US Politics

The US supreme court on Friday allowed Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, while a legal fight continues.The justices said they would hear arguments in April and put on hold a lower court ruling that had blocked the Idaho law in hospital emergencies, based on a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration.Hospitals that receive Medicare funds are required by a federal law to provide emergency care, potentially including abortion, no matter if there’s a state law banning abortion, the administration argued.The legal fight followed the court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and allow states to severely restrict or ban abortion. The Joe Biden White House issued guidance about the law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act – or Emtala – two weeks after the high court ruling in 2022. The Democratic administration sued Idaho a month later.US district judge B Lynn Winmill in Idaho agreed with the administration. But in a separate case in Texas, a judge sided with the state.Idaho makes it a crime with a prison term of up to five years for anyone who performs or assists in an abortion.But the administration argues Emtala requires healthcare providers to perform abortions for emergency room patients when needed to treat an emergency medical condition, even if doing so might conflict with a state’s abortion restrictions.Those conditions include severe bleeding, pre-eclampsia and certain pregnancy-related infections.“For certain medical emergencies, abortion care is the necessary stabilizing treatment,” the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, wrote in an administration filing at the supreme court.The state argued that the administration was misusing a law intended to prevent hospitals from dumping patients and imposing “a federal abortion mandate” on states. “[Emtala] says nothing about abortion,” Idaho’s attorney general, Raul Labrador, told the court in a brief.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust on Tuesday, the federal appeals court in New Orleans came to the same conclusion as Labrador. A three-judge panel ruled that the administration cannot use Emtala to require hospitals in Texas to provide abortions for women whose lives are at risk due to pregnancy. Two of the three judges are appointees of Donald Trump, and the other was appointed by another Republican president, George W Bush.The appeals court affirmed a ruling by US district judge James Wesley Hendrix, also a Trump appointee. Hendrix wrote that adopting the Biden administration’s view would force physicians to place the health of the pregnant person over that of the fetus or embryo even though Emtala “is silent as to abortion”.After Winmill, an appointee of Democratic president Bill Clinton, issued his ruling, Idaho lawmakers won an order allowing the law to be fully enforced from an all-Republican, Trump-appointed panel of the ninth US circuit court of appeals. But a larger contingent of ninth circuit judges threw out the panel’s ruling and set arguments in the case for late January. More

The US supreme court will hear Donald Trump’s appeal of the Colorado ruling that he should be removed from the state ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, for inciting an insurrection.The court issued a brief order on Friday, setting up a dramatic moment in American history.The case will be argued on 8 February. As the Republican presidential primary will then be well under way, with Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada having voted – and as Trump has also been disqualified from the ballot in Maine, a ruling appealed in state court – a quick decision is expected.The Colorado primary is set for 5 March. The state government must begin mailing ballots to overseas voters on 20 January and to all others between 12 and 16 February. The ruling suspending Trump is stayed, however, as long as the supreme court appeal is ongoing.In the year of a high-stakes presidential election, the case is set to move rapidly, under a fierce spotlight. Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said that with “oral argument set for 8 February, the appeal will be extremely expedited … thus, briefs will probably be due as soon as possible, maybe [in] a week or 10 days for each side.”The 14th amendment was approved after the civil war, meant to bar from office supporters of the rebel Confederate states. But it has rarely been used. Cases against Trump were mounted after he was impeached but acquitted by the Senate over the attack on Congress by his supporters on 6 January 2021, then swiftly came to dominate the Republican presidential primary for 2024, all while maintaining the lie that his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 was the result of electoral fraud.Fourteenth-amendment challenges to Trump in other states have either failed or remain undecided.The Colorado supreme court ruled against Trump on 19 December but stayed the ruling until 4 January, pending appeal. That appeal came earlier this week, Trump’s lawyers arguing that only Congress could arbitrate such disputes and saying the relevant text in the 14th amendment – in section 3 – did not apply to the presidency or vice-presidency as they are not mentioned therein.ABC News has reported debates from the passage of the amendment, in 1866, in which the presidency was said to be covered.Prominent legal scholars including Laurence Tribe of Harvard and the retired conservative judge J Michael Luttig have said Trump should be disqualified from seeking the presidency under the 14th amendment.Luttig, who testified memorably before the House January 6 committee, called the Colorado ruling “historic … a monumental decision of constitutional law … masterful and … unassailable”. He has