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      Trump’s legal woes are part of his quasi-religious mythology of martyrdom | Sidney Blumenthal

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      On 16 or perhaps 17 July 2024, in Milwaukee, the Republican national convention will likely nominate as its presidential candidate a convicted criminal. When Donald Trump ascends the podium to accept the nomination for his third time he will probably have been found guilty months earlier of having staged an attempted coup to overthrow American democracy – “conspiring to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election, obstruct the certification of the election results, and discount citizens’ legitimate votes”, in the words of special counsel Jack Smith.The US district court judge Tanya Chutkan has announced that she will set the trial date at the next hearing on Trump’s case on 28 August. Smith has sought a 2 January 2024 start date for a trial to last an estimated six weeks into mid-February. Trump’s attorneys have preposterously suggested a date in April 2026. If Judge Chutkan fixes the trial for any time before 1 June 2024, Trump will accept the Republican nomination after its verdict is rendered.And if the date is earlier than June, Republican primaries will be conducted at the same time as the trial. Day by day, the compounding of the doubled events will incite his followers to redouble their fervor and devotion. Rocket fuel will be pumped on to the fire of Trump’s campaign. While the closing statements are delivered to the jury, Republicans will, if the polls hold, have already voted overwhelmingly for Trump and reduced his opponents’ chances to ashes.The day of the first contest, the Iowa caucuses, 15 January, is also the day that his second defamation trial with E Jean Carroll begins. The judge in that case, in New York, Lewis A Kaplan, found in July that Trump had “raped” her. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted … makes clear, the jury found that Mr Trump in fact did exactly that,” he said. So Trump will mount the stage at the convention, regardless of the legal verdict about the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, or any other verdict, as an adjudicated rapist.All told, so far, Trump faces 91 criminal counts in four jurisdictions. Three other elaborate trials will follow his January 6 case, if it is scheduled any time in January or February. His trial date in New York is tentatively on the calendar for 25 March 2024. In that case, he is charged by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg “for falsifying New York business records in order to conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election. During the election, Trump and others employed a ‘catch and kill’ scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. Trump then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws.”But Bragg has suggested he would postpone this trial to allow the January 6 federal case to be first.Trump’s trial in the Mar-a-Lago presidential records case is on the calendar in Florida for 20 May 2024, where he is charged with the illegal and willful theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice.Even more than during the gripping performance of his various indictments, the theatre of his trials will subsume politics. There will not be another campaign, some semblance of a normal campaign of the past, a fantasy campaign, separate from Trump’s trials. The scenes from courtroom to courtroom will overlap with the primaries – the final ones taking place on 4 June 2024 – only intensifying the zeal of his base. And then Trump’s battle with the law will engulf the general election.The trials are a continuous spectacle, featuring an all-star cast in far-flung locations. Political reporters are barely heard from, while legal analysts fill the airwaves. Every twist and turn, every motion, every argument is the breathless lead story. Everyone, from prosecutors to co-conspirators, named and unnamed, indicted and unindicted, are characters in Trump’s new reality show – part violent action movie (the insurrection), part sleazy porn flick (Stormy Daniels), part conspiracy thriller (Mar-a-Lago), and part mafia drama (the fake elector racket).But the Trump trials are more than his means; they are his ends. The trials are not the sideshow, but the heart and soul of Trump’s campaign. They have become his essential fundraising tool to finance his defense, his platform for whipping up his followers into a constant state of excitement, and his instrument for dominating the media to make himself the center of attention and blot out coverage of anyone else.The trials are the message. They are the drama around which Trump plays his role as the unjustly accused victim, whose rights are trampled and who is the martyr for his oppressed “deplorables”. He is taking the slings and arrows for them. The narcissist is the self-sacrificing saint. The criminal is the angel. The liar is the truth-teller. If any Republican lapses in faithfulness, they are more than a mere doubter or skeptic, but a betrayer and traitor. Trump’s trials are the rigorous trial of his followers’ faith. Rejection of temptation in an encounter with an impertinent fact that might raise a qualm shows purity of heart. Seduction by fact must be resisted. The siren song of critical thinking must be cast out as sin. Trump’s convictions are the supreme test of his followers’ strength of conviction.Republicans are not prisoners of Trump’s narcissistic rage. They don’t reject it. They don’t regret it. They don’t apologize. They mirror it. They mimic it. They exult in it. It is the gratification they receive for passing through the ordeal of belief. His rage is their reward. It is their cheap vicarious defiance of the evil-doers: the establishment, the globalists, the Fauciists, the FBI, the Barbie movie. As Trump has received target letters, so judges, district attorneys, the special counsel, and their wives, too, must be targets. Fair game is fair play. Hallelujah!Poor Mike Pence, who Trump chose as his running mate to balance his sinfulness with Christian virtue, benightedly still believes that truthfulness, righteousness and clean hands makes him the ideal evangelical avatar. He has positioned himself on the Republican issues as a scold of Trump’s fall from grace on abortion. Pence is in favor of a national ban, not leaving it to the states like Trump, as if issues matter. His humility as a godly servant leader, for years imitating every gesture of Trump’s, reached its abrupt end in his refusal to drink from Trump’s poisoned chalice.Yet Pence’s embrace of scripture in the form of the constitution has not beatified him to the evangelicals. There is no worldly subject that can grant him absolution from being perceived as Trump’s Judas. His steadfastness