US Politics

Has the love affair between Trump and Fox News gone sour?The rightwing channel has not covered its former sweetheart with its regular fervour – could a billion-dollar lawsuit be why? For years, Donald Trump and Fox News were smitten.The former president would call into the rightwing news channel seemingly whenever he liked. Fox News hosts pumped up every Trump utterance. Trump watched the channel religiously, and in 2019 alone he sent 657 tweets in response to Fox News or Fox Business programs.Since then, however, things appear to have changed. Trump, as the New York Times has pointed out, has not been interviewed on Fox News for more than 100 days.A recent Trump speech was largely ignored by the network, and in a sign that Fox News has recognized alternative Republican presidential candidates are available, a Mike Pence address was broadcast live, in its entirety.Dick Cheney attacks Donald Trump as ‘greatest threat to our republic’Read moreWith the news channel embroiled in a billion-dollar lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over its claims the voting machine company tampered with the 2020 election, Trump’s continuing lies about election fraud seem to have rattled Rupert Murdoch, the media titan who owns Fox News.Two of Murdoch’s newspapers, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, published scathing editorials on Trump in July, the former calling the twice-impeached 45th president “unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again” and the latter branding Trump “The President Who Stood Still on January 6”.This week the Washington Post reported that Murdoch “has lost his enthusiasm” for Trump.The channel has begun to give Pence and Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, plenty of air-time, including two primetime interviews in the space of five days recently, the New York Times reported. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas senator who is also said to be jockeying for a 2024 presidential run, has also been a regular interviewee.But while the apparent bouncing of Trump from Fox News has been enthusiastically covered by media reporters, there are plenty of signs the channel isn’t ready to let its paramour go just yet.A recent study by Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, found that Fox News continues to discuss Trump far, far more than any of his perceived rivals for the 2024 nomination – specifically, Trump was mentioned on Fox News 8,556 times through January to July, while DeSantis and Pence received 1,083 and 589 mentions respectively.Angelo Carusone, Media Matters’ president and chief executive, said those findings suggest there has not been a souring. He said there may have been a slight change in tone, and that Trump may not have the same “stranglehold” he once had on Fox News – the days when the channel was seen to be broadcasting to “an audience of one” are probably over – but that the coverage is still overwhelmingly positive.“You were allowed to attack Donald Trump during the primaries in 2015 and 2016 on Fox News. That doesn’t happen now, at all, ever,” Carusone said.For his part, Trump has recently expressed his displeasure at Fox News’ output. The 76-year-old, who is known to be emotional, attacked Fox & Friends in July, after its host Steve Doocy suggested a straw poll of potential 2024 candidates that showed Trump with 79% of the vote be taken with a pinch of salt.Doocy hardly went off on Trump – the host just pointed to other, more scientific, polls that showed Trump lacking 79% support. But it was enough to cause upset.“Fox & Friends just really botched my poll numbers, no doubt on purpose. That show has been terrible – gone to the ‘dark side’,” Trump posted on Truth Social, his ailing rightwing social media platform.The Dominion lawsuit could be a reason for Trump’s absence. The company is suing Fox News for $1.6bn, accusing its owner, Fox Corp, and the Murdochs specifically, of allowing Fox News to amplify Trump’s false claims that the voting company had rigged the election for Joe Biden. It could be a wise strategy not to allow Trump to repeat those precise claims on Fox News during a live interview.Asked to comment, a Fox News spokesperson said: “The debate among the liberal media on this topic is the very reason FOX News exists and is the most watched cable news channel in the country with more viewers of every political persuasion than any other network.”Still, Carusone believes any cooling on the part of Fox News towards Trump is likely to be temporary.The channel’s hosts are still engaging in misty-eyed segments where they talk about how Trump would handle issues ranging from inflation to China to the “border crisis” – a Fox News staple. And Trump’s supposed achievements while in office are still championed.“They’re still fetishizing and fantasizing, it’s just that there’s no longer an audience of one,” Carusone said.“There are other people in the audience that they care about.”TopicsDonald TrumpFox NewsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Senate passes $739bn healthcare and climate bill after months of wranglingInflation Reduction Act will reduce planet-heating emissions and lower prescription drug costs – and give Biden a crucial victory Senate Democrats passed their climate and healthcare spending package on Sunday, sending the legislation to the House and bringing Joe Biden one step closer to a significant legislative victory ahead of crucial midterm elections in November.If signed into law, the bill, formally known as the Inflation Reduction Act, would allocate $369bn to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in renewable energy sources. Experts have estimated the climate provisions of the bill will reduce America’s planet-heating emissions by about 40% by 2030, compared with 2005 levels.Climate bill could slash US emissions by 40% – if Democrats can pass itRead moreDemocrats have promised the bill will lower healthcare costs for millions of Americans by allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices and capping Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket prescription drug prices at $2,000 a year. Those who receive health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace are also expected to see lower premium costs.The legislation includes a number of tax provisions to cover the costs of these policies, bringing in $739bn for the government and resulting in an overall deficit reduction of roughly $300bn. The policy changes include a new corporate minimum tax, a 1% excise tax on stock buybacks and stricter enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service.