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      Project 2025 started a half century ago. A Trump win could solidify it forever | David Sirota

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      You can be forgiven for thinking Vice-President Kamala Harris’s first attack ad against Donald Trump seems a little far-fetched. Launched this week, the television spot has all the hallmarks of a YouTube video promoting an internet conspiracy theory. There’s the obligatory scary music and the baritone narrator warning about a mysterious manifesto with the kind of cartoonish name that a Bond villain would label his blueprint for global conquest: Project 2025.And yet, this isn’t a Dr Evil send-up: Project 2025 is very real, it is absolutely Trump’s agenda and it wasn’t some slapdash screed that came out of nowhere. It is the culmination of the 50-year plot that our reporters at the Lever have uncovered in our new audio series Master Plan – a scheme first envisioned by the US supreme court justice who created the foundation for Citizens United and the modern era of corporate politics.Project 2025 touts itself as “the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025” – a grandiose and self-important billing, but no overstatement. The 922-page manifesto is a plug-and-play agenda of detailed policies designed to immediately empower the conservative movement, billionaires and Republican donors the moment Trump is sworn in for a second term.Highlights include plans to kill off climate regulations; eviscerate pollution laws; terminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that protects Americans from Wall Street scams; raise taxes on the middle class to finance billionaire and corporate tax cuts; empower the White House to replace civil servants with ideological loyalists; and limit the government’s authority to enforce campaign finance laws designed to deter pay-to-play corruption.The blueprint’s provenance means that it isn’t some fanciful pie-in-the-sky wishlist – it is a meticulously constructed action plan designed to be implemented, just as an earlier version of it was in Trump’s first term.Project 2025 was built with the involvement of at least 140 former Trump administration officials, it is endorsed by a constellation of oligarch-funded conservative groups, and it is published by the powerful Heritage Foundation, which Trump himself lauded as “a great group” that is “going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America”.This connection to the Heritage Foundation isn’t incidental. It tells us that conservatives see a Trump presidency as the final stage of their grand half-century scheme to destroy the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society – a scheme first outlined a half-century ago.Heritage was originally launched in the early 1970s with seed funding from the beer magnate Joseph Coors. He told a historian that his political activism at the time was specifically “stirred” by a 1971 memo authored by the soon-to-be supreme court justice Lewis Powell. That memo written for the US Chamber of Commerce implored corporations and oligarchs to be “far more aggressive” in influencing the political system, which he feared was becoming far too responsive to popular demands for the regulation of business.“It is essential that spokesmen for the enterprise system – at all levels and at every opportunity – be far more aggressive than in the past,” wrote Powell, who would soon after author a landmark supreme court ruling giving corporations new rights to spend money influencing elections. “There should be not the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.”According to documents unearthed in Master Plan, the chamber established a taskforce on the Powell memorandum composed of executives from some of the country’s most powerful corporations including General Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Amway and United States Steel.At a series of secret meetings in the 1970s, those powerbrokers formulated ways corporate groups could build out their political, legal and communications apparatus. The resulting political infrastructure – conservative thinktanks, law firms and advocacy groups – aimed to weaken campaign finance laws so that corporations could wield more power, and then use that power to tilt the courts and legislative systems in their favor.With Powell’s memo inspiring Coors’s lavish funding, Heritage carved out a special role for itself in all this nascent organizing: it focused intently on public policy.“Around the vortex of Heritage have spun projects, individuals and organizations devoted to Coors’ ambition to rescue the United States from the gloom and despair he believes it to be in,” the Washington Post reported in 1975. “Weyrich and Coors agree that the liberalizing trend must be halted or the United States will become, in effect, another version of godless communism.”In a White House memo just before that story was published, President Gerald Ford’s deputy chief of staff, Dick Cheney, told his boss, Donald Rumsfeld: “Coors may have problems by using this tax exempt foundation to support political activities.”But as the Powell memo movement’s conservative legal groups secured supreme court victories gutting campaign finance laws and ushering in the era of dark money, such groups faced little scrutiny in how they blurred the legal distinction between dispassionate charity and political machine.Heritage was most certainly the latter, and within a few years of its launch, it was focused on influencing presidential administrations with the original version of Project 2025 – Mandate for Leadership, described in the press at the time as “a blueprint for grabbing the government by its frayed New Deal lapels and shaking out 48 years of liberal policy”.“Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981 – the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency,” Heritage gushes in the foreword of Project 2025, which is officially the ninth installment of the Mandate for Leadership series. “By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy.”Underscoring that success, Reagan delivered a speech at Heritage lauding “the importance of the Heritage Foundation, the remarkable work of Ed Feulner, Joe and Holly Coors [and] so many of you in this room in bringing to Washington the political revolution.”Fast forward through the neoliberal rampage of tax cuts and deregulation that defined Reagan’s term and three more Republican presidencies, and the question now is: would that same political revolution inspired by the Powell memo’s master plan continue if Trump wins again?The recent past offers clues: during the first year of Trump’s first term, Heritage boasted that two-thirds of its 2016 Mandate for Leadership recommendations were championed by the Republican president.Will Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s agenda find the same receptive audience in a second Trump administration? Or should we trust Trump when now – under assault by Harris’s criticism – he insists he doesn’t even know what Project 2025 is?The answer to that can be found in the words of Trump’s own running mate.“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill,” wrote the Republican vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance. “It is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      Trump campaign strategy pivots to praying he wins September debate

