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      Missouri: home to child marriage, corporal punishment and sick ‘child welfare’ ideas | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Did you know that child marriage is still legal in much of the US? About 300,000 children and teenagers were legally married in the US between 2000 and 2018, according to the advocacy group Unchained at Last. At least 60,000 of those marriages “occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime”.Did you know that, until quite recently, Missouri was a “destination wedding spot” for children who wanted to tie the knot? The state has tightened its child marriage laws now – and is seeking to ban the practice – but not all lawmakers are happy about the changes. Missouri state senator Mike Moon said last year that he knows kids who have been married at age 12 (to another minor) and they’re “thriving”!Did you know that many school districts in Missouri still authorize corporal punishment? If a kid acts up in class, a teacher can spank them. Don’t worry though, they’re not allowed to do anything horrible like punch them in the face. According to one school district, the only punishment allowed is “swatting the buttocks with a paddle”.Did you know that Human Rights Watch gave Missouri an “F” grade last year for its compliance with international child rights standards?I mention all these fun Missouri facts because I think they’re important to bear in mind as we look at the latest dystopian news coming out of the state. Which is this: state representative Jamie Gragg is so concerned about the welfare of kids in his district that he has come up with a novel new way to “protect” them. How? By introducing a new bill which would force teachers to register as sex offenders if they use a transgender child’s preferred pronouns or otherwise help them in their “social transition”.The bill states that any teacher or school counsellor who provide support or “other resources to a child regarding social transition” could be found guilty of a class E felony and placed in the same sex offender registration category as someone possessing child sexual abuse images. They would not be able to work at a school again or be within 500ft of one.One hallmark of a Republican-authored bill is ambiguity: key terms are defined extremely broadly (or not at all) so that it is unclear what is prohibited and what isn’t. This vagueness is a feature not a bug: the idea is that people will over-comply because they’re worried about getting in trouble. It also means that Republicans can say “We didn’t mean it like that” if people try to argue that the legislation is unconstitutional. It’s a deviously brilliant tactic.This new anti-trans proposal is no exception to the GOP vagueness rule. “Social transition” is defined extremely broadly in the bill as: “The process by which an individual adopts the name, pronouns, and gender expression, such as clothing or haircuts, that match the individual’s gender identity and not the gender assumed by the individual’s sex at birth.”So what does this mean? Well it means that if this bill becomes law a teacher in Missouri would potentially be able to spank a child on the buttocks without facing any consequences but would lose their job and have to register as a sex offender if they used that kid’s preferred pronouns while doing the spanking. Hell, this bill is so broad that simply complimenting a cis girl who just got a “boyish” haircut could get a teacher in serious trouble.Of course, a bill is not a law. We should be very clear that, at the moment, HB2885 is just one lawmaker’s fantasy written down on paper. There are currently no co-sponsors for the bill and no hearing scheduled. It’s highly unlikely it will actually become law anytime soon. Erin Reed, a journalist specializing in transgender legislation and the first person to break the news of the bill, has noted that she doesn’t “believe something like this could pass, even in Missouri”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut just because HB2885, as it is currently written, is unlikely to move through the state legislature doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t alarm us. Extreme bills like this signal where Republicans want to head and help push the Overton window more and more to the right. Pretty soon a “moderate” is going to mean a raging conservative who is kind enough to think that a teacher shouldn’t be called a sex offender for using someone’s preferred pronouns. (Oh, hang on, that’s already what it means! Just how look at how frequently Nikki Haley is labelled a “moderate”.)It’s also important to note that while HB2885 might not move forward, plenty of other anti-trans bills will. Last year was a banner year for anti-trans bigots: over 308 anti-trans bills were introduced in the US, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, including 43 in Missouri. This year will probably be even worse.All this legislation, and the anti-trans rhetoric that comes with it, is endangering the lives of trans and non-gender-conforming people. A bill doesn’t have to be passed for it to contribute to an environment where is dangerous to be LGBTQ+. Transgender deaths are on the rise in the US, with 53 transgender people killed and 32 lost to suicide last year. So, again, don’t dismiss the importance of bills like HB2885. This particular proposal might not go anywhere, but its very existence is a horrifying sign of where the US is heading.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      How Covid changed politics | David Runciman

