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      Project 2025 director to step down after ‘pressure from Trump campaign’

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      The leader of Project 2025 is stepping down from his role amid a power struggle over potential government staffing if Donald Trump wins in November.Paul Dans, the director of the project housed at the Heritage Foundation, “will be departing the team”, according to a statement to the Guardian from Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage Foundation.The departure could indicate the project’s work is ending or at least will not be taking such a public role in the lead-up to the November election, though the policy ideas outlined in its extensive conservative roadmap remain public. “Project 2025” has become a shorthand term for its manifesto of conservative policies, but the project includes multiple pillars designed to influence a conservative president.Dans is leaving “after pressure from Trump campaign leadership” and an “ongoing power rift over staffing control” for a second Trump administration, Roger Sollenberger, a reporter for the Daily Beast, wrote on Twitter/X.Dans, a Trump loyalist, worked in personnel-related roles in the first Trump administration, including as chief of staff at the office of personnel management.In an internal email obtained by Semafor, Dans said the work of the project “was due to wrap” after the political parties’ nominating conventions, which for Republicans was earlier this month.“Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage,” he wrote. “Electoral season is upon us, and I want to direct all my efforts to winning, bigly!”Roberts claims the change was always intended and followed a set timeline.“When we began Project 2025 in April 2022, we set a timeline for the project to conclude its policy drafting after the two party conventions this year, and we are sticking to that timeline,” Roberts said in the statement. “Paul, who built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years, will be departing the team and moving up to the front where the fight remains. We are extremely grateful for his and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America. Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state, and local – will continue.”It is not immediately clear what “winding down” its work entails, given that the policy playbook is already written and a personnel database already compiled.The departure underscores the unpopularity of Project 2025 for Trump, who has for weeks attempted to distance himself from it.Earlier this month, Trump claimed to “know nothing about Project 2025” and have “no idea who is behind it”. The disavowal from Trump came after Roberts said: “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”At a recent rally in Michigan, Trump quipped about the project, “I don’t know what the hell it is” and “they’re seriously extreme.” But the project includes many former Trump administration officials and its aims often align with Trump’s policy ideas, albeit with far more detail.Democrats have seized on the project as a stand-in for what Trump could do if he wins a second term, bringing it up at events, in interviews and in billboard ads around the country. They have called out some of the project’s provisions, like further restrictions to abortion and an end to policies that protect LGBTQ+ rights and diversity.Kamala Harris’s campaign said in a statement: “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign leaders, have dinged the project publicly and noted how it doesn’t speak for Trump. LaCivita called the project “a pain in the ass”.“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement on Tuesday. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign – it will not end well for you.”Project 2025’s four pillars started with a lengthy roadmap. Alongside the document, the group is creating a database of potential personnel for an incoming Trump administration, as well as training them on how the government should work as part of a “Presidential Administration Academy”. The final step will be a presidential transition playbook that seeks to help the next president hit the ground running once he takes office.The personnel piece, in particular, has led to some infighting among Republicans, though so have policy ideas that are unpopular in a general election, like restricting abortions. Trump doesn’t want to be seen as outsourcing any element of his administration to an outside group. And the foundation’s bold, public move to do so may not have endeared the thinktank to Trumpworld.Hiring staff after winning the presidency is always a huge undertaking, but if Trump and Project 2025 get their way, it would be herculean. Both Trump and the project want to drastically expand the number of political appointees in the federal government, firing civil servants whose roles typically have remained nonpartisan regardless of who is in office. Doing so would require thousands, if not tens of thousands, more political hires who are beholden to the president. Despite the clash, it’s likely there’s some overlap between candidates the project has vetted and would recommend, and the Trump administration’s picks. Many of Trump’s allies, like Steve Bannon, have praised or supported the project.While the project skews Trumpian, its goals represent generational changes in policy and how the government works that would last far beyond the next presidency. Roberts said on Bannon’s show that the project was building “not just for 2025, but for the next century in the United States”. The project has the left so upset, he added, because “they’ve never seen the political right be this organized, this focused, this rational about taking power and actually using it appropriately, as the constitution says.”In a Guardian profile on Roberts earlier this month, sources noted his ability to grab attention for conservative causes – a skill that could lead to backlash. One critic of Heritage’s Trumpian turn warned: “It’s not at all clear to me that the bet that Kevin is making is going to pay off.”Dans has appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room show to boost the project and encourage War Room listeners to get involved as potential appointees in a second Trump administration. He called himself a “true-blooded deplorable” and explained how the project’s goal was about “infusing America First” in the conservative movement.“We need a new culture, we need this War Room audience to come to work in Washington,” he said in an appearance on the show last year.This week, he was back on the show, seeking to debunk the left’s narratives about the project and again imploring conservatives to help staff the government.“The swamp isn’t going to drain itself, we need outsiders coming in to do this,” he said, emphasizing that the project was not Trump’s, but had built a way to vet candidates for federal roles.In another video that resurfaced in recent weeks, Dans said that the project had a great relationship with Trump and that “Trump is very bought into this,” though emphasized that the project is intended to be “candidate-neutral”. More

