Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

Michael Cohen Was Paid to Fix Trump’s Problems. Now He’s One of Them.
Mr. Cohen once called himself Donald J. Trump’s “designated thug.” Will he help bring about the ex-president’s downfall?

Donald J. Trump has always surrounded himself with lawyers — all types of lawyers. There are the television-friendly talking heads. The polished criminal practitioners. The pit-bull litigators, the corporate suits and the legal advisers with their own legal troubles.

And then there was the singular Michael D. Cohen, lawyer by trade and enforcer by nature. With the loyalty of a surrogate son, he kept Mr. Trump’s secrets and cleaned up his messes. He was the fixer.

This week, however, Mr. Cohen is poised to unfix Mr. Trump’s life. When he takes the stand as a vital witness at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, Mr. Cohen will unearth some of the secrets he buried, revealing a mess that prosecutors say his former boss was desperate to hide.
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Some unsolicited advice for Joe Kahn of The New York Times and other editors
No one is asking you to join the Biden campaign, stop covering the flaws and foibles of Democratic candidates up and down the ballot, or to run a bunch of puff pieces about those candidates.

But we are asking you to make it clearer — in coverage, and in emphasis and framing, and, yes, in your public statements — that your news organization is aware of the threats to democracy on the ballot in November. And that it is a core part of your mission to stand for democratic principles and to have news coverage reflect that consistently.

While you’re at it, you could also stop doing everything possible to put a negative spin on Biden’s legitimate accomplishments, as these two news alerts — one from the Times, one from the Guardian — illustrate. This is one of innumerable examples.
Abortion ballot measures try to keep Dems at arm’s length
It’s a particular concern in key presidential and Senate battlegrounds like Arizona, Montana and Nevada where ballot measure campaigns to codify abortion rights need more than just Democratic voters to succeed.

“We haven’t won or beat back a single one of these ballot measures without significant independent and Republican support,” said Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All. “We spent a lot of last year talking to candidates directly saying, ‘Don’t put things on the ballot just to enhance voter turnout for Dems.’ That’s not how this works.”
In Defense of Punching Left
“Don’t punch left” is the core tenet of Solidarity, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix. In a laudatory interview with the Washington Post, Hunt-Hendrix said the book was aimed not only at progressives in general but also specifically at liberals who criticize the left, naming me and newsletter author Matthew Yglesias as “falling into the right’s divide-and-conquer strategy.”

Solidarity provides the lengthiest and most serious case I’ve seen for why liberals should withhold criticism of the left. And since the basis of my refusal to take this advice is no longer self-evident to all my readers and colleagues, and appears increasingly deviant to some, their book provides a useful occasion for me to lay out my reasons why liberals should feel free to express criticisms of the left.
Your Guide to What’s on the Ballot on May 7 and 14
Few candidates have spent as much of their own money to win an elected office than U.S. Representative David Trone; he has given his campaign more than $50 million—and counting—as he runs to replace retiring Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. He’s locked in one of 2024’s most hotly contested Senate primaries against Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who has the support of most of the state’s prominent politicians. The winner will likely face Republican Larry Hogan, the state’s former governor, in what could be a tough general election…

Indiana, Nebraska, and West Virginia are each also holding presidential primaries, though Donald Trump and Joe Biden have already locked down their respective parties’ nominations.
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Jonathan Chait is right. The heiress is wrong.
One point to hammer home is that the Far Left paints the Moderate Democrat as the tool of the Right, when it is actually the Right and the Far Left that have a symbiotic relationship. This creates an opportunity, as we explained in What The Center Can Learn From AOC:

The far-left and far-right play off each other to generate fodder for their respective audiences. By invoking the specter of the other, each side is able to fire up its base and raise gobs of small-dollar donations. Anyone whose email address has been sold to far-left candidates sees plenty of “CAN YOU BELIEVE what FOX NEWS said about ILHAN OMAR???” in their inbox.

But the far-left takes it a step further: they also attack moderate Democrats — especially in earned media and digital fundraising — without a reciprocal positive effect for the center-left. Both the far-left and far-right win when they pick high-profile fights with each other (e.g. MTG and AOC battling it out on Twitter), but only the far-left wins in the tussle with mainstream Democrats. The far-left’s success in clearly defining their dual enemies (Trump Republicans and mainstream Democrats) allows the center-left to now do the same.

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