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      US investigators were allowed access to Trump allies’ emails

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      US investigators were allowed access to Trump allies’ emailsJustice department was granted access to emails from former employees and loyalists Federal investigators have been scrutinizing emails between lawyers for Donald Trump and a loyalist Republican congressman for months, it emerged on Friday, casting new light on the direction of the criminal inquiry into the former president’s alleged insurrection efforts.Exclusive: January 6 panel considering Trump referral to justice department for obstruction of CongressRead moreBeryl Howell, the US district court chief judge, granted a request from the justice department to unseal an order she made in June.That order allowed the inquiry access to 37 emails exchanged between Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski (both justice department officials for Trump), the conservative attorney John Eastman, and Pennsylvania congressman Scott Perry, a Trump loyalist who chairs the rightwing House freedom caucus.Perry has previously been implicated in Trump’s efforts to overturn his election defeat to Joe Biden. Earlier this week, some of his texts sent to Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff, came to light, showing increasingly desperate efforts to try to keep Trump in power around the time of the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack.Those efforts included seizing voting machines and suggesting that the US government should investigate an outlandish conspiracy theory in which Italian satellites were used to zap the machines from space and flip votes for Trump to Biden.Eastman and his allies had claimed the emails were protected by presidential privilege but Washington DC-based judge Howell’s order rejected that order.The development comes as the bipartisan panel investigating the Capitol attack and Trump’s subversion prepares to release its final report on Monday as well as make civil and criminal referrals.Trump, Eastman and Clark, who sought to become acting attorney general in the waning days of the Trump presidency, are all thought to be among those who could be referred for charges.Politico reports that Howell unsealed a second opinion, issued in September, in which she determined that 331 documents from Clark were also not protected by attorney-client privilege.The contents of the emails and documents are not known, but the revelation they were in the hands of the criminal inquiry provides a clue to investigators’ thinking over Trump’s plotting.Federal agents seized Eastman’s phone in June, the same time as Howell made her order. Perry’s phone was seized in August. Both lost legal challenges to reclaim them, Politico says.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Exclusive: January 6 panel considering Trump referral to justice department for obstruction of Congress

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      Exclusive: January 6 panel considering Trump referral to justice department for obstruction of CongressSubcommittee recommended Trump could also be referred for conspiracy to defraud the United States, sources say The House January 6 select committee is considering a criminal referral to the justice department against Donald Trump for obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States on the recommendation of a special subcommittee, according to sources familiar with the matter.The recommendations on the former president – made by the subcommittee examining referrals – were based on renewed examinations of the evidence that indicated Trump’s attempts to impede the certification of the 2020 election results amounted to potential crimes.The select committee could pursue additional criminal referrals for Trump and others, given the subcommittee raised the obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud statutes among a range of options, including insurrection, and discussions about referrals continued on Thursday, said the sources.The referrals could also largely be symbolic since Congress has no ability to compel prosecutions by the justice department, which has increasingly ramped up its own investigations into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and subpoenaed top aides to appear before federal grand juries.The recommendations presage a moment of high political drama next Monday, when the full panel will vote publicly to adopt its final report and formally decide on making referrals, and increase pressure on the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to seek charges over January 6.Trump could be referred for obstruction of an official proceeding, the subcommittee is said to have concluded, because he attempted to impede the certification and did so with a “consciousness of wrongdoing” – as the panel has previously interpreted the intent threshold.The former president was seen to have met the elements of the offense since he relentlessly pressured Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral college votes for Joe Biden, despite knowing he had lost the election and had been told the plan was illegal.Trump could also be referred for conspiracy to defraud the United States, the subcommittee suggested, arguing the former president violated the statute that prohibits entering into an agreement to obstruct a lawful function of government by dishonest means.The conspiracy charge was seen to be broadly applicable because Trump’s agreement with key lawyers – and potentially even the rioters – did not need to be overt, while the plan to have Pence reject Biden slates of electors with Trump slates that did not exist was deceitful.The discussions about referring Trump for obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud appeared to build upon the major win for the panel in May, when a federal judge found that Trump and the lawyer John Eastman likely engaged in felonies in trying to subvert the 2020 election.In the ruling, US district court judge David Carter in California ruled that Trump and Eastman had concocted a “coup in search of a legal theory” and ordered Eastman to turn over his most sensitive emails to the investigation, citing the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege.The emails later showed that Eastman had admitted that he knew that having Pence interrupt the January 6 certification was illegal – and yet urged Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob that the then-vice president should move ahead with the plot anyway.The panel may not adopt all of the options presented by the subcommittee – it also suggested civil referrals to the House ethics committee for GOP congressmen and the disbarment of some Trump lawyers, among a number of options, though a witness tampering referral for Trump is no longer under consideration.But members on the select committee have resolved to suggest criminal and civil