US Politics

In a way, George Santos is one of the great success stories of American politics.The New York congressman is not responsible for exceptional legislative achievements. His brief tenure in Congress will not be held up as a success story for students of political history.Santos’s accomplishment has instead been to win election by weaving a staggering, barely believable web of lies, deception and deceit that is surely unmatched in the modern age.That wave of fabrication helped Santos win election in November 2022. But a year later, the 35-year-old has been charged with 23 federal crimes, and while he has managed to cling on to his seat in the House of Representatives, he could find himself booted out of there when Congress returns to DC next week.The list of Santos’s lies bears digging into.While he was running for Congress, Santos lied about almost everything that had ever happened to him. Sometimes it was to embellish his résumé and make himself appear more electable, but frequently, and fascinatingly, he lied for no reason at all, about things of zero consequence to his political career.Santos claimed he was privately educated at an elite New York City high school. He wasn’t. He said he went to Baruch College, where – according to Santos – he graduated in the top 1% of his class. Baruch, based in Manhattan, said it has no record of him going there, and Santos later confessed he “didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning”.While running for election, he said his mother was working in the south tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York. Her immigration history shows that she wasn’t even in the country.Santos said he was Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Holocaust. That wasn’t true. He claimed he owned 13 properties. That was also a lie; in fact, in 2022, he was living at his sister’s home.He said he worked for Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, which he didn’t, and said he ran a pet charity, only for the New York Times to discover that a) it wasn’t a registered charity and b) there were serious questions about how the charity had spent the money it raised.Some of Santos’s lies were so banal it is unclear what the benefit was in telling them. Santos claimed he had been a “star” on Baruch’s volleyball team. (He hadn’t, obviously, but what was the point of making it up? Is the college sports vote that crucial in Nassau county?)Santos also told a roommate that he had worked as a model, and said he produced a Spider-Man musical on Broadway. Neither of those things happened.But, over a period of two years, the lies worked.Santos was an unknown when he ran against Thomas Suozzi, the Democratic incumbent in New York’s third district, in 2020. After a stronger-than-expected showing, Santos ran again in 2022. Suozzi, who had been in office for six years, had stepped down, and Santos defeated Democratic nominee Robert Zimmerman by seven points, winning a seat to represent the majority of Nassau county, just east of New York City.“I ran, I lost and from defeat I grabbed the power and harnessed the energy to run again,” Santos said at a Republican Jewish Coalition event, 11 days after his win last year.“Many said I couldn’t win. Pundits across the nation, insiders, DC people [said]: ‘George Santos can’t win, let’s not pay attention to him.’“Well baby, you got that wrong.”Santos might now be wishing people had paid even less attention to him.After the New York Times reported on Santos’s litany of fabrications in December 2022, the web of lies began to fall apart. More seriously for Santos, alleged crimes were soon catching up with him, too.In October federal prosecutors charged Santos with 10 new crimes, including an allegation that he stole donors’ identities and used their credit cards without their knowledge. Santos had previously been charged with applying for and receiving unemployment benefits, even though he had a job, and misusing campaign contributions, and the total number of crimes Santos is now charged with is 23.Despite mounting evidence, the House has twice voted against expelling him. But on 17 November, when the ethics committee issued a damning report on Santos, the tide seemingly began to turn.The Republican-led committee found “substantial evidence” that Santos had used campaign funds for personal purposes, with the report detailing extravagant – and possibly illegal – spending of campaign money.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSantos allegedly spent almost $3,000 of campaign money on Botox treatments, while the committee also found that $4,127.80 had been spent at the luxury brand Hermès.Other expenditures by Santos allegedly include payments to OnlyFans, an online platform known for sexual content, and purchases at Sephora, a cosmetics store.Given what we now know about Santos, it’s barely believable that he got this far. Political campaigns normally conduct extensive opposition research on candidates, but Jay Jacobs, chair of the Nassau County Democrats, said that Santos “wasn’t considered a serious candidate by Republicans or Democrats”, and so slipped through the cracks.“He had run before, he was looked upon as kind of a joke, so nobody took it seriously,” Jacobs said.“Had they taken him seriously, had they felt that he had the slightest chance, I think the [Democratic] congressional campaign committee [DCCC], which does the research on this, would have dug a lot deeper.The DCCC, Jacobs said, has “435 contests across the country” that it needs to monitor. It has to choose where best to invest money and time in opposition research and background checking.