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      ‘It puts everyone in a really bad position’: Black journalists react to Trump joining NABJ panel

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      On Monday night, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) announced that Donald Trump will participate in a panel discussion at the organization’s annual convention in Chicago, which starts on Wednesday.The announcement, which said that the Q&A would “concentrate on the most pressing issues facing the Black community”, was met with swift online backlash from some Black journalists. They decried the decision to invite a presidential candidate who has lambasted Black journalists, led a movement to squash diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and who is responsible for increased anti-journalistic sentiment, including the popularization of the term “fake news” to describe factual, but potentially unflattering, reporting.Tiffany Walden, a co-founder and editor-in-chief of The TRiiBE, a digital platform that focuses on Black Chicago, told the Guardian that NABJ’s decision was “irresponsible”.“We’ve watched Trump threaten to send the feds here when he was in office,” Walden said. “We’ve watched him use Chicago as a dog whistle in all of his campaign’s materials during his first run for office. He talked about Chicago having top gang thugs. So this puts the city of Chicago and its residents in a very vulnerable position. It also puts Black journalists in a very vulnerable position at a convention that’s supposed to be a safe space for them.”Ameshia Cross, a political analyst, echoed this sentiment on X: “The same Trump that attacked Black journalists from the stump. The same Trump who is attacking DEI, can’t get ahead of his own racism and sexism. And the guy who wants to dissolve journalism as we know it, that’s who is speaking at #NABJ24 w/ record attendance. C’mon yall.”Another journalist, Carron J Phillips, called the move “the single dumbest and worst decision in NABJ history”.The outcry led to the NABJ president, Ken Lemon, and others defending the decision, saying that Black reporters should have the opportunity to question a political candidate.“Every year, every presidential election cycle, we invite the presidential candidates to come,” Lemon said to NABJ student journalists on Tuesday. “We extend that to anyone who is a nominee and in this case we have two presumptive nominees. We invited both of them … This is an important hour. We have people whose lives are depending on what happens in November … This is a great opportunity for us to vet the candidate right here on our ground.”Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak elsewhere on Wednesday, when Trump will be at NABJ, but her confirmation to attend this year’s convention, which lasts through Sunday, is “pending”, according to NABJ.Tia Mitchell, the chair of NABJ’s political journalism taskforce and a Washington correspondent at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote on X: “I helped make this call. And it’s in line with invitations NABJ has sent to every presidential candidate for decades. But continue to go off on your feed. I’ll continue to work to create opportunities for journalists to interview the potential next President.” (Mitchell, NABJ and NABJ’s Chicago chapter did not respond to requests for comment.)Wednesday’s panel will be moderated by Rachel Scott, a senior congressional correspondent for ABC News; Harris Faulkner, who anchors The Faulkner Focus and Outnumbered for Fox News; and Kadia Goba, a politics reporter for Semafor.“As journalists, we can never be afraid to tackle someone like Trump,” Jemele Hill, a contributing reporter for the Atlantic, wrote on X. “The reality is that he is running for president and needs to be treated as such. Being questioned by journalists is part of the job, and especially important in the company of Black journalists. Mainstream media keeps trying to convince us that he actually is gaining support among Black people. Let’s see if it’s true.”But the journalist Matthew Wright pushed back on the notion that there was anything productive in questioning Trump.“What does that serve?” Wright said to the Guardian. “We literally just watched him talk to Laura Ingraham [who] was trying to get him to answer different questions, but he practically played evasive of action even then. If a super conservative white woman can’t get straight answers out of him, what makes you think that three black women are going to get them?”In a statement about the NABJ appearance, Trump’s campaign wrote: “President Trump accomplished more for Black Americans than any other president in recent history.” Some journalists used this statement as evidence that NABJ’s decision to platform the former president was harmful, and would lead to further perpetuation of falsehoods.“This is the way 45 is touting his appearance before @nabj this week. Was this what you wanted [Tia Mitchell]? He is already lying and he isn’t even in Chicago yet. This is your legacy,” April Reign, a media strategist, wrote on X.The timing of the panel announcement – less than 48 hours before the convention’s start – also drew concern from NABJ members.Shamira Ibrahim, a culture writer, told the Guardian that she was shocked by the decision.“It puts everyone in a really bad position,” Ibrahim said. “You already paid your convention fees, you already paid for a hotel that’s likely not refundable at this point, flights are likely difficult to get replaced. Even if you have a moral opposition to it or an ethical opposition to it, you’re kind of already stuck in whatever plan you made.”NABJ’s annual convention has allowed Black journalists a space to fellowship and gather safely since the organization’s founding in 1975, with some reporters likening it to a family reunion. Inviting Trump, Ibrahim said, undermined that sense of community.“NABJ is primarily not just a place for journalists to get opportunities to interview politicians, but also a place for Black journalists to network, to have open conversations about things that are happening in the industry, to attend panels, and really get a sense of how to shift in a very, very volatile, fragile space,” she continued.“Inviting someone who, one, has made targeted attacks on Black journalists, two, has actively been responsible in defunding programs that help build Black journalists, and three, has publicly attacked the Black press flies in the face of any sort of fidelity convention.”On Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of organizations, including Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression and Anti-War Committee Chicago, announced plans to rally outside the convention to “tell Trump he’s not welcome in Chicago”. More

