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      Trump campaign attacks Biden over recognition of Transgender Day of Visibility

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      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’s 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.“We call on Joe Biden’s … White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only – the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” said the Trump campaign’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.US House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on social media that the “Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter” and called the president’s declaration “outrageous and abhorrent”.Biden devoutly attends Catholic mass and considers his religious upbringing to be a core part of his morality and identity. In 2021, he met with Pope Francis at the Vatican and afterward told reporters that the pontiff said he was a “good Catholic” who should keep receiving Communion.But Biden’s political stances in support of gay marriage and for women having the right to abortion have put him at odds with many conservative Christians.Trump’s allies took aim at Biden’s Transgender Day of Visibility proclamation as the former president prepares for a criminal trial tentatively set for 15 April. In that case, he is charged with improperly covering up hush-money paid to an adult film actor who claims to have previously had an extramarital sexual encounter with him.Despite being put under a gag order in the case preventing him from making inflammatory comments about the judge in the case or the judge’s family members, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Saturday that the judge “should be immediately sanctioned and recused”. The post contained a link to a New York Post article about the judge’s daughter, who runs a political consulting firm that works with Democrats.Trump is also battling charges for attempting to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election as well as retaining classified materials after his presidency. And furthermore, he is facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices deemed fraudulent and a rape allegation that a judge has found to be substantially true. More

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      Ronna McDaniel mess shows problem of politics-to-pundit conveyor belt

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      It should have been a straightforward appointment in the often lucrative world of political punditry: a former high-ranking party official making the move from actual politics to America’s television screens with a mission to pontificate, opine and spin.US cable news is littered with such figures: ex-congresspeople, former presidential candidates, reformed spin doctors, one-time campaign leaders. All of them on fat contracts for sitting behind desks and arguing the political talking points of the day.So it was somewhat of a surprise when NBC’s hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel triggered a staff revolt, legal fights, endless inches of bad press and a stunning media conflagration that seemed set to burn down America’s premier liberal cable news network, MSNBC. It also ended in McDaniel being canned last week shortly after her appointment was announced.But in an American political landscape still being profoundly reshaped by Donald Trump and his conspiracy-laden rhetoric – especially when it comes to the big lie of a stolen 2020 election – more savvy network bosses should perhaps have expected the turmoil.McDaniel presented a conundrum. On one hand, she had served as Trump’s chosen RNC chair from early 2017, through the turbulence of January 6 Capitol riot, winning re-election to the post in unanimous elections in both 2019 and 2021. Her perspective could be a valuable resource.But along the way, she had participated in a 2020 phone call pressuring Michigan county officials not to certify the vote from the Detroit area. “Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” she had said. She has been far from dismissive when it comes to Trump’s promotion of the idea of widespread electoral fraud in the US. For many McDaniel was not just a career politico; she had sought to help a bid to subvert an election.For any network, but especially NBC and its liberal MSNBC sibling, McDaniel’s role in being a threat to American democracy could not be ignored. On her first appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday McDaniel said that the Capitol riot “doesn’t represent our country. It certainly does not represent my party.”But she was immediately grilled as to why she hadn’t said that earlier. “When you’re the RNC chair, you … you kind of take one for the whole team right now. I get to be a little bit more myself, right?” she suggested.Apparently not. Her words were nowhere near enough to quell a rebellion within the broadcaster. The MSNBC anchors Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough condemned the move, along with Jen Psaki (herself fresh from serving as White House spokesperson), Mika Brzezinski and NBC’s Chuck Todd.Maddow said the choice to hire McDaniel was “inexplicable” and accused her employer of giving airtime to someone who is “about undermining elections and going after democracy”. Todd said that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”The rage continued for several days, and soon McDaniel was gone. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” Cesar Conde, NBCUniversal’s News Group chairman, wrote to staff. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”Previously it had been typical that the head of talent at a broadcaster made the hires, and newsroom employees went along with it, right or wrong. But these are no longer normal times in America: Trump is virtually certain to be the 2024 Republican nominee and frequently leads Joe Biden in the polls, despite continuing to voice his 2020 election fraud lies.“There are continuous arguments at the networks about how to give voice to the conservative side of the equation without giving voice to fringe elements,” said Rick Ellis, author of the Substack newsletter Too Much TV. “If NBC News had said, yeah, we’re going to have her on our shows to hear her point of view, there wouldn’t have been so much squawking. The tipping point was that she was going to be a paid analyst.”MSNBC already employs one former RNC chair. Michael Steele works as an on-air analyst and host of a weekend show. He, however, did not try to reverse the result of an election.McDaniel has yet to comment, but Politico reported she is considering legal options and expects to be paid out in full for her reported $600,000 two-year deal. A “person close to McDaniel” was quoted criticizing NBC for allowing its talent “to drag Ronna through the mud and make it seem like they were innocent bystanders”.The incident plays into a wider debate about partisanship in the US media. The McDaniel’s blowup follows well-publicized efforts by CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery to broaden its political perspective, an effort that led to the firing of the CNN chief executive, Chris Licht.In statement, the RNC hinted it could pull NBC’s credentials from its convention in Milwaukee this summer. “We are taking a hard look at what this means for NBC’s participation at the convention,” said Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for the RNC and the Trump campaign.But McDaniel and NBC’s predicament also speaks to a larger issue – that of a plush-carpeted corridor between political and media jobs that undermines the integrity of both. In many ways, the only people this system satisfied were the bosses and the pundits. At a time of an extraordinary American election McDaniel and NBC found out that was no longer enough.“There’s entirely too much of this highway between working in the White House or in Congress and ending up on cable news. I understand that its helpful because they know how government works, but the problem is they’re seen coastal or Beltway perspectives and they push out other voices that would be helpful to have in the mix,” said Ellis. More

