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Biden calls on Nigers junta to release Bazoum and restore democracy - The Guardian
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On Tuesday, at roughly the same time that Donald Trump was indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz was sworn in as a new member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, giving progressives their first majority on the court since 2008. The new composition of the court has major ramifications for American democracythe previous conservative majority came one vote shy of ruling in favor of Trumps effort to reverse Joe Bidens victory in Wisconsin and upheld the gerrymandered mapsthat locked in huge GOP legislative majorities and a series of laws that made itharder to vote.The new liberal majority could now unwind that, restoring democracy and majority rule in the state.
On Wednesday, voting rights groups filed a new lawsuit challenging the GOPs gerrymandered maps. The suit claims that the state legislative maps violate the Wisconsin constitution by retaliating against some voters based on their viewpoints and free speech; treating some voters worse than others because of their political views and where they live; and defying the promise of a free government enshrined in the state constitution. (Separate litigation could also be filed challenging the states congressional maps, where Republicans hold six of eight US House seats despite the evenly divided political makeup of the state.) By taking their challenge directly to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, state and national voting rights groups hope that new maps will be put in place before the 2024 election. Law Forward, a progressive legal group based in Madison, filed the lawsuit alongside organizations that included the Campaign Legal Center and the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School.
Since 2011, when GOP operatives drew new redistricting maps in secret, Wisconsin has been one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. The lines adopted by Republicans in 2021 preserved and expanded the GOPs advantage, largely because the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that it would choose state legislative and congressional mapsthat made the least changes from the 2011 maps, which virtually ensured that the new lines would be heavily stacked in the GOPs favor. GOP assembly leader Robin Vos admitted that the least changes requirement was not in the [Wisconsin] Constitution and that the new lines were passed for partisan purposes.
In 2022, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was reelected with 51 percent of the vote and Democrats won 4 of 6 statewide elections, but Republicans retained 67 percent of state Senate seats and 65 percent of Assembly seats. They attained a supermajority in the senate and came just two seats short of gaining asupermajority in the assembly, which would have allowed Republicans to overrule the governors vetoes and make him functionally irrelevant.
While campaigning for a seat on the court, Protasiewicz said that the GOPs maps were absolutely, positively rigged, and do not reflect the people in the state. Republicans will try to force Protasiewicz to recuse herself from the redistricting case and even floated the idea of impeaching her during the campaign in April, although Evers would simply choose her replacement under that scenario.
Extreme gerrymandering has given Republicans in the legislature a green light to entrench their own power such as when they passed a series of lame-duck laws stripping power from Evers after he won election in 2018 while allowing them to block popular policies on issues like abortion, guns, and education with little accountability.
Voting rights activists believe that striking down the gerrymandered maps is the first and most important step toward making Wisconsin a truly representative democracy again. As Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler told me after the 2022 election, the state is not a democracy as long as these maps are in place.
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This New Lawsuit Could Restore Democracy in Wisconsin Mother Jones - Mother Jones
On November 3, 2020, as America watched the first results of a fateful presidential contest roll in, voters in a North Texas suburb struck a blow for workers rights. Euless residents approved a proposition limiting some large companies ability to force employees to work overtime if they didnt want to.
The fair workweek initiative, comparable to measures passed recently in a handful of other cities, was led in Euless by employees of LSG Sky Chefs, an airline catering giant and meal-supplier for American Airlines. These workers, unionized with Unite Here, said they were being overwhelmed with mandatory overtime hours, often announced at the last minute, as American Airlines, headquartered near the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth airport, sought to dramatically increase flight volume.
You can have a wife and children, and yet every day you are forced to stay at work, and you have no time to even go back and sit and relax and play and take care of children, said Samuel Tandankwa, a Sky Chefs driver and Unite Here member, recalling the conditions in 2019 and leading up to the COVID pandemic.
Despite getting voters approval, the initiative faced legal troubles from the first. Some city officials doubted it could be enforced. Sky Chefs told the Texas Observer it didnt apply to them since they maintain a national contract with Unite Here. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already written a letter stating the policy would violate a state law that bans cities from setting minimum wages. Nevertheless, Tandankwa told the Observer in July that since the campaign, the company actually has turned away from using mandatory overtime, freeing up workers to meet family obligations, and neither he nor local worker advocates want to lose the ordinance.
