US Politics

Republican representative for Missouri Vicky Hartzler tearfully asked colleagues in the House of Representatives to vote against the Respect for Marriage Act, which forces states without marriage equality laws to recognise LGBTQ+ marriages from other states. Hartzler has faced a backlash for calling the bill ‘misguided and dangerous’, including criticism from her nephew on TikTok. Andrew Hartzler called his aunt a ‘homophobe’, saying ‘you’re just going to have to learn how to co-exist with all of us’. Vicky Hartzler has not yet responded to her nephew’s video, which has been ‘liked’ over 200,000 times on TikTok

Nephew calls Republican who tearfully opposed gay marriage bill a homophobe More

Arizona governor builds border wall of shipping crates in final days of office Critics say Republican Doug Ducey’s scheme is illegal because makeshift barrier is being erected on tribal and federal landA makeshift new barrier built with shipping containers is being illegally erected along part of the US-Mexico border by Arizona’s Republican governor – before he has to hand over the keys of his office to his Democratic successor in January.Doug Ducey is driving a project that is placing double-stacked old shipping containers through several miles of national forest, attempting to fill gaps in Donald Trump’s intermittent border fencing.The rusting hulks, topped with razor wire and with bits of metal jammed into gaps, stretch for more than three miles through Coronado national forest land, south of Tucson, and the governor has announced plans to extend that up to 10 miles, at a cost of $95m (£78m).Ducey’s shipping container wall on the AZ-MX border is worse than I imagined. I went down yesterday to see it myself for a Border Chronicle story. Imagine 10 miles of this through a national wildlife forest. This is happening right now👇👇 pic.twitter.com/mqCjVo59iA— Melissa del Bosque (@MelissaLaLinea) November 30, 2022
The area, with mountain ranges rising abruptly from the desert and a diverse environment of plants and animals, is federal land maintained by the US Forest Service.Ducey had first experimented with a smattering of shipping containers in August in Yuma, in the south-west corner of the state, bordering California and Mexico, aiming to stop migrants and asylum seekers.Since Donald Trump implemented the Title 42 rule in 2020 when he was president, which closed ports of entry to most seeking asylum in the US, people have sought gaps in barriers elsewhere in order to request asylum from border agents. The rule appears still to be on track to end later this month although a long legal battle is taking place.Ducey issued an executive order in August to erect old shipping containers near Yuma, and 11 days later workers had installed 130 of what he described as “22ft-high, double stacked, state-owned, 8,800lb, 9x40ft containers, linked together and welded shut”.In October, Ducey filed a lawsuit in which he claimed that the federal land along the border known as the Roosevelt Reservation actually belongs to the state, not the US government, and that Arizona has the constitutional right to protect itself against what he termed an invasion, citing “countless migrants” resulting in “a mix of drug, crime and humanitarian issues”.US attorneys issued a withering response, refuting the claims.The US Bureau of Reclamation and the Cocopah tribal nation said that Ducey was violating federal law by placing the containers on federal and tribal land there. In a letter, the bureau demanded that the state remove the containers. But the state has not, and has since been emboldened to embark on the larger project now proceeding apace more than 300 miles to the east.The Cochise county sheriff, Mark Dannels, supports the new series of shipping containers being placed in his county, hoping “it will deter crime and stop criminal behavior”.But as the line of metal boxes snakes west towards adjacent Santa Cruz county, the sheriff there, David Hathaway, told the Nogales International newspaper that if anyone tries to put the containers in his jurisdiction they will be arrested for illegal dumping.Dinah Bear, an attorney and former general counsel for the council on environmental quality within the executive office of the White House said Ducey’s lawsuit was “shockingly bad” and “frivolous”.“There’s just no question that this is federal property,” she added, as well as being public land, meaning “there’s no legal difference between the land they’re putting the shipping containers on and Grand Canyon national park.”To block the project, she said US Forest Service agents “would definitely want a court order from a judge … They’re not going to go down to the border and have a shootout with state police or arrest the governor at the [state] capitol.”Federal judge David Campbell, based in Phoenix, is presiding over the case, but no hearing has been called yet.“The clock is ticking,” Bear said, with courts backed up and the holidays approaching.The incoming Arizona governor, Democrat Katie Hobbs, who will assume office on 2 January after beating Republican candidate Kari Lake in the midterm elections, has said she will remove the containers.Bear predicts Campbell will order the removal.But before that happens, they are being laid down by a contractor called AshBritt, a Florida-based disaster remediation firm. A local media investigation found that Ducey’s announced $6m cost for the Yuma barriers had actually cost $13m.Daily protests by locals alarmed at the project have slowed what was breakneck-speed installation, but not managed to halt it.Meanwhile, Mark Ruggiero, the former Sierra Vista district ranger for the US Forest Service in Cochise county, said the shipping containers are a hazard that jeopardize a binational firefighting agreement with Mexico.