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      Biden campaign accuses Trump of plans for ‘formalizing white supremacy’ – as it happened

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      The co-chair of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign Cedric Richmond said that “formalizing white supremacy” will be a priority of Donald Trump, if he is returned to the White House.His statement came after Axios reported that Trump’s allies are planning to fight “anti-white racism”, and dismantle efforts to promote diversity and combat discrimination against people of color and other minorities.Richmond pointed to Trump’s promotion of the baseless conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and his equivocation over condemning the violent 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia:
      Trump couldn’t care less about Black and brown communities – he never has. Now he’s making it clear that if he wins in November, he’ll turn his racist record into official government policy, gutting programs that give communities of color economic opportunities and making the lives of Black and brown folks harder. Already, his Project 2025 allies have blocked billions of dollars in support for women and minority-owned businesses, and if he wins a second term they’ll take their divisive agenda even further. It’s up to us to stop him.
      Could the frozen negotiations on passing aid to Ukraine, Israel and other American allies finally be unthawing? Yesterday, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, laid out some potential concessions he may demand of Democrats in exchange for putting the measure up for a vote when Congress returns to work next week. We don’t know what Joe Biden, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, or other top Democrats think of this proposal, though California senator Laphonza Butler signaled that Johnson’s call to restart the permitting of new natural gas export projects may prove controversial. Meanwhile, Biden and Johnson are feuding over the White House’s declaration of 31 March as Transgender Day of Visibility – which also happened to be Easter Sunday.Here’s what else happened today:
      The president will on Friday visit the site of the collapsed Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore, as efforts to reopen the city’s vital port continue.
      Johnson downplayed rightwing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to remove him from office, but acknowledged it was a “distraction”.
      Biden gave a brief interview where he sounded upbeat about his prospects of winning re-election.
      Donald Trump’s campaign also attacked Biden for recognizing transgender people, while reportedly stretching the truth about the rules for the annual Easter Egg Roll.
      John Avlon, a former CNN anchor and Daily Beast editor, released impressive fundraising numbers as he runs for Congress in New York.
      A victory by Donald Trump could also imperil efforts to fight the climate crisis worldwide, a former top UN official warns. The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey has the story:Victory for Donald Trump in the US presidential election this year could put the world’s climate goals at risk, a former UN climate chief has said.The chances of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels are already slim, and Trump’s antipathy to climate action would have a major impact on the US, which is the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and biggest oil and gas exporter, said Patricia Espinosa, who served as the UN’s top official on the climate from 2016 to 2022.“I worry [about the potential election of Trump] because it would have very strong consequences, if we see a regression regarding climate policies in the US,” Espinosa said.Although Trump’s policy plans are not clear, conversations with his circle have created a worrying picture that could include the cancellation of Joe Biden’s groundbreaking climate legislation, withdrawal from the Paris agreement and a push for more drilling for oil and gas.The co-chair of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign Cedric Richmond said that “formalizing white supremacy” will be a priority of Donald Trump, if he is returned to the White House.His statement came after Axios reported that Trump’s allies are planning to fight “anti-white racism”, and dismantle efforts to promote diversity and combat discrimination against people of color and other minorities.Richmond pointed to Trump’s promotion of the baseless conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and his equivocation over condemning the violent 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia:
      Trump couldn’t care less about Black and brown communities – he never has. Now he’s making it clear that if he wins in November, he’ll turn his racist record into official government policy, gutting programs that give communities of color economic opportunities and making the lives of Black and brown folks harder. Already, his Project 2025 allies have blocked billions of dollars in support for women and minority-owned businesses, and if he wins a second term they’ll take their divisive agenda even further. It’s up to us to stop him.
      Speaking of the November elections, Donald Trump’s allies are putting together plans to fight racism against white people, should be elected again. Here’s more on that, from the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly:The former Trump White House adviser, anti-immigration extremist and white nationalist Stephen Miller is helping drive a plan to tackle supposed “anti-white racism” if Donald Trump returns to power next year, Axios reported.“Longtime aides and allies … have been laying legal groundwork with a flurry of lawsuits and legal complaints – some of which have been successful,” Axios said on Monday.Should Trump return to power, Axios said, Miller and other aides plan to “dramatically change the government’s interpretation of civil rights-era laws to focus on ‘anti-white racism’ rather than discrimination against people of colour”.Such an effort would involve “eliminating or upending” programmes meant to counter racism against non-white groups.The US supreme court, dominated 6-3 by rightwing justices after Trump installed three, recently boosted such efforts by ruling against race-based affirmative action in college admissions.America First Legal, a group founded by Miller and described by him as the right’s “long-awaited answer” to the American Civil Liberties Union, is helping drive plans for a second Trump term, Axios said.In John Avlon’s Vanity Fair interview, the former CNN anchor and Daily Beast editor turned Democratic candidate for a US House seat in New York says his party has a problem when it comes to “obsessing about culture-war issues”.“I think Democrats often get spun around the axle when they start obsessing about culture-war issues,” Avlon says, offering as an example, “Defund the police, one of the worst, most self-defeating political slogans imaginable.“But in reality, in the last Congress – I counted this up – there were seven members of the Democratic House who supported the policy known as ‘Defund the police’. There were 139 members of the Republican House [and eight senators] who voted to overturn the election after the attack on the Capitol. That’s asymmetric, that’s not the same moral universe.“As I wrote in my book Wing Nuts over a decade ago, the far right and the far left can be equally insane, but there’s no question who’s far more powerful and more dangerous in our time.“I mean, the Democratic party nominates and elevates centrists, right? The party is evenly divided between liberals and moderates. The Republican party is nominating Donald Trump for a third time after he tried to destroy our democracy on the back of a lie, with totally fact-free rants that are contrary to everything that party allegedly once believed. So there’s just no equivalence at all. The problem is, it distracts from a lot of the issues that we really need to deal with that are right in the Democrats’ sweet spot.”Vanity Fair’s interviewer, Joe Pompeo, asked Avlon “for his centrist view on Israel and Gaza”.Avlon said: “As someone who was formed by 9/11, fundamentally, in the wake of the absolute horror of the October 7 attacks, our impulse should be to stand with the victims of terrorism and not blame the victims of terrorism … It’s absolutely legitimate to not only defend yourself, but to ensure that Hamas leadership is taken out. You’re dealing with terrorism, but you’ve got to maximise humanitarian aid and minimise civilian casualties, because that ends up playing into the terrorist narrative. I think the Biden administration is walking a difficult line well.”Here, again, is the Guardian’s John Avlon interview, from the launch of his campaign in February:John Avlon, the former CNN anchor and Daily Beast editor running for the Democratic nomination in New York’s first US House district, is heralding an impressive fundraising effort in his first month-and-a-bit in the race.