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      You can’t fight the Republican party’s ‘big lie’ with facts alone | Peter Pomerantsev

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      Why do seemingly serious people repeat crazy political lies? This was the question the American anthropologist and political scientist Lisa Wedeen explored when she studied the Syrian dictatorship in the 1990s.She was struck by how people who were usually rational in private would repeat the utterly absurd slogans of the regime, such as claiming that the dictator Hafez al-Assad was the greatest chemist in the world.“From the moment you leave your house, you ask: what does the regime want?,” a Syrian explained to her. “The struggle becomes who can praise the government more.” The bigger the lie you uttered, the more loyal you were.“The regime’s power resides in its ability to impose national fictions and to make people say and do what they otherwise would not,” Wedeen concluded. “This obedience makes people complicit; it entangles them in self-enforcing relations of domination, thereby making it hard for participants to see themselves simply as victims of the state’s caprices.”I was reminded of Wedeen’s research when the US Congress finally selected a speaker after weeks of chaos. Their choice, Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana, is best known for ardently supporting ex-president Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Jo Biden, was rigged. Johnson was the head of the committee to question the integrity of the election. He constructed spurious legal arguments that tried to discredit the vote, though his proposals were thrown out by the US supreme court. He raised the unfounded theory that the voting machines used in the election were tampered with.This claim is so groundless that Fox, the network that supported the allegation, had to pay nearly a billion dollars in a settlement with Dominion, the company that makes the machines.Many of the Republican representatives who supported Johnson’s candidacy have admitted both publicly and privately that the elections were, in fact, not falsified. Yet when journalists faced a gaggle of Republican congressmen and questioned Johnson’s record on this blatant lie, his colleagues jeered and he mockingly said: “Next question” – as if the facts were irrelevant here.And in a sense, they are. Agreeing to Trump’s claims about the rigged election is the absurdity you have to pledge allegiance to in order to show you belong to the tribe. It ensures your fealty by making you complicit. For anyone who has lived in authoritarian regimes, it’s a familiar sight.Along with Wedeen’s Syrian example, I’m reminded of the Czech dissident and playwright Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, where he tells the story of a greengrocer in communist-era Prague who puts up pro-regime posters in his shop window. The greengrocer doesn’t believe the communist slogans; the people who make the slogans don’t believe in them; and the people who read them don’t believe in them.But as long as everyone plays along, the system continues. It’s the act of not believing and yet pretending, rather than of fervently believing, which is the power of such systems. Your will is corroded: you are made into moral mincemeat that can be shaped any which way by the leader.Havel nobly suggested that in order to fight such a system, what was needed was to “live in truth”, start being honest. Republican politicians face none of the danger communist-era Czechoslovaks or Syrians under the Assads have, but living in truth seems beyond them.Contradicting Trump’s absurdities risks falling out of favour with the leader and his supporters.Altogether, about 40% of Americans think the 2020 vote was illegitimate, and about 60% of Republicans (the figures fluctuate). A democracy will struggle to survive, let alone flourish, when such huge swathes of its population see it as their badge of loyalty not to trust its most fundamental processes.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut if the “rigged” election claim is more about identity than evidence, it also means it will be hard to fact check our way out of this situation. The issue can’t simply be resolved by “trusted” sources, even those on the far right, who can communicate the truth about the election to Trump supporters. Instead, sources only become trusted if they agree to the lie.Pledging loyalty to the “big lie” is more about identity than knowledge – and to fight it entails understanding the need for belonging and meaning it fulfils. Authoritarian propaganda can give the illusion of status and at its extremes a sense of supremacy to compensate for the lack of real agency.Self-styled “populists” can flourish in what sociologists call “civic deserts”: frequently rural areas where the old institutions that bonded communities, the local clubs and town halls have disappeared and where civic engagement is particularly low.But such communities can start to be regenerated for a digital age with, for example, online as well as offline town halls; reinvigorated local news that responds to people’s priorities; and online municipal budget making and other innovations that help people feel part of a community and have ownership over local politics.Historical lessons from understanding and fighting propaganda can be useful here too. When he investigated the psychology of German soldiers in the second world war, the British psychiatrist Henry Dicks thought that counterpropaganda needed to stress the bonds people had that went beyond belonging to the Nazi Volk: the emotional bonds they felt with loved ones and relatives, for example.The competition with the big lie is not just, or even primarily, about fact checking. It’s a competition between different models of belonging: can we build alternative communities that are more benign and yet fulfilling than the ones offered by the conspiracy theorists? More

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      Enough review – inside story of the Trump White House by star witness at Capitol riot hearings

