Evelyn Reynolds

The Republican congressman George Santos, who was expelled from Congress on Friday, still faces a sweeping federal indictment over his use of campaigns funds as well as other ethics questions that stem from his improbable, and indeed hard to believe, political career.The walls started to crumble for him in mid-December last year when the New York Times challenged many aspects of Santos’s supposed background – for one, that he is the “embodiment of the American dream” and had run for Congress to safeguard it for others.What is particularly remarkable about Santos is his ability to dodge and evade whenever he is called out for factual inaccuracies.Some choice examples:1Graduated from Baruch CollegeClaim: Santos, the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent, described himself as a New York public college graduate at Baruch. The college found no record of Santos as a student.Santos’s response: In an interview with the New York Post soon after the allegations surfaced, Santos confessed he hadn’t graduated from “from any institution of higher learning” and had used a “poor choice of words”.2Held positions at Citigroup and Goldman SachsClaim: He said he became a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor”, holding jobs at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Citigroup and Goldman Sachs said they had no record of Santos ever working there.Santos’s response: He told the Post he had “never worked directly” for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup.3Landlord of 13 propertiesClaim: Santos said he ran a family-owned portfolio of 13 properties. He asserted in an interview that his “family’s firm”, the Devolder Organization, managed $80m in assets.Santos’s response: He acknowledged that, far from having an extensive property portfolio, he had been in debt to his landlord – a result of medical debt from his mother’s cancer battle. “It’s the vulnerability of being human. I am not embarrassed by it.”4Dog rescuerClaim: He said he ran animal rescue charity, Friends of Pets United. There had been no dog charity, though he may have swindled a veteran over a pet’s medical bills and swindled off an Amish dog breeder with a bad check, according to Politico.Santos’s response: Santos told City & State that he’d worked on the non-profit but “never claimed to fly solo” on the group. “I was the guy picking up poop, cleaning, getting people, doing campaigns online,” he said.5Lost employees in Pulse shootingClaim: He said the Devolder organization had “lost four employees” at the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. But a check over the victims found that none of the 49 victims were connected to the company.Santos’s response: Santos backtracked, saying the four people had not worked for him directly. “But we did have people who were being hired to work for the company at the time … but yes, we did lose four people who were going to be coming to work for the company.”6Family escaped NazisClaim: Santos’s campaign website said that his mother was Jewish and his grandparents escaped the Nazis during the second world war. Santos’s response: Santos later clarified that he was “clearly Catholic”, but claimed his grandmother told stories about being Jewish and later converting to Catholicism. “I never claimed to be Jewish,” Santos said. “I am Catholic. Because I learned my maternal family had a Jewish background, I said I was ‘Jew-ish’.”7Former Disney actorClaim: His Wikipedia biography said he landed roles on Disney Channel shows such as Hannah Montana. Politico noted that if Santos’s Wikipedia entry, which contained the Hannah Montana claim, was not written by Santos – who was then posing as Anthony Devolder – it would mean it was written by someone posing as Santos. Santos’s response: Santos’s communications director, Naysa Woomer, refused to respond.8A varied résuméClaim: He said he had been a Broadway producer who had helped produce Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, a 2011 rock musical; a journalist in Brazil; and the target of an “assassination”.Santos’s response: “I am not a criminal,” he told the New York Post. “My sins here are embellishing my résumé. I’m sorry.”9Niece was kidnappedClaim: He said his five-year-old niece has been kidnapped from a playground by Chinese men, possibly from the Chinese government. Santos’s response: “Look, I don’t want to go into like, conspiracy theory,” he told the Times. “But you know, if the shoe fits, right?”10Mother was at WTC on 9/11Claim: He said his mother, Fatima Devolder, had been in the World Trade Center on September 11. Santos’s response: Despite immigration records showing she was not in the US at the time, he told One America News that “the toxic dust that permeated throughout Manhattan and my mother being present [in] downtown Manhattan” led to her death in 2016.11Drag queen in RioClaim: He initially denied being the drag queen Kitara Ravache at the Rio carnival in 2008. Santos’s response: He said: “I had fun at a festival. Sue me for having a life.”12Used campaign funds for Botox and OnlyFansClaim: A congressional ethics committee said $50,000 in campaign funds had been used to pay for Botox treatments, pay down personal credit card bills and other debt; make a $4,127.80 purchase at Hermès; and for small purchases at Sephora