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      Biden hopes abortion will keep him in the White House. But has he done enough to protect rights?

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      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has made a big bet that outrage over abortion will keep the president in the White House come November.Over the last several days, the Biden administration has unleashed a blitz of ads and events to spotlight the devastation wrought by the overturning of Roe v Wade. Biden met with a reproductive health task force, while his vice-president, Kamala Harris – who he has entrusted to lead this effort – embarked on a national tour to talk about abortion. They even devoted their first joint campaign stop of 2024 to the issue. From the podium, Biden promised to sign any bill that would codify Roe’s protections into law and to fight back efforts by Congress to diminish abortion access.“Donald Trump and Maga Republicans, including the speaker of the House, are hellbent on going even further,” Biden said, a reference to the hard-right Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. “As long as I have power of the presidency, if Congress were to pass a national abortion ban, I would veto it.”Congress is unlikely to ban or protect abortion anytime soon. Not only is Congress largely frozen – it passed just 27 bills last year – but both political parties seem wary of tackling national legislation around a third-rail topic like abortion.Now that Roe is gone, the question of if and how to regulate abortion access is largely up to state governments to answer. But the executive branch of the US government still maintains several powers to protect abortion access – and undermine it.What has Biden done to protect abortion access?The Biden administration’s ability to enforce remaining federal laws that touch on abortion is perhaps its greatest weapon in the fight over the procedure. Shortly after Roe’s demise, the Biden administration announced that it believed a 1986 federal law that protects people’s access to emergency care at hospitals also applies to emergency abortions. The administration later sued Idaho, arguing that the state’s near-total abortion ban flew in the face of that law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).That case has now made its way to the US supreme court. The supreme court justices are also set to hear arguments in a case involving the availability of a major abortion pill – a case in which the Biden administration is, once again, arguing in favor of abortion access.“Being a check on the supreme court is pretty significant,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California Davis school of law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. The US supreme court is dominated 6-3 by conservatives. “If the supreme court says that you can or should enforce rules against abortion providers, I don’t think a Biden administration is going to do that.”Since Roe fell, anti-abortion activists have also begun to argue that the federal government could enforce a de facto national abortion ban through the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials.However, the Biden administration has issued guidance declaring that they do not believe the Comstock Act can or should be used to enforce a national abortion ban. According to the Biden administration, as long as someone does not intend to break the law when they mail abortion-related materials, they are not violating the Comstock Act.What more could Biden be doing?The answer depends on who you ask. Abortion rights advocates have long been dissatisfied with Biden’s approach to the procedure; Biden has supported Roe’s protections but also said that, as a Catholic, he is personally not “big on abortion”. During his campaign and the first several months of his presidency, he seemed wary of even saying the word “abortion”, leading reproductive justice advocates to launch a website devoted to answering the question “Did Biden Say Abortion Yet?” (He has now said it multiple times.)The Biden administration has pursued several cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or Face Act, a federal law that penalizes people for threatening, obstructing, or injuring someone who is trying to access a reproductive health clinic, or for vandalizing a clinic. But abortion providers have long complained that the law is not being enforced enough.Abortion rights supporters have also proposed a litany of other, experimental ways to protect abortion access, such as by leasing federal land to abortion providers or advocating for the repeal of the Comstock Act. Biden could also loosen regulations around abortion pills, although Ziegler cautioned that such actions run the risk of politicizing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to a dangerous degree. Abortion rights advocates have also said that the Biden administration could take steps to lessen the impact of the Helms Amendment, a decades-old law that has been used to block the use of federal funding to pay for abortions. Advocates have accused Biden of inappropriately over-enforcing the Helms Amendment, to the point that the US Agency for International Development in 2021 cancelled a conference session on the provision of safe telemedicine abortion.However, in Ziegler’s view, the threat of the supreme court tamps down on Biden’s ability to innovate. Rather than pursuing novel, national ways to protect abortion access and run the risk of litigation, the administration may want to stay out of federal court entirely.