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      Trump dreams of ‘everlasting peace’ as acolytes drop heavy hints to Nobel committee

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      So to peace in our time. And why not? The Nobel committee is meeting in Oslo to divvy up its annual gongs and Donald Trump, convening his cabinet – and the media – in the White House had a good story to tell.After two years of death, destruction, starvation and captivity for Israeli hostages in Gaza, peace at last was at hand. Israel and Hamas were on the brink of a historic deal, brokered by the man in the Oval Office, who has made no secret of his desire to be known as the president of peace.The stakes in Gaza are so gravely baleful that it would be churlish to ascribe selfish motives to the cabinet meeting’s main theme.Yet the timing was, shall we say, serendipitous.Today is Thursday, tomorrow Friday – by coincidence, the day the winner of the Nobel will be announced.But Trump, whose previous expressions of desire for the same prize awarded to Barack Obama have bordered on the avaricious, was all decorum and restraint – at least on that narrow issue alone.In the course of a 70-minute meeting, the N word went unmentioned – apart from by one journalist near the end, whose question about Trump’s views on the prize went unanswered.There was going to be “peace in the Middle East”, he said portentously.“I think it’s going to be a lasting peace, hopefully an everlasting peace,” he added, no ambition being too great.“It will be a day of joy,” the president said, when the remaining living Israeli hostages – believed to be 20 in number – are released on Monday or Tuesday.“They’re dancing in the streets. They’re so happy. Everybody’s happy. They’re dancing in the streets of Arab countries, Muslim countries, I’ve never seen anything like it.”Everyone around him deserved credit, the president said magnanimously. “JD [Vance], you were fantastic. And Pete [Hegseth], you were great. Marco [Rubio] was fantastic. I mean, some of you were very much involved. I think almost everybody in this room was involved. Susie [Wiles, the White House chief of staff], I want to thank you very much. You were incredible … and then you have Steve Witkoff [his personal envoy].”But it fell to Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, to supply the heavy hint to the Nobel committee in Norway.“I don’t know if the one day perhaps the entire story will be told about the events of yesterday, but suffice it to say – it’s not an exaggeration – that none of it would have been possible without the president. Without the president of the United States being involved,” enthused the man once disparaged by Trump as “little Marco”.That drew a round of applause from the cabinet – the second of the meeting, the first being for Trump’s announcement at the beginning that a national holiday on the second Monday of October would henceforth be known as Columbus Day.Rubio warmed to his theme. The achievement transcended dry geopolitics to encapsulate the person of Trump himself.“Yesterday was a human story,” he said. “And because of the work you put in. And honestly, not only is there no other leader in the world that could have put this together, Mr President, but frankly, I don’t know of any American president in the modern era that could have made this possible because of the actions you have taken unrelated to this, and because of who you are, and what you’ve done, and how you’re viewed.”But this was still a Trump cabinet meeting, and it would not have been complete without some dissonant notes.They were duly supplied by the jarring contrast between the promise of peace and harmony in the Middle East and the darkening prospect of war, or at least civil disharmony, in America.Trump only had good words to say about countries in the Middle East who were he said were on board with his peace deal – even Iran, a country which he recently bombed but now said he wanted to see rebuilt.But here at home an “enemy from within” had to be confronted. Troops were to be deployed onto the streets of US cities to show elected local Democratic mayors and governors who was boss.Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, reported going to Portland and meeting the governor, mayor, chief of police and highway patrol superintendent.“They are all lying and disingenuous and dishonest people,” she declared, charitably, “because as soon as you leave the room, then they make the exact opposite response.” This presumably because the officials named depicted their city in somewhat more peaceful terms than the warzone of Noem et al’s fevered narrative.Yet taking the prize for low blows was JD Vance, who understood that the unifying theme of the meeting was Trump’s nascent success in ending bloodshed in the Middle East – yet failed to grasp that this call for a display of graciousness on his part.The vice-president has been known at cabinet gatherings to double up with contrived laughter at his boss’s jokes.This time he decided the best policy was to repurpose for his own use one of Trump’s tried-and-tested jibes – at the expense of Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.“The one thing I would say is obviously the president of the United States, a New York real estate billionaire, one of the most famous New Yorkers in the world, has a lot of interaction with a lot of people who are very pro-Israel,” said Vance.Then, perhaps realizing that he could not reach the giddy heights of Rubio’s testimonial, he added: “He also, of course, knew one of the most famous Palestinians in the world, Chuck Schumer.”The crack provoked laughter. It is one of Trump’s cruelest taunts against Schumer, a fellow New Yorker who is proudly Jewish and a staunch supporter of Israel. Given the current backdrop, retreading it at this point struck a particularly discordant note.JD, it seems, has secret aspirations as a king of comedy. A calling missed, perhaps. But someone needs to tell him about timing – and context. More

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      News organizations hold out on signing Pentagon media policies ‘designed to stifle a free press’

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      With days left before journalists covering the Pentagon must sign on to a new set of guidelines to retain physical access to the department, major US news companies – and organizations representing their interests – remain concerned about specific policies they fear will stifle independent reporting on the Pentagon.The Trump administration has been accused of preparing to impose severe limitations on the ability of journalists to cover the Pentagon and publish information that had not been officially approved for release.An “in-brief for Media Members” that updated an earlier set of policies, released last month, drew strong condemnation from media companies and groups advocating for press freedom. On Monday, the Pentagon sent out a revised version.On Wednesday, the Pentagon Press Association, which said it has been “cautious” in communicating about the policy as it worked behind the scenes, said the changes made – including an acknowledgment that signees may not “agree” with the policies – are not sufficient.In particular, the revised policy still prohibits journalists from the “solicitation” of information from Pentagon employees, “such as public advertisements or calls for tips encouraging [Department of War] employees to share non-public [Department of War] information”. Journalists fear that policy could infringe on their ability to seek information about the agency from employees.Donald Trump recently signed an executive order to change the name of the defense department to the Department of War. This would require approval from Congress to become official.