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      ​Donald Trump’s campaign insists that they’re pursuing multiple strategies against Kamala Harris, but the true picture that is emerging is that the Trump senior advisers’ grand plan, for now, is to pray that the former US president ​has a good night at the presidential debate next month.​The game plan, in other words, has become one of hoping that Trump wins the debate so they can regain momentum – a stunning approach that shows the serious predicament for Trump and his campaign as he struggles to find ways to land effective attacks against the vice-president just months before the election.​What has happened internally in the Trump campaign in recent weeks is the realization that nothing they do in the period up to the debate is likely to cut through in a significant way that blunts Harris’s gains that have her level in key swing state polls, according to people close to the matter.​And because they don’t think the messaging will cut through, senior advisers are left hoping that Trump can energize voters with his performance on stage, the people said.Trump is certain to continue his day-to-day campaign work until the debate on 10 September: he has a busy travel schedule that will see him do a town hall event in Wisconsin and a rally in Pennsylvania this week, after his visit to the Arlington national cemetery became mired in controversy.​He has also had some success in cutting through the news cycle in recent days, including when he took over headlines at the end of last week when Robert F Kennedy Jr gave his endorsement.​But the reality is that good news has been in short supply. Since Joe Biden exited the race in July and Harris rapidly replaced him, her campaign has flipped the narrative, turning a consistent Biden loss in the polls into a narrow but solid Harris lead.With Trump struggling to frame the narrative against Harris, the general posture inside campaign leadership is to write off the regular programming that won’t change the race – and look to a debate that might.View image in fullscreenThe pivot to praying Trump does well at the debate is practical, even if writing off two weeks is unusual. Trump can perform on stage, and knocked opponents back in 2016 and 2020 and against Biden in 2024 with sarcastic quips and an avalanche of disorientating false claims.The campaign also feels that Trump can use the debate as an opportunity to get across to a national primetime audience his messaging points criticizing Harris on policy – accusing Harris of allowing waves of illegal immigrants and not cracking down on crime – that have so far not broken through.As the reasoning goes, even if the television networks decline to air Trump’s rallies or remarks criticizing Harris day-to-day, they will be forced to air Trump and his attack lines when he has the floor.Trump’s advisers have also been buoyed by the likelihood that microphones will be muted when it is not a candidate’s turn to speak, believing it defangs Harris in being able to fact-check him in real time and in her ability to make quips of her own.The muted microphones have been a particularly big deal for Trump’s advisers, who internally have been repeatedly pushing for “CNN rules”, in a reference to the disastrous CNN debate with Biden last month when microphones were muted.It comes as several Trump advisers have warned about Harris’s jabs in debates in 2020: telling Mike Pence: “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking”, and responding to former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard – now involved in Trump’s debate prep – in the Democratic primary debate with chiding comments. More

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      Black voters in Georgia want affordable access to healthcare. Will Kamala Harris win them over?

