Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 175 Shares199 Views

    in US Politics

    Joe Biden reportedly more open to calls for him to step aside as candidate

    Joe Biden has reportedly become more open in recent days to hearing arguments that he should step aside as the Democratic presidential candidate after the party’s two main congressional leaders told him they doubted his ability to beat Donald Trump.While continuing to insist he will be the party’s nominee in November, the president has reportedly started asking questions about negative polling data and whether the vice-president, Kamala Harris, considered the favourite to replace him if were to withdraw, fares better.The indications of a possible rethink come after Biden tested positive on Wednesday for Covid-19, forcing him to isolate for several days while curtailing a campaign visit to Nevada that had been part of a drive to show his candidacy was very much alive.It also coincides with fresh polling data showing that he now trails Trump by two points in Virginia, a state he won by 10 points in 2020, and signals that key Democrats, including Barack Obama, now believe he should stand down.The Emerson College Polling/the Hill survey showed Trump ahead by 45% to 43%, within the margin of error but consistent with a spate of other polls showing that Biden’s support has fallen in swing states since his disastrous showing at last month’s debate in Atlanta.Biden’s newfound receptivity to at least the possibility of stepping aside represents a shift from the position he adopted at a press conference at last week’s Nato summit in Washington, when he told journalists he would only drop out if polling data showed him “there’s no way you can win”.“No one’s saying that,” he added.His willingness to listen to opposing arguments comes after Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, and Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, reportedly both told him that it would be in the country’s interests if he stepped aside, ABC reported.Schumer described the report of his meeting with Biden at the president’s Delaware home last weekend as “idle speculation” but tellingly did not deny its contents.The Senate leader’s intervention has apparently been influential in delaying a move by the Democratic National Committee to stage an early electronic roll call of delegates that could have started next week and was aimed at locking in the nomination for Biden before next month’s party convention in Chicago. The roll call vote has been pushed by at least a week, giving forces opposed to him running more time to organise.Equally persuasively, Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, also told Biden in a recent conversation that polls show he cannot beat Trump and that he could wreck the Democrats’ chances of recapturing the chamber in November, according to CNN.Biden is said to have pushed back during the conversation, insisting – as he has in several Zoom sessions with other Democrats – that he had seen polling data showing he could win.It is not known if Pelosi had called on the president to stand aside during the talk, which was said to have taken place in the past week.Pelosi has been widely reported as orchestrating the renewed pressure on Biden to give up his re-election bid, which has intensified in recent days after a brief pause following last Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Trump, to which the president responded with a series of authoritative statements calling for calm.Adam Schiff, the California congressman who on Tuesday became the latest elected Democrat to urge Biden to stand down, is known to be close to the former speaker.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The speaker does not want to call on him to resign [as the Democratic nominee], but she will do everything in her power to make sure it happens,” Politico reported one Pelosi ally as saying.A Washington Post report on Thursday suggested that Obama – for whom Biden served as vice-president – had told allies in recent days that Biden’s path to re-election had greatly diminished and that he needed to reconsider the viability of his campaign. Obama has spoken to Biden just once since the 27 June debate but he and Pelosi have reportedly shared their concerns privately on the phone. The former president initially tweeted his support for Biden in the immediate aftermath of the debate.Another key congressman, Jamie Raskin of Maryland – who played a leading role in the House committee that investigated the January 6 attack on the US Capitol – added his voice to the pressure with a four-page letter to Biden sent on 6 July comparing him to a tired baseball pitcher and pleading with him to consult with fellow Democrats over whether to continue his campaign, the New York Times reported.“There is no shame in taking a well-deserved bow to the overflowing appreciation of the crowd when your arm is tired out, and there is real danger for the team in ignoring the statistics,” wrote Raskin, drawing a comparison with a Boston Red Sox pitcher, Pedro Martinez, whose tired state cost his team a place in the World Series final in 2003.In another ominous sign for Biden, Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the president’s main advisers and a co-chairman of his campaign, has told him that donors have stopped giving money to his campaign.A Biden adviser told the New York Times that the decision on whether to withdraw from the race boiled down to three factors – polling, money and which states were in play. All three were moving in the wrong direction for Biden, he said.As renewed speculation about Biden’s thinking intensified on Thursday, his supporters continued to insist that the position was unchanged.“When it comes to if he’s open or being receptive to any of that, look, the president has said it several times: he’s staying in this race,” Quentin Fulks, the Biden campaign deputy manager, told reporters on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee.“Our campaign is not working through any scenarios where President Biden is not at the top of the ticket,” he added. More

