US Politics

Three years after supporting Joe Biden’s victorious 2020 campaign, the straight-talking rap superstar Cardi B has ditched her backing of the president after public service cuts in her home town of New York.The Grammy winner, whose legal name is Belcalis Almánzar, said in an Instagram live stream she was done with Biden. Her tirade highlighted what she portrayed as contradiction between US domestic and foreign policies, saying the White House was helping Ukraine fight Russia and Israel fight Hamas while the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, announced a 5% municipal budget cut last week.Adams said the cuts would affect schools, libraries, the New York police department and the sanitation service, among others.As Cardi B said: “In New York, there is a $120m budget cut that’s going to affect schools, public libraries and the police department.“And a $5m budget cut in sanitation … We are gonna be drowning in … rats.”Adams warned last week that more cuts would be necessary without additional funding from Washington to manage New York’s increase of migrants.“Migrant costs are going up, tax revenue growth is slowing and [Covid-19] stimulus funding is drying up,” Adams said in a statement.“No city should be left to handle a national humanitarian crisis largely on its own, and without the significant and timely support we need from Washington, today’s budget will be only the beginning.”But the Biden administration has not agreed to meet Adams’s funding plea amid growing domestic anger over the multi-billion-dollar funding of the Ukrainian defense against Russia’s invasion and Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza.An NBC poll released on Sunday showed that Biden’s approval rating has declined to 40%, the lowest level of his presidency. And the survey showed that strong majorities of all voters disapprove of his handling of foreign policy.The steepest declines of support came among voters aged 18 to 34 – 70% said they did not approve of Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.Cardi B, who memorably helped promote Biden’s candidacy as he successfully ran for the White House in 2020, vowed that she would no longer endorse political candidates in the future.“I’m endorsing no presidents no more,” Cardi B warned. “Joe Biden is talking about, ‘Yeah, we can fund two wars,’ … talking about, ‘Yeah, we got it, we’re the greatest nation.’ No … we’re not. We don’t got it, and we’re going through some shit right now. So say it!”She added: “We are really, really, really fucked right now. No, we cannot fund these … wars.”Cardi B asked whether the US was going broke and then answered: “Yes, it is. We ain’t got McDonald’s money.”In a final rebuke to Biden’s economic and foreign policy management, she said: “Feed that … to somebody else, twinkle, but don’t feed it to me.” She then promised “to get to the bottom of it”. More

The Wisconsin supreme court will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most closely watched voting rights cases in the country this year. The challenge could ultimately lead to the court striking down districts in the state legislature, ending a cemented Republican majority, and upending politics in one of the US’s most politically competitive states.The case, Clarke v Wisconsin Elections Commission, is significant because Wisconsin’s state legislative maps, and especially its state assembly districts, are widely considered to be among the most gerrymandered in the US. In 2011, Republicans redrew the districts in such a way that cemented an impenetrable majority. In the state assembly, Republicans have consistently won at least 60% of the 99 seats, sometimes with less than 50% of the statewide vote. In 2022, Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, won re-election by three points, but carried just 38 of 99 assembly districts.The Evers result underscored a disturbing anti-democratic reality in Wisconsin: the results of state legislative elections are determined before a single vote is cast. Because of that dynamic, the case could restore representation to Wisconsin voters, making their districts more responsive to how they vote.A ruling striking down the maps is likely to result in a legislature in which Republicans have a much narrower majority and could reshape policymaking in Wisconsin. Issues that have broad public support in Wisconsin, like Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization, have been non-starters in a legislature where the GOP majority is ironclad. A legislature in which Republicans are fearful of losing their majority may be more willing to at least consider broadly popular issues.