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    Donald Trump indictment: what are the charges and what happens next?

    What is the indictment?Donald Trump has been indicted on four charges: Conspiracy to defraud the US Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding Obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding Conspiracy against rightsYou can read the full indictment on the US courts website – but here is a flavour: “The defendant lost the 2020 presidential election,” the 45-page document states. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the defendant spread lies … that he had actually won.”It alleges that Trump repeated false claims of election fraud, despite repeated warnings from multiple people in his circle, including senior leaders in the Department of Justice and senior attorneys who had been appointed by Trump, and the former vice-president Mike Pence, who told him “he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud”.The indictment describes a conspiracy which, at its core, involves Trump and his co-conspirators allegedly trying to dupe Pence into falsely suggesting the outcome of the 2020 election had been in doubt.To do so, prosecutors say Trump tried to use the Department of Justice to open “sham election fraud investigations” and repeatedly tried to co-opt Pence into rejecting electoral college votes for Joe Biden in an effort to stop his election win being certified.When that failed, the indictment says, Trump tried to block the certification and exploited the January 6 Capitol attack by trying to push false claims of election fraud and to convince members of Congress to continue to delay the certification.Six other co-conspirators are listed but not named. They are thought to include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who was Trump’s attorney after his presidential defeat. The six have not been charged at this time.The backgroundThe indictment stems from Trump’s refusal, in the weeks and months after his defeat by Joe Biden in November 2020, to accept he had lost, and from the violent attempt by a group of Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021 to disrupt the congressional certification of Biden’s victory.That event caused the deaths of seven people, a bipartisan Senate report found, and has already resulted in more than 1,000 arrests.Trump is also facing other serious legal charges in New York and Florida over an alleged hush-money scheme during the 2016 election and his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Separately, he was found liable in May for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll – he has appealed. And he could face other charges in Georgia over alleged election code violations.What does Trump say?The former president hit back on Truth Social: “Why didn’t they bring this ridiculous case 2.5 years ago? They wanted it right in the middle of my campaign, that’s why!”The Trump campaign earlier issued a statement calling the indictments “nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat do others say?Chuck Schumer, the (Democrat) Senate majority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, issued a joint statement saying that the violence of 6 January 2021 “was the culmination of a months-long criminal plot led by the former president to defy democracy and overturn the will of the American people”.There was no immediate comment from Biden, who is on holiday in Delaware; he went to the cinema with his wife, Jill, to watch Oppenheimer shortly after the indictment was announced.What happens next?Trump has been summoned to appear before a federal magistrate judge in Washington DC on Thursday.Jack Smith, the special counsel, said he would seek a “speedy trial”, and stressed that the former president was entitled to a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.Smith described the January 6 insurrection as “an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy” that was “fuelled by lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing the bedrock function of the US government admissions process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election”.If convicted on all counts, Trump could, in theory, spend decades in prison, but federal penalties are rarely as high as the maximum possible sentence.Trump’s latest indictments would not bar him from standing for office – and nor would a conviction. At any other time it would be inconceivable to imagine a candidate facing multiple indictments to win the Republican nomination, but Trump’s political career has never conformed to expectations. More

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    Wednesday briefing: The big one – Trump indicted for January 6

    Good morning.Donald Trump has been indicted for “conspiring to defraud the United States” and other alleged crimes connected to his efforts to overturn the 2020 US election result.The news, which broke late last night UK time, marks the first time Trump has faced criminal charges over his actions after his defeat by Joe Biden, and throws the run-up to next year’s presidential election into even greater turmoil.Trump is bidding to regain the White House in 2024; he leads in polling for the Republican presidential nomination by a substantial majority. He called the case “ridiculous”.Our newsletter this morning rounds up the latest developments on an extraordinary story.First, the other news headlines.Five big stories
    UK news | The family of Captain Tom Moore have objected to an enforcement notice ordering them to pull down an unauthorised spa pool block at the home of the late charity fundraiser.
    Conservatives | Jeremy Hunt oversaw the signing of a low-tax treaty with San Marino that was championed by a leading Tory donor, who with his companies has given more than £700,000 to the party and £30,000 to the chancellor. Maurizio Bragagni, a prominent businessman and diplomat for San Marino, was present in No 11 Downing Street when a “double taxation” treaty was signed in May.
    AI | UK intelligence agencies are lobbying the government to weaken surveillance laws, which they argue place a “burdensome” limit on their ability to train artificial intelligence models with large amounts of personal data.
    Rights | Anti-protest laws and culture wars perpetrated by the government are among the issues highlighted as “urgent and alarming” by two thinktanks that argue the threat to Britain’s democratic spaces is growing, with charities and civil society groups come under “political attack” by ministers.
    Science | Adults’ penchant for the landscapes of Vincent van Gogh is mirrored in babies, researchers say. Infants and adults were shown a selection of 10 of Van Gogh’s landscapes among 40 possible images. The infants tended to gaze longer at artworks that adult participants rated higher for pleasantness. Van Gogh’s Green Corn Stalks had the highest shared preference.
