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      Hunter Biden takes on George Clooney and presidential debate in interview

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      Hunter Biden has given a profanity-laced, three-hour interview to the US outlet Channel 5 that is remarkable for its no-holds attack on actor George Clooney, denial that he was the source of cocaine found in the White House and thoughts on why his father bombed in his debate with Donald Trump before dropping out of his presidential re-election run.“Fuck him!” the younger Biden said of Clooney, whose remarkable New York Times opinion piece last July called on the Democratic party for which the actor is a financial donor to find a new presidential nominee.“Fuck him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be fucking nice.”Referring to comments from the well-known film director that Clooney is not a “movie star”, Biden continued: “I agree with Quentin Tarantino. Fucking George Clooney is not a fucking actor. He is fucking like … I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand.”Biden questioned why anyone had to listen to Clooney despite his friendship with Barack Obama, a former Democratic president, and his “really great place in Lake Como”.“What do you have to do with fucking anything?” Biden said, speaking rhetorically about Clooney. “What right do you have to step on a man who’s given … his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the fucking New York Times.”Hunter Biden shared with the Channel 5 outlet his belief that Clooney was upset at Joe Biden, 82, because the former president had criticized the international criminal court (ICC)’s decision to obtain an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on war crime charges. The human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who is married to the actor, was one of the legal experts who recommended that the ICC seek that warrant.“He was bitching to the White House staff, the senior staff that he was so angry that the president would criticize the arrest warrant,” Hunter Biden said. “He was very, very angry that my dad did not pay homage to her or something.”Biden’s interview to Channel 5, a popular YouTube channel created by Andrew Callaghan, comes as US House Republicans pursue investigations into his father’s presidency. Congressional Republicans have been claiming that the former president’s closest advisers covered up a physical and mental decline during his presidency, and criticizing his pre-emptive pardons of family members, including Hunter, after Trump threatened to prosecute his opponents as he captured the Oval Office again in November.Hunter Biden acknowledged that Joe Biden had an “absolutely horrible” debate against Trump before his father dropped out of the 2024 presidential race exactly a year ago on Monday and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him. Hunter Biden said his father had to drop out or see fellow Democrats fight him “every step of the way”.Among the reasons for the poor debate performance were that his father – 81 at the time – was “tired as shit”, Hunter Biden said. “They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage and looks like he’s a deer in the headlights, and it feeds into every fucking story that anybody wants to tell.”After Trump’s second presidency began in January, the FBI reopened an investigation into who left cocaine in a White House locker in 2023. Suspicions have fallen on Hunter Biden, whose past struggles with substance abuse have been well documented.But Hunter Biden denied the cocaine found in the White House was his, asserting he has been clean and sober since June 2019. “Why would I bring cocaine into the White House and stick it into a cubby outside … the situation room in the West Wing?” he asked.The 55-year-old’s Channel 5 interview comes weeks after his father embarked on a series of interviews, including with the New York Times, aimed at convincing the public that Harris’s loss to Trump in 2024 was not his fault.Asked about his business dealings, which resulted in federal tax evasion charges and illegal handgun possession that were later vacated by his father’s pardon, Biden pointed to his work as a board member at the national rail network Amtrak and the US-UN World Food Program. More

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      Harvard argues in court that Trump administration’s $2.6bn cuts are illegal