“What’s at stake in this case is really democracy in the state of Wisconsin,” said Jeff Mandel, president of Law Forward, which is representing some of the challengers in the suit.Republicans have wielded their legislative power ruthlessly and effectively for more than a decade. When Democrats won the governor’s and attorney general’s offices in 2018, Republicans stripped them of some of their power. Republican lawmakers ignored Evers’ requests for special sessions on a myriad of issues. More recently, they launched an investigation into the 2020 election that devolved into chaos, have floated impeachment for a supreme court justice and attacked the non-partisan administrator of the state elections commission.Then, liberals flipped control of the state supreme court in April in the most expensive state supreme court race in US history. Justice Janet Protasiewicz, the newest member of the court’s liberal majority, said during the campaign the maps were “rigged”, a comment that has led Republicans to call for her impeachment. The case was filed the day after Protasiewicz formally took her seat on the court in August.Tuesday’s case is one of several in recent years that have focused on state courts and state constitutions as a vehicle to strike down gerrymandered maps. In 2019, the US supreme court said that federal courts could not do anything to stop partisan gerrymandering, but encouraged litigants to turn to state courts.The challengers argue that the existing maps violate the Wisconsin state constitution for two reasons. First, they say, 75 of Wisconsin’s 132 state legislative districts are non-contiguous – 54 in the state assembly and 21 in the state senate. They argue that’s a clear violation of a state constitutional requirement that requires assembly districts to “be bounded by county, precinct, town or ward lines, to consist of contiguous territory and be in as compact form as practicable”. The constitution also says state senate districts must be “convenient contiguous territory”.The contiguity requirement serves a democratic purpose, Mandel said. When someone has a problem in their community, it should be easy for them to band together with their neighbors and bring their grievances to a common representative.“It is not easy or obvious for the people to figure this out when you scatter representatives from a district into these tiny municipal islands,” he said. “The vast majority of the districts in the state have this problem. It is a feature of the way they chose to draw this map. It is not a mistake or a slight mapmaking error or an oversight. It’s deliberate and it’s anti-democratic.”But lawyers representing legislative Republicans take a much different view of the contiguity requirement in their brief to the court. Districts are non-contiguous, they argued, because municipalities in the state have annexed islands that do not always touch the main part of its boundaries. The contiguity requirement in the state constitution refers to keeping towns and municipalities together, they said.“Literal islands are ‘contiguous’ because they are joined together by municipal boundaries,” they write in one brief. “Invisible district lines do not stop legislators or voters from traveling between municipalities and nearby municipal islands,” they argue in another.The challengers also argue that the process by which the maps were implemented violate the state constitution’s separation of powers.Wisconsin Republicans initially passed a new map in 2021 that Evers vetoed. The state supreme court, then controlled by conservatives, accepted a request from a conservative group to take over the redistricting process.The court, which had a conservative majority at the time, announced that it would make as little change as possible to the existing maps, a major win for Republicans since the districts were already heavily gerrymandered in their favor. The court then initially picked a map that had been submitted by Evers, but the US supreme court struck it down. The Wisconsin supreme court then picked maps that Republicans submitted. It was the same plan Evers had vetoed months earlier.The new map preserved the Republican tilt in districts and shored up their advantage in the few places where they had been able to make inroads.That decision by the court essentially amounted to an end run around Evers’ veto and violated the separation of powers in the Wisconsin constitution, the challengers in the case argue.“The court took away or negated the governor’s veto power without ever saying he used it inappropriately or something like that,” Mandel said. “They just said, ‘Well, nonetheless, that becomes the law.’ That can’t be right.”Republicans argue there was nothing unconstitutional about the process by which the court chose the maps. The court didn’t choose the map because it was rejected by the legislature, but picked it as one of several that were submitted by parties.“The Governor and the Legislature – like the other parties – briefed the issues to the Court and supported their proposals with expert reports. And the Court – treating the Governor and Legislature as parties – selected among proposals as an appropriate least-changes judicial remedy,” they wrote.Wisconsin election officials have said that any new map would need to be in place no later than 15 March 2024 in order to be used in next year’s elections. Because of that tight deadline, a ruling is expected in the case relatively quickly.A decision striking down Wisconsin’s map would also be a major symbolic victory in efforts to rein in extreme partisan gerrymandering over the last decade.The district is the remaining crown jewel of a 2010 Republican effort called Project Redmap, which successfully flipped state legislatures across the country in favor of of the GOP, giving them the power to draw heavily distorted districts. Using a combination of litigation and ballot measures, Democrats and gerrymandering reformers have been able to strike down those maps in many places, but Wisconsin’s have remained untouched.