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      Leading Democrats demand Alito face investigation after second report of far right-linked flag

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      Leading Democrats are demanding that Samuel Alito recuse himself from election-related cases and also face investigation after a second report that a flag now associated with the far right was flying above one of his homes.Dick Durbin, the Senate judiciary chair, urged the US supreme court justice to step back from certain major cases and demanded John Roberts, the chief justice, implement an enforceable code of conduct on his bench, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded that the US Senate investigate.The demands follow a new report by the New York Times of a second incidence of flags flown at homes of Alito that are associated with the 6 January 2021 attack at the US Capitol.Durbin put out a statement late on Wednesday, saying: “This incident is yet another example of apparent ethical misconduct by a sitting justice, and it adds to the court’s ongoing ethical crisis. For the good of our country and the court, Justice Alito must recuse himself immediately from cases related to the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection. And the chief justice must see how this is damaging the court and immediately enact an enforceable code of conduct.”Ocasio-Cortez also weighed in during an interview with the MSNBC host Chris Hayes late on Wednesday, calling on Senate Democrats to launch “active investigations”.The congresswoman said: “What we are seeing here is an extraordinary breach of not just the trust and the stature of the supreme court, but we are seeing a fundamental challenge to our democracy.”She added: “Samuel Alito has identified himself with the same people who raided the Capitol on January 6 and is now going to be presiding over court cases that have deep implications over the participants of that rally.“And while this is the threat to our democracy, Democrats have a responsibility for defending our democracy.”The New York Times reported that an “appeal to heaven” flag, which has been adopted by Christian nationalists, was flown at the summer home of Alito on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, last July and September. The flag was carried by some in the crowd during the far-right, violent insurrection at the US Capitol, where extremist supporters of Donald Trump broke in to try, in vain, to stop the US Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election over Trump.Also known as the pine tree flag, it was originally used on warships commanded by George Washington during the American revolutionary war against the ruling British. It has since been adopted by Christian nationalists who advocate for an American government based on Christian teachings.The second flag report comes after the paper also reported that an upside-down American flag was flown outside the Virginia residence of Alito’s home shortly after the January 6 insurrection. Alito claimed his wife flew the flag briefly during a spat with neighbors over politics.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, posted on X: “Flying this flag is a political statement that is a clear and compelling reason for Alito’s recusal. He cannot responsibly sit on Trump-related cases when he has already signaled his sympathy with January 6th rioters. He owes the American people an explanation.”Sheldon Whitehouse also posted, with pictures of the offending flags.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Rhode Island Democratic senator said on X: “Did another neighbor make Alito’s wife mad? How many Maga battle flags does Alito need to fly for the court or the judicial conference to see there’s a problem?”Durbin has been pushing for regulation of the supreme court.He added: “This episode will further erode public faith in the court. The Senate judiciary committee has been investigating the ethical crisis at the court for more than a year, and that investigation continues. And we remain focused on ensuring the supreme court adopts an enforceable code of conduct, which we can do by passing the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act.”He has repeatedly called for the passing of legislation that the judiciary committee advanced last July. The supreme court has an internal, non-binding code of ethics.Neither the supreme court nor Alito had commented by Thursday morning. More

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      Rightwing US supreme court justices are in trouble. So they’ve discovered feminism | Judith Levine

