US Politics

Scott Pruitt, former Trump official, to run for US Senate seat in OklahomaScandal-plagued EPA chief is seeking seat being vacated by longtime Republican senator Jim Inhofe Scott Pruitt, who had a scandal-ridden spell in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency under Donald Trump, filed on Friday to run for an open US Senate seat in Oklahoma.Pruitt, 53, a former state senator and Oklahoma attorney general, is seeking the seat being vacated by the longtime Republican senator Jim Inhofe.Scott Pruitt is out but his impact on the environment will be felt for yearsRead morePruitt stepped down as EPA administrator in 2018 amid a wave of ethics scandals, including living in a bargain-priced Capitol Hill condo tied to an energy lobbyist.He also faced ethics investigations into pricey trips with first-class airline seats and unusual security spending, including a $43,000 soundproof booth for making private phone calls.He also demanded 24-hour-a-day protection from armed officers, resulting in a swollen 20-member security detail that blew through overtime budgets and racked up expenses of more than $3m.Like Trump, Pruitt was a staunch advocate for the continued use of coal and other fossil fuels, voiced skepticism about mainstream climate science and was a fierce critic of the Paris climate agreement.Trump cheered Pruitt’s moves to expand fossil fuel production and roll back regulations opposed by corporate interests. After leaving the agency, Pruitt registered as an energy lobbyist in Indiana.In a brief interview on Friday, Pruitt said he “led with conviction in Washington DC” and chalked up the criticism against him as resulting from leading an agency that was the “holy grail of the American left”.“And I made a difference in the face of that,“ Pruitt said. “I think Oklahomans know when the New York Times and CNN and MSNBC and those places are against you, Oklahomans are for you.”Pruitt will face a crowded primary field seeking to replace Inhofe, 87, who shook up Oklahoma politics with his announcement that he would step down in January, just two years into a six-year term.Ten Republican hopefuls have filed to run for the seat, including the congressman Markwayne Mullin, former speaker of the Oklahoma house TW Shannon, Inhofe’s longtime chief of staff, Luke Holland, state senator Nathan Dahm and Alex Gray, former chief of staff of the national security council under Trump.The rightwing US supreme court has climate change in its sights | Laurence H Tribe and Jeremy LewinRead moreA former congresswoman, Kendra Horn, was the only Democrat to file for the seat by early afternoon on Friday, the final day of the three-day candidate filing period.Because of Inhofe’s announcement, both of Oklahoma’s US Senate seats are up for grabs this cycle. The current senator James Lankford is seeking another six-year term.Lankford will face the Tulsa pastor Jackson Lahmeyer in the GOP primary. Four Democrats, a Libertarian and an independent also filed this week to seek the post.The most competitive US House race is expected to be for the open second congressional seat in eastern Oklahoma, which is being vacated by Mullin. At least 13 candidates, 12 Republicans and an independent, have filed for that post.TopicsRepublicansUS SenateOklahomaDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Republicans are dusting off a tried and true election strategy: hatemongeringMoira DoneganMale voters have been drifting right in record numbers – and Republicans are taking a viciously homophobic and sexist tack to appeal to them The 2022 midterm elections are shaping up to be among the most deeply gender-divided elections in American history. A new poll by NBC News, measuring voters’ preferences ahead of the November elections, shows that the gap in women and men’s voting patterns has deepened considerably over the past 12 years, with Republicans holding an 18-point advantage among men, and Democrats holding a 15-point advantage among women. That 33-point gender gap is up from a 16-point divide in the 2010 midterms.Despite the large degree of analytical attention that has focused on the voting habits of suburban white women, it seems that it’s men who are changing their voting habits most dramatically. The NBC News polling shows that men with college degrees have moved dramatically to the right, lurching towards Republicans by 26 points since just 2018. Men on the whole have moved towards Republicans by 20 points.The Republican party’s exploding support among men comes as the organs of rightwing media and many Republican politicians have embraced a vitriolic language of gender grievance. For months now, the conservative media has been hammering a message of gender and sexual disorder, seeking to stoke the fears, bigotry and resentment of its audience against the social and legal gains that have been made by women and LGBT groups over the past decades. This message has been enthusiastically taken up by Republican politicians, and issues of sexual anxiety have come to preoccupy every level of American government, from local school board meetings to the recent confirmation hearings of a new supreme court justice.It is hard to define the exact moment when men’s gender grievance came to preoccupy the Republican party. With Republicans’ long commitment to anti-choice and anti-trans bills over the past few years, the issue has had longstanding resonance among the base. But a shift seemed to occur last September, when Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, announced that he would be taking parental leave after he and his husband adopted a pair of newborn twins. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News broadcaster who serves as a weathervane for so much conservative grievance politics, attacked Buttigieg on his show. “Paternity leave, they call it. Trying to figure out how to breastfeed. No word on how that went.”Carlson’s comments were layered with bigotry – against gay men, against mothers, against trans people. But the message was clear: caring for children was feminine and unbecoming of someone who aspired to the masculine authority of a cabinet position. Buttigieg had failed the conservative gender test not once, but twice: first, he was too feminine by virtue of being a gay man. Then, he was too feminine by virtue of being an involved, caregiving parent. The dig was homophobic but also sexist: the only way Carlson could say that Buttigieg was too womanly for power is if women aren’t appropriate holders of power in the first place.Carlson’s attack marked a return to open, avowed homophobic hatred on the Republican right, a stance that had gone dramatically out of fashion, and implicitly out of social acceptability, since the supreme court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v Hodges, the case that recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry nationwide. Republicans had made a strategic retreat from open homophobia, reasoning that the cultural and generational tides were turning toward acceptance of gay couples. With the success of Carlson’s attack – the homophobic mockery of Buttigieg was enthusiastically embraced by Carlson’s viewers – it seems the tide had turned again. In the months since, homophobia has been unleashed as a reliable way for rightwing figures to rally their base. Gay bashing is back.Merging with the elaborate fictions of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that the United States is run by a group of elite, secretive and possibly cannibalistic pedophiles, the renewed homophobic enthusiasm on the right has now manifested in a mass hysteria over so-called “groomers”. This all-purpose smear is now applied to any liberal (or insufficiently conservative) adult, from politicians to school principals, and alleges that any tolerance for gay rights, or indeed any belief in gender equality, is evidence of a pedophilic interest in children.The alarm over so-called “groomers” has led to restrictive, homophobic interventions in public schooling, from a slew of new book bans around the country, to Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill banning classroom discussion of homosexuality, to a Texas school district’s firing of an out lesbian teacher and banning of a high school Gay-Straight Alliance club.That there is no evidence for this hateful lie that liberals are pedophiles has not stopped ordinary conservatives from embracing it. In Connecticut, a rightwing online group posted the name and home address of a public school superintendent whom they labeled a “groomer” due to the alleged presence of a transgender student in one of the schools she oversaw. The forum called for the school official’s execution.Nor is there any level of ambition or pretended dignity that seems able to deter elected Republicans from indulging in the smear. At the recent supreme court confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican senators Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz all pressed Jackson on her sentencing history as a federal judge, suggesting she was soft on men convicted of possessing child abuse images. All four of the men are believed to have presidential ambitions. Apparently, they feel that stoking the sexual and gender anxieties of the American electorate is a smart move for their careers.The Republican party’s emphasis on gender grievance, and its attendant surge in male support, comes on the eve of the biggest setback for gender equality in half a century: the probable end of Roe v Wade. The supreme court is almost universally expected to overturn the abortion rights precedent this summer; many states, considering the decision already effectively nullified, have rushed to outlaw and criminalize abortion within their borders even before the verdict comes down. The bans that are swiftly moving through Republican-controlled state legislatures typically carry no exemption for rape and incest, and their cruelty is justified in viciously misogynistic terms. When Democrats in the Florida state senate tried to add an exception for rape victims to the 15-week ban that Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law on Thursday, their Republican colleagues shut them down.“I fear for the men who are going to be accused of a rape so that the woman could have an abortion,” Kelli Stargel, one of the bill’s sponsors, argued during floor debate. “A woman is going to say she was raped so she could have the abortion.”Her remark was a lie grounded in misogynist myths and, like the “groomer” smear, has no basis in reality. But it seems that Republicans, and their growing base of male voters, are ready to believe it.