Evelyn Reynolds

John Eastman, who was in the vanguard of lawyers plotting schemes involving “fake electors” and other ploys to help Donald Trump thwart Joe Biden’s win in 2020, is now under close scrutiny in federal and state investigations of Trump’s drives to stay in power, and faces possible disbarment in California, say former prosecutors.The former California law professor is one of several lawyers whose legal stratagems have been heavily examined by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s accelerating investigation into Trump and his allies’ efforts to block Biden from taking office.The fake electors scheme was a central part of Trump’s strategy to reverse his defeat.It was called that because Republican electors in seven key battleground states signed certificates falsely declaring themselves “duly elected and qualified” to affirm Donald Trump won the 2020 election.But Eastman has drawn scrutiny too in an overlapping inquiry in Georgia by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, who is expected to bring criminal charges in August against Trump and some of his legal gurus.The federal and Georgia inquiries have zeroed in on Trump legal advisers including Rudy Giuliani, who helped oversee the fake electors plot, and ex-justice department official Jeffrey Clark. Trump tried briefly to elevate Clark to attorney general in order to prod Georgia and several other swing states to substitute fake Trump electors for ones Biden actually won.Smith’s inquiry, which encompasses Trump’s inflammatory talk to a rally that Eastman and Giuliani also addressed before the Capitol attack on January 6, has accelerated with grand jury testimony from former vice-president Mike Pence and ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows. Smith has also gained cooperation from two Nevada fake electors who have testified before a Washington grand jury.Moreover, investigators from Smith’s office interviewed Giuliani under a “proffer” arrangement, which does not preclude charges against him, seeking to ferret out details about the fake electors plotting and related schemes, as the New York Times reported.Former DoJ prosecutors say Smith’s inquiry is making notable progress.“The pace of activity in the special counsel investigation into the fake electors scheme seems to be quickening,” with significant cooperation from key witnesses and a focus on Trump’s top legal advisers, former DoJ prosecutor Michael Zeldin told the Guardian.Other ex-prosecutors also see Smith’s inquiry gaining steam.“By obtaining testimony from fake electors, Smith may be better able to nail down what information and advice passed between these soldiers in the larger scheme and those Trump lawyers who helped to concoct it,” said Dan Richman, a law professor at Columbia and an ex-prosecutor in New York.“Testimony that, say, electors were advised to make false statements or given deliberately misleading advice would go far to showing a deliberate fraud by Trump’s ‘brain trust’ of lawyers, including Eastman.”Richman added: “Giuliani’s willingness to give a proffer likely reflects his desire to avoid charges by showing a lack of an intent to defraud. Smith’s readiness to accept the proffer likely reflects his interest in hearing what Giuliani had to say and avoiding a grand jury proceeding at which Giuliani might well invoke his fifth amendment privilege.”Other DoJ veterans see Meadows’ grand jury testimony as significant. “The cooperation of Meadows has the potential to help put a stake in the heart of Trump and other high level insurrectionists,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting head of the DoJ’s fraud section.Smith, who was tapped as special counsel last November, and others at the justice department have spent months conducting their sprawling inquiry into Trump’s zealous efforts to cling to power, and his coterie of legal advisers. Last summer, federal agents seized the cell phones of Eastman and Clark, whose home was also raided.A harbinger of the potential legal headaches for Trump and his elite lawyers came late last year when a House panel that spent months investigating Trump and the January 6 insurrection and produced an 845-page report, referred Trump to the DoJ for prosecution, plus Eastman, Giuliani, Clark and lawyer Kenneth Chesebro.The referrals did not mandate DoJ action, but provided substantial evidence against Trump and those lawyers.The panel’s referral accused Trump of criminally engaging in “a multi-part conspiracy”, citing four specific crimes that seems to track what special counsel Smith is looking into: making false statements, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and aiding or comforting insurrection, all of which were referred to the DoJ for prosecution.All four lawyers were referred for conspiring to defraud the United States. Except for Giuliani, the others were cited for conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, referring to Congress certifying Biden’s win on 6 January.The panel noted when Eastman addressed the “stop the steal” rally on January 6 he floated a wild conspiracy theory about “secret folders” in voting machines that were used to cast votes for Democrats.The report also discussed a “coup memo” authored by Eastman which proposed avenues Pence could use to assist Trump in reversing his election loss, including unilaterally throwing out certain state electoral college votes.At House panel hearings, Pence’s then counsel Greg Jacob testified that Eastman acknowledged to him that his push with Trump to get Pence to reject Biden’s winning electoral college count would violate the Electoral Count Act, and that Trump too was informed that if Pence tried to block Biden’s certification it would be illegal.This June, Jacob testified at California bar hearings weighing disbarment of Eastman for making false public statements about voter fraud in the 2020 elections, and misleading courts. At the hearings, Jacob charged that Eastman’s advice to Pence “brought our profession into disrepute”.Eastman has denied breaking any laws, stating that he was engaged in “good faith” advocacy on a legal question that was not settled. Trump and the other lawyers referred for DoJ prosecution have all also denied violating any laws.But ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig said he doubted Eastman will escape prosecution completely. “It will be surprising, indeed, if neither of those investigations ends in a criminal charge against Eastman, as well, possibly, as other lawyers and Trump himself.”But more broadly, DoJ veterans say it is unclear exactly what charges Smith may bring.