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      Every legal drama needs a surprise witness. Until June last year, the congressional hearings to investigate the attempted coup at the US Capitol in January 2021 were unsurprising: Democrats presented evidence that Trump had riled up the incendiary mob, to which Republicans responded with regurgitated abuse. Then into the room walked Cassidy Hutchinson, a Republican true believer who had worked as an aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. No one gasped, because the then 25-year-old woman was unknown, but her testimony, provoked by an uneasy conscience, quietly confirmed that Trump and his henchmen had knowingly lied about the outcome of the presidential election, then summoned loony militias from the backwoods and dispatched them, armed with bear spray and flagpoles sharpened into spears, to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory.Hutchinson’s memoir adds many greasy, sleazy details to the more sanitised account she gave in Congress. Trump, she recalls, smashed plates in his dining room beside the Oval Office, squirting ketchup on the walls to express his exasperation. She observes Meadows illicitly incinerating bags of telltale documents that should have been passed to the government archives; his wife complains about the cost of dry-cleaning his suits to remove the stench from so many bonfires. And as Trump exhorts his horde to invade the Capitol, Rudy Giuliani, for whom the mayhem was like a double dose of Valium, leers at Hutchinson with jaundiced eyes and slides his hand up her thigh. Disillusioned and disgusted, she decides, as the title of her book tersely puts it, that she has had enough of the president and his thuggish praetorian guards.Her earlier glimpses of Trump are killingly candid, exposing the tough guy as a weakling, even a sissy. He disdained face masks during the pandemic because the stained straps drew attention to his second skin of bronzer. During the winter he required a valet to blow-dry the insides of his leather gloves, to ensure that his tiny fingers stayed warm; volunteering tips like a chatty beautician, he even advised Hutchinson to add some blond streaks to her dark hair. In a casual aside, she notes that Trump dislikes animals – a symptom of his quaking cowardice, and of his reluctance to confront creatures unimpressed by his inflated wealth and his equally puffed-up celebrity. Titanically petulant, he sought to overturn the US constitution because he felt “embarrassed” by his lost bid for re-election.About herself, Hutchinson is less clear-eyed. Born to a working-class family in New Jersey, she was exposed during childhood to the alienation and festering resentment that eventually produced the Unabomber, QAnon and Trump’s Maga fanatics. Her father taught her to distrust anyone sporting a government-issued badge, and also anyone in a white coat: he once offered to perform an appendectomy on her with a pocketknife. On hunting trips he schooled her in what he called “the warrior spirit”, and toughened her by using turtles for target practice and feasting on the deer he shot.Despite her college education, Hutchinson surrendered to Trump’s rants and was pleased to serve as his “loyal foot soldier”. Too late, she realised she had enrolled in a movement – or perhaps in a nihilistic death cult – whose aim was to foment chaos. First, she crashed a golf cart at Camp David when drunk, while one of her colleagues almost burned down a cabin at the presidential retreat. Then Meadows solemnly asked if she would take a bullet for Trump. “Yeah,” Hutchinson replied, adding after a pause that she’d prefer to take it in the leg. The cheeky proviso revealed that she was not the kind of diehard that Trump demanded.At the end of the book, Hutchinson’s Trump-worshipping father sells his house and vanishes without trace. She is relieved to be rid of him; it doesn’t occur to her that he might be somewhere in the wilderness with the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, limbering up for the next battle. After months in hiding, she re-emerges into society and buys herself a new friend – a cockapoo puppy, which she names George in homage to Washington, founding father of the currently foundering republic. I hope that George’s lapping tongue has comforted Hutchinson, but it will take more than a puppy’s licks to clean up Washington. More

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      Romney: A Reckoning review: must-read on Mitt and the rise of Trump

