Evelyn Reynolds

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    US cites AI deepfakes as reason to keep Biden recording with Robert Hur secret

    The US Department of Justice is making a novel legal argument to keep a recording of an interview with Joe Biden from becoming public. In a filing late last week, the bureau cited the risk of AI-generated deepfakes as one of the reasons it refuses to release audio of the president’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. The conversation about Biden’s handling of classified documents is a source of heated political contention, with Republicans pushing for release of the recordings and the White House moving to block them.The justice department’s filing, which it released late on Friday night, argues that the recording should not be released on a variety of grounds including privacy interests and executive privilege. One section of the filing, however, is specifically dedicated to the threat of deepfakes and disinformation, stating that there is substantial risk people could maliciously manipulate the audio if it were to be made public.“The passage of time and advancements in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deep fake’ technologies only amplify concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files,” the justice department stated. “If the audio recording is released here, it is easy to foresee that it could be improperly altered, and that the altered file could be passed off as an authentic recording and widely distributed.”The filing presents a novel argument about the threat of AI-generated disinformation from the release of government materials, potentially setting up future legal battles over the balance between transparency and preventing the spread of misinformation.“A malicious actor could slow down the speed of the recording or insert words that President Biden did not say or delete words that he did say,” the filing argues. “That problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is now widely available technology that can be used to create entirely different audio ‘deepfakes’ based on a recording.”Biden’s interview with Hur reignited a longstanding conservative campaign of questioning Biden’s mental faculties and drawing attention to his age, which critics claim make him unfit to be president. While Hur’s report into classified documents found at Biden’s private residence did not result in charges against him, the special counsel’s description of him as an “elderly man with poor memory” became ammunition for Republicans and prompted Biden to defend his mental fitness.Although transcripts of Hur’s interview with Biden are public, conservative groups and House Republicans have taken legal action, filed Freedom of Information Act requests and demanded the release of recorded audio from the conversation as he campaigns against Donald Trump. Biden has asserted executive privilege to prevent the release of the audio, while the latest justice department filing pushes back against many of the conservative claims about the recording.The justice department’s filing argues that releasing the recording would create increased public awareness that audio of the interview is circulating, making it more believable when people encounter doctored versions of it.A number of politicians have become the target of deepfakes created in attempts to swing political opinion, including Biden. A robocall earlier this year that mimicked Biden’s voice and told people not to vote in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary was sent to thousands of people. The political consultant allegedly behind the disinformation campaign is now facing criminal charges and a potential $6m fine. More

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    Biden to sign executive order to close southern US border to asylum seekers

    Joe Biden will this week sign an executive order to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Biden’s announcement.Biden’s move echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses his one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessor’s hostility to migrants. When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trump’s policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law.He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Trump, who did not want Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.According to CBS, which broke the story, Biden’s executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims.Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trump’s presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.Like Trump’s restrictions, Biden’s order is likely to face legal challenges.Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. Buthe order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.An estimated 179,000 “border encounters” were recorded in April, according to US Customs and Border Protection figures, compared with a record high of 302,000 last December. More than 3,500 migrants were said to have crossed various points along the 2,000-mile border illegally on Sunday alone.Biden initially rolled back Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying: “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.”A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border. More

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    Trump’s $1bn pitch to oil bosses ‘the definition of corruption’, top Democrat says