and OnlyFans.Santos’s response: Santos told the Fox Business Network: “I’ll indulge you this, I just discovered what OnlyFans was three weeks ago, when it was brought up in a discussion in my office. I was oblivious to the whole concept.”13Local paper broke scandal newsClaim: The North Shore Leader, a local newspaper on Long Island that covers Great Neck – a part of Santos’s New York congressional district three, a wealthy area – began reporting on his alleged fraud in 2020, referring to him as George Scamtos. Editor Kim Tyndall said “voters ignored or didn’t avail themselves” of the reporting.Santos’s response: “I ran in 2020 for the same exact seat for Congress and I got away with it then,” he told Piers Morgan, adding he “didn’t think” he would get caught.14Lies would not deny him successClaim: Whatever exagerations he had made, he said, the controversy would “not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good”.Santos’s response: After his fate was sealed on Friday, Santos stormed out of Congress and warned that the members had “set a new dangerous precedent for themselves”, adding “to hell with this place”. More

The House voted on Friday to expel the Republican George Santos, of New York, after a critical ethics report on his conduct that accused him of converting campaign donations for his own use. He was just the sixth member in the chamber’s history to be ousted by colleagues. The expulsion push is the latest chapter in what has been a spectacular fall from grace for Santos, a first-term lawmaker initially celebrated as an up-and-comer after he flipped a district from Democrats last year and helped Republicans win control of the House. Here is a look back at some of his claims which proved untrue More

Sandra Day O’Connor, who has died aged 93, had two principal claims to fame. The first was indisputable: she was the first woman to serve as a justice of the US supreme court, holding office from 1981 to 2006. The second claim was less certain but widely believed among her fellow US citizens – that hers was the key vote that put George W Bush rather than Al Gore into the White House after the cliffhanging election of 2000.With the outcome dependent on Florida’s 25 electoral college votes, both candidates had asked a succession of state and federal courts to rule on the validity of Florida’s ramshackle voting procedures. A three-week succession of contradictory judicial rulings inevitably brought the case before the US’s highest court.By this time O’Connor had already served in the supreme court for nearly two decades and had repeatedly cast the deciding vote in a succession of 5-4 judgments by the nine justices. With the court more or less evenly divided between conservatives and reformers, she had emerged as the reliable centrist in a wide range of criminal, social and political decisions.The presidential election case centred on a Florida supreme court ruling that had extended the deadline for vote recounts. The inexorable reference to the US supreme court was greeted with private dismay by the justices. One of the conservatives, Clarence Thomas, later told a congressional hearing: “If there was a way … to have avoided getting involved in that very difficult decision and simultaneously living up to my oath, I would have done it.”The ostensible issue was a narrow technical point with, as it turned out, vast international consequences. In her questioning, O’Connor repeatedly asked whether the Florida court was trying to change the rules in the middle of the election (a breach of the constitutional requirement for equal protection under the law).Eventually, with her colleagues split down the middle, she voted to stop the recount, overturning the Florida judgment, and in effect awarding the election to Bush. There were, of course, immediate accusations that her Republican background had determined her decision.Justice John Paul Stevens, one of those in the minority, warned that by questioning the impartiality of the Florida courts, the supreme court’s decision undermined confidence in judges, which “is the true backbone of the rule of law”. In his dissenting judgment he declared: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”In 2013, O’Connor herself expressed misgivings that the supreme court had taken on the Bush v Gore case at all, saying that the case “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less than perfect reputation”.The supreme court had been an all-male institution for 191 years when President Ronald Reagan nominated O’Connor as its 102nd associate justice in 1981, elevating her from the Arizona court of appeals.She joined the eight men at the top of the legal hierarchy largely because Reagan had got himself into a political hole in his 1980 bid for the presidency, by opposing a constitutional move to outlaw sexual discrimination.The Equal Rights Amendment was a lively issue because, though Congress had passed it in 1972, its ratification by the required 38 state legislatures missed the 1979 deadline, which was then extended to June 1982. With two years to go and three ratifications needed for victory, supporters ferociously lobbied the 1980 presidential candidates in the last chance they had for effective political action. (The amendment eventually died in November 1983 for want of state support.)Reagan found