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      Help or hindrance? Biden takes a back seat as Trump goes all in on midterms

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      Help or hindrance? Biden takes a back seat as Trump goes all in on midterms The president, beset by low poll ratings, has been focusing on fundraising, while his predecessor swoops in for campaign rallies, whether Republican candidates like it or notRaucous music will be played, bellicose speeches will be given and big lies will be told. Donald Trump will hold his 20th and 21st campaign rallies of the year in Nevada and Arizona this weekend, urging voters to support Republican candidates in the midterm elections.Joe Biden will be relaxing at home in Delaware.What are the US midterm elections and who’s running?Read moreThe 45th and 46th US presidents have always been like chalk and cheese and those differences extend to how they approach next month’s crucial vote to determine control of Congress as well as three dozen state governorships.Trump is pressing on with the travelling circus of mass rallies – featuring merchandise, “Make America great again” (Maga) caps and communal grievance – in small towns or rural areas that have been a hallmark of his political career since 2015.Biden is likely to hold rallies of his own as election day approaches but for now has focused on smaller, more intimate fundraising receptions in conference centres, back gardens or ritzy New York apartments with the help of alcohol and celebrities.Underpinning both is the calculation that, although both Biden, who turns 80 next month, and 76-year-old Trump are the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively, there are plenty of situations in which they might be seen as more of a liability than an asset.“They are both a help and hindrance at different points,” said Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington. “Biden is a help raising money; he’s a hindrance with the broader public at large. Trump is a help with the base voter to help gin them up and turn them out; he is a hindrance with the same sort of voters who turned against him and who Republicans need.”The Axios website reported this week that Biden had flown less for domestic political purposes, and hosted fewer out-of-town fundraisers, than either Trump or former president Barack Obama in their corresponding midterm cycles.The coronavirus pandemic partly explains his slimmer travel schedule. But so too does Biden’s approval rating, which has hovered in the 30s or low 40s all year, meaning that he could be a potential drag on some midterm candidates seeking to focus on issues such as abortion rights rather than inflation and the threat of petrol prices rising again.Tim Ryan, a Democratic congressman running for the Senate in Ohio, a state that Trump won twice, does not appear enthusiastic about Biden coming to stump for him. He told the conservative Fox News channel: “I want to be the face of this campaign. I don’t want any distractions.”Progressives on the left of the Democratic party also have misgivings about joint appearances with a president who campaigned as a moderate and, despite some significant legislative achievements, also has fallen short of some key objectives in their view.Chris Scott, chief political officer of the political action committee Democracy for America – which this week endorsed Senate candidates Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, Cheri Beasley in North Carolina, Alex Padilla in California and Charles Booker in Kentucky – said: “There are parts, especially even in the midwest, are still very endeared to him but also you have a lot of the base of the party that still wanted to see more done by him and felt like he wasn’t pushing hard enough.“You are not necessarily the best asset for us to put out there in every place with you being a little bit more cautious at times. We’ve been vocal about the Biden administration in that, yes, you’ve accomplished some things but you should have pushed harder. You should have been more proactive versus reactive on some things.”But Scott added: “Him being the top for Democrats is still a much stronger position than everything former president Trump has been in the news for and is going to continue snowballing with. Trump is going to continue to be a liability but nobody in the party can check him. When you’ve created this monster and you wanted him to go so far, and as far as the extremism has gone, it’s hard to put the monster back in the box now.”Trump has inserted himself into the midterms whether Republican candidates and leaders like it or not. Last month the New York Times reported that the former president had invited himself to rally in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, forcing hopefuls Mehmet Oz and JD Vance to make the best of it.Some candidates, such as Kari Lake and Tudor Dixon, running for governor of Arizona and Michigan respectively, have enthusiastically embraced the ex-president as a way of firing up turnout from the Republican base.John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “Whereas it may be difficult for many inside-the-Beltway and for dyed-in-the-wool Democrats to to accept, Trump seems to be magical on the stump on behalf of candidates, many of whom, as we’ve seen, are Maga candidates.