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      Here’s how to mitigate some of Trump’s most dangerous foreign policy instincts | Kenneth Roth

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      The nightmare has arrived. Trump’s “America First” norm-flouting was bad enough the last time around, when a collection of traditional Republicans in senior positions moderated his worst impulses. No such grown-ups are expected to return.Our only hope may be that Trump no longer must worry about re-election. Instead of pandering to – and promoting – the worst instincts of his base, Trump, long preoccupied by his image, may begin to contemplate his legacy. Will history mock or admire him? The greater his concern with his lasting reputation, the better our chances of averting disaster.Ukraine illustrates the choices ahead. Does Trump really want to be known as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century, appeasing a brutal tyrant in the naive hope that he will be sated with a single gulp of ill-gotten territory?For reasons that are not wholly understood, Trump has long harbored an unseemly admiration for Vladimir Putin. Trump is likely to stop sending arms to Ukraine and to insist that Kyiv settle for at best a frozen conflict, in effect ceding its occupied eastern territory to Russia. But with Trump in the White House, Putin is likely to want more.Behind Putin’s self-serving rhetoric about denazifying Ukraine is a desire to de-democratize it. A democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border is a constant reminder to the Russian people of the freedoms that Putin’s dictatorship denies them. He wants another Belarus.No amount of strongman-admiration on Trump’s part will overcome the Ukrainian people’s refusal to become another Kremlin vassal state. Nor will it avoid Ukraine’s understandable distrust of Putin and insistence on western security guarantees if there is to be any formal accord. Trump as Chamberlain would be indifferent to Kyiv’s pleas. A Trump sensitive to his place in history might be more accommodating.Moreover, a humiliating surrender for Ukraine would hardly go unnoticed in Beijing. Trump might try to spin it as enabling greater focus on China, which he rightly sees as a threat, but Xi Jinping is likely to read it as a lack of resolve. If Trump will not defend an aspiring democracy on the threshold of the European Union, why would he prevent Beijing from incorporating Taiwan by threatened or actual force? Even close American allies such as Japan and South Korea would quickly recalibrate their need to accommodate Beijing. Is that what Trump wants to be remembered for?Trump mainly sees China as a commercial threat. Having hiked tariffs during his last presidency (Joe Biden maintained them), Trump now threatens to substantially increase them. He laughably claims that China would pay for the tariffs, ignoring the near-universal view of economists that the cost would be passed on to American consumers.Trump contends that tariffs would force more manufacturing to US soil, but a battle of tit-for-tat tariffs would more immediately fuel inflation. During the campaign, Trump played on many Americans’ mistaken tendency to equate higher prices from past inflation with ongoing inflation, but they would soon appreciate the difference as prices again soared.Biden showed the way toward a smarter trade policy – one built on common values rather than mere competition – that Trump would be wise to continue and expand. Beyond subsidies, many Chinese producers exploit Beijing’s use of Uyghur forced labor, especially in China’s north-west province of Xinjiang. That forced labor infects exports of cotton, tomatoes, aluminum and, significantly, polysilicon, the building block of China’s corner-the-market solar panels.Both the US government and the European Union claim to oppose importing the product of forced labor, but only the United States has created a legislative presumption against any imports from Xinjiang without proof that forced labor was not involved – proof that is impossible to obtain given China’s opaque supply chains. The EU never adopted that presumption, so imports from Xinjiang have surged, while US imports have diminished.A smart policy on trade with China would push the EU to adopt a similar presumption. Trump should also have US customs officials pay more attention to Beijing’s subterfuges, such as shipping from Xinjiang via other parts of China or even third countries to avoid the presumption.Israel’s war in Gaza will demand a rethink from Trump. During his first term, he gave Benjamin Netanyahu whatever he wanted, from recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital to greenlighting rapid expansion of Israel’s illegal (war-crime) settlements and refusing to call Palestinian land “occupied”. Now, Trump says that Biden has imposed too many restraints on the Israeli prime minister – by pushing him to stop bombing and starving Palestinian civilians – even though Biden refused to use the leverage of conditioning US arms sales and military aid to enforce those demands. Trump wants to let Israel “finish the job”, ideally quickly, and told Netanyahu to “do what you have to do”.But an unrestrained Netanyahu might heed the calls of his rightwing ministers to force the mass deportation of the Palestinians of Gaza to Egypt – a trip that, like the Nakba of 1948, is likely to be one-way. That would outrage the world and almost surely yield additional war-crime charges from the international criminal court (ICC).During Trump’s last term, he disgracefully imposed sanctions on the prior ICC prosecutor for opening investigations that could implicate Israeli officials in Palestinian territory as well as US torturers under George W Bush in Afghanistan. Biden lifted those sanctions, and even mainstream Republicans warmed to the court after its prosecutor charged Putin with war crimes in Ukraine. If Trump were to revive sanctions, he would virtually invite the prosecutor to abandon political restraints that keep him from charging senior US officials (soon, including Trump) for aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes in Gaza.Trump’s desire to expand the Abraham Accords, perhaps the most visible foreign policy achievement of his first term, will also founder without a tougher approach to Israel. Although the Saudi crown prince is notoriously indifferent to the plight of Palestinians, Saudi public opinion has forced him to announce that, however much he wants the carrot of US security guarantees against Iran, he will not normalize relations with Israel without a firm path to a Palestinian state. That is anathema to the Israeli government. Trump must decide whether to abandon his reflexive support for Israel in favor of a deal that would indeed be historic.A similar dilemma faces Trump on Iran. His ripping up of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal has put the clerics just a few short steps from a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu is itching for Trump to join him in a military attack on Iran’s nuclear program, but that would risk involving American forces in a regional war that Trump wants to avoid. It would also endanger the Gulf states’ oil supplies, fueling inflation. And it would only encourage Iran to obtain a ready-made nuclear weapon from, say, North Korea. Is that what Trump wants?More broadly, Trump needs to decide whether to continue his professed admiration for the world’s autocrats. He seems to relish their ability to act without the impediments of democratic checks and balances that so frustrated him during his first term.But the autocrats have learned to play him. Trump can hardly trumpet his artful dealmaking when word is out that a round of calculated fawning is all it takes to manipulate his fragile ego. Will Trump be known for dispensing with the national interest in his quest for the sugar high of flattery? Despite his transactional, go-it-alone tendencies, even Trump might come to appreciate how few friends he has if he stands for little beyond a quest for praise.Trump might even reconsider his instinctive opposition to multilateral endeavors. Biden, sadly, has already done him the favor of abandoning the US seat on the UN human rights council. But does Trump really want to defund the World Health Organization again when it is the frontline for our defense against the next pandemic, whether bird flu, mpox, antimicrobial resistance or something as yet unidentified? Does he really want to continue treating climate change as a “hoax” as severe weather decimates the homes of his supporters?On migration, Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants would cost billions, create labor shortages that fuel inflation and separate millions of US-citizen children from one or both parents. Yet with the need for an election issue behind him, he could negotiate long-awaited comprehensive legislation that would bolster border enforcement, fund the asylum system to reduce backlogs and introduce a statute of limitations that exempts longtime residents (who, despite his racist claims, typically have families, jobs and constructive lives in America) from the threat of deportation.I recognize this may all be wishful thinking. Trump may be too self-absorbed to think beyond the self-gratification of the moment. But if he has a shred of mental space left to worry about his legacy, that may be our best bet to salvage a potentially disastrous presidency – for America and the world.

      Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022, is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs More

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      Republican senator calls for release of Matt Gaetz ethics report to chamber

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      Discussion on Donald Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who had been accused of sexual misconduct, for US attorney general continued on Sunday, with Republican senator Markwayne Mullin calling for an unreleased ethics report to be released to the Senate.Mullin told NBC’s Meet the Press that the Senate, which will oversee Gaetz’s confirmation hearings to become attorney general, “should have access to that” but declined to say if it should be released publicly.Gaetz resigned from his seat in Congress on Wednesday soon after the president-elect made his controversial pick, frustrating plans by a congressional ethics panel to release a review of claims against Gaetz, including sexual misconduct and illegal drug use. Gaetz denies any wrongdoing.Republican House speaker Mike Johnson repeated his position on Sunday that the survey should remain out of the public realm. Gaetz had faced a three-year justice department investigation into the same allegations that concluded without criminal charges being brought.Johnson said the principle was that the ethics committee’s jurisdiction did not extend to non-members of the House. “There have been, I understand, I think, two exceptions to the rule over the whole history of Congress and the history of the ethics committee,” Johnson told CNN, adding that while he did not have the authority to stop it “we don’t want to go down that road.”Trump’s selection of Gaetz, while successfully provoking Democrats’ outrage, is also seen as a test for Republicans to bend Trump’s force of will. Mullin has previously noted situations in which Gaetz had allegedly shown colleagues nude photographs of his sexual conquests and described him as “unprincipled”.But the senator said he had not made a decision on whether to support Gaetz in a confirmation vote. “I’m going to give him a fair shot just like any individual,” Mullin said.The pending report seems likely to emerge in some form after other senior Republicans, including senators Susan Collins, John Cornyn and Thom Tillis have all said they believe it should be shown to them.Separately, Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman repeated his advice to members of his own party to not “freak out” over everything Trump does, pointing out that for at least the next two years, Republicans can “run the table”.Fetterman, who won decisive re-election in the state this month, said he looked forward to reviewing some of Trump’s nominations but others “are just absolute trolls”, including Gaetz.For Democrats, who are still trying to figure out reasons for their devastating loss at the ballot box this month, their outrage at Trump’s nominations “gets the kind of thing that he wanted, like the freak out”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s still not even Thanksgiving yet and if we’re having meltdowns at every tweet or every appointment.”Democrats, Fetterman added, should be “more concerned” about Republicans being able “to run the table for the next two years. Those are the things you really want to be concerned about, not small tweets or, you know, random kinds of appointments.”But Democratic senator-elect Adam Schiff told CNN that Gaetz was “not only unqualified, he is really disqualified” to become the country’s top lawyer.“Are we really going to have an attorney general [with] … credible allegations he was involved in child sex-trafficking, potential illicit drug use, obstruction of an investigation? Who has no experience serving in the justice department, only being investigated by it,” Schiff said. More

