Closing summary
The justice department announced charges in three cases alleging Chinese intelligence officers attempted to steal technology, pressured a naturalized US citizen to return to the country and interfered with the prosecution of telecommunications giant Huawei, while warning Beijing against continued wrongdoing in the United States. Meanwhile, a prominent journalist who interviewed Trump 20 times warned he wasn’t only dangerous for democracy, he was also incompetent.
Here’s what else happened today:
Polls show tight races for Senate in Ohio and Wisconsin, and a Democrat in the lead in Pennsylvania as the party hopes to maintain its majority in Congress’ upper chamber.
Supreme court justice Samuel Alito told a top Democratic senator he considered Roe v Wade settled law during his confirmation hearing in 2005 – then voted to overturn it 17 years later.
Areas represented in Congress by 2020 election deniers tend to have seen their white population share decline, and be less well off and well educated than elsewhere, a New York Times analysis found.
Republican senator Lindsey Graham’s subpoena compelling his appearance before a special grand jury investigating the campaign to meddle with Georgia’s election results two years ago is on hold thanks to conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.
Almost 17 years before he wrote the supreme court’s opinion overturning Roe v Wade, Samuel Alito told a prominent Democratic senator he considered the case guaranteeing abortion access nationwide settled law, The New York Times reports.
“I am a believer in precedents”, Alito, then a federal judge, told Edward Kennedy. In a reference to one of the core justifications for the original Roe decision, he told Kennedy, “I recognize there is a right to privacy,” and “I think it’s settled.”
The new details were taken from Kennedy’s private diary, portions of which will be published in the book “Ted Kennedy: A Life” set for release Tuesday, and reported by the Times.
The senator was skeptical of Alito’s repeated statements indicating he wouldn’t try to overturn Roe, and also didn’t buy Alito’s explanation that he had written a memo outlining his opposition to Roe because he was seeking a promotion while working as a lawyer in the administration of Republican president Ronald Reagan. Kennedy voted against confirming Alito to the supreme court, and died in 2009. Last June, Alito helmed the five-justice majority that overturned Roe, and allowed states to ban abortion completely – in an apparent contradiction of what he told Kennedy.
The state department has responded to the letter from progressive lawmakers urging the Biden administration to redouble efforts to find a negotiated solution to the war in Ukraine.
According to CNN, the department’s spokesman Ned Price said Ukraine would be willing to engage in dialogue with Russia, but Moscow appears unwilling. Here’s more from his briefing:
State Dept spokesperson Ned Price's response to this today: “In order for diplomacy to take place, there have to be parties ready and willing to engage in diplomacy. Right now, we have heard from our Ukrainian partners repeatedly that this war will only end through diplomacy... https://t.co/jRkkGqtRcd
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 24, 2022
...and dialogue. We have not heard any reciprocal statement or refrain from Moscow that they are ready in good faith to engage in that diplomacy and dialogue."
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) October 24, 2022
Hugo Lowell was at Merrick Garland’s press conference in Washington earlier and is filing updates to his Guardian report, which you can find here. Hugo’s report begins…
Two Chinese intelligence officers tried to bribe a US law enforcement official as part of an effort to obtain inside information about a criminal case against the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment unsealed on Monday.
The move to unmask the espionage operation – and charge the two agents with obstruction of justice – amounts to an escalation by the US justice department after it accused Huawei in February 2020 of conducting racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.
“This was an egregious attempt by PRC intelligence officers to shield a PRC-based company from accountability and to undermine the integrity of our judicial system,” the attorney general Merrick Garland said at a news conference unveiling the indictment.
The report in full:
Issue One Action, a “nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to uniting Republicans, Democrats and independents in the fight to fix our broken political system”, has released a report in which it names “the nine most dangerous anti-democracy candidates running to administer US elections”.
Included are Jim Marchant of Nevada, running for secretary of state; Mark Finchem of Arizona, running for secretary of state; and Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania, running for governor.
For a story published by Guardian US today, Adam Gabbatt went to Pennsylvania to look at Mastriano’s campaign. He writes:
Mastriano is, by most measures, an extremist.
As a state senator in Pennsylvania, he said women who violated a proposed six-week abortion ban should be charged with murder. Mastriano frequently attacks trans people, and has said gay marriage should be illegal, and that same-sex couples should not be allowed to adopt children.
