US Politics

As the coronavirus wreaked havoc around the world, lawmakers in the US were faced with a monumental task: carrying out a presidential election in the middle of a once-in-century pandemic.Concerned about the possibility of virus spread at polling places, Democrats pushed the federal government to approve more funding for states to expand absentee and early-voting options.But Donald Trump was against the idea for a single reason: he thought it would make it harder for Republicans to win. Trump said in a Fox News interview in March of last year that, if early and absentee voting options were expanded as Democrats wanted, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Other Republicans have echoed Trump’s argument in recent months, as the party has pushed hundreds of bills to restrict voting access in dozens of states.But voting experts now say the restrictions being approved in Republican-led states may not help the party’s chances in future elections, and in some cases, the laws may even prevent their own supporters from going to the polls. Put simply, in seeking to suppress the vote, Republicans may be shooting themselves in the foot.Republican legislators across the country have taken aggressive action to restrict access to the ballot box this year, as Trump has continued to spread the “big lie” that there was widespread fraud in the presidential election. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 389 bills with restrictive voting provisions have been introduced in 48 states this year, and 22 of those bills have already been enacted.The Republican bills take particular aim at mail-in voting, after Joe Biden’s supporters used the voting method at disproportionately high rates in the 2020 election. However, it is unclear whether restricting mail-in voting will aid Republicans in future elections.A recent study conducted by a team at the Public Policy Institute of California found that, while making mail-in voting easier did increase overall turnout, it did not necessarily result in better electoral outcomes for Democrats. In fact, many models indicated that easy access to mail-in voting resulted in slightly better outcomes for Republican candidates.This may be in part because older voters, who lean Republican, are more likely to vote by mail. According to census data, nearly 54% of Americans aged 65 or older cast their ballots by mail last year.“This can impact people regardless of their political affiliation,” said Kathleen Unger, founder of the group VoteRiders, which helps people navigate voter ID laws. “There are many people, including obviously Republicans, especially seniors and older voters, who are accustomed to voting by mail. Making it more difficult to vote by mail creates a very real barrier for all these people.”The new voting restrictions may also deter lower-turnout constituencies who have been drifting more toward the Republican party in recent years. Studies have indicated that more highly educated Americans are more likely to report having participated in elections, and those voters have recently been moving toward the Democratic party. One analysis from the progressive firm Catalist found that white voters without college degrees made up 58% of Trump’s 2020 voters.“There’s been an increasing educational divide between the two parties. And it is the case that less-educated voters are less likely to vote, and it is harder for them to vote in a wide variety of ways,” said Robert Griffin, research director of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. “Throwing up additional barriers to voting is not always the best idea if your coalition is increasingly reliant on lower-propensity voters.”Republican legislators are clearly counting on the idea that these voting restrictions will affect Democratic voters more than their own supporters. Indeed, voting rights groups say many of the provisions in the new laws specifically target Black voters, 90% of whom supported Biden in November.For example, one provision in Georgia’s controversial voting law requires anyone requesting an absentee ballot to have a state-issued driver’s license or ID on file. If the voter does not have a Georgia-issued ID, they must send a photocopy of an alternative proof of identification to the state to obtain an absentee ballot.Existing voting records indicate this requirement would have an outsized influence on Black voters, who are less likely to have a state-issued ID. However, Unger noted the provision could also negatively impact older voters who may not have a valid driver’s license because they no longer drive. And in a state like Georgia, which Biden won by about 12,000 votes out of nearly 5m ballots cast, every lost voter matters.Christina Harvey, managing director of the grassroots voting rights group Stand Up America, argued that Republicans were “surgically targeting these laws to have the biggest impact on Black and brown voters”, but she acknowledged they would have an impact on all voters.“The point is everyone should have equal access to the ballot no matter what they look like, where they live or how they prefer to vote,” Harvey said. “Policies that are targeted at disenfranchising Black and brown voters or even Democratic voters may impact those people disproportionately, but they also eat away at everyone’s freedom to vote.” More

