Evelyn Reynolds

Donald Trump is facing a backlash for repeating a remark at a political rally on Saturday where he said undocumented immigrants to the United States are “poisoning the blood of our country”.The former US president’s comments were the latest example of his campaign rhetoric that seemed to go beyond the lies and exaggerations that are a trademark of his stump speeches and instead go into territory of outright extremism or racism. In November he was widely condemned for calling his opponents “vermin”, language that echoed that used historically by dictators and authoritarians.Trump, who is the overwhelming favorite to be the Republican nominee for the 2024 race for the White House, made the comments at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, attended by several thousand supporters. He added that immigrants were coming to the US from Asia and Africa in addition to South America. “All over the world they are pouring into our country,” he said.The White House hit back, saying that Joe Biden believes “our leaders have a responsibility to bring the country together around our shared values.”“Echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government are dangerous attacks on the dignity and rights of all Americans, on our democracy, and on public safety,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement.Trump’s comments come days after he warned that if he is re-elected next year he would act on immigration like a “dictator” – but only on the first day of his term. He has since floated the idea of sending potentially “hundreds of thousands” of US troops to secure the US-Mexico border, build a network of immigrant detention camps, and “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”.“He’s disgusting,” former New Jersey governor and Republican presidential contender Chris Christie told CNN Sunday. “He’s dog-whistling to Americans who feel under stress and strain from the economy and conflicts around the world,” Christie said. “He’s dog-whistling to blame it on people from areas that don’t look like us.”Christie, who has emerged as Trump’s most outspoken counter-puncher on the Republican side, accused Republican politicians of being “robot true-believers” to Trump’s messaging, describing him as a “poison on our political system” who, predicted, would be convicted of crimes “worthy of jail this spring and that’s why he’s getting crazier every day”.On CNN Christie accused leading Republican nomination rival Nikki Haley of “enabling” Trump by saying he is fit to be president. “She’s part of the problem because she’s enabling him, but I’m saying it’s not okay to be saying these things.”Former Republican speaker of the house Paul Ryan called Trump an “authoritarian narcissist”.Denunciation of Trump’s comments come as the Biden administration attempts to secure increased military aid for Ukraine and Israel – packages that are now hooked to a political compromise on immigration controls. Progressives have warned that they will not support additional aid packages if the issues are linked.Trump’s comments also come as he is expected to easily win in Iowa’s vital first in the nation caucus next month, according to NBC News. But the latest CBS polls suggests he may face stronger opposition in New Hampshire in February, where he is running at 44% to Haley’s 29% among Republican voters.In a slew of recent polls Trump has also been ahead of Joe Biden nationally and in many key battleground states. That has led to widespread concern that Trump could return to the Oval Office and speculation that he would deeply erode or dismantle US democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAgainst the backdrop of Trump’s “poison” comments, the White House issued a statement Sunday on the 80th anniversary of the repeal of the 1882 Chinese Eexclusion Act which had imposed a 10-year immigration ban on Chinese laborers.That law, Biden said, had “weaponized our immigration system to discriminate against an entire ethnic group” and had been followed by further discrimination against Europeans and Asian groups.Biden noted that despite progress, “hate never goes away. It only hides”, adding pointedly: “Today, there are those who still demonize immigrants and fan the flames of intolerance. It’s wrong.”Asked for comment by Reuters on Saturday, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung, did not directly address the candidate’s inflammatory rhetoric which had not reportedly been included in Trump’s scripted remarks.Cheung, who has previously dismissed criticism of Trump’s language as “nonsensical”, turned instead to the controversy over how US colleges are managing campus protests, and accused the media and academia had given “safe haven for dangerous antisemitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric that is both dangerous and alarming”. More

About halfway down the main hallway in the federal courthouse in Washington DC are the names of every judge who has sat on the bench since the early 1800s. Printed in gold lettering, the names include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Antonin Scalia and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all of whom have gone on to the highest levels of public service.But this week, four floors above that hallway, in courtroom 26A, two little-known public servants mourned the moment they lost their own names.In harrowing detail, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye Moss testified about how Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump falsely accused them of election fraud and ruined their lives shortly after the 2020 election as part of a scheme to contest and overturn the results. They told eight Washington DC jurors how they received a flood of racist messages and death threats. And how they’ve fled their homes outside Atlanta, Georgia, isolated themselves from their community and started protecting their identities. “I don’t have a name no more,” Freeman said on Wednesday. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”As millions of Americans have heard by now, Giuliani, the former New York mayor, repeatedly lied about the two women, who are Black. He claimed that they wheeled suitcases of illegal ballots out from under tables after counting had concluded at State Farm Arena, that they were passing around USB drives and that they created a fake water main break.The case was one of several significant efforts to hold Giuliani, Trump and other allies accountable for the lies they spread about the 2020 election – an election Trump continues to insist that he won.The jury awarded Moss and Freeman $148.1m in cumulative damages.The Giuliani case was about more than defamation. It was about power.At issue in the case wasn’t really the fact that Giuliani lied, but whom he lied about. It was a case about the way powerful people can use their influence to destroy the reputations of the average person.Moss spoke about this during her testimony on Tuesday when she described a nightmare she continues to have. In it, she opens her front door, she said, and finds powerful people with nooses ready to kill her.“They could do that because of who they are,” Moss said. “I’m a nobody.”Giuliani showed little emotion or remorse as lawyers for Freeman and Moss played horrific messages they received, including voicemails filled with racial slurs and letters sent to their homes with graphic death threats.In the first moments of the case, Von DuBose, one of the attorneys for Freeman and Moss, asked the jurors to consider the power of a name. “What’s in a name? Power, purpose, pride,” he said. “Your name is the most important thing you know.”He went on to say that the case was about how the names of Freeman and Moss have been transformed by Giuliani’s defamatory lies. Unspoken, too, were those of two men who have built their careers around their names: Giuliani and Trump. Two men who have continued to benefit as Moss and Freeman suffered.Though they never intended it, Moss and Freeman have become symbols of the human cost of the cost of election denialism because of that imbalance of power.They have largely stayed out of public since 2020, but their presence in a Washington DC courtroom served as a stand-in for the droves of election workers who have faced lies and harassment from people who believe the election was stolen. Many of them have left the profession.That sentiment was driven home in a gut-wrenching moment when Moss testified about the initial weeks in December 2020 when she went back to work, even while receiving harassment, to prepared for Georgia’s January 2021 runoff election. “I literally felt like someone was going to come and attempt to hang me and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”“Amidst all of this my goal was to get ready for the next election,” she said. “It’s hurtful … That’s the way people feel when I’m breaking my back to make sure their vote counts.”Usually in high-profile cases, it is the wealthy, famous person who is surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers in the courtroom. But in 26A this week, Giuliani sat alone at the defense table, flicking through his tablet, with a single lawyer, Joseph Sibley.Sibley did his best, with scattershot arguments to the jury to try to persuade them that Giuliani was not responsible for serious harm against the plaintiffs. He pointed to other actors, such as the far-right platform Gateway Pundit, that he said were really to blame for Freeman and Moss’s suffering because of how they disseminated the lies and videos. It would not really cost tens of millions of dollars to repair the reputation of the two women, he argued at another point.At the end, he made a simpler appeal: judge Giuliani by his good reputation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Rudy Giuliani is a good man. I know that some of you may not think that. He hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days,” he said. “The idea of him being a racist, or him encouraging racist activity, that’s really a low blow. That’s not who he is.”At the plaintiffs’ table, about 10ft away, it was Moss and Freeman who sat quietly surrounded by a dozen attorneys. It was the first time the two women had come face to face with the man who has tormented them for years.“After everything they went through, they stood up and they said no more. They opened themselves up to you and the public, and unlike some other people, they testified here under oath,” Michael Gottlieb, one of their attorneys, said in closing arguments, needling Giuliani’s last-minute decision not to testify.He urged the jurors to “send a message” with their damages award.“Send it to Mr Giuliani,” the lawyer said in his closing argument. “Send it to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”The verdict came, and it sent a message. But it didn’t yet bring closure.It’s not clear when Moss and Freeman can expect to see a cent of the money they’ve been awarded. Giuliani is widely reported to have financial troubles and he is likely to use an appeal and every other legal maneuver to try to delay paying. And it’s not clear whether the case will even stop Giuliani from defaming them again.“I don’t regret a damn thing,” he said outside the federal courthouse on Friday.Giuliani had been far from repentant throughout the week. And since August, when Judge Beryl Howell entered a default judgment against Giuliani for defamation per se, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy, Giuliani has made at least 20 defamatory statements against Freeman and Moss, their attorneys said this week.The dynamic underscores the limits of defamation law to police misinformation. While it can force people to pay for their lies, it cannot force them to stop lying or persuade people not to believe the lies.RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah, said observers are concerned about instances in which defamers brush aside damages. In cases involving large media outlets, she said, it may simply be seen as the cost of doing business. And in others, like that of Giuliani, people may simply “be judgment-proof, bankrupt, or otherwise unwilling or unable to pay”, she said.“In both situations, we’re testing the outer boundaries of libel law’s ability to remedy the harm done by falsehoods and to deter defamers from telling future lies. We are also, more fundamentally, testing the rule of law,” she added.