Evelyn Reynolds

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    Major poll gives Trump 16-point lead in New Hampshire days before primary

    Donald Trump continues to dominate the race for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying a 16-point lead in New Hampshire days before it becomes the second state to vote, according to a major new poll.Suffolk University, the Boston Globe and NBC found the former president at 50% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, who edged out Haley for second in Iowa this week, was a distant third at 5%.In New Hampshire, undeclared voters can take part in state or presidential primaries. Many observers think such voters will have an outsized effect on the Republican primary this year, given the lack of real Democratic contest because Joe Biden is president.In the new poll, Trump dominated among registered Republicans and voters who called themselves conservatives. Haley led among moderates and independents.David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, told the Globe: “Haley’s had a tough week: underperforming in Iowa, trying to answer Trump’s attacks on her positions on social security and immigration, and the recent [Vivek] Ramaswamy endorsement of Trump helping him with younger GOP voters.”Ramaswamy, a brash biotech entrepreneur with whom Haley frequently clashed in debates, dropped out after finishing fourth in Iowa.For Haley, Paleologos said, there was still time “to at least close the gap with undecided voters or even with some Trump voters, and pull Trump below 50”.Other recent polls have shown Haley closing the gap in New Hampshire. On Wednesday, the American Research Group had Haley and Trump tied at 40% each.Not all polls are created equal. The polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com gives the American Research Group a C+ rating. Suffolk University gets an A-.After New Hampshire, the next state to vote will be Haley’s own. The FiveThirtyEight average for South Carolina puts Trump at 55%, Haley at 25% and DeSantis at 12%. Nationally, the site puts Trump at 63%, and Haley and DeSantis both 41 points behind.With Trump displaying such dominance despite facing unprecedented legal jeopardy – 91 criminal charges, various civil suits and attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection – most observers think Haley must win in New Hampshire if the primary is to present anything like a meaningful contest.Seeking to present a straight choice between her and Trump, Haley said she would not take part in New Hampshire debates planned for Thursday (to be hosted by ABC) and Sunday (CNN). As Trump has skipped all debates so far, that left DeSantis the only contender willing to appear.Both debates were scrapped. CNN said: “We will continue to pursue other opportunities as the campaign season progresses through 2024, including candidate town halls this week with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.”Haley told CNN that Trump was “who I’m running against, that’s who I want. At the end of the day, he’s the frontrunner … There is nobody else I need to debate.”But on Wednesday Trump was more than 250 miles south of New Hampshire, in court in New York City in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, whose claim that Trump raped her has already been deemed “substantially true” by the judge.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClaiming Haley was “terrified of getting smoked” on the debate stage, the DeSantis campaign posted Iowa remarks in which Haley said of Trump: “You can’t have an election and not appear on a debate stage in front of the people who are gonna be voting for you. That’s an arrogant approach to think you don’t have to do that.”Haley and DeSantis were campaigning in New Hampshire on Tuesday but DeSantis was reportedly preparing to switch focus to South Carolina. Once a fundraising juggernaut, the DeSantis campaign has seen donations fall in line with polling results.“It’s a pretty sober conversation in terms of how much more the campaign can raise in this environment,” an unnamed source told the Washington Post. Elsewhere, the DeSantis-supporting Super Pac Never Back Down began laying off staff.DeSantis sought to sound a warning to voters, telling CNN that should Trump be the Republican nominee, the presidential election “will revolve around all these legal issues, his trials, perhaps convictions … and about things like January 6” – the deadly attack on Congress Trump incited as he attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat.Republicans, DeSantis said, would “lose if voters are making a decision based on that. We don’t want it to be a referendum on those issues.”Many agree. Digesting the result in Iowa, JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois and a Biden surrogate, told MSNBC: “Almost half of the base of the Republican party showing up for this caucus voted against Donald Trump.“Think about that. I think that is telling. It tells you the weakness of Donald Trump and also the opportunity for Democrats because in the end … if the base doesn’t turn out for Donald Trump in the general election enthusiastically and Democrats turn out [their] base, this is all about independents – and independents don’t like Donald Trump.” More

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    Democrats condemn ‘cruel’ abortion bans ahead of 51st anniversary of Roe

