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Trump’s enablers in Congress are a fascinating case study of political amnesia | Sidney Blumenthal

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After 40 months and two weeks Donald Trump succeeded in being driven by car to the Capitol. The last time he attempted to get there was 6 January 2021. The mob was rampaging, ransacking offices and chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump was “irate”, according to the account of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide, because he was not among the mob. “The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.’” Hutchinson stands by her story of being told he had tried to grab the steering wheel and lunged at his driver.If the US supreme court had not intervened to postpone Trump’s January 6 trial it would likely be proceeding today or perhaps even have already reached a verdict on his conspiracy, according to the indictment of the United States of America v Donald J Trump, “to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government”.But on Thursday, in this universe, under the shadow of the insurrectionist banners displayed by Samuel Alito, the associate justice, and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, a key player in Trump’s January 6 scheme, Trump arrived as a conquering hero before the Republicans of the Congress, key members of whom were his confederates in his plot while others on that day raced to safe rooms, yet all now desperately rallying for party unity around their nominee against the rule of law.Trump’s conviction a week earlier on 34 felonies in New York for business fraud to deceive the voters in the 2016 election excited Republican hysteria to embrace him to a frantic level. Johnson assembled the Republican members into an impromptu J6 Choir, after the imprisoned members of the Capitol mob whose violent crimes Trump has pledged to pardon, to serenade the beaming felon with a rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”Lindsey Graham unsteadily took his Marilyn Monroe turn. He tweeted on X: “Happy Birthday to @realDonaldTrump. Your golf game has never been stronger, and America needs you now more than ever. Your best present will come in November when the American people elect you as our next President and Commander in Chief.” Then prodded by the Trump Stasi that he had neglected a crucial word, he sent a revised tweet: “Happy Birthday to President @realDonaldTrump.”Unlike Graham, Monroe got it right from the start, and JFK was in fact the president. Unlike Monroe, a Georgia grand jury recommended Graham’s criminal indictment as a co-conspirator in Trump’s election fraud in the state, though he escaped when the prosecutor decided not to charge him. He’s been freed to genuflect another day.One after another the Republicans came to bend the knee and offer tribute to their overlord. “No real Republican with any credibility in the party is still blaming him for January 6,” said JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, desperately seeking the vice-presidential nod. Vance, whose career has advanced by assuming multiple identities, now worships at the shrine of the one and only cult of personality.Of course, inevitably and naturally,Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, stood cheering behind Trump, despite the testimony in Trump’s trial of David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, about the deal he made with Trump not only for the “catch and kill” payoffs but also to print scurrilous falsehoods about his opponents, pointedly Cruz, whose father was smeared as an associate of JFK’s assassin. Trump once went out of his way to demean Cruz’s wife as unattractive. And there was Cruz furiously clapping as if his life depended on it and if he stopped he would be taken to the Lubyanka prison basement.The Old Crow, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, performed a literally incredible act of willful amnesia, forgetting and forgiving everything. In a tone of barely restrained anger after January 6, he had called for Trump’s prosecution for his responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. Trump called him a “dumb son of a bitch”, a “stone cold loser”, and his wife, Elaine Chao, a member of Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Transportation, who quit in protest on January 6, his “China loving wife, Coco Chow!”Now, walking out of his meeting with Trump, McConnell eked out a rigid semblance of a smile, as he said: “We shook hands a few times. He got a lot of standing ovations. It was an entirely positive meeting. I can’t think of anything to tell you out of it that was negative.” He did not even recall Trump disparaging Milwaukee, the host city for the Republican National Convention, as “horrible”. Thus spake the institutionalist, the adult in the room.Loss of memory about Trump, down to his coldly calculated refusal to acknowledge the Covid crisis because it would affect the stock market in the election year and his utter incompetence in handling the pandemic, is essential to his current poll standing. It is a form of mass aphasia masked as nostalgia that is at the core of Republican politics. Trump nostalgia is the political equivalent of long Covid, with similar symptoms of lack of mental focus and fatigue. McConnell, for his part, emerged from his meeting with Trump to act as though he had instantly suffered short-term memory loss about Trump’s weird meandering and perverse maundering in the room. He may reason that the greater Trump’s buffoonery, the more space for him to be the true hidden power, his immovable illusion.In the entire history of the Congress, there has never been such a scene of wholesale self-abasement, humiliation and degradation. The Congress has been the site of countless indignities since its beginning. In the early 19th century there was a deadly duel. There was a shocking caning by a South Carolina congressman of the abolitionist Charles Sumner, a senator, in 1856 on the floor of the Senate as he sat at his desk. There were other scuffles before the Civil War. Even the Confederacy, while it existed, made no effort to build a cult of personality around Jefferson Davis.This recent disgraceful and shameful episode glaringly stands as the diametric opposite example from the Republican congressional leaders who 50 years ago decided in the Watergate scandal that they must pressure Richard Nixon to resign. Until now, there has never been a more dishonorable spectacle than of members prostrating themselves before the cult of a criminal who has attempted to overthrow democracy and subvert the constitution – and who promises to complete his “retribution”.Since Trump’s conviction he has been obsessed with retribution and revenge, with crime and punishment. He intersperses his vindictive projections about the injuries he will inflict on his enemies with paranoid projections about the fate that awaits him. “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump told Dr Phil on his Fox News show.At the same time, Trump wondered aloud at a Nevada rally about whether he would choose to be electrocuted on a sinking electric boat or eaten by a shark. Trump’s Thanatos fantasies are a Freudian field day. He ruminates about his impending death by the most violent and bloody means. Which will it be?Contemplating his death by electrocution, he has substituted an electric boat for the electric chair, Old Sparky, which was in use to execute prisoners at Sing Sing prison in New York until 1963, and whose most famous victims were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were condemned as espionage agents stealing nuclear secrets for the Russians, and railroaded to the chair by the prosecutor, Roy Cohn, who became Trump’s lawyer and tutor in malice.Now, Trump has been indicted for “felony violations of our national security laws”, including unlawful possession of nuclear secrets, and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice”. The case may be bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, but Trump surely knows that the sentence for espionage in the past was a death sentence. Perhaps the Rosenbergs are the Rosebud of his electrocution-inspired night sweats. Through the ghost of Roy Cohn, he has entered a new phantasmagorical scene in Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s play in which Cohn, dying of Aids, is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. In Trump’s nightmare, he’s the one walking the lonely mile to Old Sparky, except it’s an electric boat.Imagining his death by sharks, Trump has returned to his long recurrent terror. “He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks,” Stormy Daniels told an interviewer. When she entered his hotel suite for their tryst, he had the television set tuned to a series called Shark Week. “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted. It’s so strange.” Now, the sharks are circling him. If he needs a bigger boat he must hope it will not be electric.Before the Republicans