Evelyn Reynolds

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    Trump wants to ‘remake’ Fema, not eliminate it, Kristi Noem says

    Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said on Sunday that Donald Trump wants to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) “remade” instead of eradicated entirely.In a new interview on Sunday with NBC, Noem defended the Trump administration’s response to the deadly Texas floods that have killed at least 120 people, saying: “I think the president recognizes that Fema should not exist the way that it always has been. It needs to be redeployed in a new way, and that’s what we did during this response.”Noem added: “I think he wants it to be remade so that it’s an agency that is new in how it deploys and supports states.”Her comments follow widespread criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of the Texas floods as reports emerged of thousands of calls from flood survivors being left unanswered by Fema’s call centers due to unextended contracts.Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Fema did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line. The outlet also reported that Noem, who implemented a new policy that she personally signs off on contracts over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until five days after they expired in the middle of the floods.Noem decried the reports as “fake news”, saying: “That report needs to be validified. I’m not certain it’s accurate, and I’m not sure where it came from, and the individuals who are giving you information out of Fema, I’d love to have them put their names behind it because the anonymous attacks to politicize the situation is completely wrong.”Noem went on to acknowledge her policy of personally signing off on contracts worth more than $100,000, saying: “It’s not extra red tape, it’s making sure everything is getting to my level, and that it’s immediately responded to.”She also praised Fema’s response as the “best response” in years to the Texas floods, saying: “This response was by far the best response we’ve seen out of Fema, the best response we’ve seen out of the federal government in many, many years, and certainly much better than what we saw under Joe Biden.”Despite Noem’s defense of the agency and the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis, many have criticized Fema as the downsized agency has seen approximately 2,000 resignations and retirements since Trump’s inauguration.Speaking to the Guardian, Michael Coen, Fema’s former chief of staff, said: “I’m concerned that Fema is going to be at a disadvantage because they don’t have the resources to respond to the disasters we know could happen, which could be two or three concurrent disasters at the same time.“Fema has eroded capacity since President Trump became president. Staff have departed. There have been cuts to grant programs and they are going to be running into a financial challenge with the disaster relief fund, because the president hasn’t requested supplemental funding from Congress.”Since taking office, Trump has routinely threatened to disband the agency which was set up by Jimmy Carter in 1979 following states’ struggle to handle major disasters. In June, Trump said that he planned to start “phasing out” Fema after hurricane season and that states would receive federal aid to respond to natural disasters.“We’re going to give out less money,” Trump said.Last month, Noem also said that Fema “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists”, adding that states should have more responsibility when handling natural disasters.However, since the Texas floods, which mark Trump’s first major natural disaster since taking office in January, his administration’s rhetoric on eliminating Fema has appeared to shift.Earlier this week, upon being asked whether he still plans to phase out the agency, Trump said it was a matter “we can talk about later”. Similarly, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the federal government’s response to natural disasters was a “policy discussion that will continue”. More

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    Trump’s latest tariffs ‘are real’ unless deals improve, economic adviser says

