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      How will drug legalization affect America's communities of color?

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      From the Pacific Northwest to the Deep South, drug legalization won big nationwide on election day in America.Under the first state law of its kind, people in Oregon soon won’t be arrested for possessing small amounts of drugs including heroin, meth and cocaine. In New Jersey, Arizona, South Dakota and Montana, voters joined 11 other states and the District of Columbia in legalizing recreational marijuana. Washington DC passed an initiative to make mushrooms and other natural psychedelics the lowest possible enforcement priority. Even Mississippi legalized medical marijuana.After months of global protests over racism in policing, advocates behind many of these campaigns focused their messaging on racial disparities in drug-law enforcement. In New Jersey, a social media ad explaining how a marijuana arrest could ruin someone’s life centered images of young Black men and women. Activists in Oregon pointed to a statewide study that found drug convictions for Black and Native people would drop by nearly 95% under the state’s decriminalization law.Yet despite these electoral successes, it remains unclear what effect the new measures will have for communities of color, who have long been disproportionately targeted in the war on drugs. Even as many states move toward legalization, drug-related violations remain the most frequent cause for arrest in the US. Nearly 40% of those arrests are for marijuana possession alone, according to federal data from 2018. Black people make up 27% of drug arrests, but only 13% of the country.Even in states that have already enacted more lax drug laws, racial disparities in enforcement didn’t disappear. An April study from the ACLU found that “in every state that has legalized or decriminalized marijuana possession, Black people are still more likely to be arrested for possession than white people.” Being caught with large amounts of marijuana, selling it, using it in a school zone, or underage use is still illegal in states that have legalized. In states like Maine and Vermont, according to the ACLU, racial disparities in weed arrests worsened after legalization passed. Disparities improved in California and Nevada.Some opponents of legalization say this increase in arrests is the result of the continued criminalization of black markets that still exist outside of the heavily regulated legal market. And they believe the potential for more widespread drug abuse under legalization, in the form of crimes like DUIs, can lead to more interactions with police – especially for people of color.Kevin Sabet, a former White House Office of National Drug Control Policy adviser, thinks that if the goal is to end racial disparities, states should continue focusing on decriminalization. “It’s a false dichotomy to think that you either have to arrest someone and lock them up, or you need to be in bed with big tobacco and have edibles,” he said. “Oregon already had a decent system for referring drug users [from jail time].”But even if people aren’t serving long sentences for simple drug possession, the impact of an arrest or a criminal conviction can follow them for years, legalization supporters say. And for repeat offenders, a drug conviction can mean a longer sentence for any future offense.“They own you after that,” said Bobby Byrd, a volunteer with Yes on 110 in Oregon who struggled to find a place to live, get promoted, and get licensed to become a drug counselor because of his felony cocaine conviction. “People need help, not punishment. Punishment didn’t help me; it just slowed me down in my life and made me have to work 20 times harder.”In South Dakota, which legalized marijuana last week, weed arrests have increased significantly since 2007, and the racial disparities for Indigenous people are especially stark. Native Americans are 10% of the state population, but were nearly 20% of marijuana possession arrests in 2018. They are nearly a third of the state prison population.Campaign organizers for decriminalization say they’ll have to stay vigilant against the over-policing of communities of color. “The reality is that systems of oppression always find different ways of incarcerating Black and Brown folks,” said Kayse Jama, executive director of Unite Oregon, a social justice organization. “I think [the new law] is a good step forward; it’s one tool we want to remove from their toolbox. But we also understand that [law enforcement] will continue to target our community.”Jama also noted the importance of decriminalization for immigrants, who will be less likely to face deportation or other federal immigration consequences over state-level drug crimes. So far in fiscal year 2020, over 600 people have been deported from the US, whose most serious conviction was marijuana possession.There’s also the question of whether Black communities can profit from the cannabis industry in states legalizing for the first time. Many states prohibit people with felony convictions from working for or owning dispensaries – convictions that are disproportionately saddled on people of color.Crucial to undoing this dynamic is ensuring that people who have already been prosecuted for marijuana can be released from jail or expunge their record. While expungement was not part of the initial ballot proposal in South Dakota, Melissa Mentele, executive director of New Approach South Dakota, said her group would push for such a policy through the state legislature.“Expungement is everything,” Mentele said. “It’s not just passing a law – you have people’s lives in your hands.”Organizers in Oregon also said they planned on addressing expungement and sentencing reductions in the upcoming legislative session. At least 15 states have passed laws making it easier to wipe marijuana-related crimes from people’s records.Applying the new law retroactively could be especially significant in New Jersey, which has some of the highest arrest rates for marijiuana – locking up an average of more than 600 people every week in 2019 for pot sales and possession.But in a state where the economic impact of a new legal weed industry could be as high as $6bn, it has been a challenge to put racial justice at the center of the conversation when some supporters of legalization see it as either a new business opportunity or tax revenue generator.The American public seems very open to a total rethink on the drug war and economic justice“In 2014, we saw a version of a bill come through that didn’t even have the word expungement in it,” said Amol Sinha, the campaign chairman of NJ CAN 2020, which backed the new measure, and the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.After a 2019 bill failed to pass the New Jersey state senate, the question to amend the constitution and legalize weed was passed to the voters. The ACLU led the campaign for the ballot measure, spending more than $300,000. “It was a huge, strategic investment,” said Sinha. “We led with racial justice every step of the way … And that is what resonated with voters.”Now it’s up to legislators to write the law, and it remains to be seen how much of the racial equity message will be baked into the new legislation. But Assemblyman Jamel Holley of district 20, a Democrat who was instrumental in writing the old marijuana bill and is helping shepherd the new one, said he is committed to delivering upon the demands of the voters.“[We can’t] have big conglomerates take over this [marijuana] industry, but at the same time have individuals who look like me have a record and can’t get a job or housing,” said Holley, who is Black. “My sole focus is that we repair the harms of the past.”Before the ballot measure had even passed, Holley called for the state to immediately dismiss all marijuana-related court cases, suspend all marijuana arrests, and implement an expedited expungement process.These kinds of actions illustrate that politicians are catching up to voters in seeing legalization as a racial justice issue, not just a revenue question, said Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing and a sociology professor at Brooklyn College.“One thing we’ve seen from the measures that have passed and the exit polling data is that the electorate is more progressive than the candidates,” Vitale said. “The American public seems very open to a total rethink on the drug war and economic justice.”This article was published in partnership with the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. 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      The Upswing review – can Biden heal America?

