Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Lindsey Graham says Alito’s upside-down flag was ‘not good judgment’

      by

      Lindsey Graham has said it was “not good judgment” for the supreme court justice Samuel Alito to allow an upside-down American flag to be flown outside his home, marking what for him is a rare rebuke of a conservative judge.The Republican US senator’s comments on Monday to HuffPost’s Igor Bobic came after the New York Times’ recent report that an American flag was displayed upside down outside Alito’s home on 17 January 2021 – less than two weeks after supporters of Donald Trump carried out the deadly US Capitol attack and three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration.The inverted flag is a symbol which has been adopted by supporters of the former president’s false claims that Biden stole the presidency from him, and it reignited fears of political partisanship among the high court’s conservative supermajority, to which Alito belongs.Graham also alluded to claims from Alito that his wife, Martha-Ann, raised the flag in question after the couple became locked in a verbal dispute with a neighbor who used an expletive that is offensive to women. Nonetheless, the senior senator from South Carolina asserted: “It’s not good judgment to do that.“He said his wife was insulted and got mad – assume that to be true – but he’s still a supreme court justice,” Graham remarked. “And, you know, people have to realize that moments like that, to think it through.”As relatively restrained as Graham’s opinion was with respect to Alito, it was a notable shift from his usual supreme court rhetoric.In July 2023, after the supreme court had struck down federal abortion rights, Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan as well as a Colorado state law that compelled entities to afford same-sex couples equal treatment, Graham exalted the justices as “truly standing up for individual constitutional rights and limited government”.“I’ve never been prouder” of the US’s highest-ranking court of law, Graham said at the time. “Unfortunately, we should prepare for and get ready to witness accelerated attacks on the supreme court by radical liberal Democrats angry about these decisions.”The Times published its report about the upside-down flag at the Alitos’ as the supreme court weighs a decision on the extent of presidential immunity. That ruling is bound to affect at least one of Trump’s pending criminal cases heading into the Republican’s expected electoral rematch with his Democratic rival Biden in November.Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge, told the Times “it would be better for the court” if Alito were not involved in cases stemming from the 2020 election. But Fogel said he was “pretty certain that [Alito] will see that differently”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supreme court has adopted a stronger yet non-binding code of ethics for the nine justices on the bench after another conservative member, Clarence Thomas, came under scrutiny for accepting non-disclosed trips funded by a Republican billionaire. Alito, too, reportedly had failed to disclose a similar trip to Alaska.Court employees are under strict rules prohibiting public displays of political affiliation, including bumper stickers on vehicles.According to Reuters, the US flag should be displayed upside down only “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property”. More

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Michael Cohen learned that membership in Trump’s inner circle has a harsh cost | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      When, in the early days, Donald Trump’s diehard fans failed to show up in front of 100 Centre Street at the Manhattan courthouse to clamor about the rank injustice of the case of The People of the State of New York v Donald J Trump, the lonely defendant roused himself from his fitful slumbers to choreograph a dance of the marionettes. The political delegations that started appearing on 14 May attired for perfectly flattering cosplay in Trump matching red ties was a refrain of surrogates echoing insults and imprecations that if the former president were to mutter himself would earn him further contempt of court citations.Trump assembled around him a miniature court and hierarchy that populated a desolation row. In the front row were seated Eric Trump and his wife, Lara Trump, now installed as the co-chair of the Republican National Committee. There were the senators and congressmen, the failed presidential candidates and hopeful running mates who repeated Trump’s scripted talking points against the judge, the prosecutors and the justice system. There were the Fox News anchors, Jeanine Pirro, who exchanged smiles and nods with Trump, and Laura Ingraham, reprimanded by court officers for staring through forbidden binoculars as though she were on safari. There was former Trump White House adviser Boris Epshteyn, indicted in the Arizona fake electors scheme.The carnival of the Trump vassals was a pop-up court society that formed below the authoritarian ruler. Their ranked serfdom revealed the status pyramid. Like the witnesses, whoever they have been, the trial has dramatized the web of the only kind of relationship Trump knows: master and servant.Day after day, Trump’s underworld has been peeled away. His main line of defense is that the people he has chosen to associate with are sleazy, corrupt and dishonest, and therefore cannot be believed. Illustrating their rotten characters proves Trump must be innocent. Their offense is that they no longer serve him. The reams of hard physical evidence, meanwhile, must be ignored. Trump’s projection reached its risible apogee when his lawyer accused Stormy Daniels of profiting from selling merchandise, which she batted away with a quip: “Not unlike Mr Trump.”The courtroom drama has more than legal implications. While the testimony and evidence may nail Trump on 34 felony charges of business fraud, the trial has painted a vast canvas of human bondage. As the prosecution has built its case, each and every person called to the stand has described their own strange master-servant relationship with Trump.There was David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, who oversaw the “catch-and-kill” hush-money operation to suppress information about Trump’s dalliances and to crank out smears of his opponents. “I felt that Donald Trump was my mentor,” he testified.There was the former teenage model and ingenue from Greenwich, Connecticut, Hope Hicks, whose association with the Trump Organization began by promoting Ivanka Trump as a fashion icon, and was elevated to Trump’s campaign press secretary and a White House counselor. When the Access Hollywood tape was disclosed a month before the election of 2016 on 7 October – “grab’ em by the pussy” – Trump “wanted to make sure that there was a denial of any kind of relationship”, Hicks testified. She ordered the campaign staff: “Deny, deny, deny.”Four days before the election in 2016, Trump directed her to deny the story of the payoff to Stormy Daniels, Hicks has said. Trump told her the next day that Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, had paid the money. “I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person,” she testified. She averted her eyes from the defendant as she spoke, and under cross-examination by his lawyer broke down crying. Whether heartfelt or crocodile tears, they were either way a tribute to “the boss”.The stories of the two principal witnesses, Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, like those of everyone else who has ever dealt with Trump, are divergent accounts of the Trump syndrome of domination and submission. Daniels refused to accept the dynamic from the start, felt dissociated from their sole, disagreeable sexual encounter, took the hush money when she could, and has since fought a running battle against him. Cohen traded himself for the grift and the glitz, thinking he had become a tough-guy prince of the city, until he became the fall guy. Then, after a stint in the pen, he became both penitent and vengeful. His rage against his former master is his servile rebellion.Stormy Daniels’ account is a passionless play in three clothes changes.Scene 1: Trump invites Stormy to his hotel suite at a Lake Tahoe golf tournament. Trump’s thuggish bodyguard, Keith Schiller, escorts her to his room. Stormy enters to find him lounging in silk pajamas. She cracks: “Does Hugh Hefner know you stole his pajamas?”Scene 2: A chagrined and humiliated Trump changes into a shirt and pants. He asks her whether she has ever had a sexually transmitted disease. She explains that she takes rigorous tests to continue working in the adult film industry. He presses whether “you ever had a bad test?” He asks about condoms. She asks about his wife. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he replies. “We are – actually don’t even sleep in the same room.”He talks more about himself, cuts her off, “and it was almost like he wanted to one-up me”. He shows her a financial magazine with his picture on the cover. “At this point, I pretty much had enough of his arrogance and cutting me off and still not getting my dinner. So, I decided someone should take him on. So I said, are you always this rude, arrogant and pompous? You don’t even know how to have a conversation, and I was pretty nasty. I snapped. And he seemed to be taken aback. And I said, someone should spank you with that.” He rolls up the magazine, she takes it and orders him to “turn around”. He bends over. She swats him. “And he was much more polite.”He raises the idea that she should appear on The Apprentice. Being an “adult actress” would be no problem. “You remind me of my daughter,” he says. She puts a friend, another “adult actress”, on the phone to prove she’s present with the real Trump. Then she goes to the bathroom.In the courtroom, while Stormy testified, Trump loudly muttered, “Bullshit!” The judge told his lawyer to silence him. Trump’s curses were a substitute for himself taking the stand.Scene 3: Stormy comes out of the bathroom to find Trump lying on the bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. “He stood up between me and the door, not in a threatening manner. He didn’t come at me. He didn’t rush at me. He didn’t put his hands on me and nothing like that. I said, I got to go. He said, I thought we were getting somewhere, we were talking, and I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park – basically, I was offended because I never lived in a trailer park.” Then, she felt like she “blacked out”.“The next thing I know, I was on the bed, somehow on the opposite side of the bed from where we had been standing. I had my clothes and shoes off. I believe my bra, however, was still on. We were in the missionary position … I was staring at the ceiling. I didn’t know how I got there.” Trump didn’t wear a condom. It worried her.Prosecutor: “Was it brief?” Answer: “Yes.” Her hands shook getting dressed. “He said: ‘Oh, great. Let’s get together again, honeybunch. We were great together.’ I just wanted to leave.” She leaves quickly. She feels “ashamed”. He calls several times a week for a while. She visits him once at Trump Tower. She never gets a gig on The Apprentice.In scene 1, Stormy made fun of Trump decked out in Hefner’s signature silk pajamas, his laughable affectation without the artifice of Hef’s highfalutin Playboy philosophy. Trump, in fact, had long tried to burnish his image through proximity to Hefner. In 1990, Trump appeared with a model on a Playboy cover, which he flaunted at a campaign stop in North Carolina in 2016. In 2000, he made a cameo appearance in a softcore Playboy-produced film called Centerfolds, pouring champagne in a Playboy limousine. He attended several Playboy anniversary parties, in 2003 bringing his then girlfriend Melania Knauss and posed for a photo with Hefner. But Hef exploited Trump for his gilt-edged louche image more than Trump succeeded in exploiting Hefner. When Trump proposed a feature for Playboy, “The Girls of Trump”, it was rejected. Trump was strictly for cameos. Hefner was never Trump’s servant.Stormy sized up Trump’s weakness at first sight. It was not an inflection moment, but a confection moment. Trump’s hollow personality is in great part confected from copying the stylized mannerisms of a swath of male entertainers of an older generation. His shtick is patched together from a variety of sources – borrowing, for example, from the method of Don Rickles, the insult comedian, to whom Trump unsuccessfully tried to sell a condo in one of his properties, to the method of Bob Grant, a now forgotten racist demagogue with a daily program on CBS Radio in New York, on whose show Trump appeared.Trump has been especially obsessed with Frank Sinatra, ring-a-ding-ding. He once clumsily tried to impose his will on “the Chairman of the Board”. Their transaction was nasty, brutish and short. When Trump sought to hire Sinatra to play at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, he tried to renegotiate the contract to pay him less than he originally promised, telling him his fee was “a little rich”. Sinatra sent Trump a message to “go fuck himself”. “He actually did loathe him,” said Nancy Sinatra, his daughter.Trump has long tried to present himself in the image of a cool swinger in Sinatra’s Rat Pack: “I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.” But the improvised group of Sinatra’s friends, accomplished musicians, actors, dancers and wits – Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop – were famous for their talent, not for an empty fame. Together they performed a spontaneous, raucous Las Vegas act and made a heist movie, Ocean’s 11, about robbing all the Vegas casinos. One aspect of their style was the show of casual bravado that was a knowing tribute and parody of the mafia dons who built and presided in Vegas. Sinatra had deflected stage-door johnnies and hangers-on since he was a teenage heartthrob. Trump was a familiar type of blustering wannabe, with a thick wad of bills to be given a ringside table and to be avoided, until he became obnoxious and Sinatra had to tell him to “go fuck himself”.In the midst of the current trial, on 11 May, Trump held a rally in New Jersey, where he hawked a patently false story about Sinatra to connect with the Jersey crowd. Supposedly, like they were pals, according to Trump: “Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, ‘Never eat before you perform.’ I said, ‘I’m not performing, I’m a politician, if you can believe it.’”If you can believe it, even in the wee small hours of the morning, Sinatra died in 1998, 17 years before “politician” Trump ran for office. On 21 January 2021, when Trump took off from Washington at Andrews air force base, after inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol and being impeached a second time, he had the loudspeakers blaring out one of Sinatra’s theme songs, My Way, as if Sinatra was granting him a pardon.In scene 2, according to Daniels, Trump kept circling, shark-like, to learn if Daniels might be infected with venereal disease. Relieved at her answer, when he pounced, he didn’t use a condom, his triumph in scene 3. “Missionary position,” Stormy testified. He called her “honeybunch”, until she later criticized him and he called her “horseface”.In February 2017, Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller – head of Trump Organization security, then promoted to “director of Oval Office operations” – invaded the New York City office of Trump’s personal physician, Dr Harold Bornstein, to seize Trump’s medical records. Bornstein said he felt “raped”. Those records have never been released. The public has no clear idea of Trump’s medical history, of whether he was ever treated for any disease, sexually transmitted or otherwise.According to Daniels, Trump promised her a spot on his TV show, then she “blacked out”, finding herself vacantly staring at the ceiling. The casting couch routine is a time-worn technique pre-existing