US Politics

California activists against caste discrimination faced a defeat on Saturday as Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill that would add caste to a list of protected categories under the state’s existing anti-discrimination laws.In a statement, Newsom called the bill “unnecessary”, explaining that California “already prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other characteristics, and state law specifies that these civil rights protections shall be liberally construed”.“Because discrimination based on caste is already prohibited under these existing categories, this bill is unnecessary,” he said in the statement.Caste is primarily associated with India and Hinduism, but caste-based divisions are found in several faiths and countries. Although India outlawed caste discrimination more than 70 years ago, bias still persists, including in diaspora communities. Dalits – or “untouchables” – have reported experiencing violence, discrimination and marginalization at school, work and places of worship in the US.California, which has one of the largest south Asian populations in the US, has been home to a growing movement of anti-caste activism, much of it focused on Silicon Valley, which has a large number of south Asian immigrants working in the tech sector.This led state senator Aisha Wahab, the first Muslim and Afghan American woman elected to the state legislature, to author the bill. California’s civil rights law outlaws many forms of discrimination, including medical conditions, genetic information, sexual orientation, immigration status and ancestry. Wahab’s bill expands the definition of “ancestry” to include “lineal descent, heritage, parentage, caste, or any inherited social status”.The bill sparked an intense response in California’s south Asian community. A public hearing on the bill this summer lasted hours as hundreds of people lined up around the Capitol to testify for and against. Opponents like the nonprofit Hindu American Foundation have argued that the law unfairly targets Hindus and “seeks to codify” negative stereotypes.Earlier this week, Republican state senators Brian Jones and Shannon Grove called on Newsom to veto the bill, which they said will “not only target and racially profile South Asian Californians, but will put other California residents and businesses at risk and jeopardize our state’s innovate edge.”Grove said the law could open up businesses to unnecessary or frivolous lawsuits.Wahab argued it was essential to expand California laws to “protect more vulnerable people in communities that we don’t often talk about”.In 2020, Cisco became the first company in the US to be sued for casteism after two high-caste Indian managers were accused of discriminating against a Dalit engineer. Cisco argued that the engineer was not a part of a protected class; California’s civil rights department dismissed the case against the managers earlier this year but is still investigating the company.In response to the work of Dalit activists, Google and Apple updated their employee handbooks to explicitly name caste as a protected group.Last year, California State University became the first university system to add caste as a protected category to its anti-discrimination policy. And on 28 September, California’s largest central valley city, Fresno, became the second city in the US to ban caste discrimination.Proponents of the bill launched a hunger strike in early September pushing for the law’s passage. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder of the Oakland-based Equality Labs, the largest Dalit civil rights group in the US which has been leading the movement to end caste discrimination nationwide, said the goal of the fast is to end caste bias in every area, including employment and housing.“We do this to recenter in our sacred commitment to human dignity, reconciliation and freedom and remind the governor and the state of the stakes we face if this bill is not signed into law,” she said.“[California] is a unique place for us to be able to take the conversation of a community that’s suffering and ensure our rights and safety. Not just for our state but the rest of the nation,” said Soundararajan.Soundararajan, who is Dalit and worked with Wahab to push the bill, said that she had faced harassment, vitriol and misinformation campaigns led by upper-caste people in the US. Last year, she said, she was invited to lead a talk at Google focused on caste discrimination, but it was cancelled after outcry from employees who argued that the talk was anti-Hindu.Wahab had hoped the new law would help spur the anti-caste movement, but it is already growing outside California. Earlier this year, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste discrimination. In 2022, Brown university in Rhode Island became the first Ivy League school to add caste protections, and was followed by Harvard and Brandeis, both in Massachusetts, which have also added specific protections for caste.Wahab said, in her remarks before the state assembly, “Caste systems are a social hierarchy that limits human potential, crushes the spirit and causes an intergenerational trauma that spans centuries.”The Associated Press contributed to this report More

The blue suit, white shirt, red tie and American flag pin looked familiar. So did the TV cameras following every move and reporters hanging on every word. So did the wild hand gestures as he unleashed a torrent of incendiary rhetoric about the elites supposedly out to get him.But this was not Donald Trump at one of his rollicking campaign rallies in middle America. This was the former US president standing outside a New York courtroom, with uniformed officers looking on, during a civil fraud trial accusing him of grossly inflating the value of his businesses.The incongruous spectacle was proof, if any more were needed, that Trump’s court appearances and White House campaign woes have essentially merged. The legal woes that would distract or destroy most candidacies have now become a defining feature of his 2024 presidential run.“Every time he’s in a courtroom, he’s campaigning,” said Joe Walsh, a former Illinois congressman who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary. “The courtroom has replaced his rallies and that’s what the next 14 months are going to look like. He’s a showman; he loves this shit. This will be his campaign and it could work.”Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington. But first this week he had to deal with a civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general Letitia James that accuses Trump and his company of deceiving banks, insurers and others by overstating his wealth by as much as $3.6bn.Judge Arthur Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud. If upheld on appeal, the case could possibly cost the ex-president control of some of his crown jewels including Trump Tower, a Wall Street office building and golf courses. James is also seeking $250m in penalties and a ban on Trump doing business in New York.Trump was under no obligation to appear in court but seized his chance to grandstand and further his narrative that has been martyred by a politically biased justice system. He had good reason based on how his previous, mandatory court appearances this year have played to his advantage in the Republican primary race which he now dominates.Just as on those occasions, reporters queued overnight to get a seat in court, TV helicopters followed his motorcade and his pronouncements were assured more extensive coverage on cable news than his rallies, which many outlets now make a conscious effort to ignore.Trump sat at the defense table observing the proceedings, at times looking sullen or leaning to confer with his lawyers. But not for him the humiliation of slipping into court while trying to hide his face under a jacket or blanket. He addressed the media assembled in the courtroom hallway several times each day, railing against the case with anger and insults familiar to his followers.