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      Social media account possibly linked to Trump shooter under FBI scrutiny

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      Though they have not pinpointed a motive behind Donald Trump’s failed assassination attempt, investigators are examining a social media account with antisemitic and anti-immigrant posts that they suspect might be connected to the former US president’s would-be killer, according to the FBI deputy director, Paul Abbate.Abbate on Tuesday appeared alongside the acting US Secret Service director, Ronald Rowe Jr, before a US Senate panel and said: “In about the 2019, 2020 timeframe, there were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect antisemitic and anti-immigration themes to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature.”While Abbate made clear that the account in question is believed to be associated with 20-year-old shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, he did not specifying which social media platform it was on.“While the investigative team is still working to verify this account to determine if it did in fact belong to the shooter, we believe it important to share and note it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter’s potential motive and mindset,” he continued.Trump, who has agreed to participate in a victim interview with the FBI regarding his assassination attempt, has routinely espoused antisemitic and anti-immigration rhetoric.The Anti-Defamation League chief, Jonathan Greenblatt, and the White House both condemned him in 2021 and this year for, respectively, suggesting that Jewish people control Congress and the media and claiming that pro-Democratic Jews “hate Israel” as well as “hate their religion”.Trump additionally has drawn criticism for his anti-immigration comments, including his accusation that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.Meanwhile, Rowe testified on Tuesday that he had visited and “laid in a prone position” on the roof of the warehouse complex in Butler county, Pennsylvania, from where Crooks fired at Trump during a political rally.“What I saw made me ashamed,” Rowe Jr said. “As a career law enforcement officer, and a 25-year veteran with the Secret Service, I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.“To prevent similar lapses from occurring in the future, I directed our personnel to ensure every event-site security plan is thoroughly vetted by multiple experienced supervisors before it is implemented.”He also said that he directed the expansion of drones at protective sites to help detect threats on roofs and other elevated areas.During his testimony, Rowe further revealed that the Secret Service had started providing protection to six additional high-profile figures, including Trump’s November presidential election running mate, JD Vance, and his family, as well as the independent White House candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.“I have heard your calls for accountability, and I take them very seriously,” said Rowe, who stepped into his role after Kimberley Cheatle resigned as Secret Service director 10 days after the assassination attempt. “Given the magnitude of this failure, the Secret Service’s office of professional responsibility is reviewing the actions and decision making of Secret Service personnel in the lead-up to, and on the day of, the attack.“If this investigation reveals that Secret Service employees violated agency protocols, those employees will be held accountable to our disciplinary process.”Abbate and Rowe’s testimonies follow a recent New York Times report that found that a Pennsylvania officer had spotted Crooks 90 minutes before he opened fire – 30 minutes earlier than officials had previously said.Meanwhile, in an interview with ABC on Sunday, the lead sharpshooter on a local police department’s special tactical team assigned to protect the president said that he and his colleagues were supposed to get an in-person briefing with Secret Service agents before the rally. But sharpshooter Jason Woods said “that never happened”.The ensuing shooting not only injured one of Trump’s ears – it also killed one rally-goer while wounding two others. More

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      Harris and Trump release dueling ads as candidates refine their messaging