“These are people that are ready to vote solidly Republican and he brings that out. What it does for independence remains to be seen.”But other Republican candidates have adopted a more traditional approach: adopt extreme positions in the primary election, then pivot to moderation in the general so as not to scare away swing voters. For example, Don Bolduc, running for the Senate in New Hampshire, reversed his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump two days after winning a primary.In these cases, joint campaign appearances with Trump, who is likely to repeat his “big lie” and make other polarising statements, could be politically toxic. But turning him away could risk his wrath and verbal abuse.Bob Shrum, a veteran Democratic election campaign strategist, said: “I don’t think Trump is helping his candidates because he’s going to drive away suburban voters, swing voters, women, but he insists on doing it.“A lot of his candidates, I think, would prefer that he not show up. He did his thing in the primaries and they’d like to pretend in the general that they’re a little different than they were in the primaries.”It looks like a replay of the 2020 presidential election in which Trump barnstormed the country while Biden, mindful of pandemic restrictions, rarely ventured out of his basement and won by 7m votes. This time Biden also has a consuming day job – the presidency – and some believe that he should stay focused on that.Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster and strategist, said: “The best thing that Joe Biden can do for the Democrats is to keep doing his job and laying out the issues and laying out the choice here, which is what he’s doing.“The best thing that Trump could do for his party is to be quiet but what he’s doing is great for the Democrats because he’s constantly talking about himself, Trump Republicans, overturning the election and running for office and that really energises Democrats and unnerves independent women.”Biden is also quietly proving an effective fundraiser. As of 1 October, he had headlined 11 receptions to raise money directly for the Democratic National Committee at venues ranging from mansions in southern California to a yacht club in Portland, Oregon, and bringing in more than $19.6m. On Thursday night he was in New York for a reception for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.Such events play to his strengths with one-on-one interactions. At a fundraiser in the Washington suburbs this summer, Biden first focused his attention on a little girl near the front. “Honey, what’s your name?” he asked a little girl, sitting through what he joked had to be the most “boring” event. “Well, let me tell you something. Is that your daddy? He owes you big for having to sit here.”The fundraisers have also featured celebrities such as the actor Robert De Niro and film-maker Ken Burns and enable Biden to cut loose from the formality of a scripted White House speech.Biden will be hoping that he fares better than Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Obama, both of whom have suffered huge losses in their first midterms – though both bounced back to win re-election to the White House two years later. For Trump, also, the stakes are unusually high – sweeping defeats for his endorsed candidates could raise fresh questions about his viability in 2024.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “Trump is responsible for the nomination of at least four Senate candidates who will make the difference in control of the Senate. He also knows that if they all go down to defeat this will be a very significant blow to him nationally. So he’s all in.“It’s pretty clear since so many of these people [are] in closely run contests in swing states that, if they lose, establishment Republicans are going to debit it to Mr Trump’s account.”Galston, a former policy adviser to Clinton at the White House, added: “To the extent that the president is not sure that appearing with many of the candidates in closely run contests would be helpful to those candidates, he’s making a wise and humble calculation as to where he could do the most good.“I have the sense that Mr Biden, who is a political professional of the highest order, understands that this can’t be about him, that he has to do what’s useful and not what’s gratifying to one’s ego. The contrast with the other fellow couldn’t be sharper. I’m not sure that that Donald Trump is capable of imagining that he might not be an asset everywhere and, even if he could imagine it, the desire to be in the spotlight would simply override everything else.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Joe BidenDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Donald Trump seeks to withhold two folders seized at Mar-a-Lago

