Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in US Politics

    John Kerry to leave White House to assist Biden re-election campaign

    John Kerry, the United States’ special climate envoy and former secretary of state and presidential contender, plans to leave the Biden administration later this winter and switch to helping Joe Biden campaign to be re-elected to the White House, Kerry’s office said.Kerry informed his staff earlier on Saturday after speaking with Biden this week, a spokesperson for Kerry told Reuters.Politics news outlet Axios first reported the news about Kerry, 80, on Saturday.Kerry was instrumental is helping to broker the 2015 Paris climate agreement, as well as the UAE consensus that calls for the transition away from fossil fuels reached in December at Cop28 in Dubai.He believes that a second term in the White House for Biden would be the “single biggest” difference for progress in the climate crisis, Axios reported, initially citing a source close to the administration.Kerry and Biden talked in the Oval Office earlier this week, after Kerry had attended the Cop28 global climate summit in Dubai late last year, and the climate envoy wants to promote the president’s climate action with a major role on the campaign trail for the 2024 election, the outlet further reported.Kerry was named as a special envoy on the climate crisis soon after Biden won the 2020 presidential election, beating Donald Trump, and began forming his team during the transition period that November.At the time, the Biden transition team said Kerry would “fight climate change full time” in the role, which for the first time would include a seat on the national security council, in an elevation of the importance of tackling the climate crisis and global heating.As President Barack Obama’s secretary of state, succeeding Hillary Clinton in the role, Kerry played a prominent role in the international effort to craft the Paris climate agreement, which committed countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid disastrous storms, heatwaves, flooding and other looming climate threats.After leaving government in January 2017 as the Obama administration was replaced by the Trump administration, Kerry became sharply critical of President Trump’s dismantling of climate policies and the decision to remove the US from the Paris agreement. Biden re-entered the accord upon taking office in 2021.Kerry ran for president in the 2004 election and won the Democratic nomination but was beaten by George W Bush that November, with the Republican president winning a second term.His election campaign was badly damaged by a pro-Bush group that smeared Kerry’s military track record as a decorated Vietnam veteran who became an anti-war campaigner.The group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, emerged in August 2004 as Kerry, then a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was doing well in the polls against Bush, who had only a domestic spell in the Texas air national guard in comparison. The group set about trying to destroy Kerry’s reputation.A Republican strategist, Chris LaCivita, who orchestrated the so-called “swift-boating” of Kerry, is now a senior aide to the Trump re-election campaign.Reuters contributed reporting More

  • 125 Shares169 Views

    in US Politics

    Trump’s novel take on January 6: calling convicted rioters ‘hostages’

    Supporters of Donald Trump have long been forced to suspend their belief in reality: expected to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that the one-term president won the 2020 election, hasn’t committed any crimes and is a successful businessman.But as another tight presidential election looms, the recent efforts by Donald Trump to reimagine the people imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection as “hostages”, and to downplay the horrors of that day as a peaceful protest, could have serious ramifications for democracy and his own party, onlookers have warned.Trump, who has been charged with four federal crimes in relation to the riot at the Capitol in 2021, has repeatedly sought to whitewash the event. But in recent days – and backed up by Elise Stefanik, one of the most powerful Republicans in the House – he has used the term “hostages” prominently as a description of the hundreds of people prosecuted and jailed for their actions attacking the US Capitol.The terminology worries some experts who see it as explicitly undermining the US legal system by saying its treatment of Trump supporters is illegitimate – something he has repeatedly tried to do while he faces a multitude of prosecutions himself.At rallies and television interviews, Trump and Stefanik have also pitched a novel history of January 6 that requires anyone aware of the events that day to ignore or forget what they witnessed and read.Rather than engaging in a storming of the seat of US democracy that left 140 police officers injured and four people dead, people that day acted “peacefully and patriotically”, Trump said in a recent speech in Iowa.Of the hundreds of people imprisoned for their role in the attack, for crimes including assaulting police officers, illegally entering federal grounds with a weapon and seditious conspiracy, Trump had a similarly positive spin.“Some people call them prisoners. I call them hostages,” Trump said.“Release the J6 hostages, Joe [Biden]. Release them, Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe.”In Trump’s fresh telling, the tens of thousands of people from across the US who gathered on January 6 quietly voiced their concerns about the electoral process, apparently doing nothing more than engaging in a sort of elf-like merriment.“A beautiful day,” Trump has called it, which featured “great, great patriots”.Some have already bought into the idea.“I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” Stefanik, who as chair of the House Republican conference is one of the most powerful GOP members in Congress, said in an interview over the weekend.“I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives.”The idea that the Trump supporters charged in connection with the insurrection have been mistreated is false. An analysis by the Intercept found that, actually, federal judges “have overwhelmingly issued sentences far more lenient than justice department prosecutors sought”.And apart from being untrue, this sanitizing of political violence is particularly troubling ahead of a presidential election between Trump and Joe Biden that could be just as tight as the 2020 race.“People convicted of violently assaulting police officers and conspiring to overthrow the government are not ‘hostages’,” Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman who served on the January 6 select committee, wrote on X.“Stefanik must apologize to the families of 130 people being held hostage by Hamas right now. Her pandering to Trump is dangerous.”It’s not just Democrats who are concerned.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s outrageous and it’s disgusting,” said Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman who has been a vocal critic of Trump, told Face the Nation.“It’s a disgrace, and you cannot say you are a member of a party that believes in the rule of law, you cannot say you are pro-law enforcement if you then go out and you say these people are ‘hostages’, it’s disgraceful.”Some serving Republicans, including those in vulnerable swing districts, also distanced themselves from the hostages concept this week, in a sign that the revisionism of January 6 could become a source of division.“Not my choice of words, but to each his own,” Jen Kiggans, a Republican congresswoman who defeated an incumbent Democrat in 2022, told the Washington Post. “It’s not what I describe them as, no.”“They’re criminal defendants, not hostages,” Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican congressman whose Pennsylvania district voted for Biden over Trump in 2020.Don Bacon, a Republican whose district also chose Biden in 2020, told the New Republic: “I don’t defend people who hit cops, who vandalized our Capitol.”For Trump the claims of mistreatment appear to be a strand of his enduring complaint that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the justice department – mostly against himself.The treatment of January 6 convicts has generally taken second place behind Trump lashing out at the 91 charges he is facing, many relating to his attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.But even if Trump’s newfound concern for others proves to be merely an attempt to exonerate himself from blame, his supporters seem to genuinely believe his claims.In the fervid environment that is Truth Social, the social media platform Trump established in a huff after he was banned from Twitter, people have breathlessly echoed Trump’s claims about “hostages” being subjected to ill-treatment.The people convicted are variously referred to as “PRISONERS OF WAR!!!!”, victims of “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” and “political prisoners”.Trump’s base, it seems, are happy to continue to suspend disbelief. But the furore has illustrated an unwanted split in the Republican party in what will be a key year at the polls – and more broadly, the attempt to exculpate the people who stormed the Capitol has dark implications ahead of a stormy presidential election. More