    Senate Democrats underscored their commitment to abortion rights in a press conference on Wednesday, ahead of the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade. The now-overturned supreme court case provided American women with a constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years.Experts at the briefing described Republican-backed abortion bans across the country as “cruel”, “extreme” and causing untold “suffering” for American women, thousands of whom are forced to travel across state lines for abortions or be forced to remain pregnant.“Senate Democrats will not let anyone turn away from the devastation Republicans have caused,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat. “And we will not stop pushing to restore the federal right to abortion.”The briefing comes at the start of the 2024 presidential election cycle, in which abortion rights are expected to be a defining issue. Former president Donald Trump, called the “most pro-life president” by anti-abortion activists and national organizations alike, has already won the Iowa Republican caucuses handily, and is widely expected to become the Republican party’s nominee.Trump nominated and the Senate confirmed three right-leaning supreme court justices, all of whom voted to overturn Roe v Wade in the case that now governs federal abortion rights – Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization.Even so, anti-abortion laws have become a politically poisonous issue for Republicans. Abortion rights have won at the ballot box again and again, as in Michigan and Kansas. Polls show more Americans than ever support abortion rights. Even Republicans in the House, where caucus members have repeatedly signed on to federal legislation that would amount to a total abortion ban, are now backing away from anti-abortion messaging bills.“The anniversary of Roe v Wade should be a joyous day for our country, a day when the supreme court decided to value a woman’s right to privacy and autonomy,” said the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer. “In 2022, tragically, alarmingly and outrageously they succeeded when a hard-right majority voted to overturn Roe v Wade,” he said.In addition to the anniversary of Roe, the briefing also comes ahead of the March for Life, the largest gathering of anti-abortion activists of the year. Before the Dobbs decision, anti-abortion activists marched in protest of Roe v Wade. Today, activists strategize about further abortion bans – including a federal 15-week ban on abortion.Dr Austin Dennard is an obstetrician and gynecologist who said she was forced to “flee” her state for an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with anencephaly, a severe and fatal condition where a fetus develops without parts of the brain or skull.“We have to flee the state,” she said. “My state” – she is a sixth-generation Texan – “where I practice medicine, where I’m raising my family,” said Dennard. “Then my doctor gave me a hug. ‘I’m so sorry,’ was all she was able to say.”Dennard was forced to travel east, but said she was afraid to use credit cards or tell people where she was going for fear she would be criminally prosecuted under Texas’s anti-abortion laws.“It was absolutely humiliating and I felt physically and emotionally broken,” said Dennard.Dr Serina Floyd, an OB-GYN in Washington DC and the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood, said only last week she provided an abortion for a woman, who she referred to under the pseudonym “Nina”.Nina traveled by bus from North Carolina, where a 12-week abortion ban recently went into effect. She missed her first bus, was able to board a second but arrived too late for her scheduled appointment. Nina was rescheduled for the next day. When Floyd asked Nina where she would stay the night, Nina said she had found a homeless shelter 15 minutes from the clinic.“Nina had no money – not for a hotel, not for food, not for nothing. All she had was a bus ticket home,” said Floyd.Another expert, feminist and columnist Jessica Valenti, said she regularly documented “suffering”, and received more messages from women than she could ever respond to.“When Republicans feign surprise or compassion over post-Roe horror stories – they are lying,” said Valenti. She said she has documented a “quiet campaign” by national abortion groups to undermine prenatal testing that reveals fetal abnormalities and to sow doubt about the accuracy of maternal mortality numbers (the US has among the worst in the developed world).“The question I get asked most often is, ‘Why?’” said Valenti. Republicans, she said, are trying to enforce, “a world view that it is women’s job to be pregnant and stay pregnant – no matter the cost or consequence”. More

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    Ron DeSantis insists US is ‘not a racist country’, echoing claim by Nikki Haley

