US Politics

Before entering elected office, Mike Johnson, the new Republican speaker of the US House, praised “18th-century values” and told an audience that Americans should live by them when it came to morality and religion.In video footage of a forum hosted in 2013 by Louisiana Right to Life, an anti-abortion group, Johnson, a devout Baptist and then an attorney for rightwing groups and causes, is asked about the “condition of conscience” in Europe and Canada regarding abortion policy.Saying he has just given “a seminar … to a bunch of high school kids in Shreveport”, Johnson quotes George Washington and John Adams, saying the first two presidents and other founders “told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today”.Johnson, 51, became speaker on Wednesday, as Republicans’ fourth candidate for the job since Kevin McCarthy was ejected by the far right of the party.Having maintained a low profile since entering Congress in 2016 (a year after he became a state representative in Louisiana), his arrival on the national stage has led to widespread examination of his political record and views.As well as his work in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, his work against abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights has been widely noted.In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Maine on Wednesday night, in which 18 people were killed and 13 wounded, a clip circulated of Johnson blaming mass shootings on 20th-century American reforms. Listing “no fault divorce laws”, “the sexual revolution”, “radical feminism” and “government-sanctioned killing of the unborn”, he said had liberals had created “a completely amoral society” in which young Americans were “taught there is no right and wrong”.He covered similar ground in his 2013 comments to Louisiana Right to Life, claiming religious motivations for those who declared independence in 1776 and wrote the constitution thereafter – regardless of their care to erect, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, the third president, “a wall of separation between church and state”.Johnson said: “Washington said in his famous farewell address: ‘Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.’ And Adams said: ‘Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’”He added: “The founders warned us. They said if you … do not maintain religion and morality, the right of conscience being the most fundamental bedrock principle of them all, then the republic is not going to stand. This will not work.”Johnson’s own predictions of American decline have been widely noted. In 2004, he called same-sex marriage a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic”.In his 2013 remarks, Johnson said the US was “still an experiment on the world stage. We’re only 237 years old, youngest form of government known to man. It’s a great model. The founders were divinely inspired … They set it up in accordance with biblical principles.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“… But the point is that the religion and morality had to be maintained and now we’re being led from the White House on down to reject and marginalise religious values … to just erase all of our moral codes and look down upon those who would try to stand up and say, ‘No, we have to maintain those.’”Barack Obama was then president. To Johnson, America under Obama had become a “post-modern culture … defined by the absence of truth”.“That makes the claims of the Bible inherently intolerant,” he said. “You know, truth has been replaced as the greatest virtue in society by tolerance. Well, we’re the inherently intolerant ones who say, ‘Wait a minute, life is sacred because we’re endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.’ We have to stand up for those.”Assuming the voice of an opponent, he said: ‘Oh, you bigot. Can’t you be a little more open-minded? Come on, that’s so like 18th-century, you know?’“Well, [the founders] told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today.” More

US congressman George Santos pleaded not guilty on Friday to revised charges accusing him of several frauds, including making tens of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges on credit cards belonging to some of his campaign donors.The New York Republican appeared at a courthouse on Long Island to enter a plea to the new allegations. He had already pleaded not guilty to other charges, first filed in May, accusing him of lying to Congress about his wealth, applying for and receiving unemployment benefits, even though he had a job, and using campaign contributions to pay for personal expenses like designer clothing.The court appearance came the morning after some of Santos’ Republican colleagues from New York launched an effort to expel him from Congress.Santos’ attorney entered a not guilty plea on his behalf and a tentative court date of 9 September 2024 was set.Santos has been free on bail while he awaits trial. He has denied any serious wrongdoing and blamed irregularities in his government regulatory filings on his former campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, who he claims “went rogue”.Marks in turn has implicated Santos. She told a judge when she recently pleaded guilty to a fraud conspiracy charge that she had helped Santos trick Republican party officials into supporting his run for office in 2022 through bogus Federal Election Committee filings that made him look richer than he really was, partly by listing an imaginary $500,000 loan that had supposedly come from his personal wealth.Santos has continued to represent his New York district in Congress since he was charged, rejecting calls for his resignation from several fellow New York Republicans.Congressman Anthony D’Esposito, who represents a congressional district next to the one that elected Santos, introduced a resolution on Thursday calling for Santos to be expelled from the House, saying he wasn’t fit to serve his constituents. He was joined by four other New York Republicans, US representatives Nick LaLota, Michael Lawler, Marc Molinaro and Brandon Williams.Santos posted a cryptic note on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying: “Everything has an end in life,” but later added three points of clarification.“1. I have not cleared out my office. 2. I’m not resigning. 3. I’m entitled to due process and not a predetermined outcome as some are seeking,” he wrote.He has previously said he intends to run for re-election next year, though he could face a lengthy prison term if convicted.During his successful 2022 run for office, Santos was buoyed by an uplifting life story that was later revealed to be rife with fabrications. Among other things, he never worked for the major Wall Street investment firms where he claimed to have been employed, didn’t go to the college where he claimed to have been a star volleyball player, and misled people about having Jewish heritage. More

