Evelyn Reynolds

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    John Lewis review: superb first biography of a civil rights hero

    John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community chronicles one man’s quest for a more perfect union. An adventure of recent times, it is made exceptional by the way the narrative intersects with current events. It is the perfect book, at the right time.Raymond Arsenault also offers the first full-length biography of the Georgia congressman and stalwart freedom-fighter. The book illuminates Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests, his service in Congress and his time as an American elder statesman.Exemplary of Malcom X’s observation, “of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Arsenault’s life of Lewis also brings to mind William Faulkner’s take on American life: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”John Robert Lewis was born into a poor family of sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping amounted to slavery in all but name. White people owned the land and equipment. At the company store, seed and other supplies, from cornmeal to calico, were available on credit. The prices set for all this, and for the cotton harvest, were calculated to keep Black people in debt.Recalling his childhood, Lewis was not referring to material wealth when he wrote: “The world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one … It was a small world … filled with family and friends.”His school books made him aware of the unfairness of Jim Crow: “I knew names written in the front of our raggedy secondhand textbooks were white children’s names, and that these books had been new when they belonged to them.”His parents and nine siblings’ initial indifference to learning proved frustrating. They viewed his emergent strength, which would help him withstand a career punctuated by arrests and beatings, as a means to help increase a meager income. First sent into the cotton fields at six, Lewis was frequently compelled to miss class through high school.His political mission grew out of a religious calling. His was a gospel of justice and liberation. As a child he practiced preaching to a congregation of the chickens. In time, like Martin Luther King Jr, he was ordained a Baptist minister.Inspired by Gandhi and Bayard Rustin as well as by King, Lewis also embraced non-violence in emulation of Jesus. He took to heart Christ’s call to turn the other cheek: love your enemy and love one another. He called his modeling of Christ’s confrontation with injustice “getting into good trouble”.Education offered opportunities. In college, Lewis met and befriended likeminded young people. Helping form and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he attracted others eager to take action, as Freedom Riders or whatever else gaining equal treatment might take.Lewis’s willingness to suffer attack while defending his beliefs gave him credibility like no other. The most remembered blow produced a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama. That barbaric 1965 assault against peaceful protesters came from authorities headed by George Wallace, the governor who said: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” A move to maintain white supremacy, the atrocity became known as “Bloody Sunday”.Time after time, Lewis found unity among colleagues elusive. In 1963, at the March on Washington, four higher-ups insisted on softening his speech. Even so, his radicalized passion shone through.Collaborating with Jack and Robert Kennedy, their self-satisfied delusion masquerading as optimism, was also problematic. Time and again, political expedience tempered the president and the attorney general in their commitment to civil rights. Sixty years on, among lessons Lewis attempted teaching was the inevitability of backlash following progress. If Barack Obama represented propulsion forward, the improbable installment of Donald Trump was like a race backward. Angering some, this was why, looking past Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Lewis endorsed for president the less exciting but more electable Joe Biden.Lewis’s ability to forgive indicates something of his greatness. Of George Wallace’s plea for forgiveness, in 1986, he said: “It was almost like someone confessing to a priest.”Rather like a priest, Lewis was admired across the House chamber. His moral compass was the “conscience of Congress”. Near the end of his life, in 2020, employing all his measured and collaborative demeanor, he exerted this standing in an attempt to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted by a rightwing supreme court. Exhibiting what seemed to be endless resolve, he nearly succeeded.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI met Lewis in 1993, in Miami, at the conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The event’s theme, “cultural diversity”, got more dubious by the day. Only Black people attended excellent Black history workshops. Only rich white people toured Palm Beach houses.There were subsidized airfares, conference fees and accommodation for people of color. But I asked the Trust’s new president, Richard Moe, if it wouldn’t be good for the Trust to acquire Villa Lewaro, a house at Irvington, New York, once the residence of Madam CJ Walker, a Black business pioneer. Moe answered: “I intend to take the Trust out of the business of acquiring the houses of the rich.”I hoped Lewis’s keynote address would deem preservation a civil right. It didn’t. Instead, Lewis lamented how high costs made preserving landmarks in poor Black neighborhoods an unaffordable luxury. Moe heartily concurred. I stood to protest.Moe cut me off: “Mr Adams, you are making a statement, not asking a question. You are out of order!”“No,” Lewis said. “The young man did ask a question! He asked: ‘Why in places like Harlem, with abatements and grants, taxpayers subsidize destruction, instead of preserving Black heritage?’ I never thought of it that way. And he’s right.”In that moment, John Lewis became my hero. As a preservationist, I share his mission to obtain that Beloved Community. It is a place where inclusion is a right and where welcome is a given.
