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      Stark warning over Republicans’ ‘dehumanizing’ rhetoric on crime

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      Republican and rightwing rhetoric over the state of crime in the US could spark a rise in violent incidents and worsen the country’s mass incarceration problem, experts say, as “tough-on-crime” political ads and messaging seem set to play a large role in the 2024 election.Violent crime was a huge focus for Republican candidates during the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans spent about $50m on crime ads in the two months leading up to those elections, the ads pushing a dystopian vision of cities ridden by murder, robbery and assault, and of Democratic politicians unwilling to act.As the 2024 contest heaves into view, it is clear that Republicans plan to follow the same playbook.“Joe Biden and the defund-the-police Democrats have turned our once-great cities into cesspools of bloodshed and crime,” Trump said in a recent campaign video.Trump said if elected president he would order police forces to reinstate “stop and frisk” – a police tactic which has been shown to disproportionately target young Black men – and said he wanted to introduce the death penalty for drug dealers.Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is expected to be Trump’s closest rival for the Republican presidential nomination, has also leaned into tough-on-crime rhetoric and policy. Last month, DeSantis signed a law lowering the death penalty threshold in Florida, allowing people convicted of certain crimes to be sentenced to death if eight or more jury members recommend it.“They think that’s the way to score political victories,” said Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton University and the former deputy national political director of the American Civil Liberties Union.“I think there’s a bit of a kneejerk, and, quite frankly, lazy attitude that tough-on-crime is the only way to win an election, despite the fact that we have so much evidence today that shows there are other ways.”There is also an element of Republicans, and, Ofer said, some Democrats, pouncing on an increase in violent crime during the Covid pandemic.The Brennan Center for Justice found that the number of murders per 100,000 people rose by nearly 30% nationwide in 2020, while aggravated assault rose by 11.4%. The rate of murder rose in big cities, which tend to vote Democratic and which are repeatedly demonized by Republicans and the rightwing media. But it also rose across the rest of the country.“So-called red states actually saw some of the highest murder rates of all,” the Brennan Center said.Since that peak, most types of violent crime have now dropped. Crime declined in 35 large cities in 2022, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, although rates remain higher than pre-pandemic levels. Still, the rate of homicide in major cities was about half that of historic peaks in the 1980s and early 1990s.The 1980s was when tough-on-crime rhetoric “exploded”, Ofer said. It culminated in the election of prosecutors who promised more convictions and longer sentences.The impact, Ofer said, was “an exponential growth in incarceration” in the US. About 300,000 people were in prisons and jails in 1973, but by 2009 that number had grown to 2.2m – making the US the largest incarcerator in the world.“This was a result of hundreds of new laws and practices at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level, including new mandatory minimum laws, more cash bail and pre-trial detention, and more aggressive prosecutorial and policing practices,” Ofer said.In this crime crackdown, not everyone was treated equally. Black people have been historically more likely to be arrested than white people, which led to higher rates of incarceration. A 2003 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that in 2001 “an estimated 16.6% of adult black males were current or former State or Federal prisoners”. Just 2.6% of adult white males had been incarcerated.Some progress has been made in the last two decades. By 2020 the number of people in jail or prison was down to 1.2 million – meaning the US still has the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world – but the obsession with tackling crime, through measures including more arrests, more prosecutions and more imprisonments, could see a reversal.“We are on the verge again of seeing the types of policies that devastated particularly low-income communities of color grow again as it did in the 1980s and 1990s.”Republicans have led the charge on crime rhetoric, Ofer said. But now Democrats are getting in on the act – “we are seeing a growing movement within the Democratic party pushing for more tough-on-crime policies”, Ofer said.The rhetoric and fearmongering over crime has led, in part, to an expansion of “stand-your-ground” laws in the US. In the past 10 years, 14 states in the US have added some form of the law, which can rule that people determined to have acted in self-defense can escape prosecution for actions up to and including murder.A 2022 investigation by Reveal found that 38 states now have some version of “stand your ground” – and the laws have proved devastating: a study published in 2022 found that the legislation was linked with an 8-11% increase in homicides.Ironically, given the accusation from the right that Democrats are too soft on crime, it appears to be traditionally “red states” that have the more serious crime problem.