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      Nine Black Robes review: how Trump turned the supreme court right

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      Joan Biskupic is senior supreme court analyst at CNN, a Pulitzer finalist and an established biographer. In her latest book, she seeks to make sense of the court during and after the presidency of Donald J Trump, culminating last June when five conservative justices overturned Roe v Wade, the ruling which guaranteed access to abortion. In one swoop, the court gutted the rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.It was more important for the favourites of the Federalist Society to be “right” than smart. As we saw this week, Wisconsin Democrats say thank you.On the US supreme court, the majority in Dobbs v Jackson, the abortion ruling, said personal autonomy lacked constitutional safeguards unless explicitly enumerated in the text of the document. Precedents protecting the right to contraception, interracial marriage, same-sex relations and marriage now stand on shaky ground.“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence and Obergefell,” Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, referring to the rulings on contraception, same-sex relations and marriage.Thomas did not mention Loving v Virginia, which guaranteed the right to interracial marriage. He is Black. His wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas, is white.Biskupic knows the history of the court. In earlier biographies, she studied the chief justice, John Roberts, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor, the retired Sandra Day O’Connor and the late Antonin Scalia.As expected, Nine Black Robes is well researched. Biskupic plumbs the papers of the late William Brennan, a liberal appointed by Dwight D Eisenhower in 1956. But her book also contains more than its fair share of chambers chatter.Biskupic captures the unease of some court members at being used as props by Trump. They felt “tricked”. Trump assured them a party for Brett Kavanaugh, his second nominee, would not turn overtly political. It did.“Some justices told me later that they were sorry they had gone,” Biskupic writes.Among the “stone faced” justices at the White House, Thomas was “conspicuously enthusiastic, alone applaud[ing] heartily after Kavanaugh spoke”. Later, Thomas’s wife would seek to help Trump overturn an election.Biskupic also recounts tensions between Roberts and Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first conservative pick for the court. Gorsuch did not attend his first scheduled justices-only meeting. Roberts’s entreaties meant little.According to Biskupic, Gorsuch penned dissents and chivvied other justices. For example, in Torres v Madrid, a police abuse case, he “suggested his colleagues were kowtowing to policing concerns and the Black Lives Matter movement”.In his dissent, Gorsuch asked: “If efficiency cannot explain today’s decision, what’s left? Maybe it is an impulse that individuals like Ms Torres should be able to sue for damages. Sometimes police shootings are justified, but other times they cry out for a remedy.”Gorsuch also accused the majority of a “schizophrenic reading of the word ‘seizure’”. The chief justice was not amused.“The dissent speculates that the real reason for today’s decision is an ‘impulse’ to provide relief to Torres,” Roberts noted. “There is no call for such surmise.”Comity and appearances do not weigh heavily on Gorsuch. As Biskupic notes, his mother, Ann Gorsuch Burford, was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan but was found in contempt of Congress, a first for an agency head. She resigned, feeling used.After less than a year on the court, Gorsuch spoke at the Trump International hotel in Washington, addressing a “Defending Freedom Luncheon” sponsored by the Fund for American Studies, a conservative group. As Biskupic notes, the hotel then stood “embroiled in litigation about unconstitutional financial benefit for the president who appointed him”.Gorsuch’s appearance may have been an act of contrition, designed to placate Trump’s wrath. Months earlier, Gorsuch reportedly conveyed criticism of the president to Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, during a courtesy call. Trump’s attacks on the judiciary were too much even for Gorsuch.But he is not the only justice with limited bandwidth for playing nice. Biskupic “learned” that Sotomayor circulated “a blistering draft dissent” which caused colleagues to back off from barring racially conscious preferences in college admissions. Now, Sotomayor’s luck may be running out. In challenges to affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the court is expected to strike down race-based admissions.Two years ago, Sotomayor attacked Kavanaugh’s legal reasoning in a case that involved a juvenile life sentence without parole.“The court is fooling no one,” she thundered, in Jones v Mississippi. “The court’s misreading is egregious enough on its own … The court twists precedent even further.”Biskupic also considers Trump’s legal woes, reporting on deliberations surrounding a ruling in favor of Cy Vance Jr, then Manhattan district attorney, in June 2020. The court upheld a subpoena demanding eight years of Trump’s tax returns. Voting 7-2, the court rejected Trump’s contention that he was immune from investigation simply because he was president. A little more than two years later, Trump stands indicted in the same jurisdiction.“We cannot conclude that absolute immunity is necessary or appropriate under article II or the supremacy clause,” Roberts wrote in 2020. “No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.”But the margin of the decision was not preordained.Biskupic writes: “In their private telephonic conference, the Trump v Vance case produced a 5-4 split, I later learned, to affirm the lower-court judgment against Trump.”Roberts’s cajoling made a difference.“Over the course of two months he coaxed and compromised,” Biskupic writes. “Only Thomas and Alito declined to sign on.”Nowadays, Biskupic laments, “the court has no middle, no center to hold.“… Donald Trump, who had demonstrated so little respect for the law, truth and democracy, changed the balance for at least a generation.”
      Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences is published in the US by HarperCollins More

