GETTYSBURG — This is the most American of towns. It is where Robert E. Lee tried to destroy the nation, where Abraham Lincoln tried to heal it, and where William Faulkner revealed a century later that the country was still irretrievably racist and broken.

Even though much of its bloody Civil War past is hidden behind McDonald’s and Burger King and Dairy Queen and Walmart, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, today is still the symbolic capital of the endless American fight over the nation’s history.

Inevitably, that fight always comes down to race.  

And so that means that this is the town that best explains Donald Trump.

Once you understand that Trump’s rise is all about white fears and white power — the same motivations that triggered the Civil War — the Trump agenda begins to make sense.

Gettysburg is where the Confederates invaded the North to make their ultimate bid to protect slavery and white supremacy. Pickett’s Charge, on July 3, 1863, the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, lives on in Southern mythology as the so-called “high tide of the Confederacy,” the closest that Southerners believe they came to winning the Civil War.

But it really wasn’t that close. Pickett’s Charge was a disaster for the Confederates, a bloody massacre of thousands of rebel troops. After Gettysburg, it was just a matter of time before the Confederacy’s ultimate defeat.

Lincoln recognized Gettysburg’s real significance as the beginning of the end and so came here to give his most iconic speech to explain what the war was about. When he said in his Gettysburg Address that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” Americans at the time understood what he meant: an oligarchic slavocracy could not be allowed to run the nation.

But after Lee surrendered at Appomattox and the war ended in 1865, there were still millions of white people in the South who refused to accept the death of the slavocracy, while many more of their descendants have never accepted that white people and Black people can truly live as equals.

In his Yoknapatawpha County masterpiece, “Intruder in the Dust,” Faulkner revealed in 1948 what Southern white people really thought about race and American history. If only they could try Pickett’s Charge again:

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old … there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods … it’s all in the balance … we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think this time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory.”

What even Faulkner couldn’t imagine was that white people all across the nation would eventually come to sympathize with and perhaps even share that Confederate fantasy.

It is white hysteria, the same phenomenon that gripped the antebellum South and led to the Civil War, that has fueled the rise of Donald Trump.

The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America has never really been about economic anxiety, as so many pundits have claimed. True, many swing voters, including some minorities, have supported Trump by wrongly thinking that he would be good for the economy. But for Trump’s MAGA base, it has always been about race and racism.

The fact that MAGA voters aren’t motivated by the economy has become clear as Trump has tanked the stock market and threatened a global financial crisis with his crippling tariffs. Trump’s voters, who loudly complained about inflation under the Biden administration, now say they don’t care about the higher prices and financial panic generated by Trump’s tariffs. 

Instead of economic angst, MAGA is gripped by a demographic paranoia of the same kind that surged throughout the South in the years just before the Civil War. The antebellum South feared what was to come in 20 years: America’s western expansion would lead to the creation of so many free states that the South would eventually be outnumbered in Congress and lose its power to defend slavery. The Civil War was about the future.

Today, MAGA also fears the future: It fears that America will soon become so diverse that white people will lose their power over politics and society.

Here is the figure that freaks out MAGA the most: In 2025, only about 47 percent of American children under five years old are white.

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That one statistic explains MAGA hysteria — and explains much of Trump’s agenda. It explains his draconian anti-immigration and deportation policies and his attempts to end birthright citizenship. It also explains the anti-abortion movement and the right-wing pro-natal movement, both of which represent flailing attempts to increase the white percentage of the population. The racist truth about the right-wing pro-natal movement becomes clear by examining its contradictory positions; many of its leaders are virulently anti-immigration at the same time they say they fear population decline. They only fear white population decline.

As long as Trump demagogues about race and identity and takes actions that his base thinks are designed to curb minority population growth and enhance white power, MAGA will go along with anything else that he wants to do.

Right now, that racial bond between Trump and his base manifests itself through Trump’s draconian anti-immigration policies. Trump and his MAGA base are obsessed with immigrants. Trump has pushed out a frenzied series of anti-immigration orders, including, among many others, the freezing of funding for refugee resettlement and the scrapping of temporary protected status for refugees from Venezuela, the banning of migrant legal aid, detaining and deporting students simply because they were involved in pro-Palestinian protests, and the withdrawal of hundreds of other international student visas with no explanation. Many of his orders, including his attempt to end birthright citizenship, are facing ongoing legal challenges. The only point of Trump’s crude anti-immigration orders is to try to reduce the number of nonwhite people entering the country. That became clear when Trump extended refugee status to white South Africans, who he falsely claimed were being persecuted by the majority-Black South African government.

The consequences of MAGA’s demographic hysteria are similar to what happened in the antebellum South, when Southerners gave up on the idea of being part of the United States.

A sense of existential dread has led to the rise of radical right-wing politics in MAGA, combined with a surge in conspiracy theories that revolve around race and identity. Conspiracy theories once confined to the margins of the internet now flourish, most infamously one that claims that a leftist deep state secretly unleashed a surge in immigration in order to replace America’s white population. There is a parallel with the antebellum South, which was also immersed in conspiracy theories about race and identity: then, conspiracy theories were stoked by Southern fears of slave revolts, of the abolitionist movement, and of Abraham Lincoln.

Today, MAGA’s beliefs have spread so far that even more traditional Republicans have embraced the notion that liberals are seeking to sabotage traditional America. William Barr, who turned against Trump after serving as his attorney general in his first term, still insisted in 2024 that he couldn’t support a Democratic presidential candidate because he believed that a “continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide.”

Trump’s rise has been stoked by his unrelenting use of racist conspiracy theories, beginning with his false claims that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and highlighted during the 2024 campaign by his lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. His one great political skill has been his shameless willingness to lie to appeal to white people fearful of a diverse future and convert them into his MAGA disciples. While Trump’s MAGA base is not a majority of the country, it is large enough to dominate the Republican Party’s base, which explains why Republican politicians have been so reluctant to speak up against any of Trump’s chaotic actions.

What is most ominous today is that MAGA is now so immersed in conspiracy theories that it has developed a deep hatred of the federal government, much as the South did in the 1850s.

Trump’s followers not only believe that the federal government has been instrumental in their demographic decline, but they also seem convinced that Western-style liberal democracy is no longer the right political system for them. They appear willing to give up on democracy in exchange for a white nationalist autocrat — someone like Donald Trump.

The post Trump’s Power Feeds on White Demographic Fears appeared first on The Intercept.

In May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, told Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, that Russia had damaging information about Trump’s political rival Hillary Clinton.

That conversation in a London bar eventually triggered the Trump-Russia case, a sprawling counterintelligence and criminal inquiry into Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Trump win.

The Russian covert operation included the hacking of emails and related documents from Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party, and the spreading of anti-Clinton disinformation on social media.

The Russians worked hard to try to get Trump elected, and Trump and his campaign knew about it and welcomed the help. Famously, Trump used his platform at a campaign event in 2016 to publicly ask Moscow to provide even more help.

Today, the U.S. intelligence community believes that Russia wants to help Trump win again in 2024. That means that it is vital that Americans finally understand the truth about the Trump-Russia case, and about the dangerous relationship between Trump and Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.

The truth about the Trump-Russia case is outlined in a series of government inquiries and court cases, which when taken together show that Russian intelligence, acting on orders from Putin, launched a cyber war against American democracy. They also show that Trump enthusiastically welcomed the help from Russia, a country where he had previously sought out major business deals and financial support. During the 2016 campaign, Trump hired a campaign manager who had previously worked for a pro-Putin political leader in Ukraine and had also developed close ties to a Russian intelligence agent, with whom he shared inside information about the Trump campaign.

In the years since the Trump-Russia inquiry began, it has become obvious what Putin has been trying to accomplish by intervening in American elections to help Trump. He is determined to rebuild a Russian empire, one similar in scale to the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. He has been steadily working at his imperial project since he consolidated his power in Moscow in the early 2000s and has already sabotaged attempts to build a democracy in Belarus, helping to install a pro-Russian dictator there, while he has also engaged in a long-running campaign to do the same in the nation of Georgia.

His main target now is Ukraine, a democracy that is eager to join the European Union and NATO.

In 2014, Putin caught the West by surprise by suddenly seizing Crimea from Ukraine, and in 2022 launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a brutal war that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

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Putin never got over Russia’s defeat in the Cold War, and his ambition is to make Russia a true superpower once again. That means that the reconquest of former Soviet republics like Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine is just the first part of his long-term plan. Putin also wants to regain control over the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which were once part of the Soviet Union, and ultimately, he wants to expand Moscow’s sphere of influence over the old Warsaw Pact satellite countries in Eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. If he stays in power long enough, he may even go for the grand prize: retaking that portion of Germany that was once East Germany. All of that may sound far-fetched, but it has only been 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell, a time when Putin was a young KGB officer stationed in East Germany and was forced to watch the Soviet empire dissolve around him. 

Putin’s ambitions require that he makes certain that the United States doesn’t try to stop him from rebuilding his empire. So he has sought to aid Trump, who has created damaging political chaos in America and who opposes U.S. involvement in NATO and Ukraine and who has proven to be easily manipulated by the Russian dictator. At the same time, Putin has also sought to intervene in elections in Western Europe, backing right-wing extremists who also oppose European support for Ukraine.

Putin has been aided in his efforts by the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States and Europe; Christian fundamentalists see Putin as their champion in a global culture war. They see Ukraine as allied with the liberal and secular European Union and thus want Putin to win the war.

Trump would likely go along with the Christian nationalists, who are a key part of his base, and side with Putin against Ukraine. That would represent the end result of Putin’s decadelong efforts to install Trump in the White House.

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To hide the truth about Trump’s ties to Putin and Russia, Trump, his lieutenants, pro-Trump pundits have all worked hard to persuade voters that he is not in Putin’s pocket. A key part of that effort has been a long-running propaganda campaign designed to convince the public that the original Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax. Trump has then used that argument to try to discredit every other investigation conducted into his actions, from his two impeachments to his four criminal indictments.

To muddy the waters, they have focused on the so-called Steele dossier, a report put together by a former British intelligence officer which became public after the 2016 election. Trump has pointed to the Steele dossier’s flaws to claim that the entire Trump-Russia investigation was based on false information. But that is not true; the Steele dossier was not the basis for the FBI’s decision to open the case and played no role in its main investigation; special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the investigation from the FBI in 2017, did not rely on the Steele dossier at all.

Trump’s efforts to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation were aided by William Barr, his own attorney general, who preemptively made misleading statements about the findings of Mueller’s investigation before Mueller’s final report was made public, and then later appointed a pro-Trump special counsel to investigate the government’s own investigation of the Trump-Russia case. That blatantly politicized effort failed spectacularly.

Now, no amount of disinformation can hide the truth about the Trump-Russia case. The truth is staring us in the face. It can be seen in the dead of Ukraine.

The post The Trump Campaign’s Ties to Russia Were No Hoax appeared first on The Intercept.

For decades, reporters have been taught not to make Hitler analogies in stories about American politics. Adolf Hitler was so uniquely evil that any comparison of an American politician with the Nazi leader was considered unfair and out of bounds.

And then came Donald Trump.

Trump is the first modern American political figure to force journalists to reassess whether Hitler references meet their editorial standards.

In my columns and other articles for The Intercept, I have drawn attention to the increasingly obvious parallels between Hitler and Trump and between the Nazi movement and the MAGA cult. Yet most mainstream journalists have stubbornly stuck to the de facto ban on Hitler analogies and have refused to compare the two. That reluctance to point out the truth about Trump has been part of a larger pattern in the media of the so-called sane-washing of Trump, in which his demagoguery, wild conspiracy theories, and racist proposals are given credence and serious treatment by the political press corps. 

But in explosive new statements, Trump’s own former White House chief of staff has made it virtually impossible for the press to justify a continued ban on Trump/Hitler references. John Kelly, a retired Marine general and Trump’s longest serving chief of staff, told the New York Times and The Atlantic in interviews published this week that when he was president, Trump made it clear that he admired Hitler and yearned for his authoritarian power.

Kelly said that Trump repeatedly said in private that Hitler “did some good things,” and that Trump said he wanted the kind of “German generals” who served under Hitler and committed unspeakable war crimes in World War II. 

Kelly said he is convinced that Trump is a fascist.

In his interview with the New York Times, Kelly pointed out the definition of fascist, and said that it fits Trump: “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy … he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Meanwhile, Kelly told The Atlantic that Trump wanted American generals to act like Hitler’s Nazi generals. Kelly recalled asking Trump, “‘Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’”

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It has been widely known for years that Kelly knew explosive details about Trump’s time in the White House, but he has largely remained silent until now. He says that he has finally decided to reveal what he knows about Trump because he was fearful of Trump’s recent statements that he wants to use the U.S. military against his political rivals and dissidents. Trump has called his political opponents the “enemy from within,” and Kelly said that those statements finally prompted him to go public.

It is important that Kelly has finally spoken out before the election. But he could have done this much earlier; it is a wonder that the January 6 insurrection didn’t prompt him.

Of course, January 6 also didn’t convince the mainstream press to begin to regularly compare Trump to Hitler, even though the similarities between the 2021 insurrection and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 were there for all to see.  

The irony is that if Trump was a political figure in another country, the American press would have long since labeled him an autocrat. The U.S. media is susceptible to domestic pressures and so frequently avoids obvious truths about American political figures and about the actions of the U.S. government. In fact, the refusal by the American press to say that Trump is a would-be dictator is similar to the way in which the U.S. press refused to say that the Central Intelligence Agency had tortured prisoners at its black-site prisons during the war on terror. Rather than say that the CIA engaged in torture, the press shamefully used euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation” and “harsh interrogation.” For many years, the use of the word “torture” to describe what the CIA did was forbidden at many news organizations. That rhetorical smoothing helped the CIA avoid accountability.

Today, the press needs to avoid repeating that failure and plainly draw comparisons between Trump and Hitler. 

Now, finally, Kelly’s statements provide all the ammunition that the press needs. He has confirmed that Trump wants to be a dictator and that he represents an existential threat to American democracy. His warning comes like a fire bell in the night that the American press — and the American people — must heed.

The post Mainstream Media Was Afraid to Compare Trump to Hitler. Now the Press Has No Excuse. appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy.

Trump tried to stage a coup in the months after his defeat in the 2020 election and then incited a violent insurrection in an illegal attempt to stay in power. He is a convicted felon, a twice impeached, four-times-indicted con man and fraudster, the leader of the MAGA cult who uses conspiracy theories and lies about immigrants and minorities to stoke fear and hatred.

Above all, he is a clear and present danger to the modern American way of life. His greatest ambition is to become a dictator.

American voters need a concise closing argument, one that explains the stakes in the 2024 presidential election and makes clear why Trump can never again be trusted with power. Too many Americans seem to be ignoring the risks that another Trump presidency would pose to the nation, and so it is important to warn about him one more time.

Threat to Democracy 

Trump is a fascist who wants to overthrow the United States’ democratic system of government. He doesn’t hide his openness to ending American democracy, telling supporters they will never need to vote again after he wins this election. “Get out and vote, just this time,” he said in July, before adding: “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”

He fawns over his role model, Vladimir Putin, the autocratic Russian president who helped Trump get elected in 2016. Trump has already suggested that he won’t accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses, just like he refused to accept defeat in 2020.