“The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020,” Third Way, a US thinktank, reported in January. Third Way also found that in 2020 murder rates “were 40% higher in Trump-voting states than Biden-voting states”.Although Republicans harangued Democrats over crime in the 2020 midterms, the strategy seems to have had mixed success. Republicans largely underperformed in those elections, and Ofer pointed to the success of progressive prosecutors across the country as evidence that a tough-on-crime message is not always a successful route to take.As well as the impact on incarceration and violent offenses, the tough-on-crime approach can also lead to the demonization of certain communities, said Stephen Piggott, a researcher at Western States Center, a non-profit organization which works to strengthen democracy.Republican talking points about the danger of immigrants and people who live in inner cities could be behind an increase in attacks on minority groups. “In recent years, there’s been a real mainstreaming of both violent and dehumanizing rhetoric, and it’s espoused by elected officials and media personalities,” Piggott said.“And it’s really served to kind of normalize this political violence. When you have individuals with large platforms, like elected officials and media personalities, and they’re talking about things like an impending civil war, it could lead to folks kind of taking that to heart and then acting on it.”The number of hate crimes in the US increased by 12% in 2021, according to the FBI, although the true number is likely to be much higher, given data from some of America’s largest cities was not included in the FBI’s report.About 65% of the hate-crime victims were targeted because of their race, according to the report, while 16% were targeted over their sexual orientation and 14% of cases involved religious bias.“So there are direct consequences on the ground for people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community,” Piggott said.“There’s a lot of impact going on right now.” More

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      DeSantis secures endorsements on visit to Iowa in preparation for likely 2024 bid

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      Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, has rolled out a hefty list of endorsements from Iowa lawmakers as he visited the crucial early-voting state on Saturday in an attempt to garner support for his potential Republican presidential campaign.The pro-DeSantis Super Pac Never Back Down announced endorsements from 37 Republican Iowa state senators and representatives, including the Iowa senate president, Amy Sinclair, and the state house majority leader, Matt Windschitl.In an interview with the Des Moines Register, Sinclair praised DeSantis, saying that he stands “head and shoulders” above other Republican presidential candidates including Donald Trump and that the choice is “an easy endorsement for me”.Windschitl echoed similar sentiments, telling the outlet: “We need somebody that’s accountable to the people that has proven in their state that they can do this job and take that same prosperity and spread it throughout America.”However, DeSantis is landing in Iowa – the first state in the Republican nomination process – after a tough few weeks. The Republican frontrunner, the former US president Donald Trump, has repeatedly attacked his ex-ally and holds a commanding lead in polls. An overseas trip by DeSantis was also seen as falling flat and he has struggled recently to impress some big Republican donors.On Saturday, DeSantis and his wife, Casey, attended the 2023 Feenstra Family Picnic hosted by the state representative Randy Feenstra in Sioux Center. DeSantis’s visit to the state is widely regarded as an early attempt at swaying Iowa Republicans, many of whom will attend an outdoor rally hosted by Trump later this evening in Des Moines.During the fundraiser, DeSantis boasted about his conservative accomplishments in Florida’s ongoing culture war, including abortion bans, blocking diversity and inclusion programs, and legislation that allows residents to carry concealed weapons without a government-issued permit.“In Florida, we are a freedom zone permanently,” DeSantis said, adding: “I think we need to restore sanity in this country,” as the crowd applauded loudly while eating hamburgers.“If you look at what’s going on in Washington DC, if we were sitting here ten years ago and someone told you we would be over $31tn in debt, you would not have believed that was the case and yet the Democrats keep borrowing and saving like drunken sailors,” he said ahead of the elections in which he is expected to soon formally announce his candidacy as Trump’s chief challenger.“If you compare how Florida’s managed or Iowa’s managed to states governed by leftist politicians, it’s like night and day,” DeSantis continued.The governor appeared to also take a veiled jab at Trump.“We must reject the culture of losing that has impacted our party in recent years. The time for excuses is over,” DeSantis said, referring to a series of electoral losses suffered by Republicans in the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms.“If we get distracted, if we focus the election on the past or on other side issues, then I think the Democrats are going to beat us again,” he told the crowd of several hundred conservatives. More

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      As Trump’s lies and scandals deepen, the GOP responds as usual – with silence