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      So the Biden-Harris ticket has won, but by narrow margins in some of the battleground states. How did partisanship reach such a pitch that Donald Trump’s tribal appeal easily cancelled doubts about his manifest unfitness for office? And what can Joe Biden do to patch together a frayed nation? The political scientists Robert Putnam, author of the acclaimed Bowling Alone, and Shaylyn Romney Garrett provide a wealth of sociologically grounded answers in The Upswing. Although the title is reassuringly buoyant, this is a tale of two long-term trends, one benign, the other a dark descent. An unabashed centrism prevails: political stability, the authors recognise, is a dance that requires a measure of cooperation and disciplined deportment from both parties.At the book’s core is a set of graphs describing the broad contours of American social, political, economic and cultural life over the past 125 years. All the graphs broadly conform to a common hump-like pattern: a growing swell over half a century or so of greater social trust, equality, bipartisanship and civic do-gooding peaking around the 1960s – followed by a marked and steady decline in all these criteria in the subsequent 50 years.The bad news is that we are living through the worst of the downswing, amid gross inequalities, corporate exploitation of the vulnerable and uncompromising hyper-partisanship. The good news is that the US has been here before – in the late 19th-century Gilded Age – and successfully pulled itself out of the mire. An antidote emerged to the robber baron industrialists, social Darwinists and anti-corporate populists of the Gilded Age in the form of the Progressive movement, whose ideals attracted reformers from within both main parties. Indeed, the short-lived Progressive party of the 1910s was an offshoot from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” brand of reformist Republicanism.Although Republican moderates managed to see off this third-party threat, Progressive ideals – the replacement of oligarchy, clientilism and corruption with modern, scientifically informed administration by middle-class professionals – endured as a significant strand in Republican politics. Progressive sentiments informed the New Deal of Roosevelt’s distant Democrat cousin FDR, but also the politics of mid 20th-century accommodationist Republicans such as Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey.The finest exemplar of harmonious “Tweedledum-Tweedledee” politics was General Eisenhower who, declining the opportunity to run for president as a Democrat, campaigned as a non-partisan Republican and governed as a big-spending progressive. The “low tide” of partisanship came in the mid-1960s when Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, the introduction of Medicare and implementation of black civil rights enjoyed support across the aisle from Republicans.Putnam and Garrett perceive an upswing in the position of women and African Americans before the rights revolution of the 60sIn this age of “depolarisation”, the real ideological divisions lay within parties, between liberal Republicans and anti-New Deal conservative isolationists, between unionised northern blue-collar Democrats, many of them Catholic, and southern Democrats – predominantly Protestant segregationists whose cultural values belonged far to the right of liberal Republicans. The authors note that on issues of race and gender progressive Republicans were often to the left of Democrats, and that as late as the 1960s Democrats were more likely to be churchgoers.Politics was, however, only one strand in “the Great Convergence” described by Putnam and Garrett. It was an age not only of growing income equalisation but of volunteering. Americans participated in huge numbers in chapter-based civic associations, such as the Elks and Rotarians, the Knights of Columbus and African American Prince Hall freemasonry. The mainstream Protestant churches themselves converged, favouring an ecumenical, theologically slender, all-American religion of social service and helping out.Staggeringly hard as it is now to believe, the Southern Baptists initially welcomed the pro-choice result in the Roe v Wade abortion case of 1973. Indeed, Putnam and Garrett perceive a long unobtrusive upswing in the position of women and African Americans before the rights revolution of the 60s. The black-to-white income ratio improved 7.7% per decade between 1940 and 1970.But the pendulum had already begun to swing in the other direction. Most of us might guess that it was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 that initiated the turn to inequality and division. Not so, insist Putnam and Garrett, for the Reagan counter-revolution turns out to be a “lagging indicator”. More ambiguous is the presidency of Richard Nixon, who appears here in strongly contrasting tones: a liberal Keynesian Republican on the policy front, but hard-boiled and amoral when electioneering.Adding a green tinge to progressive Republicanism, Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed a clean air act. Yet ultimately ideals