    John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press
    Michael Henry Adams is an architectural-cultural historian and historic preservation activist More

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    ‘We don’t want to be the bad guys’: anti-abortion marchers seek post-Roe stance

    While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are planning a cascade of ads and events to coincide with the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, hundreds of anti-abortion activists gathered on the National Mall in Washington DC on Friday in hopes of re-energizing a movement that has repeatedly stumbled since Roe’s overturning.Originally organized around the goal of overturning the Roe precedent that established federal abortion rights, the March for Life has seen what was once its greatest victory become a political liability. In the 18 months since Roe’s demise, abortion rights supporters have trounced anti-abortion activists in state-level ballot referendums. Yet the march’s message was largely similar to past years: speakers and attendees alike talked about the need to make abortion “unthinkable” rather than just illegal – with scant details on how to make that happen.“We don’t want to just go in and be the bad guys,” said Elijah Persinger, a 19-year-old from Fort Wayne, Indiana. “We want to make make people understand and help them understand the science behind things and the logic that we’re going by as well.”As in years past, march attendees skewed young. Schools and universities organize trips for students to attend the march, and groups often carry banners and flags with their schools’ names. Some groups all wear bright-colored, matching hats in order to keep from getting lost in the crowd.Persinger took a 12-hour, overnight bus ride to attend Friday’s March for Life. His group planned to leave DC after the event.But the crowd on Friday seemed relatively sparse. When the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, stood on a podium to speak, he was met with only muted applause – despite being a high-profile attendee for the march. The greatest response came when he mentioned Biden: when he said that the president’s administration planned to restrict funding to crisis pregnancy centers, the crowd booed loudly.Organizers also spoke from the stage about the need to support maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers, facilities that aim to convince people to keep their pregnancies.“Christians don’t mean to impose what we believe on anyone. But this nation was founded as a Christian nation,” said Laurel Brooks, a march attendee from North Carolina.Brooks works for an organization called My Faith Votes, which aims to mobilize Christian voters, but she clarified that she was sharing her own views, not her organization’s.“The foundation of America is truly Christian,” Brooks remarked. “That doesn’t mean we reject, hate, dislike anyone who does not believe as we do. That’s not who Christians are. We accept people for their free will. God honors free will.”After the speakers finished, marchers spent three hours slowly walking from the National Mall to the steps of the US supreme court. The weather was unusually wintry, with marchers braving wind and several inches of snow.To keep from getting cold, some marchers danced to the Cha Cha Slide. Others started a call-and-response chant of, “We are pro-life, marching for life, saving the babies, one at a time!”Icons of fetuses and babies dominated the march. Many carried signs with ultrasound images above phrases such as “Future Doctor”, “Future Dancer”, and “Future Wife”. Others had signs with images of babies above the conservative slogan “Don’t Tread on Me”.“There are no mistakes, just happy accidents,” read another sign, complete with a hand-drawn beaming baby and portrait of the painter Bob Ross. One young woman even carried a baby made out of snow.At least one man was trying to sell Trump 2024 merchandise to marchers. But overall, Donald Trump had a minimal presence at the march despite being the frontrunner for the Republican White House nomination as he seeks a second presidency.Trump has waffled on his stance on abortion: while he has taken credit for installing supreme court justices who helped overturn Roe, he has also suggested that hardline stances on abortion can backfire on Republicans.“I’m not voting for Trump, I know that much,” said Ali Mumbach, 26. She carried a sign listing police brutality, gun violence and other issues that should matter to anti-abortion activists who call themselves “pro-life”.“Trump is anti-life, especially in regards to Black lives and the lives of immigrants. So, yeah, I don’t think that he is pro-life. I don’t think that he cares about people who live in poverty. I don’t think he has the best interests of the American people,” Mumbach said.Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping sustained outrage over Roe will propel them to victory up and down the general election ballot.The Biden campaign is now launching a paid media campaign, timed to Roe’s anniversary, to target women and swing voters in battleground states.Harris plans to appear on Monday in Wisconsin to spotlight post-Roe attacks on reproductive rights before holding a campaign rally alongside Biden in Virginia.In the November 2023 state elections, Virginia Republicans tried to take control of the state legislature by promising to enact a “reasonable” ban on terminating pregnancies that were 15 weeks or beyond – an effort that failed. More