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump released dueling campaign ads on Tuesday, as the reshaped US presidential election began to grind into gear with 98 days to go.The US vice-president’s ad, Fearless, was her first since she became the de facto Democratic nominee, after Joe Biden halted his re-election campaign and endorsed her.“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said. “To give tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations and end the Affordable Care Act. But we are not going back.”The former president’s ad, I Don’t Understand, used a snippet of Harris answering a question about immigration policy to bolster a hardline message about drugs, crime, terrorism and the southern border.Showing footage of her dancing, Trump’s ad called Harris “failed, weak, dangerously liberal”.Harris’s campaign hit back against Trump, pointing to the Republican’s role in directing congressional Republicans to reject bipartisan border reform.“After killing the toughest border deal in decades, Donald Trump is running on his trademark lies because his own record and ‘plans’ are extreme and unpopular,” Ammar Moussa, a Harris campaign spokesperson, told reporters.Harris has been the presumptive Democratic nominee for little more than a week – but she has made an extremely strong start, reeling in more than $200m and appearing to make up ground in the polls.She is still considering her own vice-presidential pick. But on Monday, Trump’s Republican running mate, the hardline Ohio senator JD Vance, was revealed to have made a telling admission about the strength of Harris’s start.In remarks at a fundraiser in Minnesota last weekend, reported by the Washington Post and referring to Biden’s decision to give in to those who said he was too old for a second term, Vance said: “All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch.“The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.”Biden is 81, and Harris is 59. Trump is 78, making him the oldest presidential nominee of all time. The language of Harris’s new ad pointed to Democratic determination to target Trump’s age – and to portray him as backward-looking and a thing of the past, now that their own old man is out of the campaign picture.The Harris campaign is also keen to point to its fundraising efforts, which as the new ad was released saw a “White Dudes for Harris” Zoom call featuring celebrities including the actor Jeff Bridges, who famously played Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski. The campaign said it raised $4m.Five years before Bridges made The Big Lebowski, he played the lead role in Fearless, a 1993 movie about a man whose behaviour is changed after he survives a plane crash.In a statement accompanying the Fearless ad, the Harris campaign chairperson, Jen O’Malley Dillon, saluted Democrats’ own dramatic shift in fortunes, from plummeting polls under Biden to soaring hopes under Harris.“Kamala Harris has always stood up to bullies, criminals and special interests on behalf of the American people – and she’s beaten them,” O’Malley Dillon said, echoing the ad’s citation of Harris’s work as attorney general of California, as well as her time as a US senator and vice-president.“This $50m paid media campaign, bolstered by our record-setting fundraising haul and a groundswell of grassroots enthusiasm, is one crucial way we will reach and make our case to the voters who will decide this election.”The Harris campaign plans to air its ad prominently over three weeks, including amid coverage of the Olympic Games in Paris.The Trump campaign is also reportedly focusing on Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan – the key battleground states. More

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      Celebrity-studded ‘White Dudes for Harris’ call raises $4m for vice-president

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      A Zoom call meant to rally “white dudes” in support of Kamala Harris’s run for the White House raised more than $4m from about 190,000 participants, including several Hollywood stars, in the latest success for her nascent bid for president.The fundraiser added to a series of positives for the Harris campaign on Tuesday, including the release of a new ad, an endorsement from the Republican mayor of a large city in in Arizona, and an admission from the Republicans’ vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, that Harris posed more of a threat to the Trump campaign than Joe Biden did.Guests on the “White Dudes for Harris” call on Monday evening not only included contenders for Harris’s vice-presidential running mate – the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz; the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker; and the US transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg– but also the actors Jeff Bridges (famous for portraying the Dude in The Big Lebowski) and Mark Hamill, who secured a $50,000 donation during the call by delivering his renowned Star Wars line: “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.”A news release from the organizers said the virtual gathering “shattered expectations”.