    In depth: ‘Defendant spread lies that he had actually won’Former president Donald Trump has been summoned to appear in a Washington court to answer charges linked to his bid to overturn the 2020 US presidential election.The development, announced by special counsel Jack Smith is not wholly a surprise: a congressional panel created to investigate the January 6 insurrection recommended criminal charges last December. The US Justice Department has been investigating this and further evidence since.But that does not make this news any less astonishing. A former president, who otherwise may stand a very good chance of being re-elected, has been charged with, among other things, conspiring to defraud the country he wants to lead. It is the first time a US president has faced charges for trying to overturn an election.The indictmentTrump has been indicted on four charges:* Conspiracy to defraud the United States* Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding* Obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding* Conspiracy against rightsYou can read the full indictment on the US courts website – but here is a flavour: “The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election,” the 45-page document states. “Despite having lost the defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies … that he had actually won.”It alleges that Trump repeated false claims of election fraud, despite repeated warnings from multiple people in his circle, including senior leaders in the justice department and senior attorneys who had been appointed by Trump, and the former vice-president Mike Pence, who told him “he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud”.As our US team report today, the indictment describes a conspiracy which, at its core, involves Trump and his co-conspirators allegedly trying to dupe Pence into falsely suggesting the outcome of the 2020 election had been in doubt.To do so, prosecutors say Trump tried to use the Justice Department to open “sham election fraud investigations” and repeatedly tried to co-opt Pence into rejecting electoral college votes for Joe Biden in a bid to stop his election win being certified.When that failed, the indictment says, Trump tried to block the certification and exploited the January 6 Capitol attack by trying to push false claims of election fraud and to convince members of Congress to continue to delay the certification.Six other co-conspirators are listed but not named, though the indictment says they are four attorneys, a justice department official and a political consultant.They have been tentatively identified, however, and they are thought to include Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who was Trump’s attorney in the wake of his presidential defeat.The six have not been charged at this time, but could be in future.The background, in briefThe indictment stems from Trump’s refusal, in the weeks and months after his defeat by Joe Biden in November 2020, to accept he had lost, and from the violent attempt by a group of Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021 to disrupt the congressional certification of Biden’s victory.That event caused the deaths of seven people, a bipartisan Senate report found, and has already resulted in more than 1,000 arrests.Trump is also facing other serious legal charges in New York and Florida over an alleged hush-money scheme during the 2016 election and his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Separately, he was found liable in May for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll – he has appealed. And he could face other charges in Georgia over alleged election code violations.What does Trump say?The former president hit back on Truth Social: “Why didn’t they bring this ridiculous case 2.5 years ago? They wanted it right in the middle of my campaign, that’s why!”The Trump campaign earlier issued a statement calling the indictments “nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner”.What do others say?There have been a range of responses from Trump’s Republican rivals and supporters.Pence, who is also running in 2024, said: “Today’s indictment serves as an important reminder: anyone who puts himself over the constitution should never be president of the United States.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said he hadn’t read the indictment, but would enact reforms: “Washington DC is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” he tweeted.Others have been more vocal. Ohio congressman Jim Jordan tweeted: “When you drain The Swamp, The Swamp fights back. President Trump did nothing wrong!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionChuck Schumer, the (Democrat) Senate majority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, issued a joint statement saying that the violence of 6 January 2021 “was the culmination of a months-long criminal plot led by the former president to defy democracy and overturn the will of the American people”.There was no immediate comment from President Joe Biden, who is on holiday in Delaware; he went to the cinema with his wife, Jill, to watch Oppenheimer shortly after the indictment was announced.What happens next?The former president has been summoned to appear before a federal magistrate judge in Washington DC on Thursday.Jack Smith, the special counsel, said he would seek a “speedy trial”, and stressed that the former president was entitled to a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.Smith described the January 6 insurrection as “an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy” that was “fuelled by lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing the bedrock function of the US government admissions process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election”.If convicted on all counts, Trump could, in theory, spend decades in prison, but federal penalties are rarely as high as the maximum possible sentence.Trump’s latest indictments would not bar him from standing for office – and nor would a conviction. At any other time it would be inconceivable to imagine a candidate facing multiple indictments to win the Republican nomination, but Trump’s political career has never conformed to expectations.What else we’ve been reading
    I have been enjoying the second season of the Sex and the City reboot, And Just Like That …, but Louis Staples in Harper’s Bazaar hits the nail on the head on what is missing from the show: its inner cynic. Self-conscious and concerned with the life of Manhattan’s elite, the show’s lack of healthy scepticism leaves it feeling a little hollow, writes Staples. Nimo
    We all know the things that irritate us when we eat out – but what do chefs find most annoying about diners? Tony Naylor reports. (A tip: standing on your chair to take food pics isn’t always popular.) Esther
    After running a successful experiment last year, Jo Hunter has decided to commit to taking every August off, along with the rest of her staff. She explains why her company runs on an 11-month year and how transformative it has been for their business and employees. Nimo
    I loved this brief story from novelist Colin Walsh’s school days, about the moment one of his teachers broke off from the exam script to tell “a bunch of lads, all acne and adrenaline” about the unimaginable ways their awareness of life was about to expand. Esther
    During the London press preview screening of Barbie, influencers and writers alike were encouraged to share their positive feelings about the film on Twitter – but embargos for full reviews remained in place for two more days. Manuela Lazić left feeling censored. She asks what the role for film criticism is when studios can rely on influencers for glowing reviews. Nimo
