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      The Age of Insurrection review: how the far right rose – and found Trump

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      Rightwing extremism has always been a feature of American life, from the diehard supporters of slavery in the 19th century to the 20,000 fascists who filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 and the violent opponents of integration who beat and killed civil rights workers and leaders throughout the 1960s.Today, this ugly tradition of hatred is perpetuated by dozens of vile groups, from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to the Family Research Council and a slew of Christian nationalist organizations.But as the investigative reporter David Neiwert argues in his terrifying new book, there is one terrible difference: the relentless mainstreaming of such disgusting ideas. The white nationalist ideology which inspired Payton Gendron to travel 200 miles to massacre 10 people in a Black Buffalo neighborhood is becoming as American as cherry pie.Neiwert shows such extremism has been “widely adopted” from “the highest reaches of the Republican party” to broadcasts by Tucker Carlson, “the most popular cable talk show host” until Fox News fired him.The surge in rightwing extremism inspired by the election of the US’s first Black president was reflected in an explosion in militia groups during Barack Obama’s first year in office. Then came Donald Trump, the first modern president to celebrate white supremacists. He praised “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia, where in August 2017 neo-Nazis clashed with counter-protesters, and he embraced the Proud Boys in 2020, telling them to “stand back and stand by”.The collaboration between such a president and the high-speed locomotive of social media has had disastrous consequences. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have brought American wackos together faster than any previous medium.Neiwert is a former senior writer for Daily Kos, the admirable progressive website founded by Markos Moulitsas 21 years ago. But Neiwert’s work goes back further. When he started out, he saw rightwing extremism as “an excellent bet” to propel a career in journalism, “an endless wellspring of human misery, social disruption and frightening violence – the kind of behavior that always makes news”.When Timothy McVeigh killed 168 by blowing up a truck outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, it became clear to Neiwert that the far right was “an existential threat not just to innocent people in its vicinity, but to democracy itself … What was striking … was how frequently their rhetoric waded into open sedition.” What Neiwert has learned over decades is one of the essentials lessons of his book: “They never ever give up … They are relentless in finding new ways to insinuate their toxic beliefs within the mainstream of American politics.”Neiwert offers some of the most detailed descriptions I have read of the movement’s biggest moments, including Charlottesville and the January 6 Capitol attack. His rigorous reporting produces many details new to me, including the fact that when a Swat team evacuated congressmen from a balcony on January 6, the officers drew guns on insurgents “outside the balcony doors” and forced them to “lie prone” as the legislators escaped.After Charlottesville, as a correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Neiwert covered events that advanced the right’s strategy for “simultaneously intimidating the general public while generating a phony narrative blaming leftists … for the brutality they themselves inflicted”. Now, he documents how so many far-right conspiracies have made their way into the mainstream, especially the great replacement theory, which says progressives want to flood the country with immigrants, to undermine white citizens.How successful has this effort been? In 2020, the Republican party refused to withdraw support from of any of the “64 GOP candidates … with QAnon connections”. In 2022, a poll found that nearly 70% of Republicans believed in the great replacement theory. Last week, the Washington Post reported the adoption of the great replacement theory as far away as Tunisia, where President Kais Saied sparked “evictions, firings, arrests and brutal assaults” of Black Africans, causing a surge in their efforts to escape to Europe.When Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, said that any opponent of the Florida governor’s “don’t say gay bill” was “probably a groomer or a least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children”, she used language “directly inspired by the hysterical QAnon conspiracy cult … in no time at all, Pushaw’s tweets made ‘grooming’ a mainstream rightwing talking point”.Neiwert’s book is full of reminders of how social media promote rightwing lies. When a veteran of the Tea Party movement teamed up with two ex-writers for Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News to start a “Stop the Steal” Facebook group in November 2020, it got 300,000 followers in 24 hours. Facebook took the page down but Bannon started his own page the same day, then changed its name to “Own Your Vote”. The associated groups “amassed 2.5 million followers. YouTube, another giant purveyor of hatred and lies, hosted Stop the Steal videos which attracted 21m views and 863,151 likes.”No one has been more important to the mainstreaming of extreme rightwing views than Trump. Neiwert says the 45th president has “perfected a three-step tango with the radical right – a dance in which he’d pull them close in an embrace, spin away while staying connected, and then pull them back to close quarters. Acknowledge, deny, validate. Lather, rinse, repeat.”The book ends with a horrifying description of how the the movement has metastasized since the January 6 attack. By fall 2021, Proud Boys and “patriots” were everywhere, harassing “LGBTQ+-friendly teens at libraries, mask-promoting school board members and mall shops that required masks”. In Trump-loving rural areas, daily life “had become filled with foreboding, intimidation, threats and ugliness, all emanating from authoritarian rightwingers directing their aggression at anyone who failed to follow their dictates”.America’s only hope lies in the power of important books like this one to inspire decent citizens to redouble their efforts to defeat these vile scourges of freedom and democracy.