“I was shocked to see this barrier going in,” he said. “It’s an illegal action on public land.”As a barrier for humans, the double-stacked boxes are not much of an obstacle, but they are an existential threat to endangered migratory species, especially jaguars and ocelots, as well as being an eyesore. Emily Burns, program director for Sky Island Alliance, a binational conservation nonprofit that tracks wildlife in the Coronado national forest said: “There was no environmental review or planning or mitigation that was done.”The Center for Biological Diversity was allowed to join the federal government as a defendant in Ducey’s lawsuit and has slammed the barrier as damaging and a political stunt.Meanwhile, Burns noted that her organization has 70 wildlife cameras in this stretch of border and they rarely see migrants crossing there.TopicsArizonaUS-Mexico borderUS immigrationRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

‘That’s Hitler, Bannon thought’: 2022 in books about Trump and US politics The former president continues to dominate political bestseller lists, from staffers’ tell-alls to his own compulsion to tell all to Maggie Haberman and Bob WoodwardDonald Trump has been out of office almost two years, but he is still lodged in America’s consciousness. In mid-November, he declared his 2024 re-election bid. Days later, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreTrump has since demanded that the US constitution be terminated, and dined with Ye, the recording artist and antisemite formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. This week, on a bleak Tuesday afternoon in New York, a jury found the Trump Organization guilty on all counts in a tax fraud trial.The Trump show is never dull. As expected, in 2022 the 45th president left his mark on what Americans read about politics.In February, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times delivered Insurgency, capturing how the party of Lincoln and Reagan morphed into the fiefdom of Trump. Peters caught Steve Bannon rating his former boss among the worst presidents, and likening Trump’s history-making 2015 escalator ride to a scene from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film.“That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.” By extension, that makes Mar-a-Lago Trump’s Eagle’s Nest.As for Bannon, having burned through a Trump pardon, he awaits sentencing for contempt of Congress and will stand trial next year in Manhattan for conspiracy and fraud.In March came One Damn Thing After Another, another installment of Trump alumni performance art, this time by Bill Barr, the ex-attorney general.Barr took aim at Joe Biden for his stance on Russia, saying “demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy”, nor “the way grown-ups should think”. Looks like the author didn’t have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo card. In case anyone cares, Barr still loathes progressives, as his book makes abundantly clear. But he did spill his guts to the January 6 committee.May brought the first political blockbuster of the year, This Will Not Pass, in which Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns delivered 473 pages of essential reading. Kevin McCarthy denied having talked smack about Trump and the January 6 insurrection, so Martin appeared on MSNBC with tapes. The House Republican leader lied.Burns and Martin’s subtitle was “Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future”. They closed with an anxious meditation on the state of US democracy, quoting Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia: “You know that great line that you hear all the time, ‘This is not us. This is not America.’ You know what? It is, actually.”Later in May came A Sacred Oath by Mark Esper, Trump’s last defense secretary, and Here’s the Deal by the former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, Trump administration memoirs – and personas – as different as day and night.Esper pulled no punches, depicting Trump as unfit for office and a threat to democracy, a prisoner of wrath, impulse and appetite. His memoir was surgically precise in its score-settling, not just fuel for the pyre of Trump alumni revenge porn.Here’s the Deal was just that. Disdain unvarnished, Conway strafed Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Unsurprisingly, she had few kind words for Biden, blaming him for the Ukraine invasion and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout. Trump junked the Iran deal and was Putin’s toady. Then again, Conway is the queen of “alternative facts”.In August came Breaking History, Kushner’s own attempt to spin his triumphs while playing the victim. His book was predictably self-serving and selective, even trying to spin as something understandable his ex-con dad luring his own brother-in-law into a filmed liaison with a prostitute. The Kushners and the Trumps are not your typical families.Breaking History also came with conflicting creation stories. The New York Times reported that Kushner took an online MasterClass from the thriller writer James Patterson, then “batted out” 40,000 words of his own. By contrast, the Guardian learned that Kushner received assistance from Ken Kurson, a former editor of the New York Observer, and two other Trump White House alumni. As luck had it, Trump granted Kurson a pardon for cyberstalking, though Kurson later pleaded guilty after being charged with spying on his wife.