“Today, Senate Democrats sided with American families over special interests, voting to lower the cost of prescription drugs, health insurance and everyday energy costs and reduce the deficit, while making the wealthiest corporations finally pay their fair share,” Biden said in a statement celebrating the bill’s passage. “I ran for president promising to make government work for working families again, and that is what this bill does – period.”The final Senate vote was 51-50, with every Democrat supporting the bill while all 50 of their Republican colleagues opposed the legislation. With the Senate evenly divided on the bill’s passage, Vice-President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote.Because Democrats used the reconciliation process to advance the bill, they needed only a simple majority to pass the proposal, allowing them to avoid a Republican filibuster.But the choice to use reconciliation also somewhat limited what Democrats could include in their bill. The Senate parliamentarian ruled on Saturday that a key healthcare provision, which would have placed inflation-related caps on companies’ ability to raise prescription drug prices for private insurance plans, ran afoul of reconciliation rules. Another proposal to cap the cost of insulin in the private insurance market at $35 a month was also stripped out of the bill after 43 Senate Republicans voted to block the policy on procedural grounds.Still, Democrats celebrated that the Senate parliamentarian allowed most of their healthcare and climate provisions to move forward.“While there was one unfortunate ruling in that the inflation rebate is more limited in scope, the overall program remains intact and we are one step closer to finally taking on big pharma and lowering Rx drug prices for millions of Americans,” the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on Saturday.Democratic leaders previously had to alter the tax provisions of the bill to secure the vote of Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who announced her support for the proposal on Thursday.Sinema caused some last-minute hand-wringing among Democrats on Sunday, as she pushed for changes to the new corporate minimum tax that would exempt some businesses from the policy. Democratic senators ultimately reached an agreement with Sinema to approve the exemption, which was paid for by extending loss limitations for pass-through businesses.Sinema was considered the last Democratic holdout in the negotiations, after fellow centrist Joe Manchin said he would vote in favor of the bill. The Senate’s approval of the bill came nearly eight months after Manchin abruptly scuttled talks over the Build Back Better Act, which was viewed as Biden’s signature legislative proposal. After tanking that bill, Manchin spent months participating in quiet deliberations with Schumer over another spending package that was more focused on reducing the federal deficit and tackling record-high inflation.The resulting bill was able to win the support of the entire Senate Democratic caucus on Sunday, even though the legislation is much smaller in scope than the Build Back Better Act.The bill’s narrower focus frustrated the progressive senator Bernie Sanders, who criticized the compromise in a Saturday floor speech. Sanders complained that the legislation would do little to help working Americans struggling to keep up with rising prices, and he unsuccessfully pushed for expanding the bill to further lower healthcare costs.“This legislation does not address the reality that we have more income and wealth inequality today than at any time in the last hundred years,” Sanders said. “This bill does nothing to address the systemic dysfunctionality of the American healthcare system.”Despite that criticism, Sanders backed the final version of the bill. The Senate’s approval followed a marathon session that lasted overnight and into Sunday afternoon, as Republicans forced votes on dozens of proposed changes to the spending package. Democrats remained mostly unified in opposing Republicans’ amendments, keeping the bill unchanged and ensuring the legislation’s passage.“It’s been a long, tough and winding road. But at last, at last we have arrived,” Schumer said on Sunday. “I know it’s been a long day and a long night, but we’ve gotten it done. Today, after more than a year of hard work, the Senate is making history.”Republicans fiercely criticized the bill, rejecting Democrats’ arguments that the legislation will help tackle rising prices. According to a report issued by Moody’s Analytics, the bill will “modestly reduce inflation over the 10-year budget horizon”.“Democrats want to ram through hundreds of billions of dollars in tax hikes and hundreds of billions of dollars in reckless spending – and for what?” the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said in a Saturday floor speech. “For a so-called inflation bill that will not meaningfully reduce inflation at all.”House Democrats have dismissed Republicans’ criticism of the bill, insisting they will swiftly pass the legislation and send it to Biden’s desk. The majority leader, Steny Hoyer, has said the House will return on Friday to take up the legislation, and Democrats do not need any Republican votes to pass the bill.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has promised that the chamber would move quickly as soon as the Senate gave the bill its stamp of approval. She told reporters at a press conference last week, “When they send it to us, we’ll pass it.”TopicsUS SenateClimate crisisDemocratsUS politicsUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More