“With George Santos being – and I’m sorry, but this is how I’d refer to him – a bit of a clown, they just didn’t give it that kind of attention,” Jacobs said.There was arguably a failure among the media too. The New York Times did great work in breaking the extraordinary story on Santos’s deceit, but it only did so on 19 December 2022 – more than a month after Santos had been voted into office. Santos slipped by other New York-focused newspapers and TV news channels, and slid into office.For almost a year Republicans, who have a slim majority in the House, have been willing to hold their nose regarding Santos. The damning ethics committee report, however, may prove the final nail in the coffin.After the report was published Santos said he would not run for re-election, but he is expected to face a third expulsion vote, likely to come next week. Two-thirds of the House would need to vote to remove Santos, and reports suggest that there are enough members ready to oust him, bringing an end to one of the great political con jobs of our age.“We did it! #NY03 has spoken!” Santos declared after his victory in 2022.“I promised one thing throughout this entire campaign: to be your champion in DC. Thank you for this opportunity to be your voice!”Instead, Santos has spent almost the entirety of his time in DC fending off accusations of criminal behavior and apologizing for a vast array of deceptions and mistruths.In retrospect, that promise to champion the residents of New York’s third congressional district was just another lie, in a political career defined by dishonesty. More

“Marjorie Taylor Greene has been one of the most fierce warriors in Congress for America First and all it stands for,” Donald Trump announces, before the reader reaches the table of contents for the far-right Georgia congresswoman’s book. Over more than 275 pages, the tome duly reads like an audition for the No 2 slot on the 2024 Republican presidential ticket.The idea of being Trump’s vice-presidential pick is “talked about frequently and I know my name is on a list but really my biggest focus right now is serving the district that elected me”, Greene told the Guardian in August. “But, of course, that’s up to [Trump]. But I would be honored and consider it … I’ll help him do whatever in any way I can.”Venom, score-settling, fiction, self-absolution, self-aggrandizement. Greene’s book, MTG, has it all. It is published by Winning Team, the publishing firm Donald Trump Jr co-founded. In an unforced error, the book was printed in Canada. So much for America First.On the page, Greene repeatedly reminds us that she is a mother and a Christian. As for her divorce in 2022 from her long-suffering husband and business partner? Barely a word. As for its alleged surrounding circumstances, affairs, “tantric sex guru” and all? Nada.Greene lies about January 6. She claims Democrats abandoned the House chamber to the rioters and exited without resistance, in contrast to brave, gun-toting Republicans. Not so. Jason Crow, a former army ranger from Colorado, was among Democrats who stood their ground and helped members of Congress escape.“Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t exist in the same reality as the rest of us,” Crow previously told the Guardian. “For those of us who were there on January 6 and actually defended the chamber from violent insurrectionists, her view is patently false. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”Greene offered no rebuttal. Like Trump, she embraces the insurrectionists who attacked Congress. She writes about visiting them in lock-up, calls the DC jail a gulag.“The events of January 6 have been mischaracterized by the Democrats … and these people cruelly mistreated,” Greene writes. “They will not be forgotten. I will never forget.”She recently tweeted: “[Christopher] Wray’s FBI targets innocent conservatives and MAGA grandmas who peacefully walked through the Capitol on January 6 instead of real threats. We cannot trust them to keep us safe.”In her book, she also offers a meandering defense of her famous comment about so-called Jewish space lasers, insisting she is not antisemitic. Instead, Green advises, she has “donated to the Temple Institute in Israel, a fund that helps rebuild the Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in Israel”.The mission of the group, Machon HaMikdash, is to rebuild the temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock – one of Islam’s holiest places – and to the reinstate the sacrificial rite. Against a backdrop of Hamas terror and Israel’s response, with Jerusalem on edge, this may not be the most opportune time to trumpet such an audacious endeavor. Lots could go wrong, quickly.When Greene was a congressional newbie, the then Democratic House majority and 11 Republicans stripped her of committee assignments, after it came to light that she had “liked” a January 2019 Facebook post that called for “a bullet to the head” of Nancy Pelosi, then the Democratic speaker.Greene also branded Pelosi a traitor, accused her treason and demanded the death penalty. Sooner than most, she had realized Republican politics had become a mixture of performance art, menace and violence.Professional wrestling comes to mind. In 2018, after Greg Gianforte body-slammed Ben Jacobs, then a Guardian reporter, Trump called the Montana Republican “my guy”.“Greg is smart. And by the way, never wrestle him,” Trump warned. “You understand. Never.” The base had to be fed and flattered. Gianforte is governor now.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGreene also posted to social media a photo in which she held a gun alongside images of the Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The caption: “Squad’s worst nightmare.”