‘The first thing he told us was a lie’Labor Day signaled a pre-midterm publication rush. With The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offered a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracy. In electing Trump, the New York Times and New Yorker, husband-and-wife pair wrote, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t were the authors’ open questions.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreThe results of the midterms – Republicans squeaking the House, Democrats holding the Senate, election deniers defeated in key states – offered a glimmer of hope. Truth, however, remains a scarce commodity for Trump.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser wrote, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Specifically, Trump claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations.Baker and Glasser also depicted Hitler as a Trump role model. To John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars, Trump complained: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in World War II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as an owner’s manual.Next, a month before the midterms, Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man made its debut. A political epic, the book traced Trump’s journey from the streets of Queens to the Upper East Side, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.Haberman gave Trump and those close to him plenty of voice – and rope. She caught Kushner gleefully asking a White House visitor: “Did you see I cut Bannon’s balls off?” To quote Peter Navarro, another Trump tell-all author, like Bannon now under indictment: “Nepotism and excrement roll downhill.”Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreHaberman interviewed Trump three times. He confessed that he is drawn to her like a moth to a flame. “I love being with her,” he said. “She’s like my psychiatrist.” But she saw through him, writing: “The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists.”Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, tried his hand with So Help Me God, a well-written and well-paced memoir that will, however, do little to shake the impression that he is the Rodney Dangerfield of vice-presidents: he gets no respect.Pence delivered a surprising indictment, cataloging Trump’s faults, errors and sins from Charlottesville to Russia and Ukraine. But Pence’s is a precarious balancing act. He upbraided Trump for his failure to condemn “the racists and antisemites in Charlottesville by name”, but also rejected the contention Trump was a bigot. As for Putin, “there was no reason for Trump not to call out Russia’s bad behaviour”, Pence wrote, while calling Trump’s infamous, impeachment-triggering phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskiy “less than perfect”. In the end, So Help Me God was a strained attempt to retain political viability.‘As long as you make the right friends’Not all the notable books of 2022 were about Trump himself. Some examined the people and movements that lie adjacent. We Are Proud Boys by Andy Campbell looked at the violence-addicted street fighters who have become best friends with many of Trump’s past and present supporters, from Ann Coulter to Roger Stone.As Campbell put it, the Proud Boys have “proven that you can make it as a fascist gang of hooligans in this country, as long as you make the right friends”.Andrew Kirtzman’s Giuliani provided a vivid reminder that Trump’s gravitational pull induces destruction. The author covered Rudy Giuliani when he was New York mayor. Rudy wasn’t always a buffoon. The book is masterly and engrossing.Broken News, by Chris Stirewalt, doubled as a critique of the media and a rebuke of Fox News, his former employer, and Trump. The Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough fared poorly too. Substantively, Stirewalt contended that much of the news business is about the pursuit of ratings. These days, Fox is battling defamation lawsuits arising from repeatedly airing Trump’s “big lie”.Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion dissected the Trumpian nightmare, focusing on the consequences of the world the internet created. Republicans like the far-right Arizona congressman Paul Gosar and his mentee, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are much more likely to be rewarded than penalized for “outrageous, fact-free behavior”.Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine. His first book, The Long Alliance, brought depth and context to the near-two-decade relationship between the 44th and 46th presidents, emphasizing that the pair’s time in power together was no buddy movie. Barack Obama was the star. Joe Biden played a supporting role – until he too seized the brass ring.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreThe most memorable contribution to this year’s American political literature, however, was not a printed book. The Trump Tapes, subtitled “Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump” is an audio collection that offers a passport to the heart of darkness.In June 2020, Trump confided: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.” Wow.Woodward’s tapes convincingly demonstrated that Trump knew in early 2020 that Covid posed a mortal danger to the US, but balked at telling the whole truth.Trump holds the press in contempt but yearns for its approval. He flattered Woodward as “a great historian”. Maggie Haberman knows the feeling.TopicsBooksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US elections 2024Joe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

