US Politics

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr has been sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, promising to marshal a spirit of national unity to guide the country through one of the most perilous chapters in American history.Speaking under a bright winter sky, as snow flurries melted and the clouds parted, Biden declared “democracy has prevailed” during a ceremony that honored the ritual transfer of power at the US Capitol, where exactly two weeks ago a swarm of supporters loyal to his predecessor stormed the building in a violent and futile last stand to overturn the results of the election.“This is America’s day,” Biden said, looking across the sprawl of the capital city’s national monuments, now guarded by a military garrison unprecedented in modern times, and devoid of spectators as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. “This is democracy’s day.”Millions of Americans watched from home as Chief Justice John Roberts administered the 35-word oath of office to Biden, moments before noon, when he formally inherited the powers of the presidency.[embedded content]“Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now,” he said, promising to dedicate his “whole soul” to rebuilding a country ravaged by disease, economic turmoil, racial inequality and political division.Donald Trump, who never formally conceded his defeat, left the White House on Wednesday morning and was not in attendance, a final display of irreverence for the traditions and norms that have long shaped the presidency. Mike Pence, the outgoing vice-president, was there, joined by the Clintons, the Bushes and the Obamas.Hours after being sworn in, Biden was expected to begin undoing what his chief of staff described as “the gravest damages” of his predecessor’s legacy. Biden will sign 15 executive orders, as well as a flurry of memorandums and decrees from the Oval Office, according to his top policy advisers.He will immediately rejoin the Paris climate accords, end the effort to leave the World Health Organization, repeal a travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries, revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and extend a pause on student loan payments and a federal moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.He will also send a sweeping immigration bill to Congress and will impose a national mandate requiring mask-wearing in federal buildings.Fear and anxiety surrounded the lead-up to Biden’s inauguration. The threat of more violence resulted in the deployment of nearly 25,000 national guard troops, transforming the shining city upon a hill into a military fortress.The pandemic had already greatly reshaped the inaugural events and ceremony, which typically draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to the National Mall. Much of the area was closed. Instead, flags from the states and territories represented those who the inaugural committee had urged to stay away, out of concern that large crowds would spread the coronavirus, which has now killed more than 400,000 Americans.Part of Biden’s legacy was secured even before he placed his hand atop a large, 19th-century Bible, a family heirloom accented with a Celtic cross and held by his wife, Jill Biden. Biden, the vice-president to the nation’s first black president, elevated Kamala Harris as America’s first female, first Black and first Asian American vice-president.“Don’t tell me things can’t change,” he said, marking explicitly the history of Harris’ ascension.The ceremony was enlivened by musical performances. Lady Gaga gave a towering rendition of the national anthem, Jennifer Lopez arrestingly mixed patriotic paeans with the pledge of allegiance in Spanish – “indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos” – and Garth Brooks asked Americans to join him in singing Amazing Grace.Biden’s inauguration brings to a close one of the most volatile transitions in modern memory, an interregnum that tested the fragility of America’s commitment to an orderly and peaceful transition of power. For weeks after his defeat, Trump whipped up loyalists with baseless allegations of a stolen election.His claims were dismissed by dozens of courts, security experts, Republican election officials and his then attorney general. But Trump refused to accept his fate, a decision that culminated two weeks ago in the assault on the US Capitol, where rioters attempted to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win.Biden said the events of the past few weeks offered “painful lesson” about the power of words and the threat of conspiracy.