Evelyn Reynolds

A new poll indicates former US president Donald Trump is gaining ground among Latino voters, wiping out incumbent Joe Biden’s lead among the crucial, but diverse, voting bloc.A USA Today and Suffolk University survey showed Trump was ahead with 39% support among Latino voters surveyed, compared to Biden’s 34%, signaling a slump since 2020, when Biden garnered 65% of the approval from Latino voters.The data also highlights a broader trend of decreasing support for Biden among various key demographic groups, including young voters. The decline in support among Latinos is seen as a canary in the coal mine for Democrats, signaling potential challenges in retaining a key part of the electoral coalition that built Biden’s election victory in 2020.Trump leads among young voters under 35 with 37% support over Biden’s 33%, a stark drop from Biden’s 24-point lead among the voting group in 2020.However, although Biden was losing support among these groups of voters, they tend to lean toward third-party candidates instead of Trump, according to the poll which was conducted 26-29 December among 1,000 likely voters.Twenty per cent of Hispanic and Black voters surveyed said they would support someone other than Trump or Biden, while 21% of younger voters indicated the same outcome.In December, a CNBC All-America Economic Survey also revealed a significant shift in support among Latino voters. In a hypothetical head-to-head matchup, Trump now holds a five-point lead with Latino voters, erasing Biden’s previous seven-point lead in October.The survey, conducted between 8 and 12 December, suggests a decline in Biden’s overall performance among Latino voters, with his approval dropping from 35% in October to 28% in December.Historic data shows that Trump tends to perform better with Latino voters during economic stress. The survey results raise concerns for Democrats about their hold on this crucial demographic.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s lead stands even as he leans into the kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric that he used when he locked the Republican nomination in 2016, including racist language reminiscent of far-right dictators.The former president has listed some of the steps he would purportedly take to widen his administration’s strict immigration policies, including shifting “massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement” and moving “thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our own southern border”.Trump also said he would reinstate and expand travel bans he first carried out in 2017 toward several Muslim-majority and African countries. Another Trump administration would also include rounding up placing undocumented immigrants already in the US in detention camps to await deportation. More

A key researcher in the fight against election misinformation – who herself became the subject of an intensive misinformation campaign – has said her field gets accused of “bias” precisely because it’s now mainly rightwingers who spread the worst lies.Kate Starbird, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, added that she feared that the entirely false story of rigged elections has now “sunk in” for many Americans on the right. “The idea that they’re already going to the polls with the belief that they’re being cheated means they’ll misinterpret everything they see through that lens,” she said.Starbird’s group partnered with Stanford Internet Observatory on the Election Integrity Partnership ahead of the 2020 elections – a campaign during which a flood of misinformation swirled around the internet, with daily claims of unproven voter fraud.Starbird and her team helped document that flood, and in return congressional Republicans and conservative attorneys attacked her research, alleging it amounted to censorship and violated the first amendment.Starbird, a misinformation researcher, herself became the subject of an ongoing misinformation campaign – but said she would not let that deter her from her research. Her team wasn’t the only target of the conservative campaign against misinformation research, she noted: researchers across the country have received subpoenas, letters and criticism, all attempting to frame misinformation research as partisan and as censorship.Jim Jordan, chair of the House judiciary committee, served as the ringleader of this effort in Congress, using his power to investigate groups and researchers that work to counter misinformation, particularly as it related to elections and Covid-19. One practice that especially upset Jordan and his colleagues was when researchers would flag misleading information to social media companies, who would sometimes respond by amending factchecks or taking down false posts entirely.Nor is it just Congress attacking anti-misinformation work. A federal lawsuit from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the Biden administration violated the first amendment by colluding with social media companies to censor and suppress speech. A new lawsuit from the state of Texas and two rightwing media companies takes aim at the Global Engagement Center, a state department agency that focuses on how foreign powers spread information.The pressure campaign has chilled misinformation research just ahead of the pivotal 2024 presidential election, as some academics switch what they focus on and others figure out ways to better explain their work to a mixed audience. One thing they will probably no longer do is flag posts to social media companies, as the practice remains an issue in several ongoing court cases.Starbird has landed in the middle of all this. Her work was included in Jordan’s investigation, her emails were sought by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general, she was sued in another lawsuit brought by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, and she and the center have been inundated by records requests.“In a few years, I’ll look back and say it was a really valuable perspective,” she said. “Because I’ve seen campaigns that were extremely effective at using disinformation to smear the reputation of people – so much so that I’ve seen someone that I was studying take his own life. I know that the stakes are really high in these spaces.”Jordan’s committee released reports with outlandish claims about how the government, researchers and tech companies “colluded” to “censor Americans”. Starbird served on an external advisory committee for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; when a Republican congressional report claimed the committee tried to censor people, when in reality it solely advised the security agency, Starbird fired back, calling the Republican report a “manipulated narrative”.“It was really weird to watch how they so effectively created this false narrative. It was frustrating,” she said. “And then at some point, you step back and you’re like, ‘You gotta appreciate their craft – good at what they did.’”Starbird started her academic career by studying online volunteerism, then misinformation campaigns after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013. She’s seen the work of political actors grow more sophisticated in spreading disinformation.The reason that research into election misinformation is labelled as biased was because it’s largely the right that spreads election lies these days, she said. Widespread misinformation shared by rightwing politicians and activists since the 2020 election culminated in the January 6 insurrection, which was motivated by false claims of electoral fraud, almost all of which have been thrown out of court.