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      ‘A campaign for vengeance’: critics warn of a radical second Trump term

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      The US election primary season is effectively over. Conventional wisdom holds that the two major candidates will now pivot towards the centre ground in search of moderate voters. But Donald Trump has never been one for conventional wisdom.Detention camps, mass deportations, capital punishment for drug smugglers, tariffs on imported goods, a purge of the justice department and potential withdrawal from Nato – the Trump policy agenda is radical by any standard including his own, pushing the boundaries set during his first presidential run eight years ago.“In 2016 he was still, in his own mind at least, positioning himself to be beloved by everybody,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “That’s why ‘Drain the swamp’ was a more populist, appealing message to all sides of the aisle because everyone on some level felt like Washington’s broken, Washington’s left us behind.“Now you flash-forward to 2024 and we’re getting a much darker version of Donald Trump, one who seems to be driven by imaginary grievances from the 2020 election. There’s nothing unifying about that message in any way; it’s incredibly self-centred. This is a campaign for vengeance. In a lot of ways he is Ahab and Moby Dick is the United States of America.”Eight years ago Trump, seeking to become the first US president with no prior political or military experience, was running with a clean slate. If anything, there was a suspicion that his background as a thrice-married New York celebrity implied some ideological fluidity and latent liberal instincts.But he announced his candidacy in June 2015 by promising to build a wall on the southern border, using xenophobic language to portray Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists” and promising to “make America great again”.During the campaign he described international trade deals as “a disaster” and called for increased tariffs on imports. He promised sweeping tax cuts and vowed to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations, describing climate change as “a total hoax”.Trump pledged to nominate supreme court justices opposed to abortion and, in one TV interview, suggested that women who have abortions should be punished. With backing from the National Rifle Association, he opposed gun safety reforms.Overseas, the Republican candidate deployed the slogan “America first”, questioning the Nato alliance while calling for improved relations with Russia. He vowed to destroy the Islamic State and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”.Trump did implement his first attempt at a Muslim ban almost immediately after taking the Oval Office in January 2017, prompting protests, airport chaos and a long legal battle in the courts. The supreme court ruled in June 2018 that the third iteration of the law could go into full effect, meaning considerable restrictions on Muslim travellers entering the country.Trump failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but his presidency was hugely consequential in other ways. His $1.5tn tax cut added to the national debt and, research has shown, helped billionaires more than the working class. The US pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump reshaped the federal judiciary and appointed three supreme court justices who would be instrumental in ending the constitutional right to abortion.He botched the response to a coronavirus pandemic that has now left more than a million Americans dead, initially underplaying the threat and later suggesting that patients might inject bleach as a cure. In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have wanted the US military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.In the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, and dozens of criminal charges against him, Trump’s extremism has broadened and deepened as he heads into an electoral rematch with Joe Biden. He won the Republican primaries with ease, prompting commentators to warn of “collective amnesia” and “the banality of chaos” as many voters seemingly become numb to his demagoguery.However, an AP VoteCast poll found six in 10 moderate Republicans in New Hampshire and South Carolina were concerned that Trump was too extreme to win a general election.View image in fullscreenFor example, he now argues that presidents should have total immunity and openly threatens the guardrails of American democracy. “I only want to be a dictator for one day,” he told supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, earlier this year.He has said he would try to strip tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections as he seeks to “totally obliterate the deep state”. Given his rage at the FBI and federal prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against him, Trump may target people linked to those prosecutions for retribution.His signature issue, border security, is once again taking centre stage with record levels of migrants caught crossing into the US. In response, he has pledged to launch the biggest deportation effort in American history. This would involve far-reaching roundups and detention camps to hold people while they await removal, the New York Times reported. He has also refused to rule out reinstating a Muslim travel ban and a hugely controversial family separation policy.Trump further wants to build more of the border wall – his first administration built 450 miles (724km) of barriers across the 1,954-mile (3,144km) border, but much of that replaced existing structures. He also wants to end automatic citizenship for children born in the US to immigrants living in the country illegally, an idea he flirted with as president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFormer Republican congressman Joe Walsh said: “He’s even uglier in his language now. He’s even more cruel in his approach. He’s gotten much more extreme, which you would think means, oh my God, how stupid politically, because he needs people in the middle. But it is big issue and Democrats have never understood how important immigration and the border are