US Politics

After hearing that Donald Trump would appear at a federal courthouse in downtown Washington to answer charges filed against him for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Joan Batista made plans to be outside, celebrating what she viewed as the former president’s long overdue comeuppance.But when she arrived at the E Barrett Prettyman US courthouse, what she saw bothered her. City trucks equipped with snow plows blocked roads, hundreds of police monitored the building’s entrances and reporters from all around the world ringed its perimeter, hoping for a glimpse of the former president.“It’s a little embarrassing,” Batista, a veteran of many demonstrations in and around the Capitol, told the Guardian. Even though Trump was finally having to answer for his attempts to prevent Joe Biden from taking office, the fact that it had come to this bothered her. So, too, did the fact that despite facing the most serious criminal charges against a former American president in history, Trump appears to remain the most popular man in the Republican party.“It’s not a regular celebration,” Batista conceded, seated in a plaza outside the courthouse where demonstrators boogied to Enur’s reggae fusion hit Calabria 2008. “It shouldn’t have taken this long, and the special treatment is a little troublesome, because he should be held today.”The former president’s appearance Thursday under stormy skies and just steps from the Capitol his supporters attacked on January 6 satisfied few of those who turned up to witness it. Road closures and a huge police presence meant his motorcade was mostly out of the crowd’s sight when it arrived, and only a few members of the public made it into the courtroom where Trump entered not guilty pleas to the four charges brought against him by special prosecutor Jack Smith.There was no sign the former president saw the handful of supporters waving flags reading “TRUMP WON”, nor the demonstrators in prison stripes or the man wearing an inflatable Trump costume with the words “LOSER” written across the front.“It was also very sad driving through Washington and seeing the filth and the decay, and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti,” Trump told reporters in brief remarks on the tarmac of the Virginia airport he departed from after his court appearance. “This is not the place that I left.”It is a place, however, that Trump is strenuously working to return to. He has vowed to press on with his presidential campaign despite his mounting legal troubles, and polls indicate most Republicans are ready to help him get back into the White House.“It is totally unfair, and that’s why [Smith] indicted him several times and this is another one. It’s just bringing him more and more strength and more popularity,” said Daniel Demoura, as he carried a pole from which several Trump flags flew.Standing on a traffic island surrounded by a mix of reporters, police and curious tourists, the 32-year-old said it felt like “a circus, because I see a lot of people being crazy, making some weird jokes that doesn’t make sense and people dancing around like if it was a party. But we’re here in a serious way to defend Trump.”He may have been thinking of Lucas Elek, a law student living in Colorado who happened to be in Washington and headed down to the courthouse for Trump’s appearance wearing a Jar Jar Binks mask and carrying a cardboard sign reading “DONNY DONONO!” Elek said he chose the Star War character in reference to his role in fueling the rise of dictatorship in the films’ universe, and also to keep his face hidden after receiving online abuse from rightwing commenters.“This is, in some ways, a celebration of our democracy. And you’ve got all of your strait-laced politicos in their seats over there, but I think … they’d be lying if they said it wasn’t a historic moment. And so I think we need to celebrate it,” Elek said in a brief moment when he wasn’t dancing.Criminal defendants are usually present for their trials, and if that’s the case for Trump, it will mean more business for Stan Sinberg and his Roving Anti-Trump Bandwagon, where pins bearing Smith’s face and slogans like “I am the resistance” could be bought for $4 a piece. Conceived in the wake of Trump’s victory in the Republican primaries in 2016, Sinberg travels to rallies against the now former president, always expecting that the time would arrive when his business would dry up. It hasn’t.“It was supposed to end on election night 2016. Then he won, then people still wanted them. And then it was supposed to end again, when he lost the election in 2020, and I even put up a sign: ‘happily going out of business sale.’ But he didn’t go away. So I’m still at it,” Sinberg said.“People say to me … if he wasn’t president, you wouldn’t have a job. It’s ironic, it’s true. But, even so … every morning I would wake up and wish for a headline ‘Trump dead’. And then I’d be out of business but, alright, it’s worth it.” More

