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      ‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacks

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      ‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacks It was a terrible seven days, with major developments in investigations of his election lies and the Capitol riot reaching into his inner circle

      ‘House of Trump is crumbling’: why the legal net is tightening
      The last time Donald Trump heard such hammer blows, they were from renovations at Mar-a-Lago that displeased the former president. But not even that sound would have left his ears ringing like last week’s avalanche of bad news that some believe nudged a criminal indictment one step closer.Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn to see honorary university degrees revokedRead moreNo single week in the year since Trump left the White House has been as dramatic, or for him as potentially catastrophic, as the one just passed.It included a rebuke from the supreme court over documents related to the 6 January insurrection which Trump incited; news that the congressional committee investigating the riot was closing in on Trump’s inner circle; evidence from New York’s attorney general of alleged tax fraud; and, perhaps most damaging of all, a request from a Georgia prosecutor for a grand jury in her investigation of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.The week ended with the leaking of a document showing that Trump at least pondered harnessing the military in his attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.It all left the former president with plenty to ponder.“He’s Teflon Don, he said he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and survive it, his supporters are going to support him no matter what, but I’m starting to think more and more that the walls are closing in on this guy,” said Kimberley Wehle, a respected legal analyst and professor of law at the University of Baltimore.“The most immediate thing is the grand jury in Georgia because there’s audio of him trying to get [secretary of state] Brad Raffensperger to ‘find’ votes. Under Georgia election laws as I read them that is potentially a crime.“The looming question is whether Trump will be indicted along with 11 others so far for seditious conspiracy [over the 6 January Capitol attack]. To me that’s the biggest turn of events … the justice department believes they have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of an agreement, a meeting of minds to overturn a legitimate election.“And that there are a lot of high-level people that are looped into it, including potentially Donald Trump himself, and of course he’s not president, so he’s not immune from prosecution any more.”It is that Department of Justice investigation into the deadly Capitol assault, parallel but separate to the 6 January House committee, which harbors the most legal peril for Trump. Some believe sedition charges for members of the Oath Keepers militia indicate that the inquiry has moved into a higher gear.Others, most recently Preet Bharara, former district attorney for the southern district of New York, have questioned why it appears members of Trump’s inner guard, including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, have not yet been questioned.“It’s just not a possibility they’ve tried to interview, you know, a dozen of the top people at and around the White House like the [6 January] committee has [because] they squeal like stuck pigs when people approach them,” Bharara told The New Abnormal podcast, a Daily Beast podcast.“It’s odd to have allowed all this testimony to be collected, all these documents to be subpoenaed and compiled, and they don’t look like they’ve done any of these interviews. There are some lower-level people who breached the doors to the Capitol, but I don’t think those people are giving it up in a straight line to Trump.”At a rare press conference earlier this month, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, did not mention Trump by name but sought to reassure critics of his investigation.“The justice department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law – whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy,” he said in a carefully worded address.The objectives of the House committee are easier to divine and more likely in the immediate term to cause political harm to Trump as he mulls another White House run.Thursday’s request for testimony from his daughter Ivanka, a former White House adviser, brings the investigation to the heart of Trump’s inner circle. Trump’s actions are also set to be explored in primetime TV hearings that Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the committee, has promised will “blow the roof off the House”.The panel also scored a big victory on Wednesday when the supreme court ended Trump’s efforts to shield more than 700 pages of White House records. The treasure trove of documents included a draft executive order directing the Department of Defense to seize voting machines, and appointing a special counsel to look into the election, in support of Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen.“Documents don’t die, they don’t lie,” Wehle said. “A witness can say, ‘Oh, I don’t recall,’ and dance around it. Documents cannot. Secondly, the documents will lead to more people to discuss what happened, including Ivanka Trump.”Trump himself has been uncharacteristically quiet about his week of setbacks, other than two statements attacking Fani Willis, the Democratic district attorney for Fulton county, Georgia, for requesting a grand jury to assist her investigation into his election interference.Draft Trump order told defense chief to seize swing-state voting machinesRead more“The people looking for the crime are being hounded and the people who committed the crime are being protected,” he said. “This is not the American way.”To Wehle, the week’s developments have significance not only for Trump but for November midterm elections in which Republicans are tipped to reclaim Congress.“We have to think about the January 6th committee as getting information to voters before November about sitting members who might be up for reelection,” she said.“The question is not so much whether Trump will be indicted, but who in a seat of power in the US Congress was potentially involved in this conspiracy.“Frankly, if American democracy is to be saved from single-party minority rule, November is absolutely vital.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsUS elections 2020US midterm elections 2022US elections 2024US CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republican party signals plans to withdraw from US presidential debates