“We acknowledge and appreciate that the Pentagon is no longer requiring reporters to express agreement with the new policy as a condition for obtaining press credentials,” the Pentagon Press Association said in a statement. “But the Pentagon is still asking us to affirm in writing our ‘understanding’ of policies that appear designed to stifle a free press and potentially expose us to prosecution for simply doing our jobs.”The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), which has worked behind the scenes to relax the policies, said the changes don’t go far enough.“The fact is we still have concerns with the updated language of the policy and expect that it will pose a significant impediment as journalists weigh with their employers whether or not to sign this revised version,” Gabe Rottman, the RCFP vice-president of policy said on Wednesday.PEN America, an organization that advocates for free expression, also said Thursday that the Pentagon should “revisit” its policies. “National security is strengthened, not threatened, when journalists can investigate and report without fear,” Tim Richardson, PEN America journalism and disinformation program director said.With the exception of CNN, which does not plan to sign the policy, most news organizations have been tight-lipped when asked whether they plan to sign by next week’s deadline or risk losing access to the Pentagon compound.The New York Times said in a statement that it “appreciates the Pentagon’s engagement, but problems remain with the policy and we and other news organizations believe further changes are needed”.A spokesperson for the Atlantic also said that it “[continues] to oppose the Pentagon’s proposed press policy”.Pentagon representatives have been steadfast in rebuffing the protests of media organizations.“Access to the Pentagon is a privilege, not a right and the Department is not only legally permitted, but morally obligated to impose reasonable regulations on the exercise of that privilege,” chief spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a post on X, denying that journalists will be forced to “clear stories” with the agency before publication.Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, said in her own post that “reporters would rather clutch their pearls on social media than stop trying to get warfighters and [Department of War] civilians to commit a crime by violating Department-wide policy.”In its statement on Wednesday, the Pentagon Press Association called on the agency to reconsider the policies in the remaining days before journalists are asked to sign them.“Limiting the media’s ability to report on the US military fails to honor the American families who have entrusted their sons and daughters to serve in it, or the taxpayers responsible for giving the department hundreds of billions of dollars a year,” the group said. “The American people deserve to know how their military is being run. They deserve more information from this administration, not less.” More

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      National guard remains in Chicago area as judge to rule on Trump deployment

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      Hundreds of national guard troops remained in the Chicago area as city and Illinois officials awaited a judge’s decision to stop Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the nation’s third-largest city.It was still unclear where specifically the Trump administration would send the troops who reported to an army training site south-west of Chicago, which was laden with extra fencing and tarps put up to block the public’s view of the facility late on Wednesday evening.As they arrived this week, trucks marked Emergency Disaster Services pulled in and out, dropping off portable toilets and other supplies. Trailers were set up in rows.“The federal government has not communicated with us in any way about their troop movements,” the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, told reporters. “I can’t believe I have to say ‘troop movements’ in an American city, but that is what we’re talking about here.”Roughly 500 soldiers – 200 from the Texas national guard and 300 from the Illinois national guard – were mobilized to the city for an “initial period of 60 days”, according to statement issued from US Northern Command, part of the defense department, which called the operation a “federal protection mission”.The guard members are in the city to protect US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) buildings and other federal facilities and law enforcement personnel, according to Northern Command.A small number of troops have started protecting federal property in the Chicago area, officials told the Associated Press.Footage of uniformed troops arriving early on Thursday morning at an Ice processing facility in the suburban community of Broadview, which has become a focal point of protests. They carried shields and what appeared to be luggage.In a statement, the village of Broadview said three vans carrying 45 members of the Texas national guard had arrived at the federal building.“During their patrols, Broadview police officers observed the vans parked in the rear of 2000 25th Ave and all of the guards were sleeping. We let them sleep undisturbed. We hope that they will extend the same courtesy in the coming days to Broadview residents who deserve a good night’s sleep, too,” the statement said.While the deployment came as part of a crackdown threatened by Trump, in response to unsubstantiated claims that big cities run by Democrats are overwhelmed with crime, the stated mission says military would be “performing ground activities to protect federal functions, personnel, and property”.It marks Trump’s fourth deployment of national guard troops on to the streets of a major US city in as many months, following deployments in Los Angeles, Washington DC and Memphis. In all cases except Memphis, it has been against the wishes of state and city leaders.Trump repeatedly has described Chicago in hostile terms, calling it a “hellhole” of crime, although police statistics show significant drops in most crimes, including homicides.A judge will also have a role in determining how many boots are on the streets: a court hearing was being held on Thursday after a request by Illinois and Chicago to declare the guard deployment illegal.The state of Illinois urged April Perry, a federal judge, to order the national guard to stand down, calling the deployment a constitutional crisis. The government “plowed ahead anyway”, attorney Christopher Wells said. “Now, troops are here.”Wells’ arguments opened an extraordinary hearing where heavy public turnout at the downtown Chicago courthouse caused officials to open an overflow room with a video feed of the hearing.Eric Hamilton, a justice department lawyer, said the Chicago area was rife with “tragic lawlessness”. He discussed an incident last weekend in which a Border Patrol vehicle was reportedly boxed in and an agent shot a woman in response.But in a court filing, the city and state lawyers say protests at the Ice building in Broadview have “never come close to stopping federal immigration enforcement”.