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      Trump January 6 case: five key points in the latest filing against former president

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      In a court filing unsealed on Wednesday, federal prosecutors argue that Donald Trump is not immune from prosecution over the January 6 riots because he acted in a private capacity, and took advice from private advisers.The indictment seeks to make this case – that Trump acted in his private capacity, rather than his official one – because of a US supreme court ruling in July that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions taken as president.It also reveals further details about Trump’s alleged mood and actions (or lack of action) on the day, building on evidence that was provided in earlier briefs.In response to the new filing, the Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the brief “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional”. On Truth Social, Trump, writing in all-caps, called it “complete and total election interference.”Here are some key points made in the filing:‘Fundamentally a private’ schemeThe new court filing, in which Trump is referred to as “the defendant”, alleges that Trump’s plan that day was “fundamentally a private one”, and therefore not related to his duties as president but instead as a candidate for office.It reads: “The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.“He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”The filing looks back to election day for Trump’s use of private advisers: “As election day turned to November 4, the contest was too close to project a winner, and in discussions about what the defendant should say publicly regarding the election, senior advisors suggested that the defendant should show restraint while counting continued. Two private advisors, however, advocated a different course: [name redacted] and [name redacted] suggested that the defendant just declare victory. And at about 2.20am, the defendant gave televised remarks to a crowd of his campaign supporters in which he falsely claimed, without evidence or specificity, that there had been fraud in the election and that he had won.”On 4 January, the filing says, a White House counsel was excluded from a meeting during which Trump sought to pressure Pence to help overturn the election result. Only a private attorney was present, the filing says: “It is hard to imagine stronger evidence” than this that Trump’s conduct was private.A presidential candidate alone in a dining room with Twitter and Fox NewsTrump’s day on 6 January started at 1am, with a tweet pressuring Pence to obstruct the certification of the results. Seven hours later, at 8.17am, Trump tweeted about it again. Shortly before his speech at the Ellipse, Trump called Pence and again pressured him to “induce him to act unlawfully in the upcoming session”, where Pence would be certifying the election results. Pence refused.At this point, according to the filing, Trump “decided to re-insert into his campaign speech at the Ellipse remarks targeting Pence for his refusal to misuse his role in the certification”.Trump gave his speech, and at 1pm, the certification process began at the Capitol.Trump, meanwhile, “settled in the dining room off of the Oval Office. He spent the afternoon there reviewing Twitter on his phone, while the dining room television played Fox News’ contemporaneous coverage of events at the Capitol.”It was from the dining room that Trump watched a crowd of his supporters march towards the Capitol. He had been there less than an hour when, at “approximately 2.24pm, Fox News reported that a police officer may have been injured and that ‘protestors … have made their way inside the Capitol.’“At 2.24pm, Trump tweeted, writing, ‘Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!’”The filing reads: “The content of the 2.24pm tweet was not a message sent to address a matter of public concern and ease unrest; it was the message of an angry candidate upon the realization that he would lose power.”A minute later, the Secret Service evacuated Pence to a secure location.Trump, when told Pence had been evacuated, said: ‘So what?’The filing states that Trump said: “So what?” after being told that Pence had subsequently been taken to a secure location.The indictment notes that the government does not intend to use the exchange at trial. It argues, however, that the tweet itself was “unofficial”.The filing states that Pence “tried to encourage” Trump “as a friend” when news networks forecast a Biden win on 7 November. This again goes to the assertion that Trump acted in a private capacity.Pence allegedly told Trump: “You took a dying political party and gave it a new lease on life”.‘Fight like hell’ regardless The filing states Trump was overheard telling family members, amid his efforts to overturn the election results: “It doesn’t matter if you lose … you have to fight like hell.”“At one point long after the defendant had begun spreading false fraud claims, [name redacted] a White House staffer traveling with the defendant, overheard him tell family members: ‘It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.’”Trump knew his claims were falseThe filing states: “The evidence demonstrates that the defendant knew his fraud claims were false because he continued to make those claims even after his close advisors – acting not in an official capacity but in a private or campaign-related capacity – told them they were not true.”Among these advisers was a person referred to as P9, a White House staffer who had been one of several attorneys who represented Trump in his first impeachment trial in the Senate in 2019 and 2020, according to the filing.In one private conversation, “when P9 reiterated to the defendant that [name redacted] would be unable to prove his false fraud allegations in court, the defendant responded, ‘The details don’t matter.’”P9 at one point after the election told Trump “that the campaign was looking into his fraud claims, and had even hired external experts to do so, but could find no support for them.
      He told the defendant that if the Campaign took these claims to court, they would get slaughtered, because the claims are all ‘bullshit’.” More

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      Pelosi criticises McConnell for failing to hold Trump accountable over January 6

