<Former President Donald Trump appeared to mistakenly refer to GOP rival Nikki Haley instead of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., when discussing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Friday night.

The mix-up came during Trump's remarks to a crowd of supporters in Concord, where he spoke for more than 90 minutes and repeatedly bashed Haley, who served in his administration as an ambassador to the United Nations and has never been a member of Congress.

“Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people,” Trump said.

NBC News has reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment on his remarks.

Trump has previously accused Pelosi of turning down 10,000 soldiers on Jan. 6, a claim that has been debunked. The final report by the now-defunct Jan. 6 committee said: “Some have suggested that President Trump gave an order to have 10,000 troops ready for January 6th. The Select Committee found no evidence of this. In fact, President Trump’s Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller directly refuted this when he testified under oath.”

Trump’s gaffe comes as he frequently portrays President Joe Biden, 81, as confused and mentally unfit for office. The former president, 77, has previously confused politicians during his speeches. In September, Trump confused Biden with former President Barack Obama, saying “with Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn’t be won.”

During the same September speech, Trump also said that “we would be in World War II very quickly if we’re going to be relying on” Biden.

Trump has defended switching Obama’s and Biden’s names by saying he “sarcastically” swaps them “as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our country.”

In October, Trump referred to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as the leader of Turkey, and he greeted a crowd that he said was from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when he was in Sioux City, Iowa.

While Biden has had his fair share of gaffes and flubs, he hasn’t made his predecessor’s mental fitness a major campaign issue like Trump has.

For example, Biden in 2022 asked at a White House event whether Rep. Jackie Walorski was in the audience — almost two months after the Indiana Republican died in a car crash. The president had put out a statement offering his condolences after Walorski’s death.

Voters in a September NBC News poll expressed concern about the ages of Trump and Biden. About 74% of respondents said they had major or moderate concerns about Biden, at 80 years old, “not having the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term.” About 47% of respondents reported similar concerns about Trump.>

<A screenshot of a social media post that appeared to show a California Lutheran University professor calling for the death of Donald Trump went viral on Monday, but all was not be [sic] as it seemed.

Officials at the school say the post is fabricated.

On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the university said that the post, which was attributed to exercise science professor Louise Kelly, is a fake.

"Needless to say, remarks like this are entirely inappropriate and intolerable," spokesman Mark Berry wrote in a press release. "Professor Kelly has contacted the police regarding her legal options. Cal Lutheran is also in communication with local authorities regarding this egregious action and ensuing comments against Professor Kelly and the institution."

A Simi Valley Police officer confirmed to the VC Star that the agency was investigating the post, but that no further updates were available at this time.

Berry said that Kelly would not be conducting interviews or offering comment regarding the alleged comments.

The screenshot showed what appeared to be Kelly's Facebook profile and a number of comments on a news story, one of which — allegedly made by Kelly — hoped that the Saturday assassination attempt on Trump would not be the last, and that she would have tried to kill him herself if she "wasn't so far away."

On Saturday, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks fired several shots at Trump during the former president's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump's ear was damaged during the attack and a 50-year-old attendee was killed.

Crooks was killed by Secret Service snipers moments after his volley of shots.

On Monday, the right-wing extremist social media account Libs of TikTok shared the image of Kelly's alleged comments, calling the threat "inappropriate and intolerable." The Libs of TikTok post went viral with 1.3 million views and spawned ire amongst right-wing social media users.

Before the university announced the comment was fake, the Ventura County Republican Party chairman John Anderson sent a letter to the college president asking for Kelly to be fired.

On Tuesday the county GOP's executive director Joe Piechowski acknowledged that the university had reached out and explained the situation.

“We appreciate hearing back from (Cal Lutheran) so quickly," Piechowski said. "Based on what they have told us, I look forward to seeing the resolution of the police investigation and having those responsible brought to justice.">

<If you are worried the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is likely to lead to more political violence in the United States in the months ahead, you are in good company.

The people who spend their careers studying the question are rattled.

“If the election is close, I expect violence of various sorts,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld, whose 2018 book, “A Savage Order,” set out a framework for understanding political violence around the world, is afraid that more American blood will be spilled. This is partly because bad things tend to happen in countries — like the United States — that have a history of political violence.

Kleinfeld pointed out in a recent podcast that Trump has encouraged the intimidation of election workers in swing states, used violent rhetoric about Republicans, like Liz Cheney, who express concern about his anti-democratic tendencies, and uses violence or the threat of it to rally his base.

“I’m not worried about that kind of civil war,” she said. “I am worried about targeted political violence.”

Kleinfeld has been warning about the potential for violence in the United States because of the changing mood in the country. Increasing numbers of Americans think it is justified, on both the right and the left.

About 18 million Americans support the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency, but more — 26 million — believe violence is justified to stop that from happening, according to a recent national survey conducted by University of Chicago professor of political science Robert Pape.

Americans are aware of the increased danger. In a YouGov poll taken after Saturday’s assassination attempt, 67% of respondents said the current environment makes politically motivated violence “more likely.”

Hate crimes are up dramatically — as are threats to Congress. The FBI revealed that a record-setting 11,643 hate crimes were reported by police in 2022, and the ADL has seen a surge in antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Kleinfeld says there’s no reason to expect a civil war — but that’s because the US military is too powerful to be challenged.

But full-scale war isn’t necessary when strategic use of political violence will do — or when it can help one side achieve its goals within a democracy. “You don’t need a civil war to try to take over a party with violence, and you don’t need a civil war to try to build your base with violence,” Kleinfeld said in a recent podcast.

The assassination attempt — which is as yet poorly understood — aligns with a story Trump supporters believe, says Amarnath Amarasingam, an extremism researcher at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. It “fits into everything that the Trump team and MAGA Republicans have been saying since 2015 — that there is a kind of deep-state evil force that’s trying to stop Trump.”

Many Trump supporters still believe the 2020 election was stolen. As of last September, a whopping 63% of Republicans believed Biden’s win was illegitimate, despite evidence to the contrary. Now, Trump’s legal cases and convictions are being characterized as more ways to try to bring him down.

“When all of that failed, here you have them actually trying to kill him,” they think, says Amarasingam....>

<....The sense of a struggle for survival on both sides increases the risk of reprisals, and of more political violence, says Amarasingam. “This is kind of the core of how we think about extremist movements. Once you see an existential threat to you and your in-group, you and your people, then violence is acceptable.”

Lindsay Newman, Eurasia Group’s head of global macro-geopolitics, also believes the risk may get greater after the election but notes that it is unclear whether the risk will come only from the right.

“What do you think happens if Trump wins? What does everybody do? Do all the voters who voted for Biden, or for not-Trump, go home and just wait their turn for next time? What do you think happens if Biden wins? Do all those people who voted for Trump just go home and wait for their next time?,” she wonders.

Most Americans are opposed to political violence, but increasingly large minorities on both sides are not. “Not all of them are going to take up any sort of acts of violence, but some portion of those people will be aggrieved, will be deeply aggrieved,” says Newman.

“And what happens to them? Do they protest? Do the protests turn violent?”

It seems unlikely the two campaigns will stop using rhetoric that is convincing so many Americans that the election represents an existential struggle.

After the assassination attempt, Republican Sen. JD Vance blamed Biden for portraying Trump as ”an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” saying that rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Joe Biden delivered a speech calling for unity, but he is continuing to call Trump a “threat to democracy,” which seems to be a necessary part of his struggling campaign.

And on Monday, Trump named Vance as his vice presidential candidate, after which the crowd at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee chanted, “Fight, fight, fight,” echoing Trump’s defiant words after an assassin’s bullet almost ended his life.

