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      Will Donald Trump destroy US democracy? Unlikely | Cas Mudde

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      The most authoritarian and racist campaign of my lifetime just won Donald Trump a return to the White House. It even was the most popular Republican presidential campaign since 1988. There go four decades of academic research on far-right politics, which has confidently claimed that openly racist far-right parties could not win elections. While it is too early to explain Trump’s shockingly large victory, there is one thing I know for sure: Trump 2.0 will be nothing like Trump 1.0. When Trump returns to the White House on 20 January 2025, he will bring his own people, have a clear plan and face no internal opposition.When Trump won in 2016, he was largely a one-man band. Except for his close family, he had no powerful individuals and organizations that were loyal to him. Hence, he relied on the infrastructure of the Republican party and establishment conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation. His first administration should therefore be seen as a coalition government, between Trump and the Republican establishment – at that time, personified by Mitch McConnell, then the powerful Senate majority leader. It was mainly successful in policies that the two camps shared – notably, lower taxes, deregulation, and judicial replacement – and much less so in policies that only Trump really cared about, like “the wall” and the “Muslim ban”.Today, Trump is in a much more powerful position. There are few powerful counterweights left within both the US right wing and the broader US political system. The Republican party already controlled the supreme court and has retaken the Senate. Although the House is still in play, it is likely to stay in Republican hands given the size of Trump’s win. Finally, he has a vice-president who is blindly loyal to him.Trump is also in complete control of the Republican party. After Ron DeSantis’s unsuccessful challenge in the midterms, only two years ago, opposition to Trump has largely disappeared within the grand old party. Critics like Liz Cheney have been replaced by Trump loyalists, while challengers like DeSantis and Nikki Haley have since kissed Trump’s ring again. McConnell is literally a shadow of himself, immobilized by health issues and unable to oppose Trump even within his own Senate faction. The new Senate majority leader will undoubtedly be a Trump supporter, just like the current House majority leader, Steve Scalise.Similarly, the broader “conservative” infrastructure has changed fundamentally. Not only have most organizations radicalized, but they have also been joined by a host of new, well-funded pro-Trump organizations, often founded and run by former members of the Trump administration. So, even though the Heritage Foundation may play a lesser role in Trump’s second transition team, the organization has become solidly far right and pro-Trump under its new president, Kevin Roberts. Moreover, it will compete with new pro-Trump groups like the America First Policy Institute, primarily bankrolled by Texas oil money. And for middle- and low-level personnel in both the administration and the bureaucracy, the new Trump administration can draw on a large pool of younger Americans, well-versed in far-right ideology and loyalty to Trump by organizations like Turning Point USA.Finally, this time Trump has a plan. Although he distanced himself from Project 2025 in the campaign, and it is very likely that he never read the lengthy report, most of the people expected to take up key positions in his new administration are closely tied to the project and Trump himself has supported most of the key policies. In addition to the usual rightwing pet projects, like deregulation and lower taxes, it includes Schedule F, which would slash legal protections for tens of thousands of bureaucrats so that they can be fired “at will” – a policy that Trump already introduced in the last days of his first administration and has promised to introduce again on his first day back in office. With the combination of Schedule F and an army of young loyalists, Trump could finally transform the “deep state” into a blindly loyal, if possibly much smaller and therefore less effective, apparatus.Does this mean that Trump will destroy US democracy, like his “friend” Viktor Orbán in Hungary? Unlikely. Not because Americans are more democratic than Hungarians, which is a doubtful assumption anyway, but because the US political system is much more complex than the Hungarian political system. Largely set-up to prevent tyranny, the US political system is extremely complex and rigid. Most importantly, it is almost impossible to change the constitution, which has been at the heart of Orbán’s transformation of the Hungarian system. This does not mean that Trump cannot significantly weaken liberal democracy, but he will have to do it with weaker instruments (like executive orders) and with significant judicial pushback (although probably less from the US supreme court than from state and local courts).This will undoubtedly comfort the many college-educated white men in blue states, who disproportionately produce the news and opinions in the US media, but it will do little for those of us living in Republican-controlled states. Most importantly, it will provide little comfort for the millions of Americans who are already marginalized within the country, from the LGBTQ+ community to people of color and women.While the far right’s plans for mass deportations or a federal ban on abortion might not come to fruition, or at least not to the extent that its most fanatic supporters hope, marginalized groups will face an even more hostile state while enjoying even less protection from an increasingly embattled judiciary and media. And, while they can hope for a Democratic victory in 2028, it will be more difficult than in 2020, as this time the elections might still be free but they will no longer be fair.

      Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today More

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      Giuliani shows up to vote in Mercedes he was supposed to give to poll workers

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      Rudy Giuliani turned up to vote in Florida for Tuesday’s presidential election in a Mercedes Benz convertible that a court had ordered him to surrender more than a week ago as part of a $148m settlement to two Georgia poll workers he defamed.The 1980s car, once owned by the actor Lauren Bacall, is among the assets of the disgraced former New York mayor and vocal Donald Trump acolyte that Giuliani is deliberately hiding from their reach, according to a letter their attorney, Aaron Nathan, sent to the judge in the case.Additionally, Nathan said, the contents of Giuliani’s $5m Manhattan apartment to which the pair are also entitled were stripped out some weeks ago in contravention of the judge Lewis Liman’s receivership order. Nathan said Giuliani had deliberately ignored the court’s deadline for handing over the assets.“[Giuliani] has yet to reveal where the vast majority of the receivership property is actually located, despite repeated requests to his counsel,” said the letter, sent on behalf of the poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss.“That silence is especially outrageous given the revelation that the defendant apparently took affirmative steps to move his property out of the New York apartment in recent weeks, while a restraining notice was in effect. Furthermore, despite the cooperative pose [he] put on in his letter of October 29, the receivers’ inquiries since that time have been met predominantly with evasion or silence.”In addition to the Upper East Side apartment, Giuliani was ordered to turn over several items of New York Yankees memorabilia and about two dozen luxury watches.In response to the letter, Liman has ordered Giuliani to appear at a hearing in New York on Thursday. Giuliani’s attorney, Kenneth Caruso, has requested a delay so his client can fulfill an obligation to host a radio broadcast from Florida that evening.Giuliani, wearing a New York fire department hat and stars-and-stripes shirt, was pictured arriving at the polling site in Palm Beach on Tuesday in the passenger seat of the Mercedes SL500. He spoke to reporters but had no comment about the settlement.Caruso, in a court filing last week, denied Giuliani was being obstructive. “[He] is, and will remain, ready to comply” with Liman’s order, Caruso said – but claimed that Giuliani, who filed for bankruptcy last year, had not received information about how to deliver it, the Hill reported.Nathan said that claim was “misleading”.Giuliani’s spokesperson Ted Goodman, meanwhile, told the Hill in a statement that he “has made available his property and possessions as ordered” and that he had put a “few items” into storage over the past year.Anything else that was removed was related to Giuliani’s nightly livestreams, Goodman claimed, asserting it was therefore outside the settlement. A separate lawsuit over Giuliani’s Palm Beach apartment is ongoing.In a subsequent statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Goodman said Giuliani had made efforts to hand over the car.“Our lawyers have requested documentation to transfer over the title of the vehicle, and haven’t heard back from opposing counsel,” he said.“This is yet another attempt to render Mayor Rudy Giuliani – a man who has improved the lives of more people than almost any other living American – penniless and homeless. The weaponization of our once-sacred justice system should concern every American, regardless of partisan political affiliation.”Separately Michael Ragusa, Giuliani’s head of security, appeared to defend the disbarred lawyer’s retention of the Mercedes Benz in his own statement.“Mayor Giuliani is an 80-year-old man with a bad knee and 9/11-related lung disease, relies on this vehicle as his primary means of transportation in Florida, where there is no mass transit system like New York City’s,” he said.“He currently holds an active Florida driver’s license. The way he is being pushed toward poverty by those targeting him, after all he has done for this country, is appalling and it is clearly politically motivated.”In July, a judge dismissed Giuliani’s bankruptcy case, clearing the way for Freeman and Moss to begin collecting the settlement. But Nathan said in the letter dated Monday that Giuliani had “refused or been unable to answer basic questions about the location of most of the property”.He wrote: “The visit to the apartment, which all parties understood to be for the purposes of assessing the transportation and storage needs for the receivership property contained therein, instead revealed that the apartment was substantially empty.”Freeman and Moss said they received death threats and constant intimidation following the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden when Giuliani amplified a misleading video and falsely accused them of illegal activity while counting ballots in Atlanta on election night.The pair were formally cleared by investigators of any wrongdoing, and a jury ruled Giuliani owed them $148m for spreading lies about them.The pair subsequently settled similar defamation lawsuits with far-right media outlets the Gateway Pundit and One America News.Giuliani has sometimes been an attorney for Trump, who is running for the presidency again on Tuesday in a contest pitting him against Kamala Harris. 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      Florida may enshrine hunting and fishing by ‘traditional methods’ – but what are they?

