US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump is deeply threatened by Kamala Harris – and desperately flailing | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      “Kamala, you’re fired!” shouted Donald Trump. Then he pleaded: “You’re fired. Get out. Get out. Get out, Kamala!” The crowd cheered at his rally on 26 August in Glendale, Arizona, as though approving his order. But the invocation of the magic words he recited at the climax of every episode of The Apprentice failed to make her phantom disappear.Trump’s advisers sneak policy material into his stump speech that he must read as it scrolls on his teleprompter. They want to channel him into speaking about “the issues”. But he has revolted against them and “the issues”. “They always say, ‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal,” he complained to a rally. He turned to his Maga masses to give him license. “Should I get personal, or should I not get personal?” The crowd cheered as he knew it would. It was the poll result he wanted. “My advisers are fired!”Trump’s narcissism is his grand strategy. No adviser trying to calibrate him to polls can dislodge it. Both Kamala Harris and his advisers constrain and threaten him. He views the vice-president’s presence as an injustice. He had beaten Joe Biden. His withdrawal and her emergence were the implementation of the far-right replacement theory. The entire scenario has left Trump on the stage in a play for which his only new lines added to the script are that he is transparently faking it to be sort of for abortion before he is against it as he always was. He announced he will vote to uphold a ban after six weeks in Florida and against the state’s abortion referendum to overturn it. He cries that he is the victim, as he is always the victim when he does not get his way. His irrepressible impulse is to trash the woman. The advisers who seek to tamp him down are his adversaries.Trump believes in the marrow of his bones that his intuition, his sixth sense, is his secret power. Acting out has been his winning ticket. He is certain that is why his moment came and why it must come again. He gives no credence to circumstances or any other person, which would diminish him. He has achieved godlike status by being true to himself. It’s not just that he’s incapable of being other than himself, but that he feels it is the only way he’s won. He’s extinguished self-doubt, if he ever entertained it. He can’t be anything else. At his core, he believes idolatry of his personality is the key to his success. Without it, he is obliterated. He can never accept losing, being the loser.“We will never give up, we will never concede,” he told the crowd assembled on January 6. “It doesn’t happen.”Now against a candidate of change (a woman), his resistance to change (attacking the woman) is his only way to cling to his authenticity. Above all, he fears self-neutralization. If he cannot act out, he’s a nullity to himself, his most terrifying prospect. Anything that could be construed as criticism threatens his manhood, his mental equilibrium and evokes a reflexively hostile response. It is an impossible task to pry him away from his impulses, especially when it’s a survival instinct.His advisers’ version of “the issues” is a straight and narrow negative campaign to stain his opponents, combined with deceptive flip-flops to smudge Trump’s position on abortion. They want clean distortions and falsehoods without Trump’s accompanying mess. The architect of his ratfucking operation, Chris LaCivita, was behind the Swift Boat lies about war hero John Kerry in 2004, funded by the far-right billionaire Harlan Crow, who happens to be the big-hearted benefactor of Clarence Thomas. LaCivita has hoped to repeat his mudslinging triumph now against Tim Walz in order to undermine an alternative example of masculinity. Trump, however, keeps stumbling over his campaign’s well-laid smears.The more his advisers attempt to curb him, the more he acts out to reassert his essential nature under pressure from within his campaign. His discontent has led him to bring back his oft-disgraced goon, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly physically assaulted a female reporter during the 2016 campaign and sexually molested the wife of a major Republican donor in 2021, among other lowlights. (Prosecutors ultimately declined to charge Lewandowski in the first case; in the second he was fined and sentenced to community service and “impulse control training” after accepting a plea deal without admitting guilt.) Lewandowski claims to be the genius who invented the slogan “Let Trump Be Trump.” Trump has brought him back from his political planet Pluto as an enabler to help him avoid impulse control.Trump is on the horns of a dilemma. If he is advised that to save himself he must deny himself, he will feel that he must deny the advice to save himself. He can’t respond to a different world. His “greatness” is to reject the modern and now normal world to be led by a mixed-race woman who is also a relentless prosecutor bringing the political case against him. He’s increasingly deviant. His campaign must be to define Trump down. He must force her into subservience.Harris is an exponentially greater threat to Trump than E Jean Carroll. The Carroll defamation judgment didn’t strip him of his manhood, but could be interpreted as an affirmation: the adjudicated rapist as alpha dog. Losing to Harris would be the extinction of his virility. She compounds his existential crisis. If he loses, he will not be able to use presidential powers to be a criminal on the loose. The federal cases against him will proceed, even if the US supreme court has eviscerated the constitution in granting him “absolute” official immunity for attempting to overthrow the government.A defeated Trump will face years of trials, undoubtedly receive guilty verdicts and likely jail time. He will be a depleted convict. His fear of his fate accelerates his impulses to lie, smear and violate all norms to an uncontrollably frantic level. An aide of Trump’s, or possibly two, even allegedly physically assaulted a female employee to get the photo-op of him giving a thumbs-up over a grave in a forbidden section at Arlington National Cemetery. Trump’s spokesman smeared her as “clearly suffering from a mental health episode”, while LaCivita, drawing on his Swift Boat playbook, dubbed her “despicable”. The woman declined to file charges, reportedly out of fear of retaliation.Harris has become the personification of “nasty” women to Trump. She encompasses the women beyond his decayed appeal who do not aspire to be his ornaments and are