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      in Elections

      Republican Arizona official who said 2020 election was not stolen loses primary

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      The top election official in Arizona’s Maricopa county, who became nationally known for defending the 2020 election results from false claims by Donald Trump and others of fraud, has lost his seat in the Republican primary to a challenger who questioned those 2020 results.In his campaign, Stephen Richer reaffirmed in a primary debate with his Republican opponents that neither the 2020 nor 2022 elections were stolen. His opponents continued questioned the results, with one partly blaming Mark Zuckerberg, claiming the Facebook founder “dropped in illegal drop boxes” to sway the elections.State representative Justin Heap, another challenger, claimed election rules were not followed, though he avoided taking a direct stance on whether he thought the elections were stolen.On Wednesday it was announced that Heap had won the election with more than 40% of the vote, after 81% of ballots had been counted. Richer trailed by 6.5%.Heap is a first-term state representative who sought the votes of Maga supporters, despite deleting 2023 posts on social media claiming he is not one himself. He has, however, claimed he proudly voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and would do so again. His candidacy was supported by the far-right Freedom caucus.He has also aligned himself with the Senate candidate Kari Lake, a favorite of Trump who has also repeatedly claimed election fraud despite no evidence, and falsely accused Richer of having a role in it. Richer has sued Lake for defamation.Richer took office in 2021 after defeating a Democrat incumbent.“Nobody stole Maricopa county’s election. Elections in Maricopa county aren’t rigged,” Richer wrote in a 2021 open letter to Arizona Republicans. “The truth is that the case isn’t there. I spent November and December willing to wait for a meritorious lawsuit, a scientific claim or convincing data. But it never came because it didn’t exist.”He received death threats for denying the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and that the 2022 election was stolen from Lake. One county party official stated that he would “lynch” Richer, and a Missouri man faced federal charges for threatening to kill him in 2022.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs recorder of Maricopa county, the most populous county in Arizona, Richer ran voter registration and early voting efforts.Heap will now run against Democrat Tim Stringham, an attorney, in the 5 November general election. More

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      in US Politics

      Dar Leaf, Michigan’s ‘constitutional’ pro-militia sheriff, vies for re-election

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      This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and the Guardian.On a sunny afternoon in July, a crowd of roughly 100 gathered to listen to their local sheriff campaign for re-election in south-western Michigan. A self-described “constitutional sheriff” with longstanding ties to militia groups, Dar Leaf has made a national name for himself in far-right circles with his fruitless investigation to uncover evidence for Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen.But that wasn’t what he wanted to discuss at his rally. Having come under intense scrutiny in the last three years for his election investigation and militia affiliations, Leaf spoke to his supporters about his office’s more mundane work – upgraded vehicles and new training – and urged them to ignore the attacks he’s faced.“Our eyes are forward, that’s why God put ’em in front of our head,” he said to laughter and applause. “We’ve got to keep moving towards that finish line.”Still, it’s his relentless effort to uncover voter fraud and his associations with far-right groups that have come to define him as he seeks to defeat three rivals in next week’s Republican primary.Taking up Trump’s unfounded grievances, Leaf sent deputies to interrogate local election officials and tried to seize voting machines, which he claimed flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden. His activities fit in a broader network of far-right sheriffs who responded to Trump’s lies by wanting to police elections, and who may soon double down if the former president challenges the results of November’s elections.Leaf’s skepticism about elections and convictions about the excesses of the federal government fit in comfortably in Barry county, a deeply red and rural county just north of Kalamazoo that voted for Trump over Biden in 2020 by a two to-one margin.But locally, some Republicans want to turn the page. Two of his intra-party challengers in the 6 August primary have highlighted his investigation into the 2020 election as a key point of contrast.“The sheriff has propagated these lies,” says Joel Ibbotson, one of his three opponents. “I’m sick of that. I want it to end.”A years-long investigationWhen Trump falsely alleged a Democratic party plot to steal the 2020 election through widespread voter fraud, he found a sympathetic audience in Barry county and its sheriff.With the guidance of Stefanie Lambert, an election-denying lawyer who now faces felony charges for allegedly improperly breaching Michigan voting machines, Leaf launched an investigation into how the election unfolded in his county. He sent deputies to question local elections clerks, who saw his hunt as a form of intimidation. He repeatedly requested authorization to seize voting machines, but was denied by federal and state courts.Throughout the investigation, Leaf presented no evidence of irregularities, let alone of a plot to steal the election. He maintains that the investigation is ongoing, and said that he couldn’t elaborate on its status.Scott Price, a local pastor who supports Leaf’s re-election campaign, said Leaf was giving voice to