Evelyn Reynolds

A man who stormed the US Capitol with fellow Proud Boys far-right extremist group members was sentenced on Wednesday to six years in prison after he berated and insulted the judge who punished him.Marc Bru repeatedly interrupted chief judge James Boasberg before the sentence was handed down, calling him a “clown” and a “fraud” presiding over a “kangaroo court”.The judge warned Bru that he could be kicked out of the courtroom if he continued to disrupt the proceedings.“You can give me 100 years and I’d do it all over again,” said Bru, who was handcuffed and shackled.“That’s the definition of no remorse in my book,” the judge said.Prosecutors described Bru as one of the least remorseful rioters who assaulted the Capitol on 6 January 2021 when extremist supporters of Donald Trump, encouraged by the then outgoing US president broke into the Capitol to try to stop the certification by a joint session of Congress of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.Lawmakers were chased out of the Capitol amid threats to their lives, as law enforcement came under siege and were physically attacked. Biden’s win was certified in the early hours of 7 January 2021, after the Capitol was cleared, and he was sworn in as president, peacefully, later that month after Trump left the White House but refused to attend the inauguration of his successor.Prosecutors said Bru planned for an armed insurrection – a so-called “January 6 2.0” attack – to take over the government in Portland, Oregon, several weeks after the deadly riot in Washington DC.“He wanted a repeat of January 6, only he implied this time would be more violent,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing ahead of his sentencing.Bru has been representing himself with an attorney on standby. He has spewed anti-government rhetoric that appears to be inspired by the sovereign citizen movement. At the start of the hearing, Bru demanded that the judge and a prosecutor turn over five years of their financial records.The judge gave him a 10-minute break to confer with his standby lawyer before the hearing resumed with more interruptions.“I don’t accept any of your terms and conditions,” Bru said. “You’re a clown and not a judge.”Prosecutors had warned the court that Bru intended to disrupt his sentencing. On Tuesday, he called in to a nightly vigil outside the jail where he and other rioters are being held. He told supporters of the detained January 6 defendants that he would “try to put on a good show” at his sentencing.Trump has taken to calling such defendants “hostages”, while out on the campaign trail as he aims to win the Republican nomination and take on Biden again in the 2024 presidential election.Boasberg convicted Bru of seven charges, including two felonies, after hearing trial testimony without a jury in October.Bru flew from Portland, Oregon, to Washington a day before Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House. Before Trump’s speech, he joined dozens of other Proud Boys in marching to the Capitol and was one of the first rioters to breach a restricted area. Bru grabbed a barricade and shoved it against police officers. He later joined other rioters inside the Capitol and entered the Senate gallery, where he flashed a hand gesture associated with the Proud Boys as he posed for selfie photos. He spent roughly 13 minutes inside the building.More than 1,200 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related crimes.
The Associated Press contributed reporting More

The Tory party is carrying out a postmortem on Rishi Sunak’s leadership before it has expired. It is a gruesome spectacle. Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister, has called on the prime minister to resign on the grounds that he is navigating the Conservatives towards electoral calamity and incapable of steering them to safety.MPs who might privately agree with Mr Clarke’s analysis have denounced the intervention as counterproductive. The majority of Conservatives recognise that defeat looms under their current leader and also that it would loom larger still if he were defenestrated. The succession would be chaotic; the government’s threadbare mandate would be void. Fourteen years in office would make any administration feel stale. The lack of tangible achievements, coupled with economic stagnation and decline in public services, gives Mr Sunak’s reign an unshakable aura of decay.But there are also ideological schisms and geographic faultlines running through the Conservative base that make recovery harder. The majority that Boris Johnson won in 2019 combined long-established Conservative supporters, concentrated in southern England, with former Labour voters in the north and the Midlands.It was a politically incoherent coalition, united only in support for Brexit (or at least impatience to end the bickering about it) and aversion to the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. Labour is now under new leadership and Brexit is enacted without material benefits. What some Tory strategists identified as an epic realignment of the electorate has unravelled in the absence of either a positive prospectus for the future or charismatic leadership. Mr Johnson’s potency in that department was overrated but not inconsequential. The incineration of his popularity in the Partygate scandal also contaminated an already diminished Conservative brand.The realignment theory is not entirely without foundation. Sir Keir Starmer might be poised to reclaim many seats in Labour’s former heartlands, but that doesn’t mean that the old allegiance, rooted in working-class identity and local culture, is renewed. Brexit was the catalyst for abandonment of a loyalty that had degraded over the preceding generation. Much of the so-called red wall will remain marginal territory after the next election.That leads some Tory MPs to imagine a swift recovery under a more radical prospectus – fiercer in opposing immigration; more aggressive in “anti-woke” campaigns; and fanatical in cutting taxes.The Conservative ultras draw inspiration from Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable march towards nomination as the Republicans’ presidential candidate, and the plausible prospect of his return to the White House in November. The apparent lesson is that blood-curdling nationalism, culture wars on a nuclear scale, contempt for democratic norms and disregard for truth are a winning formula.As a model this is repellent on ethical grounds. On the amoral test of practicality, Trumpism has limited application in Britain. Fixating on potential gains from a more radical rightwing platform spares party ideologues the less comfortable task of accounting for lost support among moderate, liberal and former remain-voting Conservatives. They are now swinging to the Lib Democrats, Labour, or whichever of the two is better placed to oust the local Tory.The more in thrall the Conservatives become to the extreme wing of the US Republican movement, the more brutal will be the electoral punishment that is stirring them to panic – and the more deserved. More