But Euless overtime measure is among the local ordinances that will be vaporized by Texas House Bill 2127, dubbed the Death Star bill by critics, which was signed by GOP Governor Greg Abbott last month and takes effect in September. Its causing uproar around the state, as city officials, workers, and others try to figure out what parts of municipal law and regulation the bill will nullify.
The legislations real intent is both narrower and potentially more profound than just upending city ordinance-making powers.
The bills sweeping, alleged purpose is stated in its opening sections: returning sovereign regulatory powers to the state where those powers belong. However, closer examination suggests that the legislations real intent is both narrower and potentially more profound than just upending city ordinance-making powers. First, it is a laser beam aimed at a small group of progressive ordinances improving worker and tenant protectionslocal victories won through hard-fought campaigns over the course of more than a decade. Second, and more importantly, its a bid to permanently hamstring municipal democracy in Texas, especially in its big blue cities. Cities are where most Texans live; they are increasingly liberal, their populations often majority nonwhite, and they are the level of government most responsive to ordinary citizens. In essence, the Legislature decided there was too much Democracy afoot in Texas, so it did something about it.
To me, thats the will of the people being taken away, said Tevita Uhatafe, a Euless resident who works for American Airlines and is also a vice president of the Texas AFL-CIO. We voted for it and here we are, were going to get it taken away because people who claim to hate big government are acting just like [it].
There is no precedent for what they did this time, said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. It was not a measured response to a given policy that corporate interests didnt like; it was a wholesale transfer of power from cities to politicians in Austin.
HB 2127 is mostly broad in its languageand thus unclear in what all it actually will do. It lists vast categories of lawagriculture, business and commerce, finance, insurance, labor, natural resources, occupations, and propertyin which cities may not regulate an issue that the state already regulates, unless explicitly authorized to do so somewhere in state law.
Some cities and legal experts argue that would return populous cities to the very limited level of power they had in Texas until the early 1900s. Growing cities were burdening the Legislature with so many local concerns that the Lege put an issue on the ballot that, in essence, allowed cities with more than 5,000 people to self-governa capacity known as home rule. Voters passed the amendment in 1912. Cities could now legislate broadly, as long as their ordinances didnt contradict state law. The City of Houston has already filed suit to block the Death Star bill, charging thatundoing home rule would require another voter-approved constitutional amendment.
The full extent of what local policies the bill will undo is unclear, say city attorneys. People ask me often Are we combing through our ordinances? And the answer to that is No, San Antonio City Attorney Andy Segovia told the Observer. Because of the bills vague wording, he said, It would be almost an impossible task to identify those [ordinances] that we would have a high degree of confidence would be affected.
However, the Legislature was specific in attacking local labor and tenant protections along with a couple other grab-bag issues. The bill forbids local ordinances on overtime and other work scheduling matters, policies mandating rest breaks for construction workers like those maintained in Dallas and Austin, and also fair chance hiring policies like those on the books in Austin and DeSoto, which help the formerly incarcerated get jobs. It forbids eviction protections like those in Austin and Dallas, too. Another provision appears to target Austins ban on cat declawing, while convoluted carve-outs grandfather in existing local regulations of payday lenders and so-called puppy mills while preempting future measures.
Bills to wipe out local regulation of employment practices were pushed by the states powerful business lobby in the 2019 and 2021 legislative sessions but didnt pass. The core language of those bills was inserted into the Death Star bill.
City attorneys told the Observer they could not provide a list of affected ordinances and would ultimately need clarity from the courts. Taking a page from the states bounty hunter-style abortion ban, HB 2127 expressly authorizes individuals and trade associations to sue cities or counties for violations. A judge may order a city to abandon its policy but can only award the plaintiff costs and fees, so some cities may simply wait for these suits to arrive before making decisions.
HB 2127 is just the latest entry in a saga of state preemption, the term referring to a higher level of government big-footing a lower level. Over the last decade, the Legislature has undone local efforts to regulate fracking and ridesharing companies, to reduce police budgets and decriminalize homelessness, to prohibit discrimination against Section 8 tenants and reduce deportations from jails, while also capping local tax revenues. Between 2018 and 2019, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas also passed policies requiring employers to provide paid sick leave. These ordinances were thoroughly stymied by the courts, but the business lobbyexemplified by the National Federation of Independent Business and the Texas Public Policy Foundationwent on the warpath against local labor protections anyway.
