US Politics

From 2h agoDonald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.In John Bolton’s op-ed published on Tuesday, he said Donald Trump “disdains knowledge” and accused him of “seeing relations between the United States and foreign lands, especially our adversaries, predominantly as matters of personality”.“Foreign leaders, friend or foe, are far more likely see him as ignorant, inexperienced, braggadocious, longing to be one of the big boys and eminently susceptible to flattery,” Bolton wrote. “These characteristics were a constant source of risk in Trump’s first term, and would be again in a second term.”Bolton condemned Trump for his decision-making, saying:
Beyond acting on inadequate information, reflection or discussion, Trump is also feckless even after making decisions. When things go wrong, or when he simply changes his mind subsequently (a common occurrence), he invariably tries to distance himself from his own decision, fearing negative media coverage or political criticism.
Following his firing in 2019, Bolton published a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he strongly criticized Trump’s leadership. Earlier this year, Bolton called Trump’s 2024 presidential bid “poison” to the Republican party.Ex-national security adviser John Bolton issued harsh remarks against his former boss and the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying that the US will likely withdraw from Nato if Donald Trump wins the election.In an interview with the Hill on Thursday, Bolton criticized the former president’s foreign policy after an op-ed he wrote earlier this week called Trump’s behavior “erratic, irrational and unconstrained”.“Donald Trump doesn’t really have a philosophy, as we understand it in political terms,” Bolton said.
He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space.
Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, also lambasted Trump for his foreign policy legacy with regard to the alliance, saying in the interview:
He threatened the existence of Nato, and I think in a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from Nato.
He also criticized Republicans who have praised Trump for his foreign policy positions. He said:
Those who make these claims about what Trump did in his first term don’t really understand how we got to the places we did. Because many of the things they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.
Nearly of half of Republicans said they would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, according to a new poll.The Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted before the former president’s court appearance on Thursday, asked respondents if they would vote for Trump for president next year if he were “convicted of a felony crime by a jury”.Among Republicans, 45% said they would not vote for him, while 35% said they would. The rest said they did not know.Asked if they would vote for Trump if he were “currently serving time in prison”, 52% of Republicans said they would not, and 28% said they would.About two-thirds of Republicans said the accusation in Trump’s latest indictment that he solicited election fraud was “not believable”, compared with 29% who said it was.Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that Thomas Klingenstein’s pivot may indicate an effort to “pull of Republican outfits and donors towards more extreme positions”.While the Claremont Institute has been called “the nerve center of the American Right” for its intellectual leadership and formation of hard right activists, Klingenstein appears to have a new appetite for directly impacting electoral politics.Klingenstein is a partner in Wall Street investment firm Cohen Klingenstein, which administers a portfolio worth more than $2.3bn, according to its most recent Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.Klingenstein’s grandfather was a successful investor, and other members of his family pursue more conventional avenues for their philanthropy, but beginning in the Donald Trump era, Klingenstein has increasingly used his resources to pursue a hard-edged version of rightwing politics.Klingenstein’s characterization of the political divide as a cold civil war – spelled out in a series of glossy YouTube videos – has been previously reported, as have some of his activities as chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute, a Claremont, California-based thinktank.That organization charted a radical, pro-Trump course from 2016, culminating in Senior Fellow John Eastman advising Trump in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and delivering a fiery speech to the crowd of protesters in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.But newly available filings reveal how he has advanced these ideas in electoral and cultural battles.Read the full story here. Newly released tax and election records show that since 2020 controversial financier Thomas Klingenstein has become one of the largest individual donors to national Republicans, contributing more than $11.6m to candidates and Pac, after decades as the far-right Claremont Institute’s biggest donor and board chairman.The spending spree dwarfs the total $666,000 Klingenstein spent between 1992 and 2016, and in the last election cycle put Klingenstein in the top 40 contributors to national Republican candidates and committees.In turn the spending has allowed him to connect with a long-standing network of conservative mega-donors centered on the billionaire-founded Club for Growth, which advocates for the reduction of government.Klingenstein and the Claremont Institute push a harder-edged rightwing politics, and he appeared in a series of videos released in 2022 where he argued that American conservatives are in a “cold civil war” with “woke communists”, and that “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, big tech… together with the government function as a totalitarian regime”.A group of House Democrats called on the body overseeing federal courts to allow Donald Trump’s election fraud trial be publicly televised live.In a letter led by Representative Adam Schiff, who served on the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection, the group of 38 House Democrats asked that the judicial conference “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump”.The group wrote:
It is imperative the [court] ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and need for transparency.