“The president is using the Broadview protests as a pretext,” they wrote. “The impending federal troop deployment in Illinois is the latest episode in a broader campaign by the president’s administration to target jurisdictions the president dislikes.”It’s one of several major court fights on the deployment of federal troops to American cities.Also Thursday, a federal appeals court heard arguments over whether Trump had the authority to take control of 200 Oregon national guard troops. The president had planned to deploy them in Portland, where there have been mostly small nightly protests outside an Ice building.US district judge Karin Immergut on Saturday granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Oregon troops’ deployment, and on Sunday blocked the deployment of any national guard troops to the city.The case at the heart of Sunday’s decision was brought by the states of Oregon and California, whose national troops Trump had sent to Portland. Two dozen other states with a Democratic attorney general or governor signed a court filing in support of the legal challenge by California and Oregon. Twenty others, led by Iowa, backed the Trump administration.The case centers around the nearly 150-year-old Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the military’s role in enforcing domestic laws. However, Trump has said he would be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to dispatch active duty military in states that are unable to put down an insurrection or are defying federal law.“This is about authoritarianism. It’s about stoking fear,” Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, said. “It’s about breaking the constitution that would give him that much more control over our American cities.”Trump, meanwhile, sent barbs from Washington, saying on social media that Pritzker and Johnson, both Democrats, “should be in jail” for failing to protect federal agents during immigration enforcement crackdowns.Asked about Trump’s wish to jail him, Pritzker extended his arms and told MSNBC: “If you come for my people, you come through me. So come and get me.”Meanwhile, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said the department was “doubling down” by buying buildings in Chicago – and also Portland – for Ice personnel to operate from.“We’re purchasing more buildings in Chicago to operate out of. We’re going to not back off,” she said. “In fact, we’re doubling down, and we’re going to be in more parts of Chicago in response to the people there.”At the same time in Memphis, a small group of troops were helping on Wednesday with the Memphis Safe Task Force, said a state military department spokesperson who did not specify the exact role or number of the guard members. The taskforce is a collection of about a dozen federal law enforcement agencies ordered by Trump to fight crime.Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, who has welcomed the guard, has said previously that he would not expect more than 150 guard members to be sent to the city.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      ‘Trump is like a juggernaut’: how the Gaza ceasefire deal was done

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      It is a well-known adage in politics that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. Except when Donald Trump is involved, in which case there is only one parent.Nevertheless, many countries and individuals have a right to step forward to claim an authorial role in the deal that it is hoped will bring an end to the two-year war in Gaza.But it is a sign of the collective nature of the effort of the past few months that so many can credibly claim a role, including the US president, who after many false starts was finally persuaded to focus, end the fantasy of driving tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland and instead spell out to Benjamin Netanyahu the versions of victory the Israeli prime minister could and could not have.The turning point was a meeting in New York on the sidelines of the UN general assembly chaired by Trump, soon after his baroque speech to the gathering. Trump described the sidelines chat as his most important meeting at the UN. In the encounter organised by the United Arab Emirates, he set out for the first time his then 20-point plan for peace in front of a group of Arab and Muslim states that could form the backbone of any stabilisation force that entered Gaza in the event of a ceasefire.By then Trump, with the help of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the former British prime minister Tony Blair, had been convinced to change his mind on two critical issues. First, Palestinians should not be driven from Gaza and Israel should not rule the territory. “Gaza should be for Gazans,” one said.That meant Trump dropping the displacement rhetoric he deployed earlier in the year, when he triggered widespread alarm by speaking of plans to develop a “Gaza Riviera”.View image in fullscreenSecondly, Trump was persuaded a “day after” plan for the future of Gaza would not complicate the negotiations on a ceasefire-hostage release agreement by adding new contested ingredients, but was the precondition for success. A UK diplomat explained Blair’s thinking: “Hamas was not going to give up unless it knew the Israelis were going to get out and the Israelis were not going to get out and stop occupying Gaza unless they knew Hamas were not going to be in government. Unless you resolved the question of who governs Gaza you cannot bring the thing to an end.”That in turn made it easier for the Arab states to put political pressure on Hamas to negotiate since they could point to a route towards Palestinian statehood, something that has always been their precondition for reconciliation with Israel. The Arab states had also put their names to demands that Hamas stand aside and disarm.One of those involved in persuading the US president said: “People don’t want to hear this but the advantage of Trump is that once he decides to do something he is like a juggernaut. And he really did put pressure on the Israelis.”Trump’s mood towards Israel was clouded by Netanyahu’s unilateral decision to bomb Doha on 9 September in the hope of wiping out Hamas negotiators. Trump had not been consulted, but the US assurances were met with scepticism. As a result Netanyahu, not a man prone to contrition, was ordered to apologise and say he would respect Qatar’s sovereignty in future.View image in fullscreenTo repair relations fully with Qatar, the host of main US airbase in the Middle East, Trump issued an extraordinary executive order saying any future attack on the emirate would be treated as an attack on the US. All this meant the US leader was better disposed to the Gulf states’ vision of a new Middle East. In a sign he was prepared to push the Israeli government hard, in a way Joe Biden had not, Trump told Israel there would be no further annexations in the West Bank.From the very start of the sidelines meeting at the UN in September, the aim of the Arab states was to bind Trump personally into the process. Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, said: “We count on you and your leadership … to end this war and to help the people of Gaza.” He said Israel’s real objective was “to destroy Gaza, to render housing, livelihoods, education, and medical care impossible, stripping away the very foundations of human life”.The concept that Trump personally was central to a solution – indeed its guarantor – flattered the US president who offered himself up as the chair of the peace board, the body that would oversee the reconstruction of Gaza.In one sense, he would be just a name plate, but to the extent he has a hinterland, it is construction. That means there is a possibility he will remain engaged, for the moment at least.Those observing him said Trump began to feel he had a serious opportunity to solve a conflict he variously said had lasted 3,000 or 600 years, in contrast to his failed attempt in Ukraine. The prospect of winning the Nobel peace prize, Trump’s obsession, hovered once more into view.View image in fullscreenThat meant that once his plan was published Trump did not let go, but kept the pressure up on Hamas, warning of the group’s annihilation if it did not release the hostages in return for 250 Palestinians. But neither did Trump let Israel backtrack. Speed and momentum became of the essence.It was the seniority of the negotiators who went to the talks in Egypt that revealed the stars were finally aligning and Hamas