  • 238 Shares149 Views

    in US Politics

    Trump’s pick of JD Vance is a clear signal: this is a fight over America’s identity | Steve Phillips

    Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate is a clear and unmistakable message that Republicans are waging a holy war over the very identity of this nation. In choosing the Ohio senator, the former US president has selected and elevated a person who is one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders and whose primary qualification for national leadership is articulating the grievances of white people unhappy with the country’s changing racial composition.Rather than even pretend to reach out to the less rabid Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the primaries or attempt to win greater support among Latinos by choosing Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, Trump has simply doubled down on his crusade to make America white again.Traditionally, vice-presidential selections aim to broaden the party’s appeal by signaling a commitment to a specific constituency or sector of the electorate. Barack Obama selected Joe Biden in 2008 to racially balance the ticket and reassure white voters that he’d have a veteran, moderate, white male political leader at his side. Biden, in turn, chose a younger woman of color to run with him to inspire and acknowledge the critical importance of women and people of color to the Democratic coalition.Trump had the opportunity to make a similar, more traditional, move. In many ways, Rubio would have been the smart pick; he’d have been the first person of color on a Republican ticket, and could plausibly have tried to appeal to Latinos and peel off some support from that cornerstone of the Democratic coalition. Others in the Republican party wanted Trump to calm the fears of the more moderate voters who had backed Haley over Trump’s bombast and division.But, true to form, Trump rejected all that counsel and went with the cultural warrior, Trump critic turned sycophant Vance.By any measure, Vance – who has no prior political experience and has only been a senator for 17 months – is grossly unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, but that is not surprising given that Trump himself is arguably the least qualified person to ever occupy the Oval Office. Vance’s primary qualification is his ability to articulate the anguish of white working-class Americans. Through his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy and his rhetoric as a candidate and now senator, Vance has done little else of note in his life than complain about how America is no longer a white-dominated country, a fact that has been painful and disorienting and hard to accept for a considerable number of white people.What perhaps poses one of the greatest dangers to this country is that Vance, like Trump, has already proven that he is committed to aggressively hacking away at the fraying social fabric that binds this nation together. Most alarmingly, Vance has said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done what Trump wanted and blocked electors from states that voted for Biden. Vance has raised money for insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the elected government of the United States and who sought to block the certification of an election in which all 50 governors – Republican and Democratic alike – certified results that showed Biden won the presidency.Vance’s contempt for democracy and democratic institutions was on full display as well in the immediate hours after the Trump rally shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, last Saturday. Before anyone even knew who the shooter was, Vance was tweeting that Biden was to blame.Electorally, the implication of Vance’s selection is that it locks into place the contours, dynamics and stakes of the election.The journalist and analyst Ron Brownstein presaged this reality 12 years ago when he described modern American politics as a battle between two constellations of people, which he called the Coalition of Restoration and the Coalition of Transformation.Democrats, he observed, “are now operating with a largely coherent Coalition of Transformation that will allow (and even pressure) them to align more unreservedly with the big cultural and demographic forces remaking America”. Conversely, Obama’s 2012 re-election “clearly stamped the Republicans as a Coalition of Restoration, overwhelmingly dependent on the votes of whites unsettled by those changes”.In my books, I describe these groupings as the New American Majority and the Modern-Day Confederates, but the concepts are the same, and the implications for contemporary elections are far-reaching and under-appreciated.In each successive presidential election since Obama was elected, all that has really mattered is which coalition of voters the nominee is championing, AKA What Side Are You On?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat dynamic will play out again this fall, as Trump has simply doubled down on trying to rally his Coalition of Restoration to turn out in large numbers. The good news for Democrats is that the Coalition of Transformation is larger than the Coalition of Restoration. Republicans know this in their bones and in their spreadsheets, and that is why they are relentlessly focused on voter suppression, introducing nearly 800 different pieces of legislation designed to make it harder to vote, according to Ari Berman’s book Give Us the Ballot and the Brennan Center’s 2021 analysis.Census data and election results over the past 40 years further affirm the fact that the Coalition of Transformation is larger. With the sole exception of 2004, the Democratic nominee for president has won the popular vote in every single presidential election since 1992. The logical result of one party rooting its politics in appeals to white racial fears and resentment is that the other party gets the majority of support from people of color.In a country where nearly half of the residents are people of color (41%) the Republican party remains overwhelmingly monochromatic; according to a Pew Research analysis, 83% of Republican voters are white. Conversely, 72% of people of color supported Biden in 2020, and no Democratic nominee has ever received less than 83% of the African American vote since the advent of exit polling in 1976.By picking Vance, the Republicans show they are not going to try to broaden their coalition: they’re just going to go harder with their shrinking coalition and focus on getting their supporters to the polls. Democrats need to have similar clarity and focus, and devote their resources and energy to maximizing voter turnout from now until election day. If they can do that, they will win – and JD Vance’s voice, and Trump’s, will remain far from the White House.

    Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in US Politics

    Hundreds mourn Pennsylvania man killed in Trump assassination attempt

    Hundreds of people who gathered to remember the former fire chief fatally shot at a weekend rally for former president Donald Trump were urged to find “unity” as the area in rural Pennsylvania sought to recover from the assassination attempt.Wednesday’s public event was the first of two to memorialize and celebrate Corey Comperatore’s life. The second, a visitation for friends, was planned for Thursday at Laube Hall in Freeport.Outside the Lernerville Speedway in Sarver, where the vigil was held for Comperatore, a sign read “Rest in Peace Corey, Thank You For Your Service” with the logo of his fire company.On the rural road to the auto racing track – lined with cornfields, churches and industrial plants – a sign outside a local credit union read: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the Comperatore family.”View image in fullscreenComperatore, 50, had worked as a project and tooling engineer, was an army reservist and had spent many years as a volunteer firefighter after serving as chief, according to his obituary.He died on Saturday during the attempt on Trump’s life at the rally in Butler. Comperatore spent the final moments of his life shielding his wife and daughter from gunfire, officials said.A statement issued on Thursday by Comperatore’s family described him as “our beloved father and husband, and a friend to so many throughout the Butler region”.“Our family is finding comfort and peace through the heartfelt messages of encouragement from people around the world, through the support of our church and community, and most of all through the strength of God,” the statement said.Vigil organizer Kelly McCollough told the crowd on Wednesday that the event was not political in nature, adding that there was no room for hate or personal opinions other than an outpouring of support for the Comperatore family.“Tonight is about unity,” McCollough said. “We need each other. We need to feel love. We need to feel safe. We need clarity in this chaos. We need strength. We need healing.”Dan Ritter, who gave a eulogy, said he bought Comperatore’s childhood home in 1993, sparking a friendship that grew with their shared values of family, Christian faith and politics.“Corey loved his family and was always spending time with them,” Ritter said. “This past Saturday was supposed to be one of those days for him. He did what a good father would do. He protected those he loved. He’s a true hero for us all.”Jeff Lowers of the Freeport fire department trained with Comperatore and said at the vigil that he always had a smile on his face.Afterward, Heidi Powell, a family friend, read remarks from Comperatore’s high school economics teacher, who could not attend the vigil.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What made Corey truly extraordinary was his indomitable spirit, unyielding courage, his unflappable optimism,” the teacher, Mark Wyant, wrote.Comperatore’s pastor, Jonathan Fehl of the Cabot Methodist church, said the family “has been humbled by the way this community has rallied around them”, and by the support they have received from people around the world.The vigil concluded with people in the crowd lighting candles and raising cellphones, glow sticks and lighters as Comperatore’s favorite song – I Can Only Imagine, by the Christian rock band MercyMe – played while pictures of him and his family were shown on a screen.Two other people were injured at the rally: David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township. As of Wednesday night, both had been upgraded to serious but stable condition, according to a spokesperson with Allegheny Health Network.Joseph Feldman, an attorney for Copenhaver, said on Wednesday that he had spoken with Copenhaver by phone.“He seems to be in good spirits, but he also understands the gravity of the situation,” Feldman said. “And he’s deeply saddened about what has occurred, and he’s deeply sympathetic” to the other victims and their families.Feldman said Copenhaver suffered “life-altering injuries”, declining to go into detail. He said Copenhaver’s priority is to “keep up with the medical treatment he’s receiving and hopefully be released at some point”.In a statement, Dutch’s family thanked the “greater western Pennsylvania community and countless others across the country and world” for the incredible outpouring of prayers and well wishes.Trump suffered an ear injury but was not seriously hurt and has been participating this week in the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in US Politics