    Donald Trump has seen some trade deal offers and thinks they need to be better, Kevin Hassett, the White House economic adviser, said on Sunday, adding that the president will proceed with threatened tariffs on Mexico, the European Union and other countries if they don’t improve.“Well, these tariffs are real if the president doesn’t get a deal that he thinks is good enough,” Hassett told ABC’s This Week program. “But you know, conversations are ongoing, and we’ll see where the dust settles.“Hassett told ABC’s This Week program that Trump’s threatened 50% tariff on goods from Brazil reflect Trump’s frustration with the South American country’s actions as well as its trade negotiations with the US.On Thursday, Brazil threatened to retaliate against Trump’s plan with its own 50% tariff on US goods. “If he charges us 50%, we’ll charge him 50%,” Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, told local news outlet Record, a day after Trump threatened to impose steep duties on Brazilian goods.Hassett’s comments come one day after Trump announced on his Truth Social social media platform that goods imported from both the European Union and Mexico will face a 30% tariff rate starting on 1 August, angering European capitals who had thought they had previously reached a deal with Trump. The prior deal would have involved a 10% tariff, five times the pre-Trump tariff, which the bloc already described as “pain”.The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, on Sunday said he will work intensively with French president Emmanuel Macron and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to resolve the escalating trade war with the United States.“I discussed this intensively over the weekend with both Macron and Ursula von der Leyen,” Merz told German broadcaster ARD, adding he had also spoken with Trump about the matter.“We want to use this time now, the two and half weeks until August 1 to find a solution. I am really committed to this,” Merz said.Merz said the German economy would be hit hard by the tariffs, and he was doing his best to make sure US tariffs of 30% were not imposed.Unity in Europe and a sensible dialogue with the US president were now needed, Merz said, although countermeasures should not be ruled out. “But not before August 1,” he said.EU trade ministers are scheduled to meet on Monday for a pre-arranged summit and will be under pressure from some countries to implement €21bn ($24.6bn) in retaliatory measures, which are now paused until 1 August, the same day as Trump’s new deadline.Macron has called on the EU to “defend European interests resolutely” in response to Trump’s threats.French cheese and wine producers have warned of the damaging impact that Trump’s threatened 30% tariffs on imports from the EU would have on the country’s agriculture industry.A 30% duty would be “disastrous” for France’s food industry, said Jean-François Loiseau, the president of food lobby group ANIA, while Francois Xavier Huard, the CEO of dairy association FNIL, said: “It’s a real shock for milk and cheese producers – this is an important market for us.”In the interview with ABC News on Sunday, Hassett also said that Trump has the authority to fire the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for cause if evidence supports that, adding that the Fed “has a lot to answer for” on renovation cost overruns at its Washington headquarters.Any decision by Trump to try to fire Powell over what the Trump administration calls a $700bn cost overrun “is going to depend a lot on the answers that we get to the questions that Russ Vought sent to the Fed”, Hassett said.Vought, the White House budget director, last week slammed Powell over an “ostentatious overhaul” of the Fed’s buildings and answers to a series of questions. Trump has repeatedly said that Powell should resign because he has not lowered interest rates, and the Wall Street Journal reported this week, citing anonymous sources, that Hassett is vying to succeed him as the Fed chair. More

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    Secret Service’s ‘cascade of failures’ allowed Trump assassination attempt, report says

    A new Senate committee report on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, described the events as a “cascade of preventable failures” and called for more severe disciplinary action to be taken with the Secret Service in the future.In the 31-page, highly critical findings released on Sunday, the Senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee lamented the mishandling of communications around the rally and said Trump was denied extra security on the day.“A 20-year-old gunman was able to evade detection by the country’s top protective agency for nearly 45 minutes,” the committee stated, adding that “not a single person has been fired”.The publication of the report comes exactly a year after the attempted assassination of Trump, when he was wounded after a bullet grazed his ear on 13 July 2024. One rally-goer, Corey Comperatore, was killed before the shooter, a 20-year-old nursing-home worker from Pennsylvania named Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead by a Secret Service agent. Crooks scaled a building overlooking the rally and opened fire using an AR015-style rifle.The image of Trump defiantly raising his fist in the immediate aftermath of the attack became a political touchstone, helping push Joe Biden out of the race and fuelling support around his presidency in a heightened, accelerated manner.The committee behind this latest report, chaired by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, conducted 17 interviews with members of the Secret Service and reviewed thousands of legal documents before it reached its conclusion. While it offers no new information on Crooks’s motives, which are still ambiguous almost a year on, it does shine light on the supposed disorganization and disarray of the security agency as the assassination unfolded.The investigators found that the Secret Service “denied or left unfulfilled” multiple requests for additional staff and assets, and despite acknowledgements of vulnerabilities at the venue, assigned an inexperienced operator to oversee operations.“What happened was inexcusable,” the committee stated, adding that “the consequences imposed for the failures so far do not reflect the severity of the situation.”Six Secret Service agents have since been suspended without pay after the events last July. Their suspensions range from 10 to 42 days, with a loss of both salary and benefits during their absence.This disciplinary action comes nearly a year after the shooting. The agency’s deputy director, Matt Quinn, told CBS News that the Secret Service would not “fire our way out of this” crisis. More

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    DoJ drops charges against Utah doctor accused of destroying Covid vaccines

