US Politics

The last person who occupied the job of US vice-president ended up the target of a violent mob calling for him to be hanged. Even so, as Donald Trump closes in on the Republican nomination for 2024, there is no shortage of contenders eager to be his deputy.It is safe to assume that Mike Pence, who was Trump’s running mate in 2016 and 2020, will not get the job this time. His refusal to comply with his boss’s demand to overturn the last election caused a permanent rift and made Pence a perceived traitor and target of the January 6 insurrectionists.Undeterred, Trump’s campaign surrogates in the recent Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, both of which he won handily, have been trying to outdo each other with extravagant displays of fealty. “It’s very clear he’s holding these open auditions like it’s The Apprentice,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “He will flirt with everyone. He will make them dance. They will all debase themselves and humiliate themselves and jockey for that spot.”When he first ran for president in 2016, Trump understood that he needed a vice-presidential pick who could help shore up support among Republican evangelicals and social conservatives, who were suspicious of the thrice-married reality TV star. Pence, the then Indiana governor and fierce social conservative, was from what Trump likes to call central casting.This year Trump’s allies and Republican strategists believe that he needs help attracting suburban swing voters in a handful of battleground states, where November’s election will likely be decided. Many commentators therefore predict that he will choose a woman or a person of colour, especially since the demise of the constitutional right to abortion.Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, said one of the factors important to Trump is “just how much of a sycophant they would be, not just in terms of ‘Oh, I love you, Donald Trump’, but do you love me enough when I tell you to violate your oath of office in the constitution that you’ll do it?’ And that person for me is Elise Stefanik.”Stefanik, 39, the highest-ranking woman in the Republican conference in the House of Representatives and one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump, appears to have timed her run perfectly.She gained national prominence last month after embarrassing the heads of three top universities about antisemitism on their campuses during a congressional hearing, which prompted two of them to later resign. Stefanik claimed victory and declared: “I will always deliver results.” Trump reportedly described her as a “killer”.Since then she has outdone even the notoriously obsequious Pence. Soon after Trump described those convicted of crimes in the insurrection as “hostages”, she parroted the same term on NBC television’s flagship Meet the Press programme. When Trump confused rival Nikki Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi while discussing January 6, Stefanik brazenly denied what everyone had heard.Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “She’s running flat out for it. That’s the only explanation for the things she says and does. I’m embarrassed for her but she’s not embarrassed because she only has one career goal. She says whatever she thinks he’ll like. He does like it.”In what is currently Washington’s favourite parlour game, the smart money is currently on Stefanik. Bill Whalen, a former media consultant for politicians including the former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, said: “Just based on what she did at that congressional hearing, what could make Trump more pleased than watching her take apart the Ivy League presidents? That would be very appealing for him to put her on the ticket.”Another contender is Kristi Noem, serving her second term as South Dakota’s governor after a landslide re-election victory in 2022. She gained national attention after refusing to impose a statewide mask mandate during the coronavirus pandemic. Noem campaigned for Trump at several events in Iowa earlier this month.Then there is the South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who is African American and could help Trump make inroads among Black voters. Scott was a one-time Republican rival to Trump but dropped out of the race in November. He has since endorsed Trump and told him during his victory speech in New Hampshire: “I just love you!” He also just announced his engagement to be married.Other potential running mates are Trump’s former White House press secretary and current Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders; Ben Carson, who was Trump’s housing secretary; Kari Lake, who narrowly lost a gubernatorial bid in Arizona in 2022 and is now running for the Senate there; Florida congressman Byron Donalds; Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; and Ohio senator JD Vance.There appears to be broad resistance to picking Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador and his last rival for the Republican nomination. On 19 January she said being a running mate was “off the table” while Trump