    Donald Trump’s brazen pitch to 20 fossil-fuel heads for $1bn to aid his presidential campaign in return for promises of lucrative tax and regulatory favors is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat investigating the issue has said.“It certainly meets the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have used the term,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview about Trump’s audacious $1bn request for big checks to top fossil-fuel executives that took place in April at his Mar-a-Lago club.Whitehouse added: “The quid pro quo – so called – is so very evident … I can’t think of anything that matches this either in terms of the size of the bribe requested, or the brazenness of the linkages.”Whitehouse and his fellow Democrat Ron Wyden have launched a joint inquiry, as chairs of the Senate budget and finance panels respectively, into Trump’s quid-pro-quo-style fundraising, which already seems to have helped spur tens of millions in checks for a Trump Super Pac from oil and gas leaders at a 22 May Houston event.The two senators have written to eight big-oil chief executives and the head of the industry’s lobbying group seeking details about the Mar-a- Lago meeting, as has representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the oversight and accountability committee, who has begun a parallel investigation into the pay-to-play schemes that Trump touted to big oil leaders.Amplifying those concerns, former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble said that Trump’s unusually aggressive money pitch “violates the letter and spirit” of campaign-finance laws, and a veteran Republican consultant called it “blatant pay to play”.In a separate fossil-fuel inquiry, Raskin and Whitehouse released a joint report in April into long-running big-oil disinformation campaigns to undercut the enormous threats posed by global warming, which Trump has falsely labelled a “hoax”, and last week urged the justice department to investigate big-oil tactics to deceive the public.Trump boasts a lengthy record of rejecting scientific evidence about the links between fossil-fuel usage and climate change: he has pushed a litany of bogus climate claims, including that windmills cause cancer and that electric cars are “bad” for the environment, while promising to end tax breaks for EVs if he wins this fall.Further, in a major rebuke to environmental advocates and international efforts to curb global warming, Trump in 2017 announced the US was pulling out of the Paris agreement to limit climate change, a much-criticized move that Joe Biden reversed.Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra and his deep animosity toward alternative energy sources have been part of his fundraising pitches to oil and gas moguls, triggering alarm about the dangers of another Trump presidency.“The totality of … Trump, the fossil-fuel industry and a [conservative thinktank] Heritage Foundation blueprint advocate will put a dagger through efforts to avoid catastrophic warming,” said Joe Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.“Trump promises to undo every constraint on global warming. Trump has pushed more lies and disinformation about climate change than anyone ever has.”Other climate scholars say Trump’s climate denialism is the culmination of years of fossil-fuel propaganda.“Trump is an apotheosis of decades of denial, not only on the part of the fossil-fuel industry, but also by other industry allies, including now-certain billionaires, to deny the reality of the harms of unregulated, or very poorly regulated, capitalism,” said Naomi Oreskes, the co-author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard historian of science. “Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of this rewriting of history, culminating in the big lie that he won the 2020 election.”Trump’s strong embrace of climate-change denialism and his pro-big-oil policies were underscored by his aggressive $1bn pitch at Mar-a-Lago, which drew CEOs from giants such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, and the fracking multibillionaire Harold Hamm, the founder of Continental Resources, as the Washington Post first reported.Hamm, an early Trump backer in 2016 and 2020 who took months before helping Trump’s current presidential bid, joined with two other industry CEOs to host a Super Pac bash in Houston that reportedly raised $40m on 22 May from attendees who paid at least $250,000 each to hear Trump promise more fracking and more pipelines if he wins.Trump’s full-court press for fossil-fuel funds and political backing was palpable at an industry conference in North Dakota earlier in May, where Hamm surprised attendees by announcing Trump would join them via a video which featured bogus claims about the health of energy companies and the economy.“Under ‘Crooked Joe Biden’, the American energy industry is under siege, it’s under crisis. [Biden] has made clear that he wants to abolish your industry and, with it, destroy our economy and send us into a new dark age of blackouts, poverty and de-industrialization,” said Trump.View image in fullscreenThe spotlight on Trump’s ardent pursuit of oil and gas donations comes after Biden championed major new regulatory, tax and spending measures to reduce global warming in a sharp break with Trump policies past and present.Ironically, even as Biden succeeded in accelerating spending for green energy, and imposed new regulations on fracking on US lands and a moratorium on natural gas exports, oil and gas production in the US reached new highs in 2023 and major companies notched healthy profits.Still, the oil and gas industry has been ponying up funds for Trump’s campaign faster than it did in 2020, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets group, which tracks money in politics.The oil and gas industry has donated $7.3m to Trump’s campaign thus far, or more than three times the amount it gave at this point in 2020, OpenSecrets data shows.Further, some industry titans have donated six- and seven-figure checks to a Trump Super Pac. Texas oilman and multibillionaire Tim Dunn gave $5m to Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac this year, and Hamm kicked in at least $200,000 last fall.Campaign-finance watchdogs and some Republican veterans are dismayed by Trump’s fundraising tactics.“Trump views everything as a transaction, so I’m not surprised,” said ex-GOP representative Dave Trott. “Any other politician who made these statements would be deemed dead on arrival because they’d be viewed as corrupt.”Campaign-finance experts see other dangers in Trump’s heavy-handed fundraising appeals, which he links to favors.“When wealthy special interests, like the oil and gas industry, have special access to candidates, and mechanisms to give them enough money to control their policy choices, everyday voters suffer,” said Shanna Ports, the Campaign Legal Center’s senior legal counsel for campaign finance.“Trump’s request to oil executives is a troubling illustration of the quid pro quo corruption and pay-to-play-style politics that federal campaign laws are meant to prevent. Federal law includes strict contribution limits and bans corporate contributions precisely so candidates do not trade policy favors for campaign cash.”Ports stressed that “candidates are forbidden from soliciting contributions that would break these laws – a prohibition that Trump may have violated”.Likewise, Noble, the former Federal Election Commission general counsel, said Trump’s appeals for massive donations from oil and gas bigwigs [are] “pretty blatantly offering policy favors in exchange for large contributions”.Little wonder, then, that top Senate and House Democrats are inquiring into whether Trump’s bald $1bn ask of big oil moguls broke campaign finance laws, as well as big oil’s long track record of spreading disinformation about global warming.In Whitehouse and Raskin’s joint letter to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, urging the DoJ to investigate big oil’s history of climate change disinformation, they drew parallels with the tobacco industry’s years of disinformation about the dangers smoking poses to human health.“The DoJ is well situated to pursue further investigation and take any appropriate legal action, as it has in similar cases involving the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries,” they wrote.Looking ahead to the November election, climate change experts predict another Trump presidency would decimate efforts to curb global warming.“If Trump is elected and does what he has been saying and the fossil fuel industry wants, that would be the ruin of the United States and the world,” Romm, of the University of Pennsylvania, warned.“Trump wants to roll back” the ambitious climate change steps and spending that the Biden administration has initiated, Romm added, saying: “We have dawdled a very long time on climate change. We need very sharp reductions. We can’t afford four years focused on raising emissions.” More