and so Trump feels as if he can demagogue it in even more of an extreme fashion.”Trump has called for the death penalty for drug smugglers and those who traffic women and children. In a broader anti-crime push, he says he will require local law enforcement agencies to use divisive policing measures including stop-and-frisk. Last year, he told a rally in Anaheim, California: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Under the mantra “Drill, baby, drill”, Trump says that he would increase oil drilling on public lands and offer tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers. He would again exit the Paris climate accords, end wind subsidies and eliminate environmental regulations.Trump has suggested that he is open to making cuts to the social security and Medicare welfare programmes. But one area in which he has hinted at moderation is abortion, publicly acknowledging that the national ban favoured by some Republicans would be electoral kryptonite, although it was reported last month that he privately expressed support for a 16-week limit with exceptions.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “His campaign has been smart to float the 16-week ban because I think most Americans fall somewhere between 16 and 20 weeks as something they can live with. If he basically says the federal government will not try to do a six-week ban, we’re not going to come after a foetal heartbeat bill – so if you live in a swing state like Michigan that has codified abortion, I’m not coming after you – that is strategically a smart position. But it would be considered a modification to the centre on abortion by Trump.”On foreign policy, Trump claims that even before he is inaugurated, he will have settled the war between Russia and Ukraine. Last week, after visiting the former president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said Trump promised him that he will end Russia’s war with Ukraine by not giving “a single penny” in aid.The Republican nominee also says he will continue to “fundamentally re-evaluate” Nato’s purpose and mission. At one recent rally, he said he would “encourage” Vladimir Putin’s Russia to attack Nato allies who do not pay their bills. And he says he will institute a system of tariffs of perhaps 10% on most foreign goods.Sometimes it can all seem like campaign bluster unlikely to survive the scrutiny of advisers, Congress or the courts. But whereas Trump’s 2016 win took everyone by surprise, perhaps including him, resulting in a first term marred by infighting and hastily written executive orders, this time there are allies who consider a second term is possible, or even probable, and are ready to hit the ground running.Trump’s campaign and groups such as the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute thinktanks are assembling Project 2025 policy books with detailed plans. Groups of conservative lawyers are sizing up what orders Trump might issue on a second presidency’s first day. With lessons learned, his administration could be even more ruthless and efficient.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “Some of the general framing and themes around what it is he wants to do are relatively consistent. What is different this time around is that there’s more of an architecture and infrastructure supporting a lot of these policy proposals.“If you look at the ecosystem of organisations that’s involved in helping him think through what a second term agenda would look like, it’s much more robust in 2024 than it was in 2016. So I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that the substance is all that different or somehow more extreme. It’s just there’s a lot more people who are thinking about it. Some of them are authorised; some of them are probably not authorised.”Critics of Trump warn that, while Trump himself has few core beliefs, he would effectively become a vehicle for extremists to push a far-right agenda wildly out of step with the majority of Americans. Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “He is an empty vessel for these other people around him who do have very specific policy ideas, most of them rooted in straight authoritarianism or some noxious mix of authoritarianism and Christian dominionism.“He doesn’t care. For all of it, it’s a means to an end. If I win do these people help me or do they hurt me? Do they give me more control? Do they give me less control? Do they give me more access to making sure I’m never going to go to jail, that I can persecute and prosecute my political enemies, that I can make life harder for the media?”Galen added: “In many ways, he is the leader of the torchlight parade but he’s being taken arm in arm and pushed from behind by a bunch of very noxious individuals with what I would call fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American ideology.” More

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      Among the exvangelicals: Sarah McCammon on faith, Trump and leaving the churches behind

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      For Sarah McCammon, “it was really January 6, watching people go into the Capitol with signs that said ‘Jesus saves’ and crosses and Christian symbols” that made her finally decide to write about her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.“I wanted to tell my story,” she says.As a national political correspondent for NPR, McCammon tells many stories. Her first book, The Exvangelicals, is not just a work of autobiography. It is also a deeply reported study of an accelerating movement – of younger Americans leaving white evangelical churches.McCammon grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Kansas City, Missouri, then went to Trinity College, an evangelical university in Deerfield, Illinois. Now, she chronicles the development of her own doubts about her religion, its social strictures and political positions, while reporting similar processes experienced by others.For many such “exvangelicals”, things began to come to a head in 2016, when Donald Trump seized the Republican presidential nomination with a harsh message of hatred and division – and evangelical support.McCammon says: “When I was hired by NPR to cover the presidential campaign, I found myself pretty quickly at the intersection of my professional life and my personal background, because I was assigned to the Republican primary. I was happy about that, because I kind of knew that world.It made sense. I figured I’d be covering Jeb Bush, his waltz to the nomination. But it didn’t turn out that way.