  • 125 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    Mississippi quits child food program amid Republican ‘welfare state’ attack

    Mississippi is withdrawing from a federal program to feed children during their summer break from school, the governor there announced, characterizing the decision as a way to reject “attempts to expand the welfare state”.Governor Tate Reeves, a Republican, declined to participate in the federal program that would give electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to low-income families to supplement food costs when academic classes are out of session, Mississippi Today reported.Eligible families would have received $40 a month, or a total of $120 to account for the break between school terms.However, Mississippi’s welfare agency undercut Reeves’s reasoning, saying the state does not have the capacity to administer the program.“Both [the Mississippi department of education] and [its department of human services] lack the resources, including workforce capacity and funding, to support a summer EBT program,” a spokesperson for the state human services department, Mark Jones, said.Reeves’s latest comments ignited fierce backlash.Nikole Hannah-Jones, a scholar and creator of the 1619 Project, criticized Reeves’s decision as “cruelty”.“The cruelty of being the poorest state in America and choosing – choosing – to turn down federal aid for poor children to eat,” Hannah-Jones said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.Keith Boykin, author and co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, said funds earmarked for welfare in Mississippi have previously gone to superfluous objectives, including the construction of a sports stadium.“Mississippi gave millions of dollars of welfare funds to former NFL quarterback Brett Favre to build a volleyball facility for his daughter’s school, but they won’t take federal funds to feed hungry children. Because helping poor kids is the kind of welfare that Republicans hate,” Boykin said on X.Reeves is one of 15 Republican governors who have rejected the federally funded food program meant to help feed children during the summer, the New York Times reported.Other states that have opted out of the program include Alabama, Oklahoma, Alaska, Florida, South Carolina, South Dakota, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming.More than 8 million children will be shut out of the federal food assistance program, which provides $2.5bn in assistance to families who qualify for free or reduced lunch.In addition to Reeves, the Iowa governor, Kim Reynolds, also announced in December that Iowa would not be participating in the program.Reynolds claimed that the federal assistance program was not a “long-term” solution. She also claimed that an EBT card “does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic”.The Nebraska governor, Jim Pillen, who has also rejected federal funding, said he does not “believe in welfare”, the Washington Post reported. More

  • 150 Shares159 Views

    in US Politics

    Iowa caucuses are ‘important because they’re first’ – but are they democratic?

