Evelyn Reynolds

Asked if he would testify in his defense at the hush-money trial, Donald Trump said yes.“I would have no problem testifying. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump said.He was then asked if he was worried that a conviction would hurt his presidential campaign.It could “make me more popular because the people know it’s a scam”, Trump replied. “It’s a Biden trial.”The former president has inhabited the witness stand before, including in author E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial earlier this year:Donald Trump will go to trial on 15 April in New York City on charges related to making hush-money payments, after a judge rejected his attorney’s arguments that prosecutors had committed misconduct and the trial should be delayed, or canceled outright. The decision raises the possibility that the former president could be convicted or exonerated of one of the four sets of criminal charges he faces before the November presidential election – which could upend the campaign. However, things could still change. Trump says he’ll appeal the ruling, and scored a win at an appeals court in a separate matter earlier today, when his attorneys managed to get the bond he must produce in his civil fraud judgment reduced, and his payment date delayed.Here’s what else happened today:
The supreme court will on Tuesday hear a case brought by a conservative group against abortion pill mifepristone, which Joe Biden’s allies warn is a preview of a second Trump administration’s aspirations.
Before the appeals court ruling, Trump came close to blowing his deadline to produce at $454m bond, which he said he was struggling to find backers for.
The UN security council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza after the United States abstained.
Trump encouraged Israel to wrap up its invasion of Gaza, warning that it was risking its international reputation.
Biden mocked Trump after he gave himself an award for golfing at his own club.
In an interview with a conservative publication, Donald Trump encouraged Israel “to finish up your war” in Gaza and warned “you’re losing a lot of the world”.Trump’s comments came the same day as the United States allowed the UN security council to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, reversing months of obstruction. Joe Biden has seen some Democratic supporters defect recently over his support for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and earlier this month, the Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer accused him of inhibiting peace and called for Israel to hold new elections.In an interview with Israel Hayom, which is owned by the family of Sheldon Adelson, a conservative mogul and supporter of both Trump and Netanyahu who died in 2021, Trump expressed support for Israel’s response to the 7 October attack.“I would act very much the same way as you did. You would have to be crazy not to,” he said.But he also criticized Israel for harming its reputation, as images of destroyed infrastructure and dead civilians poured out of Gaza:
You have to finish up your war. To finish it up. You gotta get it done. And, I am sure you will do that. And we gotta get to peace, we can’t have this going on. And I will say, Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support, you have to finish up, you have to get the job done.
With the supreme court set to weigh a conservative challenge against abortion pill mifepristone, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports on a study showing more and amore Americans are relying on the medication to end their pregnancies:In the six months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, roughly 26,000 more Americans used pills to induce their own at-home abortions than would have done so if Roe had not fallen, according to a new study.Published on Monday in Jama, one of the leading peer-reviewed medical journals in the United States, the study comes ahead of a key Tuesday hearing at the US supreme court at which the justices will hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the future of a major abortion pill, mifepristone.Pills are used in 63% of all abortions within the US healthcare system, and the study suggests they are being used by even more people than previously known in order to evade abortion restrictions that now blanket much of the US.Analyzing data from abortion pill suppliers who operate outside of the US healthcare system, the study provides a rare window into the growing practice known as “self-managed abortion”. Although definitions of self-managed abortion can vary, the practice generally refers to abortions that take place outside the formal healthcare system, without the aid of a US-based clinician.Ahead of the supreme court’s hearing on Tuesday on the availability of a widely used abortion pill, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren warned that a future Trump administration would seek to ban abortion nationwide.Warren said the case brought by a conservative group, which centers on the drug mifepristone, highlighted the stakes of the 2024 election.“Republicans have gone to the courts acting as if they know better than the scientific experts at the FDA about the safety of medication abortion,” she said today on a press call organized by the Biden campaign. “What does that tell us? Donald Trump and Maga Republicans are prepared to use every tool in their toolbox to control women’s bodies: banning abortion nationwide, ending access to IVF and even attacking contraception access.”Julie Chavez Rodriguez, manager of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, said they planned to make abortion a central theme, noting that Democrats had performed strongly in elections where the issue was on the ballot. The campaign, she said, would keep reminding voters that it was Trump who laid the groundwork to overturn Roe v Wade with his appointment of three conservative supreme court justices.Mini Timmaraju, the CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said Trump’s support of a national abortion ban at 15 or 16 weeks of pregnancy would backfire.