is scorned. His blamelessness is derided. “I’m glad they didn’t hang you,” a man said to Pence at the Iowa state fair. That man’s sentiment is the current definition of moderate Republicanism.The precise source of Trump’s permanent campaign of trials can be traced to before the election of 2016, when his inveterate dirty trickster Roger Stone coined the “Stop the Steal” slogan to claim Trump had been robbed by Senator Ted Cruz in the Colorado caucuses. That falsehood became Trump’s “Stop the Steal” con before the 2020 election, which metastasized into his coup and insurrection, and now the prosecutions. (Last week, a Danish film-maker who has produced a documentary about Stone released previously unseen video of him laying out the details of the fake electors scheme on 5 November 2020, two days after the election. It seems doubtful that Stone was the originator of the conspiracy. The idea was floated in February 2020 at a closed meeting to the rightwing Council on National Policy, whose president, Tom Fitton, later called on Trump to pardon Stone. Fitton sent Trump a memo on 31 October 2020, three days before the election, advising him to declare before the ballots were counted, “We had an election today – and I won.” Fitton has been identified by a number of news organizations as Unnamed Co-Conspirator Individual 1 in the Georgia indictment.)But Trump’s career in crime is an epic story that antedates his election fraud. The Georgia indictment charging him with operating a “criminal enterprise” is overdue by almost 50 years. His coup d’état is the coup de grâce. But the enormity of his conspiracy to overturn the election ultimately depended upon the weak reed of Pence, who proved surprisingly unpliable. Trump brought the lessons he learned in the demimonde of New York to Washington.He always wanted his Roy Cohn, his model lawyer and mouthpiece. His credentials were nonpareil. Cohn was born and bred in the clubhouse political culture of graft and favoritism, Joe McCarthy’s vicious counsel, returned to the city as its number one fixer, from the mob to the Catholic archdiocese, who had won his own acquittals in four criminal trials for bribery and conspiracy when the Trumps – father Fred, with his real-estate empire in the outer boroughs, and his son Donald, on the make in the Big Apple – hired him in 1974 to get them off the hook of a federal suit for housing discrimination against black tenants. On advice of counsel, Trump repeatedly perjured himself, Cohn dragged the case out, and the Trumps ignored Department of Justice decrees. Cohn claimed the case was created by “planted malcontents”. Trump, meanwhile, got his real-estate license, and Cohn would set him up with the mob to build Trump Tower.But Roy Cohn was only one part of what Trump required to operate. He also needed the prosecutors to lay off. He needed his Robert Morgenthau, scion of one of New York’s most distinguished families, personification of civic virtue, the US attorney for the southern district of New York for a dozen years and the district attorney of Manhattan for 35 years, “my friend, the late, GREAT, Robert Morgenthau”, as Trump called him after his death at 100. Morgenthau brought Trump on to the board of the Police Athletic Association, hosted a tribute dinner to him and accepted campaign contributions. He never opened a single investigation into Trump, and always felt there was nothing to see.Soon after Rudy Giuliani was appointed the US attorney for the southern district in 1983, Trump was bounced out of New York by the bankers. Trump’s profligacy and mismanagement crashed his monumental casino and hotel, the Taj Mahal in New Jersey, built with mob help, and he could not secure his loans. Giuliani was busy elsewhere, prosecuting the five families of the mafia, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (Rico) of 1970, the first time the act was applied in a major case. His pioneering use of the Rico statute made Giuliani’s reputation. Trump and Giuliani circled each other in a strange dance of outsized egos.Giuliani threw in with Trump late in the game, during the 2016 campaign, when he manipulated his network of FBI agents in and around the New York office to raise the pressure on director James Comey to reopen the already closed investigation into Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails because of the existence of a computer owned by her aide Huma Abedin and accessed by her husband Anthony Weiner. Comey succumbed. His public announcements were decisive in shifting marginal votes in swing states to Trump. (The FBI chief of counter-intelligence in the New York office at the time, Charles McGonigal, closely connected to Giuliani, pleaded guilty this week to money-laundering payments from a sanctioned Russian oligarch.)Trump’s next task for Giuliani was to troll through the back alleys of Ukraine seeking disinformation on Joe Biden to discredit him as the Democratic candidate in 2020. Giuliani’s efforts were an essential element in Trump’s scheme that prompted him to attempt extorting Volodymyr Zelensky into trading fabricated dirt on Biden for missiles desperately needed to defend Ukraine against Russia. Trump was impeached for the first time.Giuliani was the master of Rico. He knew better than anyone how the law worked and the mafia operated. The first he used to forge his image as a crime-fighter; the second he emulated on Trump’s behalf. So, the wielder of Rico was ensnared under Rico. He learned first-hand how the mafia did its business. He discovered how to organize a racket into an effective hierarchy. He learned the potential value of intimidating innocents. From this point of view, he saw the Republican party as a racket in the making, from the Republican National Committee to the Republican Association of Attorneys General to the state parties, all constituent families of a mafia, with Giuliani himself as the consigliere to the capo di tutti capi.“This criminal organization,” stated the Georgia indictment, “… constituted an ongoing organization whose members and associates functioned as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.” Giuliani was indicted on 13 counts, including racketeering, making false statements, harassment and intimidation of an election worker, and election fraud. The former prosecutor is the prosecuted. He is struggling to meet his attorney’s fees. He complains that he is owed $300,000 from Trump for non-payment for his counsel.The trials have become Trump’s engine for capturing his third Republican nomination. His celebrity has been transformed into a passion play of victimization. His problem is that the trials are not shows.
      Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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      Democrat calls McCarthy ‘pathetic and shameful’ for protecting Santos after aide charged