In a court filing in early October, Jack Smith, the special counsel who has charged Trump in connection with the January 6 insurrection and his illegal efforts to stay in power, reminded Americans of the threat that Trump poses. With damning new details, Smith laid out the facts of how Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, showing that Trump knowingly pushed bogus claims of voter fraud with outrageous conspiracy theories in an illegal scheme to cling to power. 

“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” Smith wrote in the brief.

When those efforts failed, Trump used a speech at a rally outside the White House on January 6, 2021, to incite thousands of his followers to descend on the U.S. Capitol, where the election was in the process of being certified by Congress. Trump “knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him.” So he “delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol.”

Trump is responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6,” Smith wrote.

Imprison Political Opponents

Trump sees another term as president as a revenge tour.

He plans to weaponize the legal system by packing federal judgeships, the Justice Department, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies with lackeys and right-wing extremists in order to prosecute his political enemies. He falsely claims that he is a victim of persecution, but in reality that is what he plans to inflict on his political rivals. He will pardon the January 6 insurrectionists and fire Smith and the other prosecutors who have handled the federal criminal cases that have been brought against him. He plans to use the antiquated Insurrection Act to get the military to crush dissent.

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He will likely direct the Justice Department to challenge the votes of minorities, as he tried to do in swing states after the 2020 election, and may try to get compliant judges to throw out election results in key races in which Democratic candidates win. He is likely to repeat the tactics he used in 2020 to incite his brownshirt militias, like the Proud Boys, to intimidate voters at polling places. Just this month, Trump said the military should be used against Americans who disagree with him and said that liberals are “the enemy within.”

Dissent against Trump “should be easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” he has said.

Eliminate Reproductive Rights

Trump installed the three judges on the Supreme Court who provided the margin to overturn Roe v. Wade, and those justices now threaten to roll back reproductive rights even further. Worse, his own MAGA cult will probably pressure him to agree to a national abortion ban, despite his claims on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t sign such legislation. In October, Trump finally admitted that he was open to considering it. After saying in an interview that a national ban is “off the table,” he quickly reversed himself and said that he might be open to the idea, adding that “we’ll see what happens.”

Trump and the MAGA Republicans will try to put other extremist proposals into law to further restrict reproductive rights.

The next step would be a national ban on contraception. Earlier this year, Republicans in the Senate voted against a bill to protect access to contraception; many conservatives also oppose in vitro fertilization treatments. After crushing reproductive rights, the Trump Republicans want to impose a ban on no-fault divorce to increase the legal power of men over women, while trapping people in abusive marriages.

Concentration Camps and Mass Deportations for Immigrants

Trump’s campaign this year is just one long racist rant against immigrants. When he was president, Trump imposed cruel immigration policies, including family separation, but now his anti-immigration rhetoric and proposals are much worse. He traffics in racist tropes and conspiracy theories pulled from a weird alternate reality where immigrants kidnap and eat cats. He is exploiting the hysteria that has gripped many white Americans over their fear of becoming a minority. Trump stokes those worries by using Nazi-style rhetoric that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

Trump vows to order the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, which could mean the forced removal of an estimated 11 million people from the country.

That would inevitably lead to the creation of a network of concentration camps bigger than the entire U.S. prison system. And once those camps are built, Trump and his allies are likely to find other uses for them as well.

Create a Theocracy

Trump’s most dangerous supporters are Christian nationalists, a growing cadre of evangelicals who don’t believe in the separation of church and state and don’t even really believe in democracy. They share a dystopian vision for a Christian-dominated fascist regime and yearn for a dictator who will impose a religious order on society. Trump appeals directly to Christian nationalists in his campaign speeches when he talks of the need to reclaim a mythical lost white Christian past: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before. … I really believe it’s the biggest thing missing from this country, the biggest thing missing. We have to bring back our religion. We have to bring back Christianity in this country.”

Trump’s bogus religiosity is purely opportunistic; he is a deeply immoral man who couldn’t care less about Christianity except as a way to motivate his political base. 

Increase Censorship and Destroy the Media

Trump wants to crush dissent and impose broad censorship over the media. He will seek retribution against the press for criticizing and investigating him, and if he gains power he will bulldoze the First Amendment in order to crush independent journalism. 

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Trump has repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people,” and promises to use the government and the courts to seek revenge against individual reporters and entire news organizations that have dared to reveal the truth about him.

Trump will also enable more book banning by right-wing groups who have hijacked public school boards and state government agencies to block books from being taught in schools or being held in libraries. Those groups have frequently targeted books about gender and racial identity, but with Trump in office they are likely to go after many more books about history and politics and current events than ever before.

A Puppet for Putin

Trump is eager to bow down once again before his master, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

Trump and his minions, including many right-wing pundits, have worked tirelessly over the last few years to try to convince Americans that Trump is not Putin’s pawn, and that the Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax.

But Trump is Putin’s lackey, and the Trump-Russia case was not a hoax.

Putin ordered Russian intelligence to help Trump win the 2016 election, and Trump was happy to go along with it.

The Trump-Russia case was a counterintelligence and criminal inquiry into a Russian covert action operation to manipulate the 2016 presidential election by hacking and releasing Democratic emails and related documents to damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. The Russian operation, which also included a disinformation campaign that was spread on social media platforms, was designed to help Trump win the election. There is no doubt today that Russia worked to help get Trump elected; the only question that remains unresolved is the degree to which Trump and his lieutenants actively collaborated with Russia in 2016. But there is no doubt that they knew about and welcomed the help.

Now, U.S. intelligence officials have told Congress that Putin wants to help Trump win again in 2024.

If Trump wins, he will do Putin’s bidding by selling out Ukraine and NATO.

Trump is bitter at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he refused to buckle under pressure from Trump in 2019 to fabricate a damaging investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and thus help Trump’s political fortunes. When Trump’s scheme was uncovered, he was impeached by the House.

But right-wing hatred of Ukraine runs even deeper than Trump’s personal grievances. Christian nationalists love Putin; they see him as their fundamentalist ally in a global culture war against the liberal West. They hate Ukraine because they see it as allied with liberal Western Europe.

Christian nationalists want Putin to win the war and crush Ukraine. They also want the United States to withdraw from NATO to end American support for “woke” Western Europe. Trump is likely to go along with Putin and the Christian nationalists and abandon both Ukraine and NATO, leaving Western Europe on its own to face an emboldened Russia.

Christian nationalists are also ardent supporters of Israel’s right-wing leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and so Trump would give Israel a green light to conduct an even more brutal military campaign in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and the West Bank. Trump would be happy to watch Israel crush the Palestinian people; he doesn’t support the creation of a Palestinian state, while his MAGA Republican supporters in Congress have already proposed banning Palestinians from entering the U.S. and demanding the deportation of Palestinian passport holders already living here. 

Dictator for Life

If Trump wins, he might not go away after just one more four-year term. Despite the fact that he is already 78 and is increasingly showing signs of mental decline, he may try to stay in power, despite the two-term presidential term limits imposed by the Constitution. And he might get the blessing of the right-wing Supreme Court.

If Trump does so, he could follow Putin’s example, who circumvented Russia’s constitution that limited the country’s president to two consecutive terms. At the end of his second term as president in 2008, Putin became prime minister for four years before becoming president again in 2012. He then changed the Russian Constitution to eliminate the two-term limit.

Trump could argue that under the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, he could serve as vice president under a compliant president and then return to power when the president resigns to make room for him. That would circumvent the 22nd Amendment’s two-term presidential limit. Some constitutional scholars have been warning about this kind of scheme for years.

If you think that is too far-fetched, you haven’t been paying attention to Trump. 

The post Americans Need a Closing Argument Against Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

The outcomes of the two biggest wars in the world hang in the balance of the American presidential election, even though U.S. troops are not involved in combat in either one.

If Donald Trump wins the election, both wars will get much, much worse. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both want Trump to win the American presidential election so that they can prolong and intensify their brutal wars without the possibility of American interference.

Netanyahu has conducted his war in Gaza believing that the Biden administration can’t rein him in before the presidential election without risking severe damage to the political prospects of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Netanyahu has purposefully sought to put the Democrats in a bind between the conflicting political demands of two components of the party’s base — a progressive constituency appalled by the war and a centrist faction that backs Israel. Netanyahu has thus forced the Biden administration to engage in a difficult balancing act: supporting Israel, while still pushing for a ceasefire and the long-term goal of the creation of a Palestinian state — a compromise stance that has outraged progressives while also upsetting many conservative Jewish voters.

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But Netanyahu also knows that if Trump wins, he will give Israel a green light to conduct a far more brutal campaign in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and the West Bank than he has during the Biden administration. While Biden has called for limits on Netanyahu’s conduct of the war, he has ultimately not stood in Israel’s way despite a growing groundswell of opposition to the war within the party. Whether that voter pressure might eventually push Harris to put more limits on Israel is an open question. But under no circumstances will Trump pressure Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire and will never demand that Israel agree to the creation of a Palestinian state. Trump will endorse Netanyahu’s push for Israeli control over all remaining Palestinian territory. Many Israelis now want Trump to win in order to allow for a more aggressive Israeli military campaign; a September poll found that 58 percent of Israelis would vote for Trump if they could.

For Netanyahu, escalating the war into a regional conflict against Hezbollah and Iran also provides an October surprise designed to damage Democratic chances in the U.S. election.

Meanwhile, Putin’s war against Ukraine will remain in limbo until the U.S. election is decided. If Trump wins, he will almost certainly withdraw U.S. support for Ukraine, and Putin will be free to mount an even more aggressive military campaign. Trump is also likely to reduce or end the U.S. commitment to NATO, leaving the Baltic states and other countries in Eastern Europe under an increasing threat from Russia.

The central role that American politics plays in both the Russian war in Ukraine and the Israeli wars in Gaza and Lebanon has come into sharp focus over the past few days, culminating in Iran’s missile attack on Israel on Tuesday in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut last Friday. 

The Iranian missile strikes against Israel pose a serious threat of provoking a much wider war in the Middle East almost exactly one year after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, which triggered Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The Biden administration said that the U.S. is supporting Israel’s defense against the Iranian attack, which included at least 200 ballistic missiles fired at Israel. But United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned against “escalation after escalation” and called for a ceasefire. 

The missile strike occurred just after Netanyahu returned to Israel from New York. On that trip, he gave a militant address to the U.N. General Assembly in which he vowed not to stop Israel’s multiplying wars until he achieved “total victory.” While Netanyahu gave his speech at the United Nations, he was really addressing the American voters who will go to the polls in a little more than a month. He wanted his message of total victory — and his Orwellian notion of “de-escalation through escalation” — to be heard loudly on the campaign trail, signaling that he will oppose any peace efforts that the United States might demand if Harris wins.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, was also in the United States last week, meeting with both Harris and Trump. The Biden administration pledged $8 billion in more aid to Ukraine, while Trump, who has repeatedly criticized Zelenskyy, pouted and nearly canceled a meeting with the Ukrainian leader.

When they did finally meet, Trump made a point of saying that he has a “very good relationship” with Putin. Trump’s pro-Russian running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, also attacked Zelenskyy for touring an ammunition factory in Pennsylvania where the Ukrainian president thanked the workers for supplying shells for the Ukrainian military. Vance was petulant because Zelenskyy toured the factory with the governor of Pennsylvania, who happens to be a Democrat.

In fact, it is no secret that Trump, Vance, and the MAGA cult that now dominates the Republican Party support Putin and want Russia to win the war and conquer Ukraine. Vance is part of the Christian nationalist base of the party, which loves Putin largely because he has cracked down on gay rights.

For his part, Putin sees Trump as his puppet who will meekly stand by while he conquers Ukraine and rebuilds the Russian empire in Eastern Europe.

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Putin is once again working to help Trump win, and just as he did in 2016, he is using the internet to do it. Russian disinformation designed to help Trump is accelerating in the weeks leading up to the election. In September, the U.S. government alleged that a group of right-wing influencers were secretly being funded by Russia. Moscow has worked hard to amplify conspiracy theories and right-wing narratives. Spreading conspiracy theories about racial issues in the United States has long been a staple of Russian propaganda dating back to the Cold War. But Russian disinformation is more effective today than ever before, because Trump willingly echoes it, which leads the docile mainstream press to write about it, creating a horrific echo chamber.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Russian meddling in the presidential race in order to help Trump win became an explosive issue, leading to the politically polarizing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, which dominated the headlines throughout much of Trump’s time in office. Today, by contrast, Russia’s disinformation campaign designed to help Trump win again is taken for granted, and has been met with a collective shrug by the American public. But if it works to help Trump win, the consequences for the United States and the world will be disastrous.

In fact, the reason both Putin and Netanyahu to win the election is simple: They know that with Trump in the White House, their ruthless wars can continue without even the threat of repercussions.

The post The Reason Netanyahu and Putin Both Want a Trump Victory appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump doesn’t try to campaign on any real issues. Instead, he traffics in racist tropes and conspiracy theories as he tries to get Americans to go down a rabbit hole into a dark alternate reality where immigrants kidnap and eat cats, the 2020 election was stolen, vaccines are poison, and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is not really Black.

He has filled his third campaign for the presidency with a team that peddles conspiracy theorists, including Laura Loomer, JD Vance, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Racism, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism are at the heart of many of Trumpworld’s conspiracy theories, but it is up to Trump’s most loyal MAGA cultists to sort out the political meaning of each new harebrained idea they are told to believe. Meanwhile, the nation’s political press corps lags far behind trying to fact-check Trump and his minions, like King Canute trying to hold back the tide.

Above all, Trump has built his campaign around conspiracy theories designed to stoke racist fears of immigrants and minorities, exploiting the hysteria that grips many white Americans over the demographic changes of the last few decades that have transformed the U.S. into a more diverse nation.

This is not new for Trump, who announced his 2016 campaign alleging Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists. But this time around, stoking and exploiting racist fears of immigrants is essentially all that he’s running on.

Trump has frequently said that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

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Considering his rhetoric, Trump’s campaign slogan might as well be “Blood and Soil.” That was the Nazi slogan calling for a racially pure Aryan German nation built around the pastoral ideal of rural life. It was also the original headline on a September 14 column in the New York Times by Jamelle Bouie describing Vance’s willingness to spread false conspiracy claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were kidnapping and eating cats. Faced with complaints from Trump operatives and other right-wingers, the New York Times softened the headline to mush.

But “Blood and Soil” does capture what Trump and his legion of conspiracy theorists are doing. Trump and the MAGA cult have turned their backs on the cherished American tradition that the United States is unique because it is built on shared beliefs, rather than whether someone was born here or immigrated here.

Members of Trump’s legion of conspiracy theorists live in their own swamps of lies and disinformation.

Loomer, an extremely online far-right figure who until now was perhaps best known for spreading the lie that 9/11 was an inside job, has been traveling closely with Trump during the campaign. Kennedy, meanwhile, who ended his fringe presidential campaign and endorsed Trump in August, has a long history of spreading anti-vaccine misinformation and has branched out to add baseless conspiracy theories that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that anti-depressants cause school shootings, and that chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender.

What binds these conspiracy theories together is the way they are designed to damage the credibility of experts, scientists, and governments. Well-informed and educated voters have fled Trump and MAGA, and he relies on so-called low information voters instead. 

They are far more susceptible than other voters to Trump’s racist lies, and winning over these voters with conspiracy theories is a way for Trump to shore up his base. 