    The hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said the US was “not a racist country”, echoing a controversial claim by Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is also trying to deny Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination.“Well, the US is not a racist country,” DeSantis told a CNN town hall in New Hampshire. “And we’ve overcome things in our history. You know, I think the founding fathers – they established a set of principles that are universal.”More than 250 years before independence from Britain, enslaved African people were brought to American soil by Spanish ships in the 1500s. Native Americans were displaced and enslaved.The first ship of enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil in 1619. Slavery in southern states caused the civil war (a fact Haley failed to mention when quizzed on the subject last month), a conflict fought between 1861 and 1865 and ending with slavery abolished. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and unequal treatment in southern states until the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.Entrenched social and economic inequalities persist, affecting all racial minorities. The last presidential election, in 2020, took place after a summer of protests for racial justice inspired by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.Going into the New Hampshire primary next week, DeSantis and Haley trail Trump by wide margins. This week, DeSantis edged out Haley for a distant second in Iowa.On Tuesday, Haley, whose parents came to the US from India, told Fox News: “I’m a brown girl … who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a UN ambassador and who is now running for president.“If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is. You can sit there and give me all the reasons why you think I can’t do this. I will continue to defy everybody on why we can do this. And we will get it done.“We’re not a racist country … we’ve never been a racist country. Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can.”Amid criticism, a Haley spokesperson said: “America has always had racism, but America has never been a racist country.”Race and racism are polarising issues across US society. Republicans have recently pursued attacks on teaching about race and racism in US history as a way of attracting support. DeSantis has faced his own controversies, including over a Florida attempt to change how the history of slavery is taught.In New Hampshire, asked about Haley’s remarks, DeSantis said the principles of the Declaration of Independence – signed in 1776, saying “all men are created equal” – “may not have been universally applied at the time. But I think they understood what they were doing. They understood that those principles would be the engine for progress for generations to come.”Pressed on Haley’s contention that the US is not a racist country, DeSantis said: “Well, what I said was we’ve had challenges with how race was viewed.“And so, for example, those were universal principles in the Declaration of Independence. And you had a [supreme court] decision in the 1850s [that] said Dred Scott [an enslaved man who sued for his freedom], because he was Black, wasn’t an American citizen. That was wrong. That was discriminating on the basis of race. That’s why you ended up having the 14th amendment ratified to overturn Dred Scott.”Approved after the civil war, the 14th amendment gave citizenship to formerly enslaved people. It also barred former Confederates running for office – a provision Colorado and Maine are now seeking to apply to Trump, for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress.According to the Pew Research Center, Republican voters are overwhelmingly white.“Yes,” DeSantis continued. “We’ve had challenges with how we’ve dealt with race as a society.”On Wednesday, Kamala Harris, the first woman and first woman of colour to be vice-president, discussed Haley and DeSantis’s remarks with ABC.“The issue of race in America is not something that should be the subject of a soundbite,” Harris said. “The history of racism in America should never be the subject of … a question that is meant to elicit a one-sentence answer.“But there is no denying that we have, in our history as a nation, racism, and that racism has played a role in the history of our nation.” More

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    Crime in the US is once again falling. Can we rethink policing? | Simon Balto

