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      Amazon, Tesla and Meta among world’s top companies undermining democracy – report

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      Some of the world’s largest companies have been accused of undermining democracy across the world by financially backing far-right political movements, funding and exacerbating the climate crisis, and violating trade union rights and human rights in a report published on Monday by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).Amazon, Tesla, Meta, ExxonMobil, Blackstone, Vanguard and Glencore are the corporations included in the report. The companies’ lobbying arms are attempting to shape global policy at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York City on 22 and 23 September.At Amazon, the report notes the company’s size and role as the fifth largest employer in the world and the largest online retailer and cloud computing service, has had a profound impact on the industries and communities it operates within.“The company has become notorious for its union busting and low wages on multiple continents, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS data centres, corporate tax evasion, and lobbying at national and international level,” states the report.The report cites Amazon’s high injury rates in the US, the company challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), its efforts in Canada to overturn labor law, the banning of Amazon lobbyists from the European parliament for refusing to attend hearings on worker violations, and refusal to negotiate with unions in Germany, among other cases. Amazon has also funded far-right political groups’ efforts to undermine women’s rights and antitrust legislation, and its retail website has been used by hate groups to raise money and sell products.At Tesla, the report cites anti-union opposition by the company in the US, Germany, and Sweden; human rights violations within its supply chains; and Elon Musk’s personal opposition to unions and democracy, challenges to the NLRB in the US, and his support for the political leaders Donald Trump, Javier Milei in Argentina and Narendra Modi in India.The report cites Meta, the largest social media company in the world, for its vast role in permitting and enabling far-right propaganda and movements to use its platforms to grow members and garner support in the US and abroad. It also cited retaliation from the company for regulatory measures in Canada, and expensive lobbying efforts against laws to regulate data privacy.Glencore, the largest mining company in the world by revenue, was included in the report for its role in financing campaigns globally against Indigenous communities and activists.Blackstone, the private equity firm led by Stephen Schwarzman, a billionaire backer of Donald Trump, was cited in the report for its roles in funding far-right political movements, investments in fossil fuel projects and deforestation in the Amazon.“Blackstone’s network has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting politicians and political forces who promise to prevent or eliminate regulations that might hold it to account,” the report noted.The Vanguard Group was included in the report due to its role in financing some of the world’s most anti-democratic corporations. ExxonMobil was cited for funding anti-climate science research and aggressive lobbying against environmental regulations.Even in “robust democracies” workers’ demands “are overwhelmed by corporate lobbying operations, either in policymaking or the election in itself”, said Todd Brogan, director of campaigns and organizing at the ITUC.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is about power, who has it, and who sets the agenda. We know as trade unionists that unless we’re organized, the boss sets the agenda in the workplace, and we know as citizens in our countries that unless we’re organized and demanding responsive governments that actually meet the needs of people, it’s corporate power that’s going to set the agenda.“They’re playing the long game, and it’s a game about shifting power away from democracy at every level into one where they’re not concerned about the effects on workers – they’re concerned about maximizing their influence and their extractive power and their profit,” added Brogan. “Now is the time for international and multi-sectoral strategies, because these are, in many cases, multinational corporations that are more powerful than states, and they have no democratic accountability whatsoever, except for workers organized.”The ITUC includes labor group affiliates from 169 nations and territories around the world representing 191 million workers, including the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, and the Trades Union Congress in the UK.With 4 billion people around the world set to participate in elections in 2024, the federation is pushing for an international binding treaty being worked on by the Open-ended intergovernmental working group to hold transnational corporations accountable under international human rights laws. More

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      View politics critically but charitably and with good old common sense: cowboy commentator Will Rogers’ wisdom for 2024

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      For those trying to come to terms with a particularly tumultuous election year full of deep divisions, ideological invective and personal insults, guidance can come from a historical figure whose insights into American politics still prove useful.

      As I chronicle in my new book, “Citizen Cowboy: Will Rogers And The American People,” Will Rogers stood as perhaps the most influential commentator on public affairs in the United States a century ago. Born in Oklahoma, he had risen to fame as a cowboy humorist in vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies, Broadway shows and silent movies, and he earned public acclaim with his shrewd, folksy and witty observations on American life and values.

      By the 1920s, this led to a syndicated column Rogers wrote for over 300 newspapers, a stream of magazine articles and essays, and steady appearances on the national lecture circuit. He hosted a national radio program and had starring roles in several Hollywood “talkie” movies.

