Trump’s indictment can’t solve the real threat: our undemocratic electoral system
Read the indictment handed down by a Fulton county, Georgia, grand jury: weighing in at 98 pages, it is a breathtaking document, granular in its description of a coordinated criminal enterprise that brazenly broke numerous Georgia state laws.
The 19 persons named in the racketeering charges are not, however, members of some sleazy organized crime syndicate; rather, they include the former president of the United States, his chief of staff, a former mayor of New York, a former law school dean and a former official in the US Department of Justice. Together they stand accused of knowingly and willfully joining a conspiracy to subvert the outcome of a fair, democratic election.
Placed alongside Trump’s other three indictments, the Georgia case bears the greatest similarity to the federal charges, filed earlier this month, accusing Trump of criminal acts that culminated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Still, the Georgia matter carries different risks and rewards.
Georgia’s racketeering statute is a more flexible instrument than its federal counterpart, and so empowers the prosecution to craft a broad narrative linking Trump’s lying to the state’s officials, his intimidating and defaming its election officers, and his sanctioning a slate of false Georgian electors for his nationwide efforts to overturn Biden’s victory. And as the constitution’s pardon power only extends to federal matters, a state conviction would deny Trump the opportunity to pardon himself (itself an act of dubious constitutionality).
In declaring that she intends to try all 19 co-conspirators in a single trial, however, Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis risks turning the proceeding into a long and unfocused affair, marred by the grandstanding of multiple lawyers for the defense. Add to this the fact that while federal trials cannot be televised, this case arguably could be, raising the concern that a solemn proceeding could turn into a media circus.
There is, of course, another deeper source of alarm. Much as we might hope that the criminal justice system will put an end to the clear and present danger that Trump poses to our constitutional democracy, the prospect remains that the ultimate judgment on Trump will be passed by the voters in November 2024. And this reminds us why Trump trained his lies on the result in Georgia in 2020.
Biden defeated Trump by nearly 8m votes in 2020, a substantial if not overwhelming margin of victory. Matters were very different in the electoral college. A combined total of 44,000 votes handed Biden victory in the swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Had Trump succeeded in “finding” 45,000 more votes in these three states, the 2020 election would have resulted in an electoral college tie, an unseemly result that, by the terms of the constitution, hands the task of electing the president to the House of Representatives. In a travesty of democratic rule, when the House elects the president, each state delegation, and not each representative, gets a single vote, and while Democrats still controlled the House after the 2020 election, Republicans actually enjoyed a majority of state delegations. Trump would have won.
While it is hard to imagine Trump defeating Biden in the popular vote in 2024, the electoral college remains another matter. Polls already predict another tight electoral race. Maga zealots and election deniers continue to target and attack independent election officials in the key swing states. Add to the mix the possibility of a thirdparty candidate, who, like Ralph Nader in 2000, would have no prospect of winning but could peel away votes in these crucial states, and the perils magnify.
Generations of Americans have recognized the defects in the way we elect our president. The first serious effort to eliminate the system came in 1816 and hundreds have followed, all failing given the extreme difficulty of amending our constitution. It is a grotesque fact that a candidate who has made clear his hostility to democratic governance could only be returned to office through an antiquated, dysfunctional and anti-democratic electoral system.
Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College
about why so many of us turned to using food as a form of self-harm.
Keeping our problems as ours was the comfortable norm. But this was quite different from the depictions of disordered eating that were sold to us on screen. At the time, many of us had been drawn in by the glorious hedonism of the 00s show, Skins.But Cassie, a character with anorexia nervosa, was outspoken about her eating disorder in a way that felt alien to me. “I didn’t eat for three days so I could be lovely,” she announces in one scene – the idea of admitting the specifics of my own eating patterns would have filled the teenage me with dread.
The portrayal of eating disorders hasn’t got much better in the years since. The 2017 drama, To The Bone, was slammed for romanticising weight loss and encouraging its lead star, Lily Collins, to lose enough weight to look skeletal. The film focuses its voyeuristic attention on food, but the reasons someone might decide to come close to starving themselves are barely mentioned.
If I think about what caused my initial impulse to diet so severely, it isn’t anything to do with food at all. It’s not even a feeling of general unhappiness. It was a total inability to talk about my emotions. I was lucky – I could still function and find joy in other parts of my life. But, I never knew how to ignore the nagging voice that latched on to me, telling me not to eat this or that and to push down my feelings.
