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      Letitia James: the fearless attorney general threatening Trump’s business

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      New York attorney general Letitia James has never shied away from taking on powerful adversaries – from the National Rifle Association to former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.On Monday she will take on her biggest case yet: a fraud trial that threatens the very foundation of Donald Trump’s New York real estate empire.Critics have accused the 64-year-old career prosecutor of using her office, with 1,700 staff and over 700 assistant attorneys general, for political purposes. To others, the Democrat is a heroic figure: the first woman elected as New York’s attorney general and the first Black person to serve in the role. A fearless prosecutor who has taken on cases others would walk away from.Like Trump, “Tish” James was born and raised in New York City. It’s about the only thing they have in common. Raised with her seven siblings in Brooklyn, James attended public schools in the city before getting her law degree at Howard University in Washington DC.She started her law career as a public defender before entering New York politics as a councilmember and then as public advocate, the first Black woman to hold the watchdog role. James’s passions were clear from the start – she filed a record number of suits on behalf of tenants, seniors and people with disabilities. James became New York state attorney general in 2018.Few think her ambitions stop there. Top state prosecutor has often been the jumping off point for a run for New York’s governorship, which James briefly attempted last year.The Trump trial will thrust James further into the spotlight and she is off to an impressive start. James has already claimed one victory in the case. Last week, the New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled the real estate developer had committed fraud for years as he built his empire by inflating the value of his holdings. In an early win for James, Engoron revoked the business licenses of Trump and his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, essentially barring them from doing business in the state.This week, Engoron will hear arguments on a potential fine, which could be at least $250m.“I come from a long line of very strong, tough women. We stick to our principles and stand up for what we believe in, which is fundamental fairness, which is my raison d’être,” James told Elle Magazine in 2017.As attorney general, she has worked for more funding for pre-trial services, the reform of bail laws for minor offenses, treatments for the mental health crisis, cracking down on ghost guns and defending the state’s gun laws restricting the public carrying of firearms.James has also said she wants to prioritize antitrust investigations and consumer protections, and focus on reducing tenant evictions amid skyrocketing rents in the city and state.Last year, James suspended her campaign for New York governor, saying she wanted to “finish the job” with her ongoing investigations, including overseeing a sexual harassment investigation into former governor Cuomo that led to his resignation, an inquiry into the NRA and fraudulent financial practices of the former president.In interviews during her campaign, James said that not pursuing evidence of wrongdoing by Trump or the NRA would have been a “dereliction of my duty” and rejected claims that her legal pursuits were not on behalf of New Yorkers but her “own personal ambitions”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I make no apologies, because this is who I am, and this is what I do,” James added.On the same day that she ended her campaign, reports said she was looking to sit Trump for a deposition as part of her civil investigation into his business practices. Trump has called James “a renegade and out of control prosecutor”, dismissed the case as “crazy” and a “witch-hunt”, and invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination 400 times.Trump maintains his innocence and his lawyers are appealing the pre-trial ruling. But outside observers believe this case will be a real test of Trump’s – often successful – bluster.Andrew Lieb, a real estate attorney and legal political analyst, says James is doing no more or less than what attorneys general do. The fact that Trump received a pre-trial ruling in his fraud trial shows just how clear the case against him was.“He was so outrageous, pompous and immune to order and business practices that someone had to do something about it. It was like spitting and saying it’s raining,” Lieb said. “It’s not like he took a $10m property and said it was worth $11m. He took a $10m property and said it was worth over $100m.”James, he says, will go down as an effective attorney general. “She’s effective in that she won. No one remembers how you played the game, they just remember that you won.” More

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      Dianne Feinstein obituary