At an event this summer, organized by a pair of self-described prophets, Mastriano told his supporters: “We have the power of God with us.” He added that Jesus Christ is “guiding and directing our steps”. While working at the Army War College, an academy for military members, Mastriano posed for a faculty photo wearing a Confederate uniform.
And as a key schemer in Trump’s bid to overturn the presidential election, Mastriano spent thousands of dollars chartering buses to Washington DC on January 6, where images showed him close to the violence as Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol.
None of this stopped Mastriano, who was endorsed by Trump, from winning the Republican nomination for governor in May.
Here’s Adam’s full piece:
Switching focus for a moment from China to Ukraine, 30 liberal Democrats in Congress have signed a letter to Joe Biden, in which they call for Joe Biden to change course on the matter of the Russian invasion, to couple current economic and military support for Kyiv with a “proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire”.
The lawmakers continue:
This is consistent with your recognition that ‘there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here’, and your concern that Vladimir Putin ‘doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that.’
We are under no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in engaging Russia given its outrageous and illegal invasion of Ukraine and its decision to make additional illegal annexations of Ukrainian territory. However, if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.
The signatories are led by Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and prominent progressives including Cori Bush, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamie Raskin.
As the Washington Post points out, “the appeal for a shift in strategy comes amid some of the most significant US-Russian diplomatic engagement in some time, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently talked with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, for the first time in months. The two spoke by phone Friday and again on Sunday at Shoigu’s request, Austin wrote on Twitter.”
Austin said he “rejected any pretext for Russian escalation & reaffirmed the value of continued communication amid Russia’s unlawful & unjustified war against Ukraine”.
The Chinese government’s alleged misdeeds go beyond attempts to counter the prosecution of Huawei. Garland announced charges in two other cases – one involving technology theft and intimidation, and the other involving a pressure campaign to get a naturalized US citizen to return to China against his will.
In the first, federal prosecutors in New Jersey indicted four people, including three Chinese intelligence officers, with using “the cover of a purported Chinese academic institute to target, co-opt and direct individuals in the United States to further the PRC intelligence mission” over 10 years from 2008, Garland said.
They also attempted “to procure technology and equipment from the United States and to have it shipped to China,” and “stop protected First Amendment activities, protests here in the United States, which would have been embarrassing for the Chinese government,” Garland said.
The second case involves seven people charged with undertaking “a multi-year campaign of threats and harassment to force a US resident to return to China,” Garland said. Two of the individuals indicted in the eastern district of New York were arrested yesterday, he said.
“Defendants threatened the victim saying that, ‘coming back and turning herself in is the only way out,’” Garland said. “They showed up at the home of the victim’s son in New York. They filed frivolous lawsuits against the victim and his son and said it would be ‘endless misery for the defendant and son to defend themselves.’ And they made clear that their harassment would not stop until the victim returned to China.”
“These cases demonstrate the government of China sought to interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights,” Garland said. “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by any foreign power to undermine the rule of law upon which our democracy is based.”
Updated
Justice department accuses China of attempting to disrupt prosecution of Huawei
Two Chinese intelligence agents have been charged with attempting to disrupt the prosecution of a Chinese telecommunications firm, US attorney general Merrick Garland has announced.
While he did not name the company, the Associated Press reports it is likely Huawei, the giant Chinese manufacturer of cellphones, routers and other communications devices.
“Over the past week, the justice department has taken several actions to disrupt criminal activity by individuals working on behalf of the government of the People’s Republic of China,” Garland said in a speech.
He announced charges against “two PRC intelligence officers with attempting to obstruct influence and impede a criminal prosecution of a PRC-based telecommunications company.”
Here’s more on the case from the AP:
The two men, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, are accused of trying to direct a person with the U.S. government whom they believed was a cooperator to provide confidential information about the Justice Department’s investigation, including about witnesses, trial evidence and potential new charges. One of the defendants paid about $61,000 for the information, the Justice Department said.
The person the men reached out to began working as a double agent for the U.S government, and his contact with the defendants was overseen by the FBI.
The company is not named in the charging documents, though the references make clear that it’s Huawei, which was charged in 2019 with bank fraud and again the following year with new charges of racketeering conspiracy and a plot to steal trade secrets.
President Joe Biden is right now speaking at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, where he’s warning about the consequences of a Republican takeover of Congress.
