Eliana Willis

First Dog on … President Raccoon! More

After four years in which the Kremlin loomed large over US politics, the topics of collusion, Russian meddling or Ukrainian scandals have been largely absent from the campaign agenda as election day draws close.
It may be that Moscow still intends to interfere: the FBI director Christopher Wray said last month that the bureau has seen “very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020” – mainly involving misinformation with the primary goal of denigrating Joe Biden. And the US indictment of six Russian military intelligence hackers last week served as a reminder of the potential threat.
However, as Biden enters the final days of the campaign with a significant lead, Putin appears to be hedging his bets. The Russian president pointedly declined to amplify Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations about Biden’s son, Hunter, and his past business dealings in Ukraine, noting he did not “see anything criminal” in them. Putin has also pointed to possible common ground with the Democrats on social democratic ideology and arms control.
The Russian leader and the former vice-president certainly know each other well from past encounters, though the relationship lacks any of the warmth that Trump claims infuses his bond with the Russian leader.
“I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,” Biden told Putin at a 2011 meeting, according to an account he gave the New Yorker. “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said: ‘We understand one another.’”
Biden has not dwelled on the well-worn topics of Trump’s soft spot for Putin or Kremlin meddling – in part because coronavirus has cast such a long shadow over the election and the Biden team feel that voters are tired of hearing about Russia.
“The most resonant issues for American voters right now are Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, and the dangers of white nationalism; by contrast, Russian election interference in 2016 seems more distant for those just trying to make ends meet,” said Michael Carpenter, a foreign policy adviser during Biden’s time as vice-president who remains in touch with the campaign.
It is possible, too, that “Russiagate” was never a major vote-winning issue: Trump’s supporters dismissed the charges as “fake news” and many of his opponents were more focused on other issues.
“Russia is a media and a Washington conversation. My students don’t care about Russia; they care about Black Lives Matter and MeToo,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a Russian-American professor of international affairs at the New School in New York.
Questions over the business dealings of Biden’s son in Ukraine have failed to resonate much beyond Trump’s core base, with a recent attempt to reopen allegations of Biden’s alleged wrongdoing in Ukraine largely falling flat.
If Moscow did indeed help put Trump in the White House, their man has done little to improve the the bilateral relationship over the past four years, despite his personal praise for Putin. But his disdain for western alliances and naked America-first self-interest is something that the Kremlin appreciates – and may explain why officials in Moscow want to see Trump win a second term.
“Putin and people around him might like Trump because he fits very nicely with their view of the world. He’s a graphic illustration of their logic that the world is moving away from liberal values and multilateralism and towards sovereignty and traditional values,” said Andrey Kortunov, of the Russian International Affairs Council.
He said that while Putin genuinely does not understand politicians such as Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron – and believes their talk of values to be hollow and cynical – with Trump there is a recognition of a kindred spirit, even if there is little affection for him as a person. The two men share “scepticism of international bodies, emphasis on sovereignty, a transactionalist approach to foreign policy and a feeling that discussions about values are mere hypocrisy”, said Kortunov.
Putin earlier this month noted Biden’s history of “sharp anti-Russian rhetoric” and contrasted it with Trump’s oft-stated desire for better ties with Moscow.
“Biden’s approach to Russia would involve supporting a dialogue on arms control, strategic stability, crisis management and risk reduction from a position of strength,” said Carpenter, saying it was simplistic to see the question of Russia policy as a black-and-white hawk or dove calculation.
Kortunov said that Russia, unlike Germany, Israel or China, is in the “privileged position” that the outcome of the election is likely to have little effect on bilateral relations. “But the bad news is that this is because it will be bad either way. Almost anything that could be broken is already broken,” he said. And there is little prospect of improvement.
Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who was reportedly an intermediary for informal contacts with members of the Trump entourage after his 2016 victory, declined to say whether he favoured a Trump or Biden victory. But he said either way it was hard to imagine how things could get worse. “We are at the lowest point ever in the history of US-Russian relations so going even lower would be difficult,” he said.
Russia still denies all accusations of meddling in the 2016 election, whether it be the hacking of Democratic party servers or armies of internet trolls stirring up trouble on Facebook and Twitter.
But Fiona Hill, who was the national security council director for European and Russian affairs for three years of the Trump administration and testified at Trump’s impeachment hearing, said hawkish Russian security official Nikolai Patrushev and other top officials all but admitted Russia’s interference in the 2016 vote when she confronted them.
“The Russians said to us: ‘You guys left yourselves open.’ They were admitting it essentially. They said it’s on you that this got so out of hand.”
The officials suggested that the US had left Russia an open goal with its divisive politics – and she felt they had a point: “We were providing the raw materials, making our own mistakes,” she said. The Russian interference “wouldn’t have resonated without our deep polarisation and our structural issues”.
This time round, there are new allegations of Russian attempts to influence the political landscape, such as a rightwing site apparently set up by Russians and meant to influence US voters. But there is less attention now, perhaps because with the amount of disinformation flowing from the White House, the Russian efforts appear to be a drop in the ocean.
“The biggest risk to this election is not the Russians, it’s us,” said Hill. More