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    Roger Stone should be prosecuted, says Democrat he allegedly threatened to kill

    The California Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell has called for the rightwing activist and Trump ally Roger Stone to be prosecuted over an alleged death threat he also made against Jerry Nadler, a Democrat from New York.Asked by Scripps News if he wanted Stone to be prosecuted, Swalwell said: “Yes, I absolutely do. I know [the] aim [of the threat] is to not just threaten and in this case take a specific action, but its aim is to silence Donald Trump’s critics.”Stone, 71, is a longtime Republican operative and self-proclaimed dirty trickster, long close to Trump and involved in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Last week, Mediaite said it had obtained a recording from shortly before the election in which Stone told an associate, then a New York police officer: “It’s time to do it.“Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Nadler or Swalwell has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit any more.”Swalwell and Nadler were prominent Trump opponents during his time in office. In 2020, as chair of the House judiciary committee, Nadler said he would investigate Trump’s commutation of a jail sentence handed to Stone for obstructing the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.This week, Nadler said he had been in communication with US Capitol police and the FBI about Stone’s alleged remark.On Thursday, Swalwell told Scripps: “The message I send to Roger Stone is: ‘I’m not going away.’ We’re not going to be intimidated. We must be a country where we settle our scores not with violence, but with voting.”Stone says the recording is a fake, while his associate, Sal Greco, has dismissed it as “political fodder”.Stone’s lawyer, David Schoen – who defended Trump in his second impeachment trial, for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress – told Scripps Stone had had “two experts look at” the recording.“It’s a 92% chance or higher that it’s AI-generated,” Schoen said. “I’m sure that if he said it, that he didn’t mean literally those words. He doesn’t speak that way. He’s got zero history of violence, ever. I know him pretty well, and I think it’s an absolutely crazy charge.” More

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    Biden signs measure to avert shutdown but Ukraine aid remains frozen

    Joe Biden signed a measure to keep the US government funded on Friday but as Washington shivered under its second major snowfall in a week, the bill did not unfreeze funding for Ukraine.Hard-right House Republicans, led by the speaker, Mike Johnson, are ensuring the chances of more money and weapons for Kyiv in its fight with Moscow hinge on negotiations for immigration reform.On Wednesday, the president welcomed Johnson and other senior Republicans, as well as Democratic leaders, to the White House for talks.Though the meeting ended with the two sides still short of agreement on immigration and the southern border, Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, said he was optimistic a deal could be struck and aid to Ukraine thereby put back on the table.“Once Congress avoids a shutdown, it is my goal for the Senate to move forward to the national security supplemental as soon as possible,” Schumer said. “Our national security, our friends abroad, and the future of democracy demands nothing less.”Biden said a “vast majority” of members of Congress supported aid to Ukraine.“The question is whether a small minority are going to hold it up, which would be a disaster,” Biden added, speaking to reporters at the White House on Thursday.Johnson, however, told reporters: “We understand that there’s concern about the safety, security and sovereignty of Ukraine. But the American people have those same concerns about our own domestic sovereignty and our safety and our security.”Many observers suggest Republicans do not want a deal on immigration and the southern border, instead using the issue, and the concept of more aid for Ukraine, as clubs with which to attack Biden in an election year.“The GOP is more interested in nursing grievances and stoking anger than actually solving problems,” Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, wrote. “That’s exactly what Donald Trump has trained them to do.”Robinson went on to quote the Texas congressman Troy Nehls, who this month told CNN: “Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating. I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it. Why would I?”Amid such familiar dysfunction, one slightly dystopian possibility stood out: Democrats, senior party figures said, might provide the votes to keep Johnson as speaker – against a likely rebellion from his right – should he bring any Senate deal on immigration to the House floor, thereby putting Ukraine aid back on the table.