“If the incentive to lie to audiences eager to receive those lies is stronger than the power of any court proceeding, and if defamers have decided that they simply will not participate in cases brought against them and will avoid paying damages when they are issued, this raises far deeper concerns.”Even with the money, it won’t be able to undo the damage that the two women suffered to their reputations. Moss loved her job as a Fulton county election official and thought her interim position as the permanent absentee ballot supervisor would be made permanent.Instead, she was moved to a back office role under the impression she would never touch a ballot again.“I want people to understand this: money will never solve all of my problems. I can never move back to the house I called home. I will always have to be careful about where I go, and who I choose to share my name with,” Freeman said outside the federal courthouse in Washington DC after the verdict on Friday.“I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.” More

It was a moment that a visitor from the year 2010 might have found impossible to comprehend. As Liz Cheney, arch-conservative and daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, walked on stage in deeply liberal Washington, the audience applauded and cheered for a full 45 seconds.“They’re standing, Liz, wow!” exclaimed moderator Mark Leibovich, a journalist and author. “You could probably be elected to Congress from the District of Columbia if they had representation.”Cheney, 57, who as a Republican congresswoman voted against granting statehood to the District of Columbia, even though her home state of Wyoming has a smaller population, laughed at the comment. Leibovich added wryly: “Don’t answer that.”Wednesday night’s event at the historic synagogue Sixth & I, organised by the local bookshop Politics & Prose, which is run by a Hillary Clinton alumnus and former Washington Post journalist, was the latest stop on Cheney’s book tour. Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning is a scathing account of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy and urgent plea for America to avoid a repeat.The book debuted at No 1 on the New York Times’s bestseller list. It is also shining a light on the Trump era’s habit of scrambling old alliances and creating strange bedfellows.Cheney is unapologetically conservative. She remains close to her father, an architect of the Iraq war, and used to appear regularly on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network. She voted in line with Trump’s position 93% of the time during his presidency, according to the FiveThirtyEight website.James King, a professor emeritus at the University of Wyoming, said: “Clearly she does not disagree with most of Trump’s policies. It’s just his adequacy to be president she’s made something of a crusade over the last two years.”Cheney was one of only 10 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and one of only two who served on the House select committee that investigated the deadly riot. Her decision to put democracy before party has made her an unlikely heroine in the eyes of many liberals.At the Sixth & I event, Cheney acknowledged: “I have a lot more Democratic friends now than I used to have.”She was warmly received by the audience in one of America’s most liberal cities. During a question-and-answer session, one said: “I have to tell you that my family and I disagree with you on 90% of your policy positions but my sister and I are overwhelmed with gratitude and privilege and honour to tell you personally that you are our ‘shero’, you’re an American treasure and we thank you and your wonderful family for your courage, your strength, your integrity.”Cheney was visibly moved but a smiling Leibovich asked mischievously: “All right, show of hands, how many people voted for Dick Cheney for vice-president in 2004?” A couple of hands went up – from people related to Cheney.Dick Cheney was vice-president under George W Bush from 2001 to 2009. He was the mastermind of a neoconservative “war on terror” that spiralled into the torturing of suspects, establishment of a prison at Guantánamo Bay and an illegal war in Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. He shares his daughter’s view of Trump as a threat to democracy and the constitution.Liz Cheney served in Congress for three terms but her opposition to Trump came with a political price. She was ousted from Republican leadership in the House and last year defeated in a primary election in Wyoming by Harriet Hageman, a conservative lawyer and Trump ally. Cheney subsequently accepted an appointment as a professor of practice with the University of Virginia Center for Politics in Charlottesville.Larry Sabato, the centre’s director, recalled: “When I first announced that appointment, oh my God, you would have thought that I had converted to Satanism. The emails! It was just incredible. ‘How could you do that? This is the most terrible thing. Oh, she did just one good thing. Oh, great, it’s like having Dick Cheney on the faculty.’ Nobody’s admitted it but they were completely wrong.”Sabato has noted some changes in Cheney’s politics during her interactions with students. “We’ve had easily 20-plus classes here so I’ve picked up on nuances where she has shifted her position even on something like abortion. She’s not as conservative as she once was. There have been changes which I think she muted because she was representing Wyoming and they’re coming to the fore.”Cheney has not ruled out a 2024 presidential run as an independent but her main priority is to thwart Trump’s candidacy. Her book has given her a platform to take the message to a wide audience. Since its publication on 5 December, she has done about 30 interviews on networks such as ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and PBS, newspapers including the Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Post and USA Today, and a host of podcasts and radio broadcasts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmong the most notable was her conversation with Rachel Maddow, the first openly gay host of a US primetime news programme and a media star among progressives. The host offered this memorable introduction: “I disagree with Liz Cheney about everything. My whole adult life on everything in politics, I would not just say that Liz Cheney and I were on different proverbial teams, I would say we are from different proverbial planets. And they are planets that are mostly at war with each other.”Maddow continued: “It’s important because that tells you how serious and big something has to be to put us, to put me and Liz Cheney, together on the same side of something in American life. I’m sure Noah had a hard time convincing the mice that they should get on the same boat with the snakes … but needs must.