US Politics

Maxwell Frost, at just 25 years old, has won a competitive primary in Florida’s heavily Democratic 10th congressional district. That gives him a strong chance of becoming a member of the US House of Representatives – and the first generation Z candidate to do so. Before his victory, the Guardian’s Oliver Laughland met him during his campaign to talk about why he decided to enter the race and what he hopes  to achieve as in Congress 

‘I’ve always had these crazy ideas’: the 25-year-old Uber driver bidding to become the first Gen Z member of Congress More

Interview‘I’ve always had these crazy ideas’: the 25-year-old Uber driver bidding to become the first Gen Z member of CongressAndrew Lawrence Maxwell Alejandro Frost has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the gun-control activist has won a Democratic primary in Florida – but he still drives a taxi to make ends meet. Can he now make history?It’s been a decade since Maxwell Alejandro Frost launched his first big campaign. He was 15 years old, coming off a stint volunteering on Barack Obama’s reelection bid and desperate to attend the president’s second inauguration. In an online search for tickets, Frost stumbled across a page soliciting applications to perform in the inaugural parade. So he submitted what he thought was the perfect act to represent central Florida, the region he calls home: his nine-piece high-school salsa band, Seguro Que Sí (translation: “of course”). “I got some videos together, wrote about our band and how we would love to represent Florida and specifically the growing Latino population,” says Frost. Weeks later, he received a call while in class from the inaugural committee inviting his band to play if they could get a US senator to vouch for them and fund the trip to Washington DC themselves. When Frost totted up the costs of transport, lodging, food and the band’s float, he arrived at a figure of $13,000. His headteacher told him the school did not have the funds or the pull to make the trip happen and suggested backing out. But Frost was undaunted.He spent his Thanksgiving break doorstepping local businesses for donations and raised $5,000. He blitzed the office of Bill Nelson, Florida’s ranking US senator, with beseeching phone calls and, after two weeks, had his recommendation letter. Eventually, Frost’s school had a change of heart and added a matching pledge. Impressed, the inaugural committee picked up the cost of the float.On inauguration day, there was no missing Seguro Que Sí as they glided down Pennsylvania Avenue in matching black overcoats and red scarves, with Frost leading on the timbales. No sooner had the president and first lady heard them than they shot up from their seats to sway along. For Frost, the moment is a testament to the power of community organising. “Me and a bunch of teenagers got our band to DC, and we made the president dance,” Frost says. “I’ve always had these crazy ideas. Sometimes they work out. Sometimes they don’t.”Frost’s latest folly, running for a seat in the House of Representatives, seems to be working out so far, too. Last month he emerged from a field of 10 Democrats to comfortably win the primary for Florida’s 10th congressional district, which comprises a sizeable chunk of Orlando. This is after Val Demings, the thrice-elected Democratic incumbent, stepped down to challenge Marco Rubio’s US Senate seat.In a state where politics are increasingly defined by Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and other old, conservative white men, Frost cuts against the grain. An Afro-Cuban progressive who is barely old enough to legally hire a car, Frost fights for universal healthcare and against gun violence. (Which is to say: he’d fit right in with The Squad.) He wasn’t born into a political dynasty or educated at an Ivy League university. He was adopted at birth and went to college online – “before it was cool,” jokes the political science major, who is still a few credits short of finishing his degree. And despite raising more than $1.5m for the campaign, more than any candidate in the race by a wide margin, Frost doesn’t come from means. To make ends meet, he drives for Uber. In between, he keeps fuelled with a steady diet of egg, cheese and avocado sandwiches. (“I love breakfast sandwiches,” he gushes.) He hopes his campaign motivates more regular people to run for office.If Frost wins his seat in the midterm elections in November, it won’t just be a victory for the working class. It will also mark the first time a member of generation Z is voted to Congress. (Aged 25, he’s just old enough to legally run.) Ask Frost why he is chasing history instead of making TikToks, swiping right and otherwise whiling away his youth, and he will cite the inspiration he took from Amanda Litman, a former Hillary Clinton aide and founder of Run For Something, an organisation that encourages young progressives to enter politics. “She said: ‘You don’t run for office at 25 years old because it’s the next step in your career, or the thing you’ve been planning since you were in kindergarten or college. You run because there was a problem so piercing driving you, and you can’t imagine doing anything else with your time,’” he says. “For me, that encapsulates it. There’s so much work that needs to happen.”Frost has been at it for a while. After the school shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012, in which 20 children and six adults were killed, he started an organisation to end gun violence – a scourge that has become such a constant during his life that he refers to generation Z by a different name: “the mass shooting generation.” Even his post-primary mini-break to Charleston, South Carolina, was rocked by a pair of Labor Day weekend shootings – one downtown that left five people injured, and another that sent a 13-year-old to hospital.In recent years in Florida alone, there has been the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, (where 14 students and three staff members were killed), and the 2016 shooting at the gay Orlando nightclub, Pulse (which killed 49 people). Besides Obama’s reelection, Frost has volunteered on the political campaigns of Clinton and Bernie Sanders and worked for the ACLU. In 2018, he helped to pass Florida amendment 4, which restored voting rights to 1.5 million Floridians with felony convictions.Frost’s political endorsements run the gamut from Sanders to Parkland survivor David Hogg to the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, which fights for gun reform and abortion rights. But it was while he was national organising director of March for Our Lives – the group formed by Parkland student survivors – that Frost announced himself as a political star who would not be intimidated by gun-rights champions.He recounts how, while on a barnstorming awareness tour called Road to Change, he and his fellow activists were tailed by a group called the Utah Gun Exchange in an armoured car. It was scary, he says: “Like, wow, I’m travelling with a bunch of school shooting survivors, and these people are brandishing weapons. One day we were just like: ‘Screw it.’ We parked the bus, walked back there and started talking to them.” That led to long conversations and even agreements on some things, such as background checks. It is moments like these that give Frost the confidence that he can reach across the aisle and forge bonds that yield meaningful legislation. But when those respectful conversations can’t happen, Frost won’t hesitate to force the issue. If elected, he says he will push for a ban on assault weapons, dismantle the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other gun lobbies, and create a national gun-violence taskforce made up of young, Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) representatives.Three months ago, Frost created a national stir when he confronted Florida governor DeSantis at an Orlando event after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. In a widely circulated video posted on his Twitter page, Frost can be seen haranguing DeSantis to do something about gun violence. “Nobody wants to hear from you,” DeSantis sniffs, as Frost is escorted away. “I’m not afraid to pull up,” Frost says. “I have been Maced. I’ve been to jail for talking about what I believe in. So the threshold for un-comfortability is higher than the average person’s.”Despite his obvious maturity, Frost is prepared to follow in the august tradition of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin and other young politicians who have been pilloried for acting their age. His youth is an obvious line of attack for his Republican opponent, Calvin Wimbish, a 72-year-old former Green Beret, who was carrying out intelligence operations in Iraq while Frost was still wearing GapKids clothes. But Frost isn’t about to straighten up for any opponent; if they go low, he’ll limbo lower. “You’re gonna see me at concerts,” he says. “You’re gonna see me drumming. You’re gonna see me dancing. I was just at a library, and somebody came up to me and said: ‘I saw you dancing on stage on election day and it made me really happy to see a politician dancing.’“We’ve been conditioned to think politicians should behave a certain way. That’s why I danced on that stage after my speech. I want to give people a little taste of me and demystify the whole thing for them. I am you, you are me; I’m a small piece of a bigger puzzle.”As an Afro-Cuban on the campaign trail, Frost runs the risk of being othered by potential voters in either group. But beneath his mixed heritage and adoption story is a lot of common ground. His adoptive mother came to the US as a child in the 1960s, via a Freedom Flight from Cuba, with his grandmother and aunt; between them, they had one suitcase and no money. His childhood is full of fond memories of sumptuous food and weekend trips to south Florida. Frost’s adoptive father, a white Kansan, was a full-time steel pan player who introduced him to John Coltrane and Earth, Wind & Fire, and gifted him a drum kit in the second grade. “Not to get too deep, but when he showed me the wonder of culture, art and music, it changed my life,” Frost says. “It opened me up to what it means to be vulnerable and what it means to allow art to make you vulnerable.”Frost did not anticipate his rising political profile would result in him running for office this soon. Even as Democratic operatives recruited Frost after Demings announced her intention to unseat Rubio, Frost was content working in the grassroots. But then last July, Frost reconnected with his biological mother. Among other things, she disclosed that she had been battling with drugs, crime and poverty when Frost was born. “What made the conversation even more powerful was that I never meant to have it,” he says. “Not because I hated her, but because I was living my life.” She explained that she had given up Frost for adoption not to give him a chance for a better life, but to spare him for something even greater. After their chat Frost was convinced: he was running for Congress.So far, the Frost campaign’s biggest gains have come the old-fashioned way, through a disciplined and methodical ground game. He has been especially deliberate about canvassing the University of Central Florida and its 70,000 students, many of them in-state local people. “We had Nights for Frost, with a group of young people knocking on doors,” he says. “We did ‘dorm storms’ multiple times. All too often people write off the youth vote because it hasn’t performed as much as other [groups]. But we also have to recognise that there are so many structural barriers that impact young people going to vote. We have a lot of work to do that spans beyond registering voters. It’s not just talking to people when they’re 18, but talking to people when they’re 16, 14 – creating lifelong advocates, not just waiting until they’re 18.” Frost doesn’t just understand where young people are coming from; he’s in the same boat. He lives with his girlfriend and his sister. When they were priced out of their apartment last October, he couch-surfed and slept in his car for a month before he found a new place. “I couldn’t go back home because my 97-year-old grandmother lives there, and this was in the middle of the Delta variant,” he says.Now in a new apartment, he is splitting $2,100 a month rent, which is still too high, he says. He has made up his mind to move out when the lease expires in November, potentially leaving him unhoused on election day. If he wins, he says he wouldn’t get paid until February at the earliest. Technically, he could take a stipend from his campaign fund now, but he would rather not give the Wimbish campaign or its allies any ammunition. To soften the potential blow to come, he hit the Uber trail hard and completed 60 rides one weekend. This is in between pulling 70-hour weeks on the campaign. So when he talks with urgency about the affordable housing crisis, it’s real. “There’s still a lot of barriers for working-class people to run for office,” he says. “I want to be the voice who shows how messed up it is and help demystify the process.”When it comes to considering his potential political legacy, though, to hear Frost tell it, if he does his job right, he won’t be in it for long. “I want to live in a world where you don’t have to care about politics,” he says, “where these political clubs just don’t exist. March for Our Lives doesn’t exist. MSNBC is irrelevant. TV is all about entertainment because the government is working for you. Yeah, that’s utopian, but it’s what we need to work toward.”TopicsUS politicsFloridaDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