Is Dominion’s $1.6bn defamation lawsuit a death blow for Murdoch and Fox News?The media mogul and Fox Corp are being sued for allegedly broadcasting ‘lies’ about the voting machine company Rupert Murdoch rarely has to answer for the alternative realities presented by his hugely profitable US cable network, Fox News.Its conspiratorial claims of a parade of cover ups from the 2012 Benghazi attack to the climate crisis and Covid-19 have been lapped up by Fox viewers and scorned by much of the rest of America, and then the world moved on. But on Tuesday, the 91-year-old billionaire media mogul will be obliged to answer difficult questions under oath about the inner workings of Fox.Rupert Murdoch to testify in Dominion voting machine defamation caseRead moreDominion Voting Systems is suing the cable news station and its Murdoch-owned parent company, Fox Corp, for $1.6bn (£1.3bn) over repeated claims that it rigged its voting machines as part of a conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump.The suit shines a spotlight on Fox News’ part in promoting Trump’s “stop the steal” campaign and its hand in driving the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. But legal experts say that Dominion, which supplied voting machines to 28 states, appears to be building a wider case that Fox News has a long history of misinformation and steamrolling facts that do not fit its editorial line.Over the past few months, Dominion’s lawyers have been working their way up the tree of Fox News producers, executives and presenters with interrogations under oath about the network’s work culture and its weeks of conspiratorial, and at times outlandish, claims about Trump’s defeat. On Monday, lawyers deposed Murdoch’s eldest son, presumed successor and Fox Corp CEO, Lachlan.Now, Dominion has reached the top of the tree. Months of accumulated testimony are expected to put Murdoch, the chair of Fox Corp, in the difficult position of either having to deny he has control over what happens at his most influential US news operation or defend its campaign to promote the biggest lie in US electoral history.Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch to testify in $1.6bn Dominion lawsuitRead moreMurdoch is already grappling with the costly legacy of phone hacking by British newspapers the News of the World and the Sun. His UK company has paid more than £1bn ($1.2bn) over the past decade to keep the gruesome details from being heard in open court with no end in sight after a high court judge earlier this year refused to prevent the filing of new claims.When Murdoch was called to give evidence to a UK parliamentary hearing in 2011 about News of the World hacking the phones of a murdered schoolgirl as well as hundreds of politicians, celebrities and other public figures, he said that it was the most humble day of his life. He also claimed to have known nothing about the wrongdoing and said that he had been misled.“I feel that people I trusted … I’m not saying who … let me down and I think they behaved disgracefully,” he told parliament. “And it’s time for them to pay.”But he can make no such claim about Fox News, where its misrepresentations were on full display. So far, the only people to pay at the network are the ones who got it right.The trouble started on election night after Fox called the key swing state of Arizona for Joe Biden. The call drew Trump’s ire and unleashed a backlash against the network from his supporters.At that point, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott warned against bowing to pressure to embrace an alternate reality and reverse the Arizona call.“We can’t give the crazies an inch,” she said, according to court records.As it turned out, “the crazies” took a mile, as Fox News put a parade of Trump lawyers, advisers and apologists front and centre over the following weeks to promote a myriad of conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen from Trump, including by rigging the voting machines.Alongside them, some of Fox’s biggest names took up the cry of fraud. NPR revealed that during the discovery process, Dominion acquired an email written by a Fox News producer begging colleagues not to allow one of those presenters, Jeanine Pirro, on the air because she was spreading conspiracy theories about the vote. Pirro, a former district attorney and judge who is close to Trump, continued broadcasting.Lawyers have also obtained rafts of internal messages that are “evidence that Fox knew the lies it was broadcasting about Dominion were false” and part of a culture of politically loaded reporting and broadcasts far from the network’s claim to be “fair and balanced”.Dominion claims that without Fox, “these fictions” about electoral fraud would never have gained the same traction among large number of Americans.