand in the New York case last month to explain comments outside of court that the judge said violated a limited gag order.

Before that, he last testified in a courtroom in 2013, two years before launching his winning presidential campaign. An 87-year-old suburban Chicago widower had sued him over changes to contract terms for a hotel and condominium tower she had bought units in as an investment. Trump grew increasingly agitated as his testimony wore on, at one point raising his arms and bellowing: “And then she sued me. It’s unbelievable!”

Chicago lawyer Shelly Kulwin cross-examined Trump on behalf of the plaintiff, Jacqueline Goldberg. He said the tenor of Trump’s testimony inside the federal courthouse in Chicago echoed the bruising ebb and flow later seen at campaign rallies and on TV.

“His demeanor was calm at first, and then argumentative, defensive, off-topic, speechmaking. Exactly what he does today,” Kulwin said in an interview.

“Based on my experience with him, you better be able to have super tight questions, with documents to support them, so that he cannot wiggle around,” Kulwin added. “I would approach the judge and have him admonished before he even got on the stand: ‘Mr. Trump, this is not a political campaign. These people, you’re not trying to get their vote. This is a judicial proceeding.’”

Goldberg lost to Trump but said she did not regret suing him, testifying: “Somebody had to stand up to him.” She died in August at age 97.

Trump has attended seven days of the New York trial, quietly studying witnesses from the defense table while also lashing out at the case, the judge and state lawyers in front of TV cameras in the hallway. He’s called the case a “sham,” a “scam,” and “a continuation of the single greatest witch hunt of all time.”

Opining about the case on social media, he thrills in what he calls the trial’s “Perry Mason” moments — testimony and arguments he feels have helped his side — as he pays homage to the classic TV courtroom drama.

In 1990, Trump testified in a losing effort in a lawsuit over his company’s failure to make pension contributions on behalf of about 200 undocumented Polish workers hired to tear down a building to make way for Trump Tower. A year later, he was in court again in Manhattan, testifying against a man who claimed he had a contract to develop Trump’s board game and was owed 25% of profits from “Trump: The Game.”

Trump won that one and another lawsuit in 2005, where he testified that a construction company had “fleeced” him by overcharging him by $1.5 million for work at a golf course in New York’s Westchester County.

Trump’s current New York trial hinges in part on how much he and other Trump Organization executives were involved in valuing his properties and calculating his wealth for the annual financial statements that were given to banks, insurers and others to make deals and secure financing.

James alleges the statements inflated Trump’s net worth by billions of dollars, making him appear to lenders as a more worthy credit risk and allowing him to obtain better interest and insurance rates. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

Eric and Donald Trump Jr. testified that they relied on an outside accounting firm and the Trump Organization’s finance team to prepare the statements and that they assumed those statements were accurate.

Trump testified in a deposition in a case in April that he never felt his financial statements “would be taken very seriously,” and that a disclaimer on them warned people doing business with him to do their own homework.

He insisted the banks that James alleges were snookered with lofty valuations suffered no harm, got paid in his deals and “to this day have no complaints.” Trump decried the lawsuit as a “terrible thing,” telling James and her staff “you don’t have a case.”

Before the trial, the judge ruled that the statements were fraudulent. He set in motion punishment that shifts control of some Trump companies to a court-appointed receiver. An appeals court has put that on hold, for now.

The nonjury trial, now into its second month, concerns allegations of conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. James, who is suing Trump, his company and top executives, including his eldest sons, is seeking $250 million in penalties and a ban on the defendants doing business in New York.

When questioned in the past about his business and financial dealings, Trump has sometimes deflected responsibility and blame. In a 2013 deposition over a failed Florida condominium project, Trump blamed an employee for paperwork that said he was developing a project when, in reality, he wasn’t.

“I have a woman that does it,” he said. He then started parsing the wording at issue, saying: “But you know, developing, the word develop, it can be used in a lot of different contexts.”

Another refrain in Trump’s depositions is his incredulity that he would be taken so seriously for hyping up his real estate projects.

“You always want to put the best possible spin on a property that you can,” Trump said in a December 2007 deposition in his lawsuit against a journalist he had accused of playing down Trump’s wealth. “No different than any other real estate developer, no different than any other businessman, no different than any politician.”

Trump’s penchant for puffery is sure to come up on Monday. He and his company are accused of inflating his property values and using a variety of methods to maximize the results. For years, he even listed his Trump Tower penthouse in Manhattan as being three times its actual size. He now claims his financial statements undersold his wealth and that his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is worth more than $1 billion.

Trump is portraying the civil fraud case and his four criminal cases as prongs of political persecution designed to impede his candidacy as the 2024 Republican front-runner for president. He has referenced his political standing in prior legal settings, including during a 2016 deposition when he noted, unprompted, how he had defeated his Republican primary opponents.

“I obviously have credibility because I now, as it turns out, became the Republican nominee running against, we have a total of 17 people that were mostly senators and governors, highly respected people. So it’s not like, you know, like I’ve said anything that could be so bad,” he said.

In his April deposition, Trump soberly described the presidency as the “most important job in the world” before bragging about saving lives by preventing North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un from launching a nuclear attack.

In an October 2021 deposition, Trump waxed about weapons of a different sort, warning of the dangers posed by tomatoes and other fruit, which he feared would be thrown at him on the campaign stage.