“Our job is not to save Johnson but I think it would be a mighty pity, if he did the right thing … for us not to support him,” Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the House homeland security committee, told Politico. “Up to this point, he’s been a fairly honest broker.”In October, Democrats could have saved Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, from becoming the first speaker ever ejected by his own party – but chose not to.Whether stoked by Trumpist isolationism or by equally Trumpist authoritarianism, and therefore preference for Vladimir Putin and Moscow, resistance to aid for Ukraine remains strong among Republicans in Congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut the party is not united. On the presidential campaign trail, Trump’s closest challenger for the Republican nomination, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley, told voters in New Hampshire on Thursday that though the US did not “need to put troops on the ground anywhere … what you do have to do is deter.“There’s a reason the Taiwanese want the US and the west to support Ukraine. Because they know if Ukraine wins, China won’t invade Taiwan.”Haley also linked Ukraine aid to helping Israel against Hamas – another issue awaiting discussion should immigration talks succeed.In the House, Michael McCaul, chair of the foreign affairs committee, tried a more emotive tactic, appealing to Republicans’ better angels – or at least to their foreign policy traditions.Johnson, McCaul told the Post, “is going to have to make a hard decision about what to do. If we abandon our Nato allies and surrender to Putin in Ukraine, it’s not going to make the world safer, it’s going to make the world more dangerous … [Ronald] Reagan would never have surrendered to the Soviet Union. Maybe that’s a shift in our party.”Most observers would suggest that it is, Republicans long having surrendered to Trump. In his own contribution to the debate over whether to do a deal on immigration and get back to supporting Ukraine, Trump struck a predictably harsh note, clearly meant to stiffen Johnson’s spine.“I do not think we should do a border deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION”, the former president wrote on his social media platform.“Also, I have no doubt that our wonderful speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, will only make a deal that is PERFECT ON THE BORDER.” More

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    Former Republican candidate Tim Scott to endorse Donald Trump ahead of New Hampshire primary, reports say – as it happened

    South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott will endorse Donald Trump, according to a new report from the Hill.On Friday, a source familiar with Scott said that the senator, who pulled out of the 2024 presidential race last fall, will endorse Trump on Friday evening.In separate report released by Vanity Fair on Friday, multiple sources said that Trump has been calling Scott in attempts to win his endorsement ahead of next month’s primary in South Carolina, which is also the home state of Trump’s opponent Nikki Haley, who was previously the state’s governor.The report of Scott’s endorsement of Trump comes as the ex-president prepares to rally in New Hampshire this weekend ahead of the state’s primary next week.Here is a wrap-up of the day’s key events:
    Anti-abortion activists gathered in Washington DC on Friday as part of the March for Life campaign. The rally comes ahead of the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, which brought national reproductive rights to the country, and ahead of the two-year anniversary of the supreme court’s decision to strike it down.
    Donald Trump has renewed his mistrial request in E Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him. In a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the case, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said that Carroll’s actions “severely prejudices the president Trump’s defense [sic] since he has been deprived of critical information relating to critical evidence which plaintiff has described to the jury”.
    In response to whether the White House would publicly support a testimony from the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, before the House Armed Services Committee over his recent hospitalization, White House spokesperson John Kirby said: “That’ll be a decision for the secretary of defense and he has to make that decision … I’m not going to get into personal and private discussions that the secretary has had with the president of the United States.”
    Joe Biden has signed a stopgap government funding bill. The bipartisan legislation narrowly avoided a government shutdown at the 11th hour.