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      Congressman rebuked for call to bomb Gaza ‘like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’

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      Rather than provide humanitarian aid in Gaza, the US should ensure it is subjected to atomic bombing the way that “Nagasaki and Hiroshima” were at the end of the second world war, a Republican congressman said in shocking remarks that by all indications were recorded recently at a gathering with a relatively small group of his constituents.The comments by US House representative Tim Walberg of Michigan drew condemnation from progressive political quarters, including from some who expressed disbelief that a former Christian pastor would advocate for what they called the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.“A sitting US rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing privately about genocide,” said a user on X who circulated video of Walberg’s comments late Friday. A reply to that comment read: “Exactly what Jesus would do, right?”Entries on Walberg’s congressional calendar – along with videos on social media – establish that he met with members of the public in Dundee, Michigan, on 25 March. As Mediaite recounted Saturday, a clip of the session that was posted on YouTube and other sites, and recorded by an activist, showed Walberg telling his audience that the US should not spend a “dime” on humanitarian aid in Gaza, where Israel has been carrying out a military campaign for months.The aid would be better spent on supporting Israel, which Walberg labeled the US’s “greatest ally, arguably, anywhere in the world”.“It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” Walberg said, alluding to the Japanese cities where the US dropped atomic bombs at the end of the second world war, killing hundreds of thousands of people. “Get it over quick.”Walberg also spoke in favor of affording similar treatment to Ukraine, which has been defending itself from a Russian military invasion since 2022. But Walberg said the purpose there would be to topple Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s forces expeditiously rather than spend the bulk of US “funding for Ukraine … for humanitarian purposes” as the war there dragged out.“Defeat Putin quick,” Walberg said.Once video footage of Walberg’s pronouncements went viral, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement denouncing the congressman’s declarations as a “clear call to genocide”.“This … should be condemned by all Americans who value human life and international law,” Cair’s executive director, Dawud Walid, said in a statement.Walid, whose group is the US’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, added: “To so casually call for what would result in the killing of every human being in Gaza sends the chilling message that Palestinian lives have no value.”A spokesperson for Walberg’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.Israel began carrying out an air and ground onslaught in Gaza after Hamas attacked on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking hostages. The military strikes in Gaza have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, and the US said Friday that the Israeli campaign had probably already pushed the area into famine.Some of the Joe Biden White House’s fellow Democrats have been increasingly pressuring the president to cut off the almost $4bn in military aid that the US provides annually to Israel, which has persistently hindered the delivery of humanitarian relief in Gaza. On 26 March, the US abstained from a United Nations vote that saw 14 other members ratify a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, leaving Israel nearly isolated on the global political stage.Nonetheless, within days, Reuters reported that Biden’s administration had authorized the transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs and fighter jets to Israel, whom Republicans in the US like Walberg generally support steadfastly.“We should be resourcing Israel just like they want to – to kill Hamas on their own,” Walberg said at the meeting in Dundee.Walberg was first elected to Congress in 2007. He reportedly entered the year with more than $1.1m in campaign funds as he prepared to seek a ninth term in the US House. More

