US Politics

About 45 minutes into his New Hampshire town hall, Tim Scott said he needed to reveal a secret to the Republican voters who had gathered to hear from the presidential hopeful.“Listen, this might surprise some of y’all,” Scott told attendees with subtle laughter in his voice. He paused briefly: “I’m Black.”The line was met with loud laughter from the mostly white crowd, and it underscored the unique role that Scott faces in the Republican presidential primary ahead of the 2024 election. The 57-year-old senator of South Carolina and erstwhile Donald Trump ally, who filed paperwork on Friday to declare his presidential candidacy ahead of a formal launch event on Monday, hopes to become the first Black politician to win his party’s nomination and go on to defeat Joe Biden in the general election next November.Scott’s chances of success appear slim, as Trump continues to dominate in national polls thanks to the enduring loyalty of many Republican primary voters. But Scott believes his sunny vision for America’s future can sway a significant number of Republicans who are ready for “new leadership” in the party.To do that, Scott will need to take on Trump and convince fellow Republicans to abandon the vengeful worldview embraced by the former president in favor of a more positive message about the direction of the country. Relying on Reaganesque optimism about the brighter days ahead, Scott has called for a new era of American policy based on “personal responsibility”, deeply rooted in rightwing principles like restricting abortion access and rigorously enforcing border security.But it remains unclear whether enough Republicans are interested in dumping Trump.“You cannot lean into ‘the best days ahead of you’ until you deal with the cancer inside of you at the moment,” said Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee and a vocal Trump critic. “The way you do that is to take down the guy who’s perpetuating that narrative.”‘From cotton to Congress’As he spoke to the voters at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire earlier this month, Scott pointed to his own family history as an example of America’s promise. He was raised by a single, working mother, and his grandfather dropped out of school in the third grade to pick cotton on a South Carolina farm.That grandfather lived long enough to see his grandson win a seat in the US House of Representatives, where Scott served one term before being appointed to the Senate in 2013. Scott is currently the only Black Republican serving in the Senate.“One of the reasons why we say in my family ‘from cotton to Congress in one lifetime’ is because my grandfather had a stubborn faith,” Scott told the New Hampshire voters. “He had faith in God. He had faith in the American people, but he also had faith in the future of this great nation.”Echoing his message from 2021, when he delivered the Republican response to Biden’s first presidential speech to a joint session of Congress, Scott accused Democrats of turning Americans against each other by bringing attention to systemic oppression.“When I talk to my friends on the other side of the aisle, particularly the ones who disagree with me vehemently, the one thing I can tell them is that the proof of my life disproves your lies,” Scott said at the town hall. “America is a beautiful country. We are the land of opportunity and not the land of oppression.”Scott went on to list the benefits of his “opportunity zones” policy, an initiative aimed at directing private investment into America’s economically disadvantaged communities. He encouraged Americans to “take responsibility for yourself” and reject “today’s cultural victimhood”, alluding to the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative that has been criticized on the left as unrealistic and racist.“My mentor literally taught me that if you take responsibility for yourself, that in that mirror, you see the problem. But in the same mirror, you find the promise,” Scott said at the town hall.Scott’s upbeat tone cast quite a contrast from Trump, whose presidential campaign thus far has focused on promising “retribution” to his political enemies if he wins the White House next year.“Everything about Tim Scott is out of the ordinary. He is the exact opposite of Donald Trump, and that’s why he is so intriguing,” said the Republican pollster Frank Luntz. “He is as nice and kind-hearted as Trump is tough and critical.”Scott’s message was greeted like a breath of fresh air from attendees of his town hall, some of whom said they are looking for the Republican party to break free from Trump’s influence and move in a new direction.“I really liked the guy. I thought he was very good and forthcoming, and he’s got a great message,” Bruce Nest, a 70-year-old anti-Trump voter from Nashua, said after Scott’s town hall.Though Scott’s tone is markedly different from Trump’s, the two politicians’ platforms have far more in common. Like Trump, Scott has called for a tougher stance against China and emphasized the importance of preventing migrants from entering the US. On abortion, which will take center stage in the 2024 election because of the supreme court’s decision last year to overturn Roe v Wade, Scott has vowed to sign “the most conservative, pro-life legislation” that could pass Congress. But Scott has refused to specify his preferred timeframe for a potential federal abortion ban.In the Republican primary, the senator’s tone and temperament alone may be enough to sway some voters.Nest’s wife, Debra, 70, argued it was “time to give someone else a chance” to lead the Republican party. “We want to pass the baton,” she said. “I’m looking for someone to pass the baton to.”But Trump’s enduring popularity left some town hall attendees skeptical.“I think he has a really good backstory, and I think he will connect to a lot of different ethnicities and different cultures of America,” said Robert Plourde, a 59-year-old voter from Loudon. “It remains to be seen whether he has enough traction with the Republican party that really doesn’t know him, I think, nationally right now.”Stuck at 1%When Scott formally launches his campaign on Monday, he will join a growing Republican primary field where candidates not named Trump have struggled to break through. The most recent Morning Consult poll showed Scott has drawn the support of just 1% of Republican primary voters across the country.There is some evidence to suggest that a crucial share of Republican voters are looking to move on from Trump. One AP/NORC poll taken last month found that nearly half of Republicans do not want Trump to seek re-election, but the same survey showed Trump still enjoys a favorability rating of 68% among Republicans.Even in Scott’s home state of South Carolina, a Winthrop University survey taken last month found that 7% of Republicans supported the senator, putting him in fourth place. The former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who served as South Carolina’s governor and appointed Scott to the Senate, outpaced him by 11 points while Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis led in the poll.Scott’s advisers point out that the Iowa caucuses are still nine months away. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, senior campaign officials noted Scott’s campaign committee has nearly $22m in cash on hand. Scott has also received hefty financial support from some Republican megadonors; last year, the tech billionaire and fellow school choice proponent Larry Ellison poured $15m into a Super Pac aligned with the senator.Perhaps Scott’s greatest challenge at this early stage will be distinguishing himself from the other Republican presidential candidates. Scott has not made much of an effort thus far to distance himself from Trump on matters of policy, even as he has refused to commit to supporting the former president in the election if he wins the nomination.Appearing on the Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show in February, Scott was asked what differences there were between his campaign platform and Trump’s.