    South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott will endorse Donald Trump, according to a new report from the Hill. On Friday, a source familiar with Scott said that the senator, who pulled out of the 2024 presidential race last fall, will endorse Trump on Friday evening.
    Joe Biden has approved the debt cancellation for another 74,000 student loan borrowers across the country. The latest announcement brings the total number of people who have had their debt cancelled under the Biden administration to 3.7 million.
    Former 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang has endorsed the presidential bid of Minnesota’s Democratic representative Dean Phillips. Calling himself a former “campaign surrogate for Joe [Biden]” at a campaign event on Thursday, Yang said: “Dean Phillips is the only one with the courage, the character and conviction to go against the grain, to go against the legion of followers in Washington DC.”
    Donald Trump is trying to convince allies of Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis that the Republican race for a presidential nominee is over, according to a new report by Vanity Fair. As Trump continues to face mounting legal troubles, the ex-president is reported to have been pressuring Haley and DeSantis to drop out of the race.
    Maryland’s Democratic representative Jamie Raskin has pushed back against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal for a Palestinian state, writing in a statement on X:
    Ideological extremism is destroying prospects for peace. Most Americans will support a pragmatic peace strategy to free the hostages, provide aid to the population of Gaza, launch the two-state solution and put Hamas terror & right-wing fanaticism behind us.
    The Guardian’s Carter Sherman is at the March for Life rally in Washington DC where anti-abortion activists are protesting ahead of the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade.Here are some of her dispatches:Donald Trump has renewed his mistrial request in E Jean Carroll’s defamation case against him.In a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing the case, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said that Carroll’s actions “severely prejudices the president Trump’s defense [sic] since he has been deprived of critical information relating to critical evidence which plaintiff has described to the jury”.Earlier this week, Trump complained loudly in the Manhattan courthouse during Carroll’s testimony, making comments including “It is a witch-hunt” and “It really is a con job” to his lawyers.In turn, Kaplan threatened to remove Trump from the courtroom, to which Trump replied: “I would love it, I would love it.”While speaking at a briefing, White House spokesperson John Kirby answered a question on whether the White House would publicly support a testimony from defense secretary Lloyd Austin before the House Armed Services Committee over his recent hospitalization.Kirby said:
    That’ll be a decision for the secretary of defense and he has to make that decision … I’m not going to get into personal and private discussions that the secretary has had with the president of the United States. They have spoken as recently as late last week. As you have heard the president say himself, he has full trust and confidence in Secretary Austin and his leadership at the Pentagon and that will continue.
    In a letter to Austin on Thursday, Mike Rogers, a Republican representative from Alabama who chairs the committee, said that he is “alarmed” over Austin’s recent hospitalization.He added: “I expect your full honesty and cooperation in this matter. Anything shot of that is completely unacceptable.”Here is where the day stands:
    Joe Biden has signed a stopgap government funding bill. The bipartisan legislation narrowly avoided a government shutdown at the 11th hour.
    South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott will endorse Donald Trump, according to a new report from the Hill. On Friday, a source familiar with Scott said that the senator, who pulled out of the 2024 presidential race last fall, will endorse Trump on Friday evening.
    Joe Biden has approved the debt cancellation for another 74,000 student loan borrowers across the country. The latest announcement brings the total number of people who have had their debt cancelled under the Biden administration to 3.7 million.
    Former 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang has endorsed the presidential bid of Minnesota’s Democratic representative Dean Phillips. Calling himself a former “campaign surrogate for Joe [Biden]” at a campaign event on Thursday, Yang said: “Dean Phillips is the only one with the courage, the character and conviction to go against the grain, to go against the legion of followers in Washington DC.”
    Donald Trump is trying to convince allies of Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis that the Republican race for a presidential nominee is over, according to a new report by Vanity Fair. As Trump continues to face mounting legal troubles, the ex-president is reported to have been pressuring Haley and DeSantis to drop out of the race.
