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      Trump hush-money sentencing delayed until September – as it happened

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      Joe Biden has invited Democratic governors to meet with him on Wednesday, as he attempts to shore up support among his party’s leaders after his disastrous debate performance last week.The meeting with governors is likely to be mostly virtual, according to Associated Press, and marks the strongest indication yet that Biden is attempting to reassure those in his own party that he is capable of continuing his reelection campaign.Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
      The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case in New York postponed his sentencing to 18 September, agreeing to pause proceedings to weigh whether the supreme court’s recent ruling on immunity could imperil the conviction.
      The first congressional Democrat broke ranks and called on Joe Biden to withdraw his presidential candidacy following last week’s calamitous debate performance. Lloyd Doggett, a House member for Texas, became the first Democrat in the House of Representative to urge the president to step aside.
      Biden’s medical team said a cognitive test “is not warranted” and “not necessary”, the White House has said. The comments came after Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker, admitted that questions over whether Biden’s debate performance were “an episode” or “a condition” were legitimate.
      Biden has invited Democratic governors to meet with him on Wednesday, as he attempts to shore up support among his party’s leaders.
      Biden will sit down for his first TV interview since his debate performance. The interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos will air on Friday.
      The former New York City mayor and legal adviser to Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred in New York after a court found he repeatedly made false statements about Trump’s 2020 election loss.
      People who have spent time with Joe Biden over recent months have said that the 81-year-old president’s lapses appear to have grown “more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome”, according to a New York Times report.Several current and former officials have noticed that Biden has increasingly appeared “confused or listless”, with recent moments of disorientation generating concern among advisers and allies, the report said. According to the report:
      Last week’s debate prompted some around him to express concern that the decline had accelerated lately. Several advisers and current and former administration officials who see Mr. Biden regularly but not every day or week said they were stunned by his debate performance because it was the worst they had ever seen him.
      The Democratic congressional candidate for Colorado, Adam Frisch, has called on Joe Biden to step aside.Frisch, who is running for Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, said in a statement on Tuesday that neither Biden nor Donald Trump is “fit for office”.“We need a President that can unite America to realize our nation’s unlimited potential,” Frisch said, adding:
      We deserve better. President Biden should do what’s best for the country and withdraw from the race.
      Joe Biden’s medical team said a cognitive test “is not warranted” and “not necessary”, the White House has said, after the president’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump last week.The White House’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, in a briefing with reporters today, said Biden had a cold and a “hoarse voice” during the debate, as she admitted “it was a bad night”.Asked if there was any consideration given to releasing a more robust set of medical records, Jean-Pierre replied:
      We have been transparent. We have released thorough reports from his medical team every year since he’s been in office.
      Asked about former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comments earlier today in which she said both Biden and Trump should provide the public with test results regarding physical and mental health, the White House spokesperson said:
      His medical team have said it is not warranted. In this case, we have put forward a thorough, transparent annual report on his health. They have said that is not warranted. It is not necessary.
      Here’s a look at the announcement by judge Juan Merchan in which he postpones Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush-money case to 18 September, as shared by Law360’s Frank G. Runyeon.Merchan’s announcement comes after Manhattan prosecutors earlier today said they did not oppose a request by Trump’s lawyers to postpone his sentencing, originally set for 11 July.Trump’s lawyers asked to have the case re-evaluated, and the sentencing postponed, in light of the supreme court’s decision on Monday that conferred broad immunity on former presidents for official acts undertaken in office.Judges typically grant motions when they are unopposed. The postponement marks an unexpected setback for prosecutors and for the prospect of criminal accountability for Trump before the 2024 election, given that the other cases are indefinitely delayed.Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush-money case has been postponed to September after the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, agreed to consider the possible impact of Monday’s supreme court ruling on presidential immunity.Trump became the first US president to be criminally convicted last month when a Manhattan jury found him guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an illicit hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The sentencing had previously been set for 11 July.The postponement sets the sentencing for 18 September, well after the Republican National Convention, where Trump will formally to accept the party’s presidential nomination.Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker, has said that questions over Joe Biden’s ability to serve after his debate performance were “legitimate”.Pelosi, in an interview with MSNBC on Tuesday, backed Biden’s achievements and said the president “has a vision. He has knowledge. He has judgment. He has a strategic thinking and the rest.”But she conceded there was “mixed” feedback from Democratic donors about whether Biden was able to run for another term in office, adding that Donald Trump should be given the same scrutiny. She said:
      I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘is this an episode or is this a condition?’ And so when people ask that question, it’s legitimate, of both candidates.
      Julián Castro, the former housing secretary and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has suggested that Joe Biden should step aside, and that he believes there are stronger options out there for Democrats, including Kamala Harris.Castro, in an interview with MSNBC today, said:
      I believe that another Democrat would have a better shot at beating Trump and because, as Congressman Doggett said in his statement that it’s too risky to let Donald Trump walk into this in November, … I think the Democrats would do well to find a different candidate.
      Castro, who ran against Biden for the 2020 Democratic nomination, criticized Biden shortly after the president’s debate performance last week.“Tonight was completely predictable,” Castro told reporters after the debate. Biden “had a very low bar going into the debate and failed to clear even that”, he said, adding that the president had “seemed unprepared, lost, and not strong enough to parry effectively with Trump”.Joe Biden said in his remarks in Washington DC, moments ago that extreme weather is affecting everyone across the US “and beyond”.He noted the heat records that have been being “shattered” in the west and south-west in the early summer, in places such as Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada, and said that extreme heat is the primary weather-related killer in the US.He also mentioned deadly Hurricane Beryl that’s roaring across the Caribbean right now as the earliest category 5 hurricane on record to brew out of the Atlantic.“Ignoring climate change is deadly, dangerous and irresponsible,” he said.The US president spelled out further action his administration plans to take in five areas: federal safety standards for excessive heat in the workplace; greater resilience to withstand flooding; more funding for communities to take action to protect against extreme weather; an Environmental Protection Agency report to be prepared showing “the continued impacts of climate change on the health of the American people” and a White House summit later this summer on the issue of extreme heat.Joe Biden has just given a straightforward, short speech on weather and climate at an event in Washington, DC.It’s not a press conference or anything where, so far, there has been any scope for journalists to question the US president, he is at the city’s emergency operations center, with the DC mayor, Muriel Bowser.And he did not make any reference in his remarks to the political heat he’s getting after his feeble debate performance last week that only topped off months of concern about his advanced age and ability to campaign for and execute the job of president for a second term.Reading from a teleprompter and sounding assertive, though with the odd verbal stumble, Biden spelled out initiatives his administration is taking to deal with extreme weather in the US, especially heat and flooding, that is exacerbated by the human-driven climate crisis.And he criticized “my predecessor and the MAGA Republicans” for undermining action on climate change and planning to undo Biden’s actions if Donald Trump regains the White House this November.“They still deny climate change even exists – they must be living in a hold somewhere – at the expense of the safety of their constituents,” Biden said, adding: “It’s not only outrageous, it’s also willfully stupid…dumb.” More