Climate bill could slash US emissions by 40% after historic Senate voteInflation Reduction Act could put US within striking distance of Biden’s goal of halving emissions by 2030, analysis suggests The US is, following decades of political rancor and fossil fuel industry obfuscation, almost certain to make its first significant attempt to tackle the climate crisis. Experts say it will help rewire the American economy and act as an important step in averting disastrous global heating.Independent analysis of the proposed legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, shows it should slash America’s planet-heating emissions by about 40% by the end of the decade, compared with 2005 levels.This cut would bring the US within striking distance of a goal set by Joe Biden to cut emissions in half by 2030, a target that scientists say must be achieved by the whole world if catastrophic global heating, triggering escalating heatwaves, droughts and floods, is to be avoided.On Sunday, the US Senate passed the legislation and though it still has to be approved by the House, its passage is now virtually assured.Line chart showing the ranges of projected emissions reductions for current policy and the Inflation Reduction Act“This is a massive turning point,” said Leah Stokes, a climate policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “This bill includes so much, it comprises nearly $370bn in climate and clean energy investments. That’s truly historic. Overall, the IRA is a huge opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.”The climate provisions in the legislation – totaling $369bn, to be exact – are pared back from what Biden initially wanted. Excruciating negotiations with Joe Manchin, the coal company-owning West Virginia senator and a swing vote for the bill, ended up in a reduced compromise.But its heft can still, argued Brian Schatz, another Democratic senator, be considered “by far, the biggest climate action in human history”. Biden said the bill was a “huge step forward”.Democrats mustered all 50 of their Senate votes to pass the bill – and Vice-President Kamala Harris’s casting vote – to overcome uniform Republican resistance to acting on the climate emergency. Billions of dollars will go towards investments in renewable energy such as wind and solar, rebates for people wishing to buy electric cars and support for households to make them run on clean electricity and become more energy efficient.In sum, the bill will cut US emissions by between 31% and 44% below 2005 levels by 2030, according to Rhodium Group, a non-partisan research firm. A separate analysis by Energy Innovation, another research house, has found a similar reduction, of between 37% and 41% this decade. In total, around 1bn tons of greenhouse gases, which is more than double the total annual emissions of the UK, would be eliminated in this timeframe.The range of estimates depends on factors such as future economic conditions, but experts say the bill will set off a cascade of positive impacts, pushing fossil fuels out of the energy grid, dampening America’s thirst for oil and making wind and solar, which have already plummeted in cost in recent years, even cheaper.“This bill will really turbocharge that transition to clean energy, it will transform markets where already solar PV, wind and batteries are in many cases cheaper than incumbent fossil fuels,” said Anand Gopal, executive director of policy at Energy Innovation.“This is a dramatically large climate bill, the biggest in US history if it passes. It doesn’t mean the US won’t need to do more to achieve its emissions goals but it will make a meaningful difference.”The bulk of the bill is composed of tax credits aimed at unleashing a boom in clean energy deployment, along with payments to keep ageing nuclear facilities and other sources of low-carbon energy online. A new system of fees will be imposed to stem leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas drilling operations. The vast fleet of trucks used by the US Postal Service would go electric.Consumers will be able to access a rebate of up to $7,500 for a new electric vehicle, or up to $4,000 for a used car, along with up to $8,000 to install a modern electric heat pump that can both heat and cool buildings. Further rebates are also on offer, such as $1,600 to insulate and seal a house to make it more energy efficient.Table showing the projected effects of the Inflation Reduction act through 2030These actions would cut emissions while having other significant benefits. As many as 1.5m jobs would be created in new clean energy roles, according to Energy Innovations, while Rewiring America, another research firm, has forecast that households that install a heat pump, rooftop solar and use an electric car would save $1,800 a year on energy bills.Meanwhile, thousands of deaths would be avoided, predominantly among people of color who have to suffer air pollution from nearby fossil fuel infrastructure. “If you live next to a power plant that is pumping out toxins, that is the primary concern for you here, not climate change,” said Gopal.The legislation is also an attempt to wrest momentum back from China, which has become the world’s leading manufacturer of solar panels, batteries and other clean energy materials. There are billions of dollars in incentives for the US domestic production of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, carbon capture and storage and other technologies.This, in turn, would help proliferate these technologies in the US and make it easier for federal agencies to issue stricter pollution rules for cars, trucks and power plants. Meanwhile, the international effort to prevent the world warming by more than 1.5C (2.7F) beyond pre-industrial levels, hampered so far by a patchy American response to the climate crisis, would receive a major boost.“You’ll have a lot of mutually beneficial impacts,” said Gopal. “This should change the way the US is viewed on the global stage and will encourage better pledges from other large emitters such as China and India. Increasingly I’m more optimistic that keeping the temperature rise under 2C (3.6F) is more reachable. 1.5C is a stretch goal at this point.”Climate advocates have criticized elements of the bill, such as Manchin’s successful insistence that oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico are included, along with a stipulation that millions of acres of federal land and water are opened up for fossil fuels if they are to be also accessed by solar and wind developers. Such a deal is a “climate suicide pact”, according to Brett Hartl, a campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.But the Energy Innovation researchers insist the clean energy benefits of the bill easily outweigh any extra emissions from new drilling, with every ton of new emissions offset by at least 24 tons of emissions avoided by other provisions. The US would, much later than most other large economies, finally have a long-term climate roadmap.“I wouldn’t have put those leases in the bill but the climate side comes out way ahead,” said Gopal.“Is this legislation the size of what we need for the climate? No. Is it extraordinary given the politics and the Senate we have? Yes, it’s incredible. We can’t make up for the lost time of US inaction – we can see the price the world is paying for that right now – but it’s not too late. This can make a massive difference.”TopicsClimate crisisUS domestic policyUS politicsJoe BidenanalysisReuse this content More

