Evelyn Reynolds

The US election primary season is effectively over. Conventional wisdom holds that the two major candidates will now pivot towards the centre ground in search of moderate voters. But Donald Trump has never been one for conventional wisdom.Detention camps, mass deportations, capital punishment for drug smugglers, tariffs on imported goods, a purge of the justice department and potential withdrawal from Nato – the Trump policy agenda is radical by any standard including his own, pushing the boundaries set during his first presidential run eight years ago.“In 2016 he was still, in his own mind at least, positioning himself to be beloved by everybody,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “That’s why ‘Drain the swamp’ was a more populist, appealing message to all sides of the aisle because everyone on some level felt like Washington’s broken, Washington’s left us behind.“Now you flash-forward to 2024 and we’re getting a much darker version of Donald Trump, one who seems to be driven by imaginary grievances from the 2020 election. There’s nothing unifying about that message in any way; it’s incredibly self-centred. This is a campaign for vengeance. In a lot of ways he is Ahab and Moby Dick is the United States of America.”Eight years ago Trump, seeking to become the first US president with no prior political or military experience, was running with a clean slate. If anything, there was a suspicion that his background as a thrice-married New York celebrity implied some ideological fluidity and latent liberal instincts.But he announced his candidacy in June 2015 by promising to build a wall on the southern border, using xenophobic language to portray Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists” and promising to “make America great again”.During the campaign he described international trade deals as “a disaster” and called for increased tariffs on imports. He promised sweeping tax cuts and vowed to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations, describing climate change as “a total hoax”.Trump pledged to nominate supreme court justices opposed to abortion and, in one TV interview, suggested that women who have abortions should be punished. With backing from the National Rifle Association, he opposed gun safety reforms.Overseas, the Republican candidate deployed the slogan “America first”, questioning the Nato alliance while calling for improved relations with Russia. He vowed to destroy the Islamic State and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”.Trump did implement his first attempt at a Muslim ban almost immediately after taking the Oval Office in January 2017, prompting protests, airport chaos and a long legal battle in the courts. The supreme court ruled in June 2018 that the third iteration of the law could go into full effect, meaning considerable restrictions on Muslim travellers entering the country.Trump failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but his presidency was hugely consequential in other ways. His $1.5tn tax cut added to the national debt and, research has shown, helped billionaires more than the working class. The US pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump reshaped the federal judiciary and appointed three supreme court justices who would be instrumental in ending the constitutional right to abortion.He botched the response to a coronavirus pandemic that has now left more than a million Americans dead, initially underplaying the threat and later suggesting that patients might inject bleach as a cure. In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have wanted the US military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.In the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, and dozens of criminal charges against him, Trump’s extremism has broadened and deepened as he heads into an electoral rematch with Joe Biden. He won the Republican primaries with ease, prompting commentators to warn of “collective amnesia” and “the banality of chaos” as many voters seemingly become numb to his demagoguery.However, an AP VoteCast poll found six in 10 moderate Republicans in New Hampshire and South Carolina were concerned that Trump was too extreme to win a general election.View image in fullscreenFor example, he now argues that presidents should have total immunity and openly threatens the guardrails of American democracy. “I only want to be a dictator for one day,” he told supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, earlier this year.He has said he would try to strip tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections as he seeks to “totally obliterate the deep state”. Given his rage at the FBI and federal prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against him, Trump may target people linked to those prosecutions for retribution.His signature issue, border security, is once again taking centre stage with record levels of migrants caught crossing into the US. In response, he has pledged to launch the biggest deportation effort in American history. This would involve far-reaching roundups and detention camps to hold people while they await removal, the New York Times reported. He has also refused to rule out reinstating a Muslim travel ban and a hugely controversial family separation policy.Trump further wants to build more of the border wall – his first administration built 450 miles (724km) of barriers across the 1,954-mile (3,144km) border, but much of that replaced existing structures. He also wants to end automatic citizenship for children born in the US to immigrants living in the country illegally, an idea he flirted with as president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFormer Republican congressman Joe Walsh said: “He’s even uglier in his language now. He’s even more cruel in his approach. He’s gotten much more extreme, which you would think means, oh my God, how stupid politically, because he needs people in the middle. But it is big issue and Democrats have never understood how important immigration and the border are and so Trump feels as if he can demagogue it in even more of an extreme fashion.”Trump has called for the death penalty for drug smugglers and those who traffic women and children. In a broader anti-crime push, he says he will require local law enforcement agencies to use divisive policing measures including stop-and-frisk. Last year, he told a rally in Anaheim, California: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Under the mantra “Drill, baby, drill”, Trump says that he would increase oil drilling on public lands and offer tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers. He would again exit the Paris climate accords, end wind subsidies and eliminate environmental regulations.Trump has suggested that he is open to making cuts to the social security and Medicare welfare programmes. But one area in which he has hinted at moderation is abortion, publicly acknowledging that the national ban favoured by some Republicans would be electoral kryptonite, although it was reported last month that he privately expressed support for a 16-week limit with exceptions.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “His campaign has been smart to float the 16-week ban because I think most Americans fall somewhere between 16 and 20 weeks as something they can live with. If he basically says the federal government will not try to do a six-week ban, we’re not going to come after a foetal heartbeat bill – so if you live in a swing state like Michigan that has codified abortion, I’m not coming after you – that is strategically a smart position. But it would be considered a modification to the centre on abortion by Trump.”On foreign policy, Trump claims that even before he is inaugurated, he will have settled the war between Russia and Ukraine. Last week, after visiting the former president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said Trump promised him that he will end Russia’s war with Ukraine by not giving “a single penny” in aid.The Republican nominee also says he will continue to “fundamentally re-evaluate” Nato’s purpose and mission. At one recent rally, he said he would “encourage” Vladimir Putin’s Russia to attack Nato allies who do not pay their bills. And he says he will institute a system of tariffs of perhaps 10% on most foreign goods.Sometimes it can all seem like campaign bluster unlikely to survive the scrutiny of advisers, Congress or the courts. But whereas Trump’s 2016 win took everyone by surprise, perhaps including him, resulting in a first term marred by infighting and hastily written executive orders, this time there are allies who consider a second term is possible, or even probable, and are ready to hit the ground running.Trump’s campaign and groups such as the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute thinktanks are assembling Project 2025 policy books with detailed plans. Groups of conservative lawyers are sizing up what orders Trump might issue on a second presidency’s first day. With lessons learned, his administration could be even more ruthless and efficient.