“There is truth and there are lies,” he said, reminding the nation’s political leaders, many of whom were arrayed onstage behind him, that it was their duty to “defend the truth and defeat the lies”.As Biden spoke, Trump was nearly 1,000 miles away, at his south Florida resort in Mar-a-Lago, where he concluded his historically unpopular presidency. Earlier on Wednesday, he held a farewell event for families and supporters. In his final hours as commander-in-chief, he boasted that the last four years had been “amazing by any standard” and promised he would “be back in some form”.Biden never mentioned his predecessor by name but struck a stark contrast in tone and tenor. During his remarks, he paused to observe a moment of silence to remember those who had died from the virus, acknowledging the pandemic’s grim toll in way Trump never did.Whereas Trump four years ago conjured dark visions of “American carnage”, Biden described a nation capable of overcoming daunting odds and seemingly incontrovertible divisions. He appealed for unity, a dominant theme of his presidential campaign, while recognizing that the plea might sound like “foolish fantasy” in an age governed by tribalism and partisan passions.“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal,” he said.Nearly half a century after he was sworn in as one of the nation’s youngest senators, he became the oldest president to take the oath of office, at 78.A veteran of Washington first elected to the Senate in 1972, where he served until becoming vice-president under Barack Obama in 2009, Biden enters the White House with one of the deepest résumés in American political history, experience he will rely as he faces what he called “this time of testing”.Loss and recovery have marked his long career in public service. His first wife and his daughter were killed in a car accident days after his election to the Senate. In 2015, he buried his eldest son, Beau, who died of brain cancer. Biden’s rise to the presidency, the realization of a life’s dream, was paved with false starts and bad timing. A plagiarism scandal plagued his first run. Outshone by the history-making candidacy of his Democratic opponents in 2008, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Biden bowed out before the Iowa caucuses. Then, in 2015, still mourning the loss of his son, Biden opted not to run.But Trump’s presidency tormented him. Trump’s failure to forcefully condemn the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was Biden’s motivation for launching a third presidential bid. Biden presented himself as a rebuke to Trump – an empathetic figure shaped by personal tragedy who believed he had something to offer the country at a moment of national tragedy.“We will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era,” Biden said in his address. “Will we rise to the occasion, is the question. Will we master this rare and difficult hour? Will we meet our obligations and pass along a new and better world to our children? I believe we must.” More

Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46th US president at the US Capitol in Washington. He declared ‘democracy has prevailed’, during a ceremony at the US Capitol, where two weeks ago a swarm of supporters loyal to his predecessor stormed the building in a violent but futile last stand to overturn the results of the election
Joe Biden sworn in as 46th president of the United States More

Donald Trump departed today from the American presidency as he arrived four years ago: vain, cruel and telling lies, without any vestige of grace or magnanimity.There was no acknowledgment of, still less apology for, his deranged delinquency in the face of Covid, or of his election defeat – failures that made the nervy, locked-down inauguration of Joe Biden inevitable. But Trump leaves having changed America.Biden did his best today. He had been absolutely the right candidate to defeat Trump at the polls. He calmly outsmarted the incumbent through the campaign; his appointments have been good; and there is no one in American politics better placed to begin the healing of wounds that ran through everything he said at the inauguration.The address by Biden on Capitol Hill did not mention Trump by name, but it was saturated in his blowhard predecessor’s divisive legacy. The riot of 6 January hung over the occasion, the speech and even the images. The speech struck necessary and reassuring notes of realism, humility, hope and consistency. It was wholly unTrumpian. But Biden cannot remake America by trying to lead it back to a better yesterday. That would fail.To describe it as a presidential inauguration without parallel is to risk a lack of historical awareness on the one hand or journalistic hyperbole on the other. America, its institutions and values have survived civil war before, as well as assassination. America will probably survive the horrors of Trump’s corrupt tenure, which Biden called “this uncivil war”. But survival may no longer be enough in an America that has been led too close to the brink of a deeper conflict by a wanton leader, abetted by a weak-willed party, an elite of morally supine tech companies and the lie machines of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.Yet it is also true that Trump is not a one-off. Consider this: “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme rightwingers … But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”Each one of those words could have been written this week. In fact, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote them six decades ago, after the failed 1964 presidential bid of the rightwing Republican Barry Goldwater. Hofstadter