Evelyn Reynolds

Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired US federal judge and older sister of the former president Donald Trump, has died. She was 86.Multiple news outlets said Barry died at her home on the Upper East Side in New York City. A person familiar with the matter told the New York Times that Barry was found early on Monday morning. Her cause of death was unknown.The eldest daughter of prominent New York property developer Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, Barry became an assistant US attorney in 1974 before being appointed to the US district court for New Jersey by Ronald Reagan in 1983. Her appointment to the federal bench, the Times said, was aided by Donald Trump’s then “fixer, the lawyer Roy M Cohn”. In 1999, Barry was appointed to the US court of appeals for the third circuit by Bill Clinton.In 2018, while Donald Trump was in the White House, a New York Times investigation of his tax affairs, aided by Mary L Trump, the president’s niece who had become alienated from the family, prompted a formal complaint over whether Barry engaged in tax schemes in the 1990s.The Times report claimed that Barry, who allegedly benefited financially, was able to use her position of power to benefit her family.Barry retired from the federal bench in 2019.She was long said to be close to her younger brother, but his rise to power and chaotic White House term seemed to change the relationship.In 2020, Mary Trump released recordings in which her aunt could be heard criticising the then president.At one point, Barry was heard to say “the phoniness of it all … the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”She also said: “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God … I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”Barry was married to the late John Barry, a trial and appellate lawyer.Fred Trump Jr, the oldest of Donald Trump’s siblings and father to Mary L Trump, died in 1981, aged 42.Robert Trump, a younger brother of the former president, died in 2020 aged 71. His funeral was held at the White House.Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, died aged 73 at her home in New York City last year. She is buried at Bedminster, the former president’s golf club in New Jersey.Donald Trump, 77, is the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination next year, despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

The man who donned face paint and a horned headdress to storm the US Capitol at the 6 January insurrection has filed paperwork for a potential congressional run in Arizona as a libertarian.Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman”, became one of the most recognizable symbols of the insurrection, as media showed him walking the halls of the Capitol and standing at the dais in the US Senate.He pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding and was sentenced to 41 months in prison. He was released early in March.After his release, he resumed posting bizarre messages online. His profile on X, @AmericaShaman, says his nickname is “a straw man they created in an attempt to control the narrative & destroy my public image”. In response to someone asking for a campaign donation link, he said he wasn’t taking donations now and wasn’t sure if he would later because “BIG $$$ is a part of the problem in politics … I intend to run an ENTIRELY different kind of campaign …”As Chansley has a felony, he would not be able to vote for himself until he gets his voting rights restored in Arizona.Chansley filed a statement of interest in running for congressional district 8 with the Arizona secretary of state last week. Writing his name as Jacob Angeli-Chansley, his forms say he would run as a libertarian.The right-leaning eighth district seat will be open in 2024 as Debbie Lesko, the Republican representative, announced she would not seek re-election. Since her announcement, a flood of Republican contenders have entered the race.Republican primary candidates for the seat include the losing 2022 Senate candidate Blake Masters, the Arizona House speaker, Ben Toma, losing 2022 attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh, and a state senator, Anthony Kern, who attended the 6 January event at the Capitol. A handful of others are also running. More

Lady Bird, as Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson was better known, is a nickname that conjures the frivolous and fanciful, but the fiftysomething woman from east Texas who emerges in Dawn Porter’s elegant documentary The Lady Bird Diaries was a paragon of substance. She was also a documentarian in her own right, chronicling her time in the White House over 123 hours of audio recordings that were released after her death in 2007.Apart from the footage of wildflowers that Porter shot on the Johnson family ranch in Texas, the film entirely relies on archival audio and video recordings from the time of Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency, from the 1963 assassination of John F Kennedy to 1969. Building on an ABC News podcast, Porter’s work is a visually mesmerizing collage of mid-century America and one of its most fascinating characters.