US Politics

It looks as if the right are giving themselves heartburn to own the libs. Over the weekend, some prominent US conservatives shared pictures of themselves eating enormous slabs of meat in response to fabricated claims that president Joe Biden is planning to limit red meat consumption. Despite the fact that Biden’s imaginary meat quotas exist only in these people’s heads, rightwingers have spent the last few days frothing at the mouth over them. Several Fox News hosts have repeated this baseless claim and a number of Republican politicians, including the governor of Texas, have tweeted their opposition to this fictional policy. Larry Kudlow, the former economic adviser to Donald Trump, even complained that Biden wants Americans to drink “plant-based beer”. You know, as opposed to the flesh-based beer that real Americans enjoy.What on earth sparked this carnivorous conservative fever-dream? MailOnline. On Thursday it published a highly misleading article claiming: “Biden’s climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH.” The word “could” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there: Biden has said nothing of the sort. The assertion stems from a 2020 academic paper that has no connections to Biden; this study noted that if Americans made a 90% cut to their beef consumption, there would be a 51% reduction in diet-related US greenhouse gas emissions between 2016 and 2030.Factchecking all this is largely futile, of course: the people who get het up about an imaginary war on burgers tend to not let reality get in the way of their feelings. I suspect many of the high-profile people pushing the Biden-bans-beef narrative knew very well it was baloney; they just wanted to stoke the culture wars. Fox News, for example, rammed the story down people’s throats for days then acknowledged on Monday that its reporting about Biden’s meat quotas had been somewhat inaccurate. The rightwing grievance cycle goes like this: invent something to get upset about; have jowly men with names like Tucker and Chad amplify this imaginary grievance on conservative media outlets; find ludicrous and often self-defeating way to protest against this imaginary grievance; get Tucker and Chad to quietly admit they may have somewhat exaggerated things; conjure up something new to get outraged about.This isn’t the first time the right has had a meat-based meltdown. Meat has become a cornerstone of the culture wars, a recurring theme in the endless rightwing grievance cycle. “They want to take away your hamburgers,” the former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka yelled at the 2019 Conservative Political Action conference. “This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved.” Ah, yes, Stalin’s Five-Year Hamburger Eradication Plan – I remember learning about that in history class. In today’s polarised world, meat is no longer just a foodstuff: performative meat-eating has become a way to signal that you’re a Real Man (or a Traditional Woman who appreciates Real Men) who loves guns and freedom and is sceptical about the climate crisis. Fox News host Jesse Watters once ate a steak on air to “trigger” a vegan. Very edgy stuff! Jordan Peterson, the right’s favourite philosopher, has memorably endorsed a meat-only diet. (Tangentially, according to one study by researchers from the University of Hawaii, men incorporate more red meat into their diet when they feel like their manliness is threatened.)Ultimately, however, it is not just the right that has an unhealthy obsession with meat. Global meat consumption keeps rising: the amount of meat consumed per person nearly doubled in the past 50 years. “Plant-based” eating may have become fashionable, yet the world is on track to consume more meat in 2021 than ever before. That is a problem because the meat industry has a huge carbon footprint. While banning people from eating animal products obviously isn’t feasible, we desperately need to find ways to reduce global meat consumption. Food for thought while you enjoy a plant-based beer, anyway. More

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will join the US president, Joe Biden, at a concert in Los Angeles aimed at increasing the global vaccination effort.Harry and Meghan are “campaign chairs” of the A-list event, Vax Live. Hosted by Selena Gomez, and organised by Global Citizen, the event, on Saturday 8 May, will feature musical performances by names from the worlds of film and politics, and music performances from stars including Jennifer Lopez, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Foo Fighters, J Balvin and HER.The broadcast special aims to encourage donations to Covax, which is working to provide vaccines for low and middle-income countries.In a statement, the Sussexes said: “Over the past year, our world has experienced pain, loss and struggle – together. Now we need to recover and heal – together. We can’t leave anybody behind. We will all benefit, we will all be safer, when everyone, everywhere has equal access to the vaccine.