    The US Department of Justice dropped charges on Saturday against Michael Kirk Moore, the Utah doctor accused of destroying more than $28,000 worth of government-provided Covid-19 vaccines and administering saline to children instead of the shot.Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, announced the news in a statement on the social media platform X, saying the charges had been dismissed under her direction.“Dr Moore gave his patients a choice when the federal government refused to do so,” Bondi said. “He did not deserve the years in prison he was facing.”According to a 2023 press release from the US attorney’s office in Utah, Moore distributed at least 1,937 fraudulent vaccination record cards in exchange for either direct payment or required donations to a specific charity. The minors he gave saline shots to were under the impression, at the request of their parents, that they were receiving a Covid-19 shot. Moore ran the operations from a plastic surgery center in Midvale, Utah, and was charged, along with three other co-defendants, with conspiracy to defraud the United States.Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene thanked Bondi in a statement on X and called Moore a “hero who refused to inject his patients with a government-mandated unsafe vaccine”.The Utah senator Mike Lee also weighed in, saying on X that he was glad Moore could remain a free man and that countless Americans endured lies and lockdowns during the pandemic.Moore was indicted by the justice department in 2023. He pleaded not guilty to the charges, which also included conspiracy to convert, sell, convey and dispose of government property, and the conversion, sale, conveyance and disposal of government property.The fake vaccination records were sold under Moore’s scheme for $50 each, and operations allegedly ran between May 2021 and September 2022. Attorneys for Moore argued that the regulations set at the time by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were unconstitutional.The charges against Moore were brought in when Joe Biden was president, but Covid-19 conspiracists and skeptics have been embraced in the new administration under Trump.Recently, the Trump administration canceled a $766m award to Moderna on the research and development of H5N1 bird flu vaccines, and officials announced new restrictions and regulations for Covid mRNA vaccines.The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has for decades baselessly sowed doubt about vaccine safety, contrary to scientific research, thanked Moore in a statement on X back in April.“Dr Moore deserves a medal for his courage and his commitment to healing,” Kennedy Jr said. More

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    How the rightwing sports bro conquered America

