US Politics

We get 28 days for Black history in the US – but every month is White History MonthSteve PhillipsConservatives are blocking a more inclusive version of history – even as our Capitol contains statues of white supremacistsWelcome to White History Month! While February – the shortest of months – is typically associated with a 28-day acknowledgement of the historical contributions of African Americans, the truth of the matter is that this month, and every month, is actually a celebration of white history.This particular February is noteworthy because of the controversy surrounding revisions to the first-ever advanced placement (AP) course in African American history. (It is worth noting that the College Board, which administers AP courses, has been in existence since 1900 and is only now getting around to offering a class on African Americans.) The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has seized on the occasion to fan the flames of white racial fear and resentment by having the Florida department of education very publicly reject the course because they claimed it “significantly lacks educational value”.DeSantis’s corporate donors under fire for ‘hypocrisy’ over Black History MonthRead moreIn a profound profile in cowardice, the College Board removed references to topics such as Black Lives Matter and reparations from the curriculum after Florida raised its complaints. (The New York Times documented the process of capitulation in an article this month.)DeSantis’ antics are nothing new. He is merely following the well-worn path of prior champions of white racial grievance, such as the 1960s segregationist and Alabama governor George Wallace, the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and many, many others. Wallace most clearly discovered and articulated the political power of white racial resentment when he told a journalist: “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes – and I couldn’t make them listen. Then I began talking about [N-word] – and they stomped the floor.”What DeSantis has discovered is that in Florida, attacks on so-called “critical race theory” get many white people to stomp the floor. Last year, he pushed through legislation that seeks to shield white children from facing the facts of white supremacy – mandating that a “person should not be instructed that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race.”Although the modern-day Confederate outrage machine would have you believe that America’s children are being bombarded with Philip Kan Gotanda plays, Dolores Huerta speeches and James Baldwin books, the truth is actually the opposite. California is the only state in the country to mandate ethnic studies as a graduation requirement and that law doesn’t take effect for two more years. Arizona just elected as its state superintendent of instruction a man who in 2010 championed a law banning ethnic studies instruction in Tucson, Arizona. (A federal judge later threw out the law, saying that it was “motivated by racial animus”.)The round-the-clock white nationalist propaganda machine is not restricted to the country’s classrooms. The 1939 film Gone With the Wind glorifies the Confederates and depicts white nationalist mass murderers as dashing leading men and charming leading ladies. The movie is still the highest-grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation), and a 2018 PBS poll found that the novel is the sixth-most popular book of fiction in the country, ahead of Charlotte’s Web and The Chronicles of Narnia.The year-round white history celebrations operate in our nation’s capital as well. Dispersed throughout the Rotunda of the US Capitol – the citadel of the nation’s democracy – are 100 statues which, according to the original 1864 legislation, are intended to showcase leaders “illustrious for their historic renown” and “worthy of this national commemoration”, allowing each state two statues.Among the statues that greet the children, families and visitors to the Capitol are “19 statues, busts and paintings of Confederates.” Every day of every month of the year, these white marble monuments to white supremacists stand proudly and defiantly, mocking the notion that America is anything other than a nation for white people. (The law authorizing the placement of statues was actually passed during the civil war, when there were no Confederates in the Congress, but after the war the Southern states rushed tributes to white supremacy into the Capitol building.)Cognizant that Germany has no monuments to Nazis for a reason, Senator Cory Booker, representative Steny Hoyer and other members of Congress have tried in recent years to pass bills cleansing the Capitol of the visible stain of racism, but, tellingly, these bills have never become laws.I recently did a reconnaissance mission to the Capitol to assess the situation. While the building does try to restrict access to the most famous racists, such as Jefferson Davis, his lower-profile yet equally white-supremacist comrades are still there, front and center, greeting visitors from across the country every day, every month – teaching, celebrating and honoring white history. Trying to do my small part to highlight the fact that many of these statues actually pay homage to white supremacists, I put together a short video on my recent trip to DC.DeSantis ramps up ‘war on woke’ with new attacks on Florida higher educationRead moreWhile enraging, none of this is surprising. The marginalization of the history, cultures and contributions of people of color has been going on for centuries. The dichotomy between Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project and the one lonely month devoted annually to Black history highlights the country’s contradiction.Hannah-Jones and the editors at the New York Times set out to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country”. (The 1619 Project is now also a documentary series on Hulu.)The revolutionary power of that proposition is that all of US history has to be rethought, but, instead, we settle for one month a year paying lip service to Americans with more melanin.So, with the days ticking down on Black History Month, if we really want to teach the truth, we should confront the fact that every month is White History Month and we should have a national debate about how we feel about that. And then, perhaps we can make real progress on creating a multiracial curriculum that tells the truth about US history to the American people and our children, so that they can make it better in the future.