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      At the start of her rallies, Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who defeated the equal rights amendment, always thanked her husband, Fred, for letting her out of the house.Ah, those were the days.Husbands have lost their control. And, it would seem, none more than the poor schlubs on the bench of the supreme court of the United States.Before January 6, Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, the far-right activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, plunged deep into the “Stop the Steal” movement, which attempted to frame Joe Biden’s fair and free election as rigged. She sent dozens of texts to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, egging him on to overturn the election. Later, she claimed Clarence had nothing to do with it.“Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America,” Ginni Thomas told the Washington Free Beacon in early 2022. “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”Nevertheless, questioned by the congressional January 6 committee as to whether she conferred with anyone about the texts, she allowed that she’d spoken to her “best friend” – Clarence. She couldn’t remember the “specifics”, she said. But “my husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset.”Meadows filed an amicus brief in Trump’s appeal to withhold documents from the investigators; the texts, including Ginni Thomas’s, were included in the subpoenaed materials. Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter in the supreme court’s rejection of Trump’s appeal.Jane Sullivan Roberts – Mrs Chief Justice John Roberts – earned over $10m recruiting conservative government lawyers to elite law firms precisely during the years of her husband’s tenure on the court. Although some of these firms appear before the court, the Robertses insist that her work is her own and poses no conflict of interest for him. Anyway, according to a former colleague of Jane’s, nothing exchanged was more consequential than the chitchat at any Washington cocktail party.“Friends of John were mostly friends of Jane,” the colleague told Insider. “And while it certainly did not harm her access to top people to have John as her spouse, I never saw her ‘use’ that inappropriately.”Just affectionate give-and-take, like the uber-luxurious gifts bestowed on the Thomases by the rightwing billionaires Clarence met after ascending to the supreme court.And now we learn that an inverted American flag – ensign of Maga insurrectionists, carried by many during the Capitol riot – flew in front of Justice Samuel Alito’s home in January 2021, three days before Joe Biden’s swearing-in as president.But Alito – who is about to sign the ruling on whether Trump is immune from prosecution for inciting the riot or, for that matter, anything else he ever does – says he never touched, or apparently looked at or commented on, the flag. His wife, Martha-Ann, ran her opinion up the flagpole during a neighborly tiff. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” the justice said in an email to the New York Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” She is her own woman.This is the same Samuel Alito who opined in Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1991 that requiring the husband’s consent for an abortion did not impose an undue burden on the woman, and in fact, served a compelling state interest. Different strokes for different folks.And then there’s Amy Coney Barrett, who served as a “handmaiden” for the male-supremacist Christian sect People of Praise, advising wives on submitting to the “headship” of their husbands.So here’s the ideology of the court’s conservative majority: a husband should rule over his wife except when he declares her independence because the ideologies she clearly shares with him might cause him trouble.The women on the court are not indulging in this ploy. Why not? “He does what he wants” might be more credible. It’s not that they’re good because they’re women. Two of them have scant opportunity for family-related conflicts of interest. Sonia Sotomayor is divorced. Elena Kagan never married. Neither of them has children. Meanwhile, a conservative law firm has filed an ethics complaint against Ketanji Brown Jackson for not disclosing income from her husband’s medical malpractice consulting. If the contention is true, her omission is illegal, not to mention unethical. But it would be a stretch to call it political. And Brown hasn’t blamed her husband.Jennifer Weiner recently argued in the New York Times that “Blame my wife,” an excuse employed by Republicans and Democrats alike, might indicate “the faintest glimmer of progress” – feminist progress. “When a Supreme Court justice blames his wife, he is also acknowledging that his wife has the ability to act on her own ideas, has a mind confoundingly of her own,” Weiner wrote.Nah. The men who stripped half the US population of a 50-year-old right of bodily autonomy have not osmosed feminism despite themselves. Rather, they are exploiting feminism: impersonating pro-feminist men when it serves them and screwing women (and the less powerful in general) when it doesn’t. Mr Nice Guy; no more Mr Nice Guy. That’s patriarchal privilege.The male justices are also implicitly invoking a right that feminists, along with Black and LGBTQ+ civil rights activists, conceived and won: the right to relational privacy. By contending that their professional thoughts and actions are unaffected by their wives’, the justices communicate that no one else knows what goes on inside their marriages and no one has the prerogative to eavesdrop on their breakfast table conversations or evaluate the meanings and effects of what is said there.The sanctity of privacy in intimate behavior, including the rights of married couples to use contraception, of queer people to have sex and marry each other and of pregnant people to end their pregnancies, did not spring from the heads of supreme court justices. But supreme court justices can take them away. In fact, these are the rights, and the cases involving them, that Thomas, in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, urged the court to “reconsider” – presumably to overturn, as it overturned Roe. Thomas did not mention whether Loving v Virginia, the 1967 case securing the right to interracial marriage, like his own, should be reconsidered. Maybe he needs to talk it over with Ginni.In March 1776 the first lady, Abigail Adams, wrote to her husband, President John Adams, exercising her influence as a highly placed political wife. She implored him to “Remember the Ladies” when he and the other founding fathers were declaring independence and writing the laws that would follow.But that’s just the famous part of the letter. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands,” Mrs Adams continued, playing on the language of freedom from colonial rule. “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”American feminists have rekindled that Rebelion. Some chose to make noise in front of Alito’s home to express their rage at his majority opinion in Dobbs. They wanted “to bring the protest to [the Alitos’] personal lives because the decisions affect our personal lives”, said one demonstrator. The personal is political, as much for the men in black robes as it is for the rest of us.
      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept, and the author of five books More

