US Politics

Donald Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, refused to say if Trump should be barred from returning to the White House if he is convicted on any of 91 criminal charges against him.“I think that he’s to be left to the American people,” Pence told ABC’s This Week, on Sunday. “Let’s have the former president have his day in court. Let’s maintain a presumption of innocence.”Trump faces charges concerning federal and state election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments to a porn star. He also faces civil cases involving defamation, alleged rape and his business affairs, contributing to a schedule of trials in the election year.Nonetheless, he leads polling by wide margins nationally and in key states.On Sunday, ahead of the first debate in Milwaukee on Wednesday, CBS News released a new poll. Among Republicans, a whopping 62% picked Trump to just 16% for Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor in second place. Pence received 5% support, placing fourth.Pence and other qualifiers for the debate – a contest Trump will skip for an interview with Tucker Carlson – have backed a Republican National Committee pledge requiring support for the nominee.On ABC, Pence was asked about the case of James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat who in 2002 became one of only five people ever expelled from the US House after being convicted on corruption charges. Then a congressman from Indiana, Pence voted for that expulsion.Pence’s host, Jon Karl, asked: “Would you hold that same standard for the White House?”Pence said: “I would tell you that it is the function of the Congress to determine membership where there’s ethical violations and I remember the Traficant case from 20 years ago, it was really quite outrageous.“But if you’re saying would I apply that to my former running mate in this race, look, I think that he’s to be left to the American people. Let’s have the former president have his day in court. Let’s maintain a presumption of innocence and in this matter, and any other matter that unfolded this week here in Georgia” – a reference to Trump’s state-level election subversion case – “but I’ve said many times, I would have preferred that these matters be left to the judgment of the American people.“No one’s above the law. But with regard to the president’s future, my hope is when we get to that debate stage, and I’m still kind of hoping maybe he’ll come, is that we can really have a debate about the challenges facing the American people.”Elsewhere, the former Arkansas governor turned Trump critic Asa Hutchinson said he had qualified for the debate and would sign the pledge. Insisting that Trump would not be the nominee, Hutchinson refused to say what he would do if he were.Speaking from Des Moines, Iowa, Hutchinson told CNN’s State of the Union: “I am pleased to announce that we have met … the polling criteria and now we have met the 40,000 individual donor criteria. We submitted to the RNC 42,000 individual donors and I’m delighted.”FiveThirtyEight.com puts Hutchinson at 0.7% support – to 53.7% for Trump.“I’ll sign the pledge,” Hutchinson said. “I’m confident Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the party. And I’ve always supported the nominee. So I’m gonna sign the pledge.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPressed on whether he would support the man who sought to overturn the 2020 election and incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, Hutchinson repeated: “I’m going to support the nominee of the party. I do not expect it to be Donald Trump. And that I’m sure question will come up in the debate, so stay tuned for that.”’Conviction would not disqualify Trump from the presidency. But some say the US constitution might.Hutchinson said: “You can’t be asking us to support somebody that’s not perhaps even qualified under our constitution. I’m referring to the 14th amendment. A number of legal scholars said that [Trump] is disqualified because of his actions on January 6.”The 14th amendment says: “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice-president … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same … ”Hutchinson said: “There would have to be a separate lawsuit that would be filed, in which there would be a finding that the former president engaged in insurrection, and that would disqualify him. That’s one avenue. The other way would be that if a specific state made that determination on their own … Either way … I think it’s a serious jeopardy for Donald Trump.”Trump’s longtime leading challenger, DeSantis, has long been falling back. No dominant alternative has emerged but Hutchinson insisted his party was not risking a repeat of 2016, when voters did not coalesce around one alternative to Trump.“I don’t see that happening,” Hutchinson told CNN. “First of all, it’s really early. I talked to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire and they’re gonna be late deciding, and that’s why you’re gonna see in Iowa, where Trump’s numbers come down first, it will be here.“… This debate is important … this is really a reduced number [of candidates] from 2016 with eight or nine on the stage. We’ll see who else qualifies for it but the voters are gonna be able to lock in on it, make decisions, and they’re not gonna be in a hurry to move. So everybody needs to be patient, including the media, and let this unfold over the next three or four months.“The right alternative to Donald Trump will surface.” More

Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn Carter, are “still holding hands” as they enter their “final chapter” together at home in Plains, Georgia, the former US president’s grandson said.“It’s clear we’re in the final chapter,” Josh Carter said of his grandparents, the first couple between 1977 and 1981, in an interview published by People magazine on Saturday.Jimmy Carter, 98, entered hospice care in February, seeking “to spend his remaining time at home with his family”. In May, the Carter family announced that Rosalynn Carter, 96, has dementia.“My grandparents have always been the entertainers,” Josh Carter told People. “But now we’re kind of the ones having to entertain. It’s different, it’s just a different era.”His grandfather, he said, was “still fully Jimmy Carter. “He’s just tired. I mean he’s almost 99 years old but he … has felt the love.”His grandmother, Josh said, “still knows who we are, for the most part – that we are family. My grandmother is still able to form new memories.”The Carters married 77 years ago, in 1946. Jimmy Carter served in the US Navy before becoming the Democratic governor of Georgia in 1971. He rose to the White House in the bicentennial election of 1976, beating the Republican Gerald Ford.Through a turbulent four years in power, Rosalynn Carter was an influential first lady, known to some as the “Steel Magnolia”. In 1980, one White House insider told the Observer that Rosalynn Carter was “a great second line of defence”, able to get her husband “to change his mind”.Rosalynn Carter said: “I am in the eye of history. I know I have influence, and I enjoy it.”Speaking to People, Josh Carter said it’s “gotta be hard” for the former president to see his wife struggle with dementia, “but on the other hand, they’ve experienced everything that you can together. I think the beautiful thing is that they are still together.“They are still holding hands … it’s just amazing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Republican who beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan, died in 2004, aged 93. Reagan’s Republican successor, George HW Bush, died in 2018, aged 94. Carter is the longest-lived president. His post-presidency is widely held to be the most successful.Out of power, Carter conducted diplomatic missions and championed charitable work. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel peace prize, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.Now, Josh Carter told People, “Odds are I’m gonna lose my grandfather before my grandmother. He’s in hospice care and she’s not, and it’s just math.”In March, Joe Biden said Jimmy Carter had asked him to deliver his eulogy. More

His presidential campaign widely seen to be listing badly, Ron DeSantis fired a broadside at supporters of Donald Trump on Saturday, calling them “listless vessels”.“A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis told the Florida Standard.“The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle, if all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow … whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”Truth Social is Trump’s social media platform, set up when he was suspended from mainstream platforms after the January 6 attack on Congress.Running for re-election under four criminal indictments and 91 separate charges, Trump nonetheless dominates the Republican primary, leading polling by as much as 40 points nationally and by wide margins in key states.DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has long been established as the strongest challenger. But amid campaign firings and reported financial struggles, that status has begun to erode, with the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy creeping up in polling.Trump is set to skip the first Republican debate, in Milwaukee on Wednesday, in favour of an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.Responding to DeSantis’s remarks to the Florida Standard, Trump aides sought to link the governor to the Democrat Trump beat for the presidency in 2016.“DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary [Clinton] and call[s] MAGA supporters ‘listless vessels,’” Steven Cheung wrote.A spokesperson for a Trump-aligned fundraising committee, Maga Inc, made explicit the claimed connection to remarks by Clinton which Trump successfully weaponised.“To Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters are ‘deplorables’. To Ron DeSantis, they are ‘listless vessels’,” Karoline Leavitt said. “The truth is, Trump supporters are patriots. DeSantis must immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.”DeSantis’s spokesperson, Bryan Griffin, said the governor was referring to supporters of Trump in Congress, not among voters.