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    Biden challenger Dean Phillips vows to stay in race as ‘a mission of principle’

    Democratic presidential challenger Dean Phillips defended continuing his long-shot campaign despite a disappointing third-place finish in Saturday’s South Carolina primary, saying it was “a mission of principle”.Phillips also argued that Joe Biden remains “in a terrible position” in his pursuit of a second term in the White House despite his dominance in the Democratic presidential primary, citing his poor polling performance with the general public on a number of topics.The Minnesota congressman’s remarks about remaining in the race for the Oval Office came on Sunday during an appearance on MSNBC’s The Weekend.Another guest on the show asked Phillips “what the hell are you doing” and “what’s being served here” with his presidential run, especially after Biden captured 96% of the votes cast in the previous day’s South Carolina primary. Phillips collected less than 2% of the vote and finished behind Williamson, a self-help author.“You got an incumbent president of your party who’s pulling 96% of the vote in a very important state like South Carolina – [who] will pull a significant number of votes in subsequent states,” the former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said to Phillips. “So what does your path look like at this point and why?”Steele said Phillips, 55, was also prolonging narratives about the 81-year-old Biden’s age.An NBC poll published on Sunday found the presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, 77, had an edge of 23 percentage points over Biden on the question of which candidate had the necessary mental and physical health to be president.“Are you creating a drain in the process … when the real threat is the man across the aisle?” Steele said, referring to Trump, who is seeking a second presidency despite facing more than 90 pending criminal charges, including for trying to illegally nullify Biden’s victory over him in 2020.“I know tradition dictates that you always protect the incumbent,” Phillips replied. But Phillips said challenging Biden was “a mission of principle”.“Someone’s got to do it,” he added.Phillips said he was also concerned that Biden’s unpopularity with the electorate could cost the Democrats the White House if he is nominated for another term in the fall.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’re dumbfounded,” Phillips said. “Yes, he’s got a commanding lead in the primaries – I get it. But look at the numbers. He is in a terrible position.”The NBC News poll published on Sunday showed Biden’s approval rating had plummeted to 37%, the lowest recorded by the outlet during his presidency. Fewer than three in 10 voters approve of Biden’s handling of Israel’s military operations in Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October attack.And Biden not only substantially trails Trump on several policy and personal comparisons, he was also behind by five percentage points in a hypothetical electoral rematch with Trump, whom he defeated in 2020.The next Democratic primary is in Nevada on Tuesday. But Phillips missed a filing deadline for the contest in Nevada and therefore is not going to be on the ballot. That leaves Phillips’s next Democratic primary appearance on 27 February in Michigan. More

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    Ilhan Omar speech proved to be mistranslated but outrage continues spread