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      On election day, Florida voters will decide whether to enshrine a constitutional right to hunt and fish in their state.Amendment 2, proposed by Republican state lawmaker Lauren Melo, seeks to “preserve traditional methods, as a public right and preferred means of responsibly managing and controlling fish and wildlife”.Much is at stake. If the amendment succeeds, hunting and fishing would be considered the primary – and legally protected – conservation methods in Florida. Both activities are a huge part of the state’s multibillion-dollar recreational tourism economy. As of 30 October, backers of amendment 2 had raised nearly $1.3m for the measure, far out-fundraising the amendment’s opponents.Lawyers, scientists and conservationists worry amendment 2’s vague language, particularly the passage about “traditional methods”, could supersede science-based wildlife management in unprecedented ways.“That language is open to applying chicanery,” said David Guest, a retired Earthjustice lawyer based in Florida. “Does that mean that you can use explosives [in the destructive practice called “blast fishing”]? I mean, what in the world is this?”Pushed by conservative-leaning organizations such as the National Rifle Association and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF), these “sportsmen’s bills of rights” view hunting as a cultural tradition and are meant to counter proposals to limit hunting and fishing.View image in fullscreen“It’s a pre-emptive safeguard against the anti-sportsman agenda,” said Mark Lance, CSF’s south-eastern states senior director. The CSF and the the NRA apply that term to what they consider extremist animal-rights campaigns to end all hunting, epitomized by former Humane Society CEO Wayne Pacelle’s leadership.The CSF drafted language for many of the measures nationwide, including Florida’s, along with the International Order of T Roosevelt, a hunting advocacy group named after the former president and hunting enthusiast Theodore Roosevelt. The CSF is also fighting a Colorado proposal that would eliminate hunting for mountain lions.These campaigns to change constitutions have been effective at ballot boxes around the nation. Florida could become the 24th state and the last in the south-east to add hunting and fishing rights to its constitution. While Vermont was long the only state to constitutionally protect hunting and fishing rights – it did so for more than 200 years – these measures proliferated after Alabama residents approved one in 1996. To date, only one has failed, in Arizona. But in Guest’s analysis, “this is the one that’s the sloppiest” of other recent measures in states like North Carolina and Utah.Guest and Sierra Club Florida chapter director Susannah Randolph both told the Guardian that the amendment’s nebulous language, particularly the “traditional methods” part, could harm wildlife populations and conservation efforts. There is no legal definition of traditional methods in court, Guest said. Nor is it defined in the amendment.Advocates say this vagueness might enable worst-case-scenario possibilities, including use of steel-jaw leghold traps, which are considered cruel and outlawed in more than 100 countries; using hounds to hunt bears and other game, which is banned or restricted in several states; and more relaxed killing limits. A Florida Bar analysis also suggests that organized hunts are likely to become more common if the amendment passes. Others worry amendment 2 would backpedal on Florida’s 1995 gillnet ban, a constitutional amendment that outlawed commercial fishing nets that entangle marine mammals such as dolphins. Despite this concern, amendment 2 cannot repeal or impede the gillnet ban, Guest said, because both amendments can be applied in tandem.But it’s unclear how courts could interpret such language. Guest pointed out that, in Wisconsin, the constitutional right to hunt and fish was upheld to support wolf hunting after the species was delisted from the Endangered Species Act. Florida wildlife advocates fear the same reasoning would apply to the black bear. On the other hand, Ryan Byrne, a managing editor at the nonpartisan website Ballotpedia, noted that courts have decided states can still regulate hunting and fishing in previous lawsuits.Still, some Florida conservationists and activists think that amendment 2 could empower individuals to do what they please and ignore existing regulations. While the amendment does reiterate the authority of the state wildlife-management agency, the Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission (FWC), the constitutional preference for hunting and fishing would mean there was no guarantee FWC’s authority would win out, said Devki Pancholi, a third-year University of Florida law student and vice-president of the local Animal Legal Defense Fund chapter. Courts will typically refer to the most recent amendment when resolving constitutional disputes.The amendment’s vagueness is strategic. A CSF document distributed at a National Rifle Association convention and obtained by the NoTo 2.org campaign suggested that “by using a vague term like ‘traditional methods,’ it will be up to state agencies to determine what they include in their season as ‘traditional methods’”, such as trapping. The NRA’s lobbying arm has also published recommended language for state constitutional amendments to protect the right to hunt and fish.Florida law already codifies hunting and fishing as statutory rights, which proponents of the constitutional measure argue can be easily reversed. Yet there have not been any significant attempts to outlaw hunting and fishing in the state.“In order to change the statutory right to fish and hunt in Florida, you would need 61 House reps and 21 state senators to vote … to make hunting and fishing illegal,” said Chuck O’Neal, chair of the NoTo2.org political action committee. “It’s never going to happen, not in this state.” Melo and the state senator Jason Brodeur, the Republican lawmakers who introduced the bill in 2023, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.Still, Lance, the CSF south-east regional senior director, argues that even without direct criminalization attempts in Florida, threats exist on a national scale. “We want to be ahead of attacks to hunting and fishing in Florida before it’s too late,” he said.The bill’s supporters point to a failed 2021 Oregon ballot proposal that sought to redefine hunting and fishing as animal abuse as a leading example of nationwide threats.View image in fullscreen“That’s a backhanded way to try to regulate hunting and fishing,” said Lane Stephens, a lobbyist who represents the Southeastern Dog Hunters Association, among others.Stephens added that the attempt was aligned with the mission of the Humane Society, which contributed nearly $10,000 to the NoTo2.org campaign.“We don’t want [animal-rights activists] trying to run something in our constitution or in state law that would limit our abilities to hunt and fish,” Stephens said, adding that many of Florida’s incoming urban residents don’t understand or agree with the hunting and fishing heritage Floridians enjoy.He continued: “It’s up to FWC to decide when we have a season and what that season looks like.”But Pancholi, the law student, and others question some of the procedures behind the measure getting on the ballot and FWC’s involvement with it. The bill was fast-tracked through the state legislature, O’Neal pointed out, with fewer hearings in the statehouse and senate than usual. And the FWC, which is responsible for regulating fish and wildlife, may be the measure’s most significant supporter.In September, the FWC sent out a memo on official letterhead, written by chair Rodney Barreto. It directed those with questions about the amendment to a Yes on 2 campaign communications director. Barreto is also vice-chair of the Yes on 2 campaign and sits on the board of the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, which contributed $250,000 to the Vote Yes on Amendment 2 political action committee. FWC commissioners Steven Hudson and Preston Farrior contributed $10,000 and $15,000, respectively, to the Yes on 2 campaign as well. Commissioners are gubernatorial appointees.According to Florida law, government agencies are required to provide public notice in a public meeting before formally endorsing a ballot measure, but FWC did not hold public discussions about its position before announcing its support.“From what I could tell, I wasn’t able to find any meeting notes,” Pancholi, the law student, said. Neither could the Guardian. If true, “that would be a violation of the law”, she added. FWC did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment by press time.Conservation and science at oddsYes on 2 supporters are united by a strong belief that hunters and anglers are the original conservationists.“Hunting is a means of conservation by which animal populations remain under control,” said Stephens. “We need to make decisions based on the science and the data, and not on emotions.”Yet scientists have argued that the amendment could do exactly the opposite, placing hunting and fishing higher than other management methods such as habitat restoration, raising vulnerable species in captivity for release, or “bag limits” that restrict the kind and number of animals people can kill or keep. Such an approach appears at odds with the basics of wildlife management, said Edward Camp, a professor of fisheries and aquaculture governance at the University of Florida.“Does it influence how the best management advice is selected?” Camp said. “That’s, I think, at the heart of the issue.”Amendment 2 may prioritize hunts as the solution to human-wildlife conflicts instead, pushing other scientific methods to the backseat. After a 2015 bear hunt killed nearly 300 bears over the span of just two days, for example, several Florida counties allocated money for bear-proof trash bins that helped reduce human-bear encounters.Guest, the environmental lawyer, predicts that “the focus will be more on consumption of wildlife and less on conservation”.Ballotpedia’s Byrne noted the widespread notion that ballot measures, regardless of topic, are sometimes “really just to stoke a cultural issue and try to affect turnout”.With a much-publicized abortion measure also on the ballot in Florida and increasingly politicized judiciaries, Guest said the sportsmen’s bills of right are part of a national movement to advance the political agenda of the far right.“The constitution is the social contract,” he said. “We should be more cautious in the way we write it.” More

