Evelyn Reynolds

Joe Biden has withdrawn from his presidential re-election race and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of their party’s ticket, an extraordinary decision upending American politics that plunges the Democratic nomination into uncertainty just months before the November election against Donald Trump – a candidate Biden has warned is an existential threat to US democracy.“While it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden said in a letter announcing his decision.Biden thanked Harris in his letter and later endorsed her as the Democratic nominee for president in a tweet. He said he planned to speak to the nation in more detail later this week.“My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as president for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my vice-president. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made,” he said.“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats – it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this.”Harris thanked Biden in a statement “for his extraordinary leadership as president”. She also said “with this selfless and patriotic act, President Biden is doing what he has done throughout his life of service: putting the American people and our country above everything else.“I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” she said. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic party – and unite our nation – to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.“We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win.”The president made the stunning announcement after a weeks-long pressure campaign by Democratic leaders, organizers and donors who increasingly saw no path to victory so long as the embattled incumbent remained on the ticket. More than 30 Democratic members of Congress had called on Biden to step aside. As recently as Friday, his campaign had insisted he was staying in the race. An ABC News/Ipsos poll released on Sunday found that 60% of Democrats believed he should end his run. The same poll found that nearly 76% of Democrats would be satisfied with Harris as the nominee.Biden’s decision to withdraw appears to have been abrupt. The president told his senior staff on Sunday afternoon that he had changed his mind about staying in the race, and campaign officials were still reportedly on the phone with delegates asking if they could count on their support.In a post on Truth Social, Trump said Biden “was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was!”Biden “only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement”, Trump said. “All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t.”Trump went on to list a series of falsehoods about immigration, concluding: “We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”Minutes after Sunday’s announcement, Trump told CNN that he believed it would be easier to defeat Harris than it would have been to beat Biden.It is unclear if any other Democrats will try to challenge Harris for the nomination. And it is still not clear whether she is better positioned to beat Trump. An NBC News poll from earlier this month showed Trump leading Biden and Harris by 2 points, which was within the survey’s margin of error.Barack Obama, the former president who selected Biden as his vice-president for both of his terms, released a lengthy statement on Sunday praising Biden’s decision. There had been reporting in recent days that there was tension between the two men over Biden feeling like Obama and other Democrats were trying to push him out.“Joe Biden has been one of America’s most consequential presidents, as well as a dear friend and partner to me,” said Obama, who won the presidency in 2008. “Today, we’ve also been reminded  –  again – that he’s a patriot of the highest order.“I also know Joe has never backed down from a fight. For him to look at the political landscape and decide that he should pass the torch to a new nominee is surely one of the toughest in his life. But I know he wouldn’t make this decision unless he believed it was right for America. It’s a testament to Joe Biden’s love of the country – and a historic example of a genuine public servant once again putting the interests of the American people ahead of his own – that future generations of leaders will do well to follow.”Obama, who stopped short of endorsing Harris, said Democrats would be navigating “uncharted waters in the days ahead”. He added: “But I have extraordinary confidence that the leaders of our party will be able to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.”Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who in recent days had become a major figure signaling concerns among Democrats Biden would be able to win the race, spoke glowingly of his decision on Sunday.“President Joe Biden is a patriotic American who has always put our country first. His legacy of vision, values and leadership make him one of the most consequential presidents in American history,” she wrote.Bill and Hillary Clinton endorsed Harris in a joint statement. “We are honored to join the president in endorsing Vice-President Harris and will do whatever we can to support her,” the former president and secretary of state said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris’s nomination is not automatic, and there are other Democrats – including the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker – who could seek the nomination. If any of those candidates were nominated in Chicago next month, they would face the monumental task of introducing themselves to voters, crafting a campaign message and defeating Trump – all in two and a half months.Citing sources, CBS News on Sunday reported that neither Whitmer nor Newsom intended to pursue the Democratic nomination. The network added: “There’s no one at this moment preparing behind the scenes to challenge Vice-President Harris.”Whitmer said in a Sunday tweet: “President Biden is a great public servant who knows better than anyone what it takes to defeat Donald Trump. My job in this election will remain the same: doing everything I can to elect Democrats and stop Donald Trump, a convicted felon whose agenda of raising families’ costs, banning abortion nationwide, and abusing the power of the White House to settle his own scores is completely wrong for Michigan.”The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, said the party would “undertake a transparent and orderly process to move forward” to choose a candidate to defeat Trump in November.A disastrous debate performance last month, and his uneven public appearances since, have only exacerbated longstanding voter concerns that the 81-year-old president was simply too old to serve another four years.Democrats immediately praised Biden’s decision, including Chuck Schumer, the majority leader in the US Senate, and one of several Democrats who had been pressuring Biden to step aside.“Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative leader but he is a truly amazing human being. His decision of course was not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future first,” Schumer said in a statement.The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, suggested during appearances on Sunday talkshows that Republicans would bring legal challenges to attempt to block efforts to change the Democratic ticket. Experts are skeptical those efforts will succeed.Johnson was also one of several top Republicans who called on Biden to resign the presidency – something Biden is almost certain not to do.“If Joe Biden is not fit to run for president, he is not fit to serve as president. He must resign the office immediately,” Johnson said, adding that election day on 5 November “cannot arrive soon enough”.The Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, made similar comments on Sunday.Biden’s decision to step aside, though remain as president, caps a singular few weeks in American politics, the latest stunning episode in an unusually tumultuous election season.Trump, the former president and Republican nominee, narrowly survived an attempt on his life during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that bloodied his ear and left one spectator dead. Biden, after appealing for calm in the wake of attack, had returned to the campaign trail last week determined to salvage his candidacy and once again prove his doubters wrong.In media appearances, the president was defiant, insisting that he would remain the party’s standard-bearer in November. On Wednesday, before delivering remarks at a conference in Nevada, he tested positive for Covid.The president’s withdrawal pushes the Democratic party into largely uncharted waters, with its national convention scheduled to begin on 19 August in Chicago. The nominee will also have a tight window to choose a running mate to take on Trump and Vance. It is not clear how Democrats will choose a new ticket.After serving as Biden’s vice-president, Harris, 59, has the largest national profile of any Democratic candidate, and delegates may view her as the safest option. Campaign finance experts also say that Harris would have the most straightforward legal argument to keep the Biden campaign’s fundraising haul, while another nominee might have to forfeit that money. As of late May, the Biden campaign had $91.6m in cash on hand. More

Joe Biden’s historic decision on Sunday to step down as the Democratic nominee for president signals an imminent end to one of the most consequential American political careers.At 81, the oldest president ever sworn in has finally yielded to time – and his own party. Someone else, possibly the vice-president, Kamala Harris, will face Donald Trump in November.Biden, who endorsed Harris on Sunday, will remain in the White House until January. But Democrats and Republicans will soon survey something new: a political landscape without Biden at its centre.Born in Pennsylvania in 1942, Biden attended the University of Delaware and Syracuse law school, became a public defender, then entered politics. A natural campaigner, in 1972, at just 29, he ran for US Senate, scoring a huge upset over J Caleb Boggs, a two-term Republican more than twice his age.View image in fullscreenThe same year, voters gave Richard Nixon a landslide win. Nixon was the 37th president. In 2021, Biden would become the 46th. In that 49-year span, as eight presidents came and went, Biden was a senator for 36 years, vice-president for eight.View image in fullscreenAs a junior senator, Biden suffered his first, but not last, tragedy when a car crash killed his wife, Neilia Biden, and one-year-old daughter, Naomi, at Christmas in 1972. Biden became known for riding the rails, from Delaware to Washington DC and back, to care for his sons, Beau and Hunter, who survived the accident.He married his second wife, Jill Jacobs, in 1977, and their daughter, Ashley, was born four years later.For 17 years, Biden was a ranking member or chair of the Senate judiciary committee. He led five supreme court confirmations. In 1991 the nominee, Clarence Thomas, was accused of sexual harassment and Biden was widely seen to have mishandled the hearings. In 2019, he said Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, “did not get treated well. I take responsibility for that.”Biden’s record on crime would also haunt him, particularly his support for a 1994 bill many say contributed to problems of mass incarceration and racial injustice. Another 1994 bill, banning assault weapons, remained a source of pride.View image in fullscreenFor 11 years, Biden was chair or ranking member of the foreign relations committee. In 1991, he voted against the Gulf war. In 2002, after 9/11, he voted for the invasion of Iraq. He later said that vote was wrong.In 1987, Biden first ran for president. At 45, he sought comparison with John F Kennedy but as reported by Richard Ben Cramer in the campaign classic What It Takes, youth, ambition and drive were not enough to prevent embarrassing failure.Biden took to quoting Neil Kinnock, then Labour leader in Britain, about being the first member of his family to go to college. Unfortunately, Biden stopped saying he was quoting.View image in fullscreenKinnock didn’t mind but the US press did. Biden’s freewheeling speaking style (and accompanying evocations of his Irish ancestry) often left him open to error. But he was undoubtedly an effective communicator, all the more remarkably so given he stammered as a child.Months after abandoning his presidential campaign, Biden suffered a brain aneurysm so severe a priest was called to administer last rites. Months later, he suffered another.He was nothing if not resilient. Twenty years later, he ran for president again. A great debate stage line, about a Republican rival, went down in history: “Rudy Giuliani, there’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.” But Biden soon dropped out.