      The Age of Insurrection is published in the US by Melville House More

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      US investigators zone in on Trump election-plot lawyer John Eastman

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      John Eastman, who was in the vanguard of lawyers plotting schemes involving “fake electors” and other ploys to help Donald Trump thwart Joe Biden’s win in 2020, is now under close scrutiny in federal and state investigations of Trump’s drives to stay in power, and faces possible disbarment in California, say former prosecutors.The former California law professor is one of several lawyers whose legal stratagems have been heavily examined by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s accelerating investigation into Trump and his allies’ efforts to block Biden from taking office.The fake electors scheme was a central part of Trump’s strategy to reverse his defeat.It was called that because Republican electors in seven key battleground states signed certificates falsely declaring themselves “duly elected and qualified” to affirm Donald Trump won the 2020 election.But Eastman has drawn scrutiny too in an overlapping inquiry in Georgia by Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis, who is expected to bring criminal charges in August against Trump and some of his legal gurus.The federal and Georgia inquiries have zeroed in on Trump legal advisers including Rudy Giuliani, who helped oversee the fake electors plot, and ex-justice department official Jeffrey Clark. Trump tried briefly to elevate Clark to attorney general in order to prod Georgia and several other swing states to substitute fake Trump electors for ones Biden actually won.Smith’s inquiry, which encompasses Trump’s inflammatory talk to a rally that Eastman and Giuliani also addressed before the Capitol attack on January 6, has accelerated with grand jury testimony from former vice-president Mike Pence and ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows. Smith has also gained cooperation from two Nevada fake electors who have testified before a Washington grand jury.Moreover, investigators from Smith’s office interviewed Giuliani under a “proffer” arrangement, which does not preclude charges against him, seeking to ferret out details about the fake electors plotting and related schemes, as the New York Times reported.Former DoJ prosecutors say Smith’s inquiry is making notable progress.“The pace of activity in the special counsel investigation into the fake electors scheme seems to be quickening,” with significant cooperation from key witnesses and a focus on Trump’s top legal advisers, former DoJ prosecutor Michael Zeldin told the Guardian.Other ex-prosecutors also see Smith’s inquiry gaining steam.“By obtaining testimony from fake electors, Smith may be better able to nail down what information and advice passed between these soldiers in the larger scheme and those Trump lawyers who helped to concoct it,” said Dan Richman, a law professor at Columbia and an ex-prosecutor in New York.“Testimony that, say, electors were advised to make false statements or given deliberately misleading advice would go far to showing a deliberate fraud by Trump’s ‘brain trust’ of lawyers, including Eastman.”Richman added: “Giuliani’s willingness to give a proffer likely reflects his desire to avoid charges by showing a lack of an intent to defraud. Smith’s readiness to accept the proffer likely reflects his interest in hearing what Giuliani had to say and avoiding a grand jury proceeding at which Giuliani might well invoke his fifth amendment privilege.”Other DoJ veterans see Meadows’ grand jury testimony as significant. “The cooperation of Meadows has the potential to help put a stake in the heart of Trump and other high level insurrectionists,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting head of the DoJ’s fraud section.Smith, who was tapped as special counsel last November, and others at the justice department have spent months conducting their sprawling inquiry into Trump’s zealous efforts to cling to power, and his coterie of legal advisers. Last summer, federal agents seized the cell phones of Eastman and Clark, whose home was also raided.A harbinger of the potential legal headaches for Trump and his elite lawyers came late last year when a House panel that spent months investigating Trump and the January 6 insurrection and produced an 845-page report, referred Trump to the DoJ for prosecution, plus Eastman, Giuliani, Clark and lawyer Kenneth Chesebro.The referrals did not mandate DoJ action, but provided substantial evidence against Trump and those lawyers.The panel’s referral accused Trump of criminally engaging in “a multi-part conspiracy”, citing four specific crimes that seems to track what special counsel Smith is looking into: making false statements, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and aiding or comforting insurrection, all of which were referred to the DoJ for prosecution.All four lawyers were referred for conspiring to defraud the United States. Except for Giuliani, the others