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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US Capitol rioter who blames Trump for his actions is found guiltyDustin Byron Thompson, 38, claimed he was following orders when he stole a coat rack from a Senate office An Ohio man who claimed he was only “following presidential orders” from Donald Trump when he stormed the US Capitol has been convicted by a jury that took less than three hours to reject his novel defence for obstructing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory.The federal jury on Thursday also found Dustin Byron Thompson, 38, guilty of all five of the other charges in his indictment, including stealing a coat rack from an office inside the Capitol during the riot on 6 January 2021. The maximum sentence for the obstruction count, the lone felony, would be 20 years’ imprisonment.Jurors did not buy Thompson’s defence, in which he blamed Trump and members of the president’s inner circle for the insurrection and for his own actions.One juror who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity said: “Donald Trump wasn’t on trial in this case.”The juror, a 40-year-old man, said as he left the courthouse: “Everyone agrees that Donald Trump is culpable as an overall narrative. Lots of people were there and then went home. Dustin Thompson did not.”Thompson himself, testifying a day earlier, admitted he joined the mob’s attack and stole the coat rack and a bottle of bourbon. He said he regretted his “disgraceful” behaviour.“I can’t believe the things that I did,” he said. “Mob mentality and group think is very real and very dangerous.”Still, he said he believed Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen and was trying to stand up for him. “If the president is giving you almost an order to do something, I felt obligated to do that,” he said.The US district judge Reggie Walton, who is scheduled to sentence Thompson on 20 July, described the defendant’s testimony as “totally disingenuous” and his conduct on 6 January as “reprehensible”. The judge also cast blame in Trump’s direction after the verdict was announced.“I think our democracy is in trouble,” he said, adding that “charlatans” like Trump did not care about democracy, only about power. “And as a result of that, it’s tearing our country apart.” Prosecutors did not ask for Thompson to be detained immediately, but Walton ordered him held and he was led away handcuffed. The judge said he believed Thompson was a flight risk and posed a danger to the public.Thompson’s trial was the third to go before a jury among hundreds of Capitol riot cases prosecuted by the justice department. In the first two cases, jurors also convicted the defendants of all charges.The assistant US attorney William Dreher said Thompson, a college-educated pest exterminator who lost his job during the Covid-19 pandemic, knew he was breaking the law when he joined the mob that attacked the Capitol and, in his case, looted the Senate parliamentarian’s office. The prosecutor told jurors that Thompson’s lawyer “wants you to think you have to choose between President Trump and his client.“You don’t have to choose because this is not President Trump’s trial. This is the trial for Dustin Thompson because of what he did at the Capitol on the afternoon on Jan 6,” Dreher told jurors during his closing arguments.The defence attorney, Samuel Shamansky, said Thompson had not avoided taking responsibility for his conduct.“This shameful chapter in our history is all on TV,” Shamansky told jurors. But he said Thompson, unemployed and consumed by a steady diet of conspiracy theories, was vulnerable to Trump’s lies about a stolen election. He described Thompson as a “pawn” and Trump as a “gangster” who abused his power to manipulate supporters.“The vulnerable are seduced by the strong, and that’s what happened here,” Shamansky said.The judge had barred Thompson’s lawyer from calling Trump and ally Rudolph Giuliani as trial witnesses. But he ruled that jurors could hear recordings of speeches that Trump and Giuliani delivered on 6 January, before the riot erupted. A recording of Trump’s remarks was played.Shamansky contended that Giuliani, the Trump adviser and former New York City mayor, incited rioters by encouraging them to engage in “trial by combat” and that Trump provoked the mob by saying: “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more.”But Dreher told jurors that neither Trump nor Giuliani had the authority to “make legal” what Thompson did at the Capitol.The juror who spoke on condition of anonymity said he was “laughing under my breath” when Thompson testified he took the coat rack to prevent other rioters from using it as a weapon against police.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsUS crimenewsReuse this content More

Playwright Mike Bartlett prophesies a Donald Trump v Kamala Harris showdown against a backdrop of rolling violence

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Mike Bartlett’s new stage work, The 47th, explores a Donald Trump v Kamala Harris contest in 2024, set against a backdrop of rolling violence. Jonathan Freedland asks why artists and writers are drawn to American politics again and again, and what theatre can reveal about the protagonists that news coverage can’t Listen to this week’s episode of Politics Weekly UK with John Harris Send your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts

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Gina McCarthy, White House climate adviser, reportedly to step downTwo sources reported that she was planning to leave her job in the coming months, being ‘frustrated by the slow pace of climate progress’ White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy is planning to step down, according to two sources familiar with the deliberations, likely ending a tenure marked by ambitious emissions targets but failure in securing major US carbon-cutting legislation.McCarthy, 67, had initially planned to remain in the White House for about a year, hoping to help federal agencies implement President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate legislation, but those efforts stalled amid intraparty opposition from key Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin.Climate action has been ‘a calamity’, says Senate Democrat Sheldon WhitehouseRead moreMcCarthy has already delayed her departure, and told one Reuters source that she plans to leave as soon as next month.White House spokesman Vedant Patel said on Thursday: “This is not true and there are no such plans under way and no personnel announcements to make.”“Gina and her entire team continue to be laser focused on delivering on President Biden’s clean energy agenda,” he said in an email.Multiple news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, separately reported that McCarthy had told confidantes that she was planning to leave her job in the coming months, with the Times reporting that she had said she was “frustrated by the slow pace of climate progress”.A Politico poll from December found that 80% of Americans who labeled themselves left-leaning said that the Biden administration is doing too little to address climate change. McCarthy publicly responded to that sentiment in February, Politico reported, saying, “We understand people’s frustration. Would we all like to be running faster and faster? Yes, we would.”The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian on the reports of McCarthy’s plans.McCarthy, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator during the Obama administration, was selected by Biden to a new role leading domestic climate policy coordination at the White House. She serves as a domestic counterpart to John Kerry, who Biden appointed as his special international envoy on climate change.Her deputy, Ali Zaidi, who served as a climate policy adviser in the Obama White House, is seen as her likely replacement, the Washington Post reported.Biden came into office with an ambitious climate agenda, pegged to a $555bn plan to transition to cleaner energy in all aspects of American life. Before those policies stalled, McCarthy, a regulatory expert, was going to be tasked with implementing the plan across multiple agencies.Biden had promised to wean the nation off fossil fuels, but has now found himself looking for ways to increase global supply of oil and other carbon-rich energy products amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine and high gas prices that advisers see damaging his standing with voters.McCarthy’s position was a key demand by the liberal wing of the Democratic party and an illustration of Biden’s commitment to the cause. Not replacing her could be seen as a retreat by the environmental community.TopicsBiden administrationUS politicsClimate crisisnewsReuse this content More

Ed Buck, wealthy political activist and donor, sentenced to 30 years in prisonThe Democratic donor was found guilty on charges that he injected gay men with drugs in exchange for sex, leading to two deaths The wealthy political activist and Democratic donor Ed Buck was sentenced to 30 years in prison on charges that he supplied and personally injected gay men with methamphetamine in exchange for sex, leading to two deaths and multiple other overdoses.Buck, 67, was found guilty in July by a federal jury on all nine counts, including having a drug house, distributing methamphetamine and enticing men to travel for prostitution.Thursday’s sentencing closes a long saga, involving Buck, who prosecutors say used his wealth and influence to prey on and exploit mostly vulnerable Black men for “party and play” encounters at his West Hollywood apartment. The encounters involved Buck paying men to use drugs, injecting large amounts and performing sex acts on them. Officials said Buck would inject methamphetamine with or without the men’s consent and sometimes when they were unconscious.US teen overdose deaths double in three years amid fentanyl crisisRead more“Buck used his money and privilege to exploit the wealth and power imbalances between himself and his victims, who were unhoused, destitute, and/or struggling with addiction,” said Chelsea Norell, an assistant US attorney, in a court filing. “He spent thousands of dollars on drugs and party and play sessions that destroyed lives and bred insidious addictions.”Gemmel Moore, 26, fatally overdosed at Buck’s West Hollywood apartment in July 2017. A second man, Timothy Dean, 55, died nearly two years later in 2019 from a fatal overdose of methamphetamine at Buck’s home. It wasn’t until a third man overdosed twice at the apartmentthat Buck was arrested and charged. All three men were Black.Relatives and activists had pushed for Buck’s arrest since Moore died. They have said Buck escaped criminal charges for years because of his wealth, political ties and race.Buck, who was nicknamed “Doctor