“I urge my colleagues to look at that image and tell me what message you think it sends,” Steny Hoyer, the then House majority leader said, pointing to the inflammatory post. “Here she is armed with a deadly assault rifle pointed toward three Democratic members.”In her book, Greene does not address such escapades directly. Instead, she dumps on the Squad and revels in her liberation from committee work, which led to her repeated demands for roll call votes bringing the House to a crawl.“With all my free time, I stayed on the floor for every bill I could and asked for recorded votes,” she recalls. “It became kind of my thing, shocking representatives on both sides!”These days, after getting close to Kevin McCarthy while he was speaker, Greene sits on the House oversight and homeland security committees. At a recent hearing, she mistakenly suggested to Wray, the FBI director and a Trump appointee, that he works for the Department of Homeland Security. “I’m not part of the Department of Homeland Security,” he responded, evenly. Greene remained unmoved, viewing him as an ally of Joe Biden.In MTG, Greene proudly admits calling Lauren Boebert, a Colorado congresswoman and rival rightwing rabble rouser, a “little bitch”. Greene has also reportedly referred to Boebert as a “whore”. Lesson: some people never leave middle school.Purportedly, Boebert stole Greene’s thunder by plagiarizing and introducing as her own an article of impeachment Greene had already filed against Biden. In her book, Greene also accuses Boebert of being the driving force behind her expulsion from the rightwing House Freedom caucus.Under Trump, retribution and vengeance are Republicans’ fuel. Greene wants to sit at his right hand.
MTG is published in the US by Winning Team Publishing More

Republican George Santos has said he expects to be expelled from Congress following a scathing report by the House ethics committee that found substantial evidence of lawbreaking by the lying New York representative.In a defiant speech Friday sprinkled with taunts and obscenities aimed at his congressional colleagues, Santos insisted he was “not going anywhere”. But he acknowledged that his time as a member of Congress may soon be coming to an end.“I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” he said Friday night during a conversation on X Spaces. “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”The comments came one week after the Republican chair of the House ethics committee, Michael Guest, introduced a resolution to expel Santos once the body returns from Thanksgiving break.While Santos has survived two expulsion votes, many of his colleagues who formerly opposed the effort now say they support it, citing the findings of the committee’s months-long investigation into a wide range of alleged misconduct committed by Santos.The report found Santos used campaign funds for personal purposes, such as purchases at luxury retailers and adult content websites, then caused the campaign to file false or incomplete reports.“Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” investigators wrote. They noted that he did not cooperate with the report and repeatedly “evaded” straightforward requests for information.On Friday, Santos said he did not want to address the specifics of the report, which he claimed were “slanderous” and “designed to force me out of my seat”. Any defense of his conduct, he said, could be used against him in the ongoing criminal case brought by federal prosecutors.Instead, Santos struck a contemplative tone during the three-hour livestream, tracing his trajectory from Republican “It girl” to “the Mary Magdalene of the United States Congress”. He lashed out at his congressional colleagues, accusing them of misconduct – such as voting while drunk – that he said was far worse than anything he’d done.“They all act like they’re in ivory towers with white pointy hats and they’re untouchable,” he said. “Within the ranks of United States Congress, there’s felons galore, there’s people with all sorts of shystie backgrounds.”His decision not to seek re-election, he said, was not because of external pressure, but due to his frustration with the “sheer arrogance” of his colleagues.“These people need to understand it’s done when I say it’s done, when I want it to be done, not when they want it to be done,” he added. “That’s kind of where we are there.” More

In the year since two elected officials in rural Arizona tried to hand-count ballots then refused to certify an election, the consequences have started to trickle in.Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, the two Republican supervisors in Cochise county who led these efforts, were recently subpoenaed as part of an investigation by the state’s attorney general.The Republican-led county on the US-Mexico border has had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and settlements for the lawsuits it faced in the wake of Crosby and Judd’s decisions. They have lost in court multiple times in their quest to prevent machine counting – part of an ongoing rightwing effort to switch to hand counts – and stall election results.The elections department has had four different leaders in the past year. A longtime elections director left because of a hostile work environment, followed by the county’s recorder taking over her duties. The county then hired a director who had questioned election results in the past, only to see that director leave quickly to return to the previous county he worked in, which he called a “welcoming home”. The current director, Tim Mattix, has been on the job since October.To settle a lawsuit from the former director Lisa Marra, who left because of a toxic work environment caused by the two supervisors, the county’s insurance paid out $130,000. Other legal fees, primarily in the form of paying the costs of the other side’s attorneys in losses, have totaled nearly $170,000.Still, the costs and consequences so far haven’t quelled election denialism in the county. An effort to recall Crosby fell