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    Trump calls on supreme court to annul his guilty verdict in hush-money case

    Donald Trump has called on the US supreme court to step in and annul his guilty verdict in a hush-money trial that left him with the unwanted distinction of being the first former US president to be a convicted felon.The 2024 presumptive Republican nominee made his plea in a typically florid post on his Truth Social site, highlighting that a sentencing hearing scheduled for 11 July falls just four days before the GOP’s national convention in Milwaukee, when his nomination is expected to become official.“The ‘Sentencing’ for not having done anything wrong will be, conveniently for the Fascists, 4 days before the Republican National Convention,” Trump wrote. “A Radical Left Soros backed D.A., who ran on a platform of ‘I will get Trump,’ reporting to an ‘Acting’ Local Judge, appointed by the Democrats, who is HIGHLY CONFLICTED, will make a decision which will determine the future of our Nation?”A jury in Manhattan found the ex-president guilty last Thursday on all 34 counts of falsifying documents to conceal a sexual liaison with an adult film actor, Stormy Daniels, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won over Hillary Clinton.The verdict, which Trump has pledged to appeal, raised the atmosphere in this year’s presidential campaign to fever pitch more than five months before polling day, with Republicans circling the wagons while Democrats sought ways to exploit it.In a worrying sign for Trump, a new ABC/Ipsos poll showed 50% of voters thought the verdict was correct, nearly double the proportion, 27%, who believed it was wrong. Nearly half of those polled, 49%, thought he should end his campaign – a step he is highly unlikely to take.The figures were even starker among “double haters” – voters who equally dislike Trump and President Joe Biden – 65% of whom supported the verdict, with two-thirds saying the former president should end his campaign. Pollsters predict the cohort could be a critical component of the swing voter constituency they believe will determine the outcome in November.By appealing to the supreme court to intervene in a case he insists is nakedly political, Trump is reprising the legal strategy deployed in his defense against special counsel Jack Smith’s charges relating to the 6 January, 2021 mob attack on the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in his favor.The case is currently on hold while the nine justices consider claims by Trump’s lawyers that he had complete immunity from prosecution for decisions taken while he was president.But his invocation of the court – which has a six-to-three conservative majority after Trump’s judicial appointments while he was in the White House – also comes as questions over its political impartiality are at a peak following revelations that a US flag was flown upside down at the home of Justice Samuel Alito at the time of the January 6 riot. The gesture is identical to that used by many participants in the attack as a symbol of protest against Biden’s victory.In an interview with Fox, Trump affected to be unfazed by the possibility that he could be sentenced to jail by Judge Juan Merchan at his 11 July hearing, saying: “it could happen” and that he would be “OK” with a custodial sentence or home confinement.Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who prosecuted Trump’s case, has reportedly yet to decide whether to request a prison term or leave the decision to Merchan’s discretion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLegal analysts have pointed out that his conviction is for a low-level felony and that Trump has no prior convictions, making probation a more likely sentence.But the ex-president may have sullied his prospects of remaining free with his relentless verbal assaults on both men.Previous attacks on Bragg, a Democrat, have included posting a picture of himself holding a baseball bat next to a photo of the prosecutor’s head.The first Republican attack ad aiming to exploit the verdict has been posted by the GOP Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in his campaign against a Democratic incumbent, Jon Tester, in which he links his opponent for a Montana seat to a prosecution that the ad calls “a state-sponsored political persecution led by JOE BIDEN and the radical left”.“They want to throw Trump in jail, trying to rob Americans of their choice in the election,” the 30-second broadcast says.It also accuses Tester of advocating political violence against Trump, displaying footage of the senator saying: “I think you need to go back and punch him in the face.” More