“The influencers, political elites on the right, have embraced those lies, which is one of the reasons that they spread further,” she said. “So this is an asymmetric phenomenon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Now, they may argue and say that they’re not false, and it’s really hard to have a conversation if you don’t have a shared view of reality.”Her work now focuses on election processes and procedures. She says she now refers more to “rumors” than to “misinformation” – both because “rumor” has more historical context, and because “misinformation” is a much more politicized term, co-opted by people outside the field, similar to how the legitimate phenomenon of “fake news” on social media before the 2016 election got twisted by Donald Trump into an insult to journalists.Her team will probably not flag content to social media platforms, either. “That piece of the work has been so effectively twisted into a censorship narrative that it becomes hard to help out in that way,” she said.While she had hoped to work with local and state elections officials – the experts on how elections work, who have themselves been subject to harassment – for context and help assessing viral rumors, “it’s increasingly hard for us to think that we’ll be able to communicate with them in a way that would be helpful for them, helpful for the world, and not cause more damage because it becomes fodder for these false claims”.With misinformation research under fire and social media platforms less willing to factcheck viral posts, 2024 could see a flood of voter fraud lies, making for an even more contentious election than in 2020. Even if social media platforms, which are optimized to spread the most attention-getting posts, did more work to address misinformation, they would still be accused of bias and censorship, Starbird said.She fears that the election fraud narrative has now “sunk in” so deeply for so many Americans on the right that it could end up creating worse laws and procedures – and actually increase the possibility of a successful foreign interference campaign in US elections.“Right now, we’ve got a space where we may be in a ‘Boy who cried wolf’ situation, where there’s so much misinformation about election integrity that if we have a true threat, we may miss it,” Starbird said.Still, despite the loud voices on the right continuing to spread disinformation about elections, Starbird thinks the people who got drawn into those narratives before might be a little savvier now, perhaps less likely to fall for some of the “more extravagant” claims again.“I am hopeful that we’ve seen the worst of it,” she said. “I’m not confident we’ve seen the worst of it.” More

Nikki Haley’s feigning of staggering ignorance about the cause of the US civil war unintentionally revealed her quandary in the Republican party. It was not a gaffe. Though it was a stumble, it was not a mistake, but a message she has delivered for years and that has served her well until now. Her carefully crafted and closely memorized garble was a deracinated version of an old lie, which she had used before to attempt to mollify hostile camps in order to skid by. Some in the past praised her evasive formula as governor of South Carolina as her finest moment. It lifted her star. Yet one simple question instantly produced panicky rapid eye movements that are the telltale sign of a person desperately cornered, followed by an unstoppable stream of blather that she hoped would make it all evaporate into a meaningless ether but instead this time slid her into an abyss. Her performance, the most memorable of her entire career, was so devastating that even Ron DeSantis, the paragon of political aphasia, in the most cogent remark of his campaign, indeed his life, commented: “Yikes.” Nikki Haley turned Ron DeSantis woke.“What was the cause of the United States civil war?” a man asked Haley at a campaign town hall in North Conway, New Hampshire. She reacted as if she were being physically threatened. Haley immediately turned her back to the questioner, breathed fast and heavy into the microphone, and walked quickly away. When she swiveled to face the crowd, she did not speak at first. Gaining her composure, she replied with an accusatory edge: “Well, don’t come with an easy question.”Of course, the answer is an easy one for any eighth grader. But for Haley it went to the molten core of the history and politics of South Carolina, where she had been governor, to the southern strategy that realigned the Republican party, and to its hard crystallization in Trump’s party. She retreated as if struck, not because she didn’t know the obvious answer, but because she knows that it is more fraught than it has been in decades.“I think the cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley began haltingly. Then she stopped.“What do you think the cause of the civil war was?” she asked her questioner. He replied that he was not running for president and wished to hear her thoughts. “I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” Haley continued, and continued, and continued. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life. They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life.”She looked to her questioner in the hope that her flood of verbosity had overwhelmed him. “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery’,” he said. She shot back with her own question, as if in a spat: “What do you want me to say about slavery?” She wanted the townsman to answer for her. “You’ve answered my question, thank you,” he said. With that, he had won his point. Haley shifted again, and said: “Next question.”Haley’s whole possibility of success in her contest with Trump depends upon winning New Hampshire, and within that open primary, unlike the closed primaries that follow it, she is relying on drawing independent voters. Her recoil from the question about the civil war was an ingrained instinct. She keeps trying to pass the southern test.Her language in New Hampshire was the same as the rhetoric she honed in South Carolina. The Wall Street Journal editorially praised her in 2010 for an interview she gave to a neo-Confederate group, the Palmetto Patriots. “‘You had one side of the Civil War that was fighting for tradition, and I think you had another side of the Civil War that was fighting for change,’ she said. She did not use the word ‘slavery’ but hinted at it, saying that ‘everyone is supposed to be free.’” The Journal noted approvingly: “She pledged to retain a political compromise that gave the Confederate flag a place of prominence in front of the State House, a position that puts her within the mainstream among GOP leaders in the state.”Haley’s answer was an attempt to repeat her balancing act in the birthplace of secession, offering ‘lost cause lite’. Her rationale was a muffled echo of that of Confederate leaders justifying secession. Jefferson Davis, in his speech resigning from the Senate on 9 January 1861, before assuming the Confederate presidency, appealed to “the principles upon which our Government was founded”, and his “high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited”. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice-president and framer of the Confederate constitution, in his speech of 21 March 1861 proclaiming slavery as its “cornerstone”, stated that it “secures all our ancient rights, franchises, and liberties”. The Confederates consistently described opposition to their insurrection as “coercion”, to which Lincoln gave one of his many answers on 18 April 1864: “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.”It may not have occurred to Haley that there are no Confederate monuments in New Hampshire. There are nearly 100 in the state to the Union cause. One-tenth of the population of New Hampshire at the time served in the Union army: 32,750 men, of whom nearly 5,000 died, 130 in Confederate prisons. The fifth New Hampshire volunteer infantry had the highest casualty rate of any Union regiment. About 900 soldiers from New Hampshire fought at Gettysburg, suffering 368 casualties, many of whom are buried at the cemetery there, where Lincoln delivered his address explaining their sacrifice for a “government of, by and for the people”. The monument to the fifth New Hampshire is one of five monuments to Granite state units at the Gettysburg battlefield.If Haley appears unfamiliar with the history of New Hampshire’s contribution to the preservation of democracy and emancipation, she is certainly well acquainted with South Carolina’s attempt at its destruction, and the history that both preceded and followed it, which has been apparent in her efforts to soften and cover it up.Surely, when she entered her office as governor in the state capitol of South Carolina in Columbia, Haley recognized the larger-than-life brass statue of John C Calhoun, ideologue of the master class and leader of nullification, who declared slavery to be a “positive good”, standing in the middle of the rotunda. The Confederate battle flag that flew above the capitol was raised by an act of the legislature in 1961 as a protest of defiance against civil rights and waved there when she was elected governor.On 17 June, 2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi, murdered nine Black members of the Bible study group of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church, intending to ignite a race war. In the aftermath, after a contentious debate in the legislature, the Confederate flag was removed from the capitol. Haley favored its lowering. In 2020, another John C Calhoun statue, which had stood on a pedestal 115ft above central Charleston for 120 years, was removed.Since the controversy over the Confederate flag, Haley has defended neo-Confederates who see it as a symbol of their “heritage” while trying to separate it from Dylann Roof. “For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble – traditions of history, of heritage and of ancestry,” she stated as governor. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it. At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past. As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints. We do not need to declare a winner and loser.”In a Washington Post op-ed, she wrote that the flag was “a symbol of slavery, discrimination, and hate for many people”. But, she added: “Today’s outrage culture insists that everyone who holds a view that’s different from our own is not just mistaken. They must be evil and shunned. That’s wrong. I know too many good people in South Carolina who think differently about the flag but who are not the least bit racist. The tragedy of all of this is that it makes compromise far less possible.” In New Hampshire, she gave a blander argument, forgetting the false equivalence between those against slavery and those for “heritage”.Lee Atwater, the most adept Republican political consultant to emerge from the south in his generation, did not try to parse his self-justifications. He was also a voracious reader of books on the civil war, especially James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Atwater, of course, knew the cause was slavery. In the mid-1980s, when I was a reporter for the Washington Post, I had long discussions with him on the civil war. He was the one who gave me a tour of the capitol in Columbia and showed me the Calhoun statue.Atwater began as a protege of Strom Thurmond, who invented the modern southern strategy. In 1948, Thurmond, then governor of South Carolina, ran for president as a segregationist on the Dixiecrat party ticket. Elected to the Senate, he switched parties to become a Republican. His support for Richard Nixon in winning the Republican nomination at the convention in 1968 was crucial. Thurmond brought in Atwater to run his 1976 re-election campaign, beginning Atwater’s ascent. In 1984, working for the Reagan re-election campaign, when I first met him, he drew a chart in my reporter’s notebook to diagram the populist-establishment dichotomy along party lines.Race was always the seam that Atwater mined. In 1988, as the campaign director for George HW Bush, he was behind the exploitation of Willie Horton, a Black man convicted of murder in Massachusetts, who on a weekend furlough program raped a white woman. The program had been instituted under a Republican governor, but Horton had been released while the governor Michael Dukakis, Bush’s Democratic opponent, had been in office. Atwater publicly promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate”.Atwater explained in 1991 the evolution of race as a political weapon in the southern strategy. “Y’all don’t quote me on this,” he said. “You start out in 1954 by saying: ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”That same year, Atwater died of brain cancer, but not before, seeking redemption, he issued a deathbed apology to Dukakis for his “naked cruelty”.Haley came on the South Carolina scene post-Thurmond and post-Atwater, certainly aware of those who had turned the state Republican in the southern strategy. Her lowering of the Confederate flag has been her chief credential of moderation. Then Trump came down the escalator. Atwater was the partner in the consulting firm with Roger Stone, Trump’s adviser, who unlike Atwater never has had any use for apologies.Posed a question about the civil war, Haley tried to repeat her old balancing act, but she lost her equilibrium. Even if she had not been stunned and was instead fluent, she could not bridge the gap in the party of Trump with ‘lost cause lite’. Scrambling belatedly to say the questioner was “a Democratic plant” and that the civil war was about slavery after all did not solve her problem. Trump has now dispensed with the code words and symbols of the southern strategy. He has gone to a darker place, railing about “vermin” and “poisoning of the blood”.The unexpected incident showed Haley to be slight, frightened and cowardly. Her deeper problem is that she is a slave to her party.