Trump’s worst toadies hold degrees from Harvard and Yale. Did they learn anything?Robert ReichPoliticians educated at some of the US’s most elite universities are spreading conspiracy theories that they surely know are untrue. What happened to ‘service and stewardship’? The original justification for elite higher education in the United States was to train the future leaders of American democracy. As Charles W Eliot, who became president of Harvard in 1869, noted, Harvard existed to inculcate the ideals of “service and stewardship”.Since then, Harvard has produced eight US presidents; Yale, five. (Stanford can boast Herbert Hoover, if it feels compelled to do so.)Elite universities have also produced a disproportionate number of senators and representatives from both parties. In fact, Republicans elected to the Senate over the last decade are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to have attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford.So how to explain Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of 2006, now the third-ranking House Republican, who recently called the January 6 hearings a “partisan witch-hunt”, voted to invalidate the 2020 election, and has repeated Trump’s big lie of election fraud?Or Josh Hawley, Stanford class of 2002 and Yale law class of 2006, now senator from Missouri, who in December 2020 became the first US senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, then led Senate efforts to overturn the electoral college vote count, and fist-bumped the rioters on January 6?Or Ted Cruz, Princeton class of 1992 and Harvard law class of 1995, now senator from Texas, who in late 2020 joined in John Eastman’s and Trump’s plot to object to the election results in six swing states and delay accepting the electoral college results on January 6, potentially enabling Republican state legislatures to overturn them?And how to explain a new crop of Republican Senate candidates?JD Vance, Yale Law class of 2013, now Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, has claimed that there “were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis” in the 2020 election. When asked earlier this year if he thought the 2020 election was “stolen”, he said, “Yeah, I do.”Blake Masters, Stanford class of 2008 and Stanford law class of 2012, now the Republican candidate for the Senate from Arizona, has declared in campaign ads that “Trump won”. He promotes rightwing “replacement theory” – that Democrats favor illegal immigration “so that someday they can ‘amnesty’ these people and make them voters who they expect to vote Democrat”.These alumni of America’s finest institutions of higher education haven’t adhered to their alma maters’ ideals of service and stewardship of American democracy. In fact, they’re actively wrecking American democracy.Nor can these elite graduates claim they don’t know any better. Most third-graders can distinguish a lie from the truth.No, these scions of the most prestigious halls of American academe are knowingly and intentionally abetting the most dangerous attack on American democracy since the civil war.Whatever did they learn from their rarefied education? Obviously, zilch.The core of a good liberal arts education is ethics. The central question is the meaning of a good society. This has been the case since the 18th century, when most of America’s prestigious institutions of higher education were founded.Adam Smith, the progenitor of modern economics, didn’t call his field economics. He called it “moral philosophy”, and thought his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments more important than his The Wealth of Nations.Edmund Burke – Irish statesman and philosopher, and godfather of modern conservatism – didn’t advise that people in public life seek power above all else. He argued that they owe the public their “judgment and conscience”.There is no single answer to the meaning of a good society, of course. It is the pursuit of it that draws on one’s judgment and conscience. This is why higher education has advanced the role of reason in human affairs and stood for the Enlightenment values of democracy and the rule of law.But this new crop of Republican pretenders hasn’t learned anything of the kind. They are practitioners of a much earlier and more cynical set of ideas: that might makes right, that the purpose of human endeavor is to gain power, and that ambition and treachery trump (excuse the verb) all other values.I can’t help wondering: what do they see when they look in the mirror each morning? And what do they tell themselves after a day of deceit?Any of them who tries to justify the despicable means they are employing by telling themselves they can do more good by gaining or keeping power is under a dangerous illusion. As the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin once said, “If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end.”These products of the best education America has to offer are betraying the core values of America.They deserve only shame.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansDonald TrumpHarvard UniversityYale UniversitycommentReuse this content More

Democratic ads boosted extremists in Republican primaries. Was that wise? Helping election-denying, Trump-endorsed candidates may secure a more beatable general election opponent but some see it as a cynical and morally dubious moveWhen Peter Meijer voted to impeach Donald Trump, breaking with nearly all of his Republican colleagues in one of his first acts as a newly elected member of Congress, Democrats praised him as the kind of principled conservative his party – and the nation – desperately needed.But this election season, as Meijer fought for his political survival against a Trump-endorsed election denier in a primary contest for a Michigan House seat, Democrats twisted the knife and helped his extremist opponent win.It is part of a risky, and some say downright dangerous, strategy Democrats are using in races for House, Senate and governor: spending money in Republican primaries to elevate far-right candidates over more mainstream conservatives in the hope that voters will recoil from the election-denying radicals in November.How a Trump-backed ‘QAnon whack job’ won with Democratic ‘collusion’Read moreIn Michigan, the gamble paid off – for now. Meijer lost after the House Democrats’ official campaign arm spent $425,000 to elevate Meijer’s opponent, John Gibbs, a former Trump administration official who asserted, falsely, that Joe Biden’s victory was “simply mathematically impossible”.It is impossible to know what impact the Democrats’ ad had on the race, but cost more than the Gibbs campaign raised.Now, as the primary season nears its conclusion and the political battlefield takes shape, Democrats will soon learn whether the gambit was successful. While election deniers have prevailed in Republican primaries across the country without any aid from Democrats, critics say the effort has already undermined the party’s grave warnings about the threats to democracy.