U.S. Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat representing a swath of Texas from Austin to San Antonio, led the charge as an Austin City Council member from 2015 to 2022 when the capital city pushed the bounds of local progressive policymaking further than any other city in the state and likely across the South. He sees a continuous thread in the states pushback from then to now.
Big corporate lobbies do not want our democracy to work for working people, Casar told the Observer. And they dont want any examples that can show that democracy can work for working people.
GOP state Representative Dustin Burrows, author of the Death Star bill, minces no words in describing his feelings about local government. We hate cities and counties, he said in 2019, a comment caught on a surreptitious recording. However, his explanation of HB 2127s provisions was much less clear.
Its needed, he said at one point, because small businesses just cant navigate a patchwork of local regulationsalthough business-related local policies have often exempted companies below a certain threshold. He said the bill would actually help local officials by giving them an excuse not to vote on countless issues that activists have been harassing them to pass. In committee, he said the bill would encourage the Legislature to do a better job of regulating industrya claim that would surely elicit a bitter chuckle from any seasoned watcher of Texas politics. Throughout, Burrows stated that cities would retain control over core functions like zoning and public safety. On the other hand, he also specifically promised that cities could still regulate billboardsand the billboard industry is already scheming openly to the contrary.
Perhaps his most accurate explanation about the billand his vision of democracycame when he complained at a hearing that Some of the same advocates that come to the Legislature with their agenda that are not able to get it through here at the state Capitol have now gone to some of our cities and gotten them to adopt measures to implement their vision of Texas in a way that we have already rejected.
The bills Senate sponsor, Republican Brandon Creighton, at one point defended HB 2127 with the inspiring phrase: We write statute thats ambiguous on purpose and vague. And then he slipped into it a provision banning local governments from passing measures to give renters some protection from eviction, while utterly misdescribing what he was doing.
Levy, the state AFL-CIO president, worries that the Death Star laws strange structure will allow lobbyists to slip seemingly innocuous provisions into bills simply to create state regulation in a policy area for the purpose of later undoing local policies in court.
It sets up the state Legislature as the place where lobbyists can go to play to get anything they dont like on the local level invalidated, Levy said. Such lobbyists, of course, represent the very same organizations that are empowered to sue cities or counties for violations of the new lawa process whereby, as the City of Houston has put it, cities and taxpayers will end up funding lawsuits filed by trade associations seeking to deregulate their industries at the local level.
In its lawsuit seeking to block HB 2127, Houston argues that the bill will effectively repeal the states century-old home rule regimewhich cannot legally be done through an ordinary bill but would require a constitutional amendment approved by the people. The State of Texas is not its state legislature alone, the suit says. Instead, Texas sovereign powers are vested in Texans themselves and, in their Constitution, Texans delegated [home rule] powers to cities.
As of July 24, the state has yet to file an answer to the lawsuit, though Burrows made sure to note on Twitter that the Bayou City had enlisted the help of an attorney based in California. San Antonio has joined the suit against the state as well.
Declaring war on home rule is a recent phenomenon concentrated in states like Texas, Florida, and Arizona that have both right-wing legislatures and large urban areas. The general movement from the late 19th century to the late 20th or early 21st century [was] in the opposite direction: to increase respect for local self-government, said Richard Briffault, a scholar of preemption at Columbia Law School. But what you have been seeing in the last, Id say, 15 years is a big pushback on that, and a lot of it correlates with [the urban-rural divide]a lot of it correlates with party, and a lot of it correlates with race.
That timeline corresponds with the Republican takeover of many state legislatures, while many cities (such as Houston) grew ever-bluer. The Death Star bill specifically forms part of a more recent trend of so-called super preemption, meaning measures that target city powers broadly, but experts say Texas law is novel in its scope. In the breadth of it, in how open-ended it is, in the ways in which it really does seem to try to completely reorder the relationship between cities and the state, I do think its something new, said Nestor Davidson, another scholar of state-city conflict at Fordham University.
If you look at the role that cities play today in terms of being the level of government closest to the people, Davidson said, if they dont have the authority they need to be able to respond I do think ultimately that thats a democracy issue.
