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      Pence won’t say if criminal conviction should rule Trump out as president

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      Donald Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, refused to say if Trump should be barred from returning to the White House if he is convicted on any of 91 criminal charges against him.“I think that he’s to be left to the American people,” Pence told ABC’s This Week, on Sunday. “Let’s have the former president have his day in court. Let’s maintain a presumption of innocence.”Trump faces charges concerning federal and state election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments to a porn star. He also faces civil cases involving defamation, alleged rape and his business affairs, contributing to a schedule of trials in the election year.Nonetheless, he leads polling by wide margins nationally and in key states.On Sunday, ahead of the first debate in Milwaukee on Wednesday, CBS News released a new poll. Among Republicans, a whopping 62% picked Trump to just 16% for Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor in second place. Pence received 5% support, placing fourth.Pence and other qualifiers for the debate – a contest Trump will skip for an interview with Tucker Carlson – have backed a Republican National Committee pledge requiring support for the nominee.On ABC, Pence was asked about the case of James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat who in 2002 became one of only five people ever expelled from the US House after being convicted on corruption charges. Then a congressman from Indiana, Pence voted for that expulsion.Pence’s host, Jon Karl, asked: “Would you hold that same standard for the White House?”Pence said: “I would tell you that it is the function of the Congress to determine membership where there’s ethical violations and I remember the Traficant case from 20 years ago, it was really quite outrageous.“But if you’re saying would I apply that to my former running mate in this race, look, I think that he’s to be left to the American people. Let’s have the former president have his day in court. Let’s maintain a presumption of innocence and in this matter, and any other matter that unfolded this week here in Georgia” – a reference to Trump’s state-level election subversion case – “but I’ve said many times, I would have preferred that these matters be left to the judgment of the American people.“No one’s above the law. But with regard to the president’s future, my hope is when we get to that debate stage, and I’m still kind of hoping maybe he’ll come, is that we can really have a debate about the challenges facing the American people.”Elsewhere, the former Arkansas governor turned Trump critic Asa Hutchinson said he had qualified for the debate and would sign the pledge. Insisting that Trump would not be the nominee, Hutchinson refused to say what he would do if he were.Speaking from Des Moines, Iowa, Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union: “I am pleased to announce that we have met … the polling criteria and now we have met the 40,000 individual donor criteria. We submitted to the RNC 42,000 individual donors and I’m delighted.”FiveThirtyEight.com puts Hutchinson at 0.7% support – to 53.7% for Trump.“I’ll sign the pledge,” Hutchinson said. “I’m confident Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the party. And I’ve always supported the nominee. So I’m gonna sign the pledge.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPressed on whether he would support the man who sought to overturn the 2020 election and incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, Hutchinson repeated: “I’m going to support the nominee of the party. I do not expect it to be Donald Trump. And that I’m sure question will come up in the debate, so stay tuned for that.”’Conviction would not disqualify Trump from the presidency. But some say the US constitution might.Hutchinson said: “You can’t be asking us to support somebody that’s not perhaps even qualified under our constitution. I’m referring to the 14th amendment. A number of legal scholars said that [Trump] is disqualified because of his actions on January 6.”The 14th amendment says: “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice-president … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same … ”Hutchinson said: “There would have to be a separate lawsuit that would be filed, in which there would be a finding that the former president engaged in insurrection, and that would disqualify him. That’s one avenue. The other way would be that if a specific state made that determination on their own … Either way … I think it’s a serious jeopardy for Donald Trump.”Trump’s longtime leading challenger, DeSantis, has long been falling back. No dominant alternative has emerged but Hutchinson insisted his party was not risking a repeat of 2016, when voters did not coalesce around one alternative to Trump.“I don’t see that happening,” Hutchinson told CNN. “First of all, it’s really early. I talked to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and they’re gonna be late deciding, and that’s why you’re gonna see in Iowa, where Trump’s numbers come down first, it will be here.“… This debate is important … this is really a reduced number [of candidates] from 2016 with eight or nine on the stage. We’ll see who else qualifies for it but the voters are gonna be able to lock in on it, make decisions, and they’re not gonna be in a hurry to move. So everybody needs to be patient, including the media, and let this unfold over the next three or four months.“The right alternative to Donald Trump will surface.” More

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      Ron DeSantis calls Trump supporters ‘listless vessels’ in Republican broadside