The trouble is, neither side can afford to stop using the rhetoric that is encouraging their supporters to see November’s election in such stark terms that they feel they are right to fight.>

<Familiar figures from Donald Trump’s orbit showed up at the Republican convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday. There was his former adviser Peter Navarro, who gave a rip-roaring speech to an enthusiastic audience. There was his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. His longtime adviser Roger Stone showed up on the convention floor, too.

All of them have something in common with Trump that bears mentioning: Each is a criminal. Stone and Manafort were lucky enough to be convicted while Trump was president, earning clemency.

Other figures from Trump’s orbit were missing from the GOP celebration. Few of those who served in his Cabinet were there, for example. Nor was his former vice president, Mike Pence. Normally, a Republican convention would carve out speaking time for the party’s former nominees and executive officials; in 2024, most didn’t even show up.

There’s no mystery about why Pence wasn’t there, of course. Trump pressured Pence to subvert the results of the 2020 election, which Pence declined to do. So Trump turned against him, attacking Pence on social media as an angry mob attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Pence’s experience was simply an extreme iteration of what many others who worked for Trump went through. Former attorney general William P. Barr was fervently loyal to Trump — until he declined to endorse the idea that the election was stolen. So Trump said Barr was “gutless” and “lazy” and an enemy of Trumpworld. For his part, his predecessor Jeff Sessions “didn’t have a clue.” Former defense secretary Jim Mattis was “the world’s most overrated General.” Former secretary of state Rex Tillerson was “dumb as a rock.”

Those latter three officials were part of a Cabinet that Trump once touted as having the “highest IQ” of any ever assembled. But then Sessions, Mattis and Tillerson dared to disagree with Trump, and suddenly they were disparaged as feckless and inept.

“If there was one criticism that I would level against the President [it] is he didn’t hire very well,” Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, said on CNN in June 2020.

On a podcast this year, Trump suggested that this was because of his inexperience.

“I really knew nobody. I relied on people,” he said. “Some were good, some were RINOs” — that is, Republicans in name only — “some gave us some bad advice.”

But others he hired have been in his good graces for some time. People like Stone and Navarro and Manafort.

None of this is new, really. It’s just that the Republican convention brings it into sharp relief. In 2012, someone convicted of contempt of Congress wouldn’t get from Florida to Milwaukee to speak at the convention the way Navarro did. And a former governor turned vice president wouldn’t feel unwelcome the way Pence does.

But this disruption is also important because of how Trump has promised to approach his job should he return to the White House. One of his goals — attempted in the closing days of his presidency — is to overhaul the federal government so that fewer employees are protected from being fired at will. By removing that protection, Trump and the heads of various departments could add far more employees to the federal payroll. Far more employees, it's safe to assume, dedicated to Trump's political agenda....>

<....This aspect, too, was manifested in the months before Trump left office. His aide John McEntee implemented a new hiring regimen in the executive office predicated on rooting out anyone who wasn't devoted to Trump's worldview. McEntee, who has been intimately involved in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, might adopt a broader version of that role should Trump win in November.

In other words, the government might be staffed more thoroughly either with people that Trump turns on and disparages, like Barr, or with people who end up facing criminal sanction for their actions, like Manafort or Stone. On the plus side, some of Trump's allies and partners escape either fate. They might simply be sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud.

The fundamental issue, as Mulvaney pointed out, is Trump’s judgment. This is someone whose political rise was powered by his ostensible savvy in hiring. His presidency undermined that narrative dramatically. Particularly since loyalty is a bad metric: Barr and Pence were very loyal until the demanded loyalty went too far.

Trump and his team are aware of the conflict between wanting more control over hiring and the former president’s track record. His son Donald Trump Jr. told Axios this week that he hoped to have a role in figuring out who got a paycheck.

“I don’t want to pick a single person for a position of power,” he said, “all I want to do is block the guys that would be a disaster.” He added that his goal was to “block the liars, I want to block the guys that are pretending they’re with you.”

If that radar is perfectly attuned, it means fewer James Mattises and more Peter Navarros. More Allen Weisselbergs, the Trump Organization CFO who has been sentenced to prison for lying under oath. But he was lying for Trump, not against him, so perhaps a cushy government job awaits.>

<Former President Donald Trump misleadingly said that “under Biden’s current policies” children born to parents in the country illegally automatically become citizens. That’s not a Biden policy, but rather it has been the standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment going back more than 100 years, including under Trump.

In a video posted to Truth Social, Trump revived an old promise, saying that on Day 1 of a new term as president, he would issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born to parents in the country illegally. But as we wrote when Trump vowed to — but never did — issue such an executive order when he was president, most legal scholars believe such a change would require a constitutional amendment.

Trump said his order would also end the practice of so-called birth tourism, “where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child.” Some experts say this happens far less frequently than Trump claimed.

Ending birthright citizenship has been on Trump’s radar for years. When he was running for president back in 2015, Trump told then Fox News host Bill O’Reilly the issue has been “fully vetted now” and all that would be needed to end birthright citizenship was “an act of Congress.” But as we wrote at the time, most constitutional and immigration scholars said such a change would require a constitutional amendment, which is a higher bar than simple legislation. But, we noted, there were a few who agreed with Trump.

Fast forward three years to 2018 and Trump, then serving as president, said in an interview with Axios that he was told by White House counsel that actually, birthright citizenship wouldn’t even need to be changed with legislation, that he could do it simply with an executive order. We wrote then that most constitutional scholars said he couldn’t do it via executive order, or if he did, it would likely be overturned by the courts.

Nonetheless, Trump said such an order was “in the process” and “it’ll happen.” But it didn’t.

A year later, in August 2019, Trump again told reporters he was “looking … very, very seriously” at issuing an executive order to end birthright citizenship. But again, he never actually did it.

In late November 2020, after Trump had lost the election, members of his administration said the president was considering finally issuing an executive action in the weeks before leaving office that would seek to end birthright citizenship. It didn’t happen.

In other words, when he had the opportunity as president, Trump spoke multiple times about issuing an executive order to end birthright citizenship, but he never pulled the trigger. Now, in a video posted to Truth Social, Trump said if reelected, he would make such an order a priority on his first day back in the Oval Office.

Trump, May 30: Under Biden’s current policies, even though these millions of illegal border crossers have entered the country unlawfully, all of their future children will become automatic U.S. citizens. Can you imagine? They’ll be eligible for welfare, taxpayer-funded health care, the right to vote, chain migration and countless other government benefits, many of which will also profit the illegal alien parents. This policy is a reward for breaking the laws of the United States and it is obviously a magnet helping draw the flood of illegals across our borders. … As has been laid out by many scholars, this current policy is based on an historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates. …

As part of my plan to secure the border on Day 1 of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.

Trump packed a lot into his statement, so let’s take it in pieces.

Trump said that “under Biden’s current policies” children born to parents in the country illegally automatically become citizens. That’s not a Biden policy, but rather it has been the standing policy going back more than 100 years....>

<....According to the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”

The idea was to grant citizenship to recently freed slaves. But the 14th Amendment also forms the basis of the country’s longstanding policy of granting birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil.

Trump went on to say that “millions and millions and millions” of people come into the U.S. illegally, adding, “They come from mental institutions, they come from jails, prisoners.” This echoes comments Trump has made repeatedly on the campaign trail — that South American countries are emptying their prisons and “mental institutions” and sending those people to the U.S. But as we have written, immigration experts say there’s simply no evidence of that, and Trump has offered no backup.