in the Congress, Trump momentarily set aside his fear of death, perhaps in order not to dampen their adulation. The warm atmosphere instead stirred his sexual fantasies. In the meeting he spoke about his objects of desire, his previously undisclosed lust for Nancy Pelosi and abiding longing for Taylor Swift.Basking in the idolization of the House Republicans, Trump, according to some people present, suddenly blurted, “Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is a whacko, her daughter told me if things were different Nancy and I would be perfect together, there’s an age difference though.” Then he reportedly expressed his wish for Taylor Swift to come to his side: “Why would she endorse this dope?” Trump wondered about his presumption that the liberal Swift would support Biden as she did in 2020.His daydream about Pelosi was quickly smacked down by her daughter Christine Pelosi, who tweeted, “Speaking for all 4 Pelosi daughters – this is a LIE. His deceitful, deranged obsession with our mother is yet another reason Donald Trump is unwell, unhinged and unfit to step foot anywhere near her – or the White House.”Pelosi’s relationship to Trump is one of unrelenting contempt and domination. He is the one dominated. At a meeting with Pelosi and other congressional leaders in October 2019 in the White House Cabinet Room, he had what she described as “a meltdown”, and she stood, pointed her finger at him, and the Democrats walked out. Trump tweeted back at her, “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!”After Trump delivered his State of the Union address months later, she stood at the podium ripping it into pieces and proclaiming she felt “liberated”. On January 6, during the mob attack, sequestered in her office, when she was told Trump wanted to come to the Capitol, she said, “If he comes, I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”But, as Stormy Daniels testified, Trump likes a stern hand; she has said he asked her to spank him with a rolled copy of Forbes magazine with his picture on it. Apart from the kinky spanking, she described his sexual technique as “textbook generic”. Now, he fantasizes about a romance with Pelosi, an older woman – “perfect together”.His fantasy for a younger woman has fixated on Swift. Here he is his younger self, the leering creep whispering in the ear of Jeffrey Epstein as he points out this one or that one in a roomful of women dancing. Here he is, the proprietor of the Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe Pageant, walking in on naked contestants in the dressing room. “Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show,” Trump told Howard Stern on his radio show in 2005, “and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it … You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”Here was the earliest statement of his seductive technique he elaborated in the Access Hollywood tape that precipitated his “catch and kill” payoffs: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”“I think she’s beautiful – very beautiful!” Trump says about Swift. “I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump,” he told a reporter. He wondered if Swift is “legitimately liberal” or it’s “just an act”. Worried she would choose Biden over him, he has sworn to wage a “holy war” against her. He is, he says about the most popular pop singer in the world, “more popular”. He anticipates rejection and plots revenge.The giddy Republicans in the room, listening to the unfiltered sexual reveries of the adjudicated rapist in their midst, said nothing. They burst into song: “Happy Birthday, Mr President!”The tableau of the authoritarian leader surrounded by his fawning followers had a distinctly foreign flavor, reminiscent of Soviet totalitarian art. The Republican members staged themselves like the commissars of the Politburo, smiling faces upturned to the Leader, in unison sustaining “stormy applause”, as the Soviet newspapers always interjected in transcripts of Stalin’s speeches.“He was extremely gracious by the way. There was no score settling,” said Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, who had signaled his support to the mob on January 6 with a raised fist and later in the day was filmed running for cover inside the building.It is fitting that the most apt commentary on the nature of the Republican meeting at the Capitol was written by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his Memoirs about life in the bizarre court of Joseph Stalin: “Stalin found it interesting to watch the people around him get themselves into embarrassing and even disgraceful situations,” wrote Khrushchev. “Once Stalin made me dance the gopak before some top Party officers. I had to squat down on my haunches and kick out my heels. Later, I told Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan ‘when Stalin says dance, wise man dances.’”After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev became the first secretary of the Communist party and premier of the Soviet Union. At the 20th Party Congress, on 25 February 1956, he exposed and denounced Stalin’s crimes, which he attributed to a cult of personality. “Comrades, the cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person,” Khrushchev stated to the stunned presidium.He spoke of “the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader’, ‘sublime strategist of all times and nations’. Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens. We need not give here examples of the loathsome adulation … ”Khrushchev asked his fellow Communists, “How could it be?” He blamed “those who are blinded and hopelessly hypnotized by the cult of the individual” for covering up Stalin’s crimes. “Comrades,” he announced, “in order not to repeat errors of the past, the central committee has declared itself resolutely against the cult of the individual. Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all … ”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Trump’s enablers in Congress are a fascinating case study of political amnesia | Sidney Blumenthal

    After 40 months and two weeks Donald Trump succeeded in being driven by car to the Capitol. The last time he attempted to get there was 6 January 2021. The mob was rampaging, ransacking offices and chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump was “irate”, according to the account of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide, because he was not among the mob. “The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.’” Hutchinson stands by her story of being told he had tried to grab the steering wheel and lunged at his driver.If the US supreme court had not intervened to postpone Trump’s January 6 trial it would likely be proceeding today or perhaps even have already reached a verdict on his conspiracy, according to the indictment of the United States of America v Donald J Trump, “to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government”.But on Thursday, in this universe, under the shadow of the insurrectionist banners displayed by Samuel Alito, the associate justice, and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, a key player in Trump’s January 6 scheme, Trump arrived as a conquering hero before the Republicans of the Congress, key members of whom were his confederates in his plot while others on that day raced to safe rooms, yet all now desperately rallying for party unity around their nominee against the rule of law.Trump’s conviction a week earlier on 34 felonies in New York for business fraud to deceive the voters in the 2016 election excited Republican hysteria to embrace him to a frantic level. Johnson assembled the Republican members into an impromptu J6 Choir, after the imprisoned members of the Capitol mob whose violent crimes Trump has pledged to pardon, to serenade the beaming felon with a rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”Lindsey Graham unsteadily took his Marilyn Monroe turn. He tweeted on X: “Happy Birthday to @realDonaldTrump. Your golf game has never been stronger, and America needs you now more than ever. Your best present will come in November when the American people elect you as our next President and Commander in Chief.” Then prodded by the Trump Stasi that he had neglected a crucial word, he sent a revised tweet: “Happy Birthday to President @realDonaldTrump.”Unlike Graham, Monroe got it right from the start, and JFK was in fact the president. Unlike Monroe, a Georgia grand jury recommended Graham’s criminal indictment as a co-conspirator in Trump’s election fraud in the state, though he escaped when the prosecutor decided not to charge him. He’s been freed to genuflect another day.One after another the Republicans came to bend the knee and offer tribute to their overlord. “No real Republican with any credibility in the party is still blaming him for January 6,” said JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, desperately seeking the vice-presidential nod. Vance, whose career has advanced by assuming multiple identities, now worships at the shrine of