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      in World Politics

      The Next Surge of Trumpism

      by

      I went to a birthday party recently. The celebrants greeted each other with hugs on the patio. After an outdoor barbeque dinner, we stood shoulder to shoulder around the island in the kitchen, eating cake from small paper plates. We sang “Happy Birthday.”

      Ordinarily, an event like that wouldn’t be worth noting, but these aren’t exactly ordinary times. In this twilight world of ours, half-in and half-out of a pandemic, hanging around without masks and within spitting distance of vaccinated friends should be considered just this side of miraculous — a combination of luck, privilege and a stunning series of events on a national scale that would strain credibility in a work of fiction.

      In an Increasingly Paranoid World, Do Allies Actually Exist?

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      To get to that birthday party required, first of all, surviving the pandemic, which has so far killed somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 Americans, while infecting as much as one-third of the population (including, months earlier, a couple of the guests at that very birthday party). No foreign enemy has ever inflicted such casualties on the US, and never in our lifetimes have American civilians faced such a catastrophic breakdown in homeland security.

      Nor has the international scientific community ever responded with such dispatch and efficacy to a global crisis. Less than a year from the date of the initial outbreak, not one but several COVID-19 vaccines had been developed, tested and approved. Then came the anxious wait for eligibility and the constant refreshing of vaccination websites to try to schedule an appointment. Only when enough people like me had gone through the extended regimen of inoculation and after the infection rate had begun to fall rapidly did officials in my home state of Maryland begin to lift quarantine restrictions.

      Even though everyone at that birthday party was fully vaccinated, I still felt uncomfortably vulnerable without my mask. I hesitated before hugging people. My hands itched for a squirt of sanitizer. It was, in other words, a celebration tempered by uncertainty. We were navigating new rules of social discourse. Handshake? Bear hug? Peck on the cheek? And no one dared jinx the celebration by saying, as we normally would have, “Next year, same time, same place.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      By temperament, I’m an optimist. By profession, however, I’m a pessimist. In my day job as a foreign-policy analyst and in the speculative realm as the author of the dystopian “Splinterlands” trilogy of novels, I’m constantly considering worst-case scenarios.

      So, yes, I’m well aware that COVID-19 infection rates have dropped to levels not seen in a year and that the United States may indeed be on track to reach a 70% vaccination rate among adults by July 4, which could, as the president has promised, offer us a new version of “Independence Day.” But this country is still experiencing the same number of infections (tens of thousands) and deaths (hundreds) as it did during the lull following the first outbreak last year. More infectious variants of the disease continue to emerge globally, most recently in India, where the numbers have been horrific, as well as in Vietnam. The current vaccines reportedly stave off such variants, but what about the next ones?

      T.2?

      My professional dystopianism extends to the political sphere. I’m grateful on a daily basis that Donald Trump is no longer in the Oval Office or blathering on Twitter. I now take for granted a Democratic Congress (however marginally controlled), which seemed like a longshot last Election Day.

      But let’s face it, politically, things could go south fast. Even though the Democrats are working overtime to inoculate this country’s economy with one stimulus shot after another, the Republicans could retake the Senate and even the House in 2022 and, three years from now, Trump could still prove to be a viable presidential candidate.

      By then, for all we know, an even more infectious strain of Trumpism — call it T.2 — might have emerged in the form of far-right challengers like Republican Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, or even (God save us all) Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their followers who lurched from reopen rallies to stop-the-steal protests were struck dumb by the failure of their Duce to cling to power in January 2021. In the months since President Joe Biden’s inauguration, with a majority of Republicans still proclaiming his election stolen, they’ve again become restive.

      Keep in mind as well that dystopia remains unevenly distributed around the globe. Trump is gone (for now), but other putatively democratic authoritarians remain in power. President Vladimir Putin is still effectively leader for life in Russia, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro cling to their offices, and rebel-turned-tyrant Daniel Ortega just arrested the woman challenging him this year for the Nicaraguan presidency.

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      Meanwhile, not only has India been overwhelmed by COVID-19, but the numbers in Brazil remain terrifying and Taiwan has recently been hit with a first wave of infections — and that’s just to begin down a grim list. Even the Seychelles off the coast of Africa, despite a world-leading vaccination rate of more than 60%, has recently experienced an unexpected uptick in cases.

      In other words, as I left that party, it just didn’t feel like the right moment to exhale. Human beings are adaptable creatures. We have an unfortunate ability to normalize worst-case scenarios. Rising temperatures? Guess it’s time to sell the beach house and move inland. Raging pandemic? A good opportunity to chill for a few months with Netflix and Uber Eats.

      But dystopias are not just about objectively terrible things. Dystopia is about losing control over your life. It’s about a faceless bureaucracy trying to evict you from your home. It’s about a virus evading all your carefully constructed defenses. It’s about right-wing crazies subverting democracy even as they claim to revere it. So, tell me the truth: In June 2021, do you really feel back in control yet? 