“I’m honored and humbled to have received so much support in so short a time,” Avlon said in a statement accompanying news of more than $1.1m raised so far.“To raise over a million dollars in the first 40 days of the campaign is a measure of the excitement we’ve unleashed. Democrats understand that we can’t afford to lose this fight … Together, we’ll fight the good fight by defending our democracy, defeating Donald Trump and winning back the House from his Maga minions, who aren’t trying to solve problems in the national interest anymore.”Avlon, 51, has also spoken to Vanity Fair, describing the “moral urgency” he feels running for office with Trump at the head of the Republican ticket, as a determined centrist, calling for an end to partisan extremities.“This is a swing district,” he told Vanity Fair, “but when you look at the battleground maps in New York, it wasn’t being treated as one. We just got the new district registration numbers, and in New York one, we have the highest number of independent voters in the state. That’s prime for swing.”That could be vital in a close House election.Here’s our own interview with Avlon, from February, when he announced his run:When Joe Biden visits Baltimore on Friday, he is expected to meet with Maryland governor Wes Moore and Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott as he tours the area where the Key Bridge collapsed last week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said a little earlier in the media briefing in the west wing.She noted that the administration has already worked with local leaders to secure barges and a crane for the scene, along with an early influx of money, Reuters reports.Meanwhile Jean-Pierre condemned racist attacks on Moore and Scott from the right-wing in the wake of the bridge catastrophe. Both men are Black. Such attacks are “wrong”, she said.An Israeli air strike has hit Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria.Israeli warplanes destroyed the consulate, killing several people including a senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).Among those killed was Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Iranian state media reported. Iranian state television said several Iranian diplomats had been killed.The Guardian is live blogging this in a separate blog and you can follow all that news as it happens, here.The White House spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre, said moments ago that if reports are true that Israel is trying to shut down the Qatari news network Al Jazeera in Israel, it would be “concerning”, Reuters reports.Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, revived moves on Monday to shut down Qatari satellite television station Al Jazeera in Israel, saying through his party spokesperson that parliament would be convened in the evening to ratify the necessary law.Israel has previously accused the station of agitating against it among Arab viewers.Netanyahu indicated that the Israeli parliament would be convened this evening to ratify the necessary law. Neither the station’s main office in Israel nor the Qatari government in Doha immediately responded to a request for comment.Al Jazeera has previously accused Israel of systematically targeting its offices and personnel. Israeli officials have long complained about Al Jazeera‘s coverage but stopped short of taking action, mindful of Qatar’s bankrolling of Palestinian construction projects in the Gaza Strip – seen by all sides as a means of staving off conflict.Since the Gaza war that erupted on 7 October with a cross-border killing and kidnapping rampage by the enclave’s dominant Hamas Islamists, Doha has mediated ceasefire negotiations under which Israel recovered some of those taken hostage. However, talks on a second proposed truce appear to be going nowhere.An Israeli government spokesperson, Avi Hyman, was asked if the threat against Al Jazeera might be part of pressure by Netanyahu publicly called for the Qataris to be pressed into applying more pressure on Hamas. Qatar hosts the group’s political office and several top Hamas officials.Hyman, did not answer directly, though he did describe the station as “spouting propaganda for many, many years”.Joe Biden plans to visit Baltimore on Friday in the wake of the catastrophic collapse last week of the landmark Francis Scott Key Bridge after a massive container ship collided with one of the main supports of the bridge.The White House secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is briefing now at the White House and gave the new detail, that the US president will be heading to the Maryland city, with its huge port, where the shipping channel has been blocked since the incident, which also killed six people who were working on road repair when it happened.The wreckage of the huge bridge, which served as a road artery, fell into the Patapsco River in the early hours of last Tuesday morning, and the steel debris and the stricken container ship are still jamming the main entry and exit for the port.Jean-Pierre had few details of the visit so far and said she couldn’t add any information about whether Biden will be reviewing the site of the bridge collapse by air, land or sea, or whether he will meet the relatives of victims.The huge salvage operation on the bridge is under way.Could the frozen negotiations on passing aid to Ukraine, Israel and other American allies finally be unthawing? Yesterday, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, laid out some potential concessions he may demand of Democrats in order to bring the measure up for a vote when Congress returns to work next week. We don’t know what Joe Biden, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, or other top Democrats think of this proposal, though California senator Laphonza Butler signaled that Johnson’s call to restart permitting new natural gas export projects may prove to be the most controversial aspect. Meanwhile, Biden and Johnson are feuding over the White House’s declaration of 31 March as Transgender Day of Visibility – which also happened to be Easter Sunday.Here’s what else is going on today:
      Johnson downplayed rightwing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s attempt to remove him from office, but acknowledged it was a “distraction”.
      Biden gave a brief interview where he sounded upbeat about his prospects of winning re-election.
      Donald Trump’s campaign also attacked Biden for recognizing transgender people, while reportedly stretching the truth about the rules for the annual Easter Egg Roll.
      Here’s more on the kerfuffle over Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility that has managed to suck in Donald Trump, Mike Johnson and Joe Biden:A Joe Biden White House spokesperson said Republicans who have spent the Easter weekend criticizing the president for declaring Sunday’s annual Transgender Day of Visibility “are seeking to divide and weaken our country with cruel, hateful and dishonest rhetoric”.“As a Christian who celebrates Easter with family, President Biden stands for bringing people together and upholding the dignity and freedoms of every American,” the White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “President Biden will never abuse his faith for political purposes or for profit.”Bates’ statement came as the president faced criticism from the campaign of his Republican presidential challenger Donald Trump – along with religious conservatives who support him – for going through with issuing the annual proclamation recognizing 31 March as Transgender Day of Visibility even though that coincided with Easter Sunday.The Democrat issued the proclamation Friday, calling on “all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity”.But Republicans objected to the fact that the Transgender Day of Visibility’s designated 31 March date in 2024 overlapped with Easter, among the holiest celebrations for Christians. Trump’s campaign accused Biden, a Roman Catholic, of being insensitive to religion. And the former president’s Republican allies piled on. More