“The designers of these maps knew precisely how long these lines would endure. But almost no one else did,” said David Daley, a senior fellow at FairVote who wrote a book about Redmap called Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count. “I don’t think anyone understood that the consequences of the 2010 election in Wisconsin would be to leave Republicans in charge for another 14 years.”“It’s been difficult to call the state a functioning democracy since early in Barack Obama’s first term,” he added. “It’s perhaps the most cautionary tale of the dangers of runaway partisan gerrymandering in an age where polarization and technology can allow operatives to draw maps that lock themselves in power not just for one entire electoral cycle, but well into a second decade.” More

Here is a simple moral proposition. No one in America, or anywhere in the world, should die or suffer unnecessarily because they cannot afford a prescription drug which, in many cases, costs a few cents or a few dollars to manufacture.As Chairman of the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (Help) I’m going to do everything I can to develop a new approach to the development and manufacturing of prescription drugs that responds to medical need, rather than short-term shareholder profit. Given the power and greed of the pharmaceutical industry this is not an easy task, but it’s one that must be pursued.The tragic reality is that, today, millions of people around the world are suffering, and dying, from preventable diseases because they can’t afford the outrageous prices charged by pharmaceutical companies. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one third of humanity lacks access to essential medicines. For a staggering number of people around the world, this leads to what the WHO calls “a cascade of preventable misery and suffering.”There are a number of reasons why this tragic reality continues to happen.First, too often drug companies abuse patent monopolies to charge outrageous prices or otherwise keep lifesaving drugs out of reach for people around the world. For example, the Boston-based drug company Vertex is neither selling a transformative new treatment for cystic fibrosis in the developing world, nor allowing other local companies to produce it. Put simply, the company is not only refusing to bring a life-raft to people drowning with cystic fibrosis in poor countries, it is also blocking others from deploying their own life-rafts to people who need them to stay alive.Second, far too often, the medicines that are desperately needed by millions of people in poor countries are not being produced by the pharmaceutical industry because the drug companies cannot make sufficient profits by doing so. In the US and other developed countries people often pay exorbitant prices for life-saving medicines. Poor people in developing countries can’t. They don’t have the money. The result: they die. Because the business model of the pharmaceutical industry values dollars gained over lives saved, there are not enough companies looking for transformative treatments, especially for diseases that afflict poor people.Consider the case of tuberculosis (TB) – a disease that killed more than 1.3 million people in 2022, and is on the rise as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The TB vaccine still used today is more than a hundred years old, and only protects young children, even though adolescents and adults account for the majority of TB transmission. The testing of a promising new publicly-funded TB vaccine that could potentially save millions of lives was delayed after its corporate owner, GSK, decided to focus on more profitable vaccines.The scientist who brought GSK the idea of the TB vaccine decades ago now acknowledges that Big Pharma cannot deliver for developing countries. “You get a big company to take it forward? Bullshit,” he told ProPublica. “That model is gone. It’s failed. It’s dead. We have to create a new one.”Clearly, we must do better. The life of a millionaire in New York City is not worth more than the life of a person living in extreme poverty in South Sudan.Fundamentally, we need to transform how we pay for the development of new prescription drugs. This starts with funding open-source research, so lifesaving information is shared, and scientists around the world can work together to research and manufacture their own breakthroughs. Patents should not stand in the way of public health.If we can provide $886bn to the Pentagon for military spending, we can provide scientists with the money they need to develop cutting-edge cures that are accessible to everyone.People should not die because of their income or where they were born. We know what it will take to save lives. Now we must have the courage to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry. Let’s do it.
Bernie Sanders is a US Senator, and chairman of the health education labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More

Former US ambassador to Thailand Morton Abramowitz (left) and former US first lady Rosalynn Carter, a baby in her arms, speak to the child’s mother at the Sa Kaeo refugee camp, Prachinburi Province (later Sa Kaeo), Thailand, on 9 November, 1979.