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      His presidential campaign widely seen to be listing badly, Ron DeSantis fired a broadside at supporters of Donald Trump on Saturday, calling them “listless vessels”.“A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis told the Florida Standard.“The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow … whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”Truth Social is Trump’s social media platform, set up when he was suspended from mainstream platforms after the January 6 attack on Congress.Running for re-election under four criminal indictments and 91 separate charges, Trump nonetheless dominates the Republican primary, leading polling by as much as 40 points nationally and by wide margins in key states.DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has long been established as the strongest challenger. But amid campaign firings and reported financial struggles, that status has begun to erode, with the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy creeping up in polling.Trump is set to skip the first Republican debate, in Milwaukee on Wednesday, in favour of an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.Responding to DeSantis’s remarks to the Florida Standard, Trump aides sought to link the governor to the Democrat Trump beat for the presidency in 2016.“DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary [Clinton] and call[s] MAGA supporters ‘listless vessels,’” Steven Cheung wrote.A spokesperson for a Trump-aligned fundraising committee, Maga Inc, made explicit the claimed connection to remarks by Clinton which Trump successfully weaponised.“To Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters are ‘deplorables’. To Ron DeSantis, they are ‘listless vessels’,” Karoline Leavitt said. “The truth is, Trump supporters are patriots. DeSantis must immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.”DeSantis’s spokesperson, Bryan Griffin, said the governor was referring to supporters of Trump in Congress, not among voters.“The dishonest media refuses to report the facts,” Griffin wrote. “Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers are ‘listless vessels’. Why? Because Trump and DC insiders feel he is entitled to your vote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“… That’s why Ron DeSantis will be showing up on Wednesday night to debate, and Donald Trump will not.”The Florida Standard is a conservative website run by a young Republican, Will Witt, to whom DeSantis has regularly granted interviews.In the passage of the interview in question, the governor repeatedly targeted “establishment Republicans” and “Rinos”, meaning “Republicans in name only”.“I think that we have a stream in our party that views supporting Trump as whether you are a Rino or not,” he said. “And so you could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you’re kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a Rino.”DeSantis also said “there’ll be people who are huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have like incredibly liberal leftwing records that [are] really just atrocious and … then you have other people like [Texas] congressman Chip Roy, who’s endorsed me, [Kentucky] congressman Thomas Massie, these guys have records of principle.“… Ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual. The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle … all we are is listless vessels.” More

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      Could Trump be barred under the constitution’s ‘engaged in insurrection’ clause?

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      As Donald Trump fights a mountain of criminal charges, a separate battle over his eligibility to run for president in 2024 is fast emerging.The US constitution sets out just a handful of explicit requirements someone must meet to be the president. They must be at least 35 years old, a “natural-born” citizen, and a United States resident for at least 14 years. The constitution also bars someone who has served as president for two full terms from running again.None of those requirements disqualify Trump, or anyone else charged with a crime, from running for federal office.But one provision in the constitution, section 3 of the 14th amendment, makes things more complicated. It says that no person who has taken an oath “as an officer of the United States” can hold office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.That language disqualifies Trump from running for office because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, two prominent conservative scholars, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St Thomas, concluded in a much-discussed article to be published the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.“The bottom line is that Donald Trump ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion’ and gave ‘aid or comfort’ to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in section 3 of the 14th amendment,” Baude and Paulsen wrote in their 126-page article, which traces the history and original understanding of the amendment. “If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close.”The provision was enacted after the civil war to bar those who had joined the Confederacy from holding federal office, Baude and Paulsen note in their article. Never before has it been tested to bar a presidential candidate from office.“I think it’s really actually very clearcut,” said Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society (the group has reportedly instructed him not to speak to any journalist who identifies him as a co-founder). “Section 3 nowhere limits itself to the civil war or Confederates who broke their oath. It’s in general language, and so it applies to anyone who incites an insurrection or rebellion,” he added, noting that he believed the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an insurrection.Disqualification under the 14th amendment does not require a criminal conviction, Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), said in an interview earlier this month. The push to disqualify Trump is likely to play out at the state level in parallel to both the federal and state cases criminally charging Trump and allies in connection with their efforts to overturn the election. The left-leaning group Free Speech for People has already sent letters to election officials in 10 states urging them to declare Trump ineligible to run for office under the 14th amendment. Crew is also preparing to file litigation in several states to disqualify Trump from the ballot, Bookbinder said.“It’s really important to resolve this as soon as possible and definitely before the election and not afterwards,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University. “I am worried that if this doesn’t get resolved definitively, this issue could arise on January 6, 2025 if Trump were to win the electoral college having been on the ballot.“You could envision an effort to try and disqualify Trump after he’s won. And I think that would be a disaster. That would be a real constitutional crisis,” he added.Even if Trump winds up being constitutionally disqualified, many Americans may chafe, especially in the midst of a politically heated election year, at not being able to vote for their preferred candidate.“Viscerally in a democracy we don’t like the idea that we’re not allowed to vote for someone who we might want to vote for,” Foley said. “On the other hand, Barack Obama might actually be a pretty strong candidate for the Democratic party right now … he’s constitutionally disqualified. However much Americans or Democrats might want to nominate Barack Obama, it’s just constitutionally not permissible to do so.”The venue for the disqualification efforts could vary by state – it may be secretaries of state, boards of elections, or state courts that hear the challenges. “As a practical matter, the first time a state official decided that Trump was disqualified under Section 3, my guess is it would shoot up to the supreme court real fast and, I don’t know, who knows what the answer would be,” said Michael McConnell, a law professor at Stanford who has been more skeptical about the use of the 14th amendment to disqualify Trump.It’s also unclear who might have the legal standing to challenge Trump’s presence on the ballot. The best legal case would probably come from a candidate running against Trump, who could argue that they were injured by the presence of an unqualified candidate on the ballot. Calabresi suggested in a blogpost that Chris Christie, one of Trump’s most prominent critics in the GOP field, could lead such a challenge.The justice department did not choose to file charges against Trump under a specific statute that criminalizes insurrection, McConnell noted.“The amendment should be interpreted as … an enormous last resort and maybe January 6 rose to that level. It certainly was a much more serious civil disturbance than we usually see. But whether it’s actually an insurrection. I think it’s a bit of a stretch,” he said. “There were hundreds of participants in the January 6 incursion who have been criminally prosecuted and none of them have been charged with insurrection. Trump is one step removed.”But Calabresi said that Trump could be disqualified under the 14th amendment, even absent a formal insurrection charge. He noted that the standard for proving Trump engaged in an insurrection would be lower in the civil cases to disqualify him than in the criminal prosecutions.McConnell said his skepticism of disqualification was not intended as a defense of Trump, but rather a concern over what would happen if candidates started frequently trying to disqualify their rivals from the ballot.“I don’t want to see him water down the meaning of these words so that bringing disqualification motions against your political opponents becomes yet another aspect of our dysfunctional legal and electoral system,” he said. More

