Freddy Gray

Remember the tale of Donald Trump and the ‘illegal hoarding’ of the top-secret documents? It was only last summer. On 8 August, the FBI raided the 45th President’s home in Mar-a-Lago to seize back highly classified material. An image of the reclaimed files promptly leaked to the press. Over-excited pundits started talking about Trump’s ‘Al Capone moment’ – the great villain had been caught out for an unsensational crime. Since then, the case has been stuck in the administrative cogs of the Justice Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed Jack Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor, as special counsel for the two most grave investigations into Trump – the documents one and the one into Trump’s role in events leading up to 6 January 2021.

The presidency of the United States is hard work, everybody knows that. It’s also a pretty sweet gig for should-be retirees. The 80-year-old Joe Biden and First Lady Jill just spent six days holidaying on St Croix in the Caribbean. Biden’s critics have been quick to point out that he has so far spent some 260 of his 715 days in office on vacation. That’s more than even the famously self-indulgent septuagenarian Donald Trump spent chillaxing at his estate in Florida. Who knew that leading the free world could be a part-time job? And with so much downtime, plus such power and perks, why would any proud gerontocrat quit? Bidenologists all make the same point: he spent five decades trying to be president, so why stop now?

Yesterday, a political committee set up in order to condemn Donald Trump condemned Donald Trump. It would have been truly jaw-dropping if the congressional January 6th committee (which consisted of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom thought Trump was guilty as hell) had decided to say that Donald Trump had not criminally abetted the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. As it was, the headlines last night are about as surprising as the news that Donald Trump has released a new set of Trump-themed NFTs. Congress is not the Justice Department. The committee’s ‘criminal referrals’ may sound dramatic, yet the four counts have no legal teeth. The January 6 committee will be dissolved next month as a new Republican-led House of Representatives comes in.

For weeks now, Twitter’s new chief Elon Musk has been promising to reveal what really happened behind the scenes at the social media platform in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.  Well, yesterday, Musk did — through the journalist Matt Taibbi. It’s a big story, one that free speech supporters everywhere should take seriously, especially in the United Kingdom where we are on the verge of passing the Online Safety Bill. What happened at Twitter in 2020 shows how easily concern about ‘safety’ can, under political pressure, morph into corruption and censorship.

American conservatives like to say that the way to stop Donald Trump in 2024 is to hit him from the right. Compared with his own political movement, they argue, Trump has always been something of a squish when it comes to issues such as Covid vaccines, gay marriage, criminal justice, or border control. He never did build that wall – not properly, anyway. Any candidate wanting to take down the father of Trumpism should therefore keep pointing out that Daddy had four years in the White House and never lived up to the hype. Take note, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.