Darwin Hamilton recalls clearly the late night at Austin City Hall in 2016 when his city became the first in the South to pass a fair-chance hiring policy, which forbids private employers from initially asking about applicants criminal backgrounds. An advocate on criminal justice issues who was formerly incarcerated himself, he still remembers how the crowd erupted. It was just a monumental and historic night, Hamilton told the Observer. Given who our opposition was attorneys, well-funded, from [the Texas Public Policy Foundation] and staffing companies, Chamber of Commerceand then here are these formerly incarcerated people who basically won the debate that night.
He and his allies spent the next few years fighting state legislation to undo the victorysuccessfully, until the Death Star arrived.
A statewide but much more limited version of the fair chance hiring policy, applying to public employers only, died at the Capitol this year, along with measures mandating rest breaks and various other versions of pro-worker and pro-tenant policies over the years. Assuming Houstons lawsuit does not succeed, progressive activists will have to recalibrate their strategies post-HB 2127.
[HB 2127] doesnt necessarily mean that there still cant be a lot of really innovative and amazing things that happen at the local level, said Kara Sheehan of the nonprofit Local Progress. She pointed to San Antonio, which rather than giving up entirely on a proposed policy mandating rest breaks for construction workers is now scaling it back to apply only to employers contracted or funded by the city. A measure along those lines should survive the Death Star.
I think that its going to be just more fuel for this kind of current wave of unionization.
More ambitiously, private-sector union drives can lead to collective bargaining agreements containing requirements comparable to those that cities can no longer impose. Levy suggested HB 2127 is telling workers Youre on your own, you better organize, and I think that its going to be just more fuel for this kind of current wave of unionization thats playing out in workplaces from hospitals to newspapers to coffee shops.
Last, theres always the level of government to which even Texas must defer. As a historically hot summer bakes the Southwest, Casar, the councilman-turned-congressman, is pushing the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration to accelerate its ongoing process of promulgating a heat safety standard, which could mandate rest breaks for construction workers and other laborers nationwide for the first time.
Mourn, and then organize, Casar advised. I and lots of other organizers and elected officials put our lives into [measures undone by the Legislature], but this is what the right wing in power in the state does. What they were able to do is pass a law to try to snuff out policiesbut I dont think they can snuff out that local democracy. I think that only happens if we let them.
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'Death Star' Bill Is About Kneecapping Democracy in Texas - The Texas Observer
United States President Joe Biden has cast the conflict between the western world and its competitors as a clash between democracies and autocracies. This masks the American desire for power and the complex realities of creating democracy.
Democracy is supposed to base a states legitimacy in its accountability to its people. It supports peoples freedoms and human rights. What these ideals mean in practice and how to achieve them are difficult questions.
But its clear the U.S. is no longer a credible champion for, or exemplar of, democracy.
In fact, it has a long history of overthrowing and undermining democracies abroad.
Barack Obamas administration, for example, greenlit the military coup that overthrew Egypts democracy and ended the Arab Spring uprisings in 2013.
The U.S. also has a long history of supporting authoritarian regimes. It has made it clear that being authoritarian does not impede any country from joining its coalition against China.
The U.S. itself is a failing democracy or perhaps a better description is a plutocracy with democratic embellishments.
American politics have been corrupted by money, civil rights are under assault, voter suppression is rife and distrust and social division are ubiquitous. In 2021, only 50 per cent of Americans said they believed they live in a democracy.
Russia has used social media to interfere in elections around the world. China has tried to influence diaspora communities. But theres not much evidence these activities are co-ordinated and they pale compared to the ubiquity and influence of American interference.
The U.S. has not been defending democracy. Its been defending its power and privileges in an unequal global system.
This is not the only way the concept of democracy has been misused by the United States and other western nations.
Many countries in the West provide their citizens with the highest living standards and freedoms in the world. How they got there is something many conveniently forget.
The western worlds tendency to see itself as the pinnacle of civilization and morality has been used to justify global domination and intervention in the rest of the world.
The contemporary successes of some of the most powerful democracies are the result of the subjugation and exploitation of other people both within and beyond their borders. The U.S. was built on genocide and slavery.
Canada is only starting to acknowledge its history of cultural genocide. Every European state that practised colonialism profited from that brutality.
The British extracted more than $45 trillion of wealth from India between 1765 and 1938 and destroyed the countrys economy.
The U.K.s industrial revolution was financed by Indian plunder. Tens of millions of Indians died as the result of Britains economic policies. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill deliberately implemented policies that created and exacerbated the Bengal Famine that killed more than three million Indians.