“We must pursue equitable vaccine distribution and, in that, restore faith in our common humanity. The mission couldn’t be more critical or important.”Special guests, including Ben Affleck, Chrissy Teigen, David Letterman, Gayle King, Jimmy Kimmel and Sean Penn, will speak from around the world.Biden, along with the US first lady, Jill Biden, and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, will make special appearances through Global Citizen’s partnership with the White House’s We Can Do This initiative, which encourages measures, including mask wearing.Appearances by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and the Croatian prime minister, Andrej Plenković, are also planned, organisers say.A trailer for Vax Live promised it would feature “big names and an even bigger message”. It will be recorded at SoFi stadium in Los Angeles, and air on 8 May across networks including ABC, CBS, and iHeartMedia radio stations.The announcement comes as there are calls for the US to hand over 60m doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to India as part of the global drive to fight the virus. The US announced on Monday that 60m doses would be available to send abroad once the vaccine was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).Global Citizen calls itself a movement of “engaged citizens who are using their collective voice to end extreme poverty by 2030”. The concert has been described as a call to world leaders to ensure vaccines are accessible for all. More

Joe Biden plans to give tax collectors an extra $80bn to seek as much as $700bn in new revenue from high earners and large corporations, as part of the “American Families Plan” set to be unveiled this week.Separately, the White House announced overnight that Biden will issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay a $15 minimum wage to workers on federal contracts.Enhanced tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), coupled with new disclosure rules, could raise $700bn over the next decade from wealthy people and privately-owned businesses, according to unidentified administration officials speaking to the New York Times.The additional funding represents an increase of two-thirds over the agency’s entire funding levels for the past decade.In a statement, the administration said the new federal wage floor “will promote economy and efficiency in federal contracting, providing value for taxpayers by enhancing worker productivity and generating higher-quality work by boosting workers’ health, morale, and effort”.“The executive order ensures that hundreds of thousands of workers no longer have to work full time and still live in poverty. It will improve the economic security of families and make progress toward reversing decades of income inequality,” it said.The measures come ahead of a major policy speech before a joint session of congress on Wednesday in which Biden is expected to frame raising taxes on wealthy Americans employing sophisticated schemes to lower tax exposure and closing corporate loopholes as a way of leveling the tax burden between middle and lower earning Americans and the wealthy.As part of the new tax structure, the administration plans to raise the top income tax rate to 39.6% from 37% and raising capital gains tax rates on those who earn more than $1m a year. Tax rates will also be raised on income for people earning more than $1m per year through stock dividends.Earlier this month, IRS commissioner Charles Rettig told a Senate committee that tax cheats cost the government as much as $1tn a year and the agency lacked the resources to enforce the tax code. Biden, it is widely reported, plans to use additional money raised by a crackdown to help pay for his “American Families Plan.”But higher taxes face a pushback from Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Administration sources told the Financial Times that capital gains tax rise will hit only the richest 0.3% – a “sliver” of the US population.Conversely, the White House has said that raising the minimum wage for hundreds of thousands of workers on federal contracts is “critical” to the functioning of the federal government “for cleaning professionals and maintenance workers who ensure federal employees have safe and clean places to work, to nursing assistants who care for the nation’s veterans, to cafeteria and other food service workers who ensure military members have healthy and nutritious food to eat, to laborers who build and repair federal infrastructure”. More

Last week, Rick Santorum repeated a widely held myth of US exceptionalism. “We came here and created a blank slate, we birthed a nation from nothing,” the former US senator and CNN commentator told the rightwing Young America’s Foundation’s summit. “It was born of the people who came here.” His “we” doesn’t include Indigenous people who were already here or African people who were brought in chains. And that “blank slate” required the violent pillaging of two continents – Africa and North America. If the United States was “birthed from nothing”, then the land and enslaved labor that made the wealth of this nation must have fallen from the sky – because it surely didn’t come from Europe.It’s not the first time a CNN employee has espoused anti-Indigenous racism. Last November during live election night coverage, CNN labeled Native American voters as “something else”. The Native American Journalist Association (NAJA) asked CNN to issue an apology, which it refused to do. And just last week, CNN host Poppy Harlow misidentified the Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, as “a white woman”. The network has yet to correct the error. NAJA (of which I’m a member) has since called for the firing of Rick Santorum and its membership to avoid working with CNN for its lack of ethics and accountability around various racist views among its staff.Racist depictions of Indigenous people in the media, however, points to a deeper issue. The erasure of Native histories and peoples – which existed long before and despite a white supremacist empire – is a founding principle of the United States. In fact, it’s still codified in US law. So when Rick Santorum and his ilk stress that Europeans possess a divine right to take a continent, create a nation from “nothing”, and maintain cultural superiority, they’re not entirely wrong. It’s the default position with a long sordid history.And maybe Santorum and his kind are right when they position the US as a Christian theocratic nation. After all, the founding principles of land theft, enslavement and dispossession stem from religious justifications. A 1493 papal decree known as the doctrine of discovery, justified the Christian European conquest of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. As secretary of state in 1792, Thomas Jefferson declared the doctrine, implemented by European states, was international law and thus applied to the nascent United States as well.Those views later inspired the Monroe doctrine, the assertion of US supremacy over the western hemisphere, and manifest destiny, the ideological justification of US westward expansion and colonization. An 1823 US supreme court case, Johnson v M’Intosh, upheld the doctrine, privileging European nations, and successors like the United States, title via “discovery” over Indigenous lands. Indigenous nations and sovereignty, the court ruled, “were necessarily diminished”.Such a legal and political reality for Indigenous people is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in history books let alone mainstream commentary. Instead, a culture of amnesia permeates the United Sates. But purposeful forgetting can’t erase intent, it only perpetuates injury. Erasure makes the taking of Indigenous land easier.Although the United States quickly accuses other nations of genocide, it hasn’t acknowledged its own genocide against Indigenous people. To affirm it would mean to take measures to prevent it from happening again. That would mean halting ongoing theft and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and nations. A process of justice would have to follow suit. An entire legal order that underpins the backwards racist views and practices towards Indigenous people would have to be overturned. Indigenous land and political rights would have to be restored. A savage nation built of untold violence would have to be finally civilized and make amends with the people and nations it has attempted to destroy. After all the elimination of Indigenous nations was not only about taking the land, it was also about destroying an alternative – a world based on making and being in good relations versus that of a racialized class system based on property and conquest.That world still exists, and its stories still need to be told by Indigenous people.That’s a tall order that takes willpower, courage, and truth-telling we simply don’t see emanating from corporate newsrooms like CNN, to say nothing of political and ruling elite in this country. Firing Rick Santorum won’t solve these deep-seated inequalities and anti-Indigenous racism. But Indigenous genocide denial – the ultimate cancel culture – should have no platform if we are to finally transcend the 15th century racialist views codified in the doctrine of discovery. More

When Maya Wiley announced her candidacy for New York major – known as the second hardest job in the US – it seemed like her résumé was tailored to the moment.It was early October last year, and the city was reeling from trauma. In the spring, New York City had been the center of the coronavirus pandemic, the city rife with ambulance sirens and hospitals erecting tents to house patients outside their overflowing doors. In the summer, thousands of New Yorkers flooded the streets to protest against the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other Black Americans killed at the hands of police officers.Then came Wiley – the daughter of civil rights activists who had spent time organizing residents to hold police accountable through the Citizen Complaint Review Board. A lawyer by trade, she had served as counsel to the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and led urban policy and social justice at the New School. Like Joe Biden, who would be elected one month after she announced her bid, Wiley’s own history of trauma and loss – watching her father die on a boat ride – informs her ability to connect with aching communities.But in a race full of strong and diverse contenders – from headline-making ex-presidential candidate Andrew Yang to steadfast city official Scott Stringer to progressive Dianne Morales – Wiley is up against stiff competition.This combination of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests has influenced what New Yorkers want to see in their mayor. What part of the multiple crises that we’re facing do you feel the most equipped to tackle?All