US Politics

Meta is now allowing Facebook and Instagram to run political advertising saying the 2020 election was rigged.The policy was reportedly introduced quietly in 2022 after the US midterm primary elections, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the decision. The previous policy prevented Republican candidates from running ads arguing during that campaign that the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden, was stolen.Meta will now allow political advertisers to say past elections were “rigged” or “stolen”, although it still prevents them from questioning whether ongoing or future elections are legitimate.Other social media platforms have been making changes to their policies ahead of the 2024 presidential election, for which online messaging is expected to be fiercely contested.In August, X (formerly known as Twitter) said it would reverse its ban on political ads, originally instituted in 2019.Earlier, in June, YouTube said it would stop removing content falsely claiming the 2020 election, or other past US presidential elections, were fraudulent, reversing the stance it took after the 2020 election. It said the move aimed to safeguard the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions”.Meta, too, reportedly weighed free-speech considerations in making its decision. The Journal reported that Nick Clegg, president of global affairs, took the position that the company should not decide whether elections were legitimate.The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump ran a Facebook ad in August that was apparently only allowed because of the new rules, in which he lied: “We won in 2016. We had a rigged election in 2020 but got more votes than any sitting president.”The Tech Oversight Project decried the change in a statement: “We now know that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta will lie to Congress, endanger the American people, and continually threaten the future of our democracy,” said Kyle Morse, deputy executive director. “This announcement is a horrible preview of what we can expect in 2024.”Combined with recent Meta moves to reduce the amount of political content shared organically on Facebook, the prominence of campaign ads questioning elections could rise dramatically in 2024.“Today you can create hundreds of pieces of content in the snap of a finger and you can flood the zone,” Gina Pak, chief executive of Tech for Campaigns, a digital marketing political organization that works with Democrats, told the Journal.Over the past year Meta has laid off about 21,000 employees, many of whom worked on election policy.Facebook was accused of having a malign influence on the 2016 US presidential election by failing to tackle the spread of misinformation in the runup to the vote, in which Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Fake news, such as articles slandering Clinton as a murderer or saying the pope endorsed Trump, spread on the network as non-journalists – including a cottage industry of teenagers living in Macedonia – published false pro-Trump sites in order to reap advertising dollars when the stories went viral.Trump later appropriated the term “fake news” to slander legitimate reporting of his own falsehoods. More

In a new book, the extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claims no Democrats stayed in the House chamber on January 6 to help defend it against rioters sent by Donald Trump to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election win – a claim one Democrat who did stay labeled “patently false”.Greene’s book, MTG, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Describing January 6, Greene writes: “Several of the Republican congressmen said, ‘We’re going to stay right here and defend the House chamber.’ As they began barricading the door with furniture, I noticed not one Democrat was willing to stay to defend the chamber.”But that version of events sits in stark contrast to others prominently including that of Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democratic congressman and former US army ranger who worked to help fellow representatives before being, by his own description, the last politician to leave.Speaking to the Denver Post after the riot, Crow said: “They evacuated the folks on the floor but those of us in the gallery actually got trapped for like 20 minutes as the rioters stormed the stairwells and the doors.“So, Capitol police actually locked the doors of the chamber and started piling furniture up on the doors to barricade them, while holding their guns out.“I got into ranger mode a little bit. Most of the members didn’t know how to use the emergency masks, so I was helping them get their emergency masks out of the bags and helped instruct a bunch of folks on how to put it on and how to use it. I wasn’t going to leave the House floor until every member was gone, so I waited until we were able to get everybody out.”On Wednesday, Crow told the Guardian: “Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t exist in the same reality as the rest of us. 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.”Other Democrats have described how they tried to help.In an oral history of January 6 by Business Insider, Raúl Grijalva, of Arizona, said: “You also saw members doing their part to facilitate our evacuation – Seth Moulton [of Massachusetts, a marines veteran], Ruben Gallego, and four or five others … who assumed a role of helping us to get out of there and working with the Capitol police to make sure that we were all safe.”Gallego, also of Arizona and a former marine, told the same site: “Eventually what I did was I jumped up on a table and started giving instructions to people about how to open up the gas mask. We start seeing the doors being barricaded with furniture. We start hearing the noise of people – the insurrectionists – pounding on doors. Especially in the gallery.”Greene’s book pursues her familiar conspiracy theory-laced invective, taking shots at targets including Democrats, the media and Lauren Boebert, another Republican extremist with whom Greene has fallen out.Discussing January 6, three days after her swearing-in, Greene claims to have worked “tirelessly” on objections to key state results but to have been “utterly shocked” when rioters breached the Capitol.Some Republicans, she says “carried concealed weapons and were ready to be good guys with guns, defending themselves and others if need be” – despite guns being banned in the House chamber. Greene says she tried to stay close to Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a former law enforcement officer who was “one of the armed Republican members of Congress exercising his second amendment rights that day”.Describing instructions to put on hoods against possible exposure to teargas, Greene says she did not do so as she would not have been able to clearly hear or see.