would be forced into releasing all the hostages it held, even though Israel would not immediately leave all of Gaza. The scenes were extraordinary enough in that the Hamas negotiators were – albeit through mediators – holding talks with a government that had tried to assassinate them a month earlier. By the time they started the participants sensed a deal was unavoidable.The arrival of Kushner, the head of the intelligence office of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, İbrahim Kalın, and the prime minister of Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, confirmed a breakthrough was imminent.During the talks, Hamas negotiators led by its leader Khalil al-Hayya, Mohammad al-Hindi, the deputy secretary general of Islamic Jihad, and Jamil Mezher, the deputy secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, sought to clarify the names of the Palestinians to be released, the mechanism of the release of the Israeli hostages and the “day after” aspects of the agreement, poring over the maps showing a withdrawal of Israel’s forces.But Hamas was told while the critical “day after” principles stood, the details would have to wait for a second linked negotiation. The risk for Hamas now is that it loses its leverage upon handing over the hostages – and that fears Israel will then refuse to engage with the plans for Gaza’s future or find a pretext to restart the fighting will be realised. The domestic brake on Netanyahu resuming the fighting – the demand to save the hostages – would have gone.Here Trump’s continued willingness to keep up the pressure on Netanyahu was critical, and is acknowledged by Hamas in its statements referring to the US president as guarantor of the plan. On Fox News, Trump said he had told Netanyahu that “Israel cannot fight the world”, adding: “And he understands that very well.” He said: “You will see people coexisting and Gaza will be rebuilt.”By contrast Amit Segal, a journalist close to Netanyahu, said: “There’s no phase two. That’s clear to everyone, right? Phase two might happen someday, but it’s unrelated to what’s just been signed.”Many elements of Trump’s 20-point plan are being addressed by diplomats from the US, Europe and Arab states at a separate gathering in Paris on Wednesday.View image in fullscreenOn the agenda are issues such as the Hamas handover of weapons; its exclusion from future administrations; the mandate of an international peacekeeping force; the delivery of resumed aid flows; and the future relationship between Gaza and the West Bank as the nucleus of a future Palestinian state. On almost all these, there have been deep differences between Israel on the one hand, and Europe and the Arab states on the other.But in a promising sign, US officials will attend this meeting, suggesting Washington does not favour an armed status quo.At the centre of these discussions is Blair, who is to sit on the peace board or interim government that will oversee the Palestinian technocrats that help implement reconstruction plans. Blair will have to convince the Palestinian Authority that he is not offering a colonial-esque arrangement, as the former prime minister says it fears. But he is unlikely to do the job unless he has real powers, something he feels was not given when he was Middle East special envoy to the quartet.Arab leaders are seeking assurances that the international stabilisation force that eventually enters Gaza has a UN security council mandate, and that there is a clear plan to treat Gaza and the West Bank as one political entity.One of the most difficult issues unresolved in the rushed talks in Egypt is the timing of the Hamas weapons handover. The group may be willing to deliver its arms to an Arab-run authority, or a Palestinian civil police force, but not to Israel. Some diplomats even believe Hamas may feel the need to take a new political course, something it has been close to doing before. “Gazans are going to demand to know what the past two years were about,” one diplomat said.One diplomat involved in the talks said: “The tragedy is that this could have all been agreed 20 months ago, all the elements were there. The key Israeli objective – which is why it is a tragedy this war has gone on so long – was the removal of Hamas from future rule, and that was obtainable a long time ago.” More

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      Why is the US House speaker refusing to seat an elected Democrat? | Moira Donegan

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      The people of Arizona’s seventh congressional district – a vast territory extending across the state’s south, along the Mexican border – have been denied representation in Congress for weeks. That’s because Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, their representative-elect, who won a special election to fill the seat vacated by her father, the late Raúl Grijalva, in a landslide late last month. Grijalva, a Democrat, has been largely ignored by the speaker. Unlike sworn representatives, she has to go around the Capitol with an escort. There’s an office with her name on the door, but she hasn’t been allowed inside, and has worked instead out of a conference room on another floor.It is an unprecedented abuse of procedural power on the part of the speaker, one that has had the effect of silencing a political opponent and denying representation to the citizens of her district. In refusing to seat Grijalva, Johnson has defied the will of Arizona’s voters, and effectively nullified, at least for the time being, a legitimate congressional election. He has persisted in this even in defiance of his own promises, after saying on Friday he would seat her this week once the House returned to session – and then telling lawmakers they wouldn’t reconvene this week after all. Last week, Grijalva showed up to a three-and-a-half-minute pro forma session, hoping to be sworn in then. (Johnson has sworn in other representatives at pro forma sessions in the past.) But the Republican presiding over the session, Morgan Griffith, ignored the effort. On a weekend talkshow, Grijalva said she had heard “absolutely nothing” from the speaker about the timing of her swearing in.Grijalva thinks she knows why. There is no political calculation that could justify Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat a duly elected member of the House: Grijalva won her race, and both his oath to the constitution and his responsibilities to the body that he leads require Johnson to seat her. But in lieu of deference to these higher aims, Grijalva suspects that Johnson is pursuing a much more cynical one: in refusing to swear her in and allow her to take up the office to which she has been elected, Johnson, Grijalva thinks, is aiming to stop her becoming the final member of Congress whose signature is needed to force a vote on the release of confidential files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Currently, the petition has 217 signatures; it needs only 218. Grijalva has pledged to support it. “Why the rules are different for me – the only thing that I can think of is the Epstein files,” Grijalva told the New York Times.The Epstein scandal, and the ensuing fallout from new and resurfaced revelations about Donald Trump’s deep and longstanding friendship with the deceased child sex trafficker and financier, has long plagued the Trump administration. One of the few genuine threats to Trump’s grip over his coalition came a few months ago, when his justice department refused to release files relating to the case, causing outrage among a group of rightwing podcasters, media personalities and conspiracy theorists who had long traded on speculation about the case and accusations that powerful Democrats were involved in a cover-up.The discharge petition, if passed, would not be likely to result in the actual