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      We need to do all we can to lower the anger pervading American politics | Robert Reich

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      My first thought on hearing about the attempted shooting of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday was “I hope to God he’s OK”.I thought this for the usual reasons we human beings hope that other humans are safe from harm.But I had another reason in the case of Donald Trump.Trump has shaped his campaign around his own paranoid martyrdom. I didn’t want anything to add fuel to his dangerous message.It would be unseemly to speak ill of a man who could have lost his life today, but let me remind you of the constant undercurrent of violence in Trump’s messages to his followers during this election. He talks of an America divided between Trump supporters and “enemies within” the nation who are seeking to destroy both him and his followers.On 24 June 2023, after his second indictment, he told his followers:
      “They’re not after me. They’re after you. And I just happen to be standing in their way.”
      The first rally of Trump’s 2024 election campaign on 25 March in Waco, Texas, opened with a choir of men imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection singing Justice for All, intercut with the national anthem and with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with his hand on his heart. Behind, on big screens, was footage from the Capitol riot.Trump then repeated his bogus claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. He then declared:
      “Our enemies are desperate to stop us and our opponents have done everything they can to crush our spirit and to break our will. But they failed. They’ve only made us stronger. And 2024 is the final battle, it’s going to be the big one. You put me back in the White House, their reign will be over and America will be a free nation once again.”
      He has conjured up a conspiracy against him, and therefore against his followers.
      “In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
      After Saturday’s attempt on his life, expect more of the same paranoid martyrdom from Trump.Today is no time to dwell on the direct and alarming connection between Trump’s political rise and the increase in political violence and threats of such violence in America.Let me just say that in 2016, the Capitol police recorded fewer than 900 threats against members of Congress. In 2017, after Trump took office, that figure more than quadrupled, according to the Capitol police. The numbers continued to rise every year of the Trump presidency, peaking at 9,700 in 2021. In 2022, the first full year of Biden’s term, the numbers declined to a still-high 7,500. (The 2023 data is not yet available.)Much more to say about all this. For now, though, please join me in doing everything possible to lower the hostility and anger now pervading American politics.And let us pray that Trump, Biden and everyone running for political office and every American engaged in politics remains safe from harm.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      US supreme court grabbing ‘ultimate power’, Biden reform adviser says