Photograph: Diana Walker/Getty Images More

The Washington chattering class, often unsure what to make of outsiders, dubbed Rosalynn Carter the “steel magnolia” when she arrived as first lady.A devout Baptist and mother of four, she was diminutive and outwardly shy, with a soft smile and softer Southern accent. That was the “magnolia”. She also was a force behind Jimmy Carter’s rise from peanut farmer to winner of the 1976 presidential election. That was the “steel”.Yet that obvious, even trite moniker almost certainly undersold her role and impact across the Carters’ early life, their one White House term and their four decades afterward as global humanitarians advocating peace, democracy and the eradication of disease.Through more than 77 years of marriage, until her death Sunday at the age of 96, Rosalynn Carter was business and political partner, best friend and closest confidant to the 39th president. A Georgia Democrat like her husband, she became in her own right a leading advocate for people with mental health conditions and family caregivers in American life, and she joined the former president as co-founder of The Carter Center, where they set a new standard for what first couples can accomplish after yielding power.“She was always eager to help his agenda, but she knew what she wanted to accomplish,” said Kathy Cade, a White House adviser to the first lady and later a Carter Center board member.A passion for politicsRosalynn Carter talked often of her passion for politics. “I love campaigning,” she told the Associated Press (AP) in 2021. She acknowledged how devastated she was when voters delivered a landslide rebuke in 1980.Cade said a larger purpose, though, undergirded the thrills and disappointments: “She really wanted to use the influence she had to help people.”Jimmy Carter biographer Jonathan Alter argues that only Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton rival Rosalynn Carter’s influence as first lady. The Carters’ work beyond the White House, he says, sets her apart as having achieved “one of the great political partnerships in American history”.Cade recalled her old boss as “pragmatic” and “astute”, knowing when to lobby congressional brokers without her husband’s prompting and when to hit the campaign trail alone. She did that for long stretches in 1980 when the president remained at the White House trying to free US hostages in Iran, something he managed only after losing to Ronald Reagan.“I was in all the states,” Rosalynn Carter told the AP. “I campaigned solid every day the last time we ran.”She flouted stereotypes of first ladies as hostesses and fashion mavens: she bought dresses off the rack and established an East Wing office with her own staff and initiatives – a push that culminated in the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 to steer more federal money to treating mental health, though Reagan reversed course. At The Carter Center, she launched a fellowship for journalists to pursue better coverage of mental health issues.She attended cabinet meetings and testified before Congress. Even when fulfilling traditional responsibilities, she expanded the first lady’s role, helping to establish the regular music productions still broadcast as public television’s In Performance at the White House. She presided over the inaugural Kennedy Center Honors, prestigious annual awards that still recognize seminal contributions to US culture. She hosted White House dinners but danced only with her husband.Her approach befuddled some Washington observers.“There was still a women’s page in the newspaper,” Cade recalled. “The reporters who were on the national scene didn’t think it was their job to cover what she was doing. She belonged on the women’s page. And the women’s page folks had difficulty understanding what she was doing, because she wasn’t doing the more traditional first lady things.”Grandson Jason Carter, now Carter Center board chairman, described her “determination that never stopped”. She was “physically small” but “the strongest, most remarkably tough woman that you would ever hope to see”.Including as Jimmy Carter’s political enforcer.She “defended my grandfather in a lot of contexts, including against Democrats and others”, confronting, in person or via telephone, people she thought had damaged his cause, Jason Carter said.Yet she nearly always connected politics to policy and those policy outcomes to people’s lives – connections forged from her earliest years in the Depression-era deep south.Rural Depression lifeEleanor Rosalynn Smith was born 18 August 1927, in Plains, delivered by nurse Lillian Carter, a neighbor. “Miss Lillian” brought her son, Jimmy, then almost 3, back to the Smith home a few days later to meet the baby.Not long after, James Earl Carter Sr moved his family to a farm outside Plains. But the Carter and Smith children attended the same all-white schools in town. Years later, Rosalynn and Jimmy would quietly support integration – and call for it more vocally at Plains Baptist Church. But growing up, they accepted Jim Crow segregation as the order of the day, she wrote in a memoir.Rosalynn and Jimmy each endured challenges of rural Depression life. But while the Carters were considerable landholders, the Smiths were poor, and Rosalynn’s father died in 1940, leaving her to help raise her siblings. She recalled this period as inspiration for her emphasis on caregivers, a way of classifying people that Alter, the biographer, said was not used widely in discussions of US society and the economy until Rosalynn Carter used her platform.