drew the argument not only from the delusions of the 1960s, but from a line of conspiracy theories that stretched right back to the French Revolution in the 1790s and forward to McCarthyism in the 1950s – and beyond.This tells us two things that need to be remembered in the light of the Biden inauguration. The first is that the battle to extend and bolster democratic values needs to be as sleepless as the tradition of those who oppose them. Biden’s words, that “disagreement must not lead to disunion”, indicate the scale of what is at stake. Disunion can wreck a nation.The rioters of 6 January adhere to what the columnist David Brooks calls a “violent Know-Nothingism that has always coursed through American history”. They sometimes see themselves as refighting America’s 18th-century war of independence. It is more accurate to see them as refighting the 19th-century civil war from the side of the Confederacy, whose racial legacy still scars the United States 150 years later. They have to be punished and defeated.Biden said nothing about that. Yet, as the Economist said last week, you do not overcome division by pretending that nothing is wrong but by facing it. The US senate has to finish the job by convicting Trump too.The second lesson is that, while America sometimes echoes and influences the politics of other nations, including Britain’s, it is also extremely different. In most respects, and far more than many politicians elsewhere understand, the United States follows its own distinct path. It is a foreign country, and the better you get to know it the more aware of that you become. Trump has turbocharged that. This is the America that Biden now leads.Foreigners, especially English-speaking foreigners, need to control their delusions about America. Until 2017, every inaugural was watched from Europe as a statement of the terms on which our own politics here would be set for the coming years. Trump changed all that. American carnage broke the dials, which sadly the former British prime minister Theresa May failed to see. Biden’s warm words now will not reset the dials. There was surprisingly little in his address about foreign policy. The future of America’s place in the world is not definitively settled by the change of administration.Trump lost the election, but he has changed things for a generation. Biden’s address was an implicit acknowledgment of that. The European nations, Britain included, need to grasp the same thing. Just as the era of American domestic bipartisanship remains for the foreseeable future a thing of the past, so the era of American global leadership is not for rebuilding quickly or perhaps at all.Under Donald Trump, the arrogance of global greatness came perilously close to breaking America. If Biden and his successors fail, that may still happen. But Brexit has shown that Britain suffers from an arrogance of greatness all of its own. Britain is a vessel sailing the oceans in the dark without charts or lights. Biden’s America will not come to the rescue any time soon. It has its own problems to solve. More

Kamala Harris has been sworn in as vice-president, becoming the first woman in American history – as well as the first woman of African American and south Asian descent – to hold the post.The former California senator was sworn in by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina on the supreme court. Harris chose to be sworn in using two Bibles, one from the late Thurgood Marshall, the first Black supreme court justice, and one from Regina Shelton, a close family friend who was something like a surrogate mother for Harris and her sister when they were growing up.“Ready to serve,” Harris tweeted from her new vice-presidential Twitter account shortly after being sworn in.Harris’s inauguration marks a turning point in American history. Women have run on presidential tickets as would-be vice-presidents but until Joe Biden’s win, none were victorious.Wearing a face mask, Harris was escorted through the Capitol by Eugene Goodman, the African American Capitol police officer who was hailed as a hero for helping to distract rioters from invading the Senate floor during the attack this month.As the newly sworn-in vice-president left the Capitol, she mingled with attendees and gave a hug to Barack Obama.Harris’s elevation fulfills a major a goal of Biden’s presidential arc: to install people of color and women in powerful positions in his administration, oftentimes where, historically, only white men have been.Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who offered introductory remarks before Harris took the oath of office, noted that Harris “stands on the shoulders of so many on this platform”.Klobuchar added that with Harris as vice-president, “little girls and little boys across the world will know that anything and everything is possible. And in the end, that is America.”Harris spoke with the now former vice-president, Mike Pence, earlier this week and Pence left a note in the vice-president’s office for his successor. Pence sat feet away from Harris as she took the oath of office.Madam Vice President Kamala Devi Harris!!!— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) January 20, 2021
