US Politics

Donald Trump is facing a potentially crippling financial and political blow as state prosecutors consider filing criminal charges against his family business this week.Prosecutors in New York could soon bring an indictment against the Trump Organization related to the taxation of lucrative perks that it gave to top executives, such as use of apartments, cars and school tuition.The 45th president is not expected to be personally charged but the legal drama could bankrupt his company by damaging its relationships with banks and other business partners, as well as clouding his political comeback.Ron Fischetti, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, held a virtual meeting with prosecutors last Thursday for about 90 minutes in an effort to dissuade them from pursuing criminal charges against the company.“The charges are absolutely outrageous and unprecedented, if indeed the charges are filed,” Fischetti told the Associated Press (AP) on Friday. “This is just to get back at Donald Trump. We’re going to plead not guilty and we’ll make a motion to dismiss.”Fischetti and his colleagues had until Monday to make their final arguments against charges being brought, according to a report in the Washington Post.The long-running investigation by Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, began after Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid hush money ahead of the 2016 presidential election to two women who alleged that they had sexual encounters with Trump; Trump denies the claims.There is now a particular focus on Allen Weisselberg, 73, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, the private real estate conglomerate. Prosecutors are examining his son Barry’s use of a Trump apartment at little or no cost, cars leased for the family, and tuition payments made to a school attended by Weisselberg’s grandchildren.Such gifts and perks are worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the Weisselbergs failed to account properly for that money on tax returns and other financial filings, they could be in legal jeopardy. But Fischetti insists that any criminal charges based on fringe benefits would represent a speculative break from precedent.“We looked back 100 years of cases and we haven’t found one in which an employee has been indicted for fringe benefits and certainly not a corporation,” he told the AP. “[To be a crime] it would have to be for the benefit of the corporation with the knowledge of the corporation. They don’t have the evidence at all.”Even so, a point of intrigue is whether Weisselberg will remain loyal to the former president or turn informant, potentially testifying against Trump – the company’s owner – his son Don Jr and Eric, who are executive vice-presidents, and his daughter, Ivanka.Trump, beaten by Joe Biden in last November’s election, has long sought to dismiss the investigation as a “witch-hunt” and remains politically active. He returned to campaign rallies on Saturday, intends to be heavily involved in the 2022 midterm elections and could run for president again in 2024. But there are signs that the walls are closing in.Vance, investigating “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct”, has been scrutinising Trump’s tax records, subpoenaing documents and interviewing witnesses, including Trump insiders and company executives. A grand jury was recently empaneled to look at the evidence.Meanwhile Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, said she was assigning two lawyers to work with Vance on the criminal investigation while she continues her own civil investigation of Trump’s business.James’s office has been examining whether the Trump Organization inflated the values of some properties to obtain better terms on loans, and lowered their values to obtain property tax breaks.Court records show some overlap between Vance’s and James’ separate investigations, including their interest in Seven Springs, a 212-acre estate outside Manhattan that Trump purchased in 1995. James is examining a $21.1m tax deduction taken when Trump agreed not to develop the property, after local opposition thwarted his plan to build a golf course, and a separate plan to build luxury homes was shelved.Trump has angrily denounced both investigations. In a statement released on Monday, he claimed the case was an extension of the Democrats’ “witch hunt” against him. “They will do anything to stop the MAGA movement (and me),” he said, referring to the Make America Great Again campaign slogan and insisting that the Trump Organization had merely done “things that are standard practice throughout the US business community, and in no way a crime”.The ex-president added: “Having politically motivated prosecutors, people who actually got elected because they will ‘get Donald Trump’, is a very dangerous thing for our Country. In the end, people will not stand for it. Remember, if they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone!”Trump’s loss of power in Washington now deprives him, his family and his company of legal protections he enjoyed while in the White House.The District of Columbia attorney general’s office, for example, is suing the Trump Organization and presidential inaugural committee over the alleged misuse of more than $1m for use of event space at the Trump hotel in Washington during Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.Ivanka, who was a senior adviser at the White House, sat for a deposition with investigators last December, but is in no imminent danger of criminal charges. More

