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      in US Politics

      Proud Boys leader a scapegoat for Trump, attorney tells January 6 trial

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      A defense attorney argued on Tuesday at the close of a landmark trial over the January 6 insurrection that the US justice department is making the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio a scapegoat for Donald Trump, whose supporters stormed the US Capitol.Tarrio and four lieutenants are charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors say was a plot to stop the transfer of presidential power from Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 election.In his closing argument, the defense lawyer Nayib Hassan noted Tarrio was not in Washington on 6 January 2021, having been banned from the capital after being arrested for defacing a Black Lives Matter banner. Trump, Hassan argued, was the one to blame for extorting supporters to “fight like hell” in his cause.“It was Donald Trump’s words,” Hassan told jurors in Washington federal court. “It was his motivation. It was his anger that caused what occurred on January 6 in your beautiful and amazing city. It was not Enrique Tarrio. They want to use Enrique Tarrio as a scapegoat for Donald J Trump and those in power.”Seditious conspiracy, a rarely used charge, carries a prison term of up to 20 years.Tarrio is one of the top targets of the federal investigation of the riot, which temporarily halted certification of Biden’s win.Tarrio’s lawyers have accused prosecutors of using him as a scapegoat because charging Trump or powerful allies would be too difficult. But his attorney’s closing arguments were the most full-throated expression of that strategy since the trial started more than three months ago.Trump has denied inciting violence on January 6 and has argued that he was permitted by the first amendment to challenge his loss to Biden. The former president faces several civil lawsuits over the riot and a special counsel is overseeing investigations into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election.A prosecutor told jurors on Monday the Proud Boys were ready for “all-out war” and viewed themselves as foot soldiers for Trump.“These defendants saw themselves as Donald Trump’s army, fighting to keep their preferred leader in power no matter what the law or the courts had to say about it,” said Conor Mulroe.Tarrio, a Miami resident, is on trial with Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola. Nordean, of Auburn, Washington, was a Proud Boys chapter president. Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was a self-described organizer. Rehl was president of a chapter in Philadelphia. Pezzola was a member from Rochester, New York.Attorneys for Nordean and Rehl gave closing arguments on Monday.Tarrio is accused of orchestrating the attack from afar. Police arrested him two days before the riot on charges that he burned a church banner during an earlier march. A judge ordered him to leave Washington after his arrest.Defense attorneys have argued that there is no evidence of a conspiracy or a plan for the Proud Boys to attack the Capitol. Tarrio “had no plan, no objective and no understanding of an objective”, his attorney said.Pezzola testified he never spoke to any of his co-defendants before they sat in the same courtroom. The defense attorney Steven Metcalf said Pezzola never knew of any plan for January 6 or joined any conspiracy.“It’s not possible. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist,” Metcalf said.Mulroe, the prosecutor, told jurors a conspiracy can be an unspoken and implicit “mutual understanding, reached with a wink and a nod”.The foundation of the government’s case is a cache of messages Proud Boys leaders and members privately exchanged in encrypted chats and publicly posted on social media before, during and after the deadly January 6 attack.Norm Pattis, one of Biggs’s attorneys, described the Capitol riot as an “aberration” and told jurors their verdict “means so much more than January 6 itself” because it will “speak to the future”.“Show the world with this verdict that the rule of law is alive and well in the United States,” he said.The justice department has secured seditious conspiracy convictions against the founder and members of another far-right group, the Oath Keepers. But this is the first major trial involving leaders of the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group that remains a force in mainstream Republican circles. More

