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      Biden and Trump clinch Pennsylvania primaries shortly after polls close

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump both won their primaries in Pennsylvania shortly after polls closed.Pennsylvanians had gone to the polls on Tuesday to cast ballots in the state’s primary races – the results provide a window into where voters in the crucial battleground stand roughly six months out from the general election.Biden and Trump had already locked up their parties’ nominations, but Pennsylvania voters still had other options in the presidential primaries.With nearly 50% of the votes counted, Biden got 491,892 votes, or 94.4%, according to state election data. Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman who dropped out of the race, got 29,333 votes, or 5.6%.Trump got 268,670 votes, or 79.4%, with 33% of the votes counted, while Nikki Haley, who dropped out the race, got 70,648 votes, or 20.6%, data shows.Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, remained on the Pennsylvania ballot after dropping out of the race in March. Primary voting in the state is confined to registered Republicans, locking out the independent voters who favored her.Her results show that a number of Republicans continue to be unhappy with Trump, who is on trial on 34 criminal counts in New York.Biden faced challenges of his own in Pennsylvania, which he won in 2020 by about 80,000 votes, or 1.2 points. A group of progressive activists had run a campaign to encourage Democrats to write in “uncommitted” on Tuesday to protest against Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza. The effort, based on the similar Listen to Michigan campaign, hopes to get at least 40,000 Democrats to write in “uncommitted”, but it may take weeks to get those ballots counted.On Tuesday, voters had the economy and foreign policy on their minds as they cast their ballots.Karen Lau, a 70-year-old retired educator in Kingston, said she would be voting for Trump. She said Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza was a top issue. “Biden’s destroying our country,” she said. “The hypocrisy with Israel of saying one thing and meaning another with Biden.”Even though Trump has been quiet on what exactly he would do in Israel, Lau said she was convinced he would handle it better. “He’s always been a supporter of Israel,” she said, citing the Abraham accords and Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. “I just have a lot more trust in what he will do.”Lau, who is Jewish, added that she was “very concerned” with pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. “The rise of antisemitism is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime,” she said.Richard K, a 69-year-old retired security guard in Kingston who declined to give his last name, also said he was unbothered that Trump was not that much younger than Biden.“Trump plays golf when he can, he has a lot more energy,” he said. “Biden walks like an old man.” He also dismissed the criminal cases against Trump, calling them “election interference”.“If he wasn’t ahead, they wouldn’t be going after him,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden and Trump recently held events in Pennsylvania before the primary, underscoring the state’s pivotal role in the election. At a campaign stop last week in Scranton, where Biden was born, the president used the setting to contrast his vision for the country’s future with Trump’s.“When I look at the economy, I don’t see it through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago, I see it through the eyes of Scranton,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s Florida resort home. “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values: these are the competing visions for our economy that raise fundamental questions of fairness at the heart of this campaign.”Farther down the ballot, Pennsylvanians will cast votes in congressional primaries that will help determine control of the Senate and the House in November. In the Senate race, incumbent Bob Casey ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, while Dave McCormick was the sole candidate in the Republican primary.McCormick ran for Pennsylvania’s other Senate seat in 2022, but he lost the primary to the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who was later defeated by the Democrat John Fetterman in the general election. The Pennsylvania Senate race will probably be one of the most expensive in the country, as Casey reported having nearly $12m in cash on hand earlier this month while McCormick’s campaign has more than $6m in the bank. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “lean Democrat”.Several House races will provide additional clues about Pennsylvania voters’ leanings ahead of the general election. In the Pittsburgh-based 12th district, the progressive congresswoman and “Squad” member Summer Lee faces a challenge from local council member Bhavini Patel, who has attacked the incumbent over her support for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Moderate Pac, a group that supports centrist Democrats and is largely funded by the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, has spent more than $600,000 supporting Patel, and the race will be closely scrutinized as an early test for progressives facing primary challenges this year.In south-eastern Pennsylvania, the Republican representative Brian Fitzpatrick won his primary after attracting a threat from an anti-abortion activist, Mark Houck, who criticized the incumbent for being too centrist. In 2022, Fitzpatrick won re-election by 10 points in a district that Biden carried by 4.6 points two years earlier, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Cook rates the first district as “likely Republican” in the general election. Fitzpatrick will face Democrat Ashley Ehasz, who ran uncontested in the Democratic primary, in November.Elsewhere in the state, Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican state representative, won the seventh-district GOP primary, vying for the chance to face off against the Democratic incumbent Susan Wild. The Lehigh Valley district is considered a “toss-up” in the general election, per Cook’s ratings.In the 10th district, based around the city of Harrisburg, Democrat Janelle Stelson won the crowded Democratic primary. The former news anchor will face the Republican incumbent and former House freedom caucus chair Scott Perry. Cook rates Perry’s race as “lean Republican” in the general election.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Trump on Trial: National Enquirer boss dishes on Trump

