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      Biden administration blames Hezbollah for ‘horrific’ Golan Heights rocket attack

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      The Biden administration formally placed blame on Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah for the rocket strike that killed 12 children and teenagers on a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on Sunday.National security council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the attack was “conducted by Lebanese Hezbollah. It was their rocket, and launched from an area they control. It should be universally condemned.”The spokesperson described the attack as “horrific” and said the US is “working on a diplomatic solution along the Blue Line that will end all attacks once and for all, and allow citizens on both sides of the border to safely return to their homes”.The statement added that US “support for Israel’s security is ironclad and unwavering against all Iran-backed threats, including Hezbollah”.The statement was issued as the Israeli government announced on Sunday that it was withdrawing David Barnea, Israel’s foreign intelligence chief, from cease-fire negotiations between Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the US over the Israel-Gaza war.The day-long talks in Rome were convened to negotiate an Israel-Hamas truce that would see the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians jailed by Israel. Israel did not offer a reason for withdrawing its top negotiator.The attack on Majdal Shams village has intensified fears that without a ceasefire in Gaza of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon is drawing closer and could draw the US deeper into a regional conflict.Senior US political figures on Sunday looked past the immediate responsibility for attack to blame Iran for escalating regional unrest.The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, emphasized Israel’s “right to defend its citizens and our determination to make sure that they’re able to do that”.But, he added that the US “also don’t want to see the conflict escalate”.“Iran, through its surrogates, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, is really the real evil in this area,” said Democrat Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer on CBS’s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.“Israel has every right to defend itself against Hezbollah like they do against Hamas. It’s sort of – it shows you how bad Iran and its surrogates are,” Schumer added, saying that the Hezbollah attack had hit “Arab kids”.“They don’t care – they sent missiles at and they don’t even care who that is. But having said that, I don’t think anyone wants a wider war. So I hope there are moves to de-escalate.”Schumer, the most senior Jewish-American politician in Congress, was part of the controversial bipartisan invitation to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress last week, which led to accusations that US politicians had allowed the body to be used as a stage prop for Israel’s nine-month offensive in Gaza.Schumer, however, did not shake Netanyahu’s hand. “I went to this speech, because the relationship between Israel and America is ironclad and I wanted to show that,” Schumer said, adding that he also has “serious disagreements” with the way the Israeli prime minister “has conducted these policies”.The former house speaker Nancy Pelosi later tweeted that Netanyahu’s “presentation in the House chamber was by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with that privilege in American history”.On the other side of the political spectrum, Republican senator Lindsey Graham predicted that US and Lebanese efforts to cool tensions between Israel and Hezbollah would not be successful because “Iran is behind all of this” and warned of possible nuclear concerns.Speaking with CBS’s Face the Nation, Graham blamed the Biden-Harris administration for “a colossal failure in terms of controlling the Ayatollah. They’ve enriched him and Israel is paying the price.”Republican congressman Michael McCaul, chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, which oversees all US foreign military sales and transfers, accused the Biden administration of intentionally delaying weapons shipments to Israel in order to have “leverage” over Israel’s decision-making processes.McCaul said “daylight” between the US and Israel was “very dangerous, especially right now, for us to somehow put daylight between us and our most important US ally democracy in the Middle East.“We don’t want escalation for sure,” he said, describing Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthi rebels as “proxies of Iran”. He said Iran doesn’t want Saudi-Israel normalization, “so it’s not in their interest to have any cease-fire.” More

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      Kamala Harris allies deploy new Trump attack line: he is ‘just plain weird’