      The Insurrection Next Time

      The last scene of a horror film often elicits a gasp. The eyelid of the supposedly dead serial killer snaps open. A mad scientist, reportedly cured, is released from the asylum clutching a briefcase full of plans for his next planet-destroying invention. A puppy scampers into the kitchen with the telltale orange rash of a disease that was allegedly extinguished. Such scenes are obviously setups for sequels, but they’re also reminders that horrors seldom simply disappear. Instead, they mutate, hibernate and burrow into our everyday world.

      With that in mind, let’s revisit the final scene of this year’s most talked-about horror story: the storming of the US Capitol on January 6. Inflamed by the president’s lies and conspiracy theories, thousands of people overwhelmed the Capitol police, broke into what should have been one of the most protected buildings in the country, and launched a search-and-destroy mission against various politicians located inside. The noose set up on the West Front of the Capitol was an unambiguous indication of the insurrectionists’ intentions. Some of them had even brought bear spray.

      The story of the insurrection ended with order restored, legislators returning to their chambers to confirm the 2020 election results and a modicum of bipartisan horror at what had just happened. But the very last scene elicited a gasp from the audience watching at home. Even as they condemned the violence that had just taken place in their midst, a handful of Republican legislators continued to claim election fraud. Early on the morning of January 7, seven Republican senators and 122 members of the House refused to certify the election results in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

      Those votes were the sick puppy with the orange rash, the sign that the infectious horror of Trumpism had not been stamped out. At best, this country would experience a respite of unknown length before another surge captured the headlines. After all, Trump and his followers have been in the process of fundraising, assembling a cast and crew, enlisting thousands of extras and beginning to film their sequel, while promising even bigger thrills and chills to come. Their fans can’t wait.

      While most Americans go about their calmer post-Trumpian lives under the Biden administration, a significant number of their fellow citizens live in a different reality entirely. For them, a world of dystopian intensity has just begun. After all, those Trumpsters are now experiencing their worst-case scenario: a Biden victory in a “stolen” election and Congress in Democratic hands. They have no desire to normalize what they consider a socialist regime in Washington. Astonishingly, one-quarter of Republicans belong to the church of QAnon with its imaginary global syndicate of Satan-worshipping child traffickers.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Although it was the Trump administration that helped spur the creation of the COVID-19 vaccines, 41% of Republicans still say they won’t get inoculated (compared to 4% of Democrats). Against all evidence, they believe the vaccines to be unsafe, ineffective or even downright undemocratic in the way they subject their “victims” to nonstop surveillance through a supposedly injected microchip. Fixated on such imaginary threats, the anti-vaxxers are dismissive of a pandemic that is still a clear and present danger.

      In the good old days, people with such a tenuous connection to reality would retreat to their armchairs to listen to Rush Limbaugh. They’d live in their own private dystopias — stocking their bomb shelters, polishing their guns, muttering to themselves — with lots of fire and fury but little real-world impact.

      Taking Over the Republican Party

      Thanks to Trump, the Proud Boys and QAnon, however, the dystopians of today have turned their delusions into a political project even to the point of taking over the Republican Party. Mo Brooks, the Alabama Republican who still believes that the 2020 election featured the “worst voter fraud and election theft in history,” repeatedly incited his followers to post-election violence. Gun nut Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, called President Biden a “tyrant” for his tepid gun-control proposals after a spate of mass killings this spring. Led by Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson, the party is now rewriting the events of January 6 to blame the violence on supposed left-wing agitators.

      Equally troubling, true believers of this sort are still attempting to overturn the results of the election, beginning with the vote “recount” in Maricopa County, Arizona. The outfit in charge of that recount, Cyber Ninjas, has been set loose in a basketball arena in Phoenix like the Keystone Kops on a mad caper. In the process, they’re violating all the rules of a proper audit, from tolerating a huge error rate in tally sheets to flagging ballots as “suspicious” for things like folds, Cheeto stains and suspected bamboo fibers (the result, supposedly, of having been sent from somewhere in Asia). According to Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, the Maricopa recount is “a grift disguised as an audit.”

      It’s not the 2020 election that hangs in the balance, of course, since no amount of imaginary bamboo fibers — in Arizona or any of the other states the Trumpsters are targeting — can overturn what Congress has already confirmed. What can potentially be overturned, however, is American democracy itself. After all, it’s now clear that the Trumpsters will treat every future election that doesn’t produce the results they desire as a globalist plot no different from a new vaccine or a new pronouncement by infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci. Each contested election has the possibility of generating another potential insurrection, with the rioters perhaps chanting, “Remember January 6th!”

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      The nonsense now being spouted by the loony right would be grist for satire if we hadn’t seen all this before. Karl Marx once proposed (and Groucho Marx proved) that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” Trump has turned this dictum on its head, since many of the laughable things he said on his road to the presidency in 2016 — his paeans to his future “big, fat, beautiful Wall,” his white nationalism, his love of Putin — were indeed turned into tragic policy by his minions.