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      Like many people, I have had Covid and I have had long Covid. They are very different experiences. I first caught the disease at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, when its effects were relatively unknown. It was unnerving and highly unpredictable. I did not get particularly sick, but I probably gave the virus to my father, who did. Back then, Covid appeared to be the great divider – the old were far more at risk than the young, and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities most at risk of all – and the great equaliser. Almost everyone experienced the shock and the fear of discovering a novel killer among us. We soon acquired a shared language and a sense of common purpose: to get through this together – whatever this turned out to be.I developed long Covid last year, six months after I had caught glandular fever. The fresh bout of the Covid virus made the effects of the glandular fever far worse: more debilitating and much harder to shake. Some mornings it was a struggle to get out of bed, never mind leave the house. It was as though Covid latched on to what was already wrong with me and gave it extra teeth. The experience was unpredictable in a very different way from the drama of getting sick in 2020: not a cosmic lottery, but a drawn-out bout of low-level, private misery. Good days were followed by bad days for no obvious reason, hopes of having recovered were snuffed out just when it seemed like the worst was past. Long Covid is less isolating than being locked down, but it is also a lonelier business than getting ill at the peak of the pandemic was, if only because other people have moved on.The physical and psychological effects of these different versions of Covid – the short and the long – are oddly parallel to its political consequences. The disease turns out to be its own metaphor. We are all suffering from political long Covid now. The early drama is over. A series of lingering misfortunes has replaced it. As with long Covid, different countries are suffering in different ways, trapped in their own private miseries. The shock of the new has gone, to be replaced by an enduring sense of fatigue.When the pandemic hit, its effects on politics were intensely felt and hard to predict. In some ways, it seemed like the ultimate stress test. Different political systems – and leaders – were exposed in different ways. Those with longstanding vulnerabilities seemed destined to fail. At the same time, the advent of Covid appeared to open up the prospect of new kinds of political solidarity. We were in this together. Covid’s global impact was a reminder of what it is that we all have in common. An acute awareness of our shared vulnerability might create the conditions for a renewed sense of purpose in tackling global problems, including the climate emergency. Maybe a pandemic was just what we needed to remember what was at stake, and to remind some of us how lucky we are.Four years on, the picture looks very different. The immediate experience of the pandemic feels more and more remote, even though public inquiries are now under way, trying to establish just what really happened and who was to blame for what went wrong. Part of the reason for the remoteness is that much of what once looked like high-stakes decision-making has come out in the wash: many outcomes were similar, regardless of the political choices that were made. Maybe it was in the lap of the gods after all.At the same time, the more pernicious but harder to recognise political consequences of Covid are all around us. The immediacy of the threat has passed, but the lingering signs of the damage it did to the body politic are everywhere. The pandemic and its consequences – lockdowns, economic dislocation, inflation, growing frustration with political elites – have found out pre-existing weaknesses in our politics and made them worse. It has given what ails us extra teeth.The early days of Covid gave reason to hope that the massive disruption it entailed might also shift the direction of travel of global politics. That hope turned out to be illusory. In the first phase of the pandemic, it looked to have exposed populist grandstanding for what it was: bleach, it turned out, was no sort of viral disinfectant. But populism remains on the rise around the world, feeding off the many discontents of the lockdown years, and of the years that preceded them.Likewise, Covid did not start any major wars – 2020 and 2021 were two of the most peaceful years for international conflict on record. But a post-Covid world is now as militarily dangerous as at any time since the cold war.Covid did not exacerbate climate breakdown: for a short while, carbon emissions fell as economies shut down. But the world is still getting warmer and the hope that tackling the virus would provide a model for more urgent climate action turns out to have been a pipe dream.The pandemic wormed its way into the weak spots in our political life, just as long Covid finds weaknesses in the human body. It no longer galvanises us, nor is it capable of destroying us. Instead, its symptoms are erratic and hard to fathom, appearing in surprising and seemingly unrelated places. Political long Covid is neither the great divider nor the great equaliser. It’s the great destabiliser.During 2020, when the pandemic forced governments around the world to improvise their responses at breakneck speed, it looked as though it would expose some basic truths about the strengths and weaknesses of different political systems. The biggest and most immediate contrast was between autocratic China and the democratic west. Ruthlessness and decisiveness – which the Chinese political system appeared to possess in abundance – were the order of the day. The democracies struggled to keep up.In March of that year, after Italy became the first European country to grapple with the question of how to keep its population from infecting one another, the Chinese