US Politics

The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serveWelcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Robert Reich highlighted the link between corruption and affordability. Today’s edition was written by Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit. Sign up for future editions here.“The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” Like so many things tech oligarchs say, it’s incoherent, since Altman would like to deny the world and the people in it the agency to decide whether or not we should accept his bad things. Surveys show that most Americans would like to pause AI; opposition to AI datacenters is a factor in many races in the midterm elections. People are outraged and anxious about what tech hath wrought, mad enough to fight back in what is coming to seem like a human v machine battle. Continue reading… More

The administration seems intent on stripping the congresswoman of her US citizenship and deporting her. It’s a terrible abuse of powerWhat do you think it is about Ilhan Omar, exactly, that seems to get under Donald Trump’s tangerine-tinted skin? The president has claimed he has a problem with the progressive Democratic congresswoman because she is “unpatriotic” to the US and “disrespectful … to Israel”. However, the extent of his animus towards Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, suggests there’s more to it. Trump has insisted he is “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world”, so I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s brown and Muslim. Truly, it’s a mystery.Whatever the reason, Trump’s not a fan. The president has plenty of enemies, but few have been attacked as ferociously and consistently over the years as Omar. He’s called her “garbage”, among other nasty names, suggested (without evidence) that she married her brother, and said she “should be thrown the hell out of our country”. His supporters have echoed his calls to deport Omar, who fled war-torn Somalia as a child and became a naturalised US citizen at 17. Continue reading… More

Here’s what we need to do to stand up for international lawMany applauded when Navi Pillay was awarded the Nobel peace prize. The South African human rights lawyer had chaired the UN commission of inquiry that found Israel to have committed genocide in Gaza and served for five years as a judge on the international criminal court (ICC).Donald Trump responded a few hours later by imposing sanctions on the ICC. He chose a moment for celebrating the rule of law to try to undermine it.Kenneth Roth is a Guardian US columnist, a senior fellow at Yale University and a former executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is the author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments Continue reading… More

Ukrainian president accuses Washington of ‘denial of reality’ in continuing row with Trump over apparent support for MoscowUkraine did not receive a warning from the US about an impending Russian missile attack on Sunday evening, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, reviving concerns that Washington is withholding intelligence to bully Kyiv into capitulating to Moscow.Yuri Ihnat, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian air force, said on television on Monday morning that Ukraine had not received a warning before a Russian missile barrage hit power plants in Kyiv at about 11pm. Earlier, a Ukrainian government official had told the Guardian the US had not warned the capital about the impending missile strike. Continue reading… More

The president came out in support of Senator Roger Marshall, who is facing and unexpectedly strong challenge from Democrat Adam Hamilton The fact that Donald Trump was here at all said more about a looming electoral disaster facing his Republican party next month than anything contained in his dark and discursive 98-minute stump speech.On Monday, amid raucous chants of “USA! USA!”, the president held his first campaign rally in Kansas for eight years. No Democrat has won a US Senate seat in this ruby-red state since 1932, the year Herbert Hoover was president, Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the Nazis became the biggest party in the German Reichstag. Continue reading… More

President at Kansas rally tries to turn protests into cautionary tale for US as Republicans face midterm lossesExplainer: why are people protesting across Europe?As Republicans confront mounting political headwinds ahead of November’s midterm elections, Donald Trump is attempting to turn unrest in France into a cautionary tale for American voters, recasting the demonstrations that began as student protests against crumbling schools and the soaring cost of living as evidence of the dangers of immigration and the erosion of western civilization.At a rally in Kansas on Monday evening, Trump described France as a once-great nation that had been “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists”. Continue reading… More

This live blog is now closed.Sign up for US Breaking News emailA new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached a new low – 33%.This comes, just over two weeks away from the November midterms, as the president continues crisscrossing the country as part of his campaign blitz for embattled Republicans. Continue reading… More

Crackdown marks latest escalation in the Trump justice department’s push to target alleged noncitizen votingThe US Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against 28 green card holders in California accused of fraudulently registering to vote and casting illegal ballots.The crackdown marks another escalation in the federal government’s ongoing efforts against alleged noncitizen voting, efforts that Democrats and voting rights groups say are part of a strategy by the Trump administration to sow doubt in the results of the upcoming midterm elections. Continue reading… More