“[Being a first lady] is traditionally a feminine thing. It’s usually about children and reading and food gardens,” Porter said. “And those things are worthy.” Johnson, though, occupied herself with more than rose gardens. She was a shadow politician, serving as the president’s adviser as well as his tutor, even giving her husband grades on his speeches as we hear in one recording. “I don’t think there were a lot of A-pluses,” Porter said. “I think there was always room for improvement.”The Johnsons’ high expectations for each other mirrored the intensity of their devotion. “In a lot of ways, it’s a love story,” Porter said. “I think some of the best marriages are where each person thinks the other person is the smartest and most capable person. Her daughters confirmed that when I met them. They said, ‘Daddy thought Mother was the smartest person he’d ever met.’”Finding archival footage featuring her film’s subject was a bit of a treasure hunt, as scant material was catalogued with her name. “When we started and put in the words ‘Lady Bird Johnson’, very little came back,” the director said. Porter had better luck when she searched by the date and the names of other people who had been on the scenes of Johnson’s recounting. “She’s not noted in the description of the footage, and yet she’s right there in the middle of all of these events,” Porter said. “And I think that’s the story for a lot of women.”Johnson’s recordings brim with intimacy, and include material on her anxieties about her husband’s mental and physical wellbeing as well as her own apprehensions about living in the public eye. She also chronicled her work life, from campaigning for her husband’s second term to her environmental and anti-poverty efforts. She was the first president’s wife to hire her own staff, which was presided over by Liz Carpenter, a fellow Texan. (Carpenter’s teenage son, who liked to record himself singing, owned the tape recorder that Johnson used.)Porter’s film paints Johnson’s work on the “beautification” of Washington DC as more than an act of aesthetic improvement. “She was going into some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, which are primarily Black neighborhoods, and she was making the connection that kids need outdoor space, they need playgrounds, they need calm, beautiful places. She wasn’t just planting flowers.” The film touches on a few controversies, including the time when the singer Eartha Kitt publicly chastised Johnson at a luncheon, sounding off on the Johnson administration’s handling of the Vietnam war. But the point of view is unwaveringly Johnson’s. “This is not a tell-all movie,” Porter said. “What I wanted to do is add her perspective to what was happening.“She really was documenting this history in her tapes, and she was so accurate,” Porter said. “I’ve done a lot of films where people will tell me a story, and then we’ll go back and look at the archive and it’s similar, but memory is imperfect.” Lady Bird’s version of events, however, shared an uncanny precision backed up by the trove of film.Porter’s next two projects are about a reporter who embedded with the New York police department and ended up proving the innocence of a handful of wrongfully convicted inmates, as well as a film on the musician Luther Vandross, who died in 2005. While some documentarians like the immediacy of shadowing living subjects, Porter said that working with pre-existing footage guarantees an added layer of authenticity. “They’re not being interviewed for your movie so they’re not performing for you in any way,” she said. “The footage is very honest.”The choice not to interview anybody for Lady Bird came naturally, and it’s unlikely viewers will mind the absence of talking heads. “I wanted it to be her story. And also make the point that she’s there, she’s everywhere,” Porter said. “You just have to look for her, and then you’ll find her.”
The Lady Bird Diaries is now available on Hulu in the US More

If Donald Trump wins a second presidency, the US would resemble the authoritarian regimes of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, a prominent Democratic congressman predicted Sunday.During an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, Jamie Raskin invoked the names of some of the globe’s most powerful strongmen political leaders to characterize the threat posed by Trump’s status as the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination despite the mound of legal problems with which he is grappling.“The role of the government in his view is to advance his political fortunes and destroy his … enemies,” Raskin said of the former president and reality television show host. “So what would a second term look like?“It would look a lot like Vladimir Putin Russia. It would look a lot like Viktor Orbán in Hungary – illiberal democracy, meaning democracy without rights or liberties or respect for the due process system, the rule of law.”Raskin added: “Their position is that they don’t accept elections that don’t go their way. They refuse to disavow political violence – they embrace political violence as an instrument for obtaining power. And then everything flows from the will of a charismatic politician, and that is Donald Trump in their book.”Raskin said another turn in the Oval Office for Trump would thrust the US “into a completely different form of government than any of us would recognize as continuous with the past”, one that instead would feel more familiar in Xi Jingping’s China or in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil before the latter man was ousted from office last year and then barred by his country’s courts from running for re-election due to abuses of power.The Maryland congressman’s dramatic admonition to Psaki came days after Trump went on Univision and suggested he would use federal investigators and prosecutors to pursue his enemies if he scores a victory in next year’s presidential election.On Saturday, Trump promised in a speech to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and radical left thugs that live like vermin” in the US. Many commentators noted how the term “vermin” echoed antisemitic rhetoric that the Nazis frequently employed to dehumanize Jews as they murdered 6 million of them during the Holocaust.Meanwhile, the New York Times reported Saturday that Trump – who routinely speaks fawningly of Putin and other autocratic world leaders – is “planning an extreme expansion” of the immigration crackdown that the Republican oversaw during the presidential term he won in 2016.The plan reportedly envisions sweeping raids that round up undocumented people in the US before detaining them en masse in sprawling camps while they await deportation. Among other measures, it also calls for a revival of his first-term ban against travelers from predominantly Muslim countries.Raskin served on the US House committee which investigated the deadly Capitol attack staged by Trump’s supporters on 6 January 2021, weeks after he lost the presidency to his Democratic rival Joe Biden.After a series of televised hearings last year, the committee recommended that the justice department file criminal charges against Trump. And since March, a combination of federal and state prosecutors have obtained more than 90 criminal charges in four separate, pending indictments against Trump accusing him of election subversion, retention of government secrets and illicit hush-money payments to a porn actor.He has also faced civil lawsuits over his business affairs and a rape allegation which a judge deemed “substantially true”.Trump has denied all wrongdoing and sought to portray himself as a victim of political persecution. Nonetheless, he has held commanding polling leads in the contest for the 2024 Republican White House nomination. And there is a consensus among experts that a rematch between him and Biden would be very close.The Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, on Sunday said her organization is ready to support and embrace Trump as its candidate if he clinches the party’s nomination.“The voters are looking at this, and they think there is a two-tiered system of justice,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union. “They don’t believe a lot of the things that are coming out in this. And they’re making these decisions. And you’re seeing that reflected in the polls.” More

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has suspended his presidential campaign, conceding that he does not see any path to the Republican nomination as Donald Trump maintains a significant lead in primary polling.Scott told Fox News in an interview on Sunday evening that he had suspended his campaign. His exit may provide a modest boost for other candidates trying to dislodge frontrunner Donald Trump from the top spot.“I think the voters, who are the most remarkable people on the planet, have been really clear that they’re telling me: ‘Not now Tim,’” he said.The news comes less than six months after Scott launched his White House bid with the promise of offering a more optimistic vision about America’s future, projecting the persona of a “happy warrior” ready to lead the Republican party into a new era. Scott, who is the only Black Republican serving in the Senate, used his own personal story as the child of a single mother to make an argument for America’s greatness, accusing Joe Biden and other Democrats of “attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb”.“We live in the land where it is absolutely possible for a kid raised in poverty in a single-parent household in a small apartment to one day serve in the people’s house and maybe even the White House,” Scott said as he announced his candidacy in May. “This is the greatest country on God’s green Earth.”But that positive messaging failed to sway Republican primary voters, and Scott struggled to gain traction with a party base that remains largely loyal to Trump, despite the 91 felony counts against the former president.In more recent months, Scott explored darker rhetoric on the campaign trial in an apparent attempt to bolster his dwindling hopes of capturing the nomination. During the second Republican primary debate in late September, Scott implied that slavery had been more bearable for Black Americans than the Great Society, President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty program that led to the creation of social welfare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The comment won praise from Fox News commentators and sparked outrage among Scott’s critics, who accused Scott of downplaying the atrocities of slavery.Weeks after that incident, Scott lambasted Biden over his response to the attacks carried out by Hamas on 7 October, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis. Blasting Biden’s foreign policy agenda, Scott accused the president of inadvertently causing the violence.“While Hamas carried out these attacks, Joe Biden has blood on his hands,” Scott said. “His weakness invited the attack.”Scott later applauded the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for his “restraint” in his response to the Hamas attacks. At the time Scott made the comment, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza had already reportedly killed a large number of Palestinians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite Scott’s pivot to more severe rhetoric, his level of support in national primary polls remained in the low single digits, leaving him with no path to the nomination. Scott announced in October that he would shift his campaign resources to Iowa, zeroing in on the first voting state in a last-ditch effort to revive his campaign.But that strategy failed to lift Scott’s polling numbers, and he has now formally suspended his campaign, as Trump cements his status as the clear frontrunner in the race. More