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      ‘My jaw dropped’: Annie Jacobsen on her scenario for nuclear war

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      Annie Jacobsen was a high school student in 1983, when ABC television broadcast the film The Day After, about the horrors of nuclear war. She never forgot the experience. More than 100 million Americans watched and were terrified too. One of them lived in the White House. According to his biographer and his own memoirs, it helped turn Ronald Reagan into a nuclear disarmer in his second term.Not long after, the world’s stockpile of nuclear warheads peaked and began to decline rapidly, from 70,000 to just over 12,000 currently, according to the Federation of American Scientists.That is still enough however to reduce the Earth to a radioactive desert, with some warheads left over to make it glow. Meanwhile, the global situation is arguably the most dangerous since the Cuban missile crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinding on mercilessly and China contemplating following Moscow’s example by making a grab for Taiwan.The danger of nuclear war is as immediate as ever but it has faded from public discourse, which is why Jacobsen, now a journalist and author, felt driven to write her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario.“For decades, people were under the assumption that the nuclear threat ended when the Berlin Wall went down,” Jacobsen said, before suggesting another reason the existential threat of nuclear weapons has been filtered out of mainstream discourse – it has been turned into a technical debate.“​​Nuclear weapons and the whole nomenclature around them have been so rarefied it’s been reserved as a subject for those in the know,” she said.In her book, Jacobsen seeks to break through jargon and details in order to tell a terrifying story in a devastatingly straightforward way. The spoiler alert is that it doesn’t end well.As the book promises on the cover, it presents a single scenario for a nuclear war, set in the present day. North Korea, perhaps convinced it is about to be attacked, launches a surprise missile strike against the US, leading Washington to respond with a salvo of 50 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). These are aimed at North Korea’s weapons sites and command centres, but in order to reach their intended targets the missiles have to fly over Russia, because they do not have the range to use any other route.All too aware of the danger of miscalculation, the US president tries to get hold of his Russian counterpart. But the two men and the countries they run are not getting on, and he fails. Making things even worse, Russia’s dodgy satellite early warning system, Tundra, has exaggerated the scale of the US salvo, and from his Siberian bunker, the Russian president (Vladimir Putin in all but name) orders an all-out nuclear attack on the US.The scenario is based on known facts concerning the world’s nuclear arsenals, systems and doctrine. Those facts are all in the public domain, but Jacobsen believes society has tuned them out, despite (or perhaps because of) how shocking they are.Jacobsen was stunned to find out that an ICBM strike against North Korea would have to go over Russia, and that Russia’s early warning system is beset with glitches, an especially worrying fact when combined with the knowledge that both the US and Russia have part of their nuclear arsenals ready to launch at a few minutes’ notice. Both also have an option in their nuclear doctrine to “launch on warning”, without waiting for the first incoming warhead to land.View image in fullscreenA US president would have a few minutes to make a decision if American early warning systems signaled an incoming attack. In those few minutes, he or she would have to process an urgent, complex and inevitably incomplete stream of information and advice from top defence officials. Jacobsen points out that in such circumstances the president is likely to be subject to “jamming”, a chorus of military voices urging he or she follows protocols which lead inexorably towards a retaliatory launch.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“My jaw dropped at so much of what I learned, which was not classified but had just been removed or rather sanitised from the public discourse,” she said. “I found myself constantly surprised by the insanity of what I learned, coupled with the fact that it’s all there for the public to know.”Ultimately, only presidents can make the decision and once it is made, no one has the authority to block it. It is called sole authority, and it is almost certainly the most frightening fact in the world today. It means a handful of men each have the power to end the world in a few minutes, without having to consult anyone.It is not a group anyone would choose to have that responsibility, including as it does the likes of Putin and Kim Jong-un. In Washington it is a choice this year between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. They all bring a lot of human frailty, anger, fear and paranoia to a potential decision that could end the planet.“You would want to have a commander-in-chief who is of sound mind, who is fully in control of his mental capacity, who is not volatile, who is not subject to anger,” Jacobsen said, referring to this year’s presidential election.“These are significant character qualities that should be thought about when people vote for president, for the simple reason that the president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.”
      Nuclear War: A Scenario is published in the US by Dutton More