also said the US supreme court ruling will be “arguably … the single most important constitutional decision in all of our history”.Other voices, including conservative lawyers and professors and all Trump’s major opponents for the Republican nomination, have questioned whether section 3 applies to the presidency, or to someone not convicted of insurrection. Most (and some senior Democrats) have also said the Colorado ruling is anti-democratic, because only voters should decide Trump’s fitness for office.Luttig has countered such arguments, saying: “The 14th amendment itself, in section 3, answers the question whether disqualification is ‘anti-democratic’, declaring that it is not. Rather, it is the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that is anti-democratic, per the command of the constitution.”Trump also faces extensive legal jeopardy: he faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments, 17 concerning election subversion, and civil threats including cases over his business affairs and a defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape a judge said was “substantially true”.Nonetheless, he leads Republican polling by vast margins. Were the supreme court to rule against him in the Colorado case, the US would find itself in uncharted waters.On Friday, Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, said the campaign welcomed “a fair hearing at the supreme court to argue against the bad-faith, election-interfering, voter-suppressing, Democrat-backed and Biden-led, 14th amendment abusing decision” in Colorado.Cheung also claimed the Colorado case and others like it were “part of a well-funded effort by leftwing political activists hell-bent on stopping the lawful re-election of President Trump this November, even if it means disenfranchising voters”.Writing on his blog, Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of Los Angeles, California, pointed to uncertainties about how the supreme court case will unfold, given what he called a “blob” of a filing from Trump’s lawyers, while saying lawyers for Colorado “raised three questions, which somewhat overlap with Trump’s claims”.“This seems like it could be a free-for-all in arguments and briefing,” Hasen wrote, adding: “Buckle up; it’s going to be a wild ride from here on out.”That seems assured. The supreme court is not just dominated 6-3 by rightwingers who have delivered historic rulings including removing the federal right to abortion. It includes three justices installed when Trump was president.On Thursday, a Trump lawyer, Alina Habba, caused controversy when she told Fox News one such appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, would now “step up” for the man who put him on the court.Controversy also surrounds Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving justice whose wife, the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas, was involved in Trump’s election subversion.On Friday, Christina Harvey, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, said Thomas should not take part in the Colorado case.“The American people deserve a fair and impartial review … free from any conflicts of interest,” Harvey said. “Justice Thomas’s continued refusal to recuse himself from this case and others related to the efforts to overthrow the 2020 election … raises questions about the integrity of the judicial process and the influence of political bias.“As trust in the supreme court reaches new lows, decisions like these only reinforce Americans’ belief that supreme court justices are politicians in robes. To begin to restore public confidence in our nation’s highest court, Thomas must recuse himself.” More

A day before the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Joe Biden delivered a pointed speech to warn voters against re-electing Donald Trump, criticizing the likely Republican presidential nominee as a fundamental threat to democracy in an attempt to shape the dynamics of the 2024 election.“Today we’re here to answer the most important of questions: is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said. “Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.“America, as we began this election year, we must be clear: democracy is on the ballot.”Sharply contrasting himself with his opponent, Biden accused Trump of attempting to undermine America’s system of government, painting the Republican leader as a would-be autocrat hellbent on revenge. Biden noted that Trump had vowed “retribution” against his political enemies if he is elected, and had indicated he would act as a dictator on the first day of his second term.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him – not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future,” Biden said. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future.”The speech came a day before the anniversary of the January 6 attack in 2021, when a group of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A bipartisan Senate report found that seven people died as a result of the insurrection, and Trump now faces four felony counts over his role in the attack and his broader campaign to overturn the election results.But Trump has continued to defend those who carried out the attack as “patriots”, promising to issue pardons to them if he is elected.“In trying to rewrite the facts of January 6, Trump was trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election. But we knew the truth because we saw with our own eyes,” Biden said.“Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault. They were insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the constitution. They were there to destroy the constitution.”Trump, who spoke to hundreds of supporters in Iowa Friday night in his first campaign visit of 2024, shot back at Biden’s speech, painting a dark portrait of the US. He called it a “failing” nation, beset by “terrorists” and immigrants from “mental asylums” pouring over the US-Mexico border.Biden highlighted the setting of his speech, which took place roughly 10 miles from Valley Forge national historical park in Pennsylvania, to underscore the high stakes of the presidential race. During America’s fight for independence in the revolutionary war, George Washington and his Continental army troops camped at Valley Forge during a difficult winter.“After all we’ve been through in our history – from independence to civil war to two world wars to a pandemic to insurrection – I refuse to believe that in 2024 we Americans would choose to walk away from what’s made us the greatest nation in the history of the world: freedom, liberty,” Biden said.The speech came at a particularly vulnerable moment for Biden. Polls show Biden’s approval rating mired in the high 30s with Americans expressing concerns about the state of the economy, despite strong job creation and the easing of inflation. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that only 22% of Americans view economic conditions as “good” or “excellent”, while 78% consider current conditions to be “fair” or “poor”. National polls show Biden and Trump running neck and neck in a hypothetical general election.Biden is holding a series of events to reframe the 2024 election as a fight for democracy and fundamental freedoms. In addition to the Valley Forge speech, Biden will speak on Monday at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine African Americans were fatally shot by a white supremacist in 2015.Biden’s campaign has said the president will also hold events later this month to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a federal right to abortion access. That ruling was overturned by the conservative-leaning supreme court in 2022, resulting in abortion bans in more than a dozen states.“When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he said, ‘We are in the battle for the soul of America,’” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters on Tuesday. “As we look towards November 2024, we still are. The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since.”Despite that grim outlook, Biden expressed his trademark optimism as he spoke to supporters in Pennsylvania, reiterating his message of American exceptionalism and urging voters to embrace hope.“None of you believe America is failing. We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism,” Biden said. “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: who are we?”Reuters contributed to this report More

Michigan Republicans are on the verge of ousting their party’s conspiracy theory-touting chair after a tenure marred by financial collapse and internal feuds that have at times turned into physical altercations.Kristina Karamo, the Michigan Republican party chair, an election-denying activist who won a hard-fought race for the position last year, is facing a likely vote to fire her at a special meeting convened by concerned party leaders on Saturday.“She has failed as a leader,” said Bree Moeggenberg, a state committee member who called for the Saturday special meeting to vote on Karamo’s removal. “She has failed to build a bigger coalition of Republicans, and instead, she has disenfranchised many, including those who don’t specifically agree with her.”Anger over the chair’s leadership has grown in recent weeks. A majority of the Michigan GOP’s district chairs have demanded Karamo’s resignation. Even Karamo’s running mate and co-chair has called for her removal.“We see our opportunity to win Michigan for Republicans slipping through our fingers,” wrote party leaders in an open letter to Karamo, signed by eight of the Michigan Republican party’s 13 district chairs. “We, the undersigned District Chairs, are locking arms in our request for your resignation. Please put an end to the chaos in our Party,” they wrote.It’s unclear whether Karamo’s opponents will convince enough people to show up to the Saturday meeting to achieve the quorum needed to officially oust her – and even if they do, Karamo may not accept defeat. But it could prove the culmination of a year of bitter infighting.The calls for Karamo to step down come less than a year after she was elected to lead the state party and three years after her outspoken claims of election fraud elevated her from a virtually unknown Christian podcaster and former community college teacher to a leading voice in Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit the results of the 2020 election. She parlayed that newfound prominence into winning the GOP nomination for secretary of state in 2022, but was crushed in the general election. Despite that lopsided loss, she ran against a Trump-endorsed candidate for party chairman last year – and defeated him.Karamo’s outlandish views are not confined to election conspiracy theories. She has echoed the claim promoted by the QAnon conspiracy theory movement that a shadowy cabal of elites are harvesting children’s organs.