US elections 2024

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump gaining ground among Latino voters, poll shows

      by

      A new poll indicates former US president Donald Trump is gaining ground among Latino voters, wiping out incumbent Joe Biden’s lead among the crucial, but diverse, voting bloc.A USA Today and Suffolk University survey showed Trump was ahead with 39% support among Latino voters surveyed, compared to Biden’s 34%, signaling a slump since 2020, when Biden garnered 65% of the approval from Latino voters.The data also highlights a broader trend of decreasing support for Biden among various key demographic groups, including young voters. The decline in support among Latinos is seen as a canary in the coal mine for Democrats, signaling potential challenges in retaining a key part of the electoral coalition that built Biden’s election victory in 2020.Trump leads among young voters under 35 with 37% support over Biden’s 33%, a stark drop from Biden’s 24-point lead among the voting group in 2020.However, although Biden was losing support among these groups of voters, they tend to lean toward third-party candidates instead of Trump, according to the poll which was conducted 26-29 December among 1,000 likely voters.Twenty per cent of Hispanic and Black voters surveyed said they would support someone other than Trump or Biden, while 21% of younger voters indicated the same outcome.In December, a CNBC All-America Economic Survey also revealed a significant shift in support among Latino voters. In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, Trump now holds a five-point lead with Latino voters, erasing Biden’s previous seven-point lead in October.The survey, conducted between 8 and 12 December, suggests a decline in Biden’s overall performance among Latino voters, with his approval dropping from 35% in October to 28% in December.Historic data shows that Trump tends to perform better with Latino voters during economic stress. The survey results raise concerns for Democrats about their hold on this crucial demographic.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s lead stands even as he leans into the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric that he used when he locked the Republican nomination in 2016, including racist language reminiscent of far-right dictators.The former president has listed some of the steps he would purportedly take to widen his administration’s strict immigration policies, including shifting “massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement” and moving “thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our own southern border”.Trump also said he would reinstate and expand travel bans he first carried out in 2017 toward several Muslim-majority and African countries. Another Trump administration would also include rounding up placing undocumented immigrants already in the US in detention camps to await deportation. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Stakes are really high’: misinformation researcher changes tack for 2024 US election