Barack Obama said on Monday that his successor in office, Donald Trump, violated a “core tenet” of democracy when he made up a “bunch of hooey” about last year’s election and refused to concede he lost.Speaking at his first virtual fundraiser since the 2020 election, the former Democratic president said former Republican president’s claims undermined the legitimacy of US elections and helped lead to other anti-democratic measures such as efforts to suppress the vote.“What we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner – and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey,” Obama said.Trump has continued to falsely claim that his defeat was the result of widespread fraud, which has been rejected by multiple courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.In a rare bipartisan chime, Obama’s assertion followed an article in the Atlantic on Sunday noting that Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr – expressing himself less politely – said his Republican former boss’s claims were always “bullshit”.The Republican senator Mitt Romney on Sunday likened Trump’s claims of a stolen election to television wrestling – entertaining but “not real”.Meanwhile, Obama added: “What’s been called ‘the big lie’ suddenly gains momentum,” which in turn has fueled moves by Republican-controlled legislatures to reduce access to voting and gain more control over voting operations.“Here’s the bottom line. If we don’t stop these kinds of efforts now, what we are going to see is more and more contested elections … We are going to see a further de-legitimizing of our democracy,” he said, as well as “a breakdown of the basic agreement that has held this magnificent democratic experiment together all these years”.Republican governors of Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Iowa have signed new voting restrictions into law this year, and state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Texas are trying to advance similar measures.These states will be battlegrounds in the 2022 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.The US justice department on Friday sued to block the Georgia law, which tightened absentee ballot identification requirements, restricted the use of ballot drop-boxes, and allowed a Republican-controlled state agency to run local voting operations.Obama said he believed the US Senate would hold a new vote on a Democratic voting rights bill that Republicans blocked last week.Just before the bill before the Senate collapsed, Obama backed a compromise proposal from the conservative West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin.The former first lady Michelle Obama, weighed in, too, decrying Republican efforts in many statehouses across the country to bring in new laws that restrict voting, and urging Congress to pass federal legislation “before it’s too late”.The fundraising call was for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee as the United States heads into the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional districts that will play a critical role in determining whether Democrats keep control of the House of Representatives next year. History and redistricting suggests they are likely to fail. More

Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, reportedly “yelled” at Donald Trump that he was not and would not be in charge of the federal response to protests for racial justice, prompting the then president to yell back: “You can’t fucking talk to me like that!”The shouting match in the White House situation room was reported on Monday by Axios, in another trail of a much-trailed book: Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost by Michael Bender, a Wall Street Journal reporter.Bender’s book will be published in August but it has been extensively previewed.Milley made headlines last week when he clashed with Republicans over teaching concerning America’s history of racism – and for his pains was called “stupid” and a “pig” by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.A previous excerpt of Bender’s work showed Milley resisting Trump’s urges to “crack skulls” and “just shoot” protesters marching for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.The exchange reported by Axios concerned command authority. Milley, Bender writes, told Trump he was an adviser but could not command the response.“I said you’re in fucking charge!” Trump reportedly shouted.“Well, I’m not in charge!” Milley is said to have “yelled” back.“You can’t fucking talk to me like that!” Trump reportedly shouted.Bender reports that Milley told advisers gathered in the situation room: “Goddamnit. There’s a room full of lawyers here. Will someone inform him of my legal responsibilities?”William Barr, then attorney general, is said to have backed Milley up.Trump denied the exchange, a spokesman calling it “fake news” and saying Bender, who like scores of other authors interviewed the former president for his book, “never asked me about it and it’s totally fake news”.“If Gen Milley had yelled at me, I would have fired him,” Trump said.It has been widely reported that Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act, a historic piece of legislation to deal with domestic unrest most recently used during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It was not invoked but the New York Times has reported that aides drafted an order. Milley reportedly opposed use of the act.On 1 June last year, Trump raged at governors on a conference call, telling them to “toughen up” in response to protests which sometimes turned violent.“If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re going to walk away with you,” Trump said. “In Washington we’re going to do something people haven’t seen before.”Milley and other aides subsequently accompanied Trump on a controversial walk across Lafayette Square outside the White House, which had been violently cleared of protesters, to stage a photo-op at a church.The general later apologised.“I should not have been there,” he told students at National Defense University. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” More