release of the documents. The move has little support in the Republican-backed Senate; there is no chance that Donald Trump, who has opposed the release of the Epstein files, calling them a “waste” of “time and energy”, would sign a bill into law making them public. But what the move would accomplish is forcing a full chamber vote on the matter, requiring every member of the Republican caucus to go on the record either endorsing the release of the files – and thereby displeasing Trump – or opposing it – thereby displeasing their voters. The Times has reported that Johnson’s delay is giving the White House more time to pressure Republicans who have already signed on to the discharge petition to remove their signatures before the Grijalva is sworn in.And so it seems that Johnson is ignoring the constitution and subverting the will of the voters in order to buy time, in an effort to spare his party embarrassment over their president’s one-time close confidence with a pedophile.But the refusal to seat Grijalva has broader implications. In using his procedural control over the functioning of Congress to deny a seat to an elected Democrat, Johnson is setting a dangerous precedent and raising questions about future transfers of power. If a Democratic majority is elected in 2026, will the outgoing Republican speaker duly swear in its members? Or will he use his procedural powers to delay one, several or many of them from taking their oaths of office – either under the pretext of election fraud or personal ineligibility, or out of sheer, bald unwillingness to hand over power to members of a party that the president and his allies have repeatedly described as illegitimate?These are no longer fanciful questions; they are ones that must be asked. The Republicans who refused to subvert the law for Trump’s benefit on January 6 are now largely gone; the ones who have replaced them appear much more willing to place party before country. Every day that Grijalva is not sworn in, the shadow they cast over 2026 darkens.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Democratic candidates can win Rust Belt voters by … attacking the Democratic party | Jared Abbott and Bhaskar Sunkara

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      If anyone could have broken through as a progressive in red America, it was Sherrod Brown. For decades, the Ohio senator railed against corporations for shipping good-paying jobs overseas and pleaded with Democrats to take the struggles of deindustrialized communities seriously. Yet in 2024, even Brown, a model economic populist, fell to a Republican challenger.Does that prove, as writers such as Jonathan Chait have argued, that the idea of winning back the working class with progressive economic policies has been tried and has failed?We wanted to know why Democrats keep losing working-class support in the Rust belt, and what could turn things around. So, with colleagues at the Center for Working-Class Politics, the Labor Institute and Rutgers University, we surveyed 3,000 voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. The research suggests the story is more complicated – and that Democrats’ problems in the Rust belt are real, but solvable.We found a consistent pattern we call the “Democratic penalty”. In a randomized, controlled trial, respondents were shown hypothetical candidates with identical economic populist platforms. The only difference was that some were labeled Democrats, while others were labeled independents. Across the four states, the Democratic candidates fared eight points worse.In Ohio the gap was nearly 16 points; in Michigan, 13; in Wisconsin, 11. The voters most alienated by the party label were the very groups Democrats most need to win back: Latinos, working-class Americans, and others in rural and small-town communities.This pattern helps explain why figures like Brown can run as tough economic populists and still struggle, while independents like Dan Osborne in Nebraska dramatically overperformed expectations on nearly identical platforms. It’s the Democratic brand that’s unpopular, not the populism.What’s at the root of the mistrust? After the 2024 election, many commentators pointed to “wokeness” as the culprit. But our research tells a different story. When we asked voters to write a sentence about what first came to mind when they thought of Democrats, 70% offered negative views. Yet only a small minority mentioned “wokeness” or ideological extremism – 3% of Democrats, 11% of independents, 19% of Republicans. The dominant complaints weren’t about social liberalism but about competence, honesty and connection. Democrats were seen as out of touch, corrupt or simply ineffective: “falling behind on what’s important” and having not “represented their constituents in a long time”. While some of these critiques bled into broader claims that Democrats are focused on the wrong priorities, the responses suggest cultural issues are not voters’ dominant concern.This should be a wake-up call. Rust belt voters aren’t gullibly distracted by culture wars but, rather, are frustrated that Democrats haven’t delivered. What does resonate with them is a tougher, more credible economic message.Even if the Democratic label is a serious drag in red and purple states, our results show that full-throated economic populism that speaks directly to workers’ sense that the system is rigged can substantially boost candidates’ appeal, particularly in areas that have lost millions of high-quality jobs over the past 40 years. Standard “bread-and-butter” Democratic messaging performed over 11 points better when paired with strong anti-corporate rhetoric (condemning companies for cutting good jobs) than with a “populist-lite” frame that merely knocks a few price-gougers while acknowledging that most businesses play by the rules.When we forced respondents to choose tradeoffs among 25 economic policy proposals, the results were even clearer. Across partisan and class divides, voters consistently prioritized concrete measures framed in terms of fairness and accountability for elites: capping prescription drug prices, eliminating taxes on social security income, and raising taxes on the super-wealthy and large corporations. These policies polled far ahead of flashy ideas such as $1,000 monthly cash payments or trillion-dollar green industrial plans, and well ahead of traditional conservative staples such as corporate tax cuts and deregulation.Even on immigration, Rust belt voters proved more open than expected. Nearly two-thirds supported legalization for long-settled undocumented workers who had played by the rules. Despite years of rightwing fearmongering, a progressive position carried the day.So what’s the path forward? Not every candidate can reinvent themselves as an independent populist. In many districts, doing so would simply split the anti-Republican vote. But Democrats can blunt the “Democratic penalty” by speaking against their own party establishment and making a populist case that neither major party has delivered for working people. Candidates who take this approach appeal more effectively to the very voters Democrats have been losing.The electoral map itself makes the stakes plain. Without states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Democrats cannot hold national power. Sherrod Brown’s defeat underlined that even the most credible economic populists can only run so far ahead of the party’s damaged brand.If Democrats remain seen as out of touch with working-class concerns, more Browns will fall, and Republicans will keep gaining ground in once-reliable Democratic strongholds. But if Democrats take on corporate elites, level with voters about their own party’s failures, and fight for policies that put working families first, they might finally chart a path back to the working class – and to the future.

      Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin More

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      Mocktails for Maga: why the US right is turning sober

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      Butterworth’s, an eclectically decorated restaurant in Washington DC, is an unofficial lounge of the Maga elite. A nameplate on one table declares it the official “nook” of Raheem Kassam, the former adviser to the rightwing British politician Nigel Farage and a co-owner of the restaurant. Steve Bannon is also frequently sighted holding court over Carolina gold rice – though the signature dish is bone-marrow escargot, which some young Maga politicos swear is good for your collagen.When he opened the farm-to-table brasserie in 2024, Bart Hutchins, Butterworth’s chef and one of its partners, was determined to resist what he sees as “the new puritanism” of wellness and sobriety culture. Hutchins finds non-alcoholic “mocktails” annoying on principle. “I did this edict, where I was like, ‘I’m not stocking that stuff,’” he said. “If you want to drink a glass of juice, just ask for a glass of juice; I’m not gonna pretend it’s a cocktail.”Hutchins has never felt teetotalism’s temptation, he told me, and his memory of drinks marketed as alcohol alternatives, like the near-beer O’Doul’s, was that they were “terrible”. But lately, as more Republican staffers, pundits and politicians patronize Butterworth’s antler-bedecked environs, a fifth column of non-drinkers has quietly undermined his anti-mocktail edict.It’s not just at Butterworth’s where rightwingers are drinking less. A Gallup poll in August found that the share of Americans of any political stripe who say they consume alcohol is at its lowest in nearly 90 years – though by only one percentage point. More strikingly, Republicans are the group, of the many demographic cohorts measured, that has turned most aggressively to sobriety.Gallup, which has asked Americans about their alcohol use since the 1930s, found in 2023 that 65% of Republicans said they drink alcohol – about the same as Democrats and independents. Just two years later, in 2025, that number has plunged a staggering 19 points to 46%. Democrats and independents also report drinking less, but each only by single digits. (All the results are self-reported; Gallup took participants at their word.)The decline is surprising and “statistically significant”, Lydia Saad, the director of US social research at Gallup, told me – though she has “no real hypothesis” for the sudden rise of Republican teetotalism.View image in fullscreenLaurence Whyatt, an analyst at Barclays who covers the beverage industry, “can’t explain it” either. He suspects the broader US decline in drinking may have to do with pandemic-era inflation and belt-tightening and may not last. “But there’s no obvious reason why Republicans would be drinking less,” he said. “Of course, I’m aware that some prominent Republicans don’t drink. Could that be the reason?”Yet theories abound. Perhaps this is another manifestation of the cult of personality around Donald Trump, a Diet Coke enthusiast. Maybe the rising tide of Christian nationalism has revived an old-fashioned Protestant temperance. Or perhaps red-blooded rightwingers, eager to “Make America healthy again”, are eschewing beer, barbecues and bourbon to become the sort of smoothie-drinking health nuts they might once have mocked.Prominent rightwing or right-adjacent abstainers include Trump himself, whose older brother died of alcoholism-related heart attack; Robert F Kennedy Jr (who has spoken about his own substance problems); Tucker Carlson (a recovering alcoholic); and the activist Charlie Kirk (for health reasons). JD Vance drinks, but his predecessor Mike Pence, a devout born-again Christian, did not. Joe Rogan, the podcaster and gym-bro whisperer who endorsed Trump in 2024, quit drinking this year for health reasons.“None of my core team [of colleagues] under 30 drinks,” Bannon, who hosts the podcast War Room, said in a text message.The War Room’s 24-year-old White House correspondent, Natalie Winters, does not drink for health reasons – nor wear perfume, consume seed oils or drink fluoridated tap water. Earlier this year a friend of hers told the Times of London that elective sobriety had become common and accepted in rightwing political circles. “Here you don’t second-guess,” the friend said. “In London if someone isn’t drinking, you think they have an alcohol problem. Here it’s either that, or they’re Mormon, or because they’re focused on health.”Carlson, speaking to me by phone as he returned from grouse hunting with his dogs, said he had noticed that young conservatives, particularly men, were far more health-conscious than they once were. When he came up as a journalist, he said, the milieu was awash in booze and cigarette smoke. “I’m just from a different world. When I was 25, the health question was ‘filter or non-filter?’” he said. “And I always went with non-filter.”Carlson quit drinking in 2002, after a spiral whose nadir saw him having two double screwdrivers for breakfast. He said he was surprised – but happy – to see people today, even those who are not problem drinkers, quitting or moderating their consumption. The Athletic Brewing Company’s alcohol-free beers are popular, he has noticed, and not just among “sad rehab cases like me. I think it’s normal young people.”Carlson – who has recently offered a range of unorthodox health advice including using nicotine to improve focus and testicle tanning to improve testosterone levels – says political professionals and journalists today also inhabit a 24/7 news cycle in which “there’s just, substantively, a lot more going on; the world is reshaping in front of our eyes,” he said. “I think there’s an incentive to pay attention in a way that there wasn’t before. It’s just kind of hard to imagine spending three hours away from your phone – or three hours, like, getting loaded midday.”View image in fullscreenHutchins, Butterworth’s chef, noticed when diners, including those he considered “reasonable people, and not insufferable”, kept asking for non-alcoholic options. The restaurant was gradually “brought over to the dark side”, he said, ruefully. He tested a few zero-proof drinks that he deemed respectable enough to serve beside marrow without shame.Many patrons still drink enthusiastically, and by 10pm most nights the atmosphere is “pretty bacchanalian”, he said. But Butterworth’s now offers a pre-packaged alcohol-free Negroni, verjus (a wine alternative made from unripe grapes) and non-alcoholic Guinness (“super popular”, Hutchins said).Changing health attitudes are probably a factor in the broader decline in US alcohol consumption. Recent research has cast doubt on the idea that even moderate drinking is an acceptable health risk. In January, the US surgeon general suggested that alcohol bottles should carry warnings that drinking can contribute to cancer.Malcolm Purinton, a beer historian at Northeastern University, noted that many young people learned adult socialization during Covid lockdowns, meaning their relationship with alcohol may differ from that of their parents or older siblings. People turning 21, the legal drinking age, do not necessarily see drinking as cool.