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      A tsunami of AI misinformation will shape next year’s knife-edge elections | John Naughton

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      It looks like 2024 will be a pivotal year for democracy. There are elections taking place all over the free world – in South Africa, Ghana, Tunisia, Mexico, India, Austria, Belgium, Lithuania, Moldova and Slovakia, to name just a few. And of course there’s also the UK and the US. Of these, the last may be the most pivotal because: Donald Trump is a racing certainty to be the Republican candidate; a significant segment of the voting population seems to believe that the 2020 election was “stolen”; and the Democrats are, well… underwhelming.The consequences of a Trump victory would be epochal. It would mean the end (for the time being, at least) of the US experiment with democracy, because the people behind Trump have been assiduously making what the normally sober Economist describes as “meticulous, ruthless preparations” for his second, vengeful term. The US would morph into an authoritarian state, Ukraine would be abandoned and US corporations unhindered in maximising shareholder value while incinerating the planet.So very high stakes are involved. Trump’s indictment “has turned every American voter into a juror”, as the Economist puts it. Worse still, the likelihood is that it might also be an election that – like its predecessor – is decided by a very narrow margin.In such knife-edge circumstances, attention focuses on what might tip the balance in such a fractured polity. One obvious place to look is social media, an arena that rightwing actors have historically been masters at exploiting. Its importance in bringing about the 2016 political earthquakes of Trump’s election and Brexit is probably exaggerated, but it – and notably Trump’s exploitation of Twitter and Facebook – definitely played a role in the upheavals of that year. Accordingly, it would be unwise to underestimate its disruptive potential in 2024, particularly for the way social media are engines for disseminating BS and disinformation at light-speed.And it is precisely in that respect that 2024 will be different from 2016: there was no AI way back then, but there is now. That is significant because generative AI – tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion et al – are absolutely terrific at generating plausible misinformation at scale. And social media is great at making it go viral. Put the two together and you have a different world.So you’d like a photograph of an explosive attack on the Pentagon? No problem: Dall-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion will be happy to oblige in seconds. Or you can summon up the latest version of ChatGPT, built on OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4, and ask it to generate a paragraph from the point of view of an anti-vaccine advocate “falsely claiming that Pfizer secretly added an ingredient to its Covid-19 vaccine to cover up its allegedly dangerous side-effects” and it will happily oblige. “As a staunch advocate for natural health,” the chatbot begins, “it has come to my attention that Pfizer, in a clandestine move, added tromethamine to its Covid-19 vaccine for children aged five to 11. This was a calculated ploy to mitigate the risk of serious heart conditions associated with the vaccine. It is an outrageous attempt to obscure the potential dangers of this experimental injection, which has been rushed to market without appropriate long-term safety data…” Cont. p94, as they say.You get the point: this is social media on steroids, and without the usual telltale signs of human derangement or any indication that it has emerged from a machine. We can expected a tsunami of this stuff in the coming year. Wouldn’t it be prudent to prepare for it and look for ways of mitigating it?That’s what the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University is trying to do. In June, it published a thoughtful paper by Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan on how to prepare for the deluge. It contains a useful categorisation of malicious uses of the technology, but also, sensibly, includes the non-malicious ones – because, like all technologies, this stuff has beneficial uses too (as the tech industry keeps reminding us).The malicious uses it examines are disinformation, so-called “spear phishing”, non-consensual image sharing and voice and video cloning, all of which are real and worrying. But when it comes to what might be done about these abuses, the paper runs out of steam, retreating to bromides about public education and the possibility of civil society interventions while avoiding the only organisations that have the capacity actually to do something about it: the tech companies that own the platforms and have a vested interest in not doing anything that might impair their profitability. Could it be that speaking truth to power is not a good career move in academia?What I’ve been readingShake it upDavid Hepworth has written a lovely essay for LitHub about the Beatles recording Twist and Shout at Abbey Road, “the moment when the band found its voice”.Dish the dirtThere is an interesting profile of Techdirt founder Mike Masnick by Kashmir Hill in the New York Times, titled An Internet Veteran’s Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology.Truth bombsWhat does Oppenheimer the film get wrong about Oppenheimer the man? A sharp essay by Haydn Belfield for Vox illuminates the differences. More

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      Mike Pence tours Iowa state fair in search of votes – but who is his candidacy aimed at?