“It remains to be seen whether the false electors scheme will serve as the basis of a standalone indictment or whether it will be merged into a broader case involving the multiple ways Trump and his allies attempted to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election,” former DoJ inspector general Michael Bromwich told the Guardian“A standalone case may have less jury appeal than a case in which it is one of many sets of tactics used to overturn the election,” he added, but noted that “a broader case will almost inevitably be longer, more complex, include numerous defendants, and be more difficult to try.”Any new federal charges against Trump would come on top of the 37-count indictment of Trump by Smith for retaining hundreds of classified and national security documents after he left office, and obstructing investigators seeking to retrieve them.Trump has pleaded not guilty and denounced the charges and the other probes as “witch-hunts”.Still, the Georgia inquiry into efforts to overturn Biden’s win there seems likely to create more headaches for Trump and some of his legal advisers. Willis has indicated that Giuliani, who testified after receiving a subpoena before a special grand jury, is a target of her broad inquiry. Eastman was reportedly advised by his own lawyer that he was probably a target and invoked the fifth amendment when subpoenaed to testify.A key focus of Willis’s inquiry has been Trump’s high-pressure call on 2 January 2021 to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, beseeching him to just “find” 11,780 votes to overturn his loss to Biden in the state. Willis’s scrutiny of Giuliani has looked at testimony he gave to Georgia legislators three times after Trump’s defeat, where he promoted discredited fraud claims and urged legislators to take action.A once star federal prosecutor, Giuliani had his law licence suspended in New York and DC in the wake of his misguided legal efforts to help Trump.Willis has said she will announce charging decisions in August, and experts say the Georgia inquiry looks poised to include criminal charges against Trump and some elite lawyers.“Lawyers have a professional responsibility to tell the truth, and they may face legal liability when they don’t,” former US attorney in Georgia Michael Moore said.“In the Georgia investigation, the intentional perpetration of a fraud, if borne out by the investigation, may land them in hot water. All indications are that the DA is looking at some lawyers as directors, not just bit players, in the story of attempted election fraud.” More

Americans continue to be arrested on suspicion of taking part in the Capitol attack, two and half years after the January 6 insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump.Court documents on Monday showed that a Michigan man accused of attacking a police officer with a flagpole during the insurrection was arrested in Florida last Friday, a day after an armed man also wanted for the rioting was arrested near Barack Obama’s Washington home. Another man suspected of violence at the Capitol was arrested in Maryland last month.Latest filings show that Jeremy Rodgers, 28, was arrested last Friday in Orlando and faces felony and misdemeanor charges, including assaulting a federal officer with a weapon.Prosecutors say surveillance video shows Rodgers carrying a blue flag on his way to the Capitol and using it to strike a Capitol police officer on the helmet and then swinging the flagpole in the direction of officers, during the swarming of the seat of the US Congress.He is accused of joining with thousands of other Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol in a deadly insurrection that sought, ultimately unsuccessfully, to halt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election, at the urging of the defeated president.Rodgers was among a crowd pushing through police lines outside the entrance to the chamber of the House of Representatives, investigators said. After another scuffle with police, Rodgers paraded through the Capitol rotunda waving his flag before leaving, officials said.Last Thursday, a man armed with explosive materials and weapons, and also wanted for crimes related to the Capitol attack insurrection was arrested in the Washington neighborhood where Obama lives, law enforcement officials said.Taylor Taranto, 37, was chased by Secret Service agents before being apprehended, and had an open warrant on charges related to the 2021 insurrection, two law enforcement officials said, and also had made social media threats against a public figure.Meanwhile, on 13 June, Adam Obest, 42, of Thurmont, Maryland, was arrested and charged with crimes including assaulting an officer with a dangerous weapon on January 6, 2021, after reviews of police body camera footage, federal prosecutors announced. He and his wife had attended Trump’s rally shortly beforehand.More than 1,000 people in total have been arrested, across almost all states, for January 6-related crimes. More

Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, decided to take a stand for “wholesomeness”, against undesirable elements. The Beach Boys, he announced, would be banned from the 1983 Independence Day celebrations on the National Mall.Watt, who died in May at 85, was a lightning rod of a cabinet secretary who compared environmentalists to Nazis and divided fellow citizens into ‘‘liberals and Americans”. According to him, “hard rock” bands like the Beach Boys attracted the “wrong element” – drug-using, boozing youngsters.The decision was so out-of-step with American society – the Beach Boys were not the Dead Kennedys, after all – that he ran afoul of Beach Boys fans in the corridors of power, among them Reagan, his wife Nancy Reagan and the vice-president, George HW Bush.It would be hard to think of a more quintessential American pop band than the Beach Boys, whose hits include Good Vibrations, Surfin’ USA, Fun, Fun, Fun and Wouldn’t It Be Nice.“They are what America is,” Elton John has said. “A very wonderful place.”The backdrop to this contrived culture war episode was the appearance, over the previous three years, of the Beach Boys (1980 and 1981) and the Grass Roots (1982) in front of hundreds of thousands at July 4 celebrations in Washington DC.Watt was head of the interior department, with jurisdiction over the National Park Service, which organized such events. As a Pentecostal fundamentalist who didn’t smoke or drink, he announced that he was banning rock music from Independence Day festivities. Citing “repulsive” reports in the first two years of the Reagan administration of “high drug use, high alcoholism, broken bottles, some injured people, some fights”, Watt lined up instead “patriotic, family-based entertainment” from figures including Wayne Newton, a friend and supporter of Reagan.“We’re trying to have an impact for wholesomeness,” Watt said, adding: “July 4 will be a traditional ceremony for the family and for solid, clean American lives. We’re not going to encourage drug abuse and alcoholism as was done in the past years.“… The reason for the arrests and other trouble, we concluded, was that we had the rock bands attracting the wrong element, and you couldn’t bring your family, your children, down to the Mall for a Fourth of July picnic in the great traditional sense because you’d be mugged by … the wrong element, whatever is the nice way to say it.”But as the Washington Post reported, “a ban on apple pie couldn’t have brought a stronger reaction”.A Washington talk show host linked the controversy to a major issue of the day: “I haven’t seen the phones ring over here as steadily or heard more strong comments since the Iranian hostage takeover. Our audience regards the Beach Boys as much a part of Americana as Wayne Newton.”The New York Times also referred to Iran, likening Watt to the Ayatollah Khomenei, who among his “first acts on seizing power after the Iranian revolution … ban[ned] western music because it made listeners’ brains ‘inactive and frivolous’”.In their own statement, the band said it was “unbelievable that James Watt feels that the Beach Boys attract ‘the wrong element’ … over their 20-year career, the group has participated in many events geared specifically to the very families Watt claims they turn away”.Slightly bizarrely, they added: “The Soviet Union had enough confidence in the Beach Boys to invite them to perform in Leningrad [on] July 4 1978. Obviously the Soviet Union, a much more controlled society than our own, did not feel the group attracted the wrong element.”On Capitol Hill, scorn was bipartisan.“‘Help me, Ronald, don’t let him run wild,” said George Miller, a Democratic congressman from California, spoofing the Beach Boys song Help Me, Rhonda.“The Beach Boys are not hazardous to your health,” said Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican senator.Nor was Watt backed by his bosses.“They’re my friends and I like their music,” Bush, the vice-president, said of the Beach Boys, who played a concert for him during his 1980 presidential run.Michael Deaver, the White House deputy chief of staff, said:“I think for a lot of people the Beach Boys are an American institution. Anyone who thinks they are hard rock would think Mantovani plays jazz.”A White House spokesman told reporters the Beach Boys would “be welcome on the Mall”.Reagan had a little fun at Watt’s expense. Saying he had ordered his special ambassador to the Middle East “to settle the Jim Watt-Beach Boy controversy”, the president also presented Watt with a plaster foot with a bullet hole.Watt retreated. Standing on the White House lawn, holding his plaster foot, Watt said: “Obviously, I didn’t know anything to start with. The president is a friend of the Beach Boys. He likes them, and I’m sure when I get to meet them, I’ll like them.”Watt also said Nancy Reagan had told him “the Beach Boys are fans of hers, and her children have grown up with them and they’re fine, outstanding people and that there should be no intention to indicate that they cause problems, which I would agree with”.Watt said the Beach Boys would appear. But it was too late: they played Atlantic City instead.That fall, Watt resigned. The Beach Boys returned to the Mall the next July 4, attracting more than half-a-million, then played again in 1985. That year, the lead singer, Mike Love, defended Watt: “He said rock music attracts the wrong element, and that’s true. Rock groups do sing pornographic lyrics, satanic lyrics, but we’re certainly not one of those groups. We’re no more satanic than Pat Boone.”In his autobiography, Watt tried to shrug off the blame. The controversy was the work of the “liberal press”, he said.
