US Politics

The Texas US senator Ted Cruz, a former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, appeared on Monday to fall for one of the oldest internet hoaxes, sharing a supposed picture of a shark on a flooded highway in Los Angeles with the remark: “Holy crap.”California does indeed face potentially catastrophic flooding thanks to Storm Hilary but users of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, were swift to point out that the image Cruz reposted is in fact wholly crap.Many quoted the fact-checking website Snopes, which says: “An image purportedly documenting a shark swimming down a highway flooded by hurricane-related heavy rains was originally circulated as showing a street in Puerto Rico just after Hurricane Irene hit that island in August 2011.“Since then the same image has been recirculated several times over, typically localised to some big city in the United States that has just experienced a hurricane or other weather event producing heavy rains and floods.”Cruz shared a post from @BarstoolBigCat, AKA Dan Katz, a podcaster for Barstool Sports. It said: “Friend of mine out in LA just took this picture on the 405. And yes, all news and media outlets you have permission to use this. Wild.”Katz later shared a tweet saying “got you” as well as another fake picture: of two sharks apparently swimming at the foot of two indoor escalators.“Wait who said it was a joke?” Katz wrote. “It’s a shark on a highway. It’s real as real could be. Look I also have a shark in a mall.”Had Cruz checked Snopes before posting his remark, he might have noted the site’s description of previous uses of the shark-on-a-highway picture, including in relation to his own state.The picture, Snopes says, has appeared in relation to “Houston after heavy rains pounded portions of Texas over Memorial Day weekend in 2015, Daytona Beach after Hurricane Matthew approached Florida in October 2016, and Houston again in August 2017 after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Harvey caused massive flooding throughout the city”.Snopes also notes where the picture of the shark comes from: a picture of a great white trailing a kayak, taken in 2005.Cruz did not delete his post. Hours later, he wrote: “I’m told this is a joke. In LA, you never know … And everyone please stay safe from the storm or otherwise.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTropical storm warnings have been issued for Texas on Tuesday.It was not Cruz’s first flirtation with social media ridicule. In 2017, the senator’s account on the service then known as Twitter “liked” a tweet showing pornographic material. Cruz appeared to blame a staffer.“It was not me, and it’s not going to happen again,” he said. More

Donald Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination reacted in mostly muted fashion to his declaration that he will skip all the party’s primary debates, not just the first in Milwaukee on Wednesday.Trump’s team have strategized that as the overwhelming frontrunner, the former president would gain little from appearing on stage with his many rivals. At the same time, his legal team are probably wary Trump may be tempted to wade into subject matter at the heart of proliferating legal cases against him.Andrew Romeo, a spokesperson for Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest if distant rival, insisted: “No one is entitled to this nomination, including Donald Trump. You have to show up and earn it.”But while Trump is betting that not showing up will not hurt him with voters – and that his son Donald Trump Jr will prove an effective media surrogate in Milwaukee – DeSantis has a pressing need to earn support. With his campaign widely seen to be tanking, the hard-right Florida governor will take the stage in Wisconsin on Wednesday with serious work to do.In a Sunday night post to his online platform, Truth Social, Trump cited a CBS News poll that gave him a 46-point national lead. Bragging of “legendary numbers”, he said: “The public knows who I am and what a successful presidency I had … I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!”Fox News will host the first debate. Executives have reportedly beseeched Trump to attend. On Monday, CNN reported that an unnamed Trump adviser said the former president could still participate in a later debate, but also that Trump has long been against participating in the second scheduled debate, at the Ronald Reagan library in California next month.Trump, 77, faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments arising from his first run for president, in 2016; his attempt to stay in power after losing to Joe Biden in 2020; and his actions after leaving the White House.The charges concern hush-money payments to a porn star, federal and state election subversion, and retention of classified documents. Trump also faces civil cases concerning his business affairs and defamation linked to an allegation of rape. Trials are due during the primary next year.Despite it all, Trump enjoys huge leads in national and key state polls. On Sunday, the national poll by CBS News showed Trump with a whopping 62% support to 16% for DeSantis and other challengers trailing. On Monday, NBC News and the Des Moines Register gave Trump a 23-point lead over DeSantis in Iowa, the first state to vote. Among evangelical Christians, a key voting bloc, the thrice-married, adjudicated rapist led by 27.On Saturday, it was reported that Trump had already recorded the interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson he plans to use as counter-programming to the Milwaukee debate.Among Trump’s Republican rivals, notwithstanding a warning from the rank outsider Will Hurd that “kissing his butt is not going to help you win”, reaction to Trump’s debate avoidance plans remained muted at best.Mike Pence, formerly vice-president to Trump, echoed the chairperson of the Republican National Committee when he told ABC News: “One thing I realised about him is it’s not over till it’s over. So I’m actually still hoping he shows up.