    A week after a mistranslated clip of Ilhan Omar sparked outrage online, some far-right House Republicans are still following through with calls for the progressive lawmaker to be censured. And the repercussions of the misinformation extend beyond the country.The Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, has gone furthest in her response to the clip, calling Omar a “foreign agent in our government”. Greene, a leading supporter of Donald Trump, who also attempted to censure the Michigan Democrat Rashida Tlaib in November, called Omar a “terrorist sympathizer” on X last week, adding: “Somalian first. Muslim second. She never mentions America.”Greene said she would introduce a censure bill which could see the Minnesota Democrat removed from the remaining committees she serves, a year after Omar was forced out of the foreign affairs committee by Republicans for her criticism of Israel. The bill was on the House agenda Monday, though it is unlikely to move past political stunt.Omar, a Somali American congresswoman, had been filmed delivering a speech at a hotel in Minneapolis on 27 January where she addressed members of her constituency on a recent agreement reached between the breakaway Somali region of Somaliland and Ethiopia in early January, which bypassed Somalia’s federal government in Mogadishu.The preliminary deal, termed a memorandum of understanding, would see Somaliland lease Ethiopia a naval base on the Gulf of Aden and grant it widened access to its Berbera port. In exchange, Somaliland officials claim, Ethiopia would become the first country to recognise its independence unilaterally from Somalia.In an interview with the Observer, an adviser to Somalia’s president warned that Somalia was ready for war with Ethiopia if it doesn’t reverse course on the deal.A video of the speech was circulated soon after on X by Rhoda Elmi, Somaliland’s deputy foreign minister. The video’s translation wrongly claimed Omar had said she was “Somalian first and Muslim second”.Mocking the faulty translation, Omar pointed out that the demonym for someone from Somalia is Somali, not Somalian. “If you are gonna talk about us, at least try to get our ethnicity right,” she posted on X.The video, which has been viewed at least 4.5m times, also misquoted Omar as saying she would “liberate” Somali territories, which were “occupied” by neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, a polarising issue among Somalis, some of whom weren’t satisfied with the post-colonial settlement when the Horn of Africa was partitioned by Italy, France and the UK.Elmi, Somaliland’s deputy foreign minister, took umbrage at the Minnesota lawmaker’s purported remarks about her position on the memorandum and Somalia’s relations with its neighbours, accusing her of “ethno-racist rhetoric”.Omar defended her comments in the days that followed, saying the subtitles in the video were “not only slanted but completely off”, expressing her support for the government of Somalia, where she was born, as it finds itself embroiled in standoff with Ethiopia.Omar vowed to thwart the deal, which the US has also expressed concerns over, telling people at the gathering in Minneapolis: “For as long as I am in Congress, no one will take over the seas belonging to the nation of Somalia and the United States will not support others who seek to steal from us.”Several Somalis also posted on X about the errors in the subtitles, including the translator and author Aziz Mahdi, who objected to Omar’s remarks but said: “The translation offered fails to accurately convey the essence of her talk, leading to a distorted understanding of her message. So don’t cite it.”The Minnesota Reformer, a Minnesota-based news outlet, worked with two independent Somali translators who recorded Omar as saying: “We are people who know that they are Somali and Muslim”, not that she was “Somalians first” as the video suggested.Abdirashid Hashi, a former Somali government minister, called on Elmi to retract the video and issue an apology.Despite attempts to clarify Omar’s message, several Republicans and rightwing figures seized upon the video without verifying the misleading translation, to launch a fresh attack on Omar, including Elon Musk, whose own ties with third countries were questioned by Joe Biden. On his X account, Musk posted: “The United States or another country. Pick one.”Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, called for Omar’s denaturalization and deportation, while Tom Emmer, the House majority whip, decried her comments as a “slap in the face” to her constituents and called for an ethics investigation into her remarks.The Greene censure bill could be a further thorn in the congresswoman’s side, but Omar shrugged it off on Thursday. “I truly do not care about what that insane woman does,” she said, according to Politico.And her party is standing behind her. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, criticised the move as a “frivolous censure resolution, designed to inflame and castigate and further divide us”. More

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    Potential Trump running mate JD Vance says he still questions results of 2020 election

    JD Vance, the Ohio senator who is being floated as a potential Republican running mate to Donald Trump, said on Sunday that he still questions the results of the 2020 election and that the votes should not have been immediately certified.“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos, adding it was “ridiculous” to ask if he would have certified the results as Mike Pence had done and told the host he was “obsessed with talking about this”.In a contentious interview, the senator also suggested that Trump should ignore “illegitimate” US supreme court rulings.That remark came after Vance was questioned about a 2021 podcast during which he said he would advise Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people” and ignore legal rulings against it.“We have a major problem here with administrators and bureaucrats in the government who don’t respond to the elected branches … If those people aren’t following the rules, then of course you’ve got to fire them, and of course the president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should,” Vance said.“The constitution says that the supreme court can make rulings … but if the supreme court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling,” added Vance, whose wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, has previously clerked for John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court justices.Vance also argued that the civil claims and criminal cases against Trump were not legitimate efforts to prosecute the former president for wrongdoing, but “about throwing him off the ballot because Democrats feel that they can’t beat him at the ballot box. And so, they’re trying to defeat him in court.”The interview ended badly, with the network cutting to a commercial break after Stephanopoulos told Vance he had made it “very clear” he believed a president can defy the supreme court.“No, no, George …” Vance said before the sound was cut.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, was elected senator in 2022 after abandoning his past criticism of Trump, in which he had said the former president was “America’s Hitler”, “a total fraud” and “a moral disaster”.The reversal helped to secure Trump’s endorsement and his backing has not wavered since. He has described the legal claims against Trump, specifically E Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit that last week concluded with an $83m judgement against Trump, as “illustrative of what’s gone wrong in this country”. More