In Heartstopper, at least on the surface, Charlie’s life looks great. He’s got good friends, a solid family and the dream boy. But underneath it all, he still longs to feel secure and can’t verbalise his past traumas. “It [food] feels like the only thing I can control in my life,” he eventually says to Nick – and I get it.
Even now, in times of distress, break-ups or high-pressured situations at work, my instinct is to regulate my diet. I find it easier to cut out whole food groups and lean into something I know I have absolute power over than to properly process my emotions. The years of torture I put my body through have left a brutal stain.
Instead of glorifying and glamourising eating disorders, Heartstopper leans into the subtle, destructive reality. It shows how they creep up on you, crawl into your every day and suck the life out of things that were once easy. It notes their force and omnipresence, but also how so much about actually living with them can be left unsaid.
One of the most powerful lessons of Heartstopper is that talking helps. Yes, we’ve all heard it, but when Charlie eventually opens up to Nick about his problems with food he looks visibly lighter. The years I spent concealing my strict dietary regimes made me feel dreadful, but the few times I did open up to close friends I was touched by their genuine care and lack of judgment. Television has almost always failed to write about eating disorders without stereotypes and as something entirely rooted in despair, but Heartstopper shows that with the right people around you, things can get better.
• In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope
and constant terror that has lasted for three quarters of a century. In other words: it was about Barbie.
Because, yes, look, Barbie was great. It was funny and smart and made more money than the human mind can imagine. But the consequences of Barbie are terrifying. On Wednesday, the entertainment wing of the toy company Hasbro put out a press release announcing it was “evolving into the company’s next chapter of content creation”. Which, in other words, means that thanks to Barbie we’re all going to get lumped around the head by millions of toy movies until we die.
The key paragraph of the press release reads as follows: “Hasbro Entertainment is actively developing and producing over 30 projects and is focused on priority brands including DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, TRANSFORMERS, GI JOE, NERF, PLAY-DOH, MAGIC: THE GATHERING, PEPPA PIG, MY LITTLE PONY, and more.” Try to think of something more depressing than a film about Play-Doh.
Of course, some of these proposed movies do make a certain amount of sense. Peppa Pig has been a wildly successful television series for many years, and has a wide and deep mythology to build from. Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves was one of the nice surprises of this year, a larky little fantasy film that refused to take itself very seriously. My Little Pony has already spawned two films, four specials and 366 episodes of television spread across five distinct properties – so, sure, why not throw some more on the pile?
But Play-Doh. Imagine being the poor fool at Hasbro who had to go and find new intellectual property to turn into movies. Imagine them tearing the store cupboard apart looking for something, anything, that hasn’t already been developed for the screen. Imagine the sinking in their heart when they realised the only thing left was a tub of dough. Imagine how hard they must have talked themselves up before pitching it to their bosses. Imagine the intense fear of ridicule. Imagine the shame. Imagine the utter disbelief when the Hasbro brass heard the pitch and then agreed to make a movie – hell, it’s 2023, so it’s an entire cinematic universe – about some sodding Play-Doh.
And Hasbro is just one company. Mattel plans to maximise on Barbie’s popularity by making films based on Hot Wheels, Polly Pocket, Major Matt Mason, Boglins, Matchbox Cars, Uno, American Girl, Bass Fishin’, Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots and the Magic 8 Ball. And don’t forget, before Barbie came along, the highest-grossing film of the year was Super Mario Bros, based on a Nintendo video game. As such, Nintendo is now rumoured to be working on movies based on The Legend of Zelda, Luigi’s Mansion and Donkey Kong, as well as a Mario sequel. Mario was made when Nintendo saw how financially successful the Sonic the Hedgehog movies were; something that has made Sega supposedly start development on films based on Streets of Rage, Altered Beast, Crazy Taxi, Shinobi, Virtua Fighter, House of the Dead, Comix Zone and Space Channel 5.
This is just where we are now, isn’t it? Every movie we ever go and see for the rest of our lives is going to either be based on a toy or a game. Forget actual, serious, mid-budget independent film, this is even enough to make you nostalgic for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At least Marvel movies are based on actual comic books that were built on a long tradition of storytelling. Sure, they might all be confusing, ugly, soapy sludges at the moment. Sure, the wheels are coming off faster than anyone can keep up with. Sure, the MCU is very obviously on its last legs. But, faced with an infinite future of films based on some dough in a tub, don’t they start to look like actual masterpieces?
In other words, it’s a horrible future, and it’s all Barbie’s fault. Now she has become death, the destroyer of worlds.