US Politics

For the brief period that he stood at the pinnacle of national politics, Kevin McCarthy cast an odd sort of light on Bakersfield, his unfashionable, hardscrabble home town in southern California that might never have penetrated the national consciousness without him.The city has none of the trappings of what we think of when we think of the Golden state – no beaches, no cable cars, no redwood forests, and only an intermittent view of the Tehachapi mountains, depending on the intensity of the smog that rises from the inland oilfields and large tract farms that provide its lifeblood. The Beach Boys never immortalized Bakersfield in song – and neither, for the most part, has anyone else.Yet for the past year, as McCarthy struggled to lead the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the city has enjoyed a quirky notoriety as the place that formed the man that wielded the speaker’s gavel, albeit for an agonizingly – and historically – short time.Journalists from national publications have dutifully made the trek up from Los Angeles in search of the sandwich counter that McCarthy ran as a young man inside his uncle’s strip-mall yogurt shop (both long gone), or to eat a steak and pasta lunch at Luigi’s, which McCarthy once lauded as the kind of place that is reliably hopping by 11am because the good, hardworking people of Bakersfield start their jobs at sunrise.The reporters would try to figure out whether the city saw McCarthy as the smiling, happy-go-lucky favourite son portrayed by his friends and allies, or just another ambitious politician more interested in building his power base in Washington DC than in serving his local constituents.How much did McCarthy love Bakersfield, and how much did Bakersfield love him back? The responses were mixed then, and they remain mixed now.“If you went through the wringer he went through, I suspect there’s a little humiliation, a little embarrassment. Maybe he’s licking his wounds and wants to go off into the sunset,” said Greg Perrone, president of the Greater Bakersfield Republican Assembly, an activist group that hews to McCarthy’s right. “Still, I’m a little disappointed that he didn’t finish the term that he was elected to serve. That’s not what we expect from our elected leaders.”The critical voices that fill the letters column of the local paper, the Bakersfield Californian, have been quite a bit blunter. “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Kevin,” two of them wrote last week. One added: “You haven’t represented us in a very long time.”Local Republican officials have been quick to sing McCarthy’s praises since the announcement of his retirement from Congress, calling him optimistic, unafraid of hard work, a patriot, and a “tremendous advocate for the Central Valley”. But others less beholden to him have been notable mostly by their silence.Bakersfield’s mayor, Karen Goh, who has been photographed with McCarthy on passingly few occasions since she took office seven years ago, issued no statement. When invited to comment on ways in which McCarthy had helped the city in his 16 years in Washington, she told the Guardian she was too busy to respond.McCarthy’s district, California’s 20th, extends well beyond Bakersfield into the farmlands of Kern and Tulare counties and into the suburbs of Fresno, the largest city in the Central Valley. It was redrawn before the last election to make it more solidly Republican, relieving McCarthy of any significant pressure to fight for his own congressional seat. He scarcely visited during last year’s campaign, focusing instead on raising hundreds of millions of dollars for more competitive districts in California and the rest of the country.That focus has not always gone down well with his constituents, especially in Bakersfield, whose population has grown significantly more diverse since the days when it was a refuge for poor white farmers from the Dust Bowl and their descendants, giving the area an Oklahoma flavor with rock-ribbed conservative attitudes to match. The city is now majority Latino, and party registration between the two major parties is close to even.Still, the city may be less remarkable for its changing political complexion than for its relative lack of political engagement. In recent election cycles, Bakersfield and Kern county have seen some of the lowest voter turnout rates in California – just 34% for the 2022 mid-terms, and 58% for the presidential race in 2020 when the statewide average was more than 70%.Nothing about the place is friendly to politics, starting with a notable lack of public space. Amid the sprawl of highways and mini-malls and residential subdivisions, most political protests – including recent pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations – have been confined to the sidewalks at the intersection of Stockdale Highway and California Avenue, on the western end of town, where the corners are demarcated by a Mobil station, a Shell station, a McDonald’s and a Chick-Fil-A.Most local political offices are in business parks where the doors stay locked to anyone without an appointment. McCarthy’s own district office rarely engages with the public or with reporters.With McCarthy now on his way out, Bakersfield’s political profile is likely to dwindle even further. The city has other, mostly dubious claims to fame – as one of the most dangerous places in America for pedestrians, and as an area with one of the highest incidences of police shootings. The city’s website is currently touting a more cheerful statistic – that an obscure financial website named WalletHub has ranked it the 96th best city in the United States to have fun.That’s slightly less fun than Overland Park, Kansas, in the Kansas City suburbs, but a touch more fun than Toledo, Ohio, where Saturday nights were once infamously described in a John Denver song as “like being no place at all”. Bakersfield’s city leaders are taking that as a compliment. More

Ryan Grim’s sprawling new book is called The Squad, but it is about much more than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive allies in the US House. It does provide mini-biographies of AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, but it should have been called The Squad and Its Enemies, given the amount of space it devotes to their adversaries.Grim also gives a blow-by-blow replay of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and extremely detailed accounts of how Joe Biden’s infrastructure and domestic spending bills finally made it through Congress.The book seems to have been written at great speed without much time for editing. At times that makes it a little hard to follow. For example, on page 30, we learn that Justice Democrats, an organization founded in 2017 to elect “a new type of Democratic majority in Congress”, suddenly pulled out of AOC’s first race because she wasn’t raising enough money herself.