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      Trump predicts ‘bloodbath’ if he loses election and claims ‘Biden beat Obama’

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      Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump’s mental stability at a dinner in Washington DC on Saturday – just as the former president was making verbal gaffes at a campaign rally in Ohio as well as predicting a “bloodbath” if he met defeat in November’s election.Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, confused the crowd at an appearance in Vandalia by insisting that Biden had beaten “Barack Hussein Obama” in elections nationally that never took place.Freewheeling during a speech in which his teleprompters were seemingly disabled by high winds, Trump – a frequent critic of the 81-year-old Biden’s age and mental acuity – struggled to pronounce the words “bite” and “largest”. And he left the crowd scratching their heads over the reference to Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017 before taking the Oval Office from Trump in 2020.“You know what’s interesting? Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama but in every other state, he got killed,” Trump said.Biden joked about Trump’s mental fitness at Saturday night’s Gridiron club dinner, a traditional “roast” attended by politicians and journalists dating to the 1880s.“One candidate is too old and mentally unfit to be president. The other one is me,” the president said.“Don’t tell him. He thinks he’s running against Barack Obama, that’s what he said,” Biden added, referring to several previous occasions when the 77-year-old Trump has confused the incumbent and presumptive 2024 opponent with his Democratic predecessor.Trump’s Ohio address, ostensibly in support of Bernie Moreno, his preferred candidate in the state’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday, also saw the former president returning to darker, more apocalyptic themes.The US, Trump insisted during comments about the auto workers and the car industry, was headed for “a bloodbath” if he was rejected again at the polls in favor of Biden.“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” he said, without clarifying what he meant.Later, he added: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country, if we don’t win this election… certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”His comments prompted a statement from Biden’s re-election campaign that said “this is who Donald Trump is”.A Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said: “He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”Two Republicans who have been critical of Trump, however, came to his defense. Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday: “You could also look at the definition of bloodbath and it could be an economic disaster. And so if he’s speaking about the auto industry, in particular in Ohio, then you can take it a little bit more context.”Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president who this week refused to endorse his candidacy, made a similar argument. “[He] was clearly talking about the impact of imports devastating the American automotive industry,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation.Also during his speech, repeating unsubstantiated claims that foreign countries were “emptying” their prisons and mental institutions into the US, Trump took a familiar swipe at immigrants, calling some of them “animals”.“I don’t know if you call them people. They’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”Moreno, a Colombian immigrant who made a fortune from his car dealerships, joined in the nationalistic rhetoric, demanding that anybody who comes to the US learned to speak English.“We don’t need to vote in five different languages. We learn the language,” he said. “It means you assimilate. You become part of America – America doesn’t become part of you.”At other times during an often wild 90-minute address, Trump tossed out personal insults at political opponents. He called Biden “stupid” several times; made a vulgar reference to the first name of Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor in his criminal case for trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat; called Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom “new-scum”; and attacked the personal appearance of JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, the New York Times reported.He also attempted to blame the installation of the troublesome teleprompters on Biden, and he urged the event organizers not to pay the contractors.Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former US House speaker, condemned Trump’s comments during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.“You wouldn’t even allow him in your house, much less then the White House,” she said.“We just have to win this election, because he’s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean, he’s going to exact a bloodbath? There’s something wrong here. How respectful I am of the American people and their goodness, but how much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn’t what our country is about?”Biden echoed the warnings during the non-comedic section of his address to the Gridiron dinner, attended by more than 650 guests, continuing to refuse to use Trump’s name, and calling him only “my predecessor”.“We live in an unprecedented moment in democracy,” Biden said. “An unprecedented moment for history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack. [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s on the march in Europe. My predecessor bows down to him and says to him, ‘do whatever the hell you want.’“Freedom is under assault. The freedom to vote, the freedom to choose and so much more. The lies about the 2020 election, the plot to overturn it, to embrace the January 6 insurrection, pose the greatest threat to our democracy since the civil war.“We live in an unprecedented moment of democracy, an unprecedented moment in history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack.” More

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      Mike Pence ‘respects the right’ of fellow Republicans who plan to vote for Trump

