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      Donald Trump pleads not guilty to 34 felony charges in hush money case

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      Donald Trump on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges of falsifying business records and conspiracy related to his role in hush money payments to cover up an alleged extramarital affair in the final days of the 2016 presidential election, an unprecedented development that marks the first time in American history a former president has been charged with a crime.Trump, the 45th commander in chief and the leading contender for the Republican nomination in 2024, was stone-faced as he entered the courtroom in lower Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, after surrendering to authorities in the city where he was born, built his career and launched his bid for the presidency.Trump described the moment as “SURREAL,” as his 11-vehicle motorcade made the journey from his penthouse on Fifth Ave to the district attorney’s office downtown. Upon his arrival, Trump, escorted by a phalanx of US Secret Service agents, waved to the crush of supporters, reporters and onlookers gathered near the criminal courts building.While he was in custody, Trump, like any other criminal defendant, was fingerprinted. But given the extraordinary nature of the proceedings, he was also afforded special accommodations: he was not handcuffed and was not subject to a mug shot.In his appearance before New York supreme court justice Juan Merchan, Trump himself entered the plea of not guilty, part of an effort to project an air of defiance, people close to him said. But seated between his lawyers at the defense table, Trump appeared affected by the gravity of the moment, which amounted to a legal reckoning for the reality TV star-turned-president after nearly half a century of avoiding criminal charges.According to the charging document, unsealed on Tuesday, prosecutors accused the former president of paying $130,000 to buy the silence of adult film star Stormy Daniels, who said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. The payment was made by his then lawyer Michael Cohen, who said he was acting at the direction of Trump. Trump later reimbursed Cohen while serving as president of the United States.New York prosecutors allege that Trump violated state records law because it was falsely recorded as legal expenses, which also meant Trump avoided paying tax on the money.The prosecutors doubled down on the timing of Trump’s actions, which they said could have undermined his campaign during the 2016 election. And they asked for protective orders for discovery materials, including Trump’s escalatory posts on his platform Truth Social, such as when he vowed “death and destruction” in the event he was indicted.The arraignment marks a politically and legally perilous moment for Trump, and also for the country, which has never before been confronted with the extraordinary situation of a twice-impeached, criminally charged former president now running for re-election to the White House.The intense public interest in the case was underscored on Tuesday by dueling but peaceful demonstrations swelled on separate sides of a park near the courthouse. Metal barricades divided Trump’s supporters from his opponents, a stark visual of a nation still deeply divided over his presidency and his political future. While a conviction is far from certain, it would not preclude Trump from running or winning the presidency in 2024.The New York case is just one of an array of legal threats confronting the former president, who faces criminal investigations over the January 6 Capitol attack, his retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, as well as civil inquiries into his business and a defamation suit arising from allegations of rape.Trump and his campaign sees political opportunity in his legal jeopardy, as his supporters rallied to his defense, with signs and Maga-wear, in a show of fealty to a man many believe is the victim of a political witch hunt. It is a narrative Trump and his campaign have advanced in the days since he was indicted, using claims of a “witch hunt” to drive fundraising and pressure his likely Republican rivals to defend him. Prosecutors have said politics played no role in the decision to pursue this case.President Joe Biden, who has yet to formally announce that he’s seeking re-election next year, has declined to comment on the case. “This is not his focus for today,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Tuesday. More

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      ‘Going against the grain’: is bipartisanship really possible in America?