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      Contested state supreme court seats are site of hidden battle for abortion access

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      Abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and it’s one of the top issues in the presidential contest between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But it is also key to less publicized but increasingly contested races for seats on state supreme courts, which often have the last word on whether a state will ban or protect access to the procedure.This year, voters in 33 states have the chance to decide who sits on their state supreme courts. Judges will be on the ballot in Arizona and Florida, where supreme courts have recently ruled to uphold abortion bans. They are also up for election in Montana, where the supreme court has backed abortion rights in the face of a deeply abortion-hostile state legislature.In addition, supreme court judges are on the ballot in Maryland, Nebraska and Nevada – all of which are holding votes on measures that could enshrine access to abortion in their state constitutions. Should those measures pass, state supreme courts will almost certainly determine how to interpret them.Indeed, anti-abortion groups are already gearing up for lawsuits.“We’re all going to end up in court, because they’re going to take vague language from these ballot initiatives to ask for specific things like funding for all abortions, abortion for minors without parental consent,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief media and policy strategist for the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, which is currently campaigning around state supreme court races in Arizona and Oklahoma. “Judges have become a very big, important step in how abortion law is actually realized.”In Michigan and Ohio, which voted in 2022 and 2023 respectively to amend their state constitution to include abortion rights, advocates are still fighting in court over whether those amendments can be used to strike down abortion restrictions. Come November, however, the ideological makeup of both courts may flip.Spending in state supreme court races has surged since Roe fell. In the 2021-2022 election cycle, candidates, interest groups and political parties spent more than $100m, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost double the amount spent in any previous midterm cycle.View image in fullscreenIn 2023, a race for a single seat on the Wisconsin supreme court alone cost $51m – and hinged on abortion rights, as the liberal-leaning candidate talked up her support for the procedure. (As in many other – but not all – state supreme court races, the candidates in Wisconsin were technically non-partisan.) After that election, liberals assumed a 4-3 majority on the Wisconsin supreme court. The court is now set to hear a case involving the state’s 19th-century abortion ban, which is not currently being enforced but is still on the books.It’s too early to tally up the money that has been dumped into these races this year, especially because much of it is usually spent in the final days of the election. But the spending is all but guaranteed to shatter records.In May, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes announced that they were teaming up this cycle to devote $5m to ads, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in supreme court races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. Meanwhile, the ACLU and its Pac, the ACLU Voter Education Fund, has this year spent $5.4m on non-partisan advertising and door-knocking efforts in supreme court races in Michigan, Montana, North Carolina and Ohio. The scale of these investments was unprecedented for both Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, according to Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Judiciary Program who tracks supreme court races.