widespread concerns about election integrity. “We’re grateful that we have somebody that has the courage and literally is willing to stand and take the heat for something that other people are saying didn’t even happen,” said Price.But some within Leaf’s own party resisted the investigation.Julie Nakfoor Pratt, the county’s Republican prosecutor, rejected Leaf’s inquiry into the 2020 election and denounced it as a waste of resources. In a lengthy statement before the county board of supervisors on 25 October 2022, Nakfoor Pratt explained why she could not act on Leaf’s allegations, pointing to the importance of probable cause and exhaustive detective work in prosecuting cases. She recounted her office’s investigation into a grisly homicide case as an example of the kind of rigor necessary in investigative policing.Without evidence, she said, a case couldn’t be prosecuted. “I will not put my signature on something if it’s not there,” said Nakfoor Pratt.When his office approached her with a search warrant for voting equipment, “there was no probable cause,” Nakfoor Pratt said. “It wasn’t insufficient: there was none.”View image in fullscreenEarlier this year, Lambert, the lawyer, shared troves of private documents that she claimed were signs of a conspiracy with Leaf. She had obtained them during discovery while representing Patrick Byrne, a Trump ally, in a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which some conservatives have falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election. The documents show Serbian Dominion employees troubleshooting technical questions, but in a letter to US representative Jim Jordan, Leaf wrote that they revealed something more nefarious.“Serbian employees planned and conspired with premeditation to delete United States election data,” wrote Leaf, echoing a similar claim that Lambert made on the social media platform X.A constitutional sheriffSince long before the 2020 election, Leaf has been involved with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), an ultraconservative group that promotes the belief that sheriffs have the ultimate authority to interpret and enforce the constitution within their county. This philosophy came into focus for him during the Covid-19 pandemic when, angered by lockdown orders intended to mitigate the spread of the virus, Leaf refused to enforce social distancing rules.In an interview, Leaf said he first learned about the constitutional sheriffs in 2010, when Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff and the founder of CSPOA, reached out.“I think they were just calling sheriffs up, especially new sheriffs,” said Leaf, who was intrigued enough by their movement to attend a conference in Las Vegas. What he heard there, he said, “was a big wake-up call”.Most important, Leaf said, was what he learned about Printz v United States, a supreme court case brought by Mack and Jay Printz, a Montana sheriff who argued that a provision of a federal gun violence prevention bill that required law enforcement agencies to conduct background checks was unconstitutional. They won; the supreme court ruled that the federal government could not compel state agencies to enact such a measure.“The case proved that local officials have the right, the power and the duty to stand against the far reaching inclusions by our own Federal Government,” Mack later wrote in his book.The ideas behind the constitutional sheriffs movement are shared by a startling number of sheriffs.Still, actual membership in CSPOA appears low. One study, produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, identified 69 sheriffs who publicly endorsed the CSPOA or claimed membership in the organization. A national CSPOA conference in Las Vegas this year drew about 100 attendees, among them January 6 defendants, conspiracy theorists and rightwing influencers – but few actual sheriffs.Leaf was in Vegas, though, telling attendees excitedly: “I’m getting goose-bumpy here.”‘You can’t get away from his name’Since assuming the office of sheriff two decades ago, Leaf has developed a passionate following in Barry county.“Dar is the most well-known person in the community,” said Barry county resident Olivia Bennett, who described Leaf as a family friend. “You just can’t get away from his name.” Bennett’s father served in Leaf’s “posse”, a word Leaf uses to describe a group of citizens who don’t work for the sheriff’s office but assist him in his duties.“My dad would come home and say different things, like, ‘If terrorists come, they’re going to come from these small towns first,’ and I just thought it was stuff my dad said,” Bennett said. “When later, I heard Dar speaking about it, I realized, ‘Oh no, my dad got these beliefs from Dar himself.’“Dar really does make people feel scared and make it sound like he’s the only one who can really protect you,” Bennett added.Leaf has long flexed his beliefs that sheriffs are guardians of order. “We’re not here to intimidate people,” he told local media in 2014. “This is still a badge, it’s not a swastika. We have to prepare for the worst. We have to prepare for things you don’t like talking about.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince joining the CSPOA, Leaf has strived to introduce his community to the group’s lofty ideas about sheriffs’ unique role in upholding the constitution. Leaf hosts bi-monthly study groups focusing on Christian faith and common law and leads a course on militias, titled Awaken the Sleeping Militia Clause, promising attenders willing to pay the $175 entry fee that they’ll “learn a militiaman’s duty” and earn a certificate of completion.In one meeting, whose recording Bolts and the Guardian reviewed, Leaf expounds on Michigan’s new red flag law, which allows police to take firearms away from individuals who a judge has determined pose a threat to themselves or others. He describes it as illegitimate, implying that he had the authority to make that determination within his county.