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      in US Politics

      Sheldon Adelson, casino magnate and major Trump donor, dies aged 87

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      Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate, perennial top single donor to Donald Trump and other Republican causes and an influential opponent of a two-state solution in the Middle East, has died. He was 87.Adelson’s influence on Trump has been seen as a major factor in the president’s assertive foreign policy on Israel, including his decision to declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a deeply controversial move as parts of the city are also claimed by Palestinians.In a statement on Tuesday Adelson’s wife, Dr Miriam Adelson, said the Las Vegas Sands chairman and chief executive died “of complications from a long illness”. A Nevada newspaper Adelson owned reported the cause of death as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which Adelson was found to have in 2019.“It is with unbearable pain that I announce the death of my husband, Sheldon G Adelson,” Miriam Adelson said.Adelson was born in 1933 and grew up in a suburb of Boston, his father a cab driver of Ukrainian Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish ancestry.As the owner of the giant Venetian and Palazzo casino-resorts in Las Vegas, the Venetian Macau in China and the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, he was among the richest men in the world, with a net worth pegged by Forbes at more than $33bn.In the 2020 election, the Adelsons set a new record for political gifts from individuals, flooding the Trump campaign, related accounts and many lesser Republican campaigns with a total of $172.7m, according to the campaign finance site Open Secrets.The Adelsons were the top donors in every major election cycle going back a decade except for 2016, and their lifetime political giving amounted to about half a billion dollars, Open Secrets said.In a statement on Tuesday, Trump said Adelson “lived the true American dream”. The president also recognised Adelson’s role in the embassy move and US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Golan Heights, another hugely controversial issue.The former president George W Bush said: “Laura and I mourn the passing of a friend.”An enemy of union organizing inside his casinos, Adelson was a veteran of bruising negotiations with, and criticism from, union political machines in Las Vegas and elsewhere, a conflict seen as fueling his support for anti-union Republican politicians.In 2015, as part of a wrongful dismissal suit brought by an employee, Adelson spent four days in court defending his gambling empire from accusations of bribery and ties to organised crime in China.Initially skeptical of Trump, whom he knew as a failed casino entrepreneur, Adelson was slow to enter the 2016 election. Since the early 2000s, he had prioritized giving to candidates who opposed Palestinian statehood, and it was not initially clear where Trump stood on Israel.But Adelson and Trump’s priorities connected in Trump family connections, through the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Adelson had long supported.Adelson was adored across much of the political spectrum in Israel for his wide-ranging support to many Jewish and also Zionist organisations.In particular, he was praised by hardline nationalists, in part due to his financial support for Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, which are considered illegal by most world powers. One medical school in a settlement in the occupied West Bank is named after the Adelsons.The billionaire’s death was mourned by several far-right Israeli politicians, including Naftali Bennett, a former defense minister, who said Adelson would be “forever be recorded in the annals in the State of Israel”.Local media reported Adelson’s funeral would be held in Israel.Israel’s current and longest-serving prime minister, Netanyahu, has also been a key beneficiary of Adelson, who launched a free newspaper called Israel Hayom in 2007 that was clearly supportive of the Israeli leader. The paper has since become the country’s most widely circulated daily.Netanyahu said he felt “deep sorrow and heartbreak” on hearing of Adelson’s death. The news will be a blow to the prime minister, who is facing an election in late March, although Adelson’s wife has long been seen as a leading figure in family decisions on Israel.“Along with his wife Miri, Sheldon was one of the greatest contributors in history to the Jewish people, Zionism, settlements and the state of Israel,” Netanyahu said, using Miriam’s nickname.In 2018, Trump gave Miriam Adelson the highest US civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom – alongside Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth.In her statement on Tuesday, she called her husband “an American patriot: a US army veteran who gave generously to wounded warriors and, wherever he could, looked to the advancement of these great United States”.“He was the proudest of Jews,” she said, adding that he “saw in the state of Israel not only the realization of an historical promise to a unique and deserving people, but also a gift from the Almighty to all of humanity.”While Adelson changed American politics with his money, equipping thousands of local Republican campaigns with the resources, messaging and structure to win, his sympathy for Trump ended with the president’s re-election defeat last November.In 2015, Adelson acquired the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a secret bid, after the newspaper published exposés about his empire. Last November, the paper rejected Trump’s effort to deny his loss to Joe Biden in Nevada, urging Trump to accept the result. More