    SportFootball | Inspired by two goals and three assists from Lauren James, England’s Lionesses topped Group D after a sensational 6-1 victory against China in their final Women’s World Cup group game. Denmark took down Haiti 2-0 after captain Pernille Harder converted a first-half penalty to also qualify from the group, while the Netherlands thrashed Vietnam 7-0 England in the knockout stage and the USA squeezed into the next round after drawing 0-0 with Portugal.Netball | England clinched their place in the World Cup semi-finals with a match to spare after defeating Fiji 89-28 in a late-night game in Cape Town.Football | Chelsea have signed the midfielder Lesley Ugochukwu from Rennes for €27m (£23.2m) and are deciding whether to explore an offer to take Dusan Vlahovic from Juventus as part of a swap deal involving Romelu Lukaku. Jürgen Klopp has laughed off suggestions Liverpool are in the running to put together a loan deal for the France striker Kylian Mbappé who has rejected the chance to hold talks with the Saudi Arabian club Al-Hilal after Paris Saint-Germain accepted a world-record £259m bid and Anfield has been touted as a possible destination.The front pages“Asylum seeker barge may be ‘deathtrap’, firefighters warn” is on the front of the Guardian today, and there’s another story there on medical research, about which the Times says “AI can help medics spot more breast cancer cases”. “Cancer ‘holy grail’” says the Metro but it’s a different breakthrough – a pill that has the potential to kill tumours. The Daily Express has “Biggest house price fall in 14 years … but rise on way” while the i reports “Recession fears grow as interest rates set to rise until Christmas”. “We’re shaping Labour policy, boasts eco-mob” – that’s the Daily Mail, about you guessed it, Just Stop Oil. Top story in the Financial Times is “Business ‘breathes sigh of relief’ after post-Brexit goods safety mark ditched”. The Daily Telegraph tells us: “First-time criminals to avoid court”. “Anton: My dad stabbed me” reports the Daily Mirror under the strapline “Strictly judge’s agony”.Today in FocusLife in the UK for one of China’s most wantedHong Kong activist Finn Lau has vowed to continue his fight for democracy despite the Chinese bounty on his head.Cartoon of the day | Steve BellThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badThe longlist for the Booker prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award, has been released and, writes Ella Creamer, it features an “original and thrilling” number of diverse novelists. For the first time, novels by Irish writers comprise one-third of the list, making Ireland the country that has produced the most nominees relative to population size. The judges have also chosen smaller debuts instead of the expected major novels of the year, with seven of the titles coming from independent publishers. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ is the fifth Nigerian author to be nominated for the Booker, for her novel A Spell of Good Things, which was described by judges as a “powerful, staggering read” in its “examination of class and desire in modern-day Nigeria”. The list has been seen as a breath of fresh air, with its focus on lesser-known writers. Esi Edugyan, the chair of the panel which read 163 books in across seven months, said the longlist is defined by “the irreverence of new voices, by the iconoclasm of established ones”, and the novels are “small revolutions, each seeking to energise and awaken the language”.Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
    Quick crossword
    Cryptic crossword
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    Trump increases Republican primary lead despite swirling legal peril

    Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, is “ready to go” with indictments in her investigation of Donald Trump’s election subversion. In Washington, the special counsel Jack Smith is expected to add charges regarding election subversion to 40 counts already filed over the former president’s retention of classified records.Trump already faces 34 criminal charges in New York over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Referring to Trump being ordered to pay $5m after being found liable for sexual abuse and defamation against the writer E Jean Carroll, a judge recently said Carroll proved Trump raped her. Lawsuits over Trump’s business affairs continue.Yet a month out from the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, Trump’s domination of the field increases with each poll.On Monday, the first 2024 survey from the New York Times and Siena College put Trump at 54% support. His closest challenger, Ron DeSantis, was at 17%. No one else – including Mike Pence, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley – was higher than 3%.DeSantis’s hard-right campaign is widely seen to be out of fuel and on a glide path to destruction. Trump dominates early voting states and in national averages leads the Florida governor by more than 30 points.Heading for trials in primary season, Trump denies wrongdoing and claims political persecution. But his chaos-agent campaign, which he has said he will not abandon even if convicted and sentenced, does not just threaten the national peace. It threatens his own party.Trump is demanding Republican support for impeaching Joe Biden over corruption allegations against Hunter Biden, the president’s surviving son.“Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democrat fraud should be immediately primaried and get out,” Trump told a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.Republicans hold the US House, where impeachment would start, by just five seats. GOP members in Democratic areas seem likely to suffer at the polls next year.“If they’re not willing to do it,” Trump said, “we’ve got a lot of good, tough Republicans around. People are going to run against ’em, and people are going to win. And they’re going to get my endorsement every single time. They’re going to win ’cause we win almost every race when we endorse.”Factcheckers dispute that. Surveying the 2022 midterms, the New York Times said: “Mr Trump endorsed more than 250 candidates, and his 82% success rate is, on the surface, impressive. But the vast majority of those endorsements were of incumbents and heavy favorites to win.”The paper added: “In the 36 most competitive House races … Mr Trump endorsed candidates in five contests. All five lost.”Trump’s influence on key Senate races won by Democrats has been widely discussed.In Pennsylvania, Trump also called for conditioning aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia on White House cooperation with investigations of Hunter Biden. Trump’s own first impeachment was for withholding aid to Ukraine in an attempt to uncover dirt on the Bidens. Pundits noted the irony.“So much for denying the quid pro quo, as he did in 2019,” said Peter Baker, the Times’ chief White House correspondent.In that impeachment, Trump was acquitted when Republican senators stayed loyal, Mitt Romney of Utah the sole GOP vote to convict.Trump beat his second impeachment, for inciting the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, despite 10 House Republicans and seven senators voting to convict.Thousands have been arrested over the Capitol attack and hundreds convicted, some of seditious conspiracy. Smith, the special counsel, is homing in on indictments regarding Trump’s election subversion, though as the Guardian revealed, likely charges do not directly relate to January 6.In Fulton county, Willis, the district attorney, seems confident of winning convictions over attempts to overturn Biden’s win in Georgia.Speaking to WXIA, a CNN affiliate, she said: “I made a commitment to the American people – but most importantly the citizens of Fulton county – that we were going to be making some big decisions regarding the election investigation and that I would do that before 1 September 2023. I’m going to hold true to that commitment.“The work is accomplished. We’ve been working for two and half years. We’re ready to go.”Previous Trump indictments in New York and Washington have not fueled significant protests or violence. But in Atlanta, barriers surround the Fulton courthouse.“I think the sheriff is doing something smart in making sure that the courthouse stays safe,” Willis said. “I’m not willing to put any of the employees or the constituents that come to the courthouse in harm’s way.”In Georgia on Monday, a judge rejected Trump lawyers’ attempt to block use of a grand jury report in prosecutions and remove Willis from the case. In Florida, Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate, made his first court appearance in the classified records case. He did not enter a formal plea.In general election polling, Biden and Trump are closely matched.On Sunday, the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, a rank Republican outsider, told CBS it was “inappropriate” to float a pardon for Trump, as other candidates, DeSantis included, have done.Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer who went to jail then turned on Trump, told MSNBC Trump’s likely nomination posed a genuine threat to the nation.“I’m your retribution,” Cohen said, quoting Trump’s message to supporters. “They’re indicting me, I’m protecting you, I’m the only one between you and them.“It’s right out of Mein Kampf, which allegedly Donald used to keep on his bedside table.”In 1990, Vanity Fair said Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Trump told the magazine it was Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. The friend who gave Trump the book said it was the speeches.Cohen continued: “This is not a joke. And to anybody who thinks for a quick second there’s no way he’s going to win, that was a pretty packed audience in Erie, Pennsylvania.” More

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    The big idea: is it too late to stop extremism taking over politics?

