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      Americans have 400 days to save their democracy | Timothy Garton Ash

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      I return to Europe from the US with a clear conclusion: American democrats (lowercase d) have 400 days to start saving US democracy. If next autumn’s midterm elections produce a Congress that begins to constrain Donald Trump there will then be a further 700 days to prepare the peaceful transfer of executive power that alone will secure the future of this republic. Operation Save US Democracy, stages 1 and 2.Hysterical hyperbole? I would love to think so. But during seven weeks in the US this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of President Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled norms of US democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault. There’s a growing body of international evidence to suggest that once a liberal democracy has been eroded, it’s very difficult to restore it. Destruction is so much easier than construction.That’s why all democrats, irrespective of party or ideology, must hope the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections on 3 November 2026. Not because of the Democrats’ policies, which are a muddle, or their current leadership, which is a mess, but simply because US democracy needs Congress, the principal check on presidential power envisaged in the US constitution, to start doing its job again. That will not happen so long as the Republicans, dominated and intimidated by Trump, control both houses.Much has been made of comparisons to other authoritarian power grabs, from Europe in the 1930s to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, but I’m most struck by the distinctive features of the US case. To name just four: excessive executive power; chronic gerrymandering; endemic violence; and the way a would-be authoritarian can exploit the intense capitalist competition that permeates every area of US life.The danger of executive overreach has been there from the very beginning. Revolutionary war hero Patrick Henry (“give me liberty or give me death”) voted against the constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 precisely because he thought it would give a criminal president the chance “to make one bold push for the American throne.” Throughout the 20th century, presidents of both parties extended the “executive power” that is so ill-defined in article 2 of that constitution. More recently, a conservative-dominated supreme court has given succour to the unitary executive theory developed by rightwing legal theorists, which gives the most expansive reading of presidential power. And now the Trump administration – well prepared, unlike in 2017 – has exploited every inch and wrinkle of existing executive power, as well as simply breaking the law and defying the courts to stop it.Tom Ginsburg, a leading US comparative constitutionalist, argues that the biggest single flaw of the unreformed US constitution is that it gives state legislatures the power to draw electoral boundaries. The word gerrymandering was coined as early as 1812. In recent times, partisan redistricting has become more extreme as US politics has become more polarised. And then, in 2019, the supreme court declared that it could not correct even the most blatant party-political gerrymandering (only that done on racial lines). So now, at Trump’s direct request, Texas sets out to change constituency boundaries explicitly to win five more seats for the Republicans in the midterms, whereupon California says it will counter-gerrymander to win five more for the Democrats. There’s no longer even a bare pretence of impartiality about the most basic procedure of democracy.No European society can compare to the US for the ubiquity of violence. Hardly a day passed this summer without the evening news reporting at least one violent crime, including yet another horrific school shooting. The US has more guns than people. France loves its pseudo-revolutionary political theatre, but the US had the 6 January 2021 mob assault on the Capitol. Now the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk has been shot. Before the identity of the killer was known, Elon Musk said “the left is the party of murder” and Trump blamed the hate speech of the “radical left”. It will be a miracle if the US avoids a downward spiral of political violence, as last seen in the 1960s. That in turn could be the pretext for Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, bring more military on to US streets and further exploit an alleged state of emergency.Meanwhile, universities, business leaders, law firms, media platforms and tech supremos have utterly failed to engage in collective action in response. They have either kept their heads down, settled humiliatingly like Columbia University and the law firm Paul, Weiss, or fawned on the president, like Mark Zuckerberg. Why? Because they all follow the logic of fierce free-market competition and fear targeted reprisals. I never imagined I would see fear spread so far and fast in the US.Add in attempts to disqualify or intimidate voters, plus Trump’s threat to ban mail-in ballots, and there’s a real doubt how far next November’s midterm elections will be fully free and fair. The task for democrats of all parties is to ensure they are, so far as possible. The task for the Democrats (capital D) is to win them in spite of any such obstacles.The key to that will probably still be bread-and-butter issues. Here, in the economy, lies paradoxical hope. We’re already beginning to see Trump’s tariffs feed through into higher prices. The job numbers are weakening. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will further increase an already gobsmacking national debt of $37tn (£27tn). Already in the 2024 fiscal year, servicing that debt cost more than the entire $850bn defence budget. But until a debt crisis actually hits, such macro-risks remain remote and abstract to most voters, rather as predictions of diminished GDP growth made little impact in the Brexit referendum debate.So the big question is whether the negative economic consequences of Trump will be palpable to ordinary voters before the midterms. One astute political observer suggested to me that Trump, flush with revenue from the new tariffs, could do a pre-election cash handout to voters, perhaps presented as compensation for the “temporary difficulties” of the transition to a Maga economy. That would be a classic populist move.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe single most important thing for the Democrats in the next 400 days is therefore to bring those economic costs irresistibly home to voters. Democrats won’t win just by talking about the defence of democracy, important though that is, let alone by engaging in culture wars. They need to follow the advice of former Clinton adviser James Carville and focus relentlessly on kitchen-table issues. In doing so, they will also show that they do actually care about the ordinary working- and middle-class Americans whose support they have lost over the last 30 years.Then there’s stage 2, the presidential election in 2028. But sufficient unto the day are the challenges thereof. Despite all the serious threats to democracy itself in the US, for now the first rule of democratic politics still applies: just win the next election.

