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      US dispatches warships after China and Russia send naval patrol near Alaska

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      The US dispatched four navy warships as well as a reconnaissance airplane after multiple Chinese and Russian military vessels carried out a joint naval patrol near Alaska last week.The combined naval patrol, which the Wall Street Journal first reported, appeared to be the largest such flotilla to approach US territory, according to experts that spoke to the outlet.“It’s a historical first,” Brent Sadler, a retired Navy captain and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Journal.He also said the flotilla’s proximity to Alaska was a “highly provocative” maneuver given Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and political tensions between the US and China over Taiwan. The flotilla has since left.The US Northern Command confirmed the combined Chinese and Russian naval patrol, telling the Journal: “Air and maritime assets under our commands conducted operations to assure the defense of the United States and Canada. The patrol remained in international waters and was not considered a threat.”The command did not specify the number of vessels which made up the patrol or their exact location. But US senators from Alaska said the flotilla in question was made up of 11 Chinese and Russian warships working in concert near the Aleutian Islands.Four destroyers and a Poseidon P-8 patrol airplane made up the US response to the Chinese and Russian flotilla.In a statement to the Journal, the spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in Washington DC, Liu Pengyu, said that the patrol “is not targeted at any third party”.“According to the annual cooperation plan between the Chinese and Russian militaries, naval vessels of the two countries have recently conducted joint maritime patrols in relevant waters in the western and northern Pacific ocean,” Pengyu said. “This action is not targeted at any third party and has nothing to do with the current international and regional situation.”The Journal reported that the US destroyers sent to track the flotilla were the USS John S McCain, the USS Benfold, the USS John Finn and the USS Chung-Hoon.Alaska senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan have since responded to the joint Chinese and Russian patrol that came close to the Aleutian Islands by saying they are monitoring the situation closely for their constituents.Murkowski said: “We have been in close contact with leadership … for several days now and received detailed classified briefings about the foreign vessels that are transiting US waters in the Aleutians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a stark reminder of Alaska’s proximity to both China and Russia, as well as the essential role our state plays in our national defense and territorial sovereignty.”Sullivan echoed the sentiments of his fellow Republican Murkowski, saying: “The incursion by 11 Chinese and Russian warships operating together – off the coast of Alaska – is yet another reminder that we have entered a new era of authoritarian aggression led by the dictators in Beijing and Moscow.”He went on to compare the situation to one last September, when a single US coast guard cutter spotted a total of seven Chinese and Russian naval ships near Alaska.“Last summer the Chinese and Russian navies conducted a similar operation off the coast of Alaska,” Sullivan said. “Given that our response was tepid, I strongly encouraged senior military leaders to be ready with a much more robust response should such another joint Chinese-Russian naval operation occur off our coast.“For that reason, I was heartened to see that this latest incursion was met with four US Navy destroyers, which sends a strong message … that the United States will not hesitate to protect and defend our vital national interests in Alaska.” More

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      Inside Trump’s ‘alternate electors’ plot to steal the vote in Georgia

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      At 11.30am on 14 December 2020, Greg Bluestein, a political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, hurried into the Georgia state capitol at the start of what he knew would be a momentous day. He was one of a handful of reporters who were to witness the casting of electoral college votes which would officially hand Joe Biden victory in the critical battleground state – and with it the US presidency.As Bluestein rushed up to the state senate chamber where the 16 Democratic electors were assembling ahead of the historic vote, he passed meeting room 216. He noticed a gaggle of people milling around its heavy wooden door, among them some of the 16 Republican electors chosen to represent Donald Trump should he have won the Georgia race.The reporter was surprised. Trump had officially lost in Georgia by 11,779 votes, an outcome that had been confirmed by two recounts including a full hand tally of all ballots.Only the electors of the winning candidate based on popular support were supposed to show up. Electors representing Trump, the loser, simply had no reason to be there.“So I went over and peeked my head in and went, ‘What’s going on here, guys?’” Bluestein recalled. “A couple of people started flurrying, someone was shuffling papers, then a party functionary standing at the door said to me, ‘It’s an education meeting’ and basically slammed the door on me.”Thus began one of the more bizarre days in Bluestein’s reporting life. He spent the next couple of hours scurrying up and down the marble steps of the capitol building, ping-ponging between the official casting of the electoral college votes for Biden on the third floor and the thoroughly unofficial casting of fake Trump votes in room 216.“The Democratic vote had pomp and circumstance – it was a real, formal process. As each elector stood and voted you could feel the gravity and the emotion of the moment,” Bluestein said.Scrambling down to room 216, by contrast, he found the setting devoid of any gravitas. “It was just willy-nilly.”It is this gathering of what the Trump campaign called “alternate” electors – but which others have denounced as “fake”, “sham” and “phony” ones – which is now at the centre of the criminal investigation into the attempt to overturn the presidential election in Georgia. The probe is being led by Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton county which covers much of Atlanta.She is expected to convene a grand jury this month with the power to issue indictments. Among the targets of possible charges is Trump himself, several in his inner circle including his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, the conservative attorney credited as being the architect of the legal road map for subverting the 2020 election, and key members of the 16 fake electors who came together in room 216.The federal investigation into the efforts to overturn the 2020 election led by special counsel Jack Smith is also ramping up its probe of the fake electors. CNN reported in June that at least two Republican fake electors have been forced to testify to a grand jury in Washington in return for limited immunity. And in Michigan, attorney general Dana Nessel recently announced multiple felony charges against the state’s 16 fake electors.The Fulton county and federal investigations pose serious legal peril for Trump that adds to his criminal prosecution for allegedly mishandling classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, and the federal inquiry into his role in the violent storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. A special grand jury in Georgia has already recommended indictments for several people, with the forewoman hinting strongly that they included the former president.