Trump was arraigned at a federal courthouse in Washington on Thursday and charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.The arraignment was not televised publicly, as cameras are generally not allowed in federal courtrooms. Trump’s next court hearing in the case is set for 28 August.The letter’s signatories included other members who served on the January 6 committee which concluded with a recommendation that the justice department pursue a criminal investigation of Trump over his involvement in the insurrection.It continued:
Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings. If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.
As we reported earlier, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Friday to new charges brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith in his classified documents criminal case.Trump, who just a day ago pleaded not guilty in a Washington federal courtroom to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, officially entered a plea of “not guilty” to the 40-count superseding indictment in a separate case against him in the Southern District of Florida.The former president did not appear in court on Friday. He also waived his right to be present in court for his arraignment on the three additional charges, scheduled for Thursday 10 August before a US magistrate judge in Fort Pierce, Florida.Federal prosecutors filed the new charges last week against Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, in the criminal case over the retention of sensitive government records at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump now faces 40 charges in the case, after originally being indicted on 37 counts last month.Trump’s co-defendants, De Oliveira and Nauta, have not indicated in court filings their plans for the arraignment, according to CNN.After months of waffling, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared to finally reject Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, the New York Times reports.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” DeSantis said in response to a question from a reporter during a campaign stop in Iowa, a day after Trump appeared in a Washington DC federal court to answer charges related to his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.The governor has previously been vague about whether he adhered to Trump’s disproven claims that fraud caused him to lose re-election, though DeSantis has characterized the state and federal charges filed against the former president as politically motivated.The comments come amid a pronounced drop in DeSantis’s recent poll numbers, who is otherwise in second place to Trump among Republican primary voters.Donald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.Iowa is the first state to vote in the Republican presidential nomination process, and New York Times/Siena College polling of the state released today shows Donald Trump with a commanding lead:However, he’s underperforming his national poll numbers in Iowa, potentially giving rivals like Ron DeSantis an opening to catch up. From the Times’s story on the data:
Even Iowa Republicans who say they favor other candidates could still swing Mr. Trump’s way.
“Each indictment gets me leaning toward Trump,” said John-Charles Fish, 45, a Waukon, Iowa, social media consultant who said he still supported Mr. DeSantis, but barely. “It wouldn’t take much for me to change my mind,” he said.
For Mr. DeSantis and other competitors, the Iowa survey yielded glimmers of bright spots. About 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider other candidates. Among Republicans with at least a college degree, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are tied at 26 percent when the whole field is under consideration.
In a head-to-head match between the front-runner and his closest rival, Mr. Trump leads Iowa handily, 55 percent to 39 percent, but he is well behind Mr. DeSantis among college-educated Republicans, 38 percent to 53 percent.
According to the poll, Mr. DeSantis is seen as the more moral candidate, and although the Florida governor has been knocked for some awkward moments on the campaign trail, he is seen as considerably more likable than Mr. Trump. More than half of those surveyed said the term “likable” was a better fit for Mr. DeSantis, compared with 38 percent for Mr. Trump.
The poll also suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s argument that he is the more electable Republican may be resonating with voters, at least in Iowa. Just under half of those surveyed said Mr. Trump is the candidate more able to beat Mr. Biden, while 40 percent said Mr. DeSantis is. Nationally, Mr. Trump holds a 30-percentage-point lead on the same question.
Robert Corry, a business consultant in Grinnell, Iowa, praised Mr. DeSantis’s stewardship of Florida’s sprawling economy, his ability to “get things done” and his “exemplary, outstanding life.”
Donald Trump continues to consolidate his support among Republicans, criminal charges be damned.He just announced endorsements from almost the entirety of Alabama’s congressional lawmakers, including all the Republicans in its House delegation. Perhaps what is more notable is who from the deeply red state did not endorse him.While Trump picked up the support of Republican senior senator Tommy Tuberville, junior senator Katie Britt has reportedly said she will not be endorsing any candidate for the GOP’s nomination. Republican governor Kay Ivey also has not made an endorsement, though the former president did gain the support of lieutenant governor Will Ainsworth.And needless to say, the sole Democrat in Alabama’s House delegation, Terri Sewell, did not endorse Trump.Donald Trump’s detractors have long dreamed of seeing him behind bars, and now that he’s the subject of not one, not two, but three and perhaps even four criminal indictments, it seems like that dream could become a reality.Or could it?The Washington Post has a story looking at the practical considerations that would determine whether Trump actually goes to jail if convicted of the state and federal charges he currently stands accused of. That would be an unprecedented situation, and some former government officials the Post spoke to were skeptical of the former president ever actually ending up behind bars:
Could Trump face prison? “Theoretically, yes and practically, no,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former top federal prosecutor and counsel to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Rosenberg served briefly as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the Trump administration and notably said the president had “condoned police misconduct” in remarking to officers in Long Island that they need not protect suspects’ heads when loading them into police vehicles.