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      Trump’s defense pick reportedly paid sexual assault accuser but denies claims

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      Peter Hegseth, the military veteran, Fox & Friends chat host and Donald Trump’s pick to head the department of defense, reportedly paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault – an encounter that he insists was consensual.According to the Washington Post, the unnamed woman was paid an unknown sum after signing a nondisclosure agreement.In a statement to the outlet, Hegseth’s attorney said that Hegseth was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident and police who had looked into the woman’s claim had concluded that “the complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter.”In the statement, Hegseth lawyer Timothy Parlatore said his client had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox”.The claim against Hegseth came to light this week after a friend of the accuser supplied the Trump transition team with “a detailed memo” outlining the claim that Hegseth sexually assaulted a 30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a Monterey, California, hotel bar in October 2017.Hegseth was a speaker at a conference of the California Federation of Republican Women conference when the encounter that led to the investigation took place. Police have said a complaint was filed four days after the alleged encounter, and the complainant had bruises to her thigh.Hegseth made a payment to the woman after she threatened litigation in 2020, his attorney confirmed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Mr Hegseth is completely innocent,” Parlatore said. “Not only did she take advantage of him, but we believe she then extorted him knowing that at the height of the #MeToo movement the mere public allegation would likely result in his immediate termination from Fox News.”Earlier this week, after the claim was revealed Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said “Hegseth has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.”Hegseth’s path to Senate confirmation has been complicated over concerns about his inexperience and extreme views. More

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      In this age of rage, it’s easy for Trump to keep stoking people’s anger | Henry Porter

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      Donald Trump and the Republican party may have won a decisive victory, but do not expect the anger that has blighted America since Trump announced he was running for office nine years ago to subside. Anger and grievance are the fuel rods of Maga populism, and they must be kept at dangerously high temperatures for the movement and a second Trump term to operate.Watching the last four weeks of the campaign, the uninhibited rage of Trump and his supporting acts at rallies was very striking. There was no attempt at decent norms. As the election neared, speeches became louder and more laced with vitriol, to the degree that commentators believed they had gone too far for the American public.First lesson of the Democrat defeat is that most US voters lapped it up. This is what they want. America is a very angry place, much more so that than its neighbour to the north, Canada. In the US, dissatisfaction with opportunities, the state of the country and the government have risen sharply since the Reagan era, whereas in Canada dissatisfaction has only increased over the government’s failure to protect the most vulnerable in society. That says a lot about the wildly differing tone of the two societies as well as levels of available empathy.Road rage in the US doubled between 2019 and 2022, with 44 people killed or wounded by gunfire on the roads every month, a ­figure that bucks the trends of violent crime and murder that have been generally declining in the US since 1990.There are a lot of people walking around with the bewildering, hair-trigger rage of John Goodman’s character Walter Sobchak in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Trump echoes the craziness, amplifies it, then uses the energy tha t it returns to him.This is a feedback loop, but the anger doesn’t just circle with the same intensity between Trump and his people; it steadily increases.At a Trump rally you became aware of the exuberant high of the outrage, that this is a fix enjoyed across America both by those who tend towards unreflective negativity, racism and misogyny and by people who have a genuine complaint about their lives. In both cases they have acquired the habit of rage, and it has become a meaningful and gratifying part of their identity.The anger is not simply going to evaporate when Trump takes over in January, not only because it’s too important to people’s sense of political self but also because the communication channel between the president and his supporters works only at this level. There is no exchange of ideas, of course, no sense that he leads with a vision other than the one that meets their anger with a promise of destruction.The early evidence of this political wrecking machine comes with the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, all of whom cannot fail to vandalise and degrade the institutions they take over. Indeed, that appears to be their brief.When he moves back into the White House with the Senate, Congress and supreme court in the control of the Republican party, he will be one of the most powerful presidents ever to have governed and he will be 100% responsible for the fortunes of Americans.How will his supporters, so used to reflexively blaming Washington and the government, confront his responsibility when he fails to improve their lives, as he certainly will because of a suicidal tariff regime, tax cuts to the rich and corporations that will increase national debt, cuts to Medicaid and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants that will severely damage growth as well as cause unbelievable pain to separated families across America?His failure will be a problem for his supporters, who can’t lose faith in their idol, and also for Trump, who must not let their support fall away. The solution for both parties will be to maintain the anger but divert it away from Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd this is where we should fear for America. Trump has been lining up scapegoats. He has promised to persecute “the enemies within” and “radical left communists” like Adam Schiff, the new senator for California, and the former speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has made threats to Michelle Obama and Liz Cheney, who endorsed Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, and has demanded that CBS’s broadcast licence be revoked. He has suggested “one really violent day” and “one rough hour” against petty criminals.He will resort to this list whenever he needs to, but it will be America’s undocumented immigrants who will initially suffer, for next to the economy they topped the concerns of Republican voters. Trump will always be able to satisfy Maga anger by promising new and more cruel actions against immigrants, among which measures are likely to be privately run detention camps.There is no telling where this will end, no sense where national resistance will come in a society that is unused to dealing with an authoritarian who exploits dark and violent emotions as expertly as Trump does.The Democrats are plunged in a round of recriminations about the defeat, but they need to find new leadership and a strategy to deal with the anger that now threatens America and its institutions of government. When fuel rods overheat in a nuclear reactor, the result is usually meltdown. More