“So much of the story of the Republican primary became about Donald Trump and white evangelicals. What were they going to do? How were they going to square evangelical teachings with his history and his character?”As McCammon watched, those evangelicals embraced a three-times married icon of greed, a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women while demonising migrants, Muslims and more.For McCammon, evangelical support for Trump was then and is now a matter of simple power politics – about how he offers a way to maintain a position under fire in a changing world – buttressed by the appeal of Trumpian “alternative facts” familiar to churches that have long denied the science of evolution, ignored the role of racism in American history and taken myriad other positions at odds with mainstream thought.View image in fullscreenMcCammon had “this whole connection to this world”, having grown up “in a very evangelical, very conservative family, very politically active”. But “in a lot of ways, I think I got into journalism to get away from some of that. I didn’t want to work in an ideological space, theological or political. I didn’t want to be an advocate, I felt very uncomfortable with the pressure to make everybody believe what I believed. And I did not even feel sure.”Nonetheless, as Trump tightened his grip, McCammon was drawn back in, becoming “fascinated because I was in my mid-30s, I had some distance from my childhood and I felt I knew what questions to ask and anticipated some debates that would come up.“So after 2016, I spent a few years reflecting on where the country was and what had happened: on the evangelical embrace of Trump. And as I thought more about it, I thought maybe there’s something I want to say about this. I wanted to tell my story.”As it turned out, a lot of former evangelicals of McCammon’s generation were telling their stories too.Like other modern social and political labels – Black Lives Matter and MeToo, for example – the term “exvangelicals” first came to prominence as a hashtag around 2016, the year the writer Blake Chastain launched a podcast under the name. Much of McCammon’s research for her book duly took place on social media, tracking down exvangelicals using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share and connect.But McCammon’s own story forms the spine of her book. Her parents remain in the church. She and her first husband married in the church. It wasn’t easy to sit down and write.“When I was finishing the draft, I sent [my parents] several key sections,” she says. “Frankly, the sections I thought would be hardest for them. I wanted to do that both as their daughter and as a journalist, because in journalism, we usually give people a chance to respond. And so, they didn’t want to be quoted.”In the finished book, McCammon’s parents are quoted, one striking example a frank exchange of messages with her mother about LGBTQ+ rights.“They’re not thrilled,” she says. “But I did take their feedback into account. They didn’t fundamentally dispute anything, factually …skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope it comes through in the book that this is not an attack on my parents. I talk about my childhood because I want to illustrate what it was like to grow up inside the evangelical milieu of that time. And based on my conversations with lots of other people, I don’t think my experiences are unique.”McCammon’s grandfather was surely close to unique: a military veteran and a neurosurgeon who had three children before coming out as gay. At first largely excluded from McCammon’s life, later a central influence, he died as McCammon was writing.She says: “I make him such a central character because he was a central part of my experience of realising that there was a bigger world out there – when he was one of the only non-evangelical or non-Christian people I had any regular contact with, growing up. For my family he was always a source of concern and consternation and worry and prayer but also he was an incredibly accomplished individual, and he was somebody I think my whole family admired and was just proud of – at the same time that we prayed for his soul.“And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being told.”View image in fullscreenMcCammon still believes, though she does not “use a lot of labels”. Her husband is Jewish. Shaped by her Christian upbringing, she has “slowly opened up my mind, as I’ve gotten older”, through talking to her husband and to people in “the progressive Christian space”. She can “read the Bible when I want to”, and does.Asked how she thinks The Exvangelicals will be received, she says “there are kind of three audiences for this book.“For exvangelicals, or people who have wrestled with their religious background, whatever it may be, I hope that they will feel seen and validated, and feel like there’s some resonance with their story, because I think there is kind of a common experience, even though the details are different.“For those like my husband, who when I met him had very little connection to the evangelical world, and are maybe a little confused by it, or maddened or frustrated by it, I hope the book will provide some insight and maybe even empathy, [helping] to understand how people think, why they think the way they think, and also the fact that evangelicalism is a massive movement and within it there are lots of different people with lots of different experiences.“The most difficult one is evangelicals. I hope those who are still firmly entrenched in the movement will read it with an open mind, and maybe some empathy. I think there are a lot of boomer parents out there, not just mine, who are trying to figure out why their kids have gone astray.“And I don’t think being an exvangelical is ‘going astray’. I think it’s about really trying to live with integrity. In some ways, it’s like: ‘You taught us to seek the truth. And so it’s what a lot of us are doing.’”