short of its signature goal in May, and the former supervisor is now crowdfunding for legal help to continue his crusade. (Crosby and Judd did not respond to requests for interviews.)The rural, red county has became a microcosm of far-right election fervor that’s featured a host of conspiracies and attempts to curtail voting access. Proponents have pushed the county to hand-count all ballots, get rid of any machines involved in the voting process, end voting by mail and vote solely on one day. They have rarely pointed to any specific claims of fraud in Cochise’s elections, but instead called out problems in other places or cited potential issues.Cochise itself is not a swing county – it is reliably Republican. Arizona overall, though, has grown more purple in recent years, resulting in a backlash from the right over the state’s direction.The topic has gripped the county’s meetings, with regular appearances from people speaking in favor of hand counts and against voting by mail or machine counting. Even during meetings where election considerations aren’t on the agenda, several speakers will focus on the topic during public comment periods. In response, a group of people who support the way elections have run there and opposed the hand count and certification delay have routinely spoken up at supervisors’ meetings.Tricia Gerrodette, an unaffiliated voter who lives in Crosby’s district, started speaking up at meetings again after a decade or so off from the practice. She helped the effort that sought to recall Crosby. She doesn’t think her comments will sway the two supervisors at this point, but she has a broader mission.“It’s more letting the general public, the population, know that there are other voices that do trust the elections, so we’re not drowned out by the deniers,” she said.Despite the recall’s failure, its proponents say they found a broad array of voters from all political backgrounds who were sick of the election denial sideshow. They also informed many voters who weren’t aware of what supervisors do or what had happened with the election. Crosby now faces a Republican primary challenger in his re-election bid.Some in the county wanted the state’s attorney general, Democrat Kris Mayes, to launch an investigation into the supervisors’ actions. It appears Mayes is doing just that. Crosby and Judd were summoned to a grand jury proceeding this month, and the Democratic supervisor, Ann English, told Votebeat that investigators asked her about the hand count and certification issues. (Mayes’s office would only confirm an active investigation into open meetings law violations.)In a post on the rightwing crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, Crosby sought donations to defend himself. He has raised nearly $3,000 with a goal of $100,000.“I have been an elections integrity proponent since before it became popular,” he wrote. “I have heard that a grand jury subpeona [sic] is almost a guaranteed indictment. If that is the case, I would expect to go to trial, and be stuck with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of court costs and legal fees. If my legal adversary is successful in defeating me, it will intimidate other AZ County Supervisors into falling in line with the globalist plans of compromised elections, and forced use of voting machines.”In a board meeting this month, after hearing from people commenting on elections issues, Crosby foreshadowed that “election integrity issues are not going to go away heading into a presidential election year.”As for Judd, who once said she was prepared to go to jail for her vote in favor of a full hand count, she told Votebeat that she felt “used” by outside attorneys who advised her on the issue and that she wouldn’t vote similarly this election.Cochise’s troubles have so far deterred other Arizona counties from following suit. Mohave county, a Republican-led county, has twice rejected attempts to hand-count ballots, despite heavy lobbying efforts from state lawmakers and some local residents. The costs and potential legal consequences, highlighted by the county’s attorney and elections director, have kept Mohave from moving ahead with a hand count for 2024’s elections there. In advance of a second vote on a hand count earlier this week, Mayes’s office sent a letter to Mohave’s supervisors reminding them that undertaking a hand count would be illegal, and they would be sued for it.While the hand count and certification issues already worked their way through the courts, an investigation into the issue takes time. In the meantime, the local Democratic party chair, Elisabeth Tyndall, said, “the poison continues to spread.”All elections now are under intense scrutiny. A local all-mail election to fund jails snagged a lawsuit that sought to nullify the results and claimed the votes were all illegal. It was dismissed. When the board met to accept the results of the jail district election, Crosby abstained from the vote.“It’s this cascading effect of creating distrust and creating chaos around basic maintenance elections, things that shouldn’t be controversial. It’s a yes or no vote,” Tyndall said. “It shouldn’t be a knockdown, dragout about whether mail-in elections are valid.”The Mayes investigation came as welcome news to those who have been sounding the alarm about democracy issues in Cochise county, though there is also a concern that any criminal charges stemming from the hand count and certification issues could backfire, especially during a high-profile presidential election year in a swing state.“I’m concerned that a felony charge … would really galvanize the opposition,” Gerrodette said. “And I’m just not sure what direction that might go. There’s some really angry people out there who really believe that their votes aren’t being counted, I guess.”