While spreading the lie that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, Trump and Vance have refused to denounce bomb threats and other threats of violence targeting the city as a result of their lies. The threats of violence have gotten so bad that the Ohio state police have had to step in and announce that it will help protect schools in Springfield, while Republican Gov. Mike DeWine personally debunked the rumors spread by Trump and Vance.

Vance’s role in spreading the vile falsehood about the immigrants eating pets has been particularly egregious — since he knows that he has continued to lie even after he and his staff were told that the stories weren’t true. He’s now added new lies that Haitian immigrants are causing an increase in communicable diseases in Springfield, which the director of the Ohio health department quickly said was false.

Of all of the members of Trump’s conspiracy legion, Vance is the most intriguing, because we can now watch, in real time, as he descends into a conspiracy theory-fueled alternative reality. Loomer and Kennedy have long since left reality behind, but Vance was as recently as 2016 lionized as a bestselling author and an important new literary voice and a Trump critic. Unlike many others who have slowly fallen into the madness of the alt-world, Vance seems to be making a very conscious choice to suddenly jump in, as if that was part of his bargain to become Trump’s running mate.

On CNN last weekend, Vance admitted as much. 

When confronted with the fact that he is spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” 

Vance has sold his soul. Just like every other Republican who has allowed the GOP to be captured by conspiracy theorists.

The post Trump’s Conspiracy Theory Campaign appeared first on The Intercept.

Maybe, just maybe, Judge Juan Merchan saved American democracy last week.

On Friday, the New York state judge delayed Donald Trump’s sentencing on his felony conviction for falsifying business records to hide his hush-money scheme to buy the silence of a former porn star in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign. 

Trump was trying to cover up his affair with Stormy Daniels just after his campaign had nearly been derailed by the October release of an “Access Hollywood” videotape in which he talked openly about how he harassed and molested women. Figuring his campaign might not survive a second sex scandal, Trump was willing to break the law to keep the adulterous incident secret. 

Now, Trump won’t be sentenced in the case until after the November election.

Many political pundits and analysts called Merchan’s decision a victory for Trump, validating Trump’s campaign to sidetrack and delay his four criminal cases before the election. 

Initially, I agreed with that assessment. But then I started to think about the dangers of allowing a demagogue to portray himself as a victim. 

Of course, Trump has long cast himself as a persecuted victim: a victim of the Justice Department, Congress, the media, or whoever else has most recently sought to hold him accountable for his many lies, impeachable actions, and criminality. It is the cynical playbook that he has used over and over again to whip up his followers and get them to believe his insane conspiracy theories. He doesn’t care that his rhetoric incited an effort to overturn the government during the January 6 insurrection, or that violent white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys follow his lead, or that his dark conspiracy theories led to an attack on an FBI office. Research has found that more than a quarter of Republicans now believe that political violence is acceptable. 

But a criminal sentencing in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign would have helped Trump sell his fake victimhood to a wider audience, beyond his MAGA minions. 

Without the sentencing — and with his other three criminal cases in limbo — Trump can still claim he is persecuted, as he did during this week’s presidential debate, but it will be less effective.   

History shows there is a risk in holding would-be dictators accountable for their actions at crucial political moments. The best-known case happened exactly one century ago. 

Adolf Hitler’s 1924 trial for treason provides an important lesson for how to deal with Trump.  

Hitler was a fringe political figure in Germany before his trial began in February 1924. The trial came just months after Hitler led an insurrection that became known to history as the Beer Hall Putsch, a failed effort by Hitler and the new Nazi Party to take over the provincial government of Bavaria as a precursor to staging a coup in Berlin to take over all of Germany. Hitler was trying to follow the model set by Benito Mussolini, another fascist who had gained power in Italy after his 1922 March on Rome. 

Hitler’s putsch began on November 8, 1923, when he and his fellow Nazis stormed a political meeting at a beer hall in Munich where Bavaria’s state commissioner was speaking. Hitler fired a pistol and announced that “the national revolution has begun,” while other Nazis surrounded the hall and blocked its main entrance with a machine gun. 

But Hitler’s coup attempt quickly began to collapse. When about 2,000 Nazis tried to march into central Munich the next morning, they were met by police and a firefight broke out, leaving 15 Nazis, four police officers, and one bystander dead.

Hitler and many of his lieutenants were soon arrested and charged with high treason. At first, Hitler was despondent; he thought his life was over. But by the time his trial began, he was primed to turn the courtroom into a platform from which he could spout his lies and propaganda. 

Hitler had the benefit of going on trial at a fraught political moment. Post-war Germany was suffering an economic meltdown, while many Germans were casting about for people to blame for the nation’s defeat in World War I and were resentful of the onerous terms imposed on Germany by the victorious allies in the Treaty of Versailles. A large percentage of Germans came to believe that Germany had not really lost the war on the battlefield. Instead, they were convinced by the “stab in the back” conspiracy theory: that the German army hadn’t been defeated, and instead the nation’s political will had simply collapsed in the closing weeks of the war. For that, they blamed Jews and Socialists and other groups that they claimed had forced the surrender and the abdication of the Kaiser.           

Hitler took advantage of this chaotic political climate during his trial. Sympathetic judges allowed him to engage in demagogic speech, enabling him to portray himself as a martyr who was trying to save Germany from the evil forces behind Germany’s postwar Weimar Republic. Hitler didn’t try to fight the treason charges but instead just claimed that he was a German patriot determined to oust the real criminals in the government. He called the Weimar government the “traitors of 1918,” who were to blame for Germany’s defeat.

Before the trial’s end, Hitler gave a dramatic speech in the courtroom that resonated wildly with his diehard right-wing supporters. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the Goddess who presides over the Eternal Court of History will with a smile tear in pieces the charge of the Public Prosecutor and the verdict of this court,” he said. “For she acquits us.” 

Hitler received an unbelievably light sentence; he was released after serving just nine months. While in prison, he dictated “Mein Kampf” to other Nazi prisoners. 

The putsch and his theatrical trial turned Hitler into a political star in Germany; he and his supporters were able to claim that he was persecuted by a corrupt legal system. 

To be sure, the parallels between Hitler and Trump are not precise. It took Hitler nearly a decade after his trial to gain power, while Trump’s sentencing would have taken place just weeks before the presidential election. Most importantly, the economic and political conditions in the United States today are nothing like Germany in the 1920s.  

But Hitler and Trump have relied on the same style of victimization and demagoguery. Both saw their political fortunes rise thanks to claims of persecution and martyrdom. Trump’s playbook — claiming that he is a patriot battling dark forces inside the government and other elite institutions — was also Hitler’s playbook. 

While it is disappointing that Trump has yet to be held accountable for any of his many crimes, it is possible that it is better for the nation that he won’t be seen by many voters as a persecuted victim in the weeks before the election. Trump in handcuffs might only help him politically.

The post It’s Good Trump Won’t Be Sentenced Until After the Election appeared first on The Intercept.

Over the last few years, as it grew increasingly likely that Donald Trump would mount a third campaign for the White House, leading press critics and others in the media vowed that this time had to be different. The press couldn’t fail in its coverage of Trump once again.

This time, it must aggressively investigate Trump while focusing coverage on the threat that he poses to democracy. The stakes for the nation in the election, not just the odds of who was likely to win the campaign, should be front and center in the press coverage, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argued.

But the change in coverage hasn’t happened. Instead, the press has doubled down on horse-race coverage, proving unable to alter its traditional formula for campaign coverage. Distracted by the campaign’s dramatic moments, highlighted by the attempted assassination of Trump and President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, day-to-day, process-driven coverage of the campaign remains paramount. Horse-race coverage is back in full force, and the threat Trump poses to democracy is now an afterthought. 

The calls for reforms in covering Trump emerged because of the litany of failures in past coverage. When Trump first ran for president in 2016, the press was caught flat-footed, flummoxed by how to report on a racist demagogue. Journalists tried to cover Trump like every other candidate they had covered in the past, seeking to fit his lunacy into their traditional coverage formulas. But that disastrous effort led to recriminations over the inadequate coverage that failed to capture his malevolence.  

In 2020, the press was caught flat-footed once again, this time after the election, when Trump refused to accept defeat and tried to mount a coup to stay in power. During the campaign, the press had largely ignored the mounting evidence that Trump was planning to reject the results of the election and later failed to adequately track the warning signs of an insurrection, even as it was openly discussed among right-wing extremists. 

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Finally, after January 6, 2021, it seemed certain that the nation’s press was ready to cover Trump like a dangerous demagogue, rather than as a normal American politician. The fact that Trump was also convicted of a felony early in the 2024 campaign made changes in coverage seem inevitable.

But the press seems to have amnesia. It is as if journalists have forgotten that Trump was impeached twice, criminally indicted four times, and already convicted once. He should be facing three more criminal trials this year in the midst of the campaign, but he’s so far been saved from that fate by a series of shockingly partisan rulings by judges that he appointed. 

Yet the insurrection, the indictments, the criminal conviction, the impeachments tend to receive little more than brief mentions in the Trump campaign coverage today. Poll-driven horse-race stories now dominate, overwhelming the scattered attempts by the press to hold Trump accountable.   

Just over the last few days, political coverage has been overwhelmed by endless stories about an endorsement of Trump by independent candidate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and about Trump’s waffling on debating Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on ABC News. 

Those kinds of stories and more horse-race trivia are featured in the endless loops of bite-sized stories featured 24-7 on the homepages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other news organizations.  

Warnings of the danger Trump poses to American democracy are not in evidence on the daily campaign news feeds. (It will be intriguing to watch in the coming days how the political press deals with Tuesday’s decision by Special Counsel Jack Smith to issue a new criminal indictment of Trump in connection with January 6, on charges revised so that the case can survive under the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity.)

For Trump to escape much scrutiny from the press for the third time can be attributed in part to the deep historical, technological, and financial trends that have swept through the news industry.  

Modern American political coverage has its origins in the 1960 presidential campaign between Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy and Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. The 1960 race fundamentally altered the way journalists thought about and practiced campaign coverage.

“The Making of the President 1960,” a ground-breaking book about the Kennedy–Nixon race by Theodore White, has had a long-lasting impact on how journalists cover presidential campaigns. White’s book was a bestseller and won a Pulitzer Prize because it offered something new: White wrote about the presidential campaign as a yearlong narrative, an adventurous arc that took the reader from the snows of New Hampshire to the November day when the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod was suddenly transformed into the home of the president-elect. White created the modern campaign book, and with it, a narrative framing that became the model for generations of political reporters. Thanks to White’s book, the presidential campaign, a quadrennial event, became the story; examining policies and issues and investigating potential scandals all became secondary.

Television also came of age as a political force in 1960, and the nationally televised Kennedy–Nixon debates changed the relationship between candidates and the press. The television networks became more powerful at the expense of newspapers and weekly news magazines. Presidential campaigns were now dominated by televised visuals, and reporters in turn focused their coverage on the imagery and symbolism of campaigns, rather than the substance. Which candidate was best on television became the story. 

That transformation was captured in “The Selling of the President 1968,” another seminal campaign book that documented the way in which Madison Avenue advertising and marketing executives were able to remake and polish Nixon’s image, propelling him to victory after he was beaten by the more telegenic Kennedy in 1960. The book, by Joe McGinniss, was the first cynical examination of how television and advertising were changing campaigns, and it convinced political reporters that they should focus much of their coverage on the marketing gurus behind the candidates. That led their reporting even deeper into the weeds of the campaign process — and the horse race. 

No book has had a greater influence on the current generation of campaign reporters than “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” Richard Ben Cramer’s iconic book about the 1988 presidential campaign. “What It Takes” has shaped presidential campaign coverage ever since its publication in 1992, almost certainly in ways that Cramer never intended. The book provides deeply researched profiles of the major candidates in 1988, concluding that George Herbert Walker Bush was the most willing of all of them to slash and burn his way to victory. That has given the book an unintended legacy by convincing reporters that they should focus on whether candidates are willing to do anything, including sacrificing their integrity, in order to win. That has led to a style of campaign coverage that downplays ethical and moral lapses unless they get in the way of electoral victory. Long after Cramer’s death in 2013, “What It Takes” has inadvertently provided the narrative formulation that reporters have used to cover Trump. 

Technological change has also played a big role in making sure that horse-race coverage remains dominant. 

In the 1980s, broadcast television was revolutionized with the shift from film to video, which made it possible for network reporters to file more often and more quickly from the field. At the same time, the founding of CNN in 1980 ushered in the era of cable news, taking full advantage of new commercial satellite technology and the shift from film to video to fill endless hours of daily campaign coverage. The gaping maw of the 24-hour news cycle led to a constant hunger for new content, which meant that minor campaign process stories were treated like big news on an endless loop. 

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Cable news was followed by the rise of the internet and social media, which led to even greater demands for quick hits from the campaign trail. After Twitter was founded in 2006, many of its earliest and most avid users were political journalists, who used it to track campaigns on a minute-by-minute basis. No tactical decision by a campaign was too trivial for reporters to catalog on their Twitter feeds.

These trends all converged with the 2007 founding of Politico; its business model was built around the idea that it would cover politics faster and in shorter bites than the New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media. Politico was unabashedly focused on horse-race coverage, and it soon was setting the tone in Washington for daily campaign reporting. Before long, Politico alumni were being hired by every major media outlet, and the Politico style of horse-race coverage came to dominate the entire political journalism landscape.

The brutal financial pressures facing news organizations today have also had a big impact on political coverage. 

Demands for more web traffic have forced news organizations to put a priority on quickly written breaking news stories that help generate hourly attention. Few news organizations now can afford to have reporters take the time required to dig deeply. Horse-race coverage — quick and easy to write or broadcast — is perfect for today’s attention-deficit news landscape. And, at a time of intense political polarization, horse-race coverage has the added benefit of helping news organizations insulate themselves from criticism that they are too partisan.  

But there are costs for news organizations caused by their horse-race obsession — costs that many in the business still don’t comprehend. Horse-race coverage is substance-free journalism that simply recounts which candidate is up and which one is down. That means that in addition to a lack of investigative and accountability journalism, there is also a dearth of in-depth stories on policies and issues. 

Campaign officials take advantage of the media’s horse-race fixation when it benefits them. But increasingly, they are trying to break through the horse-race noise by going completely around the press to get their messages out to the public. It is a trend that threatens to make the political press irrelevant. 

Trump was one of the first candidates to fully embrace the new ways available to campaigns to skirt the press. In 2016, political reporters were not prepared for Trump’s prolific use of social media, which enabled him to speak directly to his supporters and influence the campaign narrative on an hourly basis. Reporters found themselves writing daily stories about each Trump tweet, which had the effect of allowing Trump to hijack the horse-race coverage.  

The trend among campaigns to ignore the press and its fixation on horse-race coverage reached new levels at last week’s Democratic National Convention, where more than 200 online influencers were credentialed by the Democratic Party to post content for their followers on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms. That move deeply angered some in the traditional political press, but the Democrats saw it as a way to communicate more directly with young people and others turned off by conventional campaign coverage. 

Yet the political press still doesn’t understand that campaigns are going around them in part because of their obsession with the horse race. They don’t get the connection.

And so horse-race coverage is likely to keep its iron grip on political journalism — an arrangement that leaves candidates unchallenged, important questions unasked, and voters uninformed. It’s an arrangement that Trump is eager to exploit.

The post Why the Media Won’t Report the Truth About Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

To understand the rise of Donald Trump, you don’t need to go to a diner in the Midwest or read “Hillbilly Elegy,” J.D. Vance’s memoir.

You just need to know these basic facts:

In 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population.