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBarack Obama won the nomination. When the Illinois senator, 47, picked Biden, 66, as his running mate, the New York Times said Obama had acquired “a longtime Washington hand” who could “reassure voters” rather than “deliver a state or reinforce [a] message of change”.View image in fullscreenBiden spent eight years as vice-president, his working relationship with Obama, reporting suggested, not quite so close as it was often portrayed. Biden played key roles in successes including advancing LGBTQ+ rights, legislating to prevent violence against women and securing healthcare reform. A push for gun reform failed.Biden eyed a third presidential run but in 2015 the death of his son Beau from brain cancer took a terrible toll. Furthermore, Obama backed Hillary Clinton.Amid the chaos of the Trump years, Biden decided to run again. Significant support from Black voters propelled a primary win. In the year of Covid, campaign travel was limited. For a 77-year-old candidate, that wasn’t much of a problem. Come the election, Biden won by more than 7m votes and with electoral college ease.The first major book on 2020 was called Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency. Regardless, his campaign message about a “battle for the soul of America” fueled two productive years. With congressional Democrats, Biden secured major legislation, boosting the economy after Covid, securing infrastructure investment and funding the climate crisis fight.Trump had incited an attack on Congress, but Trumpism would not die. Republicans took back the House. Biden oversaw foreign policy disaster – the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – and success, marshalling support for Ukraine against Russia.The dam could not hold. Questions about Biden’s age and fitness ran at a hum before the disastrous debate in Atlanta in June saw Democratic dissent burst through.At first, Biden displayed characteristic fire, blaming “elites” to which he never felt he belonged, vowing to fight on. But then Trump survived an assassination attempt and emerged seemingly stronger than ever.Democratic calls for Biden to quit grew louder. Eventually, he heard them. More

A couple of years ago, in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Anne Applebaum wrote an era-defining cover story called “The Bad Guys Are Winning”. Her argument was not only that democratic institutions were in decline across the world, but that there was a new version of old threats to them: rogue states and dictatorships were increasingly linked not by ideology, as in the cold war, but by powerful currents of criminal and mercenary interest, often enabled by western corporations and technology.“Nowadays,” Applebaum wrote, “autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources – the troll farms… [that] pound home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.”The article took as examples the relationships between Russia and Belarus and between China and Turkey, ad hoc alliances created specifically to preserve their leaders’ authoritarian power and vast illicit personal wealth, and to undermine the chief threats to it: transparency, human rights, any pretence of international law. Three years on, with wars in Ukraine and Gaza further fomenting those forces, with the real prospect of a second Trump presidency, Applebaum has published a book-length version of her thesis: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It is a necessary, if anxiety-inducing read.Applebaum, long a scourge of repressive regimes, is the author of Gulag, the definitive history of the Soviet Union’s forced labour camps. She divides her time between her homes in Washington DC and Poland – where her husband, Radek Sikorski, has recently returned to frontline politics as foreign minister (they tend to discover each other’s whereabouts in the world, she says, through Instagram posts). I met her in London for lunch a couple of weeks ago to talk about her book. She arrived making apologies about jet lag, ordered briskly, and shifted gear seamlessly into foreign affairs. The subsequent fortnight has, of course, proved a very long time in geopolitics. The UK has finally elected a grownup government; France has perhaps temporarily averted the prospect of a far-right administration; and Trump has dodged that bullet and raced ahead in the polls. Having Applebaum’s book closely in mind through all those events is vividly to sense the underlying precariousness of our world, the perils immediately ahead.In many ways, Applebaum is the consummate witness of this new world order, in that she moves comfortably in rarefied political worlds and maintains a robust view from the ground (she has spent a lot of time of late reporting from Ukraine, for example). She grew up in the US, daughter of a prominent anti-trust lawyer and an art gallery director, in a family with Republican roots in the south. “The elder George Bush would have been my father’s idea of a president,” she says. “Statesmanlike, committed to alliances and stability.”After studying Russian at Yale and in St Petersburg, she got her political education on the frontline of the “end of history”, seeing first-hand the collapse of Soviet communism in eastern Europe as a correspondent for the Economist and the Spectator. Having married Sikorski in 1992 – he had been a student leader in the Solidarity movement and for a while lived in flamboyant exile in Oxford (he was a member of the Bullingdon Club with Boris Johnson) – she literally cemented the optimism of the era by helping him restore an old manor house in western Poland. The building became a potent symbol of liberal and democratic rebirth not only in Poland but across Europe. (It was, for example, the first place that David Lammy visited earlier this month on becoming foreign secretary.)The house – Sikorski wrote a book, The Polish House: An Intimate History of Poland, about what it stood for – was the venue of a famous new year party on the eve of the millennium, attended by the couple’s many political friends, mostly on the centre right in Europe and the US. Applebaum’s last book, Twilight of Democracy, looked