US Politics

For the last decade, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway have been digging into the history of the idea that freedom only thrives if businesses are left unbothered by governments. It’s a philosophy that has touched every corner of American life, they argue, even though it has long been proven deeply flawed.In their new book – The Big Myth – How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market – Oreskes and Conway document the rise of what’s more politely called “market fundamentalism” over the last century, from corporate propaganda and fringe academic theory to mainstream ideology.The book is both a sequel and a prequel to their groundbreaking book Merchants of Doubt, which is about a handful of prominent scientists who obfuscated clear scientific findings to oppose climate regulation. At the heart of their beliefs, Oreskes and Conway argue, was the big myth.The Guardian spoke to Oreskes and Conway about The Big Myth and how it came to dominate how Americans think about government regulation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.The Guardian: How do you define “the big myth”?Oreskes: In a way, the myth isn’t just one thing; it’s a set of interconnected concepts that together support this larger ideology of market fundamentalism.The first part of the myth is the notion of the free market, the idea that you could even meaningfully talk about “the free market” as a thing that exists. In reality, people make markets. Markets are human institutions.So that leads to the second part of the myth, which is the idea that markets have wisdom, that the invisible hand guides us and that if we all do our own thing, our own self-interest will somehow lead to this productive, efficient and happy outcome. And therefore, we should just trust markets, that the government distorts markets and interferes with the wisdom of the marketplace.Then the third part of the myth is, in a way, the most damaging – it’s the piece that really informed Merchants of Doubt. It’s this idea of the inextricable link between capitalism and economic freedom as a bulwark against totalitarianism.What are the origins of the big myth?Conway: We pick up the story with business leaders fighting against the regulation of child labor and workplace safety. We’ve all forgotten that there was a crisis of workplace accidents in the United States in the late-19th and early-20th century that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of peopleBusiness leaders in the United States were absolutely dead-set against doing anything about these twin crises.Oreskes: It’s pretty hard to come up with a good argument to defend the employment of children as young as two in textile mills, which we know happened. How do you defend something that’s clearly, on the surface, really quite appalling? Come up with some kind of argument that appeals to something that we do care about, that we value: freedom.We saw this in Merchants of Doubt, when we talked about the tobacco industry and how it mobilized this whole argument about the freedom to smoke, that you don’t want the government telling you what to do. We actually thought the tobacco industry invented that strategy. But they didn’t. What we show in this new book is that it goes back much further.In the 20th century, one of the things the market fundamentalists did was rewrite US history to invent a story about how free enterprise was embedded into the very foundations of American society, economy and culture.They do this in the 1930s through a metaphor they came up with called the “Tripod of Freedom.” This was pushed by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which at the time was the largest trade organization in the United States. They claimed that the United States was founded on three essential principles that were like a tripod – if any were to be compromised, the whole structure would fall. The three pillars were representative democracy, the Bill of Rights and free enterprise. The third part was a complete invention because, actually, free enterprise appears nowhere in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights. Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence.The book covers the extensive propaganda campaign from NAM and companies like General Electric to sway the American public against government regulation of businesses. Why were these campaigns so effective?Conway: They disguised propaganda as entertainment, it was not obviously partisan or political. That was the whole idea. Propagandists need a kernel of truth in order to be successful. The best lies are ones that are built on something people already believe.They basically doubled down after the second world war when corporations could control their own advertising again. They keep doing it for decades. If you’re hammered through every outlet with the same message over and over again, eventually you start to believe it. Even if, once upon a time, you realized it was garbage.You have a whole chapter on Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s best-selling books that became a hit TV show. I imagine many people didn’t know it was largely written with the help of her daughter, Rose Lane Wilder, a staunch libertarian. Though the books are supposed to be about Ingalls Wilder’s true childhood, Lane Wilder fictionalized much of it to expound on the