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      US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird. The tactic is almost certainly calibrated to resonate with young and independent voters who, polls show, are moving from marked disinterest in the now-dropped matchup between Joe Biden and his presidential predecessor to engagement in the 100-day contest between Trump and Kamala Harris.In a press release Thursday, vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris issued a list of the main takeaways of what Trump had given the American people. “Is Donald Trump OK?” the X message said. The seventh of nine entries was: “Trump is old and quite weird?”At a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris tried out the line again, describing what Trump and running mate JD Vance had been saying about her as “just plain weird”.“I mean that’s the box you put that in,” Harris said after Trump had called her “a bum” the previous day and Vance disparaged her in 2021 as a “childless cat (lady)”.The Harris campaign, working to redefine the race with particular attention to the youth vote, including colorizing online HarrisHQ banners lime green after Charli xcx’s “brat” endorsement, has sought to draw attention to Trump’s rally storytelling. Particularly, they have highlighted his frequent but references to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs fame as well as the choice between being shocked by a sinking electric boat or being eaten by a shark.But “weird” is what seems to be sticking, in part as an apparent simplification of warnings about the threat to democracy that Trump poses – which dominated 15 months of Biden’s re-election campaign.Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz appears to have started the “weird” political trendline. He posted on X, “Say it with me: Weird,” in response to a video of Trump speaking about Lecter. Walz later followed up with “these guys are weird” to describe Trump and Vance.During a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Walz was asked if “weird” had replaced existential threat to democracy as a more effective attack strategy. The retired high school educator and football coach replied: “It’s an observation because being a schoolteacher I see a lot of things.”Walz added that a second Trump presidency could indeed put women’s lives at risk over reproductive rights after three of his US supreme court appointees helped eliminate federal abortion rights in 2022. He also said Trump could end other constitutional liberties – but musing about his embodiment of a threat to democracy “gives him way too much power,” Walz argued.“Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said.“I think we give him way too much credit. If you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is. Have you seen the guy laugh? It seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six-and-a-half years of being in the public eye and when he laughs it’s at someone – not with them.”“That’s very weird behavior,” Walz explained on State of the Union. “I don’t think you call it anything else. It’s simply what we’re observing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, also an outside contender for Harris’ vice president pick, tried a slightly amended line, telling Fox News that Trump is “clearly older and stranger than when America first got to know him”.The 78-year-old Trump’s campaign, he added, has maintained its candidate “is strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in … bounds, but we don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side”.“I’m pretty sure voters are worried about the age and acuity of president Trump compared to Kamala Harris, who represents being a generation younger,” Buttigieg said. “And how could anybody not watch the stuff he’s saying, the rambling on the trail, and not be just a little bit concerned?”The new Democratic line on Trump comes after several days of criticism aimed at Vance not only about the “childless cat” lady comment – but also because of reportedly resurfaced comments calling Trump “morally reprehensible” and expressing his hatred for police officers, who generally enjoy the support of Republicans.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer described Vance’s selection as an “incredibly bad choice” to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, adding that the Ohio Republican senator “seems to be more erratic and more extreme than President Trump”.“I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, why did I pick this guy? The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats,” Schumer said.The discursions come as a new ABC News/Ipsos poll on Sunday found that Harris’ favorability rating had jumped to 43% from 35% a week earlier. It found a major jump in her favorability rating among electorally crucial independent voters, with 44% saying they viewed her favorably compared to 28% the previous week.Also significant is the 59-year-old Harris’s numbers within the swing group of “double haters” – voters who liked neither Biden nor Trump. Within that group, the number who liked neither candidate has dropped from 15% to 7%. More

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      The Guardian view on female political leaders: new strains of misogyny fuel old battles | Editorial

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      In 1989, a schoolgirl asked Gerald Ford what advice he had for a young lady wanting to become US president, as he had been. “It won’t happen in the normal course of events,” he predicted. Instead, a man would win the presidency with a female running mate, and the woman would take over because the man would die in office. After that, he suggested, men would have to fight hard to even become the nominee.Video of that encounter went viral after Joe Biden quit his re-election bid and Democrats rallied behind Kamala Harris. Ford’s prediction and his acknowledgment that female politicians are unfairly dismissed had new resonance, though of course Mr Biden is alive and it is still a matter of hope, not fact, that the US will see its first female president. Any Democratic nominee would face a difficult race. But even after Barack Obama became the first black president, and after female leaders such as Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern have commanded international respect and admiration, some fear that the racism and misogyny Ms Harris faces could prove insurmountable, though she inspires and energises other voters.Four years ago, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud, remarking of her that “we’re not going to have a socialist president. Especially any female.” JD Vance, his running mate, described Ms Harris and others as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”. Online attacks from their supporters have been even more vicious, bigoted and graphic – and may well alienate moderate voters. For many, however, the prejudice is unconscious. Research has repeatedly shown that in politics, as in other walks of life, “women leaders are perceived as competent or liked, but rarely both”.Macho attitudes and patriarchal values have been fostered and legitimised by strongmen worldwide in recent years. Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen are ample proof that women can also be prominent in far-right movements and do little for other women. But a marked political gender gap has emerged in many places in the last few years. In the US, polling suggests women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than men of that age.Similar gaps are evident in countries from the UK and Poland to Tunisia and South Korea – where a backlash against demands for women’s rights was central to the 2022 election. The country has the highest gender pay gap of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nation, yet President Yoon Suk Yeol claims structural discrimination does not exist, and won over angry young men by vowing to abolish the ministry of gender equality. The contest was an alarming harbinger of how not just regressive but explicitly anti-feminist attitudes can be politically weaponised. In Argentina, Javier Milei followed suit and won the presidency.Ford predicted that the 1990s would see a female president; the US had already seen a vice-presidential nominee (and in the UK, of course, Margaret Thatcher was then prime minister). But it took until 2008 before there was another, Sarah Palin, and 2016 before Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential nominee of a major party. Now Ms Harris has her shot. Like women around the world, she faces not only old stumbling blocks, but new strains of misogyny. The unfairness and extremity of attacks upon her, however, could yet help to fuel a groundswell of support.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Top Republicans call Kamala Harris a ‘dangerous liberal’ as attacks ramp up

