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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. The rules have changed.” More

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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

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      Finally, three reasons for Donald Trump to be afraid: a courtroom, a jury and the truth

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      I blame the father. Frederick Trump raised his children, one in particular, to believe that the world was divided into winners and losers and that there was no greater crime than to fall into the latter category. In 2020, Donald Trump was ready to bring down the American republic rather than admit before the shade of his dead father that he had lost a presidential election. Scholars speak of “losers’ consent” as an essential prerequisite of a democratic system: without it, there can be no peaceful transfer of power. For two and a half centuries, that model held in the US. But in 2020 it ran into a man who would rather destroy his country than wear the scarlet letter L on his forehead.The result is the indictment against Trump that arrived this week, the third – with one more expected – and easily the most serious. Across 45 pages, Trump is charged with plotting to overturn a democratic election – to thwart the will of the voters who had rejected him at the ballot box and thereby remain in power.The weary assumption is that, like the two previous indictments, this will not much damage Trump’s prospects in the 2024 election and might even boost them: a major national poll this week found him crushing all his Republican rivals for the party’s presidential nomination and dead even in the presumed match-up against Joe Biden. Even so, this case, whose court date will be set on 28 August, could scarcely be more significant. It will be the first great trial of the post-truth age.None of this should come as a surprise. Trump never hid who he was or what he intended. In 2016, he refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the election he fought against Hillary Clinton: “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he said, and he was similarly coy four years later.Nor did he conceal his belief that his seat in the Oval Office put him above the law. Referring to the second article of the US constitution, he told an audience of teenagers in 2019, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”As for the impunity granted to him by his supporters, who give him more cash every time another felony charge lands, that too was foretold – by Trump himself. Back in January 2016, he predicted that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and “shoot somebody” and he would not lose any voters. So far, murder has not appeared on any Trump charge sheet, but the prescience of the remark still stands.More subtly, Trump revealed, and reveals, much of himself in the attacks he makes on others. He is currently insistent that he is the victim of Biden’s “weaponised” Department of Justice, suggesting that the independent federal prosecutors who drew up this week’s indictment were, in fact, mere partisan hacks doing the bidding of the president. And yet it is not Biden but Trump himself who has signalled that, if returned to the White House, he would end the independence of the criminal justice system, as part of a takeover of swathes of the administrative state, concentrating colossal power in his own hands. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” one senior Trump lieutenant told the New York Times. It is Trump, not Biden, who envisages using the justice department as a hit squad against his enemies: he has promised, if re-elected, to order a criminal investigation into the current president. Again, no surprise: remember the way Trump led the 2016 crowds in anti-Clinton chants of “lock her up”.But just because we can’t claim to be surprised does not mean we shouldn’t be shocked. Several crucial principles are at stake in this case. One is that every vote must count: the victims of Trump’s conspiracy were the tens of millions of Americans who voted for Biden, whose ballots would have been cast aside had the ex-president prevailed.Another is that nobody is above the law. While Trump claims to be the victim of political persecution, the truth is that it would have been an intensely political decision not to pursue him, especially when more than 1,000 of his devotees have been charged for storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021. If they can be prosecuted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, why can’t he?But perhaps the central principle at stake here is that there is such a thing as the truth. Trump has challenged that notion from the very start. Not just by lying – he’s not the first politician to do that – but by seeking to shake public faith in the very idea that truth is even possible.The former president spread specific lies claiming decisive electoral fraud in key states – as the indictment memorably puts it, “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false” – in order to construct the big lie of a stolen election. He built an alternative reality on that lie that persists to this day – a reality made up, incidentally, of the kind of “alternative facts” to which we were introduced within hours of his taking office. That episode related to the seemingly trivial matter of the size of his inauguration crowd. But it established Trump’s post-truth position: that there are no commonly accepted facts – not even those you can see with your own eyes – only claim and counter-claim.That’s why one of Trump’s go-to lines has long been “Nobody really knows”. (“Nobody really knows” if climate change is real was a 2016 classic of the form.) In a blizzard of competing claims, the blinded citizen can either retreat, confused, or else be guided by the leader who kindly tells them what is true and what is not. That was the Putin manoeuvre – his power rests on it – and Trump has made it his own. Not for nothing is his personal social media platform called Truth.Now, though, Trump’s brand of post-truth is set to face its most severe challenge. As the Economist notes this week, “a courtroom is a place where reality counts … In court, truth means something”. Up until now, Trump has succeeded in persuading half the country that they cannot trust awkward, discomforting facts, including those uncovered by federal investigators, because all such people – FBI agents, judges – are tools of the deep state. Every morsel of evidence can be dismissed as the handiwork of the “globalists and communists” who constitute America’s “corrupt ruling class”.The tactic has been remarkably effective. The acid of Trumpian post-truth has corroded large parts of the US system already, breaking public trust in elections, the media and much else. Will the courtroom that hears the United States of America v Donald J Trump be able to shut it out and remain free of its sulphuric touch? On the answer, much more than the fate of one poisonous man – shaped by a poisonous father – depends.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      Outrage after DeSantis says he’d ‘start slitting throats’ if elected president

