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      Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paid

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      Servants of the Damned review: Trump and the giant law firm he actually paidDavid Enrich delivers a withering study of how big law got into bed with the 45th president – Jones Day in particular Donald Trump stiffed his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to the tune of $2.5m. He refused to grant him a pardon. The former New York City mayor is a target of prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia. Then again, as David Enrich of the New York Times writes in his new book, by the time Trump entered politics his “reputation for shortchanging his lawyers (and banks and contractors and customers) was well known”. Giuliani can’t say he wasn’t warned.The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against AmericaRead moreIn Servants of the Damned, Enrich also recounts how Trump once attempted to settle a bill for nearly $2m.“This isn’t the 1800s … You can’t pay me with a horse,” the unnamed lawyer replied.Trump eventually coughed up. It was that or another lawsuit.Enrich is the Times’ investigative editor. Dark Towers, his previous book, examined Trump’s relationship with Deutsche Bank. It also laid out the ties that bound Anthony Kennedy, the retired supreme court justice, to the Trump family. Kennedy’s son once worked at the bank. Brett Kavanaugh, who replaced Kennedy on the court, once clerked for the judge.Servants of the Damned is informative and disturbing. In an unflattering portrait of the rise of big law, behemoth firms that reach around the globe, Enrich homes in on Jones Day. He tags other powerhouses – Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps and Baker McKenzie – for moral failures but repeatedly returns his gaze to the Cleveland-based Jones Day. It represented Trump.Whether the intensity of Enrich’s disdain is deserved is debatable. The public holds lawyers in lower esteem than auto mechanics, nursing home operators, bankers and local politicians. On the other hand, lawyers fare better than reporters. Beyond that, the bar’s canons demand that lawyers zealously represent their clients. Reputational concern and the ease or difficulty of recruiting fresh talent and clients are often more potent restraints than finger-wagging.Beginning in 2015, Jones Day was the Trump campaign’s outside counsel – which Enrich treats as an indelible stain. Almost six years later, he writes, the roof of Jones Day’s Washington office provided “a splendid view of a violent mob storming the Capitol”.The insurrection, Enrich says, was the “predictable culmination of a president whom Jones Day had helped elect, an administration the firm’s lawyers had helped run, and an election whose integrity the firm had helped erode”.Jones Day was not Trump’s post-election counsel, but Enrich assigns culpability. In the aftermath of the 2020 vote, one Trump White House insider lamented to the Guardian that Jones Day wrongly distanced itself from Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat. The campaign paid Jones Day millions. Gratitude and support, the insider said, were in order.Jones Day lawyers marbled the administration. Don McGahn, a partner and a pillar of the conservative bar, was Trump’s first White House counsel. Trump made Noel Francisco solicitor general. Eric Dreiband led the civil rights division at the Department of Justice. All three are back at Jones Day. The revolving door is real.McGahn played a critical role in filling the federal bench with conservative judges who had Federalist Society approval. He presided over a revolution, of sorts. Roe v Wade, the supreme court ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion, lies in tatters.But when McGahn refused to cross the proverbial line during the Russia investigation, Trump soured on him. McGahn made and kept notes – to Trump’s consternation. McGahn quit in fall 2018. The following spring, Trump tweeted: “McGahn had a much better chance of being fired than [Robert] Mueller. Never a big fan!”Enrich also sheds light on the unrest Trump caused within Jones Day, particularly among lawyers who identified as mainstream Republicans. In 2014, Ben Ginsberg and McGahn arrived from another DC law firm. Ginsberg possessed sterling GOP credentials. He had worked at the apex of George W Bush and Mitt Romney’s White House campaigns. Enrich describes his office as “a shrine to the old Republican party”.But in the 2020 cycle, Ginsberg grew discomforted by the direction of Trump’s re-election bid. He called the president’s rhetoric “beyond the pale”. In late August, he resigned. Days later, he wrote a brutal column in the Washington Post, attacking Trump for pushing the lie of widespread election fraud and rubbishing mail-in voting.“The president’s rhetoric,” he said, “has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out.” Republicans “risk harming the fundamental principle of our democracy: that all eligible voters must be allowed to cast their ballots. If that happens, Americans will deservedly render the GOP a minority party for a long, long time.”Days before the election, Ginsberg warned that his party was “destroying itself on the altar of Trump”.Holding the Line review: Geoffrey Berman blasts Barr and dumps TrumpRead moreThen there was Donald Ayer, deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general under George HW Bush. After a clash with Dick Thornburgh, then attorney general, Ayer resigned. Bill Barr was his replacement. Ayer returned to Jones Day. In fall 2016, Ayer publicly voiced his opposition to Trump. In 2018, he retired. Before Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Ayer told Enrich Jones Day “should have gotten off the wagon, because [Trump] is a scoundrel”.But in 2020, according to Open Secrets, the firm netted more than $19.2m in reported federal campaign spending. Trump was a golden ticket.Jones Day has emerged as a “go-to firm for Republicans, mainstream and fringe alike”, as Enrich puts it. With sneakers, vodka and computers, branding matters. Law firms are a little different. Through that lens, Servants of the Damned is as much a rebuke of one large firm as it is an indictment of Trump’s Republican party.
      Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice is published in the US by HarperCollins
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      January 6 panel could release report on Trump and Capitol attack before midterms – as it happened

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      The House committee investigating January 6 plans to release preliminary findings into the attack on the Capitol sometime in October, meaning voters may be digesting new details of the insurrection as the midterms approach, Axios reports.The committee has tentative plans to hold its first public hearing since July on 28 September, and Axios reports that its members are meeting today to flesh out the rest of their schedule. The Democratic chair Bennie Thompson said an early version of its report into the attack will come out in October. “The goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election,” he said, adding that the time between the late-September hearing and the 8 November election “won’t be a quiet period.”The committee’s public hearings held in June and July dredged up highly publicized details of the attack and Donald Trump’s actions before, during and after that put the former president and his Republican allies on the defensive. That dynamic may repeat in the two months ahead, assuming the committee is able to match its earlier revelations.For a sense of how the committee is thinking in relation to its impact on the midterms, here are the thoughts of one of its Democratic members, Jamie Raskin: “There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.Here’s what else happened today:
      President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.
      The White House condemned GOP governors’ transportation of migrants to Washington, DC and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
      Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.
      Lawmakers faced rancor and strife of all kinds, including a condemnation at a committee hearing, a feud on a flight and a kicking outside the Capitol.
      No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.
      West Virginia’s Republican governor Jim Justice has signed a recently passed abortion ban into law, making it the latest state to crack down on the procedure after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last June.Today I signed HB 302 – a bill that protects life.I said from the beginning that if WV legislators brought me a bill that protected life and included reasonable and logical exceptions I would sign it, and that’s what I did today.Read the bill ⬇️https://t.co/G7i9DTirSN— Governor Jim Justice (@WVGovernor) September 16, 2022
      The legislation approved by the GOP-controlled state legislature is intended to shut down the state’s only abortion clinic, but contains some exceptions for minors and victims of rape and incest.West Virginia passes sweeping abortion ban with few exceptionsRead moreElsewhere on Thursday, the partisan venom went airborne, when Senator Ted Cruz encountered a supporter of Democrat Beto O’Rourke on a flight.The Texas senator’s camera-wielding foe, whose identity remains unclear, captured their encounter on video, in which he challenged Cruz’s stance on gun control and asked him to name a victim of the May shooting in the town of Uvalde:Senator Cruz was on my flight, and I asked him to name any of the Uvalde victims. He couldn’t. Texas deserves better than spineless hacks like this. Right the wrongs of 2018, and make @betoorourke our next Governor. #betoforgovernor #cancuncrus #uvaldestrong pic.twitter.com/AW34oxuUNv— Beto For Everyone (@Nathan_VBB) September 15, 2022
      Cruz defeated O’Rourke when he stood against him for Senate in 2020. O’Rourke is currently trying to unseat Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is running for a third term.The congressional tumult extended beyond committee chambers on Thursday, when video appeared to show rightwing Republican House representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicking an activist as they argued about gun control.The Georgia lawmaker herself posted a lengthy video of the encounter. The alleged kicking happens at about the 1:15 mark:These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns & the rights of parents to defend their children in schools.You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law.“Gun-free” zones kill people. pic.twitter.com/1T37HH8jEO— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) September 15, 2022
      The Washington Post has a write-up about the encounter between Voters of Tomorrow, a group representing Gen Z, and Greene, whom Democratic leadership booted from her committee assignments for a series of offensive remarks last year.The entire encounter is reminiscent of what Greene used to do before being elected to Congress in 2020. She appeared in Washington the year prior to follow for several blocks and heckle gun control activist David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 shooting in Parkland, Florida.Meanwhile in the House of Representatives, rancor was the order of the day in a Thursday committee hearing when one Republican lawmaker’s comments to a witness prompted a rebuke from his Democratic colleague.“I’m trying to give you the floor, boo,” Republican Clay Higgins said as Raya Salter, a clean energy advocate, spoke before the House oversight committee.New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not pleased by how her colleague from Louisiana treated Salter, who was talking about how the fossil fuel industry affected Black people and other racial minorities.