Frederic J Frommer is the author of several books, including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

It’s been a grim week or so in the United States, especially for those with progressive values.In Baltimore, a deadly mass shooting underscored, again, how desperately gun reform is needed, and, tragically, how unlikely it is to happen.And in Washington, a spate of supreme court rulings undid decades of forward movement – the court’s rightwing majority rejected affirmative action in college admissions, favored religion over anti-discrimination laws and knocked down Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt.Add to that the one-year anniversary of the court’s devastating overturning of Roe v Wade, and you could practically hear the sound of hard-won progress being sucked down history’s drain.Pretty depressing, all told.But despite that, there are reasons to feel encouraged about the future of the nation on this, its 247th birthday.First, the successful effort in Congress to protect democracy and electoral integrity known as the Electoral Count Act reform. Widely seen as the most important such reform in a generation, it developed in direct response to Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election which came to a violent head in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Among its many admirable provisions, it prohibits state legislatures from changing how electors can be selected after an election.Then in one of two positive pieces of supreme court news in recent weeks, the court rejected a dangerous effort to allow states to ignore their own state constitutions. Undeterred, that could have radically transformed how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures a great deal of power to set rules for federal elections. The court also unexpectedly struck down Alabama’s racial gerrymandering plan under the Voting Rights Act.I find it oddly encouraging that, according to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll, seven in 10 Americans think our democracy is “imperiled.” Of course, people define that peril according to their own politics and world views, but is is undoubtedly one reason why election denialists were roundly defeated during last year’s midterm elections.As NBC News’s Adam Edelman put it: “Nearly every single candidate in battleground state races who denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election was defeated for positions that oversee, defend and certify elections – a resounding loss for a movement that would have had the power to overturn future contests.”Most Americans apparently don’t want extremists running elections and they understand how high the stakes are.“Our democracy is fortifying itself on many levels,” Greg Sargent of the Washington Post wrote recently. That happened because citizens and government officials took post-2020 threats seriously.It’s a good thing that they did, since – according to one respected organization, the Virginia-based Center for Systemic Peace – the United States in late 2020 no longer could clearly be categorized as a democracy. It had become, for the first time, an “anocracy”, which shares qualities of both autocracy and democracy. America’s rating has more recently improved, putting us back, though not safely, in the democracy zone.In media, the continuing loss of local newspapers – in itself, a serious threat to democracy – has been offset somewhat as innovation-minded journalists and entrepreneurs have stepped into that void. Witness the growth of digital-first news organizations such as VoteBeat and States Newsroom, and collaborative efforts like Spotlight PA or the partnership between the Texas Tribune and ProPublica.A recent big pricetag for Fox News – $787.5m to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems – is another encouraging development. It provided some accountability for the way the cable network knowingly spread election-related lies after the 2020 election; when that settlement was followed by Fox’s firing the reprehensible Tucker Carlson, it began to look as if legal challenges could do what advertiser boycotts could not.The various criminal prosecutions and investigations to hold the January 6 insurrectionists accountable are heartening as well. Those potentially include Trump himself – in Washington, in Georgia, and according to the latest news, maybe in Arizona, too. To some degree, the democratic guardrails are holding and the rule of law prevailing.And while this is hard to quantify, I know of many citizens and advocates who are working hard to protect voting, to support the rights of the disenfranchised. to lessen the blows dealt by the recent court rulings, and to sustain local journalism.It’s a heavy lift, so we should all lend a hand.“Get engaged locally,” urged Yale University’s Asha Rangappa told me recently when I interviewed the former FBI agent for my podcast, American Crisis: Can Journalism Save Democracy? That could mean runing for office, signing up to be a poll worker, volunteering at school, participating in the arts.Rangappa wants more Americans to “cultivate the habits of democracy”. Those habits are developed when people leave their social-media echo chambers, get out into their communities, and simply talk to each other.On this Fourth of July, let’s make sure our ever-fragile democracy endures to celebrate many more birthdays.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

The election of a president under indictment and facing criminal trial would “create an unprecedented constitutional crisis” and “cripple the operations of government”, Donald Trump said.But the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, who faces 71 criminal counts in state and federal cases and is expected to face more, was not speaking about himself – or speaking this year.As reported by CNN, which unearthed the comments, Trump was speaking on 3 November 2016, at a rally in North Carolina during his first presidential campaign, against Hillary Clinton.“She is likely to be under investigation for many years,” Trump said, “and also it will probably end up – in my opinion – in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.”Clinton did not face indictment or a criminal trial over her use of a private email server while secretary of state to Barack Obama. An FBI investigation did prove politically damaging, in a campaign Trump won.Seven years later, Trump has become the first former president ever indicted – and he has been indicted twice.In New York, he faces 34 counts regarding hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during that 2016 race. In a federal investigation, he faces 37 counts relating to his retention of classified material after leaving the White House in 2021.In New York, his trial is set to begin in late March. In the federal case, a judge in Florida has said a trial could begin as soon as 14 August.Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges and continues to deny all accusations of wrongdoing.Further indictments are expected, not least in state and federal investigations of Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.Back before he became president, in Concord, North Carolina, in November 2016, Trump also said Clinton “has no right to be running, you know that. No right.”He returned to the subject two days later, CNN reported, telling a crowd in Reno, Nevada: “We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”The same day, CNN said, Trump told rally-goers in Denver, Colorado, that because Clinton was “the prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation”, it would be “virtually impossible for her to govern”.In 2023, Trump’s legal problems have not made his campaign grind to a halt, or even slow significantly.He dominates polling averages, leading his nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, by about 30 points. The Florida governor is well clear of the rest of the field.Trump did not immediately respond to the CNN report about his comments about Clinton.He has continued to complain that Clinton was not indicted, alleging investigatory bias and a political witch hunt against him.Responding to such complaints, Joe Conason, a reporter, commentator and biographer of Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, wrote: “Contrary to Trump’s lying mantra, Hillary Clinton kept no classified documents, defied no subpoenas, engaged in no conspiracies, and stole nothing. So unlike him she is innocent of wrongdoing.” More

There are many surreal revelations in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Donald Trump. There are the texts between various Trump underlings and Walt Nauta, the Trump body man who has also been indicted, showing the president directing his employees to move the boxes containing classified information back and forth to various locations around his properties in Palm Beach and Bedminster, New Jersey. There is the annoyed missive from Trump’s wife Melania, trying to make sure the boxes don’t crowd out room for her luggage on a private plane. There is the claim from Trump’s former attorney, compelled to testify against him in an unusual arrangement, that the former president suggested, with a Grinch-like pinching gesture, that the lawyer destroy confidential documents to prevent them from being produced in a subpoena. There is a text message Nauta sent to another Trump underling, showing a box having fallen over in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, secret documents spilling on to the floor – whoops.What there is not, conspicuously, is a motive. Over the course of more than a year following his departure from office, it appears that Trump spent considerable effort and resources in transporting the documents with him and keeping them near at hand – and that later, as the federal government began to demand the boxes back, that he then went out of his way to keep and conceal them, going to great length, sparing no expense, and ultimately breaking the law so much that he incurred himself a series of felony charges. Anyone can tell you how this behavior is typical of Trump: how it reflects his pettiness, his contempt for the law, his willingness to sacrifice and endanger others. What no one can tell you is why he did it.It would be more convenient – legally, for Jack Smith and his prosecutors, and politically, for Joe Biden, for the Democrats, and for the growing number of Republicans who are looking to challenge Trump in the 2024 Republican primary – if we could say precisely why Trump wanted to keep the documents so badly, exactly what he wanted them for. It would be very easy to make a case to a skeptical jury – or to a divided American people – that Trump was a danger and could not be trusted with national secrets again if it could be said that he wanted to keep the documents for any of the straightforwardly dangerous and nefarious reasons that have been speculated: if he was seeking to sell national security secrets to the Saudis, say, or to Israel; if he was hoping, as some have suggested, that he one day might be able to blackmail someone powerful, like the president of France.It’s very possible that Trump had concocted such a plan. There is much that we do not know about the investigations into Trump, including about the special counsel’s query into his illegal document retention. But we do know that in the past, we know that he has gone further, and risked more, in the pursuit of even more harebrained schemes.But what seems the most likely explanation is the simplest, stupidest, and most aggravating one: that Trump had no plan for the documents, except perhaps for use as souvenirs, trophies to be shown off, maybe as evidence for petty score-settling. That the documents that Trump smuggled out of the White House and squirreled away around Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster were not instruments in a coherent, well-formed plan, but instead mere ornaments to Trump’s ego. In transcripts of Trump’s statements about the documents that were included in the indictment, and in audio of Trump showing some of the secret papers off to a writer that was recently released by CNN, Trump uses the documents to contradict a former national security official he was then in a spat with in the press; he tells one interlocutor not to get too close to one of the secret papers, seeming to want to create a hush of reverence for the documents in place of respecting their confidentiality in the first place. At these moments, Trump does not sound as if he has a plan. He sounds as if he wants to impress the people in the room with him, and like he can think no further ahead than to how good it will feel to get their praise.Why did Trump want the secret documents? Why did he refuse to return them? The answer may be the one truest to Trump’s piddling, puerile character: because they looked cool; because they reminded him of his own importance; because the government had asked for them back, and Trump has never missed an opportunity to throw a petulant little tantrum.It is this smallness of Trump’s character, and the possible triviality of his motives, that poses a peculiar risk to both of the cases being made against Trump – the one being pursued in a Miami courthouse, and the one being pursued in public. Because there has always been an uncanny mismatch with Trump, an incongruence: between the awesome and vast powers he had in office, the historical forces he unleashed on America, and the horrible ways his presidency warped millions of lives, on the one hand; and on the other, his pettiness, his vanity, his short-sightedness, his piddling personal grievances and constant need to be flattered and reassured.The gap between the seriousness of Trump’s role in history and his unseriousness as a person is the strange place where the documents case – and, now, much of American political thought – risks getting stuck. The very silliness of Trump’s use of the documents undercuts the grave risks posed by his hoarding of them. How can such a powerful country have been made so vulnerable by someone so stupid?