      by

      A key researcher in the fight against election misinformation – who herself became the subject of an intensive misinformation campaign – has said her field gets accused of “bias” precisely because it’s now mainly rightwingers who spread the worst lies.Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, added that she feared that the entirely false story of rigged elections has now “sunk in” for many Americans on the right. “The idea that they’re already going to the polls with the belief that they’re being cheated means they’ll misinterpret everything they see through that lens,” she said.Starbird’s group partnered with Stanford Internet Observatory on the Election Integrity Partnership ahead of the 2020 elections – a campaign during which a flood of misinformation swirled around the internet, with daily claims of unproven voter fraud.Starbird and her team helped document that flood, and in return congressional Republicans and conservative attorneys attacked her research, alleging it amounted to censorship and violated the first amendment.Starbird, a misinformation researcher, herself became the subject of an ongoing misinformation campaign – but said she would not let that deter her from her research. Her team wasn’t the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research, she noted: researchers across the country have received subpoenas, letters and criticism, all attempting to frame misinformation research as partisan and as censorship.Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, served as the ringleader of this effort in Congress, using his power to investigate groups and researchers that work to counter misinformation, particularly as it related to elections and Covid-19. One practice that especially upset Jordan and his colleagues was when researchers would flag misleading information to social media companies, who would sometimes respond by amending factchecks or taking down false posts entirely.Nor is it just Congress attacking anti-misinformation work. A federal lawsuit from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech. A new lawsuit from the state of Texas and two rightwing media companies takes aim at the Global Engagement Center, a state department agency that focuses on how foreign powers spread information.The pressure campaign has chilled misinformation research just ahead of the pivotal 2024 presidential election, as some academics switch what they focus on and others figure out ways to better explain their work to a mixed audience. One thing they will probably no longer do is flag posts to social media companies, as the practice remains an issue in several ongoing court cases.Starbird has landed in the middle of all this. Her work was included in Jordan’s investigation, her emails were sought by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, she was sued in another lawsuit brought by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, and she and the center have been inundated by records requests.“In a few years, I’ll look back and say it was a really valuable perspective,” she said. “Because I’ve seen campaigns that were extremely effective at using disinformation to smear the reputation of people – so much so that I’ve seen someone that I was studying take his own life. I know that the stakes are really high in these spaces.”Jordan’s committee released reports with outlandish claims about how the government, researchers and tech companies “colluded” to “censor Americans”. Starbird served on an external advisory committee for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; when a Republican congressional report claimed the committee tried to censor people, when in reality it solely advised the security agency, Starbird fired back, calling the Republican report a “manipulated narrative”.“It was really weird to watch how they so effectively created this false narrative. It was frustrating,” she said. “And then at some point, you step back and you’re like, ‘You gotta appreciate their craft – good at what they did.’”Starbird started her academic career by studying online volunteerism, then misinformation campaigns after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013. She’s seen the work of political actors grow more sophisticated in spreading disinformation.The reason that research into election misinformation is labelled as biased was because it’s largely the right that spreads election lies these days, she said. Widespread misinformation shared by rightwing politicians and activists since the 2020 election culminated in the January 6 insurrection, which was motivated by false claims of electoral fraud, almost all of which have been thrown out of court.“The influencers, political elites on the right, have embraced those lies, which is one of the reasons that they spread further,” she said. “So this is an asymmetric phenomenon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Now, they may argue and say that they’re not false, and it’s really hard to have a conversation if you don’t have a shared view of reality.”Her work now focuses on election processes and procedures. She says she now refers more to “rumors” than to “misinformation” – both because “rumor” has more historical context, and because “misinformation” is a much more politicized term, co-opted by people outside the field, similar to how the legitimate phenomenon of “fake news” on social media before the 2016 election got twisted by Donald Trump into an insult to journalists.Her team will probably not flag content to social media platforms, either. “That piece of the work has been so effectively twisted into a censorship narrative that it becomes hard to help out in that way,” she said.While she had hoped to work with local and state elections officials – the experts on how elections work, who have themselves been subject to harassment – for context and help assessing viral rumors, “it’s increasingly hard for us to think that we’ll be able to communicate with them in a way that would be helpful for them, helpful for the world, and not cause more damage because it becomes fodder for these false claims”.With misinformation research under fire and social media platforms less willing to factcheck viral posts, 2024 could see a flood of voter fraud lies, making for an even more contentious election than in 2020. Even if social media platforms, which are optimized to spread the most attention-getting posts, did more work to address misinformation, they would still be accused of bias and censorship, Starbird said.She fears that the election fraud narrative has now “sunk in” so deeply for so many Americans on the right that it could end up creating worse laws and procedures – and actually increase the possibility of a successful foreign interference campaign in US elections.“Right now, we’ve got a space where we may be in a ‘Boy who cried wolf’ situation, where there’s so much misinformation about election integrity that if we have a true threat, we may miss it,” Starbird said.Still, despite the loud voices on the right continuing to spread disinformation about elections, Starbird thinks the people who got drawn into those narratives before might be a little savvier now, perhaps less likely to fall for some of the “more extravagant” claims again.“I am hopeful that we’ve seen the worst of it,” she said. “I’m not confident we’ve seen the worst of it.” More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Nikki Haley’s comment on the US civil war was no gaffe | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      Nikki Haley’s feigning of staggering ignorance about the cause of the US civil war unintentionally revealed her quandary in the Republican party. It was not a gaffe. Though it was a stumble, it was not a mistake, but a message she has delivered for years and that has served her well until now. Her carefully crafted and closely memorized garble was a deracinated version of an old lie, which she had used before to attempt to mollify hostile camps in order to skid by. Some in the past praised her evasive formula as governor of South Carolina as her finest moment. It lifted her star. Yet one simple question instantly produced panicky rapid eye movements that are the telltale sign of a person desperately cornered, followed by an unstoppable stream of blather that she hoped would make it all evaporate into a meaningless ether but instead this time slid her into an abyss. Her performance, the most memorable of her entire career, was so devastating that even Ron DeSantis, the paragon of political aphasia, in the most cogent remark of his campaign, indeed his life, commented: “Yikes.” Nikki Haley turned Ron DeSantis woke.“What was the cause of the United States civil war?” a man asked Haley at a campaign town hall in North Conway, New Hampshire. She reacted as if she were being physically threatened. Haley immediately turned her back to the questioner, breathed fast and heavy into the microphone, and walked quickly away. When she swiveled to face the crowd, she did not speak at first. Gaining her composure, she replied with an accusatory edge: “Well, don’t come with an easy question.”Of course, the answer is an easy one for any eighth grader. But for Haley it went to the molten core of the history and politics of South Carolina, where she had been governor, to the southern strategy that realigned the Republican party, and to its hard crystallization in Trump’s party. She retreated as if struck, not because she didn’t know the obvious answer, but because she knows that it is more fraught than it has been in decades.