himself squeezed between the demands of a block of increasingly significant female voters and the resistance of the die-hard Republican right. The battle over the amendment had, inevitably, become entwined with that about abortion. In an effort to divert this complex row Reagan promised that one of his first nominations to the supreme court would be a woman.He was called on to honour this pledge far sooner than he expected. Barely had he arrived in the White House than Justice Potter Stewart announced his retirement. In his memoirs, Reagan said that his brief to the attorney general had been to find a female judge “who would interpret the constitution, not try to rewrite it”.O’Connor was nominated because, he wrote, “everything we had learned about her during our months of searching convinced me she was a woman of great legal intellect, fairness, and integrity – the antithesis of an ideological judge, and just what I wanted on the court”.His judgment in this instance turned out to be a great deal sounder than many of his others. Over the following decades O’Connor became a widely respected judge – and was seen by many as a strong contender to follow William Rehnquist as chief justice – and she established herself as one of the most important voices in the supreme court. Time and again she faced a 4-4 split in the court’s provisional opinions and was called upon either to devise a compromise before the formal judgment was proclaimed or, if compromise was impossible, to join one of the factions. Hers was the deciding vote on many controversial cases, when she often sided with her more liberal colleagues, including on gender equality cases, affirmative action and in upholding for many years the landmark abortion ruling Roe v Wade.Her instinct was always to err on the side of judicial restraint and to accept the judgment of state courts, unless there appeared compelling grounds for federal intervention; this issue of states’ rights, enshrined in the 10th amendment, lies at the heart of US government and is often the foundation of political and legal disputes.O’Connor had an unusual background for a supreme court justice. Describing herself as a “cowgirl from the Arizona desert”, she was born in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Ada Mae (nee Wilkey) and Harry Day, and grew up on the 198,000-acre ranch her grandfather had acquired on the Arizona-New Mexico border in 1880, later leaving home to live with her grandmother in El Paso so that she could attend a private girls’ school.From there she went to Stanford University in California, gaining a first in economics and then, as third best in a field of 102, a bachelor of law degree. At the top of that year was Rehnquist, supreme court justice from 1971 and chief justice from 1986 until his death in 2005. The two students became close friends.Rehnquist’s progress was rather smoother than his classmate’s. Shortly after her graduation in 1952 she married her fellow student John Jay O’Connor and began a fruitless hunt for a legal position in California. As she commented later of the firms she approached, “none had ever hired a woman before as a lawyer and they were not prepared to do so”. The only offer she received was to work at one of the companies as a secretary.When her husband joined the US army legal service she accompanied him to Germany for three years and worked as a civilian lawyer for the Quartermaster Corps. The first of their three children was born shortly after their return to Arizona in 1957, and though O’Connor started a legal practice in Phoenix it did little business and she was mostly preoccupied with domestic life.She resumed her full-time career in 1965, serving as the state’s assistant attorney general for four years. When a seat in the Arizona state senate became vacant in the middle of its term, the state governor appointed O’Connor to fill it; she later took the seat as a Republican when it came up for election in 1972.With a reputation for hard work and a precise and concise mind, she was elected the chamber’s majority leader in 1973, the first woman to hold such a position in US history. Her voting record was of moderate conservatism, with occasional excursions into social activism on issues such as contraception and women’s legal rights. After two terms in the legislature, however, she decided there was a brighter future in the judicial branch of government.Under the system of voting for judges prevailing in many US states, she won election on the Republican ticket in 1975 to the county superior court, where she gained a reputation as a stern but fair judge, deeply concerned about prison conditions for those she sentenced. She also became more involved in politics at a national level, supporting Reagan’s candidacy against Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential nomination battle.O’Connor was encouraged by some of Arizona’s leading Republicans to run for the governorship against the Democratic candidate, Bruce Babbitt, in the 1978 elections, but she refused. In what was widely seen as a move by Babbitt to neutralise a dangerous political rival, he appointed her to the Arizona court of appeals soon after he took office.In 1981, O’Connor was nominated as a supreme court judge. At her Senate confirmation hearing she laid out her philosophy of judicial