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The Tennessee GOP presents itself as a defender of democracy. Do not fall for it | Jan-Werner Müller
This past week, a Republican supermajority voted to expel two young African American men from the Tennessee legislature; a third Democrat – who happens to be white and female – only narrowly escaped this punishment. The charge? The lawmakers, who are now being called “the Tennessee Three”, had participated in a protest against the GOP’s cynical inaction after the elementary school shooting in Nashville on 27 March.According to Republicans, using bullhorns breached the “decorum” of the legislature. This de facto disfranchisement demonstrates yet again that the problem with the GOP is not one lone demagogue (who may or may not be consumed by lawsuits), but a commitment by plenty of its members to authoritarianism at federal, state and local levels.What’s more, Republicans, in a typical form of projection, now present themselves as defenders of democracy, and Democrats as a source of “disorder” and “dishonor” for sacred political institutions. They even draw a parallel between peaceful protest and the January 6 insurrection. We must not fall for this false equivalence; and we must remember that even measures beyond ordinary protest – namely civil, which is to say peaceful, disobedience – can be legitimate if they serve democratic ends.US states have long functioned as laboratories for autocratic measures, be it vote suppression or gerrymandering. Ron DeSantis and other pioneers of what scholars call autocratic legalism are experimenting in state assemblies to see how they can entirely disempower their opponents through measures that violate the spirit of democracy, but are passed in procedurally correct ways.This happens even in situations where Republicans already have supermajorities and Democrats appear to be condemned to griping from the sidelines. In Oklahoma, a Black, Muslim and non-binary representative, Mauree Turner, was censured and relieved of committee assignments by the GOP-controlled legislature after a transgender activist found refuge in their office. Such measures obviously have a chilling effect; they also send a not-too-subtle signal of what kind of minorities Republicans deem dangerous.Of course, as we have learned the hard way in recent years, knowing how to lose matters greatly in a democracy. Rightwing politicians will charge that protesters against outcomes they don’t like are simply sore losers who throw “temper tantrums”, as the Tennessee GOP sponsor of the expulsion measures put it; maybe not insurrectionists, but, ultimately, in the same category as the January 6 rioters. The right thus turns the charge habitually levelled against Trump and his autocratizer allies around: it is the “woke mob” that is breaking both formal and informal norms on which democracy ultimately depends.This is the politics of false equivalence. For one thing, losers in a democracy do of course remain free to criticize the outcome; all the losers are asked to do is put up with the results, not to shut up about the results. And, at the risk of stating the obvious: a noisy protest is not the same as trying to hang the vice-president and kill the speaker of the House. In situations, however, where results evidently do not reflect what majorities actually want, it is also perfectly legitimate to dramatize this fact in a peaceful manner. After all, the reason why the US remains a country where civilians can brandish assault rifles is not due to some age-old American tradition, nor to the second amendment (which – do we really need a reminder? – regulates militias and does not license individuals to acquire technology made for mass shootings). Rather, it is the multiple veto points that allow well-resourced minorities to block legislation which, in less dysfunctional democracies, would long have long been pushed through. It is not protesters who cause “disorder” and “dishonor” here; it is the cynical defenders of a long-discredited status quo.In the face of such a tyranny of the minority, what some legal scholars call a distinctly democratic form of disobedience – which is to say, peaceful and primarily symbolic, lawbreaking – can be justified. The idea is different from the kind of peaceful law-breaking associated with the civil rights movement; the latter was alerting majorities to a fundamental injustice which absolutely had to be rectified. Democratic disobedience, by contrast, gives leeway for people to decide what they consider legitimate outcomes – but it has to be genuine majorities who make the call, as opposed to special interest groups, or, for that matter, justices apparently beholden to such groups.Democracy is not about decorum or, as the communitarian kitsch endlessly repeated in our age has it, “civility”. Its purpose is to help us deal with disagreements and divisions; the latter will not magically heal if we just keep our voices down or refrain from grabbing bullhorns. Those targeted by the radical right now dominant in many GOP-controlled state legislatures have every reason to make what John Lewis famously called “good trouble, necessary trouble”. More
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Republicans are a mess right now, and voters know it. Does the party? | Moira Donegan