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      in US Politics

      Joe Biden formally announces 2024 White House run

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      Joe Biden has formally announced his campaign for re-election in 2024, asking Americans for four years to “finish this job”, possibly setting up an extraordinary rematch with Donald Trump.In a three-minute video opening with images of the US Capitol attack, Biden warned that the US remains under threat from the anti-democratic forces unleashed by his predecessor, who he beat in 2020.Biden said: “When I ran for president four years ago, I said we were in a battle for the soul of America – and we still are.”The president launched his re-election campaign on the fourth anniversary of his return to politics in 2019, when he declared his third presidential run. Since then, the political landscape has changed.The US is still grappling with the scars of a pandemic that killed more than 1.1 million and with inflation that has eased from historic highs but remains painful. Americans remain deeply divided, convulsed by the loss of federal abortion rights, near-weekly mass shootings and worsening climate disasters.Already the oldest president, Biden would be 86 before the end of a second term, nearly a decade older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the White House in 1989. Trump is 76.In his video, Biden warned that “Maga extremists” – Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again” – were working to strip away “bedrock freedoms”.“Cutting social security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy,” Biden said. “Dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”The president and his wife, Jill Biden, had made his intentions known. But Biden felt little need to rush after a better-than-expected Democratic performance in the midterm elections tamped down calls for a serious primary challenge.Ultimately, the president chose to wait until after his tour of Ireland, a three-day trip he said restored his “sense of optimism”. Returning home, he told reporters he planned to “run again”.The vice-president, Kamala Harris, the highest-ranking woman and person of color in US politics, will be Biden’s running mate again.Biden is dogged by low approval ratings and concerns about his age. Only a quarter of Americans want him to run, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Among Democrats, that figure is 50%. Should Biden win the nomination, as expected, most Democrats will support him.On Tuesday, Biden was due to welcome the president of South Korea. Next month, he will travel to the G7 summit in Japan. His team will begin to formalize a campaign expected to be headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware.Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a senior White House adviser and granddaughter of the celebrated labor leader César Chávez, will be campaign manager. Her principal deputy will be Quentin Fulks, a strategist who ran Raphael Warnock’s Senate re-election campaign in Georgia, a battleground state Biden won in 2020. The announcement begins a fundraising sprint. Donors have been summoned to Washington.Hours after making his candidacy official, during remarks to union workers at a conference in Washington, Biden was greeted by chants of “four more years”.“Our economic plan is working,” he said in a speech rife with references to his working-class upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania.“Let’s finish the job,” he said.Biden has made clear he plans to run on accomplishments in the first half of his presidency, when Democrats had majorities in Congress.Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, delivering financial assistance to those hit hard by Covid. He also approved a $1tn infrastructure bill; signed the first major federal gun safety bill in nearly 30 years; pursued initiatives to both treat veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and boost the semiconductor industry; and made Ketanji Brown Jackson the first Black woman on the supreme court.Perhaps his most significant legislative achievement to date is the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant US response to the climate crisis.But while Biden’s policies are broadly popular, he has struggled to earn credit. He has spent the last few months attempting to sell his economic policies and rally Americans before a showdown with Republicans over the federal debt limit.On the world stage, Biden has rallied a global coalition behind Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion while seeking to strengthen US defenses against China. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, was among the lowest points of Biden’s presidency, even as he fulfilled a promise to end America’s longest war.Republicans greeted Biden’s announcement by assailing his handling of immigration and the economy.“Biden is so out-of-touch that after creating crisis after crisis, he thinks he deserves another four years,” said Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee. “If voters let Biden ‘finish the job’, inflation will continue to skyrocket, crime rates will rise, more fentanyl will cross our open borders, children will continue to be left behind, and American families will be worse off.”Biden must negotiate with a divided Congress, Republicans holding the House. Biden plans to use a showdown over raising the federal borrowing limit to draw a contrast with Republican economic priorities, which he argues are aligned with big business and special interests.In his campaign video, Biden warned that individual freedoms are under attack by far-right Republicans who have trampled reproductive, voting and LGBTQ+ rights.“This is not a time to be complacent,” he said. “I know America. I know we’re good and decent people.”After nearly a half-century in public life including 36 years as a senator from Delaware and eight years as the vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden called himself a “bridge” to the next generation of Democrats. But only two fringe candidates have challenged him for the nomination: the self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr.The Republican field is growing. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, has entered the race. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott has taken steps to run. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is widely expected to announce. Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, is also weighing a run.Trump announced his candidacy after the midterms in November. He and Biden both face federal investigations over their handling of classified information. In Biden’s case, documents were discovered at his office and home. His lawyers have stressed they are cooperating.Trump resisted efforts to retrieve materials he took to his Florida estate. But that is just one of many legal challenges he faces. Earlier this month, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges related to hush money payments to a porn star. He also faces investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, trial over a rape accusation, and a civil suit over his business affairs.Ahead of Biden’s announcement, Trump lashed out, saying the “five worst presidents in American history” combined had not inflicted the “damage Joe Biden has done”.In his video, Biden said: “Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedoms. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights.”
      Joan E Greve contributed reporting. More