“A 15-week abortion ban is still an abortion ban,” she said on the call. “And as we showed in Virginia, Americans hate abortion bans, they will not fall for it, they will not stand for it.”Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has released a statement attacking Donald Trump after a weekend the former president spend awarding himself while struggling to secure a bond for his civil fraud conviction.“Donald Trump is weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate for president,” said James Singer, a spokesman for the Biden-Harris campaign.“His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda. America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.”National security spokesman John Kirby has just wrapped up his part of the press briefing at the White House and left the room, leaving press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre handing questions about congressional matters now involving the stuck legislation over aid to Ukraine.Kirby said of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s canceling of the high level delegation visit to the White House tomorrow for talks on Gaza:“It’s disappointing, we would have preferred to have had that meeting.”Kirby said that Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant is currently at the White House for a long-scheduled visit, meeting with national security adviser Jake Sullivan.“Humanitarian assistance will be on the agenda,” Kirby emphasized.He said that the US abstained in the UN security council resolution vote this morning calling for an immediate ceasefire and the release of the remaining hostages by Hamas, which controls Gaza.“We chose to abstain [rather than veto] because it did not include language condemning Hamas,” Kirby said. And it did link a ceasefire to a hostage deal. The US put forward a ceasefire resolution last Friday but it was more conditional than the one it abstained on today. The US resolution last week was vetoed by Russia and China.Kirby added: “Hamas could solve all these problems right now by putting down their arms and releasing the hostages.”Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant is in Washington, meeting with national security adviser Jake Sullivan today and will meet with US defense secretary Lloyd Austin tomorrow.My colleague Julian Borger wrote earlier that after the vote at the UN [this morning], the office of Benjamin Netanyahu cancelled a planned visit to Washington by two of his ministers, intended to discuss a planned Israeli offensive on the southernmost Gazan city of Rafah, which the US opposes. The White House said it was “very disappointed” by the decision. However, a previously arranged visit by the Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, went ahead.US national security spokesperson John Kirby said just now at the White House press briefing underway that Israel was still “a friend and ally” and that the US was still supplying Israel with aid and weapons.But the US is adamant that Israel should not only agree to a ceasefire tied to a hostage deal but should not invade Rafah, the city closest to Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, which is packed with more than 1.5 million desperate Palestinians who fled the military operation that has decimated a lot of Gaza further north.“We have the same concerns about a ground offensive in Rafah that we had yesterday and the day before,” Kirby said.The Israeli military bombed parts of Rafah overnight.National security spokesperson John Kirby just spoke to the press about the US abstaining on the vote at the UN security council in New York earlier today calling for an immediate ceasefire in Israel’s war in Gaza.“Our vote does not represent, repeat, does not represent, a shift in our policy,” he said.Kirby added: “We wanted to get to a place where we could support this resolution.”The US did not support it because it did not contain language condemning Hamas, he said.He was just asked about Israel then cancelling the high-level diplomatic delegation visit to the White House tomorrow.“We are kind of perplexed by this,” he said. He said it was a non-binding resolution at the UN so does not hamper “Israel’s ability to go after Hamas”.He emphasized that the US has not changed its policy, no matter what the Israeli government is implying.The White House press briefing is running later than originally scheduled today.Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is due to be joined in the west wing briefing room by national security spokesperson John Kirby.Jean-Pierre usually deals with most of the domestic issues while Kirby deals with foreign policy issues.The situation in Russia after the probable-Islamic State attack last Friday night at a concert hall and the latest on Israel-Gaza will be prominent on the agenda.The US abstained on a UN security council vote on an immediate ceasefire and hostage release earlier today, following which Israel cancelled its diplomatic government visit to Washington to discuss Rafah.The briefing is getting underway now.Donald Trump will go to trial on 15 April in New York City on charges related to making hush-money payments, after a judge rejected his attorney’s arguments that prosecutors had committed misconduct and the trial should be delayed, or canceled outright. The decision raises the possibility that the former president could be convicted or exonerated of one the four sets of criminal charges he faces before the November presidential election – which could upend the campaign. However, things could still change. Trump says he’ll appeal the ruling, and scored a win at an appeals court in a separate matter earlier today, when his attorneys managed to get the bond he must produce in his civil fraud judgment reduced, and his payment date delayed.Here’s what else is going on:
Before the appeals court ruling, Trump came close to blowing his deadline to produce at $454m bond, which he said he was struggling to find backers for.