In 2024, white people account for about 58 percent of the U.S. population.

Trump appeals to white people gripped by demographic hysteria. Especially older white people who grew up when white people represented a much larger share of the population. They fear becoming a minority.

While the Census Bureau says there are still 195 million white people in America and that they are still the majority, the white population actually declined slightly in 2023, and experts believe that they will become a minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.

Every component of the Trump-Republican agenda flows from these demographic fears.

The Trump phenomenon and the surge of right-wing extremism in America was never about economic anxiety, as too many political reporters claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign. 

It was, and still is, about race and racism.

The mainstream press has been afraid to say this directly and succinctly. Political pundits keep looking for other causes; after Trump’s upset win in 2016, they thought that “Hillbilly Elegy” was the answer. I read the book in its entirety — something I doubt most campaign reporters can claim — and it offers nothing about Trump or the economic anxieties in the American heartland that supposedly led to Trump’s election. It’s a personal memoir about his dysfunctional family, and the closest thing Vance gets to a political message comes when he writes that his relatives screwed up their lives on their own and have no one else to blame.

But the political press somehow concluded that the book’s narrative unlocked the key to understanding Trump voters, and the ambitious Vance, now Trump’s running mate, didn’t bother to correct them.

The press hasn’t done any better in the years since. It has now failed to adequately cover Trump for three straight presidential campaigns.

The simple truth is that Trump is a racist, and it is his shamelessness about his racism that appeals to white people. He says what they wish they could get away with saying. They forgive his criminal behavior, his lies, his egomaniacal behavior, and his other flaws because of his racism, not in spite of it. They don’t care that his economic policies will benefit billionaires and not them, just so long as he makes sure minorities have it worse than them. Vance followed up “Hillbilly Elegy,” his supposed paean to the working class, by becoming a puppet of right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, who bankrolled his Senate campaign in Ohio. Trump no doubt chose Vance to be his running mate at least in part to get more money from billionaires for his campaign. 

The evidence of Trump’s racism is so overwhelming that the press and many voters now seem to consider it old news, shrugging at his constant stream of bigoted comments. That is exactly what Trump is counting on; it’s difficult to remember that his racism was still considered shocking as recently as 2016 when he ran for president. 

Trump has been a racist his whole life; the Justice Department sued him for racial discrimination in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he took out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five — Black and Latino men falsely accused in a New York City rape case — and he has stubbornly refused to apologize to the exonerated men.

He first gained prominence as a political figure for being an obsessive “birther,” propagating false conspiracy claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus couldn’t legally be president.

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Trump remains obsessed with race and is constantly looking for ways to discredit and dehumanize any and all minorities: African Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, Muslims, Asians. He’s claimed that Mexican immigrants are murderers and rapists, that Obama was the founder of ISIS, that Covid-19 was the “kung flu,” that migrants crossing the southern border have been released from mental institutions and are coming to take “Black jobs,” that Haitians probably have AIDS.

When Trump first emerged as a presidential contender, many Republican Party leaders claimed they were disgusted by his blatant racism.

Now they embrace it.

Dominated by Trump, the Republican Party adheres to policies designed both to maintain white political power and increase the white percentage of the nation’s population.

Once you understand that it is all about white power — especially white male power — the Trump-Republican agenda begins to make sense.

The right-wing obsession over racial demographics becomes obvious in the “pro-natalism” movement, which advocates for conservatives to have more children to take control of society. The mission of the movement is “to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy,” according to a fascinating recent story in Politico.

For the right wing, pro-natalism means looking for every possible means to increase the white percentage of the nation’s population. Through this lens, it’s not hard to see why Republicans remain virulently anti-immigration and strictly opposed to abortion. 

Those two issues may appear unrelated, but in fact Republican positions on both stem at least in part from white demographic fears. Republicans want to halt the rise in the nonwhite population by curbing immigration. At the same time, they hope their abortion bans will boost domestic birth rates — staving off white demographic decline. They also want to ban contraceptives and no-fault divorce, forcing women to stay in marriages and have more children.

The Republican Party’s white nationalism is often justified in religious terms, since much of this agenda designed to enhance white power stems from the party’s Christian fundamentalist base. Along with Protestant evangelicals, the Republican religious base now includes fundamentalist Catholics, who stridently oppose abortion.

Fundamentalist Catholicism has started to attract young conservative activists, politicians, and influencers, who seem to searching for a faith steeped in tradition and hierarchy.

Converting to Catholicism has thus become a culture war flex for well-off American conservatives; it is not a coincidence that Vance converted in 2019, just as he was also in the process of converting from being anti-Trump into a Trump lackey. In April, right-wing influencer Candace Owens became one of the latest extremely online conservatives to convert. Leonard Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society and the man widely credited for turning the Supreme Court into a conservative bastion, is now focused on creating new right-wing Catholic organizations to deepen right-wing power in the American Catholic Church while expanding his culture war reach.

Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalist Catholics share a common right-wing political agenda, and both groups have aided the rise of Christian nationalism, a movement driven by opposition to any separation of church and state. Christian nationalists call for a return to a Judeo-Christian America, code for a return to a nation in which Christian whites held all the power. The most prominent Christian Nationalist in politics today is Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, who has said that the idea that the Constitution calls for a separation of church and state is a “misnomer.” 

Christian nationalism and white power also help explain the confounding nature of current Republican foreign policy. Many Republicans today oppose U.S. military aid to Ukraine but strongly support military aid to Israel.

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To understand that policy mashup requires an understanding of the beliefs of Christian nationalists. They consider Vladimir Putin to be a fundamentalist Christian, a guardian of traditional white values, largely because he has cracked down on LGBTQ+ rights in Russia. By contrast, they associate Ukraine with Western Europe, which they think is too woke. Andrew Torba, founder of the far-right site Gab who wrote a self-published book called “Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Disciplining Nations,” said after the Russia’s invasion that “Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular western globalist empire.” Nick Fuentes, another online Christian nationalist, said on Telegram after the Russian invasion that “I wish Putin was president of America.”

Meanwhile, Christian nationalists believe the Bible demands that they embrace Israel. They see it as the fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that Israel must exist as a precondition to the second coming of Jesus. Such biblically-based support among Christian nationalists means that the Republican Party will support Israel no matter what actions it takes in Gaza.

Increasingly, the Trump–Republican Party has become explicit in its embrace of policies designed to expand white power and appease white nationalists. In fact, several of the right-wing authors of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for a second Trump term filled with extremist proposals, have white supremacist backgrounds and writings. Trump has tried to disown Project 2025, but its authors include former Trump administration officials. Whether Trump officially endorses Project 2025 or not, it remains a good barometer of the white nationalist hold on the Republican Party.

The post Racism Is Why Trump Is So Popular appeared first on The Intercept.

Marvin Risen, my father’s brother, died long before I was born. He was an FBI agent in Nashville and was killed in a plane crash in 1943.

But decades later, when I was growing up, something about Marvin’s death still troubled my family.

My parents often talked about how they had never been given any answers about Marvin’s death, and that led them to speculate wildly, trying to connect the dots. They openly questioned whether he had been the victim of wartime sabotage. His plane crashed in the middle of World War II, and his Nashville FBI office was not far from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then home to a critical part of the Manhattan Project: America’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. They sometimes wondered whether spies had blown up Marvin’s plane because he had uncovered an atomic espionage ring.

It wasn’t until this year — more than 80 years after my uncle’s death — that the full story of Marvin Risen and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would finally be resolved. But even then, the FBI’s painful treatment of our family would leave an open, unhealed wound.

In hindsight, I see that my parents long, failed struggle to grasp the truth about Marvin’s death wasn’t their fault. It was the result of the FBI’s callous handling of Marvin’s case — and many others like it. When my uncle was killed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was at the height of his power, and he ran the FBI like a dictatorship. The bureau was a cult of personality built around Hoover; he served a total of 48 years in his post, first as director of the FBI’s predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigations, and then as director of the FBI from its renaming in 1935 until his death in 1972.

Hoover accumulated power in part through his legendary ability to manipulate the press to propagandize and glorify the FBI. He created a mythic origin story for the FBI built around its manhunts and gun battles with Depression-era gangsters like John Dillinger; FBI agents killed in shootouts with gangsters became Hoover’s martyrs. But that meant that FBI agents like Marvin, who died in accidents or from illnesses, were largely ignored by Hoover’s FBI — even if their deaths were work-related.

On October 15, 1943, American Airlines Flight 63 crashed in rural Tennessee, killing all 11 people on board, including Marvin. The aircraft crashed soon after taking off from Nashville for a short flight to Memphis. Records show that, not long after leaving Nashville, the pilot radioed to air traffic control asking for permission to climb to 8,000 feet, possibly in an effort to find a band of warmer air to get rid of ice clinging to the wings and propellers, according to a later federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which then regulated commercial aviation. But as the plane gained altitude, ice continued to build, making it impossible to control.

The plane rapidly lost altitude and crashed into a wooded hill near Centerville, about 60 miles from Nashville. The area was so remote that the crash site wasn’t discovered until the next morning by a farmer, who then drove 3 miles to the town of Wrigley, where he could get a phone to call officials in Nashville. In its 1945 final report on the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board was critical of American Airlines for allowing the plane to fly without deicing equipment; American had removed the equipment in the summer and had not yet reinstalled the gear for the fall and winter. The crash was caused by the “inability of the aircraft to gain or maintain altitude due to carburetor ice or propeller ice or wing ice or some combination of those icing conditions while over terrain and in weather unsuitable for an emergency landing,” the report stated. The agency’s report said that if the weather conditions on the route were known by the airline, that “should have precluded the dispatch of the flight in an aircraft not equipped with wing or propeller deicing equipment.” 

The plane nosedived into the ground, leaving a crash scene so horrific that none of the bodies could be easily identified. It was so terrible that Ernest Gann, an American Airlines pilot and author, wrote about the crash in his acclaimed 1961 memoir on the dangerous early days of aviation, “Fate is the Hunter,” which was turned into a movie in 1964.

Marvin Risen could only be identified by his official FBI briefcase. He was just 27 when he died. He had been with the FBI since 1939.

After I grew up and became a reporter, my family’s questions about what had happened to my uncle remained unanswered. As a journalist covering intelligence and national security issues, I frequently reported on stories involving the FBI, and that experience taught me that it was not surprising that the bureau had failed my family. The FBI was insular and slow to change, and many aspects of the FBI’s culture still bore the imprint of J. Edgar Hoover long after his death. 

So in the 1990s, I decided to take the initiative and find out what I could about Marvin Risen and the FBI. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for Marvin’s personnel file. After a three-year wait, a huge package from the FBI arrived at my home, filled with hundreds of pages of ancient letters and memos documenting my uncle’s life and death. The files taught me things I didn’t know about my family; they revealed that my father was interviewed by the FBI when the bureau was considering hiring his brother. The files also showed that before he was promoted to special agent, Marvin started out working in the FBI’s fingerprinting unit, and later served as a tour guide at FBI headquarters in Washington.

But the most significant discovery in the files came from internal FBI memos that described the way in which the FBI handled Marvin’s death. 

The files showed that immediately after the plane crash, Hoover took a personal interest in Marvin’s case. Phone calls, telegrams, and internal FBI communications flew back and forth between Hoover and the FBI agents in Nashville and on the scene of the crash; it was clear Hoover had some of the same suspicions about the cause of the crash that later bedeviled my parents. Hoover wanted to know whether the crash was an act of sabotage, designed to kill an FBI agent. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Blan Maxwell, the speaker of the Tennessee state Senate, was one of the other passengers who died. At the time, Maxwell was widely considered the leading candidate to become the next governor of Tennessee. Prentice Cooper, the governor at the time, was one of the first officials on the crash scene, mingling with the FBI agents who were scouring the site.  

But the FBI quickly determined that the crash was just an accident. Once the FBI concluded that the plane was not downed by sabotage, Hoover lost interest. There was no drama in Marvin Risen’s death that Hoover could use to glorify the FBI. The files show that the FBI’s interest quickly shifted to finding Marvin’s FBI badge and gun amid the wreckage. When his gun was found, it was badly damaged from the crash.  

The files also revealed that Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his right-hand man and possibly his lover, personally decided not to include Marvin Risen on the FBI Wall of Honor, which listed the FBI’s valiant dead, the agents killed in the line of duty.   

The files reveal that Tolson was named by Hoover to be the chair of the committee set up to decide who was — and who wasn’t — included on the Wall of Honor. Hoover and Tolson wanted to reserve the Wall of Honor for agents killed in gun battles with gangsters and spies. The files included memos and messages between Hoover and Tolson showing that the pair decided that an accidental plane crash didn’t qualify as dying in the line of duty. They rejected Marvin Risen from consideration for the Wall of Honor, even though he was traveling in the line of duty when he died. He had been on his way to Memphis to meet with federal prosecutors about a bank robbery case. He wasn’t hot on the trail of an atomic spy ring or some other glamorous case. Yet he was involved in the kind of criminal investigation that made up much of the FBI’s day-to-day work.

At the time of his death in October 1943, Marvin Risen had one son, Daniel, and his wife, Mary Emily, was pregnant with their second son. In April 1944, she gave birth to Marvin Patrick Risen, who became known as Pat. 

Marvin’s wife, suddenly a widow in her mid-20s with two small children, was left to pick up the pieces after the shattering death of her husband. Yet the most that Hoover did to help was to offer her a secretarial job at the FBI’s headquarters, which would have required her to move from Nashville to Washington. She rejected the offer.

Later, two of Marvin’s sisters went to FBI headquarters in Washington to try to talk to Hoover about Marvin’s case. Hoover refused to come out of his office to meet with them, leaving them waiting — and insulted.

Marvin’s wife later remarried another agent in the FBI’s Nashville office, but both her sons kept Risen as their last name.

Daniel died by suicide when he was a young man. Pat Risen lived until 2022 and had two sons, Clay Risen and Michael Risen. Clay and I both worked at the New York Times together for many years; he continues to write for the Times and is the author of several books. His brother Michael is the associate head of school at the Norwood School, a private school in the Washington area.  

Out of the blue this spring, the FBI contacted Michael Risen: The bureau wanted to talk about his grandfather.

Decades after Marvin Risen’s death, the FBI had finally changed the Hoover-era standards for determining who should be included on the Wall of Honor. A review of old files on agents who had died in the line of duty but had been rejected by Hoover and Tolson had turned up Marvin’s case.

More than 80 years after his death, Marvin Risen was finally going up on the FBI’s Wall of Honor. 

Thomas Cottone, a retired FBI agent, said in an interview that he discovered Marvin’s case while going through old issues of an internal FBI newsletter, which contained an article about the plane crash. Cottone was already pushing the bureau to include the names of several other agents who had died in accidents while on duty, and so he began to advocate for Marvin as well.

One reason the FBI may have finally changed the qualifications for the Wall of Honor is that a number of FBI employees have died in recent years from cancer and other health complications resulting from exposure to toxins while serving at Ground Zero in New York and at the Pentagon after 9/11. Several employees who died after working at Ground Zero and the Pentagon in what were clearly work-related deaths have now been added to the wall; they would almost certainly not have been included under the old Hoover-era standards. 

In May, the FBI held a ceremony at its headquarters — which is named for J. Edgar Hoover — honoring Marvin Risen and seven others whose names have just been added to the wall. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke at the event, and several members of my family attended. I was not one of them.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the ceremony. I have my own personal history with the FBI, and that experience has been painful and complicated.