    Welcome to the 2020s, the beginning of what history books might one day describe as the digital middle ages. Let’s briefly travel back to 2017. I remember sitting in various government buildings briefing politicians and civil servants about QAnon, the emerging internet conspiracy movement whose adherents believe that a cabal of Satan-worshipping elites runs a global paedophile network. We joked about the absurdity of it all but no one took the few thousand anonymous true believers seriously.Fast-forward to 2023. Significant portions of the population in liberal democracies consider it possible that global elites drink the blood of children in order to stay young. Recent surveys suggest that around 17% of Americans believe in the QAnon myth. Some 5% of Germans believe ideas related to the anti-democratic Reichsbürger movement, which asserts that the German Reich continues to exist and rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. Up to a third of Britons believe that powerful figures in Hollywood, government and the media are secretly engaged in child trafficking. Is humanity on the return journey from enlightenment to the dark ages?As segments of the public have headed towards extremes, so has our politics. In the US, dozens of congressional candidates, including the successfully elected Lauren Boebert, have been supportive of QAnon. The German far-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland is at an all-time high in terms of both its radicalism and its popularity, while Austria’s xenophobic Freedom party is topping the polls. The recent rise to power of far-right parties such as Fratelli d’Italia and the populist Sweden Democrats bolster this trend.I am often asked why the UK doesn’t have a successful far-right populist party. My answer is: because it doesn’t need to. Parts of the Conservative party now cater to audiences that would have voted for the BNP or Ukip in the past. A few years ago, the far-right Britain First claimed that 5,000 of its members had joined the Tory party. Not unlike the Republicans in the US, the Tories have increasingly departed from moderate conservative thinking and lean more and more towards radicalism.In 2020, Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski was asked to apologise for attending the National Conservatism conference in Rome. The event is well known for attracting international far-right figures such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and the hard-right US presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. This year, an entire delegation of leading Conservatives attended the same conference in London. It might be hard for extreme-right parties to rise to power in Britain, but there is no shortage of routes for extremist ideas to reach Westminster.Language is a key indicator of radicalisation. The words of Conservative politicians speak for themselves: home secretary Suella Braverman referred to migrants arriving in the UK as an “invasion on our southern coast”, while MP Miriam Cates gave a nod to conspiracy theorists when she warned that “children’s souls” were being “destroyed” by cultural Marxism. Using far-right dog whistles such as “invasion” and “cultural Marxism” invites listeners to open a Pandora’s box of conspiracy myths. Research shows that believing in one makes you more susceptible to others.I sometimes wonder what a QAnon briefing to policymakers might look like in a few years. What if the room no longer laughs at the ludicrous myths but instead endorses them? One could certainly imagine this scenario in the US if Donald Trump were to win the next election. In 2019 – before conspiracy myths inspired attacks on the US Capitol, the German Reichstag, the New Zealand parliament and the Brazilian Congress – I warned in a Guardian opinion piece of the threat QAnon would soon pose to democracy. Are we now at a point where it is it too late to stop democracies being taken over by far-right ideologies and conspiracy thinking? If so, do we simply have to accept the “new normal”?There are various ways we can try to prevent and reverse the spread of extremist narratives. For some people who have turned to extremism over the past few years, too little has changed: anger over political inaction on economic inequality is now further fuelled by the exacerbating cost of living crisis. For others, too much has changed: they see themselves as rebels against a takeover by “woke” or “globalist” policies.What they have in common is a sense that the political class no longer takes their wellbeing seriously, and moves to improve social conditions and reduce inequality would go some way towards reducing such grievances. But beyond that, their fears and frustrations have clearly been instrumentalised by extremists, as well as by opportunistic politicians and profit-oriented social media firms. This means that it is essential to expose extremist manipulation tactics, call out politicians when they normalise conspiracy thinking and regulate algorithm design by the big technology companies that still amplify harmful content.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIf the private sector is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. Surveys by the Edelman Trust Barometer found that people in liberal democracies have largely lost trust in governments, media and even NGOs but, surprisingly, still trust their employers and workplaces. Companies can play an important role in the fight for democratic values. For example, the Business Council for Democracy tests and develops training courses that firms can offer to employees to help them identify and counter conspiracy myths and targeted disinformation.Young people should be helped to become good digital citizens with rights and responsibilities online, so that they can develop into critical consumers of information. National school curricula should include a new subject at the intersection of psychology and internet studies to help digital natives understand the forces that their parents have struggled to grasp: the psychological processes that drive digital group dynamics, online engagement and the rise of conspiracy thinking.Ultimately, the next generation will vote conspiracy theorists in or out of power. Only they can reverse our journey towards the digital middle ages. Julia Ebner is the author of Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over (Ithaka Press).Further readingHow Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky (Penguin, £10.99)How Civil War Starts by Barbara F Walter (Penguin, £10.99)Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko (Redwood, £16.99) More

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    Weak, small and reckless: how Ron DeSantis, Republican Napoleon, met his Waterloo