the one and only cult of personality.Of course, inevitably and naturally,Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, stood cheering behind Trump, despite the testimony in Trump’s trial of David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, about the deal he made with Trump not only for the “catch and kill” payoffs but also to print scurrilous falsehoods about his opponents, pointedly Cruz, whose father was smeared as an associate of JFK’s assassin. Trump once went out of his way to demean Cruz’s wife as unattractive. And there was Cruz furiously clapping as if his life depended on it and if he stopped he would be taken to the Lubyanka prison basement.The Old Crow, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, performed a literally incredible act of willful amnesia, forgetting and forgiving everything. In a tone of barely restrained anger after January 6, he had called for Trump’s prosecution for his responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. Trump called him a “dumb son of a bitch”, a “stone cold loser”, and his wife, Elaine Chao, a member of Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Transportation, who quit in protest on January 6, his “China loving wife, Coco Chow!”Now, walking out of his meeting with Trump, McConnell eked out a rigid semblance of a smile, as he said: “We shook hands a few times. He got a lot of standing ovations. It was an entirely positive meeting. I can’t think of anything to tell you out of it that was negative.” He did not even recall Trump disparaging Milwaukee, the host city for the Republican National Convention, as “horrible”. Thus spake the institutionalist, the adult in the room.Loss of memory about Trump, down to his coldly calculated refusal to acknowledge the Covid crisis because it would affect the stock market in the election year and his utter incompetence in handling the pandemic, is essential to his current poll standing. It is a form of mass aphasia masked as nostalgia that is at the core of Republican politics. Trump nostalgia is the political equivalent of long Covid, with similar symptoms of lack of mental focus and fatigue. McConnell, for his part, emerged from his meeting with Trump to act as though he had instantly suffered short-term memory loss about Trump’s weird meandering and perverse maundering in the room. He may reason that the greater Trump’s buffoonery, the more space for him to be the true hidden power, his immovable illusion.In the entire history of the Congress, there has never been such a scene of wholesale self-abasement, humiliation and degradation. The Congress has been the site of countless indignities since its beginning. In the early 19th century there was a deadly duel. There was a shocking caning by a South Carolina congressman of the abolitionist Charles Sumner, a senator, in 1856 on the floor of the Senate as he sat at his desk. There were other scuffles before the Civil War. Even the Confederacy, while it existed, made no effort to build a cult of personality around Jefferson Davis.This recent disgraceful and shameful episode glaringly stands as the diametric opposite example from the Republican congressional leaders who 50 years ago decided in the Watergate scandal that they must pressure Richard Nixon to resign. Until now, there has never been a more dishonorable spectacle than of members prostrating themselves before the cult of a criminal who has attempted to overthrow democracy and subvert the constitution – and who promises to complete his “retribution”.Since Trump’s conviction he has been obsessed with retribution and revenge, with crime and punishment. He intersperses his vindictive projections about the injuries he will inflict on his enemies with paranoid projections about the fate that awaits him. “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump told Dr Phil on his Fox News show.At the same time, Trump wondered aloud at a Nevada rally about whether he would choose to be electrocuted on a sinking electric boat or eaten by a shark. Trump’s Thanatos fantasies are a Freudian field day. He ruminates about his impending death by the most violent and bloody means. Which will it be?Contemplating his death by electrocution, he has substituted an electric boat for the electric chair, Old Sparky, which was in use to execute prisoners at Sing Sing prison in New York until 1963, and whose most famous victims were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were condemned as espionage agents stealing nuclear secrets for the Russians, and railroaded to the chair by the prosecutor, Roy Cohn, who became Trump’s lawyer and tutor in malice.Now, Trump has been indicted for “felony violations of our national security laws”, including unlawful possession of nuclear secrets, and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice”. The case may be bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, but Trump surely knows that the sentence for espionage in the past was a death sentence. Perhaps the Rosenbergs are the Rosebud of his electrocution-inspired night sweats. Through the ghost of Roy Cohn, he has entered a new phantasmagorical scene in Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s play in which Cohn, dying of Aids, is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. In Trump’s nightmare, he’s the one walking the lonely mile to Old Sparky, except it’s an electric boat.Imagining his death by sharks, Trump has returned to his long recurrent terror. “He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks,” Stormy Daniels told an interviewer. When she entered his hotel suite for their tryst, he had the television set tuned to a series called Shark Week. “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted. It’s so strange.” Now, the sharks are circling him. If he needs a bigger boat he must hope it will not be electric.Before the Republicans in the Congress, Trump momentarily set aside his fear of death, perhaps in order not to dampen their adulation. The warm atmosphere instead stirred his sexual fantasies. In the meeting he spoke about his objects of desire, his previously undisclosed lust for Nancy Pelosi and abiding longing for Taylor Swift.Basking in the idolization of the House Republicans, Trump, according to some people present, suddenly blurted, “Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is a whacko, her daughter told me if things were different Nancy and I would be perfect together, there’s an age difference though.” Then he reportedly expressed his wish for Taylor Swift to come to his side: “Why would she endorse this dope?” Trump wondered about his presumption that the liberal Swift would support Biden as she did in 2020.His daydream about Pelosi was quickly smacked down by her daughter Christine Pelosi, who tweeted, “Speaking for all 4 Pelosi daughters – this is a LIE. His deceitful, deranged obsession with our mother is yet another reason Donald Trump is unwell, unhinged and unfit to step foot anywhere near her – or the White House.”Pelosi’s relationship to Trump is one of unrelenting contempt and domination. He is the one dominated. At a meeting with Pelosi and other congressional leaders in October 2019 in the White House Cabinet Room, he had what she described as “a meltdown”, and she stood, pointed her finger at him, and the Democrats walked out. Trump tweeted back at her, “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!”After Trump delivered his State of the Union address months later, she stood at the podium ripping it into pieces and proclaiming she felt “liberated”. On January 6, during the mob attack, sequestered in her office, when she was told Trump wanted to come to the Capitol, she said, “If he comes, I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”But, as Stormy Daniels testified, Trump likes a stern hand; she has said he asked her to spank him with a rolled copy of Forbes magazine with his picture on it. Apart from the kinky spanking, she described his sexual technique as “textbook generic”. Now, he fantasizes about a romance with Pelosi, an older woman – “perfect together”.His fantasy for a younger woman has fixated on Swift. Here he is his younger self, the leering creep whispering in the ear of Jeffrey Epstein as he points out this one or that one in a roomful of women dancing. Here he is, the proprietor of the Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe Pageant, walking in on naked contestants in the dressing room. “Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show,” Trump told Howard Stern on his radio show in 2005, “and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it … You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”Here was the earliest statement of his seductive technique he elaborated in the Access Hollywood tape that precipitated his “catch and kill” payoffs: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”“I think she’s beautiful – very beautiful!” Trump says about Swift. “I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump,” he told a reporter. He wondered if Swift is “legitimately liberal” or it’s “just an act”. Worried she would choose Biden over him, he has sworn to wage a “holy war” against her. He is, he says about the most popular pop singer in the world, “more popular”. He anticipates rejection and plots revenge.The giddy Republicans in the room, listening to the unfiltered sexual reveries of the adjudicated rapist in their midst, said nothing. They burst into song: “Happy Birthday, Mr President!”The tableau of the authoritarian leader surrounded by his fawning followers had a distinctly foreign flavor, reminiscent of Soviet totalitarian art. The Republican members staged themselves like the commissars of the Politburo, smiling faces upturned to the Leader, in unison sustaining “stormy applause”, as the Soviet newspapers always interjected in transcripts of Stalin’s speeches.