Nine Americans are still missing following the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel, the US national security adviser said on Sunday.Jake Sullivan, the White House’s chief security adviser, said the US is involved in “ongoing negotiations” for the release of hostages believed to be held by Hamas in Gaza.The comments come as Hamas said it is suspending hostage negotiations because of Israel’s handling of the besieged al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. On Saturday, the World Health Organization said it had lost communication with people at the hospital, where more than 30 babies are among the sick Palestinians trapped by fighting.Speaking on ABC’s This Week, Sullivan said:“There are ongoing negotiations involving the Israelis, the Qataris, and we, the United States, are actively engaged in this as well because we want to make sure that we bring home those Americans who have been taken hostage as well as all of the other hostages.”Sullivan said President Joe Biden “is not going to rest” until every hostage was released. He said it was unclear how many people were being held by Hamas.“We know the number of missing and that’s the number the Israelis have given. But we don’t know how many of those are still alive,” Sullivan said.“As far as the Americans are concerned, there are nine missing American citizens as well as a missing legal permanent representative, a green card holder.”On Sunday, Hamas said it would suspend negotiations due to the situation at al-Shifa hospital. The Guardian reported that there are multiple accounts of people being shot as they attempted to flee the hospital. Three of 39 babies in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit had died.UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, issued a statement Sunday describing “a dire situation where thousands of injured and displaced civilians find themselves trapped within the hospital grounds”.“Ongoing fighting and the lack of fuel are putting at risk the lives of health workers, patients and some of the most vulnerable people in Gaza, many of whom have been sheltering at al-Shifa, including women, children, the elderly and disabled,” the statement said.“They, and critically ill patients, have nowhere safe to go, with reports of ambulances being unable to leave the grounds. There are also reports of fighting around a number of other hospitals.”In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli’s prime minister, said Israel will not stop its fighting around al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. He said Israeli forces had “called to evacuate all the patients from that hospital”.Sullivan told ABC that he would meet with family members of American hostages in the coming week.The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has claimed that over 11,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, in response to a Hamas attack in Israel which killed 1,200 Israelis. More

One of the strongest candidates for US president in 2024 may be one who’s not yet in the race. There’s growing evidence that Gavin Newsom, the charismatic and energetic Democratic governor of California, is running something of a shadow campaign to Joe Biden and ready to step up if, or when, the incumbent is out of the running.Several developments in recent days suggest Newsom, who romped to re-election a year ago without really campaigning, is ready to bring forward what was already expected to be a strong run for the presidency in 2028.There are mounting concerns inside the Democratic party, matching polling among voters, that Biden is too old for a second term, the start of which in January 2025 would see him two months past his 82nd birthday if re-elected. Some want him to stand down.Newsom, 56, is among a generation of younger, prominent and popular Democrats expected to emerge from the shadow of the old guard, and has stolen a march on his peers with a series of bold moves many analysts see as strategic.Even movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself a Republican former two-term governor of California, thinks a Newsom run at the White House is inevitable.“I think it’s a no-brainer. Every governor from a big state wants to take that shot,” Schwarzenegger said earlier this year.But not all Democrats appear thrilled at the prospect. Pennsylvania US senator John Fetterman, at a dinner in Iowa, connected Newsom with Dean Philips, a congressman who said he is challenging Biden.“[There are two] running for president right now,” he said. “One is a congressman from Minnesota, the other is the governor of California, but only one has the guts to announce it.”This week, Newsom made a financial donation to a Democratic mayoral candidate in Charleston, South Carolina, 2,800 miles from his governor’s mansion in Sacramento. Reaching into political elections in other states is, experts say, a sure sign of a potential presidential candidate wishing to raise their profile on the national stage.“South Carolina is an early state in the primary process for Democrats, and doing well in the early states is seen as momentum for later ones,” said Eric Schickler, professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of its institute of governmental studies.“In fact, Biden’s win in South Carolina is really what propelled him to the top 2020, so building connections to important politicians in the state can certainly be seen by potential candidates as an important step.”Newsom has publicly denied that he has sights on Biden’s job.“I’m rooting for our president and I have great confidence in his leadership,” he told Fox News earlier this year.But while Schickler believes Newsom’s own thinking about the timing of any White House run probably hasn’t changed, he says circumstances have.“The Democratic party’s nervousness about Biden has certainly increased, and with him polling behind Donald Trump in many states, his low approval ratings, young voters being especially disenchanted with Biden, all of that has heightened interest among a lot of party supporters in an alternative,” he said.That alternative might not be Kamala Harris, who as vice-president would usually be assumed Biden’s heir apparent. Her public approval is currently as low as the president’s.So a rising, often progressive-leaning politician such as Newsom, with a wealth of executive and legislative experience, and a willingness to counter head-on Republican policies and personalities, makes for an attractive proposition.