“You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science,” she said.The story of how 16 men and women came together in an improvised attempt to reshape the course of US history – told here through interviews with participants, law experts and a review of evidence gathered by the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol siege – is not only a live legal issue with potentially profound ramifications for Trump as he vies to return to the White House in 2024. It also provides insight into the febrile nature of American politics, where democratic norms can seemingly be shredded “willy-nilly”.According to the House January 6 committee, the fake elector scheme was the brainchild of an outside legal advisor to the Trump campaign, Kenneth Chesebro. The committee’s final report points to the New York-based lawyer as being “central to the creation of the plan”.On 18 November, two weeks after the presidential election, Chesebro wrote a secret memo which is seen as the first shot fired in the fake elector war. Taking the example of Wisconsin, he argued that by mobilizing his electors, Trump could buy himself time to challenge through the courts his defeat in key swing states.Chesebro’s proposal was for Trump electors to turn up and vote in their respective states on 14 December – the date stipulated for the electoral college to convene only for winning candidates under America’s arcane presidential election system. The lawyer glossed over the inconvenient truth that Trump had lost in those states, rendering his electors redundant.Chesebro conceded in his memo that it “may seem odd that electors pledged to Trump and [vice president Mike] Pence might meet and cast their votes on December 14 even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count … However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”Specialists in constitutional law take a starkly different view. They point out that by then Trump’s legal team was struggling to find any credible evidence of fraud in the presidential election and were losing court challenges in abundance – out of at least 62 cases that Trump fought over the 2020 election, 61 were defeated.Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, employed Chesebro as a research assistant some 20 years ago. He told the Guardian that his former aide was “smart enough to know full well that the scheme he helped cook up – a conspiracy for fake electors to gather and sign phony pro-Trump ballots on December 14 so as to buy Trump time – was anything but a ‘reasonable course of action’.”Tribe added: “It was obviously and transparently illegal – indeed, it was manifestly criminal.”The Guardian contacted Chesebro directly and through his lawyers, but received no response.In a deposition with the January 6 committee in October 2022, Chesebro was asked to describe his role in the plan to have electors meet and cast electoral college votes for Trump in states he had lost. He declined to answer, pleading the fifth amendment.Despite its shaky legal foundations, Chesebro’s theory quickly gained traction within Trump’s inner legal circle, earning the enthusiastic embrace of Eastman and Giuliani.Within days they had devised a new strategy for what they called “litigation states”. Six states were identified – Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania – as the focal points of the “alternate” elector master plan.In all of them, Trump had lost the election, which meant that under electoral law his electors should have stood down.In all of them, too, Trump lawyers had claimed widespread election fraud without producing evidence and were using that false claim to justify calling their electors into action. It just so happened that the total electoral college votes wielded by these six states (79 votes) came out four ahead of Biden’s actual margin of victory (75 votes).In other words, the fake electors had the potential, if the plan could be pulled off, to overturn the election and keep Trump in the White House.Georgia’s 16 Trump electors were nominated towards the beginning of 2020 by the executive committee of the Georgia Republican party. They were drawn from the usual suspects – senior apparatchiks, major donors, and local dignitaries.The chairman of the state party at the time was David Shafer, who had a controversial four years at its helm. Under his tenure, the party has shifted sharply towards the extreme right. It also effectively handed control of the US Senate to Democrats by losing both senatorial elections in Georgia in 2021.The group of 16 electors, with Shafer as chairman, began routinely enough. Individuals were flattered to be invited to take part in what is usually seen as a ceremonial electoral role.John Isakson was one of the initial 16 who accepted the invitation. He told the January 6 committee in an interview that Shafer invited him to be a presidential elector.Isakson agreed. His idea of the role was that if Trump won, “we went to Washington to cast our votes in the electoral college”.As Isakson rightly conceived it, in the normal run of events the 16 Trump electors would effectively have ceased to exist on 7 December, the date that Biden’s victory was certified in Georgia. But then there was Chesebro’s “reasonable course of action” – the idea that they should gather to vote anyway to buy Trump time.Days before the Democratic electors were scheduled to appear at the Georgia capitol to cast their ballots on behalf of the winner, the Republican electors began receiving calls asking them to come to the Capitol to cast their alternative ballots. The request came as a surprise to many.Trump’s legal team tied it to a big lawsuit pending in the US supreme court in which Biden’s victory was being challenged in four battleground states including Georgia. It was claimed (without credible evidence) that voting irregularities had occurred.The case was lodged on 8 December by the attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton.Electors were told that if that suit were to have any chance of success, a slate of “alternate” ballots had to be cast in the battleground states. Otherwise, Trump might win the court challenge, and thus the presidency, only to find himself stymied because key electoral college votes hadn’t been cast on the allotted day.Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator who served as the secretary of the 16 Republican fake electors, used a sporting analogy to visualise the concept. He told the January 6 committee in a deposition: “When you have the Super Bowl you print T-shirts, both teams as being the winner, and you keep the T-shirts for the ones that were the winner, and you throw away the ones that weren’t, but you still have to have two sets of T-shirts for both sets of winners.”Guardian interviews with participants in the fake elector plan and a review of January 6 committee documents show that the same official line kept being presented: the Republican electors would have to cast their votes in order to keep Trump’s hopes alive should a judge find in his favour. The votes would only be relevant if the president’s lawsuit went ahead.The problem was that Trump’s lawsuit did not go ahead. On 11 December, the US supreme court brusquely threw out the Texas case.The decision, issued three days before the electors were set to gather, was another pivotal point at which the plan could have been called off. In fact, the team of Trump campaign lawyers who had been given the job of running the “alternate” scheme assumed that it would indeed now be terminated.Records compiled by the January 6 committee reveal that the supreme court’s dismissal of the lawsuit had a seismic impact inside the Trump campaign. Three of its key lawyers – general counsel Matt Morgan, his associate Josh Findlay, and deputy campaign manager Justin Clark – all immediately agreed that the “alternate” elector plan which they supervised up until then no longer had any merit.