ideals of individualism.Oreskes: There are people out there who are mad at us for bursting that bubble. My defense? Actually, we didn’t burst the bubble. Other historians, Caroline Fraser and Christine Woodside burst that bubble, and we’re drawing from their work.In the first chunk of the book, market fundamentalism is fighting an uphill battle. At what point did market fundamentalism start taking hold and becoming mainstream?Oreskes: A key figure in this story, obviously, is Ronald Reagan. Most Americans know that Reagan was an actor before he became a politician, but what they don’t know is how he affected that transition.Reagan’s career was not doing all that well, but he was still a Democrat. He was the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. But then he gets this job with GE, and the job has two parts: hosting General Electric Theater and promoting General Electric ideology through speeches. It’s pretty clear that during this period, his political outlook shifts to be very, very aligned with GE. So he comes out of GE with this new political ideology, quite different than what he had before he went in. Also critically, he comes out with a set of wealthy corporate backers who then finance his run for governor of California.But you make the point that it wasn’t just Reagan.Conway: When Jimmy Carter becomes president, he brings into office a new generation of economists, many of whom have now been educated with the ideas of free markets that have been pushed into academia by the Chicago School of Economics. They begin shifting the way the government manages the economy. They are the regulators Carter brings into office, the first people we now associate with Reagan and ending with Bill Clinton, who finishes the job of deregulating banks in the late 1990s.Orenskes: We see how this language, rhetoric and ideology gets taken across the board politically so that when Bill Cinton gives his State of the Union address in 1995, he says: “The era of big government is over.” And that’s a Democrat, right?So how does that happen? Milton Friedman said one of the jobs of intellectuals is to be standing ready with ideas. And you just work on your ideas and you get laughed at for a long time. But one day, the world is ready and then you’re there. So when the crisis, the postwar 1970s stagflation develops, nobody really has an explanation for why this has happened. There are probably multiple factors – but the right wing is now standing ready saying: “Oh, the problem is too much government. The problem is big government. The problem is overregulation.” That gains traction, in part because it’s a simpler explanation to a complex problem.Does it seem like market fundamentalism’s grasp is loosening? Are the tides changing?Oreskes: After the Silicon Valley Bank failure, there’s this big conversation taking place right now about how much of that was allowed to happen by weakened regulation, particularly because there were specific regulations that were weakened during the Trump administration.I think most people still see regulation as a necessary evil – even liberals and progressives. So they’re sort of apologetic about it. “Yeah, I know it’s bad. But you know, we have to do it.” I would like to try to change that conversation, to make people think much more in terms of regulations as the rules of how markets operate.At the end of the book, we make a point about biological regulation. Without biological regulation, all life would cease to exist because an organism cannot operate unless it can regulate its internal chemistry. Biological regulation makes life possible. I think that’s true of society as a whole. The right set of rules and regulations supports a vibrant economy where people can “live well and prosper” (you know, Star Trek).Conway: The question is, who are the rules set up to benefit the most? Business leaders want the rules of the road to benefit them, and we’re arguing that no, the rules of the market should benefit the majority of the citizenry, not just the business leaders. More

Republicans in Idaho have been criticized for “glorifying political violence” after the party hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, the American who shot and killed two people at an anti-racism protest and injured another, as a celebrity guest at a fundraiser.The 20-year-old was the guest of honor at a Bonneville county Republican party event, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, on 15 April, where an AR-15 style rifle signed by Rittenhouse was auctioned off as part of a fundraiser and people could buy tickets to “Trigger time”: a Rittenhouse-hosted shooting event at a gun range.The event, amid a prolonged spate of mass shootings – many conducted with AR-15s – suggests a further embrace by Republicans of the most extreme elements of the gun lobby in the US, despite polls showing a majority of Americans, across party-affiliation, supporting some gun control laws.Rittenhouse was 17-years-old when he traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, from his home in Illinois, armed with an assault-style rifle, in August 2020. Black Lives Matter protests had been taking place in the city after Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer, leaving Blake partially paralyzed.Rittenhouse joined other armed men acting as a self-described militia and roamed the city, before killing Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, 27.In a speech to the Bonneville county Republicans, Rittenhouse complained that he faces “ridicule on a daily basis” since he killed Rosenbaum and Huber. He was found not guilty of homicide in November 2021.The now 20-year-old Rittenhouse, who told the crowd in Idaho that the government is seeking to “take our guns” and “take the rest of our freedoms”, has become a darling of the far-right since the shooting, appearing on Fox News and other rightwing media.The embrace and lauding of someone like Rittenhouse is dangerous, said Stephen Piggott, a researcher at Western States Center who focuses on white nationalist, paramilitary and antidemocracy groups.