    Ron DeSantis has revealed the next phase of his plan to win the Republican presidential nomination by firing 30% of his campaign staff. He has also dismissed a staffer, Nate Hochman, a prominent conservative writer, for creating a video that features a notorious Nazi symbol. A pro-DeSantis political action committee has used artificial intelligence to generate a video in which Trump’s voice trashes the Republican governor of Iowa. A recent poll showed Trump ahead of DeSantis in Iowa by 27 points.After his campaign declared he was entering his “insurgent” stage as “the underdog”, DeSantis disappeared on a donor-provided private jet, his usual mode of travel. Several billionaire donors, however, previously enamored of DeSantis’s “electability”, gave notice that they are jumping overboard without the lifeboat of another candidate. Rupert Murdoch withdrew his mandate of heaven, not so privately dubbing DeSantis a “loser”. Two DeSantis fundraisers in the exclusive Hamptons were scrapped for lack of interest and a third was poorly attended.To steady his wobbly backers, DeSantis issued a dramatic statement, his first announcement of a potential appointment to indicate the kind of administration he would form as president. His choice, another unsteady presidential aspirant, the anti-vaxxer Democrat Robert F Kennedy Jr, to “sic” on the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Members of RFK Jr’s revered family have vehemently denounced him for propounding the antisemitic canard that Jews possess some sort of genetic immunity to Covid, unlike “Caucasians and Black people”, and for suggesting that the disease was “ethnically targeted”. By floating Kennedy’s name, DeSantis had shown that his idea of national unity begins with a government of all conspiracy theorists, regardless of party label.DeSantis capped his reset with a historic declaration, making him the first presidential candidate since before the civil war explicitly to defend the supposed benefits of slavery. (This includes Strom Thurmond, the senator who ran as a pro-segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948.) Florida’s new academic standards for the teaching of Black history include the claim slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”, a line some critics have likened to John C Calhoun’s description of slavery, in the years immediately before the civil war, as “a positive good”.DeSantis waded into the controversy with his trademark flat spottiness, remarking, “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Say what you will about human bondage; at least the enslaved could leverage slavery’s benefits down the line. The closest any political figures, much less any presidential candidates, have come in this century to DeSantis’s strained justification for slavery was the refusal of eight Republican senators in 2005 to sign a formal apology for the Senate’s long “failure to enact anti-lynching legislation”.In the immediate aftermath of DeSantis’s latest antics, Trump led him in various polls by margins ranging from 24% to 43%.“What’s going on?” asked the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “There was a lot of optimism about you running for president early in the year … What happened?”DeSantis nervously laughed.“These are narratives,” he explained. “The media does not want me to be the nominee.”“Narratives” is among DeSantis’s favorite words to assert, without further explanation, how “the corporate media” and “the woke” control politics. The “narratives” are a looming phantom enemy. It would be unfair to accuse DeSantis of grasping Foucault’s post-structuralist ideas about the expression of power through discourse. His clotted and fractured political language is related to abstruse theory the way his rudimentary distortions of history are related to history. But his understanding of political dynamics is even dimmer and more self-defeating.DeSantis’s slot as the No 2 in a Republican field of implausible bit players settles his fate as the chief non-challenger. He is inevitable, so long as his utility lasts, as the guarantor of Trump’s nomination. He is the non-viable alternative, a void who occupies unmovable political space. His function is to stymie every other non-contender, none of whom can dislodge Trump themselves. DeSantis blots out the rest. If Trump is the sun, he’s the lunar eclipse.DeSantis has vaulted into second place at least partly because the only other two notable candidates are despised within their party. The former vice-president Mike Pence will almost certainly be the decisive witness in Trump’s trial on January 6 offenses, testifying in the courtroom, facing Trump sitting at the defendant’s table. Pence has no wiggle room politically, despite his state of denial of how it will end. “Hang Mike Pence!” But, imagining himself as president, Pence did manage to criticize DeSantis for his ideological swerve.“To be clear,” he said, “pro-abortion Democrats like RFK Jr would not even make the list” of his potential appointees.The former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, unlike Pence, is utterly without illusions. Christie has an intimate, gritty knowledge of New York, at the nexus of greasy real estate, the mafia and Roy Cohn – the underworld from which Trump emerged. Christie is a former top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. His aunt’s husband’s brother was a ranking member of the Genovese crime family.“He’s never run against somebody from New Jersey who understands what the New York thing is and what he’s all about,” Christie says about Trump.Christie has what the wise-guys would call “motive”, for it was Christie who put Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and White House chief adviser, in prison.He explained: “If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?”In turn, Kushner has waged an unrelenting vendetta. In his own turn, Christie now questions the basis of Kushner’s post-Trump administration fortune.“Jared Kushner, six months after he leaves the White House, gets two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. What was Jared Kushner doing in the Middle East? … He was put there to make those relationships and then he cashed in on those relationship when he left the office.”Kushner’s aunt and uncle, who have a poisonous relationship with Jared and Charles, have maxed out contributions to Christie’s campaign. Unlike DeSantis, Christie does not want to edge out Trump in order to be Trump. He wants to prosecute him, as “a liar and a coward”. The fundamental difference between DeSantis and Christie is between the clueless and the clued-in. Among Republicans, though, Christie is polling at 3%.DeSantis is the only actual contender against Trump, and he’s not a contender. He’s trapped in a hopeless conundrum. Circumstances may be beyond his control, but whatever the circumstances he handles them poorly. Every time DeSantis turns the spotlight on himself, the play goes haywire. Whenever he gets the cue, he always hits the wrong note. Playing himself, he’s playing someone trying to imitate another character. While he can never be more like Trump than Trump, he doesn’t really know who Trump is. Only Christie is willing to make the case that Trump is a criminal sociopath. When Trump received his target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating the January 6 coup, DeSantis repeated standard Republican talking points, calculated to support Trump, that the US justice department is “weaponized” and “criminalizing political differences”. Joining the chorus, DeSantis faded into the indistinguishable background, in an exercise of the party closing ranks. His mealy-mouthed words showed him to be the weak disciple.If he were to echo Christie about Trump as a gangster, DeSantis would stand apart from the partisan pack. But then he would be a copy of Christie and earn the enmity of most of the party. Instead, in his crabbed understanding, he conceives of Trump as solely a mean-spirited rightwinger who can be gotten around by being meaner and more reactionary. The more he tries to move to Trump’s right, however, the more he exposes himself as a literal-minded