“We’re done with this, just stop work on this exercise… There’s no other recourse here,” Morgan told Findlay by phone within minutes of the court’s decision being delivered.The three lawyers thought that would be the end of it. They were wrong. Shortly after Morgan contacted Findlay to tell him to drop the fake elector scheme, he called a second time.“Rudy wants to keep fighting this thing,” Morgan said, referring to Giuliani who was at that time leading the legal effort to overturn Biden’s victory. “So we’re going to have you pass it off to Ken.”This was a bombshell exploding on top of a bombshell. Not only did Giuliani want to press on with the fake elector idea, but he wanted the three most senior campaign lawyers to step aside and hand the project over to Chesebro, the inventor of the plan.Findlay was astounded. He told January 6 committee investigators that the impetus for this switch in strategy clearly came from Trump himself.Trump “made it clear that Rudy was in charge of this and that Rudy was executing what he wanted. Rudy had been given power and this is what he wanted to do,” Findlay said.In that moment the Trump campaign was riven in half. Findlay and his fellow senior attorneys, convinced that the fake elector plan was moribund, suddenly found themselves confronted by Trump, Giuliani and Chesebro who were itching to carry on.“It led to a divide in the campaign,” Findlay said. “Everyone was shocked by the tactics. It felt like nothing was off the table to some people. [They] were going to do whatever they wanted to do.”What Giuliani and Chesebro wanted to do was have the 16 fake electors turn up at the Georgia capitol on 14 December and proceed as though Trump had won. For that to proceed, it was critical that the 16 individuals knew nothing about the significance of the dismissal of the Texas lawsuit, the consequent collapse of the legal argument for “alternate” votes, and the rift within the campaign.As investigators for the January 6 committee told Findlay during his questioning: “Based on our investigation, we have not yet seen any indication that the change in circumstances around the justification for, or reason why, the electors met was communicated to the electors themselves.”A Georgia official who was close enough to the party leadership to be able to watch the fake elector saga unfold confirmed to the Guardian that many of the electors were kept in the dark. In his estimation, 12 or 13 of the 16 “had no idea what they were doing”.For at least one of them, the paucity of information was not good enough. Isakson told the January 6 committee that shortly before the electoral college was due to convene, he received a phone call from a number he did not recognize.The man said there was a gathering at the capitol for the electors and that all of them were invited. Isakson was unimpressed by how the man pitched the event.“It came across to me like a political rally,” he told investigators. “I indicated that I couldn’t attend because of work.”In the end, Isakson was one of four of the initial cohort of Republican electors who did not participate in casting fake votes on 14 December. The other three backed out for personal and other reasons that have not been fully disclosed, and all four were replaced.Apart from keeping the electors in a state of ignorance, there was another order coming down from Trump’s top team: maintain secrecy. Two days before the electoral college gathered, Chesebro wrote to campaign operatives and said that Giuliani would “like to wait until all the electors have voted before putting out any statements or otherwise alerting anyone”.The following day – just one day to go now – an email was sent by Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s state director for election day operations, to all Georgia fake electors. “Thank you for agreeing to serve as a Republican elector or alternate,” it began.Sinners continued: “I must ask for your complete discretion in this process. Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result – a win in Georgia for President Trump – but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”In his deposition to January 6 investigators, Sinners attempted to downplay his email, saying its call for omertà among the fake electors was “innocuous”. He told investigators: “The secrecy element was simply get the people on the bus and make sure that they’re there.”That was not the sense that Greg Bluestein, the Journal-Constitution reporter, picked up in the days leading to his surreal running up and down the marble stairs at the Georgia Capitol. He reached out to many prominent state Republicans and was repeatedly told nothing was up.“I remember asking, ‘Hey, just in case, you guys aren’t planning anything right?’ Multiple people told me, ‘No, nope, we’re not gonna do anything.”This only added to Bluestein’s bemusement when he saw the gaggle outside room 216, including several Republican electors. That’s when he realized that the Trump campaign was very much preparing to do something.This is the way democracy ends, not with a bang but a whimper. After the electors had gathered in room 216, and the four replacements had been selected, the important business of the day was set to begin – casting false electoral college ballots.But there was a technical glitch. That morning Sinners, the Trump campaign operative, had bought a new printer at Target to run off the certificates of votes for the electors to sign.It took him 20 minutes to get the printer out of its box and install the driver software onto his laptop. As the secretary of the fake electors, Shawn Still, recounted to the January 6 committee: “He just fumbled through that, it just kind of became a bit of a snicker moment for everyone”.Eventually, the printer was sorted. Shafer, as chairman of the electors, called the meeting to order and told the group, in his own words, that “there was an election contest pending and that we were taking these actions today to preserve President Trump’s remedies”. Then they sat around a U-shaped table and each solemnly signed six copies of the certificates.History had been made. Even if it was fake history.Copies of those signed documents were obtained by American Oversight, and there it is in black and white: “We, the undersigned, being the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Georgia, do hereby … cast each of [our] ballots FOR DONALD J. TRUMP – 16 VOTES.”The wording was striking. In Pennsylvania, the fake electors had written into their ballots the proviso that the votes would only count should there be “a final non-appealable court order or other proceeding prescribed by law” that gave Trump victory in that state.In Georgia, there was no such caveat. The certificates read verbatim exactly as they would have done had Trump legitimately won.These un-caveated certificates were marked to be sent to the “President of the Senate” – Pence in his role as presiding official over the upper chamber of Congress – and to the head of the National Archives. Some of the fake electors were puzzled by this – hadn’t it been agreed that their votes would only be sent to Washington were Trump to win his law case?Shawn Still told the January 6 committee that he had raised precisely this point as the signed votes were being drawn together by Sinners in room 216. He thought of his Super Bowl T-shirt analogy, and wanted to know from Sinners what would happen to the votes should Trump fail in the courts.