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    Kamala Harris says Israel assault on Rafah ‘would be a huge mistake’

    Senior US Democrats on Sunday increased pressure on Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon a planned offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering.Two days after a similar call by US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was rejected by the Israeli leader, vice-president Kamala Harris said that the Joe Biden White House was “ruling out nothing” in terms of consequences if Netanyahu moves ahead with the assault.Harris said that Washington had been “very clear in terms of our perspective on whether or not that should happen”.“Any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said on ABC’s This Week. “I have studied the maps – there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”Harris declined to say if she, like Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, the most senior politician of the Jewish faith in the US, believed that Netanyahu is an obstacle to peace. But she said: “We’ve been very clear that far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.“We have been very clear that Israel and the Israeli people and Palestinians are entitled to an equal amount of security and dignity.”Her remarks came as political figure from progressive elements of the Democratic political established added their voices to the growing opposition to the humanitarian costs of Israel’s five-month military campaign on the Palestinian territory.That air and ground campaign began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 and taking hostage. The offensive has killed more than 30,000 people and pushed Gaza to the brink of famine.On Friday, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused the Jewish state of committing “genocide” against the Palestinians and called on the US to suspend military aid to Israel.She went further Sunday, saying that Israel had “crossed the threshold of intent” in blocking humanitarian aid from reaching starving Gazans.“Multiple governments [and other entities] have stated themselves plainly that the Israeli government and leaders in the Israeli government are intentionally denying, blocking and slow-walking this aid and are precipitating a mass famine,” she told ABC News.“It is horrific. What we are seeing here, I think, with a forced famine, is beyond our ability to deny or explain away. There is no targeting of Hamas in precipitating a mass famine of a million people, half of whom are children.”Netanyahu responded to US pressure on Friday by issuing a statement saying that he told Blinken there was no way to defeat Hamas without going into Rafah.“And I told him that I hope we will do it with the support of the US, but if we have to – we will do it alone,” Netanyahu said.Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday dismissed Netanyahu’s position, saying: “The actions of Hamas do not justify forcing thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to eat grass as their bodies consume themselves.“We are talking about collective punishment, which is unjustifiable.”Separately on Sunday, senator Ralph Warnock of Georgia – a key Black Democrat in Biden’s political coalition for re-election – was asked by CBS’s Face the Nation why the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had become a key issue for African American voters amid a broader discussion around US values.“We in the African American community understand human struggle. We know it when we see it,” Warnock said. While the US cannot forget or turn away from the 7 October attack by Hamas, he said, “we cannot turn away from the scenes of awful suffering and human catastrophe in Gaza”.“For Mr Netanyahu to go into Rafah, where some 1.4 million Palestinians are now sheltering, would be morally unjustifiable,” Warnock added. “It would be unconscionable. And I hope that at the end of the day, cooler heads will prevail.”Asked if continuing to transfer military supplies to Israel was a sacrifice of US moral authority, Warnock instead acknowledged that “Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and its enemies are more than just Hamas”.“But look, we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Warnock said. “We can be consistent in our support of Israel’s right to defend itself – and at the same time, be true to American values, and engage this catastrophic humanitarian situation that’s on the ground.” More

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    Louisiana Democrat wins sheriff’s race do-over after first victory was disputed

    Months after his disputed one-vote victory in a Louisiana sheriff’s race was tossed by a court, a Democrat was decisively elected over his Republican rival on his second try Saturday.Henry Whitehorn got 53% of the vote in Saturday’s election in north-west Louisiana’s Caddo parish. He’ll be the first Black sheriff in the parish – which is the word Louisiana uses for county – after defeating John Nickelson, who is white.Returns from the Louisiana secretary of state’s office show Whitehorn defeated Nickelson by more than 4,000 votes this time.Turnout was considerably higher in the second race. State figures show 65,239 people voted in Saturday’s sheriff’s race – up from 43,247 in November.A former head of the Louisiana state police and ex-Shreveport police chief, Whitehorn won by a single vote in November. But courts ordered a new election after finding evidence that two people illegally voted twice and four others voted despite being ineligible.Whitehorn had come out of retirement to run for sheriff after longtime Sheriff Steve Prator announced his retirement.“I’m troubled by the violent crime that’s plaguing our community. I had retired and I could have just sat on the sidelines, if I chose to, and watched. But I’ve been called to serve. I couldn’t just sit and watch this community suffer,” Whitehorn told the Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate.Nickelson conceded Saturday night as Whitehorn’s victory became apparent. “I wish him every success because his success will be Caddo parish’s success,” Nickelson said.Whitehorn will be sworn in on 1 July, replacing interim sheriff Jay Long who took over from Prator on 1 March.Saturday’s victory for Whitehorn came while voters in Louisiana also voted in the state’s presidential preference primary.Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump and Joe Biden won the Republican and Democratic primaries, respectively, in dominant fashion. The former president captured 90% of the vote, and the Democratic incumbent took 86%, Associated Press results show. More