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      The US senator Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, was long cherished by the CIA and others in the defence and intelligence community as someone whose staunch support they could rely on. Until one day they could not: on 11 March 2009 she launched an investigation into the CIA’s torture of detainees post-9/11.That investigation by the Senate intelligence committee, which she chaired, turned into a bitter struggle with the agency and it tried to block it. She did not buckle and finally, in December 2014, she published her report, revealing the scale and brutality of what the CIA had done and its repeated attempts to mislead Congress and the White House. On top of all that, the report found the torture had proved counter-productive in obtaining valuable intelligence.On the day of publication, she told the Senate: “There are those who will seize upon the report and say ‘see what Americans did’, and they will try to use it to justify evil actions or to incite more violence. We cannot prevent that. But history will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again’.”Her fight was dramatic enough to interest Hollywood, and the film The Report was released in 2019, with Feinstein played by Annette Bening.What made her fight with the CIA so surprising was that it was out of kilter with her career before and after, as a Senate hawk. She voted for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – though she later expressed regret over the former – supported Republicans in defence procurement projects and defended the spy agencies in controversies such as illegal mass surveillance in 2013.Her reputation as a hawk frequently put her at odds with the Democratic left and this disillusionment with her grew rapidly in the latter part of her career.In February this year, facing calls to stand down as her physical and mental health declined, she said she would not seek re-election in 2024.There was much in her life she could look back on with pride: a trailblazer for women in politics; the calm leadership she displayed as mayor in San Francisco after the killings of her predecessor, George Moscone, and of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to an official position in the US; her success, albeit limited, in getting gun control through the US senate in 1994. But it was the torture report she cited as the achievement she was most proud.The first she heard of the torture was in September 2006, when Feinstein and other members of the intelligence committee were privately briefed by the then head of the CIA, Michael Hayden. Although Hayden played down what the CIA euphemistically described as “enhanced interrogation techniques”, Feinstein was troubled by what she heard.When she became chair of the intelligence committee in 2009 – its first female head – she launched the investigation. The final 6,700-page report remains classified, but she got around this by publishing a 500-page executive summary and that was damning enough.Between 2002 and 2008 the CIA had detained 119 men at “black sites” – secret locations around the world – and of these 39 had been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, stress positions and “rectal rehydration”.In 2015, Feinstein worked with the Republican senator John McCain in steering through the Senate an amendment that reinforced a ban on torture. The McCain-Feinstein amendment was the kind of bipartisan consensus that Feinstein, a centrist, valued. But, as US politics became more polarised, her attempts to work with Republicans increasingly grated with fellow Democrats.When Donald Trump, as president, began to pack the supreme court with rightwingers, Democrats complained that Feinstein, who was the senior Democrat on the judiciary committee, did not put up enough of a fight. After the 2020 confirmation hearings of a Trump appointee, Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein left Democrats seething when she hugged the chair, Republican Lindsey Graham.Born in San Francisco, Dianne was the daughter of Betty (nee Rosenburg), a model, and Leon Goldman, a surgeon. Her family was affluent but she had a traumatic childhood: her mother was unstable and given to sudden rages due to an undiagnosed brain disorder. According to David Talbot, in his history of San Francisco in the 1960s through to the 80s, Season of the Witch (2012), Betty once chased her daughter with a knife around a dining table.Dianne attended a convent school before going to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and history. She went on to secure a job on the state parole board. Although politics was overwhelmingly male-dominated, she was elected in 1969 on to the 11-member San Francisco board of supervisors, basically the city and county council. Runs for mayor in 1971 and 1975 proved unsuccessful.In 1976, she was the target of a bomb attack on her home claimed by a California-based leftwing terrorist group, the New World Liberation Front. The bomb was planted in a window flower box but failed to go off. A few months later, another group, the Environmental Life Force, claimed responsibility for shooting out the windows of her holiday home with a BB gun.She began to carry a concealed handgun for protection. In 1978, dispirited by the combination of the mayoral defeats and being targeted, she told a reporter she was on the verge of quitting politics.Only hours after this exchange, the mayor of San Francisco, Moscone, and Milk, a fellow supervisor, were shot dead in City Hall by a former supervisor. Feinstein was the first into Milk’s office. She told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “It was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.” Checking Milk for a pulse, one of her fingers slipped into a bullet hole.As president of the board of supervisors at the time, she was well placed to take over as mayor, which she duly did, becoming the first female to occupy the post.She served until 1988. With Aids rampant, she supported many initiatives to help the gay community. She secured federal funding for an overhaul of the cable car network, which proved popular with residents and tourists.Influenced by seeing the damage to Milk’s body, she introduced in 1982 a local ordinance banning most residents from owning handguns. She had her own gun and 14 others that had been handed over in a buy-back scheme melted down and turned into a cross and given to Pope John Paul II on a visit to the Vatican.After an unsuccessful bid to become governor of California in 1990, she was elected as a US senator from California in 1992. She quickly made an impact, guiding through in 1994 the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, outlawing civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms, though with a proviso that it would expire in 2004 if not renewed, which it was not.She was ranked in 2018 as the second wealthiest senator, with her fortune estimated at about $88m (about £74m).Feinstein married three times: Jack Berman in 1956, with whom she had a daughter, Katherine, divorcing in 1959; Bertram Feinstein in 1962 until his death in 1978; and Richard Blum from 1980 to his death in 2022.She is survived by Katherine, three stepdaughters, and a granddaughter, Eileen. More