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      Republicans took to the airwaves Sunday to criticize a surging Kamala Harris, calling the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee a “dangerous liberal” as US conservatives’ lines of attack on the vice-president began to solidify.In appearances across CNN and Fox News, senior Republican figures Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham and former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis each attempted to paint Harris – who is typically seen as a centrist Democrat – as having far-left politics.Those remarks came after Trump sought to insult Harris at a rally on Friday night. The ex-president appeared to deliberately mispronounce Harris’s first name, claimed she is “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history” and stated: “She was a bum three weeks ago.”Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cotton, the US senator from Arkansas, said: “For four years things were good” during Trump’s presidency. He argued that after Joe Biden took the White House in 2020 with Harris as his running mate, “everything has gone to hell”.“And it will be much worse under Kamala Harris,” Cotton said. “Just look at her record. She wants to ban private health insurance, she wants to ban fossil fuel production, she wants to ban guns.”In 2019, Harris did propose a universal healthcare plan during her run for president. But the plan did not propose eliminating private health insurance. Harris has not said that she wants to ban fossil fuel production. And it is untrue that Harris wants to ban all guns, although she has said high-capacity rifles – used in many US mass shootings – should be banned.Cotton added: “Kamala Harris is a dangerous liberal. She makes Joe Biden look competent and moderate by contrast.”In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation show, the South Carolina US senator Graham also attacked Harris as being too liberal.“If you expect vice-president Harris to change the course we’re on as a nation, you’re going to be sadly disappointed,” Graham said of the candidate endorsed by Biden after he halted his re-election campaign on 21 July.“She is the most liberal senator in the United States senate. There is no liberal horse that she has chosen not to ride. She sponsored the Green new deal and medicare for all. At the end of the day recasting her as something she’s not – she’s a nice person but she’s incredibly liberal. I mean, major league liberal,” Graham said.A noted military hawk, Graham attempted to tie Harris to Biden’s policies in the Middle East.“When it comes to Iran, Biden and Harris have been a colossal failure in terms of controlling the Ayatollah. They’ve enriched him and Israel is paying the price,” Graham said. He suggested that Iran could “sprint to a nuclear weapon” in the four months leading up to the US election.Graham was asked about JD Vance’s characterization of Harris and others as “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives”.“This idea of trying to marginalize JD and make him some kind of bad person is not going to work, because he’s not a bad person – he’s a good person,” Graham said. The scrutiny over Vance comes as some Republicans are said to be concerned about Trump having selected him to be his running mate.DeSantis, the Florida governor who became locked in a fierce battle with Trump as the pair ran for the Republican presidential nomination, claimed that “the entrenched corporate media” will attempt to “rewrite history” regarding Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They’re going to try to present her as something she’s just not,” DeSantis told Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.“She owns all the policies. She’s not going to be able to distance herself from them, and most Americans think that this country’s going in the wrong direction.”DeSantis did concede that Republicans would have preferred to run against Biden, who had generally fallen several points behind Trump in opinion polls before Harris’s introduction into the race essentially reset it.“You take somebody like Harris, who’s not exactly lighting the world on fire – but Biden makes her look like Socrates just because we’re so used to him not even being able to do anything,” DeSantis said.Byron Donalds, the Republican congressman for Florida who had been rumored to be a potential Trump running mate, joined in the criticism of Harris on Sunday as Republicans appeared to solidify around the idea of painting her as an extreme liberal.“She wanted Medicaid for all, which would have cost our country easily $100tn. She wanted the Green New Deal, the massive old Green New Deal, not the scaled down version they were able to get through Congress,” Donalds told Sunday Morning Futures.Donalds, who has previously stressed the need to “unite this country”, also took aim at Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina, and Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. Both men are rumored to be potential Harris running mates.“Knowing both of those gentlemen, they’re both boring and nobody’s really going to care. But at the end of the day, this is about Kamala Harris’s terrible record versus a record of success from Donald Trump,” Donalds said. More