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    ‘Lincoln had something to say’: historians ponder lessons for the age of Trump

    Asked what Abraham Lincoln might have to say to Americans in 2024, an election year in a country as divided as at any time since the civil war Lincoln won, the NPR host Steve Inskeep said the 16th president would advise that a big part of “building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong”.“One of the things that drew me to the topic of Lincoln was the present and the dilemmas and difficulties of democracy right now,” Inskeep said on Saturday, appearing in connection with his book Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, at the 27th Annual Abraham Lincoln Institute Symposium, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.“I did feel like Lincoln had something to say,” Inskeep said, “and I’ve tried to express it. And it has to do with dealing with differences in a fractured society. And it has to do with building a political majority, which is a skill that I think some of us perhaps have forgotten, or we’re being told to forget.“And part of building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong. And hopefully you don’t believe they’re wrong on everything. But maybe out of 10 things, you think they’re very wrong about three things and can find some way to agree on some of the other seven and move forward and at least agree fundamentally on the idea that we have a constitution, we have a republic, we have a democracy. We have a system to mediate our differences. We have institutions and we should uphold them.”The 46th president, Joe Biden, has made Donald Trump’s threat to that constitution, republic and democracy a central plank of his re-election campaign.Trump, the 45th president, refused to admit defeat in 2020, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in an attempt to stop certification of that election. Despite that – and while facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to keep him off the ballot by constitutional means – he stormed to a third successive presidential nomination by the party that still calls itself the party of Lincoln.Three weeks short of the 159th anniversary of Lincoln’s death – he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s on 14 April 1865, Good Friday, and died the following morning – Inskeep and other historians gathered in the very same theatre. James Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, now the basis for an Apple TV drama, was among those in the stalls.The event took place at the end of another tumultuous week in US politics, in which Trump railed against Democrats while struggling to pay a $454m bond in his New York civil fraud case; sought to have federal criminal charges over his election subversion dismissed; was accused by the White House of employing “unhinged antisemitic rhetoric”; called for the jailing of Liz Cheney, a conservative opponent; and stoked huge debate over what he meant when he predicted a “bloodbath” if Biden beat him again.View image in fullscreenAppealing to the better angels of Americans on both sides of the partisan divide, Inskeep said Lincoln’s example, including his magnanimous approach to defeated Confederates after the civil war, might help voters decide not “to simply denounce, isolate or ostracise those we believe to be wrong.“It is an approach to political difference that I think is a little bit out of fashion now, but it is fundamentally what Lincoln did. It is fundamentally the reason we decided the civil war” and thereby ended slavery.Lincoln “understood that the north had the population, they had the economy, they had the advantages that become real in wartime, that eventually come to tell on the battlefield. And Lincoln had to keep enough people unified to have that political majority, and in order to have that majority win.“It’s a central message and matter for our time.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlso appearing were Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument in Washington; Gordon Leidner, author of Abraham Lincoln and the Bible; George Rable, author of Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War; and Michael Zuckert, author of A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.As moderator, Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, returned to a persistent theme of audience questions: how can Americans use Lincoln’s example today.Inskeep said: “Lincoln … understood that people would act in their self-interest but tried to harness that into something larger. And part of recognising that people have self-interest lay in trying to work out who that person was, which I feel is another thing we’re discouraged from doing.“We’re encouraged to speak our truth, which is great, because there’s lots of truths, lots of experiences that were suppressed and ignored and less so now. But the next step is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to understand where they’re coming from. And an additional step for a politician, of course, is to appeal to them.”Rable, meanwhile, said voters could learn from viewing Lincoln not as some perfect figure from the past, but as a politician and leader with faults like any other.“Here you have a full-bodied human being” Rable said. “He has strengths, he has weaknesses. And I think [we should] look at leaders that way, rather than saying, ‘OK, this leader does this, I’m just going to dismiss him,’ or, ‘I’m going to believe everything that this leader says’.” More

