Evelyn Reynolds

Donald Trump is scheduled to be interviewed by New York probation officials Monday, a required step before his July sentencing in his criminal hush-money case, according to three people familiar with the plan.The former president will do the interview via a computer video conference from his residence at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, the people told the Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to disclose the plans publicly.One of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, will be present for the interview. People convicted of crimes in New York usually meet with probation officials without their lawyers, but the judge in Trump’s case, Juan Merchan, said in a letter Friday that he would allow Blanche’s presence.The usual purpose of a pre-sentencing probation interview is to prepare a report that will tell the judge more about the defendant, and potentially help determine the proper punishment for the crime.Such reports are typically prepared by a probation officer, a social worker or a psychologist working for the probation department who interviews the defendant and possibly that person’s family and friends, as well as people affected by the crime.Present reports include a defendant’s personal history, criminal record and recommendations for sentencing. It will also include information about employment and any obligations to help care for a family member. It is also a chance for a defendant to say why they think they deserve a lighter punishment.A jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records at his own company as part of a broader scheme to buy the silence of people who might have told embarrassing stories about him during the 2016 presidential campaign. One $130,000 payment went to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Trump, which he denied.Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, says he is innocent of any crime and that the criminal case was brought to hurt his chances to regain the White House.Following Trump’s historic conviction, a New York Times/Siena College post-verdict analysis of nearly 2,000 interviews with voters found that Trump’s advantage over Joe Biden narrowed from three to one point.Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said in a statement Sunday that the president’s Democratic party allies “continue to ramp up their ongoing Witch-Hunts, further abusing and misusing the power of their offices to interfere in the presidential election”.“President Trump and his legal team are already taking necessary steps to challenge and defeat the lawless Manhattan DA case,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMerchan has scheduled Trump’s sentencing for 11 July. He has discretion to impose a wide range of punishments, ranging from probation and community service to up to four years in prison.In his first rally earlier this week following his conviction, Trump, who is appealing his conviction, issued foreboding threats.“Those appellate courts have to step up and straighten things out, or we’re not going to have a country any longer,” Trump said at a Turning Point Action event in Phoenix, Arizona.Meanwhile, reports have emerged of New York police planning to revoke Trump’s license to carry a gun as a result of his conviction.Speaking to CNN anonymously, a New York police department official said that it will complete its investigation “that will likely lead to revocation of his license”. More

An appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because they mention “butt and fart” and other content which some state officials may dislike.The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.It added: “This court has declared that officials may not ‘remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the idea contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.’”The appellate court’s latest decision follows a federal lawsuit filed in 2022 by seven Llano county residents against county and library officials for restricting and removing books from its public circulation.The residents argued that the defendants violated their constitutional right to “access information and ideas” by removing 17 books based on their content and messages.Those books include seven “butt and fart” books with titles including I Broke My Butt! and Larry the Farting Leprechaun, four young adult books on sexuality, gender identity and dysphoria – including Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen – and two books on the history of racism in the US, among them Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.Other books targeted by the ban were In the Night Kitchen, which contains cartoons of a naked child, as well as It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex and Sexual Health, according to court documents.The books were removed after parents complained, with library officials referring to the books as “pornographic filth”.In its majority decision, the overwhelmingly conservative appellate court ordered eight of the 17 books to be returned, including Being Jazz: My Life As a (Transgender) Teen, Caste and They Called Themselves the KKK.Wiener wrote how a dissenting opinion from the Donald Trump appointee Kyle Duncan “accuses us of becoming the ‘Library Police,’ citing a story by author Stephen King”.