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      Swat team says it had no contact with Secret Service before Trump rally shooting

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      Local police officers on a special tactical team who were assigned to help protect Donald Trump on the day the former president was wounded during a 13 July assassination attempt in Butler county, Pennsylvania, have said they had no contact with Secret Service agents before the gunman opened fire.“We were supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service members whenever they arrived, and that never happened,” Jason Woods, lead sharpshooter on the Swat team in nearby Beaver county, Pennsylvania, told ABC News.Woods said that initial failure in planning and communications was likely the start of errors that would lead to the 20-year-old gunman killing one spectator, injuring two others and – according to the FBI – striking the tip of one of Trump’s ears.“I think that was probably a pivotal point, where I started thinking things were wrong because it never happened,” Woods told the outlet. “We had no communication.”Separately, members of Trump’s Secret Service detail and his top advisers have questioned why they were not told that local police assigned to guard the outer perimeter of the fairgrounds on 13 July had spotted a suspicious person who turned out to be the would-be assassin.According to the Washington Post, Trump’s top advisers were in a large white tent behind the stage where the former president was speaking at the time of the shooting. They thought the sounds of shots were fireworks and later could not understand why they had not been alerted of the suspicious person before Trump took the stage.“Nobody mentioned it. Nobody said there was a problem,” Trump told Fox News recently. “They could’ve said, ‘Let’s wait for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, five minutes,’ something. Nobody said – I think that was a mistake.”According to Woods, the first communication between the Beaver Swat team and the Secret Service was “not until after the shooting”.By then, Woods added, “it was too late”.Local counter-snipers had seen Thomas Matthew Crooks loitering near the buildings that would later become his perch 20 to 25 minutes before he opened fire. They had sent a photograph to a command center staffed by state troopers and Secret Service agents, according to testimony by the head of the Pennsylvania state police.Apparent failures in communication between different law enforcement agencies are now the subject of three separate investigations. After Secret Service director Kimberley Cheatle resigned from her post on 23 July, the FBI confirmed that Trump had been struck by a bullet – whether whole or fragmented.The FBI director Christopher Wray has also said that would-be assassin Crooks, who does not appear to have any overriding ideological motive for the attempt on Trump’s life, had searched online for the distance that Lee Harvey Oswald was from John F Kennedy when shot the president to death in November 1963.As agencies continue passing blame on for the shooting, Trump has said he plans to return to Butler for “FOR A BIG AND BEAUTIFUL RALLY” despite advice from the presidential protection service that he avoid holding outdoor rallies.Trump has also dismissed criticism that hiring at the Secret Service, and the quality of the protection it provides, was negatively affected by diversity programs – something that had become a talking point among some Republicans.At a rally in Minnesota on Saturday, he defended a “brave” female Secret Service agent who “shielded” him during the attempted assassination. He praised the agent and said she “wanted to take a bullet”.“She was shielding me with everything she could and she got criticized by the fake news because she wasn’t tall enough,” he said. “She was so brave, she was shielding me with everything, she wanted to take a bullet.”The Secret Service had not commented directly on the comments by Woods. But agency spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi has said the Secret Service “is committed to better understanding what happened before, during, and after the assassination attempt of former President Trump to ensure that never happens again”. More

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      Buttigieg: Republicans calling Kamala Harris a diversity hire is ‘a bad look’