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      How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history

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      The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.
      Diane McWhorter is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama – The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution More

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      Voter drive: Biden and Trump battle for blue-collar votes in auto heartland

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      Joe Biden became the first sitting US president to join a picket line when he stopped at a General Motors facility just outside Detroit to show support for striking United Auto Workers last week. “Stick with it. You deserve a significant raise,” Biden told the crowd.A day later, Donald Trump told raucous blue-collar supporters at a speech north of Detroit: “Just get your union guys, your leaders, to endorse me and I will take care of the rest.”The tug-of-war remarks represented the unofficial opening salvoes of the 2024 election season as the parties’ likely candidates set out to woo blue-collar voters in Michigan, a critical bloc in a state that’s a must-win in any White House bid.“Politically, Michigan is ground zero right now because of the auto strike,” said Bill Ballenger, a conservative state political analyst. Biden, he said, was seeking to shore up his slipping support among unions, while Trump had spotted a “weakness in Bidenomics” that the former president was set on exploiting as the strike pushes into its third week.Trump won Michigan, an upper midwest swing state, by about 12,000 votes in 2016. Biden took the state by nearly 150,000 votes in the next election. Michigan is a heavily unionized state, and Biden won with 64% support among union members. But August polling found support among Michigan union members hangs at 49%, and Biden and Trump are in effect tied.“Clearly there’s division among the rank and file,” said pollster Bernie Porn, president of Epic MRA, a Michigan-based survey research firm. Political observers say Michigan is very much in play in the 2024 election.The dueling visits showcased two very different visions for America’s future. Trump criticized the Biden administration’s support for the auto industry’s shift to electric vehicles, which unions fear because they require fewer workers to make. “You can be loyal to American labor or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics,” Trump told the crowd in a meandering, hour-long speech. (Later he insisted he would make “sex changes for children” illegal.)Biden’s minutes’ long pitch zeroed in on the unions: “The fact of the matter is that you guys, the UAW – you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 … You made a lot of sacrifices. But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too.”The visits also put on display two competing styles. Despite the historic nature of Biden’s visit, the daytime visit was a low-key, invite-only event among a small crowd of UAW members. The tone was supportive, good-natured. At the nearby Ford Michigan Assembly plant, Biden’s supporters viewed it as a morale boost.Trump, by contrast, set up at night in a non-union shop in Macomb county, an Obama-to-Trump blue-collar swing county. Hundreds of boisterous supporters lined the streets, banging on drums and shouting “Freedom!” and breaking into chants of “USA! USA!” and “Back the blue!” The Trump campaign dismissed Biden’s visit as a “cheap photo op”, and said the rank and file support him, not Biden. Some of his supporters echoed that.“We’ve always known that the blue-collar workers are behind Trump, but the party heads and elites have such a command of the microphone that the floor worker is really underrepresented,” said Trump supporter James Anthony Minnick Jr after attending the former president’s Wednesday speech.Biden’s visit seems to convey an understanding of that, political observers say, but despite that the UAW leadership has been very clear in who it supports.“I see no point in meeting with [Trump] because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for,” the UAW president, Shawn Fain, said before Trump’s visit. “He serves a billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”Biden had attended the UAW picket at Fain’s invitation, but the union has yet to officially endorse anyone, which could signal an understanding of rank-and-file divisions, or could be read as leverage to gain continuing White House support.Scott Malenfant, 47, an Obama-to-Ted Cruz-to-Trump supporter and union rep, was among those on the picket line outside Ford’s Michigan Assembly plant on Tuesday who split from UAW leadership. After Biden’s speech, the 23-year line veteran said Democrats lost him and other union members over the EV transition and their support of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Democrats are “on the record saying those jobs are never coming back”, Malenfant noted.“Trump is the first one who said ‘We’re going to bring these jobs back,’” he added while acknowledging that Republicans are typically anti-union. But Trump was different, he said: “All he cares about is whether the country does well … and at least he’s the one pushing for workers.”Biden’s Tuesday message that auto companies need to reward workers did resonate with some who are undecided, or describe themselves as “not political”, like Lisa Carter, 53, who works in the plant’s stamping department. She has two jobs despite 17 years on the line, and she cannot afford to buy a new Ford.“If you’re for the people, then I’m for you,” Carter said. “And Trump can stay where he’s at because when he was president he said we make too much money.”Biden needs to address the EV concerns, Porn said, and talk to union members about how batteries and chips could be produced by autoworkers in the state. The visit also comes in the wake of another Trump indictment, and Porn said the former president’s mounting legal numbers appear to be a drag on his favorability numbers, which are down to 37%.Some of that may be down to Trump’s ever mounting legal troubles. But those cases are unlikely to shake his diehard supporters “because they see him as he likes to see himself – a victim, a martyr being crucified by the deep state”, said Ballenger.For now, with more than a year to go before the election, Porn and Ballenger each say Biden has the edge in the state despite his concerning poll numbers. But Ballenger warned the race was far from decided. Just like in 2016: “It could be deja vu all over again,” Ballenger said. More