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      in Elections

      I've been on Parler. It's a cesspit of thinly veiled racism and hate | Malaika Jabali

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      “Civil war is coming.”I saw this message on the social media platform Parler in November, about two weeks after the election was called for Joe Biden. The ominous post followed an even more harrowing message from a different user. “[O]ur people have guns too … it’s time for us to use it!!! Just like in old days.” The poster embedded a photograph of a noose.Parler, which has since been banned by Apple’s app store and from Amazon, has billed itself as a “free speech” platform for the “world’s town square”. Last fall, without much digging, I learned that this town square is one where an increasingly violent far right digitally dances with mainstream, influential conservatives.The fact that Parler has a vague air of legitimacy – unlike other platforms known for their explicitly far-right user bases – normalizes racist violence against Black people and anyone associated with them. Like the white police officers and “respectable” public servants who joined the Ku Klux Klan after the US civil war, or the white families who partied under the lynched bodies of Black men, white America has continued its intergenerational love affair with public anti-blackness. The methods have simply mutated. Memes calling for our deaths are the lynching postcards of the 21st century. Shared among the masses, they make casual affairs of Black terror. It’s not enough for the sharers of these memes to simply believe in white violence on a personal level; the collective experience is the point.I joined Parler in November, before various tech companies announced plans to take it offline. It didn’t take long to find a bevy of hashtags and posts romanticizing civil war. By late November, there were over 10,000 posts that included the hashtag #civilwar and its variants. The person who posted “Civil war is coming” was replying to a post by Wayne Root, a conservative media personality with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. Root leveled the same unproven accusations of voter fraud as Donald Trump, using the same calls for battle that white power groups heeded in their storming of the US Capitol the first week of 2021.While some on the far right will probably retreat into the shadows cast by polling booths and hidden by exit polling data that obscures Trump’s popularity, many have not. Any perception of progress for Black people, even if this progress does not substantively exist, perpetuates violence against us and our perceived allies like leftists, Marxists and Democrats – all named by Parler posters as opposing parties in this hypothetical civil war).To say that Parler’s users, or any Americans who revel in white power tropes and violent memes, are “extremist” is a bit of a misnomer. What we call extremism is, if anything, a common American tradition. Millions of Americans, if they don’t proactively endorse the violence, silently concede to it. They vote for it. They dress it in words like “tradition” and “free speech”.I was raised witnessing it. There is a monument honoring Confederate soldiers in my home town of Stone Mountain, Georgia. The monument isn’t an ordinary statue erected in some mundane public square. It’s a nearly half-acre relief carved into the massive quartz and granite stone for which our town is named. It would take a runner five miles to circle around the rock formation’s base. We took field trips to Stone Mountain in high school, as if it were an amusement park and not the largest Confederate memorial in the world.Stone Mountain has now become a flashpoint for conflict. I hiked the mountain on a recent holiday trip with my mom, days before white men wielding guns protested against the widespread movement to remove Confederate statues. We tried to hike another day, but were blocked from entering. It was closed for the day after Black counter-protesters came back with guns of their own.When you talk to white southerners about honoring the Confederacy, you’ll hear a lot about heritage. I’ve heard it all my life. I heard it when our state flag featured the Confederate symbol throughout my childhood and in the debates to remove it. I read about it when I decided to make it one of my debate topics for a summer college class in my last year of high school. But what you’ll seldom hear is when this heritage has been selectively commemorated. Stone Mountain’s Confederate monument opened on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination.This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the worldThis, too, is the culture of Parler.“Time to get rid of the yoke calling itself democrats,” someone wrote in response to Wayne Root’s revolution post.“Every town needs to decide on a gather place where an armed citizenry takes over everything … every traitor must be executed,” wrote another.It’s not enough to dismiss the radical right as merely having a difference of opinion, or explain it away as a population of marginalized, working-class white men who can be brought back from the brink by reason and calls for a universal basic income.Universal prescriptions are necessary, but insufficient. This is an American tradition of terror – a culture of dehumanizing Blackness that bleeds out into the world. It is the shots I heard while reporting in Kenosha, blocks from where Kyle Rittenhouse killed two white Black Lives Matter protesters, as it happened. It was the ease of white vigilantes carrying weapons in another public square, Civic Center Park in downtown Kenosha, hours earlier. It is the audacity of those white vigilantes shouting down Philando Castile’s girlfriend, from whom I was mere feet away in the park, as they argued for their right to kill to protect property. Of course, Philando was killed while exercising their revered second amendment right to bear arms, but that right is clearly reserved for some Americans more than others.Parler may be homeless now, but there is an entire world that welcomes the hatred and violence it cultivates. As threatening as it may be, the platform will probably be replaced with something else. It’s the public terror that’s the point. More