Western amnesia about its brutal history is deliberate. As the British Empire ended, it launched Operation Legacy, the destruction of millions of documents detailing the full extent of British atrocities in its colonies.
Belgium hid the truth of King Leopolds vicious exploitation of the Belgian Congo that involved the murder of 10 million people.
In the U.S., the political rights campaign against critical race theory stifles the historical reality and legacy of American racism.
Democracy is not a cure-all for human misery and inequity. For impoverished states, democracy can actually exacerbate social divisions.
Exactly what makes a democracy successful is unclear, though it seems to lie in good governance. What is clear is that democracies cannot simply be wished into existence. Most western states can only offer examples of democracy-building that have relied upon extreme military, political and social violence.
Democracy in principle is a desirable goal. Most of the world supports the responsibility to protect doctrine the idea that states bear basic obligations to their citizens. However, most do not support military interventions to further those ostensible goals. They are aware of the great difficulties involved in making democracy work.
Western states argue that only democracies are legitimate states because they are supported by the consent of their citizens. That isnt the case for most authoritarian states.
However, China the primary target of the American democracy versus authoritarianism campaign complicates the democratic narrative. A meticulous, long-term Harvard study found that the vast majority of Chinese citizens support their national government. Other surveys have reached the same general conclusion.
This support may reflect, in part, Chinas cultural and historical norms and experiences but it is mostly attributable to how much the lives of the Chinese people have improved.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has overseen 40 years of economic growth and technological development unprecedented in world history. Chinese GDP per capita increased from US$195 in 1980 to US$12,556 in 2021. As many as 800 million people have risen out of poverty. Like any government, democratic or not, the CCPs legitimacy reflects its performance.
China is not, however, aggressively promoting its political model around the world, unlike the Wests often violent, coercive and selective push for liberal democracy.
Western democracies can best help the world by doing more to live up to their highest ideals and approach their relations with the rest of the world with humility borne from historical awareness.
The one existential threat the entire planet faces is climate change. Co-operation within the entire international community is more important than ever and will require global economic and political transformation.
The American and western strategy of fomenting global division to maintain a harmful status quo is counterproductive at best.
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The world's most powerful democracies were built on the suffering of others - The Conversation Indonesia
In the long annals of the republic, the White House has seen its share of perfidy and scandal, presidents who cheated on their wives and cheated the taxpayers, who abused their power and abused the public trust.
But not since the framers emerged from Independence Hall on that clear, cool day in Philadelphia 236 years ago has any president who was voted out of office been accused of plotting to hold onto power in an elaborate scheme of deception and intimidation that would lead to violence in the halls of Congress.
What makes the indictment against Donald J. Trump on Tuesday so breathtaking is not that it is the first time a president has been charged with a crime or even the second. Mr. Trump already holds those records. But as serious as hush money and classified documents may be, this third indictment in four months gets to the heart of the matter, the issue that will define the future of American democracy.
At the core of the United States of America v. Donald J. Trump is no less than the viability of the system constructed during that summer in Philadelphia. Can a sitting president spread lies about an election and try to employ the authority of the government to overturn the will of the voters without consequence? The question would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, but the Trump case raises the kind of specter more familiar in countries with histories of coups and juntas and dictators.
In effect, Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought the case, charged Mr. Trump with one of the most sensational frauds in the history of the United States, one fueled by lies and animated by the basest of motives, the thirst for power. In a 45-page, four-count indictment, Mr. Smith dispensed with the notion that Mr. Trump believed his claims of election fraud. The defendant knew that they were false, it said, and made them anyway to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.
The elements of the alleged conspiracy laid out in the indictment were for the most part well known since the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol wrapped up seven months ago and many of them long before that. In that sense, the unsealing of the document had a bizarrely anti-climactic feel to it, given the stakes.
But if long delayed, the indictment wove together all the intrigue between the Nov. 3, 2020, election and the Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration into a damning tale of a president who pushed in seemingly every possible way to stop the handover of the White House to the challenger who beat him.
The framers considered the peaceful transfer of power fundamental to the new form of government they were devising. It was a fairly radical innovation in its day, an era when kings and emperors generally gave up power only upon natural death or at the point of a weapon. In the newborn republic, by contrast, the framers set limits on power through four-year presidential terms renewable only by the voters through the Electoral College.