“Many of the Democrats obligingly put theirs on and some were lying on the floor, hysterical,” she writes, describing a chamber “in complete and utter disarray”.Pictures of the House on January 6 show Crow comforting Susan Wild of Pennsylvania, a Republican lying on the gallery floor. Other pictures show Republicans including Troy Nehls of Texas and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma helping to barricade doors.According to the House January 6 committee, evacuation happened in stages. Democratic leaders including the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were removed at the same time as Mike Pence, the vice-president. Kevin McCarthy, then Republican minority leader, soon followed. Evacuation of the rest of the House began at 2.38pm, members escaping as a rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was fatally shot by police.“Members in the House gallery were evacuated after the members on the House floor,” the report says. “Congressional members in the gallery had to wait to be evacuated because rioters were still roaming the hallways right outside the chamber.“At 2.49pm, as members were trying to evacuate the House gallery, the [Capitol police] … cleared the hallways with long rifles so that the members could be escorted to safety … surveillance footage shows several rioters lying on the ground, with long rifles pointed at them, as members evacuate. By 3pm, the area had been cleared and members were evacuated … to a secure location.”Greene claims rioters have since been mistreated. But she is not finished. A noted fitness enthusiast, she chooses to mock another Democrat, Jerry Nadler of New York, then the 73-year-old chair of the House judiciary committee.“I saw that it was a problem that so many of our representatives were older and physically unable to run,” Greene writes. “How do you get them to safety when they cannot move quickly because of age, physical ailments or lack of physical fitness?“Oh, and many were hysterical, with the plastic bags over their heads in fear of teargas and the little electric fans running so they couldn’t hear, either. Just imagine Jerry Nadler trying to run for safety!” More

The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, is expected to sign a bill that would make crossing into the state without documentation a crime, one of the harshest immigration policies in the US to date.The bill, SB 4, was passed by the Texas house and is awaiting final approval from Abbott.On Wednesday, Abbott said that he looked forward to signing the bill, in a post to X, formally known as Twitter.“I look forward to signing Senate Bill 4, which creates penalties for illegal entry into Texas & authorizes the removal of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border,” Abbott said.In recent months, Abbott, a Republican, has launched a series of controversial programs targeting migrants, including bussing migrants to Democratic-led cities without proper coordination and Operation Lone Star, a multimillion-dollar initiative that has placed razor wire and thousands of troops at the Texas-Mexico border.SB 4 makes it unlawful for anyone to cross into Texas from another country without papers a state misdemeanor that is punishable by up to two years in prison.The law also requires a state judge to order a person to return to the country they crossed from in lieu of prosecution.If a person refuses to return, they could face a felony charge and up to 20 years in prison.The bill also gives Texas officers the ability to arrest anyone who they believe has crossed into the state illegally, a fact that advocates and Democrats have decried as racist.Legal advocates have questioned the bill’s legality, as removing noncitizens from the US falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Experts have also warned that the new bill could cause a dispute with Mexico, as the country and others could choose not to cooperate with state officials.Democratic Texas representatives and advocates soundly denounced the bill as problematic and a waste of state funds.The Texas representative Jolanda Jones called SB 4 and its supporters “racist”.“It’s not all right to be racist. I will stop pulling the race card when you stop being racist,” she said.The Texas representative Ramón Romero Jr posted a video on social media denouncing the passing of SB 4 and emphasizing the importance of winning elections.“We fought really hard but sadly on issues like this, their ears are closed on the other side,” Romero said in a video posted to X, referring to Republicans. “We can say anything and they’re just not listening.”In a statement to X, the Texas Civil Rights Project, a social justice non-profit, said the bill was “creating an entirely new, separate, unequal immigration system in the US” and allowing police to “be both judge and jury to determine a person’s right to stay in the US”.Immigrant rights organizations also rallied outside of the Texas House on Tuesday to protest the vote on SB 4.SB 4 was considered as apart of a separate legislative session requested by Abbott for several anti-immigration bills. More