Democrats look to prove economic credentials in battle for midtermsParty aims to reframe narrative that Republicans are natural custodians of economy and alleviate voters’ inflation concerns Republicans have long presented themselves as the best guardians of the US economy. Demanding lower taxes and lauding themselves as champions of small businesses, Republicans have for decades generally enjoyed an advantage with American voters when it comes to economic issues.Leon Panetta on the Afghanistan withdrawal, a year on: Politics Weekly America podcastRead moreThat advantage could prove hugely consequential this year, as Democrats attempt to hold on to their narrow House and Senate majorities in the midterm elections.With Americans fretting over record-high inflation and the possibility of a recession, Democratic lawmakers and progressive groups are trying to reframe the narrative and convince US voters that Republicans should no longer be seen as a party of good economic governance. Democrats’ success or failure on that front could determine who controls Congress after November’s crucial midterm elections.Democrats will have their work cut out for them as they try to alleviate voters’ economic concerns, as Republicans are starting off with an edge on the issue. According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll taken last month, 34% of Americans trust Republicans to do a better job of handling the economy, compared with 25% who say the same of Democrats. That advantage could help lift Republicans to victory in some important races, considering roughly three-quarters of US voters say the economy will be very important to their vote in this year’s congressional elections.“The pandemic and the economic disruptions have put pocketbook issues at the forefront of voters’ minds,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution. “At the end of the day, voters are looking to vote for politicians who will raise their standard of living.”Republicans know that economic concerns could drag down Democrats’ midterm prospects, and they have taken every opportunity to hammer Joe Biden and his party over rising prices and their impact on families’ budgets.“Hardworking Americans are living paycheck to paycheck thanks to Joe Biden and Democrats’ higher prices,” Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said Friday. “As long as Democrats continue to rubber-stamp Biden’s agenda and waste taxpayer dollars on their radical policies, families will continue to struggle to afford everything from gas to school supplies to groceries.”Republicans’ attack strategy builds on the political work of Donald Trump, who promised to transform his party into a “worker’s party” when he first ran for president in 2016. As he rose to the presidency, Trump bemoaned the outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs and pledged to deliver a raise for American workers.“Republicans have been incredibly masterful in positioning themselves as economic populists,” Geevarghese said. “They have succeeded in at least creating the perception that the Republican party is the party of working-class voters, and that is the central challenge for Democrats to overcome in the midterms.”Democrats’ recent success on Capitol Hill could significantly aid their efforts to challenge Republicans’ populist reputation. Last month, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a spending package that includes massive investments in climate initiatives and numerous provisions aimed at lowering Americans’ healthcare costs.Not a single congressional Republican supported the law, and Democrats have gone to great lengths to highlight their opposition to the spending package.“Every single Republican voted against lowering prescription drug prices, against lower healthcare costs, against tackling the climate crisis, against lower energy costs, against creating good-paying jobs, against fairer taxes,” Biden said at a rally hosted by the Democratic National Committee late last month. “Every single American needs to return the favor when we vote.”In addition to their legislative accomplishments, Democrats are quick to point out that the US economy is performing very well in a number of respects right now.The August jobs report showed that the country added 315,000 jobs last month, bringing the unemployment rate to 3.7%, which is close to a 50-year low. Gas prices have also fallen from their record highs in June, providing some relief to Americans who have been struggling to refill their cars.But that progress will not help Democrats at the polls in November unless voters actually feel the difference in their own lives, said Sarah Baron, campaign director for Unrig the Economy.“Even if GDP is good and the unemployment rate is good, if you’re struggling to buy your groceries or you’re still struggling to put gas in your car or take your kids to school, you’re not feeling so optimistic about the party in power,” Baron said. “I think it’s incumbent on progressives, on Democrats to make people feel who’s fighting for them.”Baron’s group, which launched in March, is dedicated to highlighting Republicans’ voting records and rethinking the conversation around policy solutions to everyday financial struggles. The group recently completed its Constituents Over Corporations Week of Action, holding events to cast a spotlight on House Republicans who voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. Those Republicans are running for reelection in battleground districts across the country that could determine control of the House.David Valadao, who is facing a difficult reelection race in California’s 22nd congressional district, was one of the House members invited to participate in a town hall hosted by Unrig the Economy. Valado refused to attend, but the group went ahead with the event anyway to draw more attention to his vote against the Inflation Reduction Act.“We genuinely believe that elected representatives should have to answer to their constituents,” said Alice Walton, an organizer with Unrig the Economy based in California. “If someone is going to vote against a bill, I think voters deserve to know why.”Walton argued that such events can help reshape voters’ conceptions of Republicans as champions of working-class Americans.“Republicans have talked about the economy from a business perspective,” she said. “We’re trying to talk about it from a personal perspective and helping constituents to see the economic pain that they feel can potentially be alleviated by some of these policies coming out of DC.”Groups like Unrig the Economy are instead trying to recast Republicans as allies of large corporations, the pharmaceutical industry and oil and gas companies. Republicans’ opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act has given progressives a new opening to press their case.“For way, way, way too long, corporations have driven the agenda, certainly for a lot of folks in Congress, including Representative Ashley Hinson here in Iowa,” said Matt Sinovic, another Unrig the Economy organizer. “We want to make sure that the economy works for working people and working families.”If those outreach and messaging efforts are successful, Democrats could avoid the widespread losses usually seen by the president’s party in midterm elections. With so much on the line, it is imperative for Democrats to change the narrative about which party is better for the economy, Baron argued.“This trend has been happening for decades, where increasingly Republicans are voting against increasing wages, against unions, increasingly for corporations, and yet somehow seem to be pulling one over on so much of the American people,” Baron said.