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      On election night 2016, Van Jones, the criminal justice advocate and former Obama administration official turned CNN anchor, processed his shock on live television. “This was a whitelash against a changing country,” he said. “It was a whitelash against a Black president, in part. And that’s the part where the pain comes.” The clip, in which Jones appeared near tears and essentially called Donald Trump a “bully” and a “bigot”, went viral. For many, it was shorthand for shock and dismay, an articulation of unspeakable anger, and a rare example of a pundit calling it like it was.So it was confusing that over the next few years, Jones, a Black man from western Tennessee, was seen at the Trump White House, conducted the first (and uncomfortably chummy) TV interview with Trump’s son-in-law/adviser Jared Kushner, and touted his communication with the administration and congressional Republicans in the name of bipartisan criminal justice reform. In spring 2019, Jones appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference – the Maga hat-filled, far-right convention known as CPAC – as an avowed Democrat willing, for better and for worse and with a considerable amount of controversy, to engage with the opposition. He appeared on stage with the chairman of the American Conservative Union, prompting the question, from myself, from the panel’s moderator and surely from audience members: “Why are you here?”The answer – the distance between 2016 and 2019, and the messy, at times contradictory journey in between – forms the backbone of the The First Step, a new, wide-ranging and thoughtful documentary on his fraught activism and the bipartisan criminal justice legislation he championed. Created by the brothers team of director Brandon Kramer and producer Lance Kramer, The First Step opens with that CPAC appearance and takes it name from the First Step Act, the bill heralded by Jones and his criminal justice organization, #cut50, that was signed into law by President Trump in 2018. The measure barred punitive practices such as shackling pregnant prisoners, placed inmates in facilities closer to their families, cut down some federal sentences by anywhere from weeks to years and allowed those convicted of pre-2010 crack cocaine offenses to apply for resentencing to a shorter term.During the initial Trump years, Jones “felt like somebody needed to be engaging and reaching across the aisle and trying to see if there was any sliver of room to get something accomplished on some of the issues where there is some bipartisan support”, said Brandon Kramer. The First Step Act was thus a hodgepodge of reforms and concessions, with a wide range of supporters (people as ideologically opposed as Kamala Harris and Ted Cruz) and skeptics. Some Republicans interested in decreasing mass incarceration backed it; other hardliners, such as the then attorney general, Jeff Sessions, opposed it. Many progressives viewed the measure as too little, too patchwork, one whose passage would allow Republicans to claim criminal justice reform without meaningfully addressing mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Jones’s bipartisan approach – as in, courting Republicans, Jared Kushner and Democrats – drew plenty of critics; the bill was initially opposed by liberal groups including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU.It also makes for a fascinating, thorny watch, one which, Jones’s occasional foot-in-mouth moments or glad-handing aside, tangles with evergreen questions of political work: incremental change versus radical reform, resoluteness versus compromise, how and when to build a coalition. The Kramers, who worked with Jones on a 2016 web series called The Messy Truth, in which Jones spoke to people across the political spectrum, were interested in someone “going against the grain and doing something really tough and controversial and being able to tell those stories in a really complex way,” said Brandon. “It felt like no matter what would come out of that, it would be a really important document and story for the American public to have.” The First Step began production during the Women’s March in January 2017 and filmed into 2020, as the bill was worked and nearly killed, reworked and nearly killed and then passed, and beyond. “People talk about bridge-building, but it’s very rare that you get to see bridge-building in action,” said Brandon.The film proceeds along three intertwined tracks: first, the work to pass the bill itself, trying to nail down support from Democrats and attract Republicans with a Trump endorsement, as well as Trump’s Oval Office, on the day of signing. (Jones addresses Trump personally and gratefully.) Second, on Jones’s personal journey to activism, from shy, bookish kid to Yale Law School to fighting to shut down prisons in San Francisco in the 1990s, which convinced him that “you cannot help people en masse with one party or with one race. The only way you’re gonna help is you get everybody together.”Jones, whose style encompasses hard-won insights (“you can’t fight an opponent you don’t understand,” he says of researching the right), whiffs and bromides in one impassioned mix, is often a besieged island of one; “He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit on both sides,” says the bishop TD Jakes in a phone call with a fatigued Jones. We meet his small #cut50 team as well as some of his prominent liberal critics, from his friend Senator Cory Booker