Donald Trump’s fall 2024 general election campaign kicked off Thursday afternoon with a not-guilty plea. Facing a magistrate judge, the 45th president contested the conspiracy charges leveled against him by the government. He was released without posting bail. Minutes after the arraignment, Trump referred to his travails as “persecution” and called it a “sad day” for the United States.None of Trump’s Republican rivals can compete with the free publicity and notoriety he will garner in the months ahead.Unlike them, Trump is a certified martyr. Everyone else is ambitious, ungrateful or both. He will wear this latest indictment like armor while most of the Republican field will be left to sputter defenses of the former guy. That’s not how campaigns usually work.By now, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy have internalized that the party’s base and machinery belong to Trump. There is nothing they can do about it other than bleat like sheep and wait.Regardless, they already have their main talking point – attacking the District of Columbia as the trial venue. On Wednesday night, Trump posted on social media that it is “IMPOSSIBLE to get a fair trial in Washington, DC, which is over 95% anti-Trump”.Two out of five of the district’s residents are African Americans, who are reliably Democratic voters. In 2020, Trump barely cleared 5% of DC’s vote.Instead, he urges that the trial be transferred to West Virginia where he ran better than two-to-one ahead of Biden. The state is also the third whitest in the union, behind only Vermont and Maine.“The latest Fake ‘case’ brought by Crooked Joe Biden & Deranged Jack Smith will hopefully be moved to an impartial Venue, such as the politically unbiased nearby State of West Virginia!” Trump exclaimed.John Lauro, Trump’s lawyer, seconded West Virginia as a trial site, saying he was searching for a “more diverse area that has a more balanced jury pool”. When it comes to college admissions, however, the Republican party professes to be color-blind.Already, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is echoing the man he supposedly yearns to supplant. “The reality is, a DC jury would indict a ham sandwich and convict a ham sandwich if it was a Republican ham sandwich,” the star-crossed candidate told Fox News. DeSantis is the one who is drowning and yet he is the one offering Trump a lifeline.“I think the juries are stacked, I think that they’re going to want to convict people that they disagree with,” DeSantis added for good measure. Apparently, he forgot about Trump’s rally cry of “lock her up”.As a legal matter, venue transfers are hard sells. The Watergate burglars and Paul Manafort lost their respective transfer motions decades apart. Politically, however, it’s catnip for the right. The number of Republicans who believe Joe Biden’s win to be illegitimate has floated back up to 70%.Meanwhile, Biden has little reason to gloat. He stands mired in a 43-43 tie with a prospective felon. If two indictments barely moved the needle, don’t hold your breath for the third or fourth ones to be game-changers. Without a Trump conviction, we are talking heat without light.Beyond that, it’s a race to the drain as to whether Biden or Trump is perceived more negatively. Both men turn off a chunk of the US. Meanwhile, Biden’s margins among key voting blocs continue to erode.He is down to 16 points (49-33) among non-white voters without a four-year degree. His lead among Hispanic voters is evaporating (41-38), down 30% since election day 2020. If these numbers hold, Trump stands to flip a chunk of the electoral map. Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would again be in play.Although inflation may be finally easing, working Americans have been socked with higher prices and watched their paychecks get stretched thin. “Joe Biden is more responsible for high inflation than for abundant jobs,” the Economist blared in May. “The main effect of the president’s economic policies has been to boost prices.”Although the stock market has turned in a strong recent performance, those gains disproportionately benefit the rich; lunch-bucket US, not so much. The country is still hurting.And then there’s Hunter Biden, the problem child who refuses to disappear. With Trump in prosecutors’ crosshairs, expect the Republicans to keep a spotlight on Hunter. And why not?He’s a hot mess. A federal judge rejected his plea deal while information and documents continue to ooze out that tarnish the president by extension. In a sense, actual criminal culpability is beside the point.The closer you look, the Bidens – including the president’s brothers – act like a family business, one that is marginally concerned about ethics and optics. Luckily for them, the Trumps and the Kushners monetized their government tenure, too.A prudent White House would keep Hunter Biden away from state dinners. But this White House and the incumbent don’t always act prudently. For his part, Hunter relishes his defiance.In his memoir, Beautiful Things, the prodigal son announces: “Having a Biden on Burisma’s board was a loud and unmistakable ‘fuck you’ to Putin.”But it doesn’t end there. Describing a series of interviews he granted to the New Yorker’s Adam Entous, regarding Burisma and Ukraine, Hunter writes that he “didn’t know how cathartic the experience would be”.Then for good measure, he adds: “It was my opportunity to tell everyone out there, ‘This is who I am, you motherfuckers, and I ain’t changing!’” Team Trump must be delighted.