were cited for conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, referring to Congress certifying Biden’s win on 6 January.The panel noted when Eastman addressed the “stop the steal” rally on January 6 he floated a wild conspiracy theory about “secret folders” in voting machines that were used to cast votes for Democrats.The report also discussed a “coup memo” authored by Eastman which proposed avenues Pence could use to assist Trump in reversing his election loss, including unilaterally throwing out certain state electoral college votes.At House panel hearings, Pence’s then counsel Greg Jacob testified that Eastman acknowledged to him that his push with Trump to get Pence to reject Biden’s winning electoral college count would violate the Electoral Count Act, and that Trump too was informed that if Pence tried to block Biden’s certification it would be illegal.This June, Jacob testified at California bar hearings weighing disbarment of Eastman for making false public statements about voter fraud in the 2020 elections, and misleading courts. At the hearings, Jacob charged that Eastman’s advice to Pence “brought our profession into disrepute”.Eastman has denied breaking any laws, stating that he was engaged in “good faith” advocacy on a legal question that was not settled. Trump and the other lawyers referred for DoJ prosecution have all also denied violating any laws.But ex-federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig said he doubted Eastman will escape prosecution completely. “It will be surprising, indeed, if neither of those investigations ends in a criminal charge against Eastman, as well, possibly, as other lawyers and Trump himself.”But more broadly, DoJ veterans say it is unclear exactly what charges Smith may bring.“It remains to be seen whether the false electors scheme will serve as the basis of a standalone indictment or whether it will be merged into a broader case involving the multiple ways Trump and his allies attempted to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election,” former DoJ inspector general Michael Bromwich told the Guardian“A standalone case may have less jury appeal than a case in which it is one of many sets of tactics used to overturn the election,” he added, but noted that “a broader case will almost inevitably be longer, more complex, include numerous defendants, and be more difficult to try.”Any new federal charges against Trump would come on top of the 37-count indictment of Trump by Smith for retaining hundreds of classified and national security documents after he left office, and obstructing investigators seeking to retrieve them.Trump has pleaded not guilty and denounced the charges and the other probes as “witch-hunts”.Still, the Georgia inquiry into efforts to overturn Biden’s win there seems likely to create more headaches for Trump and some of his legal advisers. Willis has indicated that Giuliani, who testified after receiving a subpoena before a special grand jury, is a target of her broad inquiry. Eastman was reportedly advised by his own lawyer that he was probably a target and invoked the fifth amendment when subpoenaed to testify.A key focus of Willis’s inquiry has been Trump’s high-pressure call on 2 January 2021 to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, beseeching him to just “find” 11,780 votes to overturn his loss to Biden in the state. Willis’s scrutiny of Giuliani has looked at testimony he gave to Georgia legislators three times after Trump’s defeat, where he promoted discredited fraud claims and urged legislators to take action.A once star federal prosecutor, Giuliani had his law licence suspended in New York and DC in the wake of his misguided legal efforts to help Trump.Willis has said she will announce charging decisions in August, and experts say the Georgia inquiry looks poised to include criminal charges against Trump and some elite lawyers.“Lawyers have a professional responsibility to tell the truth, and they may face legal liability when they don’t,” former US attorney in Georgia Michael Moore said.“In the Georgia investigation, the intentional perpetration of a fraud, if borne out by the investigation, may land them in hot water. All indications are that the DA is looking at some lawyers as directors, not just bit players, in the story of attempted election fraud.” More

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      God Only Knows why: when a Reagan aide took aim at the Beach Boys