The Lincoln Project “will not be intimidated by empty bluster”, a lawyer for the group wrote late on Saturday, in response to a threat from an attorney for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner over two billboards put up in Times Square.“Sue if you must,” Matthew Sanderson said.The New York City billboards show the president’s daughter and her husband, both senior White House advisers, displaying apparent indifference to public suffering under Covid-19.Kushner is shown next to the quote “[New Yorkers] are going to suffer and that’s their problem”, above a line of body bags. Trump is shown gesturing, with a smile, to statistics for how many New Yorkers and Americans as a whole have died.According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 8.5m coronavirus cases have been recorded across the US and more than 224,000 have died. Case numbers are at record daily levels and one study has predicted 500,000 deaths by February. New York was hit hard at the pandemic’s outset.The Lincoln Project is a group of former Republican consultants who have made it their mission to attack Donald Trump and support Joe Biden.On Friday, Marc Kasowitz, an attorney who has represented the president against allegations of fraud and sexual assault, wrote to the Lincoln Project, demanding the “false, malicious and defamatory” ads be removed, or “we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages”.The Lincoln Project responded that they would not remove the billboards, citing first amendment rights of free speech and the “reckless mismanagement of Covid-19” by the Trump White House.In a legal response on Saturday night, attorney Matthew Sanderson told Kasowitz: “Please peddle your scare tactics elsewhere. The Lincoln Project will not be intimidated by such empty bluster … your clients are no longer Upper East Side socialites, able to sue at the slightest offense to their personal sensitivities.”Due to a “gross act of nepotism”, Sanderson wrote, citing supreme court precedent and “substantial constitutional protections for those who speak out”, Trump and Kushner have become public officials whom Americans “have the right to discuss and criticise freely”.Kasowitz claimed Kushner “never said” the words attributed to him on the billboards, and Trump “never made the gesture” she is shown to make.Vanity Fair reported the Kushner quote, from a meeting in March, in which Kushner criticised New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Trump tweeted the pose used by the Lincoln Project in July, controversially promoting Goya foods.The “bruised self-image” of the president’s daughter, Sanderson wrote, “does not change the fact that this billboard accurately depicts her support of a federal response that has utterly failed to prevent an unmitigated tragedy for the United States”.“May I suggest,” he added, “that if Mr Kushner and Ms Trump are genuinely concerned about salvaging their reputations, they would do well to stop suppressing truthful criticism and instead turn their attention to the Covid-19 crisis that is still unfolding under their inept watch.“These billboards are not causing [their] standing with the public to plummet. Their incompetence is.”A footnote to Sanderson’s letter cited “one of the seminal libel-proof plaintiff cases”, that of a well-known mobster whose reputation was “so tarnished … he could claim no damages for defamation”.“Mr Kushner and Ms Trump’s claims will fare no better than Boobie Cerasini’s given their tarnished reputations on Covid-19,” it said.Sanderson also said “this isn’t over” and added: “Sue if you must.”As University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the Guardian on Saturday, that seems unlikely.Donald Trump “has honed litigation abuse, as a business person and president, to an art form,” Tobias said. But “if they did sue, the litigation might take years to resolve, be expensive and lead to embarrassing revelations … suits like this by people who have thrust themselves into the public eye are notoriously difficult to win.“In short, this appears to be the usual Trump family bluster.” More