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      White House administrator Pete Buttigieg says it is “a bad look” for Republicans to call Kamala Harris a diversity hire in their attempts to slow down the momentum that has greeted her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket for November’s presidential race.On Saturday’s episode of the New York Times podcast The Interview, the Democratic transportation secretary said “you can tell” that is the case because of how even Republican US House speaker Mike Johnson has tried to distance himself from that line of attack against Harris.“You got somebody like Mike Johnson, who is a very, very conservative figure … telling his own caucus, like, ‘Hey, cool it,’” Buttigieg remarked to podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “He’s basically saying that they are embarrassing the party, and I think acknowledging that they are diminishing the party’s chances by indulging in that kind of rhetoric.”Buttigieg added: “And the fact that they can’t think of what else to do, besides go right to race and gender, isn’t just revealing about some of the ugliest undercurrents in today’s Republican party – it’s also profoundly unimaginative because it means that they can’t speak to how any of this is going to make people’s lives better.”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 Oval Office in 2020. She is now poised to become the first woman of color to lead a major-party presidential ticket after Biden halted his re-election bid on 21 July and endorsed her, setting the stage for Harris to reportedly sign up 170,000 campaign volunteers and raise $200m for her political warchest in a matter of days.Supporters of the Republican nominee Donald Trump – who lost the presidency to Biden – have met those accomplishments by disparaging Harris as a hire resulting from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. While grappling with a criminal conviction for election-related fraud in a case involving an adult film actor who alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him as well as other prosecutions pending against him, Trump has insulted Harris as “crazy”, “nuts”, “dumb as a rock” and – at a rally on Friday – “a bum”.That approach prompted some Republican leaders to try to warn party members against aiming overt racism and sexism at Harris. Those included Johnson, who said at a Tuesday news briefing: “This election will be about policies and not personalities.”The Louisiana congressman added: “This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris, and her ethnicity or her gender having nothing to do with this whatsoever.”Buttigieg went on the Republican-friendly Fox News Sunday show and said Harris has proven herself in “one of the most visible leadership roles in the country”.“The idea that somebody hasn’t been tested or vetted when they have been vice-president of the United States just doesn’t make any sense,” Buttigieg said.Opinion polls show Harris is running a tight race with Trump after Biden had fallen several points behind, with the president’s support in vital swing states plummeting.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionButtigieg – the ex-mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 – is considered to be among a field of contenders to be Harris’s running mate. And in fact, a National Public Radio/PBS News/Marist poll showed him tied as the most popular Democratic vice-presidential candidate for the fall election.He declined to tell Garcia-Navarro whether he believed he would make a good vice-president.“I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to talk like that knowing that the person who needs to make that decision is … her – not me,” Buttigieg said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to wander down that path with you right now.” More

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      ‘Good for Joe’: Scranton residents back Biden’s decision to quit race

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      The Central Scranton Expressway, the road which leads into Scranton from the I-81 highway, was renamed in 2021 as the President Joseph R Biden Jr Expressway.The road drops down into the center of Scranton, the Pennsylvania city where the president was born, where it meets up with Biden Street – renamed in the same 2021 city council vote.There is no indication yet that Scranton, a former coal and manufacturing hub home to about 80,000 people, intends to change its name to Bidenton, but the message here is clear: this is Joe Biden country.“​​Let me start off with: we’re very proud of Joe Biden. We love Joe Biden. The fact that he’s a local guy, and all that,” said James Ferguson, 81.Ferguson was sitting with his brother, John Ferguson, 77, on a bench on Biden Street on Thursday afternoon. It was a blow for both when the president, who moved to Delaware from Scranton aged seven but who speaks often of his Scranton upbringing, decided to drop out of the race in mid-July, but the fondness for Biden remains.“I think Joe Biden showed the character that he is. He is a very good man, and he put the country first. It’s not how good he is, or whether he is smart or not. It was perception. The perception was bad for Joe, and he knew it and he dropped out. Good for Joe,” the elder Ferguson said.But with Trump leading Biden in the polls and posing an existential threat to the US, there is an acceptance that Biden had to go.“We can’t afford to lose this election, I think. So yeah, we were disappointed. We voted for him, we would vote for him again. But I think this is better for the party, better for the country,” John Ferguson said.“He’s a realist. I think he finally was convinced that he couldn’t take the risk. We’ve got to stop Trump from winning. We can’t let Trump get in. That is a terrible man. He’s an insult to the human race, that man.”Biden dropped out on Sunday, bringing to an end a painful, weeks-long pressure campaign that began with a dreadful debate performance and saw an ever-increasing number of Democratic politicians call for him to resign.Behind the scenes senior party figures, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, had also made the case to Biden that he couldn’t win, despite the president comfortably – albeit in the face of very little opposition – clinching the Democratic primary earlier this year.“His age was a concern for a lot of voters and he was slipping in the polls. And I was very worried about that. So I mean, I’m thankful of all he’s done, I think he’s done good work, and I think he did the honorable thing that really should be valued,” said Angela Miller, a civil engineer.“I never wanted him to run again. He never said he was going to, do you know what I mean? From the beginning he said he was going to be a transitional president. I felt like he kind of went back on that.”Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2020, defeating Trump by 80,000 votes. He comfortably won Lackawanna county, the north-east Pennsylvania district where Scranton is based, but not everyone in the city is an admirer.View image in fullscreen“He wasn’t really on the ball I don’t think. It was kind of like having the senile grandpa in the White House office,” said Phil Fleming, 61, as he watching his friend unpack a guitar at a bandshell in downtown Scranton.Fleming had the opposite geographic journey to Biden. He grew up in Delaware, where Biden moved with his family aged 10, and then moved to the Scranton area later in life. But Fleming has no particular affection for the president.“I always said Joe would do for the country what he did for Delaware: nothing,” he said.Biden endorsed Kamala Harris for president within minutes of pulling out of the race on Sunday. Harris has since all but secured the Democratic nomination, and if she wins in November she would become the country’s first woman president.“I’m excited about it. I think it would be awesome to have a female run the country, to see what she could bring and try to unite the country a little bit more,” said Kelly, 34.Kelly, who asked not to use her last name, was walking her dog through the Green Ridge area of Scranton, where Biden’s three-storey childhood home is now marked by a small plaque.“It’s definitely a cool thing to say that the President of the United States grew up in your neighborhood, you can’t really say that too often. So it’s a little fun fact that we have here,” she said.Few cities can claim to have a president on their books – Quincy, in Massachusetts, can lay claim to two: father and son duo John Adams and John Quincy Adams. For Scranton, Biden may no longer be in the race, but he will remain a presence.“I think he really put all his heart and soul into this country, and I just feel like maybe now it’s time to step out, and let the next generation come in and serve the same way he did,” Kelly said. More