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
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AnalysisHow Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’Charles Kaiser in New York Document makes clear senior Fox News figures knew after 2020 election voter fraud claims were false – and it’s likely a landmark caseThe Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Dominion Voting Systems’ brief requesting summary judgment against Fox News for defamation – and $1.6bn – is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.Fox News hosts thought Trump’s election fraud claims were ‘total BS’, court filings showRead more“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”The case concerns Fox News’s repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.Tribe said the filing “establishes that Fox was not only reckless” but also that producers, owners and personalities were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated”.Filed last week, the 192-page document makes it clear that senior figures at Fox News from Rupert Murdoch down knew immediately after the election that claims of voter fraud, in particular those aimed at Dominion, were false.Tucker Carlson called the charges “ludicrous” and “off the rails”. Sean Hannity texted about “F’ing lunatics”. A senior network vice-president called one of the stories “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”.But none of this knowledge prevented hosts from repeating lies about everything from imaginary algorithms shaving votes from Dominion machines to non-existent ties between the company and Venezuela.Tribe was one of several first amendment experts to call the filing nearly unprecedented.“This is the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation,” said Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and litigator with clients including CBS and the Associated Press.“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of. These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”Horton said Dominion’s case gets “huge benefit” from the way Fox employees “express themselves with a huge measure of hyperbole about absolutely everything”.Tribe agreed: “This is one of the first defamation cases in which it is possible to rule for the plaintiff on summary judgment. This is not a request to go to trial. There is no genuinely disputed fact. The defendants were deliberately lying in a manner that was per se libelous and they clearly knew it.”When the Dominion filing was first reported, Fox News said it “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law”.Lawyers for Fox News claim everything their anchors said was protected by the first amendment.Other lawyers are skeptical.“You may have a first amendment right to report on what the president said but you have no right to validate a statement that you know to be false,” said Steven Shapiro, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and counsel or co-counsel on more than 200 supreme court briefs.David Korzenik is a leading libel lawyer whose clients include the Guardian. He said the Dominion case shows it “possible to prove actual malice. If particular people are shown to have believed something to be false, or to have been highly aware of its probable falsehood, and at the same time they made statements endorsing it on air, they are in play.“You’re allowed to be biased … you’re allowed to try to make money. And people should be able to disagree with each other in a newsroom. But if Fox anchors say they don’t believe X and then turn around and endorse X on air after expressing manifest disbelief in it, they have a real problem.“The actual malice standard is very high and it’s supposed to be … it’s a burden that can be overcome in limited but appropriate circumstances.”The biggest irony revealed by the Dominion filing is that Carlson and colleagues quickly decided the greatest threat to their network was one of the only times it reported an accurate scoop: that Arizona had gone for Biden, at 11.20pm on election night.Four days later, another Murdoch property, the New York Post, asked Trump to stop the stolen election claim. Rupert Murdoch thanked the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, for making sure the editorial got wide distribution, according to the Dominion filing.But later that day, as Fox executives realized they were losing viewers, the tide began to shift.“Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch messaged Scott.In a message to his producer, Carlson sounded terrified: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”And so on 8 November Maria Bartiromo featured the Trump adviser Sidney Powell and said: “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”That alternate reality would be repeated for months. Perhaps most devastating of all is Dominion’s account of what happened on 12 November, after the reporter Jaqui Heinrich “correctly factchecked [a Trump] tweet, pointing out that top election infrastructure officials said that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”Carlson was incensed. He messaged Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously what the fuck? Actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”Hannity complained to Scott, who said Heinrich had “serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted”.By the next morning, Heinrich had deleted her tweet.TopicsFox NewsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsUS televisionUS television industryTV newsanalysisReuse this content More

Ohio senator blasts train operator and lobbyists over toxic derailmentDemocrat Sherrod Brown says derailment, which released toxic chemicals, was caused by Norfolk Southern The Ohio senator Sherrod Brown had harsh criticism on Sunday for corporate lobbyists and Norfolk Southern, the Atlanta-based operator of the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, two weeks ago while carrying toxic chemicals.‘We just need answers’: distrust grows in Ohio town after toxic train derailmentRead moreSpeaking on Sunday to CNN’s State of the Union, the Democrat said the derailment, which released toxic chemicals including the carcinogenic vinyl chloride, was an episode of “the same old story”, and that Norfolk Southern “caused it”.“Corporations do stock buybacks, they do big dividend checks, they lay off workers,” Brown said. “Thousands of workers have been laid off from Norfolk Southern. Then they don’t invest in safety rules and safety regulation, and this kind of thing happens. That’s why people in East Palestine are so upset.“They know that corporate lobbyists have had far too much influence in our government and they see this as the result … These things are happening because these railroads are simply not investing the way they should in car safety and in the rail lines themselves.”Brown said Norfolk Southern and corporate lobbyists were wholly responsible for the accident, which has caused breathing difficulties, rashes, nausea, headaches and swollen eyes, as well as killing pets and wildlife.“There’s no question they caused it with this derailment because … they underinvested in their employees. They never look out for their workers. They never look out for their communities. They look out for stock buybacks and dividends. Something’s wrong with corporate America and something’s wrong with Congress and administrations listening too much to corporate lobbyists. And that’s got to change.”On Tuesday, Norfolk Southern pledged to distribute more than $1.2m to nearly 900 families and a number of businesses affected by the crash, spill and burn. A company spokesman said the financial assistance included direct payments of $1,000.Earlier this year, the company announced $10bn in stock buybacks. Last year, it reported $3.2bn in profits.Brown warned residents along the Ohio and Pennsylvania border to be cautious.According to Brown, the company “made promises” to him and the community. But he said: “If they write a check to an East Palestine or Unity Township resident or people even a little farther away, never sign away your legal rights. You can accept the check, but don’t sign anything that would sign away your legal rights. That’s what companies like this do.”He added that he was going to make sure Norfolk Southern “lives up to everything it needs to do”.Brown said he had urged Joe Biden and the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, to strengthen regulations surrounding worker safety, consumer protection and the environment.“That’s my job, to push the administration and to move in Congress on … more pro-consumer, pro-worker, pro-environment … and pro-community safety laws to make sure these things don’t happen,” he said.Republicans have criticized Buttigieg’s handling of the accident, arguing that the federal government has been too slow to respond.In a tweet on Wednesday, Buttigieg said that the administration was restricted by certain laws on rail regulation.“We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe,” he said.That was a reference to to an Obama-era rule the Trump administration repealed, which required trains carrying highly flammable crude oil be equipped with special brakes to halt all cars at the same time.Ohio is facing a chemical disaster. Biden must declare a state of emergency | Steven DonzigerRead moreSpeaking to reporters, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, the ranking member on the Senate commerce, science and transportation committee, said: “I understand that the secretary is politically ambitious, and he’d like to move to government housing in Washington right up the street” – a reference to the White House, for which Buttigieg ran in 2020 – “but he does have a job to do.Buttigieg, Cruz said, “should focus on addressing the enormous challenges we have on our railways, with multiple derailments where the secretary has been awol”.The Ohio senator JD Vance and Marco Rubio of Florida wrote to Buttigieg, demanding “information from the US Department of Transportation regarding its oversight of the United States’ freight train system and, more generally, how it balances building a safe, resilient rail industry across our country in relation to building a hyper-efficient one with minimal direct human input”.TopicsOhioUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Larry Hogan: splitting anti-Trump vote ‘pretty good reason’ not to run in 2024Ex-Maryland governor tells Meet the Press: ‘I care about making sure we have a future for the Republican party’ The danger of splitting anti-Trump Republicans and helping the former president win the nomination again “would be a pretty good reason to consider not running” for the White House in 2024, the former Maryland governor Larry Hogan said. Bernie Sanders: Nikki Haley’s demand for mental tests is ageist and ‘absurd’Read more“I don’t care that much about my future in the Republican party,” Hogan told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “I care about making sure we have a future for the Republican party.“And if we can stop Donald Trump and elect a great Republican common-sense conservative leader, that certainly would be a factor.”A relative moderate in a GOP marched far right, Hogan has long been thought likely to run. He told NBC he would decide whether to do so, as “a small government common-sense conservative”, in a “relatively short period of time”, most likely this spring.Trump and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley are the only two declared candidates so far. Polling has shown Haley splitting a non-Trump vote dominated by Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and thereby handing Trump the win.Trump did not win a majority of voters in 2016, when he first captured the nomination. Hogan barely registers in polling regarding 2024.On NBC, Hogan was asked about culture war issues, chiefly around education and LGBTQ+ issues, on which DeSantis has based much of his appeal to voters.Hogan said: “I was a Republican governor in the bluest state in America and got things done, working across the aisle with Democrats. So I can tell you, it’s not what everyone’s talking about.“But I think some people are making the calculation that base primary voters in the Trump lane, that’s what they want to hear about. And so a lot of candidates are focusing on that. You can’t dismiss it, but I don’t think it should be the only thing we’re talking about.”Haley said this week DeSantis’s so-called “don’t say gay” law, restricting how gender and sexual orientation are taught in elementary schools, did not go “far enough”.She has refused to comment about other Republican candidates, Trump in particular, claiming only to be interested in attacking Joe Biden.Hogan was asked about Republican attempts to have candidates commit to supporting the eventual nominee.Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican partyRead more“I think it’s kind of silly because it’s not going to happen,” he said. “We already know President Trump has said numerous times he refuses to” do so.“If they say you’re not going to be on the debate stage if you won’t commit to support the nominee, then President Trump won’t be on the debate stage. And I don’t think anybody believes that’s going to happen.”Looking to Michigan, an electoral battleground where on Saturday a supporter of Trump’s election fraud lie became head of the state party, Hogan said: “There’s a lot of misinformation out there. And I am concerned about some of the parties.“And people are taking over that are believing conspiracy theories. And I think we’ve got to get back to a bigger-tent party that can appeal to more people, otherwise we’re going to keep losing elections.”In 2020, while still in office, Hogan publicly refused to support Trump. He did not vote for Biden, however, writing in “Ronald Reagan” instead.On Sunday, Hogan said he wanted “to support the nominee of the party, whoever that is. However, I’ve said before I didn’t support Trump, I wouldn’t support Trump. I put the country ahead of party and not somebody [who] should not be the president.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsDonald TrumpUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More