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      Republican party signals plans to withdraw from US presidential debatesMove comes after longstanding complaints from party that non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates favors Democrats

      US politics – live coverage
      The Republican party has signaled plans to withdraw from traditional US presidential debates, which it claims are biased against it.The New York Times first reported the move, citing a letter sent on Thursday by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).The commission was set up in 1987, as a non-partisan body “to ensure, for the benefit of the American electorate, that general election debates between or among the leading candidates for the offices of president and vice-president … are a permanent part of the electoral process”.In the most recent election, in 2020, Donald Trump made headlines with an aggressive performance in the first debate, in Cleveland, Ohio.Make up with Trump or be a failure, Republican colleague warns McConnellRead moreThe second debate was cancelled after Trump was hospitalized with Covid-19 and the CPD sought to move the event online. Trump and Republicans protested that doing so would help Joe Biden.The final debate took place in Nashville, Tennessee as planned, with Biden widely adjudged the winner. A vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris also went ahead, in Salt Lake City.In December this year, the Guardian first revealed the stunning news that Trump tested positive for Covid before the first debate but concealed the result, potentially putting Biden’s life in danger.Trump said that was fake news. So did his former chief of staff Mark Meadows – who wrote the book which contained the bombshell.The Times said the Republican move against the CPD was born of longstanding complaints that it favors Democrats, “mirroring increasing rancor from conservatives toward Washington-based institutions”.Among Republican complaints in 2020 was that the first debate took place on 29 September, more than a month before election day but after nearly a million votes had been cast.Trump and Republicans also complained about supposed bias among debate moderators – even from Chris Wallace, then of the conservative Fox News network, in the first debate.Trump remains favorite to be the Republican nominee in 2024.The threatened withdrawal from CPD debates, the Times said, followed “months of discussions between the commission and party officials”.Trump tested positive for Covid few days before Biden debate, chief of staff says in new bookRead moreDavid Bossie, a longtime rightwing operative with strong links to Trump, was reported to be leading the RNC on the issue, seeking among other aims to insert political representatives in meetings of the CPD board.Withdrawal will have to be approved at the RNC’s winter meetings in Utah in February, the Times said.In her letter, according to the Times, the RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, said: “So long as the CPD appears intent on stonewalling the meaningful reforms necessary to restore its credibility with the Republican party as a fair and nonpartisan actor, the RNC will take every step to ensure that future Republican presidential nominees are given that opportunity elsewhere.”In a statement, the CPD said it “deals directly with candidates for president and vice-president who qualify for participation”, and said “plans for 2024 will be based on fairness, neutrality and a firm commitment to help the American public learn about the candidates and the issues”.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More

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      Trump loyalists form alliance in bid to take over election process in key states