“Any federal district judge ought to understand it raises enormous and unprecedented logistical issues,” Rosenberg said of the prospect Trump could be incarcerated. “Probation, fines, community service and home confinement are all alternatives.”
And even if he is convicted, there are a range of possibilities for the type of sentence he could receive:
The prospect of potentially decades in prison for Trump is politically loaded, though the charges he faces could carry such a penalty. After entering a not-guilty plea in Miami federal court on June 13, Trump claimed he was being threatened with “400 years in prison,” adding up the statutory maximum penalty for the 37 counts against him. The charges he faces in D.C. related to his alleged efforts to stay in power despite losing the election could add additional decades, based on that math.
Judges almost never apply maximum penalties to first offenders and rarely stack sentences rather than let them run concurrently. However, federal sentencing guidelines are highly technical. Specialists estimate that a first offender convicted of multiple counts of willfully retaining national defense information and obstructing or conspiring to obstruct an investigation by concealing evidence might face a range of anything from 51 to 63 months on the low end — about five years — to 17½ to 22 years on the high end — or about 20 years, given Trump’s alleged leadership role and abuse of trust.
Similarly, Jan. 6 riot defendants convicted at trial of two of the same counts with which Trump is charged — conspiring to or actually obstructing an official proceeding — have faced sentencing guideline ranges as high as seven to 11 years, and as low as less than two years.
But judges always have the final say.
“Without question, if it were anyone else [but Trump], prison would be a certainty,” said Thomas A. Durkin, a former federal prosecutor who teaches national security law at Loyola University Chicago. However, he said, “The Secret Service waiver issue is a novel and complex issue” that could theoretically factor into an exception.
That said, if he does go to prison, the Post reports that it could actually things easier for his Secret Service details:
Former and current Secret Service agents said that while there is no precedent, they feel certain the agency would insist on providing some form of 24/7 protection to an imprisoned former president. And, they say, the agency is probably planning for that possibility, seeking to match to some degree its normal practice of rotating three daily shifts of at least one or two agents providing close proximity protection.
“This question keeps getting raised, yet no official answers” from the Secret Service, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and now chief operating officer for Teneo Risk, a corporate advisory and communications firm. “However, we can infer how security measures could be implemented based on existing protective protocols. Unless there are changes in legislation or the former president waives protection, the U.S. Secret Service would likely maintain a protective environment around the president in accordance with their current practices.”
Current and former agents said Trump’s detail would coordinate their protection work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to ensure there was no conflict about duties or about how they would handle emergencies, as well as the former president’s routine movements in a prison — such as heading to exercise or meals. The Secret Service, they said, would maintain a bubble around Trump in any case, keeping him at a distance from other inmates.
“In some ways, protection may be easier — the absence of travel means logistics get easier and confinement means that the former president’s location is always known,” Wackrow said. “Theoretically, the perimeter is well fortified — no one is worried about someone breaking into jail.”
Ron DeSantis is having a rough go of his presidential campaign. His solution? “Start slitting throats”, as the Guardian Martin Pengelly reports:Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelly, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.DeSantis is a clear second in the Republican primary but more than 30 points behind Donald Trump in most averages, notwithstanding the former president’s proliferating legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges.Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie visited Ukraine on Friday and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to underscore US support for Kyiv by one of the people bidding to be the next Republican president of the US.The former New Jersey governor met Zelenskiy at the presidential palace after visiting a mass grave in Bucha and touring damage in Iprin. Christie also toured a child protection center in Kyiv.Other Republican candidates, including frontrunner Donald Trump, have been critical of the cost of supporting Ukraine. Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year suggested that the war was simply a “territorial dispute” before backtracking. Another candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has called for an immediate end to the war and for Russia to keep its territorial gains.Former vice-president Mike Pence and US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina are also in the race, and Reuters notes both have argued it remains vital for the US to push back against Russian aggression.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, follow our live blog. A day after pleading not guilty to federal charges related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump is calling on the US supreme court to intercede in the legal battles he is facing.Trump, in a Truth Social post earlier today, repeated accusations that the legal troubles he brought upon himself amount to “election interference” from President Joe Biden.He said Biden “hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits” that will “require massive amounts of my time [and] money to adjudicate”, resources that he claimed would have been used for advertising and rallies.Trump added:
I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!