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      One day he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. The next he was on prime-time television pushing election lies, defending his own coup attempt and refusing to back Ukraine.To his millions of critics, it was another week that proved Donald Trump is unfit for office and dangerous to democracy. But to the top leaders of Trump’s Republican party, it was another week to keep heads down and say nothing.Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives; Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate; leading state governors and even most of Trump’s potential rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 have made a habit of siding with him or remaining silent as each scandal comes and goes.Critics say their complicity underlines how comprehensively Trump took over the Republican party and shaped it in his own image. Even though McConnell and others privately loathe Trump and wish him gone, they dare not alienate his fervent support base. Rick Wilson, a former Republican consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, sums it up in one word: fear.“They are afraid of the mob, they’re afraid of the horde, they’re afraid of the anger and the craziness and the rage and the threats that come any time a Republican elected official really stands up and opposes Donald Trump,” Wilson said.He added: “None of the major elected officials – McConnell, McCarthy, the big state governors – are going to come out and say what they believe and know: that he is a monstrous figure and he is a dangerous figure.”Trump ran against the Republican establishment in 2016, exciting a grassroots army of supporters and eventually bending the party to his will. His victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election and pursuit of an agenda that fit many Republican priorities, from sweeping tax cuts to rightwing supreme court justices, persuaded many in leadership to overlook his chaotic style.But relations with McConnell soured over time, culminating in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, for which he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible”. The former president has branded McConnell an “old crow” and repeatedly hurled racist insults at his Taiwanese-born wife, former transportation secretary Elaine Chao.Even so, despite their mutual animosity, the minority leader made clear this week that he will support Trump if he is the Republican nominee in 2024. Asked about the former president’s improving poll numbers, McConnell told CNN: “I’m going to support the nominee of our party for president, no matter who that may be.”Meanwhile Steve Daines, chair of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, has endorsed Trump for president in what many see as an attempt to curry favour with him and curb his meddling in next year’s Senate elections. Trump’s backing of extremists in last year’s midterms cost McConnell control of the Senate – an outcome that he is eager to avoid repeating.Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, commented: “He can say, ‘See, Mr Trump, I’m loyal to you. I love you. I’m a good person. You should listen to me. Please, please, please don’t tell Tudor Dixon she should run again or don’t tell Kari Lake she should run again.’ These are very transactional and tactical approaches but nonetheless they are approaches that these people are willing to do to survive in a war with Trump.”He added: “There is no Republican party. It’s just Trump. It is only about his desires and his political power, his political goals. If you told the average Republican elected official, you have to cut off your arm to get an endorsement from Trump, they’re going to ask you for a saw and some Band-Aids.”McCarthy, for his part, also seemed shaken by the events of January 6, but later that month he visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, signalling that all was forgiven. When McCarthy was elected speaker earlier this year after a gruelling series of votes, he paid tribute to Trump for working the phones to help him secure victory.Since then he has swatted aside every legal controversy, including last month when, as Trump became the first former president to face criminal charges, McCarthy tweeted that the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, had “weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump”.This week, in a civil case, a New York jury determined that Trump sexually abused and defamed the writer E Jean Carroll, awarding her $5m in damages (Trump is appealing the verdict). That alone would be enough to sink most political careers but McCarthy repeatedly dodged the issue when asked to comment by reporters on Capitol Hill.Other Republicans went further in expressing their fealty to Trump. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida told reporters: “That jury’s a joke. The whole case is a joke.” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added: “When it comes to Donald Trump, the New York legal system is off the rails.” Former vice-president Mike Pence told NBC News: “I would tell you, in my four and a half years serving alongside the president, I never heard or witnessed behaviour of that nature.”The following day, Trump gave an unhinged, falsehood-filled performance in a town hall event broadcast live on the CNN network. He vowed to pardon “a large portion” of the January 6 rioters, suggested that Republicans should let the government default on its debts and refused to call Vladimir Putin a war criminal over the killing of Ukrainian civilians.Strikingly, many in the audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, burst into applause and egged Trump on. When he made fun of Carroll they laughed. It was a glimpse of the “Make America great again” base that keeps party leaders awake at night.Donna Brazile, a former chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, said: “The voters stand by Donald Trump and as long as he has a grip on the Republican party and its voters, the leaders cannot step out ahead of where the voters are.