“At a certain point, it’s got to be on progressives and the Democratic party to make clear where they stand and go on offense on the economy.”TopicsDemocratsJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Pressure on Trump loyalist Jeffrey Clark as ex-DoJ colleague works with prosecutors Cooperation from Ken Klukowski could spur charges against Clark, who schemed with Trump to overturn election results in GeorgiaLegal pressure on Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department lawyer who schemed with Donald Trump and others to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, is expected to rise with the cooperation of another ex-DoJ lawyer who worked with him, say former prosecutors.FBI materials seized from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home included 90 empty foldersRead moreThe cooperation from the ex-lawyer, in tandem with other evidence obtained by prosecutors, could help spur charges against Clark – a close ally of then president Trump – and benefit prosecutors as they go after bigger targets.Clark, then an assistant attorney general, played a key role at the DoJ towards the end of the Trump administration, which overlapped with plotting by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows to persuade Georgia and other states to use “fake electors” for Trump, instead of ones that Joe Biden won.In Trump’s desperate efforts to block Biden’s win, he turned to Clark for help at the suggestion of congressman Scott Perry, who had also touted him to Meadows, according to emails revealed by the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot by Trump supporters.Trump met Clark alone in mid-December, and for a few weeks talked about replacing acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen with Clark, until Trump was told bluntly at a raucous White House meeting by Rosen and his deputy, plus White House counsel Pat Cipollone, that doing so would spur mass resignations at the department and in the counsel’s office.Clark, whose cellphone and other electronic equipment was seized by federal agents in a June search on his home, worked with former DoJ lawyer Ken Klukowski, who is now cooperating with prosecutors, on a draft letter to top Georgia state legislators and the governor which falsely claimed that department had “significant concerns” about election fraud there and in other states.The letter, which was never sent despite Clark’s efforts, also suggested that legitimate Biden electors be replaced with ones for Trump.Other potential evidence against Clark could surface in cellphones that the FBI seized over the summer that belonged to Eastman and Perry, both of whom have filed lawsuits to block investigators from accessing their phones.Moreover, Cipollone, who witnessed and was appalled by Trump’s idea of installing Clark to replace Rosen, according to testimony by a top DoJ official to the January 6 panel, testified on 2 September to a grand jury in Washington looking at Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and the Capitol attack.While the substance of Cipollone’s testimony is unknown, other evidence about his views of Clark and Trump’s flirtation with promoting Clark to lead the DoJ could add to legal pressure on Clark.Former federal prosecutor Michael Zeldin said Klukowski’s cooperation with prosecutors may help make cases against other top Trump loyalists, as well as Clark.“When pursuing conspiracy cases, prosecutors look for ‘weak links’ among the co-conspirators, to wit, people willing to cooperate. The closer to the hub of the conspiracy, the better,” Zeldin told the Guardian.“In the case of the Georgia false electors scheme, the two people who jump out as logical witnesses are Ken Klukowski and Jeffrey Clark. Both appear to have been intimately involved in the scheme, and both have a great deal to lose if convicted of a crime.”Zeldin said Klukowski’s cooperation with federal prosecutors could be “very bad news” for Clark, Giuliani, and Eastman, who were involved in the “fake electors” schemes in several states, including Georgia.Zeldin added: “Beyond these immediate probable targets, Klukowski may have insight into the role Mark Meadows is said to have played in orchestrating Trump’s efforts to set aside the Georgia election results.”Similarly, Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for Eastern Michigan, told the Guardian that “Clark may find himself in serious legal jeopardy with the seizure of phones as well as the reported cooperation of Ken Klukowski … Clark would be the most significant wrongdoer here, and so it seems likely that efforts to flip other witnesses would focus on him.”If Clark is charged with a crime, McQuade added, “he might find it appealing to cooperate. Reports indicate that he met alone with Trump to discuss efforts to undermine election results. He could potentially be a valuable witness. This up-the-chain approach is the kind of strategy prosecutors use in organized crime cases.”McQuade noted in particular that “Clark may be helpful to investigating the fake electors scheme in light of his draft letter to state legislatures suggesting they convene to appoint alternate slates of electors. “The letter that Clark wanted to send to top Georgia legislators and the governor, which Klukowski helped draft, was cited at a hearing of the House January 6 panel in late June, by vice-chairman Liz Cheney.The letter stated falsely that “the Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 2020 election for President of the United States” and that the DoJ had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states including the state of Georgia”.Former attorney general William Barr, and Rosen, who succeeded Barr in December 2020 as acting attorney general, had rejected claims by Trump and his allies of significant voting fraud in 2020.However, former acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue told the House January 6 panel that Clark pursued his own investigations and that, despite failing to find evidence of widespread fraud, Clark pressed ahead with drafting a baseless letter which both Donoghue and Rosen had flatly rejected signing and sending.Donoghue testified he repeatedly told Clark that his actions boiled down to using the DoJ to meddle in the presidential election. Donoghue recalled that Clark responded, “I think a lot of people meddled in this election.”Donoghue also told the House panel in a deposition that Cipollone had warned Trump that the draft letter falsely stating that DoJ had significant concerns about fraud was like a “murder- suicide pact” which would “damage everyone who touches it” if it were sent to Georgia officialsClark’s draft letter was rife with false statements about the election and his actions at DoJ to help Trump prompted the DC bar to file ethics charges against him alleging that his draft letter to Georgia officials represented dishonest conduct and breached legal ethics.Rachel Semmel, a spokesman for Center for Renewing America, where Jeff Clark is the Director of Litigation, blasted the DoJ inquiries involving Clark and others. .”Biden’s DoJ has made its focus attacking Americans, including attacking the legal qualifications of one of the only top lawyers at the DOJ who had the interests of the American people at heart.”Former DoJ prosecutors say Klukowski’s cooperation in conjunction with evidence that prosecutors seem to have obtained about Clark’s role pushing Trump’s false election claims at DoJ, could be quite useful.“ If Klukowski can help deliver the goods on Clark, you may be on your way to Perry and Meadows who promoted Clark to Trump, possibly to Giuliani and Eastman, and ultimately Trump,” said former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut.Likewise, McQuade sees potential bonuses for prosecutors as they probe Clark and the fake electors schemes.“Working up the chain, prosecutors could potentially flip Clark and Perry to get to Meadows, and Meadows to get to Trump,” McQuade said “Each link in the chain would seem to have information that could be useful to prosecuting the next link up.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