“I remember specifically asking him what happens to them if there is not an overturn. And he said, ‘Well, that’s not up to me to decide, but I guess we’ll just set them aside and box them up somewhere, and that’ll be the end of it’.”Unbeknownst to several of the Republican electors, Trump’s inner circle of lawyers led by Giuliani and Chesebro had no intention of setting aside the ballots should the legal strategy through the courts fail – as it already had. They now had their sights firmly set on Pence and the final certification of Biden’s victory by Congress on January 6.On 8 December 2020, six days before the electors convened, Chesebro spoke to an Arizona lawyer who was involved in organising the “alternate” slate for Trump in that state. In an email obtained by the New York Times, the lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, made clear that he was fully aware that the plan was for “fake” votes, though he quickly corrected himself, changing the word to “alternative” and adding a smiley face.Chesebro’s idea, Wilenchik wrote, was to have the electors send in their votes even though they had no legal standing. That way “members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6th … Kind of wild/creative.”Wild, certainly. Creative, maybe. Legal, unlikely. Tribe told the Guardian that mailing false certificates from Georgia and the other battleground states was a breach of both state and federal laws involving election fraud, interference with the electoral college, obstruction of official government proceedings, and subversion of the lawful transfer of presidential power.Others have pointed out that sending the false certificates to the National Archives also opened up the possibility of indictments for forgery of a public record. Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described the Georgia ballots for Trump as being as “phony as a three-dollar bill”At 12.51pm on 14 December 2020 Shafer, called the meeting in room 216 to a close. The deed had been done. In the end, 84 people from seven states including Georgia signed bogus electoral votes for Trump and sent them off to Washington as part of the billowing sequence of events that culminated violently on January 6.In the days that followed, the reality sunk in for many people involved in the fake elector plan that they had become enmeshed in something much bigger than themselves. As Sinners put it to January 6 investigators: “It became clear to me afterwards that I don’t think Rudy Giuliani’s intent was ever about legal challenges. He was working with folks like John Eastman and wanted to put pressure on the Vice President to accept these slates of electors regardless … We were just kind of useful idiots or rubes at that point.”Shafer, the chairman of the electors, stood down in June as head of the state Republican party. He faces legal peril from both the Fulton county and federal probes into the fake elector scheme.His lawyer Holly Pierson disputed that there was any legal danger from what she called a “baseless, politically motivated prosecution.” She told the Guardian that Shafer was in no actual jeopardy because “everything he and the other presidential electors did was proper and lawful, in keeping with federal and state law, done on the specific advice of legal counsel, and fully protected by the US Constitution.”Shafer’s lawyers set out his self-defense in an 11-page letter to Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, in May. They said that he had received his own legal advice a week before the events at the state Capitol arguing that it was right for him and the other Republican electors to convene in order to preserve Trump’s remedies.That advice specifically pointed to a local lawsuit, Trump v Raffensperger, that had been lodged on 4 December and was still pending. (The case languished in the courts until it was voluntarily dismissed a day after the storming of the US Capitol.)Shafer and his 15 elector peers were all informed last year that they were targets of Willis’ criminal investigation. Since then, at least eight of them have agreed to immunity deals with prosecutors.The fall-out of the elector plan has elicited a range of responses from the electors themselves. Isakson, who declined to come to the Capitol on 14 December and was replaced in the final fake elector lineup, only learned of what happened after the event.In his interview with January 6 investigators more than a year later, he was shown one of the false ballots and asked whether he approved of its language that described the 16 as the “duly elected and qualified electors in Georgia”.He replied: “Knowing everything that I know now, I would have had great concerns. The challenges have been exhausted, and this wouldn’t have been appropriate.”Some of the electors who, unlike Isakson, did go ahead and sign certificates on 14 December have let it be known privately that they were upset by how things panned out. They had tried to do the right thing but ended up being tied in legal knots.Sinners expressed even stronger sentiments. He told the January 6 committee that people had been put into a legally compromising position.“I’m angry. I am angry because I think in a sense, you know, no one really cared if people were potentially putting themselves in jeopardy.”Sinners was asked by investigators what he felt when he made the connection that his involvement in the fake elector scheme had been used by Trump and Giuliani to spearhead the pressure campaign against Pence leading to the violence on January 6.“I was ashamed,” he replied. “I was ashamed.” More

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      Trump uses UFC in bid to reach new demographic of voters

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      During a stretch of campaign stops taking place under the specter of a potential indictment, Donald Trump managed to make time for a sit-down interview on an unlikely platform: the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).Recorded just before Trump’s appearance at a UFC event in Las Vegas in July, the interview offered a rare departure from the controversial president’s politically charged interviews, instead focusing on his background as a boxing promoter, his all-time favorite combat sports matches, and the hypothetical walkout song he would pick if he were a fighter himself. The hosts described Trump as a “genuine fight fan” and their enthusiasm was palpable as he shared insights on promoting the likes of Mike Tyson during the 1980s.