back at that event, and offered a highly personal, insider’s account of the way in which so many of those friends had been seduced by the siren voices of authoritarian populism and the far right in subsequent years. How Polish friends had sought favour in the thuggish Law and Justice party that gained power in 2005; how British allies – including Johnson – became self-serving Brexiters; and how American Republicans shamelessly fell in behind Trump.As ever, Applebaum’s analysis unpicked difficult truths: notably that significant groups in every society will always support corruption and authoritarianism because they believe they can directly profit from it. That the arc of history does not naturally bend toward democracy.Sikorski and Applebaum had dreamed of a new world order with their country manor somewhere near its centre. “On this patch of land it will seem as if communism had never existed,” Sikorski wrote. “We have won the clash of ideas. It’s now time to stop wagging our tongues and get down to work.” In Applebaum’s case that involved researching and writing her monumental Pulitzer prize-winning book Gulag, drawn from newly opened archives in Russia and first-hand experience of survivors. She watched on, appalled, as that history and those archives were shut down again by Vladimir Putin soon afterwards.View image in fullscreenThe Russian president, a focus of Applebaum’s journalism for 25 years, is the most obvious example of the new-style autocrat she identifies. “The motivation is only power and wealth,” she says. “And towards that end, they think it’s important to weaken democracy and the rule of law. And it’s pretty explicit. I mean, in the case of Russia and China, that’s literally their public doctrine. The Chinese have a document that was published in 2013, which has this marvellous name of Document Number Nine, which lists seven perils threatening the Chinese Communist party. Number one is western constitutionalism. Putin has been talking about this since 2005.”One difference with the cold war, she says, is that by weaponising social media, these states – she also includes Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, North Korea and others – have been able to exploit and deepen divisions in countries in which free speech exists. Applebaum and her husband have been targets of all kinds of threats and abuse as defenders of those apparently “elite” interests: an independent judiciary and functioning democratic institutions.“At first,” she says, “I didn’t understand it at all. You are suddenly in this world of unbelievable hatred, all this vitriol focused on you. Some of it was Russian, some of it was Polish, some from the American right, and they all feed off each other. They all use the same bad English.” The attacks were fuelled by a series of magazine stories in Poland and Russia, that suggested, as she writes, that she “was … the clandestine Jewish co-ordinator of the international press and the secret director of its negative coverage of Poland” or that she was in the pay of the Ukrainian government. “To begin with, you think,” she says, “who do I sue? But then you just have to learn to get used to it.”That campaign was backed in Poland by harassment from the ruling Law and Justice party. “It had got to the point where they were investigating everybody,” she says. “For example, the equivalent of the tax service demands all of your stuff, papers and information, and you have to get lawyers. We were targeted, of course, and my fear was that if they won again this time, then they would move towards really prosecuting people and putting them in prison.” As it was, the pro-European liberal democrat Donald Tusk unexpectedly prevailed in last year’s election and appointed Sikorski to his cabinet. “You think,” she says, “OK, so now we’re not going to jail. Instead, the foreign ministry.”Applebaum had already been redoubling her efforts to fight for democracy. In her book she writes of a new network, a democratic forum, that had its first meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 2021. The group is imagined as a countervailing force to her autocracies and involves activists and exiles from the women’s movement in Iran, from among Hong Kong’s umbrella protesters, and former political prisoners from Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Turkey and beyond. “There’s an international network of dictators,” she says, “so why shouldn’t there be an international network of democrats? They helped me frame this subject – really, the idea comes from them.”View image in fullscreenThere is an understandable urgency about this work, not least because of the threats posed by Donald Trump to existing multilateral cooperation. “Trump has a vision for how the US should work, which involves him being in direct charge of the military and them fighting not to uphold the constitution but for his personal interests.”She fears that a second administration will be more effective in overcoming constitutional checks and balances. “It’s also often the case for these figures that the second time it is worse. Chávez [in Venezuela] made one coup attempt, and then he went to jail. The second time, when he was released, he knew how to do it differently, take revenge. The same thing with Orbán in Hungary. He was prime minister for one term, and then he lost. When he came back, he seemed determined to make sure he never lost again.”Did it surprise her that the 6 January insurrection didn’t help former Republican friends to come to their senses? “It did. There was a moment – had the Senate agreed to impeach Trump – that would have been the end of it. The fact that they were too partisan to do that meant he survived. And then Trump was incredibly successful at doing something that is a common feature of autocracies, which was seeding a conspiracy theory, convincing something like a third of Americans that the 2020 election had been stolen.”Her book examines some of the ways that Silicon Valley billionaires have become effectively complicit in enabling autocracies to thrive, agreeing to censorship on their platforms, following the money. She has been prominent among those writers shining a light on the ways that coordinated propaganda strategies in autocracies are fuelling division in the west.