“Normal combat, normal willingness to chomp on each other or run or defend ourselves from each other, yields to the imperative of the world-destroying flood, where all land animals face the same fate and all the old fears and rules have to be put on hold, because now we’re either all going down or we’re all in the same boat.”Stephen Colbert, a late-night comedian who has savaged Cheney’s father and Trump over the years, interviewed her on his show in the Democratic stronghold of Manhattan, New York. Colbert said: “I didn’t expect to interview you ever, really … What is this moment like, to be embraced by people who vilified you and your family for so long?” She admitted: “I think it’s weird.”It is also a sign of the times. Trump has united small “d” democrats like no one else. Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “What’s interesting about seeing Liz Cheney on programmes like that and in venues that would not have normally been part of her book tour circuit or her media circuit is that it shows you how how much bigger her message is. It transcends party lines.“The threat that Donald Trump and Trumpism poses to our country as a whole has created interesting bedfellows. Seeing Liz Cheney sitting down with Rachel Maddow and being simpatico on an issue as important as our democracy should give everyone hope that it’s not too late to turn this around.”Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 despite 91 criminal charges in four cases hanging over him. The House speaker, Mike Johnson, and his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, have endorsed the former president, But those who have broken with the party over its cult-like devotion to Trump praise Cheney for issuing a clear warning about the danger he poses.Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, added: “Liz Cheney should be the template for every Republican in the party. Unfortunately, she is an anomaly.“It’s rather remarkable as I watch her evolution from being Republican royalty to an apostate simply because she has spoken the truth about who and what Donald Trump is, what he has done to the Republican party and ultimately what he has done to our country, based off of Republican principles that she thought were unmovable. But apparently they are for many Republicans and she’s exposed that hypocrisy.”Cheney is not the only liberal bete noire to undergo a rehabilitation of sorts in the age of Trump. Two polls in 2017 found that more Democrats view Bush favourably than unfavourably. Republicans such as Jeff Sessions, Robert Mueller, Bill Barr and Mike Pence have earned praise for defying Trump. The recent death of Henry Kissinger at 100 prompted a lengthy tribute from the secretary of state, Antony Blinken.Some on the left are uneasy with such role reversals, warning that shifting the goalposts serves only to mainstream and normalise figures whose actions were beyond the pale. Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, said: “It’s very dangerous to fall into the groove of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.“The fact that she has done one admirable thing in her life politically, and that is stand up against Donald Trump, does not change the fact that she voted with him an overwhelming amount of the time. On virtually every other issue even a mainstream Democrat would find her votes abhorrent. In the House she was one of the most prominent, outspoken militarists eager to go to war. The apple’s not far from the tree in that way.” More

As hard-right movements rattle or control European governments, the words of George Steiner animate James Carville.“Nationalism is the venom of our age,” Steiner wrote in his 1965 essay on the Holocaust, A Kind of Survivor. “It has brought Europe to the edge of ruin.”Those words prompted Carville, the centrist Democratic political consultant who guided Bill Clinton to the presidency, to say: “The greatest distinction in the world is between patriotism, which is positive – a piece of ground as an idea – and nationalism, which is tribal, exclusionary and, yeah, poisonous.”Carville zeroed in on the US variant: white Christian nationalism, particularly as embodied by Mike Johnson, his fellow Louisianan and the US House speaker.“Johnson has no skill, no background, no majority to speak of,” the so-called Ragin’ Cajun declaimed on Saturday, hours before he watched the Louisiana State Univeristy quarterback Jayden Daniels win the coveted Heisman award.Football is as dear to Carville as politics and his Roman Catholic faith. A graduate of LSU and its law school, he wears the Tigers’ gold and purple shirts in many of his TV appearances, accentuating his flamboyant presence.“What Johnson does represent is a level of breathtaking hypocrisy,” Carville said. “His anti-homosexuality and young earthism are hypocrisy on steroids.”In a 2004 Shreveport Times op-ed on gay marriage, Johnson wrote: “If we change marriage for this tiny minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists and pedophiles will be next in line to claim equal protection.”“Young earthism” signals Johnson’s belief that the planet is 6,000 years old, a literal interpretation of Genesis. In a 2021 interview celebrating the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which lies 40 miles from Ark Encounter, Johnson said: “The Ark Encounter is one way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”Johnson, his role as lawyer, helped the gigantic ark attraction secure significant funding from the state tourism budget, Reuters reports.Itching for a fight, Carville is challenging the speaker to a debate at Louisiana Christian University, a small Southern Baptist campus in the town of Pineville.Carville calls LCU “the epicenter of Christian nationalism”.