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      Trump seeks to set aside hush-money verdict hours after immunity ruling

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      Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday asked the New York judge who presided over his hush-money trial to set aside his conviction and delay his sentencing, scheduled for later this month.The letter to Judge Juan M Merchan cited the US supreme court’s ruling earlier Monday and asked the judge to delay the former president’s sentencing while he weighs the high court’s decision and how it could influence the New York case, according to the letter obtained by the Associated Press.The lawyers argue that the supreme court’s decision confirmed a position the defense raised earlier in the case that prosecutors should have been precluded from introducing some evidence they said constituted official presidential acts, according to the letter.In prior court filings, Trump contended he is immune from prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office. His lawyers did not raise that as a defense in the hush-money case, but they argued that some evidence – including Trump’s social media posts about former lawyer Michael Cohen – comes from his time as president and should have been excluded from the trial because of immunity protections.The supreme court on Monday ruled for the first time that former presidents have broad immunity from prosecution, extending the delay in the Washington criminal case against Trump on charges he plotted to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss.Trump was convicted in New York of 34 counts of falsifying business records, arising from what prosecutors said was an attempt to cover up a hush-money payment just before the 2016 presidential election.Merchan instituted a policy in the run-up to the trial requiring both sides to send him a one-page letter summarizing their arguments before making longer court filings. He said he did that to better manage the docket, so he was not inundated with voluminous paperwork. More

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      Was Donald Trump, as president, a king? The US supreme court thinks so | Moira Donegan