Lisa Matthews voted for Barack Obama. But just the once. The daughter of an African American mother and Puerto Rican father, the 47-year-old grew up in one of the roughest neighbourhoods of Camden, New Jersey, a struggling former shipbuilding port on the Delaware river.“Camden was predominantly black, poor, a lot of welfare recipients, single parents, and crime. Big drug trade. My father was in the military, but he left the family when I was five. My mom was a single mom at the age of 23. We lived on food stamps,” Matthews says. “I had two of my cousins killed there in the city, and my stepbrother was murdered as well. My uncle was killed by an unknown shooter in 1987. It was a tough place to grow up.”Like her mother, Matthews became a single parent at 23 and worked several jobs to stay afloat. But her absent father’s time in the military had planted a seed. Her parents were posted around the US and to Britain, and her mother talked about other places with wonder. Matthews carried that with her. “My sister and I were very interested in the world, in other cultures,” she says. In her 20s, a friend encouraged her to move to Concord, North Carolina, where she got a job in a bank. Now she lives in a large house in a plush suburb where we chat over tea and Jammie Dodgers (she still loves all things British). She’s wearing her politics on her T-shirt: “President Trump 2020, Keep America Great”.In 2008, Matthews voted for Obama, helping to swing the former slave state to America’s first black president. “I wasn’t a really liberal Democrat back then. Even Barack Obama wasn’t that liberal in 2008. I was just excited that he was black, to be honest,” she says. But by the time the next election came round, she questioned the point of an African American president.“The black community rallied around him, but what message did he have for them? He could have said, this is how me and Michelle got out of the South Side of Chicago. We can help lift people up,” she says. “Instead he was telling people they’re oppressed: ‘Let me give you a handout.’”Matthews came to think that summed up the Democrats. As she saw it, the party kept the poor dependent on welfare instead of providing paths out of poverty. She drifted toward the Republicans, although she wasn’t ready to support Mitt Romney against Obama in 2012; that year, she didn’t vote.Four years later, Donald Trump made his attention-grabbing ride down the golden escalator of his New York tower to announce a run for president. By then Matthews had become a bank fraud investigator; she now owns her own home for the first time. She voted against Trump in the primaries, thinking he didn’t stand a chance. But when he won the Republican nomination, she embraced it.“I thought he was just a great American, New Yorker businessman. He was the epitome of what America is like. Brash, throwing money around,” she says. “But I didn’t know what kind of president he would be. I was never against him, but I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I am now. Now I tell people I love Trump.”***If Trump pulls off the unexpected once again, his victory will be built on the foundation of the four in 10 voters who have consistently said they will stick with him, despite one of the most tempestuous presidencies of modern times. Voters who have excused him, explained him, even despaired of him at times, but never spurned him.The most visible of those supporters can be found at Trump’s rallies, sporting Make America Great Again hats and cheering the president’s provocations; or forming armed vigilante groups, ostensibly to defend order and history. They push Trump’s myriad conspiracy theories, including about Covid-19, even after the president caught the virus. But most of those who remain loyal are not the ultras seen on television. Neither are they easily slotted into the demographics often assigned to Trump supporters – the embittered former factory workers turning their anger on minorities and voting against their own interests.When you see the coal trains and the trucks, and people going back to work, you see people’s attitudes changeThis autumn I drove for over a month across the US – from the south to Appalachian coal country in one of the poorest states, West Virginia; and from Detroit, Michigan, once the engine of America’s industrialisation, to the upper reaches of rural Minnesota on the border with Canada – the miles of Trump signs and flags are one demonstration of the enthusiasm some of his supporters retain. The voters were as varied as the landscape. The coalmine worker who was without a job for years. The former military officer whose father came to the US illegally. The estate agent and small city mayor angry about China. The former police officer despairing at Black Lives Matter. All told me why they are determinedly sticking with Trump.***Ronald Reagan, on his way to unseating President Jimmy Carter in 1980, famously asked American voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The division, uncertainty and fear of 2020 makes that seem an inadequate question ahead of this election. Bo Copley, however, doesn’t hesitate to say that he is. Copley lost his maintenance job on a West Virginia coalmine a year before the last election, and gained fleeting fame in 2016 after confronting Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail over her pledge to “put a lot of coalminers out of business”. More

More than 50 million Americans have cast ballots in the US presidential election with 11 days to go in the campaign, a pace that could lead to the highest voter turnout in over a century, according to data from the US Elections Project on Friday.The eye-popping figure is a sign of intense interest in the contest between Republican Donald Trump and Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, as well as Americans’ desire to reduce their risk of exposure to Covid-19, which has killed more than 221,000 people across the United States.Many states have expanded in-person early voting and mail-in ballots ahead of election day on 3 November, as a safer way to vote during the coronavirus pandemic.The high level of early voting has led Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who administers the US Elections Project, to predict a record turnout of about 150 million, representing 65% of eligible voters, the highest rate since 1908.In Texas, the level of voting has already surpassed 70% of the total turnout in 2016. In Georgia, some have waited in line for more than 10 hours to cast their ballots. And Wisconsin has seen a record number of early votes, with 1.1 million people having returned their ballots as of this week. Voters in Virginia, Ohio and Georgia have also seen long lines at early voting sites. More

