https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-10/saudi-uae-had-to-bring-assad-s-syria-back-into-arab-league?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l&leadSource=uverify%20wall

Assad is a mass murderer but he won his war, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE have vital interests to protect across the Middle East.

It should have come as no surprise that the Arab League voted overwhelmingly to restore Syria’s membership after more than a decade of suspension. The move isn’t unanimous, with Qatar remaining the primary holdout, and Washington registering muted objections. Yet, while the outrage the vote has provoked is more than understandable, it has long been inevitable.

The protracted isolation of Syria was motivated by clear moral and strategic reasons. The brutality with which the Bashar al-Assed regime put down what began as peaceful, pro-democracy protests has few parallels in the 21st century. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, including through widespread use of chemical weapons.

Torture and summary execution have been systematic, as thoroughly documented by whistleblowers like the former government photographerknown as Caesar. Nearly 7 million Syrian refugees have been forced to flee abroad, with around the same number displaced within the country.

Because of this incredible record of brutality, much of the world, including many Arabs, are dismayed at the practical re-embracing of the dictatorship. Yet there really hasn’t been any long-term alternative for the Arab states ever since the rebel-held parts of Aleppo fell to pro-regime forces at the end of 2016. That functionally ended the main part of the war for what the dictatorship has called “necessary Syria,” the central swath of the country running from the Lebanese border up the Mediterranean coast and inland far enough to encompass all the major cities.

The regime didn’t survive on its own. In the summer of 2015, high-level Iranian delegations traveled to Russia in a bid to convince Moscow that only an intense, coordinated military intervention could save their mutual ally, Assad. That fall, Iranian forces and militias they controlled, including Hezbollah from Lebanon, made a decisive intervention on the ground, with Russia providing crucial command-and-control, air and intelligence support.

Rebel groups were no match for this new coalition, and within a little more than a year the war more or less ended when eastern Aleppo fell to the pro-Assad forces. Fighting continued in peripheral areas, involving Turkey, Kurdish fighters and a small number of US troops in the north; Iranian, Kurdish and US forces in the East; and significant remnants of terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

However, re-engagement by the major Arab countries was always a matter of time, because they continue to have significant interests in Syria but no way of securing them. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have led the reintegration of Damascus into the Arab League, have legitimate concerns involving undue Iranian and Hezbollah influence in the country, Syria’s role in Lebanon, Turkey’s role in Syria, refugee return, and drug smuggling and other crimes associated with the regime, to name just a few.

Although Arab countries have made tough-sounding demands of the regime on many of these issues, it’s unlikely functional reintegration will be contingent on their implementation.

Arab governments were hoping to see the back of Assad after the uprising broke out in 2011. But with his survival, they are not prepared to walk away from Syria permanently, and don’t feel they can rely on outside forces like the US, Turkey and Israel to contain the dictator and his foreign supporters.

They’ve concluded their only real option is to hold their noses and try to use diplomatic, political and commercial leverage — was well as aid in helping Syria rebuild its shattered infrastructure — to regain influence in where that country is going.

As usual, the UAE — a small power unburdened by regional and global leadership roles — acted first. This opened the door for Saudi Arabia, a much more important country with regional Arab and global Islamic leadership aspirations, and much more complex domestic politics. (This same pattern applied to recent Gulf Arab rapprochements with Iran.) They have been joined by a set of countries including Algeria, Egypt, Oman and others that never really turned their back on the Assad regime no matter how bloody things got in Syria.

Qatar wants to sit this out because it feels it can rely on Turkey to pursue their common interests, and it wishes to avoid annoying the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups with which it is aligned. But that changes practically nothing.

Washington clearly isn’t happy, but it didn’t provide the Arab League with any practical alternatives to ensure its interests. Hence the rather attenuated US protests. Assad leads a regime soaked in blood. Sadly, the balance of power on the ground in Syria, combined with always-heated regional politics, made this distasteful reintegration inescapable.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2023/05/05/civic-virtue-expected-of-those-in-high-office-goes-missing-all-too-often/

There is one standard for ordinary Americans, another for the wealthy, yet another for the politically powerful.

Many Americans, on the left and right, are profoundly alienated from a political system they regard as deeply corrupt. This cynicism even primes some to believe former US president Donald Trump and failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake that US elections are shams. Mr Trump even declared that Senator Bernie Sanders was cheated in Democratic primaries – a claim Mr Sanders dismissed.

There is no evidence of any rigged elections, but both parties and all three branches of federal government have helped create an atmosphere of sleaze.

Most Americans are willing to accept a degree of social inequality. For example, the more money one brings to a criminal trial, the better the likely outcome. Battalions of lawyers with diverse specialisations, forensic scientists and accountants, private investigators, psychologists, psychiatrists, former police officers and so on provide a much more formidable hurdle for prosecutors than overworked public defenders.

Prosecutors, for instance, won’t seriously consider pursuing the death penalty, where it exists, against defendants of means. Execution is therefore in effect reserved for non-wealthy individuals, especially when the defendant is a black man and/or the victim was a white woman.

Late 18th century assumptions that shaped the way the US system deals with power and accountability have proven defective. The framers of the constitution expected everyone to operate in their self-interest. But they assumed that the social and political elite would largely indulge in a somewhat attenuated form of bias.

All systems, they understood, ultimately rely on civic virtue. The more prestige and power individuals or factions accumulate, the more members of that elite need to exercise a higher form of “self-governance” – not merely repudiating corruption but embracing self-regulation in the national interest.

This is an intended feature (alas a bug) of the American system to not just informally (as with wealth influencing the quality of legal protection) but often formally granting unusual degrees of unregulated autonomy and exemption to those dominating the national political hierarchy. With civic virtue playing an increasing role, they presumed, such elites would conceptualise their self-interest more in terms of institutional than personal prerogatives and privileges.

Congresspersons would naturally fight to preserve legislative authority and powers, while presidents and the courts would stick up for the executive and judiciary, respectively. Within a few years of the Constitution’s ratification, however, it became clear that the emergence of formalised political parties produced a huge and largely unanticipated partiality that greatly impeded the functioning of political checks and balances. Parties instinctively protect their own, across institutional lines.

Some of the most important guardrails established at the Constitution’s founding were greatly weakened as bad actors found significant protection within the party system. Whether real or perceived corruption has gotten worse over time or not is immaterial. As a practical matter, the system is shot through with impunity that only increases with greater authority – the opposite of the arguably intuitive notion that greater power requires stronger restraints.