“There’s a ton of money involved in those freshly harvested organs,” Karamo said on a 2020 podcast hosted by RedPill78, a conspiracy theory website. She has also called Beyoncé and Jay-Z satanists, said yoga is a satanic ritual and described Cardi B as a “tool of Lucifer”.But it’s her apparent financial mismanagement of the party as much as her polarizing politics and wild views that have local GOP leaders prepared to oust her. The state party was already in poor financial shape when she took over, with donations drying up after Democrats won a trifecta in the statehouse in 2022 – but things have gotten significantly worse on her watch. Since Karamo took over, the party has gone further into debt, with other party officials furious over questionable decisions like a loan to spend more than $100,000 to pay a speaking fee to Jim Caviezel, the actor in the 2004 biblical drama The Passion of the Christ who has emerged as a celebrity in QAnon-affiliated circles.Karamo initially agreed via text message to a phone interview, but subsequent attempts to reach her were unsuccessful. She and her general counsel on Thursday called for a town hall on Friday evening “to discuss any concerns or answer any questions” about the party’s legal woes in an apparent last-ditch effort to salvage her job.The Michigan GOP under Karamo’s leadership has even sued the Michigan Republican party Trust and Comerica Bank, which reportedly sent the party a notice of default, in an effort to gain control of the party’s Lansing headquarters. In a motion filed on Tuesday, the trust, which is governed by former establishment party leaders, asked the court to sanction the party for engaging in a “frivolous” suit.A January email obtained by the Guardian from the state GOP treasurer, Jennifer Standerfer, called concerns about the party’s financial solvency – among them, an internal report that showed the party owed more than $600,000 – “misinformation” and claimed the party “retains a net profit of approximately $30,000”. Standerfer did not immediately reply to a request for comment and has not publicly substantiated the claim.The stakes could not be higher for the state GOP. Michigan is one of a handful of states that will decide the 2024 presidential election. And local candidates on the ballot are worried about their own fates as well.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’m coming up for re-election in 2024,” said state representative Mark Tisdel, who articulated the fear, shared by state party activists, that the current Republican party would be unable to shore up campaign cash for state elected officials. “The anticipation is that with limited resources, there will be limited support.”Even if Republicans manage to remove Karamo from office, it is unclear who would be able to take over and unify the party – the divide within the state GOP runs deeper than their controversial chair. Numerous county party chapters are at war internally, with tensions in the Hillsdale and Kalamazoo GOP chapters spilling out into public battles. At a July meeting of the party’s executive committee, tensions devolved into a physical altercation when an activist tackled a local party chair, later citing a “war” between the grassroots and establishment Republicans as a cause of the dispute in an interview with the Detroit Free Press.“I had somebody say to me, ‘Well, I’m more Maga than you,’” said Kelly Sackett, the chair of the Kalamazoo Republican party, who is facing a protracted revolt within her chapter by allies of Karamo who view her as insufficiently rightwing. Sackett and her allies accused the state party of meddling in their affairs after the Michigan GOP’s general counsel called for a meeting that the Kalamazoo county leadership denounced as in violation of the party’s bylaws.Karamo’s allies offered a curious justification.“It was a ‘Peace Summit’ the term was selected because, in world politics, it is a meeting of warring factions to reach a peace accord,” the Michigan GOP general counsel, Daniel Hartman, replied in a September email obtained by the Guardian. “It was not called a meeting, and I am aware that the bylaws do not ‘authorize’ a meeting.”Party activists told the Guardian the rise of a paranoid form of Christian nationalism within the party has also played a role in dividing Michigan Republicans.“One of the things that has been said is that the Kalamazoo county Republican party is godless,” said Sackett, “and we start every single meeting with an invocation.” Muslim leaders in the party have also spoken publicly about the party’s evangelical Christian leadership, which they viewed as exclusionary and hostile to Michigan’s diverse population.“It’s fundamentalism,” said Jon Smith, a former Michigan GOP district chair who supported Karamo before becoming disillusioned with her leadership. “What I’m seeing is, like, if you don’t believe in their [view of] salvation 100% to a tee, you’re the enemy or you’re evil.” More

Brett Kavanaugh, the US supreme court justice, will “step up” for Donald Trump and help defeat attempts to remove the former president from the ballot in Colorado and Maine for inciting an insurrection, a Trump lawyer said.“I think it should be a slam dunk in the supreme court,” Alina Habba told Fox News on Thursday night. “I have faith in them.“You know, people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up. Those people will step up. Not because they’re pro-Trump but because they’re pro-law, because they’re pro-fairness. And the law on this is very clear.”Kavanaugh was the second of three justices appointed by Trump, creating a 6-3 rightwing majority that has delivered major Republican victories including removing the federal right to abortion and loosening gun control laws.Habba’s reference to Trump “going through hell” was to a stormy confirmation during which Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, which he angrily denied. Trump reportedly wavered on Kavanaugh, only for senior Republicans to persuade him to stay strong.Observers were quick to notice Habba’s apparent invitation to corruption.Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said: “Legal ethics alert. If … Kavanaugh feels in any way that he owes Trump and will ‘step up’, then [Habba] should be sanctioned by the bar for saying this on TV and thus trying to prejudice a proceeding.”Last month, the Colorado supreme court and the Maine secretary of state ruled that Trump should be removed from the ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, passed after the civil war to stop insurrectionists holding office.Trump incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in 2021, an attempt to stop certification of his defeat by Joe Biden. Impeached but acquitted, he is now the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination this year.Trump has appealed both state rulings. In a supreme court filing in the Colorado case, lawyers argued that only Congress could resolve such a dispute and that the presidency was not an office of state as defined in the 14th amendment.The relevant text does not mention the presidency or vice-presidency. ABC News has reported exchanges in debate in 1866 in which those positions are covered.The supreme court has not yet said if it will consider the matter.Norm Eisen, a White House ethics tsar turned CNN legal analyst, said: “It’s likely … the supreme court will move to resolve this. They may do it quickly. They may not do it quickly because by filing this petition … Trump has stayed the Colorado proceedings. So at the moment he remains on the ballot. The supreme court does have to speak to it.”Habba said:“[Trump] has not been charged with insurrection. He has not been prosecuted for it. He has not been found guilty of it.”She then made her prediction about Kavanaugh and other justices “stepping up”. More

Despite receiving enough signatures to appear on the ballot, a transgender woman has been disqualified from an Ohio state house race because she omitted her previous name, raising concern that other transgender candidates nationwide may face similar barriers.Vanessa Joy of was one of four transgender candidates running for state office in Ohio, largely in response to proposed restrictions of the rights of LGBTQ+ people. She was running as a Democrat in house district 50 – a heavily Republican district in Stark county, Ohio – against Republican candidate Matthew Kishman. Joy legally changed her name and birth certificate in 2022, which she says she provided to the Stark county board of elections for the 19 March primary race.But as Joy found out on Tuesday, a little-known 1990s state law says that a candidate must provide any name changes within the last five years to qualify for the ballot. Since the law is not currently listed on the candidate requirement guidelines on the Ohio secretary of state’s website, Joy did not know it existed.To provide her former name, Joy said, would be to use her deadname – a term used by the transgender community to refer to the name given at birth, not one they chose that aligns with their gender identity.And while Joy said the spirit of the law is to weed out bad actors, it creates a barrier for transgender people who want to run for office and may not want to share their deadname for important reasons, including concern about their personal safety.“If I had known that I had to put my deadname on my petitions, I personally would have because being elected was important to me,” Joy said. “But for many it would be a barrier to entry because they would not want their names on the petitions.”She continued: “It’s a danger, and that name is dead.”The office of the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, and the Stark county board of elections did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on Thursday. It is not clear if this law has applied to any current or previous state lawmakers.Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA law school and an election expert, said that requiring candidates to disclose any name changes posed problems in Ohio, but generally serves a purpose. “If a candidate has something to hide in their past like criminal activity, disclosing former names used by the candidate would make sense,” Hasen said in an email.Sean Meloy, the vice-president of political programs for the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which supports LGBTQ+ candidates, said he did not know of tracking efforts to find how many states require name changes in petition paperwork.“The biggest issue is the selective enforcement of it,” Meloy said in an interview on Thursday.Over the past few years, many states have ramped up restrictions on transgender people – including barring minors from accessing gender-affirming care such as puberty blockers and hormones. In some states, that has extended to limitations on which school bathrooms trans children and students can use and which sports teams they can join.Last year, Meloy said, a record number of candidates who are transgender sought and won office, and he expects that trend to continue in 2024.Ohio lawmakers passed restrictions late last year that were vetoed by the state’s Republican governor, though many Republican state representatives say they are planning to override that veto as soon as next week.Meloy said that some conservatives are trying to silence transgender voices.He pointed to Zooey Zephyr, a transgender lawmaker who was blocked last year from speaking on Montana’s House floor after she refused to apologize for telling colleagues who supported a ban on gender-affirming care that they would have blood on their hands.“Now that anti-trans legislation is being moved once again,” Meloy said, “this seems like a selectively enforced action to try to keep another trans person from doing that.”Joy appealed against her disqualification on Thursday, and is now seeking legal representation. She plans to try to change Ohio’s law. More