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Trump at first says he is ‘not familiar’ with Minnesota Democrat’s assassination

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      In response to a question about why he did not order flags lowered to half-staff to honor Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives who was assassinated alongside her husband this summer, Donald Trump initially said he was “not familiar” with the case.The question came up during a briefing in the Oval Office on Monday, in light of the president’s order last week to lower flags in response to the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.Trump was pressed on why he and Republicans continued cast blame the left for a rise in political violence when elected officials and activists from both parties have been targets.The exchange began when the reporter asked about the tributes paid by the White House to Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth activist group Turning Point USA and a close ally of the president and his family.“Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota house speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well?” asked Nancy Cordes, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News.“I’m not familiar. The who?” Trump replied, leaning in across the Resolute Desk.“The Minnesota house speaker, a Democrat, who was assassinated this summer,” she said.“Oh,” Trump replied. “Well, if the governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that.”Trump did not mention the Minnesota governor Tim Walz – a Democrat and the vice-presidential nominee in 2024 – by name, but suggested that had he made the request, the White House might have obliged.“I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I would’ve, if somebody had asked me,” Trump said. “People make requests for the lowering of the flag, and oftentimes you have to say no, because it would be a lot of lowering.”At the time, Trump said that speaking to Walz, a close friend of Hortman, would have been a “waste of time”.“I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” Trump said then, referring to Walz as “whacked out” and a “mess”.Kirk was fatally shot last week while speaking at Utah Valley University. In the wake of his death, Trump and other prominent conservatives have sought to place the blame for political violence squarely on Democrats, vowing to crack down on the left-wing groups and institutions they allege “fund it and support it”.As Republicans grieve the loss of Kirk, they have largely ignored the violence against Democrats, including Hortman’s assassination, the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a thwarted plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.House Republicans and a handful of Democrats gathered at prayer vigil for Kirk on Capitol Hill on Monday. In brief remarks, Representative Tom Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, reflected on several recent incidents of political violence, including Hortman’s killing by “another evil coward” who also shot a second Democratic state lawmaker that night.Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 presidential campaign, denied on Monday that he had blamed just “one side” before accusing the “radical left” of causing “tremendous violence”.“The radical left really has caused a lot of problems for this country,” he said. “I really think they hate our country.”Earlier on Monday, vice president JD Vance, a close friend of Kirk’s, said he hoped for national “unity” while hosting the slain activist’s podcast. But then he insisted that this was not a “both sides problem” and that Democrats were primarily to blame, despite widespread condemnation of Kirk’s killing by party officials and elected leaders.During the lengthy episode, Vance made no reference to Hortman or other acts of political violence, such as the 6 January assault on the US Capitol.“Something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe – a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left,” he said, and committed to using the levers of the federal government to “dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump news at a glance: JD Vance vows vengeance after Charlie Kirk killing