“The dishonest media refuses to report the facts,” Griffin wrote. “Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers are ‘listless vessels’. Why? Because Trump and DC insiders feel he is entitled to your vote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“… That’s why Ron DeSantis will be showing up on Wednesday night to debate, and Donald Trump will not.”The Florida Standard is a conservative website run by a young Republican, Will Witt, to whom DeSantis has regularly granted interviews.In the passage of the interview in question, the governor repeatedly targeted “establishment Republicans” and “Rinos”, meaning “Republicans in name only”.“I think that we have a stream in our party that views supporting Trump as whether you are a Rino or not,” he said. “And so you could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you’re kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a Rino.”DeSantis also said “there’ll be people who are huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have like incredibly liberal leftwing records that [are] really just atrocious and … then you have other people like [Texas] congressman Chip Roy, who’s endorsed me, [Kentucky] congressman Thomas Massie, these guys have records of principle.“… Ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual. The movement has got to be about what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people and that’s got to be based in principle, because if you’re not rooted in principle … all we are is listless vessels.” More

Ask any accountant and we’ll tell you that the Internal Revenue Service is woefully underfunded. Our clients complain about the long delays for refunds, the interminable waits for getting answers and the frustrations waiting for guidance on issues that affect their businesses.But it’s not just accountants that are clamoring for more IRS funding. Most taxpayers I know will admit that the IRS needs a serious upgrade. So why the big brouhaha over the $80bn approved last year to hire more auditors and upgrade the agency’s pathetically outdated systems? The answer lies not in why it’s so badly needed. It’s in how badly it was sold to the American public.We all pay for things we don’t like. We need to have insurance but we don’t like the premiums. We don’t really want to give a wedding gift to that fifth cousin or tip the waiter even though the service wasn’t that great. And of course, we pay taxes – and no one likes that either.The same goes for the IRS. We know that everyone should be paying their fair share and we get that there has to be a government agency to oversee this. Making sure the IRS has adequate funding is a no-brainer. And yet here we are arguing over its need. For this, I blame President Biden and the Democrats.The bipartisan Tax Foundation found that the costs to collect $100 (in 2021 dollars) has decreased 41% since 1991 and that during this same period, the amount collected per taxpayer has increased 45% and that the agency did this despite its much lower staff. These are impressive accomplishments when you consider that most of the agency’s systems are decades old.Even so, Republicans and the media pounced on the $80bn allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act to be used for hiring more auditors and technology upgrades which could potentially save more than $1tn per year. And during recent talks to raise the US borrowing limit, Republicans somehow managed to claw a quarter of that amount back with plans to pursue more.Most people in both parties understand the necessity to fund an agency whose sole objective is to ensure that everyone pays their fair share of taxes. But you can’t really blame Republicans for crying foul. This is what politicians do when there’s a slam-dunk issue like this. Big government: bad. Small guy taxpayer: good.But there was a better way for the Democrats to achieve this funding, which, according to the Cato Institute, will increase the IRS’s budget from $5.2bn to $19.5bn by 2033 – about $1.4bn per year, which is just one-half of one percentage point of our country’s overall spending.Why not bury some of this amount in the overall treasury department’s annual budget of $3.24tn? Over a 10-year period that funding could have been absorbed by the numerous subdivisions of the agency and then re-allocated back to the IRS in that bureaucratic way that bureaucrats do where no one really knows where or how the money was spent.Or how about trying what any business owner would do when appropriating money to a project: assign quantifiable metrics and holds its recipients accountable? Make it such that the spending could be paused or even pulled unless these numerical goals are achieved each year. That way the Republicans could insist they’re holding their opponents’ feet to the fire, while the Democrats still get to spend the money.Or you could take a pure tech angle and take people out of the equation. Remove and prohibit the “hiring” of new auditors and instead mandate that the funds only be used for technology. Better yet, AI technology because that’s what’s hot! Emphasize that the IRS is going to be the federal government’s leader in tech, reducing its headcount and increasing its output and responsiveness by leveraging the latest AI tools as it upgrades its systems. Of course, some may be scared by the prospect of out-of-control robots but it’s obvious to most of us who regularly deal with the IRS that – probably more than any other agency – most of what it does can be automated.But no. Instead, Biden and the Democrats allowed an inordinate amount of attention to be drawn directly to the $80bn for the evil IRS, which in turn invited a tidal wave of backlash. This didn’t have to happen. With a little bit of thought, some maneuvering, finessing and manipulation, that money – which is sorely needed – could have been spent under the radar and much of this controversy could have been avoided. More