said he would “probably” not pick her. Since then relations between the two have soured with Trump using insults such as “birdbrain” and Haley critiquing his age and mental acuity.In addition, Haley’s hawkish views on foreign policy, including military aid for Ukraine, are anathema to Trump’s “America first” base. Rightwing broadcaster Tucker Carlson vowed recently: “I would not only not vote for that ticket, I would advocate against it as strongly as I could.”Trump has publicly said he has already made up his mind, but he is reportedly still calling friends, supporters and donors for advice on whom he should pick. The stakes are unusually high this time and the oft-quoted old saw from Franklin Roosevelt’s deputy John Nance Garner – “The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss” – may not apply in 2024: Biden is 81 and Trump is 77, meaning that a vice-president’s ability to assume command has never been more pertinent.Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University, said: “A wary, sceptical voter is going to be thinking: ‘OK, what happens if … ?’ It makes the choice of the running mate all the more important.“We talk about this every election and we then dismiss it as voters don’t really think that way. But it’s on the table in this election in ways it hasn’t been in the past because you are focusing on the candidate’s health and their mental faculty, and the chance that one or both could not finish out a term.“That does lead to a different calculation with Trump in this regard. It’s not so much about picking up some electoral votes or reaching out to a group. It is the question of picking somebody who credibly can say they’re ready to lead from day one. You would think their chops would be more important than just their demographic.”Trump may not be in a hurry to make a final decision. The longer he dangles the prospect of the vice-presidency, the more that aspirants will genuflect and make elaborate attempts to get in his good graces.Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University, agreed. She said: “He doesn’t think he needs anybody to win this election so my guess is he’ll require lots of prominent people to come and pay homage to him. Then he’ll wait for the convention [in July] to announce it because he wants to make clear that VP – that they’re irrelevant. Generally, we worry more who his VP will be than he does.” More

Joe Biden is more unpopular than Donald Trump. The Democrats’ upstairs-downstairs coalition frays, riven by the Israel-Gaza war, crisis at the US-Mexico border and inter-generational tensions. The party convention in Chicago in August carries the potential for a repeat of 1968. Then, pandemonium in the Windy City helped cost Hubert Humphrey the White House.But for sustained Republican efforts to gut reproductive rights, a strong issue for Democrats to run on, Biden and Kamala Harris would be in even deeper trouble. Even on the economy: strong GDP numbers and an invigorated bull market have yet to yield political profit.After three years on the job, the 46th president is widely viewed as a back-slapping north-eastern pol and Hunter Biden’s dad – not the transformational figure he sees when he looks into the mirror. Worse for him, at 81, majorities say he’s just too old.With The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party, Hunter Walker and Luppe B Luppen cast a sympathetic eye toward the party of Biden, Barack Obama and the Squad, prominent progressives of color in the US House. Walker is an investigative reporter at Talking Points Memo who covered the White House for Yahoo News. Luppen is a lawyer with a social media presence. In the past, he has donated to Democrats including Obama and Hillary Clinton.Mindful of Democrats’ internal divisions, the authors warmly describe Biden’s shift left and the political cover conferred. Convincingly, Walker and Luppen argue that the tilt from the center united the party and helped Biden enact legislation – until the House was lost.“This rapprochement culminated in Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address,” Walker and Luppen write, of a speech that “leaned hard on progressive policy priorities from promoting organized labor to getting a handle on police violence”.Unfortunately, it failed to make Biden any more palatable to much of the public. On the one hand, 71% are sympathetic to unions, the highest level since 1965. On the other, Democrats remain seen as soft on crime. In 2020, protesters’ demands to “defund the police” were a boost only to Trump.“Bernie [Sanders] may have lost the election,” the Massachusetts senator Ed Markey reportedly told Ilhan Omar, a Squad member from Minnesota, after the State of the Union, referring to the Democratic primary in 2020. “But he won the speech.”Sanders, from Vermont, is the only socialist in the Senate. Biden also needed the centrists, Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema but they were never his. To a point they gave him cover but they never embraced his agenda. Manchin, from West Virginia, now mulls a third-party White House run. Sinema became an independent.Walker and Luppen also describe the enthusiasm shown for Biden’s State of the Union by Jamaal Bowman, a New York congressman and Squad member.