sent a group of health officials to help advise. The Italians were concerned by the fact that, despite putting draconian lockdowns in place, the virus was still spreading. The Chinese explained the problem. These weren’t actually lockdowns as they understood them. People could still leave their homes for emergencies, enforcement was sporadic, and punishment was relatively light. Meanwhile, in Wuhan, the very centre of the Covid outbreak, armed guards stood outside apartment blocks, curfews were brutally enforced and those with the virus could be barricaded inside their homes. Within a matter of weeks, Italy’s death toll was more than double that of China’s.The biggest contrast with China was the US, where a federal system of executive decision-making, a widespread suspicion of government mandates and an incompetent president meant that Covid soon killed far more people than anywhere else. If the US was the flagship for democracy, then it looked like democracy was failing to answer the call.However, it quickly became clear that the global picture was more complicated than any hastily assembled political morality tale might suggest. New Zealand – democratic, liberal and with a robustly independent population – for a long time kept the virus almost completely at bay. The country had the advantage of being an island state that was able to shut its borders. But Britain is also an island, and that made no difference to the government’s ability – or inability – to act. Vietnam, which is not an island, did almost as well as New Zealand. Russia did almost as badly as the US. Some of the worst death tolls were in the countries of eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, which had a mixed legacy of authoritarianism and democracy. Dividing the world up by regime types proved little.Demography turned out to be as important as politics: elderly, unhealthy populations suffered more. Equally, any geopolitical morality tales concealed a more complex set of tradeoffs. A zero-Covid policy, ruthlessly enforced as in China, turned out to be storing up trouble for the future. Even with the advent of effective vaccines – and China’s homegrown versions turned out to be less effective than elsewhere – too many of China’s population remained unprotected from the virus and the much-delayed economic opening left them exposed. China has also displayed a longstanding weakness of autocratic systems: an absence of transparency means we don’t know the ultimate death toll there, because they are not telling. It is simply not possible to compare it with other countries.View image in fullscreenThe wider tradeoffs – the toll that lockdowns have taken on mental health, on treatment for other illnesses, on educational prospects for the children worst affected – make it hard to draw any clear political lessons. Sweden, which was heralded – and viciously derided – for providing a real-time experiment in the efficacy of non-lockdown policies, now presents as mixed a picture as anywhere else: more Covid-related deaths than its Scandinavian neighbours (2,576 deaths per million, compared with Denmark’s 1,630 and Norway’s 1,054) but similar or even lower overall excess mortality rates from all causes, and less educational and economic disruption, though no readily quantifiable economic benefits. Covid was not just a political stress test. It was a series of impossible choices.Four years on, it is also clear that many of the lasting political consequences of the virus have little to do with the relative performance of individual governments. In the UK, the long-term incumbent parties north and south of the border are suffering serious Covid fallout despite adopting opposed approaches to the pandemic. The Tories in Westminster were reluctant lockdowners, the SNP in Edinburgh far more enthusiastic ones. It made little odds for the final outcomes: overall mortality rates were relatively consistent for the UK as a whole and variations had more to do with the underlying population profiles in different parts of the country than with the policy preferences of elected politicians.What lingers is something more familiar: the whiff of corruption and the stench of hypocrisy. Although Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, was responsible for one of the more hare-brained schemes of 2020, “eat out to help out” – which gave diners discounts for getting back into pubs and restaurants, at a time when the virus was still widespread in the population and about to surge back – that is not the reason why he is in such deep political trouble. Instead, the Covid legacy that haunts the Tories stems almost entirely from the parties held in Downing Street during Boris Johnson’s premiership, when the rest of the country was still locked down. Ultimately it is not the contrast between the public performance of different administrations that has come to matter politically, but the contrast between public pronouncements and private practice: not how many died in the end, but how many died while the wine was flowing in Downing Street. Hypocrisy is the political killer.The same is true for the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, who once appeared caring and decisive in her nightly news conference, now seems sanctimonious and evasive, her WhatsApp messages long deleted, her personal grievances exposed. The harsh light of a public inquiry has revealed the SNP to have been as motivated by petty point-scoring and score-settling as any other self-interested political party.Politics everywhere – in whatever form – takes its toll on its practitioners. The scars accumulate, especially for longstanding administrations. Covid, initially, appeared to be something else: an unprecedented governmental challenge, requiring a new kind of skill set. But in the