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      A senior Democrat called Kevin McCarthy “pathetic and shameful” on Wednesday, for continuing to protect George Santos even as a staffer to the fabulist Republican congressman faced charges for impersonating the House speaker’s own chief of staff.Daniel Goldman of New York said: “According to a federal indictment, George Santos paid someone to impersonate Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff to raise money, yet McCarthy continues to protect Santos.“Pathetic and shameful.”The indictment of Samuel Miele on four counts of wire fraud and one of aggravated identity theft was issued in the same New York court where in May Santos pleaded not guilty to charges including fraud, theft and money laundering, CNBC reported.Miele did not immediately comment.Santos was elected to his New York seat last November. He was soon found to have fabricated most of his résumé and to be under investigation in multiple jurisdictions for alleged misdeeds including campaign finance violations, dubious business schemes and sexual harassment.McCarthy removed Santos from committee assignments but otherwise refused to move against a congressman who backed him through 15 votes for speaker, saying investigations should run their course.In May, Republicans dodged a Democratic attempt to make Santos only the sixth member ever expelled from the House. Santos, who has admitted “embellishing” his résumé but denies wrongdoing, is running for re-election next year.CNBC first reported Miele’s impersonation of a senior McCarthy staffer, saying he called “wealthy donors” during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, identifying himself as Dan Meyer.In that report, in January, CNBC said: “The impersonation of the top House Republican’s chief of staff adds to an emerging picture of a winning congressional campaign propelled by fabrications and questionable tactics.”Since then, almost every aspect of Santos’s political career, even his real name, has been brought into question.Republicans under McCarthy control the House by just five seats, making Santos’s seat a key target for Democrats.Goldman, a former prosecutor and lead counsel to the first impeachment of Donald Trump, has worked with another New York Democrat, Ritchie Torres, to keep Santos in the spotlight.In remarks on the House floor in June, Goldman told Republicans: “You are the party of George Santos.“… The guy is an alleged and acknowledged liar and indicted, and you protect him every day … It’s pathetic, and it’s beneath you and it’s beneath this body.” More