“Over the course of the evening, speakers heard governors, senators, congressmen, actors and singers all speaking directly to white men around the need to organize and support Kamala Harris for president,” the press release said. “Speakers spoke truthfully and honestly about the path ahead, the importance for us to connect with one another and the important role we can play in getting other white men to turn their backs on the dangerous, dark path Donald Trump is trying to march us down.”Harris, a former California attorney general and US senator who is of Indian and Jamaican heritage, became the first woman to be elected vice-president when Joe Biden won the White House in 2020. She is now likely to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party presidential ticket after Biden halted his re-election run on 21 July and endorsed her.Democrats responded to Harris’s ascension with enthusiasm, illustrated by 170,000 people signing up to volunteer for her campaign as well as donating $200m for her political war chest in just the first week.But Trump – Biden’s presidential predecessor – and his Republican supporters, many of them white, have greeted her rise by disparaging her as a hire resulting from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.“Honestly, their dark vision for our future is just holding all of us back,” Brad Bauman, a Democratic party communications consultant who helped organize Monday’s call, told NBC News. “That’s why we decided to start White Dudes for Harris.”Other celebrities on Monday’s call were Mark Ruffalo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Paul Scheer, Josh Gad, Sean Astin, JJ Abrams and Bradley Whitford. The call lasted over three hours.The Zoom fundraising call came in the wake of similar, well-attended gatherings for Black women, Black men and white women supporting Harris.There is also a “cat ladies for Harris” Zoom call being planned in response to comments from Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, in which he insulted the vice-president as a “childless cat” lady. And there is a similar call in the works titled “Latino Men for Kamala”. The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, is hosting a Labor for Harris Zoom call with labor leaders and members around the US on 31 July.The white women for Harris call last Thursday raised nearly $8.5m for the vice-president and had more than 160,000 attenders.The Black women for Harris Zoom call attracted about 90,000 participants. And the Black men for Harris streaming event, moderated by the journalist Roland Martin, saw more than 53,000 people register.Those events also included appearances by numerous celebrities and Democratic officials.The calls come as Harris and Trump are polling closely to each other in crucial battleground states likely to determine the election. After Biden’s withdrawal from the race, the Republican-friendly Fox News poll conducted in three of the key states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – showed Trump and Harris were even.Trump had previously been enjoying relatively comfortable leads.The successful fundraising calls for Harris were anchored by news of an important endorsement in the battleground state of Arizona, as the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona’s third largest city, crossed party lines to endorse Harris.The Harris campaign also released its first video television advertisement, which describes the presumptive Democratic nominee as “fearless” and touts her bona fides as a prosecutor. The one-minute ad is the first of a $50m advertising campaign ahead of the Democratic national convention in Chicago on 19 August.Adding to her campaign’s sense of momentum since Biden declared last Sunday that he was stepping aside from the presidential race was an audio recording leaked to the Washington Post on Monday of Vance telling Republican donors that Harris taking over from Biden was a “sucker punch”.“All of us were hit with a little bit of a political sucker punch,” said Vance in the recording. “The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.” More