Related

My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror

During my time as a national security journalist, the FBI has over the years spied on me, sought to discredit me and my reporting, and even tried to help the Justice Department put me in prison as part of a long government campaign to silence me through the use of draconian leak investigations into my stories. At one time, there were FBI agents assigned to two separate federal grand jury investigations into my work. They pulled my life apart, sifting through my private data while subpoenaing and forcing testimony from many of my sources. They even spied on my children; they thought they had uncovered a big secret about me when they discovered that I had sent a wire transfer to Europe. It was actually money for my son, who was then on a study abroad program. 

Even as the FBI was investigating me, I had to continue to deal with the bureau as a reporter. I frequently went to FBI headquarters for interviews for new stories while I was still the subject of leak investigations related to earlier coverage. But I was always suspicious that the FBI was using the interviews at the Hoover building to try to get me to say something incriminating in connection with one of their leak investigations — or simply to intimidate me. 

For one story about the government’s counterterrorism operations, I went to FBI headquarters for an interview and was ushered into a windowless conference room where seven FBI agents were waiting for me. None of them would give me their names or talk to me at all. After I explained to them what I knew about the story I was working on, they all just sat and stared at me, not saying a word, refusing to comment or answer any questions. 

The FBI’s campaign of intimidation against me reached its peak when the bureau sent a team of agents to Europe to try to ambush a meeting I had scheduled with a source. The FBI found out about the meeting in advance from an informant who the FBI used to gather information about me. At the last minute, the ambush was averted when the FBI’s informant had a change of heart and tipped me off.

I haven’t forgotten.

I am prepared to go to FBI headquarters when it is required for my work as a journalist. But I didn’t want to go for a celebration, no matter how long overdue.

I believe that Marvin Risen would understand. 

The post My Family’s Long and Painful Relationship With the FBI appeared first on The Intercept.

Monday’s Supreme Court ruling granting far-reaching presidential immunity gives the lie to decades of right-wing propaganda about the real purpose of the long conservative campaign to take over the court.

Generations of conservative pseudointellectuals have argued that the mission of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group that has seeded the Supreme Court with its zombie-like members, was to bring the court back to its original mandate under the Constitution. The right-wing pundits who promoted the Federalist Society were always a little vague on what their version of “originalism” really entailed, which led to widespread suspicions that it just meant whatever was politically beneficial to conservatives.

The ruling on presidential immunity is just the latest piece of evidence that shows that originalism was just a confidence game by the right to gain power. The court’s conservative majority has revealed itself to be a corrupt political machine with both short- and long-term goals. Today, the court is determined to protect Donald Trump and the Republican Party; longer-term, its mandate is to protect and defend the powers of those who will enable white minority rule in America for years to come.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Donald Trump.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Trump, a brazen attempt to protect him from his ongoing criminal cases and to grant him virtually unlimited power if he gets back into the White House. With its ruling, the Supreme Court’s right-wing block has made it clear: They are tired of democracy. The justices want a dictator.

But they only want a right-wing dictator. It is not hard to imagine how differently the justices would have ruled if the question of presidential immunity had come before them in a case involving a Democratic president. 

The right-wing court is engaged in a radical revolution, and its objective is to rewrite modern American history. Through their rulings, the conservative justices are revealing what the American right has until recently tried to keep quiet, which is that the right doesn’t accept any of the major changes that have happened in American society since World War II. They have in their minds a fantasy version of 1940s America, even though almost none of them were alive at the time. What they yearn for is a nation before integration and civil rights, before women’s rights and reproductive rights, before gay rights, before the modern expansions of free speech and press freedom. Above all, they want a return to a less diverse America, a nation in which white male power was unquestioned. They want it so badly that they are willing to abandon democracy to get it. 

The radicalized court, with the Federalist Society’s approval, are in the process of demolishing the landmark Supreme Court rulings of the post-World War II era.

In order to get confirmed, Trump’s appointees to the court lied to the Senate by claiming that they saw Roe v. Wade as settled law; they ripped it up as soon as they consolidated their power on the court. In quick succession, they have gone after voting rights, affirmative action, gun control, environmental regulations, while sending out the word that now is a good time for conservative lawyers to bring their most extreme lawsuits to the court in order to create more right-wing precedents. This court could ban access to contraceptives next; another target could be a reversal on the legalization of gay marriage. The court is now so radical that it would not be surprising to see it go after Brown versus Board of Education, the historic Supreme Court ruling that declared that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional and which helped formed the basis for integration.

This court will be remembered like the justices behind the Dredd Scott decision, the worst ruling by the Supreme Court in American history. Their robes don’t hide their naked grab for political power.      

The post The Supreme Court Wants a Dictator appeared first on The Intercept.

When Julian Assange abruptly found himself back in Australia and freedom this week after reaching a plea deal with the U.S. government, I found myself thinking back to my own marathon legal fight with the U.S. government and how it finally and suddenly ended. 

I waged a seven-year legal battle against the George W. Bush administration and later the Obama administration, both of which demanded I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for story I wrote about a botched CIA operation. I wrote about the CIA operation for the New York Times, but the paper’s editors suppressed the story at the government’s request, so I published it in my 2006 book, “State of War.” The government then launched a leak investigation, subpoenaing me in 2008 to try to force me to testify and reveal my sources. The government threatened that if I didn’t comply, I could be thrown in prison for contempt of court. I refused and fought them all the way to the Supreme Court. 

In 2015, as negative publicity mounted on the Obama administration for its campaign to put a reporter in prison, I was called to attend a court hearing. When the prosecutor asked me whether I would go to prison rather than reveal my sources, I said yes. This time the government backed down, abandoning its efforts to force me to testify. At the end of that hearing, I drove home and had a glass of champagne with my wife to celebrate. I felt free for the first time in seven years.  

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that began in the post-9/11 era and has continued ever since. The Assange case was part of that same anti-press campaign, one that the government has continued to conduct under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

My personal experience has made me sympathize with Assange, even as so many other Americans have turned on him. My legal fight left me exhausted, both mentally and physically, especially during the long periods when my case was being ignored by the press and the outside world. I learned firsthand that the Justice Department’s primary legal strategy in such cases is to try to bankrupt people and wear them down so that they cut deals rather than go to trial. 

My personal experience has made me sympathize with Assange, even as so many other Americans have turned on him.

I emerged victorious when my case finally ended; I never revealed my sources. But the result of facing down the government for so long made me far more I suspicious of power and much less willing to accept authority.  

I am sure that as Assange returns to Australia to try to put his life back together, he will recognize that he has changed in surprising ways as well.     

To be sure, there are stark differences between Assange’s experience and my own. Assange was a polarizing figure long before he faced prosecution, with enemies on both sides of the American political divide. Republicans hated him for what he did in 2010, when he published classified documents from the Pentagon and the State Department on his WikiLeaks website, while also sharing those documents with mainstream news organizations like The Guardian and the New York Times. Those documents led to a wide range of disclosures about the dark and abusive actions of the United States in the post-9/11 era, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond in the global war on terror. 

Democrats, meanwhile, learned to hate Assange for what he did in 2016. Knowingly or not, he served as a go-between for Russian intelligence. Moscow hacked the emails of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and then turned them over to Assange, who published the emails and related Democratic Party documents on WikiLeaks, while also doling them out to reporters for mainstream news organizations during the 2016 presidential campaign, damaging the Clinton campaign and helping Donald Trump. 

As if all of that wasn’t enough, many others grew to hate him for evading sexual assault charges in Sweden. 

When Assange was first charged in 2019 by the Justice Department under the Espionage Act for his involvement in the 2010 leak of classified documents from the State Department and the U.S. military, very few people, liberal or conservative, came to his defense. Democrats went along with his indictment by the Trump administration, even though he was not charged in connection with the hacking of Democratic Party emails and Russian election interference in 2016. And when Joe Biden became president, his Justice Department continued the Assange prosecution without extending the charges to cover his involvement in the 2016 election.  

Now, after years in prison in Britain while fighting extradition to the United States, Assange has finally cut a deal with the Justice Department. He pleaded guilty this week to violating the Espionage Act and in return was released from prison for the time he has served in Britain. He was able to enter his plea agreement at a federal court in Saipan, a U.S. territory, and then fly directly to Australia. 

Many of his supporters have declared this a victory for Assange. But by obtaining a guilty plea, the Justice Department can also claim victory and ominously may use the same tactics to go after other reporters.  

Assange’s unpopularity means that few have viewed him as a martyr in the cause of press freedom. But he is a victim of an abusive prosecution by a government seeking to silence whistleblowers, and his case has set a dangerous precedent that could severely damage press freedom in the United States.

Few have viewed Assange as a martyr in the cause of press freedom. But he is a victim of an abusive prosecution by a government seeking to silence whistleblowers.

Though his legal saga has come to an end, the role he has played in journalism has never been fully resolved or even accurately defined. 

Assange was a strange hybrid figure in journalism. WikiLeaks, the online organization he co-founded, obtained documents from sources inside governments and other organizations and then made them public, either by publishing them on its own website or by sharing them with major news organizations. Journalists learned to cultivate relationships with Assange in order to get their hands on the secret documents that WikiLeaks had obtained from whistleblowers.

Did that make Assange a go-between, a source, a journalist, or all three rolled into one?  

The Justice Department arbitrarily sought to decide itself how to define Assange’s role by declaring that Assange did not act as a legitimate journalist when he interacted with Chelsea Manning, the former Army analyst and whistleblower who leaked the classified State Department and U.S. military documents to Assange.  

The notion that the U.S. government gets to decide how to define journalism might prove to be the least understood, but most dangerous, precedent set by the long and messy case against Assange. 

The post Like Julian Assange, I Know How It Feels to Be Prosecuted for Acts of Journalism appeared first on The Intercept.

The legal system cracked down on a New York fraudster last Thursday. Guilty of engaging in a complex scheme to move and hide money for his personal benefit, a former top executive must now face sentencing and the possibility of spending time in prison.

But last Thursday’s court hearing for Shukhratjon Mirsaidov, during which he pleaded guilty to money laundering, was overshadowed by a different white-collar criminal case in another New York courthouse on the same day. Just as Mirsaidov, a former business executive, was pleading guilty in federal court in Manhattan to a complex, fraudulent scheme to launder money, Donald Trump, a former president, was also convicted in a complex fraudulent scheme to falsify business records — in his case hiding a hush-money payment to a porn star that risked derailing his presidential campaign. 

The Trump and Mirsaidov cases aren’t exactly alike, and the stakes involved are obviously very different. But the similarities between them prove that the case brought against Trump was not out of line with the routine white-collar prosecutions that make up the daily work of the justice system. Vengeful attacks by Trump and his supporters claiming that ex-president is the victim of a political persecution don’t stand up to scrutiny when it becomes clear that the Trump case was not so different from the run-of-the-mill case that ensnared Mirsaidov on the same day.

Federal prosecutors accused Mirsaidov of laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars he obtained through health care fraud through a bank account at the company where he worked. Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the office that prosecuted Mirsaidov, said the case was more significant because Mirsaidov took advantage of his senior position to gain access to company accounts to launder funds. “While all forms of money laundering are pernicious, such conduct is particularly severe when it involves executives at major businesses abusing their positions,” Williams said. “This case demonstrates that money launderers — no matter what their station — will be held accountable.” 

Williams could just as easily have been talking about Trump. The difference was that Mirsaidov was simply trying to enrich himself, while Trump was trying to win an election through a fraudulent cover-up. 

Trump was treated like other white-collar criminals in New York, but the guilty verdict in that case stands in stark contrast to the kid-glove treatment he has received in the three other pending cases in which he has been criminally charged. The New York case was the only one that couldn’t be delayed or quashed by Republican-appointed judges or right-wing legal and political systems, and so is the only one that has yet gone to trial. All three other cases remain in legal limbo because Trump is receiving privileged treatment, giving the lie to the notion that everyone is equal before the law in the United States. 

In each jurisdiction in which he has been charged besides New York’s state courts, the legal system has provided a champagne room for Trump — and a back alley for everyone else. 

Trump has been indicted in federal court for trying to overturn the 2020 election, engaging in what amounted to a coup d’état to illegally remain in power and stop Joe Biden from becoming president. He also faces separate federal charges in a scheme in which he illicitly kept classified documents after he left office and hid them from federal investigators when they came looking for them. In a third case, Trump faces state charges in Georgia for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, which Biden won. 

The federal case involving his efforts to overturn the 2020 election is currently on hold because the Republican-dominated Supreme Court has taken up Trump’s ridiculous claim, dismissed by lower courts, that he is immune from prosecution because he was still president at the time he was trying to illegally overturn the election. 

In the classified documents case, a Trump-appointed federal judge has been doing his bidding by agreeing to endless delays. The judge seems to be hoping to delay the case until after the November election, hoping that Trump will win, quash the case, and then reward her with a position on a higher court or a top position in his administration.

The Georgia case has been delayed by a sideshow concerning the personal relationship between the district attorney who brought the case and an outside prosecutor she hired to handle the prosecution. Their sexual relationship became the subject of bitter hearings; a judge ruled that the district attorney could remain on the case despite the relationship, but that ruling is now on appeal, delaying the trial. 

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on whether Trump is immune in the federal election interference case before the end of its current term in July. If the court rules that Trump is not immune, that case could go to trial before the election. 

But the fact that ethically challenged Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito get to vote on whether to hold Trump accountable doesn’t bode well for the rule of law. 

So for now, the New York case, which the pundit class initially dismissed as the weakest of the four cases against Trump, is the only one to hold him accountable for what he is: a white-collar criminal, not so different from Shukhratjon Mirsaidov.

The post To Understand the Trump Verdict, Look at the Case Against Shukhratjon Mirsaidov appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of prison. But what happens if he has to run for president to try to stay out of prison — while he is already in prison?

What if he is running from Rikers? 

On Thursday, that possibility became very real, very fast, after Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts in a case in New York state court. The jury only deliberated for a day before issuing a sweeping verdict convicting him of charges related to paying hush money to a porn actress. 

Trump is now a convicted felon in a very complicated legal situation, brought on by his utter disregard for the rule of law.

Over the past year, he has been facing criminal charges in four separate cases, but his defense has had very little to do with proving his innocence in any of them. The facts in all of the cases go against him, and he and his lawyers know it. Instead, his legal strategy has been to delay the cases until he can win the presidential election, and then quickly abuse his presidential powers in order to kill the two federal cases against him. 

The state cases, however, pose a greater threat to him, as he wouldn’t have any ability to pardon himself, should he win.

In state court in Georgia, where Trump is accused of election interference, he is relying on a friendly, Republican-dominated state legal and political system, where efforts are already underway to discredit the local prosecutor. If that doesn’t work, Georgia’s Republican-dominated pardon board (its members are appointed by the Republican governor) will probably find some legal loophole to help Trump wriggle out of any punishment, especially if he is elected president. 

Then there is New York. 

Trump was unable to bully the state’s legal system into delaying his case there, and the judge showed little patience for the antics Trump has employed with impunity in other legal venues. All of that helped guarantee that the New York trial would take place before the election, even as his other cases were delayed and faded from political view.

Related

Stormy Daniels May Have the Last Word on Donald Trump

When the state charges were first brought against Trump in New York, pundits with little understanding of the legal system immediately branded the case to be weak, overdrawn, and too complicated. But the basic facts of the case are actually straightforward, revealing a criminal conspiracy that was designed to help Trump win the White House in 2016. 