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    John Fetterman: progressive senator perhaps not that progressive after all

    There was a time when John Fetterman, the rough-and-ready Pennsylvania senator, was a budding star of the left.Endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his 2022 Democratic race, Fetterman had supported the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders for president in 2016. On the campaign trail, Fetterman said he would fight for an increased minimum wage, while he had previously suggested he wanted to see the implementation of universal healthcare.But in recent months, Fetterman has come under attack from the left for his enthusiastic support for Israel and continued US funding to its war in Gaza. The criticism has come alongside praise from Republicans for Fetterman’s chiding of some Democrats over what he has called a “crisis at our border”.The growing distance between Fetterman and the left of his party came to a head in December.“I’m not a progressive, I’m just a regular Democrat,” Fetterman wrote on X that same month.View image in fullscreenBut although Fetterman did not openly embrace the progressive designation in his 2022 Senate race, people on X noticed an inconsistency: Fetterman’s post was flagged with readers’ context pointing to his previous posts where he described himself as a “progressive Democrat”.In the years before he was elected, Fetterman offered enough evidence that he was to the left of the party to leave supporters feeling short-changed.As lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania – he was elected in 2018 after running as a progressive – he pushed for clemency in some cases where people had been sentenced to life imprisonment. When he was mayor of Braddock, the town of 2,000 people in western Pennsylvania, he defied state law by marrying same-sex couples in his home.That history, coupled with his frequent, fierce defenses of Pennsylvania’s election system on TV in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, inspired progressives to support him.View image in fullscreenFetterman never fully fitted all aspects of the progressive mantle. As a candidate in 2022, he spoke enthusiastically about his support for Israel, but his actions since the 7 October Hamas attacks, and Israel’s subsequent response, coupled with his adjustment on border issues, has brought political scrutiny.It has prompted gossip, too. Fetterman’s wife, Gisele Fetterman, who became a prominent surrogate for him during the Senate campaign after Fetterman had a stroke, deleted her social media accounts in January.Fetterman had spoken of his wife’s immigration story during his campaigns. Gisele Fetterman moved to the US when she was seven as an undocumented immigrant with her mother and brother, before acquiring a green card in 2004 and US citizenship in 2009.That backstory prompted rebuke after Fetterman told the rightwing New York Post “there is a crisis” of migration.“We have a crisis at our border, and it can’t be controversial that we should have a secure border,” he said last month.Gisele Fetterman has since returned to social media, explaining her absence by saying she was “bored of it” – and the pair have posted pictures of themselves together, but the critics have not stopped.View image in fullscreenThe events of January 26 didn’t help, when Fetterman appeared to mock people who were protesting against the killing of 26,000 people in Gaza by waving a giant Israel flag at them. (The New York Post gleefully reported that Fetterman, a “progressive-hating Democrat”, “never misses an opportunity to mock” the left.)There were always some distinctions between Fetterman and his more progressive colleagues, however.While he was endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez in his Senate race, he said during the campaign that he would not be a member of the “Squad”, the group of progressive Democrats in Congress. When he was running for Senate, he was praised by the left for his statements on reforming the criminal justice system, but criticized for pledging his support for fracking.He had given fair warning, too, about where he might stand on Israel.View image in fullscreen“Whenever I’m in a situation to be called on to take up the cause of strengthening and enhancing the security of Israel or deepening our relationship between the United States and Israel, I’m going to lean in,” Fetterman told Jewish Insider in 2022.Still, the apparent move away from being a perceived leftwing ally has plenty upset, and Fetterman is doing little to soothe his former supporters.As people have watched with increasing horror as Israel has bombarded Gaza, Fetterman told Semafor in January that “Israel is really a beacon of the kind of values, the American values and progressive ideals, that you want to see”.And as Republicans have called for severe restrictions on migrants crossing the border reform, Fetterman has defended working with the Republican party.If Fetterman was once a progressive, it seems that he definitely is not any longer. More

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    Republican congressmen are now talking about throwing migrants from helicopters | Moustafa Bayoumi