The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham “threw Donald Trump under the bus” in testimony to a grand jury investigating election subversion in Georgia, a new book reportedly says, revealing that the former president would have believed “martians came and stole the election” he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.“After fighting a four-month legal battle all the way to the US supreme court to block his grand jury subpoena – and losing … Graham turned on a dime ‘and threw Trump under the bus’,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write in Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election, Politico reported.“According to secret grand jury testimony in Fulton county confirmed by the authors, Graham testified that if you told Trump ‘that martians came and stole the election, he’d probably believe you’. He also suggested to the grand jurors that Trump cheated at golf.”The book, which cites “a source familiar with [Graham’s] testimony”, will be published next week.Trump’s cheating at golf has been widely reported.Isikoff and Klaidman also reportedly describe a “strange encounter” between Graham and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who has pursued the election subversion case, producing 13 criminal charges against Trump and charging a host of his allies.Willis reportedly decided against charging Graham over his involvement in Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s win in the state.“After Graham was finished testifying,” Isikoff and Klaidman write, “he bumped into Fani Willis in a hallway and thanked her for the opportunity to tell his story.“‘That was so cathartic,’ he told Willis. ‘I feel so much better.’ Then, to the astonishment of one source who witnessed the scene, South Carolina’s senior senator hugged the Fulton county DA who was aggressively pursuing Trump.“Willis’s reaction: ‘She was like, “Whatever, dude,”’ according to one witness of the strange encounter.”Trump’s criminal charges in Georgia contribute to a total of 91, as do four federal charges concerning his attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe former president also faces 40 charges over the retention of classified information; 34 regarding hush-money payments to an adult film actor who claimed an affair; civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge said was “substantially true”; and attempts to remove him from the ballot, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.Nonetheless, he has dominated the Republican presidential primary, winning convincingly in Iowa and New Hampshire and now pressuring his last rival, the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, to drop out.Graham remains, in public, a vocal Trump supporter, oblivious to charges of hypocrisy given a famous 2016 prediction that Trump would “destroy” the Republican party, and given a claim, immediately after the attack on Congress, that he was finally “out” of Trump’s camp. More

A sweep of the first two nominating contests on the 2024 primary season left Donald Trump in a strong position to seize the Republican party nomination, and made a rematch with Joe Biden even more inevitable.Trump’s Republican rival, Nikki Haley, vowed to fight on despite her second place finish in New Hampshire, a state where she had hoped for an upset, and her third place finish in the Iowa caucuses. But she faces long odds. There is no precedent for a candidate winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary and losing their party’s nomination.In his victory night speech, Trump previewed the crudeness of the campaign rhetoric to come if Haley does not accede to his calls for her to drop out. In his remarks, which were more angry than celebratory, Trump suggested that Haley would find herself under investigation if she became the nominee, but then declared that she had no chance of dethroning him.“This is not your typical victory speech,” he said, surrounded by all of his vanquished Republican rivals. “But let’s not have someone take a victory when she had a very bad night.”Haley’s campaign dismissed Trump’s speech as a “furious and rambling rant” and asked: “If Trump is in such good shape, why is he so angry?”“This is why so many voters want to move on from Trump’s chaos and are rallying to Nikki Haley’s new generation of conservative leadership,” her campaign said.Haley was more gracious in her speech. She conceded to Trump and congratulated him on his victory. But she said she would not be pushed out of a contest that had just begun. “New Hampshire is first in the nation,” she told supporters in Concord, the state’s capitol. “It is not the last in the nation. This race is far from over.”Haley insisted that she could parlay her second-place showing in New Hampshire into an even stronger finish in her home state of South Carolina, where she was twice elected governor. But polls show Trump leading Haley by roughly 30 percentage points in South Carolina, which holds its Republican primary election on 24 February.Haley’s loss underscored Trump’s strength among Republican voters, who looked past his false claims of a stolen election and a web of legal troubles amounting to 91 criminal charges.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHaley has said “chaos follows” Trump and argued Republicans would lose the presidency again if he was their nominee. “A Trump nomination is a Biden win and a Kamala Harris presidency,” she said, suggesting that the 81-year-old president would not be able to complete his term.Biden was not on Tuesday’s primary ballot in New Hampshire, but won the contest thanks to a homegrown write-in campaign.“It is now clear that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. And my message to the country is the stakes could not be higher,” Biden said in a statement on Tuesday. “Our Democracy. Our personal freedoms – from the right to choose to the right to vote. Our economy – which has seen the strongest recovery in the world since COVID. All are at stake.” More