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      Same world, different planet: Trump’s arrest lays bare US polarization

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      If the US needed a reminder that a rather large group of Americans completely disagree with another very large group of Americans, it got one this week.Donald Trump’s arrest in New York City on Tuesday, when he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in relation to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, was marked by diametrically opposed rallies, commentary and media coverage.For those on the right, the charges were an outrage, a sham, a witch-hunt: evidence of an abuse of political power and proof that the system was attempting to silence their man.For non-Trump supporters, it was justice: recompense, at last, for a man who was dogged by accusations of illegality throughout his presidency, and indeed for decades before that.As Trump was fingerprinted and read his rights on Tuesday, a neat illustration of the divide was on show outside the court.A group of Trump supporters, who had gathered to support their man, chanted: “Fuck Joe Biden”. Yards away, behind a metal barrier, came the opposite chant from people gathered to cheer Trump’s arrest. “Fuck Donald Trump”, the non-Trump voters shouted.As Trump and his lawyers begin to prepare for a trial in the Stormy Daniels case – and brace themselves for other looming lawsuits – some academics believe the country has not been this politically polarized since two sides literally went to war with each other in 1861.“When I look at the numbers that are coming in when we do the polling, I don’t see any daylight in the distance as far as polarization melting away,” said Tim Malloy, polling analyst at the Quinnipiac University Poll.“And that’s not opinion, that’s just looking at the numbers – they really never change.”A recent Quinnipiac survey found that reaction to Trump’s legal travails differed widely between Democrat and Republican voters. Among Democrats, 89% thought the charges against Trump were very serious or somewhat serious. Just 21% of Republicans felt the same.Some 88% of Democratic voters thought that criminal charges being filed against Trump should disqualify him from running for president again. Only 23% of Republicans were of the same view.It mirrors the wider divide over Trump, who retains his unique knack of completely alienating some people, and utterly captivating others. Among Republicans, 73% think the one-term, twice-impeached, criminally charged former president has had a positive impact on the Republican party.Democrats disagree: 93% think Trump’s influence has been negative.It presents a continuing problem for a country that has recently seen its main seat of democracy attacked by thousands of Trump supporters, but in electoral terms, it isn’t great for the Republican party, either.“That the fact that if the election were held today, Biden would beat Trump fairly handily has got to be a huge red flag for Republicans,” Malloy said.The division has worked for Trump previously. From the moment he announced his first presidential campaign, in June 2015, he set out to paint politics as us v them: branding elected officials “losers” who were “morally corrupt”, and would-be immigrants “rapists”.Little has changed.In a rambling speech in Florida on Tuesday, hours after he had been charged, Trump lashed out against basically everyone who doesn’t own a Make America Great Again hat, claiming “our country is going to hell” and accusing “radical left lunatics” of trying to interfere in his run for president.On Truth Social, Trump’s eccentric and misleadingly named social media platform, his followers also received an interpretation of the trial that was completely different from the one in the rest of the world. Democrats have “weaponized our system of laws”, Trump posted, in an effort to drive him out of the 2024 presidential race.A problem for the US is that people listen, and believe him. Outside the Manhattan court on Tuesday, it was no surprise to hear his supporters parrot Trump’s talking points.“This is all just a bunch of BS so that Trump doesn’t run for president,” Shaun Lloyd, a Trump supporter, told the Guardian. “The American people are waking up more than ever, every day, to the truth, and the lies and the Democrats are telling them.”It also doesn’t help that the rightwing media continues to channel lies and misinformation about elections and rival politicians’ behavior. This week some went as far as to hint at violence, with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, telling his audience it was “probably not the best time to give up your AR-15s”, the semi-automatic rifle that has been used in multiple mass shootings.It is difficult to see a path out of the deep polarization in the country, in part because the divide goes to issues that run to race, identity and culture, said Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington.“There is increasing evidence that the best predictor of support for Trump in 2020 (and continuing), in addition to one’s party identification, is not feelings about the economy but racial resentment among white voters,” she said.“For that reason, it seems unlikely that this polarization will decline any time soon. Feelings about race in the US have been continually whipped up by stories of police conduct toward Black people and by a number of Republican Trump supporters, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who find it to their electoral advantage to keep making controversial statements that imply race-baiting.”The divide represents real dangers in the US, beyond the already evident destruction of faith in election integrity, the political gridlock and the inherent unsavoriness of a society at odds with itself.In the two years since Trump left office, polls have shown that one in three Americans – including 40% of Republicans – believe violence against the government is sometimes justified: a number that is at a two-decade high.“We are a nation filled with guns, many of them capable of blasting bodies to pieces,” Hershey said.“A society that’s roiled by conflict can loosen some of those people’s inhibitions. Let’s hope people remember that you can’t kill an idea by killing an individual; ideas can’t be shot.” More