“Of course, I don’t think either Trumpism or the Brexit campaign were foreign ideas,” she says. “I mean, because I worked at the Spectator in the 1990s I knew many people who were anti-EU then and who had grassroots deep in the English countryside. But as we know, what the Russians do, and now others, they don’t invent political movements – they amplify existing groups.”In the case of Trump, she suggests, “he is clearly somebody who they cultivated for a long time. Not as a spy or anything. But they were offering him opportunities, you know, he was trying to do [property] deals there [in Moscow]. And he’s been anti-Nato since the 80s. He’s openly scorned American allies all of his life. In one of his books, he talks about what a mistake it was for the US to be fighting the second world war. So of course, the Russians would want someone like that, because their aim is to break up Nato. And if they can help get an American president who doesn’t like Nato in office, that’s a huge achievement. It’s a lot cheaper than fighting wars.”Applebaum despairs at the way anything can now become a binary which-side-are-you-on? culture war. “Taylor Swift!” she says, as a case in point. “Taylor Swift is a blond, blue-eyed country and western singer, who lives in Nashville. And whose boyfriend is a football player in the midwest. And yet you’re going to make her into some kind of symbol of leftwing degeneracy?”View image in fullscreenShe fears that the horrific war in Gaza has become a similar kind of simplistic “wedge issue”. Her book was mostly written before the Hamas attack on 7 October. “I was able to make some adjustments to it later on,” she says. “But it was not conceived as a book about the Middle East.”The nature of the rhetoric around the war emphasised that for her. “The fact that the [commentary] became so toxic online so fast, when I saw that happening, I thought: ‘OK, I’m staying out of this,’” she says. “I’m not an expert in the region. I’m not there. I’m certainly not going to talk about it on Twitter. I mean, do people have completely settled views about what’s happening in Sudan, say? That’s another huge crisis.”In the terms of her book, she suggests to me that “clearly, Hamas, which is connected to Iran, is a part of that autocratic world. And clearly, Netanyahu has designs on Israeli democracy. I wouldn’t say he’s a dictator. But he clearly is willing to preside over a decline in Israeli democracy.“As journalists,” she adds, “our role is to try to collect information as accurately as possible and analyse it. If the interpretation leads to describing Israeli war crimes in Gaza or whether it leads in the direction of describing Hamas atrocities in Israel, that’s what it should do. But I think, for example, that it’s a great mistake for universities to announce what their ‘policy’ is on the war…”In this regard, I ask, have our governments been cowardly or naive in not confronting the implications of the great shift in information in our times, the unaccountable algorithms of social media?“We have been very cowardly about that,” she says. “Anonymity online is a big problem. If someone walked into the room right now with a mask over his face and stood in the centre of the room and started shouting his opinions, we would all say: ‘Who’s that crazy person? Why should we listen to him?’ And yet online that is what happens.”Given the prognosis of her book, does she never despair, I wonder, about the implications?“There are always other stories,” she says. “For example, people really misunderstood the recent European election. The French story – the rise of Le Pen – was obviously dominant. But actually everywhere else the far right underperformed: in Germany the big victor was the Christian Democrats, in Hungary Orbán’s party won fewer seats than in previous elections.”And here in the UK, too, she suggests, though Farage hasn’t gone away, the re-emergence of the liberal-left is the real story.“I think the actual transformation of the Labour party – they’re not getting enough credit for that,” she says. “Because they were fighting two kinds of populism, both on the right and from Corbyn. What impresses me about Starmer is that he had a whole career as a human rights lawyer before he went into politics. It’s pretty rare these days to have somebody come from a different walk of life and be at the top of that world. He understands how institutions work and how government works.”So real grounds for hope?“Well,” she says, “I also feel like, here we are sitting in this nice restaurant in London. Do we have any right to be pessimistic? To just say everything’s terrible, and it’s all going to get worse? We just can’t say that to our children, and we can’t say it, for example, to Ukrainians. What right do we have to be pessimistic? We have to do better than that.” More

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump last weekend is a tragedy; a tragedy for democracy, a tragedy for America and, above all, a tragedy for the whole world, because it means Donald Trump will be re-elected. And it is a tragedy for Donald Trump, who, whatever one thinks of his politics or his personality, is still a living creature, and as such, like Eamonn Holmes, is capable of suffering.Last week, I had a standup special, Basic Lee, on Sky Comedy, which even came as a surprise to me. I wish someone had shot me last weekend. The resulting publicity might have driven some traffic towards my work. Here’s hoping I’m at least wounded by a gunman while it’s still available to view on the Now streaming service. (Did you see what I did there?)When the free world’s last line of defence against a Trump MacTatorship ™ ® is Joe Biden, we are already doomed. I’m quitting quitting drinking. Stubborn Biden is too selfish to become the focus of a popularity elevating tragedy, preferring instead to let the world burn while he clings to his candidacy, a limpet in linen trousers, sitting there smiling, like something futile made of felt you’d win at a travelling fair.The now inevitable re-election of demagogue Donald, and the implementation of the puritanical Project 2025 agenda by Oliver Dowden’s Heritage Foundation friends, makes a Handmaid’s Tale-style Christian fascist America a certainty, ending not only the shared enlightenment values of the postwar western world, but also the Fifty Shades of Grey women’s erotica franchise. And Trump’s fandom for fossil fuels will hasten the inevitable extinction