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut observers expect his father’s absence to recalibrate the dynamics of the debate, DeSantis becoming top dog on stage and therefore the top target for takedowns even from Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has built his campaign in opposition to Trump and who has called the former president a coward for skipping debates.On Monday, Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur who has gone from wide outsider to contender for second place, aimed a warmup barb at DeSantis when he said: “We don’t need another career politician beholden to the donor class sitting in the White House. Cronyism leads to corruption. The choice for GOP primary voters: Do we want Super Pac puppets? Or patriots who speak the TRUTH?”According to Axios, James Uthmeir, DeSantis’s new campaign manager, used a memo to donors and supporters to warn that the Milwaukee debate would be other candidates’ “biggest chance yet to grab headlines by attacking the governor, so we know they will try their best”.Uthmeir also offered a touch of optimism.“We all know why our competitors have to go down this road,” he said. “Because this is a two-man race for the Republican nomination between Governor DeSantis and Donald Trump.” More

Donald Trump should drop out of the 2024 race for the White House because polling shows the former US president trailing Joe Biden as he grapples with more than 90 pending criminal charges, according to the Republican US senator Bill Cassidy.Cassidy’s comments to the State of the Union host, Kasie Hunt, on Sunday were not the first time he has denounced Trump. About two months earlier, he went on CNN and predicted that Trump would lose if his party nominated him to run for the Oval Office again, citing the poor performance of his endorsed candidates during the 2022 midterms.“Obviously, that’s up to him … but he will lose to Joe Biden, if you look at the current polls,” Cassidy said of his fellow Republican and the ex-president on State of the Union.The Louisiana senator added that it would do their party no good if Trump “ends up getting the nomination but cannot win a general [election]” against the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.Alluding to a Republican presidential candidates’ debate scheduled Wednesday in Milwaukee that Trump intends to skip, Cassidy said: “I want one of them to win.” But he passed on an opportunity to single out any of the expected debate participants as someone he supported and assured he would vote for “a Republican” if Trump stayed in the race.A poll by CBS News on Sunday showed Trump at the moment enjoys 62% support among Republicans, with many of them trusting him more than they do their friends, family and religious leaders. But polling for now shows Biden generally is ahead of Trump, whose next closest rival for the Republican nomination – Florida governor Ron DeSantis – is culling just 16% support among his party’s voters.Trump has established his domination so far in the Republican presidential primary despite facing 91 criminal charges across four separate indictments filed against him for his alleged 2020 election subversion, illicit retention of classified documents and hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.On Sunday’s edition of State of the Union, Cassidy said to him it seemed like the classified documents case was “almost a slam dunk”.“I’m not an attorney,” said Cassidy, who is a gastroenterologist. But, while referring to an audio recording of Trump discussing military secrets that he had not declassified at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club in 2021, Cassidy remarked: “The mishandling of the federal documents … seems … a very strong case.“They have a tape recording of him speaking of it. If that is proven, then we may have a candidate for president who has been convicted of a crime. I think Joe Biden needs to be replaced, but I don’t think Americans will vote for someone who’s been convicted. So, I’m just very sorry about how all this is playing out.”Cassidy joined six other Senate Republicans who voted to convict the former president when Trump was impeached after his supporters staged the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.Trump had more than enough votes to be acquitted at his impeachment trial despite the lack of support from Cassidy, whom the former president has previously dismissed as a “Rino”, the acronym meaning “Republican in name only”.Cassidy is in his second six-year term in the Senate and is not up for re-election until 2026. More

