Evelyn Reynolds

Republicans in Washington need to elect a new speaker “this week” and end the party’s “civil war” in the House that is sending a message to the world of dysfunction, especially amid the conflict unfolding in Israel, a senior GOP figure said on Sunday.The Texas Republican congressman Mike McCaul, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, urged his own party in the House to unify because “we have got to move quickly, we cannot paralyze democracy, especially when we have hotspots all over the world… and I’m just worried about the messaging this sends.”A small group of hard-right House Republicans last week managed to force out speaker and California Republican Kevin McCarthy, against the wishes of moderate colleagues, in an unprecedented move to punish him for allying with Democrats to prevent a government shutdown. McCarthy had only served in the post since January when he scraped through an unparalleled 15 rounds of voting.In an interview with CNN’s State of the Union show on Sunday morning, McCaul said it was important for the House, which cannot pass legislation without a speaker, to reboot “so that we can get things to the floor”, such as a bipartisan resolution condemning the attack by Hamas militants on Israel and action to help with Israel “replenishing” its Iron Dome anti-missile system.“It’s too dangerous a time right now to be playing games with national security,” he said, also expressing hope that the fighting in Israel does not escalate and spread.McCaul said of there were worries about an expansion of the crisis unfolding in southern Israel.“If this lights up into a larger jihadist war against the zionist, if you will, that’s always what keeps everyone up at night,” he said.Meanwhile, McCaul thought the House Republican conference was “ready to unify around one speaker and not have this civil war”. The rightwing congressmen Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been backed by former president Donald Trump, and Steve Scalise of Louisiana are the current leading contenders to succeed McCarthy and votes are expected on Wednesday.“It was not my idea to oust the speaker, I thought it was dangerous…[considering] all the threats that are out there,” McCaul said in the CNN interview.“What kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we cannot govern, when we are dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a speaker of the House? I mean how does Chairman Xi of China look at that when he says democracy doesn’t work, how does the Ayatollah [of Iran] look at this, knowing that we cannot function properly?” McCaul said, referring to Chinese president Xi Jinping.He said he thought either Jordan or Scalise “can provide solidarity”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe House minority leader and New York Democratic congressman, Hakeem Jeffries, also told CNN’s State of the Union that “it’s time for the GOP to end the Republican civil war…[because] we need to get things done” on Capitol Hill.Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, who instigated the ousting of McCarthy last week, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that there would be a new speaker this week and House Republicans would be “back on track” and “invigorated”.He called the crisis in Israel “horrifying” but said the situation in the House would not stop the US coming to Israel’s aid.The Republican presidential candidate for 2024 and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said on ABC’s This Week that even without the events in Israel the ousting of the speaker of the House by a small GOP faction was “wholly irresponsible”. More

Imagine that you run a perfectly legal business but are unable to open a simple checking account at a national bank. Believe it or not, that’s the case right now for anyone licensed to sell cannabis in the US. Given the size of the cannabis industry, it’s pretty shocking. But it may be about to change.In the US, 38 states have legalized marijuana for medical use and 23 of them have legalized it for recreational purposes, including three territories and the District of Columbia. An additional eight states have decriminalized its use. Both red and blue states with legalized marijuana laws have collected $15bn in tax revenue between 2014 and 2022, with $3.77bn in tax revenue attributed to 2022 alone.Meanwhile, if you run a cannabis business – one that sells, distributes, manufactures or in some cases serves the industry, you’re not allowed to be a normal business.Meta, Facebook’s parent, only allows “limited” CBD and hemp advertising. Cannabis companies can’t run TV or radio commercials for their products. They are not allowed to conduct any campaigns outside their state as interstate commerce is forbidden. In Ohio – like other states – they can’t run a billboard campaign without prior approval of the state’s board of pharmacy. Many localities have zoning laws that prohibit them from operating. Many insurance carriers are reluctant to serve the industry as do a number of the country’s largest payroll service providers.Cannabis businesses are not allowed to deduct rent, payroll or other expenses that other businesses can write off. They regularly face expanded business licensing requirements. They can’t take advantage of the federal bankruptcy rules. They can’t trademark their products.And then there’s banking. Cannabis businesses can only choose from about 200 independent and community banks. I don’t mean to throw shade on these organizations, because many of them are excellent. But they oftentimes don’t offer online banking, international access, wire transfer, investment options, financial stability and other capabilities of a larger institution. When it comes to the cannabis industry, federally chartered banks like Wells Fargo, PNC Bank, JP Morgan Chase, TD Bank and Key Bank are not playing ball. Because of this, many cannabis businesses receive fewer financial services and have been forced to retain an uncomfortable level of cash, making themselves exposed to theft and crime. The banking industry realizes this but resists.Why is this? Because cannabis is still considered to be an illegal controlled substance, subject to very strict federal laws and, because it’s illegal at the federal level, many large corporations, such as banks, insurance companies and payroll services, remain spooked.It’s no surprise that, despite all the growth, many in the cannabis industry are struggling to make profits. But there’s potentially good news on the horizon. Finally, the federal government may allow banks with federal charters to do business with those in the cannabis industry.At the end of last month the Senate committee on banking, housing and urban affairs moved forward with the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (Safer) Banking Act, which allows banks to conduct business with cannabis companies. The House already passed a similar act, so the Senate committee’s approval is a big deal.