A leading member of the hard-right Freedom Caucus indicated trouble ahead for Mike Johnson, the new speaker, after the House on Tuesday passed a bill to avert a government shutdown.Chip Roy, of Texas, told reporters the bill was “precisely what was put down on [Saturday 1 October], that then resulted in the motion to vacate against Kevin that following Tuesday, and here we are. We’re doing the same thing”.In October, Kevin McCarthy, of California, relied on Democratic support to pass a continuing resolution (CR) and stave off the threat of a shutdown, which would leave federal workers without pay and cripple many functions of government.Thus angering Roy and other rightwingers, McCarthy swiftly became the first House speaker ever ejected by his own party.After a chaotic interregnum in which candidates for speaker fell in swift succession, Johnson, from Louisiana, succeeded McCarthy as a speaker acceptable to the hard right and Donald Trump, the presidential frontrunner who Johnson supported as he attempted to overturn the 2020 election.Nonetheless, on Tuesday Johnson was forced to rely on Democratic support to get his “laddered” or staggered funding measure through. In the end, no fewer than 93 Republicans voted against the bill.Johnson enjoys one key advantage over McCarthy. There is no sense – yet – that his days as speaker are numbered.“Mike’s a friend,” Roy said. “You know, I wanted to give a little time to get all this going. I get it. It’s difficult.“But, you know, for the same reasons that I opposed the CR on 1 October, I oppose the CR that Speaker Johnson is putting forward because it continues to perpetuate the very system my constituents sent me here to oppose.“They don’t want me to continue spending money we don’t have at $1.6tn spending level, at the Pelosi spending level, to Pelosi spending, policies and priorities. And that’s what this is doing.”Nancy Pelosi, the California congresswoman who was the Democratic speaker until the last midterm elections, has long been a potent bugbear for the Republican right.Roy also aimed fire at his own ranks: “We have Republicans who violently opposed that bill a year ago and the omnibus bill last December, who are now trying to say that we need to continue that.”Lamenting unchallenged funding for the Department of Homeland Security – another Republican bugbear, given its responsibility for controlling immigration and in particular the southern border – Roy stressed: “I oppose it. I oppose” the funding bill.But Democrats did not oppose it, even if the “laddered” measure was not their preferred choice.“The main principle is keeping the government open,” Bill Pascrell, a New Jersey congressman, told the Washington Post. “We’re not talking about even saving face. This is the 11th hour. We don’t have many alternatives here.”Johnson’s bill must pass the Senate. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, indicated that it would, while of similar mind to Pascrell.Though he called Johnson’s bill “goofy”, Schumer said on the chamber floor: “I am heartened – cautiously so – that Speaker Johnson is moving forward with a CR that omits precisely the sort of hard-right cuts that would have been nonstarters for Democrats.“I certainly don’t agree with everything the speaker is proposing, and I can’t imagine too many senators would have taken the speaker’s approach in drafting this bill. But the proposal … does two things Democrats have pushed for: it will avert a shutdown, and it will do so without making any terrible hard-right cuts that the Maga [Trump-supporting] rightwing demands.”Such demands will likely be made of Johnson some time soon.“Mike is an extraordinary man of integrity and honor,” Roy told reporters. “I take him at his word. But what I think you’ve got to remember [is] this is a job where it’s very difficult to honor our commitments like that. You’re going to get up to another deadline.”For now, though, the pressure is off – regarding funding bills, at least.On a day when McCarthy denied shoving Tim Burchett of Tennessee, a rightwinger who voted to remove him as speaker last month, and when the Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin physically threatened a union boss at a Senate hearing, Johnson told reporters his CR would “allow everybody to go home for a couple of days for Thanksgiving”.“Everybody cool off,” the speaker said. “Members have been here for 10 weeks. This place is a pressure cooker.”As the next funding deadline nears, such pressure will inevitably rise again. More

The trial in the Georgia racketeering case against Donald Trump and 14 other defendants relating to an alleged conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election could stretch into early 2025, the Fulton county prosecutor, Fani Willis, has said.In an interview at a global women’s summit held on Tuesday by the Washington Post, Willis said that though she expected the case to be on appeal “for years”, the trial itself would probably take “many months”. She envisioned it ending in “the winter or the very early part of 2025”.The timeframe laid out by the Atlanta-area district attorney raises the prospect of Trump remaining on criminal trial through the critical stages of next year’s presidential election, including election day on 5 November 2024. Trump is the current frontrunner in the Republican primary race.The tentative calendar also opens up the prospect, should Trump secure the Republican nomination and go on to win the election, of him still being on trial on his inauguration day, 20 January 2025. The former president faces racketeering charges that carry a sentence under state guidelines of up to 20 years in prison.Willis said that she did not take election timing into account when pursuing cases. “I don’t, when making decisions about cases to bring, consider any election cycle or election season, it does not go into the calculus,” she said.She added that it would be a “really sad day if, when you’re under investigation for this shoplifting charge, you could go run for city council and then the investigation would stop. That’s foolishness.”Ted Goodman, a spokesperson for Trump’s co-defendant in the Georgia case Rudy Giuliani, criticized Willis for making the comments. In a statement to Politico, he said that the possibility of stretching out the trial beyond the 2024 election “further demonstrates how this entire fraudulent case is part of the Democrat Party and permanent Washington political class’s attempt to keep Donald Trump out of the White House”.The scheduling of the multiple trials that Trump now faces is likely to pose major challenges for his presidential campaign. He is now on trial in New York for a civil fraud case involving the financial statements of his business, the Trump Organization.He is also facing 91 felony charges in four separate criminal cases – the Fulton county election subversion case, a New York criminal indictment over an alleged hush money payment to an adult film actor, and two federal cases. The federal prosecutions involve his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified government documents in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.The two federal trials are scheduled to begin in March and May respectively – in the thick of Republican primary voting.