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      ‘A Russian asset’: Democrats slam Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence

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      Democratic lawmakers are slamming Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, saying their former House colleague is a vocal supporter of Russia who poses a threat to US national intelligence.Jason Crow, a House Democrat from Colorado and a member of the House intelligence committee, told NBC News that he has “deep questions about where her loyalties lie”.“We get a lot of intelligence from our allies, and there I would be worried about a chilling effect,” he said.Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a House Democrat from Florida, told MSNBC on Friday: “There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”Abigail Spanberger, another House Democrat on the intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, said on X that she is “appalled” by Gabbard’s nomination.“Someone who has aligned herself with Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad and trafficked in Russian-backed conspiracy theories is an unsuitable and potentially dangerous selection,” Spanberger wrote. “The objections to her nomination transcend partisan politics. This is a matter of national security.”Gabbard is just the latest of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks to garner alarm over her nomination. Questions and criticism have been raised by members of both parties over the qualification of other Trump nominees, including representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general, Robert F Kennedy Jr as secretary of health and human services and Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense.It’s unclear whether all of Trump’s nominees will be able to get through a Senate confirmation, even with the chamber’s Republican majority.Moderate Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have voiced reservations about nominees like Gaetz, who Murkowski said is not “a serious nomination”. Former Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy similarly said that “Gaetz won’t get confirmed”.“Everybody knows that,” he told Bloomberg.Gabbard was a Democratic representative from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and was the first Samoan and Hindu elected to Congress. She served in the military in Iraq and was once a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 primary campaign.She has since become a contributor on Fox News and said that she quit the Democratic party, which she said is run by an “elitist cabal of warmongers”. Gabbard has been a staunch critic of US foreign policy. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard accused the US of running biological weapon laboratories in Ukraine – a falsehood often touted by Russia.Michael Waldman, president of the Brenna Center for Justice, told the New York Times on Wednesday that Trump’s cabinet nominations “seem designed to poke the Senate in the eyes”.“They’re so appalling they’re a form of performance art,” he said. More

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      The ‘foolproof’ election forecaster who predicted Trump would lose – what went wrong?