therefore his tormentors. He naturally wants to reduce all women to vulnerable and undefended figures he can subjugate at will in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, or leap on by surprise in a Bel Air hotel suite. His explanation of his charm in the Hollywood Access tape was that as a star he was irresistible to women who allowed him to “grab ’em by the pussy”. But the Carroll and Stormy Daniels cases have exposed his methods, punished and humiliated him. As Daniels testified in the trial for which he was convicted for 34 felonies: “Was it brief?” “Yes.” For Trump, that was a worse judgment than the convictions for business fraud. The thrill is gone.Trump’s need to assault Harris is even more intense than it was toward Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Trump hadn’t been president before. He launched his bid as a branding exercise that went haywire. Now, he’s desperate to claw back his lost status, not least to gain the pardon power to remove the extensive federal charges against him. His restoration, which he thought was a snap until 21 July, when Biden withdrew, has been interrupted by a dangerous woman he can’t subdue and an allure he can’t fathom.Harris is a mystery woman to him. The campaign is astoundingly abbreviated. He lacks time to rehearse a degrading story to drag her down. The media, despite frequently leaning on the mindless formula of false equivalence, doesn’t seem in the same gleeful mood to join in his rampant cruelty that it was in 2016. Yet even the fair-minded Dana Bash of CNN in her interview of Harris felt compelled to earnestly ask her reaction to Trump’s racist claim that she had “turned Black” for political purposes as if it were a legitimate question. “Same old tired playbook,” Harris replied. “Next question.” Her succinct dismissal instantly reduced Trump to an exhausted, sputtering blowhard past his sell date. The younger woman swipes left.Trump has a preternatural sense it’s slipping away. The gift of the demagogue is to grasp the currents of the masses that he can exploit for his self-aggrandizement. His compulsion to attack Harris increases every day his invective falls flat.He began with a twisted pronunciation of her name, then called her “Kamabla” and moved to “Comrade Kamala”. Baffled by her self-assurance, he did not rely on his usual stable of insults hurled at those women who had testified to his sexual assaults: “horseface”, “face of a pig”, “crazed, crying lowlife”, “dog”.Trump could not surprise her as he did the young women in the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants he owned when he barged into the dressing rooms. “You know, they’re standing there with no clothes,” he told Howard Stern in 2005. “‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”But what can the predatory voyeur now “get away with”? Before the Democratic convention, Trump began bargaining with his Maga masses about the terms on which he should assault Harris. He warily circled her. “Don’t ever call a woman beautiful, because that’ll be the end of your political career, please,” he said mockingly.Trump started to circulate debasing sexual innuendo about Harris on 18 August with a retweet of a video consisting of a warped version of Alanis Morissette’s song Ironic to suggest that Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee through oral sex: “She spent her whole damn life / Down on her knees / To be commander in chief / That’s how you say please / Isn’t it moronic …”The video depicts Harris holding a sign reading, “I Am A Moron.” Then the face of Willie Brown, the former speaker of the California assembly, whom she once dated, pops up behind a sofa on which she is sitting with her husband, Doug Emhoff.Trump continued his obsessive theme on 29 August, retweeting a picture of Harris and Hillary Clinton with the caption: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently.”Trump’s campaign of sexual insinuation that launched with the phony Morissette song has been reliant on a far-right, mainly anonymous social media group called the Dilley Meme Team, which advertises itself as producing “the dankest memes and original content for Maga brands and campaigns”. During the Republican primaries, the group made crude videos of Nikki Haley as a prostitute and Casey DeSantis, the wife of Ron DeSantis, as a pornographic actor. It also created a video of Biden as a pedophile. The group was behind a video that Trump retweeted in May hailing his return to power with a mock newspaper headline proclaiming the “Creation of a Unified Reich”.Trump has worked closely on these productions, “privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content”, according to the New York Times.Trump’s quandary is that in trying to demean Harris, his old techniques have lost their fascination. Now he perceives himself as the nervous contestant in a beauty pageant. “But I say that I am much better-looking. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.” “They said, ‘No, her biggest advantage is that she’s a beautiful woman.’ I’m going, huh? I never thought of that. I’m better-looking than she is.”If this is a fairytale, he’s the jealous evil witch from Snow White. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?After Harris strode on to the stage of the Democratic national convention in a navy blue suit radiating confidence and expressing command, he fretted about his waning attractiveness. “I was sort of like a hot guy. I was hot as a pistol. I think I was hotter than I am now, and I became president. OK. I don’t know. I said to somebody, was I hotter before or hotter now? I don’t know. Who the hell knows?”Time and again, Trump repeats that Harris is “not smart” and “not very smart”, which only reveals his insecurity about facing her in a debate he has variously refused and accepted. His campaign’s insistence that his microphone be shut off only underscores his advisers’ dread of his unmonitored mouth. After her CNN interview, he accused her both of being “boring” – that is, he couldn’t figure out a point of criticism – and of “rambling incoherence”, his obvious projection.“I think I am entitled to personal attacks,” he says. “I do not have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president … And whether the personal attacks are good, bad – I mean, she certainly attacks me personally. She actually called me weird. ‘He’s weird.’ She’s not smart. I don’t believe she loves our country. Some people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you be nice?’ But they’re not nice to me. They want to put me in prison. They don’t want me to be a little bit nasty. They want to put me in prison. Me!”