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      Mike Johnson hints vote on Ukraine aid is up next despite threat to speakership

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      The US House speaker, Mike Johnson, has raised expectations that a vote on funding for Ukraine could be imminent in the chamber, even at the risk of the Republican losing his leadership position.Johnson touted “important innovations” to a possible Ukraine package during an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Night in America with Trey Gowdy, and he suggested a vote on a standalone bill could come soon after Congress returns from Easter recess on 9 April.But the Louisiana Republican acknowledged forces in his party were trying to unseat him over his efforts to find a bipartisan solution to stalled US funding for Ukraine’s efforts to repel Russia’s military invasion, which began in February 2022. The far-right extremist Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to remove Johnson in March, but she stopped short of calling it for a floor vote.The White House, meanwhile, has warned that delays are costing Ukraine lives and territory because Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, “gains every day” Congress does not pass a funding measure.“What we have to do in an era of divided government, historically, as we are, you got to build consensus. If we want to move a partisan measure, I got to have every single member, literally. And some things need to be bipartisan,” Johnson said, acknowledging the shrinking Republican majority in the House.“We’ve been talking to all the members especially now over the district work period. When we return after this work period, we’ll be moving a product, but it’s going to, I think, have some important innovations.”Those innovations include efforts to placate Republican hardliners, who have cooled on continuing to support Ukraine financially with the war there now in its third year. They include a loan instead of a grant, or harnessing Russian assets confiscated in the US under the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity (Repo) for Ukrainians Act.“If we can use the seized assets of Russian oligarchs to allow the Ukrainians to fight them, that’s just pure poetry,” Johnson said. “Even [former president Donald] Trump has talked about the loan concept, where we’re not just giving foreign aid, we’re setting it up in a relationship where they can provide it back to us when the time is right.”The specter of Trump, the prospective Republican nominee for November’s presidential election, has loomed large over the wrangling for a Ukraine deal. He was instrumental in Johnson’s refusal to call a House vote on a $95bn wartime funding bill that passed the Democratic-led Senate in February, which also included aid for Israel in its war in Gaza.Trump has also demanded Republicans reject any Ukraine funding measure that ties in money for US border security in order to deny the Joe Biden White House a “win” on immigration ahead of November’s election, hence Johnson’s pursuit of a standalone solution.The friction has led to rightwingers, such as Greene, threatening Johnson’s position. Other Republican colleagues, however, have leapt to the speaker’s defense. The New York congressman Mike Lawler blasted Greene’s motion to vacate as “idiotic” on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “It’s not actually going to help advance the cause she believes in, and in fact it undermines our House Republican majority,” he said.Some Democrats have indicated they would support Johnson if a vote to remove him were called, though other Republicans have acknowledged his precarious position.“I’m not going to deny it. It’s a very narrow majority, and one or two people can make us a minority,” the Nebraska congressman Don Bacon told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.Without identifying Greene by name, he added: “We have one or two people that are not team players. They’d rather enjoy the limelight, the social media.”Bacon is one of several Republicans who have worked across the aisle to craft a Ukraine aid proposal. “We put a bill together that focuses on military aid, a $66bn bill that provides military aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. There’s enough support in the House to get this done,” he said.Of Johnson’s plans to bring a House vote next week, Bacon added: “He’s doing the right thing.” More

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      For the sake of all of us, Sonia Sotomayor needs to retire from the US supreme court | Mehdi Hasan