The (reportedly) relatively robust restraints over who can order the firing of US nuclear weapons illustrates that such a system of limitations can work if real checks and an honest, equitable outcome were the goal. But it doesn’t appear to be. It is possible to give someone the authority to say “no,” as when it comes to national survival. But there is nothing similar regarding many truly egregious forms of corruption.

Examples are everywhere. Hardly a week goes by without a new revelation about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and/or his wife behaving improperly, unlawfully failing to report or disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from interested parties, and other improper financial relationships with vested interests on the extreme right.

Mr Thomas’s behavior is beyond outrageous. But because the Supreme Court has no ethical code and prefers not to police itself, thank you very much, he remains completely unaccountable.

Congress and the Democrats are no saints. During the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was implored by countless patriotic groups and individuals to restrain stock market trading by members of Congress, which can obviously and easily become a form of insider trading. At first, she said she simply wouldn’t consider the matter, and then she admitted it was important but ultimately and predictably did nothing.

As for the White House, Mr Trump, his cabinet and, especially, his family (his administration gave itself permission to ignore laws against nepotism) seemed to have set to work as soon as he was inaugurated milking the system in what often seemed simply a for-profit venture. The US system never saw anything like it before. We may never know how deep the rot went.

But what we certainly do know is that, as long as he was in office, he was immune from prosecution and, in many cases, even investigation. He may face the music now for some of his more egregious, scandalous misdeeds, but as long as he was president, he was untouchable.

The Biden White House has been a lot less tainted, to say the very least. But the President’s son, Hunter, although he’s never been a government official, does seem to have tried to profit by his last name. The Justice Department has been taking an inexplicably long time to decide whether he should face criminal charges on a tax matter. Once again, the impression is terrible.

Meanwhile, revolving doors between the government and private sector, and processes of bidding on contracts and outsourcing – particularly when it comes to military expenditure (the biggest chunk of discretionary, and often even non-discretionary, national spending) means that there is a huge federal trough by those who can find a way to get their snout in it. This pervasive, fundamental set of mechanisms driving the US system often may not be unlawful, but it’s another big factor reasonably informing public cynicism.

The bottom line is that, with very rare exceptions, there is one standard for ordinary people, another for the wealthy, yet another for the somewhat politically powerful, and near-total immunity and impunity for those at the very top such as Supreme Court justices and sitting presidents. Some of them even seem to enjoy flouting the rules.

No wonder so many Americans are disposed to dismiss the entire process, including perfectly legitimate elections, as a sham and a scam. The stench of corruption hangs heavy over the Washington swampland and poor old civic virtue all-too-often seems to have been quietly abandoned.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/04/25/trump-republican-2024-us-president/

It doesn’t look like there are candidates who could derail Trump next year but it’s still early in the race.

In the US, Republicans skeptical of former president Donald Trump seem trapped in a nightmarish doom loop. Nothing, it seems, can be done to stop him from once again becoming their party’s nominee for president in 2024, and then probably losing to President Joe Biden.

Mr Biden is expected to announce his re-election campaign this week, and he is unlikely to face any serious Democratic challengers. Mr Trump faces several announced competitors while numerous other hopefuls are biding their time. This suits him ideally.

He can rely on about 20-30 percent of the party’s base voters. Unless another candidate in the pack secures higher numbers, the Republican winner-take-all primary system will transform that sizable minority into unstoppable victories. You don’t need 50 percent plus one. To win all of a state’s delegates, you just need one more than a runner-up. So, Mr Trump relishes a crowded field.

But are Republicans doomed to eventually nominate Mr Trump again? Can anyone plausibly stand in his way?

For a few months, conventional wisdom held that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was not only a formidable challenger, but had Mr Trump back on his heels, clocking significant leads in most opinion polls.

But many Republicans focused on regaining the White House watched in horror as that lead rapidly dwindled and then reversed, with Mr Trump re-building commanding advantages in virtually every poll. Yet Mr DeSantis hasn’t even announced he’s a candidate. How did that happen?

The early excitement over the Florida Governor failed to account for several key factors. Mr DeSantis is totally untested on the national stage and looked distinctly unimpressive during a recent book tour that was a proxy for an early campaign.

Presidential elections are, in fact, popularity contests. Mr DeSantis is, by most accounts, a decidedly unpleasant individual, lacking personal charm, particularly in close quarters. Unfortunately, he also lacks Mr Trump’s formidable demagogic talents in front of large crowds, and so appears effective neither with big nor small groups.

His most obvious competitive advantage over Mr Trump, 76, is Mr DeSantis’ relative youth at 44. Those decades could be a potent weapon against Mr Biden, but we may never find out.

The two have launched very revealingTV attack ads against each other. Mr DeSantis criticised Mr Trump for having been open to cuts in social spending for the elderly. Mr Trump responded by mocking Mr DeSantis’ purported use of his fingers to consume pudding on an airplane when he didn’t have a spoon.

Mr DeSantis apparently imagines he can win the Republican nomination on policy issues. Mr Trump knows it’s all about shamelessly asserting dominance with impunity. He shares his followers’ belief that leadership is most clearly demonstrated through bullying in a style borrowed from professional wrestling.

However, Mr Trump has been, as usual, canny. Since leaving office after refusing to acknowledge his defeat and seeking, instead, to overthrow the constitutional system, he has plunged into new depths of extremism. But this was not merely a neurotic symptom.

He has been carefully mapping out new space on the extreme right that has never existed in mainstream American politics – vowing to dismantle much of the government and take bitter revenge against opponents if re-elected, in the spirit of his insistence that the US Constitution should have been “terminated” to allow him to remain in power. Judged by both word and deed, he now poses a far greater threat to the constitutional order than in 2016 or 2020.

In the process, he has blocked any path by which he could be attacked from his political right. What would that look like? What’s more extreme than “terminating” the Constitution and seeking “retribution” against opponents? Yet no one can win the Republican nomination by attacking him from his left. He has cleverly both outflanked and boxed in his Republican opponents, leaving them little room to manoeuvre.

It is hard not to suspect Mr DeSantis has squandered his big opportunity and his path to a comeback is not clear.

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley shows even fewer signs of gaining significant support. Before almost any of the others, she exemplified the conundrum all Mr Trump’s Republican opponents face: she feels the need to be perceived as sufficiently pro-Trump not to completely alienate his huge support base, but somehow also needs to make the case that she’s a better choice. That’s very tricky. Since leaving her post in his administration, she’s been trying to square that circle, with no success.