The UN security council passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza after the United States abstained.
Trump gave himself an award at his own golf club, drawing mockery from Joe Biden.
Asked if he would testify in his defense at the hush-money trial, Donald Trump said yes.“I would have no problem testifying. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Trump said.He was then asked if he was worried that a conviction would hurt his presidential campaign.It could “make me more popular because the people know it’s a scam”, Trump replied. “It’s a Biden trial.”The former president has inhabited the witness stand before, including in author E Jean Carroll’s second defamation trial earlier this year: More

The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” with her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s new career in media.“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel – a member of the powerful Republican Romney family who reportedly dropped the name at Trump’s behest – became RNC chair in 2017.In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.Cheney lost her seat in Congress later that year. Kinzinger chose to retire.McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.McDaniel’s move to NBC was announced last week. On Sunday, she appeared on Meet the Press, the flagship politics show.Characterising her support for Trump’s election fraud lies as “taking one for the whole team”, she said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse” and that Biden won “fair and square” – but still claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [with battleground state elections] in 2020”.A former Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, issued an on-air protest.“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” he told the current host, Kristin Welker, “because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination”.Monday brought more reports of staff discontent – and its open expression by two of the network’s biggest names.On Morning Joe, the MSNBC show that often sets the Washington agenda, co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said: “We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire” McDaniel.“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday. We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.”Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, said: “To be clear, we believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.“But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor. Here’s why.”There followed a compilation of McDaniel’s comments about the 2020 election, which Brzezinski called “exhausting”.Disquiet was also reported over McDaniel reportedly being paid $300,000.“Across MSNBC they have been cutting contributors,” an unnamed host told Politico. “So everyone’s like, what the fuck? You found 300 for her?” More

Linda L Bean – a granddaughter of the famed outdoor retailer LL Bean who became an entrepreneur, philanthropist and Republican activist – has died. She was 82.Bean died on Saturday, her business manager, Veronika Carlson, confirmed in a written statement on Sunday. No cause was given.Her support for Donald Trump when he won the presidency in 2016 prompted some on the political left to call for a boycott of her family’s clothing company. But a statement from Carlson said Bean also “was known for her amazing work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit as well as her pride and dedication to her home state of Maine and LL Bean, the company her grandfather founded”.“Our hearts go out to her family and friends,” Carlson’s statement said.Bean’s grandfather, Leon Leonwood Bean, founded the company in 1912. It grew through its popular catalogue, offering durable products such as rubber-bottomed boots that came with a lifetime guarantee.Linda Bean served on the company’s board for nearly half a century. She also bought lobster dealerships, founded the Perfect Maine Lobster brand in 2007, and owned general stores, inns and vacation rentals on Maine’s central coast, where she lived in Port Clyde.She helped lead the effort to have Maine’s lobster industry certified as sustainable in 2013 by a London-based non-profit, the Marine Stewardship Council – a certification that was pulled in 2022 over concern about harm to whales.Her philanthropic efforts included supporting LifeFlight of Maine medical helicopters and the Maine Botanical Gardens at Boothbay, as well as promoting the life of the early 20th-century illustrator and artist NC Wyeth – the father of the famous painter Andrew Wyeth – and preserving the family’s properties.“Linda Bean loved the state of Maine. Its coastal communities, islands, and art, particularly by the Wyeths, had a special place in her heart,” the Republican US senator Susan Collins said in a written statement on Sunday. “Linda also was an astute businesswoman who promoted Maine lobster through her restaurants. Many a time while waiting for my plane in Portland, I had a cup of her famous lobster stew at her airport restaurant.”Bean was also a big donor to Republican causes and twice campaigned unsuccessfully for Congress, in 1988 and 1992. She ran as an opponent of abortion rights, gay rights legislation and gun control, and she believed in cutting taxes to spur the economy.She also supported efforts to repeal a Maine law outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation, and she urged the Department of Defense to overturn Obama-era policies allowing transgender individuals to serve in the military.In 2017, the Federal Election Commission said Bean made excessive contributions to a political action committee she bankrolled to support Trump’s presidential campaign. That prompted some liberal groups to call for a boycott of LL Bean – which she described as harassment by “a small kernel of hardcore bullies out on the left coast, west coast, in California, trying to control what we do, what we buy, what we sell in Maine”.Trump came to her defense – the Republican urged his supporters to buy the company’s products.“While her politics did not align with mine, Linda and I found common ground in our mutual love of our home state, of the coast of Maine and our working waterfronts, of Maine inspired art and of the perfect Maine lobster roll,” the state’s governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a written statement. “I enjoyed her company and admired her business acumen.”No information about survivors was immediately available. More