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      McKay Coppins joined BuzzFeed in 2012, as its Mitt Romney reporter. The former Massachusetts governor won the Republican presidential nomination but lost the election to Barack Obama. Coppins wrote a postmortem, A Mormon Reporter on the Romney Bus. Its subtitle: How America Got Used to His Religion, and Mine.“I quickly found that my expertise in Romney’s religion posed a distinct advantage – not in access or sourcing, necessarily, but in understanding the elusive candidate as an actual person,” Coppins wrote.These days, Romney represents Utah in the US Senate. He has less than 14 months until he retires. His disdain for Donald Trump is legend. In February 2020, he sought to hold Trump accountable for abusing his power and strong-arming Ukraine, becoming the first senator ever to vote to convict a president of his own party in an impeachment trial. He voted to convict Trump again at his second trial, for inciting the January 6 insurrection.Coppins is now at the Atlantic. His new book is a must-read for anyone interested in how the Republican party morphed from the party of Lincoln into a Trumpian mess, picking up where Coppins left off in The Wilderness, his earlier look at the GOP.The 1960s set off a realignment in US politics. Over the past 60 years, resentment and tribalism have come to dominate, social issues come to the fore. In a Republican party once synonymous with the Union army and high-end suburbs, the south and evangelical protestantism now wield major influence.In the 1968 presidential race, the religion of George Romney – the Republican governor of Michigan and Mitt’s father – was a non-issue. His aspirations finally came undone after he said he had been “brainwashed” over the war in Vietnam.Mitt Romney first ran for the Republican nomination 40 years later, in 2008. Times and the party had changed. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister as well as governor of Arkansas, went gunning for his rival’s religion.“Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Huckabee asked.Coppins offers an engaging read, the product of 30 interviews with Romney, interviews with aides and friends, and the senator’s emails and diaries. Chock-full of direct quotes, Romney: A Reckoning offers a window into the world of a private man who has darted in and out of the public eye.The book is also a scorching critique, singeing many. Coppins captures Romney strafing a heap of A-list Republicans. Trump and Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Mike Pence and Chris Christie. All take direct hits. Coppins portrays their peevishness, pettiness and gutlessness – or worse – in Technicolor. Gingrich is a “smug know-it-all, smarmy, and too pleased with himself”. Cruz is “frightening”, “scary” and a “demagogue”.As for Ron DeSantis, in Romney’s estimation, the Florida governor is “much smarter than Trump”. But Romney also asks: “Do you want an authoritarian who’s smart or one who’s not smart?” Months before the primary, the party faithful have rendered their verdict. In poll after poll, Trump clobbers DeSantis.Onwards, to Pence: “No one had been more loyal, more willing to smile when he saw absurdities, more willing to ascribe God’s will to things that were ungodly.”Romney also recalls how Jared Kushner tried to convince him Trump’s erratic behavior was actually a manifestation of strategic savvy. Romney wasn’t buying. “I think he’s not smart,” he said. “I mean, really not smart.”Nonetheless, in 2012, Romney sought Trump’s endorsement. Beaten by Obama, Romney conceded on election night. Trump, though, unfurled his lie that the election was rigged. We had seen the future.To George Romney and his son, race relations mattered. The younger Romney parted with Trump after he was slow to disavow backing from David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. Here, Coppins quotes Romney’s journal: “It is nearly certain that he will be the nominee. I am not tempted in the slightest to retreat. I will fight him on the beaches. I will fight him in the air.” Fine words – that didn’t alter the outcome.Romney then entertained the prospect of serving Trump as secretary of state, only to be publicly humiliated. He ascribes the failed gambit to “a mix of noble motivations and self-centered ones”. Said differently, he wanted the prize but refused to pay the price. “You need to say that you’ve come to the conclusion that I’m terrific,” Trump reportedly demanded. “That I’ll be a great president … We need to clear this up.”Romney would not bend the knee. But he admits: “I like being involved and being in the middle of things, and having something important to do. It’s like, you know, I wanted to be president. If you can’t be president, being secretary of state’s not a bad spot to come thereafter.”George W Bush tells Coppins Romney dodged a bullet. Now, he has little to lose. His time in the Senate ticks down. He has a fortune to enjoy. Published estimates peg him as the third-richest member of Congress, net worth hitting $300m. Yet he is not content. Washington crumbles from within. Violence and menace are coins of the realm. January 6 cemented a new political era.Jim Jordan’s run for House speaker, from the extreme right, triggered a barrage of threats for Republicans who refused to go along. Being primaried by the right is no longer the worst that could happen. On January 6, as the Capitol lay besieged, Ann Romney, Mitt’s wife, cried: “This is our country … This is our country.”
      Romney: A Reckoning is published in the US by Scribner More

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      Sedition Hunters: how ordinary Americans helped track down the Capitol rioters