“Elected officials and media personalities should really be denouncing political violence, not embracing it,” Piggott said.“For a GOP [group] to not only host and organize a fundraiser with him, and a shooting range event, call that event trigger time, I think really is the very epitome of glorifying political violence.”Rittenhouse addressed the crowd in Bonneville county, where he said stricter gun control laws would not “lower the unfortunate school shootings”. He complained that he was facing two lawsuits, one from the family of one of the men he killed and another from Grosskreutz.“I’m being sued by the estate of Anthony Huber,” Rittenhouse said.“He was the guy who attacked me with a skateboard and I was forced to defend my life from him.”Rebecca Casper, the mayor of Idaho Falls, said Rittenhouse “does not represent the majority of the people in Idaho Falls”.“Make no mistake, this unfortunate, distasteful and insensitive event was in no way supported by the City of Idaho Falls,” Casper said. “We are an inclusive and welcoming community and we join with so many others in voicing our dismay over such an insensitive and patently offensive event.”Rittenhouse’s appearance comes as the GOP and rightwing media have increasingly embraced rhetoric previously confined to fringe extremist groups, Piggott said, sparking fear and potentially increasing violence.“The rhetoric that I’ve seen from elected officials, from media personalities, especially when it talks about things like urban crime is practically indistinguishable from what I’m seeing from white nationalists talking about the same subject,” he said.“We’re at a point now where elected officials and media personalities are almost doing the work for white nationalists, especially when talking about crime.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRittenhouse’s appearance comes amid a series of high-profile shootings in the US. According to the Gun Violence Archive there have been 167 mass shootings – defined as incidents where four people were shot or killed – in the US through 21 April.Six people, including three nine-year-old students, were murdered at a school shooting in Nashville on 27 March, while a gunman shot and killed five people at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, bank on 10 April. AR-15 style weapons were used in both mass shootings.On 13 April Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old Black boy, was shot twice by a white man after ringing the doorbell at the wrong house. Two days later a 20-year-old woman was shot and killed in New York state when she and some friends turned into the wrong driveway while looking for a house.“[Commentators] on the right have spent the last few years warning their viewers that vigilante justice might be necessary to keep their families safe – and Kyle Rittenhouse is the poster child for that inflammatory talking point,” said Matt Gertz a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog group that monitors rightwing media.Meanwhile there have also been spikes in hate crimes and incidents in the US. Violence against trans people and gender non-conforming people has risen in recent years, as have hate crimes against people based on their race, ethnicity or ancestry.Piggott said rhetoric against those communities could have contributed to the violence. He pointed to a Florida Republican recently describing transgender people as “demons” and “mutants”, and Paul Gosar, a Republican US representative, ​​referring to an “invasion of illegal aliens”, as examples.“When you’re using that type of rhetoric, that’s either violent or dehumanizing or both, I think it sends a green light that violence against those communities is acceptable,” Piggott said.The Bonneville county Republican party did not respond to a request for comment, and it seems unlikely that this will be Rittenhouse’s last invite to a rightwing event.So far this year alone Rittenhouse has appeared on Donald Trump Jr’s podcast, and been interviewed by Sebastien Gorka, a former Trump administration official, on his America First show.A planned appearance at an “anti-censorship” rally at a Texas brewery in January was canceled however. The brewery’s owner pulled the event after multiple customers complained. More