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “Some of the general framing and themes around what it is he wants to do are relatively consistent. What is different this time around is that there’s more of an architecture and infrastructure supporting a lot of these policy proposals.“If you look at the ecosystem of organisations that’s involved in helping him think through what a second term agenda would look like, it’s much more robust in 2024 than it was in 2016. So I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that the substance is all that different or somehow more extreme. It’s just there’s a lot more people who are thinking about it. Some of them are authorised; some of them are probably not authorised.”Critics of Trump warn that, while Trump himself has few core beliefs, he would effectively become a vehicle for extremists to push a far-right agenda wildly out of step with the majority of Americans. Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “He is an empty vessel for these other people around him who do have very specific policy ideas, most of them rooted in straight authoritarianism or some noxious mix of authoritarianism and Christian dominionism.“He doesn’t care. For all of it, it’s a means to an end. If I win do these people help me or do they hurt me? Do they give me more control? Do they give me less control? Do they give me more access to making sure I’m never going to go to jail, that I can persecute and prosecute my political enemies, that I can make life harder for the media?”Galen added: “In many ways, he is the leader of the torchlight parade but he’s being taken arm in arm and pushed from behind by a bunch of very noxious individuals with what I would call fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American ideology.” More

For Sarah McCammon, “it was really January 6, watching people go into the Capitol with signs that said ‘Jesus saves’ and crosses and Christian symbols” that made her finally decide to write about her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.“I wanted to tell my story,” she says.As a national political correspondent for NPR, McCammon tells many stories. Her first book, The Exvangelicals, is not just a work of autobiography. It is also a deeply reported study of an accelerating movement – of younger Americans leaving white evangelical churches.McCammon grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Kansas City, Missouri, then went to Trinity College, an evangelical university in Deerfield, Illinois. Now, she chronicles the development of her own doubts about her religion, its social strictures and political positions, while reporting similar processes experienced by others.For many such “exvangelicals”, things began to come to a head in 2016, when Donald Trump seized the Republican presidential nomination with a harsh message of hatred and division – and evangelical support.McCammon says: “When I was hired by NPR to cover the presidential campaign, I found myself pretty quickly at the intersection of my professional life and my personal background, because I was assigned to the Republican primary. I was happy about that, because I kind of knew that world.It made sense. I figured I’d be covering Jeb Bush, his waltz to the nomination. But it didn’t turn out that way.“So much of the story of the Republican primary became about Donald Trump and white evangelicals. What were they going to do? How were they going to square evangelical teachings with his history and his character?”As McCammon watched, those evangelicals embraced a three-times married icon of greed, a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women while demonising migrants, Muslims and more.For McCammon, evangelical support for Trump was then and is now a matter of simple power politics – about how he offers a way to maintain a position under fire in a changing world – buttressed by the appeal of Trumpian “alternative facts” familiar to churches that have long denied the science of evolution, ignored the role of racism in American history and taken myriad other positions at odds with mainstream thought.View image in fullscreenMcCammon had “this whole connection to this world”, having grown up “in a very evangelical, very conservative family, very politically active”. But “in a lot of ways, I think I got into journalism to get away from some of that. I didn’t want to work in an ideological space, theological or political. I didn’t want to be an advocate, I felt very uncomfortable with the pressure to make everybody believe what I believed. And I did not even feel sure.”Nonetheless, as Trump tightened his grip, McCammon was drawn back in, becoming “fascinated because I was in my mid-30s, I had some distance from my childhood and I felt I knew what questions to ask and anticipated some debates that would come up.“So after 2016, I spent a few years reflecting on where the country was and what had happened: on the evangelical embrace of Trump. And as I thought more about it, I thought maybe there’s something I want to say about this. I wanted to tell my story.”As it turned out, a lot of former evangelicals of McCammon’s generation were telling their stories too.Like other modern social and political labels – Black Lives Matter and MeToo, for example – the term “exvangelicals” first came to prominence as a hashtag around 2016, the year the writer Blake Chastain launched a podcast under the name. Much of McCammon’s research for her book duly took place on social media, tracking down exvangelicals using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share and connect.But McCammon’s own story forms the spine of her book. Her parents remain in the church. She and her first husband married in the church. It wasn’t easy to sit down and write.“When I was finishing the draft, I sent [my parents] several key sections,” she says. “Frankly, the sections I thought would be hardest for them. I wanted to do that both as their daughter and as a journalist, because in journalism, we usually give people a chance to respond. And so, they didn’t want to be quoted.”In the finished book, McCammon’s parents are quoted, one striking example a frank exchange of messages with her mother about LGBTQ+ rights.“They’re not thrilled,” she says. “But I did take their feedback into account. They didn’t fundamentally dispute anything, factually …skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope it comes through in the book that this is not an attack on my parents. I talk about my childhood because I want to illustrate what it was like to grow up inside the evangelical milieu of that time. And based on my conversations with lots of other people, I don’t think my experiences are unique.”McCammon’s grandfather was surely close to unique: a military veteran and a neurosurgeon who had three children before coming out as gay. At first largely excluded from McCammon’s life, later a central influence, he died as McCammon was writing.She says: “I make him such a central character because he was a central part of my experience of realising that there was a bigger world out there – when he was one of the only non-evangelical or non-Christian people I had any regular contact with, growing up. For my family he was always a source of concern and consternation and worry and prayer but also he was an incredibly accomplished individual, and he was somebody I think my whole family admired and was just proud of – at the same time that we prayed for his soul.“And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being told.”View image in fullscreenMcCammon still believes, though she does not “use a lot of labels”. Her husband is Jewish. Shaped by her Christian upbringing, she has “slowly opened up my mind, as I’ve gotten older”, through talking to her husband and to people in “the progressive Christian space”. She can “read the Bible when I want to”, and does.Asked how she thinks The Exvangelicals will be received, she says “there are kind of three audiences for this book.“For exvangelicals, or people who have wrestled with their religious background, whatever it may be, I hope that they will feel seen and validated, and feel like there’s some resonance with their story, because I think there is kind of a common experience, even though the details are different.“For those like my husband, who when I met him had very little connection to the evangelical world, and are maybe a little confused by it, or maddened or frustrated by it, I hope the book will provide some insight and maybe even empathy, [helping] to understand how people think, why they think the way they think, and also the fact that evangelicalism is a massive movement and within it there are lots of different people with lots of different experiences.“The most difficult one is evangelicals. I hope those who are still firmly entrenched in the movement will read it with an open mind, and maybe some empathy. I think there are a lot of boomer parents out there, not just mine, who are trying to figure out why their kids have gone astray.“And I don’t think being an exvangelical is ‘going astray’. I think it’s about really trying to live with integrity. In some ways, it’s like: ‘You taught us to seek the truth. And so it’s what a lot of us are doing.’”