end, it found a way to expose the regime fatigue that had set in regardless. As Johnson and Sturgeon have discovered, long political Covid is a lonelier business than the exposure they faced in the white heat of the initial outbreak. It works its way through to latch on to personal vulnerabilities and makes them far harder to shake off.What happened to the sense of solidarity that the arrival of Covid appeared to have engendered? In the early days of the pandemic, many governments – including in the UK – were worried that people would soon tire of restrictions on their freedom of movement. Some behavioural models had indicated that widespread disobedience would become the norm after a matter of weeks. Those models turned out to be wrong. Most citizens around the world did as they were told for far longer than might have been expected.This gave rise to a hope that concerted action on an equivalent scale might be possible in other areas, too. If, in the face of a serious threat, the public was willing to act in the common interest, even if that meant making significant personal sacrifices, then perhaps other collective action problems – from mass migration to the climate crisis – might be amenable to a similar spirit of cooperation. Maybe we were more public-spirited than we had given ourselves credit for.Yet no such dividend has been delivered. On the most contentious political questions, we remain as far apart as ever. Environmental policies – particularly when tied to net zero targets – still provoke deep divisions and can stoke widespread anger. A voting public that was so furious with Johnson over breaking his own Covid rules that it effectively helped turf him out of office nonetheless elected a Tory in his Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency when the party turned the issue of the Ulez traffic levy being introduced by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, into a symbol of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of local communities. Lockdown was one thing. But environmental protections are something else: readily weaponised as evidence of elite interference in ordinary people’s lives.Anti-immigrant sentiment, including among many of the older voters who most dutifully complied with Covid restrictions, continues to fuel populism around the developed world. Geert Wilders won the popular vote in last year’s Dutch general election on a platform that combined migrant-bashing with net zero scepticism. But unlike some other far-right politicians, Wilders is no Covid sceptic. He had also been one of the first Dutch politicians to complain about his country’s slow rollout of its Covid vaccination programme.View image in fullscreenWhy does Covid solidarity not translate to other areas? In part, it is the lack of any comparable sense of urgency. Net zero targets are there to stave off long-heralded but also long-distant threats of catastrophe. At its height, Covid threatened to crash public health systems in a matter of days. But there is another difference. Public support for government restrictions during Covid was about controlling collective behaviour when it threatened our personal safety. The danger was other people: keep them in to keep us safe. Climate action is so much harder to sell because it seems to represent an infringement of personal freedom for the sake of some far less immediate collective benefit. In that sense, Covid compliance has more in common with anti-immigrant sentiment. Keep them out to keep us safe.Throughout the pandemic, public opinion in the UK tended to be critical of the government for being too eager to lift restrictions rather than too keen to impose them. In a pandemic the majority of British people want other people to be told what to do, even if it means being told what to do themselves.This has not been the case everywhere. In large parts of the US, the public proved deeply resistant to the many varieties of mandated behaviour, particularly when it came to mask-wearing, which became a proxy for a whole host of other resentments and frustrations. The pandemic latched on to what unites us and what divides us. It did nothing to change the contours of those divisions.The truth is that public cooperation during Covid did not reveal civic capabilities of which we had been unaware. Publics obeyed the injunctions of democratic politicians because those politicians were already doing their best to respond to the choices of the public. Successfully observed lockdowns were as much a reflection of ongoing behaviour as they were a constraint upon it. Likewise, when lockdowns failed, it was often because political leaders, themselves pandering to perceived public opinion, failed to endorse them wholeheartedly.Covid didn’t generate the political response required to change the way we live. In most cases, it gave us the political response that we asked for.The area where Covid made the biggest immediate political difference was in public finance. Politicians suddenly found the money that was needed to stave off disaster, conjuring it up any way they could. The magic money tree turned out to exist after all. In a genuine crisis, despite everything that had been said about the insurmountable limits on public spending, there proved to be both a will and a way to surmount them.As chancellor in 2020, Sunak launched a furlough scheme that guaranteed 80% subsidies to almost everyone in employment: the closest the UK has ever come to instituting a kind of universal basic income. In the US, a rolling series of extensive relief and stimulus packages included direct cash payments to all households, mortgage relief, tax holidays and giant subsidies to businesses. As a result, people stayed in work and businesses stayed afloat, while public debt in both countries soared. At