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      in US Politics

      Capitol riot prompts top US firms to pull funding for leading Republicans

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      [embedded content]
      Republicans who voted to block Joe Biden’s confirmation as president have been deserted by some of the biggest corporations in the US, as some leading rightwing politicians begin to face potential consequences for the Capitol riot on Wednesday.
      A slew of companies, including Citigroup, one of the biggest banks in the US, and the Marriott hotel chain, said they would halt donations to Republicans who voted against certifying the results of the presidential election.
      The desertion comes after riots at the Capitol on Wednesday. Despite mobs storming the building, egged on by Donald Trump’s spurious claims of voter fraud, 147 Republicans voted to reject Joe Biden’s electoral victory later that same day. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley were among those to dissent, along with scores of House representatives.
      “At the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, we continuously evaluate our political contributions to ensure that those we support share our values and goals,” said Kim Keck, president and CEO of BlueCross BlueShield, a sprawling healthcare company.
      “In light of this week’s violent, shocking assault on the United States Capitol, and the votes of some members of Congress to subvert the results of November’s election by challenging Electoral College results, BCBSA will suspend contributions to those lawmakers who voted to undermine our democracy.”
      The companies’ donations amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and could have a lasting impact on future elections. The political committee arm of Blue Cross Blue Shield, Bluepac, alone donated $246,750 to Republican officials during the 2020 elections, according to Opensecrets.org.
      In a memo to staff, Citigroup said it had donated $1,000 to Hawley’s campaign – citing a “significant employee presence” in the senator’s state of Missouri, the Wall Street Journal reported. Hawley, with Cruz, has become one of the highest-profile objectors to the certification of Biden’s win, and has perpetuated hoaxes about voter fraud. There are growing calls for both men to resign.
      ‘We want you to be assured that we will not support candidates who do not respect the rule of law,’ wrote Candi Wolff, head of Citi’s global government affairs.
      ‘We intend to pause our contributions during the quarter as the country goes through the presidential transition and hopefully emerges from these events stronger and more united.’
      The Marriott hotel chain said it would also suspend donations from its political action campaign to lawmakers who opposed the presidential election results. Marriott gave $1,000 to Hawley’s election campaign and $1,000 to his leadership committee, Mother Jones reported.
      “We have taken the destructive events at the Capitol to undermine a legitimate and fair election into consideration and will be pausing political giving from our Political Action Committee to those who voted against certification of the election,” the company said in a statement.
      Boston Scientific, a medical device company, and the parent company of Commerce Bank also said they would not donate to the Republicans who attempted to overturn the election result. “At this time, we have suspended all support for officials who have impeded the peaceful transfer of power,” a spokesperson for Commerce Bancshares told the Popular Information newsletter.
      CVS, Exxon Mobil, FedEx and Target all said they were reviewing future political donations, according to multiple reports, as were Bank of America, Ford and AT&T.
      In a further blow to Donald Trump and the Republican party, the digital payment company Stripe said it would stop processing payments for Trump’s campaign website, company sources told the Wall Street Journal.
      Trump has raised more than $200m since the election, as his team has appealed for donations based on Trump’s false claims of election fraud. More

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      in US Politics

      Josh Hawley fanned the flames for diehard Trump voters. Will his gambit pay off?

