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      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historians

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      ‘I didn’t win the election’: Trump admits defeat in session with historiansThe ex-president also said that Iran, China and South Korea were happy Biden won, adding that ‘the election was rigged and lost’

      Review: The Presidency of Donald Trump
      Donald Trump has admitted he did not win the 2020 election.Capitol attack panel scores two big wins as it inches closer to Trump’s inner circleRead more“I didn’t win the election,” he said.The admission came in a video interview with a panel of historians convened by Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and editor of The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment. The interview was published on Monday by the Atlantic.Describing his attempts to make South Korea pay more for US military assistance, Trump said Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, was among the “happiest” world leaders after the 2020 US election put Joe Biden in the White House.“By not winning the election,” Trump said, “he was the happiest man – I would say, in order, China was – no, Iran was the happiest.“[Moon] was going to pay $5bn, $5bn a year. But when I didn’t win the election, he had to be the happiest – I would rate, probably, South Korea third- or fourth-happiest.”Trump also said “the election was rigged and lost”.Trump’s refusal to accept defeat by Biden provoked attempts to overturn results in key states in court – the vast majority of such cases ending in defeat – and the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Trump was impeached a second time, for inciting an insurrection, and acquitted a second time after enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal.Trump thus remains free to run for the White House again in 2024, which he has repeatedly hinted he will do.Writing for the Atlantic, Zelizer said Trump “was the one who had decided to reach out to a group of professional historians so that we produced ‘an accurate book’”.The former president called the historians assembled by Zelizer “a tremendous group of people, and I think rather than being critical I’d like to have you hear me out, which is what we’re doing now, and I appreciate it”.Trump, Zelizer wrote, “seemed to want the approval of historians, without any understanding of how historians gather evidence or render judgments”.Zelizer also pointed out that shortly after the session with the historians, Trump announced he would give no more interviews for books about his time in office.“It seems to me that meeting with authors of the ridiculous number of books being written about my very successful administration, or me, is a total waste of time,” Trump said in a statement, in July 2021.“These writers are often bad people who write whatever comes to their mind or fits their agenda. It has nothing to do with facts or reality.”TopicsBooksHistory booksPolitics booksDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath them | Gary Gerstle