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      AOC joins Hollywood picket line in New York: ‘Solidarity is stronger than greed’

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the picket line of film and television actors and writers represented by Sag-Aftra and WGA in front of Netflix’s New York City office on Monday.The liberal congresswoman from New York criticized the wealth of studio executives as new contract negotiations between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) – which represents the studio bosses – and unions have been at loggerheads.The Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents about 11,500 film and television writers, began striking on 2 May. The US actors’ union Sag-Aftra, which has 160,000 members, called their strike on 13 July.Both unions are pushing for residuals from streaming services and terms on how the industry uses technology such as artificial intelligence. The strikes have halted the majority of film and television production in the US.“How many private jets does David Zaslav need? For real. How many private jets do the CEOs need?” Ocasio-Cortez said on the picket line, referring to the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, who received a $246.6m compensation package in 2021.As the Hollywood Reporter noted, Ocasio-Cortez continued: “It is insatiable. It is unacceptable. I do not know how any person can say I need another $100m before another person can have healthcare.”Liz Shuler, the president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the largest federation of unions in the US, also attended the picket line.The picket line on Monday included high-profile actors such as Tatiana Maslany, Sandra Bernhard and F Murray Abraham.“We have workers all across the country either currently on strike or gearing up to be on strike because at the end of the day we are all facing the same challenge, which is the concentration of wealth and corporate greed in America,” Ocasio-Cortez added.She also expressed encouragement to workers on strike and emphasized the effect their strike is having on the labor movement throughout the US.“Direct action gets the goods, now and always,” she said. “The only way that we can do this is by showing them that we are stronger. That our solidarity is stronger than their greed, that our care for one another will overcome their endless desire for more.” More

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      Republican fabulist George Santos compares himself to Rosa Parks

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      George Santos, the Republican congressman whose résumé has been shown to be largely fabricated and who has pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds, stoked outrage by comparing himself to the great civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks.“Rosa Parks didn’t sit in the back, and neither am I gonna sit in the back,” Santos told Mike Crispi Unafraid, a rightwing podcast.Santos also said he will run for re-election in his New York seat, which covers parts of Long Island and Queens.A prospective opponent, the Democratic former state senator Anna M Kaplan, said: “George Santos is an absolute disgrace who continues to embarrass New Yorkers.”Now honoured by a statue in the US Capitol, Parks was a seamstress and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People secretary who carved her place in history when on a bus in Alabama in 1955 she refused to move to make way for a white passenger and was arrested and jailed.According to the Architect of the Capitol, Parks “remained an icon of the civil rights movement to the end of her life. In 1999, the United States Congress honored her with a Congressional Gold Medal. Following her death on 24 October 2005, she was accorded the rare tribute of having her remains lie in honor in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in recognition of her contribution to advancing civil and human rights.”The Parks statue is the first full-length representation of an African American person in the US Capitol. Made of bronze and granite, it is close to 9ft tall and, according to its official description, “suggests inner strength, dignity, resolve and determination, all characteristic of her long-time commitment to working for civil rights”.Santos, 34, compared himself to Parks while sitting in what appeared to be a parked car, wearing a powder blue zip-up hoodie.Since being elected last year, he has consistently attracted controversy over reports of behavior ranging from the bizarre to the picaresque and allegedly criminal. Charged in New York, his bail was guaranteed by relatives. No trial date has been set.Republican House leaders, governing with a small majority, have not seriously moved against him. A motion to expel, and make Santos only the sixth House member ever ejected, failed after Republicans refused to back it.Speaking to Crispi, a former Republican congressional candidate in New Jersey, Santos said of critics in his own party: “They come for me, I go right back for them … So, you know, it’s not gonna stay that way any more. I’m gonna call them out. You want to call me a liar? I’ll call you a sellout.”In February, at Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Santos was confronted by Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former Republican presidential nominee.Romney called Santos a “sick puppy”. Among Santos’s many controversies is a dropped charge of theft in Pennsylvania in 2017, over a purchase of puppies.Santos told Crispi: “The man goes to the State of the Union of the United States wearing the Ukraine lapel pin and tells me, a Latino gay man, that I shouldn’t sit in the front, that I should be in the back. Well, guess what, Rosa Parks but didn’t sit in the back and neither am I gonna sit in the back.“That’s just the reality of our work. Mitt Romney lives in a very different world. And he needs to buckle up because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride for him.” More