It was supposed to be the Republican party’s last stand, in a state where they had exercised near-absolute control for years, and they had every hope of putting up a good fight. Yet in the end, it wasn’t even close.Millions of dollars had poured into Wisconsin ahead of an election for a seat on the state supreme court, a hotly contested race between a liberal judge and one backed by moneyed rightwing interests. The stakes were high: Wisconsin’s state legislature has been gerrymandered out of competitiveness for more than a decade, for one thing, meaning that the state, which has a roughly even split between Democratic and Republican voters, had nevertheless become a grim experiment in one-party rule, with Republicans commanding a majority of statehouse seats despite receiving far fewer votes proportionally. Federal elections in Wisconsin seemed worryingly vulnerable, too: when Trump sued over his 2020 loss there, making spurious claims of election fraud, the Republican-controlled state supreme court ruled against him by only one vote.But most pressing was abortion. After the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, the state was thrown into chaos when a wildly sexist law from 1849, banning all abortions, went back into effect. The law is poised to be challenged at the state supreme court, and the rights of half of the Wisconsin population could depend on who controls that court.One of the candidates in the judicial race, Janet Protasiewicz, was open about her beliefs: she frankly described herself as pro-choice. The other, Dan Kelly, brushed off questions about abortion. But he was backed by anti-choice groups, and had long been on the payroll of the Republican party, including in representing them in legal matters pertaining to their 2020 election denial.While Protasiewicz relied on small-dollar donations, Kelly raised plenty of money – much of it from large, out-of-state megadonor funds like the Richard Uihlein-backed Fair Courts America. But Protasiewicz blew him out of the park: she won with a lead of 10 percentage points. Voters’ top concern? Abortion rights.Protasiewicz’s blowout victory in Wisconsin came on the same day that another high-stakes political contest was playing out in New York: the arraignment of Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business records. True to form, Trump incited a chaotic, carnivalesque, and extremely tacky scene outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse as the charges were read against him. The media breathlessly followed every moment of the arraignment, with cable-news cameras even following his plane from Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy resort home in Palm Beach, up to New York.The arraignment has renewed attention on Trump, elevating him from the sideshow status that he has occupied for much of the Biden presidency back into the center of national attention. It has also made it seem much more likely – if still not inevitable – that he may become the Republican nominee. The party’s elite wants to ditch him, and his rivals for the nomination want to defeat him, but Trump still reigns in the hearts of Republican voters. He’s the one they’re comparing every other candidate to – and why settle for imitations when you can have the real thing?But Trump, still, represents a liability for the Republican party, even as he fulfills many of their voters’ most ardent desires and least honorable impulses. He’s a crooked buffoon, and he’s getting weirder and worse; outside of the Republican party itself, most voters don’t like him, don’t find him funny any more, don’t want to put up with his chaos, and don’t like what he’s done to their country.The Republican party, then, is like the dog that caught the car: it had its deepest desires fulfilled, in the form of the withdrawal of abortion rights in Dobbs, and in the form of a candidate who embodies its grievances, in Trump. Republicans got what they wanted. Now, they risk being destroyed by it.The Republican party today is messy, internally divided, filled with self-serving carnival-barkers like Trump and his descendants – George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz – more interested in garnering publicity for themselves than in securing electoral or policy victories for their party, and most of all, beholden to positions, most notably on abortion, that inflict untold suffering and are increasingly abhorrent to the average voter.Republicans propose sadistic abortion bans that are unpopular with voters, then reject amendments that would allow doctors to save women’s lives without fear of prosecution – making a self-righteous display of their own femicidal barbarity. They enact bans on transgender girls in sports and harness the full power of the state against trans student athletes – who number, in many states, fewer than a dozen.Although party elites periodically propose alternatives to Trump – Ron DeSantis this week, Glenn Youngkin the next – they as yet have no viable presidential candidates who seem able to mount a real challenge to the former president, a man whose legal liabilities are only going to worsen over the coming year, and whom voters already soundly rejected in 2020.But the party’s problems go beyond Trump and the extremist anti-choice regime that his judicial nominees have ushered in. The party has yielded to extremists in its base, placing candidates for office that range from the out of touch to the intensely creepy. Mehmet Oz, who ran for Senate in Pennsylvania last year, has the affect of a snake-oil salesman; Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel lackey who ran in Arizona, comes off as sinister. George Santos, a congressman from New York, seems to have lied about absolutely everything, possibly including his own name.These candidates are not accidents: they are who the Republican voters chose in their primaries, and who the Republican party has cultivated. This is the face that Republicans are putting forward to the country as they head into the 2024 cycle: cruel, creepy, and corrupt.Like the voters themselves, Republican party insiders don’t seem to have much interest in changing course. In January, just weeks after anger over abortion bans and disgust at the extremism of Republican candidates drove the party to a historically weak showing in the 2022 midterms, the Republican National Committee re-elected Ronna McDaniel, a Trump loyalist, for a fourth term as chair. As voters become more and more alienated from the party, Republicans seem serenely confident in their own losing strategy – or, at least, unwilling to change it. Like the Wisconsin supreme court race, the RNC contest became heated, with multiple factions hurling recriminations. But just as the liberal Protasiewicz had a blowout victory in her election, McDaniel’s victory in the RNC chair election was a landslide, too.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More - in US Politics