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, marking the third time this year that the former president has been forced to respond to a criminal indictment.Trump was arrested and arraigned on four felony counts outlined in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment: 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 came two days after Smith’s office filed its indictment, accusing Trump of executing a “criminal scheme” to remain in office even after it became clear that he had fairly lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.Trump traveled from his Bedminster Club in New Jersey to Washington on Thursday with his lawyers and several top aides to appear at the arraignment. He was formally arrested at the E Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse, just blocks from the US Capitol, where the deadly January 6 insurrection unfolded.Sitting in the courtroom Thursday, Trump was accompanied by two of his attorneys, John Laura and Todd Blanche. Smith also attended the arraignment, which was overseen by US magistrate judge Moxila Upadhyaya. After entering his plea of not guilty, Trump was released on the conditions that he adhere to all federal, state and local laws and avoid discussing the case with any witnesses. The next hearing in the case has been set for 28 August.Smith’s 45-page indictment asserts that Trump and his associates disseminated lies alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election while convening slates of fake electors in key battleground states. The indictment also listed six co-conspirators who were not charged in the indictment.While they were unnamed, the descriptions of five of the six matched those of the Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Ken Chesebro as well as the former US justice department official Jeff Clark. According to Smith’s indictment, Trump and his associates’ relentless campaign of misinformation culminated in the insurrection, which claimed the lives of at least seven people.“Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment reads. “So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.”The charges in Washington represented the second indictment filed by Smith, who previously charged Trump in June with retaining national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. That case is currently scheduled to go to trial in May 2024.Trump has also been indicted in an unrelated case by the Manhattan district attorney, who charged him over hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. He is expected to be indicted a fourth time in Georgia, where he may face racketeering charges over his election subversion efforts.Trump’s legal team has already sought to delay the trials in New York and Florida, arguing the cases should not move forward until after the 2024 presidential election. Trump remains the frontrunner in the Republican presidential primary, and his nomination would set up a rematch against Biden in the general election next November.But Smith said Tuesday that his office would “seek a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post shared to his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said he viewed the indictment as “a great honor because I am being arrested for you”, speculating that the criminal charges would actually bolster his presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who is currently on vacation in Delaware, maintained his silence on the arraignment, ignoring reporters’ questions about the case.Trump also demanded that his case be moved out of Washington to “an impartial Venue, such as the politically unbiased nearby State of West Virginia”, where he won by 39 points in 2020. Writing on Truth Social, Trump claimed it would be “impossible” to receive a fair trial in Washington, which he lost by 87 points in 2020. The chances of a court venue charge appear slim, given that similar arguments in other federal January 6 cases have proven unsuccessful.As Trump made his way to Washington for the arraignment, some of his supporters gathered outside the E Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse to welcome the former president. Anti-Trump protesters also congregated outside the courthouse, holding signs that read, “Save our democracy!” and “Lock him up”.Upadhyaya oversaw the Thursday hearing because magistrate judges typically handle the more routine or procedural aspects of court cases, such as arraignments, but the case itself has been assigned to US district court judge Tanya Chutkan, a former assistant public defender who was nominated to the bench by Barack Obama.Chutkan is expected to set a trial date at the next hearing, but Trump’s lawyers already indicated Thursday they disagree with Smith’s push for a speedy timeline.“All we would ask, Your Honor, is the opportunity to fairly defend our client,” Lauro said. “But in order to do that, we’re going to need a little time.” More