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      Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law scholar who has advised Joe Biden as the president prepares to back dramatic reforms to the US supreme court, has criticized the court’s ultraconservative justices for acting as a “center of self-aggrandizement” threatening the checks and balances on which the US has historically depended.In comments to the Guardian a day after news broke of Biden’s plans to endorse major changes to the country’s most powerful court, the Harvard Law School professor said the justices were out of step with basic constitutional premises. The court had “reached the point of assuming ultimate power over our entire legal and political system”.He accused the supermajority of “essentially destroying the framework of checks and balances” that had maintained an uneasy equilibrium “over the course of our history”.On Monday the Washington Post revealed Biden’s intention to support major plans to restrain the supreme court. The ideas reportedly being considered include term limits for justices, an ethics code armed with real teeth, as well as a possible constitutional amendment to overturn the justices’ highly controversial decision to grant Donald Trump broad presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.The Post reported that in preparation for an announcement, expected within weeks, Biden had turned to Tribe as an authority on constitutional law. They discussed Tribe’s blueprint for supreme court reform set out in a Guardian opinion article earlier this month, the newspaper said.Tribe declined on Tuesday to talk about their conversations. But he shared with the Guardian his personal thoughts about what must be done to correct some of the court’s most flagrant abuses.He gave a withering assessment of the hard-right supermajority that controls the court following Trump’s three appointments. The six conservative justices had discarded the judicial self-constraint that the framers of the constitution had intended for the “least dangerous” branch of government.The court had overturned “decades of precedent for no better reason than that it now has the votes to do so”.Tribe blamed the supreme court for systematically rolling back the past half-century of progress on voting and human rights. He listed advances that had been laid waste in recent years, including: “Reproductive liberty, gender equality, sexual autonomy, racial justice, police abuse and government accountability.”He warned there could be no quick fix for the court’s “outlandish excesses”. But he sketched reforms that, over time, could put the court back on the rails.One of Tribe’s most favored changes appears to fall outside Biden’s plans: enlarging the nine-person court with four extra seats to offset Trump’s “stacking of the court”. Tribe embraced enlarging the court in his role as a member of the commission formed by Biden in 2021 looking into supreme court reform.But he told the Guardian that, speaking only for himself, he would be “loth to urge the president at this point to reverse his deep-rooted opposition to court expansion”.The Harvard professor said that there was growing consensus behind term limits for justices. Presidents should make two appointments to the supreme court in each four-year White House term.New appointments would then serve for 18 years as active justices, followed by lifetime service as a retired judge who could fill in for a recused colleague when required. Such a two-tier system has thrived in lower courts for more than a century.Tribe said the shift to a term-limited system – which would be prospective only, not affecting the current nine justices – could be legislated by Congress.“No other apex court in the world entrusts remotely so much power to so few individuals for so long – essentially for life,” he said.Biden also appears minded to endorse an enforceable ethics code, to replace the voluntary guidelines which the court adopted last November amid mounting criticism of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Tribe said he believed such a reform was now urgently needed, as a way to save the court “from its own worst tendencies”.The law professor called the present system untenable. With no outside mechanism for enforcing ethical rules, such as disclosure of gifts from rich patrons, the court was in effect “expected to police itself”.That remained the case even when justices appeared “prone to get away with as much exploitation of their prestigious positions as they can”.Like term limits, an enforceable ethics code would require congressional legislation. Both would be a tough proposition given the present partisan divide and the need for 60 Senate votes under the filibuster.Such reforms would look easy compared with the other major reform being considered by Biden relating to presidential immunity. This would require a constitutional amendment that would have to negotiate the convoluted rules for changing the US constitution (two-thirds support in both chambers of Congress, or two-thirds of the states in a convention, followed by ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures).What was now needed, Tribe said, was a “No Person Is Above the Law” amendment which would insert language into the constitution making clear that nobody – including the president – could claim immunity from criminal prosecution by virtue of their office.Tribe said that he also wanted to see an amendment constraining a president’s pardon power so that a lawless incumbent of the Oval Office could not pardon themselves or anyone else whom they encouraged to commit crimes on their behalf.Taken together, these changes would return to the supreme court the public respect it had lost, Tribe said. They would correct the court’s partisan majority which now acts as though it were “all-knowing and essentially infallible, paying virtually no heed to the opinions of its predecessors or of the American people”. More

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      Democratic rift over Biden candidacy deepens even as party says he will be nominee