“I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley began haltingly. Then she stopped.“What do you think the cause of the civil war was?” she asked her questioner. He replied that he was not running for president and wished to hear her thoughts. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley continued, and continued, and continued. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”She looked to her questioner in the hope that her flood of verbosity had overwhelmed him. “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” he said. She shot back with her own question, as if in a spat: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” She wanted the townsman to answer for her. “You’ve answered my question, thank you,” he said. With that, he had won his point. Haley shifted again, and said: “Next question.”Haley’s whole possibility of success in her contest with Trump depends upon winning New Hampshire, and within that open primary, unlike the closed primaries that follow it, she is relying on drawing independent voters. Her recoil from the question about the civil war was an ingrained instinct. She keeps trying to pass the southern test.Her language in New Hampshire was the same as the rhetoric she honed in South Carolina. The Wall Street Journal editorially praised her in 2010 for an interview she gave to a neo-Confederate group, the Palmetto Patriots. “‘You had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition, and I think you had another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change,’ she said. She did not use the word ‘slavery’ but hinted at it, saying that ‘everyone is supposed to be free.’” The Journal noted approvingly: “She pledged to retain a political compromise that gave the Confederate flag a place of prominence in front of the State House, a position that puts her within the mainstream among GOP leaders in the state.”Haley’s answer was an attempt to repeat her balancing act in the birthplace of secession, offering ‘lost cause lite’. Her rationale was a muffled echo of that of Confederate leaders justifying secession. Jefferson Davis, in his speech resigning from the Senate on 9 January 1861, before assuming the Confederate presidency, appealed to “the principles upon which our Government was founded”, and his “high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited”. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice-president and framer of the Confederate constitution, in his speech of 21 March 1861 proclaiming slavery as its “cornerstone”, stated that it “secures all our ancient rights, franchises, and liberties”. The Confederates consistently described opposition to their insurrection as “coercion”, to which Lincoln gave one of his many answers on 18 April 1864: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.”It may not have occurred to Haley that there are no Confederate monuments in New Hampshire. There are nearly 100 in the state to the Union cause. One-tenth of the population of New Hampshire at the time served in the Union army: 32,750 men, of whom nearly 5,000 died, 130 in Confederate prisons. The fifth New Hampshire volunteer infantry had the highest casualty rate of any Union regiment. About 900 soldiers from New Hampshire fought at Gettysburg, suffering 368 casualties, many of whom are buried at the cemetery there, where Lincoln delivered his address explaining their sacrifice for a “government of, by and for the people”. The monument to the fifth New Hampshire is one of five monuments to Granite state units at the Gettysburg battlefield.If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction, and the history that both preceded and followed it, which has been apparent in her efforts to soften and cover it up.Surely, when she entered her office as governor in the state capitol of South Carolina in Columbia, Haley recognized the larger-than-life brass statue of John C Calhoun, ideologue of the master class and leader of nullification, who declared slavery to be a “positive good”, standing in the middle of the rotunda. The Confederate battle flag that flew above the capitol was raised by an act of the legislature in 1961 as a protest of defiance against civil rights and waved there when she was elected governor.On 17 June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi, murdered nine Black members of the Bible study group of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, intending to ignite a race war. In the aftermath, after a contentious debate in the legislature, the Confederate flag was removed from the capitol. Haley favored its lowering. In 2020, another John C Calhoun statue, which had stood on a pedestal 115ft above central Charleston for 120 years, was removed.Since the controversy over the Confederate flag, Haley has defended neo-Confederates who see it as a symbol of their “heritage” while trying to separate it from Dylann Roof. “For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble – traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,” she stated as governor. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and loser.”In a Washington Post op-ed, she wrote that the flag was “a symbol of slavery, discrimination, and hate for many people”. But, she added: “Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mistaken. They must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist. The tragedy of all of this is that it makes compromise far less possible.” In New Hampshire, she gave a blander argument, forgetting the false equivalence between those against slavery and those for “heritage”.Lee Atwater, the most adept Republican political consultant to emerge from the south in his generation, did not try to parse his self-justifications. He was also a voracious reader of books on the civil war, especially James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Atwater, of course, knew the cause was slavery. In the mid-1980s, when I was a reporter for the Washington Post, I had long discussions with him on the civil war. He was the one who gave me a tour of the capitol in Columbia and showed me the Calhoun statue.Atwater began as a protege of Strom Thurmond, who invented the modern southern strategy. In 1948, Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, ran for president as a segregationist on the Dixiecrat party ticket. Elected to the Senate, he switched parties to become a Republican. His support for Richard Nixon in winning the Republican nomination at the convention in 1968 was crucial. Thurmond brought in Atwater to run his 1976 re-election campaign, beginning Atwater’s ascent. In 1984, working for the Reagan re-election campaign, when I first met him, he drew a chart in my reporter’s notebook to diagram the populist-establishment dichotomy along party lines.Race was always the seam that Atwater mined. In 1988, as the campaign director for George HW Bush, he was behind the exploitation of Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of murder in Massachusetts, who on a weekend furlough program raped a white woman. The program had been instituted under a Republican governor, but Horton had been released while the governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic opponent, had been in office. Atwater publicly promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate”.Atwater explained in 1991 the evolution of race as a political weapon in the southern strategy. “Y’all don’t quote me on this,” he said. “You start out in 1954 by saying: ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”That same year, Atwater died of brain cancer, but not before, seeking redemption, he issued a deathbed apology to Dukakis for his “naked cruelty”.Haley came on the South Carolina scene post-Thurmond and post-Atwater, certainly aware of those who had turned the state Republican in the southern strategy. Her lowering of the Confederate flag has been her chief credential of moderation. Then Trump came down the escalator. Atwater was the partner in the consulting firm with Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, who unlike Atwater never has had any use for apologies.Posed a question about the civil war, Haley tried to repeat her old balancing act, but she lost her equilibrium. Even if she had not been stunned and was instead fluent, she could not bridge the gap in the party of Trump with ‘lost cause lite’. Scrambling belatedly to say the questioner was “a Democratic plant” and that the civil war was about slavery after all did not solve her problem. Trump has now dispensed with the code words and symbols of the southern strategy. He has gone to a darker place, railing about “vermin” and “poisoning of the blood”.The unexpected incident showed Haley to be slight, frightened and cowardly. Her deeper problem is that she is a slave to her party.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      ‘A formulaic game’: former officials say Trump’s attacks threaten rule of law