    Iowans are set to brave subzero temperatures on Monday when they arrive at their caucus sites at 7pm to formally kick off the process to choose their nominee.In terms of pure numbers, the Iowa caucuses won’t have much of a role in determining who the Republican nominee is. The state allocates 40 delegates in the Republican nominating contest, roughly just 1.6% of the more than 2,400 that are up for grabs. But that small total belies the outsized influence the state can have on US presidential politics.For more than half a century, Iowa has come to occupy a near-mythological place in American politics – becoming known as the place where underdogs can become serious contenders and where dreams of the White House can die. The rural state’s voters often reward retail politicking, giving hope to candidates who visit its 99 counties to shake hands and give stump speeches.Since the 1970s, its caucuses have been the first nominating contest in each presidential cycle. Candidates crisscross the state in hopes of exceeding expectations and gaining momentum. And while it does not always pick the eventual nominee – Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have all won there – victories there have been rocket fuel to candidates like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.While Republicans are proceeding as usual with their first-in-the-nation caucuses, Democrats have chosen to shake up their calendar this year. In a largely symbolic move since there is no competitive Democratic primary, the Democratic National Committee has stripped Iowa’s caucuses of their first-in-the-nation status after mounting concerns that the overwhelmingly white state does not reflect the makeup of the party. But a battle over Iowa’s status probably looms for 2028, when there will be a competitive primary.“Iowa is not first because it’s important. It’s important because it’s first,” said Dennis Goldford, a professor at Drake University in Des Moines and the co-author of The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event. “The morning after the caucuses, Iowa falls off the face of the earth.”The importance of being firstIowa wound up being the first state to nominate presidential candidates largely by accident.After Democrats saw violent protests at the 1968 Democratic convention, the party moved to change the way it selected delegates to limit the power of party bosses. In Iowa, that meant holding precinct caucuses, and then conventions at the county, congressional district and state levels. In 1972, the state convention was set for 20 May because a hall was available for that day, according to the New York Times. A slow mimeograph machine meant that first stage of the process, the precinct caucuses, needed to start in January.“It was simply a historical accident,” Goldford said.The caucuses exploded in 1976. In that cycle, Jimmy Carter was not seen as a serious presidential candidate. But his campaign went all in on Iowa, betting that if he won there it would create enough momentum to make him a viable candidate. Carter earned the most votes of any candidate in the caucuses (he finished second behind “uncommitted”) and wound up winning the presidency.Gordon Fischer, a former chair of the state’s Democratic party, said there had been several efforts over the years by other states wanting to edge out Iowa. When he was chair in the early 2000s, Michigan made an unsuccessful play to go first.“As much as I like, love and respect the Iowa caucuses and what Iowans have done over the years, probably it was unrealistic to think we were going to keep it for ever,” Fischer said. “It was just too special.”The growing party divide and its consequencesThere has been a mounting push in recent years to have Democrats change their nomination schedule and strip Iowa of its place at the start of the nominating process.Allowing Iowa to go first, critics argued, gave outsized importance to a state that is overwhelmingly white and did not reflect the base of the Democratic party. It also brought a surge of Democratic attention to a state where Republicans have dominated in recent years (Trump won Iowa in 2020 by more than eight points). The push was exacerbated in 2020 when the Iowa Democratic party botched the release of the caucus results.The Iowa caucus being first also ignores Black voters, Joe Biden has argued, who have been the “backbone” of the party and should have a “louder and earlier voice in the process”, something the Democrats are trying to do by putting South Carolina as the first official contest this year.Last year, the Democratic National Committee officially stripped Iowa of its place at the front of the nominating contest. State Democrats have signaled that Iowa will try to compete again in 2028 for the first spot in the nominating contest.It’s not only bad for Iowans to lose their early status, but for the country as a whole, Fischer said. Iowa has a lot to offer Democrats: media markets are more affordable and the state often rewards candidates who campaign on the ground, de-emphasizing the outsized role of money in politics.And, perhaps crucially for the party, the state is rural, and Democrats have a problem with rural voters, who have increasingly turned toward the GOP. “Iowa gave candidates the opportunity to talk with and hear from voters that had a rural perspective. I’m not sure that’s the case with the other early states,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor Republicans, however, the caucuses don’t appear to be going anywhere.“I would be shocked if the Republicans wanted to change any of this,” Goldford said. “The Republicans now are essentially the party of rural America. It makes Iowa relevant to maintain for the Republicans and the position it’s in in the nomination process.”Because Republicans are keeping their caucuses, Fischer thinks that gives Iowa a “fighting chance” to make a case for Democrats keeping it, too.‘A nice exercise in democracy’On their face, the caucuses themselves seem to be the picture of what democracy looks like: Americans gathering with their neighbors to debate their political differences.“They force you to do that once every four years. To go and sit and actually have a civil discussion with your neighbors in a moderated atmosphere – if anybody’s seen it operate it’s a marvel,” Art Cullen, the editor of the Storm Lake Times, said. “It’s a nice exercise in democracy and healthy.”But in recent years there has been more discussion of the undemocratic aspects of the caucus. Only allowing people to caucus on a specific day at a specific time shuts out people who might have to work or who can’t find childcare, or who can’t make it because of bad weather.Fischer doesn’t agree with the criticisms of the format. Voters caucus in their own neighborhoods, in small precincts, on a date that’s set well in advance. The caucus allows for people to come together to talk politics and persuade each other for one night.“I think there’s something cool about that. I think there’s something valuable about that. I realize it’s a bit of a barrier, but I think it’s a barrier that can be overcome,” he said.President Biden criticized the caucus process in a letter to the Democratic National Committee in 2022, saying they hinder participation in the voting process.“Caucuses – requiring voters to choose in public, to spend significant amounts of time to caucus, disadvantaging hourly workers and anyone who does not have the flexibility to go to a set location at a set time – are inherently anti-participatory,” Biden wrote. “It should be our party’s goal to rid the nominating process of restrictive, anti-worker caucuses.”Cullen dismissed those concerns, and those that say Iowa is too white to hold this status in the election. He noted that it was Iowa that catapulted the candidacy of Obama, the US’s first Black president.“Spare me the ‘racist’ bullshit. It’s an excuse to get rid of us because they don’t like our airports and our hotels and they really don’t like the cold weather and have an answer about social security. Or having to answer about why two-thirds of Iowa’s counties are losing population.’“It gets criticized because you have to sit around for an hour, and, you know, who wants to spend an hour for democracy? An hour every four years,” he added. More

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in US Politics

    Many Republicans support abortion. Are they switching parties because of it?