“In the four years that I’ve sat on this committee, I have never seen members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, disrespect a witness in the way that I have seen them disrespect you today,” Ocasio-Cortez told Salter. “Frankly, men who treat women like that in public – I fear how they treat them in private.”In a statement to the Hill, Higgins said, “When radicals show up in front of my committee with an attitude talking anti-American trash, they can expect to get handled. I really don’t care if I hurt anybody’s feelings while I’m fighting to preserve our Republic.”Here’s a video of the exchange:Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis said bringing migrants to Democratic-led areas of the country was necessary to draw attention to the government’s failures at the southern border, Richard Luscombe reports:Joe Biden has accused Ron DeSantis of “playing politics with people’s lives” for flying Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal island community of Martha’s Vineyard without warning, while the legality of the Florida governor’s move is also under scrutiny.In what immigration activists and Democratic politicians have decried as a “political stunt”, DeSantis, who is expected to run for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, arranged for two charter planes of about 50 migrant adults and children to fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on Wednesday.Claiming that “every community in America should be sharing in the burdens,” DeSantis told a press briefing he wanted to draw attention to what he claimed was a failure by the Biden administration to secure the US-Mexico border.DeSantis criticized for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard: ‘It’s un-American’Read moreOne migrant had to be taken to urgent care upon arriving in Washington. Another wasn’t aware that he was arriving on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard until his plane began its descent.Those were some of the anecdotes White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre relayed as she continued her condemnation of Republicans governors sending migrants from the southern border to Democratic-run communities.“This should not be happening,” she said. “Republican officials should not be using human beings as political pawns.”White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is echoing Joe Biden last night in slamming Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, after he arranged for a group of migrants from Venezuela to be flown to the small Massachusetts island, without warning to the state or a true explanation to the people being transported.She said DeSantis did not notify Massachusetts that “migrant children, in need of food and shelter, were about to land on their doorstep.”Jean-Pierre added: “These vulnerable migrants were misled about where they were headed.”She said they were told they were going to Boston and misled about what benefits they would be provided when they arrived, “promised shelter, refuge benefits and more”.She accused the Florida leader, and Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who has unilaterally been bussing thousands of migrants awaiting the processing of their immigration applications in the US to Democratic-led cities New York, Washington and Chicago, of “the tactics of smugglers in places like Mexico and Guatemala”.“And for what? A photo op? Because these governors care about creating political theater, not creating actual solutions,” Jean-Pierre fumed.She accused Republicans of treating humans like “chattel in a cruel, pre-meditated political stunt”.From the White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. https://t.co/kKrEtpMa1q— Danny Usher (@dsurte66) September 16, 2022
      White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is due to brief the media shortly, in Washington DC. The session has been put back slightly from its original 1pm ET scheduling.Joe Biden is due to meet South African president Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House early afternoon.The US president plans to fly to the UK tomorrow, ahead of Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral on Monday.But on Sunday he plans to have his first meeting with the brand new British prime minister, Liz Truss. She met the Queen as incoming prime minister just two days before the monarch’s death last Thursday, providing the world with the last official photographs of the Queen, at Balmoral, smiling and wearing a tartan skirt.And as the campaigns rev up for the US midterm elections in early November, the White House has just said that Biden will hit the trail, traveling to Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday to attend a Democratic National Committee rally.Then next Wednesday, Biden plans a major speech in New York at the United Nations general assembly, where he will expand on the theme he is hammering on this autumn – the battle between the forces of democracy and autocracy, including within the US.Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also now been confirmed as a speaker at UNGA and will address world leaders via a video-link from is country, embattled since the invasion by Russia six months ago.If readers want to dive into live news of all the developments in the war, do follow our global blog on the topic, here.And for news on Queen Elizabeth and the British royal family, as thousands queue to see the casket of the monarch as she lies in state in London, follow developments in our blog out of London, as they happen, here.The run-up to the 8 November midterms will be even more eventful than usual, after the January 6 committee made clear its plans to release more details of the attack on the Capitol in the weeks ahead. Meanwhile, a federal judge has approved the appointment of a special master to review documents seized by the government from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, while stopping the justice department from further examining them until the master has finished his work.Here’s what else has happened today:
      President Joe Biden will meet with the families of two Americans detained in Russia, while Moscow has yet to act on a reported prisoner-swap offer made to secure their freedom.
      Donald Trump has apparently embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory to shore up his support base amid mounting legal problems.
      No, the White House did not hire a satanist as the deputy coordinator of its monkeypox response.