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 250 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris’ campaign has taken off, but Donald Trump still has one advantage – if he can rein himself in

      by

      Six weeks ago, it was inconceivable that Vice President Kamala Harris would be in the driver’s seat of this year’s US presidential election.

      Harris was the afterthought running mate of President Joe Biden, an historically unpopular incumbent. Donald Trump, having survived an assassination attempt by millimetres, had a commanding lead in a presidential race for the first time in his political career.

      Republicans were also coming off a flawless national convention that gave a strong message of party unity and enthusiasm for Trump’s third consecutive run for the top office. Even the vice-presidential selection of Senator JD Vance, a recent convert to Trump’s nationalist project, was seen as evidence of the former president’s strength.

      Yet this week, on the cusp of early voting, Harris leads Trump by nearly two percentage points in the RealClearPolitics national polling average and by 3.2 points in the FiveThirtyEight polling roundup.

      Democrats, evidently ecstatic over Biden’s departure from the race, have embraced Harris’ relative youthfulness and vitality. Although she has a strong progressive track record, Harris’ popularity has soared as she has embraced moderate positions on energy, immigration and key foreign policy issues. Her vibe appears to be superhuman.

      Does this mean Harris will run away with the presidency? Or can Trump get back in this race?

      Flailing at the worst time

      Since Harris’ ascendancy to the nomination (perhaps the fastest in modern American politics), Trump’s campaign has been flailing.

      He questioned her racial identity before a group of Black journalists, a rhetorical manoeuvre that predictably landed with a thud. He has spent a couple of weeks flip‑flopping on abortion, enraging his pro‑life supporters.

      Most recently, his maladroit campaign turned a visit to Arlington National Cemetery honouring service members killed during the US pullout from Afghanistan into a complete disaster. Harris and the media are slamming Trump for politicising the hallowed resting place of national heroes and even bullying the cemetery’s staff.

      It may seem hopeless for the Republicans. The race, however, is not what it appears.

      In fact, the candidates remain quite close in the critical swing states. The three “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, in particular, are vital to Harris’ chances. Harris knows this and is even willing to campaign with Biden in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his blue‑collar, working‑class appeal is greatest.

      Each campaign is spending tens of millions on ads in Pennsylvania alone. They know that turning out their voters in that state could be the key to overall victory.

      Loath to lean into his advantage

      Trump also has a latent advantage that may prove helpful in the end. On several key issues, he is still out‑polling Harris: the economy, inflation and immigration.

      With Harris winning the vibes contest, Trump needs to break through with voters on these public policy matters. Trump will have the opportunity to do just that in the first presidential debate on September 10.

      To reframe the race in his favour, he will have to show that Harris has herself shifted position on immigration and energy policy. In her only media interview since becoming the Democrats’ presidential nominee, for instance, Harris said she no longer supported a ban on fracking, which she had backed in 2019.

      But can Trump manage this? So far, he has not demonstrated the discipline required to make this a race on policy. He appears to be more interested in competing on the vibes front, discussing who is better looking (Harris or himself) and who is attracting the biggest crowds to their speeches.

      Trump’s top campaign advisers this year, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCavita, are a more accomplished and disciplined team than he has ever had. Through the Republican convention in July, the pair had successfully manoeuvred Trump, who had been deeply damaged by the January 6 insurrection, to a leading position against Biden. They orchestrated a near‑sweep of talented Republican challengers in the primaries and kept Trump’s focus on the issues that mattered to voters.

      Rather than leaning into their advice, however, Trump appears to be disengaging from his campaign managers’ steady hands. In recent weeks, he has also brought back Corey Lewandowski, who ran Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, sparking rumours of a campaign shake‑up.

      Trump speaking to supporters during the 2016 presidential election, with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
      Gerald Herbert/AP

      Perhaps Trump’s near-death experience at the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July has made him want to do things “his way”. Perhaps he is tired of being managed. Perhaps he is alarmed by Harris’ gravity-defying rise in the polls.

      In any case, he needs to return to a focus on the policy issues where he connects most with voters to get back on top of this race.

      If he doesn’t, he’ll lose his second presidential campaign in a row. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Federal judge rejects Trump’s request to intervene in hush-money criminal case

      by

      A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Donald Trump’s request to intervene in his New York hush-money criminal case, thwarting the former president’s latest bid to overturn his felony conviction and delay his sentencing.US district judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that Trump had not satisfied the burden of proof required for a federal court to take control of the case from the state court where it was tried.Hellerstein’s ruling came hours after Manhattan prosecutors raised objections to Trump’s effort to delay post-trial decisions in the case while he sought to have the federal court step in.The Manhattan district attorney’s office argued in a letter to the judge presiding over the case in state court that he had no legal obligation to hold off on post-trial decisions and wait for Hellerstein to rule.Prosecutors urged the trial judge, Juan M Merchan, not to delay his rulings on two key defense requests: Trump’s call to delay sentencing until after the November election, and his bid to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case in the wake of the US supreme court’s presidential immunity ruling.Merchan has said he will rule 16 September on Trump’s motion to overturn the verdict. His decision on delaying sentencing has been expected in the coming days.Trump was convicted in May of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to disrupt his 2016 presidential run. Trump has denied her claim and said he did nothing wrong.Falsifying business records is punishable by up to four years behind bars. Other potential sentences include probation or a fine.In a letter Tuesday, assistant district attorney Matthew Colangelo reiterated that prosecutors have not staked a position on whether to delay sentencing, deferring to Merchan on an “appropriate post-trial schedule”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s lawyers have argued that sentencing Trump as scheduled, just two days after Merchan’s expected immunity decision, would not give him enough time to weigh next steps – including a possible appeal – if Merchan rules to uphold the verdict.They also argued that sentencing Trump on 18 September, about seven weeks before election day, would be election interference, raising the specter that Trump could be sent to jail as early voting is getting under way.Colangelo said Tuesday that prosecutors were open to a schedule that allows “adequate time” to adjudicate Trump’s motion to set aside the verdict while also sentencing him “without unreasonable delay”.In a letter to Merchan last week, Trump’s lawyers said delaying the proceedings is the “only appropriate course” as they seek to have the federal court rectify a verdict they say was tainted by violations of the Republican presidential nominee’s constitutional rights and the supreme court’s ruling that gives ex-presidents broad protections from prosecution.If the case is moved to federal court, Trump’s lawyers said they will then seek to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed on immunity grounds.The supreme court’s 1 July ruling reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.Trump’s lawyers have argued that prosecutors rushed to trial instead of waiting for the supreme court’s presidential immunity decision, and that prosecutors erred by showing jurors evidence that should not have been allowed under the ruling, such as former White House staffers describing how Trump reacted to news coverage of the hush-money deal and tweets he sent while president in 2018.Trump’s lawyers had previously invoked presidential immunity in a failed bid last year to get the hush-money case moved from state court to federal court. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      John McCain’s son says he will vote Democrat as he slams Trump Arlington visit