of it. The reality of the historic crisis that we’re in is that it has laid bare once again – like all our crises that reveal racial inequity – our failure to invest in our people. It is our historic failure to really reckon with an affordability crisis that is pushing out far too many of our people from being able to live decent lives in the city. And Covid, like all crises, was traumatizing.You know, 88% of New Yorkers who have died from Covid are people of color. We are not 80% of the New York City population. The highest rates of unemployment are in the same communities that had the highest rates of death due to Covid. And the highest infection rates, and are the same communities that are overpoliced, and are the same communities that are struggling to get the vaccine.If we want to recover from Covid we have to pay attention to all our people. And what we love about the city and what we have the opportunity to hold on to in the city, is the fact that 800 languages are spoken here, and the fact that 40% of our people were born in another country, and the fact that we have descendants from North American slaves, and the fact that we have people who live in luxury housing and people who live in public housing, and that’s part of what makes us rich.Is there a part of the city that you feel needs the most attention right now?Well, I mean, the truth is, the body of the city has multiple bullet wounds, and in different parts of the body, but it’s the same neighborhoods that are always hard-hit. So it’s the South Bronx, it is south-east Queens, it is central Brooklyn, it is the North Shore of Staten Island, it is northern Manhattan. It is the same places, because it’s where we have failed to invest historically. And frankly, we could have predicted before Covid, if we were to have a pandemic, who would get hit hardest the most.That doesn’t mean we don’t have other parts of the city suffering. I mean, everyone is suffering in some form from the emotional and spiritual exhaustion and trauma that has been Covid – of the struggle to help kids through online learning of, you know, the fear and stress of being fearful about getting the infection. It’s just where is there a cold and where is there a fever?New York has a very long history of white men as mayors despite being a very diverse city. Why do you think this year feels different?Yeah, almost an entire history: 109 men, 108 of them white men. You know, even before 2016 – and before the activism and organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement that started after Trayvon Martin was killed – we were seeing a real attack on Black and Latino voting rights and Asian voting rights in this country. And the affordability crisis has been growing in US cities, and in New York, again, for a very long time. So you get to a crisis point. Then when Donald Trump [comes along] … it creates a new kind of rallying cry, and gets more people engaged in the activism.And some of the changes in local law have helped enable people like me – non-traditional candidates, people who don’t come from a political machine to run for office, because we have a very generous public match program that just went into effect. That’s huge, when you have folks who haven’t built up relationships with wealthy people, in order to pull in those big-dollar donations that it takes to win an election. So I think it’s all those things.In terms of the post-Donald Trump vibe of New York, I think obviously, there was sort of a sigh of relief for a lot of people, but –No, there was dancing in the streets, and I was dancing in the streets with everybody else.I know that some of that civil rights work runs in your blood through, you know, your father and your family. How much of that do you feel yourself reflecting back on?I reflect on it every day. And I always have, not just because I’m running for office. Because, you know, when you’re Black in America, and you come from a civil rights tradition – which really started as abolition of slavery, but certainly was very powerful in the 1950s and 60s. When you sit at the feet of that, and when you stand on those shoulders, you think about the lessons, the strategies, the steps, the lenses, the impacts, what didn’t happen, what gaps, you have to fill, how you create multiracial coalitions, which have always been a critical part of winning change. The lessons are rich and deep. But the biggest lesson of all is you fight, you just fight.New York City has lost tens of thousands of people, and billions in revenue. How do you plan to attract people back to New York?Well, first, let me say that we have to acknowledge and celebrate that most New Yorkers have gone nowhere. We’re still here. My whole family and I were together, we listened to the sirens. Every night and all through the day you know, at 7pm we’re cheering our essential workers. We have a huge wealth of talent, and the commitment of problem solvers – people who stepped up in the crisis, restaurant owners whose restaurants were shuttered, who were feeding people, even when they didn’t know whether they would have a meal. That’s who New Yorkers are.And in terms of bringing more people back, because it’s not just bringing people back, it’s also bringing more people in, right? It is fundamentally about building and investing in what