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      Trump loyalists form alliance in bid to take over election process in key states‘Coalition of America First secretary of state candidates’ disclosed by Jim Marchant, who is running for secretary of state in Nevada Extreme Republicans loyal to Donald Trump and his “big lie” that the 2020 election was rigged have formed a nationwide alliance aiming to take control of the presidential election process in key battleground states that could determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential race.The insurrection is only the tip of the iceberg | Sidney BlumenthalRead moreAt least eight Republicans who are currently running to serve as chief election officials in crucial swing states have come together to form the coalition.The group shares conspiracy theories about unfounded election fraud and exchanges ideas on how radically to reconstruct election systems in ways that could overturn the legitimate results of the next presidential race.All of them backed Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election and cling on to power against the will of American voters. Several of the alliance have been personally endorsed by Trump and have a credible shot at winning the post of secretary of state – the most powerful election officer in each state.The existence of the “coalition of America First secretary of state candidates” was disclosed by one of the members themselves, Jim Marchant who is running for secretary of state in Nevada. A former business owner and Nevada state assembly member, Marchant has ties with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement.Marchant ran for a US House seat in 2020 and lost. He challenged the result unsuccessfully in the courts, claiming he was a “victim of election fraud”, in a mirror-image of Trump’s many failed legal challenges to his defeat.In an interview with the Guardian, Marchant said that there were currently eight members of the coalition bidding for chief election official posts, with more likely to join soon. He said participants included Jody Hice in Georgia, Mark Finchem in Arizona and Kristina Karamo in Michigan – all three of whom have been endorsed by Trump.Marchant also named Rachel Hamm in California and David Winney in Colorado, and said that further members were likely to be recruited imminently in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Several in-person “summits” of the candidates had already been held, with the next planned in Wisconsin on 29 January and Nevada on 26 February.All the candidates named by Marchant have been prominent exponents of false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Finchem attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on January 6 hours before the US Capitol was stormed.Hice is running for secretary of state in Georgia against the Republican incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, who famously rebuffed Trump’s demands in the 2020 count to “find 11,780 votes” that would tip the state to him. Marchant, Karamo and Finchem all spoke at a QAnon conference in Las Vegas in October.The disclosure that extremist Republicans dedicated to election subversion have formed a network was first revealed by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House who is spearheading a “precinct-by-precinct” movement to inject far-right activists into local elected office. Marchant disclosed the alliance on Bannon’s War Room podcast.The revelation can only heighten jitters about the fragile state of American democracy. An NPR analysis of 2022 secretary of state races across the country found that at least 15 candidates have adopted Trump’s big lie.Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state and chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told the Guardian that democracy would be on the ballot in this November’s midterm elections.“Extreme members of the GOP are taking a sledgehammer to our democratic system. The big lie coalition of candidates running for secretary of state has pushed election conspiracies, authored dangerous voter suppression legislation, or attended the January 6 insurrection,” Griswold said.The nature of the threat posed by the new coalition is illustrated by Marchant. In the course of the 2020 election, he declared that had he been secretary of state at that time he would have refused to certify Joe Biden’s victory in Nevada by 33,596 votes, even though the count was unanimously approved by the Nevada supreme court.Marchant was also an eager advocate of sending an alternate slate of Trump electors to Congress in blatant contravention of the official vote count. Asked by the Guardian whether he would be prepared to do the same again in 2024, by sending an alternate slate of electors from Nevada to Congress contrary to the actual election results, he said: “That is very possible, yes.”Marchant told the Guardian that were he to win election in November and become the top election official in his state, he would act swiftly to introduce voter suppression measures. That would include introducing voter ID – “a no-brainer”, he said.He would also eradicate mail-in ballots which have been extensively blamed by conspiracy theorists, without evidence, as a source of mass fraud in 2020, and open up election counts to “aggressive poll watching”. And he would scrap electronic voting machines – also targeted by big lie advocates – and replace them with paper counts.When asked for evidence that voting machines had been manipulated to benefit Biden over Trump, Marchant pointed to Mesa county, Colorado. He said that “a very brave clerk suspected a lot of stuff going on by people who could get to the machines” and found that “clear crimes” had been committed.In fact, the clerk, Tina Peters, was recently stripped of her election duties after she was found to have sneaked an unauthorized individual into a secure room where voting machines were stored in order to copy their hard drives. The stolen information was then presented at a conspiracy theory event organized by the MyPillow executive Mike Lindell, a major proponent of the big lie.The Guardian asked Marchant who was manipulating the voting machines. He replied: “I don’t know actually. I think it’s a global thing. The people in power want to maintain their power.”The near-universal dismissal of all court challenges to the 2020 election results, including his own case, was explained by Marchant as the work of corrupt judges. “A lot of judges were bought off too – they are part of this cabal,” he said.What would he say to the criticism that his actions and those of his fellow coalition members, like those of Trump himself, were the behavior of sore losers?“I disagree,” Marchant said. “We have a lot of evidence. It is out there. Shoot, you can find it.”TopicsUS politicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More

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      Georgia Republican who resisted Trump insists he stands for ‘integrity and truth’

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      Georgia Republican who resisted Trump insists he stands for ‘integrity and truth’Brad Raffensperger says opponent for key post ‘should know better’ as pastor but dodges questions about election restrictions

