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    Ex-Trump adviser Peter Navarro sentenced to four months in prison

    Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, was sentenced to four months in federal prison and fined $9,500 after he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol attack.The sentence imposed by Amit Mehta in federal district court in Washington was lighter than what prosecutors recommended but tracked the four-month jail term handed to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was similarly convicted for ignoring the panel’s subpoena.“You are not a victim, you are not the object of a political prosecution,” the US district judge said from the bench. “These are circumstances of your own making.”Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack, claiming that executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.“He cloaked his bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt behind baseless, unfounded invocations of executive privilege and immunity that could not and would never apply to his situation,” prosecutors wrote of Navarro in their sentencing memorandum.Within hours after the judge handed down the sentence, Navarro’s lawyers John Rowley and Stanley Woodward filed a notice of appeal to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit. As with Bannon, Navarro is expected to have his punishment deferred pending appeal.Navarro’s lawyers had asked for probation, saying the judge himself seemed to acknowledge at one point that Navarro genuinely believed Trump had invoked executive privilege, a separation-of-powers protection aimed at ensuring White House deliberations can be shielded from Congress.The privilege, however, is not absolute or all-encompassing. The January 6 committee had sought both White House and non-White House material, the latter of which would not be included, and the judge concluded in any case at a hearing that Trump had never formally invoked the privilege.Regardless of what Navarro may have believed, the judge found, he failed to prove the existence of a conversation or communication from Trump that explicitly instructed Navarro not to cooperate with the January 6 committee’s subpoena specifically.That proved to be the central problem for Navarro.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore charging Navarro, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against two other Trump White House officials – Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff , and Dan Scavino, former deputy chief – even though they also did not cooperate with the January 6 committee and were referred for contempt.The difference with Meadows and Scavino, as the record later appeared to show, was that they had received letters from a Trump lawyer directing them not to respond to subpoena requests from the panel on executive privilege grounds.Navarro received a similar letter from Trump directing him not to comply with a subpoena from around the same time issued by the House committee that investigated the Covid pandemic. But he was unable to produce an invocation with respect to the later January 6 committee.“Had the president issued a similar letter to the defendant, the record here would look very different,” the judge said at a hearing last year.The January 6 committee completed its work last January, writing in its final report that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, conspiring to obstruct Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States.Last year, the US justice department charged Trump on four criminal counts related to his efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and impede the transfer of power. Trump was also charged in Georgia for violating the state’s racketeering statute for election interference efforts there. More

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    Michigan GOP chair Kristina Karamo rightly ousted, say RNC lawyers

    The Republican National Committee’s top attorneys have declared they believe the Michigan Republican chair, Kristina Karamo, was legitimately ousted from her position earlier this month, ending weeks of silence from the national party on a leadership crisis that has engulfed state Republicans.The factional split within the Michigan Republican party, over ideological differences as well as personal ones, has sown chaos with just months to go before the 2024 presidential election. In recent weeks, tensions escalated, with two feuding groups within the state party claiming to be its legitimate leaders.RNC general counsel Michael Whatley and chief counsel Matthew Raymer wrote in a letter obtained by the Guardian that they believed that an early January vote by state party officials to remove Karamo, who made her mark peddling election conspiracies after the 2020 election, as their chair was indeed legitimate – in spite of Karamo’s insistence that it was not.