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      Ex-Trump adviser says former president ‘hasn’t got the brains’ for dictatorship

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      A former national security adviser in the Donald Trump White House has said that the ex-president “hasn’t got the brains” to helm a dictatorship, despite his admiration for such rulers.In an interview with the conservative French outlet Le Figaro, John Bolton, 75, was asked whether Trump had tendencies that mirror dictators like the ones he has previously praised. Bolton not only disparaged Trump’s intellectual capacity, he also disparaged the former president’s professional background, exclaiming: “He’s a property developer, for God’s sake!”Now a vocal critic of Trump, Bolton served as the former president’s national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. Bolton had previously served as US ambassador to the UN during George W Bush’s presidency, developing a reputation as a foreign policy hawk.Bolton’s remarks to Le Figaro suggesting Trump is not smart enough to be a dictator will almost certainly do little to allay fears on the political left at home or abroad about a second Trump presidency.After all, Trump has suggested he plans to be a dictator, if only for the first day of his presidency if he were re-elected.Meanwhile, as seeks a second term in the White House, the incumbent Joe Biden has warned that Trump – the lone remaining contender for the Republican nomination – and his allies are “determined to destroy American democracy”. Trump recently provided fuel for that argument by hosting Hungary’s autocratic prime minister Viktor Orbán at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.Trump, furthermore, is known to have lavished praise on leaders considered opposed to US democratic ideals and foreign policy interests, including North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and China’s Xi Jinping.Bolton nonetheless claimed Trump – who is grappling with more than 80 pending criminal charges as well as multimillion-dollar civil penalties – lacks the kind of coherent political philosophy effective dictators require. He also said Trump does not like to “get involved in policy analysis or decision-making in the way we normally use those terms”.For Trump, Bolton added: “Everything is episodic, anecdotal, transactional. And everything is contingent on the question of how this will benefit Donald Trump.”Such disparagements from Bolton – who advocated for the Trump White House to withdraw from a deal with Iran aimed at dissuading it from developing nuclear weapons – are not new. In a new foreword to his account of his work for Trump’s presidency, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton warns that Trump was limited to worrying about punishing his personal enemies and appeasing US adversaries Russia and China.“Trump is unfit to be president,” Bolton writes. And though he may not think Trump can foster a dictatorship, Bolton has warned: “If his first four years were bad, a second four will be worse.”Trump has seemingly leaned into such predictions. He stoked alarm at a campaign rally earlier in March when – while musing about how foreign car production affects the US auto industry – he said: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.”His use of the word “bloodbath” recalled provocative language Trump has used previously, including describing immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country”.He told a rally in New Hampshire last year that he wanted to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.After that remark, Biden attacked Trump for his use of the world “vermin”, saying Trump’s language “echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany” as Adolf Hitler rose to power and orchestrated the murders of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.In his interview with Le Figaro, Bolton said it was “very likely” that Trump would act on his threat to pull the US out of the Nato military alliance if he were re-elected. In recent months, Trump has repeated his threat not to protect countries whom he believes do not pay enough to maintain the security alliance, and he claimed that European members of the alliance “laugh at the stupidity” of the US.“Trump, when he has an idea, comes back to it again and again, then gets distracted, forgets, but eventually comes back to it and acts on it,” Bolton warned. “That’s why leaving Nato is a real possibility. A lot of people think it’s just a negotiating tool, but I don’t think so.” More