A Texas man has legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else and announced he is running for US president in the 2024 election.Formerly known as Dustin Ebey, the 35-year-old is a US army veteran and seventh-grade math teacher in the suburbs of Dallas, and now has a Texas driver’s license to prove his name change.He said he wanted to change his name because he was unsatisfied with this year’s presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump.“Three hundred million people can do better,” he said in reference to the two frontrunners for the nation’s highest office. “There really should be some outlet for people like me who are just so fed up with this constant power grab between the two parties that just has no benefit to the common person.“It’s not necessarily about me as a person, but it’s about literally anybody else as an idea,” he told news outlet WFAA88.He needs 113,000 signatures from non-primary voters in the state of Texas by May to get his new name on ballots. Since that is unlikely, he is campaigning to get people to write in his name.“We don’t have a ‘neither’ option on the ballot, and this kind of fills that role,” he said.The candidate’s website says: “Literally Anybody Else isn’t a person, it’s a rally cry.“For too long have Americans been a victim of its political parties putting party loyalty over governance. Together let’s send the message to Washington and say, ‘You will represent or be replaced.’“America should not be stuck choosing between the “King of Debt” (his self-declaration) and an 81-year old.” More

Joe Biden clapped back at Donald Trump after Trump posted a typically bizarre boast about his self-proclaimed golfing prowess.“Congratulations, Donald,” the president told his Republican rival. “Quite the accomplishment.”Sarcasm is hard to type but it surely suffused Biden’s words, which were posted to the platform formerly known as Twitter as part of what appears to be a broader strategy from the Biden campaign of taunting and ridiculing Trump over his legal and financial problems.Trump made his typically capitals-splattered boast about a supposed great golfing victory on Truth Social, the platform he started when Twitter banned him for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress.“It is my great honour,” the former president wrote, “to be at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach tonight, AWARDS NIGHT, to receive THE CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY & THE SENIOR CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY. I WON BOTH!“A large and golfing talented membership, a GREAT and difficult course, made the play very exciting. The qualifying and match play was amazing … Very exciting, thank you!!!”Biden’s tweet followed. Many other social media users quoted Rick Reilly, a former Sports Illustrated columnist and author of Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.Reilly, who has played with the former president, has described how Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant”, including “kick[ing] the ball out of the rough so many times, the caddies call him Pele”, taking endless free shots and falsifying scores.On Sunday, Reilly told Trump: “Call us if you ever win one on a course you DON’T own and operate.”Trump’s dubious claims to honours and titles at his own courses are well documented. Notably, his West Palm Beach club was revealed in 2017 to list him as its 1999 champion. It opened in 2000.Away from the fairways, Trump secured the Republican nomination to face Biden again this year despite facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to remove him from the ballot.On Monday, Trump faces a hearing in his New York criminal case over hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels – who he met at a celebrity golf event in Nevada – and a deadline to pay a $454m bond in a civil fraud suit, also in New York.Golf courses are among Trump assets the Democratic attorney general of New York, Letitia James, could try to seize if Trump does not pay up.Biden’s campaign has seized on Trump’s financial troubles, taunting him as “Broke Don”. The weekend saw a social media surge for the nickname “Don Poorleone”, a play on Trump’s mob-like approach to politics and Don Corleone, the name of the mafia boss played by Marlon Brando in the Godfather saga.On Monday, meanwhile, Edward-Isaac Dovere, author of Battle for the Soul, a book on Biden’s victory in 2020, noted an interesting point.So far in the 2024 campaign, Dovere wrote, Trump “has taken more time for golf tournaments than campaign events. Last night, Trump bragged about winning at golf – while still no campaign events booked.”Most users, however, focused on mocking Trump’s golf-based braggadocio, many raising amusing parallels with another former world leader.“According to North Korean media Kim Jong Il scored 11 holes-in-one on his very first round of golf,” said Gideon Rachman, author of The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World.“So Trump has a way to go.”
Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?
On Thursday 2 May, 8-9.15pm GMT, join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign.Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

The embattled speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, should not be “fearful” of the motion to remove him filed by the far-right extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene, said Kevin McCarthy – who last year became the first speaker ejected by his own party when another extremist, Matt Gaetz, moved against him in the same way.“Speaker Johnson is doing the very best job he can,” McCarthy told CBS on Sunday, two days after Greene filed her motion. “It’s a difficult situation, but the one [piece of] advice I would give to the conference and to the speaker is: do not be fearful of a motion to vacate. I do not think they could do it again.”“They” – the Trumpist far-right of a far-right party – did it to McCarthy in October. Gaetz, from Florida, filed a motion to vacate the speakership – a move made possible by concessions won when the right put McCarthy through 15 votes to secure the speaker’s gavel nine months before.McCarthy, from California, told CBS Gaetz had been “trying to stop an ethics complaint”.“It was purely Matt coming to me trying [to get] me to do something illegal to stop the ethics committee from moving forward in an investigation that was started long before I became a speaker.”Gaetz was investigated by the House ethics committee over allegations of sexual misconduct also subject to investigation by the US Department of Justice. The congressman denies wrongdoing.Gaetz’s motion to eject McCarthy was supported by seven other Republicans and succeeded when Democrats declined to vote to keep the speaker in place.Johnson succeeded McCarthy after three Republican leadership figures – Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan and Tom Emmer – failed to gain sufficient support, in a more-than-three-week process that left the House leaderless.Johnson has now passed two spending bills with Democratic support, keeping the federal government open but committing what was McCarthy’s chief sin in the eyes of the right.Greene was not among the Republicans who moved against McCarthy but on Friday she moved against Johnson. Rightwing Republicans expressed frustration with Johnson but many also reproved Greene. Congress left Washington for a two-week recess without Greene bringing the motion up for a vote.Republicans have a two-vote majority, soon to dwindle to one. Democrats are seen as likely to support Johnson should Greene press ahead and try to remove him but also likely to extract concessions for doing so, most prominently including Johnson allowing a vote on new funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia.In line with Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president seeking a second term in the White House, Johnson has refused to bring to the floor a Ukraine aid package which passed the Senate with bipartisan support.McCarthy, who left Congress last year, told CBS: “I don’t think the Democrats will go along with [Greene’s motion]. Focus on the country. Focus on the job you’re supposed to do, and actually do it fearlessly. Just move forward.“We watched what transpired the last time. You went three weeks without Congress being able to act. You can’t do anything if you don’t have a speaker. I think we’ve moved past that. We’ve got a lot of challenges.“Those are the issues the country is actually looking [at], on the economy and others. If we focus on the country and what the country desires, I think the personalities can solve their own problems.” More

Donald Trump’s getting the band back together. But this time they come with political baggage, conspiracy theories and, in some instances, criminal convictions.The former US president’s old acolytes are returning to the fold, eager to exert influence on his bid for the White House and have their say in a potential second administration. That poses a headache for his election campaign team, whose efforts to run a disciplined operation can be upended at any moment by the mercurial Trump.“Trump always wants to feel comfortable about the people who surround him and what better way to do that than to get the band back together?” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington DC. “We could look forward to the greatest hits ad nauseam.”If a man is judged by the company he keeps, Trump’s speaks volumes. There was uproar in 2022 when when the rapper Kanye West brought the white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.Trump’s inner circle includes the far-right representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat turned rightwing media personality and outspoken critic of aid to Ukraine; and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who has pushed the “great replacement” theory and claimed that the 6 January 2021 insurrection was an inside job.Since Trump secured the Republican nomination for president earlier this month, several “Make America great again” (Maga) alumni have sought to regain his patronage or rejoin his team. It is a cast of characters with a chequered history.Paul Manafort, a veteran political consultant, could return as a campaign adviser later this year, according to the Washington Post newspaper. The job discussions have largely centred around the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July and could include Manafort playing a role in fundraising for Trump’s campaign, the report said.Trump pardoned Manafort in 2020, seven months after he was released to home confinement, sparing the Republican operative from serving the bulk of his seven-and-a-half-year prison term for federal tax evasion and bank fraud.