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      ‘A wakeup call’: more Republicans are softening staunch anti-abortion stance

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      ‘A wakeup call’: more Republicans are softening staunch anti-abortion stanceMoves comes amid a ferocious backlash to the fall of Roe that has seen Democrat hopes in the midterm elections revived A growing number of Republicans are changing their positions on abortions since the fall of Roe v Wade as midterm elections approach in the US, signaling a softened shift from their previously staunch anti-abortion stances.Since the supreme court overturned the federal right to abortion in June, many Republicans are adopting more compromised positions in attempts to win votes in key states through a slew of changes in messaging on websites, advertisements and public statements.The moves comes amid a ferocious backlash to the decision that has seen Democrat hopes in the midterm elections revived and even see a solidly red state like Kansas vote in a referendum to keep some abortion rights.With midterm elections approaching, abortion has also served as a prime motivator for women voters across the country, especially among Democrats and fueling striking special-election successes for the party seeking to hold both houses of Congress.According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, 56% of voters say that the issue of abortion will be “very important” to them at the polls this fall, marking a significant increase from 43% in March.Additionally, an increasing number of states including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are seeing growing female and male gaps among new registrants since the supreme court overturned federal abortion rights, according to the Democratic data services firm TargetSmart.As a result, Republicans are increasingly recognizing that the issue of abortion could cost them dearly at the polls as they attempt to gain control of the House and Senate.The difficulty of shifting from gung-ho anti-abortion rhetoric to a more complicated reality for a lot of Republicans was starkly illustrated by Kansas’s referendum. The usually reliably Republican state voted to keep abortion protections in its state constitution, thus providing an unprecedented boost in red state America to the abortion rights movement.“The vote earlier this summer in Kansas is a wakeup call to Republicans that not only are the most extreme abortion restrictions non-starters with voters but the whole issue has flipped as a Democratic motivation to head to the polls,” Republican strategist Barrett Marson told the Guardian.“Over the years, it’s been OK to advocate for the strictest abortion regulations in a Republican primary because abortion generally was protected by Roe v Wade. Now it’s no longer theoretical. So now the most restrictive policies have real life consequences. And suburban women are giving a candidate’s position on abortion greater weight as they consider who to vote for,” he added.Earlier this week, a Republican Senate nominee in Washington state said that she was against abortion – but supported a state law that guarantees the right to abortion until fetal viability.“I respect the voters of Washington state,” said Tiffany Smiley, who previously said she was “100% pro-life”. “They long decided where they stand on the issue,” she added, referring to the state law that was passed in 1991.In an ad released last week, Smiley told viewers she was “pro-life but I opposed a federal abortion ban”. The ad came in response to an ad from Patty Murray, Smiley’s Democratic incumbent opponent, which called Smiley “Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked candidate”, referring to the Senate Republican leader known for his anti-abortion views and push to stack the supreme court with conservative justices opposed to abortion.Murray’s ad claimed that if elected, Smiley would support federal abortion bans.“Murray is trying to scare you, I am trying to serve you.” Smiley said, “I made it clear in my ad that … I am not for a federal abortion ban. You know, the extreme in this race is Patty Murray. She is for federalizing abortion.”Nevertheless, earlier this year, Smiley’s campaign accepted the endorsement of of Tennessee Republican senator Marsha Blackburn, a staunch anti-abortion activist who previously introduced a bill to the Senate that sought to strip all abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, of federal funding.Another Republican whose position shift was more apparent than Smiley’s is Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters.In an interview in March with Catholic news outlet EWTN, Masters said, “Every society has had child sacrifice or has had human sacrifice in some form, and this is our form. And it needs to stop,” referring to abortions.Since then, Masters has appeared to soften his abortion views. In August, the Donald Trump-endorsed candidate released an ad that said, “Look, I support a ban on very late-term and partial birth abortion. And most Americans agree with that. That would just put us on par with other civilized nations.”Moreover, Masters has made changes to his campaign website which once stated that he supported ‘federal personhood law” and that he was “100% pro-life”. His current website says, “Protect babies, don’t let them be killed,” followed with, “Democrats lie about my views on abortion.”According to his current campaign website, Masters would support a third trimester federal abortion ban. Previously, his website said that he supported a constitutional amendment that “recognizes unborn babies are human being[s] that may not be killed”.The pro-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America has come to the defense of Masters’ shifting position. “Blake Masters has rightfully centered his position on what is achievable now at the federal level: a limit on abortions at a point by which the unborn child can feel excruciating pain,” said the organization’s president Marjorie Dannenfelser.Minnesota Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Jensen has signaled a similar softening in his abortion position. In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in March, Jensen said, “I would try to ban abortion. I think that we’re basically in a situation where we should be governed by … there is no reason for us to be having abortions going out.”However, Jensen backtracked on his words a few months later. In a video released in July, Jensen said that he supports abortions in cases of rape or incest or if the life of the woman is in danger.Jensen described his previous comments as clumsy, saying, “I never thought it necessary to try and identify what those exceptions might be in regards to legal abortion or not, because I always thought when I uphold the pregnant woman’s life, and if her mental and physical health is in danger or jeopardized, that’s all that needs to be said.”Despite Jensen’s amended comments, not everyone is convinced that he is genuine about his position. Minnesota Democratic party chairman Ken Martin said that if Jensen is elected, he will still try to pass an all-out abortion law that would not make exceptions for rape or incest.