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNineteen defendants were initially included in the sprawling racketeering prosecution in Georgia. That number has been reduced after four defendants accepted plea deals in the case.They include three of Trump’s lawyers during his attempt to avoid defeat in the 2020 election – Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell. Videos of interviews conducted with them during the plea agreement were leaked this week to ABC News and the Washington Post.Willis said the source of the leaks was “absolutely not my office”. She said the disclosure of the confidential recordings was “clearly intended to intimidate witnesses in this case, subjecting them to harassment and threats prior to trial”.Her office has requested an emergency protective order over discovery materials in the Fulton county case. More

One of the unspoken rules of the US supreme court is that the justices will never admit that they were wrong, and no one else is allowed to admit it, either.Last week, in oral arguments in United States v Rahimi – which asks whether it is constitutional to take guns away from men who are subject to domestic violence restraining orders – the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, had to dance around this rule very delicately as she represented the federal government. The federal law disarming abusers had been thrown into question by a ludicrous and dangerous test for all gun restrictions that the supreme court instituted in its 2022 Bruen decision, one which makes it difficult to impose new gun laws if those laws aren’t sufficiently similar to ones on the books from either the revolutionary or civil war eras.It’s a ridiculous test, one that is self-evidently not workable. But Prelogar couldn’t say that; instead, she said that lower courts had simply misinterpreted the court’s perfect test, making mistakes of methodology; that the prospect that domestic abusers could be rearmed, leading to the murders of thousands of American women, was not a result of the court’s reckless, short-sighted and self-interested decision making, but a result of other people’s mistakes. She asked them not to clean up their mess, but to “clarify” their thinking.Something similar to Prelogar’s solicitous fiction about the justices’ infallibility was evident in the justices’ own missive, issued on Monday, declaring that the court would adopt a code of conduct. On the surface, this looked like a positive step. The supreme court has come under fire in recent months for its justices’ flagrant abuses of their station: their familiarity with billionaires who shower them with gifts and vacations; their lavish lifestyles and magically disappearing debts; their willingness to appear at fundraisers for political groups, and reluctance to recuse themselves from cases involving their family members, friends or financial interests.But none of this was a real problem, the justices assured us. These concerns, they claim in a statement accompanying their new code of conduct, were not legitimate, and certainly not the product of any actual mistakes or nefariousness on the justices’ part. Rather, they were merely the result of the failure of the silly, misinformed and stupid public to understand that the court, in its mighty wisdom, is already perfectly ethical.“The absence of a Code,” the justices wrote, “has led in recent years to the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” However did Americans get that impression?It is meaningful that the justices issued this code of conduct; it means that the public pressure on the court – which has been the subject of outrage and disgust since its 2022 Dobbs decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, and which has subsequently come under increased scrutiny for its indifference to either the appearance or the reality of conflicts of interests – is working.The justices often make it clear that they read their own press, but they do not often deign to make any changes to their actual behavior, or to try to discipline their own institution. More often than not, they suggest that such gestures would be beneath them. Not so with the code of conduct, which signals that the justices admit that there is at least some obligation they have to the American people. As the legal commentator Chris Geidner put it, “They have acknowledged that the public rightfully has expectations that they will behave in an ethical way.” It’s better than nothing.But not much better. The new code of conduct, the justices assure us, is merely a formalization of guidelines to which they already adhered, a claim which on its own raises doubts about the code’s sufficiency. The code is based on a binding code of conduct that is applied to judges on the lower courts – but significantly weakened in its application to the supreme court justices.The commanding word “shall” that characterizes the lower courts’ code of conduct is softened throughout, in the supreme court version, to “should”. Prohibitions on corruption are dotted with exonerating qualifiers, like Swiss cheese. Where the lower courts’ code says judges shall not “lend the prestige of the judicial office to advance the private interests of the Justice or others” or “convey or permit others to convey that they are in a special position to influence the Justice”, the supreme court modifies this influence-peddling prohibition with a loophole big enough to drive Clarence Thomas’s RV through: the modifier “knowingly”.This kind of softening edit appears throughout the code: its strained language and convoluted application of exceptions seems like the product of vociferous intra-court infighting, or the lobbying of certain justices to ensure that their own questionable ongoing conduct can be excepted from the code. This might be the code’s one silver lining: its language seems evidence of chaos, disagreement and discord on the court, reminding us that even though we are stuck with this conservative supermajority, they are also stuck with each other.Even this weakened and exception-ridden code, it should be noted, has no enforcement mechanism. There is no way to investigate whether a justice has broken the code, no way to adjudicate the question of his or her wrongdoing, and no way to discipline him or her for any violation. The question of how to interpret the code, how to abide by it, and what to do in the event that it is broken is left entirely to the justices themselves – just like all their ethical questions were before.This response to questions about the court’s ethics with a defiant insistence that they will only ever police themselves is consistent with the way the justices have responded in the past. This is, after all, the same court that has refused to cooperate with congressional oversight of its own ethical misdeeds and appearance of corruption just this year, with the chief justice, John Roberts, issuing a contemptuous refusal to appear before the Senate judiciary committee in April. Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, opined to the Wall Street Journal this summer that Congress had no right to impose oversight or regulation on the court – that the justices and their power are immune from the principles of checks and balances.A belief that the court is its own sole and highest authority was also evident the last time the justices tried to explain away their own misconduct, when they issued a “Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices”. Like this code of conduct, that statement, published just this past April, also had no enforcement mechanism; like this one, it seemed more designed to quell public outrage about the court than to meaningfully circumscribe the justices’ behavior. No one fell for it that time, either.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

In taking the loyalty oath to support the party nominee in order to be permitted to participate in debates, the Republican candidates have transformed themselves into zombies. For one brief shining moment they may have imagined that they would edge out Donald Trump by offering themselves as more electable. But electability is a transient quality, often glittering like fool’s gold. Their unique selling proposition was that they did not carry his wagon train of baggage. Their logic was not more complicated than that. They promised that electability would be a pragmatic turn to reality. But the appeal of a rational idea that seeks a rational response immediately separated them from the Trump base. With Trump leading in the polls, and the latest poll showing him momentarily ahead of President Biden in key swing states, the electability gambit has evaporated on the ground of its premise.Beyond the misplaced gamble on evanescent electability, accepting that Trump’s negatives might be a burden in a general election would crack the entire edifice of his mythology. If it were true, it would mean that the whole Trump storyline the base has embraced is false. From his branding in The Apprentice as a master of the universe to the big lie, the greatest con in American history would collapse. Rejecting the fable would demand of his followers that they recognize their own fallibility and gullibility. But they mirror their hero in associating self-reflection as a trait of their cultural elite enemies. To shake their spell, they would have to undergo a reversal of the plot of the early film classic of humans turned into zombies, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.But the Republican party would be the last place to conduct intensive deprogramming of Republicans. Instead, its enchanted base is doubling down in intensity. When the first indictment against Trump came down in New York in the campaign fraud case of paying hush money to a porn star, Trump’s believers rallied to him as savior and martyr, his polls shot up and the electability ploy dissolved into thin air. His Republican opponents were left with their hands raised in a salute to whoever the nominee would be, which would be Trump. They were the living dead.The media participating in the debates have presented themselves as though they are performing a dignified and necessary role in the democratic process as it has always been done. But the forms are drained of substance. The media insistence on behaving normally is their state of denial. Just as the candidates pretend they are viable, the media pretends they are interviewing live candidates. The illusory horserace is driven round the track with illusory questions about the horserace. Sometimes the zombie candidates devour each other on stage – Nikki Haley aptly referring to Vivek Ramaswamy as “scum” – but that bit of friction has no frisson because the undead cannot be reanimated.The debates have no purpose other than as a harbinger of the Republican zombie apocalypse. Already some of the prescient big-money Republican donors who had previously backed Trump, but transferred their cash in rounds of roulette first to Ron DeSantis, then to Tim Scott, and now to Haley, have begun placing their chips on Trump again.What the zombie candidates can never discuss is why they are dead. Their decayed state makes it impossible for them to examine the hex that has cast them into their twilight. They cannot explain why Trump dominates their party, transfixed it into a cult of personality, how they have all enabled him, and his ambitions for a dictatorship.Nor can they discuss Trump’s influence in the triumph of theocratic reactionary leadership among the House Republicans, and the unholy alliance with evangelicals by which the supposedly sacred submits to the rule of the profane. Of course, the media questioners did not discourteously ask the candidates whether they agreed with the federal judge presiding over the E Jean Carroll defamation case, Lewis Kaplan, who stated as obiter dicta from the bench that Trump is a rapist “as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’.” Trump was found guilty of sexually assaulting and defaming Carroll, and ordered to pay $5m. Then, Trump defamed her again. His second trial will begin on 15 January 2024, the same day as the Iowa caucuses.The media have become zombies by a different process than the candidates. By acting on the false premise that the Republican candidates are not zombies they inevitably become zombies. Nothing is normal, but simulating the idea that the campaign is normal is both to inhabit a fantasy and empower the abnormal. Falling back on the familiar horserace narrative in which they are the bookies, they unsuspectingly enter the Trump netherworld. Their stupefied questions about winning