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      America’s culture wars distract from what’s happening beneath themGary GerstleWhen it comes to economic questions, there’s more agreement between culture war opponents than you might think The neoliberal order that triumphed in America in the 1990s prized free trade and the free movement of capital, information, and people. It celebrated deregulation as an economic good that resulted when governments could no longer interfere with the operation of markets. It hailed globalization as a win-win position that would enrich the west (the cockpit of neoliberalism) while also bringing an unprecedented level of prosperity to the rest of the world. A remarkable consensus on these creedal principles came to dominate American politics during the heyday of the neoliberal order, binding together Republicans and Democrats and marginalizing dissenting voices to the point where they barely mattered.Somewhat paradoxically, this broad agreement on matters of political economy nurtured two strikingly different moral perspectives, each of them consonant with the commitment to market principles that underlay the neoliberal order. The first perspective was ‘neo-Victorian’, celebrating self-reliance, strong families, and disciplined attitudes toward work, sexuality, and consumption.These values were necessary, this moral perspective argued, to gird individuals against market excess – accumulating debt by buying more than one could afford and indulging appetites for sex, drugs, alcohol, and other whims that free markets could be construed as sanctioning. Since neoliberalism frowned upon government regulation of private behavior, some other institution had to provide it. Neo-Victorianism found that institution in the traditional family – heterosexual, governed by male patriarchs, with women subordinate but in charge of homemaking and childrearing.The Republican party is obsessed with children – in the creepiest of ways | Osita NwanevuRead moreSuch families, guided by faith in God, would inculcate moral virtue in its members and prepare the next generation for the rigors of free market life. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, George Gilder, and Charles Murray were among the intellectuals guiding this movement, the legions of evangelical Christians mobilized in Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority its mass base.The other moral perspective encouraged by the neoliberal order was cosmopolitan. A world apart from neo-Victorianism, it saw in market freedom an opportunity to fashion a self or identity that was free of tradition, inheritance, and prescribed social roles. In the United States this moral perspective drew energy from liberation movements originating in the new left – black power, feminism, multiculturalism, and gay pride among them.Cosmopolitanism was egalitarian and pluralistic. It rejected the notion that the patriarchal, heterosexual family should be celebrated as the norm. It embraced globalization and the free movement of people, and the transnational links that the neoliberal order had made possible. It valorized the good that would come from diverse peoples meeting each other, sharing their cultures, and developing new and often hybridized ways of living. It celebrated the cultural exchanges and dynamism that increasingly characterized the global cities – London, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Toronto, Miami among them – flourishing under the aegis of the neoliberal order.The existence of two such different moral perspectives was both a strength and a weakness for the neoliberal order. The strength lay in the order’s ability to accommodate within a common program of political economy very different constituencies with radically divergent perspectives on moral life. The weakness lay in the fact that the cultural battles between these two constituencies might threaten to erode the hegemony of neoliberal economic principles.The cosmopolitans attacked neo-Victorians for discriminating against gay people, feminists, and immigrants, and for stigmatizing the black poor for their so-called “culture of poverty”. The neo-Victorians attacked the cosmopolitans for tolerating virtually any lifestyle, for excusing what they deemed to be deplorable behavior as an exercise in the toleration of difference, and for showing a higher regard for foreign cultures than for America’s own. The decade of the neoliberal order’s triumph – the 1990s – was also one in which cosmopolitans and neo-Victorians fought each other in a series of battles that became known as the “culture wars”. In fact, a focus on these cultural divisions is the preferred way of writing the political history of these years.Just beneath this cultural polarization, however, lay a fundamental agreement on principles of political economy. This intriguing coexistence of cultural division and economic accord manifested itself in the complex relationship between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. In the media, they were depicted (and depicted themselves) as opposites, sworn to each other’s destruction. Clinton offered himself as the tribune of the new America, one welcoming of racial minorities, feminists, and gays. He was thought to embody the spirit of the 1960s and something of the insurgent, free-spirited character of the new left. Gingrich presented himself as the guardian of an older and “truer” America, one grounded in faith, patriotism, respect for law and order, and family values. Gingrich publicly pledged himself and his party to obstructing Clinton at every turn. Clinton, meanwhile, regarded Gingrich as the unscrupulous leader of a vast right-wing conspiracy to undermine his presidency.Yet, despite their differences and their hatred for each other, these two Washington powerbrokers worked together on neoliberal legislation that would shape America’s political economy for a generation. They both supported the World Trade Organization, which debuted in 1995 to turbocharge a global regime of free trade. Their aides jointly engineered the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which did more than any other piece of legislation in the 1980s and 1990s to free the most dynamic sector of the US economy from government regulation.Major pieces of legislation deregulating the electrical generation industry and Wall Street followed closely in the telecom bill’s wake. Clinton and Gingrich also worked together to pare back the welfare state, sharing a conviction that the tough, disciplining effects of job markets would benefit the poor more than state-subsidized “handouts”. Clinton’s collaboration with Gingrich had facilitated the neoliberal order’s triumph.That order is now on the wane, its once unassailable principles of free trade, free markets, and the free movement of people now disputed on a daily basis. Meanwhile, public attention focuses on yet another chapter in the culture wars, with the American people divided, irredeemably it seems, over vaccination, critical race theory, and whether Donald Trump should be lauded as an American hero or jailed for acts of treason.Yet, beneath the churn, one can detect hints of new common ground on economic matters emerging. Trump and Bernie Sanders have both worked to turn the country away from free trade and toward a protectionist future promising better jobs and higher wages. Senators Josh Hawley and Amy Klobuchar have both been warning the American people about the dangers of concentrated corporate power and the “tyranny of high tech”; and bipartisanship is driving movements in Congress to commit public funds to the nation’s physical infrastructure and to industrial policies deemed vital to economic wellbeing and national security. It is too soon to know whether these incipient collaborative efforts indicate that a new kind of political economy is in fact taking shape and, if it is, whose interests it will serve. But these developments underscore, once again, the importance of looking beyond and beneath the culture wars for clues as to where American politics and society might be heading.
      Gary Gerstle is a Guardian US columnist. Excerpted and adapted from The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022)
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      Blinken: growing evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine a ‘punch to the gut’