“It’s a scam, it’s a sham,” he said on Monday. “It’s a witch-hunt and a disgrace.” He described James as “incompetent” and part of a broader Democratic conspiracy to weaken his election chances. After the former president posted a picture of the judge’s clerk on his social media network, Truth Social, the judge slapped a gag order barring Trump from talking about his staff.The performance may give his lawyers nightmares but it comes with financial rewards. One fundraising email from the Trump campaign was headed: “President Donald J Trump is appearing in a New York courtroom RIGHT NOW, we are calling on YOU to condemn the witch hunt.” The message said: “It’s now clear: The Liberal Mob will stop at nothing to SILENCE him and every last freedom-loving Conservative who supports our Conservative movement.”The strategy has proved effective after Trump’s four indictments over efforts to stay in power following the 2020 election, his handling of classified documents and hush money paid to an adult film star. This week his campaign announced that it raised more than $45.5m in the third quarter of the year – far surpassing Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor once seen as his principal rival. The campaign said it made $3m by selling coffee mugs, t-shirts and posters of the mugshot taken of Trump in Atlanta, where he faces state racketeering charges.Trump continues to hold massive opinion poll leads over DeSantis, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and other candidates in the Republican primary, where many voters – even those who oppose him – dismiss the legal cases as politically motivated. His decision to skip the primary debates appears to have paid off. He now frequently quips at his rallies that he is the only person who goes up in the polls each time he is indicted.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “This next election cycle will be historic in so many ways but the idea that the overwhelming leader of the Republican primary for president is a twice impeached, four-times indicted scofflaw boggles the mind.”Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a pro-democracy group opposed to Trump, raised concerns that mainstream media could be unwitting accomplices. “They cannot cover this as if it’s a conventional election because it’s not and what we’ve seen already is people have become almost desensitised to it. It’s no longer shocking, and it should be.“I blame the US mainstream media partially for that because they have normalised this, with the OJ Simpson, Bronco-style camera angles of him driving to the courthouses four times, from when he leaves his golf course to when he arrives at the courthouse.“This is our democracy on the line and we should not be covering it as if it is some third-rate reality show … that’s where Trump thrives the most, because it desensitises people to how extraordinarily detrimental to our democracy this actually is.”She is not alone in fearing a repeat of the 2016 election, in which Trump’s antics received billions of dollars worth of free advertising.Marty Baron, a former Washington Post editor, said at a Washington Post Live event on Friday: “I do think people are still struggling with how to cover him. I think there have been some recent really big mistakes; the interview on CNN, terrible mistake. I think the more recent one with Meet the Press, I think that’s a mistake. It’s just doing an interview with him like that is just giving him a platform.”Baron, author of a new book, Collision of Power, added: “He controls the conversation, and more and more what we ought to be doing is saying, ‘What would this second Trump administration actually look like? Who would he appoint to be members of his cabinet? What kinds of policies would he implement at the beginning?’Clearly, it would be a vengeance tour. He would be targeting the Department of Justice, the FBI, the press, courts, you name it.” More

“Democrats in disarray” has been an oft-repeated joke in Washington in recent years, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the tensions that repeatedly flared up between the progressives and the centrists of Joe Biden’s party. But on Tuesday, House Democrats presented a united front as their Republican counterparts turned against each other and ultimately ousted one of their own in a historic defeat.The entire House Democratic caucus voted unanimously to remove the Republican Kevin McCarthy as speaker on Tuesday, joining eight mostly hard-right lawmakers in supporting a motion to vacate the chair. Refusing to intervene in a mess of Republicans’ own making, Democrats looked on as McCarthy was unseated, making him the first House speaker in US history to be removed from office.Under the oversight of their new leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, House Democrats have marched in lockstep to challenge Republicans’ policy agenda, offering a stark contrast to the fractious conference that McCarthy tried and failed to unify. As they look to take back the House next year, Democrats hope to use the instability displayed this week to make a broader argument about the extremism that they say has come to define the modern Republican party.Heading into the Tuesday vote, speculation abounded over whether McCarthy might offer Democrats some kind of deal to help save his speakership. But McCarthy chose not to, telling CNBC on Tuesday: “They haven’t asked for anything, and I’m not going to provide anything.”Instead, McCarthy tried to appeal to members’ faith in the integrity of the House to keep his gavel, arguing that a removal of a speaker would represent an irreversible black mark on the institution.But that argument struck many Democrats as hypocritical coming from McCarthy, particularly given the speaker’s stunning flip-flop regarding the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January 2021. In the days after the attack, McCarthy said Donald Trump “bears responsibility” for the violence carried out by a group of the former president’s supporters. But just two weeks later, McCarthy flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to make amends, and he later denounced the work of the House select committee investigating the insurrection.McCarthy “went to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and voted not to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the 2020 presidential election and our government”, Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the select committee, said Tuesday. “This is a somber day for America as the chickens come home to roost for Kevin McCarthy.”The final self-inflicted nail in McCarthy’s coffin came on Sunday, the day after the House passed a continuing resolution to extend government funding through 17 November and avert a federal shutdown. House Democrats overwhelmingly supported the stopgap funding bill, with just one member voting against it, but 90 House Republicans opposed the legislation.And yet, when McCarthy appeared on CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday, he attempted to blame Democrats for the last-minute scramble.