      We laughed when Barack Obama roasted Trump at the Gridiron dinner in 2011, but those jokes likely kindled Trump’s ambition to become president. We would be wise not to laugh at the antics of Greene, who has spouted QAnonsense and compared mask mandates to the Nazi treatment of Jews, or else she could ride similar waves of derision to even greater political heights.

      The Power of the Marginalized

      I have a great deal of empathy for many people in the Trump camp. I’ve never liked Washington, DC, and its obsession with insider politics. I share the distaste that much of Trump country feels for the arrogance of the power elite and its incessant jockeying for influence.

      After all, it wasn’t Trump who created our current mess. Sure, he turned up the heat under the pot and gave its contents a vigorous stir, but he didn’t assemble the ingredients or design the recipe. The climate crisis, the travesty of global military spending, the inequities of the global economy — these were created by the “adults in the room” backed by the mainstream political parties, Washington’s “Blob” and an ever-ascendant military-industrial-congressional complex.

      The MAGA crowd was right to reject this version of the status quo. With his economic populism, Trump gave voice to those who felt shafted by Wall Street, transnational corporations and globalization in general. The wages of blue-collar workers, adjusted for inflation, had at best stagnated since the 1970s (while the incomes of America’s billionaires have done anything but). Because the mainstream parties abandoned these voters, economically speaking, many of them naturally basked in the attention Trump showered on them. They felt that their dystopia of economic marginalization might finally be on the verge of lifting.

      In challenging one pillar of the status quo, however, Trump consciously reinforced two others: the power of the wealthy elite and of white privilege. In the process, legitimate economic grievances became entangled with anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner and blatantly racist rhetoric. Trump’s electoral defeat has by no means silenced this white nationalism.

      Fortunately, other voices have come to the fore as well, as millions of Americans rejected the status quo in more productive ways. One year ago, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin reignited the Black Lives Matter movement, triggering the largest protests in American history (as well as demonstrations in more than 60 other countries). In exercising their freedoms of speech and assembly, those protesters were also very deliberately trying to regain control of their lives by rolling back a dystopia of police terror that has disproportionately harmed black Americans.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Similarly, the #MeToo movement has been a reassertion of control by women over their own bodies and lives. Thanks to such efforts, the dystopia of rape culture and patriarchal authority has begun to recede, though not everywhere or quickly enough.

      Environmentalists are likewise standing up to the fossil-fuel companies, while economic justice advocates continue to challenge multinational corporations. Peace activists are protesting wars and military spending, while human rights demonstrators are rallying against authoritarian leaders. These efforts all contribute, little by little, to the possibility that we can regain control over our own lives. They are part of a long-term process whereby the powerless become subjects in their own stories rather than the objects of someone else’s tales. Such challenges to the status quo would become more powerful still if joined by some of the economically marginalized previously drawn to Trump (as long as they check their white privilege at the door).

      “Splinterlands”

      I’ve tried to describe such historic efforts in essays and in fiction. In my “Splinterlands” series of novels, I’ve done my best to peer into our future and consider the worst-case scenarios of climate change, unrestrained corporate power and nationalism run amok. However, in the standalone finale, “Songlands,” I let a little sunlight break through the dystopian storm clouds to tell the story of an international community of activists coming together in the face of a planetary crisis. (George Orwell, meet Greta Thunberg.) As I said, by temperament, I’m an optimist. Sometimes, that optimism even leaks into my professional life.

      Sure, I continue to worry about what the next wave of COVID-19 might look like. I fear both the continued lunacy of the Republican Party and the pallid incrementalism of the Democrats. But I’m heartened by the energy of people all over the world determined to beat back dystopia, take control of their lives and transform the optimists’ credo of “hope and change” into something a great deal more significant than a campaign slogan.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch. John Feffer is the author of the dystopian novel “Splinterlands.” “Frostlands” is volume two of his “Splinterlands” series and the final novel in the trilogy, “Songlands,” has just been published. Feffer has also written “The Pandemic Pivot.”]

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

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Arizona ballot audit backed by secretive donors linked to Trump’s inner circle