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      Rightwing Florida governor and 2024 presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was widely condemned after he said that if elected to the White House, he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in power.The president of the National Treasury Employees Union, Tony Reardon, called the hardline Republican’s comment “repulsive and unworthy of the presidential campaign trail”.The president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), Everett Kelley, said: “Governor DeSantis’ threat to ‘start slitting throats’ of federal employees is dangerous, disgusting, disgraceful and disqualifying.”Among commentators, the columnist Max Boot called DeSantis’s words “deranged” while Bill Kristol, founder of the Bulwark, a conservative site, said the governor was “making a bold play to dominate the maniacal psychopath lane in the Republican primary”.DeSantis is a clear second in the Republican primary but more than 30 points behind Donald Trump in most averages, notwithstanding the former president’s proliferating legal jeopardy including 78 criminal charges.On Friday a major poll by the New York Times and Siena College in the first state to vote, Iowa, put DeSantis 24 points behind.DeSantis is widely seen to be trying to reset his campaign, having fired staffers including a conservative writer who created a video ad containing a Nazi symbol.But the governor has not noticeably retooled his hard-right rhetoric.DeSantis made his comment about slitting throats at an event in the second state to vote, New Hampshire, last Sunday.“On bureaucracy, you know, we’re going to have all these deep state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on day one and be ready to go,” DeSantis said. “You’re going to see a huge, huge outcry because Washington wants to protect its own.”Complaints about the so-called deep state – notionally an embedded government of officials and bureaucrats Republicans claim exists to thwart their agenda – is a common feature of far-right campaigns, from Trump down.Should he return to power, Trump is widely reported to be planning an administrative cull of the federal bureaucracy, seeking to instal loyalists as part of a process his close ally Steve Bannon has long called the “deconstruction of the administrative state”.DeSantis has used his “slitting throats” line before, last week telling the rightwing columnist John Solomon he wanted to appoint a defense secretary who would “slit some throats” and be “very firm, very strong”.Condemning DeSantis’s remarks, Kelley, the president of the AFGE, said: “Federal employees – over a third of whom are veterans now wearing their second uniform in service to their country – have dedicated their lives to serving their fellow Americans.“They support our military, provide healthcare to our nation’s veterans, enforce our laws, safeguard our communities, deliver benefits to America’s most vulnerable citizens, keep our skies safe for air travel, protect human health and our environment, and much more.“These public servants deserve respect and commendation from our nation’s leaders. No federal employee should face death threats from anyone, least of all from someone seeking to lead the US government. Governor DeSantis must retract his irresponsible statement.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere seemed little chance of that, from a candidate who has made harsh rhetoric and confrontational poses cornerstones of a campaign nonetheless failing to outflank Trump on the right.In Florida, Daniel Uhlfelder, a former Democratic candidate for state attorney general, pointed to controversies over DeSantis’s past when he said: “This guy started his legal career at Guantánamo Bay.”As a US navy lawyer, DeSantis was posted to the US facility on the coast of Cuba during the wars after 9/11. He has angrily denied being present at torture sessions, calling one former inmate’s claims “totally, totally BS”.In Congress on Thursday, the Virginia Democratic senator Mark Warner said “inflammatory, violent language” like that used by DeSantis in New Hampshire “can lead to very real, very dangerous consequences”.Kelley of the AFGE agreed, linking DeSantis’s violent imagery to deadly far-right violence.“We’ve seen too often in recent years – from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 to the sacking of the [US] Capitol on January 6 2021 – that violent anti-government rhetoric from politicians has deadly consequences.”In Oklahoma City, 168 people including 19 children were killed when a bomb planted by the rightwing extremist Timothy McVeigh destroyed a federal building. More than 500 people were injured.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack on the Capitol, in which Trump supporters sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden. More than a thousand people have been charged in relation to the riot, Trump among them after being indicted by the special counsel Jack Smith this week.Everett said: “Any candidate who positions themselves within that shameful tradition has no place in public office.” More

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      ‘Dark Brandon’ meme boosts Biden’s campaign merchandise sales