“Probably not very many at all,” Scott replied. “I’m so thankful that we had President Trump in office. Frankly, the policies that we were able to pass from 2017 to 2020 were monumental.”Scott’s embrace of his opponent’s record has intensified speculation that this White House bid is simply a ploy to bolster his chances of becoming Trump’s running mate, although the senator has dismissed those suggestions.“If you’re going to go for it, go for it all,” Scott told reporters last month. “Period.”With Trump maintaining his massive lead in national polls, Steele is skeptical that Scott or any other Republican candidate can seriously fight for the nomination without directly confronting the former president.“Unless your name is Donald Trump, you’re running for vice-president,” Steele said. “Until shown otherwise, that they’re willing to take this man down and willing to really press the point that he is wholly incompetent and too politically damaged to be the nominee of the party again, everybody’s running for something other than the current presidential race.”‘I know it because I’ve lived it’As Scott continues to insist that he is truly running to win the Republican nomination, his team has pointed to two factors that could help him: his personal story and his evangelical faith. In a video released last month, Scott emphasized those points.“I was raised by a single mother in poverty. The spoons in our apartment were plastic, not silver,” Scott said in the video. “But we had faith. We put in the work and we had an unwavering belief that we too could live the American dream. I know America is the land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. I know it because I’ve lived it.”Scott’s video was filmed at Fort Sumter, the South Carolina military site where the civil war began in 1861, which Scott said represented America’s strength and resilience. That message of unity may not resonate with all Republican primary voters; after all, when a group of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021, some of them entered the building waving Confederate flags.“That storyline doesn’t land the same way it used to because a lot of the folks that you’re going to be talking to don’t necessarily look at that as a positive,” Steele said. “They see that as part of the problem, which is why white nationalism has reared its ugly head the way it has.”Scott’s efforts to connect with white evangelical voters, who make up a substantial portion of the Republican primary electorate, will also likely encounter roadblocks. Evangelical voters represent a core piece of Trump’s base, and they have shown hesitation in abandoning the former president. According to data compiled by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in March, 62% of white evangelicals held favorable views of Trump.“I think it’s going to be pretty heavy lifting for Senator Tim Scott, or really any other candidate aside from Donald Trump, to gain a lot of loyalty from white evangelical voters,” said Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of PRRI.Scott’s fumbled answers on abortion policy could add to his troubles with that cohort. He remains staunchly anti-abortion, but he has bristled when reporters try to nail down his specific views on enacting a nationwide ban. When asked about his preferred cut-off point for banning the procedure, Scott told NBC News last month: “I’m not going to talk about six or five or seven or 10 [weeks].”“For the [Republican] base, the positions on abortion really matter,” Deckman said. “And when you have someone like Tim Scott or Nikki Haley sort of waffling on that issue, not trying to pin down the specifics of where they stand, I think it’s going to be harder for them to pull people away from Donald Trump in the primary.”That task is already proving difficult for Scott. On Monday, he will start finding out if it is, in fact, impossible. More

The US is careening towards a debt crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2011 when Barack Obama faced off against the Tea Party. No one knows for sure if the federal government is going to default on its debt by the end of this month. But if Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a compromise, it will have an enormous impact on small businesses around the country.Some 65% of small businesses believe they would be negatively affected by a default, according to a recent report from Goldman Sachs. This is very bad news. Small businesses accounted for 45% of all private-sector jobs in the first quarter of 2022.The first small businesses that will be affected will be those that contract directly with the federal government. Tens of thousands of small businesses received more than $154bn in federal contracts in the fiscal year 2021 – about 27% of all government contract spending that year. And this doesn’t include the small businesses that indirectly received funding from larger construction and other firms that get government money and sub-contract out work to them. If Janet Yellen is forced to prioritize interest and debt payments above all else, then these federal contracts would be suspended and the negative cash flow impact on these small firms would be substantial. Let’s remember: almost half of small businesses have less than three months of cash on hand.Then there are the small businesses that service government properties. A report from the Cato Institute estimates that the federal government owns or leases more than 350,000 buildings and properties around the country. These facilities are a critical revenue source for countless small firms that perform construction, maintenance, security, cleaning, electrical, landscaping and other kinds of services, all which would be potentially interrupted. The employees that go to these buildings every day rely on neighboring businesses for their lunches, dry cleaning, yoga, happy hours and other products and services. If ordered to stay home, these businesses – already reeling from the number of employees now working remotely – would suffer a significant blow.Then there are government functions. Individuals and small business owners rely on many areas of the government for services. They’re applying for passports, questioning the IRS, waiting on regulatory approval and loan guarantees from the Small Business Administration. These and many other critical government services could be suspended if funding is re-directed.These are all immediate effects of what would happen if the government must avoid a loan default. The longer-term effects are even more devastating. If the situation persists credit and financial markets will be volatile and banks will be forced to limit financing to only the most secure (and usually) largest of their customers, which means many small businesses seeking loans will either have to wait or be denied. The Goldman Sachs study found that 77% of small business owners they surveyed were already concerned about their ability to get loans.According to the White House, a default lasting more than three months would cause a significant recession with as many as 8 million people losing their jobs. The stock market – where small business owners park a significant amount of their retirement savings and collateral – could collapse.All of this could not come at a worse time for small businesses. Optimism among business owners – as determined monthly by the National Federation of Independent Businesses – is already at a 10-year low. Bankruptcies are ominously on the rise too, with one research firm reporting a 20% increase in filings from a year ago. An extended shutdown would make these numbers much worse.If you’re a small business owner, what can you do?It