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      Harvard University appeared in federal court on Monday to make the case that the Trump administration illegally cut $2.6bn from the storied college – a major test of the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education institutions by threatening their financial viability.US district judge Allison Burroughs heard arguments from Harvard and the Department of Justice. The cuts, imposed earlier this year, have halted major research efforts and Harvard argues they are a politically motivated attempt to pressure the school into adopting federal policies on student conduct, admissions, antisemitism and diversity.A ruling in favor of the university would revive Harvard’s sprawling scientific and medical research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.“This case involves the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard,” the university said in its complaint. “All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.”The case is being closely watched by other universities that have seen their research funds axed by the administration, which has suspended or threatened billions in grants and contracts from several institutions. The White House is reportedly close to finalizing a deal with Columbia University – the first institution it targeted for cuts – to restore $400m in funding in exchange for the university implementing a series of measures meeting the administration’s ideological demands.Harvard is the first – and so far only – university to sue.The university has separately sued the administration over its revocation of Harvard’s eligibility to host international students. (Trump has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, but he has taken no action to that effect so far.)Burroughs is overseeing both of Harvard’s cases against the administration and in June issued an injunction stopping the government from barring foreign Harvard students from entering the country.Monday’s hearing was the first time the court heard arguments about the legality of the administration’s funding cuts. The hearing ended without Burroughs issuing a ruling from the bench. A ruling is expected later in writing.Harvard’s lawsuit accuses Donald Trump’s administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university after it rejected a series of demands in an 11 April letter from a federal antisemitism taskforce.The letter demanded sweeping changes related to campus protests, academics and admissions. For example, the letter told Harvard to audit the viewpoints of students and faculty and admit more students or hire new professors if the campus was found to lack diverse points of view. The letter was meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment on campus.A lawyer for the government, Michael Velchik, said in court on Monday that the government has authority to cancel research grants when an institution is out of compliance with the president’s directives. He said episodes at Harvard violated Trump’s order combating antisemitism.Burroughs pushed back, questioning how the government could make “ad-hoc” decisions to cancel grants and do so across Harvard without offering evidence that any of the research is antisemitic.She also argued the government had provided “no documentation, no procedure” to “suss out” whether Harvard administrators “have taken enough steps or haven’t” to combat antisemitism.“The consequences of that in terms of constitutional law are staggering,” Burroughs said during Monday’s hearing. “I don’t think you can justify a contract action based on impermissible suppression of speech. Where do I have that wrong.”Velchik said the case comes down to the government’s choosing how best to spend billions of dollars in research funding.“Harvard claims the government is anti-Harvard. I reject that,” Velchik said. “The government is pro-Jewish students at Harvard. The government is pro-Jewish faculty at Harvard.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlan Garber, Harvard’s president, pledged to fight antisemitism but said no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”.The same day Harvard rejected the demands, Trump officials moved to freeze $2.2bn in research grants. Linda McMahon, the US education secretary, declared in May that Harvard would no longer be eligible for new grants, and weeks later the administration began canceling contracts with Harvard.As Harvard fought the funding freeze in court, individual agencies began sending letters announcing that the frozen research grants were being terminated. They cited a clause that allows grants to be scrapped if they no longer align with government policies.Harvard, which has the nation’s largest endowment at $53bn, has moved to self-fund some of its research, but warned it can’t absorb the full cost of the federal cuts.In court filings, the school said the government “fails to explain how the termination of funding for research to treat cancer, support veterans, and improve national security addresses antisemitism”.The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the April demand letter was sent. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel contracts for policy reasons.“It is the policy of the United States under the Trump administration not to fund institutions that fail to adequately address antisemitism in their programs,” it said in court documents.Last month, the Trump administration formally issued a finding that the school tolerated antisemitism – a step that eventually could jeopardize all of Harvard’s federal funding, including federal student loans or grants. The penalty is typically referred to as a “death sentence”.While Harvard’s cases against the administration proceeds in court, the university is reportedly also negotiating with the administration for a deal that might end the dispute out of court. More

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      Hundreds of Nasa workers rebuke ‘arbitrary’ Trump cuts in scathing letter