the talkies. Trump’s was a dismal variation on the theme of Harvey Weinstein. At the time, Weinstein was a king of Hollywood, producer of the classiest movies and winner of Oscars. Trump occupied a lower rung in the entertainment industry, faking his way through a reality gameshow. They did not cross paths much, though in 2009 Trump turned up at a Miramax premiere in New York of Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as an Italian film-maker with a complicated love life. Trump posed for a photo with his arms around his wife and Weinstein’s.When Weinstein was convicted of sexual assault and rape, Trump stated it sent a “very strong message” and was a “great victory” for women. “I was never a fan of Harvey Weinstein,” he said. “I think he said he was going to work hard to defeat me in the election. How did that work out, by the way? He was a person I didn’t like.” This was after numerous women accused Trump of sexual assault but before he was adjudicated a rapist in the E Jean Carroll defamation case.Before Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was “rigged”, he charged that the Emmys were “rigged” for failing to award him for The Apprentice. In 2017, Stephen Colbert, as the host of the Emmy awards show, mocked Trump. “Unlike the presidency, Emmys go to the winner of the popular vote,” he said. Trump’s whining about the “rigged” Emmys was a rehearsal for his “Stop the Steal” coup.The offstage but oft-mentioned character who never appears as a live witness is Trump’s third wife, Melania, of the separate bedrooms, who was pregnant while Trump was inviting Stormy and a bevy of adult film stars into his Tahoe hotel suite. The overwhelming weight of testimony introduced in the trial is that Trump’s actions were motivated by a desire to suppress the information of his sexual liaisons because they would damage his election chances.Prosecutor: Why, in fact, did you pay that money to Stormy Daniels?Michael Cohen: To ensure that the story would not come out, [and] would not affect Mr Trump’s chances of becoming president of the United States.Prosecutor: If not for the election, would you have paid that money to Stormy Daniels?Cohen: No, ma’am.Prosecutor: At whose direction did you pay the money?Cohen: Trump’s.One of Cohen’s revelations was that when the Hollywood Access tape emerged, it was Melania who invented the alibi that it was just boys’ “locker room talk”. “We needed to put a spin on this,” Cohen said, “and the spin that [Trump] wanted put on it was that this is locker room talk – something that Melania had recommended, or at least he told me that that’s what Melania had thought it was.”To maintain a degree of control in the marriage, Melania dances a tango. She has been vigilantly protective of her investment. She has renegotiated her pre-nup three times, according to Page Six, twice as a post-nuptial agreement. Nobody knows its provisions. But it may be reasonable to assume that Trump’s adamant refusal to acknowledge his sex with Stormy Daniels may relate to sums of money attached to episodes of adultery in the post-nup. Melania was reportedly furious after the disclosure of Trump’s $130,000 payment to Daniels.Cohen testified that he asked Trump,“How’s things going to go upstairs?” referring to Melania’s anger, and Trump responded with the coldest revelation to come out of the trial: “‘Don’t worry,’ he goes. He goes: ‘How long do you think I will be on the market for? Not long’.” Trump was contemplating what would happen after Melania made good on the latest post-nup.On the day that Stormy testified, in a bit of counter-programming, the chair of the Florida state Republican party announced that Barron Trump, Melania and Donald’s son, 18 years old, would be a delegate to the Republican national convention. Floating that story would show that Melania was on board. Two days later, the Florida Republican party issued a statement rescinding the original one, now stating that Barron Trump “regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments”. Perhaps Melania had made her leverage known.Where’s my Michael Cohen? “I regret doing things for him that I should not have,” he said on the stand. “Lying, bullying people to effectuate the goal … to keep a loyalty and to do the things he asked me to do, I violated my moral compass and I suffered the penalty, as has my family.” His plea for redemption was something that never would have passed the lips of Trump’s tutor in viciousness.Roy Cohn owed nothing to Trump. Trump came to him as a supplicant to rescue him from a racial discrimination suit, which Cohn resolved through his trademark intimidation, delay and bluffing. Trump, the youthful bounder, also begged Roy to wheedle him past the rope line into Le Club, an exclusive celebrity hangout. Roy had been a darling of J Edgar Hoover and the counsel for Joseph McCarthy. Roy represented everyone in New York: the Catholic archdiocese, George Steinbrenner of the Yankees, Aristotle Onassis, and the bosses of the mafia families, Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti. Roy’s apprentice was Roger Stone, who introduced him to Ronald Reagan. Roy’s beard, his make-believe fiancee, was Barbara Walters. Roy was Trump’s godfather in the city.Michael Cohen owed everything to Trump. The personal injury lawyer from Long Island claimed he read The Art of the Deal twice before Trump hired him. He eagerly became Trump’s creature. He did whatever Trump asked of him, from lying about whatever needed to be lied about to threatening inquisitive reporters to trying to negotiate a Trump Moscow Tower.One of those tasks was paying off Stormy Daniels at Trump’s orders, he testified, and Cohen served two years in prison for tax evasion and campaign-finance violations, among other crimes, for his service to Trump. Trump was named in his federal indictment from the southern district of New York as Unindicted Co-Conspirator 1. Trump sent him a message during his trial: “Stay strong, I have your back. You’re going to be fine.” Cohen was a made man; Trump had made him. He was his complicit errand boy. Roy Cohn had taught Trump how to create a Michael Cohen. Then, Cohen flipped.Trump called him a “rat”, a term of art applied to an FBI informant snitching on organized crime. Running for re-election with indictments shadowing him this year, Trump began trolling for unofficial character witnesses. In January, he landed the biggest “rat” of them all for an endorsement: Sammy “The Bull” Gravano – a former hitman for the mob who confessed to involvement in the murders of 19 men and a stoolie who sent away his boss, the “Dapper Don” John Gotti, for life – stepped forward to stamp Trump “a legitimate guy”.“Thank you to Sammy the Bull,” Trump tweeted. “I hope Judges Engoron and Kaplan see this” – the judges in his financial fraud and E Jean Carroll defamation cases, which he would lose. “We need fairness, strength and honesty in our New York Courts. We don’t have it now!” But Sammy the Bull, who in 2017 was released from an Arizona prison where he was doing time for running a drug ring, has refrained from further commentary on Trump’s legal troubles. Trump has turned elsewhere for character witnesses.The cavalcade of Republican politicians to the Manhattan courthouse has been a demonstration of the party’s servitude to the defendant. Journalists in the courtroom have observed Trump writing and editing the talking points handed to the pols to spout. These Republicans are more than a sideshow: they’re walking witnesses to the degree to which Trump has transformed the Republican party into his accomplice. It is a made party.Tommy Tuberville, the village idiot of the Senate, who held up military promotions for months, blunderingly gave the entire game away, and conceivably could get Trump into further hot water, by stating that he and the others came on Trump’s behalf to “overcome the gag order”. He complained that the courtroom was “kind of dark, cold”, and that the seats “are very, very, very uncomfortable”.