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      Two days after saying he would not endorse a second Donald Trump presidency, former vice-president Mike Pence on Sunday declared his esteem for fellow Republicans who plan to vote for his former boss anyway – and he declined to rule out eventually following suit.Pence reiterated on CBS’s Face the Nation that he “cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump” in November’s election for a number of policy-related decisions that he insisted were not personal between him and the former president whose supporters chanted for Pence to be hanged publicly as they attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Yet Pence also told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, “I respect the right of Republican voters who have made it clear who they’re for, who they want to be our standard bearer” as Trump has dominated the GOP’s presidential preference primaries in various states to lock up the party’s nomination to challenge Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.He twice ignored Brennan when she asked Pence: “Would you vote for [Trump]?” And he explicitly said he did not want to suggest prominent Republicans such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and US House speaker Mike Johnson were walking away from their conservative principles by endorsing Trump, whose stance on abortion is less rightwing than that of his former vice-president.Trump “and I [just] have different styles”, Pence said as Brennan pressed him to elaborate on his disposition toward the man whom he served as vice-president after the 2016 election. “We’re different men. … And as I said before, it’s not personal.”Pence’s exchange with Brennan came after he confirmed to Fox News on Friday that he would refuse to lend his endorsement to Trump, though he also said he would not vote for Biden.Some pundits pointed to the statements as a potentially powerful if symbolic stand against the former president – at least until Pence clearly delineated their limits on Sunday.Friday’s remarks from Pence marked a reversal because last April he had promised to endorse Trump even if the former president was convicted in connection with any of the four criminal indictments pending against him for subversion of his 2020 defeat by Biden, retention of government secrets and hush-money payments.During his appearances on Fox News and CBS, Pence said he could not vouch for a second Trump presidency in small part because of the January 6 attack – though he avoided mentioning how Trump reportedly told aides that he agreed with his supporters who chanted for Pence to be hanged after refusing to block Congress’ certification of BIden’s electoral victory.Pence also alluded to the national debt – which ballooned during Trump’s presidency – and abortion rights. Trump has claimed credit for appointing three rightwingers to the US supreme court whose conservative majority eliminated federal abortion rights in 2022. But Trump has also warned that Republicans who support extreme state-level abortion bans have suffered a series of defeats against Democrats at the ballot box, a position that Pence on Sunday characterized as uncommitted to the “sanctity of life”.Furthermore, Pence criticized how Trump recently expressed his opposition to TikTok’s China-based parent company being forced by the US government to sell the platform.“The reason why I won’t endorse Donald Trump this year is because I see him departing from the mainstream conservative agenda that has defined the Republican party … and still has the best hope for the future of the country,” Pence said.Pence – Indiana’s former governor – at one point sought the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But the ex-congressman polled poorly and suspended his campaign in October, months before the first votes in the party’s primary were cast in the Iowa caucuses. More

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      Why the rift between anti-abortion activists and Republican lawmakers is growing

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      There is a growing rift in the decades-old marriage between anti-abortion activists and Republican lawmakers.The problem came into view last month, after a bombshell decision from the Alabama supreme court temporarily halted in vitro fertilization (IVF). The ruling, which described frozen embryos as “extrauterine children”, unraveled when the Republican-controlled legislature passed short-term protections for IVF providers.Under a new law signed last week by Republican governor Kay Ivey, IVF providers are temporarily protected from civil litigation and criminal prosecution in the event of “damage or death of an embryo” during treatment.“In our state, we work to foster a culture of life,” the governor said in a statement about the court ruling. “This certainly includes some couples hoping and praying to be parents who utilize IVF.”The move offered a helpful, if limited lifeline, to IVF patients in the state. The new law does not refute the Alabama supreme court’s controversial position that an embryo, stored for the purpose of IVF, is a person. Nor does it permanently shield IVF providers from legal penalties.Despite its limited scope, the Republican-backed law took a step to align the GOP with US public consensus, which overwhelmingly supports IVF. It also invoked the wrath of rightwing Christian activists.“Tragically, the Governor of Alabama has given the IVF industry a license to kill,” said Lila Rose, president of Live Action, a non-profit that opposes abortion. “Stripping embryonic human beings of legal protections is also unconstitutional.”Some anti-abortion groups are even running ads against Alabama Republicans using the same provocative imagery – “blood, babies and scalpels” – that is typically leveraged against Democrats, according to Politico.View image in fullscreenThe backlash from anti-abortion groups, many of which are hostile to IVF, represents a persistent problem for Republicans in the post-Roe era. The party, once united under the simple goal of repealing Roe v Wade, cannot figure out how to advance the anti-abortion movement’s most hardline policy goals without alienating large swaths of US voters.In their rush to announce a restrained, politically-safe stance in support of IVF, Alabama Republicans inadvertently angered their own Christian conservative base.