“This legislation will help make our communities and small businesses safer by giving legal cannabis businesses access to traditional financial institutions, including bank accounts and small business loans,” the bill’s sponsors said in a joint statement. “It also prevents federal bank regulators from ordering a bank or credit union to close an account based on reputational risk.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStill, significant hurdles exist. There remain a number of representatives in both the House and Senate who oppose the bill.“This legislation also compromises the integrity of the United States banking system by giving banks government approval to participate in illegal activity, setting a dangerous new precedent,” some Republican senators said recently in a joint statement. “Allowing banking access to a Schedule I drug sets a dangerous legal precedent and will help facilitate money laundering for drug cartels.” This opposition, combined with a leadership void in the House, could derail progress of the bill for the foreseeable future.But I’m more optimistic. The bill is not going so far as to legalize marijuana, so that should appease some of its opponents. And given the strong bipartisan support received in both the Senate and House for the Safer Banking Act, I don’t believe it’s an overreach to expect passage … eventually. When? Who knows.In the meantime, those in the industry must wait. And fight. And deal with restrictions that few other legitimate companies have to face. It’s tough enough running any business. But for those in this game, it’s a whole new level altogether. More

For months, Republicans have been reveling in Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential bid.Running in the Democratic primary against Joe Biden, the hope has been that Kennedy could weaken the president ahead of a presumed Biden-Trump match-up in 2024.But with Kennedy expected to announce that he will ditch the Democratic party and run as an independent, some commentators are suggesting that conservatives’ schadenfreude could come back to haunt them.That’s because of the curious case of Kennedy’s political appeal.It turns out that the son of Robert F Kennedy and nephew of John F Kennedy, Democratic giants who maintain widespread admiration in the party, is actually more popular among Republicans – including some of the most influential rightwing voices in the US.Kennedy, Steve Bannon said on his War Room podcast in April, would be “an excellent choice” for Trump’s running mate.Charlie Kirk, founder of the rightwing Turning Point USA, has praised Kennedy. So has Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor and QAnon enthusiast.The noted rightwing crank Alex Jones added his endorsement on his InfoWars show.“I don’t agree with Robert F Kennedy Jr on some topics, but he’s a man of integrity that fights fluoride and poison shots and fentanyl and everything else. He’s a good man,” said Jones, who last year was ordered to pay nearly $1bn to relatives of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting victims, after he falsely claimed the shooting was a hoax.The support for Kennedy from fluoridated-water-lowers-IQ-and-or-causes-cancer Republicans makes sense. Kennedy, 69, is a man who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like.In the last few months alone, the former environmental lawyer has said that wifi causes “leaky brain”, and linked antidepressants to school shootings. In June Kennedy said chemicals in water are making kids transgender and and declared that US support for Ukraine to be “a setup by the neocons and the CIA”. He also has longstanding, and wrong, beliefs about apparently any and all vaccines.Kennedy first announced he was considering a run for the Democratic nomination in March, in a speech that, true to form, was banned from YouTube for violating the platform’s “medical misinformation” policies.In April, he announced his candidacy for real, in a video that has not yet been removed from YouTube, and soon some polls showed that up to 20% of Democratic primary voters would pledge for Kennedy.If, as expected, Kennedy is to run as an independent, those numbers would suggest he could strip votes from Biden.Not so, said Steffen Schmidt, professor emeritus in the department of political science at Iowa State University.“Kennedy is an IED – we don’t know [when] he’s going to blow and on whom,” Schmidt said.Schmidt said there may have been early “sentimental” appeal for Kennedy among Democrats, given his family’s history. Biden’s age – a recent poll showed a majority of Democrats believe the president is too old to be effective for four more years – might have also been a factor in liberals considering a different candidate.“And then they began to hear the menu of things, his conspiracy theories and all that, and they began to see him on Fox News and all kinds of other conservative media, and the honeymoon was over,” Schmidt said.That slew of appearances on conservative media, and at rightwing events – Kennedy has previously appeared at a show hosted by ReAwaken America, described by PBS as “a petri dish for Christian nationalism” – have made him popular among Republican voters, many of whom are still in thrall to Donald Trump, another noted conspiracy theorist.A FiveThirtyEight review of eight polls on Kennedy’s popularity in both parties found that he was actually better liked among Republicans than Democrats, which Schmidt attributed to his conspiratorial beliefs. (Kennedy has also said that 5G towers could “control our behavior” and suggested HIV is not the cause of Aids. He has been accused of racism and antisemitism over claims – partly withdrawn – that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, while in July the Congressional Integrity Project, a political watchdog, released a report that details Kennedy’s meetings with and promotion of racists, antisemites and extremist conspiracy theorists.