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      Alito’s flag shows the US supreme court is neither honorable nor functional any more | Moira Donegan

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      These people can’t help themselves. Last week, the New York Times revealed that during the days after the violent attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, when the US supreme court was still considering whether to take up cases challenging Joe Biden’s election victory, the home of the supreme court justice Samuel Alito, in suburban Virginia, flew a pro-coup flag. The Times printed photos of the American flag flying upside-down on a pole in Alito’s front yard; by January 2021, the upside-down flag had become a well-known symbol of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement, champions of Donald Trump who supported his legal and violent attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.At the time, pro-Trump social media groups were encouraging supporters to fly their flags this way; upside-down flags had been carried by some of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, just a few days before the symbol appeared outside Alito’s house. In the election case that was then before the court, Alito voted to hear Republican challenges to the election results. But he didn’t get enough of his colleagues to vote his way. Not that time.The flying of the pro-Trump, pro-coup flag is in clear violation of the ethics rules that apply to federal judges. After several high-profile controversies at the court – including investigations into gifts given to Alito and his fellow conservative justice Clarence Thomas by deep-pocketed Republican donors – a controversy arose over why, precisely, those ethics rules have never extended to the supreme court justices.Under enormous political pressure, the court agreed to assign itself a version of those ethics rules last year, aiming, it said, to dispel any public concerns and recommit the court to maintaining an appearance of credible neutrality. (Such rules have long applied to court employees, who, the Times points out, are not permitted to so much as attend a protest or put a bumper sticker on their car.) The justices did not elect, however, to make the new ethics code in any way enforceable for themselves. They’re not rules that can be enforced; they’re guidelines that can be – and are – ignored.The court is currently considering several cases stemming from the January 6 insurrection, and will rule on two questions that concern its aftermath in the coming weeks: first, whether insurrectionists can be charged with obstruction of an official proceeding; and second, whether Donald Trump can be held legally responsible for crimes he committed while in office. After this November’s general election, there are almost certainly going to be further legal challenges to the election results, just as there were in 2020. Alito will be on the court to hear Trump’s arguments in those cases, too.The flag, then, is just the latest reminder of a disturbing reality: that as the Republican party further radicalizes against democracy, the supreme court – the body which is tasked with checking these unconstitutional impulses – has become their ally. The rule of law cannot be relied on to stem the tide of rising authoritarianism, because our legal institutions have been captured by the authoritarians.Why would Alito make such a brazen display of his partisan loyalties and disregard for the legitimate results of an election at a moment when the court is under such intense scrutiny? When the Times asked him about the pro-insurrection flag, Alito blamed his wife: he said she put it up after getting in a fight with a neighbor who had an anti-Trump lawn sign. It’s not clear exactly how this story is supposed to exonerate him: it doesn’t explain why the Alitos used this pro-coup gesture, of all the possible options, as a way to retaliate against their progressive neighbors. And the story is still one in which the Alitos are affirmatively voicing their partisan loyalty in public, and showing themselves unable to tolerate even the proximate presence of Americans who do not share their own morbid, conspiratorial and punitive worldview.But asking why Alito feels he can get away with it misses the point: he knows he can get away with it. The justice is perfectly aware that he does not need to pretend to neutrality, or hide his partisan loyalties, or behave, with anything like a convincing effort, like his work on the court is motivated by the law and not his own reactionary political preferences. Alito knows that he does not need to maintain any pretext of integrity, intellectual commitment or seriousness in his work. The supreme court has accumulated enough power to itself – and the justices have done a sufficiently good job of insulating themselves from any accountability or consequence – that he doesn’t even think he needs to lie any more. He’s comfortable being a partisan operative right out in the open.And why shouldn’t he? He’s not even the worst offender. After all, Clarence Thomas has not recused himself from insurrection-related cases, either, even though his wife, Ginni, was a vocal supporter of the insurrection – texting Trump’s then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, over and over about the effort before, during and after the riot, and attended the “Save America” rally on January 6 herself. Like Alito, there is no way to force him to step aside.The justices do not enforce rules of impartiality, integrity, honesty, disclosure or decorum on themselves. And there are few mechanisms – and absolutely no political will – for anyone else to impose these on them. The people have no check on the court; Congress is dysfunctional and can’t act. And so the justices are acting like spoiled children: petulant, self-indulgent, shameless, jeering and unsupervised. Men like Alito and Thomas have not done what decency requires – and there are no means to compel them to.If this was an honorable court, a man like Alito would never have been appointed. If it was a functional court, he would resign. If it was a court composed of jurists capable of shame, he would recuse himself from election-related cases. But it is none of these things.It is time to admit what this court has become: an elite, but no less sadistic and vulgar, bastion of the anti-pluralist, anti-democratic forces that have captured so much of the Republican party and the conservative base. To say that the court is composed of partisan operatives – and that at least two of them are either so delusional that they have lost touch with reality or so cynical that they don’t mind when the facts diverge from their preferred outcomes – is so obvious as to be almost banal to any honest court observer. That anyone pretends that the court is a legitimate judicial body is a farce. That its actions still carry the force of law is a tragedy.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biden: what would Trump have done if the Capitol riots had been led by Black Americans?