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      Donald Trump seeks to withhold two folders seized at Mar-a-LagoThe former US president is trying to exclude a specific set of seized documents from an inquiry into his handling of government records Donald Trump is seeking to withhold from the justice department two folders marked as containing correspondence with the National Archives and signing sheets that the FBI seized from his Mar-a-Lago resort, according to court filings in the special master review of the confiscated documents.The former US president’s privilege assertions over the folders, which appear to have direct relevance to the criminal investigation into whether he retained national defense information and obstructed justice, are significant as they represent an effort to exclude the items from the inquiry and keep them confidential.Most notably, Trump asserted privilege over the contents of one red folder marked as containing “NARA letters and other copies” and a second, manilla folder marked as containing “NARA letters one top sheet + 3 signing sheets”, a review of the court filings indicated.Trump lawyer refused to report all Mar-a-Lago records had been turned inRead moreThe former president also asserted privilege over 35 pages of documents titled “The President’s Calls” that included the presidential seal in the upper left corner and contained handwritten names, numbers, notes about messages and four blank pages of miscellaneous notes, the filings showed.Trump additionally also did the same over an unsigned 2017 letter concerning former special counsel Robert Mueller, pages of an email about election fraud lawsuits in Fulton County, Georgia, and deliberations about clemency to a certain “MB”, Ted Suhl and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The documents the former president is attempting to withhold from the criminal investigation by asserting some sort of privilege – it was not clear whether he asserted executive or attorney-client privilege over the two folders, for instance – became clear after a Friday ruling by the special master.In the three-page order, US district court judge Raymond Dearie – appointed as the special master with a mandate to screen the seized materials for potential privilege issues – made public the unique identifier numbers for documents for which Trump is not claiming privilege.James Brown’s cape and Rudy gone wild: key takeaways from Haberman’s Trump bookRead moreOrdinarily, the exact nature of the documents being claimed as protected would remain private. But an apparent docketing error by the court earlier in the week revealed the seized materials that the justice department’s “filter team” identified as potentially privileged.By comparing the unique identifier numbers for which Trump was not claiming privilege with the inadvertently unsealed list of potentially privileged documents, the Guardian was able to identify which documents the former president was seeking to withhold from the department.The special master directed that the “filter team” should transfer the documents not deemed to be privileged by Trump to the “case team” conducting the criminal investigation before 10 October, the ruling showed.Once the documents are transferred, the special master wrote, Trump’s lawyers and the department should confer and attempt to resolve any disputes about executive privilege over the remaining records before 20 October – and then submit any outstanding issues to him to decide.TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      US justice department granted expedited appeal in Trump Mar-a-Lago case – as it happened

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      A US appeals court on Wednesday granted the justice department’s request to expedite its appeal of a lower court order appointing a special master to review records the FBI seized from former president Donald Trump’s Florida estate in August.The decision by the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit to fast-track the government’s appeal represents a setback for Trump, who had opposed the request, Reuters reports.Last week, the Department of Justice (DoJ) had asked the 11th circuit to address concerns it still has with US district judge Aileen Cannon’s appointment of senior judge Raymond Dearie, who is tasked with reviewing more than 11,000 records the FBI found inside Mar-a-Lago, in order to weed out anything that may be privileged.Cannon’s order blocks the justice department from relying on those records for its ongoing criminal investigation until Dearie’s review is complete.In its filing, the justice department said this prohibition is hampering its investigation, and that it needs to be able to examine non-classified records that may have been stored in close proximity to classified ones.Those non-classified records, the department said, “may shed light” on how the documents were transferred to, or stored at, the Mar-a-Lago estate, and who might have accessed them.Separately, yesterday, Trump asked the US supreme court to partially reverse an appellate court decision that prevented the special master, reviewing the seized materials for privilege protections, from examining 100 documents with classification markings.Joe Biden traveled to Florida to survey the destruction wrought by Hurricane Ian alongside Republican governor and White House critic, Ron DeSantis, with whom a temporary political truce had been declared. But bad news came from abroad, when the Opec+ grouping of oil producers agreed to slash production, potentially driving gas prices higher just as American voters cast ballots in the midterms.Here’s more about what happened today:
      The Opec+ production cut comes as the oil cartel’s leader Saudi Arabia appears to be cultivating warmer ties with Russia, in spite of Riyadh’s alliances with many western countries.
      Gas prices may indeed rise, but not necessarily by a huge amount.
      The justice department won yet another legal battle over the Mar-a-Lago documents, though the case is far from over.