    Three years ago, the Intercept published an illuminating article about the rise of the “Hoppean snake” among far-right extremists, a meme which the Intercept labelled especially “disturbing for its frightening historical reference”. For the uninitiated, the Hoppean Snake in its various forms usually depicts a serpent wearing the military hat of the American-backed Chilean dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet in the foreground while figures are dropping out of helicopters to their death in the background.The meme specifically refers to Pinochet’s known strategy of kidnapping, torturing, killing, and – here’s the point – throwing his political opponents out of helicopters and into the ocean to dispose of them. The Intercept noted that many groups and individuals on the far right, such as the “Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, armed Trumpists, and the like wear T-shirts that offer ‘free helicopter rides’.” and when they do so, “they are referencing a program of extermination.”It’s alarming to see such rhetoric from the far-right fringes; imagine seeing this kind of political violence being advocated by a sitting politician or someone seeking the highest office in the land.Well, you don’t have to imagine it any more. Last week, the Republican congressman Mike Collins of Georgia did just that. On Twitter/X,, Collins commented on a widely circulated picture of Jhoan Boada, a man who was recently arrested for allegedly assaulting two police officers in New York City outside a migrant shelter.Boada was one of seven men arrested, and multiple reports refer to him as a “migrant”. After leaving court, Boada was photographed raising his two middle fingers to reporters as he walked away. The picture prompted Republican congressman Anthony D’Esposito of New York to offer the racist riposte: “We feel the same way about you. Holla at the cartels and have them escort you back.”Collins then joined in. “Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back,” he wrote.As HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias, who covers the far right, put it on X: “So we have a congressman joking or not joking about extrajudicially executing a migrant arrested for a crime (allegedly assaulting a cop) that tons of non-migrant citizens get arrested for too.” Mathias also notes that the “free helicopter ride” meme has been popular with white supremacists and neo-fascists for about the last seven years.That such rhetoric is dangerous to human life and damaging to our political culture is hardly difficult to fathom. Collins was even briefly suspended from X for violating its rules against violent speech, which considering the bevy of white supremacists and neofascists on that site is quite an accomplishment. (“Never delete. Never surrender,” he posted, after his account was reinstated.) But Collins was hardly the only American political figure recently promoting political assassination.Lawyers for Donald Trump told a federal appeals court last month that a president would basically be immune from prosecution if the president ordered “Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival”, as a judge asked. Trump’s legal team argued that the president “would have to be impeached and convicted” before any prosecution could proceed. The New York Times called the argument “jaw-dropping”. The New Yorker wrote that we should all be worried, not because of Trump but because of how unsettled the law actually is.Rightwing disdain for everyone but themselves fuels this authoritarian thinking, and it is readily found in the writing of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, the German American academic to whom the Hoppean snake refers. (When contacted by the Intercept in 2021 about the meme, Hoppe said: “What do I know? There are lots of crazy people out there!”) In his 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed, the libertarian Hoppe writes that: “there can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.”Expulsion is also necessary, Hoppe argues, for “the advocates of alternative, non-family and kin-centered lifestyles such as, for instance, individual hedonism, parasitism, nature-environment worship, homosexuality, or communism”.Meanwhile, far-right groups assembled this past weekend in a convoy for a “Take Back Our Border” rally in Eagle Pass, Texas. Near this border town is the standoff between the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, and the federal government, after Abbott installed razor wire along the border and denied federal border patrol agents access to the area. Three people, a woman and two children, drowned after the razor wire was installed, and the supreme court ruled recently that the federal government could remove the razor wire. After the ruling was issued, Representative Mike Collins introduced legislation banning the government from removing the wire.Appearing at the “Take Back Our Border” rally was the rightwing journalist Michael Yon, who offered a tirade about how the US border has become insecure because of the funders of immigration to the United States. Among his targets was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which he described as “Jewish, right?” He continued: “This is quite interesting because [HIAS] are actually funding the people who are going to come to places like Fort Lauderdale, synagogues, and they’re going to scream ‘Allahu Akbar’ and they’re going to shoot the shit out of them. Right? And they’re coming across the border, and it’s being funded with Jewish money.”In reality, HIAS’s work aiding immigrant Muslims and Latinos so terrified the white supremacist Robert Bowers that he – not a Muslim yelling Allahu Akbar – subsequently shot and killed 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the deadliest attack on Jewish people in US history. But why let facts get in the way of a good racist screed?Jews, Muslims, immigrants – everything is a threat. Violence is the solution. Opponents should be assassinated. Fascists are role models. Welcome to the Republican party in the year 2024.
    Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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    US Senate releases draft bill to toughen border measures while securing aid to Ukraine and Israel