Here’s the latest from Politico’s reporter on the scene:
Fifteen days before the midterms, President Biden visits DNC headquarters in Washington and acknowledges that his party is running “against the tide” and casts doubt on the polls - but predicts a final surge for the Democrats pic.twitter.com/cMr6efUqi4
— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) October 24, 2022
More Biden at DNC, about Republicans:
— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) October 24, 2022
"They'll shut down the government, they say, and send the nation into default, which raises the price for everyone if we do not cut social security and Medicare.
*dramatically whispers*
"I ain't going to do it."
There’s a reason why Biden and the Democrats are quick to mention Social Security and Medicare. The two programs are relied by older Americans, who tend to be reliable voters, and any changes to them are considered politically perilous.
Six years ago, liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore correctly predicted Donald Trump’s election win. Today, he’s calling the upcoming midterms for the Democrats, and explains why in an interview with The Guardian’s Edward Helmore:
For the past month, Academy Award-winning documentary maker Michael Moore has been emailing out a daily missive “Mike’s Midterm Tsunami of Truth” on why he believes Democrats will win big in America’s midterm elections next month.
Moore calls it “a brief honest daily dose of the truth – and the real optimism these truths offer us”. It also – at this moment in time – flies in the face of most political punditry, which sees a Republican win on the cards.
Making predictions is a risky undertaking in any election cycle, but especially in this round with Democrats banking they can hitch Republican candidates to an unpopular supreme court decision to overturn federal guarantees of a woman’s right to abortion. Republicans, meanwhile, are laser-focused on high inflation rates, economic troubles and fears over crime rates.
But political forecasting has become Moore’s business since he correctly called that Donald Trump would win the national elections in 2016 against common judgment of the media and pollsters businesses.
The thrust of his reasoning that this will be “Roe-vember” is amplified daily in the emails. In missive #21 (Don’t Believe It) on Tuesday, he addressed the issue of political fatalism, specifically the media narrative that the party in power necessarily does poorly in midterm elections.
“The effect of this kind of reporting can be jarring – it can get inside the average American’s head and scramble it,” Moore wrote. “You can start to feel deflated. You want to quit. You start believing that we liberals are a bunch of losers. And by thinking of ourselves this way, if you’re not careful, you begin to manifest the old narrative into existence.”
The day so far
We’re awaiting an announcement from attorney general Merrick Garland about a “significant national security matter” that could involve another country. He’s set to speak alongside FBI director Christopher Wray at a press conference beginning at 1:30 pm eastern time.
Here’s what else has happened today:
Polls show tight races for Senate in Ohio and Wisconsin, and a Democrat in the lead in Pennsylvania as the party hopes to maintain its majority in Congress’ upper chamber.
Areas represented in Congress by 2020 election deniers tend to have seen their white population decline, and be less well-off and well educated than elsewhere, a New York Times analysis found.
Republican senator Lindsey Graham’s subpoena compelling his appearance before a special grand jury investigating the campaign to meddle with Georgia’s election results two years ago is on hold thanks to conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas.
Updated
Conservative supreme court justice blocks grand jury subpoena for Lindsey Graham testimony
Rightwing supreme court justice Clarence Thomas has placed a temporary hold on a Georgia grand jury’s subpoena compelling the testimony of Republican senator Lindsey Graham as part of its investigation into efforts by Donald Trump’s allies to meddle in the state’s election results:
BREAKING: Justice Clarence Thomas, acting unilaterally, issues a "shadow docket" ruling for Sen. Lindsey Graham, agreeing to temporarily halt Graham from testifying in probe of pro-Trump election interference in Georgia
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) October 24, 2022
Thomas is one of the court’s most conservative justices, but the move is not unusual, according to CNN supreme court analyst Steve Vladeck:
To be clear, Justice Thomas issued an “administrative stay,” which blocks the Eleventh Circuit ruling only temporarily while the full Court decides whether to block it pending appeal.
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) October 24, 2022
Such a ruling is *not* predictive of how the full Court (or even Thomas) will vote on the stay. https://t.co/CSrBaDg9JP
Indeed, there are lots of recent examples of the Circuit Justice issuing such a temporary ruling and then the full Court *declining* to make it permanent.
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) October 24, 2022
Folks will surely overreact anyway, but this isn’t a big deal — yet.
The Democrats’ two best hopes for stemming their losses in the Senate or even expanding their majority are in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and CNN has just released a poll indicating tight races in both.
The states are home to the perhaps two best pick up opportunities for Democrats this year, with Republican senator Ron Johnson defending his seat in Wisconsin, while Pennsylvania’s is vacant after GOP senator Pat Toomey opted to retire.