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      Pressure for Joe Biden to step aside as the Democrats’ presidential pick to face Donald Trump had eased since the Republican survived an assassination attempt last weekend, but began to rise again on Wednesday.The influential California congressman, Adam Schiff, said publicly that Biden should quit, becoming the most well-known representative so far to do so openly.And later on Wednesday afternoon, David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama as president, increased his persistent pressure campaign on Biden as he warned that the sitting president had not done enough to relieve voters’ concern about his age since last month’s hapless debate performance.“I’ve said for a long time, it’s not in any way a commentary on his record, which I think will be honoured more by history than it is by voters right now, but it’s a very hard case to make that anyone should be elected president in the United States at the age of 82, not for political reasons but for actuarial reasons,” Axelrod told the Guardian in Milwaukee.Having already riled Biden with criticism of his re-election bid, Axelrod continued the attack at an event on the sidelines of the Republican national convention, where Trump is expected to receive the official party nomination on Thursday.Axelrod, chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, asked if he thinks Biden can survive as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, replied: “That’s entirely in his hands.”His and Schiff’s comments followed one “prominent strategist” who was moved to say of the internal rebellion against Biden’s candidacy for re-election: “It’s over,” in a sign of how sharply divided the party stands. The strategist spoke anonymously to the Hill.At a press conference in Milwaukee, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and a party grandee, said Biden would be confirmed as the Democratic nominee by virtual vote between 1 and 7 August, before the Chicago convention.Walz told reporters: “We need to get these things done. We need to get the roll call done. But it won’t happen before 1 August.”The debate over Biden’s age and cognitive fitness is likely to stoke more nasty public splits.On Wednesday morning, as a new ABC-Norc poll found nearly two-thirds of Democrats saying Biden should withdraw, the blogger and podcaster Nate Silver linked to video of moments in a speech in Las Vegas the night before, in which the 81-year-old president seemed to struggle.Silver said: “It’s just so weird living through this real-life Emperor Has No Clothes Moment. He obviously shouldn’t be president for four more years. Everyone knows this.”Schiff followed reports that he predicted heavy Democratic losses under Biden by going public on the matter.Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history” but it was time “to pass the torch”, Schiff, now the Democratic candidate for US Senate, told the Los Angeles Times.“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November.”Biden insists he is up to the job, telling one interviewer he will be the nominee “unless I get hit by a train”.Silver also said it was “incredibly revealing which people are willing to lie” about Biden’s age and the problem facing his party.That was a reference to Silver’s public argument on Tuesday with Jaime Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chair, over plans to confirm Biden’s nomination before the convention, officially related to uncertainty over elections law in Ohio and the deadline for ballot inclusion.Harrison wrote: “Love y’all but when it comes to election law and ballot access, I put my trust in our legal team who make a living understanding these laws and processes and not in the pollster who promised us the red wave. #ClassDismissed.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe was referring to predictions that the 2022 midterms would see Republicans retake the Senate and strengthen their hold on the House, which did not transpire.Silver answered: “Jaime, I’m not a pollster and I didn’t promise a red wave. The data is here. Actual experts have weighed in and said you’re spreading misinformation. You should probably stop lying.“You and the White House have run the whole campaign on the premise that you could bullshit your way through things. It’s early enough so as not to be unsalvageable, but you’ve put Democrats in an incredibly difficult position. Enough with the BS.”Silver also accused Harrison and the DNC of “blatantly lying” about a need to confirm Biden before the convention, adding: “The good news is that there very much will be consequences if they force Biden’s nomination [through] and he loses.”Harrison said: “Nate … you can call me a lot of things but a liar is definitely not one of them. I know you THINK you know every thing but class is now truly in session. Pull up a chair.”He then offered an explanation of the plan for an early confirmation, in light of events in Ohio. Silver said he was “trying to gaslight people based on a technicality”.Elsewhere, the Ohio secretary of state said the elections law issue was “resolved”, adding that Democrats “know that and should stop trying to scapegoat Ohio for their own party disfunction”.Amid it all, Ron Klain entered the chat.The former White House chief of staff, who remains close to Biden and his campaign, posted a FiveThirtyEight prediction of a Biden electoral college victory and said: “But I thought he had ‘no path’ according to donors and the electeds following the donors?”Klain added: “Based on working in two campaigns against Trump I am unchanged in my view that Joe Biden is uniquely capable of defeating him – that’s my gut view based on experience.”Silver said: “You’d say that whether you really believed it or not. But come on the podcast Ron and we’ll see how many mental gymnastics you’re willing to do to defend this position.”Klain, Silver added, was “the one person on the campaign who might be smart enough to know he’s full of shit and will write a memoir in five years saying Biden’s inner circle was incorrigible and he had to provide the most help he could to Biden under the circumstances”.Also on social media, Simon Rosenberg, a pollster and strategist who correctly said there would be no “red wave” in 2022, made an appeal for sanity, posting on X, in part: “Fellow Dems, every moment you attack other [Democrats] you are helping Trump win. Stop it.”Harrison reposted the message. More

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      Adam Schiff says Biden should ‘pass the torch’ and bow out of 2024 US election