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      Central Park Five’s Yusef Salaam wins Democratic city council primary

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      Yusef Salaam, one of the exonerated Central Park Five, is all but assured of a seat on the New York city council after being confirmed as the winner of a Democratic primary, an improbable feat for a political novice who was wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned as a teenager for the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park.Additional votes released on Wednesday showed Salaam as the clear winner of the primary to represent Central Harlem, which took place last week.“I am here because, Harlem, you believed in me,” he said in his victory speech.Salaam, now 49, and four other Black and Latino teens became known as the Central Park Five after their arrest in 1985 over the headline-grabbing rape of a white jogger, one of the most notorious and racially fraught crimes in New York history.Salaam served nearly seven years in prison before the group was exonerated through DNA evidence.He has now prevailed over two veterans, New York assembly members Inez Dickens, 73, and Al Taylor, 65. The incumbent, the democratic socialist Kristin Richardson Jordan, dropped out of the race in May but remained on the ballot.Salaam declared victory with his vote tally barely exceeding 50%, though an unknown number of absentee ballots were yet to be counted. But his lead over Dickens seemed insurmountable and she and Taylor conceded.While all three candidates focused on promoting affordable housing, controlling gentrification and easing poverty, Salaam capitalized on his celebrity in neighborhoods that consider the Central Park Five to be living symbols of the injustices faced by the Black and Latino residents who make up about three-quarters of the district’s population.Zambi Mwendwa said she voted for Salaam because he is “a new face”, not because of the injustice in his past.“I’ve heard him talk. He seems to be talking about the things I care about,” Mwendwa said.But for others, Salaam’s status as a member of the Central Park Five was a motivating factor.“He comes from the neighborhood, and he was incarcerated then turned himself around,” Carnation France said. “He’s trying to do something for the people.”Salaam’s lack of experience in public office might have worked in his favor, according to Amani Wells-Onyioha, a partner at Sole Strategies, which worked on Salaam’s behalf.“In a time like this, when people are looking for a hero, they’re looking for somebody who can relate to them,” Wells-Onyioha said. “I think people saw him as a survivor. He was vindicated and the system eventually ended up working out for him.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSalaam moved to Georgia after he was released and became an activist, speaker, author and poet. He returned to New York in December.He was 15 when he was arrested with Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, who served between five and 12 years in prison before prosecutors agreed to re-examine the case.DNA evidence and a confession linked a serial rapist and murderer to the attack, but he was not prosecuted as too much time had passed. The convictions were vacated in 2002 and the city agreed to pay the exonerated men a combined $41m.In 2012 a Ken Burns documentary, The Central Park Five, rekindled public attention. In 2019 a TV miniseries, When They See Us, drew attention again, just before the Black Lives Matter movement launched in response to the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Burns and his co-directors applauded Harlem voters for “electing a man who has dedicated his life to reconciliation”.Donald Trump, who in 1989 placed ads in four newspapers demanding “Bring Back the Death Penalty” for the Central Park Five, later refused to apologize, saying all five pleaded guilty, a reference to coerced confessions. Salaam reminded voters of that in April, putting out his own full-page ad, headlined “Bring Back Justice & Fairness”, in response to one of Trump’s own indictments. More

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      Central Park Five’s Yusef Salaam declares victory in city council primary