were a front for the harvesting of votes. Cynically alert to Southern Democrat disenchantment with Johnson’s civil rights legislation, Nixon embarked on a Southern strategy to woo the solidly Democratic South for the party of Abraham Lincoln. The process took decades, and explains one of today’s most glaring and historically illiterate ironies: the flying of Confederate flags by rural Republican-supporting northerners.However, as Putnam and Garrett demonstrate, the Great Divergence is about much more than political realignment. The great arc of modern American history concerns economic outcomes, social trends and a range of cultural transitions that the authors describe as an “I-We-I” curve. Things started to go awry on a number of fronts from the 1960s. Both the libertarian New Right and the countercultural New Left offered different routes to personal liberation. But individual fulfilment came at a cost in social capital.Escape from the drab soulless conformity associated with the 1950s ended up all too often in lonely atomisation. A long road led from the straitjacket of early marriage in the 1950s via the freedom of cohabitation to the growing phenomenon of singleton households. Chapter-based voluntary organisations that involved turning up for meetings and activities gave way to impersonal professionally run non-profits whose Potemkin memberships existed only as mass mailing lists. Unions ceased to be focal points of worker camaraderie and sociability, and shrivelled to a core function of collective bargaining.The authors believe that the new group loyalties of Republicans and Democrats are only weakly ideological, and are based rather on emotional allegiances of a tribal natureWhat’s more, the great mid-century levelling of incomes went into reverse. First, the gap grew between the middle and the bottom, then the incomes of the elite raced away from those of struggling middle-earners, and finally, as Putnam and Garrett show, the wealth of the top 0.1% vastly outgrew that of the top 1%.The downswing America described in this book contains some surprising features. Partisan antipathy has risen to a high pitch as – seen over the long term – the intensity of religious and racial hostilities has mellowed. The authors believe that the new group loyalties of Republicans and Democrats are only weakly ideological, and are based rather on emotional allegiances of a tribal nature.Today’s partisans do not simply dislike their opponents: they loathe them, and assign character flaws to their rivals. This helps explain why Trump was able to usurp the Republican party and its followers, while to all intents and purposes jettisoning a whole slew of traditional Republican policieslike a new football manager who changes a team’s style of playwithout losing the allegiance of its hardcore fans. We might be tempted to blame social media for this state of affairs, but Facebook and Twitter have an “ironclad alibi”. The beginnings of the Great Divergence predate the internet by decades.A Biden presidency brings into focus the difficult job of healing and reconciliation. But here Putnam and Garrett run into trouble, for it is impossible to identify a single decisive factor that caused the downswing. Rather the authors identify a range of “entwined” trends “braided together by reciprocal causality”. Just as diagnosis of ultimate causes is treacherous, so too is finding a compelling plan for throwing the Great Downswing into reverse. The authors look for the green shoots of a new Progressive movement in various forms of grassroots activism, but are worried that they have yet to see this take a “truly nonpartisan” form. They try to be upbeat, but the dominant note is wistful.Yet even on their terms the election does present limited grounds for optimism. The energetic campaigning efforts of the Lincoln Project and other Biden-endorsing Republicans shows that the party – though long since abandoned by its liberal progressives – still contains several mansions. Consider the crossover potential of libertarians, Republican-inclined, who offer an unpredictable smorgasbord of options for jaded partisan palates: laissez-faire on morals as well as markets. In tight races in Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia, Jo Jorgensen, the third-party Libertarian candidate, drew small but significant numbers of disaffected Republicans away from Trump.And what are we to make of the quiet Trump phenomenon, the huge numbers of voters who unostentatiously turned to him, largely, it seems, because of the economy? That electorate – however narrowly self-interested – is at least amenable to reason. Despite all the worrying auguries, the election was not a straightforward scrap between whites and minorities. Trump lost white males to Biden, but gained surprising proportions of Latinx and African-American voters, and won niche groups such as older Vietnamese-Americans. Today’s tribes have not, alas, dissolved, but tomorrow’s seem likely on both sides to be rainbow coalitions.• The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again is published by Swift (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. More