      One of the biggest outstanding questions the January 6 committee is trying to answer is what the Secret Service knew about the attack, and why agents acted the way they did as the Capitol was being stormed.Questions have swirled around the Secret Service as its actions were brought to light, particularly after it was revealed that it deleted much of agents’ communications from around the time of the insurrection. Bloomberg reports that the committee has obtained documents, text messages and other materials from the Secret Service that could answer some of those questions. “It’s a combination of a number of text messages, radio traffic, that kind of thing. Thousands of exhibits,” the committee’s chair Bennie Thompson said earlier this week.It was unclear if any of what had been turned over were the communications from January 5 and 6 that were reported as erased. Another committee member, Zoe Lofgren, said some of what had been obtained was “relevant”.Secret Service watchdog suppressed memo on January 6 texts erasureRead moreThe House committee investigating January 6 plans to release preliminary findings into the attack on the Capitol sometime in October, meaning voters may be digesting new details of the insurrection as the midterms approach, Axios reports.The committee has tentative plans to hold its first public hearing since July on 28 September, and Axios reports that its members are meeting today to flesh out the rest of their schedule. The Democratic chair Bennie Thompson said an early version of its report into the attack will come out in October. “The goal is to have … some information pushed out, obviously, before the November election,” he said, adding that the time between the late-September hearing and the 8 November election “won’t be a quiet period.”The committee’s public hearings held in June and July dredged up highly publicized details of the attack and Donald Trump’s actions before, during and after that put the former president and his Republican allies on the defensive. That dynamic may repeat in the two months ahead, assuming the committee is able to match its earlier revelations.For a sense of how the committee is thinking in relation to its impact on the midterms, here are the thoughts of one of its Democratic members, Jamie Raskin: “There are those partisans of former President Trump that will denounce anything we do, so we’re not going to jump through hoops to please people who will call anything we do partisan.”If there’s one thing Donald Trump likes, it’s people who like him. The Associated Press reports that the former president has reached out to a new group of friends: QAnon supporters.While saying as recently as 2020 that he didn’t know much about the convoluted conspiracy theory-turned-movement, he has lately made several social media posts embracing some of its ideas. The AP reports that it may be a way to shore up his support base as he deals with an array of legal troubles, like the Mar-a-Lago investigation:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The former president may be seeking solidarity with his most loyal supporters at a time when he faces escalating investigations and potential challengers within his own party, according to Mia Bloom, a professor at Georgia State University who has studied QAnon and recently wrote a book about the group.
      “These are people who have elevated Trump to messiah-like status, where only he can stop this cabal,” Bloom told the AP on Thursday. “That’s why you see so many images (in online QAnon spaces) of Trump as Jesus.”
      On Truth Social, QAnon-affiliated accounts hail Trump as a hero and savior and vilify President Joe Biden by comparing him to Adolf Hitler or the devil. When Trump shares the content, they congratulate each other. Some accounts proudly display how many times Trump has “re-truthed” them in their bios.
      By using their own language to directly address QAnon supporters, Trump is telling them that they’ve been right all along and that he shares their secret mission, according to Janet McIntosh, an anthropologist at Brandeis University who has studied QAnon’s use of language and symbols.
      It also allows Trump to endorse their beliefs and their hope for a violent uprising without expressly saying so, she said, citing his recent post about “the storm” as a particularly frightening example.A survey published earlier this year found that belief in QAnon has surged ever since Trump left the White House.Belief in QAnon has strengthened in US since Trump was voted out, study findsRead more More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to kick teenage gun control activist

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to kick teenage gun control activistFar-right congresswoman tweets footage of her seeming to kick Marianna Pecora during exchange in Washington on Thursday Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted footage to Twitter in which she appears to kick an 18-year-old activist pressing her on gun control outside the Capitol in Washington.The activist, Marianna Pecora, indicated she could press charges.The encounter, in which Pecora and others asked about gun control in light of recent mass shootings in the US, happened as the Georgia congresswoman left the Capitol on Thursday. Greene has championed gun rights.January 6 panel could release report on Trump and Capitol attack before midterms – liveRead moreIn her tweet, Greene wrote: “These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns and the rights of parents to defend their children in schools.“You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law. ‘Gun-free’ zones kill people.”Pecora is deputy communications director for the group Voters of Tomorrow.On Twitter, she said: “Our team is in DC this week to lobby for youth rights. All the members of Congress we’ve met with so far (both Republicans and Democrats) have been nothing but respectful – except for Marjorie Taylor Greene. She kicked me.”In the footage, Pecora and others argue with Greene and film with their phones. Pecora walks in front of Greene, who appears to tread on her heel. Greene repeats “excuse me” and appears to kick Pecora’s leg from behind.Pecora then protests and Greene waves her off.Nick Dyer, Greene’s communications director, says: “You’re blocking a member of Congress. You can’t block members of Congress.”On Twitter, Pecora said she “started out Hispanic Heritage Month by getting kicked by [Greene]. I’ve never been prouder to be a Mexican-American.”She also wrote: “First month living in DC and I get featured in” the Washington Post.Pecora told the paper: “It’s honestly, like, really disheartening to think that a bunch of kids can hold themselves with better composure than a sitting member of Congress.”The Post said Dyer “voiced objections to the description of the video and described a version of events unsubstantiated by video evidence”.Greene has initiated other public confrontations, including harassing the gun control campaigner David Hogg, also 18 at the time, and the New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, incidents that achieved online infamy of their own.Pecora pointed to a message from Santiago Mayer, the Mexican-born founder of Voters for Tomorrow whom Greene said should “move to another country”.Mayer wrote: “To answer the most prevalent question about pressing charges: we’re talking to our legal team and keeping our options open. Love y’all.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden says US democracy is under threat. Here’s what he can do to help fix it | Stephen Marche