sounds obvious but it’s a fact that my very best clients are always thinking ahead. So the first thing you should be doing is preparing. A federal default or shutdown may not happen at all, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ready for such an event by the end of this month.That means hoarding cash, confirming your credit availability (including credit cards) and communicating with your customers, suppliers, employees and partners. No one should be surprised by your actions – like delaying payments – if a shutdown occurs. They should know that this is something you may be forced to do and they should know this well in advance. The more you tell them of your plans the better they can also plan and the more appreciative they will be.Also, and this is probably no consolation for businesses right now, is to take away an important lesson: diversity is important. If your business relies too much on any one customer (ie the federal government) then once this problem is behind us you should be making it a priority to diversify your customer base. Too much dependence on one source of revenue is too big a risk and even the federal government can’t be relied on to pay its bills on time – or at all.The silver lining in this dangerous, avoidable situation is that it would take time for things to get really, really bad. Although Yellen warns of a default by the end of May, she does have options for at least funding major parts of the government. And quarterly tax payments – expected by mid-June – could help stave off disaster for a while longer. But none of this should stop a business owner from thinking about the consequences now and preparing for this event. Even if we escape this time, given the acrimonious environment in Washington, we shouldn’t be surprised if something like this doesn’t occur again – and soon. More

After repeated failed attempts to pass stricter bans, Republicans in some US states are changing their messaging, touting “common sense” abortion laws presented as more lenient than outright bans, but that are more restrictive than they seem when looked at in detail.Nebraska’s state legislature passed a 12-week ban on Friday, days after another 12-week ban cleared its final hurdle in North Carolina.Meanwhile, South Carolina’s senate will again weigh a six-week abortion ban that the legislature has repeatedly tried and failed to pass in previous weeks.In Nebraska, Republican lawmakers praised the ban as a compromise, but their Democratic colleagues did not see it that way. “This place is morally bankrupt,” said the Omaha state senator Machaela Cavanaugh. “I’m looking forward to 2025 when I no longer have to serve with many of you.” Cavanaugh filibustered for hundreds of hours in recent months in an attempt to stop the bill passed on Friday, an anti-trans measure to which the abortion ban was attached.Two weeks ago, a six-week ban was tanked in Nebraska, partly by one of its original co-sponsors – the Republican state senator Merve Riepe – who had come to think of it as too extreme, as many women do not yet realize they are pregnant at six weeks. Ahead of the earlier vote, which Riepe abstained from, he passed around a news article warning that abortion was hurting the Republican party, according to the Washington Post. Polling has consistently found that strong majorities of Americans oppose abortion bans.The Nebraska ban includes no exceptions for fetal anomalies or pregnancies incompatible with life and threatens doctors with jail time.Republicans in Nebraska’s technically non-partisan legislature (where each lawmaker nonetheless identifies either as Republican or Democrat) have painted the bill as a huge step down from the six-week ban.Nebraskans crowded the statehouse as the bill progressed on Wednesday, drowning out the lively debate on the house floor with angry chants and foot stomping. By the end of the night, lawmakers were forced to seek refuge, fleeing the capitol rotunda through a back tunnel flanked by police escorts in a bid to avoid angry protesters.With the legislative session about to end, lawmakers craftily advanced the ban by attaching it to a measure limiting gender-affirming care to transgender people.“You are willing to drive this state into the ground. You look ridiculous,” Cavanaugh, said on Wednesday, adding: “Women will die, children are dying, and you are responsible.”In North Carolina, the 12-week ban was passed on Wednesday, when Republican politicians overrode the Democratic governor’s veto. The fresh ban brings the current limit down from 20 weeks.Republicans described the bill as “pro-life plan, not an abortion ban”, as they passed it amid protestors chanting “shame” from inside the state legislature. But the bill will make it incredibly difficult to obtain an abortion in North Carolina, a state that has become somewhat of a safe haven for abortion in the increasingly restrictive Bible belt.Most notably, the bill limits the use of medication abortion – the most common US method of abortion – to 10 weeks of pregnancy, and requires three in-person visits to get pills or any other form of the procedure. Those restrictions will make it harder to get an abortion for those with uncompromising work schedules, those who can’t afford to pay for childcare and those traveling from out of state.Further worsening the effect of abortion bans on low-income people and women of color, it will also make people seeking abortions wait 72 hours between visits. It will require women to watch ultrasounds before they have an abortion, and to be warned about unfounded medical side-effects of abortion before having one.Strict licensing requirements written into the bill could also shutter a number of the state’s remaining 14 clinics, and oblige abortion providers to report details on people who have sought an abortion to the state department of health and human services.And in South Carolina on Wednesday, a six-week abortion ban finally progressed to the senate, after weeks of Republicans repeatedly trying and failing to move it forward. But even if it passes, it must be upheld by the state supreme court, which blocked a similar six-week ban earlier this year. (The composition of that supreme court has since changed – the judge who wrote the decision striking down the ban has been replaced by judge who GOP lawmakers hope will overturn it.) Meanwhile, Republican and Democratic women have repeatedly united in a filibuster to stop the bill from passing. They have said they plan to do so again.Some 900 amendments were affixed to the legislation – many by Democrats hoping to delay the passage of the bill. Some of those amendments included making the state liable for funeral costs of people who die after being denied an abortion, and making men liable for child support and the costs of half of all pregnancy expenses, starting from fertilization. More