“There is no reason to assume that Governor Scott Jensen would not attempt to pass the abortion ban – without exceptions for rape and incest – that he has repeatedly supported,” he said in a statement.In May, Iowa Republican candidate Zach Nunn raised his hand during a primary debate when asked whether if “all abortions, no exceptions” should be illegal.Nunn also previously voted for a measure that required women seeking an abortion to wait 72 hours. The measure included an exception to protect the mother’s life but did not mention cases of rape and incest.Nunn’s Democratic opponent, Representative Cindy Axne, released a political ad against him that used footage of him raising his hand at the primary. “Even in the case of rape, even in the case of incest, even if a woman’s life is in danger – who will take away a woman’s right to make her own decisions, regardless of the circumstances? Zach Nunn,” the video said.In response to the video, Nunn changed his tune in an op-ed he published last month, saying, “I’m pro-life, and I support protecting the life of the mother and the baby.” He accused Axne of taking his comments out of context and went on to say, “This issue is too important: Iowans deserve to have their voices heard.”In the op-ed, Nunn said that he supports abortion in “exceptions for horrific circumstances like rape, incest and fetal abnormalities, and to save the life of the mother”.With many Republicans looking to secure votes from moderate and independent voters, some political strategists worry that all this effort spent on reconfiguring their abortion positions could negatively impact their political momentum, especially as Democrats are making the issue a cornerstone in their own campaigns.“While the economy and inflation should be the most important issue this cycle, Republican candidates are now having to defend their stances on eliminating all or most abortion options,” said Marson.“Anytime they aren’t talking [about the] economy and inflation, they are losing opportunities.”TopicsRepublicansUS midterm elections 2022US politicsAbortionnewsReuse this content More

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      Hillary Clinton laments US extremism and calls for unity on 9/11 anniversary

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      Hillary Clinton laments US extremism and calls for unity on 9/11 anniversaryFormer US secretary of state makes an impassioned attack on turn towards extremism and divisiveness in American politics Hillary Clinton seized the opportunity presented by Sunday’s 21st anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington to make a thinly-veiled attack on the extremism and divisiveness stoked by Donald Trump, as she called for a return to national unity.The former US secretary of state and first lady invoked the bipartisan mood of the country in the wake of the 9/11 attack in which almost 3,000 people were killed.“We were able to come together as a country at that terrible time, we put aside differences. I wish we could find ways of doing that again,” she told CNN in and interview for the State of the Union politics show on Sunday morning.It was recalled how, as a Democratic US Senator for New York, in 2001 she flew over the burning wreckage of the World Trade Center at the disaster zone known as Ground Zero, in lower Manhattan, and went on air to pledge her unswerving support for Republican president George W Bush’s efforts to lead the US response.Clinton noted that she met with Bush and asked for $20bn in federal funds to rebuild. “And he said ‘You got it’,” she told CNN anchor Dana Bash.Clinton’s lament for the passing of such national togetherness then led her to make an impassioned attack on the turn towards extremism in American politics, albeit without mentioning Trump, the former Republican president who may yet run again in 2024, by name.She said that 9/11 reminded Americans “about how impossible it is to try and deal with extremism of any kind, especially when it uses violence to try to achieve political and ideological goals”.In another implicit reference to Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) rightwing movement, she went on to say that a “very vocal, very powerful, very determined minority wants to impose their views on the rest of us. It’s time for everybody, regardless of party, to say no, that’s not who we are as America.”Clinton’s remarks came on the morning that the US marked 21 years of the al-Qaida attacks on the twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, as well as Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Joe Biden laid a wreath at the Pentagon, where he recalled that “terror struck us on that brilliant blue morning” but did not destroy “the character of this nation that terrorists sought to wound”.Biden, who lost his first wife and their daughter to a car crash that also injured their two sons, then later lost one of those sons, Beau, to cancer, said: “I know for all of you who lost someone that 21 years is a lifetime and no time at all.”The US president was joined in the pouring rain by General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and defense secretary Lloyd Austin, who spoke about “a day of horror and loss” as 2,977 people were killed by the impact of the four passenger jets hijacked by the terrorists.First lady Jill Biden led commemorations at the memorial site in Shanksville, accompanied by her sister Bonny Roberts, whom Biden initially feared she might have lost that day as she was a flight attendant for United Airlines, which suffered two of the hijackings, but, it turned out, was not flying that morning.Kamala Harris and the second gentleman, her husband Doug Emhoff, joined the observance at the National September 11 Memorial in New York.The vice-president did not speak, as per tradition, allowing the commemoration to be led by the reading of the names of those who died and moments of silence to mark the points when the hijacked planes struck each of the towers.But in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, aired on Sunday, she spoke of America’s reputation as a world role model for democracy being under threat.She cited challenges from the right wing to election integrity, including the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a bid to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, and extremist Republicans’ unwillingness to condemn it, while also fielding many candidates in current elections who still refuse to accept the true result.