The most obvious question in American politics today should be: why is the guy who committed treason just over two years ago allowed to run for president?Answer: he shouldn’t be.Remember? Donald Trump lost re-election but refused to concede and instead claimed without basis that the election was stolen from him, then pushed state officials to change their tallies, hatched a plot to name fake electors, tried to persuade the vice-president to refuse to certify electoral college votes, sought access to voting-machine data and software, got his allies in Congress to agree to question the electoral votes and thereby shift the decision to the House of Representatives, and summoned his supporters to Washington on the day electoral votes were to be counted and urged them to march on the US Capitol, where they rioted.This, my friends, is treason.But Trump is running for re-election, despite the explicit language of section three of the 14th amendment to the constitution, which prohibits anyone who has held public office and who has engaged in insurrection against the United States from ever again serving in public office.The reason for the disqualification clause is that someone who has engaged in an insurrection against the United States cannot be trusted to use constitutional methods to regain office. (Notably, all three branches of the federal government have described the January 6 attack on the US Capitol as an “insurrection”.)Can any of us who saw (or have learned through the painstaking work of the January 6 committee) what Trump tried to do to overturn the results of the 2020 election have any doubt he will once again try to do whatever necessary to regain power, even if illegal and unconstitutional?Sure, the newly enacted Electoral Count Reform Act (amending the Electoral Count Act of 1887) filled some of the legal holes, creating a new threshold for members to object to a slate of electors (one-fifth of the members of both the House and the Senate), clarifying that the role of the vice-president is “solely ministerial” and requiring that Congress defer to slates of electors as determined by the states.But what if Trump gets secretaries of state and governors who are loyal to him to alter the election machinery to ensure he wins? What if he gets them to prevent people likely to vote for Joe Biden from voting at all?What if he gets them to appoint electors who will vote for him regardless of the outcome of the popular vote?What if, despite all of this, Biden still wins the election but Trump gets more than 20% of Republican senators and House members to object to slates of electors pledged to Biden, and pushes the election into the House where Trump has a majority of votes?Does anyone doubt the possibility – no, the probability – of any or all of this happening?Trump tried these tactics once. The likelihood of him trying again is greater now because his loyalists are now in much stronger positions throughout state and federal government.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYes, they were held back in the 2020 midterms. But in state after state, and in Congress, Republicans who stood up to Trump have now been purged from the party. And lawmakers in what remains of the Republican party have made it clear that they will bend or disregard any rule that gets in their way.In many cases, the groundwork has been laid. As recently reported in the New York Times, for example, the Trump allies who traveled to Coffee county, Georgia, on 7 January 2021 gained access to sensitive election data. They copied election software used across Georgia and uploaded it on the internet – an open invitation to election manipulation by Trump allies in 2024.If anything, Trump is less constrained than he was in 2020.“In 2016, I declared I am your voice,” Trump said last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a line he repeated at his first 2024 campaign rally, in Waco, Texas, a few weeks later. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”Filing deadlines for 2024 presidential candidates will come in the next six months, in most states.Secretaries of state – who in most cases are in charge of deciding who gets on the ballot – must refuse to place Donald Trump’s name on the 2024 ballot, based on the clear meaning of section three of the 14th amendment to the US constitution. More

Dominion Voting Systems would have better served the US public had it refused to settle its $1.6bn defamation suit against Fox News until the network agreed to apologise on air for spreading Donald Trump’s lie about voter fraud in the 2020 election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said.“What would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that,” the New York congresswoman said.Dominion and Fox this week reached a $787.5m settlement, shortly before trial was scheduled to begin in a Delaware court.Legal filings laid out how in the aftermath of Joe Biden’s election win and the run-up to the January 6 attack on Congress, Fox News hosts repeated claims they knew to be untrue, as executives feared viewers would desert the network for rightwing competitors One America News and Newsmax.Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media mogul and Fox News owner, was among witnesses due to testify.Fox faces other legal challenges but its avoidance of an apology to Dominion caused widespread comment, with some late-night hosts moved to construct their own on-air mea culpas.Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC, acknowledged Dominion was not beholden to public opinion.