“Mr President, that was awesome – that was awesome!” Bowman is quoted as saying.“Did you write the speech?” he is shown asking Sanders.Bowman has attracted controversy of his own. In September, he pulled a fire alarm in a congressional office building, then denied doing so in an attempt to delay a crucial vote. He did plead guilty to a misdemeanor.More recently, Bowman praised Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who has accused Israel of using the Holocaust to justify its actions against Palestinians, who has said Holocaust deniers should be allowed to teach, and who on 7 October, the day Hamas fighters raped and murdered Israelis, wrote: “It warms every fiber of my soul [to see] the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”Introducing Finkelstein at a panel session, Bowman said he was “starstruck” and had “watched him all the time on YouTube”. Under fire, Bowman said he had been “unaware of Norman Finkelstein’s completely reprehensible comments”.Encapsulating Democrats’ deepening divide over Israel, Bowman now faces a primary challenge from George Latimer, the Westchester county executive. Two months after that vote, the party will most likely face a convention fight fueled by the same issue.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDoubt also swirls around Biden’s vice-president. Walker and Lappen distill it. “Kamala is not ready for prime time”, a “senior White House aide” is quoted as saying, adding: “She ain’t made for this.” Fifty seven percent of registered voters concur. Walker and Luppen are not done. “This person should not be president of the United States,” a “top aide” to the former California senator’s 2020 campaign says.“The problems Harris and her team experienced on her campaign persisted during her time as vice-president,” Walker and Luppen write, adding that a source offered a damning assessment: “It was, they said, Game of Thrones.”HBO also aired Veep.The Truce also shines a light on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York and perhaps the most prominent Squad member. In the process, the book dishes on Corbin Trent, a former senior aide, and Riley Roberts, the congresswoman’s fiance.“I was hooked on fucking pain pills,” Trent acknowledges. Walker and Luppen stress that Ocasio-Cortez did not know. These days, Trent is back in the news for allegedly siphoning $140,000 in Pac money and for attempting to oust Biden as the nominee.As for Roberts, Walker and Luppen remind us of how his feelings for the police and his entrepreneurial spirit came to coincide. The authors recall a now-deleted site on which Roberts pushed the “Cop-Out Collective”, boasting, “High-end hemp t-shirts with our logo will be available for sale.”According to one poll, 47% of voters see the Democrats as too liberal, a seven-point swing since 2020. In another survey, only 57% of Democrats and Democratic-leaners expressed satisfaction with Biden as their nominee. More than seven-in-10 Republicans and allies are content with Trump.The Democrats have ceded economic policy to Sanders, their social agenda to Ivy League professors. When pivoting left on economics, it is imperative to remain in the cultural center. Democrats, including Biden, ignore this at their peril.
The Truce is published in the US by WW Norton More

Newly reviewed records show that presidential hopeful Nikki Haley was the target of a swatting incident in late December when an anonymous person called 911 claiming to have killed his girlfriend at Haley’s South Carolina home.Authorities responded to a call on 30 December from a person who said he had shot his girlfriend and was threatening to harm himself, giving Haley’s address to the operator. It was shortly deemed a fake emergency, Reuters reported. Haley and her son were not at home during the time of the call; her husband was overseas.“The incident is being investigated by all involved,” Craig Harris, the director of public safety at Kiawah Island, where Haley’s home is located. South Carolina state police, the FBI and Haley’s security team were informed of the event.Representatives for Haley have not responded to the incident publicly or responded to the Guardian’s request for comment.The report comes after a surge in swatting – when anonymous people use the addresses of public figures when calling 911 to report fake violent incidents, like shootings – against public officials in recent months. Some experts have noted that swatting has become a prolific tool of political intimidation in recent years as people respond to inflammatory rhetoric.Earlier this month, special counsel Jack Smith and DC district court judge Tanya Chutkan, both key figures in the federal case against Donald Trump for attempts to overturn the election, were targets of swatting. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state who barred Trump from the state’s Republican primary ballot, was also singled out in an incident last year.Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, said that 14 police cars, a firetruck and an ambulance appeared at his home when someone called 911 about a hoax shooting.“Now I bolt my doors every night,” he told Reuters. “That’s the reality I’m living in.”Jen Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal agency that is tasked with bolstering election security, was also a target of a hoax December 30, NBC News reported earlier this week.“One of the most troubling trends we have seen in recent years has been the harassment of public officials across the political spectrum, including extreme incidents involving swatting and direct personal threats,” Easterly told NBC News. “These incidents pose a serious risk to the individuals, their families and, in the case of swatting, to the law enforcement officers responding to the situation. While my own experience was certainly harrowing, it was unfortunately not unique.”Some officials have also been targets of more direct threats. On the morning of closing arguments in Trump’s New York fraud trial, a bomb squad responded to a threat directed toward the Long Island home of judge Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing the case. More

Joe Biden said on Friday that the border deal being negotiated in the US Senate was the “toughest and fairest” set of reforms possible and vowed to “shut down the border” the day he signs the bill.The bipartisan talks have hit a critical point amid mounting Republican opposition. Some Republicans have set a deal on border security as a condition for further Ukraine aid.Earlier in the day, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the deal is “dead on arrival” in its current form, according to a letter to Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives reviewed by Reuters.Biden, a Democrat seeking another term in the 5 November elections, has grappled with record numbers of migrants caught illegally crossing the US-Mexico border during his presidency. Republicans contend Biden should have kept the restrictive policies of Republican former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for his party’s nomination.“What’s been negotiated would – if passed into law – be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” Biden said in a statement.“It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”The White House has agreed to new limits on asylum at the border, including the creation of an expulsion power that would allow migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally to be rapidly returned to Mexico if migrant encounters surpass 4,000 per day, three sources familiar with the matter said.If encounters pass 5,000 per day, the use of the expulsion authority would become mandatory, according to the sources who requested anonymity to discuss details of the private negotiations.In December, encounters averaged more than 9,500 per day, according to US government statistics released on Friday.The sweeping authority would be comparable to the Covid-era Title 42 policy put in place under Trump during the pandemic and which ended under Biden in May 2023.Migrants trying to claim asylum would still be able to do so at legal border crossings if the expulsion power was in effect, one of the sources said.The US would be required to allow at least 1,400 migrants per day to approach legal crossings to claim asylum if the expulsions were in effect, the source added.The bill aims to resolve asylum claims in six months without detaining migrants, the source said, faster than the current process, which can take years.Trump, however, took to social media last week to warn against any deal that fails to deliver everything Republicans want to shut down border crossings.Biden also urged Congress on Friday to provide the funding he asked for in October to secure the border.“This includes an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers, and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl at our south-west border,” the president said. More

It was a moment for Donald Trump to be gracious, magnanimous, perhaps even presidential. Instead he lashed out at his opponent’s clothes. “When I watched her in the fancy dress that probably wasn’t so fancy, I said, ‘What’s she doing? We won,’” he said of rival Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday night.Trump had just won the first primary election of 2024 and all but clinched the Republican nomination for US president. Party leaders and campaign surrogates are now eager to banish Haley to irrelevance, move on from the primary and unify against Democrats. They want Trump to pivot to an almost inevitable rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.Yet the 77-year-old remains consumed with rage over Haley’s unwillingness to quit the race. His petulance offers a reminder of the unhinged behaviour that turned off independent voters in New Hampshire and could prove to be a liability in a head-to-head contest with Biden. It is also at odds with what is an unusually professional and disciplined campaign operation.Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “Donald Trump wants the race to be over and we see evidence of why that’s important for the Trump campaign from his speech, which was essentially a train wreck and exhibited all the worst tendencies of Donald Trump. It was an undisciplined Trump and this is what turns off independent voters.”She added: “This is the achilles heel for the Trump campaign and they know it. The sooner this gets wrapped up then he doesn’t have any more of those impromptu late night speeches. Their worry is not that they’re not going to win the nomination; their worry is the damage that Trump having to respond to Haley will do in the general election with independent voters.”Trump’s investment of emotion and energy in attacking Haley is wildly out of proportion for the minimal threat that Haley poses. He won the Iowa caucuses in a landslide – she was third – and beat her by double digits in New Hampshire. No other Republican candidate in history who won the first two contests has failed to clinch his party’s nomination. His dominance looks set to render the next five months of primaries irrelevant.Newt Gingrich, a former House of Representatives speaker and ex-presidential candidate, said: “Trump’s best strategy is to assume he is the nominee and go straight at Biden and ignore Haley, let her flounder around until she either runs out of money or realises that there is no future. She’ll presently disappear.”Republicans have coalesced around the former president, putting pressure on Haley to step aside. She is not competing in next month’s Nevada caucuses. Trump has racked up endorsements from most of South Carolina’s leading Republicans and opinion polls show him with a big lead in the state, which has a strong base of Christian evangelicals, ahead of the primary on 24 February.View image in fullscreenYet Haley, 52, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the UN, is soldiering on. She tweeted on Thursday: “Underestimate me, that’s always fun.” Next week she is scheduled for a fundraising tour that includes stops in New York, Florida, California, Texas and South Carolina. She is expected to continue to draw donor support as Never Trumpers within the party make a last stand and hope he could yet be derailed by the 91 criminal charges against him.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I do know some of her donors and my guess is they want her staying in to put Trump through his paces. They don’t put it on the record but they think there’s a reasonable chance that something will happen to Trump, either health-wise or conviction to the extent that he can no longer be the nominee.”Haley describes herself as “scrappy”, continues to hold rallies and is becoming more aggressive in her denunciations of Trump. On Wednesday she launched a $4m advertising campaign in South Carolina describing the prospect of a Biden v Trump election as “a rematch no one wants”. Its narrator says: “Biden – too old. Trump – too much chaos. There’s a better choice for a better America.”How long can she last? Michael Steele, a Trump critic and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “My bet is two weeks. You really want to go into that race in your home state and lose by 30 or 40 points? Where is the political viability after that? We’ve seen candidates who run actual general election presidential campaigns and they lose their home state and we never heard from them again.”Haley’s tenacity has enraged Trump. He has branded her “birdbrain”. He has threatened to blacklist anyone who donates to her campaign. He has railed against her frequently on social media, writing: “Could somebody please explain to Nikki that she lost – and lost really badly. She also lost Iowa, BIG, last week. They were, as certain non-fake media say, ‘CRUSHING DEFEATS.’”The insults and outbursts are a reminder of why Trump alienated moderate voters in the past. While his win in New Hampshire was historic, it also exposed general election vulnerabilities, showing him to be highly popular with Republicans but highly unpopular with independents, who were allowed to take part in the Republican primary under the state’s rules.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere has never been such a wide gap between the Republican vote and the independent vote in a New Hampshire Republican primary. According to CNN’s exit polls, Trump won Republican voters by 74% to 25%, but Haley won independents 58% to 39%.Forty-two per cent of voters said they would not consider Trump to be fit for office if he were convicted of a crime. An analysis by Fox News found that 35% of voters in New Hampshire would be so dissatisfied with a Trump nomination that they would not vote for him in November.Steele, a host on the MSNBC cable news network, added: “There’s 91 indictments hanging over this guy. Of course he’s vulnerable but everyone wants to keep puffing him up like he’s some tiger or some lion. It’s just ridiculous.