Wearing dark suit and sunglasses reminiscent of a character in The Matrix, Brian Fallon pointed a finger at the gleaming US Capitol building to his left, then to the marble edifice of the supreme court to his right.“If you look at any point in the last 40 years, Congress’s public approval always hovers around 10%,” said Fallon, a former justice department official who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “But the [supreme] court’s is now in the 30s and that’s a historical anomaly because there’s always at least been the benefit of the doubt conferred upon the court.”There is no better symbol of the crisis of trust in American institutions than its highest court, pummeled by partisan appointments, divisive rulings and ethical scandals. In a University of Chicago survey last year just 18% of Americans said they had a great deal of confidence in the supreme court – the lowest in half a century.Congressional Democrats and allies such as Fallon, now head of the pressure group Demand Justice, believe that they have a solution: expand the court by adding four seats to counter a rightward tilt during the Donald Trump administration that, they say, put it out of step with mainstream public opinion.This week a group including Senators Ed Markey, Tina Smith and Elizabeth Warren, and representatives Jerrold Nadler, Hank Johnson, Cori Bush and Adam Schiff announced the reintroduction of legislation that would create a 13-justice bench.At a press conference in front of the supreme court steps, surrounded by activists holding “Expand the court” signs as tourists and school groups wandered by, they pointed out that, while Democrats gained more votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections and represent 40 million more people in the Senate, Republicans have appointed 15 of the last 19 justices.These two “stolen” seats, the group argues, after Republicans blocked the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 only to ram through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett 10 days before the 2020 election, even as millions of votes were being cast for Joe Biden.Now, Markey said, it is time to “fix this broken and illegitimate court” with a forceful response. He said: “When a bully steals your lunch money in the schoolyard, you have to do something about it, or else the bully will come back over and over again,” he said. “So we’re in this fight, and we’re going to reclaim these seats. We’re not going to allow the bully to win.”The Massachusetts senator also called for the resignation of Justice Clarence Thomas over his failure disclose gifts provided by the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow and his wife Ginni’s more than $680,000 in unreported income from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank. “We’ve got to remind him that we have a system of constitutional checks and balances, not cheques or balances.”The speakers argued that, given recent decisions on abortion rights, voting rights, gun control measures and environmental regulations, the supreme court is beholden to rightwing special interests and facing a crisis of legitimacy.Schiff, a congressman from California, said: “This is not a conservative court, not in a legal sense. A conservative court would have some respect for precedent. This is instead a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda and the only question, Mitch McConnell having packed the court, is will we do anything about it or will we subject an entire generation of Americans to the loss of their rights?“Dirtier air and dirtier water and dirtier elections? Is that the fate we would have for the next generation? My kids are both in their early 20 and I am not satisfied that they should have to live under a reactionary supreme court for their entire adult lives and I don’t want anyone else’s kids to have to suffer that fate.”The legislative effort was first launched two years ago but this time it is backed by Planned Parenthood and Naral Pro-Choice America, spurred by the court’s decision last year to overturn the constitutional right to abortion after nearly 50 years.Jacqueline Ayers, senior vice-president of policy, campaigns and advocacy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, noted that 19 states have since moved to ban the procedure. “The moment is calling for us to realise that it’s necessary that we have fairness, that we have balance in our supreme court,” she said. “The bottom line is the courts are being used as a weapon to take away our rights.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCongress has added and removed seats on the supreme seven times throughout its history – though the most recent example goes all the way back to the presidency of Ulysses S Grant in 1869. Supporters also contend that 13 is not an arbitrary number but based on sound logic: it would mean one justice per circuit court of appeals, consistent with how the number of justices was originally determined.But they face an uphill battle to persuade Biden and other senior Democrats to put the issue front and centre of next year’s election campaign. In 2021 a report by the president’s supreme court reform commission suggested that “court packing” would be a cure that is worse than the disease, citing autocrats using it to shore up power in Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary and Poland.Biden, who hangs a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt in the Oval Office, may also be wary of what happened when the 32nd president, up against a supreme court that ruled parts of his New Deal unconstitutional, floated a plan in 1937 that could have expanded the bench to 15 seats. It was unpopular with the public and failed to clear the Senate.Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “I don’t think the Biden White House are going to walk down that road during a presidential election. You don’t need to know a lot of American history to remember what happened the last time a president tried to do this – that was a president at the very peak of his popularity and no one can say that President Biden is at the very peak of his.”Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, added: “The general Democratic narrative is that Republicans are trying to change the rules to their advantage and a White House-led effort to expand or, as the Republicans would say, instantly pack the supreme court would blow up that narrative and create a new centre of attention with the Democrats on the defensive.”Conservatives would indeed cry foul at any such proposal and accuse Democrats of hypocrisy. Curt Levey, president of the advocacy group Committee for Justice, said: “If you could just add seats every time one party controls both Congress and the presidency then the supreme court would reflect whatever party was in power at the time and it would be a completely politicised supreme court. It would be very dangerous.”He added: “It strikes me that the Democrats are sore losers here. You had a liberal activist supreme court arguably from 1937 to as late as 2015 and during that entire 80-year period Republicans did not call for packing the court and they did not question the court’s legitimacy. They complained about the court’s decisions but they really never tried to undermine the court.“It’s only been three years since Barrett was appointed and there was a real conservative majority in the court and the Democrats just can’t stand it. They have used the court to implement their agenda for so many decades that the idea that they’ve lost that is just driving them crazy.”Democrats contend, however, that in recent years Republican dominated state legislatures have been content to expand the number of seats on their states’ respective supreme courts.The national effort has a new sense of momentum with the backing of dozens of civil liberties, education, climate and labour organisations, while last year’s midterm elections showed the political potency of abortion rights. Fallon described the presence of Planned Parenthood and Naral this week as “a gamechanger”.Acknowledging that Biden will be “one of the last dominoes to fall”, Fallon predicted that supreme court expansion could be on the agenda for Democrats in next year’s congressional elections, for example in Senate primary races in California and Maryland and in House races in New York and Los Angeles.He said in an interview: “If you want to be a Democratic candidate speaking to that outrage, if you want to mobilise those voters upset about rulings that come out of the court on reproductive rights, now you need to have this as part of your arsenal and what you’re going to promise in terms of what you’ll support when you get to Washington.“It might not be on the timeline of Joe Biden in 2024 but certainly in 2028, when there’s another open contested presidential primary, I would expect by then that every candidate has to be for it.”