charges to some degree, and any referral letters would be accompanied by supporting evidence not dissimilar to prosecution memorandums that are routinely drawn up by the justice department, one of the sources said.A spokesman for the select committee declined to comment.Regardless of how the panel proceeds against Trump, the intention to make criminal referrals against the former president has been practically an open secret for months as its members have used the issue of potential criminality to reinforce the seriousness of Trump’s conduct.The recommendations from the subcommittee – led by congressman Jamie Raskin and comprised of vice-chair Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, all members with a legal background – follow internal discussions for nearly a year that Trump committed crimes in seeking to nullify his defeat.Even before the select committee filed its civil suit to Carter, Cheney read aloud parts of the the obstruction statute at a public business meeting last December. And then throughout public hearings in the summer, the panel detailed their findings like prosecutors, treating the public like a jury at trial.If the members decide to move forward with criminal referrals against Trump in particular – essentially a letter informing the justice department they uncovered evidence of crimes – they would be creating a roadmap for a prosecution put together by the select committee’s top lawyers.The select committee’s investigation has been principally driven by color-coded teams of investigative lawyers, many of whom have previously worked as federal prosecutors, conducting more than 1,000 witness interviews and reviewing documents and communications from Trump’s confidantes.Still, the justice department has no obligation to take up any criminal referrals and, at this stage, could have a better perspective about the strength of criminal charges as it escalates its own January 6 inquiries with an investigative arsenal far more potent than possessed by Congress.In recent months, an increasing number of top Trump advisors and election officials in states where Trump tried to nullify his defeat have been subpoenaed to testify before an increasing number of federal grand juries in Washington hearing evidence about events connected to the Capitol attack.The recent subpoenas to election officials have demanded any and all communications involving Trump and the Trump campaign from June 2020 to January 2021, as part of the investigations into Trump’s so-called fake electors scheme, according to two subpoenas reviewed by the Guardian.TopicsDonald TrumpJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Losing the plot’: Trump mocked after announcing superhero card collection

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      ‘Losing the plot’: Trump mocked after announcing superhero card collectionCards cost ‘only $99 each’ and ‘would make a great Christmas gift’, says former president in ‘major announcement’ video Donald Trump walked into a comic-book universe of internet mockery on Thursday, when in a carefully trailed announcement he introduced his “official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card” collection with a picture of himself in superhero costume, cape and “Trump Champion” belt. Trump ‘is in trouble’, says insider after DeSantis surges in 2024 pollsRead more“Just when you thought this grifter couldn’t humiliate himself any more than he already has,” wrote John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower turned author, “there’s this. THIS is what the big announcement was.”On Wednesday, Trump used his Truth Social media platform – set up after he was thrown off Twitter for inciting the Capitol attack – to trail a “major announcement”.Just when you thought this grifter couldn’t humiliate himself any more than he already has, there’s this. THIS is what the big announcement was. pic.twitter.com/npsjPNYpBA— John Kiriakou (@JohnKiriakou) December 15, 2022
      In what with hindsight appeared a clue that the forthcoming announcement might not be in the traditionally dignified vein of statements from former presidents, that video featured Trump saying “America needs a superhero” over an animation of himself standing outside Trump Tower, ripping open his suit to reveal a superhero costume and shooting lasers from his eyes.Some social media users thought Trump might announce a bid to be speaker of the US House, an outlandish if theoretically possible gambit pushed by some rightwing Republicans.Others wondered if Trump was attempting to ape the “Dark Brandon” internet meme, in which Joe Biden – who beat Trump resoundingly at the ballot box in 2020 – is shown as a super-competent comic book figure with laser vision.Donald Trump making a “major announcement” tomorrow. Unless it’s “I’m guilty, and turning myself in”, no one cares. pic.twitter.com/dJvyh1X4xV— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) December 14, 2022
      But when the announcement came on Thursday, Trump said he was merely offering supporters “limited edition cards featur[ing] amazing ART of my Life & Career”, which he promised would prove “very much like a baseball card but hopefully much more exciting”.“GET YOUR CARDS NOW!” the 76-year-old former president commanded, above the picture of himself standing in a ring for boxing or wrestling, muscles rippling under a red leotard and wearing high blue boots emblazoned with “45” (his presidential number) and an American flag as a cape.The cards, the declared candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024 said, cost “Only $99 each” and “would make a great Christmas gift”.“Don’t Wait,” Trump added. “They will be gone, I believe, very quickly!”Trump’s need for funds has increased recently, amid unprecedented legal jeopardy over his business and political affairs.He has also taken a battering in polls regarding the GOP nomination in 2024, slipping behind the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, in surveys carried out by USA Today, CNN and the Wall Street Journal.On Thursday, amid widespread mockery, Santiago Mayer, executive director of Voters Tomorrow, wrote: “Donald Trump’s major announcement is that he’s selling his own Pokémon cards.”Ginger Gibson, senior Washington editor for NBC Digital, wrote: “Donald Trump’s ‘major announcement’ appears to be that he still thinks people will give him $99 when he asks.”Sarah Rumpf, a contributing editor to Mediate, a media watchdog, said: “This is somehow hilariously dumber than even I had expected.”Philip Bump, a Washington Post columnist, said Trump was “losing the plot”.Rick Wilson, of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “Major Trump embarrassment, more like, amirite?”TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by 23 points in Republican poll