      Rogers became the most beloved figure in America until his death in 1935. As I discovered in my research, a flood of eulogies appeared in newspapers and magazines following his passing. Typical was this one appearing in the Minneapolis Journal: “We all loved Will Rogers … . Poets we have had, and philosophers, and humorists of note; but not one among them all so endeared to the heart of the whole people. None was ever mourned with such genuine grief, none will be so missed from our common life.”

      Especially fascinated by the nation’s politics, Rogers often trained his humor on its foibles and achievements alike. Three touchstones guided his commentary: a genial skepticism about politics as usual, a belief that politics must be subsumed within a broader perspective on life and, above all, an insistence that political discussants honor a code of civility.

      Will Rogers sends up politics and politicians in this radio broadcast from 1924.

      ‘I just … report the facts’

      Rogers got most of his laughs from skeptical jabs at the system. He gleefully skewered the “bunk” of American politics, his favorite word for politicians’ shameless hypocrisy, bombastic rhetoric, inflated egos and shady deal-making. Both Democrats and Republicans stood guilty of peddling bunk.

      “You know, the more you read and observe about this politics thing, you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other,” Rogers said. “It is getting so that a Republican promise is not much more to be depended on than a Democratic one. And that has always been considered the lowest form of collateral in the world.”

      The Oklahoman poked fun at the political system’s grandiose rituals and fumbling institutions. He wrote of a benumbing presidential convention in 1924 that took three weeks and 103 ballots to nominate a nonentity: “In number of population the convention is holding its own. The deaths from old age among the delegates is about offset by the birthrate.”

      Rogers pilloried governmental ineptness in Washington, D.C. One year, when Congress reconvened after a round of egregious bickering and inaction, he joked, “Let us all pray: Oh Lord, give us strength to bear that which is about to be inflicted upon us. Be merciful with them, Oh Lord, for they know not what they do.”

      He claimed a simple approach: “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”

      ‘Critical yet charitable’

      Yet Rogers insisted that political disputation should be kept in perspective. He urged his fellow citizens to avoid politicizing every public issue and instead concentrate on more meaningful endeavors – family, friends, community and work.

      Despite the dire warnings of political zealots, he said, “There is no less sickness, no less Earthquakes, no less Progress, no less inventions, no less morality, no less Christianity under one (president) than the other.”

      But for Rogers, the ultimate guarantee of stability came from the mass of workaday American citizens seeking commonsense solutions to public problems. What Rogers called the “Big Honest Majority” lived simply and worked hard, wanted a good life for their families and pursued their own version of happiness.

      The average citizen, Rogers believed, had solid judgment and “was not simple minded enough to believe that EVERYTHING is right and doesn’t appear to be cuckoo enough to believe that EVERYTHING is wrong.”

      Finally, Rogers urged an approach to politics that was critical yet charitable, principled yet magnanimous. A connoisseur of civility, he insisted that political disputants were opponents, not enemies, and that contrary viewpoints deserved respect.

      The humorist set the example: “I haven’t got it in for anybody or anything.”

      Will Rogers dining with Oklahoma Gov. Bill Murray on Feb. 3, 1931, in Oklahoma City. Murray had his usual meal of hard-boiled eggs and milk; Rogers chose fried chicken.
      Associated Press

      Surviving overwrought partisanship

      Even as he pilloried politicians’ shortcomings, he never made it personal. Despite their faults, Rogers wrote, “the Rascals, when you meet ’em face to face and know ’em, they are mighty nice fellows.” He declared famously, “I’ve joked about every prominent man in my time but I never met a man I didn’t like.”

      Determinedly nonpartisan throughout most of his career, he leaned toward the party of Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression while jesting, “I don’t belong to any organized political faith; I’m a Democrat.” The cowboy humorist saw politics as an endeavor for genial discussion, not a blood sport.

      Rogers’ political axioms of healthy skepticism, perspicacity and civility remain useful guides for surviving even the most sordid electioneering.

      So when you hear overwrought partisans lamenting “the end of democracy” or “we won’t have a country left anymore,” take a deep breath and consider Will Rogers’ calmer, wiser approach to presidential elections a century ago. Remember his conclusion that America won’t be ruined “no matter who is elected, so the Politicians will have to wait four more years to tell us who will ruin us then.”