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” the company claims in its lawsuit.In August, lawyers questioned another presenter, Sean Hannity, who has been described as “part of Trump’s campaign apparatus”. He was grilled for more than seven hours including about a broadcast two weeks after the presidential election in which Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell was a guest.Powell claimed that Dominion “ran an algorithm that shaved off votes from Trump and awarded them to Biden”. She said the company “used the machines to inject and add massive quantities of votes for Mr Biden”. Powell has also claimed that Dominion used software developed to help the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez steal elections.Dominion has said that it warned Fox News that such claims were false but that it continued to air them in an attempt to assuage Trump supporters out of concern they would move to other right-wing broadcasters.Top US conservatives pushing Russia’s spin on Ukraine war, experts sayRead more“It’s an orchestrated effort,” Dominion’s lawyer told a court hearing. “It’s not just on the part of each host individually, but it’s across Fox News as a company.”So far the only Fox employees to pay a price for the debacle are those who got it right. Weeks after the election, the network fired its political director, Chris Stirewalt, who had infuriated Trump and other Republicans by refusing to back down from calling Arizona for Biden. The Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, who supported Stirewalt’s decision, took retirement.Fox argues that Hannity and the other presenters are protected by journalistic privilege but that position has been complicated by the Fox host’s own description of his role.In defending his overt bias in favour of Trump and Republicans, Hannity has more than once said he is not a journalist but a talk show host, and so does not have to adhere to the profession’s ethical standards. He took the same position earlier this year after the January 6 congressional committee exposed dozens of his messages to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, offering advice and seeking direction as the White House challenged the presidential election result.TopicsRupert MurdochFox NewsUS politicsUS television industryfeaturesReuse this content More

Biden faced internal opposition to Brittney Griner swap, reports sayDepartment of Justice viewed deal to exchange basketball star for Russian arms dealer as a mistake Joe Biden has faced pressure from within his own administration, as well as his political opponents, in securing the release of basketball player Brittney Griner from Russia, according to reports.On Thursday, Biden hailed the “intense and painstaking negotiations” that led to the release of Griner in a prisoner swap deal with the arms dealer Viktor Bout. Griner was arrested at a Moscow airport in February for possession of a small amount of cannabis oil, while Bout, nicknamed ‘the merchant of death’, was serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison for fueling conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.Was the Viktor Bout exchange deal really a win for Moscow?Read moreThe large discrepancy between these two offenses led the US Department of Justice to believe the prisoner swap was a mistake, according to a report in the Washington Post. One department official told the Post that “trading a notorious international arms dealer for a basketball player is madness”.Critics of the tense political and diplomatic trade-off in the prisoner swap have highlighted the case of Paul Whelan, a US marine veteran who is serving a 16-year sentence in Russia on espionage charges. Biden said that “we’ve not forgotten about Paul Whelan, who has been unjustly detained in Russia for years” and blamed Russia for treating his case differently to Griner’s for “totally illegitimate reasons”.Russia refused to release Whelan along with Griner unless one of its former colonels and alleged spy, Vadim Krasikov, was also released from custody in Germany, according to CNN. Germany was unwilling to do this and the US’s offer of other potential Russian prisoners was rebuffed by Moscow, the report states.These complex equations between two countries currently at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has anguished Whelan’s family, who say they fear the conditions may not be right for him to return to the US for several years. David Whelan, his brother, did say, however, that the Biden administration made the right decision to secure Griner’s release.The situation has been used by Republican leaders and rightwing media to attack Biden, with Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, warning that Bout will soon return to arms dealing.“He was convicted of conspiring to kill American law enforcement,” McCarthy said. “His release is a gift to Vladimir Putin and a threat to American lives. Leaving Paul Whelan behind for this is unconscionable.”TopicsBrittney GrinerJoe BidenUS politicsRussianewsReuse this content More

Nephew calls Republican who tearfully opposed gay marriage bill a homophobeCongresswoman Vicky Hartzler voted against bill protecting same-sex marriage but Andrew Hartzler, who is gay, was unimpressed The backlash to the Republican member of Congress who broke down in tears in her opposition to the same-sex marriage bill has included a familiar face – her nephew, who has called the lawmaker a “homophobe”.On Thursday, Vicky Hartzler, a Republican representative from Missouri, shed tears as she urged colleagues in the US House of Representatives to vote against the Respect for Marriage Act, which forces states without marriage equality laws to recognize LGBTQ+ marriages from other states.House passes landmark legislation protecting same-sex marriageRead moreHartzler’s high-profile objection to the bill, which passed the House following assent from the Senate and is now set for Joe Biden’s