US Politics

June is Pride month, and many US corporations are advertising their support for the LGBTQ+ community. A new study, however, has found that 25 companies otherwise eager to wave the rainbow flag have donated more than $10m to anti-LGBTQ+ federal and state politicians over the past two years.The study, released on Monday by the Popular Information newsletter, found that alongside pronouncements of LGBTQ+ support, corporations including CVS, AT&T, Walmart and Comcast have supported candidates who seek to block or otherwise restrict equal rights based on gender or sexual orientation.Many of the corporations have 100% ratings on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) 2020 Corporate Equality Index, which measures workplace policies and “public commitment to the LGBTQ community”. The index does not take political donations into account.The study found that CVS, while receiving a perfect HRC score and announcing on Twitter it was “proud to join more than 100 companies that have signed HRC’s Business Statement Opposing Anti-LGBTQ State Legislation”, also supported sponsors of anti-trans legislation in Texas, North Carolina and Tennessee, through its corporate political action committee.In Texas, CVS backed Republican state senators Dawn Buckingham and Bryan Hughes, co-sponsors of SB1646, a bill that would “change the state’s child abuse law” to make it a crime for parents to allow children to receive gender-affirming medical care.The company also backed North Carolina state senator Ralph Hise, primary sponsor of S514, which would ban anyone under 21 receiving gender-affirming treatment and which the Advocate, an LGBTQ+ outlet, called “the most repressive anti-transgender healthcare bill in the nation”.CVS’s $1,000 donation to Hise in August 2020 came four years after huge controversy over an anti-trans “bathroom bill” the senator argued was necessary “to protect the citizens of the state of North Carolina”.CVS has donated $259,000 to 54 members of Congress who received a HRC rating of zero, largely through voting against the Equality Act, over the last two years.Others named in the study include cable giant Comcast, which has donated more than $1m to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians since 2019.A Comcast subsidiary, Xfinity, recently tweeted: “Pride is the love we share. And with Xfinity, it’s Pride all year.” Comcast itself has created “a virtual ‘Pride World’, where we will feature events, Pride floats, Pride flags, and even a Pronoun Guide for employees”.But according to the study by Popular Information, Comcast has also donated more than $1.1m to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians since 2019, including $30,000 to the sponsors of anti-trans legislation in Florida and Texas and $1,095,500 to 149 members of Congress marked zero by HRC.AT&T, which recently said “We can #TURNUPTHELOVE for LGBTQ youth together”, also signed a HRC letter opposing anti-LGBTQ state legislation. But it has also supported sponsors of anti-trans legislation in Arkansas ($12,950), Tennessee ($4,000), North Carolina ($5,000), Texas ($22,500), and Florida ($17,500).Walmart – whose website features a “Pride & Joy” section – has donated at least $442,000 to 121 politicians who received a zero from HRC, according to campaign finance reports.Others mentioned in the study for promoting a perfect score on the Corporate Equality Index and publicising support for LGBTQ+ rights while donating to anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers include United Health, Deloitte and Wells Fargo, which made a $1,000 donation to the North Carolina state senator Joyce Krawiec, who has shared anti-trans articles on social media.Wells Fargo is a corporate supporter of Heritage of Pride, the non-profit that plans and produces New York City’s Pride events. The group has also been supported by Comcast.Michael Bullock of Weekly Senator, a crowdfunding group that channels donations to Senate candidates supporting progressive causes, said LGBTQ+ organisations supported by corporations that donate to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians should be boycotted.Bullock claimed Heritage of Pride “has over time created a parade in which the main goal is to pimp out queer people and queer culture to corporations to make as much money as possible. It’s crazy that this even needs to be said, but all LGBTQ people should boycott the Heritage of Pride until they make sure none of the sponsors fund anti-gay legislation.”Dan Dimant, a spokesperson for Heritage of Pride, told the Guardian the group makes efforts to prevent “pink-washing”, including guidelines on its website, and “takes great pains to ensure that partnerships meet strict criteria and that all partners are working to further the mission of the organization”.“There is a vetting process, so we make our best effort to avoid some of these conflicts of interest but that said it’s a moving target because companies change over time,” Dimant said.While many companies named in the Popular Information study did not comment, many reaffirmed their commitment to LGBTQ+ rights.General Motors said its political contributions “do not represent an endorsement of the candidate or support for all the issues the candidate supports [and] we will continue to clearly communicate with policymakers GM’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion”.Ford said “contributions by our employee Pac are bipartisan and take into consideration many issues that are important to meeting the needs of our customers, our team and our company”.Google defended its record on supporting “the rights of all LGBTQ people” and said a contribution to a candidate “doesn’t mean that Google agrees with that candidate on every issue. In fact, we may disagree strongly on some issues.” Amazon took a similar position. More