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      Joe Biden has launched one of his most scathing attacks yet on Donald Trump’s record of racism, suggesting that the former US president would have acted differently to the January 6 2021 insurrection if it was led by Black people.The remarks, at a dinner hosted by a civil rights organisation in a critical swing state, pointed to an intensifying battle between Biden and Trump for African American voters ahead of November’s presidential election.“Let me ask you,” Biden said during an address to an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) dinner in Detroit. “What do you think he would have done on January 6 if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol?”There was a collective gasp and murmur in the cavernous convention centre, where an estimated 5,000 guests had gathered. The president insisted: “No, I’m serious. What do you think? I can only imagine.”The great majority of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to overturn his election defeat were white. One was pictured carrying the flag of the Confederacy, which fought the 1861-65 civil war to in a failed effort to preserve slavery in the south.But as a congressional panel investigating the attack chronicled, Trump remained at the White House and took no action for hours, even as the mob threatened to hang his vice-president, Mike Pence. He eventually released a video calling for the rioters to stand down and go home.More than 1,265 defendants have been charged and hundreds imprisoned for their role in January 6. But Trump has described them as “patriots” and “hostages” and, as Biden noted in his remarks, suggested that he will pardon them if reelected.Biden was speaking during a campaign swing through Georgia and Michigan, two battlegrounds where the Black vote will be crucial. Opinion polls suggest that a small but significant percentage are turning from Biden to Trump.The president told the audience in Detroit: “You’re the reason Donald Trump was defeated for president. You’re the reason Donald Trump is going to be a loser again.”Biden touted his own record but kept returning to Trump and the threat he poses to democracy. He highlighted his own appointment of the first Black female supreme court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson.“Let me ask you, who do you think he’ll put on the supreme court?” he asked. “Do you think he’ll pick anybody who has a brain?”Biden also accused Republicans of banning books and undermining African American history. “Extremists close the doors of opportunity, strike down affirmative action, attack the values of diversity, equality and inclusion,” he said.“They don’t see you in the future of America, but they’re wrong. We know Black history is American history.”The president also warned: “The threat that Trump poses in a second term is greater than the first.” He said “something snapped in Trump” after his 2020 election defeat and “he’s clearly unhinged”.The president received one of the biggest cheers of the night when he proclaimed himself a “union guy”, adding: “I walked the picket line with union workers here in Michigan. At the same time, Trump went to a non-union stop to show his disrespect for union workers.”Other speakers included Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, tipped as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. More