“I just wish people would get honest about what’s in front of them. This guy is vulnerable as hell. He’s weak as hell. But in reality TV land, he’s the guy that fires people: he’s rough, he’s tough, he’s single-minded. No, he’s a petulant little boy who shows that petulance when he’s challenged.”Biden’s campaign is working on the premise that Trump will be the nominee. He has delivered two major speeches about the threat that Trump poses to democracy and the dangerous rise of white supremacy. This week he held a joint event with his vice-president, Kamala Harris, in Virginia to promote reproductive freedom, highlighting Trump’s role in the supreme court’s Dobbs decision that overturned the constitutional right to abortion.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “The Dobbs decision basically became this before-and-after moment in American politics where there just became this sense that the Republican party had become too ugly, too extreme, too dangerous, and it has struggled mightily in election after election since the spring of 2022.”He added: “You’re starting to see, even in the early going here, there is a lot more weakness than strength coming out of the Republican party in the last couple of weeks. It’s because Maga [Make America great again] has become unattractive even to Republican voters. Fear and opposition to Maga is the most powerful force in American politics. It’s why Republicans keep losing, and Republicans have chosen a candidate who is ultra-Maga to be their nominee in 2024.” More

America’s “unchecked” gambling boom risks exacerbating a nationwide mental health crisis, according to a congresswoman pushing for federal government support. The industry is pushing back hard.Operators must be held “accountable” for rising addiction rates, Andrea Salinas told the Guardian, after lawmakers proposed legislation that – if approved – would provide tens of millions of dollars in funding to help those affected.Sports betting is “proliferating like never before”, she said. “Rather than try to put the genie back in the bottle, let’s make sure we have the research and the treatment before it does become out of control.”The supreme court struck down a decades-old law in 2018 that had banned sports betting across much of the nation. The market is now legal in 38 states, attracting billions of dollars in wagers every month. Its rapid growth has coincided with a spike in addiction cases, according to clinicians, counsellors and campaigners.Diverting taxes already raised on sports wagers towards compulsive gambling support services would make “the entire industry healthier”, said Salinas, a Democrat representing Oregon’s sixth district. “I, as much as anybody, enjoy the recreation of gambling, in a fun casino. When done, like everything, in moderation, it’s fun, right?“But the access to these applications for sports betting has taken us in a direction that is harmful. Nearly 7 million Americans are struggling with the gambling addiction.”The Grit (Gambling addiction Recovery, Investment and Treatment) Act, proposed this month by Salinas and the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, is pinned around the federal sports excise tax. Receipts from the tax, which dates back to the early 1950s, have surged in recent years as the legal market expanded; it raised an estimated $271m last year.Under the proposed law, half of the revenues raised by the tax would be set aside for gambling addiction treatment, prevention and research. Taxes would not rise and the funds for treatment would go through an existing federal grant program.Researchers have identified close links between gambling addiction and other mental health disorders, like alcoholism. “If we let this go unchecked, this could be one of the sources” of an escalating mental health crisis, said Salinas. “We would be ignoring an upstream problem that we could start to address.”Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, which has been pushing for the Grit Act, has said it would “significantly bolster” addiction prevention, research and treatment resources.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut gambling operators are against the proposal. “Our industry’s growth means that there’s never been more attention paid to, or money invested in, problem gambling support than there is today,” Chris Cylke, senior vice-president at the American Gaming Association, said.Suggesting the Grit Act would “give criminals a leg up”, Cylke argued that the excise tax – upon which it is based – should be repealed. “Today, this antiquated policy puts the nascent legal market at a competitive disadvantage against offshore illegal operators, who do not pay any taxes and prey on vulnerable customers.”Advocates for greater compulsive gambling support criticised the “predictable, shortsighted objection” of operators. “The gambling sector can no longer reasonably expect to evade external responsibility,” said Derek Webb, founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling. “The Grit Act is our best chance to save lots of lives by doing what’s responsible, fair and inevitable.”But Salinas is braced for a long campaign to pass the Grit Act. Politicians in Washington and beyond “aren’t really paying attention” to gambling addiction rates, she said. Congress is “not doing a lot of substantive work right now. So, yeah, it could take a while.” More