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      Josh Hawley, a 41-year-old US senator from Missouri, has spent the last four years positioning himself as one of the political heirs to Donald Trump – a more polished successor who can unite rightwing nationalism with populist economic policies. He is widely expected to run for president in 2024.Hawley was the first Republican senator – soon joined by Ted Cruz – to announce that he would challenge the certification of the election results in Congress last Wednesday. Democrats, as well as several of Hawley’s Republican colleagues in the Senate, lambasted Hawley’s decision as irresponsible, inflammatory and politically cynical.There is no credible evidence of fraud in the presidential election, which Hawley, a Yale-trained lawyer, presumably knows. He pressed on, however, defending his vote against certification as a symbolic gesture and noting that Democrats made similar challenges after Republican presidential wins in 2000, 2004, and 2016. On his way to the US Capitol on the day of the certification vote, he raised a fist in salute to pro-Trump protesters gathered nearby. He looked “like a doofus,” a Republican strategist complained to NBC.Unlike Donald Trump, Hawley did not directly encourage the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol last Wednesday. But his move to muddy the legitimacy of the election undoubtedly fanned the flames. Now, with five people dead, human excrement smeared on the walls of a building many Americans regard as close to sacred, and widespread calls for Trump to resign or face impeachment, Hawley may have succeeded in casting himself as a mini-Trump – and is facing an accordingly fiercebacklash.Although he condemned the violence at the Capitol, Hawley has doubled down on his decision to challenge the election. “I will never apologize for giving voice to the millions of Missourians and Americans who have concerns about the integrity of our elections,” he said in a public statement after the riot. “That’s my job, and I will keep doing it.”As blowback builds, the question is whether Hawley – now an overnight pariah in Washington – will suffer politically for his wild gamble to pander to a minority of Americans who are diehard Trump supporters, and include Qanon conspiracy theorists. His decision to cast his lot with would-be insurrectionists, if only indirectly, may have been a bridge too far for many Americans.Hawley’s mentor, the Republican former senator John Danforth, recently told the St Louis Post-Dispatch: “Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” Simon & Schuster has cancelled publication of a forthcoming book by Hawley. Several Democratic members of Congress have called for Hawley and Cruz to resign, as has his home state newspaper, the Kansas City Star.Over the past several years, Hawley’s political star had risen unsettlingly fast. In his arch-conservative intellectual credentials, willingness to cast aside Reaganite economic orthodoxies for more populist messaging, and all-around chutzpah, Hawley has sometimes been characterized as a more clever Trump – and, perhaps, for that reason, more dangerous. What if “Republicans come back in 2024 with a smarter, slicker, savvier version of Trump?” Mehdi Hasan speculated in The Intercept last year. “[D]on’t be fooled, progressives. Josh Hawley is not your friend.”Unlike Trump, an erratic and loud-mouthed reality TV star and real estate mogul with no previous political experience, Hawley has an impeccable conservative CV. He studied at Stanford and at Yale law school, clerked for US chief justice John Roberts, and at one point taught at St Paul’s School, an all-male London private school known for educating the British elite. In 2016, he was elected Missouri attorney general. After only two years in the post, he was elected to the US Senate in 2018, by defeating Claire McCaskill, a centrist Democrat whom Hawley painted as an out-of-touch liberal.Hawley, currently the youngest member of the Senate, is known for his modishly slim-cut suits and his general eagerness for media coverage. “[I]n a town full of thirsty people, Josh Hawley is a man crawling across the Kalahari,” Charles Pierce, a political columnist for Esquire, wrote last year. “The most dangerous place to stand in Washington DC is any place between Senator Josh Hawley and a live microphone.”Hawley is a conservative evangelical Christian who is ardently anti-abortion and known for railing against the “cosmopolitan elite”. Unusually for a Republican politician, however, he has also called to investigate and possibly break up major Silicon Valley tech companies and criticized corporations such as Walmart for underpaying their employees.In December, he formed an unexpected alliance with congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the socialist senator Bernie Sanders in an unsuccessful attempt to secure higher Covid relief checks. Hawley called the $600 checks which Congress ultimately issued insulting to struggling people.The senator’s favorite pet issue, however, is the evils of big tech. He has pushed for the government to investigate Facebook and Google for antitrust and consumer violations and has described social media as addictive and “a parasite” on society. In 2019, he introduced a bill in Congress that would automatically limit time on social media platforms to 30 minutes a day unless individual users opt out of the requirement. The unsuccessful bill also sought to ban functions such as “infinite scrolling” and autoplay.The libertarian wing of the conservative movement is, unsurprisingly, leery about Hawley and his enthusiasm for using the levers of the state to enforce morality. The libertarian magazine Reason has called Hawley “a first-rate demagogue” and “the ultimate Karen”.The extent to which Hawley is actually an economic populist, let alone economically leftwing, is questionable. He opposed raising the minimum wage in Missouri and has endorsed anti-union legislation. But he has a finger in the wind, and is keenly attuned to the fact that the Republican party, historically the party of the more educated and affluent, is increasingly becoming the party of the working class.Hawley appears to be placing his bets on a political realignment, one in which Trump was the beginning, not the culmination, of a political phenomenon. The Missouri senator has worked overtime to position himself as a voice for socially conservative, working-class Americans.The notion that Hawley – Ivy League-educated, the son of a banker – is a man of the people may be difficult to swallow. Then again, Trump, a billionaire, successfully ran for president by presenting himself as an outsider attacking an establishment elite.The question now is whether Hawley’s eagerness to court diehard Trump voters has helped his 2024 ambitions, or hindered them. His actions may be popular with part of his Republican base in Missouri, a state which Trump won by a more than 15% margin.It seems less likely, however, that the American public as a whole will be sympathetic. Hawley did “something that was really dumbass,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, complained on NPR. “This was a stunt. It was a terrible, terrible idea.” More