George Washington established the precedent of voluntarily stepping down after two of those terms, a restraint later incorporated into the Constitution through the 22nd Amendment. John Adams established the precedent of peacefully surrendering power after losing an election. Ever since, every defeated president accepted the verdict of the voters and stepped down. As Ronald Reagan once put it, what we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.
Until Mr. Trump came along.
For all of the many, many allegations made against him on all sorts of subjects during his time on the public stage, everything else feels small by comparison. Unlike the indictment by New York State for allegedly covering up a payment to a porn actress and Mr. Smiths previous indictment for allegedly jeopardizing national secrets after leaving the White House, the new charges are the first to deal with actions taken by a president while in office.
While he failed to keep his grip on power, Mr. Trump has undermined the credibility of elections in the United States by persuading three in 10 Americans that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him, even though it was not and many of his own advisers and family members know it was not.
Bringing the case to court, of course, may not restore that public faith in the system. Millions of Mr. Trumps supporters and many Republican leaders have embraced his narrative of victimization, dismissing the prosecution without waiting to read the indictment as merely part of a far-reaching, multi-jurisdictional and sometimes even bipartisan witch hunt against him.
Mr. Trump has been laying the ground for the eventual indictment for months, making clear to his backers that they should not trust anything prosecutors tell them. Why didnt they do this 2.5 years ago? Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site on Tuesday afternoon. Why did they wait so long? Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign. Prosecutorial Misconduct!
A statement issued by his campaign went further, equating prosecutors with fascists and communists. The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes, it said. President Trump has always followed the law and the Constitution, with advice from many highly accomplished attorneys.
Name-calling is a political defense, not a legal one, but one that so far has succeeded in preserving his electoral standing in his comeback campaign for the White House. Despite prognostications to the contrary, the last two indictments succeeded only in enhancing his appeal among Republicans in the contest for the party nomination to challenge President Biden next year.
In a court of law, however, the challenge for Mr. Trump will be different, especially with a jury selected from residents of Washington, a predominantly Democratic city where he won just 5 percent of the vote in 2020. Mr. Trumps strategy may be to try to delay a trial until after the 2024 election and hope that he wins so that he can short-circuit the prosecution or even try to pardon himself.
The most essential facts of the case, after all, are not in dispute, nor did he deny any of the assertions made in the indictment on Tuesday. Mr. Trump was astonishingly open at the time in declaring that he wanted to overturn the election. Since leaving office, he has even called for the termination of the Constitution to reinstall him in the White House immediately.
The question is whether the facts add up to crimes as alleged by a federal grand jury at Mr. Smiths behest. Just as no president ever tried to reverse his defeat at the ballot box before, no prosecutor has brought charges for doing so, meaning there is no precedent for applying the statutes on the books to such a circumstance.
Mr. Trumps defenders argue that he had good-faith reasons for contesting the election results in multiple states and that he did nothing more than pursue his legitimate, legal options, a view shared by 74 percent of Republicans in a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College. What Mr. Smith is doing, they maintain, is criminalizing a political dispute in what amounts to victors justice Mr. Bidens administration punishing his vanquished foe.
But as the indictment methodically documented, Mr. Trump was told over and over again by his own advisers, allies and administration officials that the allegations he was making were not true, yet he publicly continued to make them, sometimes just hours later.
He was told they were not true by not one but two attorneys general, multiple other Justice Department officials and the governments election security chief all his appointees. He was told by his own vice president, campaign officials and the investigators they hired. He was told by Republican governors and secretaries of state and legislators. As one senior campaign adviser put it at the time, it was all just conspiracy garbage beamed down from the mothership.
Despite all that, Mr. Trump has never backed down in the two and a half years since, even as assertion after assertion has been debunked. Not a single independent authority who was not allied with or paid by Mr. Trump no judge, no prosecutor, no election agency, no governor has ever validated any substantial election fraud that would have come close to reversing the results in any of the battleground states, much less the three or four that would have been necessary to change the winner.
The one who tried to defraud the United States, Mr. Smith charged, was Mr. Trump, with bogus claims that he knew or had every reason to know were bogus, all in a bid for power. The former president will argue that this is all politics and that he should be returned to office in next years election, and so far millions of Americans have taken his side.
Now the justice system and the electoral system will engage in a 15-month race to see which will decide his fate first and the countrys. The real verdict on the Trump presidency is still to come.
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Trumps Third Indictment Has Broad Implications for U.S. Democracy - The New York Times