The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Monday it was “highly unlikely” he would allow Joe Biden to fill a supreme court vacancy arising in 2024, the year of the next presidential election, if Republicans regained control of the chamber.“I think it’s highly unlikely – in fact, no, I don’t think either party, if it were different from the president, would confirm a supreme court nominee in the middle of an election,” McConnell told Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio host.McConnell blocked Barack Obama from filling a vacancy in 2016, denying Merrick Garland, now attorney general, even a hearing after he was nominated to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia.McConnell said that was because no new justice should be seated in an election year – a position he reversed with alacrity in 2020, on the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg two months before polling day.Ginsburg, a liberal lion, was replaced by the conservative Amy Coney Barrett, tipping the court 6-3 to the right. Major cases are coming up on abortion rights, gun control, affirmative action and more.McConnell claimed then, and repeated to Hewitt, that no new justice should be seated in an election year when the White House and the Senate are controlled by different parties.“I think in the middle of a presidential election,” McConnell said, “if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled.“So I think it’s highly unlikely. In fact, no, I don’t think either party if it controlled, if it were different from the president would confirm a supreme court nominee in the middle of an election. What was different in 2020 was we were of the same party as the president. And that’s why we went ahead with it.”Asked what would happen if a vacancy arose in 2023 with Republicans in control of the Senate, McConnell said: “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”He also said keeping Scalia’s seat open – to be filled under Donald Trump by Neil Gorsuch – “is the single most consequential thing I’ve done in my time as majority leader of the Senate”.McConnell’s hardball tactics have contributed to his status as a hate figure among progressives. On Monday, much online reaction to his remarks focused on beseeching Stephen Breyer, a liberal and at 82 the oldest justice on the current court, to retire while Biden is in the White House and Democrats hold the Senate.Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, said: “Exactly as I wrote last week. McConnell will NOT fill a Breyer seat if he’s majority leader, even if he has to wait two years with the seat open.”Jeet Heer, a columnist for the Nation, wrote: “Can someone send this to USA supreme court justice Stephen Breyer. Thanks!”The conservative hold on the court was strengthened in 2018 when Anthony Kennedy, often a swing vote on civil rights issues, stepped down and was replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, once an official in the White House of George W Bush.Kavanaugh faced and denied allegations of sexual assault during a stormy confirmation but McConnell said he was “stronger than mule piss” in support and the process was duly completed.Breyer, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1994, has shown little inclination to follow Kennedy’s example and step aside for a younger justice.Last month, he angered some on the left by telling high school and middle school students the key to working with conservatives was to talk to them more.Among progressives, support is growing for countering conservative dominance of the court by increasing the number of justices. Republicans are stringently opposed.McConnell told Hewitt he wanted to give Breyer “a shout out, though, because he joined what Justice Ginsburg said in 2019, that nine is the right number for the supreme court, and I admire him for that. I think even the liberal justices on the supreme court have made it clear that court packing is a terrible idea.”The number of justices on the court is not fixed in the constitution. More

On the first day of Pride month, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, signed a law banning transgender girls from participating on girls’ sports teams in middle school through college.It was just one of 13 anti-trans bills conservative lawmakers in the US passed this year, and one of more than 110 bills that were proposed – by far the largest number in US history.This extraordinary legislative attack on trans rights has primarily targeted children and young adults and has dramatically escalated over the last several months, establishing anti-trans policy as a signature priority for state Republicans. The results could be catastrophic for vulnerable children, advocates and affected families say, given that the bills target healthcare, recreation and school life, with policies that intensify discrimination and exclusion of trans kids.The proposals have spanned 37 states, affecting nearly every region of the country, according to Freedom for All Americans, a not-for-profit that has tracked the bills and compiled data for the Guardian.While most legislative sessions have now ended and a majority of the bills failed, there are at least six anti-trans bills that remain active, in addition to the 13 laws that passed.“What we saw was unprecedented, and it was an avalanche,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, a professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and an expert on trans kids. “There’s this relentlessness and exhaustion. How do you fight a war on 100 fronts simultaneously?”The most common target: trans athletesThe most common anti-trans proposals were focused on sports, many of them specifically seeking to ban trans girls from competing on girls’ teams. Sports bills limiting the access of trans girls to teams have been passed this year in Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi and West Virginia. Bills that more broadly ban trans kids from playing on the teams that match their gender were signed into law in Alabama, Montana and Tennessee. (Arkansas also passed a second sports-related law that creates an enforcement mechanism for its ban.)In South Dakota, the sports bills failed, but the governor instead signed two executive orders banning trans girls from girls sports teams in K-12, and in college. There are several states where the legislative sessions are ongoing and these types of bans are still under consideration, including Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In total more than 60 sports ban laws were proposed this year across 36 states.