“He was extremely gracious by the way. There was no score settling,” said Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, who had signaled his support to the mob on January 6 with a raised fist and later in the day was filmed running for cover inside the building.It is fitting that the most apt commentary on the nature of the Republican meeting at the Capitol was written by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his Memoirs about life in the bizarre court of Joseph Stalin: “Stalin found it interesting to watch the people around him get themselves into embarrassing and even disgraceful situations,” wrote Khrushchev. “Once Stalin made me dance the gopak before some top Party officers. I had to squat down on my haunches and kick out my heels. Later, I told Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan ‘when Stalin says dance, wise man dances.’”After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev became the first secretary of the Communist party and premier of the Soviet Union. At the 20th Party Congress, on 25 February 1956, he exposed and denounced Stalin’s crimes, which he attributed to a cult of personality. “Comrades, the cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person,” Khrushchev stated to the stunned presidium.He spoke of “the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader’, ‘sublime strategist of all times and nations’. Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens. We need not give here examples of the loathsome adulation … ”Khrushchev asked his fellow Communists, “How could it be?” He blamed “those who are blinded and hopelessly hypnotized by the cult of the individual” for covering up Stalin’s crimes. “Comrades,” he announced, “in order not to repeat errors of the past, the central committee has declared itself resolutely against the cult of the individual. Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all … ”
    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Iowa presidential poll may contain warning for Biden’s re-election – but it’s still early – as it happened

    Donald Trump has a big lead over Joe Biden in Iowa, according to a survey of the state conducted by authoritative pollster Ann Selzer for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom.Fifty percent of Iowa voters who responded to the survey say they will vote for Trump, against 32% who say they’ll support Biden, the poll finds, which is not much of a surprise, since Iowa has become increasingly Republican in recent cycles.The former president’s big lead could nonetheless be a bad sign for Biden’s support in other midwestern states he must win in order to secure a second term. While Iowa is not considered a swing state, there has in the past been some correlation between Trump’s lead there, and his support in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – all states that Biden is targeting to win.Trump’s 18-point lead in Iowa could signal a significant loss in support for Biden elsewhere in the midwest, but there is a big caveat: we are still a ways away from the November election, and though Selzer is considered the best pollster in the Hawkeye state, there’s plenty of time for voters’ sentiments to change.Are the voters who could matter most in determining the November election souring on Donald Trump over his felony convictions? A newly released poll showed a drop off in support for the former president among independents, who may prove crucial in tipping a race that other polls indicate is currently too close to call. However, the same survey shows a sizable segment of voters wondering whether Trump’s conviction was politically motivated, while a poll of red state Iowa indicates Trump has an 18-point lead, potentially a sign of low support for Biden elsewhere in the midwest. The big caveat with all these polls is that it’s still early, and a lot could change between now and the 5 November vote.Here’s what else happened today:
    Senate Democrats will on Tuesday attempt to pass a bill banning “bump stocks”, which allow semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly. Majority leader Chuck Schumer pleaded with Republicans not to block the legislation.
    The Biden campaign is spending big to remind voters of Trump’s felony conviction ahead of next week’s presidential debate.
    Tim Scott, the Republican senator and potential vice-presidential pick for Trump, said he stood behind his decision to certify Biden’s 2020 election win.
    The Mountain Valley Pipeline is in operation, after overcoming years of protests and lawsuits by activists concerned about the natural gas conduit’s effect on the climate and environment.
    Joe Biden may on Tuesday announce a new program to shield from deportation undocumented spouses of US citizens.
    Immigration advocates are cautiously optimistic Joe Biden will unveil a new program on Tuesday that would shield from deportation the undocumented spouses of US citizens in what some say will be the largest relief program since Daca.Biden is expected to make the announcement on Tuesday during an event marking the 12th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, which shields from deportation nearly 530,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children.On a call with reporters, advocates said they were still waiting for the formal announcement, but felt confident Biden would deliver the relief many have sought for so many years.Among those who will be listening closely on Tuesday is Ashley de Azevedo, the president of American Families United. She met her husband, Sergio, an immigrant from Brazil, on a train to New York City. When they married in 2012, she assumed he would be eligible for a green card. But under US law, he would have to return to Brazil for 10 years before he could apply for permanent residency because he had entered the US illegally.“The system doesn’t work like it does in the movies,” Azevedo told reporters. “You don’t marry an American and automatically get a green card. There are laws in place that make it impossible for so many.”The expected announcement will come after Biden moved forward with an aggressive asylum crackdown that infuriated immigration advocacy groups and some Latino leaders, who compared the action to Trump-era border policies.“A positive, effective announcement like the one we expect tomorrow can be a game changer for many of the voters in our communities who need to see the bright line, clear contract between the parties on immigration,” said Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of the pro-immigration group, America’s Voice.It could also help Biden win back support among Hispanic voters, as polling shows Trump making significant inroads with this key constituency.“We anticipate that immigrants and Latino voters will express their gratitude at the ballot box in November, rewarding the president,” said Gustavo Torres, president of CASA in Action.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said Democrats would attempt to pass legislation to ban “bump stocks”, the device that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly which the supreme court last week allowed to remain available to the public.Schumer said Martin Heinrich, the Democratic senator of New Mexico, will propose the ban, and urged Republicans not to block it.“This week, the Senate will step in to try and fix the chaos the Maga court just unleashed,” Schumer said. “As soon as tomorrow, Democrats will seek passage of a federal ban on bump stocks, and I urge my Republican colleagues not to block Senator Heinrich when he comes to the floor.”Schumer continued:
    Passing a bill banning bump stocks should be the work of five minutes. Most Americans support this step. Poll after poll show that a majority of people, including independents, support restrictions on AR-15 style rifles, which is what ‘bump stocks’ are designed to emulate.
    I understand that the issue of gun safety provokes intense disagreement in Congress, but shouldn’t we all agree that preventing another tragedy like Las Vegas is just plain common sense and a good thing. Banning bump stocks will go a long way to making it harder for murderers to carry out large shootings. So I hope our Republican colleagues join us.