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      Adam Schiff, the high-profile California Democrat and US Senate candidate, on Wednesday called on Joe Biden to end his presidential campaign, stating he had “serious concerns” about the president’s ability to beat Donald Trump in November.In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles-area congressman joined almost 20 other congressional Democrats in asking the president to step aside. Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history”, Schiff said, but it was time “to pass the torch”.“A second Trump presidency will undermine the very foundation of our democracy, and I have serious concerns about whether the president can defeat Donald Trump in November,” Schiff told the newspaper.The development comes as an increasing number of Democrats express doubts about whether Biden can win in November and concerns over his age and cognitive abilities following his debate performance against Trump.A new survey published this week found that nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw. Only about three in 10 Democrats are extremely or very confident that Biden has the mental capability to serve effectively, the AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research survey also found.Some of Biden’s top donors have said that he should bow out, and have paused donations until he does so. It was reported on Tuesday that Schiff had told donors he believed Democrats would lose the presidency, and probably the House and Senate as well, if Biden remained on the ticket. “I think if he is our nominee, I think we lose,” the New York Times reported Schiff told donors in New York.With Democrats in turmoil, the party backtracked on Wednesday on plans to expedite a virtual roll call to officially select Biden as its presidential nominee before August after facing opposition from several House members. The members had planned to send a letter to the DNC calling a proposal to fast-track Biden’s nomination a “terrible idea”.“We’re glad to see that the pressure has worked and the DNC will not rush this virtual process through in July,” said a spokesperson for the congressman Jared Huffman, a California Democrat.The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, who heads the DNC’s rules committee, confirmed during a press conference in Milwaukee on Wednesday morning that the roll call vote will not be conducted this month. The governor’s spokesperson later confirmed that the process should wrap up by 7 August.The extended deadline buys Democrats more time for continued internal debate over whether Biden should remain the party’s nominee.For his part, Schiff said on Wednesday he would support whoever is the Democratic nominee, including Biden, and will do anything to help the ticket succeed.“There is only one singular goal: defeating Donald Trump. The stakes are just too high,” he told the LA Times. More

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      Trump is now a member of the mass shooting survivor’s club – will it change anything?

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      The assassination attempt on Donald Trump has put the former president in a category that hundreds of other Americans have been forced into in recent decades: the victim of a high-profile mass shooting.For those who have been at the scene of public shootings or lived through the media whirlwind that followed a loved one’s death to mass violence, the past week has felt like a “rinse and repeat” of more than a decade of this type of violence, said Christian Heyne, the chief officer of policy and programs at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization named after the former White House press secretary Jim Brady, who was shot in the head during an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.