“It’s a piece of your life that you work so hard for, and for it just to be taken away is hard,” a 12-year-old swimmer and trans girl in Utah told the Guardian earlier this year. The proposed ban in her state ultimately failed.Other bills target gender-affirming healthcareThe bulk of the other anti-trans bills sought to outlaw gender-affirming healthcare, with at least 36 proposals related to medical treatments across 21 states. In April, Arkansas passed the first ban on affirming healthcare for youth, with a policy that threatens to discipline or revoke the licenses of doctors who provide it. Experts and clinicians had strongly objected, arguing that the state was prohibiting care that is considered standard and best practice, and advocates said it was one of the most extreme anti-trans bills to ever be enacted.Tennessee later adopted a more narrow anti-trans medical bill, which prohibited hormone treatments for “prepubertal minors”. Advocates noted that youth do not receive hormones pre-puberty and that this law would not disrupt existing care, but was nonetheless sending a hateful message.‘No goals here except discrimination’Five states also considered anti-trans bathroom bills, with Tennessee ultimately passing two separate laws. One prohibits trans kids from using bathrooms and locker rooms at school that match their gender. Another requires that if businesses allow trans people to use the correct bathrooms, they have to post a sign that says, “This facility maintains a policy of allowing the use of restrooms by either biological sex, regardless of the designation on the restroom.”Montana passed a law banning trans people from correcting the gender marker on their birth certificates if they haven’t undergone affirming surgery.“State legislatures prioritized mean-spirited, dangerous and unnecessary bills targeting transgender kids at a moment when states are still recovering from the pandemic,” said Hannah Willard, the vice-president of government affairs with Freedom for All Americans. “It was unconscionable.”Civil rights groups have begun filing lawsuits challenging the bills, some of which are scheduled to go into effect in July. These court battles could overturn or temporarily block the laws, but families have already reported fleeing their states to protect their kids. Some advocates have called on people in power to defy the laws, and the district attorney in Nashville has said he would not enforce one of the bathroom bills.Trans youth, who have repeatedly traveled to their state capitols to testify against the bills, said the political debates about their lives have worsened their mental health and anxiety.“It’s hard to describe the magnitude of damage that has been done,” said Gill-Peterson. “Even in the states where the bills didn’t pass, trans young people are living in an environment where prominent politicians have stated that it’s open season on their lives, that they don’t deserve basic human rights, that their lives are expandable or wrong, and that the people who love and care for them are somehow enemies of the Republican party.”She said she feared that the next legislative cycle would bring even more extreme bills, adding, “There were no goals here except discrimination, and cheap political points. And now, we are living in a more policed, more dangerous country for trans young people.” More

Nato leaders have declared China presents a security risk at their annual summit in Brussels, the first time the traditionally Russia-focused military alliance has asserted it needs to respond to Beijing’s growing power.The final communique, signed off by leaders of the 30-member alliance at the urging of the new US administration, said China’s “stated ambitions and assertive behaviour present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order”.After the summit, Joe Biden said that the US had a “sacred commitment” to come to the defence of its Nato allies in an effort to soothe residual nervousness in the wake of Donald Trump’s hostility. Biden said that his fellow leaders at the summit knew most Americans were committed to democracy and that the US was a “decent, honourable nation”.On the question of potential Ukrainian membership of Nato, Biden said the Russian occupation of Crimea would not be an impediment, but that Ukraine still had work to do on corruption before it could join a membership action plan.“It depends on whether they meet the criteria. The fact is, they still have to clean up corruption,” Biden said.The Nato leaders declared their concern about China’s “coercive policies” – an apparent reference to the repression of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang – the expansion of its nuclear arsenal and its “frequent lack of transparency and use of disinformation”.The language, notably stronger than the China remarks contained in the G7 statement agreed on Sunday, follows lobbying and pressure by the Biden administration, seeking to create a counterweight of democratic nations in response to Beijing’s growing economic and military might.However, Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, insisted China was “not an adversary”, saying instead the emerging strategy was to address “the challenges” posed by Beijing, which will “soon be the biggest economy in the world” and “already has the second-largest defence budget, the biggest navy”.At the beginning of the summit, Biden said there was a growing recognition that Nato faced new challenges. “We have Russia, which is acting in a way that is not consistent with what we had hoped, and we have China.”Nato, founded in 1949 at the start of the cold war, was created to respond to the Soviet Union and more recently Russia, while Beijing rarely posed a serious security concern for its members.China had never previously been mentioned in a Nato summit declaration, apart from a brief reference in 2019 to the “opportunities and challenges” the country posed for members of the western alliance – a time when Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was president.On Sunday night, Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, promised Nato would increase its focus on Beijing, saying that China “will feature in the communique in a more robust way than we’ve ever seen before”.Other countries have highlighted the importance of striking a balance. Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, said as he arrived at the gathering: “I think when it comes to China, I don’t think anybody around the table today wants to descend into a new cold war.”G7 leaders criticised Beijing over human rights in its Xinjiang region, called for Hong Kong to keep a high degree of autonomy and demanded a full investigation of the origins of the coronavirus in China.China’s embassy in London said such mentions of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan distorted the facts and exposed the “sinister intentions of a few countries such as the United States”. It added: “China’s reputation must not be slandered.”Stoltenberg also said the alliance’s relationship with Russia was at “its lowest point since the end of the cold war”. He blamed Russia’s “aggressive actions” for the deterioration in relations at the start of a one-day summit attended by Biden for the first time since he took office.Alliance members had hoped for a strong statement of support for Nato from Biden after several years in which Donald Trump dominated the summits, threatening to pull out of Nato in 2018 and storming home early in 2019.“Nato is critically important for US interests in and of itself,” Biden said as he met Stoltenberg. The president described Nato’s article 5, under which an armed attack against one member is deemed an attack against them all, as “a sacred obligation”.He added: “I want Nato to know America is there.”The allies denounced Moscow’s “hybrid actions”, “widespread disinformation campaigns”, “malicious cyber activities”, and election interference directed against Nato members. “Until Russia demonstrates compliance with international law and its international obligations and responsibilities, there can be no return to ‘business as usual’,” the statement said. “We will continue to respond to the deteriorating security environment by enhancing our deterrence and defence posture.”Alliance members agreed a new cybersecurity strategy in response, and will for the first time help each other out in the case of “cyber-attacks of significance”, mirroring Nato’s obligation of collective defence in the traditional military sphere, enshrined in article 5. More

Late on the night of 24 April, the wife of Georgia’s top election official got a chilling text message: “You and your family will be killed very slowly.”A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”That followed a 5 April text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident”.Those messages, which have not been previously reported, are examples of the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after Donald Trump’s November election defeat.While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide, from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers.The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims.The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the justice department will prosecute threats against election officials, amid other additional measures to protect democracy.Tricia Raffensperger has now spoken out publicly about the threats of violence to her family, and shared menacing text messages.Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66, began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in Georgia, long a Republican bastion.Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled weekly visits in her home with two young grandchildren, the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.“I couldn’t have them come to my house any more,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them.That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s election lies, were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. “Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.Brad Raffensperger told Reuters in a statement: “Vitriol and threats are an unfortunate, but expected, part of public service. But my family should be left alone.”Trump’s baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for US election leaders and workers, especially in contested states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Reuters she continues to receive death threats. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who faced armed protesters outside her home in December, is also still getting threats, her spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.Many others whose lives have been threatened were low- or mid-level workers. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric could reverberate into the 2022 midterm congressional elections and the 2024 presidential vote. Many election offices will lose critical employees with years or decades of experience, predicted David Becker, executive director of the non-partisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.“This is deeply troubling,” he said.Carlos Nelson, elections supervisor for Ware county in south-eastern Georgia, shares that fear.