CNN’s new poll indicates Johnson has a slight edge over Democrat Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, where 50% of voters back his candidacy against 49% for his challenger.
In Pennsylvania, Democratic lieutenant governor John Fetterman is at 51% support against Republican Mehmet Oz, who was polling at 45%.
The poll otherwise confirmed dynamics that have become well-known this election cycle. The economy is far and away voters’ top issue, with abortion a distant second. President Joe Biden is also unpopular with voters in both states, the survey finds.
Districts whose congressional representatives have embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election tend to be poorer, less educated and have experienced declines in their white population, according to an analysis published by The New York Times today.
The report suggests that racial anxiety is a major factor in voters’ willingness to embrace Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in Joe Biden’s election win, in addition to economic stagnation and social maladies like the opioid epidemic. The report is a sprawling look at corners of the country that have grown so alienated they’re willing to support lawmakers who object to the certification of the 2020 election, despite fears the campaign poses a mortal threat to American democracy.
Here’s more from the Times:
When Representative Troy Nehls of Texas voted last year to reject Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat, many of his constituents back home in Fort Bend County were thrilled.
Like the former president, they have been unhappy with the changes unfolding around them. Crime and sprawl from Houston, the big city next door, have been spilling over into their once bucolic towns. (“Build a wall,” Mr. Nehls likes to say, and make Houston pay.) The county in recent years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former white majority has fallen to just 30 percent of the population.
Don Demel, a 61-year-old salesman who turned out last month to pick up a signed copy of a book by Mr. Nehls about the supposedly stolen election, said his parents had raised him “colorblind.” But the reason for the discontent was clear: Other white people in Fort Bend “did not like certain people coming here,” he said. “It’s race. They are old-school.”
A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped the movement to keep him in power.
The portion of white residents dropped about 35 percent more over the last three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably higher as well.
The January 6 committee is likely finished with its public hearings into the deadly attack on the Capitol, and The Guardian’s Tom Ambrose surveyed readers about whether the committee’s work changed their mind about what happened that day, and Trump’s role in it. Here’s what one had to say:
I think that hearings solidified what most people thought already: that Donald Trump and his allies coordinated to assault the foundations of democracy on January 6 because they were unhappy with the result of the 2020 election. The juxtaposing of previously aired and unaired video clips helped provide clearer and fuller picture of the chaos that unfolded that day.
I believe that anyone who tuned into the hearings with an open mind saw January 6 for what it was: a disgraceful attack on American democracy that amounts to treason. I believe the committee was convincing in their effort to show premeditation by the president and his followers.
I am worried that those who believe January 6 was justified will use this committee as an example as of how “the Democrats/liberals” are out to get the president and his followers. They demonstrate this belief daily as they continue to call for violence against elected officials and refuse to believe the truth that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
It feels like that their position is: either we won, or we were cheated. I fear that the upcoming elections in November will only be a taste of what kinds of vitriol await during the 2024 election. Patrick, 29, public school teacher from Chicago
Republican senator Ted Cruz was a vociferous objector to the 2020 election, but ended up hiding in a supply closet when insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6, as Ramon Antonio Vargas reports:
As a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol during the January 6 attack in a desperate attempt to keep him in the Oval Office, Ted Cruz hid in a closet next to a stack of chairs, but he never thought twice about continuing to sow doubt about the former president’s electoral defeat, the Republican senator from Texas has revealed.
Cruz revealed his whereabouts on the day of the deadly Capitol attack – which unsuccessfully aimed to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election – in a new book. The news was first reported by Newsweek.
The book – titled Justice Corrupted – recounts how Cruz was listening to his colleague James Lankford of Oklahoma speak in the Senate chamber when a terrible commotion erupted outside. Capitol police rushed in to escort Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, whom the mob wanted to hang, off the dais, and the session was paused.
“In the fog of the confusion, it was difficult to tell exactly what was happening,” Cruz wrote. “We were informed that a riot had broken out and that rioters were attempting to breach the building.
What would Republicans do with a majority in the House? Demand concessions in exchange for raising the debt limit, which will likely be necessary at some point next year, Politico reports.
GOP lawmakers could demand that the tax cuts passed during the Trump administration are made permanent, or that Social Security and Medicare, the two massive federal benefit programs for older Americans that have long been in Republicans’ crosshairs, are overhauled. But the strategy is a risky one, because without an agreement to lift its legal ability to borrow, Washington could default on its debt – with potentially calamitous implications for the global economy. And even if Republicans took both the House and the Senate, expect tortuous negotiations with Biden to find an agreement.