      One of the unanswered questions of the January 6 insurrection was whether senator Ron Johnson, a conservative Republican representing Wisconsin, was involved in the plot to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win.In the fourth hearing of the congressional committee investigating the attack held in June, it was revealed that a staff member for the senator contacted vice-president Mike Pence’s legislative affairs director, asking how to get fake slates of electors from Johnson to Pence, who was to preside over the certification of Biden’s election victory that day. The documents never got to the vice-president, but the January 6 committee detailed the attempt during a hearing dedicated to exploring the legal efforts made by Donald Trump’s allies to interfere with Biden taking office.NBC News reports that Johnson told his side of the story during an appearance in Wisconsin on Tuesday, where he’s in a tough re-election battle against Democrat Mandela Barnes. Here’s what he had to say:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Of the electors scheme, Johnson said he communicated with Jim Troupis, a Wisconsin-based attorney who led legal efforts for Donald Trump in a recount of the state’s 2020 results.
      “What would you do if you got a text from the attorney for the president of the United States?” Johnson said. “You respond to it.
      “I got a text from the president’s lawyer asking if we could deliver something to the vice president and if I could have a staff member handle it,” Johnson said. Asked whether he knew what it was he was being asked to deliver, he said: “No. I had no idea.”
      Johnson said he turned it over to his chief of staff, who was new at the time. “Next thing I know he’s letting me know the vice president’s not accepting anything, so I just texted back ‘no, we’re not delivering it,’ end of story. Nothing happened. I had no idea there were even an alternate slate of electors.”Trump campaign knew ‘fake electors’ scheme was fraudulent, panel arguesRead moreThat Biden even brought up climate change is bound to infuriate some Republican elected officials and conservative commentators, who see any mention of the scientific reality as cover for a wider liberal agenda.DeSantis may be among them. “What I’ve found is, people when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. We’re not doing any left-wing stuff,” the governor said at a speech last year, according to Florida Phoenix. DeSantis has grown popular among Republicans for standing up to Democrats and their perceived ideologies, and those comments may be seen as a classic example of his success. But as governor, DeSantis has backed some efforts to help his famously low-lying state deal with the climate crisis. Last year, he signed a bill to strengthen Florida’s resiliency against sea level rise, and has also publicly uttered the words “climate change” – a break from his Republican predecessor Rick Scott, who reportedly banned some state employees from using the terms. More

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      James Brown’s cape and Rudy gone wild: key takeaways from Haberman’s Trump book

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      James Brown’s cape and Rudy gone wild: key takeaways from Haberman’s Trump bookThe former president really doesn’t like Mitch McConnell – and other notable things we’ve learned from Confidence Man Maggie Haberman’s new book, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, was published in the US on Tuesday. As is now customary for books about the 45th president, its revelations have been widely reported.‘She say anything about me?’ Trump raised Ghislaine Maxwell link with aidesRead moreBut thanks to the New York Times reporter’s dominance of the Trump beat – before his time in power, through it and after – the intensity of interest has perhaps outweighed that for any other such book.Here are the key takeaways.Trump’s Waterloo?Trump was long said to be in the habit of ripping up notes from White House meetings and throwing them in the toilet. Haberman published photos. Trump is also in all sorts of legal trouble for taking classified material to Mar-a-Lago, prompting an FBI search. He admitted such to Haberman – perhaps as a result of his comfort talking to a reporter he called “my psychiatrist”. She also shows him being cavalier with national security concerns regarding Iran and Russia.Jared who?Haberman shows Trump relentlessly mocking Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and adviser, for his voice and manner; wishing Ivanka had married the NFL star Tom Brady instead; deciding to fire both of them then chickening out; ranting about Kushner’s Jewish religious observance; and predicting that Kushner would be attacked, even raped, were he ever to choose to go camping. Kushner, meanwhile, is shown as a White House turf warrior who gloried in having “cut [Steve] Bannon’s balls off” – as the Guardian’s Lloyd Green pointed out, they grew back – and tried to inflate poll numbers so as not to anger his father-in-law.Ghislaine Maxwell was a worryTrump fell out with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and denies wrongdoing associated with him – but nonetheless worried aloud that Epstein’s former girlfriend might talk about him after her own arrest. Trump, who denies allegations of sexual misconduct or assault from more than 20 accusers, also predicted that “the women” would be the source of most trouble once he entered politics. Melania Trump seems to have agreed – Haberman says she renegotiated her prenuptial agreement.Trump was racist and