“You have a lot of Christian Right and pro-life groups that think that Alabama’s supreme court decision was good, and – if anything didn’t go far enough,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “For state lawmakers in solidly red districts, where there’s no chance that a Democrat could win, the Christian right could launch a primary challenge against Alabama Republicans who supported the IVF bill.”It’s not the first time that the rightwing Christian movement has demanded that Republican lawmakers split from public opinion on reproductive healthcare.In 2022, after the US supreme court repealed the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade, anti-abortion activists rejoiced: the Right to Life lobby had finally won. Uninhibited by Roe, state Republican leaders were free to set their own laws on abortion access – and yet wholly unprepared to answer the thorny legal questions that followed: should abortion bans offer an exception for cases where the life of the mother is jeopardized? What about cases where a rape or incest victim is impregnated by their abuser?Like IVF, abortion ban exceptions are supported by the majority of US voters.The GOP’s conservative Christian base, however, argued that exceptions should not exist, or at least be extremely narrow in scope. Rightwing activists believe that a fetus is a “preborn person” entitled to the same rights and protections as any other American citizen.The concept of fetal personhood, once a fringe ideology that could be mostly ignored by mainstream Republican lawmakers, now underscores much of the modern anti-abortion movement’s work.Abortion bans in states like Georgia and Alabama, for example, contain language that define a fetus as a person. In 2022, Georgia’s department of revenue announced that “any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat” can be counted as a dependent on tax forms.The Alabama supreme court ruling itself hinges on the belief that a fetus is a legally-protected person.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven before Roe’s demise, fetal personhood seeped into the criminal justice system, enabling the prosecution and criminalization of pregnancy complications. In 2020, Oklahoma police arrested a 19-year-old woman who had a miscarriage in her second trimester of pregnancy. Alleging that she had used meth, police charged her with first-degree manslaughter of the fetus (a medical examiner identified five other potential factors that may have led to the miscarriage).As fetal personhood continues to transform American politics and law, anti-abortion lobbyists have been more willing to turn on Republican allies for failing to champion the ideology.View image in fullscreen“Politicians cannot call themselves pro-life, affirm the truth that human life begins at the moment of fertilization, and then enact laws that allow the callous killing of these preborn children simply because they were created through IVF,” said Rose in her statement condemning the Alabama governor’s support of IVF.Prompted by Alabama’s IVF wars, leading far-right think tanks are also pressuring congressional Republicans to back fetal personhood on the national stage. In a memorandum released late last month, the Heritage Foundation urged conservatives to view the Alabama supreme court decision on embryos as a means of protecting children.“This ruling merely ensures that parents using the service can rest assured that their children will receive the same legal protections as everyone else’s,” the memo said.It is unclear if the GOP will ultimately back fetal personhood, or decide that the ideology is too extreme.In 2023, 124 Republicans co-sponsored the federal Life at Conception Act, which would give embryos the rights of people “at the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment when the individual comes into being”.A recent attempt by Senate Democrats to advance a bill protecting the procedure failed after a single Republican blocked it.Meanwhile, House Republicans have repeatedly sidestepped questions about federal protections for IVF, leaving Alabama lawmakers to answer fundamental questions about fetal personhood on their own.“It’s not my belief that Congress needs to play a role here,” said the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, at a West Virginia press conference on Thursday. “I think this is being handled by the states.” More

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      ‘A campaign for vengeance’: critics warn of a radical second Trump term

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      The US election primary season is effectively over. Conventional wisdom holds that the two major candidates will now pivot towards the centre ground in search of moderate voters. But Donald Trump has never been one for conventional wisdom.Detention camps, mass deportations, capital punishment for drug smugglers, tariffs on imported goods, a purge of the justice department and potential withdrawal from Nato – the Trump policy agenda is radical by any standard including his own, pushing the boundaries set during his first presidential run eight years ago.“In 2016 he was still, in his own mind at least, positioning himself to be beloved by everybody,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “That’s why ‘Drain the swamp’ was a more populist, appealing message to all sides of the aisle because everyone on some level felt like Washington’s broken, Washington’s left us behind.“Now you flash-forward to 2024 and we’re getting a much darker version of Donald Trump, one who seems to be driven by imaginary grievances from the 2020 election. There’s nothing unifying about that message in any way; it’s incredibly self-centred. This is a campaign for vengeance. In a lot of ways he is Ahab and Moby Dick is the United States of America.”Eight years ago Trump, seeking to become the first US president with no prior political or military experience, was running with a clean slate. If anything, there was a suspicion that his background as a thrice-married New York celebrity implied some ideological fluidity and latent liberal instincts.But he announced his candidacy in June 2015 by promising to build a wall on the southern border, using xenophobic language to portray Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists” and promising to “make America great again”.During the campaign he described international trade deals as “a disaster” and called for increased tariffs on imports. He promised sweeping tax cuts and vowed to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations, describing climate change as “a total hoax”.Trump pledged to nominate supreme court justices opposed to abortion and, in one TV interview, suggested that women who have abortions should be punished. With backing from the National Rifle Association, he opposed gun safety reforms.Overseas, the Republican candidate deployed the slogan “America