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      Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by 23 points in Republican pollFlorida governor takes enormous lead over embattled ex-president for 2024 race as Mike Pence nears a run of his own In a new poll regarding potential Republican nominees for president in 2024, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, led Donald Trump by a whopping 23 points.Republican and Republican-leaning voters dealt the significant blow to the former president’s ego in a survey carried out by USA Today and Suffolk University and released on Tuesday.There was good news for Trump in another poll covering the same time period, by Morning Consult, which gave him an 18-point lead over DeSantis. Furthermore, the polling website FiveThirtyEight still shows Trump in the lead in most surveys.Nonetheless, David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, told USA Today: “Republicans and conservative independents increasingly want Trumpism without Trump.”That much has been clear in the rise of DeSantis, a former US military lawyer and hard-right congressman who has pursued distinctly Trumpist hardline, theatrically cruel policies as governor of Florida, in particular on immigration and education.Last month, DeSantis marked a crushing re-election victory with a confidant speech, declaring his state “where woke goes to die” to chants of “two more years”.Trump declared his third consecutive run for the Republican nomination shortly after the midterm elections.But he has shown precious little momentum, particularly after elections in which most of his endorsed candidates for key state posts and in Congress went down to defeat, contributing to a disappointing Republican performance.Trump is also in extensive legal jeopardy, over his attempted election subversion, the retention of White House records and his business affairs.USA Today said its poll showed that among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, enthusiasm for another Trump run is receding.“In July, 60% of Republicans wanted Trump to run again. In October, that number had dipped to 56%. Now it has fallen to 47%, an almost-even split with the 45% who don’t want him to run for a third time.”The poll put Joe Biden, the president, up 47%-40% in a notional rematch with Trump.Biden is 80, Trump 76. Biden has said he will decide on whether to run again over the Christmas holidays.The new poll put DeSantis, 44, ahead of Biden in a notional match-up, 47%-43%.Paleologos sounded a familiar note of caution, saying a big primary field could divide Republican opposition to Trump and hand him the nomination again.“Add in a number of other Republican presidential candidates who would divide the anti-Trump vote and you have a recipe for a repeat of the 2016 Republican caucuses and primaries, when Trump outlasted the rest of the divided field.”Another likely candidate, the former vice-president Mike Pence, is edging closer to announcing a run.Speaking in New Hampshire, an early voting state, on Tuesday, the former vice-president told Fox News the reception accorded his recent memoir “has been a great source of encouragement as we think about the way forward and what our calling might be in the future”.Pence said he and his wife, Karen, would make a decision on whether to mount a run next year, after “prayerful consideration” over the holiday period.“We’ll continue to travel, we’ll continue to listen,” he said.TopicsUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansRon DeSantisDonald TrumpMike PencenewsReuse this content More

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      ‘That’s Hitler, Bannon thought’: 2022 in books about Trump and US politics

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      ‘That’s Hitler, Bannon thought’: 2022 in books about Trump and US politics The former president continues to dominate political bestseller lists, from staffers’ tell-alls to his own compulsion to tell all to Maggie Haberman and Bob WoodwardDonald Trump has been out of office almost two years, but he is still lodged in America’s consciousness. In mid-November, he declared his 2024 re-election bid. Days later, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, appointed Jack Smith as special counsel.DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreTrump has since demanded that the US constitution be terminated, and dined with Ye, the recording artist and antisemite formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. This week, on a bleak Tuesday afternoon in New York, a jury found the Trump Organization guilty on all counts in a tax fraud trial.The Trump show is never dull. As expected, in 2022 the 45th president left his mark on what Americans read about politics.In February, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times delivered Insurgency, capturing how the party of Lincoln and Reagan morphed into the fiefdom of Trump. Peters caught Steve Bannon rating his former boss among the worst presidents, and likening Trump’s history-making 2015 escalator ride to a scene from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film.“That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.” By extension, that makes Mar-a-Lago Trump’s Eagle’s Nest.As for Bannon, having burned through a Trump pardon, he awaits sentencing for contempt of Congress and will stand trial next year in Manhattan for conspiracy and fraud.In March came One Damn Thing After Another, another installment of Trump alumni performance art, this time by Bill Barr, the ex-attorney general.Barr took aim at Joe Biden for his stance on Russia, saying “demonizing [Vladimir] Putin is not a foreign policy”, nor “the way grown-ups should think”. Looks like the author didn’t have an invasion of Ukraine on his bingo card. In case anyone cares, Barr still loathes progressives, as his book makes abundantly clear. But he did spill his guts to the January 6 committee.May brought the first political blockbuster of the year, This Will Not Pass, in which Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns delivered 473 pages of essential reading. Kevin McCarthy denied having talked smack about Trump and the January 6 insurrection, so Martin appeared on MSNBC with tapes. The House Republican leader lied.Burns and Martin’s subtitle was “Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future”. They closed with an anxious meditation on the state of US democracy, quoting Malcolm Turnbull, a former prime minister of Australia: “You know that great line that you hear all the time, ‘This is not us. This is not America.’ You know what? It is, actually.”Later in May came A Sacred Oath by Mark Esper, Trump’s last defense secretary, and Here’s the Deal by the former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, Trump administration memoirs – and personas – as different as day and night.Esper pulled no punches, depicting Trump as unfit for office and a threat to democracy, a prisoner of wrath, impulse and appetite. His memoir was surgically precise in its score-settling, not just fuel for the pyre of Trump alumni revenge porn.Here’s the Deal was just that. Disdain unvarnished, Conway strafed Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Unsurprisingly, she had few kind words for Biden, blaming him for the Ukraine invasion and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout. Trump junked the Iran deal and was Putin’s toady. Then again, Conway is the queen of “alternative facts”.In August came Breaking History, Kushner’s own attempt to spin his triumphs while playing the victim. His book was predictably self-serving and selective, even trying to spin as something understandable his ex-con dad luring his own brother-in-law into a filmed liaison with a prostitute. The Kushners and the Trumps are not your typical families.Breaking History also came with conflicting creation stories. The New York Times reported that Kushner took an online MasterClass from the thriller writer James Patterson, then “batted out” 40,000 words of his own. By contrast, the Guardian learned that Kushner received assistance from Ken Kurson, a former editor of the New York Observer, and two other Trump White House alumni. As luck had it, Trump granted Kurson a pardon for cyberstalking, though Kurson later pleaded guilty after being charged with spying on his wife.‘The first thing he told us was a lie’Labor Day signaled a pre-midterm publication rush. With The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offered a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracy. In electing Trump, the New York Times and New Yorker, husband-and-wife pair wrote, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t were the authors’ open questions.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreThe results of the midterms – Republicans squeaking the House, Democrats holding the Senate, election deniers defeated in key states – offered a glimmer of hope. Truth, however, remains a scarce commodity for Trump.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser wrote, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Specifically, Trump claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations.Baker and Glasser also depicted Hitler as a Trump role model. To John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars, Trump complained: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in World War II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as an owner’s manual.Next, a month before the midterms, Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man made its debut. A political epic, the book traced Trump’s journey from the streets of Queens to the Upper East Side, from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.Haberman gave Trump and those close to him plenty of voice – and rope. She caught Kushner gleefully asking a White House visitor: “Did you see I cut Bannon’s balls off?” To quote Peter Navarro, another Trump tell-all author, like Bannon now under indictment: “Nepotism and excrement roll downhill.”Confidence Man review: Maggie Haberman takes down TrumpRead moreHaberman interviewed Trump three times. He confessed that he is drawn to her like a moth to a flame. “I love being with her,” he said. “She’s like my psychiatrist.” But she saw through him, writing: “The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists.”Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, tried his hand with So Help Me God, a well-written and well-paced memoir that will, however, do little to shake the impression that he is the Rodney Dangerfield of vice-presidents: he gets no respect.Pence delivered a surprising indictment, cataloging Trump’s faults, errors and sins from Charlottesville to Russia and Ukraine. But Pence’s is a precarious balancing act. He upbraided Trump for his failure to condemn “the racists and antisemites in Charlottesville by name”, but also rejected the contention Trump was a bigot. As for Putin, “there was no reason for Trump not to call out Russia’s bad behaviour”, Pence wrote, while calling Trump’s infamous, impeachment-triggering phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskiy “less than perfect”. In the end, So Help Me God was a strained attempt to retain political viability.‘As long as you make the right friends’Not all the notable books of 2022 were about Trump himself. Some examined the people and movements that lie adjacent. We Are Proud Boys by Andy Campbell looked at the violence-addicted street fighters who have become best friends with many of Trump’s past and present supporters, from Ann Coulter to Roger Stone.As Campbell put it, the Proud Boys have “proven that you can make it as a fascist gang of hooligans in this country, as long as you make the right friends”.Andrew Kirtzman’s Giuliani provided a vivid reminder that Trump’s gravitational pull induces destruction. The author covered Rudy Giuliani when he was New York mayor. Rudy wasn’t always a buffoon. The book is masterly and engrossing.Broken News, by Chris Stirewalt, doubled as a critique of the media and a rebuke of Fox News, his former employer, and Trump. The Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough fared poorly too. Substantively, Stirewalt contended that much of the news business is about the pursuit of ratings. These days, Fox is battling defamation lawsuits arising from repeatedly airing Trump’s “big lie”.Robert Draper’s Weapons of Mass Delusion dissected the Trumpian nightmare, focusing on the consequences of the world the internet created. Republicans like the far-right Arizona congressman Paul Gosar and his mentee, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are much more likely to be rewarded than penalized for “outrageous, fact-free behavior”.Gabriel Debenedetti is the national correspondent for New York magazine. His first book, The Long Alliance, brought depth and context to the near-two-decade relationship between the 44th and 46th presidents, emphasizing that the pair’s time in power together was no buddy movie. Barack Obama was the star. Joe Biden played a supporting role – until he too seized the brass ring.‘It’s on the tape’: Bob Woodward on Donald Trump’s ‘criminal behavior’Read moreThe most memorable contribution to this year’s American political literature, however, was not a printed book. The Trump Tapes, subtitled “Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump” is an audio collection that offers a passport to the heart of darkness.In June 2020, Trump confided: “I get people, they come up with ideas. But the ideas are mine, Bob. Want to know something? Everything is mine.” Wow.Woodward’s tapes convincingly demonstrated that Trump knew in early 2020 that Covid posed a mortal danger to the US, but balked at telling the whole truth.Trump holds the press in contempt but yearns for its approval. He flattered Woodward as “a great historian”. Maggie Haberman knows the feeling.TopicsBooksUS politicsDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS elections 2020US elections 2024Joe BidenfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump was fresh and new during his 2016 campaign. Has his fame fizzled?