to progressive criminal justice advocates. The First Step Act is “not the law that we need right now”, says the Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors in the film. “This bill is going to jeopardize the work that we’ve done for the last couple decades.”And third, the film sits in on meetings facilitated by Jones between two grassroots groups grappling with addiction and incarceration: an organization of Black and Hispanic residents from South Central LA besieged by the crack epidemic and the “war on drugs”, and some predominantly white, Trump-voting citizens of McDowell county, West Virginia, reeling from the opioid crisis and cyclical arrests. Each group visits the other; most find common ground in shared trauma and frustration over a system that punishes rather than rehabilitates, if not in justifying the others’ vote in 2016. In one of the film’s most riveting scenes, Jones tries to convince the LA group members to visit Trump’s White House to tell their stories, because the people who shouldn’t be in power will make the trip, and “the right people won’t go” to make an impact. Some do make an uncomfortable visit, greeted by Kellyanne Conway; others view engagement as a bridge too far, certain that Trump and Conway “will find a way to misuse it”.The tension between engagement and non-engagement, incremental work versus comprehensive reform, course throughout the film with, of course, no definitive resolution. “There are very legitimate and important reasons why to engage, and there’s legitimate and important reasons why some people don’t engage or why they’re fighting for a more comprehensive reform,” said Brandon. “The hope is that you see people who represent your view, but you’re also given a window into a different strategy or opinion or view.”“It’s valuable for the human experience but also the political process to be able to engage with these kind of narratives but also just paradoxes in this space,” said Lance Kramer of the multitude of experiences and approaches professed in the film. “I think it’s a healing space, when you have that opportunity.”If anything, the US political environment has only grown more polarized, and the Republican party more untethered from reality, in the years since The First Step was filmed; it can feel weird to watch the film, and its depiction of bipartisan efforts, in a post-January 6 context. But, as Jones and the film-makers point out, there is still a point to political bridge-building. The First Step Act did get passed, allowing thousands of federal prisoners to go home early. The film ends with immediately eye-watering clips of former inmates reunited with their families, months or years ahead of time. “There’s virtues in still trying to get things done and not just throwing up our hands and giving up,” said Lance. “At the end of the day, it’s people’s lives that depend on it.”
      The First Step is now available digitally in the US More

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      Every indictment will make Trump stronger – and Republicans wilder | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The indictment of Donald J Trump has not driven a wooden stake through his heart. He has risen, omnipresent and ominous again, overwhelming his rivals, their voices joined into his choir, like the singing January 6 prisoners, proclaiming the wickedness of his prosecution. As he enters the criminal courthouse to pose for his mugshot and to give his fingerprints, evangelicals venerate him as the adulterous King David or the martyred Christ.Trump does not have to raise his hand to signal to the House Republicans to echo his cry of “WITCH-HUNT”. He owns the House like he owns a hotel.“I keep him up on everything that we’re doing,” says Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who serves as one of his agents over the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Nine of the 25 Republicans on the House judiciary committee and 11 of the 26 on oversight have endorsed him. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, has pledged her allegiance. Jim Jordan, who refused to honor a subpoena from the January 6 committee, now issues flurries of subpoenas as chair of the Orwellian-named subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, to obstruct investigations of Trump, and not incidentally into Jordan’s and other House Republicans’ roles in the insurrection. But not even a subpoena to the New York district attorney, Alvin Bragg, or any other prosecutor, could command the tide of indictments.Between the motion of Trump’s first indictment and the act of the last Republican primary, more than a year from now, on 4 June 2024, the shadow will fall on the only party with an actual nomination contest. Trump’s pandemonium will only have an electoral valence for the foreseeable future in its precincts. His damage to the constitution, the national security of the United States and the rule of law will be extensive, but his most intense and focused political destruction will be circumscribed within the Republican party.From the report of every new indictment to its reality, Republican radicalization will accelerate. Every concrete count will confirm every conspiracy theory. Every prosecution and trial, staggered over months and into the election year, from New York to Georgia to Washington, will be a shock driving Republicans further to Trump. Every Republican candidate running for every office will be compelled to declare as a matter of faith that Trump is