“Based upon its initial review, it appears to the counsel’s office that Ms Karamo was properly removed in accordance with the Michigan GOP bylaws on January 6,” they wrote in a letter to Karamo and Pete Hoekstra, who was elected to replace her by party members who engineered her ouster. They noted that the issue was not yet settled and that the RNC’s position was not final or binding.The RNC attorneys’ opinion offers Michigan and national Republicans guidance as they head to their winter meeting in Las Vegas at the end of the month. But it is not a definitive resolution in the factional dispute that has festered over the last year within their state party. The letter also declared that neither Karamo nor Hoekstra would be “credentialed as Michigan GOP chair” when those meetings convene.Until now the RNC had remained silent over the feud, especially since its current chair, Ronna McDaniel, is herself a former chair of the Michigan Republican party.But Karamo and her allies insist that even a ruling from the RNC won’t remove them from leadership. In a 25 January email to precinct delegates, the Michigan GOP general counsel – a Karamo ally who was also removed in the 6 January vote – wrote that he acknowledged the RNC letter was “authentic”, but added: “I do not care because their opinion is irrelevant to any resolution.”When Karamo took office nearly a year ago, she inherited an organization that was broke and divided – and in her year as chair, the party’s problems have worsened. Karamo, who embodies the GOP’s shift into stranger and more extreme political territory, made a name for herself as a vocal proponent of Trump’s false election claims, pushing election conspiracy theories as well as even wilder ideas (like claiming Jay-Z is a “satanist” and yoga is a “satanic ritual” ) during her 2022 run for secretary of state.She was defeated in the general election but refused to concede, then beat a Trump-backed nominee for state party chair who had voiced similar campaign conspiracy theories last February after she promised to revitalize the state party’s moribund fundraising operation.But the flow of grassroots cash Karamo promised never came. Divisions deepened in county chapters over the growth of extreme factions on the right, with physical altercations breaking out on multiple occasions. The party under her leadership got wrapped up in litigation. Even though the party was nearly broke, under Karamo’s leadership state GOP took out a loan to cover a more than $100,000 speaking fee to bring Jim Caviezel, a celebrity figure in the QAnon movement and the starring actor in The Passion of the Christ, to the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in September.By the time a group of Michigan GOP committee members moved to oust Karamo on 6 January, tensions had been brewing for months.As the RNC stayed silent, other powerful Michigan and national Republicans weighed in.The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the official party organization for Republican House candidates, expressed frustrations about the party’s spending last week in a letter to the Michigan GOP general counsel under Karamo, Daniel Hartman.“I will not deny that we are growing increasingly alarmed by reports that the Michigan GOP is in dire financial straits and grossly mismanaging their limited funds,” wrote NRCC general counsel Erin Clark, in a letter obtained by the Guardian. The Michigan GOP, Clark admonished, was not acting like a party that “adheres to conservative principles; or frankly, one that has the desire or ability to elect Republicans to office”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCongressman John James, a Michigan Republican up for re-election in a contested district in 2024, nodded to the leadership crisis on X on Saturday.“Congrats to Pete Hoekstra on being elected as the chair of MRP,” wrote James. “I look forward to working with you to put America First, hold our battleground #MI10 seat, and deliver victories for conservatives up and down the ballot this November.”Karamo’s opponents say they believe a new party chair will bring unity, and, most critically in an election year, the return of major donors such as the DeVoses, a Michigan family that lavishes donations upon conservative causes, into the party’s good graces. They are betting on Hoekstra, the former ambassador to the Netherlands under the Trump administration, to bridge the divide between the party’s activist base and its more traditional donor class.But if one goal of Karamo’s challengers is to reunify the party, they may have to assuage local dissent.“They should have come to us and asked for our opinion,” said Mary Harp, a precinct delegate in the Oakland county Republican party, the largest Republican party chapter in the state. Harp said she did not support Karamo in her run for GOP chair last year, but expressed frustration in the way Karamo was removed, saying it lacked the input of lower ranking members of the party.“A lot of us are going to have a hard time going forward supporting the state party,” she warned. More