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      Forget Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is Sonia Sotomayor who is the greatest liberal to sit on the supreme court in my adult lifetime. The first Latina to hold the position of justice, she has blazed a relentlessly progressive trail on the highest bench in the land.Whether it was her lone dissent in a North Carolina voting rights case in 2016 (“the court’s conclusion … is a fiction”); her ingenious referencing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin and WEB DuBois in another 2016 dissent over unreasonable searches and seizures; or her withering observation at the Dobbs oral argument in 2021 (“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?”), Sotomayor has stood head and shoulders above both her liberal and conservative colleagues on the bench for the past 15 years.And so it is with good reason that she has been called the “conscience of the supreme court” (the Nation), “the truth teller of the supreme court” (New York Times) and “the real liberal queen of the court” (Above the Law).I happen to agree 100% with all of those descriptions. But – and it pains me to write these words – I also believe it is time for Sotomayor to retire.Why?Okay, now it is time to remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To recall how RBG, who had survived two bouts of cancer, refused to quit the court despite calls to do so from leading liberals during Barack Obama’s second term office. To hark back to her insistence, in multiple interviews, that it was “misguided” to insist she retire and that she would only stand down “when it’s time”. To recollect how, on her deathbed in 2020, she told her granddaughter that her “most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed” – and how it made no difference whatsoever! Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett as RBG’s replacement just eight days after her death, and Senate Republicans confirmed Barrett to RBG’s vacant seat just eight days before election day.With Joe Biden trailing Trump in several swing states and Democrats also in danger of losing their razor-thin majority in the Senate, are we really prepared for history to repeat itself? Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. Of course, only Sotomayor knows the full status of her health, still it is public knowledge that she has had type 1 diabetes since she was seven; had paramedics called to her home; and is the only sitting justice to have, reportedly, traveled with a medic. To be clear: she could easily – and God willing – survive a potential Trump second term and still be dishing out dissents from the bench come 2029.But why take that risk? Why not retire now? Why not quit the bench at the same age that justices in Belgium, Australia and Japan are forced to do so?Let’s deal with the three most obvious objections.First, wouldn’t a replacement for Sotomayor that Senator Joe Manchin has to approve be less progressive, and more centrist, than our sole Latina, super-progressive justice? Perhaps. But, again, consider the alternative. Would we rather Biden replace Sotomayor with a centrist in 2024 … or Trump replace her with a far-right Federalist Society goon in 2025? Or, what if Trump doesn’t win but the Republican party takes control of the Senate and blocks a second-term Biden from replacing her between 2025 and 2028?Second, is there really any difference between a 6-3 conservative majority on the court and a 7-2 majority? Isn’t all lost already? Not quite. The damage to our democracy from a 7-2 hard-right court would be on a whole other and existential level. Yes, 6-3 has been a disaster for our progressive priorities (Dobbs! Bruen! Kennedy!) but there have also been a handful of key 5-4 victories (Redistricting! Razor wire at the border! Ghost guns!) in cases where Roberts plus one other conservative have come over from the dark side. None of that happens in a 7-2 court. The hard-right conservatives win not just most of the time but every single time.Third, how can anyone on the left dare ask the first, and only, Latina justice to quit the supreme court?It’s simple. Women in general, and Latinas especially, will suffer most from a 7-2 supreme court. It is because I am so worried about the future of minority rights in this country that I – reluctantly – want Sotomayor to step aside.This has nothing to do with her race or her gender. Forget RBG (again). Consider Stephen Breyer. You remember Breyer, right? The bookish and bespectacled liberal justice who quit the supreme court in 2022, at the age of 83, in part because of an intense pressure campaign from the left.The fact that he was a white man didn’t shield him from criticism – or from calls for him to stand down. In 2021, the progressive group Demand Justice sent a billboard truck to circle the supreme court building with the message: “Breyer, retire.” I joined in, too. “Retire, retire, retire,” I said in a monologue for my Peacock show in 2021. “Or history may end up judging you, Justice Breyer.”So why is it okay to pressure Breyer to retire but not Sotomayor? This time round, Demand Justice isn’t taking a position on whether an older liberal justice should quit while a Democratic president and Senate can still replace them and, as HuffPost reports, “on the left, there is little open debate about whether she should retire.”Democrats, it seems, still don’t seem keen on wielding power or influence over the highest court in the nation. In 2013, Barack Obama met with RBG for lunch and tried to nudge her into retiring, but as the New York Times later reported, Obama “did not directly bring up the subject of retirement to Justice Ginsburg”.Compare and contrast with Donald Trump. The finance journalist David Enrich, in his book Dark Towers, reveals how the Trump family carried out a “coordinated White House charm offensive” to persuade Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire in 2018. Trump himself, according to Vanity Fair, “worked for months to assure Kennedy his legacy would be in good hands”.The offensive was a success. Out went self-styled moderate Kennedy, in came the hard-right political operative Brett Kavanaugh.If there is to be a change to the supreme court in 2024, Biden and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have only a few months left to make it happen. And yet they don’t seem too bothered about Sotomayor’s age or health. Last week, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, called it “a personal decision for her to make”.A personal decision? The prospect of a 7-2 conservative supreme court, with a far-right Federalist Soceity apparatchik having taken “liberal queen” Sotomayor’s seat on the bench, should fill us all with dread.Biden, elected Democrats, and liberals and progressives across the board should be both publicly and privately encouraging Sotomayor to consider what she wants her legacy to be, to remember what happened with RBG, and to not take any kind of gamble with the future of our democracy.If insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results, then I’m sorry but a liberal supreme court justice about to enter her 70s and refusing to retire on a Democratic president and Democratic Senate’s watch is nothing short of insane.
      Mehdi Hasan is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Zeteo More

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      Senator Raphael Warnock: ‘The Bible doesn’t need Trump’s endorsement’