Climate change is a global crisis and cannot be solved by any one country alone. If the United States, China and other industrialized countries do not come together to dramatically decrease greenhouse gas emissions, the world we leave our children and future generations will become increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable. Tragically, the cooperation required to address this existential threat is being undermined by hawks in both the United States and China who are moving us toward a disastrous cold war.Now is the time for a radical rethinking of geopolitics to reflect the reality that international cooperation is not only in the best interests of all countries, but is absolutely necessary for the survival of the planet.Here’s the reality. The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record. This year is on track to be the hottest year in recorded history, and this past July was the hottest month on record. Across the United States, July broke more than 3,200 daily temperature records and dozens of American cities broke or tied their previous daily temperature records three or more times. Phoenix experienced 31 days in a row at or above 110F (43.3C), 13 days longer than the previous record. El Paso, Miami, Austin and many other places also suffered under record-breaking stretches of extreme heat.Smoke from unprecedented wildfires in Canada enveloped US cities and drifted halfway around the world, causing dangerously unhealthy air quality. Vermont, my home state, experienced floods that damaged 4,000 homes and 800 businesses, the state’s worst natural disaster since 1927. In Maui, Hawaii, rapidly moving fires destroyed 2,700 structures in historic Lahaina and took more than 100 lives, making it the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century.But it’s not just the US that is dealing with record-breaking heatwaves and enormous climate-caused devastation. China experienced record-high temperatures last month, including the country’s all-time temperature record of 126F (52.2C), and recent flooding has killed about 100 people, destroyed nearly 200,000 homes, displaced some 1.5 million people and caused more than $13bn in damage.From Tokyo to Rome to Tunis to Tirana, cities across Asia, Europe and north Africa experienced their hottest days on record. In Iran, the heat index hit 158F (70C), testing the limits of human survival. In our own hemisphere, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador all saw temperature records fall. It’s winter right now in South America, but that hasn’t stopped temperatures from exceeding 100F (37.7C) in some places, a heating event a climate historian labeled “one of the extreme events the world has ever seen”.And it’s not just that temperatures have been soaring on land. Our oceans have never been warmer. Right now, 44% of the world’s oceans are experiencing a marine heatwave. The Mediterranean Sea is experiencing its hottest temperatures on record, more than 9F hotter than average in some places. Off the coast of Newfoundland, waters are as much as 18F above normal. South of Miami, waters reached 101F (38.3C). You’re supposed to find temperatures like that in a hot tub, not the ocean. This warming could further devastate coral reefs, fisheries and marine ecosystems around the world.In the midst of this global crisis, there is both good news and bad news. The good news is that recent years have seen long-overdue steps to transition the global economy away from fossil fuels into more efficient and renewable energy sources. In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act included an unprecedented $300bn in investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, which could help increase US solar energy by 500% and more than double wind energy by 2035, reducing carbon emissions by roughly 40%.Other countries have also made major investments. China spent $546bn on clean energy last year and continues to manufacture and deploy more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. By 2030, China may deploy enough renewable energy to essentially power the entire US electrical grid three times over. The European Union has laid out a plan to invest more than $1tn over the next decade in renewables and energy efficiency, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared with 1990.Importantly, large sections of the corporate world have turned away from investments in fossil fuels and are now spending hundreds of billions on sustainable energy. Altogether, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects the global community to invest $1.6tn in wind, solar power, electric vehicles, batteries, and electric grids this year, compared with just $1tn in fossil fuels. This progress has led the IEA to forecast that renewables will surpass coal to become the largest source of global electricity generation by early 2025, much faster than previously predicted.The bad news is that we are still falling well short of the kinds of investments needed to deal with this crisis. We are still not moving fast enough to save our planet. The latest report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that without more urgent action, the world will pass the key 1.5C (2.7F) threshold by the early 2030s, risking a far deadlier future for our children and future generations. The science is clear: if the US, China, and the rest of the planet do not act with greater urgency to dramatically cut carbon emissions, our planet will face enormous and irreversible damage.Let’s be clear: since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the US has put more carbon into the atmosphere, by far, than any other country. While the new technologies sustained by fossil fuels improved our standard of living, we laid the groundwork for the climate calamity the planet is now experiencing.In recent years, the rapidly growing Chinese economy has eclipsed the US as the world’s major carbon emitter. Right now, China is building six times as many coal-fired power plants as the rest of the world combined – the equivalent of two new coal plants every week. Last year, they quadrupled the number of new coal plants approved compared