As Donald Trump fights a mountain of criminal charges, a separate battle over his eligibility to run for president in 2024 is fast emerging.The US constitution sets out just a handful of explicit requirements someone must meet to be the president. They must be at least 35 years old, a “natural-born” citizen, and a United States resident for at least 14 years. The constitution also bars someone who has served as president for two full terms from running again.None of those requirements disqualify Trump, or anyone else charged with a crime, from running for federal office.But one provision in the constitution, section 3 of the 14th amendment, makes things more complicated. It says that no person who has taken an oath “as an officer of the United States” can hold office if they “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof”.That language disqualifies Trump from running for office because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, two prominent conservative scholars, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St Thomas, concluded in a much-discussed article to be published the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.“The bottom line is that Donald Trump ‘engaged in insurrection or rebellion’ and gave ‘aid or comfort’ to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in section 3 of the 14th amendment,” Baude and Paulsen wrote in their 126-page article, which traces the history and original understanding of the amendment. “If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close.”The provision was enacted after the civil war to bar those who had joined the Confederacy from holding federal office, Baude and Paulsen note in their article. Never before has it been tested to bar a presidential candidate from office.“I think it’s really actually very clearcut,” said Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society (the group has reportedly instructed him not to speak to any journalist who identifies him as a co-founder). “Section 3 nowhere limits itself to the civil war or Confederates who broke their oath. It’s in general language, and so it applies to anyone who incites an insurrection or rebellion,” he added, noting that he believed the January 6 attack on the Capitol was an insurrection.Disqualification under the 14th amendment does not require a criminal conviction, Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), said in an interview earlier this month. The push to disqualify Trump is likely to play out at the state level in parallel to both the federal and state cases criminally charging Trump and allies in connection with their efforts to overturn the election. The left-leaning group Free Speech for People has already sent letters to election officials in 10 states urging them to declare Trump ineligible to run for office under the 14th amendment. Crew is also preparing to file litigation in several states to disqualify Trump from the ballot, Bookbinder said.“It’s really important to resolve this as soon as possible and definitely before the election and not afterwards,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University. “I am worried that if this doesn’t get resolved definitively, this issue could arise on January 6, 2025 if Trump were to win the electoral college having been on the ballot.“You could envision an effort to try and disqualify Trump after he’s won. And I think that would be a disaster. That would be a real constitutional crisis,” he added.Even if Trump winds up being constitutionally disqualified, many Americans may chafe, especially in the midst of a politically heated election year, at not being able to vote for their preferred candidate.“Viscerally in a democracy we don’t like the idea that we’re not allowed to vote for someone who we might want to vote for,” Foley said. “On the other hand, Barack Obama might actually be a pretty strong candidate for the Democratic party right now … he’s constitutionally disqualified. However much Americans or Democrats might want to nominate Barack Obama, it’s just constitutionally not permissible to do so.”The venue for the disqualification efforts could vary by state – it may be secretaries of state, boards of elections, or state courts that hear the challenges. “As a practical matter, the first time a state official decided that Trump was disqualified under Section 3, my guess is it would shoot up to the supreme court real fast and, I don’t know, who knows what the answer would be,” said Michael McConnell, a law professor at Stanford who has been more skeptical about the use of the 14th amendment to disqualify Trump.It’s also unclear who might have the legal standing to challenge Trump’s presence on the ballot. The best legal case would probably come from a candidate running against Trump, who could argue that they were injured by the presence of an unqualified candidate on the ballot. Calabresi suggested in a blogpost that Chris Christie, one of Trump’s most prominent critics in the GOP field, could lead such a challenge.The justice department did not choose to file charges against Trump under a specific statute that criminalizes insurrection, McConnell noted.