“He was a fierce guy,” Trump, who was among Tyson’s staunchest defenders during his rape trial in 1992, said about the boxer during the UFC Unfiltered podcast. “I had more Tyson fights than anybody else and I got along great with him. In fact, I saw him recently and he could not have been nicer to me. He was a draw. He could draw anything, and he had a great career.”Trump’s decision to appear on a UFC podcast may seem strange, but it is actually part of a savvy campaign strategy targeting unconventional media platforms that cater to young male audiences with little interest in politics. In 2018, during Trump’s presidency, four out of 10 white men said they viewed Trump favorably, according to a Public Religion Research Institute poll.Earlier this year, Trump appeared on a podcast hosted by Nelk, a group of pranksters who rose to prominence in 2015 for their “Coke Prank On Cops” video, in which they bait officers into believing they had “coke” in their car, leading the officers to believe it was cocaine when, in fact, they were referring to Coca-Cola. Their videos have generated more than 1bn views on YouTube and garnered a rabid cult following across social media platforms.Nelk were initially introduced to Trump by UFC president Dana White prior to the 2020 presidential election, leading the group to take a trip aboard Air Force One. The former president has since appeared on their podcast on numerous occasions, including an episode that was pulled by YouTube because of Trump’s disinformation about the 2020 election.While Trump’s relationship with Nelk is a recent development, his affection for UFC goes back more than two decades, when he hosted UFC fights back at a time when many states shunned the sport and pay-per-view platforms refused to air their shows. Trump’s support was acknowledged by White, who credited him as someone who played a pivotal role in the organization’s growth. Since then, White has actively promoted Trump and his politics, speaking on his behalf at the 2016 and 2020 Republican conventions and defending his controversial policies, including the wall on America’s southern border.Trump, who is facing 71 criminal charges and was charged a third time this week, continues to garner favorable reception at UFC events. During his most recent appearance at UFC 290 in July, Trump was greeted with raucous applause from the crowd and even hi-fived some supporters as he entered the arena flanked by secret service agents. It was a clear example of his adeptness at utilizing the UFC’s counter-culture branding and overwhelmingly white male audience as a conduit for his political aspirations.Similarly, Trump’s UFC interview underscored his calculated approach to engaging a demographic outside the traditional politician’s reach. While a vocal portion of the UFC’s fanbase identifies as right wing, the sport is also home to less politically engaged voters who could be swayed by Trump’s apparent cultural cachet. His ability to carry a lengthy conversation dedicated to combat sports emphasizes his comfort around the fight game and his willingness to engage with its audience on their terms – a trait that his political opponents sorely lack.“Political opinions or not, it is cool to see such an influential person chop it up about sports like they are one of us,” read one of the YouTube comments beneath the interview. Another user chimed in, saying: “Such a pleasure to hear Trump speak candidly about boxing and MMA. No politics nor BS.”While Trump has managed to win over the UFC and its loyal fanbase, his popularity in the combat sports space is not universal. Longtime UFC color commentator and podcaster Joe Rogan, revealed last year that he repeatedly turned down Trump as a guest on his popular podcast despite other political candidates including Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, and, most recently, Robert F Kennedy Jr. having airtime“I’m not a Trump supporter in any way, shape or form,” Rogan said. “I’ve had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once. I’ve said no every time. I don’t want to help him. I’m not interested in helping him.” More

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      Trump looked like ‘scared puppy’ on way to court, Nancy Pelosi says

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      Donald Trump looked like “a scared puppy” before his arraignment in court in Washington on charges related to his election subversion, Nancy Pelosi said, comments likely to anger an ex-president that the former US House speaker has long delighted in baiting.“I wasn’t in the courtroom of course but when I saw his coming out of his car and this or that, I saw a scared puppy,” Pelosi told MSNBC.“He looked very, very, very concerned about the fate. I didn’t see any bravado or confidence or anything like that. He knows the truth that he lost the election and now he’s got to face the music.”Pelosi, 83, stepped down as the House Democratic leader last year but kept her seat in Congress. As speaker, she became a leading hate figure among Republicans, in large part thanks to overseeing Trump’s two impeachments. She and Trump never got on, rarely meeting to discuss government business.The friction between the two was on very public show in February 2020 at the State of the Union address. First, Trump appeared to snub Pelosi’s proffered handshake. Then, Pelosi responded to Trump’s performance by standing from her seat behind him to theatrically rip up his speech.Trump gave Pelosi a signature nickname: Crazy Nancy. He has also called her an “animal”.In federal court in Washington on Thursday, Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges related to his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.He faces (and denies) 78 criminal counts, including charges over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels and over his retention of classified documents. He is expected to face more charges regarding election subversion in Georgia.On Friday, Trump’s closest – if distant – challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, edged away from Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, as outlined in the indictment obtained by federal special counsel Jack Smith.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” the Florida governor said in Iowa.But like most of the rest of the Republican field, DeSantis has backed Trump’s claim to be the victim of political persecution.Pelosi told MSNBC it was “really sad” Republicans continued to support Trump, adding: “They have to change the subject and they have nothing to offer the American people in terms of jobs and the rest.”The Republican party, she said, “shouldn’t be a cult to somebody frivolous with the law and his puppets”. More

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      Trump pleads not guilty to new charges in classified documents case – US politics live

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      From 2h agoDonald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.In John Bolton’s op-ed published on Tuesday, he said Donald Trump “disdains knowledge” and accused him of “seeing relations between the United States and foreign lands, especially our adversaries, predominantly as matters of personality”.“Foreign leaders, friend or foe, are far more likely see him as ignorant, inexperienced, braggadocious, longing to be one of the big boys and eminently susceptible to flattery,” Bolton wrote. “These characteristics were a constant source of risk in Trump’s first term, and would be again in a second term.”Bolton condemned Trump for his decision-making, saying:
      Beyond acting on inadequate information, reflection or discussion, Trump is also feckless even after making decisions. When things go wrong, or when he simply changes his mind subsequently (a common occurrence), he invariably tries to distance himself from his own decision, fearing negative media coverage or political criticism.