of all life on Earth, the only positive being that he may yet see his Scottish golf courses reclaimed by rising seas.American liberals and intellectuals with means and money, like Kacey Musgraves and the singer from Tool, must already be considering escape options as the nation begins its descent into the hell of an evangelical religious dictatorship. Trump’s presidency will, however, strengthen ties between Trump and the Clacton constituency of his right-hand man Nigel Farage, which is poised to be bulldozed and made into a private golf course-cum-leisure facility-cum-seaside stolen document storage unit.I’m joking, of course. But the attempted assassination of Trump and its butterfly flap consequences are no joke. Last Saturday, a piece of Trump’s ear was shot away by a gunman. Trump, with a presence of mind Biden might have benefited from when trying to remember the name of the president of Ukraine, struggled to his feet and, in a spirit of peace and reconciliation, shouted: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, energising supporters who three years ago forced entry to the Capitol aiming to lynch Mike Pence, the Hartlepool monkey of American politics.But what if it had been Trump himself who had been shot away, and only Trump’s ear fragment had been saved by security? Could Trump’s meat ear rim itself have been persuaded to run for the presidency? Could Trump’s ear flesh fragment have beaten Biden in a democratic election? Almost certainly. And would an America governed by a small severed slice of Trump’s ear have offered the world a more secure future than an America governed by Trump, or an America governed by Biden? Again, the answer, sadly, is a resounding yes.The American Christian right believes that Trump, despite his obvious moral corruption, is a massive tool of a God bent on shaping America into their own twisted theocracy. Evangelical Christian America believes their selectively myopic deity actually intervened to save Trump from the gunman, while leaving a heroic volunteer firefighter to take the bullet. Blessed are the firefighters. But how much more useful to this morally equivocating God is a simple severed ear, unencumbered by accusations that it tried to overturn an election, or paid an adult film star hush money, or stole classified documents, or sexually assaulted a woman in a department store. The ear would be innocent and pure and good, like Jesus, or the unborn child.And if an ear had, as Trump did, repeatedly socialised with the unsavoury sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his young friends, it is unlikely it would have been able to do anything inappropriate, due to its being an ear. And should the ear be found to have lost the public trust, it could, due to its inability to defend itself or argue its case, be easily dispensed with by the Republicans without too much fuss. Ear today, gone tomorrow.Imagining different ways the Trump shooting might have played out raises deep ethical questions. Philosophers call this concept “killing baby Hitler”. Would it be ethical for someone to travel back from the future and kill Hitler in his cot in order to prevent the second world war? And would it be ethical to travel back in time and carry out an attack on Trump that ensured future government by Trump’s ear alone? Of course not. And the idea of replacing Trump himself with Trump’s own ear is, at this stage, neither ear nor there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRather than risking the future on the policymaking of Trump’s unpredictable ear, the precise political leanings of which remain ill-defined at best, would it be better to go further back in time and stop the rise of Trump sooner? Perhaps, when he encountered Trump in Home Alone 2, Macaulay Culkin could have comforted the troubled billionaire with the same innocent friendship he gave to the sad dancer Michael Jackson, on the proviso that Trump abandon political ambition. But Macaulay Culkin didn’t do that. And now we all suffer for his selfishness. Macaulay Culkin has blood on his astonished infant face. Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on the streaming service Now. He is previewing 40 minutes of new material in Stewart Lee Introduces Legends of Indie at the Lexington, London, in August with Connie Planque (12), Swansea Sound (13) and David Lance Callahan (14)

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Donald Trump has said China’s president wrote him a “beautiful note” after the assassination attempt a week ago, as he continued to court leaders whom Joe Biden has criticised as dictators.In his first campaign rally since narrowly escaping the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, Trump told a crowd in Michigan on Saturday: “[President Xi Jinping] wrote me a beautiful note the other day when he heard about what happened.”The Republican presidential nominee recalled how he described Xi as “a brilliant man, he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist”, adding that the Chinese leader makes people like Biden look like “babies”.As well as familiar attacks on Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, Trump also used the rally in Grand Rapids to hail Xi and Vladimir Putin as “smart, tough” figures who “love their country”, echoing praise he gave in 2022 of the Russian president’s strategy to invade Ukraine. In that same 2022 speech, at a rally in Georgia, Trump called North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “tough”, and said of Kim and Xi: “The smartest one gets to the top.” On Saturday, Trump said he “got along very well” with both leaders.Still wearing a small wound dressing a week after the shooting, Trump also publicly supported the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, saying he was right in saying that “we have to have somebody that can protect us”. Orbán was this week accused by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, of betraying European leaders after he travelled to Moscow for what he called a “peace mission”, holding a joint press conference with Putin in which the Russian leader told Kyiv to give up more land, pull back its troops and drop its efforts to join Nato.After meeting Trump recently in Florida, Orbán flagged the likelihood of a Trump victory, and urged European leaders to reopen “direct lines of diplomatic communication” with Russia and “high-level political talks” with China.Trump’s reference to a “beautiful note” from Xi echoes the now-famous “love letters” he received from North Korea’s Kim. In September 2018, Trump told a rally in West Virginia: “We fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters.”The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward later obtained 25 letters between Trump and Kim for his second book on the Trump presidency, Rage.In one letter, about a meeting in Singapore in June 2018, Kim wrote: “Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched.”After a summit in Vietnam in February 2019, Kim wrote that “every minute we shared 103 days ago in Hanoi was also a moment of glory that remains a precious memory”.The summits did not reduce tensions with North Korea.With Reuters More