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      For one rioter at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, wearing a Caterpillar hoodie proved a bad fashion choice. Admittedly, with an American flag-patterned cap and some shades, the garment helped shield his identity as he manhandled a police officer. Yet it came back to haunt him. Investigators used an app and facial-recognition technology to zero in and eventually got their man: Logan Barnhart, a construction worker in Michigan with a passion for fitness. His résumé included bodybuilding and modeling for romance novel covers. While hitting a punching bag in a workout video, he wore some familiar attire: a Caterpillar sweatshirt. Cue the Dragnet music.There was something else remarkable about this investigation: the sleuths were ordinary Americans, part of a spontaneously formed citizen network volunteering their time to track down Capitol rioters. Now their story is shared in a book that takes its name from the movement, Sedition Hunters: How January 6 Broke the Justice System, by Ryan J Reilly, an NBC News justice reporter.“They were really just random Americans who got together and decided they wanted to do something about what happened on January 6,” Reilly says.Those random Americans did not just identify Barnhart. They sought and found other rioters who stormed the Capitol after Donald Trump refused to accept his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden and invited supporters to rally in Washington on the day Congress was to certify the results. Now, one of the Sedition Hunters, Forrest Rogers, is using his talents to siphon out misinformation of a different sort – as a journalist reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a newspaper based in Zurich.In the wake of January 6, the citizen sleuths proved invaluable to the FBI, which Reilly describes as reeling from the fallout of the riots and overwhelmed by the subsequent federal investigation, the largest in American history, as an initial estimate of 800 rioters entering the Capitol ballooned to more than 3,000.While the FBI approached the task with antiquated technology, the Sedition Hunters had all the latest tools, including the app that helped catch Barnhart, which was designed in a garage by one particular sleuth, known only as Alex in Reilly’s book. Many others did such critical work. Like Alex, “Joan” used an article of clothing to pin down a suspect. In her case, it was a blue-and-white sweatshirt from a school in her home town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, worn by a Capitol window-smasher. Its wearer had also been seen inside but all she had was a nickname: “Zeeker.” Joan searched the school’s Facebook page. Zeeker turned out to be Leo Brent Bozell IV, scion of a conservative dynasty.By the time of Bozell’s arrest, two other people had identified him to authorities. Both knew him. Although there are occasional mentions in the book of people who turned in rioters they knew, the Sedition Hunters focused on tracking down hard-to-find individuals who they had never met.“It was easy to get the person virtually if they posted their own crime, built their own case on a social media post,” Reilly says. “Some of them were making efforts to hide their identity in some way.”In his hoodie, baseball cap and sunglasses, one of many faces in a mob, Barnhart was tough to identify. Alex’s app proved a gamechanger. It created a virtual library of images of the attack collected by the Sedition Hunters, which they could now search to unmask the culprit. Each suspect was given a relevant nickname: Barnhart was “CatSweat”, for his Caterpillar garb. Ironically, an image from the rightwing social media platform Parler delivered the coup de grace. Facial recognition technology confirmed CatSweat as Barnhart. His social media accounts yielded further confirmation: a hat he wore in one photo matched his headgear on January 6. On Twitter, he promised Trump he would “be there” at the Capitol that day.Asked if any of the Sedition Hunters were secretly FBI agents, Reilly discounts the possibility with a quip: “They were way too skilled.” More seriously, he adds: “I think that really is what they brought to bear.”The Sedition Hunters sometimes outperformed their professional counterparts. The FBI made some wrong hits. John Richter, a Biden campaign worker, shared his name with a rioter who reached the Senate floor. Guess who was apprehended first? Although the Democratic Richter convinced them they had the wrong guy, with help from his puppy, two years would pass before the feds arrested the actual rioter.“This guy worked for Joe Biden, got him elected,” Reilly says. “He was probably not the man to look for … Stopping the election of a man he worked for did not make a lot of sense.”Reilly also notes that conservative elements within the FBI supported Trump and were lukewarm on investigating those who rioted for him.“Despite what we heard the past seven or eight years from Donald Trump, at its core, it’s a conservative organization,” Reilly says. “A lot of people generally lean conservative. It does not mean they’re all Trump supporters, but there was a lot of whataboutism in the FBI after the Capitol attacks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReilly does provide many examples of FBI personnel acting on tips from the Sedition Hunters. After Joan made her initial identification of Zeeker as Bozell and communicated this to the bureau, she kept scanning images from the riots for that blue-and-white sweatshirt. This uncovered further evidence of his violent actions, which she also transmitted. A special agent thanked her, promised to update prosecutors and made good on that vow, an additional charge against Bozell being brought within 24 hours.Reilly is mindful of some developments still on the horizon. There is a five-year statute of limitations for Capitol rioters – 6 January 2026 – so the window to bring remaining fugitives to justice is about two and a half years wide. There’s a wild card too: what happens if Trump wins the presidency again and decides to issue pardons?“I think it’s very real,” Reilly says of that possibility. “He said he’s going to. To me, it really depends on what the extent is going to be … You can easily see him pardoning everybody who committed misdemeanors, something like that.”Of more serious charges, he adds: “I don’t know across the board.”Who knows what will happen. For now, readers can savor the unheralded work of the Sedition Hunters, best summed up in Joan’s reflection about helping bring Bozell to justice: “He probably would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling sleuths.”
      Sedition Hunters is published in the US by PublicAffairs More

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      Judge orders Ivanka Trump to testify in family’s civil fraud trial – as it happened