When Jack Smith announced the latest indictment of Donald Trump this week, the special prosecutor’s language was remarkably clear.Smith used the phrase “fueled by lies” about Trump’s role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. (Trump officially pleaded not guilty today to charges that he conspired to defraud the United States, to disenfranchise voters and to obstruct the post-election transfer of power.)Smith didn’t hesitate to use the word “heroes” to describe the Capitol police and other law enforcement officials who tried to protect the seat of American democracy. “They are patriots,” he added, “and they are the very best of us.”And he asked Americans to perform a simple, patriotic act: read the indictment. Those who comply will find equally forthright language there. The indictment – clearly intended for citizens, not just lawyers – does not mince words or pussyfoot.More importantly, if they followed Smith’s urging, they quickly would find the response to the “free speech” defense that’s getting so much play by Trump’s political and media allies. Those allies are trying to make the case that speech – even false speech – cannot be a crime in America.“What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the first amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” Trump’s defense lawyer John Lauro said in a CBS News interview.But the indictment anticipates that argument, and addresses it quickly – on the second page of this 45-page indictment.“The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” it acknowledges. It adds that the former president also had the right to challenge the election through legal means like recounts, audits or lawsuits. (Trump, of course, did do these things, to no avail.)Lying? Sure, that’s within the law. Challenging election results? Legal, too.But then came the “unlawful” part: not mere words but criminal actions. Specifically, perpetrating conspiracies to discount legitimate votes and subvert the election results. In short, making concerted efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power – the very heart of American democracy.Sorry, but the first amendment is not down with that.“There is no First Amendment privilege to commit crimes just because you did it by speech,” Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor who led the justice department’s prosecution of Enron, told the New York Times.In Buell’s even simpler terms: “Tony Soprano can’t invoke the first amendment for telling his crew he wants someone whacked.”Examples abound. If you believe that the US currency system is unlawful, then you have a right to go around and tell everybody they have a right to print their own money.That’s protected free speech.“But the moment you start printing your own money and putting it into traffic, you are engaging in counterfeiting,” as Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin told the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus.And that’s a crime that the first amendment wants no part in protecting.You can hear high-pitched and logic-free versions of that defense at nearly every moment on Fox News, which has convinced its viewers that Trump is a victim of a weaponized justice system.How convinced are they? Very. More than 90% of likely Republican primary voters who rely on Fox as their main news source and who stay away from mainstream media, do not think Trump committed serious crimes, according to one poll taken shortly before the latest legal chapter. Only 5% disagree.But a jury who takes these charges seriously should be a different matter.“Jack Smith’s indictment is straightforward and narrow but boy, it packs a punch,” the prominent attorney Neal Katyal said on MSNBC this week. “It’s clean, it’s calculated and I feel like it’s almost certainly going to result in a conviction.”We won’t know if that’s accurate for many months, despite the prosecution’s obvious intention to put this trial on a fast track.But if the foundation of Trump’s defense really turns out to be first amendment protection, Katyal’s prediction should be proven right.A jury, especially a Washington DC jury, surely won’t fail to see a crucial difference.Protected speech is one thing. Criminal action – conspiring to overthrow an election result – is quite another.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

A federal judge who has emerged as one of the toughest authorities against rioters who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol will soon meet her most high-profile defendant: Donald Trump.Tanya Chutkan, a 2014 appointee of former president Barack Obama, was randomly assigned to oversee the case on Tuesday after a federal grand jury indicted the former president on four counts related to his attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election, including conspiracy and obstruction of official proceedings.Chutkan was born in Jamaica, where she trained as a classical dancer, and moved to the US where she attended George Washington University before earning her JD at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, according to the DC district court website. She worked as a public defender in DC for a decade before joining the private law firm where she specialized in “litigation and white-collar criminal defense”.Chutkan has ruled on a Trump case before. She once blocked an attempt by Trump to refuse the House January 6 select committee’s request for White House files in the months after the election. That decision released mounds of evidence that shaped the committee’s investigation, according to Politico.In her November 2021 ruling, Chutkan described the attack as an “unprecedented attempt to prevent the lawful transfer of power from one administration to the next [that] caused property damage, injuries, and death”.But that case involved only legal questions about court proceedings and did not require her to rule on Trump’s role in the riot.Chutkan is also the only judge who has delivered stricter sentences against January 6 defendants than requested by federal prosecutors. In December 2021, she imposed the longest sentence at the time for a January 6 rioter – 63 months in jail for Robert Palmer, a Florida man who sprayed Capitol police with a fire extinguisher.