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    The Republican party has transformed into the Trump Maga party | Sidney Blumenthal

    The Republican leaders were of one mind: if the Republican president committed a crime, he could no longer hold office. They had defended him to a point, but they understood that with proof of criminality they would withdraw their support. Even before the evidence was conclusive, their ultimate judgment about their constitutional duty and of the president’s was certain. “If it can be proved that he lied, resignation would have to be considered. It would be quick. Everything would be over, ended. It wouldn’t drag out like impeachment.” So stated senator Barry Goldwater, a previous Republican presidential nominee, still the icon of the conservative movement, in May 1973.It did not matter that Richard Nixon was popular, that he had won the presidency twice, the last time just a year earlier, in a landslide, carrying 49 states. Goldwater did not know that after he made his statement, the “smoking gun” tape would be revealed on 5 August 1974. He and the other Republican leaders, however, did know then that a president who had authorized payment of hush money to the Watergate burglars in order win an election and had engaged in a coverup to thwart both the investigation and accountability in the courts would have to quit or face impeachment and removal.On 6 August, at the Senate Republican Conference lunch, Goldwater exclaimed: “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House – today!” The next day, Goldwater, the House Republican leader John Rhodes and the Senate Republican leader Hugh Scott traveled down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House to deliver the message to Nixon that he was doomed. In his memoir, Goldwater wrote that Nixon “knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished. None of us doubted the outcome. He would resign.” On 9 August, Nixon wrote a letter of one sentence: “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.”Within minutes of the jury delivering its verdict in the trial of The People of the State of New York versus Donald J Trump, convicting him of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to coverup hush-money payments in order to suppress information about his illicit adulterous affairs to win the election, the Republican leaders released their prepared statements of support. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who played a leading role in trying to overturn the 2020 election, went on Fox News to assure its viewers that the supreme court would soon overturn the conviction: “I think that the justices on the court – I know many of them personally – I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight.”Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said the charges “never should have been brought in the first place”, and predicted the conviction would “be overturned on appeal”. One after another, Republicans lined up to denounce the verdict, the judicial system and New York – “the Manhattan kangaroo court”, according to Congressman Jim Jordan. They hate New York.“I am a political prisoner,” Trump protested in a fundraising email. But, “the good news”, he said in his press conference the day after the verdict, was that he had raised millions. He said he had wanted to testify in the trial, as he promised he would, but that was a lie. If he had testified, he and his lawyers knew, he would have lied, like he lied in his press conference. His cowardice saved himself from a perjury rap.Trump’s self-image as a martyr was embraced by more than his Republican acolytes. Now, three months after the murder of Alexei Navalny, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov stated: “The fact that a de facto elimination of political rivals by all possible legal and illegal means is going on there is obvious.” Trump supporter, the representative Nancy Mace, echoed Peskov’s remark, tweeting: “There’s no difference: Putin silences Navalny, Biden’s DOJ targets Trump. The left’s outrage over Navalny is hypocritical as they cheer on Biden’s tyranny.”The Republican party of Barry Goldwater, John Rhodes and Hugh Scott is not even a flickering shadow of a memory. Both Nixon and Trump succeeded during their campaigns in covering up their sordid transactions through bribery. When Nixon’s perfidy was finally exposed the Republican leaders accepted the truth. His party support crumbled. He had no alternative to leaving. But when Trump’s conviction on all counts was announced, the Republican leaders rallied ‘round his upside-down flag. None of them remembered the events of 50 years ago, or cared if they did. The party still carries the name of “Republican”, but it is a party transformed. It is the Trump Maga party.Trump hails the imprisoned January 6 insurrectionists as “hostages” and promises to pardon them. In the shadow of the Capitol, at the headquarters of the Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 is an authoritarian blueprint for a second Trump term, the upside-down flag signaling insurrectionist sympathy was hoisted within moments of the jury’s verdict of Trump’s guilt.The Republican party today is the fruit of the poisoned tree. Trump has thoroughly tainted all of its branches. The party’s central organizing principles are impunity from justice and contempt for the rule of law, which have always and everywhere been the hallmarks of despotism.The zombie party it is prepared to nominate a felon in a convention beginning four days after his sentencing. Before Trump emerges on stage through clouds of dry ice smoke, he will be preceded by speakers seeking to exceed each other in tirades against the evil of the judicial system.There are very few Republicans