      by

      The son of the late Republican senator John McCain – whose war record was disparaged by Donald Trump – has added his voice to criticism of the former president’s controversial Arlington cemetery visit, accusing him of violating a sacred burial site for political purposes.First Lieutenant Jimmy McCain, an intelligence officer in the 158th infantry regiment of the national guard, said Trump’s behaviour at the cemetery – America’s most revered burial ground for fallen military personnel and military heroes – was in line with previous acts of disrespect.He told CNN that Trump’s attitude to military service has driven him away from the Republican party of his father, adding that he had changed his registered voter affiliation to Democrat and planned to vote for Kamala Harris in the forthcoming presidential election.Trump’s reputation for disdaining military personnel is rooted in his first presidential run in 2016, when he said McCain Sr, who died in 2018, did not deserve the war hero status accorded to him because he had been captured during the Vietnam war.He has since been reported to have called US soldiers buried at a first world war cemetery in France “suckers” and “losers” and questioned the value of the Congressional Medal of Honor, generally given for acts of military heroism.McCain said the shift in his political affiliation had been party influenced by Trump’s comments about his father. “Hearing things [from Trump] like, he was a loser because he was captured – I don’t think I could ever overlook that,” he said.But he also suggested Trump had effectively violated the service of fallen soldiers in last week’s episode. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice,” said McCain, whose grandfather and great-grandfather are buried at Arlington.The Republican presidential nominee has drawn broad condemnation and a rebuke from the US army after a visit to the cemetery ostensibly to mark the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 American servicemen during the US pullout from Afghanistan in 2021 devolved into a campaign photo opportunity.Members of Trump’s campaign staff reportedly pushed aside a female cemetery worker when she tried to enforce federal regulations prohibiting taking camera and film equipment into section 60, the facility area reserved for those killed in the Afghan and Iraq campaigns.Pictures and footage were subsequently published of a smiling Trump giving the thumbs up while posing alongside some of the fallen servicemen’s family members, who had invited him. The graves of other personnel – whose families did not give permission – can be clearly seen in the background. Some of them have condemned the visit.Trump has defended it and released supportive statements from relatives of six of the armed forces members killed in the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing.On a statement on his Truth Social site on Wednesday, he went further, accusing Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, of making up the story and claiming there had been no altercation.“There was no conflict or ‘fighting’ at Arlington National Cemetery last week,” he wrote. “It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad. She made it all up to make up for the fact that she and Sleepy Joe [Biden] have BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS for the INCOMPETENT AFGHANISTAN Withdrawal.”But speaking to CNN, McCain suggested his actions were driven by feelings of insecurity about his own lack of military service experience.“It was a violation,” he said. “I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently – that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”“Many of these men and women who served their country chose to do something greater than themselves. They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they put their right hand up and they chose to serve their country. And that’s an experience that Donald Trump has not had. And I think that might be something that he thinks about a lot.” More

    • 188 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump claims ‘no conflict’ during Arlington national cemetery visit despite US army statements – live

      by

      Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that “there was no conflict” during his visit to Arlington national cemetery last week, calling it “a made up story” by his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Trump wrote:
      There was no conflict or “fighting” at Arlington National Cemetery last week. It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.
      The US army accused the Trump campaign of turning a wreath-laying ceremony on 26 August to mark the deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan into a photo opportunity.The army also accused two campaign workers representing Trump of pushing aside an official who told them it was forbidden to take pictures at the graves of military members who had recently died.An army spokesperson said a female Arlington national cemetery official was “abruptly pushed aside” during an argument with Trump aides over photos and filming on the grounds for partisan, political or fundraising purposes. A spokesperson for the military said the episode was “unfortunate”, and it was “also unfortunate” that the cemetery “employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked”. The employee is not pressing charges.This blog is pausing coverage. We’ll be back soon.

      Kamala Harris will travel to Pittsburgh on Thursday and will remain there while she prepares for next Tuesday’s presidential debate with Donald Trump, according to reports. The Harris campaign is still negotiating with ABC News about rules for the 10 September debate, a Harris campaign official said.

      Kamala Harris is expected to announce new proposals meant to boost small businesses and entrepreneurs ahead of a campaign speech on Wednesday in New Hampshire, according to a report.

      The Harris campaign launched the “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour aimed at advocating for women’s reproductive rights starting today in Palm Beach, Florida. The second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, the Minnesota first lady, Gwen Walz, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and the Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez are among those who will be on the tour.