For months, Biden and other Democrats have raised alarm about efforts to restrict the vote. Republicans have succeeded nonetheless.Since January, Republican lawmakers in Georgia, Florida, Iowa, Arkansas and Montana have all enacted new legislation that impose new barriers to voting. The successful Republican filibuster this week – which stalled the sweeping voting rights legislation, the For the People Act – only underscored how Democrats have failed to stop GOP efforts to curtail the vote.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterDemocrats have pledged the fight for voting rights is far from over, but activists told the Guardian it did not feel like Biden and Democrats were meeting the moment and treating the fight for voting rights with the urgency it deserved. “They’re checking the boxes,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, an advocacy group that is focused on mobilizing Black voters. “They’re not acting like we are facing an existential crisis. That’s the problem. It’s from the top down,” added Albright, who is currently on a multi-state bus tour across the south to raise awareness about the need for voting protections.After the bill stalled this week, the White House this week made a clear escalation of its efforts on voting rights. Biden announced he is embarking on a nationwide voting rights tour to highlight the threat of new GOP laws. “I’m going to be going around the country, making the case to the American people that this isn’t just about [showing identification] or being able to give someone water in line, this is about who is able to judge whether your vote gets counted,” he said at the White House on Thursday.The justice department also announced Friday that it was filing a major voting rights case challenging a sweeping new voting law in Georgia, one of the biggest voting cases the department has filed in recent years.The suit is a “step in the right direction,” said Albright, and would signal to other states that efforts to restrict voter access would not be tolerated. But Democrats have a narrow window to pass legislation. In August, state lawmakers will begin the once-per-decade process of redrawing US House and other state legislative districts, a procedure Republicans are poised to use to wipe out Democrats’ majority in the US House. The For the People Act would curb excessive manipulation of district lines for partisan gain, and if it isn’t in place by August, Republicans would be free to freely gerrymander districts.“The Republicans, they’re putting everything to stop it. I need that to be matched with the same kind of passion and commitment and to be vocal,” said LaTosha Brown, the other co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “I have not seen the kind of response that makes me believe they’re seeing this as a do-or-die moment for American democracy.”The problem isn’t that Biden isn’t paying attention, the activists say. The president issued a series of modest, but potentially consequential, executive orders expanding voting rights in March. He has appointed some of the country’s top voting rights lawyers to the upper echelons of the Justice Department, which recently announced it was doubling the number of attorneys focused on voting rights issues. And he has a White House adviser focused on voting rights.Biden has also been unsparing in his criticism of Republican efforts to make it harder to vote, ripping the efforts as “sick,” “un-American,” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”Still, some think Biden so far has failed to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to treat the issue as an emergency, said Ezra Levin, the founder of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots group.“He’s phoning it in,” Levin said. “We’ll see what the public actions look like. We’ll see how overwhelming the campaign is. So far we’ve seen basically no action, so any action is an improvement.”While the White House has highlighted its public commitment to voting rights, some advisers privately don’t think the GOP-backed rules will be as big a boon to Republicans as some fear, according to The Atlantic. Advisers privately see infrastructure as a better political winning issue for Biden, the Associated Press reported.“Recently, I’ve been encouraged to see him name voting rights as a priority, but at this point, words simply aren’t enough. We have heard more about a watered-down, bipartisan infrastructure bill than we have about how the White House will help House Democrats save our ailing democracy,” Mondaire Jones, a Democratic congressman from New York, said in a statement.“So we need action with the urgency that this crisis demands.”Brown, the Black Voters Matter activist, said Biden and Democrats in Washington should emulate Texas Democrats, who last month walked out of the state legislature, denying GOP lawmakers a quorum needed to pass legislation. Even though the legislature will reconvene in a special session next month and likely ultimately pass the bill, Republicans have already walked back some of the most damaging provisions. The maneuver also offered a jolt of energy and a symbolic win for Democrats after months.Biden has shown some flashes of upping the stakes. In April, he caught many off guard when he endorsed the idea of Major League Baseball moving its All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s new voting law. MLB did just that days later, offering some of the firmest consequences to Republicans to date for a voting law.Earlier this month, Biden also appeared to fire a shot at two moderate Democrats in the senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, two of the staunchest defenders of the filibuster, saying there were “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” The White House quickly walked back the comments, saying Biden was not talking about the two senators.But when Biden gave a speech to Congress earlier this year, he only mentioned voting rights briefly, towards the end of his remarks. “If I’m your opposition, and I tell you something’s important to me, and then I only give it 30 seconds, how seriously are you going to take me?,” Albright said.If Biden and Democrats were ultimately unable to pass voting rights legislation, Brown said, it would be “devastating” to Black voters, who not only played a big role in getting Biden to the White House, but also helped Democrats flip two Georgia US senate seats in January.