      by

      As Donald Trump faces 91 felony counts with four trials slated for 2024, including two tied to his drives to overturn his 2020 election loss, his attacks on prosecutors are increasingly conspiratorial and authoritarian in style and threaten the rule of law, say former justice department officials.The former US president’s vitriolic attacks on a special counsel and two state prosecutors as well as some judges claim in part that the charges against Trump amount to “election interference” since he’s seeking the presidency again, and that “presidential immunity” protects Trump for his multiple actions to subvert Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.But ex-officials and other experts say Trump’s campaign and social media bashing of the four sets of criminal charges – echoed in ways by his lawyers’ court briefs – are actually a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and very tenuous legal claims, laced with Trump’s narcissism and authoritarian impulses aimed at delaying his trials or quashing the charges.Much of Trump’s animus is aimed at the special counsel Jack Smith, who has charged him with four felony counts for election subversion, and 40 felony counts for mishandling classified documents when his presidency ended.Trump’s chief goal in attacking Smith, whom he’s labelled a “deranged lunatic”, and other prosecutors and judges is to delay his trials well into 2024, or until after the election, when Trump could pardon himself if he wins, experts say.Similarly, Trump has targeted the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who has brought a racketeering case in Georgia against Trump and 18 others for trying to overturn Biden’s win there, branding her a “rabid partisan”.Right before Christmas, Trump’s lawyers asked an appeals court in Washington to throw out Smith’s four-count subversion indictment, arguing that his actions occurred while he was in office and merited presidential immunity, and Trump in a Truth Social post on Christmas Eve blasted Smith for “election interference”.In an 82-page brief rebutting Trump’s lawyers on December 30, Smith and his legal team wrote that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in 2020 “threaten to undermine democracy,” and stressed Trump’s sweeping immunity claims for all his actions while in office “threatens to license Presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.”Former justice department officials say Trump’s rhetoric and tactics to tar prosecutors and judges are diversionary moves to distract from the serious charges he faces – especially for trying to subvert the 2020 election.“Claiming the federal criminal cases or the Georgia Rico action are election interference, and railing constantly about the character of the prosecutors, judges and others, is just a formulaic game to Trump,” Ty Cobb, a White House counsel during the Trump years and a former DoJ official, said.“Delay is his major strategic objective in all these cases. These criminal cases were started because of Trump’s criminal acts and his refusal to allow the peaceful transfer of government for the first time in US history. Trump’s constitutional objections to the trial-related issues are all frivolous including his claim of presidential immunity and double jeopardy.”Cobb added that Trump’s “everyone is bad but me and I am the victim” rants, lies and frivolous imperious motions and appeals are just his “authoritarianism in service of his narcissism”.Other ex-officials offer equally harsh assessments of Trump’s defenses.“The reality is that Trump has clearly done a series of illegal things and the system is holding him to account for things that he’s done,” said the former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer, who served during the George HW Bush administration. “He’s telling more lies to mischaracterize prosecutions that we should be thankful for.”Yet Trump keeps escalating his high-voltage rhetoric and revealing his authoritarian tendencies. Trump even bragged that Russian president Vladimir Putin in December echoed Trump’s charges of political persecution and election interference to bolster his claims.“Even Vladimir Putin … says that Biden’s – and this is a quote – ‘politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy’,” Trump told a campaign rally in Durham, New Hampshire.For good measure, Trump complimented two other foreign authoritarian leaders, calling Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, “highly respected” and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “very nice”.In November Trump sparked fire for slamming his opponents on the left as “vermin”, a term that echoed Adolf Hitler’s language, and the ex-president has more than once pledged in authoritarian style to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.Likewise, critics have voiced alarm at Trump’s vow of “retribution” against some powerful foes in both parties if he’s re-elected, including ex-attorney general Bill Barr. That pledge fits with Trump painting himself a victim of a vendetta by “deep state” forces at the justice department, the FBI and other agencies Trump and his allies want to rein in while expanding his executive authority, if he’s the Republican nominee and wins the presidency again.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCritics say Trump’s attacks on the prosecutions are increasingly conspiratorial.“Of course, it’s true that Trump is the undisputed master of election interference, so he certainly knows the field,” Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a leading Trump critic in the House, said.“It’s hard to think of a greater case of election interference than what Trump did in 2020 and 2021. His claim of election interference is meant to give him a kind of political immunity from the consequences of his criminal actions.“He’s basically inviting the public to believe that the legal system’s response to his stealing government documents or trying to overthrow an election are illegal attempts to interfere with his political career.”Raskin noted there was some Trump-style logic to citing Putin in his defense.“We know Putin is Trump’s hero and effective cult master,” the congressman said. “So it makes sense that Trump would try to elevate him as a kind of moral arbiter. Trump would love a world where Vladimir Putin would decide the integrity of elections and prosecutions. Wouldn’t that be nice for the autocrats?”Trump’s modus operandi to stave off his trials is emblematic of how he has operated in the past, say some ex-prosecutors.“Trump has a habit of picking up allegations made against him and, like a kid in the playground, accusing the critics of doing the same thing”, such as crying “electoral interference”, said the Columbia law professor and former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman.Richman stressed that “I wouldn’t assume Trump is trying to mimic other authoritarians. He just shares their values, or the lack of them.”Other scholars see Trump’s desperate defenses and incendiary attacks on the legal system as part of his DNA.“The Trump team is looking to cobble together a defense for the indefensible,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. “Trump has long been looking for and finding ways to protect himself whenever he crosses legal lines. This is who he is.”Naftali suggested: “Trump announced his second re-election bid much earlier than is traditional for major candidates. A likely reason why he announced so early – and then hardly campaigned for a long time – was to pre-empt any indictments so that he could later denounce them as ‘election interference’ and perhaps undermine any future trials. This is a man who lies and creates a reality most favorable to him.”More broadly, Raskin views Trump’s attacks on the legal system as hallmarks of fascist rulers.“Fascism is all about the destruction of the rule of law in the service of a dictator. It’s important for Trump to continue to attack our essential legal institutions. He’s also gotten to the point of dehumanizing his opponents by using words like ‘vermin’. Violence permeates his rhetoric,” he said.“Trump feels entirely emboldened by his supporters. He’s been given license by the Republican party to go as far as he wants.” More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      It’s the democracy, stupid … and other issues set to shape the 2024 US election