“Every time this type of gun violence happens, it dredges up a lot of trauma,” said Heyne, whose mother was killed and father was injured in a shooting rampage in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2005. In addition to Heyne’s mother, a police officer was killed in the attack, and five other people were injured.After Saturday’s shooting, Heyne was brought back to the day his mother was killed and his community was terrorized. He is troubled that more people now face the trauma he has lived with for nearly 20 years.“The thing that baffles me is that we can be in this cycle of rinse and repeat but we’re not tapping into a conversation about how we prevent the next shooting,” he added.For many like Heyne, Saturday’s shooting was a reminder of their own losses and a stark reminder that gun violence can touch anyone, including a presidential nominee surrounded by armed law enforcement. The policy solutions, they say, are the same they have asked for following every mass shooting tragedy.“The fact that a 20-year-old with an AR-15 was able to get that close to killing a previous head of state is the reason that we have to focus on the gun at the end of the day,” said David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives, a violence prevention group founded after 17 of his classmates were killed at their high school in Parkland, Florida.As the news of the Trump rally flooded television, one of Hogg’s first thoughts was of his mother, who he says is deeply affected by news of shootings. Then, he began calling out what he sees as the fallacy that more guns will ensure protection from mass shootings. “We’re not going to bulletproof our entire society,” he said.Now, he is looking forward with hope that the near-killing of the leader of the Republican party will push lawmakers to build the trust among themselves needed to pass gun policies at the state and federal levels.“The former president of the United States has heightened security and additional Secret Service, and this still happened. We need to change the conversation.“We have to have some semblance of trust between these major party political leaders,” Hogg continued. “Do I think Republicans are actually going to step up to the plate and do something? I don’t think so. But I hope so after the crown jewel of their movement was threatened.”The only similarity Hogg saw between the Parkland shooting and Trump’s assassination attempt was the deluge of conspiracies, speculation and misinformation that have become commonplace following high-profile shootings at Parkland and Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. “This is America, people love conspiracy theories in general,” he said.“There’s this range of public outcry that we continue to live through,” echoed Mark Barden, whose seven-year-old son Daniel was one of 26 people killed in the 2012 tragedy in Connecticut. “There’s sympathy, empathy, outrage and anger. There’s sadness, there’s horror and fear and then conjecture.”After 12 years of advocacy through Sandy Hook Promise, the organization he co-founded with Nicole Hockley another parent whose child was killed in the attack, Barden says he has grown used to the intense news cycle that follows high-profile shootings. He has found a way to move past the ugliest parts of the post-mass shooting news cycle, he said, to focus on spreading awareness about identifying the warning signs and behaviors that often precede mass public violence.“I spend all of my intelligence and mental capital on getting people to know the signs and giving them the tools to make an intervention on themselves or somebody else,” he said.“I think this could be – depending on how this unfolds – a catalyst moment,” Barden said of the rally shooting in Pennsylvania on Saturday. “There’s an opportunity for folks to understand that this doesn’t have to be our way of life.” More