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      You’re reading the Guardian US’s free Trump on Trial newsletter. To get the latest court developments delivered to your inbox, sign up here.On the docket: Pecker tells allDavid Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, returned to the witness stand on Tuesday as a witness for the prosecution and explained to jurors how he coordinated with Donald Trump and his team to bury scandals about the then candidate during the 2016 campaign.Pecker laid out how he’d repeatedly paid to purchase stories about Trump’s alleged marital infidelities before keeping them from reaching the light of day – a scheme known as “catch-and-kill” that prosecutors claim Trump illegally falsified business records to conceal in order to help his presidential campaign.Pecker said he had a “great relationship” with Trump that dated back to the late 1980s – then spent the next hours of testimony damning him with not-so-faint praise.Pecker described Trump as “very knowledgeable”, “very detail-oriented”, “very cautious and very frugal”, and “almost a micromanager” in his business dealings. Those complimentary descriptions hurt Trump because prosecutors need to prove that Trump had direct knowledge of the scheme to pay his attorney Michael Cohen back for his payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels by falsely labeling them as business expenses.Pecker then discussed a 2015 meeting he had at Trump Tower with Trump, Cohen and Hope Hicks, a top Trump campaign official, where they asked him what he could do “to help the campaign”.He promised to be the campaign’s “eyes and ears” to find out about “women selling stories” about Trump, and work to kill them, because Trump was “well known as the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women” (another unhelpful compliment for Trump, who had been married to his third wife, Melania, for a decade at that point). He then testified that he routinely coordinated with Cohen at Trump’s behest to run negative stories about Trump’s political foes. It’s a misdemeanor under New York law to conspire to promote the election of someone by unlawful means.Pecker then walked through two schemes to catch and kill those stories. The first was paying Trump Tower doorman Dino Sajudin $30,000 for the rights to a story about Trump fathering a child with a maid who worked in the building. When Pecker told Cohen the Enquirer would pay the fee itself (even though he didn’t plan to run the story), he said Cohen told him “the boss would be very pleased”.Pecker then testified that he bought the rights to the story of Karen McDougal, a former model who claims she had an affair with Trump.Pecker said Trump called him once about McDougal, but that most of his interactions were with Cohen.“Michael was very agitated – it looked like he was getting a lot of pressure,” Pecker said shortly before court adjourned for the day.Pecker will return to the witness stand when the trial resumes on Thursday. He’ll likely finish testifying about McDougal and move on to explain his role in connecting Trump’s team to Stormy Daniels.Judge rips Trump’s lawyer during contempt hearingView image in fullscreenOn Tuesday morning, before the trial resumed with Pecker’s testimony, Judge Juan Merchan held a hearing to determine whether he should find Trump in contempt for repeatedly violating his gag order prohibiting the former president from attacking potential witnesses and jurors.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Hugo Lowell reported from the courtroom, it didn’t go well for Trump’s team.Merchan was deeply skeptical of arguments from Trump attorney Todd Blanche, expressing frustration that Blanche wasn’t answering his questions about Trump’s specific social media posts, and rebuking him for his arguments.“Mr Blanche, you’re losing all credibility, I have to tell you right now,” Merchan said at one point. “You’re losing all credibility with the court.”Prosecutors had highlighted 10 different Trump social media posts in which he’d attacked likely witnesses including Cohen and Daniels and reposted attacks on the jury itself. They also said they’d file paperwork on an 11th example: Trump left court on Monday and immediately went on camera to attack Cohen by name. They said they wouldn’t seek jail time for the violations, but asked Merchan to fine Trump the legal maximum of $1,000 for each violation.Blanche’s arguments that Trump was “allowed to respond to political attacks” and that, in some cases, he was just resharing others’ comments didn’t fly with Merchan.“Give me one. Give me one recent attack he was responding to,” Merchan said when Blanche said Trump was just responding in kind.Merchan didn’t issue a ruling on whether he’d hold Trump in contempt.But Trump was nonetheless furious. After court concluded for the day, the former president complained to reporters that the “totally unconstitutional” gag was blocking him from attacking likely witnesses.“They can say whatever they want, they can lie, but I’m not allowed to say anything. I just have to sit back and look at why a conflicted judge has ordered me to have a gag order,” he said. More

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      Trump’s hush-money trial: National Enquirer publisher says he was ‘eyes and ears’ of 2016 campaign