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      in US Politics

      Why the Democrats should not impeach Donald Trump | Simon Jenkins

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      There is a good reason for America’s Congress to humiliate Donald Trump this week, just days from his end of term. His incitement of violence against the Capitol merits his instant removal, as it does the alternative of impeachment. It would be a signal to the world that America is ashamed of this man and sees him as a mistake, a blip, a passing nightmare. The world should sigh with relief.Beyond that, all reasons for removing Trump are bad ones. They would deflect attention from Joe Biden’s victory and transition into office. And they would run a bigger risk.The single most significant feature of last November’s election was that Trump won 11 million more popular votes than he did in 2016, a rise from roughly 63 million to 74 million. He might be rich, crude, immoral and incompetent, but he became more popular in office with his base, not less. According to exit polls, support for Trump also increased among black and Latino voters.Analysts can debate these figures all night, but they are facts. Biden clearly owed his victory to a rise in support from college-educated and wealthier Democrats. Last week, Trump may have tested populism to destruction, but it remains to be seen if he destroyed the bedrock of his support.Trump’s 2016 desire to “drain the swamp” – of federal power, overseas alliances and political insiders – was undimmed after four years in office. At the end, as at the beginning, he loathed the old guard in Congress and abhorred the normal channels of communication with voters. In last year’s election, Trump portrayed his cause as incomplete and essential, and persuaded almost half of America that its ruling class was still out to balk him. An extra 11 million Americans voted to give him another try.Trump’s enemies may have hoped that his actions last week killed him politically. In which case, leave him dead. To pursue him now looks like a vendetta; not just against him, but against his cause and supporters. It is one thing to hate Trump but another to hate those who voted for him, and who in their hearts may yet admire Trump’s extremism and eccentricity and see him as their spokesman. Many are non-college-educated Americans who feel failed by those in power, those who Hillary Clinton in 2016 called a “basket of deplorables”.The outgoing president’s reputation among these people will only grow with each cry of glee from his enemies. Even if he vanishes into exile, his supporters will seek another saviour, another maverick from the rambling confederacy that is modern American democracy. That is why liberals everywhere should be careful how they react to Trump’s going. Losers should know how to lose well, but victors should know how to win wisely. So ignore Trump, and just count the minutes until he goes. More

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      in US Politics

      Republican civil war: what's the party’s future after the US Capitol attack?