“I’ve not been in many courtrooms in my life,” he went on. “Hopefully I don’t have to go to too many more.” So far, Trump’s further trials have been conveniently delayed.Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, evangelical avatar, arrived on the shuttle to lend moral support to the immoral. “People are curious,” he explained about his motivation last year. “What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview. That’s what I believe.’”In Alabama, while working as an attorney for the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom, Johnson spoke out in favor of Judge Roy Moore’s posting of the Ten Commandments at the Montgomery judicial building. Moore lost a bid for the US Senate in 2017 after accusations of sexual assault and misconduct with underage girls. After Johnson’s little intervention at the Trump trial, he might edit the commandments down to six, dropping the bits about adultery, stealing, lying and greed. If he were especially self-aware about his courthouse antic, he could also drop the first one: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”Standing behind the metal barrier in front of the courthouse, careful not to enter, Johnson waved to Trump. He got the talking points for the courthouse rally, too. The trial, he said, was “a sham”. The gesture was a small price to pay after convincing Trump to help him fend off Marjorie Taylor Greene from carting him away in a tumbril. Empty flattery of Trump is worth the speakership. But Johnson’s bended knee has guaranteed that the Democrats will not vote to maintain him again, if there is another attempt to guillotine him.Mike Johnson is a Trump made man, too, enlisted as an accomplice in the January 6 coup and the subsequent effort to cover it up. He was instrumental in advancing the falsehood that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic had “rigged software” that came from the deceased “Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela”, sought to nullify the votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania, and charged that the judges who rejected Trump’s bogus claims were committing an illegal “usurpation”. Once he became speaker, he ordered that in the film of the January 6 attack the faces of insurrectionists should be blurred “because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DoJ”. It was too late, however, to obstruct justice. The justice department announced after Johnson’s order that it already had the footage.For Johnson, the courthouse demonstration to denigrate the justice system was consistent with his participation in the January 6 plot. After Johnson fended off the attempt to remove him, he must play a game to defend Trump in order to play Trump in order to defend himself from Trump’s feral acolytes. Everyone who has tried that game has eventually wound up devoured.For the chorus line of vice-presidential hopefuls, the courthouse was an off-Broadway tryout. They pirouetted to win Trump’s nod, but only one could be chosen: “One singular sensation”.Senator JD Vance, of Ohio, who in one of his several past incarnations denounced Trump as “America’s Hitler”, has since turned into a Trump trooper. The cultural contradictions of Trumpism no more bother the pious Vance than they do Mike Johnson. Vance has said he had come just “to support a friend … Sometimes it’s a little bit lonely to sit up there by yourself.” But Vance’s courtroom elegy as Miss Lonelyhearts was clipped. His good friend had previously described him at a campaign rally as “JD Mandel”, confusing him with another Ohio politician. If Trump needs Vance to win Ohio, he has already lost.Who was and who wasn’t present in the worshipful gaggle was a tale of two Dakotas. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, aspiring running mate, was significantly absent from the courthouse, still busily justifying blasting her 14 months-old puppy and a goat after dragging them into a gravel pit. Her tale of slaughter in a recently published memoir was an exhibition of performative sadism to catch the eye of Trump. Her cruelty to animals was an unprecedented bid to secure the second slot under him. But the opprobrium she attracted terminated her short-lived campaign.The trigger-happy governor, quick on the draw, had put a clear bullseye on her target’s viciousness – Trump, not Cricket the dog. But there’s no getting back up on the horse for her. By the way, she has also disclosed offing three family horses. Trump infamously boasted that he could get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, but Noem’s bragging about killing her dog on the farm unexpectedly became her retelling a murder-suicide.Trump’s other Dakota applicant, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum – who dropped out of the Republican contest before a single vote was taken, polling a barely detectable 1% – turned up at the courthouse to drone the Trump talking points that the trial was “election interference” and a “scam”. The colorless Burgum, without the slightest measurable constituency, should be considered the frontrunner as Trump’s vice-presidential pick. His advantage is not that he is bland and can never outshine Trump. Burgum’s asset is his assets. He sold his software company to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1bn. Trump is frantic for cash.Trump has installed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair of the Republican National Committee, to replace Ronna Romney McDaniel, who had resisted shoveling every last penny of RNC funds into Trump’s legal defense fund. As slavish as McDaniel was to Trump, her sin was that it was not down to the last cent. She could not be subservient enough; so, she was defenestrated. Under Lara Trump, the party’s money will flow in an endless river to his campaign.Burgum, a political nobody, appears as a godsend to Trump. If Trump is the Republican goldencalf, Burgum is his potential cash cow. With him on the ticket, Burgum would be outside campaign finance restrictions and could open the spigot of his fortune for Trump. When it comes to Trump, the mercenary motive always prevails. For Burgum, it might be a cheap deal, a speculation as profitable in its own way as selling his firm Microsoft made him a billionaire. If Trump is elected, the non-entity would be a heartbeat away from the presidency. In the meantime, he simply has to perform like a Mike Pence dummy, until the moment inevitably arrives when Trump tries to coerce him to become a co-conspirator.By Thursday, 16 May, the supporting cast was down to the scraps of Freedom Caucus devotees, most prominently Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz. “And I want all of the news to start asking the question, ‘What is the crime?’” Boebert shouted outside the courthouse. “Because everyone in this court has not been informed of what the crime is. The defendant does not know the crime that was committed.” As she spoke, one bystander heckled: “Beetlejuice!” Boebert had been evicted from a Denver theater staging of “Beetlejuice” for allegedly vaping, making loud noises and groping her then boyfriend, owner of a dive bar named Hooch that features drag queen shows.After Gaetz appeared at the courthouse, he posted on Twitter/X a picture of himself there in a Trump-style red tie with a caption comparing himself to the Proud Boys, whose leader is serving a prison sentence for seditious conspiracy for the January 6 insurrection. “Standing back and standing by, Mr President,” wrote Gaetz. He understood Trump’s bottomless need for displays of subservience. In the courtroom, Gaetz was given a place of honor seated next to Eric Trump.The House ethics committee has yet to report on its investigation into Gaetz’s alleged sexual relation with a minor. Former speaker Kevin McCarthy, removed from the speakership by the people rallying at the courthouse, observed recently that the motive for his ousting was because “one person wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old”.But the red-tie Trump brigade were not a snake line of Proud Boys armed with weapons ready to rush the courthouse to liberate the defendant. Their dim perception about the trial they came on Trump’s orders to deride blinded them to the tragic story of the chief witness, Michael Cohen. The Trump lackey, through a tortured ordeal, at last came to a harsh realization of how grotesquely Trump had manipulated, exploited and betrayed him, and now he stood lashed in the witness box by Trump’s lawyer for being Trump’s lawyer, the liar that Trump depended on. Outside the courtroom, Trump’s self-abasing retinue lines up to serve him like the old Michael Cohen.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump allies push bill to bar non-citizen voting, even though it’s already illegal