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      Nancy Pelosi has criticised Mitch McConnell, the outgoing Senate minority leader, for failing to hold Donald Trump accountable for inspiring the violent January 6 mob to attack the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives whose office was vandalised in the attack, also told Semafor she felt sorry for McConnell, who has endorsed Trump’s current campaign for the White House despite being repeatedly insulted by the former president.McConnell “knew what had happened on January 6”, Pelosi said.“He said the president was responsible and then did not hold him accountable.”She added that she and other congressional leaders unsuccessfully begged Trump to send in the national guard while the mob besieged the building.In the days after the riot – which resulted in five deaths at the time, with four police officers killing themselves in the following seven months – McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events”.However, he voted to acquit Trump in a Senate trial after the House had impeached Trump for a second time. A Senate conviction, which needs a two-thirds majority to pass, could have barred Trump from holding elective office again. In the event, 57 senators – including just seven Republicans – voted to convict, 10 short of the numbers needed.McConnell’s vote contradicted his belief that Trump was guilty, according to the book This Will Not Pass, by the New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” the book quotes McConnell as saying, adding that he also said holding Trump to account should be left to the Democrats. “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” the book says he told two associates.Explaining the contradiction, McConnell apparently told a friend: “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference.”In 2022, McConnell criticised the Republican National Committee for censuring Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, GOP House members at the time, over their role in a Democrat-led congressional investigation into January 6. Kinzinger and Cheney have since left Congress and are among several prominent Republicans who have endorsed Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy.“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” McConnell said in response to the censure.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked if she had any advice for McConnell – who will step down as the GOP leader in November but will remain in the Senate – Pelosi said: “I feel sorry for Mitch McConnell.”Pelosi has not always been so scathing. She issued a generous tribute when McConnell announced his decision to step down from the Senate leadership, saying: “Mitch McConnell is to be recognized for his patriotism and decades of service to Kentucky, to the Congress and to our country. He and I have worked together since we were appropriators … While we often disagreed, we shared our responsibility to the American people to find common ground whenever possible.”Trump has frequently targeted McConnell for abuse and has aimed racial slurs at his wife, Elaine Chao, who served as transportation secretary in his administration.The former president has variously described McConnell as a “broken-down crow”, a “stone-cold loser” and a “dumb son of a bitch”. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘His ego will not accept defeat’: the story behind Trump’s attempt to steal an election