“This was a corporation suing another corporation for material damages,” she told the former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, now an MSNBC host, on Sunday. “Their job is to go in and get the most money that they can. And I think that they did that. They are not lawyers for the American public.”The congresswoman continued: “I think what is best for the country, what would have been best for the country, would have been to demand that and to not settle until we got that. But that is not their role.“And so for us, I think this really raises much larger questions. Very often, I believe that we leave to the courts to solve issues that politics is really supposed to solve, that our legislating is supposed to solve.“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air. And we saw that with January 6. And we saw that in the lead-up to January 6, and how we navigate questions not just of freedom of speech but also accountability for incitement of violence.”Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 Capitol attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than a thousand arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack. Acquitted by Senate Republicans, he is the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.Asked if media platforms should be held accountable for incitement, Ocasio-Cortez said: “When it comes to broadcast television, like Fox News, these are subject to federal law, federal regulation, in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.“And when you look at what [the primetime host] Tucker Carlson and some of these other folks on Fox do, it is very, very clearly incitement of violence. And that is the line that I think we have to be willing to contend with.” More

Dick Durbin, the Democratic chair of the Senate judiciary committee leading a push for supreme court ethics reform, accused the top court of being a panel of “nine justices [who] believe they are exempt from the basic standards of disclosure”.His claim came amid growing criticism of the conservative justice Clarence Thomas, whose judicial record is under scrutiny after he became embroiled in scandal over taking undeclared gifts from a Republican mega-donor.The last US Congress considered a bill demanding the inclusion of the supreme court in existing judicial conference regulations but it did not clear the Senate and the chief justice, John Roberts, has been mostly silent on the issue.Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Durbin said he hoped Roberts would take advantage of an invitation to testify before the judiciary committee on 2 May, to explain how he intended to handle ethics reform.“This is John Roberts’s court,” the Illinois Democrat said. “We are dealing with a situation where history will remember it as such. He is an articulate, well-schooled man when it comes to presenting his point of view. I’m sure he’ll do well before the committee.“But history is going to judge the Roberts court by his decision as to reform, and I think this is an invitation for him to present it to the American people.”Asked why he didn’t ask Thomas to appear, Durbin said: “I know what would happen to that invitation. It would be ignored. It is far better from my point of view to have the chief justice here.”Durbin’s statement that he thought all nine justices considered themselves above ethics standards came when he was asked what a code of conduct might look like.“[It] would look an awful lot like the code that applies to the rest of federal government and other judges, and basically would have timely disclosures of transactions like this purchase of the justice’s mother’s home,” he said, referring to Thomas’s failure to declare the sale to the mega-donor Harlan Crow.“It would also give standards for recusal so that if there’s going to be conflict before the court and recusal, it’d be explained publicly, and investigations of questions that are raised. It’s the same across the board code of conduct, ethics laws, applied to the court.“Why this supreme court, these nine justices, believe they are exempt from the basic standards of disclosure, I cannot explain.”Durbin’s invitation to Roberts did not mention Thomas, referring instead to “a steady stream of revelations regarding justices falling short of the ethical standards expected of other federal judges and, indeed, of public servants generally”.The court’s “decade-long failure” to address those problems has “contributed to a crisis of public confidence”, Durbin wrote.He said the 2 May hearing would focus on “the ethical rules that govern the justices of the supreme court and potential reforms to those rules”, noting that the “scope of your testimony can be limited to these subjects, and that you would not be expected to answer questions from senators regarding any other matters”. More