transphobicHaberman’s reporting here is not particularly surprising but it is routinely horrific. Trump thought Black political staffers were waiters. He said he couldn’t afford to alienate white supremacists, because they tended to vote. He persisted in asking if a notional transgender debate questioner was “cocked or de-cocked”.He was also dangerously ignorantWrong-footed by a health official’s uniform, Trump thought the confused apparatchik could organise bombing raids on drug labs in Mexico. “The response from White House aides,” Haberman writes, “was not to try to change Trump’s view, but to consider asking [Adm Brett] Giroir not to wear his uniform to the Oval Office anymore.”Taxes dodge was made up on the flyTrump pulled his “I can’t, I’m being audited” excuse for not releasing his tax returns out of thin air on his campaign plane – and rolled it out to reporters apparently without legal advice. Those who knew Trump in New York pre-politics suspected his returns would show he wasn’t as rich as he said. Haberman also reports alleged dodgy practices including a parking garage lease payment made with a box of gold bars.Trump was no diplomatAmong multiple diplomatic faux pas, Haberman shows Trump asking Theresa May why her mortal rival Boris Johnson wasn’t prime minister instead and speaking crudely about abortion, and calling the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, “that bitch”. Trump’s apparent affinity with or interest in Nazi Germany – widely reported but now at issue in a lawsuit against CNN – contributed to one chief of staff, John Kelly, deciding the president was a fascist years before Joe Biden said the same. In terms of delicate domestic situations, Haberman shows Trump sarcastically praying for the health of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the liberal supreme court justice who died in late 2020.Trump hates MitchTrump’s disdain for the Senate minority leader is no secret, but he gave it pungent expression in interviews with Haberman. McConnell said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the Capitol attack, though he voted to acquit at Trump’s second impeachment trial. Trump told Haberman: “The Old Crow’s a piece of shit.”Foiled Covid Superman stunt was inspired by James BrownThis bit is as weird as the subhead suggests. Haberman recounts familiar aspects of Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic but also thickens out the tale of how Trump wanted to present his own recovery. She writes: “He came up with a plan he told associates was inspired by the singer James Brown, whom he loved watching toss off his cape while onstage, but it was in line with his love of professional wrestling as well. [Trump] would be wheeled out of Walter Reed in a chair … dramatically stand up, then open his button-down dress shirt to reveal [a] Superman logo beneath it. (Trump was so serious about it that he … instruct[ed] an aide, Max Miller, to procure the Superman shirts; Miller was sent to a Virginia big-box store.)”Capitol attack officer Fanone hits out at ‘weasel’ McCarthy in startling interviewRead moreTrump wanted to refuse to leaveTrump denied to Haberman that he spent most of 6 January watching the Capitol attack on TV and refusing to stop it, as congressional witnesses have described. Slightly more surprisingly, Haberman reports that Trump told aides – including the guy who brought the Diet Cokes – he simply wouldn’t cede power. In his quasi-legalistic efforts to overturn the 2020 election, he also told his personal attorney: “OK, Rudy, you’re in charge. Go wild, do anything you want. I don’t care.” Giuliani proceeded to go wild.Some aides tried to rein Trump inHaberman says William Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, told his president: “People are tired of the fucking drama.” But it seems the publishing industry is not – Haberman has followed Baker and Glasser, Woodward and Costa, Rucker and Leonnig and many, many other authors to the top of the bestseller charts.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansPolitics booksNew York TimesfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Trump asks supreme court to intervene in Mar-a-Lago special master dispute

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      Trump asks supreme court to intervene in Mar-a-Lago special master disputeAppellate court ruling prevented special master also examining 100 files seized from Mar-a-Lago with classification markings Donald Trump on Tuesday asked the US supreme court to partially reverse an appellate court decision that prevented the special master, reviewing for privilege protections materials seized by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago resort in August, also examining 100 documents with classification markings.US supreme court hears case that could gut voting rights for minority groupsRead moreThe motion to vacate the ruling by the US appeals court for the 11th circuit represents the former president’s final chance to temporarily bar federal prosecutors from using the materials in their inquiry into whether he illegally retained national defense information.In the emergency request, lawyers for Trump argued that the appellate court lacked jurisdiction to intervene in the lower district court decision that appointed a special master to review all seized documents – including those marked classified – for privilege protections.The technical motion argued among other things that because the appointment of a special master was a procedural order and not an injunction, the decision by the trial judge in Florida was supposedly not subject to “interlocutory review” by the appellate court at that time.