    Reports on 2023 in the United States are in, and a banner one is this: crime plummeted last year.According to the New York Times, citing FBI data, Detroit recorded its lowest murder figures in roughly half a century; homicides and shootings in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and most other major cities dropped precipitously; and car thefts were the only “serious” criminal category that didn’t see notable drop-offs over the course of the calendar year. In Minneapolis – which, after the police murder of George Floyd, became the epicenter in 2020 of the largest wave against racial injustice since the civil rights movement – homicides reportedly fell by 9% last year, gun violence by roughly a quarter, and carjackings by half.This is, of course, good news.To be frank, I’m skeptical (all of us should be) about the utility of crime statistics. They over-rely on police activity (what police reacted to) rather than victimization (what actually happened to people), meaning that those statistics often don’t reflect harms people experienced that they didn’t report to police (which is the majority of harms).And, for decades, scholars have convincingly questioned the legitimacy of police-reported crime statistics, for many reasons. I’ve seen this in my own research: as I wrote about in my first book, changes to how police in Chicago catalogued crime in the early 1960s provoked an illusory but powerful panic about supposedly spiking crime.Nevertheless, while crime statistics often lie, body counts usually do not, and at the minimum it’s pretty clear that fewer people were murdered in 2023 than in preceding years. Again, that’s a good thing.The question is: why? In a nation overrun with weapons that for years has been lurching evermore toward violence, why did violence decline in 2023?If you were to believe the Minneapolis police chief, Brian O’Hara, the drop in crime in that city was singularly a product of the police force he commands. The same of the New York City mayor and former NYPD officer, Eric Adams, who at a press conference last week touted the NYPD as the “finest police department on the globe” in announcing that crime in New York was down year-over-year.Similarly, a press release from the Chicago police department gave some credit for that city’s declining crime to community partnerships, but the majority of its praise on the subject went to, well, itself.Such claims are interesting. Were police just magically better at their job in 2023 than they were in other years? If police do a “good job” and are the sole reason why crime goes down in the years that it goes down, are they doing a “bad job” and are the reason why crime goes up in the years that it goes up?The insanity of trying to discuss policing in this country is that most policymakers, and many citizens, refuse to accept that those two questions are intractably related. It is intellectually incongruent to answer the first in the affirmative and the second in the negative. Year after year, for more than half a century, the United States has poured more and more money into policing and argued that it does so to keep people safe.Even in times of austerity, when funding for pretty much everything else gets slashed, funding for police generally rises. In times of plenty, funding for police rises. It rises when crime is high, and it rises when crime is low. When cities find that they need to trim budgets, the one thing that they almost always won’t meaningfully touch is their police department.While as part of his austerity measures last year, Adams did threaten to delay the induction of new NYPD officers, he also authorized $150m (yes, million) more on overtime in 2023 for police to patrol New York’s subway system than in 2022. That investment paid off with an almost non-noticeable increase in arrests for serious crimes and about $100,000 in fines for fare evasion, largely grifted from poor people, at the same time that Adams divested from other city services while blaming it all on the costs of housing incoming migrants to the city.No one can provide compelling evidence that this makes any sense. For decades, year-over-year crime rates have experienced peaks and valleys. The same is not true for spending on police, which moves ever-upward. Expressed visually, the two lines would look like a series of waves on the one hand (crime), and a straight line upward on the other (police spending).I’m not sure what conclusion people could muster from that besides to say that how much we spend on policing doesn’t actually matter, at least in the socially positive sense. If we spend X billion of dollars on policing when crime is high (or perceived to be high), and if crime rates don’t decline as a result of said investment, then why do we consider that to have been a good investment?And, in the opposite direction, why do we not question our investments when funding for police is at all-time highs and at the same time, said investments don’t precipitate a drop in crime statistics? Even the most ill-informed financial planner would advise against this based on the evidence.Maybe it’s not entirely our fault. On this matter, and as Americans, we are conditioned by blinkered political visions and blinded understandings of history to accept that the way things are are the way that they must be. And perhaps that’s a universal human condition; grasping for what we don’t know (what could be) is much harder than holding on to what we do (what is). But there is a uniqueness, I think, to the political wizardry of US-style policing: it has instantiated itself so firmly as the answer to societal issues that we are left with few obvious off-ramps from it when we witness or experience such societal problems.“Call the police” is what we are taught to do when we sense that we’re in danger, across all the enormous spectrum that “being in danger” entails, from the very real to the very racist. “Call the police” is what we are told to do if we get in a fender-bender because insurance won’t take your call without a police report. “The police” have become the social default if someone has a mental health episode or doesn’t use a turn signal or uses the wrong kind of drug in public or panhandles for loose change in the wrong location or sleeps on the wrong bench when they have nowhere else to go. Ad infinitum.In contrast, the key lesson of recent decades is that how we approach public safety is utterly nonsensical. If investing billions into police every year doesn’t meaningfully influence whether or not people are safer as they go about their lives, would not our investments be better made elsewhere?Chicago, for instance, recently began a guaranteed income pilot program, allotting an unconditional $500 per month to people living in economic precarity, versions of which have been adopted in other cities, too. Why do we not at least try new modes of operating to give people the things they need and that will better ensure they’re shielded from harm: access to both mental and physical health resources, to housing, to domestic abuse protection, and so on?My hope for 2024 is that we start asking better questions about these systems, so that we can find better answers.
    Simon Balto is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power More

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    Republicans’ bid to hold Hunter Biden in contempt appears to be suspended