Too many people have access to the US government’s closest secrets and a central entity should oversee the classification process, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said on Sunday, addressing leaks of documents in an online chat group.A US air national guardsman was charged on 14 April with leaking classified documents on the Discord platform.It is believed to be the most serious US security breach since more than 700,000 documents, videos and diplomatic cables appeared on the WikiLeaks website in 2010.On Sunday, Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, told ABC’s This Week that “once we get to that highest level of classification, we maybe have too many folks taking a look at them, over 4 million people with clearances”.The senator’s powerful position gives weight to his recommendations as Joe Biden’s administration examines the handling of intelligence and looks for ways to clamp down on future leaks.The US has numerous intelligence-gathering entities and Warner said the situation needed to be dealt with.“We need somebody fully in charge of the whole classification process and I think for those classified documents there ought to be a smaller universe,” he said.As an example, Warner said the National Security Agency has suffered leaks in the past – notably including the disclosures by Edward Snowden in 2013 – and internal controls now limit the copying of documents.The Pentagon has called the latest leak a “deliberate, criminal act”.Warner also said that not everyone handling a document needs to see the whole document and that just seeing the header could be enough. More

Donald Trump is a “four-time loser” who will not necessarily be the Republican presidential nominee despite dominating primary polling, the New Hampshire governor said on Sunday.“Donald Trump is positioning himself to be a four-time loser in 2024,” Chris Sununu said. “We need candidates that can win.”A Republican governor in a Democratic part of the country – and of a key early voting state – Sununu is seen as a potential candidate in the moderate lane, should such a lane still exist in a party dominated by Trump.Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Sununu was confronted by comments to the same network just two months ago, when he said Trump was “not going to be the nominee”.“We’re just moving on as a party, as a country,” Sununu said in February. “He’s not going to be the nominee. That’s just not going to happen. Here’s the good news … Ready? … You’re dead wrong. He’s not going to be the nominee.”Since then, particularly since Trump was this month arraigned on criminal charges in New York, relating to his hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, the primary paradigm has shifted.Trump dominates polling, expanding his lead over Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who has not declared a run, and other actual or likely candidates.Trump also faces legal jeopardy over his election subversion and incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, his handling of classified material, his business and tax affairs and a civil rape case due to go to trial in New York next week.He denies wrongdoing and claims victimisation by Democrats. On Sunday, NBC released a poll in which a fraction under 70% of Republicans agreed.Sununu told NBC there had “definitely [been] a shift” but insisted: “I still don’t think he’s necessarily going to be the nominee.“Look, I think your poll is spot on in all these areas. I think that’s actually a great poll. I hope folks listen to it.“I’ll say this. Republicans are rallying. They’re supporting former president Trump over these indictments, right? … Now, does it actually translate into a vote? We will see, I mean, most folks don’t decide who they’re voting for until about three weeks before the election.“… There’s not even a single debate has been had. Other candidates are going to get in the race. I just think it’s so far away.“And at the end of the day, we want a winner, right? Republicans want someone who can win in November of ’24. Donald Trump is a loser. He has not just lost once. He lost us our House seats in 2018. He lost everything in ’20. We should have 54 US senators right now and we don’t because of his message.“So, Donald Trump is positioning himself to be a four-time loser in 2024. We need candidates that can win.”Many within and without Republican ranks are questioning whether DeSantis is that sort of candidate. The Florida governor has fallen away in polling, experiencing problems including a pause by a major donor who said he was turned off by hard-right policies including school book bans and a six-week abortion ban.Thomas Peterffy, an online trader, did not say he would not support DeSantis at all. But he also gave $1m to the Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, who has not declared a run.On Sunday, Rolling Stone quoted a source formerly allied to DeSantis but now “in the Trump orbit” as saying: “If Ron thinks the last couple months have been bumpy, he’s in for a painful ride.”As Florida Republicans in Congress have endorsed Trump, so DeSantis has come under fire for an alleged lack of personal warmth. Rolling Stone described an evolving attempt by Trump to trash his rival personally as well as politically.The unnamed source said: “The nature of the conversations among the people who used to work for Ron is just so frequently, ‘OK, how can we destroy this guy?’ It is not at all at a level that is normal for people who hold the usual grudges against horrible bosses. It’s a pure hatred that is much, much purer than that.“People who were traveling with Ron every day, who worked with him very closely over the years, to this day joke about how it was always an open question whether or not Ron knew their names … And that’s just the start of it.”Unlike DeSantis, Sununu barely registers in polling. On NBC, he was asked for his timetable for deciding on whether to run.“Probably by lunch,” he joked.“I think everybody will have to make a decision by 4 July … There’s a lot of opportunity here … a lot of folks want to get on that stage. I think the threshold for the debate are going to be very low to start in terms of polling numbers and donors, so I think we’re going to have a very crowded stage early on.”That stage may yet include Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence. In Iowa on Saturday, at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event which Trump addressed by video, the former Indiana governor flirted with confirming a run.“I think if we have an announcement to make, it’ll be well before late June,” Pence told CBS’s Face the Nation, adding: “Anyone that would be serious about seeking the Republican nomination would need to be in this contest by June.“If we have an announcement to make it will be well before then.” More