“But King, a well-known free speech activist, would surely be horrified to see how his words are being twisted in service of censorship,” wrote Wiener, whop was appointed during George HW Bush’s presidency.“Per King: ‘As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.’ Defendants and their highlighters are the true library police.”Wiener also said that “libraries must continuously review their collection to ensure that it is up to date” and engage in “removing outdated or duplicated materials … according to objective, neutral criteria”.In a report released last October, the American Library Association found that Texas made the most attempts in the US to ban or restrict books in 2022. In total, the state made 93 attempts to restrict access to more than 2,300 books.A wave of book banning has also emerged in Florida as part of the culture wars of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, on “wokeism,” a term meant to insult liberal values.In January, a Florida school district removed dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books because the texts included descriptions of “sexual conduct”.Meanwhile, in 2022, a Mississippi school district upheld the firing of an assistant principal after he read a humorous children’s book, I Need a New Butt, to his students. More

The US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, defended both the timing and substance of Joe Biden’s new executive order to restrict immigration at the southern border, as the president faces criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike over the measure.The order, issued on Tuesday, tells officials to shut down asylum requests once the average number of encounters between legal ports of entry reaches 2,500 or more. If the number of encounters falls to 1,500 or fewer for seven consecutive days, the border would reopen two weeks later.During an interview on ABC News’s This Week, host Martha Raddatz noted that crossings had never reached the threshold of falling to 1,500 or fewer during Biden’s presidency – and Mayorkas declined to say whether he expected it to happen before election day.Mayorkas declined to give a concrete timeline on when to expect border crossings to meet the targeted threshold. Mayorkas was impeached by House Republicans earlier this year over his handling of the border, but the charges were quickly dismissed by the Senate.“We are at a very early stage. Implementation, as you noted, has just begun,” Mayorkas told Raddatz on Sunday. “It’s early, the signs are positive. Our personnel have done an extraordinary job in implementing a very big shift in how we operate on the southern border.”Some Democrats have assailed the order as essentially a revival of the Trump administration’s asylum ban, which was struck down by federal courts. Biden also criticized the measure when he was a candidate for president.Mayorkas insisted on Sunday that the executive order was not at odds with Biden’s campaign promise.“What the president said then is what we are living today,” he said. “We are allowing individuals to access asylum through the ports of entry, pursuant to a program that we developed. We are allowing people to access asylum if they come from the countries of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.”Republicans have dismissed the policy as insufficient and an election-year stunt. “This is like turning a garden hose on a five-alarm fire. And the American people are not fools. They know that this play is too little, too late,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, said last week. But the Republican criticism comes after Republican senators twice blocked a sweeping bipartisan border security bill. Trump, who is the presumptive Republican nominee in November’s presidential election, had lobbied against the measure.Mayorkas defended the timing of the executive order, which came four months after the border bill first failed. He said the administration would have preferred for Congress to act.“The bipartisan deal was rejected once. We pressed forward again. It was rejected a second time. And then we developed this and have implemented it and we are at an early stage,” he said. “And let’s not minimize the significance of this move and the significance of operationalizing it. And it requires the cooperation of other countries which we have secured.” More

Donald Trump’s campaign is hiring extra medics, loading up on fans and water bottles and allowing supporters to carry umbrellas to an outdoor rally on Sunday in Las Vegas, where temperatures are expected to exceed 100F (38C).The former president is returning to Nevada, one of the top battleground states in the November election, for his second rally since he was found guilty in a hush-money scandal. The unprecedented conviction of a US president, current or former, has juiced Trump’s fundraising and galvanized his supporters, but it remains to be seen whether it will sway swing voters.Temperatures in the south-west have cooled since reaching historic highs late last week, but remain above normal for this time of year and are expected to top 100F by the time Trump is scheduled to begin speaking around noon. His rally is at a park with little shade next to the airport.Campaign organizers say they will have ample water bottles to hand out to attendees and that cooling tents will be placed throughout the venue. Misting fans will