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      ‘Everything is possible’: a worrying new book explores the danger of disinformation

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      You might not have heard of Rosanne Boyland. She made the 10-hour drive from Kennesaw, Georgia, to Washington on 5 January 2021. The next day, the 34-year-old died after losing consciousness in the crush of a mob of Donald Trump supporters as it surged against US Capitol police. She would never have been there, her sister said later, “if it weren’t for all the misinformation”.The tragedy opens Barbara McQuade’s new book, Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America. The NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst explores how the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth has been weaponised to consolidate power in the hands of the few, undermine legal structures and drive voters such as Boyland. It is both cause and symptom of the US’s corrosive polarisation.A former national security prosecutor, McQuade has seen the threat of disinformation evolve from al-Qaida to Islamic State to cyber-attacks from Russia. Teaching at the University of Michigan Law School, where she is a professor, she had her students study special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on 2016 election interference by Russia.“I was fascinated by the details of accounts that were created by Russian operatives with names like Blacktivist or Heart of Texas posing as grassroots activists on the right or the left or various groups, and then taking very divisive stands on various issues just in an effort to sow discord,” McQuade, 59, says in an interview in the lobby of a Washington hotel.It was then Trump’s bogus “stop the steal” movement in 2020, based on the big lie of widespread voter fraud rejected in more than 60 lawsuits and by his own attorney general, that inspired her to write the book. It considers lessons learned ahead of a potential repeat in 2024 as the US braces for a Joe Biden v Trump rematch.“We will definitely get interference from foreign adversaries, including Russia and probably China, North Korea, maybe Iran, but there is a domestic part of this now where we are already hearing Donald Trump talk about how voting by mail is unreliable and laying the groundwork so that, if and when he loses, and there are more Democrats who have voted by mail than Republicans, he will have credibility.View image in fullscreen“He will say: ‘See, I won the election and then it all flipped for me. It was fraud.’ The same strategy that he used in in 2020. I don’t know if he’ll have new strategies but ‘stop the steal’ was a classic disinformation influence campaign based on no evidence whatsoever.”Trump commentary falls into categories. Some stop short of drawing comparisons with Adolf Hitler, perhaps wary of Godwin’s law, which holds that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches. Others dive in, arguing that some aspects of Trump’s authoritarianism, nativism and charisma do evoke the Nazi tyrant in enlightening ways.McQuade goes there with an “authoritarian playbook” charting a brief history of disinformation from Hitler and Benito Mussolini to Jair Bolsonaro and Trump and noting the tactics: demonising the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts and stoking violence.She elaborates: “Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that there are two things that are essential to effective propaganda. One was a very simple repeatable message because when people hear a message repeated again and again – and start hearing it from different sources – they begin to believe it to be true.“The other is that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed. All of us are guilty of white lies from time to time that we might say out of kindness. My sister might say your hair looks fine when she means anything but, or my husband might say to me, no, dear, that dress doesn’t make you look fat.“They’re saying these things out of kindness, even though they might be technically lying. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, most people would not ever imagine that anyone could have the audacity to lie about something that is so significant – he was talking about the role of Jewish people in society, for example.“But here the big lie for Trump was that the election has been stolen because people say: ‘How could you possibly pull that off? It’s so ridiculous.’ That’s part of what gives it its credibility and he knows that so I worry we’re going to begin to hear that again, and there are a significant number of Americans who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen. There will always be people who are manipulated by those strategies.”Now the history of the January 6 insurrection itself is being rewritten, with the rioters recast as “patriots” and, if tried and imprisoned, as “hostages” whom Trump is promising to pardon if elected. Opinion polls show that more than a third of Americans believe that Biden’s election was illegitimate; Republicans are more sympathetic to the US Capitol rioters now than they were in 2021.McQuade says with some dismay: “They assaulted people, they brought weapons, they broke windows, they spread faeces on the walls of the temple of democracy, they carried Confederate flags in there. Now to refer to it as legitimate political discourse or ordinary tourist activity, and then to refer to people who have been arrested, charged and imprisoned for their crimes as hostages, is absolutely a brand of disinformation. I’m curious to see how many people will continue to fall for that in this election.”View image in fullscreenTrump svengali Steve Bannon, an arch election denier and vaccine conspiracy theorist, once memorably declared that the real opposition was the media and the way to deal with them was to “flood the zone with shit”. This brings to mind the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin. McQuade cites the Russian author and journalist Peter Pomerantsev on “the fog of unknowability”.She explains: “Everything is possible and nothing matters, and so everything’s PR because people begin to doubt the very existence of truth. One day Putin might say the missiles were shot by Ukraine; the next day the missiles were shot by Russia; the next day the missiles were shot by Nato.