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      Donald Trump sat for the second day of witness testimony in court in Manhattan on Tuesday in his criminal trial over hush-money payments to an adult film star and an alleged fraudulent cover-up of those payments just weeks before the 2016 election.David Pecker, the ex-president’s longtime ally and former publisher of the National Enquirer – who prosecutors contend was integral in illicit, so-called catch-and-kill efforts to prevent negative stories about Trump from going public – was on the stand again as a prosecution witness after a brief appearance on Monday following opening statements.He told the court about being invited to a meeting with Trump and his then lawyer, Michael Cohen, in New York in 2015 after Trump had just declared his candidacy for president and was seeking a friendly and powerful media insider.“They asked me what can I do – and what my magazines could do – to help the [election] campaign … I said what I would do is I would run or publish positive stories about Mr Trump and I would publish negative stories about his opponents, and I said that I would also be the eyes and ears because I know that the Trump Organization had a very small staff,” he said.Earlier on Tuesday, however, Judge Juan Merchan heard arguments about a request from prosecutors to hold Trump in contempt of court. They said he repeatedly violated a gag order barring him from publicly attacking witnesses in the trial.Todd Blanche, Trump’s lawyer, argued that his client was just responding to political attacks, not flouting the judge’s order, and that seven of the instances cited were reposts of other people’s content on social media, which “we don’t believe are a violation of the gag order.”Merchan asked whether there was any case law on it. Blanche replied: “I don’t have any case laws, your honor, it’s just common sense.”As Blanche continued to repeat that claim, the judgesaid:“Mr Blanche you’re losing all credibility…with the court. Is there any other argument you want to make?”Merchan on Tuesday did not announce a decision on the contempt issue.Trump’s criminal hush-money trial: what to know
      A guide to Trump’s hush-money trial – so far
      The key arguments prosecutors will use against Trump
      How will Trump’s trial work?
      From Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels: The key players
      Pecker first took the stand on Monday and provided brief testimony of his work as a tabloid honcho. “We used checkbook journalism and we paid for stories. I gave a number to the editors that they could not spend more than $10,000 to investigate or produce or publish a story, anything over $10,000 they would spend on a story, they would have to be vetted and brought up to me, for approval.”Pecker said he had final say over the content of the National Enquirer and other AMI publications.Prosecutors contend that Pecker was at the center of a plot to boost Trump’s chances in the 2016 election. The alleged plan with Trump and Cohen was, if Pecker caught wind of damaging information, he would apprise Trump and Cohen, so they could figure out a way to keep it quiet. That collusion came to include AMI’s $150,000 payoff to the Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed to have had an extramarital affair with Trump, prosecutors have said.This kind of “catch-and-kill” tactic did not happen with Trump before he ran for president, Pecker said.The alleged plot to cover up a claimed sexual encounter between Daniels and Trump is the basis of prosecutors’ case.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn October 2016, the Washington Post published a video featuring Trump’s hot-mic comments during an Access Hollywood taping, in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women. The comments, which Colangelo read to jurors, included “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”After they surfaced, the campaign went into panic mode, Colangelo said. It worked to characterize these comments as “locker room talk”, but, when Daniels’ claim came across Trump and his allies’ radar, they feared the backlash: people would see these ill-behaved ways were not mere talk.“Another story about infidelity, with a porn star, on the heels of the Access Hollywood tape, would have been devastating to his campaign,” Colangelo said in his address to jurors. “Cohen carried out a $130,000 payoff to Daniels which Trump allegedly repaid him in checks that he listed as legal services in official company records.“Look, no politician wants bad press, but the evidence at trial will show that this wasn’t spin or communication strategy,” Colangelo continued. “This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures – to silence people with something bad to say about his behavior.“It was election fraud, pure and simple.”Trump denies the charges. On Tuesday afternoon, Steinglass asked why Pecker said he would notify Cohen if he heard “anything about women selling stories”.Pecker said: “In a presidential campaign, I was the person that thought that there would be a lot of women that would come out to try to sell their stories because Mr Trump was well-known as the most eligible bachelor and dated the most beautiful women.”In fact, he was also accused of sexual assault and harassment by a series of women. In a civil case, Trump was found liable last year for having sexually abused the New York writer E Jean Carroll in the 1990s.Pecker said he ran negative stories about Trump rivals, including presidential opponent Hillary Clinton and GOP rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.He said he paid $30,000 to catch and kill a story from a doorman purporting that Trump had fathered an illegitimate child with a woman who cleaned his New York penthouse.The trial is due to resume on Thursday. More

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      Trump lauds House speaker as a ‘good person’ after Ukraine aid bill passage