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      Voters to choose between two starkly different candidates in US ‘Armageddon election’

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      A man convicted of dozens of felonies versus a criminal prosecutor. An architect of abortion bans versus a champion of reproductive freedom. An elderly white man fixated on the past versus a mixed-race daughter of immigrants leaning into the future.One hundred days from the US presidential election, the choice for voters has never been so clear cut. Kamala Harris, 59, the de facto Democratic nominee after the dramatic withdrawal of Joe Biden, is a progressive person of colour bidding to become the first female president in America’s 248-year history.Donald Trump, at 78 the oldest nominee in history, is a populist-nationalist who has demonised immigrants, gained backing from far-right extremists and tapped into white Christian nostalgia by promising to “make America great again”.“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” Harris told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis on Wednesday. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”Biden has previously spoken of a “battle for the soul of the nation” and Trump has described this election as “the final battle”. But the nomination of Harris will be clarifying about the culmination of a tumultuous decade and a collision of two Americas: one liberal, diverse and optimistic, the other conservative, nativist and, in Trump’s telling, driven by grievance and vengeance.Halifu Osumare, professor emerita in the department of African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis, said: “The difference between the candidates couldn’t be any starker. To me it represents this country and its schizophrenia. This country is both racist to its core yet the leader of the world in the rights of the individual and democracy.“This election is going to play out that schizophrenia because you’ve got a good deal of the nation who wants to take us back to those days where white supremacy was absolutely dominant, and those who want us to evolve as a human species. We need somebody who has humanity at her core in order to do that.”The road that led here began with the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, in 2008. For millions of Americans, Obama represented hope; for millions of other Americans, he represented fear that the country they grew up in was disappearing. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the US population in 2008, they have now slipped into the minority and make up only 44%.Racially motivated backlash against Obama was evident in the stirrings of the populist Tea Party movement. Then came Trump’s entry into politics as a “birther”, questioning whether Obama had in fact been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for the presidency.Again, Trump offered hope to one America and fear to the other. He embodied a rage against change, political correctness and liberal elites, gaining traction in small towns and rural areas that felt left behind. He scapegoated immigrants as the source of blame, creating an us-versus-them dynamic, and promised to build a border wall to keep them out.The country faced a clear choice in 2016 and handed Trump victory over Hillary Clinton in the electoral college, though there were complicating variables such as her status as a former first lady and the FBI reopening an investigation into her handling of classified information.Four years and one global pandemic later, Trump, a white man who was the oldest president ever, was defeated by Joe Biden, a white man who was even older and a moderate who won back white working-class votes that Clinton had lost in the rust belt. In 2024, the world was braced, somewhat wearily, for a rematch.Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said: “When it was Biden and Trump, you had two septuagenarians that created a battle of senior citizens. Now you have not only gender, not only the past versus the future, not only a difference in heritage – you have also the stark contrast in hope versus hate.”In the past month, American politics has moved at incredible speed, upending all certainties. Biden flopped at a presidential debate in Atlanta, Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and, as a chorus of Democrats questioned his age and mental acuity, Biden became the first incumbent since 1968 to announce he would not seek re-election.The party quickly rallied around Harris, a former US senator, prosecutor and California attorney general, with an avalanche of endorsements, fundraising and memes. She hit the campaign trail with electrifying speeches and Beyoncé tracks, providing a shot of adrenaline that flipped Democrats from doom and gloom to giddy optimism. Opinion polls show Harris outperforming Biden among Black, Latino and young voters, and running more or less even with Trump.Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, said: “There’s a hundred days to go to the election and, in a year where everything has pretty much happened, it’s hard to tell how this all plays out. But I don’t think there’s any question that the Democrats are very much back in this race and are looking a hell of a lot better than they did a few weeks ago.”Panetta, who served in various capacities under nine US presidents, has witnessed growing polarisation and a coarsening of political discourse. “It’s obvious that America in these last number of years has become more divided, more partisan, and our democracy in many ways has become much more dysfunctional as a result of those divisions,” he added. “Kamala Harris presents a message that we could have a better America in the future, and we need that message of hope.“The message of Trump, whether he wanted to change it or not, still gets trapped by his own sense of retribution, vengeance and going after people. That’s not what Kamala Harris is about and so the American people are going to have a real choice here in November to decide what kind of direction we want for our country. The more defined that difference is, the better the chances are that the Democrats can win.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBorn in Oakland, California, to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris is the anti-Trump in myriad ways. She is 19 years younger, instantly neutralising the age argument and turning it against her opponent, whose ramblings and name confusions will be under special scrutiny.She has been the face of the Biden campaign on the issue of abortion as reproductive rights became an animating issue after the supreme court in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision. She is expected to stick largely to Biden’s foreign policy playbook on Ukraine, China and Iran but could strike a tougher tone with Israel over the war in Gaza.Her sudden ascent punctured Republican balloons after a successful party convention in Milwaukee, where Trump was almost deified after his defiant response – “Fight! Fight! Fight” – to a near-death experience. His entrance to the sound of It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, and speeches by the likes of wrestler Hulk Hogan, underlined an image of old-school machismo.The Trump campaign, which relished a contest with the ailing Biden, is now having to rapidly adapt to the new challenge of Harris. It has begun casting her as a leftwing radical from California who was the “co-pilot” of what they say are the Biden administration’s failed policies on immigration and inflation.Trump told a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week: “For three and a half years, Lyin’ Kamala Harris has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe … As border czar, Kamala threw open our borders and allowed 20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world.”Republican representative and rightwing media have mispronounced her name, mocked her laugh (“Cackling Kamala”), and invoked diversity, equity and inclusion programmes to brand her potentially the “first DEI president”. Commentators predict a torrent of bigotry, racism and misogyny reminiscent of the playbooks deployed against Obama and Clinton. The tone of the two campaigns could not be more different.Tara Setmayer, co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led Super Pac, said: “That’s the decision. It’s between democracy versus autocracy, and progression versus regression. Usually a future-forward vision wins out. But we’ll see. It’s going to be a hell of a battle. When you think we were battling for the soul of America in 2020, this is the battle for the soul of America on steroids.”The clarity of the choice raises the temperature in an already febrile atmosphere. The attempt on Trump’s life came after years of political violence that included the shooting of representative Steve Scalise, a hammer attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.Both parties now head into an “Armageddon election” in which they say the American way of life is on the line. Winning will signify total vindication; losing will signify total catastrophe. How would Trump’s fervent base react to defeat by a Black woman? At a rally for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, in Middletown, Ohio, this week, state senator George Lang warned: “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved.”Differences personified by Harris and Trump appear irreconcilable. David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, said: “It’s about crushing the other side. There’s no bipartisanship about this election except for the ‘never Trumpers’ [traditional Republicans who oppose Trump], who have seen a light and don’t want to live in a country with that kind of authoritarianism.“We’re on the brink of something here.” More