copycat incapable of arousing the depth of emotional devotion that Trump enjoys.DeSantis diminished himself from the start by chasing Trump’s shadow. There is no rightful succession to a cult of personality, and certainly not with the absence of personality. Being a messiah is a one-at-a-time business. The false messiah who turns out not to be the second coming typically winds up being castigated as a fraudulent betrayer and burned at the stake. Christie presents the only true alternative model, which is to purge both the cult and the personality, to deal with crime and punishment. That herculean task would require expunging most of the Republican party. DeSantis owes his career to the Trump party, not the old defunct Republican party. He has sought to become Trump after Trump, only to have to confront the existence of Trump being Trump. So, DeSantis has reduced himself to a troll.Trolling is not merely one of DeSantis’s characteristics; it’s become his principal one. DeSantis struggles to establish an identity through his culture war on identity politics. Yet he lacks both culture and a distinct identity. His battles are stunts, a series of negative projections, at best an accumulation of fears that do not add up. Suing Disney over its acknowledgment of gay people, banning books, gutting universities, prohibiting abortion, shipping unsuspecting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, and slipping into the curriculum a good word for slavery have only prompted DeSantis to try out another personality larger than himself as a summing up.“We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the corporations,” he has declared. “We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”It is also where its governor stages an unselfconscious satire of Winston Churchill’s defiant speech against the Nazis in which the performer does not recognize his comic absurdity.DeSantis’s inconsistency is his one constancy. On issues, he has an extensive and recurring history of flip-flopping on federal disaster relief, privatizing social security and Medicare, aid to Ukraine, and so forth. But his deeper problem is his failure to connect, which pressures him to flounder and spiral in a never-ending search for a convincing image. His behavior demonstrates a pattern of impatience, anxiety over things not happening exactly as he wishes, his frustration building, insistent that people do as he says, obliviousness to their signals, angering easily, and an impulsive inability to cope with criticism. On a campaign stop in New Hampshire in June, when a reporter asked if he intended to take questions from the audience, he snapped: “What are you talking about? Are you blind? Are you blind?” But it was not the reporter who was tone-deaf.DeSantis’s wife, Casey, a former Jacksonville TV host, is his producer. His first defining ad, in 2018, in his first campaign for governor, depicted him as a good father following the guidance of the great father-figure: Donald Trump. It began with Casey.“Ron loves playing with the kids,” she said. DeSantis played with blocks with his infant son and said, “Build the Wall!” “He reads stories,” said Casey. “Then,” said DeSantis, holding Trump’s The Art of the Deal and his baby on his lap, “Mr Trump said, “You’re fired! I love that part.” “People say Ron is all Trump,” Casey chimed in, “but he is so much more.” DeSantis leant over the crib to see his baby lying in a jumper stenciled, “Make America Great Again.” “Big league, so good,” Ron said.DeSantis was a little-known backbencher and member of the House Freedom Caucus, lagging in the polls, running behind the establishment candidate, the agriculture commissioner, Adam Putnam. Suddenly, Trump leaped in to endorse him as a “special person who has done an incredible job”.“My opponent’s running on an endorsement,” Putnam said. “No plan, no vision, no agenda – just an endorsement. Just hanging on to the coattails.”Putnam was correct – and DeSantis won the primary by about 20 points. He barely squeaked by in the general election, defeating his Democratic opponent by 0.4%, a razor-thin margin, but Trump’s endorsement again made the difference. Running on the image of the dutiful Maga dad, DeSantis owed his elevation to his worship of Big Daddy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter DeSantis’s landslide re-election in 2022, preparing his run for the Republican presidential nomination, his wife cast him in a new TV ad as a Tom Cruise-a-like knock-off from the movie Top Gun: Maverick, donning the leather bomber jacket and the Ray-Ban sunglasses to teach the “Top Gov” class.“This is your governor speaking,” he said, to invisible students. “Today’s training exercise, dogfighting, taking on the corporate media.”Cut. He walked to a fighter jet marked “Top Gov”.“Don’t accept their narrative … I’ve just disabused you of their narrative.”The whoosh of a jet taking off.In his identity cosplay, DeSantis is the heroic pilot willing and able to take on the enemy. Every element of his alibi for his subsequent nosediving campaign can be found in this video: “Corporate media … their narrative …” His latest excuses imitate his previous, empty scripted self. He’s replicating his facsimiles.A few months later, his wife oversaw production of yet another TV ad in which God was now Ron’s co-pilot. She tweeted it out, under the cover line, “I love you, Ron.” Fortunately, so does God, essentially DeSantis’s executive producer, who was mentioned 10 times within 90 seconds in the black-and-white video.While morning light and rolling waves showed the finger of God, Casey DeSantis’s photograph appeared four times. “And on the eighth day,” the deep voiceover explained, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.” DeSantis stood before an American flag. “God said, ‘I need someone to be strong,’” who can “advocate truth in the midst of hysteria” against “the conventional wisdom” and take “the arrows”.“God said: ‘I need a family man, a man who would laugh and then sigh, and then reply with smiling eyes when his daughter says she wants to do what Dad does.’ So God made a fighter.”In this narrative, DeSantis is more than divinely inspired. He is the chosen one. The will of God is revealed. The Almighty has cast his vote. But the basso profundo voice expressing God’s anointment and the narration itself duplicate in precise tone – and partly word for word – an old routine of the long-ago conservative radio broadcaster and huckster Paul Harvey, a chum of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the FBI director J Edgar Hoover.Harvey’s masterpiece of kitsch, “God Made A Farmer,” ends with a riff.“God said, ‘I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales, yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs … who would laugh, and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life ‘doing what Dad does.’ So God made a farmer.”The DeSantis ad is a divine revelation of a reproduction of old-time corn. Plagiarizing the identity from Harvey’s spiel, the salt of the earth is transformed into the holy warrior.DeSantis’s opening act of his campaign was to establish his image as a strongman to displace Trump. His strategy was to belittle and hurt the helpless – Black people, migrants, women, gay people, trans people, academics – targets he wraps up as “the woke”. His antipathy seemed to come naturally. His chief adviser in his Florida kulturkampf has been a prolific conservative activist and would-be scholar, Christopher Rufo, who claimed to have a master’s degree from Harvard. In fact, he attended Harvard Extension School, a separate, “open enrollment” branch. Rufo was another case of an overextended identity. After Rufo advised DeSantis to trash the New College of Florida, a public institution, for its “focus on social justice”, DeSantis installed him as a trustee.DeSantis’s victorious crusades over his vulnerable woke foes led him to lay siege to Disney’s Magic Kingdom. The little Napoleon’s attack in Orlando, however, began his downfall. As a ploy, taking on Disney less resembled misleading a bunch of migrants to board a flight to Martha’s Vineyard than marching through the Russian winter. DeSantis had thoughtlessly miscalculated, out of false bravado.The aspiring authoritarian tries to seize absolute authority through contempt for civil authority. But once he stumbled into his quagmire with Disney, one of the largest employers in Florida, DeSantis’s theatrics did not seem so clever in beating the woke and owning the libs. His imitation of Trump’s defiant exploitation for political and personal advantage hit a snag. Against Disney, DeSantis trapped himself into a conflict with a more popular and powerful adversary. His stalling upset his image-building to inflate himself above Trump. He made himself appear weak, small and reckless.When his stunts ceased working to make him seem big, DeSantis’s stature fell to earth. His obvious ploys are increasingly seen, even by his erstwhile donors, as his vain effort to define his identity. His battles with “the woke” are insignificant in comparison with the Deep State Trump conjures to fight. DeSantis is too insubstantial to be attacked at the same level. Trump’s high and low crimes are integral to who he is. DeSantis’s carnival acts are contrived sideshows. Trump has been consistently malicious, malignant, deceptive, cruel, vengeful and selfish. This is the character his followers adore. DeSantis is both cruel and a bad mime of cruelty. His gestures at viciousness in the light of Trump’s vast villainy cast him as a follower seeking to be the leader.Trump knows no limits in committing any offense, personal or legal, while DeSantis is bound and driven by his stringent limitations. He’s a static figure. He launches spectacles of abuse in compensation for his drab and detached personality. They are his substitute to generate an interest he does not have intrinsically. He is seemingly incapable of operating apart from his stunts because of his deficit of being. He fills his vacuum with barbs, insults and cruelties to prove his strength in a strained effort to draw attention away from his nullity. He tries to manufacture authenticity through these forced gestures that rebound to illustrate his artificiality and highlight the inescapability of the all-too real Trump.Trump has sniffed out DeSantis’s weakness, his “no personality”, as Trump has put it. Searching for a demeaning nickname, he tried out “Meatball Ron” before settling on “Ron DeSanctimonious”, inspired by the “God made a fighter” ad. He doesn’t take him seriously as a contender. The trait that rankles him is disloyalty.Trump lifted DeSantis from the dregs of the House Freedom Caucus to be his Florida Man. It was not for any special qualities that DeSantis displayed, other than slavish devotion to Trump. Trump never saw him as a successor. Trump never thinks of successors. Narcissists don’t have successors. They don’t groom anybody to follow in their footsteps. DeSantis attempted to groom himself as if he were groomed by Trump, in order to surpass Trump without disturbing Trump. He was acting out a unique Oedipus simplex. It did not work.“And, now Ron DeSanctimonious is playing games,” Trump tweeted, right after the 2022 midterm elections. “Well, in terms of loyalty and class, that’s really not the right answer.” Trump recounted in detail how he saved the hapless DeSantis from oblivion during the Republican primary of 2018. “I said, listen Ron, you’re so dead that if Abraham Lincoln and George Washington came back from the dead, and if they put their hands and hearts together and prayed … nothing is going to change. Ron, you are gone.” Trump now refers to him as “very disloyal”.DeSantis’s failed attempts to outflank Trump ideologically on the woke front moved him to a new phase, launching a contest to defeat Trump as a sexual emblem of superior virility. In response, Trump collected gossip, rumors and innuendo. On 20 March, Trump tweeted a photo of DeSantis when he was a high school teacher, at a party with teenaged girls. “Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he’s unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are ‘underage’ (or possibly a man!)”.DeSantis answered with an ad accusing Trump as “the politician who did more than any other Republican to celebrate” LGBTQ+ Pride month and felt comfortable around trans people – in contrast to DeSantis, who touted his “draconian” record to “threaten trans existence”. The ad was weirdly filled with fleeting images of young male actors from American Psycho, Troy, Peaky Blinders and The Wolf of Wall Street – as if a glancing view of Brad Pitt proved Trump was weak on woke. Interspersed between shots of Pitt as Achilles in a Greek war helmet were rerun images of “Top Gov” DeSantis in his bomber jacket, playing at being Tom Cruise in Top Gun.But DeSantis’s bizarre effort to nail Trump as a dangerous sexual hypocrite only created puzzlement. Of course Trump is a hypocrite. Trump is also the living embodiment of toxic masculinity, however decayed it may be. He remains the Maga-mega male idol. He has been, after all, found liable for sexual assault, and a judge stated he is a rapist. Trump proclaimed his credo in the infamous Access Hollywood tape: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” DeSantis neither does “anything” – nor is he a star.Nor is DeSantis in peril from the law, another deficit. With each indictment, Trump’s support rises and solidifies. The indictments prove to true believers he is the true enemy of their enemies. Unindicted, DeSantis cannot out-Trump Trump. DeSantis’s pledge to “Make America Florida” is only a promise that he can transcend being a provincial would-be dictator. Trump has and will always beat him to the subversion of American institutions – and on a far larger scale.In his ad swiping at Trump for being responsible for the gay movement, DeSantis claimed his bona fides by flashing leftwing denunciations of himself. “DeSantis is public enemy No 1”. “DeSantis is evil”. Showing he is hated more than Trump, he hopes, might be the ultimate stunt, the one that makes Trump No 2.DeSantis’s cruelty may be genuine, but he’s a minor fiend, not Satan himself. Abandon all hope. More

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    Why Ron DeSantis’s slavery curriculum is so dangerous | Saida Grundy