with 2021. Current plans will see China add as much new coal to its grid as used in all of India, the second largest coal user, and five times more coal capacity as the US.It is no great secret the Chinese government is undertaking many policies that we and the international community should oppose. They are cruelly repressing and interning the Uyghurs, threatening Taiwan and stifling freedom of expression in Tibet and Hong Kong. China has bullied its neighbors, abused the global trading system, stolen technology and is building out a dystopian surveillance state.The US is rightly organizing its allies to press Beijing on these and other issues. But organizing most of our national effort around a zero-sum global confrontation with China is unlikely to change Chinese behavior and will alienate allies and partners.Most importantly, it could doom our planet by making climate cooperation impossible between the world’s two largest greenhouse emitters. We need to move in a bold new direction. Recent history provides some instructive examples.In 1962, when the US and the Soviet Union stood on the verge of nuclear war, President John F Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, came together to prevent mutual destruction. Just a few months later, with the nuclear crisis as the background, President Kennedy proposed to the Soviet Union an arms reductions plan which would change the confrontational dynamic that had brought the world to the brink. Even arch anti-communists like Nixon and Reagan made bold gambits to reduce tensions, fearful of global annihilation. We face a similar dynamic today, facing collective catastrophe if we do not change course.Here is the insane dynamic that must be changed. In recent years, both the US and China have greatly increased their military budgets. The US now spends some $900bn on the Pentagon, more than the next 10 nations combined. China, with the world’s second largest military budget, spends almost $300bn. Despite spending these huge amounts on “defense”, both countries are losing the war against the climate ccrisis. The US has experienced massive floods, fires, drought and extreme weather disturbances, which have cost us hundreds of billions. The recent flooding in China alone will cost that government tens of billions. Into the future, scientists tell us that great cities like Shanghai and New York will be underwater if we do not act effectively against the climate crisis.So here’s a “radical” idea. Instead of spending enormous amounts of money planning for a war against each other, the US and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets and use the savings to move aggressively to improve energy efficiency, move toward sustainable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels. They should also provide increased support for developing countries who are suffering from the climate crisis through no fault of their own.Now, I know that establishment politicians in both countries will tell me how naive and unsophisticated I am to offer such a suggestion and they will provide a million reasons as to why it can’t be done. My response is this: go talk to the people in Vermont who have lost their homes because of unprecedented flooding and the families in Hawaii who lost loved ones in the recent fires. Go talk to the more than 1 million people in China who have been displaced by catastrophic floods. Go talk to the people in southern Africa who are starving because of the terrible drought and floods they are experiencing or farmers around the world who can no longer grow their crops because of water shortages.Perhaps most importantly, go talk to the hundreds of millions of young people in every country on earth who are losing hope, wondering whether they should even have children of their own, given the enormous challenges the climate crisis poses for a normal life.Nelson Mandela famously remarked; “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” If we are to save the planet, now is the time for bold action. Let’s do it.
Bernie Sanders is a US Senator and chairman of the health, education, labor and pensions committee More

On 16 or perhaps 17 July 2024, in Milwaukee, the Republican national convention will likely nominate as its presidential candidate a convicted criminal. When Donald Trump ascends the podium to accept the nomination for his third time he will probably have been found guilty months earlier of having staged an attempted coup to overthrow American democracy – “conspiring to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, obstruct the certification of the election results, and discount citizens’ legitimate votes”, in the words of special counsel Jack Smith.The US district court judge Tanya Chutkan has announced that she will set the trial date at the next hearing on Trump’s case on 28 August. Smith has sought a 2 January 2024 start date for a trial to last an estimated six weeks into mid-February. Trump’s attorneys have preposterously suggested a date in April 2026. If Judge Chutkan fixes the trial for any time before 1 June 2024, Trump will accept the Republican nomination after its verdict is rendered.And if the date is earlier than June, Republican primaries will be conducted at the same time as the trial. Day by day, the compounding of the doubled events will incite his followers to redouble their fervor and devotion. Rocket fuel will be pumped on to the fire of Trump’s campaign. While the closing statements are delivered to the jury, Republicans will, if the polls hold, have already voted overwhelmingly for Trump and reduced his opponents’ chances to ashes.The day of the first contest, the Iowa caucuses, 15 January, is also the day that his second defamation trial with E Jean Carroll begins. The judge in that case, in New York, Lewis A Kaplan, found in July that Trump had “raped” her. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted … makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that,” he said. So Trump will mount the stage at the convention, regardless of the legal verdict about the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, or any other verdict, as an adjudicated rapist.All told, so far, Trump faces 91 criminal counts in four jurisdictions. Three other elaborate trials will follow his January 6 case, if it is scheduled any time in January or February. His trial date in New York is tentatively on the calendar for 25 March 2024. In that case, he is charged by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg “for falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election. During the election, Trump and others employed a ‘catch and kill’ scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. Trump then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws.”But Bragg has suggested he would postpone this trial to allow the January 6 federal case to be first.Trump’s trial in the Mar-a-Lago presidential records case is on the calendar in Florida for 20 May 2024, where he is charged with the illegal and willful theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice.Even more than during the gripping performance of his various indictments, the theatre of his trials will subsume politics. There will not be another campaign, some semblance of a normal campaign of the past, a fantasy campaign, separate from Trump’s trials. The scenes from courtroom to courtroom will overlap with the primaries – the final ones taking place on 4 June 2024 – only intensifying the zeal of his base. And then Trump’s battle with the law will engulf the general election.The trials are a continuous spectacle, featuring an all-star cast in far-flung locations. Political reporters are barely heard from, while legal analysts fill the airwaves. Every twist and turn, every motion, every argument is the breathless lead story. Everyone, from prosecutors to co-conspirators, named and unnamed, indicted and unindicted, are characters in Trump’s new reality show – part violent action movie (the insurrection), part sleazy porn flick (Stormy Daniels), part conspiracy thriller (Mar-a-Lago), and part mafia drama (the fake elector racket).But the Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else.The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed “deplorables”. He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. If any Republican lapses in faithfulness, they are more than a mere doubter or skeptic, but a betrayer and traitor. Trump’s trials are the rigorous trial of his followers’ faith. Rejection of temptation in an encounter with an impertinent fact that might raise a qualm shows purity of heart. Seduction by fact must be resisted. The siren song of critical thinking must be cast out as sin. Trump’s convictions are the supreme test of his followers’ strength of conviction.Republicans are not prisoners of Trump’s narcissistic rage. They don’t reject it. They don’t regret it. They don’t apologize. They mirror it. They mimic it. They exult in it. It is the gratification they receive for passing through the ordeal of belief. His rage is their reward. It is their cheap vicarious defiance of the evil-doers: the establishment, the globalists, the Fauciists, the FBI, the Barbie movie. As Trump has received target letters, so judges, district attorneys, the special counsel, and their wives, too, must be targets. Fair game is fair play. Hallelujah!Poor Mike Pence, who Trump chose as his running mate to balance his sinfulness with Christian virtue, benightedly still believes that truthfulness, righteousness and clean hands makes him the ideal evangelical avatar. He has positioned himself on the Republican issues as a scold of Trump’s fall from grace on abortion. Pence is in favor of a national ban, not leaving it to the states like Trump, as if issues matter. His humility as a godly servant leader, for years imitating every gesture of Trump’s, reached its abrupt end in his refusal to drink from Trump’s poisoned chalice.Yet Pence’s embrace of scripture in the form of the constitution has not beatified him to the evangelicals. There is no worldly subject that can grant him absolution from being perceived as Trump’s Judas. His steadfastness is scorned. His blamelessness is derided. “I’m glad they didn’t hang you,” a man said to Pence at the Iowa state fair. That man’s sentiment is the current definition of moderate Republicanism.The precise source of Trump’s permanent campaign of trials can be traced to before the election of 2016, when his inveterate dirty trickster Roger Stone coined the “Stop the Steal” slogan to claim Trump had been robbed by Senator Ted Cruz in the Colorado caucuses. That falsehood became Trump’s “Stop the Steal” con before the 2020 election, which metastasized into his coup and insurrection, and now the prosecutions. (Last week, a Danish film-maker who has produced a documentary about Stone released previously unseen video of him laying out the details of the fake electors scheme on 5 November 2020, two days after the election. It seems doubtful that Stone was the originator of the conspiracy. The idea was floated in February 2020 at a closed meeting to the rightwing Council on National Policy, whose president, Tom Fitton, later called on