      Following his firing in 2019, Bolton published a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he strongly criticized Trump’s leadership. Earlier this year, Bolton called Trump’s 2024 presidential bid “poison” to the Republican party.Ex-national security adviser John Bolton issued harsh remarks against his former boss and the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying that the US will likely withdraw from Nato if Donald Trump wins the election.In an interview with the Hill on Thursday, Bolton criticized the former president’s foreign policy after an op-ed he wrote earlier this week called Trump’s behavior “erratic, irrational and unconstrained”.“Donald Trump doesn’t really have a philosophy, as we understand it in political terms,” Bolton said.
      He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space.
      Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, also lambasted Trump for his foreign policy legacy with regard to the alliance, saying in the interview:
      He threatened the existence of Nato, and I think in a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from Nato.
      He also criticized Republicans who have praised Trump for his foreign policy positions. He said:
      Those who make these claims about what Trump did in his first term don’t really understand how we got to the places we did. Because many of the things they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.
      Nearly of half of Republicans said they would not vote for Donald Trump if he were convicted of a felony, according to a new poll.The Reuters/Ipsos poll, conducted before the former president’s court appearance on Thursday, asked respondents if they would vote for Trump for president next year if he were “convicted of a felony crime by a jury”.Among Republicans, 45% said they would not vote for him, while 35% said they would. The rest said they did not know.Asked if they would vote for Trump if he were “currently serving time in prison”, 52% of Republicans said they would not, and 28% said they would.About two-thirds of Republicans said the accusation in Trump’s latest indictment that he solicited election fraud was “not believable”, compared with 29% who said it was.Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian in a telephone conversation that Thomas 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.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.Read the full story here. 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”.A group of House Democrats called on the body overseeing federal courts to allow Donald Trump’s election fraud trial be publicly televised live.In a letter led by Representative Adam Schiff, who served on the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection, the group of 38 House Democrats asked that the judicial conference “explicitly authorize the broadcasting of court proceedings in the cases of United States of America v. Donald J. Trump”.The group wrote:
      It is imperative the [court] ensures timely access to accurate and reliable information surrounding these cases and all of their proceedings, given the extraordinary national importance to our democratic institutions and need for transparency.
      Trump was arraigned at a federal courthouse in Washington on Thursday and charged with 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.The arraignment was not televised publicly, as cameras are generally not allowed in federal courtrooms. Trump’s next court hearing in the case is set for 28 August.The letter’s signatories included other members who served on the January 6 committee which concluded with a recommendation that the justice department pursue a criminal investigation of Trump over his involvement in the insurrection.It continued:
      Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings. If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.
      As we reported earlier, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Friday to new charges brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith in his classified documents criminal case.Trump, who just a day ago pleaded not guilty in a Washington federal courtroom to federal charges over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, officially entered a plea of “not guilty” to the 40-count superseding indictment in a separate case against him in the Southern District of Florida.The former president did not appear in court on Friday. He also waived his right to be present in court for his arraignment on the three additional charges, scheduled for Thursday 10 August before a US magistrate judge in Fort Pierce, Florida.Federal prosecutors filed the new charges last week against Trump and two of his employees, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, in the criminal case over the retention of sensitive government records at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump now faces 40 charges in the case, after originally being indicted on 37 counts last month.Trump’s co-defendants, De Oliveira and Nauta, have not indicated in court filings their plans for the arraignment, according to CNN.After months of waffling, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appeared to finally reject Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, the New York Times reports.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” DeSantis said in response to a question from a reporter during a campaign stop in Iowa, a day after Trump appeared in a Washington DC federal court to answer charges related to his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.The governor has previously been vague about whether he adhered to Trump’s disproven claims that fraud caused him to lose re-election, though DeSantis has characterized the state and federal charges filed against the former president as politically motivated.The comments come amid a pronounced drop in DeSantis’s recent poll numbers, who is otherwise in second place to Trump among Republican primary voters.Donald Trump has entered pleas of not guilty to new charges federal prosecutors brought against him last week in the case of the classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago, CNN reports:Special counsel Jack Smith last week added charges to the indictment against Trump claiming he tried to erase surveillance footage that prosecutors subpoenaed, which showed boxes of classified documents being removed from a storage room at his South Florida resort. Smith also indicted property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who allegedly worked with Trump to destroy the footage.De Oliveira made an initial court appearance this week, but did not enter a plea as he was still looking for a lawyer to represent him in Florida.Iowa is the first state to vote in the Republican presidential nomination process, and New York Times/Siena College polling of the state released today shows Donald Trump with a commanding lead:However, he’s underperforming his national poll numbers in Iowa, potentially giving rivals like Ron DeSantis an opening to catch up. From the Times’s story on the data:
      Even Iowa Republicans who say they favor other candidates could still swing Mr. Trump’s way.
      “Each indictment gets me leaning toward Trump,” said John-Charles Fish, 45, a Waukon, Iowa, social media consultant who said he still supported Mr. DeSantis, but barely. “It wouldn’t take much for me to change my mind,” he said.
      For Mr. DeSantis and other competitors, the Iowa survey yielded glimmers of bright spots. About 47 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters said they would consider other candidates. Among Republicans with at least a college degree, Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis are tied at 26 percent when the whole field is under consideration.
      In a head-to-head match between the front-runner and his closest rival, Mr. Trump leads Iowa handily, 55 percent to 39 percent, but he is well behind Mr. DeSantis among college-educated Republicans, 38 percent to 53 percent.
      According to the poll, Mr. DeSantis is seen as the more moral candidate, and although the Florida governor has been knocked for some awkward moments on the campaign trail, he is seen as considerably more likable than Mr. Trump. More than half of those surveyed said the term “likable” was a better fit for Mr. DeSantis, compared with 38 percent for Mr. Trump.