and losing cannot restore the lost world. They treat the candidates as hopefuls, ignoring the motto at the entrance: Abandon all hope.The media heavily rely on questions and answers produced by pollsters. Odds-making is offered as shrewd analysis. Repeating ever-changeable poll numbers as static empirical facts that project the future as all things being equal is the lowest and most banal surrogate for objectivity, the most common journalistic evasion of the higher duty of objectivity. It is the equivalent of reporting a poll in Weimar Germany for the July 1932 federal elections (National Socialist Workers’ party at 37%, etc), but avoiding the issue at stake of the survival of democracy, and after the election describing the result in terms of “winners and losers”.How should an election that might end democracy be understood?But why just make a captious reference to Germany, however pertinent the point? Our history provides dangerous precedent enough. The United States itself faced an election over the fate of democracy in 1860. The refusal to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln – the rejection of democracy – resulted in the civil war. His platform to prevent the extension of slavery to the territories was grasped by all sides as about the ultimate disposition of political power. A conservative supreme court attempted pre-emptively to impose a solution to the crisis in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 to advantage the south and crush the new Republican party through an originalist justification that the founders believed that black people were “beings of an inferior order, so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”.To which Lincoln replied in his Cooper Union speech on 27 February 1860, speaking as if directly to the gathering forces of secession: “Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’ To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.”Approaching the 1860 election, the stakes for democracy were daily discussed in the press, north and south, east and west. “How stands the case?” editorialized the New York Herald, the largest circulation newspaper in the country, opposed then to Lincoln. “The question, therefore, of Union or Disunion, will have to be settled with Lincoln’s election,” it wrote. The paper explained that if his “administration go on smoothly”, six free states would join the Union, creating majorities in the Senate and the House, and breaking the hold of minority rule. “The simple truth is, that in submitting to Lincoln’s election, the south must be content to prepare deliberately for the abolition of slavery from Delaware to Texas. This is exactly what this thing means.”So, what is the simple truth exactly about what this election means? Since none of the Republican zombie candidates have a ghost of a chance, media questions about how the undead might get ahead only underscore both their and the candidates’ hollowness. Horserace questions are beating a dead horse. Such questions derive from a combination of lazy complacency and fear of offending that renders the media jockeys that flog them into zombies themselves.Those questions are the media contribution to avoiding the fundamental and obvious stakes in this election: the character of the Trump Republican party, its antipathy to democracy, the rise of authoritarianism and theocracy, the criminality of the prospective nominee, the conservative phalanx on the supreme court stamping the rightwing agenda on the country, the theocratic predilections of the new speaker of the House, second in the line of succession to be president, and the utter dysfunctionality of the Republican House, which is subject to Trump’s sway.Footnote: after his election as speaker, Mike Johnson adjourned the House as a federal government shutdown looms to travel abroad to confer with rightwing groups at what was dubbed the World Freedom Initiative, in a trip co-sponsored by the Danube Institute, a foundation financed by the anti-democratic government of Hungary sympathetic to Putin, and included the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s political director as well as far-right figures from across Europe, one of them convicted in France of hate speech. The conference’s events included segments on “The Future of [the] Right-Wing Alliance” and “Trump’s 2016 [Campaign Managers’] Secrets, Social Media and Governmental Interference”.In his first chess move as speaker, Johnson has sought to separate aid to Israel from that to Ukraine, but to tie the Israel aid to slashing the budget of the Internal Revenue Service – a poison-pill proposal unacceptable to the Biden administration and the great majority of the Senate including most Republicans. The consequences of Johnson’s crackpot foray into policy is that aid to both Israel and Ukraine has been stalled. But the new speaker’s proposal was not raised in the debate by the media questioners. Nor did they once mention the name Mike Johnson.The Republican debate on 9 November occurred after extensive reportage of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which lays out an anti-democratic plan to turn the US government into an authoritarian state as Trump’s program for a second term. On 25 April, the New York Times reported of the plan to replace the career civil service – “snakes” and “traitors”, according to Trump – with Trump-vetted far-right appointees in the Project 2025 database.On 27 July, the Times reported how Trump and his allies plan to end the independence of the justice department and all other federal agencies. “And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the state department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as ‘the sick political class that hates our country’.”On 7 August, the Times reported Project 2025’s plan to end environmental regulation, all green energy programs and any mention of climate change. On 1 November, the Times reported the plan to purge the justice department and replace its lawyers with Trump loyalists, including those who supported the coup.The Washington Post reported on 6 November on the Trump plan “for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”I reported in the Guardian on 7 November on the Heritage Foundation’s support for Senator Tommy Tuberville’s blockade against military promotions unless abortion services are denied to women in the service in