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    View image in fullscreenThis February, Pat McAfee was broadcasting live on ESPN, the most watched sports network in the US, when he aired a salacious rumor about the sex life of a teenage college student. Once a workaday punter with the Indianapolis Colts, McAfee is now the most influential pundit in American sports with an eponymous ESPN show, who has more than 11m followers across YouTube, X, Instagram and TikTok.To howls of merriment from his panel, McAfee spelled out the rumor centered on a 19-year-old female student at Ole Miss, a public university in Mississippi, as it was “being reported by everybody on the internet”: that the student had sex with her boyfriend’s father. “Ole Miss dads are slinging meat right now!” roared “Boston” Connor Campbell, one of McAfee’s sidekicks.McAfee did not directly name Mary Kate Cornett, the college freshman at the center of the rumor, but she has since described how McAfee’s amplification of this “completely false” story encouraged others in the sports talk world to do likewise, resulting in her receiving a deluge of threats and harassment. Cornett has engaged lawyers to explore suing McAfee, ESPN and others involved in spreading the rumor for defamation. McAfee appeared moderately chastened by the episode: “I never, ever want to be a part of anything negative in anybody’s life, ever,” he said recently while addressing the outrage that his boosting of the rumor prompted. But he has not yet apologized, and in no way does his future as one of ESPN’s most bankable stars seem in jeopardy. Whatever blowback ensued has blown right on by.The whole episode served as a demonstration of power: the world of sports influencers such as McAfee, which is particularly influential among young men and can be understood as an extension of the Donald Trump-aligned “manosphere”, now stands as an important bastion of the culture of insensitivity and entitlement on which Trumpism thrives.View image in fullscreenA new generation of sports talk starsThe Pat McAfee Show, a two-to three-hour afternoon blast of high-volume sports chat, sweating and raw, uncomplicated American male heterosexuality, launched in 2019. It has quickly become a favored media stop for many of the top names in US sports and culture. Tom Cruise spent 30 minutes on the show recently (“I appreciate the shit outta you,” McAfee told Cruise); LeBron James stopped by for an hour.Throughout the show’s history, McAfee has courted controversy: he’s called WNBA star Caitlin Clark a “white bitch”, he’s made jokes about child abuse, he’s helped air rumors linking celebrities to Jeffrey Epstein. None of it seems to matter: McAfee, whose show moved to ESPN on a five-year, $85m deal in 2023, powers on unperturbed, growing in cultural might with each passing month.McAfee is now the avatar of a new generation of sports talk stars who have upended the rules about public speech, remade culture in their own brash image, and are completely bulletproof.View image in fullscreenAmong McAfee’s peers in this dripped-out new world of costless needling are Barstool Sports boss Dave Portnoy; former NFL players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, who co-host the show Bussin’ With the Boys; and NFL receiver-turned-podcaster Antonio Brown. Sports are also a major, though not exclusive, topic of conversation for Joe Rogan, Theo Von and other leaders of the manosphere. The Wikipedia pages of many of these figures contain hefty “controversy” tabs. Portnoy has faced extensive and credible accusations of sexual misconduct; Brown refers to WNBA star Clark, an athlete on whom the anti-woke right seems psychotically fixated, as “Cousin Itt”, referencing the Addams Family’s hirsute, non-verbal relative, and is so crassly sexist online that even the famously feminist redoubt of Barstool Sports has described him as a “crackpot”.In an earlier era, reckless promotion of tasteless gossip about a teenager’s sex life might have been enough to sink a career like McAfee’s. Provocation, abrasiveness and a delight in offending have been essential to sports talk – on radio and cable TV – for decades. But in the years before social media, on-demand programming and betting turned sports into an all-hours, all-platforms juggernaut, there were still lines that sporting pundits could not cross: shock jock Don Imus, for instance, built his career on being outspoken but was fired by WFAN/MSNBC in 2007 after making racist and misogynist comments including describing the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”.Today’s sports broadcast world runs according to a new set of rules, in which “respectable” TV and the demi-monde of sports podcasts, streaming, and shitposting increasingly intersect: all engagement is good engagement, and the best type of filter is no filter. Whatever faint norms of decorum constrained earlier generations of professional sports talkers have faded completely.There’s a reciprocal flow of testosterone and ideas between these shows, the world of sports, social media and real life. A handful of subjects and themes recur: veneration of the military, glorification of strength and traditional “male” values, celebration of gambling, the denigration of women and anything thought to represent “woke” culture. On any given day across the sporting bro-zone you might hear Bussin’ With the Boys and their guests rail against pronouns and cancel culture, the hosts of Barstool Sports’ Pardon My Take podcast argue Taylor Swift needs to “release a sex video” to make her presence at NFL