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      By now, 6 January 2021 has so thoroughly saturated the American political consciousness – a single date conjuring up images of the once unthinkable, mentioned every day in news about criminal court cases, the future of democracy and Donald Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign – that you could argue we are used to it. Election denialism has become a feature, not a bug, of a major political party for nearly four years. The fact that Trump, when given the opportunity by ABC moderators to distance himself from efforts to discredit the 2020 election during this month’s presidential debate, still refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimate victory is no longer surprising, though we are also inured to shock.But a new HBO documentary argues, through forensic chronological detail and, perhaps ironically, the testimony of Republican election officials and former members of Trump’s administration, for remembering just how beyond the pale attempts to subvert the 2020 election were. As recounted in Stopping the Steal, a new film from the Leaving Neverland director, Dan Reed, the period between election night 2020 and 6 January 2021 was a series of genuinely shocking, potentially devastating opportunities for democratic disaster that often came down to clashes between obscure, local Republican officials and the president of the United States. January 6, in fact, “isn’t the scary bit”, Reed said. “The really scary bit is all the machinations that happened before. Because had they succeeded, the knock-on effect would have been to just gum up the system.“Step by step, you can see that enough uncertainty was being injected into the system, and enough small gains were being made, to result in potentially a cataclysmic outcome.”Though Trump may deny any responsibility for January 6, his efforts to undermine the American electoral process and discredit the result in 2020 began the night of the election, before any network had even called it for Biden. At 2.30am, after news networks projected a Biden win in the crucial swing state of Arizona, Trump held an impromptu press conference in which he falsely claimed: “Frankly, we did win this election.” What happened next is a matter of real-time journalistic record, playing out over several weeks and relived in Stopping the Steal by the people who were there: administration pressure on election officials in Arizona and Georgia to support evidence-free claims of fraud or, in one infamous Trump phone call, to find him “11,780 votes”; activation of misinformation channels and true believers, who latched on to claims of fraud, harassed election officials and showed up outside county offices armed with AR-15s; a media campaign by Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and others bringing fringe legal “theories” into the mainstream; and finally the legitimization of crackpot legal theories to hijack the arcane electoral college, culminating in Trump’s January 6 rally.Stopping the Steal synthesizes these many episodes, through the perspectives of the officials – the then attorney general, Bill Barr; the Maricopa county supervisor, Clint Hickman; the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger; the Georgia election operations manager, Gabriel Sterling – who worked to prevent the steal by simply doing their jobs. The framing offers “a story told by people who love Trump, but who love democracy more, who love the institution more”, said Reed – mostly, Republicans who “held the line and who came under extraordinary pressure”.By their own admission in Stopping the Steal, these officials would have entertained evidence of voter fraud, even celebrated it, had there been any. “I had every motivation,” says Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s former speaker of the house, in the film. But there wasn’t – and Trump knew it. “He knows he lost,” says Stephanie Grisham, a Trump campaign and White House official for six years. “But he’s a narcissist and his ego will not accept defeat. And when you have people who will so willingly come around you and tell you you didn’t lose and the things you want to hear … that enables him to double down and triple down.”So he tripled down, with the help of (seemingly) true believers, some of whom also appear in the film – Jacob Chansley, also known as the QAnon Shaman, and Marko Trickovic, who spread numerous conspiracy theories about votes being stolen or discounted. “The guys on the grassroots level, I think they really believe,” said Reed. “I don’t think they have any doubt that the election was stolen, because they inhabit a universe in which that is a given.”Reed, who also recently performed a similar forensic analysis on January 6 called Four Hours at the Capitol, maintains that including the perspective of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement does not platform its beliefs; if anything, it puts the alternate universe of the “stolen” 2020 election in starker relief to the facts. “Whether you think they’re sincere or insincere, they’re protagonists in this drama,” he said. “It’s always good and fair to hear from them, and give them a chance to express what they have to say in a coherent way.View image in fullscreen“I presume my audience is intelligent,” he added. “I presume that they’re smart enough to know the difference between someone who’s indulging wish fulfillment or embracing a fantasy, and other people who are doing it for more cynical reasons.”Stopping the Steal ends with January 6, and makes no presumptions about what will happen in November if Trump wins or, perhaps just as distressingly, if he refuses to lose again, which some Republicans are already preparing for. “I’m not a political pundit,” said Reed. “I made the film because I want it to be a timeless film, because it marks a turning point in the way that we do elections. Now we have an option of: the Republicans won, the Democrats won, or someone stole it. We never had that option. That narrative didn’t exist before.“The blueprint is there, the playbook is there – why would it be different this time, if Kamala Harris wins?”The day-by-day recounting of how the votes in 2020 were counted, and then protected – in nondescript county buildings, secretary of state offices, board meetings and eventually the US Congress – only underscores that a democracy is only as strong as its most obscure, smallest offices, whose character can make the difference between business as usual and a steal. “The functioning of democracy depends on people who buy into the idea that it should be fair,” said Reed. “If the system isn’t populated with people who embrace the basic idea of it, that it should be fair and everyone gets their fair shot, then the system no longer works.”Stopping the Steal, in revisiting the timeline largely through Republicans’ first-person narratives – it was not Democratic officials that Trump personally called – acts as a “non-partisan” review of the facts, “the look back that we can all share”, said Reed. The election in November will come down to how many people vote, where they vote, and for whom. But it will also be determined by “the remote gearboxes and the little bits of democracy you can’t see”, he said. “And that’s what we need to look out for. That’s what we need to shine a light on this time.”

      Stopping the Steal is now available on Max in the US. In the UK, Trump’s Heist: The President Who Wouldn’t Lose is on Channel 4 on 17 September and 18 September at 9pm. More

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      in US Politics

      American democracy is in peril. And racism will be the sledgehammer that destroys it | Kimberlé W Crenshaw