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    One Way Back review: Christine Blasey Ford faces down Brett Kavanaugh again

    In September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified that Brett Kavanaugh, then an intermediate appellate judge nominated by Donald Trump to the US supreme court, sexually assaulted her 36 years earlier when they were high school students, fixtures of the suburban-DC country club set.“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford, then 51, told the Washington Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”Kavanaugh vehemently denied it. He also professed his penchants for suds.“We drank beer … I liked beer,” the judge memorably told Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, at his Senate hearing. Pressed by Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota over whether he had ever blacked out because of drinking beer, Kavanaugh ratcheted up the heat. On SNL, Matt Damon memorialized the rabid performance. PJ, Squi, Handsy Hank and Gang-Bang Greg: all are now part of TV lore. The Senate confirmed Kavanaugh anyway, 50-48, a party-line vote.Ford now returns to retell her story, in One Way Back: A Memoir. In essence, she dares Kavanaugh to sue her for defamation. Both know truth constitutes an absolute defense.Kavanaugh is not a “consummately honest person”, Ford writes. “The fact is, he was there in the room with me that night in 1982. And I believe he knows what happened. Even if it’s hazy from the alcohol, I believe he must know.”Ensconced on the high court, Kavanaugh holds his peace.Ford is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a faculty member of Stanford medical school. She is an avid surfer. Metallica is her favourite band. She invokes personal circumstance to explain why she delayed coming forward, electing not to bring her story to the attention of law enforcement as Kavanaugh rose in the Washington legal firmament.“Honestly, if it hadn’t been the supreme court – if my attacker had been running for a local office, for example – I probably wouldn’t have said anything,” Ford writes, adding that this is “a sad, scary thing to admit”.From Kavanaugh’s clerkship to Anthony Kennedy, his immediate predecessor on the supreme court, to his time in the White House of George W Bush and on the US court of appeals, Ford stayed silent. Even with her explanation, the reader is left wondering why.Ford also sheds light on her own college days.“I’d tried mushrooms and pot occasionally before, but now also explored MDMA, which helped me get outside of myself,” she writes, adding: “At the time, I just knew that they seemed to call bullshit on everything, including my self-esteem issues … I never got into anything harder, since cocaine didn’t help with my anxiety and heroin never crossed my path until I was out of college, and by that point I’d kind of missed the window of experimentation that heroin would have required.”Should any rightwingers seeking vengeance think of pouncing on such admissions, it should be noted that Trumpworld is littered with tales of drugs and alcohol. Consider the very public cases of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former lawyer, and Ronny Jackson, the Trump White House physician turned congressman from Texas. The GOP likes to hound Hunter Biden, who has struggled with addiction. But he never held office.For Ford, the Kavanaugh confirmation fight took a heavy personal toll. There were threats on her person and family. There were wounds to her psyche. One day, she recalls, she stared at a construction site and imagined it to be a Lego set. “That’s so cool,” she thought. “I wish I was a construction worker. Perhaps people were right. Perhaps I was crazy.”Ford writes favorably of meeting Anita Hill, the staffer who in 1991 confronted Clarence Thomas over his alleged sexual harassment, stoking another epically nasty supreme court nomination fight. Like Kavanaugh, Thomas was confirmed. In 2019, in the aftermath of the Kavanaugh fight, Hill told Ford time can help salve wounds.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFord’s politics shade left. In One Way Back, she records her satisfaction with the “blue wave” of 2018, “progressive wins” and in particular the victory in a New York House race that year of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, praises One Way Back on its jacket. So does Hill.Kavanaugh is a consequential and controversial figure. In 2022, he cast his lot with four other conservatives in Dobbs v Jackson, voting to overturn Roe v Wade. Those five justices eviscerated the concept of a constitutionally protected right to privacy. In a separate concurrence, Kavanaugh said that in doing so the court had not undercut precedents protecting contraception, interracial marriage and same-sex unions. Other justices differed.The tremors of Dobbs reverberate across the political divide. In the 2022 midterms, a much-anticipated red wave failed to materialize, thanks in part to Dobbs. In reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, voters have conferred legal protections for abortion rights.On Capitol Hill, Pelosi’s successors as House speaker are also subject to the whims of Republican zealots. Kevin McCarthy is no longer even a congressman. Mike Johnson holds the gavel by the narrowest of margins. In February, Democrats flipped the seat previously held by George Santos, the indicted fabulist. Postmortems found that abortion rights played an outsized role in that Republican defeat. The threat of a national abortion ban drove voters to the polls. For the moment, for Democrats, Dobbs is a gift that keeps on giving – thanks to Kavanaugh and co.“I’d like to believe we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in the years to come,” Ford writes.Maybe sooner than that.
    One Way Back: A Memoir is published in the US by Macmillan More