This article was amended on 21 May 2023 to replace an incorrect photograph of Ed Markey. More

The episode is called “America Decides”. But fans of HBO’s widely watched satire, Succession, will not have been shocked to see scions of the eminently dislikable Roy dynasty showing little respect for who Americans elect as president when it collides with the family’s financial and political interests.It’s also no secret that Succession’s story of a domineering father and the cutthroat rivalries of his offspring draws heavily on Rupert Murdoch’s family, his media empire and its ugliest creation, Fox News.In Succession, the Fox News stand-in, ATN, declares the probable loser – the Republican neo-fascist Jeryd Mencken – as the winner of a presidential election in an attempt to overturn the vote. Parts of the storyline mirror the turmoil of several American elections, from what many regard as George W Bush’s daylight robbery of the Florida vote in 2000 to Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat two decades later. But Succession veers from history at a crucial juncture.Clearly, the series writers drew inspiration from Fox News’s nightly ventures into what an ATN executive calls its “unique perspective” on the news, not least the recently departed Tucker Carlson’s campaign to paint the 2020 election as rigged against Trump.But what if Fox News starts taking inspiration from Succession? Could the news channel that cared so little for the truth it was forced to pay $787.5m over false accusations of rigged voting machines go all the way and declare Trump the winner of next year’s election – even if he loses – just to keep its viewers happy? And, if it did, what would be the consequences?Succession has yet to reveal whether ATN and Mencken pull off their coup. But Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, is sceptical that reality would prove so straightforward.“I can believe that Fox would cheat. I can believe that Fox would try to miscall an election or insist that these four, five, six states are just too close to call, and that means the election is up in the air when others are saying it’s over. I can see all kinds of things like that. I just don’t think it would produce a crisis as serious as [Succession] is trying to suggest, because we’re on to Fox. We know what they’re up to,” he said.“And while there’s a tiny chance that some weird scenario could develop because we’ve had weird scenarios develop before, it’s difficult to create a crisis of legitimacy unless there are several other factors besides Fox.”In Succession, we see Mencken facing, but not accepting, defeat.“If I lose, I want it correctly characterised as a huge victory,” he tells Roman Roy, the ruthless, snarky chief executive of ATN’s parent company. “I want to be the president.”The tone of ATN’s coverage is already set. In an echo of revelations about Fox News, the character overseeing election night on ATN, Tom Wambsgans, is worried about losing viewers to other rightwing broadcasters. He pushes to report anything that will call into question the legitimacy of votes for Mencken’s Democratic opponent, Daniel Jimenez.“Did you see the viral thing about the woman who voted, like, 40 times for Jimenez under her dead mom’s name?” Wambsgans asks the station’s news manager.The manager says the woman making the claim is “not a well person”.“You’re not a doctor,” Wambsgans responds. “Until you qualify, why don’t you get her on the air?”Shortly afterwards, a report comes in of a fire at a vote-counting centre in a heavily Democratic part of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The 100,000 destroyed ballots look almost certain to decide the election.Roman Roy characterises the blaze as an “antifa firebombing”, even though it advantages Mencken. On air, ATN’s version of Tucker Carlson pushes that line.“Maybe some of the crazies heard they were underperforming, and decided to stop the counting and destroy the evidence,” he says.Roman Roy seizes the chance to declare Wisconsin for Mencken in a move that swings the entire election in his favour.“We’re not waiting for burned votes, so call it,” Roy demands of ATN’s editors.Mencken gives a victory speech in which he declares his win has been called “by an authority of known integrity” and that, in effect, there is no need to wait for the official results.There are reasons to doubt that such a move would be successful in reality. As cumbersome and compromised as the US’s electoral machinery may be at times, it can also prove resilient.Trump’s repeated efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, governor and other officials to “find” the extra votes to overturn Biden’s victory in 2020 met with a wall of refusal, despite Fox News’s backing. The courts wouldn’t play ball, either. The system held, and the former president may well be on his way to prison for his efforts, along with some of his cronies.In fact, some key events in 2020 played out in a mirror image of the Succession scenario in which ATN calls Wisconsin for Mencken.Fox News’s data team actually played it straight in 2020 and infuriated Trump by going out on a limb and calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night before other news organisations. It turned out to be the right call, even if it was based on unreliable exit polls, and the outcome proved to be a lot closer than they suggested.But Succession did capture one consequence of the Fox News call.Once Fox gave Arizona to Biden, the numbers meant the network could not call another state for him without also declaring that he had therefore won the presidency and, more importantly to Fox News viewers, that Trump had lost. When Fox News’s Washington team was ready to call Nevada for Biden, it was blocked by some presenters and the network held off on a result until every other network had declared more than 14 hours later.In Succession, Roman Roy understands that with Wisconsin as a win for Mencken, he can use the result from one of two remaining states in play to declare total victory for the Republican even if the votes aren’t really there.That scenario requires that the election come down to a single state, a rare occurrence. Even if Fox News had called Arizona for Trump in 2020, he would still have had to take two or three of the other closely run states to win the electoral college.But Craig Harrington, research director at Media Matters for America, which tracks misinformation in the conservative media, said the election did come down to a single state two decades ago in Florida and Fox News was instrumental in determining the outcome.