Fewer pronouns, more guns: Ron DeSantis’s plan to turn the US into Florida
The title of Governor Ron DeSantis’s book, which he is zealously promoting across the nation, is less important than the subtitle. The Courage to Be Free is a forgettable title shared by a volume by actor and gun rights activist Charlton Heston. But the subtitle, Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, unlocks DeSantis’s national ambitions.While former US president Donald Trump labours under the frayed slogan of “Make America great again”, DeSantis is building a case to “Make America Florida” – a phrase that appears on caps, flags and other merchandise.The governor argues that he has made glorious summer in the Sunshine state. If and when he announces a run for US president in 2024, he will claim that he can repeat the formula in state after state across the US. Florida, his theory goes, is an incubator of conservative ideas that work.He dangles a carrot to Republicans who, weary of Trump’s losing streak, are seeking a saviour. DeSantis writes that when he was elected in 2018, there were nearly 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida; by October 2022, there were more than 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.“What Florida has done is establish a blueprint for governance that has produced tangible results while serving as a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground,” DeSantis writes in The Courage to Be Free.But the governor’s critics question whether his fixation on culture wars (“Florida is where woke goes to die!”) is quite as popular as it seems. They also contend that, with numerous climatic, economic and social problems, Florida is not quite the paradise that DeSantis likes to portray.“What it is is a blueprint for is people who want to abuse their power in order to target people who disagree with them politically,” said Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress, who represents a Florida district. “That’s what we’ve seen from someone like Governor DeSantis.“What we’re exporting out of Florida is fascism. For him to sit there and say, ‘Oh, yeah, my bill on banning trans kids from talking about who they are is now equated to a top education system,’ it’s just a bunch of bullshit, to be honest. Most Floridians hopefully will see through that.”DeSantis, 44, as governor of the third most populous state has imposed limits on how race and sexuality can be taught in schools, forcing some teachers to remove books from their libraries. He has also banned transgender girls from school sports, redrawn the state’s political maps to favour Republicans, attacked Disney and other businesses that disagree with his ideology, and cracked down on Black Lives Matter protests.Then there was the coronavirus pandemic. The governor mostly followed guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the early months, closing Florida’s beaches, bars and schools. But he pivoted in early 2021, reopening schools before other states and banning face mask and vaccine mandates in businesses and government. When the media questioned his approach, he hit back pugnaciously to the delight of a base that revels in “owning the libs”.DeSantis claimed vindication last year when he smashed fundraising records and won re-election by nearly 20 percentage points in what used to be a swing state, albeit against a weak candidate from a disorganised Democratic party. Republicans saw hope that DeSantis has cracked the code for a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.The party now enjoys a supermajority in the Florida state legislature and is pushing issues such as telling teachers which pronouns they can use for students, making guns more available and easier to carry, keeping immigrants who are in the country illegally out of the state and criminalising some drag shows.Republicans argue that DeSantis’s agenda explains why Florida ranks number one in the nation for net in-migration. About 319,000 people moved there last year, according to an analysis of census data by the National Association of Realtors, while California lost the most residents, with 343,000 departing.Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican party, said: “You’re seeing people leave other states that have completely opposite ideology and political positions and policy positions. California, New York – everyone’s leaving those states and everyone’s flocking to our state. That validates the claim that Florida is a working model. If it was a cellphone, it would probably be the Apple iPhone. Everyone wants it, everyone’s buying it and everyone’s gravitating towards it.”Part of the attraction, Ziegler claims, is DeSantis’s “pro-freedom” approach to the pandemic, which allowed businesses and tourism to bounce back more quickly than elsewhere, and his support for what Republicans frame as “parents’ rights”.“I can’t tell you how many parents have moved here from other states because they want their kids in school not shut down, not to have masks forced on them, not to have a vaccine forced on them,” he said.Critics of DeSantis present a very different version, noting that Florida has long been a magnet because of its sunny weather and lack of state income tax. The pandemic, and the rise of remote working, made it especially attractive to people fleeing expensive big cities such as New York. (The trend may be temporary: latest census data shows that Manhattan’s population grew last year.)Speaking from Sarasota, Ziegler also defended DeSantis’s controversial policies on the teaching of US racial history. “From my standpoint, I can tell you we learned about the injustices of slavery. We learned about the heroic efforts of Harriet Tubman or Dr Martin Luther King Jr,” he said. “That is far different than the critical race theory, where they’re trying to point out that everyone in society is oppressed or an oppressor or that just the colour of your skin is going to make you biased and hateful.”This is a misrepresentation of critical race theory, which examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people. It is not typically taught in public schools.Progressives dispute the assertion that DeSantis’s focus on hot-button culture war issues is working.