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      Trump’s coup continues. It will soon enter its fourth phase | Robert Reich

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      Trump’s attempted coup against the US continues. We are now in phase three.Phase one was his refusal to concede the loss of the 2020 election and his big lie that the election was “stolen” from him, without any basis in fact.Trump’s actions in phase one were not illegal, but they were immoral. They violated the norms that every president before Trump had dutifully followed.Phase two was his plot to overturn the result of the 2020 election.Phase two was hatched even before election day. On 31 October 2020, Trump’s confidant Steve Bannon told associates that Trump planned to declare that he won and claim Joe Biden’s expected victory fraudulent. Audio footage recently available shows that two days before the election, Trump’s lieutenant Roger Stone was already planning for alternative slates of electors.Then came Trump’s efforts to strong-arm election officials in swing states to alter votes, persuade the vice-president Mike Pence to reject the certification of electors, get the justice department to find fraud in the election process, come up with slates of fake electors, persuade Republican members of Congress to reject the certification, defame and intimidate poll workers and invite supporters to Washington on the day of the certification – which led inexorably to the violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Phase two was illegal. It violated both statutory laws and the US constitution. Trump is only now starting to be held accountable for these violations, in federal court in Washington and in state court in Georgia.Phase three is his current attempt to discredit and undermine the criminal justice system that is seeking to hold him accountable for phase two.Trump is smearing presiding judges, excoriating prosecutors and harassing and intimidating potential witnesses and jurors.He’s telling another big lie: that prosecutors, grand juries, judges, potential jurors and witnesses who are prepared to try him are corrupt and partisan – engaged in a plot to prevent him from being re-elected. Like his original big lie, this one has no basis in fact.Trump’s efforts in phase three are illegal. By publicly threatening people who are or will soon be participating in his trials, he is violating the explicit terms of his release pending trial, which prohibited him from engaging in harassment or intimidation.In seeking to silence or intimidate judges, prosecutors, potential jurors and witnesses, Trump is attempting to obstruct justice.Whether Trump is held accountable for phase three of his attempted coup will be up to the judges and prosecutors now engaged in trying to hold him accountable for phase two.Which brings us to what is likely to be phase four of his attempted coup – his campaign for re-election.As his trials approach in the months ahead, Trump is likely to escalate his lies that the election system and the criminal justice system are both rigged against him, and therefore, against his supporters.It is too early to know what additional illegal or unconstitutional means he will employ in phase four, but there is no reason to believe Trump will treat the upcoming election any more respectfully than he treated the 2020 election or has treated efforts to hold him accountable for what he did then.Notwithstanding Trump’s ongoing attempted coup, the most recent New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump in a dead heat with Biden for the presidency. Last week’s Quinnipiac poll also shows Trump and Biden in a virtual tie.Polls are fallible, of course, and the election is 15 months away. But the closeness of the race should be of concern, especially given that Trump has now been indicted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election.Trump’s attempted coup continues. Since before the 2020 election, he has been engaged in a concerted attempt to undermine the institutions of the US government.Everyone who cares about American democracy should be prepared for phase four.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      RFK Jr draws quite a crowd – what does it mean for 2024?