Her best bet is for Republicans to conclude they need a woman of colour to erode Democratic support among women and ethnic minorities. But, like all the others, since she is stridently anti-choice, abortion’s rise as a dominant issue is disastrous for Republicans in general, and Ms Haley in particular.
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The rest of the announced field includes a couple of wealthy non-entities and a trivial talkshow host. But there are some more interesting unannounced candidates, particularly Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. He is the most prominent African-American Republican, with a style that’s essentially a mashup of the Trump/DeSantis brand of dour culture war politics but with a sunny disposition and uplifting tone. His best bet is probably for Mr Trump to lead the party into another atrocious debacle in 2024 and try again in 2028, when there may be more takers.

He can rely on about 20-30 per cent of the party’s base voters. Unless another candidate in the pack secures higher numbers, the Republican winner-take-all primary system will transform that sizable minority into unstoppable victories. You don’t need 50 per cent plus one.

Mr Trump is also facing an unannounced challenge from his former vice president Mike Pence. The stigma of having followed the Constitution on January 6, 2021 and not unlawfully blocked the certification of Mr Biden’s victory has led to Mr Pence being vigorously booed by core Republican audiences in many recent public appearances. Perhaps he’ll think better of it after all.

Yet even he won’t strongly criticise Mr Trump. That’s being left to one declared candidate, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, and an undeclared one, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Neither seem particularly formidable, to put it charitably.

It’s very early, and things could change. But it doesn’t look as though even criminal trials, or for that matter convictions, are going to be enough to derail Mr Trump. Yet it would probably take a huge unexpected development to create enough space for him to regain the presidency in 2024.

There’s a long way to go, but right now Mr Biden looks incredibly well-positioned for a second term in the White House

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/04/19/in-todays-america-i-cant-even-visit-a-hospital-without-getting-infected-by-politics/

The dangerous divides that have come to shape American culture are increasingly inescapable.

Casually held truisms can sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly erupt into daily life with the power of a thunderbolt. In the abstract, I know perfectly well that many Americans live in political-cultural bubbles that rarely communicate with each other. Yet I wasn’t prepared for a recent encounter with how that can turn a simple human interaction into an irrational furore.

I’ve been recovering from an injury in rural Virginia and ended up sharing a room with a man in his mid-80s, born and raised in this area. The results were eye-opening and deeply disturbing.

At first, he couldn’t have been more pleasant, warm and welcoming. On our first day together, he asked if I didn’t mind a little TV later on. I said fine, and then came the evening doses of Fox News.

He regularly watches three programmes, culminating in the notorious Tucker Carlson broadcast. In their entirety and natural environment, these shows were quite new to me. They all have a simple formula: find something, for the next segment or two, about which to thunder in faux indignation, before moving on to the next abomination.

I was astounded that at least three quarters of the horrors they fulminated against were exaggerations to the point of being effectively fictional or simply outright fabrications. I generally kept quiet during these evening reveries, but once observed that the subject of the last segment was entirely made up. I got no reply, so I asked him if he knew that no such thing existed. I was duly ignored.

The only other time I said anything was when Mr Carlson concluded a profoundly racist rant, and I noted it was one of the most offensive things I had viewed in a long while. He snorted and we moved on.

It was obvious that this virulent propaganda was carefully designed to produce mounting and sustained outrage in regular, enthusiastic viewers. My roommate consumed three to four hours of it daily and nothing else whatsoever, yet something wasn’t adding up. He seemed to remain perfectly calm and amiable. So, I began to wonder if I had badly misjudged both the intended and the real effect of Fox programming on its core audience. Where was the rage?

I didn’t have to wait for long. Shortly thereafter, he came into our room as I was having a conversation about US politics with a third individual. He interrupted, disputing what I was saying with increasing anger. He then stood up, declared that I was “against the country, against America,” denounced US President Joe Biden as “a communist,” and marched out.

It was the last I saw him because he immediately arranged to lodge elsewhere and had others retrieve his possessions. It was clear that I was being effectively declared anathema and that remaining in my presence for a moment longer was intolerable entirely because we didn’t agree about former US President Donald Trump’s term in office and bid for reelection (questions such as the attempted coup and the January 6 insurrection, hush money to adult film stars and his hero’s demands to “terminate” the US Constitution to allow himself to remain in office never came up – though he would undoubtedly have dismissed it all as “fake news.”)

His extraordinary reaction to my quite mild though clear disagreement with him suggests several important things.

While I didn’t react with the fury and revulsion he expressed, I live in my own, essentially liberal, bubble where I don’t encounter people like him. Most of the Republicans I know don’t like Mr Trump, and even those who do remain at least partly tethered to the fact-based reality.

Some Americans now simply cannot abide those who categorically disagree with them about domestic politics. Separation is the watchword, as representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia suggested a “national divorce” between red and blue America.

Some left-wing Americans must be just as intolerant, but he fits the Trump-supporting demographic perfectly: male, elderly, strongly Christian, lacking higher education and firmly rooted in a rural community. He’s a perfect target for Fox’s calculated, disingenuous propaganda. They are trying to make him and people like him angry and are succeeding brilliantly – to the point that he cannot stand to even share a room briefly with someone who politely and occasionally challenges his political dogma.

It is unclear how many Americans share these views but it’s probably at least 20 per cent of core Republican voters. It is clear, however, there is no mass market liberal propaganda on American television seeking to promote hatred and rage like I saw Fox successfully doing in a small corner of rural Virginia. MSNBC, and arguably even CNN, have liberal biases. But they aren’t deliberately seeking to demonise, and provoke anger and hatred against, other Americans the way Fox does.

The worst part is how cynical we now know this is – although my former roommate will likely never hear of it and wouldn’t believe it if he did. The internal messages uncovered by the Dominion lawsuit against Fox clearly demonstrate that Mr Carlson and the other hosts, along with owner Rupert Murdoch and other senior executives, privately do not believe, and even mock, Mr Trump’s election lies and those being spread by his representatives, while continuing to broadcast heavy support for those very fabrications.

Mr Carlson added “I hate him passionately,” but you’d never guess that by the fawning “interview” in which he recently allowed Mr Trump to spout all manner of falsehoods and gibberish, including suggesting he alone appreciates the destructive power of nuclear bombs, unchallenged.