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      Forty years ago, Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, decided to take a stand for “wholesomeness”, against undesirable elements. The Beach Boys, he announced, would be banned from the 1983 Independence Day celebrations on the National Mall.Watt, who died in May at 85, was a lightning rod of a cabinet secretary who compared environmentalists to Nazis and divided fellow citizens into ‘‘liberals and Americans”. According to him, “hard rock” bands like the Beach Boys attracted the “wrong element” – drug-using, boozing youngsters.The decision was so out-of-step with American society – the Beach Boys were not the Dead Kennedys, after all – that he ran afoul of Beach Boys fans in the corridors of power, among them Reagan, his wife Nancy Reagan and the vice-president, George HW Bush.It would be hard to think of a more quintessential American pop band than the Beach Boys, whose hits include Good Vibrations, Surfin’ USA, Fun, Fun, Fun and Wouldn’t It Be Nice.“They are what America is,” Elton John has said. “A very wonderful place.”The backdrop to this contrived culture war episode was the appearance, over the previous three years, of the Beach Boys (1980 and 1981) and the Grass Roots (1982) in front of hundreds of thousands at July 4 celebrations in Washington DC.Watt was head of the interior department, with jurisdiction over the National Park Service, which organized such events. As a Pentecostal fundamentalist who didn’t smoke or drink, he announced that he was banning rock music from Independence Day festivities. Citing “repulsive” reports in the first two years of the Reagan administration of “high drug use, high alcoholism, broken bottles, some injured people, some fights”, Watt lined up instead “patriotic, family-based entertainment” from figures including Wayne Newton, a friend and supporter of Reagan.“We’re trying to have an impact for wholesomeness,” Watt said, adding: “July 4 will be a traditional ceremony for the family and for solid, clean American lives. We’re not going to encourage drug abuse and alcoholism as was done in the past years.“… The reason for the arrests and other trouble, we concluded, was that we had the rock bands attracting the wrong element, and you couldn’t bring your family, your children, down to the Mall for a Fourth of July picnic in the great traditional sense because you’d be mugged by … the wrong element, whatever is the nice way to say it.”But as the Washington Post reported, “a ban on apple pie couldn’t have brought a stronger reaction”.A Washington talk show host linked the controversy to a major issue of the day: “I haven’t seen the phones ring over here as steadily or heard more strong comments since the Iranian hostage takeover. Our audience regards the Beach Boys as much a part of Americana as Wayne Newton.”The New York Times also referred to Iran, likening Watt to the Ayatollah Khomenei, who among his “first acts on seizing power after the Iranian revolution … ban[ned] western music because it made listeners’ brains ‘inactive and frivolous’”.In their own statement, the band said it was “unbelievable that James Watt feels that the Beach Boys attract ‘the wrong element’ … over their 20-year career, the group has participated in many events geared specifically to the very families Watt claims they turn away”.Slightly bizarrely, they added: “The Soviet Union had enough confidence in the Beach Boys to invite them to perform in Leningrad [on] July 4 1978. Obviously the Soviet Union, a much more controlled society than our own, did not feel the group attracted the wrong element.”On Capitol Hill, scorn was bipartisan.“‘Help me, Ronald, don’t let him run wild,” said George Miller, a Democratic congressman from California, spoofing the Beach Boys song Help Me, Rhonda.“The Beach Boys are not hazardous to your health,” said Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican senator.Nor was Watt backed by his bosses.“They’re my friends and I like their music,” Bush, the vice-president, said of the Beach Boys, who played a concert for him during his 1980 presidential run.Michael Deaver, the White House deputy chief of staff, said:“I think for a lot of people the Beach Boys are an American institution. Anyone who thinks they are hard rock would think Mantovani plays jazz.”A White House spokesman told reporters the Beach Boys would “be welcome on the Mall”.Reagan had a little fun at Watt’s expense. Saying he had ordered his special ambassador to the Middle East “to settle the Jim Watt-Beach Boy controversy”, the president also presented Watt with a plaster foot with a bullet hole.Watt retreated. Standing on the White House lawn, holding his plaster foot, Watt said: “Obviously, I didn’t know anything to start with. The president is a friend of the Beach Boys. He likes them, and I’m sure when I get to meet them, I’ll like them.”Watt also said Nancy Reagan had told him “the Beach Boys are fans of hers, and her children have grown up with them and they’re fine, outstanding people and that there should be no intention to indicate that they cause problems, which I would agree with”.Watt said the Beach Boys would appear. But it was too late: they played Atlantic City instead.That fall, Watt resigned. The Beach Boys returned to the Mall the next July 4, attracting more than half-a-million, then played again in 1985. That year, the lead singer, Mike Love, defended Watt: “He said rock music attracts the wrong element, and that’s true. Rock groups do sing pornographic lyrics, satanic lyrics, but we’re certainly not one of those groups. We’re no more satanic than Pat Boone.”In his autobiography, Watt tried to shrug off the blame. The controversy was the work of the “liberal press”, he said.