“The amendment should be interpreted as … an enormous last resort and maybe January 6 rose to that level. It certainly was a much more serious civil disturbance than we usually see. But whether it’s actually an insurrection. I think it’s a bit of a stretch,” he said. “There were hundreds of participants in the January 6 incursion who have been criminally prosecuted and none of them have been charged with insurrection. Trump is one step removed.”But Calabresi said that Trump could be disqualified under the 14th amendment, even absent a formal insurrection charge. He noted that the standard for proving Trump engaged in an insurrection would be lower in the civil cases to disqualify him than in the criminal prosecutions.McConnell said his skepticism of disqualification was not intended as a defense of Trump, but rather a concern over what would happen if candidates started frequently trying to disqualify their rivals from the ballot.“I don’t want to see him water down the meaning of these words so that bringing disqualification motions against your political opponents becomes yet another aspect of our dysfunctional legal and electoral system,” he said. More

Trump’s attempted coup against the US continues. We are now in phase three.Phase one was his refusal to concede the loss of the 2020 election and his big lie that the election was “stolen” from him, without any basis in fact.Trump’s actions in phase one were not illegal, but they were immoral. They violated the norms that every president before Trump had dutifully followed.Phase two was his plot to overturn the result of the 2020 election.Phase two was hatched even before election day. On 31 October 2020, Trump’s confidant Steve Bannon told associates that Trump planned to declare that he won and claim Joe Biden’s expected victory fraudulent. Audio footage recently available shows that two days before the election, Trump’s lieutenant Roger Stone was already planning for alternative slates of electors.Then came Trump’s efforts to strong-arm election officials in swing states to alter votes, persuade the vice-president Mike Pence to reject the certification of electors, get the justice department to find fraud in the election process, come up with slates of fake electors, persuade Republican members of Congress to reject the certification, defame and intimidate poll workers and invite supporters to Washington on the day of the certification – which led inexorably to the violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Phase two was illegal. It violated both statutory laws and the US constitution. Trump is only now starting to be held accountable for these violations, in federal court in Washington and in state court in Georgia.Phase three is his current attempt to discredit and undermine the criminal justice system that is seeking to hold him accountable for phase two.Trump is smearing presiding judges, excoriating prosecutors and harassing and intimidating potential witnesses and jurors.He’s telling another big lie: that prosecutors, grand juries, judges, potential jurors and witnesses who are prepared to try him are corrupt and partisan – engaged in a plot to prevent him from being re-elected. Like his original big lie, this one has no basis in fact.Trump’s efforts in phase three are illegal. By publicly threatening people who are or will soon be participating in his trials, he is violating the explicit terms of his release pending trial, which prohibited him from engaging in harassment or intimidation.In seeking to silence or intimidate judges, prosecutors, potential jurors and witnesses, Trump is attempting to obstruct justice.Whether Trump is held accountable for phase three of his attempted coup will be up to the judges and prosecutors now engaged in trying to hold him accountable for phase two.Which brings us to what is likely to be phase four of his attempted coup – his campaign for re-election.As his trials approach in the months ahead, Trump is likely to escalate his lies that the election system and the criminal justice system are both rigged against him, and therefore, against his supporters.It is too early to know what additional illegal or unconstitutional means he will employ in phase four, but there is no reason to believe Trump will treat the upcoming election any more respectfully than he treated the 2020 election or has treated efforts to hold him accountable for what he did then.Notwithstanding Trump’s ongoing attempted coup, the most recent New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump in a dead heat with Biden for the presidency. Last week’s Quinnipiac poll also shows Trump and Biden in a virtual tie.Polls are fallible, of course, and the election is 15 months away. But the closeness of the race should be of concern, especially given that Trump has now been indicted for seeking to overturn the 2020 election.Trump’s attempted coup continues. Since before the 2020 election, he has been engaged in a concerted attempt to undermine the institutions of the US government.Everyone who cares about American democracy should be prepared for phase four.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