“It is immoral and dangerous,” said Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. He said the risk of miscalculation was great, particularly at a moment when the January 6 committee is attempting to show just how destructive Trump’s stolen election myth has been for American democracy.“It’s hard for Democrats to take the high road when they’re cynically boosting some of these candidates in order to try to gain an advantage in the general election,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that what Democrats are doing is as bad as what Republicans are doing, but it still makes it objectionable.”Meijer’s defeat has fueled a sharp debate among Democrats over the potential perils of the tactic, especially as the party warns of the risks posed by these very Republicans. But others argue it’s a necessary and calculated gamble in pursuit of keeping a dangerous party from winning power.“If you let Republicans back in power, it is going to be those Maga Republicans who are going to take away your rights, your benefits and your freedom,” Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said, defending the strategy in a recent interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “We need to stop it.”The president’s party historically loses ground during the midterms. Decades-high inflation and widespread frustration with leaders in Washington have dragged Joe Biden’s approval ratings to record lows, hampering Democrats’ efforts to preserve their razor-thin majorities in Congress.The ads are ostensibly scripted as an attack – highlighting a candidate’s loyalty to Trump and their conservative views on abortion. In Michigan, for example, Democrats charged that Gibbs was “handpicked by Trump to run for Congress” and “too conservative” for the district. But when aired during a primary, the message is intended to appeal to the conservative base.“The voters in the Republican primary had agency,” said Bill Saxton, the Democratic party chair in Kent county. “They had two choices.”Saxton, whose county is situated in the west Michigan district, said it was now time to set aside the bickering over tactics and focus on the real threat: Gibbs’s extremism.In 2020, Gibbs could not win Senate confirmation to direct Trump’s Office of Personnel Management over past comments he made, among them calling Democrats the party of “‘Islam, gender-bending, anti-police, ‘u racist!’”. Democrats’ efforts to pick their opponents extends far beyond a single Michigan House race. They have deployed this strategy in House, Senate and governor’s races across the country.In Maryland, the Democratic Governors Association boosted Dan Cox, who attended the January 6 rally and called Vice-President Mike Pence a “traitor” for not stopping the congressional certification of Biden’s victory as Trump wished. He won the party’s nomination for governor. That was after Democrats’ spent millions of dollars to successfully promote the Trump-backed election denier in the Illinois Republican gubernatorial primary. Both states lean Democratic and the party is reasonably confident their candidate will prevail.The race causing the most angst is in battleground Pennsylvania. There the Democratic nominee for governor, Josh Shapiro, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads boosting the rightwing extremist Doug Mastriano – far more than the candidate spent on his own campaign. Mastriano, who attended the January 6 rally and has cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, is now the Republican nominee in a swing state where the chief elections officer is appointed by the governor.Polls show a tight race.The strategy hasn’t always worked. In California, the incumbent Republican congressman David Valadao narrowly beat back a rightwing challenger despite Democratic spending on ads that highlighted his vote to impeach Trump.And in Colorado, an outside group aligned with Democrats spent millions to boost an election denier who marched to the Capitol with rioters on January 6 over a relatively moderate Republican, businessman Joe O’Dea, in the race to take on the Democratic senator Michael Bennet. O’Dea won and now the resources Democrats spent to make him unpalatable to the Republican base may help him appeal to moderate and independent swing voters.Meddling in the opposition’s primary is not a new tactic. In 2012, Claire McCaskill, then a Democratic senator from Missouri, was facing a difficult re-election in a state where Barack Obama was deeply unpopular.Surveying her prospective opponents, she devised a plan to lift the one she thought would be the weakest candidate, the far-right congressman Todd Akin. It worked: he won the primary, and she beat him decisively in the general.But a decade later, she is urging caution.“This has to be done very carefully,” she told NPR, adding: “You also have to be careful what you wish for.”Maloney, the DCCC chair, has said the committee has a “high bar” for meddling in a Republican primary, but insisted that there are races where it “does make sense”. Still, it has become an issue for Maloney in his own primary race, where his challenger, Alessandra Biaggi, has accused him of playing “Russian roulette with our democracy”.Some Democrats have also expressed misgivings about punishing the few Republicans willing to stand up to Trump. David Axelrod, a longtime Democratic strategist and political adviser to Barack Obama, said Democrats’ involvement in Meijer’s primary “makes them an instrument of Trump’s vengeance”.Trump’s support has been one of the most decisive factors in choosing the party’s standard bearers, not Democrats, said David Turner, a spokesman for the Democratic Governors Association. In these races, he said Democrats seized the opportunity to expose a prospective opponent’s extremism early and pre-emptively blunt any attempt to “pivot” toward the mainstream during the general election.Turner blamed Republican leaders for being “too cowardly to tell their voters the truth” about the 2020 election, a failure that he said ensured the success of election-deniers in the GOP’s 2022 nominating contests.In Pennsylvania, one of Mastriano’s chief rivals was Lou Barletta, a signatory to the state’s fake elector scheme. And in Colorado, the candidate deemed more moderate won the Republican primary for governor but then selected an election denier to be her running mate.