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      Trump was fresh and new during his 2016 campaign. Has his fame fizzled?The failed ‘red wave’ during the midterm elections marked the beginning of a downward spiral of losses and lost support Instead of taking off like a rocket over the past three weeks, Donald Trump’s bid to win back the White House appears, so far at least, to be blowing up on the launchpad.The swagger of 2016 has given way to somnolence in 2022. Opinion polls are grim. Legal setbacks are piling up. A run of dismal results in the midterm elections, culminating in another Republican loss in Georgia this week, have punctured his aura of invincibility within the party.And Trump has performed astonishing acts of self-sabotage, from dining with antisemites to calling for the constitution to be shredded. He has eschewed a widely-anticipated spree of public rallies, instead remaining largely out of the public gaze.Trump’s act is ‘old and tired’, says his own former national security adviserRead moreFor any conventional candidate, such a list would be career-ending. For Trump, who has long defied political gravity, the fallout remains uncertain. But even the most ardent propagandist would be hard pushed to describe it as a flying start.“It couldn’t be going any worse,” said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington. “And it’s not because Donald Trump is making mistakes. It’s because Donald Trump is being Donald Trump.“He was something new and fresh and interesting back in 2016. He has presided over three disastrous election cycles for Republicans in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and he’s the same old Donald Trump, caring only about himself, wrapped up in his own grievances and his own whining. It’s just not playing anymore for the American people.”It was not meant to be like this. When Trump first set the date for his campaign launch at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for 15 November, it was based on the premise that Republicans would enjoy a “red wave” in the midterm elections, putting wind in his sails for the coming months.Instead the midterms were a nightmare as most of his handpicked candidates, including election deniers, were wiped out in swing states. This week’s defeat of former American football star Herschel Walker by incumbent Raphael Warnock in a Senate runoff in Georgia seemed to confirm that Trump has become ballot box poison, prompting a headline on the once loyal Fox News website: “Herschel Walker just wrote Donald Trump’s political obituary”.Gallingly, one of the biggest winners in the midterms was Ron DeSantis, re-elected as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points, cementing his status as the biggest threat to Trump. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted from 1 to 5 December found DeSantis leading the former president by five percentage points in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination.So it was that Trump’s Mar-a-Lago speech was widely derided as a damp squib, lacking his usual bombast and brio and even his daughter, Ivanka, has decided to sit this one out. Since then, the campaign has been running on autopilot and little has been seen of the former president hunkered down in Florida, venturing out only to play golf.Trump’s rambunctious campaign rallies, expected to give early momentum to his third consecutive run for president, have mysteriously failed to materialise. In June 2015, by contrast, he declared his candidacy after riding down an escalator in New York and held his first rally in Iowa just 10 hours later, moving on to New Hampshire a day later.Yet Trump is still making plenty of news from Mar-a-Lago. He dined with two antisemites: Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes (Ye subsequently expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler). Still harping on the 2020 election, which he falsely claims was stolen, Trump mused about the “termination” of the constitution that he once swore to preserve, protect and defend. He also posed for photos with a reporter supporter of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories.Such antics have shaken even the faithful. Larry Kudlow, who was Trump’s economic adviser in the White House, shared his concerns with Trump’s former counselor Kellyanne Conway during his Fox Business show. “I don’t understand what our former boss is doing,” Kudlow said. “I love the guy, but I do not understand Kanye West, hanging out with white nationalists, hanging out with antisemitic people, talking about ending the constitution or postponing the constitution.”He added: “I don’t get it, I don’t understand why he’s saying it, and if he says it why hasn’t he apologised for it or corrected the record or something, because he’s losing support left and right. I hear it everywhere.”Then there are the legal headaches, another contrast from the carefree days of 2016. Trump’s business was this week found guilty on all 17 counts in a tax fraud case in New York. The Trump Organization – which operates hotels, golf courses and other global assets – faces up to $1.6m in fines, denting his carefully constructed image as a businessman with the golden touch.Last month attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith special counsel for two justice department investigations. One is focusing on Trump for retaining government records, including some marked as classified, after leaving office. On 1 December Trump suffered yet another defeat when an appeals court reversed a judge’s appointment of an independent arbiter to vet documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago, clearing the way for all the records to be used in a criminal investigation of the former president.The other concerns of the far reaching effort to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election; Smith this week issued grand jury subpoenas to local election officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. Separately, a prosecutor in Georgia is pursuing Trump’s alleged efforts to influence that state’s 2020 election results. And the House of Representatives panel investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is expected to make criminal referrals to the justice department.Lichtman added: “Trump’s companies have been operating as a criminal enterprise. That’s now established in court: 17 counts. And of course he still could be indicted on a host of different charges: mishandling classified documents, meddling in the Georgia election, inciting a riot, interfering with Congress, tax fraud. There are any number of potential violations.”Georgia’s runoff was a resounding rebuke of Trumpism. Will Republicans hear it? | Lloyd GreenRead moreMany regard Trump’s early campaign launch as blatant attempt to head off such a prospect. He characterises the investigations as politically motivated “witch hunts” reminiscent of the Russian collusion “hoax”. His gamble is that the justice department will be reluctant to prosecute an active candidate lest it be accused of interfering in an election.