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    We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency | Margaret Sullivan

    With Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, the battle lines are drawn for November. Unless something very weird happens, we’re looking at a Joe Biden and Donald Trump rematch.It’s time – past time, really – to sweep away any remaining delusions about the viability of a more moderate Republican challenger or what a second Trump term would bring.Now the question isn’t who’s running but whether American democracy will endure.To put it bluntly, not if Trump is elected.He’s already told us, many times over – and in abundantly clear terms – what he will do with a second term:He’ll prosecute his perceived enemies with the full power of the government. He’ll call out the military to put down citizen protest. He’ll never allow a fair election again.“Twelve more years” is no longer just a joke to pander to the raucous and red-capped faithful.“The serious scholars of fascism are now saying that the ‘F-word’ is merited,” Jeff Sharlet, a Dartmouth professor and author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, told me in an interview on Wednesday.Do Americans really want to live in a fascist or authoritarian nation? Some may believe it will work out just fine – that the loss of freedom may hurt others, but not them – but most of us don’t want that. Or we wouldn’t if we were fully aware of the consequences.I talked with Sharlet about the actions that the mainstream press and regular citizens can take now that we know what we know.Newsrooms big and small, he believes, need to educate their staffs about the dangers of fascism.“There needs to be a pause,” he said, in coverage as as usual, and an internal reckoning. Sharlet suggests that media leaders bring in scholars – for example, Yale’s Timothy Snyder, who wrote On Tyranny – to lead newsroom discussions, based on clear historical precedent. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, would be another excellent choice.After the New York Times wrote that Trump’s New Hampshire win “raises questions” about Nikki Haley’s path forward, Sharlet scoffed, noting that such questions have been settled for some time “but a press built for the horse race keeps touting a path that never existed when it should be retooling itself to cover a rapidly mutating fascism”.Is such a retooling really possible? Of course it is.The fact that many newsrooms now have democracy teams or democracy reporters suggests that they understand the problem to some extent. But they need to get much more urgent about it.That kind of change takes clear leadership from the top.The New York Times – now more influential than ever, as other news organizations shrink and fade by the day – should set an example. Its top editor, Joseph Kahn, with his background as a foreign correspondent in China, is extremely well positioned to take the lead.As NYU professor Jay Rosen so memorably put it, coverage must refocus: “Not the odds but the stakes.” We do see “stakes” stories, of course, including on the Times front page, but it’s inarguable that horserace coverage still dominates.What, exactly, we are racing toward is a question worth asking in every day’s politics coverage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat about regular citizens?Perhaps most importantly, they need to stop tuning out. They shouldn’t throw up their hands and decide not to care about politics or the future of the country.“People need to pay attention to the exhaustion they feel and know that it is a symptom of acquiescence and adaptation,” Sharlet told me.As Ben-Ghiat told me on my American Crisis podcast, that exhaustion is part of the strongman’s playbook.Trump creates chaos, and we grow tired of it. Weary of the relentless flow of bad news, the dire warnings, the anxiety, we retreat into our personal lives or our political bubbles.More advice from Sharlet for citizens: form a “boring book club” and read – for example – Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, the shocking (and nearly 1,000-page) rightwing plan to dismantle the federal government and install political allies after a Trump election.As the Associated Press wrote: “Trump-era conservatives want to gut the ‘administrative state’ from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.”Neither politics reporters nor regular citizens need to become full-blown scholars of authoritarianism over the next nine months.But failing to understand and act upon what’s at stake – either out of ennui or because “we’ve always done it that way” – is dangerous.Now, with the clarity of the New Hampshire primary behind us, it’s high time to take things seriously.
    Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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    How an alleged office romance could derail the Trump election interference case

    After spending nearly three years seeking to hold Donald Trump and his allies accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, faces a series of imminent, critical choices that could upend her consequential case against the former president and 14 remaining co-defendants.“The stakes could hardly be higher,” said Clark Cunningham, a law professor and ethics expert at Georgia State University.Michael Roman, a seasoned Republican operative and one of the defendants in the wide-ranging racketeering case, filed a motion earlier this month seeking the disqualification of Willis and Nathan Wade, an outside lawyer hired by Willis in 2021 to assist with the Trump case. In court filings, Roman alleged Willis and Wade were in a romantic relationship and Wade had used some of the more than $650,000 he earned from his work for her to pay for vacations for the two of them. Bank records made public last week showed Wade had paid for tickets for himself and Willis to California in 2023 and Miami in 2022.Neither Willis nor Wade has confirmed or denied a romantic relationship yet, and Willis has said she will respond in a court filing due on 2 February. A hearing on the request is set for 15 February. Willis has said all of the special prosecutors she hired were paid the same rate.While experts cautioned they were waiting for Willis and Wade to respond to Roman’s claims, it has already caused a headache for Willis, whose case has long been seen as one of the strongest efforts to hold Trump accountable for 2020. Because the case is in Georgia state court, it is also immune from Trump’s interference should he win the election.“As a legal matter, I don’t see much of anything as of yet that would make me think that a disqualification is likely,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has closely followed the case. “In terms of the political bucket, it is both an optics disaster, but it’s also been a lot of political malpractice from the office for not responding. So this drip, drip, drip is a problem.”A disqualification would upend the case against Trump and significantly delay it. If the judge Scott McAfee were to disqualify Willis’s office from handling the case, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia would appoint a replacement. There’s no time limit on how long that could take. “It could entirely derail the entire enterprise,” Kreis said.Wade was a municipal judge and well-known lawyer in the Atlanta suburbs with little prosecutorial experience before Willis hired him to work on the Trump case. The two met in 2019 during a legal education course for judges, and he became a confidante and mentor to Willis. Willis told the New York Times in 2022 that Wade was not a first choice to work on the prosecution team, but that she approached him after other more experienced lawyers turned her down. Wade was tepid, too, she told the Times, telling her he didn’t have much prosecutorial experience. She eventually convinced him to join the team. “I need someone I can trust,” she told the Times.View image in fullscreenRoman’s accusation has prompted national interest in Wade’s ongoing divorce. Willis was subpoenaed for a deposition as part of that case, but a judge this week put off requiring her to testify.Regardless of what happens legally, Trump is likely to use the salacious allegation to continue to try to undermine Willis’s credibility. While his lawyers did not join Roman’s motion, Trump has already weighed in.“When is the Great State of Georgia dropping the FAKE LITIGATION against me and the others? ELECTION INTERFERENCE! The case is a FRAUD, just like D.A. Fani Willis and her ‘LOVER’,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on 20 January.Norman Eisen, a former “ethics czar” under Barack Obama, has been supportive of Willis, and argued that disqualification isn’t merited under Georgia law. Still, he has called for Wade to step aside.“Questions about gifts and related matters go to Willis’s and Wade’s obligations to the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, and have no connection to assuring the defendants a fair trial,” he wrote in an essay in Just Security with the former US attorney Joyce White Vance and Richard Painter, a former ethics czar under George W Bush.“Although the Georgia law on disqualifying a prosecutor would permit Wade to remain on the case as well, in our view he should voluntarily step down. His continued presence will create a distraction, and his departure, in addition to an on-the-record hearing in court, is the best path to dispense with any lingering concerns,” they wrote.Willis has had a brush with disqualification already. In July of 2022, when a special purpose grand jury was still investigating the case, she held a political fundraiser for Charlie Bailey, the Democratic opponent of Burt Jones, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, who served as a fake elector for Trump in 2020. Jones was under investigation by the special purpose grand jury at the time. Judge Robert CI McBurney disqualified Willis’s office from handling any part of the case against Jones.