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      JD Vance and senior Trump aide Stephen Miller doubled down on promises of vengeance in the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk, vowing to destroy what they claimed is a leftwing “domestic terror movement” and calling on people to go hard against anyone deemed to be celebrating the rightwing political activist’s death.The US vice-president stepped in to host an episode of Kirk’s podcast and was joined by the White House deputy chief of staff for Monday’s episode. Miller sought to blame what he called “far left” organisations for Kirk’s death, despite the motive for the shooting remaining unclear.He told Vance: “We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said, adding that they would do this “in Charlie’s name”.Vance then urged Americans to go hard against anyone perceived to be celebrating Kirk’s murder. He said: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer.”JD Vance threatens crackdown on ‘far-left’ groups after Kirk shootingJD Vance assailed what he called the “far left” and its increased tolerance for violence while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Monday, saying the administration would be working to dismantle groups who celebrate Kirk’s death and political violence against their opponents.Vance, hosting the podcast from his office next to the White House, spoke to high-profile members of the Trump administration and some of Kirk’s long-time friends in the movement, including Tucker Carlson and Trump adviser Stephen Miller.Vance said the administration would “work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”.Read the full storyTrump announces deadly US strike on another alleged Venezuelan drug boatDonald Trump said on Monday that the United States had carried out a strike on a second Venezuelan boat and killed three alleged terrorists he claimed were transporting drugs, expanding his administration’s war against drug cartels and the scope of lethal military force to stop them.Read the full storyTrump to send national guard to Memphis, with Chicago ‘probably next’Donald Trump on Monday announced that he was sending in the national guard and other federal authorities into Memphis, in a “replica” of the administration’s expanding military-led response to urban crime in Democratic-run cities.Announcing the taskforce in an Oval Office meeting, Trump vowed to end the “savagery” and said Chicago was “probably next”. “We’re going to fix that just like we did Washington,” Trump said.Read the full storyProsecutor in Epstein case sues Trump’s DoJ over abrupt firingMaurene Comey, a federal prosecutor involved in cases against Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and led the recent case against Sean “Diddy” Combs, filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging her abrupt termination as politically motivated retaliation against her father, former FBI director James Comey.Read the full storyUS and China reach deal to transfer TikTok ownership, trade officials sayJamieson Greer, a US trade representative, said on Monday that Washington and Beijing have struck a framework agreement on transferring TikTok to US-controlled ownership.Speaking after emerging from negotiations with Chinese officials, Scott Bessent said the deal was coming but declined to reveal the commercial terms.Read the full storyRubio says Netanyahu has full support of US over plans to destroy HamasThe US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has put the Trump administration’s full support behind Benjamin Netanyahu in a visit to Jerusalem, saying Washington’s priorities were the liberation of Israeli hostages and the destruction of Hamas.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The backlash to “inappropriate” public comments made in the days following Charlie Kirk’s death has sparked a new wave of firings and suspensions, with a number of university employees disciplined for sharing their views.

      Rev William Barber, a left-leaning pastor and social activist, has condemned last week’s “brutal, ugly” murder of Charlie Kirk while calling for a broader denunciation of political violence on all sides. Barber, leader of the “Moral Monday” events staged by Repairing The Breach, a pro-social justice group, also appeared to criticize the rightwing political activist’s brand of Christianity.

      Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says she has been firedfrom the newspaper over social media posts about gun control and race in the aftermath of far right commentator Charlie Kirk’s killing.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 14 September 2025. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump says military carried out strike on alleged Venezuelan drug cartel vessel

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      Donald Trump said on Monday that the United States had carried out a strike on a second Venezuelan boat and killed three alleged terrorists he claimed were transporting drugs, expanding his administration’s war against drug cartels and the scope of lethal military force to stop them.The US president gave few details about the strike, saying in a social media post that the action was on his orders and that it had happened earlier in the morning. The post was accompanied by a video clip showing the boat, which appeared to be stationary, erupting into a fireball.“The strike occurred while these confirmed narco-terroists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the US,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.Trump’s announcement of the strike appeared to be worded in a way to suggest there was a valid legal basis for the strike – an issue that became a source of heavy criticism in Washington after the operation against the first alleged Venezuelan drug boat earlier this month, which killed 11 people.According to people familiar with the matter, the administration briefed Congress last week that the first strike was legal under the president’s article 2 powers because it involved a boat connected to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump designated a foreign terrorist organization.The administration has provided little evidence that the first boat was carrying illegal drugs beyond asserting they had tracked the drugs being loaded on to the boat in order to be distributed in the United States, even if the boat at one point was said to have turned around.Asked on Sunday about that first strike and claims it was a fishing vessel, Trump said in response to questions from the Guardian: “You saw the bags of white. It’s nonsense. So we knew it before they even left. We knew exactly where that boat, where it came from, where the drugs came from and where it was heading.”By claiming, for the strike on the second boat, that the drugs were a threat to the United States and asserting that the boat’s crew were “terrorists”, Trump appeared to be preemptively setting the groundwork to make the same Article II legal claim to order a missile strike against the second boat.The latest strike comes as the US continues a massive buildup of forces around Venezuela. Over the weekend, five F-35 fighter jets arrived in Puerto Rico to join about half a dozen US navy destroyers already moved to the US territory recently, and support assets the administration said had been deployed to disrupt the flow of illegal drugs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump demurred on whether the US would conduct operations inside Venezuela against drug cartels there. He also deflected a question from the Guardian about its president, Nicholás Maduro, accusing Trump of acting illegally. “What’s illegal are the drugs that were on the boat,” he said.The Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group – including the USS San Antonio, the USS Iwo Jima and the USS Fort Lauderdale, carrying 4,500 sailors – and the 22nd marine expeditionary unit, with 2,200 marines, were deployed to the region ahead of the first strike this month. The US also deployed several P-8 surveillance planes and submarines, officials said. More

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      Trump should be reassuring the country at this time. Instead he is sowing fear