      Then you can adopt his sage advice that when dealing with a political adversary, “don’t disagree with him looking at him; walk around behind him and see the way he’s looking.” More

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      Jane Fonda rallies disaffected young US voters: ‘Do not sit this election out’

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      Young people’s understandable unhappiness with the Biden administration’s record on oil and gas drilling and the war in Gaza should not deter them from voting to block Donald Trump from again becoming president of the United States, the Hollywood actor and activist Jane Fonda has warned.“I understand why young people are really angry, and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”View image in fullscreenFonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative Covering Climate Now and conducted by the Guardian, CBS News and Rolling Stone magazine.Making major social change requires massive, non-violent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of activism, from her anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it”, or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”View image in fullscreenScientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by the next decade, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling, and fracking, and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate political action committee three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state and local. “The Pac focuses down ballot – on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”Forty-two of the 60 candidates the Pac endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the Pac is providing money, voter outreach and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state”, she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California”.Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency”. She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our Pac candidates” as well.View image in fullscreenHer Pac has a strict rule: it endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said:polls show that most Americans want climate action, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “we’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the climate emergency and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris-Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well”. But she “was very disturbed that the No 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour-and-a-half to come up and was not really addressed”, she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”Given her years of anti-nuclear activism – including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 – it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these small modular reactors are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: no nuclear reactor of any kind – the traditional or the smaller or the modular, none of them – has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “Solar takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”The reason that solar – and wind and geothermal – energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it”. Noting that air pollution from fossil fuels kills 9 million people a year globally, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it! We pay $20bn a year [in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet – but they run the world.”The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds Taylor Swift for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.“I think she’s awesome, amazing and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central valley and Kern county and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”View image in fullscreenClimate activism is also “so much fun”, she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘everything’s gonna be fine’, but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is: I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.”

      Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for the Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now More

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      As the election looms, can Harris’s campaign juggle joy with a sense of gravity? | Osita Nwanevu

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      While presidential campaigns always distort and distend time in strange ways, this election already feels like it’s stretched on surreally for eons – long enough that several distinct and quite different feeling periods have been pressed into the fossil record.Recall for instance, if you can, the Republican primary. For many months, Republican insiders who should have known better and were paid handsomely to know better pushed the idea that Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, or even one of his lesser-known and lesser-resourced rivals, stood a real chance of defeating Donald Trump for the nomination – even as the former president remained firmly at the top of the polls and his challengers struggled to articulate a rationale for their campaigns to a still staunchly pro-Trump base. There were never any real grounds for this, but the press mocked up a race for DeSantis and his fellow also-rans anyway, complete with the most irrelevant series of debates in the history of American presidential politics.Then there were the doldrums of July, after a debate that wound up being extraordinarily consequential. Joe Biden’s shockingly poor performance finally made his age unignorable as an issue in the race – despite the best efforts of many Democrats and their unhinged hangers-on to ignore it. They manufactured an impressive amount of nonsense in his defense – their baseless warnings about Republican ballot shenanigans that never materialized, for instance, or the insistence that wanting Biden off the ticket was an expression of white male privilege, a glittering idiocy that should be long remembered.All that gave way predictably and immediately to unbridled enthusiasm for Kamala Harris once Biden stepped away, of course. And already in the brief and bewildering time she’s been on the ticket, Harris has essentially run two different campaigns.The first campaign, in those early days and weeks after she stepped into the race, was defined by relief and exuberance, bundled up into the repeated invocations of “joy” – a word that established an immediate contrast between Harris and both Biden and Trump. Both had staked their campaigns on a sense of gravity – Trump’s morbid and ludicrous vision of an America being undermined and invaded by dangerous foreigners and Biden’s well-founded warnings that Trump remained an existential threat to the American republic.The first Harris campaign didn’t depart from Biden there, but it did begin communicating with voters in a different register – Trump was to be feared, yes, but could also be mocked jovially. “You know it, you feel it,” Walz told a Philadelphia crowd in early August. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.” There was something thrillingly barbed underneath that folksiness and his avuncular affect – a hostility towards the Republican party beyond Trump that turned the page from Biden’s forlorn appeals to the right of the past and was grounded by invocations of Project 2025, surely by now the most infamous policy document the conservative movement has ever produced.Project 2025 still figures heavily in Harris’s messaging, and Oprah Winfrey herself talked up the merits of political joy in an appearance with Harris this week, but the campaign overall has plainly changed – the affective contrasts with the right are being replaced with affective and substantive moves in its direction. Consider Harris’s references to her gun ownership – “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot, sorry,” she told Oprah with a laugh – or her promises, before national audiences at the Democratic national convention and during this month’s debate, that she’ll command “the most lethal” military in the world as commander-in-chief. More substantively, the predictable backtracks from positions on energy, criminal justice and other issues she took during the 2020 Democratic primary have been joined by a departure from the Biden administration’s own tax policy – she’s pointedly proposing a smaller increase in the capital gains tax rate – and more criticisms of Trump’s sabotage of the Republican senator James Lankford’s bipartisan but remarkably conservative border bill.Obviously, to win the election, Harris will have to spend the next several weeks convincing the voters who matter most in this country – swing state swing voters who might loosely be described as center-right to the extent that they have coherent and categorizable views at all – to see her as something other than the generically liberal Democratic woman of color from California she’s been on most issues for most of her career. But she needn’t throw everything her campaign can think up at the wall to that end. It’s doubtful that many votes – or more relevantly, that many donations – are going to hinge on the difference between Harris’s capital gains tax increase and Biden’s; appealingly tough talk on hypothetical home invaders does not have to be paired with a substantive retreat from, say, eliminating the death penalty.Moreover, ridicule should remain an important part of the campaign’s playbook – ideally, the more time Harris spends framing the right as bizarre and culturally alien, the less time she’ll spend implicitly, and wrongly, conceding that they might be right on an issue like immigration, where a panic over immigrants stoked by the mainstream and conservative press alike has finally and inevitably curdled into the execrable campaign against the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio. The garbage about barbecued cats isn’t something to be laughed off. The immigration discourse of the last several years has already produced multiple massacres and promises still more violence; polls show most Americans have now been frightened into nativism. All the talk and positioning of the moment aside, what would Harris do to pull those numbers back down? How much courage can we expect from Harris and the party she now leads, more broadly, should she win? At the moment, the campaign is doing everything it can to ensure only time will tell.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Harris calls out Trump again for ‘looking for an excuse’ to avoid a second debate