The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

Last week, the US House of Representatives, a dysfunctional body that hitherto could not agree on anything, suddenly converged on a common project: a bipartisan bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in the US, TikTok’s largest market.American legislators’ concerns about the social media app have been simmering for years, mostly focused on worries that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance (and therefore TikTok) to hand over data on TikTok users or manipulate content on the platform. A year ago, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, told Congress that TikTok “is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government – and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns”.These fears were amplified by the raging popularity of TikTok among US users. It has upwards of 170 million of them and their addiction to it has bothered Mark Zuckerberg and his empire for the very good reason that TikTok is the only other social media game in town. Six of the world’s 10 most downloaded apps last year were owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent. But TikTok, beat all of them except Instagram to the top spot.TikTok is ferociously addictive, at least for people under 30. What bothers Meta most is that TikTok extracts far more granular data from its users than any other platform. “The average session lasts 11 minutes,” writes blogger Scott Galloway, “and the video length is around 25 seconds. That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session, with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.”To date, public discourse about the platform has been pretty incoherent – as one critic pointed out: “From policymakers completely talking past each other to the media falling into false binaries when discussing TikTok and a possible ban, too many narratives on the issue have been contradictory, full of logical leaps, or incredibly reductive.” But two main themes stand out from the hubbub. One is that TikTok gathers incredibly detailed personal data on its users (data that may find its way to the platform’s Chinese parent); the other is that it may be a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist party (CCP).The first is plausible but overegged. As the Economist puts it: “If Chinese spies want to find out about Americans, the country’s lax data protection laws allow them to buy such information from third parties.” The second proposition – that TikTok may be an efficient conduit for propaganda and misinformation – looks spot-on, though. After all, about a third of under-30s in the US regularly get news on TikTok and a recent study has found grounds for thinking that the platform already systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is respectively aligned with or opposed to the interests of the CCP.And here’s where the question of what happens to TikTok takes on geopolitical and domestic political dimensions. On the former, it’s highly likely that the prospect of TikTok separating from ByteDance and thereby slipping out of the control of the CCP does not appeal to Beijing. So this congressional bill (which passed overwhelmingly in a floor vote on Wednesday) looks like bad news.On the other hand, there was some good news last week for Beijing. First, Donald Trump became the Republican party’s nominee for the presidency. And second, he announced that he was against the bill. “If you get rid of TikTok,” he posted on his Truth Social platform, “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”For those who appreciate hypocrisy, this was a collector’s item. Is this not the same Trump who in 2020 tried (but failed) to get rid of TikTok? What lies behind this change of heart? Who can say: trying to read what is loosely called Trump’s mind is a fool’s errand. Still, it was interesting to learn that recently Trump reportedly had a “cordial” meeting in his Mar-a-Lago lair with a guy called Jeff Yass. Who’s he? Oh, just someone whose business happens to have a $30bn-plus stake in ByteDance. Sometimes you couldn’t make this stuff up.What I’ve been readingMatter of InterestViewing the Ob-scene is David Hering’s terrific review of Jonathan Glazer’s great movie The Zone of Interest.Machine learningRead Of Top-Notch Algorithms and Zoned-Out Humans, a sobering essay by Tim Harford about the downsides of becoming dependent on smart machines.Science fiction Superconductivity Scandal: The Inside Story of a Scientific Deception in a Rising Star’s Physics Lab recounts a gripping investigation by Nature magazine’s news team. More

Joe Biden should use his leverage and the law to pressure Israel to change how it is prosecuting the war in Gaza, the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen said.Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, is among a group of senators urging Biden to stop providing Israel with offensive weapons until it lifts restrictions on the delivery of food and medicine into Gaza, where children are now dying of hunger and famine looms.“We need the president and the Biden administration to push harder and to use all the levers of US policy to ensure people don’t die of starvation,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Friday.This week, Van Hollen and seven of his colleagues sent a letter to the president arguing that Israel was in violation of the Foreign Assistance Act, a section of which prohibits the sale and transfer of military weapons to any nation that restricts the delivery of US aid.Their call comes as the administration faces mounting domestic and international pressure over what critics have described as an “absurd” and “inherent contradiction” at the heart of US policy on Israel’s war against Hamas: while the US attempts to ease the deepening humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s military campaign in the Palestinian territory, it continues to arm the country.In a sign of the widening rift between Israel and its most important ally, Van Hollen said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was openly defying Biden’s pleas that Israel do more to protect civilians in Gaza and work toward a long-term solution to the conflict that includes the establishment of a Palestinian state.“Prime Minister Netanyahu has been an obstacle to the president’s efforts to at least create some light at the end of this very dark tunnel,” Van Hollen said.In recent weeks, Biden has escalated his criticism of Israel’s military offensive, saying last weekend that Netanyahu was “hurting” his country’s standing by failing to prevent more civilian deaths in Gaza. But the US president has so far resisted Democrats’ calls to leverage future military aid as a means of reining in Israel’s conduct in the war.The United Nations warned last month that more than a quarter of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza face “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation”. It said without action, widespread famine would be “almost inevitable”. Israel’s military campaign, which came in retaliation for the Hamas attack on 7 October that killed about 1,200 people, has devastated Gaza and killed more than 30,000 people, most of them civilians.With the prospects of a truce elusive and far too little aid trickling in, Biden has authorized airdrops and the construction of a maritime corridor to deliver desperately needed food and medicine to the Palestinian people living in the besieged territory. But critics say those methods are less effective, less efficient and more dangerous than the unhindered delivery of supplies by land.“The very fact that the United States is airlifting humanitarian supplies and is now going to be opening a temporary port is a symptom of the larger problem, which is [that] the Netanyahu government has restricted the amount of aid coming into Gaza and the safe distribution of aid within Gaza,” Van Hollen said.Israel, which tightened its already strict controls on access to the enclave after 7 October, has denied that it is impeding the flow of aid.Amid intensifying international pressure, Israel said this week it would expand the amount of supplies into the country. A small convoy of six trucks, coordinated by the Israeli military, brought humanitarian aid directly into the isolated northern Gaza earlier this week. Separately, an aid ship loaded with 200 tons of rice, flour, chicken and other items arrived in Gaza on Friday, in the first test of a new sea route.But that is a far cry from what is needed, humanitarian workers say. Before the five-month-old conflict began, roughly 500 truckloads of humanitarian aid per day crossed into the territory. Now the number is far less, sometimes peaking above 200 trucks per day but often well below, according to UN figures.Van Hollen’s insistence that the US do more to push Israel on humanitarian aid was informed by his visit to the Rafah crossing from Egypt in January, and the onerous Israeli inspection process he witnessed.“You witnessed these very, very long lines of trucks trying to get in through Rafah and through the Kerem Shalom crossing, and quite an inspection review, including arbitrary denials of humanitarian aid being delivered into Gaza, which just makes the process even more cumbersome,” he said.