“He has conspiracy theories, including his anti-vaccine position, which is very popular among conservative Republicans,” Schmidt said. “There’s a pretty formidable list of things that would appeal to a more fringy group on the Republican side.”Kennedy is already attracting Republican donors: in July Axios reported that a “small but growing number” of donors had given heavily to the presidential campaigns of both Kennedy – when he was still running as a Democrat – and Republican candidates.“Republicans put a lot of effort and money into getting visibility because they thought that was going to hurt Joe Biden and now it looks more like it’s going to backfire on them. I’m not a gambling man. But if I had to put $1,000 on the table in Las Vegas, I would put it on Republicans losing some votes in some states to him and not the Democrats,” Schmidt said.“Although with RFK Jr, there will be people who will lose some sleep on both sides. Biden supporters and staffers, as well as some of the Trump campaign people will be worried as to what’s going to happen.”For all the talk of Kennedy’s potential effect, there is near universal agreement that, as an independent, he will not win the presidential election.“Independent candidates typically will carve away support from one of the major parties,” said Emmitt Y Riley III, associate professor of political science and Africana studies at DePauw University and president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.“But the problem is most voters in the US will claim that they are independents, when in actuality they’re more partisan than people who identify with political parties. And people like the label ‘independent’, but their politics isn’t independent at all.”There is some precedent for independent and third-party candidates having an effect in presidential elections, including Ross Perot, who won 19% of the popular vote in the 1992 race between George HW Bush and Bill Clinton.In 2000, George W Bush beat Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida, which clinched Bush the presidency. Ralph Nader, running on the Green party ticket, won 97,421 votes in the state, and Democrats – including Joe Biden – blamed him for Gore’s loss.“Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors [of Congress]. Nader cost us the election,” Biden told the Guardian at the time.Similarly, a CNN analysis of Trump’s 2016 win found that Jill Stein, the Green party presidential candidate and Gary Johnson representing the Libertarian party, did well enough “in several states arguably to help elect Donald Trump”.The financial might of the Democratic and Republican parties, however, means independents or third party candidates will always face an uphill battle. The electoral college system, in which a successful candidate must win the vote in numerous states, is another obstacle.And while exposure hasn’t been a problem for Kennedy, at least among rightwing media, he will face difficulties making it into the presidential debates, which are watched by millions.Kennedy could also face an Icarus moment, should he be seen as drawing too much support from either of the main parties.“If he wants to run, run. Fine,” a source close to the Trump campaign told the Daily Beast after rumors of Kennedy’s independent effort began to circulate.“But if he chooses to run as an independent, then he’s our opponent.”Not everyone agrees that Kennedy’s campaign will be most damaging to Trump, however. Riley said that given the lack of enthusiasm for Biden at large – his public approval rating has been below 50% for more than two years – and continuing concerns over the economy, plus the enthusiasm of Trump’s base, Democrats should be more worried.“I’m not convinced that he will threaten Trump. I think the core supporters who support Donald Trump are typically rich white conservatives, and conservatives who have negative racial attitudes.“And as a result, the way in which he’s been able to prime support among these particular voters, I think Trump has a solid core of voters who will support him. I don’t think any of the voters who are voting for Trump are swing voters, or voters that are on the fence.”On Kennedy’s side, so far is a demonstrated ability to bring in lots of money, including $5m given to an affiliated Super Pac by a Trump donor. He’s not young, but he’s younger than Biden and Trump, in an election where age may become a factor.While Kennedy and his novel beliefs are mostly a benign fascination at the moment, the consequences of him forging a strong independent run could be serious.“I think if Trump wins the election, we’re gonna see the nation move more towards authoritarianism,” Riley said.“We’re going to see more erosion of our democratic norms, I think we’re going to be in trouble. America can no longer sell itself as a republic, or even as a democratic form of government – with a president who disrespects our democratic institutions.“I think that this is one of the most consequential inventions of our time.” More