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to president Bill Clinton 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 More

Whether or not the 2024 US presidential election presents the expected Joe Biden v Donald Trump rematch, much will be at stake.From the future of reproductive rights to the chances of meaningful action on climate change, from the strength of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia to the fate of democracy in America itself, existential issues are set to come to the fore.Economy“It’s the economy, stupid.” So said the Democratic strategist James Carville, in 1992, as an adviser to Bill Clinton. Most Americans thought stewardship of the economy should change: Clinton beat an incumbent president, George HW Bush.More than 30 years later, under Joe Biden, the post-Covid recovery seems on track. Unemployment is low, the Dow at all-time highs. That should bode well for Biden but the key question is whether enough Americans think the economy is strong, or think it is working for them in particular. It seems many do not. Cost-of-living concerns dominate public polling, inflation remains high. Republican threats to social security and Medicare might offset such worries – hence Biden (and indeed Donald Trump) seizing on any hint that a Republican candidate (see, Nikki Haley) might pose a threat to such programmes.EqualityRon DeSantis made attacks on LGBTQ+ rights a hallmark of his attempt to “Make America Florida”. The hardline governor’s tanking campaign suggests how well that has gone down but Republican efforts to demonise all forms of so-called “woke” ideology should not be discounted. There have been tangible results: anti-trans legislation, book bans and restrictions on LGBTQ+ issues in education, the end of race-based affirmative action in university admissions thanks to the conservative-packed supreme court.Continuing struggles on Capitol Hill over immigration, and Republicans’ usual focus on crime in major cities, show traditional race-inflected battles will play their customary role on the campaign trail, particularly as Trump uses extremist “blood and soil” rhetoric in front of eager crowds. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, a distinctly worrying sign: Black and Hispanic support for Biden is no longer such a sure thing.AbortionHigh-ranking Democrats are clear: the party will focus on Republican attacks on abortion rights, from the Dobbs v Jackson supreme court ruling that struck down Roe v Wade last year to the forthcoming mifepristone case, draconian bans in Republican states and candidates’ support for such bans.For Democrats, it makes tactical sense: the threat to women’s reproductive rights is a rare issue on which the party polls very strongly and has clearly fuelled a series of electoral wins, even in conservative states, since Dobbs was handed down.Trump, however, clearly also recognises the potency of the issue – while trying to dodge responsibility for appointing three justices who voted to strike down Roe. Haley and DeSantis have tried to duck questions about their records and plans on abortion. Whoever the Republican candidate is, they can expect relentless attacks.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionForeign policyThe Israel-Gaza war presents a fiendish proposition for Biden: how to satisfy or merely mollify both the Israel lobby and large sections of his own party, particularly the left and the young more sympathetic to the Palestinians.Proliferating protests against Israel’s pounding of Gaza and the West Bank show the danger of coming unglued from the base. A recent Capitol Hill hearing, meanwhile, saw Republicans claim a political victory with the resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania over alleged antisemitism amid student protests for Palestinian rights.Elsewhere, Biden continues to lead a global coalition in support of Ukraine in its fight against Russia but further US funding is held up by Republicans seeking draconian immigration reform, some keen to abandon Kyiv altogether. Throw in the lasting effects of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan (teed up by Trump but fumbled by Biden), questions about what the US should do should China attack Taiwan, and the threat Trump poses to US membership of Nato, and heavy fire on foreign policy is guaranteed throughout election year.DemocracyIf Biden is happy to be seen as a protector of democracy abroad, he is increasingly keen to stress the threat to democracy at home. After all, his most likely opponent refused to accept the result of the 2020 election, incited the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, has been linked to plans to slash the federal government in a second term, and has even said he wants to be a “dictator” on day one.Trump will no doubt maintain the lie that his 2020 defeat was the result of electoral fraud as various criminal cases proceed towards trial, 17 of 91 state and federal charges concerning election subversion. For Biden, the issue has been profitable at the polls. DeSantis and Haley, though, must dance around the subject, seeking not to alienate Trump supporters. The New York Times sums up their responses, dispiritingly, thus: DeSantis “has signed restrictions on voting rights in Florida, and long avoided questions about 2020”; Haley “said Biden’s victory was legitimate, but has played up the risk of voter fraud more broadly”.ClimateIf Trump threatens US democracy, the climate crisis threatens the US itself. From forest fires to hurricanes and catastrophic floods, it is clear climate change is real. Public polling reflects this: 70% of Americans – strikingly, including 50% of Republicans – want meaningful action. But that isn’t reflected in Republican campaigning. Trump says he doesn’t believe human activity contributes to climate change, nor that climate change is making extreme weather worse, and is opposed to efforts to boost clean energy. Haley does believe humans are causing climate change and making weather worse, but worked for Trump as UN ambassador when the US pulled out of the Paris climate deal and opposes clean energy incentives. DeSantis is closer to Trump – and wants to end regulation of emissions.Biden’s record on climate may be criticised by campaigners but his record in office places him firmly against such Republican views. More

