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      Trump’s trial calendar becomes clearer – as do his delay tactics

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      Donald Trump’s legal calendar is coming into sharper relief after a New York judge affirmed last week that the ex-president’s first criminal trial – on charges that he manipulated the 2016 election by concealing hush-money payments to an adult film star – will proceed to trial in Manhattan next month.A federal case in Washington over the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election had once been expected to go first. But when Trump filed appeals on grounds of presidential immunity last year, the presiding US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, was forced to put the case on hold.With Trump’s legal calendar otherwise clear, justice Judge Juan Merchan on Thursday scheduled Trump’s hush money trial to start on 25 March in Manhattan and last roughly six weeks. Allowing a week for jury selection and deliberation could mean a verdict might arrive around mid-May.That is the straightforward part.For the federal case in Washington, the timing of the trial depends on what the US supreme court decides to do with Trump’s immunity arguments, which contend Trump should be absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for what he claims were official acts he took as president.There are several options available to the court that could affect a trial date: refuse to hear the case and send it back to Chutkan with immediate effect, hear the case and issue a ruling expeditiously, or hear the case and issue a ruling late in the summer.Complicating matters, Chutkan isn’t expected to schedule a trial immediately even if the court denies the immunity claim and sends the case back to her, because Trump is technically entitled to the “defense preparation” time that elapsed since he first started appealing the immunity issue.(Trump filed his immunity claims to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit on 8 December. The moment he appealed, it paused the case before Chutkan, including her since-scrapped 4 March trial date. The clock ticking down to trial only starts again when all the appeals are done.)As a result, the way to estimate a potential trial date is to take the elapsed time between 8 December, and add that to when the case is returned to Chutkan’s control, assuming the supreme court won’t decide Trump has absolute immunity from all the charges.If the supreme court refused to take the case, for instance as early as this week, the total time elapsed that Trump would get back might stand at roughly 80 days, meaning Chutkan could schedule a trial around the final week of May.If the supreme court agrees to take the case with oral arguments set sometime in March, and then issues a quick decision in April, the total time Trump would get back might stand at roughly 100-120 days, meaning Chutkan could set a trial to commence in June.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut in the worst-case scenario for the special counsel, Jack Smith, if the court agrees to take the case but puts off ruling on immunity until the end of its term, for instance at the end of June, there might not be a trial in Washington until after election day.The date that the federal election case goes to trial is important mainly because estimates for how long the trial itself might take has been estimated at roughly a week for jury selection, eight weeks for the prosecution, four weeks for Trump, and a final week for deliberation.Added together, the trial might take around 100 days. If voters wanted to go to the ballot box knowing whether Trump was guilty of conspiring to stop the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election, a trial would need to have started before the last week of July.All of this matters because Trump has made it no secret that his strategy is to seek delay – ideally even beyond the election – in the hopes that winning a second presidency could enable him to pardon himself or allow him to install a loyal attorney general who would drop the charges. More

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      Voters may at last be coming round to Biden’s sunny view of the economy