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      Gun reform advocates embrace a new tactic: running for office

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      After losing her son to gun violence, Shaundelle Brooks knew she had to do something big.Brooks’ son, Akilah DaSilva, was killed in a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018 that left four dead and two wounded. His death launched Brooks into advocacy.While still mourning, Brooks fought for gun reform at the Tennessee legislature. Testifying in front of lawmakers, she evoked DaSilva in her demands for more restrictive gun laws. “I realized quickly that I had lost my child, but didn’t want to lose any more children or see another mom go through what I’ve been through,” she said. “I learned to channel my grief into action.”While Brooks felt empowered as an organizer, she also faced real challenges. Lawmakers shut down her proposals. Gun owners harassed her, claiming that if DaSilva had been carrying a gun, he would have been able to protect himself. Brooks would leave the statehouse in tears, heartbroken by the lack of accountability she witnessed. “I thought: ‘I have to do more than what I’m doing. I have to find ways to get through,’” Brooks said.So in February, Brooks announced her bid for a seat in the Tennessee state House of Representatives. On 1 August, she’ll be vying in the Democratic primary.View image in fullscreenPropelled by and fed up with what they see as a lack of progress when it comes to addressing America’s epidemic of gun violence, many activists like Brooks, who have felt the effects of gun violence first hand, are embracing a new tactic: running for elected office. For political organizers, this group represents a promising new cohort, whose members, if elected, may finally move the needle on gun reform.“There is a new wave of activists-turned-candidates, particularly among women and mothers, who are no longer willing to stand by,” Brooks said. “How can we not think about our kids?”Pinpointing the moments that led them to run for office comes easily to these candidates.For Emily Busch, who is running for a US congressional seat in Michigan, it was the November 2021 mass shooting at Oxford high school, where her son was a freshman, that propelled her to action. The event left four dead and seven injured. “My son ran for his life with 1,700 other kids,” Busch said. “It’s something that you never ever want to experience, which is why I’m running.”At a school board meeting held shortly after, Busch was appalled that masking received more attention than gun safety. “It wasn’t until the third or fourth person got up to speak that they actually addressed that four children had just been murdered two weeks before,” she recalled.Busch began organizing, urging neighbors and fellow parents to support gun reform legislation like universal background checks and safe storage requirements. She was then asked to run for state representative in a heavily Republican district in 2022 – but lost. Undeterred, her eyes are now set on Washington, as she readies for the Democratic primary on 6 August.For those who have lost loved ones, championing gun reform has served as a way to carry grief.Rhonda Hart, who is running in Texas’ 14th congressional district, “went full tilt into volunteer and activism” after her daughter, Kimberly Vaughan, was killed. Vaughan was one of 10 people murdered in the 2018 Santa Fe high school shooting.“You can sit here and be sad 24/7 and twiddle your thumbs, or, for me, I needed to get up and do something,” Hart said. So, in 2019, Hart began working on a bill in her daughter’s name that focused on preventative measures, such as safe storage and gun safety educational programs.View image in fullscreenThe US House passed the Kimberly Vaughan Firearm Safe Storage Act last session, but Hart, a disabled veteran, was surprised by the amount of resistance she faced along the way. Her own congressman, Republican Randy Weber – now her opponent – refused to support it, even after she and other advocates traveled to DC to meet with him after the 2022 Uvalde mass shooting. Weber has a record of supporting pro-gun legislation, including bills that would increase police presence at schools and allow gun owners to carry a firearm on school grounds.An enraged Hart knew then and there that if she wanted effective legislation to be passed, she would have to do it herself. “If anybody has an axe to grind and a story to tell, it’s me,” Hart said. “We don’t want these people to go uncontested.”Brooks says gun violence survivors and their loved ones are in a unique position to convince others of the pressing need for reform.“I think we’re going to be more passionate because we’ve experienced it,” she said, emphasizing the growing need for “leaders who understand this issue on a personal level and who can bring authentic, passionate advocacy to the legislative process”.That same vision is driving progressive groups to find more candidates who are willing to run for office on gun violence platforms. Last February, nearly 50 new candidates gathered in Las Vegas with Demand a Seat, an initiative to train gun safety advocates to run for office and work on campaigns offered by advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety. At the four-day boot camp, participants received mentorship from veteran politicians, training in the fundamentals of campaign building and guidance in how to effectively elevate a gun safety platform.The program capitalizes on a trend that gun safety advocates have been witnessing for several years. “Gun safety is actually good politics now, it’s not just good policy,” said Moms Demand Action’s executive director, Angela Ferrell-Zabala. “Folks [are] choosing to run and win on gun safety.”View image in fullscreenSince 2021, more than 250 volunteers from Everytown alone have been elected into office, and the organization has a 58%-win rate, said Ferrell-Zabala. And while a decade ago, half of congressional Democrats had A-ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA), today, that number is zero. Down-ballot races are especially important to this electoral strategy, with almost 95% of the program’s volunteers-turned-candidates running in state and local elections.Participants in the program – and gun reform candidates more broadly – share more than their experiences as gun safety advocates and gun violence survivors. They are also connected by gender and parenthood: the cohort is “overwhelmingly” made up of women and mothers, explained Ferrell-Zabala. “We intentionally aim to empower people who may never have thought they could run for office, like women and mothers – especially Black and brown survivors of gun violence,” she said.Members of the so-called “mass shooting generation” themselves are also entering races, taking inspiration from young progressives who won seats during the 2022 midterms. Most notable is Florida’s Maxwell Frost, the first member of gen Z to be elected to US Congress after serving as national organizing director for March for Our Lives, the gun control advocacy group founded after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018.Earlier this year, 19-year-old Navian Scarlett, a vocal gun safety organizer just two years out of high school, ran for school board in Frederick county, Maryland. While she lost her bid in April, Scarlett’s candidacy offered insight into how violence prevention policy is felt by youth on the ground.As an adolescent, she felt the ripples of gun violence on numerous occasions: first when members of her high school basketball team were shot and wounded on campus, and again when shots rang out at a prom after-party that her brother attended. Days after that party, her school ran an active shooter drill that she says traumatized the student body. “I witnessed students having breakdowns. Some of them were curled up with their knees to their chests rocking back and forth and crying,” she said. “It wasn’t as effective for students as [school leaders] may have thought.”For her, that disconnect speaks to the importance of having youth voices in the movement.In Nashville, Brooks says that when the the race catches up with her, she remembers why she is running in the first place.She’s proposing expanding background checks, striking down laws that allow gun owners carry without permits and elevating red flag laws, something she said could have saved her son. “Akilah could have been here,” she said, explaining that the man who killed him had a mental illness and had previously had his gun taken away.“The journey has been transformative. It has shown me that from immense loss can come a powerful drive to create a better world.” More