It’s a mixed bag for US journalism that Dominion has settled the lawsuit for $787.5 million. It may save investors in the voting machine company, but probably isn’t massive enough to rattle a purse as heavy as Mr Murdoch’s. Fox has admitted that “certain claims” it made about Dominion were “false,” but will not have to broadcast apologies to its audience, or any admission of culpability, on its programming, particularly its powerful evening shows.

Lies indeed have consequences, but not commensurate ones. Therefore, Fox will be able to buy its way out of a potential crisis of credibility with its core audience, whether they think that they lied about Mr Trump winning the election in 2000 or that they are lying now about the fact that he really lost. But most of its audience will probably never learn of the blatant manner in which they were deliberately deceived.

Dominion’s victory will therefore do little to counteract the painstakingly concocted poison that Fox pours into the eyes and ears of its credulous proselytes. The channel is deliberately tearing American society apart in an unseemly scramble for the almighty dollar. Unfortunately Dominion couldn’t provide it, but while protecting the First Amendment and free speech, the means must be found to attenuate their venom and counteract the impact of this carefully curated outrage and fury against other Americans.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2023/04/11/wild-abortion-rulings-to-private-jet-freebies-why-do-us-judges-have-such-bad-judgment/

As gridlock hits the legislative process and the Supreme Court’s credibility is worse than ever, marginal players seek national glory.

As the Biden administration’s domestic agenda is stalled by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, which is also unable to pass legislation, peripheral sources of authority such as local prosecutors, judges, and state legislatures are suddenly hoping and reaching for an opportunity to influence national policies and practices.

It’s mainly, but not just, Republicans. Democrats are also contributing.

The indictment of former president Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg could invite future prosecutions of former presidents on a partisan basis – or so claim Republicans.

It would be much harder for a district attorney in Lubbock, Texas to indict former president Bill Clinton on some trumped-up charge. There would probably never be a trial at all, even if a local grand jury co-operated. After all, Mr Trump was residing in Manhattan when he allegedly committed the hush money crimes there, so Mr Bragg has uncontested jurisdiction.

Nonetheless, his case may involve potentially dangerous interplay between state and federal authorities. Part of his argument seems to hinge on the idea that Mr Trump’s dishonest financial filings, misdemeanours in New York State, rise to the level of felonies because they helped violate a major crime: federal campaign laws. This arguably flips federalism on its head, or so Mr Trump’s lawyers will undoubtedly argue, expanding the District Attorney’s local power by usurping what should be federal jurisdiction.

The DA in Fulton County, Georgia, investigating alleged election tampering by Mr Trump, is likely to follow suit, doubling down on local Democratic indictments against the former Republican president. When Republicans can take revenge and try to enforce federal laws at the local level against nationally prominent Democrats, they will.

This weekend’s headlines were dominated by an extraordinary ruling by a Trump-appointed Texas judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, purporting to overturn the 23-year-old Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a medicine mainly used in early-term abortions. The ruling attempts to render illegal the sale of mifepristone everywhere in the country.

The ruling is a minor masterpiece of abysmal reasoning and super-tendentious language. He uncritically cites particularly outlandish claims from anti-abortion groups while dismissing the fact that more than two decades of being approved and widely used in the US have demonstrated mifepristone to indeed be safe and effective.

Even the Supreme Court in its highly controversial overturning of the nearly 50-year-old constitutional guarantee of women’s access to early-term abortions avoided what, in the American political context, is remarkably inflammatory rhetoric, referring to doctors as “abortionists” and foetuses as “unborn humans” and “unborn children”.

Mr Kacsmaryk also endorses “foetal personhood,” the groundless claim that the US Constitution protects zygotes from the moment of conception as full human beings with all the core safeguards afforded to other citizens. Other legal systems may embrace such notions, but the American one never has. Instead, in line with English common law, it traditionally considers the process and fact of birth to be the defining point for personhood.

If his ruling were somehow to stand, this federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, would have effectively nationally banned early-term medicinal abortions, which account for most US abortions. Any federal judge would then presumably be able to outlaw any medicine or approved treatment she or he dislikes for whatever reason, especially given the apparently limitless flexibility of the ruling’s arguments.

Another concern with Mr Kacsmaryk’s tirade is his repeated invocation of the 1873 Comstock Act, which imposed a century of heavy censorship on US publications and outlawed mailing or shipping “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, material and “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion or for any indecent or immoral purpose”.

After decades of suffocating restrictions, by the 1960s the Comstock Act became a disregarded relic. When Congress removed the last restrictions on contraception in 1971, it was a truly dead letter, although, like thousands of other anachronistic laws, it was never formally repealed. Now comes Mr Kacsmaryk to resurrect one of the most repressive, detested pieces of legislation in US history. But even he stayed his ruling for a week, allowing the FDA to appeal.

A mere hour after Mr Kacsmaryk’s ruling was issued, a judge in Washington state ordered the FDA to protect the status quo in 17 states and the District of Columbia that allow abortion access. These competing rulings not only demonstrate how divided the country is over abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision last year, they also illustrate how regional judges are competing to control or influence what legislatures and the federal government may or may not do on this hot-button issue.

The growing trend of local courts seeking to impact national decision-making comes as the reputation of the Supreme Court has taken yet another massive hit at the hands of the incorrigible Justice Clarence Thomas, who has apparently never seen an ethics violation he didn’t like.

Recent news investigations have revealed that he took multiple, lengthy vacations on private planes and yachts to Indonesia, New Zealand, Greek islands and so on at the expense of one of the most prolific right-wing Republican political donors with a huge vested interest in the outcome of countless potential court decisions.

Mr Thomas breezily claimed “advisers” told him he didn’t need to report these vast gifts, which total in the millions of dollars in value, even though the law is clear, particularly regarding private plane trips. Yet Supreme Court justices face no ethics rules. The Court itself will not act. Neither will Congress, which, I have argued on numerous occasions, should have long ago impeached and removed Mr Thomas.

But who needs ethics, or even laws, when you’re a Supreme Court justice?

The impunity is repugnant.

Yet, the Court is hardly powerless. It’s on a rampage to repeal many aspects of settled law that particularly offend religiously conservative Christians.

With the collapse of ethics and credibility at the Supreme Court and a traditional gridlock stalemate between the House and President Biden, local panjandrums dream of national decision-making glory. In reality, The Democrats, winning election after election, are rapidly emerging as the epicentre of national power. It’s largely due to the unrelenting, highly unpopular right-wing offensive against abortion access with which Republicans are heedlessly charging off a political cliff.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-04-10/a-flirtation-with-china-won-t-rock-the-saudi-us-marriage?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

The diplomacy agreement with Iran announced in Beijing wasn’t a threat to America’s position in the Middle East.

The relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia has been written off countless times since it began just after World War II. We are in another such moment. Last weekend, OPEC+, led by the Saudis, moved to oil lower production and raise global prices again. A few days later, Saudi Arabian and Iranian officials in Beijing announced an agreement to potentially restore diplomatic relations, with Chinese facilitation.

Although many have declared the oil cut an affront to Washington, government officials said the US was informed in advance; behind the scenes, there isn’t so much objection to the new Saudi pricing targets, which are between $80-$90 a barrel. This situation bears no resemblance to last October, when Washington genuinely was surprised by an OPEC+ quota cut and recriminations on both sides ensued.

Still, last year’s kerfuffle was quickly resolved, as Saudi Arabia was proven correct that there wouldn’t be a price surge for Western consumers. And in recent months, Washington and Riyadh quietly ramped up security cooperation, especially regarding a new strategy of containment and deterrence against Iran.

Aha, the doomsayers say, but what about Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic outreach to US rivals and adversaries? Isn’t that obvious evidence of a crisis? Not if you know what to look for.

Saudi Arabia has expanded cooperation with China, highlighted by a visit from President Xi Jinping to Riyadh last December. That event produced scores of agreements for cooperation on a wide range of issues, including artificial intelligence, sustainable energy, joint investments and, especially, infrastructure projects reminiscent of China’s Belt and Road initiative.

This outreach to China is an excellent example of Saudi Arabia playing a long game as it emerges more authoritatively onto the world stage as the leader of the OPEC+ oil cartel and the most influential Arab, and arguably Sunni Muslim, country. The Middle East is entering a multipolar era, and Saudi Arabia is maneuvering to find its place in this new reality.

Washington understands this and, indeed, sees benefits in these evolving arrangements, that it anyway cannot prevent. Despite the huge range of commitments, Saudi Arabia was extremely careful not to agree to anything that violates the fundamental American red line — basically, don’t do anything that gives China an undue strategic foothold in this crucial region.

The US cannot stop China from seeking relations with Gulf countries that go beyond buying and selling energy. And Washington has an interest in its regional partners breaking up the increasingly strong Iran-China relationship.

What about this week’s Chinese-brokered agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia? The Chinese role is actually welcome, because Tehran won’t talk to Washington. The Joe Biden administration has been promoting diplomacy over confrontation, and has welcomed the rapprochement. There is no reason a reduction in regional tensions should be a problem for the US. To the contrary, it could even help prompt badly needed dialogue, however indirect, between Washington and Tehran, as well as an end to the war in Yemen.

Much the same applies to Saudi Arabia’s recent outreach to the dictatorship in Syria. The two countries may restore diplomatic relations soon, and Saudi Arabia might invite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the next Arab League summit, this May in Riyadh. The US may not be delighted with this — Assad is a murderous tyrant Washington has long wanted out of power — but there is no other way forward for countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that have security interests in Syria, but (unlike Iran) have no troops or armed proxies there.

Saudi Arabia is spreading its wings, but it’s doing so within a US umbrella. And it’s being very careful not to challenge the fundamental partnership with Washington. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US is increasingly recognizing that security control of the three key waterways around the Middle East (the Red Sea, Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf) and the three crucial choke points (the Suez Canal, Bab al-Mandab and the Strait of Hormuz) is one of the most significant American competitive advantages in great power competition with China.

The US-Saudi partnership has survived the 1973 oil embargo, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and countless disputes over oil pricing and production, most recently in 2013 and, on a smaller scale, last October. That’s because both sides need each other and neither has a plausible alternative.

The specifics of the relationship are being readjusted for a new strategic reality, as they have several times before. Yes, OPEC+ could produce more tensions over oil pricing and production in the coming months. But, for now, the US-Saudi partnership is fundamentally sound and very likely to remain robust.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/04/07/donald-trump-court/

This is probably not the last such experience in a courtroom for the former US president.

On Tuesday, Americans were presented with a remarkable split screen of former president Donald Trump sullenly submitting to the indictment process in New York and his familiar raging, furious performance before his closest friends and advisers back at his hotel in Florida. After 50 decades of living in a grey zone of legality, taking full advantage of the myriad ways in which US law avoids punishing wealthy, white-collar defendants for financial offences and resorting, in the end, when necessary, to paying fines, Mr Trump’s fuzzy bookkeeping habits appear to have finally caught up with him.

Mr Trump’s final posting on his bespoke social media network, Truth Social, captured his disbelief and outrage: “Heading to Lower Manhattan, the Courthouse. Seems so SURREAL — WOW, they are going to ARREST ME. Can’t believe this is happening in America. MAGA!”

In the courthouse, though, the only words he spoke, reportedly softly, were “not guilty”, in response to 34 felony counts involving false financial reporting in furtherance of a range of other alleged crimes.

It was fully anticipated that Mr Trump would face charges related to $130,000 in payments made by his former lawyer and self-declared “fixer” Michael Cohen to the former adult film actress Stormy Daniels to ensure her silence a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election. But it also includes similar payoffs of $150,000 to former model Karen MacDougall who also says she, like Ms Daniels, indulged in an extramarital affair with Mr Trump. That, too, came as no surprise.

However, District Attorney Alvin Bragg did present an unexpected theory that could significantly strengthen his case. The two hush-money payoffs could be tricky to turn into convictions. Defence attorneys will likely argue that statute of limitations has passed. And such payoffs for silence are, on their own, not illegal. Even the bookkeeping fraud charges alone constitute misdemeanours, and would often not be prosecuted.

But, as expected, Mr Bragg is insisting that all 34 counts involve felonies because, under New York law, financial misrepresentations in furtherance of separate crimes rise to the level of felonies punishable by up to four years in prison. Mr Cohen, for example, was sentenced to three years in prison for the payoffs he insists were at the behest of Mr Trump. There is no doubt that he made the payoffs and that Mr Trump subsequently over-reimbursed him, including for taxes the fixer would have incurred in the process.

But Mr Trump’s lawyers have many potential arguments to counteract Mr Bragg’s assertions that the former president and his “fixer” were engaged in de facto unlawful campaign contributions or other underlying felonies. They could, for instance, try to argue that Mr Trump routinely made such payments to alleged former lovers throughout his career to protect his reputation and family, and that therefore these payments were routine reputational hygiene rather than covert campaign contributions.