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      Vow of silence: why Biden is saying nothing about Trump’s indictment

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      The biggest news story in the US this week was Donald Trump’s unprecedented appearance at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan courtroom – an event that Joe Biden took pains to appear blissfully unaware of.On the day Trump learned he was facing 34 charges related to falsifying business records in the first-ever indictment of a former American president, Biden spent his day talking on the phone with the French leader, Emmanuel Macron, and Britain’s King Charles III, and presided over a meeting with his science and technology advisers at the White House. And, despite the best efforts of the reporters who follow him around on a daily basis, he ignored all questions about the allegations made by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg.“Look, our focus is going to continue to be the American people. What you all cover is up to all of you, but we’re going to do our best to stay the course, to talk about the issues that matter,” the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said on Wednesday when asked why the indictment appeared to be a verboten subject at the White House.Observers of Biden’s administration say the strategy is probably a wise one as he heads into a potential rematch next year against Trump, the Republican opponent he bested in the 2020 election. Despite several legislative wins, Biden’s approval ratings have been underwater for months, and CNN on Thursday released a survey that found a majority of Democrats would prefer someone else as their nominee for president in next year’s election.“I think that is sort of the intentional thing. I think they want to keep their distance from what they see as the chaos and divisiveness that Donald Trump creates,” said Navin Nayak, executive director at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a former Democratic campaign staffer.This strategy also gives Biden the opportunity to cast Trump as scandal-plagued and unfit for office, and himself as the competent alternative – a tactic he deployed to defeat him in 2020.Biden has yet to say whether he’ll run for a second term, though people close to him have repeatedly said he will. “He says he’s not done,” the first lady, Jill Biden, said in February. Reports from earlier this year indicated the president would announce his re-election campaign sometime after his February State of the Union address – a date that has come and gone. Trump’s prosecution could be one reason for the delay.“Why compete with that?” said the Democratic pollster Carly Cooperman. “I don’t see any reason right now for him to announce that he’s running. He’s already the president, and there’s gonna be all this attention on Trump and his legal battles, at least in the short term. And so I think it’s definitely a reason to push that back a little bit, at minimum.”The former president’s Tuesday appearance at the criminal court in Manhattan was covered by hundreds of journalists, some of whom waited overnight to be in the courtroom when details of the indictment centered on facilitating hush money payments and running a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress negative news stories ahead of the 2016 election were relayed to a scowling Trump.Trump could also soon find himself summoned to courtrooms elsewhere in the US. Fani Willis, the district attorney in the Atlanta-area Fulton county, is investigating Trump and his allies’ failed effort to overturn Biden’s election win in Georgia. In Washington DC, special prosecutor Jack Smith is in the middle of an inquiry into three sources of legal peril for the former president: the classified documents the FBI discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, his election meddling and the January 6 insurrection.As serious as the allegations in Bragg’s case are – no current or former American president has ever been indicted – Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the White House may view it as the sort of scandal Biden should stay away from.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It wouldn’t surprise me if his team just sees that as almost below the president or not what the president should focus on,” he said. But if Trump were to be charged over the January 6 insurrection or his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, subjects Biden has spoken out against forcefully in the past, that might change the president’s tone.“That’s something where you need the president to be out front. Even if it doesn’t persuade a lot of people, that still is part of the president’s role, to defend the constitutional order,” Schickler said.While Biden may have kept his thoughts about the Manhattan case to himself, Cooperman said the indictment is to the president’s benefit, in part because it serves as a distraction for the discontented public.“By saying nothing, Biden is kind of saying everything,” Cooperman said. “Even if this might help Trump win his own party’s presidential [nomination], I think that from Biden’s perspective, less is more, and being able to say nothing and let that play out is the best thing that he could be doing.” More

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      The case(s) against Trump: New York charges only beginning of legal woes