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      Mike Pence and wife Karen strolled through the Iowa state fair, their little fingers locked together, as soap bubbles drifted by and chairlifts trundled overhead. The couple donned red aprons – his said “Vice President Mike Pence” – and flipped pork chops on a giant grill while smiling for photographers.Then, with a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead and settling on his cheek on a hot August day, Pence told reporters that he was the “most qualified candidate” and “most consistent conservative in the field” for the Republican nomination for US president in 2024.But the carefully choreographed scene hit a glitch. Andrew Wallace was wearing a “Make America great again” cap and “Buck Fiden” T-shirt and holding a “Trump” sign as well as Pence’s memoir So Help Me God. The 21-year-old from Wisconsin said loudly: “Mike Pence is a traitor and we all know it. He could have sent the votes back to the states but he chose not to do it because he’s a coward.”The episode offered a stark reminder that Pence, once loyal to the point of sycophancy, now stands accused of treachery by supporters of former president Donald Trump over his refusal to overturn their defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Some called for the then vice-president to be hanged as they stormed the US Capitol on January 6 2021 (this week in Iowa a man approached Pence and remarked: “I’m glad they didn’t hang you.”)Now Pence has emerged as one of the central figures in a criminal indictment of Trump over his alleged effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat. Filed earlier this month by special counsel Jack Smith, the indictment documents Trump’s many attempts to pressure Pence to disrupt the certification process on January 6. At one point, Trump allegedly told Pence, “You’re too honest.”Although constitutional experts agree that Pence had no authority to challenge the election results, his role in certifying Trump’s defeat has won him few fans with Republican voters, 70% of whom believe Biden’s win was illegitimate. That reality has complicated, if not erased, the hopes of a man seen by many as a throwback to a Republican party that has largely ceased to exist.Pence used his platform at the Iowa state fair – a rite of passage for candidates to gorge on fried food and woo middle America – to defend his actions in protecting the constitution, affirm a hawkish approach foreign policy and endorse cutting welfare benefits in the name of fiscal responsibility. He spoke of his faith in God, civility and former president Ronald Reagan. These would once have been uncontroversial, even essential foundations of any Republican candidacy, especially in religiously conservative Iowa, which holds the first-in-the-nation caucuses in January.But Trump took over the party of Reagan and transformed it from within. He attacked constitutional democracy with a barrage of lies, promoted “America-first” isolationism and ran up a huge national debt. There is nothing traditional about his approach to civility or God. All of which has left Pence out of step with the party base.One example is over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where Pence has pledged continued US support but Trump and his allies in Congress want to halt funding. Wallace, the Trump supporter, said: “If Mike Pence was a true conservative, he would join the conservative movement and oppose the war in Ukraine.”John Rusk, a Republican who opposes Trump, retorted: “How would you like it if your country was overtaken – your democratic country was attacked, bombed, raped, murdered, looted? Come on. That’s not the American way. The American way is to stop people like that, stop tyrants.”Wallace replied: “Talk to the majority of young Republicans. They did a poll of that kind down in West Palm Beach and 96% opposed it. Those are the young people, Gen Z, millennials. If the people that are going to be fighting in a war don’t want to fight the war then why are the people like you, the older generation, fighting for us to go to Ukraine?”With that he left and Rusk shouted after him: “You want Russia to come here then, don’t you? You’d love it.”Pence is also the only major candidate who supports a federal ban on abortion at six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. Recent voters across America suggest this could be an electoral liability. But Pence said on Friday: “I reject the notion that … standing for the sanctity of life is a political loser. There are things more important than politics but I really believe that, when we stand for the sanctity of life on principle and with compassion, the American people will rally to our cause.”Earlier, the former vice-president drew a crowd of about a hundred people to an event hosted by Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. Wearing checked shirt, blue jeans and brown boots, the white-haired Pence, once described by Trump as “central casting”, looked the part of a Republican candidate from another era. He played folksy by praising the food at the state fair, saying he would see its famed butter cow sculpture and recalling a meeting in Iowa with a cow called Chippy.Sherry Power, 78, a retired nurse from Corona, California, who said: “I love him. He’s got integrity like we don’t see any more here and he’ll build on that if he gets in. He doesn’t have bad things to say about any of the other people that are running for president and I like that. He has experience and that is the big difference between he and a lot of the other people that are running.”But Pence’s poor standing in opinion polls underscores the monumental challenge he faces. According to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, he stands at a distant fourth in the race, winning the support of roughly 5% of likely Republican primary voters across the country. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed Pence at just 3% in Iowa, which will hold its caucuses in January.In one bleak sign of his primary prospects, Pence raised a meagre $1.2m during the second quarter of the year. That haul put Pence behind two other candidates, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who announced their campaigns the same week that he did.The Pence campaign is remaining upbeat and content with the notion that he represents traditional values. Marc Short, an adviser, said: “I would argue that he’s the only classical conservative in this race. But as he says, what the Trump-Pence era did was to build upon that, not to replace it. It took that as the foundation and there were some populist policies added on top of that. There’s a much broader number of classical Republicans still in our party and we’ll test that theory.”But political analysts regard his chances as slim. Michael D’Antonio, co-author of The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, said: “I don’t know what he’s doing in this race other than trying to keep himself in the public eye. His candidacy is really puzzling. I don’t get it. Maybe he’s trying to recover some of the dignity he lost as vice-president.”D’Antonio suggested the former vice-president’s campaign may be intended for the history books rather than the primary voters of today. “The stand that he took on January 6 is the main thing that has distinguished him as a public official, and he could be trying to make sure that history doesn’t forget,” he said. “In a way, defying Trump’s base is similar to defying Trump himself on that day.”But in Iowa, David Stelzer, who at the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox asked Pence if he had committed treason, thinks he should have spoken out much sooner after January 6. “The sad thing is he won’t get that chapter in a future Profiles in Courage book because he didn’t finish the job and it was because he’s so worried about alienating the Trump base.”Stelzer, 63, a retired federal government employee who lives in Denver, added: “His chances in the Republican primary are zero. This is the tragedy. He will not win because the Trump base will not allow it. I mean, Jesus, they set up gallows for him.” More

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      Perverse as it sounds, Donald Trump in a prison cell may be the worst possible outcome | Emma Brockes

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      It seems a long time ago, but there was a brief period, after Joe Biden’s inauguration and before the 6 January hearings and the start of campaigning for next year’s presidential election, when it was possible to avoid Donald Trump for days at a time. He was still there, obviously, wandering the corridors at Mar-a-Lago, Gloria Swanson-style, and posting screeds to Truth Social. But there was no real reason to think about him and, for that short period, he was returned to his essential state: just another person posting unhinged rants online.This is not where Trump is now – in the US, at least. Thanks to a raft of legal actions, culminating earlier this month in the justice department’s arraignment of the former president for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election result, Trump is not only front and centre every day, but in danger of ascending to a new position in the news cycle: political martyr and victim of a witch-hunt. Given the preposterousness of the events leading up to this moment – only recently, a jury found Trump liable for defamation and sexual abuse – it seems inevitable we should find ourselves here.Trump, of course, is keenly aware of the potential in his superficially dire situation and has already leaned fully into it. In campaign stops across the US, and with the threat of jail hanging over him, he is doing the thing we know from experience to be the man’s absolute forte: siphoning the heat and energy from any given charge against him and refracting it back on his enemies. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” he told a crowd in New Hampshire on Tuesday. As the New York Times pointed out this week, his new campaign message for the 2024 election is: “I’m being indicted for you”. (A woman at the New Hampshire event told the reporter, nonsensically but with heart: “What, am I next?”)It is an exceedingly weird and insoluble problem. From experience we know that the only blows that land on Trump are either ridicule – recall his face when Obama mocked him, all those years ago, during the White House correspondents’ dinner – or ignoring him. Of the two, only the latter really promises results. In the shocked days after Trump’s election in 2016, I recall that Obama’s moment of mockery was singled out as an example of precisely the kind of leftwing self-indulgence that dislodged the first pebble in Trump’s psychology, and ended in his run for the White House. It is a mistake to take the man seriously; indicting him on four criminal counts of allegedly attempting to overturn a democratic election is the very definition of taking someone seriously. And yet, in a functioning democracy, how on earth might one let this pass?As such, the unfolding of the latest and most serious legal action against Trump highlights a stark divide between the political and judicial rationales for pursuing him. As has already been observed, Trump is on exceedingly thin ice with Moxila A Upadhyaya, the judge who set the terms of his conditions for release pending trial. In the last week, Trump posted what might be construed as vague threats in the direction of any prospective juror (“If you go after me, I’m coming after you!”), raising the possibility of a scenario in which he is yanked to jail and campaigns for the presidency from his cell.There is, in the current climate in the US, nothing pleasing about this image. In fact, with every passing day, and with a perversity no amount of exposure to Trump can ever quite normalise, Trump in jail seems like the worst possible outcome. Campaigning from a prison cell would lend Trump a righteousness exceeding even his present grandiose narrative, and widen the sweep of his supporters by offering them a wildly romantic and dramatic cause to join.What remains so hard to grapple with is that in spite of the deadly seriousness of the events that got us here – it is easy to forget, sometimes, that people died on 6 January – as ever with Trump, one senses the wink behind every gesture. When he tells supporters, as he did in March, “I am your retribution”, his language is like a biblical script with Mel Gibson behind it, a hokey narrative that serves two purposes: it offers a genuine cause for aggrieved supporters to latch on to and, simultaneously, it extends an invitation to join him in a cosmic joke against everyone else. One imagines Trump in jail, his demeanour unchanged, which is to say that of an after-dinner host, smirking and shrugging and rolling his eyes as he says: “I’m like Jesus Christ at this point.”