    The first time Carol Whitmore ever had sex, she got pregnant.It was 1973, and Whitmore was a teenager. Whitmore’s parents were in and out of trouble with the police, Whitmore said. When they told Whitmore they would help her raise the child, she thought, nope.Instead, Whitmore got an abortion. That same year, the US supreme court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade.“I made that choice myself, and to this day, I don’t regret it,” Whitmore told the Guardian. A half-century later, Whitmore is still staunchly supportive of abortion rights. She’s recently taken to collecting petitions in support of a Florida ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.Whitmore is also a deeply committed Republican, who has held multiple positions in Florida local government. For her, abortion rights are part and parcel of her Republican worldview.“Do you want more government overreach to tell us how to take care of ourselves?” Whitmore said. She’s not the only conservative who feels this way, she said: “Everybody I talked to says: ‘Well, we aren’t coming out publicly, but we are definitely going to sign that petition, we are definitely going to vote for that amendment to be passed.’”In the year and a half since the US supreme court overturned Roe in June 2022, Republicans have floundered over how to handle abortion. The issue is widely thought to have cost them the promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterms, as well as control of the Virginia state legislature in 2023. Abortion rights supporters have triumphed on every abortion-related ballot measure since Roe’s demise, including in states that are traditionally believed to be conservative strongholds like Kansas, Kentucky and, most recently, Ohio.Experts still have questions about the driving forces behind these victories. Was it a surge in Democratic turnout? Or Republicans breaking with their party platform on abortion? And will abortion convince Republicans to leave the GOP behind entirely?The outcome of the 2024 elections, when roughly a dozen states may vote on abortion referendums, could hinge on the answers.“It may be in the narrowest sense possible to win with only Democrats, but that’s not even on our radar,” Jodi Liggett, the senior adviser for Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona, said late last year. Liggett’s organization is championing a proposal for a 2024 abortion-related ballot measure in Arizona. “I think if anything, you’re for sure gonna need independents,” she said. “And we think people actually agree across parties, on the pure issue of who should be deciding: physicians, medical professionals and families, not politicians.”Democrats, who once avoided the issue of abortion in election campaigns, are now banking on the issue to amplify anger and turnout overall. Yet in interviews with eight Republican or formerly Republican women who support abortion rights, hailing from six states across the country, a complex portrait emerged, suggesting Republicans might not be the silver bullet that Democrats are hoping for in November.When the US supreme court first legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade, neither party was unified in its position on the issue. Over the next five decades, Republicans grew increasingly opposed to the procedure. Although abortion rights are broadly popular in the United States today, support is sharply split by party: while 80% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, just 38% of Republicans say the same, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.Still, that is a significant fraction of Republicans. Men and women make up equal shares of these abortion rights-supporting Republicans – but women consistently vote at higher rates than men, making them a critical voting bloc for abortion-rights supporters to win.For Stephanie Tyler, a longtime Republican in Nevada, Roe’s overturning “was the proverbial last straw”.“I believe so fundamentally in a woman’s right to choose,” Tyler said, adding: “Any party that would make that a key piece of its platform, and then support a supreme court that obviously pushed that as a primary agenda, is not my party.”Weeks after Roe fell, Tyler dropped her affiliation with the Republican party and registered as an independent.‘There will be no Republicans left’Some prominent Republican women have started to urge the GOP to stop focusing on banning abortion so much – including Ann Coulter, the conservative firebrand not generally known for moderation. “The demand for anti-abortion legislation just cost Republicans another crucial race,” Coulter tweeted in April. “Pro-lifers: WE WON. Abortion is not a ‘constitutional right’ anymore! Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.”This week, Donald Trump similarly warned that Republicans have been “decimated” over extreme abortion stances, even as he took credit for what he called the “miracle” of overturning Roe.Many of the interviewed women shared Coulter’s concern about what the GOP’s hardline stance on abortion would mean for the party’s future.Sandy Senn, a Republican state senator from South Carolina, , believes abortion should be outlawed after the first trimester of pregnancy (with exceptions). But last year, she banded together with the four other female senators in South Carolina’s state legislature – two Republicans, a Democrat and an independent – to stop a total abortion ban from passing in South Carolina. They called themselves the “sister senators”.At one point, the sister senators filibustered for three days. Their efforts worked, for a while. By the end of the year, though, South Carolina had banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy.“You cannot have laws that are going to thumb a group of people down, because they’re ultimately not going to listen, and they’re going to find a workaround,” Senn said. “If we continue down this path – we hate gays, we hate women, we hate transsexuals – if we become the party of hate, we lose independents. We’re gonna lose young voters.”She continued: “You’re gonna see moderate Republicans walk away from the party on certain issues, or maybe not even vote top-ballot or in some elections, just because they feel like they can’t.”Gauging how many Republicans will break away from the party to support abortion rights, though, is complicated by much of the GOP’s recent tack to the far right. Kelly Dittmar, the director of research and a scholar at the center for American women and politics at Rutgers University–Camden, said that it’s become increasingly difficult to even locate moderate Republican women, either as voters or as elected officials. So many have simply left the party.“Women in general have been more likely to be liberal, and that includes among Republicans,” Dittmar said. “In surveys, it’s hard to compare Republicans over time, because you’re actually talking about a really different group of people. Instead of seeing Republican women say, ‘Oh, we don’t agree with the party’, they just don’t even come up in the count, because they don’t identify at the beginning of a survey as Republican.”Mirabel Batjer is one of those women. She left the GOP around 2010, after supporting Barack Obama for president in 2008.“I just decided that it was silly for me to pretend any longer that it was a party for me, because it certainly was not,” said Batjer, who now calls herself a “rabid liberal Democrat”. “I was almost a single-issue voter when it came to being concerned about Roe v Wade and what the supreme court could do. And I guess my fears were right.”Some Republicans, such as Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump adviser, have suggested the GOP should pivot to emphasizing contraception or risk losing in 2024. At a GOP presidential debate, candidate Nikki Haley, who has urged “consensus” on abortion, asked the audience: “Can’t we all agree contraception should be available?”But that plan might not get far in the modern Republican party. Anti-abortion activists, who have long been wedded to the GOP and have helped propel it to electoral victories across the country, have mixed views on hormonal birth control. The powerful Students for Life of America, for example, has labeled oral contraceptives and IUDs “abortifacients”, meaning that they cause abortions, which is false.This year, Senn was enraged by the introduction of a South Carolina bill to require that parents give consent before doctors can fulfill minors’ requests for medication, including birth control – in apparent defiance of a federal program, Title X, that allows minors to receive confidential family-planning help.“Here they are, making an attempt to basically keep women barefoot and pregnant, because now they don’t even want them to have birth control,” Senn said. “The bill is asinine, and women aren’t going to put up with that.”But multiple Republican women who support abortion rights said they prefer to stick with the GOP come November, even if they vote for access to the procedure in states that are holding referendums. Even those who were undecided on or opposed to Trump said that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden.Yuripzy Morgan, a Republican who ran to represent Maryland’s third congressional district in 2022, supports some access to abortion. But, she said, abortion is not a “primary issue of mine” when she enters the voting booth.“When I say it is a complicated topic, I don’t say that because it’s the speaking point. I’ve felt the baby kick in my tummy. I’ve given birth. I know what that feels like,” Morgan said. “One of my biggest pet peeves is when people make this a black-and-white issue.”Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, doesn’t believe women are ditching the Republican party in significant numbers because of abortion. According to her organization’s research, Republican women remain much more likely to think that abortion should be illegal in all cases.Instead, it’s Democrats who now feel more strongly than ever about supporting abortion access. Before Roe fell, most Democrats did not consider abortion their top issue; post-Roe, it’s become a litmus test for half of Democrats, according to research from the Public Religion Research Institute. If anything, Deckman says, Democrats are likely to benefit from boosted turnout among independents or relatively weak Democrats.“Generally speaking, most Republicans are opposed to abortion. That’s become the party line and party voters really feel that way,” Deckman said. “I don’t think there’s any indication that there’s mass exodus from the GOP because of the decision that happened.”Even Whitmore, the Florida woman who had an abortion in 1973, said that access to the procedure will not be a factor in her vote for president.“The president or whoever is not going to decide this issue,” she said. “It’s going to be the citizens of Florida.” More