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      Around 4am last Christmas Eve, Kuanita Murphy’s father suddenly became short of breath and briefly passed out. Without a medical facility nearby, Murphy had to drive him 45 miles east to Albany, Georgia, to the Phoebe Putney memorial hospital. The only hospital in their small town of Cuthbert, Georgia – Southwest Georgia regional medical center – had closed down three years earlier due to financial strain from failing infrastructure and an increase in uninsured patients.After waiting for several hours, Murphy’s dad was finally admitted at noon into a hospital room for internal bleeding and a restricted heart valve. While he eventually underwent lifesaving surgery, Murphy said that he would have received treatment faster had Cuthbert still had a hospital.“He had some pain dealing with his chest and the anxiety of not knowing exactly what was going on with him,” Murphy, the editor of Rural Leader magazine, said. “That made it worse off than it probably was, not knowing and having to wait.”Hospital closures are top of mind for Black voters throughout Georgia, since it’s one of 10 states to reject Medicaid expansion. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris launched a two-day bus tour through south Georgia that will culminate with a rally in Savannah on Thursday afternoon. “Campaigning in this part of the Peach state is critical as it represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban and urban Georgians – with a large proportion of Black voters and working-class families,” the campaign said in a statement.Since 2013, 12 hospitals have closed down in rural and urban areas throughout the state, according to the Georgia Hospital Association. In 2022, two Wellstar Atlanta medical centers closed in the Atlanta metro area, where more than two-thirds of the 4,281 emergency room patients were Black, according to 2019 data from the private, non-profit Wellstar Health System cited by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.In Murphy’s eyes, the shuttered medical facility where she was born 49 years ago has served as a rallying cry before the upcoming presidential election. The city’s residents, she said, want to “back a candidate that is going to support Medicaid expansion, or affordable access to healthcare”.Murphy, like most residents in majority-Black Cuthbert, has long voted Democrat. Although Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since 1992, the Republican-led state legislature has rejected expanding Medicaid coverage to more lower-income adults. The Biden-Harris administration has long urged all states to expand Medicaid – a legacy that health policy experts predict Democratic nominee Harris will continue if she becomes president.Throughout her vice-presidency, Harris has discussed the need to expand Medicaid coverage for postpartum mothers from two to 12 months after giving birth. “We also must work together to call on Congress to advance other components of our Build Back agenda, to expand Medicaid in every state,” Harris said during a speech in 2021. “People live in every state, that’s the logic.”Floundering healthcare facilities might stay open if they have received Medicaid reimbursements for patients who otherwise couldn’t pay their bills, according to health policy experts. As they gear up for state and federal elections, healthcare advocates and community organizations say they want Georgians to vote for candidates who prioritize affordable and equitable access to healthcare.Bobby Jenkins, the Cuthbert mayor, believes that the state’s hospital closures could drive voter turnout there. “That’s a way of engaging people in the electoral process to get them to understand this is a direct impact of your vote, or it could be a consequence of your lack of voting,” he said. Case in point, Jenkins said, is that Biden-Harris’s 2025 fiscal year budget includes “Medicaid-like” coverage to people in states that haven’t expanded the program. Meanwhile, Donald Trump sought to repeal Medicaid expansion and supported work requirements for people to qualify for free government healthcare during his presidency.‘Our governor said no, which is crazy’According to surveys and canvassing sessions, access to healthcare has remained the most pressing concern only behind the economy for Black and brown communities over the past two years, said Kierra Stanford, the lead community health organizer for the non-profit New Georgia Project. At ice cream teach-ins and public meetings, Stanford tells residents that hospitals could stay open if state and federal leaders expanded Medicaid. While the group is nonpartisan, they encourage voters to research candidates’ stances on healthcare.Healthcare redlining, which Stanford defined as “the deliberate managing of healthcare resources in Black communities”, has led hospital systems to divest from historically marginalized areas. “It’s an ongoing trend,” Stanford said, that “has been exacerbated by not expanding Medicaid”.In May, Stanford held a public meeting with 30 attendees in East Point, Georgia, a majority-Black city south-west of Atlanta, to discuss the connection between hospital closures and the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid. A few days later, the New Georgia Project packed the public comment period of an East Point city council meeting to share their concerns about access to healthcare.On the state level, the New Georgia Project releases a voting guide to alert voters of pressing healthcare concerns before elections. Eventually, they plan to roll out a scorecard that shows the state politicians who didn’t vote to expand Medicaid. On the national level, Stanford explains to voters: “Georgia has literally been offered the funds, but our governor said no, which is crazy.”“I try to tell people that the money that’s being taken out of your check for federal taxes,” Stanford said, “you’re paying for healthcare for people in California, for people in these other states that have expanded Medicaid.”Hospital closures hit Black rural communities the hardest, said Sherrell Byrd, executive director of Sowega Rising, a Georgia-based non-profit focused on coalition-building and rural revitalization. “When a hospital closes in rural areas, it’s much more devastating than in urban areas, because it’s like a black hole,” Byrd said. “It takes out a whole subset of the economy side of the community.”It’s common for residents to drive up to an hour or to cross state lines to access hospitals. The organization encourages rural residents to speak to their legislators about their healthcare access concerns, but Byrd said that politicians have not shared any steps they have taken to solve the issue.“That’s where people start to be frustrated, because year after year, they still don’t have hospitals,” Byrd said. “And so that’s when people become disenfranchised.”Hospital closures are top of mind for Medlyne Zamor, a Rockdale county voter who was previously unconcerned about candidates’ healthcare platforms. She didn’t see the need to expand Medicaid and thought that the state would benefit from funding other institutions. However, after a spate of hospital visits due to fibroids in 2022, Zamor met other patients who had been personally affected by the closures. Some of them had needed to wait several months to see specialists. That opened her eyes to the issue, she said: “When I saw how the hospital closures … impacted them in the community, it definitely made me shift my vote to expansion.” Now she only votes for candidates in state and federal offices who support Medicaid expansion.As a result, Zamor began volunteering at the New Georgia Project, where she hosts events to inform Georgians about the lack of access to healthcare. She also addresses the issue by phone banking, sending out email blasts to residents and writing senators. “These hospital closures, not only does it affect the nearby citizens,” Zamor said, “but also it affects the workers, and it affects the [remaining] hospitals, too.”State and federal politicians hold the power in slowing down the closures by extending healthcare coverage to lower-income adults, “relieving fragile hospitals from providing free care to uninsured patients”, said Laura Colbert, the executive director of the non-profit Georgians for a Healthy Future. “After that, state and federal leaders should work together to slow consolidation among hospitals and other investors, which can accelerate some rural hospital closures.”Congress members have stepped up to save Cuthbert’s healthcare system after its only hospital closed four years ago. The city plans to establish a new hospital after recently receiving nearly $12m in federal funding. The Randolph County Hospital Authority is currently working with an accounting firm on a feasibility study to ensure that the facility stays in the community for good. More