Wearing a Robert Kennedy Jr campaign T-shirt, Kevin O’Keeffe found there was standing room only as the candidate, introduced as “Bobby Kennedy”, walked on a sunbaked stage decked with hay bales to whoops and applause.“He supports freedom of speech, and he’s questioned the efficacy of the vaccine, which is legitimate at this point,” said O’Keeffe, 52, who works for a telecommunications company in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “I like his views on foreign policy and keeping us out of the war. He cares about his fellow Americans in a way that a lot of the politicians nowadays I don’t think really do.”He was far from alone in rooting for Kennedy at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines last weekend. The longshot challenger to Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024 drew one of the biggest and most energetic crowds, outnumbering conventional politicians on the Republican side. The shouts of “We love you, Robert!” and “Thank you, Robert!”, and subsequent mobbing of Kennedy for handshakes and selfies, hinted at the stirrings of a movement.In a nation that has seen plenty of political convulsions over the past decade, Kennedy, a 69-year-old environmental lawyer who has never before run for public office, is proof that Americans’ appetite for insurgents and outsiders, mavericks and populists, remains undimmed. Even when a campaign traffics in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and has been hit by antisemitism scandals.Kennedy rose to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic because of his strident and widely condemned opposition to vaccines. He has styled himself as a hammer of the elites – quite a feat for a scion of one of America’s most storied political dynasties. He has scrambled old political allegiances, striking an anti-establishment nerve on the far left and far right over the Ukraine war and other issues.Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News, summed up his supporters as “anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, internet contrarians, billionaire tech bros, Camelot nostalgists and rightwing provocateurs who seem to be pumping Kennedy as a spoiler candidate”.In his speech from the Des Moines Register newspaper’s political soapbox, Kennedy wore blue jeans and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He spoke of his father, former attorney general Robert Kennedy, and uncle, President John F Kennedy, as figures from a golden age when America was the envy of the world.His campaign chairman, Dennis Kucinich, held up a map as Kennedy railed against proposed pipelines that would run through Iowa to transport liquefied carbon dioxide away from ethanol plants for burial underground. It was a retro, 20th-century presentation but more locally targeted than many candidates offered.Such is the celebrity-style clamor for Kennedy that, for an interview with the Guardian, he slipped away from the crowds and sat in the back of a black limousine with security detail present. Kucinich, a former congressman and past presidential contender, offered to take an Uber back to the hotel but Kennedy insisted that he climb in too, then asked an aide for some fried bacon from the fair.His uncle, Ted Kennedy, was once floored by the simple question, “Why do you want to be president?” This Kennedy does have an answer for that one: “I’m running for president because I feel like I’m losing my country and because I feel like the Democratic party is going in a bad direction. In particular, it has become the party of war – the Ukraine war was an unnecessary war.“It has become the party of censorship. It’s become the party of a pugnacious neocon-driven foreign policy and a Wall Street-driven domestic policy. Those are all the opposite of the Democratic party that I grew up with, so I’m running to bring the party back to its traditional values.”The political class was rattled in 2016 by the two-headed insurgency of not only Donald Trump on the right but Bernie Sanders on the left, channeling frustrations with the status quo in very different ways. Kennedy argues that Democrats, once the party of the poor and middle class, now own most of the nation’s wealth and dominate its richest counties.“Americans feel ignored by both political parties,” he said. “Their wealth is being strip mined by large corporations, corporate interests, and you’re seeing a level of desperation that I’ve never seen in this country. They just don’t feel that anybody’s listening, and they felt like Bernie was maybe listening, and they felt like Donald Trump was maybe listening as well.”Many are disturbed by Kennedy’s flirtations with the far right, including racists and antisemites. He has appeared on Infowars, a channel run by Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and granted interviews to pro-Trump extremists Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. A Super Pac supporting Kennedy’s presidential run owes half its money to a longtime Republican mega-donor and Trump backer, according to campaign finance