      Frederic J Frommer is the author of several books, including You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals More

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      On the Fourth of July, a few reasons to feel encouraged about US democracy | Margaret Sullivan

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      It’s been a grim week or so in the United States, especially for those with progressive values.In Baltimore, a deadly mass shooting underscored, again, how desperately gun reform is needed, and, tragically, how unlikely it is to happen.And in Washington, a spate of supreme court rulings undid decades of forward movement – the court’s rightwing majority rejected affirmative action in college admissions, favored religion over anti-discrimination laws and knocked down Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt.Add to that the one-year anniversary of the court’s devastating overturning of Roe v Wade, and you could practically hear the sound of hard-won progress being sucked down history’s drain.Pretty depressing, all told.But despite that, there are reasons to feel encouraged about the future of the nation on this, its 247th birthday.First, the successful effort in Congress to protect democracy and electoral integrity known as the Electoral Count Act reform. Widely seen as the most important such reform in a generation, it developed in direct response to Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election which came to a violent head in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Among its many admirable provisions, it prohibits state legislatures from changing how electors can be selected after an election.Then in one of two positive pieces of supreme court news in recent weeks, the court rejected a dangerous effort to allow states to ignore their own state constitutions. Undeterred, that could have radically transformed how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures a great deal of power to set rules for federal elections. The court also unexpectedly struck down Alabama’s racial gerrymandering plan under the Voting Rights Act.I find it oddly encouraging that, according to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll, seven in 10 Americans think our democracy is “imperiled.” Of course, people define that peril according to their own politics and world views, but is is undoubtedly one reason why election denialists were roundly defeated during last year’s midterm elections.As NBC News’s Adam Edelman put it: “Nearly every single candidate in battleground state races who denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election was defeated for positions that oversee, defend and certify elections – a resounding loss for a movement that would have had the power to overturn future contests.”Most Americans apparently don’t want extremists running elections and they understand how high the stakes are.“Our democracy is fortifying itself on many levels,” Greg Sargent of the Washington Post wrote recently. That happened because citizens and government officials took post-2020 threats seriously.It’s a good thing that they did, since – according to one respected organization, the Virginia-based Center for Systemic Peace – the United States in late 2020 no longer could clearly be categorized as a democracy. It had become, for the first time, an “anocracy”, which shares qualities of both autocracy and democracy. America’s rating has more recently improved, putting us back, though not safely, in the democracy zone.In media, the continuing loss of local newspapers – in itself, a serious threat to democracy – has been offset somewhat as innovation-minded journalists and entrepreneurs have stepped into that void. Witness the growth of digital-first news organizations such as VoteBeat and States Newsroom, and collaborative efforts like Spotlight PA or the partnership between the Texas Tribune and ProPublica.A recent big pricetag for Fox News – $787.5m to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems – is another encouraging development. It provided some accountability for the way the cable network knowingly spread election-related lies after the 2020 election; when that settlement was followed by Fox’s firing the reprehensible Tucker Carlson, it began to look as if legal challenges could do what advertiser boycotts could not.The various criminal prosecutions and investigations to hold the January 6 insurrectionists accountable are heartening as well. Those potentially include Trump himself – in Washington, in Georgia, and according to the latest news, maybe in Arizona, too. To some degree, the democratic guardrails are holding and the rule of law prevailing.And while this is hard to quantify, I know of many citizens and advocates who are working hard to protect voting, to support the rights of the disenfranchised. to lessen the blows dealt by the recent court rulings, and to sustain local journalism.It’s a heavy lift, so we should all lend a hand.“Get engaged locally,” urged Yale University’s Asha Rangappa told me recently when I interviewed the former FBI agent for my podcast, American Crisis: Can Journalism Save Democracy? That could mean runing for office, signing up to be a poll worker, volunteering at school, participating in the arts.Rangappa wants more Americans to “cultivate the habits of democracy”. Those habits are developed when people leave their social-media echo chambers, get out into their communities, and simply talk to each other.On this Fourth of July, let’s make sure our ever-fragile democracy endures to celebrate many more birthdays.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Trump said president under indictment would create ‘constitutional crisis’