being unjustly persecuted or be themselves branded traitors.Profession of the holy creed of election denial has already been broadened to demand profession of the doctrine of Trump’s impunity. Every Republican attempting to run on law and order will be required to disavow law and order in every case in which Trump is the defendant. Trump’s incitement to violence will not have an exception of immunity for the Republican party. Beginning in the Iowa caucuses, the confrontations may not resemble New England town meetings. If Trump were to lose in the first tumultuous caucuses, can anyone doubt he will claim it was rigged? Was January 6 a preliminary for the Republican primaries of 2024?The death watch of Trump is a cyclical phenomenon. After each of his storms, the pundits, talking heads and party strategists on all sides emerge from their cellars, survey the latest wreckage and check the scientific measurements of the polls to give the “all clear” sign that the cyclone had passed. When Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, thoughtful analysts assured that Trump’s time was gone, he would fade away and his comeback in 2024 was an impossibility, just “not going to happen”. Everyone should “relax”. Then came January 6. When Trump’s endorsed candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, a gaggle of election deniers and conspiracy mongers, were ignominiously rejected, last rites were pronounced. Trump was dead again.“We want to make Trump a non-person,” Rupert Murdoch said after the January 6 insurrection. Trump’s image was virtually banished from his bandbox of Fox News. He would be airbrushed out of the next episode of history.“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” wrote Emily Seidel, chief executive of the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, in a memo.On 5 February, the Koch dark money syndicate held a conference of its billionaire donors and key activists at Palm Springs, California, to lay the groundwork for the dawning of the post-Trump age. There it was decided to swing its enormous resources behind the candidacy of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who they had originally cultivated as one of their Tea Party hothouse congressmen.The wishful thinking that Trump would magically disappear, however, ignored the omens of Liz Cheney’s purging, the victories of his candidates in the midterm Republican primaries over blanched “normies”, and the corrupt bargain that McCarthy was forced to make to secure his speakership. The implacability of Trump’s political base’s attachment was discounted.Murdoch, Koch et al should have grasped the dangerous fluidity of the extremism they stoked, financed and organized for decades, which metastasized into Trump. Their approach to Trump was not dissimilar to that of Vladimir Putin, treating him as their useful idiot. Putin’s purpose was and is to use Trump to destroy Nato and the western alliance, and as an agent of chaos within the US of a magnitude that no KGB agent could have recruited during the cold war.The Koch network contentedly used Trump to pack the courts with Federalist Society stamped judges, deregulate business and thwart policy on climate change. But despite delivering those goods, Trump was ultimately uncontrollable. The problem with Trump was not his wildness and lawlessness. They were willing to tolerate him so long as his administration produced for them. Trump’s foibles were the cost of business. His liability was that he was not their kind of Republican, at heart a laissez-faire free market libertarian. Trump hated international trade and opposed slashing entitlements, particularly social security and Medicare, which they have long tried to hobble and privatize. In 2018, he tweeted his contempt for the “Globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles … I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them rich.” But his worst debit for them was that he lost. With DeSantis, they thought they could finally move on. Without Trump, they could wipe the slate clean, restore the past and return to the glory days when the Tea Party militants besieged town hall meetings to shriek against Obamacare. The undercurrent of the oligarchs’ romance with DeSantis is a strange nostalgia.Trump’s announcement on 18 March that he would be arrested and charged in New York three days later, born of a combination of panic and seizing an opportunity for grift, was not a deliberate strategic masterstroke, though it had that effect. In February, DeSantis led Trump by 45% to 41% in the Yahoo/YouGov poll. In the poll taken just after Trump said he would be arrested, Trump shot into the lead 47% to 39%. After he was indicted, he left DeSantis in the dust, 57% to 31%.Trump had already sent Murdoch’s and Koch’s presumptive candidate reeling. DeSantis has positioned himself as a cultural warrior but Trump smashed into his vulnerable flank. Before he adopted his gay bashing and race- and Jew-baiting persona, DeSantis was a cookie-cutter Tea Party congressman who voted several times to cut social security and Medicare. When Trump slammed him for his votes in early March as “a wheelchair over the cliff kind of guy”, DeSantis renounced his position, saying he would not “mess” with social security. Even before the indictment, Trump had Il Duce of the Sunshine State dancing like Ginger Rogers backwards in the Cuban heels of his cowboy boots. Trump has not relented. The day after he was indicted, his Make America Great Again political action