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      Wearing a Robert Kennedy Jr campaign T-shirt, Kevin O’Keeffe found there was standing room only as the candidate, introduced as “Bobby Kennedy”, walked on a sunbaked stage decked with hay bales to whoops and applause.“He supports freedom of speech, and he’s questioned the efficacy of the vaccine, which is legitimate at this point,” said O’Keeffe, 52, who works for a telecommunications company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “I like his views on foreign policy and keeping us out of the war. He cares about his fellow Americans in a way that a lot of the politicians nowadays I don’t think really do.”He was far from alone in rooting for Kennedy at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines last weekend. The longshot challenger to Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024 drew one of the biggest and most energetic crowds, outnumbering conventional politicians on the Republican side. The shouts of “We love you, Robert!” and “Thank you, Robert!”, and subsequent mobbing of Kennedy for handshakes and selfies, hinted at the stirrings of a movement.In a nation that has seen plenty of political convulsions over the past decade, Kennedy, a 69-year-old environmental lawyer who has never before run for public office, is proof that Americans’ appetite for insurgents and outsiders, mavericks and populists, remains undimmed. Even when a campaign traffics in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and has been hit by antisemitism scandals.Kennedy rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic because of his strident and widely condemned opposition to vaccines. He has styled himself as a hammer of the elites – quite a feat for a scion of one of America’s most storied political dynasties. He has scrambled old political allegiances, striking an anti-establishment nerve on the far left and far right over the Ukraine war and other issues.Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News, summed up his supporters as “anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, internet contrarians, billionaire tech bros, Camelot nostalgists and rightwing provocateurs who seem to be pumping Kennedy as a spoiler candidate”.In his speech from the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox, Kennedy wore blue jeans and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He spoke of his father, former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and uncle, President John F Kennedy, as figures from a golden age when America was the envy of the world.His campaign chairman, Dennis Kucinich, held up a map as Kennedy railed against proposed pipelines that would run through Iowa to transport liquefied carbon dioxide away from ethanol plants for burial underground. It was a retro, 20th-century presentation but more locally targeted than many candidates offered.Such is the celebrity-style clamor for Kennedy that, for an interview with the Guardian, he slipped away from the crowds and sat in the back of a black limousine with security detail present. Kucinich, a former congressman and past presidential contender, offered to take an Uber back to the hotel but Kennedy insisted that he climb in too, then asked an aide for some fried bacon from the fair.His uncle, Ted Kennedy, was once floored by the simple question, “Why do you want to be president?” This Kennedy does have an answer for that one: “I’m running for president because I feel like I’m losing my country and because I feel like the Democratic party is going in a bad direction. In particular, it has become the party of war – the Ukraine war was an unnecessary war.“It has become the party of censorship. It’s become the party of a pugnacious neocon-driven foreign policy and a Wall Street-driven domestic policy. Those are all the opposite of the Democratic party that I grew up with, so I’m running to bring the party back to its traditional values.”The political class was rattled in 2016 by the two-headed insurgency of not only Donald Trump on the right but Bernie Sanders on the left, channeling frustrations with the status quo in very different ways. Kennedy argues that Democrats, once the party of the poor and middle class, now own most of the nation’s wealth and dominate its richest counties.“Americans feel ignored by both political parties,” he said. “Their wealth is being strip mined by large corporations, corporate interests, and you’re seeing a level of desperation that I’ve never seen in this country. They just don’t feel that anybody’s listening, and they felt like Bernie was maybe listening, and they felt like Donald Trump was maybe listening as well.”Many are disturbed by Kennedy’s flirtations with the far right, including racists and antisemites. He has appeared on Infowars, a channel run by Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and granted interviews to pro-Trump extremists Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. A Super Pac supporting Kennedy’s presidential run owes half its money to a longtime Republican mega-donor and Trump backer, according to campaign finance reports.Kennedy insists that he is happy to receive support from across the spectrum and focus on issues that united Americans rather than divide them. He said: “My message is a populist message. The Republicans are appealing to a populist base and I appeal to the same base. I appeal to working people, middle class people and the poor.”So what did he make of Trump’s presidency? Kennedy seemed a little reluctant to reply and kept his answer short: “I don’t think it was the shining apex of American exceptionalism.”Trump is facing 91 criminal charges across four cases, many related to an attempted coup after his 2020 election defeat. Democrats warn starkly that his return to the White House could spell the end of American democracy. But again Kennedy swerved: “There’s authoritarian impulses on both sides. On one side it’s the authoritarianism of rightwing demagoguery, and on the left it’s the authoritarianism of the elites, which is equally dangerous because it involves censorship.”Equally dangerous? “I would say equally dangerous,” he reiterated. “What do you think is more dangerous? The attack on the Capitol building on January 6 or the revelations that the White House has been using the CIA and the FBI to censor its critics? What do you think is more dangerous for the republic? Both parties are doing things that are equally dangerous.”He added: “Once a government can silence its critics it has licence for every atrocity and so it’s shocking to me that people in the Democratic party now think it’s OK to silence people. I’ve never thought that’s right. I’ve always spoken to people who I don’t agree with. That’s an important part of being American.”It is an exercise in false equivalence fueled by personal animus. Kennedy accuses the government of colluding with social media companies to deny his freedom of speech, making him the first person censored by the White House after Biden’s inauguration. In reality he was suspended from platforms such as Instagram and Twitter for spreading coronavirus vaccine misinformation.Without the pandemic, it might be argued, there would be no Kennedy candidacy. He has long promoted bogus theories linking vaccines to autism, antidepressants to school shootings and chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity. But now his anti-scientific views have moved from the fringe to resonate with millions of people, especially consumers of rightwing media.His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered during the pandemic, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8m, according to filings made with charity regulators. Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of Covid, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. In 2021 he published a book, The Real Anthony Fauci, in which he accused America’s top infectious disease expert of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against western democracy”.In his Guardian interview, Kennedy is unrepentant, saying: “Show me where I got one thing wrong.” He tossed out far-fetched claims that might have been plucked from dark corners of the web: “The British study that just came out said 98% of the people who died were triple vaccinated”; “If you look at the data, countries that were least vaccinated had the least Covid deaths”. He did not take the vaccine himself and did catch the virus but “it didn’t stop me from skiing”.Earlier this year the UN’s World Health Organization declared an end to Covid as a public health emergency, stating that immunity increased due to “highly effective vaccines” developed in record time. A modelling study by the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health at the end of last year found that Covid vaccines kept more than 18.5 million people in the US out of the hospital and saved more than 3.2 million lives.Kennedy’s own family have distanced themselves from him. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said in an Instagram video: “He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame. I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment.”But at the state fair there was a significant constituency thrilled to hear Kennedy keep saying the unsayable, renewing questions about what the rise of such candidates tells America about itself and its yearning. Gail Buffington, 62, wearing a white “Kennedy 2024” cap and “RFK Jr for president 2024” T-shirt, said: “I believe in freedom of speech, peace and civil liberties. Trump drew a large crowd too, and I was in that crowd, and I got nothing but thumbs up from everybody.” More

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      ‘America First 2.0’: Vivek Ramaswamy pitches to be Republicans’ next Trump