“I think Biden has been really cautious,” Ziegler said. “But I do also think that had he not been as cautious, it could have ended up the same or worse anyway, just because the supreme court is so conservative.”What could Donald Trump do to further restrict abortion?If Trump wins the presidency in November 2024, he may reverse course on many of the Biden administration’s decisions around how and if to enforce federal abortion law. He could try to implement the Comstock Act to ban abortion in some form, including in states that haven’t passed bans. He could also decrease Face Act prosecutions, or tighten regulations on mifepristone.Unlike Biden, he likely wouldn’t worry about politicizing the FDA, Ziegler said. “There’s a lot of asymmetry that hurts Democrats, but also Democrats do value some of these institutional separations that Republicans don’t.”Trump’s first four years in the White House also offer a blueprint for how he may further dismantle access to both abortion and contraception if he returns to power.Since the 1980s, whenever a Republican becomes president, he has implemented what is known as “the Mexico City policy” or the “global gag rule”, as abortion rights supporters call it. This policy typically blocks foreign NGOs that receive US family planning funding from providing abortion-related services or even advocating for increased access to the procedure. (Historically, whenever a Democrat replaces a Republican as president, he has rescinded the Mexico City policy.)Trump, however, turbocharged the Mexico City policy during his presidency. Rather than stripping funding only from family planning assistance, in 2017 his administration expanded it to apply to all US global health assistance. Rather than impacting $600m worth of funding, by 2018 it impacted $12bn, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.As president, Trump also implemented a “domestic gag rule”, which blocked members of Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program, from even referring people for abortions. Rather than comply with this rule, a quarter of Title X-funded health centers simply left the program. Six states were left with zero Title X providers, who offer low-cost access to family planning services like birth control.If Trump wins in 2024, he will likely reinstate this rule, said Robin Summers, vice-president and senior counsel for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. And that’s just the beginning of Summers thinks he might do.“I think it only gets worse,” Summers said.Trump could, Summers suggested, legally label certain forms of hormonal birth control – such as IUDS – as abortifacients, suggesting that they cause abortions. (Medical experts widely believe that they do not.) The US supreme court has previously supported a similar move. In a 2014 decision, issued when the court’s makeup was far less conservative, the justices ruled that a corporation did not have to cover certain forms of birth control for employees because the corporation’s religious owners believed them to be abortifacients.“The bottom line here is that advocates sounded the alarm for years that Roe was at significant risk of being overturned. And we were dismissed by many as catastrophizing the whole thing,” Summers said. “And look where we are.” More

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      Indictments fueled extremists’ support for Trump, survey finds

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      The criminal charges against Donald Trump have fueled increased radical support for the former president while his efforts to paint the government and Democrats as a threat to democracy have convinced more people to distrust democratic institutions.New survey results from the University of Chicago’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPOST) shows increased violent support for Trump aligns with the indictments, as did the erosion of support for democratic norms. Court cases using the 14th amendment to try to keep Trump off the ballot could further erode confidence in the political system, regardless of how the supreme court rules on the issue, the survey found.Support for democratic norms has gone from “bad to worse”, said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who directs CPOST. The two ideas are connected: The more a person believes the system is corrupt or rigged, the more likely they are to support using violence instead of the political system.“Once you think you live in a corrupt political system, then you give up on politics as a solution and you go for violence,” Pape said.While 50% of survey respondents said Trump was a threat to democracy, now 36% said the same of Democratic president Joe Biden. That means Trump’s attempt to twist messaging is working: the former president has repeatedly attacked Biden in recent months as Biden warns of the threat Trump poses to democracy after Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Trump has called Biden a “threat to democracy” and a “destroyer” of democracy.Effectively, Trump has turned a losing issue for himself, the future of democracy, into much less of a liability, particularly among Republicans.