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      “For a long time, judicial campaign ads often were just judges saying that they were fair and independent and had family values, and that was about it. Now, you’re seeing judges talk about abortion rights or voting rights or environmental rights in their campaign ads,” Keith said. By contrast, rightwing judicial candidates are largely avoiding talk of abortion, Keith said, as the issue has become ballot box poison for Republicans in the years since Roe fell. Still, the Judicial Fairness Initiative, the court-focused arm of the Republican State Leadership Committee, announced in August that it would make a “seven-figure investment” in judicial races in Arizona, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.Balancing the federal benchAbortion is far from the only issue over which state courts hold enormous sway. They also play a key role in redistricting, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and more. And with the US Congress so gridlocked, state-level legislation and its legality has only grown in importance.For years, conservative operatives have focused on remaking the federal judiciary in their ideological image – an effort that culminated in Donald Trump’s appointments of three US supreme court justices and has made federal courts generally more hostile to progressive causes. Now, the ACLU hopes to make state supreme courts into what Deirdre Schifeling, its chief political and advocacy officer, calls a “counterbalance” to this federal bench.“We have a plan through 2030 to work to build a more representative court,” said Schifeling, who has a spreadsheet of the supreme court races that will take place across eight states for years to come. (As a non-partisan organization, the ACLU focuses on voter education and candidates’ “civil rights and civil liberties” records.) This cycle, the organization’s messaging has centered on abortion.“Nationally, you’re seeing polling that shows the top thing that voters are voting on is the economy. But these judges don’t really influence the economy,” Schifeling said. “Of the issues that they can actually influence and have power over, reproductive rights is by far the most important to voters.”Abortion rights supporters are testing out this strategy even in some of the United States’ most anti-abortion states. In Texas, where ProPublica this week reported two women died after being denied emergency care due to the state’s abortion ban, former US air force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones has launched the Find Out Pac, which aims to unseat three state supreme court justices.Justices Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock and John Devine, the Pac has declared, “fucked around with our reproductive freedom” in cases upholding Texas’s abortion restrictions. Now, Jones wants them out.“Why would we not try to hold some folks accountable?” Jones said. “This is the most direct way in which Texas voters can have their voices heard on this issue.” (There is no way for citizens to initiate a ballot measure in Texas.) The Pac has been running digital ads statewide on how the Texas ban has imperiled access to medically necessary care.However, since state supreme court races have long languished in relative obscurity, voters don’t always know much about them and may very well default to voting on party lines in the seven states where the ballots list the affiliations of nominees for the bench. Although the majority of Texans believe abortions should be legal in all or some cases, nearly half of Texans don’t recall seeing or hearing anything about their supreme court in the last year, according to Find Out Pac’s own polling.“This conversation that we’re having in Texas, around the importance of judicial races, is new for us as Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s not for the Republicans.” More

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      ‘He could go to jail’: for Donald Trump, election day is also judgment day