games tolerable to the average male fan, or McAfee devote 30 minutes (as he did recently) to describing his day among “maybe the baddest motherfuckers on earth”: the drill instructors at the US Marine Corps training center on Parris Island in South Carolina. These interests and obsessions mirror the president’s cultural politics, turning the sports bros into critical emissaries for Trump’s peculiar brand of popularly elected vandalism.It’s worth questioning, of course, how influential these influencers really are. A recent poll from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics found that 35% of young men had an unfavorable view of Rogan, while a further 36% had never heard of him or did not know enough about him to have an opinion. The much-rehearsed idea that the minds of young male voters have been irretrievably colonized by the manosphere is surely overblown.But there seems little dispute that these influencers have been effective in platforming rightwing figures and ideas. The sports bros are an essential part of that legitimizing apparatus – all the more so because their endorsement of the right’s reflexes, priorities and modes of attack is couched in the ostensibly apolitical language of sports. The cultural supremacy of the sports bros is now so total that Barstool’s Dave Portnoy is now famous for his online pizza reviews that can make or break restaurants in America. When a casual day trader from Massachusetts who built his media empire on college gambling advice becomes the arbiter-in-chief of America’s favorite food, something fundamental has shifted in how we determine cultural authority.View image in fullscreenThe sports bro supremacyThe unsinkability of these sporting mouths, bobbing forever on the surface of our cultural consciousness, parallels the envenomation of online discourse and the transformation of Trump from presidential punchline into the most consequential political figure of the century. Trump, let’s not forget, first reached the White House after navigating a storm of outrage over the Access Hollywood tape, a victory that set a precedent for the practitioners of “locker room talk” who have found fame in his wake. With the tacit endorsement of the sports bros, on whose shows he became a regular guest during last year’s election, Trump not only seized the young male vote, he also engineered a complete reversal in his own reputation throughout the sporting world from his first to second terms.Interestingly, McAfee himself declined an invitation to have Trump on his show during last year’s election campaign, reasoning that he and his sidekicks are “not the ones” to be asking questions about politics – an uncharacteristic moment of modesty. But UFC-adjacent comedian Theo Von and Barstool Sports’ Bussin’ With the Boys both featured extended conversations with Trump during the campaign.These appearances showed Trump to be extremely well-versed in sports, which is perhaps no surprise when you consider the amount of time he spends tweeting about them, watching them and playing them – not to mention his own tangled history with the business side of sports (Trump owned a New Jersey-based team in the short-lived United States Football League during the 1980s). These podcasts also helped humanize Trump, presenting him as a relatable guy who works long hours and is sympathetic enough to engage a jumpy figure like Von in a conversation about drug addiction. The warm audience Trump received helped normalize his politics and support.Today the sporting world, with a few notable exceptions, genuflects before Trump in a way that seemed unthinkable during his first term. Beyond the unquivering Trumpian stronghold of Dana White’s UFC, the big professional leagues such as the NFL and NBA either kept their distance from the 45th president or were at outright war with him; now No 47 is the guest of honor at the Super Bowl and every second athlete is doing the Trump dance, the double fist pump and minor hip swivel that the president has turned into his signature choreographic move on the campaign stage.The president’s political endurance has perhaps, in turn, acted as a kind of bro bat signal, helping to validate the obnoxiousness and resistance to introspection on which the sports bros thrive: if he doesn’t have to censor himself, apologize or pay lip service to feelings, why should they?View image in fullscreenThe personality of American culture has long been split between purity and profanity. The death of consequences for figures like McAfee suggests the balance of power has definitively swung in favor of the trolls and tough guys, and now none of puritanical old America’s sanctities will hold them back. It says everything about the sports bros’ invincibility that among the top names floated by progressives to counter the blitzkrieg of Trump’s second term and lead them to 2028 is Stephen A Smith, the sports pundit who turned relentlessness into a career and is something of a spiritual godfather to the McAfees and Portnoys of the world. The only person who can defeat a sports bro is another sports bro.Might there be another strategy for the left to combat this tide flooding the sporting-cultural zone? Recent reports suggest Democrats are slinging money to all corners of the country in a desperate attempt to find the progressive answer to Rogan: the chatter is all about “speaking with American men” and investing to generate a “return on culture”, and Democrats such as Hakeem Jeffries and Josh Shapiro have in recent months zombied from sports podcast to sports podcast in a doomed and focus