“People should not condemn these voters, these voters who need to be educated, listened to and respected. After all, over 70 million Americans supported Donald Trump in the last election. That’s nothing to sneeze at. That’s voters who know what he stands for, know what he represents and still they’re with him.”She added: “As long as they’re sticking with Trump, I do believe that the leaders of the Republican party will also stand by Trump. Regardless of what they say behind his back, they’ll stick with Trump.”Even in the Trump era, the Republican party is not a monolith. The sexual abuse verdict prompted criticism from senators including John Cornyn, Mitt Romney, Mike Rounds and John Thune. In an interview with Punchbowl News, Bill Cassidy asked: “What if it was your sister? How could it not create concern?”After the chaotic CNN town hall, Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, described Trump as “Putin’s puppet” and there was condemnation from Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, and Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas running for president. But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Other confirmed or likely primary candidates steered clear in what is now a familiar pattern.After all, the Trump era is littered with the political corpses of Republicans who tried to oppose him only to suffer online abuse, public heckling, death threats or retribution at the ballot box. Senators Bob Corker, Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse and Representatives Justin Amash, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are among those who quit or were purged. They left behind a party that increasingly resembles Trump.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “They have refused to divorce themselves from someone that they know is both a political loser for them and who represents things that are completely destructive to our democracy. After everything that we have seen, after everything that the Republican party itself has endured in terms of its underperforming in multiple election cycles, the only reason why they haven’t divorced themselves from Donald Trump is because they don’t want to.” More

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      Oregon Republican boycott threatens key bills on abortion and gun control

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      Oregon Republicans boycotted the statehouse for a ninth day on Thursday, denying lawmakers the quorum necessary to pass legislation, in a protest that could derail hundreds of bills, including proposals on gun control and abortion rights.While Democrats control the capital in the Pacific north-west state, Republicans have leveraged rules requiring two-thirds of lawmakers be present to pass legislation, which means Democrats need a certain number of Republicans to be there too.Republicans walked out of the statehouse more than a week ago as the chambers prepared for a final vote on a bill that that would have expanded gender-affirming care and abortion protections, and have not returned. Their absence has thrown the capitol into disarray, and threatened Democrats’ legislative agenda.The boycotting lawmakers could face consequences for their protest. Lawmakers with 10 unexcused absences are not eligible for re-election under an initiative passed overwhelmingly last November by voters. Republican and Democratic leaders in the Oregon legislature met privately for a second day on Thursday to try to bridge the divide and agreed to cancel sessions planned for Friday through the weekend.Statehouses around the nation, including in Montana and Tennessee, have been ideological battlegrounds amid rising tensions over issues including gender-affirming care, abortion access and gun violence. Oregon – which pioneered marijuana decriminalization, recycling and protecting immigrants – is often viewed as one of America’s most liberal states. But it also has deeply conservative rural areas.That clash of ideologies has led to the senate being out of action since 2 May. Pending bills are stacked up and the state budget, which must be approved by both the house and senate by the end of June, is left undone.The office of Oregon’s Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, noted on Thursday night that there were many important bills at stake.“Oregonians are demanding that elected leaders deliver results on homelessness, behavioral health, education and other major issues right now,” Kotek’s spokesperson, Elisabeth Shepard, said.To give time for negotiations – and keep boycotters with nine unexcused absences from hitting that 10-day tripwire – Rob Wagner, the senate president, agreed to cancel senate sessions that were scheduled for the coming days. The statehouse is instead scheduled to reconvene on Monday.“I think people, at least people who observe politics, are going to have a pretty anxious weekend,” Priscilla Southwell, professor emerita of political science at the University of Oregon, said on Friday.About 100 people, including members of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group, protested against the walkout late on Thursday on the steps of the Oregon state capitol in Salem.