It happened the way Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, described going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Last month in Georgia, Scott Graham Hall, an obscure bail bondsman and Trump supporter, took a plea. Hall had been indicted in Fulton county prosecutor Fani Willis’s Georgia election fraud case on charges of helping Trump surrogates steal election data from voting machines in rural Coffee country. Hall bargained his felony conspiracy and racketeering charges down to misdemeanors, for which he would pay nominal fees and serve no jail time. To many of his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, it must have looked like an appealing deal.Hall was a small fish in the Georgia scheme, just a minor player in what Willis had charged as a sprawling conspiracy. But the bizarre excursion to Coffee county that he had agreed to testify about was central to the charges against a much bigger fish: Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer who pursued the most bizarre and brazen of the president’s post-election lies. Last week, she flipped too. Powell, who was facing multiple felonies, accepted probation and restitution fees in place of jail time – conditioned, of course, on her willingness to testify against her co-defendants.And thus, the dominoes began to fall. Willis’s generous terms to the cooperating witnesses – along with the growing number of testimonies that are now lined up on the prosecution’s side – seem to have incentivized other co-defendants in the Georgia case to flip.Powell’s plea was followed soon after by one from Ken Chesebro, the lawyer who devised the so-called “fake electors” scheme, whereby Trump would have overturned the results of the 2020 election by having Mike Pence disregard the genuine elector slates and instead adopt fraudulent ones composed of various Trump loyalists and cranks. Chesebro’s plea bargain indicates an abrupt change of heart: he had demanded a speedy trial just weeks before, a motion that had accelerated the court’s work, and by the time the news of his decision to flip was announced, jury selection for his hearing was already under way. Chesebro had reportedly refused another plea offer in late September.And then there was Jenna Ellis. The Trump campaign lawyer – a member of the so-called “Elite Strike Force” legal team that Powell had said would “release the kraken” to vindicate Donald Trump’s election lies – has been central to the effort to overturn the election. Ellis had gone about recruiting potential fake electors for Chesebro’s scheme, soliciting Republican officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan to back the plan. She is also alleged to have been involved in planning ways to disrupt and stall the 6 January 2021 certification proceeding. This all could have sent her to prison for a long time; instead, she got probation and a “first offender” status that will expunge her record. She’ll be testifying, too.The news of the flips in the Georgia case came as another rumor went trembling through the political press: that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and the man who was closest to him in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, was cooperating with Jack Smith’s office in Washington DC, in the January 6 trial there that covers many of the same events as the Georgia case. ABC News reported that Meadows had been granted immunity to testify to a grand jury – a development that could signal serious danger for the Trump defense.The reports on Meadows are mixed: has he flipped, or merely provided some testimony under limited protection? Is he still loyal to his former boss, or is he now looking to save his own skin? And who benefits from the leak about his testimony so far? But no matter what, Meadow’s involvement – even if only partial and temporary, even if it does not lead to a bigger deal – suggests a more significant crack in the hull, and only added to the growing feeling that, as the Trump criminal cases proceed, many of the rats are starting to flee the ship.For their part, the defendants turned witnesses in Georgia have taken various positions on their own decisions to quit team Trump. Jenna Ellis tearfully apologized in court, claiming she was misled about the veracity of her false claims by the other lawyers. Chesebro’s lawyer issued a terse statement to the press saying that the plea bargain somehow vindicated his client.Powell, for her part, always the conspiracist and true believer, has spent the days since turning state’s witness trying to publicly signal her continued loyalty to Trump and his lies, sworn testimony be damned. On her social media accounts, she had continued to claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and that Willis’s office “extorted” her plea by threatening her with jail time – which is, indeed, more or less how plea bargains usually work.How does Trump feel, watching all of these former loyalists agree to testify against him? Trump stands now a diminished figure, still ominous and still very much capable of winning a presidential election, but increasingly isolated. On the one hand, his various criminal and civil cases are distracting him from the campaign trail, and he seems doomed to lose many of them; on the other hand, his grip on the Republican presidential nomination is so firm that his challengers increasingly look silly for running against him, and he seems to have retained at least some degree of kingmaking power in the House, where this week he was able to instantly sabotage the short-lived speakership candidacy of the Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer.Trump wields decisive power within the Republican party, and he commands the unceasing, unconditional loyalty of its base: about one-third of Republican voters who will never vote for anyone else so long as his name appears on a ballot. But in his real life, among the people who actually interact with him, Trump has long been paranoid and embittered, prone to blowout fights with close aides and dead-to-me turns on those he sees as insufficiently loyal. He has the kind of sad resentment of someone who knows he has never felt the warmth of a friendship he has not bought.When Chesebro and Ellis announced their flips in Georgia, Trump was in New York, listening to the testimony of another former loyalist, his one-time fixer Michael Cohen, testify in a corporate fraud suit brought against the Trump organization by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. “Don’t know anything, we’re totally innocent of everything,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s shouted question about Ellis. Increasingly, it’s hard to tell who is “we” is.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