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      Is the president a king? The US supreme court thinks so. On Monday, in its very last ruling of the term, the chief justice, John Roberts, writing for the court’s six conservatives, held in Trump v United States that Donald Trump has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for all acts that can be interpreted as part of the official course of his “core” duties, and “presumptive” immunity for all other official acts.The move dramatically extends executive authority, insulates past and future presidents from prosecution for illegal or even treasonous actions they carry out while in office and renders the former president largely criminally immune for his role in the January 6 insurrection.The court said that Trump cannot be charged for some of his “official” actions in the lead-up to the insurrection, including his attempts to pressure Mike Pence and his efforts to weaponize the justice department to force some states to reverse their election results. Much of Jack Smith’s criminal case against Trump has thereby been voided.What remains of the January 6 prosecution will now be remanded to a lower court, which will be tasked with determining what charges, if any, can proceed against Trump under the court’s new, unprecedented vision of executive immunity. That trial, if it ever happens, will not take place until long after this November’s elections, and will now likely not be able to address most of Trump’s efforts to assist in either the judicial or violent coup attempts.Richard Nixon’s status as a criminal and crook was once summarized by recounting his ominous declaration: “Well, when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” The court has now taken that vulgar absurdity and made it law.It is difficult to overstate the blow this decision will have to the integrity of our democratic system of government, or the depth of its insult to the principles of the separation of powers and the rule of law. In a ruling issued on stark partisan lines, the court’s conservatives elevated the president to a position that no person can hold in a republic: one with a sweeping entitlement to commit criminal acts for the sake of his own vulgar self-interest, without any fear of criminal legal repercussions. Criminal law no longer applies to the president; so long as he occupies the office, he exists in a permanent state of The Purge-like immunity, the ordinary rules of social and civic life suspended for him, able to use the trappings of power to flatter his vanity, reward his friends and punish his enemies as it suits him.This is one of the most consequential and frightening supreme court decisions of our lives. On the verge of an election in which Trump may well be restored to presidential power, the court has officially declared that he cannot be held accountable for abuses of that power in a criminal court.In its holding, the court’s majority made a flimsy distinction between the immunity they are granting to presidents for “core powers” and “official” acts – terms whose precise meanings they don’t define – and the criminal liability that Trump and other presidents still have for “unofficial” acts. But these distinctions are likely to collapse if any prosecutor, be it Smith or someone else, actually attempts to use them. That’s because the scope of the presidential office and its powers are so broad that its “core” powers are difficult to tell from its extraneous ones, and “official” and “unofficial” acts by the president are likely to prove ambiguous.The court also declares, needlessly, that conduct undertaken in the pursuit of “official” powers cannot be used in prosecutions of “unofficial” acts – another protection for presidential conduct that will hamstringing future prosecutions. The president, meanwhile, also retains the pardon power – meaning that he is entitled not only to commit crimes, but to secure impunity for his accomplices.In practice, Trump – and any subsequent president, should we ever get to have one – is now unaccountable to either legislative checks or criminal law. It is a development that has radically changed the nature of the office. The president is now less like a democratically accountable official than like a little emperor, endowed by the court with an all-encompassing right to wield power as he sees fit, much like the way that divine right used to bless the actions of kings. There is virtually nothing that he is not allowed to do.Preposterously, as if to mock the American public and their historical aspirations to freedom, the court claims that this new state of affairs was mandated by the framers – the very people who broke with their country and fought a war specifically so as to free themselves from this kind of unaccountable executive power.In her dissent, the justice Sonia Sotomayor listed some of the things that the president can now do without consequence, according to the majority. “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune,” she writes. “Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Take a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune … The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a kind above the law.”Sotomayor’s dissent is among the most alarmed and mournful pieces of legal writing I have ever read. She concludes it: “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”There will be people who try to tell you that this ruling is not so bad. They will decry the “bed-wetting caucus”, or smugly declare themselves above “hysteria”. They will point to the majority’s evident concessions, to the president’s supposed liability for “unofficial” conduct – as if these false and pretextual possibility of accountability is anything like the real thing. It isn’t; don’t believe them. This decision is a seismic revision of the constitutional order, issued by a court packed with extremist Republicans who are anticipating a Trump victory in November.They know, as well as we do, that Trump aspires to usher in an era of corruption and autocracy. Today’s decision is an invitation for him to do just that.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Immunity ruling likely to gut parts of criminal prosecution against Trump