left to terminate for treason to Trump. Isolated heretics, like Liz Cheney, have been long purged from the ranks. Larry Hogan, an outlying old-style moderate, the former governor of Maryland, currently running for the Senate, perhaps the decisive figure for its capture by Republicans, urged the public to “respect the verdict and the legal process”. In an instant, Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita replied: “You just ended your campaign.” If Hogan ever stood a chance, it is now evaporated. Respect for the law is disloyalty to Trump. In front of Trump Tower the day after the verdict waved a huge flag: “Trump Or Death”. Every Republican candidate for every office must now pledge fealty to a felon, declare an oath to his victimhood and show contempt for the justice system. Then they can feign campaigns as law-and-order candidates.For all of his rage against the judicial system, Trump’s protectors on the courts have spared him from the worst of the charges he rightfully should bear. Before his conviction in the Manhattan courtroom, he should have already been tried in federal courts for his crimes in the January 6 insurrection, his theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice.The conservative majority on the supreme court has shielded him through unwarranted delays in the presidential immunity case, which it will almost certainly further delay by referring it back to the appeals court to engage needlessly in defining distinctions between official and personal business. Intervening as a political actor, the court has granted Trump de facto immunity for the course of the campaign.By contrast, in United States v Nixon, the supreme court in July 1974 unanimously decided within two weeks on Nixon’s executive privilege in controlling his White House tapes. The court rejected his “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances”. One justice, William Rehnquist, recused himself from the case because he had been the assistant attorney general who had fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox on Nixon’s order in the Saturday Night Massacre. He did not want even an appearance of a conflict of interest. No matter the result, he felt the necessity of ethical obligation.On the Roberts Court, by contrast, two justices with apparent conflicts of interest, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, adamantly refuse to recuse themselves. Thomas’s wife Ginni was a political operative in organizing the false electors scheme in Arizona and in helping to coordinate the events leading to the insurrection. Alito’s wife, it seems, at least according to Alito, was responsible for flying flags that were emblems of the insurrection at their Virginia residence and New Jersey beach house. Alito disclaims any ability or will of his own to lower those flags. “My wife loves to fly flags,” he said. Happy wife, happy life.But his chronology of events does not match that of his neighbor, whom he blamed for provoking poor beset Martha-Ann Alito to raise the banners in the first place by exhibiting nasty anti-Trump signs. The neighbor, for her part, said Martha-Ann spat at her family. Trump praised Alito for being “strong”, and Chief Justice John Roberts rebuffed inquiries about the ethical quandaries of Thomas and Alito from the Senate judiciary committee. The history and tradition of stonewalling is the predicate for the Trump immunity ruling. Trump has infected the supreme court down to the wives.In the national security papers case in Florida, a federal judge appointed by Trump, Aileen Cannon, has used every contrivance to thwart the special prosecutor Jack Smith and to prevent the case from moving to trial. She stands in the sharpest contrast to Judge John J Sirica, of the US district court in Washington, who relentlessly and expeditiously pressed to expose the underpinnings of the Watergate scandal and to push the Nixon tapes to the supreme court for a speedy resolution. If someone like Sirica were presiding over the Florida case, the trial would have been held by now and Trump almost certainly convicted, which would have figured as a prior conviction to toughen the sentencing in the Manhattan case.Outside the courthouse, Trump mixed in criminals with congressmen to join his cheerleading section. There was a Hells Angels biker, Chuck Zito, close to the Gambino crime family who served six years in prison. There were also two rappers, Michael Williams, AKA Sheff G, and Tegan Chambers, AKA Sleepy Hallow, currently indicted with other alleged gang members on 140 felony counts for attempted murder conspiracy.The unanswered question about these criminals’ association with Trump remains: what’s in it for them? They are not known to be motivated by political ideas. If Trump paid them, arranged to pay them, or for them to receive anything of value, it would have been a bizarre refraction of the charges for which he was convicted.Just as Trump surrounded himself with criminals, he suffused his party from top to bottom with criminality. Then the jury decided that he is a criminal. “That the defendant, Donald J Trump, is guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, to conceal a scheme to corrupt the 2016 election,” stated Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.Trump will appeal his conviction, but the history cannot be appealed. Historians operate on different methods than judges and juries. Yet the verdict contributes to settling the history. Pundits may continue to quibble about this or that about the trial and its aftermath. Historians cannot doubt that Trump won the presidency in 2016 at least in part through criminal means.
    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Kevin McCarthy says ‘every American should accept’ election results

    Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican US House speaker, has said that Americans should accept the results of November’s presidential race – as rising political tensions in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s campaign finance violation conviction in New York are set to inflame election integrity issues.The relatively moderate McCarthy, who was ousted as speaker last year in a Republican power struggle and has since resigned from Congress, said on Sunday that “every American should accept the results” of the election that is expected to pit the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden against the former Republican president Trump.McCarthy’s remarks on CNN’s Inside Politics came after Marco Rubio, the senior Florida senator and potential Trump vice-presidential pick, refused to commit to standing by the outcome on Sunday.Like Rubio, McCarthy is an ally of Trump, and he even visited the former president after his supporters carried out the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021. But he is now contradicting a Republican narrative that has become a test of loyalty to Trump: questioning the integrity of the US electoral system, at least when conservative candidates lose at the ballot box.After the guilty verdict in the New York case against Trump came down on Thursday, the Maryland Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin said that if the former president wins the vote in November then he “should be impeached before he was even sworn in” given his conviction. But other Democrats have adopted a more conciliatory position.Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, said on Sunday that he would “certainly” accept the results “because in America the peaceful transfer of power is sacrosanct”.Jeffries cast the blame on the extreme right wing of the Republican party, saying that “many Americans – Democrats, independents and traditional Republicans – have been troubled by the election denialism or the denial that we’ve seen coming from the other side of the aisle”.Trump has also said that he would accept November’s vote – but only, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in May, “if everything’s honest”.On Sunday night, Trump posted on his social media site a call for the US supreme court to intervene in his conviction in New York state court ahead of his scheduled sentencing on 11 July. Legally an appeal can only be initiated after sentencing.McCarthy, who is free of political obligation to Trump, had previously signed a legal petition soon after the 2020 election that urged the supreme court to review a Texas lawsuit challenging the election results in several swing states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe also voted not to certify election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania during the vote certification process that came after police managed to halt the 2021 Capitol attack.But in his interview with CNN, McCarthy said that resistance to election results was not just a question for politicians but “for the whole American public”.“We’ve gotta get beyond it,” McCarthy said. More

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    Crowing about the Trump verdict will only hurt Biden – populists thrive on claims of persecution | Simon Jenkins