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      Surely not even Nostradamus could get it right all of the time.Allan Lichtman had correctly forecast the result of nine of the past 10 US presidential elections (and even the one he didn’t, in 2000, he insists was stolen from Al Gore). His predictive model of “13 keys” to the White House was emulated around the world and seemed all but indestructible.Until, that is, Donald Trump, the notorious human wrecking ball, came along and broke his crystal ball. Lichtman had prophesied that Democrat Kamala Harris would win eight of his keys, claiming the presidency, forcing him to face the harsh truth that his winning streak was over. Was it a big personal blow?“Of course,” the 77-year-old admits by phone. “But I care far less about the personal blow than I care about the blow to our democracy. Even before the election I said, ‘Look, if I’m wrong, the implications are vastly greater for our society than they are for the keys.’ It’s much more important to look at the broader implications.”Lichtman, a history professor who has been teaching at American University in Washington for more than a half a century, developed his keys to the White House in the early 1980s. With Vladimir Keilis-Borok, a Soviet expert on earthquake prediction, he analysed elections in terms of stability (the party holding the White House holds it) versus earthquake (the party holding the White House is ejected).The pair devised 13 true/false questions: if six or more keys went against the White House party, it would lose. Lichtman used the model to successfully predict Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1984 and (nearly) every election that followed. After the 2016 election, he received a copy of his Washington Post interview with a message written in a Sharpie pen: “Congrats, professor. Good call. Donald J Trump.”The 2024 election was always going to be a tough test for Lichtman. Joe Biden dropped out in favour of Harris while Trump, who survived two assassination attempts, is a norm-busting figure who was bidding to become the first former president to win back the White House since Grover Cleveland in the 19th century.Why did he think Harris would win, and what went wrong? “The keys are premised on the proposition that a rational, pragmatic electorate decides whether the White House party has governed well enough to get another four years,” he explains. “Just as this kind of hate and violence is new, there are precedent-shattering elements now to our political system, most notably disinformation.“There’s always been disinformation but it has exploded to a degree we’ve never seen before. It’s not just Fox News and the rightwing media. It’s also rightwing podcasters and we have a brand new player, the $300bn guy, Elon Musk, whose wealth exceeds that of most countries in the world and has heavily put his thumb on disinformation.”Musk’s Super Pac reportedly spent about $200m to help elect Trump while his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, amplified rightwing propaganda. Musk was a leading Trump surrogate and has since become a near-permanent fixture at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, he will now head an effort to reduce wasteful government spending.Lichtman continues: “It’s been reported that the disinformation that he disseminates has been viewed billion of times. The disinformation extends to every aspect of our society and our economy. Many people are living in an alternative universe and that calls into question the fundamental basis of political decision-making in this country.”That includes disinformation about inflation, jobs, employment, the stock market, growth, hurricane aid, the Ukraine war and undocumented immigrants, falsely portrayed as dangerous killers when in fact they commit crimes at far lower rate than native-born Americans.Another problem for Lichtman’s model was a presidential candidate who has constantly torn up the rulebook and defied categorisation. “We’ve seen Trump far more than we’ve ever seen in the history of this country channel the darkest impulses in American life – things that have always been with us but were increased exponentially this time: racism, misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism.“We’re seeing something new in our politics, which affected the prediction and could affect future predictions but has a much bigger message for the future of our democracy. George Orwell was 40 years too soon. He made it clear that dictatorships don’t just arise from brutality and suppression. They arise from control of information: doublethink. Famine is plenty, war is peace. We’re in the doublethink era and maybe we can get out of it, maybe not.”After Lichtman made his 2024 prediction, he and his wife received a backlash in the form of death threats, vulgar abuse and even people trying to breach their home. They were also the victims of swatting (false reports of a threat intended to draw a heavy police response at the target’s home) and doxing, in which their private information was published online.“I’ve been doing this for 42 years and I have never experienced anything remotely like this,” he says. “I haven’t had to call the police before ever; now they’ve been here several times. They’re on alert. They notified the FBI.”Once an idealistic 13-year-old who watched John F Kennedy speak in New York, Lichtman is dismayed that politics has come to this. “It tells me that America has fallen to an absolute new low,” he reflects.“All I have done is exercise my free speech and yet here I am, subject to all of this hate, attempts to breach the security of my family, and it’s consistent with what we heard from Donald Trump, who’s constantly invoking violence as legitimate, plus for dehumanising those he doesn’t agree with as vermin, scum, something less than human to be dealt with. We’ve never seen anything like this before in America.”Looking back at his 2024 miscalculation, Lichtman is not about to let Democrats off the hook. He had been a staunch defender of Biden until the end and condemned the party for forcing him to step aside in favour of Harris. He is now unimpressed by its epic blame game and self-flagellation over the election result.“They’re pointing the finger at everyone else but not taking any responsibility. This election proves what I’ve been saying for years. I can summarise American politics in one sentence. Republicans have no principles, Democrats have no spine.”As if to prove the point, Trump has nominated Matt Gaetz, a Maga bomb thrower once subject to a sex-trafficking investigation, as his attorney general. The post is currently held by Merrick Garland, whom Lichtman has known for 60 years.“I love the guy,” he says. “I thought he was maybe the greatest federal judge in America and he is now the poster child of the spineless Democrats who have let all this happen. He diddled for almost two years before appointing a special counsel [to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 2021 insurrection].“We all knew on January 7 what Trump had done. Certainly we knew it by the time Merrick Garland was appointed in early 2021. If he had acted as he should have right away, everything would have been different. I believe Trump would have been convicted of serious federal crimes and either be in jail or be on probation and the whole political system would have been different.”Lichtman adds: “He epitomises the spineless Democrats. ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because I might seem political and Republicans might criticise me.’ Didn’t he learn anything from his supreme court nomination? Republicans are going to do what they’re going to do.“It doesn’t depend on what you do. I always go by the mantra of: it’s not just the evil people who wreak havoc on this world, it’s the good people who don’t do enough to stop them. And Merrick Garland is right front and centre of that.”The Trump-Musk axis “broke my predictive model this year”, Lichtman admits, but he intends to pick himself up, dust himself down and try again in 2028. “I fully expect to adjust the keys according to what I see unfolding over the next several years,” he promises. “The beauty of being a presidential predictor is you have four years to correct your course.“Presuming I’m still around at 81 and fully engaged in my faculties, I will be very carefully monitoring developments over the next few years apropos of the keys and also speaking out in defence of our democracy. The keys are one thing – they’re totally non-partisan – but I have my own political views as well and I fully intend to express them. And when I think the Democrats are worthy of criticism, I don’t hold back.” More