Mounting legal fees have forced Trump to drain his campaign’s financial resources ahead of the GOP primary season. In filings with the Federal Election Commission FEC) on Monday, Trump’s political action committee, Save America, said that at the end of June it had less than $4m cash on hand, having paid tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for the former president and associates. More

Ex-national security adviser John Bolton issued harsh remarks against his former boss and the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying that the US will likely withdraw from Nato if Donald Trump wins the election.In an interview with the Hill on Thursday, Bolton criticized the former president’s foreign policy after an op-ed he wrote earlier this week called Trump’s behavior “erratic, irrational and unconstrained”.“Donald Trump doesn’t really have a philosophy, as we understand it in political terms,” Bolton said. “He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space.”Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, also lambasted Trump for his foreign policy legacy with regard to the alliance, saying in the interview: “He threatened the existence of Nato, and I think in a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from Nato.”He also criticized Republicans who have praised Trump for his foreign policy positions. He said: “Those who make these claims about what Trump did in his first term don’t really understand how we got to the places we did. Because many of the things they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.”In Bolton’s op-ed published on Tuesday, he said Trump “disdains knowledge” and accused him of “seeing relations between the United States and foreign lands, especially our adversaries, predominantly as matters of personality”.“Foreign leaders, friend or foe, are far more likely see him as ignorant, inexperienced, braggadocious, longing to be one of the big boys and eminently susceptible to flattery,” Bolton wrote. “These characteristics were a constant source of risk in Trump’s first term, and would be again in a second term.”Bolton condemned Trump for his decision-making, saying: “Beyond acting on inadequate information, reflection or discussion, Trump is also feckless even after making decisions. When things go wrong, or when he simply changes his mind subsequently (a common occurrence), he invariably tries to distance himself from his own decision, fearing negative media coverage or political criticism.”Following his firing in 2019, Bolton published a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he strongly criticized Trump’s leadership. Earlier this year, Bolton called Trump’s 2024 presidential bid “poison” to the Republican party.Since March, Trump has been criminally charged in connection with hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, with his hoarding of classified documents at his Florida resort, and with allegedly having a hand in illegal efforts to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges filed against him. More

A Black journalism professor who was hired by Texas A&M University before objections in some quarters over her history of promoting diversity foiled the job offer has secured a $1m settlement from the institution.Kathleen McElroy also received an apology from officials at Texas A&M, the largest public school in the US, who in a statement Thursday acknowledged “mistakes … made during the process”.In her own statement, McElroy said she would remain in a tenured teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin, and hoped the settlement would “reinforce A&M’s allegiance to excellence in higher education and its commitment to academic freedom and journalism”.“I will never forget that … students, members, former students and staff voiced support for me from many sectors,” McElroy’s statement also said.The payment and apology to McElroy all but closed an episode that unfolded as Republican lawmakers across the US eye the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at college campuses. Such programs are in conservatives’ crosshairs after the Republican supermajority on the US supreme court’s bench ruled in June that race-conscious college admissions decisions were unconstitutional.That court ruling effectively ended affirmative action in the US’s higher education system.Texas A&M announced in June that it had hired McElroy – a school alum and former New York Times editor – to refurbish its journalism department in June. Hiring McElroy away from a more liberal rival at the University of Texas won the school plaudits from some sectors.But then, in a July interview with the Texas Tribune, McElroy revealed that she had encountered pushback at Texas A&M because she had previously worked to diversify newsrooms and make them more inclusive.Documents released Thursday to media organizations including the Associated Press and the local news outlet KVUE showed that six of the school governing board’s members had expressed “concerns” about McElroy after the right-leaning website Texas Scorecard reported on her prior diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.Alums and active students had also called and emailed the university president’s office to challenge the hiring of “a DEI proponent … to serve as director of the new journalism program,” said the documents, which summarized Texas A&M’s investigation into the McElroy matter, according to the AP.Subsequently, as the professor told it, the school president Katherine Banks reduced McElroy’s job offer to a five-year position as opposed to one that was on track to be tenured, which implies certain longer-term employment protections. McElroy told the Tribune that the five-year position – from which she could be fired