“No, my people did not consent to that,” said Leaf. “It’s a jurisdictional thing.”View image in fullscreenDuring a separate meeting this spring, Leaf updated members on the CSPOA’s April conference in Las Vegas. He said he was especially pleased to hear from Richard Fleming, a doctor who pleaded guilty in 2009 to felony charges of mail and healthcare fraud and has made a name of himself since then as a proponent of the unsubstantiated theory that Covid-19 was created as a bioweapon.Fleming’s claims, Leaf said, “are pretty much being ignored by the cabal that’s trying to take over the world”.Lockdowns and militiasAs Covid-19 spread across the country in March 2020, Leaf vowed to strike back against stay-at-home orders that he viewed as an example of governmental overreach.During that period, Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor, briefly prohibited the use of motor boats, permitting only kayaking and canoeing as a form of outdoor recreation. The order, which Whitmer later walked back, infuriated many residents of Barry county.Leaf said he would not enforce the order. “The sheriff came out and said, ‘I don’t care if your boat has a motor on it or not. If you’re getting in a heated argument with your wife, go on the lake and go fishing, if that’s what it takes to cool off,’” said Ibbotson, who used to be an outspoken supporter of the sheriff and is now running as one of his primary challengers.Leaf took part in a rally against Michigan’s stay-at-home orders, and called them tantamount to an “unlawful arrest”. Also at the event were members of a militia called the Wolverine Watchmen, a group that was later implicated in a plot to kidnap Whitmer.When William and Michael Null, two brothers from Barry county who attended the event, were accused of taking part in the kidnapping plot, Leaf defended them. The group, he suggested, could have been planning to “arrest” the governor. “In Michigan, if it’s a felony, you can make a felony arrest,” he told a local news outlet. The Null brothers were later acquitted, during a trial that showcased how deeply involved FBI informants and agents had been in pushing the militia members’ rhetoric toward a kidnapping plot.When asked about the controversy and about concerns that he might be too closely connected to militias, Leaf smiled and looked a little bewildered.“Of course,” Leaf said. “There should be militias connected with every sheriff.”Pushback from RepublicansLeaf’s growing embrace of far-right politics has ruffled residents, including some of his former supporters.“When he had mentioned that the Null brothers were perhaps just trying to do a citizen’s arrest on the governor, that was the final straw for me,” said Ibbotson, who decided to challenge him in the Republican primary.Ibbotson, who owns a logistics company, said he wanted the office to drop the election issue. Election administration, he said, should be in the hands of the county and township clerks.“My goal through this, even if I lose, is to make it unpopular to talk about election integrity, in the sense that the sheriff has propagated these lies,” said Ibbotson. “I’m sick of that. I want it to end.” Ibbotson says he has hired formerly incarcerated drivers to work in his business in hopes of reducing recidivism.Leaf’s second challenger, Richelle Spencer, is a sergeant in the Barry county sheriff’s office, who has worked as a narcotics detective and in the K9 unit, says she decided to run for sheriff despite her aversion to politics. She said that the unending election investigation and Leaf’s involvement in the CSPOA has sowed divisions.“Everybody is ready for something different in the sheriff’s office – we’re ready for some stability, I can tell you that,” said Spencer.“He goes away and does these speaking engagements and when he’s doing that, he’s not available to us,” she added, “and he’s not aware of what’s going on in his own community.”Leaf’s third challenger, Mark Noteboom, a deputy in the sheriff’s office, has had a direct hand in Leaf’s investigation. Noteboom declined to share specifics about the investigation, but told Bolts and the Guardian that he felt “the clerks in Barry county did absolutely nothing wrong. They did everything they were supposed to do, and they did it the right way.” Noteboom added that as sheriff he would focus on improving conditions in the county jail and other local issues.“You’re the sheriff of Barry county, not the sheriff of the United States,” he added.At the CSPOA event in March, Leaf addressed the gathering on the topic of his investigation in Barry county and the status of election integrity nationwide. His police work, Leaf said, had been hampered by Dana Nessel, attorney general of Michigan and a Democrat who has been investigating Lambert and others for allegedly improperly seizing and tampering with voting machines. Deputies in his office didn’t want to touch the case.“That was the first major stumbling block,” said Leaf. Local crime had also pulled him away from the investigation. “We had a missing person and we took quite a while, a lot of manpower, to go find. I had to put my light-duty deputy off to go find this missing person.”There were so many leads, the investigation had become so expansive, and the end wasn’t even in sight more than two years after Leaf initiated the investigation. Still, he said, he had not given up. It was on him and other sympathetic minds to keep up with the search.“Keep chuggin’,” he advised the room. “Keep charging the castle!” More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden is politicizing US supreme court reform – and that’s a good thing | Austin Sarat