On 7 November 2020, after several days of vote-counting, Donald Trump lost the US presidential election. More than 60 unsuccessful lawsuits and one insurrection later, Trump has still lost the election, but the former president refuses to accept defeat.Egged on by a group of sycophants and fantasists, including a small-time Pennsylvania politician, a host on a far-right news network, and the CEO of a pillow company, Trump now plans to hold rallies at the end of June where he is likely to continue his fraudulent claims of a stolen election.Despite the election having been repeatedly investigated and declared “the most secure in American history” by a group of experts, the former president is said to be convinced the election result will be overturned.As are those in his close circle fighting a series of quixotic battles on his behalf.Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a Trump confidant who claims to have evidence that shows voting machines were hacked by China, told the Guardian Trump would be returned to office by August or – at the latest – September.“With me they just keep saying: ‘It’s a conspiracy, Mike Lindell – he’s crazy, blah blah blah,’ all this stuff,” Lindell said. “But I think it gives the whole country hope because they know me and they know I wouldn’t be out there if I wasn’t 100%.”Lindell, who is being sued for $1.3bn by the voting machine manufacturer Dominion over his repeatedly stated conspiracy theory that the company distorted the results of the election, might not be giving the whole country hope, but Trump and the 53% of Republicans who believe he won the election are certainly receiving a boost.Trump’s aspirations are also being bolstered by Doug Mastriano, a failed Republican candidate for Congress in 2018 who now represents one of the 50 state senate districts in Pennsylvania, and Christina Bobb, a host at One America News Network, a rightwing channel that has faithfully propagated claims of election meddling, despite no evidence of any widespread fraud.A lack of evidence has apparently not prevented Trump from believing the hype. The Washington Post reported this month that Trump is enthralled by a politically charged vote recount in Arizona, while according to the New York Times the 45th president, egged on by the likes of Lindell, does indeed believe he will be back in the White House this summer.“His main focus is on Maricopa county and all the audits that are actually going on in the country here,” said Lindell, whose friendship with Trump grew over the last four years and blossomed when the pillow connoisseur became one of the loudest voices crying voter fraud.“I think that gives him the most hope because everyone can see that,” Lindell said. Republicans have pushed for audits in several key states, despite previous audits having found no evidence of wrongdoing in any state in the country.While Trump is concentrating on his audits, Lindell has focused his energies on a mysterious batch of data he says he was given – he won’t reveal who handed it to him – on 9 January.Lindell claims that the data shows that Dominion and Smartmatic machines were hacked into by China, which changed votes from Trump to Biden. The results, he claims, are conclusive.“If you were at a crime scene, and you had a DNA of blood and you had a movie of who did it, this is kind of what you have here, only better,” Lindell said.The US government’s cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency disagrees. In a statement addressing “election security rumor vs reality”, the agency said voting system safeguards prevent exactly the thing Lindell is attempting to prove.Last November, top cybersecurity experts from inside and outside the government issued a joint statement saying the election was “the most secure in American history”. They added: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”None of that has deterred Lindell, who said he has spent more than $12m of his own money on his bid to overturn the election. “I’ve had private investigators, I’ve had lawyers, I’ve put money into my own social media platform, I just … every waking moment is on my efforts to get this out there,” he said.As Lindell barrages his way across the post-election conspiracy theory landscape, the other main attempt to overturn the election is happening at the local level.Republicans’ main hopes seem to rest on Arizona, where the Republican-controlled state senate is performing its own audit of the election result in Maricopa county, despite multiple audits having already affirmed the election results.The firm hired to conduct the audit, Cyber Ninjas, has little experience in elections, its CEO has promoted conspiracy theories that the election was fraudulent, and the audit has been funded, at least in part, by Trump-aligned figures, suggesting it may not be an entirely neutral effort. But it has excited many on the right.Bobb, the OANN host, has been a repeated visitor to the audit. “Why Christina Bobb’s OAN ‘coverage’ of the Arizona audit is deceptive – and dangerous,” read one headline in the Arizona Republic newspaper this week. Bobb has discussed the effort with Trump and his team, the Washington Post reported. While nominally acting as a reporter on the audit, Bobb has also been fundraising for the venture.Bobb interviewed Mastriano as the state senator visited the Maricopa county in early June and declared the goings on there as “the first forensic audit in the world”.The pair share more than just a passion for spurious election fraud claims. Like Bobb, Mastriano is said to have been whispering in Trump’s ear, and he has called for a Maricopa-style audit in Pennsylvania. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the far-right member of Congress, has backed a similar audit in her state of Georgia, where multiple recounts have already confirmed Joe Biden’s win. There is also a push for an audit in Michigan.There is no direct way for the supreme court to overturn the election – “in the same way sharks can’t grow legs on command and stroll on to land”, as Business Insider put it – but people like Lindell, Mastriano and Bobb will keep pushing. And in any case, shilling for Trump does have its benefits.Mastriano, unknown until recently, has seen a once scarcely imaginable rise in his fame and is expected to run for Pennsylvania governor next year. Trump has promised to campaign on his behalf, Mastriano told a local radio station, while Rudy Giuliani headlined a Mastriano event in May. Bobb has seen her profile inexorably increase and become a star in rightwing circles.Lindell, hunkered down with his secret data and his cybersecurity experts, seems unlikely to see any benefit, however.He was being mentioned as a candidate for Minnesota governor before his immersion in the election fraud conspiracy, which has cost him both credibility and the ability to sell his pillows at Bed Bath and Beyond, Kohl’s and other big-name stores.Nevertheless, Lindell will keep going on his lonely march. His next step, he said, would be to hold a “symposium” in July, where cybersecurity experts and journalists can examine his data. He hasn’t chosen a state yet, or a date, or sent out any invites, but he has high hopes.Once people had seen his information, Lindell said, he would petition the supreme court and ask it to overturn the presidential election and reinstate Trump.“Just because it hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean that, when a crime of this magnitude has been committed, you don’t look at it and you don’t take care of it,” Lindell said.“I think they’re gonna move very fast. It could be August, it could be off by a month or so.”He added: “It’ll be this year. I don’t see what other choice they have.” More

Ben Rhodes was Barack Obama’s speechwriter and became one of the former president’s closest aides, a constant presence at his shoulder as he toured the world and sat down with the powerful and famous. Three years ago, soon after leaving the White House, Rhodes wrote a compelling insider account of that era called The World As It Is. He has now written the sequel, and has opted for the apocalyptic title After the Fall. It is the story of an aftermath, of the acolyte still travelling the globe with the greying former president as he garners awards, mobbed by adoring fans. A rueful Obama muses about his transition from political force to celebrity, adored but virtually powerless.After the Fall is a cleverly chosen title. It is about the ending of an administration and the aspirations of those who served in it, who look on aghast at the reign of Donald Trump. But it also has the suggestion of original sin – in this case, the US’s. The subtitle is Being American in the World We’ve Made, and the central theme of the book is a contemplation of the seeds of the country’s fall from grace in the world. Trump’s crassness is not the cause of the descent, but a symptom.Rhodes traces much of the decline to the 9/11 attacks and the George W Bush administration’s reaction to them, which sought to “reorient America’s entire national purpose to the task of fighting terrorism”. The Iraq invasion, in pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, “cracked open the facade that elites in the United States knew what they were doing” and called into question “why Americans were the stewards of world order”. Then came the largely made-in-America financial crash of 2008, destabilising politics-as-usual around the world. At home, a pivotal 5-4 vote by the US supreme court in 2010 opened the floodgates to unaccountable “dark money” saturating politics. Meanwhile ever more extreme politics were facilitated by Facebook, Twitter and the like.