be given out.The campaign has paid for additional emergency medical services to be on site in the case of emergency. The US Secret Service will be making an exception to allow people to bring in personal water bottles and umbrellas.During a Trump rally in Arizona on Thursday, the Phoenix police department said 11 people were transported to hospitals, treated and released for heat exhaustion. Many of Trump’s supporters waited in line for hours and some were unable to get inside before the venue reached capacity. The temperature reached a record 113F (45C) that day.Trump’s Nevada rally, his third in the state this year, comes on the tail end of a western swing that included several high-dollar fundraisers where he was expected to rake in millions of dollars.Hillary Clinton won Nevada in 2016 as did Joe Biden in 2020, but Nevada was the only battleground state where Trump did better against Biden than Clinton. In the 2022 midterms, Nevada’s governor, Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, was the only incumbent governor who did not win re-election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump hopes his strength among working-class voters and growing interest from Latinos will push him to victory in the state. More

The South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, said on Sunday that Donald Trump should pick a woman to be his running mate amid reports that her fellow Republican’s shortlist is nearly all men.“I think that that would be beneficial, according to the polling that I’ve seen for him and a lot of swing states, is that having a woman that is helping his campaign makes a difference,” she told Dana Bash during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union. “One in four Republican women haven’t made up their minds because they want to have a woman talking to them about the issues they care about. And women aren’t monolithic. They don’t care about just one issue.”Noem’s comments come amid reports that the former president’s campaign for a second term in the White House is vetting possible picks. Only one of them, congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, is a woman.Others include senators JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott and Tom Cotton. The North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, congressman Byron Donalds, and Ben Carson, the former secretary of housing and urban development, are also reportedly under consideration.Noem gave the interview from Wausau, Wisconsin, where she has been stumping for Trump.Until recently, Noem was considered a top possible pick for the No 2 spot on the Republican ticket for November’s election. But her chances reportedly fell significantly after she published a story in her recently published memoir about killing her dog.She said on Sunday that she did not know if she was under consideration.Asked whether she had regrets about publishing that story, Noem suggested that she did not.“That story’s a 20-year-old story of a mom who made a very difficult decision to protect her children from a vicious animal that was attacking livestock, and killing livestock, and attacking people,” she said. “So it’s in the book because it was difficult for me.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Bash tried to press her further, Noem cut in and said “we’ve covered this”.Noem’s book also exposed her to criticism after she needed to retract an anecdote about meeting Kim Jong-un – and then feeling “underestimated” by the North Korean dictator during the encounter.The Dakota Scout newspaper was the first to report how Noem’s account of meeting Kim during a prior stint as a congresswoman was unlikely to have happened. Within days of the Scout’s report, Noem said: “This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book, and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.” More

Donald Trump has assailed the validity of his conviction in the criminal case involving hush-money payments to an adult film actor because “cheaters don’t like getting caught,” Kamala Harris said during a speech on Saturday.“Simply put, Donald Trump thinks he is above the law,” the vice-president told an audience at a dinner hosted by the Michigan state Democratic party. “This should be disqualifying for anyone who wants to be president of the United States.”Harris’s remarks in Detroit about the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s presidential election came after the former president has repeatedly disparaged the New York state judge who oversaw the trial culminating in Trump’s being found guilty on 30 May.Trump has tried to persuade the electorate into believing that the judge, Juan Merchan, is unfair and somehow conspiring with the Joe Biden White House to which Harris belongs, even though it was state-level prosecutors – not federal ones – who brought the recently concluded case against him.Trump’s rhetoric that his criminal trial in New York was “rigged” echoed his supporters’ justification for their attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, a desperate but failed attempt to keep him in power after his electoral defeat to Biden weeks earlier, Harris suggested on Saturday. She also alluded to how Trump and his allies have openly boasted about exacting retribution against those who are perceived to have crossed the former president and some of his aides.