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      Vivek Ramaswamy was at the Iowa state fair, a must-visit destination for any presidential candidate, when he decided to rap.Wearing a red cap and a baggy white polo shirt, the millennial founder of a biotech company launched into a spirited rendition of Eminem’s Lose Yourself, as the governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, edged further and further towards the edge of their shared stage.“The whole crowd goes so loud, when he opens his mouth,” Ramaswamy rapped. The largely white crowd watched on politely.“But the words won’t come out. He’s choking, how, everybody’s joking now but the clock’s run out time’s up, over, blaow!”It was not a scene one usually associated with a Republican presidential candidate – especially a rightwing, deeply conservative one. But then again, the era of Donald Trump has upended almost all norms in US politics.Getting his words out has rarely been a problem for Ramaswamy, who is the youngest candidate running for the Republican nomination. The 38-year-old son of Indian immigrants has given scores of interviews since he entered the race, and has spent more time wooing people in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire than any other candidate.It’s working too. In some recent polls, Ramaswamy has now started to appear second only to the dominant frontrunner of Trump himself.Before demonstrating his musical abilities, Ramaswamy had sat down with Reynolds for a “fair-side chat”, where he said as president he would fire 75% of federal employees and abolish a raft of government agencies including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – which handled much of the US response to the Covid-19 pandemic – and the Department of Education.As president he would “revive our national identity”, Ramaswamy said. For good measure, he declared “the climate change agenda” a “hoax”.Hours after his appearance with Reynolds, Ramaswamy repeated much of the same things at the Des Moines Register newspaper’s “political soapbox”.Onlookers seemed enthused by Ramaswamy’s combination of extreme rightwing populism and youthful energy – and by his ready willingness to engage with them directly.“I like what he has to bring to us. He is on the same lines of where I’m at where there’s no reason to hide behind computers; actually speak to people and have open debates and talk real to people instead of being fake the way most of the world is now,” said John Meyers, a service director at a car dealership.Meyers, 54, agreed with Ramaswamy on climate change, adding: “I believe it is a hoax. I don’t believe it’s happening in the way everybody feels it is.”For someone who turned 38 in early August, Ramaswamy certainly has some extreme ideas: beyond just his head-in-the-sand approach to the cataclysmic environmental change happening on our planet.He rails against “the cult of radical gender ideology” – a term which he seems to use to qualify his opposition to trans rights. Ramaswamy wants to ban “addictive social media” for under-16s, while under his leadership the federal workers whom he has not fired would see remote working – which Ramaswamy calls “pro-lazy” – brought to an end.Like barroom bores across the country, he thinks the US has lost its “civic pride, civic identity, civic duty”. He has said affirmative action – the effort designed to ensure colleges and businesses offer equal opportunities to people of color, and people of all genders and sexual orientation – is “a cancer on our national soul”. His opposition to affirmative action, however, invariably lands on policies which may benefit Black or Latino Americans.“Top companies now regularly disfavor qualified applicants who happen to be white or Asian,” he tweeted in June. “Time to restore colorblind meritocracy once and for all.”Ramaswamy did not provide any evidence for his claim and did not respond to a question on the topic from the Guardian. Last year, a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that “one of the most durable and defining features of the US labor market is the 2-to-1 disparity in unemployment that exists between black and white workers”.“African Americans have made considerable gains in high school and college completion over the last four and a half decades – both in absolute terms as well as relative to whites – and those gains have had virtually no effect on equalizing employment outcomes,” the EPI wrote.Ramaswamy has also called Juneteenth, a federal holiday which recognizes the emancipation of Black people from slavery, a “useless” holiday.Strikingly, he wants to strip the vote from people under 25; they can avoid being disfranchised if they agree to serve in the military or as a first responder (he did neither).Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ramaswamy studied at Harvard and Yale before becoming a venture capitalist and investing in pharmaceutical companies, some of which focused on pharmaceutical drug development. It has made him very wealthy – his net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars – and as of late June he had loaned his own campaign $15m.While Ramaswamy has pledged to use his business prowess to lead the US to fiscal glory, in part through revitalizing the coal industry, it is the ongoing American culture war where he has focused much of his attention.A particular bugbear is “wokeism”. He wrote a book about the subject, and according to his website, education, capitalism, big tech companies, American Express and Mother’s Day have all been infected by wokeness, which he defines as “obsessing about race, gender and sexual orientation”.Probably not coincidentally, all of Ramaswamy’s shtick fits in with current rightwing Republican dogma, and Trump’s agenda.Billing his plan as “America First 2.0”, he has clung tightly to Trump’s lengthy coattails, defending the former president against the four indictments he faces. In Iowa he said Trump was the “most successful president in our century”.What Ramaswamy offers, in his telling, is Trumpism, but with more competence, and with a youthful vigor.He has leaned into his youth – as well as the rap he frequently mentions his prowess on the tennis court – as a point of difference from both Trump and Biden. He is also not short on confidence: in Iowa he went so far as to compare himself to the US founding fathers.“Thomas Jefferson was 30 years old when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was 24 at the time. Years later, he wrote the Federalist Papers, along with John Jay and James Madison. So do I think those guys were too young to set this nation into motion? You’re darned right they weren’t,” Ramaswamy said.Jefferson was actually 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, while Hamilton, who was 19, had nothing to do with the famous breakup text, but in any case Ramaswamy’s tender years are not the only obstacle he faces.It remains unclear whether a person of Indian descent can charm Republican voters, 85% of whom are white. In Iowa, Ramaswamy was asked by the Guardian about his experience of racial discrimination.“I have faced racial discrimination in my life. It has come from people of diverse races. I don’t think racism is limited to one race, actually, but I also don’t let it ruin my life. Have I stubbed my toe? Yes, I have. Is it pleasant when your toe is stubbed? No, it is not but you don’t let it ruin your life. So hardship is something that happens to you; victimhood is a choice,” he said.Hopefully Ramaswamy does not spend too much time on Truth Social, the social media network established by Trump as a safe space for his supporters to rant and rave.On the rightwing platform Ramaswamy’s eligibility to run, as a child of immigrants, has been questioned (Ramaswamy is eligible to serve as president), while Trumpers frequently draw attention to Ramaswamy’s Indian heritage, and his Hindu faith.Moreover, he is running in a party that undeniably has a racism problem.A Trump supporter was arrested last week after threatening to kill Tanya Chutkan, the judge who is overseeing the election interference case against Trump in Washington. The threat against Chutkan, who is Black, included racist terms. Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Trump over alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has also received racist threats, while this week Trump himself used the word “riggers” in a social media post – which a former Trump aide described as a racial “bullhorn”.As for Ramaswamy’s chances of winning the Republican nomination, they – along with all other candidates not named Trump – seem small at the moment.Trump has a 40-point lead over his Republican rivals in an average of national polling, with 54.6% of party members planning to vote for the twice-impeached former president. Ramaswamy is in third place, at 6.7%, but has gone from an unknown to a near ever-present face, and on Wednesday one poll put him in second place among Republican primary voters – albeit 47 points behind Trump.He has so far thrown everything at the key early voting states of Iowa – where he has spent at least 26 days, far more than his rivals – and New Hampshire, but it remains to be seen if ubiquity will be enough.“He has no political background, which in this day and age could be a very big plus,” said Steffen Schmidt, professor emeritus in the department of political science at Iowa State University.“People are tired of professional politicians. He seems to have an outgoing, engaging personality, which is what you need to have when you’re going and meeting people who have no idea who the hell you are.”There’s no rest for a presidential candidate, and on Sunday, fresh from the fair, Ramaswamy traveled to New Hampshire, where he won applause as he railed against the “rotten, corrupt federal bureaucratic state” at a “No BS BBQ”.The next night, Ramaswamy, who frequently pops up on the influential Fox News, was the focus of a town hall hosted by NewsNation, a far-right channel popular among Trump supporters, as he tries to expand his national profile.“He will talk to any media who will have him,” said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire.“That’s all part of the game now. You can’t just rely on Iowa and New Hampshire catapulting you. Because in some ways if you wait until then, the catapult is too late.”People tend to like Ramaswamy. In New Hampshire, he has the highest approval rating of any Republican candidate, and people who come to his events invariably have good things to say. But Scala pointed to an old political adage that people in early-voting states “will date candidates, but marry someone else”.“I think Ramaswamy’s dilemma is he’s generating a lot of good word of mouth, and people like what they see,” he said.“But ultimately will they go beyond dating to actually marrying – especially if that means abandoning someone like Trump?” More