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      Almost 300 current and former US Nasa employees, including at least four astronauts, have issued a scathing dissent opposing the Trump administration’s sweeping and indiscriminate cuts to the agency, which they say threaten safety, innovation and national security.The formal letter, titled The Voyager Declaration, is addressed to the acting Nasa administrator, Sean Duffy, a staunch Trump loyalist appointed on 7 July who is also his transportation secretary. The declaration, which is dedicated to 17 astronauts who have died in past spaceflight incidents, warns of catastrophic consequences if the proposed cuts to science grants, staffing and international missions are implemented.“Major programmatic shifts at Nasa must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully,” the letter said. “Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on Nasa’s workforce.“We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources. These cuts are arbitrary and have been enacted in defiance of congressional appropriations law. The consequences for the agency and the country alike are dire.”The letter sounds the alarm over suggested changes to Nasa’s Technical Authority, a system of safety checks and balances established in the wake of the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster that killed seven astronauts. “The culture of organizational silence promoted at Nasa over the last six months already represents a dangerous turn away from the lessons learned after the Columbia disaster,” the declaration states.The declaration has 131 named signatures – including at least 55 current Nasa employees – and 156 anonymous signatories. Interim administrator Duffy, a former television host who was appointed after the ousting of a longtime Nasa employee, Janet Petro, is the final step in the chain of Technical Authority command.Trump’s billionaire donor and former ally Elon Musk oversaw the loss of at least 2,600 of Nasa’s 17,000-plus employees, according to Politico, before the billionaire businessman stepped back from the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). So far, at least $120m in Nasa grants have been terminated, and the White House has proposed slashing a quarter of the agency’s total budget for next year. International missions have been cancelled, and almost half the agency’s science budget could be cut in 2026.The signatories said they dissent from the indiscriminate cuts to Nasa research which supports national security by ensuring the US role as a global leader in science and technology. “Basic research in space science, aeronautics, and the stewardship of the Earth are inherently governmental functions that cannot and will not be taken up by the private sector,” the letter says.The Voyager Declaration, named after the twin Nasa spacecraft that are exploring interstellar space, is only the latest formal dissent against Trump’s unprecedented assault on science and federal agencies.In June, at least 300 employees at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published a declaration calling for the restoration of grants into life-saving treatments that the Trump administration had “delayed or terminated for political reasons”.Earlier in July, 140 workers at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were placed on administrative leave after signing a letter highlighting key concerns including a culture of fear at the agency, the cancellation of environmental justice programs and grants, undermining public trust and “ignoring scientific consensus to protect polluters”. More

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      Congo and critical minerals: What are the costs of America’s peace?

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      In March 2025, President Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) offered the country’s critical mineral reserves to the United States and Europe in exchange for security and stability.

      At the time, the March 23 (M23) militia insurgency was unleashing violence: killing civilians, committing sexual violence, displacing communities and looting mineral resources. Since 1996, eastern Congo has been engulfed in wars and armed conflicts driven by regional powers and more than 120 armed groups.

      The U.S.-brokered peace agreement between Rwanda and the DRC raises critical questions: Is this a genuine path to sustainable peace, or a continuation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s strategy to secure access to critical minerals through coercive diplomacy?

      Read more:
      4 things every peace agreement needs – and how the DRC-Rwanda deal measures up

      Global arms race for critical minerals

      The global shift toward renewable energy, digital infrastructure and military modernization has sparked a geopolitical scramble for critical and rare earth minerals.

      In early 2025, Trump signed a series of executive orders that introduced aggressive and imperial-style tactics to secure access to mineral wealth. He threatened Canada with annexation and tariffs, demanded access to Greenland’s resources and linked U.S. support for Ukraine to access to its mineral reserves.

      The DRC’s offer must be viewed through this lens of global resource competition.

      Congo’s critical mineral wealth

      The DRC holds some of the world’s richest deposits of critical minerals and metals. A 2012 article estimated the value of Congo’s untapped mineral wealth at US$24 trillion, a figure nearing the U.S. first-quarter 2025 GDP of $29.962 trillion.

      The DRC produces 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt, ranks fourth in copper, sixth in industrial diamonds and also possesses vast reserves of nickel and lithium, including the Manono deposit expected to yield 95,170 tonnes of crude lithium.

      But the struggle to control these resources has fuelled a cycle of armed violence, displacement and exploitation. Despite several peace agreements, peace and stability remain elusive.

      America’s interests in Congo

      U.S. involvement in Congo stretches back to the Cold War, when it played a role in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first elected prime minister who sought economic sovereignty.

      In 1996, the U.S. was accused of backing Rwanda and Uganda in the initial invasion of eastern Congo. A U.S. diplomat, “Mr. Hankins,” was quoted in Goma saying: “I am here …to represent American interests.”

      In 2024, President Joe Biden met Tshisekedi to advance the Lobito Corridor, a strategic trade route to counter China’s dominance in the region. Chinese companies currently control around 80 per cent of Congo’s copper market.

      When Trump signed the 2025 peace agreement, he openly stated the U.S. would gain “a lot of mineral rights … foreign trade and investment from the regional critical mineral supply chains.”