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      Democratic leaders across US work to lead resistance against Trump’s agenda

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      After the November elections ushered in a new era of unified Republican governance in Washington, Democratic leaders across the country are once again preparing to lead the resistance to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said he would convene a special legislative session next month to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights”.Washington state’s governor-elect, Bob Ferguson, who is currently the state’s attorney general, said his legal team has been preparing for months for the possibility of a second Trump term – an endeavor that included a “line-by-line” review of Project 2025, the 900+ page policy blueprint drafted by the president-elect’s conservative allies.And the governors of Illinois and Colorado this week unveiled a new coalition designed to protect state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism, as the nation prepares for a president who has vowed to seek retribution against his political enemies and to only govern as a dictator on “day one”.“We know that simple hope alone won’t save our democracy,” the Colorado governor, Jared Polis, said on a conference call announcing the group, called Governors Safeguarding Democracy. “We need to work together, especially at the state level, to protect and strengthen it.”With Democrats locked out of control in Washington, many in the party will turn to blue state leaders – governors, attorneys general and mayors – as a bulwark against a second Trump administration. For these ambitious Democrats, it is also an opportunity to step into the leadership void left by Kamala Harris’s defeat.Progressives such as Newsom and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, are viewed as potential presidential contenders in 2028, while Democratic governors in states that voted for Trump such as Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan are seen as models for how the party can begin to rebuild their coalition. And Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential running mate, returned home to Minnesota with a national profile and two years left of his gubernatorial term.Leaders of the nascent blue state resistance are pre-emptively “Trump-proofing” against a conservative governing agenda, which they have cast as a threat to the values and safety of their constituents. As a candidate, Trump promised to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history”. In statements and public remarks, several Democrats say they fear the Trump administration will seek to limit access to medication abortion or seek to undermine efforts to provide reproductive care to women from states with abortion bans. They also anticipate actions by the Trump administration to roll back environmental regulations and expand gun rights.“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people – you come through me,” Pritzker said last week.Unlike in 2016, when Trump’s victory shocked the nation, blue state leaders say they have a tested – and updated – playbook to draw upon. But they also acknowledge that Trump 2.0 may present new and more difficult challenges.Ferguson said Trump’s first-term executive actions were “often sloppy”, which created an opening for states to successfully challenge them in court. Eight years later, and after studying Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47, he anticipates the next Trump White House will be “better prepared” this time around.Pritzker said Trump was surrounding himself with “absolute loyalists to his cult of personality and not necessarily to the law”. “Last time, he didn’t really know where the levers of government were,” the governor said on a call with reporters this week. “I think he probably does now.”The courts have also become more conservative than they were when Trump took office eight years ago, a direct result of his first-term appointments to the federal bench, which included many powerful federal appeals court judges and three supreme court justices.The political landscape has also changed. In 2016, Trump won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Despite Republican control of Congress, there were a number of Trump skeptics willing – at least initially – to buck the president during his first two years in office.This time around, Trump is all but certain to win the popular vote, and he made surprising gains in some of the bluest corners of the country.Though the former president came nowhere close to winning his home state of New York, he made significant inroads, especially on Long Island. At a post-election conference last week, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, struck a more neutral tone. Hochul, who faces a potentially tough re-election in 2026, vowed to protect constituents against federal overreach, while declaring that she was prepared to work with “him or anybody regardless of party”.In New Jersey, where Trump narrowed his loss from 16 percentage points in 2020 to five percentage points in 2024, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, acknowledged the result was a “sobering moment” for the party and country. Outlining his approach to the incoming administration, Murphy said: “If it’s contrary to our values, we will fight to the death. If there’s an opportunity for common ground, we will seize that as fast as anybody.”Progressives and activists say they are looking to Democratic leaders to lead the charge against Trump’s most extreme proposals, particularly on immigration.