      Is the US really heading for a second civil war?
      The Republican official who famously resisted Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat in Georgia has said he will run for re-election on a platform of “integrity and truth”, against an opponent who as a churchman “should know better” than to advance the former president’s lies.Capitol attack: Trump not immune from criminal referral, lawmakers insistRead moreBrad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, became a household name after he turned down Trump’s demand that he “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have [to get]” in order to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the southern state. It was the first victory by a Democrat in a presidential race in Georgia since 1992.This year, Raffensperger will run for re-election against Jody Hice, a pastor, US congressman and Trump acolyte.“Congressman Hice, he’s been in Congress for several years,” Raffensperger said on Sunday, on CBS’s Face the Nation. “He’s never done a single piece of election reform legislation.“Then he certified his own race with those same machines, the same ballots [that were used for the presidential election]. And yet for President Trump, he said you couldn’t trust that.“That’s a double-minded person. And as a pastor, he should know better. So, I’m going to run on integrity and I’m going to run on the truth. I don’t know what he’s going to run on.”Hice played a key role in legal and political attempts to overturn the 2020 election result.Writing for the Guardian to mark the anniversary of the 6 January Capitol attack, in which Trump supporters failed to stop Congress certifying the election result, the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal said that as the riot unfolded, Hice “raced by a Democratic colleague, who told me Hice was screaming into his phone: ‘You screwed it up, y’all screwed it all up!’”Hice, Blumenthal wrote, “was tasked to present a challenge to Georgia’s electors … as part of the far-rightwing Republican faction, the Freedom Caucus, directed by Congressman Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who was in constant touch that day with Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff and former Freedom Caucus member, and a watchful Trump himself.“Just as the violent insurrection launched, and paramilitary groups spearheaded medieval style hand-to-hand combat against the police and burst into the Capitol, Hice posted on Instagram a photo of himself headed into the House chamber with the caption, ‘This is our 1776 moment.’”Hice deleted that post and said he condemned the violence at the Capitol. But he formally objected to results in Arizona and Pennsylvania and voted against investigation of the attack. The select committee is reportedly interested in his own phone records as Hice remains a vocal proponent of the lie that Trump lost due to electoral fraud, a lie believed by clear majorities of Republicans.Hice announced his run to be secretary of state in Georgia, last March, later gaining Trump’s endorsement. Should he win, he will be in charge of state election counts.Many outside the Republican party fear the prospect of Trump allies filling such posts in battleground states, preparatory to another attempt to overturn a presidential election.“It’s certainly not by accident that we’re seeing individuals who don’t believe in democracy aspire to be our states’ chief election officers, particularly in the states that were under the greatest spotlight in 2020,” Jocelyn Benson, Michigan secretary of state, told the Guardian earlier this month.Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, however, have placed Georgia among Republican-run states which have implemented election laws which critics say aim to restrict Democratic turnout.Democracy under attack: how Republicans led the effort to make it harder to voteRead moreAsked about visits to Georgia this week by Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, to promote federal voting rights protections, Raffensperger told CBS: “6 January was terrible, but the response doesn’t need to be eliminating photo ID and then having same-day registration.“If you don’t have the appropriate guardrails in place, then you’re not going to have voter confidence in the results.”Pressed on claims by figures including the Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams that state election law is skewed against people of colour, Raffensperger heralded provisions for early voting and said: “I think that we have shown that Georgia has fair and honest elections. We have record registrations. We have record turnout.”He also said he was confident Hice would not take over the elections process.“The results will be the results,” Raffensperger said, “and those will be the results that will be certified. You cannot overturn the will of the people and so that won’t matter.“But at the end of the day, I will be re-elected, and he will not be.”TopicsUS voting rightsUS midterm elections 2022US elections 2024US politicsRepublicansGeorgianewsReuse this content More

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      US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns

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      US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warnsCanadian political scientist warns in op ed of Trumpist threat to American democracy and possible effect on northern neighbor

      The Steal: stethoscope for a democracy near cardiac arrest
      The US could be under a rightwing dictatorship by 2030, a Canadian political science professor has warned, urging his country to protect itself against the “collapse of American democracy”.America is now in fascism’s legal phase | Jason StanleyRead more“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail.“In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.”Homer-Dixon’s message was blunt: “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a rightwing dictatorship.”The author cited eventualities centered on a Trump return to the White House in 2024, possibly including Republican-held state legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic win.Trump, he warned, “will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance” of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.A “scholar of violent conflict” for more than four decades, Homer-Dixon said Canada must take heed of the “unfolding crisis”.“A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of Covid-19, reconciliation and the accelerating effects of climate change.“But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unraveling of democracy in the United States. We need to start by fully recognising the magnitude of the danger. If Mr Trump is re-elected, even under the more optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable.”Homer-Dixon said he even saw a scenario in which a new Trump administration, having effectively nullified internal opposition, deliberately damaged its northern neighbor.“Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country and the US regime demands them back. Do we comply?”One in three Americans say violence against government justified – pollRead moreTrump, he said, “and a host of acolytes and wannabes such as Fox [News]’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene”, had transformed the Republican party “into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy”.Worse, he said, Trump “may be just a warm-up act”.“Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce a political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon said.“Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he’ll be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state, the bureaucrats, officials and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law.“Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.”TopicsUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansUS elections 2024US foreign policyThe far rightCanadanewsReuse this content More