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      Yusef Salaam, who as a child was part of a group of teenagers wrongly accused, convicted and imprisoned for the rape of a woman jogging in New York’s Central Park, has declared victory in a Democratic primary for a city council seat in New York – giving him a very good chance of representing a Harlem district as an elected official.Salaam faced two veteran politicians, New York state assembly members Al Taylor, 65, and Inez Dickens, 73, in the race for a seat representing part of the majority-Black uptown Manhattan neighborhood. The incumbent, democratic socialist Kristin Richard Jordan, dropped out of the race in May but remained on the ballot.The contest was taking place more than two decades after Salaam and four other men – then known as the Central Park Five, now often called the Exonerated Five – were cleared of the crime using DNA evidence.It was one of the city’s most notorious and racially fraught crimes, inflamed when Donald Trump, then best known as a flamboyant real estate mogul in the city and later to become US president, took out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the five.The Associated Press has not declared a winner in the primary race and the election’s outcome might not be certain for days because of New York’s ranked-choice voting rules. That system kicks in if no candidate claims more than 50% of the total vote.It was unclear early on Wednesday whether Salaam would stay above that threshold. With about 95% of votes counted, Salaam had a little less than 51% of the vote, with Dickens trailing substantially in second place.Salaam nonetheless declared victory in a speech to supporters late on Tuesday.“What has happened in this campaign has restored my faith in knowing that I was born for this,” he said.Salaam likened his youthful imprisonment to being “kidnapped”, but he also called his nearly seven years in prison a gift that allowed him to see a racially unjust criminal justice system from the “belly of the beast”.“I am here because, Harlem, you believed in me,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDickens conceded late on Tuesday, but promised to “continue to fight for what my community needs”.If Salaam were to prevail in the primary it would virtually assure him a general election victory in a district unlikely to elect a Republican. It is his first time seeking public office.Salaam was 15 when he was arrested in 1989 and accused, along with four other Black and brown teenagers – Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise – of beating and raping a white woman in Central Park, Trisha Meile.Members of the group served between five and 12 years in prison before prosecutors agreed to re-examine the case. DNA evidence and a confession ultimately linked a serial rapist and murderer to the Central Park attack. The convictions were vacated in 2002 and the city ultimately agreed in a legal settlement to pay the exonerated men $41m. More

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      George Santos mystery bail guarantors to be revealed on Thursday

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      The two people who guaranteed bail for George Santos will have their names publicly revealed, a federal judge ruled, rejecting the indicted Republican congressman’s claim that the disclosure could threaten the guarantors’ safety.Joanna Seybert, a US district judge in Central Islip, New York, said the names would be made public on Thursday at 12pm ET.Seybert said Santos could in the meantime try to modify the terms of his release if his guarantors, who he has suggested are family members, withdraw their $500,000 guarantee.Santos, 34, has expressed a willingness to go to jail rather than release the names.The first-term congressman has pleaded not guilty to a 13-count indictment accusing him of fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds.Following his election, Santos drew huge criticism, including bipartisan calls that he resign, after reports that he had lied about much of his personal and professional background.Amid numerous stories detailing a picaresque political rise, Santos has denied wrongdoing but admitted to fabricating large parts of his résumé.Republican leaders in the House have not pushed Santos to quit. As he took his seat in Congress in January, he supported Kevin McCarthy of California through 15 votes for the position of speaker. McCarthy must rely on a narrow majority, prey to the far right of the party.Joseph Murray, a lawyer for Santos, did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the order to reveal the identities of the guarantors.Santos appealed a 6 June ruling by a federal magistrate judge to identify the guarantors.At least 11 media organizations sought the names, citing public interest. According to a court filing, the House ethics committee also wants the names, to determine whether Santos violated rules on gifts.Murray has said Santos and his staff have been subjected to a “media frenzy and hateful attacks” since the congressman’s indictment became public on 9 May, and it was “reasonable” to believe his bail guarantors might face the same treatment. More

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      Digested week: A beer with Mike Pence to figure out what his deal is? Possibly …