InterviewEnabling a demagogue: a new film traces Republicans’ capitulation to Donald TrumpDavid Smith in WashingtonMichael Kirk’s documentary Lies, Politics and Democracy is a chilling study in how Trump subdued the Republican party Michael Kirk has been making documentary films for more than half a century. He has chronicled the peaks and troughs of US politics, winning every significant broadcast journalism award along the way. But nothing prepared him for the scale of the threat now facing American democracy.“There’s never been a film I made where I was more anxious, unhappy to make it, unwilling to discover the things we were discovering,” Kirk, 74, says of his latest project for PBS’s investigative series Frontline. “‘Worried’ is not a strong enough word for how I feel about where we are as a country and I don’t think I’m alone.”Lies, Politics and Democracy tells the story of how, like a colonial army of occupation, Donald Trump subdued the Republican party with a combination of brute force and manufactured consent. It is a chilling character study in how, one after another, party leaders ignored, acquiesced, collaborated and enabled a demagogue while fearing his fervent fanbase.The film draws on more than 30 interviews with former government officials, political journalists and experts. Like the congressional January 6 committee hearings, it provides a compelling narrative of half-forgotten turning points that, viewed in totality, resemble a Greek tragedy hurtling towards the inevitable and deadly climax of 6 January 2021.It is striking, for example, that three of Trump’s most oleaginous loyalists have also, at various stages, suffered the harshest blowback for defying him. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was publicly humiliated at the 2016 Republican National Convention after pointedly refusing to endorse the party nominee. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was heckled as a “traitor” by furious Trump supporters after appearing to disown the president on January 6. Lesson learned, he was soon back on board. Vice-President Mike Pence, who for four long years remained unswervingly loyal, may have been hanged if the mob had their way after he refused to overturn the 2020 election.Lies, Politics and Democracy – which will be broadcast on PBS on Tuesday at 9pm – complements a growing body of literature tracking the Republican party’s capitulation that includes It Was All a Lie by Stuart Stevens, American Carnage by Tim Alberta, Insurgency by Jeremy Peters, Why We Did It by Tim Miller and Thank You for Your Servitude by Mark Leibovich.It has a heartbreaking opening for anyone who cherishes democracy: graceful concession speeches from Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore and other defeated presidential candidates going back decades. Cut to Donald Trump in 2020 falsely claiming, “Frankly, we did win this election.”Kirk explains: “The one non-negotiable rule in American politics is peacefully transfer the thing. It’s just too tenuous otherwise. Around the inauguration, there’s always some news anchor who says, ‘Here it is again, the thing that makes us the strongest country in the world: the peaceful transfer of power.’ It says everything about where we are.”The documentary recalls how, during his reality TV days, Trump claimed that the Emmy awards were rigged when his show The Apprentice was beaten by The Amazing Race. So it was hardly surprising that, when he lost the Republican caucuses in Iowa in February 2016, he tweeted that Cruz “cheated” and should be disqualified.Speaking via Zoom from a book-lined room in Brookline, Massachusetts, Kirk reflects: “You see so obviously what his method is and that he is this kind of rich guy: ‘I didn’t get the table I wanted in the restaurant, I’m going to trash the restaurant. Or I didn’t win an Emmy for my show, The Apprentice; I’m going to trash the Emmys and all the competition.’”In probably the nastiest primary in history, Trump insulted Cruz’s wife’s looks and implicated his father in the assassination of President John F Kennedy. The defeated Cruz was a speaker at the convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and agonised with his team for days over whether to support the strongman nominee.Alberta, who along with fellow journalist Jelani Cobb worked with the film’s producers, says on camera: “He tells them his decision, that he’s not going to endorse Donald Trump in his speech, and they ask him why and Cruz looks at them and he says: ‘History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket.’”The convention floor was not kind to Cruz, however. As he urged Republicans to vote their conscience, the crowd turned on him with boos, jeers and shouts of “Get out!”, “Pull the plug!” and “Get off the stage!” To view their snarling expressions with seven years’ hindsight is to witness the “Make America great again” base emerge screaming from the womb.Kirk, who was in the arena that day, says: “It felt like a potent moment for sure when it happened, but to see it again now, all these years later, and to see the faces of the people – and I was really determined to try to show who’s complaining; it’s not Nazis; it’s Mr and Mrs Republican complaining about Ted Cruz of all people, booing him off stage – I said, there’s the Maga party right there.“It’s growing right before our eyes because that was probably the purest manifestation even for Trump. He’s been seeing it in crowds out around America but right there among the Republican establishment, he had them. Boy, that sent a powerful message. I promise you it wasn’t lost on Mitch [McConnell] or Kevin [McCarthy] or any of the other establishment leaders.”Cruz proved spineless and went on the campaign trail for Trump in an effort to stay politically relevant. Meanwhile Pence had agreed to be Trump’s running mate, a decision that did much to normalise and legitimise the nominee, giving Christian conservatives permission to support him.Kirk continues: “This is the way authoritarians rise. They get the collaboration. Sometimes even the collaborator doesn’t really know that they’re collaborating. They also have their own agenda. They want to win. They want to get a heartbeat away from the presidency.“Pence [then governor] was in deep electoral trouble in Indiana so sure, why not? ‘I’ll get on that train. I’ll get on TV 500 times over the next six months. I’ll stay there and wave and he’s not going to win anyway but it will rejuvenate me and I can run in four years.’