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      Upside-down US flag reportedly hung outside Samuel Alito’s home days after Capitol attack

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      An upside-down American flag was reportedly spotted flying outside the home of the conservative US supreme court justice Samuel Alito during the closing days of the 2020 election.The inverted flag is a symbol that has become associated with the former president Donald Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden stole the election.Used by some Trump supporters during the January 6 Capitol Hill riots, the upside-down flag was seen outside Alito’s home on 17 January 2021 – 10 days after the riots in DC and three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, according to a report in the New York Times on Friday.The image of the flag outside Alito’s home is likely to renew fears of partisanship among political appointees on the conservative-leaning court. The court has found itself at the epicenter of US culture wars in recent years for the rulings it has made, including a rollback of reproductive rights and a relaxation of restrictions relating to gun ownership.According to the Times, word of the upside-down flag made its way back to the court as the justices were considering an election case related to ballot-counting in Pennsylvania. Alito, an appointee of George W Bush, was on the losing side of the decision.“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in a statement to the paper. “It was briefly placed by Mrs Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, had been in a dispute with a neighbor about an anti-Trump sign on their lawn. Neighbors said they interpreted the Alito family’s flag as a political statement, and one said it had hung outside the home for several days.On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough offered an impassioned take on the flag’s appearance at Alito’s home, telling viewers of his show on Friday morning: “For a guy who is a supreme court justice that let that happen at his own home in one of the most fraught times in American history since the civil war is just … it’s just sad. And it shows how little respect he has for the institution. It shows how little respect he has for the law. It really … It’s disgusting. It’s just disgusting.”Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who appeared on Morning Joe on Friday alongside Scarborough, echoed those thoughts.“I am beyond disturbed. I was a law clerk to Justice Blackman on the US supreme court when this kind of behavior would have been unimaginable. You wouldn’t have read about it in a book of fiction,” he said.“Justice Alito should not sit on any of these cases involving Donald Trump. He ought to recuse himself. Here is the challenge to Chief Justice Roberts: the US supreme court’s credibility is plummeting – lower than perhaps the US Congress, and that’s saying something. It is due to the supreme court’s own self-inflicted wounds.”Experts on judicial conduct told the Times that symbols of partiality, including flying an upside-down flag, could be a violation of ethics rules designed to avoid even the appearance of bias.“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia, told the Times.Frost added that the inverted flag was “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US supreme court recently adopted a stronger but nonbinding code of ethics for the nine justices on the bench after the conservative justice Clarence Thomas came under scrutiny for accepting but not disclosing trips funded by a Republican billionaire. It was later reported that Alito had similarly failed to report a trip to Alaska.Court employees are under strict rules that warn against public displays of political affiliation, including bumper stickers on vehicles. According to Reuters, the flag should only be displayed upside down “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property”.The revelation that Martha-Ann Alito hung an upside-down flag in her yard may not provide a determination that Alito was in any way aligned with Trump-inspired insurrectionists, but rather that during the 2020 election neighborhood passions ran hot.Neighbors told the Times that the street was divided between Republicans and Democrats and had been “tensed with conflict”. The anti-Trump sign that Martha-Ann Alito objected to, they said, contained an expletive and had led to mounting tensions.One said neighbors had joined demonstrators outside the Alitos’ home with the intent “to bring the protest to their personal lives because the decisions affect our personal lives”. Those protests have continued. Last Saturday, some used a megaphone to broadcast expletives at Alito.Two years ago, a bipartisan bill was passed to provide round-the-clock police protection for the justices and their families. That came after the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, ordered the US Marshals Service to provide 24/7 protection to the justices following the still-unexplained leak of a draft decision that overturned federal abortion rights guarantees.But with political tensions again increasing with the approach of the November elections, including a supreme court decision on the extent of presidential immunity that will affect at least one of Donald Trump’s pending prosecutions, Alito’s neighborhood flag-flying comes down to “a question of appearances and the potential impact on public confidence in the court”, the former federal judge Jeremy Fogel told the Times.“I think it would be better for the court if he weren’t involved in cases arising from the 2020 election,” Fogel added. “But I’m pretty certain that he will see that differently.” More