“The message that it sends is that they’re not willing to go hard to deliver the things that we were expecting when we went out to vote for them and we risked our lives to do so,” Albright said. “The message that they’re sending is that they’re OK with a little bit of Jim Crow.” More

The neoliberal order that dominated American politics for 40 years is coming apart. This order prized the free movement of capital, goods and people. It celebrated deregulation as an economic good that resulted when governments were no longer allowed to manage markets. It valorized cosmopolitanism as a cultural achievement, the product of open borders and the consequent voluntary mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples. It hailed globalization as a win-win position: the west would be enriched but so would the rest – Latin American countries and Asian nations, large and small. There would be no losers in this global project – not among the working classes of the west nor among the peoples of the global south. Globalization and free markets would lift all boats. In America, the neoliberal order transcended party lines, compelling all those who wanted political power to subscribe to its core beliefs. Ronald Reagan was its most prominent architect, Bill Clinton its key facilitator, converting the Democratic party to its core precepts.The promise of neoliberalism could not survive the economic wreckage of 2008-09. Millions lost jobs and homes. The economic inequality long characterizing the neoliberal world now widened further, as governments did more to bail out the investing classes than those who lived by wages alone. Many among the latter began to lose faith in neoliberalism and then in democratic government, the latter now accused of exploiting “the people”, either through gross economic mismanagement or through complicity in maintaining a system ostensibly committed to popular rule but in reality rigged to favor the “best” over the rest.The fracturing of neoliberal hegemony opened politics to new voices. Donald Trump shocked the political establishment both with his crude style and with rhetoric that struck at the heart of neoliberal orthodoxy: free trade was a chimera that had done nothing for America’s working man; America’s borders had to be established, walls built, immigrants expelled and globalization reversed. Bernie Sanders’s rise on the left was equally astonishing, his influence on American politics greater than that any other American socialist save for Eugene Victor Debs himself.The real estate huckster from Queens and the socialist shouter from Brooklyn were worlds apart on many political issues. But both attacked globalizing economic agendas, the privileging of free trade over the needs of America’s working men and women, the evisceration of American manufacturing, and the corruption of America’s political system by elites. Both men generated intense levels of support that convulsed the parties with which they were allied. Partisanship hardened during their rise, making politics both more exciting and more volatile, patterns that the Covid pandemic only intensified.What lies ahead? If Trump gets his way, America may devolve into an authoritarian state in which the country’s democratic institutions are made subservient either to the decrees of “the great leader” or to an oligarchic Republican party able to manipulate electoral processes to keep itself in power even when a majority of Americans vote to oppose its rule. Such a regime would seek both to fire up America’s shrinking (and thus vulnerable) white majority with ethnonationalist appeals and enrich regime members by striking lucrative and mutually beneficial deals with capitalist elites. We know something about how these regimes operate: they were common in Latin America and Africa across the second half of the 20th century – and were endlessly castigated by US observers then for betraying democratic principles.Roosevelt broke with free market dogmas, insisting the government had to manage capitalism in the public interestThe Sanders road runs through Joe Biden who, ironically, long kept a healthy distance between himself and progressive causes. But now the new president, grasping the magnitude of the moment and understanding that this is likely to be his last tour of public duty, has decided to channel the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America’s most successful Democratic president.Roosevelt himself broke with free market dogmas, insisting that the federal government had to manage capitalism in the public interest. He undertook major projects of infrastructural improvement, understanding their importance both for economic growth and for demonstrating in visually dramatic ways the Democratic party’s ability to transform for the better the everyday world in which Americans lived and worked. He opened his Democratic party to the left, believing that such an alliance would enhance, rather than imperil, the chances of reform. He understood the need to reinvigorate democracy in the US at a time when it was on the defensive