“There’s always some form of rebellion between generations,” he said. Thanks to the cruel march of time, for instance, craft beer – which millennials once embraced as a sophisticated alternative to their fathers’ Miller Lites – is now itself a “dad drink”.Yet none of this explains the dramatic shift among Republicans. Nor does it explain another odd anomaly: the same Gallup poll found that Republicans, despite reporting drinking less than other groups, were less likely than Democrats or independents to say they viewed moderate drinking as dangerous.Some observers suggest the shift may have more to do with who now identifies as Republican. “Republicans made a big push in toss-up states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania in 2024 to register more Republicans, especially among far-right Christians, Mormons and Amish,” Mark Will-Weber, the author of a book on US presidents’ drinking habits, told the Financial Times in August. “These religious groups abstain from alcohol.”Saad is not sure. Republican respondents report drinking less regardless of other factors such as religiosity, she noted. “We’re not seeing anything that would tell us, you know, ‘It’s religious Republicans,’ ‘It’s pro-Trump Republicans,’ ‘It’s Republicans paying attention to the news.’ It’s really across the board.”It’s also difficult to determine the ideological correlation with sobriety. Although rightwing parties have gained ground in many other countries in recent years, Whyatt said, those places have not typically seen the same “aggressive decline in consumption”. The phenomenon seems specific to conservative Americans.The best guess may be that Republicans have turned against alcohol for the same economic and health reasons that Americans in general have – but amplified by “Make America healthy again” politics (with its hostility to vaccines and chemicals, and its faint granola paranoia) and a self-help podcast culture popular on the right that extols wellness, discipline, and treating your body like a temple.Months before his death, Charlie Kirk spoke on his podcast about the reasons he had quit drinking. He said he had done so “four or five” years earlier to improve his sleep and general health. Sobriety was “becoming trendier”, he argued, listing Trump, Carlson, Elon Musk and the Christian pundit Dennis Prager among prominent conservatives who don’t drink – or, in Musk’s case, don’t often.“The top-performing people I’ve ever been around,” Kirk said, “are very against alcohol, against substances. They’ll tell you they perform better, think clearer, have better memory, better recall, more energy, more pace. And I [also] find that some of the people who drink the most, they’re hiding something, they’re masking something.”Most experts acknowledged that it is too soon to tell whether this new sobriety will stick. “You can tie yourself in knots trying to solve those puzzles,” said Saad, the Gallup pollster. “We’re going to just have to wait and see if this holds up next year … maybe by then we’ll see other groups catch up.”Hutchins said Butterworth’s will continue to cater to drinkers and non-drinkers, just as it caters to diners of all political persuasions. But one group of patrons, he added, seems particularly unsettled by the sight of conservatives – or anyone – succumbing to the vice of sobriety.“We have a lot of British clientele, for some reason,” he said. “As soon as some new [British] journalist or diplomat type moves to DC, they come here. And they all say: ‘Nobody drinks here. Nobody even has martinis at lunch. What is happening in this country?’” More

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      ‘You cannot undo a wrongful execution’: push to halt killing of Texas man in ‘shaken baby’ case

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      At 6pm next Thursday, barring a last-minute reprieve, Robert Roberson will become the first person in America to be executed under the theory of “shaken baby syndrome”, a medical diagnosis from the 1970s that is so disputed it is now widely denounced as junk science.Roberson, 58, will enter the death chamber at the Huntsville unit in Texas, where he will be strapped to a gurney and injected with a cocktail of lethal drugs. He will be put to death having been convicted of shaking to death his two-year-old daughter Nikki Curtis in 2002.A coalition of advocates is calling for the execution to be called off, arguing Roberson is innocent of a crime that never even happened. They include several people exonerated from shaken baby syndrome convictions; more than 80 bipartisan Texas lawmakers; the lead detective in Roberson’s original investigation; and members of his trial jury.Roberson’s lawyer, Gretchen Sween, told the Guardian that not only was her client’s life in the balance – so too was justice. “If Robert is executed next week, with all that is known about the profound due-process problems on top of his actual innocence, then Texas would have no legitimate justice system.”She added: “How could you have confidence in a system that cannot fix a case like this, where the science has been so thoroughly discredited?”A year ago, Roberson came within two hours of dying by lethal injection and was only saved by a frenzied late-night intervention by Texas legislators. In an interview with the Guardian from death row shortly before that execution date, he denied having shaken his daughter.“I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I wouldn’t want that to be on nobody: to lose a child, especially if you tried to do right and you loved her and tried to get to know her, then to be accused.”Now Sween and Roberson’s legal team are scrambling yet again to prevent him becoming a statistic – as the first person on death row to be judicially killed on the back of disputed shaken baby syndrome.Last week his defense team petitioned the US fifth circuit court of appeals requesting a federal review of new evidence that points to an alternative explanation for Nikki’s death. The petition includes expert testimony from 10 medical pathologists who question the findings of Nikki’s 2002 autopsy.The experts conclude that the child’s brain swelling was not caused by violent shaking, but was the result of serious infection. Nikki had undiagnosed pneumonia at the time she slumped into a coma, according to the experts, exacerbated by improper prescription of dangerous medicines and a short fall from the bed in which she was sleeping.The petition also highlights that