      The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee announced it will transfer $25m to support down-ballot candidates.

      Donald Trump claimed that “there was no conflict” during his visit to Arlington national cemetery last week, calling it “a made-up story” by his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. The US army accused two campaign workers representing Trump of pushing aside an official who told them it was forbidden to take pictures at the graves of military members who had recently died.

      Jimmy McCain, the son of the late Republican senator John McCain, condemned Trump’s visit to the Arlington national cemetery last week as a “violation”. “These men and women that are lying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be a backdrop for a political campaign, he told CNN.

      Fred Trump III, the nephew of Donald Trump, said the Republican presidential nominee “just doesn’t give a shit” about members of the US military. “He just doesn’t. Donald believes in Donald,” he told MSNBC.

      The offices of Donald Trump’s campaign and Republican National Committee were briefly evacuated last week after staff thought they discovered listening devices under a desk, according to a local police report.

      A federal judge ordered Donald Trump and his campaign to stop using the song Hold On, I’m Coming co-written by the late R&B artist and songwriter Isaac Hayes, after Hayes’s estate sought an emergency injunction to stop the Trump campaign from using the song at campaign events.

      The Manhattan district attorney’s office urged the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal case to rule on his motion to vacate his conviction, and not wait until a federal judge considers a separate motion filed by Trump last week to move the case into federal court.

      Pat Toomey, the former Republican senator for Pennsylvania, said he will not be voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the November election. Toomey said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but that he could not bring himself to support the Republican presidential candidate, citing Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

      A rightwing thinktank report proposing sweeping restrictions to abortions and fertility treatments was endorsed by JD Vance years before he became a fervent backer of Donald Trump and – eventually – his vice-presidential running mate known for his derisive views on childless women.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr was asked if he would be vice-president under Donald Trump hours after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, it has been revealed. Kennedy reportedly rejected the suggestion from Calley Means, an entrepreneur who sometimes advised him on chronic diseases and was acting as an intermediary, according to the New York Times.

      Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, warned his opposite number, the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that history will judge him “poorly” because he paved the way to rightwing policies out of touch with the American people.
      Seven Republican states sue over Biden administration’s new student debt relief planRepublican-led states are again attempting to halt the Biden administration’s plans to implement a student debt forgiveness program.Seven states have filed a lawsuit challenging a new debt relief plan and said efforts were under way at the US Department of Education to start canceling loans as soon as this week, Reuters reported. That news came after the supreme court last week rejected the Biden administration’s bid to revive a different student debt relief plan.“We successfully halted their first two illegal student loan cancellation schemes; I have no doubt we will secure yet another win to block the third one,” Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, said in a statement.Kamala Harris will travel to Pittsburgh on Thursday to prepare for next Tuesday’s presidential debate with Donald Trump, according to reports.Harris will remain in Pittsburgh until the debate takes place on 10 September, CNN reported, citing sources familiar with the planning.In Pittsburgh, Harris will participate in intensive debate prep, informally known as “debate camp” led by Karen Dunn, a Washington-based lawyer who helped prepare Harris for her 2020 vice-presidential debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, a longtime Harris policy aide, the Washington Post reported.Harris is expected to meet voters in Pittsburgh and stay on the campaign trail in the key battleground state while also preparing for the debate, according to CNN.In recent weeks, Harris has held at least one debate prep session at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington, according to the Post.The Harris campaign is still negotiating with ABC News about rules for the 10 September debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, NBC News reported, citing a Harris campaign official.No agreement has been reached on the final rules, the official said.The offices of Donald Trump’s campaign and Republican National Committee were briefly evacuated last week after staff thought they discovered listening devices under a desk, according to a local police report.About 50 employees were evacuated on Thursday afternoon after people heard beeping under a staff member’s desk at the Trump campaign offices in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to the local police department.Three devices were found by police and security, who subsequently swept the floors of the building, the Washington Post reported. Employees returned to the building later that afternoon. The devices were identified as “a cricket noisemaker prank” that can be bought on Amazon, it said.A security official who worked in the building told the police he believed “the devices were part of a prank. The suites were canvassed for any additional devices and evidence yielding negative results”, the New York Times reported.The Philadelphia Eagles said it is aware of “counterfeit ads being circulated” that claim the American football team has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.Posters appeared on the streets of Philadelphia showing Harris wearing an Eagles helmet and holding an American football, with “KAMALA” in large bold letters and the tagline “Official candidate of the Philadelphia Eagles”.NBC Philadelphia reported spotting at least six of the counterfeit ads around the city before they were taken down on Monday. It is unclear who was responsible for them, it said.A rightwing thinktank report proposing sweeping restrictions to abortions and fertility treatments was endorsed by JD Vance years before he became a fervent backer of Donald Trump and – eventually – his vice-presidential running mate known for his derisive views on childless women.In 2017, months into Trump’s presidency, Vance wrote the foreword to the Index of Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays by conservative authors for the Heritage Foundation that included ideas for encouraging women to have children earlier and promoting a resurgence of “traditional” family structure. The essays lauded the increase in state laws restricting abortion rights and included arguments that the practice should become “unthinkable” in the US, a hardline posture the Democrats now say is the agenda of Trump and Vance, who they accuse of harbouring the intent to impose a national ban following a 2022 supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade and annulling the federal right to terminate a pregnancy.The report also includes an essay lamenting the spread of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments, with the author attributing them as reasons for women delaying having children and prioritising higher education rather than starting families.IVF has emerged as an issue in November’s presidential race after Trump said last week that he favoured it being covered by government funding or private health insurance companies – a stance seeming at odds with many Republicans, including Vance, who was one of 47 GOP senators to vote against a bill in June intended to expand access to the treatment.Donald Trump has a knack for rallying a remarkable range of political opinion around a common goal: preventing his return to the White House.That now includes prominent names from his own Republican party and top aides who worked under him as president. From former White House officials and national security staff to a once-worshipful press secretary, a host of one-time Trump fans are now lining up to join Democrats in declaring him unfit for another term in office.White House lawyers who served Republican presidents going back to Ronald Reagan and retired senior military officers have also denounced Trump as a danger to democracy.Adding to Trump’s humiliation, even members of his own cabinet – who once pledged their fealty with a subservience that would not displease Vladimir Putin – are declining to endorse him for re-election in November.Read the full story: Republicans are lining up to oppose Trump. Will it make a difference?A federal judge ordered Donald Trump and his campaign to stop using the song Hold On, I’m Coming by the late R&B artist and songwriter Issac Hayes.The decision came after Hayes’s estate sought an emergency injunction to stop the Trump campaign from using the song at campaign events, alleging the campaign does not have approval.Judge Thomas Thrash Jr ruled Trump and his campaign not to use the song “without proper license”, but he did not grant the estate’s request to order the campaign to take down recordings of past events in which it had used the song.Trump regularly used the song as his exit music for much of the past year, including at the Republican National Convention in July, according to the New York Times.