in most of the rest of world.Biden hopes to make each of these Rooseveltian projects his own. But he lacks FDR’s congressional clout. Roosevelt possessed a congressional base in 1932 larger than Biden currently enjoys, and he increased it in 1934 and 1936. To rival Roosevelt’s success, Biden will have to do the same in 2022 and 2024. Republicans understand the stakes of 2022 and 2024 all too well, which is why their state legislators are working day and night to jigger electoral procedures and districts in ways that advantage their party.Can Biden nevertheless pull off a New Deal for the 21st century, appropriately festooned in 50 shades of climate-friendly green? The odds are against him. But Vegas oddsmakers (and their pollster soulmates) have shown themselves to be shaky guides to political behavior during this tumultuous era. Biden has had two big policy successes – the vaccine rollout and the nearly $2tn American Rescue Plan. He needs two more, likely to be a conventional infrastructure plan passed with bipartisan support, and then a second, unconventional infrastructure plan that is both green and focused on “social” rather than physical infrastructure, passed through reconciliation. If, as a result, the economy begins to hum; if the American landscape begins to bloom with new roads, bridges, rail lines, and recharging stations; if hope in an American future thus rebounds; and if the Democrats can find 50 (or even 20) versions of Stacey Abrams, each able to make the Democratic party the force it became in Georgia in 2020: then Biden will have a shot at beating the oddsmakers, and at giving America a political order that many would be proud to call progressive. More

In Washington, the real insiders know that the true outrages are what’s perfectly legal and that it’s simply a gaffe when someone accidentally blurts out something honest.And so it barely made a ripple last week when a Texas congressman (and Donald Trump’s former White House physician) said aloud what’s supposed to be kept to a backroom whisper: Republicans intend to retake the US House of Representatives in 2022 through gerrymandering.“We have redistricting coming up and the Republicans control most of that process in most of the states around the country,” Representative Ronny Jackson told a conference of religious conservatives. “That alone should get us the majority back.”He’s right. Republicans won’t have to win more votes next year to claim the US House.In fact, everyone could vote the exact same way for Congress next year as they did in 2020 – when Democratic candidates nationwide won more than 4.7m votes than Republicans and narrowly held the chamber – but under the new maps that will be in place, the Republican party would take control.How is this possible? The Republican party only needs to win five seats to wrench the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi. They could draw themselves a dozen – or more – through gerrymandering alone. Republicans could create at least two additional red seats in Texas and North Carolina, and another certain two in Georgia and Florida. Then could nab another in Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and New Hampshire.They won’t need to embrace policies favored by a majority of Americans. All they need to do is rework maps to their favor in states where they hold complete control of the decennial redistricting that follows the census – some of which they have held since they gerrymandered them 10 years ago. Now they can double down on the undeserved majorities that they have seized and dominate another decade.If Republicans aggressively maximize every advantage and crash through any of the usual guardrails – and they have given every indication that they will – there’s little Democrats can do. And after a 2019 US supreme court decision declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political issue, the federal courts will be powerless as well.It’s one of the many time bombs that threatens representative democracy and American traditions of majority rule. It’s a sign of how much power they have – and how aggressively they intend to wield it – that Republicans aren’t even bothering to deny that they intend to implode it.“We control redistricting,” boasted Stephen Stepanek, New Hampshire’s Republican state party chair. “I can stand here today and guarantee you that we will send a conservative Republican to Washington as a congressperson in 2022.”In Kansas, Susan Wagle, the Republican party state senate president, campaigned on a promise to draw a gerrymandered map that “takes out” the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation. “We can do that,” Wagle boasted. “I guarantee you that we can draw four Republican congressional maps.”Texas Republicans will look to reinforce a map that has held back demographic trends favoring Democrats over the last decade by, among other things, dividing liberal Austin into five pieces and attaching them to rural conservative counties in order to dilute Democratic votes. Texas will also have two additional seats next decade due largely to Latino population growth; in 2011, when similar growth created four new seats for Texas, Republicans managed to draw three for themselves.North Carolina Republicans crafted a reliable 10-3 Republican delegation throughout the last decade. When the state supreme court declared the congressional map unconstitutional in 2019, it forced the creation of a fairer map in time for 2020. Democrats immediately gained two seats. But the state GOP will control the entire process once again this cycle, so those two seats will likely change side – and Republicans could find a way to draw themselves the seat the state gained after reapportionment.Two Atlanta-area Democrats are in danger of being gerrymandered out of