    US senators on Sunday evening released the details of a highly anticipated $118bn package that pairs federal enforcement policy on the US-Mexico border with wartime aid for Ukraine, Israel and others, launching a long-shot effort to push the bill past sceptical, hard right House Republicans – whom Democrats accuse of politicizing immigration while being in thrall to Donald Trump.The proposal is the best chance for Joe Biden to bolster dwindling US wartime aid for Ukraine – a major foreign policy goal that is shared by both the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, and top Republican, Mitch McConnell. The Senate was expected this week to hold a key test vote on the legislation, but it faces a wall of opposition from conservatives.Joe Biden urged the US Congress to pass the legislation, for the sake of immigration reform and aid for US allies.The bill “includes the toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades,” he said in a statement issued by the White House.He added: “Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border? I’ve made my decision. I’m ready to solve the problem.”Crucially, with Congress stalled on approving $60bn in Ukraine aid, the US has halted shipments of ammunition and missiles to Kyiv, leaving Ukrainian soldiers outgunned as they try to come out on top of a grinding stalemate with Russian troops.“The United States and our allies are facing multiple, complex and, in places, coordinated challenges from adversaries who seek to disrupt democracy and expand authoritarian influence around the globe,” Schumer said in a statement.In a bid to overcome opposition from House Republicans, McConnell had insisted last year that border policy changes be included in the national security funding package.The bill would overhaul the asylum system at the border with faster and tougher enforcement, as well as give presidents new powers to immediately expel migrants if authorities deemed themselves overwhelmed with the number of undocumented people requesting asylum at the international boundary.The tough new measures discussed among select senators for months include a new federal requirement to “shut down” the US-Mexico border if more than 5,000 undocumented people cross into the US daily and plans to swiftly throw out economic migrants.Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who broke from the Democratic party in 2022 to become an independent, told CBS’s Face the Nation earlier on Sunday some of what she and other Senate negotiators have been working on.When the number of migrants crossing without an appointment with the US authorities approaches 4,000 people a day, the US government would be granted the power to voluntarily turn away all people presenting at border stations, to give time for the asylum application processing to catch up, she said.At other times, migrants would be taken into short-term detention as their claims for asylum were rapidly assessed. Anyone failing to meet the standards for a claim would be “swiftly returned to their home country”, Sinema said.“We believe that by quickly implementing this system, individuals who come for economic reasons will learn very quickly that this is not a path to enter our country and will not take the sometimes dangerous or treacherous trek to our border,” she told the Sunday morning TV show.Alongside the faster deportation provisions, the draft bill would also speed up the time needed to process successful asylum applications. “Folks who do qualify for asylum will be on a rapid path, six months or less, to start a new life in America,” Sinema said.The draft Senate bill meets several of the demands that have been raised by Republicans who have accused the Biden administration of failing to secure the US border. In particular, it proposes an end to the system of allowing people to remain in the US while their asylum applications are processed – a procedure Republicans dismissively call “catch and release”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs many as 10,000 migrants a day have been encountered crossing the US-Mexico border without necessary immigration papers or an appointment with the US authorities.But the Senate bill is likely to be blocked by Republican leaders in the US House who are following Donald Trump’s lead and opposing the deal. The former president, who is running for re-election, has made it clear that he does not want to see Biden presented with a legislative win on the border crisis.Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has said the Senate bill would be “dead on arrival” were it to reach his chamber. On Saturday he also made a pre-emptive move that could further imperil the chances of the Senate bill ever becoming law by announcing that he would bring to a vote on the House floor a separate $17.6bn military aid package for Israel.Johnson was asked by NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday whether his aid for Israel plan was a ruse to kill the Senate compromise deal on the border. He was also asked whether he was merely doing Trump’s bidding, with Trump “calling the shots”.“Of course not,” the speaker said. “He’s not calling the shots, I am calling the shots for the House – that’s our responsibility.”Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House, derided House Republicans, in interview on the ABC US network’s This Week Sunday show, as “wholly owned subsidiaries of Donald Trump”.With the numbers of migrants turning up at the border remaining high, and with the presidential election year getting under way, immigration is set to continue to cause ructions on both sides of the political aisle.On Sunday Nikki Haley, Trump’s only remaining rival in the race to secure the Republican nomination, accused Trump in a CNN interview of “playing politics” with the border with his attempt to scupper the Senate deal.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More