Trump then said the U.S. “is among the only countries in the world” that extend citizenship to babies born in their country when neither parent is a citizen. But as we have written, a 2010 analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates lower immigration, found that 30 of the world’s 194 countries grant automatic birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants in the country illegally. The U.S. and Canada are the only ones among those 30 countries that have advanced economies as defined by the International Monetary Fund. Outside North America, most of the 30 counties that have birthright citizenship policies are in Central and South America. No country in Europe has such a policy. Although Trump has said Mexico doesn’t have a policy like the U.S., it is actually pretty similar.

In his campaign video, Trump argued that the standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment bestowing citizenship to children born in the country even though their parents are in the U.S. illegally is — according to “many scholars” — “based on an historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” Trump said his executive order will make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”

Although Trump said “there aren’t that many of them around” who interpret the 14th Amendment to confer birthright citizenship to a child whose parents are in the country illegally, that’s not accurate. As we have written, that’s actually the opinion of most constitutional scholars.

The birthright citizenship portion of the amendment was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1898 in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which involved a man, Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to parents who were citizens of China but legally living in the United States. (There was no such thing as illegal immigration at the time.) Some argue that while that settles the issue of whether the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to children born to parents in the country legally, it doesn’t necessarily settle the issue regarding children born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally.

Another Supreme Court involvement on the issue is a footnote in a 1982 decision in the case Plyler v. Doe, which dealt with the issue of whether states must provide education to children not “legally admitted” into the United States. In that case, Justice William Brennan, writing the majority opinion in the 5-4 decision, stated that “no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

In a 2015 op-ed in the New York Times, John Eastman, a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, argued that the longstanding policy of extending citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally was based on a misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment and its limitation to people born in the U.S. who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

In 2018, Eastman told us that phrase precludes granting birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants in the country illegally, and he encouraged Trump to clarify that through an executive order. (Two years later, after the 2020 election, Trump hired Eastman, who was described in the final report from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol as one of the principal planners of an effort to overturn the certified presidential election results.)....>

<....But as we have said, most constitutional scholars don’t agree that a president can change the longstanding birthright citizenship policy via executive order. As we wrote in 2015, most constitutional experts think such a change would require a constitutional amendment. To achieve that, the change would have to be proposed by a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate, and then it would need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

As we noted then, at least some constitutional scholars think a change could be achieved simply through federal legislation passed by Congress. Some legislators have tried unsuccessfully for years to pass a bill to end birthright citizenship for children of adults in the country illegally, and some of those bills implicitly assume the issue can be solved without a constitutional amendment.

Most recently, Republican Rep. Brian Babin introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2021. The bill sought to redefine what it means to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States so that birthright citizenship would only apply to a child born to a parent who is “(1) a citizen or national of the United States; (2) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States whose residence is in the United States; or (3) an alien performing active service in the armed forces.” The bill, which had 31 Republican co-sponsors, never came up for a vote.

In 1995, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that suggests Trump would be on dubious legal ground, as would even an attempt to change the policy through legislation.

According to then-Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger, “A bill that would deny citizenship to children born in the United States to certain classes of alien parents is unconstitutional on its face.”

“The phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ was meant to reflect the existing common law exception for discrete sets of persons who were deemed subject to a foreign sovereign and immune from U.S. laws, principally children born in the United States of foreign diplomats, with the single additional exception of children of members of Indian tribes,” Dellinger wrote. “Apart from these extremely limited exceptions, there can be no question that children born in the United States of aliens are subject to the full jurisdiction of the United States.”

Ultimately, though, if Trump were to issue an executive order as president, it would likely be up to the Supreme Court to decide whether it passes constitutional muster.

In his campaign announcement, Trump also pledged that he would end the practice of so-called birth tourism via executive order.

Trump had similarly pledged to do this as president, but never did. Rather, his administration issued a rule in 2020 for the State Department, directing staff to deny nonimmigrant visas to women if there is a “reason to believe” they intend to travel to the U.S. for the primary purpose of obtaining citizenship for a child by giving birth in the U.S....>

<....In his campaign announcement, Trump claimed “hundreds of thousands of people” have participated in birth tourism.

“My order will also end their unfair practice known as birth tourism, where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for the last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members,” Trump said in his campaign video. “It’s a practice that’s so horrible and so egregious, but we let it go forward. At least one parent will have to be a citizen or a legal resident in order to qualify.”

Trump’s campaign website provided a yearly figure, saying that “tens of thousands of foreign nationals fraudulently enter the U.S. each year during the final weeks of their pregnancies for the sole purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for their child.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to our inquiry seeking support for these figures, but it seems likely they come from the Center for Immigration Studies, which estimates there are 20,000 to 26,000 possible birth tourists a year.

If Trump were looking at a period of, say, 10 years, then his estimate of “hundreds of thousands” of birth tourists could be accurate, Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, told us in a phone interview. But Camarota acknowledged the CIS estimate was based on data that was not limited only to women coming to the U.S. “for the last few weeks of pregnancy,” as Trump said.

Jeremy Neufeld, a senior immigration fellow at the Institute for Progress, took issue with the methodology underpinning Camarota’s estimates in a March 2020 blog post.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services does not provide a definitive count on birth tourism. Short of that, Neufeld told us the best estimate of birth tourism numbers comes from data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC reports that there were 5,636 children born to foreign nonresidents in 2021. That annual figure was likely lower due to the pandemic; the CDC data indicate there were 10,042 children born to foreign nonresidents in 2019.

Camarota believes those figures significantly underestimate birth tourism because, he said, most mothers will list an address in the U.S. — rather than their foreign address — and remain in the U.S. until they are able to obtain a Social Security card, birth certificate and passport for their child. And so, he said, they are not captured in the CDC data.

Neufeld believes the CDC numbers are still the best estimate for the magnitude of birth tourism.

“The CDC numbers aren’t perfect — no numbers are — but I’ve never seen any evidence they’re more likely to be too low than too high,” Neufeld said. “Yes, they may miss birth tourists who lie about their residence, but they also include people who never intended to give birth in the US or are in the process of getting residency. Which of these effects is bigger? Nobody really knows.”>

<Democrats in Congress have been developing proposals for the reform of the Supreme Court for years—and this week, we learned that President Joe Biden is warming to the idea. Although a series of controversial cases recently decided by the Court has given new impetus to this movement, the need for an overhaul lies less in the rulings’ seeming rightward swing and more in the pretexts the justices have used to reach them. The Court’s reasoning is becoming more and more incoherent as the conservative majority tosses aside even its own recent jurisprudence in order to serve ideological dogma.

This month’s Supreme Court decision granting presidents at least presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for much of what they do in office is a case in point.

It seems reasonable on its face: A democracy can hardly function if the Justice Department is free to prosecute a former president for executing policies that some successor happens to dislike. Read as an effort to ward off such a scenario, the concept is sound—but the details choke it. How is a prosecutor to distinguish “official from unofficial actions,” the opinion wonders, before offering guidance for answering that question.

To the dismay of Donald Trump’s critics as well as many historians and legal scholars, the Court staked out expansive boundaries for the “official” category. The ruling’s generosity runs entirely counter to a separate body of jurisprudence stemming from a series of cases on public corruption. There, the Court clearly defined what counts as an official act and what does not. The answer? Not much makes the grade.

If that precedent were respected, no item listed in the federal indictment of former President Trump for trying to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election would qualify as an official act. But the only way the Roberts Court could achieve its objective of erecting a shield around the nation’s chief executive was to contradict its own rationale for shielding a state’s chief executive.

