Mr Trump could face charges under the Rico Act over his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

The Fulton County district attorney is expected to bring election interference charges against former US president.

People near me at the Iowa State Fair were frantic. “Do you see him yet?” they panted. “Do you think he’ll come out into the crowd to talk?” When the presence of Secret Service officers made it clear that former President Donald Trump would appear at the Steer ’N Stein restaurant on the Grand Concourse, fairgoers formed a line whose end was out of sight.

Not all of them could squeeze into the restaurant, so they filled the street outside, one giant blob of eager, sweating Iowans. When the former president finally appeared, the scrum was so dense that they could barely make out his silhouette through the restaurant’s open side. “You know, the other candidates came here, and they had like six people,” Trump’s giddy voice said through the speakers above us. The audience responded with hoots and cheers.

[David Axelrod: The indictment is stunning. Will Trump supporters care?]

One of the few rules of American politics to have withstood the weirdness of these past tumultuous years is that anyone who wants to be president of the United States must endure both the many splendors and the equally many ritual humiliations of the Iowa State Fair. It is an essential audition, at least for the GOP. (The Democratic Party has recently shuffled the order of its primary season, demoting the Iowa caucus from its first-in-the-nation status.)

If a Republican candidate, drenched in sweat and stuffed with fried butter, can pique the interest of Iowa’s choosy voters, then that candidate has a real shot in the caucuses and, perhaps, the White House. Sometimes, a long-shot outsider can work the crowds and gain an unexpected edge, as Rick Santorum did in 2012, and Ted Cruz did in 2016.

So the fair is a place to charm and be charmed. Early on in the weekend, it seemed to be working its magic.

“He’s really very engaging,” Shirley Burgess, from Des Moines, said of Mike Pence. “I thought he delivers a much clearer message in person than what I’m getting from him on TV.” The former vice president had just wrapped one of several “Fair-Side Chats” hosted by Republican Governor Kim Reynolds. This was a new feature at the fair, at which the governor asks the candidates such hard-hitting questions as “What’s your favorite walkout song?”

The night before, Pence had been heckled by a man who asked how he was doing “after Tucker Carlson ruined your career.” Another said, “I’m glad they didn’t hang you!”

But on Friday morning, Pence drew a respectful crowd for his conversation with Reynolds at J.R.’s Southpork Ranch. Attendees asked him polite questions, and half a dozen people personally thanked him for his “integrity” when Trump was trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Pence had company, however. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also attracted crowds at the Pork Ranch and at the Des Moines Register’s Soapbox venue. Most of the undecided Iowans who attended told me that they’d supported Trump in 2016 and in 2020. These voters appreciated his service, they said, but after eight years of idiotic rants on social media, baseless but relentless assertions of election fraud, and a string of criminal indictments, they were hankering for some new energy. You know, a leader without so much baggage, they told me; someone more … classy.

“Everything out of his mouth is like, ‘Shut up, Donald,’” Charles Dunlap, a two-time Trump voter from Johnston, Iowa, told me. He was eager to hear from Ramaswamy and Haley, people he believed would “institute similar policies” to Trump’s—just without the drama.

But the intimate enchantment of the fair—the promise of thoughtful, measured consideration—dissipated around 1 p.m. Saturday, when the former president arrived. What very quickly became clear was that the Trump-exhausted, change-minded Iowans I’d met that morning were in the minority. Most folks? They still love Trump.

The former president skipped possible speaking slots at the Soapbox and with Reynolds (because of his strange beef with the governor), but showed up to mingle with his people. They packed into every fair establishment where the president might conceivably speak. Because his event wasn’t on any official schedule, everyone was kept guessing. Parts of the fairground came to a standstill. People who just wanted to slurp lemonade and admire the prize-winning steers were annoyed. “Why did we have to come on the day that all the politicians are here?” a man pushing a stroller through the throng asked his wife. (Almost every Iowan, for the record, has at one point uttered the phrase.)