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      The Democrats sound less lofty, more earthy – and it’s working | Margaret Sullivan

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      Back in 2016, as Michelle Obama was doing a campaign speech for Hillary Clinton, she urged a way to deal with bullies like Donald Trump.“When they go low, we go high,” the former first lady said.Later, once the catchphrase had caught on, she explained that “when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level”.Taking the high road sounded inspiring and possibly effective. Was it? Trump never stopped his horrid ways; but the Democrats, having lost to him in 2016, managed to defeat him in 2020 with Joe Biden, known for his empathy and decency.However you evaluate that, the Democrats feel like a different party these days. Their tone has changed from lofty to earthy.Consider the squawking chickens. When Trump waffled on whether he’d participate in the next presidential candidate debate, Kamala Harris’s campaign didn’t exactly go high. Instead, they posted barnyard sound effects and emoji over footage of Trump speaking and asked if he was getting scared.An Axios headline summarized the new tone: “Taunting Trump: Harris campaign’s sneer tactics.”The digital campaign team operating out of Wilmington, Delaware, “has pivoted from the stuffier, decorous Biden for President campaign to a saucier, more ruthless Harris for President campaign”.And don’t forget the couch jokes.Prominent Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren and Tim Walz, have made a few none-too-subtle wisecracks about an untrue rumor that Trump running mate JD Vance had an unusual relationship with some living-room furniture.The basis for this sordid tale has been debunked. The Associated Press not only fact-checked the claim, but then deleted the fact-check, which was headlined, No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.Nevertheless, uproarious cheers and laughter followed when Warren took her shot, speaking at the Democratic national convention about the need for an economy that benefits working people: “Trust Donald Trump and JD Vance to look out for your family? Shoot, I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch.”The conservative New York Post tut-tutted: “Elizabeth Warren makes crude couch joke in apparent reference to JD Vance.” Steven Cheung , a Trump spokesperson, complained to Axios: “Acting like whiny schoolchildren is not a political strategy, but it is a coping mechanism for the Kamala campaign who knows they have a weak candidate incapable of being authentic.”Somehow, charges of immaturity ring a little hollow from this crowd, led by a former president who specializes in dumb nicknames and cringey insults, from “Little Marco” Rubio to “Sleepy Joe” Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump occasionally tries to claim the high ground but may need more practice. Last year he posted about the Florida governor, then a rival for the Republican nomination: “I will never call Ron DeSanctimonious ‘Meatball’ Ron, as the Fake News is insisting I will.”Besides, the Harris campaign’s irreverence isn’t really all that low. Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, who should be appointed talker-in-chief, had the perfect response when challenged to defend Barack Obama’s suggestive hand-gesture joke (big? small?) about Trump’s obsession with crowd size.“We aren’t completely above the temptation to tweak our opponents,” Buttigieg admitted, while noting that the Harris campaign’s overall tone is positive and forward-looking, not mired in darkness and grievance.How effective is this counterpunching? After hesitating for days about the debate, Trump finally agreed to show up in Philadelphia next month.Did his capitulation have anything to do with suggestions that he was a coward? Any relationship to the chickens squawking as they crossed the low road?Maybe not. But for the Harris campaign, the barnyard noises do seem to be delivering the intended message.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      This presidential race will be fought over competing understandings of ‘freedom’ | Eric Foner