      The poll also suggests that Mr. DeSantis’s argument that he is the more electable Republican may be resonating with voters, at least in Iowa. Just under half of those surveyed said Mr. Trump is the candidate more able to beat Mr. Biden, while 40 percent said Mr. DeSantis is. Nationally, Mr. Trump holds a 30-percentage-point lead on the same question.
      Robert Corry, a business consultant in Grinnell, Iowa, praised Mr. DeSantis’s stewardship of Florida’s sprawling economy, his ability to “get things done” and his “exemplary, outstanding life.”
      Donald Trump continues to consolidate his support among Republicans, criminal charges be damned.He just announced endorsements from almost the entirety of Alabama’s congressional lawmakers, including all the Republicans in its House delegation. Perhaps what is more notable is who from the deeply red state did not endorse him.While Trump picked up the support of Republican senior senator Tommy Tuberville, junior senator Katie Britt has reportedly said she will not be endorsing any candidate for the GOP’s nomination. Republican governor Kay Ivey also has not made an endorsement, though the former president did gain the support of lieutenant governor Will Ainsworth.And needless to say, the sole Democrat in Alabama’s House delegation, Terri Sewell, did not endorse Trump.Donald Trump’s detractors have long dreamed of seeing him behind bars, and now that he’s the subject of not one, not two, but three and perhaps even four criminal indictments, it seems like that dream could become a reality.Or could it?The Washington Post has a story looking at the practical considerations that would determine whether Trump actually goes to jail if convicted of the state and federal charges he currently stands accused of. That would be an unprecedented situation, and some former government officials the Post spoke to were skeptical of the former president ever actually ending up behind bars:
      Could Trump face prison? “Theoretically, yes and practically, no,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former top federal prosecutor and counsel to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Rosenberg served briefly as head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in the Trump administration and notably said the president had “condoned police misconduct” in remarking to officers in Long Island that they need not protect suspects’ heads when loading them into police vehicles.
      “Any federal district judge ought to understand it raises enormous and unprecedented logistical issues,” Rosenberg said of the prospect Trump could be incarcerated. “Probation, fines, community service and home confinement are all alternatives.”
      And even if he is convicted, there are a range of possibilities for the type of sentence he could receive:
      The prospect of potentially decades in prison for Trump is politically loaded, though the charges he faces could carry such a penalty. After entering a not-guilty plea in Miami federal court on June 13, Trump claimed he was being threatened with “400 years in prison,” adding up the statutory maximum penalty for the 37 counts against him. The charges he faces in D.C. related to his alleged efforts to stay in power despite losing the election could add additional decades, based on that math.
      Judges almost never apply maximum penalties to first offenders and rarely stack sentences rather than let them run concurrently. However, federal sentencing guidelines are highly technical. Specialists estimate that a first offender convicted of multiple counts of willfully retaining national defense information and obstructing or conspiring to obstruct an investigation by concealing evidence might face a range of anything from 51 to 63 months on the low end — about five years — to 17½ to 22 years on the high end — or about 20 years, given Trump’s alleged leadership role and abuse of trust.
      Similarly, Jan. 6 riot defendants convicted at trial of two of the same counts with which Trump is charged — conspiring to or actually obstructing an official proceeding — have faced sentencing guideline ranges as high as seven to 11 years, and as low as less than two years.
      But judges always have the final say.
      “Without question, if it were anyone else [but Trump], prison would be a certainty,” said Thomas A. Durkin, a former federal prosecutor who teaches national security law at Loyola University Chicago. However, he said, “The Secret Service waiver issue is a novel and complex issue” that could theoretically factor into an exception.
      That said, if he does go to prison, the Post reports that it could actually things easier for his Secret Service details:
      Former and current Secret Service agents said that while there is no precedent, they feel certain the agency would insist on providing some form of 24/7 protection to an imprisoned former president. And, they say, the agency is probably planning for that possibility, seeking to match to some degree its normal practice of rotating three daily shifts of at least one or two agents providing close proximity protection.
      “This question keeps getting raised, yet no official answers” from the Secret Service, said Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent and now chief operating officer for Teneo Risk, a corporate advisory and communications firm. “However, we can infer how security measures could be implemented based on existing protective protocols. Unless there are changes in legislation or the former president waives protection, the U.S. Secret Service would likely maintain a protective environment around the president in accordance with their current practices.”
      Current and former agents said Trump’s detail would coordinate their protection work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to ensure there was no conflict about duties or about how they would handle emergencies, as well as the former president’s routine movements in a prison — such as heading to exercise or meals. The Secret Service, they said, would maintain a bubble around Trump in any case, keeping him at a distance from other inmates.
      “In some ways, protection may be easier — the absence of travel means logistics get easier and confinement means that the former president’s location is always known,” Wackrow said. “Theoretically, the perimeter is well fortified — no one is worried about someone breaking into jail.”
      Ron DeSantis is having a rough go of his presidential campaign. His solution? “Start slitting throats”, as the Guardian Martin Pengelly reports: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 Kelly, 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.Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie visited Ukraine on Friday and met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an attempt to underscore US support for Kyiv by one of the people bidding to be the next Republican president of the US.The former New Jersey governor met Zelenskiy at the presidential palace after visiting a mass grave in Bucha and touring damage in Iprin. Christie also toured a child protection center in Kyiv.Other Republican candidates, including frontrunner Donald Trump, have been critical of the cost of supporting Ukraine. Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year suggested that the war was simply a “territorial dispute” before backtracking. Another candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has called for an immediate end to the war and for Russia to keep its territorial gains.Former vice-president Mike Pence and US senator Tim Scott of South Carolina are also in the race, and Reuters notes both have argued it remains vital for the US to push back against Russian aggression.For more updates on Russia’s war in Ukraine, follow our live blog. A day after pleading not guilty to federal charges related to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the January 6 insurrection, Donald Trump is calling on the US supreme court to intercede in the legal battles he is facing.Trump, in a Truth Social post earlier today, repeated accusations that the legal troubles he brought upon himself amount to “election interference” from President Joe Biden.He said Biden “hit me with a barrage of weak lawsuits” that will “require massive amounts of my time [and] money to adjudicate”, resources that he claimed would have been used for advertising and rallies.Trump added:
      I am leading in all Polls, including against Crooked Joe, but this is not a level playing field. It is Election Interference, & the Supreme Court must intercede. MAGA!