They are fresh-faced, suited and booted, the National Mall behind them and the world at their feet. Congressmen Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan smile out from the cover of Young Guns, their co-authored 2010 book about the next generation of conservatives. “This isn’t your grandfather’s Republican party,” said publicity material at the time.Thirteen years later, the trio is neither young nor the future. Cantor (“the leader”) became Republican leader in the House of Representatives but lost his seat to a nascent rightwing populism. Ryan (“the thinker”) became speaker but retired early to escape a toxic political relationship with President Donald Trump. And this week McCarthy (“the strategist”) was ousted by some of the extremists he helped elect to Congress but could not tame.The men’s careers chart the Republican party’s journey from disciplined machine to dysfunctional malaise. Like Britain’s Conservative party, Republicans were once admired and feared for their ability to fall into line and ruthlessly consolidate power. But on Tuesday, as eight rebels joined Democrats to visit humiliation on McCarthy, the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan was in turmoil – and nearly came to blows.“I’ll be really candid, I think if we had stayed together in the meeting last night, I think you would have seen fists thrown,” Congressman Garret Graves, an ally of McCarthy, told CNN. “And I’m not being dramatic when I say that. There is a lot of raw emotion right now.”Such a scene would have been unthinkable two decades ago when Republicans were effective at wielding power and pushing through laws relating to everything from foreign wars and domestic surveillance programmes to Medicare and the No Child Left Behind schools policy. Tom DeLay, House majority leader from 2003 to 2006, was dubbed “the Hammer” because of his willingness to crush dissent.Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide, said: “They were a legislative juggernaut. But that changed in the 2010s with the emergence of the Tea Party. The disruptive factions within the Republican party began to splinter away from the traditional, more pragmatic conservatism that we saw in the 2000s.“Whether it was [Speaker John] Boehner, Cantor, Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy, none of them was equipped to be able to manage that. None of them was equipped to prevent their own demise. It’s basically a Maga hitlist at this point, when you look at Cantor, Ryan and McCarthy on the cover of that book.”McCarthy had, as campaign chairman, played a central role in 2010 in recruiting dozens of Tea Party conservatives who took control of the House. He shared their views on fiscal restraint but underestimated their darker impulses: distrust in government, racial hostility to Barack Obama and a conviction that the base had been betrayed by the elites.It was fertile territory for Trump, who in 2015 and 2016 fused celebrity culture with economic discontent and white grievance to knock the Republican party back on its heels. Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party conservative who served in Congress, said: “The one thing Trump got right was he understood how weak the party establishment was, and so they were in no position to fight him.“When he came on the scene in 15 and 16, the base was pissed off. The establishment ignored the base for years. People like me inflamed the base, so when Trump got there the base was ready to just dictate shit. The donors in the establishment have never understood that.”Republicans at the time such as Tara Setmayer, a former communications director who worked on Capitol Hill for seven years, believed the party needed to reach young voters, women and minorities to survive. But the ascent of Trump sent it spinning in the opposite direction, with consequences that still reverberate today.“That was the inflection point,” Setmayer said. “It was political expediency instead of standing up for what was right. If enough people had stood up to Donald Trump they could have beaten him back. But they didn’t, and they let it get away from them. They mistakenly thought they could control him and it was a case of a political Frankenstein’s monster.”Ryan, then the speaker, clung to the hope that Trump would mature, moderate and become “presidential” once in office. It proved to be folly. Ryan appreciated the tax cuts and military spending but, after two years, had to accept that the “Make America great again” forces could not be contained. He bowed out of public life.The baton passed to McCarthy, who had an advantage: with Democrats in control of the House, Republicans had reason to bury their differences and unite in opposition to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But last year’s midterm elections sowed the seeds of his downfall.Republicans emerged with a much thinner majority than opinion polls had predicted. In January it took McCarthy 15 rounds of voting to be elected speaker after cutting a deal with the far right, including a rule change that would let any member of the House to seek his removal. Nine rocky months later, after averting a government shutdown with Democratic help, he became the first speaker in history to be ditched.Democrat Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said on Wednesday: “All three of them were chased out. Speaker Boehner, Speaker Ryan and now Speaker McCarthy have all learned the same lesson: you cannot allow the hard right to run the House, or the country.”McCarthy’s nemesis was Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman egged on by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who hosts an influential podcast (Gaetz was a guest on it a day after McCarthy’s demise). Critics say Gaetz is taking advantage of an era in which, instead of working their way up the ranks one committee at a time, politicians can build their brand, “go viral” and raise money by flaunting their extremism in the rightwing media ecosystem.Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review magazine, wrote: “Republican backbenchers used to be people such as Jack Kemp and Paul Ryan, who became something by promoting ideas that they carefully developed, sincerely believed, and persuaded their colleagues to embrace. Now, the emphasis is on becoming a micro-celebrity via constant outrage.”Bardella, a former spokesperson for the conservative Breitbart News who is now a Democratic strategist, added: “Matt Gaetz isn’t the cause. He’s a symptom of the complete radicalisation of not only the Republican party a the conservative rightwing media sphere in general.“Their deliberate decision to amplify the most extreme voices and give them a platform and give them a microphone and give them an audience every single night of the most ardent Republican primary voters to watch it, absorb it, paved the way for the chaos that has engulfed the entire Republican party right now.”It seems likely to get worse before it gets better. Without a speaker, the House cannot fully function to pass laws or fund the government. Steve Scalise, the majority leader, and Jim Jordan, the judiciary committee chairman, are the two leading candidates to succeed McCarthy and frantically chasing endorsements ahead of a vote among Republicans expected on Tuesday.A long, divisive struggle could ensue while Democrats remain united, making a mockery of the temptingly alliterative headline “Dems in disarray”. Now the roles have been reversed. Even Trump wondered aloud: “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves?”Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “We now see [that] the kind of authoritarian populism that talks about taking control, bringing order and strongman rule is an utter fiction.“That rhetoric has led to anarchy and the breakdown of governance and, just to bring it full circle, we’re now almost assuredly going to hear Trump and other Republican presidential candidates running on the promise to bring order to Washington to solve the very disorder they created.”He added: “We are in some very weird Alice in Wonderland politics here. The problems created by the fanatics in the Republican party have created a disorder that they are claiming they can solve.” More

More than 11 years ago, before Donald Trump emerged from the primordial ooze of the far-right fever swamp, before the aborted January 6 insurrection and before the latest spasm of Republican extremism felled House speaker Kevin McCarthy, two renowned political scientists, Thomas Mann, and Norman Ornstein, put their finger on the essence of increasingly dysfunctional US politics: the Republican party. Mann and Ornstein argued that the Grand Old Party (GOP) had become an “insurgent outlier” that was “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition”.Eleven years later, the enfant terrible of American politics has somehow got unimaginably worse. The GOP today is less a political party and more an inchoate mass of cultural grievances, conspiracy theories and lowest common denominator political slogans. Trump, for all his toxicity, is a symptom of the GOP’s decades-long descent into madness. Legislating is not seen as a tool for bettering the plight of the American people but rather an opportunity to troll Democrats and play to the perceived slights of the party’s rank-and-file supporters.But Republican indifference to governing is, perhaps, the least of the party’s pathologies. In slavishly supporting Trump and his Maga – Make America Great Again – supporters, they have empowered a political movement that is increasingly testing the limits of the US democratic experiment.McCarthy’s political trajectory tells the sorry tale. After January 6, McCarthy, who, along with his political colleagues, was forced to hide from the marauding insurrectionists, turned against the man responsible for the day’s violence. Privately, he told fellow Republicans: “I’ve had it with this guy”. But within weeks, he travelled to the ex-president’s palatial digs in South Florida and, on bended knee, pledged loyalty to the GOP’s orange god. He tried to block a bipartisan congressional committee to investigate January 6 and allied himself with conspiracy theorists who continued to spread lies about the 2020 election. Earlier this year, he gave in to Republican extremists and announced an impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, even though there is no evidence that the president has committed any impeachable offences.McCarthy, like countless Republican supplicants over the past eight years, realised that his political aspirations were directly tied to his willingness to support Trump and the extremist forces within the party that have rallied around him. In a tale as old as time, he made a deal with the devil, only to be burned by the political forces he’d empowered. Trump’s hold over the Republican party is so complete that it borders on the pathological. Since March, he has been indicted four times and charged with 91 separate felonies. Yet his poll numbers among Republicans have dramatically improved. He enjoys a more than 45-point lead in the race for the party’s presidential nomination.There simply is no future in the GOP for an elected official who refuses to prostate themselves to Trump. Liz Cheney was the most vocal and impassioned Republican in speaking out against him after January 6. Her reward: McCarthy engineered her removal from the GOP House leadership. Then, in 2022, a Maga Republican challenged Cheney in a GOP primary and defeated her by nearly 40 points. Another Republican apostate, former presidential candidate and current Utah senator Mitt Romney, who twice voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trials, recently announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election.In a series of interviews with the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, he recounted how, “in public”, his fellow Republican senators “played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behaviour. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler-like psyche.”Like other principled Republicans, Romney is choosing to walk away, and it’s hard to blame him. His criticisms of Trump have led to death threats and he is now spending an estimated $5,000 a day on private security. But the result is that the GOP’s ranks are now increasingly filled by those with bottomless reservoirs of ambition and empty cupboards of integrity. So for those hoping that a principled and mature Republican party will somehow emerge from this mess, think again. The political incentives in the GOP run in a singular direction – to the far right. If there is any silver lining, it is this: for all the Republican voters who love Trump, there is a larger mobilised group of voters who loathes him.Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about Trump is the static nature of his political support. In fact, if one compares his approval ratings from February 2020 – before the Covid pandemic ravaged the nation – to those in November 2020, when he ran for re-election, they were largely unchanged. Since leaving office, his approval numbers have also largely stayed the same. Americans have, by and large, made up their minds about Trump – and the verdict is: “We don’t like him.”The last three US elections prove the point. In what was largely seen as a rebuke to Trump, in the 2018 midterms, Democrats picked up more than 40 seats and control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, he lost re-election by at least 7m votes to Biden(4m more than he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016). In the 2022 midterms, the Democrats dramatically overperformed, picking up a seat in the Senate and barely losing the House of Representatives. So far this year, in dozens of special elections, Democrats are overperforming by a whopping 11 points. Part of this is a byproduct of the supreme court’s decision on abortion rights, but it’s also a backlash to the extremism that Trump has engendered.Of course, elections are tricky things and there is no guarantee that the unpopular Biden will emerge victorious next November. But take his current lousy polling with a grain of salt. It’s one thing to want a different Democratic nominee, as many Democrats do, but elections are about choices. That the likely option for voters in November 2024 will be Biden, or a deeply unstable opponent who could be a multiple convicted felon, has a way of narrowing one’s focus. But even if Trump loses, the problem of the Republican party will still be with us long after he’s left the political scene. More

In a media landscape so polluted by politicians addicted to cheap thrills (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Orange Monster) and the pundits addicted to them (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Steve Bannon), the success of Heather Cox Richardson is much more than a blast of fresh air. It’s a bona fide miracle.The Boston College history professor started writing her newsletter, Letters from an American, almost four years ago. Today her daily dose of common sense about the day’s news, wrapped in an elegant package of American history, has a remarkable 1.2 million subscribers, making her the most popular writer on Substack. Not since Edward P Morgan captivated the liberal elite with his nightly 15-minute broadcasts in the 1960s has one pundit been so important to so many progressive Americans at once.In the age of social media, Richardson’s success is counterintuitive. When she was profiled by Ben Smith in the New York Times a couple of years ago, Smith confessed he was so addicted to Twitter he rarely found the time to open her “rich summaries” of the news. When he told Bill Moyers, one of Richardson’s earliest promoters, the same thing, the great commentator explained: “You live in a world of thunderstorms, and she watches the waves come in.”Richardson’s latest book shares all the intelligence of her newsletter. It doesn’t have the news value of her internet contributions but it is an excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history – and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.Like other recent books, including The Destructionists by Dana Milbank, Richardson’s new volume reminds us that far from being an outlier, Donald Trump was inevitable after 70 years of Republican pandering to big business, racism and Christian nationalism.So many direct lines can be drawn from the dawn of modern conservatism to the insanity of the Freedom Caucus today. It was William F Buckley Jr, the most famous conservative pundit of his era, who in 1951 attacked universities for teaching “secularism and collectivism” and promoted the canard that liberals were basically communists. Among Buckley’s mortal enemies, Richardson writes, were everyone “who believed that the government should regulate business, protect social welfare, promote infrastructure and protect civil rights” – and who “believed in fact-based argument”.In place of the liberal consensus that emerged with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Buckley and his henchmen wanted a new “orthodoxy of religion and the ideology of free markets”. A few years later, the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Four years after that, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy included promises to slow down the desegregation the supreme court had ordered 14 years before.In one of the most notorious dog whistles of all time, Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign by declaring his love for states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi – made infamous by the murders of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964.Since the 1950s, Richardson writes, conservatives have fought to destroy “the active government of the liberal consensus, and since the 1980s, Republican politicians [have] hacked away at it” but still “left much of the government intact”. With Trump’s election in 2016, the nation had finally “put into office a president who would use his power to destroy it”. Republicans fought for 50 years for an “end to business regulation and social services and the taxes they required”. Trump went even further by “making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism”.Richardson is refreshingly direct about the importance of the fascist example to Trump and his Maga movement. When he used the White House to host the Republican convention in 2020, the first lady, Melania Trump, wore a “dress that evoked a Nazi uniform”. And, Richardson writes, the big lie was a “key propaganda tool” for the Nazis, which Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf, the book Trump may have kept on his night table at Trump Tower (or maybe it was a collection of Hitler’s speeches).Richardson even uses the psychological profile of Hitler by the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency during the second world war, to remind us of similarities to Trump. The OSS said Hitler’s “primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy … never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong”.But Richardson’s book isn’t just a recitation of the evil of Republicans. It is also a celebration of progressive successes. She reminds us that before Vietnam ruined his presidency, Lyndon Johnson compiled an incredible record. In one session, Congress passed an astonishing 84 laws. Johnson’s “Great Society” included the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided federal aid for public schools; launched Head Start for the early education of low-income children; the social security amendments that created Medicare; increased welfare payments; rent subsidies; the Water Quality Act of 1965; and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.These laws had a measurable impact. “Forty million Americans were poor in 1960”; by 1969, that had dropped to 24 million.Addressing graduates of the University of Michigan in 1964, Johnson used words that are apt today:“For better or worse, your generation has been appointed by history to … lead America toward a new age … You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation.”Johnson rejected the “timid souls” who believed “we are condemned to a soulless wealth. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