“I wasn’t sure it was going to pass. You want to know why? Because the Democrats tried to do everything they can not to let it pass,” McCarthy said. “They did not want the bill. They were willing to let government shut down, for our military not to be paid.”House Democratic leaders played a clip of McCarthy’s interview during their Tuesday morning caucus meeting, just hours before the chamber’s vote on removing the speaker. McCarthy’s comments outraged Democrats, fortifying the caucus’s resolve to support the motion to vacate.“It goes in political 101 textbooks going forward as maybe one of the most … stupid things somebody could do on the eve of your survival vote,” Gerry Connolly, a Democratic Virginia congressman, told NBC News.In the end, every present House Democrat voted to oust McCarthy, ensuring the end of his speakership. Democrats commended Jeffries on keeping his members unified on Tuesday, mirroring the caucus’s unanimous support for Jeffries through 15 rounds of voting during the speakership election in January.“Yesterday was a pure demonstration of the type of leadership and continuity that [Jeffries] brings to the table and how inclusive he is,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist. “He has, I think, been extra intentional about keeping all four corners of the House Democratic caucus square together and living out what diversity and inclusion means when it comes to House Democrats.”Jeffries has now called on more centrist members of the House Republican conference to join Democrats in forming a “bipartisan governing coalition”.“At this point, we simply need Republican partners willing to break with Maga extremism, reform the highly partisan House rules that were adopted at the beginning of this Congress and join us in finding common ground for the people,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published on Friday.So far, Republican partners have been difficult to find. Some of McCarthy’s allies blamed House Democrats for the speaker’s removal, accusing them of prioritizing their political goals over the good of the country. Democrats have scoffed at that argument, asserting that McCarthy brought about his own downfall by trying to appease the hard-right members who ultimately ousted him. McCarthy only won the speakership in January by making concessions to hard-right lawmakers, including a rule allowing any single member to introduce a motion to vacate the chair. That decision came back to haunt McCarthy this week.“The same rightwing extremism that gave McCarthy the speakership was the same rightwing extremism that took away his speakership,” Seawright said. “House Democrats should continue to draw the contrast with extremism that has hijacked and pretty much taken over the Republican conference with the comparison and the contrast of what was able to be done” when the Democrats had the House majority.Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, suggested the speakership debacle could be a launchpad for Democrats to engage in a fuller discussion about rightwing extremism. With government funding due to run out in just a month, Green said it was urgent for Democrats to make a policy-based pitch against Republicans’ legislative agenda.“Extremism doesn’t just mean they can’t rally their caucus on the House floor. Extremism means they would actually cut social security benefits for millions of current and future seniors,” Green said. “The extremists within an already extreme Republican party that are in charge are the same ones who would be most likely to use their leverage to cut programs like social security.”As the House prepares for another speakership election, much of the conversation in Washington has focused on who might replace McCarthy. But for Green, the more important conversation involves how the new Republican speaker will govern with a newly emboldened hard-right faction in his conference. Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan, two speaker candidates, have also backed drastic government funding cuts, voting in favor of McCarthy’s recent failed proposal to temporarily reduce most government agencies’ budgets by up to 30%.“I think it’s important to connect the dots between the chaos and extremism we’ve seen playing out in this leadership fight and what those same forces will attempt to do in the upcoming government funding fight,” Green said. “It’s very possible that members of the public perceive these as two very different stories, as opposed to two chapters in the same story.” More

Marty Baron led the Washington Post as executive editor for eight years, retiring in 2021. All told, newsrooms he led won 17 Pulitzer prizes, 10 of them at the Post. Liev Schreiber portrayed him in Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar-winning movie that depicted a Boston Globe investigation of sexual predation by priests.Baron has stories to tell. His first book has a tantalizing subtitle – Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post – and he dives right in.In August 2013, “five days after the announcement that Bezos would buy the Post, Trump heaped praise on both Bezos and the paper”, Baron recalls.“I think it’s a great move for him, I think it’s great for the Washington Post,” Trump remarked. Beyond that, Trump, then a mere reality TV star, called Bezos “amazing” and proclaimed that he was a “fan” of the paper.Trump soon fell out of love. In December 2015, as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, he accused Bezos and Amazon of scamming the American taxpayer. In March 2018, as president, he began hammering away at the supposed Amazon “post office scam”. But the deference Trump demanded never arrived.Baron’s book is timely. Last month, Trump barked that Comcast, owner of NBC and MSNBC, should be investigated for “treason”, and will be if he is re-elected next year.His Republican opponents offered no pushback. This was not a surprise. During his first presidential run, and then as president, Trump repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people”, treating reporters as foils. To Baron, that echoed Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Goebbels. Threats of violence against the press wafted through campaign rallies. In late October 2016, in Miami, Trump whipped a crowd into a frenzy against Katy Tur of MSNBC. On Twitter, death threats circulated like “loose trash”, she recalled.Baron writes: “The middle finger he had given the press was about to become a fist. My own mood was one of stoic acceptance.” Throughout his book, his tone is measured and concerned, not simply alarmed. He calls for objectivity but he knows the press is under attack. Nationally, investigative journalism thrives. Locally, it dies.This being a Trump book, Baron also deals some dish. According to Baron, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, tried to oust him from the Post.“Trump and his team would go after the Post and everyone else in the media who didn’t bend to his wishes,” Baron writes. “In December 2019, Kushner would lean on [the Post publisher Fred] Ryan to withdraw support for me and our Russia investigation. ‘He aims to get me fired,’ I told Ryan.”Kushner “suggested the Post issue an apology and there be a ‘reckoning of some sort’”, Baron writes. No apology followed. Baron kept his job.The Post came with a storied history: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers and more. It was no one’s toy or bauble. It was not the New York Observer, once owned by Kushner, whose own memoir reportedly received an assist from Ken Kurson, a former Observer editor pardoned by Trump on cyberstalking charges only to plead guilty to state charges of spying on his wife.In Collision of Power, Baron also describes a White House dinner in June 2017, months after the inauguration, at which Trump unleashed a torrent of grievance and self-adulation.