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      Racism has been the achilles heel of American democracy since its founding as a racialized project, predicated on theft of land, of labor and of the reproductive autonomy of Black women. These are truths that Maga extremists want to erase.But it is not just history that Maga wants to silence and it isn’t just Maga that has acquiesced. Because we have not normalized the important conversation about our racial history and its present consequences, the dangerous nexus between anti-democratic forces in our nation and its racist foundations is among the least talked about dimensions of our slide into fascism.The anti-woke assault on race-conscious history and knowledge and against the hard-fought policies to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is extremely dangerous, not only to people of color, but to stakeholders of racial justice and democracy. Despite the intentional misdirection, the war against woke is not just a war against critical race theory, but it is a war against Black history and the entire infrastructure built out of the civil rights movement. It is a war against our multiracial democracy that too many are unable to name. And because assaults that cannot be seen or named cannot be fought, the consequences are disastrous.The mainstream media contribute to our collective incapacity to wrestle with the forces that continue to bedevil our democracy. In coverage of the January 6 insurrection, the racist and white nationalist underbelly that informs the mantra “we want our country back” is merely a footnote in the story of how we almost lost our democracy. This erasure denies the centrality of the racist narrative that defines who this nation belongs to, who gets to govern and who gets to belong.Exclusive notions of who belongs and who doesn’t are fundamental features of fascist regimes. Yet in the drama unfolding in the United States, the racial narratives that continue to target racial others to receive the wrath of disgruntled masses escape the grasp of those who now decry the collapse of our democracy. The media’s widespread reluctance to confront the racist underbelly of the “big lie” obscures the impossibility of saving our democracy without addressing racial denialism.Where did Trump target his venomous big lie? It was Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Phoenix. Who were the voters there who “illegitimately” denied him the White House? Black and brown voters. Who were the poll workers who supposedly did this dirty work? African American women like Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman. The failure to confront the racial contours of the myth of a stolen election has facilitated a dangerous and misleading wormhole to the past. It was no accident that among the most chilling symbols that marched through the Capitol that day – for the first time ever – was the Confederate flag.Congressman Jamie Raskin was one of a very few observers alarmed by this reflection of Maga’s “common cause with extremist groups steeped in racism and hellbent on insurrection”. And yet, the insight gained from a fully realized encounter with our past languishes in the margins of our national discourse. As the great poet Langston Hughes wrote, “we are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism. We Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know.” It is an enduring awareness that is being written out of our usable history.Toni Morrison, writing across the decades, explained how the creation of a pariah class was one of the first steps of fascist regimes. As she noted, such regimes “isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse”.So it is not merely ironic that Morrison, one of the most celebrated American authors of the 20th century, has become one of the most banned writers in this country. It is evidence. The fact that Morrison was so prophetic in telling us what this crisis means is all the more reason that our response to so-called “anti-woke” censorship should be reflexive. If the Maga faction wants to silence and suppress our voices, we must go to the mat to sustain them all the more. What is at stake is more than a book, a theory, a practice or a value. What is at stake is our democracy itself. We cannot save it without fortifying the tools, histories and ideas that are the legacies of the long fights against racial injustice.Derrick Bell once wrote something that may, unexpectedly, open a pathway to recover the lost momentum that was quashed by the fierce reaction to the post-George Floyd reckoning. The backlash against the demands for racial justice that erupted in all 50 states has metastasized into the anti-woke juggernaut against anti-racism, critical race theory, 1619 and now DEI. For too long, too many of our allies and stakeholders sat it out, thinking that the stakes were not that high, that we could simply pivot and not use certain words, effectively dodging the backlash by saying “we don’t do that here”.Now that this assault came for something that most Americans really do care about – their country – the potential for interest convergence is ripe. Our country cannot be saved without the input of “the other”, without our history, and without the knowledge about this country that we have long brought to the table. We cannot pivot our way out of this crisis. Our only choice is to fight – to fight for our freedom to speak our history, to name our reality, to learn our condition and to vote to change it.

      Kimberlé W Crenshaw is the Co-founder and Executive Director of African American Policy Forum and Faculty Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS). She is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. She is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the Promise Institute Chair on Human Rights at UCLA Law School More

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      in Elections

      Trump pleads not guilty to revised 2020 election interference charges

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      Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Thursday, via his legal team, to the revised charges in his federal criminal election interference investigation, in the first hearing in the Washington DC case since the US supreme court gave its immunity ruling.The former US president and current Republican nominee for the White House in this November’s election was not present in federal court in the capital.The US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, said she would not set a schedule in the case at this status conference for the prosecution and defense teams, but hopes to do so later on Thursday.The case relates to Trump’s conduct surrounding events after he lost his re-election bid in November 2020 to his Democratic rival Joe Biden, culminating in the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, by thousands of extreme Trump supporters intent on overturning the election result.Chutkan is hearing arguments about the potential next steps in the election subversion prosecution of Trump for the first time since the supreme court narrowed the case by ruling that former presidents are entitled to broad immunity from criminal charges.As the hearing opened, the judge noted that it has been almost a year since she had seen the lawyers in her courtroom. The case has been frozen since last December as Trump pursued his appeal.The defense lawyer John Lauro joked to the judge: “Life was almost meaningless without seeing you.”Chutkan replied: “Enjoy it while it lasts.”A not guilty plea was entered on Trump’s behalf for a revised indictment that the special counsel Jack Smith’s team filed last week to strip out certain allegations and comply with the supreme court’s ruling in July. Prosecutors have said they can be ready at any time to file a legal brief laying out its position on how to apply the justices’ immunity opinion to the case.Defense lawyers are challenging the legitimacy of the case and said they intend to file multiple motions to dismiss the case, including one that piggybacks off a Florida judge’s ruling that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.Neither side envisions a trial happening before the November election. The case is one of two federal prosecutions against Trump, in a host of legal cases. The other, charging him with illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, was dismissed in July by the US district judge Aileen Cannon, who said Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unlawful.Smith’s team has appealed that ruling. Trump’s lawyers say they intend to ask Chutkan to dismiss the election case on the same grounds.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      ‘January 6 was just the warm-up’: the film that tracks three Maga extremists storming the Capitol