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      Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone | Dan Brooks

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      Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked: “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.The other week, Twitter user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a passage from an essay JG Ballard wrote for Vogue in the 1970s (incorrectly attributed to his 1975 novel High-Rise) about a future in which our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality. David Foster Wallace predicted the filter, too, around page 111 of Infinite Jest, in which internet-enabled video calling makes everyone so insecure about their faces that they briefly adopt electronic face-improving technology, before it develops such a stigma that they all go back to voice-only telephony. Wallace’s 1996 novel about a form of entertainment so fascinating that it amuses its viewers to death raises some uncomfortable questions for any reader who gets screen time updates on their phones.All these texts – DeLillo, Ballard and Wallace for sure, and The Simpsons, too, in my opinion – fall under the category of “postmodernism”. The contours of the genre are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.I also submit that it’s kind of weird that we have identified our own time as “postmodern” for three generations running. In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. At the same time, we aren’t kicking against it – at least not much. There is that postmodern sense that the systems governing our world are too big and complex to do anything about them. We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story. What happens next is not written, even in outline form.The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.

      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana More

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      in US Politics

      Washington insiders simulated a second Trump presidency. Can a role-play save democracy?

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      It is the afternoon of 20 January 2025 and Donald Trump is in his White House dining room, glued to the same TV where he sat transfixed as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol unfolded four years ago. This morning, he completed one of the most spectacular political comebacks in US history, reciting the oath of office at the inauguration ceremony that returned him to the most powerful job on Earth.His political resurrection has caused turmoil in the transition period, and massive anti-Trump demonstrations have erupted in several big cities. In his inaugural address, the 47th president makes clear his intention to deal with his detractors: “They are rioting in the streets. We are not safe. Make our cities safe again!” he commands.The peaceful marches are portrayed on Fox News, the channel he is watching, as anarchic disorder. Trump grows increasingly incensed, and that evening calls his top team into the situation room with one purpose in mind: to end the demonstrations by any means necessary.“I need to make sure that our streets are safe from those who are running amok trying to overthrow our administration,” he tells the group of top law enforcement, national security and military officials. A flicker of alarm ripples through the room as the president cites the Insurrection Act, saying it allows him to call up the national guard in key states to suppress what he calls the “rebellion”.Discerning the concern among his top officials, Trump gives them an ultimatum. He is in no mood to compromise or stand down – he did that in his first term in the face of “deep state” opposition. “I have been charged by the American people to make this country great again,” he states, “and I need to know right now that everybody in this room is on board.”The scenario was imaginary, but the discussion around it was very real. Dozens of men and women in a Washington DC-area hotel conference center were seated at tables arranged to resemble the White House situation room, wearing name tags denoting their part in the role-play. Prominent people from both parties were in character as the president of the United States, AKA Trump; the joint chiefs of staff; Republican and Democratic governors; Congress members; federal prosecutors; religious and business leaders; and community organizers.About 175 people participated in five exercises, bringing to the process an extraordinary wealth of bipartisan institutional knowledge. Among the lineup were senior officials from successive administrations of both parties, including the Trump administration.They came with a mission: to wargame Trump acting out the most extreme authoritarian elements of his agenda and explore what could be done, should he win in November, to protect democracy in the face of possible abuses of power. What they discovered could be used to inform public debate and sound the alarm about what most participants agreed was a woeful lack of preparation.View image in fullscreenThe event was being held as part of the Democracy Futures Project, an ambitious series of nonpartisan tabletop exercises. Spearheaded by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, the role-playing games were staged in May and June amid tight security. A similar set of wargaming exercises, conducted under different leadership in 2020, pinpointed with uncanny precision Trump’s efforts to subvert that year’s presidential election.This year, the games included that imaginary scenario in which Trump, newly ensconced in the Oval Office, invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces into American cities to fight supposed anarchy and crime.A second game looked at Trump’s threat to politicise federal agencies, including the justice department, and weaponise them against his political enemies. A third probed his immigration plans, which include dark warnings of mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and large-scale deportations.The Guardian attended two of the five exercises in the role of observers.The vocabulary of the exercises was that of the playground or sports field: the simulations were “games” revolving around “role-play”, with participants acting in the characters of Trump, his cabinet, military, law enforcement and congressional leaders, split into Trump’s “red” team and an oppositional “blue” team. Despite the linguistic levity, the purpose of the enactments could not have been more grave.“This is a pivotal moment for our democracy,” said Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who took part in the Insurrection Act simulation. “I believe very strongly that, should Trump be elected, we’re going to see a vast change and our democracy will not be what it looks like today.”The sense of urgency surrounding the gatherings has intensified dramatically as a result of recent events. Since the war games were staged, Trump has been emboldened by the attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally, Joe Biden has stepped out of the race, and Kamala Harris has shot up to become the presumptive Democratic candidate. The course of the election – and its outcome – is now deeply uncertain.Participants attended under the so-called Chatham House rule, meaning that what was said in the simulations could be reported publicly but not who said it. Some individuals agreed to be named, including Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee; Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Richard Danzig, the navy secretary under Bill Clinton.That so many prominent public figures were prepared to set aside entire days to delve deeply into a hypothetical was in itself a sign of these troubled and profoundly anxious times. “A lot of