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      The motives that drove a pro-Donald Trump mob to attack Congress last Wednesday ranged from hazy to proudly hateful. But the actions of certain ambitious Republican officeholders in the days leading up to the tragedy were not clouded by confusion.Trump may have lost the election, but his movement was on the march, and for politicians hoping someday to succeed Trump as president, that meant an opportunity was afoot.With Trump now finally accepting he will leave office, the future leadership of his movement is increasingly up for grabs, with a ragtag band of senators, congressman, Trump family members – and Trump himself – already jostling for the position.Whether anyone apart from the president is able to successfully ride the tiger of racism, nihilism and grievance politics that carried Trump to near-re-election after four years of American chaos and hundreds of thousands of preventable pandemic deaths is an open question.It also might be an irrelevant question, if Trump decides to stage a 2023-24 stadium tour doubling as a new presidential campaign.“Absent disqualification, the 2024 GOP presidential nomination remains his if he wants it,” tweeted Dave Wasserman, Congress editor of the Cook Political Report.But with Trump gone, for the moment, after years of rock-like reign over the Republican party, powerful currents of political ambition and realignment have swirled into the vacuum.Longtime Trump loyalists, chief among them the vice-president, Mike Pence, have suddenly broken with the president over his fight to reverse the election result. Mick Mulvaney, the former chief of staff and special envoy to Northern Ireland whose loyalty helped Trump escape conviction in the impeachment scandal, resigned over the Capitol riot debacle, saying: “I can’t do it. I can’t stay.”Two firebrand conservative senators, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, went the other direction, taking up Trump’s cause – only to see their campaign result almost immediately in the death of a police officer and four others, and the vandalization of the US Capitol.A third young senator with designs on the presidency, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, blasted his plotting colleagues “who, for political advantage, were giving false hope to their supporters”, he said. The Republican old guard, meanwhile, in the guise of Mitt Romney, who has actually run for president – twice – accused his colleagues of being “complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy”.Even the former Republican House speaker John Boehner, who since his 2015 retirement has mostly limited his commentary on politics to tweeted pictures of himself mowing his lawn, said the Grand Old party (GOP) was in trouble.“I once said the party of Lincoln and Reagan is off taking a nap,” Boehner wrote on Thursday. “The nap has become a nightmare for our nation. The GOP must awaken.”For certain Republicans, the violent and deadly near-sacking of the Capitol on Wednesday by white supremacists and other Trump sympathizers seemed to be only the second most disturbing event of the week.The night before, Republicans had lost two runoff US senate elections in Georgia, a state that until 2020 had not voted for a Democrat for president for 30 years. The two Georgia losses meant that Republicans lost control of the Senate – and leader Mitch McConnell lost his majority.“Emotions [are] running high among McConnell-aligned Republicans,” National Journal columnist Josh Kraushaar reported, “after [the] reality of what transpired in Georgia settled in. May be the heat of the moment, but mood is for declaring war on Team Trump.”A former McConnell chief of staff and campaign manager, Josh Holmes, was quick to knock down the idea.“A lot of emotions. People are angry,” Holmes replied on Twitter to Kraushaar. “Nobody is declaring war on anything. We’ll get through this.”But even the people with money, whose interests McConnell has expertly defended, grew agitated at the mess Trump had made.“This is sedition and should be treated as such,” Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, an influential business trade group, said. “The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power, and any elected leader defending him is violating their oath to the constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy.” The chiefs of multiple Wall Street banks echoed the sentiment.That is not even to mention the cavalcade of Republicans who had long since broken with Trump, who piled on the president after the Capitol was sacked. The conservative columnist George Will said: “The three repulsive architects of Wednesday’s heartbreaking spectacle” – Trump, Hawley and Cruz – “will each wear the scarlet ‘S’ of sedition.” The conservative National Journal declared: “Trump must pay.” Matt Drudge’s web ite ran the sarcastic banner “Thanks, Donald”. The National Review hailed “Trump’s final insult”. A second former Trump chief of staff, John Kelly, joined those calling for his immediate removal from office.The Republican cross-currents do not mean that the party will not find direction in time to win back the Senate, plus the House, in 2022 – or to win the presidency in 2024, whether with Trump’s name on the ticket or tattooed on the nominee’s forehead.But Trump’s role in the party, and the politics, has never been to introduce order, except when that means that everybody falls behind him. For now, everybody is doing the opposite: falling out. More