“It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment,” she said at his sentencing, justifying lengthy jail time.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEleanor Norton, the US congresswoman who has represented DC since 1991, recommended Chutkan, then a partner at a private law firm, to the post in 2013, according to a press release at the time. Chutkan became the third Black woman ever to serve on the sole DC district court, joining Ketanji B Jackson, now a supreme court justice, on the bench in 2014.A different federal judge, Moxila A Upadhyaya, presided over Trump’s arraignment at a federal courthouse in DC on Thursday afternoon. More

Congress responded to the fiery train derailment in eastern Ohio earlier this year with bipartisan alarm, holding a flurry of hearings about the potential for railroad crashes to trigger even larger disasters. Both parties agreed that a legislative response was needed.Yet six months after life was upended in East Palestine, little has changed.While Joe Biden and Donald Trump have praised a railroad safety bill from the Ohio senators Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and JD Vance, a Republican, the Senate proposal has also encountered resistance. Top GOP leaders in Congress have been hesitant to support it, and the bill has faced some opposition from the railroad industry, which holds significant sway in Washington.As a result, it remains an open question whether the derailment that shattered life in East Palestine will become a catalyst for action. And for Republicans, the fight poses a larger test of political identity, caught between their traditional support for industry and their desire to champion voters in rural America.“These rail lines pass frequently through Republican areas, small towns with a lot of Republican voters,” Vance told the Associated Press. “How can we look them in the eye and say, we’re doing a good job by you? If we choose the railroads over their own interests, we can’t.”In East Palestine, a village of approximately 5,000 people near the Pennsylvania state line, the railroad has reopened both its tracks in the area but the cleanup continues. Norfolk Southern estimates that its response to the derailment will cost at least $803m to remove all the hazardous chemicals, help the community and deal with lawsuits and penalties related to the derailment.But residents still worry about the long-term health effects. Many are looking to Congress to act, hoping it will prevent another community from enduring the trauma, fear and upheaval they have endured.Jami Wallace, who has lived in East Palestine for 46 years along with her extended family, has helped lead a community group called the Unity Council to represent residents’ concerns and push for government action.“If our legislators don’t take East Palestine as an example of some of the reforms that need to be in the regulations that need to be put on, you know, the railroad industry, then they’re fools,” Wallace said. “Again, we don’t want to suffer for nothing.”Rail labor groups say the widespread cuts the industry has made in the name of efficiency in recent years have made railroads riskier, so they believe reforms are needed to reduce the more than 1,000 derailments that happen every year because just one can be disastrous.“There have been more than 60 high-profile derailments since East Palestine, including multiple in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Montana,” said the Transportation Trades Department coalition that includes all the rail unions. “Through it all, freight rail companies have maintained their fundamental disregard for public safety. Safety is just a buzzword to the railroads.”Vance, a freshman senator, said he was counting on a few more Republican senators to back the bill before it comes to a vote. The majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has already placed the bill at the top of the agenda for the fall.But Vance and Brown acknowledge their legislation faces an even steeper climb in the Republican-controlled House. GOP leaders there want to wait until the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) completes its investigation of the derailment – which will probably not happen until next year – before taking action. The NTSB in a preliminary report on East Palestine found fault with an overheated wheel bearing.But a contingent of Ohio House lawmakers, led by Democratic Representative Emilia Sykes and Republican Representative Bill Johnson, whose district includes East Palestine, want action now.