Here’s more from Politico:
Tight Senate margins and a Democratic president would make it impossible for GOP leaders to deliver on the party’s most hardline fiscal wishes, at least with President Joe Biden still in office. The disappointment would surely prompt blowback from right-leaning Republicans already known as the sharpest thorns in the party’s side.
“Spare me if you’re a Republican who puts on your frigging campaign website, ‘Trust me, I will vote for a balanced budget amendment, and I believe we should balance the budget like every family in America.’ No shit,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), a member of the pro-Trump Freedom Caucus, said in an interview.
“You have two simple leverage points: when government funding comes up and when the debt ceiling is debated,” Roy reminded his fellow Republicans. “And the only question that matters is, will leadership use that leverage?”
There was also new polling today for Ohio, which seems to align with broader national trends for the 8 November midterms.
Once considered a swing state, Ohio has become more solidly Republican in recent elections. But that doesn’t mean JD Vance, the GOP candidate for Senate, is running away with the race. Today’s Spectrum News / Siena poll shows him tied with Democrat Tim Ryan, underscoring that for all the momentum Republicans seem to have, retaking the Senate is not a sure bet.
Spectrum News / Siena Poll: Ohio Likely Voters
— SienaResearch (@SienaResearch) October 24, 2022
DeWine Continues to Hold Very Large Lead over Whaley, 58-34%
Vance vs. Ryan Even, 46-46%, Two Weeks to Go
Voters Prefer Republicans over Democrats to Control Congress, 40-33%https://t.co/nenKiR8q6o pic.twitter.com/K1MaXlksmQ
However, notice the strong bias among Ohio voters towards Republicans on the generic congressional ballot. That matches recent nationwide polling suggesting the GOP has overtaken Democrats as the party preferred to control Congress – an outcome that may well come to pass when the midterm dust settles.
There was some dire news for Democrats this morning from The Cook Political Report, which is known for its comprehensive rankings of congressional races across the country.
The subject was congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, who is chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tasked with winning elections in the House of Representatives. Cook changed their rating for his suburban New York City district to toss-up from lean Democrat:
House rating change: Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D) moves from Lean D to Toss Up at @CookPolitical as Dems admit the DCCC chair is now in serious danger in #NY17. Full analysis: https://t.co/89bvezbNuw pic.twitter.com/ncljBkSfZw
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) October 24, 2022
Polls indicate that Democrats are likely to lose their majority in the House in the 8 November midterms, and a loss by Maloney would make an embarrassment of their efforts to stem what appears to be a rising tide of Republican sentiment among voters.
We’re 15 days away from the 8 November midterms, but early voting data from across the country indicates a surge in voter enthusiasm, Adam Gabbatt reports – though it’s not yet clear which party is set to benefit:
Early voting in the midterm elections is on track to match records set in 2018, according to researchers, as voters take advantage of both in-person and mail-in voting in states across the country.
More than 5.8 million people had already cast their vote by Friday evening, CNN reported, a similar total to this stage in the 2018 elections, which had the highest turnout of any midterm vote in a generation.
States with closely watched elections, including Georgia, Florida and Ohio, are among those seeing high volumes, with Democrats so far casting early votes in greater numbers.
Republicans, including Donald Trump, have encouraged their supporters to vote in person, citing a mishmash of debunked conspiracy theories about election security.
The New York Times reported that in-person turnout is up 70% in Georgia, where the incumbent Republican governor is facing a tough challenge from Democrat Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock, the Democratic US senator, is competing with Herschel Walker. As of Friday about 520,000 people had already cast their ballots during in-person early voting, according to Fox5 Atlanta.
Justice department to hold press conference on 'significant national security matter'
Attorney general Merrick Garland will this afternoon hold a press conference on a “significant national security matter,” the justice department has announced.
The 1:30pm eastern time speech will “discuss significant national security cases addressing malign influence schemes and alleged criminal activity by a nation-state actor in the United States,” and feature Garland along with FBI director Christopher Wray, along with other top justice department officials.
The Guardian will cover the press conference on this blog as it happens.
Updated
From Las Vegas, The Guardian’s Edwin Rios reports on the cost-of-living concerns that are influencing voters in the swing state crucial to the upcoming midterm elections:
Claudia Lopez, 39, is worried for her children.