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      Blinken: growing evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine a ‘punch to the gut’Secretary of state promises US will join allies in documenting atrocities and hold perpetrators accountable Growing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine are “a punch to the gut”, the US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Sunday, promising that America would join its allies in documenting the atrocities to hold the perpetrators accountable.A retreat of Russian forces around Kyiv has revealed evidence of atrocities against civilians as Ukrainian troops and journalists have moved back into a broad swathe of suburbs and towns around the capital.“We can’t become numb to this. We can’t normalize this. This is the reality of what’s going on every single day as long as Russia’s brutality against Ukraine continues,” Blinken said on CNN’s State of the Union.“You can’t help but see these images as a punch to the gut. We said before Russia’s aggression we thought it was likely that they would commit atrocities. Since the aggression we’ve come out and said we believe that Russian forces have committed war crimes, and we’ve been working to document that to provide the information that we have to relevant institutions and organizations that will put all of this together.“There needs to be accountability for it,” he added.Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, echoed Blinken’s stance on the same program, saying the international community was sickened by the horrific images emerging from Ukraine, including the apparent execution-style killings of unarmed citizens.“It is a brutality against civilians we haven’t seen in Europe for decades and it’s horrific, and it’s absolutely unacceptable that civilians are targeted and killed,” Stoltenberg said.“It just underlines the importance that war must end, and it is [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s responsibility to stop the war.”Asked about holding Putin and Russia’s military leaders accountable, Stoltenberg said: “It is extremely important that the international criminal court has opened an investigation into potential war crimes, that all facts are on the table, and that those responsible are held accountable. So I strongly welcome the investigation.”Blinken said it appeared Russia was withdrawing forces from the Kyiv region, but he warned its military was likely preparing to strike elsewhere in Ukraine, or even planning to return to the capital at a later date.“It’s too early to say what that actually means because they could be regrouping and restocking and replenishing, and then coming back to Kyiv. It’s also very possible that what we’re seeing is what it seems to be, a focus to the east and the south,” he said.“[But] the will of Ukrainian people is clear. They will not be subjected to a Russian occupation, whether that’s in and around Kyiv or whether that’s in the east and the south.“Here’s the problem. In the meantime, the terrible death and destruction that you started with is going to continue and that’s why it is so urgent that Russia end this war of aggression, and we do everything that we can to support the Ukrainians.”Blinken would not be drawn on the details of US military aid being sent to Ukraine, but said the aim was “to make sure they have the systems they need”.“That includes many different weapons systems,” he said. “Let me give one example, between the United States and our allies and partners, for every Russian tank, there are or soon will be, more than 10 anti-tank systems.“That’s what’s been happening. It’s been incredibly effective because of the courage and bravery of Ukrainian forces.”In a later interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Blinken said Russia was regrouping after having “been dealt a devastating setback” by Ukraine’s resistance.“Russia had three goals going into this: to subjugate Ukraine to its will, to deny its sovereignty and its independence; to assert Russian power; and to divide the west, divide the alliance,” he said. “And on all three fronts, it’s failed. Ukraine is now more united. A sovereign, independent Ukraine is going to be there a lot longer than Vladimir Putin’s on the scene.“Russian power has actually vastly diminished, its military has greatly under-performed, its economy is reeling. And, of course, Nato, the west, are more united than in any time in recent memory.”Asked about the prospect of easing sanctions as part of peace negotiations, Blinken said the issue was in Russia’s hands.“The purpose of the sanctions is not to be there indefinitely. It’s to change Russia’s conduct. And if as a result of negotiations, the sanctions, the pressure, the support for Ukraine, we achieve just that, then at some point the sanctions will go away. But that is profoundly up to Russia and what it does going forward.”TopicsAntony BlinkenUS foreign policyUS politicsRussiaUkraineEuropenewsReuse this content More

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      ‘I don’t do this often for state people’: Trump stumps for Michigan candidates in voting rights battle