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      Losing an election for the highest office is a crushing blow that no candidate forgets. But when the American electorate delivers its verdict next week, the personal stakes for Donald Trump will be uniquely high. His fate will hover between the presidency and the threat of prison.If he claims victory, Trump will be the first convicted criminal to win the White House and gain access to the nuclear codes. If he falls short, the 78-year-old faces more humiliating courtroom trials and potentially even time behind bars. It would be the end of a charmed life in which he has somehow always managed to outrun the law and duck accountability.For Trump, Tuesday is judgment day.“He branded himself as the guy who gets away with it,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, adding that, should he lose, “he is facing a lot of moments of reckoning. He could go to jail. He could end up considerably less wealthy than he is. No matter what happens, and no matter whether he wins or loses, there will be a reckoning over his health. Death, ill health, dementia – those are things even he can’t escape.”The property developer and reality TV star has spent his career pushing ethical and legal boundaries to the limit, facing countless investigations, court battles and hefty fines. Worthy of a novel, his has been a life of scandal on a gargantuan scale.In the 1970s Trump and his father were sued by the justice department for racial discrimination after refusing to rent apartments to Black people in predominantly white buildings. His property and casino businesses, including the Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza, filed for bankruptcy several times in the 1990s and early 2000s.Trump University, a business offering property training courses, faced multiple lawsuits for fraud, misleading marketing and false claims about the quality of its programmes. In 2016 Trump settled for $25m without admitting wrongdoing.View image in fullscreenThe Donald J Trump Foundation, a charitable organisation, was investigated and sued for allegedly using charitable funds for personal and business expenses. Trump eventually agreed to dissolve the foundation with remaining funds going to charity.Trump and his company were ordered to pay more than $350m in a New York civil fraud trial for artificially inflating his net worth to secure favourable loan terms. He is also known to have paid little to no federal income taxes in specific years which, although technically legal, was seen by some as bordering on unethical.But Trump became a fixture of the New York tabloids and hosted his own reality TV show, The Apprentice. Blair added: “His early realisation was that if you get famous, if you get large, people will get out of the way. He spent the first part of his career as a real estate developer, making himself seem the embodiment of enormous tycoon-level success even though, in fact, many things he did weren’t successful and his father kept bailing him out.“But he put across that impression and he rode that fame express that he had created for himself over a remarkable number of obstacles all the way to The Apprentice, which set him up permanently as the image of this unstoppable always-on-top tycoon and people are in awe of that. All of which could be described as branding.”Trump’s private life is no more savoury. Trump has reportedly cheated on all three of his wives. More than two dozen women have come forward with accusations of sexual misconduct against him, most recently the former model Stacey Williams, who told the Guardian that Trump groped her in 1993 as Jeffrey Epstein watched in what felt like a “twisted game” between the two men.During the 2016 election campaign, an Access Hollywood tape emerged in which Trump could be heard bragging about grabbing women by their private parts. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Then last year a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996, awarding her $5m.Trump’s presidency and its aftermath were no less morally compromised. He made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims over four years, according to a count by the Washington Post newspaper, spanning everything from the crowd size at his inauguration to the result of the 2020 election.View image in fullscreenHe became the first president to be impeached twice, first for withholding military aid to pressure Ukraine’s government to investigate his political opponents, then for instigating a coup on 6 January 2021 following his defeat. He also became the subject of not one but four criminal cases, any one of which would have been enough to scuttle the chances of any other White House hopeful.In May Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush-money payment to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels, making him the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes. Sentencing is scheduled for 26 November (the judge delayed it from 18 September after the Republican nominee asked that it wait until after the election).What was billed as the trial of the century has already begun to fade from public consciousness and played a relatively modest role in the election campaign. Jonathan Alter, a presidential biographer who was in court for every day of the trial, recalled: “I’ve covered some big stories over the years but there was nothing like the drama of watching the jury foreperson say, ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty’ 34 times and Donald Trump looking like he was punched in the gut.”Alter, who describes the experience in his new book, American Reckoning, reflects on how Trump has been able to act with impunity for so long. “It’s a combination of luck, galvanised defiance and the credulousness of a large chunk of the American people,” he said. “Demagoguery works. Playing on people’s fears works. It doesn’t work all the time but we can look throughout human history to political figures and how demagoguery and scapegoating ‘the other’ works.”Alter, who covered the trial for Washington Monthly magazine, added: “We’ve had plenty of demagogues, scoundrels and conmen in politics below the level of president. Trump has been lucky to escape accountability but the United States has been lucky that we haven’t had something like this before. The founders were very worried about it. They felt we would face something like this for sure.”The US’s system of checks and balances has been racing to keep up. Trump was charged by the special counsel Jack Smith with conspiring to overturn the results of his election loss to Joe Biden in the run-up to the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. The former president and 18 others were also charged by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, with taking part in a scheme to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia.Trump was charged again by Smith with illegally retaining classified documents that included nuclear secrets, taken with him from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after he left office in January 2021, and then obstructing government demands to give them back.With a such a caseload, it was widely assumed that Trump would spend this election shuttling between rallies one day and trials the next. But the courtroom campaign never really happened since, true to past form, he found ways to throw sand in the gears of the legal system and put off his moment of reckoning.View image in fullscreenOr he simply got lucky. In Georgia, it emerged that Willis had a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor Nathan Wade, prompting demands that she be removed. Smith’s federal election case was thrown off track for months by a supreme court ruling that presidents have immunity for official actions taken in office. The classified documents case was thrown out by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, although Smith is appealing and the charges could be reinstated.Such delays have made it easier to forget just how much of an outlier Trump is. Past presidential brushes with the law consisted of Ulysses S Grant being fined for speeding his horse-drawn carriage in Washington and Harry Truman receiving a ticket for driving his car too slowly on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1953. Richard Nixon resigned before he could be impeached over the Watergate scandal and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.Meanwhile the standard for presidential aspirants has been high. Joe Biden’s first run for the White House fell apart amid allegations that he had plagiarised a speech by Britain’s Labour leader Neil Kinnock. During the 2000 campaign, a last-minute revelation that Republican candidate George W Bush had a drunk driving conviction that he concealed for 24 years generated huge headlines and was seen as a possible gamechanger. Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 defeat on an FBI investigation into her email server that produced no charges.Trump, by contrast, once memorably boasted that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. He has done everything but yet still finds himself within touching distance of a second presidency.Indeed, he has repeatedly flipped the script, citing the cases against him as evidence that he is a martyr of sinister deep state forces. In this version it is Democrats, not Trump, who are the threat to democracy. Claiming solidarity with others who feel a sense a grievance, he often says: “They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.”The Georgia case produced the indelible image of Trump’s mugshot, with the former president staring defiantly at the camera. Within hours it had been transformed from a badge of shame into a literal badge for sale, along with posters, T-shirts and other merchandise that is still sported by his fans at rallies with slogans such as “Convicted felon” or “Never surrender”.View image in fullscreenJohn Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump, said: “For reasons that I don’t understand, every time he gets indicted his poll numbers have gone up. The reason is people have very negative attitudes about Biden and they think he has weaponised the justice system – which I don’t think he’s done – but Trump has convinced people he’s a victim.“Every time he gets indicted again, he just uses it as more proof that he’s oppressed. It’s ridiculous but he has turned it. Like a good conman, he’s taken a seemingly impossible argument and made it worth a lot to him.”This judo move, turning the opponent’s weight against them, might explain why Democrats have not emphasised Trump’s criminal record to the degree that might once have been expected.Early on, the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, did shine a light on Trump’s misdemeanours, drawing a contrast with her past as a courtroom prosecutor by stating: “I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”The line drew cheers but was absent from her closing argument in Washington on Tuesday night, which focused instead on likening Trump to a “petty tyrant” who would sow chaos and division. Indeed, some have taken the view that even criminal convictions pale in significance compared with the threat of a would-be fascist.But Moe Vela, a lawyer and a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said he wishes that Trump’s criminal past had been given greater emphasis by the Harris campaign. “I am extremely surprised we have not heard about that more,” he said. “He is a convicted felon. I thought it should have been said more often in the litany of grievances about him because I thought it was like low-hanging fruit.”Can Trump’s luck hold one more time? He has waged another White House campaign riven with extremism and racism, divisiveness and violent language, earning comparisons with fascists from the past. If elected, he is expected to use all the levers of power at his disposal to squash the outstanding cases against him; last week he boasted that he would fire his nemesis Smith “within two seconds” of becoming president. But if Trump is defeated by Harris, his legal perils will again gather like a dark cloud.Vela added: “If he loses this election, I pray to God that she does not in any way pardon him. I hope that our judicial system functions effectively and properly in taking all of these cases through to fruition. Some of them may come out where he is not convicted, but if conviction is the result, he should be punished just like anybody else. No one in this country is above the law.”That point was illustrated by the New York case, in which even a former president stood trial and was held to account. The system worked. Alter reflected: “That was very inspiring, the wisdom of the judge and jury, who took their responsibilities very seriously. It gave me a lump in my throat. It made me realise we’re not done.” More