“He’s selling a blueprint for hate and bigotry,” said Brandon Wolf, press secretary of the LGBTQ+ rights organisation Equality Florida and a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. “Ron DeSantis is being honest about one thing and that is that he is trying to sell the snake oil of his authoritarian tactics in Florida to the rest of the country.”Wolf pointed out that, beneath the veneer of prosperity that the governor projects, there are plenty of shadows in the state. A haven for retirees, Florida has the worst long-term care for elderly people among all 50 states, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. It is among 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for people with low income, under the Affordable Care Act. It ranks 16th worst for healthcare among the 50 states, says the Commonwealth Fund, a grant-making foundation that supports independent healthcare research.Meanwhile the cost of living is spiralling. Norada Real Estate Investments found that Florida home values have risen by 80% over the past five years. The cost of home insurance is rising fast as the market struggles to deal with stronger hurricanes and more intense rainstorms due to the climate crisis.“Leaning into the culture war issues was successful for him and the challenge that I pose to that is ask any everyday Floridian: what are the top five things keeping them up at night? I guarantee you, they’re not going to say someone in a wig reading Red Fish Blue Fish at the library,” Wolf said.“The question of has Florida been wildly successful is best posed to people who are kept up at night by the cost of housing, the potential for dangerous storms,” he added. “You just ask them if Florida feels like the most successful and freest state in the nation.”Education is another such example. While DeSantis has created political theatre around pandemic measures and racial and sexual identity, the state faces a severe shortage of teachers in its long-underfunded public schools. Florida ranked 49th in the country for average teacher pay in 2020, according to the National Education Association.Tim Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale and a former congressional candidate, said: “Teachers are underpaid, understaffed, the curriculums are dictated centrally on down, whether it’s Common Core federal standards or from the state in Tallahassee.“It’s a miserable job for teachers. They don’t have much autonomy. They’ve got big class sizes. They don’t get paid much. They’ve got to constantly fill out reports about their teaching. It’s a problem that’s way beyond Florida but the schools in Florida have been weak for a long time.”Research by Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm and advocacy group, also raises questions about the viability of DeSantis’s hard-right policies beyond Florida’s borders, with independent voters across the country largely siding with Democrats on culture war issues.A survey of 1,252 likely voters nationally from 17 to 20 March found that 41% support and 50% oppose mandating K-12 libraries to immediately remove and review books flagged as inappropriate; 37% support and 47% oppose eliminating college diversity, equity and inclusion programmes; 39% support and 46% oppose banning college majors and minors in critical race theory.Danielle Deiseroth, interim executive director of Data for Progress, said: “Most Americans might agree that they like Florida’s weather. They certainly don’t like policies being put forward by Governor DeSantis and Florida lawmakers, especially on some of these culture war issues that have been dominating, especially on rightwing news media.”“In terms of DeSantis positioning himself for a potential presidential run in ’24, which seems all but certain at this point, these extreme policies are going to alienate a lot of voters right off the bat,” she said. “Women in particular were one of the groups most opposed to many of these policies.”Last year’s midterm election results appear to support this view as far-right Republicans underperformed among female voters, in part because of their extreme positions on issues such as abortion after the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. DeSantis is expected to sign a six-week abortion ban, even though polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose it.DeSantis critic Rick Wilson, a fifth-generation Floridian and Republican strategist, has been involved in more than 30 political campaigns in the state, and co-founded the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. Based in the state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is sceptical of the notion that Florida could be the laboratory of ideas for a Republican revival.Recalling Texas governor Rick Perry’s failed presidential campaign, he said: “Perry came out and said, ‘I did all these conservative things, I’m the champion, I could make Washington work like Texas.’ That was his biggest line and it fell flatter than a pancake. That was also Jeb Bush’s argument: ‘I was Florida’s most conservative governor, I accomplished all these amazing conservative reforms.’”Far from a blueprint for America, Wilson describes Florida as “the Petri dish of bad ideas”. He added: “There is a slowly emerging theme among some conservatives I’ve been talking to of ‘I wish he’d do more about tax cuts and less about book banning, and talk more about smaller government and less about using government to punish people.’“In Maga world, that authoritarian stuff sells pretty well. But again, you can’t out-Trump Trump.”That authoritarian streak alarms activists who say DeSantis and his allies have pushed voter suppression bills to marginalise people of colour. His Florida model, they argue, would pose a fundamental threat to civil rights if exported elsewhere.Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, a Black-led civic engagement organisation, said: “It is not a state where people of colour, particularly Black people who have been on the other end as targets of his attacks, are feeling like this is a model for success, freedom or liberation.“If you are invested in a world that is seeded in white supremacy, hate and racist policies, then it is absolutely the perfect blueprint for the rest of the nation.” More