    Efforts by House Republicans to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress appear to be in suspension following new discussions with his attorneys that could lead to the president’s son testifying in the near future.The development follows Biden’s surprise appearance at a congressional oversight committee meeting last week during which the Republicans complained he was refusing to make himself available in defiance of their subpoena for closed-door testimony.The panel, in parallel with the judiciary committee, voted to progress contempt resolutions to the full House anyway.Now both resolutions are on hold as both sides seek cooperation over a new date for him to testify in the Republican-led impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. It follows lawyers for Biden writing to the chairs of both committees, Republicans James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio, stating their subpoenas were “legally invalid” because they predated December’s House vote authorizing the impeachment push, NBC News reported.Both chairs said they would issue new subpoenas, the network said, and were willing to recommend delaying the contempt vote if Biden “genuinely cooperated … and worked to set a date for a closed-door deposition”.Biden had previously insisted he would be willing to testify to the committees only in open session, but his attorneys have since said they would accept new subpoenas to give evidence in private.“If you issue a new proper subpoena, now that there is a duly authorized impeachment inquiry, Mr Biden will comply for a hearing or deposition,” his lead lawyer, Abbe Lowell, wrote to Comer and Jordan.“We will accept such a subpoena on Mr Biden’s behalf.”Lowell did not immediately respond to a request for further comment, NBC said, but an oversight committee spokesperson’s comments to the network on Tuesday suggest negotiations have advanced.“Following an exchange of letters between the parties on January 12 and January 14, staff for the committees and lawyers for Hunter Biden are working to schedule Hunter Biden’s appearance,” the spokesperson said.“Negotiations are ongoing this afternoon, and in conjunction with the disruption to member travel and canceling votes, the House rules committee isn’t considering the contempt resolution today to give the attorneys additional time to reach an agreement.”Republicans want Biden’s testimony as they look into unproven allegations of corruption involving his father, with Democrats accusing them of seeking it in private because they know there is no evidence that would implicate the president.“We are here today because the chairman has bizarrely decided to obstruct his own investigation and is now seeking to hold Hunter Biden in contempt after he accepted the chairman’s multiple public offers to come answer the committee’s questions under oath before the American people,” the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin told last week’s oversight hearing.The meeting quickly descended into farce when Biden appeared in the company of his lawyers, and Democratic members pleaded with Comer to let him testify, to no avail.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLowell held a gaggle with reporters outside the committee room after Biden walked out just as the firebrand Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene was rising to speak.“Republican chairs … are commandeering an unprecedented resolution to hold somebody in contempt who has offered to publicly answer all their proper questions. The question there is, what are they afraid of?” he said.Democrats see the contempt moves against Biden, and the “baseless” impeachment inquiry against his father, as part of a wider effort to smear the president as he seeks re-election later this year.In a separate development reported by NBC, Hunter Biden’s Hollywood attorney, Kevin Morris, is scheduled to speak with members of the House oversight, judiciary and ways and means committees for “transcribed interviews” on Thursday.Biden pleaded not guilty to federal tax charges in Los Angeles last week, prosecutors alleging he engaged “in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4m in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019”.Morris has emerged as a key figure and “fixer” in Biden’s California troubles and appeared at his side in Congress last week.According to NBC, Morris began advising Biden in 2020 and arranged to pay about $2m outstanding tax obligations to the IRS during the following two years. More

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    Donald Trump beat his opponents. But can he beat the courts? | Sidney Blumenthal