This article was amended on 25 November 2023 to correct the spelling of Tim Mattix’s name. More

Five years ago, while working on a high-profile case, the trial lawyer Don L Scott Jr received a call from a reporter. “Hey, is it true that you had gone to prison?” Scott remembers them asking. “I said, ‘It is, and if you want the entire story, before you print it, I hope that you will sit down and talk to me.’”On 10 January 2024, Scott will be sworn in as Virginia’s first Black speaker of the house in the commonwealth’s 400-year-plus history. His rise to the position started in 2018, when that reporter called him. Scott said that although he hadn’t hidden his past before, “it’s not something you put on your résumé either”. That call was a pivotal moment for him, empowering him to share his story widely, and helping him realize that he had the potential to be a politician.After the story was published in the Virginian-Pilot, everyone knew his past, and Scott said he was then able to discuss it more freely, even as an attorney. He thinks the impetus behind the piece might have come from a politician who was concerned Scott would run against him, or from the opposing attorneys on the case, but at this point it doesn’t matter.“They were thinking they were going to drop it on me to hurt me, but what they really did was free me up,” he said. “I got such positive feedback from my community and other folks that I knew that I said, ‘Heck, I’m free now. If I decide I want to run, I can run.’”Eventually, Scott, who’s 58, did run for election to the Virginia house of delegates – and won. Then he won again and again. In his new role as speaker of the house, Scott plans to help lead Virginia Democrats in following through on their campaign promises: namely, codifying Roe v Wade, banning assault weapons and increasing teacher pay.‘There are people who are just like me’On 30 July 1619, Virginia’s house of burgesses, the colonial predecessor to the commonwealth’s current general assembly, met for the first time. About one month later, enslaved Africans were brought to the Virginia colony, marking what is considered to be the start of chattel slavery in the colonial US. In several interviews since his election as speaker, Scott has referenced the historic importance of his nomination: “I know I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors who built that capitol.”Scott was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in a small town by a single mother who hid the family’s poverty so well that Scott didn’t realize how much she struggled until he was an adult. He grew up with five siblings, including his elder sister, Jeta Lenoir, who taught him to read.After his graduation from Texas A&M University, Scott enlisted in the US navy and served a few years before he was honorably discharged. He went on to obtain a law degree from Louisiana State University Law School, but in 1994, shortly after graduating, Scott was arrested on federal drug charges. He served seven years in prison. (Scott has said previously that he made a “bad decision”, but denies having ever handled any drugs.)In Virginia, citizens’ voting rights are not immediately restored after their release from prison – that decision depends on the governor. For almost a decade after rejoining society, Scott was unable to vote. Once his rights were restored in 2013, he was able to finally sit for the bar exam and become a trial lawyer.During his time as a partner at the Breit Biniazan law firm, Scott joined various civic organizations, including his state’s chapter of the NAACP. He started paying closer attention to the difference between what people around him were experiencing and what he saw and heard in courtrooms as a lawyer. As a result, his first campaign for the house of delegates in 2019 focused on criminal justice reform and alleviating poverty.“I came in saying that there are some things that are wrong, that are unfair in our criminal justice system and need to be fixed,” Scott said. “I think people have a misconception about Black communities that are sometimes having tough times and issues with crime. They don’t want to talk about poverty. They don’t want to talk about all the causes of crime. They don’t want to talk about mental health. They just want to say ‘crime’ and look at the outcome.”Scott’s lived experiences continue to inform how he sees the world. He intimately knows what it means to serve time and still be penalized after leaving prison. “I had a nonviolent drug offense that I was sentenced to 10 years [in prison] for,” he said. “There are people who are just like me who are not voting and can’t vote and are smarter than I am. [They] can’t vote because they’re waiting on somebody like Governor [Glenn] Youngkin to restore their rights. I will be speaker with a felony, while other people who are just like me … will not be able to vote. That’s nuts.”As speaker, Scott plans to help mitigate voter disenfranchisement by taking away the governor’s right to determine whether formerly incarcerated people can vote again. He wants to change the state’s constitution so that people have an automatic restoration of rights after completing their sentences. Earlier this year, in a separate voter-rights issue, about 3,000 Virginians were purged from voter rolls “in error”, according to Youngkin’s administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Personally, this is important to me, that we take the restoration of rights away from the governor,” Scott said. Of the purged voters, he continued: Youngkin “abused that privilege that he has, that privilege that the people have bestowed on him. He used it arbitrarily and capriciously to deny the franchise – that sacred franchise – from people that he deemed unworthy to vote.”