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Trump bets indictments could make him 2024 nominee
Donald Trump appeared angry and shaken during his arraignment in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday, but he had brushed off the moment by the weekend, contending that the indictment and other legal troubles would carry him to the 2024 Republican nomination, people close to him said.With his status as a criminal defendant subjecting him to the structures of the judicial process, the former president is playing an increasingly high-stakes game to inextricably tie his legal strategy to his political gameplan as he seeks to recapture the Oval Office next year.Trump’s wager is that using his legal troubles as a campaign issue will harden support from his base and Republican elected officials, and that support could undercut or falsely delegitimize prosecutions in Georgia or by the US justice department in other various criminal investigations.The approach may or may not work, and Trump’s advisers acknowledge that campaigning on his personal legal issues that appeal to Republican primary voters could backfire in a general election where independent voters might recoil at re-electing a former president who is charged with 34 felonies.But the benefits to Trump of using for campaign purposes his indictment over hush money allegedly paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 has been readily apparent, providing him with a boost across all areas: in polling, in fundraising and in wall-to-wall media coverage.The person most hurt by the indictment, his advisers contend, was his expected rival for the Republican nomination: the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who was forced to come to Trump’s defense and still fell behind him in multiple polls, which suggested a trend rather than an outlier result.In a recent Yahoo news poll, Trump was beating DeSantis 57% to 31% in a hypothetical one-to-one contest and was attracting majority support, at 52%, when pitted against a wider, 10-candidate field including DeSantis as well as the UN ambassador in the Trump administration, Nikki Haley.Trump improved his lead over DeSantis in internal polling by McLaughlin and Associates, which surveyed 1,000 likely 2024 general election voters and found Trump would beat DeSantis 63% to 30%, improving his lead from January when he was at 52% and DeSantis at 40%.Trump’s allies also noted the indictment snapped Republican members of Congress into line, with House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan sending a flurry of subpoenas to the Manhattan district attorney’s office to get confidential information about the case against him.And Trump received a boost in fundraising, with his campaign claiming it raised more than $12m in donations in the week after the indictment. Roughly a third was from first-time donors, though the actual figure won’t be available for confirmation for several weeks.Whether the political pressure – as well as the personal attacks on prosecutors that Trump has vowed to launch – works to dissuade prosecutors is less clear. In Georgia, prosecutors expect to charge Trump and dozens of others over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in that state, a person familiar with the matter said.But if Trump cannot actually stave off prosecutions, then the next best outcome for him is to at least raise suspicions among voters across the country that the cases are politically motivated, his advisers have suggested in conversations with his legal team.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven beyond the major news events like Trump’s indictment or his arraignment in the New York hush money case, advisers and associates have discussed for weeks about how tying the legal strategy to the political strategy remains a winning formula, if only in the short term.At least one Trump associate noted that the former president was a “guilty pleasure” for everyone in the political ecosystem, describing how Trump-related developments give Democrats an issue to rail against and Republicans an issue to rally behind, and boost ratings for cable news outlets.The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s arraignment – including helicopter shots following Trump boarding his plane from his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort to New York and speedboats dogging his motorcade as it drove down FDR Drive in Manhattan – increased ratings for every major TV network.On the evening after the arraignment, Fox News topped 6.4 million viewers on Tucker Carlson’s show. MSNBC hit 2.8 million viewers and CNN peaked at 2.2 million viewers for their special coverage, exceeding their top-rated shows in the first quarter of 2023, which had respectively hauled in 3.3 million, 1.4 million and 0.6 million viewers.The Trump team has been watching cable news viewership closely. Last month, when Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he mocked an aide for talking to CNN because of its recent ratings dip and later laughed at how TV networks would hire a speedboat “only for Trump”. More
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A culture of truth denial is wilting US democracy and Britain is following fast | Will Hutton