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      ‘I don’t do this often for state people’: Trump stumps for Michigan candidates in voting rights battleTrump praises little-known Republicans Matthew DePerno and Kristina Karamo, who both falsely claimed 2020 election fraud and are now seeking key Michigan offices Eight hours before Donald Trump took the stage in the Detroit suburbs on Saturday, an army of canvassers darted along the line of people snaking outside the hulking sports complex where supporters of the former president were waiting to get in. “You guys think we’re gonna have a fair election?,” one canvasser asked Marco Braggion, 26 and Christian Howard, 25, who was standing in a cowboy hat and jean jacket. “We need to be able to work those polls to keep eyes on what’s going on.”The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’Read moreIt was an exchange that underscored how Republicans, stewing in doubts about the 2020 election, are organizing to take control of the machinery of elections – how ballots are cast and counted. And when Trump took the stage Saturday evening, his first visit to Michigan since 2020, that’s what he was focused on too. He was there to campaign for two-little known candidates who are seeking offices that wield significant power over voting rules in Michigan, one of the most important battleground states in the presidential election.Trump was stumping for Matthew DePerno, who is seeking the GOP nomination for attorney general, and Kristina Karamo, a Republican running to be Michigan secretary of state, the state’s chief election official. Both are seeking to earn the Republican nomination at the party’s convention in the state this month.Neither has any prior political experience and their political rise stems almost entirely from their efforts to spread misinformation about the 2020 election. Joe Biden defeated Trump in the state by just over 154,000 votes in 2020, and Trump’s efforts to throw out the election. If Karamo and DePerno were elected this fall, it would place two Trump allies in key positions from which they could potentially do what he could not in 2020: overturn an election result.“Remember this is not just about 2022, this is about making sure Michigan is not rigged and stolen in 2024,” Trump said in a meandering hour and forty-five minute speech in which he repeatedly insisted, falsely, that he won Michigan in 2020. “I have to be honest, I don’t do this often for state people, this is so important. What happened in Michigan, it’s a disgrace.”Karamo is a part-time community college professor who became a celebrity in Republican circles after claiming she witnessed fraud on election night while observing ballots being counted in Detroit. Those claims have been debunked, but she has nonetheless catapulted to the front of the Republican field in the secretary of state race. She joined an unsuccessful Michigan’s 2020 election from being certified and sought to intervene in an unsuccessful effort at the US supreme court seeking to overturn election results in key swing states. She has called public schools “government indoctrination camps” and suggested those who attacked the US capitol on 6 January were antifa.She electrified the crowd packed into the astroturf inside the Michigan Stars Sport Center on Saturday night calling Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat currently serving as secretary of state, “an authoritarian leftist who treats the people of Michigan like the unwashed masses.”“There’s an army of people across our state who are fighting back. Little MAGA warriors and we’re getting the job done,” she said, using the acronym for Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again.Speaking to reporters earlier this week, Benson said Michigan was “ground zero” in the battle for American democracy. She said Trump was seeking to put loyalists in power who might succumb to future requests to undo elections.“We’ve also been fighting election-deniers, some of whom now want to take over statewide offices so they can potentially be in a position to block or undo or fail to certify election results that they disagree with in the future. That is simply what’s at stake this fall,” she said.DePerno rose to prominence last year as he spread false allegations of fraud in Antrim county, in Northern-Michigan, where a clerk made a mistake on election night and posted incorrect numbers that initially showed Biden leading. DePerno led a lawsuit against the county and spread incorrect information suggesting votes could have been switched. A government review and a separate GOP-led investigation of the incident found no evidence of fraud, and was unsparing in its criticism of DePerno.“No longer will we allow the elites in this country to control our elections and to control us,” DePerno said on Saturday. He has pledged to arrest Benson and Dana Nessel, the current Democratic attorney general.“[Trump] wants people who will manipulate the 2024 election to his advantage,” Nessel told the Guardian on Friday. “ Just a handful of years ago, they would have been seen as extreme, fringe candidates that never would have gotten any traction in the Republican party. And now, they are emblematic of the Republican party.”Outside of the rally, a soundtrack of songs that have become staples of Trump rallies – Elton John’s Tiny Dancer among them – blasted while some people played cornhole. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO got thunderous applause when he briefly appeared.The most prominent canvassers were those seeking to get rallygoers to sign a petition for a ballot measure to “decertify” the results of the 2020 election in Michigan, something that is not legally possible. Organizers hoped to get 10,000 signatures at Trump’s rally on Saturday, said Janice Daniels, a former local mayor involved in the effort, who was collecting signatures on Saturday. She said she was unmoved by widespread legal agreement that the 2020 election cannot be undone and several reviews in Michigan that have affirmed the result of the 2020 election.“That’s what the enemies say. They want to discourage you from doing what is right and what is good and what is possible,” she said. “Extraordinary problems require extraordinary solutions. We’re in an extraordinary environment where we had a coup d’etat take over our entire government.”But some people at the rally acknowledged that decertifying the election wasn’t really a possibility. “I don’t think it’s possible, but it so should have been done. It’s a done deal,” said Diane Zechmeister, 67. Zechmeister said she didn’t follow election administration particularly closely until 2020, “when things went sideways”.A friend who attended with her, Carol Fischer, 68, said nothing could persuade her that the results of the 2020 election were accurate. “I will never believe that,” she said. Several polls since the 2020 election have shown that many Republicans continue to believe Trump won.Greg Taylor, 38, also was in line early to get into the rally to ensure he would get a spot inside. Even after state officials, and legislative Republicans in Michigan, have put out several audits and reports debunking conspiracies in Michigan, Taylor couldn’t think of anything that would persuade him the results of the election were accurate. “Not with what I’ve seen. I really, I just can’t see that,” he said. “The only way that we could know is, I guess, through an audit I guess. But who knows about the audit?”“It’s so hard to trust anybody. I don’t trust either side,” he said.Tyler Griffin, who was waiting in line wearing an oversized red cowboy hat, also said nothing could persuade him to accept the 2020 results. “I looked at all the numbers and it doesn’t add up.”Not everyone at the rally was enthusiastic about Trump’s continued focus on elections. Howard, the early rallygoer who was approached about being an election worker, said he hoped Trump would leave the 2020 election in the past.“I hope he kind of lets it go,” he said. “I know he’s not going to, but I hope he does.”TopicsUS newsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’