“She was crushed and considered dropping out,” Grim writes. But then, two pages later, we learn that Justice Democrats “just went all in and just diverted it all” to AOC. “We stopped raising money for anybody else,” an organizer explains.There are small, easily checkable errors. The Rayburn House Office Building, we’re told, was “built in the 1950s during the postwar boom”. Actually its cornerstone was laid in 1962 and the building opened in 1965.Grim is a big fan of hard-left, hard-edged judgments against middle-of-the-road Democrats. On the very first page, we are told of the “rubble of the Obama administration’s pivot to austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis”. Nine pages later, Obama is accused of encouraging more home foreclosures “to keep the bailed-out banks alive”.According to Grim, the present House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, has a “visceral hatred toward the radical left”; gets “roughly half” of his campaign money from corporate political action committees; and has the additional sins of being a “vocal supporter of charter schools”, an ally of the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and a supporter of Hillary Clinton.Grim is on more solid ground when he attacks the Problem Solvers, a group that “claimed it would solve problems by bringing together moderate Democrats and reasonable Republicans for common sense solutions” but whose primary goal is to block “tax increases on private equity moguls and hedge fund executives” who funded dark money groups linked to No Labels, the “centrist” group threatening to run a third-party candidate for president, potentially hurting Joe Biden and helping Donald Trump.Grim offers very long sections about the debilitating effects of dark money on the entire political system, and the negative effects of the extremely large amounts spent by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and the rest of the lobby for Israel. He is at his best when he describes Washington alliances that are mostly invisible to casual students of the Capitol scene. There is a long narrative about Josh Gottheimer, a former Clinton intern and speechwriter turned New Jersey congressman elected with the support of Aipac, a Problem Solvers founder .Gottheimer’s most important ally is Mark Penn, a key Hillary Clinton strategist and the former head of the PR powerhouse Burson-Marsteller. Gottheimer, a congressional champion of Israel, was paradoxically aided by Penn’s longtime work for Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and the United Arab Emirates “built an alliance with the Israeli lobbying operation in Washington”, Grim explains. “Israel won Arab cred from the two autocracies even as its settlements in occupied Palestinian territory were rapidly expanding. And the autocracies were helped by association with one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies.”“Israel and the Arabs standing together is the ultimate ace in the hole,” an Israeli embassy official tells the author.Because of this unholy alliance, Gottheimer became one of the “top recipients of cash” from lobbyists and lawyers working for Saudi Arabia in his first re-election cycle.We also learn in detail how the mere threat of opposition by Aipac in his Florida congressional primary transformed Maxwell Frost’s position on the Middle East. The young Democrat had signed a pledge to “heed the call of Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” (BDS) and called for “an end to US political, military and economic support to Israel, and to all military security and policing collaborations”. But after Richie Torres, a New York Democrat, befriended Frost, the Floridian ended up “a candidate who wanted no strings attached to military aid to Israel” and who considered BDS “extremely problematic and a risk to the chances of peace and a two-state solution”.Stories like this lend credence to the judgment of Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, who survived her own “near-death experience” at the hands of the Israel lobby. She tells Grim she knows people deterred from running for office “because this is a topic that they know will bury them. There’s absolutely a chilling effect”.Lee continues: “It’s very hard to survive as a progressive Black, working-class-background candidate when you are facing millions and millions of dollars.” This also “deters other people from ever wanting to get into it. So then it has the effect of ensuring that the Black community broadly, the other marginalized communities are just no longer centered in our politics”.As Grim demonstrates convincingly, that is one of the many big costs the US pays thanks to the gigantic role of dark money in its politics.
The Squad is published in the US by Henry Holt & Co More

The publication of Liz Cheney’s book, Oath and Honor, is bringing plaudits, once again, for her courage in calling out Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the constitution. From this historian, it brings a different kind of gratitude. Not only for her patriotism, which has already come at a cost, but for how she allowed the slow work of history to inform a fast-moving political situation that was rapidly becoming a crisis.In this case, the history was a little-known story about the vexed election of Abraham Lincoln, embedded in a book I wrote in 2020, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington. The book came out with almost laughably bad timing: in April 2020, just after Covid hit. Printing plants struggled to get the book to stores, stores struggled to stay open, all talks were canceled. After nearly a decade of research, it seemed like the book would go straight to the remainder bin. But as it turned out, people still read it, including members of Congress.Lincoln’s presidency is, of course, well known. It is difficult to imagine a world in which he is not looking over us from the Lincoln Memorial. But as I researched the presidential transition of 1860-61, I was surprised to discover just how much resistance he faced. He nearly didn’t make it to Washington at all.Then, as now, a significant subpopulation refused to accept the result of an election. We all grew up learning about the result: the civil war, which killed 750,000. In the weeks before Lincoln’s arrival, armed militias menaced Congress and there were rumors of a violent takeover of the Capitol, to prevent his inauguration. Seven states seceded before he arrived. Four would secede after.Passions came to a head on 13 February 1861, when Congress assembled to tally electoral certificates. Lincoln had clearly won, with 180 votes. The closest runner-up was the candidate of the south, John C Breckinridge, with 72. Amazingly, the certificates, carried in a wooden box, were sent to Breckinridge, who as the outgoing vice-president was also president of the Senate. If the certificates were miscounted, he would stand to benefit. Then Congress might interfere, as it did in 1824, when it denied the winner of the popular vote, Andrew Jackson, in the so-called “Corrupt Bargain” that put John Quincy Adams in power.To his eternal credit, Breckinridge counted honestly and Lincoln was confirmed. Another southerner, Gen Winfield Scott, posted soldiers around the Capitol and kept an anti-Lincoln mob from entering the House. Breckinridge would become a high-ranking Confederate but he helped to make Lincoln’s presidency possible.Strangely, these footnotes from my research began to come back to life at the end of 2020, during another interregnum, as Americans awaited the arrival of Joe Biden. Once again, there were dark rumors of violence, and a plot centered around the counting of the