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      MondayIn a reversal of the who-would-you-most-like-to-have-a-drink-with test, candidates declaring for the Republican presidential race this week presented as so singularly unappetising as to beg the question who among them would you leave the bar to avoid? Trump is not, weirdly, at the top of this list, since when he cares to use it one knows his charm is considerable. Mike Pence, who declared his candidacy on Monday and remains enduringly weird, would definitely break the top three, although a small part of me would like to take a crack, over a beer, at figuring out what his deal is. The former vice-president and evangelical Christian’s very clenched personality and eagerness to be photographed at the weekend in leathers on a Harley-Davidson, is suggestive of a range of possibilities.Also throwing his hat into the ring this week is Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey and, for my money, the least appealing candidate in the current Republican lineup, even taking into account Ron DeSantis. Christie, you may remember, was for a hot minute in 2016 spoken of as a credible centrist Republican before everyone remembered who he was. (My favourite Christie story is the one from 2017 when he was snapped from a news helicopter enjoying a deserted beach with his family during a state-wide shutdown when the beaches were closed.) In the years since, he has flip-flopped between craven appeasement and condemnation of Trump and is now running – hollow laugh – as a moral standard-bearer on the strength of his objection to the events surrounding the storming of the US Capitol on January 6.Other candidates in the race include the requisite comedy multimillionaire who has never held office – in this case, the former pharmaceutical company CEO Vivek Ramaswamy whose manifesto seems to be the single word “anti-woke” – and a lone woman, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina. Described by the former CNN host Don Lemon earlier this year as a woman who “isn’t in her prime”, Haley, at 51, is among the youngest of the candidates. There are reasons to dislike Haley (“America is not racist”) as strong as any triggered by the rest of the field, but assuredly, that isn’t one of them.TuesdayAs hot takes continue to fly around in the wake of Hannah Gadsby’s “disastrous” (ARTnews), “silly” (New York Times) curated exhibition about Picasso at the Brooklyn Museum, let’s turn instead to Françoise Gilot, whose death at the age of 101 was announced on Tuesday. Gilot was an artist, an icon in her own right and – there’s no avoiding her connection to the man, although it was the source of career-long irritation to her – the only one of Picasso’s lovers ever to walk out on him. I met her a few years ago in her apartment on the Upper West Side where she presented with the kind of fanatical chic only French women of a certain age can pull off. She wasn’t interested in false modesty. “I was considered astonishingly good,” she said of herself as a young artist. And she wasn’t sentimental about the past. “I have to admit,” she told me, “that I was never so much in love with anyone that I could not consider my own plan as interesting.” When I asked if leaving Picasso had been a liberating experience, she looked at me as if I was mad. “No, because I was not a prisoner. I’d been there of my own will and I left of my own will. That’s what I told him once, before I left. I said watch out, because I came when I wanted to, but I will leave when I want. He said, nobody leaves a man like me.” She smiled and the thrill of that moment, 70 years later, disturbed the air in the room. “I said, we’ll see.”WednesdayThe school field trip to Staten Island is cancelled because of air quality in New York, a decision parents bemoan in the morning and revisit at lunchtime when the sky darkens to a Martian glow. The air is nicotine yellow; the sun is an eery orange disc; the cars have their headlights on at midday. While Californians fold their arms and say to New Yorkers “We told you”, people in the city re-mask and shut the windows. Outside my apartment, it smells as if there is a five-alarm fire a block away.The fires burning in Canada cover an area 10 times larger than is usual for this time of year and Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, describes the smoke across the state as “an emergency crisis”, while New Yorkers describe it, variously, as smelling like “a barbecue”, “cigars”, and “9/11”. It smells to me like cigarette smoke, carried 500 miles down wind by an area of low pressure and bringing a forecast to terrify us all.ThursdayThe spectacle of Harry in court this week makes one wince for the gap between what he might hope his appearance will achieve and how things in reality are likely to play out. I don’t mean in terms of judgment, exactly, but as John Crace wrote this week, the court system is an imprecise mechanism for the deliverance of closure and it is more likely to aggravate than soothe your unease. As ever with Harry, one understands that while the Mirror group is the main target of his ire, there is a family dynamic playing out, too. The 38-year-old prince must know how unbearable his father will find the breach of protocol inherent in his appearance in court, not to mention the implied criticism that while the king did nothing, Harry is the only one in the family with the mettle to take on the tabloids. And the corrupt you-asked-for-it logic of justifying the way he was hounded on the basis that he still seeks publicity seems likely to trail him until he retires to Gloucestershire and is never heard of again.FridayDrew Barrymore on the cover of New York magazine this week exhibits a style of celebrity that seems to date back to Lucille Ball. Barrymore, at 48, has a daytime chatshow in the US in which she giggles and sits on her legs and drops her jaw when someone says something mildly diverting, and empathises so busily with her guests that at times she looks in danger of exploding. (This style is described, by the magazine, as “radically intimate” and involves a lot of “manifesting” of “precepts”.) I urge you to look up her recent interview with the actor Melanie Lynskey, during the course of which Barrymore seizes on the alcoholism of Jason Ritter, Lynskey’s husband, with the avidity of a shark happening upon a seal. I would pay good money to see her apply that unruly energy to the field of Republican candidates for president. More