      by

      Dozens of Donald Trump’s allies and election denialists, including extremists like lawyer Cleta Mitchell and ex-adviser Stephen Miller, are promoting a bill to bar non-citizens from voting in federal elections, even though it’s already illegal and evidence that non-citizens have voted in federal races is almost nil.The push for the bill is seen as further evidence of extremist tactics used by ex-president Trump and his Maga movement to rev up his base of supporters for the 2024 election with outlandish claims designed to scaremonger over election fraud and far-right rhetoric detached from reality.It also fits a pattern, that many Trump allies appear to be laying the groundwork for false complaints of election fraud should Trump suffer electoral defeat again in 2024 – raising fears that the US could see a civic crisis similar to what followed the 2020 contest when his allies attacked the Capitol in Washington DC.The legislation’s rationale, which Trump touted at a Mar-a-Lago event with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, last month, has drawn sharp criticism from voting experts and even some Republicans.At the bill’s formal unveiling on 8 May, Johnson was joined by Mitchell, Miller and leaders of rightwing groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and the Arizona Freedom Caucus, who have formed the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, which boasts some 70 members pushing the measure.Johnson hyped the Save act – or Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act – framing illegal citizen voting as a more serious threat than Trump’s false charges that Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020 due to voting fraud.Johnson – whose 8 May press conference drew the bill’s lead sponsors, the senator Mike Lee of Utah and the representative Chip Roy of Texas – allowed that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”View image in fullscreenA lawyer and key Trump ally, Johnson was a central player in Trump’s baseless drive to overturn his 2020 defeat. Johnson led an amicus brief that more than 100 House GOP members signed backing a Texas lawsuit that tried to block the results in four key states that Biden won.“Even if you weren’t concerned about the drop boxes and the ballot harvesting and the mail-in ballots in 2020,” Johnson said on 8 May, referring to some of the phoney fraud claims Trump and his allies made about Biden’s win, “you definitely should be concerned that illegal aliens might be voting in 2024.”Actually, studies have shown that non-citizens are extremely unlikely to vote in federal elections, and that the minuscule number who attempt to vote have no impact on the outcome.One Brennan Center for Justice study that focused on the 2016 election revealed that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with a total of 23.5m votes, were suspected to include non-citizens voting, or 30 incidents altogether.A more recent Arizona study showed that less than 1% of non-citizens try to register to vote, but the large majority of those are believed to be errors, as the Washington Post initially reported.“These lies about widespread non-citizens voting fuel xenophobic fears and unwarranted doubts about the integrity of our elections. They appear intended to lay the groundwork to baselessly challenge any election results. Americans should be confident that our elections are safe and secure,” said Andrew Garber, an elections counsel at the Brennan Center.Even some Republican stalwarts say the bill is aimed at spurring more votes for Trump and his allies in Congress by raising the specter of a phoney election-fraud issue.“This is all political,” the veteran Republican consultant Charlie Black said. “The people who are promoting it know it is already illegal. But they hope by promoting the issue to convince voters that illegal immigrants are voting.”Other Republicans concur. “This is a messaging bill,” said former representative Charlie Dent, who noted it was “already illegal” for non-citizens to vote. “They’re trying to tie this to the border issue. It’s completely campaign-driven by challenging Democrats to vote against it.”Critics warn that the Save Act, which is seen as unlikely to pass the Senate if the House approves the bill, would make it harder to register people to vote since it would require citizenship proof such as a birth certificate or passport, which many Americans lack.Federal law now just requires voters to fill out a form swearing they are a US citizen.View image in fullscreenLittle wonder that the legislation is fueling hefty support from many well-funded, Trump-allied election-denialist groups and their leaders.Rightwing lawyer Mitchell, who runs the election-integrity network at the Conservative Partnership Institute where she is a senior legal fellow, has been in the vanguard of promoting conspiracies about non-citizen voting.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMitchell raised the specter of non-citizen voting in February on a conservative Illinois talk radio show where she said: “I absolutely believe this is intentional, and one of the reasons the Biden administration is allowing all these illegals to flood the country. They’re taking them into counties across the country, so that they can get those people registered, they can vote them.”A little-known group that Mitchell quietly set up last year, dubbed the Fair Elections Fund, which she is president of, is listed as a member of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition.A longtime election conspiracist, Mitchell was on Trump’s call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on 2 January 2021 when Trump exhorted him to “find” 11,780 votes to overturn Biden’s win there.Similarly, Stephen Miller, who runs the rightwing litigation outfit America First Legal and served as Trump’s hardine immigration adviser, has been working zealously to promote fears of illegal voting by non-citizens.“Democracy in America is under attack,” Miller said at the 8 May press event. Miller decried the “wide-open border and obstruction of any effort to verify the citizenship of who votes in our elections”.View image in fullscreenNotwithstanding the dearth of evidence that non-citizen voting is a real threat, Miller has repeated bogus conspiracy theories that Democrats are bringing voters into the US to boost Biden winning in November.The Maga world’s obsession with non-citizen voting was palpable at a Las Vegas event last month hosted by the former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, who leads the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which drew a number of sheriffs and other elected officials from several states. Mack, an ex-board member of the extremist Oath Keepers, said in April that “election fraud and the border go hand in hand”, a claim that lacks any evidence.Voting experts are alarmed at the growing efforts of Trump allies to highlight a virtually nonexistent threat and promote legislation that would require voters to show documents to register that millions of Americans do not have.“Millions of eligible American citizens lack easy access to a passport or birth certificate, so requiring eligible voters to show either one to register to vote would impose a significant hurdle with no real benefits for election security,” said Garber of the Brennan Center.Other voting specialists voice similar concerns.“Instead of taking meaningful action to strengthen our critical election infrastructure, Speaker Johnson is adding fuel to the fire by linking immigration policy to election security,” said Carah Ong Whaley, director of election protection at Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.Instead, Whaley urged Johnson and his allies to work in a bipartisan way “to increase federal funding to ensure that officials have the resources they need to guard against growing foreign interference concerns and cybersecurity threats”.Republican figures also express strong misgivings about what is driving the bill’s backers.“Since Trump has surrounded himself with the losing general election narrative about fraud in 2020, he needs to change the narrative,” said Republican consultant Chuck Coughlin. “These types of proposals pushed by his allies are critical to him duping American voters to vote for him again.” More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Marco Rubio says he would not accept 2024 election results ‘if it’s unfair’