“His new argument … is that the institutions of government are unfairly targeting him,” Pape said. “And what this data is showing is that he is actually persuading significant numbers of people on this issue.”Support for violence has also increased across the political spectrum, a sign of intense polarization and weakened beliefs in the political system. The percentage of people who believe using force would be justified to keep Trump from being president again is higher, at 9.6%, than the percentage of people willing to use force to restore Trump to the presidency, at 6.5%.Through the 2024 election, CPOST will be releasing new survey data tracking continued dangers to democracy every quarter. The data will be published first with the Guardian.The survey results cut across various questions about the state of American democracy. Now, 50% of survey participants said political elites, both Republicans and Democrats, are the most immoral and corrupt people in America, up from 42% a year ago. And 63% said they agreed that a small group of elites controls all the levers of power and enriches themselves at the cost of normal Americans, up from 54% last January.Support for conspiracy theories has increased during that time as well: 22% now believe Biden stole the 2020 election, up from 21%; 30% believe the Democratic party is trying to replace the current electorate with more obedient voters from the third world, up from 21%; and 14% believe a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is ruling the US government, up from 11%.They are also more likely to support the use of violence to achieve political goals now compared with one year ago. 16% said the use of force is justified to coerce Congress, up from 9%, while 6.5% said force would be justified to return Trump to the White House, compared with 4.5% last January. On abortion rights, 9% said force would be justified to restore them, up from 8%.Supporters of Trump who also believe in using violence to achieve their political goals are statistically much more likely to believe democratic institutions are deeply corrupt: 68% of that subgroup believe the 2020 election was stolen; 56% say their party has virtually no chance of winning elections in 2024 because the system is rigged and 81% think the prosecutions of Trump are intended to hurt his electoral prospects this year.Those radical Trump supporters are the most likely to move toward violence if they don’t achieve their goals through the political process, Pape said. And depending on how Trump himself fares politically, he could instigate or orchestrate violence as well, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If Trump is put in jail, in prison, then his radical support is likely to go up,” Pape said. “And that’s where political violence is most likely to happen from the right.”The 14th amendment cases, where left-leaning groups have filed lawsuits seeking to remove Trump from the ballot for violating the 14th Amendment by participating in an insurrection while an officer of the US, could exacerbate the political violence problem, no matter which way the case is decided by the US supreme court.There’s an extreme partisan divide on the issue. For Democrats, 78% support disqualifying Trump from the ballot. For Republicans, 72% believe removing him would be an assault on democracy, with 16% of Republicans saying it would justify the use of force to restore him to the White House.“There’s a real risk that whatever the supreme court decides is going to be viewed as illegitimate by one side or the other in the 14th amendment controversy,” Pape said.There’s a subset of Republicans, 14%, that support disqualifying Trump. Of that group, 24% already plan to vote for Biden, while 71% said they wouldn’t vote for Trump. The group is heavily college-educated. Pape said this group is “enough to swing 2024” and serves as a “critical vulnerability for Trump” that his opponents could target in key states.In order to subdue any claims of illegitimacy, the court itself should work to publicly explain its reasoning and make the case that its decision was based on the facts of the case, Pape said.“This is why democracies fade into authoritarianism. These are the issues, ” he said. More

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      Mitt Romney: Trump’s call to stonewall Democrats on immigration ‘appalling’

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      Donald Trump’s directive to congressional Republicans to not agree to a deal with Democrats on immigration and border control is “appalling”, Mitt Romney said.“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” Romney, the Republican senator from Utah, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday.“And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame [Joe] Biden for it is … really appalling.”Having won in Iowa and New Hampshire and with only the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley still in the race, Trump is the clear favourite for the Republican presidential nomination to face Biden in November.His progress has not been impeded by 91 criminal charges, attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress and assorted civil trials.It was widely reported this week that Trump has sought to dynamite Senate talks for an immigration deal long linked to prospects of a new aid package for Ukraine.Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, reportedly acknowledged that Trump’s opposition makes it highly unlikely immigration talks will succeed, given hardline Republicans’ hold on the House and its speaker, Mike Johnson, a far-right congressman from Louisiana.Romney is a former Massachusetts governor who became the Republican nominee for president in 2012 before winning a Senate seat in Utah in 2018.Though he flirted with working for Trump when he won the White House, Romney has since emerged as a constant opponent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe sole Republican to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, for seeking political dirt in Ukraine, Romney was one of seven senators to find Trump guilty in his second such trial, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.On Thursday, Romney said: “The reality is that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border, and someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved, as opposed to saying: ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’” More