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in US Politics

    Sanders warns Biden: address working-class fears or risk losing to demagogue

    Bernie Sanders, America’s leading progressive politician, has issued a stark warning to Joe Biden at the start of presidential election year: be more aggressive in addressing the anxieties of millions of struggling voters or risk handing back the White House to the anti-democratic demagogue Donald Trump.In an interview with the Guardian from his home base in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders urged the Democratic president to inject more urgency into his bid for re-election. He said that unless the president was more direct in recognising the many crises faced by working-class families his Republican rival would win.“We’ve got to see the White House move more aggressively on healthcare, on housing, on tax reform, on the high cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders said. “If we can get the president to move in that direction, he will win; if not, he’s going to lose.”The US senator from Vermont added that he was in contact with the White House pressing that point. “We hope to make clear to the president and his team that they are not going to win this election unless they come up with a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class of this country.”Sanders’ warning comes at a critical time in American politics. On Monday, Republicans in Iowa will gather for caucuses that mark the official start of the 2024 presidential election.Biden faces no serious challenger in the Democratic primaries. But concern is mounting over how he would fare against Trump given a likely rematch between them in November.Recent polls have shown Trump not only doing well in key battleground states but gaining traction with demographic groups who proved vital to Biden’s 2020 victory, including Hispanic and young voters.In his Guardian interview, Sanders cast the threat of a second Trump presidency in existential terms. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” he said.He predicted that over a further four years, Trump would shift the electoral goalposts so that “many people who would vote against Trump are unable to do so. He will make it harder for young people, people of colour, to participate in the political process.”It is in that dystopian context that Sanders criticises the president’s re-election team for failing to bang the drum hard enough. “They’re not their own best advertisers, they don’t do a particularly good job in explaining what Biden has accomplished,” he said.Sanders praised Biden for the $1.9tn Covid rescue plan which he said helped avoid economic collapse during the pandemic, and for the Inflation Reduction Act which pumped money into transforming US energy away from fossil fuels. He was also effusive about Biden’s historic decision to join a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line during the union’s strike with the three biggest carmakers, which he said made him “the strongest pro-union president that we have had, certainly, since FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt]”.But Sanders urged the White House to resist sitting back on its laurels. “The president has got to do something that’s very, very hard,” Sanders said.“He should be proud of his accomplishments, but he’s also got to say that he understands that there is a housing crisis, that people can’t afford healthcare or prescription drugs or childcare – that he’s trying, but he hasn’t yet succeeded.”Biden could find a historical template for such messaging, Sanders suggested, in Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election campaign. By then, the Democratic president had been in office for almost four years and had implemented the first two of his groundbreaking New Deal programmes.“Roosevelt didn’t go around saying, ‘Look at all I’ve done’,” Sanders explained. “He said: ‘I see a nation that is ill-clad, ill-housed. We made some progress, but I know there are enormous problems.”Critics will accuse Sanders of attempting to press his own brand of politics on to the establishment of the Democratic party. But he has credibility when it comes to presidential campaigns, having come close to securing the Democratic nomination twice and having given Biden a leg up into the White House in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Vermont senator not only rallied his millions of young supporters to vote for Biden, he also used his influence as runner-up in the 2020 Democratic primaries to push the candidate in a more progressive direction. He formed a set of “taskforces” in which top Biden and Sanders advisers worked together to forge policy agreements in several key areas including the economy, immigration and the climate crisis.In his new book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, Sanders sets out a similar progressive agenda for 2024. He calls for the Democratic party to wean itself from “corporate elites” and redirect its sights on to working-class struggles.He told the Guardian that if that does not happen, he fears that many young Americans will simply stay at home in November. “The polling is clear. Given the choice between Biden and Trump, a lot of people are saying, ‘Thank you, but no thank you’.”The danger of support for Biden fading among young voters has been enhanced by the Israel-Hamas war. The senator said that Biden’s staunch support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza could affect his standing among young progressive voters in November.He implored Biden to detach himself from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who has taken a hard line on the military assault. “I hope that he [Biden] understands that you can be pro-Israel without supporting Netanyahu and the horrific war he is waging against the Palestinian people.”Opinion polls have shown a generational divide, with younger Americans tending to be more critical of US backing for the bombardment of Gaza. Almost three-quarters of voters aged 18 to 29 disapproved of Biden’s handling of the conflict, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found.Sanders also faces challenges over his position on the war. Though he has become steadily more damning of the Israeli onslaught, calling it a “mass atrocity”, he continues to resist calling for a permanent ceasefire which he says would open the door to further Hamas outrages following the 7 October attack.That has strained relations with some of his army of young supporters. Asked whether he feared that the coalition he has so diligently nurtured since the 2016 presidential election was in danger of splintering, he said: “I think, at the end of the day, we’ll be all right”.The senator said he was actively working with allies to develop what he called a “progressive strategy to defeat Trump”. Central to that is “rallying the working class of this country to stand up to Trump”.He said he draws confidence from recent labor union victories, including wage increases won by the UAW and new agreements secured by the Teamsters at UPS and by Hollywood writers and actors. “We are seeing the revitalisation of the trade union movement in this country in a way that we have not seen for many, many decades.” More

  • 263 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    ‘It will be the end of democracy’: Bernie Sanders on what happens if Trump wins – and how to stop him