“Succession was uncomfortable to watch because we have already lived an entire lifetime in a world where Fox News’s decision to pre-emptively call an election on behalf of their political ally arguably changed the course of history. So “Could this happen again?” is the question rather than “Could this happen at all?” he said.Harrington sees the fictional burning of the ballots in Wisconsin as modeled on the wiping out of thousands of votes in Florida in 2000 which delivered the state and the presidency to George W Bush.On the night, the TV networks, including Fox, initially called Florida for Al Gore. But then Bush’s team began calling. As it happened, the head of Fox News election night decision desk was George W Bush’s cousin, John Ellis.Before long, George W and his brother, Jeb, who was Florida’s governor, were on the phone to Ellis telling him that the election was much tighter than the polls said and urging him to rescind the declaration for Gore. Ellis obliged. Then Fox News called the state for Bush. The other networks rapidly followed. Gore called Bush to concede.Fox News had got it wrong. The vote was still too close to call and the networks reversed themselves a couple of hours later. Gore withdrew his concession. But by then a large number of Americans thought Bush had won the presidency, and it had consequences.Hundreds of Republican party staffers and lawyers led what became known as the Brooks Brothers riot, named after shop selling suits, that shut down a recount of votes and froze Bush’s claim to victory in place until the US supreme court handed him the keys to the White House.“Because of Fox News’s decision to make the call when they did not have the data to back it up, the whole nation was informed that George W Bush had won the presidency,” said Harrington. “He started to become the president in waiting. The government began to transition. It set a tone in public that changed the course of history.”Sabato regards 2000 as a “terrible breakdown in the system” but thinks a repeat remains unlikely.Harrington agrees and said that without other factors at play, Fox News could only get so far in trying to push any particular candidate into the White House.“In order to actually rig an outcome, you have to have processes in place or individuals in place to interdict operations and to slow things down intentionally,” he said.In the Succession story, Harrington said it’s quite likely that ATN’s guns would have been spiked in real life by Milwaukee election officials finding a way to fix the issue of the burned ballots. But he added that might be different if the Trump camp had succeeded in its attempt to place supporters in strategic roles.“We saw this effort in 2022 to get election deniers elected to key roles in local government, state government, county governments all around the country during the midterm elections. We saw election deniers run and overwhelmingly they lost. And so we kind of dodged this attempt to infiltrate the election system,” said Harrington.Still, as Fox News attempts to paint the 2020 election as stolen from Trump showed, its ability to stir up trouble should not be underestimated. The network’s persistent pushing of vote fraud claims played an important part in rallying support for Trump after the election, and in fuelling the myths and anger that drove the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol.Sabato said that Fox News may not decide the winner but it can still stir up “small numbers who can cause great tumult in free societies”.“Fox could easily be the match that started a prairie fire, at least in deeply red states or in places where white nationalists or supremacists are prominent,” he said.“I do believe that the democratic process would win out but there are other points in American history where it’s gotten very messy. That’s what I’m worried about.” More

Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin Luther King Jr was only published last week but it has already been hailed by the Washington Post as “the most compelling account of King’s life in a generation”. The documentarian Ken Burns described it as “kind of a miracle” and the New York Times declared it “supplants David J Garrow’s [Pulitzer-winning] 1986 biography, Bearing the Cross, as the definitive life of King”.In a remarkable act of generosity, Garrow opened his files to Eig and acted as his consultant. Garrow now agrees with other critics, calling Eig’s book “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” and “the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years”.Eig is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written five other highly regarded books, including bestselling biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali. This week, Eig chatted about how his book on King came about and what he hopes readers will take from it.The Guardian: I read somewhere that the new book came out of your work on Ali.Eig: Yeah, it was completely organic. I was interviewing people who knew both of them and every time they would start talking about King, I would just get more curious. So I felt like I already had their phone numbers. I could call them back and get another meeting and this time talk about King. And I could do that before they got any older.The Guardian: When I wrote The Gay Metropolis I started with the oldest people I could find. Did you do that?Eig: 100%. It was like actuarial tables: factor for age and health and go after those who are the most frail. I hate to be crude about it, but that’s exactly what I did. Basically I was calling everybody all at once.The Guardian: How long did this one take?Eig: This one was six years. That’s full-time work, like 60 hours a week for six years.The Guardian: You had access to thousands of FBI files that weren’t available to previous biographers. How did that come about?Eig: I got somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 new documents. Donald Trump signed an order to release documents that were gathered during congressional hearings on JFK’s assassination. And I think accidentally that also led to the release of all the MLK FBI stuff, because the Church committee [a 1975-76 Senate panel on government intelligence activities] investigated them both.I really think Dave Garrow was the only one who went through every file. I went through a lot of them and Garrow was kind of like the first reader and he would tell me what was important and I, of course, looked through a lot on my own. But I don’t really know that too many other people were out there looking at this stuff.The Guardian: You did more than 200 interviews. Why were there so many people who knew King who were much more forthcoming than they had been before?Eig: Because they were older and because Coretta [Scott King, King’s wife] was gone. They were more comfortable saying things that they wouldn’t have said before. Certainly when it came to talking about Dorothy Cotton [one of King’s mistresses], people were really reluctant to say anything while Coretta was alive.The Guardian: I always tell my young friends writing a great book is all about what you leave out. Do you agree?Eig: (chuckling) Yeah. Even at 600-something pages! I left out a