Eight years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts signed the opinion in McDonnell v. United States, a decision that was stunning for its unanimity as much as for its content. It overturned the jury conviction, upheld on appeal, of a former Virginia governor for corruption. Governor Bob McDonnell had accepted some $175,000 worth of loans, cash handouts, and presents from Jonnie Williams, a businessman who dabbled in repurposing tobacco for supposedly benign products. In return for his money and bling, this would-be pharmaceutical executive wanted McDonnell to induce Virginia state universities to conduct clinical trials on a tobacco-based formula with a view to obtaining FDA approval. At the very least, Williams hoped that McDonnell could get the pills, which he claimed could treat inflammation, covered under the Virginia government employees’ health plan.

Proving bribery under U.S. laws, which have defined the act more and more narrowly over the past several decades, is not easy. You have to tie the briber’s gifts directly to something the public official does in return. Such an explicit quid pro quo transaction represents a tiny subset of the clever ways that well-heeled individuals and corporations make it worth an official’s while to further their interests.

Still, in the McDonnell case, prosecutors met the standard. They satisfied the jury that the quid and the quo were closely connected in the governor’s mind. For example, according to time stamps on emails, only minutes elapsed from when McDonnell checked with his benefactor about a promised $50,000 loan to when he asked his chief counsel to join him on devising strategies for clearing obstacles to the clinical trials Williams wanted.

Jurors and appellate-court judges had no doubt, in other words, that McDonnell had leveraged his position as governor to help Williams. But such help qualifies as part of a quid pro quo under the federal bribery statute only if the steps the officeholder takes to fulfill his side of the bargain are “official acts.” So, just like Trump v. United States, McDonnell hinged on which acts count as official.

Overturning two lower-court rulings, a unanimous Supreme Court decided in 2016 that none of the ways prosecutors showed McDonnell helping Williams counted as an official act. McDonnell’s activities deemed not to be official included: instructing his subordinates to meet with and listen favorably to Williams, having his staff organize a gala event at the governor’s mansion aimed at persuading state-university researchers to conduct clinical trials, and leaning on subordinates to make the decisions Williams wanted.....>

<....“To qualify as an ‘official act,’” Roberts spelled out, “the public official must make a decision or take an action on” a matter that “must involve a formal exercise of governmental power”—a lawsuit, for example, or a determination before an agency. Although “using [an] official position to exert pressure on another official to perform an ‘official act’” is an official act in its own right, “simply expressing support” does not equate to such pressure, according to this interpretation.

The August 2023 indictment of Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States (among other counts) includes a list of actions that the then-president and his alleged co-conspirators took to further their objectives. According to prosecutors, the president and his associates tried to “get state legislators and elections officials to subvert the legitimate election results,” and they discussed opening investigations with Justice Department officials and options for blocking certification proceedings with then–Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. To use Roberts’s own words, the co-defendants were “simply expressing support” for a course of action in calls and meetings with other officials. Under McDonnell, that activity is ordinary political practice and does not amount to deciding anything or even using governmental authority to pressure those officials to do anything.

The defendants also organized meetings of fraudulent state electors that, in the words of this month’s ruling, were allegedly “attempting to mimic the procedures” that real electors follow. But according to the McDonnell decision, “setting up a meeting” or “hosting an event” does not equate to “a formal exercise of governmental authority” or “qualify as an ‘official act.’”

Americans who believe that their president should be subject to the same laws as they are might reasonably take heart. Lower courts that are now charged with making specific determinations on each of Trump’s actions should be free to apply the same standards of official conduct that the Supreme Court laid out in McDonnell. The recent immunity ruling would still have the effect of stalling the January 6 case, but at least it would not serve as an invitation to Trump, if he is reelected, to behave even more egregiously in the future.

But that world of logical consistency is not the one that the Roberts Court has fashioned. Nothing in its recent history, or in the text of the Trump opinion itself, suggests that the majority has that much respect for its own prior work. Instead, Roberts has ignored, even contradicted, the precedent that he himself authored. In his guidance on how to tell official and unofficial acts apart, for example, he instructs lower courts not to “deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law.” That is, a decision or an order may be illegal, but it still enjoys presumptive immunity.

The exceptions to McDonnell continue. Trump, Roberts writes, met with “senior Justice Department and White House officials to discuss investigating purported election fraud.” Yet those discussions with subordinate officials are no longer considered informal chitchat, as they are under McDonnell: Even though no “decision or action” is taken on a matter resembling a determination before an agency, “Trump is absolutely immune from prosecution for the alleged conduct involving his discussions with Justice Department officials.”

As for discussions with Vice President Pence in which Trump expressed support for obstructing the congressional certification of the 2020 election, the former president enjoys “presumptive immunity.” The slightly weaker formulation is due only to Pence’s alternate role in that context as president of the Senate, answerable to another branch of government, rather than as a subordinate to the chief executive.

The same inconsistency applies to Trump’s interactions with state officials and private citizens. Under McDonnell, such conversations—none of which reached the level of a decision or a formal action—are unofficial. But again, the Roberts Court reverses its prior determination, saying that each exchange must be examined for potential connections to Trump’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” Even social-media posts and speeches to partisans favoring his second-term candidacy may, in this rendition, qualify as official acts.....>

<.....Americans puzzled by these two contradictory Supreme Court rulings should take note of one striking consistency: whom the outcome favors. By defining the same plain words in opposite ways, each decision shelters a chief executive from legal review. McDonnell could not be convicted, because almost nothing he did as governor qualified as an official act; Trump’s prosecution could not move ahead, because Roberts’s guidance called almost everything the then-president did official, and therefore safe from scrutiny.

After the Supreme Court’s deeply unpopular Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, which similarly disdained precedent by effectively repealing the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, Roberts went on a campaign to shore up the Court’s flagging reputation. “The legitimacy of the Court,” he told a Colorado audience that year, “depends on the fact that it satisfies the requirements of the statute and the constitution, as John Marshall put it, to ‘say what the law is.’”

But justices are not licensed to say that the law is whatever they want it to be. They’re supposed to apply standards consistently. Apparently gripped by an ideological bent for protecting chief executives’ prerogatives—including to break the law—the Roberts Court dismantled that elementary rule of jurisprudence. So long as it keeps making things up this way, it will keep earning the contempt of the American people—not only for itself but also for the laws it is supposed to uphold.

Trump needed no pretext to despise U.S. laws and find ways to circumvent them. The Roberts Court’s legacy may include encouraging him, should he regain office, to refuse to relinquish his newly expanded power voluntarily. Is that what Roberts and his cohorts want?

If so, and if they’re willing to torture logic to get it, this danger—not the substance of any one decision—is the most urgent reason for reforming the Supreme Court.>

<Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination with a marathon speech that began with an uncharacteristic call for national unity before veering into his familiar mix of grievance, bombast and apocalyptic warnings about the country's fate if he is not returned to the White House.

Trump's coronation before an adoring audience on Thursday stood in contrast to the turmoil roiling the campaign of President Joe Biden, his opponent in the Nov. 5 election, who was "soul searching" about whether to abandon his reelection bid under pressure from fellow Democrats, a source said.

Speaking to his party's national convention in Milwaukee, Trump delivered a dramatic account of the attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally five days ago, describing how he put a hand to his ear after hearing a bullet whiz by and saw blood.

When he told the crowd that he was "not supposed to be here," the delegates chanted back, "Yes you are!" With photos of a bloodied Trump projected behind him, he praised the Secret Service agents who rushed to his side.

Trump struck an unusually conciliatory tone during the speech's opening moments.