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    Nikki Haley: Trump spends more time ‘ranting’ than fighting for American people

    Nikki Haley pressed her case on Sunday to become the Republican presidential nominee by launching a sharp attack on her rival Donald Trump as a candidate who is set to spend more time in court than on the campaign trail this year and is intent on ranting about his own supposed victimhood rather than fighting for the American people.With less than three weeks to go before the Republican primary in her home state of South Carolina, which many observers see as the former governor and UN ambassador’s last stand, Haley attacked Trump for being more concerned with himself than with the future of the country. She told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning TV show that his multiple court cases, in which he faces 91 charges across four criminal cases, amounted to a “real issue”.Turning Trump’s own words against him, Haley said that the former president is “going to be spending more time in a courtroom than he’s going to be spending on the campaign trail”. At a time when the US is “in disarray and the world is on fire, we need a president that’s going to give us eight years of focus and discipline, not one that’s going to be sitting there ranting about how he’s a victim.”.She added that Trump, in recent days, “hasn’t once talked about the American people. And that’s a problem.”She went on to accuse him of having a “temper tantrum” after she garnered 43% of the vote in New Hampshire last month. “Why? Because he wasn’t controlling the situation.”Haley’s caustic attack on Trump came as he continues to command a seemingly unassailable lead in the Republican nomination contest. He comfortably won elections in Iowa and New Hampshire, and is now showing a double digit lead in opinion polls in South Carolina, where the Republican primary contest is on 24 February.In the latest Washington Post-Monmouth University poll of potential Republican primary voters in South Carolina, Trump was 26 points ahead on 58% to Haley’s 32%.As part of her increasingly direct assault on the standing and reputation of Trump, Haley has also taken to comparing him to Joe Biden. She pointedly predicted that if Trump became the Republican nominee, there would be a woman in the White House.In that circumstance, “Joe Biden will win and Kamala Harris will become president,” she said.She said that America deserved better than either Trump or Biden as leader. “Why are we doing this? We are allowing ourselves to have two 80-year-olds, who can’t serve eight years, who are both diminished whether it’s in their character or in their mental capacity.”For his part, Biden surprised no one by taking more than 95% of the primary vote in South Carolina on Saturday. His two competitors, Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota, and self-help author Marianne Williamson, lagged far behind.South Carolina has been promoted by the Democratic party as its first official primary election, partly out of recognition that it was the state in which African American voters gifted Biden a huge win in 2020 that lifted him to the Democratic nomination. Jim Clyburn, the Democratic congressman from South Carolina who was seminal in turning that vote to Biden, was asked by CNN whether was retaining the support of Black voters in this election cycle.“Joe Biden has not lost any support among African Americans. You can go out and talk to 10 people, purposely find one who maybe gives off a different thought, but he has not lost any support among African Americans,” Clyburn said.Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic party leader in the House of Representatives, hinted at better things to come for Biden as he struggles to best Trump in many opinion polls.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was a tremendous victory in South Carolina, a decisive one and I think it demonstrates that as we enter into the campaign season that the American people are beginning to focus on President Biden’s incredible track record of results,” he said.Jeffries cited economic and health measures executed by the Biden administration as the US worked its way out from the Covid-19 pandemic, “allowing the American economy to emerge as the most advanced in the world”.He added: “Yes, more needs to be done in addressing affordability and the inflationary pressures and President Biden has a vision to do that.”Biden was scheduled to travel to Las Vegas on Sunday for a campaign event in the Historic Westside neighborhood ahead of Nevada’s Democratic primary on Tuesday.Nevada is a key swing state for Biden to win again this year. He beat Trump by less than three points there in 2020, relying heavily on support from Hispanic and working class union member voters in the Las Vegas area.Biden needs a good showing in the Democratic primary, while the nominating race for the Republicans in Nevada is a confusing and messy one with two contests two days apart and Trump having a clear advantage over Haley.Meanwhile, Haley made a cameo appearance on the US comedy staple Saturday Night Live. More

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    A once or future king? Floridians ask if DeSantis is looking forward or back