electoral certificates, to be held on 6 January 2021. The parallels are not perfect. In 1861, the country was weakened because a lame-duck president, James Buchanan, checked out. In 2021, an enraged president directed traffic. But still, I felt a sense of deja vu that fall.We all know the rest of the story. On the day of the count, Trump summoned a mob to disrupt the vote. They were more successful than in 1861, with results we are still dealing with. But they failed, thanks to bravery of the Capitol police and the members of Congress, including Cheney, who stood their ground.At the time, I wondered if anyone beside me was thinking about the eerie parallels to 1861. It turned out that Cheney was, for the simple reason that she was reading my book.I learned about her interest in profiles written during the hearings staged by the January 6 committee. I heard similar stories about Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat and committee member who mentioned my book in his 2022 book, Unthinkable. They may have passed it to each other. Just that image, of a Democrat and a Republican sharing a recommendation, is heartening.In Cheney’s book, she describes reading my book in December 2020, remembering “chilling reading” as storm clouds gathered. Everything about her courage since January 6 would be familiar to the Americans of 1861 – northerners and southerners alike – who stood up for Lincoln. Many disapproved of him, or worried about rumors spread by his enemies. But they believed in democracy, and the constitution, and wanted to give him a chance. They were patriots in the old-fashioned sense.It is a simple thing to agree with our allies. What is harder is to agree with our adversaries, or at least to let them speak their piece. Democracy depends on that respect.When Lincoln finally arrived in Washington, after so many ordeals, he delivered a famous inaugural address, invoking our “better angels”. Since then, he has become something like the angel-in-chief, hovering over us, more present than most other ex-presidents. In 1963, he was looking over Martin Luther King Jr’s shoulder as he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1970, he gave some comfort to Richard Nixon when he wandered to the Lincoln Memorial to speak to anti-war protesters. To the rest of us, he can still appear unexpectedly, offering a form of communion. Or perhaps union is a better word, for a nation seeking desperately to find common ground.In his oft-quoted poem, The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney wrote of a “longed-for tidal wave”, a rare convergence when “justice can rise up” and “hope and history rhyme”. History does not always rhyme, despite the quote often attributed, falsely, to Mark Twain. But now and then, the convergences are real. Liz Cheney found one, and acted on it. This historian is grateful for every reader, but especially for one who read a book so well.
Ted Widmer, distinguished lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York, is the author of Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington More

Since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza nearly two months ago, outraged young Americans have been at the forefront of a growing Palestinian solidarity movement.They have led protests in Washington and across the country to demand a permanent ceasefire and to voice their disapproval of Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s military campaign, which has killed thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, and plunged Gaza into a humanitarian catastrophe.A generational divide on the conflict is shifting the terms of the foreign policy debate in Washington, where support for Israel has long been bipartisan and near-unanimous. And, ahead of an already contentious election year, there are signs the issue could pose a threat to Biden’s prospects of winning re-election in 2024.“There’s something profound taking place in the way young Americans, particularly Democrats, think about the issue,” said Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland, who has studied American public sentiment on the Israeli-Palestine conflict for decades.Shifting attitudesThere was a surge of support for Israel in the wake of the 7 October attack, when gunmen killed at least 1,200 people, roughly two-thirds of whom were civilians, and seized as many as 240 hostages, more than 100 of whom have been freed so far. But attitudes have evolved in the two months since, especially among young Americans, thousands of whom have taken to the streets in protest of Israel’s air and ground offensive, which has killed at least 17,000 Palestinians and displaced more than three-quarters of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents.Americans overall continue to sympathize with Israel, but surveys show stark divides by party affiliation and age. Young Americans are far more likely than older Americans to express sympathy for Palestinians and to disagree with Biden’s response and strategy, a trend that is especially pronounced among Democrats.A pair of University of Maryland Critical Issues Polls, the first taken shortly after 7 October and the second taken four weeks after the attack, found that the number of young Democrats who said Biden was “too pro-Israeli” had doubled while the percentage who said they were less likely to support him in 2024 based on his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issue more than doubled.“It is the deepest shift in a short period of time that I’ve seen,” said Telhami, who is the director of the Critical Issues Poll. While public attitudes often evolve during the course of a war, he said such a significant swing suggests “this isn’t episodic”.Among voters 18-34, a majority – 52% – said they were more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released in mid-November. It marked a sharp reversal from the survey taken the previous month, after the 7 October assault, when 41% of young people said their sympathies lay with the Israelis, compared with 26% who said the Palestinians.The poll also found young people were about equally divided between those who believe supporting Israel is in the US’s national interest – 47% – and those who don’t – 45% – compared with older cohorts who overwhelmingly said it was.According to a recent NBC poll, a striking 70% of voters ages 18 to 34 say they disapprove of Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. A Pew poll published this week charted a similar trend, with just 19% of Americans under 30 approving of the president’s response.Watching a young, multiracial coalition champion Palestinian rights has been a glimmer of hope amid the horrors of war in Gaza and a rise in Islamophobia in the US, said Nihad Awad, executive director and co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair).“We hope to see a break with the past,” said Awad, who is Palestinian American, “and a shift not only in the public opinion among young people but hopefully among the general public, ultimately towards a policy that reflects universal values of justice and freedom for all.”