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      Homegrown is a documentary about three American patriots who love their country, revere Donald Trump and balk at the result of the 2020 presidential election. Director Michael Premo spent months trailing his subjects – Chris, Thad and Randy – in the run-up to the attack on the Capitol building of 6 January 2021, and his illuminating, gripping film looks back at a dark period of recent US history. Implicitly, though, it also warns of further unrest.“I think January 6th was just the warm-up,” Premo says. “This November, we’re going to see an even more frantic and desperate attempt to attack every level of the electoral system.” He is not optimistic about the US’s current direction of travel. The country, he argues, is effectively on the brink of civil war.Homegrown premieres in the International Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. It is one of a number of campaigning political pictures that could put the event at loggerheads with Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing Italian government. Joining it on the programme is Separated, Errol Morris’s documentary about family separation on the US’s southern border; Dani Rosenberg’s harrowing Gaza-themed drama Of Dogs and Men; and Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth, which is billed as an audiovisual diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Another highlight, says festival boss Alberto Barbera, will be the epic M: Son of the Century, Joe Wright’s eight-part TV biopic charting the life and times of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whose government established the Venice film festival back in 1932. “And I must add,” Barbera told Variety magazine, “the time it describes has some pretty striking similarities with the present day.”View image in fullscreenLinks with the past are certainly clear in Homegrown, which spotlights a right-wing insurrectionist movement that had flourished on the fringes for decades before finding a new energy and focus under the Maga banner of Trump. Premo, a New York-based film-maker, began researching the documentary in 2018, eventually homing in on his three main protesters. One, Chris Quaglin, is a New Jersey electrician who divides his time between preparing a nursery for his soon-to-be-born son and stocking his “man-cave” with firearms in readiness for war. He says: “An AR-15 and enough people is enough to take our country back.”This, Premo argues, remains a distinct possibility. “Most prominent thinkers still dismiss the idea of civil war, because their reference is an event that occurred in 1860 under a very specific set of circumstances. But that’s discounting the way that modern political violence manifests itself, and particularly the way that sectarian violence plays out around the world. If this was happening in another country, say in Africa or Asia, I think American journalists would already be referring to the situation as a cold civil war. That’s how it feels to me.”Homegrown climaxes with powerful, ground-level footage of the January 6 attack. We see Quaglin in the thick of the action, resplendent in his stars-and-stripes Maga jumpsuit. He is swept up in the moment, storming the DC police by the metal barricades. “Almost a victory, I would say,” he brags afterwards, although this moment of near triumph proves short-lived. Quaglin was later found guilty of assaulting police and obstructing Congress and is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence.Premo has spent his career filming direct action protests. January 6 felt different, he says. “This was one of the most well-documented crimes in history. It was planned in public: a collaborative conspiracy involving numerous actors and institutions. Everyone knew it was coming.”View image in fullscreenThe director says he anticipated a massive police presence which would prevent protesters from gaining access to the Capitol. In the event, he was shocked by the lack of security; he says it almost felt deliberate. “I have to imagine that there are many law enforcement people who are part of these same conservative Facebook groups. They’re watching Fox News, watching Alex Jones and all the other pundits bang the drum about storming the Capitol. They had the same information I did and chose to do nothing about it.”What Homegrown highlights, however, is how broad-based and diverse America’s right-wing populist movement has become. Premo, who is black, claims that its main organising principle is not race hatred so much as despair and disillusion, characterised by a widespread loss of faith in American democracy’s ability to safeguard public interests. Significantly, the film chooses to cross-cut Quaglin’s journey with that of his fellow rebel Thad Cisneros, a charismatic Latino activist from Texas. Cisneros explains that he was first radicalised by watching Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. He now dreams of forming an alliance with Black Lives Matter organisers.Cisneros, it transpires, is now also serving time and thus unavailable for comment. But he represents an increasingly fractured and muddied political landscape, one in which the old left-and-right stereotypes no longer apply. “We need to have a more nuanced understanding of the people driving this movement,” Premo says. “We need to know who these people are, what they look like, where they come from. Only then can we understand what we need to do to support the principle of a pluralistic democracy that stands any chance of surviving beyond this current era of us-versus-them politics.” More