“People don’t know what to think and consistency doesn’t matter. In fact, inconsistency is part of the point, because first people become angry and then they become cynical and then finally they become numb and disengaged from politics altogether and so that’s a very dangerous place for democracy.“The other thing that people think in Russia is that truth is for suckers: you should just get what you can while you can and everybody is corrupt, which is one of the things that causes Donald Trump to constantly be suggesting that the Bidens are corrupt – if everybody is corrupt, then it gives you permission to overlook Donald Trump’s corruption, right?“‘Well, they’re all corrupt. Who knows what to believe? All these investigations are themselves weaponised and corrupt so I might as well look for someone who is strong, who will advance my values despite all of his corruption.’ This normalisation of corruption is something that is part of it all as well.”How has it come to this? McQuade, who was born in Detroit and lives Ann Arbor, Michigan, identifies three central causes. First, the delivery mechanism of disinformation has changed. For centuries, the deceiver had to rely on word of mouth or leaflets or planting a false story, perhaps in a foreign newspaper, in the hope that someone would pick it up and pass it on. Now someone can spread a lie at the push of a button.“Social media is a wonderful tool and can connect us to people all over the world in wonderful ways, but can also be used as a weapon when people want to and so it has been a really efficient vehicle for delivering disinformation,” says the author. “They’re completely unaccountable and we have ceded all of our power on social media to a handful of young bro billionaires, whose interest, of course, is in their own profits, not in the social good.”Second, we are living through the worst political divisions in America since the 1861-1865 civil war. McQuade reckons it began with the combative, attention-grabbing Republican Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and has grown as parties concentrate on turning out their bases rather than finding common ground. With elections framed as an existential struggle between good and evil, voters demand political purity. “If my tribe says X then I say X too, even if I don’t believe X to be true.”Third, there is anxiety about a changing world: the climate crisis, refugees and border security, economic shifts with potential job losses. It is fertile soil for demagogues who promise that they alone can fix it. “We have leaders who want to use that to stoke fear because they perceive that that will be in their own political interest to attract those voters who are concerned about those changes and attract them into their own fold.“It’s a combination of those three things that Donald Trump has exploited in this country like no one we’ve ever seen. I don’t think that he’s necessarily a political genius, but I do think he’s a conman and a marketing genius who knows how to sell things. He’s a huckster and he has taken advantage of this moment for personal and political gain.”The huckster’s rise nearly a decade ago caught the media off guard. The old and laudable rules of balance, impartiality and not editorialising no longer seemed to work when one candidate was so blatantly mendacious. The New York Times newspaper broke the seal in 2016 with the headline: Trump Gives Up a Lie but Refuses to Repent. But as another election looms, McQuade worries that journalists have still not figured out how to cover him.“That which is novel is always newsworthy, that which is controversial is always newsworthy, and so they present those things. But in an effort to present both sides of a story and in a tradition of not calling people liars, they have allowed Donald Trump and his supporters to manipulate them and play them. They’ll just say he made a statement that is not backed up by evidence; say he’s lying! You gotta say it out loud.”View image in fullscreenBut Attack from Within is not a letter of surrender or obituary of America. McQuade offers solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law, such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, reviving local journalism, criminalising doxxing (the act of revealing identifying information about someone online) and considering a ban on online anonymous accounts.The former US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan urges politicians to get ahead of the curve of artificial intelligence. “I hope that our Congress can do something which we failed to do with social media, which is get ahead of it, because if it can put things in place before they create havoc, it’s much easier than trying to react after the fact.”Individual citizens, she says, can gain skills be critical consumers of social media. “We can educate ourselves and take responsibility by doing things like, when we read an article, don’t rely just on the headline; we should actually read the article before we forward it to someone else.“We should look for second sources of a story; if there’s an outrageous story, someone else will be reporting it. If there is data in a story, we should look at that data. How big was the sample set? Was it a sample of three or a sample of 3m? That makes a difference. Were the results of this study a causation or just coincidence with an outcome? We need to do that.”McQuade also calls for increasing media literacy in schools and a revival of teaching civics rather than focusing on test scores. “Civics education is important for all of us, because when someone explains to you how the separation of powers works and how the three branches of government work, it is impossible to believe that a president could be immune from prosecution. We all need that education.”