      Donald Trump claimed that “there was no conflict” during his visit to Arlington national cemetery last week, calling it “a made up story” by his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. The US army accused two campaign workers representing Trump of pushing aside an official who told them it was forbidden to take pictures at the graves of military members who had recently died.

      Jimmy McCain, the son of the late Republican senator John McCain, condemned Trump’s visit to the Arlington national cemetery last week as a “violation”. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be a backdrop for a political campaign, he told CNN.

      Fred Trump III, the nephew of Donald Trump, said the Republican presidential nominee “just doesn’t give a shit” about members of the US military. “He just doesn’t. Donald believes in Donald,” he told MSNBC.

      Donald Trump said he had “every right” to interfere with the results of the 2020 presidential election in a Fox News interview that aired on Sunday. The Harris campaign said Trump’s comments “makes it clear that he believes he is above the law”.

      The Harris campaign launched the “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour aimed at advocating for women’s reproductive rights starting today in Palm Beach, Florida. The second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, the Minnesota first lady, Gwen Walz, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and the Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez are among those who will be on the tour.

      The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee will transfer $25m to support down-ballot candidates.

      Kamala Harris is expected to announce new proposals meant to boost small businesses and entrepreneurs ahead of a campaign speech on Wednesday in New Hampshire, according to a report.

      The Manhattan district attorney’s office urged the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal case to rule on his motion to vacate his conviction, and not wait until a federal judge considers a separate motion filed by Trump last week to move the case into federal court.

      Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, warned his opposite number, the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that history will judge him “poorly” because he paved the way to rightwing policies out of touch with the American people.

      Pat Toomey, the former Republican senator for Pennsylvania, said he will not be voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the November election. Toomey said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but that he could not bring himself to support the Republican presidential candidate, citing Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr was asked if he would be vice-president under Donald Trump hours after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, it has been revealed. Kennedy reportedly rejected the suggestion from Calley Means, an entrepreneur who sometimes advised him on chronic diseases and was acting as an intermediary, according to the New York Times. More

    • 288 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      RFK Jr’s animal antics are bizarre – but his treatment of women, along with a litany of Kennedy men, is far more disturbing

      by

      America’s first family has been in the news again recently. This time, the focus has been Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. After nominating as an independent candidate for the US presidential election, he subsequently withdrew and endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump.

      His staunch anti-vaccination stance had already been reported, but then came the bizarre stories about him chainsawing the head off a dead whale and driving around with it attached to the roof of his car – after he’d already admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park ten years ago.

      Review: Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan (HarperCollins)

      The nephew of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and son of Robert (Bobby) F. Kennedy, the former US attorney general who was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, RFK Jr has a long history of inconsistent and embarrassing behaviour.

      But what is more concerning, according to Maureen Callahan’s new book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is his behaviour towards women, including the neglect and gaslighting of his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who died by suicide in 2012.

      RFK Jr neglected and gaslit his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, before she died by suicide in 2012.
      AAP

      She writes that he “remains unbothered and unquestioned about the circumstances” leading to the death of this “fragile woman who he tormented toward the end of their marriage and in the lead up to her suicide, cheating on her, cutting off her credit cards and access to cash, trying to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her she’d be ‘better off dead’.”

      RFK Jr’s prominence in the 2024 US election (Trump has appointed him to a senior role in his transition team) makes Ask Not particularly timely and topical. While the book mostly focuses on people and events from the past, it highlights the persistent influence of the Kennedy legacy on American politics.

      Entitlement and recklessness

      Ask Not draws a line between the Kennedy history and contemporary America, while also connecting the stories of the many women who have suffered at the expense of the Kennedy men’s extraordinary sense of entitlement and recklessness.

      Divided into 12 parts, with sections on 13 different women, Ask Not turns the attention from the prominent Kennedy men to the women they “destroyed”. Some of these women are well known. There are two sections devoted to Marilyn Monroe and three to Jackie Kennedy. Other women would have barely been noticed by the Kennedys until their lives were ended or ruined through associations with the family.