Given his commanding lead in the GOP primary polling, it’s not so shocking that Trump’s presence would create such fervor. But seeing it, feeling it, was different. By contrast, the crowds that had gathered for the other Republican candidates didn’t seem impressive at all. Suddenly, the entire GOP primary contest felt painfully futile, pathetic even. Why are they even doing this? For the also-rans—basically, the rest of the field already—was suffering the abuses of the campaign trail worth even the best-case scenario of being anointed Trump’s running mate?

On Saturday, while Pence stood in the sun flipping pork burgers, people in the crowd whispered about him. “Look at him sweat,” someone behind me said. “He’s a dweeb, and so is DeSantis,” a young man from Cedar Rapids named Jacob, who declined to give his last name, told me. “You just want to take their lunch money. It’s instinct.” Ramaswamy, whose big personality has charmed many Republicans, apparently felt the need to put on a non-dweeb showing after his interview with the governor, and rapped confidently to the Eminem song “Lose Yourself.” A sea of silver-haired onlookers, who found themselves trapped near the front of the stage, were obliged to awkwardly bob along.

DeSantis, more than anyone else, suffered at the fair. While he spoke with Reynolds, a plane flew in circles overhead, carrying a long sign that read Be likable, Ron! DeSantis pretended not to notice it. When the Florida governor took his turn in the Pork Tent, Trump supporters gathered behind his photo op, wearing green-and-yellow trucker hats handed out by the Trump campaign. They chanted and yelled insults as DeSantis and his wife flipped burgers.

And when Trump finally arrived on Saturday afternoon, he brought with him a posse of Florida lawmakers who had endorsed him over DeSantis. (Representative Matt Gaetz warmed up the crowd by saying that he’d grilled burgers well done at the Pork Tent, but “the most done you can be is Ron DeSantis.”) Will the humiliation pay off in the end? DeSantis’s campaign has to hope so. At least in Iowa, the Florida governor is running somewhat closer to Trump than he is nationally.

Earlier in the day, I’d interviewed Matt Wells, a DeSantis supporter and a county chair from Washington, Iowa, who had been following the candidate around the fair all morning. Trump’s people “don’t really know what they’re doing; it’s all an emotional thing,” he told me. Wells worked for Ted Cruz’s campaign in 2016. They’d had a strong ground game then, as DeSantis does now, he said. “Trump,” Wells added, “doesn’t have any ground game here.”

[Helen Lewis: The humiliation of Ron DeSantis]

Cruz may have won Iowa, but he quite memorably did not go on to win the 2016 election. I was about to bring up this fact when someone near us gasped. A dozen fingers pointed toward the sky, and people began to scream with excitement. There, in the bright-blue ocean above us, was a plane with TRUMP emblazoned on its side heading for the nearby airport. Someone whispered, “Did I tell you that I shook his hand twice?” The clamor grew louder.

Trump would be here soon. The man, the myth, had landed.

Former US president could soon face charges in state of Georgia over his efforts to overturn 2020 election results.

The left in the U.S. hasn’t shown much love for the democracy movement that has rocked Israel since January. Such indifference is, perhaps, unsurprising, because many progressives consider Israel to be a—if not the—force for evil in the world. At its recent convention, the Democratic Socialists of America put forward a resolution titled “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis,” and the Harvard Crimson editorial board has “proudly” endorsed a campus protest that equated Zionism with “white supremacy,” among other ills. Even many liberals, including Jewish ones, seem oddly disconnected from the events that are unfolding; in the United States, demonstrations against the Netanyahu government have been insignificant and mainly confined to small left-Zionist groups.