people are getting worried,” Whitman said, “and trying to figure out what guardrails are going to be left should Trump get in.”The danger with any attempt to role-play possible future scenarios is that it could sound paranoid or preposterous. Trump may say extreme things, but destroy democracy? Really? The co-founders of the project, who include Barton Gellman, the Brennan Center’s senior adviser and a former Atlantic journalist, and Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, can point to two powerful arguments in support of the project. The first is the accuracy of the 2020 wargaming.The Transition Integrity Project imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.The second ballast for the Brennan Center’s exercises was provided by Trump himself. All of this year’s scenarios were based on explicit statements from Trump and his closest allies, laying out his intended executive actions during a second term.Take the scenario that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests. The 1807 law gives presidents the power to deploy the US military to suppress insurrections and quell civil unrest. Trump already considered this in 2020, when White House aides drafted a proclamation order invoking the act in preparation for suppressing Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. According to the Washington Post, similar drafts have been drawn up recently by Trump associates. .“This wasn’t a fanciful or unrealistic scenario,” said Peter Keisler, former acting US attorney general under George W Bush, who participated in the simulation. “We know people associated with Trump have been looking into how to use the Insurrection Act to deploy military force domestically against protests.”Keisler said that taking part in the exercise brought home to him how hard it would be to stop such a move: “It confirmed for me that for an authoritarian-minded president, deploying the military domestically could be one of the easiest and fastest levers of power that could be pulled, given how vaguely written the statute is.”View image in fullscreenIn the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise, the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. As the scenario unfolded, Trump grew impatient and ended up firing the joint chiefs of staff, replacing them with military officers who would do his bidding and federalise the national guard.The way the exercise played out jibed with the fears of another of its participants, Paul Eaton, a former major general in the US army. “I’m not sure we can count on the military in a Trump world,” he said.Eaton pointed to a letter from May 2021 signed by 124 retired generals and admirals that propagated the lie that Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump. He added that studies had shown that almost one in seven of those prosecuted for storming the Capitol on January 6 had a military background.“When you have an armed force of 2 million-plus men and women who get a steady diet of lies from Fox News and social media, then you risk ending up with a military that’s going to question what is really true,” Eaton said.The second war game observed by the Guardian involved the scenario in which Trump, on day one, sets out to drain the swamp, free the January 6 “patriots”, and lock up his political enemies. “Let’s be an intelligent authoritarian,” the participant playing Trump told his red team allies, telling them to push the boundaries of what a president can do.Over the next few hours, the president sat on his phone firing off social media posts, while his cabinet executed his agenda. The justice department announced the investigation of Biden and others in his circle, and instructed the FBI to be very aggressive, to the extent of looking for even minor crimes.By the end of the day, they had arrested three of Biden’s grandchildren and, for good measure, Mike Pence’s daughter, “just to make sure Pence keeps his mouth shut”. They also withdrew all pending criminal charges against Trump.Trump’s team also prioritised schedule F: an effort to purge the civil service of people disloyal to the president. And they instructed the treasury department to look at tools at its disposal to withhold federal funding from top US universities under the guise that they were “harboring antisemitism”In response, the blue oppositional team called congressional hearings, tried to mobilize people across the country to protest against the president’s actions, staged acts of civil disobedience, and threatened lawsuits.At the end of the simulation, the consensus among many policy experts was that the blue team’s response felt weak and inadequate, with little agreement over message. “Blue has a catch-22 because they’re forces of normality, but all of this is not normal,” one participant said.Meanwhile, the red team’s efforts may have been alarming, but they didn’t get to even a fraction of what Trump has said he wants to accomplish in his first 90 days. “That is just the tip of the iceberg,” another participant said.As the Brennan Center has highlighted in its initial findings from the war games, participants came away from the simulations sobered by the experience. Above all, they discovered that there were far fewer effective restraints at their disposal than they had expected.Asked to identify the biggest lesson she had learned, Whitman said: “How little there is we can do.”Many of the attendees concluded that this time around, the courts cannot be relied upon as the primary means of staving off Trump’s attacks. In the thick of his 2020 “stop the steal” conspiracy to overturn the election results, courts did play a critical role, rejecting Trump’s claims of illegal voting in almost all cases.Trump’s many appointments to the federal judicial bench during his term, including his game-changing three appointments to the supreme court, have dented the hope that the judiciary will be a bastion against an authoritarian president.Participants also came away rattled by the thought that Trump and his associates are now much more experienced and adept at working the federal apparatus. As one of the Trump role-players put it: “This time around, they’re going to know where the door handles are.”Such apprehensions are disturbing. Yet the intention of the exercises was not to stun pro-democracy activists into depressed paralysis.Rather, it was, as Brennan put it, to show that “time is short, and the work of preparation demands more ambition and more hands on deck”.The exercises pointed to some positive guardrails that might still hold. State governors have their own reserves of independent authority, which, if combined with the capabilities of state attorneys general, could block, or at least slow down, federal abuses.Federal officials, who are in Trump’s sights as he threatens to politicise the top of the civil service in his attack on the “deep state”, also have the ability to safeguard the workings of democratic government. It may be easier said than done in the face of mass firings, but the Brennan Center is calling for a “well-resourced campaign” to persuade civil servants to stay the course and not resign, and provide them with legal support in case of retaliation.The last resort when all else fails, many participants suggested, would probably be the power of public protest. “Public opinion, mobilized by a powerful communications strategy, can help set boundaries on authoritarian behavior,” Brennan said in its initial findings.Keisler, the former acting US attorney general, said that the war game he attended shook him more than he had expected: “Do I think there’s a genuine jeopardy to our democracy? Absolutely. Do I think the country is ready for it? No. Do I think it’s guaranteed to end well? No.”He added: “And this was just a game. Then there’s real life, and that’s ahead of us.” More