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      Biden isn’t going into 2024 very strong. But Republicans are very weak | Moira Donegan

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      It’s not surprising, but now it’s official: Joe Biden is running for re-election. In a video on Tuesday launching his bid for a second term, Biden cast his administration as standing for personal freedom, democracy and pluralism in contrast to what he called “Maga extremists”. The video emphasized abortion rights and contrasted Biden and the Democrats with unsettling images of the Capitol insurrectionists. Echoing a repeated line from his most recent State of the Union address, the president implored Americans: “Let’s finish the job.”There will be no primary. True, Biden has disaffected some members of the Democratic party’s precariously large coalition, and he has failed to capture the hearts and imaginations of Americans the way that, say, Barack Obama did. In 2020, a basketball team’s worth of Democrats entered the presidential primary – partly out of perceptions of then president Trump’s weakness, but also partly because Biden seemed like such a poor fit to be the party’s standard-bearer.He’s an old white man in a party that is predominantly female, increasingly non-white and very young. He is a moderate in a party with a resurgent left. And he is a bone-deep believer in the merits of compromise and bipartisanship, in an era where the Republican party has become anathema to cooperation, hostile to Democratic governance and committed to racial and gender hierarchies that are not worth compromising with. He seemed like a man out of time, responding to the political conditions of a different era; it was unclear, then, that he could see the country as it really was, unclear that he could confront the true threat.As he announces his re-election campaign, four years after he threw his hat into the ring for 2020, Biden has quieted these fears, if not disproved them. The left, leaderless after Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 primary, has not formed a cohesive bloc, and their pressures on the Biden administration have been noble but sporadic. Congressional Republicans hamstrung most of Biden’s agenda, causing him to abandon, in particular, promises he made to help Americans get affordable childcare; but he still managed to pass a large infrastructure bill, as well as Covid relief.The pandemic has largely receded, and both deaths and new infections are down. Inflation is slowing, and jobs numbers are encouraging. The economy, while not perfect, seems to be benefiting from the stability of Democratic leadership, with stock prices no longer beholden to wild fluctuations in the aftermath of an errant comment or impulsive tweet from Trump.When Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing horrific humanitarian catastrophes on the people there and endangering other European allies, a trap was laid that could have easily drawn the United States into war. Biden and his administration have deftly kept us out of it. The president who once seemed like an out-of-touch old man has been successfully rebranded as an affable grandfather whose gaffes are thoughtless but aggressively well-meaning.Even major missteps do not seem to have meaningfully injured Biden. The administration was shockingly tone-deaf and ill-prepared following the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, having little in the way of policy proposals to reduce the humanitarian and dignity harms imposed on American women – and at one point, trying to appoint an anti-choice judge to a lifetime seat, before withdrawing the nomination under pressure.Despite the primacy Tuesday’s campaign announcement gave abortion rights, Biden has generally seemed uncomfortable and incompetent on the issue, even as women face degradation and medical emergencies inflicted at the hands of conservative states; he has largely shied away from directly addressing abortion, and shunted it off to his unpopular, largely powerless vice-president, Kamala Harris – whose own marginalization within the administration is a signal of how little he values the issue.Even since Dobbs, Biden has been entirely unwilling to confront the federal judiciary – a captured and unaccountable extremist rightwing body that will foil his whole agenda, and gradually eliminate both pluralist society and representative democracy, if it is not reformed. Yet the Republicans’ virulent misogyny and bald sadism on abortion seems poised to be a boon to Democrats anyway: it was mostly abortion that drove voters to give a worse-than-expected showing to Republicans in the 2022 midterms, and to allow Democrats to keep control of the Senate.In that sense, the political fallout of the Dobbs decision may serve as a good model for the Democrats’ emerging 2024 strategy: they don’t need to be especially good, because the Republicans are so cruelly and chaotically worse. The Republican party is in shambles – internally divided; married to gruesome and unpopular policies, particularly on gender, that alienate voters; branded as violent, antisocial and creepy. There’s still a long way to go, but the Republican party seems only slightly less eager to anoint Trump as their nominee than the Democrats have been to appoint Biden.It very well may wind up being a rematch of the 2020 election – only now, Trump is even weaker, even more marginal, even more disliked, linked forever the memory of the January 6 violence and devoid of what was once his novelty and comedy and reduced to a rambling catalogue of personal grievances. With an opponent like that, it might not matter much if all that Biden has to offer is a series of charming anachronisms, or grinning photo ops in his aviators.All the Republicans have to offer is sex obsession and cheesy fraud, parading a series of candidates for state and federal office who talk like a collection of snake-oil salesmen and gun fetishists. Biden isn’t going into 2024 particularly strong. But right now, the Republicans are particularly weak.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      Prosecutor in Trump-Georgia case says charging decisions to come in summer