we’ve got, and the people we’ve got. I’m going to spend $10bn, increase our capital construction budget to create 100,000 new jobs for the people who are here right now, who need to work to put food on the table. But it’s not just about creating the jobs. It’s about how we have community care centers, drop-off centers for folks for childcare, we build it. For so many people in New York City, childcare and eldercare is a top-three cost of living. In addition to housing, we’ll build more affordable housing so that people have more options, even if they are on $25,000 a year, not just if they earn $125,000 a year.The other thing I will say is mental health, mental health, mental health. We’ve seen a rise in gun violence and people get worried. We have an opportunity to do the right thing to address gun violence and street homelessness, which will also help bring us back. But that is investing in trauma; informed care for communities that have high rates of gun violence. But also helping people be able to live whole lives, do better in school, stay in school. We have the opportunity, rather than spending $3bn a year on congregate shelters … to actually get them into housing with support services.Part of your plan is redirecting police funds and allowing communities to help create their own tailored violence prevention programs. With the uptick in violence can this happen soon enough?We absolutely can start doing this right now today. I was just going to the store with my friend Nequan McLean today. His nephew was 22 years old, shot and killed in October. And in BedStuy [the Brooklyn neighborhood] we were stopping at all these spots where a kid has been shot or killed. They do not have a violence interruption [group]. There is one nearby, but the boundary of their geographic area ends and leaves this whole swath where there’s all this gun violence. That’s just a money problem.Most of these violence interruption groups understand they have to solve multiple problems. We have folks coming back from prison into communities who’ve engaged in violence, but they get jobs becoming violence interrupters, using their knowledge of the community, their knowledge of the people and the players, their credibility, because they’ve been there. These programs exist in the city, and we talked to these leaders about what would make it more effective. It’s everything from fixing how we pay them, so that they can do the work more effectively. So those things are in place, we just have to expand them.This is another example. We can put social workers in the schools now, we just have to hire them. It’s not that there aren’t any – New York City’s rich with social workers. We just don’t fund social workers in every school. And the services that we need, like trauma-informed care, exist, we have to create partnerships so that the services are delivered in the schools. A lot of this can happen quickly.Some communities, including Black and brown ones, are opposed to the idea of redirecting police funds. How do you respond to that?When people are scared and traumatized, it’s important to listen to them. What they’re saying is “I think there is a role and a need for policing. And we also recognize it is not fair. It’s not right. Because we’re also victimized by it.” And they also want investments in their community.This is a good example: when I was in BedStuy today with Nequan McLean, we stopped at the store where his nephew was killed. In October, there was a police truck out in front of the store [when he was killed]. It’s like, has this solved the problem? And he said, no. Two other people were shot right down the block from the police officers. The presence didn’t solve the problem.We have some of the strongest gun control laws in the country, we have got to keep guns from coming into our city – we need police doing that. But we need violence interruption, we need more jobs and employment opportunities, we need more resources and trauma-informed care to deal with actually the things that are causing the increase in gun violence. But we’ve never become safer because of an increase in police.The delays in the city’s Covid response was partly due to the fractured relationship between our mayor and our governor. Given what’s happening with Governor Cuomo at the moment, how would you manage that relationship?I would manage the relationship with the governor the way I manage all relationships: open communication, starting with principles and purpose that meets the needs of people. We have a shared constituency. There are many partnerships, we need to get what we need from the state government. And if you want partnerships that focus on hard problems and real solutions, then pick a Black woman. Because that’s what we do every single day and in every single way. More