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      The recently concluded Democratic national convention marked a sharp turn in US political rhetoric. “Freedom, where are you?” Beyoncé sang in the video that opened the gathering. Her song proved to be a fitting introduction to the days that followed. Joe Biden had made saving democracy from the threat of Maga authoritarianism the centerpiece of his ill-fated campaign for re-election. The keynote of Kamala Harris’s convention, invoked by nearly every speaker, was “freedom”.Nearly a century ago, in the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt linked freedom to economic security for ordinary Americans – “freedom from want” was one of the four freedoms summarizing the country’s aims in the second world war. This definition of freedom, a product of the New Deal, assumed an active role for the federal government. But since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan in effect redefined freedom as limited government, low taxes and unregulated economic enterprise, Democrats have pretty much ceded the word to their opponents. Now they want it back.Of course freedom – along with liberty, generally used as an equivalent – has been a US preoccupation ever since the American revolution gave birth to a nation that identified itself, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, as an “empire of liberty”, a unique embodiment of freedom in a world overrun by oppression. The declaration of independence includes liberty among mankind’s unalienable rights; the constitution announces at the outset its aim of securing the “blessings of liberty”. As a result, freedom has long been a powerful rhetorical weapon. As the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940: “Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow, knows that this is ‘The land of the free’ … [and] the ‘cradle of liberty’.”Yet freedom is neither a fixed idea nor an evolutionary progress toward a predetermined goal. The history of US freedom is a tale of debates and struggles. Often, battles for control of the idea illustrate the contrast between “negative” and “positive” meanings of freedom, a dichotomy elaborated by Sir Isaiah Berlin in an influential essay in 1958. Negative liberty defines freedom as the absence of outside restraints on individual action. Positive liberty is a form of empowerment – the ability to set and fulfill one’s goals. As the contrast between FDR and Reagan illustrates, the first sees government as a threat to freedom and the second as removing barriers to its enjoyment, often by government intervention.The Democratic convention built upon this history. Positive and negative freedom co-existed and reinforced one another. The frequent calls for “reproductive freedom” – the right to make intimate decisions free of governmental interference (or as vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz put it, the principle of “mind your own damn business”) – embraced and expanded the idea of negative freedom. Never before has the 60s slogan “the personal is political” found such powerful expression at a party convention.Positive freedom also made its appearance, notably in Bernie Sanders’ litany of future government action against the likes of big oil and big pharma in the name of combating economic inequality and “corporate greed”. Walz, echoing FDR, commented that people who lack access to affordable housing and healthcare are not truly free.There is another crucial element to the ongoing debate about freedom: who is entitled to enjoy it. When the constitution was ratified, the United States was home to half a million enslaved African Americans. The first laws defining how immigrants could become citizens, enacted in the 1790s, limited the process to “white” persons. It took more than half a century for slavery to be eradicated and for Black persons, for a brief period during the era of Reconstruction that followed the civil war, to be incorporated into the body politic.This history exemplifies what the historian Tyler Stovall, in a recent book, calls “White Freedom”. Fast forward to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. With its freedom rides, freedom songs and insistent cry “freedom now”, that revolution linked freedom with equality regardless of race or national origin. What is now remembered simply as “the movement” did more to redefine the meaning of freedom than any other development of the last century. Its fruits were visible every night in the Democratic convention’s remarkably diverse composition.Throughout our history, freedom has been defined, in large measure, by its limits. This is how the Confederacy was able to claim to be fighting for liberty. The historian Jefferson Cowie, whose book Freedom’s Dominion won the Pulitzer prize for history in 2023, argues that negative freedom, expressed as opposition to federal intervention in local affairs, has often boiled down to little more than the determination of local elites to exercise political and economic power over subordinate groups without outside interference. Civil rights were condemned as a threat to white people’s liberty (the freedom, for example, to choose who is allowed to live in one’s neighborhood). The vaunted independence of men depended on limiting the freedom of women.With the party conventions over, the campaign now becomes, in part, a contest to define the meaning of freedom. Historical precedents exist for such a battle. In 1936, the New York Times observed that the fight for possession of “the ideal of freedom” was the central issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Three decades later, the journalist Theodore White noted that freedom was the “dominant word” of both civil rights demonstrators and supporters of the conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, but they meant entirely different things by it. The United States, he concluded, sorely needed “a commonly-agreed-on concept of freedom”.Freedom is often used to mobilize support in wartime. No recent president employed it for this purpose more egregiously than George W Bush, who made freedom an all-purpose justification for the invasion of Iraq. In his first inaugural address, Bush used the words “freedom”, “free” or “liberty” seven times. In his second, a 10-minute speech delivered after the invasion, they appeared no fewer than 49 times.Bush’s egregious distortion of the ideal of freedom seemed to discourage his successors from using the word at all. Barack Obama preferred the language of community and personal responsibility. Nor has freedom been a major theme of Donald Trump, who prefers to speak of raw military and economic power. But Trump’s long campaign to deny that Obama is a US citizen, and his calls for the immense deportation of undocumented immigrants, resonate with those who seek to redraw freedom’s boundaries along racial and nativist lines.The Democratic convention appears to have guaranteed that the 2024 election will be a contest over the meaning of freedom. Whatever the result, it will likely define American freedom for years to come.

      Eric Foner’s many books on American history include The Story of American Freedom More

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      Trump staffers reported over altercation at Arlington cemetery during photo op