The United States is a grim warning of what happens when a society dispenses with the idea of truth. Fragmentation, paranoia, division and myth rule – democracy wilts. Fox News, we now know from emails flushed out by a lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about the 2020 presidential election result. Instead, it knowingly broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen – in particular the known unfounded allegation that Dominion had programmed its voting machines to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that would challenge and even supplant what it considered an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression and getting your people into key roles in pivotal institutions and there are the bones of an anti-democratic coup.For years, the right had a target in its sights, rather as the British right today has the BBC – the 1949 Fairness Doctrine. This required American broadcasters to ensure that contentious issues were presented fairly; that both sides to any argument had access to the airwaves and presented their case factually. Like the BBC, it enraged the right and, over his period of office, Ronald Reagan ensured the Federal Communications Council, which enforced it, was chaired and increasingly staffed by anti-Fairness Doctrine people. Finally, in 1987 the doctrine was ruled unnecessary because it obstructed free speech. Within months, The Rush Limbaugh Show, the ultra-rightwing talkshow platform, was being nationally syndicated as the scourge of the liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying Covid vaccines – and always rejecting the evidence that smoking caused cancer. No need any longer for countervailing views. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh died in 2021 of the very lung cancer he denied.Through the 1990s, many rightwing TV stations were launched following suit, including the “fair and balanced” Fox News – although in 2017 it replaced the logo with “most watched, most trusted”. Donald Trump’s ascent would have been impossible without it, even as the US grew more ungovernable. Tens of millions believe the lies. And anyone who calls out the process is quickly dismissed as an elitist: out of step with the real opinions of real voters in neglected America, opinions that have been forged by the Republican media.In this respect, the next general election is the most important in Britain’s democratic life. The Tory party has learned from the rise of the Republicans. Voter suppression is one part of the toolkit – the new UK requirement to show photographic ID to vote is borrowed straight from the Republican playbook, as is the weakening of the Electoral Commission. Ensuring appointments to key roles are only available to Tories or known Tory sympathisers – from chairing the BBC and Ofcom to membership of any regulatory or cultural body – is another building block in achieving ascendancy. What remains is to control the commanding heights of the broadcast media, given the right already possesses the majority of the print media. Freezing the BBC licence fee in a period of double-digit inflation helps to enfeeble it – but better still would be to consign it and conceptions of fairness and impartiality to history. Thus the promised end of the licence fee before the current charter expires in 2027. This will open the prospect of overtly rightwing broadcaster GB News trying to reproduce the scale and success of Fox News, as its Dubai-based backer the Legatum Ventures Ltd together with hedge fund owner Sir Paul Marshall – stomaching £31m of losses this year – anticipate.GB News in important respects goes further than Fox; Fox gives few presentation slots to active rightwing politicians. But from the married Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies via Jacob Rees-Mogg to the deputy chair of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, GB News has become the broadcasting arm of Conservative central office. There is little pretence of journalism, which ceases altogether if a programme can be branded as current affairs. Ofcom raps its knuckles over some of the more egregious examples of bias, but it has no real power. Ofcom chair Michael Grade knows from his spells at ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC what good TV journalism looks like – it’s not on GB News – but equally he knows his role in the Tory scheme of things.Lastly, the coup needs useful intellectuals to draw the sting from any critics. Step up last week the academic Matthew Goodwin, who has morphed from studying the right to becoming an active rightwing advocate, arguing that a liberal elite constituting Emily Maitlis, Gary Lineker and Emma Watson (some elite!) has the country in its thrall, out of step with virtuous mainstream working-class opinion who it haughtily disparages. Yes, it is possible to understand why many in the working class in “red wall” seats want strong defence and immigration policies and think climate change is only a middle-class preoccupation – but that does not mean that objectively the “stop the boats” policy is not cruel and inhumane, that climate change is bogus or that Brexit has nothing to do with queues at Dover. What should matter surely is the truth – not whether the answer is closer to the view of some member of an elite or red-wall voter. Goodwin’s function is to throw a smokescreen around what is actually happening.There is endless commentary about how technocratic, charisma-light Keir Starmer lacks definition against proved technocratic Rishi Sunak. Wrong. His election would bring this coup to a halt; Britain would strike out on a different, more democratic course. You may shake your head at the shenanigans in the US, but the Conservative ambition is to go at least as far, if not further in a country with none of the US’s checks and balances. The issue is whether you want that. More
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Trump’s indictment and the return of his biggest concern: ‘the women’