A New York City jury awarded $83.3m to E Jean Carroll in her defamation trial against Donald Trump on Friday.Carroll will receive $18.3m in compensatory damages and $65m in punitive retribution. The former president is paying Carroll compensatory damages of $18.3m – $11m to fund a reputational repair campaign. The $7.3m is for the emotional harm caused by Trump’s 2019 public statements. Carroll and her legal team were beaming as they left court in a black SUV. They did not answer questions immediately after court let out.Moments after the decision was announced, Trump decried it as “absolutely ridiculous” on Truth Social, and said he would be filing an appeal.“I fully disagree with both verdicts, and will be appealing this whole Biden Directed Witch Hunt focused on me and the Republican Party,” Trump wrote. “Our Legal System is out of control, and being used as a Political Weapon. They have taken away all First Amendment Rights. THIS IS NOT AMERICA!”The Manhattan federal court decision comes less than one year after Carroll won $5m in her sexual abuse and defamation trial against Trump.This sum stems from Carroll’s rape claim against the president in a June 2019 New York magazine article. The publication ran an excerpt of her then-forthcoming book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.In that excerpt, Carroll said that Trump raped her inside the dressing room of a luxe Manhattan department store around early 1996. The tenor of Trump’s denials – saying, for example, that she lied and was a political operative – became the subject of her 2019 defamation suit against him.At the time, Carroll could not sue Trump over the alleged assault, as it would have taken place outside the civil statute of limitations. A novel New York state law in 2022, the Adult Survivors Act, opened a one-year window for adult accusers to file suit for incidents outside the civil statute of limitations.Carroll filed another lawsuit, this one over the incident and defamatory statements after Trump’s presidency ended. This lawsuit proceeded to trial first and the judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, determined jurors’ findings – that Trump sexually abused Carroll and tarnished her reputation – would be accepted as fact in this trial.As a result, Trump could not re-litigate her sexual abuse claim. The jurors were tasked only with weighing financial penalties for damaging Carroll’s reputation – and the sum required to keep Trump from making still more defamatory statements.“I’m here because Donald Trump assaulted me, and when I wrote about it, he said it never happened,” Carroll said on the stand. “He lied, and it shattered my reputation. I expected him to deny it, but to say it was consensual, when it was not. But that’s what I expected him to say.”She continued: “The thing that really got me about this was, from the White House, he asked if anyone had any information about me, and if they did, to please come forward as soon as possible, because he wanted the world to know what’s really going on – and that people like me should pay dearly.”Trump did not attend Carroll’s first trial but made appearances at the second – marking the first time she confronted him publicly in a courtroom. Trump’s comportment during the courtroom showdowns was in keeping with his infamously bombastic behavior, prompting warnings from the judge.“Mr Trump has the right to be present here. That right can be forfeited, and it can be forfeited if he is disruptive, which is what has been reported to me, and if he disregards court orders,” Kaplan warned.“Mr Trump, I hope I don’t have to consider excluding you from the trial … I understand you are probably very eager for me to do that.”“I would love it, I would love it,” Trump retorted with a gesture.“I know you would, you just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently,” Kaplan said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe end stages of this trial were also marked by another hallmark of Trump’s legacy: Covid-related chaos. On 22 January, trial proceedings were postponed as one juror experienced coronavirus symptoms; his leading attorney, Alina Habba, also told judge Kaplan that she felt unwell and had been exposed to Covid.Trump did take the stand on 25 January. Kaplan restricted the scope of her questions and his responses, as per his prior ruling that he could not re-litigate her claims.Habba was allowed to ask: “Do you stand by your testimony in the deposition?”“One hundred percent, yes,” he said, referring to the deposition in which he denied her claims.“Did you deny the allegation because Ms Carroll made an accusation?”“That’s exactly right. She said something, I consider it a false accusation. No difference,” Trump retorted. This sparked an objection from Carroll’s camp. Kaplan said that everything after “yes, I did” was stricken.“Did you ever instruct anyone to hurt Ms Carroll in your statements?”“No. I just wanted to defend myself, my family, and frankly, the presidency,” Trump said. Carroll’s team objected again. Kaplan deemed that everything after “no” be stricken, so jurors were ordered to disregard this statement.In total, Trump’s direct and cross testimony lasted about two or three minutes. More