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      US judge returns lawsuit against Elon Musk’s $1m voter scheme to state court

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      A federal judge on Friday denied an attempt by America Pac – the political action committee founded by Elon Musk to support Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency – to move to federal court a civil suit brought by the Philadelphia district attorney over a daily $1m prize draw for registered voters.The lawyers for Musk and his America Pac had argued that the lawsuit, which is seeking to halt the sweepstakes in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, needed to be resolved in federal court as it referenced the 5 November presidential election.But the presiding US district judge Gerald Pappert disagreed with that contention in a five-page opinion, writing that the motivations of the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, were irrelevant – and that his office had the power to bring the case in state court.“Having now considered the parties’ submissions, the court grants the motion and remands the case back to the Court of Common Pleas,” it said.The civil suit that names both Musk and America Pac alleges that a petition asking registered voters in battleground states to submit their address, phone number and emails in exchange for $47, as well as to enter a daily $1m prize draw, was a lottery scheme that was illegal under state law.The petition has separately attracted scrutiny from the US justice department, which warned America Pac that the lottery violated federal law as it in effect amounts to paying people to register to vote. But the civil suit was the first legal action taken to stop the scheme.As the petition asks people to pledge their support to the US constitution’s first and second amendments – big causes for Republicans – it is widely seen by election law experts as illegally encouraging Trump supporters to register to vote in swing states. In a close election, turnout by voters for the former president could tip the result.