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      The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’ Kristina Karamo is running for Michigans’s chief elections officer, and if she wins she would have considerable sway over how the presidential election is conducted in 2024Donald Trump will return to Michigan on Saturday for his first visit since November 2020 when he spent the final hours of his presidential election campaign desperately trying to hold on to the state and fend off nationwide defeat to his Democratic rival Joe Biden.This time his visit will be motivated by an attempt to forge a path to victory in the 2024 presidential election, in which he has hinted he may run again. If that is his intention, he is going about it in a very irregular fashion.Revealed: Trump used White House phone for call on January 6 that was not on official logRead moreHis guest of honor at the rally he is staging in Washington Township will be bear no resemblance to the local politicians whom former US presidents normally champion. Kristina Karamo is a part-time community college professor who has never held elected office and who up until 18 months ago was relatively little known outside conservative and religious circles in the Detroit suburb in which she lives.Karamo, 36, describes herself as a defender of the Christian faith and espouses some arresting beliefs. She opposes teaching evolution and has called public schools “government indoctrination camps”; she argues that many Americans live in poverty because “they just make dumb decisions”; and she contends that the instigators of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol were “totally antifa posing as Trump supporters”.There are two clues as to why Trump is willing to make the 1,200-mile schlepp from his home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, to chilly Michigan on Karamo’s behalf. The first is the position for which she is standing in November’s midterm elections – secretary of state.The post-holder acts as chief elections officer in Michigan, and in that capacity will have considerable sway over how the presidential election is conducted in 2024. What happens in the state could then in turn have enormous national implications: in both 2016 and 2020 Michigan was pivotal in securing the White House for Trump and Biden respectively.The second clue to Trump’s thinking is the language he used when he endorsed her last September. “She is strong on crime,” he said, “including the massive crime of election fraud”.What initially drew Karamo to Trump’s attention was the prominent role she played in Michigan in promoting his “big lie”, the false conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. From almost total obscurity, Karamo was thrown into the limelight when she began to cry foul about what she claimed was illegal vote counting in the overwhelmingly African American city of Detroit.It all began with a basic misunderstanding.As America held its breath in the days after the election, when it remained uncertain whether Biden or Trump would win, Karamo relocated herself to the TCF Center in downtown Detroit where poll workers were counting 174,000 absentee ballots. Karamo was one of scores of Trump supporters who – without any formal training in election procedures or laws – designated themselves as “poll challengers” watching over the politically-charged count.The convention space was packed to overflowing, with about 900 poll workers counting ballots, as another 400 or so media and political observers looked on. Over the next 24 hours, TCF began to resemble, in the description of the Detroit Free Press, a high-stakes sports match “complete with yelling, taunting, cheering, fists pounding on glass and unruly challengers being hauled off by cops”.Amid the melee, Karamo claimed that she personally witnessed fraudulent activity in which ballots were switched illegally from Trump to Biden. A week after the election, by which time Biden had been declared winner, she filled out an “incident report” in her neat closely-spaced handwriting.The three-page document looks like an official police report, though the small print at the bottom says: “Paid for by Donald J Trump for President, Inc.” In it, Karamo gives her account of what she claims to have witnessed.She was standing at an “adjudication table” where ballots that are incorrectly filled in are scrutinized. She spotted a ballot on the screen in which a voter appeared to have cast their ballot along straight-party lines but for both main parties.That was clearly an error as you can’t vote for more than one presidential candidate at a time.Karamo says in the “incident report” that she watched as a poll worker unilaterally decided to award the ballot to Biden, no questions asked. When she complained and called for a supervisor, she claims she was told not to talk to the election staff.The supervisor, she wrote, instructed the poll worker “to ‘push it through’, when the ballot legally should have been rejected. I said I’m challenging the ballot… but he continued to tell the worker to push it through.”That sounds like a blatant abuse of election integrity, taking an effectively spoiled ballot and counting it for Biden. Karamo was incensed, and on the back of that eruption of anger began her meteoric rise as an advocate for Trump’s big lie that the election was rigged.The problem was that Karamo’s interpretation of what happened to the wrongly-completed ballot was based on a simple misreading of election procedure. Chris Thomas, Michigan’s former director of elections who oversaw the state’s vote counts for 36 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, told the Guardian why.He explained that when Karamo heard “push it through” she assumed that meant “give the vote to Biden”. But that was a misunderstanding.In fact, the edict “push it through” when issued at the adjudication table is in effect an order to discard “overvotes” – ballots like the one Karamo witnessed where more than the maximum number of candidates are selected.