The prospects for the US Congress approving new aid to Ukraine as well as military assistance to Israel worsened on Friday after the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said he was unlikely to support a deal under negotiation in the Senate that is considered crucial to unlocking the funds.A bipartisan group of senators have for weeks been looking for an agreement to implement stricter immigration policies and curtail migrant arrivals at the southern border with Mexico, which have surged during Joe Biden’s presidency. Republicans have named passing that legislation as their price for approving aid to Ukraine, whose cause rightwing lawmakers have soured on as the war has dragged on and Donald Trump, who has been ambivalent about sending arms to Kyiv, draws closer to winning the Republican presidential nomination.While the precise details of the immigration bargain have yet to be released, Johnson told his Republican colleagues in a letter that “if rumors about the contents of the draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House anyway”.Underscoring his stridency on the topic, Johnson reiterated his demand that the Democratic-controlled Senate vote on the Secure the Border Act, a hardline proposal that would essentially resurrect Trump’s immigration policy by restarting construction of a wall on the border with Mexico and forcing asylum seekers to wait in that country while their claim is processed.He also announced the chamber would move ahead with its plan to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Republicans have accused of mishandling border security.“When we return next week, by necessity, the House Homeland Security Committee will move forward with Articles of Impeachment against Secretary Mayorkas. A vote on the floor will be held as soon as possible thereafter,” Johnson wrote.The speaker’s demands cast into further doubt on Congress’s ability to find agreement on reforming the immigration system – which has for decades been one of the most intractable issues in Washington – as well support two countries the Biden administration considers national security priorities. The United States has been the top funder of Kyiv’s defense against the Russian invasion that began in February 2022, and after Hamas’s 7 October terror attack against Israel, Biden argued in an address from the Oval Office that the two country’s causes were linked, and asked Congress to approve aid to both, as well as funds for Taiwan and to further secure the border.Johnson responded by having House Republicans approve a bill that would fund aid to Israel alone and also cut the Internal Revenue Service’s budget, boosting the federal deficit. Democrats, who control the Senate, have rejected both that measure and the Secure the Border Act, leaving the bipartisan immigration reform negotiations as the last avenue remaining to win approval of Ukraine aid.Congresses and presidents since the days of George W Bush have tried and failed to reform the US’s system for admitting workers and immigrants. The long odds of the latest negotiations succeeding were underscored on Wednesday when Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, told his lawmakers that because Trump wanted to campaign on immigration reform, he doubted that the party would support any agreement that emerges from the talks.“We are in a quandary,” McConnell said, according to Punchbowl News. “The politics of this have changed.”Senators from both parties expressed outrage, with Chris Murphy, the main Democratic negotiator in the talks, saying: “I hope we don’t live in a world today in which one person inside the Republican party holds so much power that they could stop a bipartisan bill to try to give the president additional power at the border to make more sense of our immigration policy.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe following day, Politico reported that McConnell changed his tone, telling Republicans in a meeting that he still supported the talks. But the damage may well have been done.The GOP’s control of the House means that Republicans may have the votes to impeach Mayorkas, and, at some point, Biden, whom the party has also opened an inquiry against. But the Senate’s Democratic leaders are almost certain to reject the charges against the homeland security chief, who has used his appearances before Congress to describe the country’s immigration system as “broken” and urge reforms.On Friday, the top Democrat on the homeland security committee sent a letter to its Republican chair, Mark Green, objecting to the charges against Mayorkas, noting that the House hasn’t voted to approve the impeachment and that Green had reportedly promised donors months ago that he’d go after him.“Nothing about this sham impeachment has abided by House precedent, but all of it has been done to reach the predetermined outcome you promised your donors last year,” the committee’s ranking member, Bennie Thompson, wrote. More