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      Biden says US democracy is under threat. Here’s what he can do to help fix itStephen MarcheWe don’t need lofty rhetoric about democracy. We need to pack the courts, fight partisan gerrymandering, campaign finance reform and more In the run-up to the midterm elections, liberal America is starting to realize how much danger it’s in. The right has been openly, defiantly stoking the fires of civil war since at least 2008 – openly promoting secession, political violence and the overturning of electoral outcomes. Now the left, slowly, probably too late, is having some of the same discussions about the catastrophic failure of American political institutions. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, his attempt to set the agenda for the midterms, mattered in this respect if in no other. The Democratic leader has finally, against all instinct, acknowledged the risk of national collapse.I’m 65 and have $300,000 in student debt. I and other older debtors are going on strike | Lystra Small-CloudenRead more“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault,” the president declared. “We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.” He even allowed himself to be specific, going so far as to call the Republican party under Trump “a threat to democracy”. Biden has a gift for stating what has been obvious to everyone as if he were thinking it for the first time. Still, his diagnosis was accurate, which is what made his proposed solution to the threat so frighteningly shallow: “I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology.”That’s not good enough. It’s nowhere even close to good enough. If the president of the United States declares that democracy in his country is under assault, then he needs to announce in the next breath what he’s doing about it, not try to exploit it for temporary political gain in a single election cycle.A recent poll found that more than 40% of Americans believe that a civil war is likely with the next decade. The past two years have seen the rot of American government accelerate, even as Biden has made real legislative progress. That’s the irony of these midterms. Biden has made hugely significant strides on matters of policy, on climate crisis, on infrastructure, on education during his first two years. At the same time, the forces tearing America apart are more intense than they were during the Trump years.Since the Dobbs decision, American women have come to exist in a patchwork of legal statuses, not only between states but even on county level. Just as before the first civil war, the question of free movement between different jurisdictions is once again unclear. The Mar-a-Lago raid has created a situation in which there are no good options: the government must either arrest an ex-president or allow classified secrets to fill up random closets. Already the fundamental question of civil war is in the air: how do you deal legally with citizens who want to destroy the basis of law? The success of election deniers across American states has created inevitable conflict over 2022 and 2024. The peaceful transition of power is more doubtful now than it has been at any period since the 19th century.The drift towards disunion is not in Biden’s control if, indeed, it is in anyone’s control at this point. Hyper-partisanship is increasing and increasingly violent. Trust in institutions continues to decline. The sense of legitimacy in the press and the courts continues its long slide. Biden’s approach to the collapse of American institutions is institutionalist, and he is trying to make his faith in institutions the focus of the next election cycle. But the current crisis requires more than politics as usual, and more than Biden is providing.If you want to take America off the high boil, promote open primaries, not vacuous calls to national unity. Independent redistricting commissions to fight partisan gerrymandering, campaign finance reform to pull America back from the black hole of dark money, and a general overhaul of the Federal Election Commission are, at this point, obviously necessary on the most basic level if American democracy is to survive. They are also against the interests of both parties. They are not on the table in 2022.A pro-democracy agenda also requires a genuine reckoning with the opponents of democracy. The US supreme court is already dive-bombing into illegitimacy, passing through theocracy on its way to irrelevance. Biden is not preserving the legitimacy of the court by choosing not to stack it. He is only ensuring that an already illegitimate court will be opposed to democracy.How far Biden can enact a pro-democracy agenda is dubious, of course, and every year, from now on, it will become more dubious. Biden seems to have nothing more to offer than the old soaring rhetoric that somehow still has people who will listen to it: “This is where the United States constitution was written and debated. This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known,” he said, flanked by marines. Then he put the onus for defending that experiment on the American people.That’s an alibi, an abrogation of responsibility. Biden was elected in 2020 to defend US democracy, but the solution to America’s crisis is not political but structural. It doesn’t require the American people to vote one way or another in order to enact one or another legislative agenda but to find a different way to govern themselves.The first portion of the Biden administration has revealed a clandestine tragedy: the president has loved American institutions so much that he cannot bring himself to do what’s required to save them.
      Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionJoe BidenBiden administrationDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpcommentReuse this content More

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      Rightwingers threaten legal action on Biden’s student loan debt relief

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      Rightwingers threaten legal action on Biden’s student loan debt reliefRepublicans seek to challenge loan forgiveness in the courts and are making it a key talking point in the midterm elections Even before Joe Biden announced his recent plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans for Americans burdened by their unprecedented debt from higher education, the US president was threatened with legal action by his adversaries on the right.Since the plan was put forward, chatter about a legal threat has grown even louder as Republicans have said they will seek to formulate opposition in the courts. But what remains unclear is how big of a threat those legal challenges actually pose.Student loan forgiveness: what you need to know about Biden’s planRead moreMeanwhile, supporters of debt forgiveness are also working on challenging the political threat to the plan as Republicans have also sought to make the program a key talking point during the upcoming midterm elections.The plan, which includes the forgiveness of federal student loans of up to $20,000 for Pell grant recipients and up to $10,000 for all others, with some exceptions, will provide a substantial amount of relief for the millions of Americans encumbered with student loan debt.Those ineligible for student debt cancellation include individuals who make over the income limit of $125,000 annually, for example.One of the plan’s staunchest opponents is rightwing Texas senator Ted Cruz. He laid out plans for pursuing legal action against the Biden administration in an interview on a rightwing podcast.Cruz explained that he and others would have to actively seek out someone that makes over the income limit – and is thus ineligible for any student debt forgiveness – who would be willing to be the plaintiff in a lawsuit, illustrating how they were “harmed” by Biden’s executive action.Cruz conceded that courts won’t accept just any plaintiff – for example, any taxpayer outraged by Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan. “Well, that may prove a real challenge. The difficulty here is finding a plaintiff whom the courts will conclude has standing to challenge this,” he said.Loan service providers stand to lose from Biden’s plan, but whether or not companies will legally challenge the cancellation and also claim to be “harmed” remains to be seen. Since Biden’s announcement, it was reported that the websites of nearly every major loan servicer crashed or experienced severe traffic-related problems as borrowers scrambled to check the latest status of their loans or get more information.Jim Hawkins, a law professor at the University of Houston and an expert in lending law, said Cruz is right to worry about the amount of work it will take to sue the Biden administration for student debt cancellation.He said: “One problem is identifying a plaintiff who has standing to sue. Who got hurt from loan forgiveness? I think the Republicans will have to work to find someone who was injured in order to sue them.”But while it’s unlikely that Republicans will find a plaintiff who has standing, Hawkins said it’s not impossible.“There’s uncertainty until a court makes a decision interpreting a law or applying the law to the facts of the specific case,” Hawkins said. “So for a lot of people, it’s going to be up in the air until we have decisions from courts.”Another uncertainty is how far some are willing to go to question the constitutionality of Biden’s use of executive authority to cancel the debt. Biden invoked the 2003 Heroes Act in order to cancel student loan debt, which gave the secretary of education authority to make changes to any provision of the law applicable to student aid programs in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.Hawkins said the Heroes Act “has broad language, giving the president power. But it might be a bit of a stretch to think that the act written in response to 9/11 applies to Covid. It applies to anyone affected by an emergency. The question is, how much authority does that give Biden?”Hawkins said there is a chance a court could say the act is more narrow than Biden thinks. Cruz and others argue student debt cancellation is an overreach of power, despite Trump invoking the same act to pause student loan payments at the start of the pandemic.Biden’s secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, sought to clear up confusion by publicly releasing a legal opinion from the Department of Justice that states the Covid-19 pandemic qualifies as a national emergency.One speculative lawsuit has already been launched by an Oregon homeowner who once ran for the US Senate as a Republican. Daniel Laschober is arguing both that Biden overstepped his authority and that as a homeowner he will suffer damages because the program could stoke inflation and raise interest rates on his mortgage.But the rightwing pushback over student loan forgiveness is also a political fight in the court of public opinion, and one where supporters of the program are also gearing up to have their say, especially when it comes to false narratives pushed by the right that the program will largely benefit an elite class of people.That is certainly the tone of the Republican response so far. Ron DeSantis, the far-right governor of Florida, argued that Biden’s student debt cancellation plan benefits members of high society. He said: “It’s very unfair to have a truck driver have to pay back a loan for somebody that got like a PhD in gender studies. That’s not fair. That’s not right.”DeSantis joined 21 other Republican governors across the country to publish a joint letter condemning Biden’s plan to forgive student debt. “We fundamentally oppose your plan to force American taxpayers to pay off the student loan debt of an elite few,” the letter read. Astra Taylor, a film-maker and activist who founded Debt Collective, a union of debtors, said that those condemning people with student loans fail to take into consideration that these borrowers are in reality anything but the elite. They are usually working-class Americans, many of whom went into debt for trade school or community college rather than for a top university degree.