It wasn’t too weak, too overdrawn, or too complicated for the jury. 

Think back to Friday, October 7, 2016. In the closing weeks of the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, a Washington Post story was posted online that night reporting on a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump talked openly about how he frequently groped women, adding that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” 

Almost immediately, shocked Republican leaders began to call on Trump to drop out of the presidential race. It was the biggest crisis of the Trump campaign. 

Trump’s campaign barely survived. But what would have happened to Trump if other scandals had come out immediately after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public? What if the “Access Hollywood” tape was quickly followed by the revelation that Trump had sex with a porn actress while he was married? 

In his closing arguments in the New York trial, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass emphasized the connection between the political firestorm surrounding the “Access Hollywood” tape that was engulfing the Trump campaign in October 2016 and the scheme to silence Stormy Daniels, the adult film star. Steinglass pointed out that the deal to pay off Daniels was made just after the “Access Hollywood” tape came out.

“It’s critical to appreciate this,” Steinglass told the jurors. “Stormy Daniels … would have totally undermined his strategy of spinning away the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.”

So to avoid another big scandal on top of the “Access Hollywood” scandal, a combination punch that could have knocked him out of the presidential campaign, Trump engaged in a plot to secretly pay off Daniels and bury the story. As part of the cover-up, he fraudulently falsified records about the transactions involved in his scheme. 

Charges related to that cover-up were at the heart of the New York state case, including the falsifying of business records in order to hide the fact that he paid back his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for his payment to Daniels.

To bolster the argument that Trump engaged in a wide-ranging fraud to hide damaging news in the middle of the presidential campaign, the New York case also featured the role of the sensationalist tabloid National Enquirer in the practice of the “catch and kill” of stories potentially harmful to Trump. David Pecker, the former chief executive of the company that owned the Enquirer, testified during the trial in New York that he was involved in three payments to silence people with negative information about Trump: a Trump Tower doorman who said Trump had an illegitimate child, a former Playboy model who had an affair with Trump, and Daniels. 

Sentencing in the case will be July 11 — less than a week before the Republican National Convention. 

Update: May 30, 2024, 8:12 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a quote from prosecutor Joshua Steinglass.

The post These Convictions Thwart Trump’s Plan to Pardon Himself appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy in the United States. If he is elected president, he will try to become a dictator.

That warning must be repeated, over and over again, so Americans don’t forget it in November.

But that’s not the daily news that you will read or hear in the American press today. Instead, it’s mostly coverage of polls favorable to Trump and cute scene-setting stories about the carnival-like atmosphere at his crazed rallies, where his massive cult following is on display.

That daily coverage ignores the five-alarm fire burning up the 2024 election. The mainstream political press is effectively ignoring the coming national apocalypse. How can that be? How can they once again screw up covering Trump?

After all, Trump isn’t hiding his lust for dictatorial power. He admits it publicly. In December, when his Fox News lackey, Sean Hannity, gave him an opportunity to dispel fears that he wanted dictatorial power, Trump instead offered a rare truth. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked. “Except for day one,” Trump replied.

Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.

In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.

Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”

Trump is a fascist. But the mainstream political press doesn’t want to say it. They want to act like 2024 is just another election year.

With their obsession with horse-race coverage, political reporters tend to judge what Trump says or does by whether his words and actions will help him politically. By doing so, the press is saying that Trump’s racism, corruption, criminality, and insane abuses of power matter only so far as his electability.

There are exceptions: major news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have done some important stories about Trump’s dictatorial plans for a second term. But those investigative stories are drowned out by the chorus of horse-race stories — sometimes published on the same days and by the same news organizations behind more substantial coverage.

The media is sleepwalking.

I’ve often wondered how the press, both in Germany and around the world, failed to see Hitler for the monster that he was before he gained power. After Trump, I think I understand.

Hitler took advantage of the incremental nature of daily journalism. For years, his rise in Germany was not taken seriously in the United States, and that period of American inattention and isolationism enabled Hitler to become a much greater global threat. The American press played a significant and ugly role in downplaying the threat Hitler posed to the Western world.

American journalists initially viewed Hitler as little more than a German version of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who they saw as a blustering demagogue, yet also a leader who had helped save Italy from the economic chaos of the post-World War I era.

The New York Times credited Mussolini “with returning turbulent Italy to what it called normalcy,” according to a study of the press coverage of Hitler and Mussolini in Smithsonian Magazine in 2016.

When Hitler first burst into German political life, the American press sought to downplay his importance by treating him as a joke; the Smithsonian notes how Newsweek called him a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” and that his appearance suggested “Charlie Chaplin.”

Over time, American journalists’ views of Hitler began to shift, but mostly just to show greater respect for his skills as a charismatic public speaker and a successful demagogue. Ultimately, through more than a decade in German politics before he came to power, Hitler was normalized by American reporters. The press became numb to the outrageous things he said and wrote and did. He kept saying the same things for years; he laid out many of his plans and intentions in “Mein Kampf” in 1925, eight years before he came to power. By the time of the crucial 1932 German elections and Hitler’s subsequent rise to power in 1933, his rabid antisemitism and his lust for power were treated as old news.

The American press is making the same mistake today.

Ever since Trump announced he was running for president in 2015, reporters have alternated between depicting him as a goof who couldn’t be taken seriously and showing respect for his skills as a demagogue.

Two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and one insurrection later, Trump is normal now, at least as far as the political press corps is concerned. The January 6 insurrection, in which Trump tried to illegally hold on to power, is old news. Just like Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was old news by the 1932 German elections.

After Trump’s chaotic four years in office, too many journalists think that everything about Trump’s insane record has already been reported and written. This leads to more coverage of his poll numbers than his criminality or the threat he poses to the United States.

Mainstream journalists are increasingly open about their refusal to cover the campaign in crisis terms. In a recent interview, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn bristled at the notion that the Times needs to recognize the threat that Trump poses to the republic. He claimed that would just be doing the bidding of the Biden campaign and would turn the Times into a state propaganda organ like “Xinhua News Agency or Pravda.”

Kahn’s defensive crouch is symptomatic of the press today. After years of losing to social media companies in the fight for advertising and attention and fending off a constant barrage of attacks from right-wing critics who seek to discredit their journalism, major news organizations have become increasingly insular. A sudden surge in readership and viewership during the Trump administration has waned, while a drive to make newsrooms more diverse by hiring a wave of young progressive journalists has left older white editors embittered that the new generation has dared to challenge the status quo.

News organizations have always been hostile to outside scrutiny, but their hypocrisy about transparency and openness have reached new heights. Earlier this year the Times launched an ill-conceived leak investigation of its own staff to find out who talked to The Intercept for a story, while more recently the Washington Post has sought to downplay evidence that its new publisher, Will Lewis, was involved in a scheme to conceal evidence about phone hacking of British royals and celebrities while he was an executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in London. Semafor reported this week that an editor at the Post ordered the staff not to promote on its newsletters one of the Post’s own stories that included new allegations about Lewis from a lawsuit filed by Prince Harry in London.

Expect little accountability for these actions; the Post got rid of its ombudsman in 2013, and the Times got rid of its last public editor in 2017. Both the Times and the Washington Post have media reporters, but they rarely write about their own newsrooms and instead spend most of their time punching down on smaller news organizations.

Last year, CNN went through an internal crisis as well, after its new owners sought to force the newsroom to bend more toward Trump. That controversy ultimately led to the firing of CNN’s chief, but it is not clear whether the new ownership group still plans to push for more Trump-friendly coverage.

These efforts to build protective bubbles around their organizations at a time of unprecedented volatility in the news business seem to be at the heart of the refusal by the mainstream press to get out in front of the voters and take a stand on Trump.

In fact, many in the news business would secretly be thrilled by Trump’s return to the White House, particularly old, white pundits and commentators who claim to be liberal but quietly believe that “cancel culture” is a bigger threat than Trump. Many corporate executives in the news business would likewise be happy to see a return to Trump-era revenues.

But the basic reason the press isn’t sounding the alarm about the threat Trump poses to American democracy is much more banal. It’s about the structure of journalism. 

Just like Hitler before him, Trump is benefiting from the fact that journalism is an incremental, daily business. Every day, reporters have to find something new to write or broadcast. Trump keeps saying dangerous and crazy things, but that’s not new. He’s said it all before. His impeachments and the January 6 insurrection happened years ago. True, he has been indicted four times and now faces up to four criminal trials, but that’s already been reported. What’s new today?

For political reporters covering the campaign, that means usually treating Trump’s authoritarian promises as “B-matter.” That’s an old newspaper phrase that refers to the background information that reporters gather about a story’s subject. B-matter is usually exiled to the bottom of an article — if not cut entirely to save space or time.

But the horrifying truth is that when Trump’s dictatorial ambitions are left on the cutting room floor as B-matter, America is in trouble.

The post The Media Still Doesn’t Grasp the Danger of Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

To understand the state of American politics today when it comes to Gaza, Israel, and Palestine, just look at the very different ways in which the House of Representatives handled the cases of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, and Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican.

Tlaib was punished for her views on Israel and the war in Gaza. Mast was not.

It’s not hard to figure out why.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, was censured by the Republican-controlled House in November after she posted a video of protesters in Michigan chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters claim the chant is code for a desire to wipe the Jewish state off the map, but Tlaib responded that it was just “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.”

“I can’t believe I have to say this,” she added, “but Palestinian people are not disposable.” 

Tlaib’s censure was a symbolic act that has no substantive impact on her ability to function in Congress, but that wasn’t the point. House Republicans just wanted to embarrass her and politically marginalize any congressional support for the Palestinian people. House Democrats briefly sought to censure Mast for comparing Palestinians to the hundreds of thousands of German civilians carpet bombed into oblivion by the Allies in Nazi Germany during World War II. His implication was that Palestinians deserve to be obliterated for the crimes of Hamas, just as German civilians were annihilated for the crimes of Hitler and the Third Reich. “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians,” he said. “I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.”

The motion to censure Mast was introduced in the House last November, at the same time the Republicans were going after Tlaib. But while the censure motion against Tlaib succeeded, the motion against Mast was quietly withdrawn.

Ever since, Mast has doubled down on his anti-Palestinian rhetoric without facing any consequences. He even wore an Israeli military uniform to a Republican conference meeting on Capitol Hill. When questioned about it by reporters, he said that since Tlaib displays a Palestinian flag outside her office, he thought he should wear his old Israel Defense Forces uniform. A U.S. Army veteran who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan in 2010, Mast briefly volunteered with the IDF in January 2015, performing support functions like packing medical kits. Virtually every other Republican in Congress shares Mast’s views and would gladly don an IDF uniform if they had one.

Earlier this year, Mast expanded on his comments about Palestinian civilians, saying that even Palestinian babies are not innocent and are thus legitimate targets. “It would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters,” he told Code Pink protesters. When asked about images of Palestinian infants being killed in Israeli attacks, he said “these are not innocent Palestinian civilians.” 

The contrasting outcomes of the Tlaib and Mast cases highlight an undeniable fact: The American political establishment still strongly favors Israel over the Palestinians. But if Donald Trump gets back into the Oval Office, he and his MAGA Republicans like Brian Mast will be even worse.

Trump is a big fan of war crimes, especially against Muslims. During his first term, he intervened on behalf of Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader convicted of posing for a photo with the body of dead Iraqi; another SEAL team member told investigators that Gallagher was “freaking evil,” but Trump said at a political rally that he was one of “our great fighters.” Trump also pardoned Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in a wild shooting spree in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. There is no chance that he would try to stop Israel from indiscriminately killing Palestinians.

After the October 7 Hamas attack, Trump was briefly critical of Netanyahu and blurted out that Hezbollah was “very smart.” Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group designated a terrorist organization by the United States, has battled Israel on its northern border with Lebanon. Trump was immediately and roundly attacked by other Republicans for his comments, and he quickly renewed his long-standing pledge to align the United States fully with Israel. If he’s reelected, he will give Israel unalloyed support for all-out war, and he will do so with the wholehearted backing of the Republican Party.

Republicans’ support for Israel is matched or exceeded by their hatred for Palestinians. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican who was secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, has proposed legislation that would prevent Palestinians from entering the United States and trigger the mass deportation of those already here. It would ban those holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority from obtaining U.S. visas, while mandating the removal of Palestinian passport holders already living here. 

Many Republicans express their unwavering support for Israel in biblical and apocalyptic terms. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Christian evangelical, made his first public appearance after being elected House speaker last October at a conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he said that “God is not done with Israel.”

It is dangerous to get between evangelicals and their theology. Trump recognizes their importance to his political success, and his support for Israel is a way to satisfy his evangelical Christian base. “No president has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump claimed in 2022. “Our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”

At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump pushed through a provision in the party platform ending GOP support for a two-state solution and a Palestinian state. Now, Trump and Republicans agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says that Israel can no longer agree to a two-state solution. “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan,” Netanyahu said in January. “This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do? This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel.”

That’s fine with Trump and Republicans like Brian Mast.

Although the Biden administration has bent over backward to support Israel, the president has said repeatedly in recent weeks that an independent Palestinian state is still possible. What’s more, political unrest within the Democratic Party is starting to have an impact on Biden, forcing changes in the White House’s approach to Israel. Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire; such new pressure from the Biden administration appears to be working, as Israel and Hamas now seem closer to an agreement.

Trump would never face such pro-Palestinian pressure from within the Republican Party. He and his MAGA cult of Christian nationalists would never force Israel to accept a ceasefire — or a Palestinian state. Mast has harshly attacked Biden for continuing to support a two-state solution, dismissing the idea by saying that “a Palestinian state would be run by terrorists.”

There are limits to Biden’s support for Netanyahu. Trump and the Republican Party have none.

Correction: March 4, 2024 8:26 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the organization that Trump called “very smart.” It was Hezbollah, not Hamas.

The post On Israel, Trump Is Even Worse Than Biden appeared first on The Intercept.

When the obituary of the baby-boom generation is finally written, they’ll have to mention Donald Trump in the very first paragraph to explain how a cohort that began with such idealism and promise turned so toxic.

The generation that took to the streets in anti-war protests and civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s and championed the environmental and women’s movements in the 1970s has now retreated to right-wing retirement enclaves in Florida, where Fox News is always on in the background. Boomers drove jam-packed VW vans in a haze of drugs to Woodstock; now they scoot around The Villages in golf carts festooned with Trump flags.

The boomer rallying cry of the 1960s was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Boomers today can’t stop whining about how young people are too “woke.”

I’m a baby boomer myself, and I no longer recognize my own generation. A big slice of white boomers are now living on hate. They hate nearly everything and everybody — even Disney and Taylor Swift! — because Trump and MAGA and Fox News have told them to. They hate books, vaccines, colleges, unions, corporations, cities, Hollywood, Broadway, the NBA and the NFL, Black people, brown people, and of course immigrants. They really hate immigrants. They are convinced that college professors and journalists secretly control America.

My generation has not aged well.

I blame Trump for the boomers’ weird transformation from a youthful progressive force into a tribe of right-wing conspiracy theorists. To be sure, there are plenty of boomers who haven’t succumbed to Trump-induced hate. But too many of us fell for him when he first emerged as a dangerous demagogue spewing racism and lies, and boomers have fueled his rise ever since.