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      Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHead-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president. More

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      Trump says he won’t run for president again in 2028 if he loses in November

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      Donald Trump said in an interview released on Sunday that he did not think he would run for president again in 2028 if he loses this year’s race for the White House.In an interview on the Full Measure television show with Sharyl Attkisson, the former US president – who ran in 2016 and 2020 – was asked whether he saw himself running yet again in four years time.“No, I don’t,” Trump answered. “I don’t see that at all.”He said: “Hopefully, we’re going to be successful.”In the polls, Kamala Harris leads Trump in most head-to-head surveys after Trump had previously established a solid lead over Joe Biden – before he scotched his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate performance. But the presidential race remains tight ahead of November’s election, especially in the key battleground states that will hold the key to victory.Attkisson asked Trump what positions he saw people such as the tech billionaire Elon Musk, the former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and the ex-independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, holding in his administration. Trump said he had not made deals with anybody because “it’s not appropriate to do it” and “it’s too early”.Still, he laid out what Musk, Gabbard and Kennedy, who are all former Democrats or supporters of the party, could potentially work on if he were to be elected.“Bobby will do great on health and on the environment,” he said. “He looks at other countries where they don’t use chemicals, where they use much less than we use, and the people are healthier than they are in the United States, which is not that healthy a country.”Kennedy has been campaigning for Trump since he ended his own independent presidential bid to support the Republican nominee.Trump described Gabbard, a military veteran who served as a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii before retiring, as “a common sense person”. She recently said she would “be honored to serve” under a second Trump administration. Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, but chose to support the Republican nominee in this year’s elections.During a Fox News interview, Gabbard said she was aiming for a role working on foreign policy.“I’ve known her a little bit, and it was a great honor when we got her,” Trump said in Sunday’s interview.Last month, both Gabbard and Kennedy were appointed to Trump’s transition team, which would help Trump choose policies and personnel if he were to win White House in November.Trump praised Musk as a person who can advance policies to cut costs in the federal government, an idea he has raised along with a “government efficiency commission”.“Elon is Elon,” he said. “He’s a big cost-cutter. He’s always been very good at it, and I’m good at it. But Elon, I’ll tell you what, he will go in, and he’ll say: ‘This is what you have to do. You have to do this.’ He is so into that, he feels there’s so much waste and fat in this country, and he’s right.” More

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      ‘This isn’t the real Oprah’: Trump lashes out at talkshow host over Harris support