Some critics insist that Israel isn’t a real democracy because Arab Israelis face discrimination, or because Israel was founded as a state of refuge for the Jewish people, or because the occupation persists. Underlying this view is an oddly moralistic, rather than political, understanding of democracy that confuses it with purity. Democracy—the rule of law, the equality of citizenship, the balance of governmental powers, the freedom to speak and publish, the protection of minorities, the sanctity of elections, the ability to be religious or secular—can be, and in fact usually is, partial and incomplete. Democracies have been known, and not just occasionally, to embark on odious wars, support oppressive institutions, and sustain colonialism; see, for instance, France when it ruled Algeria. The difference is that Israel’s colony—the West Bank—abuts it, rather than being a thousand miles away.

[Matti Friedman: After 30 years in Israel, I see my country differently]

Despite the purists’ claims, the unfolding events in Israel are, in fact, an extraordinary example of what democracy in the streets looks like. The movement is all the more noteworthy precisely because of the country’s flaws. We might do well to pay attention.

Israel has a history of mass movements and intense political engagement, but the present protests are something new—as is the current Israeli government, which Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad official, has described as “Kahanist-fascist-messianic.” Members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition aim to annex the West Bank, stifle dissent, dismember the independent judiciary, crush the Palestinian Israeli minority, curtail women’s and LGBTQ rights, and send Israel back a few thousand years into a Halachic state.

The democracy movement that has erupted in response is big: Some half a million Israelis have protested, which is the equivalent of approximately 17 million Americans. It is powerful: It has shut down an airport, highways, schools, businesses. It is broad: The country’s doctors, as well as 150 of its largest companies, have gone on strike. Lawyers, scientists, teachers, students, entrepreneurs, and agricultural workers have joined the protests; the Histadrut, Israel’s national trade union representing more than 700,000 workers, has been pressured to call a general strike. Tech firms have threatened to leave the country. Women’s-rights advocates demonstrate dressed in the somber red capes of The Handmaid’s Tale. Shockingly, thousands of reservists, including pilots and members of the elite fighting units, have threatened to withhold their service. Former leaders of the Shin Bet and the Mossad have spoken out strongly in support of the protests and condemned what the opposition refers to as a coup.

And the movement is unflagging; it has organized weekly demonstrations, many enormous, for more than seven months. All of this activity dwarfs anything we saw in the United States during the Donald Trump years, despite the anti-Trump forces’ self-flattering description of themselves as “the Resistance” and the now-dashed hope that Black Lives Matter could create a sustainable, genuinely mass movement. A bit of humility would be apt.

The mainstream press in the United States, both print and broadcast, has been covering events in Israel. (So have Al Jazeera and Hezbollah’s Al-Manar, which keeps an eye on what it calls “the Zionist entity.”) In the U.S., Israel is sometimes depicted as a country that is just like us—a puny sister democracy with shared values—or, alternatively, as a country so different from ours that we can’t possibly understand it. Both of these have an element of truth, but each—like the blind men and the elephant—misses the complexity of the situation. And though much of the coverage has focused on the so-called judicial reform, the crisis in Israel extends far beyond that to the very essence of the country’s identity, or multiple identities, and its fissures, which have been decades in the making.

Israel is not engaged in a conflict merely over legal proposals. As the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg told me, to call the crux of the crisis “judicial overhaul” is like calling the war in Ukraine a special military operation. What’s at stake is whether Israel will remain a modern, liberal democracy—albeit one with grievous defects—or become a dictatorial theocracy, joining the other failed states of the Middle East. That transformation would resonate far outside Israel; the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently wrote that if Ukraine and Israeli democracy go down in defeat, “the whole world would tip the wrong way.”

Events in Israel do have parallels to those in other countries. As in France and Italy, the once powerful social-democratic left in Israel has shrunk and lost its working-class base. As in Turkey, India, and the United States, radical religious extremists have obtained enormous political power. Ominous parallels between Netanyahu and Trump are especially obvious. Each is a shameless liar who appeals to religious conservatives despite well-known sex scandals. Each has declared war on the rule of law, governmental balance of powers, and their county’s elites. Each sees himself as a victim. Each threatens his country’s national security. Each has tried to fracture the cohesion of his multiethnic country through base appeals to racism, ethnic hatred, and presumed grievances. (Unhappily, Slobodan Milošević also comes to mind.) Each has intimidated the once-sane voices within his own party. Each is desperately trying to stay out of jail.