    Trump’s Republican convention speech: how to watch and what’s at stake

    The biggest event of the Republican convention kicks off Thursday night, with Donald Trump’s address to thousands of party loyalists in attendance.Trump appeared at the opening night of the Republican national convention on Monday, when he was greeted with thunderous applause, marking his first public appearance since surviving an assassination attempt at his campaign rally. Earlier in the day, Trump announced JD Vance, the Ohio senator and once vocal critic of Trump, as his running mate.Vance formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday, with a speech that presented the Republican party as a champion of working-class Americans while denouncing Democrats as out of touch and ineffective.Other speakers on the third day of the convention included Matt Gaetz, Newt Gingrich, Peter Navarro, Greg Abbott, Kellyanne Conway, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr.Notable speakers at the convention so far have also included Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who both challenged Trump for the GOP nomination but backed him at the convention. Sean O’Brien, Ted Cruz, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Ben Carson, Kristi Noem, Rick Scott, Tim Scott and Tom Cotton also spoke at the convention.When is Trump’s convention speech?Trump is expected to deliver remarks on Thursday evening, the final day of the Republican convention, as delegates officially vote to nominate him as the party’s presidential candidate. His speech is scheduled to begin at 9p.m.Earlier this week, Trump told the Washington Examiner that he rewrote his convention speech to focus on calls for national unity. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now,” he told the paper.“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” he said, adding that the speech will be “a lot different” from the original draft.What else to know?After surviving Saturday’s assassination attempt, Trump suggested he had been changed by the experience and wanted to project a message of unity during his convention speech. In an interview Sunday, Trump said he is reworking his remarks with speechwriter Ross Worthington. He had intended to deliver biting remarks against Joe Biden until the shooting at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, prompted him to throw it out.The test of whether Trump will lead the effort to promote a spirit of unity, or whether it was more of a directive aimed at his surrogates, will probably come when he delivers his speech on Thursday.Where can I watch it?The Guardian will have live coverage of the speech. All major networks will carry convention coverage, including CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News and C-SPAN. PBS said it will begin broadcasting each night at 6pm ET.A livestream of the convention is also available on the GOP Convention website.Will Melania be in the audience for Trump’s speech?Former first lady Melania Trump has made very few public appearances or statements since Trump left the White House. She did not attend the 27 June debate against Joe Biden, nor did she appear at any of Trump’s court appearances during the hush-money trial.Following Saturday’s assassination attempt against Trump, Melania released a statement condemning the man who authorities say tried to assassinate her husband. She described the shooter as “a monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine”.Melania will attend the convention, according to Eric Trump, but she is not confirmed as a speaker.What about Ivanka Trump?Ivanka Trump has spent the last several years distancing herself from politics, having served as an advisor in her father’s White House. She and her husband Jared Kushner testified before the House committee investigating the January 6 attack.The eldest daughter of the former president was absent in November, 2022 as Trump announced his bid for re-election. “I do not plan to be involved in politics,” she said in a statement at the time.Eric Trump confirmed Ivanka will attend the convention; however unlike in 2016, she’s not confirmed as a speaker.Tiffany Trump is not on the list of confirmed speakers but was in the crowd Monday night. Barron Trump was invited, but will not attend “due to prior commitments”, according to a statement released by his mother, Melania.Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump; Eric’s wife, Lara Trump; and Guilfoyle (Donald Jr’s finance) are listed as speakers. More

  • 175 Shares129 Views

    in US Politics

    To his supporters, Trump is a martyred messiah, resurrected after crucifixion | Sidney Blumenthal