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      Mike Johnson is a “good person” and is “trying very hard”, Donald Trump said, after the US House speaker oversaw passage of military aid to Ukraine, long opposed by Trump, in the face of fierce opposition from the right of the Republican party.“Well, look, we have a majority of one, OK?” Trump said in a radio interview on Monday night, after a day in court in his New York hush-money trial.“It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do,” Trump said of Johnson. “I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on Nato when I said Nato has to pay up … I think he’s a very good man. I think he’s trying very hard. And again, we’ve got to have a big election.”Johnson faces opposition from rightwingers in his party, in particular from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fervent Trump ally who has threatened to trigger a motion to vacate, the mechanism by which a speaker can be removed, and called for Johnson to quit.No less than 112 House Republicans voted against Ukraine aid, leaving Johnson reliant on Democratic support. A similar scenario saw his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, removed last year, but with an election looming, many see Johnson as safe for now.Trump’s distaste for Nato was often on show when he was president and has been prominent in his campaign to return to the White House despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties.Trump recently said he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies he deemed financially delinquent: remarks Joe Biden condemned as “dumb, shameful, dangerous [and] un-American”.Trump’s apparent fondness for Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader who ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has also been a constant of his time in politics.Most observers thought Trump would therefore continue to back Republicans who blocked Ukraine aid for months. But as Johnson manoeuvred towards passing a bill and then did so last Saturday, Trump declined to shoot down the effort.In his Monday interview with John Fredericks, a rightwing radio host, Trump praised Johnson for converting $9bn of Ukraine aid into a “forgivable loan” – a proposal some Republicans wanted to apply to the whole package.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFocusing on avoiding chaos in Congress in an election year, Trump said: “We’ve got to election [sic] some people in Congress, much more than we have right now. We have to elect some good senators. Get rid of some of the ones we have now, like [Mitt] Romney [of Utah] and others.”Romney, who as the Republican presidential nominee in 2012 picked Russia as the “number one geopolitical foe” of the US, was also the only GOP senator to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, for seeking to blackmail Ukraine by withholding military aid in return for dirt on his rivals.Focusing on his own political prospects, in a rematch with Biden in which polling his been slowly tilting towards the incumbent, Trump said: “We have to have a big day, and we have to win the presidency. If we don’t win the presidency, I’m telling you I think our country could be finished … We are absolutely a country in decline.”Trump spent much of the interview complaining about his various prosecutions, which have reduced his ability to campaign. Teeing Trump up, Fredericks called the hush-money case, concerning payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair, “this scam, communist, Soviet manifesto trial that is going on in New York City”. More

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      Trump has dodged financial calamity – for the time being | Lloyd Green

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      Donald Trump dodged financial calamity on Monday. The office of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and lawyers for Trump reached agreement in open court on the terms governing the appellate bond posted by the former president. After nearly an hour of argument and an extended recess, the parties achieved a workable solution. It is a ray of sunshine in Trump’s otherwise bleak legal landscape.Trump would be required to leave $175m in cash only as collateral for the bond. Mutual funds or other securities will not suffice. In addition, the brokerage account holding the funds would fall under the exclusive control of the bonding company.Trump would no longer maintain any authority over the account. In turn, James remains barred from enforcing her $454m judgment against Trump and his businesses. For those keeping score, Trump is now out-of-pocket in a neighborhood north of a quarter of a billion dollars and counting.His pretense of being cash-rich is soiled. In March, he shelled out for a separate $91.63m bond while he appeals the $83.3m verdict in the latest E Jean Carroll defamation case. Earlier, he paid another $4m into court to block Carroll from collecting a prior defamation judgment, also on appeal.The stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group – his eponymous meme stock, DJT – is in the doldrums. Politico also reports that Save America, a Trump-controlled Pac, has already spent $59m on his legal fees and may run shortly out of money.Beyond that, Trump World tussles with Ken Griffin, a major Republican donor and the chief of Citadel Securities, a leading Wall Street market-maker. Last Thursday, Devin Nunes – the former Republican congressman who resigned from the House to run Trump’s media company – wrote to the head of the Nasdaq, raising the issue of “potential market manipulation” of DJT stock and blasting “naked short-selling”.Griffin, whose wealth is estimated at a cool $37bn, quickly struck back. He branded Nunes a “proverbial loser” whom Trump “would have fired on The Apprentice”. He also accused the humorless Californian of trying to deflect blame for DJT’s lackluster stock price.The hush-money trial in Manhattan, however, is presently Trump’s greatest fear. On Monday, the case finally kicked off with opening arguments. David Pecker, of the National Enquirer, will reportedly be the prosecution’s first witness – but not the witness likely to garner the most attention. Not even close.Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, will eventually take center stage, with assists from Hope Hicks, an ex-senior Trump White House aide, and Karen McDougal, a Playboy model and one-time playmate of the year. Testimony by Daniels and McDougal will likely turn graphic.According to reports, Hicks has already met with prosecutors. Purportedly, she was involved in negotiations aimed at preventing Daniels from publicly disclosing her alleged trysts with Melania’s husband and Ivanka’s dad. For the record, neither woman is expected to attend the trial.The criminal case also involves alleged hush-money payments to McDougal. She too claims that she had sex with Trump, albeit “many dozens of times”.“I was in love with him. He was in love with me,” she said in a 2019 interview. “I know that because he told me all the time.“He’d say, ‘You’re my baby and I love you.’ He showed me off to his friends.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe sincerity of Trump’s purported displays of extramarital affection may likely be met with disbelief by at least one jury member. In court, the juror disclosed that she thought Trump to be “very selfish and self-serving”.Last Friday, Juan Merchan, the trial judge, looked at Trump and sternly announced: “Sir, can you please have a seat.” To some, it sounded as if Merchan were talking to an unruly dog. On Monday, the court ruled that if Trump takes the witness stand, he may be cross-examined over past bad acts.Don’t hold your breath on Trump testifying in his own defense. It would likely be embarrassing, if not necessarily perjurious.The emcee of Mar-a-Lago stands diminished. Together, all this may be straining his coping mechanisms, wallet and poll numbers. In contrast, Joe Biden demonstrates renewed political vitality. On Saturday, he scored a major legislative victory, a foreign aid package that bolstered Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Punchbowl’s headline blared: “Attention House GOP: Biden is the winner”.Looking back, when Trump complained to Randall Stephenson, then CEO of AT&T, of women being the bane of his existence he wasn’t far off. Among female voters, Trump consistently trails Biden by double digits. Meanwhile, James stands ever ready to separate the man from his money.“For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little,” wrote Maggie Haberman. His image as a pugnacious rule breaker will likely get dinged. “Vagina is expensive,” Trump once reportedly told radio shock-jock Howard Stern.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

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      On trial, Trump is a shadow of the superhero his supporters crave | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump is already in jail. He is pressed into confinement every weekday, except Wednesdays, beginning bright and early, no excuses, at 9.30 in the morning, in the dreary courtroom in Manhattan, where his impulse to mouth off wearies and worries his lawyers, and he must listen, for the first time since his father slapped him down, to an authority telling him to gag himself. He had more leeway when Fred Trump shipped the problem child to the New York military academy where Donald bullied his classmates.Trump’s required attendance in the courtroom as a criminal defendant is his first loss of liberty.His image there is raw, uncut and unfiltered, like Andy Warhol’s film Sleep,in which Warhol fixed a camera on his slumbering lover for six hours. It’s not a Trump rally. The withering focus – without the introduction of the thumping music, his emergence from a dry ice-generated cloud of fog and the predictably orgasmic reception of frenzied minions – reveals something less than the conquering hero in a “Make America Great Again” red baseball cap clapping his hands.Day after day, Trump slumps in his chair, his eyes narrowing and closing, his facial features sagging, until he suddenly jerks to life, once muttering a seemingly veiled threat to a potential juror that earned him a rebuke from Judge Juan Merchan that if he persisted he would be in contempt for witness intimidation. Without self-discipline, Trump invites being disciplined. Lacking control, he fails to control himself. Time and again, he falls asleep, “appeared to nod off a few times, his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest”, Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times.He appears to pass through the seven ages of man in a blink of the eye without having gone through those of adulthood, leaping from caterwauling infant to angry curmudgeon, the stages from napping to napping.Trump clearly prefers to be where he is when his eyes are closed rather than when they are open. His sleeping might be a form of passive aggression, showing his hostility, and at the same time willful avoidance and denial. Railing on his Truth Social account, while minute by minute the price of the market-listed “DJT” dives, he wails in capital letters against the trial – “THIS SCAM ‘RUSHED’ TRIAL TAKING PLACE IN A 95% DEMOCRAT AREA IS A PLANNED AND COORDINATED WITCH HUNT” – and the judge – “POSSIBLY THE MOST CONFLICTED JUDGE IN JUDICIAL HISTORY, WHO MUST BE REMOVED FROM THIS HOAX IMMEDIATELY.”For Trump, the trial is an ordeal – literally an ordeal, in the sense of a medieval trial in which the offender is subjected to torture to determine guilt or innocence. Documents and witnesses did not figure into those trials in the Middle Ages. The verdict was procured by ordeals of walking on fire or boiling in water. Trump, for his part, flips the historical script. He is out to discredit the documents and witnesses. He acts as if the only truth appears when he speaks outside the courtroom. He wants his devotees to see the trial as an ancient ordeal by combat in which he is warrior, not the offender.In a waking moment, Trump’s promise that he will testify shows his understanding of the trial as more than a matter of the law, but a spectacle that raises the central issue at stake in his cult of personality. Of course, if he were to take the stand, inevitably to allegedly lie, as he has in past depositions, and inescapably to present himself to the jury as an unsympathetic narcissist, he would undermine his case, and possibly face additional severe penalties for obstruction of justice and perjury up to a separate sentence of seven years in jail.But it is likely that Trump will not take the witness chair to subject himself to the prosecutor’s cross-examination. Trump’s dissembling is a gesture of false bravado showing that he intuitively grasps that for his followers his image as a strongman is on trial. He needs to tell them he fears nothing. He’ll think of an excuse later. He is on trial because he has been accused of bribing people not to tell the truth, but he has to lie to maintain his myth.The trial is a morality play that has also become a mortality play. His elemental appeal is that he can do whatever he wants, that his power derives from making a mockery of the rules. He wants more than presidential immunity for anything he has done, from the attempted coup of January 6 to stealing national security secrets. He demands absolute immunity from social norms and conventions. His defiance, so far without consequences, is essential to demonstrating his strength. He appears immune to ordinary strictures. But strongmen can’t exist within someone else’s regime. The trial is a prequel of Trump caged. He doesn’t play by the rules, but now he has to obey them.Trump has strategized that he could use the trial as his platform to depict himself as the superhero against the system. He would invert the terms of the prosecution to persecution and convert the trial into his campaign trail. As a victim of the forces of evil elites, he would inflate himself into a larger fighter for his followers. “I am your retribution!”But the action hero can’t move without permission. “Sir, would you please have a seat,” the judge ordered when he stood up to walk out before adjournment. Superman can’t fly. He may dream of racing like Batman through Gotham, but he is facing the judge on the high bench issue a ruling about his contempt for violating the gag order.He has lost more than his ability to articulate; he is becoming disarticulated as a figure. “It is a shame,” he whined. “I am sitting here for days now, from morning until night in that freezing room. Everybody was freezing in there! And all for this. This is your result. It is very unfair.” Under the weight of the trial, he is decaying, “haggard and rumpled, his gait off-center, his eyes blank”, according to the Times.Trump is widely seen as obnoxious, vile and no model for children, even by some who support him, but he retains one great political asset that has allowed him to transcend his toxicity. He is perceived as a “strong and decisive leader”, according to the Gallup Poll. For his followers his strength has been immutable. This image is at the heart of his cult of personality, the center of his political theology and the core of his authoritarianism.The trial is about facts, fiction and putrefaction. The prosecution will present its facts to strip Trump of his lies, his fiction. That regular and expected process has surprisingly but naturally disclosed his physical deterioration, which is hardly incidental but critical to his projection, which is another fiction.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the kitsch art of Trumpism, a cross between Stalinist socialist realism and comic books, his true believers always, without exception, portray him as a physical strongman. In popular versions, there is Trump in leather jacket on a Harley, Trump on a galloping horse holding a flag, and Trump in fatigues holding an AR-15 rifle standing next to Lincoln and Washington, also in fatigues.Trump, used to living the life of a sloth of the leisure class, actively encourages and profits from these images of virility. When he announced his re-election campaign for president in December 2022, he sold a deck of digital cards for $99 showing himself as Superman (with a “T” on his muscled chest), a Star Wars-like hero, and another holding a lightning bolt in his hand with jet planes in the background and the logo: “Superhero.”His obsession with cultivating the strongman image, like that of Vladimir Putin posing shirtless on a horse, reached an apogee in October 2020, when he was released from the Walter Reed medical center for treatment of Covid, and planned to rip open his shirt to reveal a Superman’s letter “S”. Instead, he stood on the White House balcony and tore off his mask.Trump now aspires to be a dictator “only on day one”. His desire to be an absolute despot is another of his wishful medieval anachronisms. “Be a king, be a killer,” Fred Trump told him. If he is the personification of the Leviathan, the state itself, a divine monarch above the law, his corporeal body merges with that of the body politic. His followers already accept implicitly that tenet of his myth, whether they know it or are Know Nothings. It is vital to his cult.But, if true, the physical decline of his body must be reflected in the decline of his body politics, his kingdom of Maga, which is not the state, at least yet, unless there is a new law of succession, not yet introduced by the Freedom Caucus. Trump’s putrefaction in the courtroom is refutation of his pretension to royalty apart from any legal argument that might be considered by the conservatives on the supreme court to grant his plea of immunity as if he were king.Being tried on the evidence trail of his pathetic old affairs is a cruel irony for the lumpish former man-about-town forced to sit today in the courtroom. He is being visited by the ghost of Playboy Mansion past.“I am supposed to be in Georgia; in North Carolina, South Carolina. I’m supposed to be in a lot of different places campaigning, but I’ve been here all day,” Trump complained. “It’s a whopping outrage and it is an outrage. Everybody is outraged by it.”