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      It was the day that Donald Trump got mugged by reality. After years of dodging legal accountability, the former US president found himself being driven towards a New York courtroom where he would be charged with a crime.“WOW, they are going to ARREST ME,” he wrote on his Truth Social media platform, the true scale of his predicament finally dawning on him. “Can’t believe this is happening in America.”But dramatic as the day was, as Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to hush money payments, it represented only the first drop of rain in what could be a legal thunderstorm. Several more cases are fast approaching and some are potentially far more devastating.Whereas the ex-president has so far been able to spin the hush money indictment to his political advantage as he seeks to win back the White House in 2024, experts suggest that the quantity and gravity of the upcoming investigations could ultimately bury him and his electoral chances.Tuesday’s court appearance, in which Trump – the first former US president in history to be arrested and arraigned on criminal charges – had to answer meekly to a judge and found there was no one to hold doors open for him, was the humbling and sobering moment that he discovered his legal troubles are no longer theoretical.Michael D’Antonio, a political commentator and author of The Truth About Trump, said: “His attitude prior to this has always been obstinance and a chin-jutting pride and refusal to appear to be affected. But he sure appeared to be affected this time. There was a quality of a cow being led to the slaughter.”He added: “He must realise that he’s in trouble and that the situation is grave and that showed on his face. He doesn’t care as much about the proceedings politically as he cares about the story that he can tell about them. He is a storyteller above all and a fabulist. If he can tell a story that motivates his base and also manage to stay out of prison, he will argue that it’s a victory over a corrupt system.”Trump himself will not be in jeopardy when Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial, currently scheduled for 17 April. But the case, which could hear testimony from the Fox Corporation executives Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and an array of Fox News hosts, could provide some deeply embarrassing details about how the ex-president is perceived by the network.Then, on 25 April, a civil trial in a New York lawsuit involving Trump is scheduled to begin. E Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, accuses Trump of defaming her by denying he raped her in New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in late 1995 or early 1996. Carroll is seeking monetary damages and it is not known whether Trump will testify.Another important trial is set for 2 October. Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is suing Trump and his Trump Organization for fraud. James has said her office found more than 200 examples of misleading asset valuations between 2011 and 2021, and that Trump inflated his net worth by billions of dollars.James said the scheme was intended to help Trump obtain lower interest rates on loans and better insurance coverage. The civil lawsuit seeks to permanently bar Trump and three of his adult children from running companies in New York state, and recoup at least $250m obtained through fraud.Before then, there may have been developments in Georgia, where a prosecutor is investigating Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in that state. Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who will ultimately decide whether to pursue charges, told a judge in January that a special grand jury had completed its work and that decisions were “imminent”.If convicted, Trump would not be able to seek clemency from a future Republican president since such pardons do not apply to state offences. Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said: “The most perilous is probably the case out of Georgia because it relates to election interference and because there is no ability for Trump, if he becomes president again, to pardon himself.“We know the grand jury foreperson said that they were recommending indictments of more than a dozen people and she strongly hinted one of those people was Trump. That one might pose the most danger to him at the moment.”Meanwhile the justice department has investigations under way into both Trump’s actions in the 2020 election, including lies that led to the January 6 insurrection, and his retention of highly classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Both are overseen by Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor and political independent.When he returned to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Tuesday night and hurled abuse at the investigators one by one, Trump devoted the lion’s share of his comments – and patent falsehoods – to the classified documents case, implying that he recognises it as posing the maximum danger.The FBI seized 13,000 documents from Mar-a-Lago last August; about 100 documents were marked classified and some were designated top secret. Earlier this week the Washington Post newspaper reported that investigators have fresh evidence pointing to possible obstruction of justice by the former president as he resisted a subpoena demanding the return of all classified documents.As for the charges over hush money payments during the 2016 election campaign, Trump is expected back in court in New York on 4 December – about two months before the official start of the 2024 Republican presidential primary calendar.Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “The moment he set foot into official custody in New York probably was a chilling realisation for him of the difficulties that lie ahead, and not just in this case, although it’s serious.“It’s that feeling of the walls closing in from every direction. He’s got a lot of serious problems on his hands. Even in a Republican primary, the compound of all of these challenges will be very deleterious because Republican primary voters are going to ask: can he win?”Asked if the 45th president could end up in prison, Eisen, author of Overcoming Trumpery: How to Restore Ethics, the Rule of Law, and Democracy, replied yes. “It won’t be easy, it may not be fast but it’s certainly possible,” he said.Beneath the cries of a witch-hunt by Democrats and the “deep state”, and despite a bounce in primary polls as Republicans rally in his defence, Trump, 76, may no longer be sleeping easy at Mar-a-Lago. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, commented: “He looked like a man with pins sticking into his torso. He is scared stiff.“Sure, he’s going to bluster and express bravado and confidence, but he is terrified of being confined. No doubt about that. This is the beginning of the first day of the rest of his life. The issues are just going to pile on. It’s extraordinary. Outside of the mafia, it’s hard to find any American with such legal problems.” More

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      Trump reportedly seeks 2024 campaign role for far-right activist Laura Loomer