“Profit-driven social media algorithms, like unchecked political contributions, were treated as free speech beyond the reach of government regulations,” Rhodes writes. He travels around the world observing the plight of other frail societies, such as Myanmar, Hungary, Russia and Hong Kong, where democracy is in retreat or has been routed altogether. He talks to dissidents trying to push back against the tide, and finds common strands in the American malaise and the rest of the world’s. Little of the analysis is new or original, but it is certainly elegantly expressed. This is the man, after all, with a degree in creative writing, who wrote so many of Obama’s soaring speeches.And Rhodes does have an interesting personal tale to tell. He found out from reporting by the Observer in May 2018 that a shady firm of Israeli ex-spooks-for-hire called Black Cube was sniffing around him and another Obama staffer, Colin Kahl. The firm had been hired by the Trump camp to discredit the top officials involved in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The abortive smear effort involved sending creepy fake emails to Rhodes’s wife. She did not fall for it but the experience so unnerved her that she insisted on moving their young family out of the political crosshairs to Los Angeles. Rhodes cannot help wondering if the family’s decision to flee politics is what his persecutors wanted all along. To kill off political engagement and drive an activist generation towards apathy and cynicism. He comes to the realisation that he is “a casualty of a war over identity – who defines it and who doesn’t, what is true and what isn’t, what happened and what didn’t, who you are and who you aren’t.”There is a very personal element to After the Fall in which Rhodes admits to disorientation and a desire for purpose in the long spiralling descent from the Oval Office. “I was a thirty-nine-year-old with as little idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life as I’d had as a twenty-three-year-old,” he reflects. “History was no longer something that took place in rooms where I sat.” The introspection, coupled with an itinerary of venerable European destinations, such as Paris, Budapest and Baden-Baden, sometimes gives the book the feel of a melancholy Chekhovian tale: the young courtier in the retinue of a revered, recently ousted monarch, touring old watering holes. He meets like-minded contemporaries, including Hungarian, Russian and Hong Kong dissidents, and they try to come to terms with the implosion of the world they had once hoped for.Throughout, Rhodes struggles with a certain ennui. On a trip to Yangon, he wanders into a pagoda and “sat staring at a Buddha, waiting to feel something”. Some of the best passages arise when he is back together with his old boss, and we are given an insight into what Obama thinks of it all, including the acerbic and memorable observation that “Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s acquittal was to a lot of black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.”We can also sit in while Obama considers the leadership challenge facing the progressive democratic cause in the US and further afield. Surveying the candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries, the former president says he agrees with Bernie Sanders in his diagnosis of America’s malaise, a system chronically rigged to benefit the very rich. “But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about it,” Obama adds. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not nationalist.” Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are better at invoking national unity but don’t have Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s fire in the belly, their outrage. Searching for a historical precedent of a progressive leader who could offer both, Obama has to go all the way back to Bobby Kennedy.It illustrates a certain nostalgia pervading the book, looking back at the times before the fall, and the allure of the apparent certainties of Rhodes’s youth, when America seemed to have all the answers. They still exert their pull on him, even though he now knows them to be hollow. More

Jonathan Freedland and Prof Sarah Binder discuss why two Democratic senators are proving a thorn in Joe Biden’s side

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President Biden is facing some barriers in passing his rather ambitious agenda, namely senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are refusing to toe the party line on abolishing the filibuster and on issues such as voting rights. So, which side is most likely to win out? Sarah Binder, professor of political science at George Washington University, brings us up to speed on what is happening. Watch some of the campaign adverts by Joe Manchin mentioned by Prof Binder Listen to the first episode of Comfort Eating with Grace Dent Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

The US will officially recognize Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in America, as a federal holiday after Joe Biden signed a bill into law on Thursday.At a jubilant White House ceremony, the president emphasized the need for the US to reckon with its history, even when that history is shameful.“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments,” Biden said, before he established what will be known as Juneteenth National Independence Day. “Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with the mistakes we made. And remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.”Just before signing the bill, Biden added: “I’ve only been president for several months, but I think this will go down for me as one of the greatest honors I will have had as president.”Kamala Harris, also in attendance, reflected on the historic nature of the day and the presence of Black lawmakers who worked diligently to advance the bill.Harris, who is the first Black woman to serve as vice-president, told those at the White House for the bill signing: “We are gathered here in a house built by enslaved people. We are footsteps away from where President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.