    Anti-abortion activists are gathering in Washington DC today for the annual March for Life campaign.This time the event takes place ahead of the 51st anniversary, on Monday, of the supreme court’s ruling in Roe v Wade in 1973 that brought in the national right to an abortion in the US, and ahead of the two-year anniversary of the current, right-leaning supreme court striking down Roe in 2022.Joe Biden and Kamala Harris plan to highlight the depletion of reproductive rights, which is proving a vote-loser for Republicans, on the 2024 campaign trail next week, amid high Democratic party spending on related ads, Axios reports.The Guardian’s Carter Sherman is in the cold and snowy capital and will be sending a dispatch. Meanwhile, she’s on X/Twitter with vignettes.The move follows the House of Representatives passing the short-term spending bill late on Thursday, sending the legislation to the president’s desk with just two days left before government funding was to run out, in the latest nail-biter.The bipartisan legislation averted a government shutdown that would have begun at one minute past midnight tonight.The bill, which represents the third stopgap spending measure of this fiscal year, will extend government funding at current levels until 1 March for some government agencies and until 8 March for others.The House vote came hours after the Senate approved the bill in a vote of 77 to 18, following bipartisan negotiations that stretched into late Wednesday evening. The Senate majority leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, praised the bill as a vital measure that would allow lawmakers more time to negotiate over full-year appropriations bills.“Avoiding a shutdown is very good news for the country, for our veterans, for parents and children, and for farmers and small businesses – all of whom would have felt the sting had the government shut down,” Schumer said in a floor speech. “And this is what the American people want to see: both sides working together and governing responsibly. No chaos. No spectacle. No shutdown.”You can read more on the passage of the legislation last night, from my colleague Joanie Greve, here.The Associated Press is also now reporting that Tim Scott of South Carolina is expected to endorse Republican frontrunner Donald Trump for president ahead of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. It would be a blow to Scott’s fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s pick for ambassador to the United Nations during his presidency.The New York Times was first to report the story today, noting it would “spur more talk” of Scott’s prospects as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.The AP news agency also further reports:
    A person familiar with Scott’s plans confirmed Friday to The Associated Press that Scott would travel from Florida to New Hampshire with the GOP front-runner.
    The person spoke on the condition of anonymity due to not being allowed to discuss the plans publicly.
    Scott launched his own bid to challenge Trump last May before shuttering his effort about six months later. Trump has been appearing on the campaign trail with several other former rivals who have endorsed him, including North Dakota governor Doug Burgum and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
    Scott’s endorsement was sought by the remaining major contenders in the Republican primary, particularly ahead of South Carolina’s February 24 primary, which has historically been influential in determining the eventual nominee.
    Haley appointed Scott to the Senate in 2012.
    South Carolina’s Republican senator Tim Scott will endorse Donald Trump, according to a new report from the Hill.On Friday, a source familiar with Scott said that the senator, who pulled out of the 2024 presidential race last fall, will endorse Trump on Friday evening.In separate report released by Vanity Fair on Friday, multiple sources said that Trump has been calling Scott in attempts to win his endorsement ahead of next month’s primary in South Carolina, which is also the home state of Trump’s opponent Nikki Haley, who was previously the state’s governor.The report of Scott’s endorsement of Trump comes as the ex-president prepares to rally in New Hampshire this weekend ahead of the state’s primary next week. More

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    US should ‘reset relationship of unconditional support’ for Israel, progressives say

    Leading progressive and Jewish members of Congress have criticized the US’s “unconditional support” for Israel after Benjamin Netanyahu declared bluntly that he was opposed to a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza and directly rejected American policy.The Israeli prime minister declared on Thursday that Israel would forever maintain control over all land west of the River Jordan, making an independent Palestinian state there impossible. “This is a necessary condition, and it conflicts with the idea of [Palestinian] sovereignty,” Netanyahu said. “What to do? I tell this truth to our American friends, and I also stopped the attempt to impose a reality on us that would harm Israel’s security.”Pramila Jayapal, the US representative who heads the influential Congressional Progressive caucus, on Friday issued one of the sharper responses to Netanyahu, saying in a video that the Israeli prime minister’s stance “should cause us to reset our relationship of unconditional support to [his] government”.