US Politics

The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson announced on Sunday that he plans to run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, saying the US needs “leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts” while also calling for Donald Trump to drop out the race.Meanwhile, on the other side of the political aisle, the centrist Democrat and West Virginia senator Joe Manchin evaded a question during an interview on CNN about a potential run challenging his party’s Oval Office incumbent, Joe Biden, fueling speculation about his own ambitions.“This is one of the most unpredictable political environments that I have seen in my lifetime,” Hutchinson said on ABC, adding that he traveled the US for six months and listened to repeated demands for new leadership before declaring himself as a candidate.Hutchinson’s announcement follows an eclectic career including stints as a prosecutor, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a member of Congress. He joins the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley as the only members of the Republican mainstream to challenge Trump, Biden’s presidential predecessor, for the party’s 2024 White House nomination. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has been Trump’s only serious rival in polling.Hutchinson spoke of his recent visit to Iowa, which has historically been the first state to vote in presidential primaries and holds a crucial spot in White House election cycles.The former governor of Arkansas had hinted at this candidacy for almost a year and said in May that a possible Trump campaign wouldn’t deter him from running.He said he doesn’t “align” with a lot of Trump’s politics and that the country needed to go in a “different direction”.In Sunday’s interview, he said that Trump is better off focusing on his criminal indictment in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, as well as other legal concerns, instead of taking another shot at the presidency.“If we’re looking at the presidency and the future of our country, then we don’t need that distraction,” said Hutchinson, who added that he would formally kick off his presidential campaign later this month.Meanwhile, on Sunday morning, CNN’s Dana Bash spoke with Manchin and informed him of Hutchinson’s announcement. The host then asked Manchin about his own plans for 2024 after the senator skirted a question about whether he would support re-electing Biden in 2024.“I’m worn out,” Manchin said. “The people are tired, sick and tired of the fighting and division that we have.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Bash asked Manchin again about his plans for 2024, Manchin replied evasively, saying: “We have a movement. There’s a movement. There’s a movement going on that people want to bring the extremes back to the sensible and reasonable, responsible middle.”He then went on to say he would like to be at least “a part of trying to get a dialogue” that would bring people “to the middle”.“It’s about our country,” Manchin said. “Everyone’s worried about their own political future. I’m worried about the country.”A millionaire coal-trading company founder, Manchin at times has undermined the agendas of Biden and other Democrats, occasionally voting against the party’s interest in the Senate, where the party and the independents who caucus with it currently hold just a two-seat advantage. Notably, last year, Manchin torpedoed sweeping climate legislation staunchly opposed by Republicans before later helping ratify a less ambitious bill.The self-help author Marianne Williamson has so far been the only Democrat to announce an intent to challenge Biden for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024. Biden is widely expected to announce another White House run but as of Sunday had not officially done so. More

An attorney for Donald Trump has said he hopes the proceedings can stay “painless and classy” at the court hearing scheduled for Tuesday where the former president plans to plead not guilty to charges filed against him after an investigation into hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.Joe Tacopina told CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday that many of the particulars of the arraignment set for Tuesday were still “very much up in the air” besides the fact that the ex-president would “very loud and proudly say not guilty”.For instance, though he has said he doesn’t expect his client to be handcuffed, he claimed to not even know whether Trump would take the standard criminal defendant mugshot while being fingerprinted at the courthouse. Many people facing charges have found getting a mugshot taken to be humiliating, but some observers believe Trump could seek to put it on merchandise meant to raise funds as he runs for the oval office again in 2024.“Hopefully, this will be as painless and classy as possible for a situation like this,” Tacopina told the show’s host, Dana Bash. “I don’t even know, really, what brings us here.”Tacopina then spent some of the rest of his time with Bash arguing that the payments to Daniels that preceded Trump’s indictment were personal, as he’s done before. He insisted that they were part of a legal settlement, had nothing to do with the 2016 presidential campaign that he won and therefore documentation of them was not filed with the federal election commission.