‘What moral standing is there?’Many Americans of Biden’s generation can remember Israel as a young, left-leaning democracy founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust – a vulnerable country in a hostile region and a place the 81-year-old president has described as an indispensable haven for Jews. Biden, who was five at the time of Israel’s founding, has said: “If there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”Younger Democrats, by contrast, have mostly known Israel as a military power led by the rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has aligned himself closely with Republicans in the United States and is accused of undermining democratic institutions in Israel.Those generational tensions have roiled the party, pitting young staffers against their bosses at the White House and at agencies across the administration, on Capitol Hill and at the Democratic National Committee. In letters, cables and in some cases, resignations, they have expressed their concern over the administration’s policy toward Israel.Polling shows Biden’s support deteriorating among the nation’s youngest voters, considered a key part of the Democrats’ electoral coalition. In 2020, Biden won voters under 30 by more than 20 percentage points, according to exit polls. Recent surveys show the president competitive with or in some cases trailing Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, among young people.Last month, a coalition of youth-centered progressive organizations signed an open letter calling on Biden to support a ceasefire, which he has resisted, and warning that his approach to the war in Gaza “risks millions of young voters staying home or voting third party next year”. Unless he changes course, they cautioned that Democrats would probably struggle to recruit the often young volunteers, organizers and staffers to work on Democratic campaigns.“Biden ran on a promise to restore America’s moral standing in the world. What moral standing is there when you allow for more than 6,000 children to be killed?” said Zohran Mamdani, a 32-year-old Democratic state lawmaker from New York who staged a five-day hunger strike outside of the White House to protest against Biden’s handling of the war. “If the fabric of your coalition was built on promises that you are betraying, you cannot be surprised if that coalition cannot be reactivated once more.”In the days after 7 October, Biden condemned Hamas’s attack on Israel as “sheer evil” and offered his administration’s unwavering support for Israel. The White House has argued that Biden’s strategy of standing by Israel as it wages war in Gaza has allowed his administration to push for diplomatic breakthroughs. The president has earned some praise for his administration’s efforts to restart the flow of desperately needed aid into the besieged region and to secure a week-long truce last month that saw the release of more than a hundred hostages held by Hamas.Amid global outrage at the scale of the death and destruction in Gaza, the president and his administration have become more blunt in expressing their concern over Israel’s military campaign as well as Israeli settler violence in the West Bank.“I have consistently pressed for a pause in the fighting for two reasons: to accelerate and expand the humanitarian assistance going into Gaza and, two, to facilitate the release of hostages,” Biden said recently.Many young activists, especially young Arab and Muslim Americans, say the president’s support for Israel is abetting a war that is already outpacing the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century. They have been alarmed by some of his rhetoric, particularly his comments questioning the veracity of the casualty figures kept by health officials in the Hamas-run enclave, which struck many as dehumanizing. And they say the fatal stabbing of a six-year-old Palestinian boy and the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont underscore the threat facing Arab and Muslim American communities.“No amount of time will erase the last two months from our memory,” said Munir Atalla, 30, of the Palestinian Youth Movement.Why it’s happeningPolitical scientists, activists and lawmakers on both sides of the debate say a range of factors are shaping the way young people perceive Israel’s war against Hamas. Social media, where young people have watched the horror of war unfold in real time on their cellphones, is one.About a third of American adults under 30 say they regularly get their news from TikTok, where videos discussing the war have racked up billions of views.Nerdeen Kiswani, 29, co-founder and leader of Within Our Lifetime, a Palestinian-led community organization that staged a peace protest near the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Times Square, New York, last month, said young people distrust traditional media. Instead, she said they rely on social media to hear directly from Palestinian civilians and journalists in Gaza.“They can see with their own eyes,” she said. “Social media now has really democratized what news comes out there.”But young people’s interest in Israel-Palestine – and the US’s approach to the conflict – is not new and the conversation is not only happening online, said Rachel Janfaza, the founder of the Up and Up newsletter that explores gen Z political culture.“While social media is one element of where young people are getting their news and information about what’s going on between Israel and Hamas,” she said, “there’s also a robust campus conversation about the conflict that predates the existence of TikTok.”Many leftwing activists have embraced the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial justice movement that mobilized following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. For them, the fight for Palestinian rights is linked to domestic causes like police brutality and climate justice.“When I go to marches, when I go to rallies, when I go on hunger strike and I look around, these are the same people that I was marching with for Black Lives Matter,” said Mamdani. “That solidarity is at the crux of why so many young people are able to stand up for justice wherever it applies.”A searing conversation over Palestinian rights has swept college campuses and even high schools, where educators are struggling to foster civil discourse as they confront a rise in bias attacks against Arab, Muslim and Jewish students.At protests, pro-Palestinian activists describe Israel as a “colonial” power and an oppressive, occupying force. Behind claims of anti-Israel bias, they see an effort to silence any criticism of the Israeli government, which many activists now charge with perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people.Supporters of Israel have argued that viewing the Israel-Palestinian conflict through a lens of power and privilege often flattens the complex roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict and ignores Jewish people’s history of persecution. They say some of the slogans and rhetoric used by pro-Palestinian activists cross a line into antisemitism and denialism of the atrocities of the 7 October attacks.