    The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.The most important revelation was written within hours of the shooting by Senator JD Vance, now Trump’s running mate. His was not a gospel of peace, but of wrath. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Vance wrote. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”Pointing his spear at the enemy, Vance settled the apostolic succession. He is a changeling, who once compared Trump to “heroin” and “Hitler”, but his conversion into Trump’s warrior has vaulted him to become the anointed disciple and chief of the praetorian guard of the living godhead.Before the assassination attempt, the Christian nationalists’ narrative awkwardly tried to fit the licentious, sinful and predatory Trump into a framework in which his apparent absence of virtue and religious faith served virtue and faith. They commonly referred to him as King Cyrus, after the Persian ruler, who did not “recognize” God but was described in Isaiah 45 as “anointed” by the Lord to free the exiled Jews in Babylon.Trump’s origin story as the son of the brutish real estate operator Fred Trump and the pupil of the nefarious fixer and Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn was always problematic. None of his followers ever acknowledge it, except perhaps for Cohn’s protege Roger Stone, who was handed Trump to run as a client when Cohn was dying of Aids. That true crime story remains dangerous to the Trump mythology.A movie about Trump’s relationship with Cohn, The Apprentice, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, has not yet found an American distributor. Media companies have been intimidated at the possibility of Trump’s vengeance. “If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote the producers of the film.So, as in Isaiah 45, the 45th president was the king whose “right hand” was invisibly guided from above. “He, like King Cyrus before him, fulfilled the biblical prophecy of the gods worshiped by Jews,” proclaimed Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host. The Trump Prophecy, a film hailing his presidency as divinely ordained, produced with faculty and students from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, also cast him as King Cyrus. An evangelical preacher, Paula White, whom Trump invited to speak at his 2017 inauguration ceremony and welcomed to the White House to bless him for nominating Neil Gorsuch to the supreme court, declared: “Because God says that he raises up and places all people in places of authority, it is God who raises up a king.”After Trump’s multiple indictments and felony conviction, he intensified his image-making as a martyr, the victim of conspiratorial forces, of the “Deep State”, “radical left Democrats” and “globalist elites”. He presented himself as selflessly absorbing the blows that were really meant for his supporters, whom he was shielding from “poisoning of the blood” from immigrants. But he instantly translated his supposed self-sacrifice into cries of revenge.On 4 August 2023, the day after he was formally charged in the January 6 case, Trump posted on Truth Social: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” By April of this year, Trump had made numerous threats against the judges, court staff and witnesses in all of his cases, who have received death threats and are under the protection of security details, including the US marshals. Trump’s courtroom outbursts forced judges to issue 14 gag orders. In the New York hush-money case, he violated 10 gag orders, which may be pertinent in his sentencing on 18 September. In that case, after Trump attacked Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Merchan said, in issuing one of the gag orders: “The threat is very real.”On 4 June, after his conviction on 34 felonies in the New York hush-money case, Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News: “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them. And it’s easy because it’s Joe Biden and you see all the criminality.” Biden, of course, had nothing to do with the New York case.Two weeks earlier, Trump had appeared before the National Rifle Association convention to warn: “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain.” He conflated gun control with his trials: “No, they want to take away your rights. Well, I know that better than anybody. They want to take away my rights better than anybody, worse than Alphonse Capone.” He returned to guns. “We have to have a gun,” he said. “If we don’t have a gun, we’re dead people.”On 6 January 2024, a week before the Republican Iowa caucuses, 17-year-old Dylan Butler entered his school in a small town in Perry, north of Des Moines, killed one student and wounded seven more people before he shot himself. He also had an explosive device. “Two friends and their mother who spoke with the AP said Butler was a quiet person who had been bullied relentlessly since elementary school,” the Associated Press reported. After 36 hours of silence, Trump called the incident “very terrible”, adding: “But we have to get over it, we have to move forward.”Back in 2015, after Trump announced his first candidacy, he gave an interview to a gun blog called Ammoland. He had previously supported the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, passed in 1994 under the Clinton administration, which a research team at New York University’s Langone Medical Center for the National Institute of Health calculated reduced mass shootings by 70%. That ban was allowed to lapse in 2004 under the George W Bush administration.Trump wanted to reassure the gun lobby that he was emphatically against gun control. “To the left, every gun is an assault weapon,” he said. “I certainly stand by my opposition to gun control when it comes to taking guns from law-abiding citizens. You mention that the media describes the AR-15 as an ‘assault rifle,’ which is one example of the many distortions they use to sell their agenda. However, the AR-15 does not fall under this category. Gun-banners are unfortunately preoccupied with the AR-15, magazine capacity, grips and other aesthetics, precisely because of its popularity.”On 9 August 2016, Trump delivered a stemwinding speech against gun control and threatened the assassination of Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. He ridiculed the idea of “gun-free zones” and hypothesized being shot by a gunman from the side, saying: “Do you know what a gun-free zone is? That’s like – they study where the gun-free zones – if they would have known you had guns, if they would have known that they were going to be shot at from the other side, it would have been a whole different story. Maybe it wouldn’t have even happened in the first place.”Then, he incited the crowd against Hillary Clinton. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said. “Although the second amendment, people – maybe there is, I don’t know.”Four years later, Hillary Clinton still appeared as a target for Donald Trump Jr, who posted a picture of himself on Instagram on 4 January 2020, holding an AR-15 etched with a Crusader’s Cross, a far-right symbol, and Hillary Clinton’s image behind bars on the magazine. “Nice day at the range. @rarebreedfirearms and @spikes_tactical adding a little extra awesome to my AR and that mag,” he wrote.On January 6, according to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to the White House chief of staff, when Trump was informed that thousands in the crowd on the Ellipse whom he urged on to the Capitol refused to be screened for weapons at the magnetometers set by the Secret Service, he shouted: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons! They’re not here to hurt me. They can march to the Capitol from here.”Among the banners carried by the mob assaulting the Capitol was a large Confederate flag adorned with an AR-15 and the inscription “Come and Take It”. Other flags depicted Trump carrying an assault rifle. One of the rightwing militias staging the attack, the Oath Keepers, stashed a small armory of AR-15s and other weapons at the ready in a suburban Virginia motel.On 13 July, earlier this month, Trump stepped onto the stage in Butler county, Pennsylvania, where he began by denouncing “the fake news” for not reporting the size of this “big, big, beautiful crowd”. He falsely claimed that Joe Biden had lied about his own crowd sizes, and said: “And we got to bring our country back to health, because our country is going to hell, if you haven’t noticed. Millions and millions of people are pouring in from prisons and from mental institutions.” Trump ripped into “Crooked Joe Biden and laughing Kamala Harris”. He said: “Our country’s been stolen from us … one of the greatest crimes is what they’ve done over four years and hiding what the obvious facts are … .”He was referring to the election of 2020: “I tell you what, we did fantastically in 2016. We did much better in 2020. You know we did much better, and it was rigged. It was a rigged deal.”He turned to talking about people crossing the southern border: “Criminals, we have criminals. We have drug dealers. We have people who should not be here.” On a large screen to the right of his stage, a chart showed how immigration had increased under Biden, though not its recently rapid decrease; he said: “The worst president in the history of our country took over, and look what happened to our country.” Trump turned his head slightly to look at the chart, and said: “And if you, uh, want to really see something that’s sad, take a look at what happened … .” Then the bullet clipped his ear. The shooter with a semi-automatic rifle killed a bystander and critically injured two others.The reborn Trump announced that he would rewrite his acceptance speech to the Republican convention. “It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance,” he said. On the first day of the convention, a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, issued a ruling in the national security documents and obstruction case stating that the special prosecutor was illegal, and dismissed the entire case against Trump – a ruling nearly all legal experts regarded as bizarre, partial and likely to be overturned.Trump’s continuing streak of remarkable luck inspired him to descend from his heavenly state into his usual pit of grievance. His idea of bringing the country together is a lengthy self-interested checklist of settling scores. Uneasy rests the crown of thorns. On 15 July, he posted:
    As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts – The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!
    The motive of the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, remains obscure. From the accounts of those who knew him, he was a quiet boy, awarded a $500 high school prize for his talent at math, who spent two years at a local community college studying engineering, worked as a dietary aide at a nursing home and lived at home. He once gave $15 to a liberal organization, but was a registered Republican. Fellow students remember him as always being a conservative.“He definitely was conservative,” one former classmate told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It makes me wonder why he would carry out an assassination attempt on the conservative candidate.” In a school mock debate, the classmate said: “Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side. That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”Another student recalled that others “tormented Crooks ‘almost every day’ and that he often wore ‘hunting’ outfits to class”. Crooks seems to have recently spent time down the rabbit hole of a pro-gun YouTube channel called Demolition Ranch; when he shot Trump, he was wearing one of its T-shirts, with the slogan “What The Hell”. He had parked his car nearby filled with explosives. Perhaps he intended to ram it into the crowd in a spectacular suicide.Crooks left no letter, no manifesto and no clues on social media. His premeditation did not involve making known his personal motive. He wrote no political statement. Trump’s appearance near his home suddenly gave him an opportunity to strike back. He was a bullied boy.

    Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

  • 225 Shares99 Views

    in US Politics

    Why the Trump attack has spawned myriad conspiracies theories – from left and right alike | Colin Dickey

    Accusations that the assassination attempt on Saturday was staged have proliferated all over social media. Many on the left are arguing that the attack was meant to garner pity for Trump and ensure a kind of “Reichstag fire” scenario so Trump could seize power unilaterally. Many of these focused on the photos of Trump in the immediate aftermath, his fist raised in defiance, as evidence that the entire event was set up to garner sympathy and show the ex-president as unbowed. Meanwhile, on the right, rumours swirled that it was an assassination attempt by President Biden – on Sunday, Alex Jones blasted out an email with a subject line that read in part: “Desperate Deep State Will Try to Assassinate Trump Again”.None of this is surprising – the United States has a long history of presidential assassination and assassination attempts, and a long love affair with conspiracy theories of all kinds. But the ease with which conspiracists of all political alignments have been able to assimilate Saturday’s shocking, unexpected news with their preformed opinions tells us what political conspiracy theories do for people and how they operate.In the wake of breaking, confusing news, conspiracy theories offer the illusory promise of an explanation. Not only that, but a conspiracy theory also offers a narrative of history that is resilient, one that continues to hold up no matter what transpires. If you believe, for example, that the “deep state” is engaged in a long-running, omnipresent campaign to defeat Donald Trump, then anything that happens can be seen as further proof of that.Presidential assassinations – and assassination attempts – are among the most destabilising, confusing and terrifying political events. Alongside major attacks like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, they can change the course of history for ever. So it’s not surprising that such events attract paranoid musings – they proliferate immediately, almost as a sort of self-defence mechanism against the shock of the new.The United States, in particular, has had a long history of yoking conspiracy theories to political assassinations. In 1886, ex-priest Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy wrote a bestseller, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, in which he claimed (among other things) to be a confidant of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had, in fact, represented Chiniquy in 1850 as a young lawyer on a minor matter, but in Chiniquy’s telling, he went on multiple private visits to the White House, where Lincoln purportedly told him that not only were the Catholics behind the civil war, but that if anything were to happen to him, it would be the Jesuits who had pulled the trigger.More recently, they’ve been used to shape reactions in the dramatic aftermath of breaking news. Immediately in the wake of John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, everyone from organised crime to the KKK to Cuban exiles to the CIA was accused of being behind the attack – anyone, it seemed, was more plausible than Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone and using an antiquated rifle. Five years later, when Kennedy’s brother Robert was also killed during his presidential candidacy, once again conspiracists alleged that the killer, Sirhan Sirhan, had been brainwashed or was otherwise part of a larger conspiracy.Similar theories surrounded Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, even though he wasn’t a presidential candidate, and this is to say nothing of the various political assassination attempts carried out by the US government in other countries – in Congo, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Indonesia, as well as the successful coup of Salvador Allende in Chile – and the resulting conspiracy theories they engendered. As the US has long been involved in actual conspiracies (including against its own citizens, such as the FBI’s surveillance program Cointelpro, or the CIA’s experimentation on Americans, MKUultra), the problem is not necessarily in entertaining beliefs – rather, the danger is in using them as a filter against breaking news.It’s natural to want to make sense of something that seems to come from nowhere, changing everything and throwing us off kilter – in such moments of disorientation, any kind of explanation can help reestablish some kind of sense to the world. But when news breaks, facts and motives aren’t at all clear, which is when conspiracy theories emerge as a means of filling that gap, providing a narrative that explains everything that’s happened and what it means. It’s why we turn to them again and again, and why they’re not likely to go away anytime soon.For all the certainty these theories have offered regarding the potential impact of Saturday’s act – that it’s clinched Trump’s election, or that it’s proof that the deep state will stop at nothing to bring him down – it’s far too soon to say for sure. Presidential assassinations have certainly had large impacts on American history: had Lincoln lived past 1865, for example, his successor Andrew Johnson wouldn’t have been in a position to kill Reconstruction. But the effects of assassination attempts are harder to measure. The failed assassination of George Wallace didn’t get him any nearer to the presidency in 1972, and the two assassination attempts of President Gerald Ford didn’t save his re-election campaign in 1976.Actual, verified information takes time; law enforcement has said they still know relatively little about the shooter or his motives. In the coming days, some aspects of this story are going to come into crystal-clear focus. Some may, as with the Kennedy assassinations, remain forever murky. Given all we know about the history of the United States’s covert operations, it’s impossible right now to rule out any possibility of some kind of conspiracy. But what remains true is that any such revelations, should they ever come, won’t come from random social media accounts, and they won’t come from Alex Jones.

