Before Donald Trump became President, some purportedly knowledgeable students of the Constitution had never even heard of the emoluments clause. (Me, for example.) This heretofore obscure provision of Article I had its origin in the distant mists of American history, when representatives of the young republic were seen as vulnerable to temptations offered by the wealthy grandees of Europe. As a result, the Framers decided to ban American officials from receiving any gifts or money—that is, emoluments—from foreign governments. It was a simple rule, easy to comply with, and the clause generated few controversies and even fewer court cases for more than two centuries.

But Trump brought the emoluments clause to life. After he refused to divest his real-estate holdings upon becoming President, his hotels became a magnet for foreign visitors seeking to curry favor with his Administration. A former Trump Organization official recently estimated that foreign governments spent more than a million dollars at Trump’s businesses in 2018, mostly at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. (Since Trump was inaugurated, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have been good customers there.) But the money flowing from foreign governments to the President’s businesses could soar if he makes good on his apparent plan, which he announced last month, to host next year’s G-7 meeting at his Doral golf resort, in Florida. If the deal comes to fruition, the conference would mark a new level of grifting by the President, and it appears consistent with a new brazenness in his efforts to profit from his office. (Zach Everson’s newsletter follows issues relating to Trump’s use of the Presidency for financial gain.)

Some of Trump’s efforts may have run afoul of an even more obscure provision of the Constitution: the so-called domestic emoluments clause. This section of Article II states that the President “shall not receive” any emolument, other than his fixed salary, from “the United States, or any of them.” Again, the idea behind this provision is similar to the one underlying the foreign clause: the Framers didn’t want any part of the government, or any state, trying to influence the President by funnelling money to him. This is precisely the problem with Vice-President Mike Pence’s recent trip to Ireland, where he wasted many hours and untold thousands of dollars of government money, to stay at a Trump golf resort that was nearly two hundred miles away from his meetings with Irish leaders, including the Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, in Dublin. (The Administration’s explanations for how Pence came to stay at the hotel have been unconvincing, to say the least.) Can anyone seriously doubt that the reason Pence stayed at Trump’s hotel was to please the boss, at the taxpayers’ expense? And that’s precisely the ill that the constitutional provision was designed to prevent.

Since practically the day that Trump took office, his political opponents have taken to the courts to protest what they characterize as his violations of the emoluments clauses. The cases have generally gone poorly for the President’s adversaries, although none has been definitively resolved. A panel of the Fourth Circuit threw out an emoluments case brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked the legal standing to sue. A similar case in a New York federal court met the same fate. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., held that a group of members of Congress, led by Senator Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, did have standing to bring an emoluments case, but the Trump Administration has appealed, and that case is stalled, too. Another possibility for resolution of the emoluments issues, of course, is for Congress to use it as a basis for impeachment. As with other potential grounds for impeachment, such as obstruction of justice, it awaits a determination by the Democratic leadership in Congress about whether to pursue it.

In all, the emoluments issue represents a good illustration of Kinsley’s law, named for the journalist Michael Kinsley, who observed that the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal. What society chooses not to punish tells you the most about the prevailing moral standards of any age. According to an estimate by the Center for Responsive Politics, various domestic political groups and committees have spent nearly twenty million dollars on events at Trump’s properties.

Unlike government expenditures, there’s no question that these payments are legal. But in a country that purports to demand that its politicians work for the public interest, not for their private gain, Trump’s behavior is an outrage. At this point, it seems unlikely that the courts, or even the Congress, will do anything about it. The only hope for a check on Trump, and for his removal, is the voters.

The current crisis of gun violence in America registers mostly in two distinct forms. (At least two; the crisis of suicide by gunshot is its own subject.) Inevitably, most of those who try to act on the crisis concentrate on the more visible form, which expresses itself in what is by now an American regularity as much as it is an American singularity: the gun massacre.

That isn’t a false emphasis. Gun massacres, in addition to the death and horror that they bring, are reshaping our culture in ways so destructive— producing perverse exercises in school architecture and the constant, usually needless, but real panic in parents’ hearts—that to register their damage even in terms of the lives lost is insufficient. (That damage is as incomprehensible as it is real—as one chronicle shows, there have been more mass shootings this year than there have been days in the calendar.)