first”, questioning the Nato alliance while calling for improved relations with Russia. He vowed to destroy the Islamic State and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”.Trump did implement his first attempt at a Muslim ban almost immediately after taking the Oval Office in January 2017, prompting protests, airport chaos and a long legal battle in the courts. The supreme court ruled in June 2018 that the third iteration of the law could go into full effect, meaning considerable restrictions on Muslim travellers entering the country.Trump failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but his presidency was hugely consequential in other ways. His $1.5tn tax cut added to the national debt and, research has shown, helped billionaires more than the working class. The US pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump reshaped the federal judiciary and appointed three supreme court justices who would be instrumental in ending the constitutional right to abortion.He botched the response to a coronavirus pandemic that has now left more than a million Americans dead, initially underplaying the threat and later suggesting that patients might inject bleach as a cure. In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have wanted the US military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.In the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, and dozens of criminal charges against him, Trump’s extremism has broadened and deepened as he heads into an electoral rematch with Joe Biden. He won the Republican primaries with ease, prompting commentators to warn of “collective amnesia” and “the banality of chaos” as many voters seemingly become numb to his demagoguery.However, an AP VoteCast poll found six in 10 moderate Republicans in New Hampshire and South Carolina were concerned that Trump was too extreme to win a general election.View image in fullscreenFor example, he now argues that presidents should have total immunity and openly threatens the guardrails of American democracy. “I only want to be a dictator for one day,” he told supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, earlier this year.He has said he would try to strip tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections as he seeks to “totally obliterate the deep state”. Given his rage at the FBI and federal prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against him, Trump may target people linked to those prosecutions for retribution.His signature issue, border security, is once again taking centre stage with record levels of migrants caught crossing into the US. In response, he has pledged to launch the biggest deportation effort in American history. This would involve far-reaching roundups and detention camps to hold people while they await removal, the New York Times reported. He has also refused to rule out reinstating a Muslim travel ban and a hugely controversial family separation policy.Trump further wants to build more of the border wall – his first administration built 450 miles (724km) of barriers across the 1,954-mile (3,144km) border, but much of that replaced existing structures. He also wants to end automatic citizenship for children born in the US to immigrants living in the country illegally, an idea he flirted with as president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFormer Republican congressman Joe Walsh said: “He’s even uglier in his language now. He’s even more cruel in his approach. He’s gotten much more extreme, which you would think means, oh my God, how stupid politically, because he needs people in the middle. But it is big issue and Democrats have never understood how important immigration and the border are and so Trump feels as if he can demagogue it in even more of an extreme fashion.”Trump has called for the death penalty for drug smugglers and those who traffic women and children. In a broader anti-crime push, he says he will require local law enforcement agencies to use divisive policing measures including stop-and-frisk. Last year, he told a rally in Anaheim, California: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Under the mantra “Drill, baby, drill”, Trump says that he would increase oil drilling on public lands and offer tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers. He would again exit the Paris climate accords, end wind subsidies and eliminate environmental regulations.Trump has suggested that he is open to making cuts to the social security and Medicare welfare programmes. But one area in which he has hinted at moderation is abortion, publicly acknowledging that the national ban favoured by some Republicans would be electoral kryptonite, although it was reported last month that he privately expressed support for a 16-week limit with exceptions.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “His campaign has been smart to float the 16-week ban because I think most Americans fall somewhere between 16 and 20 weeks as something they can live with. If he basically says the federal government will not try to do a six-week ban, we’re not going to come after a foetal heartbeat bill – so if you live in a swing state like Michigan that has codified abortion, I’m not coming after you – that is strategically a smart position. But it would be considered a modification to the centre on abortion by Trump.”On foreign policy, Trump claims that even before he is inaugurated, he will have settled the war between Russia and Ukraine. Last week, after visiting the former president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said Trump promised him that he will end Russia’s war with Ukraine by not giving “a single penny” in aid.The Republican nominee also says he will continue to “fundamentally re-evaluate” Nato’s purpose and mission. At one recent rally, he said he would “encourage” Vladimir Putin’s Russia to attack Nato allies who do not pay their bills. And he says he will institute a system of tariffs of perhaps 10% on most foreign goods.Sometimes it can all seem like campaign bluster unlikely to survive the scrutiny of advisers, Congress or the courts. But whereas Trump’s 2016 win took everyone by surprise, perhaps including him, resulting in a first term marred by infighting and hastily written executive orders, this time there are allies who consider a second term is possible, or even probable, and are ready to hit the ground running.Trump’s campaign and groups such as the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute thinktanks are assembling Project 2025 policy books with detailed plans. Groups of conservative lawyers are sizing up what orders Trump might issue on a second presidency’s first day. With lessons learned, his administration could be even more ruthless and efficient.