    Bernie Sanders sweeps into his state office in Burlington, Vermont, itching to get on with our interview. When I try to break the ice by asking the US senator how he is, he replies gruffly, “Good,” and motions with his outstretched hand for our conversation to begin.It’s a Saturday, and Sanders is dressed in his casual weekend uniform of cream chinos, blue shirt and sweater, no tie. I’d been hoping the day would be so cold and crisp in Burlington, the idyllic college town which has been his home since 1968, that he’d be wearing the mittens captured in a cult photo of Sanders huddled against biting winds at Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. The ones that launched a quadrillion memes and sent the US senator hurtling into the cyber stratosphere. “I couldn’t believe it, all I was doing was trying to keep warm!” he says, before breaking the bad news. Not only is he not wearing the mittens, “I don’t even know where they are.”Sanders always seems to be in a hurry. Like Alice’s white rabbit, he’s forever racing against the clock in his battle with the billionaires and corporate interests. He is the most unlikely harbinger of change: a politician who drove young voters wild with “Berniemania” in 2016, when he was already 74; a man with none of the usual TV good looks and smooth talking attached to presidential candidates, but one who, by being absolutely himself, still turned out to be hugely charismatic.In the past decade, he’s done more than almost anyone to change the political lens in the US, bringing income inequality, poverty and what he calls “uber-capitalism” into focus. And yet before that he was a virtual unknown.In his 20s and 30s, Sanders worked lean years as a carpenter and freelance writer, alongside campaigning for the local socialist party, Liberty Union. It took him 10 years to learn how to win an election, which he did in 1981, aged 39, by all of 10 votes, to become Burlington’s mayor, before taking Vermont’s only congressional seat a decade later.He remained for the next quarter of a century largely in the shadows, a rare overtly leftwing voice in Congress, diligently ploughing his self-styled democratic socialist furrow. And then in 2016, he suddenly burst on to the national stage in his challenge against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, attracting an army of young voters chanting: “Feel the Bern”.Eight years on, he’s still in a rush, but he comes across as more sombre now, more edgily reflective. He imbues that mood in an afterword to the new paperback edition of his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, in which he writes that though he would like to be optimistic about the future, he cannot. He invokes his seven grandchildren, and laments that they will inherit a world that faces “more urgent and undeniable crises than at any time in modern history”.I ask him to spell that out. “We’re looking at a series of extraordinary crises. Climate: it’s up in the air whether the world community will make the cuts in carbon emissions to provide a habitable planet for our grandchildren. The growth of oligarchy: a small number of extremely wealthy people control the economic and political life of billions. Democracy: under severe threat from those capitalising on people’s fears.”Not long ago, Sanders used to be ridiculed for such disquieting rhetoric; he was denounced as a firebrand, a rabble-rouser. No one’s laughing at him now. Two wars, a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, vast swathes of North America literally burning, inequality between rich and poor at mind-sizzling levels. As the New Yorker memorably noted, “reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders”.Is that how it seems to him, that all his fears are coming home to roost? “It’s not a great feeling,” he says. “I’m extremely nervous about what is coming.”Ah yes. Donald Trump.Sanders has long had the measure of Trump. In 2016, when Trump said, “I alone can fix it,” as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Sanders commented: “Is this guy running for president or dictator?” Two months before the 2020 election, he predicted that a defeated Trump might not go peaceably – another portent that was dramatically fulfilled.Now, as the Iowa caucus kicks off the 2024 primary season on Monday, Sanders is at it again. Except this time, he says, the stakes are much higher.Even for a politician who doesn’t mince his words, his assessment of a Trump victory in November is sobering. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy.”It may not happen on day one, he says. Trump wouldn’t be as obvious as to abolish elections. But he would steadily weaken democracy, making it harder for young people and people of colour to vote, enervating political opposition, whipping up anger against minorities and immigrants.A second Trump presidency would be much more extreme than the first. “He’s made that clear,” says Sanders. “There’s a lot of personal bitterness, he’s a bitter man, having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he’s going to take it out on his enemies. We’ve got to explain to the American people what that means to them – what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us.”He doesn’t ascribe the rise of Trump solely to a lumpen mass of redneck working-class Americans, deplorables to borrow a phrase. “I do not believe that all of Trump’s supporters are racist or sexist or homophobes. I think what’s going on in this country is a belief that the government is failing ordinary Americans.”Sanders’ office sits in the main street of Burlington and is, like the man, minimalist and spare. There are posters from different stages in his political life, including an inevitable “Feel the Bern” placard and a photograph from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, which mayor Sanders twinned Burlington with during Ronald Reagan’s Contra war against the leftwing Sandinistas. A third wall-hanging says: “In recognition of your support for fish hatcheries in the Lake Champlain Basin”.He lives in a modest house a little way from the centre of town, with Jane O’Meara Sanders, whom he married in 1988 and to whom he dedicates It’s OK to Be Angry, calling her his “wife, co-worker and best buddy”. He also dedicates the book to his brother, Larry Sanders, who lives in Oxford, England, and is a former Green party councillor, and to his four children – one by his first wife, Deborah Shiling Messing, and three stepchildren, who are Jane’s but whom he considers his own – as well as to those seven grandchildren.He has built his political persona around reciting startling and infuriating statistics, and my encounter with him is no exception. With his index finger jabbing as though pointing to an invisible crowd, he tells me that before the pandemic three multibillionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) owned more between them than the combined wealth of the 160 million Americans who make up the bottom half of society. “Three people! That’s unbelievable! Incredible! Wages, accounting for inflation, are lower today for working people than they were 50 years ago. Think about that! My grandchildren will have a lower standard of living than my generation.”In this scheme of things, Trump is merely doing what demagogues are doing the world over – capitalising on the anxieties and struggles of the people. “Trump comes along and says, ‘I’ll be your strong guy, I’ll deal with all your anxieties – immigration, transgender issues, race – I’ll be there for you.’”Uncomfortably for his colleagues in Congress, Sanders reserves much of his sharpest criticism for the Democratic party. Officially, he has sat as an independent since entering the House of Representatives in 1991, but he votes as a Democrat in Congress and ran both his presidential campaigns as one. Yet he denounces the party establishment as a “consultant-driven, ad-producing election machine”.It is “beyond pathetic”, he writes in the book, that a phoney corporate hack like Trump should be able to present himself as the “champion of the working classes”, while the Democratic party stands back and cedes territory to him. He caricatures the Democratic promise to voters as, “We’re pretty bad, but Republicans are worse”, and warns that is simply not good enough.Which brings us to Biden.Sanders describes Biden, whom he has known since he was elected to the Senate in 2007, as a likable and decent man. But he has a clear message for the sitting president: step up to the plate or the future of the United States, of the world, is in peril. “The challenge we face is to be able to show people that government in a democratic society can address their very serious needs. If we do that, we defeat Trump. If we do not, then we are the Weimar republic of the early 1930s.”Sanders says he’s in touch with the White House, exhorting them to be more vocal in their appeals to working Americans. “He has got to say, in my view, that if he is re-elected, within two months he will bring about the sweeping changes the working class of this country desperately need.”So are they listening? “As is always the case, not as strongly as I would like.”You can see why Sanders was enticed to move to Burlington as a 27-year-old, having been brought up in a Brooklyn tenement. The town, which is famous as the birthplace of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, is flanked by Lake Champlain on one side and the Green mountains on the other, its steeples and cobbled streets dusted with snow. It feels like an oasis of peace in a very disturbed world.Until it doesn’t.On 25 November, three 20-year-old Palestinian-American students, best friends from Ramallah in the West Bank who had come to the US to pursue a safe university education, were shot in a Burlington street by a hate-filled stranger. One of the men, Hisham Awartani, is paralysed from the chest down.The incident has left Sanders shaken. In a speech to the Senate five days after the shooting, he stepped out of the limited emotional range he usually displays in public – anger, outrage, disgust – and sounded palpably upset.He sounds upset now. “Less than a mile away from where we are right now, three really bright young people were walking down the street, talking some Arabic. Words fail to describe the ugliness and the horror of this, in this city.”The Israel-Hamas war that erupted on 7 October with the Hamas massacre has troubled Sanders like few other events in his 40 years in politics. “It’s on my mind all of the time,” he says. “This is something I literally dream about.”That’s not surprising, given that he is both one of the most prominent Jews in the United States and a politician who puts human rights front and centre. And this is profoundly personal for him.During his 2020 presidential campaign he told a CNN town hall that there were two main factors behind his worldview. One was growing up in a cash-strapped Brooklyn family supported by his father’s job as a paint salesman. The other was being Jewish.Sanders recalls the visceral way he learned as a young child about the Holocaust. He lifts up the sleeve of his left arm and rubs his skin as he tells me: “I remember going down a few blocks to the shopping area, and there were people working in the markets, and they had their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms.”His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, emigrated from Poland to the US in 1921. He was 17 and penniless, and fleeing antisemitic pogroms. Most of that side of Sanders’ family remained in Poland and were almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis.A few years ago, Sanders went with his brother, Larry, to Słopnice, the Polish village where their father had been raised. “There was a mound, and it was a mass grave of people slaughtered in the town,” he says. “So racism, wiping out people because of a different religion, that’s stayed with me my whole life.”His deep personal understanding of the horrors human beings can inflict on each other helps explain the tightrope Sanders has been walking over the war. He has always stood firmly beside Israel as a safe haven for Jews, and has also spoken up over many years for the right of the Palestinians to live in peace. It’s a classic two-state position.