      by

      Dark money groups tied to Donald Trump’s inner circle and backed by people who have spread baseless claims about the 2020 presidential election appear to be playing a key role in funding an unprecedented review of 2.1m ballots in Arizona.Republicans in the Arizona state senate, which authorized the inquiry, allocated $150,000 in state funds to pay for it – just a fraction of the projected overall cost, which is still unknown. The state senate had enough money in its operating budget to pay for the investigation, the Arizona Mirror reported in April, but chose not to pay the full price.Instead, the effort is being paid for by private donors, who remain hidden from the public, according to a review by OpenSecrets and the Guardian. Arizona Republicans and Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company overseeing the review, have refused to say who is providing the rest of the money.“It is wholly inappropriate that the Arizona state senate is hiding the mechanisms by which their sanctioned activity is being funded,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who served as the top election official in Maricopa county, the target of the ballot review, until he lost his re-election bid last year. “The lack of transparency there is just grotesque.”*Questions about funds come as the Arizona senate has faced scrutiny for why it hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with little experience in auditing elections to oversee its massive review. Doug Logan, the firm’s chief executive, expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.Karen Fann, the president of the Arizona state senate, said last year she received a phone call from Trump thanking her for “pushing to prove any fraud”, according to emails obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group. Fann, a Republican, also said she had spoken with Rudy Giuliani, a Trump ally, multiple times last year.At least $150,000 of the inquiry’s funding has purportedly come from Voices and Votes, a 501(c)(4) run by Christina Bobb, an anchor for the One America News Network (OANN), a rightwing media network that has given air to election conspiracy theories. The group is also run with the White House correspondent Chanel Rion and Courtland Sykes, Rion’s fiance. Bobb spoke with Trump about the review, according to the Washington Post, and emailed Fann affidavits on behalf of Giuliani last year, emails show.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterBobb frequently plugs the effort during shows, where she covers the Arizona review, and on social media, but told BuzzFeed that OANN is not “in any way” affiliated with her fundraising despite the dark money group being run by multiple OANN employees and being promoted on the network. Voices and Votes was incorporated in Wyoming in March, shortly before the inquiry was announced, by Greg Roeberg, an Arizona attorney. A press release from the Trump campaign last year listed a Greg Roeberg as a “key member” of Jewish Voices for Trump. Roeberg said in an email he was not involved with the charity beyond helping it with the initial legal papers. The group declined an interview request.L Lin Wood, the pro-Trump attorney behind a slew of lawsuits seeking to overturn election results last year, told Talking Points Memo that his non-profit, Fight Back, donated $50,000 to Voices and Votes for the review. But it is not clear what the money is actually going to since the groups are subject to few financial disclosure rules.Wood, who has promoted fundraising efforts for the review on Telegram, also told TPM that Cyber Ninja chief Logan worked out of Wood’s home to investigate 2020 election voter fraud claims.Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and an ardent Trump supporter, is also leading a group funding the effort. Byrne was involved in what Axios described as the “craziest meeting of the Trump presidency” – a December 2020 summit in the Oval Office that included Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell, who falsely claimed voting machines had flipped votes for Trump and suggested he use government resources to seize voting machines. Byrne also reportedly screamed at representatives from the White House counsel’s office, saying they were not sufficiently helping to overturn the election.In April, Byrne’s non-profit, the America Project, launched a Fund the Audit campaign aiming to raise $2.8m. Byrne says he contributed $1m to the effort, but at least another $900,000 has come from unknown sources. Byrne’s non-profit is also helping vet workers who participate in the review, according to the Arizona Republic.Byrne also served as chief of another dark money group involved in the review, Defending the Republic, though he claims he resigned in April. Created by Powell, Defending the Republic published every Arizona lawmaker’s contact info on their website and promoted a misleading “Election Fraud Facts & Details“ document authored for the Arizona senate by Cyber Ninja’s Logan before the “audit” effort. The document contains disproven claims about voting machine software switching votes from Trump to Biden.Powell’s group also previously hired Wake Technology Services, Inc (Wake TSI), a subcontractor, to audit election equipment in Fulton county, Pennsylvania, at the request of Doug Mastriano, a state senator who aggressively suggested the election was stolen, according to county documents obtained by the Guardian.Paula Shives, a Democrat on the three-member county commission, was stunned that the company was allowed to inspect election materials last year. “Who authorized this? When was this scheduled? Who was notified and present during the process?” Shives wrote in a text message to the country’s election director and two commissioners that was obtained by OpenSecrets and the Guardian through a public records request.The lack of transparency there is just grotesqueRandy Bunch, a Republican county commissioner, replied that the review did not show any problems: “On a good note, they didn’t find one thing wrong and praise our team meaning Patty and our staff on how organized everything was and we come [sic] out with no flaws it all matched up.”Wake TSI submitted a draft report to county officials in February that appeared to back up that assessment, according to the Washington Post.But the copy of that Pennsylvania review uploaded on the county website contended Dominion Voting Systems did not meet the state’s certification requirements, documented “errors” in scanning ballots, and purportedly identified “non-certified” software installed in the county’s voting system. (Wake TSI did not respond to requests for an interview.)Wake TSI abruptly withdrew from the Arizona review in May, and it is unclear why. Mastriano was one of several Pennsylvania lawmakers who visited the audit site in early June, where he was interviewed by Bobb on OANN.