“The debate I want begins: ‘Resolved, Christian nationalism is a greater threat to America than al-Qaida,’” Carville said. “I want students to see real debate and make up their own minds about what kind of America we want.”Before his election to Congress, Johnson was founding dean of a campus law school to be named for Paul Pressler, 93, a retired Texas judge, legislator and Southern Baptist potentate. In 2018, the Houston Chronicle reported Pressler paid $450,000 to settle a lawsuit by a man who alleged that Pressler sexually assaulted him as a high school student in Bible study. The law school never materialized.Carville, 79, and Johnson, 51, stand a generation apart, their lives mirroring the state’s divided history. Once a Democratic party stronghold of the Gulf south, Louisiana has gone deep red: Republicans hold the major state offices and a heavy legislative majority. The attorney general and governor-elect, Jeff Landry, boasted of the former president Donald Trump’s endorsement as Landry coasted to an outright, multiparty primary victory.Carville lives in New Orleans with the Republican political operative Mary Matalin, his wife. But he grew up 16 miles south of Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River in the town of St Gabriel, in the Carville neighborhood, named for his grandfather.The oldest of eight children, he attended mass in a church built in the late 18th century, taking comfort in the gospels as he does today. The 1960 election of John F Kennedy, a Catholic, was like a magnet pulling Carville into politics.Johnson is a firefighter’s son from Shreveport – far upstate, an area more culturally akin to Alabama or Mississippi. He came of age as Pentecostal Christianity became a political force. He won election to the House in 2016, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message newspaper: “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a lifelong conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”He claimed the speaker’s gavel after it was wrested from the retiring congressman Kevin McCarthy, emerging from the subsequent Republican infighting.For all of his spitfire attacks on Johnson and “the blood and soil” Make America great again (Maga) agenda pushed by Trump, Carville draws on a wellspring of faith. He says he has “a Catholic construct of the world” – and that attending mass daily at 8am calms and comforts him.“I like the predictability of the gospel readings,” Carville said. “So much of my life is unpredictable.”The church’s ongoing clergy sex abuse crisis eats at him, in part because one of his cousins is an ordained priest who holds the elevated title of monsignor. “I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about that,” Carville said. “Like most people, I struggle.”Although Pope Francis is a widely admired global figure, the American church is as deeply torn as the US’s red v blue political split. Carville draws a careful distinction between the power structure of bishops and the people in churches with priests they like.“I’ve seen how [bishops] try to repress people while they were allowing predators, covering up, lying to people and hiding behind their lawyers,” Carville said. “I hold the Roman Catholic church to a higher standard than I would Ford Motor Company.”The hard-right network of Catholic organizations such as the Napa Institute, Church Militant and Eternal Word Television Network offend Carville for similar reasons that send him into attack mode against Trumpism and Johnson.“The essence of Trumpism is that politics has run over you,” Carville said. “I understand why people feel that – the idea of loss, what people once had. In the church, we’re seeing a real defense of power in reaction to the hypocrisy and rottenness that’s been exposed. So the right wing doubles down.”Carville was delighted when Francis sacked the American cardinal Raymond Burke from his Vatican apartment and salary. Burke, a former archbishop of St Louis, is known for his lavish, regal attire and attacks on the pope’s agenda of “radical mercy” – reaching out to migrants and people on the margins, seeking to make the church more welcoming to LGBTQ+ believers, divorced Catholics and women.“The Cardinal Burkes of the world are telling you that you have to protect power at all costs,” Carville said. “That branch of the church has never really liked democracy, an open society or anything approaching bodily autonomy.”Like most liberal Catholics, Carville finds a bulwark in faith in the form of the big tent, the messy, sprawling people of God packed into sacred spaces that unite them on Sunday to hear the gospel, take the host and go back to their different lives.That sensibility, quaint though it may seem to myriad of others aghast at the church scandals, nevertheless holds a ray of hope for the likes of Carville. Down in the mud pit of politics, he is worried about more than just Christian nationalism.“I have all kinds of people tell me: ‘James, this is not the country we grew up in,’” Carville said.And they’re right, he says – but probably not in the way they mean.Carville said: “I actually hear [white people] say: ‘People knew their place.’ Well, I graduated from LSU law school with one Black and three females in the class. You go to any law school today and half the class are women. That’s a profound change in my lifetime. You can’t show someone a Norman Rockwell painting, say this used to be America, and expect the world to change.”Carville’s greatest concern about the 2024 election is Joe Biden. He points to a recent Wall Street Journal poll that had the president at 31%.“I don’t think he should run,” Carville said. “I like President Biden. I like people who get scarred politically and come back and survive – he’s that kind of guy.“But he’s too old. It’s that simple. The Democratic party has breathtaking talent, but no energy. We’re keeping it bottled up. If you ask the average person in Terre Haute, Indiana, what do you think of the Democratic party, they’d say two things: ‘They’re for the cities and they’re too old.’ We need to change that image.” More