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      Donald Trump has told aides to hire the far-right anti-Muslim activist and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer for a role in his campaign to return to the White House in 2024, the New York Times has reported.Citing four anonymous sources, the Times noted that Loomer, 29, attended Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday night, an angry rant delivered hours after the former president pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges in New York over hush money payments, including to the porn star Stormy Daniels.Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying big leads over his closest challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, despite the historic indictment and multiple other forms of legal jeopardy.DeSantis has not declared a campaign but has nonetheless presented himself as a candidate in Trump’s hard-right mould. The former governors Nikki Haley (South Carolina) and Asa Hutchinson (Arkansas), declared candidates closer to the political centre, barely register in polling.Loomer told the Times: “I’m not going to comment on private conversations that I had with the president. The president knows I have always been a Trump loyalist and that I’m committed to helping him win re-election in 2024.”A Trump spokesperson said: “The entire movement is united behind President Trump and his campaign, and it will take everyone rowing in the same direction in order to beat [Joe] Biden and take our country back.”Loomer said Trump “likes me very much. And it’s a shame that he’s surrounded by some people that run to a publication [the Times] notorious for attacking him in order to try to cut me at the knees instead of being loyal.”Loomer ran for Congress in Florida in 2020, winning Trump’s endorsement and a Republican primary but losing the general election.She told the Times she was a “Jewish conservative woman, a Trump loyalist and a free speech absolutist”. In the current election cycle, she has agitated against DeSantis, in one instance picketing an appearance to promote his campaign memoir.Loomer has previously described herself as “pro-white nationalism”, claiming “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy … and a lot of liberals and leftwing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that”.In the same conversation with a white supremacist podcast, in 2017, Loomer said the US “really was built as the white Judeo-Christian ethnostate, essentially. Over time, immigration and all these calls for diversity, it’s starting to destroy this country.”Another attendee at Trump’s speech on Tuesday, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, greeted news of Trump’s courtship of Loomer with evident dismay.“Laura Loomer is mentally unstable and a documented liar,” wrote Greene, who has risen to power in the Republican party despite spreading conspiracy theories including that wildfires are caused by space technology controlled by the Rothschild family and that the Parkland school shooting in Florida was a “false flag” operation.Loomer, Greene said, “can not [sic] be trusted. She spent months lying about me and attacking me just because I supported Kevin McCarthy for [House] speaker and after I had refused to endorse her last election cycle.”Greene also accused Loomer of “loving” Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white supremacist activist who controversially dined with Trump and the rapper Ye last November.Observers pointed out that Greene has appeared with Fuentes in public and spoken at a conference he staged.Regarding Trump, Greene said she would “make sure he knows” why hiring Loomer would be a bad move. More

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      New York judge in Trump arraignment reportedly receives ‘dozens’ of threats