*For weeks, observers have pointed out that the procedures in place for the unprecedented inquiry are shoddy and do not resemble a neutral audit. But Trump has also become increasingly focused on the Arizona review and possible similar efforts elsewhere. Trump has reportedly told people close to him he expects to be “reinstated” as president this summer – something that would be impossible under the current legal system.The influx of private funds comes as Republicans themselves, including in Arizona, have pushed to outlaw the use of private grants for election processes after charities stepped up to fund underresourced election officials during the pandemic. In particular, Republicans have targeted grants from organizations backed by hundreds of millions dollars of donations from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.In April, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed a law prohibiting election officials from accepting private money to help run elections, saying it could weaken confidence in elections. Similar provisions have been enacted in Florida and Georgia this year.And dark money raised for the review may be going to more than just paying the firms conducting it.The Arizona state representative Mark Finchem, a strong supporter of the review and the “Stop the Steal” movement, claimed that his 501(c)(4) Guardian Defense Fund is “paying money for additional security at the site” in an interview with Steve Bannon on America’s Voice News.Finchem is currently campaigning to be Arizona’s next secretary of state, and claimed he had talked to Trump about the 2020 election in an appearance on the Twitch stream of Redpill78, which the New York Times reported promotes QAnon conspiracy theories. His attorney previously represented Cyber Ninjas.“Ironically, after outlawing transparent philanthropic funding of election administration, used to assist all voters, regardless of party, during a global pandemic, the Arizona senate now relies upon secret funding for their ‘audit’,” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a group that received funding from Zuckerberg and Chan last year.*Key individuals behind the dark money groups have also been using a network of Telegram channels to coordinate messaging and amplify each other’s content.One of the main Telegram channels boosting the groups is Arizona Red Roots. Using Telegram and other messaging platforms, review proponents have quietly coordinated efforts and distributed “AZ Ground Troops Updates” detailing strategies pushing for the ballot review.An April “AZ Ground Troops Update” document downloaded from Telegram lists a number of key players in the Arizona review, including Power of the Meme, a site dedicated to making memes to promote the Arizona review and “Demand a Forensic Kinematic Audit”.In messages throughout March and April, organizers in the channel pushed followers to pressure the Arizona legislature to hire Jovan Pulitzer, a treasure hunter best known for inventing a cat-shaped device that allowed people to scan barcodes in magazines to find the product online. PC World magazine ranked it as one of the 25 worst tech products of all time.Pulitzer has become a kind of folk hero among those who believe the election was stolen (he has his own song) and Telegram messages in the channel told users Pulitzer was the only person who could do a necessary audit.“If New Hampshire uses Jovan + other auditors, why not AZ? Jovan, since Nov 2020, was the first and only one to propose auditing paper ballots in an ingenious and novel way – never proposed & never before done! And it is what we need for the best chance to find ballots pre-printed from China. Or ballots filled out by the same fraudulent person,” reads one message.The effort appears to have been successful. Pulitzer’s technology is reportedly being used by those running the Arizona review to inspect the quality of ballot paper and search for watermarks – a process election officials have said is unlikely to detect fraud. Officials are also reportedly using the technology to look for bamboo fibers in ballots, an echo of a conspiracy theory Pulitzer has endorsed suggesting ballots were flown into Arizona from Asia.Even some people involved in advising the review are skeptical of Pulitzer’s involvement.“This guy is nuts,” John Brakey, an activist who is helping with the Arizona process, told the Guardian in May. “He’s a fraudster.”*Even as experts have warned of the dangers of the Arizona review, it has fast emerged as a model for similar efforts elsewhere. Trump on Friday called for the Pennsylvania senate to authorize a similar effort, just days after Mastriano and other lawmakers visited the Arizona count. Activists in New Hampshire unsuccessfully tried to get Pulitzer involved in a review of a local election there. And there are bubbling efforts in Michigan to conduct a “forensic audit” – language that mirrors what is being used to describe the Arizona effort.Some of the firms and individuals conducting the review also stand to potentially benefit from a proliferation of similar efforts across the country.A recently dismissed Michigan case that was promoted and fundraised for in the Arizona Telegram channels featured Cyber Ninja’s Logan as an expert witness. Another expert witness in the case was Benjamin Cotton, the founder of CyFIR, a digital forensics firm that is helping conduct the Arizona audit.The plaintiff’s attorney, Matthew DePerno, raised around $300,000 for an “Election Fraud Defense Fund” to support the failed case in Michigan.And while the amount of money raised through online fundraising platforms is publicly available, the total amount of money changing hands between each of the individuals and organizations involved in the efforts is subject to few disclosure requirements.Fontes, the Arizona Democrat, said it was “wholly inappropriate” for the Arizona state senate not to disclose who was funding the effort.“They have permitted this to happen, it happens under the authority of the Arizona state senate, this is senate president Karen Fann’s operation,” he said. “She can set whatever rules she wants to set. She has chosen secrecy. She has chosen to obfuscate. And she is trying to deflect responsibility for the lack of transparency.” More