Donald Trump’s victory in New Hampshire’s Republican presidential primary election moves him closer to a November rematch with US president Joe Biden. His only remaining rival, former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, vowed to continue her 2024 campaign and attempted to coax Trump into a debate More

Can we stop pretending now? After weeks of speculating by the media that perhaps Nikki Haley might eke out a win in New Hampshire – or at least lose by a percentage small enough to make continuing in the race reasonable – she lost by a wide margin.Before we had been offered various rationales for why, just maybe, this wouldn’t happen. Haley, after all, had recently come into a flush of donor money at the end of 2023, as the field dwindled and she was left alone as the last almost-plausible non-Trump candidate. She’d put much of that money into New Hampshire, a state whose Republicans tend to hew more moderate. (Haley, a rabid conservative but one who does not seem to oppose the rule of law outright, is what passes for “moderate” in today’s Republican party.)There was also the force of history to consider, the fact that primary campaigns of either major party do not usually look like this. When there’s such a big field, as there was in this Republican cycle, normally New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary can have quite a bit of sway, helping to advance the strongest contenders and cull the stragglers.But this year there were only two people really running by the time New Hampshire rolled around, and one of them loomed much larger than the other – both in fundraising and in his power to animate the public. It was like watching a race between a whale and a minnow: he lapped her without seeming to try.One word for the 2024 Republican primary contest is “anticlimactic”. But considering how completely Trump has captured the imagination of his party, it is possible that the real story is not about how easily he has trounced his challengers, but that there were so many challengers in the first place.What possessed so many Republicans to run against Trump? Were they delusional? Hopeful? Cynical? Had they missed the memo on what their party had become – a personality cult devoted in total service to one man? Or did they think, somehow, that he was weaker than he was?Perhaps this was the idea of the Trump imitators. Whiny, pleading Ron DeSantis hoped that if he demonstrated enough cruelty in Florida, his home state, Republican voters might admire him as strong, and forget how annoying he is. He was Trump without the charm.Nasally, scheming Vivek Ramaswamy attempted to channel Trump’s snake-oil salesman pitch for nostalgia, punishment of enemies and exaggerated promises; he was Trump without the movement.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey best known for shutting down the George Washington Bridge to punish a mayor who had crossed him, was the only Republican willing to attack Trump, building his campaign around severe, self-serious intonations about the former president’s danger to the nation. But it was impossible to take Christie seriously: he could not convincingly feign honor.Maybe it was fitting, then, that Haley was the last one standing: though she was equally misguided, she was doing something different from her fellow candidates. Haley’s campaign, focused on a revival of a hawkish neoconservative foreign policy and a comparative de-emphasis of social issues, seemed uncannily retro and anachronistic – a 90s-era Republican wearing a 21st-century blazer set.Hers was a campaign that talked about a generational shift and played up Haley’s relative youth (she’s 52), but which also seemed to wish for a return to the political past, attempting to proceed as if Trump had never happened. Who could look at today’s Republican party – animated by racist and misogynist zeal, in thrall to short-sightedness and bigotry, harnessed around petty grievances and functionally largely, for its base, to entertain – and think that what such people wanted was a competent, cool-headed and strategic woman of color? Only the most naive people in the world could think that. Haley, at least, was willing to take their money.In debates, Haley talked about the virtues of foreign military involvement and played up her own discipline and competence. There might be arguments for all this, but they are clearly not arguments that the Republican party base wanted to hear: foreign wars remain unpopular in post-Iraq America. (Trump’s pivot to an “America First” isolationism seems to have returned Republicans to a Lindbergh-esque hostility to the outside world for the foreseeable future.)And things like competence, self-discipline and hard work are qualities that tend to render women into useful, serviceable minor characters – the sort of background figures who can be useful to a man of showmanship and bombast.One of the most plausible explanations for Haley’s campaign has always been that she is actually running for vice-president. This might be the role she is best suited to play: that of a bridge between the old-guard establishment Republicans and the new, permanently Trumpist reality.But it’s unclear how much of a reconciliation is really needed there. After his landslide victory in Iowa, the big donor money has once again flowed to Trump; reporters at Davos issued dispatches detailing how the global rich have made their peace with Trump’s possible return to the White House.The old-school Republicans that Haley represents have never been as far from Trump as it would benefit their egos to pretend. The national war hawks, the corporate rich: these people do not need the democracy that Trump threatens. And in a few days or weeks, when she inevitably drops out of the race and endorses Trump, Nikki Haley will discover that she can live without it, too.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Donald Trump has won the first in the nation primary election in New Hampshire, making it almost inevitable that we’re poised for the first rematch in a general election since 1956. Despite coming in second in a two-person race, Nikki Haley celebrated at her election night event in Concord.
So in our final episode of this special three-part series from New Hampshire, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Lauren Gambino and Semafor’s David Weigel about whether or not Haley actually has reason to be positive. Or is she running on hope rather than reason?