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      in Elections

      Trump’s latest indictment leads to fears of rise in calls for violence – live

      by

      After news broke on Monday night of Donald Trump’s indictment in Fulton county, Georgia, attention quickly turned to the possible spectacle of a trial unfolding on television as a former president attempts to rebut charges of racketeering and conspiracy over his efforts to overturn the results of an election.But before the district attorney Fani Willis can have the opportunity to make her case against Trump with the cameras rolling, she must first clear a key procedural hurdle to keep the case in Fulton county.Trump’s legal team is expected to rely on a little known legal statute to argue the case should be moved to federal court, and that jurisdictional question could delay a trial for months. The stakes of that procedural fight will be high, as a conviction in Fulton county would leave Trump facing years of prison time with no clear pathway to a pardon.Read the full story here.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, dismissed the suggestion that she is running in the 2024 GOP presidential race in order to become the vice president.In an interview with Politico, Haley said:
      I think everybody that says, ‘She’s doing this to be vice president,’ needs to understand I don’t run for second.
      That’s something that I hear all the time, and I’ll tell you that, look, we have a country to save, and I don’t trust anybody else to do it.
      Donald Trump’s legal advisers have urged the former president not to hold a press conference next week in response to his latest indictment, according to an ABC report. Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that he would present a “report” to refute the allegations in the indictment handed up by the Fulton country district attorney’s office from his home in Bedminster, New Jersey.But the press conference, originally scheduled for 11am Monday, is now very much in doubt, multiple sources told ABC.
      Sources tell ABC News that Trump’s legal advisers have told him that holding such a press conference with dubious claims of voter fraud will only complicate his legal problems and some of his attorneys have advised him to cancel it.
      The names, photographs and home addresses purportedly belonging to members of the Fulton county grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants this week are circulating on social media.The grand jurors’ purported addresses were posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC reported on Wednesday.The indictment issued on Monday includes the names of all the grand jurors who served on the 26-member panel in Fulton county, but not their addresses or other personal information.Websites where the purported photographs, social media profiles and home addresses of the grand jurors included pro-Trump forums and sites that have previously been linked to violent extremist attacks, according to a CNN report. In some cases, users have posted social media profiles of different people who have the same name as some of the grand jurors, while some addresses appear to be wrong, the report said.The rightwing extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has not made up her mind about running for Senate in Georgia – in part because she hopes to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.“I haven’t made up my mind whether I will do that or not,” Greene told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, about a rumoured challenge to the current governor, Brian Kemp, in a Georgia Senate primary in 2026.
      I have a lot of things to think about. Am I going to be a part of President Trump’s cabinet if he wins? Is it possible that I’ll be VP?
      Despite a string of controversies over voicing conspiracy theories, aggressive behaviour towards Democrats and progressives and recent squabbling with her fellow House extremist Lauren Boebert, and despite being “kicked out” of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Greene remains influential in Republican ranks, close to the speaker, Kevin McCarthy.She told the AJC she would consider it an “honour” to be picked as Trump’s running mate to take on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris next year. She would consider such an offer “very, very heavily”, she said.Trump has encouraged Greene to harbour higher ambitions, saying in March he would “fight like hell” for her if she ran for Senate.Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, has personally appealed to the former president to pay his ballooning legal bills, according to a CNN report. The former New York mayor traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in late April, along with his lawyer Robert Costello, where they had two meetings with Trump to discuss Giuliani’s seven-figure legal fees, the report said, citing a source.Giuliani and Costello made several pitches about how paying Giuliani’s bills was ultimately in Trump’s best interest, but the former president did not seem interested, the source said.The source said Trump verbally agreed to help with some of Giuliani’s bills but did not commit to any specific amount or timeline. He also agreed to attend two fundraisers for Giuliani, a separate source said.Giuliani is facing hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and sanctions amid numerous lawsuits related to his work for Trump after the 2020 election.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges against Donald Trump in the 2020 Georgia election subversion case were made public on Monday night.The former president’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. Several Gab posts reproduced images of nooses and gallows and called for Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis and grand jurors who delivered the charges to be hanged. And posts on Patriots.win combined the wordplay with direct calls to violence.Earlier this month, Willis wrote to Fulton county commissioners and judges to warn them to stay vigilant in the face of rising tensions ahead of the release of the indictment. She told them that she and her staff had been receiving racist threats and voicemails since she began her investigation into Trump’s attempt to subvert the election two years ago.