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      Ivanka Trump said she was done with politics – but is the Maga Princess plotting a return?

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      If you’re a woman freaking out about the imminent possibility of another Trump term, don’t despair quite yet. Yes, Project 2025 is hoping to turn the US into a Christian nationalist country. Yes, JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running partner, has been primed for the job by Peter Thiel, a man who has mused that women having the vote is problematic. Yes, experts are raising the alarm that “a Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history.” But it’s not all doom and gloom: there may well be a beacon of light and female liberation coming into the White House as well. Signs suggest Ivanka Trump is considering a return to politics. Ladies and gentlewomen, the patron saint of female empowerment may selflessly serve us once again!To be clear: the younger Trump hasn’t explicitly said that she’s interested in another go at being Daddy’s special adviser. In fact, she’s spent the last few years getting as far away from politics as possible. A renaissance woman, Trump has sold everything from handbags to shoes to real estate – but her most valuable product has always been herself. The former first daughter has always been very careful about protecting her personal brand. And, for a while, that meant staying well clear of her father.With Donald Trump now formally the nominee, it can be hard to remember just how bad things looked for the former president a couple of years ago. After an underwhelming performance by GOP candidates in the 2022 midterm elections, a lot of Trump’s former acolytes started turning on him. High-profile Republicans complained that Trump was a drag on the party. Even the New York Post, once Trump’s personal Pravda, thought he was a joke: “TRUMPTY DUMPTY”, a post-midterm front page crowed. And then, of course, there were Trump’s mountains of legal problems. A lot of people wrote Trump off.Ivanka was noticeably not by her father’s side during his hours of need. The moment that Donald got kicked out of the White House, Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, followed him to Florida but kept a safe distance from the political goings on at Mar-a-Lago. Can’t have an insurrection ruining one’s image, after all.View image in fullscreenA company called College Hunks Hauling Junk helped them clear out their DC mansion and the pair decamped to Miami’s “Billionaire Bunker”. They didn’t go empty-handed, of course. The couple reported between $172m and $640m in outside income while working in the White House and Saudi Arabia gave Kushner’s private equity firm $2bn to invest. Enough to keep them busy for a while.For a long time, Javanka stayed fairly under the radar. Ivanka Trump would pop up in headlines now and again in Fun-loving Mother and Caring Philanthropist mode. Behold, a flattering headline about Ivanka helping deploy medical supplies and meals to Ukraine! Look: here’s an Instagram slideshow of the whole family skiing! Now here’s a fun picture of the Javanka family at the flashy Ambani wedding!A cynic might say these carefully curated images were designed to humanize Trump and erase her messy political past. Aiding this was a consistent drip-drip of mysterious sources telling the press that Javanka had no desire whatsoever to return to politics. Even this year, when Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee, media “sources” kept insisting that the former first daughter wanted nothing to do with the White House. “She is very happy, living her best life,” a source told People in March. “She left politics totally in the rearview mirror and so this time around, even if her dad is the leading Republican candidate, she basically doesn’t care. She told him when he said he was going to run again that she didn’t want to be involved.”Mary Trump, the woman who has made a career out of being Donald Trump’s disgruntled niece after a legal battle over her inheritance, has been blunt about why Ivanka seems to have retreated from politics. “I think Ivanka made very clear that she doesn’t get enough out of [her relationship with her father] any more,” Mary Trump told CNN at the end of May. “She’s barely been heard from for months; she could not be bothered to show up at [her father’s] trial [over falsifying business records].”As the election inches closer, however, Ivanka seems to have reassessed the value of her relationship with her father. In early May, the media outlet Puck reported that she was “warming to the idea of trying to be helpful again … She’s not like ‘Hell no’ any more.” A similar report from Business Insider soon followed: according to a “friend of Ivanka”, the entrepreneur wasn’t ruling politics out. A spokesperson for the couple told Puck that this was all nonsense but rumours of a political comeback kept mounting.Then, a couple of weeks ago, Ivanka jumped back into the spotlight with an appearance on Lex Fridman’s highly influential podcast. (Fridman has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube.) In this she opened up about how working at the White House was “the most extraordinary growth experience of my life” and how privileged she was to have been asked by her father to help so many people. During the conversation, she also carefully recapped some of (what’s she’s claimed as) her key achievements in the White House, such as boosting the child tax credit. It wasn’t so much an interview as it was a hype project by a friend. It felt a lot like it was teasing Trump’s return to political life should her dad be re-elected.So, after years in the Floridian wilderness, has the Maga Princess officially returned to the family fold? It’s a tad too early to tell but it increasingly looks that way. As one would expect, Ivanka Trump has spent the last few days close to her father after the attempt on his life: she’s very much thrown herself into the role of doting daughter again.And while Ivanka has been absent from the Republican national convention so far, she and Jared are expected to be at Donald’s side on Thursday when he formally accepts the party’s nomination. And if that happens and images of Ivanka standing next to her father hit the headlines, it won’t just be a celebratory photoshoot – it’ll be a preview of Trump’s second term. More

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      Yes, Joe Biden’s mind is a problem. So is his cold heart towards Palestinians | Ahmed Moor