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      The election of a president under indictment and facing criminal trial would “create an unprecedented constitutional crisis” and “cripple the operations of government”, Donald Trump said.But the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, who faces 71 criminal counts in state and federal cases and is expected to face more, was not speaking about himself – or speaking this year.As reported by CNN, which unearthed the comments, Trump was speaking on 3 November 2016, at a rally in North Carolina during his first presidential campaign, against Hillary Clinton.“She is likely to be under investigation for many years,” Trump said, “and also it will probably end up – in my opinion – in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.”Clinton did not face indictment or a criminal trial over her use of a private email server while secretary of state to Barack Obama. An FBI investigation did prove politically damaging, in a campaign Trump won.Seven years later, Trump has become the first former president ever indicted – and he has been indicted twice.In New York, he faces 34 counts regarding hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during that 2016 race. In a federal investigation, he faces 37 counts relating to his retention of classified material after leaving the White House in 2021.In New York, his trial is set to begin in late March. In the federal case, a judge in Florida has said a trial could begin as soon as 14 August.Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges and continues to deny all accusations of wrongdoing.Further indictments are expected, not least in state and federal investigations of Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.Back before he became president, in Concord, North Carolina, in November 2016, Trump also said Clinton “has no right to be running, you know that. No right.”He returned to the subject two days later, CNN reported, telling a crowd in Reno, Nevada: “We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”The same day, CNN said, Trump told rally-goers in Denver, Colorado, that because Clinton was “the prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation”, it would be “virtually impossible for her to govern”.In 2023, Trump’s legal problems have not made his campaign grind to a halt, or even slow significantly.He dominates polling averages, leading his nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, by about 30 points. The Florida governor is well clear of the rest of the field.Trump did not immediately respond to the CNN report about his comments about Clinton.He has continued to complain that Clinton was not indicted, alleging investigatory bias and a political witch hunt against him.Responding to such complaints, Joe Conason, a reporter, commentator and biographer of Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, wrote: “Contrary to Trump’s lying mantra, Hillary Clinton kept no classified documents, defied no subpoenas, engaged in no conspiracies, and stole nothing. So unlike him she is innocent of wrongdoing.” More

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      Why was Trump hoarding classified government documents? | Moira Donegan

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      There are many surreal revelations in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Donald Trump. There are the texts between various Trump underlings and Walt Nauta, the Trump body man who has also been indicted, showing the president directing his employees to move the boxes containing classified information back and forth to various locations around his properties in Palm Beach and Bedminster, New Jersey. There is the annoyed missive from Trump’s wife Melania, trying to make sure the boxes don’t crowd out room for her luggage on a private plane. There is the claim from Trump’s former attorney, compelled to testify against him in an unusual arrangement, that the former president suggested, with a Grinch-like pinching gesture, that the lawyer destroy confidential documents to prevent them from being produced in a subpoena. There is a text message Nauta sent to another Trump underling, showing a box having fallen over in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, secret documents spilling on to the floor – whoops.What there is not, conspicuously, is a motive. Over the course of more than a year following his departure from office, it appears that Trump spent considerable effort and resources in transporting the documents with him and keeping them near at hand – and that later, as the federal government began to demand the boxes back, that he then went out of his way to keep and conceal them, going to great length, sparing no expense, and ultimately breaking the law so much that he incurred himself a series of felony charges. Anyone can tell you how this behavior is typical of Trump: how it reflects his pettiness, his contempt for the law, his willingness to sacrifice and endanger others. What no one can tell you is why he did it.It would be more convenient – legally, for Jack Smith and his prosecutors, and politically, for Joe Biden, for the Democrats, and for the growing number of Republicans who are looking to challenge Trump in the 2024 Republican primary – if we could say precisely why Trump wanted to keep the documents so badly, exactly what he wanted them for. It would be very easy to make a case to a skeptical jury – or to a divided American people – that Trump was a danger and could not be trusted with national secrets again if it could be said that he wanted to keep the documents for any of the straightforwardly dangerous and nefarious reasons that have been speculated: if he was seeking to sell national security secrets to the Saudis, say, or to Israel; if he was hoping, as some have suggested, that he one day might be able to blackmail someone powerful, like the president of France.It’s very possible that Trump had concocted such a plan. There is much that we do not know about the investigations into Trump, including about the special counsel’s query into his illegal document retention. But we do know that in the past, we know that he has gone further, and risked more, in the pursuit of even more harebrained schemes.But what seems the most likely explanation is the simplest, stupidest, and most aggravating one: that Trump had no plan for the documents, except perhaps for