“There he is making a political calculation and not understanding that what he’s conferring on someone like Donald Trump to Pence’s own base, evangelical Christians and the right wing, is his power. Trump – no fool in any way about all of this stuff – knows how to use something like that and he sure did.”Trump stunned the world by beating Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Republican leaders thought that he would be a useful idiot, easy to manipulate, only to find themselves manipulated in turn. They enjoyed policy wins, for instance on tax cuts, and instinctively defended him when Democrats attacked. But under constant pressure from Fox News and other rightwing media, they willfully ignored Trump’s authoritarian impulses.Bill Kristol, a conservative commentator and former White House official, tells the film: “Rationalisation is a very powerful force, it turns out, in human psychology. It was a funny kind of choice, though, because you read history books and it’s like, ‘this is the moment’ and you choose this or that. But there are also ways in which you choose gradually and incrementally and the choice is more of an accommodation and a rationalisation and an enabling.“It’s not a sort of, ‘I’m standing up here and choosing this path’. Some did that but an awful lot went along and they kept on going along and then they had to rationalise where they were going along so they became sort of enthusiastic about going along. You can rationalise your way into a series of choices, which becomes a very damaging and dangerous choice.”That said, Kirk highlights an inflection point when Republican leaders could have said enough is enough: a 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that turned violent and resulted in the death of the civil rights activist Heather Heyer. Trump insisted there were “very fine people on both sides”. Paul Ryan, the House speaker, seemed ready to disavow the president but ultimately bit his tongue.Kirk says: “That seemed like a real moment for Ryan and obviously a dramatic moment for the Republican party and what they were enabling in such an obvious racist act. It seems to fly in the face of who the Republicans used to be in Reconstruction in America after the civil war.“They were the heroes in so many ways and, for the Republican party after Charlottesville to be where it found itself, either silence from somebody like Mitch, or shrinking back in a way like Ryan did, it’s just tragic to watch.”If Charlottesville failed to break the fever, and if the heavy-handed clearance of protesters outside the White House for a photo op in 2020 also failed, then surely the big lie of a stolen election and the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol would do it? For a while, it seemed that way. Graham announced that he was done. McCarthy said Trump bore responsibility for the riot.But as Lies, Politics and Democracy recounts, when Trump relinquished the presidency on 20 January, he had one more ace up his sleeve. From his last flight on Air Force One, he reportedly called Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, and threatened to quit and form his own party – a potentially devastating split.Kirk goes on: “That threat – that I’m going to create my own party, I’ve got the voting lists, I can wreck your Republican dream of a midterm in ’22 and a new president in ’24 – was Trump’s maximum moment of humiliation and loss and also his last great threat. And it worked.”Sure enough, soon McCarthy was making a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to kiss the ring once more. Graham was playing golf with him again. Republican senators could have banned Trump from running for office in future but acquitted him at an impeachment trial. It was, despite everything, still Trump’s party.He has always boasted that he can identify an opponent’s weakness and exploit it. Kirk’s take: “It’s possible that he’s not a master strategist but it is very possible that the guy is a street fighter at the highest magnitude. This is somebody who seems to know how to intimidate, how to strike fear, how to manipulate.“It’s always an astonishing thing to me. How does he get people like [former attorney general] Bill Barr to do his bidding when there’s nothing about it that would make them do it if they wanted to keep their legacy? They go along. What is it about him? That may be at the heart of this film.“It may just be that politicians are a different breed and for them the purity and the simplicity of right and wrong is very fungible. Their calculus about somebody is all about them. I was talking to somebody when we were making this film and they said, ‘The definition of a politician is somebody who wants to get reelected’. Say no more.”Internal critics, such as Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona and congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have been purged. Many received vile abuse and death threats from the angry Maga base seeking to intimidate them and influence their votes – another intimation of authoritarianism.But not even Trump is immune. Last year he was booed for telling his supporters to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and again for revealing that he had received a booster shot. There have been moments during this year’s Republican primary elections when the base has appeared to take on a life of its own.Alyssa Farah Griffin, former White House director of strategic communications, says in the film: “The biggest misunderstanding of the Trump era is that he leads the base and the base goes where he does. I actually think that he’s created a monster that he doesn’t even control and he is actually very much driven by the base, not other way around.”That implies Trumpism will survive Trump; even when the man has gone, his dangerous anti-democratic movement will thrive and metastasise. With polls showing that a majority of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate, is there any hope that the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower can be saved?It was a question that Kirk put to many people in the party and many scholars who study it. “Something really fundamental has happened and all the old paradigms don’t fit,” he says. “The invasion of Donald Trump may have really, really changed the Republican party in a way that it’s hard to see how the current players remake it, if that’s what they try to do.”Kirk and his team have made more than 15 documentaries seeking to understand Trump’s impact on American politics, including Trump’s American Carnage, The Choice 2020: Trump vs Biden and Trump’s Takeover. This latest film, showing days after Joe Biden gave a prime-time speech about the battle for the soul of the nation, is a portrait of a democracy more fragile than he ever imagined.“Every single person we talked to, even among very conservative Republicans, you’re not finding any kind of, ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK, hey, it’s all right,” he says bleakly. “I am very, very concerned about where we find ourselves right now and I don’t know how it fixes itself. I don’t know what happens.”TopicsRepublicansDocumentary filmsDonald TrumpUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