“There are only four kinds of people in this world,” she said. “Those who have been caregivers; those who are currently caregivers; those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.”As she grew up, Rosalynn became close to one of Jimmy’s sisters. Ruth Carter later engineered a date between her brother and Rosalynn during one of his trips home from the US Naval Academy during the second world war. Jimmy, newly commissioned as a Navy lieutenant, and Rosalynn were married 7 July 1946 at Plains Methodist Church, her home church before she joined his Baptist faith.Already an appointed school board member, Jimmy decided to run for state Senate in 1962, without consulting Rosalynn. She embraced the decision because she shared his goals.Four years later, Jimmy ran for governor, giving Rosalynn the first chance to campaign by herself. He lost. But they spent the ensuing four years preparing for another bid, traveling the state together and separately, with a network of friends and supporters. It would become the model for the “Peanut Brigade” they used to blanket Iowa and other key states in the 1976 Democratic primary season.The center of Carter’s circleThose campaigns for governor solidified mental health as Rosalynn’s signature issue.By the time they got to the White House, Rosalynn had distinguished herself as the center of Carter’s inner circle, even if those beyond the West Wing did not appreciate her role.Carter sent her on diplomatic missions. She took Spanish lessons to aid her Latin America voyages. She decided herself to travel in 1979 to Cambodian refugee camps. Spurred by a Friday briefing, she was on a plane the next week, having put together an international delegation to address the crisis.“She wasn’t just going to have pictures made … she watched people die,” Cade said.She traveled to US state capitals and urged lawmakers to adopt vaccine requirements for schoolchildren, winning over converts to policies that largely remain intact today, recent fights over Covid-19 vaccine mandates notwithstanding.Rosalynn wanted her husband to delay the treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal, pushing it to a second term. She met regularly, without the president, with pollster Pat Caddell. They discussed a re-election path she knew was perilous on the heels of inflation, rising interest rates, oil shortages and the Iran hostage situation.Distraught upon their return to Plains in 1981, she dived back into the farming business. But the void would not begin to close until the former president conceived The Carter Center. In their Atlanta outpost, she found an enduring platform from which to travel the world, pushing to eradicate Guinea worm disease and other maladies in developing countries, monitoring elections, elevating discussion of women’s and girls’ rights and continuing her mental health advocacy. All while living in the same Georgia village she once wanted to leave forever.“My grandparents, you know, have a microwave from 1982 … They’ve got a rack next to their sink where they dry Ziploc bags, reuse them,” Jason Carter said recently, explaining their “simple” and “frugal” style in the same home where the Carters lived when Jimmy was first elected as a state senator.There, the former first lady welcomed foreign dignitaries, Joe Biden and Jill Biden, aspiring politicians seeking advice and, as her health declined, a new generation of Carter Center leadership. She liked to serve pimento cheese sandwiches, fruit and, depending on the guest list, a few glasses of wine. And she came with an agenda.“Mrs Carter would always be the first one at the door, and she would insist on walking me to the door at the end,” Paige Alexander, CEO of The Carter Center, said of her sessions in Plains. “That final walk … so she could get her last points in was, I think, quite indicative of the relationship that they had and how she managed it from the governor’s mansion all the way through.” More

Rosalynn Carter, wife of the 39th president Jimmy Carter, has died at the couple’s Georgia home aged 96.Carter, who became one of the nation’s leading mental health advocates during and after her husband’s time in the White House, was diagnosed with dementia in May.On Friday, her family announced she had entered hospice care at home, joining her 99-year-old husband in end-of-life treatment in the Plains one-story residence they shared since before Jimmy Carter was elected a Georgia state senator in 1962.The former president has been in hospice care there since February after declining further medical intervention for his own health issues.“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Jimmy Carter said in a statement released Sunday afternoon by the Carter Center.“She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”The statement said Mrs Carter “died peacefully, with family by her side” at 2.10pm ET. An online tribute book is open at www.rosalynncartertribute.org.Chip Carter, the couple’s middle son, said: “Besides being a loving mother and extraordinary first lady, my mother was a great humanitarian in her own right. Her life of service and compassion was an example for all Americans.