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      The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hope | Robert Reich

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      The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hopeRobert ReichAs the first anniversary of the Capitol attack nears, all decent Americans must commit to deprogram this Republican cult. Doing so will mean paying attention to those we left behind 6 January will be the first anniversary one of the most shameful days in American history. On that date in 2021, the United States Capitol was attacked by thousands of armed loyalists to Donald Trump, some intent on killing members of Congress. About 140 officers were injured. Five people died.Capitol panel to investigate Trump call to Willard hotel in hours before attackRead moreEven now, almost a year later, Americans remain confused and divided about the significance of what occurred. Let me offer four basic truths:1. Trump incited the attack on the CapitolFor weeks before the attack, Trump urged supporters to come to Washington for a “Save America March” on 6 January, when Congress was to ceremonially count the electoral votes of Joe Biden’s win.“Big protest in DC on 6 January. Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted on 19 December. Then on 26 December: “See you in Washington DC on 6 January. Don’t miss it. Information to follow.” On 30 December: “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” On 1 January: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington DC will take place at 11am on 6 January. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”At a rally just before the violence, Trump repeated his falsehoods about how the election was stolen.“We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”He told the crowd Republicans were constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back, respectful of everyone – “including bad people”.But, he said, “we’re going to have to fight much harder … We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong … We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”He then told the crowd that “different rules” applied to them.“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike [Pence] has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the Rinos [Republicans in Name Only] and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”Then he dispatched the crowd to the Capitol as the electoral count was about to start. The attack came immediately after.2. The events of 6 January capped two months during which Trump sought to reverse the outcome of the electionShortly after the election, Trump summoned to the White House Republican lawmakers from Pennsylvania and Michigan, to inquire about how they might alter election results. He even called two local canvassing board officials in Wayne county, Michigan’s most populous county and one that overwhelmingly favored Biden.He asked Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, according to a recording of that conversation, adding: “The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”He suggested that the secretary of state would be criminally prosecuted if he did not do as Trump told him: “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal – that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”He pressed the acting US attorney general and deputy attorney general to declare the election fraudulent. When the deputy said the department had found no evidence of widespread fraud and warned that it had no power to change the outcome of the election, Trump replied: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and his congressional allies.Trump and those allies continued to harangue the attorney general and top justice department officials nearly every day until 6 January. Trump plotted with an assistant attorney general to oust the acting attorney general and pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn election results. But Trump ultimately decided against it, after department leaders pledged to resign en masse.Presumably, more details of Trump’s attempted coup will emerge after the House select committee on 6 January gathers more evidence and deposes more witnesses.3. Trump’s attempted coup continuesTrump still refuses to concede the election and continues to say it was stolen. He presides over a network of loyalists and allies who have sought to overturn the election (and erode public confidence in it) by mounting partisan state “audits” and escalating attacks on state election officials. When asked recently about the fraudulent claims and increasingly incendiary rhetoric, a Trump spokesperson said the former president “supports any patriotic American who dedicates their time and effort to exposing the rigged 2020 presidential election”.Last week, Trump announced he will be hosting a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on 6 January.“Remember,” he said, “the insurrection took place on 3 November. It was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on 6 January.” (Reminder: they were armed.)He then referred to the House investigation: “Why isn’t the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political hacks investigating the CAUSE of the 6 January protest, which was the rigged presidential election of 2020?”He went on to castigate “Rinos”, presumably referring to his opponents within the party, such as representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who sit on the 6 January committee.“In many ways a Rino is worse than a Radical Left Democrat,” Trump said, “because you don’t know where they are coming from and you have no idea how bad they really are for our country.”He added: “The good news is there are fewer and fewer Rinos left as we elect strong patriots who love America.”Trump has endorsed a primary challenger to Cheney, while Kinzinger will leave Congress at the next election. Trump and other Republicans have also moved to punish 13 House Republicans who bucked party leadership and voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill in November.4. All of this exposes a deeper problem with which America must dealTrump and his co-conspirators must be held accountable, of course. Hopefully, the select committee’s report will be used by the justice department in criminal prosecutions of Trump and his accomplices.But this in itself will not solve the underlying problem: a belligerent and narcissistic authoritarian has gained a powerful hold over a large portion of America. As many as 60% of Republican voters continue to believe his lies. Many remain intensely loyal. The Republican party is close to becoming a cult whose central animating idea is that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.Capitol rioter in Michael Fanone assault asks judge to let him use dating websitesRead moreTrump has had help, of course. Fox News hosts and Facebook groups have promoted and amplified his ravings for their own purposes. Republicans in Congress and in the states have played along.But Trump’s attempted coup could not get as far as it has without a deepening anger and despair in a substantial portion of the population that has made such Americans susceptible to his swagger and lies.It is too simplistic to attribute this anger solely to racism or xenophobia. America has harbored white supremacist and anti-immigrant sentiments since its founding. The anger Trump has channeled is more closely connected to a profound loss of identity, dignity and purpose, especially among Americans who have been left behind – without college degrees, without good jobs, in places that have been hollowed out, economically abandoned, and disdained by much of the rest of the country.Trump filled a void in a part of America that continues to yearn for a strongman who will deliver it from despair. A similar void haunts other nations where democracy is imperiled. The challenge ahead for the US as elsewhere is to fill that void with hope rather than neofascism. This is the real meaning of 6 January.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS Capitol attackOpinionUS politicsUS CongressDonald TrumpRepublicansThe far rightUS voting rightscommentReuse this content More