“For example, we visited a warehouse in Rafah that was filled with goods that had been rejected at the inspection sites. The rejected goods included things like maternity kits, included things like water purification systems.”Van Hollen said no specific reason was given as to why the items were rejected, but said Israel has broadly claimed that they could be considered “dual use” or having a civilian or military purpose. The maternity kit, Van Hollen said, contained a “teeny little scalpel” that he speculated was the reason the package was turned back.Across the border in Gaza, the situation is dire. UN agencies have estimated that 180 women give birth every day, sometimes without access to adequate pain medication, food or hygiene products. Malnourished, dehydrated and increasingly anemic, many pregnant women in Gaza face elevated risks of postpartum hemorrhaging.Another problem, Van Hollen said, is that so many of the people delivering aid or accompanying the aid convoys have been killed, making coordination and distribution of the aid that does enter difficult.Netanyahu and his government, the senator said, “need to open more crossings, they need to end the arbitrary rejection of goods like maternity kits and solar powered desalinization units, and they need to make sure that food can be safely delivered within Gaza without people getting killed.”Van Hollen’s comments came the day after Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the US and a longtime ally of Israel’s, was unsparing in a speech in which he declared that Netanyahu had “lost his way”, and urged Israelis to hold elections to replace him. Biden, who has been increasingly open about his frustration with Netanyahu, called it a “good speech”.Van Hollen called Schumer’s speech an “important moment” that made clear the US believes “there needs to be a change in course” in the way Israel is conducting the war.‘The administration will have to decide’In the letter to Biden earlier this week, Van Hollen and his colleagues wrote: “According to public reporting and your own statements, the Netanyahu government is in violation of [the Foreign Assistance Act]. Given this reality, we urge you to make it clear to the Netanyahu government that failure to immediately and dramatically expand humanitarian access and facilitate safe aid deliveries throughout Gaza will lead to serious consequences, as specified under existing US law.”Van Hollen also argued that the Israeli government is “not in compliance” with a national security memorandum (NSM 20) issued by the president last month that requires any country that receives US military assistance to provide written assurances it will “not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede” the delivery of humanitarian aid.Israel reportedly provided that commitment in a letter to Biden signed by Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant on Thursday, according to Axios. Van Hollen said the onus is now on the US to assess the credibility of Israel’s assurances.“Part of that evaluation will depend on what’s happening on the ground right now, and their assessment of whether or not, in fact, the Netanyahu government is meeting that requirement,” he said. “And if the signatures and commitments are found to be lacking, then the administration cannot provide military assistance until they determine that they’re credible.”View image in fullscreenVan Hollen stressed that enforcing the statute would not prevent the US from continuing to send defensive military assistance to protect Israeli citizens from rocket attacks, such as the Iron Dome.The memorandum was issued last month, after Van Hollen and more than a dozen Democratic senators introduced an amendment to a wartime aid package that included military assistance for Ukraine, Israel and other US-allies. The senators’ proposal, which would have required any country receiving US weapons to comply with humanitarian laws, risked a messy floor fight among Democrats divided over the US’s approach to the war amid Gaza’s rising death toll.Instead, Van Hollen said, the administration offered to turn the amendment into a memorandum that, with the force of law, would apply the terms to the sale and transfer of all US military aid. Biden issued the memorandum, and the Senate later approved the foreign aid package, with Van Hollen’s support. That measure is now languishing in the House.Biden has warned that Israel would cross a “red line” if it proceeded with a large-scale invasion of the southern city of Rafah, where the war has pushed nearly half of Gaza’s population. Reports suggest Netanyahu has approved a plan to invade the city, setting him up for direct conflict with the US president.Biden has not made clear what consequences Netanyahu might face if he ignores the US’s position. An invasion of Rafah, Van Hollen said, would present “one of those moments where the Biden administration is going to have to decide whether it’s going to back up the president’s strong words with the leverage that it has”. More

Donald Trump White House official Peter Navarro appealed to the US supreme court on Friday to allow him to stay out of prison as he appeals his contempt of Congress conviction.Navarro is due to report to a federal prison on Tuesday after an appeals court ruled that his appeal wasn’t likely to overturn his conviction for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the January 6 attack that Trump supporters aimed at the US Capitol in 2021.Navarro has maintained that he couldn’t cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege. Federal judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed during Barack Obama’s presidency, barred Navarro from making that argument at trial, finding that he didn’t show Trump had actually invoked it.The emergency application comes as the supreme court separately prepares to hear arguments on whether Trump himself has presidential immunity from charges alleging he interfered in the 2020 election that he lost to Joe BidenNavarro was the second Trump aide convicted of misdemeanor congressional contempt charges. The former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon previously received a four-month sentence but was allowed to stay free pending appeal by federal judge Carl Nichols, who was appointed by Trump.Navarro – an economist and Trump’s trade adviser – was found guilty of defying a subpoena for documents and a deposition from the House committee that was investigating the January 6 attack. He also promoted Trump’s lies about how electoral fraudsters denied him victory against Biden and was also given a four-month prison sentence. More

Stormy Daniels, the adult movie star who received hush-money payments at the center of one of Donald Trump’s pending criminal cases, says she is “so tired” as she confronts the prospect of testifying against the former president, whose supporters have flooded her social media accounts with threats.“I’m desensitized to some of it … but I’m also tired,” Daniels says in a new documentary premiering on Monday on Peacock, according to Slate, which reported viewing the film in advance. “Like, my soul is so tired. And I don’t know if I’m so much a warrior now as out of fucks, man. I’m out of fucks.”Daniels’ remarks in the documentary, titled Stormy, are meant to illustrate how overwhelmed, exhausted and – at times – hopeless she has felt since she accepted a $130,000 payment before Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory to keep quiet about an extramarital sexual encounter she says she had with him a decade earlier.Authorities allege that they later learned the payment to Daniels – whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford – was falsely recorded as a legal expenses reimbursement from Trump to the attorney who made the transaction and later pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law, Michael Cohen.Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying business records that were filed against him by New York state prosecutors, and is facing a trial date tentatively set for April at the earliest.Caught in the middle of the slowly unwinding legalities is Daniels, who in Stormy vividly describes Trump having “cornered” her in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite on the night she maintains they had sex.“I don’t remember how I got on the bed,” Daniels says in the film about the purported tryst in 2006, the year after the former president married Melania Trump, according to Business Insider. “And then the next thing I knew, he was humping away and telling me how great I was.“It was awful. But I didn’t say no.”Daniels is shown in the film telling a journalist that one of the reasons she accepted Trump’s hush money was to establish a “money trail” that linked her to him – “so he could not have me killed”, as she put it.After all, Daniels recalls in the film, a friend had admonished her that the Republican party under Trump’s command likes “to make [its] problems go away”, Slate noted. The film also reportedly shows a horse belonging to Daniels with a wound in its flank – she explains how she fears it may have been inflicted by someone who fired a rubber bullet at the animal in hopes of drawing its owner out into the open.Daniels also details how much mental anguish she suffers from the invective aimed at her online by Trump supporters reacting to coverage of the criminal charges against him. Some of the comments are insulting and misogynistic – “liar”, “slut” and “gold digger” – but stop short of violence.Others that she cites are overtly violent. “It is … ‘I’m going to come to your house and slit your throat.’ ‘Your daughter should be euthanized,’” Daniels says in the documentary, according to Slate. “They’re not even using bot accounts. They’re using real accounts.”It was enough to prompt Daniels to record a last will and testament outlining how she wanted her affairs handled in the event of her untimely death. While many people take such a step as a standard part of their life’s long-term planning, Daniels did so under circumstances few ever have to confront, a journalist who captured video footage seen in the documentary suggested.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When I met Stormy, she was convinced she was living in the last weeks or months of her life,” that journalist, Denver Nicks, says in the documentary, according to Slate.Daniels says she has acquired a measure of “legal knowledge” that has left her better positioned to navigate her role in the case against Trump than when the hush-money payment first became public in 2018. But at times it has also forced her to be away from family – whether for safety reasons or to exert whatever control that she can over her public narrative.One such instance was in April 2023, when she was on a media tour in the UK shortly after Trump was indicted in connection with her case and learned that her 11-year-old daughter had finished her school year with a straight A report card over a text message rather than in person.“Instead of being there with her, I’m here talking about an ex-president’s penis,” Daniels reportedly tells the documentary film-makers, a remark that possibly contained an allusion to her 2018 book which compared Trump’s reproductive organ to a toadstool.Besides the Daniels case, Trump is also facing dozens of criminal charges for subverting the outcome of his failed 2020 re-election bid as well as retention of classified documents. A separate civil jury verdict has also found him liable for the sexual abuse of writer E Jean Carroll, and he has also been adjudicated a business fraudster in a lawsuit over his entrepreneurial practices.Trump nonetheless has clinched the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic incumbent Joe Biden for a second presidential term in November. More

On a glorious spring day in Phoenix, in an atrium beneath the majestic cupola of the old state capitol, the secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, is celebrating Arizona’s 112th birthday.He solemnly recites President William Howard Taft’s proclamation welcoming Arizona as the 48th state of the union. Speeches fete the state’s breathtaking landscapes, from the mighty Grand Canyon to the sprawling deserts of Yuma and lush green forests of Coconino. Then, a cake iced with the state seal is cut into 112 pieces and devoured in the sun-dappled Rose Garden.There is only one discordant note on this otherwise joyous day: who is that person standing silently and alert behind Fontes? Why is Arizona’s chief election administrator, responsible for the smooth operation of November’s presidential election, in need of a bodyguard?“It’s very sad,” Fontes said. “It’s a sad state of affairs that in a civil society, in one of the most advanced civilizations that anybody could have imagined, we have to worry about physical violence.”These are troubled times in Arizona. Until 2020, election officials were the largely anonymous folk who did the important yet unseen work of making democracy run smoothly.“Nobody knew who we were, what we did,” Fontes said ruefully. “It’s a little bit different now.”All changed with Donald Trump’s unprecedented refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election. His conspiracy to subvert the election has had an explosive impact in Arizona, a battleground state that has become arguably ground zero for election denial in America.In 2020, the Republican-controlled state legislature sponsored a widely discredited “audit” of votes in Maricopa county, the largest constituency, which contain Phoenix. Republican leaders put themselves forward as fake electors in a possibly criminal attempt to flip Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona to Trump’s.Two years later, in the midterms, armed vigilantes dressed in tactical gear stalked drop boxes in a vain hunt for “mules” stuffing fraudulent ballots into them. Amid the furore, election officials found themselves assailed by online harassment and death threats.No longer faceless bureaucrats, they had become public enemy No 1.With the likely presidential rematch between Trump and Biden just eight months away, Fontes, as the top elections administrator, is facing a formidable challenge. He is preparing for it like the marine veteran that he is.The secretary of state is staging tabletop exercises in which officials wargame how to react to worst-case scenarios. What would they do if a fire broke out at the ballot-printing warehouse, or if a cargo train spilled its toxic load on to the facility storing voting equipment?“Tiger teams” have been assembled to be quickly dispatched across the state to fix software or other voting problems. To anticipate bad actors using artificial intelligence to create malicious deepfakes of candidates, his office has done its own AI manipulations, making videos in which individuals speak fluently in languages they do not know such as German and Mandarin. “They were very, very believable,” Fontes noted.Specialists from the Department of Homeland Security have been deployed to advise counties on physical and cyber security. Active-shooter drills have been rehearsed at polling stations.As the Washington Post reported, kits containing tourniquets to staunch bleeding, hammers for breaking glass windows and door-blocking devices have been distributed to county election offices. “These are not things we would ever want to train anybody on,” Fontes said. “But given the environment … ”With all this under way, Fontes insists he’s ready for anything. “We will prepare as best we can for any contingencies,” he said. “And then we have no choice but to march forward, hopefully.”View image in fullscreenA single statistic underlines the looming danger hanging over the 2024 presidential contest. More than half – 53% – of Arizonans are currently represented in the state legislature by Republicans with a proven track record of election denial.That arresting figure comes from the election threat index, a database compiled by the voting rights organization Public Wise. The directory is designed as an accountability tool, tracking local and state officials who spread misinformation and participate in legislation undermining democracy.“This is a race to the bottom,” said Reginald Bolding, a Public Wise adviser and former Democratic minority leader in the Arizona house. “We are seeing the Republican party reward whoever’s most extreme about elections.”All the big names in Arizona’s flourishing market in election denial remain active traders. Kari Lake, the Phoenix TV anchor who reinvented herself as a Trump acolyte, continues to deny her idol’s 2020 presidential defeat as well as her own failure in Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial race; she is now running for a US Senate seat.Mark Finchem, the former state legislator and member of the Oath Keepers militia who was present at the US Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021, is attempting to return to the Arizona legislature in a state senate seat. He has founded an election-denial outfit, the Election Fairness Institute, and, as the monitoring group Media Matters has revealed, continues to brag about uncovering “phantom voters” while offering zero evidence.View image in fullscreenAbe Hamadeh last month lodged yet another lawsuit claiming that Arizona’s attorney general post had been stolen from him after he lost the midterm race. Now he is vying for a congressional seat.For seasoned political observers, the midterms were like a controlled experiment that proved that election denial is unpopular among most Arizonans. Prominent deniers lost all statewide elections in 2022 – Lake to Katie Hobbs in the governor’s race, Finchem to Fontes for secretary of state, and Hamadeh to Democrat Kris Mayes for attorney general.“It was the perfect case study,” said Mike Noble, a pollster based in Arizona. “All the election deniers standing in statewide races lost, while everything else down-ticket went to the Republicans.”Opinion polls tell the same story. A whopping 70% of Republicans nationally are still wedded to Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Yet such fondness for conspiracy theories does not translate to the general population.Republicans form 34% of Arizona’s electorate. But 30% identify as Democrats and another 35% are unaffiliated independents – voting blocs that are much less susceptible to the stolen election lie.Strangely, blanket statewide defeats do not appear to have dampened the Republican embrace of Trump’s deceit. “The rhetoric hasn’t stopped, terrible as it is for them,” Noble said.If anything, the debate around stolen elections has intensified. “New political careers have been created out of it. A whole industry and infrastructure now exists to make sure that it perpetuates itself,” said Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder of Maricopa county tasked with maintaining the voter files of 2.6 million citizens.Mayes, the state attorney general who is being sued – again – by Hamadeh two years after she beat him, is stark about the enduring strength of election denial. She was a Republican until 2019 when, dismayed by the direction in which Trump was dragging the party, she defected to the Democrats.