The closing moments of the final presidential debate focused on climate change. Joe Biden stressed the need to expand sources of renewable energy while again disputing Donald Trump’s claim that he intended to ban fracking, which he does not. ‘I know more about wind than you do,’ Trump retorted, drawing an exasperated laugh from Biden. ‘It’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds’
Humanity has eight years to get climate crisis under control – and Trump’s plan won’t fix it
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In Donald Trump’s world – laid bare during Thursday night’s final presidential debate with his Democratic rival Joe Biden in Nashville – fossil fuels are “very clean”, the US has the best air and water despite his administration’s extensive regulatory rollbacks, and the country can fix climate change by planting trees.
But according to the harsh realities being laid out by climate scientists, Trump’s world does not exist.
Humanity has just eight years to figure out how to get climate change under control before the future starts to look drastically worse – multiple-degree temperature increases, global sea-level rise, and increasingly disastrous wildfires, hurricanes, floods and droughts. Doing so will mean that unless there is a technological miracle, humans will at some point have to stop burning oil, gas and coal.
“We’re told by all the leading scientists in the world we don’t have much time,” Biden said. “We’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to 10 years. Four more years of this man … will put us in a position where we’ll be in real trouble,” the former vice-president said.
Much of the media coverage of the exchange – which as usual didn’t come until the end of the debate as time was running out – will probably focus on Trump’s attacks on Biden. He called his plan job-killing, argued it would cost $100tn and not $6tn, and accused Biden of flip-flopping on fracking. The drilling method has fueled a natural gas boom in swing states such as Pennsylvania, which both candidates see as critically important to winning the election. At one point, Biden dared Trump to publish evidence of him ever saying he would end fracking, and Trump promised he would.
Stories might quote Trump, who has denied the human-made climate crisis in a variety of strange ways, telling Biden “I know more about wind than you,” despite previously wrongly claiming wind power causes cancer. “They want to take buildings down because they want to make bigger windows into smaller windows. As far as they’re concerned if you had no window it would be a lovely thing,” Trump accused in another tangent. “This is the craziest plan that anyone has ever seen. It wasn’t done by smart people. Frankly, I don’t know how it could be good politically.”
But perhaps the most interesting point was when the candidates were asked what they would do for people – often people of color – who are living next to polluting gasoline refineries and petrochemical plants.
Trump pressed Biden: “Would you close down the oil industry?”
And Biden, who might typically steer clear of such a politically controversial question, said he would.
“I would transition from the oil industry, yes,” Biden said.
“The oil industry pollutes significantly,” he added. “It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.”
Trump shot back that Biden “is saying is he would destroy the oil industry”.
“Would you remember that Texas? Would you remember that Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?”

The moment was notable, including because it was the opposite of what he said about natural gas. He would not commit to any kind of end to the second half of the industry which has a fast-growing role in causing climate change.
“We need other industries to transition to get to ultimately a complete zero-emissions,” Biden said. “What I will do with fracking over time is to make sure we will capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that by investing money.”
Speaking to reporters after the debate, Biden insisted the fossil fuel industry wouldn’t “be gone” until 2050.
“We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels, but we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time,” Biden said.
Those kinds of statements illuminate why American environmental advocates have quietly worried whether Biden will do enough on climate, even as they have endorsed him and backed his plan.
While Biden is pitching large-scale spending to both help the economy recover and put people to work in green jobs, some fear climate could get lost among his priorities or that the political roadblocks to working with Congress and getting climate efforts past a conservative supreme court would prove too difficult.
A Trump win could be devastating to both US and global climate action, but a Biden win is not assured to significantly address the challenge either. More

The Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden assailed Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic during Thursday night’s final presidential debate, as the president attempted to reset a race that shows him trailing his opponent in opinion polls less than two weeks before election day.
The evening in Nashville began relatively calmly, with the rivals making their closing arguments to the nation amid a pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 Americans and infected millions more, including the president. In part due to the pandemic, more than 40 million Americans have already cast their ballot, shattering records and leaving Trump an increasingly narrow window to reset the debate around his handling of the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout.
But Trump continued to downplay the severity of the public health crisis, defending his response and predicting that a vaccine was imminent, even though his own public health experts have said one would likely not be widely available to the American public until next summer.
“It will go away,” Trump said, offering a rosy assessment of the pandemic’s trajectory even as cases have started rising again across the US and public health experts warn that the US is on the precipice of a dangerous new wave.
“We’re rounding the corner,” he added.
“We can’t keep this country closed. This is a massive country with a massive economy,” Trump said. “There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level nobody’s ever seen before. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”
In contrast, Biden opened his remarks by acknowledging the grim toll of the coronavirus pandemic and warned that the nation must prepare for “a dark winter”.
Biden said: “220,000 deaths. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States.”

The 90-minute debate was a far more coherent and civil affair than the first presidential debate last month, which devolved into a chaotic brawl with Trump incessantly hectoring his opponent and sparring with the moderator. The shift in tone was probably due to a rule change that required a candidate’s microphone to be muted while his rival delivered a two-minute response to the opening question on each of the six debate topics.
On Thursday, Trump largely abided by the rules, allowing Biden to speak uninterrupted, and even complimenting the moderator, the NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker, who he spent the last week criticizing.
Biden, too, was more restrained. When Trump made a false claim about his opponent, Biden looked skyward, as if calling on a higher power to keep him from reacting. But it didn’t always stop him.
When Trump said Biden called his decision to impose Covid-19 related travel restrictions on China “xenophobic”, the Democrat shot back: “He is xenophobic, but not because he cut off access from China.”
The stakes were high for both candidates, even if the debate was unlikely to dramatically redefine the contours of the presidential race. Despite the cascading public health and economic crises, Biden has maintained a steady lead over the incumbent, according to public opinion polls, while Trump has struggled to outline his vision for a second term and grapple with voters’ disapproval of his response to the pandemic.
Despite the increasingly ugly and personal nature of the campaign, the evening featured a substantive policy debate as the candidates diverged sharply on the issues of race, immigration and climate.

They were asked to speak directly to the black and brown Americans about racism in America. Biden said plainly that institutional racism exists and that combatting racial inequality would be a priority of his administration. Trump, ignoring the prompt, assailed his opponent for playing a central role writing the 1994 crime bill that many experts and critics say laid the groundwork for mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black communities. Shielding his eyes to peer into the audience and concluding it was too dark to see properly, Trump was nonetheless confident that he was the “least racist person in this room”.
Biden was incredulous. “This guy has a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn,” he said, accusing Trump of being “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history” and a leader who intentionally “pours fuel on every single racist fire”.
In an exchange on immigration, Trump attempted to defend his administration’s decision to separate thousands of immigrant families at the southern border, even after revelations that 545 children have still not been reunited with their parents after two years apart. The president said the White House was working on a plan to reunite the children and their parents but insisted the blame lay with the Obama administration, which enforced a record number of deportations.
Biden forcefully denied that the previous administration was responsible for Trump’s family separation policy, decrying the situation as “criminal”.
But pressed on why voters should trust him to deliver immigration reform when the Obama administration failed to deliver on this promise, he conceded: “we made a mistake. It took too long to get it right.”

The final moments of the debate were devoted to a discussion on climate change. Biden stressed the need to expand sources of renewable energy – while again disputing Trump’s claim that he intended to ban fracking, which he does not.
“I know more about wind than you do,” Trump retorted, drawing an exasperated laugh from Biden. “It’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds.”
But at one point Biden said he would “transition from the oil industry” and replace it with renewable energy over the next several years. “That’s a big statement,” Trump said.
Departing Nashville after the debate, Biden sought to clarify the remark: “We’re not getting rid of fossil fuels. We’re getting rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels.”

The candidates also clashed sharply on their finances and family business entanglements.
Citing revelations in the New York Times that Trump only paid $750 a year in federal income taxes while maintaining an undisclosed bank account in China, Biden implored Trump to “release your tax returns or stop talking about corruption”. Trump, who has not yet released his tax returns, claimed his accountants told him that he had “prepaid tens of millions of dollars” in taxes.
In turn, Trump repeatedly leveled unsubstantiated claims about the former vice-president’s son Hunter Biden. The Democratic nominee defended his son and categorically denied the accusations as he sought to turn the conversation back to policy.
“There’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey,” Biden said, speaking directly to the camera. “He doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family.” More