the same time, governments around the world spent heavily to support vaccine development programmes. Conventional practice in the pharmaceutical industry meant there was invariably a multi-year gap between finding a new treatment and bringing it to market. But again, these constraints turned out to be dispensable. Effective vaccines arrived within a year of the outbreak.Was this, then, the model for an alternative political future, in which vastly accelerated public spending can drive innovation while protecting citizens from disruption? Could it be the means of tackling the climate crisis?In reality, the response to Covid was less like a trial run for a new climate politics and more like the response to a war. The emergency measures were put in place for the attritional phase of the pandemic, when the threat of collapse was real. They have been steadily wound down ever since. Meanwhile, the spending on vaccine research was only a part of wider government programmes that tended to be far less efficient and highly wasteful. As in any actual war, successful weapons programmes are the exception, not the norm. Most of the money gets siphoned off by schemes that go nowhere.View image in fullscreenAs a result, the legacy of government action on Covid has been lingering dissatisfaction rather than a new sense of political possibility. The symptoms of political long Covid include public frustration with the bill that has to be paid. Part of the cause for that frustration is widespread inflation, stoked by looser public finances, which has fuelled anger with governments around the world and created electoral volatility. Javier Milei might not be president of Argentina without Covid-fuelled inflation. Donald Trump might not be making a comeback without it, either.At the same time, stories of the waste and corruption that inevitably went along with unfettered government spending continue to surface. In the UK, the face of government pandemic spending is not Kate Bingham, the head of the highly effective UK vaccines taskforce, but the Tory peer Michelle Mone, who is accused of having used a VIP fast-lane to bypass standard procurement processes and secure government contracts for a company to supply PPE worth more than £200m, much of which apparently turned out to be useless (though the company denies this). The price of sidelining politics as normal is that when politics as normal resumes, the corner-cutting doesn’t look so good.In the aftermath of the first and second world wars, when government spending among the belligerents was colossal, and waste and corruption were widespread, lasting social transformation nonetheless followed in their wake. The foundations of a new kind of welfare state were laid by the scale of wartime public investment, along with a sense that public sacrifices needed to be repaid.The pandemic has not been the same. In part, it is a question of scale. The $12bn the US federal government spent supporting vaccine research is a drop in the ocean of public spending. Even the trillions of dollars the US government made available in various forms of aid pales compared with the legacy of pre-existing programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid. The levels of US public debt in 2024 are similar as a percentage of GDP to what they were in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of second world war. But that has more to do with the long-term burdens of welfare programmes and defence spending than with the response to Covid.In a war, the young fight and give up their lives to keep the old safe, who in return pledge to make life better for the those who are being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. It is part of what creates a sense of mutual obligation between the generations. In Covid, it was the old who lost their lives, but it was still the young who made many of the sacrifices, in lost employment and educational opportunities. That makes the tradeoff more complicated. Its legacy has not been a new intergenerational compact. If anything, political differences between the generations are wider than ever, and Covid has exacerbated them. The young have not been repaid for their sacrifice with the kinds of promises that tend to follow an actual war: better housing, greater educational access, full employment. This is in part because the price paid by the younger generation has proved far harder to quantify than the physical toll the disease took on the old. Who owes whom for what? This was a war with no obvious winners.Except, perhaps, those politicians who saw what might come next. In October 2022, as his invasion of Ukraine was stalling, Vladimir Putin told his government coordination council in Moscow that the lesson was clear: Russia needed to translate Covid urgency into military urgency. “We faced certain difficulties and the need to upgrade our work, give it a new momentum and a new character when we were responding to the coronavirus pandemic,” he said. Those lessons had to be taken forward in prosecuting the war. “We need to get rid of those archaic procedures that are preventing us from moving forward at the pace the country needs.” As a first step, Putin declared martial law in the four regions controlled by Russian forces.Covid was not an actual war, though it often felt like one. Nor was Covid a dry run for how to deal with the challenge of the climate crisis, though it occasionally felt like that too. Now we know that Covid was, for some politicians, a dry run for war itself.Covid did not fundamentally change the way we live. The French writer Michel Houellebecq, when asked what impact Covid would have on the future, said: “The same, but worse.” That is perhaps too bleak. It is not all worse. In some respects, life has returned to its previous patterns, for