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Tulsi Gabbard repeats false Hillary Clinton ‘grooming’ claim in new book

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      Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, has repeated a discredited claim about Hillary Clinton that previously saw Gabbard lodge then drop a $50m defamation suit in a new book published as she seeks to be named Donald Trump’s running mate for US president.Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”Gabbard ran for the Democratic nomination. Clinton did not accuse her of being “groomed by the Russians”.What Clinton said, in October 2019 and on a podcast hosted by the former Barack Obama adviser David Plouffe, was that she thought Republicans would encourage a third-party bid in 2020, aiming to syphon votes from the Democratic candidate in key states as Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, did four years before.“They are also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said, “and I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”Gabbard was then in the Democratic primary, though she never made any impact.Clinton continued: “She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset. Totally. And so they know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee they’ll have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”Amid uproar, a spokesperson for Clinton said she had been referring to Gabbard and the Russians – saying “If the nesting doll fits”, thereby stoking media coverage in which Clinton’s remarks about “grooming” and “assets” were conflated.Clinton’s meaning was soon cleared up, but Gabbard seized on the “grooming” remark. She penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal under a headline, I Can Defeat Trump and the Clinton Doctrine, that might now prove an awkward fit with her political ambitions.Later, after dropping out of the Democratic primary and endorsing Joe Biden, who she said had “a good heart” and would “help heal” a badly divided country, Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m over the “Russian asset” comment, rather than the remark about “grooming”. That lawsuit was dropped in May 2020.Four years on, Gabbard has completed a remarkable journey across the political aisle, from being seen as a rising Democratic star in the US House to hosting on Fox News and speaking at events including CPAC, a hard-right annual conference. Her book – For Love of Country: Why I Left the Democratic Party – will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.On the page, Gabbard presents a mix of memoir – from growing up in Hawaii to service in Iraq, from entering Congress to her failed presidential run – and pro-Trump screed. Light on detail and heavy on invective, the book includes excoriations of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It will hit shops, however, in the aftermath of the passage in Congress of billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.Gabbard is widely reported to be a contender for Trump’s running mate in his rematch with Biden. In her book, she defends the 88-times criminally charged former president on many legal fronts.Her complaint about Clinton’s remarks about Russia seems designed to stir up familiar Trump campaign furies over Clinton and the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, which US intelligence agreed was carried out in his support but which prompts Gabbard to write: “None of it was true.”She also accuses Democrats of planting evidence and stories with a compliant press, aided by a “deep state” consisting of “active and retired officials from within the justice department and other national security agencies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deep state conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent government of operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart populist leaders, is popular with Trump and followers notably including Liz Truss, a former UK prime minister. However, one of its chief creators and propagators, the Trump aide and ally Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”.Gabbard does not only repeat conspiracy theories in her book, but also makes elementary mistakes. In rehashing her inaccurate complaint about Clinton saying she was being “groomed” by Russia, she writes that Clinton was speaking to David Axelrod, also a former Obama advisor but the host of a separate podcast to Plouffe’s.Gabbard also claims that “the propaganda media repeated Clinton’s lies over and over, without ever asking for evidence or fact-checking her themselves”.In fact, Gabbard’s claims against Clinton were widely fact-checked or made the subject of article corrections.In October 2019 – months before Gabbard filed suit – the Washington Post, a leading exponent of the fact-checking form, said: “The initial news reports got it wrong, perhaps fueled by the ‘nesting doll’ comment, with many saying Clinton said the Russians were grooming Gabbard for a third-party bid.”Clinton, the paper added, “certainly said Gabbard was backed by Russian bots and even suggested she was a Russian asset”. But “within a 24-hour news cycle, Clinton’s staff made it clear she was talking about the GOP, not the Russians, eyeing Gabbard as a possible third-party candidate. A simple listen to the podcast confirmed that.“In other words, this was all cleared up 12 days before Gabbard published her [Wall Street Journal] article, making the inaccurate version of [the] ‘grooming’ statement the very first sentence. So there’s little excuse for getting this wrong.”The paper therefore awarded Gabbard three Pinocchios – denoting “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” – out of a possible four. More

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      Trump fangirl Liz Truss channels Maga menace at US conservative thinktank