committee broadcast an ad ripping DeSantis: “President Trump is on the side of the American people when it comes to social security and Medicare. Ron DeSantis sides with DC establishment insiders … The more you see about DeSantis, the more you see he doesn’t share our values. He’s not ready to be president.” On the right that Trump has made, national socialism beats laissez-faire.DeSantis reacted to Trump’s indictment by stating that he would not extradite him from Florida to New York, which nobody had asked him to do. His empty gesture as a two-bit secessionist would be in defiance of the constitution’s article IV extradition clause. Between the emotion and the response falls the hollow man. His rhetorical lawlessness in tribute to Trump only enhanced Trump’s pre-eminence over him.If anyone should have known better, it was Murdoch. His media properties now veer from slavishly outraged defense of the accused Trump on Fox News (“Witch-hunt!”) to trashing him in the New York Post (“Bat Hit Crazy!”) to puffing DeSantis in the Times of London, not widely read in Iowa or New Hampshire. The ruthless operator has been outplayed. Murdoch, who takes no prisoners, is Trump’s prisoner.Murdoch profitably buckled in for the Trump ride all the way to January 6. His decision not to jump off for the crash has now landed him in his biggest scandal, thrusting him in the middle of the Trump debacle with a January 6 trial of his own. After the 2020 election, following the lead of Trump and his attorneys, Fox News broadcast that Dominion Voting Systems had changed or deleted votes to help steal the election. The Fox chief executive, Suzanne Scott, wrote in an email shutting down the fact-checking of Trump falsehoods: “This has to stop now … this is bad business … the audience is furious and we are just feeding them material.” On 5 January, the eve of the attack on the Capitol, Murdoch discussed with Scott whether the network should report the truth: “The election is over and Joe Biden won.” He said those words “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen”. Scott told him that “privately they are all there” but “we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers”. On 12 January, Murdoch emailed the Fox board member Paul Ryan that he had heard that the Fox host Sean Hannity “has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers”.Fox was terrified of its own audience, the Trump base it had whipped up day after day, fearful it would defect to a more pro-Trump site, Newsmax or One America News Network. Instead of broadcasting the facts, its executives ordered conspiracy theories and lies be aired to satisfy voracious demand. Murdoch admitted in an email that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were “really crazy stuff”. But the show must go on. Dominion is now suing Fox News for $1.6bn for defamation.Much of the material in the discovery documents reads like dialogue from a bad French farce.“I hate him passionately,” wrote a histrionic Tucker Carlson about Trump. Murdoch told Scott about Giuliani’s and the others’ lies: “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.” On 21 January 2021, Murdoch called Trump “increasingly mad”. Murdoch wondered, after serving as Trump’s chief enabler, “The real danger is what he might do as president.” Quel surprise!Of course, the specific falsehoods Fox recklessly and maliciously broadcast about Dominion were of a piece with those the network has been pumping out for years. That Murdoch is shocked, shocked is worthy of Capt Renault discovering there is gambling in the backroom of Rick’s Café in Casablanca. “Your winnings, sir.”The day after Trump was indicted, Judge Eric Davis ruled that the Dominion case would go to trial.“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it is] CRYSTAL clear that none of the [Fox News] statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” he wrote. That trial will begin in mid-April and will probably last for weeks with major Fox personalities and Murdoch called to the stand. The very bad news is that in Delaware, where the trial will take place, unlike in New York, where the Trump trial will be held, television cameras are allowed in the courtroom. Undoubtedly, Fox will not be airing the humiliation of its stars and executives, but it is certain that CNN, desperate for ratings, and MSNBC will happily fill schedules with a Fox cavalcade.Fox’s propaganda was intimately linked to the January 6 coup, but could not be investigated by the January 6 committee. Murdoch’s desperate desire to separate himself from Trump will be impossible when Fox’s lies for Trump in the subversion of constitutional democracy are on full display. The Dominion trial will provide a necessary complement to the trials of Trump, more than an atmospheric touch of political theater, but bearing on politics moving forward. Murdoch, chained to his service to Trump, will not escape a judgment any more than Trump.The response of Fox’s audience to Fox in the dock will inevitably be to rally around Trump. Murdoch may be finished with Trump but Trump is not finished with him. Murdoch’s trial will contribute to the tightening of support for his object of contempt.“I am your retribution,” Trump promises. He rages against DeSantis and Fox as “Rinos” – Republicans In Name Only, which is to say Republicans. In the courtroom drama ahead, Trump will flail against his host of prosecutors, but his retribution during his battle for the nomination will be levied against the Republican party.