      by

      The Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio said on Sunday he would not commit to accepting the 2024 presidential election results, insisting that “if it’s unfair” his party will “go to court and point out the fact that states are not following their own election laws”.Rubio’s statements on Meet the Press come as he is considered among former president Donald Trump’s top candidates for vice-president. Trump has continuously said falsely that the 2020 election was stolen.Those claims spurred the 6 January 2021 insurrection, during which participants stormed the Capitol building as lawmakers were in the midst of certifying the election results. Trump is facing a variety of charges related to alleged election meddling.When asked by host Kristen Welker: “Will you accept the election results of 2024, no matter what happens, senator?” Rubio replied: “No matter what happens? No.“If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested … by either side.”Welker kept pushing Rubio to answer whether he would contest the results “no matter who wins”.“Well, I think you’re asking the wrong person,” Rubio said. “The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000, every single one.”Welker repeatedly pointed out that Democrats who had issues with election results nevertheless conceded. Rubio, in turn, asked repeatedly whether Welker had asked Democrats this same question.Rubio – who did certify the 2020 election results, and said on that day that “democracy is held together by people’s confidence in the election and their willingness to abide by its results” – would not directly respond to whether Trump’s unwillingness to accept election results served to undermine confidence in democracy.He also refused to criticize Trump for his comments on Florida’s six-week abortion ban, during which Trump called the law a “terrible thing, a terrible mistake” – despite also repeatedly claiming credit for overturning the federal protection for abortion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I support any bill that protects unborn human life, but I don’t consider other people in the pro life movement who have a different view to be apostate,” said Rubio, who has long pushed for strict limits on abortion. “They just have a different view about the best way to approach this issue. We are not like the Democrats where, unless you are in favor of their bills that basically say, ‘Let’s just put in all this fancy language, but it’s not meaningful in terms of any restrictions.’”He played coy about whether he would agree to be Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election, saying he had not discussed the possibility with Trump, but adding, “I think anyone who’s offered that job, to serve this country in the second highest office, assuming everything else in your life makes sense at that moment, if you’re interested in serving the country, it’s an incredible place to serve.” More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Missouri Republican party fails to boot KKK-linked candidate from gubernatorial ticket

      by

      A long-shot Missouri gubernatorial candidate with ties to the Ku Klux Klan will stay on the Republican ticket, a judge ruled on Friday.Cole county circuit court judge Cotton Walker denied a request by the Missouri GOP to kick Darrell McClanahan out of the August Republican primary.McClanahan is running against the Missouri secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft; the lieutenant governor, Mike Kehoe; state senator Bill Eigel; and others for the GOP nomination to replace Governor Mike Parson, who is barred by term limits from seeking re-election.McClanahan’s lawyer, Dave Roland, said the ruling ensures that party leaders do not have “almost unlimited discretion to choose who’s going to be allowed on a primary ballot”.“Their theory of the case arguably would have required courts to remove people from the ballot, maybe even the day before elections,” Roland said.McClanahan, who has described himself as “pro-white” but denies being racist or antisemitic, was among nearly 280 Republican candidates who officially filed to run for office in February, on what is known as filing day. Hundreds of candidates line up at the secretary of state’s Jefferson City office on filing day in Missouri, the first opportunity to officially declare candidacy.The Missouri GOP accepted his party dues but denounced him after a former state lawmaker posted photos on social media that appear to show McClanahan making the Nazi salute. McClanahan confirmed the accuracy of the photos to the St Louis Post-Dispatch.In his decision, Walker wrote that the Republican party “has made clear that it does not endorse his candidacy, and it remains free to publicly disavow McClanahan and any opinions the plaintiff believes to be antithetical to its values”.“I’m not sure they ever actually intended to win this case,” said McClanahan’s lawyer, Roland. “I think the case got filed because the Republican party wanted to make a very big public show that they don’t want to be associated with racism or antisemitism. And the best way that they could do that was filing a case that they knew was almost certain to lose.”The Associated Press’s emailed requests for comment to the Missouri GOP’s executive director were not immediately returned on Friday. But Missouri GOP lawyers have said party leaders did not realize who McClanahan was when he signed up as a candidate back in February.McClanahan has argued that the Missouri GOP was aware of the beliefs. He previously ran as a Republican for US Senate in 2022.In a separate lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) last year, McClanahan claimed the organization defamed him by calling him a white supremacist in an online post.In his lawsuit against the ADL, McClanahan described himself as a “pro-white man”. McClanahan wrote that he is not a member of the Ku Klux Klan; he said he merely received an honorary one-year membership in the white supremacist terrorism organization. And he said he attended a “private religious Christian identity cross lighting ceremony falsely described as a cross burning”. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘She’s in the pantheon now’: Kristi Noem and the politicians who hit self-destruct

      by