Conservatives threw a collective hissy fit over a familiar target last week: LeBron James. The NBA star had tweeted – then deleted – a post about the police killing of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio. The context of the tweet is important.People around the world were on pins and needles, hoping that the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin didn’t go the same way as so many before. Officers such as Sean Williams (John Crawford), Timothy Loehmann (Tamir Rice), Daniel Pantaleo (Eric Garner), Betty Shelby (Terence Crutcher), Jarrett Tonn (Sean Monterrosa), and the six officers who killed Willie McCoy either have not faced charges or were found not guilty after killing Black and Latino men, despite video footage of the shootings. Qualified immunity, the police bill of rights and law enforcement unions dedicated to defending officers right or wrong, means it is a near impossibility to achieve a conviction in such cases. But Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd was different. For the first time in Minnesota state history, a white police officer was found guilty of murdering a Black man. The world let out a collective exhale of relief with the hope that the verdict could be the first step towards complete accountability for police officers. However, that jubilation was very short lived. Minutes after Chauvin’s guilty verdict was announced, news spread about the killing of Ma’Khia Bryant. The timing was devastating and tragic. As a result, LeBron took his angst to Twitter and posted a picture of the officer who shot Ma’Khia, along with the caption: “YOU’RE NEXT #ACCOUNTABILITY” and an hourglass emoji. Anyone with an elementary school level of education could see that LeBron’s tweet was not an incitement to violence. It didn’t say “#GetTheStrap” or “#DoUntoThemAsTheyHaveDoneUntoUs” or “#HideYaKidsHideYaWife” it read “#Accountability”. The outrage from the right followed anyway. “LeBron James should focus on basketball rather than presiding over the destruction of the NBA,” Donald Trump said in a statement. Trump, not noted as a unifying force, continued with the statement: “He may be a great basketball player, but he is doing nothing to bring our Country together!” The hypocrisy kept coming. Trump, of all people, then called LeBron a “racist” even though he had made no mention of the officer’s race in his tweet. The former president’s toadies also chimed in. Republican senator Ted Cruz said LeBron’s tweet was a “call for violence”. Another GOP senator, Tom Cotton, said LeBron’s statement was “disgraceful and dangerous”.If LeBron had made a mistake in posting a photo of the officer, he also made changes to fix it. He deleted the initial post then explained in a subsequent tweet that his demand for accountability should have been read in context. “ANGER does [not do] any of us any good and that includes myself! Gathering all the facts and educating does though! My anger still is here for what happened that lil girl. My sympathy for her family and may justice prevail!”, he wrote. He clarified he wanted to address injustice in America as a whole. “This isn’t about one officer. it’s about the entire system and they always use our words to create more racism,” saying he was “so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police.” He added: “I am so desperate for more ACCOUNTABILITY.”I’m so damn tired of seeing Black people killed by police. I took the tweet down because its being used to create more hate -This isn’t about one officer.  it’s about the entire system and they always use our words to create more racism. I am so desperate for more ACCOUNTABILITY— LeBron James (@KingJames) April 21, 2021
So this wasn’t a demand for violence. In fact, allow me to illustrate what inciting violence actually looks like. On 17 April 2020, Trump tweeted his support for armed protests against physical distancing and other Covid-19 measures in three states led by Democratic governors. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” the then president wrote in capital letters. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”. He followed up with a third tweet: “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!”This prompted former acting US assistant attorney general for national security Mary McCord to write that Trump had “incited insurrection” in his own country. It was the start of a campaign by Trump that would end in a mob of his supporters invading the US Capitol.“The timeline [of the Capitol attack] tracks 365 days that built up to that moment. It shows how the president often glorified violence as a tool to confront perceived political enemies. It is no wonder the mob followed through,” said Professor Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s editor-in-chief.Goodman also highlighted Trump’s backing of his supporters in Texas, who just days before November’s presidential election surrounded a Joe Biden campaign bus and nearly forced it off the road.“I LOVE TEXAS,” Trump tweeted at the time, alongside a video of the incident. “These patriots did nothing wrong,” he added when the FBI started an investigation. Just Security also highlighted a string of “Stop the Steal” tweets made by Trump ahead of the US Capitol invasion, in reference to baseless rumors the election was somehow fixed in Biden’s favorThese are real examples of inciting violence. But the same people who are now accusing LeBron of inciting violence were silent at best during the events leading up to the Capitol invasion. An invasion after which a police officer died. Interesting that we didn’t hear much from the Blue Lives Matter crowd condemning Trump after that either. The bottom line is this: the outrage from the right toward LeBron’s tweet is disingenuous, baseless and hypocritical. Conservatives fear him because of his influence. They want to bully LeBron into silence so that they can dominate the narrative with their Back The Blue campaign, no matter what rhetoric. If he wasn’t such a threat, they wouldn’t pay him half as much attention. More