    “Guilty”, screamed the one-word headline in the New York Times last week, dripping with undisguised glee. Howls of contempt descended on Donald Trump as he slunk from his Manhattan courtroom to cries of “felon”. He now awaits sentence and three more criminal trials, two of them over his response to his 2020 election defeat.Ecstasy is a dangerous substance in politics. Trump’s enemies should be careful what they wish for. Within 24 hours of his leaving court, $39m reportedly poured into his campaign coffers. Though some Republicans seemed hesitant, an Ipsos poll for Reuters showed voting intention tilting in his favour. As with his victory in 2016, the more the political establishment damns him, the more those outside its reach are drawn to him.To many people in the US and around the world, the prospect of Trump’s return is the reduction to absurdity of the populist surge experienced by many western democracies. His still narrow lead in several polls has been enough to scare nervous Republicans to back him. To the House speaker, Mike Johnson, his New York conviction was “a shameful day in American history … a purely political exercise.” The same was true of the rightwing media. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post replied to the Times’s “Guilty” headline with another single word, “Injustice”.To many jurists, the fact that Trump’s prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, was an elected Democrat who reportedly vowed to “get Trump” did indeed give the trial a political spin. This gives the former president a decent chance of victory on appeal next year. If that followed a “stolen” Biden win, there would be grounds for alarm. As Trump said at the weekend of his possible house arrest: “I am not sure the public would stand for it … There’s a breaking point.” The US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021 showed what that meant.As for Trump’s next trials, never was “the law’s delay” so clearly justice denied. The US judicial offices are highly politicised. It was Trump’s packing of the supreme court when in office that has helped stall any progress against him at the federal level. It has left him to dismiss local state prosecutors as political enemies. This in turn has added to his appeal among the “left-behind Americans” of populist folklore, those ignored by what he calls “the swamp”, the liberal elites of the nation’s east and west coasts.This gulf between “insiders and outsiders”, cities and provinces, cannot be ignored. It is evident in all western democracies. It underlay the Brexit referendum in Britain and is seen in support for Trump from Reform’s Nigel Farage and from Boris Johnson, who called his trial a “machine-gun, mob-style hit job”. Populists clearly stick together, however outrageous the cause.This means that for those who view another Trump presidency as a disaster, handling the next six months needs caution rather than cheering. Trump’s appeal to his supporters lies not in his affection for them but in the hatred he expresses for his enemies. It is why his support has been rising among non-graduates, the poor, African Americans and even Latinos. Joe Biden’s strength lies rather with the better educated and the better off. Old divisions between Republican and Democrat are meaningless in the age of populism.The answer cannot be to reason with Trumpism, which is more a stance than a programme. The television debate with Biden will be mere gladiatorial theatre. The strategy can only be to lower the temperature, to minimise publicity for Trump’s vapid accusations and bolster the virtues of Biden’s presidency and his increasingly uncertain leadership. Elections to the White House reflect the constitution’s balance of sovereignty between Washington and the states. They are when the states matter, in particular the dozen or so swing states that regularly change sides, where the contest is won or lost. As for the outside world, it normally cares about who becomes the US president. This time it cares about who does not.
    Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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    in US Politics

    The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler?