    Donald Trump’s most dangerous race is not with other Republican candidates, but against the law. In his political match, he faces no serious contest. His victory in the Iowa caucuses results was crushing. But in his legal trials, he is on the run. For Trump, the legal is the political.The calendars overlap. His overarching strategy is not so much calculated to defeat his feeble Republican opponents but to delay his trials by any gambit necessary. The delays give him space to depict himself as a martyr, taking the slings and arrows for his believers, who are his hope to rescue him.So long as the band plays, he doesn’t have to face the music. Once it stops, his primary voters are replaced by a jury. He can rant all he likes on his Truth Social account, but the evidence will finally speak for itself. Trump strains to exploit the political campaign as his shield to avoid the day of judgment. Plus, it’s a cash cow.January 6 is more than the most important issue in the election for Trump and his followers. It is his passion play. His rivals have helpfully acted as his Greek chorus. Rather than develop an alternative strategy, say, to lever college-educated Republicans away from Trump, they have shouted from the wings to amplify his conspiracy theories. “Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?” Ron DeSantis tweeted last June. Nikki Haley, for her part, chimed in to denounce the justice system as “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics”. Trump could not have paid for better ringers.Only Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, erstwhile but remorseful booster, was willing to utter the forbidden, “Too bad, go to jail.” The rest waved their hands at an August debate like eager pupils seeking teacher’s attention that they would pardon Trump. Five days before the Iowa caucuses, polling poorly, Christie dropped out, declaring: “I’m going to make sure that in no way do I enable Donald Trump to ever be president of the United States again.” He refused to endorse anyone. “No one’s going to tell the truth about him.” On a hot mic, he was caught saying about Haley: “She’s going to get smoked,” and “She’s not up to this.” Stating the obvious was more a shrug than a prophesy. Yet she could not even scratch into second place.The result of the Iowa caucuses was an easy tale foretold. But it has been significant in revealing the degree to which Trump has consolidated his domination over the shell of the Republican party. At the end of the process that will inexorably nominate him the remnant of the GOP will be subsumed into his cult.His success in debauching opinion among Republicans is clear in the answer of Iowa Republicans to an exit poll question: “Do you think that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency in 2020?” Of the respondents, 65% answered negatively, and of them 69% voted for Trump. For them, the January 6 insurrection is the centerpiece of this election. With Trump, they believe that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers imprisoned for their violent assault on the Capitol are “hostages” who deserve pardons, and that Trump must be vindicated. In their eyes, he is not being prosecuted, but persecuted, just as Trump’s primary opponents have echoed.Iowa was more than a political event. It was a religious experience for most of the caucus goers, slightly more than half of them evangelical Christian nationalists. Voting for Trump was not a civic exercise but a spiritual crusade to make America into a Christian nation on a divine mission as the founding fathers supposedly intended according to their crackpot history. The first Trump term was just the beginning; the next will be like a second coming. Iowa is the first step towards Trump’s anointment, his deification for a holy war.In Trump’s first campaign in 2016, he was an outlander, a brash New Yorker from the church of the art of the deal. Iowa Republicans have consistently given their votes to the candidate who was the most fervent evangelical Christian linked to the religious right. In 2000, born-again George W Bush won in a walk; in 2008, it was preacher and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who defeated John McCain; in 2012, rightwing Catholic Rick Santorum trounced Mitt Romney; and in 2016 Ted Cruz of Texas clobbered Trump, who then only won only 21% of the evangelical support.Within the new dispensation, Trump has been elevated into a double existence. He is both an American incarnation of King Cyrus of ancient Persia, who conquered Babylon, and the godhead himself. Before January 6, Christian nationalists saw him as a flawed vessel sent by God to restore the old kingdom. Many of the January 6 insurrectionists flaunted Christian nationalist signs, flags and slogans. Now, they view Trump as Christ-like, being crucified on their behalf. As Cyrus, Trump is forgiven his sins. As Christ, his crimes are signs of his divinity.During the 2016 Iowa caucuses, the most prominent evangelical leader of the Christian right in the state, Bob Vander Plaats, endorsed Ted Cruz. This time he backed DeSantis. Trump was so confident of evangelical backing that two days before the caucuses, he laid into him, tweeting: “Bob Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years. He’s more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory, but now he’s going around using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats.”Trump in Iowa conflated his pressing legal troubles with the imaginary oppression of Christians. “Under crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted and government has been weaponized against religion like never before. And also presidents like never before,” Trump said on 19 December. Referring to the mafia kingpin who was finally nailed on income tax evasion, he added: “I always say Al Capone was treated better than I was treated.” Vander Plaats’ grip was broken.Of all the odd occurrences in the campaign so far, one of the strangest was a stray cogent remark from Ron DeSantis, who has been relentlessly clueless to the point that after his last debate with Nikki Haley he approached the audience from the stage to shake his wife’s hand. In trying to explain why he was failing, without mentioning that he spent more on private jets than on advertising, he blathered into coherence. “It’s all a racket – they’re trying to get clicks, they’re trying to do all this stuff,” he said. “Big causes start out as a movement, end up a business and degenerate into a racket. That’s just human nature.”Not exactly. DeSantis was paraphrasing a social philosopher on the psychological basis of authoritarian movements. Eric Hoffer was an itinerant longshoreman whose book The True Believer, on the mentality of Naziism and Communism, published in 1951, drew praise from President Dwight Eisenhower in one of his first press conferences. Hoffer described how individuals erased their volition and critical thinking by submerging themselves into movements led by demagogues.“The fanatic,” Hoffer wrote, “is perpetually incomplete and insecure. He cannot generate self-assurance out of his individual resources – out of his rejected self – but finds it only by clinging passionately to whatever support he happens to embrace.” The demagogue appeals to restoring the good old days. “A glorification of the past can serve as a means to belittle the present.” Through propaganda, “people can be made to believe only in what they already ‘know’”. Enemies must be identified as the source of decay. “Finally, it seems, the ideal devil is a foreigner. To qualify as a devil, a domestic enemy must be given a foreign ancestry.” But, Hoffer wrote, it would be a mistake to give too much credence to the ideas of demagogues. “The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”Eisenhower, who had led the armies that defeated Hitler, wrote a letter in 1958 warning against authoritarianism. Citing Hoffer, he stated that “dictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems – freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions”.DeSantis, who has attempted and failed to supplant Trump by whipping up hysteria against the menace of “wokeness”, more or less got one of Hoffer’s memorable quotes right. “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”In Georgia, on 14 August 2023, Trump was indicted on 41 felony counts with 18 co-defendants for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results under the state’s Rico statute – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.The problem in applying Hoffer’s aphorism to Trump is that with him it was always a racket.
    Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist. He is a 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 More