“This was a personal expenditure, not a campaign expenditure,” Tacopina said. “Had it been a campaign expenditure, he would have used campaign funds, and then of course we’d be talking about … the outrage at Donald Trump [using] campaign funds for personal spending. They’d be baying for his scalp. … He’s damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.”It remained unclear Sunday even to Trump’s legal team exactly what he had been charged with – the state indictment that a Manhattan grand jury handed up against him three days earlier was still under a court seal. However, it appears he may face dozens of charges over his role in the payment of $130,000 to Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 that the ex-president denies.The deal to pay Daniels to stay quiet materialized during the presidential race that Trump won over Hillary Clinton as the actor negotiated a deal to go on television and discuss her claims of the purported sexual encounter. Trump’s then lawyer, Michael Cohen, made the payment before pleading guilty in 2018 to federal charges of tax evasion and campaign-finance violations.The federal case that ensnared Cohen – who has since forfeited his license to practice law in New York – did not produce any charges against Trump. It was a separate state grand jury empaneled earlier this year by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg which voted to indict Trump after investigating whether the way in which he repaid Cohen – in $35,000 monthly increments documented as legal expenses – complied with laws governing campaign finances and the keeping of business records.At least one of the charges filed against Trump is a felony, reported the Associated Press, citing people familiar with the matter, which ostensibly increases the risk of prison time the former president might face if he is eventually convicted.Tacopina on Sunday dismissed Cohen as “a pathological, convicted liar”. He also alluded to how Cohen had gone on CNN hours after Trump became the first former US president to be indicted criminally and said he actually didn’t believe he had done anything wrong when he pleaded guilty in 2018.“I have all the documents to show – there was no tax evasion,” Cohen said. “None of this is accurate.”Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, spoke on the air with Bash after Tacopina and said there was “substantial documentation” beyond his client’s word of Trump’s role in the Daniels hush money as well as a similar payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. McDougal has maintained that she had an affair with Trump in 2006 as well, when he was already married to former first lady Melania Trump. Trump denies McDougal’s claims, too.“There are other documents from other people and other testimony from other people – some of it direct [and] involved in conversations with Mr Trump,” Davis said. “It’s a wrong strategy if he thinks he’s building his whole strategy on personal attacks on Michael Cohen.”Preparations for Trump’s arraignment at Manhattan’s state criminal courthouse at 100 Centre Street have been ongoing for more than a week. Barriers have been put in place to help authorities with crowd control.If Trump enters his plea as planned on Tuesday, he is scheduled to be doing so in a courtroom where defendants accused of murder, attempted terrorism and illegal gun possession are set to appear as well.Reuters reported that the former president intended to spend the night at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Monday night. Trump sent out a statement on Sunday saying he then planned to make remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday evening after the scheduled arraignment. More

More than $37m has already been spent in an election that will this month determine control of Wisconsin’s supreme court, easily making it the most expensive judicial contest in US history.Spending in the race easily shatters the $10m spent in the 2020 Wisconsin supreme court race, the previous record in the state. It also easily surpasses the previous national record, $15m spent on an Illinois supreme court race in 2004. The race has national implications – it will probably ultimately determine the legality of abortion in the state as well as play a key role in setting voting rules for the 2024 election in one of America’s most competitive states.