“He was spared by the hand of God!” a man wrapped in a flag chanted as he walked past a line of people snaking outside the 12,000-seat Van Andel Arena in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan.The display prompted a smattering of loud cries of “USA! USA!” but the general tone of the packed-in crowd who had gathered to see Donald Trump’s first rally since a would-be assassin opened fire on him at a campaign event in Pennsylvania a week ago was more laid-back.Indeed, despite the roiling impact of the shooting on US politics over the past week, it felt like back to business-as-usual for the Trump campaign road show.Joe Attard, a worker at a factory that makes sheds, made the drive from Southgate, Michigan, to Grand Rapids hoping to catch a glimpse of Trump, who was appearing in the crucial battleground state after being formally anointed as the Republican presidential candidate and hitting the campaign trail with his new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance.“There’s a real feeling of community here, everybody in the same mind,” Attard said. “It’s a great feeling.” Other than a lone man across the barricades holding a “Deport Trump” sign, Attard seemed to be right. There were few people around without some kind of Trump-branded apparel.Perhaps in keeping with a party that has fully unified around Trump after the shocking attempt on his life, most people seemed excited to be at the rally. A man in an army baseball cap pointed people towards the ADA-accessible line. People waved and cheered for the Secret Service officers and mounted police patrolling the street.Standing in line, Isaiah White, a 25-year-old from Hudsonville, Michigan, said he was “very excited” for another chance to see Trump. The last time Trump came to Van Andel Arena, White got in line too late and had to watch on the Jumbotron outside the venue.Betsy Gatchell Goff, who came to Van Andel Arena from her hometown of Benton Harbor, Michigan, said she thought Trump was “a unifying figure for our country”. Gatchell Goff hoped that with Trump back in office, “we’ll have a president who does more than sleep all day”, a disparaging reference to Joe Biden.But there was also a strain of bitter sentiment among the crowd. “Trump won” and “Unvaxxed and Proud” were two of the most common slogans on T-shirts, hats and flags.The mood around last Saturday’s assassination attempt was surprisingly nonchalant among attendees. Indeed, as has happened with Trump’s campaign, the imagery and fact of the attack had been exploited for gain. A vendor on the corner sold shirts sporting a bloodstained Trump, fist raised, with the caption: “Missed me, motherfucker.”Attard was glad to see Trump back on the campaign trail so soon after an attempt on his life. “It shows the world that he’s strong,” Attard said.Among the elected officials present, the tone was more reverent. As the event opener, a local Michigan representative gave a prayer that thanked God for “graciously sparing President Trump”.Security, on the other hand, was fully alert. Secret Service and TSA agents, including at least one K-9 unit, motioned people through metal detectors, while legions of staffers in crisp polos emblazoned with “Team Trump” ushered people to their seats.There was serious political red meat from some speakers. Michigan Republican party chair Pete Hoekstra took the stage to open the event and called governor Gretchen Whitmer the “worst governor in the United States”. Anti-Whitmer sentiment was widespread, with people throughout the event calling her “Witless”, “Witchmer” or “Whitler”.The state of Michigan politics was a prominent theme. Bill Huizenga, the US representative for Michigan’s fourth district, said Trump was in Grand Rapids to show the world how “the blue wall” of midwestern states was “going to crumble like a cookie”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Grand Rapids rally was the first since JD Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate. The Ohio senator seemed to be a bit of an unknown quantity among rally attendees.“I’ll support him because Trump supports him,” Betsy Gatchell Goff said. Isaiah White admitted: “Honestly, I had to Wikipedia him, but he seems all right.”The tone shifted once Vance appeared. The new vice-presidential candidate opened with a joke about the Ohio-Michigan football rivalry and followed it up with challenging Vice-President Kamala Harris’s record, saying: “What the hell have you got?,” prompting the loudest cheers of the afternoon.But much of the tone was the usual politics-as-entertainment fare that is a hallmark of Trump rallies. Even in the wake of an attempted assassination, Trump’s rally struck a celebratory tone in this extraordinary American election.As the crowd filtered in, Macho Man by the Village People and Born Free by Kid Rock alternated with La Vie enRose by Édith Piaf. A sizzle reel from the Trump campaign lit up the arena, then launched straight into a dramatized victimhood narrative.“The only crime I’ve committed is to fiercely defend this country,” Trump’s voice boomed in the accompanying voiceover. At the line: “When I’m re-elected, I will obliterate the deep state!,” the crowd erupted into cheers and whistles. In a later promotional video, a union worker said: “Fuck you” to a reporter when asked about Joe Biden’s policies.At this, people throughout the crowd broke into laughter. More