Trump to pardon Stone. Fitton sent Trump a memo on 31 October 2020, three days before the election, advising him to declare before the ballots were counted, “We had an election today – and I won.” Fitton has been identified by a number of news organizations as Unnamed Co-Conspirator Individual 1 in the Georgia indictment.)But Trump’s career in crime is an epic story that antedates his election fraud. The Georgia indictment charging him with operating a “criminal enterprise” is overdue by almost 50 years. His coup d’état is the coup de grâce. But the enormity of his conspiracy to overturn the election ultimately depended upon the weak reed of Pence, who proved surprisingly unpliable. Trump brought the lessons he learned in the demimonde of New York to Washington.He always wanted his Roy Cohn, his model lawyer and mouthpiece. His credentials were nonpareil. Cohn was born and bred in the clubhouse political culture of graft and favoritism, Joe McCarthy’s vicious counsel, returned to the city as its number one fixer, from the mob to the Catholic archdiocese, who had won his own acquittals in four criminal trials for bribery and conspiracy when the Trumps – father Fred, with his real-estate empire in the outer boroughs, and his son Donald, on the make in the Big Apple – hired him in 1974 to get them off the hook of a federal suit for housing discrimination against black tenants. On advice of counsel, Trump repeatedly perjured himself, Cohn dragged the case out, and the Trumps ignored Department of Justice decrees. Cohn claimed the case was created by “planted malcontents”. Trump, meanwhile, got his real-estate license, and Cohn would set him up with the mob to build Trump Tower.But Roy Cohn was only one part of what Trump required to operate. He also needed the prosecutors to lay off. He needed his Robert Morgenthau, scion of one of New York’s most distinguished families, personification of civic virtue, the US attorney for the southern district of New York for a dozen years and the district attorney of Manhattan for 35 years, “my friend, the late, GREAT, Robert Morgenthau”, as Trump called him after his death at 100. Morgenthau brought Trump on to the board of the Police Athletic Association, hosted a tribute dinner to him and accepted campaign contributions. He never opened a single investigation into Trump, and always felt there was nothing to see.Soon after Rudy Giuliani was appointed the US attorney for the southern district in 1983, Trump was bounced out of New York by the bankers. Trump’s profligacy and mismanagement crashed his monumental casino and hotel, the Taj Mahal in New Jersey, built with mob help, and he could not secure his loans. Giuliani was busy elsewhere, prosecuting the five families of the mafia, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) of 1970, the first time the act was applied in a major case. His pioneering use of the Rico statute made Giuliani’s reputation. Trump and Giuliani circled each other in a strange dance of outsized egos.Giuliani threw in with Trump late in the game, during the 2016 campaign, when he manipulated his network of FBI agents in and around the New York office to raise the pressure on director James Comey to reopen the already closed investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails because of the existence of a computer owned by her aide Huma Abedin and accessed by her husband Anthony Weiner. Comey succumbed. His public announcements were decisive in shifting marginal votes in swing states to Trump. (The FBI chief of counter-intelligence in the New York office at the time, Charles McGonigal, closely connected to Giuliani, pleaded guilty this week to money-laundering payments from a sanctioned Russian oligarch.)Trump’s next task for Giuliani was to troll through the back alleys of Ukraine seeking disinformation on Joe Biden to discredit him as the Democratic candidate in 2020. Giuliani’s efforts were an essential element in Trump’s scheme that prompted him to attempt extorting Volodymyr Zelensky into trading fabricated dirt on Biden for missiles desperately needed to defend Ukraine against Russia. Trump was impeached for the first time.Giuliani was the master of Rico. He knew better than anyone how the law worked and the mafia operated. The first he used to forge his image as a crime-fighter; the second he emulated on Trump’s behalf. So, the wielder of Rico was ensnared under Rico. He learned first-hand how the mafia did its business. He discovered how to organize a racket into an effective hierarchy. He learned the potential value of intimidating innocents. From this point of view, he saw the Republican party as a racket in the making, from the Republican National Committee to the Republican Association of Attorneys General to the state parties, all constituent families of a mafia, with Giuliani himself as the consigliere to the capo di tutti capi.“This criminal organization,” stated the Georgia indictment, “… constituted an ongoing organization whose members and associates functioned as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.” Giuliani was indicted on 13 counts, including racketeering, making false statements, harassment and intimidation of an election worker, and election fraud. The former prosecutor is the prosecuted. He is struggling to meet his attorney’s fees. He complains that he is owed $300,000 from Trump for non-payment for his counsel.The trials have become Trump’s engine for capturing his third Republican nomination. His celebrity has been transformed into a passion play of victimization. His problem is that the trials are not shows.