“Get back to work,” they chanted.Republican lawmakers in Oregon have stymied several previous legislative sessions.This time, Republican senators insist their stayaway is mostly due to a 1979 law that requires bill summaries to be written at an eighth-grade level. Tim Knopp, the senate minority leader, said Republicans also want Democrats to set aside “their most extreme bills”.But to Democrats, it’s obvious the readability issue is just an excuse to prevent progress on Democratic-priority bills.“It is abundantly clear that there is a concerted effort to undermine the will of people and bring the legislature to a halt in violation of the constitution of the state of Oregon,” Wagner said as he gaveled closed the 5 May floor session because of the lack of quorum.A prolonged boycott by senate Republicans would throw into doubt not only the rest of the 2023 legislative session, which is supposed to end by 25 June, but could sow complications for next year’s primaries and general election.That’s because it is unclear how the boycotters would be disqualified from running again. The 2022 ballot measure is now part of the Oregon constitution, which disqualifies a lawmaker with 10 or more unexcused absences “from holding office” in the next term.An explanatory statement for Ballot Measure 113, signed by a former state supreme court justice and others, says a disqualified candidate “may run for office … and win, but cannot hold office”.But Ben Morris, spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said the secretary of state’s elections division would not put a disqualified lawmaker on the ballot.Disqualified Republicans are expected to file legal challenges. More

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      There is a clear and present danger of a new Trump presidency. Democrats must act now to prevent it | Jonathan Freedland

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      We may come to remember this period as the interlude: the inter-Trump years. After the sigh of relief heard around the world when Donald Trump was defeated in November 2020, a grim realisation should be dawning: the threat of a Trump return to the White House is growing.His first task is to win the Republican party’s presidential nomination, but that hurdle is shrinking daily. Trump’s grip on his party remains firm, with none of his putative rivals coming close. Of course, the first round of primary voting is months away and much could change, but the shape of the race is already clear – and Trump is dominant. Witness the reaction to an event that would once have been terminal for any politician: this week’s civil court verdict that he had sexually abused the magazine writer E Jean Carroll in a New York department store in the 1990s, and then defamed her by branding her a liar.That “makes me want to vote for him twice”, said Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama of the jury’s decision, articulating the view held by many millions of Republicans that this judgment – and any other legal finding against the former president – proves only that the elites are out to get him.There was a similar Republican response in March when Trump was indicted, also in New York, over hush money paid to the former porn star Stormy Daniels. That saw his approval numbers among Republicans – the self-proclaimed party of family values – go up. For the believers, the indictment merely vindicated Trump’s claim that he is the martyred victim of a liberal deep state. The pattern is clear: what should kill him only makes him stronger.It means Democrats and those who wish to see Trump finished need to let go of the hope that the courts will dispatch him once and for all. There are multiple other cases pending, perhaps the most serious relating to his pressure on election officials in Georgia to “find” the votes that would overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state. But on the current evidence, a slew of guilty verdicts would barely dent his standing with his own party. As Trump intuited back in 2016, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and Republicans would still vote for him.It helps that his most obvious challenger, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is growing smaller in the spotlight. He is tetchy and struggles to connect: this week tape surfaced of advisers urging him before a TV debate to write the word “likable” at the top of his notes – just as a reminder. DeSantis’s failure to go after Trump directly makes him look like a coward. Above all, DeSantis is pursuing a flawed strategy. He is offering Trumpism without Trump. The trouble is, too many Republican primary voters like Trump, while DeSantis’s brand of Trumpism is a hard sell to the wider electorate who will vote in November 2024.Plenty of Democrats concede that Trump is likely to win his party’s nomination. Indeed, many want him to win, so sure are they that he will lose to Biden in a rematch of 2020. And he may. But that contest will be far too close for comfort, at least in the electoral college that decides the outcome. In 2020, just 44,000 votes in three states stood between a Biden victory and an electoral college tie. Now the polls look much worse for him.This week a Washington Post/ABC survey not only showed the president six points behind Trump, it also found 63% of Americans believe Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second term, lacks the mental sharpness to serve effectively, up from 43% in 2020. Put simply, it was a photo finish last time and Trump’s prospects are better now than then.What would a Trump restoration entail? He himself has promised “retribution”, and those who served under him warn that a returned Trump would be less chaotic, more focused, than he was first time around. His appearance at a CNN town hall event this week provided several clues. On policy, Ukraine should get