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    Trump doubled his voting base in Iowa. Here’s who voted for him

    Iowa Republicans showed up on 15 January in force for Donald Trump, voting overwhelmingly in the nation’s first primary for the former president, whose grip on his party has only deepened as he weathers numerous lawsuits and 91 felony charges relating to his business dealings and involvement in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The Iowa caucuses confirmed polls that have consistently shown Trump carrying a comfortable lead ahead of the remaining Republican challengers.Before the caucuses, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, repeatedly reminded voters and the press that he had toured all of Iowa’s 99 counties. Trump won 98 of them. With the exception of college graduates and voters under 30, who for the most part caucused for DeSantis or the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, most other demographic groups reported strong support for Trump this year.Even young Republican voters favored Trump slightly more strongly this year than in the 2016 Iowa caucuses: CNN entrance polls showed a modest 3% jump in caucus-goers under 30 who support Trump, while his share of supporters over the age of 30 nearly doubled across the board.Since 2016, Trump has consolidated support among evangelical Christian voters, a key block in Iowa. Just over 20% of Trump’s Iowa supporters in 2016 self-reported as evangelicals or born-again Christians; evangelicals made up 53% of his supporters in 2024 Iowa polling.Support for Trump among evangelical Christians can be chalked up to “transactional politics” said Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.Their support may be puzzling on the surface – Trump, a philandering and corrupt adulterer twice divorced who is not particularly religious, would seem an unlikely candidate for wide support from the devout. But behind the scenes, leaders in the evangelical movement, including influential members of the Southern Baptist church, struck a deal with Trump in 2016. In exchange for the support and endorsements of church leaders, Trump would afford evangelicals institutional power in his administration. Through an evangelical advisory board, they would help set social policy and do whatever they could to end the legal right to abortion.Leaders in the church, in exchange, crafted a message that would make Trump more palatable to members.To evangelicals, “Trump was not a man of God,” said Nelson. “He was an instrument of God, like King Cyrus, the Persian king in the Bible.”The bargain held: Trump won the support of evangelical voters and then delivered to them a supreme court that overturned Roe v Wade, erasing nearly 50 years of legal precedent that guaranteed the right to abortion.And despite political divisions among prominent pastors in Iowa, support for Trump among evangelical voters increased this year.The Iowa primary may be a reasonable bellwether for evangelical support for him – and as far as it served as a litmus test for Republican party polling, the polling held up. But Iowa’s primary is atypical.Iowa is more racially homogeneous than the rest of the US – more than 85% of Iowans identify as white, and Black people make up only about 4% of the population, compared with the national average of 71% and 12%. While Black men across the US have increasingly reported supporting Trump in polling, there were so few non-white Republican caucus-goers that entrance polling did not register them as a statistically significant bloc.The Republican caucuses are also party meetings, requiring party membership to participate and consisting of an exclusively in-person vote.The time commitment, the fact that caucuses also involve Republican party business, and even the extreme cold in Iowa this week probably affected turnout, which was estimated at 110,000 voters, significantly lower than 2016.“The proportion of rank-and-file Republicans who are going to participate in the caucuses would be fewer than in a typical primary,” said Barbara Trish, a professor of political science at Grinnell College in Iowa.“The smaller the core of participants, the more likely they are to be more ideologically extreme, or more, on average, experienced and active in the party.”The next stop to test the strength and growth of Trump’s base is New Hampshire, which is also demographically less diverse than most of the country and thus not representative of what the US election as a whole will look like. Even so, Trump is predicted to win the state, further cement his monopoly of the party, and box out those who threaten it. More