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      Republicans are shamelessly working to subvert democracy. Are Democrats paying attention?

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      Republicans are shamelessly working to subvert democracy. Are Democrats paying attention? Voting rights activists say the country has not fully awakened to the threat A dry run. A dress rehearsal. A practice coup. As the first anniversary of the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol approaches, there is no shortage of warnings about the danger of a repeat by Republicans.But even as Donald Trump loyalists lay siege to democracy with voting restrictions and attempts to take over the running of elections, there are fears that Democrats in Washington have not fully woken up to the threat.“At the state level we’re raising hell about it but the Democrats on the national level are talking about Build Back Better, the infrastructure bill, lots of other things,” said Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin. “When we think about voting rights and democracy, I would hope we would hear a little bit more about that from the national level.”Hopes that the attack on the Capitol would break the fever of Trumpism in the Republican party were soon dashed. All but a handful of its members in Congress voted against a 9/11-style commission to investigate the riot and many at national level have downplayed it, rallying to the former president’s defense.But it is an attritional battle playing out state by state, county by county and precinct by precinct that could pose the bigger menace to the next election in 2024, a potential rematch between Trump and Joe Biden.An avalanche of voter suppression laws is being pushed through in Republican-led states, from Arizona to Florida to Georgia to New Hampshire. Gerrymandered maps are being drawn up to form districts where demographics favour Republican candidates.Backers of Trump’s big lie of a stolen election are running to be the secretary of state in many places, a position from which they would serve as the chief election official in their state. Trump has endorsed such candidates in Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada – all crucial swing states.The all-out assault suggests that Trump and his allies learned lessons from their failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, identifying weak points in the system and laying the groundwork for a different outcome next time.Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, said: “It looks like Plan B is populating state elected offices with believers of the big lie and morally corrupt candidates. We should all be concerned about that and, by the way, not just Democrats: everybody.”Yet despite waves of media coverage – recently including the Atlantic magazine and the Guardian and New York Times newspapers – Democrats face the challenge of getting their voters to care. Many are confronting inflation, crime and other priorities and may assume that, having defeated Trump last year, they can stop paying attention.Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state, said: “It’s still very difficult to imagine the severity and depth of what Donald Trump tried to pull off. It’s hard sometimes to recognise something when it’s new. For the president of the United States to try and stage a coup is unprecedented. It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around it.”Inslee described Trump as “a clear and present danger” who is “trying to remove the impediments that rescued democracy last time”. State governors are not the only ones sounding the alarm about the dangers of complacency or assuming that normal service has resumed.Jena Griswold, a Colorado Democrat seeking re-election, is chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, which focuses on electing Democrats to those positions. She said while there’s been a surge of attention from activists and donors to those races, “it is not enough.”