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

The 17 June groundbreaking of a future suburban neighborhood in Gastonia, North Carolina, had all the trappings of a campaign rally. Brock Fankhauser, the real estate developer of 1776 Gastonia, waved to onlookers from the open top of a sport-utility vehicle; his wife, Nicole, was by his side, wearing a cowboy hat and matching T-shirt with the development’s namesake year, referring to the American Revolution.Video footage of the event shows a crane dangling a giant US flag over the site where 43 lots are for sale. Parcels range from $17,500 to $75,000 for land, and homes cost $410,000 and up in this city 20 miles from Charlotte. A young girl rode a horse down a newly paved street flanked by American flags. She gripped the saddle with one hand; in the other, a giant flag. Her sandy blonde hair flowed in rhythm with the Stars and Stripes.There will be even more flags. This development, which the company has described as “where freedom lives”, is for homeowners 55 and older. And not just any homeowners: “patriots” who will be required to fly the US flag on their properties, on a pole provided and maintained by the subdivision. Each 1776 community (Fankhauser plans on more) will also donate a home with no mortgage, free of cost, to a wounded veteran through the nonprofit Building Homes for Heroes.With ambiguous ideals and an insistence on a disinterest in politics, the 1776 brand builds off the contentious history of the US flag. Historically, the flag has been a symbol of protest, pride and polarization. When Donald Trump kissed and caressed the American flag after a 2020 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he mouthed the words: “I love you, baby.” The gesture landed favorably with his conservative base.When asked how this community will define patriotism, Fankhauser responded obliquely that patriotism is a mountain landscape. “We’re in a valley right now, and to the extent that I can have any impact whatsoever on bringing us from a valley towards a peak, it would give me tremendous satisfaction,” he said via phone.As for how he plans to identify potential homeowner-patriots for the 1776 community, Fankhauser said: “There is no screening process that’s different than how one would buy a home in any other neighborhood. We’re only as strong as the pledges that individual homeowners make to one another.”Fankhauser began his career at his father’s real estate company. He now specializes in low-maintenance housing for seniors, a fast-growing segment of real estate. According to Plante Moran Living Forward, an accounting firm specializing in advising senior living, projections show that age-related units will increase at a 4.7% annual growth rate, doubling senior housing demand from 2020 to 2040.Some of that boom has expanded to include “active adult communities” or others with on-site health care. 1776 Gastonia is part of an even newer type of neighborhood: one where community members presumably share ideals or interests. There are even themed subdivisions like Latitude Margaritaville in Florida and South Carolina for Jimmy Buffet fans.Fankhauser says the 1776 brand is a “movement” and the Gastonia project is “only the beginning”.“We think that commonality and unification is a critical element in patriotism because it brings us to the broadest denominator of being in America,” Fankhauser told the Guardian. “We will shun any attempts to make this a political movement.” (Fankhauser donated to the Republican party and Donald Trump in 2020 and had previously donated to Republicans in 2003, according to Federal Election Commission records).Still, he’s got the practiced manner of a politician whose conversations swell with lofty, vague talk about American values. It’s the kind of nationalist rhetoric common to movers and shakers across the political spectrum. It’s also the kind of discourse that can be weaponized – metaphorically and literally: The real estate company’s staff show off star-spangled handguns on Instagram, a gift from fans.In the launch event’s recap video on the company’s YouTube channel, men in kilts play bagpipes, and bikers slowly cruise a parade route. Fankhauser delivered a speech that becomes a voiceover to the tune of the national anthem. His remarks end with this signoff: “God bless this community, and God bless this great nation.”Fankhauser’s nonspecific brand leans into what American studies professor Ben Railton refers to as mythic patriotism, which “creates and celebrates a mythologized, white supremacist vision of American history and identity”. Railton, author of Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism, argues that such thinking led to the January 6 insurrection and the Trump-initiated 1776 Commission that targeted professors and other educators.Railton said this ideology “very often has meant agreeing with that white-centered vision”. And “a lot of the time, that also defines someone who doesn’t agree with that vision, who is entirely outside of it and not a part of it. When I was looking at the [1776 Gastonia] website, it’s this undercurrent of, if one doesn’t share this perspective, then there’s not a place for you here.”Real estate lawyer Harmony Taylor, who is based in nearby Charlotte, agreed that “this appears to be a pretty overt political agenda”. Taylor first learned about the community through an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer.“In the United States in 2023, unfortunately, the flying of a flag or the mandating of an exhibition of patriotism in some way seems to have become aligned with a particular [far-right] political movement. And I don’t think that can be ignored,” she said.But is requiring the flag even legal?1776 Gastonia will use a restrictive covenant that includes the flag stipulation. Restrictive covenants, a norm in residential real estate, allow homeowners associations to enforce rules and consistency in planned communities. Fankhauser defines them as a “pledge of allegiance” to the United States and “promises” among neighbors. He doesn’t anticipate that enforcing the flag provision will be an issue and has not included repercussions in the covenant if anyone refuses to fly the flag. The Guardian obtained the 1776 Gastonia covenant via email, but it had not yet been recorded in a Gaston County, North Carolina public database at the time of publication and is therefore not enforceable.Harmony Taylor, the Charlotte real estate lawyer, wrote about the rules governing flags and political signs in HOAs for a legal blog in 2020.“Typically, restrictive covenants are designed to protect the rights, not impose a speech,” she said. The Freedom to Display the American Flag Act of 2005 did just that, legislating that condos, co-ops, residential associations or housing management groups could not ban any of their members from flying the US flag within their properties. Under North Carolina state law, the right to fly a United States or state flag in a planned community or condominium is similarly protected, with some exceptions.Taylor believes the 1776 Gastonia rule is the first of its kind in the state, and she’s curious about its implications for freedom of speech. She added that constitutional free speech protections generally don’t apply to private actions that curtail speech, such as covenants. But she’s still uncomfortable with the idea of the development’s flag mandate.“I believe there is a strong public policy against requiring someone to espouse a particular political view, and I can’t help but think that is different from telling someone to simply keep silent,” said Taylor. “In my opinion, there is a real risk that the covenant requiring someone to fly a particular flag would be contrary to the public policy of the state of North Carolina and invalid.”1776 Gastonia properties go on sale on 10 July, according to spokesperson Casey Kupper. One home site has already been allocated to veterans Peter and Kelly Clark, through the Building Homes for Heroes nonprofit. Peter is a lung and brain cancer survivor with memory issues, and his wife, Kelly, is his caregiver. Speaking from their RV in South Carolina, Kelly said they fit in well in RV parks where seniors often live, but were looking for a forever home. They don’t consider themselves heroes, applying that term to Fankhauser and the nonprofit instead.“Without their generosity, we would be worried about the financial part of it because we can’t afford a house right now. This is really life-changing. There’s really no words to describe it,” Kelly said. The neighborhood’s patriotism focus was “an amazing bonus”.For his part, Fankhauser is gearing up for outreach, with the goal of spreading “a patriotic flame that lives inside” of him.“I do think that I can have some influence on turning up that flame in every individual,” he said. More

The US supreme court ruled in favor of North Carolina voting rights groups last week, which celebrated with one breath and with the next condemned the new election laws and political maps being pushed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.“We are still in a five-alarm fire here in North Carolina,” said Gino Nuzzolillo, campaign manager for the state’s Common Cause branch, which was one of the plaintiffs that won in the case the supreme court ruled on.North Carolina Republicans, including Tim Moore, the speaker of the state’s house of representatives whose name is on the case, Moore v Harper, had asked the supreme court to take up a highly controversial legal theory that would have given him and legislators around the country immense power over setting state-level federal election laws.Even though the high court rejected that theory in a 6-3 vote, preventing a nationwide shift in checks and balances over writing election laws, North Carolina’s Republican legislators can already act largely unchecked by the other branches of state government. They have a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature and the now Republican-controlled state supreme court signaled it would not act as a check on legislative power, including by taking the rare step to reverse two recent decisions by the previously Democrat-controlled court to re-allow partisan gerrymandering and require voter ID.Moore v Harper originated in state court as a partisan gerrymandering case, and as part of that litigation state courts put temporary maps in place for the 2022 elections. In a statement about the supreme court decision, Moore confirmed that the legislature will draw new maps.“We will continue to move forward with the redistricting process later this year,” Moore said.North Carolina is the only state where the governor cannot veto election maps drawn by the legislature, meaning that not even split-party leadership of the executive and legislative branches is a check on gerrymandering.For voting rights groups in North Carolina, this political reality makes the supreme court’s other voting rights decision this term that much more important. In Allen v Milligan, a case out of Alabama, the court rejected arguments from Republicans to do away with another part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This leaves an open lane to sue in federal court to overturn maps that dilute the voting power of racial minorities.Even with the victories in these two cases, federal judicial protections for voting rights are still the weakest they’ve been since at least 2013, when the supreme court crippled the Voting Rights Act. Still, voting rights groups are celebrating these two rulings because they preserve what legal tools are left at the federal level to