“It’s one thing to criticize Netanyahu, his policies,” said Tyler Gregory, 35, CEO of the Bay Area’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC). “It’s another thing to demonize Israel in the same way that Jews have been demonized for millennia, as being the source of the world’s problems.”Young Jewish peopleIsrael’s military campaign in Gaza has also divided young American Jews, a group that tends to be politically liberal and secular.A survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute conducted a month after the war began revealed a significant generational split among American Jews that mirrored the US population as a whole.While nearly three-quarters of American Jews said they approve of Biden’s response to the conflict, it found that Jewish voters aged 18 to 35 were far more likely than their older counterparts to disapprove.With chants of “not in our name”, young progressive Jewish activists have led several of the major ceasefire protests, some of which have drawn rebukes from prominent Jewish advocacy groups.Meanwhile, young Jews were among the tens of thousands of demonstrators who gathered in Washington last month to show solidarity with Israel and voice support for its war against Hamas as calls for a ceasefire grow.Joe Vogel, a 26-year-old Maryland state delegate running for Congress, said it had been deeply worrying to see attempts from some on the left to “justify” the violence on 7 October.“The only way that we’re really going to secure peace and justice for everyone in Israel and Palestine is if we move away from the binary thinking,” said Vogel, who is Jewish and describes himself as a “pro-Israel progressive”. “We have to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian. We have to be pro-Jewish and pro-Muslim.”In 2020, Eva Borgwardt worked as a Democratic field director to help elect Biden in Arizona. Now the 27-year-old is helping to lead protests against him as the national spokesperson of IfNotNow, a leftwing Jewish group demanding the president back a permanent ceasefire.“We know that the only way this horrific violence will end is with a ceasefire. You cannot bomb your way to peace,” she said. “That’s what young people are saying in the streets right now.”Audra Heinrichs contributed to this report from New York More

A federal appeals court has upheld most of a gag order against Donald Trump imposed by the judge handling his trial on charges related to attempting the overthrow of the 2020 election.Washington DC-based judge Tanya Chutkan imposed the order in October that prevented the former president from making inflammatory statements and social media posts attacking prosecutors, potential witnesses and court staff in the case. Trump appealed the order, arguing it unconstitutionally infringed on his first amendment rights and hindered his political speech amid his campaign for a second term in the White House.The order was put on hold as appeals judges considered his challenge. In its ruling, the court generally upheld Chutkan’s order, but said Trump was now also allowed to assail the special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the criminal case against the former president.A federal appeals court upheld most of the gag order judge Tanya Chutkan imposed on Donald Trump following incendiary comments he made about people involved in his trial on charges related to overturning the 2020 election. The former president is barred from attacking court staff, prosecutorial staff and potential trial witnesses, but the appeals judges did allow him to criticize Chutkan, the justice department, the Biden administration and the case itself as politically motivated. Elsewhere, Hunter Biden’s legal trouble deepened after prosecutors filed new tax charges against him, and in an interview with the musician Moby, the president’s son said the GOP is “trying to kill me” to undermine Joe Biden’s presidency.Here’s what else happened today:
Hunter Biden’s attorney said the latest charges against his client were the result of “Republican pressure”.
Trump’s campaign discouraged speculation over who might be hired to staff his administration, if he wins next year’s presidential election.
The rightwing House Freedom Caucus demanded Congress approve hardline immigration policies that Democrats oppose in exchange for more Ukraine aid.
Joe Biden’s approval ratings have hit a record low, poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight reports.
A protest against a Philadelphia Jewish restaurant by demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip was more complicated than it initially appeared.
The Trump campaign has also released a statement regarding speculation in the media over who might staff his administration, assuming he wins next year’s election.“Let us be very specific here: unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official,” write Trump aides Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita.“Let us be even more specific, and blunt: People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump … and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction. Second term policy priorities and staffing decisions will not – in no uncertain terms – be led by anonymous or thinly sourced speculation in mainstream media news stories.”For more on the speculation surrounding Trump’s staff in his second term, here’s the Guardian’s Peter Stone:Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Donald Trump, has released a statement that attempts to reframe today’s federal appeals court decision upholding the gag order against the former president:
Today, the D.C. Circuit Court panel, with each judge appointed by a Democrat President, determined that a huge part of Judge Chutkan’s extraordinarily overbroad gag order was unconstitutional. President Trump will continue to fight for the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans to hear from the leading Presidential candidate at the height of his campaign. The Biden-led witch hunts against President Trump and the American people will fail.
While the court did strike down parts of the order, it upheld the aspects banning Trump from attacking the prosecutors, witnesses and court staff.In their ruling upholding most of federal judge Tanya Chutkan’s gag order against Donald Trump, the US court of appeals for the district of Columbia circuit found his statements could threaten his trial on charges related to trying to overturn the 2020 election.“We agree with the district court that some aspects of Mr. Trump’s public statements pose a significant and imminent threat to the fair and orderly adjudication of the ongoing criminal proceeding, warranting a speech-constraining protective order,” judge Patricia A Millett wrote for the court.Among the statements cited was one Trump posted on social media the day after his initial appearance in the case: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” The appeals court also noted that he attacked Chutkan as a “fraud dressed up as a judge” and “a radical Obama hack”, and that a supporter responded with a threat to kill the judge that used what appears to be a racial slur.“We do not allow such an order lightly,” federal appeals court judge Patricia A Millett wrote as she concluded the court’s decision allowing the gag order against Donald Trump.She continued:
Mr. Trump is a former President and current candidate for the presidency, and there is a strong public interest in what he has to say. But Mr. Trump is also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants. That is what the rule of law means.