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      in Elections

      US Capitol rioter sentenced to 20 years – one of the longest punishments yet

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      A California man with a history of political violence was sentenced on Friday to 20 years in prison for repeatedly attacking police with flagpoles and other makeshift weapons during the US Capitol riot on 6 January 2021.David Nicholas Dempsey’s sentence is among the longest among hundreds of Capitol riot prosecutions. Prosecutors described him as one of the most violent members of the mob of Donald Trump supporters that attacked the Capitol as lawmakers met to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory.Dempsey, who is from Van Nuys, stomped on police officers’ heads. He swung poles at officers defending a tunnel, struck an officer in the head with a metal crutch and attacked police with pepper spray and broken pieces of furniture, prosecutors said.He climbed atop other rioters, using them like “human scaffolding” to reach officers guarding a tunnel entrance. He injured at least two police officers, prosecutors said.“Your conduct on January 6 was exceptionally egregious,” the US district judge Royce Lamberth told Dempsey. “You did not get carried away in the moment.”Dempsey pleaded guilty in January to two counts of assaulting police officers with a dangerous weapon.Only the former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has received a longer sentence in the January 6 attack. Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating a plot to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Biden after the 2020 election.Dempsey called his conduct “reprehensible” and apologized to the police officers whom he assaulted.“You were performing your duties, and I responded with hostility and violence,” he said before learning his sentence.Justice department prosecutors recommended a prison sentence of 21 years and 10 months for Dempsey, a former construction worker and fast food restaurant employee. Dempsey’s violence was so extreme that he attacked a fellow rioter who was trying to disarm him, prosecutors wrote.“David Dempsey is political violence personified,” assistant US attorney Douglas Brasher told the judge.The defense attorney Amy Collins, who sought a sentence of six years and six months, described the government’s sentencing recommendation as “ridiculous”.“It makes him a statistic,” she said. “It doesn’t consider the person he is, how much he has grown.”Dempsey was wearing a tactical vest, a helmet and an American flag gaiter covering his face when he attacked police at a tunnel leading to the lower west terrace doors. He shot pepper spray at the Metropolitan police department detective Phuson Nguyen just as another rioter yanked at the officer’s gas mask.“The searing spray burned Detective Nguyen’s lungs, throat, eyes and face and left him gasping for breath, fearing he might lose consciousness and be overwhelmed by the mob,” prosecutors wrote.Dempsey then struck the Metropolitan police sergeant Jason Mastony in the head with a metal crutch, cracking the shield on his gas mask and cutting his head.“I collapsed and caught myself against the wall as my ears rang. I was able to stand again and hold the line for a few more minutes until another assault by rioters pushed the police line back away from the threshold of the tunnel,” Mastony said in a statement submitted to the court.Dempsey has been jailed since his arrest in August 2021.His criminal record in California includes convictions for burglary, theft and assault. The assault conviction stemmed from an October 2019 gathering near the Santa Monica pier, where Dempsey attacked people peacefully demonstrating against then president Trump, prosecutors said.“The peaceful protest turned violent as Dempsey took a canister of bear spray from his pants and dispersed it at close range against several protesters,” they wrote, noting that Dempsey was sentenced to 200 days of jail time.Dempsey engaged in at least three other acts of “vicious political violence” that didn’t lead to criminal charges “for various reasons”, according to prosecutors. They said Dempsey struck a counter-protester over the head with a skateboard at a June 2019 rally in Los Angeles; used the same skateboard to assault someone at an August 2020 protest in Tujunga, California; and attacked a protester with pepper spray and a metal bat during a August 2020 protest in Beverly Hills, California.More than 1,400 people have been charged with January 6-related federal crimes. More than 900 of them have been convicted and sentenced, with roughly two-thirds receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from a few days to the 22 years that Tarrio received. More