White boomers have had a conservative streak since the Reagan era of “greed is good” in the 1980s. But Trump and his presidency sent the boomers’ rightward shift into overdrive, and many have gone all the way into the thrall of the MAGA cult. Trump brought far-right politics to the fore among his fellow boomers, playing on their fears of America’s growing racial diversity.

White boomers now make up a key segment of Trump’s base. He is a threat to democracy today mainly because so many in my generation are willing to hand him unlimited power. I find it depressing that people I grew up with have allowed their brains to curdle to the point that they are willing to abandon the democratic values that were central to the American society we boomers inherited.

From Huckster to Extremist

From the start, the extraordinary demographics of the boomer generation have set it apart. As American soldiers came home from World War II in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and Japan, they were eager to make up for lost time and start families. That created a sudden baby boom in 1946, a year after the war’s end. But the boom surprisingly continued for decades, as Americans, benefiting from sustained economic growth in the 1950s and ’60s, found they could afford to have larger families. Demographers have defined the boomer generation as the 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964, a period when the U.S. total fertility rate — an estimate of lifetime fertility — exploded from 2.49 children per woman in 1945 to a peak of 3.77 in 1957. (For comparison’s sake, the total fertility rate in 2022 was just 1.67.)

The millennial generation (those born roughly between 1981-1996) has now surpassed boomers as the largest living adult generation, but the boomers have certainly been one of the most politically dominant generations America has ever seen. There have now been four boomer presidents, including two from each major party: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. (Joe Biden, born in 1942, belongs to the so-called Silent Generation, which includes those born between 1928 and 1946: the children of the Great Depression.)

Even with a Silent Generation president, boomers still hold sway over the American establishment. A generational power index, created in 2021 by the Visual Capitalist website, calculated the overall economic, political, and cultural power of each living generation, and found that boomers still ranked first with 43.4 percent of the nation’s economic power and 47.4 percent of political power. They only trailed in cultural power, where Generation X (1965-1980) led with 36 percent.

Donald Trump, born on June 14, 1946, was one of the first boomers. But unlike the fathers of millions of others born that year, Trump’s father, Fred Trump, did not fight in World War II. Instead, he profited from it by building and owning thousands of apartments that he rented out to war workers.

As the born-wealthy son of a New York real estate mogul, Donald Trump skipped the anti-war and the civil rights movements, and never shared the counter-cultural experiences of the 1960s and early 1970s that so defined the boomers’ coming of age. He was enamored instead of money and money-making and burnishing his own image, and his Scrooge-like tendencies would finally align him with the rest of his generation as boomers moved into their 30s and 40s in the Reagan era.

When Obama became the nation’s first Black president in 2008, boomer politics really began to warp into something ugly. By then, the oldest boomers were in their early 60s, and they proved susceptible to Trump when he began to transform himself from a corporate huckster into an extremist political figure who used conspiracy theories about the president’s birth certificate to gain right-wing notoriety.

White Backlash

Obama’s election was fueled by a diverse group of younger voters, while older white voters chose Republican nominee John McCain. In 2008, 51 percent of Americans over 60, a group that included the oldest boomers, voted for McCain; it was only the second election in 37 years in which older voters didn’t support the winner.

The growing racial and ethnic diversity that underscored Obama’s victory seemed to frighten these older boomers who had grown up in a much more homogeneous society. In 1980, when the oldest boomers were in their early to mid-30s and were coming into their own as adults, the U.S. was nearly 80 percent white; by 2023, white people made up less than 60 percent of the population.

The anti-Obama tea party movement in 2009 and 2010 claimed to be built around opposition to the president’s budget policies, but it was really a backlash by white boomers and other older white Americans against the rise of a more diverse and progressive society. By 2015, Gallup found that 44 percent of boomers identified as conservative, and only 21 percent as liberal.

The racial backlash grew and helped elect Trump president in 2016. The only age group that supported Trump that year were voters over 50. The oldest boomers turned 70 in 2016, and that year Trump had his biggest win among voters 65 and older. 

As president, Trump surrounded himself with other white boomers who had turned hard right: Roger Stone (born in 1952); Steve Bannon (born in 1953); and Michael Flynn (born in 1958), among many others. Despite Trump’s psychopathic and criminal behavior, despite the January 6 insurrection, two impeachments, and four criminal indictments, boomer voters have generally stuck with him.

I know that my parents’ generation, those who fought fascism overseas in World War II, would be ashamed that so many members of their children’s cohort are now willing to give in to fascism at home.

So many right-wing boomers today claim they want a return to the America we grew up in. If that’s true, they should remember that our parents and teachers also warned us about what the Nazis wrought in Europe just before we were born.  

The post Donald Trump and His Boomer Base appeared first on The Intercept.

American presidential elections are binary. Either a Democrat or a Republican wins. Nobody else.

The 2024 presidential election will be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. No matter how much Americans may wish for other candidates, that’s the choice.

Third-party candidates don’t win, can’t win; they only steal votes from the mainstream Republican or Democratic candidate with whom they are most closely aligned. They help the candidate at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

This year, progressives who vote for a third-party candidate, or don’t vote at all, are really voting for Trump.

In 1992, Ross Perot ran one of the most significant third-party campaigns in American history, winning nearly 20 percent of the vote. The Dallas entrepreneur campaigned as a folksy populist conservative, a slightly crazy-sounding fiscal and trade hawk with a billionaire business resume — sort of a precursor to Trump but without the racism, fascism, and criminality. Perot took millions of votes from disaffected Republicans angered by President George H.W. Bush’s willingness to compromise with congressional Democrats on taxes. When Bush ran for president in 1988, one of his key campaign pledges had been not to raise taxes; his reversal once he was in office fueled Perot’s rise. Perot’s strong showing in 1992 ensured the election of Bill Clinton, returning the Democrats to the White House for the first time since Jimmy Carter.

I covered Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign for the Los Angeles Times, and the experience convinced me that third-party candidates launch what they know are futile presidential bids to satisfy their egos or because they harbor grudges against one of the major candidates and hope to damage their campaigns.

In Perot’s case, it was both. He had a massive ego. I saw that side of him during one interview over lunch, when I challenged one of his false assertions about his business background. Perot stared at me in fury and then took out his wallet, slammed it on the table, and loudly said that he would bet all the money in it that he was right. I laughed and told him that I didn’t have as much money as he did.  

Another key driving factor for Perot was his bitter hatred of Bush and the Bush family, who he saw as rich northern carpetbaggers and not real Texans. Throughout the campaign, Perot spouted strange conspiracy theories about Bush and other Republican officials.

Perot ended his presidential bid abruptly in July 1992, just when he was starting to come under real scrutiny. He weirdly restarted his campaign in October, in time to join the televised presidential debates. At almost every turn, Perot’s actions helped Clinton; he quit the race just as the successful Democratic National Convention in New York was ending, stunning the nation and solidifying Clinton’s standing as the only alternative to Bush. When Perot got back into the race in October, he kept Bush from regaining momentum. Perot ran again in 1996 with less success, but still hurt Republican nominee Bob Dole.

A MAGA Dark Age

None of the third-party candidates this year are likely to come close to Perot’s 1992 vote total, but it is possible that a combination of left-wing votes for third-party candidates and low voter turnout among young progressives because of an antipathy to Biden could damage the Democratic incumbent in a handful of critical states and doom his reelection bid. That would put Trump back in the White House.

So, just to be clear: A progressive who doesn’t vote, or who votes in the general election for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Cornel West or Jill Stein — or whoever No Labels puts up as a candidate — is voting for Donald Trump.

A Trump presidency means the return of a vengeful maniac to the White House, determined to destroy anyone who gets in the way of his lust for power and ambition to become an American dictator. It means the ascendancy of a deranged MAGA Republican agenda, more vicious and poisonous than ever before, an agenda that will usher in a dark age for the United States.

That agenda would likely bring major wars abroad and cultural fundamentalism at home. MAGA-world wants wars with China and Mexico. Trump and his backers would undoubtedly support the complete Israeli takeover of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and the dislocation of millions of Palestinians. He would endorse a Russian victory by cutting off U.S. aid to Ukraine; a U.S. withdrawal from Europe would likely follow, along with a Russian invasion of the Baltic states.

Despite acknowledging that it would be bad politics, Trump would almost certainly support a complete, nationwide ban on abortion and probably also endorse Christian fundamentalist demands to ban contraceptives, along with nationwide book bans. His aides are already on record calling for the creation of concentration camps for immigrants, while he has made it clear he wants to prosecute and imprison his political opponents, journalists, and other dissidents.

As president, he would name hundreds of more judges who would eagerly bring about the end of voting rights for minorities. And of course, Trump would pick up where he left off during his last term and loot the government’s coffers. The twice-impeached, four-times-indicted Trump is already vowing to politicize the Justice Department to escape his myriad legal troubles. America will be subjected to a government in the thrall of White Christian nationalists, who don’t believe in the separation of church and state.

Above all, Trump is clearly unfit for the presidency, or any leadership role. He constantly spews threats and hate on social media. Many of his former advisers now agree that he shouldn’t be in a position to give orders to the U.S. national security apparatus.

They are right. Trump poses an existential danger to the United States.

Progressives should not make the same mistake that Ernst Thälmann made in 1932. The leader of the German Communist Party, Thälmann saw mainstream liberals as his enemies, and so the center and left never joined forces against the Nazis. Thälmann famously said that “some Nazi trees must not be allowed to overshadow a forest” of social democrats, whom he sneeringly called “social fascists.”

After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, Thälmann was arrested. He was shot on Hitler’s orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.

The post Don’t Fall for the Third-Party Trick appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump is a psychopathic criminal. He is a racist, fascist cult leader determined to destroy American democracy.

Those facts must be repeated over and over this year, because so many Americans appear willing to re-elect him president.

In the wake of his sweeping victory in the Iowa caucuses, Trump stands astride the ruins of the Republican Party, which he has transformed into a cult of MAGA zombies who believe every lie and conspiracy theory he spouts. Other Republican politicians have long since surrendered, even those who have gone through the motions of contesting the Republican primaries. These days, virtually all Republican politicians try to outdo each other in their goose-stepping fealty to Trump, while Republican voters who hate him have long since become quiet collaborators or left the party.

So Trump will easily win the Republican nomination this year for the third straight time.

The real question is whether non-MAGA Americans will fall for his demented act. Will voters remember why they chose his opponent in 2020?

Trump hopes not; he is counting on America’s recency bias and social media-fueled short attention span to cast a veil over the ugliness and criminality of his first term.

The danger lies in the possibility that Trump’s egotism and criminality will once again be normalized during the presidential campaign, accepted as nothing more than background noise. When voters size up the candidates, will Trump’s greed and dishonesty merely be seen as unpleasant character traits, about equal to the drawbacks of Joe Biden’s advanced age?

Covering the Horse Race

The political press corps is certainly doing its best to make that happen. They are largely ignoring the danger Trump poses to the nation.

Political reporters hate to be perceived as biased, so they usually focus on the horse-race aspects of elections, providing a running tally of who’s up and who’s down in the polls. That lets them avoid focusing on policy substance – or, in this case, on whether Trump wants to be a dictator. After each election, often following harsh criticism for their failures, political reporters write laments seeking to diagnose why they failed; famously, they traveled to diners in the Midwest to talk to Trump voters after his surprise 2016 win. Then they went right back to horse-race coverage, which is too easy and addictive to give up because it makes reporters feel like insiders who understand the game of politics. 

When they do write about Trump’s many scandals, political reporters often feel the need to provide “balance.” So they write about purported Biden scandals that they know Republicans have fabricated. Congressional Republicans understand this dynamic, and they have ginned up an impeachment of Biden without any evidence, counting on the press to cover it.

The reporters who fall for this gimmick can’t handle the truth: that the GOP no longer exists as a legitimate political party and is merely a collection of Trump lackeys who will deceive the American people to further his autocratic interests. Reporters don’t want to admit that this presidential race will be a contest between a reasonable, centrist Democrat and a would-be dictator.

This could be the last free election in American history. If Trump wins and his MAGA acolytes gain control of Congress, they will work tirelessly to destroy the American republic and the electoral process.

Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch

One sign of Trump’s dictatorial ambitions lies in the ominous parallels between his view of the January 6 insurrection and the way Adolf Hitler viewed the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. They were dress rehearsals for later seizures of power.

Trump now views the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as a key element of the mythological, violent birth of his MAGA movement. It has become Trump’s version of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed effort to use street violence to gain power.

Almost exactly a century ago, on November 9, 1923, between 2,000 and 3,000 armed Nazis marched into central Munich and tried to take over the provincial government of Bavaria; Hitler planned to follow his coup in Bavaria with a march on Berlin to take control of Germany. But the Nazis were defeated by police in a gun battle that killed 16 of them, along with four police officers. Hitler was arrested, convicted of treason, and sentenced to five years in prison, but released after just nine months, time he spent writing “Mein Kampf.” The putsch brought him fame, and when he became Germany’s dictator a decade later, he turned the Nazis who died in the uprising into sacred martyrs. The Beer Hall Putsch became central to the Third Reich’s origin story; it is clear that Trump views January 6 in similar terms.

Trump already calls the rioters arrested for their involvement in January 6 “hostages.” It isn’t too difficult to imagine that, if he regains the presidency, he will mythologize the mob the same way Hitler did the putsch, perhaps pushing for a monument to the 2021 insurrection on the National Mall in Washington, similar to the twin “temples of honor” the Third Reich built in Munich to entomb the Nazi dead of November 9, 1923.

The post Don’t Normalize Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

In 82 percent of the 719 January 6-related cases that have been resolved, and in which the defendants have either pleaded guilty or been convicted, judges have issued lighter sentences than federal prosecutors requested, the analysis of Justice Department data through December 4, 2023, shows. They imposed the same sentences sought by prosecutors in just 95 cases and harsher sentences in only 37.

Nearly every one of the 24 federal judges handling the massive docket of January 6 cases has shown leniency toward the defendants, regardless of whether the judges were appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents, the data shows. Perhaps the most surprising finding is that the judges appointed by President Joe Biden have been slightly more lenient than those appointed by former President Donald Trump. Biden appointees issued lighter sentences than prosecutors sought for January 6 defendants in 24 of the 26 cases they handled, or 92 percent, effectively tying with George W. Bush appointees as the most lenient. Judges appointed by Trump, meanwhile, have issued more lenient sentences in 90 percent of their cases.

Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that the federal judicial system has been unnecessarily punitive in its treatment of January 6 defendants, complaining that they are “political prisoners” who have been unfairly persecuted for trying to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s 2020 election. One leading January 6 defendant compared himself to a Jew living in Nazi Germany and said that his “only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”

The Intercept’s analysis sharply contradicts that right-wing narrative. In many cases, judges have rejected prosecutors’ requests for prison time, often reducing defendants’ sentences to home detention or probation. Defendants have been sentenced to standard prison terms in only 429 out of 719 cases, or 60 percent. Another 31 defendants were sentenced to intermittent incarceration, meaning they only had to serve time on nights or weekends. Home detention was given instead of prison in 101 cases, while defendants in 135 cases got probation.

“There is no evidence that the judges in these cases are handing out sentences that are excessive,” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush administration. “I think this shows that the system is working.”

The Intercept’s analysis is the most comprehensive examination so far of how federal judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents ruled in January 6 cases that have reached a final resolution in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which is handling all the criminal cases stemming from the insurrection. Hundreds more cases are still in progress and will likely be assigned to the same group of judges. A total of 1,233 individuals have so far been charged in connection with the January 6 mob, according to a running tally compiled by the Associated Press.