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      Donald Trump’s decision to sell Bibles branded under his name is “risky business”, the Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock said on Sunday, as the former president stands accused of having few moral scruples in four separate criminal indictments pending against him.“The Bible does not need Donald Trump’s endorsement,” Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist church, said to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. Speaking on Easter, one of Christianity’s holiest celebrations, Warnock added: “It’s a risky bet because the folks who buy those Bibles might actually open them up, where it says things like thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not bear false witness, where it warns about wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothing.“I think you ought to be careful. This is risky business for somebody like Donald Trump.”Warnock’s comments to CNN came days after the Republican who is running against Joe Biden for a second presidency in November presented an offer for the public to buy Trump-endorsed Bibles for $59.99. “Let’s Make America Pray Again”, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, a clear reference to the “Make America Great Again” slogan that he rode to the White House in 2016.But indeed more than 80 criminal charges filed against Trump over the previous 12 months – including in Warnock’s home state of Georgia – charge the former president with behaving in ways that many true Bible devotees would frown upon.Trump has pleaded not guilty to allegations that he tried to unduly overturn the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to his Democratic rival Biden, improperly retained classified government materials after his presidency, and illicitly covered up hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has claimed to have engaged in extramarital sex with him.He is also facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent and an allegation that he raped a woman – a claim that a judge has determined to be substantially true.Warnock on Sunday said he wasn’t surprised Trump had turned to selling Bibles to help raise funds for his soaring legal bills as well as his presidential campaign. The senator alluded to Trump’s history of hawking – among other things – Trump-branded steaks, non-accredited business school degrees and, more recently, $399 gold sneakers.“Now he’s trying to sell the scriptures,” said Warnock, who was first elected to the US Senate in 2020. “At the end of the day, I think he’s trying to sell the American people a bill of goods.”Warnock went out of his way to mention that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, but recognized that his tact allowed him to triumph in the electoral college. But Warnock remarked: “It did not work in 2020,” when Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes.“And,” the senator said,” I don’t think it’s going to work in 2024.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuring his interview on CNN, Warnock also addressed criticism from Trump and his Republican allies that Biden recognized Transgender Day of Visibility – which falls annually on 31 March – as scheduled on Sunday, even though this year it coincided with Easter.The Republican US House speaker, Mike Johnson, notably asserted that Biden had “betrayed the central tenet of Easter”, something that he called “outrageous and abhorrent”.Warnock, who is part of a succession of Ebenezer Baptist church pastors that includes the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, said the fabricated controversy was another instance of people “who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us”.“Apparently, the speaker finds trans people abhorrent, and I think he ought to think about that,” Warnock said. “The fact of the matter is … March 31 has been a day to lift up transgender people who endure violence and bigotry.“But this is just one more instance of folks … who do not know how to lead us trying to divide us. And this is the opposite of the Christian faith. Jesus centered the marginalized. He centered the poor. And in a moment like this, we need voices, particularly voices of faith, who would use our faith not as a weapon to beat other people down, but as a bridge to bring all of us together.” More

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      Engineers begin removing Baltimore Key Bridge’s mangled wreckage

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      Crews of engineers have begun the dangerous and intricate job of removing the mangled wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge from the Patapsco River outside Baltimore, as top federal government and Maryland state officials stressed Sunday that the health of the US national economy depended on it.Officials took to the political talkshows Sunday to praise the emergency teams that have now amassed in the Patapsco and have started the delicate process of cutting and lifting steel debris from the north side of the destroyed bridge. Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, said the operation was extremely complex.“We have a ship that has nearly the size of the Eiffel Tower that is now stuck within the channel that has the Key Bridge sitting on top of it,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. He added that the bridge collapse, which occurred six days ago when the 985ft cargo ship the Dali lost power and crashed into the structure, was not a local but a national economic catastrophe.“This port is one of the busiest most active ports inside of the country. This is going to impact the farmer in Kentucky, the auto dealer in Ohio, the restaurant owner in Tennessee,” he said.Some 15,000 people are estimated to rely on the Port of Baltimore directly for their livelihoods, with a further 140,000 jobs indirectly affected. The port handles the shipping of more cars and light trucks than any other in the US, and it is also a major hub for agricultural equipment.Last year, more than 1m cargo containers passed through it. That amounted to more than 50m tonnes of foreign cargo, worth about $80bn.Pete Buttigieg, the US transportation secretary, was unable to give CBS News’s Face the Nation a timeline for the removal of the stricken bridge or for its rebuilding. He noted that the original bridge took about five years to construct, though that was not an indication of how long it will take to replace.Buttigieg said that it was possible the Biden administration may have to turn to Congress for approval of federal funds, which are expected to meet up to 90% of the costs of recovery. So far only $60m has been provided from an emergency pot held by the Federal Highway Administration.Asked by CBS News why any skeptical lawmakers should vote for what promises to be a multimillion-dollar project, Buttigieg said: “The pitch is: your district could be next. And this has historically been bipartisan.”James Clyburn, the influential Democratic congress member from South Carolina, underlined that point on NBC’s Meet the Press. “The fact of the matter is, all of us, every state in the nation, all 50 of us, will take our turns needing this kind of assistance,” he said.Clyburn added: “It may be gust storms in some places, it may be a flood, or here in this part of the country, hurricanes. We all are subjected at one time or another to some kind of calamity.”Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, who is Black, addressed the ugly wave of conservative social media attacks against him since the bridge disaster erupted. He was trolled by a user on X as “Baltimore’s DEI mayor”.Asked about the abuse on CBS News’s Face the Nation, Scott said that the backlash was coming from those who were “too afraid to use the N-word”. He added: “I am a young Black man, a young Black mayor. I know how racism goes in this country.”Moore, the state’s Black governor, has also been caught up in the rightwing backlash that has sought to connect the bridge collapse to progressive politics and initiatives promoting the concept of DEI (short for diversity, equity and inclusion), especially after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPhil Lyman, who is running for governor of Utah, posted on social media after the disaster occurred that “this is what happens when you have governors who prioritize diversity over the well-being and security of citizens.”Unlike Scott, Moore refused to respond to the trolling Sunday. Asked by CNN whether he thought the attacks were racist, he replied: “I have no time for foolishness. I’m making sure we can get closure and comfort to these families … I have no time for foolishness, and so I’m not going to delve into it.”The rescue operation has been taken up a notch by the arrival on location of a massive crane that can lift 1,000 tonnes, along with six other floating cranes also now at the site of the disaster. According to Associated Press, the clean-up teams also now include 10 tugboats, nine barges and eight salvage vessels.A top priority of emergency workers is to address the human tragedy of the bridge collapse. Eight construction workers were working on the bridge in the early hours of Tuesday when the disaster happened. Only two of them survived.The bodies of two workers, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, who were trapped underwater in their vehicle, have been recovered. Four other workers, who are presumed to have died, have yet to be found.Scott said that a fund set up to help the families of those who died has reached over $300,000. “We will support them throughout this, and that could mean ongoing trauma care in the future,” he said.Beyond the lives lost, the main structural priority at the site of the collapsed bridge is first to open a channel for smaller boats to be able to enter and exit the port. The main goal of allowing big ships in and out is expected to take much longer.Recovery operations are being hampered by the murkiness of the water in which the wreckage is partially submerged. Sunken metal beams also increase the perilousness of the work. More