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      Trump once seemed invincible. Then Kamala Harris broke the spell | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “It’ll begin to end when the act gets tired and the audience starts walking out,” Warren Beatty, a perspicacious observer, told me eight years ago, in the early summer of 2016, when Donald Trump had just secured the Republican nomination.At the time, Trump was calling in for hours to enraptured TV talk show hosts jacking up their ratings. It was a cocaine trade. In return he snorted $5bn in free media – more than all the other candidates combined. When Trump launched The Apprentice in 2004, a tightly edited fantasy of the six-time bankrupt as king of the heap, he had long been dismissed as a loser and bore in New York. His charade was popcorn fare for out-of-towners. Who knew that the fake reality show’s ultimate winner, announced years after its cancellation, would be JD Vance?But, in 2016, Trump’s pastiche of fast-talking narcissism, unapologetic insults and brazen lies was eagerly amplified by many of the “leftwing radical media elites” he stuck pins in while the “poorly educated” he claimed to “love” were living the vicarious dream of owning the libs. The shtick was taken as an authentic novelty rather than the rehearsed patter of “John Barron”, his transparent former pseudo-identity as his own huckster. JD Vance, aka Jimmy Bowman, aka James Hamel, isn’t the only one on the Republican ticket with multiple personalities.Trump’s routine was attributed to personal magic that levitated him to become seemingly inevitable. Yet Trump survived time and again, not because he ever won a popularity contest, but through the intercession of others, taken by his true believers to be divine intervention and proof of his higher election. His luck that an odd range of people with motives of their own happened to rescue him from his self-created messes built his mystique, even after he lost.The billionaire grabbing the mic as a stand-up comedian when he came down the escalator was laughing gas for many in the media. But the billionaire part itself was an act, since he wasn’t a billionaire, but scamming loans. “You guys have been supporters, and I really appreciate it,” Trump thanked popular TV hosts for giving him free access on 10 February 2016. “And not necessarily supporters, but at least believers. You said there’s some potential there.” He carried a grievance that he never won an Emmy for his shambolic boss-man routine on The Apprentice. Now, he gloried in the kudos for his performance. He had finally made it, phoning in to talk shows – his art form. His heartfelt racism, misogyny and nativism were mainly excused as the joker’s tradecraft. When the TV talkers called him out, he called them “dumb”, suffering “mental breakdown”, “low IQ”, “crazy”, “psycho”. Yet those taunts were seen as something new and exciting, too. That’s entertainment.Trump had gotten a pass in the city for decades for his fraudulent business practices. “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is,” said his sage mentor Roy Cohn – or the high-minded district attorney and how to grease his favorite philanthropy. But after the spoiled ne’er-do-well squandered nearly a half-billion dollars of his father’s fortune on casinos, yachts and planes, the New York banks cut him off. He waved his Page Six clippings about his sexual prowess, stories he had invented himself, but the bankers weren’t distracted by his flimsy celebrity. No one has accounted since for the flow of foreign funds through Deutsche Bank and other sources. Many in the media remained mesmerized by the song-and-dance.As the shock president, Trump would supposedly be reined in by the fabled adults in the room. His entourage of misfits couldn’t staff a government. He would be contained by the responsible grown-ups, his administration pressed into the mold of a sort of fourth Bush term, with Trump as the headliner to keep the customers chortling, while the serious business was done in the backroom. The theory was the Oval Office as day care center. The Federalist Society-types squeezed every drop they could out of him – the judges and justices – but the others became his chumps. They beguiled themselves with the illusion that he was their frontman. They hadn’t reckoned that he was a career criminal, not a juvenile delinquent. Eventually it would occur to them, but they kept what they thought was secret knowledge to themselves. Publicly admitting it would pull back the curtain on their embarrassment. Over time, he gratified his sadism by humiliating them one after another, his most personal kind of entertainment. You’re fired!Magnetic attraction was attributed to Trump in defiance of his granitic unpopularity and greater repellence. He never won the popular vote. He lost it by 2.5m in 2016 and 7m in 2020. Throughout his entire presidency, he never crossed the threshold of 50% approval in the Gallup Poll. He finished with the historically lowest approval rating for a president since polls were first taken.Trump was headed for defeat in 2016 after his final debate with Hillary Clinton on 19 October; four days later, CNN reported their poll showing she held a 13-point lead over him. Five days later, on 28 October, 10 days before the election, the deus ex machina in the form of FBI director James Comey intervened, in violation of justice department guidelines, to reopen an investigation into Clinton’s emails, to probe whether classified material was on her aide’s husband’s computer, which eight days later, two days before the election, he declared was not there. Two subsequent state department inquiries under the Trump administration would find she never held any classified material on a private email server.Comey’s interference, more than anything else, inspired the myth of Trump’s invincibility. Comey would be one of Trump’s first adult-in-the-room victims when he would not submit the FBI to serve Trump’s direct political orders. Having singularly elevated Trump, his sanctimony could not shield him from his defenestration.In 2020, Trump’s utter incompetence in handling the Covid pandemic cost him re-election. He told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that at its start, “I wanted to always play it down.” When Woodward published Trump’s coldly neglectful remarks, Trump slammed Woodward’s report as “FAKE”. Woodward produced the tapes.Anticipating defeat, Trump called the election “rigged”, organized the scheme to stop the constitutional counting of the electoral college votes on January 6, and incited a violent mob to attack the Capitol. Hang Mike Pence!Supposedly, Trump was done again. The consensus stretching from Mitch McConnell to Joe Biden to Merrick Garland was that he would be left by the wayside at Mar-a-Lago to disappear while regular order returned. McConnell had intervened to save Trump twice from removal after impeachments. Garland did nothing to probe Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection for 18 months. The lapse was critical to Trump’s ability to mount another presidential campaign.No outside force could halt Trump’s trial in New York for his 34 felony counts paying hush money to an adult film star to manipulate the outcome of the 2016 election. But in the case of his theft of national security documents and obstruction of justice, a federal judge he had appointed, Aileen Cannon, threw monkey wrenches into the process to ensure he would not face justice before the election. In the January 6 case, originally