“He had better relations with foreign leaders than Obama, who was lazy and never called them.” His predecessor had “left disasters around the world for him to solve”.In the same breath, Baron says, Trump took to task the chief executive of Macy’s for pulling Trump-branded products in reaction to his calling Mexican immigrants “rapists”. The store, Trump said, “would have been picketed by only 20 Mexicans. Who cares?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBaron also captures Trump throwing jabs at Benjamin Netanyahu, complaining of how little the US received in exchange for aid to Israel. Fresh off a trip there, and advised he couldn’t leverage aid to broker peace with the Palestinians, Trump was annoyed.“I was told ‘there’s no connection,’” Trump told Bezos, Baron, Ryan and Fred Hiatt, another Post editor. “He was incredulous. ‘No connection?’”Trump’s take, Baron says, foreshadowed reporting by Barak Ravid of Axios, that Trump “said he was surprised to find that the Palestinians want a peace deal more than the Israelis”. In his own book, Trump’s Peace, Ravid captures Trump saying of Netanyahu, “fuck him”, and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures.A postscript: Trump’s dinner with Baron and Bezos was held on 15 June 2017, the night of the congressional baseball game. Trump chose to hang out with a bunch of reporters despite the shooting, at practice for that game, of Steve Scalise of Louisiana, a House Republican leader and Trump supporter, who was left fighting for his life.Of course, this is not surprising. In summer 2020, when protests for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd came close to the White House, Trump hid in the basement. More recently, John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff, has confirmed that Trump refused to be seen with wounded veterans. In the Trump White House, bravura was common, compassion and bravery near-non-existent.A year after Trump was ejected from power, Baron retired and went to work on his book. As it comes out, Scalise is both battling cancer and plotting to become House speaker. Trump, 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination again.From the beginning, as Baron saw close up, Trump “had the makings of an autocrat”. In the next election, the tenor of coverage will be vital. Should Trump win, the plight of the press may be uncertain. Either way, Baron says, journalists will need “idealism, determination and courage”.
Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post is published in the US by Macmillan More

Kevin Seefried did what the rebel army never could. On 6 January 2021, the 53-year-old carried a Confederate flag through the US Capitol. For historians of the American civil war such as Heather Cox Richardson, it was like a blow to the solar plexus.“The whole point of a civil war was to make sure that battle flag never had influence in the United States Capitol,” she says, via Zoom from near Augusta, Maine. “With a loss of almost $6bn and 600,000 lives, they kept that flag out of the Capitol, and then, I’m sorry, but those fuckers brought it in. I saw that, and the gut-punch was larger than any other moment in history, for me as a historian who has lived that civil war as deeply as I have.”Richardson, 60, a history professor at Boston College, has been described by the New York Times as “the breakout star” of the newsletter platform Substack, where her Letters from an American has more than a million subscribers. She has 1.7 million followers on Facebook while her bio on X, formerly known as Twitter, says: “Historian. Author. Professor. Budding Curmudgeon. I study the contrast between image and reality in America, especially in politics.”Readers welcome Richardson’s ability, like Ken Burns, Rachel Maddow and Jon Meacham, to make sense of Trump-era chaos by assuring us we have been here before and survived. She is the cohost of Now & Then, a Vox Media podcast, and author of award-winning books about the civil war, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and the American west.Now she offers Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, a thoughtful study of how the world’s wealthiest democracy came to teeter on the precipice of authoritarianism with an assist from Donald Trump. She seems relieved it’s done.“Writing 1,200 words every day is itself a chore and then to write a book on top of it damn near killed me,” Richardson admits. “The reason for the book originally was to pull together a number of essays answering the questions that everybody asks me all the time – What is the southern strategy? How did the parties switch sides? – but very quickly I came to realise that it was the story of how democracies can be undermined.”Crucial in that is how history and language can be used to divide a population and convince some the only reason they have fallen behind economically, socially or culturally is because of an enemy. The antidote, Richardson argues, is an explicitly democratic history “based in the idea that marginalised populations have always kept the principles of the Declaration of Independence front and centre in our history”.She is not pulling punches. Her preface observes that the crisis in American democracy crept up on many and draws a direct comparison with the rise of Adolf Hitler, achieved through political gains and consolidation.“Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint,” she writes.America’s current malaise, she argues, began in the same decade: the 1930s. It was then that Republicans who loathed business regulations in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began to consider an alliance with southern Democrats, who found Roosevelt’s programmes insufficiently segregationist, and western Democrats who resented the idea of the federal government protecting land and water. In 1937, this unholy coalition came up with a “Conservative Manifesto”.Richardson says: “When it gets leaked to the newspapers, they all run like rats from it because the Republicans decide it’s better to fight FDR from the outside than try and work with Democrats, and Democrats don’t want to be criticising their own president. They all disavow it but that manifesto gets reprinted all over the country in pro-business and racist newspapers and pamphlets and it has very long legs.“They want to get rid of business regulation, they want to get rid of a basic social safety net and send all that back to the churches, they want to get rid of infrastructure projects that FDR is engaging in because they think it costs too much in tax dollars and it should be private investment. They don’t really talk about civil rights because because FDR is really just flirting with the idea of equality in the New Deal programmes but they do say they want home rule and states’ rights, which is code for “We don’t want civil rights.’”These four principles would become a blueprint for Republicans such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, language sometimes mapping directly. In the early 1970s, Richardson contends, Republicans began to pursue anti-democratic strategies such as gerrymandering and shifting the judiciary rightwards. They also spent decades waging an “information war”.A prime example was the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, an attempt to convince the public he was not a legitimate president.