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      Was that Donald Truss? Or Liz Trump? A former British prime minister turned up in Washington on Monday channeling the Maga menace who once lorded it in the Oval Office and now spends his days in a dingy courtroom.Liz Truss was at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank in Washington, within sight of the US Capitol dome, to promote her grandly titled book Ten Years to Save the West. Why does she keep coming back to America? It was not hard to figure out.Far from the London literary critics sharpening their knives, Heritage offers Truss a happy place, full of gushing sycophancy with an audience hanging on her every word. In this regard the 48-year-old has gone all Trumpy: the ex-president loves to surround himself with oleaginous flatterers who dare not cross him.How divine that the politicians who whine about “groupthink” and “safe spaces” are the ones who cling to groupthink and safe spaces.To illustrate the point, Truss’s war on “the global left” establishment evidently includes the Guardian. Last Friday, this reporter received an email from Heritage about the Truss event that said: “Due to space limitations, we unfortunately must rescind your in-person invite.”Curiously, come Monday morning, Truss posted a tweet encouraging members of the public to register the event and enclosing a link. So much for space limitations. But those who did attend were informed they couldn’t get a signed copy of the book due to “supply chain issues”.Others were still able to watch a live stream on YouTube where, three hours after it ended, the event had just over 700 views. (Heritage’s biggest hit on the site is a Tucker Carlson speech that attracted a million views.)Heritage is the thinktank behind Project 2025, a sprawling plan for a second Trump presidency. Wearing a dark blue jacket and trousers, white blouse and shiny black shoes, Truss noted that when she was first invited to Heritage as environment secretary in 2015, she was warned against not to go by then British ambassador Kim Darroch.“He says to me, ‘You’ve got to be wary of this organisation. They’ve spoken out against President Obama. They’ve even been critical of Prime Minister Cameron. Are you really sure, minister, that you want to go and see them?’” Truss recalled, speaking from a wooden lectern against a backdrop of the Stars and Stripes and a blue wall dotted with Heritage Foundation logos.“And I said, yes, I’m sure because I’m a conservative and they’re a conservative thinktank in the United States of America, our closest ally. So eventually, I prevail because I am a determined person but the car from the embassy dropped me off two blocks away from the Heritage Foundation so that the British flag wouldn’t be sitting outside the building.”Making a lot of sub-Trump hand gestures with open palms, Truss proceeded to deliver her standard speech railing against left-dominated institutions, an anti-growth coalition, the IMF and Conservatives in name only. Naturally there was a swipe at wokery as “another bad neo-Marxist idea developed from Foucault and all those crazy postmodernists in the 1960s, the idea that biological sex is not a reality”.She blamed these forces for making her the shortest serving British prime minister in history (49 days that sparked mayhem on the financial markets). She reeled off a list of foes, foreign and domestic, who joined the “pile on”. Among them was Joe Biden, who had the temerity to criticise her radical mini-budget’s tax plans “from an ice cream parlour in Oregon”. There was some laughter in the auditorium. So vanilla!The Trump fangirl had some advice to impart: “I come today with a warning to the United States of America. I fear the same forces will be coming for President Donald Trump if he wins the election this November.”Truss repeated her plea from the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland for the right to grab a “a bigger bazooka” to combat the activist left with their money and “friends in high places”. She called for a “bonfire of the quangos” and, echoing Trump ally Steve Bannon, declared: “We need to dismantle the administrative state.”In her book, Truss writes that she was an early fan of the reality TV show The Apprentice and “enjoyed the Donald’s catchphrases and sassy business advice”. She also pays little heed to the convention that senior British politicians stay out of US elections.She told the audience on Monday: “I worked in cabinet whilst Donald Trump was president and while President Biden was president and I can assure you the world felt safer when Donald Trump was in office… Getting a conservative back in the White House is critical to taking on the global left.”Praise for Truss was laid on think by Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a former foreign policy researcher for Thatcher herself. He has been named one of the 50 most influential Britons in the US by the Daily Telegraph.In God we Truss; no lettuce jokes here. The baby-faced, bespectacled Gardiner proclaimed her book “an absolutely tremendous read”, “very robust”, “very gutsy”, “very courageous”, “a wonderful read”, “very powerful”, “a thrilling read”, “a tremendous book” and “a wonderful message”. He speculated that the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be writing memoirs in the near future but “yours are far more conservative and interesting”.Truss and Gardiner sat on plush white armchairs with glasses of water on a table between them. Truss warned that another Biden term would mean “the promotion of leftwing ideology”, girls unable to use bathrooms in privacy and no policy to deal with immigration and the southern border. “Four more years of this would be a disaster for the US internally. I think Bidenomics has been a failure.”Gardiner wondered what a second Trump term would mean for Britain. Truss said free the world needs conservative leadership. “It’s only Britain that has a conservative government. We’ve got Biden in the US, we have Trudeau in Canada, we have Macron in France, we have Scholz in Germany and it’s not working. The west is not winning.”Trump has said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any Nato country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defence. But Truss echoed Trump’s call for Europe to spend more. “There are too many countries free riding at the moment who are in serious threat. If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he won’t stop there… Donald Trump is right to say to Europe: you need to pay up.”Elise Stefanik? Kristi Noem? Marjorie Taylor Greene? Forget it. Trump-Truss 2024 would have been unstoppable. If only she had been born in Kansas. More