In August 2015, at Trump Tower in New York, Donald Trump met with Michael Cohen, then his lawyer and fixer, and David Pecker, then chief executive of American Media, owner of the National Enquirer. According to the indictment of the former president unsealed in New York this week, Pecker agreed to help with Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination, “looking out for negative stories” about Trump and then alerting Cohen.It was a “catch and kill” deal, a common tabloid practice in which Pecker would buy potentially damaging stories but not put them in print.Pecker “also agreed to publish negative stories” about Trump’s competitors. The media this week seized on that passage in the indictment, noting how the Enquirer baselessly linked the father of Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and Trump’s closest rival for the nomination, to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who killed John F Kennedy.Last year, however, a New York Times reporter got to the heart of the matter. In her book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Maggie Haberman says that around the same time as the meeting with Pecker and Cohen, Sam Nunberg, a political adviser, asked Trump for his “biggest concern” about running.“Trump had a simple reply: ‘The women.’”Trump now faces 34 counts, all felonies, of falsifying business records with intent to conceal another crime: breaches of campaign finance laws. All the charges relate to the $130,000 Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, the adult film star and director who claims an affair Trump denies, and how Cohen was repaid $420,000 including $50,000 for “another expense” Cohen has said was for rigged polls, another $180,000 to cover taxes and a $60,000 bonus.But the New York indictment is not the only form of legal jeopardy Trump now faces. As well as state and federal investigations of his election subversion, a federal investigation of his retention of classified records and a civil lawsuit over his business practices, he faces a civil defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape.Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. One of them, the writer E Jean Carroll, says Trump raped her in a department store changing room in New York in the mid-1990s.Trump denies the allegation. Carroll has sued him twice: for defamation and for defamation and battery, the latter suit under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law which gave alleged victims of crimes beyond the statute of limitations a year to bring civil claims. In the defamation case, trial has been delayed. The case under the Adult Survivors Act is due to go to trial on 25 April.To the New York writer Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, there is a some sense of poetic justice in Trump finally facing a legal reckoning in cases arising from his treatment of women.But, Jong-Fast says: “The thing I’m sort of struck by is, like, how much women continually are dismissed, even in this situation.“There’s so much talk about the Stormy Daniels case, there was so little talk about actually what happened, right? There was almost nothing about how he was married to his third wife [Melania Trump], and she had just had a child [Barron Trump], and he had this affair. He denies the affair but the affair is pretty much documented.“That’s as close to truth in Trumpworld as possible. But we’re discussing the nuances of who paid the hush money and whether or not that’s a campaign contribution, and whether that rises to a federal crime.“That can be argued, but I was surprised at how little focus women had in it. How nobody was talking about like, this is a serial philanderer who has the kind of problems that serial philanderers have.“The filing talked about how he had paid off this doorman, about the illegitimate child. I guess that may have been not true … but like, you don’t pay off somebody unless you have a sense that this could actually be true.”As Jong-Fast indicates, the New York indictment detailed two other “catch and kill” deals which prosecutors said also showed “illegal conduct” admitted by Pecker and Cohen but directed by Trump himself.In late 2015, American Media paid $30,000 to a former Trump World Tower doorman who was trying to sell a story about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock.In September 2016, Cohen taped Trump talking about a payment to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims an affair Trump also denies.“So what do we got to pay for this?” Trump asked. “One fifty?”American Media paid McDougal $150,000 to stay silent.After Trump won the presidency, the indictment says, American Media “released both the doorman and [McDougal] from their non-disclosure agreements”.That speaks to the central contention made by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in his charges over the Daniels payment: that Trump concealed it because he feared it could derail his campaign.According to Bragg’s indictment, in the McDougal case Trump “was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy”. In the case of the doorman, Cohen instructed Pecker “not to release [him] until after the presidential election”. Regarding Daniels, Trump is said to have directed Cohen “to delay making a payment … as long as possible … [because] if they could delay payment until after the election, they could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public”.In short, prosecutors contend that Trump did not make and conceal hush-money deals because he wanted to avoid embarrassment or hurting his wife – the argument successfully pursued by John Edwards, the Democratic presidential candidate who made hush-money payments in 2008 but avoided conviction four years later. The case against Trump is built on the contention he broke state and federal campaign finance laws.Observers argue over whether Bragg has built a case he can win. Some expect Trump to wriggle off the hook. Others think the first prosecutor to indict a president has a good chance of securing a conviction. In either case, the indictment has brought Trump’s treatment of women back to the national spotlight.So has Trump himself. As Jong-Fast points out, as the former president this week attacked the judge in New York, who subsequently became subject to threats to his safety, so too Trump went after the judge’s wife and daughter.“If you see interviews with Stormy Daniels, she has had terrible experiences as a result of her brush with Trump. Even the judge in that case, the judge’s daughter, Trump went after them. You go after Trump, you get it. He’s like a mob boss. That’s just how he does it.” More
- in US Politics
Same world, different planet: Trump’s arrest lays bare US polarization