“Let’s hit while the iron is hot,” Johnson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth the House and Senate bills would increase fines for safety violations, require more inspections and increase the number of trackside detectors that monitor for overheated wheel bearings. In one significant difference, the Senate bill would require that most freight trains have two-person crews, while the House bill would not.Railroads have spoken out against the two-person crew requirement and urged Congress to wait for the final NTSB investigation to pass any new regulations.The industry has also stepped up its lobbying this year. In the first three months of 2023, industry groups spent a combined $7.1m on lobbying – a roughly $1.8m increase from the $5.3m it spent in the previous three months.The railroads say there is no data to show one-person crews are riskier than two-person crews.Railroads have a long history of resisting new regulations, and an industry group has already filed a lawsuit challenging some new state rules Ohio passed after the derailment. It maintains that any new regulations should be based on data that proves the rules would actually make railroads safer.As the bill proponents make a push in the coming months, Brown said he was counting on help from residents directly affected by the February derailment.“The area of the state this happened in is a very conservative, Republican part of the state. But I am their ally. They know it. They’re my allies in this,” said Brown, who is expected to face a tough reelection race next year. “They put pressure. They don’t care about partisan politics.” More

The Tennessee representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who became Democratic heroes as members of the “Tennessee Three”, are hoping to once again reclaim their legislative seats on Thursday after they were expelled for involvement in a gun control protest on the House floor.The young Black lawmakers were both reinstated by local officials, but only on an interim basis. To fully take back their positions, they must advance through a special election. Both easily cleared their primary election in June, and now face general election opponents for districts that heavily favor Democrats.Jones, who lives in Nashville, is up against the Republican candidate Laura Nelson. Meanwhile, Pearson, from Memphis, faces an independent candidate, Jeff Johnston.“Let’s send a clear message to everyone who thought they could silence the voice of District 86,” Pearson tweeted earlier this month. “You can’t expel a movement!”Jones and Pearson were elected to the GOP-dominated statehouse last year. Both lawmakers flew relatively under the radar, even as they criticized their Republican colleagues’ policies. It wasn’t until this spring that their political careers received a boost when they joined fellow Democrat representative Gloria Johnson in a protest for more gun control on the House floor.The demonstration took place just days after a fatal shooting in Nashville at a private Christian school where a shooter killed three children and three adults. As thousands of protesters flooded the capitol building to demand that the Republican supermajority enact some sort of restrictions on firearms, the three lawmakers approached the front of the house chamber with a bullhorn, and joined the protesters’ chants and cries for action.Republican lawmakers quickly declared that their actions violated house rules and moved to expel their three colleagues – an extraordinary move that has been taken only a handful of times since the civil war.The move briefly left about 140,000 voters in primarily Black districts in Nashville and Memphis with no representation in the Tennessee house.Ultimately, Johnson, who is white, narrowly avoided expulsion while Pearson and Jones were booted by the predominantly white GOP caucus.House Republican leaders have repeatedly denied that race was a factor in the expulsion hearings. Democrats have disagreed, with Johnson countering that the only reason that she wasn’t expelled was due to her being white.The expulsions drew national support for the newly dubbed “Tennessee Three”, especially for Pearson and Jones’s campaign fundraising. The two raised more than $2m combined through about 70,400 campaign donations from across the country. The amount is well beyond the norm for Tennessee’s Republican legislative leaders and virtually unheard of for two freshman Democrats in a superminority.Meanwhile, more than 15 Republican lawmakers have funneled cash to fund campaign efforts of Jones’s Republican opponent, Laura Nelson. Nelson has raised more than $34,000 for the race. Pearson’s opponent, Jeff Johnston, has raised less than $400 for the contest.Thursday’s election will also influence two other legislative seats.In Nashville, the community organizer Aftyn Behn and former Metro councilmember Anthony Davis are currently vying to advance to the general election for a house seat in a district in the city’s north-eastern region that opened after Democratic representative Bill Beck died in June.Meanwhile, in eastern Tennessee, Republican Timothy Hill will face Democrat Lori Love in a general election for Republican-leaning district 3. The seat was left empty when former Republican representative Scotty Campbell resigned following a finding that he had violated the Legislature’s workplace discrimination and harassment policy.Hill served in the state house from 2012 until 2020 and rose to the position of majority whip. He later left his seat to run for an open US House seat in 2020, but lost in a crowded primary to current Republican US representative Diana Harshbarger. More