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      Politician who attended Charlottesville white-supremacist rally faces recall

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      Voters in the north-west Oklahoma city of Enid are being asked to decide whether a councilmember who attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 should be removed from his post.Iraq war veteran Judd Blevins, 42, was elected to Enid’s city council to be the commissioner of its first ward last year. He soon faced an effort by the Enid social justice committee, which claimed Blevins “embraces the same Nazi ideology [the US] defeated almost 80 years ago” during the second world war.Accusations against Blevins levelled by the group are not limited to his attendance in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazi groups protested the removal of a Confederate monument in a demonstration that led to the murder of a counterprotester.He also has been linked to chatroom posts planning the march, and posted hate group propaganda and recruited members to Identity Evropa, a white-supremacist group that has been disbanded.In addition to the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer, the Charlottesville rally was marked by a state police helicopter crash that killed two.Blevins’ election to office came after a local newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle, ran a story about his ties to white nationalism.“Our initial desire was for either Judd Blevins to address these questions and denounce any sense of neo-Nazism or white supremacy or for Enid’s leadership to step up and get those answers and demand those answers,” the committee’s James Neal said in a petition to remove Blevins.He added: “Neither of those things have occurred, and we are left to take it to the voters, to the people, to address the issue.”In his response, Blevins said: “Regrettably, this fringe group has chosen to continue a smear campaign against me.” He maintained that the effort to remove him would be an added cost to taxpayers.He invoked the wishes of his predecessor, Jerry Allen, who had said: “Mr Blevins deserves the respect of the office, and I hope you give him the opportunity that I was given many years ago.”Blevins noted his achievements, including voting for a movie theater in his ward, storm water drainage improvements and the opening of a branch of the Texas Roadhouse steak restaurant chain. Blevins added that voters had elected him “because they believed I was the best candidate who shared their values, their concerns and their hopes for the future of Enid”.In November, a resolution to censure Blevins for his failure to explain or apologize for aligning himself with white nationalists was brought before the city council. The measure was then dropped after a fellow commissioner, Derwin Norwood, the only Black member of the city governing body, said he accepted Blevins’ statement that he was opposed “to all forms of racial hatred, racial discrimination and any form of government that would suppress the rights that are enshrined in our constitution”.Blevins acknowledged in recent days that he participated in the Charlottesville rally, where white nationalists held a tiki torch-light parade across the University of Virginia campus chanting “Jews will not replace us” and said he had been connected to Identity Evropa.But he repeated that he is “opposed to all forms of racial hate and racial discrimination”.He told a community forum that his involvement in the rally and ties to Identity Evropa were to bring “attention to the same issues” that won Donald Trump the presidency in 2016.Those included, he said, “securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, pushing back on … anti-white hatred”.When voters go to the polls on 2 April to decide whether Blevins should continue in office, they could opt to replace him with his opponent, Cheryl Patterson, a grandmother and longtime youth leader at an area church, who is also a Republican.One of the organizers of Blevins’ recall push, Democrat Nancy Presnall, told the Associated Press: “There are people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who are totally together with us on this. This isn’t a Republican-Democrat thing. It’s a Nazi and not-Nazi thing.”However the vote falls, some of the city’s 50,000 residents are concerned about lasting damage to Enid’s reputation. Some residents blamed a decline in newspaper readership and voter apathy, particularly in municipal elections, for allowing a small group of hard-core Blevins supporters to help him with the seat by a margin of 36 votes out of 808 cast.Neal, who is pastor of the Holy Cross Orthodox-Catholic church in Enid, agreed with that assessment, saying: “I think a lot of people in the community, myself included, thought that he had no chance of winning,” Neal said. “The people who support that ideology are very passionate and very dedicated, and up until this point we haven’t been.”The pastor added: “This has been galvanizing and helped us get off our asses, quite frankly, and fight back.” More

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      Trump rebuked for sharing video showing Biden hog-tied on pickup truck