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile the New York Times reported that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager in 2016, could also play a role at the convention. Lewandowski was ousted from a pro-Trump political action committee in 2021 after a major donor’s wife accused him of inappropriate behaviour.Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the MSNBC network: “Manafort coming back in is to set up control of the convention so that there are no slippages. You’ve got Lewandowski and others who are keen political operatives for Trump that will be out and about enforcing a strategy that will take no prisoners.“I don’t think people appreciate exactly what we’re going to be in for. This campaign is going to be very difficult on the country because these folks are all about one thing and one thing only: Donald Trump’s absolute return to power.”Meanwhile Roger Stone, a self-proclaimed dirty trickster who has been a friend and ally of Trump for 30 years, still speaks to him occasionally and was spotted at the Super Tuesday victory party at Mar-a-Lago. Stone was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and sentenced to 40 months in prison before the then president commuted the sentence.The rapper Kurt Jantz, professionally known as Forgiato Blow, was also at the Super Tuesday event. His Maga songs have been criticised for homophobia and glorifying violence and he has suffered social media bans. Blow said: “He’s the American dream. I supported Trump since 2015. I was one of the people early about it. At first it was just about Trump being a boss but he’s a rapper’s dream: beautiful wife, amazing mansion that we’re in right now. At the end of the day, that’s what everybody wants.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThe rush of would-be influencers eager to whisper unsolicited advice into Trump’s ear is making life difficult for his otherwise unexpectedly professional campaign led by the longtime political operatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who find themselves attempting to play gatekeeper.Christina Bobb, a lawyer and former One America News Network (OAN) host who amplified Trump’s false claims of election fraud, faced questions over her competence at the campaign. She has been diverted to the RNC as senior counsel for “election integrity”.Trump reportedly wanted to hire the far-right activist Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist, Islamophobe and former Republican candidate for Congress, but Wiles managed to block the move, according to the Axios website.Charlie Sykes, a conservative columnist and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “In a normal world, a presidential candidate would not get within a zip code of Laura Loomer. Now she’s showing up at Mar-a-Lago. And, of course, they can be relied upon to attack any other conservative that does not engage in the kind of rhetoric that Trump engages in.”But Trump continues to speak by phone to some without the knowledge of his campaign. Their indulgence is seen by critics as an ominous indicator that, should he return to the White House, Trump would make appointments based only on loyalty and Maga credentials, a break from his first term when figures such as the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, and defence secretary, Jim Mattis, sought to rein him in.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: Trump has made it clear that he was disappointed and fed up with the Washington establishment, as he calls it, and so he’s got a group of henchmen and women who will do his bidding, who don’t feel bound by the law or being liked and respected outside their core.“These are the foot soldiers in Trump’s authoritarian army. They will do whatever it takes to win and we’ve seen it; this is not speculation. They put out the playbook in 2020 and we’d be foolish not to expect that playbook to be used in 2024.” More

Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, earlier this month to mark the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a turning point in the struggle for civil rights, the Rev Al Sharpton’s thoughts turned to an old mentor.Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman to serve in the US Congress and the first woman to seek the Democratic nomination for president. More than half a century later, Sharpton now stood with Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour to serve as vice-president.“I told her Mrs Chisholm – Mrs C as I called her – is smiling down on us,” Sharpton, 69, says by phone. “It’s a long road from her in ’68 to you on that bridge but we still got one more river to cross and that’s electing a woman president. When they do that then Mrs C can smile with that smile only she could have. She would be disappointed but not discouraged because she always believed you’ve got to keep fighting no matter how long it takes.”The story of Chisholm’s run for the presidency in 1972, smashing gender and race barriers and unsettling old school politicians, is told in Shirley, a film written and directed by John Ridley (an Oscar winner for his 12 Years a Slave screenplay) and starring Regina King, streaming on Netflix.Expect to hear more about the trailblazing politician, instantly recognisable for her puffy wigs and retro glasses, throughout this year, which marks the centenary of her birth. Among her evergreen quotations: “Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt”; “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair.”Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1924, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants. Her mother was a seamstress and domestic worker, her father (a follower of Marcus Garvey) worked in a factory. She lived in Barbados from age five to nine with her maternal aunt and grandmother.She returned to Brooklyn in 1934 and excelled academically, graduating from Brooklyn College with honours in sociology and prizes for debating, and earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from Columbia University.Chisholm began her career as a teacher, advocating for better opportunities for minority students. Her outspoken passion for social justice led her to become involved in local politics and community activism. In the 1960s she served in the New York state assembly, where she fought for education reform, affordable housing and social welfare programmes.Sharpton first met her in 1968 when, as a 12- or 13-year-old boy preacher at a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn, he was supporting a friend of the bishop, James Farmer, in the election for New York’s 12th congressional district. “I went out and I met Shirley Chisholm, who was running against James Farmer, and she said, ‘Boy preacher, you’re on the wrong side.’ That’s how we started talking and she was very kind to me. In about two or three weeks, I switched sides.”Sharpton adds: “She was a very regal woman, an educator. She would always say, ‘Alfred, you’re not speaking proper English. Repeat that sentence!’ She was very formal but very much a grassroots person. She’d get on the corners and take the megaphone from me and she would draw her own crowd and she probably was one of the greatest underestimated orators of our time.”Using the slogan “unbought and unbossed”, Chisholm duly pulled off an upset victory, making history as the first African American woman elected to Congress. She declared: “Just wait, there may be some fireworks.”Washington was still dominated by white men who had grown up in the era of Jim Crow racial segregation. One of them harassed Chisholm every day about her making the same salary as him: “I can’t believe you’re making 42.5 like me.” Eventually she told him to vanish when he saw her enter the chamber.Historian Barbara Winslow, 78, founder of the Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism,, says: “How was she treated? Well, the white southerners were absolutely repulsive and disgusting. One of her aides told us the story of she would go into a congressional meeting, and you’d sit all around and, when she would get up to leave, this one congressman had a bottle of Lysol and wiped off her chair.”Leaders of the House of Representatives relegated Chisholm to the agriculture committee, a position she condemned as irrelevant to an urban district such as hers. She was reassigned, first to the veterans affairs committee and eventually to the education and labour committees. During seven terms in Congress she championed legislation to improve the lives of marginalised communities, advocating for childcare, education and healthcare reform.View image in fullscreenIn 1972 Chisholm became the first African American woman to seek the nomination for president from a major political party. She announced: “I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolises a new era in American political history.”It was always a long shot and she did not expect to win. But Shola Lynch, an award-winning film-maker whose directorial debut was the documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, understands why she did it.“Every time she went on a campus to speak, people would be like, Shirley Chisholm, you should be our president!” Lynch says. “She had defied odds twice to become something that nobody could imagine. So part of her was like, you know what? Let’s do it. That willingness to put yourself out there and to try and to go for it and to not limit yourself as a woman, as a Black woman, is an incredible example.“To have her in the documentary telling her own story, she becomes your relative, the aunt you wish you had who did the amazing thing you didn’t realise when you ignored her at Thanksgiving so many times because she had that weird fur on and then all of a sudden, you’re old enough to be like, hot diggity woman, you did that?!”With a coalition of students, women and minority groups serving as her campaign volunteers and a shoestring budget of $300,000, Chisholm entered a dozen state primaries and campaigned in several states in what became known as the “Chisholm Trail”. She seized the opportunity to rattle the status quo and advocate for issues such as gender and racial equality and economic justice.She also pushed into once unthinkable political territory. Winslow, author of Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change, says: “She was in the Florida Panhandle. It’s pretty conservative, to put in bluntly, and she’s campaigning in a town where there had been a very famous lynching. She writes later that she’s campaigning under a Confederate statue of men with a rifle and she has a good-sized crowd. This elderly Black man comes up to her afterwards and says, ‘I never thought I’d live to see the day.’”Chisholm had the backing of the Black Panther party and the civil rights stalwart Rosa Parks. But she faced opposition, resistance and scepticism as she took on white male rivals including George McGovern, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie. Black activists such as Jesse Jackson, John Conyers Jr and Julian Bond supported McGovern.Sharpton says: “I remember going with her to meetings where she would come out almost with tears in her eyes because Black men, Black elected officials that she had fought for, would not support her only because she was a woman. She would always say to me, ‘Alfred, we are fighting racism and misogyny.’ I couldn’t believe these are guys that would preach Black power and they had already made their deals with McGovern and others and wouldn’t support her.”Chisholm boycotted 1972’s National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, because it was dominated by men and the conveners could not decide whether to endorse her campaign.View image in fullscreenSharpton adds: “She was disappointed in a lot of the women’s groups and the Black groups that didn’t support her. I think that hurt her. I was more angry than she was because I felt as a kid that these guys and women’s groups weren’t who they said they were; this was my first exposure to the hypocrisy of a lot of them.“She would say, ‘Alfred, it is a scar but you have to learn to fight through your pain and keep going and keep going. She was determined to go ahead but I think it hurt her because she, in some cases, was as surprised as I was.”Chisholm alienated some Black voters when she visited Wallace, a governor of Alabama who had built his political career on racial segregation, in hospital as he recovered from an assassination attempt. It was a hugely controversial and divisive gesture.Congresswoman Barbara Lee, then a student president, Black Panther party volunteer and campaign organiser for Chisholm in California, was mortified. “I hated that,” she recalls by phone from Washington. “I was about ready to leave the campaign. Oh, my God, here I was, idealistic, young, first campaign, first time I registered to vote.“Got to know her, loved her dearly, loved her politics and then she goes to meet this segregationist who’s known as a racist who I couldn’t stand because of what he did to people in Alabama. Here he was running for president. I was furious. She took me to task and she used to shake her finger at me – she called me little girl – and she said you’ve got to stop and you have to be human.”Lee, 77, was later told by Wallace’s daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, what had happened in the hospital meeting. “Shirley Chisholm said, I’m a Christian, and she prayed with him. She was the one responsible for George Wallace in his wheelchair (he was paralysed) rolling down the middle of Dexter Avenue Baptist church [in Alabama] apologising to the Black community for his segregationist views and the harm he had done. Of course, that was much too little too late and an expedient political move. But he did it.”Chisholm herself did not regret the meeting, arguing that Wallace always spoke well of her and helped her rally support among southerners in Congress for a bill to extend federal minimum wage provisions to domestic workers.It was a lesson that Lee, who appears as a character in Shirley, took to heart in her own political career. “There were people like George Bush I’ve had to deal with. I disagreed with him on everything when I brought to him my legislation, and talked to him about global Aids and needing to do something, he signed the bills that I put forth that established the Pepfar programme and the Global Fund and all of those global initiatives and helped save 25 million lives. That’s because I worked with a rightwing Republican who I voted against and disagreed with on every policy he put forward. So she taught me a lot.”She arrived at the 1972 Democratic national convention with 152 delegates, more than Muskie or Humphrey. But McGovern had put together 1,729 delegates and claimed the nomination. He went on to lose in a landslide to President Richard Nixon. Chisholm went back to Congress and rose in leadership to become the secretary of the House Democratic Caucus.View image in fullscreenShe retired in 1983, noting that “moderate and liberal” members were “running for cover from the new right” in the era of Ronald Reagan. In addition, her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, had been injured in a car accident and needed extensive care (her first marriage, to Conrad Chisholm, ended in divorce in 1977 and she did not have children).Chisholm co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women, which represented the concerns of African American women, and taught politics and women’s studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College in Atlanta. She also had fun. Lee – who helped the film-makers with historical research, visited the set and attended this week’s premiere in Los Angeles – recalls: “She was always dancing and she came to my mother’s 75th birthday party in Berkeley.“She and my mother danced with the young guys until 2am, closed the place down. I have pictures of her on the dancefloor. She was a fun-loving person. She was very sensitive, though, and she cried a lot in private but you would never know it because she was a very stern, very tough, very brilliant strong Black woman.”President Bill Clinton nominated Chisholm to be US ambassador to Jamaica but she declined due to ill health. She died aged 80 in 2005 at her home in Ormond Beach, Florida. Lee has since fought hard to preserve her legacy. She arranged for a portrait of Chisholm to be displayed at the US Capitol and is now working on the creation of a congressional gold medal in her honour.When Harris made her own bid for the White House in 2019, she paid tribute to Chisholm in her campaign speeches, slogans and colours. But she abandoned her run before the Iowa caucuses, meaning that America is still waiting for its first female president after nearly 250 years.Sharpton reflects: “She was very proud of her race and her gender and she in private would say that it always takes people in history to take us to the next step and, if I’ve got to take America to the next step for Blackness and Black America to the next step for misogyny, then let me be that vessel.“The thing that was always striking to me about Mrs C is she never saw herself in contemporary terms. She saw herself as historic and that’s how she would talk about it. She would tell me, ‘Don’t pay attention to tomorrow’s tabloids; think about what history will say about you, young man.’ That’s how she thought.”
Shirley is now available on Netflix More