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      Kamala Harris questioned over not going to US-Mexico border – video

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      US vice-president Kamala Harris has brushed off questions about her decision not to go to the US-Mexico border as part of her work to address the spike in migration. Harris, who was asked about the issue during visits to Mexico and Guatemala, said: ‘I’ve been to the border before and I will go again, but when I’m in Guatemala dealing with root causes, I think we should have a conversation about what is going on in Guatemala’, Harris said. Republican lawmakers have criticised her for not prioritising the shared frontier

      Kamala Harris takes on a new role as she heads on her first overseas trip
      AOC condemns Kamala Harris for telling Guatemalan migrants not to come to US More

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      Joe Biden’s mission at the G7 summit: to recruit allies for the next cold war | Rafael Behr

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      Joe Biden crosses the Atlantic this week on a tide of goodwill. After four years of Donald Trump, European leaders are grateful for the mere fact of a US president who believes in democracy and understands diplomacy.Trump had no concept of historical alliance, strategic partnership or mutual interest. He saw multilateral institutions as conspiracies against US power, which he could not distinguish from his own ego. He heard European talk of a rules-based international order as the contemptible bleating of weakling nations.Biden’s stated purpose is bolstering that order. In an article published in the Washington Post on the eve of his trip, the president talks about “renewed” and “unwavering” commitment to a transatlantic relationship based on “shared democratic values”.The itinerary starts in Cornwall with a gathering of G7 leaders. Then comes Brussels for a Nato summit, plus meetings with presidents of the European Council and Commission. Biden intends to orchestrate a surge of western solidarity as mood music ahead of a final stop in Geneva, where he sits down with Vladimir Putin. On that front, a stable chilling of relations will count as progress after the downright weirdness of Trump’s willing bamboozlement by the Kremlin strongman.A re-enactment of cold war choreography would suit Putin by flattering his pretence that Russia is still a superpower. In reality, Washington sees Moscow as a declining force that compensates for its shrunken influence by lashing out where it can, causing mischief and sowing discord. Putin is seen as an irritant, not a rival.That is in marked contrast to the view of China – an actual superpower and the eastern pole that Biden has in mind when he talks about reviving an alliance of western democracies. In that respect, the repudiation of Trumpian wrecking-ball rhetoric can be misleading. It sounds to European ears as if the new White House administration is hoping to set the clock back to a calmer, less combative epoch. In reality, Biden is coming to tell Europe to get its act together in the coming race for global supremacy with Beijing.By Europe, in this context, the president also means Britain. Boris Johnson might imagine himself a world leader of continental stature, but a US president is not required to indulge that fantasy.Biden takes a dim view of Brexit, seeing it as a pointless sabotage of European unity. The White House preferred Britain as a pro-US voice wielding influence inside the EU. Since that function is lost, Brexit’s only utility is in making it easier for the UK to embrace economic and strategic vassalage to the US. That means toeing a hawkish line on China.European nations should not really have to pause for long if the choice is alignment with Washington or Beijing. It is easy to muster resentment of US global swagger and point out hypocrisies in its claim to be a beacon of political freedom. But the alternative is an expansionist totalitarian state that militates against democracy and is currently engaged in a genocide against the Uyghurs.If China were a poorer country, Biden’s mission would be easier. But the economic gap between the established superpower and the challenger is closing. Per capita, Americans are still much better off, but China could overtake the US in gross domestic product by the end of this decade. With that heft comes world-leading technological capability with crossover military application that keeps the Pentagon up at night.During the cold war, the Kremlin maintained a credible military rivalry with the west but was not an economic competitor for long. The collapse of the Soviet model seemed to prove that political freedom and prosperity came as a package. There could be no enterprise without markets, no markets without fair rules, and no enforceable rules without democracy. The Chinese Communist party’s hybrid model of authoritarian capitalism appears to have disproved that theory.When the G7 was conceived in the 1970s, its combined membership – the US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan – comfortably represented a commanding share of global wealth. There was a natural association of liberal democratic institutions and economic success. Today, those seven nations’ combined GDP is down to 40% of the world total. The west is still rich, but it is no longer the world’s envied super league.Chinese money gives Europe commercial incentives that compete with its high-minded rhetoric on democratic values. China is Germany’s biggest export market. Smaller EU members have welcomed Chinese investment in infrastructure and businesses, although qualms are steadily growing about built-in political strings and security trapdoors. A huge Brussels-Beijing trade deal, signed last year (much to Washington’s dismay), is currently frozen as part of a tit-for-tat dispute over European criticism of Chinese human rights abuses.But EU governments simply don’t feel US levels of urgency to contain China. Geography is a factor – the US has a Pacific coast and strategic commitments to Taiwan, where Britain and France, for all their naval bravado, are little more than spectators. There is a conceptual difference too. As one diplomat puts it, Europe doesn’t like what China does, but the US doesn’t like what China is. The idea of the US being superseded as the paramount global power within the current century is existentially appalling for Washington.The Trump phenomenon compounds that anxiety for the current White House administration. It was a near-death experience for America’s constitutional order; an intimation of mortality for a political and economic model that looked insuperable at the dawn of the 21st century. The US president urges fellow western leaders to show strength in solidarity because the prospect of division, decline and the discrediting of democracy is more real than at any time in his five-decade Washington career.During that time, Biden has succeeded by patience, diplomacy and soft-spoken understatement. That style earns him a grateful audience in Europe, but the president’s manners should not be mistaken for mildness of purpose; the modest style is deployed in service of a tough message. He is not flying across the Atlantic to wallow in nostalgia for the alliances that won the first cold war. He is drumming up recruits for the second one. More