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      With Donald Trump gone, Brexit Britain will be very lonely on the world stage | Afua Hirsch

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      After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, an American friend compared the nativist populism of the United States with the state of Brexit Britain. “You think it’s bad that Britain voted to leave the EU,” he told me. “America has voted to leave itself.”
      Four years later, things look a little different. Having indeed taken leave of its senses, America has now been rescued – not for the first time – by its citizens of colour. Polling data shows that without minority-ethnic voters, many of whom had to overcome deliberate and systemic attempts to suppress their participation – the nation’s constitutional and political integrity would have endured a further four years of Trump’s wrecking ball.
      Under cover of the past four years of regression, the British government has been running riot. However badly our leaders behaved, though, they knew there was a larger, more powerful democracy behaving even worse. Conservative attacks on the independence of the judiciary, for example, may represent an unprecedented assault on our constitution. But for Trump, lashing out personally at individual judges on Twitter became routine.
      The British government’s relaxed attitude about violating international law has prompted the condemnation of nearly all living former prime ministers. But Trump led the way in tearing up international agreements and withdrawing from multilateral organisations.
      And then there is race. In Britain we have had to endure an equalities minister who suggests anti-racism reading materials are illegal in school, a foreign minister who derided Black Lives Matter as a Game of Thrones spoof, and Boris Johnson himself, as ready to insult black children in Africa as he was the black president in the White House. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris is said to “hate” Johnson for claiming Obama held a grudge against Britain because of his “part-Kenyan” heritage. The prime minister’s comments have not aged well.
      The Kenya reference was not accidental. Much of Johnson’s political strategy rests on foundations of imperial pride and colonial nostalgia. That was compatible with the “special relationship” when the American president was, like him, similarly smitten by an imagined great white past. Lamenting the decline of this relationship has become a national pastime in Britain – traditionally at just such moments as this, when a change of guard in the White House threatens the status quo. What is clear is that, insofar as the special relationship does exist, it’s rooted in “shared cultural values”. This phrase, whenever deployed by Britain, is almost always code for: “We colonised you once, and how well you’ve done from it.”