lot. At one point – I’ll be honest – I asked Colin Dickerman [his original editor] if I could do a three-volume work. I wanted to do one from childhood to Montgomery and then from Montgomery to maybe Selma and then Selma to death. Wisely, Colin disabused me of that idea. I’m trying to give the reader not just a good book but a readable book. I told my wife, I want people to cry at the end of this book – and they’re not gonna cry if I’ve put them to sleep!The Guardian: What do you know now that you didn’t know when you wrote your first book, about Lou Gehrig?Eig: It took me a couple of books to figure out that journalists’ archives are really valuable … When you find a good interview a journalist did with one of your subjects, go to his archives and see if the notes are there, see if the tapes are there.I got David Halberstam’s notes from his interview with King and he describes King taking his kids to the swimming pool and his daughter falls and scrapes her knee. And King grabs a piece of fried chicken and rubs it on her knee and says, “You know, chicken is the best thing for a cut.” It’s just a sweet little moment that didn’t make Halberstam’s story. But it was in his notebook.The Guardian: You describe King as one of America’s founding fathers. I’d never seen that before.Eig: Yeah. It was my idea. It was inspired somewhat by reading some of the 1619 Project. They talk about the idea that Black activists were seeking to force the country to live up to the words of the founding fathers. And that’s what kind of triggered it for me. I think you can make an argument that King more than anyone else is a founding father. He’s trying to create the nation as it was meant to be.The Guardian: The great Texas journalist Molly Ivins said something similar: “There’s not a thing wrong with the ideals and mechanisms outlined and the liberties set forth in the constitution of the US. The only problem is the founders left a lot of people out of the constitution. They left out poor people and Black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our constitution to everyone in America.”Eig: Yeah, I, I like that.The Guardian: What would you most like people to feel from reading your book?Eig: I hope people see King as a human being and not this two-dimensional character we’ve made him into since he became a national holiday and monument. [They should know] he had feelings and suffered and struggled and had doubts, because I think that makes his heroism even greater.I certainly want people to appreciate just how radical he was. A lot of people reduce him to this very safe figure who was all about peace, love and harmony. But he was challenging us in ways that made a lot of people uncomfortable, which is partly why the FBI came down on him the way they did.The Guardian: The thing that I think is probably most forgotten about him is that he was as anti-materialism as he was anti-militarism. Would you agree?Eig: That’s right. And it drove Coretta crazy because he would never even buy nice stuff for the house. And of course he left no money behind when he died. So he took it really seriously.
King is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

Recent reports about how migrants displaced unhoused veterans from upstate New York hotels have turned out to be false after circulating widely among rightwing media outlets.In an odd saga involving apparently altered receipts and paid unhoused actors, the chief executive of Yerik Israel Toney Foundation (YIT) – a non-profit organization focused on housing military veterans – has been accused of fabricating stories about unhoused veterans getting kicked out of hotels to make space for migrants.Last week, the conservative tabloid New York Post ran a viral story about nearly two dozen unhoused veterans who were purportedly booted out of hotels in upstate New York because of a surge of migrants in search of asylum in the state.The YIT foundation leader, Sharon Toney-Finch, spoke on the record to the outlet, whose story caught the attention of the local Republican state assembly member Brian Maher.Maher told the New York Post that officials’ priority should be serving Americans over “asylum seekers”.However, an investigation by local news outlets Mid Hudson News and the Times Union found several holes in Toney-Finch’s claims.Mid Hudson News reported that Maher provided a copy of a credit card receipt that purportedly showed a payment of more than $37,000 for rooms at the Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh for the unhoused veterans who were then allegedly displaced.The Times Union also published an image of the receipt, along with a copy of what appears to be Toney-Finch’s credit card. The pictures were allegedly sent to Maher to confirm that YIT had booked and paid for hotel rooms for the unhoused veterans.However, according to a graphics expert who examined the document, the receipt appeared to have been “altered with smudges behind the darker type and [had] different fonts”, Mid Hudson News reports.Mid Hudson News also contacted the hotel manager who said: “I checked the dollar on the net on the credit card … and the screen shows no transactions. The hotel has no record of this transaction.”He added that not only were there no veterans at the hotel, none were kicked out and no other guests were forced out of their rooms. The manager also told Mid Hudson News that although the hotel does have several asylum seekers there, it was not booked to capacity, and rooms were still available.After concerns that the receipt had been edited, Maher asked Toney-Finch to meet him outside a local bank to provide further evidence that her foundation had indeed paid for the veterans’ rooms. Toney-Finch never appeared, however, the Times Union reported.Additionally, several unhoused men proceeded to tell Mid Hudson News and Times Union that they were actually recruited to pose as displaced veterans.Douglas Tery, Eric Brown and William – who asked Times Union not to use his last name – told the outlet that recruiters had come to their shelter in Poughkeepsie saying that they had work for 15 men between 40 and 60 years old, adding that they were offered $100 for two to three hours of work and that no heavy lifting would be required.Several of the unhoused men from the shelter also told Mid Hudson News that they were asked to take a trip to meet with an elected official and discuss homelessness while being promised food, alcohol and money in return.After they were recruited, the men were driven to a diner where they were joined by Toney-Finch, who told them that they could order freely from the menu, Mid Hudson News reports. “We ate like kings,” said one of the men, who wished to remain anonymous.Following their meal, Toney-Finch gathered the men in a parking lot and asked them to act as if they were veterans who had been displaced, one of the men told Mid Hudson News.The man also said that he and the others were instructed to say: “I am too traumatized to talk about it,” if asked to elaborate.After local reports contesting Toney-Finch’s original claims emerged, Maher told Times Union that he was “devastated and disheartened” following a conversation with Toney-Finch which revealed the story to be a hoax.