“It’s not a situation where there’s like 20, or 50, or 100 Democratic leaders who could be viewed as legitimate. If there were such a group, Newsom has positioned himself pretty well and would be on a very short list along with [Michigan governor] Gretchen Whitmer and a couple others,” Schickler said.“The problem is the party. There’s just a lot of different voices, a lot of different constituencies, and not really anybody or any group that could authoritatively say, ‘Oh, it’s Newsom’.“[But] he would certainly be one of the most serious people. The things he’s doing now, it helps him for 2028, which still is the most likely scenario, and certainly doesn’t eliminate him if something crazy or unexpected were to happen in the next six months.”Other not so subtle clues that Newsom has sights on higher office include his $10m (£8.2m) investment earlier this year in a new political action committee designed to spread the Democratic party’s message in Republican-held states he said have “authoritarian leaders directly attacking our freedoms”.Among the targets is Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor and faltering candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The pair will debate each other on 30 November in a highly anticipated nationally televised event once billed as a clash of two leading White House contenders.“The idea of debating DeSantis was probably a lot more appealing when it really did look like he might actually defeat Trump. In that scenario, showing you can debate him and score a lot of points helps Newsom’s visibility with the party and makes his case that he would be an effective candidate,” Shickler said.“With DeSantis not doing so well, the upside for Newson is less, but there are still Democrats who would be happy to see him debate and defeat him. He only stands to benefit, it’s just the benefit will be smaller.” More

US House speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a Republican stopgap spending measure late Saturday aimed at averting a government shutdown in a week, but the measure quickly ran into opposition from lawmakers from both parties in Congress.Unlike ordinary continuing resolutions that fund federal agencies for a specific period, the measure announced by Johnson would fund some parts of the government until 19 January and others until 2 February. House Republicans hope to pass the measure Tuesday.“This two-step continuing resolution is a necessary bill to place House Republicans in the best position to fight for conservative victories,” Johnson said in a statement after announcing the plan to House Republicans in a conference call.The House Republican stopgap contained no supplemental funding such as aid for Israel or Ukraine.The House and Democratic-led Senate must agree on a spending vehicle that President Joe Biden can sign into law by Friday. Otherwise, they risk a fourth partial government shutdown in a decade that would close national parks, disrupt pay for as many as 4 million federal workers and disrupt a swath of activities from financial oversight to scientific research.The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a release that the proposal was “just a recipe for more Republican chaos and more shutdowns”. She said: “House Republicans are wasting precious time with an unserious proposal that has been panned by members of both parties.“Johnson, the top Republican in Congress, unveiled his stopgap a day after Moody’s, the last major credit rating agency to maintain a top “AAA” rating on the US government, lowered its outlook on the nation’s credit to “negative” from “stable”. Moody’s cited political polarization in Congress on spending as a danger to the nation’s fiscal health.The Louisiana Republican appeared to be appealing to two warring House Republican factions: hardliners who wanted legislation with multiple end-dates; and centrists who had called for a “clean” stopgap measure free of spending cuts and conservative policy riders that Democrats reject.The legislation would extend funding for military construction, veterans benefits, transportation, housing, urban development, agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and energy and water programs through 19 January. Funding for all other federal operations would expire on 2 February.But members of both parties aimed political fire at the plan quickly.“My opposition to the clean [continuing resolution] just announced by the speaker … cannot be overstated,” Chip Roy, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said on the social media platform X.The Republican Roy had called for the new measure to include spending cuts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocratic senator Brian Schatz called Johnson’s measure “super convoluted”, adding that “all of this nonsense costs taxpayer money”.“We are going to pass a clean short term [resolution]. The only question is whether we do it stupidly and catastrophically or we do it like adults,” Schatz wrote on X.A stopgap measure would give lawmakers more time to implement full-scale appropriations bills to fund the government through 30 September.Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was ousted from the House speakership by eight hardline fellow Republicans after he moved a bipartisan measure to avert a shutdown on 1 October. McCarthy opted for the bipartisan route after hardliners blocked a Republican stopgap measure with features intended to appease them. More