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      Officials at Arlington national cemetery have filed a report over the behavior of members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff who reportedly shoved and verbally abused an employee during a “crass” photo opportunity for the Republican presidential candidate.The officials confirmed that a confrontation took place at the Virginia cemetery on Monday after the former president participated in a wreath-laying ceremony for 13 US servicemen and -women killed in a 2021 suicide bomb attack outside Kabul airport in Afghanistan.In a statement, Arlington acknowledged one of its representatives became involved in the altercation with two Trump staffers, telling them that only cemetery representatives were allowed to take video and photographs in Section 60, an area where recent US casualties, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, are buried.“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” the statement said, adding that “a report was filed” over the incident.“Arlington National Cemetery reinforced and widely shared this law and its prohibitions with all participants,” the statement said.The staffers “verbally abused and pushed the official aside” as the person attempted to prevent them from accompanying Trump into the section, according to NPR, which first published the allegation on Tuesday night.JD Vance later on Wednesday dismissed the row as media exaggeration over “a little disagreement”. But Trump’s running mate also laid into Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic rival for the White House in November and the US vice-president, for the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the chaotic US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying Harris could “go to hell”.At an event in Wisconsin later on Wednesday, Vance was asked by a journalist whether or not someone who wants to be president should have to abide by the law outlined by Arlington.In response, he accused the media of “acting like Donald Trump filmed a TV commercial at a gravesite”.Following the wreath-laying, photographs from his visit showed Trump grinning and flashing a thumbs-up sign as he stood at the graves of several of the fallen military members, imagery that drew swift rebuke.The family of Master Sgt Andrew Marckesano, who is buried in Arlington, issued a statement on Wednesday saying that they had not given Trump’s staff permission to film at Marckesano’s gravesite, though another family, that of Sgt Darin Taylor Hoover, also buried there, had given permission, the New York Times reported.In a statement shared with the New York Times, Marckesano’s sister Michelle said: “According to our conversation with Arlington National Cemetery, the Trump campaign staffers did not adhere to the rules that were set in place for this visit to Staff Sergeant Hoover’s gravesite in Section 60, which lays directly next to my brother’s grave.”She continued: “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.”View image in fullscreenTrump was reported in 2018 to have canceled a visit to an American military cemetery outside Paris because he thought the dead soldiers were “suckers” and “losers”, and because he did not want the rain to mess up his hair.Instead of an apology, the Trump campaign attempted to turn around the narrative of the Arlington incident, with senior officials separately branding the cemetery’s representative “a despicable individual” who was experiencing “a mental health episode”.“There was no physical altercation as described and we are prepared to release footage if such defamatory claims are made,” the campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.”The senior Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita, meanwhile, posted a video to X of Trump placing flowers on a grave, and launched a tirade against the Arlington staff member, saying they were “spreading lies”.“For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” LaCivita, a former marine, said in a statement reported by NBC.Mark Esper, a former defense secretary under Donald Trump, told CNN on Wednesday morning that he hoped the reported altercation would be investigated, adding that the grounds should never be used for “partisan political purposes”.Members of some of the service members’ families also issued a statement, supporting Trump and thanking him for his visit, which he posted to his Truth Social network.Vance was speaking during a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, when he said of the US military deaths: “Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened. She wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up. She can go to hell!”Trump has previously attempted to gain political capital from the haphazard 2021 US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which he signed off on during his single term of office and which took place during the first year of Joe Biden’s administration.“Caused by Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, the humiliation in Afghanistan set off the collapse of American credibility and respect all around the world,” Trump claimed on Monday in a speech at the National Guard Association conference in Michigan commemorating the third anniversary of the Kabul airport attack.A scathing state department report published earlier this year criticized both Biden and Trump for decisions they made leading to the chaotic evacuation, and the bombing at the airport gate that killed 150 Afghans alongside the 13 Americans.A group called Veterans for Responsible Leadership posted on X, at the top of a thread going into the cemetery rules: “Trump not only violated the sanctity of Arlington, but he violated the official cemetery conduct.”Hellen Sullivan, Chris Stein and Maya Yang contributed reporting More

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      Vance says Harris can ‘go to hell’ in critical remarks on Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal – live