Trump considered hiring heavyweight Jones Day law firm during Russia inquiry, book saysEx-president said to have wanted ‘someone a bit more bombastic’, writes New York Times reporter David Enrich Donald Trump considered but rejected hiring the law firm Jones Day to represent him during the Russia investigation, a new book says.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead moreThe news that Trump could have hired a heavyweight firm for his personal defence but chose not to – preferring “someone a bit more bombastic”, according to senior partners – comes after the former president appointed a new lawyer in his battle with the Department of Justice over the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida for classified White House documents.In his many brushes with the law as president and after, Trump is widely seen to have struggled for quality representation.Jones Day, a huge international firm, advised Trump’s campaign in 2016 and played a major role in his administration from 2017 to 2021, most publicly through the work of Donald McGahn, a partner, as Trump’s first White House counsel.The firm’s talks about doing more personal work for Trump are described in Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump and the Corruption of Justice, a book by the New York Times reporter David Enrich that will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.According to Enrich, at the outset of the Trump administration, McGahn “wanted to be spending his time in the White House filling the judiciary with [conservative] Federalist Society judges and, to a lesser extent, dismantling the ‘administrative state’”.The White House counsel enjoyed great success on the judges issue, piloting a process that installed hundreds of judges and saw three conservatives put on the supreme court.But, Enrich writes: “What McGahn increasingly found himself and his team spending time on was Trump’s personal legal problems.”McGahn, Enrich writes, thought Trump should have “his own, competent counsel” to deal with investigations of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow, and Trump’s firing of the FBI director James Comey.That, Enrich says, led to Trump having at least two Oval Office meetings with Stephen Brogan, managing partner of Jones Day.Enrich reports that some at Jones Day thought such a deal would tie the firm too closely to Trump as his presidency pitched into controversy and chaos. Brogan was advised to pull back but pushed to land the client.“In the end, Brogan didn’t get the job,” Enrich writes, adding that it “went instead to John Dowd. The feeling among some senior Jones Day partners was that Trump wanted someone a bit more bombastic than Brogan as his defender-in-chief.”Trump’s pick had ramifications for the rest of his presidency and beyond. Dowd, a former US Marine, resigned in March 2018, his conduct of Trump’s response to the Russia investigation widely seen as a failure. McGahn, who cooperated with the special counsel Robert Mueller quit five months later.The Russia investigation bruised Trump but he escaped impeachment. He did not escape it over approaches to Ukraine involving withholding military aid while seeking dirt on rivals including Joe Biden.Because enough Republican senators stayed loyal, Trump was acquitted in his first Senate trial and in his second, for inciting the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January 2021, in his attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat.But throughout such travails, Trump was represented by lawyers widely seen as not up to the task, including Bruce Castor, a former district attorney from Pennsylvania who gave a rambling presentation in the second impeachment trial.Two Trump lawyers could be witnesses or targets in FBI investigationRead moreThroughout his wild post-presidency, Trump has continued to struggle to hire top talent. Regarding the Mar-a-Lago search last month, critics suggest Trump’s lawyers have made life easier for the DoJ with moves including demanding details of the related affidavit and warrant be made public.Writing for The Intercept last week, the reporter James Risen said: “Even [Trump’s] cultishly loyal lawyers have become radioactive with prosecutors, angering the justice department with their efforts to politicise the case. In a court filing … the justice department said that Trump’s lawyers have leveled ‘wide-ranging meritless accusations’ against the government.”Two Trump attorneys, Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran, may be in danger of becoming targets of an obstruction investigation, given their roles liaising with the DoJ over records stored at Mar-a-Lago.Last week, in a move widely seen as a play for better representation, Trump hired Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor general who has won cases before the US supreme court.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpLaw (US)US politicsRepublicansPolitics booksnewsReuse this content More

‘Tired of trickle-down economics’: Biden calls for expansion of unions in Labor Day speechPresident again pledges to be ‘most pro-union president’ in history during speech in Milwaukee Joe Biden used a Labor Day speech in the battleground state of Wisconsin to endorse the expansion of unions, reiterating his election promises to be the “most pro-union president” in American history.The US president argued in Milwaukee that a skilled, unionised workforce would help the US regain its place as a world leader in infrastructure and manufacturing.Drawing on Franklin D Roosevelt’s explicit support for unions during the New Deal, Biden said: “I am encouraging unions … we need key worker protections to build an economy from the bottom up and middle out. I am sick and tired of trickle-down economics.”Biden’s comments come amid a major resurgence for the labor movement in the US, with more support for unions than at any time in the past 60 years, especially as low-paid workers across a range of industries try unionising.Biden warns US democracy imperiled by Trump and Maga extremistsRead moreEarlier on Monday, Biden came out in support of a proposed law in California, the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act – currently on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk – that would make it easier for farmhands to organise.“The least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union,” Biden said.The Labor Day holiday in an election year typically marks the start of the final sprint before the November vote. With so much at stake in this year’s midterm elections, Biden and Republican leaders are revving up the rhetoric.There is also fevered speculation about whether Donald Trump will announce, before the election, a fresh run for the Republican nomination to recapture the White House in 2024, while he is embroiled in a host of criminal and civil investigations, from New York to Georgia.In Wisconsin, Biden again attempted to distinguish between the type of mainstream Republicans whom he has previously worked with and the “extreme right, Maga Republicans, Trumpies”, he said, who “pose a threat to democracy and economic security, and embrace political violence”.His use of the word “Trumpies” lit up social media. Biden in office has largely avoided referring to his predecessor by name in public or taking direct aim at his loyalist voter base.But last month he referred to the phenomenon of extremist Republicans hewing unshakably to Trump’s “Make America great again” nationalist agenda amid encouragement of “political violence” as “semi-fascism”, then last week said the US was in a battle for the soul of the nation.Biden refers to MAGA republicans as “The Trumpies” pic.twitter.com/I49hQZRzIe— Acyn (@Acyn) September 5, 2022