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      DeSantis claims agents can tell traffickers from migrants in call for deadly force

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      The rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has sparked controversy by outlining a hardline border policy of deadly force despite acknowledging that drug traffickers could be difficult to distinguish from migrants crossing into the US.DeSantis, whose ailing campaign has failed to cut into the lead of the Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, said that under his direction as president, US law enforcement on the lookout for drugs would not mistakenly use lethal force on migrants because US agents would have “rules of engagement” similar to police or US forces in war zones like Iraq.In an NBC interview broadcast on Monday night, the Republican Florida governor was asked about a campaign-trail promise: “If cartels are trying to run product into this country, they’re going to end up stone-cold dead.”“How do you know you’re using deadly force against the right people?” his interviewer, Dasha Burns, asked.“Same way a police officer would know,” DeSantis said. “Same way somebody operating in Iraq would know.“You know, these people in Iraq at the time, they all looked the same. You didn’t know who had a bomb strapped to them. So those guys have to make judgments.”Data analysis by Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit, shows police killed at least 1,201 people in the US in 2022.John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, called DeSantis’s proposal “terrifying”.“That ‘same way in Iraq’ line is terrifying,” Pfaff wrote. “It’s an open embrace of any sort of false positive rate and the large-scale murder of innocent people. DeSantis really is really being quite openly murderous. (And imputing that same murderous indifference to police, as a compliment.)”Pfaff also pointed to a 2020 ruling in which conservatives on the US supreme court said the family of a 15-year-old Mexican boy shot dead by a US border patrol agent could not sue, because the shooting was a matter of national security.In Iraq, between the invasion in 2003 and the large-scale US withdrawal in 2011, American forces were often attacked with bombs either vehicle-borne, remote-controlled or carried or propelled by suicide bombers.The US defense department puts the US military and civilian death toll between 2003 and 2010 at 4,431. Iraq Body Count, a British non-profit, says 15,162, or 13%, of documented civilian deaths in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 were caused by US-led coalition forces.As a US navy lawyer, DeSantis deployed to Iraq in 2007, advising special forces. He has touted his military service, also at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, saying it sets him aside from the rest of the Republican field.But he has struggled to make his mark on the primary, falling further behind Trump despite the former US president’s criminal indictments and other forms of legal jeopardy.Amid a widely reported campaign reset, the hard-right governor, who has targeted LGBTQ+ rights, the teaching of race in US history and other progressive priorities, also attempted to show a softer side. Joined by his wife, Casey, to discuss their children and life at home, DeSantis told NBC he was “really good” at making waffles, adding that his children “actually do like the eggs”, as well as macaroni and cheese from a box.With his children, he said, “I’m very even keeled, but if I do raise the voice a little bit, they do, they snap to attention.”On the campaign trail, DeSantis has faced fierce criticism after using violent imagery, including a promise to “start slitting throats” among federal workers once elected.Discussing his hardline border policy, DeSantis said his proposal to authorise lethal force against cartels would be “similar to like if you’re in the military.“You have rules of engagement. Anyone that’s hostile intent or a hostile act, which … cartels are, you know, you would then engage with lethal force.“I think these cartels are basically foreign terrorist organisations. They are responsible for killing more Americans on an annual basis than any other group or country throughout the entire world. And yet, this is just happening, and it’s happening in communities all across the United States.”Hardline rhetoric about the border and law enforcement is common among Republican candidates. In office, Trump reportedly wanted to bomb cartel facilities in Mexico but was blocked by aides.DeSantis continued: “It really hit me when I was down in Arizona. You know, most of the border doesn’t have a wall, of course, but there was parts where there was a wall. And these guys are working on the wall. I’m like, ‘What are you doin’?’ They’re like, ‘We’re repairing the hole the cartels cut through the steel beams.’“So if you see that happening, and they’ve got the satchel of fentanyl strapped to their back, you use deadly force against them, you lay them out, you will see a change of behaviour. You have to take the fight to the cartels; otherwise we’re going to continue to see Americans dying.” More

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      DeSantis says Trump ‘of course lost’ in 2020 when pressed in interview

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      “Of course” Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Ron DeSantis said in an interview broadcast Monday – after being pressed on the issue.Appearing on NBC, the Florida governor and nearest challenger to Trump for the nomination in 2024 was asked: “Yes or no – did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”DeSantis said: “Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on 20 January every four years is the winner.”His interviewer, Dasha Burns, said: “If you can’t give a yes or no on whether or not Trump lost –”DeSantis said: “No, of course he lost!”Burns said: “Trump lost the 2020 election?”DeSantis said: “Of course! Joe Biden’s the president.”Trump continues to lie that the 2020 election was decided by voter fraud, even after the former president was last week indicted on four criminal charges related to his attempts to overturn the result.Despite those charges and 74 others over hush-money payments and retention of classified records, and despite the prospect of more election-related charges in Georgia, Trump leads DeSantis by more than 30 points in most polling averages and by healthy margins in early voting states.DeSantis’s campaign is widely seen to be tanking. He and the rest of the Republican field have struggled to find a way to attack Trump, given his hold on the party. Discomfort when asked to say Biden won in 2020 or to condemn Trump’s lie is widely seen to be a symptom of that malaise.DeSantis told NBC the 2024 election should be a “referendum on Joe Biden’s policies, and the failures that we’ve seen and we are presenting a positive vision for the future”.If it is, he said, “We will win the presidency, and we will have a chance to turn the country around.