Social media made John Fetterman’s battle with mental depression last year even more difficult, the Democratic US senator from Pennsylvania said Sunday.Fetterman said the comments on social media about him and his family played a role in the depression which sent him to a hospital for six weeks in February. “It’s an accelerant, absolutely,” he said.The first-term senator added: “It’s just astonishing that so many people want to take the time to hop online and to say things to a stranger that never did anything to you – especially members of my family.”Fetterman’s blunt remarks about his depression, the resulting hospitalization, and the effect of social media came during an exclusive interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that the news program aired Sunday.In the pre-recorded conversation with Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, Fetterman said virtually everyone he knew advised him to stay off social media after he defeated Republican celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz for an open Senate seat in November of 2022.Fetterman – once the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and the ex-lieutenant governor of the state – triumphed despite vocal support for Oz from former president Donald Trump.Victory for Fetterman helped give his party control of the Senate and cemented him as a rising star among leftists. And Fetterman, 54, said he subsequently “made the mistake to check … out” social media commentary several weeks after defeating Oz.Fetterman said he felt how doing so palpably worsened the dread he experienced whenever he pondered being sworn in on 3 January 2023 – thoughts that accompanied a sudden weight loss and lack of physical energy to get out of bed at the time.“It wasn’t the things said … but it was the volume, just the, like, where is this coming from?” Fetterman said Sunday. “And it’s like, is this [what it] would be the rest of my life? Look what it’s done to me, and more importantly what has this done for my family?”Fetterman has previously said his depressive symptoms at the time prevented him from engaging in the usual banter or work discussions with his staff, and he began avoiding spending time with his wife, Gisele, and their three children.Ultimately, on 15 February, which was his son’s 14th birthday, Fetterman admitted himself into the Walter Reed medical center for clinical depression treatment.He remained there six weeks, which is longer than typical for inpatient treatment for depression. And the hospital stay also came after Fetterman suffered a stroke that he says nearly killed him during his Senate campaign. The earlier medical ordeal also required him to be hospitalized for a time, and Republicans pointed at the episode to argue that he was unfit for office.Fetterman told Welker in Sunday’s interview that he feared his time in politics was all but over after his mental health hospitalization.“I had assumed that would be the end of my career,” said Fetterman, who wore his usual uniform of a black hooded sweatshirt and matching shorts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Fetterman has won praise for being transparent about his mental health care, with experts saying it could inspire people who need similar aid to overcome their reluctance about seeking it out. He recently earned flattering news coverage by vowing to block the multibillion-dollar sale of US Steel to the Japanese company Nippon Steel, in no small part because Braddock is home to a major US Steel plant.Furthermore, he drew headlines by sending US senator Bob Menendez, who is facing federal corruption charges, a $200 Cameo message from George Santos, the expelled former congressman who is grappling with his own pending fraud-related criminal counts.Fetterman on Sunday pledged to continue discussing his bout with depression as long “as that conversation helps”.“It’s a risk that I wanted to take because I wanted to help people … know that I don’t want them to suffer the way … I’ve been,” Fetterman said.Additionally, Fetterman characterized his social media use as selective now that his depression has been in remission, and he encouraged viewers to consider adopting a similar approach.“I would just warn anybody … I’ve never noticed anyone to believe that their mental health has been supported by spending any kind of time on social media,” Fetterman said. “And if they do, I’d love to meet that person.” More

The re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 could “end American democracy as we know it”, according to three women who worked for him in the White House during his chaotic term in office.All three gave testimony to the US House committee investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat as well as the 6 January 6 Capitol attack staged by his supporters. And they warned in an unprecedented television interview on Sunday that time was short to prevent a second Trump administration in which they insist his behavior would be much worse.“People in general have short memories, and might forget the chaos of the Trump years,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary who resigned on the day of the deadly Capitol riot, said on ABC’s This Week.“They also might not just be paying attention to what he’s saying now – and the threat to democracy that exists. It does really concern me if he makes it to the general [election] that he could win. I’m still hopeful that we can defeat him in the primaries, but we’re running out of time.”Matthews was joined in the interview by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a key witness against Trump during the House committee’s public hearings in 2022, and Alyssa Farah Griffin, his former communications director, who said she dreaded him returning to office.“Fundamentally, a second Trump term could mean the end of American democracy as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly,” Griffin said.