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      The public response to the killing of Charlie Kirk in cold blood, has revealed how drastically our democracy – our belief in the importance of free speech and in the irreplaceable life of each and every individual – has deteriorated over the last half century.I was a senior in high school when John F Kennedy was assassinated, and a senior in college when Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed. Plenty of conspiracy theories, some of which have never been put to rest, were floated and debated. But the difference between what happened then and what we are seeing now is that, in the aftermath of those violent deaths, there was a sense of shared grief, of national mourning. Those tragedies seemed to bring us, as a country, closer together in our shock and sorrow.Obviously, tha is quite unlike what is occurring today, when the president has publicly declared that he “couldn’t care less” about healing the divisions plaguing and weakening our society. The instinctive and widespread response to Kirk’s death has been to demonize and blame a perceived enemy. Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and their minions were quick to accuse the “lunatic radical left”.Despite the emerging evidence, they seem unwilling to amend their version of what happened. I will admit that, on hearing the news, my first thought was that the Maga movement had orchestrated the killing to distract us from the Epstein files, or that this was the modern-day equivalent of the 1933 Reichstag fire, which occurred when the German parliament building was torched, and the National Socialists blamed the communists, and used the event as a pretext for suspending civil liberties and installing an authoritarian regime.The motives of the suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, are still unclear. But it appears that both the right and the left both had it wrong to some degree. Robinson was a studious young man from a solidly Republican, Mormon family, used anti-fascist slogans and apparently disliked Kirk for his hateful views.Regardless of what we thought of Kirk, it is profoundly and dangerously immoral to sanction political violence, regardless of its object. It is unseemly to celebrate the shooting of a human being with a wife and children – even a man whose rhetoric we may have despised.In another country, in another era, the death of Kirk might have served to remind us of the essential importance of free speech, of the concept that even the most polarizing figures should be able to speak publicly without fear of violent retribution. In drafting the first amendment, the founding fathers affirmed the idea that even racists, misogynists and anti-immigrant bigots have the right to express their beliefs and to engage in a free and fair debate with those who hold very different views. In fact, it’s the essence of democracy, the cornerstone on which our nation was founded and that every patriot (however that word is construed now) should affirm.Instead, Kirk’s death has been weaponized as a pretext to further undermine first amendment protections, to circle the wagons around the worst aspects of censorship and blind obedience to authority. It is being employed to foster the fear of saying anything that runs contrary to what those in power believe and allow us to express. Already, teachers, soldiers, government officials, firefighters and reporters – most prominently, MSNBC news analyst Matthew Dowd – have been censured or lost their jobs after saying in public or on social media that Kirk’s rhetoric was a form of not-so-thinly-disguised hate speech.There has been some pushback, among the public and on the floor of Congress, against the directive that prayers should be said and flags lowered to half mast in Kirk’s memory. Personally, I’m fine with the idea of prayers and lowered flags, except that I think that these gestures of mourning, honor and respect are being deployed too selectively.The flags should have been lowered for, among others, another recent victim of political violence: Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, who was murdered, along with her husband, Mark, in June. Prayers should be said for the Colorado high school students wounded in one of the latest school shootings, on the very same day as Charlie Kirk’s murder. Flags should be lowered and prayers said for every victim lost to senseless gun violence, until we are tired of all the praying and flag-lowering, until we decide, as a nation, to take action to prevent these tragic deaths.My great fear is that we are nearing the day when, if we are being honest, the flag should be lowered in memory of our fragile, flawed, precious democracy. In that case, we may have to wait a while to see it flying proudly and at full mast, once again.

      Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences More

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      in Elections

      Election deniers now hold posts on local US election boards, raising concerns for midterms