      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 More

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      The indictment of Donald Trump – podcast

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      Donald Trump will make history this week as the first US president to be charged with a criminal offence. Later today he will present himself at a court in Manhattan to hear the charges against him which relate to campaign finance irregularities over the hush money paid to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final days of his successful 2016 run for office. As Hugo Lowell tells Michael Safi, once again with Trump we are in uncharted territory. Trump denies breaking the law and has targeted the prosecutor of the case with claims of a “witch-hunt”. He’s also using the court appearance as a focal point for recent fundraising efforts. The case is unlikely to be resolved before the 2024 election in which Trump is still the leading candidate in the Republican nomination race. But in all likelihood he will be campaigning for the White House while facing felony charges next year. More

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      Prosecuting Donald Trump is right. But is it politically wise? | Simon Jenkins

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      The best reason for arraigning Donald Trump in New York this week is that he is guilty. It is possible that the jury might agree and he might go quietly to jail, thus being unable to return to the White House were he to be elected. That is a good reason, but it does not make it a wise one.American justice is not political but it can be highly politicised. We won’t know until Tuesday afternoon what exactly Trump has been indicted on, but many assume he will face charges of falsely concealing “hush money” paid to the former adult film actor Stormy Daniels. The case was brought by an elected Democratic district attorney, Alvin Bragg. It comes more than six years after the alleged offence occurred, and at the start of Trump’s campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination for president. At the very least, this does not look coincidental.Most observers had reached the view that Trump the politician was over the hill. His rallies were tired and his speeches meandering. New Republican hopefuls for 2024 were on the horizon, notably Florida’s Ron DeSantis and former vice-president Mike Pence, both of whom have publicly criticised Trump for refusing to concede the 2020 election. Continued reports of his many misdemeanours would surely lead Republicans to accept his days were over.Legal analysis of this week’s case against Trump suggests there are serious obstacles in the way of his ending up in prison. A law professor and former prosecutor, Jeffrey Bellin, has pointed out that falsifying accounts can have numerous mitigating factors. Any judge and jury, even in New York, will be aware of the political perils of jailing an ex-president, not least for crimes ostensibly less awful than those for which President Nixon was excused. Were Trump to be on trial for interfering in the Georgia poll or inciting a riotous assault on the Capitol, it might be different. But Republicans find it hard to disagree with Trump’s claim that the New York case is a witch-hunt that amounts to “political persecution and electoral interference”.Meanwhile, Trump’s team have treated the indictment as the best adrenaline boost a populist could ask for. It has given them a platform, an enemy and a cause. They even planned T-shirts with Trump’s mugshot on them. The Republican party’s belief in its hero might have waned, but now Pence and DeSantis have had to declare the trial “outrageous” and “un-American”, while the party’s leaders in Congress lined up to decry the “injustice”. This includes those who outspokenly opposed Trump’s challenge to his 2020 defeat.Public opinion has vindicated this second coming. YouGov reports 57% of Republicans are now for Trump, against just 31% for DeSantis. A Harvard CAPs/Harris poll has Trump four points ahead even of Biden. The roughly third of American voters who had remained loyal to him now agree with DeSantis: the Democratic party has “[weaponised] the legal system to advance a political agenda”. As one southern churchgoer said with a smile when asked if she would still support Trump after the Stormy Daniels revelations: “We are all sinners, aren’t we?”Trump’s political appeal has been built on promoting a boisterous self-confidence in defence of the huddled masses of “middle America” against the so-called liberal elites of New York and Washington. He contrasts “ordinary Americans” with the college-educated, media-driven, woke-obsessed lefties of the east coast and big government. He cries: “I am your warrior. I am your justice.” An ill-defined “they” are said to have stolen the 2020 presidential election and they mean to steal the next one. To Trump his trial is “straight out of the Stalinist Russian horror show”.Democrats must now hope they can damage him on the stage of a high-profile legal theatre as they have not done before the court of public opinion. The strategy must be to see him exploit the trial sufficiently to see off