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      Joe Biden has spent most of his presidency insisting to Americans that the economy is on the right track. Poll after poll has shown that most voters do not believe him. That may be changing.After months of resilient hiring, better-than-expected economic growth and a declining rate of inflation, new data shows that Americans are becoming upbeat about the US economy, potentially reversing the deep pessimism Biden has struggled to counter for much of the past three years.That trend could reshape campaigning ahead of November’s presidential election, in which Biden is expected to face off against Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Experts believe the president’s case for a second term will benefit from more optimistic views of the economy – but the hangover from the inflation wave that peaked a year and a half ago presents Republicans with a potent counterattack.“Over the last couple of years, people have been feeling the most pain on day-to-day spending, on things like groceries and gas prices and prescription drugs. And, fortunately, those prices are beginning to come down, which gives Democrats a stronger hand than we had just a few months ago,” said Adam Green, co-founder of advocacy group the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.“For a campaign that says that they want to finish the unfinished business of the Biden presidency, our polling shows that it’s perfectly OK to acknowledge that there has been pain, and there’s more business to do,” said Green.He added that the Biden campaign should “really focus the voters’ attention on the forward-looking agenda of one party wanting to help billionaires and corporations, and the Democratic party wanting to challenge corporate greed and bring down prices for consumers”.Biden has been unpopular with voters, according to poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, even as employment grew strongly and the economy avoided the recession that many economists predicted was around the corner. While it’s not the only factor, pollsters have linked voters’ disapproval with Biden to the wave of price increases that peaked in June 2022 at levels not seen in more than four decades, and which have since been on the decline. An NBC News poll released this month showed Biden trailing Trump by about 20 points on the question of which candidate would better handle the economy, a finding echoed by other surveys.But new data appears to show Americans believe the economy has turned a corner. Late last month, the Conference Board reported its index of consumer confidence had hit its highest point since December 2021, while the University of Michigan’s survey of consumer sentiment has climbed to its highest level since July of that year.View image in fullscreen“The people who give positive views of the economy, they tend to point to, the unemployment rate is low, and they also point to that inflation is down from where it was,” said Jocelyn Kiley, an associate director at Pew Research Center, whose own data has found an uptick in positive economic views, particularly among Democrats.Trump and his Republican allies have capitalized on inflation to argue that Biden should be voted out, though economists say Biden’s policies are merely one ingredient in a trend exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and global supply chain snarls that occurred as a result of Covid-19. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is the last major challenger to the former president still in the race has said the economy is “crushing middle-class Americans”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut voters’ improving views of the economy could blunt those attacks ahead of the November election, where the GOP is also hoping to seize control of the Senate from Biden’s Democratic allies and maintain their majority in the House of Representatives. Lynn Vavreck, an American politics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Trump might have to fall back to tried-and-true tactics from his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, such as promising to institute hardline immigration policies.“The economy is growing. People don’t really say that they feel good about it, but if you’re gonna load up your campaign on those people’s feelings, I feel like that’s a little risky,” said Vavreck, who has studied how economic conditions can affect presidential campaigns.“You could do that, and that would be a bit of a gamble, or you could find an issue on which you believe you are closer to most voters than Joe Biden, that is not about the economy, and you could try to reorient the conversation around that issue.”There is already evidence that harnessing outrage over the flow of undocumented immigrants into the United States is key to Trump’s campaign strategy. The former president’s meddling was a factor in the death of a rare bipartisan agreement in Congress to tighten immigration policy in exchange for Republican votes to approve assistance for Ukraine and Israel’s militaries.With the economy humming along, Trump is apparently nervous that the US economy could enter a recession at an inconvenient moment. “When there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover,” he said in an interview last month, referring to the US president who is often blamed for the Great Depression that began 95 years ago.Even though the rate of inflation has eased, albeit haltingly, prices for many consumer goods remain higher than they were compared with when Biden took office, which his opponents can still capitalize on, said the Republican strategist Doug Heye.“Consumers go to the grocery store, and they spend money, and they’re upset with what things cost, and that should always be what they’re talking about,” Heye said.While Biden has been quick to take credit for the strong hiring figures during his administration, polls show that hasn’t landed with voters. In recent months, the White House has shifted strategy, announcing efforts to get rid of junk fees and accusing corporations of “price gouging”.Evan Roth Smith, head pollster for the Democratic research firm Blueprint, said that lines up with his findings that voters care less about job growth and more about the fact that everything costs more.“Voters just felt a prioritization mismatch between what they were experiencing, the kind of pressures they were under, which isn’t that they didn’t have jobs, it’s that they couldn’t pay their bills,” Smith said.“Makes all the sense in the world that if the White House and president and the Biden campaign are touting this stuff, that they are going to make headway, and are making headway with voters in getting them to feel like Joe Biden in the Democratic party do understand.” More

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      After a bad legal week for Trump, even worse could be on the horizon