Mike Pence has not decided whether to enter the Republican presidential primary but if he does he will enter “well before late June”.The former congressman, Indiana governor and vice-president to Donald Trump has been moving towards a run for months, releasing a memoir, visiting early voting states and establishing a political staff.He made his less-than-bold prediction in an interview with CBS Face the Nation.“I think if we have an announcement to make, it’ll be well before late June,” Pence said, adding: “Anyone that would be serious about seeking the Republican nomination would need to be in this contest by June.“If we have an announcement to make it will be well before then.”Pence must perform a balancing act, distancing himself from Trump, the rival candidate whose supporters chanted for Pence to be hanged when they attacked the US Capitol, while trumpeting their achievements together in office.It seems a doomed effort in a party and primary dominated by Trump, particularly as Pence recently dropped attempts to avoid testifying in the justice department investigation of the January 6 attack.In March, in perhaps his boldest break from Trump, Pence told a Washington dinner: “President Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”On CBS, asked if he was “leaning in or leaning away”, Pence said: “Well, I’m here in Iowa.”His interviewer, Robert Costa, said: “Sounds like you’re leaning in.”Pence said: “I would tell you that I’m very humbled by the encouragement that we’re receiving. And I promise when we have something to announce, you’ll be among the first to know.”Pence spoke on Saturday at an event in Clive, Iowa, staged by the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a rightwing nonprofit.Trump also addressed the event. Responding to a recent rebuke from a leading anti-abortion group, which called his opposition to a federal abortion ban “morally indefensible”, the former president highlighted the decision by which a supreme court including three justices he named removed the right to abortion last year.“Those justices delivered a landmark victory for protecting innocent life,” Trump said, in a speech delivered by video. “Nobody thought it was going to happen. They thought it would be another 50 years. Because Republicans had been trying to do it for exactly that period of time, 50 years.”The Roe v Wade decision which protected the right to abortion came in 1973 – 49 years before it was overturned by Dobbs v Jackson.The Iowa caucuses will kick off the Republican primary in February. Ten months out, Trump enjoys clear leads in polling.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has maintained a hold on second place without declaring a run.But DeSantis’s numbers are tanking. The governor faces his own difficulties at state level while Trump surfs a wave of support generated by his criminal indictment in New York, over a hush money payment to an adult film star, and other forms of legal jeopardy including a civil rape trial due to open next week.Trump denies wrongdoing and claims to be the victim of Democratic witch-hunts: a potent combination for attracting donations and support. On Sunday, an NBC poll said 68% of Republican voters thought Trump was the victim of politically motivated attacks and it was important to support him.Pence is contesting third place with Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who declared her run in February. Both are at around 4% support.The other mainstream Republican to have declared, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, struggles to break 1%. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott has all but declared a run but remains all but invisible in polling.Polls do not provide uniformly good news for Trump. A poll this week from the Associated Press and the University of Chicago said 44% of Republicans (and 70% of Americans) do not want him to be the nominee.The Dispatch, a conservative anti-Trump site, said Pence was planning a launch in Indiana, followed by another trip to Iowa.Pence, the site said, “plans to campaign as the traditional conservative he is, eschewing momentary cultural flashpoints that inflame passions and attract eyeballs … [to] instead focus on wonky topics fraught with political peril, like how to address the ballooning federal debt and reforming popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.“On abortion, Pence is eager to highlight his opposition – and his commitment to signing federal legislation limiting the procedure.”Such positions have proved unpopular with general election voters. The Dispatch also said Pence planned to “aim fire directly at” Trump. More