“That era is when congressional investigations to smear the Democrats take off,” Richardson says. “Those investigations don’t turn up anything but it doesn’t matter because it keeps it in front of the American people – the idea that something is there.”Enter Trump, a blowhard who turned disinformation into an artform in the business world and become a reality TV star. He promised Christian conservatives he would appoint rightwing judges; he promised fiscal conservatives he would cut taxes; he promised the white working class he understood their resentments. He made the party his own.Richardson says: “The establishment Republicans played the issue of abortion, played the issue of ‘the Democrats are evil’ to stay in power and enact what was essentially a libertarian destruction of the federal government that had been in place since 1933. But I don’t think that they intended to give up their power. Trump took one look at that and said, ‘I’m going to bypass you and go right around this.’ He could do that because he was such a good salesman and he put in place something very different.“Trump is an interesting character because he’s not a politician. He’s a salesman and that is an important distinction because in 2016 he held up a mirror to a certain part of the American population, one that had been gutted by the legislation that has passed since 1981, and gave them what they wanted.“If you remember in 2016, he was the most moderate Republican on that stage on economic issues. He talked about infrastructure, fair taxes, cheaper and better healthcare, bringing back manufacturing. He talked about all those economic issues but then he also had the racism and the sexism and of course that’s what he was really going for, that anger that he could tap into.“Tapping into that anger was crucial to him forging an authoritarian movement, because at least in the United States the authoritarian rightwing movements have always come from street violence rather than the top and from ideas of what fascism should look like. He quite deliberately tapped into that emotional anger that he could spark with racism and sexism.”Richardson is again not bashful about invoking the Nazi comparison when she cites the communications scholar Michael Socolow’s observation that Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address, in which he demonstrated that he could “raise hurting individuals up to glory”, mirrored the performances of Hitler, who sought to show an almost magical power to change lives.Trump’s rise could be described as a triumph of the will. Republican politicians offered little defence.“If there is one group that infuriates me in all of this, it is the senators,” Richardson says. “The Republican senators could have stopped Trump at any moment and they liked the tax cuts and then they became frightened of his followers. They should have stopped him in 2015, in 2016, in 2017, and they can stop him now and they won’t. I’m so tired of hearing these people saying, ‘Well, we knew he was bad.’ Thank you for that!”Despite 91 criminal charges, Trump dominates the Republican primary. Polls show him neck-and-neck with Biden. It is looking like a close-run thing. What would a second Trump term mean for America?“An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down. By that I mean they want to hurt their enemies for sure but, so long as they can be in control, they don’t care if it means that Nato falls apart or that Americans are starving or dying from pandemic diseases. As long as somebody gets hurt, that’s enough for them.”Biden understands the threat. Last month in Phoenix, Arizona, he issued another stark warning. The president’s approval rating is anaemic and some Democrats are restless but Richardson casts a historian’s eye on his record.“Biden is a fascinating character in that in that he is one of the very few people who could have met this moment. I was not a Biden supporter, to be honest. I thought we needed somebody new and much more aggressive, and yet I completely admit I was wrong because he has, first of all, a very deep understanding of foreign affairs, which I tended to denigrate.“I thought in 2020 that was not going to matter and could I have been more wrong? I think not. That really mattered and continues to matter in that one of the reasons Republicans are backing off of Ukraine right now is that they recognise, for all that it’s not hitting the United States newspapers, Ukraine is actually making important gains. A win from the Ukrainians would really boost Biden’s re-election and the Republicans recognise that and are willing to scuttle that so long as it means they can regain power here. His foreign affairs understanding has been been key.“The other thing about Biden is his extraordinary skill at dealmaking has made this domestic administration the most effective since at least the Great Society and probably the New Deal. You think about the fact that Trump could never get infrastructure through Congress, even though everybody wanted it.“That has been huge but the whole argument behind all that has been he needs to prove that the government can work for people after 40 years in which we had a government that we felt was working against us. That has been a harder and harder case for him to make because the media is not picking that up.“The question going into 2024 is: will people understand that Biden has created a government that does work for the people? Whether or not you like its policies personally, he is trying to use that government to meet the needs of the people in a way that the Republicans haven’t done since 1981. He is a transformative president. Whether or not it’s going to be enough, we’re going to find out in 14 months.”Biden, who turns 81 next month, is also the oldest president. Surveys show many Democrats think he is too old. Richardson is not buying.“He’s older than dirt; they all are. But age is actually a benefit for him. First of all it’s non-threatening to a lot of older white people, and second of all he does have those connections that you just simply don’t have if you’re 40.“I watch him constantly, I read him constantly, and I have met him and interviewed him. He’s fine mentally. As I get older, when I’m on task, I don’t miss a trick. I’m going to leave to go to the grocery store after this, and the chances are very good I will run into somebody I know quite well and not remember their name. That’s just the way it is.”Richardson glides between excavations of 19th-century history and a running commentary on the hot political story of the day. On Wednesday, her Substack column was devoted to the ousting of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy.She reflects: “One of the things that people like me do is give people firm ground to stand on in a swamp. That is, after years of not being able to tell what is real, to have somebody say, ‘This happened, this happened, this happened and here are citations that you can go to check, and this is how things work,’ is very comforting.“Maybe that’s just me because when I write I don’t know the answers myself every morning. But when I want to know, for example, what happened in the committee, I actually do the research and say this is what happened so that I can sleep at night feeling like my feet are under me.“So it’s partly a search for history but it’s also partly a search to feel like you understand the world again, which is hard to do when you’re being bombarded with hearings and lies and all that kind of crap. I actually think that the meaning of it is less about history than it is about returning to a reality based community.”