restraint. Spelling out her commitment to the constitution’s separation of powers, she said: “Judges are not only not authorised to engage in executive or legislative functions, they are also ill-equipped to do so.” In the subsequent vote by the chamber she only missed unanimous confirmation because one of the 100 members was absent through illness.During her years in the court she became extremely popular among the staff as a humorous and approachable boss. She started an aerobics class for female employees, in which she was an enthusiastic participant, and became well known for the informality of the conferences she held with young lawyers, handing out popcorn while discussing cases.Largely under her influence, the court steered a firm, middle-of-the-road course through most of the contentious issues it had to confront. That was a solid achievement in itself. But her greater contribution was successfully to destroy the myth that women lacked judicial skills of the highest calibre. She cut a very large hole in the glass ceiling.O’Connor retired from the supreme court in 2006, after her husband developed Alzheimer’s disease; he died in 2009. She continued as an active public speaker, and was an advocate for civic education. In 2018 she announced that she had developed early stage Alzheimer’s herself and would no longer play a part in public affairs.She is survived by her sons, Scott, Brian and Jay, six grandchildren and her brother, Alan. Sandra Day O’Connor, jurist, born 26 March 1930; died 1 December 2023Harold Jackson died in 2021 More

The New York Republican, fabulist and accused fraudster George Santos has been expelled from Congress.The vote to expel Santos, the second since his election last year, required a two-thirds majority of those present. The final tally on Friday was 311-114, with two members recorded present and eight absent.Santos therefore becomes only the sixth member ever expelled from the US House. The first three fought for the Confederacy in the civil war. The other two were expelled after being convicted of crimes.Santos has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal fraud charges but has not been tried. A previous expulsion attempt, mounted by members of his own party, failed in part because senior Democrats voted no, citing the dangers of expelling members without convictions secured.But a damning report from the House ethics committee, detailing how Santos used campaign funds for purchases including travel, cosmetic treatment and luxury goods, changed the political equation.Democrats and Republicans introduced motions to force the expulsion vote this week. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, sought to persuade Santos to resign – an overture Santos rejected. In the event, Johnson and other senior Republicans voted not to expel. But nor did Johnson attempt to whip his party into line.A majority of Republicans, 112 of 222, voted not to expel. Five did not vote, 105 supporting the motion. Among the New York delegation, 22 members voted for expulsion. Three New York Republicans voted no: Santos himself, Claudia Tenney and Elise Stefanik, the House Republican conference chair.Robert Reich, a Berkeley professor, former US labor secretary and Guardian columnist, said: “George Santos may be gone from Congress, but a majority of Republicans voted against expelling him – including the entire House GOP leadership. The Republican party once again showed that it doesn’t really care about ethics or the law, only power.”Johnson took the gavel to announce the final vote tally. Santos, who stood through the vote with his coat round his shoulders, soon left the chamber.Sharon Eliza Nichols, communications director for Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Democratic delegate for the District of Columbia, alluded to Cinderella when she said: “And just like that, without even a goodbye twirl, George Santos hopped in her carriage and departed.”But he has shown no sign of going quietly. On Thursday, railing against the looming vote, Santos attacked other members, introducing his own expulsion resolution against Jamaal Bowman (a New York Democrat who admitted pulling a fire alarm in a congressional office building, a misdemeanour) and calling Max Miller, a Republican from Ohio, an “accused … woman beater” in a clash on the House floor.Santos’s district must now hold a special election within 90 days. On Friday, the Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, said she was “prepared to undertake the solemn responsibility of filling the vacancy in New York’s third district. The people of Long Island deserve nothing less.”Santos won the seat as part of a New York Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections last year, a key part of Democrats’ loss of control of the House.But as Santos’s résumé quickly unraveled under press scrutiny, alleged criminal behaviour, in Brazil and the US, was also brought to light.Amid a flood of increasingly bizarre stories, including about Santos’s past as a drag performer in Brazil and a claim to have been a volleyball star at a college he did not attend, Santos admitted embellishing his record but denied wrongdoing.Achieving notoriety, he made common cause with Republican extremists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a prominent Trump ally.Kevin McCarthy, the speaker from January until October, resisted taking action other than withdrawing committee assignments, in large part because the GOP controls the House by a slim margin and Santos backed McCarthy through 15 votes for speaker. In October, when the far right made McCarthy the first speaker ever ejected by his own party, Santos did not support the change.Democrats now hope to retake Santos’s seat, to reduce the Republican majority.In a statement on Friday, the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or Crew, said: “George Santos’s pattern of unethical and illegal conduct is shocking and continues to escalate. Expulsion from Congress was appropriate and overdue.