    At her briefing to reporters today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Biden administration disagreed with the supreme court’s ruling last week allowing “bump stocks” to remain available, and urged Congress to ban the modifications, as well as assault weapons.The devices allow semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly, and one was used in the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 people.“Weapons of war have no place in our streets,” Jean-Pierre said. “Unfortunately, the court’s ruling strikes down an important, common-sense regulation on devices that convert semiautomatic rifles into weapons that can fire hundreds of bullets per minute, also known as bump stocks.”She reiterated that Joe Biden would sign legislation banning bump stocks and assault weapons if Congress passes it. Left unsaid was the fact that Republicans mostly oppose such efforts.“We want to see that happen. And so, this is a legislative priority for this president,” Jean-Pierre said.Here’s more from last week, on the ruling by the supreme court’s conservative supermajority:Donald Trump and Joe Biden are right now scheduled to debate twice before the November election, with their first encounter scheduled for 27 June. Over the weekend, CNN, the host of the first debate, made public their rules for the parlay, the Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports:The first US presidential debate between incumbent Joe Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump on 27 June will include two commercial breaks, no props and muted microphones except when recognized to speak, CNN said on Saturday.The rules, agreed outside the Commission on Presidential Debates, are designed to reduce fractious interruptions and cross-talk that have often marred TV encounters in recent presidential election cycles.CNN, a division of Warner Bros Discovery, said debate moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion” during the 90-minute broadcast from Atlanta.Another Biden-Trump face-off will be hosted by ABC anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis in September. The traditional October debate will not take place as part of the agreement between the two campaigns and television networks that cut out the commission following years of complaints and perceived slights.A big change is coming to the way Oklahoma courts handle the sentencing for domestic violence survivors found guilty of crimes, the Guardian’s Olivia Empson reports:Oklahoma’s governor, Kevin Stitt, signed Senate Bill 1835 at the end of last month – marking a radical change for incarcerated domestic violence survivors in the state.Also known as Oklahoma’s Survivors Act, the law will be signed into effect on 1 September and will grant hundreds of people who experienced abuse the opportunity to be resentenced with more leniency in what is one of the most extensive reforms to the state’s justice system following years of advocacy.Incarcerated people in Oklahoma, like Shari McDonald and April Wilkens, whose crimes were motivated by domestic violence, can file for resentencing when the law is signed. Going forward, courts can impose lesser sentences under certain circumstances if abuse is substantiated, and survivors can be considered for a lesser prison range than they were initially eligible for.Crucially, the legislation will also ensure that future survivors are not judged so harshly by the justice system for acting in self-defense.Wilkins was 25 years old when she killed her fiance. She alleged he raped, threatened and abused her for years, and that behavior had been happening on the night of the murder. She claims that pulling the trigger had been an act of retaliatory self-defense and never imagined it would be repudiated by the police who arrested her. Over the years, Wilkens had three past protective orders against her fiance and had filed 14 police reports.“What use is a piece of paper, though,” she said, “if you’re dead.”Norcross attended the press conference announcing his own indictment, according to several outlets.Norcross sat front row as the New Jersey attorney general gave additional insight into the corruption charges Norcross and five other defendants face.A powerful Democratic broker from New Jersey has been charged with racketeering, the New Jersey attorney general announced on Monday.George E Norcross III, a former member of the Democratic National Committee, along with five defendants face several corruption charges, according to a 13-count indictment that was unsealed on Monday.Norcross and others allegedly obtained properties throughout the city of Camden, unlawfully collecting millions in tax credits and influencing New Jersey politicians to continue their scheme, NJ.com reported.New Jersey attorney general Matthew J Platkin alleged that Norcross and others had been “running [the] criminal enterprise in this state for at least the last 12 years,” the New York Times reported.“On full display in this indictment is how a group of unelected, private businessmen used their power and influence to get government to aid their criminal enterprise and further its interests,” Platkin added.Read the full NJ.com article here.Read the full Times article here (paywall).Maryland governor Wes Moore signed an executive order Monday morning that pardons more than 175,000 people with marijuana-related convictions.The pardon by Moore is the largest state pardon to date. Moore told the Washington Post that he signed the pardon to coincide with the Juneteenth holiday, which commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans.Historically, Black people are more than three times more likely than white people to be arrested on marijuana-related charges despite similar rates of drug use.“I’m ecstatic that we have a real opportunity with what I’m signing to right a lot of historical wrongs,” Moore said to the Post. “If you want to be able to create inclusive economic growth, it means you have to start removing these barriers that continue to disproportionately sit on communities of colour.”The pardon will not release anyone from prison, the Post reported, but will forgive low-level marijuana possession charges for some 100,000 people.Are the voters who could matter most in determining the November election souring on Donald Trump over his felony convictions? A newly released poll showed a drop off in support for Trump among independents, who may prove crucial in tipping a race that other polls indicate is currently too close to call. However, the same survey shows a sizable segment of voters wondering whether Trump’s conviction was politically motivated, while a poll of Iowa indicates the former president has an 18-point lead in the red state, which could be a sign of low support for Biden elsewhere in the midwest. The big caveat with all these polls is that it’s still early, and lots could change between now and the 5 November election.Here’s what else has happened so far today:
    The Biden campaign is spending big to remind voters of Trump’s felony conviction ahead of next week’s presidential debate.
    Tim Scott, the Republican senator and potential vice-presidential pick for Trump, said he stood behind his decision to certify Biden’s 2020 election win.
    The Mountain Valley Pipeline is in operation, after overcoming years of protests and lawsuits by activists concerned about the natural gas conduit’s effect on the climate and environment.