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The cruelty is the point.As Joe Biden acknowledged on Tuesday night, Donald Trump now has the Republican presidential nomination sewn up. But like a Roman emperor or mob boss, Trump used his victory speech in New Hampshire to humiliate his former opponents – and make sinister threats against his last primary rival.The former US president had followed up his record win in the Iowa caucuses with victory over Nikki Haley, his former ambassador to the UN, with a double-digit triumph in less favourable political territory. As Republican politicians and donors scramble to jump aboard the Trump train, it is clearly game over for the Never Trumpers.Trump could have been magnanimous in victory and congratulated Haley on a race well run. Instead, he was palpably irked by her refusal to drop out of the race. Petty and vindictive, he became a playground bully punching down for the benefit of an audience that glories in metaphorical violence.Addressing a crowded hotel ballroom in Nashua, he gave Haley a dark warning: “Just a little note to Nikki. She’s not going to win. But if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes, and I could tell you five reasons why already.“Not big reasons, little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, that she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron [DeSantis] have been, but he decided to get out.”There were echoes of political operative Lee Atwater or Roger Stone’s dirty tricks campaigns, or Trump senior campaign aide Chris LaCivita’s Swift Boat veterans takedown of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. It was also redolent of Trump’s own vicious attacks on Senator Ted Cruz’s wife and father (whom he baselessly linked to the John F Kennedy assassination) in 2016.But Trump has plenty of humiliation to serve around, even to people on his own side. He invited former opponent Vivek Ramaswamy to speak but only “if he promises to do it in a minute or less” (admittedly, given Ramaswamy’s fiendishly irritating debate performances, many will take Trump’s side on that one).Then there was Senator Tim Scott, another ex-rival who has already debased himself with a fawning endorsement of Trump. With his unerring ability to get under people’s skin, he said to Scott that, since former South Carolina governor Haley appointed him to the Senate, “You must really hate her.”There was an awkward silence in the room and a rare grunt of dissent from someone. To rescue the situation, Scott stepped forward to the lectern, looked at Trump and grovelled: “I just love you!” The crowd exhaled in relief. Scott was the hapless father in The Godfather who had accepted: “For justice, we must go to Don Corleone.”Like Chris Christie in 2016, Scott has surrendered his principles to the inevitability of Trump. Haley now stands alone in a Republican party that belongs to him. Did she ever have a chance? Perhaps she could have done more to make it a choice rather than a coronation.Haley could have emphasised her spouse’s military record and gone after Trump on his description of fallen solders as “losers” and “suckers”. She could have celebrated her identity as a daughter of Indian immigrants to contrast herself with Trump’s bigotry, nativism and racism. She could have played up her gender and what masterstroke it would be for Republicans, not Democrats, to produce America’s first female president after nearly 250 years.She could also have been more forceful in making the electability argument, taking her cue from Christie who hammered Trump over his defeat in election after election.But none of these are deemed viable in today’s party. Instead, when Haley did go bold and against the grain, it was on foreign policy, ardently pro-Israel and anti-Russia, and constantly bashing China. It was never going to win many extra votes but it was sure to alienate the isolationist “America First” wing of the party, personified by Ramaswamy.Other flashes of courage arrived too little too late. Early on Tuesday Haley appeared on Fox News’s Fox & Friends and said, bluntly, she did not know if they would “tell the truth” about her campaign. Later, in her concession speech, she pushed the electability argument: “The worst-kept secret in politics is how badly the Democrats want to run against Donald Trump.”If it was such a badly kept secret, why not shout it from the rooftops months earlier?But like many bullies, Trump’s ostentatious show of strength was motivated by inner weakness. Haley did well enough among independents to raise red flags for Republicans in the general election.The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, commented: “It’s clear that Trump is political poison to moderates. Sane and moral republicans said their conscience won’t allow them to vote for a chaos-driven maniac who is under 91 criminal counts, a proven sexual predator, and authoritarian wannabe who will shred the constitution and burn this country down.”Biden, meanwhile, won the unsanctioned Democratic primary without even being on the ballot. He, not Trump, was the winner of the night when judging how things will play out in November.Trump rules by fear in his party but lacks the love of his nation. For many voters, it is not love but loathing. More