      But empires, inconveniently, have a habit of striking back. And so the victims of British colonial abuse in Ireland have, through a twist of fate, lent their ancestral memory to the new US president. When Joe Biden visited County Mayo in 2016, he heard how his home town experienced the worst of the potato famine – even by the catastrophic standards of the nation as a whole – the entire population “gone to workhouse, to England, to the grave”.
      Kamala Harris’s heritage gives her more in common with many British people than it does with most Americans. Her grandfather worked for the British colonial government in India, where he strived for independence from the white supremacist ideology of the British empire. The power behind this empire earlier pioneered the enslavement of Africans that led Harris’s father, Donald Harris, to be born in Jamaica.
      Tories pumped with pride from this same history – gloriously bragging in song that “Britons never shall be slaves” – are unlikely to find its seductive power holds much sway within the incoming US administration. The government ignored British ethnic minorities when we offered the truth of our own lineages to counter this propaganda. Ignoring the president and vice-president of America is slightly harder to pull off.
      That leaves Johnson looking particularly fragile and exposed. This week one of his predecessors, John Major – no stranger to strained relations with America when he was in office – warned that “complacency and nostalgia are the route to national decline”. Britain needed a reality check, Major cautioned. “We are no longer an irreplaceable bridge between Europe and America. We are now less relevant to them both.”
      Much of Britain’s decline is structural, set in motion long before Johnson took office. But if you wanted to exacerbate it, you’d struggle to find a more effective path than the one we are currently on. We have never in modern times endured anything quite as extreme as the toxic assault on America’s political culture left behind by Donald Trump. As usual, ours is a poor imitation. And like all cheap fakes, it’s not built to last.
      • Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist More

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      Donald Trump has lost the election – yet Trumpland is here to stay | Aditya Chakrabortty

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      Perhaps one day Donald Trump will be dragged out of the Oval Office, his tiny fingernails still dug deep into that fat oak desk. But Trumpland, the country that ignored the politicians and the pollsters and the pundits and gave him the White House in 2016, will outlast him; just as it emerged before he even thought of becoming a candidate. And for as long as it is here it will warp politics and destabilise the US.
      I first stumbled upon Trumpland in 2012, a time when it bore no such name and appeared on no maps.
      I was reporting in Pittsburgh that autumn, as Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney while cruising to a second term as president. The big US broadsheets wrote up the Republicans as if they were an endangered species , while thirtysomethings in DC gazed deep into their spreadsheets or West Wing boxsets and foretold permanent Democratic majorities, gaily handed to them by a rainbow coalition of black, Latino and granola-chewing graduate voters.
      Except I kept meeting people who lived in an alternative country. People like Mike Stout and his family. He’d worked for decades in the local steel mills and had been a fiery union leader. Now he spent every spare hour as a reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, carrying a guitar along with memories of standing in 2009 on Washington’s Mall to watch Obama’s inauguration, his breath freezing in the January air as the first black president was sworn in . “It was like a new world had opened up, just for an afternoon,” said his wife, Steffi.
      But it was their far more subdued daughter, Maura, who troubled me. The steelworks of her dad’s day was long gone, so she’d gone to university and then spent two years hunting for a job. Now the 23-year-old was doing the accounts for a hotel, a non-graduate position paying $14 an hour, which Mike recalled as the same rate he’d earned at the steelworks in 1978 – without, of course, three decades of inflation. Among Maura’s year of about 500 graduates, she counted as one of the lucky ones.
      “I don’t think I’m ever going to earn as much as my parents,” she said. “I don’t think my husband and I will ever have the same life as they did.”
      We were in Pennsylvania, often painted as a land of blue-collar aristocracy and true-blue Democrats. But the political economy that had underpinned those ballot-box majorities was as rusted as an abandoned factory. Instead, Maura saw a political system that had failed her and her generation, in which every new day was worse than yesterday. And while the Stouts were leftwing, they had little in common with the party they supported. In their eyes, their home had been gutted of manufacturing and bilked by foreign trade deals, and appeared nowhere on the Clinton/Obama ideological map.