‘You have to deliver’Scott understands the historic nature of his impending leadership position. He also knows that his community and Virginians at large are expecting more than him to just be a face in power.Recently, Scott said, he attended a breakfast meeting with a former governor who was energized by his nomination, but who told him that it was time for the real work to begin. “He said, ‘Now you have to go and be great. You have to be competent. You have to deliver.’ And that’s what our community is looking for. They’re not looking for symbolic wins any more,” Scott recalled. “I’m the first Black speaker, but I’m also a speaker who happens to be Black.”Democrats gained control of Virginia’s state legislature this year, as voters opposed Youngkin’s attempt to pass a strict abortion ban. In addition to codifying Roe v Wade, many of the Democrats who ran and won promised to raise the minimum wage, to ban assault weapons, to pass a responsible gun act and to raise teacher pay.“These are the promises that we made … These are not extreme ideas. I think everybody can agree that we need to do these things, and I think we will,” Scott said.But for the moment, he is taking time to soak it all in.“I’m excited,” he said. “It’s the dream of a lifetime. I feel embarrassed of how much I’ve been blessed. I went to jail in ’94; 2004 is 30 years and I’ll be standing taking my oath. That’s a powerful testament to the power of faith, and the power of resilience.” More

Nibbling appetizers off American-flag printed paper plates in a city hall basement, the group of Democrat voters had been listening to a party official’s appeals to get active in politics when Terri Rodebaugh stood up to air a grievance.“One thing I want to say is I’m tired of being called a baby killer, which I am not,” said Rodebaugh, her shirt pink and her hair, like most others in the room, gray. Yet having such epithets hurled at them is what it has come to for party faithful and pro-choice West Virginians like Rodebaugh in Nicholas county.For much of the 20th century, voters in Nicholas county and much of the rest of West Virginia were reliably Democratic, backing the party even in its worst years. That changed in 2000, when George W Bush won the state’s electoral votes, and by 2020, nearly 78% of Nicholas county voters had cast ballots for Donald Trump. West Virginians overall gave him the second-highest share of support of any state in the nation.A few weeks before that year’s election, the then president’s adherents paraded through the county seat Summersville, and the Democrats held a counterprotest. Trump supporters then turned up outside the party’s offices in their pickup trucks, burning out their tires and kicking up gravel. The landlords called not long after and told the Democrats to leave, and ever since, the party has been itinerant, meeting in churches, restaurants and, most recently, Summersville’s city hall.“I never dreamed Nicholas county would ever go Republican,” said 81-year-old John Jarrell, who has served on the local party committee for decades. “And I never dreamed West Virginia would ever go Republican.”The Democratic party’s power in the state now seems on the brink of reaching its nadir.Even as the GOP was consolidating its hold on the state’s politics, voters kept electing one Democrat: Joe Manchin, a two-term governor who won a Senate seat in 2010 and just over a decade later became one of the most controversial politicians in the country for refusing to support proposals by Joe Biden to fight the climate crisis, poverty and a host of other social ills.Manchin was scheduled to face voters again in 2024, and whether he could win a third full term representing his ruby red state was a subject of fierce debate. Now, West Virginians will never learn the answer – earlier this month, Manchin announced he would not run again for the Senate, and is openly mulling a third-party run for the presidency.Few politics watchers believe any other Democrat can win Manchin’s seat, and by the start of 2025, the party may hold none of West Virginia’s statewide elected offices for the first time since 1931.“We’re going to be underrepresented,” Pam Tucker-Cline, the chair of the Nicholas county Democratic party, said of Manchin’s exit as the 27 supporters who turned up for the meeting filtered out into the Summersville evening. “I don’t think people realize what he’s done for the state.”Party leaders refuse to give up, but acknowledge they’re not quite sure what the path back to power is in a state that lacks so much of what makes Democrats successful elsewhere.“We don’t plan to give up on any seat, and we know that the odds are against us, but we feel that West Virginians are worth fighting for,” said Mike Pushkin, the state Democratic party chair and a lawmaker in the state house of delegates.