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      Donald Trump was already reeling from multiple legal setbacks when a New York judge last week handed the former president a staggering defeat in his civil fraud case, ordering him to pay roughly $450m to the state after finding him liable for conspiracy to manipulate his net worth.The decision by Justice Arthur Engoron capped a bad legal week for Trump, who had watched his lawyers attempt to get access to sealed filings in a classified documents case in Florida and then watched his lawyers lose their attempt to delay his first criminal trial in New York.There may be worse coming.The immediate priority for Trump’s legal agenda remains, according to people familiar with the matter, figuring out how to come up with $450m – a figure that includes pre-judgment interest – or finding a company prepared to help him post bond within 30 days of when the court entered the judgment, so that he can appeal the penalty.Trump saw the ruling as a two-pronged stab at his personal identity: it is likely to almost entirely drain his accounts of cash and it bars him from running the Trump Organization, the vehicle he used to attain his fame, for three years.Trump’s preference is to avoid using his own money while he appeals and his lawyers have contacted several companies to provide the bond, which essentially assures the state that Trump has the money to pay the judgment should he lose his challenge.To obtain the bond, Trump would first have to find a company willing to accept him. He would then have to pay a premium to the bond company and offer collateral, likely in the form of his most prized assets, which would accrue interest and fees.If the penalty is upheld on appeal, Trump will face a huge financial burden. In an interview under oath with the New York attorney general’s office last year, Trump said he had $400m in cash and cash equivalents, though that figure could not be verified.A proportion of that figure comes from Trump’s sales of two properties after he left the White House, as well as new ventures including a real estate branding deal in Oman.The deals were intended to give Trump a cash cushion in the event of a sudden financial setback. But even if Trump’s $400m claim was accurate, that would clearly be wiped out should the $450m penalty be largely upheld.Adding to the total sum Trump must disgorge is an $83.3m judgement entered against him last month after he lost the second defamation trial involving the writer E Jean Carroll. That figure is not payable immediately, but it is another massive figure for which he has to account.Trump may ultimately find himself without enough of a cushion and face the need to mortgage or sell some of his properties. While Trump is not expected to go bankrupt – his total holdings are in the billions – it would mark a particularly humiliating moment for the former president.The legal woes extend beyond causing him financial pain. On Thursday, it was confirmed Trump would face trial in New York on charges that he falsified business records over hush money payments to a porn star to shield himself from bad press before the 2016 election.Jury selection in the case is now scheduled for 25 March, despite a last-ditch attempt by Trump’s lawyers to stave off the trial.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore the hearing to affirm the trial date, people involved in the situation said, Trump’s advisers had retained some hope it might be delayed even if they believed it was the most politically advantageous case of all his four criminal indictments.If Trump must face a criminal case before the election in November, they would choose the hush money case because Trump may not face jail time even if he is convicted, an outcome that could desensitize voters to the other, federal criminal cases looming before him.But Trump may have to grapple with the fallout from another legal setback in Atlanta, after he and his co-defendants charged by the Fulton county district attorney over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election struggled to argue she should be disqualified from bringing the case.The second day of the evidentiary hearing examining whether Fani Willis’s romantic relationship with her top deputy, Nathan Wade, amounted to some sort of kickback scheme sufficient to generate a conflict of interest went sideways for the defendants.The defendants called Terrence Bradley, the former divorce lawyer for Wade, to testify that the relationship started before Willis hired Wade to work on the Trump case on 1 November 2021, in order to contradict Willis and Wade’s testimony.The objective was to have Bradley contradict under oath the testimony of Willis and Wade, in order to make the case that they committed perjury and argue the presiding Fulton county superior judge, Scott McAfee, to discredit their testimony.But Bradley was a particularly reluctant witness and testified he had privileged information about when the relationship started, but not personal knowledge he obtained separate from him representing Wade.By the end of the day, it appeared uncertain whether the defendants had met their burden of proof to force Willis off and make the criminal charges in Georgia go away. 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      Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tells fellow Democrats: reject Biden in primary