      Sure enough, four years later Pennsylvania became one of the rustbelt states that won Trump the White House.
      Trumpland is not the same as the old Republican heartlands, even if they overlap. What the dealmaker saw more clearly than the Bushes, the Romneys and the McCains was that there was a new electoral coalition to be forged out of downwardly mobile white voters. “The people that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned,” he called them in Ohio in 2016. “I am your voice.”
      And so he completed the great inversion of American politics: he turned the Republicans into a party whose future is tied to Trumpland. Even Trump’s rivals accept that. This summer, Texas senator Ted Cruz said: “The big lie in politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich and Democrats are the party of the poor. That just ain’t true. Today’s Republican party are Ohio steelworkers, today’s Republican party are single mums waiting tables…”
      Whatever promises Trump made on the threshold of the White House, once inside he spent four years giving billions in tax cuts to rich people and trying to deprive millions of low-paid Americans of decent healthcare. For the poor whites who put him in power, Trump had nothing to offer apart from racism.
      However grossly used by its leader, Trumpland is more than an imagined community. It has its own society and economics and politics ­– and they barely resemble the rest of the US. The 477 large and densely populated counties won by Biden account for 70% of America’s economy, according to new calculations by the Brookings Institute ; Trump’s base of 2,497 counties amount to just 29% (a further 1% is still to be counted). Brookings describes Trumpland as “whiter, less-educated and … situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many.”
      These people haven’t been left behind so much as cut loose from the US. Between 2010 and 2019, the US created nearly 16m new jobs but only 55,000 of them were suitable for those who left school at 16. Inequality this deep is not just economic, it is social and psychological. It is also lethal.
      Two economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, have found that working-age white men and women without degrees are dying of drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease and suicide at unprecedented rates . In 2017 alone, they calculated that there were 158,000 of these “deaths of despair” ­– equal to “three fully loaded Boeing 737s falling out of the sky every day for a year”.
      As Case and Deaton point out, African Americans have still harder lives. They die younger, and are less likely to go to college or get a job. Yet over decades their prospects are improving. For poor white Americans, on the other hand, the trends point straight down. The result, according to a new study by Andrew Oswald and former Bank of England rate-setter David Blanchflower, is that middle-aged, white American school leavers are now suffering an epidemic of “extreme mental distress”.
      When you live in a zero-sum economy, in which you always lose while the other guy wins, then you too might subscribe to zero-sum politics – in which the Democrats aren’t just opponents but enemies, and democratic norms are there to be broken. “These people are hurting,” says Blanchflower. “And when you’re hurting you’ll buy what looks like medicine, even if it’s from a snake-oil merchant.”This is where Biden’s kumbaya politics, all his pleas to Americans to join hands and sing, looks laughably hollow. You can’t drain the toxicity of Trumpism without tackling the toxic economics of Trumpland. And for as long as Trumpland exists, it will need a Trump. Even if the 45th president is turfed out, he will carry on issuing edicts and exercising power from the studio set of any TV station that will have him.
      Eight years after meeting Mike Stout, I spoke to him this week. He didn’t have much good news for me. Maura lost her hotel position last year and is now working from home in the pandemic, phoning up people deep in debt and pressing them to repay their loans. His son, Mike, lost his job just a few weeks ago for the second time in five years, and now has no medical insurance while his wife has stage-4 cancer.
      “They’ve been pushed off the shelf straight into the gutter,” he told me. “I don’t see any party out there willing to protect my children’s lives: not Democrat, not Republican.”
      • Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More