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      Trump seeks to disqualify Fani Willis from prosecuting him in Georgia

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      Donald Trump joined a motion on Thursday seeking to disqualify the Fulton county district attorney prosecuting him over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia after her recent remarks decrying allegations of an affair with one of her deputies.The filing, submitted to Fulton county superior judge Scott McAfee on Thursday, adopted and added to an earlier motion to have the district attorney Fani Willis and her entire office thrown off bringing the case.At issue is an explosive complaint from Trump’s co-defendant and former 2020 campaign election day operations chief Michael Roman, asking Willis to be relieved because her alleged relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest.The filing itself included no concrete evidence that might give rise to a disqualification. But exhibits in related filings – notably Wade’s divorce proceeding – has shown that Wade paid for trips with Willis to California and Florida.Willis has not formally responded to the complaint to date, though she addressed some of the claims in a speech delivered earlier this month at a historic Black church in Atlanta, suggesting the claims were in part racially motivated.“How come, God, the same Black man I hired was acceptable when a Republican in another county hired him and paid him twice the rate?” Willis said in her remarks, in a thinly veiled effort to defend the hiring of Wade without specifically naming him.In the new filing joining Roman’s motion, Trump lawyer Steve Sadow contended for the first time that Willis’s remarks, in addition to coming outside of proper court channels, were themselves improper.“The DA’s provocative and inflammatory extrajudicial racial comments, made in a widely publicized speech at a historical Black church in Atlanta, and cloaked in repeated references to God, reinforce and amplify the ‘appearance of impropriety’ in her judgement and prosecutorial conduct,” Sadow wrote.The district attorney’s office is expected to file a response before 2 February, ahead of an evidentiary hearing set for 15 February before McAfee in Atlanta.The relationship between Willis and Wade threatens to undercut the Georgia election interference case against Trump and his allies because a finding of a conflict of interest could see the entire district attorney’s office disqualified from continuing with the prosecution.The transactions from Wade’s credit card statements attached as an exhibit show that Wade paid for at least two trips during the criminal investigation into Trump that named Willis as a travel companion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe first trip, dated 4 October 2022, involves a flight from Atlanta to Miami. Wade paid for a ticket for himself and for Willis. Separately, on the same date and without any names attached, the statement shows Wade’s credit card was used to make two purchases with Royal Caribbean Cruises, for $1,284 and $1,387.The second trip, dated 25 April 2023, involved a flight from Atlanta to San Francisco. Wade again paid for a ticket for himself and for Willis. Separately, on 14 May 2023, Wade’s credit card was used to make two purchases of $612 and $228 at a Doubletree hotel in Napa Valley, California.Roman’s motion claimed Willis personally profited from the contract. Wade was paid at least $653,000 and potentially as much as $1m for legal fees as one of the lead prosecutors on the Trump case, and the filing alleged Wade then paid for trips he took with Willis to Napa Valley and the Caribbean. More

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      US border policy deal within reach despite efforts by Trump to derail it, senators say

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      Congressional negotiators said a border deal was within reach on Thursday, despite efforts by Donald Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill to derail the talks.With the fate of US aid for Ukraine hanging in the balance, the outlook for border compromise had appeared grim following reports on Wednesday night that the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, was walking away from a compromise that he suggested could “undermine” Trump’s chances in a November general election against Joe Biden. But by Thursday afternoon, senators involved in the discussions were insisting that the opposite was true: an agreement was within reach and legislative text could be released in the coming days.Referring to Trump as the “nominee”, McConnell reported told Republicans in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday night that “politics on this have changed”, according to a report in Punchbowl News. With Trump as their likely standard bearer, he suggested that it would be unwise to move forward with a bipartisan immigration bill that could possibly neutralize one of Biden’s biggest vulnerabilities. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell said, referring to Trump.