“‘Push it through’ means you are done with it, and the vote is tabulated as a non-count,” Thomas said.In other words, the call to fraudulently count the ballot for Biden which Karamo thought she had heard was in fact an instruction to place the vote in the electronic equivalent of a dustbin where it would be stored but discounted.What did Thomas make of the fact that Karamo made a hue and cry about fraud based on a mistaken interpretation of electoral practices? “This is the problem when people make all these comments when they don’t understand the system,” he said. “They see what they want to see.”Thomas was present inside the TCF Center for the duration of the two-day count, working as a senior consultant and handling disputes. With his almost four decades of non-partisan experience of orchestrating elections, how would he rate the way the ballots were handled inside the space?“The count was totally above board,” he said. “It was accurate and it was fair. The count was good.”That one mistaken claim of fraud propelled Karamo into the dizzy heights of the Trump firmament. Sean Hannity billed her as a “whistleblower” on his primetime Fox News show, she was invited by Republicans to testify before a legislative committee, she participated in a four-state lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election result that went all the way up to the US supreme court (which promptly rejected it).Emboldened, her baseless critique of rampant election fraud became more forthright. “I was a poll challenger at TCF Center in Detroit,” she told the podcast Coffee and a Mike. “I saw illegal activity and I realized if we don’t cure our election system we no longer have a republic, we have a fake country, an illusion of a country, so I have to do something.”That “something” was to stand for Michigan secretary of state – a position that would potentially allow her to take her discredited views on voter fraud and use them to Trump’s advantage in 2024. So far, she is doing very well in the race, with a credible shot at prevailing.With Trump’s enthusiastic backing, she has amassed a campaign war-chest of more than $228,000, more than any other Republican vying for the secretary of state nomination. As an indication of how much heat the race is generating, Karamo has attracted more than 2,000 individual donors – more than all candidates combined in the last secretary of state contest in 2018.Michigan’s incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, is running for re-election as the Democratic candidate. She told the Guardian that the steam that has built up around the race this year is an indication of its high stakes.“This secretary of state race is the top targeted race in the country, and I am the top targeted incumbent secretary of state seeking re-election this year. Trump’s decision to endorse someone running against me, and his rally on Saturday, are a warning that what is unfolding here should be on everyone’s radar – democracy is on the ballot in November,” Benson said.Benson was in charge of the presidential election count in Michigan in 2020, which Biden won by 154,188 votes. She believes Karamo was present in the TCF Center “simply for the purpose of interfering with the counting process, causing chaos and confusion and spreading misinformation”.Asked what would happen if the Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist won in November and took her job, Benson replied: “Michigan would have a chief election officer more than willing to find those extra votes if the candidate asked them. It would be akin to putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department, or giving the keys to the vault to a bank robber.”As the secretary of state contest gains momentum, progressive groups are mobilizing to try and stop Karamo. The left-leaning End Citizens United/Let America Vote has launched a new “democracy defender program”, investing $7m in secretary of state and attorney general races where Trump-endorsed big lie candidates are on the ticket.“Karamo sought to silence and overturn the will of Michigan voters. Her false and extreme rhetoric is a threat to democracy because it undermines faith in our elections,” said a spokesperson for the group, Tina Olechowski.The Guardian reached out to Karamo, but she did not respond.As the race hots up she continues to claim that Trump won the 2020 election and to demand a “forensic audit” of the results – even though “forensic audits” do not exist under Michigan election law. In October she spoke at a QAnon convention in Las Vegas where she joined other pro-Trump big lie candidates running for secretary of state positions around the country.“She was one of several political candidates appealing to QAnon for political gain in ways that could have a drastic impact on future elections,” said Alex Kaplan, senior researcher at the watchdog Media Matters for America.Karamo has said that if she wins in November, her role as secretary of state will be “to make sure elections are secure and that the result represents the will of the people, not those corrupting the system”.That’s not how Benson sees it. Karamo, she said, is one of several Trump-endorsed secretary of state candidates around the country who appear willing “to violate their oath, the law and the principles of our democracy in service of their party and their private agenda”.And if that happens, Benson said, “then democracy will have been dealt perhaps its greatest blow since the origins of our country”.TopicsMichiganDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020featuresReuse this content More