“Trump may be re-elected but he does not have a mandate to come into and rip apart our communities,” said Greisa Martínez Rosas, the executive director of United We Dream Action, a network of groups that advocate for young people brought to the US as children, known as Dreamers.She called on state and local officials, as well as university heads and business leaders, to “use every tool at their disposal” to resist Trump’s mass deportation campaign, stressing: “There is a lot we can do to ensure Trump and his cabinet are not successful in their plans.”State attorneys general are again poised to play a pivotal role in curbing the next administration’s policy ambitions.“The quantity of litigation since the first Trump administration has been really off the charts – it’s at a new level,” said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University in Wisconsin. “I fully expect that to continue in Trump 2.0.”There were 160 multi-state filings against the Trump administration during his four years in office, twice as many as were filed against Barack Obama during his entire eight-year presidency, according to a database maintained by Nolette.Many of the Democratic lawsuits succeeded – at least initially – in delaying or striking down Trump administration policies or regulations, Nolette said. Attorneys general can also leverage their state’s influence and economic power by entering legal settlements with companies. States have used this approach in the past to “advance their own regulatory goals”, Nolette said, for example, forcing the auto industry to adopt stricter environmental regulations.In a proclamation calling for a special session next month, Newsom asked the legislature to bolster the state’s legal funding to challenge – and defend California against – the Trump administration. Among his concerns, the California Democrat identified civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, as well as Trump’s threats to withhold disaster funding from the state and the potential for his administration to repeal protections shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation.Trump responded on Truth Social, using a derisive nickname for the Democratic governor: “Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California. He is using the term ‘Trump-Proof’ as a way of stopping all of the GREAT things that can be done to ‘Make California Great Again,’ but I just overwhelmingly won the Election.”Democratic leaders in battleground states that Trump won are also calibrating their responses – and not all are eager to join the resistance.“I don’t think that’s the most productive way to govern Arizona,” the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, told reporters this week, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Hobbs, who faces a potentially difficult re-election fight in 2026, said she would “stand up against actions that hurt our communities” but declined to say how she would respond if Trump sought to deport Dreamers or to nationalize the Arizona national guard as part of his mass deportation campaign.The state’s Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, who also faces re-election in two years, drew a harder line against Trump, vowing to fight “unconstitutional behavior” and protect abortion access, according to Axios. In an interview on MSNBC, Mayes said she had “no intention” of dropping the criminal case against allies of the former president who attempted to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory in the state.Yet she insisted there would be areas of common ground. She urged Trump to revive a bipartisan border deal that he had previously tanked and called on the next administration to send more federal resources and agents to help combat the flow of fentanyl into the US.With Democrats locked out of power in Washington, the new Indivisible Guide, a manual developed by former Democratic congressional staffers after Trump’s election in 2016 and recently updated to confront a new era of Maga politics, envisions a major role for blue states.“Over the next two years, your Democratic elected officials will make choices every single day about whether to stand up to Maga or whether to go along with it,” the Indivisible guide states. “Your spirited, determined advocacy will ensure that the good ones know they’ve got a movement behind them as they fight back – and the bad ones know they’re on notice.”Among the examples of actions blue state activists can demand their leaders consider, it suggests establishing protections for out-of-state residents seeking abortion access or gender-affirming care; refusing to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and forging regional compacts to safeguard environmental initiatives, data privacy and healthcare.Democratic leaders at every level and across the country – even those in purple or red states – can serve as “backstops for protecting the democratic space”, said Mary Small, chief strategy officer at Indivisible.“The important things are to be proactive and bold, to be innovative and to work with each other,” she said. “I don’t think everybody has to have all of the answers right now, but to have that intention and that commitment and to not shrink down in anticipation of a more oppressive federal government.” More

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      Loyalists and jesters fill Trump’s ‘winter White House’ for court of King Donald