    When Donald Trump shared a video that dreamed of a “unified reich” if he wins the US presidential election, and took nearly a full day to remove it, the most shocking thing was how unshocking it was.Trump has reportedly said before that Adolf Hitler did “some good things”, echoed the Nazi dictator by calling his political opponents “vermin” and saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, and responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides”.The Hitler-Trump analogy is controversial. “Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison,” the Politico website observed recently. “Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.”The former camp now includes Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain. The Dutchman, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.In it, De Berg compares and contrasts Hitler and Trump as political performance artists and how they connect with their respective audiences. He examines the two men’s work ethic, management style and narcissism, as well as quirks such as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache and Trump’s implausible blond hair.In a Zoom interview from his office at the university campus, De Berg quotes the American comedian and actor George Burns: “The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” He adds: “The most important thing in populism is authenticity. The moment you’re able to fake that, you’re in.”De Berg, 60, happened to be renewing his study of National Socialism, and rereading Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, just as Trump was first running for the White House in 2015. “Obviously, there are massive differences,” he acknowledges. “Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.“But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?“We tend to see Hitler as a genocidal mass murderer, which of course he was, but not so much as a populist. I thought looking at it through the perspective of Trump can help us wrap our heads around the idea as to why so many people actually supported Hitler and vice versa.”View image in fullscreenAbove all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes.“Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements?“Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?”Along with its headline-grabbing potential, the extremist language also plays well with many voters. De Berg says: “Most of their electorate are dissatisfied with the status quo for a variety of reasons – globalisation, automation – so they want to change the system and here you have an anti-establishment candidate who is not politically correct, who says that we will sort it, who doesn’t come up with all these ‘cowardly, rotten compromises’.”Many such voters are ready to blame a scapegoat, “the other”. Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in the first world war; Trump launched his 2015 campaign demonising immigrants from Mexico and continues to put border security front and centre. “It decomplexifies the world. Instead of abstract social structures and historical developments, you have one specific group of people that you can blame all your problems on.”One of the touchstone observations from the early Trump years came from the journalist Salena Zito. In September 2016 she wrote in a column for the Atlantic magazine that “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally”.Again De Berg is alive to rhymes with Hitler. “There were a lot of National Socialists interviewed after the war who said, well, yeah, OK, Hitler was saying all these extreme things but we realised he was a mass politician and we thought that he was just saying things that he didn’t really mean, that he was just exaggerating a little bit. Someone said the demands in Mein Kampf we took as the dogmas in the Bible – no one thought that these things would be fulfilled 100%.“The same is true, dangerously, with the things that Trump says. In his rallies he outlined a whole range of very problematic things that he would do when he was going to be president, but that doesn’t mean all people literally believe that. I don’t think they literally believed that he was going to build this big concrete wall between Mexico and the United States. Many of them thought, unconsciously, what he’s really saying is he will protect America’s traditional identity.“And that – to use a posh phrase – interpretative openness means that both the more extreme followers and the less extreme or ‘moderate’ followers can recognise themselves in the speaker’s words. That made Hitler and makes Trump so difficult.”Trump’s incoherent, meandering and zigzagging mode of speech adds to the effect. “Trump goes from the FBI to a judge to the Democrats to communists and so on. You can then say, well, clearly this guy is an intellectual nitwit, he can’t talk in a logical, argumentative way. He could but he realises that this vague way of tying all these people together actually gives different sections of the electorate different things they can identify with. Some might not like the FBI, others might not like immigrants and so on.”Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years as president, according to a count by the Washington Post. Perhaps the most egregious is “the big lie” that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election, only for it to be stolen due to widespread fraud. De Berg writes in his book: “The idea behind the concept of the big lie is that if an untruth is sufficiently extreme, people are likely to accept it if only because they cannot bring themselves to believe that anyone could lie in such an outrageous manner.“It was Hitler who came up with the concept, writing in Mein Kampf that ‘the great masses of the people … more easily fall victim to a big lie [große Lüge] than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.’”View image in fullscreenThe spectacle and social glue of mass rallies is also key. In controversial comments to Playboy magazine, the British singer David Bowie once observed: “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars … Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for 12 years. The world will never see his like again.”Trump’s rallies are typically rollicking affairs, the atmosphere part circus, part concert, part sports, bringing like-minded people together as ritualistically as church. In all weathers they share a collective sense of grievance and also find ways to have fun. In small towns that often feel left behind by big cities, they can represent the biggest event of the year and offer the thrill of live performance in an otherwise digitally saturated age.De Berg comments: “If you look at the lives of many ordinary Germans during the Weimar Republic immediately after the first world war, when the economy wasn’t doing well and there were all sorts of problems, many of them could not afford to enjoy all sorts of spectacles but they could go to a Hitler rally.“You can go to a Trump rally as well and that creates a feeling of solidarity, a community of feeling, which of course is at the same time the dangerous thing because people then identify with each other. They lose their individuality, they lose their critical capacity, and at the same time all together they identify with a political leader, so the political leader can do whatever he wants.”There is also something alarmingly familiar about the way in which the Republican party thought it could co-opt and control Trump, only to find itself capitulating and being recast in his image. One by one the party stalwarts have fallen into line, abandoning long-held principles, while dissenters have been purged.De Berg continues: “Hitler goes from 2.6% of the vote in 1928, meaning more than 97% of the electorate don’t want him, to the Nazi party becoming the biggest party in 1932. Then these conservative politicians say, OK, we’ve got this political nincompoop here but he’s a populist and he’s popular, the people like him. If we try and make this guy vice-chancellor then he can do our bidding.“Hitler says no, I’m not going to be vice-chancellor, I want to be chancellor, so eventually they give in but they still think that he is going to do what they want and push through their policies. One of these conservative politicians memorably said, ‘We’ve hired him.’ Hitler manipulated them and he becomes chancellor and from there on in it all goes disastrously wrong with German society.”He adds: “One of the most worrying things for me about Trumpism is the way he has managed to transform what you thought were very rightwing but ultimately rational politicians into people who have become basically Trumpists.“What happened was not that they manipulated Trump but Trump ended up manipulating them and then, in effect, just taking over the Republican party. All these people had to renounce all the things they used to believe in: international free trade agreements, a forward-leaning role for America in the world.”There is, the academic warns, method in Trump’s madness: the buffoonery, chaos and word salad speeches may be more calculated than they appear. “I would like people to become more aware of how incredibly consciously Trump is going about doing what he’s doing, how incredibly cunning and devious he’s been. People should absolutely not underestimate this guy.” More