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      Amid all the jockeying in next year’s presidential race, frontrunner for the Republican nomination Donald Trump has been busy in a New York City courtroom, where a judge is presiding over his family’s civil fraud trial – and just ruled that his daughter can appear as a witness.Law360 reports that judge Arthur Engoron decided Ivanka Trump can be called to testify in the trial, where he is deciding what penalties to impose against the Trumps after finding they committed financial fraud:However, the soonest Ivanka could appear on the witness stand is next week, Engoron ruled:A New York City judge ruled that Ivanka Trump may appear on the witness stand in the civil fraud trial of her father Donald Trump and other family members as soon as next week. In Long Island, the Republican congressman and prolific liar George Santos pleaded guilty to a slate of new federal charges against him, and learned he would stand trial beginning on 9 September of next year. That’s about two months before the presidential election, and it appears Joe Biden will have a challenger for the Democratic nomination: Dean Phillips, a relatively inexperienced Minnesota congressman who declared his candidacy today.Here’s what else happened:
      Biden was briefed on the manhunt for the perpetrator of a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine that killed 18 people on Wednesday.
      A new Gallup poll shows the president’s approval rating slipping among Democrats, potentially due to his pro-Israel stance in its boiling conflict with Gaza.
      Some of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election subversion case are being offered plea deals, while others are not.
      Mike Johnson signaled he would be willing to continue the impeachment inquiry into Biden, in the Republican’s first interview since being elected House speaker.
      Democrats hope an upcoming Wisconsin supreme court case could turn the balance of power in the crucial swing state back in their favor.
      The mass shooting in Lewiston has prompted one of Maine’s two House representatives, Jared Golden, to reverse his opposition to an assault weapons ban, the Guardian’s Erum Salam reports. There could be political implications to this, as Golden is one of five Democrats nationwide whose districts voted for Republican Donald Trump in 2020:US house representative Jared Golden, of Maine’s second district, has made a stunning reversal of his opposition to efforts to ban assault rifles – in the wake of the mass shooting in a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston in the state on Wednesday night, which killed 18.In 2022, Golden was among the few Democrats to vote against a bill in Congress that would have banned the sale of assault weapons to the American public for the first time since 2004. Joe Biden has repeatedly sought such a ban and, on Thursday, a day after the worst such massacre in his state’s history, Golden joined the US president’s calls.The bill would have blocked the sale, manufacture, transfer, or possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and large-capacity ammunition devices and Golden also voted against a bill that would have raised the age limit for purchasing a semiautomatic rifle and banned the sale of high-capacity magazines.Golden is now receiving praise from many of his constituents and colleagues for his change of position.The White House just announced that Joe Biden has received an update on the search for the gunman behind a mass shooting Lewiston, Maine on Wednesday that left 18 people dead.From their statement:
      This afternoon the president was updated by his senior staff on the latest information about the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine. He also spoke with FBI director Christopher Wray, who described the more than 200 FBI personnel who are in Maine to support the investigation – including the ongoing manhunt – and provide assistance to the victims. The president expressed appreciation for the courageous work of all the federal, state and local law enforcement personnel.
      We have a live blog covering the latest on the manhunt, and you can read it here:In Wisconsin, a crucial swing state for any presidential candidate, the Guardian’s Alice Herman and Sam Levine report a supreme court decision could unravel gerrymandered maps that Republicans have used to their advantage for more than a decade, potentially boosting Democratic candidates:Lynn Carey, a retired nurse with a double lung transplant, has spent years trying to get Wisconsin lawmakers to improve healthcare. Carey organized voters in support of the Affordable Care Act back in 2009. Since its passage, she has pushed to get her Republican representatives in the state legislature to expand Medicaid coverage to its poorest residents.The idea has been overwhelmingly popular in Wisconsin: a 2019 poll showed 70% of voters in the state supported it. But Medicaid expansion hasn’t gone anywhere – even after Democrats won back Wisconsin’s governorship in 2018.Republicans still hold near-supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature, and have shown no sign of compromise on this issue or many others popular with most Wisconsinites. Their legislative majorities are virtually impenetrable, cemented by Republican-drawn district lines that have guaranteed Republicans control of the legislature even in years where Democrats received more votes statewide. “We don’t have competitive districts where people have to listen to their constituents,” Carey said.That could change soon.Differing opinions over the conflict between Israel and Hamas erupted in the House yesterday, when the rightwing lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced a resolution to censure Rashida Tlaib.The progressive Democrat from Michigan is one of two Muslim lawmakers in the chamber, and has been calling for a ceasefire in the worsening conflict. Tlaib responded to Greene’s allegations of antisemitism by calling her Islamophobic in a statement:Later in the day, the Democratic congresswoman Becca Balint introduced a separate resolution to censure Greene for allegations of racism and dishonoring people who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks. Here’s her reading the proposal on the House floor:And the Republican Anthony D’Esposito also spoke to introduce a resolution expelling his fellow New Yorker George Santos from the chamber, citing his many lies and federal criminal charges:Thus, the first full day of work for the House since Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker and eventual replacement by the conservative Republican Mike Johnson ended with two censure resolutions and one expulsion petition pending before it. The chamber is in recess today.Speaking of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, the president has thrown his support firmly behind Israel in the wake of the 7 October terror attack and its threat to invade the Gaza Strip to defeat Hamas. As the Guardian’s Tom Perkins and Erum Salam report, it’s a stance that could have consequences for his ability to win electoral votes in Michigan, a swing state with a large Arab American population:Leading up to the 2020 election, Arab American organizers in south-east Michigan like Terry Ahwal worked to convince their community to go to the polls for Joe Biden. The message was simple: Donald Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric and policies such as the Middle East travel ban were a threat to Arab Americans. Voters mobilized to help push Biden over the top in this critical swing state.Several years on, amid Biden’s full-throated support of Israel in the current war and an unfolding humanitarian crisis that has claimed thousand of lives in Gaza, Ahwal feels deep regret: “I have to say “I’m sorry’ to my friends.’”Ahwal is among hundreds of thousands of Arab Americans in Michigan, many of whom are watching with horror as the US supports Israel as it carries out its bombing campaign. After the community backed Biden by a wide margin in November 2020, the feeling goes “beyond betrayal”, about a dozen Arab Americans in Michigan said.