“That’s like parallel universe shit,” Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina involved in the negotiations, fumed to reporters on Thursday. “That didn’t happen.”It would amount to a surprising about-face for McConnell, a strong supporter of sending aid to Ukraine and no friend of the former president, who has leveled racist broadsides against McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, and mercilessly disparaged the Republican leader as an “old crow”.Walking through the Capitol on Thursday, McConnell told Bloomberg News that the immigration talks were “ongoing”. Later he reportedly assured his confused conference that he was “fully onboard” with the negotiations, and brushed off reports that suggested otherwise.The proposal under discussion in Congress would have changed immigration policy to discourage migration. It would include major concessions from Democrats on immigration in exchange for Republican support on passing military assistance to Israel and Ukraine, a country whose cause the party’s far right has turned against.But the politics of a deal have only become more challenging as Trump consolidates support from Republican officials in what many view as his inevitable march toward the GOP nomination.On social media, Trump implored Mike Johnson, the arch-conservative House speaker, not to accept a deal “unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions and Millions of people”.Failure to strike a deal would have global implications, with the Pentagon warning that Ukrainian soldiers on the frontlines of its grinding war with Russia risk running out of ammunition. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has said the “future of the war in Ukraine” and the “security of our western democracy” depend on Congress reaching an agreement.Biden had requested tens of billions of dollars from Congress to send aid to Ukraine and Israel as well as to allies in the Asia Pacific region. But the funding package has been stalled for months in Congress amid Republican demands for dramatic changes to border policy.View image in fullscreenSenate Republicans who support the border talks said the party should seize the opportunity to address the record rise of people arriving at the US southern border, a situation both parties and the White House have described as a crisis.“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump,” the Utah senator Mitt Romney, a Republican who has pressed his party to approve military aid for Ukraine, told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday. “And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling.”He continued: “The reality is that we have a crisis at the border, the American people are suffering as a result of what’s happening at the border. And someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved as opposed to saying: ‘Hey, save that problem. Don’t solve it. Let me take credit for solving it later.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven in less contentious times, immigration remains one of the thorniest issues in American politics, and efforts to reform the nation’s outdated system have failed repeatedly. But as an unprecedented number of people fleeing violence, poverty and natural disasters seek refuge at the US-Mexico border, the issue has become top of mind for many Americans who overwhelmingly disapprove of the Biden administration’s handling of the matter.Trump has already made immigration a central issue of his campaign, outlining a draconian vision for his second term that includes mass raids, detentions camps and more funding to build his long-promised wall along the border with Mexico.Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill have argued that a bipartisan deal would only serve to give Biden political cover without actually solving the problem. Others argue that the Senate plan was designed to force the hand of the Republican-controlled House, where the speaker is under pressure from the far-right flank of his party not to compromise on the issue.At a press conference earlier this week, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, denounced the proposal, the details of which have not yet been released, as a “stinking pile of crap” that “represents Senate Republican leadership waging war on House Republicans”.Cruz alleged that the negotiators involved cared only about supporting Ukraine and not fixing the issues at the southern border.If a deal falls apart, Schumer and Biden will be forced to look for alternative legislative paths to approving aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But with Republicans demanding border security measures in exchange for their votes, it remains far from certain that tying the aid to must-pass spending bills or bringing it to the floor as a standalone measure would garner the necessary 60 votes in the Senate.The world will likely know soon whether a deal is possible, the Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, one of the Democratic negotiators, told reporters on Thursday.“I think the Republican Congress is going to make a decision in the next 24 hours as to whether they actually want to get something done or whether they want to leave the border a mess for political reasons,” he said. More

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      Ex-Trump adviser Peter Navarro sentenced to four months in prison