order to replace the “woke” officer corps.Yet the media interlocutors of the Republican debate asked not a single question about any aspect of the Project 2025 plan to turn the federal government from top to bottom into Trump’s personal tool and abrogate civil liberties. As it happened, the day after the debate, Trump answered that question without prompting: “If I happen to be president,” he said, “and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.”Lester Holt, the anchor of NBC Nightly News, opened the debate with this question: “Speak to Republican voters who are supporting Donald Trump. Why should you and not him be the Republican nominee to face Joe Biden a year from now?”The problem with that question was that it embodies journalistic lethargy barely tolerable in pre-Trump elections but glaringly inadequate in this one. The question was not an attempt to communicate or elicit vital information, but instead invited self-serving triteness. Beginning the debate with that question conveyed an implicit point of view that this campaign and election is an ordinary contest of contending opinions taking place within democratic norms. Negligence in asking straightforward questions about Trump’s brazen intent to establish a dictatorial regime to replace constitutional government served as a prophylactic for the absent but overshadowing presence.The ghost at the debate, quitting from lack of funds and abysmal polls, was the former vice-president, Mike Pence. “Hang Mike Pence!” No one, moderators or candidates, saw fit to acknowledge his existence. He may be spectral for now, but he is not a zombie. He will likely reappear very much alive as a central witness in Trump’s trial starting in March 2024 in the Washington DC district court. He is not forgotten by Jack Smith.Three days before the debate, special prosecutor Jack Smith filed a motion entitled “Government’s Opposition to Defendant’s Motion to Strike Inflammatory Allegations from the Indictment”. In it, he wrote: “Indeed, that day was the culmination of the defendant’s criminal conspiracies to overturn the legitimate results of the presidential election, when the defendant directed a large and angry crowd – one that he had summoned to Washington DC, and fueled with knowingly false claims of election fraud – to the Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification proceeding. When his supporters did so, including through violence, the defendant did not try to stop them; instead, he encouraged them and attempted to leverage their actions by further obstructing the certification.”Neither Jack Smith nor his latest or any filing were raised by the moderators in the debate. Other words that went unsaid were “trial”, “indictment” and “January 6”.Trump’s portentous invisibility was reinforced by the media ignoring his statements. Kristen Welker, the moderator of Meet the Press, asked each candidate where they stood on funding for Ukraine. But since the candidates have become zombies, the only valuable query would be to probe their views about Trump’s to gauge the degree of absolute mindlessness of their loyalty oath to him.Eleven days before the debate, on 29 October, Trump told a story about how he rebuked Nato leaders that if they did not pay more the US would not honor its treaty obligation to defend the alliance. “We’re not going to protect you any longer,” Trump said he had boasted. “The head of a country stood up, said, ‘Does that mean if Russia attacks my country, you will not be there?’”“That’s right, that’s what it means,” Trump said. “I will not protect you.”Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, stated in May of 2022 that Trump “may well have withdrawn from Nato” in a second term and that Putin “was waiting for that”. Trump’s former chief of staff, the retired general John Kelly, stated that “one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of Nato”, according to the New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt. But there was no follow-up question to ask the candidates about Trump’s evident intention to wreck the western alliance in Putin’s obvious interest.Welker moved on to an abortion question, framed on the implicit terms that the Republican problem with the issue was one of messaging, reducing it to a matter of positioning, a question again of winning and losing. “Abortion rights supporters saw victories in Ohio and Virginia following earlier wins in states like Kansas and Kentucky. Governor DeSantis, first to you. How do you see the path forward for Republicans on this issue?” The supreme court went unmentioned.The question avoided everything that surrounded the high court’s decision in Dobbs overturning a half-century women’s right. Did Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett commit perjury in their Senate confirmation hearings when they stated under oath that they believed in the judicial doctrine of stare decisis, of deference to long-established precedent, and as a result would retain Roe v Wade? Sonia Sotomayor has said about Dobbs: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible.”Her question went unasked. Nor were there questions about the ethical crisis enveloping the supreme court, with revelations of luxury gifts lavished on conservative justices by wealthy interested patrons. Nor was Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s herculean effort to bring the court under the ethics standards of the rest of the federal judiciary mentioned. Under intense public pressure, the court issued its first ethics guidelines four days after the debate, with no mechanisms for enforcement, leaving the matter to each individual justice: the Clarence Thomas honor code. The media moderators missed their opportunity – and their responsibility.The zombie candidates will all, one by one, decompose into a pile of dust and be swept into the proverbial dustbin of history. Senator Tim Scott, after raising more than $13m, and his associated political action committee millions more, supported by less than 3% of Republican voters, dropped out after the debate. When he departed, he left no trace of his prior existence. And soon enough there will be none, except Trump.The sleepwalking media in the debate performed a pantomime made up of archaic conventional gestures. But their willful obliviousness obscures the present danger posed by Trump’s fever dreams of dictatorship.
Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

We have been here before countless times: prematurely anticipating the end of Donald Trump on the basis of actions or implications that, for anyone else, would have proven fatal long ago. Quick recap: the former president is facing four separate criminal cases, involving 91 felony counts, in four separate states; plus a civil fraud case currently being heard in Manhattan; plus a second defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, whom earlier this year Trump was found guilty of sexually assaulting and defaming and ordered to pay $5m. Plus a clutch of broken gag orders and the resultant fines.The question in all of these cases is less whether Trump will be found guilty than whether there is any outcome whatsoever that would be capable of preventing him from standing for president next year, or – the more depressing calculation, in some ways – of damaging his chances, if not. Trump voters have, historically, proven even more resistant than the rest of us to changing their minds when the evidence changes. And Trump himself has an almost preternatural gift for turning the most unpromising situations to his advantage. Even so, there may, within the detail of these extremely wide-ranging cases, be some aspects that are more harmful to Trump than others.For the former president, the most straightforwardly dangerous criminal trial – that is the one that is, simultaneously, the most serious and also appears to involve the most clear-cut evidence against him – is the so-called classified documents case, brought in Florida by special counsel Jack Smith. This case, which is due to be heard next May, ranges across 40 felony charges, the most serious of which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, which perhaps explains why Trump has described Smith variously as “deranged”, a “thug” and a “Trump hater”. Trump’s defence – that he “un-classified” the documents before removing them from the White House – is seemingly contradicted by, for example, audio evidence of Trump saying he could have declassified “secret” documents, but didn’t.And, yet, as a possible end to Trump’s political hopes the case isn’t as open and shut as it seems. For a start, it is slated to come before Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, and to be heard by a jury that will be selected from Florida districts that voted heavily for Trump. It is also a federal prosecution, meaning that should Trump’s lawyers manage to push the start date beyond the November election, and should Trump be returned to office, he could conceivably instruct the justice department to shut the whole thing down until his tenure expires.That principle applies similarly to two of the other criminal cases: the hush money trial brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, which is scheduled for March next year and is in some ways the flimsiest of the four criminal trials, resting as it does on fiddly definitions around improper campaign donations. (Briefly: if Trump paid hush money to Stormy Daniels via his fixer, Michael Cohen, then lied about it, the DA’s office will try to contend that this constitutes not only a misdemeanour crime of cover-up, but a more serious felony entailing “intent to defraud” in the interests of furthering Trump’s election prospects. The $130,000 paid to Daniels may then be framed as an improper campaign donation.)Much more serious for Trump is the four-count indictment for election interference, also being brought by Smith, in relation to Trump’s actions in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The most damning of those charges – that Trump tried to subvert democracy and disenfranchise voters – is much harder to prove than anything he will face in the documents case. But, unlike Smith’s Florida case, this one will be heard in the District of Columbia, where the jury will be pulled from a population heaving with Democrats. It is also set for March, presenting the Republican frontrunner with mind-boggling logistical and psychological (where even to begin with this) issues.That leaves what, on the surface, looks like the most local and least impressive case against Trump, which is the Georgia election interference case, alleging a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia via a pressure campaign and for which no date has yet been set. Oddly, of the four criminal cases, it is this case that is the most promising in terms of its potential to scupper Trump, purely because it has been brought under state not federal law, and as such lies beyond the reach of a sitting president.Those are the criminal trials. On the evidence of Trump’s polling numbers, which over the past year have risen undisturbed as the 91 indictments rolled in, there is nothing much on paper to indicate that Trump is in trouble. Indeed, if being described by a judge, as Trump was earlier this year, as guilty of rape isn’t a dealbreaker for his supporters, then the small matter of alleged treason isn’t likely to move the needle either.For my money, it is the current civil trial in New York, brought by the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, that threatens Trump’s reputation most acutely and right where it hurts. The suit carries no threat of prison or disruption to Trump’s presidential bid. But in the short term it does threaten to unseat his reputation as a businessman of any standing and strip him of his licence to operate a business in New York.A judge has already found him guilty of fraud and this hearing is purely to assess the level of damages. Unlike all the other legal actions against Trump, which he has apparently successfully been able to pass off as part of some vast conspiracy against him, the fraud case, in which it is alleged that he inflated the value of his businesses to secure better loan rates, lands differently. It makes Trump look shabby, small-time, crooked and crucially, given the nature of his appeal, not nearly as wealthy as he says he is.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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