      by

      Whether or not the 2024 US presidential election presents the expected Joe Biden v Donald Trump rematch, much will be at stake.From the future of reproductive rights to the chances of meaningful action on climate change, from the strength of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia to the fate of democracy in America itself, existential issues are set to come to the fore.Economy“It’s the economy, stupid.” So said the Democratic strategist James Carville, in 1992, as an adviser to Bill Clinton. Most Americans thought stewardship of the economy should change: Clinton beat an incumbent president, George HW Bush.More than 30 years later, under Joe Biden, the post-Covid recovery seems on track. Unemployment is low, the Dow at all-time highs. That should bode well for Biden but the key question is whether enough Americans think the economy is strong, or think it is working for them in particular. It seems many do not. Cost-of-living concerns dominate public polling, inflation remains high. Republican threats to social security and Medicare might offset such worries – hence Biden (and indeed Donald Trump) seizing on any hint that a Republican candidate (see, Nikki Haley) might pose a threat to such programmes.EqualityRon DeSantis made attacks on LGBTQ+ rights a hallmark of his attempt to “Make America Florida”. The hardline governor’s tanking campaign suggests how well that has gone down but Republican efforts to demonise all forms of so-called “woke” ideology should not be discounted. There have been tangible results: anti-trans legislation, book bans and restrictions on LGBTQ+ issues in education, the end of race-based affirmative action in university admissions thanks to the conservative-packed supreme court.Continuing struggles on Capitol Hill over immigration, and Republicans’ usual focus on crime in major cities, show traditional race-inflected battles will play their customary role on the campaign trail, particularly as Trump uses extremist “blood and soil” rhetoric in front of eager crowds. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, a distinctly worrying sign: Black and Hispanic support for Biden is no longer such a sure thing.AbortionHigh-ranking Democrats are clear: the party will focus on Republican attacks on abortion rights, from the Dobbs v Jackson supreme court ruling that struck down Roe v Wade last year to the forthcoming mifepristone case, draconian bans in Republican states and candidates’ support for such bans.For Democrats, it makes tactical sense: the threat to women’s reproductive rights is a rare issue on which the party polls very strongly and has clearly fuelled a series of electoral wins, even in conservative states, since Dobbs was handed down.Trump, however, clearly also recognises the potency of the issue – while trying to dodge responsibility for appointing three justices who voted to strike down Roe. Haley and DeSantis have tried to duck questions about their records and plans on abortion. Whoever the Republican candidate is, they can expect relentless attacks.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionForeign policyThe Israel-Gaza war presents a fiendish proposition for Biden: how to satisfy or merely mollify both the Israel lobby and large sections of his own party, particularly the left and the young more sympathetic to the Palestinians.Proliferating protests against Israel’s pounding of Gaza and the West Bank show the danger of coming unglued from the base. A recent Capitol Hill hearing, meanwhile, saw Republicans claim a political victory with the resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania over alleged antisemitism amid student protests for Palestinian rights.Elsewhere, Biden continues to lead a global coalition in support of Ukraine in its fight against Russia but further US funding is held up by Republicans seeking draconian immigration reform, some keen to abandon Kyiv altogether. Throw in the lasting effects of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan (teed up by Trump but fumbled by Biden), questions about what the US should do should China attack Taiwan, and the threat Trump poses to US membership of Nato, and heavy fire on foreign policy is guaranteed throughout election year.DemocracyIf Biden is happy to be seen as a protector of democracy abroad, he is increasingly keen to stress the threat to democracy at home. After all, his most likely opponent refused to accept the result of the 2020 election, incited the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, has been linked to plans to slash the federal government in a second term, and has even said he wants to be a “dictator” on day one.Trump will no doubt maintain the lie that his 2020 defeat was the result of electoral fraud as various criminal cases proceed towards trial, 17 of 91 state and federal charges concerning election subversion. For Biden, the issue has been profitable at the polls. DeSantis and Haley, though, must dance around the subject, seeking not to alienate Trump supporters. The New York Times sums up their responses, dispiritingly, thus: DeSantis “has signed restrictions on voting rights in Florida, and long avoided questions about 2020”; Haley “said Biden’s victory was legitimate, but has played up the risk of voter fraud more broadly”.ClimateIf Trump threatens US democracy, the climate crisis threatens the US itself. From forest fires to hurricanes and catastrophic floods, it is clear climate change is real. Public polling reflects this: 70% of Americans – strikingly, including 50% of Republicans – want meaningful action. But that isn’t reflected in Republican campaigning. Trump says he doesn’t believe human activity contributes to climate change, nor that climate change is making extreme weather worse, and is opposed to efforts to boost clean energy. Haley does believe humans are causing climate change and making weather worse, but worked for Trump as UN ambassador when the US pulled out of the Paris climate deal and opposes clean energy incentives. DeSantis is closer to Trump – and wants to end regulation of emissions.Biden’s record on climate may be criticised by campaigners but his record in office places him firmly against such Republican views. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Former aides warn of ‘running out of time’ to prevent Trump re-election