“I think it is a threat…it is very dangerous and I think it is very harmful. And it makes us weaker,” she said.She added that when meeting foreign leaders, the US “had the honor and privilege historically of holding our head up as a defender and an example of a great democracy. And that then gives us the legitimacy and the standing to talk about the importance of democratic principles, rule of law, human rights….through the process of what we’ve been through, we’re starting to allow people to call into question our commitment to those principles. And that’s a shame.”On Sunday, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the US House of Representatives, slammed the Biden administration.“Twenty one years ago, we had a commander-in-chief [George W Bush] who united the country rather than divided the country,” McCarthy told Fox News. He said were the Republicans to take back control of the House in November’s midterm elections, “we would build a nation that is safe. We have watched Democratic policies make it the deadliest of America (sic) in the last 20 years.”TopicsSeptember 11 2001Hillary ClintonUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      History will judge Republicans who stay silent about the big lie | Robert Reich

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      History will judge Republicans who stay silent about the big lieRobert ReichIf the democratic experiment called America continues to unravel because of what Republicans did or failed to do, they will live in infamy I have a serious question for people who have power in America, and who continue to deny the outcome of the 2020 election and enable Trump’s big lie: what are you saying to yourself in private? How are you justifying yourself in your own mind?I don’t mean to be snide or snarky. I’m genuinely curious.If you hold public office and deny the outcome of the 2020 election, are you telling yourself that despite the overwhelming evidence that Biden won and the lack of evidence of fraud, you still genuinely doubt the outcome?But you must know that 60 federal courts have found no basis in Trump’s claim, nor have any so-called state “audits” and even Trump’s own attorney general found the claim baseless.Or are you telling yourself that it will soon be over – that Trump will fade, that the big lie will disappear, that your party and America will soon move on?But you must know you’re wrong. The big lie is growing. It has metastasized into a cancer that’s dividing the nation and devouring our democracy.Or are you telling yourself that you have no real choice but to support the lie if you want to keep or obtain political power?Even if true, is power so intoxicating to you – so important as an end in itself – that you’ll do anything for it?Where will you draw the line? If Trump is reelected and imposes martial law? If he or another Republican president forbids public criticism of his administration? If he calls for violence against those who oppose him?And what do you tell yourself about the measures your party is taking based on the big lie: suppression of votes, takeovers of election machinery, assertions that state legislatures can overturn voter preferences in the certification process, rejection of the January 6 committee’s findings?You have sworn an oath to uphold the constitution. How do you defend yourself in your own mind?I’m asking you, Kevin McCarthy. And you, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, and Rick Scott and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson. And others.And I’m asking those of you with significant power in the Republican party who have remained silent in the face of all this – such as you, Mitch McConnell, and you, Mitt Romney: how do you justify your silence?And I ask those of you now running for office who are denying the 2020 election results and pushing other aspects of Republican authoritarianism – such as you, JD Vance, and Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, Doug Mastriano, and Kari Lake: what are you telling yourself in private? How are you excusing yourself? Why are you even running?And I ask the billionaires and CEOs who are bankrolling these people: how do you rationalize spending millions, even tens of millions, helping them get or remain elected?I’m asking you, Peter Thiel, and you, Stephen Schwarzman, and Ken Griffin and Steve Wynn and Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne and others: is this really the way you want to spend your fortune? Is this your legacy to the nation?And I ask all the people making money off this rot – the TV hosts and producers and media moguls who are raking it in while poisoning the minds of America with bald-faced lies – what are you telling yourself in private?I’m asking you, Rupert Murdoch, and you, Tucker Carlson, and you, Sean Hannity, and you, Laura Ingraham: how are you defending yourself to yourself?I don’t expect you to answer me. This is a question for you to answer to yourself, alone and in private.But before you do, may I have a confidential word?Whether you’re a politician supporting the big lie, a billionaire backer of it, or a broadcaster who’s pushing it, it is not too late for you to get off the road you are on.Yet if you continue to promote or enable this lie, you are undermining our democracy. The crisis you have helped create is worsening. You bear part of the responsibility for what comes next.When the history of this trying time is written, future generations of Americans will judge your actions and your silences harshly.They will recall your cowardice and your self-justifications. They will remember your lust for power and your moral blindness. They will recollect your unwitting ignorance or your witting failure to come to democracy’s defense in this perilous time.Generations to come will sit in judgment about what you have wrought. And if the democratic experiment called America continues to unravel because of what you did or failed to do, you will live in infamy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com.
      TopicsDonald TrumpOpinionRepublicansUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Trump’s increasing tirade against FBI and DoJ endangering lives of officials

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      Trump’s increasing tirade against FBI and DoJ endangering lives of officialsThe ex-president’s cries of a witch hunt by law enforcement, echoed by his allies, have imperiled officers’ physical safety Donald Trump’s non-stop drive to paint the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents as a political witch hunt is drawing rebukes from ex-justice department and FBI officials who warn such attacks can spur violence and pose a real threat to the physical safety of law enforcement.But the concerns have not deterred Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and other Trump allies from making inflammatory remarks echoing the former US president.Mar-a-Lago a magnet for spies, officials warn after nuclear file reportedly foundRead moreThe unrelenting attacks by Trump and loyalists such as McCarthy, senator Lindsey Graham, Steve Bannon and false conspiracy theorist Alex Jones against law enforcement have continued despite strong evidence that Trump kept hundreds of classified documents illegally.Before the 8 August raid, Trump and his attorneys stonewalled FBI and US National Archives requests for the return of all classified documents and did not fully comply with a grand jury subpoena in a criminal probe of Trump’s hoarding of government documents.The FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and club recovered 33 boxes with over 100 classified documents, adding to the 200 classified records Trump had earlier returned in response to multiple federal requests.Trump’s high decibel attacks on law enforcement officials for trying to recover large quantities of classified documents including some that reportedly had foreign nuclear secrets was palpable in Pennsylvania recently when Trump at a political rally branded the FBI and justice department “political monsters” and labelled president Joe Biden “an enemy of the state”.The day before in Pennsylvania, to coincide with a major Biden speech about threats to democracy posed by Trump and some of his allies, McCarthy mimicked Trump’s high decibel attacks on the court-approved FBI raid by calling it an “assault on democracy”.Former law enforcement officials and scholars warn that using such conspiratorial rhetoric impugning the motives and actions of justice department and the FBI runs the risk of inciting threats of violence and actual attacks, fears that have already been proven warranted.Consider Trump supporter Ricky Shiffer, who posted angry messages about the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump Social, and then on 12 August armed himself with an assault rifle and attacked an FBI office in Cincinnati. After fleeing the scene he was hunted down and killed by police.In another sign of potential violence, federal judge Bruce Reinhart in Florida, who had approved the FBI warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, reportedly received death threats after his name was cited in press accounts.“I have been dealing with law enforcement and the criminal justice system for close to 40 years. I have never seen the type or virulence of attacks being made every day against the FBI, DoJ lawyers, and judges,” former justice department inspector general Michael Bromwich told the Guardian. “It’s a chorus led by Trump but that includes elected officials at every level. It is dangerous and unacceptable.”Bromwich added: “It’s one thing for professional rabble rousers, liars, and nihilists – such as Bannon and Jones – to attack law enforcement and DoJ in the way that they have since the search; it’s quite another for so-called respectable political figures such as McCarthy and Graham to do so. Their recent actions and words reflect that theirs is a politics detached from facts and principle.”Similarly, Chuck Rosenberg, a former US attorney for the sastern district of Virginia and ex-chief of staff to former FBI director James Comey, told the Guardian: “The attacks on federal law enforcement are sickening and reckless.”To historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has studied authoritarian leaders and wrote the book Strongmen, Trump’s attacks on the FBI and justice department and his retention of classified documents are consistent with his “authoritarian” leadership style“It’s very typical of authoritarians to claim that they’re the victims and that there are witch hunts against them,” Ben-Ghiat told the Guardian.Trump’s furious assaults on law enforcement also targeted the National Archives and Records Administration, causing a notable uptick in threats against the agency, according to sources quoted by the Washington Post.“No NARA official involved in negotiating the return of presidential records from Mar-a-Lago would have acted with any motive other than to ensure the safe return of all of the presidential records back into the custody of the government,” said Jason R Baron, the former director of litigation at the US National Archives. “It is unfortunate that some would impugn the motives of NARA staff in simply doing their job.”The frenzied attacks on law enforcement began almost immediately after the raid and included some especially rabid Trump supporters.Former White House adviser Bannon, who has been convicted on two counts of criminal contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 panel, made unsupported claims to conspiracy monger Jones on Infowars that the FBI planted evidence against Trump during the Mar-a-Lago raid, and that the “deep state” is planning to kill Trump.“I do not think it’s beyond this administrative state and their deep state apparatus to actually try to work on the assassination of President Trump,” said Bannon, who on 8 September was charged by New York prosecutors with fraud, money laundering and conspiracy involving his role in a private fundraising scheme to fund constructing the US-Mexico border wall.Right before he left office, Trump pardoned Bannon who had been indicted on similar federal charges involving fraud and the border wall.Graham provoked heavy criticism for making the suggestion in a Fox News interview that the FBI raid and investigation would lead to “riots in the street”, if charges were filed against Trump.After critics noted Graham’s comments could fuel violence, Graham doubled down a week later saying he was just trying to “state the obvious”.In a twist, some veteran justice department prosecutors point out that predictions of violence can potentially be criminal.“The risk is that predictions of violence can easily become threats of violence bordering on extortion,” former justice department prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig told the Guardian. “Explicitly calling for violence against the government can, in context, become criminal. When Trump loyalists like Bannon and Graham seem to cross that line, they are risking criminal prosecution.”On another front, even some former close allies of Trump say that his shifting and hard edged attacks on law enforcement look desperate and don’t pass the smell test.William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general who formerly was a close ally, told Fox News on 2 September he didn’t see any reason why classified documents were at Mar-a-Lago once Trump left office.“People say this was unprecedented,” Barr told Fox News “But it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?”To historian Ben-Ghiat, the fact that “Trump had those classified documents and they were mixed in with golf balls and family photos is very typical of authoritarian type leaders who don’t recognize any divides between public and private. Everything is theirs to trade, to sell and to use as leverage.”For Bromwich, the attacks on law enforcement by Trump and his ardent allies is unprecedented and very dangerous.“For those of us who have spent time with federal law enforcement personnel, the idea that they are members of the deep state or doing the bidding of the radical left is ridiculous. In my experience, the majority are conservative and Republican. Whatever their politics, they don’t let their political views affect their work.”“The search of Mar-a-Lago was indeed unprecedented. It was preceded by an unprecedented and colossal theft of government property by the former president.”TopicsUS newsDonald TrumpMar-a-LagoFBILaw (US)RepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      President Biden finally is sounding the alarm about democracy. Good | Thomas Zimmer