reports.Kennedy insists that he is happy to receive support from across the spectrum and focus on issues that united Americans rather than divide them. He said: “My message is a populist message. The Republicans are appealing to a populist base and I appeal to the same base. I appeal to working people, middle class people and the poor.”So what did he make of Trump’s presidency? Kennedy seemed a little reluctant to reply and kept his answer short: “I don’t think it was the shining apex of American exceptionalism.”Trump is facing 91 criminal charges across four cases, many related to an attempted coup after his 2020 election defeat. Democrats warn starkly that his return to the White House could spell the end of American democracy. But again Kennedy swerved: “There’s authoritarian impulses on both sides. On one side it’s the authoritarianism of rightwing demagoguery, and on the left it’s the authoritarianism of the elites, which is equally dangerous because it involves censorship.”Equally dangerous? “I would say equally dangerous,” he reiterated. “What do you think is more dangerous? The attack on the Capitol building on January 6 or the revelations that the White House has been using the CIA and the FBI to censor its critics? What do you think is more dangerous for the republic? Both parties are doing things that are equally dangerous.”He added: “Once a government can silence its critics it has licence for every atrocity and so it’s shocking to me that people in the Democratic party now think it’s OK to silence people. I’ve never thought that’s right. I’ve always spoken to people who I don’t agree with. That’s an important part of being American.”It is an exercise in false equivalence fueled by personal animus. Kennedy accuses the government of colluding with social media companies to deny his freedom of speech, making him the first person censored by the White House after Biden’s inauguration. In reality he was suspended from platforms such as Instagram and Twitter for spreading coronavirus vaccine misinformation.Without the pandemic, it might be argued, there would be no Kennedy candidacy. He has long promoted bogus theories linking vaccines to autism, antidepressants to school shootings and chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity. But now his anti-scientific views have moved from the fringe to resonate with millions of people, especially consumers of rightwing media.His anti-vaccine charity, Children’s Health Defense, prospered during the pandemic, with revenues more than doubling in 2020 to $6.8m, according to filings made with charity regulators. Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of Covid, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. In 2021 he published a book, The Real Anthony Fauci, in which he accused America’s top infectious disease expert of assisting in “a historic coup d’etat against western democracy”.In his Guardian interview, Kennedy is unrepentant, saying: “Show me where I got one thing wrong.” He tossed out far-fetched claims that might have been plucked from dark corners of the web: “The British study that just came out said 98% of the people who died were triple vaccinated”; “If you look at the data, countries that were least vaccinated had the least Covid deaths”. He did not take the vaccine himself and did catch the virus but “it didn’t stop me from skiing”.Earlier this year the UN’s World Health Organization declared an end to Covid as a public health emergency, stating that immunity increased due to “highly effective vaccines” developed in record time. A modelling study by the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health at the end of last year found that Covid vaccines kept more than 18.5 million people in the US out of the hospital and saved more than 3.2 million lives.Kennedy’s own family have distanced themselves from him. Jack Schlossberg, President Kennedy’s grandson, said in an Instagram video: “He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame. I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment.”But at the state fair there was a significant constituency thrilled to hear Kennedy keep saying the unsayable, renewing questions about what the rise of such candidates tells America about itself and its yearning. Gail Buffington, 62, wearing a white “Kennedy 2024” cap and “RFK Jr for president 2024” T-shirt, said: “I believe in freedom of speech, peace and civil liberties. Trump drew a large crowd too, and I was in that crowd, and I got nothing but thumbs up from everybody.” More