Mr Bragg’s surprising addition to the charges that argue the bookkeeping fraud was pursuant to second crimes (often federal ones, further weakening his argument), is to insist that these financial misrepresentations were also intended to break serious New York State laws, primarily state tax regulations. The District Attorney insists that participants in the scheme, including Mr Trump and Mr Cohen, had mischaracterized the true nature of the payments for unlawful tax avoidance purposes, a felony in New York.

These tax allegations give Mr Bragg’s case a largely unanticipated safety net, whereby his state tax-avoidance allegations are more secure from the numerous potential weaknesses of his hybrid and untested state/federal campaign finance violation charges. If all else fails, in other words, he’s got an excellent chance of winning on state tax-avoidance issues with few, if any, of the problematic complications of the anticipated charges.

The most sobering part of Mr Trump’s day in court may have come from the realisation that this may well not be the last such experience in the coming months. Mr Bragg’s case has been widely viewed as significantly weaker than potential prosecutions of Mr Trump in Georgia for alleged election tampering and at the federal level for the January 6 uprising and attempted coup. Even the purloined “documents case” – often despaired of because classified documents were also found in the possession of President Joe Biden and former vice president Mike Pence – has reportedly been strengthened with new evidence.

According to The Washington Post, significant evidence suggests that even after all government and classified materials were subpoenaed, Mr Trump personally went through his boxes to try to keep some items in his possession unlawfully. Evidence is stronger than ever that he may have instructed one of his valets to move the boxes after the subpoena was received for similar purposes. Furthermore, texts and emails also help illustrate the key aspect of the case: clear evidence of intent to frustrate the government and obstruct justice. One of the strongest of these threads is potential testimony that Mr Trump allegedly showed these documents and maps to potential donors to impress them.

So not only does Mr Bragg’s case seem stronger than anticipated, even as the classified documents potential charges join the January 6 and Georgia cases as serious legal vulnerabilities facing the former president. Mr Trump was also admonished by the judge in New York to “refrain from making statements that are likely to incite violence or civil unrest”.

Nonetheless, in his enraged speech in Florida, the former president said he was facing “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family,” and singled out the judge’s daughter for special criticism. Both of Mr Trump’s sons also denounced the daughter by name and with photos in angry social media posts. Over time, Mr Trump is going to have to learn to control himself or find himself in serious jeopardy of incarceration, despite the judge’s statement of commitment to free speech, especially for political candidates.

Meanwhile, Democrats continued to rack up practical political victories as Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly, meaning that liberals finally ended 15 years of right-wing control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. This will have colossal impacts ranging from abortion rights to election procedures, including the 2024 presidential election, in a crucial swing state.

Images of Mr Trump sitting in the dock and then raging, surrounded by his closest supporters at his Florida hotel, don’t merely contrast with each other. They present a remarkable irony for a candidate who spent so much of his 2016 campaign encouraging chants of “lock her up, lock her up”, referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. Who is on the way to getting locked up now?

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/04/03/netanyahus-attempt-to-reform-israels-judiciary-is-bringing-the-occupation-home/

A new extremist Israeli political majority is, in the meantime, dividing America’s  support for Israel along partisan lines.

The uproar in Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s effort to transform the judicial system is accelerating trends reshaping US-Israel relations. But it is also integrally related to the occupation Israel maintains over millions of Palestinians. These two threads interweave in a complex pattern that poses serious challenges to Israel, the US and the Palestinians alike.

From its founding, Israel touted itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. This was never true. It was only for a few years in the mid-1960s, after martial law for Palestinian citizens of Israel was lifted and before the occupation began in 1967, that most Arabs living under Israeli rule were not systematically excluded from the most basic democratic processes.

Since 1967, Israel has ruled over millions of Palestinians who have no access whatsoever to the government that controls them. They live side-by-side with Israeli settlers, but under completely different legal systems and with all aspects of life separate and radically unequal.

There are few, if any, socio-political systems in the distinctly repressive Middle Eastern region that are more oppressive than those Israel maintains over Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Yet the occupation has become almost invisible to most Jewish Israelis. It has not been a factor in an Israeli election in ages, as if the only related issues worth talking about involve Jewish settlers and settlements.

There is the occasional flash of anxiety about violence in, or coming out of, the occupied territories, but most Israelis appear confident this problem is effectively under the control of the military, with the grudging co-operation of the Palestinian Authority security forces.

But whether such a sanguine attitude about holding some 5 million people in subjugation with little prospect of any meaningful change is rational, most Jewish Israelis have also become blind to another dangerous, albeit very different, threat posed to them by the occupation.

Israelis typically take pride in their democracy, which for Jewish citizens has been vibrant and impressive and which the demonstrators are trying to protect. But the Arab citizens, about 18 per cent of Israel’s population, not to mention the millions of Palestinians iving under occupation, have been excluded to one degree or another from this democracy.

Israel, especially with no end in sight for the occupation, cannot honestly be described as a “democracy”. It would instead be better categorised as an “ethnocracy“ – the rule of one ethnic group over another – or at least a restricted “Jewish democracy”.

The unstated assumption among Israelis since 1967 has been that they can manage the occupied territories and Palestinians living there on a completely separate, parallel track to their own Jewish democracy inside Israel – even when extended to the settlements or wherever a Jewish Israeli happens to be in the occupied territories – without any damaging cross-contamination.

Most Israeli analysts have ignored the occupation as a factor in Mr Netanyahu’s attempt to redefine Israel’s Jewish democratic system and would probably dismiss this contention. Yet from an Arab perspective, it seems obvious that decades of repression, lawlessness and arbitrary governance in the occupied territories have served as an indispensable foundation on which the attempted attack on judicial independence rests.

It is not just a matter of angry, and at times violent, Palestinian responses to Israeli repression. It is also the impact that maintaining this system has had on the attitude of Jewish Israelis about the nature of political power.

All this comes as most religiously and politically liberal Jewish Americans are being systematically alienated by concomitant efforts from Mr Netanyahu’s coalition to exclude large numbers of them from the Jewish fold under Israeli law. They are also exasperated with Israel’s increasing abandonment of a two-state solution and embrace of eventual annexation.