better and for worse. The drivers of change remain the same, even if some of them have accelerated.The pandemic dramatically accelerated some social transformations that were already under way. Working from home was something being facilitated by new technology long before 2020. The pandemic did not create hybrid working, nor did it begin the steady hollowing out of downtown office space. But it brought them forward by about a decade.Politics, too, is similar enough to what went before that it seems unlikely future historians will see 2020-21 as representing a sea-change in world affairs. The US and China are more hostile to each other than they were, though the hostility had been growing for more than a decade before 2020. The Middle East is more unstable than it was, electoral politics more fractious, authoritarians more assertive, the planet hotter, the disparities greater. This is somewhat different. But none of it is new. And there is no vaccine for political long Covid, any more than there is for the longer form of the disease itself. Its effects are too sporadic and its triggers still too poorly understood for that.But in one respect, the political consequences of Covid in 2024 might yet come to look decisive in the history of the 21st century. The politician who paid the highest electoral price for the pandemic was Donald Trump. At the start of 2020 he was well set for re-election: the US economy was relatively strong, his base was relatively happy (above all with his nominations to the supreme court), and the Democrats were unable to agree on a candidate to oppose him. Covid changed all that. Trump handled it badly – he never got his message straight – and even some of his supporters noticed. The economy suffered. The Democrats rallied behind Joe Biden, who did not have to suffer the physical stresses of a full campaign because most forms of campaigning were impossible. Trump lost, but only narrowly – without Covid he would almost certainly had won.For the many people inside and outside the US who found Trump beyond the pale, his removal from office looked like one of the few blessings of the pandemic. Yet had Trump won in 2020 he would have been, like most second-term US presidents, something of a lame duck. He had achieved little by way of serious reform in his first term: a second term would have likely been even more underwhelming, since Trump runs on resentment, which re-election would have done much to defuse. Now, in 2024, we would be looking at the back of Trump, and at a new generation of candidates, some of whom might have been offering something new.Instead, a narrow defeat in 2020 – coupled with his insistence that he had been robbed – has given Trump all the resentment he needs. It is Biden who has inherited the problems of a post-Covid world and the challenge of defending his administration from the resentments that have built up. A second Trump term coming after an interlude of four years, during which time he and his supporters have been making sure they won’t get fooled again, and his opponents have been looking for ways to have him jailed, is a far more serious prospect. The stakes are much higher. The damage could be far greater.This year is the busiest year around the world in the history of electoral democracy: more than 4 billion people are entitled to vote in elections from India to Ireland to Mexico. It is one sign that Covid, which put so many democratic freedoms on hold, did not do so permanently. But the US presidential election in November still has the potential to outweigh all that. Trump is by no means certain to win. Yet if he does, and if he decides this time to make good on his promise to change the way the US is governed, by hollowing out the administrative state and by withdrawing US support for Ukraine and for Nato, then Covid will have had a truly lasting impact on global politics. At that point, political long Covid will be hard for any of us to escape. More

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      Trump claims he will debate Biden ‘anytime, anywhere’ as US election rivals chase Haley voters after her exit – as it happened

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      As Nikki Haley announced the end to her presidential campaign and effectively ceded the 2024 Republican nomination to Donald Trump, the fight to win over her supporters began.The former South Carolina governor and Trump’s UN ambassador did not endorse her former boss during her speech on Wednesday, instead saying that it was up to him to “earn” the support of her voters. Whether Haley will endorse him is now a central campaign question for Trump.Both Joe Biden and Trump quickly released statements calling on Haley voters to join their team – although using very different language. While Biden praised Haley for “speaking the truth” about Trump, Trump said he had “trounced” her in the Super Tuesday contests. Following her speech announcing her exit from the race, Trump’s campaign in a fundraising email falsely claimed that Haley had endorsed his candidacy.Despite enduring a long string of losses, exit polls showed Haley’s strength among suburban women and independents – key constituencies in a general election that she warned Trump was continuing to alienate. A sizable share of her supporters – and Republican voters more broadly – say they would not vote for a candidate convicted of a crime.Nearly 570,000 voters in the key battleground states of Nevada, North Carolina and Michigan voted for Haley, Reuters reported, a small but potentially significant group in races that have been decided by tiny margins in recent elections.A group that had targeted independents and Democrats to vote for Haley over Trump in Republican primaries is now pushing those voters to back Biden in November.