The January 6 defendants have been charged with a wide range of crimes, including low-level violations like disorderly conduct and unlawful entry that would be forgettable if they were not committed with the aim of derailing the peaceful transfer of power. But the charges also include far more serious offenses, such as assaulting law enforcement officers and members of the media; theft; entering restricted areas with deadly weapons; disrupting Congress; and seditious conspiracy. About 140 police officers were assaulted as they tried to protect the Capitol and members of Congress, according to the Justice Department.

Judges have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors recommended across the board. The Justice Department is now appealing some of them.

“This dispels the idea that [the January 6 defendants] are victims,” said William Banks, a law professor at Syracuse University, when The Intercept told him about the analysis.

Lisa Klem, a spokesperson for the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on the statistics.

The pro-Trump revisionist history surrounding the January 6 defendants is part of a larger effort to downplay the significance of the insurrection while perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The campaign to anoint the January 6 defendants as martyrs began soon after the uprising at the Capitol and quickly gained momentum. The following year, a former defendant sat in a phony jail cell in what amounted to a performance art installation created for attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and last spring, a group of January 6 defendants singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over a prison phone line became a hit on iTunes. Many January 6 defendants have sought to cash in on their fame and have raised millions of dollars from right-wing supporters, particularly through the Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. Prosecutors have asked judges to impose fines to counter the flood of donations.

The right-wing support for January 6 defendants has continued even as many have apologized in court for their actions and blamed Trump for lying about the election results and inciting them to storm the Capitol. One recent study by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that 174 January 6 defendants have said they believed they were doing Trump’s bidding.

Lawyers for Peter Schwartz, who threw a chair at police officers and attacked them with pepper spray, told the court that he was only following Trump’s directions. “There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being the most prominent,” they wrote in an April 2023 court filing. “Mr. Schwartz is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong.”

Trump and the MAGA right have ignored these statements of remorse and continue to treat the defendants as heroic figures. At a campaign event in Texas in November, the Republican front-runner described incarcerated January 6 offenders as “hostages, not prisoners.” Last June, Trump attended a fundraiser for January 6 defendants, calling them “great people” who have “been made to pay a price.” 

J. Michael Luttig, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, said that the pro-Trump attacks on the judicial process in the January 6 cases are deeply damaging to the nation. “The American people, as well as the courts, must understand that the former president will continue these disgraceful, condemnable attacks on our institutions of law and democracy until he has succeeded in delegitimizing them in the eyes of a sufficient number of Americans that not only will they not accept the justice system’s verdicts against him, but they will return him to The White House in 2024 precisely because of those verdicts.”

Federal sentencing guidelines establish a range for each crime, but the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that sentencing guidelines are not mandatory. Federal judges must consider the guidelines, but they are not required to follow them. Prosecutors usually make recommendations in criminal cases, often reflecting the guidelines, while defense attorneys tend to propose lower sentences. But judges can ignore both recommendations.

The judges handling the January 6 cases have taken advantage of the leeway they are granted under the law to largely ignore prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations. Luttig, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, said he always had confidence that judges handling the January 6 cases were not persecuting the defendants as Trump and his supporters had alleged, and were instead following normal and consistent sentencing patterns. He said he was not surprised “by the fact that the judges appear to have sentenced this group of defendants to lesser terms of imprisonment than was generally recommended by the prosecutors,” nor that “the party affiliation of the president appointing the judges” was not “a variable” in their sentencing patterns.

“This is as it should be,” Luttig said.

Obama appointees have handled the most January 6 cases, and they, too, have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in the vast majority. They have presided over 337 cases that have been resolved and have issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in 281 of them, or just over 83 percent.

Judge Tanya Chutkan — who is presiding over Trump’s own federal trial on charges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and who Trump and his supporters have accused of being out to get the former president — has actually been lenient in many of the other January 6 cases she has handled. She has issued sentences lighter than prosecutors sought in almost exactly half — 19 out of 39 — of her January 6 cases. Those statistics contradict a media narrative promoted by the MAGA right that Chutkan, an Obama appointee, has meted out unusually harsh sentences in cases related to the Capitol riot and that she may be exceptionally tough on Trump as well.

Judges appointed by Trump have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors wanted at only a slightly higher rate than Obama appointees. Out of 173 cases, Trump appointees gave lighter sentences than the government requested in 156. Trump appointees agreed to the sentences recommended by prosecutors in 16 cases, while issuing a harsher sentence in one.

By contrast, judges appointed by President Bill Clinton have meted out the harshest sentences, yet they have still been more lenient than prosecutors recommended slightly more than half the time. George W. Bush appointed judges have issued lesser sentences than prosecutors sought in 50 out of 54 cases, or 92 percent, while judges appointed by Ronald Reagan issued more lenient sentences in 42 out of 68 cases, or 61 percent. 

Judges handling the January 6 cases have been relatively lenient even when sentencing the most prominent defendants charged with the most serious crimes. Some leaders of militant groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy — plotting to use force to keep Trump in power — and received long sentences, but those penalties were still significantly lighter than what prosecutors had recommended.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in prison by Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee. That struck many as a long sentence for the 58-year-old graduate of Yale Law School, but it was seven years less than prosecutors recommended for a man the government says was one of the insurrection’s key leaders. Mehta imposed the lesser sentence despite finding that Rhodes’s actions constituted terrorism, which calls for longer sentences under federal guidelines. The Justice Department has appealed the sentence, along with those of other Oath Keepers who received much lighter sentences than prosecutors recommended.

When it came time to mete out punishment for Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Oath Keepers Florida chapter who joined other members of the group to march up the steps of the U.S. Capitol in a “stack” formation to storm the building, Mehta issued a sentence of 188 months in prison; prosecutors had sought a 252-month sentence. Prosecutors asked that Oath Keepers member Roberto Minuta — a tattoo shop owner in Newburgh, New York, who was also convicted of seditious conspiracy — serve 204 months in prison, but Mehta sentenced him to just 54 months. On his way to Washington, Minuta filmed a video of himself warning that “millions will die” in a looming civil war; just before the Capitol riot began, he and Meggs were part of a security detail for Trump adviser Roger Stone.

Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader convicted of seditious conspiracy, was sentenced to 22 years in prison by Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee. Tarrio’s is the longest sentence given to any January 6 defendant so far, but it was still much shorter than the 33 years that prosecutors had recommended. The Justice Department has indicated that it plans to appeal the sentences of Tarrio and four other Proud Boys.

Jacob Chansley stormed the U.S. Capitol shirtless, covered in face paint, and wearing a horned headdress. He became known as the “QAnon Shaman” and got all the way up to the Senate rostrum, where he wrote a threatening note to Vice President Mike Pence, who was due to preside over the congressional certification of the presidential vote. “It’s only a matter of time,” the note read. “Justice is coming!”

Prosecutors described Chansley as “the public face of the Capitol riot” and asked that he be sentenced to 51 months in prison after he was convicted in 2021 of obstructing an official proceeding. Senior Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, sentenced him to 41 months, but Chansley was released after just 27 months. In July, Lamberth dismissed an effort by Chansley to get his conviction overturned, noting that new information obtained by prosecutors showed that Chansley may have been aware that a gallows had been erected outside the Capitol when he wrote his threatening note to Pence — evidence that Lamberth said might have convinced him to issue a longer sentence.

Chansley is now gearing up to run for Congress, the institution he helped invade on January 6. As he launches his bid for a House seat in Arizona’s 8^th District, the 36-year-old says he may rebrand himself as “America’s shaman.” Just before Christmas, Chansley attended a conference of Turning Point USA, a major conservative group, in Phoenix and had his photo taken with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the right-wing House member from Georgia. Chansley wore the same costume he’d had on at the Capitol; Greene said she was honored to meet him.

The most lenient individual judge handling January 6 cases was not appointed by Trump or Biden, but by George W. Bush. Judge John Bates, now on “senior” or semi-retired status, issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in all 28 of the January 6 cases he handled, often turning down requests for prison time and letting defendants walk free. 

Take the case of Abram Markofski, an active member of the Wisconsin National Guard when he stormed the Capitol. After Markofski agreed to plead guilty to one of four charges against him — parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building — prosecutors asked for him to spend 14 days in jail; Bates gave him two years’ probation instead. Prosecutors sought a sentence of 30 days in jail for Thomas Fee, a retired New York firefighter who pleaded guilty to a parading charge that carried a sentence of up to six months in prison, but again Bates sentenced him to probation. Prosecutors sought seven months in jail for right-wing Florida pastor James Cusick; nine months for his son Casey Cusick; and seven months for David Lesperance, a member of Cusick’s congregation. Bates reduced their sentences to just 10 days each.

Bates has shown leniency toward even the most violent January 6 defendants on his docket. He sentenced Joseph Padilla, a former corrections officer from Tennessee who threw a flagpole that hit a police officer in the head, to 78 months in prison, less than half the 171-month sentence sought by prosecutors. Bates gave Padilla the lower sentence even after describing him as “one of the most aggressive rioters” on January 6.

“The judge was fair, I have to admit,” Padilla’s wife wrote in September on GiveSendGo, the Christian fundraising website.

Bates was also lenient in the wild case of Nathan Pelham. The same day Pelham agreed to surrender on charges related to the Capitol riot, the Texas man was arrested for shooting a gun in the direction of law enforcement officers. The shooting happened in April, after an FBI agent called Pelham to inform him of the January 6 charges. Later that day, when a local sheriff’s deputy was sent to his home for a welfare check, Pelham fired in the deputy’s direction. Prosecutors wanted Pelham to spend six months in prison for his role in the insurrection, but Bates sentenced Pelham to just a $500 fine in the January 6 case. Separately, Pelham pleaded guilty to a charge of illegal possession of a firearm in connection with the shooting and was sentenced to two years in prison.

One Obama appointee has been nearly as lenient as Bates. Judge James Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., has issued sentences more lenient than prosecutors sought in 34 of the 37 cases he has handled.

William Cotton of Rhode Island was a low-level member of the mob that breached the U.S. Capitol, and he quickly cut a plea deal with the government. But prosecutors contended that he should still spend some time in jail because they said he showed no remorse for his actions. “Cotton does not view this case or his participation in the Jan. 6 riot as serious,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo. “Put differently, Cotton does not take this case seriously because he does not expect this Court to take it seriously.” It appears that Cotton was right; while prosecutors sought a 21-day prison sentence, Boasberg gave him probation instead.

Boasberg also issued a lighter sentence than prosecutors sought in the case of a defendant involved in one of the riot’s most violent incidents. On January 6, Jonathan Munafo of Albany, New York, stole a police officer’s shield and repeatedly punched him, causing “the officer’s head to snap back,” prosecutors wrote in a statement. The government sought 37 months in prison, but Boasberg reduced the sentence to 33 months, despite the fact that Munafo had been arrested in another election-related case for making death threats to a Michigan 911 dispatcher in a series of deranged calls on January 5, 2021. Munafo, who reportedly spent much of 2020 following Trump around to campaign events, was separately sentenced to 24 months in prison on charges related to the death threats.

Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, has also been extraordinarily lenient, issuing lighter sentences than prosecutors sought in 48 of the 50 January 6 cases he has handled, including cases involving some of the day’s most infamous incidents. Kevin Seefried of Delaware was photographed carrying a Confederate flag through the Capitol building, an image that went viral and captured the extremist, racist aspect of January 6. Seefried also confronted U.S. Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, a Black man, and threatened him with the flagpole. Seefried, the first rioter to encounter Goodman, cursed at the officer and chased him up a flight of stairs in a scene famously captured on video. Goodman testified that Seefried told him, “You can shoot me, man, but we’re coming in.” The flagpole with a Confederate flag on it, prosecutors noted, “was brandished by a man standing at the front of a volatile, growing mob towards a solitary, Black police officer.”

Goodman said that Seefried jabbed the flagpole in his direction several times while demanding to know “where are the members at, where are they counting votes?” Prosecutors recommended 70 months in prison for Seefried, but McFadden sentenced him to 36 months.

In the case of Geoffrey Sills, a Virginia man who stole a baton from a police officer and beat him with it, prosecutors sought 108 months in prison, but McFadden determined that he should only serve 52 months.

Chutkan, the judge handling Trump’s federal trial, has also issued more lenient sentences than prosecutors sought in cases involving January 6 defendants convicted of violent crimes. Matthew Capsel of Ottawa, Illinois, fought National Guard soldiers protecting the Capitol, charging a line of troops and ramming into their shields. Capsel — who filmed himself fighting the soldiers on TikTok and whose Facebook profile name was “Mateo Q Capsel,” suggesting he was an adherent of QAnon conspiracy theories — only stopped fighting after he was pepper-sprayed, prosecutors wrote in a statement. Capsel kept posting about January 6 afterward, writing that “on the 6^th good men had to do a bad thing.”

Capsel was charged with civil disorder and reached a plea deal with prosecutors, who recommended that he be sentenced to 31 months in prison. But Chutkan reduced that to 18 months, well below the 27 to 33-month sentencing guideline range for his offense, according to prosecutors, and not much more than the sentence proposed by Capsel’s defense lawyers.

Perhaps the toughest January 6 judge has only presided over a small handful of cases and thus has not had much impact on the overall figures. Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee now on senior status, has handled nine cases and issued sentences harsher than prosecutors sought in five, the same as prosecutors sought in two others, and more lenient sentences in only two. 

During the sentencing hearing in the cases of John Getsinger Jr. and Stacie Hargis-Getsinger, a married couple from South Carolina who joined the mob storming the Capitol, John sought to influence Sullivan by expressing regret and acknowledging that “we brought this on ourselves.”

Sullivan wasn’t buying it. Although prosecutors recommended just 45 days in jail for each, Sullivan gave them 60 days apiece.

Some January 6 defendants may soon find their sentences reduced or completely thrown out thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court agreed in December to consider an appeal of one of the charges brought by the government in a large number of January 6 cases: obstruction of an official proceeding. A lower court judge ruled that federal prosecutors inappropriately used the law against January 6 defendants. That ruling was overturned by an appeals court, and now the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case.

Obstruction of an official proceeding is the sole charge in 24 out of the 719 January 6 cases in which defendants have been convicted and sentenced, according to the Intercept’s analysis; in many other cases, it is one of several offenses of which defendants were found guilty. If the Supreme Court determines that the obstruction law was misused, the defendants who have only been convicted of obstruction could presumably have their records cleared.

As the cases of hundreds of January 6 defendants continue to work their way through the legal system, Trump’s own trial on charges stemming from January 6 and his efforts to overturn the election is looming in the same federal courthouse, an imposing white stone building on Constitution Avenue just a few blocks from the Capitol. Trump is facing a charge of obstructing an official proceeding, along with other charges, so a Supreme Court verdict could affect him as well.

But while Trump has repeatedly spoken out in support of the January 6 defendants, he’s trying to block special counsel Jack Smith from even mentioning the Capitol mob during his trial, which is scheduled to begin in March. In a recent court filing, Smith made clear that he plans to highlight the insurrection as the culmination of Trump’s illegal post-election efforts to remain in power. But Trump is now trying to distance himself from it. His lawyer has argued that any mention of the Capitol riot is “not relevant” to Trump’s case and would be “prejudicial and inflammatory.” 

The post Federal Judges Have Shown Leniency in Nearly All Jan. 6 Cases appeared first on The Intercept.