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      Trump swooped in to profit from White House photographer’s book deal – report

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      Trump swooped in to profit from White House photographer’s book deal – reportEx-president blocked Shealah Craighead plan and then made up to $20m from publishing images in own memoir, New York Times says Donald Trump blocked plans by his chief White House photographer to publish a book of pictures of his time in power – then published a book of such images himself, the New York Times reported.The smooth compromise: how Obama’s iconography obscured his omissionsRead moreOne former White House photographer told the Times that by using Shealah Craighead’s images for his own profit – with books selling for as much as $230, Trump is reported to have made $20m – the former president had dealt her “a slap in the face”.Craighead was only the second woman to be White House chief photographer, after Sharon Farmer, who worked under Bill Clinton.In 2018, Craighead told Marie Claire magazine that she and Trump had “a lovely relationship … very professional, but also … quite humorous at times”, and added that Trump had “a genuine, strong, caring heart”.She also said she was “always very cautious to make sure I’m not pushing the photos in a manner that are associated with me on a personal level, but rather associated with the president and the administration on a professional level”.Nonetheless, the Times said, at the end of Trump’s time in power Craighead reached a “tentative deal with a publisher [that] involved an advance in the hundreds of thousands of dollars”.A Trump spokesperson did not dispute that Craighead was first asked to have Trump write a foreword in return for a cut of that advance. But the spokesperson, Taylor Budowich, told the Times that Trump then decided to use the images and others taken by other official photographers for his own book first.“President Trump has always had an eye for beautiful and engaging curation, which came alive through the pages of his book,” Budowich said.Most former presidents sign huge deals with mainstream publishers. Trump, who left office after four years of bitter partisan warfare, two impeachments and the deadly Capitol attack, has not done so.But he has released a pictorial memoir, Our Journey Together, via Winning Team Publishing, a venture started by his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and a Republican operative, Sergio Gor.An unsigned copy of the coffee table book, for which Trump wrote captions, costs $74.99. Signed copies are $229.99.CNN recently reported sales amounting to $20m in just two months.White House photographers’ work is in the public domain, available to all via Flickr. But photographers commonly release books of their own work.Pete Souza worked for Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama and has released bestselling books of his pictures. He told the Times: “It’s valuable for each chief photographer to do a book just for the historic record and put it together in a way that it tells sort of their story and contextualises images.”Eric Draper, chief White House photographer under George W Bush, said Trump had been disrespectful to Craighead.“It’s a slap in the face,” Draper said. “I would be disappointed if I were in her shoes.”‘It was worth giving up my anonymity’: how Obama’s photographer became a starRead moreSpeaking to the Times, Craighead said only that she was as “apolitical as possible, as I am a neutral historical documentarian. By staying neutral I am able to remain a keen observer.”But Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s third White House press secretary and the author of her own tell-all memoir, was less restrained.“Shea’s a very talented photographer,” Grisham said, “and this was really all of her hard work. I just keep thinking: what a shame that he is actually now profiting off of it. But then again, this is the guy who is hawking caps and all kinds of stuff right now to raise money for himself.”According to the Times, after it contacted Trump for comment, Trump called Craighead for the first time since leaving power.He reportedly said he was prepared to write her foreword now.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘I know how much it hurts’: Biden to release US oil in bid to lower gas prices – as it happened

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      Key events

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      ‘Incontrovertible evidence that this [war] has been a strategic disaster for Russia’ – White House

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      Biden: Putin may be in ‘self-isolation’

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      Biden confirms draw on oil reserves to lower gas prices