at any time – was then reduced to a one-year post.At that point, McElroy rejected the job and indicated that she would stay in her teaching role at the University of Texas at Austin.Banks maintained she was not involved in modifications to the contract offered to McElroy. Nonetheless, she resigned from the presidency on 21 July, and the Texas A&M board later negotiated a settlement with McElroy.McElroy was one of two reasons why Texas A&M drew national headlines in July. In a separate case, A&M professor Joy Alonzo was suspended within hours of speaking critically about Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick during a lecture on the ongoing opioid crisis.Alonzo’s suspension, along with McElroy’s botched hiring, have prompted concerns among many in higher education that colleges are increasingly clamping down on free speech at campuses in the face of political pressure.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

I blame the father. Frederick Trump raised his children, one in particular, to believe that the world was divided into winners and losers and that there was no greater crime than to fall into the latter category. In 2020, Donald Trump was ready to bring down the American republic rather than admit before the shade of his dead father that he had lost a presidential election. Scholars speak of “losers’ consent” as an essential prerequisite of a democratic system: without it, there can be no peaceful transfer of power. For two and a half centuries, that model held in the US. But in 2020 it ran into a man who would rather destroy his country than wear the scarlet letter L on his forehead.The result is the indictment against Trump that arrived this week, the third – with one more expected – and easily the most serious. Across 45 pages, Trump is charged with plotting to overturn a democratic election – to thwart the will of the voters who had rejected him at the ballot box and thereby remain in power.The weary assumption is that, like the two previous indictments, this will not much damage Trump’s prospects in the 2024 election and might even boost them: a major national poll this week found him crushing all his Republican rivals for the party’s presidential nomination and dead even in the presumed match-up against Joe Biden. Even so, this case, whose court date will be set on 28 August, could scarcely be more significant. It will be the first great trial of the post-truth age.None of this should come as a surprise. Trump never hid who he was or what he intended. In 2016, he refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election he fought against Hillary Clinton: “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he said, and he was similarly coy four years later.Nor did he conceal his belief that his seat in the Oval Office put him above the law. Referring to the second article of the US constitution, he told an audience of teenagers in 2019, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”As for the impunity granted to him by his supporters, who give him more cash every time another felony charge lands, that too was foretold – by Trump himself. Back in January 2016, he predicted that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and “shoot somebody” and he would not lose any voters. So far, murder has not appeared on any Trump charge sheet, but the prescience of the remark still stands.More subtly, Trump revealed, and reveals, much of himself in the attacks he makes on others. He is currently insistent that he is the victim of Biden’s “weaponised” Department of Justice, suggesting that the independent federal prosecutors who drew up this week’s indictment were, in fact, mere partisan hacks doing the bidding of the president. And yet it is not Biden but Trump himself who has signalled that, if returned to the White House, he would end the independence of the criminal justice system, as part of a takeover of swathes of the administrative state, concentrating colossal power in his own hands. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” one senior Trump lieutenant told the New York Times. It is Trump, not Biden, who envisages using the justice department as a hit squad against his enemies: he has promised, if re-elected, to order a criminal investigation into the current president. Again, no surprise: remember the way Trump led the 2016 crowds in anti-Clinton chants of “lock her up”.But just because we can’t claim to be surprised does not mean we shouldn’t be shocked. Several crucial principles are at stake in this case. One is that every vote must count: the victims of Trump’s conspiracy were the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Biden, whose ballots would have been cast aside had the ex-president prevailed.Another is that nobody is above the law. While Trump claims to be the victim of political persecution, the truth is that it would have been an intensely political decision not to pursue him, especially when more than 1,000 of his devotees have been charged for storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021. If they can be prosecuted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, why can’t he?But perhaps the central principle at stake here is that there is such a thing as the truth. Trump has challenged that notion from the very start. Not just by lying – he’s not the first politician to do that – but by seeking to shake public faith in the very idea that truth is even possible.The former president spread specific lies claiming decisive electoral fraud in key states – as the indictment memorably puts it, “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false” – in order to construct the big lie of a stolen election. He built an alternative reality on that lie that persists to this day – a reality made up, incidentally, of the kind of “alternative facts” to which we were introduced within hours of his taking office. That episode related to the seemingly trivial matter of the size of his inauguration crowd. But it established Trump’s post-truth position: that there are no commonly accepted facts – not even those you can see with your own eyes – only claim and counter-claim.That’s why one of Trump’s go-to lines has long been “Nobody really knows”. (“Nobody really knows” if climate change is real was a 2016 classic of the form.) In a blizzard of competing claims, the blinded citizen can either retreat, confused, or else be guided by the leader who kindly tells them what is true and what is not. That was the Putin manoeuvre – his power rests on it – and Trump has made it his own. Not for nothing is his personal social media platform called Truth.Now, though, Trump’s brand of post-truth is set to face its most severe challenge. As the Economist notes this week, “a courtroom is a place where reality counts … In court, truth means something”. Up until now, Trump has succeeded in persuading half the country that they cannot trust awkward, discomforting facts, including those uncovered by federal investigators, because all such people – FBI agents, judges – are tools of the deep state. Every morsel of evidence can be dismissed as the handiwork of the “globalists and communists” who constitute America’s “corrupt ruling class”.The tactic has been remarkably effective. The acid of Trumpian post-truth has corroded large parts of the US system already, breaking public trust in elections, the media and much else. Will the courtroom that hears the United States of America v Donald J Trump be able to shut it out and remain free of its sulphuric touch? On the answer, much more than the fate of one poisonous man – shaped by a poisonous father – depends.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelley, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.DeSantis is a clear second in the Republican primary but more than 30 points behind Donald Trump in most averages, notwithstanding the former president’s proliferating legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges.On Friday a major poll by the New York Times and Siena College in the first state to vote, Iowa, put DeSantis 24 points behind.DeSantis is widely seen to be trying to reset his campaign, having fired staffers including a conservative writer who created a video ad containing a Nazi symbol.But the governor has not noticeably retooled his hard-right rhetoric.DeSantis made his comment about slitting throats at an event in the second state to vote, New Hampshire, last Sunday.“On bureaucracy, you know, we’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on day one and be ready to go,” DeSantis said. “You’re going to see a huge, huge outcry because Washington wants to protect its own.”Complaints about the so-called deep state – notionally an embedded government of officials and bureaucrats Republicans claim exists to thwart their agenda – is a common feature of far-right campaigns, from Trump down.Should he return to power, Trump is widely reported to be planning an administrative cull of the federal bureaucracy, seeking to instal loyalists as part of a process his close ally Steve Bannon has long called the “deconstruction of the administrative state”.DeSantis has used his “slitting throats” line before, last week telling the rightwing columnist John Solomon he wanted to appoint a defense secretary who would “slit some throats” and be “very firm, very strong”.Condemning DeSantis’s remarks, Kelley, the president of the AFGE, said: “Federal employees – over a third of whom are veterans now wearing their second uniform in service to their country – have dedicated their lives to serving their fellow Americans.“They support our military, provide healthcare to our nation’s veterans, enforce our laws, safeguard our communities, deliver benefits to America’s most vulnerable citizens, keep our skies safe for air travel, protect human health and our environment, and much more.“These public servants deserve respect and commendation from our nation’s leaders. No federal employee should face death threats from anyone, least of all from someone seeking to lead the US government. Governor DeSantis must retract his irresponsible statement.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere seemed little chance of that, from a candidate who has made harsh rhetoric and confrontational poses cornerstones of a campaign nonetheless failing to outflank Trump on the right.In Florida, Daniel Uhlfelder, a former Democratic candidate for state attorney general, pointed to controversies over DeSantis’s past when he said: “This guy started his legal career at Guantánamo Bay.”As a US navy lawyer, DeSantis was posted to the US facility on the coast of Cuba during the wars after 9/11. He has angrily denied being present at torture sessions, calling one former inmate’s claims “totally, totally BS”.In Congress on Thursday, the Virginia Democratic senator Mark Warner said “inflammatory, violent language” like that used by DeSantis in New Hampshire “can lead to very real, very dangerous consequences”.Kelley of the AFGE agreed, linking DeSantis’s violent imagery to deadly far-right violence.“We’ve seen too often in recent years – from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 to the sacking of the [US] Capitol on January 6 2021 – that violent anti-government rhetoric from politicians has deadly consequences.”In Oklahoma City, 168 people including 19 children were killed when a bomb planted by the rightwing extremist Timothy McVeigh destroyed a federal building. More than 500 people were injured.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack on the Capitol, in which Trump supporters sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden. More than a thousand people have been charged in relation to the riot, Trump among them after being indicted by the special counsel Jack Smith this week.Everett said: “Any candidate who positions themselves within that shameful tradition has no place in public office.” More