“The Republican party in Arizona has been taken over by a faction that wants to undermine our democracy by sowing seeds of doubt about our election system,” she said. “As a former Republican, I find that horrendous, and nothing short of heartbreaking.”View image in fullscreenOf the first 13 cases prosecuted by the election threats taskforce, the unit set up within the US justice department in 2021 to protect election officials from the attacks unleashed by Trump, by far the largest number – five – relate to Arizona.Two of those involved death threats against Fontes’s office, including a bomb threat. A third was a threatened lynching directed at Clint Hickman, a Republican on the Maricopa county board of supervisors.The final two prosecutions both involved menaces against Richer. In one of the attacks, a Missouri man left a voicemail in which he warned the recorder to stop criticizing the state senate’s “audit” or “your ass will never make it to your next little board meeting”.In an interview, Richer was hesitant to discuss the bombardment he and his family have suffered from fellow Republicans. But he did say this: “The fracturing of my party saddens me. There are people who I consider to be part of my tribe, part of my team, who now view me as a bona fide enemy.”Even moderate Republicans who have long been forced out of the legislature are exposed to the aggravation. Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona house who was ousted in 2022 for refusing to illegally overturn Biden’s win, has been out of office for 13 months but was still subjected on the day after Christmas to swatting – a fake prank anonymous call that brought police cars screeching to his house and officers scouring the premises.Bowers has a take on why he is still attracting Maga wrath all these months later: “Fear brings people tighter together, justifying mistreatment even of your own. It all becomes magnified. You know, we’re falling apart.”Arizona is suffering one of the severest brain drains of electoral knowhow in the country. Of its 15 counties, 12 have lost a top election administrator since the last presidential cycle, prised out by a constant barrage of bile.Most of those quitting are women, a reflection of the predominance of female election officials and the often sexually charged nature of the threats.Of the five members of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, two have announced they are not standing for re-election. Hickman, recipient of the lynching threat, said recently that “it’s gotten worse and worse … I thought I was looking way too much in the rearview mirror”.View image in fullscreenThe second departing supervisor is Bill Gates. In January, the attorney general secured a sentence of three years’ probation for a man who accused Gates of being a “corrupt Democrat” and threatened to poison him to death “multiple times”.In fact, Gates has been a loyal Republican since he was a teenager – he set up a Republican club in his high school when he was 16. “I’m a true child of the Reagan revolution,” he said in an interview.Gates had to evacuate his family from their home twice after being advised by the local sheriff they were in imminent danger. The low point came one Christmas when he posted a photo of his family on social media. A Trump supporter responded that his daughter should be raped.As the pressure reached a boiling point, Gates was diagnosed with PTSD. Since then he has worked hard to stabilize himself through therapy, but he struggles.It’s not just the death threats. Like Richer, he feels wounded that the attacks are coming from his own people.“It’s my team that’s going after me,” he said. “Four of us supervisors are Republicans in Maricopa. We stood up for democracy, we stood up for elections that are safe and secure, and we’ve been called Rinos, traitors, Marxist communists on a daily basis.”Gates said that there were several factors behind his decision, at this point, to leave public office once the presidential election is done. One of the largest is the trauma of these past four years.He said he would leave the supervisor job with a heavy heart, as he regards it as the most important work of his professional life. He will also depart with foreboding.“Democracy is teetering,” he said.What does he mean?“It is extremely difficult to win a Republican primary if you defend our election system. If that’s not teetering, I don’t know what is.”Kris Mayes is on the frontline of efforts to hold together Arizona’s teetering democracy. As the state’s top prosecutor, she is painfully aware that the eyes of the world were on Arizona in 2020 and 2022, and will be again in 2024.“Every election cycle, we seem to face a test,” she said, speaking in her office in downtown Phoenix. “I think we’re going to pass it, but it’s dangerous.”Mayes has aggressively prosecuted those who allegedly violate election laws. Last year she secured felony indictments for two Republican supervisors in Cochise county in the south of the state who were refusing to certify 2022 election results.View image in fullscreenIn Mohave county, a deeply conservative community in the north-west, she intervened in a fierce dispute over hand counts. Republican supervisors were pressing for hand counts only, calling for the scrapping of vote-counting machines – a move that Mayes pointed out in a letter would be unlawful and could attract serious legal consequences.She told the Guardian that her motive was deterrence. “We want to send a message that we will not put up with violations of the law, whether that’s sending a death threat to an election official or creating chaos in the election system,” she said.Despite the attorney general’s efforts, those in the thick of the gathering election storm are on edge. Security has been increased at the Runbeck Elections Services factory where ballots are printed.CEO Jeff Ellington said the aim was to protect staff and reassure voters that the process is watertight. Public tours of the factory have been stepped up. Extra cameras have been installed, and the facility has been reinforced against cybersecurity attacks. All trucks transporting ballots around the state and beyond are monitored with GPS.Most tellingly, armed guards are stationed at the facility around the clock.Ellington admits to being worried that the volatile events of 2020 and 2022 will repeat themselves. “People are very amped up. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. We’re just not a trusting nation right now,” he said.Assuaging such fears is one of the attorney general’s top priorities. “My focus is making sure we protect our elections, and our officials, against threats of violence,” Mayes said.One of her biggest pending decisions is whether to charge the 11 Republican “fake electors” who gathered on 14 December 2020 to cast “alternative” electoral college votes for Trump, even though by then his defeat had been confirmed. A “very serious investigation” is under way, she said, promising that it would be completed.But she was coy about whether she would follow Georgia, Michigan and Nevada in pressing charges against the fake electors. “We’re spending the time we need to see that justice is done,” was her careful choice of words.The attorney general’s decision will be of some interest to Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, leading Republicans in the state senate. They were among the 11 fake electors, and Kern went on to appear at the attack at the US Capitol on January 6.The two senators are also key members of the Freedom Caucus, the alliance of far-right Republican lawmakers that dominates the legislature. Since the advent of Trump, the Arizona Republican party has moved relentlessly to the right, with the Freedom Caucus accumulating power while moderate Republicans have been driven out.The Freedom Caucus is umbilically linked to Turning Point Action, the political arm of Turning Point USA, which is based in Phoenix. The group, under the leadership of the pro-Trump activist Charlie Kirk, has catalyzed the party’s rightward march.Before he entered the legislature, Hoffman was head of communications for Turning Point USA. The group’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a close ally of Hoffman’s and represents Arizona on the Republican National Committee.“Turning Point is now a national advocacy group for culture warriors,” said Chuck Coughlin, a Phoenix-based political consultant and CEO of Highground Inc. “They’ve taken over the Arizona Republican party.”According to Public Wise, 12 of the 16 Republicans in the Arizona senate have participated in election denialism or other acts that undermine confidence in democracy. Of the 32 Republican state lawmakers listed on the election threats index, almost half have introduced anti-democratic legislation and 84% have voted for it.Recent bills proposed by far-right lawmakers include:
House bill (HB) 2472, which would make it easier to challenge election results in court, removing legal hurdles that led to Lake and Hamadeh’s lawsuits being dismissed for lack of evidence;

Senate bill (SB) 1471 and HB2722, which would promote hand counts of all ballots, a key demand of election deniers who claim without proof that vote-counting equipment is rigged; and

(HB)2415, which would strip Arizonans from the early voter list whenever they fail to vote.