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America is published in the US by Viking More

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the attorney, conspiracy theorist and political gadfly set to next week transform his run for the Democratic presidential nomination into an independent campaign, was announced on Friday as a speaker at an event staged by the hard-right Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.“Robert F Kennedy Jr has a unique voice in advocating for the defunding of the weaponised bureaucracy and ensuring the constitutional right of medical freedom,” said the CPAC chair, Matt Schlapp.Kennedy, 69, will speak at the CPAC Investor Summit to Save America, in Las Vegas, Nevada, between 18 and 21 October. Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech investor who has performed unexpectedly strongly in the Republican primary, will also speak.Kennedy comes from a storied US political family – the son of former US attorney general Robert F Kennedy and nephew of President John F Kennedy. He built a public profile as an attorney and environmental campaigner but has now emerged as a prominent anti-vaccine campaigner, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.A claim that Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews have greater immunity from Covid caused huge controversy. So did a comparison of government public health mandates to laws in Nazi Germany, invoking the name of Anne Frank. Last month, Kennedy repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York.Kennedy has polled relatively strongly against Joe Biden, the incumbent Democratic president. Standing next to no chance of winning the nomination, however, Kennedy’s announcement of an independent run was trailed last week. The announcement is set for Philadelphia on Monday.Polling shows the potential for a third-party candidate to pull votes from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the president’s expected challenger in what would be a contest between aging and unpopular candidates.This week, a Reuters-Ipsos poll showed Kennedy “could draw the support of about one in seven US voters”.Some observers think Biden likely to sustain worse damage from a strong third-party candidate, perhaps handing the White House back to Trump: a twice-impeached ex-president who faces 91 criminal charges, 17 over election subversion culminating in the January 6 attack on Congress, as well as assorted civil trials.Nonetheless, Kennedy’s links to rightwingers including the mega-donor Timothy Mellon and Steve Bannon, a close Trump ally, have been widely reported and his more extreme stances could see also pull support from Republicans.Bannon was among other figures listed to appear at the CPAC Las Vegas event. So were Ric Grenell, a former Trump aide; Kari Lake, a failed gubernatorial candidate now running for US Senate in Arizona; the Utah Republican senator Mike Lee; and Ken Paxton, the impeached and acquitted Texas attorney general.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSchlapp, the CPAC chair, is a former White House political director under George W Bush now the subject of claims of sexual misconduct, which he denies.Schlapp said: “Kennedy joining such an important event is a reflection of the splintering of the leftwing coalition that has gone full woke Marxist to the point that traditional liberals don’t feel welcome anymore.”Not everyone thinks a Kennedy candidacy will only damage Biden. This week, a “Kennedy campaign insider” told Mediate: “This is going to fuck Trump. Bobby’s values are much more in line with patriots. He’s against Big Pharma. He’s pro-Bitcoin. Decentralise so the government can’t control it.”That prompted Rick Wilson, a former Republican operative and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, to say: “Blame Bannon. His monster got out of the cage.” More

Supporters of Donald Trump may need to be “deprogrammed” as if they were cult members, Hillary Clinton said.“Sadly, so many of those extremists … take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president told CNN.“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.”In 2016, in one of the most seismic shocks in US history, Clinton lost the presidential election to Trump.The billionaire spent four chaotic years in power before losing to Joe Biden in 2020. Refusing to accept that loss, Trump stoked the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. That brought his second impeachment, which, like the first, he survived. He now faces 91 criminal charges (17 related to election subversion) and assorted civil threats but is nonetheless the clear Republican frontrunner to face Biden again next year.Clinton said: “I think, sadly, he will be the nominee and we have to defeat them. And we have to defeat those who are the election deniers, as we did and 2020 and [in the midterms of] 2022. And we have to just be smarter about how we are trying to empower the right people inside the Republican party.”Clinton was speaking after the fall of Kevin McCarthy, who became first US House speaker ever ejected by his own party thanks to pro-Trump extremists.Clinton called Trump “an authoritarian populist who really has a grip on the emotional [and] psychological needs and desires of a portion of the population and the base of the Republican party, for whatever combination of reasons.”Republicans, she said, “see in him someone who speaks for them and they are determined they will continue to vote for him, attend his rallies and wear his merchandise, because for whatever reason he and his very negative, nasty form of politics resonates with them.“Maybe they don’t like migrants. Maybe they don’t like gay people or Black people or the woman who got the promotion at work they didn’t get. Whatever reason.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClinton said Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan, first in 2016, “was a bid for nostalgia, to return to a place where people could be in charge of their lives, feel empowered, say what they want and insult whoever came in their way.“And that was really attractive to a significant portion of the Republican base.“So it is like a cult and somebody has to break it, break that momentum. And that’s why I believe Joe Biden will defeat them and hopefully then that will be the end and the fever will break.” More

From 4h agoIn remarks at the White House, Joe Biden declined to comment on conservative stalwart Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker of the House, but said he would try to find ways to cooperate with whoever is chosen.“Whomever the House speaker is, I’m going to try to work with,” Biden said. “They control … half the Congress and I’m going to try to work with them. Some people, I imagine, it could be easier to work with than others, but whoever the speaker is I’ll try to work with.”Donald Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan, a prominent House conservative, to serve as the chamber’s next speaker. He made the decision public on social media, but only after a congressman’s indiscretion reportedly torpedoed a plan to do so in a far more public fashion. Trump is certainly influential, but the race is far from decided, and at the White House, Joe Biden said he would try to “work with” whoever sits in the speaker’s chair next.Here’s what else is happening today:
Kevin McCarthy is considering resigning from Congress once the House elects a new speaker, Politico scoops.
Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries called on Republicans to work with his party to reform Congress’s lower chamber, but any such efforts’ prospects are unlikely.
The US economy added far more jobs than expected last month, a sign that the labor market remains robust.
Hunter Biden’s attorney has filed to dismiss the charges against the president’s son, arguing a plea deal that collapsed over the summer remains in effect.
Two far-right Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy also reportedly believe the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is not worth doing.
Politico reports that Kevin McCarthy told House Republicans he may resign after they elect a new speaker.“I’m going to spend time with my family,” he told GOP lawmakers in a closed-door meeting, according to people familiar with what took place. “I might have been given a bad break, but I’m still the luckiest man alive.”However, later, KGET-TV reporter Eytan Wallace said on X – formerly Twitter – that he spoke directly to McCarthy and the congressman denied having any intentions of resigning. In fact, Wallace said McCarthy expressed an intention to run for re-election.McCarthy represents a California district centered on the city of Bakersfield and extending into the southern Sierra Nevada mountains and out into the Central Valley, where oil and gas and agriculture are major industries. He has been in office since 2007, representing a district considered the most-Republican leaning in the state.The Washington Post took a close look at the prospect of some kind of bipartisan coalition filling the power vacuum caused by Kevin McCarthy’s ouster.Their conclusion: not going to happen.While there’s only a four-seat difference in the chamber between Democratic and Republican control, existing ill will between the two parties doomed attempts by moderate GOP lawmakers to convince their counterparts on the other side of the aisle to save McCarthy. With many Republicans now furious at Democrats for their role in his ouster and the party’s right wing on the ascent, moderates have few incentives to attempt to build the sort of coalition that could get one of their own into the speaker’s chair, or carry out the sorts of reforms Jeffries envisioned in his op-ed.Here’s more, from the Post:
As GOP lawmakers ducked in and out of meetings this week, making pitches to one another in initial bids to garner support for the top job, rank-and-file members ruled out the imminent possibility of a bipartisan effort to save them from their latest state of chaos.
“I think the Republican conference will be stronger when we first work with ourselves,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Tex.) said Wednesday on his way to a lunch with the Texas delegation where prospective speakers sounded out potential allies.
Compromise, even among pragmatic members in swing districts, is a tall order in this political environment. Moderate Democrats and Republicans face the constant threat of primaries, and many live in fear of being targeted by powerful conservative media. Even members who represent swing districts fret about being punished by extreme voters in primary elections, a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus said.
House rules adopted in a compromise that allowed McCarthy to win the job in January — after days of strife and 15 ballots — have also empowered individual members with outsize influence over the House GOP conference, exacerbating the party’s partisan polarization. A motion to vacate, for example, is a congressional procedure to remove a presiding officer from a position that can be triggered by just one House member. Once initiated, it takes priority on the House floor ahead of all other business. This week, the motion was moved by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump ally.
In a column published in the Washington Post, the Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries called on the GOP to work with his party to reform the rules of the House and encourage more bipartisanship:
House Republicans have lashed out at historic public servants and tried to shift blame for the failed Republican strategy of appeasement. But what if they pursued a different path and confronted the extremism that has spread unchecked on the Republican side of the aisle? When that step has been taken in good faith, we can proceed together to reform the rules of the House in a manner that permits us to govern in a pragmatic fashion.
The details would be subject to negotiation, though the principles are no secret: The House should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support. Under the current procedural landscape, a small handful of extreme members on the Rules Committee or in the House Republican conference can prevent common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day. That must change — perhaps in a manner consistent with bipartisan recommendations from the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.
In short, the rules of the House should reflect the inescapable reality that Republicans are reliant on Democratic support to do the basic work of governing. A small band of extremists should not be capable of obstructing that cooperation.
By all indications, leading House Republicans are furious at Democrats who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy, even though his overthrow was orchestrated by a small number of far-right GOP lawmakers. The acting speaker, Patrick McHenry, ordered Democratic veterans Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer out of their Capitol building offices hours after taking his post, while the two leading contenders to replace McCarthy are majority leader Steve Scalise and judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan, both deeply conservative.If the GOP is to take Jeffries up on his suggestions, it would probably happen at the behest of the party’s moderates – but unlike the party’s right wing, they have yet to show signs of uniting and making demands of the leadership.Democrats have scored a win in New Mexico, where a state judge turned down a challenge from Republicans to its congressional map, the Associated Press reports.The map is friendly to Democrats and will likely allow them to win all of the state’s three districts, as the Cook Political Report makes clear:Republicans had, in particular, taken issue with Democratic state lawmakers’ decision to split up an oil-producing region that skews conservative, according to the AP.Earlier in the day, Joe Biden provided more details on why his administration decided to begin building new border wall.His predecessor Donald Trump had made fortifying the frontier with Mexico a top priority, but Biden repudiated that in his first days in office. Yesterday, it was revealed his administration was building new barriers on the southern border, angering environmentalist, Indigenous rights and other activist groups who characterized the decision as a betrayal.Biden had previously said federal law obliged him to start the construction and, in response to a request for more details from a reporter today, elaborated on how that happened:United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain is scheduled to say soon whether recent intensified bargaining with the Detroit Three automakers has produced enough progress to forestall more walkouts, Reuters writes.A video address by Fain is scheduled for 2pm ET and will cover substantive bargaining updates, people familiar