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      Fascism in America: a long history that predates Trump

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      Pro-Nazi propaganda, courtesy of the US post office? This unlikely scheme was hatched by George Sylvester Viereck, a German-born American who between 1937 and 1941 sought to marshal US sentiment against intervention in Europe. Those who heeded him included prominent members of Congress, such as Burton Wheeler of Montana and Rush Holt Sr of West Virginia, anti-interventionist Democratic senators known for speeches that prompted accusations of antisemitism. Viereck’s contacts on Capitol Hill allowed him to place anti-interventionist speeches in the appendix to the congressional record. Thanks to friends in high places, he could order inexpensive reprints and have German-American groups mail them out on government postage.If this sounds out of place in the land of the free, it shouldn’t – according to an illuminating new anthology, Fascism in America: Past and Present, edited by Gavriel D Rosenfeld and Janet Ward. In 12 chapters plus an introduction and epilogue, the co-editors and their contributors make the case that fascism has existed on US soil for well past a century and remains disturbingly present today.“We don’t sufficiently teach civics or democratic awareness [in high schools], how fascism and far-right extremist movements have a long history in the US,” Rosenfeld said. “We think we’re an exception, that America fought ‘the good war’ to defeat fascism and Nazism. We patted ourselves on the back for many decades as ‘the greatest generation’ – a useful myth for American public life that blinded us to darker undercurrents in our society.”Ward mentions history from even further back, “eugenics-based scientific standards” that “informed opinions and policies on what it meant to be included not just as fully American, but as fully human” in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, subsequently influencing Nazi laws regarding race.Rosenfeld is president of the Center for Jewish History in New York and a professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut. From the UK, Ward is a history professor at the University of Oklahoma; she is a past president of the German Studies Association and was an American Council on Education fellow at Yale. Both are scholars of Germany, including the second world war and the Holocaust. (Rosenfeld authored a chapter in the anthology, on alternate histories of the war, from The Plot Against America to Watchmen.) Both editors became alarmed by developments during the Trump administration that suggested parallels with the rise of Nazism and hinted at a reawakening of homegrown fascist sentiments lying dormant for decades.“We redirected attention on our own backyard and applied the same kind of lens to a place that had not been subject to the same kind of scrutiny, the vulnerabilities in our own kind of democratic institutions,” Rosenfeld said. “We reached out to scholars in related fields – American studies, Black studies – to see what we could learn from the American experience … We were equally concerned about the present-day democratic backsliding.”Ward said: “More than one country has turned toward populism and the extreme right. It began to worry a lot of us, not just academics but cultural commentators.” The resulting volume is “very much part of a new awareness of the way in which traditional academics circulate to a broader public”.Collaborators include the New York University history professor Linda Gordon, who incorporated findings from a forthcoming project and The Second Coming of the KKK, her 2017 book about the years after the first world war. Ousmane K Power-Greene, an African American scholar at Clark University in Massachusetts, examined Black antifascist activism from the 1960s to the 1980s, by activists such as Angela Davis and H Rap Brown.Trump comes up repeatedly. Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, compares “Anarchy and the State of Nature in Donald Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany”. Marla Stone of Occidental College researched Trump-era detention facilities for migrant children. Her chapter title: “Concentration Camps in Trump’s America?”“It’s not just that we wanted to determine for ourselves, is Trump a fascist or not, is Trumpism fascist or not, is Maga-ism fascist or not,” Rosenfeld said, noting that such questions are frequently posed by scholars, journalists and readers. “We try to trace the evolving debate, the historical shift over time – of course, after the Charlottesville Unite the Right march in 2017 … [Trump’s] defending the Proud Boys at the 2020 debate, obviously after January 6 … it’s been a moving target.”Yet, Rosenfeld said, “ever since January 6, more people are inclined to believe that even if Trump is not a dogmatic fascist, so many of his followers are willing to use violence to overturn the rule of law, the constitution, to make it very concerning for people. At a certain point, you want to be safe rather than sorry, err on the side of caution, to believe we’re in a potential fascist moment.”The book suggests fascism in America might date back as far as the late 19th century, amid Jim Crow laws in the south and nativist fears over immigration from Europe. In the early 20th century, the US enacted infamously high immigration quotas, while domestic white supremacist groups thrived: the Ku Klux Klan during its 1920s resurgence, followed by Depression-era proto-fascist militant groups such as the Silver Legion, under William Dudley Pelley. While the interwar years witnessed clandestine German-backed attempts to mobilize Americans against intervention, the book makes it clear fascism needed no foreign encouragement.“Ultimately, this is an American story,” Ward said. “You can’t – you shouldn’t – look at fascism solely as an outside influence into the US … it needs to be looked at from within, as well as something coming in from without.”She noted that she received her doctorate from the University of Virginia, the campus on which the Charlottesville riots occurred six years ago.“The August 2017 events of Charlottesville pinpointed it for a lot of people,” Ward said. “The open demonstration of violence, the coming together of racism, antisemitism and white supremacy all at once through that ugly moment.”As to whether America is on the precipice of another such ugly moment, the co-editors are hoping democracy holds firm, just as it did in the second world war.“I’m going to be an optimist,” Ward said, “with education, with informed voices like the contributors to our book, with discourse and engagement [to prevent] a doomsday scenario with the new presidential election coming up.”Rosenfeld agreed, but could not help recalling a sobering lesson.“We know now that Franklin Roosevelt was still dealing with a nearly 20% unemployment rate on the eve of world war two,” he said. “Only billions and billions of dollars in military spending got us out of debt. All the isolationists got on board against the Nazis and Japan. Rightwingers were forced into silence.“It’s clear in retrospect,” he added, “that world war two did make the US a great power on the world stage. It also spared us the kind of fascism that Vichy France and Germany experienced, that many other countries experienced. We were spared the same thing – but it was a close call. We shouldn’t be complacent.”
      Fascism in America is published in the US by Cambridge University Press More