the potentially more electable DeSantis but not enough to win a second contest against Joe Biden. In other words, they are reckoning on 18 months of personalised political viciousness, while the outside world struggles with the twin horrors of global trade wars and an escalating conflict in Ukraine.The one salutary message to liberals of all stripes is that it is dangerous in any democracy to dismiss out of hand large numbers of those with whom they disagree. They will nurse their grievances unheard in provincial haunts far from the capital until, sooner or later, they find someone to sympathise with them, someone to listen.This applies in Europe as in the US. As the psephologist Matthew Goodwin has pointed out, if Britain’s Labour party is to hold on to its lead it must beware of capture by groups such as those Trump derides: the graduates, the government-employed, the capital city-oriented. They made it “even easier for Nigel Farage, the Brexiteers, and then Boris to speak loudly and clearly to their instinctive desire for a more communitarian, nation-first brand of politics”. This brand has not gone away and remains the biggest threat to Keir Starmer. He need not agree with them, but he must listen.A large number of Americans clearly like and trust Donald Trump. They appear to do so more than they trust a New York judge. This is alarming. It has presented not just the US, but the entire western political community with a potential crisis of leadership.
      Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist More

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      Donald Trump vows to escalate attacks against Alvin Bragg – sources

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      Donald Trump has told advisers and associates in recent days that he is prepared to escalate attacks against the Manhattan prosecutor who resurrected the criminal prosecution into his hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 now that a grand jury has indicted him.The former president has vowed to people close to him that he wants to go on the offensive and – in a private moment over the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida that demonstrates his gathering resolve – remarked using more colorful language that it was time to “rough ’em up”.Trump had already signaled that he would go after the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, weeks before the grand jury handed up an indictment against him on Thursday, saying in pugilistic posts on Truth Social that the prosecution was purely political and falsely accusing Bragg of being a psychopath.But the latest charged language reflects Trump’s determination to double down on those attacks as he returns to his time-tested playbook of going after prosecutors, especially when faced with legal trouble that he knows he cannot avoid, people close to him said.The episode at Mar-a-Lago came on the sidelines of strategy meetings Trump had with advisers and associates about how to respond to the indictment from a legal and political standpoint, sessions which were described by two sources close to the former president.The case centers on $130,000 that Trump paid to Daniels through his former lawyer Michael Cohen in the final days of the 2016 campaign. Trump later reimbursed Cohen with $35,000 checks, which were recorded as legal expenses. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal tax evasion and campaign-finance violation charges.With the indictment under seal until Trump’s scheduled arraignment on Tuesday, the exact charges remained unclear on Sunday, though they are expected to include the falsification of business records and additional charges that elevate what would otherwise be a misdemeanor to a felony.Trump was initially caught off-guard by the indictment and spent the following 24 hours absorbing the news that was relayed to him by several of his top advisers. Later, at one point, Trump repeated to himself almost incredulously that prosecutors had actually charged him.The shock had dissipated by the weekend, when Trump’s tone changed and he told his team that he wanted to attack the case and fight the prosecutors. He steadfastly contends he did nothing illegal and won’t accept a plea deal that would force him to admit culpability.The ex-president’s pugnacious tone has only accelerated in recent days with a series of critical posts about New York state supreme court justice Juan Merchan, to whom the case has apparently been allotted after he presided over a separate matter involving the Trump Organization last year.On his Truth Social platform, Trump said Merchan had “railroaded” Allen Weisselberg, the former chief executive of the Trump Organization, who on Sunday was in the middle of serving a 100-day sentence in the Rikers Island jail complex after pleading guilty to tax fraud charges in that case.Referencing Merchan, Trump said: “The Judge ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has also since pivoted his focus to seeing how he can benefit politically from the indictment, the sources said, and he was encouraged that it had boosted his poll numbers over potential rivals for the Republican nomination who found themselves forced to come