“She alluded to the fact that, ‘Maybe it’s not exactly how I said it was,’” Maher recounted to Times Union, adding: “This is something I believe hurt a lot of people.”Speaking to the Associated Press, Toney-Finch refused to say that her claims were fabricated and instead said: “We should have verified better.”The Associated Press reported that Toney-Finch abruptly ended the phone call upon further questioning.On Friday, a spokesperson from state attorney general Leticia James’s office told Politico that the office is aware of the situation and is “looking into it”.The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, has condemned the apparent ruse, telling reporters that people seeking asylum “were sent there with a legal contract between the city of New York and a hotel owner”.The governor added: “They are allowed to contract that way and if people want to fabricate stories to undermine the whole process, I think it’s reprehensible.”Meanwhile, after aggressively covering Toney-Finch’s claims as if the channel believed her, Fox News on Saturday issued a rare, on-air correction. Network host Laura Ingraham said: “Turns out the group behind the claim made it up. We have no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing, but we’ll bring you any updates should they come.” More

Watching the opening day of the US Senate hearings on AI brought to mind Marx’s quip about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Except this time it’s the other way round. Some time ago we had the farce of the boss of Meta (neé Facebook) explaining to a senator that his company made money from advertising. This week we had the tragedy of seeing senators quizzing Sam Altman, the new acceptable face of the tech industry.Why tragedy? Well, as one of my kids, looking up from revising O-level classics, once explained to me: “It’s when you can see the disaster coming but you can’t do anything to stop it.” The trigger moment was when Altman declared: “We think that regulatory interventions by government will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.” Warming to the theme, he said that the US government “might consider a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a threshold of capabilities”. He believed that companies like his can “partner with governments, including ensuring that the most powerful AI models adhere to a set of safety requirements, facilitating processes that develop and update safety measures and examining opportunities for global coordination.”To some observers, Altman’s testimony looked like big news: wow, a tech boss actually saying that his industry needs regulation! Less charitable observers (like this columnist) see two alternative interpretations. One is that it’s an attempt to consolidate OpenAI’s lead over the rest of the industry in large language models (LLMs), because history suggests that regulation often enhances dominance. (Remember AT&T.) The other is that Altman’s proposal is an admission that the industry is already running out of control, and that he sees bad things ahead. So his proposal is either a cunning strategic move or a plea for help. Or both.As a general rule, whenever a CEO calls for regulation, you know something’s up. Meta, for example, has been running ads for ages in some newsletters saying that new laws are needed in cyberspace. Some of the cannier crypto crowd have also been baying for regulation. Mostly, these calls are pitches for corporations – through their lobbyists – to play a key role in drafting the requisite legislation. Companies’ involvement is deemed essential because – according to the narrative – government is clueless. As Eric Schmidt – the nearest thing tech has to Machiavelli – put it last Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, the AI industry needs to come up with regulations before the government tries to step in “because there’s no way a non-industry person can understand what is possible. It’s just too new, too hard, there’s not the expertise. There’s no one in the government who can get it right. But the industry can roughly get it right and then the government can put a regulatory structure around it.”Don’t you just love that idea of the tech boys roughly “getting it right”? Similar claims are made by foxes when pitching for henhouse-design contracts. The industry’s next strategic ploy will be to plead that the current worries about AI are all based on hypothetical scenarios about the future. The most polite term for this is baloney. ChatGPT and its bedfellows are – among many other things – social media on steroids. And we already know how these platforms undermine democratic institutions and possibly influence elections. The probability that important elections in 2024 will not be affected by this kind of AI is precisely zero.Besides, as Scott Galloway has pointed out in a withering critique, it’s also a racing certainty that chatbot technology will exacerbate the epidemic of loneliness that is afflicting young people across the world. “Tinder’s former CEO is raising venture capital for an AI-powered relationship coach called Amorai that will offer advice to young adults struggling with loneliness. She won’t be alone. Call Annie is an ‘AI friend’ you can phone or FaceTime to ask anything you want. A similar product, Replika, has millions of users.” And of course we’ve all seen those movies – such as Her and Ex Machina – that vividly illustrate how AIs insert themselves between people and relationships with other humans.In his opening words to the Senate judiciary subcommittee’s hearing, the chairman, Senator Blumenthal, said this: “Congress has a choice now. We had the same choice when we faced social media. We failed to seize that moment. The result is: predators on the internet; toxic content; exploiting children, creating dangers for them… Congress failed to meet the moment on social media. Now we have the obligation to do it on AI before the threats and the risks become real.”Amen to that. The only thing wrong with the senator’s stirring introduction is the word “before”. The threats and the risks are already here. And we are about to find out if Marx’s view of history was the one to go for.What I’ve been readingCapitalist punishmentWill AI Become the New McKinsey? is a perceptive essay in the New Yorker by Ted Chiang.Founders keepersHenry Farrell has written a fabulous post called The Cult of the Founders on the Crooked Timber blog.Superstore meThe Dead Silence of Goods is a lovely essay in the Paris Review by Adrienne Raphel about Annie Ernaux’s musings on the “superstore” phenomenon. More