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      View image in fullscreenThe shutters are down, the curtains are open, and Donald Trump’s opulent, waterfront palace of intrigue is open for business once more. A succession of ambitious, ultra-loyal subjects has paraded through, vying for attention and seeking favors from the throne. Servants fall over themselves to indulge their master’s every whim. And then there are the jesters …Given this week’s extraordinary developments at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, as he builds the cabinet with which he will govern in January, it is difficult to escape the notion that the operation is being run something akin to a royal court.Trump certainly gives the appearance of acting as America’s first monarch since the official end of the revolutionary war in 1783, plotting, scheming and playing favorites, and setting individuals against each other as his courtiers are assembled.His unexpected nomination as attorney general of the Mar-a-Lago regular Matt Gaetz, the controversial Florida congressman under investigation for sexual misconduct, was a power move that wrong-footed even his closest advisers, and threw a gauntlet to Republicans in the US Senate who must confirm the appointment.It followed Trump’s equally astonishing choice a day earlier of a weekend presenter from the rightwing TV station Fox News to be the US defense secretary in charge of the world’s largest and most potent military: Pete Hegseth, the ultimate entertainer who caught the eye of the king.Public health experts decried the choice of the vaccine denier Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary. And perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of all is the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a billionaire who has been elected to precisely nothing, strutting around the expansive resort’s perfectly manicured lawns and flaunting his new bromance with the next supposed leader of the free world.Reports say Musk has accompanied Trump almost every day since the election, joining telephone calls to multiple world leaders, offering advice on policy and staffing decisions, playing golf with Trump family members, and dining with them on the open-air patio.Musk received a standing ovation from assembled guests on the other side of the red velvet rope, according to the New York Times, and joined Trump and the classical singer Chris Macchio in a cringy rendition of God Bless America at a Thursday night gala.On Tuesday, five days into his tenure as Trump’s most favored house guest, Musk was named joint head of the freshlycreated Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), where he will generate plans to “slash and burn” government spending. It remains to be seen if any proposed cuts extend to the billions of dollars in lucrative government contracts and subsidies enjoyed by his own companies, SpaceX and Tesla.“He loves Mar-a-Lago. Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him,” Trump joked to Republicans on Wednesday in his first return to Washington DC since the election, before adding ominously: “Until I don’t like him.”Observers say it is no surprise that these machinations are playing out at Mar-a-Lago, the $1m-a-head private members’ club haughtily branded his “winter White House” by Trump during his first term, where he handed out ambassadorships to wealthy friends and donors, and where he took policy advice from regulars written on cocktail napkins.“A lot of action will get done down there during Trump’s second term, as we’re seeing right now with the transition,” said the political historian Matt Dallek, professor of political management at George Washington University.“It’s really a hub. People come in and out of there all the time, he spends a great deal of time there, and as he famously likes to do, he has multiple people telling him different things and he talks to a lot of people.“He’ll be talking to his wealthy friends, and people who come to the resort from around the world to pay homage to him there. He partly likes it because it’s kind of a shrine to him, and it’s his best version of himself, his best vision of himself and the kind of power that he wants to cultivate. He loves the attention. He loves the people coming in and around him.”Dallek noted that Trump also thrived on the atmosphere of unpredictability his presence at Mar-a-Lago creates. This was evident this week by his unorthodox cabinet hiring and procession of hopefuls desperate for an interview in a hastily assembled war room at what CNN called the “chaotic epicenter” of his transition.“There’s a certain amount of chaos that has long surrounded Trump, that Trump really cultivates, and that is a core part of his political identity. And Mar-a-Lago has been a center of that chaos,” Dallek said.“It’s been a kind of hothouse of fringe figures who’ve come there. He dined there with Ye, the antisemitic rapper, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist. There have been foreign spies who have attempted to penetrate the resort. It’s where he stored some of the most highly classified documents on the planet in his bathroom.“We don’t need to look very far back in time to get a sense of the goings-on, how freewheeling and just how bonkers it is. He’s dealing with these incredibly important matters of life and death, of national security, and doing it in this unsecured, chaotic atmosphere where people are coming and going all the time, and where some of his more memorable, and memorably unhinged, moments have occurred.”Dallek, and others, expect Trump to spend considerable time at Mar-a-Lago during his second term. During his first four years in office, the Washington Post calculated in 2021, he was there for all or part of 142 days, and played an estimated 87 rounds at his Trump International golf club in West Palm Beach. Mar-a-Lago’s 128 guest suites are always full when he is in residence.“It’s possible that some people just want to hang out with the president and the people who are around the president, but I think people were explicit about it and the first presidency was an opportunity to be able to tell him what your thoughts were, but also to seek favor,” Robert Weissman, president of the Washington DC-based pro-transparency group Public Citizen, told the Guardian in August.“There are profound and systemic issues regarding ethics, and big money, and access for the rich, but Trump is in a category by himself.”As well as operating Mar-a-Lago as his command center ahead of his second administration, Trump is also reaping a significant financial windfall.Mar-a-Lago is expected to be at full occupancy until January’s inauguration, and CNN reported that members had been offered money by outsiders eager to accompany them on to the grounds to get face time with him.Even after he takes office, return trips to Mar-a-Lago will keep Trump’s coffers swollen. In October, it was revealed that Trump properties had overcharged the Secret Service by 300% for rooms occupied by agents providing security for Trump and his family.“Of course it’ll be a money-making opportunity for him,” Dallek said. “Which he’ll never pass up.” More