“I think one of the issues happening is that because this is the United States, the idea that our most fundamental freedom of living in a democracy is under attack, is hard to really grasp,” she said. “It’s important that we keep leaning in because the folks on the other side are definitely leaning in.”In Michigan, one of the leading candidates in the Republican field is Kristina Kamaro, who has spread lies about 6 January and the election. She is seeking to oust Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who became one of the most high profile secretaries of state in 2020 when she took steps to make it easier to vote by mail in her state.Like Griswold, Benson, who describes herself as “avowedly not a partisan”, said she noticed increased interest from voters and independent donors, but not from the national Democratic party.“We’re not seeing the same sense of urgency that perhaps ‘the other side’ has shown in investing in these offices,” she said. “With the exception of the vice-president, who’s been enormously supportive and gets the importance of these offices from a voting rights standpoint, I have seen no significant increase in support from national party leaders than what we experienced in 2018, which wasn’t insignificant.”Acolytes of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement are drilling down even deeper, targeting local election oversight positions that have traditionally been nonpartisan and little noticed, with only a few hundred votes at stake and candidates often running unopposed. Yet these too could pull at the threads of the democratic fabric.In Pennsylvania, for example, there is concern that election deniers are running for a position called judge of elections, a little-known office that plays a huge role in determining how things are run on election day.Scott Seeborg, Pennsylvania state director of All Voting is Local, a voting advocacy group, said the role is essentially the top position at the precinct polling place on election day. They could cause huge disruptions at the polls based on how the office holder interprets rules around ID and spoiling mail-in ballots, he added.Seeborg agreed that not enough attention has been paid to these local races. “There’s no precedent for this, as far as we know in sort of the modern history of elections,” he said. “I don’t think folks anticipated this, I’m not sure how seriously entities like the Democratic party are taking this, but they ought to.”Similar anxieties emerged earlier this week when the grassroots movement Indivisible ran a focus group with members from Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina and elsewhere.Ezra Levin, the group’s co-founder and co-executive director, said: “They’re worried about their governors, they’re worried about their secretaries of state and they’re worried even at a more local level about previously nonpartisan or uncontroversial election administration officials being taken over by a well-funded and very focused operation led by people who have embraced the big lie.“These are not positions, especially at the local level, that are getting as much attention but it’s real. We see Steve Bannon [former White House chief of staff, now a rightwing podcaster] trying to lead the charge, getting folks to take up the lowest level spots in the election administration ecosystem. It’s happening right in front of our eyes.”Levin, a former congressional staffer, noted that the Democratic party is not a monolith but warned that Biden has devoted his political capital – traveling the country to make speeches, holding meetings on Capitol Hill – to causes such as infrastructure rather than the future of democracy.“The big missing puzzle piece in this entire fight for the last 11 months has been the president.”Pressure on the Senate to act intensified this week when 17 governors wrote a joint letter expressing concern over threats to the nation’s democracy. Evers of Wisconsin was among them.In a phone interview, he said Democrats in his crucial battleground state are highlighting the “full throated attack on voting rights” but acknowledged that voters have numerous other concerns.“Everybody’s talking about it but when they go home from the capital and they’re visiting with people, I’m guessing that the conversation talks about more bread and butter things like ‘I want my roads fixed,’ and ‘Thank you for reducing taxes,” Evers added.TopicsUS voting rightsRepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2024featuresReuse this content More

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      Pence appears to set up a presidential run – can he win over Trump’s base?