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      Attention has rightly been focused on Biden’s cognitive lapses – the incomplete sentences, the trailing thoughts, the obvious gaps in coherence. The spectacle, which has been obvious to anyone who isn’t a Democratic party surrogate or a diehard party member, has been astonishing to witness. The images of Giorgia Meloni seemingly redirecting Biden at the meeting of the G7, or his frozen visage as Jill Biden sought to drum up enthusiasm for his candidacy, or Barack Obama guiding him off a stage, or his rigid dancing during a Juneteenth celebration have caused many to ask about Joe Biden’s physical fitness and ability to hold the highest office in the land.Yet, in calling for Biden to step back from running a second time, some Democrats have described the president as “decent” and “a good man”. The opposite is true.Biden has enabled a ghastly genocide, the starvation of children in Palestine, and his legacy is defined by it. Unfortunately, his record before Palestine also puts the lie to the “decency” myth. His enthusiasm for the Iraq war and the savage destruction of Lebanon in 1982 illustrate his poor judgment and ethical lapses on foreign policy. His opposition to federally mandated desegregation busing, his lazy plagiarism, and his sexist treatment of Anita Hill, a Black woman who was allegedly sexually harassed by the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, do not comprise a record of decency either.Donald Trump is a dangerous man. In his first term he employed cartoonishly bad people. Steve Bannon, a criminal and an Islamophobe; Jared Kushner, whose primary achievement appears to have been transmuting an inscrutable role in the White House into a $2bn investment from the Saudis in 2021 and John Bolton, who lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to propel this country into war, all “served” him as president. This time around, we should reasonably expect more of the same. Or maybe worse.Democrats are right to fret – and, to use the illustrative if childish metaphor favored by the Biden campaign – to wet their beds at the prospect of another meeting between Trump and Biden. The president’s decline is alarming many Democrats. Trump, by contrast, presents as someone who is a little more alert, but is self-indulgent and undisciplined. He comes across as a peevish, unimaginably rich man, who has been so wealthy for so long, whose money has insulated him from the consequences of his actions for so long, whose primary company is sycophantic, that he chooses to rant incoherently. If there is something wrong with his brain, it may be attributable to the long-term effects of money on cognition.Another Trump-Biden debate is scheduled for 10 September, and, if he remains the Democratic candidate, there is no reason to believe that Biden will fare any better. While cognitive decline is highly mediated by personal characteristics, it does not get better with time; age is age. Today, Biden is unable to meet the challenge posed by Trump – not cognitively, and not ethically.The argument for replacing Biden was strong as soon as his first “bear hug” embrace” of the “insufferably arrogant” war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu caused him to lose voters in Michigan, an indispensable swing state. And it has grown stronger in the wake of the disastrous July debate. It seems reasonable to believe the polls: Americans will not vote for someone who cannot plausibly hold a regular job to the office of the presidency.Before the debate, it seemed likely that enough Americans would not vote for someone who actively abetted a genocide, who openly regarded Palestinian lives with contempt, and who cast an entire generation of college students and young people as antisemites and miscreants, to produce a Trump presidency. But politics is dynamic – and presaged does not mean prescribed.Biden’s poor performance during the debate with Trump may act as an unexpected opportunity for Democrats. Because far from being “a good man” – as Nicholas Kristof, who has spent time documenting aspects of the Israeli genocide, has nonetheless called Biden – Biden’s ethical failures have always been an albatross. He was poised to lose the election even before the debate – an argument that his supporters were able to successfully withstand, primarily by browbeating the realists in the party. But now, with his mental decline so evident, those who seek a different candidate can argue forcefully that he is unfit.The Democrats do not have to lose this election to Donald Trump. The country, and the world, does not have to contend with another four years of incoherence and ineptitude. As the French election – which saw the Palestine-supporting New Popular Front win a shock victory – shows: the best way to beat the far-right is a strong and principled left.This race is salvageable. To win, the Democrats must jettison one bad, ailing man. And find someone decent to take his place.

      Ahmed Moor is a writer, activist and co-editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine More

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      Ohio voters hope son of soil JD Vance will ‘do something good for us’