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    Israel defence chief to head to Washington for Gaza talks

    Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant will leave on Sunday for talks in the United States, the Israeli government said, amid growing tensions between the allies over the war in Gaza.Gallant will meet with US counterpart Lloyd Austin, US secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan “and additional senior officials”, a statement said.“The parties will discuss developments in the war against the Hamas terrorist organisation in Gaza, efforts undertaken to return the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, humanitarian efforts and measures required to ensure regional stability,” it said.The visit comes after Blinken’s latest whistle-stop tour of the region during which he warned that an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah would be a “mistake” that “risks further isolating Israel around the world”.Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel was prepared to move ahead with the Rafah operation “alone”, without US support.There are widespread fears of mass civilian casualties in Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge during the war which erupted after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October.Gallant’s visit will be his first to Washington since the fighting broke out.US president Joe Biden said Monday he had told Netanyahu to send a team to Washington to discuss how to avoid a full-scale military operation in Rafah.A US defence official said this week that Gallant’s scheduled meeting with Austin was separate from the delegation visit requested by Biden.The Hamas attack on 7 October resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory military campaign to destroy Hamas has killed at least 32,142 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. More

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    Undertaxed and over here: why the UK welcomes US mega firms | Phillip Inman

    Americans love Britain, and in many ways the British admire Americans, but the benefits of the relationship are becoming increasingly one-way.That’s the argument set out in a book published next month documenting how US companies have made inroads into the UK economy by exploiting a desperate need for investment, weak regulation and a public that seems oblivious to the cost to themselves and, ultimately, the economy.Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden: whichever administration is pulling the levers, presidents pay lip service to a special relationship with the UK. Each one makes sure US companies leverage Washington’s power to gain entry, kill off local competition, secure monopoly control and run off with the profits largely tax-free.But UK companies that try to break into the US face huge legal and regulatory hurdles. It’s true that selling goods to America is a lucrative business. That’s not the same as setting up a US subsidiary in the US and going head-to-head with domestic corporations.Labour leaders fall into the trap of lauding energetic and profitable US companies as much as their cheering Tory counterparts do. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were more ardent Americanophiles than most. And Keir Starmer shows every sign of rushing to Washington should he be elected, even if Trump is in charge – much as Theresa May did in 2017, before a humiliating return visit two years later.The new book is not an anti-American leftist call to arms of the kind published in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s admiration for Ronald Reagan generated tomes about the UK being the 51st state of America. Vassal State by Angus Hanton (Swift Press) examines for the first time the disparate data showing how much US companies have embedded themselves in the UK, capitalising on our willingness to pay them outlandish fees and subscriptions and afford them the hefty tax breaks needed to keep them in the UK.We know about the power and influence of Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Alphabet/Google. Other high-profile names include online sellers eBay, Wayfair and Etsy, and streaming companies Sky, Disney and Apple TV.The internet’s cloud storage is mostly provided by American companies. All our data, bit by bit, is being collected by US firms, whether at the front end as we buy stuff using Amazon or travel using Google Maps, or at the back end, so to speak, as health data is scraped by US spy technology firm Palantir – which is run by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of another US web behemoth, PayPal.Hanton, a London-based entrepreneur who co-founded the Intergenerational Foundation charity, documents their rise, but also that of less well-known firms which have acquired the UK’s financial and physical plumbing.A classic example is WorldPay, a payments system used by tens of thousands of UK businesses to process card transactions. Once owned by NatWest, it was offloaded after the 2008 crash to US private equity firms Advent International and Bain Capital for £2bn.That was a European Commission order that the UK could have ignored but chose to obey. Advent and Bain floated the company on the London stock market for a handsome profit in 2015, but it soon went private again. Another Advent-owned firm, payments processing technology company Vantiv, paid $10.4bn for it in 2018, then Florida-based Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) paid $35bn in cash and shares for WorldPay in 2019.What ties these firms together is that they offer popular services that somehow we accept should be charged for, without any reference to the cost of production or market influence.It doesn’t happen on the continent in nearly the same way – and some would probably argue France, Germany, Spain and Italy are the poorer for it. WorldPay executives would no doubt say US companies are big investors, enhancing and expanding the UK businesses they buy, often with a long-term vision. Except that the vision includes domination and control of the economy, holding the government to ransom with threats of cutting investments if tax subsidies are not generous enough or tax rates low enough.Google’s soon-to-be-opened monster HQ in London’s King’s Cross is emblematic of the way the UK’s red-carpet treatment for investors has profited US companies and offset the threat of an exodus after Brexit. Google has found the UK, unlike the EU, willing to turn a blind eye to its monopolistic practices.That is great news for Brexiters. It’s not so good for the rest, who, wherever they turn, must pay for the services of an ever-expanding array of US mega-companies. More