      I guess I am sending this as a reminder that you should stay alert over the month of August and stay safe.
      As Willis’s investigation approached its climax, Trump intensified his personal attacks on her through social media. He has accused her of prosecutorial misconduct and even of being racist herself.Willis, who on Wednesday said she wants to take the case to trial in March 2024, has rebuffed Trump’s claims as “derogatory and false”.Trump has also unleashed a barrage of vitriol against Jack Smith, the special counsel who earlier this month brought four federal charges against Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump has referred to the prosecutor, who is white, as “Deranged Jack Smith”.Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney in Georgia who is prosecuting Donald Trump and 18 other allies over efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is facing a flurry of racist online abuse after the former president attacked his opponents using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump went on his social media platform Truth Social calling for all charges to be dropped and predicting he would be exonerated. He did not mention Willis by name, but accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets.“They never went after those that Rigged the Election,” Trump wrote.
      They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!
      Willis is African American. So too are the two New York-based prosecutors who have investigated Trump, the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg who indicted him in April over alleged hush-money payments, and Letitia James, the state attorney general who is investigating Trump’s financial records.Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms including Gab and Patriots.win. The sites hosted hundreds of posts featuring “riggers” in their headlines in a disparaging context.The word has also been attached to numerous social media posts to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. The two Black poll workers from Atlanta were falsely accused by some of the 19 defendants in the Fulton county case of committing election fraud during the 2020 vote count, and the indictment accuses Trump allies of harassing them.US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who overseeing Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case, warned the former president last week to refrain from making statements that could intimidate witnesses or prejudice potential jurors.Just a day before Abigail Jo Shry allegedly left a voicemail message threatening to kill Chutkan, Trump had posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: writing “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”Trump has specifically posted about Chutkan since she was randomly assigned to oversee his 2020 election case. On Monday, the former president said she “obviously wants me behind bars” and described her as “very biased and unfair”.Chutkan has reportedly been assigned extra security by the US marshals service in recent weeks, and CNN reported observing more security detailed to the judge around the Washington DC federal courthouse.A Texas woman was arrested on charges that she threatened to kill US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the prosecution of former president Donald Trump on allegations that he tried to overturn the 2020 election.Abigail Jo Shry, 43, of Alvin, Texas, called the federal courthouse in Washington DC on 5 August and left the threatening voicemail message, using a racist slur, according to court documents.In the call, Shry told the judge: “You are in our sights, we want to kill you,” according to the documents. Prosecutors allege Shry also said: “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you.”Investigators traced the phone number and Shry later admitted to making the threatening call, according to a criminal complaint.Shry is charged with Transmission in Interstate or Foreign Commerce of any Communication Containing a Threat to Injure the Person of Another. She is being held in detention pending trial, according to court documents, and a bond hearing has been set for 13 September.Good morning, US politics blog readers. A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill the federal judge presiding over former president Donald Trump’s criminal case in Washington DC over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.Abigail Jo Shry, 43, left a voicemail at US district judge Tanya Chutkan’s chambers on 5 August in which she used a racial slur and threatened her, saying “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch”, according to a court document. She also allegedly threatened to kill “all democrats in Washington DC and all people in the LGBTQ community”, according to the court filing.On the day before the threatening phone call, Trump had posted on his social media platform, Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” The former president has intensified attacks against those individuals involved in the many indictment against him, including Chutkan and Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney who is prosecuting him over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.Hours after Willis had released the indictments on Monday night, Trump accused prosecutors of pursuing the wrong criminal targets using the word “riggers”, a thinly veiled play on the N-word. Trump’s allusion to the racial slur was immediately picked up by his supporters on far-right platforms, and Willis – who is African American – has faced a flurry of racist online abuse.Calls to violence have proliferated across far-right sites since the charges were made public on Monday night. The purported names and addresses of members of the Georgia grand jury that indicted Trump and 18 of his allies were posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News reported.Here’s what else we’re watching today:
      10am Eastern time: President Joe Biden will get his daily intelligence briefing.
      11.25am: Biden will leave for Andrews, where he will fly to the Wilkes-Barre Scranton Airport.
      12.35pm: Biden will travel to Avoca, Pennsylvania, where he will pay respects to the state’s former first lady Ellen Casey in advance of a viewing.
      2.10pm: Biden will fly to Hagerstown, Maryland, for Camp David.
      The House and Senate are out. More