After he was indicted for the third time, Donald Trump reacted with his now-standard, twin-pronged approach: first, expressing outrage and denying the charges, and second, asking his many loyal supporters for money.But the former US president, who faces four charges over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, also found defenders among rightwing media in America which has often fervently defended him, sometimes flying in the face of reality to do so.In the minutes after the Trump indictment was filed in federal district court in Washington, conservative commentators rapidly scrambled to his defense. Rightwing pundits lined up to compare the charges to “criminalizing thoughts” and the dropping of “fifteen dozen” atomic bombs – and that was just on Fox News.Rightwing TV channel Newsmax, which has drained some of Fox News’s audience in recent months, brought on Rudy Giuliani, an unnamed co-conspirator in Tuesday’s indictment, who railed for seven minutes about Hillary Clinton’s emails and Biden being a “crooked president”.In America’s rightwing media ecosystem it was a largely united front. News outlets repeatedly pressed the idea that Trump’s free speech was being criminalized: that the former president had done nothing more than talk about the election being stolen.The effort, perhaps deliberately, ignored prosecutors’ allegations that Trump had convened false slates of electors and attempted to block the certification of the election on January 6.“This is like lawfare, they call it,” Jesse Watters, Fox News’s newly-installed prime-time host, railed in the moments after the indictment was announced. “Legal warfare. If this was political, this would be, like, a political war crime. This is overkill. This is political germ warfare. These are political war crimes. It’s an atrocity. It’s, like, not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen.”Those claims were made on Fox News’s The Five show, which Watters co-hosts. By the time he got to his 8pm show, he hadn’t calmed down.Watters assembled a panel of experts, which included Alina Habba, a former Trump attorney who now works for Trump’s political action committee and Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law.In the wake of the 2020 election Trump “did exactly what you would want a president to do”, Lara Trump said.“He upheld and defended the constitution of the United States by trying to ensure that we indeed had a free and fair election. That was his whole goal, that’s what he wanted to ensure was going on,” she said.“[And] what about his first amendment freedom of speech.”Sean Hannity, a friend of Trump who was disciplined by Fox News in 2018 for appearing on stage at a Trump campaign rally, brought John Lauro, a Trump attorney, on to his 9pm show.“This is the first time, in the history of the United States, that the Justice Department has weaponized and politicized political speech,” Lauro claimed.Newsmax, meanwhile, went where Fox News – the channel recently settled a lawsuit after repeating the kind of claims that Giuliani lobs out incessantly – apparently feared to tread. The right-wing channel hauled on an emotional Giuliani, who referenced his own book as he criticized Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the indictment.“You don’t get to violate people’s first amendment rights, Smith,” Giuliani said. “No matter who the hell you are, no matter how sick you are with Trump derangement syndrome.”There were some calmer voices of dissent in conservative media. One anyway: the Wall Street Journal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an op-ed the editorial board of the Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, criticized Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election, but worried that the indictment “potentially criminalizes many kinds of actions and statements by a president”.“You don’t have to be a defender of Donald Trump to worry about where this will lead,” the editorial board wrote.“It makes any future election challenges, however valid, legally vulnerable to a partisan prosecutor.”Away from the non-rightwing media, the interpretation was largely covered in a sober fashion in the US. The mainstream newspapers New York Times and the Washington Post stuck to a undramatic descriptions of the charges, while ABC News reported on the “sweeping indictment” Trump faces – noting it was his third in the last four months.None of that mattered among conservatives.One America News Network pivoted to Hunter Biden – always a source of interest among right-wing news – with an OANN correspondent pushing an emerging conspiracy theory that the Trump indictment was timed to coincide with Biden Jr’s tax charges trial.Elsewhere, a senior editor of the Blaze website suggested that the Republican-led House should force a government shutdown – which could see about 800,000 federal employees furloughed or forced to work without pay – in the hope that the case against Trump would collapse.Perhaps the most berserk take, however, was the one pushed by Trump’s own campaign.“The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” the campaign posted to Truth Social.On a day when the rightwing media seemed willing to do and say anything to defend their man, none of them was willing to go as far as that. More