If the US needed a reminder that a rather large group of Americans completely disagree with another very large group of Americans, it got one this week.Donald Trump’s arrest in New York City on Tuesday, when he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in relation to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, was marked by diametrically opposed rallies, commentary and media coverage.For those on the right, the charges were an outrage, a sham, a witch-hunt: evidence of an abuse of political power and proof that the system was attempting to silence their man.For non-Trump supporters, it was justice: recompense, at last, for a man who was dogged by accusations of illegality throughout his presidency, and indeed for decades before that.As Trump was fingerprinted and read his rights on Tuesday, a neat illustration of the divide was on show outside the court.A group of Trump supporters, who had gathered to support their man, chanted: “Fuck Joe Biden”. Yards away, behind a metal barrier, came the opposite chant from people gathered to cheer Trump’s arrest. “Fuck Donald Trump”, the non-Trump voters shouted.As Trump and his lawyers begin to prepare for a trial in the Stormy Daniels case – and brace themselves for other looming lawsuits – some academics believe the country has not been this politically polarized since two sides literally went to war with each other in 1861.“When I look at the numbers that are coming in when we do the polling, I don’t see any daylight in the distance as far as polarization melting away,” said Tim Malloy, polling analyst at the Quinnipiac University Poll.“And that’s not opinion, that’s just looking at the numbers – they really never change.”A recent Quinnipiac survey found that reaction to Trump’s legal travails differed widely between Democrat and Republican voters. Among Democrats, 89% thought the charges against Trump were very serious or somewhat serious. Just 21% of Republicans felt the same.Some 88% of Democratic voters thought that criminal charges being filed against Trump should disqualify him from running for president again. Only 23% of Republicans were of the same view.It mirrors the wider divide over Trump, who retains his unique knack of completely alienating some people, and utterly captivating others. Among Republicans, 73% think the one-term, twice-impeached, criminally charged former president has had a positive impact on the Republican party.Democrats disagree: 93% think Trump’s influence has been negative.It presents a continuing problem for a country that has recently seen its main seat of democracy attacked by thousands of Trump supporters, but in electoral terms, it isn’t great for the Republican party, either.“That the fact that if the election were held today, Biden would beat Trump fairly handily has got to be a huge red flag for Republicans,” Malloy said.The division has worked for Trump previously. From the moment he announced his first presidential campaign, in June 2015, he set out to paint politics as us v them: branding elected officials “losers” who were “morally corrupt”, and would-be immigrants “rapists”.Little has changed.In a rambling speech in Florida on Tuesday, hours after he had been charged, Trump lashed out against basically everyone who doesn’t own a Make America Great Again hat, claiming “our country is going to hell” and accusing “radical left lunatics” of trying to interfere in his run for president.On Truth Social, Trump’s eccentric and misleadingly named social media platform, his followers also received an interpretation of the trial that was completely different from the one in the rest of the world. Democrats have “weaponized our system of laws”, Trump posted, in an effort to drive him out of the 2024 presidential race.A problem for the US is that people listen, and believe him. Outside the Manhattan court on Tuesday, it was no surprise to hear his supporters parrot Trump’s talking points.“This is all just a bunch of BS so that Trump doesn’t run for president,” Shaun Lloyd, a Trump supporter, told the Guardian. “The American people are waking up more than ever, every day, to the truth, and the lies and the Democrats are telling them.”It also doesn’t help that the rightwing media continues to channel lies and misinformation about elections and rival politicians’ behavior. This week some went as far as to hint at violence, with Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, telling his audience it was “probably not the best time to give up your AR-15s”, the semi-automatic rifle that has been used in multiple mass shootings.It is difficult to see a path out of the deep polarization in the country, in part because the divide goes to issues that run to race, identity and culture, said Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington.“There is increasing evidence that the best predictor of support for Trump in 2020 (and continuing), in addition to one’s party identification, is not feelings about the economy but racial resentment among white voters,” she said.“For that reason, it seems unlikely that this polarization will decline any time soon. Feelings about race in the US have been continually whipped up by stories of police conduct toward Black people and by a number of Republican Trump supporters, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who find it to their electoral advantage to keep making controversial statements that imply race-baiting.”The divide represents real dangers in the US, beyond the already evident destruction of faith in election integrity, the political gridlock and the inherent unsavoriness of a society at odds with itself.In the two years since Trump left office, polls have shown that one in three Americans – including 40% of Republicans – believe violence against the government is sometimes justified: a number that is at a two-decade high.“We are a nation filled with guns, many of them capable of blasting bodies to pieces,” Hershey said.“A society that’s roiled by conflict can loosen some of those people’s inhibitions. Let’s hope people remember that you can’t kill an idea by killing an individual; ideas can’t be shot.” More