Harris’s congressional and California colleagues, as well as fellow Howard University alumnae, hailed her new job. Democrat Karen Carter Peterson, a Louisiana state senator running for Congress who also attended the university, tweeted: “Madam Vice President Harris!”“In many folks’ lifetimes, we experienced a segregated United States,” said Lateefah Simon, a civil rights advocate and longtime Harris friend and mentee. “You will now have a Black woman who will walk into the White House not as a guest but as a second in command of the free world.”Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and sometime Democratic rival to Harris, said: “History made.”Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio noted the momentous nature of Harris’s new position for Americans and especially young Black people.“American workers will finally have someone on their side in the White House, and millions of girls – especially Black and brown girls – all over the country are seeing that there is no limit to their dreams, and they belong in every room where decisions are made,” Brown said in a statement.Oprah Winfrey said she was in tears over Harris.Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, also offered felicitations.Congratulations to @KamalaHarris on being sworn-in as @VP. It is a historic occasion. Looking forward to interacting with her to make India-USA relations more robust. The India-USA partnership is beneficial for our planet.— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) January 20, 2021
Republicans offered cautious greetings to Harris and the new Biden administration.Congratulations to President @JoeBiden and VP @KamalaHarris. I’m glad to have joined in the peaceful transition of power today. I look forward to working with the Biden administration when it is good for Montana and will vigorously push back when necessary.— Steve Daines (@SteveDaines) January 20, 2021
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate, said Wednesday marked a peaceful transition of power. He did not mention Harris directly.Today we witnessed a central tenet of American democracy: the peaceful transition of power. We are one nation under God, and it is time for all of us to unite as one American family. (1/2)— Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) January 20, 2021
Brandon Davis, a veteran Democratic political strategist who runs a firm specializing in working for Black candidates, said Harris “will likely have a larger profile given the historic nature and her high profile, but she will be able to learn and strengthen her personal politics from a key position”.It “will be interesting to see how she tacks her politics on issues of race, particularly criminal justice reform, and how she builds a record on the economy,” Davis added in an email. “No matter what, she is a HUGE player in the Democratic Party / Left for the next decade.”Harris often says that she wants to be a “person that sees everyone”, said the Democratic strategist Minyon Moore, who had been advising Harris when she became vice-president-elect and helped set up the staffing for her office. “I think what the president did by appointing her as his nominee at the time, he was signaling to the world: we see everyone in America.”Governor Phil Scott of Vermont, a Republican and one of the most popular governors in the country, issued a statement extending “my sincere congratulations and best wishes to the president and vice-president on their swearing-in to lead our nation.”“The challenges we face are great: confronting a global pandemic and its economic fallout; strengthening America’s position in the world and our alliances; combating systemic racism; addressing climate change; building a stronger and more diverse economy that reduces economic inequality for all Americans in every community; and so much more,” Scott said.Even as she becomes vice-president, Harris’s portfolio remains unclear. Biden and Harris have described their ideal relationship as similar to that between Biden and Barack Obama when the latter was president. Biden was to be the last voice in the room on any major decision.But that dynamic will not be perfectly replicated. Biden spent decades in the Senate while Harris was in her first term when she first ran unsuccessfully for president and then was selected as Biden’s running mate.Unlike recent vice-presidents, though, Harris is expected to often play a deciding role in the Senate because of the 50-50 split.Harris will reside at the Naval Observatory, the traditional home of the vice-president. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, will join her there and become the first man married to a vice-president. He will be referred to as the second gentleman.Harris, a lawyer, is the former attorney general for California. She attended Howard University in Washington DC for her undergraduate degree and often references her time there.Harris becomes vice-president with a relatively new team in her office. Her chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, was not a member of her campaign staff. Harris’s chief spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, also a woman of color, served as a top adviser to Biden throughout his successful presidential campaign. Sanders began traveling with Harris near the end of the campaign and stayed on with Harris through the transition. More