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      The prosecutor in Atlanta investigating whether Donald Trump and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 presidential election in Georgia said on Monday she expects to announce charging decisions in the case this summer and urged “heightened security”.Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis wrote in a letter to local sheriff Pat Labat that she expects to announce the decisions some time between 11 July and 1 September. She said she wanted to give Labat time to coordinate with local, state and federal agencies “to ensure that our law enforcement community is ready to protect the public”.“Open-source intelligence has indicated the announcement of decisions in this case may provoke a significant public reaction,” Willis wrote in the letter, adding that some could involve “acts of violence that will endanger the safety of our community”.As leaders, they need to be prepared, she wrote, adding that her team would be in touch to talk about arrangements.The letter was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which added that letters were also sent to the city’s police chief and the head of the emergency management agency serving the municipality and county.The Atlanta police department confirmed receipt of a letter from Willis and said it would “continue to monitor the potential for unrest throughout our city”.“We stand ready to respond to demonstrations to ensure the safety of those in our communities and those exercising their first amendment right [to peacefully assemble], or to address illegal activity, should the need arise,” a department statement said.Willis has been investigating whether Trump and his allies broke any laws as they tried to overturn his narrow election loss to his Democratic rival Joe Biden in Georgia as Biden cruised to a more comfortable victory in the electoral college.She opened the investigation in early 2021, shortly after a recording of a phone call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, was made public. In that call, Trump suggested the state’s top elections official could help “find” the votes needed to overturn his loss in the state.It has become clear since then that the scope of Willis’s investigation has expanded far beyond that call.Trump, who last fall announced a 2024 bid campaign for the White House, already faces criminal charges in New York. A Manhattan grand jury in March indicted the former president on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments to a porn actor during the 2016 election that he won.New York police had said ahead of his arraignment there that they were ready for large protests by Trump’s supporters, who believe any charges against him are politically motivated. And while hundreds of onlookers, protesters, journalists and some politicians did show up, fears that unruly crowds would cause chaos ultimately proved unfounded.Meanwhile in Washington, federal grand juries are investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election and the potential mishandling of classified documents by Trump at his Florida estate. Federal prosecutors have questioned numerous Trump administration officials before the grand jury. It’s not clear when those investigations, both overseen by a special counsel appointed last fall, might conclude or who, if anyone, might be charged.Trump’s legal team in Georgia – Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg – said in a statement that Willis’s announcement to law enforcement “does nothing more than set forth a potential timetable” for decisions Willis had already said were coming.“On behalf of President Trump, we filed a substantive legal challenge for which [Willis’s] office has yet to respond,” the statement said. “We look forward to litigating that comprehensive motion which challenges the deeply flawed legal process and the ability of the conflicted [prosecutor’s] office to make any charging decisions at all.”Trump’s legal team last month filed a motion seeking to toss out a report drafted by a special grand jury that was impaneled to aid Willis’s investigation. They also asked the court to prohibit Willis from continuing to investigate or prosecute Trump. A judge gave Willis until 1 May to respond. More

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      in US Politics

      Who is E Jean Carroll, the woman who alleges Trump sexually assaulted her?