As the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported last month, an appeals court appeared inclined to uphold judge Tanya Chutkan’s gag order against Donald Trump, and indeed they have:A federal appeals court appeared inclined at a hearing on Monday to keep some form of a gag order against Donald Trump preventing him from assailing potential trial witnesses and others in the criminal case related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The court expressed concern, however, that the order was too broad and left open the possibility of restricting its scope – including allowing the former US president to criticize the prosecutors in the office of the special counsel Jack Smith who brought the charges.The trial judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case in federal district court in Washington, entered the order in October that prohibited Trump from making inflammatory statements and social media posts attacking prosecutors, potential witnesses and court staff in the case.It allowed Trump only to criticize the case in general terms – such as broadly attacking Joe Biden, the Biden administration or the justice department as bringing politically motivated charges against him – and to criticize the judge herself.Trump appealed to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, arguing the order unconstitutionally infringed on his first amendment rights and protected core political speech as he campaigns to be re-elected to the presidency next year. The order was paused while he appealed.A federal appeals court has upheld most of a gag order against Donald Trump imposed by the judge handling his trial on charges related to attempting the overthrow of the 2020 election.Washington DC-based judge Tanya Chutkan imposed the order in October that prevented the former president from making inflammatory statements and social media posts attacking prosecutors, potential witnesses and court staff in the case. Trump appealed the order, arguing it unconstitutionally infringed on his first amendment rights and hindered his political speech amid his campaign for a second term in the White House.The order was put on hold as appeals judges considered his challenge. In its ruling, the court generally upheld Chutkan’s order, but said Trump was now also allowed to assail the special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the criminal case against the former president.Here’s the moment from Hunter Biden’s interview with Moby where he says Republicans are trying to “kill me” to bring down his father’s presidency:Earlier this week, Democratic and Republican politicians from the White House on down condemned the targeting of a Philadelphia Jewish restaurant by protesters calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip as antisemitic. But the Guardian’s Wilfred Chan reports that the story is more complex than that:The 21-second clip went viral almost as soon as it was posted early on Sunday evening. It showed hundreds of protesters, some with Palestinian flags, united in a rhyming chant: “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”They were protesting outside Goldie, a vegan falafel restaurant owned by Michael Solomonov, the Israel-born celebrity chef best known for Zahav, an Israeli-themed restaurant widely considered one of the United States’ finest eateries. It was one brief stop along a march traversing Philadelphia that lasted about three hours.Many of the protesters hadn’t even returned home from the march when the condemnations began to pour in. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, posted on X: “Tonight in Philly, we saw a blatant act of antisemitism – not a peaceful protest. A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.”Even the White House piled on: it was “antisemitic and completely unjustifiable to target restaurants that serve Israeli food over disagreements with Israeli policy”, said the deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates. Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice-President Kamala Harris, wrote on X that he had spoken with Solomonov and “told him @POTUS, @VP, and the entire Biden-Harris Administration will continue to have his back”.It was the apex of a saga that has resulted in at least three workers fired from Solomonov’s restaurants over, as they see it, their pro-Palestine activism coming into conflict with their bosses’ views and policies, and at least one other worker who has resigned in protest – thrusting the renowned Israeli eateries into the thick of bitter US disagreements over the Israel-Hamas war.The street protest against Goldie has sparked heated debate. As the war on Gaza rages on, with over 17,000 people killed in Gaza since 7 October – 70% of them women and children, according to Gaza’s health ministry – are Israel-linked businesses in the US implicated? Was Solomonov, a chef who has credited Palestinian influences in his cooking, an appropriate target?The 2024 election is months away, but Donald Trump and his allies are already planning on who they might hire for White House jobs, assuming he wins. The Guardian’s Peter Stone takes a look at what we know so far about Trump’s hiring plans:As Donald Trump and his allies start plotting another presidency, an emerging priority is to find hard-right lawyers who display total fealty to Trump, as a way to enhance his power and seek “retribution” against political foes.Stocking a future administration with more ideological lawyers loyal to Trump in key posts at the justice department, other agencies and the White House is alarming to former DoJ officials and analysts who say such plans endanger the rule of law.Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen Miller, president of the Maga-allied legal group America First Legal, is playing a key role in seeking lawyers fully in sync with Trump’s radical agenda to expand his power and curb some major agencies. His search is for those with unswerving loyalty to Trump, who could back Trump’s increasingly authoritarian talk about plans to “weaponize” the DoJ against critics, including some he has labeled as “vermin”.Miller is well known in Maga circles for his loyalty to Trump and the hard-line anti-immigration policies he helped craft for Trump’s presidency. Notably, Trump has vowed to make those policies even more draconian if he is the GOP nominee and wins again.Such an advisory role for Miller squares with Trump’s desire for a tougher brand of lawyer who will not try to obstruct him, as some top administration lawyers did in late 2020 over his false claims about election fraud.As Joe Biden centers his presidential campaign around major pieces of legislation enacted on his watch, like the bipartisan infrastructure act, Reuters reports Donald Trump and the GOP are expected to make channeling public funds to private and religious schools a key part of their pitch to voters:Beyond the tumult surrounding Donald Trump’s presidential bid and his threats to seek revenge against his political enemies should he win, the Republican frontrunner has seized on an issue that even some Democrats say could attract new voters in 2024.Trump is backing “school choice” programs that use taxpayer dollars to send students to private and religious schools. It is a stance with wide appeal as parents have become increasingly fed up with the state of US public education.Polls show that about 70% of parents favor greater education options. The issue resonates strongly enough with some voters that Trump’s support could make a difference in the presidential election as well as help Republicans in state and congressional races.“It’s popular among the Republican base, it’s popular among independents and even popular among the Democratic base – in particular African Americans and Hispanics,” said Jason Bedrick, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.Hunter Biden’s legal trouble deepened after prosecutors filed new tax charges against him. In an interview with the musician Moby, the president’s son said the GOP is “trying to kill me” to undermine Joe Biden’s presidency, while James Comer, the Republican chair of the House oversight committee, claimed his panel’s work led to the new charges. The president, meanwhile, had nothing to say about the latest developments in the prosecution, instead cheering better-than-expected employment data and announcing new investments in high-speed rail.Here’s what else is going on:
Hunter Biden’s attorney said the latest charges against his client were the result of “Republican pressure”.