      She could have been a contender. But then she wrote a book. And suddenly Kristi Noem was caught like a rabbit – or a rambunctious puppy – in the headlights.The governor of South Dakota found herself insisting that a false claim she met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had been put in her book by accident. Wait, said Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation, you recorded the whole audiobook version and read this passage out loud. Why didn’t you take it out then?Noem blinked, nodded and waffled. She was pressed on the point twice more. Finally she asked in desperation: “Did you want to talk about something else today?”It was a car crash interview at the end of a train wreck week. Noem went on to abruptly cancel further appearances on CNN and Fox News, sparing herself further vilification over both the Kim lie and an admission that she had once dealt with a misbehaving puppy by shooting it dead in a gravel pit.Branded a fabulist and a dog murderer, her hopes of becoming Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election lay in ruins. Noem had become the latest in a long line of politicians – from Gary Hart’s affair to Sarah Palin’s gaffes to Mark Sanford’s cover up – to perform a spectacular act of self-immolation.“She’s in the pantheon now,” said Rick Wilson, a strategist who has worked on many Republican election campaigns. “The arrogance of a lot of political candidates who think they’re good with the press is they’re good with the press until they realise they’ve been skating on thinner and thinner ice and, when that ice goes, they are under the water.”The rise and fall of Kristi Noem happened with dizzying speed. The rancher and farmer served in the South Dakota legislature for years then entered Congress in the rightwing populist Tea Party wave of 2010. She became South Dakota’s first female governor in 2019 and won plaudits from Republicans for resisting coronavirus pandemic lockdowns.View image in fullscreenIn 2022 Noem published a book, Not My First Rodeo, with a front cover that shows her wearing a cowboy hat on horseback, reins in one hand, giant American flag in the other. “From humorous barnyard battles with feisty cattle and rodeo horses … ” was part of the PR pitch. The book seemed to shore up her status as a serious player in the Make America Great Again (Maga) universe.There were concerns over Noem’s hardline stance on abortion and media reports of an affair with the former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski. But in February this year, when the Conservative Political Action Conference held a straw poll for Trump’s vice-presidential pick, she came in joint first with Vivek Ramaswamy among 17 possible candidates.But things began to unravel when Noem appeared in a bizarre infomercial-style video lavishing praise on a team of cosmetic dentists in Texas. Then she went a book too far. In No Going Back, as first reported by the Guardian, she wrote that she took Cricket, her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, on a bird-hunting trip with older dogs in hopes of calming down the wild puppy.Instead Cricket chased the pheasants, attacked a family’s chickens during a stop on the way home and then “whipped around to bite me”, she recalled. Later she led Cricket to a gravel pit and killed her. For good measure, she added that she also shot a goat that the family owned, claiming that it was mean and liked to chase her kids.Although Trump once famously asserted that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, it soon transpired that shooting a dog is the last taboo of American politics, the one sacrilegious act that Democrats and Republicans can unite to condemn in an otherwise hyper-partisan time.Joe Biden’s re-election campaign posted on social media a photo of the president strolling on the White House lawn with one of his three German Shepherds. The Democrat Hillary Clinton reposted a 2021 comment in which she warned: “Don’t vote for anyone you wouldn’t trust with your dog.” She added now: “Still true.”The former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich told the Politico website: “Killing the dog and then writing about it ended any possibility of her being picked as VP.” The far-right extremist Laura Loomer, a Trump devotee, posted on X: “Wow. No coming back from this. This is so heartless. She killed a puppy? As a dog lover, that is just too much for me.”What was she thinking? Some speculated that, because the story has circulated for years among state politicians that Noem killed a dog in a “fit of anger” – and there were witnesses – she was going public now because she was being vetted as a candidate for vice-president.Others felt sure it was a misguided attempt to curry favor with Trump, who admires “killers” and has no love of dogs. Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Writing about killing a dog was not about writing about killing a dog for her.“Corey Lewandowski or someone around her told her: you need to show Trump that you’re tough and mean and bad, you can do the hard thing, you can be the one who would never be like Mike Pence, you can be counted on by Trump to be as brutal and ugly as he needs, no matter what the order is.”View image in fullscreenHe added: “That’s why she wrote that way, to say, I’d kill a puppy and isn’t that good enough for you, Donald? But even Donald Trump, who hates dogs, hates bad PR more. Kristi Noem became the definition of bad PR.”Then came the catastrophic book tour. Noem gave interviews on CBS, NewsNation, Newsmax and Fox Business, where the normally Maga-friendly Stuart Varney pushed her on the dog story until she snapped: “Enough, Stuart. This interview is ridiculous – what you are doing right now. So you need to stop.”Wilson commented: “By the third or fourth day of her getting humiliated over and over again in public, even I felt like somebody should put her out of her misery and take her to the gravel pit and end this pain. She was absolutely just flailing at every moment and did not have a sense of clarity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If you’re on a PR tour trying to appeal to the Maga base, there is this belief in the Maga world that you never ever apologise, never say you were wrong, never back down. But unfortunately that’s not how humans work. Even in the Maga media space, she started getting her head caved in on this thing and rightly so. She deserved it.”Noem faced a particular grilling over the passage in her book that stated she remembered meeting Kim: “I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor after all).” She subsequently conceded that no such encounter took place and promised to correct later editions.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “Being a woman in the Republican party, she wanted to project the image of toughness and she’s trying out for the position of running mate. It’s not really the dog; the giveaway is Kim Jong-un. That could have been any foreign leader.“Why did she pick and lie about meeting Kim Jong-un? Because she remembered the ‘love affair’ between Trump and Kim Jong-un, so she thought that Trump would be particularly impressed if she met and talked with him. That’s something they have in common – except they don’t.”Noem is not the first American politician to push the self-destruct button.View image in fullscreenEarl Butz, a secretary of agriculture, was on a flight after the 1976 Republican National Convention when he said: “I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.” The remark was reported in the media, prompting a reprimand from the then president, Gerald Ford, and the resignation of Butz, who claimed “the use of a bad racial commentary in no way reflects my real attitude”.The senator Gary Hart, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, told a reporter: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’d be very bored.” The Miami Herald duly did watch Hart, who was married, and report that he spent a night with a young model named Donna Rice. He withdrew from the race.John Edwards, a young and charismatic star of the Democratic party, ran for president in 2008 while conducting an affair and fathering a child with a woman even as his wife was battling cancer. The scandal was exposed and destroyed his political career.The Republican Sarah Palin was John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 election but became a liability with gaffes revealing her lack of foreign policy experience or knowledge of the supreme court. Asked what newspaper or magazine she regularly reads, Palin replied: “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.”Mark Sanford was the governor of South Carolina when, in 2009, he flew to Argentina to be with a woman who was not his wife but told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. The deceit was quickly uncovered, made vivid headlines and ended his 20-year marriage.View image in fullscreenSanford told the Guardian this week: “The reality of life is ups and downs and I think the measure of all of us is how we respond to the down more than the up. The record stands for itself in terms of I was honest and laid my cards out on the table and dealt with things as they came and that’s best you can do in those situations.