“He suggests the case could be a ‘breaking point’ for his supporters, hinting at violence. He spreads lies that our administration is controlling this case when everyone knows it was a state prosecution. And he says that he will use a second term for revenge,” Harris said.“You know why he complains? Because the reality is cheaters don’t like getting caught.”While there was a generally friendly audience for her comments about Trump on Saturday, she was heckled by a pro-Palestinian protester demonstrating against the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s ongoing military strikes on Gaza. Officials quickly removed the heckler as the vice-president said, “I value and respect your voice – but I’m speaking right now,” the local television station WJBK reported.That encounter wasn’t the only time over the weekend that Biden’s administration was reminded of public dissatisfaction with its handling of the war in Gaza, which the Israeli military launched in response to Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the White House on Saturday. Though footage posted to social media showed police using pepper spray on demonstrators, the Republican US senator Tom Cotton – a vocal, far-right critic of the Biden administration – appeared on Sunday on Fox News and argued that the president goes too easy on such protests.“Joe Biden thinks that these pro-Hamas, anti-American lunatics should be guiding American policy towards Israel,” Cotton said.Harris took aim at Trump on Saturday as the former president and Biden are essentially tied nationally as well as in key battleground states, at least according to a new poll by CBS News.That stalemate exists even after Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments delivered to Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainer who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with the Republican before he successfully ran for the Oval Office.He still faces 54 other pending criminal charges accusing him of 2020 election interference as well as improper retention of classified materials after his presidency, allegations contained in two federal prosecutions and one state case in Georgia.In civil court, Trump has been grappling with multimillion-dollar penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent as well as a rape accusation that a judge has determined to be substantially true.Republicans, meanwhile, have sought to embarrass Biden over the fact that his son, Hunter, had spent the previous several days standing trial on federal gun charges in Delaware. More

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View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy name looms large over American politics. John F Kennedy, despite serving only twoand a half years as president before his assassination, is frequently ranked among the top 10 US leaders; his brother, Robert F Kennedy, seemed set for his own spell in the White House until he too was killed in 1968.Enter: Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the former, son of the latter and increasingly, persona non grata of the surviving Kennedy clan.Part-time environmental lawyer, full-time conspiracy theorist, an animal enthusiast who owned a pet lion at his elite boarding school and who, in his telling, had part of his brain eaten by a worm, Kennedy entered the 2024 presidential race as a Democrat running against Biden, before switching to an independent in October last year. The 70-year-old, who also has a history of associating with white supremacists, is an unknown quantity in the 2024 election race, with both parties worried about the havoc he could wreak.Five months out from perhaps the most consequential election in recent US history, Biden and Trump continue to be unpopular with the American public. Kennedy’s ability to be neither of those men, and his willingness to lean into his family name, have positioned him as a spanner in the works of American democracy.Both Democrats and Republicans fear that Kennedy, who is polling at about 10% nationally, could pull votes away from their men. Even a few Biden or Trump voters hopping on to the Kennedy train could be enough to influence what is expected to be a tight race. In an indication of the threat he poses, Trump has gone from praising Kennedy as a “very smart person” a year ago to recently posting a four-minute video attacking him on Truth Social.Plenty of people try to be president. In 2020 alone, 1,212 people filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission saying they were running for the White House. Yet it is Kennedy who is drawing all the coverage.Would he be getting as much attention – and pulling in millions of dollars in donations, some of it from former Trump supporters – if he had a different last name? Probably not.The world was introduced to RFK Jr early. His father, a supporter of Israel, was killed by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man, as Kennedy Sr campaigned for president in Los Angeles. A 14-year-old Kennedy Jr was a pallbearer at his funeral: black and white photos from the funeral show a shaggy-haired Kennedy at the head of the coffin, looking numb and out of place among a crowd of grown men.Kennedy was the third of 11 children (the Kennedys were prodigious breeders), born to his father and Ethel Kennedy – a Chicago-born daughter of a coal magnate who remained a public presence way into the 1990s. Ethel made an appearance on the sitcom Cheers and was even named a tough tennis opponent in a Seinfeld episode.If Kennedy benefited from the family name, he benefited from the family wealth, too. Kennedy was raised in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at the Kennedy compound – where his mother lives to this day.He studied at Millbrook school, a private boarding school in New York. At Millbrook, Kennedy was not universally liked, Jerry Oppenheimer wrote in a biography of the future presidential candidate.