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      JD Vance said at a rally that Kamala Harris can “go to hell” as he heavily criticized the Biden administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal.The Republican vice-presidential candidate was speaking at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. Republicans have long sought to use the Afghanistan pullout to attack Joe Biden and are now using the same line of criticism against Harris in hopes of defeating the Democrat in November.Sarah Palin won a new trial in her libel lawsuit against the New York Times.A jury in 2022 rejected the former Alaska governor’s claims of defamation. Palin had argued that the newspaper damaged her reputation by linking her campaign rhetoric to the 2011 Arizona shooting that wounded US representative Gabby Giffords and left six others dead.On Wednesday, a federal appeals court ruled that she should receive a new trial, and found that the judge in the original proceedings made several errors, including wrongly excluding evidence.A spokesperson for the Times called Wednesday’s decision “disappointing” while Palin’s lawyer said it was “a significant step forward”.Mike Waltz, a Republican congressman, shared a statement from the families of US soldiers killed and injured during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, who said they approved of Donald Trump’s campaign staff taking photos and videos during his visit to Arlington national cemetery on Monday:However, according to NPR, an Arlington official got into an altercation with Trump’s campaign staff because the former president’s entourage had been visiting a section of the grounds where only cemetery employees can take photos.It’s unclear whether Trump having the permission of some of the families of those buried there is relevant to the cemetery’s policies.Speaking of Donald Trump, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that the former president is gearing up to continue his legal challenge against special counsel Jack Smith, who yesterday unveiled a new indictment against him for trying to overturn the 2020 election:Donald Trump is expected to​ continue to battle against criminal charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election by challenging further parts of the revised indictment that removed allegations​ the US supreme court found were subject to immunity​.The superseding indictment ​filed on Tuesday by special counsel prosecutors mainly removed allegations about Trump’s efforts to use the​ justice department to ​obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and reframed the narrative to say Trump was being charged in his capacity as a candidate​.The document retains the same four criminal ​conspiracy statutes against Trump that were originally filed last summer. But portions of the new indictment have been rewritten to emphasize that Trump was not acting in his official capacity during his efforts to try​ to overturn the election.Trump’s lawyers see the changes as minimal and will seek to pare back the charges further, ​according to people familiar with the matter, because they consider large parts of what remains in the updated indictment to be presumptively immune conduct that the judge needs to resolve​.In that sense, there are no immediate consequences of the ​special ​counsel Jack Smith getting a superseding indictment in the case. Trump still ​plans to initiate new litigation, ​which will be appealed to the US court of appeals for the DC circuit​, and any trial would not happen before the November election.JD Vance said the Trump campaign was given permission to have a photographer present during his visit this week to a section of Arlington national cemetery where photography is not allowed.“There is verifiable evidence that the campaign was allowed to have a photographer there … they were invited to have a photographer there,” Vance said during a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.NPR has reported that two Trump campaign staffers got in an altercation with a Arlington official for filming and taking pictures in a section of the cemetery reserved for recent US military casualties, and where only staff members are allowed to use cameras.Addressing reports of a scuffle, Vance said: “The altercation at Arlington cemetery is the media creating a story where I really don’t think that there is one,” and, “Apparently somebody at Arlington cemetery, some staff member, had a little disagreement with somebody, and they have turned the media has turned this into a national news story.”During an appearance in Erie, Pennsylvania, this afternoon, JD Vance trotted out a new attack line against Kamala Harris, accusing her of running a “copycat campaign”.The Ohio senator, who Donald Trump selected as his running mate last month, said, without offering evidence, that the Democratic nominee had adopted the same policies as his campaign.“If you look at her campaign the past week and a half, she pretends that she agrees with Donald J Trump on every issue. She is running a copycat campaign,” Vance said.There are wide differences between the two campaigns – something Vance well knows, considering that he spent much of his speech attacking Harris for her support of efforts to encourage electric vehicle usage.The “copycat campaign” line may be a reference to one of the few areas where the two candidates align, which is on taxing tips. Trump has said he’d like to remove taxes on gratuities, and Harris recently said she would support that as well. The policy is generally seen as a way to woo votes in Nevada, a swing states with a large number of workers dependent on tips:The US supreme court has declined a request from the Biden administration to allow a plan that would lower or pause federal student debt payments for borrowers to take effect, the Associated Press reports.Joe Biden proposed the plan, known as Save, after a previous attempt to cancel billions of dollars in federal student loans was blocked by the supreme court’s conservative majority. Republican-led states sued over the Save plan, and have won rulings against it at the appeals level.Today’s decision from the nation’s highest court will allow those rulings to stand while litigation plays out.Here’s more, from the AP:
      The justices rejected an administration request to put most of it back into effect. It was blocked by 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
      In an unsigned order, the court said it expects the appeals court to issue a fuller decision on the plan “with appropriate dispatch.”
      The Education Department is seeking to provide a faster path to loan cancellation, and reduce monthly income-based repayments from 10% to 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income. The plan also wouldn’t require borrowers to make payments if they earn less than 225% of the federal poverty line — $32,800 a year for a single person.
      Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rejected an earlier plan that would have wiped away more than $400 billion in student loan debt.
      Cost estimates of the new SAVE plan vary. The Republican-led states challenging the plan peg the cost at $475 billion over 10 years. The administration cites a Congressional Budget Office estimate of $276 billion.
      Two separate legal challenges to the SAVE plan have been making their way through federal courts. In June, judges in Kansas and Missouri issued separate rulings that blocked much of the administration’s plan. Debt that already had been forgiven under the plan was unaffected.
      The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that allowed the department to proceed with a provision allowing for lower monthly payments. Republican-led states had asked the high court to undo that ruling.
      But after the 8th Circuit blocked the entire plan, the states had no need for the Supreme Court to intervene, the justices noted in a separate order issued Wednesday.
      The gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, viewed the event as a “target of opportunity”, the FBI revealed today, according to the Associated Press.The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, Kevin Rojek, told reporters that Thomas Crooks, who opened fire on Trump, searched on the internet for: “Where will Trump speak from at Butler Farm Show?” “Butler Farm Show podium” and “Butler Farm Show photos” ahead of the former president’s rally in July.However, Rojek said that Crooks’s motive remains a mystery: “We have a clear idea of mindset, but we are not ready to make any conclusive statements regarding motive at this time.”The gunman who tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania in July searched more than 60 times for information about Trump and Joe Biden, before registering for the Trump rally, according to a new Reuters report that cites FBI officials.Reuters also reported that Kevin Rojek, the FBI’s top official in western Pennsylvania, said that the 20-year-old gunman, Thomas Crooks, mounted a “sustained, detailed effort to plan an attack on some events, meaning he looked at any number of events or targets”.Crooks then became “hyper focused” on the Trump rally after it was announced, Rojek said.According to USA Today, Rojek said that Crooks researched the Trump and Biden campaigns between April and July 2024.A new poll released today by ActiVote shows the vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the former president Donald Trump “essentially tied” in the battleground state of Michigan, with Harris leading Trump by just 0.2%.The new Michigan presidential poll was conducted between 28 July and 28 August and was among 400 likely voters. The poll has an “average expected error of 4.9%”, the company said.According to the data, Harris leads among such as urban voters, women, low income voters, young voters in Michigan, where Trump leads among rural and suburban voters, men, and those 50 to 64 years old, ActiVote wrote.A new survey released by Gallup suggests that a majority of Americans continue to approve of labor unions.According to the survey, 70% of respondents said that they approve of labor unions, up from 67% last year. This year’s approval rating is the second highest recorded by Gallup since 1965, per the data, with the 2022 being the highest with 71% approval rating of labor unions.The recent survey, which was conducted in August of this year, also states that 23% of respondents said that they disapproved of labor unions and 7% had no opinion.The new data comes as Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and governor of Minnesota, spoke to unionized firefighters this morning at the International Association of Fire Fighters convention in Boston.Controversy brews over a report that campaign staffers for Donald Trump were involved in a physical altercation with an official from Arlington national cemetery, which he visited earlier this week. Trump’s former defense secretary Mark Esper told CNN he was waiting to hear the outcome of an investigation into the scuffle, while saying the cemetery should never be used for “partisan political purposes”. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s communications director indicated that her campaign and Trump’s were still not on the same page about the rules for their 10 September debate, with the sticking point being whether the candidates’ microphones would be live when it was not their turn to talk. Trump seems to want them switched off, while Harris’s people want them on.Here’s what else has happened today so far:

      Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor who is Harris’s running mate, invited unionized firefighters to tune into the debate, saying: “It’s going to be good.”

      Clips of JD Vance attacking people who do not have children keep emerging.

      Trump continued to rail against the gag order imposed on him in his hush money case, saying it is preventing him from talking about the “most important and corrupt aspects” of his prosecution.
      Donald Trump’s legal troubles are clearly on his mind today, if his recent Truth Social posts are any indication.The special counsel Jack Smith yesterday unveiled a new indictment of the former president for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. While it does not dramatically alter the facts of the case, and appears mostly a response to the supreme court’s immunity decision handed down last month, the Guardian’s Victoria Bekiempis reports in our Trump on Trial newsletter that it may be a sign the former president’s luck in the courts has run out:Donald Trump is meanwhile busy on Truth Social, posting about various things on his mind, including the gag order he remains under in his New York hush-money case.The order prevents him from making statements about prosecutors, court staff and their families, at least until his 18 September sentencing date. That’s a fairly small group of people, but Trump is nonetheless very upset about it, as he wrote:
      When asked about the lawless Manhattan D.A. Hoax, I am not allowed to talk about the most important and corrupt aspects of it, because of the completely unConstitutional Gag Order. I am the first Candidate in American History who is not allowed to freely speak about a major Witch Hunt being perpetrated against him. I must be immediately released from the Gag Order, so I can continue to expose the Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Democrats. The GOOD NEWS is that the American People see through these Witch Hunts, and will bring us a dominant Victory on November 5th. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
      Donald Trump yesterday said he had agreed on the rules for his 10 September debate with Kamala Harris, but a spokesman for the vice-president indicates they still are not on the same page over whether the microphones will be on or off when it is not a candidate’s turn to speak.Trump yesterday said he had agreed to the same rules that governed his June debate with Joe Biden. In that case, microphones were muted when it was not time for him or the president to talk.In an interview with CNN today, the Harris campaign’s communications director Michael Tyler implied that Trump had agreed that microphones would be on throughout – something the former president has not explicitly said.“We’re going to have a 90-minute debate. Both candidates have said that they are comfortable with live, unmuted microphones for the duration of the debate that allows for the free flow and exchange of ideas between the two candidates. I understand that Donald Trump’s team of handlers is now attempting to overrule him. But as insofar as the candidates themselves, we’re in total alignment that this should be a 90-minute debate with live microphones. And so that’s what we look forward to,” Tyler said.Asked if Harris would attend the debate, hosted by ABC News, if microphones are not always on, Tyler replied:
      We fully intend to debate. We’re going to be there. The question is, will Donald Trump commit to the terms that he’s publicly agreed to? Or will he let his team overrule him? So I guess we’ll see if when he shows up on September 10, which decision he has made. More