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      in US Politics

      With Donald Trump the Republican talisman again, should America’s allies plan for the worst? | Bruce Wolpe

      by

      The question from the Finnish journalist to President Biden at last month’s US-Nordic leaders’ summit in Helsinki was direct: “What actions will you take to assure Finland that the US will remain a reliable Nato partner for decades to come?”Biden replied: “I absolutely guarantee it. There is no question. There’s overwhelming support from the American people,” before adding the caveat: “You know, no one can guarantee the future, but this is the best bet anyone could make … As sure as anything can possibly be said about American foreign policy, we will stay connected to Nato – connected to Nato, beginning, middle and end.”In an interview a few weeks earlier, Richard Haass, who recently stepped down as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the most serious threat to the security of the world right now was the United States. “It’s us,” he told Peter Baker of the New York Times. “I should have a nickel for every non-American, every foreign leader who said to me, ‘I don’t know what’s the norm and what’s the exception any more. Is the Biden administration a return to the America I took for granted and Trump will be a historical blip? Or is Biden the exception and Trump and Trumpism are the new America?’”These issues are beginning to hit home in Australia and with other US allies. Many are already seeing in 2024 a reprise of the successive shocks of 2016 – the Brexit vote in June as a precursor to the upheaval heralded by Trump’s election in November – and what ensued during Trump’s four years in office. We know from the litany of explosive books, from veteran journalist Bob Woodward to Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton and so many others in between, what Trump is capable of – and that he would approach a second term with vengeance uppermost in his mind against those who crossed him or stood in his way. Today, leaders of the world’s democracies at least have the benefit of over-the-horizon political radar of what may be coming, given the long lead time of Trump’s all-so-visible and unrelenting campaign to regain power.With respect to my country, Australia, the deep engagement with the US began on the western front in the first world war. Australia has supported American troops in numerous wars the US has waged since then. The Anzus treaty is in its 71st year and “a hundred years of mateship” has been richly celebrated. It is safe to say that Australia’s alliance with the US is the least troubled of any bilateral relationship the US has with other countries, including Israel, Canada and the UK. Australia is an integral part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) with India, Japan and the US. The Aukus agreement brings the US together with the UK and Australia in a strategic partnership to promote stability and security in the Asia Pacific region.But what happens to this web of ties if Trump returns to the presidency? Trumpism has four pillars that he wields as swords. America first, to ensure that US interests are always paramount in any foreign policy and military decision taken. Isolationism, where the default position is to end American commitments overseas and to bring US forces home. Protectionism, expressed through trade and tariff wars with the goal of securing trade surpluses for the US with all its trading partners, from China to Canada to Mexico to Europe and back across all of Asia. And nativism, to build walls on America’s southern border and close its doors to migrants seeking the American dream.In a second term, he will pursue these policies even harder. Trump learned immense lessons from his first four years about who, in the US and around the world, frustrated his policy objectives and how they could be crushed and punished to help him win more victories in his second term. What happens if Trump cripples, perhaps even works deliberately to destroy, Nato and the UN, begins a trade war with the EU, executes accommodations with Putin and Russia over Ukraine, surrenders Taiwan to China and withdraws troops and naval forces from the Asia Pacific region?At this granular level, each leader of a state around the globe allied with the US faces the daunting issue of how to manage all this incoming from Trump should he return to the Oval Office. How can you best deal with a hostile partner? How do those western countries allied with the US today realign their policies to ensure their security tomorrow?But these questions also reveal a deeper issue with respect to the ties that bind so many democracies around the world with the US. For example, can Australia – should Australia – continue its alliance with the US if the US in 2025 may no longer be the United States that has existed for nearly 250 years?Australia’s alliance is with a country that stands for freedom; democracy; liberty; human and civil rights; and the rule of law. What happens if the struggle for democracy and the soul of America fails in 2025? What if President Trump declares martial law, if the military is deployed to cities across the country to put down protests and restore law and order? What if Trump disobeys court orders, including from the supreme court, to cease and desist his executive actions? What if he ignores laws passed by Congress, orders the detention and imprisonment of his political enemies, has journalists arrested and jailed, and shuts down certain media outlets? What if he interferes with elections held in states across the country and for Congress?If Trump dismantles American democracy, America will no longer be populated by united states. It will be bitterly divided. There will be immense unrest. The country will no longer be the United States.Trump redux therefore poses an existential question: how could Australia remain allied with a country that has discarded the fundamental values of democracy that have bound these two nations together? How can Australia be allied with a country that is drifting towards autocracy?And it’s not just Australia. Every country strategically tied to the US will need to contemplate the consequences of Trump’s campaign for the presidency.It is time to face up to this question. It is better for America’s allies to be proactive in 2024 in planning for such a catastrophic upheaval in global politics than to be reactive in 2025.As long as Trump is within reach of the presidency, this question is a clear and present danger to every democratic country that today stands proudly with the US.
      Bruce Wolpe is a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. He is author of Trump’s Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2023) More