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “It seems like it’s not really a campaign but more of an effort to use the illusion of a campaign to try and manage his legal situation. The Trump legal strategy is directly tied to the Trump 2024 strategy. They’re one and the same.”Garland’s actions so far suggest that the bid for legal immunity has failed. Trump’s effort to clear the Republican field, intimidating and chasing away potential challengers in 2024, has been equally futile, serving only to expose his vulnerabilities.DeSantis, former vice-president Mike Pence, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin and Senator Tim Scott have left a trail of clues about their intentions. Big money donors and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire have indicated that they are ready for an alternative.And yet, if these candidates divide the anti-Trump vote, his shrinking but hardening Maga base may help him prevail in a Republican primary just as in 2016. Loyalty to the former president runs deep in county and state parties. Even after his latest transgressions, the number of senior Republicans speaking out against Trump has been striking but so too has the number mincing their words or staying silent.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Show me the evidence where his grip on the party is breaking. The only thing we’ve heard from the party leadership is there’s no place for antisemitism in the Republican party. We haven’t heard anybody call for Donald Trump to be removed as a potential nominee of the party.“Ron DeSantis has said nothing about the Mar-a-Lago dinner. He is absolutely silent, so the idea that he’s going to be a leader is a joke because that was the moment to lead and he quivered in the corner because he was afraid of getting smacked by Donald Trump.”He added: “Trump still is the thing that animates and controls outcomes inside the Republican party for as long as the political leadership allows the tail to wag the dog. If you’re afraid of your own shadow, you’re not going to get out much.”There is no doubt that Trump’s political obituary has been prepared a thousand times, only to be torn up when the Republican party capitulates once more. Is there something different in the air this time? Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who worked on Al Gore and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, said: “The problem is we’ve said it so many times and it hasn’t been true. On the other hand, some time it will be true.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024RepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      We Are Not One review: assured history of Israel’s place in US politics

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      We Are Not One review: assured history of Israel’s place in US politicsTo Eric Alterman, ‘Israel is a red state’ while ‘US Jewry is blue’. Like so much else, Donald Trump has disrupted that dynamic The civil war divided America’s Christians along axes of geography and theology. These days, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, soon to be prime minister again, have wrought a similar sorting. In the words of Eric Alterman, “Israel is a red state. US Jewry is blue.”DeSantis and Pence lead Republican wave – of presidential campaign booksRead moreAlterman is a distinguished professor of English and journalism at the City University of New York. We Are Not One represents four decades of effort, patience and research. Sixty pages of endnotes undergird his arguments, some dating to his student days.Alterman posits that closeness between the US and Israel has oscillated over time and that younger American Jews, particularly those outside Orthodox Judaism, are now distancing themselves from the Zionist experiment. He relies, in part, on polling by Pew Research.Practically speaking, the divide may be more nuanced, with the latest shifts also reflecting a response to a rise in crime – and messaging about it. In the midterms, the Republican Lee Zeldin won 46% of Jewish voters in New York as he came close to beating the governor, Kathy Hochul. Donald Trump never surpassed 30% nationally. In 2020, he took 37% of New York’s Jewish vote.In We Are Not One, Alterman observes how unsafe streets and racial tensions helped spawn neoconservatism. It is “impossible” to separate the movement’s “origins from the revulsions caused by constant news reports of inner-city riots … and broader societal dislocations”. Between 1968 and 1972, Richard Nixon’s share of the Jewish vote doubled from 17% to 35%.One Saturday night in 1968, a crowd thronged the streets of Borough Park in Brooklyn, a predominately Jewish enclave, to cheer the vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee. Over the next four years, “law and order” found purchase. To top it off, George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, made Israel supporters nervous.The South Dakota senator’s message, “Come home America”, left them wondering if the US would be in Israel’s corner if war came again. Vietnam was a proxy for foreign policy anxieties. As a coda, Alterman recollects how Nixon nonetheless yearned to turn Jews into political foils and whipping boys. That 2016 Trump ad with a six-pointed star over a field of dollar bills? It had deep roots.Why pro-Israel lobby group Aipac is backing election deniers and extremist RepublicansRead moreAlterman also recounts how Daniel Moynihan, a Democrat, used his position as Gerald Ford’s UN ambassador to reach the Senate in 1976. With support from neoconservatives, hawkish Jews and the New York Times, he beat Bella Abzug, a leftwing lion, in the primary. Then he beat James Buckley, the Republican incumbent.Moynihan