As her curly haired seven-year-old daughter bounced around a play area inside El Mercado, a shopping center within the Boulevard Mall in Las Vegas where the smell of arepas and tacos hovers over the shops, Lopez soaked in her day off from knocking on doors and talking to residents about the upcoming election.
For much of her life, Lopez, whose parents emigrated from Mexico to California, where she was born, didn’t care for politics. This year, that changed: since Lopez moved to Las Vegas seven years ago, rents have rocketed. In the first quarter of 2022, the Nevada State Apartment Association found that rent had soared, on average, more than 20% compared to the same period last year. That growth has since slowed, but the self-employed house cleaner worries about her children’s future: their safety, their schools, their shelter.
“I don’t care about Democrats or Republicans,” Lopez says. “I care about change. I just want change for the better. Everything’s getting worse. You see little kids like, ‘Are they going to live to my age?’”
In Nevada, the political stakes of this election are high. Latino voters are projected to account for one for every five potential voters in November, turning the state into a microcosm of the national influence voters of color will have on the election. While Nevada voted Democrat in the last election, its contests were won by slim margins. And as a voting bloc, Latinos are not monolithic: what they care about ranges from immigration to the economy and depends on where throughout the country they live.
Trump isn’t alone in presenting a danger to democracy. As Adam Gabbatt reports, Doug Mastriano is copying many of the former president’s tactics in his campaign for governor of Pennsylvania, from his perpetual lying to his belief in conspiracy theories about the 2020 election:
As Pennsylvanians prepare to vote for their next governor, it is no exaggeration to say the future of American democracy is at stake.
Doug Mastriano, a retired army colonel who has enthusiastically indulged Donald Trump’s fantasy that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, is the Republican candidate. If he wins, he plans to deregister every single one of Pennsylvania’s 8.7 million voters. In future elections, Mastriano would choose who certifies – or doesn’t – the state’s election results.
With Pennsylvania one of the few swing states in presidential elections, Mastriano could effectively have the power to decide the next president. But in a midterm election season defined by Republicans who seem to oppose democracy, there is some evidence that Mastriano, a retired army colonel, could be too fringe even for the Republican party.
Mastriano is, by most measures, an extremist.
Bob Woodward’s recorded excerpts of his conversations with Donald Trump take listeners back to 2020, and make clear just how much of the White House’s fumbling response to Covid-19 came from the president himself.
“I feel good. I think we’re doing a great job. I think we’ll never get credit from the fake news media no matter how good a job we do. No matter how good a job I do, I will never get credit from the media, and I’ll never get credit from Democrats who want to beat me desperately in seven months,” Trump told Woodward in an early April interview, days after the economy had shut down to unsuccessfully stop the spread of a virus that would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans that year alone.
Trump’s denialism continued into July: “It’s flaring up all over the world, Bob. By the way, all over the world. That was one thing I noticed last week. You know they talk about this country. All over the world, it’s flaring up. But we have it under control.”
Later that month, he insisted that he would soon release a plan to fight the virus, but appeared to tie its timing to how it would affect his election chances. “I’ve got 106 days. That’s a long time. You know, if I put out a plan now, people won’t even remember it in a hundred — I won the last election in the last week.”
While Woodward agrees with many other observers of the former president that his attempts to overturn the 2020 election make him a danger to democracy, he also makes the case to listeners that Trump didn’t even fully understand how to do his job – and the nation paid the price.
“Trump reminds how easy it is to break things you do not understand — democracy and the presidency,” Woodward concludes.
'Trump is an unparalleled danger' reporter warns after hours of interviews with ex-president
Good morning, US politics blog readers. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has released more excerpts from his interviews with Donald Trump in 2020, and closes with this warning: “Trump is an unparalleled danger.” Describing him as “overwhelmed by the job” while in office as Covid-19 spread across the United States, Woodward warns that Trump continues to pursue “a seditious conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election – and end democracy itself. While Woodward is far from the first person to say that, the journalist’s opinion is uniquely informed, given that the two men spoke 20 times during the last year of his presidency.
Here’s a look at what’s happening today:
Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis will face his Democratic challenger Charlie Crist for the only debate of the election at 7pm ET.
Joe Biden will hold a rally today at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at 1pm.
Poll tracker FiveThirtyEight downgraded Democrats’ chances of keeping control of the Senate over the weekend, lowering it to 55% amid a wave of polls that signal several of its candidates may be in trouble.