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      Peter Navarro, a top former Trump administration official, was sentenced to four months in federal prison and fined $9,500 after he was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 Capitol attack.The sentence imposed by Amit Mehta in federal district court in Washington was lighter than what prosecutors recommended but tracked the four-month jail term handed to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was similarly convicted for ignoring the panel’s subpoena.“You are not a victim, you are not the object of a political prosecution,” the US district judge said from the bench. “These are circumstances of your own making.”Navarro, 74, was found guilty in September of two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the Capitol attack, claiming that executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.“He cloaked his bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt behind baseless, unfounded invocations of executive privilege and immunity that could not and would never apply to his situation,” prosecutors wrote of Navarro in their sentencing memorandum.Within hours after the judge handed down the sentence, Navarro’s lawyers John Rowley and Stanley Woodward filed a notice of appeal to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit. As with Bannon, Navarro is expected to have his punishment deferred pending appeal.Navarro’s lawyers had asked for probation, saying the judge himself seemed to acknowledge at one point that Navarro genuinely believed Trump had invoked executive privilege, a separation-of-powers protection aimed at ensuring White House deliberations can be shielded from Congress.The privilege, however, is not absolute or all-encompassing. The January 6 committee had sought both White House and non-White House material, the latter of which would not be included, and the judge concluded in any case at a hearing that Trump had never formally invoked the privilege.Regardless of what Navarro may have believed, the judge found, he failed to prove the existence of a conversation or communication from Trump that explicitly instructed Navarro not to cooperate with the January 6 committee’s subpoena specifically.That proved to be the central problem for Navarro.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore charging Navarro, prosecutors decided not to bring charges against two other Trump White House officials – Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff , and Dan Scavino, former deputy chief – even though they also did not cooperate with the January 6 committee and were referred for contempt.The difference with Meadows and Scavino, as the record later appeared to show, was that they had received letters from a Trump lawyer directing them not to respond to subpoena requests from the panel on executive privilege grounds.Navarro received a similar letter from Trump directing him not to comply with a subpoena from around the same time issued by the House committee that investigated the Covid pandemic. But he was unable to produce an invocation with respect to the later January 6 committee.“Had the president issued a similar letter to the defendant, the record here would look very different,” the judge said at a hearing last year.The January 6 committee completed its work last January, writing in its final report that Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, conspiring to obstruct Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States.Last year, the US justice department charged Trump on four criminal counts related to his efforts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and impede the transfer of power. Trump was also charged in Georgia for violating the state’s racketeering statute for election interference efforts there. More

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      We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency | Margaret Sullivan

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      With Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, the battle lines are drawn for November. Unless something very weird happens, we’re looking at a Joe Biden and Donald Trump rematch.It’s time – past time, really – to sweep away any remaining delusions about the viability of a more moderate Republican challenger or what a second Trump term would bring.Now the question isn’t who’s running but whether American democracy will endure.To put it bluntly, not if Trump is elected.He’s already told us, many times over – and in abundantly clear terms – what he will do with a second term:He’ll prosecute his perceived enemies with the full power of the government. He’ll call out the military to put down citizen protest. He’ll never allow a fair election again.“Twelve more years” is no longer just a joke to pander to the raucous and red-capped faithful.“The serious scholars of fascism are now saying that the ‘F-word’ is merited,” Jeff Sharlet, a Dartmouth professor and author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, told me in an interview on Wednesday.Do Americans really want to live in a fascist or authoritarian nation? Some may believe it will work out just fine – that the loss of freedom may hurt others, but not them – but most of us don’t want that. Or we wouldn’t if we were fully aware of the consequences.I talked with Sharlet about the actions that the mainstream press and regular citizens can take now that we know what we know.Newsrooms big and small, he believes, need to educate their staffs about the dangers of fascism.“There needs to be a pause,” he said, in coverage as as usual, and an internal reckoning. Sharlet suggests that media leaders bring in scholars – for example, Yale’s Timothy Snyder, who wrote On Tyranny – to lead newsroom discussions, based on clear historical precedent. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, would be another excellent choice.After the New York Times wrote that Trump’s New Hampshire win “raises questions” about Nikki Haley’s path forward, Sharlet scoffed, noting that such questions have been settled for some time “but a press built for the horse race keeps touting a path that never existed when it should be retooling itself to cover a rapidly mutating fascism”.Is such a retooling really possible? Of course it is.The fact that many newsrooms now have democracy teams or democracy reporters suggests that they understand the problem to some extent. But they need to get much more urgent about it.That kind of change takes clear leadership from the top.The New York Times – now more influential than ever, as other news organizations shrink and fade by the day – should set an example. Its top editor, Joseph Kahn, with his background as a foreign correspondent in China, is extremely well positioned to take the lead.As NYU professor Jay Rosen so memorably put it, coverage must refocus: “Not the odds but the stakes.” We do see “stakes” stories, of course, including on the Times front page, but it’s inarguable that horserace coverage still dominates.What, exactly, we are racing toward is a question worth asking in every day’s politics coverage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat about regular citizens?Perhaps most importantly, they need to stop tuning out. They shouldn’t throw up their hands and decide not to care about politics or the future of the country.“People need to pay attention to the exhaustion they feel and know that it is a symptom of acquiescence and adaptation,” Sharlet told me.As Ben-Ghiat told me on my American Crisis podcast, that exhaustion is part of the strongman’s playbook.Trump creates chaos, and we grow tired of it. Weary of the relentless flow of bad news, the dire warnings, the anxiety, we retreat into our personal lives or our political bubbles.More advice from Sharlet for citizens: form a “boring book club” and read – for example – Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, the shocking (and nearly 1,000-page) rightwing plan to dismantle the federal government and install political allies after a Trump election.As the Associated Press wrote: “Trump-era conservatives want to gut the ‘administrative state’ from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.”Neither politics reporters nor regular citizens need to become full-blown scholars of authoritarianism over the next nine months.But failing to understand and act upon what’s at stake – either out of ennui or because “we’ve always done it that way” – is dangerous.Now, with the clarity of the New Hampshire primary behind us, it’s high time to take things seriously.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      How an alleged office romance could derail the Trump election interference case

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      After spending nearly three years seeking to hold Donald Trump and his allies accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, faces a series of imminent, critical choices that could upend her consequential case against the former president and 14 remaining co-defendants.“The stakes could hardly be higher,” said Clark Cunningham, a law professor and ethics expert at Georgia State University.Michael Roman, a seasoned Republican operative and one of the defendants in the wide-ranging racketeering case, filed a motion earlier this month seeking the disqualification of Willis and Nathan Wade, an outside lawyer hired by Willis in 2021 to assist with the Trump case. In court filings, Roman alleged Willis and Wade were in a romantic relationship and Wade had used some of the more than $650,000 he earned from his work for her to pay for vacations for the two of them. Bank records made public last week showed Wade had paid for tickets for himself and Willis to California in 2023 and Miami in 2022.Neither Willis nor Wade has confirmed or denied a romantic relationship yet, and Willis has said she will respond in a court filing due on 2 February. A hearing on the request is set for 15 February. Willis has said all of the special prosecutors she hired were paid the same rate.While experts cautioned they were waiting for Willis and Wade to respond to Roman’s claims, it has already caused a headache for Willis, whose case has long been seen as one of the strongest efforts to hold Trump accountable for 2020. Because the case is in Georgia state court, it is also immune from Trump’s interference should he win the election.“As a legal matter, I don’t see much of anything as of yet that would make me think that a disqualification is likely,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has closely followed the case. “In terms of the political bucket, it is both an optics disaster, but it’s also been a lot of political malpractice from the office for not responding. So this drip, drip, drip is a problem.”A disqualification would upend the case against Trump and significantly delay it. If the judge Scott McAfee were to disqualify Willis’s office from handling the case, the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia would appoint a replacement. There’s no time limit on how long that could take. “It could entirely derail the entire enterprise,” Kreis said.Wade was a municipal judge and well-known lawyer in the Atlanta suburbs with little prosecutorial experience before Willis hired him to work on the Trump case. The two met in 