Election denier Kristina Karamo chosen to lead Michigan Republican partyKaramo lost secretary of state race in 2022 after mounting a campaign in support of Trump’s lie about electoral fraud The election conspiracist Kristina Karamo, overwhelmingly defeated last year in her bid to become Michigan secretary of state, was chosen on Saturday to lead the state Republican party for the next two years.Karamo defeated a 10-candidate field dominated by far-right candidates to win the position after a party convention that lasted nearly 11 hours.The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’Read moreIn 2022, the former community college professor lost her secretary of state race by 14 points after mounting a campaign in support of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 election defeat was the result of electoral fraud.Karamo inherits a state party torn by infighting and millions in debt. She will be tasked with helping win back the legislature and flipping one of the most competitive US Senate seats, while helping a presidential candidate win the battleground state.Addressing delegates, Karamo said “our party is dying” and needs to be rebuilt into “a political machine that strikes fear in the heart of Democrats”.Karamo rose to prominence following the 2020 election when she began appearing on conservative talk shows claiming that as a poll challenger in Detroit, she saw “ballots being dropped off in the middle of the night, thousands of them”.The decision to elect Karamo, who will lead through the 2024 elections, solidifies the hold far-right activists have on the state party after sweeping losses last year.It took three rounds of voting at the convention in Lansing for delegates to pick Karamo over the former attorney general candidate Matthew DePerno, who was endorsed by Trump.Contemplating a field dominated by grassroots activists running on far-right messaging, the former Republican congressman Fred Upton said: “We lost the entire statehouse for the first time in 40 years, in large part, because of the top of the ticket. All deniers. It turned off a lot of voters.”The party may take “a cycle or two to correct itself and to get out of the ditch that we’ve been in for the last couple of years”, Upton said.The Michigan Republican party has been led by figures including the former education secretary Betsy DeVos and the current national Republican chair, Ronna McDaniel.Trump won Michigan in 2016 but Democrats now control all levels of power for the first time since the 1980s. In 2022 they won both houses of the legislature and defeated Republicans by significant margins for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.Longtime donors withheld millions as Republicans grew increasingly loyal to Trump. Tudor Dixon, a Trump loyalist who lost for governor to Gretchen Whitmer, said her campaign was hurt by the state party not having as much money as in the past.TopicsMichiganRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Bernie Sanders: Nikki Haley’s demand for mental tests is ageist and ‘absurd’Senator makes remark to CBS’s Face the Nation after Republican presidential candidate calls for tests for politicians over 75 The Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s demand for mental competency tests for politicians older than 75 is “absurd” and ageist, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said.Bernie Sanders: ‘Oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? They run the US as well’Read more“We are fighting racism, we’re fighting sexism, we’re fighting homophobia, I think we should also be fighting ageism,” Sanders, 81, told CBS’s Face the Nation.Sanders has mounted two strong challenges for the Democratic presidential nomination, the first in 2016 when he was 74.Haley, 51, launched her 2024 campaign this week, calling for a “new generation” of leaders but offering few policy specifics except a call for political term limits and mental competency tests.She has aimed that talking point at Joe Biden, the 80-year-old president, but not at Donald Trump, the 76-year-old former president who remains her only declared rival for the Republican nomination.Asked on Fox News Sunday why she was a better choice for the nomination than Trump or anyone yet to declare, the former South Carolina governor said: “Why not me?”“You know, I am a wife of a combat veteran. I’m a mother of two children.”Haley said those children were struggling with the cost of buying a home and with the challenge of “woke education”, while her Indian immigrant parents were “upset by what’s happening at the border”.Claiming she had “never worked in DC”, the former ambassador to the United Nations who was part of Trump’s White House cabinet and met with the president in the Oval Office, said it was “time that we start putting a fire on what’s happening in Congress”.Repeating her call for term limits and “mental competency tests for people over the age of 75”, she said: “And what I do strongly believe is the American people need options. I don’t think you have to be 80 years old to be in Washington DC.”Sanders told CBS: “I think that’s absurd. We are fighting racism, we’re fighting sexism, we’re fighting homophobia, I think we should also be fighting ageism.Bernie Sanders on going viral: ‘There I was with my mittens on the moon, at the Last Supper, on the Titanic’Read more“Trust people, look at people and say, ‘You know, this person is competent, this person is not competent.’ There are a lot of 40-year-olds out there who ain’t particularly competent. Older people, you know, you look at the individual, I don’t think you make a blanket statement.”Sanders also discussed age, and its relevance for serving politicians, in an interview with the Guardian published on Sunday.Speaking to promote his new book, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, he said he expected Biden to run for re-election in 2024, when the president will be 82, and vowed to support that effort.“Age is always a factor,” Sanders said. “But there are a thousand factors. Some people who are 80 or more have more energy than people who are 30.“… There are a lot of elderly people with a whole lot of experience who are very capable of doing great work.”TopicsBernie SandersNikki HaleyUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Trump claims he will ‘never call’ Ron DeSantis ‘Meatball Ron’Ex-president tests new nickname for Florida governor, chief rival in 2024 polls, by saying he would not use it Donald Trump road-tested a new nickname for his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination by claiming he would not use it, saying he would “never call” Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, “Meatball Ron”.How Florida’s Republican supermajority handed Ron DeSantis unfettered powerRead moreNo less an authority than the New York Times has reported that Trump has been floating the nickname for the only Republican who challenges him in polling regarding the forming field for 2024.Trump is one of two declared candidates so far. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and UN ambassador, announced her campaign this week. DeSantis is expected to run.In his surge to the White House in 2016, Trump made hay by coining nicknames for Republican opponents he relentlessly belittled at rallies and in debates.In a late-night post to his Truth Social platform on Saturday, the former president used an extant nickname when he wrote: “I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will.”Trump linked DeSantis to two Republican establishment figures, “lightweight” Paul Ryan, the former House speaker and Trump critic, and “Low Energy” Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who Trump beat easily in 2016.Trump also took a crack at DeSantis’s initial response to the Covid pandemic in 2020, a strict slate of measures the governor is now trying to place in the rearview mirror, as he courts a Republican base hostile to vaccine mandates and other public health rules.“His loyalty skills are really weak,” Trump wrote. “It would be totally inappropriate to use the word ‘meatball’ as a moniker for Ron!”Earlier this month, Maggie Haberman and Michael Bender of the Times, two of the best connected reporters on Trump, reported on the former president’s preparations for an expected DeSantis challenge.According to Bender and Haberman, Trump recently “insulted Mr DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as ‘Meatball Ron’, an apparent dig at his appearance, or ‘Shutdown Ron’, a reference to restrictions the governor put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic”.They also said Trump advisers were “amassing data about Mr DeSantis’s actions in response to the pandemic, in part to try to depict him as a phony”.DeSantis has largely avoided responding to Trump’s attacks. In an interview published on Saturday by the New York Post, he remembered “bad words” being used in nicknames in his high-school baseball days but said no one called him DeSanctimonious then.“No,” he said. “There weren’t enough letters to be able to do that. I don’t know if anyone even can spell that.”Elsewhere this week, Stephen Colbert, host of the Late Show on CBS, gleefully picked up on the Times “Meatball Ron” report.“Ooooh, I do not like how much I love that,” Colbert said in a monologue this week, calling the “Meatball Ron” nickname “so dumb and accurate”.Trump, Colbert said, was “never gonna do better than the crystallized genius that is ‘Meatball Ron’”.The host proceeded to sing “Meatball Ron” to the tune of Uptown Girl by Billy Joel, a song peppered with references to culture war policies including DeSantis’s “don’t say gay” law about teaching sexuality and gender in elementary schools and his focus on critical race theory, or CRT, as a way to fire up Republican voters.“Meatball Ron/ He’s a walking talking beef baton / And he tells you that you can’t say gay / And that Covid will just go away / That’s not OK.“Meatball Ron / Marinara is his big turn on / Very scared of CRT / Loves to roll around in spaghetti / With extra cheese.”TopicsDonald TrumpRon DeSantisUS elections 2024US politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

The veteran senator is now part of Joe Biden’s inner circle, and is still fighting his country’s vast inequalities

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