“If, on the other hand, the election is not about 20 January 2025 [inauguration day] but 6 January 2021 [the day of the deadly attack on Congress by Trump supporters] or what document was left by the toilet at Mar-a-Lago, if it is a referendum on that, we are going to lose, and that’s just the reality.”A Trump spokesperson, Steve Cheung, told NBC: “Ron DeSantis should really stop being Joe Biden’s biggest cheerleader.”Another Trump aide, Liz Harrington, said: “If you think Joe Biden got 81 million votes, you’re an idiot. If you’re just saying that, you’re either a coward or corrupt. Either way it’s disqualifying.”In 2020, Biden received 81,282,916 votes to 74,223,369 for Trump. Biden won the presidency in the electoral college by 306-232, the result by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.DeSantis did offer Trump support, echoing his claim that his proliferating legal problems are the results of political persecution.DeSantis also said the 2020 election was not a “good-run election”.“But I also think Republicans didn’t fight back,” DeSantis added. “You’ve got to fight back when that is happening.“But here’s the issue that I think is important for Republican voters to think about: Why did we have all those mail votes? Because of Trump turned the government over to [former Covid task force leader Dr Anthony] Fauci.“They embraced lockdowns. They did the Cares Act, which funded mail-in ballots across the country.”As NBC pointed out, Florida has long allowed voting by mail.In the interview, scheduled to air on NBC Nightly News on Monday night, DeSantis was also asked about new standards for teaching history in Florida schools, which have proved controversial for saying some Black people benefited from being enslaved.DeSantis said: “We’ve been involved in education, not indoctrination. Those standards were not political at all.”Kamala Harris, the vice-president, has attacked DeSantis on the issue.Asked about criticism from Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the US Senate and a rival for the presidential nomination, DeSantis said: “Don’t take that side of Kamala Harris against the state of Florida. Don’t indulge those lies.” More

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      Pence has ‘no plans to testify’ against Trump but vows to ‘obey the law’

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      Former vice-president and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence said that he has “no plans to testify” against Donald Trump but vowed to “obey the law”.In a recent interview after federal prosecutors charged Trump over his efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Pence was asked by CBS correspondent Major Garrett whether he would be a witness against Trump if the case went to trial.Pence replied: “In this case, we’ve stood firmly for the rule of law. I took a stand, we challenged in court the scope of any testimony that I could provide, because as [the former] president of the Senate, the constitution provides me with the protections that are afforded to members of Congress. We won that at the lower court level and ultimately, we responded to a subpoena, and I have no plans to testify.“But people can be confident we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes and we’ll just tell the truth.”Garrett went on to ask Pence whether he regards the latest indictment against Trump as political persecution, a claim that rightwing media outlets have been promoting in attempts to undermine the ex-president’s charges.Trump is accused of conspiracy to defraud the United States and one count of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in connection with his supporters’ attack on the Capitol on January 6 2021, the day that Congress met to certify his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.Pence said: “I’ve been very concerned about politicization at the justice department for years. I’ve been deeply troubled to see the double standard between the way that the justice department has gone after the president … and the way they seem to … take no interest in getting to the bottom of allegations of corruption around” Biden’s family.The Democratic incumbent president’s son Hunter Biden is facing tax- and gun-related charges filed by prosecutors.Nonetheless, Pence added he didn’t want to “prejudge” the indictment against Trump.“I don’t know whether the government has the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to support this case,” Pence said during the interview, scheduled to air Sunday morning on CBS’s Face the Nation. “[Trump] is entitled to the presumption of innocence.”Pence vowed to “clean house” at the justice department, should he become the next president, saying that he will appoint “men and women at the highest levels … in this country that will restore the confidence of the American people in equal treatment under the law.”In response to whether he believed Trump can receive a fair trial in Washington DC’s federal courthouse, Pence replied that he has “every confidence” that the former president will make his case before a judge.“I’m never going to waver in making it clear to people that whatever the outcome of this indictment and – wherever it goes – I know I did my duty … to the constitution.”Earlier this week, Pence told Fox News that Trump and his “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” asked him to “literally reject votes” during the certification process.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAccording to the indictment, Trump pressured Pence repeatedly from late December to early January to reject electoral college votes, including on Christmas Day.At one point, Trump allegedly told the former vice-president, “You’re too honest,” a phrase that the Pence campaign has since capitalized on by selling “Too Honest” merchandise.Pence, in a separate interview Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, said: “I’ve been called worse. … I’m more than happy to wear that label.”In a typically combative post on his Truth Social platform, Trump denied saying Pence was “too honest”.“He’s delusional,” said Trump’s post, which also dismissed Pence as “not a very good person”.Trump’s charges related to his 2020 defeat were contained in one of three indictments pending against him as of Sunday. He is also facing charges in New York state stemming from hush money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels. And he is also facing a separate federal indictment pertaining to his allegedly illicit hoarding of government secrets at his Florida resort after he left the Oval Office.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. He is widely seen as the frontrunner to clinch the Republican nomination for president, with the rest of the field – including Pence – trailing him substantially in the polls. More