lauded Israel’s raid at Entebbe. In Alterman’s description, he appealed to “American Jews’ feelings of vulnerability and their pride and relief at Israel’s military prowess in kicking the asses” of Palestinian and German terrorists and “humiliating” Idi Amin, Uganda’s “evil dictator”.Time passes. Things remain the same. In New York, transit crime is up more than 30%. Violence against Jews is a staple, according to the NYPD.Meanwhile, on college campuses, in Alterman’s words, Israel is a “mini-America”, a useful target for faculty and students to vent against “rapaciousness on the part of the US and other western nations vis-a-vis the downtrodden of the world”.The author quotes Benzion Netanyahu, the Israeli leader’s late father: “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts.” Modern insecurities spring from ancient calamities.Kanye West spews bile. Trump entertains him with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier. Republicans quietly squirm. Trump’s Jewish supporters grapple with cognitive dissonance and emotional vertigo. Take Mort Klein, of the hard-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), who makes several appearances in We Are Not One.Testifying before Congress, Klein accused the press of taking Trump’s comments on Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis marched in 2017, “completely out of context”. In 2018, after 11 worshippers were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Klein rode to the rescue again. At the ZOA dinner, he said it was “political blasphemy” to blame Trump.Last month, ZOA gave Trump its highest honor. According to Klein, the ex-president was the “best friend Israel ever had in the White House”. Then Trump met West, now known as Ye, and Fuentes, twisting Klein into a human pretzel.“Trump is not an antisemite,” he announced. “He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”Trump reportedly kept Hitler’s speeches by his bed. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.At a recent confab of Agudath Israel of America, an ultra-Orthodox group, Rabbi Dovid Zwiebel, its executive vice-president, condemned Trump: “Yesterday’s friend can be tomorrow’s greatest enemy.” Two years earlier, though, its members clearly backed Trump over Joe Biden. Borough Park was as deep red as Lafayette, Louisiana.It all carries a whiff of deja vu. Alterman recounts how neoconservatives admonished America’s Jews against complaining of Israel’s alliance with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: “The Christian Zionists’ devotion to ‘Greater Israel’ earned them a pass from the neocons for their occasional outbursts of antisemitism.”Trump had dinner with two avowed antisemites. Let’s call this what it is | Francine ProseRead moreTrump’s Mar-a-Lago dinner created a similar bind. David Friedman, his bankruptcy lawyer and ambassador to Israel, tweeted: “To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this … I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong.”Trump was not amused. On Friday, he lashed out at “Jewish Leaders”. Friedman must learn patience. ZOA may wish to rescind its award.Jason Greenblatt, a Trump Organization lawyer who moved to the White House, echoed Friedman for CNN. Days later, he spoke at a synagogue in Scarsdale, north of New York City. Greenblatt repeated the need for Trump to correct the record and urged those in attendance to politely speak up.In the next breath, he lauded his one-time boss’s achievements and character. It sure is tough to quit Trump.
      We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel is published in the US by Hachette Book Group
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      Pelosi in the House: documentary captures speaker’s January 6 struggle

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      Pelosi in the House: documentary captures speaker’s January 6 struggle Film by her daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, captures how Nancy Pelosi fought to preserve democracy in the dramatic hours of the Capitol attackThe struggle of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, to preserve American democracy in the dramatic hours of the January 6 attack are captured in a new documentary film shot by her daughter.Pelosi is seen watching on TV Donald Trump’s incendiary speech to his supporters, getting rushed out of the US Capitol building and making calls to Vice-President Mike Pence and other officials from the Fort McNair military base, where congressional leaders took refuge from the mob.Despite the chaos and confusion, she is immediately clear that Trump is responsible for instigating what she describes as an “insurrection”.The blow-by-blow reconstruction of the assault on democracy is contained in Pelosi in the House, produced and directed by the speaker’s daughter, film-maker Alexandra Pelosi, broadcast on HBO on Tuesday. Some of the behind-the-scenes footage was seen in edited form during the House January 6 committee hearings.Early in the day Pelosi is in her office, wearing a face mask and adjusting her hair, as three TV screens show Trump whipping up his supporters at the Ellipse and vowing never to concede the 2020 presidential election. She tells her staff with a laugh: “Tell him if he comes here, we’re going to the White House.”Watching through a window, Alexandra’s teenage son, Paul, spots a flag-waving mob gathering ominously outside the US Capitol. Pelosi’s chief of staff, Terri McCullough, reports that the Secret Service have dissuaded Trump from coming to the Capitol because they would not have the resources to protect him.Pelosi replies defiantly: “If he comes, I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out and I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”Members of Congress adjourn to consider objections to the 2020 election results. A car has “Trump” and “Pelosi is Satan” signs on its windscreen. The chanting, horn-blowing mob attacks police, smashes windows and force its way into the building, shouting: “This is our house!”Pelosi escapes with just two minutes to spare. At 2.15pm she is escorted to safety down a staircase. She asks: “Are they calling the national guard?” A woman replies: “Yes. Yes, ma’am.”Hastening through a tunnel, she asks: “Did you reach McConnell?” – a reference to the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Someone says: “We did.” Pelosi: “And will they call