Kevorkian”, had at least 10 victims and would sometimes drug them while they were unconscious, according to court filings. One victim said he was “unable to move” after Buck injected him with a tranquilizer. He added that later when Buck wanted him to leave his home, Buck “became frustrated and obtained a power saw from a closet, turned it on, and approached [the] victim with it”.Prosecutors urged the judge to sentence Buck to life in prison, saying that he used “human beings as playthings, destroying their lives merely to appease his own sexual gratification”. Buck’s attorneys sought a 10-year sentence, rather than “relegating him to death in prison”. They asked the judge to consider Buck’s drug addiction, which they said he developed because of a medical condition, and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his father and several priests.LaTisha Nixon, Moore’s mother, said in a letter to the court that she hoped Buck would receive the maximum sentence. Nixon, a certified nursing assistant, said she could not comfort her son the way she has for countless dying people.“All I can think about is how my son died naked on a mattress with no love around him,” Nixon said. “No one to hold his hand or tell him good things.”Buck asked for leniency before he was sentenced, telling the court: “I ask that the court take a look at my life in total,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times, rather than “the horrible caricature the government painted me as: a meth-fueled axe killer”.Buck, a wealthy white man who was active in gay causes and animal rights issues has given more than $500,000, mostly to Democratic politicians and causes since 2000.Black LGBTQ+ activists in California had been advocating for years for Buck to be brought to justice and accused police of ignoring their concerns and allowing Buck to continue hurting people. Buck continued to prey on gay men after Moore’s death, even complaining about the investigation to Dean, who would later die in his home.“Buck’s lack of remorse is aptly captured in one image: as he was hiding out in a hotel, evading arrest for Gemmel Moore’s death, he was injecting Dane Brown, another young Black man, with back-to-back slams of methamphetamine,” Norell said.Brown, who was homeless, moved into Buck’s apartment, where Buck frequently injected him with meth, often several times a day. He was hospitalized in September 2019 after Buck shot him up three times with back-to-back doses, putting five times the meth in his system that Moore and Dean had when they died, prosecutors said.Brown returned to Buck’s home weeks later where Buck again injected him with an overdose of methamphetamine, and refused to help him, he said.“Brown sat on the couch, resigned to the same fate as Moore and Dean, when he heard his deceased mother cry out to him, ‘Get up, Dane,’” Norell said.He escaped Buck’s home and made it to a nearby gas station, where he called for help and was taken to a hospital. His harrowing account of being revived twice finally led to Buck’s arrest.TopicsUS crimeLGBT rightsUS politicsUS justice systemDrugsnewsReuse this content More

Republican party withdraws from US Commission on Presidential DebatesRepublican National Committee accuses organization that has run electoral debates since 1987 of bias The Republican National Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, saying the group that has run the debates for decades was biased and refused to enact reforms.“We are going to find newer, better debate platforms to ensure that future nominees are not forced to go through the biased CPD in order to make their case to the American people,” the committee’s chairperson, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement.Republican party signals plans to withdraw from US presidential debatesRead moreThe RNC’s action requires Republican candidates to agree in writing to appear only in primary and general election debates sanctioned by the committee.The non-profit commission, founded in 1987 to codify the debates as a permanent part of presidential elections, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Democratic National Committee, the RNC’s counterpart for the party of President Joe Biden, was also not immediately available.It was unclear what format future RNC-backed debates would take or whether they would take place as often as in recent decades.The move, which followed months of wrangling between the RNC and the commission, will potentially deprive voters of seeing Republican and Democratic candidates on the same stage.Millions of Americans usually watch the presidential debates and many viewers say they help them to make up their minds about whom to vote for, according to research by Pew Research Center.The RNC’s decision follows grievances aired by former president Donald Trump and other Republicans about the timing of debates, debate formats and the selection of moderators.Defenders of the debates say they are an important element of the democratic process, but critics say they have become television spectacles in which viewers learn little about the candidates’ policies.Trump refused to participate in what was supposed to be the second of three debates with Biden in 2020, after the commission switched it to a virtual contest following Trump’s Covid-19 infection.TopicsRepublicansUS politicsUS elections 2024newsReuse this content More