“He should have resigned and saved Congress all this trouble. Now he’ll be remembered as only the third member of Congress since the civil war to be expelled.”Adav Noti, legal director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said the expulsion of Santos showed that “no one is above the law”, and “the power and potential of ethics enforcement”.“While it should not take violations as egregious as those committed by Santos for this system to work effectively … all Americans have the right to financial honesty from members of Congress, and to effective enforcement against any elected official who deprives the voters of that right.”So rapid was Santos’s rise to infamy, he attracted a biographer who worked fast to produce a book released this week, just three days before Santos was kicked out of Congress.On Friday, the author, Mark Chiusano, posted: “Definitely didn’t think I’d be writing a political obit[uary] for Santos … one year after he was elected, but here we are.” More

On Thursday night, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, reminded the US why he will never be president. His voice grates, his visage a cross between a squinted grimace and scowl. He looks like Manuel Noriega, the ex-Panamanian dictator, without the scarring. On a personal level, he lacks humor, warmth, wit or uplift. He is ham-handed, an awkward social warrior.DeSantis comes across as too hot. This is the guy who picked a fight with Mickey Mouse, his state’s largest employer. He holds degrees from Yale and Harvard, but repeatedly flashes clouded judgment. In other words, there are plenty of reasons why he is getting walloped among Republicans by Donald Trump.“You’re down 41 points in your own home state,” California’s Gavin Newsom happily reminded DeSantis during their televised debate, which Fox moderated.And if you can’t win your own state, you are going nowhere. Recall: Senator Elizabeth Warren lost to Joe Biden in 2020’s Massachusetts primary and never regained her former stature.The dust-up was organized and moderated by Fox’s Sean Hannity, with Fox advertising the gubernatorial cage match – between the governors of two of the US’s largest states – as “DeSantis vs Newsom: The Great Red v Blue State Debate”.Over 90-plus minutes, DeSantis attacked Newsom – whose Republican ex-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle is engaged to Don Jr – without lasting impact. He ran through a litany of California’s woes but couldn’t make them stick. Then again, he carries a ton of baggage, from crime and abortion to January 6 and needless Covid-related deaths. A recent court settlement over Florida’s improper withholding of Covid records highlights the fact that DeSantis’s boasts were empty.Florida is plagued by high murder and gun mortality – as Trump, DeSantis’s bitter rival, is fond of reminding Republican primary voters. DeSantis has dangled the prospect of pardoning January 6 defendants but claims to love the police.By the numbers, Florida’s homicide rate tops California’s (and New York’s, for that matter). Beyond that, Christian Ziegler, the chair of the Florida Republican party, is under investigation for rape and sexual assault. Law and order; traditional family values; whatever.On the debate stage, DeSantis failed to land the blows he needed to rejuvenate his formerly promising campaign. His one-on-one confrontation did nothing to dent Nikki Haley’s rise or bring him any closer to Trump. Air continues to exit DeSantis’s low-flying balloon.He recently received the endorsement of Bob Vander Plaats, an evangelical leader in Iowa, but that gain has yet to move the dial. On the other hand, Haley just this week scored the endorsement of the Kochs’ political network, which translates into money and campaign foot-soldiers, as DeSantis knows from personal experience.“DeSantis wins formal Koch backing as momentum continues to shift,” a Politico headline from 2018 blared. Those days are so gone.“When are you going to drop out and give Nikki Haley a shot to win?” Newsom zinged. Great question, one that DeSantis failed to answer in front of the Trump fan boy Sean Hannity. DeSantis – a Rupert Murdoch personal favorite – fell flat on Murdoch’s own network. Meanwhile, the Fox board member and ex-House speaker Paul Ryan was touting Haley to whomever would listen.Much like Mike Pence, the former vice-president and former presidential wannabe, DeSantis is bogged down in abortion and Dobbs, the gift the right wing prayed for but is now living to regret. For Pence, it was a matter of conviction; for DeSantis it looks like a case of expedience that quickly headed south.In July last year, Florida enacted a 15-week cut-off for abortion. For DeSantis that wasn’t enough. He doubled down on the issue and lost. To burnish his rightwing credentials, he then pressed the Florida legislature to adopt a six-week abortion ban and it backfired. Tremendously.He got what he demanded and is now living with its consequences. A majority of Floridians are pro-choice, by a 56-39 margin. Florida isn’t Mississippi, to DeSantis’s chagrin.