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      The progressive US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has called on her fellow Michigan Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s presidential primary election – at the expense of the party’s incumbent, Joe Biden – in late February.Appearing in a video posted to X on Saturday by Listen to Michigan, a political campaign to encourage the state’s voters to vote “uncommitted” in the 27 February primary, Tlaib justified her stark display of displeasure with Biden by alluding to Israel’s military strikes on Gaza, which local authorities say have killed nearly 29,000 Palestinians since last October.Tlaib – Congress’s only Palestinian American lawmaker – also criticized the Biden White House’s support for Israel, which launched its military campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October Hamas attacks that killed about 1,200 Israelis.Speaking in front of the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, which has one of the US’s largest populations of Arab Americans, Tlaib said: “It is important … to not only march against the genocide, not only make sure that we’re calling our members of Congress and local elected [officials], and passing city resolutions all throughout our country. It is also important to create a voting bloc, something that is a bullhorn to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”Tlaib added: “We don’t want a country that supports war and bombs and destruction. We want to support life. We want to stand up for every single life killed in Gaza … This is the way you can raise our voices. Don’t make us even more invisible. Right now, we feel completely neglected and just unseen by our government.“If you want us to be louder, then come here and vote uncommitted” rather than in support of Biden, the Democratic party’s presumptive nominee for November’s presidential election.The congresswoman’s message echoed the calls of Listen to Michigan, whose campaign manager is Tlaib’s sister Layla Elabed.Speaking to Business Insider, Elabed said: “Voting uncommitted is our way of demanding change, and this is going to be our vehicle to return political power back to us.”More than 30 elected officials across south-east Michigan have already pledged to vote “uncommitted” in the state’s 27 February primary elections. Those officials include the Dearborn mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, along with city council members and state representatives.A statement released by Listen to Michigan earlier in February said, “Let us be clear: we unequivocally demand that the Biden administration immediately call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. We must hold our president unaccountable and ensure that we, the American taxpayers, are no longer forced to be accomplices in a genocide that is backed and funded by the United States government.”It also said: “Therefore, we pledge to check the box for ‘uncommitted’ on our ballots in the upcoming presidential primary election. These are not empty words; they signify our steadfast commitment to justice, dignity, and the sanctity of human life, which is greater than loyalty to any candidate or party.”With the 81-year-old president facing increasing pressure over his handling of Israel’s military strikes in Gaza, as well as scrutiny over his age, Arab and Muslim Americans across multiple swing states – including Michigan – have organized campaigns under the slogan #AbandonBiden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTlaib’s latest video announcement has received mixed responses.The former Ohio Democratic state senator Nina Turner tweeted, “Arab Americans do not want their tax dollars going to kill their family members. It’s unnerving to see the liberal response to that demand. Rashida Tlaib is absolutely justified to endorse this.”Meanwhile, in response to Tlaib’s endorsement of Listen Michigan, the conservative group Republicans Against asked on X who among Democrats would run against the congresswoman ahead of her running for re-election in November.Tlaib last year was censured by the Republican-led US House over her criticisms of Israel. She responded to the censure measure by saying that she would “not be silenced” and that “Palestinian people are not disposable”. More

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      Ronald Reagan’s daughter says he would be ‘appalled’ by current political tenor

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      The daughter of former president Ronald Reagan has hit out at contemporary White House politics, saying she thinks her late father would be “appalled” by the personal tenor of current political discourse.“I think he’d be appalled … it was just more civilized,” Patti Davis told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “He didn’t understand lack of civility. He didn’t understand attacking another person. … He didn’t understand cruelty. And that’s what we’re dealing with now.“I think he would be really scared for our democracy,” Davis added.Davis, 71, supposed that her father – a former Republican California governor who served two terms as president beginning in 1980 and gained a reputation as “the great communicator” – would have sought to address voters rather than opposing candidates.“I think he would address the American people at what has divided us,” Davis – the author of a new book, Dear Mom & Dad – told Meet the Press. She added that she thought Reagan would interpret contemporary political division as fear that had translated into anger.“There are people on the public stage and on the political front who understand very well that synergy between fear and anger and who are masterful at exploiting it,” Davis remarked.Reagan was 69 when he took office and 77 when he stepped down – four years younger than Democratic incumbent Joe Biden and the same age as the presumptive Republican nominee to challenge him, former president Donald Trump.Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994 but may have been suffering from aspects of dementia during his second term.Davis said that cognitive tests for presidential candidates was “probably” appropriate.Her comment on cognitive tests came as the Biden White House continued to push back on a special counsel Robert Hur, who assessed the president to be a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in a report declining to prosecute Biden over his retention of some classified documents before his presidency.Trump, too, has faced questions about his mental acuity after, for instance, confusing Biden with Barack Obama as well as his fellow Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley with former Democratic US House speaker Nancy Pelosi.Davis said: “We know about what age can do. It doesn’t always do that, but it would probably be a good idea.” More