      Joe Biden says his plan to release 1m barrels daily from the US strategic oil reserves will: “Ease the pain families are feeling right now, end this era of dependence and uncertainty and lay a new and new foundation for true and lasting American energy independence.”
      The president is speaking live at the White House to announce the move, which he said would last up to six months and which will represent the largest ever draw ever on the country’s emergency supplies.
      “I know how much it hurts,” he said of rising gas prices that have followed the decision by the Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
      “Putin’s price hike is hitting Americans at the pump.” More

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      in World Politics

      Radicalization and the Role of Video Games

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      The audience for video games is massive. According to Nielsen, 82% of global consumers either played video games or watched content related to them in 2020 — a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

      The Fusion of Polish Nationalist Groups and Roman Catholicism

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      In 2019, the anti-hate organization ADL published survey data of US gamers, revealing that 23% of respondents had been exposed to white supremacist ideology in online games. Given recent surges in right-wing extremism and violence, including concerning trends in youth radicalization, understanding the extent to which this hugely popular medium offers a potential vector for radicalization is important.

      Gaming and Right-Wing Extremism

      There is a growing corpus of literature exploring the intersection between gaming and right-wing extremism. This includes work that focuses on the cultural overlap between online extremism and gaming communities; potential vulnerabilities that might mean gamers are more susceptible to radicalization; the gamification of extremist activity; and discussion of the “gamergate” controversy that saw a number of gamers involved in coordinated online trolling help drive online extremism.

      However, there is a limited body of work exploring the use of gaming platforms for recruitment by extremists, with much of the content exploring this phenomenon being largely anecdotal, such as a report in November 2020 by Sky News on the radicalization of a 14-year-old boy in the United Kingdom which suggested that the boy had been shown “extreme neo-Nazi video games” by his older brother.

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      Understanding whether there are concerted radicalization efforts that seek to leverage online gaming to reach new audiences has implications for regulatory discussions, interventions and prevention efforts.

      Our Findings

      To help fill this dearth in knowledge, the digital analysis unit at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) engaged in a piece of scoping research across four platforms associated with online gaming. This included two live-streaming services — Twitch and DLive, which both host individuals who broadcast online gaming to digital audiences, and which have both been used to stream extremist activity.

      Additionally, we explored Steam, the PC game digital distribution service that also provides a platform for gamers to build community groups, and Discord, a chat application originally designed for gamers that has been notably used by right-wing extremists.

      To better understand the potential for overlap between extremism and gaming, we used digital ethnography to scope these platforms, searching for users and communities promoting extremist content. In total, we identified 45 public groups associated with the extreme right on Steam, 24 extreme right chat servers on Discord, 100 extreme right channels on DLive and 91 channels on Twitch.

      These communities and individuals commonly promoted racist, exclusionary and supremacist material associated with the extreme right, including the sharing of material from proscribed terrorist organizations on Discord.

      We then qualitatively analyzed the content shared by these extremist channels and publicly accessible discussion threads to explore the extent that gaming was being used to radicalize or recruit individuals.

      Here we identified several ways in which extremists use gaming. In some instances, extremists would use politically aligned games, such as “Feminazi: The Triggering” as a means to signify their ideology to their peers. Additionally, we found evidence that extremists used historical strategy games to role-play extremist fantasies, such as winning the Second World War for Nazi Germany or killing Muslims in the Crusades. However, although we found ample evidence that extremists are using gaming platforms, we found limited evidence to suggest they are using them to radicalize or recruit new members.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      Instead, extremists primarily seemed to use gaming as a means of building bonds and community with their peers, as well as more broadly to blow off steam. Whilst there has been a focus in preexisting literature on extremist-created games, we found that a majority of extremist gamers preferred popular mainstream titles such as “Call of Duty” or “Counter-Strike.” Additionally, although anecdotal evidence suggests that young people are being groomed over online games, we didn’t find content that corroborated this.

      Future Research

      Although there were gaps in our methodology — in particular, we didn’t seek to play online games with extremists — these preliminary findings suggest that gamers seem to primarily use gaming in the same way that non-extremists do: as a hobby and past time. These findings have implications for policy responses to online radicalization as well as for future research. In particular, they highlight how extremist users have been able to find a home on gaming platforms online.

      Our project was designed as scoping research to pick up on key trends and didn’t attempt to gauge the scale and reach of these communities, but it is important that future digital research tracks the size of extremist communities so that proportional policy responses can be proposed.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More