“You want to roll back hard-earned national rights on voting rights and civil rights, human rights and women’s rights, not just access to abortion, but also access to contraception,” Newsom fired. The US is still waiting for DeSantis’s retort.Here, Trump smells blood. He has privately derided anti-abortion leaders as lacking “leverage” to force his hand while tweaking them for having nowhere else to go once the supreme court struck down Roe v Wade. He has also reportedly mocked as “disloyal” and “out of touch” those evangelicals who cast their lot with DeSantis.Simply put, Vander Plaats won’t be receiving a Christmas card from the Trumps later this month. In that same vein, the evangelical rank and file has parted ways with its leadership. These days, Nascar and Florida’s Daytona are their spiritual homes; church pews on Sunday, not so much.In a sense, DeSantis is stuck in the past, rerunning yesteryear’s campaigns. Right now, Trump demonstrates traction with younger voters and is making inroads with minority communities. By contrast, DeSantis is picking losing fights.Gasping for attention, he unfurled a “poop map” of San Francisco to highlight the magnitude of the city’s homeless problem. The stunt backfired. Right now, it’s DeSantis’s campaign that seems to be the raging dung heap. The words “Florida man” usually precede a punchline or something gruesome.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

Now that Thanksgiving has passed in America, and everyone’s Trumpy uncle is on his way back to his conservative state, we still have our catastrophizing Democratic cousins to contend with. Triggered by the drumbeat of horrific poll results, they are panicking that Joe Biden is too old and unpopular to prevent a second Trump administration from taking power.These cousins, and perhaps you too, are suffering from the latest strain of what I call Mad Poll Disease. It’s a perpetual state of anxiety – spread by the media’s obsession with using polls to forecast the outcome of the next election, instead of empowering voters with all the information they need to decide what they want that outcome to be and act, or vote, accordingly.To cure Mad Poll Disease, start by making this your mantra: Horserace polling can’t tell us anything we don’t already know before election day about who will win the electoral college. We know it will be close. We know it will be decided by six swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin). Importantly, these states were so close that even the best polls couldn’t call all of them the day before the 2016, 2020 or 2022 elections.In both 2016 and 2020, the margin of victory in most of them was less than one point. If you had clicked on FiveThirtyEight in June 2022, you would have thought Republicans had a 60% chance of controlling the Senate, in September that Democrats had a 70% chance of holding the Senate, and on election day, that Republican had a 60% chance of flipping it again. But in the real world, Democrats increased their Senate majority.Trying to use horserace polls to project the winner in swing states is like trying to predict the weather nine months from now by taking the temperature outside today. Elections come down to turnout, and what that will look like on election day is truly anyone’s guess. Taking the temperature of how voters feel today doesn’t tell us how they’ll feel a year from now – much less whether they will act on those feelings by turning out to vote, or for whom they’ll vote if they do.So why the scary numbers?Pollsters want voters to tell them who they will vote for next November; voters want to tell pollsters how unsatisfied they are now with the direction of the country and their own lives. For most of this century, Americans have said the country was on the wrong track – and they have taken out those broader frustrations on whoever was president at the time. Low presidential approval ratings are now the norm in the United States (for old and young presidents alike), in a stark contrast to the last century.And other world leaders aren’t faring well either. Of the seven countries regularly surveyed by Morning Consult, only the Swiss have positive feelings about their leader and their country’s direction.But when it comes time to cast a ballot, voters understand the stakes. This is where we can really tell those cousins to take heart: ever since Trump’s shocking win in 2016, many Americans who thought elections didn’t matter realized that they very much do. Most Americans reject everything Trump and Maga stand for – taking away our freedoms, filling the government with incompetent lackeys, and ruling with hate and fear. An anti-Maga majority was born, and it has turned out to vote in record numbers again and again. This has been a predictable weather pattern since 2018, but most pollsters and pundits fail to account for it.Remember how 2022 was supposed