“We all witnessed him trying to steal a democratic election before and go into historic and unconstitutional lengths to do so. That just shows he’s willing to basically break every barrier to get into power and to stay into power.“What scares me as much as him and his retribution is the almost cult-like following he has, the threats, the harassment, the death threats that you get when he targets you, is really horrifying and has no place in our American discourse.”About two days before the interview aired, someone placed a fake emergency call to police that prompted armed officers to arrive at the home of Maine’s secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, after she removed Trump from the state’s presidential primary under the US constitution’s insurrection clause. Bellows was not home when the attempted “swatting” call was made.Hutchinson, ex-aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, said voters needed to believe Trump when he said he would be a dictator on his first day back in the White House.“The fact that he feels that he needs to lean into being a dictator alone shows that he is a weak and feeble man,” she said.Matthews, meanwhile, said Trump had already signaled what his second administration would look like.“We don’t need to speculate because we already saw it play out,” she said.“To this day, he still doubles down on the fact that he thinks that the election was stolen and fraudulent. And his rhetoric has just gotten increasingly erratic. He’s literally called for things like doing away with parts of the constitution, [and] wanting to weaponize the department of justice to enact revenge on his political enemies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I knew that coming forward and speaking out against Donald Trump I could … face security threats, or death threats, online harassment. Despite all the personal sacrifice, I knew that ultimately it was the right thing to do. I just would encourage others to come forward because they’re running out of time in order to try to stop Trump from being in the Oval Office again.”The courage of the three women in speaking against Trump was a recurrent theme in the interview by This Week’s co-anchor Jonathan Karl. Martin and Hutchinson spoke of secret meetings in the basement of the Capitol with Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans who sat on the House committee, and their loss of friendships with others in the Trump White House who felt the women had betrayed them.“There were critical parts of history that the public would not know if not for Cassidy Hutchinson,” Griffin said.“Other senior officials witnessed them, but did not come forward. They did not testify, whether it was credible threats about the attack on the Capitol, that people showing up that day were going to be armed, that there was a scheme to try to stop the vice-president certifying the election.“I credit these women who are younger than me and had not as senior of titles, and stepped forward. For me, I want to be able to look my future kids in the eye and say when history called, I did the right thing, and I had the courage to do it.“That matters to me more than any future job or power structure that might exist if he’s president again.” More

More than 300,000 people were on track to cross the US-Mexico border in December without authorization and are being processed by American immigration officials, a tally that sets the latest monthly record, according to government figures obtained by CBS.The number of crossings, averaging roughly 8,400 apprehensions a day by US border agents, comes amid urgent efforts by the Joe Biden White House to curb migrant flows that have become a domestic political liability for him as he seeks re-election in 2024.In the first 28 days of December, border agents processed nearly 235,000 people without permission crossed the southern border in between ports of entry, alongside 50,000 who entered the country under an appointment system. Included in that number were nearly 96,000 parents traveling together with their children.The previous monthly high in US-Mexico border crossings was in September, when the agency processed nearly 270,000.Earlier in December, the White House had hinted it may accept new limits on asylum seekers as well as an expansion of detention and deportation efforts – a potential reversal of immigration liberalizations announced early in Biden’s presidency.Mexico and Venezuela on Saturday announced that they had restarted repatriation flights of Venezuelans migrants in Mexico. That comes after a high-level meeting between US and Mexico officials aimed at curbing the flow while maintaining cross-border trade.Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said last week that he had received a request from Biden to discuss the issue. “He was worried about the situation on the border because of the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at the border,” López Obrador later said, according to the Associated Press. “He called me, saying we had to look for a solution together.”A recent CBS poll found that immigration ranks second among concerns facing the country, behind inflation but ahead of concerns about the stability of the democratic system.According to government figures, most people who entered the US without permission are released with court notices, without any asylum screenings. The immigration court system, with fewer than 800 immigration judges, has a backlog of 3m pending cases – or 4,500 for each judge, and it may take three years to clear.A caravan of about 6,000 people was reportedly making its way north through Mexico toward the US, placing additional pressure on authorities. On Sunday’s political talkshows, the mayors of Chicago and Denver described the burden that the backlog of immigration cases was placing on their cities.Republican US senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CBS’s Face the Nation that “expedited removal [of migrants] is on the table” amid negotiations with Democrats for approval of an aid deal for Ukraine. Graham said he looks “at the border problems as a national security nightmare for America”.Later, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat, told CBS: “This is clearly an international and federal crisis that local governments are being asked to subsidize, and this is clearly unsustainable.