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      in Elections

      Bernie Sanders says Republicans are afraid to stand up to Trump following election loss – video

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      Democratic senator Bernie Sanders says members of the Republican party are afraid to stand up to Donald Trump as he continues his refusal to concede the result of last week’s presidential election. Speaking on CNN, Sanders said his Senate colleagues on the Republican side are not ‘idiots’, but there’s an intimidation factor from Trump that is preventing members from speaking up. ‘They understand Trump has lost,’ Sanders said. ‘But one of the other things we should all be nervous about and fearful about is the degree to which Trump intimidates and scares the hell out of Republican members of Congress. They are afraid to stand up to him’
      Trump under growing pressure to accept election defeat – US politics live More

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      ‘It must be made to fail’: Trump's desperate bid to cling to power

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      Donald Trump stepped out of the White House for the first time in six days on Wednesday as Americans strained to interpret a flurry of sudden personnel changes inside the administration, including at the Pentagon, while top Republicans refused to admit that Joe Biden had won the presidency.
      Instead of ushering in a becalmed moment of transition, the US election eight days ago has given way to escalating concerns over the president’s shocking visible effort to cling to power – and over top Republicans’ failure to dispute the president’s wild claims of election fraud.
      The proportion of Biden’s victory in the popular vote crept up to 50.8% on Wednesday, the highest percentage for a challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932. Judges in six states had thrown out at least 13 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign to challenge the vote while agreeing to hear zero. There is every indication that Biden will be inaugurated on 20 January.
      But continued leaks about the Trump team’s long-shot strategies for overturning the election result, and references such as one by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on Tuesday to a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration”, fed a sense of alarm that America was witnessing more than just hardball politics, cynical fundraising or Trumpian sour grapes.
      “What Donald Trump is attempting to do has a name: coup d’état,” said Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University specializing in authoritarianism, on Twitter. “Poorly organized though it might seem, it is not bound to fail. It must be made to fail.
      “Coups are defeated quickly or not at all. While they take place we are meant to look away, as many of us are doing. When they are complete we are powerless.”
      Trump did not deliver remarks to reporters en route to a Veteran’s Day ceremony at Arlington national cemetery on Wednesday, where he stood with the vice-president, Mike Pence in the rain. Biden and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, attended a Veteran’s Day ceremony in Delaware. More

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      'Downright dangerous': Democrats' alarm as Trump stacks Pentagon with loyalists