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      Joe Biden’s re-election team has apparently discovered a fundraising boon by subverting a foul-mouthed rightwing chant.Axios reported that “Dark Brandon” items, including mugs and T-shirts, are responsible for more than half of the Biden campaign’s merchandising sales.The Dark Brandon meme, which typically shows the president with red, laserlike eyes, emerged as a reaction to the Republican term: “Let’s go Brandon” – a phrase which is widely interpreted as code for “Fuck Joe Biden”.The image of Biden, which first gained ground in 2022, has “been fashioned into a boast, depicting Biden playing five-dimensional chess, a master of the political dark arts”, Politico reported.Biden’s campaign has seized upon the Dark Brandon concept, and the image of a smiling, crimson-eyed Biden has been slapped on all manner of campaign merchandise.Visitors to the Biden-Harris official store can purchase Dark Brandon baseball caps, tote bags, and other paraphernalia, and according to Axios the “Dark” items are responsible for 54% of the store’s revenue.The surge in revenue comes at a good time for the Biden campaign, which has been struggling to raise money from small donors, defined as people who donate $200 or less.The New York Times reported that the Biden campaign and the Biden Victory Fund, a joint committee of the campaign, raised $10.2m from small donors across April-May, less than half the amount Barack Obama raised during the same period in 2011.Let’s Go Brandon entered common parlance in 2021, following an incident at a Nascar race in Alabama.After the race, some members of the crowd chanted “Fuck Joe Biden” while Brandon Brown, a driver, was being interviewed. The interviewer suggested the crowd were actually chanting “Let’s go Brandon”, and the subverted version became popular among Republicans, including some members of Congress. More

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      The far-right financier giving millions to the Republican party to fight ‘woke communists’