“[Kennedy] was viewed by some fellow students as egotistical and irresponsible for strutting around the campus and on the sidelines at home football games with a potentially dangerous young lion on a leash,” Oppenheimer wrote.Millbrook’s headmaster eventually banished the lion, who was called Toto, from campus, and the then 130lb big cat went to live at a safari park in Florida.Other interests, Oppenheimer reported, included “getting stoned” and, oddly, falconry. Kennedy was in a gang too: the Hyannis Port Terrors, who apparently “ran around and stole alcohol” during the summer months.(Kennedy’s parading around with a lion had apparently been forgiven by 1998: that year, he was the commencement speaker at the school.)His teenage years were difficult. In an interview in 2023, Kennedy said he started taking heroin when he was 15 years old, saying he “had a big empty hole inside”, and in 1983, when he was 29, Kennedy was charged with heroin possession after he “became ill”, the New York Times reported, “in the washroom of an airliner” which stopped in Rapid City, South Dakota.“All of a sudden everybody knew I was a drug addict and it gave me the freedom to get help,” Kennedy told an interviewer. “I could just be who I was and be honest.”Kennedy had hidden his addiction while graduating from Harvard University and earning a law degree from Pace University in New York, and after he had completed two years’ probation as a result of the heroin charge, he embarked on a career in environmental law.He worked for Riverkeeper, an organization which protects New York’s Hudson River, and sued polluters in an effort to protect waterways; his work earned him a place on the front cover of New York Magazine in 1995, which described him as “The Kennedy who matters”.But Kennedy – who during his campaign has criticized Biden for overspending on environmental issues – would become better known in the US as a conspiracy theorist.Kennedy spent years claiming, loudly and wrongly, that vaccines cause autism, while in 2023 alone Kennedy stated that wifi causes “leaky brain”, linked antidepressants to school shootings and said that chemicals in water were making children transgender.His history of embracing conspiracy theories meant Covid-19 was a perfect storm for Kennedy. His already-existing anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense became “an influential force that spreads false and misleading information”, Associated Press reported, with the group publishing books that falsely claim the Covid-19 vaccine caused a spike in deaths. A report in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2022 named Kennedy’s Twitter account as “the top superspreader” of misinformation about Covid-19.Kennedy was particularly criticized for a speech he gave at a rally against mandatory Covid vaccines in Washington in January 2022. Standing at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy told an animated crowd that unnamed figures were trying to control the American population in a way never seen before.“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said.“Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”The remarks caused uproar, not least from the Auschwitz museum, which tweeted: “Exploiting of the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany – including children like Anne Frank – in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.”Kennedy later apologized for saying that people who wished to remain unvaccinated had fewer freedoms than Anne Frank. But he continued to dabble in Covid-19 misinformation, writing in a 2021 book that Anthony Fauci, the top US public health expert during the pandemic, had conspired with Bill Gates to suppress alternative medicine treatments for Covid-19.View image in fullscreenGiven his history, Kennedy’s declaration, as he announced his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in April 2023, that he was “not an ideal presidential candidate for normal times”, could seem like an understatement. But people barely had a chance to get to grips with his candidacy before, in October, he scrapped the idea of running as a Democrat, and announced an independent campaign, this time claiming that the “two-party establishment” was “leading us all over a cliff”.As an independent choice, Kennedy represents a still quite old, but not as old as Biden or Trump, candidate. He would be 71 by the time he took office, but Kennedy presents as younger than his two rivals: less jowly, more robust and with a more convincing head of hair. At a campaign stop in June 2023, he stripped to the waist to lift some weights at a gym in Los Angeles, revealing a fairly impressive physique.On the campaign trial, Kennedy looks the part: that thick silver hair, those big white teeth, that perma-tan. His voice, then, comes as a surprise. Kennedy has a strained, halting tone, owing to spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition which affects his voice.That condition is far from Kennedy’s only brush with ill health. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a deposition Kennedy had given during his divorce from his second wife, Mary Kathleen Richardson Kennedy. In the deposition, given in 2012, Kennedy said he had experienced memory loss, which “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” Kennedy said. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”After the Times article was published, Kennedy tweeted that he was willing “​​to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate”.Richardson Kennedy died by suicide in 2012, leaving behind her four children with Kennedy. Before Richardson Kennedy, Kennedy had two children with his first wife, Emily Black, one of whom is called Robert F Kennedy III. In 2014, Kennedy married Cheryl Hines, an actor best known for playing Larry David’s wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. The pair live in Los Angeles.Hines, 58, has sought to distance herself from her husband’s campaign. She said in an interview with Fox News earlier this year that she did not always agree with Kennedy’s politics: “We’ve learned to talk through it. Talk it out. Listen to each other. Sometimes, agree to disagree or say: ‘Oh, I’m going to think about that and I hear what you’re saying,’ or: ‘I don’t like the way you’re saying it. I wish you’d say it in a different way.’”The fear for Biden and Trump is that Kennedy could be a Ralph Nader figure. Nader ran as the Green party candidate in the 2000 presidential election, and some Democrats still believe that it was his performance in Florida that swung the election away from Al Gore and towards George W Bush.Early predictions suggested Kennedy – as a scion of the most famous Democratic family in history – would draw support from Biden. Trump and other Republicans certainly seemed to think so, and spent months extolling his virtues – there was even suggestions among rightwing media that Kennedy could be a good vice-president to Trump.But conservatives might come to regret pumping him up. Polls have shown that Trump supporters are more drawn to Kennedy – with his vaccine skepticism and hardline policies on the border particularly popular – than Biden.Republican donors have flocked to Kennedy, too. Timothy Mellon, a Wyoming-based billionaire who has previously donated to groups supporting Trump, has given $25m to the Kennedy campaign, while Rolling Stone reported that other donors include regular Republican donors like John Schnatter, the disgraced former CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, and a financier who briefly supported Ron DeSantis’s bid for the Republican nomination.The support is enough for Kennedy to potentially make a nuisance of himself in terms of pulling votes away from Biden or Trump. But that doesn’t mean Kennedy is popular.Like Biden and Trump, more people dislike Kennedy than like him. According to FiveThirtyEight, 42% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Kennedy, with just 35% seeing him favorably: a favorability rating of -7%. (Trump has a favorability of -12%, Biden -16%.)He’s a bit less unpopular than his two main opponents, then, which can only be a good thing. But Kennedy has already shown himself to be a problematic figure on the campaign trail.Last July, he caused controversy when a video recording showed him falsely claiming that the Covid-19 virus had been “ethnically targeted” at Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people had greater immunity.Members of the Kennedy family roundly criticized the candidate after his remarks were made public: Jack Schlossberg, a grandson of President Kennedy, called his cousin’s campaign “an embarrassment” in a video.Other family members have made it clear that they oppose their namesake’s candidacy. In April, more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, including six of Kennedy’s siblings, endorsed Biden for president.That should be galling for Kennedy, who on the campaign trail repeatedly mentions his family history. His Kennedy 2024 website frequently references his uncle, who despite his short term ranked as the ninth best president in a 2022 Siena College poll of historians, and 10th in a similar survey of 154 historians and presidential experts this year. (Biden was placed 14th, Trump came last.)Kennedy’s uncle president may even have influenced his decision to run as an independent. In a speech in Maryland in 1958, when he was still a senator and was two years away from becoming the 35th president of the US, John F Kennedy said:“Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past: let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”Kennedy is hoping that Americans will agree with that quote – or at least the bit about not seeking Republican or Democratic answers – come November. More