“It’s just a truly incredible amount of money,” said Douglas Keith, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice who closely follows state courts. “It’s a sign of what we should expect to see in the future in other state supreme court elections in other states provided that for some reason a particular seat is seen as important.”A once-in-a-generation set of circumstances have come together to make the state supreme court race between liberal Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Daniel Kelly – typically a little-noticed contest outside Wisconsin’s borders – the most important election this year.First, the ideological balance of the seven-member court is up for grabs. Second, the outcome of the race will probably directly determine whether abortion is legal in Wisconsin, as the court is expected to weigh in soon on the state’s 1849 abortion ban. Third, the court could strike down Wisconsin’s gerrymandered legislative maps, ending Republicans’ unshakable majority in the state. Lastly, the court is expected to weigh in on a range of disputes over election rules ahead of the 2024 presidential election in Wisconsin, a key battleground state.Protasiewicz and Kelly have taken different approaches to how that money has been raised. Protasiewicz’s campaign has raised $14.5m in total, a vast haul that dwarfs the $2.7m Kelly has raised. But Kelly has benefited from an influx of outside spending from third-party groups, most notably Fair Courts America, a Super Pac backed by the GOP mega-donors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, which has spent nearly $4.5m on advertising so far. Women Speak Out Pac, which is connected to the anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, has also pledged to spend $2m in support of Kelly and has spent nearly $1.3m on advertising so far.The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which focuses on state-level elections – has also spent about $200,000 in support of Kelly through its Judicial Fairness Initiative, according to an analysis by the Center for Political Accountability, a watchdog group. Some of the RSLC’s donors since the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade have been companies like Google, Comcast and Amazon that have pledged to support their employees if they want an abortion, according to the Center for Political Accountability.“You have so many major household name companies come out in support of their employees’ access to abortion rights. Offering to cover travel expenses, offering to cover medical expenses, that sort of thing,” said Jeanne Hanna, the Center for Political Accountability’s research director, “but then continuing to fund these groups that elect openly anti-abortion judges in battleground states where one judicial seat could make the difference of whether people in this state can access abortion care at all. They’re saying one thing and doing another with their political spending.”Kelly has openly touted his support from outside groups, telling supporters earlier this month not to worry because a “cavalry” of outside money was coming to support him.“What has been most surprising is that Dan Kelly has basically raised no money as a candidate … So all of his backing has been from outside groups,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s hard to understand. Legally, they’re not allowed to coordinate. So he’s essentially handed over messaging to groups that he cannot control.”Protasiewicz’s fundraising has been prolific. She has spent more than $10.5m on television advertisements alone, compared with Kelly’s $580,000, according to a Brennan Center tracker. And while she has benefited from considerable spending from liberal outside groups – A Better Wisconsin Together, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Everytown for Gun Safety among them – the bulk of the money she’s raised has come from the state Democratic party.The party’s $8.8m contribution to her campaign was made possible by a 2015 Republican rewrite of the state’s campaign finance rules. Those changes removed a cap on the amount of money candidates could receive from state parties. They also allowed individual donors to make unlimited contributions to the political parties.“When the Republicans rewrote the laws in 2015 … they did it with the expectation that it would advantage them. They felt that the sources of money they could rely on, both outside groups and big contributors, would mean they would always have financial advantages in races like this. Just the opposite has happened,” said Jay Heck, the executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group. “That is the reason why [Wisconsin Democratic party chair] Ben Wikler and the Democrats have been able to be such a powerhouse.”Protasiewicz has said she would recuse herself from cases involving the Wisconsin Democratic party. Kelly has declined to make a similar recusal pledge for cases involving his major donors.“Judges should not be able to hear cases involving major donors or supporters,” said Keith, the Brennan Center expert. “One of the issues that comes with all this money being as opaque as it is is that the public doesn’t actually know who the judge’s major supporters are often. And if the judges do know, then that’s even more troubling that the judge has information that the public doesn’t about what cases they may have a conflict in.” More

In spring 2021, Neil King trekked 330 miles from his Washington DC home to New York City. He passed through countryside, highways, towns and churchyards. His 25-day walk was also a journey through time. He looked at the US as it was and is and how it wishes to be seen. His resultant book is a beautifully written travelog, memoir, chronicle and history text. His prose is mellifluous, yet measured.In his college days, King drove a New York cab. At the Wall Street Journal, his remit included politics, terror and foreign affairs. He did a stint as global economics editor. One might expect him to be jaded. Fortunately, he is not. American Ramble helps make the past come alive.In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, King stops at the home of James Buchanan, the bachelor president from 1857 to 1861, who sympathized with the south and loathed abolition. Ending slavery could wait. Of the supreme court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, Buchanan highly approved.Also in Lancaster, King visits a townhouse once owned by Thaddeus Stevens, the 19th-century Republican congressman and radical abolitionist. At the start of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, viewed the conflict as the vehicle for preserving the Union. He opposed slavery but opposed secession more. For Stevens, slavery was an evil that demanded eradication.Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, King describes how the ancestors of one town greeted Confederate troops as heroes while another just 20 miles away viewed them as a scourge. Forks in the road are everywhere.King pays homage to the underground railroad, describing how the Mason-Dixon Line, the demarcation between north and south, free state and slave, came into being. Astronomy and borders had a lot to do with it. All of this emerges from the scenery and places King passes on his way.Imagining George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, he delivers a lesson on how such rivers came to be named. Names affixed to bodies of water by Indigenous peoples gave way to Dutch pronunciation, then anglicization. The Delaware, however, derived its moniker from Lord De La Warr, a “dubious aristocrat” otherwise known as Thomas West.Yet joy and wonder suffuse King’s tale. He smiles on the maker’s handiwork, uneven as it is. American Ramble depicts a stirring sunset and nightfall through the roof-window of a Quaker meeting house. Quiet stands at the heart of the experience. The here and now is loud and messy, but King ably conveys the silent majesty of the moment. The Bible recounts the Deity’s meeting with the prophet Elijah. He was not in the wind, a fire or an earthquake. Rather, He resided in a whisper.King recalls an earlier time in a Buddhist monastery. Warned that surrounding scenery would detract from solitude and commitment, he nevertheless succumbed. King is nothing if not curious.The quotidian counts too. He pops cold beers, downs pizzas and snarfs chicken parmesan. A wanderer needs sustenance. He is grateful for the day following the night. Predictability is miraculous, at times invaluable.King is a cancer survivor and a pilgrim. He is a husband and father, son and brother. Life’s fragility and randomness have left their mark. His malady is in remission but he moves like a man unknowing how long good fortune will last. His voice is a croak, a casualty of Lyme disease. He is restless. Life’s clock runs. He writes of how his brother Kevin lost his battle with a brain tumor.King puts his head and heart on the page. His life story helps drive the narrative, a mixture of the personal, political and pastoral. But it is not only about him. He meets strangers who become friends, of a sort. At times, people treat him as an oddity – or simply an unwanted presence. More frequently, they are open if not welcoming. As his walk continues, word gets out. Minor celebrity results.The author is awed by generosity, depravation and the world. He is moved by a homeless woman and her daughter. Traversing the New Jersey Turnpike presents a near-insurmountable challenge. A mother and son offer him a kayak to paddle beneath the traffic. He accepts.A Colorado native, King is at home in the outdoors. Nature is wondrous and sometimes disturbing. Rough waters complicate his passages. He studies heaps on a landfill. He meets a New Jerseyan with pickup truck adorned by Maga flags. The gentleman bestows beer, snacks and jokes. King divides the universe into “anywheres” and “somewheres”. He puts himself in the first camp and finds placed-ness all around.American Ramble captures the religious and demographic topography that marks the mid-Atlantic and north-eastern US. Here, dissenters, Anabaptists, German pietists, Presbyterians and Catholics first landed. King pays homage to their pieces of turf. His reductionism is gentle. He appreciates the legacy of what came before him. Landscapes change, human nature less so, even as it remains unpredictable.“When I crossed the Delaware two days before,” he writes, “I had entered what I later came to call Presbyteriana, a genteel and horsey patch settled by Presbyterians and Quakers.” Princeton University stands at its heart.E pluribus unum was tough to pull off when the settlers came. It may even be tougher now. King quotes Nick Rizzo, a denizen of Staten Island, New York City’s Trumpy outer borough: “We are losing our ability to forge any unity at all from these United States.”Rizzo joined King along the way. In the Canterbury Tales, April stands as the height of spring. It was prime time for religious pilgrimages, “what with Chaucer and all, and it being April”, Rizzo explains.“Strangers rose to the occasion to provide invaluable moments,” King writes. Amen.
American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal is published in the US by HarperCollins More

Donald Trump understands the camera. He is particular about angles, lighting and his inimitable orange hair. But come this Tuesday, in a New York courthouse, the camera will become his tormentor as Trump, once the most powerful man in the world, is told to provide a mug shot like a common criminal.The first reality TV star to be elected US president, and the first US president to be twice impeached and attempt the overthrow of an election, is now the first US president to be charged with a crime. The 76-year-old faces the humiliation of being photographed, fingerprinted and entering a plea to charges involving a 2016 hush money payment to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.The impact of that is already being felt. There are signs that the legal perils now engulfing Trump are pushing him to new extremes. Trump has never been a conventional politician, but his divisive brand of populist-nationalism is growing ever more intense and extreme.His 2024 campaign for the White House is embracing a violent rhetoric that could inflame tensions and put America on a path to conflagration. Barricades have gone up around the courthouse in New York. Daniels canceled a Friday television interview out of “security concerns”. Trump’s language on the campaign trail and social media, haranguing his enemies, is laced with race-baiting and antisemitic conspiratorial tropes.“There’s nothing traditional about Donald Trump and there never has been, but we’ve never been in this situation before and what’s different now is how polarised we are,” said Frank Luntz, a pollster who has worked on numerous Republican election campaigns. “This is like lighting a match in the middle of a bonfire that’s been doused with gasoline. I’m afraid that we’re lighting a match and we’re going to see on Tuesday what happens.”For a moment, it had seemed that this time might be different. Trump launched his 2024 election campaign last November at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida with an uncharacteristic low energy, steering clear of his stolen election lies and insisting: “We’re going to keep it very elegant.”He then went unusually quiet before embarking on small-scale campaign events, issuing policy proposals and hiring staff in early voting states. Unlike his ramshackle 2016 effort, his campaign team appeared disciplined. The Hill website observed: “Former President Trump is doing something shocking – he’s running a campaign that is starting to look quite conventional.”But just as hopes that Trump would grow into the presidency were constantly dashed, so this newly orthodox candidate was never going to last. The trigger came two days after he became the first contender to hit the 2024 election campaign trail, delivering unremarkable speeches in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina.In a surprise move, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, revived what had seemed be a cold case, an investigation into an alleged $130,000 payment to Daniels in the waning days of the 2016 campaign. Daniels has said she received money in exchange for keeping silent about a sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006, when he was married to Melania Trump.As witnesses testified to a grand jury and the walls closed in, Trump used the threat to raise money and rally supporters as he seeks his party’s nomination to challenge Joe Biden next year. He abandoned all pretence of moderation and reverted to the old demagoguery.At the Conservative Political Action Conference at the National Harbor in Maryland, he spoke in apocalyptic terms of a “final battle” and vowed to supporters: “I am your retribution.” On his Truth Social media platform, he inaccurately predicted his own arrest and called for protests, echoing his charged rhetoric ahead of the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.Luntz commented: “He knows the power of that word ‘protest’. He knows what happened the last time he used that word. This is a deliberate effort to engage people in his situation and I am concerned about the consequences of him using that word.”Trump went on to warn of potential “death & destruction” if he were charged and described Bragg as an “animal” who was “doing the work of Anarchists and the Devil, who want our Country to fail”. He accused Bragg, who is Black, of racial bias and even shared an image – later removed – of himself holding a baseball bat next to a picture of the district attorney. Bragg’s office has been the target of bomb threats in recent weeks.Then, last weekend, Trump held his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas, exactly 30 years after a 51-day standoff and deadly siege there, and began by standing with hand on heart during the playing of a song that features a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing the national anthem, as footage from the riot was shown on big screens.The ex-president proceeded to describe the “weaponisation of law enforcement” as the biggest threat to America today and vow: “The thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system will be defeated, discredited and totally disgraced.”When on Thursday the grand jury had voted to indict, Trump responded in similar fashion and, significantly, Republicans rallied to his defence. Such is his grip on that party that even potential 2024 rivals felt compelled to defend his claim of a witch-hunt. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, called the move “un-American”, while former vice-president Mike Pence told CNN the charges were “outrageous”.Both will have been aware that Trump’s campaign of rage in recent weeks has put him back in the headlines and expanded his lead in opinion polls. DeSantis, promoting a new book, has found himself going backwards. It is little surprise that Trump feels emboldened.Luntz said: “His numbers have gone up five points since this whole thing came about and I’m afraid that it will galvanise and solidify the support that had been leaving him. Donald Trump is the best politician in my lifetime at playing the victim card. There’s no one who comes close to him.”Trump alleges that there are political motivations behind all four criminal investigations he is known to face – including into his retention of classified documents and attempts to overturn his election defeat, and a separate Georgia investigation into his efforts to overturn his loss in that state. One line of attack is reframing January 6 as a heroic defence of democracy.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “It’s clear that January 6 is a badge of valour for him, given that he’s continued to escalate the violent rhetoric similar to that which he used prior to January 6. He seems to get off on the idea of people engaging in violence on behalf of him.”She added: “He’s like a political vampire with a taste. He got a taste of what that violence can do on his behalf and now he wants more because he feels powerful.”The shift to the right goes beyond posturing. Trump has unleashed a barrage of policy proposals that include punishing doctors who provide gender-affirming care, measures that would make it harder to vote and imposing the death penalty on drug dealers. He appears to be taking the Republican party with him.Staunch allies such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have risen to prominence in Congress. Republican state legislatures across the country have passed extreme legislation curtailing abortion and LGBTQ and voting rights. DeSantis, seen as Trump’s principal rival for the nomination, has adopted many of the same positions or tried to move even further right.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “I don’t think he’s dragging them anywhere. They’re going willingly and voluntarily. They’re not putting up any kind of struggle. It just tells me intuitively that this is what they want, this is the kind of party that they want to be a part of because they’re doing absolutely nothing to divorce themselves from the extremism that Donald Trump regurgitates every single day.”Police are likely to close streets around the Manhattan courthouse ahead of Tuesday’s expected appearance. In a sign of the increasingly febrile atmosphere, Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator for South Carolina, mocked Bragg’s sense of priorities by writing on Twitter: “How can President Trump avoid prosecution in New York? On the way to the DA’s office on Tuesday, Trump should smash some windows, rob a few shops and punch a cop. He would be released IMMEDIATELY!”A potential trial is still at least more than a year away, meaning it could occur during or after the presidential campaign. While it is unclear what specific charges Trump will face, some legal experts have said Bragg might have to rely on untested legal theories to argue that Trump falsified business records to cover up crimes such as violating federal campaign finance law.Luntz, the pollster, warned: “If you go to kill the king and the king lives, you die. If you prosecute Donald Trump and he is found innocent, there will be no stopping him. If he is found guilty, there’ll be no calming down of his most fervent supporters. Either way, it’s bad for the American democracy.” More

In the tumultuous, multifaceted case of Donald J Trump versus the people of the United States, the biggest question is why this former president, political con artist and serial offender is not already in jail. Trump will be charged this week in Manhattan over alleged “hush money” payments to a former porn star. This action, both welcome and overdue, makes him the first US president to be criminally indicted. Yet twice-impeached Trump stands accused of a string of infinitely more serious, well-documented crimes, including a violent attempt to overthrow the government. The continuing mystery is why justice is so long in coming.The full Trump charge sheet reads like a horror novel in which democracy is murdered. In the weeks following his clear-cut defeat by Joe Biden in November 2020, Trump did everything he could to subvert the result, legally and illegally, by making baseless accusations of fraud. This is not in dispute. Not disputed, either, is a taped telephone conversation on 2 January 2021 between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in which the then president pressed the latter “to find 11,780 votes” – sufficient to cancel Biden’s victory in the key swing state.Why has Trump not been criminally charged in what appears to be an open-and-shut case of shameless election interference? A special grand jury in Atlanta has recommended the prosecution of all involved in the illegal lobbying of Raffensperger. Perhaps the courage shown by Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, in indicting Trump will inspire his Fulton County counterpart, Fani Willis – and other state and federal prosecutors – to follow suit without further delays. If this case had been conducted in a timely manner, Trump might be behind bars now.It is more than two years since Trump incited his supporters to attack the Capitol in order to halt Congress’s ratification of Biden’s victory. The ensuing riot on 6 January 2021 led to deaths and injuries. Yet Trump did nothing to call off the mob until it was far too late. He has since hailed the rioters as heroes. Again, much of this is on the record. Congress has conducted exhaustive investigations. Why has Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, failed to act against the chief instigator as well as the perpetrators of the coup attempt? Only in November did Garland finally appoint