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe mayor placed blame on Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, whose administration is sending planes and buses of migrants to northern cities. Abbott, he said, “is determined to continue to sow seeds of chaos”.In the same conversation, the Denver mayor, Mike Johnston, said his city had received 35,000 migrants in December who had been successfully integrated. “What we don’t want is people arriving at two in the morning at a city and [at] county buildings with women and children outside in 10-degree weather and no support,” he said.Ohio congressman Mike Turner, chairman of the US House intelligence committee, told ABC’s This Week that White House action on the issue would have to come before he and his fellow Republicans moved on administration requests on Congress to approve a national security package that includes aid for Ukraine and Israel in their respective ongoing wars.“We have cities across the country who are having … huge impacts, who are calling on the administration to address it,” Turner added. More

Jonathan Jackson’s eyes brim with tears as he recalls the 1984 campaign of his father, Jesse, to become the United States’ first Black president. “To see my great-grandmother, who couldn’t read or write, vote,” the US congressman says, his voice faltering. “It let me see how meaningful it was to be able to vote.”Jackson is a lifelong political activist who has come to elected office late in the game. He was a spokesperson for the Rainbow Push Coalition, an international human and civil rights organisation founded by his father. In Chicago the younger Jackson fought against the closure of public schools and worked on false-confessions cases involving the police. More recently, he co-sponsored a House resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.Next month Jackson will turn 58 and mark his first year representing Illinois’s first congressional district in the House of Representatives. He stepped up after the Democratic congressman Bobby Rush, whom he calls “Uncle Bobby”, retired after three decades representing Chicago’s South Side.In an interview at his Washington office on Capitol Hill, Jackson – whose wife, Marilyn, leads the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky – admits that it had been the last thing on his mind until he took part in a radio show and was urged to run. “My parents were 80. The family’s been through a lot. I want to make Mom and Dad proud and so I jumped in there and it was a good uplift for them,” he says.Jackson’s parents, Jesse and Jacqueline Jackson, are veterans of the civil rights movement. Jesse witnessed Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, twice ran for president in the 1980s and is now living with Parkinson’s disease. (Jackson’s brother Jesse Jackson Jr served time in prison after pleading guilty to spending $750,000 in campaign money on personal items.)Jackson continues: “I have to talk with Dad every day. He’s a junkie for this stuff. He’s in a wheelchair and not moving around as fast but his mind is super sharp as he has challenges from Parkinson’s. He knows the terrain better than anyone I can imagine.”He describes serving in Congress as a “tremendous honour” that often yields “awe and wonderment”. But some days, he chuckles, “it feels like a bad high school that you’ve transferred into” and on others “you feel like you’re walking a tightrope over a pool of sharks without a safety net”.Jackson is a believer in God’s grace. He and his father were arrested outside the South African embassy in DC in 1986 while protesting against racial apartheid, and then again some 35 years later outside the supreme court while protesting for voting rights.One of six siblings, Jackson recalls the family home in Chicago always buzzing with activity and engagement with social causes. He says: “Our phone at the house would ring like a switchboard and my mother and father were both activists, if you will.“I remember the last time we saw President Nelson Mandela of South Africa and he could barely walk any more. He heard my father was in the country and asked him to come to visit him. My father came in the room. The president was trying to stand up and he hollered out to my father: ‘Freedom fighter!’“I would like to think that I come from the background of freedom fighters, not politicians of who’s dividing the pie, who gets what, when, where and how?”When Jesse Jackson first ran for president in 1984, Jonathan was 18 and able to vote for the first time. He was also a campaign surrogate and witness to the backlash from a nation resistant to the idea of a Black major-party nominee. He says: “We started registering the record amount of death threats and it was just insane.“The headlines: what does he want, can he run? Like, the audacity of being able to run? I remember one time we were in a motorcade coming down through from Washington to Virginia and they still had chain gangs out here on the highway, and to see those men stop and wave with pride, you realised it was a bigger issue.”Jesse won four contests and 18% of the popular vote, finishing third behind Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Four years later, when he tried again, Jonathan finished college early so he could travel the country with his father.“I would describe that experience as sitting in the cockpit of American history, that we saw all these things happening and we saw it on the news the next day. By 88, you realised this was 20 years after the Rev Martin Luther King’s assassination and how much pride my father had in trying to move King’s dream for political empowerment, justice, economic empowerment forward,” Jackson said.This time Jesse won 13 contests and 29% of the popular vote but still came in behind Michael Dukakis for the nomination. At the 1988 Democratic national convention, he shared a stage with Rosa Parks, whom he introduced as the “mother of the civil rights movement”. Jackson muses that he must find a photograph of that moment so he can put it up in his office.