Yet we can see some small signs that the inevitable process of democratic reform—in which legislation is a lagging, not a leading, indicator, and public outrage eventually directs political conduct more than political conduct can defeat public outrage—is under way. This week’s announcement that Walmart, the second-largest retailer in the world, will end the sale of some kinds of ammunition—and end the sale of handguns in Alaska, the only state where it still sells them—might seem pitifully minimal to visitors from other countries, not least because it was paired with a “request” that customers in the states that allow open carry refrain from openly bringing guns into Walmart stores. But the announcement is nevertheless significant, even astounding.

Walmart, historically a conservative company, has taken other steps in recent years, including banning the sale of assault-style rifles. It was moved to act now, in part, by the fact that this summer two of its stores were the scene of shootings, including the one in El Paso in which twenty-two people were killed. More meaningfully, the move was also propelled, as social action most often is, from below—from the pleadings and the polemics of Walmart employees, who, deciding that they no longer wanted to be “complicit” in profiting from the sale of firearms, put their livelihoods on the line in order to push their bosses to take a further stand on the gun issue.

Though it can’t change everything, Walmart’s act is likely to change something. The employees’ response shares the logic of a previous people’s fight, against drunk driving. It’s the primary rule both of social agitation and of social reform: the more micro-changes you make in more places, the more effective the macro-change becomes. Banning the sale of some of the most dangerous kinds of guns and ammunition is just one step. But many steps make long marches.

The other chief, though often less visible, form that the gun crisis currently takes in this country is that of gun violence in the cities. A fine new book, “Bleeding Out,” by Thomas Abt, sheds light on the issue of urban violence and offers some practical, street-tested solutions to it. Though the situation is very different, the solutions seem effectively cast in a similar vein—as focussed and specific programs designed to solve seemingly overwhelming problems. Abt, a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Development, who previously worked in the Obama Justice Department and for Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, is aware that gun massacres are, so to speak, the megafauna of the gun-crime environment. They grab our attention, while, Abt writes, “we largely overlook the thousands of black and brown young men who die violently each year, caught up in cycles they do not fully understand and cannot easily escape.”

Though completely committed to social justice, and passionately aware of the role that bigotry plays in creating disparate forms of social violence, Abt believes that the only way to attack violence is to attack violence. This means that we have to attack urban violence and its immediate causes as a specific social problem and behavior, not as an über-symptom of some other underlying problem. Essentially, get rid of guns and you begin to get rid of gun violence.

Abt’s approach is, in the classic American manner, an empirical one, wielding a quick pragmatic broom. Gangs, for instance, a favorite tabloid and cable-television indicator and cause of street violence, are strongly deprecated as a propellant in urban crime. Gangs, Abt explains, are far more fluid and complex social organizations than the tabloid picture presupposes. “We fetishize gangs, obsessing over the details of their rites, rituals and ceremonies. We exaggerate their numbers and their crimes,” he writes. “We have to start over and refocus our efforts not on gangs but on gang violence. If a gang or a gang member is violent, they deserve our anti-violence attention. With gangs, the issue is not the group’s identity; it is the group’s behavior.” Trump needs the MS-13 gang as a symbol with which to frighten his followers, but terrifying gangs should terrify few others.

Similarly, drugs and drug dealing turn out not to be causal for much urban violence. A lot of city drug dealing is nonviolent and, Abt argues, should be left as a problem to the public-health system. “Drugs are no longer central in the fight against urban violence. When rivalries among drug dealers spark shootings and killings, then those rivalries must be addressed, but generally speaking drugs should not be the focus of anti-violence efforts,” he writes. Indeed, alcohol turns out to be a far more insidious agent of street violence than illegal narcotics are: “One systematic review found strong evidence that preventing bars and restaurants from selling alcohol late at night can lead to substantial reductions in violence.” A criminologist has even suggested “that tripling alcohol taxes could reduce the murder rate by six percent.” And Abt insists that “community policing” alone is inadequate. “Racially discriminatory governmental policies were essential to producing concentrated poverty in many communities of color,” he writes. “Having played a role in creating violence-ridden urban communities, the state must now play a role in liberating them.”