“There aren’t any Liz Cheneys running for governor,” he said, referring to the Republican vice chair of the January 6 committee who may lose her primary over efforts to hold Trump accountable. “In terms of gubernatorial candidates, the scary part is that all these Republicans are regurgitating the same Maga talking points.”Still, some Democrats argue that they are being held to a different standard than Republicans, who have failed to hold Trump and loyalists in Congress accountable. They say Republicans often cheer their leaders for being ruthless while Democrats are criticized for refusing to play hardball, especially when the stakes are the highest.As a result of gerrymandering, Republican dominance of the redistricting process and historical trends, Democrats see few opportunities to flip House seats this cycle. Michigan’s third congressional district is one of them.Gibbs has downplayed the impact of the ads, and projected confidence that he can win in November.Hillary Scholten, the Democrat who will face him in the Michigan House race and had no involvement in the DCCC’s decision, called the focus on her party’s tactics an unwanted distraction from the issues voters care most about.Scholten said: “It is the Republicans that decided who they wanted in their primary, and they chose John Gibbs, an extremist that embraces conspiracy theories and is way out of step with west Michigan. I’m focused on making sure he doesn’t get to Congress.”Her newly redrawn Michigan district is considerably more favorable to Democrats this cycle than it was two years ago. And many Democrats believe Scholten, a former justice department attorney in the Obama administration who came close to beating Meijer in 2020, would have been a strong contender in a rematch.While many are confident she can beat Gibbs, those still haunted by Trump’s against-the-odds victory in 2016 fear that in a “wave” election, Republicans deemed unelectable could be swept to power.On the eve of his primary race, Meijer lashed Democrats in an online essay that accused them of “sell[ing] out any pretense of principle for political expediency”.“Republican voters will be blamed if any of these candidates are ultimately elected,” Meijer wrote in an online essay published on the eve of the primary, “but there is no doubt Democrats’ fingerprints will be on the weapon. We should never forget it.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

Forward! Is America’s latest third party marching to power – or oblivion? A new centrist grouping including Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman aims to tap into Americans’ wish for a third political option – but history is not encouragingAfter the 2020 election, Americans were clear: they wanted a viable third political party.In modern US history the country has been dominated by the Republican and Democratic parties almost to the exclusion of all others, effectively creating a near two-party monopoly on power in the White House, Congress and the state level.Sorry, Andrew Yang – a new third party won’t fix America’s political problems | Andrew GawthorpeRead moreOther parties, like the Reform party, the Greens or the Libertarians have never really broken through. In 2021, as the fallout from the 2020 election continued, polling showed widespread support among Americans for a fresh third party that would offer something different from the status quo. Even a majority of self-identified Republicans said they wanted a new party in the mix.This should be prime ground, then, for the Forward party, founded in July by a group of self-defined centrists including the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Republican New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.People wanted a new third party, and they have been given one – one that has boasted of already raising more than $5m. So what are the chances of Yang and co winning office, and holding forth on the floors of the US Capitol?“Slim to none,” says Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington. “With an emphasis on none.”Third parties face resource problems, for one thing. Forward’s $5m pales in comparison with the $1bn Joe Biden raised from donors during his 2020 election campaign.Donald Trump raised $774m from donors, according to Open Secrets, while data from the Federal Election Commission shows that House and Senate candidates raised $4bn between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2020, spending $3.8bn.The two dominant parties also have huge structural advantages: mailing lists, email addresses, existing supporters and name recognition, things that have taken decades to build.A more fundamental issue is that the US election system just isn’t set up to accommodate a third party.The first-past-the-post system, in which one person is elected in each congressional district, means that a third party could, in theory, win 49% of the vote in a given area, and it would count for nothing if their opponent wins more.Forward, which launched on 23 July, was formed from three existing political groups: Renew America Movement, made up of dozens of former Republican administration officials ; the Forward party, which was founded by Yang after his failed bid to become the Democratic party’s nominee for New York City mayor; and the Serve America Movement, a centrist group of Democrats, Republicans and independents.“The rigid, top-down, one-size-fits-all platforms of the outdated political parties are drifting toward the fringes, making solutions impossible,” Forward’s website reads.“We stand for doing, not dividing. That means rejecting the far Left and far Right and pursuing common ground.”The party’s mission: “Not left. Not right. FORWARD,” as its slogan lays out, is a noble one. But there are doubts about what a centrist party might actually look like and stand for.