“It wasn’t a political campaign. It was a more of a moral crusade and, from that, we’re so grateful to see President Obama win and Mrs Harris become vice-president and [Raphael] Warnock become a US senator from Georgia and that tipped the balance of power to save the democracy again.”Jesse also channeled energy into social justice and freelance diplomacy, risking friction with US officials by inserting himself into fraught global hotspots. Jackson was at his father’s side during negotiations with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad for the release of the captured US navy lieutenant Robert Goodman, and with Fidel Castro for the release of 22 Americans held in Cuba.“When we went to visit Saddam Hussein and they were talking about the weapons of mass destruction and the human shields, we didn’t have the portfolio of the United States government. We didn’t have a ranking member or chairmanship or United States military, went over there with just a Bible and some imams and rabbis,” Jackson says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I believe in the faith community. I’ve seen it work and that’s been at the core. It’s not been politics. It’s been faith that had us travel around the world in some dangerous places with God’s grace.”This philosophy informs Jackson’s decision to sign on as an original co-sponsor of a House resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A member of the House foreign affairs committee, he had visited Israel a month before the 7 October attack by Hamas. During a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, he posed a question about a reciprocal visa waiver programme but found the prime minister evasive.“I can see that he’s a blame shifter. He will not answer the question,” he says. “He took the time to answer all the other questions but not that. I’ve never seen him seek a two-state solution in all these many years … I’ve seen him court Hamas, not wanting the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] to have influence over the Gaza territories.“I know his involvement in this territory over the years and so my basic frame of reference on asking for a ceasefire is not to seek revenge. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will leave you blind and snaggletoothed. You’ve got to break the cycle of pain.”The world was aligned in sympathy for Israel but Israel has squandered that opportunity, Jackson argues: “What happened to Israel was horrific and it was brutal. It was a massacre, disgraceful, and there was so much goodwill and I said, this man is going to mess this up. It’s just not in him. He’s a one-string guitar. The only tool he has is a hammer and he’s not a peacemaker.”The Hamas attack signified failures of both intelligence and diplomacy, Jackson argues, but going forward there are lessons to learn from countries such as South Africa and Rwanda in seeking reconciliation: “After 400 years, African Americans have never been told to pick up arms, to seek any sort of reparations or any sort of vengeance.“We’ve been taught reconciliation, so my position was clear morally from my cultural point of view: to seek reconciliation and that starts now. The spirit of Rev Martin Luther King that peace is not the absence of noise, peace is the presence of justice. The Scripture that stayed on my mind was: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.’ Peace is possible if you seek it and I have not seen Mr Netanyahu seek peace.”The elder Jackson served in the Senate from 1991 to 1997 as a shadow delegate for the District of Columbia but never quite lost his outsider status. It would be understandable if his son were still breaking in life in Congress like a pair of new shoes. But when asked about Joe Biden’s handling of the war – seen by many on the left as ostentatiously pro-Israel and lacking empathy for Palestinians – Jackson is deftly on-message.“President Biden is doing a tremendous job,” he says. “Like any of us in office, we have regrets. I don’t know what his will be at the end of the day, but I know he would like to see an alternative option.“These people are now almost defenceless, certainly the babies, so I want the humanitarian aid to flow. Intelligence is what is needed now more than bombs to find these people. If you … agree that the Palestinian people are being held hostage and you agree that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, you don’t kill the hostage by going after the hostage taker.”Jackson’s Illinois district includes an area known as Little Palestine. In October he attended the funeral of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy stabbed 26 times by his family’s landlord because he was Muslim, according to police. For Jackson, such concerns are more pressing than whether Biden stands to lose Arab American votes in the 2024 presidential election.“I get a call almost every other day when one of these bombs goes on the pain that someone is suffering because of a family’s relative has died. I get a call once a week from someone that’s still in Gaza trying to get on a state department list, so I can’t think about November and who’s voting for calling the state department and other agencies to try and still get people out,” he says.Opinion polls show Biden struggling among African American voters after his efforts to pass racial justice and voting rights legislation stalled in Congress. Jackson comments simply: “Some parts of his record will rival that of LBJ [the former president Lyndon Baines Johnson]. I am proud of his work. Let me leave it with, there’s a lot has been done and there’s a lot more to do.”Then he bursts out laughing.What of his father, who was born in the Jim Crow era and lived to see Obama assume the mantle of first Black president – only to see a backward lurch to Trump and white nationalism?“We are eternally optimistic. There are so many stories of progress and hope. Although this is very dangerous, we’ve not been here: two speakers to turn over in one year; we went 20 days without one of our three branches functioning. We saw a violent insurrection happen here and all of the insurrectionists have not been prosecuted. So he’s very concerned about the fragility of our democracy. We’ve never been here before.” More