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      Donald Trump drew an angry response from the Joe Biden White House as well as other opponents after he posted a video containing the image of the president hog-tied on the tailgate of a passing pickup truck.The Biden campaign communications director, Michael Tyler, said the provocative image of the truck festooned with Trump 2024 insignia on Friday night could be construed as suggesting physical harm toward the former president’s political rival.“Trump is regularly inciting political violence and it’s time people take him seriously – just ask the Capitol police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6,” Tyler said, referring to the day in early 2021 when the ex-president’s supporters attacked Congress.The Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, replied that the picture in question depicted the back of a pickup truck that was traveling down the highway.“Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against president Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him,” Cheung said.Cheung’s remark was a clear reference to more than 80 criminal charges pending against Trump for attempts to forcibly overturn his defeat to Biden in the 2020 election, retention of classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments. Trump is also facing multimillion-dollar civil penalties for business practices that have been deemed fraudulent and a rape claim which a judge has determined to be substantially true.The image of Biden in the truck as well as the reaction to it cap another week of scripted – and unscripted – drama on a presidential campaign trail that is becoming increasingly tense.Biden’s polling number have risen in crucial swing states since a punchy State of the Union address. And his campaign is beating presumptive Republican nominee Trump in fundraising to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.On Thursday night, Biden held a fundraiser at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall with former Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The glitzy event raised a reported $25m, though it was repeatedly interrupted by demonstrators protesting against the military aid that Biden’s administration has provided to Israel in its strikes in Gaza.Trump, meanwhile, was at the wake of New York police officer Jonathan Diller, 31, who was shot to death during a traffic stop. The former president called Diller’s murder “a horrible thing” and said “police are the greatest people we have”.Yet Trump’s remarks also earned him criticism, with commenters noting that the January 6 US Capitol attack carried out by his supporters injured dozens of officers. The attack – a failed, desperate effort to keep Trump in office despite his defeat to Biden – was also linked to some officers’ suicides.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, a caption on the video with the image of a hog-tied Biden said it had been taken in Long Island, New York, just as the former president attended Diller’s memorial and condemned the violence that killed the officer.Trump’s posting of the hog-tie video comes less than three weeks before the former president is due to stand trial in a criminal case alleging that he covered up payments to two women ahead of the 2016 election to suppress information about extramarital sexual encounters they said he had with them years earlier.The prosecutor in that case, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has also been the subject of violent pictorial representation posted by Trump. The former president last year shared a picture showing him holding a baseball bat next to Bragg. More

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      ‘Feeble, desperate, mentally unfit’: Biden changes tack to mock Trump