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    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls Israeli Gaza campaign an ‘unfolding genocide’

    Progressive US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the Israeli military campaign in Gaza an “unfolding genocide” in a scathing speech that demanded the Joe Biden White House suspend aid to Israel’s armed forces.“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor on Friday.Citing 30,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and noting 70% were women and children, she continued: “A famine … is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government. This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated.“This was all accomplished – much of this was accomplished – with US resources and weapons. If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes.”Ocasio-Cortez’s comments marked the first time the congresswoman, one of the most prominent members of the US’s political progressive left, referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide. Israel mounted the campaign there in response to the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,100 and took hostages.While other American progressives – including congresswomen Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian – have used the term “genocide”, Ocasio-Cortez had refrained from doing so until her remarks on Friday.In January, Ocasio-Cortez implied that she was waiting for the UN’s international court of justice to weigh in on the term, noting that “the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think, demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gaza is facing”.Earlier in March, a group of protesters confronted Ocasio-Cortez at a movie theater in Brooklyn, criticizing her for “refus[ing] to call it a genocide”.Ocasio-Cortez on Friday called on Biden to suspend the transfer of US weapons to aid the Israeli government, saying “honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer,” she said. “Blocking assistance from one’s closest allies to starve a million people is not unintentional. We have a responsibility to prove the value of democracy, enshrined in the upholding of civil society, rule of law and commitment to human and civil rights.”Ocasio-Cortez was one of 22 House Democrats who voted against the $1.2tn, six-month spending package that both the House and Senate passed on Friday. The package includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025.Biden is expected to sign the bill, which was sent to his desk early on Saturday morning after it passed the Senate. More

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    ‘It’ll be bedlam’: how Trump is creating conditions for a post-election eruption