      Miners work at the D4 Gakombe coltan mining quarry in Rubaya, Democratic Republic of Congo, in May 2025.
      (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

      U.S.-brokered peace deal

      The deal, however, prioritizes America’s access to minerals over the well-being of Congolese citizens. Historically, Congo’s mineral wealth has enriched elites and foreign powers while leaving its people impoverished and vulnerable. The new agreement could entrench existing inequalities and inflame tensions further.

      The U.S. has also cut off aid for war survivors, including emergency medical kits and antiretrovirals for rape victims, undermining humanitarian efforts.

      Crucially, the agreement overlooks:

      The root causes and drivers of conflict at national, regional and international levels.
      The role of Rwanda and Uganda, whose militaries and intelligence services have long been implicated in supporting groups like M23. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, has referred to M23 as “our brothers” and threatened military action in Congo.
      The voices of Congolese civil society, war survivors and the public, who were excluded from the negotiation process.
      State fragility and institutional collapse — major enablers of protracted violence.
      The grievances of Hutu and Tutsi communities in the DRC, deeply rooted in colonial and regional politics.
      The presence of more than 120 armed groups, many of them proxies for foreign powers engaging in what some scholars call “geocriminality.”

      Between January and February 2025 alone, more than 7,000 people were killed in the DRC. The United Nations and several human rights organizations have documented mass atrocities, including crimes of genocidal magnitude.

      A child carrying water walks past Wazalendo forces fighting M23 rebels patrolling in Sake, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in August 2024.
      (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)

      A path toward real peace

      The peace agreement fails to demand justice for crimes committed against the Congolese people. Nobel Peace laureate Denis Mukwege condemned the deal for “rewarding aggression, legitimizing the plundering of Congo’s natural resources, and sacrificing justice for a fragile peace.”

      It also ignores the roles of international mining corporations and external entities that have long profited from Congo’s instability.

      True and lasting peace in the DRC cannot be imposed from the outside. U.S.-led mineral extraction without justice risks deepening the crisis. Since 1999, UN peacekeepers have been deployed in the Congo , yet violence continues.

      Sustainable peace will require:

      An end to impunity;
      Thorough investigations into war crimes;
      Regional truth-telling processes;
      Justice and reparations for victims;
      And most importantly, inclusion of Congolese voices in shaping their future.

      Without these commitments, the U.S. risks replicating a long history of exploitation, trading in minerals while ignoring the human cost. More

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      Leftists are determined to date each other – and not settle for liberals: ‘Politics are the new religion’