Confronted with Donald Trump’s abuse, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said: “Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.”Romney’s view of the former president and current Republican presidential frontrunner was communicated to McKay Coppins, author of a new biography, Romney: A Reckoning, written in co-operation with its subject.Romney once flirted with joining Trump’s cabinet but has since emerged as a chief antagonist, voting to convict at both Trump’s impeachment trials.Earlier this week, responding to reporting about Coppins’ work, Trump called Romney “a total loser that only a mother could love”, erroneously said the senator “just wrote a book”, and said it was, “much like him, boring, horrible, and totally predictable”.Trump also claimed to have forced “this left-leaning Rino [Republican in name only] out of politics”, a reference to Romney’s announced retirement next year.On Thursday, Coppins spoke to Brian Stelter, the former CNN anchor now host of Inside the Hive, a Vanity Fair podcast.Coppins said: “I sent [Trump’s] statement to Mitt and … I’ll just pull up the text. He wrote back, ‘Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.’ So Mitt kind of enjoyed Trump’s response.”Coppins also discussed how he came to write Romney’s biography – in part because, as he writes in his book, Romney decided not to write a traditional memoir.Coppins said: “When I first approached him, it was just a couple months after January 6. I remember our first meeting was in his Senate hideaway, which is this little cramped windowless room that the senators get near the chamber in the Capitol building. And there was still barbed wire fence around the building because the riots had just happened.”On 6 January 2021, Trump sent supporters to the Capitol to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. They failed but nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds convicted, some for seditious conspiracy.Coppins said Romney’s “initial decision to cooperate with this book was just born of … extreme frustration and disappointment with the leaders of his party and fear for the country. I think he thought of this book as a warning.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges, for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments. He also faces civil threats including a fraud trial regarding his business and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Nonetheless, he leads by huge margins in national and key state polling regarding the Republican presidential nomination.Coppins told Stelter that Romney was now “looking back at the moments in his pursuit of the presidency that he sort of flirted with the more extreme elements of his party.“I think he realises now that the mistake he made, and the mistake that a lot of the Republican establishment made, was thinking that they could basically harness the energy of the far right without succumbing to it.”In 2012, Romney accepted Trump’s endorsement.“He wishes he didn’t do it,” Coppins said. “And I think that that’s emblematic of a lot of these these small ethical compromises that he and a lot of his party leaders made, not realising the kind of Pandora’s box they were opening.” More