“That appointment order is simply not appealable on an interlocutory basis,” the filing said. “Nevertheless, the 11th circuit granted a stay of the special master order, effectively compromising the integrity of the well-established policy against piecemeal appellate review.”In the petition submitted to the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, who receives 11th circuit appeals, Trump asked that the special master be allowed to review 100 documents marked classified in addition to 11,000 other documents about to be subject to the independent filter process.The former president does not appear to be seeking to stop the DoJ using the 100 documents in its criminal investigation, since Trump’s argument hinges on the Presidential Records Act, which does not account for whether documents are classified or declassified.The former president will face significant challenges even if the supreme court hears the case, and even though the bench is dominated by six conservative justices – three of whom he appointed – who have previously shown deference to executive-branch powers.The argument appears flawed, legal experts said, since it would suggest that higher courts would have no ability to review an order from any federal judge to stop criminal and national security investigations.Lawyers for Trump also contended that the seized materials could be marked classified for national security purposes and simultaneously be personal documents – a position the DoJ has previously said is impossible, with which the 11th circuit indicated it agreed.The Trump motion was silent on whether Trump actually declassified any of the documents, as he has claimed publicly. It instead suggested the supreme court consider the case on the basis that he had the power to do so, and might have done so, without providing evidence.TopicsDonald TrumpUS supreme courtUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Trump lawyer refused to report all Mar-a-Lago records had been turned in

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      Trump lawyer refused to report all Mar-a-Lago records had been turned inTrump told lawyer to report to National Archives that he had given them all the documents, but lawyer was ‘not sure’ that was true A lawyer for Donald Trump refused to report to the National Archives that the former president had turned over all Oval Office documents as required out of concern that the claim was a lie.Earlier this year, Trump returned 15 boxes of federal government records from his Mar-a-Lago resort home to the National Archives, and he directed one of his lawyers, Alex Cannon, to inform the agency that the boxes contained all the documents taken from his time in office.Cannon, who was facilitating the records’ return, refused Trump’s request because he “told others he was not sure if other documents were still at the [Florida resort] and would be uncomfortable making such a claim”, The Washington Post reported.Faced with Cannon’s refusal, Trump later directed a statement in February to aides saying that all his documents from his time in office had been returned to the National Archives and Records Administration. But federal agents later learned Trump still had government documents at Mar-a-Lago, including some records marked with the highest level of classification.The FBI seized those documents during its 8 August search of Mar-a-Lago.On Monday, the National Archives released a letter that revealed they had alerted lawyers for Trump in May 2021 that the former president’s correspondence with Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, were missing along with two dozen boxes of other records.The US justice department has been investigating whether Trump’s unauthorized retention of such government secrets violated multiple laws, including the Espionage Act.Trump’s aides turned over a set of documents in June to the justice department. The August search of Mar-a-Lago produced the seizure of thousands of documents, among them dozens of classified records.When archives officials opened the initial 15 boxes they recovered in January, they found a large volume of documents with classified markings and notified the justice department, which set off the chain of events leading the criminal investigation into Trump.Legal wrangling between the justice department and Trump’s lawyers has slowed that investigation down.Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the FBI planted evidence during its search of Mar-a-Lago residence. The federal judge presiding over those claims, Aileen Cannon, granted Trump’s request for an independent official known as a “special master” to review the seized documents before the case proceeded further.That review process is expected to last until between the end of November and the middle of December.TopicsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracy | Steve Phillips