“It’s been extremely hard for anybody with a D after their name in rural America, as of late, but we feel that things are definitely never static in politics, things are always changing.”In the first two years of Biden’s administration, Manchin became the rare kind of lawmaker who goes from state-level star to national fixation for the way he used his power to manipulate the president’s agenda.While Democrats had an effective majority in the Senate, it was only by a single vote, giving any member the power to derail legislation that did not attract Republican support.Manchin made his objections known after the president proposed Build Back Better, a huge plan to fight the climate crisis and poverty, offer universal paid parental leave and make childcare more affordable. The White House spent months negotiating with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator who was the other holdout to the plan and last year left the Democratic party to become an independent.Kayla Young, a Democratic member of West Virginia’s house of delegates, remembers advocacy organizations from around the country descending on the capital, Charleston, seeking ways to get Manchin to drop his blockade. “I worked with some of those groups. We literally were all Manchin whisperers for a year, because everybody just wanted to come and figure him out,” Young recalls.As 2021 drew to a close, Manchin said he wouldn’t vote for the plan, citing its estimated $2tn cost and rising inflation, and Young remembers the organizations that had been so keen to hear from West Virginians swiftly departed.“Seeing all those groups that I align with still come in and use us was not good. That did not feel good to just be used,” Young said.In the years before Biden took office, the GOP used a similar sense of abandonment among West Virginians to dismantle what had been decades of Democratic dominance.Democrats had controlled the governor’s mansion, the entire congressional delegation and the legislature with supermajorities simultaneously, and West Virginia Democrats see it as a point of pride that John F Kennedy, a Catholic, bagged the party’s presidential nomination in 1960 by triumphing in the mostly Protestant state.That consensus ended in 2000 with Bush’s victory, and after Barack Obama won the White House eight years later, the GOP adopted an argument against his administration that proved especially potent: the Democrat was waging a “war on coal”. The industry has historically undergirded both the Appalachian state’s economy and cultural identity, but employment had been declining for decades as more mines automate extraction and power stations shift to cheaper forms of energy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“West Virginia was ripe for flipping,” said Mike Plante, a Democratic strategist based in Charleston, describing a belief among the state’s residents that outsiders were intent on both harming its economy and disrespecting its culture. “There’s a feeling that we’ve kind of been taken advantage of for years and years and years, and I think that plays into the the Maga message of score-settling.”In 2015, the GOP took control of both houses of the legislature for the first time in decades, and in the presidential election the following year, West Virginia voters gave Trump his largest share of support of any state.Four years later, Biden ousted Trump from office by rallying voters in suburbs and cities nationwide as well as racial minorities – all of which West Virginia lacks. The state is 91% white, and the population of Charleston, its largest city, is just over 47,000, while the rest of its 1.8 million residents are spread out in a handful of small cities, towns and villages dotting its landscape of rolling hills and narrow valleys.Even strategies Democrats have used elsewhere to win elections in red states barely work in West Virginia. The GOP now holds supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, and after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, they quickly moved to ban abortion. Young represents one of the most competitive districts in the state, and says she successfully used her Republican opponent’s support for the ban to win a second term – but only by a razor-thin margin of 58 votes.“In West Virginia, we thought that in 2022 … we would pick up more seats, and we lost them. So, it helped me. I don’t think it helped anybody else,” she said. The party today has three lawmakers in the 34-seat senate, and 11 in the 100-member house of delegates.Last year, the Democrats did not field candidates for several legislative seats across the state, something Young, who serves as minority leader pro tempore in the legislature’s lower chamber, hopes the party will change. She also has her own re-election to worry about in 2024, a task she expects to be even more difficult now that Manchin has exited.