Donald Trump launched a full-throated attack on Democratic rivals Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday as he returned to the campaign trail a week after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.In his first rally since the shocking shooting, and his first with new running mate Ohio senator JD Vance, Trump appeared on stage with the conspicuous white ear bandage he wore during the Republican national convention replaced by a smaller covering. He referred to the assassination attempt as a “horrific event” and said he stood before supporters “by the grace of God. I shouldn’t be here, but let’s face it, something very special happened.”Trump said “he owed his life to immigration”, because he’d turned his head to the right toward a chart about border crossings fractionally before the bullet whizzed past his head, grazing his ear. “I hope I never have to go through that again,” Trump added. He said his opponents call him “a threat to democracy” but countered that he “took a bullet for democracy”.Trump also referred to leadership chaos within the Democratic party, which has been consumed with a debate over whether Joe Biden should step down from his re-election bid amid concerns about his age and mental acuity. “They have no idea who their candidate is, and neither do we,” Trump jibed. He called Biden a “feeble old guy”.Trump, appearing jocular and in good spirits during a lengthy speech, said he would rather be in Michigan than sitting “on some boring beach watching the waves coming in” – another dig at Biden, who is currently recovering from Covid at his Delaware beach home.As Trump campaigned on Saturday, his team put out an official update on his injuries. Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, who served as Trump’s White House physician, said that the bullet fired from Crooks’ gun came “less than a quarter of an inch from entering his head, and struck the top of his right ear” and produced a “2cm wide wound”.Jackson said the wound is healing but that the former president is still experiencing some bleeding, requiring an ear dressing. “Given the broad and blunt nature of the wound itself, no sutures were required,” he wrote.At the Michigan arena, the former US president went on to predict a landslide election, asking the crowd whether they preferred he run against Vice-President Kamala Harris, to loud boos, or Biden, to cheers. But he said he would also also be happy to run against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer who, he said, has done “a terrible job”.Trump hit his usual themes, attacking electric vehicles, China and trade and promising a massive effort on deportation. He talked in his usual extreme rhetoric, especially when it came to immigration, where he talked in dire terms of crimes committed by immigrants that echo rightwing conspiracy theories.View image in fullscreenBut Trump also pushed back on accusations that a second Trump presidency would be influenced by the extremist manifesto Project 2025 from the conservative Heritage Foundation and including scores of people close to Trump and his campaign.The document, he said, had been produced by the “severe right – very, very conservative and the opposite of the radical left. I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want to know anything about it.”Trump was preceded on the stage by Vance, who received a warm reception, despite the sports rivalry between his home state of Ohio and Michigan.Vance criticized both Republicans and Democrats in his speech for previously failing to protect manufacturing jobs in Michigan and the US. “Both parties were broken in very profound ways until Trump came along,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCrowds numbering in the thousands waited outside the 12,000-capacity Van Andel Arena in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to greet the former president amid what was expected to be improved security after the Secret Service and local police allowed 20-year-old would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks to get on a roof with sightline of the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, and fire several shots at the former president.Grand Rapids law enforcement declined to say whether it had deployed extra officers, referring questions to the presidential security agency. But, unlike the open county fair fairgrounds last week, Trump’s rally on Saturday was in an enclosed arena where security would be easier to secure and without, as in Butler, outer areas that were assigned to local police.“I think what you’re going to see is just a visual increase of additional agents and certainly some pretty unprecedented level of police officers just because it’s the first event after the previous Saturday,” former Secret Service agent Jason Russell told Michigan Live.Eric Winstrom, the Grand Rapids police chief, said his department had worked closely with federal partners on planning for the event “with solid operational planning, effective resource deployment, and an unwavering commitment to the safety of the community we serve”.John Schaut, chair of the Republican party chapter in Kent, Michigan, told Michigan Live the shooting hadn’t deterred Trump fans and predicted “a blowout event”.View image in fullscreenMichigan is one of a handful of must-win states for Trump and Biden. Recent polling averages place Trump with a 4% lead over Biden, at 46% to 42%. That tallies with the pattern in other key battleground states, especially in the wake of the disastrous debate performance by Biden three weeks ago that triggered a wave of panic in the party about this electability. On a national level, Trump has opened a lead against Biden in head-to-head surveys.According to local news reports, supporters began arriving for the rally as early as Friday afternoon, and by midday Saturday, lines to get in to see Trump stretched six blocks.“I think it’s amazing. It just shows how strong he is and we’re so very proud of him, not that we would expect anybody, if they weren’t up to it, to be here like this,” supporter Julie Bryant of Marshall, Michigan, told Michigan Live. “We’re just here to support, especially after what he’s just been through.”Supporter Adam Salton said he’d been in line since 6am: “Screw the right and the left, this is about Trump, this is about us. He could be on a golf course right now, he could be with his family, but he’s out here doing this for us so I’ll stand out here for eight hours for him, because it’s for us.” More