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      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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      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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      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

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      in Elections

      Man accused of Nazi salute during US Capitol attack jailed for nearly five years

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      A Marine who stormed the US Capitol and apparently flashed a Nazi salute in front of the building was sentenced on Friday to nearly five years in prison.Tyler Bradley Dykes, of South Carolina, was an active-duty US marine when he grabbed a police riot shield from the hands of two police officers and used it to push his way through police lines during the attack by a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021.Dykes, who pleaded guilty in April to assault charges, was previously convicted of a crime stemming from the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Dykes was transferred to federal custody in 2023 after he served a six-month sentence in a state prison.US district judge Beryl Howell sentenced Dykes, 26, to four years and nine months of imprisonment, the justice department said.Federal prosecutors had recommended a prison sentence of five years and three months for Dykes.“He directly contributed to some of the most extreme violence on the Capitol’s east front,” prosecutors wrote.Dykes’ attorneys requested a two-year prison sentence. They said Dykes knows his actions on January 6 were “illegal, indefensible and intolerable”.During the sentencing hearing, Dykes said that he still stood with Trump and that he supports him “to be the next president of our country”.“Tyler hates his involvement in the Capitol riot,” his lawyers wrote. “He takes complete responsibility for his actions. Tyler apologizes for those actions.”Dykes, then 22, traveled to Washington to attend the Republican Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally with two friends from his hometown of Bluffton, South Carolina. After parting ways with his friends, Dykes ripped snow fencing out of the ground and pulled aside bicycle rack barricades as he approached the Capitol.Later, Dykes joined other rioters in breaking through a line of police officers who were defending the stairs leading to the Capitol’s East Rotunda doors.“After reaching the top of the stairs, Dykes celebrated his accomplishment, performing what appears to be the ‘Sieg Heil’ salute,” prosecutors wrote.After stealing the riot shield from the two officers, Dykes entered the Capitol and held it in one hand while he raised his other hand in celebration. He also used the shield to assault police officers inside the building, forcing them to retreat down a hallway, prosecutors said.Dykes gave the shield to an officer after he left the Capitol.Dykes denied that he performed a Nazi salute on 6 January, but prosecutors say his open-handed gesture was captured on video.In August 2017, photos captured Dykes joining tiki torch-toting white supremacists on a march through the University of Virginia’s campus on the eve of the Unite the Right rally. A photo shows him extending his right arm in a Nazi salute and carrying a lit torch in his left hand.In March 2023, Dykes was arrested on charges related to the march. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of burning an object with intent to intimidate.Dykes briefly attended Cornell University in the fall of 2017 before he joined the US Marine Corps. In May 2023, he was discharged from the military under “other than honorable” conditions.“Rather than honor his oath to protect and defend the constitution, Dykes’s criminal activity on January 6 shows he was instead choosing to violate it,” prosecutors wrote.More than 1,400 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol riot.More than 900 of them have been sentenced, with roughly two-thirds receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from a few days to 22 years. More

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      US prosecutors retool January 6 plea deals after supreme court ruling – report