And though both men pose as ultranationalists, both are prime examples of what the Israeli journalist Alon Pinkas has called the “psycho-political phenomenon” of oikophobia: “a person’s aversion to their home, environment or country.” (Pinkas argues that Netanyahu is essentially an anti-Zionist.) Each has declared war on the country he despises and is happy to see it disintegrate, even in bloodshed, if that is the price of remaining in power.

But these similarities, though real, can be misleading. Israel is a very different place from the United States (or Western Europe). And the differences, not the similarities, are the key to the Israeli movement’s strength—and to what we can learn from it.

The United States is a sprawling country. I’ve lived here all my life but have never visited the majority of states. I don’t, I admit, feel too connected to many people in Idaho or Arkansas—except on Election Night, when I resentfully watch their vote tabulations. America is a powerhouse that dwarfs its neighbors, and indeed much of the world. Being apolitical here is easy, if you so choose. I worry a lot about our country’s future, especially these days, but I don’t doubt its continued existence.

In contrast, Israel is a tiny, claustrophobic country. It is hemmed in by neighbors that, for much of its existence, have tried to destroy it (when you’re there, it’s a bit unnerving to see how close Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan are). It has been existentially challenged since the day it declared independence. It is the target of Iran, a large and powerful country whose leadership is enthusiastically dedicated to its destruction. Israelis do not spend their lives quaking in fear. But its security situation dictates that a very large proportion of the population, representing all political tendencies, serves in the armed forces, which is the most binding national institution; about 5 percent remain in the reserves for decades. Virtually every Israeli, and every Palestinian in the occupied territories, has lost someone to war, terrorism, or military assault. Most of Israel’s political sea changes, unlike those in the United States, have been the result of its wars and violent conflicts.

And, in sharp contrast to the world’s other countries, Israel has no set borders. It has neither annexed nor liberated the Palestinian West Bank. It has ruled over another people, who are kept stateless, rights-less, and under violent military dictatorship, for 56 years. So yes, Israel is different.

An equally significant difference, though, is in the relationship that Israelis have to the state and to one another. In the United States, we focus, sometimes obsessively, on rights. Rights are undeniably crucial. But they aren’t everything. We Americans pay far less attention to the concept of responsibility: of democracy as a dialectic among government, civil society, and citizens. When I ask my students—smart, empathetic, caring young people—what they feel they owe our country, they usually come up blank. But in Israel, as Gorenberg told me, “The social contract is very demanding. There is no tradition of the rugged individual, of American libertarianism; that’s really foreign to us. This is a society that was created with a sense of the collective: The state is supposed to provide a lot, and we’re supposed to provide a lot. The government is violating that”—hence the widespread feeling of anger and betrayal.

[Susie Linfield: Palestine isn’t Ferguson]

In the Times of Israel, the journalist Yossi Klein Halevi wrote:

Over and over, protesters tell interviewers variations on the same story: I’m doing this for my father who was wounded in the Yom Kippur War, for my son who was killed in Lebanon, for my grandparents who were uprooted from Iraq or who survived the Holocaust, for my great-grandparents who helped build the state. Now, they say, it’s my turn to defend the country.

That shared social contract has enabled the Israeli movement to be so capacious; it has even incorporated some Likudniks, some settlers, and some of the religiously observant, who constitute much of Netanyahu’s base. The ideological breadth of the Israeli movement is almost impossible to imagine in the United States, where one needs to sign on to a host of positions—regarding, among other things, immigration; policing; diversity, equity, and inclusion; transgender rights; and yes, hatred of Israel—in order to be welcomed into the progressive camp. Indeed, our parameters of acceptable debate seem to narrow rather than expand. In contrast, the Israeli movement has dispensed with litmus tests; people who disagree—a lot—about crucial issues are marching side by side. One of the main protest organizations in Jerusalem refers to its mission as “protecting the shared home.”