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      Court upholds Steve Bannon’s January 6 contempt of Congress conviction

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      Steve Bannon, the controversial hard-right strategist who has been influential in the thinking of Donald Trump, has lost his appeal against his conviction for contempt of Congress relating to the investigation into the January 6 insurrection.A unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals upheld Bannon’s conviction on Friday. The decision brings him closer to a four-month sentence behind bars meted out to Bannon for having resisted the terms of Congress’s subpoena against him.He has one last hope left to avoid a prison term – he could appeal to the full bench of the circuit court.Bannon was convicted of contempt charges at trial in July 2022, having been charged with two federal counts. He was accused of refusing to appear for a deposition and of refusing to provide documents to the committee in response to a subpoena.He was sentenced later that year to four months in prison. The punishment was put on hold after Bannon appealed.Bannon’s lawyers claimed in the appeal that he had not ignored the committee’s subpoena, but was acting out of concern that he might violate executive privilege objections raised by Trump.Bannon worked as Trump’s chief strategist in the White House during the first seven months of his presidency. He left the White House in August 2017 following controversy over Trump’s response to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and now runs a popular podcast called the War Room.The January 6 committee was led by Democrats in the House of Representatives with the participation of some Republican Congress members. It concluded that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and had not prevented a mob of his supporters attacking the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. More

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      Civil War is a terrifying film, but Trump: The Sequel will be a real-life horror show | Simon Tisdall

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      Director, cast and critics all agree: Civil War, the movie depicting America tearing itself to bloody bits while a cowardly, authoritarian president skulks in the White House, is not about Donald Trump. But it is, really.Likewise, the first ever criminal trial of a US president, now playing to huge audiences in New York, is ostensibly about claims that Trump fraudulently bought the silence of a former porn star called Stormy after a tacky Lake Tahoe tryst. But it isn’t, really.Both movie and trial are about a Trump second term. They’re about sex, lies and Access Hollywood videotape, about trust and betrayal, truth and division. They’re about democracy in America, where political feuds and vendettas swirl, guns proliferate and debates over civil rights are neither civil nor right.Alex Garland’s smash-hit “post-ideological” dystopian nightmare and the Manhattan courthouse peak-time showdown are both ultimately about the same things: the uses and abuses of power, about a nation’s journey to extremes where, as in Moby’s song, it falls apart.Talking of disintegration, what a diminished figure Trump now cuts in court. Slouched, round-shouldered and silenced alongside his lawyers, he acts up, sulky, aggrieved, childishly petulant. The room is cold, he whinges. Potential jurors rudely insult him to his face! It’s all so unfair.Trump never did dignified, not even in the Oval Office. Yet even by his tawdry standards, this daily demeaning before an unbending judge is irretrievably, publicly humiliating. The loss of face and sustaining swagger begin to look terminal. For Trump the alleged criminal conspirator, as opposed to Trump the presidential comeback king, the familiar campaign cry of “Four More Years!” has a disturbing ring. Four years in chokey is what he faces if found guilty on 34 felony charges.It’s no coincidence, so Trump camp followers believe, that Civil War premiered in election year. No surprise, either, that a Democratic district attorney pushed for the trial. Or that latest polling by the “liberal media” suggests Trump is losing ground to Joe Biden.Despite all that, the Make America Great Again screenplay is unchanging. Trump’s blockbuster second march on Washington is merely on pause, Maga-men say. He’s making an epic sequel and he’ll be back in November with all guns blazing – which is the problem, in a nutshell.If you doubt it, just look at Pennsylvania. Even as the defendant, dozy and defiant by turns, snoozed in court and slandered witnesses on social media, this same presumed 2024 Republican champion was effortlessly sweeping last week’s party primary with 83% of the vote.View image in fullscreenThere’s no real-world contradiction here. A grumpy Trump scowling at the bench and a Civil War-like wannabe dictator hot for White House power and glory are united in one unlovely, vicious personage. Two sides of the same bent cent. The list of Trump’s crimes for which he has yet to be tried extends far beyond the New York indictment and the charge sheets in three other pending cases. Like Tom Ripley, the sociopathic narcissist anti-hero of Netflix’s popular TV mini-series, Trump is violently dangerous beyond all knowing.The lethal 6 January insurrection he incited and applauded was stark treason against the republic. No argument. The racist relativism of Charlottesville in 2017 foreshadowed recent, unrepentant talk of “poisoning the blood of our country”. His corrosive words burn like acid through the social fabric. No Civil War paramilitary crazy could wish for more than Trump’s eager feeding of America’s gun addiction, support for domestic execution and assassination overseas, collaboration with murderous dictators, debasement of the supreme court and hostility to open government, free speech and impartial reporting.No Ripley-style conman or fraudster could hope to emulate the master criminal’s arm-twisting of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden’s son, Hunter, his political protection rackets and shameless nepotism, his suborning of his party, Congress and the legal system or his rich man’s contempt for the ordinary Joe who actually pays taxes.A prospective second Trump term presages obsessive score-settling at home and abject appeasement abroad. Judges, law officers, witnesses, female accusers, military men, diplomats, academics and critical media may be among the early victims of a national revenge tragedy – a personalised purge of the institutions of state that could prove fatal to democracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s fawning obsequiousness towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and vendetta against Kyiv’s leadership, spell disaster for Ukraine. Nor can there be much confidence, for all his bluster, that he would stand up to China should it invade Taiwan.Prepare, too, for a likely European rupture and trade war, a Nato split and an unravelling of 75 years of transatlantic collaboration. Prepare for an out-of-control global arms race, unchecked nuclear weapons proliferation on Earth and in space and the wholesale abandonment of climate crisis goals. A Trump success in November, with all the ensuing chaos, schism and constitutional outrages, would bring closer both an end to peaceful, rational debate within America and the demise of US global leadership.So truly, is Civil War so very far off the mark? Is it really not about Trump and Trumpism? It’s certainly more comforting to frame the movie as an entertainment, to interpret its studied avoidance of direct references to present-day politics as reassurance that, at heart, it’s essentially make-believe. But that denialist view is itself a type of escapism or wishful thinking. It won’t silence the guns.In one untypical, symbolic scene, the war-weary photojournalist played by Kirsten Dunst, all body armour and pursed lips, tries on a pretty dress in a downtown store insulated from the fighting. It is as if she, like America, is trying, fleetingly, to recover her humanity.It’s unclear whether she succeeds. More hopeful moments like that, and a good deal less trumpery, are badly needed now. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      Aaron Sorkin to write film about January 6 and Facebook disinformation