None of these bills have hope of being enacted, given the veto power of Hobbs, the Democratic governor. Last year she vetoed a record 143 bills, dismissing them with such tart remarks as “the 2020 election is settled” and “it’s time to move on”.Of all the recent moves from Republican lawmakers, the most striking has been SCR1014, a senate constitutional resolution introduced in January by Kern. It rehashes a highly dubious judicial doctrine championed by Trump’s lawyer John Eastman in the buildup to the January 6 insurrection.The “independent state legislature theory” claims that the US constitution gives state legislatures – as opposed to individual voters – the power to choose who becomes the next president. “The Legislature, and no other official, shall appoint presidential electors in accordance with the US Constitution,” Kern’s resolution bluntly states.SCR1014 has no chance of becoming law – it would require a majority of Arizonans to back the idea in a ballot initiative, which in effect would be asking the state’s 4 million registered voters to disenfranchise themselves. But the resolution does lay down a road map of the Freedom Caucus’s intentions.The Guardian invited Kern to explain his resolution, but he did not respond.Sonny Borrelli, the majority leader of the Arizona senate and a fellow Freedom Caucus member, was willing to talk.In his senate office, he began by reaffirming his conviction that Arizona’s 2020 result, which put Biden ahead by 10,457 votes, was unreliable. “I believe that it was an uncertifiable election, so whether Trump won or Biden won, we just don’t know,” he said.View image in fullscreenHe ran through several allegations of fraud, all of which have been thoroughly investigated and debunked. They included “video footage of people stuffing ballots” into drop boxes (the core of the discredited film 2000 Mules by the conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza) and “22,000 dead voters’ signatures”.Last year Borrelli sponsored SB1074, which would require all vote-counting equipment to be made exclusively out of US-manufactured parts. Hobbs vetoed that bill too, pointing out that no such machines existed.Borrelli then went on a grand tour of Arizona counties, instructing election supervisors that they had to conform to a non-binding resolution banning electronic voting machines. “We need to go back to hand-count paper ballots,” he told the Guardian. “Anything is hackable, so why take that chance?”November’s presidential contest will not be hand-counted in Arizona. The elections director of Maricopa county has estimated that it would take an additional 25,000 temporary workers to carry out a hand count of the presidential election, working nine-hour shifts for 25 straight days – a monumental feat that would set the county back some $71m.Borrelli is confident that despite failing to secure hand counts, his side is ready for November.“People throughout the state are stepping up. There will be a lot more volunteers at the polls, and they will be more aware. They are going to be watching better.”View image in fullscreenWhat if the presidential contest erupts in a fiery dispute, as it did in Arizona in 2020? Could he conceive of Kern’s resolution being rolled out and the legislature wresting control?“I believe our US constitution grants us the authority,” Borrelli said. “We have plenary authority over the presidential election, meaning we can choose the electors – the constitution says so.”But wouldn’t that be overturning the will of the Arizonan people?“How could you overturn the will of the people,” he said, “if the people didn’t actually get what they were supposed to be getting?”The drive west to Borrelli’s constituency traverses moonscapes of dry cactus deserts, cracked rocky outcrops and windswept mesa. The politics of the 30th district are, like the scenery, unforgiving, rugged and proud.First stop is Kingman, a scraggy town of 32,000 on Route 66. A bikers’ shop on the side of the highway sells Trump memorabilia and other Maga delights.There are T-shirts imprinted with Trump’s scowling mugshot taken when he was charged with illegally trying to overturn the election in Georgia, above the caption: “Nuff said.” Confederate flags fly from the roof stamped with the motto “Heritage not hate”.Maggie Passaro, 69, is a Kingman resident who at a public meeting of the Mohave county supervisors board in November became so distraught over hand counts that she almost burst into tears.She tells her life story over coffee in the Route 66 diner. She inherited from her father strong anti-government leanings. “Little one, don’t ever trust the government, they all lie and cheat,” he would tell her.As an adult, Passaro worked variously as a bartender, dancer, artist and caregiver to her ailing mom. She flirted with the Tea Party and with the birther movement that claimed falsely that Barack Obama was not American, but her true engagement with politics only came with Trump.After her mother died, she became so detached from public life that she didn’t vote in 2016. On 20 January 2017, she was listening to a local radio station and was astonished to hear Trump’s inauguration speech – she hadn’t even realized he had won the presidency.With Trump in the White House, she started burrowing down into online rabbit holes, following Cathy O’Brien and other conspiracy theorists. Her news source became the podcast of Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon and the misinformation website of Dan Bongino.A warm and affable woman, Passaro admitted freely that she tends to obsess over things. She watches online videos for days on end. “I won’t sleep until I’ve seen them all,” she said.One such obsession is the alleged stealing from Trump of the 2020 election using rigged vote-counting machines. Passaro talked with animation about PCAPS – so called “packet captures” that Trump associates like the My Pillow founder, Mike Lindell, claim are proof that China controlled the machines.By last fall, Passaro had become so incensed that when she heard that Mohave county supervisors were holding a public meeting to discuss hand counts, she vowed to be there. That’s when she almost wept: when she heard someone say that hand counts were too slow and expensive to adopt in Mohave county.“I thought:‘Oh, you stupid ass!’” Passaro said, her eyes welling up again. “How much value do you put on your freedom? What’s your life worth? It’s priceless, you can’t put a value on it! You cannot have a life without freedom!”Why was that moment so overwhelming for her?“I do get very, very emotional,” she said.Why?“I’m afraid we’re losing our country.”About an hour’s drive farther west is Lake Havasu City, a dusty desert city on the banks of the Colorado River. This is home to Ron Gould, the Mohave county supervisor who has spearheaded the push to scrap machines and move to hand counts.When the Guardian asked Gould to give his take on why hand counts are so important, he offered a different analysis. He wasn’t touting PCAPs or Chinese hacking.He even admitted that hand counts weren’t necessary in a place like Mohave. “Machines aren’t the big problem, it’s not really an issue in my county,” he said.The paradox is that the loudest, most passionate expressions of election denial are being made in staunch conservative parts of the state where the results of ballots are never in dispute. Trump trounced Biden in Mohave county by 75% to 24% – a margin that nobody would challenge.View image in fullscreenSo why is Gould so fired up? At the public meeting in which Passaro teared up, he told the crowd that he was willing to go to jail if it meant his county could hand-count the ballot. He also recently sued Mayes over the attorney general’s letter warning of criminal charges if the supervisors switched to manual counting.Gould explained his suit in personal terms: “I’m tired of them threatening me, that’s really what my lawsuit is about.”But he cast his compulsion for hand counts in much more portentous terms. It was all about democracy, he said: “I’m concerned that people are losing faith in elections. I’m concerned that people will decide not to vote because they think it’s rigged, and then you lose the democratic process. If going to a hand count takes care of it, that’s why I back it.”Gould is seeking to alleviate his constituents’ growing doubts about democracy by sowing doubts about democracy. Wouldn’t it be easier than moving to costly and cumbersome hand counts simply to tell his constituents that voting machines work?“They’re hearing that from everybody, and that doesn’t make them believe it’s true. So if hand counts are what they want, I’m going to give them what they want,” he said.Where does he think this could end?“In a revolution, actually,” he said. “People are ginned up. They feel disenfranchised, disgusted, that they have no control over their lives or the political direction of their country. If they can’t solve it at the ballot box, then they’re going to do it in other ways.” More