use as souvenirs, trophies to be shown off, maybe as evidence for petty score-settling. That the documents that Trump smuggled out of the White House and squirreled away around Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster were not instruments in a coherent, well-formed plan, but instead mere ornaments to Trump’s ego. In transcripts of Trump’s statements about the documents that were included in the indictment, and in audio of Trump showing some of the secret papers off to a writer that was recently released by CNN, Trump uses the documents to contradict a former national security official he was then in a spat with in the press; he tells one interlocutor not to get too close to one of the secret papers, seeming to want to create a hush of reverence for the documents in place of respecting their confidentiality in the first place. At these moments, Trump does not sound as if he has a plan. He sounds as if he wants to impress the people in the room with him, and like he can think no further ahead than to how good it will feel to get their praise.Why did Trump want the secret documents? Why did he refuse to return them? The answer may be the one truest to Trump’s piddling, puerile character: because they looked cool; because they reminded him of his own importance; because the government had asked for them back, and Trump has never missed an opportunity to throw a petulant little tantrum.It is this smallness of Trump’s character, and the possible triviality of his motives, that poses a peculiar risk to both of the cases being made against Trump – the one being pursued in a Miami courthouse, and the one being pursued in public. Because there has always been an uncanny mismatch with Trump, an incongruence: between the awesome and vast powers he had in office, the historical forces he unleashed on America, and the horrible ways his presidency warped millions of lives, on the one hand; and on the other, his pettiness, his vanity, his short-sightedness, his piddling personal grievances and constant need to be flattered and reassured.The gap between the seriousness of Trump’s role in history and his unseriousness as a person is the strange place where the documents case – and, now, much of American political thought – risks getting stuck. The very silliness of Trump’s use of the documents undercuts the grave risks posed by his hoarding of them. How can such a powerful country have been made so vulnerable by someone so stupid?
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      US set to rejoin Unesco after leaving during Trump presidency

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      The US is set to rejoin Unesco this month after a four-year absence from the global cultural and educational body that the country abandoned during the Donald Trump presidency over what his administration called “anti-Israeli bias”.The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s reunion with the US came after a two-day special session held at the body’s headquarters in Paris.Of Unesco’s 193 member states, 142 participated in Friday’s vote. Ten states voted against the US rejoining, including Russia, Belarus, Iran, North Korea and Nicaragua. China, which had become the organisation’s biggest financial backer in the absence of the US, also voted against readmittance.US efforts to rejoin Unesco have been building since last year when the Joe Biden White House said within a $1.7tn spending bill that the administration would seek to rejoin the organisation in order to “counter Chinese influence”.“I am encouraged and grateful that Unesco members have accepted the US proposal that will allow us to continue steps toward rejoining the organisation,” the American secretary of state Antony Blinken said in a statement.The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, described the decision as “very good news”.“If we are not engaged in international institutions, then we leave a void and lose an opportunity to advance American values and interests on the global stage,” she added.Meanwhile, the UN’s director for the International Crisis Group, Richard Gowan, told CBS News on Tuesday: “The Biden administration has always made it clear that it is suspicious of China’s rising influence in the UN.“Biden’s team believes that Trump ceded a lot of ground to China with its anti-UN attitude. The decision to rejoin Unesco is just the latest example of the US deciding it can do more to counter China by actively engaging in UN institutions than sitting on the sidelines.”As a condition of readmission, the US will repay around $619m in unpaid dues, meet 22% of Unesco’s annual budget, and make contributions to programs supporting education access initiatives in Africa, Holocaust remembrance and journalists’ safety.Beyond stepping up actions for Africa, Unesco said it would be able to increase its efforts toward gender equality, a strategic priority.“With this return, Unesco will be in an even stronger position to carry out its mandate,” said Audrey Azoulay, Unesco’s director general.“Unesco’s mandate – education, science, culture, freedom of information – is absolutely central to meeting the challenges of the 21st century. It is this centrality, as well as the easing of political tensions within the organisation and the initiatives launched in recent years, that have led the United States to initiate this return.”Last month, the US acknowledged in a letter to Unesco that it noted the organisation’s “efforts to implement key management and administrative reforms, as well as its focus on decreasing politicized debate, especially on Middle East issues”.The organisation in 2011 had voted to admit Palestine, which is not formally recognized by the US or Israel as a UN member state. The Barack Obama White House cut Unesco contributions, sending the US into owing millions in arrears to the organization.Five years later, in 2016, the Unesco World Heritage Committee adopted a decision ruling that Israeli actions related to archaeology, tourism and freedom of movement in the Old City of Jerusalem contravened cultural heritage laws and practices.US and Israeli officials complained that not including the full Jewish history in any decision about Jerusalem was equivalent to a denial of Jewish history.In 2017, a year into the Trump presidency, the US cited “mounting arrears at Unesco, the need for fundamental reform in the organisation, and continuing anti-Israel bias at Unesco” as reasons for the decision.The decision by Unesco to readmit the US, which has 24 properties inscribed on the world heritage list, is the second time it has left and rejoined since the organisation was founded in 1945.In 1983, Ronald Reagan’s administration pulled the US out over what it saw as anti-Western bias. Unesco, it complained, “has extraneously politicized virtually every subject it deals with”.