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      Aaron Sorkin is set to write a film about the January 6 insurrection and the involvement of Facebook disinformation.The Social Network screenwriter is returning to similar territory for an as-yet-untitled look at how social media helped radicalise Donald Trump supporters who went onto storm the US Capitol in 2021.“I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said on a special edition of The Town podcast, live from Washington DC. When asked to explain why, he responded: “You’re gonna need to buy a movie ticket.”He then announced that he would be covering the subject in an upcoming project.“Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible,” he said. “Because that is what will increase engagement and because that is what will get you to, what they call inside the hallways of Facebook, the infinite scroll.”When asked whose responsibility that was, he replied: “Mark Zuckerberg.”He continued: “There is supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity, there isn’t. It’s just growth so if Mark Zuckerberg wakes up tomorrow and realises that there is nothing you can buy for $120bn that you can’t buy for $119bn, so how about if I make a little less money, I will tune up integrity and I will tune down growth.”Sorkin said he has yet to have a conversation with the Facebook CEO that isn’t “through the op-ed pages of the New York Times”.The writer-director’s 2010 adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires looked at the origins of the site and the early controversy surrounding it. The script won Sorkin his first Oscar.Sorkin was also asked about why he dropped his agent Maha Dakhil last year after she shared a post online that criticised Israel’s involvement in the ongoing conflict with Palestine which read: “You’re currently learning who supports genocide.”“She posted something on Instagram that I just didn’t understand,” he said before adding: “There were people in my family who would have been hurt if I stayed.”Last year saw Sorkin return to the stage with an adaptation of the musical Camelot, which received five Tony nominations but mixed reviews. His last film was 2021’s Being the Ricardos starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. More