“You get hit with fruit it’s — no, it’s very violent stuff,” he said. Trump was testifying in connection to a lawsuit filed by a group of protesters who said they were roughed up by Trump’s private security guards when he was running in 2015.

Trump had been asked about a rally in which he told the crowd: “If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, just knock the crap out of them, would you.”

“It was said sort of in jest. Buy maybe, you know, a little truth to it,” Trump said of his remarks.

“It’s very dangerous stuff. You can get killed with those things,” he warned. “I wanted to have people be ready because we were put on alert that they were going to do fruit. And some fruit is a lot worse than — tomatoes are bad by the way. But it’s very dangerous.”

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“The third one, when I walked over to see if someone was hurt, I saw a person get shot and fall off their stool,” Asselin said.

It was just before 7 p.m. Wednesday at Just-in-Time Recreation, a 34-lane bowling alley where the $75 “Pizza, Pins and Pepsi” special included a large pizza, a pitcher of soda and two hours of bowling for six people.

One bowler had just removed his shoes when he thought he heard a balloon popping some 15 feet (4.5 meters) behind him. He turned toward the door, saw a man holding a gun, and took off running down one of the lanes.

“I slid basically into where the pins are and climbed up into the machine,” he said.

The gunman, Robert Card, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot Friday, two nights after he destroyed an innocent night of bowling and socializing and turned it into tragedy. People gunned down bowling for strikes and spares, throwing beanbags, shooting pool, having beers with friends, working the night shift.

For Asselin and her mother, Tammy, the situation was especially gut-wrenching. A coach hustled the 10-year-old and several of her youth league teammates outside. An employee hid some of the children in a backroom office while other workers barricaded themselves in a freezer. She became separated from her mother, who initially stood frozen as others fled.

Turning to run, Tammy Asselin tripped over some bowling ball bags and took a hard fall before hiding behind a flipped over table and calling 911. Authorities said the first of multiple calls came in at 6:56 p.m. Four plainclothes officers who were at a nearby shooting range arrived a minute and a half after the first call, followed by uniformed officers less than three minutes later.

At one point, a young boy turned to Asselin. “Don’t cry,” he told her. “It will be OK.”

Several more shots were followed by a strange silence.

“Is he hunting or is he dead?” Asselin thought. “Is it safe? Are the police here?”

“Does anyone see Toni?” she shouted before being hushed by others who worried the shooter was still there.

“I had thought maybe the last shot we heard, he had taken his life,” she said.

Instead, the shooter headed 4 miles (6.44 kilometers) south to Schemengees Bar & Grille, where workers from other bars and restaurants could get 25% discounts every Wednesday night and employees were collecting Halloween-themed cocktail recipes for a cornhole tournament planned for later in the week.

The restaurant was hosting an event for members of the deaf community, and cornhole games were underway when a man entered and started shooting. In total, 18 people would be killed at the bowling alley and restaurant. Thirteen others were wounded.

Peyton Brewer-Ross, who enjoyed the game of cornhole so much that he brought out the angled boards and bags at family gatherings, had a spot next to the door and was likely one of the first at the bar to die, according to his brother.

“When he was shot, he was doing the thing he loved,” Wellman Brewer said.

Bar manager Joe Walker picked up a butcher knife and tried to stop the gunman, Walker’s father told multiple media outlets.

“And that’s when he shot my son to death,” Leroy Walker told WGME-TV.

Walker said his son was shot twice in the stomach.

“He died as a hero,” he told NBC News.

Authorities received multiple calls from Schemengees at 7:08 p.m., and the first officers arrived five minutes later.

An hour later, they released a photo of the suspected shooter. By 9:30 p.m., they had received a call identifying him as Card, 40, of Bowdoin. Lewiston residents were urged to stay inside with their doors locked.

Fern Asselin and his wife were waiting outside the bowling alley Wednesday night for word about their daughter and granddaughter. Finally, after two hours he got a call from his granddaughter, Toni.

“And the words that came out were four words I’ll never forget,” he said. “It was: ‘I’m not dead, Pepere.’”

Just before 10 p.m., police found Card’s car at a boat launch in Lisbon, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) from Lewiston. Those who had been in the bowling alley were taken to the city’s middle school to be reunited with their families.

“Now it’s midnight and I’m just getting home,” the bowler who hid in the bowling pin machinery told The Associated Press, identifying himself only as Brandon. “All my stuff’s there, no shoes, just ready to go home. I’m tired.”

At a late-night news conference, officials said more than 350 law enforcement personnel had joined the search for Card, a U.S. Army reservist they described as a “person of interest.”

By morning, authorities were calling Card an armed and dangerous suspect who should not be approached. Authorities launched a multistate search on land and water, including patrols along the Kennebec River. Schools as far away as Kennebunk, more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Lewiston, closed out of caution, as did public buildings in Portland, the state’s largest city.

Much of the search Thursday focused on property owned by Card’s relatives in Bowdoin. Two law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that investigators found a note at a home associated with Card on Thursday addressed to his son. The officials described it as a suicide note, but said it didn’t provide a specific motive for the shooting. On Friday night, authorities found Card’s body at a recycling plant where he once worked.

Tammy Asselin, who later learned that her cousin Tricia was killed at the bowling alley, wondered Friday if the gunman was thinking of someone he hated as he opened fire. She said her daughter also has been asking questions.

“Why the bowling alley?” Asselin said. “Why us? Why good people? And that’s what we don’t know.”

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