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      The New York judge who presided over the arraignment of Donald Trump and the judge’s family have reportedly received multiple threats following the historic arrest of the former president.In court in Manhattan on Tuesday, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts related to his hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.NBC was among outlets to report that the judge, Juan Merchan, and his family subsequently received “dozens” of threats.Citing two sources familiar with the matter, NBC said the threats, like those recently directed towards the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and other officials, had come in the form of calls, emails and letters.In addition to increased security surrounding Merchan and the court, New York police were providing “extra security to all affected staff members”, NBC said. Biographies of employees at Bragg’s office had been removed from the district attorney’s website.The New York Daily News also reported threats to Merchan and his family, a source telling the paper “the content of the calls, emails and letters was … harassing and defamatory, with most of the trolls calling from out of state”.Lucian Chalfen, a spokesperson for the New York office of court administration, told the paper: “We continue to evaluate and re-evaluate security concerns and potential threats. We have maintained an increased security presence in and around courthouses and throughout the judiciary and will adjust protocols as necessary.”Elsewhere, J Michael Luttig, the retired conservative judge and adviser to the former vice-president Mike Pence who came to national prominence with testimony to the House January 6 committee, warned Trump he risked a gag order over his attacks on Judge Merchan.“There is no court that would want to impose a gag order on a president of the United States,” Luttig told Axios. But “if the former president forces the Manhattan criminal court, the court will have no choice”.Mike Scotto, a former rackets bureau chief for the Manhattan district attorney, told the same site: “A gag order is used to protect the defendant’s rights to a fair trial and also the government’s rights to a fair trial, so that the potential jurors don’t learn anything about the case that they’re not going to learn in court.”Luttig is an influential voice in conservative circles, widely deemed unlucky not to have reached the supreme court. He has predicted “the beginning of the end of Donald Trump”.But the former president enjoys comfortable leads in polling regarding the Republican nomination in 2024 and senior party figures have rallied round him in response to his historic indictment.Before his arraignment in the New York case, Trump stoked controversy with inflammatory social media posts about the case and Bragg and calls for protest.On Tuesday, the far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene led a rally for Trump in a park outside the court in Manhattan.Inside the court, Merchan warned Trump to “refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence and civil unrest”. He also told a Trump lawyer: “I don’t share your view that certain language is justified by frustration.”Hours later, in a speech at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, Trump called Merchan “a Trump-hating judge”; attacked the judge’s family (“I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris”); and went after Bragg (“a criminal”) and other prosecutors overseeing investigations of his behaviour in the White House and out of power.Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is investigating Trump’s election subversion attempts there, with an indictment believed likely.Trump called her “a local racist Democrat”.At the US justice department, the special counsel Jack Smith is overseeing investigations of Trump’s election subversion and incitement of the Capitol attack, and of Trump’s retention of classified records.Trump called him “a radical-left lunatic known as a bomb-thrower”.The Lincoln Project, a group formed by anti-Trump Republicans, condemned what it called “a paranoid and delusional speech cheered on by fanatical cult members who do not care about democracy and American values”.“Trump got the circus he wanted,” the group said. “The rest of the GOP has fallen in line.” More