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat has translated in the current crisis as Sanders steadfastly defending the right of Israel to go after Hamas, which he calls a “disgusting terrorist organisation”. At the same time, he has become steadily more damning of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military’s “mass atrocity” in Gaza.He has also grown increasingly disapproving of Biden’s staunch support for the Israeli war effort, condemning what he calls US complicity in “destroying the lives of innocent men, women and children in Gaza”. He is trying to block billions of dollars of extra US military aid to Israel, and is demanding a Senate investigation into how US arms are used in Gaza.I ask him whether he feels a special distress watching a country he has always supported as a post-Holocaust shelter for Jews inflict such indiscriminate bombing on others. “The answer is yes. If there are any people that have suffered, it’s Jewish people. And they should not be imposing that type of suffering on Palestinian children – killing children is not the solution.”To say the dual position Sanders is attempting to hold is uncomfortable would be a gross understatement. He has come under fire from pro-Israeli Democrats and Republicans who accuse him of betraying America’s great ally by failing to offer Netanyahu unconditional support.On his own progressive side, his refusal to countenance a permanent ceasefire, which he fears would merely embolden Hamas to renew its attacks with the aim of destroying Israel, has also landed him in hot water. More than 400 of his former staffers signed an open letter imploring him to shift his position; one of them, his 2020 campaign spokesperson, Briahna Joy Gray, tweeted “biggest political disappointment of our generation” in response to an interview in which Sanders explained his view.There has also been fallout among young Americans, whom Sanders has long cultivated as the sweet spot of his base. Young voters, drawn towards his no-nonsense takedown of the ultra-rich, are at the core of his 15.2 million following on X, formerly known as Twitter. Yet amid the Gaza crisis, polls show a stark generational divide, with young, progressive Americans coalescing around demands for a permanent ceasefire. I ask him, does he fear that his movement of youthful supporters could be starting to splinter?He clearly doesn’t want to go there. “I think, at the end of the day, we’ll be all right,” is all he’ll say.Is Sanders swimming against the tide of an increasingly polarised and social-media-driven world?“I’m trying to do my best,” he concedes, a little mournfully, “within the complexities.”When Sanders went up against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, those who were paying attention could feel the tectonic plates of US politics shifting. An insurgent campaign focused around inequality and corporate greed was giving a figurehead of the Democratic establishment a run for her money.Not that there were many paying attention. Sanders clearly still feels riled by how marginalised he was in the 2016 race. While his gargantuan crowds chanted, “Feel the Bern”, pundits derided the “free stuff” he promoted, such as decent housing and healthcare for all, with the New York Times chiding that it would add $3tn a year to government spending.Many media outlets largely ignored him. Even those dismissive of him had to recognise that he had become a phenomenon. By the end of the primaries he had won 22 states and more than 13m votes. Though he lost, he gained a universe: an army of young, progressive, impassioned Americans fluent in Bernie-ese.Oh, and he also acquired a picture-perfect impersonation of himself on Saturday Night Live, courtesy of Larry David. The Curb Your Enthusiasm star was not only the spitting image of his subject, but he got Bernie’s arms-flailing stump speech and legendary crotchetiness to a T, and as a fellow Brooklyn Jew spoke his language (“yuuuge”). The two men appeared together on SNL just before the 2016 New Hampshire primary, and a few months later were revealed by genealogists to be distant cousins.The shorthand often used for the uprising Sanders catalysed is the Squad, the team of progressive Congress members around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that emerged in the wake of 2016. Sanders writes in his book that the Squad were a “breath of fresh air”, but to me he insists the sea change went even deeper. “When I was elected to the House in 1990, there were five members of the progressive caucus. Today, there are well over 100. It is far more powerful and progressive than back then.”Could there one day soon be a President AOC, not just a female president, but a progressive one?Sanders squirms a little, saying he doesn’t want to play the name game. But then he says: “Absolutely. Absolutely. The possibility exists, of course.”For all his talk of revolution, for all his tax-the-rich bills and declarations of radical populism, a large part of the Sanders creed is nothing more nor less than an appeal for the basic fundamentals of life – health, housing, a living wage, education – that are taken for granted by all other developed nations. He devotes an entire section of It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism to Finland, which is hardly a hotbed of revolution.Look at it that way, and it’s not Bernie who is the extreme radical, it’s the far-right march of the Republican party. Which brings us back to Biden, the threat of Trump, and the ominous 10 months ahead.Sanders has plenty of nice things to say about Biden. In the book he praises the president’s 2020 campaign platform, saying that if it had all been put into effect, he would have been the most progressive president since Franklin D Roosevelt. (The compliment is in part self-serving – Sanders credits himself with having pushed Biden further to the left in the run-up to the election.) He also applauds Biden’s decision to join a picket line during the recent auto workers strike, the first sitting president in history to do so.But as we enter election year, he warns that there is much more to be done. “Look, the president has put a historic amount of money into transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, but the fossil fuel industry keeps on its merry way, and we’re not stopping them. The president is making efforts to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, but it’s nowhere near enough. He tried to lower student debt; it was reversed by the supreme court.”Sanders suddenly leans towards me and gives me a blast of rhetoric that is almost overpowering.“The president has got to acknowledge the enormous crises facing people’s lives. You can’t fool them. If I say to you all the great things I’ve done for you, you will come back and say, ‘Well, I can’t afford healthcare, I can’t send my kid to college.’ Americans are feeling anxious right now, and we’ve got to address that.”Is there a danger many young Americans and voters of colour who formed a critical part of the coalition that elected Biden – and defeated Trump – in 2020 will look at the rematch of the same two candidates in November, decide they aren’t inspired by either, and stay at home?“There’s no question. The polling is clear. Given the choice between Biden and Trump, there are a lot of people saying, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’”It’s a strikingly different analysis from that offered by much of the commentariat, which has lasered in on Biden’s age. Which is interesting, because Sanders, at 82, is a year older than the president yet rarely gets labelled as old. If anything, he comes across as ageless – as crotchety and energetic as he’s ever been.I ask what he thinks of the focus on Biden’s age, remarking that it’s not just Biden. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, is the same age as Biden at 81, and has caused some alarm by freezing mid-speech. Is it time to drop to a younger cadre of political leaders?“It’s a nice phrase, a new generation of leadership, and yes most of the strongest progressives are young people. But you’ve got young Republicans who are among the most rightwing people in the country. So it’s not age, it’s what the individual stands for.”And what about him? On one level, with the world going up in smoke, his brand of urgent analysis is needed more than ever today. But he’s been at it a long time, he had a heart attack during the 2020 campaign, and must be feeling the weight of it all.He’s surprisingly candid. “I am tired. I’ve been doing this since I was elected mayor of this city in 1981. What I see in Washington is so dishonest. There’s no debate on the crumbling healthcare system, no debate on climate, no debate on wealth inequality. None! That’s distressing, and what we’re seeing in the world is distressing, and being 82 … this is painful stuff.”Just when I think Sanders might be about to announce his retirement, he sits back, rallies himself, and says: “Let’s get back to my grandchildren and the future generation. It’s in my DNA, it’s the way I look at the world. You’ve got to stand up and do the best you can. We don’t have the moral right to simply walk away.”“You keep going,” I suggest.“You gotta keep going.” More