2019 during a legal education course for judges, and he became a confidante and mentor to Willis. Willis told the New York Times in 2022 that Wade was not a first choice to work on the prosecution team, but that she approached him after other more experienced lawyers turned her down. Wade was tepid, too, she told the Times, telling her he didn’t have much prosecutorial experience. She eventually convinced him to join the team. “I need someone I can trust,” she told the Times.View image in fullscreenRoman’s accusation has prompted national interest in Wade’s ongoing divorce. Willis was subpoenaed for a deposition as part of that case, but a judge this week put off requiring her to testify.Regardless of what happens legally, Trump is likely to use the salacious allegation to continue to try to undermine Willis’s credibility. While his lawyers did not join Roman’s motion, Trump has already weighed in.“When is the Great State of Georgia dropping the FAKE LITIGATION against me and the others? ELECTION INTERFERENCE! The case is a FRAUD, just like D.A. Fani Willis and her ‘LOVER’,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on 20 January.Norman Eisen, a former “ethics czar” under Barack Obama, has been supportive of Willis, and argued that disqualification isn’t merited under Georgia law. Still, he has called for Wade to step aside.“Questions about gifts and related matters go to Willis’s and Wade’s obligations to the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, and have no connection to assuring the defendants a fair trial,” he wrote in an essay in Just Security with the former US attorney Joyce White Vance and Richard Painter, a former ethics czar under George W Bush.“Although the Georgia law on disqualifying a prosecutor would permit Wade to remain on the case as well, in our view he should voluntarily step down. His continued presence will create a distraction, and his departure, in addition to an on-the-record hearing in court, is the best path to dispense with any lingering concerns,” they wrote.Willis has had a brush with disqualification already. In July of 2022, when a special purpose grand jury was still investigating the case, she held a political fundraiser for Charlie Bailey, the Democratic opponent of Burt Jones, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, who served as a fake elector for Trump in 2020. Jones was under investigation by the special purpose grand jury at the time. Judge Robert CI McBurney disqualified Willis’s office from handling any part of the case against Jones.“An investigation of this significance, garnering the public attention it necessarily does and touching so many political nerves in our society, cannot be burdened by legitimate doubts about the District Attorney’s motives,” McBurney wrote in his disqualification order. A replacement special prosecutor still has not been appointed.McBurney also admonished the DA’s office during a hearing, calling it “a ‘What are you thinking?’ moment”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University, agreed that there was no conduct identified in Roman’s motion that would cause the indictment to be dismissed – an opinion shared by other experts.“Indictments do not get dismissed because of behavior like this. Nothing about the allegations suggests that the indictment is in any way tainted,” he said in an interview.He also agreed that Willis’s conduct likely would not result in disqualification. And the fact that Wade was paid a high hourly rate was not in itself grounds for him to be disqualified. “Every lawyer who bills by the hour has that interest. Hourly billing is quite common nationally. So of course the lawyer has an interest in a continuation of a case,” he said.Still, Gillers said he was concerned by the vagueness of the invoices Wade had submitted and that were approved by the Fulton county district attorney’s office. They would not pass muster at most government agencies or corporations, he said.“They’re generic, they are in whole numbers. Eight hours, six hours, seven hours. They don’t break down the particular tasks that were done. For someone like me, looking at that, that’s a red flag,” he said.“In my view, he has to step aside, unless the board of commissioners or other Fulton county official, knowing all the facts, approves of the arrangement, and designates someone other than Willis to review Wade’s bills,” he continued. “His position is tainted by the romantic relationship unless there is informed consent from the appropriate authority in Fulton county.”By filing the allegations as part of the court case, and not directly with a disciplinary body, Roman may have made a strategic decision to try and muddy the legal issues in the case, understanding the optics for Willis would look bad, he added.Cunningham said he was waiting for more information to evaluate the merits of Roman’s disqualification claim. But regardless of what McAfee rules, he said, there are likely to be efforts to appeal that could drag out the case. Willis, he said, should step aside from the case and let a chief deputy or someone else take over and decide whether Wade continues on the case.“The argument that the case as it moves forward is being motivated improperly goes away. That is absolutely the best way to make sure that the motion to disqualify isn’t granted,” he said.“It minimizes it just to say it’s a question of optics, though that’s certainly the case,” he said. “Right now, they’re the story. Every day. And that’s bad in every possible way. It’s not good for public confidence in this case, which is needed.” More