    In the mid-20th century, a generation after the civil war, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to rebrand the image of slavery. The group, composed of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, was fixated on returning the country’s social order to its antebellum racial hierarchy. It sought to reimagine slavery as a benign institution, and to glorify the “lost cause” of white southern insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the government in slavery’s defense. The place that served as ground zero for the UDC’s revisionist-history effort? Schools.In one of its most successful campaigns, the UDC called for the widespread adoption of textbooks that trivialized the horrors of slavery. As a result, a 1954 middle school textbook titled History of Georgia claimed that a typical slave owner “often had a barbecue or picnic for his slaves. The [enslaved] often had a great frolic. Even while working in the cotton fields they sang songs.” (It is no coincidence that the book was published the same year the NAACP won the supreme court case to desegregate public schools.) And while most contemporary school texts have since moved towards acknowledging that slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era were reprehensible, organized efforts against teaching accurate racial history continue to occur.The UDC’s legacy of revision emerged again in Florida recently, when the Republican governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis introduced legislation that would de-emphasize racism in the state’s public education curricula. Last week, DeSantis announced that Florida texts will teach students that slavery benefited African Americans who “gained skills” that “eventually parlayed … into doing other things in life”. Civil-rights leaders, educators, and scholars were quick to criticize this minimization of slavery’s cruelty as ignorance at best and deliberate misrepresentation at worst. Vice-President Kamala Harris even reacted, calling the policy an attempt “to replace history with lies”.The backlash to DeSantis’s move is warranted and necessary, but most of the critiques miss the mark on identifying the Florida law’s deeper insidiousness. What the architects of this legislation are really attempting to do – as the UDC attempted a century before – is galvanize a political right and hold on to conservative white rule in a country with rapidly changing demographics. By denying the true ills of slavery, DeSantis is working to release the American government from the obligation of correcting for its present-day inequalities. The violence of slavery is not just limited to a series of heinous acts that happened in the past, it also includes a deliberate process of disinformation that enables future generations to maintain the power yielded by that violence.Though DeSantis’s career has relied heavily on making power gains by denying violence, the political strategy is not his invention. The practice of violence denial has long been a hallmark of the modern world’s most oppressive regimes. Take, for example, the British empire. During her 21st birthday address in 1947, the heir apparent Elizabeth II memorably declared that her life would be lived in “service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”. Her characterization of upholding Britain’s unrelenting and exploitative colonial system as “service”, and her assertion of an “imperial family” that included subjugated African, Asian and Caribbean people, are examples of the same whitewashing tactic employed by DeSantis. Even his efforts to ban “controversial” texts were cribbed – the British crown consistently prohibited books that challenged colonial rule in conquered territories.Another world power that has sought to subvert the historical record is Turkey, with regard to the government’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. To aid in its denial, Turkey spent millions of dollars to control the massacre’s narrative and enacted laws that criminalized anyone who accurately used the term “genocide” in reference to the killing, starvation and forced removal of an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians in the country from 1915 to 1916. Even today, Turkish loyalists dismiss dissenters who speak up about the genocide as having an agenda or being backed by foreign agitators.Ultimately, regimes exploit disinformation about the past because the truth threatens their grip on power. But it should surprise no one when those tactics to win a political advantage also spill over into present-day issues. DeSantis’s war on reality doesn’t stop at slavery. During the pandemic, his administration also banned mandates on masks, quarantines and vaccines, and suppressed facts about the ballooning number of Covid cases, even as the death toll for Floridians soared ahead of other states.Calling out the information that DeSantis and his supporters are distorting in textbooks and other messaging is important. However, it is just as important to not lose sight of the larger threat that violence denial poses for societies. Organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation. More

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    ‘Stop’: Black Republican congressman attacks DeSantis over slavery curriculum

    Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has “gone too far” in defending his state’s new educational standards which require public schools to teach that enslaved Black Americans benefited from their forced labor by learning useful skills, Republican congressman John James has said.James – who is Black – made his remarks in a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.“Nothing about that … evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” James, from Michigan, said in reference to DeSantis’s support of the recently approved Florida state education board curriculum teaching schoolchildren that enslaved Black Americans “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal” gain.James continued by saying that DeSantis’s education board “is re-writing history”, leaving him “so far from the party” of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who emancipated enslaved Black Americans before his 1865 assassination.“You’ve gone too far,” James wrote. “Stop.”The comments from James constituted an impassioned defense of his fellow Black Republican federal lawmakers Byron Donalds and Tim Scott. Donalds, a Florida congressman, and Scott – a South Carolina senator and declared 2024 presidential candidate – each criticized the curriculum in question and DeSantis’s support of it.Donalds had asserted that “the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong [and] needs to be adjusted”. Scott had said “slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives”.DeSantis rebuked both men, suggesting they sounded too similar to Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, who dismissed the curriculum as “propaganda”.During a 21 July speech in Jacksonville, Florida, Harris – the first woman and Black person to hold her office – had also said: “They want to replace history with lies.”James cautioned DeSantis against assailing Donalds and Scott, who make up 40% of the population of Black Republicans in Congress.“There are only five [B]lack Republicans in Congress, and you’re attacking two of them,” James’s X post said of DeSantis. “My brother in Christ … if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down.”DeSantis joins Scott and several others in a field of Republicans who for the moment are trailing former president Donald Trump in the polls for their party’s White House nomination next year. All are trying to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, who is running for re-election.James, meanwhile, has announced that he intends to seek a second term representing Michigan’s 10th congressional district. The businessman and former US army captain won his seat after a relatively close victory over Democratic candidate Carl Malinga during the November midterms. More