US President Joe Biden, in opposing the judicial overhaul effort, said the Israelis “know my position” and, more pointedly, “the American Jewish position”. Obviously, Mr Biden does not speak for all Jewish Americans, particularly not the religious conservatives many of whom generally support Mr Netanyahu’s coalition. But he’s accurately speaking for most mainstream Jewish Americans, who are firmly rooted in the Democratic Party and feel increasingly alienated by these extreme religious and chauvinistic policies which seem to represent a new Israeli majority.

From its outset, the cornerstone of Jewish-American lobbying for Israel has been to prevent the issue from becoming partisan, ensuring both parties support Israel. But that seems to be happening now, as Republicans and their evangelical Christian base are increasingly supportive of the theocratic and annexationist Israeli right. They are joined by religiously conservative Jewish constituencies, but the large majority of Jewish Americans are Democrats, liberals and increasingly alienated from Israeli government policies.

Slowly and quietly, the premier Jewish American pro-Israel lobbying umbrella, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – better known as Aipac – is aligning with Republicans, including from the much-hated Donald Trump faction.

It appears that the founding image of Jewish-American pro-Israel lobbying – support for the country turning into a partisan issue in the US and therefore vulnerable to election outcomes – may now be virtually irreversible and only likely to intensify.

None of this, unfortunately, is good news for Palestinians. New finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, at a recent speech in Paris – from a podium draped with a flag showing Israel including not just all the occupied Palestinian territories but all of Jordan as well – thundered that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. In just a few months, he has clearly demonstrated far more interest in annexation than finance. If he and his ilk can turn such dangerous provocations into Israeli policies, they won’t hesitate.

The Israeli demonstrations that forced Mr Netanyahu to pause his attempted judicial changes do not seem to have prompted much reconsideration of the impact of the occupation on their own political culture. But, at least in theory, these throngs ought to provide a base with which the Palestinians, who lack their own effective national leadership and policies, can finally begin to purposively re-engage.

Unfortunately, the next serious test for all parties may come only when the violence brewing in the West Bank eventually erupts into another sustained revolt, potentially providing Israeli extremists with plausible rationalisations for annexation and expulsion. History is distinctly discouraging. And Washington – whether controlled by alienated Democrats or pro-annexation Republicans – may be more uninterested than ever in stepping into the breach.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/03/31/could-trumps-indictment-could-work-in-his-favour/

The former president’s arrest will whip up his base – but most Americans will be turned off.

For the first time in US history, a former president will face criminal indictment. The grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Thursday voted to indict Donald Trump regarding hush money payoffs to an alleged former paramour.

Mr Trump has shattered so many norms in his political career – including being the only president to have been impeached twice and to have refused to recognise his electoral defeat and instead attempt to overturn the constitutional system to remain in power – the political and historic significance of this latest breakthrough may be lost in the shuffle. But that would be a significant mistake.

2023 had been acquiring a powerful odour of 2016 regarding Mr Trump’s latest bid for party leadership and a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination. But the indictment adds a very different dimension.

The former president reportedly welcomes the indictment and has even contemplated the televisual optics of surrendering to the traditional Manhattan “perp walk,” in which the indicted individual is paraded, handcuffed, before the media and marched into the courthouse. Cooler heads in his own camp, and certainly in Mr Bragg’s office, will undoubtedly prevail, and he is likely to have an uneventful surrender and quick processing next week.

Nonetheless, Mr Trump is undoubtedly convinced that this indictment, which he appeared to welcome in numerous statements in recent days, will strengthen him politically. And this highlights the noteworthy elements of 2023 that are arguably similar to and distinct from 2016.

Once again Mr Trump appears to be the unstoppable candidate despite obvious trepidation from party leadership. He has been consistently gaining ground against his only plausible opponent thus far, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Mr DeSantis, who has not even announced his candidacy, has demonstrated the impossible dilemma facing Republican leaders who wish to defeat Mr Trump but feel unable to directly criticise him by name because of his deep popularity with the party faithful. So, while the former president has been criticising and mocking Mr DeSantis, the Florida governor has barely uttered Mr Trump’s name. Therefore, Mr Trump’s lead has been consistently extending.

Overt opposition to his candidacy is coming from two very weak sources. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie is unabashed in bashing Mr Trump, but he is not exactly a potent political threat. Similarly, some programmes and hosts on Fox News Channel have proven distinctly hostile to Mr Trump, but others remain loyal. And the channel as a whole has proven more than willing to ultimately give its audience what it wants, including if that means consciously, deliberately and systematically lying to them. Again, Mr Trump has little to fear.

The Trump campaigns in 2023 and 2016 both pulled the party to the right, or at least exposed and empowered an ultra-right-wing faction that had been leaderless and largely powerless since the end of the Second World War. But in 2023 clearly Mr Trump is pulling his party in a much more dangerous direction, one overtly hostile to the American political system and democracy.

He has openly called for the “termination” of the Constitution to allow him to remain in power, has fully embraced the January 6 prisoners awaiting trial for sedition and other offences during the assault on Congress, and has vowed “retribution” against all those he feels wronged him or his followers.

Trump 2023 is considerably more radical than Trump 2016 or 2020. And he appears to be pulling the Republican Party with him, particularly in the House of Representatives. And he not only faces no significant opposition, he appears to be pulling away with the nomination at this extremely early stage with no plausible obstacle in his way.

It is into this morass that the criminal indictment comes. He has threatened “death and destruction” if he is charged with a crime, but that is empty hyperbole. Given the aftermath of January 6, only lone wolf terrorists, not furious mobs, are imaginable albeit highly unlikely.

Instead, what he hopes to do is use this indictment and other possible charges – for election tampering in Georgia And at the federal level for prolonging documents and attempting a coup – to amplify his victimhood and intensify his supporter’s hatred of the government and all major US national institutions.

There is every danger this will indeed work within the Republican Party base. But it will surely further alienate him from the suburban and swing voters who decide national elections. It is yet more good news for President Joe Biden’s re-election chances.

For far-right wing Republicans who already despise government, these probably multiple indictments and forthcoming trials will solidify rancid narratives about a non-existent corrupt “deep state” and various “rigged” systems. And it will probably spread and deepen those paranoid delusions within the party itself, including both the base and elected officials.

But as the 2000 general election and, even more, the 2022 midterms demonstrated, running on these narratives can win a lot of votes but not a lot of elections.

As for the charges themselves, the hush money payment plot doesn’t seem as strong as the Georgia election interference or January 6 coup plot cases. But Mr Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen who actually made the payments at his behest pled guilty to virtually the same charges and was sentenced to three years in prison. So, the case is clearly both precedented and plausible.