with the UAW’s plans said earlier.’That timing is a departure from the previous two Fridays in which Fain addressed union members at about 10am and ordered walkouts at additional factories to start at noon.Fain kept automakers Ford, GM and Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler and Jeep, guessing on Thursday.People familiar with the bargaining said talks have heated up this week after days of little movement.Ford, GM and Stellantis have made new proposals in an effort to end the escalating cycle of walkouts that threaten to undercut profits and cripple smaller suppliers already strained from months of production cuts forced by semiconductor shortages.The pressure is rising on the three automakers as EV market leader Tesla cut US prices of its Model 3 sedan and Model Y SUV, ratcheting up its price war and further pressuring profits on all EV models that are forced to match CEO Elon Musk’s aggression.Deutsche Bank estimated in a research note on Friday that the hit to operating earnings at GM, Ford and Stellantis from lost production has been $408 million, $250 million and $230 million, respectively.Meanwhile, Republican freshman Senator JD Vance swung by an Ohio picket line, only to get a dry burn from Toledo congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, who’s served the district for 40 years.Why is Joe Biden campaigning for Donald Trump? The US president is helping to build Trump’s border wall. What is he thinking?The question sounds ludicrous, but how else would you characterize Biden’s latest pronouncement to build 20 new miles of Trump’s border wall along the southern border? This is like throwing red meat to Trump’s base, who will chomp and salivate over what they will portray as an admission of defeat by the Democrats on securing the border.And why wouldn’t they? Back when he was campaigning for president, Joe Biden promised “not another foot” of Trump’s border wall would be built. He halted construction of the wall on his first day in office with a proclamation stating that “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.”Now, the government is poised to spend nearly $200m on 20 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley. The administration says it has been forced into this situation because Congress appropriated $1.375bn for such border barriers in 2019, and the funds that remain must be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year. But Democrats had control over Congress for the first two years of the Biden administration. They could have reallocated those funds. Instead, this Democratic administration is now sounding very Trump-like. “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries,” reads the notice in the Federal Register.This is a political failure by the Democrats on one of the most important issues of the looming 2024 election. And it’s a massive policy failure as well.The full op-ed will be published by Guardian US shortly.Donald Trump has endorsed Jim Jordan, a prominent House conservative, to serve as the chamber’s next speaker. He made the decision public on social media, but only after a congressman’s indiscretion reportedly torpedoed a plan to do so in a far more public fashion. Trump is certainly influential, but the race is far from decided, and at the White House, Joe Biden said he would try to “work with” whoever sits in the speaker’s chair next.Here’s what else is happening today:
The US economy added far more jobs than expected last month, a sign that the labor market remains robust.
Hunter Biden’s attorney has filed to dismiss the charges against the president’s son, arguing a plea deal that collapsed over the summer remains in effect.
Two far-right Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy also reportedly believe the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden is not worth doing.
In remarks at the White House, Joe Biden declined to comment on conservative stalwart Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker of the House, but said he would try to find ways to cooperate with whoever is chosen.“Whomever the House speaker is, I’m going to try to work with,” Biden said. “They control … half the Congress and I’m going to try to work with them. Some people, I imagine, it could be easier to work with than others, but whoever the speaker is I’ll try to work with.”Donald Trump’s plan to endorse Jim Jordan as speaker of the House was supposed to be done in a far more dramatic fashion, but a congressman’s announcement of the ex-president’s intentions torpedoed that plan, the Messenger reports.Trump was considering traveling to the Capitol where he would engage in something of a stunt intended to unite the fractious Republican conference around Jordan. That plan is now off, the Messenger reports:
When House Republicans ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this week, Donald Trump began toying with the idea of heading to Washington, D.C. in a high-profile visit, briefly standing as a candidate for the post before dramatically delivering his support and his votes to an ally, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan.
Trump outlined the spotlight-grabbing plan in calls to Republicans on Wednesday night, four sources familiar with the discussions tell The Messenger, which first reported Trump’s initial interest in visiting the paralyzed U.S. House.
But Trump had one ask: “Keep this quiet.”
Texas Congressman Troy Nehls either didn’t heed or didn’t hear that Trump request, blabbing about the once-private call on the social media platform X at 9:32 p.m.
“Just had a great conversation with President Trump about the Speaker’s race. He is endorsing Jim Jordan, and I believe Congress should listen to the leader of our party. I fully support Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House,” Nehls wrote.
The Nehls post appeared just as a Trump adviser was discussing the effort with a Messenger reporter about Trump’s idea of flirting with the speakership and then elevating Jordan instead.
“Nehls just totally f—-d this up,” the adviser said, hanging up the phone. The four sources who described Trump’s thinking for this story all spoke with The Messenger on condition of anonymity over the past three days to describe private conversations.
Less than three hours later, at 12:13 a.m., Trump publicly endorsed Jordan on his Truth Social media platform, saying the Ohio Republican, who is the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, would be “a great speaker of the House and has my complete and total endorsement.”
Now Trump’s congressional travel plans are in doubt.
Trump’s allies are discussing the utility of going at all because, for Trump, the plan revolved around secrecy. He wanted to stoke the coals of speculation about what he would do, thereby heightening the drama and attention, advisers said. His appearance and speech would have made a splash on Capitol Hill and sucked up all the media attention in the presidential primary, where he’s already leading by a forbidding margin.
No travel decision has been made, advisers say, noting it’s up to Trump, who can change his mind on a whim – along with the flight plans for his Trump-branded 757 private aircraft.
But everyone in his orbit agrees about one aspect of Trump’s mind.
“Trump is pretty annoyed at Nehls,” said another Trump adviser.
Mike Pence, the former vice-president who spent more than a decade representing an Indiana district in the House, again condemned the far-right revolt that remove Kevin McCarthy: More