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      A number of people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and often of other elections in which Republicans have not been victorious, have been elevated to positions of power since Donald Trump’s re-election, raising concerns about the potential for partisan meddling in critical parts of the country such as Arizona and Georgia.State by state, activists aligned with the “election integrity” movement have found their way on to local elections boards and elections offices, raising red flags for Democrats who have already started efforts to have them removed.“I think Republicans want to put us in jail,” Fulton county commissioner Dana Barrett said, moments after a contempt hearing in an Atlanta, Georgia, courtroom in August, where she and five other county commissioners were fighting a battle to reject the appointment of two Republican election denialists to the Fulton county board of registrations and elections.The commission’s charter says the board must appoint two nominees made by each political party. A finding of criminal contempt could have resulted in commissioners being jailed until they agreed to make the appointment, but Fulton county superior court judge David Emerson found the board in civil contempt last month for refusing to vote for the appointment as ordered by the court. A $10,000 daily fine for failing to make the appointment is on hold, pending appeal.“At the end of the day, we have no choice but to resist,” Barrett said. “This is not a particularly strategic move on my part, but rather a move to defend the integrity of our elections and to do what I can in my corner of the world to try to help hold this democracy together. If that means I’m resisting, then by all means, I’m resisting.”One of the two appointees in question, Julie Adams, works for the Election Integrity Network, an election denial activist organization founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. The other, Jason Frazier, is a consultant for EagleAI, software that collects open-source data of dubious validity to aid activists making thousands of voter challenges at a time. Frazier was a plaintiff in a 2023 lawsuit demanding voter registration purges by the county and the state.“I believe that Jason Frazier and Julie Adams are election deniers,” Barrett said.“We all find ourselves in positions where we have to make tough decisions considering the climate in our country,” said Fulton county commissioner Mo Ivory. “I’m glad to be standing up for the people that put me in office, and continue to fight for our democracy, not for partisan politics, but for what it means to live in a democracy.”In Georgia, board appointments to county election offices are idiosyncratic. Fulton county’s charter gives power to the board of commissioners and to the political parties’ county committees. In neighboring DeKalb county, the appointments are made by the chief judge of its superior court, who is free to reject a nominee by one of the party’s committees if that person doesn’t meet the judge’s legal standards.Such was the case earlier this year, when Shondeana Morris, chief judge of the DeKalb county superior court, rejected William Henderson after a letter campaign by the county’s Democratic committee and voting rights activists. But the judge did allow the appointment of Gail Lee, another Republican activist linked to the Election Integrity Network.During a DeKalb county election board meeting last week, local political activists challenged the qualification of Jason Lary, a former mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, to run for the city council. Lary recently returned from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for fraud after being convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds allocated to the city.Lary is a Democrat and the board has a Democratic majority, but after a brief discussion, the board voted unanimously to kick him off the ballot and strip him of his voter registration, given that he was still under supervision for his sentence and thus ineligible to vote.“The one thing that became clear is the importance of the public to remain vigilant on little things like people who qualified for office,” Lee said at the end of the meeting. “Because if a person hadn’t come for and challenged the candidates then they would have gone forward and possibly had a felon in office.”There’s only so much a Republican activist can accomplish on a five-person board with a Democratic majority, as is the case in metro Atlanta’s core counties. When Adams refused to certify a primary election in Fulton county in 2024, state superior court judges ruled that she was required to do so by state law, a decision affirmed by the Georgia supreme court this week. The duty to certify is “ministerial”, a pronouncement that is obligatory, not discretionary.And many if not most decisions by an elections board involve mundane procedural questions about where to site a voting drop box or how to schedule poll worker training. Even contentious issues often result in unanimous votes.But elections offices are staffed by human beings maintaining sensitive equipment and critical records, all of which are vulnerable to someone with authority and an agenda.Protect Democracy, an advocacy organization, describes a strategy of election subversion in three parts: deceive, disrupt and deny.Disinformation from influencers suggests that voter fraud or noncitizen voting occurs often enough to swing an election. Then these influencers call on their supporters to disrupt election administration and voting process and introduce chaos into the system. Finally, they attempt to interfere or halt the certification process and “declare the true result untrue, unknown, or unknowable”, Protect Democracy’s advocates wrote.The object is to allow the loser to claim victory regardless of the results, forcing a court to either choose a winner or order a new election, delegitimizing a fair vote.Changes wrought by a new law specific to Spalding county, Georgia, populated its board with Republican election activists. The board members and the county’s new elections director called for a hand-count of ballots following elections in 2022 and 2023. The process, observers noted, was painfully slow and riven by inaccuracies that took days to rectify, with an end result that showed Dominion machines had counted votes correctly.They did not hand count ballots in 2024.Spalding county’s Republican elections board members – Ben Johnson, Roy McClain and James Newland – are among the many defendants in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn a law permitting mass voter challenges passed in the wake of the 2020 election that voting rights advocates argue violates the Voting Rights Act.Meanwhile, Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has been in a political war with the county’s elected recorder Justin Heap to prevent this outcome. Maricopa county contains Phoenix and almost two-thirds of Arizona’s population.Heap, a former state representative, defeated the incumbent Republican in 2024 while refusing to say if he believed the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair and calling Maricopa county elections a “laughingstock”.After Heap’s victory, the board stripped the recorder’s office of its duties to manage in-person early voting and some IT management of voter rolls. Negotiations broke down in May, leading to lawsuits and acrimony. Heap retained America First Legal, a Trump-aligned firm, to represent him in the lawsuit.“Justin Heap is lying about me, and going forward, he better keep my name out of his lying mouth,” Maricopa county supervisor Steve Gallardo said in a July release, refuting claims by Heap that Gallardo had agreed to restore power to the recorder’s office. “Since his election, Justin Heap has taken actions that have confused voters and damaged relationships. This must end. Justin Heap should stop the performative theater and just do his job.”Some states appear to be more fertile ground than others for election denialist’s influence on boards.North Carolina’s Republicans controlled the state legislature with a veto-proof majority last year, even though its former governor Roy Cooper was a Democrat. After Josh Stein, another Democrat, won the governor’s race, legislators stripped the governor of the power to appoint members to state and county elections boards, handing it to newly elected state auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican.The state’s Republican-majority supreme court ratified the law in May after court challenges. Boliek almost immediately replaced 3-2 Democratic majorities with 3-2 Republican majorities across all 100 county election boards.Those appointments have drawn pushback from election denialists as well as from Democratic activists.Places such as Durham county, where less than 10% of voters are registered Republicans, now has a Republican majority on its elections board. But most new board members appear to have been rewarded for their loyalty to the party and not their fidelity to election denialism.“There are concerns that there are people that are getting rewarded as a political favor, as opposed to their working knowledge and their experience in elections,” said Jim Womack, Lee county GOP chair and the president of the non-profit North Carolina Election Integrity Team, speaking to North Carolina news site The Assembly. More