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      The US supreme court’s decision on Monday to confer broad immunity to former presidents is likely to eviscerate numerous parts of the criminal prosecution against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The court remanded the case back to the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan to apply a three-part test to decide which actions were protected – but Chief Justice John Roberts pre-emptively made clear that some were definitively out.On some of the closer calls, Roberts also gave suggestions on behalf of the majority conservative opinion, which could bear on Chutkan when she eventually weighs each allegation line by line and decides whether it can be introduced in any future trial.Most crucially for the special counsel, Jack Smith, his prosecutors will not be able to introduce as evidence any acts deemed to be official and struck from the case, even as contextual information for jurors to show Trump’s intent.Trump is accused of overseeing a sprawling effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election, including two counts of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election results, conspiring to defraud the government, and conspiring to disenfranchise voters.The alleged illegal conduct came in five categories: Trump pressuring US justice department officials to open sham investigations into election fraud, Trump pressing his vice-president to return him to the White House, Trump trying to obstruct Congress from certifying the election, Trump giving a speech that led rioters to storm the US Capitol building, and Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors .Roberts undercut at least three of the five alleged categories in the opinion.Trump’s interactions with justice department officials, including his threats to fire the then attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and the then acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, were absolutely immune because overseeing the department was a core function, Roberts found.As for Trump’s interactions with Pence, including pressuring him to reject electoral votes for Joe Biden in Congress on January 6, were presumptively immune because presidential discussions about vice-presidential responsibility were part of the job.The remaining allegations, about Trump’s other attempts to obstruct Congress’s certification, Trump’s speech that led rioters to storm the US Capitol building, and his efforts to organize fake slates of electors in part by spreading false claims, were left up to Chutkan.View image in fullscreenBut even then, Roberts weighed in on a key conspiracy charge against Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding before Congress.In the first footnote in the majority opinion, Roberts instructed Chutkan to apply the supreme court’s determination in a previous, related ruling about the applicability of the obstruction statute when prosecuting January 6-related crimes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling in Fischer v United States, handed down last week, held that the obstruction statute could only be used to prosecute crimes that impaired the integrity or the availability of documents.The footnote appeared to be a clear warning to Chutkan that she could not use Trump calling up Republican members of Congress on January 6 and pressuring them to continue delaying the certification of the election results after the Capitol riot temporarily halted proceedings.After all is said and done, prosecutors may be left with only Trump’s plot to recruit fake electors – which is in many ways a circumstantial case about the extent of his personal knowledge – Trump’s speech on January 6, and some private conversations.The biggest blow to prosecutors may be the inability to present any of the official acts at trial, but the reasoning for it was not revolutionary.In many ways, the new rule set by the supreme court that precluded evidence cannot be brought at trial, mirrored how federal courts apply other privilege protections, such as the so-called speech and debate clause that makes acts by members of Congress done in an official capacity immune from prosecution.Under the speech and debate clause, protected communications do not come into contextual evidence because they are litigated out during the criminal investigation stage on a line-by-line basis. They are never even presented to a grand jury when it considers indicting a defendant. More

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      New York judge partially lifts Trump’s gag order in hush-money case

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      The New York judge who presided over Donald Trump’s hush-money trial has partially lifted a gag order that has been hanging over the former president since he was convicted of the accounting fraud charges last month.Under the revised order by Judge Juan Merchan, Trump is now free to criticize trial witnesses, which includes Stormy Daniels and his former lawyer Michael Cohen, but must maintain restrictions on his comments about individual prosecutors and others involved in the case.Trump’s lawyers argued in court motions that the broad gag order stifled his campaign speech, and could limit his ability to respond to Joe Biden when the two meet in the first presidential debate of 2024 on Thursday.They also argued Trump’s political opponents were using the restrictions as a “political sword” and that Trump was unable to respond to public attacks from Cohen and Daniels.The office of Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said limits imposed on Trump’s speech about witnesses were no longer needed, but they had urged Merchan to keep restrictions on Trump’s comments about jurors, court staff and individual prosecutors “at least through the sentencing hearing and the resolution of any post-trial motions”.The gag order, in its totality, will be terminated after “the imposition of sentence”.Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement on Tuesday that the order “leaves in place portions of the unconstitutional Gag Order, preventing President Trump from speaking freely about Merchan’s disqualifying conflicts and the overwhelming evidence exposing this whole Crooked Joe Biden–directed Witch Hunt,” according to NBC News.Cheung added it was “another unlawful decision by a highly conflicted judge, which is blatantly un-American as it gags President Trump” and vowed to appeal it.Merchan issued Trump’s gag order on 26 March, a few weeks before the start of the trial and later expanded it to prevent comments about his own family, including his daughter, who Trump had identified as a “part of the Democrat machine”.After his conviction, Trump continued to test the judge’s ruling, saying he was under a “nasty gag order” and indirectly calling Cohen, his former fixer, “a sleaze-bag”.Trump plans to appeal is conviction and denies having an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Daniels. Sentencing is scheduled for 11 July, days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on 15 July to formalize his nomination as the party’s presidential candidate.Last week, an appeals court in New York declined to hear Trump’s appeal against the gag order in the case, asserting that “no substantial constitutional question is directly involved”.Trump’s lawyers had argued that the gag order restricted Trump’s “core political speech on matters of central importance at the height of his presidential campaign … and thus it violates the fundamental right of every American voter to hear from … [a] candidate for president on matters of enormous public importance”.New York prosecutors opposed the appeal, urging the court to dismiss it, and cited Trump’s “well-documented history of leveling threatening, inflammatory and denigrating remarks against trial participants”.Merchan imposed the gag order before the trial began in April, finding that Trump’s history of threatening statements posed a threat to the proceedings. Trump was later fined $10,000 for 10 violations of the order and threatened with incarceration if he continued. More