    Reuters reports that lawyers for the president’s son, Hunter Biden, withdrew a motion requesting a new trial after he was convicted on federal gun charges last week.Biden is considering whether to appeal his conviction, and is also scheduled to face trial in September on federal tax charges.Here’s more from last week, when a jury in Delaware returned guilty verdicts on the gun charges:Donald Trump has a big lead over Joe Biden in Iowa, according to a survey of the state conducted by authoritative pollster Ann Selzer for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom.Fifty percent of Iowa voters who responded to the survey say they will vote for Trump, against 32% who say they’ll support Biden, the poll finds, which is not much of a surprise, since Iowa has become increasingly Republican in recent cycles.The former president’s big lead could nonetheless be a bad sign for Biden’s support in other midwestern states he must win in order to secure a second term. While Iowa is not considered a swing state, there has in the past been some correlation between Trump’s lead there, and his support in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – all states that Biden is targeting to win.Trump’s 18-point lead in Iowa could signal a significant loss in support for Biden elsewhere in the midwest, but there is a big caveat: we are still a ways away from the November election, and though Selzer is considered the best pollster in the Hawkeye state, there’s plenty of time for voters’ sentiments to change. More

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    Why is Trump cozying up to America’s most powerful business leaders? | Robert Reich

    The Business Roundtable is an association of more than 200 CEOs of America’s biggest corporations. It likes to think of itself as socially responsible.Last Wednesday, its chair, Joshua Bolten, told reporters that his group planned to drop “eight figures” while “putting its full weight behind protecting and strengthening tax reform”.Translated: it’s going to pour money into making sure that Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts – most of which benefit big corporations and the rich – don’t expire in 2025, as scheduled.On Thursday, Trump met at the Business Roundtable’s Washington headquarters with over 80 CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Walmart’s Doug McMillon.Trump reportedly promised the CEOs he would cut corporate taxes even further and curtail business regulations if elected president.Trump’s 2017 tax cuts reduced the rate of corporate income taxes from 35% to 21%. That has cost America $1.3tn.Those tax cuts, along with the tax cuts put in place by George W Bush, are the primary reason that the national debt is rising as a percentage of the economy.What have corporations done with the money they have saved? They haven’t invested it or used it to raise wages. Nothing has trickled down to average workers.A large portion has gone into stock buybacks. The year after the tax cut went into effect, corporations bought back a record $1tn of their shares. Buybacks do nothing for the economy but raise stock prices – and, not incidentally, CEO compensation, which is largely in shares of stock.Making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent – as the Business Roundtable seeks – will cost $4tn over the next 10 years, $400bn per year – and cause the debt to soar.Yet every one of the CEOs that Trump met with last week has been thriving under Biden. Corporate profits are way up. Stocks are at near record levels. Inflation has plummeted.So why are they attracted to Trump, whose antics are likely to destabilize the economy? Is it mere ideology?Kathryn Wylde, the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City (a non-profit that represents the city’s top business leaders), relates that Republican billionaires have told her “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”In my experience, CEOs of large corporations are more practical than ideological. They’re coming around to Trump because they want even more tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks – which means even more money in their own pockets.The Business Roundtable’s motto – “More than Leaders. Leadership” – suggests a purpose higher than making its CEOs and corporations richer.Indeed, in August 2019 the Roundtable issued a highly publicized statement expressing “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders”, including a commitment to compensating all workers “fairly and providing important benefits”, as well as “supporting the communities in which we work”, and protecting the environment “by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses”.Signed by 181 CEOs of major American corporations, the statement concluded that “each of our stakeholders is essential,” and committed “to deliver value to all of them”.The statement got a lot of favorable press. But it was rubbish. At the time, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were gaining traction in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries with their criticisms of corporate America, and the CEOs of the Roundtable were worried. They needed cover.Then, after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, many of these CEOs announced they would not provide campaign funds to Republican members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election.Now, they’re lining up to fund Trump, because they and their corporations want another giant tax cut and rollbacks of regulations.If the Business Roundtable’s CEOs were honestly committed to all their stakeholders, they wouldn’t seek massive tax cuts.If they cared about preserving American democracy, they wouldn’t support Trump or any Republican.The greedy cynicism of America’s corporate elite is now on full display.
    Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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    Biden ad blitz targets Trump’s criminal conviction in pitch to swing voters

    Joe Biden is seeking to exploit Donald Trump’s recent felony conviction in a television advertising blitz, amid polling evidence that the presumptive Republican nominee’s criminal status is hurting him with independent voters.A new 30-second advert released on Monday homes in on Trump’s 31 May conviction in a Manhattan court on 34 counts of falsifying documents to conceal the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels, an adult actor, who testified that the pair had sex.The ad – featuring black-and-white courtroom images of Trump – also highlights his losses in two civil court cases, one from the writer E Jean Carroll, who said the former president raped and defamed her, and a $355m fraud ruling against his businesses.“We see Donald Trump for who he is,” the ad’s narrator says. “He’s been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault and he committed financial fraud.“Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s been working,” the narrative continues in a calculated comparison between Trump and his successor in the Oval Office. “This election is between a convicted criminal who is only out for himself and a president who is fighting for you and your family.”The ad will run in key battleground states and is the Biden campaign’s most aggressive commentary yet on Trump’s criminal status after a muted initial response.It is part of a $50m advertising onslaught as the Biden election machine seeks to make Trump’s character a central issue in the run-up to the first scheduled televised debate between the pair on CNN on 27 June.In the immediate aftermath of the verdict – which Trump has appealed – the president appeared to play it down, saying: “There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.”The apparent change of course follows polling indicators that the conviction may sway potential swing voters, widely deemed crucial in a close race. A fresh poll for Politico shows 21% of independent voters saying it makes them less likely to vote for him in November – a potentially decisive factor in a contest in which opinion surveys have shown the two candidates running neck-and-neck, with Trump leading narrowly in many instances.The poll also recorded 43% of voters as believing that the verdict was intended to help Biden.One of Trump’s leading surrogates, the Florida congressman Byron Donalds, who has been tipped as a potential vice-presidential contender, called on the US supreme court – which has a six-to-three conservative majority, largely because of Trump’s nomination of conservative justices while he was president – to reverse the conviction, despite it having no jurisdiction over state cases.“In New York, the only ability for this to be overturned … is going to be happening two or three years from now,” he told NBC’s Meet The Press.“That’s why what happened in lower Manhattan was to interfere with an election, which is why Speaker [Mike] Johnson, myself included, and many Americans believe the supreme court should step in to this matter.”At a fundraising event in Los Angeles, attended by former president Barack Obama, and actors George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Biden told the comedian Jimmy Kimmel that a Trump victory would result in at least two more conservative justices being appointed to the supreme court, which he said would be “very negative in terms of the rights of individuals”. More

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    Donald Trump looking for ‘fighter’ as Republican running mate

    Donald Trump is looking for a “fighter” as his running mate in this year’s presidential election and regards factors such as their gender or race as irrelevant, according to sources close to the former US president.Conventional wisdom used to hold that Trump was likely to choose a woman or a person of color as his potential vice-president in an effort to broaden his appeal. But aides close to the presumptive Republican nominee currently say he will not take so-called identity politics into account.Instead, Trump, who is still trying to make up his mind, wants a candidate who is media-savvy and will fight for him on adversarial TV networks. “In short,” a Trump ally said, “he wants someone who is everything Mike Pence wasn’t.”Former vice-president was a valuable asset during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns – the Christian conservative who shored up support among Republicans suspicious of the thrice-married reality TV star. But Pence’s refusal to comply with Trump’s demand to overturn the 2020 election led to a falling out and made Pence a target of the January 6 rioters.Trump is seeking a “Goldilocks” running mate this time: strong but loyal, in tune with Maga but not over-rehearsed, telegenic but not likely to outshine him. His choice will go up against Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to serve as vice-president.But his campaign does not regard having a Black candidate – such as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina – as intrinsically helpful, preferring to reach voters of color through community outreach and policy plans. A source said the campaign hears from Black voters that identity politics matter less to them than the economy and community safety.Biden is 81 while Trump turned 78 on Friday. Both candidates have already served one term, putting more focus on the vice-presidency than in a typical election year. Fifteen vice-presidents have gone on to be president, eight of whom succeeded to the office upon the death of the incumbent.View image in fullscreenJim McLaughlin, a former pollster for Trump, said: “It’s got to be somebody that he knows can be the president of the United States because – he hasn’t said this but other people are saying this – this could be a person that’s in the White House for the next 12 years, so he understands the importance of that.”Speaking on a panel in Washington organised by polling firm JL Partners, McLaughlin added: “I think it’s also somebody who definitely believes in his agenda. I don’t think he’s going to go for somebody to have some sort of an ideological or necessarily political balance.