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

Offering “free advice” to his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, the former Texas congressman Will Hurd said: “If Donald Trump is leading in the polls, and he’s your opponent, then kissing his butt is not going to help you win.”Trump is indeed leading national and key state polls by wide margins, despite facing 91 criminal charges under four separate indictments for election subversion, retention of classified documents and hush-money payments to a porn star.A poll by CBS News on Sunday showed Trump with a whopping 62% support among Republicans. Ron DeSantis was next with 16%. The Florida governor’s campaign is seen to be tanking but, ahead of a first debate this week in which Trump will not take part, no rival has staked a firm claim to replace DeSantis in second place.Hurd has not qualified to debate in Milwaukee but he is one of the few candidates prepared to attack Trump in strong terms, not least over scheduled trials that include civil cases over defamation and a rape allegation and investigations of his business affairs.On Sunday, Hurd told the MSNBC host Jenn Psaki: “Things are improving and changing.“Had a great time in Des Moines [Iowa] yesterday or this week at the Iowa state fair. And what people want is someone who’s willing to be honest. What people want is folks that are not afraid of Donald Trump and who are going to articulate a vision for a future and talk about the issues of the day that are impacting them, and not just focusing on Donald Trump’s legal baggage.”Hurd was recently booed in Iowa but he said people in the first state to vote also told him “thank you for being honest”.He said: “Here’s what we’re learning. There’s a good chunk of people that are never going to vote for Donald Trump, and there’s folks that like Donald Trump, voted for him twice, still like him as a person, and don’t think he has a chance in a rematch against Joe Biden.”In polling between Biden and Trump, Biden is generally ahead.“If the GOP puts up Donald Trump as a nominee, Joe Biden will win four more years of office, and I think people are recognising that. And what I’d also remind folks is that the voting doesn’t start for about 24 more weeks. A lot can change between now and then.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionInstead of debating on Wednesday, Trump has chosen to prerecord an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.Hurd said that showed Trump was “afraid to go on the debate stage and answer for being a proven loser. The last time he won was in 2016. He doesn’t want to have to defend his poor record, he doesn’t want to have to defend all of these issues he’s dealing with. These legal issues are self-inflicted wounds.“And that’s what I’m looking forward to talking about: not only his problems but articulating what the GOP needs to be doing, so we prevent a trend that has been happening for the last 20 years. And that’s losing the general election popular vote.”Republican candidates for president have not won the popular vote since 2004. Presidents, however, are elected via the electoral college. More

Donald Trump has confirmed that he will not attend the first Republican primary debate on Wednesday, in a post on Truth Social, amid reports that he is weighing several options in an attempt to upstage the opening event in the party’s nominating contest.The former president confirmed on his social media platform that he would be attending no primary debates. “New CBS poll, just out, has me leading the field by ‘legendary’ numbers… I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES.”The Trump team has two overarching priorities for the debate, according to several sources briefed on the situation: to starve the other Republican presidential candidates of attention, and to publicly humiliate Fox News, which is hosting the event with the RNC, because he has been displeased with some of its recent coverage.For weeks, Trump has asked his aides privately and rally crowds publicly whether he should attend the debate or engage in counter-programming efforts in a boastful display of his political strength even after being criminally charged four times.The response has overwhelmingly been for him to skip the debate. Trump has told allies he intends to shun the event and that his sit-down interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which he taped in recent days, could be released around the same time.Trump had also considered swaggering into the debate at the last minute – without prior warning – betting that would almost certainly cause the news coverage to be about his surprise visit and not the other candidates’ answers. But he has since soured on that option, people briefed on the matter said.The Trump team had explored whether Trump could do the ultimate counter-programming by scheduling his surrender to authorities, after the Fulton county district attorney charged him with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, to take place at the same time.But even though the political team had pushed for him to be booked at the Fulton county jail on Wednesday, his legal team has been opposed. Trump’s lawyers thought Thursday was a more realistic option and intend to finalize logistics with the district attorney’s office on Monday, the people said.At the meeting with the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, Trump’s lawyers are expected to negotiate the scope of his surrender, including whether the former president will have his mugshot and weight released.The Trump campaign have asked the lawyers for there to be no photograph, in part because aides have produced a flattering “mugshot” which they have used on promotional material, even though Trump once thought getting arrested and photographed would make him look defiant.The