“There are a lot of people who would consider themselves moderate or centrist, who disagree very strongly with other people who consider themselves moderate or centrist. It’s not one group,” Hershey said.The Forward party is yet to lay out a detailed platform. But once it does set out its positions on divisive issues like abortion, social security and tax cuts, Hershey said, “some of that middle is going to disagree with other parts of that middle, and the so-called huge middle is no longer huge.”In a statement, the Forward party said it “can’t be pegged to the traditional left-right spectrum because we aren’t built like the existing parties.“The glue that holds us together is not rote ideology, it is a shared commitment to actually solving problems. The hunger for that simple but revolutionary kind of politics is immense.”In terms of how it will compete with Democrats and Republicans, the party said it “isn’t looking to drop a billion dollars in a 2024 presidential race”.Instead, it will focus on gaining ballot access and recruiting candidates to run in races across the country.“That takes money,” Forward said. “But more than money it takes people, and we are rich with them.”Forward is less than two weeks old, but has already attracted a good deal of both cynicism and criticism, not least for the false equivalency it deployed when describing the need for a third party.In an op-ed in the Washington Post titled “Most third parties have failed. Here’s why ours won’t,” Yang, Whitman and David Jolly, another co-founder who was previously a Republican congressman from Florida and executive chairman of the Serve America Movement, appeared to offer disingenuous arguments for why their efforts were required.On guns, Forward suggested that most Americans are “rightfully worried by the far right’s insistence on eliminating gun laws”, but “don’t agree with calls from the far left to confiscate all guns and repeal the Second Amendment”.As Andrew Gawthorpe, a historian of the United States at Leiden University and host of the podcast America Explained, wrote in the Guardian:“These two things are not the same: the first is what is actually happening in America right now, whereas the second is a view that was attributed to Kamala Harris as part of a fabricated smear on Facebook and enjoys approximately zero support in the Democratic party.”Third parties can have an impact, said Bernard Tamas, associate professor of political science at Valdosta state university and author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties: Poised for Political Revival?. But there’s usually a pretty specific formula.“It’s always built on outrage,” Tamas said. “It has to be where the public is galvanized.”Tamas pointed to the Progressive party, founded in 1912. That party, led by former president Theodore Roosevelt, advocated for child labor laws and the establishment of improved working conditions, including and eight-hour working day and “one day’s rest in seven” for workers.Roosevelt, who was shot during his campaign, won 27.4% of the vote, besting William Howard Taft, the incumbent Republican, but losing to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But progressive reforms were eventually introduced.“What they have historically done successfully could be described with an analogy of ‘sting like a bee’,” Tamas said.“They emerge, really often quite suddenly, and they attack the two parties [and] they effectively pull voters away from them.“And the two parties then respond, and in critical moments, they respond by trying to take away these issue bases, whatever is making the third party successful. They take those away, the major party changes, and then effectively the third party dies.”Forward, which has pledged that it will reflect “the moderate, common-sense majority”, has plenty of people skeptical as to whether it can sting like a bee – let alone do more and actually elect candidates.“The way that they’re presenting themselves, it may not have the galvanizing message,” Tamas said.“Simply saying: ‘Hey, you know, let’s all get together and work together’ is barely something that gets people running on the streets protesting.”TopicsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

Pelosi’s ‘reckless’ Taiwan visit deepens US-China rupture – why did she go? The speaker insisted she was promoting democracy but critics suggest a last hurrah before she loses the gavel in NovemberRoy Blunt lived up his surname when he said this week: “So I’m about to use four words in a row that I haven’t used in this way before, and those four words are: ‘Speaker Pelosi was right.’”The Republican senator was praising Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the first by a speaker of the US House of Representatives in a quarter of a century.But not everyone was so sure. In poking the hornets’ nest and enraging China, which claims the self-governing island as its territory, Pelosi deepened a rupture between the world’s two most powerful countries – and may have hurt the very cause she was seeking to promote.On Thursday, China fired multiple missiles into waters surrounding Taiwan and began a series of huge military drills around the island; the White House summoned China’s ambassador, Qin Gang, to protest. On Friday, China said it was ending cooperation with the US on key issues including the climate crisis, anti-drug efforts and military talks.It was yet another moment of peril in a world already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine and mass food shortages.So why did Pelosi go? The speaker is a fervent defender of Taiwan and critic of China’s human rights abuses. During the visit, she pointed to a global struggle between autocracy and democracy, a favourite theme of Joe Biden’s, and told reporters in Taipei: “We cannot back away from that.”But the 82-year-old may also have been rushing for a last hurrah before November’s midterm elections in which she is expected to lose the speaker’s gavel. Her televised meetings in Taiwan, sure to have registered in Beijing, appeared to some like a vanity project.Writing just ahead of the trip, Thomas Friedman, an author and New York Times columnist, described Pelosi’s adventure as “utterly reckless, dangerous and irresponsible”, arguing that Taiwan will not be more secure or prosperous because of a “purely symbolic” visit.Friedman warned that the consequences could include “the US being plunged into indirect conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time”, without the support of European allies in the latter.Biden himself had publicly admitted that the US military felt the trip was “not a good idea right now”, not least because President Xi Jinping is preparing to secure a third term at the Chinese Communist party’s national congress later this year.In a call last month, the White House has said, Biden sought to remind Xi about America’s separation of powers: that he could not and would not prevent the speaker and other members of Congress traveling where they wish.But Biden and Pelosi are close allies from the same political party, a different scenario from 1997 when Democrat Bill Clinton was president and Republican speaker Newt Gingrich went to Taiwan. Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, flew into the island on a US military aircraft with all the government heft that implies.It was perhaps telling that Biden and Democrats remained mostly silent, whereas the speaker’s loudest cheerleaders were rightwing Republicans and China hawks including Gingrich.Some commentators believe that a superpower conflict between America and China over Taiwan or another issue is one day inevitable. White Pelosi may have shaved a few years off that forecast, it could be argued that Biden himself has supplied some of the kindling.For months the president has sown doubts about America’s commitment to the “One China” policy, under which the US recognises formal ties with China rather than Taiwan. In May, when asked if the US would be get involved military to defend Taiwan, he replied forcefully: “Yes. That’s the commitment we made.”Although America is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has never directly promised to intervene militarily in a conflict with China. This delicate equilibrium has helped deter Taiwan from declaring full independence and China from invading. But some worry that Biden is supplanting this longstanding position of “strategic ambiguity” with “strategic confusion”.Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States thinktank in Washington, told a Council on Foreign Relations podcast this week: “There has been a lack of clarity, consistency, a lack of discipline, shall we say, and even a lack of coherency, I think, in US policy statements.“The Biden administration continues to say that the United States has a One China policy, that the United States does not support Taiwan independence, but then there are other things that the US does, which from China’s perspective and using their language, looks like we are slicing the salami. We are heading towards supporting a Taiwan that is legally independent.”Glaser added: “So Speaker Pelosi going to Taiwan doesn’t really, I think, in and of itself cross a red line, but I think the Chinese see a slippery slope … And then on top of all this, we have President Biden talking about policy toward Taiwan in confusing ways.”Other analysts agreed that, once news of Pelosi’s plan to visit Taiwan emerged, it would have been impossible to back down without handing Beijing a propaganda victory.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank and former policy adviser to Clinton, said: “I can see the arguments on both sides. Argument on one side, this was probably an ill-timed gesture on her part. Argument on the other side, once the issue was joined, allowing the Chinese to bully her out of the trip would would have been a really bad sign to the region.“If she hadn’t put the issue on the table, that would have been one thing. But once she did and once it was clear that she was pretty firm in doing it, it would have been a mistake, say, for the president to put a lot of pressure on her not to go. That would have been both a substantive mistake and a political mistake.”Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Palo Alto, California, wrote in an email: “Pelosi wanted to convey our commitment and resolve. I respect her for that. However, I still think the trip was a mistake. It provoked a serious escalation of Beijing’s military intimidation without really doing anything to make Taiwan more secure.“What Taiwan really needs now is more military assistance, especially a large number of small, mobile, survivable and lethal weapons, like anti-ship missiles. To paraphrase [Ukraine’s Volodymyr] Zelenskiy, they don’t need more visits, they need weapons. And they have to do a lot more themselves to prepare for a possible attack.”TopicsNancy PelosiUS politicsUS foreign policyChinaTaiwanAsia PacificnewsReuse this content More

Republican who voted to impeach Trump projected to win primaryDan Newhouse, one of 10 members of Congress to vote for impeachment, set to beat Trump-backed Loren Culp in Washington state Dan Newhouse, one of the few Republican House members to vote in January in favor of the impeachment of Donald Trump, is poised to move forward to the general election in Washington state, according to a projection by the Associated Press.Viktor Orbán turns Texas conference into transatlantic far-right love-inRead moreNewhouse was one of 10 Republicans who voted in January to have Trump impeached, even ahead of explosive revelations about the former president’s support and endorsement of the January 6 riots just a year prior.This victory comes on the heels of another fellow Republican supporter of the impeachment, Peter Meijer, losing his votes in Michigan.Republican Loren Culp, who has been backed by Trump in the election, was a close second to Newhouse in Washington’s fourth congressional district, garnering the second highest number of Republican votes in four out of the eight counties. In some of the counties where Newhouse won, however, he received almost double the number of votes as Culp.Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BSTCulp was up against six other Republican candidates, and will face Doug White, the district’s only Democratic candidate, in November for the general election.Despite his victory, the journey has rarely been smooth for Newhouse. Following his vote for impeachment in January, six Republican leaders in his district demanded his resignation.He defended his position, claiming he “made a decision to vote based on my oath to support and defend the constitution”.On 2 August, he had majority votes in three out of those six counties that had voted for his resignation.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsWashington stateDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More