a few years ago Roberson was found to have autism, a condition which had gone undiagnosed at the time of his daughter’s death. His lawyers argue that this helps explain how flat and unemotional he appeared when he brought the dying girl into hospital, a demeanor that was used against him at trial as evidence of guilt.A separate petition has been pending for eight months at the state’s top criminal court, the Texas court of criminal appeals. The 163-page document filed by Roberson’s lawyers in February argues that science behind shaken baby syndrome had been so undermined by new evidence that today “no rational juror would find Roberson guilty of capital murder”.A decision from the court is expected any day.Last year, the same criminal appeals court overturned the 35-year sentence of Andrew Roark, who had been found guilty of injuring his girlfriend’s 13-month-old child in 1997. The judges found that key scientific testimony at Roark’s trial had been unreliable, and concluded that if it were presented to a jury today it would “likely yield an acquittal”.There are glaring similarities between the Roark case and Roberson’s conviction. Both men became the subject of shaken baby syndrome accusations on the back of a diagnosis from the same child abuse specialist, Janet Squires, delivered from the same hospital.“The similarities between the cases are overwhelming,” Sween said.The attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, continues to stand by Roberson’s death sentence, describing the efforts of the condemned man’s supporters as “11th-hour, one-sided, extra­ju­di­cial stunts that attempt to obscure facts and rewrite his past”.In an unusual move, Paxton secured next week’s execution date while the prisoner’s petition was still pending before the appeals court.Some of Nikki’s other family members are also pressing for the execution to go ahead.Shaken baby syndrome (SBS), which often now goes under the name “abusive head trauma”, was developed in the early 1970s to diagnose children who became severely ill or died from internal brain injuries without necessarily showing outward signs of harm. One of its earliest proponents was the British pediatric neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch.View image in fullscreenBy the 1980s the theory had hardened into the presumption that a triad of symptoms in children under two years old conclusively indicated abusive shaking. If those three symptoms were indicated – brain swelling, bleeding between the tissues covering the brain, and bleeding behind the eyes – then a crime must have been committed.In the past 15 years medical understanding has grown. It is now widely recognised that other factors can lie behind such brain injuries, including underlying conditions, infections, and even relatively short falls.Studies have also shown that it is physically unlikely that severe brain trauma is caused by shaking alone, without there also being visible injuries to the spine or skull. In Roberson’s case, Nikki displayed no such injuries.Guthkelch himself warned in 2012 that the three symptoms he had identified should not be taken as categoric signs of abuse. “There was not a vestige of proof when the name was suggested that shaking, and nothing else, causes the triad,” he said.In 2023 a group of global experts drawn from many disciplines including pediatrics, pathology, ophthalmology, neurology, physics and biomechanics reviewed the literature on SBS. Their work was published as a book, Shaken Baby Syndrome: Investigating the Abusive Head Trauma Controversy.The book’s co-editor, Keith Findley, said that “we consistently reached the conclusion that the scientific underpinnings for shaken baby syndrome are just not there. This is not to deny that abuse happens. It’s to say that medical findings alone simply cannot be a reliable basis for diagnosing child abuse.”Findley, who is founder of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, said: “It is absolutely horrifying to think we are days away from killing a man based on scientific assertions that are known to be wrong”.As medical doubts have grown about the reliability of an SBS diagnosis, so too have concerns about its application in criminal cases. Since 1989, 39 parents and caregivers have been exonerated in the US having been convicted largely on the grounds of a faulty SBS hypothesis, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.Two of those exonerations were in Texas, including Roark’s last November.Josh Burns, 49, is an SBS exoneree. In 2014, when he was working as a Delta Air Lines pilot and living in Michigan, his daughter Naomi suffered a bout of vomiting and he was accused of having harmed her by violent shaking.The girl was taken into foster care, and he was convicted of child abuse and spent a year in jail. It took him 10 years to clear his name.An investigation by the state’s conviction integrity unit last year concluded there had been no reliable evidence of harm. Naomi’s symptoms could be explained by dehydration caused by a stomach bug.Burns and his family paid a devastating price for his wrongful conviction. He lost his job as a pilot, and his family was forced to move out of Michigan – ironically, they ended up in Texas, where Roberson is now scheduled to be executed.“I know how gut-wrenching and soul-crushing it is to be accused of harming the person that you love the most,” Burns told the Guardian. He has joined other SBS exonerees to campaign for a reprieve for Roberson, viscerally aware that there is a critical difference between his plight and Roberson’s.“You can undo a wrongful conviction like mine,” he said. “But you cannot undo a wrongful execution.”Audrey Edmunds, 64, has also joined the campaign to save Roberson. She was babysitting a neighbor’s child, Natalie, in Wisconsin in 1995 when the girl fell ill and died.She was convicted a year later of first-degree reckless homicide under the SBS hypothesis. At trial key facts, including that Natalie had visited the doctor 24 times in the 27 weeks before her death, were glossed over.Edmunds served 11 years of an 18-year sentence, before the forensic pathologist in her case recanted his own testimony having taken on board changes in scientific understanding. In 2008 she was released and all charges against her dismissed.“Mr Roberson should never have been put on death row,” Edmunds said. “Executing him would be a crime. He has been through more than enough.”She said that she saw strong parallels between her case and Roberson’s. “They checked into junk science. They went down a one-way road, and didn’t look at all the other factors.”Texas was the first state in the country to allow prisoners to challenge their sentences on grounds of junk science. Since its inception in 2013, the so-called “junk science writ” has been taken up by about 70 death row prisoners.None of their challenges have been successful. More