The US is a house divided. The presidential election is set to be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But as 2023 draws to a close it leaves a legacy in print, in books about the US political scene that help explain the crises that engulf us.February brought The Lincoln Miracle, Edward Achorn’s in-depth examination of the 16th president’s quest for the Republican nomination in 1860. Beautifully written, Achorn’s book reminds us that outcomes are not preordained and that elections bring consequences. Achorn also shows that the battle between red and blue America is now more than 160 years old.The party of Lincoln, however, is no more. Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, had two books on Trump behind him before Tired of Winning. Well-paced, meticulously sourced and amply footnoted, Karl’s latest shines another light on how the Republican party has been recast by a man now under multiple felony indictments.Steve Bannon, Trump’s brain and muse, a leading voice of the far right, talked on the record. He stressed that as long as Trump lives, the party belongs to him. Confronted by a grandee who suggested Trump play less of a role in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Bannon unloaded: “Have you lost your fucking mind?” If Trump defeats Biden, Bannon may well return to the West Wing.Loyalty to Trump has emerged as a cardinal tenet of Republican life. In Enough, Cassidy Hutchinson, the White House aide who became the lead January 6 witness, offers a persuasive, dispiriting tale of political degradation. Hutchinson “isn’t crazy”, a Trump White House veteran confided before her first public appearance in front of the January 6 committee. But she is a “time bomb”. True on both counts.McKay Coppins’s Romney: A Reckoning is a must-read for anyone interested in how the Republican party became a Trumpian mess. Picking up where he left off in The Wilderness, his earlier look at the GOP, Coppins, a veteran Romney-watcher now at the Atlantic, offers an engaging read, the product of 30 interviews with the 2012 presidential nominee, access to aides and friends and also the senator’s emails and diaries. Coppins offers a scorching critique, capturing Romney strafing Trump and Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz and Mike Pence.Adam Kinzinger represented a Republican Illinois district in the US House for six terms. He voted to impeach Trump for the January 6 insurrection, and with Liz Cheney was one of two Republicans on the investigating committee. Like Cheney, from Wyoming, Kinzinger earned the ire of Trump and the GOP base. Both are no longer in Congress. Renegade, Kinzinger’s memoir, written with Michael D’Antonio, biographer of Pence, is a steady, well-crafted read.In the year of the Republican shadow primary, before voting begins next month, presidential aspirants past and present gave their spin too. Mike Pompeo, ex-congressman, CIA director and secretary of state, wrote Never Give an Inch. Tart and tight, filled with barbs, bile and little regret, it was an unexpectedly interesting read. Pompeo did give an inch to reality, though, accepting there was no point mounting a run.On the other side of the aisle, with The Last Politician, Franklin Foer provides a well-sourced look at Biden. A staff writer at the Atlantic and former New Republic editor, Foer captures successes and cock-ups. The 46th president is caught wondering why John F Kennedy was not so tightly handled by his aides – or “babied”. Less than a year from election day, Biden trails Trump at the polls.Chris Whipple’s The Fight of His Life is a flattering portrait of Biden. Ron Klain, his first chief of staff, hails “the most successful first year of any president ever”, adding: “We passed more legislation than any president in his first year.” Many remain unimpressed. Inflation scars remain visible. The retribution impeachment looms. Hunter Biden is under felony indictment.With Filthy Rich Politicians, Matt Lewis skewers both sides of the aisle. A senior columnist at the Daily Beast, Lewis performs a valued public service, shining a searing light on the gap between the elites of both parties and the citizenry in whose name they claim to govern. The book is breezy and readable. The Bidens and Clintons, the Trumps and Kushners, right and left – all are savaged.Michael Waldman ran the speechwriting shop in Bill Clinton’s White House and now heads the Brennan Center at NYU. The Supermajority, his book about the conservative bloc that dominates the supreme court, is written with great verve. He takes the Citizens United decision to task for allowing unlimited political spending. He also argues that the court has become a serious threat to American democracy.Religion in politics garnered its share of attention this year, particularly evangelical Protestants. Sunday attendance is down but the movement retains political clout. In Losing Our Religion, the Rev Russell Moore, conservative but a Trump critic, laments the growing interchangeability between cross and flag, and the paganization of Christianity. “The step before replacing Jesus with Thor is to turn Jesus into Thor,” he writes. Like the caesars of old, Trump is deified by his minions.In The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, Tim Alberta poignantly and painfully captures the metamorphosis of US evangelism. A writer at the Atlantic and the son of a Presbyterian minister, Alberta lays bare his hurt over how Christianity has grown ever more synonymous with those who fervently wave the stars and stripes. He takes us back to summer 2019. The Rev Richard Alberta died suddenly. At his funeral, a church elder delivered to Alberta a one-page screed expressing his disapproval of the author for not embracing Trump. Alberta also delivers a deep-dive on the disgraced Jerry Falwell Jr and Liberty University.The media and the Murdochs remained in the spotlight too. In Network of Lies, Brian Stelter, the former CNN host, captured the Murdochs’ struggle to make money, keep their audience happy and avoid liability. It wasn’t easy: Fox News coverage of the 2020 election led to a $787.5m settlement of a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems. Other litigations remain.Stelter had competition. In The Fall, Michael Wolff gave the Murdochs and Fox the treatment he gave Trump, memorably with Fire and Fury and two sequels. Wolff says he may be “the journalist not in his employ who knows [Murdoch] best”. Quotation marks abound – whether the author was an actual witness is another matter. But The Fall is full of digestible dish.