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      The suit also accuses Musk and America Pac of violating state consumer protection laws by deploying deceptive or misleading statements. For instance, Krasner contends that winners are not random, as advertised, because multiple winners have been people who showed up at Trump rallies.Musk’s defenders say it is simply a contest open to registered voters. In theory, they say, Democrats registered to vote in battleground states can complete the petition and have a chance to win the $1m lottery.The petition is perhaps the most public of the various strategies employed by America Pac to bolster Trump’s candidacy. The Super Pac now leads the crucial get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of the Trump campaign as Musk searches for more ways to help the former president return to the Oval Office.The ground game effort has suffered from some setbacks. The Guardian has previously reported that tens of thousands of Trump voters might not be reached after America Pac’s internal systems flagged that 20 to 25% of door knocks reported in Arizona and Nevada may have been fraudulent. More

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      Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro barred from practicing law in New York

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      Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney for Donald Trump, has been suspended from practicing law in New York and could be disbarred just days after pleading guilty in what prosecutors claim was an effort to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.Chesebro was charged in 2023, alongside Donald Trump and 17 others, with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law relating to alleged efforts by the defendants to “knowingly and willfully” join a conspiracy to change the outcome of the 2020 election in the state.In the decision this week to suspend Chesebro’s law license, a panel in New York concluded that he had been “convicted of a serious crime”. The order reads: “Having concluded that respondent has been convicted of a serious crime, we accordingly suspend respondent from the practice of law in New York on an interim basis.”It defers to a court determination of whether a judgment of conviction has become “final” in Chesebro’s Georgia criminal proceeding.Chesebro pleaded guilty to a single felony charge in October 2023: conspiracy to commit filing false documents. He was sentenced to five years’ probation and 100 hours of community service, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution, write an apology letter to Georgia’s residents and testify truthfully at any related future trial.Fellow attorney Sidney Powell separately pleaded guilty to six counts of conspiracy and will serve six years of probation, pay a fine of $6,000, and write an apology letter to Georgia and its residents.Last week, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, who is also a defendant in the Georgia election interference case, was ordered by a judge in a separate defamation case to turn over his Manhattan apartment, a Mercedes and a variety of other personal possessions to two Georgia election workers who won a $148m judgment against him.Giuliani was previously disbarred in July 2024. More

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      Elon Musk skips hearing as $1m election giveaway case moves to federal court

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      Elon Musk failed to show up to a required hearing in a Philadelphia case challenging his $1m-a-day sweepstakes. His absence would have risked contempt of court had the case continued in Pennsylvania court, but it was moved to federal court in response to a motion filed by Musk’s attorneys, who did attend the hearing. No hearings were immediately scheduled in the federal case.Judge Angelo Foglietta agreed that Musk, as a named defendant in the lawsuit filed by the district attorney, Larry Krasner, should have attended the hearing in person, but he declined to immediately sanction the tech mogul. Musk’s attorney said his client could not “materialize” in the courtroom with notice only given the night before.Krasner’s team challenged the notion that the founder of SpaceX could not make it to Philadelphia, prompting a quick retort from the judge.“Counsel, he’s not going to get in a rocket ship and land on the building,” Foglietta replied.On Wednesday, the judge had ordered all parties to attend the Thursday morning hearing, including Musk. Musk’s attorneys had filed a motion to shift the suit from Pennsylvania state court to federal court in a filing late that day, which was granted shortly after Musk did not appear.Lawyers for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office requested the case be returned to state court, calling the move to the higher court a “cowardly” delay tactic meant to “run the clock until election day”. The federal judge assigned to the case ordered Musk’s attorneys to respond by Friday morning. Musk’s counsel had argued that state court was not the proper venue and that the Philadelphia district attorney was engaging in thinly veiled electioneering.“Rather, although disguised as state law claims, the complaint’s focus is to prevent defendants’ purported ‘interference’ with the forthcoming federal presidential election by any means,” the Tesla CEO’s attorneys wrote.In the original suit, Krasner argued that Musk’s petition and associated contest were “indisputably violating” specific Pennsylvania laws against illegal lotteries. Musk’s attorneys said he was engaging in legally protected political speech and spending.John Summers, an attorney for the DA’s office, told the judge on Thursday that Musk’s Pac had “brazenly” continued the sweepstakes despite the lawsuit, awarding about 13 checks of $1m since the contest began, including one the day of the hearing.“They’re doing things in the dark. We don’t know the rules being followed. We don’t know how they’re supposedly picking people at random,” Summers said. “It’s an outrage.”The cash giveaways come from Musk’s political organization, which aims to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the vital swing state, which is seen as a key to victory by both Trump and his opponent, Kamala Harris.Krasner, a Democrat, filed suit on Monday to stop the America Pac sweepstakes, which is set to run through election day and is open to registered voters in swing states who sign a petition supporting the constitution. Musk has been tweeting photographs of the winners holding novelty checks.Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, saying he is tasked with protecting the public from both illegal lotteries and “interference with the integrity of elections”.Election law experts have raised questions about whether Musk’s drawing violates a federal law barring someone from paying others to vote. Musk has cast the money as both a prize as well as earnings for work as a spokesperson for the group. More