“He’s going to want an ‘America first’ Republican to be his nominee. I get calls a lot of times from candidates: ‘Can you help me with the Trump endorsement?’ My first question to them is: what kind of relationship do you have with him? Because loyalty is huge with him. It’s got to be somebody he is comfortable with as a person.”Earlier this month, ABC News reported that Trump’s campaign had started a process of formally requesting information from a small handful of potential running mates. It named Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota; JD Vance, a senator for Ohio; and Marco Rubio, a senator for Florida.Speculation around Burgum, a 67-year-old multimillionaire businessman, has been gathering momentum in recent weeks, culminating in an 1,800-word profile in the New York Times. The article included details such as Burgum having worked as a chimney sweep in college, wearing a black-top hat and tails to evoke Dick Van Dyke’s character in the film Mary Poppins.View image in fullscreenRubio, 53, a son of Cuban immigrants, could potentially help the former president peel away Latino voters from Biden and, as the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, brings foreign policy experience. The US constitution poses a headache, however, since it bans electors from selecting a president and vice-president from the same state – and both Trump and Rubio call Florida home.Vance, 39, rose to fame in 2016 with his memoir Hillbilly Elegy about growing up poor in Appalachia. That year, he was a fierce critic of Trump, at one point calling him “cultural heroin”. Since 2018, however, he has embraced the 45th president and befriended his son, Don Jr. Vance is seen as an intellectual standard bearer for the ‘America first’ ideology with a connection to blue-collar voters.Reed Galen, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Vance tends to make the most sense. There’s the anti-Trump video that will be played a million times, but everyone’s got something like that now probably except for Ben Carson. But Vance seems to me to be the person who can bring youth to the ticket. He can lay back on that Hillbilly Elegy bootstraps bullshit that Republicans love.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe added: “Trump is certainly more dynamic on stage because he’s nuts – he’s a coked-up Tasmanian devil – but I would venture to say that, for a lot of Republicans, Vance reminds them of a Republican party that they want. Burgum’s boring but he’s got money. He’s not going to hurt you. He’ll do whatever he’s told. I think Vance would, too.”Other contenders include former housing secretary Ben Carson, the senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the representative Byron Donalds of Florida, the former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, the Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and the representative Elise Stefanik of New York. Scott, of South Carolina, who is African American, challenged Trump in the Republican primary race but is now a staunch advocate.View image in fullscreenAsked by the Newsmax network recently whether he is close to choosing a running mate, Trump replied: “I thought Tim Scott didn’t run as good of a race as he’s capable of running for himself, but as a surrogate for me, he’s unbelievable. He’s been incredible. Governor Burgum from North Dakota has been incredible. Marco Rubio has been great. JD Vance has been great. We’ve had so many great people out there.”Trump has ruled out Nikki Haley, his former US ambassador to the UN, who eviscerated him during the primaries but now says she will vote for him. Another potential pick, Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, is widely seen has having disqualified herself after writing in a memoir that she shot dead an “untrainable” dog that she “hated” on her family farm.Trump is expected to make the announcement at next month’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee. Given his mercurial nature and flair for theatricality, anything is possible. The names circulated by Trump, his campaign and the media might yet be upstaged by an entirely unexpected nominee.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “It would not at all surprise me if Trump were to pull a name out of left and right field that he’s really been looking at and this is an entire misdirection.”Will it matter? Not much, if history is any guide. Olsen added: “If somebody is going to move the needle for Trump, it’s going to be somebody like a woman or a Black person. I guess I just won’t predict that because it’s quite clear going back decades that the identity of a vice-presidential nominee has a very limited and regional effect, if it has an effect at all.“You can be somebody who is callow and unprepared for office, like Dan Quayle, and George Herbert Walker Bush still comes from 17 points behind to win a comfortable seven-point victory. You can be somebody who clearly is out of her depth, like Sarah Palin – John McCain still rises or falls on his own merits, not Palin’s problems.” More

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    Trump always returns to his folly. And his Republican acolytes always return to him | Richard Wolffe

    Anyone can rat, as Winston Churchill once supposedly said. But it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.Say what you like about Donald Trump, but there’s no shortage of rodent-like ingenuity around his dealings with the sewer life that populates today’s Republican party.On Thursday, the convicted felon who now leads the party of law and order paid a very special visit to his closest friends on Capitol Hill.This is the same convicted felon who bravely whipped a mob into attacking the same friends, in the same place, along with the police officers paid to protect them, all of three years ago. Which, as it happens, is the average life of a domesticated rat.Back in the mists of time of 2021, all of 10 House Republicans and seven Senate Republicans voted to impeach the soon-to-be-ex-president for inciting insurrection.Most of those brave and principled supporters of the blindingly obvious are no longer with us: either retired or defeated, they long abandoned the sinking ship of sedition. The rest decided to normalize an unhinged insurrectionist whom they all disdain while speaking to reporters in the fetal position of their own fears.For those left scurrying below deck, Thursday’s royal visit from the king of bling was a dizzying display of dubious electioneering. The felonious future nominee managed to rat on the city of Milwaukee that will host his party’s convention next month, around the time he gets sentenced for his very many crimes of paying hush money to a former porn actor.“Milwaukee, where we’re having our convention,” he proclaimed, “is a horrible city.” It also happens to be the largest city in the swing state of Wisconsin, where – until last week – the polls suggested Trump was running neck-and-neck with Joe Biden.Instead of triggering a round of second-guessing about their presumptive nominee, the rat pack of Republicans proceeded to dump on the fine news outlet, Punchbowl, that reported on their friend in low places.According to them, either Trump didn’t say any such thing, or he was talking about the city’s crime rates, or possibly its administration of elections, or its position on public protests against the party’s convention.That’s the thing about re-ratting: it’s all a bit confusing. It’s almost like Trump and his enablers are making it up as they go along.Of course he didn’t stop at Milwaukee. Why would he?Trump has read the polls, or at least had the polls read to him. He knows that the greatest single achievement of his presidency – not peace in the Middle East, but stacking the supreme court with anti-abortion activist justices – is now one of the greatest motivators of votes against him and his hapless party.So he had some choice words of advice for the party that opposes choice. Stop talking about abortion. Or at least talk about abortion with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.There’s just one tiny problem with this position: his own party and his own supreme court justices don’t agree with him.Anyone can rat on any issue. But it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to rat on your signature issue and expect your party to rat alongside you. It’s almost like Trump is expecting his enablers to make it up as they go along.For someone who built his fragile fortune on branding, these ratty moments are something of a challenge to the core Trump-y brand.Yes, the chaos is constant. But you’re supposed to know what you’re getting with Trump. He’s supposed to speak his mind, to mean what he says, even if you think he’s plain old bonkers.Clearly and sadly, this election cycle is dominated, much like the last two presidential contests, by The Trump Question. He drives people to the polls both for and against him, in seemingly equal measure. The president certainly isn’t driving anyone to the polls.However, The Trump Question is not what it used to be. Beyond the issue of whether he should ever walk inside the White House again, there’s an un-Trumpy confusion about what he stands for.Is he for or against the anti-abortion movement? For or against TikTok under Chinese ownership? For or against Milwaukee, for heaven’s sake?Even as he pandered recently to the nation’s richest CEOs, at the Business Roundtable, Trump promised to cut corporate taxes by a less-than-whopping one percentage point, from 21 to 20%. “It’s a nice round number,” he said.At this point, Trump is in danger of flubbing the famous Roger Mudd question that Ted Kennedy fumbled so badly in 1979: Why do you want to be president?It wasn’t that Kennedy couldn’t answer the question. He desperately wanted to say it was his turn to carry the Kennedy flame. He just wouldn’t say it in public.Why does Trump want to be president? To stay out of jail? To seek revenge on his opponents? To pretend like he’s not the loser who lost the 2020 election?They don’t really fit on a red baseball cap. Or a gold pair of sneakers.So the tongue-tied populist returned to Capitol Hill to fire up his troops with a confusing set of ratty statements. Or, as Nancy Pelosi put it so memorably, he returned to the scene of his biggest crime: campaigning for election at the very place where he wanted to stop an election.The writers of the Book of Proverbs might have recognized this story back in biblical times. Like a dog returning to his vomit, Trump can’t help but return to his folly. And his Republican supporters can’t help but return to him.
    Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Democrat Khanna: Biden is ‘running out of time’ with young voters over Gaza war

    Progressive California Democrat Ro Khanna warned Sunday that Joe Biden is running out of time to win over young voters opposed to his administration’s handling of the Israel-Gaza conflict and that he will not attend Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress next month.In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Representative Khanna said the erosion of support that the US president is seeing among young voters is a “challenge for our party” and the Democrats could be “running out of time” to restore support with “more people dying” in the conflict.“We have to remember the humanitarian stakes,” he said. “Young people want the war to end. But what young people want is a vision, and the president started that with a ceasefire. I hope he can go further. He should call for two states. He should say in his second term, he’s going to convene a peace conference in the Middle East, recognize a Palestinian state without Hamas, work with Egypt, Saudi Arabia on it.”Khanna said he was “not going to sit in a one-way lecture” from the Israeli prime minister during his address to a joint session of Congress, scheduled for 24 July, but “if he wants to come to speak to members of Congress about how to end the war and release hostages, I would be fine doing that.”Khanna echoed congressional colleague Jim Clyburn, who last week said he would also not attend and cited the feud between Netanyahu and Barack Obama over Palestinian statehood and the US pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran.“How he treated President Obama, he should not expect reciprocity,” Khanna said, adding that Netanyahu should be treated with “decorum” by the legislative body. “We’re not going to make a big deal about it,” he added.Khanna called on Biden to put more pressure on Netanyahu regarding a UN-endorsed ceasefire proposal, which is supported by the US and the Arab league.“Benny Ganz is saying prioritize the hostage deal and the peace,” Khanna said, referring to the Israel’s national unity chair Benny Gantz who resigned from Netanyahu’s coalition government. “Netanyahu is saying they want to destroy … all of Hamas, and I don’t think that’s achievable”.Khanna’s comments come as political divisions between progressive and centrist Democrats over Israel and Gaza are being exposed by a key congressional race in the New York suburbs that pits Bernie Sanders-supported progressive Democrat Jamaal Bowman against George Latimer, a centrist who was endorsed by Hillary Clinton last week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe contest between the two Democrat candidates in New York’s 16th district may turn on differing positions on the Israeli action on Gaza, which Sanders has called “ethnic cleansing” and Bowman a “genocide”. Clinton has said US pro-Palestinian protesters “don’t know very much” about the Middle East and that a full ceasefire would “perpetuate the cycle of violence”. More

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    Muted mics, no props: CNN details rules for Biden and Trump debate

    The first US presidential debate between incumbent Joe Biden and Republican rival Donald Trump on 27 June will include two commercial breaks, no props and muted microphones except when recognized to speak, CNN said Saturday.The rules, agreed outside the Commission on Presidential Debates, are designed to reduce fractious interruptions and cross-talk that have often marred TV encounters in recent presidential election cycles.CNN, a division of Warner Bros Discovery, said debate moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion” during the 90-minute broadcast from Atlanta.Another Biden-Trump face-off will be hosted by ABC anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis in September. The traditional October debate will not take place as part of the agreement between the two campaigns and television networks that cut out the commission following years of complaints and perceived slights.CNN said both candidates will appear at a uniform podium during the 90-minute debate, podium positions will be determined by a coin flip and candidates will be given a pen, a pad of paper and a bottle of water but cannot use props.“Microphones will be muted throughout the debate except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak,” CNN said.The network also said that during the two commercial breaks, campaign staff will not be permitted to interact with their candidate, and unlike previous debates there will be no studio audience.Biden and Trump, the two oldest candidates ever to run for US president, will be seeking the support of an uncommonly large swathe of undecided voters who may only begin to pay close attention to the contest closer to the 5 November election day.But with polls already narrowing in crucial swing states, the debates come with risks for both candidates with markedly different styles of governance – on a seasoned senator who relies on an extensive staff for policy positions, and a New York developer-turned-reality TV star who shoots from the hip.According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll earlier this month, Biden is losing support among voters without college degrees, a large group that includes Black people, Hispanic women, young voters and suburban women.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe essence of the argument – Biden accuses his predecessor of being unhinged and a danger to democracy, while Trump accuses Biden of being senile and corrupt – has so far left many voters cool to the prospect of a 2024 rematch between two political candidates who, at 81 and 78, are twice the US median age.According to a campaign memo viewed by Reuters, Biden has three preferred debate topics: abortion rights, the state of democracy and the economy. Trump’s team has indicated that immigration, public safety and inflation are his key issues.The hosting networks will be keen to ensure that the twin debates will run more smoothly than in 2020, when the discussion focused on Trump’s pandemic response and moderator Chris Wallace had to step in to remind the candidates he was asking the questions.The second scheduled debate set for October did not take place due to Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis and his refusal to appear remotely rather than in person. In this election cycle, both candidates have refused to refused to debate rivals for their party’s nomination.CNN said that candidates eligible to participate must appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold needed to win and receive at least 15% in four separate national polls.It said it was “not impossible” that independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, could still qualify, saying he has received at least 15% in three qualifying polls to date and has qualified for the ballot in six states, making him eligible for 89 electoral college votes.The Kennedy campaign said Saturday that its polling showed he was now in second place alongside Biden in Utah, but behind Trump, and that he outpaces Biden and Trump among independents nationally.Reuters contributed to this story More