The rightwing House Freedom Caucus demanded Congress approve hardline immigration policies that Democrats oppose in exchange for more Ukraine aid.
Joe Biden’s approval ratings have hit a record low, poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight reports.
The infrastructure act was passed in 2021 with a combination of Democratic and Republican votes, during a period when Congress was a much more functional place than it is today.Things sure have changed, particularly after the GOP took control of the House in last year’s midterm elections. The Republicans made clear they would not go along with the Biden administration’s plans, and though they have spent a substantial time fighting amongst themselves, they are currently fairly united in opposing an attempt by Joe Biden to win approval of a security package for Israel and Ukraine’s military, and the southern border with Mexico.The GOP instead wants Democrats to agree to enact hardline policies that they oppose, like restarting construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, and measures to keep asylum seekers out of the country. There is enough agreement among both parties over the importance of getting aid to Israel and Ukraine that they are still talking about a compromise, but the rightwing House Freedom Caucus just issued a statement saying, in part, that they will not support any bill that does not include the hardline immigration policies:If any compromise passes the House, there’s a good chance it will do so with some Democratic votes, and the Freedom Caucus’s opposition may not matter. Perhaps the person who should be most concerned about their statement is speaker Mike Johnson, considering several of the caucus’s members led the charge to remove his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, from the leadership post over his willingness to work with Democrats.Joe Biden’s trip to Las Vegas today will see him specifically focus on how the 2021 infrastructure law will revamp railway and build new high-speed lines between major metropolitan areas.High-speed rail has long been an elusive goal for transportation planners in the United States, which, unlike many of its peers among developed countries, has only one line that falls under that classification: Amtrak’s Acela service running between Washington DC and Boston.The White House today announced $8.2b in funding from the infrastructure law will go towards high-speed rail development, including new projects connecting California and Nevada. Here’s more from the Biden administration’s press release:
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing $8.2 billion in new funding for 10 major passenger rail projects across the country, including the first world-class high-speed rail projects in our country’s history. Key selected projects include: building a new high-speed rail system between California and Nevada, which will serve more than 11 million passengers annually; creating a high-speed rail line through California’s Central Valley to ultimately link Los Angeles and San Francisco, supporting travel with speeds up to 220 mph; delivering significant upgrades to frequently-traveled rail corridors in Virginia, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia; and upgrading and expanding capacity at Chicago Union Station in Illinois, one of the nation’s busiest rail hubs. These historic projects will create tens of thousands of good-paying, union jobs, unlock economic opportunity for communities across the country, and open up safe, comfortable, and climate-friendly travel options to get people to their destinations in a fraction of the time it takes to drive. More

Donald Trump may now assail the special counsel who brought the federal criminal case against him over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, in addition to being free to criticize the judge, the justice department, the Biden administration and the case as politically motivated.The former president remains barred, however, from attacking potential trial witnesses, court staff or the special counsel’s staff, as well as the family members of any court staff or the special counsel’s staff.That was the ruling handed down on Friday by the US court of appeals for the DC circuit, which found that Trump’s inflammatory statements posed a threat to the fair administration of justice and only partly narrowed the gag order imposed by the federal judge overseeing the case in Washington.“Mr Trump is a former president and current candidate for the presidency,” the appeals court wrote in a 68-page opinion. “But Mr Trump is also an indicted criminal defendant, and he must stand trial in a courtroom under the same procedures that govern all other criminal defendants.”The decision by the three-judge panel marks the latest defeat for Trump over the gag order, which was entered by the US district judge Tanya Chutkan in October after prosecutors complained that Trump’s statements and social media posts could intimidate potential trial witnesses.Trump is expected to appeal the ruling to the US supreme court, people close to his legal team said on Friday. A Trump spokesperson added: “President Trump will continue to fight for the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans to hear from the leading presidential candidate at the height of his campaign.”The ruling from the three circuit judges – all Democratic appointees – struck a cautious balance between allowing Trump to criticize the case as a political vendetta while he runs for re-election, and protecting the people involved in the case who Trump has targeted in his statements.In particular, the judges concluded that the original gag order was too broad in preventing Trump from personally attacking the special counsel Jack Smith. They also narrowed the order to say Trump can attack people involved in the post-2020 election matters as long as he does not target their trial testimony.But the judges were adamant that Trump’s relentless attacks clearly threatened the integrity of proceedings because his statements about potential witnesses could chill their testimony at trial while his statements about court staff could impede them from fulfilling their jobs.“Mr Trump’s documented pattern of speech and its demonstrated, real-time, real-world consequences pose a significant and imminent threat to the functioning of the criminal trial process in this case,” the opinion said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe judges also rejected all three of Trump’s arguments for lifting the gag order in its entirety, finding that his lawyers appeared to take the extreme position that only Trump’s first amendment rights – and no other consideration – mattered when it came to restricting his speech.They wrote that they found untenable Trump’s position that there could only be a gag order after a Trump statement caused harm or chilled a witness, not least because the point of a protective order was to ensure no such harm would occur in the first place.They also rejected Trump’s complaint that a gag order amounted to being bound by a “heckler’s veto” – gagging a defendant merely because of fears about how a third party might act – because the court had an obligation to ensure third parties did not threaten proceedings.The judges were also unimpressed with Trump’s argument that his political speech mattered more than criminal trial proceedings. “The existence of a political campaign,” the court wrote, “does not alter the court’s historical commitment or obligation to ensure the fair administration of justice.” More