scheduled for 4 March, he appealed to the supreme court, whose conservative majority ruled on 1 July to grant him absolute immunity for his “official actions”. In order to protect him and his candidacy, the court fundamentally twisted the constitution to set the president above the law. The founding fathers and originalism went out the window. If their decision had been in effect during Watergate, Nixon would have walked scot-free. Trump had been rescued from facing the music in the nick of time. “Tell me who the judge is.”Biden demanded an early debate to dispel his age issue. He imploded on 27 June. Trump was saved. The immunity decision, coming three days later, seemed the ratification of his invulnerability.Fate intervened yet again. On 13 July, an assassin fitting the profile of a school shooter missed him. Trump arose streaked with blood with an upraised fist. His followers proclaimed his divine salvation. In the rush of triumphalism, he named as his running mate JD Vance, the 39-year-old Ohio senator, lately incarnated as a crusader in the Maga kulturkampf. Finally, on 21 July, Biden recognized his hopelessness and withdrew from the race.Circumstances had conspired to coronate Trump the once and future king, invested with the powers of a “dictator on day one” by the supreme court. But at the height of his hubris his nemesis appeared.The bullet that grazed Trump hit Biden. He had been Trump’s perfect foil, a lifelong politician appearing more fossilized than himself. The jack-in-the-box that jumped out was the 19 years younger, vital and unhesitatingly articulate Kamala Harris, whose very appearance unified the Democratic party that seemed about to burst at its seams. The inevitable and invulnerable Trump sank into his old and embittered persona. His close encounter gave him no pause; he underwent no character development. Vance flopped, his numbers the worst of any vice-presidential candidate since Thomas Eagleton dropped out as George McGovern’s running mate in 1972 after the revelation of his electro-shock therapy. Trump was aggrieved at the reversal of roles and the reversal of fortunes.Worse, Trump had worn out his material. His rally on 22 July, the day after Biden left the race, was a concert of golden oldies. There was his story about whether he should be electrocuted by a battery-supplied boat or eaten by sharks, the Hannibal Lecter joke, the Al Capone self-reference, Nancy Pelosi as “Crazy Nancy”, “low IQ” and still running against “Crooked Joe Biden.”Worse than that, he acknowledged his fear that his material was stale. He was filled with performance anxiety. He opened his monologue with an enigmatic: “Whenever I imitate him…” Suddenly, he brought up Melania. “She looked great the other night. She made that entrance. She made a lot of entrances. She’s just something. But she walked in. But I told her the other night, I said, ‘How good was I? How good?’ This was at a rally a couple of weeks ago. ‘How good was I?’ ‘Well, you were really good, but not great.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, it showed that you didn’t know how to get off the stage.’ Well, I was imitating Biden. So, what they do is they show the imitation of Biden. They said, ‘Trump didn’t know how to get off the stage.’ That’s our fake news.”Trump’s stream of consciousness disclosed his worry over his wife’s censorious judgment. He was needy for her praise. She hedged. Her withholding of unreserved flattery sent him spiraling. She suggested he was becoming Biden, someone having trouble selling his act, but Trump protected himself by casting the blame on the media. His awareness of danger to his image provoked an instinctive recoil. Showing him as Willy Loman was the true phoniness.His campaign grasped to find a thread to pull on Harris to unravel her, the equivalent of Biden’s age or Hillary’s emails. They decided to tar her as some kind of leftwinger, but it was the generic Republican negative campaign with risible additions. “Wants To Limit Red Meat Consumption”, Trump posted. He orders his steak burnt and douses it with ketchup. “More Liberal Than Bernie Sanders.” Yawn.Harris was rising, Trump struggling. His young sidekick hired to be his warm-up act, JD Vance, bombed on delivery. Trump was thrown back on himself. His predicament was reminiscent of the flailing music-hall hoofer played by Laurence Olivier in the grim 1960 film, The Entertainer, desperately trying to float his act, shamelessly manipulating and trampling everybody, but incapable of performing anything but the old numbers before a bored audience.So, Trump reached to the bottom of his repertoire. On 31 July, he calculatingly accepted to be interviewed at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, an ideal forum to serve as his backdrop. “I come in good spirits,” he lied. “I was the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”Then he launched his attack on Harris: “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? … All of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person … And I think someone should look into that, too.”Trump’s race-baiting is the hoariest of his riffs. He introduced his minstrel show 35 years ago when he took out full-page newspaper advertisements to demand capital punishment for five young Black men who were convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a white female jogger. The Central Park Five, as they became known, served years in prison, but had been falsely accused and were exonerated.Trump comes by his bigotry naturally. According to his nephew, Fred Trump III, in a new memoir, All In The Family, his uncle used the N-word to blame Black people for a car scratch: “Look what the n—–s did.” A producer for The Apprentice said Trump used the N-word to describe a finalist: “I mean, would America buy a n—– winning?” Trump laid the groundwork for his 2016 presidential run by promoting the birtherism fraud against Barack Obama that he was not born in the United States. As president, Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”, And, so on and on. “The same old show,” remarked Harris.“I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” Trump stated in 2016, when asked about his birther campaign. In attacking Harris’s “roots”, Trump returned to his.Two days after his appearance at the NABJ, Trump “retruthed” a post on his Truth Social network from Laura Loomer, a fringe character in Maga circles notorious for her ethnic slurs, and labeled “disgusting” by the Anti-Defamation League. “I have a copy of Kamala Harris’s birth certificate,” she wrote. “Nowhere on her birth certificate does it say that she is BLACK OR AFRICAN. @KamalaHQ is a liar. Donald Trump is correct. Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been.”Then, on 3 August, Trump backed out of a scheduled ABC News debate, proposing one on Fox News instead, issued insults that were obvious projections that Harris “doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL debate against me”, that she was “afraid”, and that she and Biden are “two Low IQ individuals”. He offered as proof of her fear, that she could never “justify”, among other things, “her years long fight to stop the words, ‘Merry Christmas’.”The Entertainer, frantic to hold the crowd’s attention, is hamming it up with his cake walk. But the minstrel show that had once packed them in at the Hippodrome has descended into burlesque. He won’t listen to Melania. “Trump didn’t know how to get off the stage.”

      Sid Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist More