US Politics

While Donald Trump launches verbal attacks against the prosecutor and judge overseeing his criminal charges in connection with hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels, an attorney for the former US president has said his main focus is on legal maneuvers aiming to get the case dismissed long before a trial jury is ever seated.Jim Trusty appeared on Sunday on ABC’s This Week and argued that “there’s a lot to play with” when examining whether New York state prosecutors waited too long to secure an indictment against Trump and if the ex-president intended to commit any crimes with the payments at the center of the case.The payments were made at the height of the 2016 White House race which Trump won, and Trusty also reiterated questions that his side has previously asked about whether Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office should be able to apply “federal election law into a New York case”.“The motions to dismiss have to be a priority because they amputate this miscarriage of justice early on,” Trusty said to show host Jonathan Karl. “And I think you’ll see some very robust motions.”In his remarks to Karl, Trusty also doubled down on questions already floated by his side about whether Trump could get a fair trial in Manhattan. The New York City borough voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrat who defeated Trusty’s client in the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden, after all.However, though Trusty said Manhattan is “a real stronghold of liberalism, of activism, and that infects the whole process”, he suggested pretrial dismissal motions citing statutes of limitation and an alleged lack of criminal intent are almost certain to come before one that might seek a change of trial venue.A state grand jury in Manhattan on 30 March handed up 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to cover up $130,000 in payments meant to keep Daniels quiet about claims of an extramarital sexual encounter in what Bragg’s office maintains was a conspiracy to influence the race Trump won over Hillary Clinton. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges on Tuesday.The Daniels payments have already led to one conviction, in federal court: that of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Cohen, in that case, said he paid Daniels at the behest of Trump and was reimbursed by the then president during his time in the Oval Office. Prosecutors alleged that those payments were falsely classified as legal expenses as part of a conspiracy for Trump to get around state and federal election laws or to deceive tax authorities.Cohen pleaded guilty to federal crimes stemming from the hush money payments, resulting in a three-year prison sentence as well as the loss of his law license.Trusty on Sunday called Cohen “a convicted perjurer with an ax to grind” but said it would be ineffective to attack his credibility in a motion at this stage. He also suggested that Trump’s political rhetoric about Bragg being a “failed district attorney” and a “criminal” and about the judge to whom the case was allotted, Juan Merchan, being “a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife” was unlikely to be reflected in some of his side’s upcoming legalese.“It was pointing [out] that they have a bias, that they have a political interest that is contrary to President Trump,” Trusty said about comments that prompted Merchan to issue a warning against any statements that were “likely to incite violence or civil unrest”.Trusty added: “There’s kind of a political lane and a legal lane. I’m in the legal lane. I’m not going to worry too much or be able to control the politics of the moment.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Trusty didn’t elaborate on his statute of limitation mention, New York law gives prosecutors five years to charge felony falsification of business records. The last alleged false record in the indictment is from December 2017, more than five years before Bragg obtained the charges against Trump.It’s unclear how Bragg’s office might try to defend against such a line of attack. But in other settings, lawyers confronted with a motion to dismiss based on a statute of limitation often argue that steps taken to conceal the alleged wrongdoing should result in prolonging – if not entirely suspending – any relevant charging or filing deadlines.Meanwhile, Trusty’s comment about applying “federal election law into a New York case” seemed to refer to Bragg’s decision to indict the former president over payments during a federal election although the US justice department prosecutors who secured Cohen’s conviction passed on charging Trump. The justice department’s decision against charging Trump does not amount to a finding of innocence for the former president, though it remains to be seen whether Bragg’s office has enough evidence to eventually secure a conviction.Trump’s next court date in the case that made him the first former US president to be criminally charged is 4 December. But Trusty said the public should not be surprised if some of the possible motions that he discussed were filed well ahead of that date.If Trump were to eventually be found guilty as accused, it is possible that he would face up to four years in prison, the director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center recently told the resource website factcheck.org. Yet it is also possible that Trump would not be at risk for anything more than probation, fines and community service because he was charged as a first-time offender, Columbia University law school professor John C Coffee Jr said to factcheck.org.Despite the case in Merchan’s courtroom, Trump is widely considered to be the frontrunner to land the Republican presidential nomination for the 2024 election. More

Two Tennessee state lawmakers who were expelled from the legislature after partaking in a gun control protest outside the chamber to which they were elected have called the move an unprecedented act of political retaliation as well as an “attempt to crucify democracy”.During an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Easter Sunday, Justin Jones said his and Justin Pearson’s removals from the Tennessee house of representatives would “not go on unchallenged”.“The Tennessee house Republicans’ attempt to crucify democracy has instead resurrected a movement led by young people to restore our democracy,” said Jones, who – like Pearson – is a Democrat.Pearson echoed Jones’s sentiments, which seemed to evoke the imagery of Easter, when Christians mark the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion.“The reality is an institution filled with people who are more concerned about supporting [gun access advocates] than it is protecting the [free expression] right to children and teenagers to be able to come to the capitol and advocate for gun violence prevention laws,” Pearson said to Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press.Jones and Pearson were ousted from the Republican-controlled Tennessee house after a vote on Thursday prompted by the two Black, first-year lawmakers’ roles in a gun control protest held outside the chamber days after a shooting at a school in Nashville killed three nine-year-old students and three staffers.Jones condemned his and Pearson’s ousting from posts to which they were democratically elected, saying: “This attack against us is hurting all people in our state.”“Even though it is disproportionately impacting Black and brown communities, this is hurting poor white people,” Jones added. “Their attack on democracy hurts all of us.”During the interview, Pearson pushed back against the Republican Tennessee house speaker, Cameron Sexton, who called the youth-led rally for gun control at the state capitol an “insurrection”.“It’s that type of language, it’s that type of political ideology that is destructive to our democracy,” Pearson said. “And what ends up happening is the perpetuation of systems of injustice like patriarchy, like white supremacy that lead to the expulsion of two of the youngest Black lawmakers in Tennessee.”He went on to describe the work environment in the house as “toxic … where you have people who make comments about hanging you on a tree … as a form of capital punishment”.The remarks seemed to allude to one of the most common ways that white supremacists historically lynched Black people, particularly in the US south. In February, a Republican state lawmaker suggested adding “hanging by a tree” to a bill concerning methods of execution in Tennessee.“They’re really sending signals that you don’t belong here,” Pearson said, adding: “It’s about us not belonging in the institution because they are afraid of the changes that are happening in our society and the voices that are being elevated.”Jones described his and Pearson’s expulsions as a result of a “system of political hubris … an attempt to silence our districts, predominantly Black and brown districts who no longer have representation”.He added that when he and Pearson went outside the statehouse to support the gun control protests, their voting machines were turned off so they could not be able to vote on the chamber floor.“The speaker … runs the capitol like it’s his private palace and so there is no democracy in Tennessee,” Jones said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe expulsion of the two Black Democrats have prompted nationwide outcry.Tennessee’s state legislature opted against expelling a Republican representative accused of sexual misconduct in 2019. Those the body had previously expelled included one lawmaker accused of spending federal nursing school grant money on a wedding and another who allegedly had improper sexual contact with more than 20 women in four years in office.Joe Biden called the expulsions “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent”.“Three kids and three officials gunned down in yet another mass shooting,” the president said. “And what are GOP officials focused on? Punishing lawmakers who joined thousands of peaceful protesters calling for action.”A third Democrat, Gloria Johnson, also joined in on the calls for increased gun control and narrowly avoided expulsion by one vote. Johnson is a white woman, and she has said she believes she was spared only because of her race.County commissions in the districts Jones and Pearson were elected to represent are now tasked with picking their replacements to serve in the newly vacant seats until special elections can be held. Jones and Pearson remain eligible to run in those special elections and could also possibly be appointed by the county commissions to stay in their seats until those contests, though the commissions have reportedly been facing Republican political pressure to choose interim replacements.After the deadly shootings at the Covenant school in Nashville on 27 March, the US Senate’s chaplain, Barry C Black, called on federal lawmakers to offer more than just platitudes after deadly mass shootings.Last month, Black opened the legislative session by asking senators to move beyond “thoughts and prayers” – words that critics say are used by opponents of substantial gun control to deflect the responsibility to take action after mass killings.Black on Sunday told CBS’s Face the Nation: “I have been hearing, ‘You have my thoughts and prayers’ … But I also know that there comes a time when action is required.” More

The New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday there was “an extraordinary amount of precedent” for the Joe Biden White House to ignore a Friday court ruling suspending federal approval of a drug used in medication abortion.Those remarks from the Democratic US House member quickly prompted a threat by the Texas Republican congressman Tony Gonzales to defund certain programs under the federal agency which oversees medication approvals if Biden’s administration did as Ocasio-Cortez suggested.The Biden administration has already said it plans to appeal a Friday ruling from Texas-based federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative appointed by the Donald Trump White House, that blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the drug mifepristone. The FDA approved the drug in 2000, a move that is now being challenged by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group.In urging the Biden administration to decline to enforce the ruling, Ocasio-Cortez noted that the Trump administration had ignored court rulings on immigration issues. She also pointed out that there was a contradicting ruling from a federal judge in Washington state on Friday which blocked the FDA from taking any action to limit access to the drug, virtually ensuring that the US supreme court would settle the matter at some point.“There is an extraordinary amount of precedent for this … The Trump administration also did this very thing. This has happened before,” she said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.“The courts rely on the legitimacy of their rulings. And when they make a mockery of our system, a mockery of our democracy and a mockery of our law, as what we just saw happen in this mifepristone ruling, then I believe that the executive branch, and we know that the executive branch has enforcement discretion, especially in light of a contradicting ruling coming out of Washington.”CNN host Dana Bash said Ocasio-Cortez was offering a “pretty stunning position” and pressed the congresswoman on whether the Biden administration should ignore the ruling if the US supreme court eventually upheld Kacsmaryk’s decision.“I think one of the things that we need to examine is the grounds of that ruling,” she said. “But I do not believe that the courts have the authority … over the FDA that [Kacsmaryk] just asserted. And I do believe that it creates a crisis. Should the supreme court do that, it would essentially institute a national abortion ban.”During a later appearance on State of the Union, Gonzales told Bash that there would be consequences if the Biden administration ignored the ruling.“The House Republicans have the power of the purse,” Gonzales said. “And if the administration wants to not live up to this ruling, then we’re gonna have a problem. And it may become a point where House Republicans on the appropriations side have to defund FDA programs that don’t make sense.”Bash also asked the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, whether ignoring the ruling was “off the table”. Becerra declined to say specifically what the administration would do if appellate courts, including the supreme court, upheld the decision.“Everything is on the table,” he said on CNN. “We want the courts to overturn this reckless decision.” More

A large cache of what appear to be classified Pentagon documents circulating on social media channels is becoming a growing source of anxiety for US intelligence agencies, as numerous allies have been forced into denials over the purported leaks.Half a dozen photographs of printed classified documents, mostly pertaining to the state of the Ukraine war as of the beginning of March, started to be shared on Russian Telegram channels in the middle of last week, even though research by open-source intelligence organisation Bellingcat suggests they made the rounds on niche gaming image boards several weeks earlier.On Friday, a further batch of more than 100 Pentagon documents was being shared on Twitter, seemingly revealing confidential information that US spy agencies had obtained, not just about Russia and its war of aggression against Kyiv, but also about supposed allies such as Israel and South Korea.While at least some of the images from the first leak appeared crudely doctored, the authenticity of the latest batch has not been immediately questioned. The New York Times described the leak as “a nightmare for the Five Eyes” – the intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.On Sunday, the office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, issued a statement in which it firmly rejected a claim made in one of the leaked documents: that the Israeli foreign intelligence agency had encouraged its staff and Israeli citizens to participate in March’s wave of anti-government protests across the country.“The Mossad and its serving senior personnel have not engaged in the issue of the demonstrations at all and are dedicated to the value of service to the state that has guided the Mossad since its founding,” the statement read.The leaked document, labelled top secret, said that in February, senior Mossad officials “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli government’s proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli government, according to signals intelligence”.While the Mossad’s purpose is not defined by law, the spy agency is not meant to wade into domestic political matters.Government officials in South Korea, meanwhile, said on Sunday they were aware that another leaked document suggested that US intelligence had spied on its allies in Seoul, and were planning to “have necessary consultations with the US side” over issues raised by the leak.At least two of the leaked Pentagon documents, based at least in part on intercepted foreign intelligence communications, describe South Korean concern over US pressure to aid Ukraine in its defensive effort against Russia, with the former foreign minister Yi Mun-hui expressing concern that artillery shells requested by Washington for its own use could ultimately end up in Kyiv’s hands.South Korea’s longstanding official policy is to not provide lethal weapons to countries at war. The South Korean presidential official, speaking to reporters, declined to respond further to questions about US spying or to confirm any details from the leaked documents.While potentially embarrassing for the Pentagon, the leaked documents also paint a flattering portrait of the US’s ability to penetrate Russian military planning, including the internal plans of the notorious Wagner mercenary group.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe leaked documents show the mercenary outfit’s ambition to operate in African states as well as Haiti, and that it had hatched plans to source arms covertly from Nato member Turkey.In early February, Wagner personnel “met with Turkish contacts to purchase weapons and equipment from Turkey”, one of the reports states, suggesting that Mali could act as a proxy buyer. Wagner is known to have set up a sizeable operation in the west African state, and one of the leaked documents claims the mercenary group has 1,645 fighters in the country.On Saturday evening, France’s defence ministry denied that there were French soldiers in Ukraine, as allegedly revealed in one of the leaked documents that circulated on social media in the middle of last week.“There are no French forces engaged in operation in Ukraine,” said a spokesperson for the minister of the armed forces, Sébastien Lecornu. “The documents cited do not come from the French armies. We do not comment on documents whose source is uncertain.”The first batch of leaked Pentagon documents contained charts and details about anticipated weapons deliveries, battalion strengths and losses on the battlefield. One slide suggested that a small contingent of less than 100 special operations personnel from Nato members France, America, Britain and Latvia were active in Ukraine.Some of the circulated documents have been obviously digitally altered to understate US estimates of Russian troops killed and Russian vehicles and fighter jets destroyed. Kyiv has said the leaked files contain “fictitious information”.The US Department of Justice said it has opened an investigation into the apparent leaks, but declined to comment further. More

April 9 should be a national holiday in the United States, but the wrong people are celebrating. On this day in 1865, Confederate Gen Robert E Lee surrendered to Union forces – marking the effective defeat of the Confederacy and the triumph of those who opposed the idea that this should be a white nationalist nation where Black bodies could be bought and sold on the open market. Yet rather than celebrate this seminal milestone in defending and creating a multi-racial democracy, the country’s leaders ignore the occasion, creating a vacuum into which the champions of white nationalism happily goose-step.Boiled down to its essence, the civil war began because the presidential candidate sympathetic to African Americans, Abraham Lincoln, won the election of 1860, and the losing side refused to accept the election results (sound familiar?). That defiance of democracy led to eleven states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederacy, which was founded, in the words of Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition”. The civil war was a truly existential conflict that raged for four years of killing and carnage that resulted in the deaths of 2% of the country’s residents – the equivalent of 7 million people, based on today’s population.April 9 not only recalls the defeat of the white supremacists, but the beginning of the first faltering steps towards making the country a multi-racial democracy. During Reconstruction, laws were passed, land divided, and institutions created to foster education and public health for people of all racial backgrounds. In the words of the writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, “the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see”.One would think that such a landmark achievement would be annually remembered, recognized and cherished. But one would be wrong. It is in fact the Confederates and their ideological and genealogical heirs who regularly nurture the memories of those who fought for legalized white supremacy within our borders.Organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans promoted and defended the creation of hundreds of monuments to Confederate leaders across the country and continue to do so to this day. (You can buy shot glasses, belt buckles and bars of soap honoring Confederate heroes online.) Hollywood showered huge sums of money on creating films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind that sanitized mass murder and human bondage. To this day, Texas offers a paid holiday to state employees so that they can celebrate Confederate Heroes Day and honor the white supremacists Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee.For the health of our democracy, the education of our children, and the elevation of the vision and values that this is a nation where people of all racial backgrounds are cherished, we should launch a movement from coast to coast to make April 9 a holiday.There is a reason that the rallying cry about the Holocaust is “Never Forget.” People around the world recognize the importance of preserving the memory of one of the great atrocities in the history of humanity so that it doesn’t occur again. Nazism is predicated on the same kinds of white supremacist beliefs that precipitated the civil war, and an institutionalized reminder of the threat and defeat of that threat will help create guardrails to defend the democracy in the future.Modern-day Confederates are well aware of the importance of what children are taught about this country’s racial history and contemporary realities. That is why leaders in former slave-holding states such as Florida, Virginia, and Texas have passed legislation and taken aggressive action to whitewash their curricula through attacks on so-called Critical Race Theory.Public support for racial justice requires an understanding and appreciation of the persistence and prevalence of racial injustice. Formalizing the recognition of what the civil war was, which side won, and where we currently stand will deepen young people’s understanding and commitment to continuing the vigilance needed to foster racial justice and equality.As much as the holiday itself, the debate over establishing it will educate the country and affirm our values. We don’t have to wait for a divided Congress to act. School boards, city councils, boards of supervisors, and state legislatures can all pass resolutions marking the occasion and declaring a local holiday, thereby creating momentum for a federal holiday. And introducing a bill in Congress will force members to go on record, creating a basis for ads and campaign materials challenging voters to choose a side between white nationalism and multi-racial democracy.The only reason not to proceed is lack of courage – and bad math skills. The ideological descendants of the Confederacy will get mad, no question; but they are not the majority. Forcing people to choose will reveal that the majority want a multi-racial democracy, and if that is in fact the case let’s set aside the 9th of April as a day of national celebration.
Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

The United States is a grim warning of what happens when a society dispenses with the idea of truth. Fragmentation, paranoia, division and myth rule – democracy wilts. Fox News, we now know from emails flushed out by a lawsuit from the voting machine company Dominion, feared it would lose audiences if it told the truth about the 2020 presidential election result. Instead, it knowingly broadcast and fed Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen – in particular the known unfounded allegation that Dominion had programmed its voting machines to throw millions of votes to the Democrats. Fox could have been instructed to tell the truth by its owner, as this month’s Prospect magazine details, but as Rupert Murdoch acknowledged under oath: “I could have. But I didn’t.” There was no penalty for lying, except being on the wrong side of a $1.6bn lawsuit.But the culture of truth denial is no accident; it was a key stratagem of the US right as it fought to build a counter-establishment in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that would challenge and even supplant what it considered an over-dominant liberal establishment. Unalloyed facts, truthful evidence and balanced reporting on everything from guns to climate change tended to support liberals and their worldview. But if all facts could be framed as the contingent result of opinions, the right could fight on level terms. Indeed, because the right is richer, it could even so dominantly frame facts from its well-funded media that truth and misinformation would become so jumbled no one could tell the difference. “Stop the steal” is such a fact-denying strategy. Ally it with voter suppression and getting your people into key roles in pivotal institutions and there are the bones of an anti-democratic coup.For years, the right had a target in its sights, rather as the British right today has the BBC – the 1949 Fairness Doctrine. This required American broadcasters to ensure that contentious issues were presented fairly; that both sides to any argument had access to the airwaves and presented their case factually. Like the BBC, it enraged the right and, over his period of office, Ronald Reagan ensured the Federal Communications Council, which enforced it, was chaired and increasingly staffed by anti-Fairness Doctrine people. Finally, in 1987 the doctrine was ruled unnecessary because it obstructed free speech. Within months, The Rush Limbaugh Show, the ultra-rightwing talkshow platform, was being nationally syndicated as the scourge of the liberal elite – anti-immigrant, anti-tax, anti-feminist, anti-LGBT, anti climate change and later denying Covid vaccines – and always rejecting the evidence that smoking caused cancer. No need any longer for countervailing views. A lifelong smoker, Limbaugh died in 2021 of the very lung cancer he denied.Through the 1990s, many rightwing TV stations were launched following suit, including the “fair and balanced” Fox News – although in 2017 it replaced the logo with “most watched, most trusted”. Donald Trump’s ascent would have been impossible without it, even as the US grew more ungovernable. Tens of millions believe the lies. And anyone who calls out the process is quickly dismissed as an elitist: out of step with the real opinions of real voters in neglected America, opinions that have been forged by the Republican media.In this respect, the next general election is the most important in Britain’s democratic life. The Tory party has learned from the rise of the Republicans. Voter suppression is one part of the toolkit – the new UK requirement to show photographic ID to vote is borrowed straight from the Republican playbook, as is the weakening of the Electoral Commission. Ensuring appointments to key roles are only available to Tories or known Tory sympathisers – from chairing the BBC and Ofcom to membership of any regulatory or cultural body – is another building block in achieving ascendancy. What remains is to control the commanding heights of the broadcast media, given the right already possesses the majority of the print media. Freezing the BBC licence fee in a period of double-digit inflation helps to enfeeble it – but better still would be to consign it and conceptions of fairness and impartiality to history. Thus the promised end of the licence fee before the current charter expires in 2027. This will open the prospect of overtly rightwing broadcaster GB News trying to reproduce the scale and success of Fox News, as its Dubai-based backer the Legatum Ventures Ltd together with hedge fund owner Sir Paul Marshall – stomaching £31m of losses this year – anticipate.GB News in important respects goes further than Fox; Fox gives few presentation slots to active rightwing politicians. But from the married Tory MPs Esther McVey and Philip Davies via Jacob Rees-Mogg to the deputy chair of the Tory party, Lee Anderson, GB News has become the broadcasting arm of Conservative central office. There is little pretence of journalism, which ceases altogether if a programme can be branded as current affairs. Ofcom raps its knuckles over some of the more egregious examples of bias, but it has no real power. Ofcom chair Michael Grade knows from his spells at ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC what good TV journalism looks like – it’s not on GB News – but equally he knows his role in the Tory scheme of things.Lastly, the coup needs useful intellectuals to draw the sting from any critics. Step up last week the academic Matthew Goodwin, who has morphed from studying the right to becoming an active rightwing advocate, arguing that a liberal elite constituting Emily Maitlis, Gary Lineker and Emma Watson (some elite!) has the country in its thrall, out of step with virtuous mainstream working-class opinion who it haughtily disparages. Yes, it is possible to understand why many in the working class in “red wall” seats want strong defence and immigration policies and think climate change is only a middle-class preoccupation – but that does not mean that objectively the “stop the boats” policy is not cruel and inhumane, that climate change is bogus or that Brexit has nothing to do with queues at Dover. What should matter surely is the truth – not whether the answer is closer to the view of some member of an elite or red-wall voter. Goodwin’s function is to throw a smokescreen around what is actually happening.There is endless commentary about how technocratic, charisma-light Keir Starmer lacks definition against proved technocratic Rishi Sunak. Wrong. His election would bring this coup to a halt; Britain would strike out on a different, more democratic course. You may shake your head at the shenanigans in the US, but the Conservative ambition is to go at least as far, if not further in a country with none of the US’s checks and balances. The issue is whether you want that. More

It was a line guaranteed to raise a smile. “As we know, every American president is a little bit Irish on St Patrick’s Day,” Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach, observed during last month’s celebration at the White House. “But some are more Irish than others.”Joe Biden is as Irish as it gets. On Tuesday he travels to Belfast, Northern Ireland, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the peace accord that helped end decades of deadly sectarian violence, then on to the Republic of Ireland for stops including Dublin, County Louth and County Mayo for what will feel almost like a homecoming.The visit will underscore Biden’s status as “unmistakably a son of Ireland”, as Varadkar described at last month’s celebration in Washington. America’s oldest president is sure speak of his Irish heritage, quote Irish poetry and embrace Ireland as a fundamental part of his personal and political identity.Biden’s spiritual attachment to Ireland has been a constant all his life. He introduces himself as the great-great-grandson of the Blewitts of County Mayo and the Finnegans of County Louth, “who boarded coffin ships to cross the Atlantic more than 165 years ago”. He expresses deep pride in his Irish ancestry, recently commenting: “As long as I can remember, it’s been sort of part of my soul.”Sometimes, however, it comes out wrong. The gaffe-prone president said last year: “I may be Irish but I’m not stupid.”Biden can also trace his family tree to Britain, specifically Westbourne in West Sussex and Portsmouth in Hampshire. Yet in his public persona, Britain has become a convenient foil. When, after his election victory in November 2020, a BBC journalist asked if he had “a quick word” for the British public broadcaster, Biden shot back: “The BBC? I’m Irish!”Less flippantly, Biden tends to cite the example of British rule in Ireland as a template to express empathy with persecuted minorities. Speaking in Jerusalem, Israel, last year, he said: “My background and the background of my family is Irish American, and we have a long history of – not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people with Great Britain and their attitude toward Irish-Catholics over the years, for 400 years.”In contrast to the high emotion of the Ireland visit, the White House has announced that Biden will not attend the coronation of King Charles III next month, although First Lady Jill Biden will represent the US.Ireland, by contrast, appears to resonate with Biden through his strong sense of loyalty to both family and the Catholic church. It was also written into his childhood in Scranton, Pennsylvania.Daniel Mulhall, a former Irish ambassador to the US, said: “I’ve been there and it’s probably the most Irish place in America. I remember meeting all the Irish organisations over breakfast one morning and there were so many of them I couldn’t count them.“It’s a very traditional Irish-American community, proud of its roots connected with Ireland, proud of heritage, the kind of place where anybody growing up would definitely encounter that affinity with Ireland, that affection for Ireland that Joe Biden developed as a child.Mulhall added: “He often talks about his grandfather Finnegan, who was the son of two Irish immigrants who I suppose passed on stories about the old country to the grandson. Things you hear at your grandfather’s knee tend to live with you.“He’s very good example of that Irish-American identity, which is still strong in America despite the fact that most of the people who are Irish-American now are descended from people who came to America in the 19th century. But nonetheless, the heritage lives on.”Biden has spoken and written often about his Irish roots. In his book, Promise Me, Dad, he states: “We Irish are the only people in the world who are actually nostalgic about the future.”In another passage, he observes: “One of my colleagues in the Senate, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once made this simple but profound observation about us Irish: ‘To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.’”Evan Osnos, author of a 2020 biography of Biden, said: “To Joe Biden, in effect, being of Irish descent is all about the relationship between suffering and hope. The Irishness of life has become a kind of grand metaphor for Biden over the course of his own life, beginning when he was a kid.“The process of getting over a stutter became this fulcrum in his own self narrative and in practical terms the way that he actually got over the stutter was by memorising quotes from Yeats and [American Ralph Waldo] Emerson. That’s one of the reasons why he has this quick instinct to deploy Irish poetry.”The president frequently deploys W B Yeats’s Easter, 1916 and has quoted Seamus Heaney’s lines – “History says, don’t hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up, / And hope and history rhyme,” – in at least half a dozen speeches since becoming president. He likes to quip: “They think I do it because I’m Irish. I do it because they’re the best poets.”This soft power will be on full display next week. The White House has said Biden will visit Belfast from 11 to 12 April to mark progress since the Good Friday agreement was signed a quarter of a century ago and to show US readiness to support Northern Ireland’s economic potential.In the 1980s Biden was among a group of senators who pushed for greater US diplomatic involvement to end the conflict in Northern Ireland. He recently praised the Windsor framework as an important step in maintaining the peace accord, remarking: “It’s a vital, vital step and that’s going to help ensure all the people in Northern Ireland have an opportunity to realise their full potential.”Biden will then spend 12 to 14 April in the Republic of Ireland, addressing the Irish parliament and attending a festival in County Mayo. He is guaranteed an effusive welcome, although comparisons with John F Kennedy’s famous visit to Ireland in 1963, which the young president described to aides as the best four days of his life, are perhaps less interesting than the contrasts.Brendan Boyle, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and leading member of the Friends of Ireland group, who has been invited to join Biden on the trip, said: “Sixty years separate JFK’s trip in 1963 and Joe Biden’s trip next week. I don’t think any country on the planet has experienced more change in those six decades than Ireland.“My father was 13 years old when President Kennedy came to Ireland. He was growing up in a very rural part of the country, a country that was socially conservative, that at that point was only a few decades removed from winning its independence, was still experiencing unemployment north of 20%. In terms of the media landscape, it was like 600 years ago.“Now, Ireland today is one of the wealthiest countries on earth, a very forward looking, socially tolerant place, a country unlike most of the western world in which it’s a rather young population. This trip in many ways will celebrate President Biden’s connection with Ireland but also just how far Ireland has come in a relatively short period of time.” More

China sent dozens of warplanes towards Taiwan for a second day of military drills on Sunday, launching simulated attacks in retaliation to the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, meeting the US House speaker during a brief visit to the US.Taiwan’s defence ministry said it was monitoring the movements of China’s missile forces, as the US said it too was on alert.China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent 70 warplanes, including fighter jets, reconnaissance craft and refuellers, into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday morning, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry. It did not provide a map or locations, but said 31 planes had crossed the median line – the de facto border in the Taiwan strait between Taiwan and China.The PLA had announced the immediate start to three days of drills on Saturday morning. By 7pm that evening it had sent 71 warplanes and eight ships into Taiwan’s ADIZ with almost 60 crossing the median line.Taiwan’s ministry said the activity had severely violated Indo-Pacific peace and stability, and had a negative effect on international security and economies. It urged other countries to speak out against China’s actions.Chinese state television reported that multiple units carried out simulated strikes on key targets in Taiwan and the surrounding sea. The Chinese military’s eastern theatre command put out a short animation of the simulated attacks on its WeChat account, showing missiles fired from land, sea and air into Taiwan with two of them exploding in flames as they hit their targets.A Taiwan security source told Reuters that on Saturday the Chinese drills around the Bashi channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, included simulated attacks on aircraft carrier groups as well as anti-submarine drills.Last August, after a visit to Taipei by then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi, China staged war games around Taiwan including firing missiles into waters close to the island, though it has yet to announce similar drills this time.Chinese maritime authorities have issued just one notice of a live fire zone, in a small area of water near Pingtan, in the Taiwan strait. The mandatory notice warns air and seacraft to keep clear of the area, which is just a fraction of the areas designated for live fire during last year’s drills.While in Los Angeles last week, on what was officially billed a transit on her way back from Central America, Tsai met the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, despite Beijing’s warnings against the meeting.The de facto US embassy in Taiwan said on Sunday that the US was monitoring China’s drills around Taiwan closely and is “comfortable and confident” it has sufficient resources and capabilities regionally to ensure peace and stability.US channels of communication with China remain open and the US had consistently urged restraint and no change to the status quo, said a spokesperson for the American Institute in Taiwan, which serves as an embassy in the absence of formal diplomatic ties.Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in favour of Beijing in 1979 but is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself.China, which has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control, says Taiwan is the most important and sensitive issue in its relations with the US, and the topic is a frequent source of tensions.Beijing considers Tsai a separatist and has rebuffed her repeated calls for talks. Tsai says only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.China has over the past three years or so stepped up its military pressure against Taiwan, flying regular missions around Taiwan, though not in its territorial airspace or over the island itself.Chinese state media said the aircraft flown into the ADIZ this weekend were armed with live weapons.Taiwanese air force jets also typically carry live weapons when they scramble to see off Chinese incursions.Late on Saturday, Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council, which runs the coast guard, put out footage on its YouTube channel showing one of its ships shadowing a Chinese warship, though it did not give an exact location.“You are seriously harming regional peace, stability and security. Please immediately turn around and leave. If you continue to proceed we will take expulsion measures,” a coast guard officer says by radio to the Chinese ship.Other footage showed a Taiwanese warship, the Di Hua, accompanying the coast guard ship in what the coast guard officer calls a “standoff” with the Chinese warship.Still, civilian flights around Taiwan, including to Kinmen and Matsu, two groups of Taiwan-controlled islands right next to the Chinese coast, have continued as normal.In August, civilian air traffic was disrupted after China announced effective no-fly zones in several areas close to Taiwan where it was firing missiles.Meanwhile the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said in an interview published on Sunday that Europe must not be a “follower” of either the US or China on Taiwan, saying that the bloc risks entanglement in “crises that aren’t ours”.His comments risk riling Washington and highlight divisions in the European Union over how to approach China, as the US steps up confrontation with its closest rival and Beijing draws closer to Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.“The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans must be followers and adapt ourselves to the American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction,” Macron told media as he returned on Friday from a three-day state visit to Beijing.Reuters contributed reporting More