It was a moment of immense relief across the world, rather than unbridled celebration. Washington saw an orderly transition of power at the Capitol, just two weeks after the attack on it; the departure of a man who has thrived on division and the anointment of Joe Biden, who pledges unity; the arrival of Kamala Harris – the first female vice-president and a woman of colour – after the racism and misogyny of Donald Trump. Yet there were no cheering crowds to greet the new president, and 25,000 members of the National Guard stood watch, thanks to his predecessor’s legacy: the deadly toll of the pandemic and the political violence epitomised by this month’s insurrection. That threat did not recede when the 46th president took his oath of office. It is part of America’s body politic, as are the bitter political forces that birthed it. Though Mr Trump was resoundingly defeated, more than 70 million Americans voted for him and a huge number of those now believe that President Biden stole his job. One in five voters supported the storming of the Capitol.Mr Trump, petty to the last, slunk away to Florida rather than face his defeat. But whether or not the twice-impeached ex-president can maintain political momentum, Trumpism in the broader sense is thriving. Its next standard bearer – there are plenty of hopefuls – could well be smarter and more dangerous. So the sombre mood was not only inevitable but apt. The perils facing the republic have rarely been greater. Mr Biden’s speech rose to the moment. He acknowledged the constant struggles of his nation, and the current dangers. But he also promised: “Democracy has prevailed … Our better angels have always prevailed.”The new president has promised a flurry of action, expecting little honeymoon. He must tackle the pandemic that has taken 400,000 American lives – a quarter of those in the past month – and the economic crisis, with 10 million fewer employed than a year ago; he plans a $1.9tn stimulus package. A slew of executive orders on his first afternoon – axing the Muslim travel ban; rejoining the Paris climate agreement – are set to reverse some of Mr Trump’s most egregious acts. But erasing the last four years is impossible. Only some policies can be enacted at the stroke of a pen. An ambitious legislative agenda must force its way through a 50/50 Senate. The Trump administration scrapped regulation and stacked courts. Above all, it tore apart the social and political fabric of the United States, making brazen lies, naked cruelty and hatred commonplace. Mr Trump was the product of his country’s failures, but further exposed and exacerbated them. Europe and other allies are breathing easier, but America’s standing cannot truly be restored until its domestic crises are resolved. At best, Mr Biden will begin to address them. He reminded his listeners that politics “does not have to be a raging fire destroying everything in its path”, in a call for honesty and decency that should be heard not only in the US, but across the Atlantic. Yet others are still pouring on the fuel. While some Republicans belatedly scramble for the vestiges of respectability, others continue to foment lies. Facts have become optional in the age of disinformation.Changing the president, as hard as it has been, was an easy task set against the challenge of binding up the nation’s wounds. But this is, at least, the removal of a dangerous man and the arrival of a president who believes in his oath of office. This inauguration brings hope, however tentative, at a time when the US desperately needs it. More

Over the past few months, I’ve been editing a book about soulful beliefs, practices and feelings that overflow from their religious and spiritual origins into secular and profane spaces. I’ve also been wondering what Joe Biden means when he talks about restoring the soul of America.
In a country fatigued by COVID-19, Zoom calls and a president who thought he was entitled to grab the bodies and attention of his fellow Americans, it appears that Biden wants to offer us some solace. A politics of kindness that permits intentional listening and introspection. Or at least a news cycle that is less taxing, chaotic and demanding.
Such discussions of the American soul are often interpreted through the prism of Biden’s Catholicism and Irish ancestry. On occasion, they are also read as a sign that we will be returning to the tone and texture of the Barack Obama years and the calm authority of “no-drama Obama.” Yet they are rarely connected to what the African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois called the “souls of Black folk.”
It remains difficult for Americans who live in a racially segregated country to consider how African American social and political thought might have informed the thinking of an “average Irish guy” about soul.