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      The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians review – unpicking the lexicon of America’s leaders

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      Politicians mince or mash words for a living, and the virtuosity with which they twist meanings makes them artists of a kind. Their skill at spinning facts counts as a fictional exercise: in political jargon, a “narrative” is a storyline that warps truth for partisan purposes. Carlos Lozada, formerly a reviewer for the Washington Post and now a columnist at the New York Times, specialises in picking apart these professional falsehoods. Analysing windy orations, ghostwritten memoirs and faceless committee reports, the essays in his book expose American presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices as unreliable narrators, inveterate deceivers who betray themselves in careless verbal slips.Lozada has a literary critic’s sharp eye, and an alertly cocked ear to go with it. Thus he fixes on a stray remark made by Trump as he rallied the mob that invaded the Capitol in January 2021. Ordering the removal of metal detectors, he said that the guns his supporters toted didn’t bother him, because “they’re not here to hurt me”. Lozada wonders about the emphasis in that phrase: did it neutrally fall on “hurt” or come down hard on “me”? If the latter, it licensed the rampant crowd to hurt Trump’s enemies – for instance by stringing up his disaffected vice-president Mike Pence on a gallows outside the Capitol.Tiny linguistic tics mark the clash between two versions of America’s fabled past and its prophetic future. Lozada subtly tracks the recurrence of the word “still” in Biden’s speeches – for instance his assertion that the country “still believes in honesty and decency” and is “still a democracy” – and contrasts it with Trump’s reliance on “again”, the capstone of his vow to Make America Great Again. Biden’s “still” defensively fastens on “something good that may be slipping away”, whereas Trump’s “again” blathers about restoring a lost greatness that is never defined. Biden’s evokes “an ideal worth preserving”; Trump’s equivalent summons up an illusion.At their boldest, Lozada’s politicians trade in inflated tales about origins and predestined outcomes, grandiose narratives that “transcend belief and become a fully formed worldview”. Hence the title of Hillary Clinton’s manifesto It Takes a Village, which borrows an African proverb about child-rearing and uses it to prompt nostalgia for a bygone America. Lozada watches Obama devising and revising a personal myth. Addressed as Barry by his youthful friends, he later insisted on being called Barack and relaunched himself as the embodiment of America’s ethnic inclusivity; his “personalised presidency” treated the office as an extension of “the Obama brand”. In this respect Trump was Obama’s logical successor, extending a personal brand in a bonanza of self-enrichment. The “big lie” about the supposedly stolen 2020 election is another mythological whopper. Trump admitted its falsity on one occasion when he remarked “We lost”, after which he immediately backtracked, adding: “We didn’t lose. We lost in the Democrats’ imagination.”All this amuses Lozada but also makes him anxious. As an adoptive American – born in Peru, he became a citizen a decade ago – he has a convert’s faith in the country’s ideals, yet he worries about contradictions that the national creed strains to reconcile. A border wall now debars the impoverished masses welcomed by the Statue of Liberty; the sense of community is fractured by “sophisticated engines of division and misinformation”. Surveying dire fictional scenarios about American decline, Lozada notes that the warmongers enjoy “a narrative advantage”: peace is boring, but predictions of a clash with China or an attack by homegrown terrorists excite the electorate by promising shock, awe and an apocalyptic barrage of special effects. Rather than recoiling from Trump, do Americans share his eagerness for desecration and destruction?Changing only the names of the performers, The Washington Book has a shadowy local replica. Here in Britain, too, ideological posturing has replaced reasoned argument, and buzzwords are squeezed to death by repetition. Whenever Sunak drones on about “delivering for the British people”, I think of him as a Deliveroo gig worker with a cooling takeaway in his backpack, or a weary postman pushing a trolley full of mortgage bills.Though such verbal vices are international, a difference of scale separates Washington from Westminster. In America, heroic ambition is brought low by errors of judgment or moral flaws that for Lozada recall “the great themes of literature and the great struggles of life”: Kennedy’s risky confrontations with Cuba, Lyndon Johnson mired in Vietnam, Nixon overcome by paranoia. To set against these tragic falls, we have only the comic spectacle of Boris Johnson gurning on a zip wire or Liz Truss vaingloriously granting an interview atop the Empire State Building; neither of them had the good grace to jump off. American politics is dangerously thrilling because it is so consequential for the rest of the world. In Britain we are doomed to sit through a more trivial show, an unfunny farce played out in a theatre that is crumbling around us. More

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      US election workers face thousands of threats – so why so few prosecutions?