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      Mike Pence will not appeal order to testify to January 6 grand jury

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      The former vice-president Mike Pence will not appeal an order compelling him to testify in the US justice department investigation of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, attempts which culminated in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.The order was handed down last week. A spokesperson for Pence announced the decision on Wednesday, clearing the way for Pence to appear before a grand jury in Washington.Other Trump administration officials have testified in the investigation, as well as in an investigation of Trump’s retention of classified documents. Pence would be the highest-profile witness to appear before a grand jury.His closed-door testimony could offer a first-hand account of Trump’s state of mind in the weeks after he lost to Joe Biden and further expose a rift in Trump’s relationship with his former vice-president.Lawyers for Trump objected to the subpoena on grounds of executive privilege, an argument rejected by James Boasberg, a federal district court judge in Washington. Boasberg did accept arguments by Pence’s lawyers that for constitutional reasons he could not be questioned about his actions on January 6.Lawyers for Pence argued that because he served that day as president of the Senate, overseeing the certification of electoral college results, he was protected from being forced to testify under the “speech or debate” clause of the US constitution, which protects members of Congress from questioning about official legislative acts.On Wednesday, Pence’s spokesperson, Devin O’Malley, said: “Having vindicated that principle of the constitution, vice-president Pence will not appeal the judge’s ruling and will comply with the subpoena as required by law.”Lawyers for Trump could still appeal the executive privilege ruling.The justice department investigation, under the special counsel Jack Smith, is just one form of legal jeopardy faced by Trump, even as he continues to enjoy big leads in polls regarding the Republican presidential nomination.The former president was indicted in New York this week on charges related to a hush money payment to a porn star who claims an affair.Trump also faces a Georgia state election subversion investigation, the federal investigation of his retention of classified documents and civil suits in New York over his business practices and a defamation case arising from an allegation of rape.Trump denies all wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of political witch-hunts.Pence, who is expected to announce his own run for the presidency, was almost a victim of the mob Trump sent to the Capitol on 6 January 2021, seeking to block certification of Biden’s win. As rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and erected a makeshift gallows, Pence was sent running for safety.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than a thousand people have been arrested and hundreds convicted, some of seditious conspiracy.Pence has publicly addressed his interactions with Trump after election day and up to and including January 6, not least in a book, So Help Me God, seemingly meant to prepare the ground for a presidential run.As he tries to balance his own ambitions with Trump’s dominance among Republican voters, Pence has sought to distance himself from his former president.Last month, Pence told the Gridiron dinner in Washington: “President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”Associated Press contributed reporting More