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      Just over a week ago, it was the pop superstar Taylor Swift. Now Donald Trump is taking aim at Oprah Winfrey over her support of Kamala Harris.Whether or not attacking some of the most popular and powerful entertainment figures in US history will prove a solid campaign strategy is yet to be proven, but the former president has not held back.In a rant on Truth Social, Trump said he “couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah”.“This isn’t a person that wants millions of people, from prisons and mental institutions, and terrorists, drug dealers, and human traffickers from all over the world pouring into our country,” he wrote.In the post, Trump noted that the TV show host Winfrey had invited him and his family on to her talkshow the final week of the show’s finale.“It was my honor, with my family, to do it,” he wrote.The episode with his family actually aired in February, three months before the series finale in May 2011. At the time, Winfrey’s show billed it as the first Trump family interview with his wife, Melania, who he had married six years earlier.Winfrey hosted a livestreamed interview with Kamala Harris on 19 September that served as a virtual rally with other celebrity guests, including Tracee Ellis Ross, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock and Ben Stiller.“There’s a real feeling of optimism and hope making a comeback … for this new day that is no longer on the horizon but is here,” Winfrey said during the event, which had 400 in-person attendees and 200,000 live viewers.The live stream gave Harris a viral and somewhat controversial clip when Winfrey said she was surprised that the Democratic nominee was a gun owner.“If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said, laughing. She immediately brushed off the comment, saying: “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t have said that. But my staff will deal with that later.”Winfrey is just the latest in a slate of high-profile celebrities Trump has slammed in recent months.When George Clooney became the first major celebrity to voice concern over Joe Biden’s age, Trump called Clooney “a fake movie actor who should get out of politics”.Then in September, after the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris. Trump went on to say on his social media site: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.” More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s attacks on migrants: smirking racism is no less dangerous | Editorial

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      There is a humanitarian crisis involving Haitians and, despite JD Vance’s lies, it isn’t in Ohio. It’s in Haiti itself, where violence has reached terrifying levels. Five children a week are killed and injured and almost 5 million people – about half the population – face acute hunger. Little wonder families flee. Most of the 15,000 Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield are in the US through the temporary protected status (TPS) granted to them because of the turmoil in their own country.Now they face fresh danger thanks to the vicious and baseless lies of Donald Trump’s campaign. In his debate with Kamala Harris, Mr Trump declared that “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats.” He had picked up on his running mate Mr Vance’s slanders on X that “pets [have been] abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country”.These were claims first spread by far-right groups and neo-Nazis. Promoting them had predictable results. Hospitals, schools and government buildings have been forced to close after bomb threats. The town as a whole has been endangered, though of course the Haitian population – or those who might be mistaken for them – are most at risk. Some say they are living in constant fear, and are too scared to leave their homes.The woman who first aired the pet-eating slurs has admitted they are baseless. The city’s Republican mayor, Rob Rue, has stressed that “your pets are safe”. Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, has dismissed the claims. A grieving father, Nathan Clark, asked Mr Trump and others to stop exploiting his 11-year-old child’s death in a bus crash involving a Haitian immigrant to stoke hatred in the town. The lies have led to an emergency order being issued in Springfield. When Mr Trump said he was planning a visit there, Mr Rue, backed by Mr DeWine, said it would be better if he stayed away.Mr Trump and Mr Vance continue to lie because it allows them to focus, in a hateful way, on immigration. The Republican vice-presidential nominee openly admits as much. The former president has already called migrants who enter the US illegally “animals” and “not human”, and accused them of “poisoning the [country’s] blood”. The claim about pets taps into old tropes about “savagery”, the threat of the sinister outsider, and associating foreigners with “weird” eating habits, evoking not only loathing but disgust.The current administration is not beyond criticism when it comes to Haiti – despite the TPS measures, it has continued to deport some Haitians. But that’s a world away from this cynical fomentation of hatred. As Joe Biden put it last week: “We don’t demonise immigrants. We don’t single them out for attacks. We don’t believe they’re poisoning the blood of the country. We’re a nation of immigrants, and that’s why we’re so damn strong.”Writing of the Trump presidency’s cruelties, the author Adam Serwer observed that “the cruelty is the point” and that “their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump”. Now Arizona Republicans run LoLtastic “EAT LESS KITTENS” hate posters and Mr Vance instructs his supporters to “Keep the cat memes flowing”. Smirking racism is no less lethal. Haitians in Ohio have not been singled out because they are a threat, but because the far right knows they are an easy target.

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