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      Nikki Haley condemns Trump for not commenting on Alexei Navalny death

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      Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley on Sunday criticized her party’s leading contender for the White House nomination, Donald Trump, for avoiding meaningful comment on the death of Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned political nemesis of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.“Either he sides with Putin and thinks it’s cool that Putin killed one of his political opponents – or he just doesn’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Haley said Sunday on ABC News This Week. “Either one of those is concerning. Either one of those is a problem.”The attack which Haley aimed at Trump with respect to Navalny came six days before her home state of South Carolina was scheduled to host its Republican presidential preference primary. With the rest of the Republican field having dropped out, polls show Haley, the ex-governor of South Carolina, trails the former president by more than 30 percentage points.Haley joined other prominent US politicos – including Democratic president Joe Biden – in blaming Putin for Navalny’s death Friday at a Russian penal colony. Trump, on the other hand, has declined to directly remark on the death of Navalny, which authorities reportedly explained to his mother as occurring from “sudden death syndrome”.The former president – who once appointed Haley to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations – has only pledged on social media to “bring peace, prosperity and stability” if he is given another term in the Oval Office.Haley on Sunday said that Trump’s response had not gone nearly far enough.“I think it’s important to stand with the Russian people who believe Navalny was really talking for them,” Haley told the host of This Week, Jonathan Karl. “I mean you look at this hero – he was fighting corruption, he was fighting what Putin does. And what did Putin do? He killed him just like he does all his political opponents. And I think that’s very telling.”Haley added that the 47-year-old Navalny’s death was an opportunity for political leaders in the US “to remind the American people that Vladimir Putin is not our friend”.“Vladimir Putin is not cool. This is not someone we want to associate with,” Haley said. “This is not someone we want to be friends with. This is not someone that we can trust.”Haley’s remarks alluded to how Trump – during his presidency from 2017 to 2021 – demonstrated favor and, arguably, subservience to Putin. They also came a little more than a week after Trump caused global alarm with a campaign speech in South Carolina during which he declared that he would encourage Russia to attack any Nato allies whom he considered to have not paid enough to maintain the alliance.The former UN ambassador on Sunday called Trump’s earlier Nato comments “bone chilling”.“All he did in that one moment was empower Putin,” Haley said.Throwing in a reference to Russia’s jailing of Wall Street reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges which the US have dismissed as bogus, Haley continued: “All [Trump] did in that one moment was he sided with a guy who kills his political opponents – he sided with a thug that arrests American journalists and holds them hostage.“And he sided with a guy who wanted to make a point to the Russian people: ‘Don’t challenge me in the next election, or this will happen to you, too.’”Haley said Americans needed to “start waking up to what this means”, and she called it essential for Ukraine to fend off the invasion Russia launched nearly two years earlier.Trump was entering the South Carolina primary under indictment on more than 90 criminal charges, including for trying to illegally nullify his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election. He is also faced with having to pay civil judgments in excess of half a billion dollars after being adjudicated a business fraudster as well as being found liable for sexually abusing and defaming magazine columnist E Jean Carroll.Nonetheless, polls at the moment show Trump enjoys a relatively slight advantage with the American electorate over Biden. More

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      Is Joe Biden too old to be president? – podcast

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      At 81 years old, Joe Biden has a wealth of experience to draw on. There is just four years difference between him and Donald Trump. And his rival is as well known as the president for misspeaking and making gaffes. Yet something has changed. Unease has been growing about Biden’s perceived frailty and his mental acuity – and that was before a bombshell report by the US Justice Department’s special counsel. In the report Robert Hur, the Republican special counsel, said Biden would not face criminal charges for mishandling classified documents. The ruling should have been good news for Biden, except the reason given – that Biden would appear to any jury as a “sympathetic well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory” – was so damning. Biden hit back in a press conference slamming the inference that he was old and doddery. But as he did so he managed to mix up the names of the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. Biden’s supporters argue that Trump is just as prone to making mistakes and is hardly more reliable, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, David Smith, notes. Yet somehow the mistakes Biden makes are all taken to be a sign he is losing his grip. Michael Safi asks why the same charges against Trump don’t stick and how Biden’s campaign can prove the president is fit and sharp enough for another four-year term. More