Like the country itself, the Israeli democracy movement is radically imperfect. A mass movement doesn’t include everyone (although recent polls show that the Netanyahu coalition would fall if an election were held today). Divisions between Ashkenazi and Sephardim, between the central cities and the poorer periphery, are deep. Few Arab Israelis are taking part, though they are more imperiled than Jewish Israelis by the governing coalition’s plans. (In February, 200 prominent Arab Israelis released a statement urging Arab citizens to participate in the protests: “A regime change is taking place that will affect the lives of all citizens … and the Arab public will be the first victim,” they wrote.) And despite its wide tent, the movement is, in some sense, dominated by the elite.

But the elite in Israel is different from ours: Silicon Valley software engineers and leftist academics rarely fight in America’s wars. In contrast, as Halevi pointed out, Israel’s “elites are not only ‘privileged’ but sacrificial.” In any case, as the historian Anita Shapira recently wrote, “‘Elite’ is not a dirty word. A country cannot exist without elites. In the weekly mass demonstrations … a large measure of popular strength is also visible.”

The brutal occupation is Israel’s central, but often unacknowledged, moral and political catastrophe—one that underlies all others and points to two simultaneous, confounding truths. First, Israel can’t rid itself of its racism, ultranationalism, and religious fanaticism until the occupation ends. Ayman Odeh, the head of the predominantly Arab Hadash-Ta’al Party, put the point succinctly when he addressed “the dear demonstrators on Kaplan Street” in Haaretz: “The occupation is the umbilical cord of Israeli fascism.” Second, the occupation won’t (and some, even on the left, say can’t) end tomorrow. The upshot is that, paradoxically, the defense of democracy can’t wait for its precondition to emerge. Some Israelis, hopefully a growing number, recognize this conundrum. But they also know that a partial, even drastically defective democracy is categorically different from a dictatorship.

Most important, Israel’s protest movement has rejected moralistic hectoring in favor of democratic patriotism. It appeals to a people’s sense of what their country can and should be, rather than fostering guilt and shame.

Democratic patriotism isn’t alien to the United States. On the contrary, it’s been the basis of our best—and, arguably, most successful—movements. Think of the abolitionists, who rejected slavery—a worldwide institution that had existed for several millennia—as a betrayal of our country’s essential principles; of the militant, interracial union movement from the 1930s to 1950s, which insisted that fair worker compensation and labor rights were the American way; of the early civil-rights movement, which, though originally emanating from the Black churches of the South, appealed to fellow Americans not on the basis of Christian values but on those of shared citizenship.

The departure from this ethos came in the ’60s, when the more radical segment of the anti–Vietnam War movement, in understandable anger and frustration, represented itself not only as an opponent of a deeply immoral war but of “AmeriKKKa” itself. (Carrying Vietcong flags did not go over well with the working-class people whose sons were dying in the Mekong Delta.) More recently, the anti-racist movement that has emerged from Black Lives Matters often paints the United States as founded on, and eternally stamped by, a desolate fusion of “original sin,” racist “DNA,” and genocide.

[Gal Beckerman: What American liberals can learn from Israel’s protests]

The Israelis, in contrast, have unashamedly put themselves forth as patriots: They are organizing for the country, which means for their neighbors, not against it or them. They have seized the flag back from the racist hooligans who terrorize local Palestinians in Jerusalem in the annual flag parade. They have refused to be intimidated by the right’s traditional accusations of treason. They have proudly declared that democracy is patriotism, and vice versa.

In short, the Israeli movement is a model for what it means to despise your government but to love your country. It shows that creating a welcoming sense of civic identity—open to all who prize democracy rather than to an enlightened few—is the sine qua non of a mass movement. This is the Israelis’ gift to us, and their lesson—one that I hope we can learn, not for their sake but for ours.

An admirer of Trump, Milei rocks Argentina's political establishment after winning most votes in presidential primary.