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      “Better late than never” is a useful maxim in all of life and in politics as well. On Monday, Joe Biden caught the “better late than never” bug when he unveiled a series of proposals to reform the US supreme court.Those proposals come more than two and a half years after the US president’s presidential commission on the supreme court issued its recommendations, and more than 40 years after Biden called former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to impose term limits on the court “boneheaded”.In 2020, during his quest for the White House, Biden again distanced himself from people who were pushing for significant institutional reform at the court.How times have changed. That was before the court overruled Roe v Wade, the ethics scandals of justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas came to light, and before the court gave the president almost blanket immunity from criminal prosecution.Biden announced his new thinking in a Washington Post op-ed, in which he detailed what he called “three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy”. They begin with a constitutional amendment designed to reverse the supreme court’s Trump v United States decision granting presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts.Biden calls it the “No One Is Above the Law Amendment”. It would “make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office”.The second of Biden’s reform proposals would impose term limits on the justices who sit on the supreme court. It would institute “a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court”.Third, Biden called for enacting “a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court”. Justices, Biden wrote, “should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest”.While each of these proposals is a wise response to the current crisis of the supreme court, none of them has any chance of being enacted in the near future. Still, Biden has done a service by going public with these ideas and politicizing the court reform question.His op-ed and speech on court reform at an event commemorating the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act will help ensure that supreme court reform is a live issue during the remainder of the 2024 presidential campaign.The first of Biden’s proposals, the call for a constitutional amendment, is the most important but also the most difficult to achieve among his three ideas. Like earlier versions of the same idea, it offers an important vehicle for engaging the public in resisting yet another exercise of judicial supremacy by our increasingly rogue supreme court.America has a long history of using the amendment process to reverse repugnant supreme court decisions, like Trump v United States. But as Harvard Law’s Jill Lepore notes, over the long arc of American history, amending the constitution has “become a lost art”.In fact, Lepore noted elsewhere: “The US Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971.”However, by supporting an amendment to reverse Trump v United States, Biden has teed up a winning issue for Kamala Harris. Polls show that 65% of Americans do not think presidents should have immunity for actions taken in office.Among independent voters, that number is 68%.Even larger majorities support 18-year term limits for supreme court justices. As the Biden commission noted: “Up until the late 1960s, the average term of service was 15 years. It has now risen to roughly 26 years, and a number of Justices have served three or more decades, spanning numerous election cycles and presidential administrations.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis may be why a Fox News Poll conducted earlier this month found that 78% of the respondents favor that idea. That is up from 66% in 2022.While term limits are popular, it is unclear whether Congress could impose them by ordinary legislation or whether this proposal would also require a constitutional amendment. Even Biden’s supreme court commission was divided on that question.As an article in Forbes explains: “Article III of the Constitution states judges ‘shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,’ which has been interpreted to mean justices have to hold lifetime appointments. The commission said Congress could get around the issue by having only the most recent justices hear most cases, which originate in lower courts, while still keeping the older ones on to hear cases that originate in the Supreme Court.”“That strategy … would create the ‘effective equivalent’ of term limits without actually violating Article III by kicking justices off the court.”What is clear is that Donald Trump is on the wrong side of the supreme court term limits idea. Earlier this month, the former president branded court reform proposals such as term limits “illegal” and “unconstitutional”.“The Democrats are attempting to interfere in the Presidential Election, and destroy our Justice System, by attacking their Political Opponent, ME, and our Honorable Supreme Court,” he posted on Truth Social. “We have to fight for our Fair and Independent Courts, and protect our Country.”Trump is even out of step with his supporters on the idea of term limits for justices. Newsweek says: “Among those who voted for Trump in 2020, 54% supported term limits, while 20% opposed them.”Finally, a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted last September showed that “three-in-four voters want the justices bound to an ethics code, the most popular reform proposal in the survey”. This figure reflects what Politico calls “a bipartisan consensus of 81% of Democrats, 72% of Republicans, and 69% of independents”.Here, too, Maga world is on the wrong side politically, as well as on the wrong side of history. Just last month, as NBC News reported, Senate Republicans “blocked a Democratic-sponsored bill that would have required Supreme Court justices to adopt a binding code of conduct”.In the end, no matter how Biden’s proposals play out in the presidential contest, by politicizing the issue, by going public with them in a high-profile manner, the president has offered the people of the United States a chance to make their voices heard about the kind of supreme court they want. It is now up to all of us to take him up on that offer and use our votes to weigh in on this most important question.