    Colin Dickey is the author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy

    Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

  • 200 Shares179 Views

    in US Politics

    American rule of law is vanishing at the tips of Trump-appointed judges’ pens | Moira Donegan

    Donald Trump stole thousands of classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, according to prosecutors, and shoved them in unsecured areas around the tacky Florida golf club where he lives. He kept them in basements, bathrooms and ballrooms; they were often unlocked, accessible to anyone who happened to wander by, as dozens or hundreds of people do, every day, at Mar-a-Lago. Trump refused to return the documents when asked; he also lied about what he had.On at least one occasion in 2021, he was recorded showing off one of the classified documents to a visitor, apparently for the sake of his own aggrandizement. “It is like highly confidential. Secret,” Trump said to the man, who was not authorized to see the information. “See, as president, I could have declassified it. Now, I can’t, but this is still a secret.”Aileen Cannon, a US district court judge in Florida whom Donald Trump appointed during his last year in office, has done everything in her power to make sure Trump is never held accountable for the theft of the documents. Since the special counsel Jack Smith’s case – widely considered to be the most legally airtight of the several criminal prosecutions against the former president – was formally assigned to Cannon in June 2023, she has often acted as if she was a member of the defense team; denying routine motions from the prosecutors, antagonizing Smith and his team personally, and dragging on the proceedings in endless rounds of briefings and delays, all surely meant to postpone the case until after Trump retakes the White House.On Monday, she dismissed the case entirely, throwing out all the document-related charges against Trump. Her purported reasoning? That special counsels such as Jack Smith are unconstitutional. Smith signaled that he plans to appeal the decision.Cannon’s ruling flies in the face of decades of precedent, going back to the Watergate era, wherein courts, including the US supreme court, have repeatedly reaffirmed the constitutionality of special counsels and their appointments. But although Cannon wears a robe, she is not interested in the law, which is a mere pretext for her bald effort to advance and protect Trump’s interests. She is not a judge any more than the man who works at the mall every December is Santa Claus. She has the trappings and the power, but none of the expertise, none of the obligations and none of the shame.Cannon’s dismissal of the Trump documents case was predictable: the prosecution, widely considered to be doomed, came at the end of months of strategic moves on her part meant to provide Trump maximum leeway to message publicly about the case, and minimum threat to his electoral process. When Trump lied about the FBI raid on his home, saying that it was a plot on his life orchestrated by the Biden administration, Smith, fearing violence and public misperception, asked for a gag order. Both the sensitivity of the case and the egregious danger posed by Trump’s conduct should have made it an easy call; but Cannon denied it, allowing Trump to continue lying about the raid.At one point during preliminary proceedings, Cannon outright refused to let prosecutors see the documents that had been seized from Mar-a-Lago, a move that prompted a reversal and rare rebuke from the appeals court above her, Atlanta’s 11th circuit. That 11th circuit warning seems to have prompted the first instance in which another federal judge urged Cannon to recuse herself from the case. It would not be the last.Cannon’s single-handed nullification of the classified documents case demonstrates the core problem with what has been, until now, the dominant theory of how to hold Trump accountable for his crimes: with the law. Increasingly, it seems prosecutions in the federal courts are a futile exercise when it comes to the former president. And that’s because the courts are packed with Republican partisans, Trump appointees and personal Trump loyalists, and large numbers of other right-leaning judges who aim to use their seats to roll back the social progress of the past century, further Trump’s authoritarian agenda, and shield him permanently from consequence. To the extent that they are controlled by these actors, the federal courts will never provide a check to Trump’s power. They will only augment it.This reality was underscored on 1 July. The supreme court’s last decision of the term, Trump v United States, created, out of thin air, a vast and near-absolute immunity from criminal prosecution that the court’s conservative justices say applies to presidents – or, at least, applies to their favorite former president.That decision stemmed from another of Smith’s prosecutions, in the January 6 case; in his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing alone, signaled that he thought that perhaps special counsels such as Smith might not be legal after all. It was less like a real, considered legal position than like a set of instructions for Cannon: throw the documents case out on these grounds. Her argument mirrors Thomas’s; she took her marching orders straight from the top.The 11th circuit is likely to reverse Cannon’s dismissal, and it’s possible that Smith will get a chance to re-file his charges – possibly in Washington, closer to the site of the original illegal conduct, which will have the benefit of permanently removing his case from Cannon’s court. But the case will not be heard before the election, and so it may never be heard at all.Even prosecuting Trump might turn out to offer little more than a delay of the inevitable: the complicity of the courts in Trump’s criminality reveals an institutional rot that even locking him up would not solve. If the courts cannot hold the president accountable – or rather, if they choose to exempt one man from their authority, and instead bend themselves to his will – what, exactly, is the check on the presidency? How can a powerful criminal be held to account? Where does the rule of law apply, and where does it vanish?We have at least one answer: the rule of law vanishes at the tip of a Trump judge’s pen.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More