group-refined attempt to revive a cadaverous Democratic party with the tonic of their everyman cool.These appearances might be wooden and inauthentic, but it does suggest a key role for sports in the left’s attempt to pull itself off the canvas following the catastrophe of last November. Sports are hardly the exclusive preserve of the right. The Golden State Warriors’ four-time championship winning head coach, Steve Kerr, is probably the most vocal critic of Trumpism at work in American sports today, and Democrats have long associated themselves with sports: Barack Obama, of course, is an accomplished hooper, while Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate for New York City mayor who loves Arsenal and cricket and has spun his appearances at Knicks games during the recent NBA playoffs into campaign trail gold, is living proof that it’s possible to be passionate and knowledgeable about sports while eschewing the ugliness of bro culture.But left-leaning sports pundits? That’s a tougher ask. The pallor of recent attempts to seed a more robust progressive presence online highlights how severely Democrats have been left behind in the new world of sports talk. Broadcasts such as the Pat McAfee Show are powerful engines of political orientation not because they address politics directly – they almost never do – but because their politics emerge in the interstices of everything said on screen.There aren’t many popular voices in sports punditry that do for the left what McAfee and his cohort do, casually yet masterfully, for the right: embody an ethos, solidify an idiom and transmit a set of values that find a natural downstream outlet in electoral politics. Influential Twitch lefty Hasan Piker occasionally discusses sports but they are not his main focus; pundits such as Pablo Torre and Bomani Jones lean liberal but they do not have the same reach that the McAfees of the world do, and they don’t express their politics with anything like the same splash. Over the past decade sports broadcasters who discussed politics from a leftist perspective, such as former ESPN host Jemele Hill, were gradually forced out of the mainstream. NFL star Travis Kelce, who hosts a popular podcast with his older brother Jason, seems vaguely progressive in orientation but he also said playing in front of Trump at this year’s Super Bowl was “a great honor”, a tellingly wimpy political intervention. Like LeBron before him, he’s too big to get too real, too good to get dirty; the Kelce-James brand of progressivism is very much by the book, a progressivism of the civics class. Where the right is loud, the sporting left speaks with a militant squeak.View image in fullscreenA lack of voices on the leftOn-field athletic competition is about domination, strength, winners and losers, yes, but it’s also about finesse, beauty, cunning and wit; it’s a place where conservative fantasies of order and the cerebrations of the progressives can both find a home.But if any side should be controlling the field of sports talk, it is the left, since so many of the inequalities that plague society at large now infect sports as well, which are increasingly run on extractive lines for the benefit of predatory rentiers, autocrat-backed sovereign wealth funds and private-equity ghouls. Meanwhile the leveling mechanisms that still keep the American professional leagues interesting and unpredictable – collective wage bargaining, drafts, salary caps and luxury taxes – have their roots in this country’s unlikely tradition of sporting socialism. Far from being a natural stage for the tiresome politics of cultural revenge in which the right traffics, sports (as a thing to shoot the shit about) offer a rich canvas for the exploration of many issues about which the left cares deeply: race, gender, class, social mobility and the corrupting influence of money.The left should not be afraid of learning from the lords of the sporting bro-zone even as it spurns their machismo and lack of tact. A culture used to crew necks can’t go back to buttoned collars.For example, as part of his deal with ESPN, McAfee is allowed to swear live on TV: “The following progrum is a collection of stooges talking about happenings in the sports world,” announces a disclaimer that airs before each show, read aloud in a geriatric voice reminiscent of Grampa Simpson. “There may be some ‘cuss’ words because that’s how humans in the real world talk.” This is one area where the bros and the left should make common cause: swearing is good. Viewers love McAfee not despite the fact he’s loose, unpolished and has a dirty mouth; they love him because of these things. This is a man, let’s not forget, who first came to prominence at age 23, while playing for the Colts, after being arrested in downtown Indianapolis for taking a pre-dawn swim in a canal. Asked to explain why he was soaking wet, McAfee replied: “I am drunk.” The charge was dismissed but the hearts of a city were won, and a media career was born.Why can the left not take the best of McAfee and his ilk while jettisoning the worst? Surely it’s possible to talk sports in a way that’s biting, real, unfiltered, funny and even mean – to “connect with men where they are”, as we are repeatedly told the left must – without descending into toxicity, cruelty, belligerence and hate. If progressives want to reclaim the White House, they could do worse than to start rambling for hours on end about games and players that have nothing to do with politics at all. Sports-loving leftists of America, unite: you have nothing to lose but your parlays. More