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      AOC condemns Kamala Harris for telling Guatemalan migrants not to come to US

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      The progressive New York representative Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez has criticized Vice-President Kamala Harris, for saying undocumented migrants from Guatemala should not come to the US.On her first foreign trip as vice-president, Harris visited Guatemala on Monday. At a press conference with Guatemala’s president, Alejandro Giammattei, the former California senator spoke about investigating corruption and human trafficking in Central America, and described a future where Guatemalans could find “hope at home”.But she also had a clear message that undocumented Guatemalan migrants would not find solace at the US border under the Biden administration.“I want to be clear to folks in the region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border,” she said. “Do not come. Do not come.”Later on Monday, Oscasio-Cortez condemned Harris on Twitter, calling her comments “disappointing to see”.“First, seeking asylum at any US border is a 100% legal method of arrival,” said the congresswoman, an influential voice on the Democratic left since her upset win in a 2018 primary and widely known as AOC.“Second, the US spent decades contributing to regime change and destabilization in Latin America. We can’t help set someone’s house on fire and then blame them for fleeing.”Several human rights groups also spoke out.Rachel Schmidtke, Latin America advocate at the non-profit Refugees International, said: “We continue to urge the Biden administration to build policies that recognize that many Guatemalans will need to seek protection until the longstanding drivers of forced displacement are addressed and realign its message to the Guatemalan people to reflect America’s commitment to the right to seek protection internationally.”The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a non-profit that works with asylum seekers, tweeted: “Kamala Harris, seeking asylum is legal. Turning back asylum seekers is illegal, dangerous, & oftentimes sends them back to their deaths. Seeking asylum is a right under US and international law.”Despite Joe Biden moving to undo Trump-era restrictions at the border, including instituting changes to the asylum process, Harris’s speech underlined a continued stance of turning back undocumented migrants.Central America has long been affected by poverty and violence, amid entrenched cycles of political instability partly caused by criminal elites. Experts contend the US has often aided oppressive regimes. Despite the litany of dangers migrants often face when traveling north, the journey is often safer than remaining at home.“People are leaving because the corrupt governments (supported by the US) have tolerated and encouraged the growth of these criminal organizations,” said Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute, in an interview with USA Today.In April, according to CNN, more than 178,000 migrants arrived at the US-Mexico border, the highest one-month total in two decades. More

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      Legal storm clouds gather over Donald Trump’s future