Communicating with a post-soul generation
Even though Biden was a moderate Irish American who was psychically distant from the activist fervour of the 1960s, he participated in an American culture transfixed by Martin Luther King Jr.’s soulful call for people to be judged on the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin.
He also lived through a period in which Black artists in music, performance, dance, fashion, food, film, literature and visual culture advanced a thrilling vision of soul power.
Obama and Kamala Harris are too young to have participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and are, in age or temperament, part of a “post-soul generation” . Yet, because of their skin colour and Biden’s ability to work with segregationist senators in the 1970s and ‘80s, the American media remains more likely to associate them with the soulful, redemptive humanism of the 1960s than Biden.
Kamala Harris is sworn in as U.S. Vice President. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
The outcry over one of Biden’s gaffes during the 2008 presidential campaign is one revealing example of what Obama might call the “chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.” After describing Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden was thought to have perpetuated antiquated stereotypes about African American intelligence and cleanliness. Or, at the very least, was portrayed as a political dinosaur surprised by the existence of an African-American candidate who appeared articulate, bright and clean to mainstream America.
‘People like us’
While Biden was criticized for his ham-fisted attempts to make it clear that he did not think “all Blacks look alike,” a younger generation of post-soul politicians were praised for strategically using the phrase “people who look like me.”
After George Zimmerman deemed Trayvon Martin a suspicious young man wearing a hoodie and fatally shot him in 2012, Obama didn’t point out that Martin was vulnerable to such violence because of racialized ways of seeing and stereotypes about young Black men wearing hoodies. Instead, he chose to acknowledge the power of family metaphors in American popular culture and noted that, if he had a son, he would “look like” Trayvon Martin.
When Harris became Vice-President-elect, we were similarly bombarded with articles about how she sent a message of hope to young women of colour who “looked like” her. Harris is also featured on the front cover of Leadership Looks Like Me, a colouring book containing affirmations meant to inspire children and adults alike.
A mural depicting Kamala Harris and Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, D.C. Getting individual people of colour into powerful positions should be a means to tackle structural inequalities, not a goal in and of itself. AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
For my book about the history of soulful resistance, I interviewed African Americans who participated in a civil rights movement or produced work that was deeply inspired by a 1960s protest ethic. Many noted their discomfort with the contemporary discourse of “people who look like me.”
Some associated it with an image-based and superficial culture. Others connected it to profiteers and schemers who appropriate collective struggles for personal or career advancement. All were convinced that getting individual people of colour into powerful positions was a means to tackle structural inequalities, not a goal in and of itself.
They were concerned that a smattering of new faces in slick, official forms of multiculturalism may distract or co-opt campaigns to challenge racial hierarchy and neo-colonialism wherever it may be in the world.
If we are to include the substantive contributions of African Americans in our discussion of an American soul, we cannot presume that this is limited to the mere inclusion of African Americans in a Biden cabinet that “looks like America.” After all, such visual diversity may divert people away from a Black political identity that is defined by mental attitude and consciousness rather than skin tone.