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “Some of the general framing and themes around what it is he wants to do are relatively consistent. What is different this time around is that there’s more of an architecture and infrastructure supporting a lot of these policy proposals.“If you look at the ecosystem of organisations that’s involved in helping him think through what a second term agenda would look like, it’s much more robust in 2024 than it was in 2016. So I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that the substance is all that different or somehow more extreme. It’s just there’s a lot more people who are thinking about it. Some of them are authorised; some of them are probably not authorised.”Critics of Trump warn that, while Trump himself has few core beliefs, he would effectively become a vehicle for extremists to push a far-right agenda wildly out of step with the majority of Americans. Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “He is an empty vessel for these other people around him who do have very specific policy ideas, most of them rooted in straight authoritarianism or some noxious mix of authoritarianism and Christian dominionism.“He doesn’t care. For all of it, it’s a means to an end. If I win do these people help me or do they hurt me? Do they give me more control? Do they give me less control? Do they give me more access to making sure I’m never going to go to jail, that I can persecute and prosecute my political enemies, that I can make life harder for the media?”Galen added: “In many ways, he is the leader of the torchlight parade but he’s being taken arm in arm and pushed from behind by a bunch of very noxious individuals with what I would call fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American ideology.” More

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      Among the exvangelicals: Sarah McCammon on faith, Trump and leaving the churches behind

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      For Sarah McCammon, “it was really January 6, watching people go into the Capitol with signs that said ‘Jesus saves’ and crosses and Christian symbols” that made her finally decide to write about her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.“I wanted to tell my story,” she says.As a national political correspondent for NPR, McCammon tells many stories. Her first book, The Exvangelicals, is not just a work of autobiography. It is also a deeply reported study of an accelerating movement – of younger Americans leaving white evangelical churches.McCammon grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Kansas City, Missouri, then went to Trinity College, an evangelical university in Deerfield, Illinois. Now, she chronicles the development of her own doubts about her religion, its social strictures and political positions, while reporting similar processes experienced by others.For many such “exvangelicals”, things began to come to a head in 2016, when Donald Trump seized the Republican presidential nomination with a harsh message of hatred and division – and evangelical support.McCammon says: “When I was hired by NPR to cover the presidential campaign, I found myself pretty quickly at the intersection of my professional life and my personal background, because I was assigned to the Republican primary. I was happy about that, because I kind of knew that world.It made sense. I figured I’d be covering Jeb Bush, his waltz to the nomination. But it didn’t turn out that way.“So much of the story of the Republican primary became about Donald Trump and white evangelicals. What were they going to do? How were they going to square evangelical teachings with his history and his character?”As McCammon watched, those evangelicals embraced a three-times married icon of greed, a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women while demonising migrants, Muslims and more.For McCammon, evangelical support for Trump was then and is now a matter of simple power politics – about how he offers a way to maintain a position under fire in a changing world – buttressed by the appeal of Trumpian “alternative facts” familiar to churches that have long denied the science of evolution, ignored the role of racism in American history and taken myriad other positions at odds with mainstream thought.View image in fullscreenMcCammon had “this whole connection to this world”, having grown up “in a very evangelical, very conservative family, very politically active”. But “in a lot of ways, I think I got into journalism to get away from some of that. I didn’t want to work in an ideological space, theological or political. I didn’t want to be an advocate, I felt very uncomfortable with the pressure to make everybody believe what I believed. And I did not even feel sure.”Nonetheless, as Trump tightened his grip, McCammon was drawn back in, becoming “fascinated because I was in my mid-30s, I had some distance from my childhood and I felt I knew what questions to ask and anticipated some debates that would come up.“So after 2016, I spent a few years reflecting on where the country was and what had happened: on the evangelical embrace of Trump. And as I thought more about it, I thought maybe there’s something I want to say about this. I wanted to tell my story.”As it turned out, a lot of former evangelicals of McCammon’s generation were telling their stories too.Like other modern social and political labels – Black Lives Matter and MeToo, for example – the term “exvangelicals” first came to prominence as a hashtag around 2016, the year the writer Blake Chastain launched a podcast under the name. Much of McCammon’s research for her book duly took place on social media, tracking down exvangelicals using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share and connect.But McCammon’s own story forms the spine of her book. Her parents remain in the church. She and her first husband married in the church. It wasn’t easy to sit down and write.“When I was finishing the draft, I sent [my parents] several key sections,” she says. “Frankly, the sections I thought would be hardest for them. I wanted to do that both as their daughter and as a journalist, because in journalism, we usually give people a chance to respond. And so, they didn’t want to be quoted.”In the finished book, McCammon’s parents are quoted, one striking example a frank exchange of messages with her mother about LGBTQ+ rights.