“She will be sorely missed not only by our family but by the many people who have better mental health care and access to resources for caregiving today.”The former first lady was born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith in August 1927, in Plains, a small rural town of fewer than 600 people where her husband was also born and raised.She was a fiercely loyal ally throughout his political career, both in the White House and during his years as a respected international diplomat after his single term in office ended in 1981. But she also forged her own identity for her mental health advocacy and as a social justice activist.She founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers in 1987, and remained active in the organization into her later years.The Carter Center, a human rights non-profit founded by the couple, paid tribute to her work in its statement earlier this year announcing her dementia diagnosis.“Mrs Carter has been the nation’s leading mental health advocate for much of her life. We recognize, as she did more than half a century ago, that stigma is often a barrier that keeps individuals and their families from seeking and getting much-needed support,” it said.“We hope sharing our family’s news will increase important conversations at kitchen tables and in doctor’s offices around the country.”Rosalynn Carter and her husband were also supporters of Habitat for Humanity, raising awareness and funds for the Carter Work Project named for them, and frequently tackling projects themselves as “some of our best hands-on construction volunteers”.One of the couple’s final public appearances was at the Plains Peanut Festival in September, days before Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday, when they rode the parade together in the back of an SUV.Their families were already known to each other when they met while Jimmy Carter was at the US naval academy in Maryland during the second world war. They married in 1946, and helped run the Carter family’s peanut farm together until his political career took off.She wore the same gown to Carter’s 1977 presidential inauguration as she had when he was elected Georgia governor in 1970.The couple, who celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021, had four children, Jack, Chip, James and Amy. Their sons were adults by the time Carter was elected president, but Amy, aged nine, was the subject of massive media attention and became one of the most famous child residents of the White House. More

Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration, his plans for a second presidency if he wins next year’s election, and his description of political enemies as “vermin” reflect the language of 1930s Germany and the Nazis’ rise to power there, a senior Democrat warned on Sunday.JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor of Jewish descent who helped drive the construction of the state’s Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Chicago, added his voice to a wave of condemnation over the former president’s remarks.Joe Biden last week also likened Trump’s comments to the era when Nazi Germany orchestrated the murders of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, saying “it isn’t even the first time” he had done so.Trump had deliberately chosen to use words “that are unfortunately reminiscent of the past”, Pritzker said during an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.“The rhetoric that’s being used by Trump, by some of the Maga (Make America great again) extremists, is rhetoric that was used in the 1930s in Germany [and] I am very concerned about the direction of the country if we see policies like what Donald Trump is espousing come to light,” he said.“In Germany in the 1930s people that they didn’t want to have power, people that they wanted to separate and segregate, they began calling them immigrants, even people who had been in Germany for generations. This is a way to begin to segregate people and then eventually … dehumanize and kill people.“I don’t know where it’s going with Donald Trump. What I can tell you is that the things that he talks about are frightening to those of us who know the history of Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And I’m deeply concerned about his predilection for revenge and what that will mean for groups of people that didn’t support him in the 2024 election if he gets elected.”Highlighting Trump’s extremism has become a key part of messaging from the Joe Biden White House and Democratic party as the runaway leader in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination moves further ahead of his challengers.“Employing words like ‘vermin’ to describe anyone who makes use of their basic right to criticize the government echoes dictators like [Adolf] Hitler and [Benito] Mussolini,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said during a press briefing last week.“Using terms like that about dissent would be unrecognizable to our founders, but horrifyingly recognisable to American veterans who put on their country’s uniform in the 1940s” and defeated the Axis Powers which included forces from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy during the second world war.Pritzker expanded on the theme Sunday in his interview with Psaki, Biden’s former White House press secretary.“I repeat it wherever I go, that Donald Trump is dangerous for our democracy. He’s dangerous for specific minority groups in the US. And I think that for those of us who have a platform to call it out it is a requirement,” he said.“I’m deeply concerned about the rise of hate. I worry about it on our college campuses. We’ve seen protests, and I think it’s everybody’s right to express themselves. What I don’t want is protests and counter-protests encountering each other and that turning into violence.