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionElsewhere in the media, Marty Baron led the Washington Post as executive editor for eight years, retiring in 2021. Newsrooms he led won 17 Pulitzer prizes, 10 at the Post. Baron has stories to tell. The actor Liev Schreiber even played him in Spotlight, winner of the best picture Oscar in 2016. Collision of Power, Baron’s first book, carried a tantalizing subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post”.“Trump and his team would go after the Post and everyone else in the media who didn’t bend to his wishes,” Baron writes. From the beginning, as Baron saw close up, Trump “had the makings of an autocrat”.In finance, with Going Infinite, Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, The Big Short and other bestsellers, wrote about Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto and the scandal that saw the one-time billionaire convicted on seven counts of fraud. To politicians, as well as to profilers, Bankman-Fried had allure. Exactly why he continues to puzzle. Money doesn’t explain everything, but it does shed light on plenty.Foreign policy impinged on domestic politics too, of course. Last spring, Israel marked its 75th anniversary, roiled by internal divisions. On 7 October, Hamas mounted a barbaric binge of rape, murder, plunder and hostage-taking. Israel’s response continues.In May, Isabel Kershner of the New York Times painted a masterly and poignant portrait with The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel’s Battle for Its Inner Soul. Attempting to make sense of a “national unraveling”, she spoke with members of competing and clashing tribes. Wisely, she offered no sense of immediate resolution. None is on the horizon.Back home, Trump stands ready to plunge a knife into US democracy. A year ago, he called for terminating the constitution. More recently, he said he would be a dictator “on day one” of a second term. He is the “most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office”, Liz Cheney writes in Oath and Honor, her own memoir.The former congresswoman, a member of the Republican establishment, adds: “This is the story of when American democracy began to unravel. It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize.”The book is well-timed. Iowa and New Hampshire vote next month.“We cannot survive a president willing to terminate our constitution,” Cheney adds. Promoting her book, she warned that the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship”. In 11 months, we will find out how fast. More

A jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay former election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss $148.1m after he spread lies about them following the 2020 election.The verdict, after a four-day trial in Washington, came after Moss and Freeman testified in court that they feared for their lives when Giuliani falsely claimed they had tampered with votes.Here’s a look back at some of the key moments in the trial:
The $148.1m damages award for to two Atlanta election workers is one of the most significant verdicts to date seeking accountability for those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.
Freeman and Moss testified about the effects of lies spread by Giuliani and others who put them at the center of an election conspiracy theory. They shared examples of the racist, harassing, threatening messages they received after being publicly named by election deniers.
Freeman testified about her experiences following Giuliani’s defamatory comments, in which he accused her of committing election fraud. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am,” said Freeman.
Lawyers for Freeman and Moss played audio and displayed several of the racist messages they received in court. It included one of a person saying a racial slur over and over again. Another was a picture of what Freeman described as a kind of “monkey beast” and had writing on it that said “Ruby Freeman’s father”.
Freeman said she had to leave her home for safety reasons. She hired a lawyer to help keep her name off any home-related documents for her new place. She said she felt like she has lost who she is, and her good name.
Moss detailed how she became anxious to even leave the house, and that the false claims caused her son to be harassed, eventually failing his classes. She said she still does not really go out.
Giuliani was initially expected to testify. But after two separate incidents of him doubling down, his team did not put him on the stand. His lawyer said the women had been through enough, but also pointed to Gateway Pundit, the rightwing media outlet, as more culpable for the harassment.
Speaking outside court on Friday, Freeman said: “Today’s a good day. A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and held him accountable, and for that I’m thankful.Today is not the end of the road, we still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable too. But that is tomorrow’s work.”
Her daughter Shaye Moss also gave a statement, saying: The flame that Giuliani lit with those lies and passed to so many others to keep that flame blazing changed every aspect of our lives – our homes, our family, our work, our sense of safety, our mental health. And we’re still working to rebuild.
Giuliani himself dismissed the verdict and told reporters outside Washington’s federal courthouse that he will appeal, saying the “absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding”. “It will be reversed so quickly it will make your head spin, and the absurd number that just came in will help that actually,” he said.
Ashlee Humphreys, a professor from Northwestern University and an expert witness of Freeman and Moss, walked through the significant reputational damage done to them, showing how their names are now associated with election fraud.
Freeman and Moss’s lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, said they hope the case sends a clear message to people launching smear campaigns not to do it.