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      E Jean Carroll is an 80 year-old former journalist who, until she accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her, was best known as an advice columnist for Elle magazine for 26 years.The column was praised for its forthright writing including Carroll’s view that women should never build their lives around men and the compassion of her replies to readers seeking advice. Elle terminated Carroll’s contract in 2019. She said the magazine fired her because of her dispute with Trump. Elle denied it.Born in Detroit and raised in Indiana, Carroll began writing for leading magazines of the era, including Rolling Stone and Playboy, after drawing attention with a “witty literary quiz” about Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald for Esquire.Carroll left her husband and moved to New York where she established herself as “feminism’s answer to Hunter S Thompson”. By the mid-1980s she was writing for Saturday Night Live. A decade later she turned the advice column into a television talk show, Ask E Jean.Carroll was well known within New York’s literary set. But she is now likely to be best remembered for her book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, and for suing Trump. The book describes the alleged assault by the now former president and attacks by other men, including the former chief executive of CBS Les Moonves, who was forced out over allegations of sexual harassment. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden expected to announce 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday

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      Joe Biden is expected to announce his 2024 re-election campaign as early as Tuesday, possibly setting the stage for an extraordinary rematch with Donald Trump.A Tuesday launch would come exactly four years after Biden announced his 2020 presidential bid, in which he warned that the “soul” of the nation was at stake after four tumultuous years under Trump.More than two years into his own presidency, Biden has struggled to heal political and cultural divisions he believes are tearing American society. But he has racked up a list of legacy defining legislative accomplishments while working to restore US leadership on the world stage.Following Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the November midterms, Biden has been open about his intention to seek a second term. For months, the question was not if he would run, but when and how he would announce.Just before leaving Ireland earlier this month, Biden declared that the ancestral journey had reinforced a “sense of optimism” about what he might accomplish. He told reporters the “calculus” on a second term had been completed and he planned to run. An announcement, he said, would come “relatively soon”.Asked again on Monday, Biden replied: “I told you I’m planning on running. I’ll let you know real soon.”Partial to symmetry and nostalgia, Biden appears to have signed off on a plan to announce his 2024 campaign with a video outlining his vision, as he did in 2019. The president is scheduled to speak at the North America’s Building Trades Unions’ US Legislative Conference in Washington on Tuesday, an echo of his first campaign event in 2019, when he spoke at a union hall in Pittsburgh.Much has changed. The pandemic that reshaped US life for nearly three years has receded, due in large part to the mass vaccination campaign the Biden administration oversaw. Decades-high inflation is abating, though economic uncertainty lingers. A loss of federal abortion protections and threats to democratic institutions have fueled Democrats in key battleground elections.“Part of the case President Biden will make to the public after he announces his reelection campaign is that he needs more time to do more and build on the things he has done during his first term,” Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on her MSNBC show on Sunday. “That’s the message: ‘Let me finish the job I started.’”Biden’s team is touting the historically productive start to his term, which included a pandemic-relief package that temporarily halved child poverty; a generational investment in infrastructure; rare action to reform gun laws; a wide-ranging effort to combat climate crisis; lower healthcare costs; and efforts to boost US competitiveness and arrest inflation, leading to an unexpectedly successful midterm election season.With Republicans in control of the House and major legislative action unlikely, Biden has focused the second half of his term on selling these policies to the public. Visits to Japan and Australia next month will bring an opportunity to emphasize efforts to rally the world in defense of Ukraine and against the growing influence of China.But Biden will also have to contend with voter disapproval of his handling of the economy and Republican attacks on immigration.Perhaps most urgently, Biden must decide how to engage with House Republicans in a debt limit standoff. The speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has proposed dramatic spending cuts, including to Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare bill, in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling and avoiding default. Accusing Republicans of holding the economy hostage in order to cut social programs, the White House has repeatedly called on Congress to keep negotiations over the debt ceiling separate from debate about fiscal restraint.Biden is dogged by low approval ratings and concerns about his age. Already the oldest president in American history at 80, he would be 86 by the end of a second term. Polling has consistently shown that most Americans, including a majority of Democrats, do not want him to seek re-election. That lack of enthusiasm is especially prevalent among young voters, who were skeptical of Biden in 2020 but ultimately turned out in high numbers to help him beat Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has also tangled with progressives who accuse him of returning to his moderate roots on crime, immigration and climate. Yet the desire to keep Trump or a Trumpian alternative out of the White House remains strong among Democrats and independents. Most Democrats say they will back Biden if he is their nominee.While Biden is not expected to face any major challenge for the nomination, the field of Republican contenders remains unsettled. Trump leads the pack.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is expected to jump into the race, offering a combative alternative to Trump, who faces legal challenges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his handling of classified documents, payments to a porn star, a rape allegation and his business affairs.Biden is also confronting a legal inquiry into his handling of classified documents as vice-president and before that as a Delaware senator.Biden ran unsuccessfully for president twice before 2020. To defeat Trump, he mobilized a coalition of young people, women and voters of color while persuading independents soured on his opponent.Biden presented himself as a bridge to the next generation of leaders. But with his mind now made up about a second term, and little agreement over who might succeed him if he did step aside, he appears best placed to be the party’s standard-bearer in 2024.“Running for the president the first time is aspirational. You can make all sorts of big bold promises,” Psaki said. “Running for reelection is when you actually get your report card from the American people.” More