      Robert and Ethel Kennedy with their children, 1966. From right: Kathleen, 15; Joseph, 14; Robert Jr, 13; David, 11; Mary Courtney, 10; Michael, 8; Kerry, 7; and Christopher, 3.
      AAP

      Callahan identifies Pamela Kelley as one of those women. As a teenager, she was friends with RFK Jr and his brothers David and Joe. In August 1973, she reluctantly agreed to travel with David and Joe and others on a trip to Nantucket. Seven teenagers piled into an open jeep.

      According to Callahan, Joe tore through the streets of Nantucket, driving in circles before crossing into the other lane and incoming traffic. He swerved and the jeep flipped at least twice. “The carnage,” Callahan writes, “was unbelievable”. Two of the girls had broken necks. Pamela was thrown 30 metres into the air before landing on a tree trunk. She would never walk again.

      Six days later, Joe Kennedy pled not guilty in court, standing before Judge George Anastos, an old classmate of his late uncle, Joseph Kennedy. Callahan recounts the scene: “You had a great father and you have a great mother,” Anastos said. “Use your illustrious name as an asset instead of coming into court like this.” He gave Joe a $100 fine and let him go.

      There was a similar lack of accountability when Joe’s uncle, US Senator Ted Kennedy, faced court over the death of Mary Jo Kopechne a few years earlier. The young political staffer was the only passenger in a car that Ted Kennedy crashed after a party at Martha’s Vineyard in 1969.

      Ted had been drinking and was speeding when the car plunged from a bridge into the water. He left Mary Jo in the car to seek help but did not call the authorities. By the time trained rescuers arrived, Mary Jo had suffocated.

      Senator Ted Kennedy’s car is pulled from the water in July 1969. Mary Jo Kopechne was killed after Kennedy drove his car off Dyke Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island.
      AAP

      Defying belief

      The stories in Ask Not often defy belief. But most of the older stories in the book have been well and truly verified by now. For the more recent examples, Callahan has relied on original interviews with friends and families of the affected women, plus additional sources including other books and media reports. She provides notes for each woman included.

      She conducted original interviews with (mostly unnamed) people who knew John F. Kennedy Jr’s wife Carolyn Bessette, who died along with her sister when a plane he was flying crashed in 1999. She also spoke to those who knew RFK Jr’s second wife Mary Richardson, Mary Jo Kopechne, Pamela Kelley and a young girl called Martha Moxley.

      Martha Moxley, aged 14, a year before she was murdered.
      AAP

      Moxley was brutally murdered aged 15. RFK Jr’s then-teenage cousin, Michael Skakel, was convicted and jailed for the crime. After serving 11 years of a 20-year sentence he was released and the conviction was vacated, pending a retrial that never happened. RFK Jr later published a book, Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.

      Callahan also drew on “a long history of reporting on the Kennedy dynasty” as a writer for Vanity Fair and the New York Post. Callahan’s author note doesn’t specify whether she interviewed any of the Kennedy men. Although there is very little direct attribution in the book, Ask Not appears to be thoroughly researched and she is an excellent writer.

      Her language is concise and evocative. Each section reads like a tightly edited feature story. She draws the reader in, and at various points, leaves them wanting more. Ask Not is a long book, but it is also compulsively readable (not to be confused with an easy read; it’s frequently disturbing).

      A key strength is the unconventional structure. Divided into 12 parts, it does not follow a chronological order, instead combining the various stories of the women by themes such as “Rebels”, “The Girls”, “The Survivors” and “Falling Stars”.

      Unexpectedly, Ask Not includes sections on women within the Kennedy family: the matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and two of her four daughters, Rosemary and Kathleen (known as Kick), sisters to JFK, Bobby and Ted.

      These sections provide insights into the family’s attitudes towards women, driven largely by pervasive patriarchal values and misogyny, but also through Rose’s religious beliefs: “The only Catholic more devout than Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy may have been the pope.”

      From left, are, seated: Eunice, Jean, Edward, on lap of his father, Joe Kennedy Sr, Patricia, and Kathleen, and standing, Rosemary, Robert, John, mother Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and Joseph Jr. 1938.
      AAP

      When Kick Kennedy decided to marry an English protestant, she continued to have a relationship with her father Joe, while Rose completely cut her off. She died, aged 28, in a horrific plane crash in 1948.

      Her sister Rosemary lived a long life, but her story is no less tragic. According to Callahan, Rosemary was seen as different to her smart and sporty siblings. She was “slow at school, earnest, child-like and needy”. The Kennedys were winners; yet she was a loser.

      Her father Joe was so embarrassed of Rosemary that he hid her away for years before arranging for her to have experimental surgery at age 23. She was lobotomised and “left functionally as a two-year-old” and subsequently “stashed away in another state without any contact from her siblings or parents”.

      Dangerous men

      Ask Not starts with “Icons” and Carolyn Bessette, detailing her initial reluctance to allow her husband, JFK Jr, to fly her to Martha’s Vineyard on the night of July 16 1999.

      Long before he made a series of rash and senseless decisions that led to the plane crash that killed him, Carolyn and her sister, Lauren, JFK Jr had a history of selfish risk-taking. “No one could have believed that the kind, humble, gorgeous John Kennedy had a habit of putting others in danger too – most often his closest friends and girlfriends,” Callahan writes.