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    Senate votes against Sanders resolution to force human rights scrutiny over Israel aid

    US senators have defeated a measure, introduced by Bernie Sanders, that would have made military aid to Israel conditional on whether the Israeli government is violating human rights and international accords in its devastating war in Gaza.A majority of senators struck down the proposal on Tuesday evening, with 72 voting to kill the measure, and 11 supporting it. Although Sanders’ effort was easily defeated, it was a notable test that reflected growing unease among Democrats over US support for Israel.The measure was a first-of-its-kind tapping into a decades-old law that would require the US state department to, within 30 days, produce a report on whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza is violating human rights and international accords. If the administration failed to do so, US military aid to Israel, long assured without question, could be quickly halted.It is one of several that progressives have proposed to raise concerns over Israel’s attacks on Gaza, where the Palestinian death toll has surpassed 24,000 and Israel’s bombardment since Hamas launched attacks on it on 7 October has displaced most of Gaza’s 2.4 million residents.“We must ensure that US aid is being used in accordance with human rights and our own laws,” Sanders said in a speech before the vote urging support for the resolution, lamenting what he described as the Senate’s failure to consider any measure looking at the war’s effect on civilians.The White House had said it opposed the resolution. The US gives Israel $3.8bn in security assistance each year, ranging from fighter jets to powerful bombs that could destroy Hamas tunnels. Biden has asked Congress to approve an additional $14bn.The measure that Sanders proposed uses a mechanism in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which Congress to provide oversight of US military assistance, that must be used in accordance with international human rights agreements.The measure faced an uphill battle. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress oppose any conditions on aid to Israel, and Joe Biden has staunchly stood by Israel throughout its campaign in Gaza, leaving Sanders with an uphill battle. But by forcing senators to vote on the record about whether they were willing to condition aid to Israel, Sanders and others lawmakers sparked debate on the matter.The 11 senators who supported Sanders in the procedural vote were mostly Democrats from across the party’s spectrum.Some lawmakers have increasingly pushed to place conditions on aid to Israel, which has drawn international criticism for its offensive in Gaza.“To my mind, Israel has the absolute right to defend itself from Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack on October 7, no question about that,” Sanders told the Associated Press in an interview ahead of the vote.“But what Israel does not have a right to do – using military assistance from the United States – does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people,” said Sanders. “And in my view, that’s what has been happening.”Amid anti-war protests across the US, progressive representatives including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Barbara Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a ceasefire. In a letter to the US president, many of these lawmakers stressed that thousands of children had been killed in the Israeli bombings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking from the Republican side before the measure was introduced on Tuesday evening, South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham said that Hamas, the Islamist group, has “militarized” schools and hospitals in the territory by operating amongst them.Israel has blamed Hamas for using hospitals as cover for military purposes, but has not provided definitive proof backing its claims that Hamas kept a “command center” under Gaza’s main al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli Defense Forces raided in November.Two thirds of Gaza’s hospitals have been closed amidst what Biden has characterized as “indiscriminate bombings”, during a time of acute need, where United Nations agencies are warning of famine and disease as Gaza is besieged by Israel.Despite the defeat, organizations that had supported Sanders’ effort saw it as something of a victory.“The status quo in the Senate for decades has been 100% support for Israel’s military, 100% of the time from 100% of the Senate,” said Andrew O’Neill, the legislative director of Indivisible, one of the groups that backed the measure. “The fact that Sanders introduced this bill was already historic. That ten colleagues joined him is frankly remarkable.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More