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      Mar-a-Lago search warrant was properly granted, says Trump documents judge

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      The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal case for retaining classified documents suggested she would deny his attempt to exclude the documents the FBI seized at the Mar-a-Lago club, saying at a hearing Tuesday that the warrant for the search was properly granted.The former president’s lawyers had contended the warrant was unconstitutionally vague and the FBI affidavit, used to convince the magistrate judge to find there was probable cause for a crime at the club, contained contextual omissions.But the US district judge Aileen Cannon suggested she considered the warrant was sufficiently specific about what items FBI agents could seize at Mar-a-Lago, and told Trump’s lawyers the omissions would have made no difference on whether there was probable cause.The attempt by Trump to suppress the Mar-a-Lago evidence came through a request for a Franks hearing, where a judge applies a four-part test to decide whether false or misleading statements in the affidavit meant the evidence obtained through that search needed to be suppressed.Even before Cannon, who has shown a proclivity for ruling in his favor on motions about evidence, Trump’s request was ambitious because the legal threshold to get a Franks hearing is onerous. Trump needed to make a “substantial preliminary showing” that the affidavit had parts that were recklessly false.The evidence Trump’s lawyers presented was limited to complaints that the FBI agent omitted the fact that some top FBI officials preferred a consensual search of Mar-a-Lago, the FBI tying the need for a warrant to the National Archives, and Trump did not need a security clearance as president.Cannon suggested she found those omissions unavailing. “Why would it have changed the magistrate judge’s determination of probable cause” if the omissions had actually been included, Cannon asked Emil Bove, who argued on behalf of Trump.Trump’s lawyers also complained that the warrant itself was too broad, arguing for instance that the warrant allowed FBI agents to seize any documents that fell under the Espionage Act and the Presidential Records Act, without defining the technical terms in the statutes.That meant the agents were making unilateral on-the-fly decisions about whether they could seize a particular document, Trump’s lawyers said, suggesting that the warrant should have outlined what “national defense information” meant under the Espionage Act.But Cannon appeared similarly unconvinced by that argument. “It just seems like you’re making policy arguments. It seems far afield from whether the affidavit reached the probable cause standard. I’m unclear what you think should have been included” in the warrant, Cannon told Bove.The hearing came after a morning session where Trump’s lawyers asked the judge, behind closed doors, to revoke prosecutors’ access to transcripts of voice memos made by Trump’s ex-lawyer Evan Corcoran, which constitute key evidence in the obstruction of justice part of the documents case.The Guardian first reported last week that Trump’s lawyers would ask the judge to exclude the memos, arguing they should not have been given to prosecutors on the crime-fraud exception, which allows prosecutors to see privileged communications if legal advice is used in furtherance of a crime.The sweeping request could have far-reaching consequences since the memos – with, for example, Trump asking whether they could ignore the subpoena, or a later suggestion to “pluck” out some classified documents instead of returning them to the FBI – are the strongest evidence of Trump’s obstructive intent.Even if the judge excludes only some of the passages, it could dramatically undercut the strength of the obstruction case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the worst case for prosecutors, their evidence of Trump’s obstructive intent could be reduced to CCTV footage of boxes being moved at Mar-a-Lago by his co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, logs of Trump’s calls with Nauta, and testimony about Nauta’s movements.The obstruction charges center on Trump’s incomplete compliance with an 11 May 2022 grand jury subpoena that demanded the return of any classified documents in his possession, months before the FBI seized 101 classified documents when it searched Mar-a-Lago.The Corcoran memos – the contents of which were first reported by the Guardian last year – have played a major role in bolstering the charge that Trump conspired with Nauta and De Oliveira to play a “shell game” in hiding boxes of classified documents so Corcoran could not ensure their return.The indictment quoted the memos as saying Trump responded: “Well, what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” and “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and “Well, look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”After Corcoran found 38 classified documents in the storage room, his memos recount Trump asking him, “Did you find anything? …… Is it bad? Good?”, and made a sort of plucking motion, suggesting “if there’s anything really bad in there, like, pluck it out”.Trump’s lawyers were expected to argue that the chief judge in Washington was overly broad in turning over more than 60 pages of memos, and that the instances of Trump asking whether he needed to comply with the subpoena are questions that every defendant asks to understand the full scope of their obligations.Trump’s lawyers were also expected to argue that none of the commentary – about Trump asking whether they needed to comply with the subpoena, or the plucking motion – satisfied the crime-fraud exception because it did not amount to Trump using Corcoran’s legal advice for a crime. More