to be a Red Wave, but it never materialized? Actually, it did – in 35 states. But in the other 15 states, where a prominent Maga candidate was running, we saw numbers more like the 2018 Blue Wave. Where voters understood the anti-Maga stakes, they turned out. This allowed Democrats to keep the Senate. When Democrats lost the House, it was by a much narrower margin than pundits expected. And it could have gone the other way had anti-Maga voters in California, New Jersey and New York understood what similar voters in the states with key Senate races understood – that staying home was voting for Maga to control the chamber.As a practical matter, only Biden can decide not to run, and he shouldn’t base that decision on fear of bad polls. Polls can mislead us into making unforced errors. We hear a lot about how risky it is to run an 81-year-old candidate with bad poll numbers. What about how risky it would be to replace someone who has beaten Trump before, and who has already been defined by both left and right, with someone who hasn’t? It would be an absurd gamble – like doubling down on your bet when you haven’t seen any of your own cards yet.It’s even more absurd to focus on this when we still have a year of news headlines in front of us. As we saw after Roe v Wade was overturned, there is a huge difference between knowing intellectually that something could happen, and actually living in the world where it is happening. It’s not news to most people that Trump will stand trial for multiple criminal indictments next year. But none of us can fully feel the way we will about it once we are reminded every day of Trump’s crimes against the country.To be clear, I’m not saying that Biden is going to win – just that there’s no reason to declare him likely to lose. But media outlets create this narrative out of thin air when they choose to field and devote so many headlines to horserace polls a year out from the election. This saps our agency as voters by creating a false sense of inevitability about the final outcome. And it steals oxygen from coverage of why an election matters – the real stakes to voters’ lives.We know what those stakes are because we have lived through some of them. We know how much worse Trump and Maga are promising to do. Our duty, not as Democratic partisans but as small-d democratic partisans, is to put in the work to make sure every voter understands the choice ahead.
Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, the chair of the Analyst Institute, the Research Collaborative and the Defend Democracy Project, and writes the Substack Weekend Reading More

American media billed it as a “slugfest” and the “Vendetta in Alpharetta”. Ron DeSantis’s campaign hyped it with a “tale of the tape”. In the era of politics as entertainment, everyone had an interest in turning a debate between two state governors with presidential aspirations into something resembling fight night in Las Vegas.After all, it seems the Elon Musk v Mark Zuckerberg cage match is not going to happen, so the showdown between Florida governor DeSantis and his California counterpart Gavin Newsom on prime time television on Thursday would just have to do.For Fox News, there was the promise for ratings for a White House race that might have been or might still be. DeSantis is desperate to be president but losing badly to Donald Trump in Republican primary opinion polls. Newsom equally aches with ambition but dare not say so while fellow Democrat Joe Biden has the big chair. Consider this Newsom’s audition for 2024 should the current president bow to old age or bad polling or both.There were plenty of low blows, blood on the canvas and less than impartial refereeing from Hannity. DeSantis, in the red corner, failed to land the big punch that could turn his fortunes around. Newsom, in the blue corner, floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, ensuring that he will live to fight another day – quite possibly in 2028.So this remained effectively the undercard for the expected rematch between Biden and Trump next year. Newsom turned both presidents into a one-two punch, promoting Biden’s economic record while relishing Trump’s dominance of the Republican primary.He goaded DeSantis: “You’re trolling folks and trying to find migrants to play political games, to try to get some news and attention, so you can out-Trump Trump. And by the way, how’s that going for you, Ron? You’re down 41 points in your own home state.” DeSantis stared into the middle distance, his face contorted in a rictus like an overripe pumpkin.The governors represent two of the three biggest states in the US. DeSantis, 45, is a culture warrior who wages war on Covid science, gun control and pronouns. Newsom, 56, is a progressive peacock seen by his foes as part of the hypocritical liberal elite. The debate put two Americas on the same stage: hunter v hipster, heartland v Hollywood, Duck Dynasty v Modern Family, Cracker Barrel v Whole Foods, beer v wine.The gulf often appeared unbridgeable, a snapshot of a nation at odds with itself. Differences on policy soon descended into the governors talking over one another. DeSantis snapped: “You’re a liberal bully!” Newsom answered: “You’re nothing but a bully.” DeSantis retorted: “You’re a bully!” Repetitive it was, Socratic it was not. Over the past eight