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      in US Politics

      Enough review: Cassidy Hutchinson on Trump and the damage done

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      Cassidy Hutchinson may have done more to place Donald Trump in legal jeopardy than anyone other than Trump himself. By the time the twentysomething deputy to Mark Meadows (Trump’s last chief of staff) completed her first public appearance before the January 6 committee, in June last year, the US had received an up-close-and-personal view of the venom, wrath and malice of the 45th president.Hutchinson “isn’t crazy”, a Trump White House veteran confided to the Guardian before that first hearing. But she is a “time bomb”.When told that he would not be driven to the Capitol to join the rioters, Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his car. He said Mike Pence “deserved” to be hanged for his refusal to overturn the election. He broke dishes and splattered condiments. Hutchinson “grabbed a towel and started wiping the ketchup off of the wall to help the valet out”. Her testimony was extraordinary. It has also withstood scrutiny.The Capitol was defaced for the “sake of a lie”, Hutchinson declared, on camera. She placed Trump, Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, in the middle of it all.Fifteen months later, however, Trump is both a 91-times charged criminal defendant and the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, tied with, if not ahead of, Joe Biden in the polls. In Fulton county, Georgia, a grand jury indicted Meadows and Giuliani as well as Trump, for seeking to illegally overturn Biden’s win. As for Hutchinson, she is out with Enough, her memoir.She shares her life story, pointing a damning finger at the powerful, the guys she once worked for and her own father. She tries to exhale but doesn’t fully succeed. She can’t. She is likely to be a witness at Trump’s Washington trial on four election subversion charges, slated to kick off the day before Super Tuesday, the key point of the Republican primary next year.Hutchinson expresses gratitude for life’s opportunities and disgust for what she has seen and endured. Her nameless “dad”, her mother’s first husband, was all too often a no-show in clutch moments. She considers Paul, the man who followed, to be her “chosen father”. He was there when it counted. Meadows once asked if she had a happy childhood, she writes. She offers a detailed answer.Hutchinson’s disdain for Trump is on record. Now, too, is her deep disillusionment with Meadows and disgust for Giuliani.On January 6, “America’s mayor” allegedly preyed upon her. John Eastman, Trump’s legal adviser in his attempted coup, purportedly looked on and smiled.Over time, Meadows let Hutchinson down, then abandoned her entirely. When the subpoenas began to fly, he left her to fend for herself. He never offered to help, she says, in contrast to how he treated his male deputy, Ben Williamson. To Hutchinson, Meadows extended platitudes as if she were a mass shooting victim.“Tell her me and Debbie are thinking about her,” he told Williamson.In her own memoir, Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s last White House press secretary, gushed at Hutchinson: “You were a constant reminder of faith. Thank you for being an inspiring leader for the entire West Wing.” The contrast in the two women’s post-White House lives is remarkable. McEnany is ensconced at Fox News. Hutchinson gives interviews at home with the shades drawn, worried for her safety.According to Hutchinson, Meadows ceaselessly sought to endear himself to Trump, a task impossible for anyone other than Ivanka, Trump’s oldest daughter. Early on, Meadows told Hutchinson he would take a bullet for his boss.“I would do anything … to get him re-elected,” he said.Months later, Meadows did something: he hid Trump’s Covid from Hutchinson and from the world at large. He knew Trump had fulfilled appearances and taken the debate stage against Biden after testing positive. He did not share that information. Later, when Hutchinson and Meadows were in a limo, she asked if Trump had Covid. Meadows did not answer.“His silence answered every question I had,” Hutchinson writes now.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe did not sicken and flirt with death, as Chris Christie did after helping prep Trump for the debate. But no apology was forthcoming. All were expected to take the bullet.Out of office, however, Meadows ratted Trump out, in his own memoir, The Chief’s Chief. Hutchinson cites his book in hers.“Stop the president from leaving,” Meadows says Sean Conley, the White House physician, told him. “He just tested positive for Covid.”“Mr President,” Meadows says he said, “I’ve got some bad news. You’ve tested positive for Covid-19.” Trump’s reply, the devout Christian writes, “rhyme[d] with ‘Oh spit, you’ve gotta be trucking lidding me”.When Meadows’s book came out, Trump trashed it as “fake news” and derided Meadows as “fucking stupid”. Meadows concurred. These days, though, he appears to be cooperating with Jack Smith, the special counsel. The prospect of prison can bring clarity. Ask Michael Cohen.Giuliani and Eastman deny Hutchinson’s description of how the former groped her as the latter smiled. They also threaten to sue but they have larger things to focus on, professions and freedom at risk.If anyone’s character can be judged by the identities of their enemies, Hutchinson is well placed. Starting with Trump, she has amassed an array of appalling detractors. But she has able folks in her corner. Liz Cheney, the January 6 vice-chair whose stand against Trump cost her so dearly, is there. Hutchinson’s roster of legal talent, meanwhile, includes Jody Hunt and Bill Jordan. A justice department veteran, Hunt was chief of staff to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general.When news of Enough was breaking, another former Trump legal adviser, Ty Cobb, told the Guardian: “Hutchinson was a very devoted White House employee who worked very very hard. She was proud to serve her country. So sad she had to endure this.”
      Enough is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      in Elections