The jury began deliberations on Thursday and returned their verdict on Friday afternoon. More

A 10in-thick binder containing nearly 3,000 pages of highly classified material related to the investigation of Russian election interference as well as links between Moscow and Donald Trump went missing in the final days of his presidency, CNN and the New York Times reported.CNN said the disappearance raised alarms in the American intelligence community because “some of the most closely guarded national security secrets from the US and its allies could be exposed”.The Times said national security officials were “vexed” by the disappearance of the “Crossfire Hurricane binder”, which was “the name given to the investigation by the FBI”.The issue was so concerning, the Times added, the Senate intelligence committee was briefed.Now the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump faces 91 criminal charges arising from his conduct since entering politics in 2015. Forty charges, brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, concern the retention of classified information after leaving office.In August 2022, FBI agents searched Trump’s Florida home. They did not find material related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the Times said.The investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election won by Trump ended in April 2019. At that time, a report by the special counsel Robert Mueller laid out evidence of Russian interference and links between Trump and Moscow and occasions on which Trump may have tried to obstruct justice.But Mueller did not establish collusion between Trump and Russia. Aided by his second attorney general, William Barr, Trump claimed exoneration.On Friday, reports about the missing binder – which the Times said ran to 2,700 pages – brought the Russia investigation back to the headlines.According to the Times, the binder contained “a hodgepodge of materials related to the origins and early stages of the Russia investigation that were collected by Trump administration officials”.That “hodgepodge”, the paper said, “included copies of botched FBI applications for national security surveillance warrants to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser as well as text messages between two FBI officials … expressing animus toward Mr Trump”.The paper said the “substance” of the material was not particularly sensitive and was posted online, with redactions, by the FBI. Official concerns centered on what the binder could reveal about sources and methods, the Times said, while noting that the online version runs to 585 pages – more than 2,000 fewer than the missing binder.“Among other murky details,” the paper said, “it is not known how many copies were made at the White House or how the government knows one set is missing.”CNN said “multiple copies” of the binder were created in the last hours of the Trump administration, “with plans to distribute them … to Republicans in Congress and rightwing journalists”.Trumped ordered declassification but that has not happened in full. Reportedly “deeply focused” on the binder, Trump offered to let the author of a book about him have a look inside.“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Trump said in April 2021, according to the Times. “It’s a treasure trove … it would be a sort of cool book for you to look at.”Maggie Haberman, one of the reporters on Friday’s piece, wrote a book about Trump which was published last year.Trump indicated that his last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had the binder. A lawyer for Meadows told the Times his client “never took any copy of that binder home at any time”.Presented with the CNN report, one former Trump national security aide simply said, in a message viewed by the Guardian: “Holy cow.” More

A Washington DC jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148.1m to two Atlanta election workers after he spread lies about them, one of the most significant verdicts to date seeking accountability for those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.The verdict follows a four-day trial in which Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, her daughter, gave haunting details about the harassment and threats they faced after Giuliani falsely accused them of trying to steal the election in Georgia. The women, who are Black, described how they fled, are afraid to give their names in public, and still suffer severe emotional distress today. Their lawyers asked the jury to award them each at least $24m in damages.“Most days I pray that God does not wake me up and I just disappear,” Shaye Moss said on Tuesday in testimony that frequently turned tearful.In her testimony on Wednesday, Freeman said she had been “terrorized”.“I don’t have a name any more,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”Their lawyers had asked the eight-person jury to award them at least $48m in compensatory damages and to use their discretion to grant additional punitive damages.The case is the latest in a series of cases in which plaintiffs have used defamation law to push back on lies spread about them since the 2020 election. The voting equipment vendor Dominion settled with Fox for $787m earlier this year in a defamation case. Freeman and Moss also have a pending lawsuit against the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news outlet. Last year, they also settled with One America News, another far-right outlet. Civil rights groups are turning to defamation law as a new tool to ward off misinformation.The lies about both women were a cornerstone of efforts by Giuliani and Trump to try to overturn the election results in Georgia. On 3 December 2020, Giuliani tweeted a selectively edited video that he claimed showed Freeman and Moss wheeling suitcases full of ballots out from under a table after counting had concluded for the night. The accusation was quickly debunked by Georgia officials, but Giuliani continued to spread the lie. He also accused them of “passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine”, when Freeman was passing Moss a ginger mint.Almost immediately, Freeman and Moss started to receive death threats through the mail, email, social media and voicemail. Many of those racist messages were displayed and played in court this week.Giuliani refused to turn over documents as part of the case and conceded earlier this year that he made false statements about the women. US district judge Beryl Howell found him liable of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The only question for the jury to decide was how much in damages Giuliani should pay.Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, conceded to jurors in his opening statement that his client had done something wrong by making false statements. But over the course of the week, he sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment that resulted from the false statements. He also argued that the tens of millions of dollars they requested were not proportional to the harm they had suffered.Giuliani did not do himself any favors when it came to his defense. After proceedings concluded on Monday, he spoke to reporters on the courthouse steps, where he insisted that what he had said about Freeman and Moss was true. Sibley said earlier this week that Giuliani intended to take the witness stand in his own defense, but he reversed on Thursday and decided not to.From the outset, lawyers for Freeman and Moss made it clear that the case was about repairing the reputations of their clients and sending a message to other powerful figures that they could not make similar false claims without consequences.“Send a message. Send it to Mr Giuliani and to any other powerful figure who is considering taking this chance,” Michael Gottlieb, one of the attorneys for Moss and Freeman, said in closing arguments.It was a message Moss herself emphasized in her testimony on Tuesday.“We need to make a statement. We need to ensure that the election workers that are still there don’t have to go through this. Hopefully by hitting someone in their pockets, for someone whose whole career has been about their pockets, we will send a message,” she said. More