      Austin Sarat is a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College and the author of Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump sure makes a lot of ‘jokes’ about ruling as a dictator, doesn’t he? | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Last Friday, Donald Trump told an audience of Christian conservatives to “get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”Selling the idea to US citizens that their next vote will be their last one just doesn’t seem like a winning proposition to me, but what do I know? I’m not running to be elected dictator on day one of my second presidency.That campaign pledge is of course what the former president told Sean Hannity last December. Hannity posed a question to Trump, who weeks earlier had called his political opponents “vermin”. “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked.“Except for day one,” Trump responded. “I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”Democrats rang all the alarm bells then, as they are ringing them now, responsibly warning us of our impending authoritarian future under Trump. And Trump’s supporters? They just thought he was kidding. “Of course he’s joking,” one attendee who’s been to more than a dozen Trump events told the Washington Post last December. “You can’t be a dictator with a constitutional republic.”Whether this attendee is right isn’t the point. The issue is how one side hears jackboots marching just over the hill, ready to trample on our democracy. And the other side hears only guffaws.And this disconnect continues, day by day, week by week, month by month. After Trump’s comments on Friday, the prominent Democrat and California representative Adam Schiff stated: “Democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism.” Meanwhile, on CNN’s State of the Union, Senator Tom Cotton dismissed any worry about Trump’s call to end voting by 2028 by saying that Trump was “obviously making a joke”.I don’t find Trump’s jokes funny, but what’s really missing from this conversation is how much Trump’s so-called sense of humor draws from the information strategies of the contemporary far right, and how much the Democrats end up playing right into his hands.There was a time when satire and irony belonged primarily to the left. From Jonathan Swift to Jon Stewart, humor was the knife to cut deepest into the excesses of political authority. There is thankfully still some residual humor on the left today – John Oliver comes to mind – but, as a political party, the Democrats could learn a thing or two about comic timing. (Their timing for stepping down from high office, admittedly, is sublime.) Eschewing political humor, Democrats seem comfortable opting for a moralizing politics, which truth be told can be as politically off-putting as it is well-meaning.Today’s right wing, on the other hand, “weaponizes irony to attract and radicalize potential supporters”, according to media studies scholar Viveca Greene. She argues that today’s far right uses irony and humor “to challenge progressive ideologies and institutions”, and in so doing, the right is able “to create a toxic counter public”.Greene is mostly concerned with the alt-right – that is to say, the more extreme elements of the right wing – but Trump’s signature contribution to this discourse is to mainstream alt-right communication strategies on to a national stage. And a kind of plausible deniability plays an enormous role in this rhetorical ecosystem.Did Trump just call for democracy to end in the next election cycle? Oh, come on. He’s just being funny! (But yes, he did.) Did Trump guarantee to root out the “radical left thugs” that “live like vermin” in our country? That’s hilarious! (He said he will.) Did Trump promise that he will be president for three terms? Stop! My sides are aching! (You bet he did.) Will Trump “terminate” the US constitution if he’s elected? So funny! It’s like he’s saying: “You’re fired!” to a piece of paper! (It’s on the record.)And with every rightwing excess and with each lousy joke, often at the expense of politically marginal populations (such as Muslims and immigrants), the Democrats predictably recoil in public and performative horror. Yet by doing so they only add to their perceived unfunny “wokeness” and provide more material for the political comedian who will next seek to legislate our very laughter at his own pathetic humor, as if a monstrous dad joke just became our Dear Leader.Wouldn’t it be smarter to draw attention to Trump’s ridiculousness rather than his threats? Isn’t there some cliche out there about choosing honey over vinegar? Can the Democrats rediscover the extraordinary political power of satire before it’s too late? The demands on humor on a national stage have never been greater, and that’s no laughing matter.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Atlanta rally: Harris tells Trump to ‘say it to my face’ and challenges him to debate