ready to be abandoned, while the world should brace for a US prepared to default on its debts. Americans will once again be deluged with a torrent of lies, delivered so fast that by the time you’ve challenged one, there will have been four more. (That is one reason why the CNN broadcast was horribly misconceived: it failed to learn a key lesson of 2016, when the US media made itself a tool of misinformation.)Trump also called Carroll a “whack job” and dismissed the sexual abuse verdict because it had been delivered in a liberal state under a judge appointed by Bill Clinton. This too has become a pattern, casting the justice system as merely another theatre in the partisan culture wars. Not content with destroying Republicans’ faith in electoral democracy in order to divert attention from the fact he lost an election, Trump is now doing the same to his followers’ trust in the law, this time to distract from the fact that he is a sexual predator.A second-term Trump would set about finishing what he started, breaking any institution that might stand in his way, whether that be the ballot box or the courts. As Senator Mitt Romney, a rare Republican voice of dissent, put it after the CNN show: “You see what you’re going to get, which is a presidency untethered to the truth and untethered to the constitutional order.”None of this is certain, but all of it is possible. Democrats need to snap out of the complacency brought by victory in 2020 and work as if they are in a race against the devil and lagging behind – because they are. They need to address the Biden age issue fast: several party veterans urge the president to get out more, recommending the kind of closeup encounters with the public at which he thrives. They need to sell their achievements, not least a strong record on jobs. And they have to sound the alarm every day, warning of the danger Trump poses. Because it is clear and it is present.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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      George Santos, liar and fantasist, fits the Republican party just fine | Moira Donegan

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      When news broke on Tuesday afternoon that the justice department was indicting George Santos – the disgraced Republican Long Island congressman whose election to the House of Representatives in 2022 was enabled by a series of lies about his background and elaborate, inventive frauds – it was at first hard to think of just what he was being indicted for. George Santos, after all, is alleged to have been so prolifically criminal in his 34 years that one imagines law enforcement would have a hard time narrowing things down.Would Santos be charged over the fake pet charity he seems to have invented, collecting money for things like surgery for the beloved dog of a veteran, which was never turned over to the animal’s owner? Or would he face charges stemming from his lies about his professional background, like the claim he made during his most recent congressional campaign, wholly false, that he used to work for Goldman Sachs, or his bizarre story, also a fabrication, about having been a college volleyball star?Would it be something like the check fraud he allegedly committed in Brazil as a teenager, or like the bad check he supposedly wrote to, of all people, a set of Amish dog breeders in Pennsylvania?What George Santos has been indicted for is not one of his funnier or more colorful scandals, but something extremely typical in Washington: lying about money. On Wednesday, prosecutors at a federal courthouse in Central Islip, New York, charged Santos with seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, two counts of making false statements to the House of Representatives, and one count of theft of public funds. He pleaded not guilty, and was released on a half-million dollar bond.The indictment against Santos is sprawling and complicated, reflecting the expansiveness of the congressman’s alleged frauds, but the allegations that federal prosecutors make fall essentially into three columns: first, they charge that Santos set up a fraudulent LLC, where he directed donors to give money that he claimed would be spent on his political campaign. Instead, he used the funds to make car payments, pay off his debts, and notably, to buy expensive clothes.Second, the Department of Justice charges that Santos defrauded the government when he applied for and received special Covid unemployment benefits in New York, despite drawing a salary of approximately $120,000 from an investment firm in Florida. (That firm, Harbor City Capital, is itself alleged to be a “classic Ponzi scheme”.)And third, the indictment claims that Santos falsified financial disclosure forms related to his congressional seat, falsely certifying to Congress that he drew a $750,000 salary and between $1m and $5m in dividends, and had between $100,000 and $250,000 in a checking account and between $1m and $5m in savings. It was often remarked upon with wonder, and not a small amount of alarm, that Santos, who had not long before his election to Congress struggled to pay rent and faced eviction, was suddenly in possession of so much income and such apparent good luck. How, exactly, had Santos come across all that money? Now, a federal indictment alleges that he simply didn’t: he made it up, like so many college volleyball championships.Maybe it’s for the best that Santos is being charged, ultimately, for the most typically white-collar of his crimes: it will help dispel the myth that he is not a typical Republican. Since the revelation of Santos’s seemingly bottomless dishonesty and malfeasance, a number of House Republicans have tried to distance themselves from the congressman. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina congresswoman trying to style herself as a moderate, called for his resignation; so did Max Milner, of Ohio, over Santos’s false claims of Jewish heritage and having lost relatives in the Holocaust. Reportedly, Senator Mitt Romney encountered Santos at the State of the Union address and told him, with his signature air of the put-upon patrician: “You don’t belong here.”But doesn’t George Santos belong in the modern Republican party? After all, how different, really, is Santos’s alleged scheme to defraud donors for his own enrichment from Donald Trump’s insistence, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, that his supports should donate to him to fight the “election fraud” that didn’t exist? How different is Santos’s use of his congressional campaign to raise funds for fancy clothes from Clarence Thomas’s use of his seat on the supreme court to get fancy vacations on Harlan Crow’s dime? How different is George Santos’s alleged falsification of his financial records to Congress from the conspicuous omissions on the financial disclosure forms required of justices of the supreme court?Even where the technicalities of the malfeasance are different, the Republican spirit is the same, in everyone from George Santos to Clarence Thomas to Donald Trump: the use of public office for personal enrichment, the contempt for the public interest, the indignant declarations that any efforts to hold them accountable are partisan, illegitimate and conducted in bad faith. Outside the federal courthouse on Wednesday, George Santos channeled Trump, calling the indictment against him a “witch-hunt”. I’d say he fits in with the Republican party just fine.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Schumer decries Republican senator’s ‘revolting’ remarks on white nationalists

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      The Democratic US Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned as “utterly revolting” remarks in which the Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville appeared to defend white nationalists in the US military.In an interview with the Alabama station WBHM, published on Monday, Tuberville was asked: “Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?”He answered: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”The Senate armed forces committee member added: “We are losing in the military so fast. And why? I can tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda, as Joe Biden’s agenda.”Tuberville is currently attempting to impose his own agenda on the US military, by blocking promotions and appointments in protest of Pentagon rules about abortion access.On Thursday, Schumer said: “Does Senator Tuberville honestly believe that our military is stronger with white nationalists in its ranks? I cannot believe this needs to be said, but white nationalism has no place in our armed forces and no place in any corner of American society, period, full stop, end of story.”Previously, Sherrilyn Ifill, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal defense fund, said: “I hope we are not getting so numb that we refrain from demanding that Mr Tuberville’s colleagues in the Senate condemn his remarks.”Schumer added: “I urge Senator Tuberville to think about the destructive spectacle he is creating in the Senate. His actions are dangerous.”On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Tuberville said he was “being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military”.A Tuberville spokesperson told the Washington Post the senator “resents the implication that the people in our military are anything but patriots and heroes”.The same spokesperson told NBC Tuberville “has kind of a sarcastic sense of humor” and “was expressing doubt about this being a problem in the military”.Reports have shown the US military has a problem with white nationalism and white supremacy, despite the Pentagon having prohibited “active participation” in extremist groups since 1996.In October 2020, a Pentagon report warning of a problem with white supremacists in the military was sent to Congress. It was released in 2021.In February 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, co-published documents showing one in five applicants to one white supremacist group claimed ties to the US military.On Thursday, Adam Hodge, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said it was “abhorrent that Senator Tuberville would argue that white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, while he also threatens our national security by holding all pending DoD military and civilian nominations.“Extremist behavior has no place in our military. None.”Fact-checking Tuberville, WBHM, an NPR station, noted Pentagon efforts “to keep extremists, particularly fascists, out of the military”.The station also fact-checked a remark about “what [Joe Biden’s] done to our military with the woke ideas, with the [critical race theory] that we’re teaching in our military”.Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans have turned it into an electoral wedge issue.WBHM said: “The US military is not requiring that CRT be taught and there is little evidence that it’s being discussed much at all in the ranks. According to Military Times, the one instance in which it is being used in an educational setting is at the US Military Academy at West Point.” More

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      CNN head defends Trump’s lie-strewn town hall: ‘America was served very well’