We may feel too fatigued to question who benefits from the discourse of “people who look like us.” But if we are to deepen and develop our understanding of the American soul, we can’t ignore the seriously soulful campaigns in the 1960s that talked about building solidarity with “people who feel like us” and participate in the struggle for freedom and justice with us. More

Donald Trump has departed Washington DC in greater legal jeopardy than when he arrived. Despite the president’s pronouncement that he possesses the “absolute right to PARDON” himself, he flinched. When Trump delivered scores of late-night pardons with just hours to go in the job, his name and those of his family members were not on the list, not even Ivanka.Instead, the former television reality show host stands to star in another drama of his own making, but this time as a possible criminal defendant. From New York to Atlanta – and parts in between – federal and state prosecutors may be lining up for their shot at the twice-impeached president.In case anyone forgot, the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York previously treated Trump aka “Individual-1” as un-indicted co-conspirator in Michael Cohen’s case. As a result, the confirmation hearings of Joe Biden’s pick for attorney general, Merrick Garland, will certainly be interesting.Already, prosecutors in Manhattan have the Orange Don and his crew in their cross-hairs. According to court filings and published reports, Cyrus Vance Jr, Manhattan’s district attorney, is investigating the truthfulness of the Trump Organization’s financial reporting and the company’s relationship with Deutsche Bank.It is not for nothing that Trump again appealed to the US supreme court to quash a subpoena issued to his accountants for eight years of tax returns. Trump previously lost a similar bid last summer.Back in July, Chief Justice John Roberts derailed Trump’s efforts to shroud his tax filings from Vance’s office. “No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding”, wrote Roberts. For good measure, Brett Kavanaugh, the infamous Trump appointee added: “In our system of government, as this court has often stated, no one is above the law.”There is little reason to believe that Trump’s latest gambit will be any more successful than what came before it, especially as he will no longer be president. A reminder, the same justices repeatedly rejected his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.When Trump lands in Mar-a-Lago just hours from now, his claims of immunity will be ready to wither. Justice department guidelines would no longer preclude the “sovereign district of New York” from re-examining Trump’s role in Cohen’s hush-money payments in the waning days of Trump’s 2016 run to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, and Karen McDougal, a Playboy model. Former presidents receive less prosecutorial deference.In addition, Trump’s recent bouts of wrath have given lawyers in Washington and Georgia plenty to ponder. Local authorities in the Peach state are weighing a criminal investigation into his failed efforts to browbeat Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, into submission. Trump telling Raffensperger to “find” 11,779 more votes and interfering with election certification may have been a step too far.And then there is the Trump-fomented insurrection. When Bill Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, lays the blame at his one-time boss’ feet, it is clear that the story is no longer simply about over-zealous House Democrats. Likewise, when Senator Mitch McConnell accuses the president of “feeding the mob lies” and provoking insurrection, conviction of Trump by the US senate is very much on the table.In a word, Trump’s problems aren’t disappearing. Two separate federal statutes and a law on DC’s books may have criminalized Trump’s exhortations to his devotees to “fight like hell” in the face of his loss, a reality acknowledged by Karl Racine, the District’s attorney general.To be sure, Trump is not the only person within his own orbit who remains at risk. Rudy Giuliani could have used a pardon but didn’t get one; his well-publicized pleas for a pardon have gone unmet. Instead, the man who was once called “America’s mayor” is now a punchline with really bad hair.Worse still for Giuliani, he may have legal exposure arising from his efforts in Ukraine. Giuliani now sits in the same boat as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, three men with uncertain futures.As always, there were winners. Steve Bannon, the mastermind of Trump’s 2016 upset victory, will no longer face pending felony charges in connection with a fundraising scheme. Apparently, the fact that Bannon subsequently called for the execution of Anthony Fauci did not deter Trump: Bannon was there for Trump when the president sought to upend the will of the people. To Trump, Bannon will always be “my Steve”.Another Trump beneficiary is Elliott Broidy, a former deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee – just like Michael Cohen. This past fall, Broidy pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges connected to foreign influence peddling. For good measure, Broidy aka David Dennison was party to a non-disclosure agreement with Shera Bechard, another Playboy model. In Trump World this appears to be a “thing”.Since his second impeachment, Trump has remained outside the public’s eye. Getting Trump staffers to attend their boss’s sendoff at Joint Base Andrews has been difficult. On the other hand, Trump’s swamp remained opened to the very end, a fitting close to the presidency from hell. More

Donald Trump said it had been his ‘greatest honour and privilege’ to have served as US president in a speech to supporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. ‘Goodbye, we love you, we’ll be back in some form,’ Trump said, before boarding Air Force One to the sound of the Village People’s ‘YMCA’. Trump is the first president in more than 150 years not to attend the inauguration ceremony of his successor.
Donald Trump leaves White House for the last time as president
Trump leaves White House a final time as president as Biden set to be sworn in More