"I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America," he said, a marked shift in tenor for the typically bellicose former president.

But he quickly abandoned the message of unity he had promised in the wake of the shooting, pivoting to well-worn attacks on the Biden administration.

He claimed without evidence that his criminal indictments were part of a Democratic conspiracy, predicted that Biden would usher in "World War Three" and described what he called an "invasion" of migrants over the southern border.

The meandering address capped a four-day event during which he was greeted with adulation by a party now almost entirely in his thrall.

Trump devoted much of his record-breaking 92-minute speech to attacking migrants, a theme that has always animated his campaigns.

"They're coming from prisons, they're coming from jails, they're coming from mental institutions," he said, before citing by name several Americans murdered by suspects in the country illegally.

There is no evidence foreign governments are intentionally sending such people to the U.S. Academic studies show that immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than native-born Americans.

The speech broke Trump's own 2016 record for the longest delivered by a nominee, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California in Santa Barbara. He also had the third longest, in 2020.

Biden campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon said in a statement that Trump "sought to find problems with America, not solutions."

With Biden forced off the campaign trail due to a COVID-19 diagnosis, Trump seized the spotlight on Thursday as only the former reality television star could, emerging from behind a screen in front of a set of massive spotlights spelling out his name.

The entrance evoked that of a professional wrestler, just moments after the wrestler Hulk Hogan tore his shirt in half to reveal a sleeveless red Trump campaign shirt underneath.

Hogan wasn't the only celebrity to occupy a primetime slot. After the musician Kid Rock performed "American Bad Ass," Dana White, the chief executive of Ultimate Fighting Championship, introduced Trump as "the toughest, most resilient guy that I've ever met in my life."

After Trump concluded, his family and that of his 39-year-old running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, shared the stage as balloons dropped from the ceiling.

With his grip on the Republican Party never tighter, Trump is in a much stronger position than in his 2017-2021 term to follow through on his agenda if he wins the election.

Isolating at his Rehoboth Beach home in Delaware because of COVID, Biden faces increasing pressure from party leaders to cede his position at the top of the ticket following a halting debate performance on June 27. Former House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi is among those who have told him he cannot win in November, according to a White House source familiar with the matter.

After weeks of insisting he will remain in the race, Biden is now taking calls to step aside seriously, and multiple Democratic officials think an exit is a matter of time, sources said.

Senator Jon Tester, who faces a challenging reelection battle in Montana this year, on Thursday became the 21st congressional Democrat to publicly call on Biden to drop out.>

<Economist Paul Krugman just made clear that Americans should not trust 2024 Republican vice presidential nominee Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH).

In an op-ed published by the New York Times Thursday, Krugman emphasizes that while "Trump and Vance have a lot" of similarities, one thing they have "in common" is that "they’re both con men who despise their most avid supporters."

According to Krugman, the Ohio senator "talks a lot about his hardscrabble roots. But people should read what he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” which shows startling contempt for the people he grew up with but who, unlike him, didn’t escape small-town poverty."

The longtime economist adds that Americans "should also be aware that while his convention speech on Wednesday denounced 'Wall Street barons,' his rise has to a large extent been orchestrated by a group of tech billionaires; he’s a protégé of Peter Thiel."

Krugman points to the "sharp rise in the fraction of men in their prime working years without jobs, notably in the eastern part of the American heartland," highlighting the fact that "social problems have proliferated," and "as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented, there has been a surge in 'deaths of despair,' which they defined as deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide."

Certain "changes in the economy that undermined many small towns’ reason for being, a process that began during the Reagan years and isn’t unique to our country," yielded " social dysfunction — echoing the earlier rise in social dysfunction in America’s cities when blue-collar urban jobs disappeared," Krugman writes.

The economist emphasizes:

We should be making a national effort to ameliorate the problems of left-behind regions. Actually, the Biden administration has been doing just that, with much of its industrial policy aimed at helping depressed areas. Among other things, a Biden administration grant of up to $575 million — partly financed by legislation Republicans unanimously opposed — will help upgrade a steel plant in Vance’s hometown, Middletown, Ohio.

"There’s no reason to believe anything Vance says about supporting the working class," Krugman writes. "His book makes it clear that, at least to a degree, he looks down on those who haven’t managed some measure of his professional trajectory.">

<I said a couple of weeks ago that if President Biden decided to withdraw from the race it would be awesome if he would do it on the night Donald Trump accepted the GOP nomination. That didn't come to pass last night during the final night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee but the political media still spent the whole day speculating that it was about to happen, which no doubt irritated Trump almost as much since he always wants to be the center of attention — even when his opponents are doing his job for him.

It's obviously helpful to Trump that the Democrats are fighting each other over the fate of their presidential candidate just three months from the election. Still, the drama around Biden potentially withdrawing from the race has stepped on Trump's martyr storyline even as he's ostentatiously sporting a bizarrely large bandage on his right ear and cynically playing the sympathy card. But he made up for it with a smarmy opening to his acceptance speech in which he gave a mournful minute-by-minute recitation of the assassination attempt. At one point he indulged in some truly embarrassing schmaltz by kissing the helmet of the fireman who was killed at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. It all just seemed .... weird. One suspects he's been talking about this nonstop since it happened and is still understandably obsessed.

That part of the speech was reportedly written by Trump and I think it was evident. He's been dying to share the dramatic story of his allegedly brave reaction to the terrifying experience and this was his chance to take as long as he wanted to do it. (Brushing it off and saying "Honey I forgot to duck," as Reagan did, isn't exactly his style). Unfortunately, he also had to talk about other stuff. It was a major political event after all. And despite the billing of the speech as a call for unity, the rest of it was a flat rendition of his usual rally speech although he did curtail the profanity, eschewed the crude impressions of his political opponents and managed not to insult too many Republicans seeing as it was the RNC and all.

If social media is any indication, the speech seemed to shock many observers who have forgotten that Trump lies constantly and is incoherent and ignorant even when he's at his best. And he was certainely not at his best. Despite the long-winded delivery of all his greatest hits going back to 2016, he's definitely lost a step.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes astutely described what we all saw last night:

"This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who's been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it's really wearing thin."

The substance, to the extent there was any, was delusional and frightening. From bragging that when he was president he "could end wars with a phone call" to the endless lies about his accomplishments while in office, he assiduously avoided speaking specifically about 98% of his agenda as laid out in Project 2025 and his own Agenda 47. But he did say one thing that caught my attention and should catch the attention of every American. After admonishing Joe Biden for saying he's a threat to democracy earlier in the speech, Trump said in passing, "we had that horrible, horrible result that we'll never let happen again, the election result, we're never gonna let that happen again."

One might think that was just another example of Trump's cognitive decline. But that was actually a very straightforward comment and one that is backed up by ample evidence. The Republicans who are backing Trump (virtually all of them) have a fully developed plan to ensure that if the Democrats win in November, they will contest the results regardless of any evidence of fraud. When Trump says "we're never going to let that happen again" he means we're never going to let the Democrats win again.

And he's not talking about getting out the vote. Trump has been quoted repeatedly telling his troops "we don't need votes":

We got more votes than anybody’s ever had. We need to watch the vote. We need to guard the vote. We need to stop the steal. We don’t need votes. We have to stop — focus, don’t worry about votes. We’ve got all the votes. I was in Florida yesterday — every house has a Trump sign. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. We have to guard the vote.....>

<....The New York Times took a long look at the Republican plan this week and it's not good news.

Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

At the heart of the strategy is a drive to convince voters that the election is about to be stolen, even without evidence.