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe governor also had words of comfort for Democrats concerned at recent polls placing Trump ahead of Biden in several key swing states.“I don’t think yet people have really put these two next to each other and evaluated what the philosophies and agendas are,” he said.“People don’t really focus until, let’s face it, after the conventions. It’s just in those final couple of months, July all the way through November, that this needs to be brought home to people.“When that happens, that crystallization will occur in people’s minds and people will see that the democracy that they believe in, the country that they owe their allegiance to, that the best thing for America is to put aside the authoritarian Donald Trump.”Trump was in Texas near the border with Mexico on Sunday to promote an escalation of hard-line immigration police that he adopted while in office.Those policies alarmed civil rights activists and drew court challenges. More

Ron DeSantis defended Elon Musk as “a guy that believes in America” on Sunday as the Florida governor refused to condemn X’s billionaire owner for an antisemitic post that caused numerous key advertisers to desert the social media platform.In an interview Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, the Republican Florida governor claimed he had not seen the message on the platform that was formerly known as Twitter. The message – in which Musk said an X user who accused Jewish people of hating white people was speaking “the actual truth” – was denounced by the White House on Friday as “abhorrent”.Instead, DeSantis dedicated his remarks on CNN to exalting Musk as a banner carrier for free speech. And he dismissed other prominent right wingers who have expressed antisemitic positions as “fringe voices”.“Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it into a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like,” said DeSantis, whose campaign for the Republican 2024 nomination continues to crater. “I was a big supporter of him purchasing Twitter.”When State of the Union host Jake Tapper brought Musk’s widely condemned “actual truth” message to the screen, DeSantis said he had “no idea what the context is” and said he would not “pass judgment on the fly”, although he said he stood against antisemitism “across the board”.“I know Elon Musk,” DeSantis said. “I’ve never seen him do anything. I think he’s a guy that believes in America, I’ve never seen him indulge in any of that. So it’s surprising if that’s true.”Critics have previously accused the governor of being slow to condemn rallies by neo-Nazis in his state, some carrying flags with the words: “This is DeSantis country.” He has attempted to portray the criticism as a “smear campaign” by political opponents while a campaign aide posted a “reprehensible” tweet suggesting DeSantis’s Nazi supporters were actually Democratic party staffers.After Sunday’s CNN interview, senior Democrats were skeptical of DeSantis’s insistence he hadn’t seen Musk’s message. The message drew headlines globally and prompted disgusted major companies – including Apple, Disney, IBM and Warner Brothers – to suspend advertising on X.“The guy’s running for president, and Elon Musk [posted] that on Wednesday. It’s Sunday. So this is four days later, and he has not had the chance to read what Musk wrote? That is very hard for me to believe,” Democratic US House member Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Tapper.“You showed it to him, and he still refused to condemn it. If you’re serious about condemning and confronting antisemitism, and racism, and these bigotries, which are the gateway to destruction of liberal democracy, you’ve got to be explicit and open and full throated about it when you’ve got [the opportunity] to denounce antisemitism and racism across the board.”DeSantis has vocally supported Israel since its war with Hamas began in October. On Sunday, he urged greater US support for the Israeli’s military’s onslaught against Hamas in Gaza.“We need to let Israel win this war,” DeSantis said. “We should support them publicly and privately to actually finish the job, because if you just do some glancing blows, Hamas is going to reconstitute itself and we’re going to end up in the same cycle going forward.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Israel’s in a situation where they suffered the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. You have an organization, Hamas, that wants to wipe Israel totally off the map. This is not just some minor dispute. This is an existential threat to the survival of the world’s only Jewish state [and] they have to do whatever they can to protect their people.”DeSantis pointed to his ban of a pro-Palestinian student group from Florida’s university campuses, a policy challenged in court this week on free speech grounds, as an example of standing up to terrorists.“We have Jewish students fleeing for their lives because you have angry mobs,” he said. “I have constituents in Florida whose kids don’t even want to go to campus … because of such a hostile environment.”Tapper, in a thinly disguised dig at DeSantis’s well publicized previous attacks on minority students on grounds of race and gender, replied: “Absolutely Jewish students, just like Muslim students, Black students, gay students, or all students, should feel safe on campuses.” More