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      Three weeks ago, the political commentariat was writing off Georgia and talking of narrow pathways for Joe Biden to hold the White House. Georgia was a desert. Tuesday evening, an Atlanta crowd greeted Kamala Harris like she backed up a truck full of sweet tea to that desert.It’s probably too early – nine days since the president’s withdrawal and the vice-president’s ascension – to know if sentiment in Georgia had shifted enough to justify jubilation. But the crowd in Atlanta treated the new presumptive presidential nominee as a reason to celebrate after months of her quieter campaigning in the city as the vice-presidential nominee.“As many of you know, before I was elected vice-president … I was an elected attorney general and an elected district attorney,” Harris said after taking the stand. “Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type, and I have been dealing with people like him my entire career.”This elicited chants of: “Lock him up!”Harris addressed a crowd of 10,000 who filled the Georgia State Convocation Center, with people waiting outside for a seat. She touted her prosecution record and referenced Trump’s criminal convictions and the findings of fraud in his businesses.“As an attorney general, I held big Wall Street banks accountable for fraud. Donald Trump was found guilty of fraud,” Harris said. “In this campaign, I will proudly put my record against his any day, including on the issue of immigration.”Harris spoke of walking underground tunnels at the California border and prosecuting traffickers, and pledged to bring back the border security bill that was tanked in Congress by Republicans to preserve the issue in the campaign.Referencing a Migos song – popular as an Atlanta group – she said: “He does not walk it as he talks it.”Ahead of Harris’s appearance on Tuesday, several Atlanta voices made the case for her. Mayor Andre Dickens noted that this was the vice-president’s 15th time visiting the state since 2021. Harris has been in Atlanta so often that she may as well have rented a condo in Buckhead to save money.Harris is expected back in the state next week, and will debut her running mate on a seven-stop swing state tour, according to details confirmed by her campaign. Politico reported Harris will hold the first rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday. Harris said she as of today has not yet picked the candidate yet.For the last two years, Harris has been Joe Biden’s chief campaign surrogate in Georgia, making deliberate connections with campaign organizers and Black community leaders, a weapon in the Democratic arsenal that Republicans have not been able to match.“Georgia is on everybody’s mind,” said Raphael Warnock, the senator and reverend, to a boisterous crowd. “And there’s a reason. Because of what you did in 2020, 2021, everybody knows that the road to the White House goes through Georgia.”View image in fullscreenDonald Trump has been on his heels in recent polls, which show ground captured in the rust belt. The former president announced that he would refrain from committing to a debate against Harris until after the Democratic national convention, which the senator Jon Ossoff characterized as cowardice.“I know about having an opponent who’s too scared to debate,” Ossoff said, harkening back to his winning 2020 campaign against then senator David Perdue, in which he spent 90 minutes debating an empty chair. “The candidate who is dodging debates is the candidate who is losing.”Stacey Abrams took the stage at 5.33pm to thunderous chants of “Stacey!”, which Abrams immediately turned around into a chant for “Kamala!”“We are the ones who put our boots on the ground,” said the former gubernatorial candidate and voting rights advocate. She preached the virtues of a progressive presidency on infrastructure development in the Black community, on job creation and on the climate. She pointedly noted that Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, who defeated her two years ago, took credit for new investment in solar panel manufacturing in Georgia even as the federal government has been spurring those investments.View image in fullscreen“They started with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden believing in the environment,” she said.Now that Harris has replaced Biden as the presumptive nominee, the question is whether there is time to capitalize on the administration’s connections in a state that may still be difficult to win for Democrats.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When we get deep into those communities, when we are hitting apartment complexes in the hood, when we’re places we don’t usually go, I’ll know its real,” said state representative Imani Barnes, a Democrat representing a sprawling suburban district in DeKalb county near Atlanta.Barnes’ constituents range from CDC scientists to some of the poorest immigrant communities in the state, and she can see how campaigns have to change the language on flyers to reach some voters. “That’s how we know a campaign is making a difference.”Previous appearances in Georgia by Biden and Harris have been closely vetted campaign events filled with a curated selection of activists, advocates and party leaders. Though the guest speakers on Tuesday were a selection of federal officials and local leaders – with Geoff Duncan, the former Republican lieutenant governor, stalking the edges of the press pit – that selectivity was less evident.“Georgia saved the whole nation,” Warnock said. “I have a feeling that Georgia is going to save the nation one more time.”In her speech, Harris sought not only to attack her opponent but to refocus on top voter issues in Georgia, such as the economy.“Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said. “When our middle class is strong, America is strong. To keep our middle class strong, families need relief from the high cost of living so that they have a chance not to get by but to get ahead.”She said she would go after price gouging and hidden fees by banks and other companies, and take on corporate landlords to cap unfair rent increases, and to cap prescription drug costs.“There are signs Donald Trump is feeling” the competition, she says.“You may have noticed he pulled out of the debate.”She repeated the assertion made by her campaign in recent days that Trump is “just plain weird”.“I do hope Trump will agree to meet me on the debate stage, because as the saying goes – if you got something to say, say it to my face,” she said as the crowd exploded.The convocation center at Georgia State University is a state-owned building. Election law requires the facility to offer its use on the same terms to the Trump campaign. Hence, Trump will appear here Saturday, offering a mark to compare their relative fortunes even as he refuses to accept debate. More

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      in US Politics

      JD Vance writes glowing foreword to Project 2025 leader’s upcoming book

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      JD Vance endorses the ideas of Kevin Roberts, leader of Project 2025, as a “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics” and a “surprising – even jarring” path forward for conservatives, the Republican vice-presidential nominee writes in the foreword of Roberts’ upcoming book.The foreword was obtained and published in full by the New Republic on Tuesday. Roberts’ book is out in September. Its title was watered down recently to remove references to “burning down” Washington.In the foreword, Vance finds parallels between his upbringing and that of Roberts, and between their visions for what the US needs. Both grew up in poor families in parts of the country “largely ignored by America’s elites”, with Roberts in Louisiana and Vance in Ohio and Kentucky. They’re both Catholic, with Vance as a convert in his adult life. Both had grandparents who played big roles in their upbringing.Now both are in DC, with Roberts “just a few steps” from Vance’s office.Vance praises Roberts for using his perch as the president of the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing DC thinktank, to advance a more radical conservative vision rather than resting on the foundation’s laurels.“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” Vance writes. “Yet it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.”The Trump campaign has tried to distance the former president from Project 2025, a conservative roadmap for a second Trump term that includes policy ideas unpopular with the voters Trump needs to win. But Vance’s ties to Roberts, like the foreword, make it harder for Trump to make the case he doesn’t know what the project is.In the hours before the foreword was published by news outlets, Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, said he was stepping down from his role and that some of the project’s work was winding down, though it’s not clear what that means. The project consists largely of a 900-plus-page policy manifesto and an effort to find potential staffers for a second Trump term. Roberts said the plan to create a “personnel apparatus” for all levels of government would continue.Roberts has faced scrutiny in recent weeks for comments that the US is “in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be”. His ties to a radical part of the Catholic church, Opus Dei, and belief that birth control should be outlawed were also revealed by the Guardian.Vance has previously said Roberts “is somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts”, he told news outlet Notus in January. He said that Heritage, under Roberts, went from a “relatively vanilla” thinktank to one willing to participate in the fights and debates on the right about where the party should head.On two subjects in particular, Vance praises the way Roberts lays out the stakes and his goals: reining in large tech companies and focusing on a Christian view of the family.He notes that Roberts argues the US founders would not have envisioned the way companies like Apple or Google would amass power to “censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats”, saying this “deserves the scrutiny of the right, not its support”.And Vance agrees with the way Roberts recognizes that “cultural norms and attitudes matter”.“We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids,” Vance writes. “We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred – and to the extent possible, lifelong – union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”This belief in the family also means that conservatives need to ensure that families aren’t just for people with wealth, which calls for creating better jobs and listening to young people when they say they can’t afford homes or families, he writes.“Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand,” Vance writes.In order to create the America Roberts and Vance envision, conservatives need to go on offense – not just remove policies they don’t like, but rebuild the country in what Roberts has referred to as a “second American Revolution”.“The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems – we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach,” Vance writes. “As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.” More