It is not a prediction, but it is a possibility – and a growing one. Barring a major upset, Donald Trump is on course to be the Republican nominee for US president. If he wins that contest, which begins in earnest in Iowa on 15 January, then polling in the handful of must-win, battleground states suggests he has a better than even chance of beating Joe Biden in November. Of course, much can change between now and then: once voters’ minds are concentrated on the looming prospect of a Trump return, many might recoil. All the same, Americans need to prepare themselves now for a second Trump presidency – and so does the rest of the world.A good first step will be shedding any illusions that the sequel would simply be a repeat of the original. Trump 2.0 will be more focused and more capable than the initial iteration. In January 2017, he was a novice, new to Washington, new to political office and clueless as to the machinery of government. He relied on appointees who could, and often did, thwart his crazier, darker impulses – even if that meant swiping key documents from his desk before he had a chance to see or sign them.Trump is different now. Four years in the White House taught him where the levers of power are and who he needs to push aside to reach them. Next time, he won’t allow himself to be babysat or reined in by assorted appropriate adults: there will be no Rex Tillerson at the state department or James Mattis at the Pentagon. Instead, he will populate his administration with loyalists undistracted by any duty to democratic norms and conventions, committed solely to ensuring Trump’s will is done. Once those informal, unwritten constraints are off, there is little that will stand in his way.He has been shockingly upfront about this. As early as last summer, Trump aides were briefing their plans for a massive presidential power grab should their boss be re-elected. They promise to bring independent agencies, including those that oversee the media and the internet, or trade and industry, under the direct control of the Oval Office. They will hand themselves the power to fire tens of thousands of civil servants, replacing them with yet more loyalists – eyeing up especially the intelligence and security agencies, rooting out anyone deemed unreliable. In the words of Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump term and is now involved in drawing up plans for a second: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”Team Trump makes no secret of its particular interest in the justice department, ditching the convention that the executive stay out of decisions over who does, and does not, get prosecuted. With judicial independence cast aside, Trump would be able not only to pardon himself and his pals, but to order investigations into his enemies, starting with the Biden family and all those who, he believes, have wronged him – including, no doubt, those state election officials who refused to fiddle the numbers and declare him the winner of the 2020 contest. If that sounds hyperbolic, remember Trump’s stated promise to his supporters: “I am your warrior. I am your justice … I am your retribution.”Not for nothing is there serious concern in the US that January 2025 could open a new chapter of US authoritarianism, even an American dictatorship – with Trump bent on filling the judiciary and the upper reaches of the military with those whose first loyalty will be not to the US constitution but to him. Perhaps the most telling moment of the primary season so far came last month when Trump was interviewed by major league sycophant Sean Hannity of Fox News. Clearly trying to help, Hannity invited Trump to quash the rumours that he planned to rule as a dictator, abusing power and seeking revenge against his political rivals. “Except for day one,” came the reply. “After that, I’m not a dictator.So Americans have much to brace for: a Trump presidency with all the darkness, bigotry and corruption of the first, only this time more determined, efficient and ruthless. But it is not only those inside the country who need to gird themselves. The rest of the world must prepare too.Among the more startling pieces in a collection compiled by the Atlantic magazine under the heading “If Trump wins”, was one by the analyst Anne Applebaum. Her stark prediction: “Trump will abandon Nato.” She makes the persuasive case that even if he does not formally withdraw from the alliance, Trump can render it defunct simply by shaking confidence in its central commitment: that each member come to the defence of any other if attacked. Once the likes of Vladimir Putin conclude that Trump no longer believes in that creed of collective defence, the game will be up.The immediate casualty of such a shift will be Ukraine. Kyiv has relied on US arms and aid since Russia’s invasion nearly two years ago, an act of aggression whose initial stages were praised by Trump as “genius”. A re-elected Joe Biden would keep that support for Ukraine coming. Under Trump, it would dry up.Orysia Lutsevych of Chatham House told me that, in that scenario, Kyiv would have to pursue a “totally different war strategy, lowering its ambition from retaking territory seized by Russia to denying Russia the opportunity to take more”. One former high-ranking figure in the US military reckons that “the best we can hope for is that Europe pressures [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy into accepting some form of armistice with Russia that concedes Donbas and Crimea”, along with international security guarantees. He offers that verdict with no enthusiasm: “This is exactly the outcome Putin desires.”It’s worth spelling out what that means: a Moscow no longer deterred by the threat of Nato, rewarded for its aggression and free to pursue more elsewhere, eyeing up its neighbours and licking its lips. If the US is led by a man who, we already know, grovels to dictators and disdains the US’s allies, other nations will start to recalculate: watch smaller, more vulnerable countries in Asia cosy up to Beijing, as a matter of self-preservation. Some might welcome a Trump-led retreat as the end of US imperialism; in reality, it would merely advance the day when Chinese and Russian imperialism take its place.None of this can wait. The US’s allies need to prepare now for a change that could well be just a year away. To defend Ukraine without US help will take money and hardware on a scale dwarfing anything Europe has come up with so far. But no less important, the return of Trump will also require deep cooperation, whether on security or the climate emergency, especially among the nations of Europe – and that includes Britain.The go-it-alone fantasies of the Brexit era were always delusional. In a second Trump era, they would be downright dangerous. An orange storm could be coming – and we need to be ready.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