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      Trump committed treason and will try again. He must be barred from running | Robert Reich

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      The most obvious question in American politics today should be: why is the guy who committed treason just over two years ago allowed to run for president?Answer: he shouldn’t be.Remember? Donald Trump lost re-election but refused to concede and instead claimed without basis that the election was stolen from him, then pushed state officials to change their tallies, hatched a plot to name fake electors, tried to persuade the vice-president to refuse to certify electoral college votes, sought access to voting-machine data and software, got his allies in Congress to agree to question the electoral votes and thereby shift the decision to the House of Representatives, and summoned his supporters to Washington on the day electoral votes were to be counted and urged them to march on the US Capitol, where they rioted.This, my friends, is treason.But Trump is running for re-election, despite the explicit language of section three of the 14th amendment to the constitution, which prohibits anyone who has held public office and who has engaged in insurrection against the United States from ever again serving in public office.The reason for the disqualification clause is that someone who has engaged in an insurrection against the United States cannot be trusted to use constitutional methods to regain office. (Notably, all three branches of the federal government have described the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as an “insurrection”.)Can any of us who saw (or have learned through the painstaking work of the January 6 committee) what Trump tried to do to overturn the results of the 2020 election have any doubt he will once again try to do whatever necessary to regain power, even if illegal and unconstitutional?Sure, the newly enacted Electoral Count Reform Act (amending the Electoral Count Act of 1887) filled some of the legal holes, creating a new threshold for members to object to a slate of electors (one-fifth of the members of both the House and the Senate), clarifying that the role of the vice-president is “solely ministerial” and requiring that Congress defer to slates of electors as determined by the states.But what if Trump gets secretaries of state and governors who are loyal to him to alter the election machinery to ensure he wins? What if he gets them to prevent people likely to vote for Joe Biden from voting at all?What if he gets them to appoint electors who will vote for him regardless of the outcome of the popular vote?What if, despite all of this, Biden still wins the election but Trump gets more than 20% of Republican senators and House members to object to slates of electors pledged to Biden, and pushes the election into the House where Trump has a majority of votes?Does anyone doubt the possibility – no, the probability – of any or all of this happening?Trump tried these tactics once. The likelihood of him trying again is greater now because his loyalists are now in much stronger positions throughout state and federal government.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYes, they were held back in the 2020 midterms. But in state after state, and in Congress, Republicans who stood up to Trump have now been purged from the party. And lawmakers in what remains of the Republican party have made it clear that they will bend or disregard any rule that gets in their way.In many cases, the groundwork has been laid. As recently reported in the New York Times, for example, the Trump allies who traveled to Coffee county, Georgia, on 7 January 2021 gained access to sensitive election data. They copied election software used across Georgia and uploaded it on the internet – an open invitation to election manipulation by Trump allies in 2024.If anything, Trump is less constrained than he was in 2020.“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a line he repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, a few weeks later. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”Filing deadlines for 2024 presidential candidates will come in the next six months, in most states.Secretaries of state – who in most cases are in charge of deciding who gets on the ballot – must refuse to place Donald Trump’s name on the 2024 ballot, based on the clear meaning of section three of the 14th amendment to the US constitution. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Four-time loser’ Trump may not be nominee for 2024, Republican insists