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      Shortly before midnight on 14 February 2021, James Clark tapped out a message on his home computer in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, that would change his own life and shatter the peace of mind of several others.Clark, then 38, was surfing the internet having been drinking and taking drugs. Social media platforms were overflowing with heated debate around Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him.Five days earlier, Trump’s second impeachment trial had opened over his alleged incitement of the insurrection at the US Capitol. Over in the battleground state of Arizona the online debate was especially raucous, with conspiracy theories raging that the vote count had been rigged.Though Clark lived 2,700 miles away from Phoenix, the Arizona capital, he felt driven to intervene. He found the contact page of the state’s top election official and typed: “Your attorney general needs to resign by Tuesday February 16th by 9am or the explosive device impacted in her personal space will be detonated.”Then he signed the message “Donny Dee”, and hit send.Clark’s bomb threat was discovered two days later, with instant seismic effect. Terrified staff fled from the state executive office building, sniffer dogs scoured several floors, and top state officials had to shelter in place.Four months after the panic at the Arizona executive building, the US Department of Justice circulated a memo to all federal prosecutors and FBI agents. There had been a “significant increase in the threat of violence against Americans who administer free and fair elections”, the memo said.The increase in threats amounted to “a threat to democracy. We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders.”The memo announced the formation of a new unit within the justice department, the election threats taskforce. Its job was to respond to a phenomenon that had barely existed before Trump unleashed his 2020 stolen election lie – violent and abusive messages, including death threats, specifically targeting election officials and their families.The taskforce was devised as a crack multi-disciplinary team bringing together experts from across the justice department and linking them with local FBI and US attorney offices. Its mission: to protect election officials from the intimidation let loose by Trump, by coming down hard on perpetrators.As the November presidential election fast approaches, the taskforce faces its greatest challenge. With Trump back on the ballot, and with swing states such as Arizona continuing to be roiled by election denial, the federal unit is at the frontlines of what promises to be a combustible election year.Much is riding on it. The Brennan Center, a non-partisan law and policy institute, has estimated that since 2020, three election officials have quit their jobs on average every two days – that’s equivalent to about one in five of those who run US elections nationwide bowing out in the face of toxic hostility.View image in fullscreen“What the election threats taskforce does this year is going to be critical,” said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program. “They have the biggest megaphone, and they need to use it to make clear that threats of violence against election workers are illegal and will not be tolerated.”Day-to-day efforts of the taskforce are headed by John Keller, principal deputy chief of the public integrity section of the justice department’s criminal division. As the election year gets under way, his team is preparing itself for whatever lies ahead amid a collapse of confidence among some sections of American society in election results – and by extension, election workers – which Keller described as “incredibly concerning”.“Any criminal threat to an election official that seeks to intimidate them, or change their behavior or how they perform their critical functions, is a significant problem,” he told the Guardian. “The election community in the current climate feels attacked, they are scared, and the department recognizes that.”As part of those preparations, the election threats taskforce is stepping up its contact with election administrators from coast to coast. Since its inception, the team has held more than 100 trainings and engagements with election officials and regional prosecutors to share knowledge on how to deal with hostile attacks.Over the next eight months the taskforce will continue to hold a series of tabletop exercises in which federal experts and their regional partners role-play responses to possible worst-case scenarios, from serious death threats aimed at election administrators to bomb threats against polling places or other election infrastructure. Similar war games will act out what would happen in the event of a cybersecurity attack or attempt to bring down the power grid on election day.At the core of the taskforce’s operations are criminal prosecutions of the most serious threats against election staff and volunteers. In almost three years, the unit has prosecuted 16 cases involving 18 defendants, two of whom are women.Ten perpetrators have so far been sentenced, with punishments ranging from 30 days to 3.5 years in prison. A further three people have pleaded guilty, and five have been charged and are awaiting plea deals or trials.Clark was sentenced to 3.5 years’ imprisonment earlier this month for his Arizona bomb threat. At his sentencing hearing in federal district court in Phoenix, a prosecutor from the election threats taskforce requested a strong deterrent punishment, pointing out that within minutes of sending his threat Clark had searched online for information on “how to kill” the then secretary of state.Arizona is the ground zero of election threats, accounting for seven of the taskforce’s 16 prosecutions. On Monday Joshua Russell was sentenced to 30 months in prison in federal court in Phoenix for leaving a series of voicemails in 2022 for Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic governor of Arizona who was then acting as secretary of state.He said: “Your days are extremely numbered. America’s coming for you, and you will pay with your life, you communist traitor.”One of the striking features of the taskforce is the relatively few cases it has prosecuted compared with the mountain of hostile communications that has been dumped on the election community in the Trump era. In its early stages, the unit invited election offices around the country to forward all the offensive material to its Washington headquarters and was inundated with thousands of obscene, abusive and hostile messages.View image in fullscreenBut when it pored over the reports it found that up to 95% of them failed to meet the threshold for conducting even a criminal investigation, let alone prosecution. That standard was set by the US supreme court in the 2003 ruling Virginia v Black, which weighed the need to shield public servants from criminal threats of violence against the robust protections for political speech under the first amendment of the US constitution.The court’s conclusion was that for a communication to be a crime it has to be a “true threat”. The justices defined that as a “serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence”.Most of the messages reviewed by the taskforce were distressing and inappropriate, certainly, but in its analysis fell short of that criminal bar. They were indirect rather than direct, implicit rather than explicit, ambiguous and aspirational rather than an active statement of intent to carry out illegal violence.“The difference between what is criminally actionable, and what feels like a threat to an election administrator on the ground, is an inherent problem in this space. What is potentially actionable is closer to dozens of cases, compared with the thousands of hostile communications we have received,” Keller said.Despite the legal complexities of a “true threat”, some at the receiving end of the vitriol are calling for more urgent action. Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s current secretary of state whose office has been the target of several of the most serious threats, told the Guardian that in his view it was taking “monstrously long” for federal prosecutors to secure sentences.He called for an increase in penalties, and a broadening of the scope of what constitutes a criminal threat against election officials. “I don’t know that the federal bureaucracy has been nimble enough. They’re not treating it like the domestic terrorism that it is,” he said.Bill Gates, a Republican supervisor with Arizona’s largest constituency, Maricopa county which covers Phoenix, is quitting his job as a top election administrator after the November election in part because of the terrifying threats he and his family have suffered. He also called on the taskforce to step up the intensity of its operations at this critical moment.“I’m grateful for what they’ve done, but we feel like they could do more,” he said. “We all feel that the January 6 prosecutions [over the attack on the US Capitol] have been very aggressive and well-publicized, and we’d like to see the same level when it comes to threats against election workers.”The taskforce said that the 12- to 24-month gestation period for its election threats prosecutions was similar to any other federal case, from violent crime to fraud. Keller agreed though that deterrence was vital.View image in fullscreen“The deterrent value of the cases is critical. Like most things in most spaces, I’m sure that we could do more and do better, and we are trying to come up with new ways to attract more attention to this work to maximize that deterrent impact,” he said.It’s not just legal constraints that affect the number and speed of prosecutions, there are other technical hurdles that the taskforce has to negotiate. Identifying perpetrators who disguise themselves by using foreign internet service providers or burner phones can be a challenge, and subpoenas seeking the information from companies such as Facebook and Twitter or Verizon and AT&T usually take six to eight weeks.Against such impediments, the taskforce is hoping to build up resilience against the anti-democratic onslaught by improving communications between the central justice department and the FBI’s 56 field offices and 94 US attorney’s offices around the country. Each FBI office has an election crime coordinator, working in tandem with the taskforce’s election community liaison officer.The network has been used to share information about how to deal with growing problems such as swatting – hoax calls to 911 reporting crimes or fires at public officials’ homes. Lists are being compiled of potential swatting targets in sensitive areas like Maricopa county so that officers are aware that the emergency calls may be false as soon as they come in.Norden of the Brennan Center said that as the election year hots up, relationships between beleaguered local election workers and the powerful federal hub will become ever more important. “The taskforce’s presence lets election officials know the federal government has their backs. That’s essential, because a lot of them, particularly in the immediate aftermath, felt kind of abandoned.” More