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      How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracySteve PhillipsPeople forget that championing whiteness is what makes Trump powerful A growing chorus of voices is warning that our democracy is in grave danger, but there is much less discussion of the exact nature of the threat. Recently, President Biden emphasized the severity of the threat by going to the place where the constitution was signed to give what the White House described as “a speech on the continued battle for the soul of the nation”.Biden specifically named “Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans” as the ones carrying out the attacks, and that is accurate, on the surface. The deeper, more longstanding threat, however, was articulated by historian Taylor Branch in a 2018 conversation with author Isabel Wilkerson recounted in Wilkerson’s book Caste. As they discussed how the rise of white domestic terrorism under Trump was part of the backlash to the country’s growing racial diversity, Branch noted that, “people said they wouldn’t stand for being a minority in their own country”. He went on to add, “the real question would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”Whiteness is the deeper threat because championing whiteness is what makes Trump powerful. People forget that Trump was not particularly well-regarded before he started attacking Mexican immigrants and signaling to white people that he would be the defender of their way of life. In the months before he launched his campaign, he was polling at just 4% in the May 2015 ABC/Washington Post poll. After stirring the racial resentment pot, his popularity took off, growing exponentially in a matter of weeks and propelling him to the front of the pack by mid-July 2015 when he commanded support of 24% of voters, far ahead of all the other Republican candidates.As his support grew with each racially infused statement – such as banning Muslims from entering the US – Trump marveled at the unshakable passion of his followers, observing quite presciently that, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters … It’s like, incredible.”Trump’s 2015 discovery of the power of whiteness is the same lesson that Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace internalized in the crucible of southern politics during the civil rights movement in the 1950s. “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen,” Wallace said, adding, “Then I began talking about n—–s – and they stomped the floor.” After Trump began talking about Mexicans, and then Muslims, many white people from coast to coast stomped the floor and even stormed the Capitol to keep him in power, seeking to destroy the democratic tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.As Wallace’s words show, Trump is not the first leader of a movement to make America white again, and for more than a century we have consistently underestimated the political power of whiteness.The clearest example is the start of the civil war itself. A hundred and sixty years before the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the legislatures in one-third of the states passed laws rejecting the outcome of a presidential election and then issued a literal call to arms where hundreds of thousands of people picked up their guns and, in the name of defending whiteness, proceeded to shoot and kill hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans.In 1968, Alabama’s Wallace saw that the audience for white nationalism reached far beyond his state’s borders and mounted a presidential campaign that secured 13.5% of all votes cast. The strength of Wallace’s showing influenced Richard Nixon’s presidential administration to the extent that historian Dan Carter wrote: “When George Wallace had played his fiddle, the President of the United States had danced Jim Crow.”In 1990, an actual Klansman, former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke, mounted a bid for the US Senate and was initially dismissed as unable to win because of his unapologetic white supremacist views. Duke shocked the establishment by attracting the support of 44% of Louisiana’s voters.The good news is that the proponents of whiteness do not command majority support. The original Confederates themselves were in the minority and represented just 11% of the country’s white population. People who enjoy majority support have no need to unleash fusillades of voter suppression legislation in the states with the largest numbers of people of color. Yet, from the grandfather clauses of the 1800s to the restrictive voting laws passed last year in the south and south-west, we are seeing an unrelenting practice of trying to depress and destroy democracy by engaging in what the writer Ron Brownstein has described as, “stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change”.Just as the enemies of democracy know that they must destroy democracy in order to prevail, the clearest way to defeat them is to aggressively expand democratic participation. Mathematically there is a clear New American Majority made up of the vast majority of people of color in alliance with the meaningful minority of white people who want to live in a multiracial nation. With the sole exception of the 2004 election, that coalition has won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1992.In order to defend democracy and win the fight for the soul of the nation, two things must happen. One is to make massive investments in the people and organizations working to expand voting and civic participation. Coalitions like America Votes Georgia and Arizona Wins played critical roles in bringing hundreds of thousands of people of color into the electorate, helping to transform those former Confederate bastions.The second step is to directly challenge the nation to choose democracy over whiteness. When Taylor Branch posed his provocative question in 2018, it was in the wake of tragedies such as the killing of Heather Heyer, a white woman protesting the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, march of white nationalists incensed at plans to remove Confederate statues. Trump’s response to Heyer’s killing – she was intentionally struck by a car driven by a white supremacist – was to shrug and note that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the march.When he launched his presidential campaign in 2019, Biden explicitly invoked Trump’s post-Charlottesville embrace of whiteness, saying “We have a problem with this rising tide of white supremacy in America,” and went on to oust a defender of white nationalism from America’s White House. Far from being chastened, however, the enemies of democracy have only intensified their efforts. To ultimately prevail in this defense of our democracy, we must clearly understand the underlying forces imperiling the nation, name the nature of the opposition, and summon the majority of Americans to unapologetically affirm that this is a multi-racial country.