What does work against urban violence, which is, mostly, gun violence? Abt recommends neither noxious stop-and-frisk policies nor amorphous community policing but, instead, what he calls “partnership-oriented crime prevention”—using all of a city’s resources, including but not limited to the police, to attack “hot spots” where violence occurs and is likely to occur again. Some years ago, in Kansas City, for instance, a program directed exclusively against illegal firearms, which involved seizing guns, checking cars, and stopping pedestrians in one violent neighborhood, saw gun crime fall by almost fifty per cent.

Abt recognizes the risk that this kind of policing can become stop-and-frisk-style harassment, and so he emphasizes the crucial role of community buy-in. “Extensive community outreach was done before police patrols began and when residents were surveyed later, they expressed support for the patrols” (emphasis mine). Urban crime is cruellest to the poor; if poor communities feel that they are being empowered, not preyed on, they act together with local government to end it.

Questions of tone, respect, and transparency are also crucial to ending urban violence: “When an officer approaches a group of young men and starts asking questions, the officer might be asked, ‘Why are you hassling us?’ That question should receive a respectful answer, such as, ‘We’ve had a lot of shootings nearby so we’re paying special attention to this area. We just want to be sure everybody is being safe.’ ” Things that might seem mere mood markers—an atmosphere of cynicism, a pervasive mistrust of the criminal justice system and the police—turn out to be key impediments to ending violence. Once an atmosphere of mutual effort begins, productive things happen. What might seem to be just “playing with the surface”—emphasizing a mutuality of interests, transparency of means, respectful address, and common effort—alters what happens below the surface. Big changes in urban violence can begin with small alterations in urban voices.

In both the fight against gun massacres and the fight against urban violence, what matters is not addressing an imagined underlying cause—mental illness or the broken family—but addressing the presence of too many guns. The essential step in limiting gun violence is to limit guns. What both fights have in common is that we can, finally, claim some small hard-won optimism about the possibility of direct action from direct actors. (Abt ends his book with a practical appendix detailing how networks of the engaged can be found and made to work together.) We don’t have to wait for a solution to all our problems—or for legislation from Washington, which, with Senator Mitch McConnell in charge, is not likely to happen soon—to have hope. The employees of Walmart acted as communities in cities are trying to, by doing the work that the law has ceased efficiently to do. As Abt wisely remarks, “If the law must be enforced, it has already lost.” By acting in communities—or in stores—before the killings start again, we act for our country in ways that our country, right now, seems unable to act for itself.

In June, during a rapid-fire round of questioning on the first night of the Democratic debates, Chuck Todd, of NBC, pressed each of the ten candidates onstage to identify the “greatest geopolitical threat to the United States.” Tying China, with four votes—and beating out Russia, Iran, and Donald Trump—was climate change. The answer offered both an overdue recognition of the dire times and an early sign that, at last, environmental action might be an imperative in the race for the Democratic nomination. Earlier in the summer, many activists had hoped for an official debate devoted to the issue, a prospect that the D.N.C. nixed last month. Instead, on Wednesday, as the Amazon continued to burn and Hurricane Dorian hovered over the southeastern coast of the United States, CNN convened the ten leading candidates for a succession of town halls on climate change, allowing each of them forty minutes to field questions from audience members and the network’s top anchors. The event lasted seven hours.

Most of the Democratic hopefuls aimed to portray the climate crisis as an issue of universal urgency, one whose broad threat to humankind ought to transcend partisan bickering. (On Wednesday, while Trump acknowledged the event’s kickoff with a series of insulting tweets, some Republican legislators expressed a sort of solidarity online.) Still, the marathon forum offered an occasion for Democratic front-runners to showcase their distinct, and sometimes distracting, styles. Amy Klobuchar, making a point about the need to develop green appliances, joked that she intended to build “a fridge to the next century.” Andrew Yang, asked whether citizens under his Administration would have to drive electric cars, skirted the question with a laugh line. “It’s not something you have to do. It’s awesome,” he said, adding at one point that Elon Musk had endorsed him. Pete Buttigieg, who likes to engage his faith by calling the climate crisis “a kind of sin,” demurred when asked whether his reliance on private air travel conflicted with his climate policy. “Sometimes I fly because this is a very big country,” he said, “and I’m running to be President of the whole country.” One could imagine Greta Thunberg, the teen-age activist who braved a two-week boat ride from Sweden to New York, in order to attend the U.N. Climate Action Summit this month, rolling her eyes.