political team has since recalibrated for a potential surrender on Thursday morning followed by a news conference.A spokesperson for Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.Trump’s decision to spurn the debate on Fox News in favor of an online interview with Carlson marks a new level of hostility with the network.Fox News executives and hosts have reportedly been begging Trump to take part in the debate. Last month, the Fox News president, Jay Wallace, and CEO, Suzanne Scott, went to Bedminster to convince Trump to attend, and came away thinking he could still participate.But Trump has been openly attacking Fox News since the launch of his presidential campaign, in part because of its positive coverage of his 2024 rival and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and has privately lashed out at the Fox Corporation chairman, Rupert Murdoch. More

The former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told investigators he had no knowledge of Donald Trump either talking about or declassifying confidential information, it was reported on Sunday, potentially skewering the ex-president’s defense in his classified documents case.Meadows’ alleged admission to the special counsel Jack Smith, reported by ABC News, suggests Trump made no blanket declassification of secret papers later seized from his Mar-a-Lago resort by FBI agents, leading to 40 criminal counts against him.Trump, who pleaded not guilty to all charges, has insisted without proof he gave automatic clearance to every government document he took to Florida at the conclusion of his administration in January 2021. But his lawyers have not yet presented the defense in court and doing so could open the possibility of Meadows being called as a witness to contradict it, ABC said.According to ABC, Meadows also told Smith he was not involved in packing the boxes, did not witness Trump or anybody else doing so, and claimed he was unaware the former president was taking anything with him.If true, it would be extraordinary that one of Trump’s closest aides had absolutely no knowledge of anything to do with the retention of the documents. It might also suggest Trump knew what he was taking and planned and executed the operation himself.Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, also said he was unaware of any standing order for declassifying documents.Asked about the report, he told ABC’s This Week: “There is a process that the White House goes through to declassify materials. I’m aware of that occurring on several occasions over the course of our four years but I don’t have any knowledge of any broad-based directive from the president.”Pence, now challenging his former boss for the Republican presidential nomination, added: “That doesn’t mean it didn’t occur. It’s just not something that I ever heard about.”Asked if Meadows, as Trump’s chief of staff, should have been aware of any such broad declassification order, Pence said: “I would expect so.”Meadows, who has remained publicly silent about the documents case, was indicted alongside Trump and 17 others last week by Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton county in Georgia who is investigating efforts to reverse Joe Biden’s win there in 2020.On Saturday, attorneys for Meadows asked a federal court to dismiss the state charges against him.Meadows claims his alleged actions, including participating with Trump in a phone call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, should be immune from state prosecution because they were performed in his capacity as a federal official.A 37-page document filed on Saturday with a US district court in Georgia asserted that Meadows’ actions were protected by the supremacy clause of the US constitution, under which federal officials are immune from state prosecution for acts committed within the reasonable scope of their duties.“The conduct charged here falls squarely within the scope of Mr Meadows’s duties as chief of staff and the federal policy underlying that role,” attorneys said in the filing.The document also claimed protection under the first and 14th amendments to the constitution.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe filing came days after Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman, sought to have the case moved from Georgia’s Fulton County to federal court.In the investigation over the classified documents, ABC said, Meadows appeared before a federal grand jury investigating the classified documents in April. According to ABC’s sources, Meadows told the special counsel he made an offer to Trump to go through the boxes and retrieve classified documents after the National Archives first requested their return in 2021, but was turned down.ABC also claimed to have reviewed a draft copy of Meadows’ 2021 memoir, The Chief’s Chief, which Meadows allegedly asked to be rewritten to change a description of Trump’s discussion of a classified Iran war plan in front of unauthorized persons at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.A reference to Trump’s handling of the document was removed from the final draft, ABC said, because it could be “problematic”. Audio of the meeting, heard by the Guardian, features Trump boasting about having a document on Iran from the “defense department”. Trump later claimed there was no document, and he was referring to news clippings.In a statement to ABC News, the Trump campaign accused the justice department of “selectively leaking incomplete information that lacks proper context”.Echoing language Trump has used in response to all his indictments, the statement said: “This witch hunt is nothing more than a desperate attempt to interfere in the 2024 election as President Trump dominates the polls and is the only person who will take back the White House.”
Reuters contributed to this report More