“An investigation of this significance, garnering the public attention it necessarily does and touching so many political nerves in our society, cannot be burdened by legitimate doubts about the District Attorney’s motives,” McBurney wrote in his disqualification order. A replacement special prosecutor still has not been appointed.McBurney also admonished the DA’s office during a hearing, calling it “a ‘What are you thinking?’ moment”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, agreed that there was no conduct identified in Roman’s motion that would cause the indictment to be dismissed – an opinion shared by other experts.“Indictments do not get dismissed because of behavior like this. Nothing about the allegations suggests that the indictment is in any way tainted,” he said in an interview.He also agreed that Willis’s conduct likely would not result in disqualification. And the fact that Wade was paid a high hourly rate was not in itself grounds for him to be disqualified. “Every lawyer who bills by the hour has that interest. Hourly billing is quite common nationally. So of course the lawyer has an interest in a continuation of a case,” he said.Still, Gillers said he was concerned by the vagueness of the invoices Wade had submitted and that were approved by the Fulton county district attorney’s office. They would not pass muster at most government agencies or corporations, he said.“They’re generic, they are in whole numbers. Eight hours, six hours, seven hours. They don’t break down the particular tasks that were done. For someone like me, looking at that, that’s a red flag,” he said.“In my view, he has to step aside, unless the board of commissioners or other Fulton county official, knowing all the facts, approves of the arrangement, and designates someone other than Willis to review Wade’s bills,” he continued. “His position is tainted by the romantic relationship unless there is informed consent from the appropriate authority in Fulton county.”By filing the allegations as part of the court case, and not directly with a disciplinary body, Roman may have made a strategic decision to try and muddy the legal issues in the case, understanding the optics for Willis would look bad, he added.Cunningham said he was waiting for more information to evaluate the merits of Roman’s disqualification claim. But regardless of what McAfee rules, he said, there are likely to be efforts to appeal that could drag out the case. Willis, he said, should step aside from the case and let a chief deputy or someone else take over and decide whether Wade continues on the case.“The argument that the case as it moves forward is being motivated improperly goes away. That is absolutely the best way to make sure that the motion to disqualify isn’t granted,” he said.“It minimizes it just to say it’s a question of optics, though that’s certainly the case,” he said. “Right now, they’re the story. Every day. And that’s bad in every possible way. It’s not good for public confidence in this case, which is needed.” More

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    US elected officials avoiding topics of abortion and gun control over fear of threats

    Tens of thousands of state legislators and elected local officials are avoiding hot-button policy issues such as abortion and gun control because they are fearful of the backlash of intimidating abuse, a new report has found.A major survey by the Brennan Center for Justice released on Thursday warned that the spate of extremist intimidation that has been seen nationally in the US, epitomized by the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021, is also sweeping local and state politics. In the fallout, elected individuals are limiting their interactions with constituents and narrowing the contentious topics they are prepared to take on.Some are even contemplating quitting public life altogether. Such chilling of public discourse poses a threat to the functioning of representative democracy at every level of government, the Brennan Center, a non-partisan authority on law and policy, concludes.The center conducted a survey of 350 state legislators and more than 1,350 local officeholders working in towns, municipalities and county government. It found that more than 40% of state lawmakers had experienced threats or attacks in the past three years, while almost one in five local officials faced the same abuse over 18 months.View image in fullscreenAlmost one in 10 state legislators reported that they had been intimidated by a person wielding a weapon. Many others faced death threats, including one state lawmaker who said they had received a message that provided granular detail down to the date, time and precise location where an attack would take place.The abuse is often directly related to the policy positions that elected individuals have adopted over contentious issues such as gun control and abortion. That in turn is having a withering impact on the democratic process, the Brennan Center warns.Some 39% of locally elected officials and more than one in five state lawmakers said they were less willing to advocate for contentious policies for fear of abuse. When those figures are extrapolated for all public servants in state and local government, many tens of thousands of officials