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      in US Politics

      A Storm Foretold review – a terrifying glimpse into Trump’s time in the White House

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      The most immediately convincing words out of the subject’s mouth in A Storm Foretold are when he is threatening the director. “Obviously,” says Roger Stone to Danish film-maker Christoffer Guldbrandsen at the end of an anti-Trump rant, “if you use any of that I’ll murder you.”As Guldbrandsen notes earlier in the film, their relationship is complicated.The 90-minute documentary follows Donald Trump’s longtime ally – friend, possibly, if either man is capable of friendship – and political adviser for three years from 2019 to 2022. Except, that is, for a short hiatus when Stone switches allegiance to another crew and cuts Guldbrandsen off, the stress of which surely contributes to the Dane’s ensuing heart attack. It’s a busy time for Stone. He splits his time between using diatribes on Infowars to inflame his boss’s base with a hatred for liberals – who, naturally, are in love with “rapist” Bill Clinton and his supposed accessory to the crimes, Hillary – and managing a manchild president who throws tantrums if he feels he is being managed at all. Stone describes, for instance, how, if he wants Trump to say something in particular, he tells him that he needs to use a line in a speech that he used brilliantly before. “Doesn’t matter if he never said it.” It’s one of several terrifying glimpses into the internal mechanics of Trump’s time in office and the scope of its – and his – inadequacies. Such is the destabilising force of these revelations that you start to feel almost grateful that there was someone recognisably politician-like in the mix. Stone is just as arrogant, vain, bullying and thuggish. But he has a genuine analytical intelligence running alongside the same populist touch, instinctive animal cunning and talent for geeing up a crowd that Trump has. You feel glad someone somewhere knows what they are doing, even if everything they are doing is awful and bent on destroying democracy. Like I say – it’s a very destabilising documentary.We watch as Trump’s election campaign is investigated for interference by Russia and Stone goes on trial for allegedly covering up Trump’s various improprieties. He is convicted but his sentence is commuted by Trump, though Stone had been confident of a full pardon.We follow Stone through 2020 as he prepares the backup plan for the increasingly likely event that Trump loses the election to Joe Biden: the “Stop the Steal” campaign that will, we know, culminate in a march on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 and an outbreak of violence that essentially amounts to an insurrection. He rallies the troops, especially the rightwing group known as the Proud Boys, who have appointed themselves his voluntary security force and seem to worship him with almost as much fervour as they do Trump himself. Stone strides on, dropping jokes about it being “Shoot a Liberal for Christ” day and, like a jovial barracuda, reckoning they should “fuck the voting – let’s get right to the violence”, advising crowds on “what you can do for the Republic”, turning truths into plausible lies and generally fostering the tension, conspiracy theories, fear and sense of powerlessness (“a thousand years of darkness” will follow a Democrat win) that fuels the Maga membership. When Biden does win, they are assured that Trump won and the lie falls on perfectly prepared ground. The march takes place, the Capitol is breached, lives are lost and hundreds injured.Trump abandons Stone during the fallout. It turns out that a face contorting with rage is not just something that happens in books. In the back of Guldbrandsen’s car, Stone’s face twists and tics as if snakes are rising from his soul. He denounces Trump, says he will support impeachment charges against the “cocksucker” who “surrounded himself with morons … Fuck you and your abortionist bitch daughter.”It’s a scene that, in the damage it potentially does to his cause – the preservation and exaltation of Roger Stone in the coming new New World – crystallises the question floating throughout the film: why did he agree to it? Why didn’t he get one of any number of patsies who would have been delighted with an all-access three years and delivered a pile of fawning goods at the end of it? What kind of documentary was he expecting from a serious film-maker such as Guldbrandsen? Did he think he could fool him or win him over? Does he actually believe in the cause and want it legitimised in the mainstream media? How deep do the arrogance and delusion run?Guldbrandsen pushes him on little – that’s the price you pay for that all-access pass – though his voiceover generally clarifies his stance, or points up Stone’s latest hypocrisy. But, by the end of a film full of jaw-dropping footage of what seem to be very incriminating moments for Stone personally and Trumpism generally, it comes together as a terrifying testimony to the deliberate nature of the destruction of the literal and metaphorical fabric of US politics. It is also an even more terrifying poser of the question – what storms are yet to come?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More