    A bloodbath. The end of democracy. Riots in the streets. Bedlam in the country. Donald Trump has made apocalyptic imagery a defining feature of his presidential election campaign, warning supporters that if he does not win – and avoid criminal prosecution – the US will enter its death throes.The prophecies of doom, repeated ad nauseam at rallies and on social media, have raised fears that the former president is making an electoral tinderbox that could explode in November. While there has been much commentary assessing the implications of a Trump win, some experts warn that a Trump defeat could provide an equally severe stress test of American democracy.“Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins or loses, there’s going to be violence,” said Michael Fanone, a retired police officer who was seriously injured by pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. “If Donald Trump loses, he’s not going to concede and he’s going to inspire people to commit acts of violence, just like he did in the weeks and months leading up to January 6, 2021.“If he wins, I also believe that there’s going to be violence committed by his supporters, targeting people who previously tried to hold him to account, whether it was members of the press, average citizens like myself, Department of Justice officials, state and federal prosecutors. I believe him when he says that he will have his vengeance.”Trump has long sought to sow distrust in the electoral system while using rhetoric outside the boundaries of modern political discourse, dehumanising opponents and immigrants and portraying the US as a nation on the verge of collapse.During his first run for president, in 2016, he encouraged his supporters to “knock the crap out” of protesters and said he would pay their legal bills if they got into trouble. Should he be denied the presidential nomination at the Republican national convention in Cleveland, he warned: “I think you’d have riots.”In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have called for the military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. When he disputed his election defeat that year, he suggested that an adverse ruling by the Pennsylvania supreme court would “induce violence in the streets”.Then, at a rally before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, Trump said: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness … If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”After the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in August 2022, he predicted that “terrible things are going to happen”, and then quoted the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham warning of “riots in the streets” if Trump were charged.View image in fullscreenSince declaring his candidacy in November 2022, Trump has intensified inflammatory and racist statements on the campaign trail. He has promised to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, suggested that Gen Mark Milley should be executed and asserted that immigrants who are in the US illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country”.At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared: “This is the final battle, they know it. I know it, you know it, and everybody knows it, this is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”He threatened “potential death & destruction” if he was charged by the Manhattan district attorney over a hush-money payment and criticised those urging his supporters to remain peaceful, fuming on his Truth Social platform: “OUR COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYED, AS THEY TELL US TO BE PEACEFUL!”In November, at a rally in New Hampshire, he promised that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. In January this year, returning to New Hampshire, Trump told supporters: “I only want to be a dictator for one day.”Addressing efforts to remove him from the ballot under the 14th amendment, Trump warned that “if we don’t [get treated fairly], our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so.” And referring to those 88 criminal charges that could yet scupper his electoral chances, he opined: “I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes. It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. It’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.”Campaigning this month in North Carolina, Trump claimed that Biden’s immigration policies amounted to a “conspiracy to overthrow the United States” because, in his view, they allow millions of people to stream across the border with Mexico.History has shown that Trump’s words are taken both seriously and literally by his base. Hannah Muldavin, a former spokesperson for the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack, said: “We know when Donald Trump says something – whether it’s in a tweet or in a speech – his supporters listen.“That’s what we saw on January 6. His tweet – ‘Be there. Will be wild!’ – led to a rise in activity online that led people to organise and come to DC on January 6. When Trump uses this incendiary language, it’s concerning.”Last week, appearing alongside a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, Trump again referred to immigrants in the country illegally in subhuman terms. “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.”At the same rally, Trump warned: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” At the time he was discussing the need to protect the car industry from overseas competition, and Trump and allies later said he had been referring to the car industry when he used the term. Biden’s campaign team rejected that defence.Once again, Trump has crossed lines and broken conventions like no other politician in his lifetime. Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Since 1945 I don’t think there has been a politician in a democracy who’s used such authoritarian language, ever. It’s hard to think of anybody. Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin when running for office don’t use the kind of language that Donald Trump uses, so that’s pretty notable.”As historical examples around the world have shown, such language can create a permission structure for violence. Ziblatt added: “No matter what happens, there will be some effort to deny the results of the election if he loses. My best-case scenario is a decisive defeat so that his claims of a stolen election are just simply not credible. But if it’s close, as it seems like all indicators suggest, then I would expect violence and threats of violence and at least protests of the sort that we experienced in 2021.”Opinion polls suggest another tight race. Several have shown Trump with a narrow lead and, in the bars and cafes of Washington DC, it is not hard to overhear idle chatter predicting a Trump victory as more likely than not. This, combined with Trump’s own exaggerated projections, raises the prospect that his supporters will take victory for granted – and assume foul play if, in fact, he loses again.View image in fullscreenLarry Jacobs, director of the center for the study of politics and governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Donald Trump is engaged in a misinformation campaign both to raise the expectation of his supporters that he is going to win, he’s ahead, it’s in the bag, and also to set the conditions for claiming that the election was stolen if he doesn’t win. Obviously, these polls are far out and not predictive but he’s clearly using them now to set the conditions.”In an early preview of how aggressively Trump’s supporters might react to defeat, Charlie Kirk, a far-right political influencer, told an audience at a faith-based event last week: “I want to make sure that we all make a commitment that if this election doesn’t go our way, the next day we fight. It’s a very important thing; a lot of people don’t want to hear that. They say: ‘What do you mean it doesn’t go our way? It has to go our way. We have to win.’ I agree.”Trump’s divisive rhetoric and election denialism in 2020 culminated in the attack on the US Capitol. But members of Congress returned the same night to certify Biden’s election victory, and Trump reluctantly departed the White House two weeks later. This time Biden is the incumbent and Trump has no control over the levers of government, making a replay of the insurrection in Washington less likely.Ezra Levin, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots movement, said: “Trump is already spreading lies that this election is rigged and we know there is no realistic scenario where he concedes after losing.“One big difference between his loss this year and 2020 is this time they’re better prepared and have already gone through a dress rehearsal. But the other big difference is he won’t be a sitting president – he’ll just be a sore loser who the nation rejected in record numbers two elections in a row.”Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, added: “What I fear is that the repetition of violent rhetoric will lead to the normalisation of violent acts. There’s no sugarcoating it. This is a dangerous period for American constitutional government.“In the end, the institutions are no better or worse than the men and women who are sworn to defend them and, if they do their duty, we’ll be OK. If they’re stormed, or if they’re paralysed by fear, then there’s a chance that they would not hold. It’s more likely than not that it won’t happen, but this election will be the ultimate stress test.” More