The article quotes numerous GOP officials who say that fair elections are impossible under the current laws so they have set out to challenge and change them in the swing states that are decisive in our bizarre electoral college system. Most concerning is their plan to give local elections officials the power to hold up certification of the vote.

Certification was never a matter of contention before 2020, having always been seen as a largely ceremonial non-partisan part of the process. But Republicans and their allies have decided this is a useful tactic to disqualify results that don't go their way. In some states, like Georgia, they've even empowered right-wing activists who are now members of the election boards to "investigate" voters to determine if the votes are legal. In Nevada, a similar law has already caused chaos in primary elections which are still in limbo due to board members contesting the results. These cases are wending their way into the courts, delaying the certifications.

At the RNC this week, Chris LaCivita, Trump's campaign manager, made it clear that they don't plan to accept any loss or concede the race even after the votes are counted:

This is the assault on democracy that the Biden campaign is talking about. It's not just rhetorical. They are literally assaulting the democratic process by changing laws at the local and state levels that will make it possible for them to contest the certification of the election results all the way up until January 6, 2025, and, apparently, beyond.

Trump is beatable, as demonstrated by that bizarre performance at the RNC. He is not a well man. It's clear that he and his team know this, which is why they are pulling out all the stops to contest the results of an election that hasn't even happened yet. These are not the actions of a confident campaign. But keep in mind that this now goes way beyond Trump and his massive ego. He's shown the Republicans the weaknesses in the system and they're going to exploit them. As he said, "we're never going to let that happen again." This is a problem that will exist long after 2024 — whether Trump gets back into the White House or not.>

<The United Auto Workers union lashed out at Donald Trump after the former president called for firing its leader during his Republican National Convention speech on Thursday.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, the UAW continued the ongoing feud between Trump and its leader, Shawn Fain, by saying the former president is a "scab and a billionaire [and] that's who he represents."

"We know which side we're on. Not his," the union said.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's office via email for comment.

The post arrived after Trump called for Fain to be "fired immediately" while suggesting China is building factories across the southern border in order to sell Mexican-assembled vehicles into the United States.

"The United Auto Workers ought to be ashamed for allowing this to happen," Trump said. "And the leader of the United Auto Workers should be fired immediately. And every single autoworker, union and non-union, should be voting for Donald Trump."

Trump had previously tried to get the endorsement of the influential union for his 2024 campaign, including giving a speech to striking union workers last September rather than taking part in the second Republican primary debate.

Instead, the UAW, which is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, endorsed President Joe Biden in January following a monthslong holdout over concerns about Biden's push toward electric car manufacturing in the U.S.

"This choice is clear: Joe Biden bet on the American worker while Donald Trump blamed the American worker," Fain said at a union conference in Washington, D.C.

Fain also described Trump as a "scab" who only represents billionaires during the endorsement of Biden.

During his speech at the RNC, Trump vowed to scrap the Biden administration's legislation to make significantly more new electric or hybrid cars in a bid to reduce carbon emissions on "Day One" if he returns to the White House.

"All of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams, and we will not allow it to be spent on meaningless 'Green New Scam' ideas," Trump said.

"And I will end the electric vehicle mandate on Day One, thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now, and saving us customers thousands and thousands of dollars per car."

The Environmental Protection Agency believes the EV mandate, finalized in March, will result in 56 percent of the new vehicles in 2032 being battery electric, while an additional 13 percent could be hybrids.>

<This week's Republican National Convention (RNC) suggests the transition of the Republican Party from the party of Ronald Reagan to the party of Donald Trump is officially complete. And some Republicans are bemoaning the GOP's MAGA makeover.

In a Friday report, the Washington Post quoted several Republicans — including some who served in Trump's first administration — lamenting how they no longer feel at home in their chosen party. One of the attendees of the 2024 RNC in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence. Short was alarmed that multiple RNC speakers embraced tariffs, distancing the U.S. from its commitment to the NATO alliance, allowed a labor union boss to trash corporations and seemed to want to "walk away from life and traditional marriage and stop defending Taiwan."

"None of this is in any way conservative," Short told the Post.

There were notably almost no non-MAGA voices at the 2024 GOP convention. The Post noted that former President George W. Bush was not in attendance, nor Vice President Dick Cheney. 2012 presidential and vice presidential nominees Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were also not there, and former Vice President Dan Quayle was also absent.

Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was in Milwaukee and spoke at a hotel a few blocks away from the Fiserv Forum, but never took the main stage. Pence's absence from the RNC was noticed by several delegates who spoke to Mother Jones, telling the outlet that the former vice president "betrayed his country" by refusing to block Congress' certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.

John Bolton, who was Trump's former National Security Adviser, told the paper he had no regrets about missing out on his party's quadrennial nominating convention despite attending eight others.

"I certainly wasn’t going to come and celebrate Donald Trump, that’s for sure," Bolton said. "I think I’m in good company missing this one, because there are a lot of us."

Kyle Sweetser, a self-described "Reagan Republican" from Alabama, has appeared in several ads by the "Republican Voters Against Trump" super PAC. told the Post that "Trump isn't a Republican" but is instead a "MAGA populist."

“I don’t even know what you’d want to call his foreign policy, but I call it left of [Joe] Biden. His trade policy is something that Bernie Sanders would have supported," Sweetser said. "A principle of conservatism is free trade. He’s against that. He’s against free markets.”>

<"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again," it says in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. "There is nothing new under the sun." It means that the human experience is essentially constant, and we should keep our powder dry. This is usually true, but not in the United States right now: there is dirty work afoot. We have a pretty big problem.

I am not talking about the attempt last weekend to assassinate former President Donald Trump. No individual's actions, however impactful, can teach us very much (other than that randomness governs the universe). Rather, I mean a combination of extreme polarization with shocking distortions, debilitating dysfunction and systemic paralysis that are driving the more productive parts of the country to insulate themselves from national politics—if not from the nation.

One symptom of the polarization is Trump's selection Monday as his running mate of 39-year-old Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a populist conservative who opposes gay marriage and has suggested support for a federal abortion ban. If Trump were inclined to try to heal the country, he would have picked one of several centrist alternatives.

But the problems bedeviling the Republic go far beyond quotidian events, and have more to do with the distortions, dysfunction and paralysis. And much of it has to do with an excessive focus on the states. That's what led to the fundamentally anti-majoritarian reality of the U.S. system—which both creates the distortions and blocks change.

The most important government body other than the executive is the Senate, which must approve all legislation and most major appointments, including Supreme Court justices, and has the sole power to remove the president. In this body, each of the 50 states has two representatives, which means that (in the most egregious contrast) every voter in Wyoming has about 70 times more impact than a voter in California, because that's the relative proportion of the two states' populations.

Overall, the 25 least populous of the 50 states have about 16 percent of the population, which means a sixth of the country can dominate the Senate. And it is not a random 16 percent, which would make it politically irrelevant; despite exceptions like Vermont, the overwhelming majority of the small states, being rural, are conservative and Republican-leaning—so the reality is that the Republicans are guaranteed to win most of the Senate seats they need, perhaps 40 of the needed 51, with even a small fraction of the national vote.

The "Founding Fathers" wanted the rural states not to be ignored, but they never intended the current situation, when two of the largest states, California and New York, with almost a fifth of the overall population, can basically be ignored instead.

The Electoral College system used to choose the president is the second antimajoritarian element. Though less egregious than the Senate, it, too, disproportionately amplifies the influence of smaller states and diminishes the impact of larger states, since each receives a number of electors based on its total number of senators and representatives, which means less populous states get more electoral votes per capita than more populous ones.