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      President Biden finally is sounding the alarm about democracy. GoodThomas ZimmerThe president’s speech last week was a testament to the extraordinary danger democracy is facing President Biden’s speech in Philadelphia last week, on the imminent threat to democracy, marks an important moment in US history.The president was precise and direct about why democracy is under threat, and from whom. Throughout his speech, he made sure to distinguish between what he called “mainstream Republicans” on one side and extremist “Maga Republicans” on the other. But Biden also left no doubt that the extremist forces are not simply fringe phenomena, that today’s Republican party is “dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans”.Biden was right to tie the Republican anti-democratic radicalization to the broader assault on the post-1960s civil rights regime. “Maga forces are determined to take this country backwards,” the president declared, “backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love”.Both the attempts to subvert the political system and to impose conservative social and cultural ideals on the entire country are indeed part of a broader reactionary counter-mobilization against egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy. The conservative vision for America is one of maintaining traditional hierarchies, of 1950s-style white Christian patriarchal dominance in all spheres of American life: the political institutions, the public square, the workplace, the family. And conservatives understand that they are pursuing a minoritarian project. In a functioning democratic system, they would have to moderate, accept compromise, accommodate the will of the majority. Instead, they have chosen a different path, favoring authoritarian minority rule over the acceptance of democratic defeat.Biden explicitly marked the current situation as exceptional, as “not normal”. In many ways, however, the struggle over democracy has been very much the norm in US history, as the question of who should get to actually participate in the democratic process has always been a highly contested issue. And yet, the fact that this struggle now overlaps so clearly with party lines is indeed the result of a rather recent ideological reconfiguration of the two major parties.This process of party realignment or partisan sorting started before the 1960s – but the major civil rights breakthroughs of that era certainly acted as a crucial catalyst. Until the final third of the 20th century, those who wanted to leave white patriarchal rule intact largely dominated in both parties, or at least were powerful enough to veto any serious racial and social progress; those who wanted to transcend traditional hierarchies could also be found on either side of the aisle, but they weren’t influential enough to upend the bipartisan white elite consensus.The establishment of the civil rights regime in the 1960s sped up a process by which all those opposed to egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy united in the Republican party. Their voices have dominated the Republican party since the 1970s. While the Democratic party came to lean towards embracing the idea of extending the democratic promise, conservatives were willing to tolerate democracy only as long as it wouldn’t undermine established hierarchies. Their allegiance, however, was never to democratic ideals – but to the traditional order of white Christian patriarchal dominance.Whatever doubts anyone may still have held about where the parties stood on the question of multiracial pluralism got a clarifying answer during the Obama and Trump presidencies, which fully polarized “the Left” and “the Right” around the core issue of democracy. That’s the main reason why the media’s criticism of the speech’s “partisan” nature misses the mark so severely: yes, it was partisan! Because that is the fundamental reality of American politics right now: The conflict over whether or not the country should actually be a democracy maps on to the conflict between the two parties. Democracy itself has become a partisan issue.The president claimed that the country has reached an inflection point, a moment in which “America must choose to move forward or to move backward.” Within the context of the speech, this notion served to sharpen the contrast between the pro-democratic forces Biden wants to mobilize and the Maga Republicans. But it’s also an apt description that captures the historical significance of the current moment, emphasizing the fact that the status quo is untenable, that there is no stable equilibrium in sight.As the reactionary counter-mobilization is escalating, particularly in Republican-led states, America is being split into a multiracial, pluralistic “blue” part that accepts the country’s changing social, cultural and demographic realities v a white Christian nationalist “red” part that is led by people entirely devoted to rolling back those changes.While Republicans claim to be representing “real America”, their agenda of entrenching a white Christian patriarchal order lacks majority support – and the gap between what most Americans want and what the Republican party is implementing wherever it gets the chance is rapidly growing. Some form of stability can only be achieved by either overcoming reactionary rule – or through ever more authoritarian measures and increasingly violent oppression. The fact that a shrinking minority of white conservatives is consistently being enabled to hold on to power against the will of the majority of voters is causing a massive legitimacy crisis. And unless the system is properly democratized, it is only going to get worse.Of course, there has never been a consensus that the “soul of the nation”, as President Biden called it, is defined by egalitarian ideas. At its heart, the country has always been divided between those who envision America as a beacon of democratic equality and those who see it as a land of and for white Christians. “We honor the will of the people,” Biden proclaimed. But the key conflict has always been over who gets to delineate the boundaries of “the people” – and who gets to claim equal rights as a member of the body politic.“For a long time,” Biden warned, “we’ve told ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed, but it’s not.” Still, the president insisted on striking a hopeful note at the end: “I have no doubt, none, that this is who we will be and that we’ll come together as a nation that will secure our democracy.”But the future of American democracy is actually very much in doubt. That was the whole reason why this presidential intervention was urgently needed. It really could happen here. And any successful attempt at halting America’s slide into authoritarianism must be built on an unflinching admission of where we are, of democracy’s potential demise – even here, in the land of the free.
      Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer
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      Bannon is not finished: his ‘precinct strategy’ could alter US elections for years

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      AnalysisBannon is not finished: his ‘precinct strategy’ could alter US elections for yearsChris McGrealOne longtime Bannon watcher says it’s too early to count him out – even a prison term could enhance his status among the Maga crowd When Steve Bannon heard that he was, after all, going to face charges last week for allegedly ripping off contributors to a multimillion-dollar fund to build a wall on the Mexican border, he claimed it was a sign of his success.Donald Trump’s former strategist said his arrest on Thursday was an attempt to shut down his War Room pod and video cast because it is driving grassroots support for the former president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement and reshaping the Republican party ahead of the midterm elections.“They are coming after all of us, not only President Trump and myself. I am never going to stop fighting,” he said.That much was apparent from Bannon’s final broadcast before his arrest as he let loose against the Biden “regime” and “social media oligarchs” he accused of conspiring to fix elections for the Democrats. For Bannon, the endless war is between “people in our posse” and Joe Biden’s “global attack on Maga”.The audience for this daily assault on reality is not as large as it once was. YouTube blocked the War Room two days after the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 for falsely claiming the presidential election was stolen. Exact numbers of listeners are hard to come by but the programme has been downloaded millions of times and still regularly appears in the top 50 most listened to podcasts in the US, at times reaching No 2 in Apple podcasts about American politics.From there, the War Room appears to be having an impact far beyond the sight of most Americans, as Bannon pushes a strategy for Maga supporters to infiltrate the Republican party before the midterms and 2024 presidential election.But now the 68-year-old architect of Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory, and briefly a White House aide, could be stopped in his tracks by his legal problems. Bannon already has a conviction for contempt of Congress under his belt for refusing to testify over his role in the attack on the Capitol that could send him to jail for months when he is sentenced in October.The latest charges put the white nationalist back on the hook for alleged crimes for which he was pardoned by Trump in the last hours of his presidency. That pardon covered only federal crimes and New York state has waded in to accuse Bannon of stealing $1m from donations to the We Build The Wall campaign to help construct an anti-migrant barrier on the US border with Mexico. Two other men have already pleaded guilty in connection with the alleged fraud and face lengthy prison sentences.Madeline Peltz, who has followed Bannon’s broadcasts for the past two years for Media Matters, which monitors conservative and far-right commentators, said that for all his problems, it would be a mistake to write off the populist agitator.“The big picture shows that you can never really count out Steve Bannon, both because of the trajectory of his career as well as the status of the movement in which he is a prominent figure,” she said.Bannon has maintained that status by keeping the myth of the stolen 2020 presidential election front and centre in his broadcasts as key to engineering Trump’s comeback if he runs again in two years.But Bannon’s most important role at present may be his championing of what is known as the “precinct strategy”, which seeks to take control of the Republican party from the bottom up, getting Trump supporters to take low-ranking, often vacant, positions within local branches. They are then in a position to select more senior party officials and to influence decisions such as the staffing of elections and selection of candidates, and ultimately to move up the party ranks.Maga activists are also targeting school boards and poll monitoring positions.“We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct,” Bannon said in one of his shows pushing the strategy.ProPublica contacted dozens of Republican party county leaders across the US who reported significant increases in membership applications that appear tied to the precinct strategy.Peltz said that the consequences could be with America for years.“If Bannon is successful in shoehorning grassroots activists, which it appears that he is, he could have loyalists controlling the levels of power within the Republican party and, even more concerning, in election administration. That could be almost impossible to unwind for years and decades to come,” she said.For all that, Bannon faces challenges.As he sought to remain politically relevant after a brief and turbulent stint as a White House aide at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, Bannon launched a far-right group in Europe, the Movement, that rapidly failed.He also fell out badly with Trump, with the president saying that his former strategist had “lost his mind” after Bannon was quoted as describing a meeting between one of the president’s sons and a group of Russians as “treasonous”. Bannon backed off but the damage was done and it cost him his position running the far-right Breitbart News after a major financial backer withdrew support over the Trump comments.Bannon reingratiated himself in part by launching the War Room from a Washington townhouse three years ago to campaign against Trump’s impeachment. Within a few months, it evolved into War Room: Pandemic to exploit uncertainty and fear about the spread of coronavirus. Eventually, it broadened as a platform for Bannon’s rants about whatever was frustrating him.Bannon’s influence is not without its limits. Most of the candidates he backed in the 2022 Republican primaries lost. Peltz said that he is also financially vulnerable.