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      US prosecutors are “beginning to offer retooled plea deals” and drop charges in cases related to the January 6 attack on Congress, CNN said, citing legal filings in the weeks since the rightwing-dominated US supreme court narrowed how prosecutors can charge rioters with obstructing an official proceeding.The report noted a Monday filing concerning five members of the far-right Proud Boys group, which said each defendant had been offered a plea deal not including the obstruction charge.Should the deal be declined, CNN said, the obstruction charge would be dropped and the men taken to trial on other charges.A rioter famously seen carrying a Confederate battle flag through Congress is also among prisoners or defendants whose cases are being reassessed.On 6 January 2021, Kevin Seefried, from Laurel, Delaware, was part of the mob that stormed the Capitol at the urging of Donald Trump, seeking to stop certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.A famous picture showed Seefried underneath portraits of the senator and vice-president John Calhoun, a champion of secession in the early 19th century, and Senator Charles Sumner, a leading voice for union and the abolition of slavery in the civil war years.In February this year, Seefried wept as he was sentenced to nearly three years in prison for obstruction of an official proceeding, as well as misdemeanour charges.But he was soon released to await a decision in Fischer v United States, a supreme court case concerning the obstruction charge.In late June, the court’s decision narrowed the grounds on which the charge could be used in January 6 cases.According to the chief justice, John Roberts, the obstruction charge should be applied to whether a “defendant impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of [actual] records, documents, objects, or … other things used in the proceeding, or attempted to do so”.The opinion was sent to an appeals court for further consideration. Prosecutors were left to work out how to link the obstruction charge to threats to actual records, in particular the electoral college certificates used to formalise results, rather than to the general attempt to overturn an election.The supreme court decision prompted outrage among court observers.Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or Crew, said Roberts and the other five justices who ruled in the majority had helped “insurrectionists dodge accountability”, adding: “If attempting to block the certification of the 2020 election isn’t obstructing an official proceeding in the court’s eyes, then what is?”The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, was also disappointed, saying the court had “limit[ed] an important federal statute that the [justice] department has sought to use to ensure that those most responsible for that attack face appropriate consequences”.Nonetheless, Garland said, “the vast majority of the more than 1,400 defendants charged for their illegal actions on January 6 will not be affected by this decision. There are no cases in which the department charged a January 6 defendant only with the offense at issue in Fischer.”Though the department would “comply with the court’s ruling”, Garland said, it would “continue to use all available tools to hold accountable those criminally responsible for the January 6 attack on our democracy”.Earlier this month, the US justice department released statistics showing how January 6 cases would be affected by the supreme court ruling.More than 1,472 people had been charged in relation to the attack on Congress by the time the court said it would consider Fischer, it said. Of those people, “roughly 259 … were charged with corruptly obstructing, influencing, or impeding an official proceeding, or attempting to do so”.Of those 259 defendants, Seefried and 132 others had been sentenced. Of those 133, the department said, 76 were convicted of obstruction and other felonies while “approximately 17” were convicted on the obstruction charge but no other felonies and were then still serving prison time.“Nearly all” the other 126 defendants were on pre-trial release, the justice department said.The department said it would review “individual cases against the standards articulated in Fischer, as well as the anticipated ongoing proceedings related to Fischer in the DC circuit, to determine whether the government will proceed with the charge”.The department also noted the wide range of other charges against January 6 rioters, many concerning violent conduct.“Approximately 531 defendants have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees,” it said, “including approximately 157 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.”Fourteen convictions have been secured for seditious conspiracy, the most serious charge arising from the Capitol attack.Running for president again, Trump leads Biden in most polling.He has promised pardons to those imprisoned over January 6. 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      Peter Navarro airs grievances in convention speech hours after prison release

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      Walking out to a standing ovation, Peter Navarro, the former Trump official, delivered a speech of personal grievances at the Republican national convention on Wednesday, hours after he was released from federal prison following his conviction on contempt of Congress charges for obstructing the January 6 committee investigation.The former Trump White House adviser tried – as he has done previously – to portray his criminal case as an egregious overreach of prosecutorial power, taking a page from Trump’s own playbook to claim he was a martyr taking hits on behalf of voters.“If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, they can come for you,” Navarro said. “If we don’t control our government, their government will control us.”“I went to prison so you don’t have to,” Navarro later added.Navarro, 75, was found guilty last September on two counts of contempt of Congress after he refused to produce documents and testimony in the congressional investigation into the 2021 Capitol attack, claiming executive privilege protections meant he did not have to cooperate.The committee took a special interest in Navarro because of his proximity to Trump and his involvement in a series of efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including to have members of Congress throw out the results in a plot he named “the Green Bay Sweep”.But Navarro’s subpoena defiance prompted a criminal referral to the US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which brought the charges and ultimately asked for six months in jail because he brazenly ignored the subpoena even after being told executive privilege would not apply.“He cloaked his bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt behind baseless, unfounded invocations of executive privilege and immunity that could not and would never apply to his situation,” prosecutors wrote of Navarro in their sentencing memorandum.At trial, Navarro’s lawyers offered evidence that Trump had asserted executive privilege over a subpoena issued by a different congressional committee examining the Trump administration’s handling of the Covid pandemic. But there was no such explicit letter for the January 6 subpoena.The reality of the charges did not dissuade Navarro from offering a sanitized version of the story, for which he received thunderous applause from the crowd at the convention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Your favorite Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, created your favorite committee, the sham Jan 6 committee, which demanded that I violate executive privilege,” Navarro said as the crowd booed. “What did I do? I refused.”“The January 6 committee demanded that I betray Donald John Trump to save my own skin. I refused,” Navarro continued. “And the Democratic majority in the House then voted to hold me in contempt.”At the end of his remarks, Navarro brought out his fiance, who appeared in a red Maga hat, and abruptly jumped into a kiss – before continuing his remarks assailing the justice department for causing his separation from his family: “On election day, the American people will hold these lawfare jackals accountable.” More