signature, prompted her own nephew to speak out against her in a TikTok video that has been seen more than 200,000 times.In the video, Andrew Hartzler said his aunt was crying “because gay people like me can get married”. He added: “So despite coming out to my aunt this past February I guess she’s still just as much as a homophobe.”Vicky Hartzler said the legislation was “misguided and dangerous” as it would threaten religious institutions opposed to marriage equality. The tenor of the bill was “submit to our ideology or be silenced”, the congresswoman claimed in her House speech.Her nephew pointed out that religious schools still receive federal funding even if they discriminate against LGBTQ students. The 23-year-old has said he was reported for “homosexual activity” when attending Oral Roberts University, an evangelical private college in Oklahoma, and is part of a federal class-action lawsuit against the US Department of Education for funding such institutions.The new legislation does not alter conditions for such funding and churches, mosques, synagogues and other houses of worship will not be required to perform LGBTQ marriages if it goes against their beliefs.“It’s more like you want the power to force your religious beliefs on to everyone else, and because you don’t have that power, you feel like you’re being silenced,” Andrew Hartzler said to his aunt on his video. “But you’re not. You’re just going have to learn to coexist with all of us. And I’m sure it’s not that hard.”Andrew Hartzler told Buzzfeed he isn’t close to his aunt, who is considered one of the most anti-gay members of Congress, and that his relationship with his conservative, religious parents has also become strained.“It was weird to me that she was crying. I would say that,” he said. “I don’t think that was a performance. Knowing my aunt, I think those were genuine tears.“I do feel compelled to speak out when I see this just to counter these messages. I don’t want my last name to be associated with hate. I want it to be associated with love.”Vicky Hartzler is just the latest Republican politician to be publicly criticized by close members of their family. In October, Adam Laxalt, a Republican candidate for a closely run Senate seat in Nevada, was faced with 14 members of his family endorsing his opponent, the incumbent Democrat, Catherine Cortez Masto. Laxalt went on to lose.In 2018, six of Republican Paul Gosar’s siblings backed his Democratic opponent in midterm elections for the far-right politician’s House of Representative district in Arizona. Gosar prevailed despite the familial acrimony.TopicsRepublicansLGBTQ+ rightsHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsSame-sex marriage (US)newsReuse this content More

Kari Lake: defeated governor candidate challenges Arizona election resultTrump-backed Republican files lawsuit asking court to throw out certified results of her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs Kari Lake, the Republican defeated in Arizona governor’s race, is formally challenging her loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs, asking a court to throw out certified election results from the state’s most populous county and either declare her the winner or rerun the governor’s election in that county.The lawsuit filed late on Friday by Lake centers on long lines and other difficulties that people experienced while voting on election day in Maricopa county. The challenge filed in Maricopa county superior court also alleges hundreds of thousands of ballots were illegally cast, but there is no evidence that is true.‘Hatred has a great grip on the heart’: election denialism lives on in US battlegroundRead moreLake has refused to acknowledge that she lost to Hobbs by more than 17,000 votes. The Donald Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate has bombarded Maricopa county with complaints, largely related to a problem with printers at some vote centers that led to ballots being printed with markings that were too light to be read by the on-site tabulators.Lines backed up in some polling places, fueling Republican suspicions that some supporters were unable to cast a ballot, though there is no evidence it affected the outcome. County officials say everyone was able to vote and all legal ballots were counted.Lake sued Maricopa county officials and Hobbs in her current role as Arizona’s secretary of state.Sophia Solis, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said Lake’s lawsuit was being reviewed but had no other comment on the filing.Jason Berry, a Maricopa county spokesperson, declined to comment on Lake’s request to throw out the county’s election results in the governor’s race. But he said the county “respects the election contest process and looks forward to sharing facts about the administration of the 2022 general election and our work to ensure every legal voter had an opportunity to cast their ballot”.Hobbs in a post on her Twitter account called the lawsuit “Lake’s latest desperate attempt to undermine our democracy and throw out the will of the voters.” She posted a statement from her campaign manager that called the lawsuit a “sham” and said her camp remained focused on “getting ready to hit the ground running on Day One of Katie Hobbs’ administration”.Lake’s lawsuit says Republicans were disproportionately affected by the problems in Maricopa county because they outvoted Democrats on election day 3-1. GOP leaders had urged their voters to wait until election day to vote.In late November, Lake filed a public records lawsuit demanding Maricopa county hand over documents related to the election. She was seeking to identify voters who may have had trouble casting a ballot, such as people who checked in at more than one vote center or those who returned a mail ballot and also checked in at a polling place.During the summer, a federal judge also rejected a request by Lake and Mark Finchem, the defeated Republican candidate for secretary of state, to require hand counting of all ballots during the November election.The judge has since sanctioned lawyers representing Lake and Finchem, saying they “made false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions” in their lawsuit. The lawyers told the court that their claims were “legally sound and supported by strong evidence”.Hobbs in her role as secretary of state has petitioned a court to begin an automatic statewide recount required by law in three races decided by less than half a percentage point.The race for attorney general was one of the closest contests in state history, with Democrat Kris Mayes leading Republican Abe Hamadeh by just 510 votes out of 2.5m cast.The races for superintendent of public instruction and a state legislative seat in the Phoenix suburbs will also be recounted, but the margins are much larger. TopicsArizonaUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

Trump was fresh and new during his 2016 campaign. Has his fame fizzled?The failed ‘red wave’ during the midterm elections marked the beginning of a downward spiral of losses and lost support Instead of taking off like a rocket over the past three weeks, Donald Trump’s bid to win back the White House appears, so far at least, to be blowing up on the launchpad.The swagger of 2016 has given way to somnolence in 2022. Opinion polls are grim. Legal setbacks are piling up. A run of dismal results in the midterm elections, culminating in another Republican loss in Georgia this week, have punctured his aura of invincibility within the party.And Trump has performed astonishing acts of self-sabotage, from dining with antisemites to calling for the constitution to be shredded. He has eschewed a widely-anticipated spree of public rallies, instead remaining largely out of the public gaze.Trump’s act is ‘old and tired’, says his own former national security adviserRead moreFor any conventional candidate, such a list would be career-ending. For Trump, who has long defied political gravity, the fallout remains uncertain. But even the most ardent propagandist would be hard pushed to describe it as a flying start.“It couldn’t be going any worse,” said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington. “And it’s not because Donald Trump is making mistakes. It’s because Donald Trump is being Donald Trump.“He was something new and fresh and interesting back in 2016. He has presided over three disastrous election cycles for Republicans in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and he’s the same old Donald Trump, caring only about himself, wrapped up in his own grievances and his own whining. It’s just not playing anymore for the American people.”It was not meant to be like this. When Trump first set the date for his campaign launch at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for 15 November, it was based on the premise that Republicans would enjoy a “red wave” in the midterm elections, putting wind in his sails for the coming months.Instead the midterms were a nightmare as most of his handpicked candidates, including election deniers, were wiped out in swing states. This week’s defeat of former American football star Herschel Walker by incumbent Raphael Warnock in a Senate runoff in Georgia seemed to confirm that Trump has become ballot box poison, prompting a headline on the once loyal Fox News website: “Herschel Walker just wrote Donald Trump’s political obituary”.Gallingly, one of the biggest winners in the midterms was Ron DeSantis, re-elected as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points, cementing his status as the biggest threat to Trump. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted from 1 to 5 December found DeSantis leading the former president by five percentage points in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination.So it was that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago speech was widely derided as a damp squib, lacking his usual bombast and brio and even his daughter, Ivanka, has decided to sit this one out. Since then, the campaign has been running on autopilot and little has been seen of the former president hunkered down in Florida, venturing out only to play golf.Trump’s rambunctious campaign rallies, expected to give early momentum to his third consecutive run for president, have mysteriously failed to materialise. In June 2015, by contrast, he declared his candidacy after riding down an escalator in New York and held his first rally in Iowa just 10 hours later, moving on to New Hampshire a day later.Yet Trump is still making plenty of news from Mar-a-Lago. He dined with two antisemites: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes (Ye subsequently expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler). Still harping on the 2020 election, which he falsely claims was stolen, Trump mused about the “termination” of the constitution that he once swore to preserve, protect and defend. He also posed for photos with a reporter supporter of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories.Such antics have shaken even the faithful. Larry Kudlow, who was Trump’s economic adviser in the White House, shared his concerns with Trump’s former counselor Kellyanne Conway during his Fox Business show. “I don’t understand what our former boss is doing,” Kudlow said. “I love the guy, but I do not understand Kanye West, hanging out with white nationalists, hanging out with antisemitic people, talking about ending the constitution or postponing the constitution.”He added: “I don’t get it, I don’t understand why he’s saying it, and if he says it why hasn’t he apologised for it or corrected the record or something, because he’s losing support left and right. I hear it everywhere.”Then there are the legal headaches, another contrast from the carefree days of 2016. Trump’s business was this week found guilty on all 17 counts in a tax fraud case in New York. The Trump Organization – which operates hotels, golf courses and other global assets – faces up to $1.6m in fines, denting his carefully constructed image as a businessman with the golden touch.Last month attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith special counsel for two justice department investigations. One is focusing on Trump for retaining government records, including some marked as classified, after leaving office. On 1 December Trump suffered yet another defeat when an appeals court reversed a judge’s appointment of an independent arbiter to vet documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago, clearing the way for all the records to be used in a criminal investigation of the former president.The other concerns of the far reaching effort to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election; Smith this week issued grand jury subpoenas to local election officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. Separately, a prosecutor in Georgia is pursuing Trump’s alleged efforts to influence that state’s 2020 election results. And the House of Representatives panel investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is expected to make criminal referrals to the justice department.Lichtman added: “Trump’s companies have been operating as a criminal enterprise. That’s now established in court: 17 counts. And of course he still could be indicted on a host of different charges: mishandling classified documents, meddling in the Georgia election, inciting a riot, interfering with Congress, tax fraud. There are any number of potential violations.”Georgia’s runoff was a resounding rebuke of Trumpism. Will Republicans hear it? | Lloyd GreenRead moreMany regard Trump’s early campaign launch as blatant attempt to head off such a prospect. He characterises the investigations as politically motivated “witch hunts” reminiscent of the Russian collusion “hoax”. His gamble is that the justice department will be reluctant to prosecute an active candidate lest it be accused of interfering in an election.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It seems like it’s not really a campaign but more of an effort to use the illusion of a campaign to try and manage his legal situation. The Trump legal strategy is directly tied to the Trump 2024 strategy. They’re one and the same.”Garland’s actions so far suggest that the bid for legal immunity has failed. Trump’s effort to clear the Republican field, intimidating and chasing away potential challengers in 2024, has been equally futile, serving only to expose his vulnerabilities.DeSantis, former vice-president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin and Senator Tim Scott have left a trail of clues about their intentions. Big money donors and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire have indicated that they are ready for an alternative.And yet, if these candidates divide the anti-Trump vote, his shrinking but hardening Maga base may help him prevail in a Republican primary just as in 2016. Loyalty to the former president runs deep in county and state parties. Even after his latest transgressions, the number of senior Republicans speaking out against Trump has been striking but so too has the number mincing their words or staying silent.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Show me the evidence where his grip on the party is breaking. The only thing we’ve heard from the party leadership is there’s no place for antisemitism in the Republican party. We haven’t heard anybody call for Donald Trump to be removed as a potential nominee of the party.“Ron DeSantis has said nothing about the Mar-a-Lago dinner. He is absolutely silent, so the idea that he’s going to be a leader is a joke because that was the moment to lead and he quivered in the corner because he was afraid of getting smacked by Donald Trump.”He added: “Trump still is the thing that animates and controls outcomes inside the Republican party for as long as the political leadership allows the tail to wag the dog. If you’re afraid of your own shadow, you’re not going to get out much.”There is no doubt that Trump’s political obituary has been prepared a thousand times, only to be torn up when the Republican party capitulates once more. Is there something different in the air this time? Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who worked on Al Gore and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, said: “The problem is we’ve said it so many times and it hasn’t been true. On the other hand, some time it will be true.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024RepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More