When he delivered his State of the Union address in March, Joe Biden framed the state of the American economy as a true success story, pointing to the historically low unemployment rate and falling inflation as signs of the country’s robust recovery from the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.“I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world,” the US president said. “And it takes time, but the American people are beginning to feel it.”As Biden frequently boasts, 15m jobs have been created since he took office, and the unemployment rate now stands at 4% after 41 consecutive months of job gains, following the longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment since the 1960s. Inflation has also cooled, after the annual consumer price index hit a peak of 9.1% in June 2022. Stock markets have hit new highs, with the Dow Jones industrial average passing 40,000 points for the first time ever. The International Monetary Fund predicted last month that the US economy was on track to grow at double the rate of any other G7 nation this year.But so far, many Americans are not buying what Biden is selling. According to a Harris poll conducted for the Guardian last month, 56% of Americans wrongly believe that the US economy is in a recession, even though the country’s GDP has grown in recent months. Republicans were more likely to hold that belief, with 67% of them saying the economy is in a recession compared with 49% of Democrats and 53% of independents.The survey continued a trend of Republicans reporting higher levels of pessimism about the nation’s finances since Biden took office. But the relationship between political identity and consumer sentiment has actually been documented for decades, intensifying alongside partisanship in recent years.This political bias offers a partial – although far from complete – explanation for Americans’ persistently dour opinions of the nation’s finances. In recent weeks, the Guardian has dispatched reporters to key swing counties in battleground states, and voters representing a wide array of political views expressed disappointment with the higher cost of living.As LeMario Brown, a former city council member in Fort Valley, Georgia, and local pecan farmer, said: “It doesn’t matter if we’re Republican or Democrat, we all got to eat.”With less than five months left before election day, Biden must find a way to break through the gloom and sell his vision of economic success.A partisan splitThe partisan skew in perceptions of the economy dates back at least to the Reagan administration, as the University of Michigan’s national consumer confidence data shows. With a Republican in the White House, Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say the economy is strong, and the same principle applies when a Democrat takes office.Though the correlation between political identity and consumer sentiment has long been recognized by economists, it appears to have grown stronger in recent years. One study from the University of Florida, based on decades of data from the Florida Consumer Attitude survey, found that state residents reported notably higher levels of consumer confidence after their preferred party regained control of the White House. In the fall of 2016, after Trump won the presidential race, Republicans started expressing much more optimism about their personal finances.View image in fullscreen“Over time, [these shifts] have gotten bigger and bigger* … It’s true that, somehow, this kind of partisanship has been increasing,” said Hector Sandoval, director of the economic analysis program at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research.Sandoval noted that, in 2016, the shift in sentiment can be observed in the immediate month after Trump won the election in November, even though he did not take office until January.“That’s even kind of striking because nothing has really happened [by this time],” Sandoval said. “The change in power isn’t until the next year, in January. But already by then you see how the consumer sentiment is changing a lot.”Although Democrats’ consumer attitudes have also been found to vary depending on the national political environment, Sandoval’s research found this shift to be particularly pronounced among Republicans, a finding that has been corroborated by other studies. Ryan Cummings, who previously worked for Biden’s council of economic advisers, and Neale Mahoney, who served as an adviser to the Biden administration’s national economic council, refer to this pattern as “asymmetric amplification”.According to an analysis by Cummings and Mahoney, the magnitude of the partisan bias on consumer sentiment is roughly two and a half times larger for Republicans compared with Democrats. In a phone call, Mahoney, now an economics professor at Stanford University, summarized the finding by saying that Republicans “cheer louder and boo harder” when their party controls the White House.Cummings and Mahoney found that this asymmetric amplification accounts for roughly a third of the gap between predicted consumer sentiment, based on current economic conditions, and observed consumer sentiment. In the Harris poll, Republicans were indeed more likely to incorrectly say that the economy is in a recession, but notably, nearly half of Democrats believed the same.So even when accounting for partisan bias, about two-thirds of the consumer sentiment gap remains. That has left economists – and many frustrated members of Biden’s team – searching for answers.Beyond the politicsPotential explanations for consumers’ lingering pessimism have abounded as election day nears. Greg Ip, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has attributed the pessimism to what he calls “referred pain”, meaning Americans are casting their broader doubts and fears about the state of the world on to the economy.