      Prosecutors reiterate need for gag order against Trump in 2020 election case

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      Special counsel prosecutors reiterated Friday to the federal judge overseeing the 2020 election interference prosecution against Donald Trump the need to impose a limited gag order against the former president to curtail his ability to attack them and potentially intimidate trial witnesses.The sharply worded, 22-page filing, submitted ahead of a hearing scheduled for 16 October in federal district court in Washington, accused Trump of continuing to make prejudicial public statements even after they had first made the request three weeks ago.“He demands special treatment, asserting that because he is a political candidate, he should have free rein to publicly intimidate witnesses and malign the court, citizens of this district, and prosecutors. But in this case, Donald J Trump is a criminal defendant like any other,” prosecutors wrote.The prosecutors said the need for a limited gag order had only increased in urgency since their initial request, filed under seal to US district judge Tanya Chutkan on 5 September, as they cited several threatening statements from Trump that could impact their case and potential jurors.In particular, the filing highlighted Trump’s posts on his Truth Social platform that attacked his former vice-president Mike Pence, saying without evidence that he had “made up stories about me” and had gone over to the “dark side” after he testified to prosecutors about Trump’s conduct.The filing also raised Trump’s post about Gen Mark Milley, the retiring chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and another likely trial witness after he was cited in the indictment, that baselessly accused him of committing treason and suggested that he be executed.“No other criminal defendant would be permitted to issue public statements insinuating that a known witness in his case should be executed,” the assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote. “This defendant should not be, either.”Trump has angrily pushed back at attempts to constrain his public remarks about the case as being politically motivated and had his lawyers previously complain to the judge that prosecutors were infringing on his first amendment rights, especially as he campaigns for another presidential term.But prosecutors rejected that characterization. The proposed gag order was narrowly tailored to limit Trump from making statements that could affect the outcome of the trial, prosecutors argued, such as about the identities or credibility of witnesses, or comments that could be intimidating.The additional problem with letting Trump go unchallenged, the prosecutors argued, was that he could continue to intentionally comment on witnesses and what they might say at trial months beforehand, which could poison the jury pool by making them adopt improper beliefs.“The defendant has made a large volume of public statements …… that would be unaffected by the proposed order,” the filing said. “All it would limit is the defendant’s use of his candidacy as a cover for making prejudicial public statements about this case.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe filing also raised the issue to the judge about how Trump appeared to be seeking special treatment as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, saying he may have violated the terms of his release agreement when he visited a gun shop this week on a campaign swing through South Carolina.The incident involved Trump’s campaign spokesperson posting a video of the former president handling a custom Glock pistol and suggesting he wanted to buy the gun, which would be a federal offense because he is under indictment – but aides quickly denied he had done so.What actually happened with the gun is uncertain, not least because Trump would have to be a South Carolina resident to lawfully buy a firearm in that state. But prosecutors used the episode as an example of Trump benefiting from incendiary public statements and have others take responsibility.“The defendant either purchased a gun in violation of the law and his conditions of release, or seeks to benefit from his supporters’ mistaken belief that he did so,” the filing said, adding that Trump surely knew the effect of his words in all of his public statements. More

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      in US Politics

      Robert Kennedy Jr to run for president as independent in 2024 – report

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is reportedly set to end his challenge to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination and run instead as an independent candidate, in a move that could upset the 2024 race for the White House.Kennedy, 69 and a scion of a famous political dynasty – a son of the former US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, a nephew of President John F Kennedy – will announce his run in Pennsylvania on 9 October, according to Mediaite.“Bobby feels that the Democratic National Committee is changing the rules to exclude his candidacy so an independent run is the only way to go,” the website quoted a “Kennedy campaign insider” as saying.Whether Kennedy, the Green party pick, Cornel West, or a notional nominee backed by No Labels, a supposedly centrist group, a third-party candidate is widely seen to be likely to peel more support from Biden than the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, thereby potentially handing the presidency to the Republican.Kennedy is an attorney who made his name as an environmental campaigner before achieving notoriety as a prominent vaccine sceptic, particularly over Covid-19. His campaign has been rife with controversy, not least in a podcast interview released this week in which he repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.His campaign has also been roiled by an antisemitism scandal after Kennedy told reporters at a press dinner that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity. The false claim was embraced by neo-Nazi groups and condemned by scientists and Jewish organizations.Kennedy’s remarks echoed antisemitic tropes that circulated widely during the pandemic which portrayed the coronavirus as a global Jewish plot and caused members of his own family to denounce him for “deplorable and untruthful” comments.Polling has shown Kennedy performing relatively well against Biden, the incumbent president, in the Democratic primary, but not close to posing a serious threat.However, Biden aides are reportedly nervous about the possible impact of third-party candidates in a likely presidential election match-up with Trump.Polling shows widespread concerns, including among Democrats, that at 80, Biden is too old to serve an effective second term in the White House. Trump is only three years younger – and faces 91 criminal charges, including for election subversion, and assorted civil threats – but polls show less concern among his fervent Republican base that he could be unfit to return to office.Rightwing figures – prominent among them Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s White House strategist – have encouraged Kennedy to run against Biden or as an independent.As cited by Mediate, in July the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said: “I think he should run as a third-party candidate because I do think he should, he would win.”But not every observer thought Kennedy’s move would be bad for Biden.Joe Conason, editor of the National Memo, said: “Go Bobby! Running ‘independent’ means you’ll draw more voters from the candidate you resemble most in political ideology, personal conduct, and narcissistic mentality. (That’s Trump, not Biden.)” More