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      William Delahunt, former congressman of Massachusetts, dies aged 82

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      Longtime Democratic congressman William D Delahunt, who postponed his own retirement from Washington to help pass the Barack Obama presidency’s legislative agenda, has died after a long-term illness, his family announced.Delahunt died Saturday at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts, at the age of 82, news reports said.Delahunt served 14 years in the US House, from 1997 to 2011, representing Massachusetts’s 10th congressional district. He also was the Norfolk county district attorney from 1975 to 1996 after serving in the Massachusetts state House from 1973 to 1975.The Delahunt family issued a statement Saturday saying he passed away “peacefully” but did not disclose his specific cause of death, news reports said.“While we mourn the loss of such a tremendous person, we also celebrate his remarkable life and his legacy of dedication, service, and inspiration,” the statement said. “We could always turn to him for wisdom, solace and a laugh, and his absence leaves a gaping hole in our family and our hearts.”Democratic US senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts lauded Delahunt’s long public service as a legislator in the nation’s capital and a prosecutor in a county south of Boston.“I met with Bill in Quincy in February, and he was clear and as committed as ever to working on behalf of the … people of Massachusetts,” Markey said in a statement. “It is a fitting honor that the door of the William D Delahunt Norfolk county courthouse opens every day so that the people inside can do the hard work of making lives better, as Bill Delahunt did.”President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela posted a statement on Twitter/X mourning Delahunt’s passing. As a member of Congress, Delahunt brokered a 2005 deal with then Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to obtain heating oil for low-income Massachusetts residents, according to news reports. Delahunt also attended Chavez’s state funeral in Caracas in March 2013.Delahunt stepped down from the US House in January 2011. He told the Boston Globe he had previously considered retirement, but the late Massachusetts US senator Ted Kennedy convinced him he was needed to help pass Obama’s legislative initiatives at the time.Delahunt was an early Obama backer. He became the first member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation to endorse the Illinois senator’s presidential bid, according to reporting by the Patriot Ledger, the newspaper in Delahunt’s home town, Quincy.Announcing his retirement in March 2010, Delahunt said Kennedy’s death the previous year turned his thoughts to finding time for priorities beyond Washington.“It became clear that I wanted to spend my time, the time that I have left, with my family, with my friends and with my loved ones,” Delahunt said. More