That's the main reason why a candidate can win the presidency without securing the national popular vote, and that it happens so often. There are distortions and problems in every political system, but this one, in the U.S., has been elevated to an outrageous level by the way in which the population has dispersed in the past century or so—with half the states having small conservative-leaning populations.

That is why of the last three elections won by a Republican, in 2000, 2004 and 2016, two were cases in which the winner actually lost the popular vote. The last election, in which a Republican did not win, was even more instructive: President Joe Biden won by over 7 million votes nationwide in 2020, but a change of fewer than 50,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin would have been enough to alter the Electoral College outcome in favor of Trump.

This is not just a matter of party politics—I would hardly care about that. It is about the resulting policies. Strong American majorities want stronger gun control (certainly a resumption of the assault weapons ban), more robust health care guarantees, to preserve abortion rights, and a tax regime that lowers as opposed to worsens the developed world's highest level of income and wealth inequality. The Republicans oppose all these things, and on abortion they have caused incredible damage in recent years. They can do this without much fear of retribution because of the system.

Indeed, the Republicans can nominate a presidential candidate who is manifestly unfit—not only a proven liar and convicted criminal, but a person who boasts he could shoot someone on the street without losing votes—and they know they will be competitive regardless.....>

<....The result is not just a series of wildly unpopular policies or dangerous candidates. It creates a level of despair about politics—a sense that it simply doesn't matter what most people want because the system is rigged in favor of a minority. It creates despondency about the country itself.

Which brings us to the main problem. In most other democracies, this level of systemic breakdown would lead to calls for reform. Indeed, reform is usually (though not always) considered progress. But in America, reform on important issues is well-nigh impossible because of the process for amending the constitution, which would be needed to address the problems.

For starters, an amendment can be proposed either by a two-thirds majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of state legislatures. After that, the amendment must be "ratified" by three-quarters of the states (38 of them) by either a ratification in the legislature or via conventions.

Consider that only about a half-dozen states are genuinely in play in any given election—the others all lean strongly one way or the other— so there is no realistic chance of getting two-thirds or three quarters of the states to go along with a process that dismantles the Republicans' built-in advantage.

That is why we cannot fix the Electoral College, and indeed why just last year we finally gave up, incredibly and shamefully, on efforts to pass an amendment guaranteeing women equal rights. It was too hard a slog in the Red states.

The defense of this nonsensical situation generally rests with the idea that the founders' vision cannot be tinkered with, as if a uniquely divine wisdom was coursing through their veins.

Putting aside the idolatry of such notions, in fact, the early American leaders held diverse views on the balance between state and national power, with some key figures advocating for a strong national government. James Madison, known as the "Father of the Constitution," was instrumental in moving beyond the weak Articles of Confederation, urging a more robust national framework to unify the states and address common issues. Alexander Hamilton also argued for a strong central government, believing it essential for maintaining stability. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, underscored the importance of a unified nation, too.

I would argue that most Americans, if pushed to make a choice, would choose the national identity. I love the Keystone State, but do not roam the earth as primarily a Pennsylvanian.

I can think of one way around this total dysfunction: the emergence of a centrist political party that represents the board [sic] swath of people between the roughly one-third who are MAGA-leaning and the roughly one-sixth who are progressives (or can at least stomach the woke movement). Such a party would have to somehow accommodate the likes of both moderate conservatives like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and moderate liberals like, well, Biden—but if that happened it would align with the views of about half the country (myself included) and might win most states, reshuffling the deck.

That is, for various reasons, not likely. But if things continue as they are, expect America's national mood to turn increasingly ornery.

And since the populist conservatives are a majority of the Republicans, winning most of the party's primaries, they'll dominate it for a while. If they somehow retain enough support to continue to win elections on the strength of the distorted system, I would not be surprised to see a movement toward secession among the Blue states of the West and Northeast. Although there is no constitutional provision for secession, it would not be inconsistent with the idea – popular especially on the right – that the states are somehow supreme. A breaking point approaches that could get ugly. Push people far enough and even liberals will get violent.

The world has known many empires—and their close cousins, huge countries. Most have fallen, from the Roman to the Byzantine, from the Mongol to the Ottoman. The only ones that stumble on have a strong national identity, like China. The others usually fell victim to an internal rot: like people, they arise, flourish, decay and die.

America is well along this path, and it can only save itself by mustering up a focus on a viable national identity. You are either a country, or you are not. The states, with all due respect, are in the way. And while this may sound like heresy, so is the uniquely American cult of the Constitution.>

<Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s stunning dismissal this week of the most serious charges faced by Donald Trump put her on shaky legal ground, according to experts, who say she is on track to be reversed on appeal and could even be removed from the case — an extraordinary, but not unheard of step.

Because of the political calendar, however, any legal repercussions could be short-lived.

Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified national security records and obstruction of government efforts to retrieve the material may not matter if the former president and current Republican nominee is elected in November. If he gets back to the White House, Trump could pressure his Justice Department to close the case. He could also promote Cannon to the very appeals court that will soon examine her decision to toss the case.

Cannon’s finding that special counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump conflicts with numerous past court decisions and the nation’s long history — during both Democratic and Republican administrations — of allowing independent prosecutors to handle high-profile instances of alleged wrongdoing.

Smith has filed notice of his plans to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which reviews decisions from the Florida district where Cannon, a relatively inexperienced judge appointed by Trump in 2020, sits.

The court has already rebuked her twice for her handling of other aspects of the classified documents case, sending what Yale Law School professor Akhil Amar described as a message that her decisions had been “way out of line.”

The question now, Amar said, is how quickly and dramatically the appeals court acts on the latest ruling, which dismissed the entire indictment for Trump and his two co-defendants.

“They may not want to stick their head in a buzz saw if they can just let the case take its slow, deliberative course,” he said.

In her 93-page decision, Cannon said there is no specific statute authorizing the attorney general to appoint a special counsel. She also said the Constitution requires someone with Smith’s authority to be confirmed by the Senate.

The judge acknowledged the tradition of special-attorney-like figures in moments of political scandal involving high-level government officials, from Watergate to Iran-contra to Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.

But Cannon said the practice of appointing such independent prosecutors has been inconsistent and based on a “spotty historical backdrop.” Smith, she wrote, is “a private citizen exercising the full power of a United States Attorney, and with very little oversight or supervision.”

Conservative legal groups have long questioned the constitutionality of special counsel appointments. Cannon repeatedly cited Justice Clarence Thomas, who raised the issue in a solo opinion this month as part of the Supreme Court’s decision granting Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official acts. That Supreme Court case focused on Smith’s separate election interference prosecution of Trump in D.C.

She also embraced the arguments in a law review article by Gary Lawson of Boston University School of Law and Steven G. Calabresi, a Northwestern law professor and a co-founder of the Federalist Society, with which Cannon is affiliated.

Other legal experts, however, have joined former Justice Department officials and Smith’s legal team in saying her ruling ignores the history of special counsel appointments and flouts Supreme Court precedent.

Most notably, the high court in 1974 unanimously required President Richard M. Nixon to hand over recordings to a special prosecutor as part of the Watergate investigation. In that opinion, the justices endorsed the office, citing several statutes under which the attorney general had “delegated the authority to represent the United States in these particular matters to a Special Prosecutor with unique authority and tenure.”

While lower-court judges are bound to follow the Supreme Court’s lead, Cannon took the unusual step of finding she was not required to abide by that aspect of the high court’s opinion in U.S. v. Nixon, saying the case did not directly address the validity of the office of special counsel.....>

<....Michael J. Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor who teaches about constitutional conflicts between presidents and Congress, said Cannon cannot just brush aside a unanimous high court ruling.