protect the significant gains in voting access and fair representation since the civil rights era.What’s nextMoore and his Republican colleagues are working on three election bills, which they have enough votes to pass and overturn a likely veto from the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, as long as no Republicans defect.S747 is an omnibus election bill that would make wide-ranging changes to voter access, including requiring all same-day registration voters to cast provisional ballots and changing the deadline for mail ballots.S749 would change the structure and powers of state and county boards of elections, making them deadlocked between parties, rather than having a majority vote favoring the party in control of the governor’s mansion, as it is now.H772 would change rules around poll observers, including the possible criminalization of elections officials who are found to interfere with observers.In the fall, the legislature will turn its attention to redistricting maps for seats in the US House of Representatives. North Carolina is a purple state, currently controlled by a Democratic governor but with a Republican supermajority in the legislature. Under the current map, North Carolina sent seven Democrats and seven Republicans to Congress.The redrawn map this fall will probably look similar to the map Republicans first proposed in 2021, which would likely have given Republicans a 10-4 advantage, according to Western Carolina University political science professor Chris Cooper. He testified as an expert witness for Common Cause in state court that the congressional map, as well as the state map’s counterparts, were partisan gerrymanders.He anticipates that Democratic representatives Jeff Jackson, Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickel will have their districts redrawn to favor Republican candidates.Leaders from Common Cause and the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters, both groups that sued the state and won in the Moore v Harper case, said they oppose all three bills and will oppose redistricting that dilutes the votes of political or minority groups.Public polling by the Associated Press showed that a majority of people in both parties see gerrymandering as a major problem, and research shows it is a key driver of political polarization and protecting politically extreme candidates.Neither Moore nor Ralph Hise, chair of the state senate’s redistricting and elections committee, responded to emailed questions about how the public can participate in legislative action around the election bills or redistricting, about whether the legislature will consider racial data for redistricting or about limiting partisan bias in drawing maps.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2021, North Carolina Republicans wrote rules that they could not consider racial data when drawing political maps. At the time, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), whose attorneys represented Common Cause in the Moore litigation, argued they should have used racial data for fair representation.In light of the Allen v Milligan ruling, the coalition’s senior voting rights lawyer, Hilary Harris Klein, said the legislature will have to consider racial data this time or be in violation of federal law.Using racial data, or not, will be a key point in the development of possible federal litigation to challenge discriminatory maps. Klein stressed that the SCSJ will advocate for equitable maps during the drawing process because the organization does not want to resort to litigation.Weakness of democratic institutionsNorth Carolina Republicans have a long history of passing racially and politically discriminatory voting maps and election laws, according to several federal and state court judgments since 2013.Since 2016, voting rights groups have been able to turn back some of those laws with a Democratic-majority state supreme court. But as of 2022, Republicans control the court, and will at least until 2028.“The state courts are probably a closed avenue to any further vindication of voter’s rights under the state constitution,” Nuzzolillo said.Relying on federal courts has been made increasingly difficult by the US supreme court under its chief justice, John Roberts.“The court in the last 10 years has done extraordinary damage to democratic institutions,” said Carolyn Shapiro, professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law. She wrote a brief to the supreme court in the Moore v Harper case supporting the voting rights groups.She points to the 2013 Shelby county decision, in which Roberts wrote the opinion to strike down the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act and allowed states to immediately pass laws aimed at voter suppression. In the Abbott v Perez and Rucho v Common Cause cases from 2018, the court made it harder to win racial gerrymandering cases and impossible to bring political gerrymandering cases in federal courts. Then, in 2021, in Brnovich v DNC, the court made it harder to bring vote denial claims, which are the claims voting rights groups could try to bring against the election laws that North Carolina’s legislature is currently considering.The reason voting rights groups saw this year’s rulings as huge victories was because expectations were so low, Shapiro said.That Moore v Harper and Allen v Milligan were even taken up is an aberration from the historically typical strategy of the supreme court, showing how far the court and political thinking has shifted, according to Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina.The rulings mainly kept precedent in place rather than adding any rights or protections, Su said. That responsibility would fall to Congress.“We held the line,” Klein said. “In this climate, that is a huge win.” More