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      CNN bosses have defended their decision to host a primetime town hall with Donald Trump, after triggering widespread outrage by allowing the former president to spout lies and disinformation on subjects from sexual assault to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Addressing staff anger over the decision to host the New Hampshire event, the CNN chief executive, Chris Licht, saluted what he called a “masterful performance” by Kaitlan Collins, the anchor who attempted to cope with Trump’s lies and abusive comments in front of a raucous Republican audience.On an internal call, Licht reportedly told staffers: “You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.“Kaitlan pressed him again and again and made news … Made a lot of news, [and] that is our job.”Before the town hall, CNN said it was hosting Trump because he is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination to face Joe Biden in the presidential election next year.After the event, in a Thursday statement, the network said it had acted “to get answers and hold the powerful to account”.But CNN saw widespread criticism for hosting the twice-impeached former president, who is under investigation for a litany of alleged crimes and civil offenses.Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges over a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. This week, he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting and defaming the writer E Jean Carroll.He also faces state and federal investigations for election subversion, federal scrutiny of his retention of classified information and a multimillion-dollar civil suit over his business affairs.Licht took over at CNN last year and has faced criticism for pursuing changes in staffing and tone. His comments on Thursday were reported by Brian Stelter, a media commentator and anchor who Licht pushed out of the network.Licht reportedly said: “While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story.”At St Anselm’s College in Manchester, members of an audience of Republican voters clapped when Trump denied assaulting Carroll and mocked her as a “whack job”, a day after he was found liable for assaulting and defaming her and was ordered to pay her around $5m.When Trump denied taking three hours to tell supporters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 to to go home, audience members applauded.When Trump called Collins “nasty” and said she did not know what she was talking about, audience members laughed.Licht reportedly told staffers the audience in New Hampshire, the state which will host the first Republican primary, represented “a large swath of America”, a reality US media missed in 2016, when Trump shocked Hillary Clinton to become president.According to Stelter, Licht also said covering Trump would “continue to be messy and tricky, but it’s our job”, adding: “America was served very well by what we did last night.”Stelter said: “Many CNN employees strongly disagree.”One employee, the reporter Oliver Darcy, began the Reliable Sources newsletter he inherited from Stelter with stern words for his own network.“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Darcy wrote.Calling Collins “as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come”, Darcy pointed to how she “fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall” … repeating “that there was no evidence for the lies he was disseminating on stage.“… Yet … Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of [Republicans] continue to believe.”Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, pointed to CNN’s retreat from the adversarial stance it maintained throughout Trump’s presidency.He said: “Is anyone surprised by what we saw? If you are, you weren’t watching the last eight years. Thanks again to CNN, who helped get us into this in 2016, and is now helping us get deeper into this in 2023.”Galen also said Collins “probably tried the best she could, given the circumstances”.But the anchor was not universally praised, critics pointing for example to her failure to correct or challenge Trump’s comments on abortion, including claiming Democrats support abortion at nine months and killing babies after they are born.The Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, told MSNBC his party’s “position on reproductive freedom is very clear. We support a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive decisions. And it’s unfortunate that [Trump] was allowed to repeat those lies repeatedly without it being questioned, including by anyone in the audience, which was very disturbing.”In a statement on Thursday, a CNN spokesperson said: “Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist.“She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner.“That is CNN’s role and responsibility: to get answers and hold the powerful to account.”Not all observers said CNN was wrong. Jon Ralston, chief executive of the Nevada Independent, said on Twitter: “I still believe CNN should have put Trump on, and Kaitlan Collins did her best.“But for every interview, you have to have a strategy. She didn’t, and that’s why it was a farce. You have to be willing to ignore the audience … and interrupt him and call out every lie.”Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive congresswoman from New York, called the decision to host Trump “profoundly irresponsible”.Referring to Carroll, she told MSNBC: “What we saw tonight was a series of extremely irresponsible decisions that put a sexual abuse victim at risk … in front of a national audience and I could not have disagreed with it more. It was shameful.” More