years Trump has coarsened the discourse so that no disagreement is complete without a personal insult or viral-friendly barb.After months of trash talking each other’s records from afar, DeSantis and Newsom finally came face to face in a studio in Alpharetta in swing state Georgia. The lack of audience and other participants made this feel less chaotic and raucous than the debates that have taken place so far as part of the Republican primary contest. The men stood at lecterns about eight feet apart with red and blue images from their states behind them, as well as their state flags. It was “not a cheap set that we’ve built for you all”, Hannity said.From the opening bell, both men were on brand. DeSantis, wearing the standard issue Trump uniform of dark suit, white shirt and red tie, was bleak and saturnine, like a graveyard at night, going on the offensive against Newsom in his opening statement: “He led the country in school closures locking kids out of school while he had his own kids in private school in person. Now he’s very good at spinning these tales. He’s good at being slick and slippery. He’ll tell a blizzard of lies to be able to try to mask the failures.”Newsom, by contrast, began with sunshine and charm like a sommelier at an overpriced restaurant. He smiled and complimented Hannity for wearing a tie. But then he responded in kind: “You want to bring us back to the pre-1960s or older, America in reverse … You want to weaponise grievance; you are focused on false separateness. You in particular run on a banning binge, a cultural purge, intimidating and humiliating people you disagree with. You and President Trump are really trying to light democracy on fire.”Over 90 minutes, the pair clashed on jobs, taxes, coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, immigration, crime, homelessness, abortion and more. Hannity often had to intervene to stop them talking over one another. Statistics flew back and forth on everything from murder rates to Covid deaths. So did allegations of lying, leaving Democrats to cheer Newsom, Republicans to cheer DeSantis and viewers none the wiser.DeSantis claimed that Newsom’s own father-in-law had moved to Florida because it was better governed and wielded a map of what he said showed the quantity of human faeces found on the streets of San Francisco. He called Newsom “a slick, slippery politician whose state is failing”.The California governor responded to the tirades with a raised eyebrow and wry smile. He accused DeSantis of “smirking” and was withering about his incorrect pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name, saying he should show more respect for the vice-president. He scored points by hammering home the threat a President DeSantis would pose to abortion rights.For a while, Hannity, who is friendly with both men, played the part of affable and even-handed host. But he showed his true colours when he stated as fact that Biden, 81, is experiencing “significant cognitive decline”. DeSantis claimed that Newsom agrees and that is why he is running a “shadow campaign” for president. Newsom had a response ready: “I will take Joe Biden at 100 versus Ron DeSantis any day of the week at any age.”Such lines ensured that the charismatic Newsom will avoid the charge of disloyalty and continue his ascent. DeSantis is still in his 40s but resembled an ageing, over-the-hill fighter throwing punches at a phantom opponent. He did nothing to stall rival Nikki Haley’s momentum or close the gap on Trump. Newsom observed that what the men have in common “is neither of us will be the nominee for our party in 2024”.The debate was also a chilling reminder that America is heading into another election torn between different realities. Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary, said on Fox News afterwards: “Democrats are from Mars and Republicans are from Venus.”DeSantis’s campaign sent out a statement with the wildly improbable headline: “DeSantis crushes Newsom and Biden, unites Republicans in debate win.” The governor dashed to a hotel press conference where he sought to justify taking part: “To have 90 minutes on national TV where I’m able to go and box somebody who is on the far left – that is good exposure for me.”The pugilistic metaphor was at least consistent. But it may be time to throw in the towel. Stuart Stevens, a veteran political consultant, tweeted: “In the history of American politics, @RonDeSantis will go down as the chump who not only lost every debate in his race, but lost to a guy who isn’t even in the race. That’s talent.” More

Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state under Richard Nixon, died at the age of 100 this week. One of the most famous and powerful diplomats of the 20th century, some will remember him as the person who won a Nobel peace prize for his work negotiating the end of the Vietnam war. For others, he will forever be known as a war criminal.
So what is Kissinger’s legacy? This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to journalist and author Michael Goldfarb about how Kissinger came to be one of the most powerful people of the 20th century, and why back in the 1970s he had the opportunity to criticise the man to his face – and chose not to. Does he regret staying quiet?

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