“This is a complete loss of humanity, it is the active support of a genocide, and I don’t think it gets any worse than that,” said Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American activist and attorney. “I’ve gotten a few comments, ‘Well, the GOP is going to be worse,’ and my question is: ‘How can you get worse than active support of a genocide?’”Polls show that Americans have generally been supportive of Israel and its response to the 7 October attack, though Morning Consult data released this week also shows the number of people who sympathize equally with Israelis and Palestinians is on the rise. That poll also showed support for Biden’s response is growing.But Arab Americans who spoke with the Guardian said they did not know of anyone in their community who would vote for Biden in 2024. That could have profound consequences in a state in which Trump won by 10,000 votes in 2016, and a tight rematch is taking shape.Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, the Democratic congressman Dean Phillips launched his bid to oust Joe Biden atop the party’s presidential ticket next year.In remarks after he began his campaign, he eluded both to Biden’s dire poll numbers and his advanced age as reasons for running:Phillips also responded to a question about a reported 2019 campaign donation from Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor who also lavished gifts on conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas:Now that all three of Donald Trump’s adult children are due to testify at the civil fraud trial of the family business, in addition to the former president himself, the scene is set for a great reunion in New York.Ivanka Trump has been relatively absent from mainstream media headlines since her father lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and the clan packed their boxes and departed the White House, where Ivanka had acted as an aide to her father as president.She testified briefly but devastatingly to the congressional bipartisan committee investigating the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol encouraged by the then president.She admitted to the panel in July 2022 that she did not believe Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him because of widespread voting fraud. She hadn’t stood up and made statements to that effect when all the malarkey was going down with Trump’s failed legal campaign to reverse the result and then the deadly attack on the Capitol.She accepted that Biden had won after Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr essentially told her he had, something Barr also told Donald Trump and had acknowledged publicly in 2020.So Ivanka, Donald Jr and Eric can now be expected on the witness stand in the trial of the Trump Organization. She stepped down from the family business empire in 2017. Ivanka had her own fashion business that was also based in New York before her father won the White House. That ended in 2018.Her lawyer told the court on Friday that she hadn’t personally done business in the Big Apple since 2017.Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner and their children live in Florida and have appeared to distance themselves from presidential politics.Ivanka Trump may appear on the witness stand in the civil fraud trial of her father Donald Trump and other family members as soon as next week, thanks to a judge’s ruling. Elsewhere in New York state, Republican congressman and liar George Santos pleaded guilty to a slate of new federal charges against him, and learned he would stand trial beginning on 9 September of next year. That’s about two months before the presidential election, and it appears Joe Biden will have a challenger for the Democratic nomination: Dean Phillips, a relatively inexperienced Minnesota congressman who declared his candidacy today.Here’s what else has happened:
      A new Gallup poll shows Biden’s approval rating slipping among Democrats, potentially due to his pro-Israel stance in its boiling conflict with Gaza.
      Some of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election subversion case are being offered plea deals, while others are not.
      Mike Johnson signaled he would be willing to continue the impeachment inquiry into Biden in the Republican’s first interview since being elected House speaker.
      Donald Trump’s legal troubles extend far and wide, including to Georgia, where the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports some of his co-defendants in his election meddling case are not being offered plea deals by prosecutors – while others are:Donald Trump’s top co-defendants charged with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia have not been offered plea deals since they were indicted, people close to the matter said on Wednesday, raising tensions among some in that group as they prepare to recalibrate their legal strategies.The co-defendants without offers include the former US president himself, former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and former Trump lawyers John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, the people said – individuals who played leading roles in the alleged conspiracies.The lack of offers from the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, in contrast to those deals agreed with the other Trump election lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, has caused some of Trump’s top co-defendants to reconsider their legal strategy and weigh options such as seeking an expedited trial or trying to sever their cases.Trump and his original 19 co-defendants pleaded not guilty in August to charges that they violated the Rico statute in Georgia in trying to reverse his election defeat. But the pressure on Trump’s closest allies has increased in recent weeks after four co-defendants accepted plea agreements.Shifting back to Donald Trump and his family’s civil fraud trial in New York City, NBC News reports that it is unclear what Ivanka Trump may say on the witness stand, but prosecutors have waged a hard-fought campaign to get her to testify.Her lawyers could also still appeal the ruling that will see her take the stand after 1 November. Here’s more from NBC’s report:
      Trump’s attorneys had challenged New York Attorney General Letitia James’ subpoena to Ivanka Trump, noting an appeals court had ruled earlier this year that she should be dropped as a defendant in the case over statute of limitations issues.
      They contended the AG’s office was trying “to continue to harass and burden President Trump’s daughter long after” the appeals court “mandated she be dismissed from the case.”
      They also argued that the AG waited too long to subpoena her, and argued the office doesn’t have jurisdiction over her because she no longer lives in the state.
      The AG’s office countered that Ivanka Trump, a former White House official, still has information important to their case.
      “While no longer a Defendant in this action, she indisputably has personal knowledge of facts relevant to the claims against the remaining individual and entity Defendants. But even beyond that, Ms. Trump remains financially and professionally intertwined with the Trump Organization and other Defendants and can be called as a person still under their control,” the AG contended in a court filing.
      The office said it wanted to ask her questions about Trump’s former Washington, D.C. hotel, and noted she profited from the sale.
      “Ms. Trump remains under the control of the Trump Organization, including through her ongoing and substantial business ties to the organization,” the AG argued, adding that she “does not seem to be averse to her involvement in the family business when it comes to owning and collecting proceeds from the OPO (hotel) sale, the Trump Organization purchasing insurance for her and her companies, managing her household staff and credit card bills, renting her apartment or even paying her legal fees in this action. It is only when she is tasked with answering for that involvement that she disclaims any connection.” More