      Attack from Within is out now More

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      Trump hush-money trial delayed for 30 days as lawyers review new evidence

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      A judge on Friday delayed Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial until at least mid-April after the former president’s lawyers said they needed more time to sift through a profusion of evidence they only recently obtained from a previous federal investigation into the matter.Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day postponement and scheduled a hearing for 25 March to address questions about the evidence dump. The trial had been slated to start on 25 March. It is among four criminal indictments against Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee.Trump’s lawyers wanted a 90-day delay, which would have pushed the start of the trial into the early summer. Prosecutors said they were OK with a 30-day adjournment “in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials”.Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the last two weeks from the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the hush money arrangement while Trump was president.The evidence includes records about former Trump lawyer turned prosecution witness Michael Cohen that are “exculpatory and favorable to the defense,” Trump’s lawyers said. Prosecutors said most of the newly turned over material is “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case,” though some records are pertinent.The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels. His lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses and were not part of any cover-up.Prosecutors contend Trump’s lawyers caused the evidence problem by waiting until 18 January – a mere nine weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection – to subpoena the US attorney’s office for the full case file.District attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said it requested the full file last year, but the US attorney’s office only turned over a subset of records. Trump’s lawyers received that material last June and had ample time to seek additional evidence from the federal probe, the district attorney’s office said.Short trial delays because of issues with evidence aren’t unusual, but any delay in a case involving Trump would be significant, with trial dates in his other criminal cases up in the air and election day less than eight months away.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe defense has also sought to delay the trial until after the US supreme court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claims, which his lawyers say could apply to some of the allegations and evidence in the hush money case. The supreme court is scheduled to hear oral arguments 25 April.Trump has repeatedly sought to postpone his criminal trials while he campaigns to retake the White House.“We want delays,” Trump told reporters as he headed into a 15 February hearing in New York. “Obviously, I’m running for election. How can you run for election if you’re sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?” More

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      Kamala Harris puts abortion front and center with visit to Minnesota clinic

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      Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic on Thursday, becoming what is believed to be the first vice-president ever to do so.Harris stopped by a clinic in Minnesota, a state where abortion remains legal following the overturning of Roe v Wade, as part of her nationwide tour to highlight the impact of Roe’s downfall. Harris also toured the clinic, which remained open to patients as the nation’s first female vice-president made her historic visit.“Walking through this clinic, that’s what I saw, … people who have dedicated their lives to the profession of providing healthcare in a safe place that gives people dignity,” Harris told reporters after her tour. “And I think we should all want that for each other.”Protesters had already assembled outside the clinic by the time of Harris’s arrival. They carried signs with messages such as “Planned Parenthood = abortion” and “abortion is not healthcare”.Harris and Joe Biden are banking on outrage over Roe to help propel them to a second term in the White House come November. Anger over the landmark decision’s demise was credited with helping stop a much-promised “red wave” of Republican victories in the 2022 midterms, as well as leading abortion rights to triumph in multiple ballot initiatives, including in red states such as Kentucky, Kansas and Ohio.One in eight voters now say that abortion is their top issue in the 2024 elections, according to a KFF poll released last week. Harris and Biden have said that they would like to codify Roe’s protections into law – legislation that is unlikely to move anytime soon, given the degree of inaction and polarization in the US Congress.Biden’s record on and ability to talk about abortion rights dims in comparison to his running mate’s. Biden, a devout Catholic, has said that he is personally “not big” on abortion. And while Biden highlighted the threat to “reproductive freedom” in his State of the Union address to Congress last week, he did not say the word “abortion”.In contrast, Harris has spoken far more openly about the issue. On Thursday, she mentioned “abortion care” and said that the overturning of Roe has led to a “healthcare crisis”.“Elections matter,” Harris told reporters. “When it comes to national elections and who sits in the United States Congress, there’s a fundamental point on this issue that I think most people agree with, which is that one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling women what to do with her body.”Asked about her role in this issue, Harris said: “My role is to do what I just did, which is to articulate exactly these points and to continue to articulate them, and to organize folks around what I know is an issue that is impacting more people than you will ever really know.” More

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      Republicans say Democrats’ hardball Ohio Senate play could backfire