You might not have heard of Rosanne Boyland. She made the 10-hour drive from Kennesaw, Georgia, to Washington on 5 January 2021. The next day, the 34-year-old died after losing consciousness in the crush of a mob of Donald Trump supporters as it surged against US Capitol police. She would never have been there, her sister said later, “if it weren’t for all the misinformation”.The tragedy opens Barbara McQuade’s new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. The NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst explores how the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth has been weaponised to consolidate power in the hands of the few, undermine legal structures and drive voters such as Boyland. It is both cause and symptom of the US’s corrosive polarisation.A former national security prosecutor, McQuade has seen the threat of disinformation evolve from al-Qaida to Islamic State to cyber-attacks from Russia. Teaching at the University of Michigan Law School, where she is a professor, she had her students study special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on 2016 election interference by Russia.“I was fascinated by the details of accounts that were created by Russian operatives with names like Blacktivist or Heart of Texas posing as grassroots activists on the right or the left or various groups, and then taking very divisive stands on various issues just in an effort to sow discord,” McQuade, 59, says in an interview in the lobby of a Washington hotel.It was then Trump’s bogus “stop the steal” movement in 2020, based on the big lie of widespread voter fraud rejected in more than 60 lawsuits and by his own attorney general, that inspired her to write the book. It considers lessons learned ahead of a potential repeat in 2024 as the US braces for a Joe Biden v Trump rematch.“We will definitely get interference from foreign adversaries, including Russia and probably China, North Korea, maybe Iran, but there is a domestic part of this now where we are already hearing Donald Trump talk about how voting by mail is unreliable and laying the groundwork so that, if and when he loses, and there are more Democrats who have voted by mail than Republicans, he will have credibility.View image in fullscreen“He will say: ‘See, I won the election and then it all flipped for me. It was fraud.’ The same strategy that he used in in 2020. I don’t know if he’ll have new strategies but ‘stop the steal’ was a classic disinformation influence campaign based on no evidence whatsoever.”Trump commentary falls into categories. Some stop short of drawing comparisons with Adolf Hitler, perhaps wary of Godwin’s law, which holds that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. Others dive in, arguing that some aspects of Trump’s authoritarianism, nativism and charisma do evoke the Nazi tyrant in enlightening ways.McQuade goes there with an “authoritarian playbook” charting a brief history of disinformation from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to Jair Bolsonaro and Trump and noting the tactics: demonising the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts and stoking violence.She elaborates: “Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that there are two things that are essential to effective propaganda. One was a very simple repeatable message because when people hear a message repeated again and again – and start hearing it from different sources – they begin to believe it to be true.“The other is that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. All of us are guilty of white lies from time to time that we might say out of kindness. My sister might say your hair looks fine when she means anything but, or my husband might say to me, no, dear, that dress doesn’t make you look fat.“They’re saying these things out of kindness, even though they might be technically lying. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, most people would not ever imagine that anyone could have the audacity to lie about something that is so significant – he was talking about the role of Jewish people in society, for example.“But here the big lie for Trump was that the election has been stolen because people say: ‘How could you possibly pull that off? It’s so ridiculous.’ That’s part of what gives it its credibility and he knows that so I worry we’re going to begin to hear that again, and there are a significant number of Americans who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. There will always be people who are manipulated by those strategies.”Now the history of the January 6 insurrection itself is being rewritten, with the rioters recast as “patriots” and, if tried and imprisoned, as “hostages” whom Trump is promising to pardon if elected. Opinion polls show that more than a third of Americans believe that Biden’s election was illegitimate; Republicans are more sympathetic to the US Capitol rioters now than they were in 2021.McQuade says with some dismay: “They assaulted people, they brought weapons, they broke windows, they spread faeces on the walls of the temple of democracy, they carried Confederate flags in there. Now to refer to it as legitimate political discourse or ordinary tourist activity, and then to refer to people who have been arrested, charged and imprisoned for their crimes as hostages, is absolutely a brand of disinformation. I’m curious to see how many people will continue to fall for that in this election.”View image in fullscreenTrump svengali Steve Bannon, an arch election denier and vaccine conspiracy theorist, once memorably declared that the real opposition was the media and the way to deal with them was to “flood the zone with shit”. This brings to mind the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. McQuade cites the Russian author and journalist Peter Pomerantsev on “the fog of unknowability”.She explains: “Everything is possible and nothing matters, and so everything’s PR because people begin to doubt the very existence of truth. One day Putin might say the missiles were shot by Ukraine; the next day the missiles were shot by Russia; the next day the missiles were shot by Nato.“People don’t know what to think and consistency doesn’t matter. In fact, inconsistency is part of the point, because first people become angry and then they become cynical and then finally they become numb and disengaged from politics altogether and so that’s a very dangerous place for democracy.“The other thing that people think in Russia is that truth is for suckers: you should just get what you can while you can and everybody is corrupt, which is one of the things that causes Donald Trump to constantly be suggesting that the Bidens are corrupt – if everybody is corrupt, then it gives you permission to overlook Donald Trump’s corruption, right?“‘Well, they’re all corrupt. Who knows what to believe? All these investigations are themselves weaponised and corrupt so I might as well look for someone who is strong, who will advance my values despite all of his corruption.’ This normalisation of corruption is something that is part of it all as well.”How has it come to this? McQuade, who was born in Detroit and lives Ann Arbor, Michigan, identifies three central causes. First, the delivery mechanism of disinformation has changed. For centuries, the deceiver had to rely on word of mouth or leaflets or planting a false story, perhaps in a foreign newspaper, in the hope that someone would pick it up and pass it on. Now someone can spread a lie at the push of a button.“Social media is a wonderful tool and can connect us to people all over the world in wonderful ways, but can also be used as a weapon when people want to and so it has been a really efficient vehicle for delivering disinformation,” says the author. “They’re completely unaccountable and we have ceded all of our power on social media to a handful of young bro billionaires, whose interest, of course, is in their own profits, not in the social good.”Second, we are living through the worst political divisions in America since the 1861-1865 civil war. McQuade reckons it began with the combative, attention-grabbing Republican Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and has grown as parties concentrate on turning out their bases rather than finding common ground. With elections framed as an existential struggle between good and evil, voters demand political purity. “If my tribe says X then I say X too, even if I don’t believe X to be true.”Third, there is anxiety about a changing world: the climate crisis, refugees and border security, economic shifts with potential job losses. It is fertile soil for demagogues who promise that they alone can fix it. “We have leaders who want to use that to stoke fear because they perceive that that will be in their own political interest to attract those voters who are concerned about those changes and attract them into their own fold.“It’s a combination of those three things that Donald Trump has exploited in this country like no one we’ve ever seen. I don’t think that he’s necessarily a political genius, but I do think he’s a conman and a marketing genius who knows how to sell things. He’s a huckster and he has taken advantage of this moment for personal and political gain.”The huckster’s rise nearly a decade ago caught the media off guard. The old and laudable rules of balance, impartiality and not editorialising no longer seemed to work when one candidate was so blatantly mendacious. The New York Times newspaper broke the seal in 2016 with the headline: Trump Gives Up a Lie but Refuses to Repent. But as another election looms, McQuade worries that journalists have still not figured out how to cover him.“That which is novel is always newsworthy, that which is controversial is always newsworthy, and so they present those things. But in an effort to present both sides of a story and in a tradition of not calling people liars, they have allowed Donald Trump and his supporters to manipulate them and play them. They’ll just say he made a statement that is not backed up by evidence; say he’s lying! You gotta say it out loud.”View image in fullscreenBut Attack from Within is not a letter of surrender or obituary of America. McQuade offers solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law, such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, reviving local journalism, criminalising doxxing (the act of revealing identifying information about someone online) and considering a ban on online anonymous accounts.The former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan urges politicians to get ahead of the curve of artificial intelligence. “I hope that our Congress can do something which we failed to do with social media, which is get ahead of it, because if it can put things in place before they create havoc, it’s much easier than trying to react after the fact.”Individual citizens, she says, can gain skills be critical consumers of social media. “We can educate ourselves and take responsibility by doing things like, when we read an article, don’t rely just on the headline; we should actually read the article before we forward it to someone else.“We should look for second sources of a story; if there’s an outrageous story, someone else will be reporting it. If there is data in a story, we should look at that data. How big was the sample set? Was it a sample of three or a sample of 3m? That makes a difference. Were the results of this study a causation or just coincidence with an outcome? We need to do that.”McQuade also calls for increasing media literacy in schools and a revival of teaching civics rather than focusing on test scores. “Civics education is important for all of us, because when someone explains to you how the separation of powers works and how the three branches of government work, it is impossible to believe that a president could be immune from prosecution. We all need that education.”
Attack from Within is out now More