to his defense against Bragg, a Democrat.With a grim fixation on having a mug shot taken, Trump has asked whether his team could print it on T-shirts that could serve as a rallying motif for his supporters – an idea that his advisers have been particularly enthusiastic about.Trump also spent the weekend reviewing a Yahoo news poll that showed him leading Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whom he considers his closest rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, 57% to 31% in a hypothetical one-on-one contest. The poll also found Trump was attracting the majority of support, at 52%, when pitted against a wider, 10-candidate field.The polling illustrated the perilous dance for DeSantis and Trump’s other challengers, who have so far struggled to find a way to defend the ex-president strongly enough to ensure the support of his core base in the Republican party without undercutting their pitch as being worthy successors to him.Trump’s advisers observed over the weekend that DeSantis had struggled in that test when his only response to the indictment was to snap back in line behind the former president, calling the case “the weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda”. More

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      Supreme court justices felt tricked by Trump at Kavanaugh swearing-in – book

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      Sitting justices of the US supreme court felt “tricked” and used by Donald Trump when the then president assured them a White House celebration of the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh would not be overtly political, then used the event to harangue those who questioned Kavanaugh’s fitness to sit on the court.“Most of the justices sat stone faced” as Trump spoke at the ceremonial swearing-in, the CNN correspondent Joan Biskupic writes in a new book, Nine Black Robes: Inside the Supreme Court’s Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences.“Some justices told me later that they were sorry they had gone.”Biskupic, senior supreme court analyst for CNN, adds: “To varying degrees, the justices felt tricked, made to participate in a political exercise at a time when they were trying to prove themselves impartial guardians of justice, rather than tools of Republican interests.”Nine Black Robes will be published in the US on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Published excerpts have covered key issues on the court including the controversial treatment of staff for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal justice who died in September 2020 and was swiftly replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, an arch-conservative; rulings on gay rights; and the 2022 Dobbs vs Jackson decision that removed the federal right to abortion.The appointment of Coney Barrett – jammed through before the election by the same Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, who previously held open a seat for a year and through an election in order to fill it with a conservative – tilted the court 6-3 to the right.Joe Biden has made the historic appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the court, but he has not altered that 6-3 balance.Kavanaugh was Trump’s second appointment, replacing the retiring Anthony Kennedy, a conservative for a conservative.Accused of drunken behaviour and sexual assault while a high school student, Kavanaugh, a former George W Bush administration aide, was narrowly confirmed in an atmosphere of deeply partisan rancour.On 8 October 2018, Trump staged his celebration.Saying “what happened to the Kavanaugh family violates every notion of fairness, decency and due process”, Trump falsely claimed Kavanaugh had been “proven innocent” of the claims against him.As Biskupic writes: “There had been no trial, not even much of an investigation of [Professor Christine Blasey] Ford’s accusations. But as with so many of Trump’s assertions, the truth did not matter to him or … his supporters.”Biskupic notes that among the “stone faced” justices at the White House, Clarence Thomas, the senior conservative, was “conspicuously enthusiastic, alone applaud[ing] heartily after Kavanaugh spoke”.She adds: “A Department of Justice spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, later described Thomas as ‘the life of the party’ at the event.”Thomas is the subject of controversy centering on the activities of his wife, the far-right activist Ginni Thomas.Ginni Thomas has been shown to have lobbied state lawmakers as part of Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat and to have attended an event in Washington on January 6, prior to the deadly attack on Congress by Trump supporters.In January 2022, Clarence Thomas was the only supreme court justice to say Trump should not have to give records to the House January 6 committee. Such records turned out to include texts between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff.In congressional testimony released last December, Ginni Thomas said she was “certain [she] never spoke with” her husband “about any of the challenges to the 2020 election”.She also claimed Clarence Thomas was “uninterested in politics”. More