Leading up to the 2020 election, Arab American organizers in south-east Michigan like Terry Ahwal worked to convince their community to go to the polls for Joe Biden. The message was simple: Donald Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric and policies such as the Middle East travel ban were a threat to Arab Americans. Voters mobilized to help push Biden over the top in this critical swing state.Several years on, amid Biden’s full-throated support of Israel in the current war and an unfolding humanitarian crisis that has claimed thousand of lives in Gaza, Ahwal feels deep regret: “I have to say “I’m sorry’ to my friends.’”Ahwal is among hundreds of thousands of Arab Americans in Michigan, many of whom are watching with horror as the US supports Israel as it carries out its bombing campaign. After the community backed Biden by a wide margin in November 2020, the feeling goes “beyond betrayal”, about a dozen Arab Americans in Michigan said.“This is a complete loss of humanity, it is the active support of a genocide, and I don’t think it gets any worse than that,” said Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American activist and attorney. “I’ve gotten a few comments, ‘Well, the GOP is going to be worse,’ and my question is: ‘How can you get worse than active support of a genocide?’”Polls show that Americans have generally been supportive of Israel and its response to the 7 October attack, though Morning Consult data released this week also shows the number of people who sympathize equally with Israelis and Palestinians is on the rise. That poll also showed support for Biden’s response is growing.But Arab Americans who spoke with the Guardian said they did not know of anyone in their community who would vote for Biden in 2024. That could have profound consequences in a state in which Trump won by 10,000 votes in 2016, and a tight rematch is taking shape.Still, the Biden administration has remained steadfastly supportive of Israel, proposing $14bn in aid; providing weapons such as missiles and armored personnel carriers; refusing calls for a ceasefire; and deploying US troops to the region. A Data for Progress poll released Thursday found 66% of Americans think the US should call for a ceasefire.The use of Arab American tax dollars to bomb Gaza is generating “widespread horror and fury”, Arraf said.Though Biden has called on Israel to show restraint and touted a deal he struck to allow trucks carrying aid to enter Gaza, Arab Americans who spoke with the Guardian view the gestures as pittances. They see the US’s support as ham-fisted and “shocking” in the context of the last presidential election.“Even our conservative members voted for Biden, only to get a guy who dehumanizes us, who is sending the weapons to Israel, and the only purpose of these weapons is to use Palestinian as target practice,” Ahwal said. “I don’t know anybody who would vote for him.”That sentiment was echoed by Muslim and Arab Americans elsewhere in the country. Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblymember, called Biden’s response to the crisis “disgusting” and warned that the president is underestimating the Arab American voting bloc.“I have had many constituents of mine, as well as Muslims from beyond my district, reach out to me and ask me: ‘How am I supposed to vote for Joe Biden?’ And I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell them,” he said.A number of people also expressed fears that the Biden administration’s rhetoric and positions are fanning the flames of Islamophobia in the US and putting their communities in danger. People who are publicly critical of Israel or supportive of Palestine have lost jobs and faced harassment in recent weeks. Muslim and Arab American politicians are receiving death threats and the level of vitriol is above what was experienced in the wake of 9/11, said Abraham Aiyash, a Muslim American state representative in Michigan.The president’s comparison of Hamas’s attacks to “15 9/11s”, Aiyash said, “enhances Islamophobia”, referencing the recent murder in Illinois of a six-year-old Palestinian American boy in an alleged hate crime.“If you support [Israel’s war] abroad, you have to be ready for the consequences of it at home,” he said.Multiple Palestinian Americans who do not work in politics declined to speak with the Guardian over safety fears.Any potential for political fallout for Biden is greatest in Michigan, a critical swing state that is home to 300,000 Arab Americans who helped boost Biden after Clinton’s narrow 2016 loss. Biden beat Trump in 2020 by about 150,000 votes.Few – if any – issues are more important to this group than Palestine and Middle East foreign policy, said Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American activist and comedian. He noted that Dearborn, a majority Arab American city just outside Detroit, went for Bernie Sanders by a significant margin during the last two Democratic presidential primaries because Sanders was willing to challenge US policy on Israel.But Biden was viewed as better than Trump, so Arab-Americans turned out in the general election, Zahr said. Next time, many people have said, they will vote third party, or leave the top of the ticket blank.Dearborn went 63% for Clinton in 2016 when she lost the state by 10,000 votes, but nearly 80% for Biden four years later. In the four municipalities with the largest Arab American populations in metro Detroit, about 40,000 more people voted for Biden than Clinton.“They came into our community and asked us to vote for Joe Biden and save America from Donald Trump, and now we feel like we have to save Palestine from Joe Biden,” Zahr added. “The argument that we heard before is we have to save the country from Trump – that’s not going to work.”“If [2024] is going to be a close election then the loss of Arab American support for Biden could have an impact,” said the state pollster Bernie Porn.The White House’s “lazy” language and the skewed portrayal of the crisis in US media dehumanizes Arabs – Palestinians, in particular, said James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, a Washington DC-based civil rights advocacy organization.“This objectification of Palestinians and the humanization of Israelis – which is an old story going back to the beginning of the conflict – fed into the pre-existing narrative that it’s Israeli people versus the Arab or Palestinian problem,” he said.The White House, he added, “sets the tone”, and “it’s important for us to let the administration know, you’re at risk of losing this particular component group of the community.”Those who spoke with the Guardian said they found the situation especially frustrating because they expected this kind of policy and positions from Republicans, but not Democrats.“What makes me incensed with Democrats is that they preach human rights, preach equality and diversity, but when it comes to Palestinians, all the preaching goes away, and there is justification for the killing and slaughter,” Ahwal said.“I know the ramifications and I know the consequences but I cannot justify a vote for a guy who says it’s OK to kill Palestinians.” More

After a gunman killed 18 people in Maine this week, the Democratic representative, Jared Golden, said he was changing his stance on gun legislation and would now support banning assault weapons. At a news conference in Lewiston, where the mass shooting occurred, Golden said he had previously opposed a ban on what he described as ‘deadly weapons of war’ out of fear for the lives of his family members. Announcing his new position, Golden said he would work with any colleague to achieve gun legislation during his time left in Congress More