On Monday he said: “You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy,” referring to defenders of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by extremist Trump supporters hoping to overturn Biden’s victory. Biden continued on the campaign trail from Milwaukee to Pittsburgh for his third visit to Pennsylvania in a week – underscoring the importance of the swing state, which the president, a Pennsylvania native, won back for the Democrats in 2020. Trump, who won Pennsylvania in 2016, rallied there on Saturday.After months of dire polling, the signs are more positive for Biden and the Democrats after a spate of legislative and policy wins, including getting a historic bill to tackle the climate crisis and healthcare costs over the line.Could unexpected Democratic gains foil a midterm Republican victory?Read moreThe US supreme court’s decision in June to overturn the right to abortion also seems to be galvanising the Democrat base, independent and swing voters, especially women, which could hurt Republicans at the polls.In Wisconsin, Biden listed some of his administration’s key victories for workers and ordinary Americans through last year’s American Rescue Act (Arpa) and most recently the Inflation Reduction act (IRA) – without any Republican support.TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsWisconsinMilwaukeeUS unionsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

Judge grants Trump’s request for special master to handle seized documentsFederal court accepts ex-president’s call for official to set aside materials potentially subject to privilege protections A federal judge has granted Donald Trump’s request to have a “special master” appointed to review documents the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate that could be subject to privilege protections in the investigation into unauthorized retention of government secrets.The order from the US district court judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, also temporarily barred the justice department from reviewing the documents for its criminal inquiry until the special master completes its work, in a decision that marked a procedural victory for the former president.What is a special master and why does Donald Trump want one? Read moreCannon wrote in her 24-page ruling, however, that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) could continue to review the seized materials for its separate inquiry into whether Trump’s retention of documents with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago risked national security.Cannon gave Trump’s legal team and the DoJ until Friday to file a proposed list of special master candidates.The DoJ is likely to appeal the decision to the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit, officials said, though in the meantime it will almost certainly delay the investigation into potential violations of the Espionage Act and potential obstruction of justice.Still, the ruling does not change the underlying facts of the investigation that led to the FBI executing a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago last month – that Trump was in unauthorized possession of highly sensitive government documents that could yet result in criminal charges.Cannon disagreed with the DoJ’s opposition to appointing a special master on several points, including its main argument that Trump lacked standing for such a motion because he had no “possessory interest” in White House records since he was no longer president, according to the filing.The judge wrote that she believed the government had misinterpreted the appellate court precedent, writing that Trump did not need to conclusively prove ownership of the seized property, but only that he had a colorable right, or plausible legal claim, to possess some of the materials.Cannon also disagreed with the DoJ’s argument that another review of the seized materials by a special master was unnecessary after the FBI’s so-called filter teams screened the documents for potentially privileged material in the two weeks it took Trump’s lawyers to file their motion.The judge, as she previewed in court last week, noted that the DoJ’s investigative team had inadvertently seen potentially privileged material on at least two occasions that she said raised questions about the adequacy of the FBI’s filter team review.Cannon additionally wrote that she disagreed with theDoJ’s argument that Trump could not seek a special master to set aside documents potentially protected by executive privilege from an investigation being conducted by the DoJ, part of the executive branch.The judge wrote she believed the government was overstating the law, saying – as she corrected the DoJ’s lawyer in court – that in the landmark case of Nixon v General Services Administration 1977, the US supreme court left open the concept that a former president’s assertion of executive privilege might be stronger than a current president’s waiver of it.In this case, Cannon’s ruling referred to the possibility of Trump asserting executive privilege over certain documents and preventing the DoJ from using them in its investigation, even if Joe Biden, the current president, declined to assert privilege. The law over what happens in such a dispute has not been conclusively settled.“Even if any assertion of executive privilege by Plaintiff ultimately fails in this context, that possibility, even if likely, does not negate a former President’s ability to raise the privilege as an initial matter,” Cannon said in her decision. William Barr defends FBI and justice department over Mar-a-Lago searchRead moreBut the judge also made no mention of the Presidential Records Act mandating the documents belong at the National Archives.Cannon gave the DoJ and Trump’s lawyers until Friday to submit a joint filing for candidates to serve as the independent arbiter, known as special master – typically a retired lawyer or judge – to weed out any attorney-client or executive-privileged documents from the evidence cache.A special master was used, for instance, to review materials seized in the searches of the homes and offices of two of Trump’s former attorneys – Rudy Giuliani and Michael Cohen.The DoJ had opposed Trump’s motion, arguing that it would delay its criminal investigation, and in a court hearing last week in West Palm Beach, Florida, sounded alarm that a special master process could give Trump access once more to highly sensitive and classified documents.Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, also called the special master request a “waste of time”, adding: “Even if they are subject to executive privilege, they still belong to the government.“And any other documents that were seized … those were seize-able under the warrant,” Barr said.In a reaction posted on Twitter, Neal Katyal, former US acting solicitor general, wrote that the appointment of a special master wouldn’t derail the federal investigation but that this decision “sets a terrible precedent”.“Even though this judge’s order appointing a special master won’t stop the very serious Trump stolen docs investigation, having been the decider of whether DOJ should appeal various cases in the past, I think DoJ has to appeal here,” Katyal tweeted, adding: “That’s what I’d do.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsFBIMar-a-LagonewsReuse this content More