      by

      The re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 could “end American democracy as we know it”, according to three women who worked for him in the White House during his chaotic term in office.All three gave testimony to the US House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat as well as the 6 January 6 Capitol attack staged by his supporters. And they warned in an unprecedented television interview on Sunday that time was short to prevent a second Trump administration in which they insist his behavior would be much worse.“People in general have short memories, and might forget the chaos of the Trump years,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary who resigned on the day of the deadly Capitol riot, said on ABC’s This Week.“They also might not just be paying attention to what he’s saying now – and the threat to democracy that exists. It does really concern me if he makes it to the general [election] that he could win. I’m still hopeful that we can defeat him in the primaries, but we’re running out of time.”Matthews was joined in the interview by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a key witness against Trump during the House committee’s public hearings in 2022, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, his former communications director, who said she dreaded him returning to office.“Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly,” Griffin said.“We all witnessed him trying to steal a democratic election before and go into historic and unconstitutional lengths to do so. That just shows he’s willing to basically break every barrier to get into power and to stay into power.“What scares me as much as him and his retribution is the almost cult-like following he has, the threats, the harassment, the death threats that you get when he targets you, is really horrifying and has no place in our American discourse.”About two days before the interview aired, someone placed a fake emergency call to police that prompted armed officers to arrive at the home of Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, after she removed Trump from the state’s presidential primary under the US constitution’s insurrection clause. Bellows was not home when the attempted “swatting” call was made.Hutchinson, ex-aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, said voters needed to believe Trump when he said he would be a dictator on his first day back in the White House.“The fact that he feels that he needs to lean into being a dictator alone shows that he is a weak and feeble man,” she said.Matthews, meanwhile, said Trump had already signaled what his second administration would look like.“We don’t need to speculate because we already saw it play out,” she said.“To this day, he still doubles down on the fact that he thinks that the election was stolen and fraudulent. And his rhetoric has just gotten increasingly erratic. He’s literally called for things like doing away with parts of the constitution, [and] wanting to weaponize the department of justice to enact revenge on his political enemies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I knew that coming forward and speaking out against Donald Trump I could … face security threats, or death threats, online harassment. Despite all the personal sacrifice, I knew that ultimately it was the right thing to do. I just would encourage others to come forward because they’re running out of time in order to try to stop Trump from being in the Oval Office again.”The courage of the three women in speaking against Trump was a recurrent theme in the interview by This Week’s co-anchor Jonathan Karl. Martin and Hutchinson spoke of secret meetings in the basement of the Capitol with Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans who sat on the House committee, and their loss of friendships with others in the Trump White House who felt the women had betrayed them.“There were critical parts of history that the public would not know if not for Cassidy Hutchinson,” Griffin said.“Other senior officials witnessed them, but did not come forward. They did not testify, whether it was credible threats about the attack on the Capitol, that people showing up that day were going to be armed, that there was a scheme to try to stop the vice-president certifying the election.“I credit these women who are younger than me and had not as senior of titles, and stepped forward. For me, I want to be able to look my future kids in the eye and say when history called, I did the right thing, and I had the courage to do it.“That matters to me more than any future job or power structure that might exist if he’s president again.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump 2024 trials in limbo as supreme court becomes entangled