Joe Biden’s re-election team has apparently discovered a fundraising boon by subverting a foul-mouthed rightwing chant.Axios reported that “Dark Brandon” items, including mugs and T-shirts, are responsible for more than half of the Biden campaign’s merchandising sales.The Dark Brandon meme, which typically shows the president with red, laserlike eyes, emerged as a reaction to the Republican term: “Let’s go Brandon” – a phrase which is widely interpreted as code for “Fuck Joe Biden”.The image of Biden, which first gained ground in 2022, has “been fashioned into a boast, depicting Biden playing five-dimensional chess, a master of the political dark arts”, Politico reported.Biden’s campaign has seized upon the Dark Brandon concept, and the image of a smiling, crimson-eyed Biden has been slapped on all manner of campaign merchandise.Visitors to the Biden-Harris official store can purchase Dark Brandon baseball caps, tote bags, and other paraphernalia, and according to Axios the “Dark” items are responsible for 54% of the store’s revenue.The surge in revenue comes at a good time for the Biden campaign, which has been struggling to raise money from small donors, defined as people who donate $200 or less.The New York Times reported that the Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, a joint committee of the campaign, raised $10.2m from small donors across April-May, less than half the amount Barack Obama raised during the same period in 2011.Let’s Go Brandon entered common parlance in 2021, following an incident at a Nascar race in Alabama.After the race, some members of the crowd chanted “Fuck Joe Biden” while Brandon Brown, a driver, was being interviewed. The interviewer suggested the crowd were actually chanting “Let’s go Brandon”, and the subverted version became popular among Republicans, including some members of Congress. More

Newly released tax and election records show that since 2020 controversial financier Thomas Klingenstein has become one of the largest individual donors to national Republicans, contributing more than $11.6m to candidates and Pac, after decades as the far-right Claremont Institute’s biggest donor and board chairman.The spending spree dwarfs the total $666,000 Klingenstein spent between 1992 and 2016, and in the last election cycle put Klingenstein in the top 40 contributors to national Republican candidates and committees.In turn the spending has allowed him to connect with a long-standing network of conservative mega-donors centered on the billionaire-founded Club for Growth, which advocates for the reduction of government.Klingenstein and the Claremont Institute push a harder-edged rightwing politics, and he appeared in a series of videos released in 2022 where he argued that American conservatives are in a “cold civil war” with “woke communists”, and that “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, big tech… together with the government function as a totalitarian regime”.Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that Klingenstein’s pivot may indicate an effort to “pull of Republican outfits and donors towards more extreme positions”.While the Claremont Institute has been called “the nerve center of the American Right” for its intellectual leadership and formation of hard right activists, Klingenstein appears to have a new appetite for directly impacting electoral politics.The Guardian attempted to contact Klingenstein for comment, including by contacting lawyers for his private foundation, but was unsuccessful in getting a response.Klingenstein is a partner in Wall Street investment firm Cohen Klingenstein, which administers a portfolio worth more than $2.3bn, according to its most recent Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.Klingenstein’s grandfather was a successful investor, and other members of his family pursue more conventional avenues for their philanthropy, but beginning in the Donald Trump era, Klingenstein has increasingly used his resources to pursue a hard-edged version of rightwing politics.Klingenstein’s characterization of the political divide as a cold civil war – spelled out in a series of glossy YouTube videos – has been previously reported, as have some of his activities as chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute, a Claremont, California-based thinktank.That organization charted a radical, pro-Trump course from 2016, culminating in Senior Fellow John Eastman advising Trump in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and delivering a fiery speech to the crowd of protesters in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.But newly available filings reveal how he has advanced these ideas in electoral and cultural battles.IRS filings show that Klingenstein has bankrolled Claremont and other rightwing nonprofits from a private foundation for decades. But Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign finance records show that Klingenstein’s political contributions prior to 2020 were modest and intermittent.More recently, however, he appears to have joined a network of big-money donors centered on the Club for Growth and an associated Pac, Club for Growth Action.A $2.5m donation in January made Klingenstein the fourth largest contributor to the Club for Growth Action Pac, by bringing his total contributions to the PAC to $7m since 2020.The Guardian previously reported