Democracy Awakening is published in the US by Viking More

California activists against caste discrimination faced a defeat on Saturday as Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill that would add caste to a list of protected categories under the state’s existing anti-discrimination laws.In a statement, Newsom called the bill “unnecessary”, explaining that California “already prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics, and state law specifies that these civil rights protections shall be liberally construed”.“Because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited under these existing categories, this bill is unnecessary,” he said in the statement.Caste is primarily associated with India and Hinduism, but caste-based divisions are found in several faiths and countries. Although India outlawed caste discrimination more than 70 years ago, bias still persists, including in diaspora communities. Dalits – or “untouchables” – have reported experiencing violence, discrimination and marginalization at school, work and places of worship in the US.California, which has one of the largest south Asian populations in the US, has been home to a growing movement of anti-caste activism, much of it focused on Silicon Valley, which has a large number of south Asian immigrants working in the tech sector.This led state senator Aisha Wahab, the first Muslim and Afghan American woman elected to the state legislature, to author the bill. California’s civil rights law outlaws many forms of discrimination, including medical conditions, genetic information, sexual orientation, immigration status and ancestry. Wahab’s bill expands the definition of “ancestry” to include “lineal descent, heritage, parentage, caste, or any inherited social status”.The bill sparked an intense response in California’s south Asian community. A public hearing on the bill this summer lasted hours as hundreds of people lined up around the Capitol to testify for and against. Opponents like the nonprofit Hindu American Foundation have argued that the law unfairly targets Hindus and “seeks to codify” negative stereotypes.Earlier this week, Republican state senators Brian Jones and Shannon Grove called on Newsom to veto the bill, which they said will “not only target and racially profile South Asian Californians, but will put other California residents and businesses at risk and jeopardize our state’s innovate edge.”Grove said the law could open up businesses to unnecessary or frivolous lawsuits.Wahab argued it was essential to expand California laws to “protect more vulnerable people in communities that we don’t often talk about”.In 2020, Cisco became the first company in the US to be sued for casteism after two high-caste Indian managers were accused of discriminating against a Dalit engineer. Cisco argued that the engineer was not a part of a protected class; California’s civil rights department dismissed the case against the managers earlier this year but is still investigating the company.In response to the work of Dalit activists, Google and Apple updated their employee handbooks to explicitly name caste as a protected group.Last year, California State University became the first university system to add caste as a protected category to its anti-discrimination policy. And on 28 September, California’s largest central valley city, Fresno, became the second city in the US to ban caste discrimination.Proponents of the bill launched a hunger strike in early September pushing for the law’s passage. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder of the Oakland-based Equality Labs, the largest Dalit civil rights group in the US which has been leading the movement to end caste discrimination nationwide, said the goal of the fast is to end caste bias in every area, including employment and housing.“We do this to recenter in our sacred commitment to human dignity, reconciliation and freedom and remind the governor and the state of the stakes we face if this bill is not signed into law,” she said.“[California] is a unique place for us to be able to take the conversation of a community that’s suffering and ensure our rights and safety. Not just for our state but the rest of the nation,” said Soundararajan.Soundararajan, who is Dalit and worked with Wahab to push the bill, said that she had faced harassment, vitriol and misinformation campaigns led by upper-caste people in the US. Last year, she said, she was invited to lead a talk at Google focused on caste discrimination, but it was cancelled after outcry from employees who argued that the talk was anti-Hindu.Wahab had hoped the new law would help spur the anti-caste movement, but it is already growing outside California. Earlier this year, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste discrimination. In 2022, Brown university in Rhode Island became the first Ivy League school to add caste protections, and was followed by Harvard and Brandeis, both in Massachusetts, which have also added specific protections for caste.Wahab said, in her remarks before the state assembly, “Caste systems are a social hierarchy that limits human potential, crushes the spirit and causes an intergenerational trauma that spans centuries.”The Associated Press contributed to this report More