a special counsel – which amounts, in effect, to another delay.It is hard to avoid the conclusion that reluctance to energetically pursue these and other crimes, such as Trump’s apparent theft of secret documents found at his Florida home, stems from political timidity at the top. As he showed again last week, Trump is ready and able to use his mafia-like grip on the Republican party and rightwing media to intimidate the entire US body politic. He plays the victim, turns the tables and claims Biden and the Democrats are the lawbreakers. Trump says political enemies have singled him out. Yet the only special treatment he has received is to have been allowed to avoid prosecution for so long.Diffidence over confronting Trump full-on stems in part from an understandable desire to avoid feeding national divisions. The entire Trump saga, akin to tawdry, never-ending reality TV show, is a distraction from pressing issues such as post-pandemic economic revival, the climate emergency and war in Europe. The US should focus on these challenges rather than endlessly indulge the antic ravings of a narcissistic, foul-mouthed, misogynistic crook.Biden would surely wish it so. At the start of his term, he plainly hoped that, by ignoring him, Trump would eventually go away. Yet sadly, here he is again, hogging the limelight. Trump will have his day in court amid blanket media coverage and feared street violence. He will repeat his usual inflammatory lies and slanders, proceedings will be adjourned, probably for months, and meanwhile, this arch-enemy of democracy, decency and justice will try to exploit his “victimhood” to secure the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In a sense, Trump-ism is eternal. It cares for nothing and no one but itself.The Trump case poses potentially historic challenges for an American republic founded on the rule of law. The idea, peddled by Republicans, that a current or former president enjoys de facto immunity from prosecution is at odds with modern-day concepts of justice. The fact that it appears such a person may stand again for the White House while under criminal investigation, or even following a criminal conviction, points to dangerous flaws in America’s constitutional arrangements. No person, however famous, big-headed or threatening, should be above the law.The aggressive reaction to the indictment of many leading Republicans, and especially Ron DeSantis, Trump’s closest competitor, is dismaying. By parroting Trump’s line about “weaponisation” of the courts, the Florida governor shows himself to be no better or wiser than his egotistic rival. The party as a whole continues to place its interests ahead of the principles for which America stands. Democrats, meanwhile, should avoid talk that exacerbates national polarisation. “Lock him up!” is a tempting slogan, given how Trump used it against Hillary Clinton. But calm, restraint and patience are required. If there’s any justice, Trump’s time in court will ultimately be followed by time served.The manner in which this unprecedented legal drama is handled, and its outcome, could decide America’s immediate political future. It may also have a significant, lasting impact on US influence and moral authority in the global struggle to uphold a democratic, law-based international order. The world is watching – and that, regrettably, is what Trump likes.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at [email protected] More

Tory MPs hailed the UK’s entry last week into the Indo-Pacific trading bloc as a major step on the road to re-establishing Britain as a pioneer of free trade.It was a coup for Rishi Sunak, said David Jones, the deputy chairman of the European Research Group of Tory Eurosceptics, who was excited to be aligned with “some of the most dynamic economies in the world”.Trade secretary Kemi Badenoch also used the word “dynamic” to describe the 11 members of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). She pushed back against criticism that signing a trade deal with a loose collection of countries on the other side of the world would only add 0.08% to the UK’s gross national product, and then only after 10 years of membership. That figure was an estimate by civil servants 10 years ago, she said in an interview with the Daily Mail. The CPTPP is more important these days.And it might be, but not for the trade it facilitates. The significance lies in the geopolitical realignment it promotes and how such pacts could harm future Labour governments.The CPTPP was signed on 8 March 2018. Australia, Brunei, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Singapore were the first to form a bloc before being joined in the five years that followed by Vietnam, Peru, Malaysia and Chile.Former president Barack Obama hoped the US would also be a founder member before coming up against a Republican Congress that disagreed. Later, Donald Trump abandoned the deal altogether.Obama wanted to throw a friendly arm around Pacific countries threatened by China’s increasingly aggressive attitude to its neighbours – or, looked at another way, maintain open markets for US goods and services across south-east Asia in opposition to Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road investment initiative. Joe Biden, despite having control of Congress, refused to consider reopening talks about US membership, paving the way for China to apply in 2021.Thankfully for Biden, Britain’s application preceeded Beijing’s by six months, putting the UK ahead in the queue; quickly it became apparent that Britain’s role could be to help block China’s entry to the CPTPP without the US ever needing to join. For the Americans, the potential loss of trade was a side issue.Brexit was never considered by Washington to be a positive development, but there was a silver lining once it became clear the UK could