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      Democrats working to boost a Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for the US Senate in Ohio, as a way to boost their own progressive senator, should be careful, an aide to the Republican said, lest such efforts backfire and they lose a precious seat.Such tactics have been used by Democrats before – when they support a more extreme Republican to be nominated out of a calculation that that candidate will then stand less chance of winning against a Democrat in a general election. Of course, such tactics could backfire and see extremists elected.“Democrats constantly underestimate the America First movement at their own peril,” Reagan McCarthy, communications director to Bernie Moreno, told news outlets.“They thought President Trump would be easy to beat in 2016 and then they got their clocks cleaned when he demolished Hillary Clinton. The same thing is going to happen to Sherrod Brown this year.”Democrats control the US Senate by 51 seats to 49. Republicans have high hopes of retaking the chamber, with Ohio on their list of targets.Brown, 71, is a major presence on the Democratic left, first elected to the Senate in 2006 when he beat Mike DeWine.DeWine is now the Republican governor of a former battleground state that has trended right. In the last Senate election, the bestselling author JD Vance, a self-described “conservative knuckle-dragger”, took the other seat.This year’s Republican Senate primary sees Moreno, a businessman also endorsed by Vance, facing Matt Dolan, a state senator backed by DeWine, and Frank LaRose, the secretary of state. Polling indicates a close race with Dolan leading. Election day is next Tuesday.On Thursday, multiple outlets reported that Duty and Country, a group linked to the Democratic Senate Majority political action committee, was spending about $2.7m on an ad to run across the state, meant to boost Moreno among Republicans by calling him “ultraconservative”, “too conservative for Ohio” and “too aligned” with Trump.“Donald Trump needs Bernie Moreno,” said the ad, titled Maga Fighter, in reference to Trump’s endorsement.“Ohio doesn’t.”The aim is to give Brown a better chance in the general election, against a candidate Democrats can portray as too extreme, linked to attacks on reproductive rights and democracy itself, key themes for Democratic campaigns from Joe Biden down.Hannah Menchhoff, a spokesperson for the Senate Majority Pac, said: “When Ohio voters head to their polling place, they deserve to know the truth about Bernie Moreno – and the truth is that Moreno is a Maga extremist who embraced Donald Trump just like he embraced his policies to ban abortion nationwide and repeal” the Affordable Care Act.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA similar Democratic effort recently succeeded in California. In an open primary for a US Senate seat, the former US House intelligence chair Adam Schiff successfully boosted the Republican Steve Garvey past other Democrats, making for what should be an easy victory in November.Democrats in Pennsylvania – much more of a battleground than deep-blue California – have also enjoyed success with such tactics. In 2022, they played up the conservative credentials of Doug Mastriano, a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor with far-right links and views. The Democrat, Josh Shapiro, won the election with ease.Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said that such tactics were “relatively common but not always sound.“The risk of course is that you lose to the Trumpier guy. But it’s hardball – something Democrats aren’t typically known for,” he said.Galen also pointed to Brown’s strength even when targeted by national Republicans, saying the senator had a “better than average” chance of re-election.According to polling released on Wednesday by Emerson College Polling and the Hill, Brown is indeed well placed to retain his seat. In hypothetical match-ups, the Democrat led LaRose 39% to 33%, Moreno 39% to 34% and Dolan 37% to 34%.“He’s an institution,” Galen said of Brown. More

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      ‘Lead, follow or get out the way’: House speaker urged to act on Ukraine aid bill

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      A group of congressional Democrats including the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and armed services veterans urged the current Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, to “lead, follow or get out of the way” of more military support for Ukraine in its war against Russian invaders.“In the military, we have a great expression,” Mikie Sherrill, a House Democrat from New Jersey and a former navy helicopter pilot, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “‘Lead, follow or get out of the way.’ That is exactly what our speaker has to do.”Last month, Senate Democrats and Republicans passed a $95bn foreign aid package covering Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel.The Democrats who spoke on Wednesday faced vocal competition from protesters with Code Pink: Women for Peace opposing funding for Israel in its war against Hamas. On Ukraine policy, though, House Republicans have proved more obstructive than Medea Benjamin, the Code Pink co-founder, was able to be at the Capitol.Under the direction of Donald Trump, the presumptive presidential nominee who openly favors Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, Johnson has shown no sign of bringing the Senate package up for a vote. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently emerged from meeting Trump to say that if Trump is re-elected, he will not give “a penny” to Ukraine.Trump has said he will encourage Russia to attack US allies he deems not to pay enough to be members of Nato.House Democrats have lodged discharge petitions, a mechanism by which the speaker can be bypassed. Despite significant Republican support for Ukraine aid such efforts remain unlikely to succeed. On Wednesday, one petition was about 50 votes short of success.Johnson, Sherrill said, “has to show some leadership and put this bill on the floor so we can get an up-or-down vote on it. We know we have about 300 votes in favour.“He can follow the Democrats: we have put our discharge petition on the board, get his members to sign this petition and again, support Ukraine. Or he could just get out of the way because we know that the American people are behind the Ukrainians.