Join Jonathan Freedland at 8pm GMT on Tuesday 16 January for a Guardian Live online event. He will be talking to Julian Borger, whose new memoir, I Seek a Kind Person, reveals the story of his father’s escape from the Nazis via an ad placed in the Guardian. Tickets available here More

The re-election of Donald Trump would bring “four more years of chaos” the US “won’t survive”, the former president’s closest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, told an Iowa audience, turning her fire on the frontrunner as the first vote of the 2024 primary looms.The former South Carolina governor has caught up with Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, in the battle for second place in Republican presidential polling. The gap between Haley and Trump is also closing, particularly in New Hampshire, the second state to vote when it holds its primary on 23 January.Trump faces a slate of criminal and civil trials as well as attempts to keep him off the ballot, for inciting the 6 January 2021 insurrection.Nonetheless, he remains formidably popular with the Republican base and Haley, who as UN ambassador under Trump was often touted as a potential vice-president, must perform a balancing act on the campaign trail.In Iowa, she said Trump had been “the right president at the right time”. But she added: “The reality is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him, and we all know that’s true … and we can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.”Saying she used to tell Trump he was “his own worst enemy”, Haley added: “We have a country to save, and that means no more drama. No more taking things personally.”Haley was speaking in Des Moines, as CNN hosted town hall events for her and DeSantis, rivals who will also meet on the debate stage next week, as Trump continues to avoid such traditional forums. DeSantis also used his airtime to attack Trump, but Haley is widely seen to have acquired greater momentum and therefore attracted greater attention.A confident performer and stump speaker, she is not immune to gaffes. On stage at Grand View University, she addressed her controversial failure last week in New Hampshire to say slavery caused the civil war.Saying she “had Black friends growing up”, and that slavery was “a very talked-about thing” in her state (the first to secede in 1860, its declaration of secession citing slavery as the cause), Haley said: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have said slavery. But in my mind that’s a given, that everybody associates the civil war with slavery.”She was also forced to deal with a remark in New Hampshire only the day before, when she appeared to dismiss the importance of Iowa, telling voters: “You know how to do this. You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.”DeSantis is Trump’s closest challenger in Iowa, Haley closest in New Hampshire. In Iowa, Haley claimed she had been joking.“You are going to see me fight until the very end, on the last day in Iowa,” she said. “And I’m not playing in one state. I’m fighting in every state. Because I think everybody’s worth fighting for.”Trump’s campaign has switched to a fighting stance, airing its first attack ad against Haley in New Hampshire this week, portraying her as soft on immigration.That offensive coincided with Haley securing the endorsement of Don Bolduc, a far-right former special forces general who ran for US Senate with Trump’s backing but now says: “With Trump, there’s too many distractions. There’s too much risk of losing.”Still, any Trump opponent faces an uphill fight: Haley’s state, South Carolina, will vote in February and she trails Trump there by about 30 points. There are also other candidates still in the race.On Thursday, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate, pinning his hopes on New Hampshire, angrily rejected calls to drop out and throw his weight behind Haley.“The fact is that I’m running for president of the United States and no one’s voted yet,” Christie told Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio host, in an interview that started awkwardly and went downhill from there. “And I don’t have an obligation to do anything other than to answer questions, tell the truth, run a good campaign, and try to win. And so, you know, where this has become Nikki Haley’s campaign when no one’s voted yet is kind of a mystery to me.”The biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are also still in the race. But their odds are even longer than Christie’s.On Friday, writing on Substack, the Republican operative turned anti-Trump crusader Steve Schmidt said: “Nikki Haley is an imitation of Trump, a hollow woman … firmly on Trump’s side of the field. She is an acolyte who has strayed, probably much to Trump’s amusement because he knows she will be back in the menagerie more loyal than ever.“It is Chris Christie who stands alone against Trump. He is … the only moral choice.”Christie, however, told Hewitt that if he did not win the nomination, and even if Trump did, he would not vote for Joe Biden. More