be deployed more flexibly in a fight with China – a confrontation that Brussels has so far backed away from.The Aukus defence pact between Australia, the UK and US is another example of this anti-China coalition – and of Sunak’s efforts to win back Washington’s approval.The move also plays to a domestic agenda. In the same way that Margaret Thatcher’s sale of state assets – from council housing to essential utilities – denied Labour the means to directly influence the economy without spending hundreds of billions of pounds renationalising those assets, so global trade deals undermine Labour’s promise to use the state to uphold workers’ rights and environmental protections.Secret courts form the foundation stone of most trade deals and allow big corporations to sue governments when laws and regulations change and deny them profits.Badenoch’s civil servants say they are comfortable with the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunal system because the UK government has never lost a case.However, a government that wanted to push ahead at a faster pace with environmental protections, carbon taxes, or enhanced worker’s rights might find themselves on the wrong end of a court judgment.The TUC’s general secretary, Paul Nowak, was quickly out of the blocks to voice these fears when the deal was announced on Friday. That is why the EU parliament has forced Brussels to ban ISDS clauses from future trade deals.Sunak, on the other hand, appears comfortable with the prospect of CPTPP countries beginning to dictate how the UK considers basic rights – and how this could become the price of easier trade, and more importantly, foreign policy. More

Weekend events at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, were suspended on Friday as the former president was “huddling” with his attorneys after being blindsided by the grand jury indictment handed up against him after payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels.Trump, the New York Post reported, is meeting with advisers who were said to be “shaken” by the news of dozens of criminal charges related to a $130,000 payment given to Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Gregory Clifford.“It won’t be business as usual,” a source told the Post. “They expected this but there is shock now that it’s happened.“It’s real now. And they are worried about a surprise.”Separately, a source told the outlet that Trump had been “a little nervous and somber” about the indictment, but he has since “become more upbeat and thinks public opinion is on his side and that this will help him win the election”.Trump received formal notification of the charges, which have yet to be unsealed, stemming from a grand jury empaneled by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Confirmation of the indictment came on Thursday after reports suggested that the grand jury would not sit again until May.On 23 March, Trump indicated that he believed he had beaten the rap when he shared a now-deleted post on his Truth Social network of himself holding a baseball bat next to a photo of Bragg and later warned of the potential for “death and destruction” if he was charged.Days later the charges were filed, and now Trump is due to enter a plea in the case at a hearing in New York on Tuesday afternoon. Trump is expected to plead not guilty.An attorney for Trump, Joe Tacopina, told NBC’s Today show that his client would not consider taking a plea deal after becoming the first former president to be criminally charged.“There’s no crime,” Tacopina argued.Preparations for the ex-president’s arraignment at Manhattan’s criminal courthouse at 100 Centre St have been under way for 10 days, with barriers being erected for crowd control.The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Secret Service director, Kimberly Cheatle, told agents that the agency will take “the necessary steps” to protect Trump from harm, including placing agents in a “bubble formation” to separate him from the public.But Cheatle also said the service had not sought any special accommodations in the court’s standard procedures for processing and arraignment. The former president will nonetheless find himself in company he probably did not anticipate.Indictments and criminal trials scheduled for Tuesday at the same courthouse include: burglary for taking paintings from a West Village townhouse; a thwarted terrorist attack on a Jewish community; the illegal selling of firearms; murder for a deadly East Harlem hammer attack; murder and attempted murder for attacking multiple homeless men; murder and criminal possession of a weapon for shooting into a car in East Harlem; and a grand larceny case involving sim-card swapping.New York police have issued a memo instructing all officers to wear their uniforms and prepare for mobilization, according to local news reports. That came after Bragg acknowledged in a memo to the DA’s 1,600 staff members that the office had been receiving offensive and threatening phone calls and emails.Bragg said the safety of his staff remained a top priority, and he thanked them for persevering in the face of “additional press attention and security around our office”.Trump will not be handcuffed at his arraignment or subjected to a “perp walk”, and discussions are still being held about whether his booking photo will be publicly circulated. Trump reportedly “wants the mugshot out” because it could harness donations to his presidential campaign.“The funds will start flying in,” a source told the Post.Melania Trump is not expected to join her husband on his trip to New York, where he will reportedly stay at his triplex in Trump Tower. She plans to “lay low”, according to reports.Trump’s daughter Ivanka issued a statement on her Instagram page on Friday saying “I love my father, and I love my country. Today, I am pained for both.” More