“They’re not thrilled,” she says. “But I did take their feedback into account. They didn’t fundamentally dispute anything, factually …skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope it comes through in the book that this is not an attack on my parents. I talk about my childhood because I want to illustrate what it was like to grow up inside the evangelical milieu of that time. And based on my conversations with lots of other people, I don’t think my experiences are unique.”McCammon’s grandfather was surely close to unique: a military veteran and a neurosurgeon who had three children before coming out as gay. At first largely excluded from McCammon’s life, later a central influence, he died as McCammon was writing.She says: “I make him such a central character because he was a central part of my experience of realising that there was a bigger world out there – when he was one of the only non-evangelical or non-Christian people I had any regular contact with, growing up. For my family he was always a source of concern and consternation and worry and prayer but also he was an incredibly accomplished individual, and he was somebody I think my whole family admired and was just proud of – at the same time that we prayed for his soul.“And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being told.”View image in fullscreenMcCammon still believes, though she does not “use a lot of labels”. Her husband is Jewish. Shaped by her Christian upbringing, she has “slowly opened up my mind, as I’ve gotten older”, through talking to her husband and to people in “the progressive Christian space”. She can “read the Bible when I want to”, and does.Asked how she thinks The Exvangelicals will be received, she says “there are kind of three audiences for this book.“For exvangelicals, or people who have wrestled with their religious background, whatever it may be, I hope that they will feel seen and validated, and feel like there’s some resonance with their story, because I think there is kind of a common experience, even though the details are different.“For those like my husband, who when I met him had very little connection to the evangelical world, and are maybe a little confused by it, or maddened or frustrated by it, I hope the book will provide some insight and maybe even empathy, [helping] to understand how people think, why they think the way they think, and also the fact that evangelicalism is a massive movement and within it there are lots of different people with lots of different experiences.“The most difficult one is evangelicals. I hope those who are still firmly entrenched in the movement will read it with an open mind, and maybe some empathy. I think there are a lot of boomer parents out there, not just mine, who are trying to figure out why their kids have gone astray.“And I don’t think being an exvangelical is ‘going astray’. I think it’s about really trying to live with integrity. In some ways, it’s like: ‘You taught us to seek the truth. And so it’s what a lot of us are doing.’”
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      TikTok may be on borrowed time in the US, but it still holds a Trump card | John Naughton

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      Last week, the US House of Representatives, a dysfunctional body that hitherto could not agree on anything, suddenly converged on a common project: a bipartisan bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in the US, TikTok’s largest market.American legislators’ concerns about the social media app have been simmering for years, mostly focused on worries that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance (and therefore TikTok) to hand over data on TikTok users or manipulate content on the platform. A year ago, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, told Congress that TikTok “is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government – and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns”.These fears were amplified by the raging popularity of TikTok among US users. It has upwards of 170 million of them and their addiction to it has bothered Mark Zuckerberg and his empire for the very good reason that TikTok is the only other social media game in town. Six of the world’s 10 most downloaded apps last year were owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent. But TikTok, beat all of them except Instagram to the top spot.TikTok is ferociously addictive, at least for people under 30. What bothers Meta most is that TikTok extracts far more granular data from its users than any other platform. “The average session lasts 11 minutes,” writes blogger Scott Galloway, “and the video length is around 25 seconds. That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session, with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.”To date, public discourse about the platform has been pretty incoherent – as one critic pointed out: “From policymakers completely talking past each other to the media falling into false binaries when discussing TikTok and a possible ban, too many narratives on the issue have been contradictory, full of logical leaps, or incredibly reductive.” But two main themes stand out from the hubbub. One is that TikTok gathers incredibly detailed personal data on its users (data that may find its way to the platform’s Chinese parent); the other is that it may be a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist party (CCP).The first is plausible but overegged. As the Economist puts it: “If Chinese spies want to find out about Americans, the country’s lax data protection laws allow them to buy such information from third parties.” The second proposition – that TikTok may be an efficient conduit for propaganda and misinformation – looks spot-on, though. After all, about a third of under-30s in the US regularly get news on TikTok and a recent study has found grounds for thinking that the platform already systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is respectively aligned with or opposed to the interests of the CCP.And here’s where the question of what happens to TikTok takes on geopolitical and domestic political dimensions. On the former, it’s highly likely that the prospect of TikTok separating from ByteDance and thereby slipping out of the control of the CCP does not appeal to Beijing. So this congressional bill (which passed overwhelmingly in a