“Having him on the top of the ticket on the ballot was really good for all Democrats in the state, whether you agree with him or not, and sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t,” she said.There’s no telling if Manchin would have won another term, but Sam Workman, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, said even an unsuccessful run would have forced the GOP to allocate resources to the state that they are now free to spend elsewhere – probably in Ohio and Montana, both red states with Democratic senators whose re-election campaigns will be crucial if the party is to keep control of Congress’s upper chamber.At the state level, the Democrats are on the defensive, their elected positions confined to a handful of mayor’s offices and legislative districts in more populated areas.But Workman said the party had an opportunity to champion West Virginia’s economic transition away from extractive industries like coal and towards tourism and renewable energy – areas where Manchin’s mark will be felt long after he leaves the Capitol.After months of deadlock, the senator last year reached a compromise with Biden to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which lowers prescription drug prices and will subsidize the country’s transition to clean energy. He’s also been a champion of the New River Gorge, a recreation area popular with whitewater rafters, hikers and rock climbers, where he helped establish a national park in 2020.“Whatever the Democratic party is going to be going forward, it has to come to grips with these transitions and have coherent messaging around those transitions, and I just don’t think we’re there yet,” Workman said.The long odds for Democrats have not dampened Tucker-Cline’s enthusiasm to find the party a new office in the center of Summersville in time for next November’s vote. She’s been looking all over town for a storefront to hang campaign signs and welcome volunteers, while trying to coax many of the county’s younger voters into supporting the party openly.“The ones that really want to put signs in their yard are the old Democrats. You have to really work on these young Democrats to make them feel like they’re not going to hurt themselves or hurt their businesses,” Tucker-Cline said.She’s got a lead on one property right in the middle of Summersville, but it’s on the second floor, and their most active volunteers are elderly – she worries they’ll struggle with the stairs, but insists on the party headquarters being right where Nicholas county residents can see it.“If we have to go upstairs in the building in downtown we’ll do that,” Tucker-Cline said. “We want to be in the red country.” More

This week marked 60 years since President John F Kennedy was shot dead as he travelled in the back of a car through the streets of Dallas, Texas. From the moment the news broke, people had their theories about what happened.
So why did the assassination of JFK spawn dozens of conspiracy theories that have persisted for decades? Is there a reason why Americans are quick to believe their government is covering something up? And despite multiple examples of when conspiracies turn dangerous, are politicians today, including Kennedy’s own nephew, using conspiracy theories for political gain?
This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Prof Kathryn Olmsted, author of Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has been accused of sexual assault in a court filing submitted on late Wednesday.The summons against Adams alleges that the plaintiff “was sexually assaulted by Defendant Eric Adams in New York, New York in 1993 while they both worked for the City of New York”.It was filed under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York state law which provided a one-year “look-back” window for adult sexual misconduct accusers to file civil lawsuits that previously would have been barred due to the statute of limitations.The window expires on 24 November.The summons adds that the concerns “sexual assault, battery and employment discrimination on the basis of Plaintiff’s gender and sex, retaliation, hostile work environment and intentional infliction of emotional distress”.Asked about the allegation, a city hall spokesperson said: “The mayor does not know who this person is. If they ever met, he doesn’t recall it. But he would never do anything to physically harm another person and vigorously denies any such claim.”The three-page summons does not detail the alleged sexual assault. The Guardian is withholding the name of Adams’ accuser as the allegation involves sexual assault.The summons also names the New York City police department’s transit bureau, and the New York City police department Guardians Association social organization, as defendants.The accuser’s attorney, Megan Goddard, said: “Goddard Law is thankful for the Adult Survivors Act, which has given so many women the opportunity to seek justice. We are immensely proud of our clients and all the women who are seeking justice under the ASA. We are also thankful that the legislature may be considering reopening the window because so many victims of sexual assault are only finding out about the ASA now.”The Messenger first reported the summons.The summons comes as Adams, who was elected in 2021, faces scrutiny from the FBI, which is reportedly investigating his campaign. Its inquiry reportedly focuses on whether Adams’ campaign unlawfully accepted money from the Turkish government in exchange for favors, such as pressuring the New York City fire department to speed up the opening of a Turkish consulate.On 2 November, federal agents raided the home of Adams’ top fundraiser, Brianna Suggs, seizing electronic devices and documents. The FBI also reportedly searched a Turkish Airlines executive’s home, as well as Brooklyn construction company owned by Turkish immigrants; the executive and company had both fundraised for Adams.This is a developing story and will be updated … More