“A big weakness is that he’s super desperate for money. His billionaire benefactor, Gou Wengui, declared bankruptcy. Since then the whole show has turned into a big rightwing direct-to-consumer ad for a variety of scammy projects, including gold, MyPillow, satellite cellphones, prepper supplies. That’s a sign that he’s not in a good position,” she said.Then there is the prospect of prison. He would not be able to broadcast the War Room from his cell, although others might hold the fort if he was serving a relatively short spell in jail. A longer prison sentence of several years, which is quite possible if he is convicted on the fraud charges, would be a different matter.Still, Peltz said that a prison sentence could bolster Bannon’s credibility on the right. “He ultimately will be a bigger hero among the Maga crowd than ever, and I think that his sort of profile in American politics could take off from there,” she said.TopicsSteve BannonTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansanalysisReuse this content More

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      Trump backed failed campaign coup against Kushner, Navarro book says

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      Trump backed failed campaign coup against Kushner, Navarro book saysEx-adviser says president in 2020 agreed that his son-in-law had to be replaced by Steve Bannon but did not dare try to fire him In June 2020, less than five months before polling day, Donald Trump agreed to a “coup d’état” to remove his son-in-law Jared Kushner from control of his presidential re-election campaign and replace him with the far-right provocateur Steve Bannon.‘You have to run’: Romney urged Biden to take down Trump, book saysRead moreThe coup had support from Donald Trump Jr but according to a new book by the former Trump aide Peter Navarro it did not work, after Trump refused to give Kushner the bad news himself.Fearing “family troubles if [he] himself had to deliver the bad news to … the father of his grandchildren”, Trump asked Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, a major Republican donor and a central player in the coup, “to be the messenger” to Kushner.In Navarro’s telling, Kushner first insulted Marcus by skipping a call, then told Trump’s emissary “things were fine with the campaign, there was no way he was stepping down and, in effect, Bernie Marcus and his big moneybags could go pound sand”.Navarro writes: “And that was that. And the rest is a catastrophic strategic failure history.”In November, Trump lost the White House to Joe Biden.With his wife, Ivanka Trump, Kushner was a senior adviser to Trump in the White House and on the campaign, essentially acting as a shadow chief of staff.Before entering the White House, Navarro, with a Harvard PhD in economics, wrote a number of books attacking China (and liberally quoting a source whose name was an anagram of his own).His new book, Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win It Back, will be published later this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Navarro’s dim view of Kushner permeates his new book: one section is titled Both Nepotism and Excrement Roll Downhill.Navarro also took a central role in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. He says planning for the campaign coup originated when Kushner told Fox News in April 2020 the pandemic would be over by the summer.“In being so wrong,” Navarro writes, “Jared ‘Pangloss’ Kushner woke up” big donors who until then thought “Kushner and the Trump campaign would, at some point, get its ship together”.Dr Pangloss is a character in Voltaire’s Candide, given to extreme optimism in the face of adversity.Navarro reprints a journal entry for 25 June 2020 which describes a meeting in New York between Bannon and donors who “want[ed] Kushner and Brad Parscale [the campaign manager] out the door”. He adds: “Don Jr [and his girlfriend] Kimberly Guilfoyle feel the same way. This could be really interesting. It could also be our last chance for victory.”According to Navarro, the plotters thought Bannon, who chaired Trump’s campaign in 2016, was the only operative who could steer him to re-election four years later.The plotters also knew that Kushner would never agree to the change – Navarro says Kushner told him he wanted to “crush Bannon like a bug” – and that Trump resented Bannon for taking “too much credit for the 2016 win”.Bannon was fired as White House strategist in August 2017, amid controversy over Trump’s supportive remarks about far-right protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. Returning to Breitbart News, Bannon remained influential in Trump’s orbit.On the page, Navarro risks Trump’s ire by criticizing his actions as president, at one point devoting six pages to outlining “why a president who is supposed to be one of the greatest assessors of talent … would make such bad personnel choices across so many White House and cabinet-level positions”.He also writes that Trump could not have beaten Hillary Clinton in 2016 without Bannon, at the behest of another big donor, Robert Mercer, “coming in towards the end of the campaign and righting the Kushner ship”.In 2020, Navarro says, he conquered his “trepidations” about angering Trump and pressed ahead with the anti-Kushner plot. Navarro says he set up and attended a White House meeting between Trump and Marcus at which Trump “readily