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      Trump mocked for claiming he was ‘tortured’ in Georgia mugshot arrest

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      Donald Trump has been met with a chorus of online mockery after claiming that he was “tortured” while being processed at the Fulton county jail in Georgia last August, an occasion that generated the mugshot that he has since turned into a money-making device as he campaigns for a second presidency.The outlandish and unsubstantiated claim came in a fundraising email and drew at least one unflattering comparison with one of the former president’s political nemeses: John McCain, the former Republican senator for Arizona whose real experience of torture and incarceration during the Vietnam war was a target for Trump’s mockery.“I want you to remember what they did to me. They tortured me in the Fulton County Jail, and TOOK MY MUGSHOT,” Trump wrote in an email promoting coffee cups with his mugshot emblazoned on them.“So guess what? I put it on a mug for the WHOLE WORLD TO SEE!”Trump’s jail experience resulted from his criminal indictment, on which he now faces 13 charges, over allegations that he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia, one of the key states he lost in his defeat to Joe Biden.That case is separate from the criminal prosecution in New York, which recently led to Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies stemming from hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who alleged an adulterous affair with him.After arriving in a presidential-style motorcade in Georgia, he was booked, fingerprinted and photographed for a mugshot in a process that took about 20 minutes. No allegations of torture or mistreatment surfaced at the time – but Trump’s supporters have perceived the resulting photo to be a mark of pride that has been stamped on campaign merchandise.Alleging torture prompted a social media comparison with McCain, who Trump repeatedly ridiculed for being unable to raise his arms after having them broken under torture.“Trump is claiming he was ‘tortured’ while getting his mug shot taken at the Fulton County jail,” one post on X read. “John McCain knew all about REAL TORTURE, unlike Trump who has NO IDEA what ‘TORTURE’ is or he would have REQUIRED Hospitalization.”Trump, who earned a medical draft deferment from the Vietnam war because of heel spurs, openly disdained McCain’s war record and prisoner of war status when he successfully campaigned for the White House in the 2016 election, saying: “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”Others ridiculed his torture claim in more general terms. “What does Trump mean by this,” another X user posted. “Like they inconvenienced/annoyed him or that they did something painful/harmful like pulling his fingernails out? I highly doubt the Secret Service allowed Atlanta PD to truly torture Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother X user posted: “Trump thinks torture includes photographs and fingerprinting. Was he strip-searched? How many criminals are laughing at him?”Another user wrote: “Cry baby Trump now claims that he was tortured when they took his mug shot. Truth is he tortured us with that mug.”It is not the first time Trump has invoked political prisoner imagery while facing multiple felony charges. He has compared himself to Alexei Navalny, the late jailed Russian opposition leader and critic of Vladimir Putin, who died mysteriously in a Siberian penal colony in February.Trump has also used the term “hostages” to describe his supporters who were jailed for their part in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol in an effort to overturn Biden’s victory in the presidential election weeks earlier. More