“Anybody who’s failed publicly at anything, if they’ve learned anything from it, they’ve learned to do exactly what the Bible says in not judging others. It’s just recognising the nature of the human condition is imperfect. Those who pretend to be most perfect aren’t and inevitably live in a glass house.”But Sanford admits that he is baffled how Trump, who faces 88 charges in four criminal cases, seems to get a free pass and is once again the Republican presidential nominee. “The higher you climb, the further you fall and, appropriately, there’s a magnifying glass that’s applied to people in public office that frankly ought to be there.“People shouldn’t be above the law and get away with things that other people don’t and there is an added level of scrutiny that that goes with public life, which may have something to do with the fact that we live in country of 330 million people and, remarkably, [Trump and Biden] are the best two folks the country has to offer on the Republican and Democratic side. Are you kidding me?”Other politicians undone by a fatal flaw include Andrew Gillum, Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner. Some appear destined to fly too close to the sun. Sabato commented: “They want it all and they’re used to being very lucky. That’s what does them in. They assume they’re going to continue to be lucky. That’s fatal for anybody. If you’re lucky, go have a drink but don’t expect to get lucky every day. It doesn’t happen.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      The Darkness Has Not Overcome: limp pro-Trump piety for a second coming

      by

      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is a far cry from Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims’s kiss-and-tell from 2019. Under the subtitle My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, that book sold well and spawned a brief legal spat with Donald Trump himself. But in a somewhat less stirring second outing, the Alabama son of two generations of Baptist ministers who became a reporter then a White House aide pays greatest attention to the lessons he takes from scripture and faith.Back in the Trumpian fold, this viper’s venom is distinctly diluted.Sims was cast out of Trumpworld in 2018 but returned to work as a speechwriter for Trump family members at the Republican convention in 2020. Then he landed a slot as a deputy to John Ratcliffe, a congressman turned director of national intelligence.Donald Trump Jr offers his praise for Sims’s new book, calling Sims “his friend”. The younger Trump – not noted for public displays of piety, let’s say – also laments that “American Christians are under attack every day by leftwing activists, mainstream media and liberal politicians”.Sims aches to land a punch for the team, but is reduced to trading on old glories. In his prologue, he rehashes near-verbatim a Team of Vipers story involving Trump and Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.Richmond purportedly praised the president to his face in a closed meeting, then intimated he was a bigot when the cameras rolled.“Congressman Richmond had been so sincere and complimentary of him behind closed doors, I thought he might at least be willing to say he didn’t personally believe Trump was racist. But he didn’t,” Sims writes – in both Team of Vipers and The Darkness Has Not Overcome.“‘You’d have to talk to the people who made those allegations and ask them what they would say about it,’ [Richmond told reporters]. ‘I will tell you that he’s the 45th president of the United States …’”If it had not been offered before, in greater detail – there’s no Omarosa Manigault this time – the anecdote might add a pinch of zest to a bland book. After all, Richmond now co-chairs Biden’s re-election campaign.Elsewhere, under a new, less fun subtitle – “Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power” – Sims decides to examine the legacy of Adolf Hitler, the “big lie” and the nature of tyranny. Those of a naive disposition, look away: Sims proves oddly unwilling to consider Trump’s affections for and frequent rhetorical echoes of Hitler, and his yearning to be an American strongman.“A psychological analysis of Hitler commissioned by the [Office of Strategic Services] during world war two described his obsession with lying as a way to manipulate the masses,” Sims writes.“Hitler’s policy of lies propelled him into power and ultimately played a significant role in his ability to perpetrate mass genocide. The truth matters a lot more than you might think.”So how does Trump, the man Sims backs to return to the White House and who lies as he breathes, think about Hitler?Trump reportedly kept a collection of the Führer’s speeches at his bedside.Jeremy Peters of the New York Times has captured Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, giving this judgment of Trump’s history-making escalator ride in spring 2015, to enter the Republican race: “That’s Hitler, Bannon thought.”Jim Sciutto of CNN has quoted John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, on Trump’s fondness for Hitler.Trump: “Well, but Hitler did some good things.”Kelly: “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”In the White House, relations between Sims and Kelly were sulfurous. “In the past 40 years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a subordinate whose reputation is worse than yours,” Sims quotes Kelly as saying in Team of Vipers.Now, Sims also avoids discussion of Trump’s stated intention to act as a dictator for at least a day if re-elected, and his own big lie: that the 2020 election went to Joe Biden because of electoral fraud.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust last weekend, Trump compared the Biden administration to Hitler’s Gestapo. Can you say, “projection”?Sims still has scores to settle. He luxuriates in the downfall of Robert Bentley, an Alabama governor whose affair with a campaign consultant went public. Oddly demure, Sims omits Bentley’s name while describing obtaining a damning recording from a source at midnight at a gas station, carrying a gun just in case.“The episode felt like a dramatic scene out of a spy movie … Ruger nine-millimeter pistol tucked in my waistband,” Sims writes. “I plugged the drive into my computer, opened the file and within a few minutes knew indeed that it would change the course of Alabama’s political history.”Bentley, a church deacon, resigned in the face of impeachment. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, for misuse of state funds.After reveling in the details of Bentley’s descent, Sims delivers a killer coda: he called Bentley to let him know he “had been praying for his family”.You can’t make such stuff up. But it doesn’t end there: Sims spikes the football.“Even after he had lost everything, including the powerful office to which he had violently clung, he returned to his dermatology practice and hired as his office manager, believe it or not, his former political advisor and mistress.”Bentley never mounted an insurrection or claimed immunity from prosecution. Sims, of course, doesn’t even mention January 6.He also stays mum about Trump’s alleged hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, an adult film star and a Playboy model who claimed affairs. The adjudicated sexual assault of E Jean Carroll? Nothing.The Darkness Has Not Overcome is an audition for a return trip to the White House. In that, Sims is not alone. Heck, even Ivanka wants in.
      The Darkness Has Not Overcome is published in the US by Hachette More