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      Donald Trump is a “four-time loser” who will not necessarily be the Republican presidential nominee despite dominating primary polling, the New Hampshire governor said on Sunday.“Donald Trump is positioning himself to be a four-time loser in 2024,” Chris Sununu said. “We need candidates that can win.”A Republican governor in a Democratic part of the country – and of a key early voting state – Sununu is seen as a potential candidate in the moderate lane, should such a lane still exist in a party dominated by Trump.Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Sununu was confronted by comments to the same network just two months ago, when he said Trump was “not going to be the nominee”.“We’re just moving on as a party, as a country,” Sununu said in February. “He’s not going to be the nominee. That’s just not going to happen. Here’s the good news … Ready? … You’re dead wrong. He’s not going to be the nominee.”Since then, particularly since Trump was this month arraigned on criminal charges in New York, relating to his hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, the primary paradigm has shifted.Trump dominates polling, expanding his lead over Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who has not declared a run, and other actual or likely candidates.Trump also faces legal jeopardy over his election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, his handling of classified material, his business and tax affairs and a civil rape case due to go to trial in New York next week.He denies wrongdoing and claims victimisation by Democrats. On Sunday, NBC released a poll in which a fraction under 70% of Republicans agreed.Sununu told NBC there had “definitely [been] a shift” but insisted: “I still don’t think he’s necessarily going to be the nominee.“Look, I think your poll is spot on in all these areas. I think that’s actually a great poll. I hope folks listen to it.“I’ll say this. Republicans are rallying. They’re supporting former president Trump over these indictments, right? … Now, does it actually translate into a vote? We will see, I mean, most folks don’t decide who they’re voting for until about three weeks before the election.“… There’s not even a single debate has been had. Other candidates are going to get in the race. I just think it’s so far away.“And at the end of the day, we want a winner, right? Republicans want someone who can win in November of ’24. Donald Trump is a loser. He has not just lost once. He lost us our House seats in 2018. He lost everything in ’20. We should have 54 US senators right now and we don’t because of his message.“So, Donald Trump is positioning himself to be a four-time loser in 2024. We need candidates that can win.”Many within and without Republican ranks are questioning whether DeSantis is that sort of candidate. The Florida governor has fallen away in polling, experiencing problems including a pause by a major donor who said he was turned off by hard-right policies including school book bans and a six-week abortion ban.Thomas Peterffy, an online trader, did not say he would not support DeSantis at all. But he also gave $1m to the Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, who has not declared a run.On Sunday, Rolling Stone quoted a source formerly allied to DeSantis but now “in the Trump orbit” as saying: “If Ron thinks the last couple months have been bumpy, he’s in for a painful ride.”As Florida Republicans in Congress have endorsed Trump, so DeSantis has come under fire for an alleged lack of personal warmth. Rolling Stone described an evolving attempt by Trump to trash his rival personally as well as politically.The unnamed source said: “The nature of the conversations among the people who used to work for Ron is just so frequently, ‘OK, how can we destroy this guy?’ It is not at all at a level that is normal for people who hold the usual grudges against horrible bosses. It’s a pure hatred that is much, much purer than that.“People who were traveling with Ron every day, who worked with him very closely over the years, to this day joke about how it was always an open question whether or not Ron knew their names … And that’s just the start of it.”Unlike DeSantis, Sununu barely registers in polling. On NBC, he was asked for his timetable for deciding on whether to run.“Probably by lunch,” he joked.“I think everybody will have to make a decision by 4 July … There’s a lot of opportunity here … a lot of folks want to get on that stage. I think the threshold for the debate are going to be very low to start in terms of polling numbers and donors, so I think we’re going to have a very crowded stage early on.”That stage may yet include Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence. In Iowa on Saturday, at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event which Trump addressed by video, the former Indiana governor flirted with confirming a run.“I think if we have an announcement to make, it’ll be well before late June,” Pence told CBS’s Face the Nation, adding: “Anyone that would be serious about seeking the Republican nomination would need to be in this contest by June.“If we have an announcement to make it will be well before then.” More