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      For many in Middletown, Ohio, JD Vance is better-known as a bestselling author and hit Hollywood movie subject than a politician who on Monday was propelled into the political big time as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick.Amanda Bailey moved into Vance’s grandmother’s house, the home in which Vance was mostly raised, 18 months ago. Since then, she’s been dealing with a steady stream of curious passersby inspired by Vance’s 2016 autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, and the 2020 film of the same name, driving by and taking photos of the house.Bailey, who works at a local hardware store, admits she’s not entirely up to speed with Vance’s policy positions.“I hope he’ll do something good for us, and I think he will,” she says.Her thoughts are echoed by Jerry Dobbins, who has lived three doors down the street for the past 31 years. Dobbins says his memories of Vance’s family are mainly of the vice-presidential candidate’s grandmother, Bonnie, who mostly raised JD and his sister, Lindsay.“Bonnie was a tough bird. She was just a strong woman from Kentucky,” he says.But there’s a reason Bailey, Dobbins and a number of other Middletown residents say they are not especially concerned by Vance being rocketed into the political mainstream without much in the way of experience – it’s because they have complete faith in the person who picked him: Donald Trump.“I like Trump,” says Bailey. “And I think they’ll do a lot of good work together.”“Trump’s not a politician. He’s a businessman,” says Dobbins, who worked as a fabricator at a nearby aerospace company before retiring. “When Trump got in [in 2016], things started looking better economy-wise, business-wise. I don’t think he can be beat [in November].”The Middletown Vance was raised in is not unlike the dozens of other left-behind communities in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and beyond, where Trump’s particular brand of politics and rhetoric has found favor. In Butler county, which encompasses most of Middletown and several satellite towns of Cincinnati, Trump beat Biden by 24 points in the 2020 election.Like thousands of others, Vance’s family were lured from Appalachia to Ohio by the promise of work at Middletown’s many paper and steel mills that for much of the 20th century dominated the region’s economy.And as with dozens of other rust belt towns, Middletown’s economy shrank due to industrial offshoring that began in the 1970s, giving rise to job losses and the ravages of the opioid epidemic that endure today.It’s these ills, which the 39-year-old Vance has blamed on Joe Biden, immigrants and China, that he has used to craft a so-far successful political career. Despite these claims, the Biden administration has invested billions of dollars in the midwest, while immigrants have helped stem population decline in many towns and cities.For longtime Middletown residents Bev and Tom Pressler, Vance’s lack of political experience may even be an advantage.“I think the young blood is good. We need some younger politicians running the country,” says Tom. “Obama got in and he wasn’t all that old, and he didn’t have all that experience. Trump didn’t have all that experience and I think he did excellent.”For Bev Pressler, a 62-year-old resident, Vance has worked hard to get where he is today.“If you saw the movie and read the book, he was trying to get into these schools, he was trying to pull his mom out of drug addiction, his family depended on him,” she says.But not everyone in Middletown thinks Vance’s meteoric rise to the forefront of US politics is a good thing.“He has a legislative legacy of zero achievements, especially lacking any meaningful support for Ohioans,” says Kathy Wyenandt, the chair of the Butler county Democratic party.“Vance is willing to change his beliefs at any time for the sake of amassing power … he is an out-of-touch millionaire and political shapeshifter who is wrong for Ohio, and wrong for our country.”Although Vance launched his political career in the US Senate with a campaign rally at a steel manufacturer in Middletown in July 2021, locals say they haven’t seen much of him since then.“What concerns me more than anything is that, at Senator Vance’s age, he is able to take the Maga agenda and to see it out far beyond even Trump’s time, if he were to get re-elected,” says Scotty Robertson, a pastor who has lived in Middletown for seven years.“Those policies are so destructive to our country and to Middletown. We’re talking about potentially ending social security and Medicare as we know it, continuing to roll back voting rights and ensuring that large segments of our population find it extremely hard to even vote. We’re talking about supporting policy that allows the president to essentially do whatever he or she chooses without any kind of accountability.”Still, for Debbie Dranschak, who with her husband runs the White Dog Distilling Company on Middletown’s Central Avenue, that’s not enough of a reason not to vote for his running mate in November.“I don’t know him, I don’t know his politics, but I’m glad Trump picked him,” she says. “Biden is just too old. He needs to get out. I grew up Democrat, but it’s about who is going to do the best for the country.”For Chad Sebald, an audio engineer, Vance has been unfairly labeled by some locally as a “class traitor” – someone who leaves behind the people they grew up with in search of better opportunities elsewhere.“Knowing his history, he came from nothing. He did what just about anybody in Middletown would do – he got out. I can’t blame the guy for getting out of here,” says Sebald, who also plans to vote for Trump in November.However, for a few minutes on the same street Vance was raised, the kind of dangerous, racist rhetoric that many say Trump has fueled over the years was in full view on Monday afternoon.As a local TV news car pulled up to interview residents, a man wearing a T-shirt with the word “freedom” written on it emerged from a nearby home angrily asking the car and its occupants to leave.“JD Vance is a race traitor,” he yells. Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of immigrants from India. “Fuck that motherfucker.” More