agreed with Bernie that Jared had to be replaced with Steve”.But there was another problem, again at odds with the ruthless image Trump constructed on The Apprentice, his NBC reality TV hit, in which his catchphrase was “You’re fired!”As has been extensively documented, Trump in fact does not like firing people.Peter Navarro: what Trump’s Covid-19 tsar lacks in expertise, he makes upRead more“Rather than being shot himself,” Navarro writes, Trump “asked Bernie to be the messenger” to Kushner.Marcus “accepted the mission, albeit grudgingly”. The mission failed. Parscale, the campaign manager under Kushner, was removed in July but the son-in-law stayed in control.Navarro played a central role in Trump’s attempts to overturn his election defeat, outlining a plan called the “Green Bay Sweep” which was meant to block certification of Biden’s win.In November, Navarro will stand trial. He is charged with contempt of Congress, for refusing to comply with the January 6 investigation. He faces up to two years in jail. The judge in the case refused a request to hold the trial next April, so Navarro could market his new book.TopicsBooksDonald TrumpJared KushnerSteve BannonTrump administrationUS elections 2020RepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Doug Mastriano prayed for Trump to ‘seize the power’ before Capitol attack

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      Doug Mastriano prayed for Trump to ‘seize the power’ before Capitol attackThe Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s governor spoke during a video call hosted by a Christian nationalist group member A week before the Capitol attack, on a video call organised by a member of a Christian nationalist group, a Pennsylvania state senator who is the Republican candidate for governor in the battleground state prayed that supporters of Donald Trump would “seize the power” on 6 January 2021.Doug Mastriano attended the pro-Trump rally in Washington that day, after which supporters, told by Trump to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat, stormed Congress in an attempt to stop certification of Joe Biden’s victory.The riot was linked to nine deaths, including suicides in the aftermath of the attack among law enforcement.‘You have to run’: Romney urged Biden to take down Trump, book saysRead moreMastriano denies crossing police lines at the Capitol and affiliations with Christian nationalist groups. He is now one of a number of Republican candidates for state positions with sway over elections who support Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat was the result of voter fraud.Two months from election day, the polling website fivethirtyeight.com puts Mastriano just shy of seven points behind his Democratic opponent.Mastriano’s 6 January prayer, first reported by Rolling Stone on Friday, was delivered during a Zoom call, titled Global Prayer for Election Integrity, organised by what the magazine called “a prominent figure in the far-right New Apostolic Restoration movement”.As defined by Rolling Stone, “Christian nationalism is a central tenet of … NAR [which] emerge[ed] from charismatic Christianity (think: Pentecostalism) and is anchored in the belief that we are living in an age of new apostles and prophets, who receive direct revelations from the holy spirit.“NAR adherents hold that the end times are fast approaching and their calling is to hasten the second coming of Christ by re-fashioning the modern world in a biblical manner.”Mastriano is a US army veteran who once dressed up as a Confederate soldier. In his prayer, he listed historical events including the battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, the plane which came down in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11, after passengers attacked their hijackers.He said: “In 2001, while our nation was attacked by terrorists, a strong Christian man from Paramus, New Jersey, Todd Beamer, said, ‘Let’s roll.’“God I ask you that you help us roll in these dark times, that we fear not the darkness, that we will seize our Esther and Gideon moments. That … when you say, ‘Who shall I send?’ we will say, ‘Send me and not him or her’, we will take responsibility for our republic and not waver in these days that try our souls.“We’re surrounded by wickedness and fear and dithering and inaction. But that’s not our problem. Our problem is following your lead.”In the weeks before the Capitol attack, Mastriano was involved in failed attempts to overturn Trump’s defeat in Pennsylvania, the announcement of which confirmed Biden’s electoral college win.On the Zoom call, Mastriano displayed what he said were “letters that President Trump asked me this morning to send to [Senate Republican leader] Mitch McConnell and [House leader] Kevin McCarthy, outlining the fraud in Pennsylvania, and this will embolden them to stand firm and disregard what has happened in Pennsylvania until they have an investigation”.He also said: “We think about our elected officials in Pennsylvania who’ve been weak and feckless and we’ve handed over our power to a governor” – Tom Wolf, a Democrat – “who disregards the freedoms of this republic.“I pray that we’ll take responsibility, we’ll seize the power that we had given to us by the constitution, and as well by you providentially. I pray for the leaders and also in the federal government, God, on the sixth of January that they will rise up with boldness.”After the Capitol riot, when Congress reconvened, McCarthy was one of 138 Republican congressmen and nine senators who voted to object to results in Pennsylvania or Arizona or both.TopicsRepublicansChristianityUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpPennsylvaniaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More