“These are people who work for little or no money, 12 to 14 hours a day on election day,” Nelson said. “If we lose good poll workers, that’s when we’re going to lose democracy.”In Georgia, Trump faces an investigation into alleged election interference, the only known criminal inquiry into his attempts to overturn the 2020 vote.Trump spokesman Jason Miller did not respond to Reuters’ questions, including why Trump has not forcefully denounced the torrent of threats being made in his name.One email, sent on 2 January to Georgia officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites, saying: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.”It was forwarded to the FBI, which declined to comment.In Georgia, threatening violence against a poll officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $100,000. Making death threats is a separate crime carrying up to five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.Criminal law specialists say the widespread threats could increase the legal jeopardy for Trump in the Georgia investigation. Among other matters, investigators are examining a 2 January call in which Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his Georgia loss.That statement suggests Willis may be examining whether Trump, or others acting with him, solicited or encouraged death threats against election officials, said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. Such intimidation could fit into a possible racketeering investigation into Trump if the threats were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the election, said Clint Rucker, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney and former Fulton county prosecutor.Since launching her inquiry in February, Willis has added several high-profile attorneys to her team, including a leading racketeering expert, to assist on cases including the Trump investigation, Reuters reported on 6 March.“I think there’s going to be a big-picture look at all of it,” said Rucker, a Democrat, who once prosecuted a high-profile racketeering case with Fanni Willis, district attorney for Fulton county, which includes Atlanta.A Fulton county district attorney spokesman, Jeff DiSantis, did not respond to requests for comment on the office’s inquiries into election-related threats of violence.In April, two investigators from Willis’s office, met with the county elections director, Richard Barron seeking information on “hundreds” of threats against Barron and his staff, Barron said. He said his staff was made up almost entirely of Black election workers. “The racial slurs were disturbing and sickening,” he said of the threats.Barron’s election registration chief, Ralph Jones, 56, received abhorrent, racist messages, and strangers showed up at his house.“It was unbelievable: your life being threatened just because you’re doing your job,” he said.And Barron was bombarded with threats after Trump accused him of criminal election fraud at a rally in December. “I underestimated how hard he was going to push that narrative and just keep pushing it,” Barron said.Between Christmas and early January, Barron received nearly 150 hateful, vicious calls, many accusing him of treason or saying he deserved to he hanged or killed by firing squad, according to Barron and a Reuters review of some of the phone messages.Election officials in at least 11 Georgia counties received an email in January – during the Senate runoff that resulted in a historic win for the Democrats in both the state’s US Senate seats – threatening “death and destruction” unless Trump continued to be president, and the bombing of all election sites.It added: “We’ll make the Boston bombings look like child’s play,” apparently referring to the 2013 extremist attack on the Boston Marathon.During the Senate runoff, Vanessa Montgomery, 58, was a polling manager in the Georgia city of Taylorsville. When polls closed that night, she set off to deliver ballots to an elections office in Bartow county, a predominantly white, Republican district in north-western Georgia. Montgomery, who is Black, was traveling with her daughter, also a poll worker hired temporarily for the election.They were followed by an SUV, which nearly ran them off the road. They had to call 911 and be guided to safety. The scare triggered a panic attack in Montgomery, something she had not experienced since being an army officer in Bosnia, seeing people blown up by landmines.Her manager, Joseph Kirk, Bartow county elections supervisor, said he worried the ugly reactions to Trump’s loss could result in shortages of good election workers nationwide in future.Many other election officials told of incidents such as receiving violent, “ranting” calls, threatening people that could go to prison for “rigging” the election against Trump.Brad Raffensperger’s deputy, Jordan Fuchs, said she had received death threats and obscene images after a Trump supporter posted her contact details online.Hostile messages, including calls for public hangings of officials, began pouring in to the office after Trump called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” last year and continued as he refused to overturn the election results.“I don’t think any of us anticipated this level of nastiness,” said Fuchs, 31, who grew up in a conservative Christian family and has worked for years to help elect Republicans.Vivian Ho contributed reporting More

The White House press secretary turned Fox News contributor Kayleigh McEnany has claimed she “never lied” while speaking for Donald Trump.Addressing a conservative group on Sunday, McEnany said of her first steps in the role: “And then there was the question, ‘Will you ever lie to us?’, and I said without hesitation, ‘No’, and I never did, as a woman of faith.“As a mother of baby Blake, as a person who meticulously prepared at some of the world’s hardest institutions, I never lied. I sourced my information, but that will never stop the press from calling you a liar.”The press has questioned the veracity of McEnany’s claims. So have political factchecking sites. For instance, Politifact gave McEnany a “pants on fire” rating last September after she told reporters: “The president never downplayed the virus.”She was responding to questions about reporting by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, to whom Trump said in March 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”Politifact said: “The record shows she’s wrong.”McEnany restarted White House briefings after more than 400 days without one under Stephanie Grisham. Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders also presided over a deterioration in relations between the press and the White House and, critics said, the relationship between the White House and truth.Reporting McEnany’s first appearance, on 1 May 2020, the Guardian said that “even on an assured debut, McEnany skated close to peddling dodgy information about Trump’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic (‘This president has always sided on the side of data’) and allegations of sexual misconduct (‘He has always told the truth’).”The Washington Post’s factcheckers put Trump’s final tally of false or misleading claims at 30,573.At the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas, McEnany said she came up with a motto for her press operation: “Offense only.”“Because I knew what we were up against. Republicans always get the bad headlines, always get the false stories, always get the lies, if I can use that word, told by the press. There is one standard for Democrats and another for Republicans, and we must be on offense, confident, bold and willing to call it out. We cannot be silent.”Regarding supposed lying by the press, McEnany cited coverage of the clearing of Lafayette Square, intelligence on Russian bounties on US troops and the theory the coronavirus escaped a laboratory in China – all stories subject to evolving reporting.McEnany is one of a number of veterans of the Trump White House to have found roles at Fox News, where she is a commentator and co-hosts Outnumbered.But when she was press secretary, even Fox News cut away from her remarks when she advanced Trump’s lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud.In March, responding to news of McEnany’s new job, an anonymous Fox News staffer quoted by the Daily Beast referred to the 6 January attack on the US Capitol in calling McEnany “a mini-Goebbels” who “helped incite an insurrection on our democracy”.On Sunday, amid uproar over her claim never to have lied in service of Trump, she tweeted: “Haters will hate!” More

Three years ago it was Donald Trump who stunned Nato members at a summit in Brussels, warning that he may be prepared to pull the US out of the western military alliance if its other members did not increase their defence spending.At a summit in the same city on Monday, it falls to Joe Biden to repair the damage from four years of his predecessor’s freewheeling theatrics, although experts caution that the Trump era will have lasting consequences.Rhetorically, at least, the omens are favourable. The US president declared Nato’s article 5, under which an armed attack against one member is deemed an attack against them all, a “sacred commitment” last week.Similar language and a respectful tone, long a Biden trademark, are expected in the Belgian capital, not least because the US wants Nato, along with the G7, to take a more robust line against Russia, particularly on cyberwarfare, and even China, not traditionally seen as an opponent.US officials were confidently briefing before the summit that “this will be the first time that the Nato countries will be addressing the security challenge from China”.The alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has promised a new cybersecurity policy and has said relations with Russia, from where most hacking emanates, were at their lowest point since the end of the cold war.Karin von Hippel, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, said: “Biden is arguably the United States’ most experienced foreign policy president. He really does value alliances and knows they are needed to tackle problems like China.“But Nato allies also know that four years can go by pretty quickly in world affairs. They know that Trump, or a politician like him, could return to the presidency soon. They have to imagine a world where the US is not there all the time.”Until Biden’s election, Nato had been paralysed or in retreat. Three years ago, Trump arrived late to a morning session and bulldozed into a discussion about Ukraine’s application for membership and the situation in Afghanistan with a theme of his own.The president accused the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, of refusing to spend more on defence and went on to declare that Nato allies would have to raise their spending by January 2019 or Washington would go it alone.No firm commitments were extracted in the emergency discussion that ensued and most leaders left hastily, but Trump held a press conference and declared, in a parallel universe, that the summit had been a great success. “I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius,” he said, repeating an already familiar phrase.Nato officials pared back the 2019 summit in London but Trump ensured it was even shorter anyway, storming out after a group of leaders were caught on video ridiculing his lengthy press conferences. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was two-faced, Trump said, accusing Ottawa of not spending enough on defence.It was almost something of a relief that the coronavirus pandemic intervened in 2020, although Trump ordered the withdrawal of 12,000 US troops from Germany, a decision Biden has reversed. The idea that other Nato members should increase their defence spending and share more of the burden has, however, united a string of US presidents.At the Nato summit in Cardiff in 2014, when Barack Obama was president and Biden his deputy, members agreed to reverse cuts in defence spending and lift it above 2% of GDP. Helped somewhat by falls in GDP related to the pandemic, the UK will hit 2.29% in 2021 and France 2.01%, but Germany’s spending stands at 1.53%.Nor is Biden’s commitment to US militarism absolute. He followed through with Trump’s announcement of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though other Nato allies such as the UK would have preferred to continue the long-running peacekeeping mission.Stoltenberg was asked at a press conference on Friday whether Trump’s absence would allow other alliance members to go easy on defence spending. During his reply, he argued that the “transatlantic bond in Nato goes beyond individual political leaders”.Von Hippel, however, cautioned against over-confident talk at what is likely to be an upbeat gathering. “The threat of another Trump should make the Europeans less complacent,” she said. More