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      Newly released tax and election records show that since 2020 controversial financier Thomas Klingenstein has become one of the largest individual donors to national Republicans, contributing more than $11.6m to candidates and Pac, after decades as the far-right Claremont Institute’s biggest donor and board chairman.The spending spree dwarfs the total $666,000 Klingenstein spent between 1992 and 2016, and in the last election cycle put Klingenstein in the top 40 contributors to national Republican candidates and committees.In turn the spending has allowed him to connect with a long-standing network of conservative mega-donors centered on the billionaire-founded Club for Growth, which advocates for the reduction of government.Klingenstein and the Claremont Institute push a harder-edged rightwing politics, and he appeared in a series of videos released in 2022 where he argued that American conservatives are in a “cold civil war” with “woke communists”, and that “education, corporate media, entertainment, big business, big tech… together with the government function as a totalitarian regime”.Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that Klingenstein’s pivot may indicate an effort to “pull of Republican outfits and donors towards more extreme positions”.While the Claremont Institute has been called “the nerve center of the American Right” for its intellectual leadership and formation of hard right activists, Klingenstein appears to have a new appetite for directly impacting electoral politics.The Guardian attempted to contact Klingenstein for comment, including by contacting lawyers for his private foundation, but was unsuccessful in getting a response.Klingenstein is a partner in Wall Street investment firm Cohen Klingenstein, which administers a portfolio worth more than $2.3bn, according to its most recent Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.Klingenstein’s grandfather was a successful investor, and other members of his family pursue more conventional avenues for their philanthropy, but beginning in the Donald Trump era, Klingenstein has increasingly used his resources to pursue a hard-edged version of rightwing politics.Klingenstein’s characterization of the political divide as a cold civil war – spelled out in a series of glossy YouTube videos – has been previously reported, as have some of his activities as chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute, a Claremont, California-based thinktank.That organization charted a radical, pro-Trump course from 2016, culminating in Senior Fellow John Eastman advising Trump in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and delivering a fiery speech to the crowd of protesters in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.But newly available filings reveal how he has advanced these ideas in electoral and cultural battles.IRS filings show that Klingenstein has bankrolled Claremont and other rightwing nonprofits from a private foundation for decades. But Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign finance records show that Klingenstein’s political contributions prior to 2020 were modest and intermittent.More recently, however, he appears to have joined a network of big-money donors centered on the Club for Growth and an associated Pac, Club for Growth Action.A $2.5m donation in January made Klingenstein the fourth largest contributor to the Club for Growth Action Pac, by bringing his total contributions to the PAC to $7m since 2020.The Guardian previously reported that the Club for Growth Pac’s biggest donors are conservative billionaires Richard Uihlein, Jeff Yass, and that the Pac was one of the largest supporters of Republican candidates who wanted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The most recent FEC data indicates that this is still the case, with Yass’s contributions totaling over $51m and Uihlein’s at over $77m. Another conservative mega donor, Virginia James, has contributed almost $14.5m to the Pac. Klingenstein has now joined them as one of Club for Growth Pac’s foremost funders.Beirich said of the apparent collaboration between Klingenstein and these Club for Growth’s network of megadonors that “the Club for Growth has always prioritized taxes and economic issues and and dabbled in climate denial, but it’s interesting to see Maga types mixing with them”.She added that “it might be an attempt to bring the Club for Growth into the Maga universe”.There are indications that Klingenstein has succeeded in interesting Club for Growth donors in projects for which he is the principal funder.The American Leadership Pac was registered in September 2022, and by mid-October it had received $1.5m in two tranches from Klingenstein, $500,000 from Richard Uihlein, $250,000 from William Koch, and another $250,000 from Koch’s petroleum company, Oxbow Carbon LLC.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast January, Klingenstein poured another $500,000 to the Pac, bringing his total to $2m.The Pac spent some $1.8m in the lead-up to the 2022 mid-term elections, mostly on text messages in support of a slate of Republicans and attacking their Democratic opponents nationwide, mostly in close districts around the country.In 2020 Klingenstein contributed $500,000 to the American Principles Project Pac, which was the largest single contribution by an individual to that committee in its decade-long history, although Sean Fieler, described by watchdog group Right Wing Watch as an “anti-LGBTQ megafunder” has donated over $1.7m to the Pac in 13 donations since 2013.Other individual donors include Robert Mercer, the rightwing hedge fund manager who achieved prominence after 2016 for his funding of both the Trump campaign and Breitbart News.While the likes of Mercer, Uihlein and Yass let their donations do the talking, and largely eschew public commentary, Klingenstein has sought prominence as a culture warrior and far-right thought leader.Another Pac where he is the leading donor sought not to promote election candidates, but Klingenstein’s own apocalyptic vision of a “cold civil war” in America.In 2021 and 2022, Klingenstein contributed $500,000 to Firebrand Pac. The committee spent almost all of that by the end of 2022, with its main output being five YouTube videos starring Klingenstein, in which he claims that a “a cold civil war… is not a time for too much stability, compromise, or for imputing good motives to the enemy”.Klingenstein’s role as the Claremont Institute’s board chairman and principal donor have been widely reported, but while he told the New York Times last year that Claremont had become “increasingly less reliant on me” for funding, figures released since indicate that he has significantly increased his level of financial support.IRS filings from one of his private foundations, the Thomas D Klingenstein Fund, indicate that he has given more than $19m to the Claremont Institute since 2005, with the most recent publicly available filing showing a $2.97m donation in 2021, his highest to date, and almost half a million dollars more than the $2.5m figure the Times reported for 2019.Klingenstein’s foundation also funds Claremont Institute offshoots like the American Strategy Group, whose website claims it is “dedicated to understanding the existential threats to the United States and western civilization presented by the Islamic world, Russia, China, and the loss of America’s founding principles”.That organization is headed by Brian T Kennedy, a former president of the Claremont Institute, who told an audience at Hillsdale College in April that he had appeared in front of a “grand jury in Washington DC” because “I was one of thirty people subpoenaed from Trumpworld” in the justice department’s ongoing pursuit of those responsible for the events of January 6 2021.Klingenstein’s foundation has also consistently funded the National Association of Scholars, and giving just over $100,000 in 2021 per its IRS filing. That organization is a rightwing nonprofit “that seeks to reform higher education” according to its website, and Klingenstein is a board member. He used the organization’s website to spell out an early version of his vision of “cold civil war” in 2021.There are indications, both in spending records and Klingenstein’s public commentary, that he believes rightwing Florida governor Ron DeSantis to be best placed to prosecute his side of the “war”.In an interview with conservative broadcaster Steve Deace in 2022, posted to Klingenstein’s personal YouTube channel, Klingenstein said that “DeSantis understands that we’re in a war, and that’s the most important thing”.“If you don’t understand we’re in a war, almost nothing else matters,” he added. More

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      Donald Trump’s January 6 indictment – podcast

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      “The attack on our nation’s Capitol on 6 January 2021 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” special counsel Jack Smith said on Tuesday. “As described in the indictment, it was fuelled by lies.” Donald Trump has been charged over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The former president faces four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. Trump, who is leading the polls in the Republican candidate race for the 2024 election, has been charged in three criminal indictments since leaving office. Hugo Lowell, a reporter at the Guardian’s Washington bureau, takes Michael Safi through the case outlined in the latest indictment and what it could mean for the upcoming election. More