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      ‘These people are diehard’: Iowa Trump supporters shrug off indictments

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      From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there.Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president’s share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it.“Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions,” he said. “Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats’ effort to make him look bad, it hasn’t. It’s probably going to make him the [Republican] nominee and, honestly, he may win the general election again. And then whose fault would it be?”After pleading not guilty on Thursday to federal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, Trump denounced the indictment as “a persecution of a political opponent”.“If you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him,” he said.There are plenty who buy that line in Iowa and the rest of Trump-sympathetic America.With Trump likely to spend a good part of the next year in one courtroom or another, after being indicted in New York, Florida and Washington on an array of charges and with more expected in Georgia before long, his supporters are more than willing to believe it is a plot to keep their man out of the White House.One of them is Tom Schatz, a Howard county farmer on Iowa’s border with Minnesota.“They’re bringing the charges against Trump so he can’t run against Biden. Biden is so damn crooked. We’ve never had this kind of shit in this United States, ever,” he said. “Democrats are gonna keep riding [Trump’s] ass and bringing shit up against him. They don’t quit. They just don’t like him because he’s draining the swamp, and they don’t like that.”Schatz, like many Trump supporters, sees the prosecutions as part of a pattern of establishment attacks, from Congress twice impeaching the then president to the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign. The same message is hammered home on rightwing talk radio stations that are often the background to the working day in rural America.On the day of Trump’s arraignment, Buck Sexton, a former CIA analyst on AM 600 WMT in Iowa, was energetically telling his listeners, without irony, that the prosecutions undermined confidence in the electoral system.“We are up against something we have never dealt with before,” he said. “They don’t care how reckless this is, the Democrats. It doesn’t bother them the disruption that they are doing to faith in the judicial system, faith in our elections, something that he’s talked about all the time. How can you have a fair election when one candidate has soon to be four criminal trials against him? Specifically timed to happen during the election.”Shaffer, who works for the state as a river conservationist as well as running a family farm, has watched Trump’s support rise, fall and then bounce back.Some support drained away to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, after several prominent candidates backed by the former president lost in the midterm elections last November. For a while, polls put DeSantis ahead of Trump in a primary matchup. Shaffer said his county party was split, although at the time he still thought Trump would win because his supporters had more energy and commitment.“Now I think it’s even more so. When I speak up for DeSantis at our Republican monthly meeting, these people wearing their Trump hats don’t want to hear it. It’s such a foregone conclusion. Trump is going to get the nomination easily, whether he’s in a jail cell or in the courtroom. These people are that diehard,” he said.Shaffer sensed the renewed vigor in Trump’s campaign when he met the former president days before the latest indictment, at the Iowa Republican party’s annual fundraising Lincoln Dinner. Trump was among 13 candidates there to argue their case before meeting party activists one on one. So was his former vice-president, Mike Pence.“I feel bad for Pence because there were 500 people in line to see Trump and there were literally five people in the room for Pence,” said Shaffer. “Trump has that connection. Most of our group was there just to meet him.”Shaffer said the line to see DeSantis was longer than for Pence but nothing like the one for Trump, which he took as further evidence that the rightwing Florida governor’s moment had passed and that the the prosecutions helped revive Trump’s candidacy.“I think DeSantis is awesome. I think he’ll make a great president someday. But as long as Trump is running, there’s no way he’s gonna get the nomination,” he said.The polls back Shaffer’s view. But among some Howard county voters, support for Trump is more ambivalent.Tom Schatz’s son, Aaron, was a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. He voted for Obama but didn’t like Hillary Clinton. He was much more enthusiastic about Trump four years later but has cooled on him since.For all that, Schatz believes the former president is the victim of a political conspiracy.The dairy and corn farmer said he was more concerned about inflation, rising interest rates and falling prices for his milk than the details of the 45-page indictment laying out Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He preferred to see the charges as evidence of a double standard in which the Washington establishment failed to properly investigate Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden for alleged crimes.Asked about Trump’s part in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, Schatz brushed it off as a bad thing but not very different from what he said were Democratic politicians encouraging the protests and riots that followed the killing of George Floyd three years ago.