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      in US Politics

      Pelosi says House will proceed with efforts to remove Trump 'with urgency'

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      The House is prepared to launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump as early as this week if Vice President Mike Pence and the cabinet refuse to remove him from office for his role in inciting a mob that carried out a deadly assault on the seat of American government.
      The House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, delivered the ultimatum in a letter to colleagues on Sunday night that described the president as an urgent threat to the nation.
      On Monday, the House will move forward with a non-binding resolution that calls on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, and strip Trump of his presidential authority. If the measure fails to receive unanimous support, as is expected, the House will vote on the resolution on Tuesday. Pence, Pelosi said, would have “24 hours” to respond.
      Next, Pelosi said the House “will proceed with bringing impeachment legislation to the floor.” Though she did not specify an exact timeline, top Democrats have suggested the House could begin proceedings as soon as midweek, with a Senate trial delayed – possibly for months – so as not distract from Joe Biden’s agenda.
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      Will Trump be impeached for a second time? Yes. Congressman Ted Lieu has said most Democrats in the House have signed on to articles of impeachment accusing the president of having “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions” that are due to be introduced on Monday. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on board.
      Is Trump heading to the Senate for trial? It seems so. A House majority will send the articles to the upper chamber, and it is hard to see any Democrats deserting their party. Some Republicans have also said the president needs to go.
      Can the Senate try Trump so close to Joe Biden’s inauguration? Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has indicated that it can, although the narrow timeframe means the earliest a trial could be held would be after inauguration day, 20 January, when Trump will be out of power. The wait may be longer, however: on 10 January, House whip James Clyburn, who is close to Biden, indicated that Democrats may not send articles to the Senate until it has confirmed the new president’s cabinet nominees – a vital process.
      Will he be convicted? Unlikely. Conviction in the Senate requires a two-thirds majority. The chamber is split 50-50, and though some Republicans have either said Trump should go or indicated sympathy for impeachment, nowhere near enough seem likely to cross their own supporters by voting against the president to whom the party remains overwhelmingly loyal.
      So what happens if he gets off again? Barring a presidential pardon – which Trump may try to give to himself, a move most scholars doubt will work – once out of the White House Trump will be vulnerable to federal prosecution over acts in office. State investigations, including those under way in New York, can proceed and business creditors will circle.  Martin Pengelly

      Photograph: Brian Snyder/X90051

      “In protecting our Constitution and our Democracy, we will act with urgency, because this President represents an imminent threat to both,” she wrote. “As the days go by, the horror of the ongoing assault on our democracy perpetrated by this President is intensified and so is the immediate need for action.”
      Pelosi noted urgency was required because Trump was due to leave office on 20 January.
      She explained that the resolution called on Pence “to convene and mobilize the cabinet to activate the 25th amendment to declare the president incapable of executing the duties of his office.”