“I’m just not sure that they’re playing to the base the way they think they are,” Taylor said. “Obviously, [Republicans] are very invested in a kind of anti-intellectual, anti-academy politics. But people go to trade school and get student debt. People go to cosmetology school and get student debt.”Taylor is right. Ten per cent of those with student debt received a professional certificate from institutions like trade schools, according to Upjohn Institute labor economist Aaron Sojourner.In an interview with Axios, Sojourner said: “Many Americans understandably, but mistakenly, assume that the vast majority of student loan debtors have four-year degrees, when in fact about half do not.”And on the whole, 90% of relief dollars will go to people making less than $75,000 annually, according to the Department of Education.So far, polling shows Republicans may not have found the winning issue some of them might think they have. Surveys on the plan usually show majority support for it and two recent polls – by Quinnipiac and the Economist/YouGov – have registered voters backing it by 51% and 52%, respectively. That support rises among Latino and Black voters and those aged under 50.While Taylor, like many others across the country, believes the student debt forgiveness plan doesn’t go nearly far enough, she said she understands its significance and that it is worth fighting hard for.“My position is very clear in that I think all student debt should be lost and we should return and expand the model of higher education that was the standard in this country a few generations ago,” she said. “But on paper, it’s enormous. It’s an incredibly significant political victory for progressives.”She added: “We’ve had all sorts of debt relief over the last decade plus, for more affluent people and corporations, so I think this is really significant in terms of showing that for working class and middle class people, debt can also be canceled. It’s just the beginning of a real reckoning with the scale and scope of the student debt crisis.”TopicsUS student debtUS politicsJoe BidenRepublicansUS student financefeaturesReuse this content More

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offer a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracyThe US labors in Donald Trump’s shadow, the Republican party “reborn in his image”, to quote Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Trump is out of office but not out of sight or mind. Determined to explain “what happened” on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, the husband-and-wife team examines his term in the White House and its chaotic aftermath. Their narrative is riveting, their observations dispiriting.Trump chief of staff used book on president’s mental health as guideRead moreThe US is still counted as a liberal democracy but is poised to stumble out of that state. The stench of autocratization wafts. Maga-world demanded a Caesar. It came close to realizing its dream.In electing Trump, Baker and Glasser write, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t are the authors’ open questions.Trump spoke kindly of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. He treated Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as a plaything, to be blackmailed for personal gain.In a moment of pique, Trump sought to give the Israeli-controlled West Bank to King Abdullah of Jordan. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and possibly future prime minister of Israel, he had a tart “fuck him”.At home, the US is mired in a cold civil war. Half the country deems Trump unfit to hold office, half would grant him a second term, possibly as president for life. Trump’s “big lie”, that the 2020 election was stolen, is potent.The tectonics of education, religion and race clang loudly – and occasionally violently. The insurrection stands as bloody testament to populism and Christian nationalism. The cross and the noose are icons. The Confederacy has risen.Baker is the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent. Glasser works for the New Yorker and CNN. Their book is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Those who were in and around the West Wing talk and share documents. Baker and Glasser lay out receipts. They conducted more than 300 interviews. They met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, “his rococo palace by the sea”, to which we now know he took more than 300 classified documents.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser write, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Imagine that.Trump falsely claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations. Eventually, he forgot he had spun that yarn. It never happened.Baker and Glasser depict a tempestuous president and a storm-filled presidency. Trump’s time behind the Resolute Desk translated into “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals”. The authors now compare Trump to Napoleon, exiled to Elba.Congress impeached him twice. He never won the popular vote. His legitimacy flowed from the electoral college, the biggest quirk in the constitution, a document he readily and repeatedly defiled. Tradition and norms counted little. The military came to understand that Trump was bent on staging a coup. The guardrails nearly failed.The führer was a role-model. Trump loudly complained to John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in world war II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”It’s fair to say Trump probably did not know that. He dodged the Vietnam draft, suffering from “bone spurs”, with better things to do. He is … not a reader.In Trump’s White House, Baker and Glasser write, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as some sort of owner’s manual.A week before Christmas 2020, Trump met another retired general, the freshly pardoned Michael Flynn, and other election-deniers including Patrick Byrne, once a boyfriend of Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent. Hours later, past midnight, Trump tweeted “Big protest in DC on January 6th … Be there, will be wild!”In that moment, the fears of Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who saw the coup coming, “no longer seemed far-fetched”. Now, as new midterm elections approach, Republicans signal that they will grill Milley if they retake the House.Baker and Glasser also write of how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump sought refuge from the Trumpian storm, despite being his senior advisers. They endeavored to keep their hands clean but the muck cascaded downward.Not everyone shared their discomfort. Donald Trump Jr proposed “ways to annul the will of the voters”. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, pushed for Republican state legislatures to declare Trump the winner regardless of reality.“HERE’s an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY,” a Perry text message read.Trump’s increasing tirade against FBI and DoJ endangering lives of officialsRead moreIn such a rogues’ gallery, even the wife of a sitting supreme court justice, Ginni Thomas, stood ready to help. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, was a child who yearned for his parent’s affection. He would say and do anything. And yet he managed to spill the beans on Trump testing positive for Covid before debating Biden. Trump called Meadows “fucking stupid”. Meadows has since complied with subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice and the January 6 committee.Baker and Glasser conclude by noting Trump’s advanced age and looking at “would-be Trumps” who might pick up the torch. They name Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson.On Thursday, Trump threatened violence if he is criminally charged.“I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before,” he said. “I don’t think the people of the US would stand for it.”As Timbuk 3 once sang, with grim irony: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”
      The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 is published in the US by Penguin Random House
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      Fox News and Republicans try to shift attention to crime as midterms loom

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      Fox News and Republicans try to shift attention to crime as midterms loomRightwing leaders push ‘soft on crime’ narrative to propel Republicans this fall, as most voters focus on abortion rights With most US voters indicating that the preservation of abortion rights is their chief focus as midterm elections loom, the face of Fox News and Republican politicians appear to be trying to shift attention to crime, a progressive media watchdog has warned.As Democrats seek to maintain razor-thin advantages in both congressional chambers, an analysis from Media Matters for America notes that on 19 August, the highest-rated Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, implored “every Republican candidate in the United States” to pitch themselves as favoring “law and order and equality under the law”.‘He could be a good president’: is Tucker Carlson the next Donald Trump?Read moreSince then, the word “crime” has appeared in 29% of Republican political ads, up from 12% in July, Media Matters said, citing reporting from the Washington Post.In one of the most closely watched contests, the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, Dr Mehmet Oz, then launched ads attacking his Democratic rival, John Fetterman, on criminal justice.Blake Masters – a past Carlson guest and Republican Senate candidate in Arizona – last week derided the Democrats as “the party of crime”.A new survey by the Pew Research Center showed 56% of voters said abortion would be “very important” at the polls after the US supreme court struck down the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that established the right to terminate a pregnancy.A separate poll from the Wall Street Journal found that 60% of voters support abortion rights in most or all cases.Media Matters said it is not new for Republicans – who hailed the supreme court ruling in June – to fixate on crime and the concept of “law and order” as a topic in national elections.The left-leaning nonprofit pointed to a notorious ad about a convicted murderer, Willie Horton, that George HW Bush aired during his successful run to the Oval Office in 1988. The ad accused his Democratic rival, Michael Dukakis, of being soft on crime while Massachusetts governor because Horton raped a woman and robbed a man during a temporary furlough from prison in that state.Media Matters also said that Carlson and Republicans have echoed each other before. For instance, Republicans joined the star Fox News host in characterizing Black activists’ protests against police brutality after the 2020 murder of George Floyd as a threat to safety.But despite the increase in overall crime that the US has experienced in recent years across Democratic and Republican cities and states, murder and other violent offenses remain well below levels in the early 1990s, part of which was under a Republican White House.While property crime rates have fallen, murder rates have increased roughly equally in Republican-controlled cities as in their Democratic counterparts, said a Brennan Center for Justice report cited by Media Matters.The analysis also found that Republican candidates have not clearly outlined what federal-level policies they would adopt to drive down crime.Despite claims that Joe Biden has done nothing to address crime, the president recently signed both the first federal gun safety bill in nearly 30 years and the American Rescue Plan, under which he successfully pushed for $10bn for policing and public safety.Every Republican in Congress opposed the American Rescue Plan, which was aimed at helping the national economy recover in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.A spokesperson for New York City-based Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Media Matters analysis.TopicsRepublicansFox NewsUS television industryUS politicsTV newsTelevision industrynewsReuse this content More

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      Why Biden blames Trump’s MAGA as a threat to democracy: Politics Weekly America | podcast

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      After Joe Biden delivered a landmark speech a couple of weeks ago warning that the extremism of Donald Trump’s Republican supporters now threatened the country’s democratic foundations, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the journalist Luke Mogelson, who has written a book chronicling the transformation of America in the run-up to January 6

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