floor vote on Wednesday) looks like bad news.On the other hand, there was some good news last week for Beijing. First, Donald Trump became the Republican party’s nominee for the presidency. And second, he announced that he was against the bill. “If you get rid of TikTok,” he posted on his Truth Social platform, “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”For those who appreciate hypocrisy, this was a collector’s item. Is this not the same Trump who in 2020 tried (but failed) to get rid of TikTok? What lies behind this change of heart? Who can say: trying to read what is loosely called Trump’s mind is a fool’s errand. Still, it was interesting to learn that recently Trump reportedly had a “cordial” meeting in his Mar-a-Lago lair with a guy called Jeff Yass. Who’s he? Oh, just someone whose business happens to have a $30bn-plus stake in ByteDance. Sometimes you couldn’t make this stuff up.What I’ve been readingMatter of InterestViewing the Ob-scene is David Hering’s terrific review of Jonathan Glazer’s great movie The Zone of Interest.Machine learningRead Of Top-Notch Algorithms and Zoned-Out Humans, a sobering essay by Tim Harford about the downsides of becoming dependent on smart machines.Science fiction Superconductivity Scandal: The Inside Story of a Scientific Deception in a Rising Star’s Physics Lab recounts a gripping investigation by Nature magazine’s news team. More

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      Top senator calls on Biden to ‘use all levers’ to pressure Israel over Gaza

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      Joe Biden should use his leverage and the law to pressure Israel to change how it is prosecuting the war in Gaza, the Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen said.Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, is among a group of senators urging Biden to stop providing Israel with offensive weapons until it lifts restrictions on the delivery of food and medicine into Gaza, where children are now dying of hunger and famine looms.“We need the president and the Biden administration to push harder and to use all the levers of US policy to ensure people don’t die of starvation,” Van Hollen said in an interview on Friday.This week, Van Hollen and seven of his colleagues sent a letter to the president arguing that Israel was in violation of the Foreign Assistance Act, a section of which prohibits the sale and transfer of military weapons to any nation that restricts the delivery of US aid.Their call comes as the administration faces mounting domestic and international pressure over what critics have described as an “absurd” and “inherent contradiction” at the heart of US policy on Israel’s war against Hamas: while the US attempts to ease the deepening humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s military campaign in the Palestinian territory, it continues to arm the country.In a sign of the widening rift between Israel and its most important ally, Van Hollen said Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was openly defying Biden’s pleas that Israel do more to protect civilians in Gaza and work toward a long-term solution to the conflict that includes the establishment of a Palestinian state.“Prime Minister Netanyahu has been an obstacle to the president’s efforts to at least create some light at the end of this very dark tunnel,” Van Hollen said.In recent weeks, Biden has escalated his criticism of Israel’s military offensive, saying last weekend that Netanyahu was “hurting” his country’s standing by failing to prevent more civilian deaths in Gaza. But the US president has so far resisted Democrats’ calls to leverage future military aid as a means of reining in Israel’s conduct in the war.The United Nations warned last month that more than a quarter of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza face “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation”. It said without action, widespread famine would be “almost inevitable”. Israel’s military campaign, which came in retaliation for the Hamas attack on 7 October that killed about 1,200 people, has devastated Gaza and killed more than 30,000 people, most of them civilians.With the prospects of a truce elusive and far too little aid trickling in, Biden has authorized airdrops and the construction of a maritime corridor to deliver desperately needed food and medicine to the Palestinian people living in the besieged territory. But critics say those methods are less effective, less efficient and more dangerous than the unhindered delivery of supplies by land.“The very fact that the United States is airlifting humanitarian supplies and is now going to be opening a temporary port is a symptom of the larger problem, which is [that] the Netanyahu government has restricted the amount of aid coming into Gaza and the safe distribution of aid within Gaza,” Van Hollen said.Israel, which tightened its already strict controls on access to the enclave after 7 October, has denied that it is impeding the flow of aid.Amid intensifying international pressure, Israel said this week it would expand the amount of supplies into the country. A small convoy of six trucks, coordinated by the Israeli military, brought humanitarian aid directly into the isolated northern Gaza earlier this week. Separately, an aid ship loaded with 200 tons of rice, flour, chicken and other items arrived in Gaza on Friday, in the first test of a new sea route.But that is a far cry from what is needed, humanitarian workers say. Before the five-month-old conflict began, roughly 500 truckloads of humanitarian aid per day crossed into the territory. Now the number is far less, sometimes peaking above 200 trucks per day but often well below, according to UN figures.Van Hollen’s insistence that the US do more to push Israel on humanitarian aid was informed by his visit to the Rafah crossing from Egypt in January, and the onerous Israeli inspection process he witnessed.“You witnessed these very, very long lines of trucks trying to get in through Rafah and through the Kerem Shalom crossing, and quite an inspection review, including arbitrary denials of humanitarian aid being delivered into Gaza, which just makes the process even more cumbersome,” he said.