      Jake Sherman
      (@JakeSherman)
      🚨NEW … ⁦@LeaderHoyer⁩ is asking for consent for the 25th amendment bill tomorrow. And then the House will move to impeach trumpHere’s ⁦@SpeakerPelosi⁩ letter to her Dem colleagues. pic.twitter.com/CubXVVvgli

      January 10, 2021

      Under the procedure, the vice president “would immediately exercise powers as acting president,” she wrote.
      On Sunday, Pelosi told 60 Minutes Trump was “a deranged, unhinged, dangerous president of the United States,” adding that he has done something “so serious that there should be prosecution against him”.
      Pence is not expected to take the lead in forcing Trump out, although talk has been circulating about the 25th amendment option for days in Washington.
      Earlier it had been speculated that House Democrats could try to introduce articles of impeachment as early as Monday.
      One touted strategy was to condemn the president’s actions swiftly but delay an impeachment trial in the Senate for 100 days. That would allow President-elect Biden to focus on other priorities as soon as he is inaugurated 20 January.
      Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking House Democrat and a top Biden ally, laid out the ideas on Sunday as the country came to grips with the siege at the Capitol by Trump loyalists trying to overturn the election results.
      “Let’s give President-elect Biden the 100 days he needs to get his agenda off and running,” Clyburn said.
      The push by House Democrats came after the office of the Colorado Democratic representative Jason Crow released a readout of a call in which army secretary Ryan McCarthy “indicated that [the Department of Defense] is aware of further possible threats posed by would-be terrorists in the days up to and including Inauguration Day”.
      According to the readout, McCarthy said the Pentagon was “working with local and federal law enforcement to coordinate security preparations” for 20 January.
      Crow, a former US army ranger, said he had “raised grave concerns about reports that active duty and reserve military members were involved in the insurrection” and asked that “troops deployed for the inauguration … are not sympathetic to domestic terrorists”. The readout said McCarthy agreed and said he was willing to testify publicly in the coming days.
      On Sunday Republican senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania joined colleague Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in calling for Trump to “resign and go away as soon as possible.”
      “I think the president has disqualified himself from ever, certainly, serving in office again,” Toomey said. “I don’t think he is electable in any way.”
      Murkowski, who has long voiced her exasperation with Trump’s conduct in office, told the Anchorage Daily News on Friday that Trump simply “needs to get out.” A third Republican, Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, did not go that far, but on Sunday he warned Trump to be “very careful” in his final days in office.
      Corporate America began to tie its reaction to the Capitol riots by tying them to campaign contributions.
      Citigroup said it would be pausing all federal political donations for the first three months of the year. Citi’s head of global government affairs, Candi Wolff, said in a Friday memo to employees, “We want you to be assured that we will not support candidates who do not respect the rule of law.”
      House leaders, furious after the insurrection, appeared determined to act against Trump despite the short timeline.
      Another idea being considered was to have a separate vote that would prevent Trump from ever holding office again. That could potentially only need a simple majority vote of 51 senators, unlike impeachment, in which two-thirds of the 100-member Senate must support a conviction.
      The Senate was set to be split evenly at 50-50, but under Democratic control once Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and the two Democrats who won Georgia’s Senate runoff elections last week are sworn in. Harris would be the Senate’s tie-breaking vote.
      The FBI and other agencies are continuing their examination of the circumstances of the insurrection, including allegations that Pentagon officials loyal to Trump blocked the deployment of national guard troops for three hours after officials called for help.
      “We couldn’t actually cross over the border into DC without the OK and that was quite some time [coming],” the Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, told CNN.
      “Eventually I got a call from the secretary of the army, asking if we could come into the city, but we had already been mobilising, we already had our police, we already had our guard mobilised, and we were just waiting for that call. More

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      Republican congresswoman Mary Miller quotes Hitler during rally – video

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      US Congresswoman Mary Miller of Illinois tells a crowd outside the US Capitol: Hitler was right on one thing – “Whoever has the youth has the future.” Our children are being propagandised.’ Miller has since apologised for quoting the Nazi leader at the right-wing rally, issuing a statement on Twitter saying: ‘I sincerely apologize for any harm my words caused and regret using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history’
      Illinois Republican Mary Miller sorry for quoting Hitler in Capitol speech
      Capitol attack: two men believed to have brought zip-tie handcuffs arrested More