      by

      When Donald Trump was indicted in multiple criminal cases this summer, the conventional wisdom was that the former US president could spend vast amounts of time during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign stuck in courtrooms for back-to-back trials in New York, Florida and Washington.But the reality is that with the federal 2020 election interference case on hold pending appeals, and repeated delays pushing the classified documents case behind schedule by several months, for instance, Trump may find himself in courtrooms far less than expected.Trump has pleaded not guilty in his criminal cases: plotting to overturn the 2020 election in Washington, retaining national defense information and obstructing justice in Florida, conspiring to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, and paying hush money to an adult film star in New York.The US district judge Tanya Chutkan, overseeing the federal election case, set a trial date for March 2024. And with her clear determination to keep that date – including warning that she could even move it forward – the case was widely seen as the one to take place before next year’s election.(There has been no trial date set in Georgia, though the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has proposed an August start, while there has been uncertainty over whether the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg would put his case on hold should a federal trial happen.)That was until the US supreme court became entangled in the case in two major ways this month, in a development that could have far-reaching implications for the timing and for the eventual outcome of the trial.First, the court declined to decide the question of whether Trump could dismiss the charges on presidential immunity grounds before the US court of appeals for the DC circuit had issued its own ruling, remanding the case back to what could kickstart a lengthy appeals process.The supreme court then became entangled in a second way when, two days later, it agreed to review whether an obstruction statute that prosecutors have used against Capitol attack rioters – but formed two of the four charges against Trump – could be used in relation to January 6.Separately, the supreme court is almost certain to take up Trump’s expected appeal against the Colorado supreme court disqualifying him from being on the ballot for the state Republican primary under the 14th amendment, after finding that Trump “engaged” in insurrection.Depending on how quickly the court schedules oral arguments, how quickly it issues rulings and what decisions it ultimately makes, the timing and scope of the special counsel’s case against Trump could be dramatically altered just months before voters choose whether to give him a second term.“In the obstruction case, limiting the application of the obstruction statute – as the court has previously done – could knock out or impact that same charge in the indictment,” said former House counsel and current defense lawyer Stanley Brand, whose firm Brand Woodward has also represented January 6 defendants.The wild card, Brand added, was with the Colorado decision. “A ruling by the court on whether January 6 constituted an insurrection under the 14th amendment could similarly cast a shadow on allegations in the indictment,” he said.The worst-case outcome for the special counsel is that the federal election case remains frozen for weeks while the DC circuit considers the immunity question, Trump secures additional delay by seeking a rehearing before the full circuit, and then rules against the use of the obstruction statute.There is the possibility that the supreme court gives the special counsel its best outcome, where it takes the immunity claim quickly should the DC circuit rule against Trump, preserving the March trial date, and decides the obstruction statute is not being used too broadly and applies to Trump.But the uncertainty over two central parts of the special counsel’s election interference case now has a direct impact on whether Trump will spend more of his 2024 campaign in court, or on the trail.ImmunityThe US supreme court’s first entanglement was with Trump’s foremost defense to charges that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election results: that the indictment should be dismissed because he enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution for actions related to his “official duties” as president.The special counsel Jack Smith on Saturday issued a court filing in which his team said no one, not even presidents, were above the law. Smith’s argument suggested that, as president, Trump should be held to an even higher standard to protect the electoral process and reiterated that Trump engaged in “illegal acts to remain in power despite losing an election”.On Friday, the court declined to grant certiorari, remanding the matter back to the DC circuit to decide in a move that could carry profound consequences for the viability of the March trial.Even if the three-judge panel at the DC circuit – Florence Pan, Michelle Childs and Karen Henderson – rules against Trump quickly, Trump can then ask the full appeals court to rehear the case en banc, and then has 90 days to lodge his final appeal to the supreme court.The now-cemented potential for delay was laid out by the special counsel’s supreme court litigator and former solicitor general Michael Dreeben.“The court of appeals’ expedited briefing and argument schedule does not assure an appellate decision that will give this court adequate time to grant review, receive briefing, hold argument, and resolve this case in advance of the scheduled trial date,” Dreeben wrote in the government’s brief.Trump has also made no secret that his overarching legal strategy, for all of his criminal cases, is to pursue procedural delays. If the cases do not go to trial before next year’s election and he wins a second term, then he could direct his handpicked attorney general to drop all of the charges.And even if the case did go to trial before November, the people said, Trump’s preference would have been for the trial to take place as close as possible to the election because it would have given his 2024 campaign ammunition to miscast the criminal case against him as political in nature.ObstructionThe supreme court is also set to consider next year whether federal prosecutors can charge January 6 riot defendants with a statute that makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding of Congress, which also formed the basis of two out of the four charges against Trump.The case involves Joseph Fischer, who was charged with obstruction for assaulting police officers during the riot, which he sought to dismiss, arguing the obstruction statute passed under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 in response to the Enron scandal, had to do with document or evidence tampering.The US district judge Carl Nichols, who presided in the case, interpreted the statute as requiring prosecutors to show that the defendant took some action with respect to a document or record and did not apply to Fischer as he assaulted police officers at the Capitol.But a split three-judge panel at the US court of appeals for the DC circuit reversed the decision, deciding that obstruction applied more broadly and encompassed impeding any official proceeding. Fischer, and two other January 6 defendants, appealed to the supreme court to resolve the issue.If the supreme court decides that section 1512 of title 18 of the US criminal code was being used too broadly, that could cripple part of the case against Trump as the special counsel looks to draw a line at trial from the former president’s January 6 speech to the violence.“The court’s grant of certiorari in the Fischer case over over the solicitor general’s objection may foretell trouble for the government’s use of the statute,” Brand said.And if the court strikes down the use of the obstruction statute because it disliked the way prosecutors were using general conspiracy statutes for specific crimes, like it did with Jeffrey Skilling in the Enron scandal, it could undercut the remaining general conspiracy statutes used in the indictment against Trump, Brand added. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      How 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok

      by

      Banning TikTok in the US seemed almost inevitable at the start of 2023. The previous year saw a trickle of legislative actions against the short-form video app, after dozens of individual states barred TikTok from government devices in late 2022 over security concerns. At the top of the new year, the US House followed suit, and four universities blocked TikTok from campus wifi.The movement to prohibit TikTok grew into a flash flood by spring. CEO Shou Zi Chew was called before Congress for brutal questioning in March. By April – with support from the White House (and Joe Biden’s predecessor) – it seemed a federal ban of the app was not just possible, but imminent.But now, as quickly as the deluge arrived, it has petered out – with the US Senate commerce committee confirming in December it would not be taking up TikTok-related legislation before the end of the year. With the final word from the Senate, 2023 became the year Congress forgot to ban TikTok.“A lot of the momentum that was gained after the initial flurry of attention has faded,” said David Greene, a civil liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “It seems now like the idea of a ban was being pushed more so to make political points and less as a serious effort to legislate.”Lots of legislation, little actionThe political war over TikTok centered on allegations that its China-based parent company, ByteDance, could collect sensitive user data and censor content that goes against the demands of the Chinese Communist party.TikTok, which has more than 150 million users in the United States, denies it improperly uses US data and has emphasized its billion-dollar efforts to store that information on servers outside its home country. Reports have cast doubt on the veracity of some of TikTok’s assertions about user data. The company declined to comment on a potential federal ban.With distress over the influence of social media giants mounting for years, and tensions with China high after the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon hovering over the US in February 2023, attacks on TikTok became more politically viable for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Legislative efforts ensued, and intensified.The House foreign affairs committee voted in March along party lines on a bill aimed at TikTok that Democrats said would require the administration to effectively ban the app and other subsidiaries of ByteDance. The US treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) in March demanded that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell off the app or face the possibility of a ban. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, and more than two dozen other senators in April sponsored legislation – backed by the White House – that would give the administration new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they pose national security threats.But none of these laws ever made it to a vote, and many have stalled entirely as lawmakers turned their attention to the boom in artificial intelligence. Warner told Reuters in December that the bill he authored has faced intensive lobbying from TikTok and had little chance of survival. “There is going to be pushback on both ends of the political spectrum,” he said.The Montana effectMontana passed a total statewide ban on TikTok in May, to start on 1 January 2024, setting the stage for a federal one. That momentum for a nationwide prohibition ebbed, however, when a US judge last week blocked the legislation from going into effect – a move that TikTok applauded.“We are pleased the judge rejected this unconstitutional law and hundreds of thousands of Montanans can continue to express themselves, earn a living, and find community on TikTok,” the company’s statement reads.In a preliminary injunction blocking the ban, US district judge Donald Molloy said the law “oversteps state power and infringes on the constitutional rights of users”. The closely watched decision indicated that broader bans are unlikely to be successful.“The Montana court blocking the effort to ban TikTok not only threw a wet blanket on any federal efforts to do the same, but sent a clear message to every lawmaker that banning an app is a violation of the first amendment,” said Carl Szabo, general counsel at the freedom of speech advocacy group NetChoice, of which TikTok is a member.The EFF’s Greene, who also watched the Montana case closely, echoed that the results proved what many free speech advocates have long argued: a broad ban of an app is not viable under US law.“This confirmed what most people assumed, which is that what is being suggested is blatantly not possible,” he said. “Free speech regulation requires really, really precise tailoring to avoid banning more speech than necessary. And a total ban on an app simply does not do that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolitical discussions around the ban also exposed a need for comprehensive privacy legislation, Greene said. The same politicians raising concerns about the Chinese government collecting data had done little to address companies like Meta collecting similar reams of data in the US.“The ideas that were floated were legally problematic and belied a real, sincere interest in addressing privacy harms,” he said. “I think that can cause anyone to question whether they really cared about users.”Election year fearsMeanwhile, some analysts think Congress and the White House are unlikely to even attempt to ban TikTok in 2024, an election year, given the app’s popularity with young voters.Joe Biden’s re-election campaign team has been reportedly debating whether to join TikTok, on which the president does not currently have an official page, to attempt to reach more young voters. Nearly half of people between 18 and 30 in the US use TikTok, and 32% of users in that age group say they regularly consume news there. To date, Vivek Ramaswamy is the only Republican candidate to join the app, a move which has elicited lashings from his opponents in multiple debates.“The same lawmakers calling for a ban are going to need to pivot to online platforms like TikTok for their upcoming get-out-the-vote efforts,” said Szabo. “To cut off a major avenue of reaching voters during an election year doesn’t make political sense.”Even as interest in banning TikTok wanes – politically and among voters – the efforts are not entirely dead. Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, told Reuters she is still working on legislation and in talks with federal agencies, noting that the Senate held a secure briefing on concerns about foreign influence by way of social media last month.Even as the interest and political power to fuel a TikTok ban wanes, social networks are going to be under the magnifying glass in the coming year, said Szabo.“As we go into 2024, I will say that control of speech on the internet is going to be even more heated, as lawmakers try to control what people can say about their campaigns,” he said. “I would also expect to see those very same politicians using the platform to raise money and to get out the vote.”Reuters contributed reporting More