“For example, we visited a warehouse in Rafah that was filled with goods that had been rejected at the inspection sites. The rejected goods included things like maternity kits, included things like water purification systems.”Van Hollen said no specific reason was given as to why the items were rejected, but said Israel has broadly claimed that they could be considered “dual use” or having a civilian or military purpose. The maternity kit, Van Hollen said, contained a “teeny little scalpel” that he speculated was the reason the package was turned back.Across the border in Gaza, the situation is dire. UN agencies have estimated that 180 women give birth every day, sometimes without access to adequate pain medication, food or hygiene products. Malnourished, dehydrated and increasingly anemic, many pregnant women in Gaza face elevated risks of postpartum hemorrhaging.Another problem, Van Hollen said, is that so many of the people delivering aid or accompanying the aid convoys have been killed, making coordination and distribution of the aid that does enter difficult.Netanyahu and his government, the senator said, “need to open more crossings, they need to end the arbitrary rejection of goods like maternity kits and solar powered desalinization units, and they need to make sure that food can be safely delivered within Gaza without people getting killed.”Van Hollen’s comments came the day after Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the US and a longtime ally of Israel’s, was unsparing in a speech in which he declared that Netanyahu had “lost his way”, and urged Israelis to hold elections to replace him. Biden, who has been increasingly open about his frustration with Netanyahu, called it a “good speech”.Van Hollen called Schumer’s speech an “important moment” that made clear the US believes “there needs to be a change in course” in the way Israel is conducting the war.‘The administration will have to decide’In the letter to Biden earlier this week, Van Hollen and his colleagues wrote: “According to public reporting and your own statements, the Netanyahu government is in violation of [the Foreign Assistance Act]. Given this reality, we urge you to make it clear to the Netanyahu government that failure to immediately and dramatically expand humanitarian access and facilitate safe aid deliveries throughout Gaza will lead to serious consequences, as specified under existing US law.”Van Hollen also argued that the Israeli government is “not in compliance” with a national security memorandum (NSM 20) issued by the president last month that requires any country that receives US military assistance to provide written assurances it will “not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede” the delivery of humanitarian aid.Israel reportedly provided that commitment in a letter to Biden signed by Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant on Thursday, according to Axios. Van Hollen said the onus is now on the US to assess the credibility of Israel’s assurances.“Part of that evaluation will depend on what’s happening on the ground right now, and their assessment of whether or not, in fact, the Netanyahu government is meeting that requirement,” he said. “And if the signatures and commitments are found to be lacking, then the administration cannot provide military assistance until they determine that they’re credible.”View image in fullscreenVan Hollen stressed that enforcing the statute would not prevent the US from continuing to send defensive military assistance to protect Israeli citizens from rocket attacks, such as the Iron Dome.The memorandum was issued last month, after Van Hollen and more than a dozen Democratic senators introduced an amendment to a wartime aid package that included military assistance for Ukraine, Israel and other US-allies. The senators’ proposal, which would have required any country receiving US weapons to comply with humanitarian laws, risked a messy floor fight among Democrats divided over the US’s approach to the war amid Gaza’s rising death toll.Instead, Van Hollen said, the administration offered to turn the amendment into a memorandum that, with the force of law, would apply the terms to the sale and transfer of all US military aid. Biden issued the memorandum, and the Senate later approved the foreign aid package, with Van Hollen’s support. That measure is now languishing in the House.Biden has warned that Israel would cross a “red line” if it proceeded with a large-scale invasion of the southern city of Rafah, where the war has pushed nearly half of Gaza’s population. Reports suggest Netanyahu has approved a plan to invade the city, setting him up for direct conflict with the US president.Biden has not made clear what consequences Netanyahu might face if he ignores the US’s position. An invasion of Rafah, Van Hollen said, would present “one of those moments where the Biden administration is going to have to decide whether it’s going to back up the president’s strong words with the leverage that it has”. More

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      Former Trump adviser appeals to supreme court to keep him out of prison

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      Donald Trump White House official Peter Navarro appealed to the US supreme court on Friday to allow him to stay out of prison as he appeals his contempt of Congress conviction.Navarro is due to report to a federal prison on Tuesday after an appeals court ruled that his appeal wasn’t likely to overturn his conviction for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the January 6 attack that Trump supporters aimed at the US Capitol in 2021.Navarro has maintained that he couldn’t cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege. Federal judge Amit Mehta, who was appointed during Barack Obama’s presidency, barred Navarro from making that argument at trial, finding that he didn’t show Trump had actually invoked it.The emergency application comes as the supreme court separately prepares to hear arguments on whether Trump himself has presidential immunity from charges alleging he interfered in the 2020 election that he lost to Joe BidenNavarro was the second Trump aide convicted of misdemeanor congressional contempt charges. The former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon previously received a four-month sentence but was allowed to stay free pending appeal by federal judge Carl Nichols, who was appointed by Trump.Navarro – an economist and Trump’s trade adviser – was found guilty of defying a subpoena for documents and a deposition from the House committee that was investigating the January 6 attack. He also promoted Trump’s lies about how electoral fraudsters denied him victory against Biden and was also given a four-month prison sentence. More