      JFK Jr had a history of selfish risk-taking before he, wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and her sister died in a plane crash he piloted.
      Luca Bruno/AAP

      “Speeding, swimming too far out into the ocean, driving recklessly onto sidewalks or while high on pot, skiing in whiteout conditions, acting like an expert in all sports when really he was just an amateur – there was little John wouldn’t dare and he bullied almost everyone in his life to be as wild as he was.” Like many of his male relatives, JFK Jr was not used to being told “no”. Whatever he wanted, he got. His life was defined by a sense of entitlement others would struggle to comprehend.

      The initial focus on JFK Jr works well, as he exemplifies the recklessness and carelessness of the Kennedy men that Callahan outlines throughout the rest of the book. For most of the Kennedy men, a sense of entitlement extended beyond their professional lives and into their interactions with women. JFK Jr was somewhat of an exception, according to Callahan. His father, on the other hand, may have the worst reputation for womanising.

      Even though some of the women in JFK’s life had shared their experiences publicly before, they make for confronting reading. As president, JFK would invite young women who worked at the White House to drinks in his office before offering them “a tour of the residence”. When 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley agreed, the president pushed her onto Jackie Kennedy’s bed, pulled off her underwear and had sex with her.

      Jackie Kennedy famously endured her husband’s relentless womanising.
      John Rous/AAP

      According to Callahan, JFK Jr had a voracious sexual appetite. He constantly slept around, repeatedly infecting his wife with sexually transmitted diseases, sharing lovers and prostitutes with his friends and brothers. Concerningly, his womanising was well known in Washington circles, including among the press who turned a blind eye.

      A destructive force

      Other Kennedy men may not have been as extreme, but they tended to share a perception that women were objects of lust, something that they were owed.

      In diaries he left around for the house for his wife Mary to read, RFK Jr kept a list of all the women he had been with. There were so many – “astronomical numbers”. He ranked them from 1 to 10, as if he were a teenager, according to Callahan.

      “The Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force, both in our politics and in our culture,” Callahan writes in the prologue, citing RFK Jr’s current influence as an example.

      We must examine the Kennedy history, Callahan argues, and question the family’s enduring legacy. “Do the Kennedys deserve to remain a power centre in American life and politics?” she asks. She ends the prologue with an explanation for the book’s title, taken from JFK’s famous 1961 inaugural address, and a call for the question to be reframed.

      “Ask not” has also forever been an admonition to women in the Kennedy sphere: Ask no questions. Don’t ask for help or respect, for fairness or justice.This book takes that as a dare. Ask Not?Let’s. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Ex-aide to New York governors charged with being agent of Chinese government

      by

      A former New York state government official who worked for the former governor Andrew Cuomo and current governor, Kathy Hochul, was charged on Tuesday with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors revealed in a sprawling indictment.Linda Sun, who held numerous posts in New York state government before rising to the rank of deputy chief of staff for Hochul, was arrested on Tuesday morning along with her husband, Chris Hu, at their $3.5m home on Long Island.Prosecutors said Sun, at the request of Chinese officials, blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to the governor’s office, shaped New York governmental messaging to align with the priorities of the Chinese government and attempted to facilitate a trip to China for a high-level politician in New York, the indictment said. Hu is charged with money-laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of means of identification.In return, she and her husband received benefits including help for Hu’s China-based business activities and undisclosed tickets to performances by visiting Chinese orchestra and ballet groups, the indictment says. A Chinese government official’s personal chef prepared “Nanjing-style salted ducks” that were delivered to Sun’s parents’ home, it adds.The couple then laundered the financial proceeds, using them to buy their property in Manhasset, a condominium in Hawaii for $1.9m and luxury cars including a 2024 Ferrari, the indictment says.“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the … state executive chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the” country’s communist party, US attorney Breon Peace said. “The illicit scheme enriched the defendant’s family to the tune of millions of dollars.”A lawyer for Sun, Seth DuCharme, did not immediately return an email seeking comment. Sun and Hu were expected to make an initial court appearance on Tuesday afternoon, a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn said.The indictment outlines a series of exchanges Sun had with officials in the Chinese consulate in New York in January 2021, when Cuomo was still governor and Hochul was lieutenant governor. Neither leader is named in the document, but they are instead referred to as “Politician-1” and “Politician-2.”After Chinese officials requested a lunar new year video from the governor, Sun said Hochul could probably do it and asked for “talking points of things you want her to mention”.“Mostly holiday wishes and hope for friendship and cooperation / Nothing too political,” an official told her, according to the indictment.Sun later told a different official that she had argued with Hochul’s speechwriter over the draft because the speechwriter insisted on mentioning the “Uyghur situation” in China. She promised that she would not let that happen, and the final speech did not mention the Muslim ethnic minority, according to the indictment.The FBI searched the couple’s $3.5m home in Manhasset in late July but declined to release details at the time.Sun worked in state government for about 15 years, holding jobs in Cuomo’s administration and eventually becoming Hochul’s deputy chief of staff, according to her LinkedIn profile. In November 2022, Sun took a job at the New York labor department as deputy commissioner for strategic business development, but she left that job months later in March 2023, the profile said.In a statement, a spokesperson for Hochul’s office said the administration fired Sun after “discovering evidence of misconduct”.“This individual was hired by the executive chamber more than a decade ago. We terminated her employment in March 2023 after discovering evidence of misconduct, immediately reported her actions to law enforcement and have assisted law enforcement throughout this process,” the statement reads.A spokesperson for Cuomo did not immediately return an emailed request for comment.Sun and Hu live in a gated community on Long Island called Stone Hill. The couple bought the house in 2021 but placed it in a trust earlier this year, records show. More