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      Why are so many of Trump’s supposed loyalists flipping on him? | Moira Donegan

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      It happened the way Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, described going bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.” Last month in Georgia, Scott Graham Hall, an obscure bail bondsman and Trump supporter, took a plea. Hall had been indicted in Fulton county prosecutor Fani Willis’s Georgia election fraud case on charges of helping Trump surrogates steal election data from voting machines in rural Coffee country. Hall bargained his felony conspiracy and racketeering charges down to misdemeanors, for which he would pay nominal fees and serve no jail time. To many of his 18 co-defendants in the Georgia case, it must have looked like an appealing deal.Hall was a small fish in the Georgia scheme, just a minor player in what Willis had charged as a sprawling conspiracy. But the bizarre excursion to Coffee county that he had agreed to testify about was central to the charges against a much bigger fish: Sidney Powell, a Trump lawyer who pursued the most bizarre and brazen of the president’s post-election lies. Last week, she flipped too. Powell, who was facing multiple felonies, accepted probation and restitution fees in place of jail time – conditioned, of course, on her willingness to testify against her co-defendants.And thus, the dominoes began to fall. Willis’s generous terms to the cooperating witnesses – along with the growing number of testimonies that are now lined up on the prosecution’s side – seem to have incentivized other co-defendants in the Georgia case to flip.Powell’s plea was followed soon after by one from Ken Chesebro, the lawyer who devised the so-called “fake electors” scheme, whereby Trump would have overturned the results of the 2020 election by having Mike Pence disregard the genuine elector slates and instead adopt fraudulent ones composed of various Trump loyalists and cranks. Chesebro’s plea bargain indicates an abrupt change of heart: he had demanded a speedy trial just weeks before, a motion that had accelerated the court’s work, and by the time the news of his decision to flip was announced, jury selection for his hearing was already under way. Chesebro had reportedly refused another plea offer in late September.And then there was Jenna Ellis. The Trump campaign lawyer – a member of the so-called “Elite Strike Force” legal team that Powell had said would “release the kraken” to vindicate Donald Trump’s election lies – has been central to the effort to overturn the election. Ellis had gone about recruiting potential fake electors for Chesebro’s scheme, soliciting Republican officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan to back the plan. She is also alleged to have been involved in planning ways to disrupt and stall the 6 January 2021 certification proceeding. This all could have sent her to prison for a long time; instead, she got probation and a “first offender” status that will expunge her record. She’ll be testifying, too.The news of the flips in the Georgia case came as another rumor went trembling through the political press: that Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff and the man who was closest to him in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, was cooperating with Jack Smith’s office in Washington DC, in the January 6 trial there that covers many of the same events as the Georgia case. ABC News reported that Meadows had been granted immunity to testify to a grand jury – a development that could signal serious danger for the Trump defense.The reports on Meadows are mixed: has he flipped, or merely provided some testimony under limited protection? Is he still loyal to his former boss, or is he now looking to save his own skin? And who benefits from the leak about his testimony so far? But no matter what, Meadow’s involvement – even if only partial and temporary, even if it does not lead to a bigger deal – suggests a more significant crack in the hull, and only added to the growing feeling that, as the Trump criminal cases proceed, many of the rats are starting to flee the ship.For their part, the defendants turned witnesses in Georgia have taken various positions on their own decisions to quit team Trump. Jenna Ellis tearfully apologized in court, claiming she was misled about the veracity of her false claims by the other lawyers. Chesebro’s lawyer issued a terse statement to the press saying that the plea bargain somehow vindicated his client.Powell, for her part, always the conspiracist and true believer, has spent the days since turning state’s witness trying to publicly signal her continued loyalty to Trump and his lies, sworn testimony be damned. On her social media accounts, she had continued to claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and that Willis’s office “extorted” her plea by threatening her with jail time – which is, indeed, more or less how plea bargains usually work.How does Trump feel, watching all of these former loyalists agree to testify against him? Trump stands now a diminished figure, still ominous and still very much capable of winning a presidential election, but increasingly isolated. On the one hand, his various criminal and civil cases are distracting him from the campaign trail, and he seems doomed to lose many of them; on the other hand, his grip on the Republican presidential nomination is so firm that his challengers increasingly look silly for running against him, and he seems to have retained at least some degree of kingmaking power in the House, where this week he was able to instantly sabotage the short-lived speakership candidacy of the Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer.Trump wields decisive power within the Republican party, and he commands the unceasing, unconditional loyalty of its base: about one-third of Republican voters who will never vote for anyone else so long as his name appears on a ballot. But in his real life, among the people who actually interact with him, Trump has long been paranoid and embittered, prone to blowout fights with close aides and dead-to-me turns on those he sees as insufficiently loyal. He has the kind of sad resentment of someone who knows he has never felt the warmth of a friendship he has not bought.When Chesebro and Ellis announced their flips in Georgia, Trump was in New York, listening to the testimony of another former loyalist, his one-time fixer Michael Cohen, testify in a corporate fraud suit brought against the Trump organization by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. “Don’t know anything, we’re totally innocent of everything,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s shouted question about Ellis. Increasingly, it’s hard to tell who is “we” is.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘Ha, ha, ha’: Mitt Romney laughs off Trump’s ‘total loser’ attack