It was an awkward night for Joe Biden, who took the stage hours after a report had surfaced that a high-dollar fund-raising event on his schedule the following day would be co-hosted by Andrew Goldman, a founder of the fossil-fuel company Western LNG. “How can we trust you to hold these corporations and executives accountable for their crimes against humanity?” a doctoral student from Northwestern asked him. Biden, whose left eye filled with blood at one point during his appearance, seemed taken aback when Anderson Cooper pressed him on the same question. “What I was told by my staff is that he did not have any responsibility relating to the company,” Biden said, referring to the fund-raiser’s host. “He was not on the board. He was not involved at all in the operation of the company at all. But, if that turns out to be true, then I will not in any way accept his help.” (A senior representative of Biden’s campaign took to Twitter to insist that Goldman, the executive, was “not involved in the day-to-day operation” of the company.)

Kamala Harris, who had previously declined an invitation to the forum, ended up expressing for the first time her intent to eliminate the filibuster if Senate Republicans tried to block the Green New Deal. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose environmental plans tend to earn the highest marks among climate activists, seemed especially confident in their commitment to the issue. When Anderson Cooper asked where climate policy would fall among Sanders’s progressive proposals—instituting a single-payer health-care system, cancelling student debt—the candidate replied, “I have the radical idea that a sane Congress can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.” Warren expressed similar impatience as Chris Cuomo repeatedly asked whether Americans should transition to more energy-efficient light bulbs. (The same day, Trump’s Administration had weakened mandates forcing them to do so.) Warren pointed out that the question seemed to absolve larger industries of their outsized role in the devastation of climate change. “Give me a break,” she told Cuomo, who asked her to clarify. Warren admitted that individual actions were obviously important before suggesting that the premise of the question was distracting. “That’s what they want us to talk about,” Warren said, referring to corporations that sought to cast the climate crisis as an individual problem. “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, around your straws and around your cheeseburgers, when seventy per cent of the pollution, of the carbon that we’re throwing into the air, comes from three industries.” (She cited the building industry, the electric-power industry, and the oil industry.)

Between the candidates’ forty-minute appearances, CNN wedged live-news updates that reminded viewers of topical emergencies. A live stream from California showed plumes of smoke rising from a wildfire. On a meteorological map, the crimson knot of Hurricane Dorian swirled over South Carolina. Most moderators pointed out that, since the industrial revolution, the global temperature had already risen by one degree Celsius, more than halfway toward a threshold that climate scientists predict will render the crisis irreversible. By the end of the night, the debate had revealed a consensus among Democrats that climate change was less a “geopolitical threat” than an existential one; that the country had to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, at the latest; and that some sort of price should be placed on carbon emissions. The first priority, many agreed, was for the United States to rejoin the Paris climate accord—though the undeniability of that fact seemed obvious to Cory Booker, who took the stage last. “I’m sorry,” he said, referring to the pledges of his fellow-contenders to rejoin the agreement. “That is, like, a cost of entry even to run for President.”

The true stars of the night were not the candidates, whose extemporizing often felt canned, but the questioners in the audience, whose backstories and adamance offered the more inspiring reminder that, while it’s too late to avoid the crisis completely, it’s not too late to act. Carson Tueller, an advocate from Utah who questioned Harris from his wheelchair, pointed out that climate change disproportionately hurts disabled Americans; his spine injury prevents him from sweating, a condition that proved nearly unbearable, he said, on the hottest days of July. Francine Streich, a mother whose child was killed by a falling tree during Hurricane Sandy, seemed unfazed when Biden launched a political pitch without offering his condolences. There were students from the Sunrise Movement, parents who had resettled their families, and scientists who had seen their warnings largely ignored. There was a lawyer who had refocussed his work to address the crisis and a black activist who observed that climate change poses the greatest risks to systematically neglected communities of color. A number of the questioners had lost their homes or their relatives. It seemed clear that all of them, perhaps even more than the most progressive candidates, had lost their patience.