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      With November set to be one of the most consequential elections in US history, it would be understandable if Donald Trump and Joe Biden reached for soaring, lofty rhetoric: if they attempted to match the high-minded ideals of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the nation’s founding fathers.American voters, and the country’s political class, are long used to Trump’s insult-laden and often crude rhetoric. “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit,” Trump said in Georgia earlier this month, during a rally at which he also also mocked Biden’s stutter.But recently Biden and his campaign team appear to have decided to fight fire with fire, after previously seeking to stay above the fray. It’s a shift that seems to accept that Trump has moved the standards of US politics and that it’s more effective to embrace that notion than remain out of the fight.But it also probably reflects the unique threat that Trump’s bid to return to the White House for a second term represents to American democracy and that the time to sugarcoat the fight against that is long past. For many, Biden and his team’s insults aren’t just political hardball, they also smack of the truth.In recent months, Biden has dubbed Trump “mentally unfit”, while this week his campaign declared that the US “deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump”.The president’s campaign has dubbed Trump “weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate for president”. They’ve also taken to calling Trump, who says he is a multibillionaire but was recently unable to pay a court-ordered $454m bond, “Broke Don”.It’s a remarkable shift for Biden, who less than a month ago raised eyebrows for only referring to Trump as “my predecessor” during his State of the Union speech.Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, suggested to the Guardian Biden’s reason for this shift was “very straightforward.“What he was doing before obviously wasn’t working. Typically, we all learn from bad experience and Biden has been behind in the polls to a candidate who is quite frankly hated by almost half of the American electorate,” she said.“I think that Biden was under considerable pressure from his advisers, from activists, to do something different.”Notably, polling this week showed Biden gaining on Trump in six key states – after his supporters previously had a wake-up call when the incumbent reported dismal numbers.View image in fullscreenSo far, Biden seems to be fully embracing his new persona. On Wednesday, the president, not known for his comic timing, even cracked a joke at his rival’s expense.“Just the other day, this defeated-looking man came up to me and said: ‘Mr President, I need your help. I’m in crushing debt. I’m completely wiped out,’” Biden chortled.“I said, ‘Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.’”While negative campaigning is not new, Trump took the practice to a new level almost from the moment he announced his run for president in June 2015. At the time, he claimed his rivals for the presidential nomination had “sweated like dogs” during their own campaign events, and said Mexico was sending “rapists” into the US.With Trump having spent the last four years peppering Biden with insults, it seems Biden and his team have decided they need to respond in kind.“We’ve learned that ignoring negative campaigning doesn’t work well,” Hershey said.“People are more likely to remember negative charges than positive statements. People are more likely to give negative statements greater weight than they do positive statements.“And so trying to take the high road and create a contrast between yourself and a negative opponent by not responding simply doesn’t work.”With Biden in the political ring throwing verbal punches back at Trump, he has hewn closer to the “Dark Brandon” meme that is popular among some of his supporters. That concept, which frequently sees Biden depicted with red laser eyes, imagines Biden as a sort of edgy hero or even antihero – the kind of person who wouldn’t think twice about sarcastically congratulating an opponent on a golf tournament win.If we rewind back to the 1980s, there were plenty of negative, and nasty, political campaigns afoot. The New York Times reported from the 1982 Tennessee Senate race that the Republican candidate Robin Beard hired an actor to dress up as Fidel Castro in an attempt to paint his opponent as soft on Cuban communism – but there is hard evidence that Trump dragged things to a new low.According to a study published in 2023, “the frequency of negative emotion words” used by American politicians “suddenly and lastingly increased” when Trump entered the 2016 presidential race.Researchers analyzed quotations from politicians from millions of news articles, and found that the use of negative language by politicians had begun to decrease during Barack Obama’s presidency.“Then in June 2015, precisely the month when Trump started his campaign, there was a massive jump in negativity,” said Robert West, a professor in the school of computer and communication sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the co-authors of the study.View image in fullscreenIt wasn’t just Trump’s own language that accounted for the increase. When West and his colleagues removed all Trump quotations from the data, they found that the amount of negative language had still gone up: people had begun to copy Trump’s tone, just as Biden appears to have done.“It’s very sad that the other side is now starting to play the same game. This looks like we’ve lost as a society, because everyone plays that game now,” West said.For now, it is hard to tell whether Biden cracking jokes about Trump will be a winning strategy. There is evidence, however, that Republican and Democratic voters increasingly view members of the opposing party with contempt.In 2022, Pew Research found that 72% of Republicans consider Democrats to be “more immoral” than the average American, compared with just 47% who felt that way in 2016 (63% of Democrats thought Republicans were more immoral, up from 35% in 2016). In this climate, perhaps there is a real appetite among Biden supporters for him to swing for Trump’s kneecaps.While some say a negative campaigning strategy is effective, others point out – like Stephen Craig, a political science professor at the University of Florida who has studied political campaigns – that is not always the case.View image in fullscreen“There is a humongous amount of literature testing the effectiveness of negative ads, and negativity in other media as well – whether its speeches, radio or mail – and the bottom line is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Craig said.“And no one can tell in advance when something is going to work and when it won’t.”In the modern era, it is only Trump who has fully embraced mockery and insults as presidential campaigning, although during the 1988 presidential election George HW Bush’s team got plenty of mileage from making fun of Michael Dukakis, his opponent, for trying to look tough in a military tank.But going back in time, it turns out the founding fathers weren’t really all that polite. The 1796 presidential election, in which John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson, saw Adams’s camp claim Jefferson would promote prostitution and incest, and suggest that Jefferson had an affair with an enslaved woman.Jefferson’s backers, meanwhile, claimed Adams was a hermaphrodite, and dubbed Adams, who they said was overweight, “His Rotundity”.Neither Biden nor Trump have gone quite that low yet – although there are still seven months to go until election day. More