office by Republicans. The single Democratic member from Kentucky, and one of just two from Tennessee, are in jeopardy if Republicans choose to crack Louisville and Nashville, respectively, and scatter the urban areas across multiple districts. Florida Republicans ignored state constitution provisions against partisan gerrymandering in 2011 and created what a state court called a conspiracy to mount a secret, shadow redistricting process. It took the court until the 2016 election to unwind those ill-gotten GOP gains, however, which provides little incentive not to do the same thing once more. This time, a more conservative state supreme court might even allow those gains to stand.Might Democrats try the same thing? Democrats might look to squeeze a couple seats from New York and one additional seat from Illinois and possibly Maryland. But that’s scarcely enough to counter the overall GOP edge. In Colorado, Oregon and Virginia, states controlled entirely by Democrats, the party has either created an independent redistricting commission or made a deal to give Republicans a seat at the table. Commissions also draw the lines in other Democratic strongholds like California, Washington and New Jersey. There are no seats to gain in overwhelmingly blue states like Massachusetts, New Mexico and Connecticut.In many ways, the Republican edge is left over from 2010, when the party remade American politics with a plan called Redmap – short for the Redistricting Majority Project – that aimed to capture swing-state legislatures in places like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida, among others. They’ve never handed them back. Now Redmap enters its second decade of dominance – just as the lawmakers it put into office continue rewriting swing-state election laws to benefit Republicans, under the unfounded pretext of “voter fraud” that did not occur during 2020.Republicans already benefit from a structural advantage in the electoral college and the US Senate. Presidents that lost the popular vote have appointed five conservative justices to the US supreme court. Now get ready for a drunken bacchanalia of partisan gerrymandering that could make “hot vax summer” look like a chaste Victorian celebration.Meanwhile, this is how a democracy withers and disappears – slowly, legally, and in plain sight. More

The Fox News anchor Chris Wallace made headlines of his own on Sunday, by pointing out to a senior Republican that he and the rest of his party recently voted against $350bn in funding for law enforcement.“Can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?” Wallace asked Jim Banks, the head of the House Republican study committee.The congressman was the author of a Fox News column in which he said Democrats were responsible for spikes in violent crime.“There is overwhelming evidence,” Banks wrote, “connecting the rise in murders to the violent riots last summer” – a reference to protests over the murder of George Floyd which sometimes produced looting and violence – “and the defund the police movement. Both of which were supported, financially and rhetorically, by the Democratic party and the Biden administration.”Joe Biden does not support any attempt to “defund the police”, a slogan adopted by some on the left but which remains controversial and which the president has said Republicans have used to “beat the living hell” out of Democrats.On Fox News Sunday, Banks repeatedly attacked the so-called “Squad” of young progressive women in the House and said Democrats “stigmatised” law enforcement and helped criminals.“Let me push back on that a little bit,” Wallace said. “Because [this week] the president said that the central part in his anti-crime package is the $350bn in the American Rescue Plan, the Covid relief plan that was passed.”Covid relief passed through Congress in March, under rules that meant it did not require Republican votes. It did not get a single one.Asked if that meant it was “you and the Republicans who are defunding the police”, Banks dodged the question.Wallace said: “No, no, sir, respectfully – wait, sir, respectfully … I’m asking you, there’s $350bn in this package the president says can be used for policing …“Congressman Banks, let me finish and I promise I will give you a chance to answer. The president is saying cities and states can use this money to hire more police officers, invest in new technologies and develop summer job training and recreation programs for young people. Respectfully, I’ve heard your point about the last year, but you and every other Republican voted against this $350bn.”Turning a blind eye to Wallace’s question, Banks said: “If we turn a blind eye to law and order, and a blind eye to riots that occurred in cities last summer, and we take police officers off the street, we’re inevitably going to see crime rise.”Wallace asked if Banks could support any gun control legislation. Banks said that if Biden was “serious about reducing violent crime in America”, he should “admonish the radical voices in the Democrat [sic] party that have stigmatised police officers and law enforcement”.Despite working for Republicans’ favoured broadcaster, Wallace is happy to hold their feet to the fire, as grillings of Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy have shown.He has also attracted criticism, for example for failing to control Trump during a chaotic presidential debate last year which one network rival called “a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck”.Last year, Wallace told the Guardian: “I do what I do and I’m sitting there during the week trying to come up with the best guests and the best show I possibly can and I’m not sitting there thinking about how do we fit in some media commentary.“We’re not there to try to one-up the president or any politician.” More