the national guard?” Reply: “That’s correct.”Upstairs, the rioters are demanding to know where votes are counted. Walking through another corridor with aides around her, Pelosi evidently realises what a perilous moment this is for democracy. She says: “If they stop the proceedings, they will have succeeded in stopping the validation of the president of the United States. If they stop the proceedings, we will have totally failed.”She is then seen on a phone, telling an unidentified person: “We have got to finish the proceedings or else they will have a complete victory.”Both Pelosi and her daughter climb into the back of a black SUV so they can be taken to safety. Upstairs, her office is being ransacked by Trump supporters. One thinks he has found Pelosi’s laptop. Another asks: “You want Nancy’s pink boxing gloves?” Someone shouts with primal rage: “Fuck Nancy Pelosi!”Sitting in the moving vehicle, the speaker is livid at the disruption of Congress’s sacred duty. “So what’s the prospect? We’re gonna stay here all day, for the rest of our lives, or what? We’re here until what, until the national guard decides to come and get rid of these people?”By now the insurrectionists are inside the Senate chamber. One demands: “Do you see Nancy Pelosi?” Another asks: “Where the fuck is Nancy?” Outside, a bearded man in a “Maga” cap picks up a phone and shouts: “Can I speak to Pelosi? Yeah, we’re coming, bitch.”Pelosi is seen entering the military base at Fort McNair. As Congressman James Clyburn looks on, she says: “There has to be some way we can maintain the sense that people have that there is some security, some confidence that government can function and that we can elect the president of the United States.”Chuck Schumer, then the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, informs Pelosi: “My wife just called watching TV. There are people with guns trying to get into the House chamber.”Pelosi had to leave the Capitol without her phone so is forced to borrow others’. Sitting and studying a photo on one phone, says: “Oh, one of them is in the president of the Senate’s seat.”Schumer notes that some senators are still in hiding and pleads by phone with Ryan McCarthy, the army secretary, to send in military personnel. Pelosi, watching the carnage on CNN, speaks to Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia: “They’re just breaking windows. This is horrendous. And all at the instigation of the president of the United States.”She tells Schumer that Northam agreed to dispatch 200 state police and a national guard unit.At 3.30pm Pelosi and Schumer speak by phone to Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general. Pelosi tells him: “Safety just transcends everything but the fact is, on any given day, they’re breaking the law in many different ways and, quite frankly, much of it at the instigation of the president of the United States.”Schumer adds sharply: “Why don’t you get the president to tell them to leave the Capitol, Mr Attorney General, in your law enforcement responsibility? A public statement they should all leave?”Rosen begins to say his team is “coordinating as quickly and as –” before getting cut off by Schumer, who demands: “No, no, no – please answer my question, answer my question!”Congressional leaders then have a call with the acting defence secretary, Christopher Miller. Pelosi says forcefully: “Just pretend for a moment it was the Pentagon or the White House or some other entity that was under siege. You can logistically get people there as you make the plan and you have some leadership of the national guard there they have not been given the authority to activate.”Then Pelosi speaks to Pence as he waits in a parking garage beneath the Capitol, where rioters chanted for him to be hanged.Taking a seat beside a plant and cabinet full of decorative plates, the speaker says she and other congressional leaders are OK, then asks: “How are you? Oh, my goodness, where are you? God bless you. But are you in a very safe –?”She says she has been told that it will “take days” to clear the Capitol and that Fort McNair has facilities for the House and Senate to meet, adding: “We’d rather go to the Capitol and do it there but it doesn’t seem to be safe.”Pelosi continues: “We’ve got a very bad report about the condition of the House floor, with defecation and all that kind of thing.”She is then seen using her teeth to help unwrap a beef jerky stick and eating while holding the phone in her right hand. She tells Pence: “I worry about you being in that Capitol room. Don’t let anybody know where you are.”Finally, Trump releases a video calling his supporters to go home, but Pelosi and Schumer are not impressed. She comments: “Insurrection. That’s a crime and he’s guilty of it.”By 5.45pm the security forces have regained control. Pence informs Pelosi and Schumer by phone that Congress will be able to reconvene. The backup plan of doing so at Fort McNair is therefore not necessary.Sitting in a vehicle heading back through darkened streets, Pelosi expresses her disgust towards Trump. “I just feel sick at what he did to the Capitol and to the country today. He’s got to pay a price for that.”Back inside the Capitol, Pelosi is informed that the sign outside her office has been taken. She responds phlegmatically: “They took the sign? We’ll get another.”Entering the office, she is warned that there is still a lot of broken glass. A gold framed mirror above the fireplace is smashed. She observes: “Boy, the staff looks scared. They’re traumatised.”The Senate reconvenes around 8pm and the House around 9pm. Pelosi watches on TV as Schumer compares the insurrection to the attack on Pearl Harbor as a “day of infamy”. At 3.48am on 7 January, Joe Biden’s election victory is ratified after all.At 9am Pelosi is in a car, telling Clyburn: “We have to stop this man, the insurrectionist in the White House.” Clyburn warns that invoking the 25th amendment would be a “complicated process” and there may not be enough time, “but there is enough time – and it’s rather simple – to tag him with the uniqueness of a second impeachment”.On 13 January, a week before he left office, the House voted to impeach Trump by a vote of 232-197 for incitement of insurrection. He was the first president in history to be impeached twice.TopicsNancy PelosiDocumentary filmsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpfeaturesReuse this content More