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      Extreme Republican partisans have been installed in important roles in the Pentagon, following the summary dismissal of the defense secretary, Mark Esper, at a time Donald Trump is refusing to accept his election defeat.
      Democrats immediately demanded explanations for the eleventh-hour personnel changes and warned that the US was entering dangerous “uncharted territory” with the reshuffling of key national security roles during a presidential transition.
      However defence experts argued there was little the new Trump appointees could do to use their positions to the president’s advantage, given the firm refusal of the uniformed armed services to get involved in domestic politics.
      Anthony Tata – a retired army brigadier general, novelist and Fox News commentator who called Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” – has taken control of the Pentagon’s policy department, following the resignation of the acting undersecretary of defence for policy, James Anderson.
      Tata had been unable to win Senate confirmation after old tweets surfaced in which he expressed virulent Islamophobic views.
      Meanwhile, Kash Patel – a former Republican congressional aide who played a lead role in a campaign to discredit the investigation into Russian election meddling – has been made chief of staff to the new defence secretary, Chris Miller.
      According to Axios, another new Miller adviser is Douglas Macgregor, a retired army colonel who was nominated over the summer, but not confirmed, as ambassador to Germany. Macgregor has referred to immigrants to Europe as “Muslim invaders”, advocated shooting illegal immigrants on the US border, and promoted a range of white nationalists conspiracy theories. He advocated a fast withdrawal from Afghanistan and has said the US should not “rush hundreds of thousands of troops to the Polish border to deal with the Russians”.
      The undersecretary of defence for intelligence, Vice Admiral Joseph Kernan, a retired navy Seal, was also reported to have resigned on Tuesday, and was replaced by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former aide to Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser who pleaded guilty to perjury.
      Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, was forced to quit on Friday.
      The fate of CIA director, Gina Haspel, was also in question. In a show of support, Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell invited Haspel to his office on Tuesday and Republican Senator John Cornyn tweeted: “Intelligence should not be partisan”. But he was attacked on Twitter by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, who asked if he or other Republicans backing Haspel had “actually discussed this with anyone in the Admin[istration] who actually works with her … or are you just taking a trained liar’s word for it on everything?”
      The reasons for the post-election personnel changes 10 weeks before the end of Donald Trump’s tenure were unclear, but they came at a time when the president is refusing to accept election defeat.
      The former defence secretary, Mark Esper, fired by tweet on Monday, had refused to allow active duty troops to be deployed on US streets during the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. More

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      Pressure builds on Trump to concede as Biden pushes ahead with transition plan

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      Pressure was mounting on Donald Trump on Wednesday to concede the US election that he lost to Joe Biden by more than 5 million votes, even as the president continued to pursue claims on social media and in court about ballot tampering and fraud – without evidence.
      The president’s refusal to accept defeat is increasingly alarming those senior Republicans prepared to admit it, with one, former US senator and former defence secretary William Cohen, calling Trump’s behavior “more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy”.
      As European leaders lined up to congratulate Biden, British prime minister Boris Johnson even referred to Trump as the “previous president” while talking in parliament, although Trump is president for 10 more weeks.
      Trump fired his defence secretary Mark Esper by tweet on Monday and followed up with a purge of several senior civilian officials at the Pentagon, raising further concerns over his intentions.
      Meanwhile Biden, the Democrats’ winning candidate, who has already secured more than the 270 electoral college votes he needed, pressed ahead with building his transition team and speaking out about urgent issues facing the US, including the coronavirus pandemic.
      As more votes from the election were counted and his popular vote advantage over the Republican incumbent continued to grow, Biden laid a wreath at a Korean war memorial in Philadelphia to mark Veterans Day.

      And in pelting rain, Trump, who had not had any public engagements since Biden was declared the election winner on Saturday morning, laid a wreath at Arlington national cemetery.
      This in the wake of reports in September that Trump had previously referred to military veterans as “losers” and “suckers”. The president did not make any public remarks during the remembrance ceremony.
      Biden has attempted to lower the temperature of the furore swirling around the White House since election day, and promised on Tuesday “to get right to work” on the transition while ignoring provocation from the Trump administration, including baseless claims of voter fraud and the thwarting of access to intelligence briefings and federal funding to help finance the transfer of power.
      Without money from the federal General Services Administration, headed by Trump appointee Emily Murphy, Biden’s team is hampered from conducting background investigations and obtaining security clearances for prospective staff.
      In a statement released on Wednesday, Biden attempted to reinforce his message of calm. “Today, we as a nation pause to honour the service, the valour, and the commitment of all those who have worn the uniform of the Armed Forces of the United States,” it said.
      “This Veterans Day, I feel the full weight of the honour and the responsibility that has been entrusted to me by the American people as the next president, and I vow to honour our country’s sacred obligation.”
      A day earlier, at an event to unveil his plans for healthcare policy once he assumes office, Biden called Trump’s refusal to concede “an embarrassment”.
      Numerous world leaders have congratulated Biden on his victory, including the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and some southern European and middle-eastern nations, although not China or Russia. More