For Democrats it has been a hundred days of sweeping legislation, barrier-breaking appointments and daring to dream big. For Republicans, a hundred days in the political wilderness.The party that just four years ago controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress now finds itself shut out of power and struggling to find its feet. As Joe Biden forges ahead with ambitions to shift the political paradigm, Republicans still have a Donald Trump problem.The former US president remains the unofficial leader of the party and exerts a massive gravitational pull on its senators, representatives, governors and state parties. Obsessed with “culture wars” and voter fraud, the Trump distortion field has made it difficult for Republicans to move on.“Trump is like a fire,” said Ed Rogers, a political consultant and a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations. “Too close and you get burned. Too far away, you’re out in the cold. So the party spends a lot of time talking about the fire, managing the fire, orbiting the fire. It takes a lot of energy out of the party.”Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was the last time Democrats swept the board of White House, House of Representatives and Senate. On that occasion conservatives exploited the financial crisis to stir resentment about government spending, giving rise to the Tea Party and winning back the House in the midterm elections.It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t existBut this time looks very different. Republicans were forced to watch from the sidelines as Biden oversaw the distribution of 200m coronavirus vaccination doses while bringing down unemployment. They failed to find a coherent line of attack on his $1.9tn Covid relief package, which opinion polls showed was popular with the public, including Republican voters.Instead of setting out a clear alternative agenda, the party has spent much of the past three months wading into issues that animate the Trump base, such as the rights of transgender athletes and the withdrawal of six Dr Seuss books due to racist content. In this policy vacuum “cancel culture” and “wokeness” are the rallying cries while the loudest voices, such as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, are also the most extreme.Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, said: “When you don’t have a plan you go to what you think you’re good at and that is creating tensions and divisions that move people emotionally rather than practically. So the reality is, you’re going to talk about Dr Seuss when you have nothing to say about Covid-19. You’re going to talk about transgender issues when you have nothing to say on infrastructure.”He added: “It’s a lot easier to grift on people’s fears of other people and prey on their concerns about culture wars that really don’t exist. But at the end of the day, when you’re watching family members get sick and die, when you’ve lost your business, when you’ve been fired from your job in the midst of a global pandemic, you don’t give a damn about Dr Seuss.”Republicans have also passed new voting restriction laws to appease activists pushing Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him. When corporations raised objections to such measures in Georgia, the party lashed out and called into question its longstanding relationship with big business – a further sign of identity crisis under Trump.Its efforts to stall Biden’s momentum, for example by focusing on a sharp increase of migrants at the US-Mexico border, have fallen short; the president has a 59% approval rating, according to Pew Research Center study.Trump’s charge of “Sleepy Joe” has failed to stick as the 78-year-old president’s verbal slips prove relatively rare, while Biden’s identity as a white male has shielded him from base instincts that were whipped up against Obama and Hillary Clinton. And his longstanding reputation as a non-threatening moderate has made it hard for Republicans to credibly define him as a dangerous radical.Steele commented: “This goes back to the campaign. They tried to paint this guy a certain way and put him in a box. He’s just not boxable the way politically Republicans would like to box him in: try to create this impression this guy is some leftwing dictator or wolf in sheep’s clothing.“People have a 50-year relationship with this man. They know who he is and so that has not helped them the way it may have served them with someone like Barack Obama, who the country largely didn’t know when he first came on to the scene.”The iron laws of politics suggest that, if Republicans remain patient, Biden will suffer a major stumble or setback sooner or later. The coronavirus may prove stubbornly durable, the border crisis may flare up again or there may be some entirely unpredictable lightning strike. Even in the current climate, Republicans remain confident of winning back the House next year given that a first-term president’s party usually struggles in the midterms.Trump is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for RepublicansNothing can be taken for granted, however, in a world shaken by both Trump’s election and a pandemic that cost half a million American lives. Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist, said: “Talking about the border when everybody cares about Covid and the economy, talking about Dr Seuss, is not the way to electoral victory.“Biden is on a pretty steady course to deal with the pandemic and get the economy open and, if he does that and does it well, he has a chance to be the third president in a hundred years to do well in the midterms after his initial election.”Typically a party that has taken an electoral beating holds a postmortem and regroups in an effort to broaden its appeal. Republicans might also have been expected to reckon with the deadly 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol and change course.But Trump continues to cast a long shadow from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where a procession of party leaders have paid homage. The 45th president told Fox News last week that he will campaign aggressively during the midterms and is “very seriously” considering running for the White House again in 2024, ensuring that the party remains paralysed.Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham University in New York, observed: “He is still sucking all of the oxygen out of the room for Republicans. Some of them seem satisfied with that, some of them don’t, but no one seems able to overcome that on behalf of the party or to put themselves forward to be an alternative to Trump in terms of leading the party. So at this point, they’re stuck with him.” More

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is set to face a recall election after organizers of the effort collected enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.The California secretary of state’s office announced Monday that more than 1.6m signatures had been verified, about 100,000 more than needed to force a vote on the first-term Democrat.A recall election would likely be held in the fall, when voters will first be asked whether Newsom be removed from office, and then, who should replace him. Responses to the latter question will only be counted if more than 50% vote to recall the governor. California is one of more than a dozen states that allow voters to hold recall elections.The recall effort is led by Republicans who opposed Democrat Newsom’s pandemic shutdowns and mask mandate, as well as his immigration and tax policies. The campaign has tried to distance itself from its ties to far-right groups, including QAnon, following the deadly 6 January attack on the US capitol. Petitioners collected a groundswell of supporters as the state faced its most deadly phase of the pandemic in the winter.Newsom will face off against an array of political challengers that includes a reality TV star and a former Facebook executive.Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic athlete known for her role in Keeping Up With the Kardashians, announced plans to run against Newsom last week.Other Republican challengers include Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego, John Cox, who lost to Newsom in 2018 by more than 20 points, and Doug Ose, a former congressman.The porn actor and reality TV star Mary Carey and the model Angelyne, who rose to prominence in the 1980s after she was featured in a series of iconic billboards around LA, are also running.In 2003, voters recalled Democratic governor Gray Davis and replaced him with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is the only other recall of a California governor to qualify for the ballot.Newsom won election in 2018 with support from more than 60% of voters. Recalling him will be a tough sell in the heavily Democratic state where just a quarter of registered voters are Republicans, about the same number as those who identify as “no party preference”.But organizers see an opening by energizing voters who were angered by Newsom’s handling of the pandemic and those frustrated by one-party rule in Sacramento. Republicans have not won statewide office since 2006, when voters gave Schwarzenegger a second term.Republicans had already tried and failed to recall Newsom before. But the pandemic gave the latest recall effort new momentum, especially after the governor was caught last fall dining at a fancy restaurant for a lobbyist’s birthday while urging residents to stay home.Dozens of other candidates, serious and not, are expected to enter the race.Still, ousting Newsom remains an uphill battle. Speaking to the Guardian in March, Mindy Romero, the founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a non-partisan research organization, described the recall as more of a strategy to rally Republican voters and raise funds, rather than a serious effort at leadership change.“The recall can be a rallying cry, in California and across the county,” Romero said. “For the Republican candidates running against the governor, it can raise their national profiles.”So far no other Democrats have announced plans to run against Newsom. The governor launched an anti-recall campaign in March, crafting the effort as one driven by Republican extremists and adherents to Donald Trump, who lost California twice.If Newsom survives the recall he will be up for re-election next year. More