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      Find Me the Votes review: Fani Willis of Georgia, the woman who could still take down Trump

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      If this week’s hearing about Fani Willis’s affair with her assistant Nathan Wade has piqued America’s interest in the character of the Fulton county district attorney, Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman have written the perfect book for this moment.Isikoff has been a dogged investigator for the Washington Post, NBC and Yahoo, while his longtime friend and collaborator Klaidman is a former managing editor of Newsweek now a newly minted investigative reporter for CBS. Together they have produced the most readable and authoritative account to date of all of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.At its center is a nuanced portrait of Willis, who at least until a couple of days ago appeared to be Trump’s most effective nemesis, having indicted him, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and the former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, as well as 16 other co-conspirators.Whether Willis’s affair with one of her principal assistants is a valid reason to force the presiding judge to dismiss her from the case remains to be seen. But the revelation seems to have been as much of a bombshell for her biographers as it was for everyone else.Contacted by the Guardian, both authors declined to predict the outcome of the current proceeding. But Isikoff sounded optimistic that Willis would survive this latest assault.“How did the relationship between Willis and Wade prejudice any of the other defendants?” Isikoff asked. “There is simply no evidence that it did.”Willis is a daughter of the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, her father, John C Floyd III, migrated from the politics of John F Kennedy and the non-violence of Martin Luther King Jr to the much tougher ideology of the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles, which he co-founded in 1967. After that he became a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer.Isikoff and Klaidman say Floyd’s odyssey gives us “a glimpse into his daughter’s pugnacious personality and her deep-seated loathing of bullies” – both of which were on prominent display when she defended herself in the hearing room.While it was her personal passion that brought Willis into an unwelcome spotlight, it was her own focus on allegations of sexual harassment against her previous boss and mentor that made her election as the first woman district attorney of Fulton county possible. Paul Howard became the first Black person to hold the job of Fulton county DA in 1996, and made Willis a star by giving her some of his Atlanta office’s most famous cases. She became famous as the lead prosecutor in an indictment of 35 public school officials for alleged violations of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) Act. The Atlanta schools superintendent, six principals, two assistant principals and 14 teachers were accused of faking students’ test scores, in response to the requirements of No Child Left Behind.That law, championed by George W Bush, put schools at risk of losing federal aid if students didn’t meet minimum standards for success on standardized tests. All but one of the defendants was Black, which made the prosecution even more controversial. By the time Howard gave Willis the case she was chief of the office’s trial division. Isikoff and Klaidman say she proved a “hands-on micromanager” who “plunged into every detail of the case”. Its complexity turned out to be the perfect training for Willis to use the same Rico statute to go after Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.One of this book’s most important contributions is to remind us of the breadth and viciousness of the president’s efforts to undermine democracy – and the horrendous effects they had on the lives of decent, honest election officials in every swing state Trump lost.After multiple lawsuits alleging voter fraud were thrown out by nearly every judge who heard them, Trump famously turned his attention to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, one of several Republicans whose resistance proved heroic. When Trump got Raffensperger and his assistants on the phone, they were shocked by how many QAnon conspiracy theories Trump seemed to have accepted as fact – just because so many of his supporters had retweeted them. A particular favorite of the president’s was the notion there had been 200,000 forged signatures on absentee ballots in Fulton county – even though the total number of absentee votes had been 148,319.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the same call, Trump repeated the big lie that the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss had run between 18,000 and 56,000 bogus ballots through election scanners. Trump said Freeman was “known all over the internet”. This was the same lie promoted by Giuliani, which ultimately cost him a richly deserved verdict of $148m for libeling the two innocent women.In one of the many telling details of Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, the authors remind us that the other hero from that phone call was the Georgia deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs.“Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors believe. To protect her boss, she decided to tape the phone call – without telling Raffensperger. After the tape leaked to the Washington Post, it quickly became the single most powerful piece of evidence against the ex-president in any of the four prosecutions he is still facing.When you see all of Trump’s alleged crimes piled together in a single narrative, it is beyond belief that he remains the favorite of a majority of Republican primary voters. But these same facts should surely be enough to guarantee his defeat if he actually gets the chance to face the larger electorate in November.
      Find Me the Votes is published in the US by Twelve More