“Just as one part of your body can hurt because of injury to another, pessimism about the economy may reflect dissatisfaction with the country as a whole,” Ip wrote in November. “Lately, there has been a lot to be dissatisfied about: intensifying political and cultural conflict and intolerance, the pandemic, the border, mass shootings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother explanation touches on the role of the media, with some experts arguing that coverage of the economy has become skewed toward bad news. One recent study from Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner of the Brookings Institution concluded that “economic news has become systemically more negative beginning in 2018, with the negative bias growing over the past three years”.A third school of thought addresses the long-term pain and general psychology around inflation. Although the most recent CPI data found that prices rose by 3.4% over the past 12 months, prices have increased by roughly 20% since 2019. So even as the rate of inflation has fallen, Americans are still adjusting to the overall rise in the cost of living over the past few years. Prices also show no sign of significantly decreasing, a phenomenon known as deflation that is generally associated with times of severe economic distress.View image in fullscreenA separate analysis from Cummings and Mahoney found that “the impact of inflation on consumer sentiment fades out with a decay rate of about 50 percent per year,” meaning it takes a few years for the sting of a high inflationary period to substantially dissipate.“The impact of inflation this year is half as big as the impact last year, which is half as big as the impact in the year beforehand, so it has a half-life of basically one year,” Mahoney said. “But it takes two to three years for most of the impact of inflation to no longer show up in an analysis which connects inflation to consumer sentiment.”That lingering effect can dramatically alter views on the economy because, to put it bluntly, consumers really hate high inflation. Research by Stefanie Stantcheva, an economics professor at Harvard University, found that high inflation triggered feelings of anger, fear and injustice. Respondents expressed a widespread belief that their wages were not keeping pace with inflation, resulting in decreased buying power for their households.Respondents do report receiving wage increases as the inflation rate rose, but people tend to associate those raises with their own job performance or career progression, rather than the higher cost of living, so they often feel like inflation is robbing them of their hard-won earnings. Interestingly, people also tend to believe that the salaries of higher-income individuals are better able to keep up with inflation, amplifying feelings of unfairness.“As a result, when you ask people about the emotions that are triggered when they see prices rise, it’s a lot of stress, fear, anger,” Stantcheva said. “[That anger] tends to be directed at businesses [and] quite a lot at the government.”The way forward?Behind Americans’ doubts about the health of the economy are statistics that go beyond jobs and inflation rates. Understanding those metrics could be key to moving beyond some of the partisan perspectives.Despite the overall economic improvement, persistently high interest rates have increased the cost of carrying debt, adding to the burden of credit card bills and auto loans. Credit card debt hit a record high of $1.1tn in the final quarter of 2023, although that figure slightly declined in the first quarter of this year. Mortgage rates have come down marginally since last fall, when they reached a 23-year high, but their elevation has added to Americans’ existing concerns that the goal of homeownership has moved permanently out of reach.Underlying these statistics is the grim reality of how they disproportionately affect lower-income families. Stantcheva’s study found that lower-income Americans report being most adversely affected by high inflation, with some saying they have even delayed buying essentials to cope with rising prices. Her work builds on existing research suggesting that, though high inflation is loathed by all, the burden of the rising cost of living is not equally shared.Stantcheva’s research also offers some insight into Americans’ thoughts on building a fairer economic system. Like other recent surveys, respondents displayed broad support for a number of policy proposals that might address some of those concerns, including raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest households. Biden has called for such changes to the tax code, although he has struggled to get them approved by Congress, and he has incorporated his support for tax reform into his campaign messaging.The messaging could help Biden bridge the divide between his story of economic success and the reality that many Americans are not yet feeling the benefit of the recovery.“We don’t know each person’s situation, and the statistics just don’t capture this very well,” Stantcheva said. “So I think these feelings should not be dismissed at all. They should be taken quite seriously.” More