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    Blood and bravado: the Trump shooting upended an election and shook the US

    Blake Marnell was standing in the front row, about 10 yards from Donald Trump, when the shots rang out. He watched the Secret Service pile on the former US president. “I was able to see him standing and I could see the blood on his ear,” Marnell recalls. “When he put his fist up, I remember yelling, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’”Sunday marks one year since the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a week that changed US politics. Eight days later then-president Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of the election race amid concerns over his mental and physical decline.The twin shocks to the system of July 2024 continue to echo. Trump’s supporters hailed his survival as proof of divine intervention. He declared in his inaugural address in January: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” He has governed with a zealous self-belief that earns comparisons with authoritarians from history.Democrats, meanwhile, continue to wrestle the fallout of Biden’s late withdrawal. Some argue that he could have pushed on and won; most believe that he left the race too late and paved the way for Trump’s return to the White House. Younger voters accuse the party establishment of betrayal and beat the drum of generational change.What few dispute is that the shooting of Trump was indicative of a culture of political violence that has taken hold over the past decade, with recent examples including the murder of a Minnesota politician and her husband. It also set in motion a news cycle that has barely drawn breath over the past year as the most unconventional president of modern times dominates the national consciousness.View image in fullscreenFor Marnell, who lives in San Diego, California, that hot summer’s day in Butler began like dozens of the other Trump rallies he has been to before and since. He was wearing a “brick suit” that symbolises the president’s border wall and looked up at a giant screen that displayed a chart detailing US-Mexico border crossings.Trump had his head turned to the right to review the graphic when the gunfire began and nicked his right ear. “I didn’t even recognise them as gunshots,” 60-year-old Marnell said in a phone interview. “I thought they might be firecrackers.”For several long seconds there was pandemonium. Firefighter Corey Comperatore was killed while David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both hospitalised with injuries. Secret Service agents killed the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, whose motives remain a mystery, and rushed on top of Trump, whose fate was initially uncertain.“There was every range of emotion in the crowd. There was anger. There were people who turned around and were yelling at the TV cameras. There were people who were in prayer. There were people crying. There were people who were in disbelief. It was just an incredible gamut and range of reactions.”But what happened next became the stuff of political legend. Trump rose, pumped his fist and beseeched his followers to “Fight! Fight! Fight” even as blood streaked his face. The resulting image flashed around the world and is still displayed in the West Wing and worn on T-shirts by his “Make America great again” (Maga) acolytes.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “He showed courage and determination when you’d think the first thing somebody wants to do is slink away and save themselves. His response was to be the medieval chieftain who was rallying his troops round the banner and showing that he was undeterred to fight, to use his word. It was incredibly moving.”Biden was quick to call Trump and express sympathy. On 17 July, Biden tested positive for Covid-19. On 19 July, Trump, wearing a patch on his ear, delivered a 90-minute address at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, where some delegates wore ear patches in solidarity.Then, on 21 July, Biden suddenly announced that he was stepping aside and would not be the Democratic nominee for president. The writing had been on the wall since his disastrous debate performance against Trump the previous month. Party leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer had urged him to withdraw. Finally, he yielded.View image in fullscreenEven by the standards of the Trump era, it had been a jaw-dropping eight days. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “There have been dramatic weeks and months but, in an election campaign, there’s just nothing like it in all of American history.”Journalist Chris Whipple was working on a different project when he heard the news of Biden’s exit, “realised this was the political story of the century”, and pivoted to writing a book that would become Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.“It created that devastating split screen between the strengths of Trump and the weakness of Biden,” Whipple said. “The image of Trump rising off that stage with blood on his cheeks and his fist in the air mouthing ‘fight, fight, fight’ was devastating in comparison to the image of Biden shortly thereafter climbing off Air Force One with Covid headed to his bunker in Rehoboth Beach, standing on those steps, looking lost and gripping the handrail.”In their new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf write how Trump’s future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told him after the assassination attempt: “You do know this is God.” At first Trump was silent, they write, but by the next day he was telling everyone: “If anyone ever doubted there was a God, that proved there was.”Numerous speakers at the Republican convention insisted that Trump had been spared by God so that he could pursue his mission. The Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell refers to it as a “millimetre miracle”.Whipple added: “To this day the true believers think this was God’s plan and maybe – without playing armchair psychologist – it’s contributed to a kind of fearlessness in Trump that I’m not sure we saw in the first term. Some might say recklessness. It changed Trump. It changed the country.”Conversely, the Democrats have still not recovered from the debacle of Biden’s late departure. His anointed successor, Kamala Harris, had only 107 days to campaign and ignited a burst of Democratic enthusiasm, notably at the party convention and when she debated Trump. But it was too little too late and she lost both the electoral college and the national popular vote.Whipple commented: “It was a seismic political event and the reverberations continue to this day. His 11th-hour abdication, leaving Kamala Harris with too short a runway to mount a winning campaign, obviously is historic and there is to this day a lot of anger among Democrats about the fact that Biden should have stepped away a year earlier or more.View image in fullscreen“That has real political ramifications. We’re seeing it in the popularity of ZohranMamdani in New York and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. It’s not just their message which is appealing to so many but also the fact that they’re anti-establishment. Biden and his gang have come to represent the corrupt Democratic establishment because of his last-minute abdication. You’re seeing an anti-establishment revolt.”Biden’s determination to cling on has been the subject of Democratic hand-wringing – and several books – though he insists he has no regrets. Many in the party wish he had stepped aside after the 2022 midterm elections so it could have held an open primary contest to find an heir apparent. Now Democrats find themselves leaderless and, according to a March poll, at a record low approval rating of 29%.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and political commentator, said: “The real fallout was the lack of a clear successor to President Biden.“Had there been a real primary process that would have been able to unfold over the course of a year and a half, it would have weeded out the contenders and pretenders and would have put forward a ticket that, even if they ended up losing, could still have been very much part of the conversation heading into 2028. Instead, we’re starting 2028 already behind.”How elections are won and lost is always complex. With inflation and immigration looming large, there is no guarantee that another Democratic candidate would have beaten Trump. Nor will it ever be known how determinative his made-for-TV response to the assassination attempt was. But it did have some important consequences.Within minutes of the shooting, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, announced his endorsement of the former president. Musk would go on to spend a record of about $280m in backing Trump and Republican candidates, then lead the president’s assault on the federal bureaucracy until their spectacular falling-out.The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, also praised Trump’s reaction, calling his raised fist “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”. Zuckerberg went on to attend Trump’s inauguration and make changes to Meta such as ending third-party fact-checking, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bringing political content back to users’ feeds.The events of one year ago may also have shaped Trump’s psychology, fuelling an impatient, seize-the-day approach to the presidency that sets the news agenda at breakneck speed, knocks opponents back on their heels and brooks no compromise.Olsen said: “Trump dialed it up to 11 on his inauguration. A lot of that is the indirect influence of his survival of the assassination attempt. This is a man who is going with his instincts and going to do what he’s going to do and not going to prioritise – he’s going to push everything everywhere all at once.”Trump has survived legal troubles and taken on the elites and won, at least in his own mind, Olsen added. “I don’t think he thinks he’s invincible but he feels vindicated. Coupled with a sense of vulnerability means this is a guy who knows that everything could end tomorrow and believes he’s been proven right, so he’s darn well going to use the time that he has left to him to move forward to do even more that he believes is right.” More