“It has exhibited hostility toward a free society, especially a free market and a free press, and it has demonstrated unrestrained budgetary expansion,” the Reagan White House added.But beneath that expressed rationale was frustration that Unesco, with an increasing number of members, no longer acted in consort with US foreign policy objectives.“The countries which have the votes don’t pay the bill, and those who pay the bill don’t have the votes,” the US ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick said at the time.But in 2002, George W Bush’s administration negotiated readmittance as part of an effort to foster international goodwill to counter deep misgivings over the US “war on terror” in the Middle East.Reuters contributed reporting. More

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      If Trump wins, he’ll turn the justice department into a vendetta machine | Robert Reich

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      Last week Donald Trump said that, if re-elected, he’d appoint a “real special prosecutor” to “go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”.In other words, if Trump is re-elected, you can kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye.His remark made me think back almost a half century ago, to when I was a rookie lawyer in the Department of Justice.The department was in shambles, discredited by the political abuse and corruption of Richard Nixon and John Mitchell, the attorney general.To restore trust in the department, President Gerald Ford appointed Edward Levi attorney general. In naming Levi, who had been president of the University of Chicago and the dean of its law school, Ford found someone whose reputation for integrity was impeccable.As Levi said at his swearing-in: “Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of the goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.”Levi set out to insulate the justice department from politics, instituting rules limiting White House involvement in law enforcement decisions.The Senate Watergate committee chairman, Sam Ervin, didn’t think Levi’s rules went far enough to protect the department from an unscrupulous future president. Ervin wanted to make the justice department an independent agency with an attorney general appointed by the president every six years and removable only for neglect.At the time, I thought Ervin’s proposal too extreme. I assumed America had learned its lesson from Watergate and would never again elect a president as repugnant as Nixon, willing to sacrifice the institutions of government to his own political ambition.Yet there was some precedent for Ervin’s view. The position of US attorney general was originally viewed as an independent, semi-judicial role – analogous to that of judges.Congress established the office of the attorney general in the Judiciary Act of 1789 – the same act that created the federal court system, as distinct from acts establishing executive departments.In the original draft, attorneys general would be appointed by the US supreme court, not the president. Congress changed this so that attorneys general would be appointed exactly like federal judges.When George Washington appointed the nation’s first attorney general in 1789, Thomas Jefferson referred to him as “the attorney general for the supreme court”.Early attorneys general shared offices with the court. Their budgets were line items under the federal judiciary, not the executive. Originally, the attorney general was not even in line to succeed to the presidency.Even after the attorney general became a key part of the executive branch and the Department of Justice was established in 1870, presidents continued to respect the need for prosecutorial independence.Until Nixon and the scurrilous John Mitchell.But surely, I said to myself at the time, Nixon and Mitchell were the extremes. Edward Levi’s reforms were adequate.Then came the worst offender of all. During his presidency, Trump viewed the department as an extension of his own will – even claiming: “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the justice department.”Trump interfered in the department’s prosecutions of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, fired the FBI director James Comey for investigating possible collusion between Russia and Trump associates, and demanded that the department reopen a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.John Dean, former White House counsel to Nixon, described Trump’s efforts to use the justice department for personal gain as “Nixon on stilts and steroids”.Now, Trump threatens that if re-elected he’ll turn the department into his own personal vendetta machine. If there weren’t already enough reason to fear a second Trump presidency, this would be it.Public trust in our governing institutions has already sunk to a new low – due in large part to Trump’s first term, his subsequent big lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and now his second big lie that Biden is orchestrating a “witch-hunt” against him.Even if Biden is re-elected, it will be necessary to deal with the damage Trump and his Republican enablers have wrought.Perhaps Sam Ervin’s proposal for an independent justice department should be given more serious consideration.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More