Although there are reasons to be skeptical that Donald Trump will run for president in 2024, one thing could push him into it: Mounting legal troubles. With his potential crimes related to the insurrection becoming clearer, he is reportedly growing more serious about running, reasoning that as a candidate, he’ll be harder to prosecute. As it happens, this is unfolding even as the Supreme Court has announced plans to hear a case next term that could upend democracy. The court will likely validate in some form the “independent state legislature” theory, which could expand the power of state legislatures over elections in radically anti-democratic ways. That has generated much discussion of how the theory could enable hyperpartisan gerrymandering. But it could also enable more election subversion, which could dovetail with the looming Trump threat in combustible ways. Even if Trump doesn’t run, the tendencies he’s unleashed — Republicans are running for positions of control over election machinery while essentially vowing to treat future elections as subject to nullification — could be made more dangerous by the court’s ruling.
National: Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington | Steven Lee Myers and Eileen Sullivan/The New York Times
The memo that reached the top of the Department of Homeland Security in September could not have been clearer about its plan to create a board to monitor national security threats caused by the spread of dangerous disinformation. The department, it said, “should not attempt to be an all-purpose arbiter of truth in the public arena.” Yet when Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas announced the disinformation board in April, Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators denounced it as exactly that, calling it an Orwellian attempt to stifle dissenting views. So did some critics from the left, who questioned the powers that such an office might wield in the hands of future Republican administrations. Within weeks, the new board was dismantled — put on “pause,” officially — undone in part by forces it was meant to combat, including distortions of the board’s intent and powers. There is wide agreement across the federal government that coordinated disinformation campaigns threaten to exacerbate public health emergencies, stoke ethnic and racial divisions and even undermine democracy itself. The board’s fate, however, has underscored how deeply partisan the issue has become in Washington, making it nearly impossible to consider addressing the threat.
Full Article: Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington – The New York Times