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    Trump news at a glance: Trump shocks EU and Mexico with tariffs as he gives Ice agents ‘total authorization’ to protect themselves

    Donald Trump has said he will impose tariffs of 30% on the European Union and Mexico from 1 August, threatening Europe that it would pay a price if it retaliated and telling Mexico it had not done enough to stop North America from turning into a “Narco-Trafficking Playground”.“If for any reason you decide to raise your Tariffs and retaliate, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the 30% that we charge,” he wrote in a letter to the EU.EU trade ministers will meet on Monday for a pre-arranged summit and will be under pressure from some countries to show a tough reaction by implementing €21bn ($24.6bn) in retaliatory measures, which they had paused until midnight the same day.Here are the key US politics stories at a glance:Donald Trump announces 30% tariffs on goods from EU and MexicoDonald Trump announced on Saturday that goods imported from both the European Union and Mexico will face a 30% US tariff rate starting 1 August, in letters posted on his social media platform, Truth Social.The tariff assault on the EU came as a shock to European capitals as the European Commission and the US trade representative Jamieson Greer had spent months hammering out a deal they believed was acceptable to both sides.Read the full storyTrump authorizes Ice agents to protect themselves using ‘whatever means’ necessaryDonald Trump has given “total authorization” to federal immigration agents to protect themselves after a series of clashes with protesters, including during enforcement raids on two California cannabis farms.“I am giving Total Authorization for Ice to protect itself, just like they protect the Public,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday, adding that he was directing the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and border czar, Tom Homan, to arrest anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) protesters who impede immigration enforcement operations.Read the full storyTrump cuts to Fema questioned as Texas flood cleanup continuesRecently departed officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) say the organization is dangerously underresourced and overstretched in the event of further natural catastrophes, as the cleanup continues from this month’s torrential rain storms and flooding in Texas that left more than 120 dead.Read the full storyKash Patel denies rumors he’s quitting the FBI over DoJ ruling on Epstein filesFBI director Kash Patel has denied swirling resignation rumors over reported unhappiness at a justice department decision to close the book on Jeffrey Epstein after administration officials teased a big reveal earlier in the year.In a Saturday social media post, the agency director said: “the conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been. It’s an honor to serve the President of the United States – and I’ll continue to do so for as long as he calls on me.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    David Gergen, a veteran of Washington politics and an adviser to four presidents, Republican and Democrat, has died aged 83.

    As US regulators restrict Covid mRNA vaccines and as independent vaccine advisers re-examine the shots, scientists fear that an unlikely target could be next: cancer research.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened on Friday 11 July. More

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    Kash Patel denies rumors he’s quitting the FBI over DoJ ruling on Epstein files

    FBI director Kash Patel has denied swirling resignation rumors over reported unhappiness at a justice department decision to close the book on Jeffrey Epstein after administration officials teased a big reveal earlier in the year.In a Saturday social media post, the agency director said: “the conspiracy theories just aren’t true, never have been. It’s an honor to serve the President of the United States – and I’ll continue to do so for as long as he calls on me.”Over the past week, Maga hardliners, including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, former White House adviser Steve Bannon and – reportedly – FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, have been strongly critical of a joint decision by US attorney general Pam Bondi and the FBI to not release further information about Epstein held in government files, including a so-called client list.Critics have slammed the FBI-justice department conclusion about Epstein’s official autopsy that the disgraced financier had hung himself in his cell. Many have refused to accept that, repeating a conspiracy theory that Epstein, who died in August 2019 while awaiting trial, was in fact murdered to silence him.“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list’,” the memo stated. “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”Rumors of a rift between the FBI and the justice department over the memo have been denied by deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who wrote on social media that there is “no daylight” between the FBI and the Department of Justice leadership on the issue.“I worked closely with [Kash and Bongino] on the joint FBI and DOJ memo regarding the Epstein Files. All of us signed off on the contents of the memo and the conclusions stated in the memo. The suggestion by anyone that there was any daylight between the FBI and DOJ leadership on this memo’s composition and release is patently false,” Blanche said.But on Friday, NBC News reported that Bongino is considering stepping down from his post at the FBI after a “heated confrontation” with Bondi over the issue.“Bongino is out-of-control furious,” the person who has spoken with the deputy FBI director said. “This destroyed his career. He’s threatening to quit and torch Pam unless she’s fired.”Donald Trump has also grown testy with repeated questions about Epstein, who was once a neighbor in Palm Beach. He erupted on Tuesday when he was pressed on an apparent one-minute gap in a 10-hour video recorded outside of Epstein’s cell.“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he said. “This guy’s been talked about for years … Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.”Bondi has since explained that the missing minute of surveillance film was simply the recording equipment resetting itself, as it does every night.Still, it is not clear that Maga hardliners are willing to let the Epstein conspiracy theories go – they have provided a constant stream of material that supposedly supports their theories of a deep state.But no evidence has emerged that Epstein was engaged in a conspiracy to blackmail high-profile visitors, including Britain’s Prince Andrew, to his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico and the US Virgin Islands.The FBI-DoJ memo stated that it had uncovered “a significant amount of material”, including more than 300GB of data and physical evidence that included “a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography”.“Through this review, we found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials and will not permit the release of child pornography,” the memo said. More