  • 163 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    E Jean Carroll lawyer warns Trump plans to turn damages trial into ‘circus’

    Donald Trump’s legal woes continued to mount as a lawyer in an upcoming defamation case asked a judge to ensure the former president does not disrupt imminent legal proceedings – and, in a separate issue, he was ordered to pay nearly $400,000 in legal fees to the New York Times.In the first of those two cases, a lawyer for E Jean Carroll – a columnist who last year won a $5m jury award against Trump for sexual abuse – urged a judge to take strong measures to ensure Trump does not “sow chaos” when a new jury considers next week if he owes even more in damages.Trump said on Thursday that he would next week attend the Manhattan federal court trial, where a jury will consider a request by lawyers for Carroll that she be awarded $10m in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages for statements Trump has made.“If Mr Trump appears at this trial, whether as a witness or otherwise, his recent statements and behavior strongly suggest that he will seek to sow chaos. Indeed, he may well perceive a benefit in seeking to poison these proceedings,” attorney Roberta Kaplan wrote in a letter to Judge Lewis A Kaplan.“There are any number of reasons why Mr Trump might perceive a personal or political benefit from intentionally turning this trial into a circus,” said Roberta Kaplan, who has no relation to the judge.She said she worried about “the possibility that he will seek to testify, and the associated risk that he will violate court orders if he does so”.She recommended that Lewis Kaplan warn Trump of the possible consequences of violating court orders severely limiting what the former president and his lawyers can say at the trial.A lawyer for Trump did not immediately return a message seeking comment from the Associated Press.Meanwhile, ABC News reported that the New York supreme court justice Robert Reed had ordered Trump to pay the New York Times $392,638 in legal fees after a failed lawsuit against the newspaper over its reporting on his tax records.In 2021, Trump sued his niece Mary Trump, the New York Times and three of its reporters. He alleged the reporters were “motivated by a personal vendetta”.But the case was dismissed, paving the way for the Times to get back its financial costs of fighting the matter in court.Citing court papers, ABC reported Reed as stating: “Considering the complexity of the issues presented in this action, the number of causes of action, the experience, ability and reputation of defendants’ attorneys, the considerable amount in dispute, and the attorneys’ success in dismissing the complaint against their defendants … the court finds that $392,638.69 is a reasonable value for the legal services rendered.”The decision is likely to irk Trump more than just financially. He frequently rails against the media and the New York Times in particular.Meanwhile, in the Carroll case, the columnist’s lawyer urged Judge Kaplan in her letter to require Trump to say under oath in open court but without jurors present that he understands he sexually assaulted Carroll and that he spoke falsely with actual malice and lied when he accused her of fabricating her account and impugning her motives.A jury last May awarded Carroll $5m in damages after concluding that, although there was not sufficient evidence to find Trump raped Carroll, there was proof that she was sexually abused at the Bergdorf Goodman store, and Trump defamed her with statements he made in October 2022.Because the defamation award was limited to Trump’s fall 2022 statements, a jury next week will begin considering whether Carroll is entitled to additional damages for statements Trump made about her claims while he was president in 2019 and the day after the verdict last spring.Carroll, 80, testified at last year’s trial that she had suffered emotionally and in her romantic life since Trump attacked her and that his severe denunciation of claims she first made in a 2019 memoir after she was inspired by the #MeToo movement had severely damaged her career and led to threats against her.Trump has repeatedly said that he never assaulted Carroll and didn’t know her and that he suspected she was driven to make claims against him to promote her book and for political reasons.In her letter to the judge on Friday, Kaplan cited Trump’s behavior at a state court proceeding on Thursday in Manhattan where he ignored a judge’s insistence that he keep remarks focused on trial-related matters. Trump said, “I am an innocent man,” adding that he was being “persecuted by someone running for office”.She wrote that Trump’s behavior in state court “provides a potential preview of exactly what we might expect to see at next week’s trial”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More