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      Confronted with Donald Trump’s abuse, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said: “Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.”Romney’s view of the former president and current Republican presidential frontrunner was communicated to McKay Coppins, author of a new biography, Romney: A Reckoning, written in co-operation with its subject.Romney once flirted with joining Trump’s cabinet but has since emerged as a chief antagonist, voting to convict at both Trump’s impeachment trials.Earlier this week, responding to reporting about Coppins’ work, Trump called Romney “a total loser that only a mother could love”, erroneously said the senator “just wrote a book”, and said it was, “much like him, boring, horrible, and totally predictable”.Trump also claimed to have forced “this left-leaning Rino [Republican in name only] out of politics”, a reference to Romney’s announced retirement next year.On Thursday, Coppins spoke to Brian Stelter, the former CNN anchor now host of Inside the Hive, a Vanity Fair podcast.Coppins said: “I sent [Trump’s] statement to Mitt and … I’ll just pull up the text. He wrote back, ‘Ha, ha, ha. He’s such a whack job.’ So Mitt kind of enjoyed Trump’s response.”Coppins also discussed how he came to write Romney’s biography – in part because, as he writes in his book, Romney decided not to write a traditional memoir.Coppins said: “When I first approached him, it was just a couple months after January 6. I remember our first meeting was in his Senate hideaway, which is this little cramped windowless room that the senators get near the chamber in the Capitol building. And there was still barbed wire fence around the building because the riots had just happened.”On 6 January 2021, Trump sent supporters to the Capitol to block certification of Joe Biden’s election win. They failed but nine deaths have been linked to the riot, including law enforcement suicides. Thousands have been arrested and hundreds convicted, some for seditious conspiracy.Coppins said Romney’s “initial decision to cooperate with this book was just born of … extreme frustration and disappointment with the leaders of his party and fear for the country. I think he thought of this book as a warning.”Trump faces 91 criminal charges, for state and federal election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments. He also faces civil threats including a fraud trial regarding his business and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Nonetheless, he leads by huge margins in national and key state polling regarding the Republican presidential nomination.Coppins told Stelter that Romney was now “looking back at the moments in his pursuit of the presidency that he sort of flirted with the more extreme elements of his party.“I think he realises now that the mistake he made, and the mistake that a lot of the Republican establishment made, was thinking that they could basically harness the energy of the far right without succumbing to it.”In 2012, Romney accepted Trump’s endorsement.“He wishes he didn’t do it,” Coppins said. “And I think that that’s emblematic of a lot of these these small ethical compromises that he and a lot of his party leaders made, not realising the kind of Pandora’s box they were opening.” More

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      Will Mitt Romney be remembered as a ‘good Republican’? – podcast

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      Republican Mike Johnson of Louisiana became the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Democrats immediately criticised his support for Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Most Republicans will just be happy the speaker selection debacle is over for now, but there may be some in the party, such Mitt Romney, who wish events had taken a different direction.
      A senator for Utah, Romney has spent the last few years angering his Trump-supporting colleagues by voting to convict the former president in both of his impeachment trials and speaking out against him on several occasions.
      He announced he was retiring in September, and this week his biography hits the shelves, detailing his life in politics and how he has fallen out of love with the Republican party of today. Jonathan Freedland talks to McKay Coppins, a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of Romney: A Reckoning.

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More