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      in US Politics

      Chicago organizers say city needs support, not politicalization by Trump: ‘This is not a serious solution’

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      For months, Donald Trump and his administration have been using violent crime as a justification for ramping up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) operations and sending or threatening to send the national guard to blue cities – first in Los Angeles, then Washington DC and, last week, Chicago.But for those who work on the ground to prevent crime, the White House’s approaches will do little to address underlying causes. Instead, they say, increased law enforcement will only lead to harassment and increased surveillance in communities that are already overpoliced.“[Trump doesn’t] mean well for our community,” said Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, a non-profit that offers services for people most at risk of shooting someone or being shot. “Yes, there’s a lot of violence, and it’s because of policies over decades. If you want to go after violence, go to the cities and invest in them, not just send in the national guard.”Gross has worked in violence prevention for more than three decades. Over the years, he’s heard Chicagoans talk about the need for increased law enforcement in their neighborhoods, including deploying the national guard – comments he saw as expressions of understandable desperation. He says residents have grown exhausted from witnessing decades of bloodshed and poverty that go unabated under both Republican and Democratic administrations.Still, he said that these issues won’t be solved through the shows of force Trump is enacting. “We deal with grief daily. We see death daily. This is not a serious solution,” he said.Last year, 574 people were killed in Chicago, primarily from gunshot wounds, giving the city a homicide rate of 17 per 100,000 people. This is far below that of some cities in red states, such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport, Louisiana, whose rates were 59 and 41, respectively, that same year. Still, Chicago’s reputation for shootings is being exploited to normalize military force on city streets and expand law enforcement in neighborhoods that are already highly policed and surveilled, said Ethan Ucker, executive director of Stick Talk, a Chicago non-profit that approaches youth gun-carrying through a harm reduction lens.“Those narratives are strategically being deployed to justify state violence,” Ucker said. “I worry about increasing and accelerating criminalization. But that won’t stop when the national guard leaves. It’s ongoing.”The Rev Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, who leads Live Free Illinois, a coalition of faith-based organizations that advocate for criminal justice reform and public safety, said if Trump actually wants to help, he would emphasize better clearance rates and community-based support services for victims of crime, and would get gun trafficking under control.“We’ve advocated for more community-based resources to be invested in,” she said. “We’ve advocated to improve clearance rates. But to completely disregard those requests is immoral and not about protecting citizens.”Bates-Chamberlain, a native of Chicago’s South Side who’s worked in the violence prevention space for more than a decade, said that “two things can be true at the same time” when it comes to the current national conversation about crime in the US. While Chicago’s leadership is boasting a more than 30% decline in homicides in 2025 so far, there were still nearly 200 people killed in the city by the end of June and many more injured.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The numbers are down, yet communities are still feeling the impact,” she said.But the pain these losses and injuries carry and their reverberations throughout the community won’t be addressed by sending more law enforcement to the street, Bates-Chamberlain said.“He’s politicizing our pain and that is diabolical and despicable for the president of the United States to do,” she said. “This is really harmful.” More