“We know that each and every day that goes by is another day that Ukrainians are dying. We have members of the Ukrainian armed forces in my district, people who have lost legs, who have lost their vision, because they were standing in the breach … We’re fighting hard for this, Mr Speaker. Lead, follow or get out of the way.”Other Democrats who spoke to reporters included army, navy and air force veterans with service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.All saluted Ukrainian courage. More than one called the Ukrainians “MacGyvers”, an admiring evocation of their make-do-and-mend spirit with meagre supplies, arising from a cult 1980s TV series starring Richard Dean Anderson.The press conference in the House Triangle was staged in conjunction with Vote Vets and introduced by Alexander Vindman. A former US soldier of Ukrainian heritage, Vindman and his brother Eugene helped blow the whistle on Trump’s attempts as president to extract political dirt from Ukraine, prompting his first impeachment. Both were pushed out of the military. Eugene Vindman is now running for Congress in Virginia.Representing Vote Vets, Rick Harris, the father of Thomas Gray Harris, a former US marine killed in Ukraine, said: “It is hard to have lost my son but I am proud of what he did. If he were here today, though he would use much more colourful language than me, he would tell the speaker to call the vote now.”Dan Goldman of New York was not the only speaker to say Ronald Reagan, the Republican president revered in his party for standing up to Moscow, would be “rolling in his grave if he knew his party was not supporting democracy against Russia”. Vote Vets unveiled a new ad, featuring Reagan saying “democracy is worth dying for” and set to be broadcast on Fox News.On Tuesday the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, told reporters Johnson should “let the House speak”. Asked about Republican proposals to offer aid to Ukraine as a loan not a grant, McConnell said it was more important to act quickly.“The only way to get relief to the Ukrainians and the Israelis quickly is for the House to figure out how to pass the Senate bill,” he said, adding: “We’ve got a bill that got 70 votes in the Senate. Give members of the House of Representatives an opportunity to vote on it. That’s the solution.”Also on Tuesday, the White House said the US would send Ukraine aid worth $300m, the first such move in months. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the funds came from unanticipated savings from Pentagon contracts and would be used for artillery munitions.“This ammunition will keep Ukraine’s guns firing for a period but only a short period,” Sullivan said. “It is nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs and it will not prevent Ukraine running out of ammunition.”US officials have also looked at options for seizing $285bn in Russian assets immobilised in 2022, then using the money to pay for weapons for Ukraine.Also on Tuesday, Biden met the president and prime minister of Poland, to talk about Ukraine. On Capitol Hill, US intelligence agency chiefs pressed House members, saying new Ukraine aid would also discourage Chinese aggression.The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, told French media Kyiv had improved its strategic position despite shortages of weaponry, but suggested the situation could change again if new supplies were not forthcoming. He also said Russia was preparing a new offensive for late May or summer.Zelenskiy has said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the two-year war. More

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      Biden slightly behind Trump but voters’ views of economy improve, poll shows

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      Joe Biden officially begins his general election campaign with a slight polling deficit against Donald Trump, and no indications that his forceful State of the Union address has provided much of a boost with voters, according to a public opinion survey released on Wednesday.But the newly released USA Today/Suffolk University poll also shows views of the economy have hit their highest level of Biden’s presidency, a sign that voters may be starting to agree with the president that his policies helped the country recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.Biden and Trump on Tuesday clinched the final delegates they needed to win the Democratic and Republican nominations, respectively, with primary victories in Washington state, Mississippi and Georgia. They will be officially named the nominees at their party’s conventions over the summer, but by all indications, Americans are not looking forward to the first rematch between presidential candidates in almost seven decades.Polls have repeatedly shown both men are unpopular with voters, but the USA Today/Suffolk University survey finds Trump has a slight advantage over Biden nationally, with 40% of voters preferring him over the president’s 38%.And while unfavorability ratings for both men are 55%, the poll finds Republicans are more fired up about a second Trump presidency than Democrats are for another four years of Biden. Forty-three per cent of Republicans say they are “excited” about Trump’s nomination, versus 22% of Democrats about Biden.Biden’s approval ratings have been underwater for more than two and a half years, and the dip roughly coincided with the intensification of inflation that accompanied the economy’s bounceback from the mass layoffs and business closures caused by Covid-19.While the White House has tried to redirect voters’ attention to the strong labor market, ebbing rate of price growth and the potential offered by Biden’s legislative accomplishment, views of the economy specifically have remained negative.But the USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows that voters are becoming less pessimistic. A third of registered voters believe the economy is recovering, the highest share saying that since Biden took office, the survey says.“This data point is particularly important to track. If the trend continues, more voters could connect the economic recovery to President Biden, especially if the economy continues to dominate other issues as we get closer to November,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats were also cheered by Biden’s performance at the annual State of the Union address last week. The president laid into Trump in a passionate speech that, for some of his allies, quieted fears about the 81-year-old Biden being too old to campaign effectively.But it didn’t do much to move the needle among the poll’s respondents. While a majority watched the speech, they were nearly evenly split on whether it improved or worsened their views of Biden, and 39% said it made no difference at all. More