that the Club for Growth Pac’s biggest donors are conservative billionaires Richard Uihlein, Jeff Yass, and that the Pac was one of the largest supporters of Republican candidates who wanted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The most recent FEC data indicates that this is still the case, with Yass’s contributions totaling over $51m and Uihlein’s at over $77m. Another conservative mega donor, Virginia James, has contributed almost $14.5m to the Pac. Klingenstein has now joined them as one of Club for Growth Pac’s foremost funders.Beirich said of the apparent collaboration between Klingenstein and these Club for Growth’s network of megadonors that “the Club for Growth has always prioritized taxes and economic issues and and dabbled in climate denial, but it’s interesting to see Maga types mixing with them”.She added that “it might be an attempt to bring the Club for Growth into the Maga universe”.There are indications that Klingenstein has succeeded in interesting Club for Growth donors in projects for which he is the principal funder.The American Leadership Pac was registered in September 2022, and by mid-October it had received $1.5m in two tranches from Klingenstein, $500,000 from Richard Uihlein, $250,000 from William Koch, and another $250,000 from Koch’s petroleum company, Oxbow Carbon LLC.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast January, Klingenstein poured another $500,000 to the Pac, bringing his total to $2m.The Pac spent some $1.8m in the lead-up to the 2022 mid-term elections, mostly on text messages in support of a slate of Republicans and attacking their Democratic opponents nationwide, mostly in close districts around the country.In 2020 Klingenstein contributed $500,000 to the American Principles Project Pac, which was the largest single contribution by an individual to that committee in its decade-long history, although Sean Fieler, described by watchdog group Right Wing Watch as an “anti-LGBTQ megafunder” has donated over $1.7m to the Pac in 13 donations since 2013.Other individual donors include Robert Mercer, the rightwing hedge fund manager who achieved prominence after 2016 for his funding of both the Trump campaign and Breitbart News.While the likes of Mercer, Uihlein and Yass let their donations do the talking, and largely eschew public commentary, Klingenstein has sought prominence as a culture warrior and far-right thought leader.Another Pac where he is the leading donor sought not to promote election candidates, but Klingenstein’s own apocalyptic vision of a “cold civil war” in America.In 2021 and 2022, Klingenstein contributed $500,000 to Firebrand Pac. The committee spent almost all of that by the end of 2022, with its main output being five YouTube videos starring Klingenstein, in which he claims that a “a cold civil war… is not a time for too much stability, compromise, or for imputing good motives to the enemy”.Klingenstein’s role as the Claremont Institute’s board chairman and principal donor have been widely reported, but while he told the New York Times last year that Claremont had become “increasingly less reliant on me” for funding, figures released since indicate that he has significantly increased his level of financial support.IRS filings from one of his private foundations, the Thomas D Klingenstein Fund, indicate that he has given more than $19m to the Claremont Institute since 2005, with the most recent publicly available filing showing a $2.97m donation in 2021, his highest to date, and almost half a million dollars more than the $2.5m figure the Times reported for 2019.Klingenstein’s foundation also funds Claremont Institute offshoots like the American Strategy Group, whose website claims it is “dedicated to understanding the existential threats to the United States and western civilization presented by the Islamic world, Russia, China, and the loss of America’s founding principles”.That organization is headed by Brian T Kennedy, a former president of the Claremont Institute, who told an audience at Hillsdale College in April that he had appeared in front of a “grand jury in Washington DC” because “I was one of thirty people subpoenaed from Trumpworld” in the justice department’s ongoing pursuit of those responsible for the events of January 6 2021.Klingenstein’s foundation has also consistently funded the National Association of Scholars, and giving just over $100,000 in 2021 per its IRS filing. That organization is a rightwing nonprofit “that seeks to reform higher education” according to its website, and Klingenstein is a board member. He used the organization’s website to spell out an early version of his vision of “cold civil war” in 2021.There are indications, both in spending records and Klingenstein’s public commentary, that he believes rightwing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to be best placed to prosecute his side of the “war”.In an interview with conservative broadcaster Steve Deace in 2022, posted to Klingenstein’s personal YouTube channel, Klingenstein said that “DeSantis understands that we’re in a war, and that’s the most important thing”.“If you don’t understand we’re in a war, almost nothing else matters,” he added. More

On 26 August, Rev Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, and other civil rights activists will commemorate the 1963 march on Washington, which was organised to advocate for civil and economic rights for African Americans.
This week, Jonathan Freedland sits down with Sharpton to discuss why he believes Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech has been abused by some on the right, why he is still fighting for police reform, and how James Brown was so influential on his life

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