“They burned down Minneapolis. Were they prosecuted for that?“ he asked. “Trump acted poorly when he lost, I’ll give them that. But they’re just out to get anything they can on him. Part of me thinks that all they’re going to do is unite the Trump followers. I think they’re doing more harm than good.”Shaffer, too, is not persuaded by the detail of the indictment.“I still don’t like a lot of what Trump was doing, a lot of what he was saying. People know he didn’t handle himself very well from election day through January 6. But does it rise to the level where he should go to jail because he said something in a phone call? I think we’re more adult than that,” he said.Suspicions about the barrage of indictments even extends to the chair of Howard county’s Democratic party, Laura Hubka, a US navy veteran and ultrasound technologist at the city’s hospital who has no like of Trump.“I think that they’re going after him because he’s running,” she said. “Did he break laws and is he a bad guy? Yeah. But I think if he just went into the sunset, and blathered on Truth Social, maybe they would just have left him alone. But once he ran again, people thought he’s popular enough to win again and we need to do something to stop him. They had to do something, I guess.”The impact of Trump’s coming trials, and the evidence they lay bare, remains to be seen. But it might be expected that while diehard supporters will remain loyal through it all, those who voted for him once but then swung to Biden four years later have little reason to switch back.Trump was defeated by 7m popular votes and 74 electoral college ballots in 2020, and some Democrats are calculating that he will struggle to overcome that deficit with the additional baggage of indictments, trials and possibly even prison time.Yet the polls show the US’s two most recent presidents tied, including in key swing states such as Michigan.“Every time they indict him, he goes up in the polls,” said Shaffer. “I think the Democrats are so arrogant. Some of the liberals believe that, just like they did in 2016, he’ll never be elected, he’ll never get in again. Don’t be too sure about that.”For her part, Hubka cannot believe that the polls are that close even if the election is more than a year away.“I feel like he could be running from prison and it’ll still be a tight race with Joe Biden. That’s what scares me,” she said.Which raises a question about why the Democrats are not doing better in a former stronghold like Howard county.Shaffer says Howard county is doing well in many ways, and thanks to Biden. He said the presidents’s Inflation Reduction Act has pumped money into the county, paying to renew infrastructure, including bridges and roads. Shaffer’s conservation work for the state is well funded thanks to the federal government, and that brings financial benefits to farmers. In addition, the push for green energy has resulted in a proliferation of very profitable windmills.“We’ve got a lot of windmills around here and it’s a huge benefit. Each one of those is valued at a million dollars and we’re able to tax them and it puts money in our budget so we can build bridges and roads and have money for the schools,” said Shaffer.“I’ve got one of my farmers has four windmills and all the roads and lines. He gets $185,000 a year from it. He built a new home. He’s got new tractors. The whole northwest part of the county used to be a more depressed area. The windmills pumped in a lot of money “Shaffer is surprised that, with so many Republicans denouncing renewable energy, the Democratic party isn’t making more of an effort to claim credit for the benefits in Howard county.Hubka blames the Democratic national leadership, which has been accused of overly focusing on parts of the country where a majority of the residents have a college education, unlike rural Iowa.“They need to get some balls, be more bold. I also feel like they just are writing off the rural counties,” she said.But Hubka is still there, campaigning and waiting to see what happens if Trump goes to prison. She bought a gun before the last election because of so many threats from Trump supporters.“I was really very scared that I was going to get shot or hurt. It’s calmed down a bit in that sense. But who knows what happens if he gets thrown in jail,” she said.Around the corner from her hospital, a flag hanging outside a house might be read as a warning: “Trump 2024. 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      Trump shatters laws of political physics with third indictment

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      It was hardly the triumphant return to Washington that he and his campaign imagined. Donald Trump was back in America’s capital this week, not as president but an accused criminal. “Not guilty,” he pleaded in a hushed courtroom to four charges stemming from the effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.But even as observers savored a sombre yet reaffirming moment for the rule of law, a follower of the former US president could be seen outside court waving a giant flag. “Trump or death,” it declared, not far from the halls of Congress where lethal violence erupted on January 6,2021.Trump is now twice impeached and thrice indicted but his support base is holding firm.Indeed, each negative in a court of law translates into a positive in the court of public opinion. He remains the dominant figure among Republican voters who share his view that he is being unfairly targeted by a justice system bent on helping Democrat Joe Biden.“The more the indictments, the better his poll numbers, the easier the argument that it’s two standards of justice and Donald Trump is persecuted and picked on,” said Bill Whalen, a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California. “It’s very funny, considering he’s the pre-eminent bully in American politics, that no one plays the victim card better than Donald Trump.”A whiff of criminality or scandal used to be career ending for politician. President Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate; Vice-President Spiro Agnew quit after being charged with bribery, tax evasion and conspiracy; Gary Hart’s presidential campaign collapsed due to allegations of an extramarital affair; Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress after a series of sexting scandals.But Trump has shattered the laws of the political physics. He has made the state and federal charges – now a combined 78 across three jurisdictions – against him a central plank of his campaign platform, casting himself as a martyr. At his rallies he portrays the cases as not just an attack on him but his supporters. He told a crowd last week in Erie, Pennsylvania: “They’re not indicting me, they’re indicting you.”A few dissenting voices apart, Republicans have echoed and amplified these talking points with characteristic fervour. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that she “will still vote for Trump even if he’s in jail”.Far from destroying his prospects, many observers believe, the latest and arguably most serious indictment for his alleged role in undermining American democracy will likely fuel a march toward the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024.Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Every time he’s indicted or under the spotlight, his numbers go up with Republican voters.“I don’t see a pathway right now where Republican base voters suddenly wake up and say, ‘Wow, this is a bad guy and we’re going to change our minds, we’re going to to vote for Chris Christie or Ron DeSantis.’ All of them have failed on a fundamental level to make a case for themselves because the base will punish them if they attack him.”Some Republicans in Congress are still willing to criticise Trump on certain issues and a few, such as Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, are outspoken in their conviction that he is unfit for office. Others, such as Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have either retired or been ousted.But most party leaders have stayed silent and fallen into line, apparently terrified of alienating Trump’s fervent support base in what critics describe as political cowardice. Even his main opponents in the party’s presidential primary race have dodged the issue or endorsed his claim of a Democratic witch-hunt and “deep state” conspiracy.Wilson added: “Not one of the serious candidates – there aren’t many in the primary field – are making any kind of argument other than this is illegitimate, this is wrong, [special counsel] Jack Smith’s the real criminal, all these crazy things. Not one of the serious ones is saying this guy should be in prison, not in the White House.“I don’t think this is a moment where Trump has been harmed in the primary; it’s solidified it. He’s going to be on TV every minute of every day for weeks and weeks and weeks and every time that happens the fundraising for the other Republicans dries up, their ability to communicate a messaging stops, none of it works. The whole thing is set of perverse incentives and it’s an almost inescapable trap for the rest of the field.”Trump himself understands this trap and how it starves his opponents of political oxygen. Ahead of his court appearance on Thursday, he wrote on his Truth Social media platform: “I need one more indictment to ensure my election!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has also used the cases to raise cash, sending out a flurry of fundraising emails and raking in millions. Even so, an analysis by the Associated Press found that so far this year the former president’s political operation has spent more on legal fees defending him, his staff and his allies than on travel, rallies and other campaign expenses combined.And commentators say that while the indictments could help Trump solidify support within his base and win the Republican nomination, his ability to capitalise on them will be more limited in next year’s presidential election, when he will have to win over more sceptical moderate Republicans and independents.In a July Reuters/ Ipsos poll, 37% of independents said the criminal cases against Trump made them less likely to vote for him for president, compared to 8% who said they were more likely to do so.However, hours before the latest indictment was unsealed, alarm bells were set off among Democrats by a New York Times/Siena opinion poll that showed him running neck and neck with Biden at 43%. Wilson’s advice to Democrats is simple: “They should say over and over again: this is a choice between economic growth and steady leadership in the world and at home or backing a criminal.”Democratic leaders in Congress welcomed this week’s indictment as proof that all are equal before the law. But Biden has been circumspect about commenting on Trump’s trials and tribulations.He appointed Merrick Garland as attorney general, who in turn appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to lead the Trump investigations. The president, an institutionalist, has been careful to keep his distance from both and to avoid commenting on the cases, lest he give credence to the accusation of political meddling. On Tuesday, as the nation was digesting the latest indictment, Biden continued his holiday by going to see the blockbuster film Oppenheimer. On Thursday, asked if he would watch the court hearing, Biden replied: “No.”Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “There’s a reason the justice department is independent and Merrick Garland appointed the special counsel so there’s no role whatsoever for the president to be involved in it. First of all, the separation of powers and secondly, it doesn’t help him politically to become entangled in this.“At this moment the Republican party has to sort this out, not the Democratic president, not the Democratic party, not Democratic voters. Trump is running for president not to solve America’s problems; he’s running to try to stay out of jail and not be held accountable.”The electoral and legal calendars are set to collide. A New York state criminal trial involving a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels is due to start on 25 March next year, and his Florida trial in a federal classified documents case is scheduled to begin on 20 May. Both would take place just months before the November election, as might a third trial in the case centred on his 2020 election lies.But plenty of analysts agree that the White House should resist the temptation to weigh in on Trump’s woes. Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “They need to let the law speak for itself. The more they talk about it, the more it looks political.“They want the person who didn’t vote, particularly the young person who is culturally liberal and inclined to the Democratic party, to let the facts speak for themselves and not have them think, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I think Trump is awful but this is awful too’. That’s the question you never want to have appear in marginal voters’ minds. That means let the court thing play out for itself. Don’t talk about it.” More