    Two weeks have passed since Ron DeSantis crashed out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but many in Florida are questioning if the rightwing governor is still auditioning.On his return to Tallahassee following his national humiliation there was no period of quiet contemplation, or pause to refocus on his day job. Instead, DeSantis got straight down to business, little of it having immediate consequence to Florida or its voters.This week, insisting that the US looked to Florida for “leadership”, he called for constitutional reforms in Washington, including term limits for elected officials. Days later, he announced he was sending the Florida state guard to Texas to “fortify” its battle with the Biden administration over border security.And anybody in his home state figuring DeSantis was ready to move on from his obsession with the culture war issues that helped bring down his White House run was quickly disabused. One month into the year, Florida Republicans’ priorities have included banning Pride flags and stopping transgender drivers from changing their sex on licenses.Prominent questions circulating in the state are, now he is back to serve his final three years as governor: what are DeSantis’s intentions? And what is his ultimate goal?There is no shortage of theories. Some suggest he is ostensibly still in the race for the 2024 nomination, running a shadow campaign that would leave him ready to step in if legal troubles or other factors force Donald Trump out of contention.Others think he’s plotting further ahead. “He’s still running for president, just changed the timeline from 2024 to 2028,” Bob Jarvis, a constitutional law professor at Nova University, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.Another possibility is gaining traction among those who have studied DeSantis since he evolved from a nondescript and aloof US congressman to the helm of the third largest state: that he simply wants to be remembered for something when he’s termed out of office in January 2027.Such a hypothesis has plausibility if, as some observers believe, his future political career was mortally wounded by the implosion of a profligate presidential campaign that blew through $160m to garner barely 23,000 votes in Iowa, the only state he competed in.“My personal opinion is that he’s finished, that he’s going to go the way of Rick Perry in Texas, Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, all of these great governors who were going to be president, who were like shooting stars and then disappeared into the darkness,” said the political analyst Mac Stipanovich, a former Republican strategist.“If he were to resign today, he would have a legacy in Florida unlike almost any governor in my lifetime. It would be a legacy of anger, outrage and highly centralized top-down vitriol.“He can’t turn on a dime and sprint left because that would make him seem even more inauthentic than he normally does. But if he’s patient, if he takes time, he can move to the center and become, I shouldn’t say more likable, but likable at all since he has been a black hole of anti-charisma.”The “legacy” theory resonates with Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida. “He’s still got a good while in office, and right now he’s carrying on with points he was making on the campaign trail, but this happens with governors that run and come back home after having not done well, governors are always thinking about their legacy,” she said.“Some want to be known as the education governor, the tax relief or tax reform governor, the environmental governor. There’s that possibility, but if he’s going to take that direction it is probably best to just get through this legislative session being consistent with what you’ve been on the campaign trail.“Maybe he’s comfortable with his legacy being the ‘anti-wokeism’ governor, we will see. Some Republicans say they see the environment as a possibility for him, making inroads and having a good legacy because he’s been fairly proactive spending a lot of money on water issues and so forth, but it looks right now there’s been no break in his commitment to anti-wokeism.”To that end, on Wednesday, DeSantis celebrated a ruling by a Trump-appointed district court judge dismissing Disney’s lawsuit against the state for “political retaliation”, the stripping of powers from Florida’s largest private employer for opposing his “don’t say gay” law banning classroom discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation.His backing of the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, by sending state and national guard personnel, and law enforcement officers paid by Florida taxpayers, to bolster his fellow Republican’s fight with federal authorities over immigration is to critics another example of DeSantis placing his political agenda above the needs of his own state.There’s also growing evidence it could backfire. A survey by Mi Vecino, a grassroots voter registration and advocacy group, found 58% of Republican respondents rated as “very poor”, and an additional 18% as “poor”, the effectiveness of Florida’s political leaders to handle issues that mattered most to them: in order, the cost of living, healthcare and gun violence.“People are feeling the squeeze. They are struggling with real world issues, and they feel like the governor and the legislature are spending their time on manufactured outrage, and not legislating or improving their lives in any tangible way,” said Alex Berrios, the group’s co-founder.“Ron DeSantis has created an engaged segment of the Republican party that will vote, is involved, and is also incredibly unhappy with him and the Republican legislature. They have become exhausted by this firehose of outrage and legislation and policy.” More