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      He’s Teflon Don no more, at least when it comes to court.Donald Trump, no longer insulated by claims of presidential protections, faces a host of increasingly serious legal problems in some of the US’s most high-profile courts, including both criminal investigation and civil litigation.So even as Trump maintains his grip on the Republican party and teases ambitions to run again for president in 2024 – his legal woes could render all that debate meaningless: Trump’s future could lie in the courtroom, not the Oval Office.Trump “can face criminal charges for activities that took place before he was president, after he was president, and while he was president – as long as they were not part of his duties while he was president of the United States,” said attorney David S Weinstein, partner at Jones Walker LLP’s Miami office.Trump has not been charged with any crimes, and he has repeatedly denied wrongdoing personally and in his business dealings. His attorneys did not respond to requests for comment. A request for comment through his website received an automatic response of: “Thank you for your inquiry. Our staff is currently reviewing your request.”But the exact impact of this on Trump’s political future is unclear. Political science experts say that legal actions against Trump might not pose problems, as even if he were found to have committed wrongdoing, his loyalists might stick with him.The most threatening legal investigation, which involves potential for jail either for Trump or his associates if it proceeded and resulted in conviction, does not relate to his presidential duties.The Washington Post reported on 25 May that Manhattan prosecutors had convened the grand jury that is “expected to decide whether to indict Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges”.This development suggests that Manhattan prosecutors’ inquiry into Trump and his business concerns has hit an “advanced stage” after proceeding for more than two years. More, it indicates that Manhattan prosecutors believe they have discovered evidence of a crime. This potential evidence could be against Trump, an executive at his company, or his business.This inquiry is broad-ranging, involving Trump’s business dealings before his presidency. The investigation is exploring whether the value of some real estate in his company’s portfolio was manipulated in a manner that defrauded insurance companies and banks. The investigation is also seeking to determine whether questionable assessment of property values might have resulted in unlawful tax breaks, per the Washington Post.The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment.Meanwhile, the New York state attorney general has ramped up its investigation. “We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time,” a spokesman for the office said in an email to the Guardian.Fani Willis, district attorney of Fulton county, Georgia, said in February that there were plans to investigate Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, in which he urged him to “find” sufficient votes to allow him to win. Willis also announced plans to investigate other “attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia general election,” the Post said.In New York, Trump faces several major civil suits. Two women who accused Trump of sexual assault, ex-Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos and advice columnist E Jean Carroll, have filed defamation actions against him for statements he made about their allegations. He also faces a lawsuit filed by Efrain Galicia, an activist, over allegedly being attacked by Trump’s security during a 2015 protest outside Trump Tower.Something like criminal proceedings involving taxes could firm up support, as Trump could ramp up his claims of victimhood, playing to aggrieved voters who think the system is rigged against them. Plus, experts said, some of Trump’s base is attracted to his boorish, bullying behavior.“The majority of the evidence that we have on hand says that people who like Trump don’t care what he does – it just doesn’t matter if he breaks the law,” said Francisco I Pedraza, a political scientist at University of California Riverside. For those voters, “he can do no wrong”.“We know from a lot of social science research that people who back Trump also register very high on validated and reliable indexes of racial resentment, for example, he serves that and offers a kind of politics that responds to that flavor of politics,” Pedraza said. “Anything else doesn’t matter as long as he continues to be a champion for racist [sentiments].”Several experts said, however, that Trump could lose some support if allegations offended economically disadvantaged persons in his base – if he cheated the proverbial little guy, for example, those who feel cheated by the system might turn on him.Samuel Popkin, a research professor at the University of California San Diego and author of Crackup: The Republican Implosion and the Future of Presidential Politics, said: “If he gets nailed on stuff that is very complicated and hard to decipher and just looks like taxes are too high and everybody gets screwed, ‘I’m just another businessman trying to [give] the government no more than they deserve.’ It will not hurt him.“If there’s a conviction that has to deal with real theft, and stealing and scamming people, like the business with Trump University but on a massive scale, then it could hurt him.“It really depends on which charges.”Susan MacManus, professor emerita of political science at the University of South Florida, similarly said: “If it’s taxes, people are less likely to see that as big an issue” compared to something more serious, such as security.However, “any kind of conviction of some kind of criminal offense could definitely sway” a number of Republicans, MacManus said.“The question is when you start looking at the fringes of the base, and you start looking at independent voters, not Republicans,” said Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School. With that group, legal action could carry the “possibility of erosion” in supporting Trump.Regardless of whether Trump, his employees, or company are prosecuted, it’s all but guaranteed to result in unprecedented attention and controversy, exacerbated by the ex-president’s notorious recalcitrance.One New York courts insider told the Guardian that the frenzy would make the Harvey Weinstein case “look like somebody with training wheels”.“I can only imagine what a circus it would be,” the insider said. More

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      Barack Obama criticizes Republicans for pushing election lie

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      Americans should be worried that the Republican party “is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognisable and unacceptable even five years ago”, Barack Obama said on Monday.The former president warned Americans “to recognise that the path towards an undemocratic America is not gonna happen in just one bang” but will instead come “in a series of steps”, as seen under authoritarian leaders in Hungary and Poland.Obama was speaking to CNN the night before two Senate committees released a report on the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.Five people died after supporters of Donald Trump stormed the building in service of Trump’s lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden in the electoral college and the popular vote was caused by electoral fraud.Trump was impeached a second time, with support from 10 House Republicans. But Republicans in the Senate acquitted him of inciting an insurrection. He remains free to run for office and has returned to public speaking and hinted about plans for running for the White House again in 2024.Last month, Republicans blocked the formation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack. The Senate report released on Tuesday did not address political questions.Away from Washington, in states including Texas, Florida and Georgia, Republicans are pursuing laws to restrict ballot access in constituencies likely to vote Democratic, and to make it easier to overturn election results.In Washington, opposition from centrist Democrats such as the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is blocking federal voting rights protections.Obama told CNN “large portions of an elected Congress [are] going along with the falsehood that there were problems with the election”.Some Republicans did speak up against Trump’s lie after 6 January, Obama said, praising officials like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Georgia secretary of state who resisted pressure to overturn Biden’s win there, as “very brave”.But then, Obama said, “poof, suddenly everybody was back in line. Now, the reason for that is because the base believed it and the base believed it because this had been told to them not just by the president, but by the media that they watch.“My hope is that the tides will turn. But that does require each of us to understand that this experiment in democracy is not self-executing. It doesn’t happen just automatically.”Obama, the first black president, has considered his impact on the American right at length, particularly in his memoir, A Promised Land, which was published after the 2020 election.He told CNN the rightwing media, most prominently Fox News, was a particular driver of deepening division. Republicans and Democrats, he said, “occupy different worlds. And it becomes that much more difficult for us to hear each other, see each other.“We have more economic stratification and segregation. You combine that with racial stratification and the siloing of the media, so you don’t have just Walter Cronkite delivering the news, but you have 1,000 different venues. All that has contributed to that sense that we don’t have anything in common.”Asking “how do we start once again being able to tell a common story about where this country goes?”, Obama said Americans on either side of the divide needed to meet and talk more often.“The question now becomes how do we create … meeting places,” he said. “Because right now, we don’t have them and we’re seeing the consequences of that.” More