If Mr Trump and his supporters imagine that it will strengthen his image with the general American public to be put on trial for having authorised and subsidised hush money payments to an “adult film actress” for a sexual liaison, they are delusional.

It doesn’t help that Mr Trump denied any affair with Stormy Daniels on the grounds that she “wasn’t his type”. Or that he claimed he didn’t know anything about the $130,000 payment. Or that he then said that perhaps he did know about it, but never ordered Mr Cohen to make the payment, despite having secretly and allegedly unlawfully reimbursed him.

Mr Trump likely faces at least one or two more indictments in the coming months. The Republican base may rally around him, but most Americans are unlikely to be impressed with the facts of the hush money case, whatever the trial’s outcome. And Mr Trump will be remembered, on top of everything else, as the first former US president to face a major criminal indictment.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/03/06/email-leaks-in-the-american-media-underlie-the-absence-of-moderate-republicans/

Fox deliberately lied to its audience, but that same audience isn’t hearing anything about the emails proving it.

The US is being rocked by one of the worst political scandals in its modern history, yet the essential constituency remains blissfully unaware. The trove of Fox News emails uncovered in the lawsuit by Dominion Voting System, the election technology company, as I recently explained in these pages, reveal, apparently irrefutably, that Fox News Channel’s executives and star personalities deliberated and consciously misled their vast audience about the outcome of the 2020 election.

While privately mocking the notion that US President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump through massive fraud, both hosts and guests insisted – and still maintain – that the outcome is in serious doubt. The rift between Republican “red” and Democratic “blue” America is being severely exacerbated as right-wing audiences remain largely unaware they have been systematically deceived.

Although this is an unparalleled media scandal, Fox has refused to cover it at all, implicitly because anything it says can still be used against it by Dominion. But that ensures that at least a large part of its own audience remains unaware of being intentionally misled, as the overwhelming evidence seems to prove.

And it’s not just Fox. Its right-wing cable television competitors – the very upstarts that Fox apparently feared could capture its market share if it did not feed its right-wing audience the disinformation they apparently believed it craved as a matter of “respect” – aren’t covering it either. Newsmax and One America News, and most major right-wing websites, are avoiding the topic altogether. In the right-wing echo chamber, only the upmarket and well-informed readers of the Wall Street Journal – also owned by News Corp, Fox News’s parent company – are being entrusted with these revelations.

This episode is not merely illustrative of the bifurcated landscapes – informational and imaginary – and presumed baseline realities, cleaving right and left America. It is deepening it considerably. A victory by Dominion is likely to be regarded as rigged and phony, much in the same way that Mr Biden’s election was, by the rank-and-file of the political right, if they ever hear of it at all.

Considerable ink has been spilt explaining the proactive ways in which political disinformation, particularly on the right, beginning with the talk radio craze of the 1980s, shattered a supposedly shared set of fundamental political reference points defined, above all, by the network evening news programmes. As channels and programming proliferated in the US, it is widely and convincingly argued, audiences have been increasingly self-selecting and self-segregating into homogenising echo chambers. The internet proved the last straw, as algorithms – which are designed to maximise user engagement by social media platforms – fed viewers increasingly shrill propaganda, rewarded with ample jolts of dopamine.

That might be a cliched narrative, but it accurately summarises what happened. And by now the US news media and audiences are divided neatly in twain. One giant camp is not only being lied to but, Fox apparently believed, is demanding to be aggressively misled as a form of twisted political representation but is not hearing anything about how and why that happened. Meanwhile, the rest of public-affairs consuming Americans are looking on in dismay.

Most analyses of how and why the Republican Party has become so extreme in recent years have focused on the takeover of the party by traditionally fringe elements. But the Fox scandal suggests that an even more significant factor has been the concomitant disappearance of liberal and even centrist Republicans.

The key inflection points were probably the failed effort to impeach former US president Bill Clinton and the “tea party” response to the election of former US president Barack Obama. The mainstream of the party leadership, and Fox News itself, enthusiastically promoted the growth of such extremism for political and financial profit, only later to discover it was and remains completely beyond their control.

They couldn’t stop the presidential nomination of Donald Trump in 2016, although they tried, and their increasingly ham-handed efforts to promote Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative to him for 2024 have yet to look any more effective.

All this created a reactionary echo chamber in which populist outbidding, pandering and absurd theatrics are automatically rewarded, so that in merely two years a talentless mediocrity such as Republican congresswomanMarjorie Taylor Greene could rise to power, prominence and prestige in the House of Representatives purely on unmatched stridency.

Because there have long been no rewards for Republican moderation, especially on Fox programmes, it now no longer exists. As the emails demonstrate, Fox ended up chasing the audience it created down an endless rabbit hole of reactionary disinformation and extremism.

Lowest common denominator appeals of the Republican right have been consistent since at least the end of the Second World War. The first is sexual and gender anxieties, currently expressed through book banning and outlandish fears of “grooming” in public schools. The second go-to is racial hysteria, now embodied in campaigns to police the teaching of history in the name of opposing Critical Race Theory.

That’s very old wine in slightly updated bottles. But what’s now missing is any discernible voice of centrism and moderation.

The contrast with the Democrats is striking. Under Mr Biden, the party centre has fended off continuous efforts by the progressive left to push the agenda too far, most recently with his pledge not to veto a Republican-led effort to overturn changes to Washington’s criminal code. And by sticking to the centre, Democrats are consistently winning.

Conventional wisdom held that only a series of dramatic political defeats could rescue the Republican Party from its freefall into ever greater extremism. But despite exactly such a cascade of debacles following 2016, no self-regulating moderation is emerging. But if Fox and its right-wing media competitors and Mr Trump and his Republican opponents insist that the 2020 vote was “stolen,” the most significant of those defeats can be dismissed as “fake news”.

In his first two years, Mr Biden accumulated legislative victories that will allow him to spend the next two years of his presidency cutting ribbons at major infrastructure and other spending projects creating new working-class jobs and opportunities. He will be making the case, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that he’s really delivering on the renewed “greatness” Mr Trump only promised.

He’s betting Republicans can be won over through good governance despite appeals to sexual or gender phobias and cultural anxieties. The 2024 election should prove a fascinating test of Mr Biden’s theory, but only if mostRepublican voters ever learn about any of it. Don’t bet on that.