With little more than a month to go before the US presidential election season kicks off in Iowa, a new projection of political spending says a record $15.9bn will be spent on advertising, up more than 30% up on the 2019-2020 election cycle.The assessment, by GroupM, one of the world’s largest paid advertising agencies, suggests total political ad revenue could add a billion more to reach a total of $17.1bn, if including direct mail pitches.Despite voters already knowing the likely two nominees – Joe Biden and Donald Trump – depriving the two main parties of traditional meet-our-candidate introduction spending, the extraordinary spend on political advertising next year is now so large that it will be the 10th largest singular ad market in the world – larger than all of Australia’s.The projected ad spending totals in the presidential election year will also be five times higher than the $3.6bn spent on political and issue ads during the last midterm elections. By the 2028 presidential election, the group said, political ad spending could reach $20bn.According to the GroupM survey, obtained by Axios, a majority of political advertising spend in the US goes to local broadcast TV. But an increasing amount goes to digital platforms.Other novelties of the year ahead in political advertising, the outlet said, are the use of AI to place ads. In August, the Federal Election Commission opened a public debate on how to address the malicious use of AI in campaign ads. The window for comments closed in October.The GroupM projection is higher by $6bn than similar political ad spending forecasts. AdImpact projects the 2023-2024 election cycle will be the most expensive of all time, totaling $10.2bn in political expenditures across all media and a 13% increase over the 2019-2020 election cycle.The survey projected that $2.7bn would be spent directly on presidential candidates, $2.1bn on Senate candidate spending, and $1.7bn on house candidates. The area projected to see the most spending on political advertising is “down ballot” – political spending not related to presidential, House, Senate or governor races, at $3.3bn. More

Lawyers for Donald Trump, defending him against charges that he retained national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, have asked a federal judge to grant them unprecedented access to the classified information that prosecutors want to redact before it gets introduced at trial.“Cleared counsel for President Trump seek attorneys’-eyes-only access to these filings so that we can challenge the [special counsel’s] assertions in adversarial proceedings,” the Trump legal team said in the 18-page filing.The request – asking for access to the US government’s sealed court filings that are off limits to defense counsel by default under statute – is significant because even a partial ruling in Trump’s favor by the US district judge Aileen Cannon could trigger the first appeal in the case.Such an appeal to the 11th circuit would be interlocutory, meaning it would have to be adjudicated before trial, almost certainly delaying other pre-trial deadlines and therefore the May 2024 trial date, which is already estimated to be running about four months behind schedule.The Trump motion was also widely regarded by legal experts as extraordinary because it turned on its face the point of the complex procedures governing how classified documents can be made public in criminal cases without risking national security.Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury in June with violating the Espionage Act by retaining documents about the likes of US nuclear secrets, which means his case will be tried under the rules laid out in the seven-section Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.At issue in the Trump case is the Cipa section 4 filing submitted by special counsel prosecutors. Under section 4, the government can file a motion to redact classified information that would qualify as discovery but would not be “relevant or helpful” to defense counsel.The goal of section 4 is to eliminate what was previously known as the “graymail” problem in national security cases, where defense counsel threatened to reveal classified information at trial, betting that the government would prefer to drop the charges rather than risk disclosure.It remains unclear what prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith want to redact, other than the fact that it encompasses “four categories of especially sensitive classified information”, according to recently unsealed filings.The judge technically has discretion under the statute to decide how to proceed with section 4 filings, but legal experts said the Trump motion, asking to see everything, amounted to a request to defeat the entire purpose of Cipa section 4 to protect against the threat of graymail.Trump’s lawyers essentially argued that special counsel prosecutors should be forced to share what classified information they want to redact because the criminal justice system broadly disfavors filings that are not shown to defense counsel, and because they have the necessary clearances.The Trump team also made a novel argument about how the development of laws granting greater access to national security matters – like having motions to suppress evidence in the secret foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) courts – should prompt Cannon to consider creating new precedent.The Trump legal team’s motion also asked for the judge to order special counsel prosecutors to file redacted versions of their Cipa section 4 filing on the public docket, which could shed light on the government’s legal arguments about the relevance of some of the classified information. More