The blue suit, white shirt, red tie and American flag pin looked familiar. So did the TV cameras following every move and reporters hanging on every word. So did the wild hand gestures as he unleashed a torrent of incendiary rhetoric about the elites supposedly out to get him.But this was not Donald Trump at one of his rollicking campaign rallies in middle America. This was the former US president standing outside a New York courtroom, with uniformed officers looking on, during a civil fraud trial accusing him of grossly inflating the value of his businesses.The incongruous spectacle was proof, if any more were needed, that Trump’s court appearances and White House campaign woes have essentially merged. The legal woes that would distract or destroy most candidacies have now become a defining feature of his 2024 presidential run.“Every time he’s in a courtroom, he’s campaigning,” said Joe Walsh, a former Illinois congressman who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary. “The courtroom has replaced his rallies and that’s what the next 14 months are going to look like. He’s a showman; he loves this shit. This will be his campaign and it could work.”Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington. But first this week he had to deal with a civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general Letitia James that accuses Trump and his company of deceiving banks, insurers and others by overstating his wealth by as much as $3.6bn.Judge Arthur Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud. If upheld on appeal, the case could possibly cost the ex-president control of some of his crown jewels including Trump Tower, a Wall Street office building and golf courses. James is also seeking $250m in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.Trump was under no obligation to appear in court but seized his chance to grandstand and further his narrative that has been martyred by a politically biased justice system. He had good reason based on how his previous, mandatory court appearances this year have played to his advantage in the Republican primary race which he now dominates.Just as on those occasions, reporters queued overnight to get a seat in court, TV helicopters followed his motorcade and his pronouncements were assured more extensive coverage on cable news than his rallies, which many outlets now make a conscious effort to ignore.Trump sat at the defense table observing the proceedings, at times looking sullen or leaning to confer with his lawyers. But not for him the humiliation of slipping into court while trying to hide his face under a jacket or blanket. He addressed the media assembled in the courtroom hallway several times each day, railing against the case with anger and insults familiar to his followers.“It’s a scam, it’s a sham,” he said on Monday. “It’s a witch-hunt and a disgrace.” He described James as “incompetent” and part of a broader Democratic conspiracy to weaken his election chances. After the former president posted a picture of the judge’s clerk on his social media network, Truth Social, the judge slapped a gag order barring Trump from talking about his staff.The performance may give his lawyers nightmares but it comes with financial rewards. One fundraising email from the Trump campaign was headed: “President Donald J Trump is appearing in a New York courtroom RIGHT NOW, we are calling on YOU to condemn the witch hunt.” The message said: “It’s now clear: The Liberal Mob will stop at nothing to SILENCE him and every last freedom-loving Conservative who supports our Conservative movement.”The strategy has proved effective after Trump’s four indictments over efforts to stay in power following the 2020 election, his handling of classified documents and hush money paid to an adult film star. This week his campaign announced that it raised more than $45.5m in the third quarter of the year – far surpassing Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor once seen as his principal rival. The campaign said it made $3m by selling coffee mugs, t-shirts and posters of the mugshot taken of Trump in Atlanta, where he faces state racketeering charges.Trump continues to hold massive opinion poll leads over DeSantis, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and other candidates in the Republican primary, where many voters – even those who oppose him – dismiss the legal cases as politically motivated. His decision to skip the primary debates appears to have paid off. He now frequently quips at his rallies that he is the only person who goes up in the polls each time he is indicted.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “This next election cycle will be historic in so many ways but the idea that the overwhelming leader of the Republican primary for president is a twice impeached, four-times indicted scofflaw boggles the mind.”Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group opposed to Trump, raised concerns that mainstream media could be unwitting accomplices. “They cannot cover this as if it’s a conventional election because it’s not and what we’ve seen already is people have become almost desensitised to it. It’s no longer shocking, and it should be.“I blame the US mainstream media partially for that because they have normalised this, with the OJ Simpson, Bronco-style camera angles of him driving to the courthouses four times, from when he leaves his golf course to when he arrives at the courthouse.“This is our democracy on the line and we should not be covering it as if it is some third-rate reality show … that’s where Trump thrives the most, because it desensitises people to how extraordinarily detrimental to our democracy this actually is.”She is not alone in fearing a repeat of the 2016 election, in which Trump’s antics received billions of dollars worth of free advertising.Marty Baron, a former Washington Post editor, said at a Washington Post Live event on Friday: “I do think people are still struggling with how to cover him. I think there have been some recent really big mistakes; the interview on CNN, terrible mistake. I think the more recent one with Meet the Press, I think that’s a mistake. It’s just doing an interview with him like that is just giving him a platform.”Baron, author of a new book, Collision of Power, added: “He controls the conversation, and more and more what we ought to be doing is saying, ‘What would this second Trump administration actually look like? Who would he appoint to be members of his cabinet? What kinds of policies would he implement at the beginning?’Clearly, it would be a vengeance tour. He would be targeting the Department of Justice, the FBI, the press, courts, you name it.” More