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and is a Guardian US columnist. His book How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good will be published October 18th
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      Oath Keepers founder accused of ‘armed rebellion’ on January 6 at trial

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      Oath Keepers founder accused of ‘armed rebellion’ on January 6 at trialStewart Rhodes and four associates face the rare civil war-era charge of seditious conspiracy for attacking the US Capitol The founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group and four associates planned an “armed rebellion” to keep Donald Trump in power after he lost the election, a federal prosecutor contended on Monday as the most serious case yet went to trial involving the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Stewart Rhodes and his band of far-right militants were prepared to go to war to stop Joe Biden from becoming president, assistant US attorney Jeffrey Nestler told jurors.The group celebrated the Capitol attack as a battle they had won and continued their plot even after Biden’s November 2020 electoral victory was certified by Congress in the early hours of 7 January, Nestler alleged.Capitol attack officer Fanone hits out at ‘weasel’ McCarthy in startling interviewRead more“Their goal was to stop, by whatever means necessary, the lawful transfer of presidential power, including by taking up arms against the United States government,” the prosecutor said during his opening statement. “They concocted a plan for armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy.”Rhodes and the four others are the first January 6 defendants to stand trial on the charge of seditious conspiracy, a rare civil war-era charge that calls for up to 20 years behind bars, which they deny. The stakes are high for the US Department of Justice (DoJ), which last secured a seditious conspiracy conviction at trial nearly 30 years ago.Rhodes’ attorney painted a far different picture, describing the Oath Keepers as a “peacekeeping” force. He accused prosecutors of building their case on cherry-picked evidence from messages and videos and told jurors that the “true picture” would show that the Oath Keepers had merely been preparing for presidential orders they expected from Trump but never came.“Stewart Rhodes meant no harm to the Capitol that day. Stewart Rhodes did not have any violent intent that day,” Rhodes’ attorney, Phillip Linder, said. “The story the government is trying to tell you today is completely wrong.”On trial with Rhodes, of Granbury, Texas, are Kelly Meggs, leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, Kenneth Harrelson, another Florida member of the group, Thomas Caldwell, a retired US navy intelligence officer from Virginia, and Jessica Watkins, who led an Ohio militia group. They face several other charges as well.About 900 people have been charged and hundreds convicted in the Capitol attack. Rioters stormed police barriers, fought with officers, smashed windows and temporarily halted the certification of Biden’s electoral victory.Prosecutors told jurors the insurrection was no spontaneous outpouring of election-fueled rage but part of a detailed, drawn-out plot to stop Biden from entering the White House.Rhodes began plotting to overturn Biden’s victory right after the election, Nestler said.He told his followers during the planning stage that “it will be torches and pitchforks time if they (Congress) don’t do the right thing”, according to an encrypted Signal message he sent to his followers that was shown to the jury by prosecutors.During a December media interview, Rhodes called senators “traitors” and warned that the Oath Keepers would have to “overthrow, abort or abolish Congress”.Before coming to Washington, they set up “quick reaction force” teams with “weapons of war” stashed at a Virginia hotel, the prosecutor said.As Oath Keepers stormed the Capitol, Rhodes stayed outside, like “a general surveying his troops on a battlefield”, Nestler said. After the attack, the Oath Keepers were “elated”, Nestler said.“These defendants were fighting a war and they won a battle on January 6 … but they planned to continue waging that war to stop the transfer of power prior to Inauguration Day. Thankfully their plans were foiled,” Nestler said.Defense attorneys say the Oath Keepers came to Washington only to provide security at events for figures such as Trump ally Roger Stone before the president’s big outdoor rally behind the White House. Rhodes has said there was no plan to attack the Capitol and that the members who did acted on their own.Rhodes’ lawyer told jurors that his client will take the stand to argue that he believed Trump was going to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up a militia. TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More