Little-known Democratic congressman Dean Phillips has launched a campaign to challenge sitting President Joe Biden, leaving many of his supporters and colleagues confused, if not outright upset.After weeks of speculation and behind-the-scenes manoeuvreing, Phillips finally publicly announced he’s running in an interview on CBS.A campaign website, dean24.com, went live Thursday night, but simply solicits donations and carries no details on Phillips’ plans or policy ideas. He also filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission Thursday night.The centrist third-term Minnesota congressman is expected to file paperwork to run in the primary contest in New Hampshire on Friday morning, the secretary of state’s office there confirmed Thursday.Running on a slogan of “Make America Affordable Again,” a nod to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” Phillips brought a campaign bus and “government repair” van to New Hampshire to make his case to voters.In his interview on CBS News, Phillips said Biden had done a “spectacular job for our country.”“But it’s not about the past,” Phillip said. “This is an election about the future. I will not sit still, I will not be quiet, when we’re facing numbers that are so clearly saying that we’ll be facing an emergency next November.”Phillips so far has not articulated the policy differences between himself and Biden. Instead, he’s pointed to Biden’s age, saying a younger generation should be given the opportunity to lead.It’s not clear how Phillips’ entry into the Democratic primary would achieve the goal of passing the torch to younger politicians: He is near-certain to lose the Democratic nomination contest, and his pressure on the president’s campaign cannot solve the issue of Biden’s age. Phillips’ end goal with the campaign could be an attempt to boost himself nationally, though it’s likely to anger more Democrats than win them over.He will not have the financial or organizational support of the Democratic Party, either nationally or locally, as it will work to keep the top office in party control by backing Biden. Phillips, though, has his own wealth. He is heir to a distilling company and the former co-owner of gelato company Talenti.While Democrats nationally and in New Hampshire are asking “who” when they hear of Phillips’ campaign, Minnesota Democrats are asking “why.”The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party said it will be “enthusiastically supporting” Biden in the primary and general election, touting the president’s record.“A primary challenge only wastes the resources we need to defeat Donald Trump and the Maga extremists who are threatening our democracy,” said Ken Martin, the Minnesota party’s chair.Some local Democrats who supported Phillips in his previous runs for Congress, in a centrist district that he flipped from Republican control in 2018, said they feel bewildered by the choice and are struggling to figure out the end goal. The presidential announcement comes after another move that angered some progressives in his district, when Phillips said he wouldn’t oppose Republican Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer for speaker as long as Emmer met certain conditions, like funding the government and bringing aid bills for Ukraine and Israel to the floor. His speculated run for the presidency drew him a primary challenger in his district.Bonnie Westlin, a state senator in Minnesota who lives in Phillips’ district, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the congressman should resign his seat and that he would never get her support for elected office again.“Make America Affordable Again? Pretty rich coming from a multimillionaire,” she wrote.Westlin told the Guardian that she’s supporting Biden, like the rest of the state and national party leaders.“With so much on the line in 2024, including abortion rights and the very fate of democracy at home and abroad, undermining president Biden with a primary challenge is an unnecessary distraction and only serves to put the future of our country in jeopardy,” she said.Susan Herder, a Democrat in Minneapolis, near Phillips’ suburban district, said she has respect for Phillips but that his entry into the presidential race is an “unfortunate choice.” She’s a huge Biden supporter and hopes that Phillips being in the primary somehow fuels the Biden campaign more and gives the president additional momentum.Nationally, Democratic elected officials have spoken out against Phillips’ plans to run. Phillips stepped down from a Dem leadership role because his views on Biden’s reelection were “causing discomfort” with his colleagues. Biden’s camp has pointed to Phillips’ near-lock-step voting record with the Biden agenda.Biden himself will not be on the New Hampshire ballot because the state’s contest because it now falls outside the Democratic National Committee’s rules for selecting delegates. He is, however, visiting Minnesota next week. More

Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana became the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Democrats immediately criticised his support for Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Most Republicans will just be happy the speaker selection debacle is over for now, but there may be some in the party, such Mitt Romney, who wish events had taken a different direction.
A senator for Utah, Romney has spent the last few years angering his Trump-supporting colleagues by voting to convict the former president in both of his impeachment trials and speaking out against him on several occasions.
He announced he was retiring in September, and this week his biography hits the shelves, detailing his life in politics and how he has fallen out of love with the Republican party of today. Jonathan Freedland talks to McKay Coppins, a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of Romney: A Reckoning.

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