Georgia

“We gotta win the midterms,” President Donald Trump told the crowd in Iowa at the end of last month. “I’m here because we’re starting the campaign to win the midterms. That means Senate and it means House.” Trump is, by all accounts, obsessed with the upcoming elections in November. Having been distracted by various foreign dramas, and seeing his approval ratings dip, the President aims to pivot back to a domestic mission in 2026. If the Democrats capture the House, Trump will face noisy congressional battles and possibly impeachment Trump understands the stakes, hence choosing Iowa, the traditional starting place for presidential primaries, to launch this campaign. The final two years of his presidency hinge on the outcome of these elections.

The collective memory of Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen has, for most Americans, been buried if not entirely forgotten.  Donald Trump, however, is not the sort of man who moves on from such matters. In his mind, Crooked Joe Biden stole the election from him through widespread voter fraud, at the heart of which was Fulton County, Georgia. And now a succession of court battles that started with him in the dock is ending with Team Trump doing the prosecuting.  The FBI and his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, have raided a warehouse in Fulton stuffed with 2020 votes and taken them away in trucks. Will they find voter irregularity? Perhaps. Recent admissions by Fulton officials have cast doubt on the processing of 335,000 votes.

‘They say the human body, given time, builds a resistance to pain. But after being tear-gassed six times in 21 nights, I can’t say I’ve started to tolerate it, let alone appreciate it,’ says a colleague who hasn’t missed a single night of the pro-European protests on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue since 28 November. She counts herself lucky; so far, she has avoided the brutal beatings meted out by the masked riot police, nicknamed ‘robocops’. These enforcers have become the Georgian government’s ruthless arm for crushing dissent, their mission seemingly to maim and mangle those who find the prospect of embracing the Kremlin’s Russkiy mir less than appealing and aren’t afraid to say so.

"The whole thing is fucked.” That’s how one former blue-state GOP official describes the current turmoil facing state Republican parties. Numerous reports have laid bare the financial struggles, leadership turnover and abject chaos that have ensnared the GOP’s state parties. State parties in Arizona and Pennsylvania, unable to make rent, have sold off their headquarters. There are active battles for control of the party in Michigan and Colorado. Arizona also recently pushed out its chairman and in Georgia the party chair stepped down. Meanwhile, multiple former state-party officials are under indictment in cases related to January 6.

It was the power of love that halted Georgia’s election subversion case against Donald Trump, saving the former president for now from another possible conviction. Now, the emergence of juicy details of the romance — what Cockburn really wants to learn from the case — are being stymied.  Nathan Wade, the former lover of Georgia attorney general Fani Willis and a former prosecutor in the racketeering case, sat down with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday. Collins did her best to draw out the timeline of the affair when the interview was unfortunately interrupted.  What Wade did reveal is that he is still close with his former fling. “We are great friends. We speak regularly. The conversation has changed though,” Wade said.

State officials and nonprofit leaders often chatter about economic diversification and a just transition for Appalachia. But old habits die hard. Many still dream of large factories and firms returning to the region, bringing economic wealth — and tax revenue.  The divide between smokestack chasers and economic diversifiers has an extra urgency as the federal government directs more money into the region than they have in decades. But the diversification versus big business divide threatens to squander the money from federal legislation like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.  Swinging for the fences promises the revival of a golden era, when Appalachia was dotted with coal mines and factories.

On Wednesday, Georgia’s government came one step closer to realising its desire to embed the country deeper within Russia’s sphere of influence. A year after mass protests forced them to pull the plug on a controversial ‘foreign agents’ law, the Kremlin-sympathetic ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party is once again trying to force this ‘Russian-style’ legislation through parliament.  While the bill was undergoing its first reading in parliament, 20,000 Georgians turned out onto the streets to demonstrate. Several thousands protested in Tbilisi alone. Shouts of ‘No to the Russian law’ rang out alongside renditions of the Georgian national anthem and ‘Ode to Joy’, the EU’s official song. Once again, like last year, riot police were deployed.

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis might reflect on the proverb, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” She will have ample time to reflect as she watches her career decompose in a Georgia courtroom and state Senate hearing. The old saying is directly on point. The spotlight searches out prominent people and their entourage. If they are caught cheating, they will shrivel under the glare. If they are caught lying under oath, their troubles will be far worse. That is exactly what is happening in an Atlanta courtroom to Willis, as well as her paramour, Nathan Wade, and Wade’s former law partner, Terrence Bradley, who was also briefly his divorce attorney. The spotlight is on Willis because she is prosecuting Donald Trump and a busload of co-defendants.

Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, went down in flames on Thursday. A crematorium wouldn’t have been more efficient. Her angry, self-righteous defense added a load of fossil fuel to the conflagration.  It happened at a judicial hearing before Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the election-interference case Willis brought against Donald Trump and eighteen codefendants. The district attorney charged them with acting jointly to overturn the 2020 US presidential election. Her basic allegation is that they conspired to add bogus votes to Trump’s total so they could flip the state’s electoral vote. Then, a slate of false electors, pledged to Trump, would certify he had won the state.

Some enterprising entrepreneur ought to find a way of collecting a cover charge for the entertainments that the Get Trump concession is currently offering the public free and for nothing. At the moment, the first of my two favorite forays into the twilight zone are the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Trump. Carroll claims that sometime, she cannot remember exactly when, but it was about thirty years ago, Trump sexually assaulted her in a fitting room at the swank department store Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. A New York jury found Trump guilty of defamation and sexual abuse (but not rape) and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million of the crispest. Now she is back asking for more. Who knows whether she will get it. Stand by and pass the popcorn.