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      Zohran Mamdani gave Hinge an unofficial boost last month when the New York mayoral candidate revealed that he met his wife, Rama Duwaji, through swiping. “There is still hope on those dating apps,” he said on the Bulwark podcast a week before his stunning victory in the Democratic primary. The tidbit spread over social media, cementing the 33-year-old democratic socialist’s status as a millennial everyman. A subsequent Cosmopolitan headline read: “Zohran Mamdani could make history (as the first NYC mayor to meet his wife on Hinge).”Representatives for Hinge would not comment, but plenty of eligible New Yorkers did, claiming they would redownload the app due to Mamdani’s success, in spite of their dating fatigue. “Now I’m clocking in like it’s a full-time job,” one user posted on TikTok. “If he can find love on that app maybe I can,” another wrote in a caption.However, they could run into an ideological hurdle while filling out their profiles. Alongside answering basic questions – “Do you smoke, drink or do drugs? Where did you go to college?” – Hinge ask singles to choose their political affiliation: liberal, conservative, moderate, not political, or the mysterious “other”.Some people to the left say the label “liberal” does not encapsulate their socialist views. They associate it with establishment figures such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – or Mamdani’s rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo. Many liberals deem proposals by Hinge’s golden boy (freezing rent, taxing the super-rich, making buses free) too radical. A socialist might want to distance themselves from such center-leaning liberalism and instead embrace the “hot commie summer” that hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb warned his fellow billionaires of.“There’s a real appetite to date leftists now,” said Abby Beauregard, fundraising chair for Democratic Socialists of America’s New York chapter. She said that Mamdani’s victory reinvigorated the dating scene in in the city, “but it’s really hard to find explicitly leftist dating spaces. Most dating apps have a liberal option, but no leftist option, and it’s not a turn-on to see ‘other’, because that could mean anything.” (For instance, far-right or communist.)So lefty singles are finding more explicit ways to signal their politics to like-minded love matches, on Hinge and beyond.View image in fullscreenSome have turned their dating profiles into mini-manifestos, writing out their entire belief system as answers to the apps’ prompts. It’s common to see watermelon emojis as euphemisms for solidarity with the Palestinian people. Some users will warn that they’ll swipe left on Terfs (the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminists), cops or Donald Trump supporters.“It’s important for me to see those signifiers,” said Caroline, a 38-year-old florist who lives in Queens. (She and other sources are going by their first name for privacy reasons.) “There’s a nice feeling on the apps right now with people being proud to be communists or leftists, and they’re saying that.”But she’s wary of anyone who comes off as too lefty. “That seems kind of tryhard,” she said. “It can read as too performative, that you’re fishing for alt-girls or you’re a centrist who just wants someone freaky from Bushwick.”Tinder, OK Cupid and the kink-friendly app Feeld allow users to write their own bios, unlike Hinge, and they can choose within those bios whether they reveal their political affiliations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Tinder also launched profile “stickers” so users could signal the issues they felt strongly about, such as “voting for reproductive rights”.For her part, Caroline, who uses Feeld, wrote in her profile that she’s “far left” and “COVID-cautious”. That feels like enough for her. “Saying ‘I love vaccines!’, ‘free Palestine!’ or ‘fuck Trump!’ would be trite. It’s all implied.”Dennis Mulvena describes himself as “very left-leaning”. He used to keep his affiliations private on Hinge because he believed there was room for nuance in discussing politics, but recently listed himself as liberal.“With the return of Trump in the last two years, it’s important to have that out there,” said Mulvena, 30, who works in customer service for a car manufacturer. “Admittedly gay people who live in Brooklyn tend to lean left, but I have had the experience of going on a date with someone who then revealed he was part of his college’s Young Republicans club.” That was the last time he assumed that everyone he matched with would share the same views as him.According to an NBC News poll from April, the partisan gap between gen Z women, who are more likely to say they are Democrat, and gen Z men, who have shifted right, is the widest of all generations. And, increasingly, a person’s politics have an impact on their perceived desirability. While past generations may have thought nothing about a conservative and liberal romantic pairing (“don’t talk about politics or religion at the dinner table”), 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds think it’s important to date or marry someone who shares their political beliefs.“Politics is the new religion,” said Dr Jess Carbino, a former sociologist for Bumble and Tinder who studies dating apps. “It’s become the way that people choose to frame how they look at the world and their values.”Lily, a 23 year-old socialist who was recently laid off, is wary of seeing someone identify as “not political” on Hinge. “I’m immediately scared of what that means,” they said. “As a queer person living through everything that’s happening in this country, I need to know someone has a baseline care for people and their community.”In New York, more voters between the ages of 25 and 34 – a mix of gen Z and younger millennials – turned out to vote in the Democratic primary than any other age cohort, indicating a vigor for leftist politics. Recently, Lily has seen young people write on Hinge that they’d only go out with someone who voted for Mamdani or that they’d never go out with a Cuomo supporter. They have seen multiple people answer the Hinge prompt “when was the last time you cried?” with: “when Zohran won”. (They presume these were happy tears.)This is not to say New York is a young Bolshevik paradise: conservatives in the city are also trying to find each other. Some have gone into voluntary exile from mainstream dating apps, creating their own options. “Our dating apps have gone woke,” reads the description for Date Right Stuff, one such app backed by Peter Thiel. “Connect with people who aren’t offended by everything.”In March, Date Right Stuff hosted a singles event at New York’s Trump Tower called “make America hot again”. It was a coming-out night for what the app’s former chief marketing officer Raquel Debono called “city conservatives”, or Republicans who prefer urban life to small towns and tradwifedom.They are not the only ones going off-app: the Mamdani effect on New York’s lefties could not be contained to Hinge.In early July, young people gathered inside a cocktail bar on the Lower East Side for a “sexy socialist singles” event hosted by New York’s DSA. Those looking for something casual – or, as the host put it, “if you just want fast and free, like Zohran’s buses” – were sent to one part of the bar, while those who wanted “a slow burn, like taxing the fucking rich” went to another. At one point, organizers directed polyamorous attendees to a room upstairs, where they could mingle with other non-monogamous individuals.Upstairs, Sven, 25, an economics master’s student who lives in Bushwick, said that young people view the DSA as a social club just as much as a platform for socialist candidates. “I saw a post on Reddit talking about how all Zohran’s canvassers are hot, and we have soccer leagues and book clubs,” they said. “It’s a great way to make friends.”Downstairs, back in monogamyville, Lauren, a video editor who lives in Astoria (the Queens neighborhood Mamdani represents as a New York assemblymember), waited for a friend who was off flirting. “There’s definitely an energy when I wear my Zohran T-shirt out,” she said. “People are revved up. They’ll call you from across the street saying, ‘What’s up?’ or ‘I love that guy.’ It’s a real conversation starter.”New York’s DSA will continue its sexy socialist mixers in youth hubs Bushwick and Williamsburg, and in the Upper West Side for those over 30. In the meantime, singles will have to keep parsing political signifiers on dating apps. More