are affected.At a time when the US is experiencing record numbers of mass shootings, gun regulations were repeatedly mentioned as an area in which lawmakers were holding back for fear of attack. Kelly Cassidy, a Democratic representative in the Illinois legislature, told the researchers that she decided not to lead bills that would introduce safety controls on firearms because “my kids were too little, the threats were too common and too on point”.View image in fullscreenPublic service is being distorted in other ways. Many officials said they are now less likely to participate in public events, post on social media, visit public spaces when off-duty or bring their family members with them, or make media appearances.A similar pattern has been seen on the national stage, with politicians becoming increasingly wary of confronting controversial subjects. Liz Cheney, the former leading Republican in the US House of Representatives who was herself forced out of her Wyoming seat in retaliation for her criticisms of Donald Trump, has alleged that some of her party colleagues voted not to impeach Trump over his role in the Capital insurrection because they were afraid for their lives.Concern for the safety of elected individuals has become a top priority for the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, as the country enters the 2024 presidential election year. On 5 January he convened a meeting at the justice department to discuss increasing protection for all public servants, from law enforcement personnel, members of Congress and judges, to election workers.View image in fullscreenGarland said the country was seeing “a deeply disturbing spike in threats against those who serve the public”. The abuse threatened “the fabric of our democracy”.Kristine Reeves, a Democratic lawmaker from Washington state, told the Guardian that as the first Black woman elected to the state house in 2016 she now has to think carefully before addressing hard political topics. She recently introduced a bill that would disqualify anyone convicted of acts of insurrection from running for state office under the 14th amendment of the US constitution.The blowback has been extreme, she said. “White men have come online and told me that I need to be hanged. They have called my office and suggested that me and my family need to watch out because we’ve got what’s coming to us. It’s one thing to take those risks on for yourself; it’s completely another to do so knowing that you’re putting your family in harm’s way.”Reeves belongs to a demographic group that is bearing the brunt of the incipient political violence sweeping the US. The Brennan survey shows that women – and women of colour in particular – are disproportionately likely to endure severe abuse, often of a sexual nature and frequently with the threats extending to their families including children.Reeves and her election campaigns team have been forced to limit contact with the public. They have curtailed the canvassing of citizens during elections – a bedrock of US democracy – with door knocking increasingly replaced by phone banking, mail outs and virtual events.When canvassers do go out, Reeves encourages them to travel in pairs and to avoid knocking on doors alone. “It sounds crazy to say this out loud as a woman of colour, but if we have a Black man going out, we encourage him to go with a white counterpart, just to ensure that there’s a de-escalation opportunity.”Canvassers are also handed pepper spray in case of attacks. Reeves herself was abused on a doorstep recently when she was called the N-word.As the election year unfolds, the volatile language and imagery used by Trump at his rallies and in fundraising communications is raising concern about what might lie ahead. Trump has taken to calling convicted rioters from the January 6 insurrection “hostages”.In a recent fundraising email the Trump campaign offered supporters free “Make America great again” knives, with “razor-sharp, 3.5[in]” flick blades. The knives are recommended for “military personnel”, “tactical enthusiasts”, and “law enforcement” and are described as a “symbol of patriotic pride” that are perfect for “self-defense”. More

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    ‘We can lose more freedoms’: Florida braces for Ron DeSantis’s wrath after national rout

    Ron DeSantis has fallen off the national stage and the US will not, after all, become Florida like he once envisaged. But back in his home state, opponents are bracing for the return of the Republican to serve the remainder of his final term as governor following the implosion of his presidential campaign.Florida is where DeSantis honed his extremist attacks on a wide range of targets from the transgender community to immigrants and Black voters. Although he will no longer be carrying them to the White House, critics here say there’s probably plenty more to come.“He’s gonna come home with a vengeance. He’s going to try to regain the mantle that he had after [his re-election in] November 2022. And he’s going to try to bring everybody back together and continue on this anti-woke, anti-democratic, anti-freedom platform,” Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic party, said.“The question will be: ‘What do the Republicans do?’ Rank-and-file Republicans in Florida, elected as well as grassroots, are not having any of it. But there are those in higher-up elected positions that still have to reckon with the fact that he’s going to be governor for the next few years and are going to have to play ball in order to get their priorities accomplished.”Fried was referencing the Republican supermajority in both houses of the Florida legislature, which acted as little more than a rubber stamp for DeSantis’s culture war policies that also included the near dismantling of the state’s higher education system and banning face mask and vaccine mandates as the Covid-19 pandemic still raged.Some analysts questioned if DeSantis would return to Tallahassee chastened by his national humiliation, weaker in the eyes of legislators and unable to replicate the swagger or command the same authority as he did following his 19-point re-election.Fried, who saw DeSantis in action first-hand when she served in his cabinet as agriculture commissioner, and the only statewide elected Democrat, from 2019 to 2023, has no such doubt.“We can lose more freedoms,” she said, noting that DeSantis will likely remain in office until he is termed out in January 2027.“I don’t know what his agenda is for this session, he didn’t lay that out in his state of the state address, which was entirely for Iowa, so we don’t have his legislative priorities. But if he continues to try to rule with an iron fist here in Florida, we’re going to have a lot more of these misogynistic, homophobic policies that are going to come out of this administration.“And unfortunately, Floridians are going to continue to feel the impact of his wrath and his extreme agenda. That doesn’t work across the country [but] he’s going to take no learning lessons from what he just experienced, that his agenda and his policies don’t work. But he’s going to try to prove otherwise.”Other senior Democrats share her concern.Val Demings, the former US congresswoman who lost to Republican incumbent Marco Rubio in the 2022 Senate election, warns the governor will remain “dangerous” with a free rein at home.“Ron DeSantis is out. All that damage to Florida through bizarre policies, for nothing. Ambition at any costs, with no guardrails, is dangerous,” she said in a tweet.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSo it falls to Florida’s Democratic party, written off by DeSantis a year ago as “a dead, rotten carcass”, to form the resistance, Fried says. Buoyed by a string of successes at the ballot box, including Donna Deegan’s victory in Jacksonville’s mayoral race last May, and new state congressman Tom Keen’s ousting of a Republican incumbent earlier this month, Democrats see a momentum shift fueled by anger at DeSantis they hope will carry through to November.“The balance is making sure we’re holding Republicans accountable for their votes for the policies that were, and are, rejected by Floridians, and by the same respect talking about what we are going to do when we get out of the super-minority and start picking up seats,” Fried said.“I mean not just in the legislature, but good Democrats elected all the way down to school boards, and city and county commission seats.“What policies are we looking to reverse or to move forward on? People are tired of the divisiveness. People are tired of the anger and they just want their government to get back to work.”Ultimately, Fried believes, Republican voters nationwide rejected DeSantis because they saw the same traits, she says, that have become familiar to Floridians.“There’s nothing there. There’s no soul. There’s no charisma. There’s no ability to connect to a voter or to show true empathy,” she said.“It turned voters off. They didn’t like his personality and then they didn’t like his policies, so combine the two of them and this is the result, a disaster of a presidential campaign and from all calculations, the most expensive presidential primary bid in American history.“Americans don’t want to be Florida. They see what’s happened here in our state. And so voters now are going to be walking away, especially independent voters, from a very authoritarian overreaching of Ron DeSantis and this Florida Republican party.” More

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    Tim Scott’s behaviour around Trump is ‘humiliating’, says the Rev Al Sharpton

    The South Carolina Republican senator Tim Scott’s behaviour around Donald Trump is “humiliating”, the civil rights leader Rev Al Sharpton said.“It was humiliating to watch what Tim Scott did as a sitting senator,” Sharpton told MSNBC, for which he hosts a show, after Scott appeared with the former president in New Hampshire, where Trump won the Republican presidential primary on Tuesday.Trump faces 91 criminal charges (including 17 for election subversion), civil lawsuits (one arising from a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”) and attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection.Regardless, his only remaining rival for the Republican nomination is Nikki Haley, who in 2012, as governor of South Carolina, appointed Scott to the US Senate.The only Black Republican in that chamber, Scott ran for president himself but dropped out early, endorsing Trump before New Hampshire.Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, said: “I think [Trump] will be the nominee. And I think he’s demanding people bow to him.“There are few moments in my life [when] I’ve been more embarrassed than to watch Tim Scott. You know, I know Tim and I are both practicing Christians, but I don’t know if he could pray like that to the other side. It was humiliating to watch what Tim Scott did as a sitting senator. And at one time … he wasn’t even on the script, he interrupted Trump to pay homage.”In Nashua, Trump said: “Did you ever think [Haley] actually supported you, Tim? And you’re the senator of her state. And [you] endorsed me. You must really hate her.”Interrupting, Scott said: “I just love you.”“That’s why he’s a great politician,” Trump said.Sharpton said: “It’s not a fine day in my life to watch [Scott] do that. To think that we fought to see people like him, Black, become high-elected in the south … he has a right to be Republican, he has a right to [endorse] Donald Trump, but to do it in such a way that is so humiliating was troubling. Let’s put it that way. I’m going to try to be as nice as I can.”Other critics were less nice.Etan Thomas, an NBA player turned writer, said: “Good Lord, Tim Scott. Shaking my head.”Tara Setmayer, a Republican operative turned Trump opponent, asked: “Who’s worse? Trump or his court jester enablers?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe author Jeff Sharlet said: “I hold Tim Scott in contempt, but the depth of self-abasement here is hard to look at. All the more so for understanding how Trump’s supporters see it, a racist inoculation against charges of racism that in turn ‘permits’ more racism.”On CBS, Scott was asked about his decision to oppose Haley.“Let’s not forget that President Trump appointed Nikki Haley to be an ambassador [to the United Nations],” Scott said. “So she’s certainly campaigning against him.”He claimed he had not heard Trump suggest that as president he would investigate Haley if she did not drop out. His host pointed out that Trump said Haley had “a very bad night” and added: “I don’t get angry, I get even” as cameras caught Scott laughing.“I did,” Scott conceded. “I did.”Asked about speculation he could be Trump’s running mate, Scott said: “The only conversation I had with [Trump] about being vice-president was, ‘I’ll never ask you to be vice-president, I’ll never ask to be part of your cabinet.’”Pressed on whether he would like to be vice-president, Scott declined to answer. More

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    Chair of Arizona Republican party resigns after leak reveals alleged bribe

    The leader of Arizona’s Republican party resigned on Wednesday after leaked audio of him surfaced, appearing to show him offering a bribe to the Republican candidate Kari Lake by asking if there were a dollar amount she would take to stay out of the US Senate race there.Jeff DeWit, the chair of the state party, was captured in audio secretly recorded by Lake telling her “there are very powerful people who want to keep you out” of the Senate race and that “they’re willing to put their money where their mouth is, in a big way”.DeWit said that rather than fight to keep his job, he was stepping down because Lake’s team threatened to release more secret recordings unless he resigned: “I am resigning as Lake requested, in the hope that she will honor her commitment to cease her attacks.” (Lake’s team has denied this, saying no one on her campaign threatened or blackmailed DeWit.)Lake, a Trump ally who has been campaigning for the former president, previously lost the race for governor to the Democratic candidate, Katie Hobbs, and is now running for the Senate against the Democrat Ruben Gallego and, possibly, the incumbent independent, Kyrsten Sinema.In the audio, obtained by the Daily Mail, Lake objects to the idea that she can be “bought” and rejects any attempt at a bribe. DeWit repeatedly asks Lake not to tell anyone about the conversation.“They should want me. I’m a great candidate, people love me. These people are corrupt,” Lake said in the leaked audio.The secret recording fiasco highlights the schism among Arizona Republicans over the party’s direction during an election year in which Arizona will again be a close swing state. In recent years, the state party moved further to the right and embraced Trumpism at a time when the state itself moved more toward the center. Many Republicans there have continued to insist the 2020 election was stolen, a frequent refrain Lake has made on the campaign trail.In a statement on Wednesday, DeWit called the audio “selectively edited” and a “deceptive tactic” and said that Lake was actually employed by his private company at the time the conversation took place 10 months ago, raising legal questions. Lake, a former television anchor, often wears a microphone to record footage that gets used to boost her brand online.While Lake and her allies have cast DeWit’s comments as an attempt to bribe her, DeWit characterized the conversation as “offering a helpful perspective to someone I considered a friend”.The party’s far right wanted DeWit out of his role before the audio was leaked, though the leak came out just before Trump was scheduled to return to Arizona for a visit later this week, followed by the state party’s annual meeting. More