      Mounting legal fees have forced Trump to drain his campaign’s financial resources ahead of the GOP primary season. In filings with the Federal Election Commission FEC) on Monday, Trump’s political action committee, Save America, said that at the end of June it had less than $4m cash on hand, having paid tens of millions of dollars in legal fees for the former president and associates. More

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      John Bolton suggests US will leave Nato if ‘erratic’ Trump wins in 2024

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      Ex-national security adviser John Bolton issued harsh remarks against his former boss and the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying that the US will likely withdraw from Nato if Donald Trump wins the election.In an interview with the Hill on Thursday, Bolton criticized the former president’s foreign policy after an op-ed he wrote earlier this week called Trump’s behavior “erratic, irrational and unconstrained”.“Donald Trump doesn’t really have a philosophy, as we understand it in political terms,” Bolton said. “He doesn’t think in policy directions when he makes decisions, certainly in the national security space.”Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019, also lambasted Trump for his foreign policy legacy with regard to the alliance, saying in the interview: “He threatened the existence of Nato, and I think in a second Trump term, we’d almost certainly withdraw from Nato.”He also criticized Republicans who have praised Trump for his foreign policy positions. He said: “Those who make these claims about what Trump did in his first term don’t really understand how we got to the places we did. Because many of the things they now give Trump credit for, he wanted to go in the opposite direction.”In Bolton’s op-ed published on Tuesday, he said Trump “disdains knowledge” and accused him of “seeing relations between the United States and foreign lands, especially our adversaries, predominantly as matters of personality”.“Foreign leaders, friend or foe, are far more likely see him as ignorant, inexperienced, braggadocious, longing to be one of the big boys and eminently susceptible to flattery,” Bolton wrote. “These characteristics were a constant source of risk in Trump’s first term, and would be again in a second term.”Bolton condemned Trump for his decision-making, saying: “Beyond acting on inadequate information, reflection or discussion, Trump is also feckless even after making decisions. When things go wrong, or when he simply changes his mind subsequently (a common occurrence), he invariably tries to distance himself from his own decision, fearing negative media coverage or political criticism.”Following his firing in 2019, Bolton published a book, The Room Where It Happened, in which he strongly criticized Trump’s leadership. Earlier this year, Bolton called Trump’s 2024 presidential bid “poison” to the Republican party.Since March, Trump has been criminally charged in connection with hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, with his hoarding of classified documents at his Florida resort, and with allegedly having a hand in illegal efforts to overturn his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges filed against him. More

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      Black US journalism professor wins $1m over botched university appointment

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      A Black journalism professor who was hired by Texas A&M University before objections in some quarters over her history of promoting diversity foiled the job offer has secured a $1m settlement from the institution.Kathleen McElroy also received an apology from officials at Texas A&M, the largest public school in the US, who in a statement Thursday acknowledged “mistakes … made during the process”.In her own statement, McElroy said she would remain in a tenured teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin, and hoped the settlement would “reinforce A&M’s allegiance to excellence in higher education and its commitment to academic freedom and journalism”.“I will never forget that … students, members, former students and staff voiced support for me from many sectors,” McElroy’s statement also said.The payment and apology to McElroy all but closed an episode that unfolded as Republican lawmakers across the US eye the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at college campuses. Such programs are in conservatives’ crosshairs after the Republican supermajority on the US supreme court’s bench ruled in June that race-conscious college admissions decisions were unconstitutional.That court ruling effectively ended affirmative action in the US’s higher education system.Texas A&M announced in June that it had hired McElroy – a school alum and former New York Times editor – to refurbish its journalism department in June. Hiring McElroy away from a more liberal rival at the University of Texas won the school plaudits from some sectors.But then, in a July interview with the Texas Tribune, McElroy revealed that she had encountered pushback at Texas A&M because she had previously worked to diversify newsrooms and make them more inclusive.Documents released Thursday to media organizations including the Associated Press and the local news outlet KVUE showed that six of the school governing board’s members had expressed “concerns” about McElroy after the right-leaning website Texas Scorecard reported on her prior diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.Alums and active students had also called and emailed the university president’s office to challenge the hiring of “a DEI proponent … to serve as director of the new journalism program,” said the documents, which summarized Texas A&M’s investigation into the McElroy matter, according to the AP.Subsequently, as the professor told it, the school president Katherine Banks reduced McElroy’s job offer to a five-year position as opposed to one that was on track to be tenured, which implies certain longer-term employment protections. McElroy told the Tribune that the five-year position – from which she could be fired at any time – was then reduced to a one-year post.At that point, McElroy rejected the job and indicated that she would stay in her teaching role at the University of Texas at Austin.Banks maintained she was not involved in modifications to the contract offered to McElroy. Nonetheless, she resigned from the presidency on 21 July, and the Texas A&M board later negotiated a settlement with McElroy.McElroy was one of two reasons why Texas A&M drew national headlines in July. In a separate case, A&M professor Joy Alonzo was suspended within hours of speaking critically about Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick during a lecture on the ongoing opioid crisis.Alonzo’s suspension, along with McElroy’s botched hiring, have prompted concerns among many in higher education that colleges are increasingly clamping down on free speech at campuses in the face of political pressure.The Associated Press contributed reporting 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