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      Are non-voters the key to Democrats winning in 2028? | Alex Bronzini-Vender

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      Since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, the electoral theory of the American left has rested upon the idea that a sizable bloc of Americans – alienated from the traditional politics of left and right – have withdrawn from politics entirely. They stand closer to the Democrats on many issues, but, seeing little by way of material benefit from the party’s soaring rhetoric of “defending democracy”, they have opted out of the political process. And, as the theory goes, a bold, populist candidate – someone like Sanders himself – could bring this silent constituency back into the fold.If that logic once explained how Sanders might have won, it might now explain why Kamala Harris lost. And, as new troves of post-election data surface, the debate over whether Democrats might have avoided last year’s defeat by mobilizing non-voters has become one of the party’s hottest factional disputes.Among those strategizing within the Democratic party, one’s confidence in voter activation is often a proxy for their broader politics. Those who believe Harris’s campaign failed to activate non-voters typically argue her platform lacked the populist edge needed to mobilize disaffected Americans. Their critics tend to believe the problem ran in the opposite direction: the electorate had moved right and the Democrats’ failure lay in their inability to meet it there.Detractors of the activation theory point to a 26 June Pew Research report – which found Donald Trump leading Harris by three points among non-voters – as decisive proof that non-participants lean Republican. The catch, though, is that the survey concluded less than two weeks after Trump’s victory. Polling taken in the aftermath of a race is notoriously vulnerable to distortion, and the bandwagon effect can temporarily inflate a victorious candidate’s popularity. That effect is especially pronounced among disengaged or loosely affiliated voters. That number almost certainly marks the high-water line of Trump’s support among non-voters.Another oft-cited figure from the New York Times/Siena College, which the Democratic strategist and data scientist David Shor referenced during his own interview with the Times’s Ezra Klein, found Trump leading by 14 points among 2020 non-voters. But it uses survey data collected before Biden dropped out of the race. Then there is Shor’s own post-election poll, conducted through his polling firm Blue Rose Research, which found Trump leading by 11 points among non-voters – though the underlying data remains private and the methodology undisclosed.The Cooperative Election Study (CES) – a late-November survey of more than 50,000 voters – offers one of the few high-quality, public windows on 2024. An analysis of the CES data by political scientists Jake Grumbach, Adam Bonica and their colleagues found that a plurality of non-voters identified themselves as most closely aligned with the Democratic party – and an absolute majority of registered voters who declined to cast a ballot in 2024 considered themselves Democrats. The non-electorate certainly wasn’t blue enough to have swung the race, but by no means as red as the activation theory’s opponents claim.What’s even clearer is the geography of turnout. Voter participation dropped especially sharply in Democratic strongholds – particularly urban counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. By contrast, turnout in Republican areas held steady or even increased modestly. In other words, the Democratic campaign had more to gain from energizing its own base than from chasing centrist swing voters.Harris wouldn’t have prevailed under conditions of 100% turnout. (Grumbach, Bonica, etc don’t claim as such.) But a more focused strategy – mobilizing the Democratic base, speaking directly to material concerns, and resisting the pull toward bland centrism – might have narrowed the margin significantly.Ironically, the aforementioned Pew report concludes the same. “As in prior elections, a change in voters’ partisan allegiances – switching from the Democratic to the Republican candidate or vice versa – proved to be a less important factor in Trump’s victory than differential partisan turnout,” write the authors. “Republican-leaning eligible voters simply were more likely to turn out than Democratic-leaning eligible voters in 2024.”Even so, the CES data may disappoint progressives, if not for the reasons their critics imagine. An analysis of the CES from the Center for Working Class Politics’s Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella found that Democrats who stayed home in 2024 were, on average, less ideologically liberal on hot-button social questions – more skeptical of an assault-rifle ban, receptive to a border wall, less concerned with climate change, and cooler to the language of structural racism – than the Democrats who showed up.Yet, as Abbott and Guastella found, those same non-voters were more economically populist: disproportionately working-class and non-college, while eager for bigger public investment programs, a higher corporate tax rate, and a stronger social safety net.The Democratic non-electorate doesn’t clearly align with progressive orthodoxy. Equally clear, though, is that a blanket lurch toward cultural moderation, absent populist economics, would do little to fire up non-voters who already share many progressive economic instincts.Making decisive claims about non-voters is necessarily difficult. By definition, they are the least likely to respond to pollsters, and their political preferences are often tentative or inconsistent. Yet certain commentators’ eagerness to cast non-voters as Trump supporters reveals more about elite assumptions than about public sentiment.There’s been a rush to cast non-voters as conservatives, not because the evidence demands it, but because the alternative – that Democrats need to speak more directly to the working class – remains uncomfortable for the party establishment. There is no way around the fact that in 2024, those Americans didn’t hear anything worth voting for.

      Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More

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      Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges

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      Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hierela – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.There was so little space at Krome, and so many detainees, the report says, that every available room was used to hold new arrivals.“By the time I left, almost all the visitation rooms were full. A few were so full men couldn’t even sit, all had to stand,” Andrea, a female detainee, said.At the third facility, the Broward transitional center in Pompano Beach, where a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in April, detainees said they were routinely denied adequate medical or psychological care.Some suffered delayed treatment for injuries and chronic conditions, and dismissive or hostile responses from staff, the report said.In one alleged incident in April at the downtown Miami jail, staff turned off a surveillance camera and a “disturbance control team” brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention to one of their number who was coughing up blood. One detainee suffered a broken finger.All three facilities were severely overcrowded, the former detainees said, a contributory factor in Florida’s decision to quickly build the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” jail in the Everglades intended to eventually hold up to 5,000 undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.Immigration detention numbers nationally were at an average of 56,400 per day in mid-June, with almost 72% having no criminal history, according to the report.The daily average during the whole of 2024 was 37,500, HRW said.The groups say that the documented abuses reflect inhumane conditions inside federal immigration facilities that have worsened significantly since Trump’s January inauguration and subsequent push to ramp up detentions and deportations.“The anti-immigrant escalation and enforcement tactics under the Trump administration are terrorizing communities and ripping families apart, which is especially cruel in the state of Florida, which thrives because of its immigrant communities,” said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South.“The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”The Guardian has contacted Ice for comment. More

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      Is Trump building a political dynasty? – episode one

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      The United States has had its fair share of political dynasties – the Bushes, the Clintons, the Kennedys … but has Donald Trump been quietly moulding his own family to become a political force long after he leaves office? Who from within the family fold could be a successor to the president? Or does Trump simply see the presidency as an opportunity to enrich himself and promote the Trump family brand?In this first episode, the author Gwenda Blair takes us back through Donald Trump’s family history and how the decisions made by his dad and grandfather led him to where he is today. The reporter Rosie Gray talks us through the role the first lady, Melania Trump, played in supporting her husband. And Ashley Parker profiles the roles of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, as they served as senior advisers to the president during his first term.Archive: ABC News, BBC News, CBS Philadelphia, CNN, the Ellen Degeneres Show, NBC News, PBS Newshour
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Help support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More