There is mean things happening in this landOh the rich man boasts and bragsWhile the poor man goes in ragsThere is mean things happening in this landSo runs the opening verse of John Handcox’s classic 1930s song There is Mean Things Happening In This Land. Handcox was a tenant farmer and union organiser in Arkansas during the Great Depression. His family, like thousands of others, had been made destitute, crushed between the droughts that afflicted the dust bowl and the ruthlessness of east coast bankers and of the old plantation owners, the white oligarchy that had retained its power in the south after the civil war.I don’t know if Oliver Anthony knows of Handcox. A jobbing country singer from Virginia, Anthony’s video of his song Rich Men North of Richmond has gone viral over the past week, clocking up more than 20m views on YouTube, rising to the top of the streaming charts and becoming an anthem for conservatives from Marjorie Taylor Green, the reactionary Republican congresswoman from Georgia, to the rightwing political commentator Matt Walsh, all viewing Anthony as a righteous figure, whose “rawness” and “authenticity” speak to real Americans.In some ways, Rich Men North of Richmond echoes the themes of Handcox’s song, giving voice to a sense of a world divided into rich and poor, and of ordinary people as menaced by those in power. It also shows the degree to which the working-class tradition that Handcox helped forge has decayed, politically and culturally.Handcox was not simply a singer or songwriter. He was first and foremost a union activist, and it was out of his activism that his music flowed. He stood in a long line of working-class troubadours. From The Ballad of Joe Hill to This Land Is Your Land, much of what is now called the Great American Songbook emerged from grassroot struggles, songs created to organise, inspire and console. Some names in that tradition are well known – Paul Robeson or Woody Guthrie. Others, such as Ella May Wiggins, a millworker murdered by a militia during thenotorious Loray Mill strike in 1929, and Sarah Ogan Gunning, a nurse and midwife from the mining country in Kentucky, are largely lost to the collective memory.All helped create a movement in which music became a central strand in the struggle for justice and betterment. It was a tradition that, long before the civil rights movement, was committed to interracial solidarity. Not only were African Americans, such as Robeson and Handcox, an inextricable part of the working-class folk scene, but there was much cross-fertilisation across blues, gospel and folk.Handcox was an organiser for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), helping stage a major strike of cotton pickers demanding better pay in 1935. The strike was met with ferocious violence from planters, militias and the Ku Klux Klan. The union was crushed, and Handcox, blacklisted and threatened by lynch mobs, was forced to flee, joining the thousands who had formed a great exodus out of the dust bowl, the raw horrors of which were captured in Dorothea Lange’s photographs and in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.Handcox would have understood Anthony’s lament in Rich Men North of Richmond about the precariousness of working-class life. But where he was committed to collective action and unionisation, Rich Men North of Richmond expresses individualised resentment. It is a resentment not towards bosses or the capitalist class, as in the old songs but, as has become fashionable today, towards a nebulous political elite, defined as much by its cultural alienness as by its economic power.A boss who is culturally familiar seems less threatening than a member of the cosmopolitan elite. Anthony even gives a nod towards conspiracy theories about paedophiles (“I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere”). It is a resentment, too, not just towards the elite but also the undeserving poor, towards benefit recipients and welfare scroungers: “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat / And the obese milkin’ welfare”. For Anthony, “if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”. Only for some is the precariousness of life to be condemned.All this has turned the song into a conservative hymn, “the protest song of our generation”, as Walsh has described it. Most of those who laud Rich Men North of Richmond as being, in Greene’s words, “the anthem of the forgotten Americans”, have also long campaigned to deny those forgotten Americans their dues. They oppose unionisation and Medicare and abortion rights, view tax cuts for the rich as more important than support for the poor, and despise welfare payments as “money stolen”. A century ago, they would have condemned Handcox and Wiggins, Robeson and Guthrie, as treacherous “reds”, cheered on the strike-breaking militias, and probably joined them, too.It is a common theme on the right that when people take collective action to defend their interests, they are the wrong kind of workers. It is only when workers lament without resisting that their voice is deemed “authentic”. Yet, the decline of radical struggles, the neutering of labour movement organisations and the abandonment of working-class issues by many sections of the left has allowed the most grotesque of reactionaries to shamelessly pose as friends of the downtrodden.“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay.” Anthony’s plaint rings down the decades. But as long as disaffection is shaped by a politics that abases working-class hopes, and is directed as much against the undeserving poor or the culturally different as against employers and politicians who seek to crush unions and impose austerity, rich men, whether north and south of Richmond, will remain in power.“The way they’re treated is a sin, / So I’m gonna get organised”, Sarah Ogan Gunning sang in her 1937 recording I’m Goin’ to Organize, Baby Mine. It is an attitude, and a defiance, as necessary today as it was almost a century ago. More