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      Pence appears to set up a presidential run – can he win over Trump’s base?The former vice-president seems to be playing a long game for the 2024 election, possibly betting Trump’s influence over the Republican party will wane “Hang Mike Pence!” was the chilling chant of the mob at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Can the same constituency be persuaded to vote Mike Pence on 5 November 2024? He, for one, appears to think so.The former vice-president this week travelled across New Hampshire, host of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary elections, to meet local activists, raise money and deliver a speech attacking potential opponent Joe Biden.‘It’s who they are’: gun-fetish photo a symbol of Republican abasement under TrumpRead morePence, who has nursed White House ambitions since his teens, has also paid recent visits to the early-voting states Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, implying that a run is more likely than not. But there is one problem.Donald Trump.The ex-president, whom Pence served faithfully – or obsequiously, in the eyes of critics – has not forgiven him for ignoring his plea to overturn the result of the 2020 election. That Pence, presiding over the Senate at it certified Biden’s victory, had no such power has become irrelevant at this stage.Pence’s continued insistence that he did his constitutional duty on 6 January has done little to assuage the sense of betrayal among livid Trump supporters. In June he was heckled as a “traitor” during a speech to a gathering of religious conservatives in Orlando, Florida – hardly a positive omen.“His biggest challenge is the people that he’s going to need to vote for him – the Republican primary base – are also the people who wanted to hang him on January 6,” said Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee. “I don’t see how you overcome that.”Yet the former Indiana governor appears to be playing a long game, perhaps betting that Trump’s influence over the party will wane over the next three years. He may also be calculating that the stand he made for democracy on 6 January – a day on which he refused to flee the Capitol, taking cover in an underground car park – will resonate with moderate Republicans and independents.Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist in Indiana, said: “He’s doing everything he needs to set himself up to run and, if Trump is not the nominee or is not running, I think he’s clearly the frontrunner.”“I think people are realising that he was an unlikely hero on January 6. In the end, even for people who disagree with him for many other policy positions he’s taken, whether it was as a governor or as a vice-president, he did the right thing when the pressure was on on January 6.”Pence’s visit to New Hampshire was his second to the state, which has a huge say in choosing the party nominee, since leaving office. He attended holiday parties, raised money for state Republicans and posed for photos at at the Simply Delicious bakery in Bedford.In a speech hosted by Heritage Action, a conservative policy advocacy organisation, the 62-year-old accused Biden of fuelling inflation and lambasted the president’s social and environmental spending plan, warning: “Keep your hands off the American people’s pay cheques.”As is customary at this stage of an election cycle, Pence did not confirm or deny whether he was running for president, insisting that his priority was next year’s midterm elections for Congress.He told the Associated Press: “To be honest with you, all of my focus is on 2022 because I think we’ve got a historic opportunity for not just a winning election, but a realignment election. So I’m dedicating all of my energy to the process of really winning back the Congress and winning statehouses in 2022. And then in 2023, we’ll look around and we’ll go where we’re called.”The campaign-style tour did not go unnoticed by Trump, who released a statement that said: “Good man, but big mistake on not recognizing the massive voter fraud and irregularities” in the 2020 election. There is no evidence of any such fraud or irregularities.Pence, however, may choose to borrow from the playbook of Glenn Youngkin, who recently won election as governor of Virginia by keeping Trump at arm’s length without overtly denouncing him, thereby reaping the best of both worlds: the party establishment and “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base.There are already signs of Pence having his cake and eating it too. In a radio interview on Wednesday he repeated a now familiar line that he and Trump may “never see eye to eye” on the events of 6 January, but he also told several news outlets “there were irregularities that happened at the state level” in the election. He also insisted that he parted with his boss on good terms.This Trump-lite approach might do just enough to satisfy the former president’s followers while promising other Republicans a lower political temperature.Michael D’Antonio, a Pence biographer, said: “What’s weird is he earned his bona fides with Trump by being so craven in his loyalty and then he expressed his independence in that one moment when it really mattered. So he could make a play in both directions and say, ‘Look, I’m Donald Trump but without the violence.’” There are signs of the Maga core “cooling off” or losing interest in politics, D’Antonio added. “I also knew a number of Trump voters who chose him in 2016 because of Pence. So Pence may have built up a lot of credibility with people. And I guess the last point is, you don’t need to win 50% to get the nomination.”Some Republicans, including former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, have said they will not contest the primaries if Trump throws his hat in the ring. Others, such as ex-New Jersey governor Chris Christie, have rejected the idea that a Trump candidacy should prevent others running.Florida governor Ron DeSantis, South Carolina senator Tim Scott and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo are seen as potential contenders to be party standard bearer. Pence, however, might hope that his status as a former vice-president would count in his favor, just as it did for Biden last year.Clues to his intentions include the fact he is writing a book and recording a regular podcast: in the latest episode of American Freedom, the devout Christian says “we hope and pray” the supreme court will overturn Roe v Wade, its 1973 decision upholding a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.Should he secure the nomination, however, Pence would be hard pushed to win over millions of Trump critics who have not forgotten how he failed to speak out or take a principled stand during four years of chaos. There are countless hours of footage of him giving speeches in which he mentions “President Trump” over and over again, praising his “leadership” and calling him “my friend”.Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide, said: “Mike Pence will be regarded for what he is, which is a coward void of any real moral conviction or principles.“The fact that he is turning around now, still trying to court the hearts and minds and votes of the very people who perpetrated the domestic terrorist attack on our country illustrates that he is the worst kind of political figure because, even though he may not believe these things, he’s still pandering and catering to those elements. I don’t believe that history will look back on him kindly at all.”TopicsMike PenceRepublicansUS elections 2024US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More