“And we are here to witness President Joe Biden establish Juneteenth as a national holiday. We have come far, and we have far to go, but today is a day of celebration.”[embedded content]Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the people of Galveston, Texas, freeing slaves in the last rebel state. Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but the proclamation wasn’t enforced in Galveston until federal soldiers read it out on 19 June 1865.Black Americans are rejoicing at the move, but many say more is needed to address systemic racism.Republican-led states have enacted or are considering legislation that activists argue would curtail the right to vote, particularly for people of color. Legislation to address voting rights issues, and institute policing reforms demanded after the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans, remains stalled in the Congress that acted swiftly on the Juneteenth bill.“It’s great, but it’s not enough,” said Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Kansas City. “We need Congress to protect voting rights, and that needs to happen right now so we don’t regress any further,” she added. “That is the most important thing Congress can be addressing at this time.”Federal recognition of Juneteenth also comes as Republican officials across the country move to ban schools from teaching students “critical race theory”, the history of slavery and the continuing impacts of systemic racism.The Senate unanimously passed the bill earlier this week, but in the House, 14 Republicans voted against it.Most federal workers will observe the holiday on Friday. The Washington DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, and Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, announced that state and city government offices would be closed on Friday in honor of Juneteenth. District of Columbia public schools will also be closed on Friday.Before 19 June became a federal holiday, it was observed in the vast majority of states and the District of Columbia. Texas was first to make Juneteenth a holiday, in 1980.In Texas, residents celebrated the role their state played in the historic moment.“I’m happy as pink,” said Doug Matthew, 70, a former city manager of Galveston who has helped coordinate the community’s Juneteenth celebrations since Texas made it a holiday.He credited the work of state and local leaders with paving the way for this week’s step by Congress.“I’m also proud that everything started in Galveston,” Matthew said.Pete Henley, 71, was setting up tables on Thursday for a Juneteenth celebration at the Old Central Cultural Center, a Galveston building that once was a segregated Black school. He said the Juneteenth holiday would help promote understanding and unity.He said his family traced its roots back to enslaved men and women in the Texas city who were among the last to receive word of the Emancipation Proclamation.“As a country, we really need to be striving toward togetherness more than anything,” Henley said. “If we just learn to love each other, it would be so great.” More

A Republican congressman “ran as quickly as he could, like a coward” when a police officer injured in the attack on Congress on 6 January saw him and tried to shake his hand, the officer said.“I was very cordial,” Michael Fanone told CNN on Wednesday of his interaction with Andrew Clyde, in a Capitol elevator earlier that day.Fanone, of the DC metropolitan police, was assaulted and injured after he rushed to help defend the Capitol from supporters of Donald Trump who rioted in service of his attempt to overturn his election defeat.Fanone returned this week with a colleague from the US Capitol police, in an attempt to speak to Republicans including Clyde who voted against awarding the congressional gold medal to officers who defended the building.When he saw the Georgia representative, Fanone said, he “extended my hand to shake his hand. He just stared at me. I asked if he was going to shake my hand, and he told me that he didn’t who know I was. So I introduced myself.“I said that I was Officer Michael Fanone. That I was a DC Metropolitan police officer who fought on 6 January to defend the Capitol and, as a result, I suffered a traumatic brain injury as well as a heart attack after having been tased numerous times at the base of my skull, as well as being severely beaten.“At that point, the congressman turned away from me.”Fanone said Clyde “pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps”, apparently trying to record the encounter. Once the elevator doors opened, Fanone said, the congressman “ran as quickly as he could, like a coward”.Clyde has not so far provided comment.Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, and the Illinois anti-Trump Republican Adam Kinzinger tweeted in support of Fanone.Swalwell said: “To honour Trump, House Republicans will dishonour the police.”Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, told CNN the congressional gold medal vote on Tuesday was “a new low” for the 21 Republicans who voted no.“They voted to overturn an election,” he said. “But in their vote today, they kind of sealed the deal of basically affiliating with the mob. They now are part of the insurrectionist mob.”Clyde made headlines in May when he told a congressional hearing many in that mob on 6 January behaved as if there for “a normal tourist visit”.As the Washington Post reported, pictures taken as rioters searched for lawmakers to capture and kill showed Clyde rushing to barricade a door. More

Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump, focusing on the final days of his presidency, will be published in July under a provocative title: Landslide.Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college – a result he called a landslide when it was in his favour against Hillary Clinton in 2016.Trump has pursued the lie that Biden’s victory was the result of electoral fraud – a speech on the subject fuelled the deadly attack on the US Capitol in Washington on 6 January, leading to a second impeachment trial.Though Trump told Fox News on Wednesday night he “didn’t win” and wished Biden well, he also said the election was “unbelievably unfair”.Wolff published his first Trump tell-all in January 2018, rocking the White House when the Guardian broke news of the book, Fire and Fury.Trump sought to block publication, calling Wolff “a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book”. The reading public ignored him: the explosive exposé sold 1.7m copies in its first three weeks.In 2019 Wolff published Siege, which looked at a “presidency under fire”, tackling topics including Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow.Wolff no longer enjoyed unfettered West Wing access but he did produce a bombshell, again first reported by the Guardian: that Mueller’s team had prepared and shelved an indictment of the president, on three counts of obstruction of justice.Wolff said he obtained the documents from “sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”. The special counsel rejected his claim, a spokesman saying: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”Amid such controversy, and with competitors having flooded the shelves with reportage on the chaotic Trump presidency, Siege did not sell as well as Fire and Fury.Like its predecessor, Siege used Steve Bannon as a major source. By then, however, the far-right provocateur was no longer a White House strategist or even, thanks to his cooperation for Fire and Fury which enraged the president, a major figure in Trumpworld.On Thursday, Wolff’s publisher said he had interviewed the former president. It also said Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, would focus on his “tumultuous last months at the helm of the country”.Out on 27 July from Little, Brown in the UK and Macmillan in the US, the book is based on what the publishers called “extraordinary access to White House aides and to the former president himself, yielding a wealth of new information and insights about what really happened inside the highest office in the land, and the world”.Trump has claimed to be writing “the book of all books” himself. In a statement last week, he claimed he had “turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers”, adding: “I do not want a deal right now. I’m writing like crazy anyway, however.”After major publishers said they would not touch a Trump memoir, he insisted “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses have made very substantial offers which I have rejected”.“That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future,” he said. “… If my book will be the biggest of them all … does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money?”Possibly to Trump’s chagrin, those who served him in office have found publishers eager to release their memoirs – and to pay a lot of money to do so.Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has a “seven-figure”, two-book deal – despite a staff rebellion at Simon & Schuster.Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has a deal for a “definitive” account of the Trump presidency. Broadside Books, a conservative imprint at HarperCollins, has said the book will come out in early 2022. The price of the deal was not disclosed.Last November, shortly after Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, Barack Obama published the first volume of a projected two-part memoir that was sold to Penguin Random House with books by his wife, Michelle Obama, for a reported $65m. The former president’s book, A Promised Land, sold strongly.Another former president, Bill Clinton, has moved into fiction. The President’s Daughter – his second thriller, in this case about a president who also happens to be a former Navy Seal – is again written with James Patterson. This week, it debuted at No1 on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestsellers list. More