“These are policies that are diametrically opposed to the US’s stated goals,” Jayapal said about Netanyahu’s calls for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.Meanwhile, 15 Jewish members of the House released a statement Friday saying they “strongly disagree with the prime minister” of the predominantly Jewish nation.“A two-state solution is the path forward,” said the statement, whose signatories included Jerry Nadler, Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff and Elissa Slotkin. They were joined by 11 fellow House Democrats: Jake Auchincloss, Rebecca Balint, Suzanne Bonamici, Steve Cohen, Daniel Goldman, Seth Magaziner, Mike Levin, Dean Phillips, Jan Schakowsky, Kim Schrier and Bradley Sherman.In a separate statement, the Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid predicted that “continuing to unconditionally fund Israel’s war in Gaza” would cost him enough votes to doom Joe Biden’s campaign to be re-elected as president.“He will break a fundamental trust with many Democrats,” said Shahid, a former spokesperson for the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats. Shahid also warned that “lecturing about the greater evil” represented by the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump, would do “little” to repair it.Trump is facing more than 90 pending criminal charges for attempting to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, illegally retaining government secrets after he left the Oval Office, and hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him. He has also been grappling with civil litigation over his business practices and a rape accusation which a judge has determined to be substantially true.“I pray, for all our sakes, that Biden corrects course – because our country cannot afford to pay the bill for disregarding Palestinian lives should it come due in November,” Shahid said.A spokesperson for Biden’s national security council, John Kirby, said the president and Netanyahu discussed “post-conflict Gaza” on Friday by telephone, as the foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen wrote on the social media platform X.Biden made clear that “an independent Palestinian state” was important for long-term security, Kirby remarked, as reported by Rozen.“The president still believes in the promise and the possibility of a two state solution,” Kirby said, in part, according to Rozen. “And the United States stands firmly committed to eventually seeing that outcome.”Despite occasionally endorsing the concept, Netanyahu has worked to obstruct the establishment of a Palestinian state throughout his political career.His statements on Thursday were his most pointed attack on the US’s preferred foreign policy approach in Gaza, however.It came after Biden’s administration had spent enormous domestic political capital – and billions of dollars in aid – to support Israel’s military in its strikes there.Israel, which receives $3.8bn annually in security assistance from the US, mounted the offensive in Gaza in response to the 7 October attack by Hamas that killed about 1,200. Israeli military operations in Gaza have since killed more than 24,000 people.Netanyahu’s comments on Thursday came two days after US senators defeated a measure from the progressive Bernie Sanders that would have made military aid to Israel conditional on whether the Israeli government is violating human rights and international accords with its offensive in Gaza.Biden’s White House opposed Sanders’s proposal and has asked Congress to approve an additional $14bn for Israel. More

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    There is still a way to stop Donald Trump – but time is running out | Jonathan Freedland

    The few Republicans who have not succumbed to the cult of Donald Trump cling to one last hope. They are crossing their fingers that on Tuesday night the ex-president’s march to his party’s nomination will be halted, or at least delayed, by a defeat in the New Hampshire primary at the hands of the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley. But it is a thin hope.Even if Haley wins a famous victory in this snowbound state, the battles ahead are on terrain far more tricky for her and congenial to him. On Monday, Trump won his party’s contest in Iowa by a record-breaking margin, amassing more votes than all his rivals combined – and the primary electorates that come next look more like Iowa’s than New Hampshire’s, which, unusually, includes a big slice of Trump-sceptic independents. When you combine that with surveys that show Trump even – or better than even – with Joe Biden, making him many forecasters’ favourite to win the White House in November, it prompts a question that confounds blue-state America and baffles most of the rest of the world. Given all that he’s said and all that he’s done, given all that he is, why do so many Americans want Donald Trump to be their next president?Any answer to that question has to begin with the weakness of Trump’s opponents. When the New York Post branded Ron DeSantis “DeFuture” in 2022, hailing him as the man to push Trump aside and become the Republican standard bearer in 2024, it had not reckoned on the Florida governor being astonishingly awkward with the basics of retail politics: smiling, shaking hands, interacting with other people. It’s