“For a trial judge to ignore it is judicial malpractice,” he said, describing her most recent decision as part of a “pattern of bias that leads her to endorse wacky or unfounded arguments, and that’s a problem if you’re a judge.”

Until the late 1990s, authority for an independent prosecutor was found in a federal law that many analysts believed was problematic in part because it required a panel of judges to appoint the independent counsels. The law was replaced by Justice Department regulations written according to specific statutes, according to former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, who drafted the rules in consultation with Congress when he worked for then-Attorney General Janet Reno.

Separately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has twice rejected challenges to the use of special counsels. First, in a 1987 opinion upholding the appointment of Lawrence Walsh to investigate the Iran-contra scandal, and more recently in 2019, upholding the appointment of former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III to probe Russian election interference and possible ties between those efforts and the 2016 Trump campaign.

Former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller, said the fact that special counsels are accountable to the attorney general is significant. Just as rank-and-file federal prosecutors are subject to oversight in handling their assigned cases, the special counsel can be overruled by the attorney general, said Rosenstein, who also was part of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater trial team investigating President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton in the 1990s.

“The Attorney General’s authority to overrule the special counsel is critical,” Rosenstein said, “because in my opinion it would be unconstitutional to make a prosecutor fully independent.”

Bruce Fein, another former high-level Justice Department official, worked in the office of legal counsel during the Nixon administration when then-acting attorney general Robert H. Bork appointed Leon Jaworski as the Watergate special prosecutor. Fein recalled deep concerns about the department’s internal ability to investigate the Nixon administration and a strong awareness of the need for independence.

Contrary to Cannon’s opinion, Fein said, the position of special counsel was specifically designed to strengthen separation of powers by preventing the executive branch from covering up its own crimes. While Garland appointed Smith to reassure the public that the investigation of Trump would be shielded from politics, Fein emphasized that Smith is still subject to oversight by the attorney general and must follow Justice Department policies and regulations.

Garland has met with Smith and the other special counsels he has appointed multiple times throughout their investigations, according to people familiar with the meetings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss them.

The appeals court has already shown skepticism of Cannon’s handling of Trump’s case in its earlier blunt reversals.

In September 2022, the 11th Circuit unanimously granted the Justice Department a reprieve from Cannon’s order barring them from reviewing documents with classified markings seized from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and private club. Three months later, a different 11th Circuit panel said Cannon was wrong to appoint an outside expert to decide whether any of the seized documents should be shielded from criminal investigators.

In both cases, two of the three judges on the panel were nominated by Trump.

But Cannon’s decision to appoint the special master nevertheless delayed the case — just as her dismissal of the indictment will at the very least push any possible trial past the coming presidential election. Such delays have been a primary part of Trump’s legal strategy in this and his other criminal cases.

“Everything points in one direction,” Fein said of Cannon. “She is trying to ensure that Trump cannot be tried before November in hopes that if he’s elected he’ll shut down the prosecution.”

It is not known how soon Smith will file an appeal or whether as part of it he will ask the 11th Circuit to take Cannon off the case. Such a move, while unusual, would not be unprecedented. The D.C. Circuit in 2006 removed a trial court judge from a case involving Native American oil and gas royalties, finding that the judge appeared biased against the Interior Department. It was the third time a sitting judge had been removed by the D.C. Circuit.....>

<....At a hearing in her Fort Pierce, Fla., courtroom last month, Cannon acknowledged that precedent seemed to support Garland’s appointment of Smith even as she pressed prosecutors about whether there had been “any actual oversight” by the attorney general.

Less than two weeks later, Thomas issued his concurring opinion in Trump’s immunity case that called into question the validity of the appointment of Smith.

Even though the Florida indictment was not before the justices, Thomas seemed to speak directly to Cannon: “If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding.”

Cannon gave her answer Monday, declaring Smith’s appointment invalid. Adding to the drama was the fact that her opinion landed on the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where Trump — ear bandaged for an injury sustained during a failed assassination attempt — was feted by the party faithful before accepting the nomination.

Trump praised Cannon by name in his convention speech, referring to her as a highly respected federal judge.

Whatever the 11th Circuit decides may be appealed to the Supreme Court, which issued several notable rulings favorable to Trump this term — including the sweeping grant of immunity.

It is not clear how the justices would view Cannon’s conclusion on the special counsel issue, however. Legal experts said it was telling that no other justice joined Thomas’s separate opinion.

One justice, Brett M. Kavanaugh, has been highly critical of the now-expired independent counsel law and the Supreme Court’s decision upholding that statute. As a young lawyer, Kavanaugh was part of independent counsel Starr’s team. During oral arguments in Trump’s immunity case, Kavanaugh called the 1988 ruling known as Morrison v. Olson “one of the court’s biggest mistakes.”

But Amar, the Yale law professor, said those concerns do not necessarily translate to the separate position Smith occupies. Like Kavanaugh, Amar is critical of the former law because it required a panel of judges to appoint the independent counsel. The special counsel process avoids that problem and offers an antidote, he said, because the prosecutor is selected by the executive branch and can be fired by the attorney general.

Even as he and other legal experts predicted Cannon’s ruling would be overturned, Amar also said her legal future could be bright.

If Trump is reelected and Republicans take control of the Senate, he said, Cannon could be tapped for the appeals court or even to the Supreme Court, if there is a vacancy.>

<If you listened to Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, on the third night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, you’d think it was Democrats — and President Joe Biden, in particular — who were to blame for thousands upon thousands of combat deaths and postwar suicides of American military personnel who served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“When I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq,” said Vance, who enlisted in the Marines and served in Iraq, before attending Ohio State and Yale Law. He later added: “From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the great recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.”

Yes, Biden did vote for the Iraq War. So did a significant number of Democrats on Capitol Hill — including then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, a fateful choice that a younger colleague, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, used to assail her during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

But it was then-President George W. Bush who ignored warnings during the summer of 2001 that Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda group was, as the title of a famous memo goes, “Determined To Strike in U.S.” It was Bush, in the thrall of hawkish Vice President Dick Cheney, who spun a fictitious narrative about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

And it was Republican lawmakers who were almost universally in lockstep with the president on his Bush Doctrine, which legitimized the concept of preventive war with its “you’re with us or against us” view of the world.

And Republican voters — most of whom have since become MAGA supporters and “America First” foreign policy isolationists, judging by surveys and polls — overwhelmingly supported both.

It was Bush who launched the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which led to 7,000 deaths in foreign operations, as well as 30,000 suicides, according to a database kept by Brown University. He condoned torture. And much of it was made possible by the lies his administration told about the supposed need to topple Hussein.

The unfocused campaign against Al Qaeda also demanded extending the “Global War on Terror” — with U.S. military action in 22 countries authorized by Congress’ near-unanimous Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which became law just seven days after the 9/11 attacks. (The lone vote against the 2001 AUMF was by a Democrat, Rep. Barbara Lee of California.)

Since then, both Republicans and Democrats have tried to clean up the mess he made. Their failure to do so is a testament to the disaster caused by Bush administration hawks who saw 9/11 as the perfect pretext to realize their vision of American power.

Obama tried to extricate U.S. troops, only to order “surges” in both Iraq and Afghanistan, while also creating a regime of legally questionable drone warfare. To his credit, Trump moved to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to leave the job unfinished. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was legitimately disastrous, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, as well as his top deputy Jon Finer, should have resigned. They didn’t, with a subsequent Biden administration review of the debacle essentially blaming Trump for the timeline he’d set....>