been painful to watch. (Seeing Nikki Haley flail as she defends her view that the US has “never been a racist country” is not much better.)More important, though, was the strategic miscalculation. DeSantis decided to offer Trumpism without Trump, picking fights with the same culture-war targets as the former president – migrants, the media, the “woke” – but without the chaos and lunacy. Trouble was, that made him too Trumpy for those Republicans eager to move on, and not Trumpy enough for the Maga hardcore. That latter group weren’t looking for Trump-lite, because they’re quite happy with the full-strength original.Still, the larger failure was shared by almost the entire Republican field, including Haley. Even though they were nominally running against Trump, only one of them – Chris Christie of New Jersey – dared make the direct case against him. They feared antagonising the (many) Republicans who love Trump, so tiptoed around his obvious and disqualifying flaws – including his support for a violent insurrection in 2021 that sought to overturn a democratic election. Each candidate hoped someone else would take on that task, knocking out Trump in a kamikaze mission that would leave the remaining contenders to scoop up his supporters.It was a classic collective action problem. Had they combined against Trump, they’d have all benefited. Between them, and in their own different ways, they could have devised what political pros say many Republicans needed in order to make the break from Trump: a permission structure. They could have told Republican voters that they did not make a mistake in choosing Trump back in 2016, but his record of broken promises – he never did build that wall – and association with serial electoral defeats, in midterm contests as well as in 2020, made him the wrong choice in 2024. Haley is edging towards that message now, but it has come as time is running out.Trump has been aided, too, by the opponent he hopes to face in November. Initially, many Republicans were wary of backing Trump because they feared he would lose (again) to Biden. But as the president’s numbers continue to bump along the bottom, that fear has receded. Biden’s parlous standing is not chiefly about his record, but something he can do nothing about: how old he is and, more important, how old he seems. One poll found that just 34% of Americans believe the 82-year-old Biden would complete a second term. Biden’s frailty has led Republicans to dismiss the electability argument that might have compelled them to look for an alternative to Trump.And yet, an uncomfortable truth has to be faced. That Donald Trump is very possibly set to return to the Oval Office is not only down to the weakness of others; it is also a product of his own political strengths. He has a skill lacking in every other major figure in the current US political landscape: the ability to craft a narrative that millions believe. He has, for example, turned what should have been a terminal blow – facing multiple prosecutions and 91 criminal charges – into a winning story, one in which he is a victim of, and courageous fighter against, a liberal establishment engaged in “lawfare”, confecting bogus allegations to keep him from power. That story is false, but it has persuaded nearly half the country.He is helped in that by a news environment in which Americans regard themselves as entitled not only to their own opinions but to their own facts, where their feeds and timelines confirm their prejudices and shield them from any unwelcome evidence to the contrary.But Trump is also helped by some actual facts. When he brags about the health of the economy when he was president, it’s not wholly spurious. During his first three years in office, before Covid-19 struck, the typical US household saw its standard of living go up – with a 10.5% real-terms increase in the median household income – only for that same measure to fall by 2.7% during Joe Biden’s first two years. In that period, inflation surged and Americans’ wages could not keep up with rising costs.Of course, it’s laughable for Trump to claim those healthy pre-Covid economic numbers were all down to him. But that doesn’t stop millions of US voters looking back fondly on, say, the low petrol prices of the Trump years. Meanwhile, memories of the daily mayhem, bigotry and creeping authoritarianism are fading.His opponents are weaker than they needed, and still need, to be; he is stronger than many can bear to admit; and the core issue of any election – the economy – may favour him. For all those reasons, Trump has a plausible, even probable, path back to the White House.The best chance to stop him has already passed. It came in February 2021, when the Senate could have convicted Trump on the “incitement of insurrection” charges levelled against him in his second impeachment following the 6 January riot. Had that happened, Trump would have been barred from public office for life. That was the moment, but Senate Republicans ducked it.Trump has benefited from that cowardice, from that perennial belief that someone else will deal with Trump, eventually. Well, eventually is now – and it may already be too late.
    Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
    Jonathan Freedland is presenting three special episodes of the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast from New Hampshire. You can hear the first episode here More