      Donald Trump and Joe Biden are set for a rematch in the November election, after Nikki Haley announced the end of her presidential campaign after being soundly defeated in coast-to-coast Super Tuesday contests. Haley declined to immediately endorse the former president as nearly all of his other Republican rivals did, instead challenging Trump to earn the support of her voters.
      Joe Biden praised the “courage” he said Haley displayed in seeking the Republican nomination despite knowing it was likely to provoke the wrath of Trump and his most loyal supporters. By contrast, Donald Trump attacked her in a social media post, accusing his rival of drawing support from “Radical Left Democrats” and downplaying her sole win in Vermont.
      Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, endorsed Donald Trump for president despite years of acrimony between the pair including Trump calling McConnell a “piece of shit” and using racist invective in attacks against his wife.
      Dean Phillips, the Minnesota congressman running against Biden in the Democratic primary dropped out of the race, ending a long-shot bid to stop the US president from winning the nomination.
      Joe Biden and Donald Trump largely cruised to easy victories on Super Tuesday. Biden won every contest except American Samoa, while Trump won everything except Vermont, where Haley scored a close surprise victory.
      Biden faced his biggest challenge so far from an ongoing protest vote against his stance on the Israel-Gaza war. The “uncommitted” campaign is moving nationally to push Biden on the issue, calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
      Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest people, said he will not donate money to either Biden or Trump. His statement came after reports that Musk met with Trump in Florida over the weekend.
      TheUS supreme court has scheduled argument hearings surrounding Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution in his involvement in the 2020 presidential overturn efforts.
      Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has defended his decision to endorse Donald Trump for president despite years of acrimony, including Trump calling McConnell a “piece of shit” and attacking his wife in racist terms.Asked by a reporter how he reconciles his endorsement with the fact that he said Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the January 6 insurrection, McConnell replied:
      February 25th, 2021, shortly after the attack on the Capitol, I was asked a similar question, and I said I would support the nominee for president even if it were the former president.
      Donald Trump has called for debates with Joe Biden on issues that are “vital to America, and the American people”.In a post on his TruthSocial platform, Trump said:
      It is important, for the Good of our Country, that Joe Biden and I Debate Issues that are so vital to America, and the American People. Therefore, I am calling for Debates, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE!
      As Nikki Haley announced the end to her presidential campaign and effectively ceded the 2024 Republican nomination to Donald Trump, the fight to win over her supporters began.The former South Carolina governor and Trump’s UN ambassador did not endorse her former boss during her speech on Wednesday, instead saying that it was up to him to “earn” the support of her voters. Whether Haley will endorse him is now a central campaign question for Trump.Both Joe Biden and Trump quickly released statements calling on Haley voters to join their team – although using very different language. While Biden praised Haley for “speaking the truth” about Trump, Trump said he had “trounced” her in the Super Tuesday contests. Following her speech announcing her exit from the race, Trump’s campaign in a fundraising email falsely claimed that Haley had endorsed his candidacy.Despite enduring a long string of losses, exit polls showed Haley’s strength among suburban women and independents – key constituencies in a general election that she warned Trump was continuing to alienate. A sizable share of her supporters – and Republican voters more broadly – say they would not vote for a candidate convicted of a crime.Nearly 570,000 voters in the key battleground states of Nevada, North Carolina and Michigan voted for Haley, Reuters reported, a small but potentially significant group in races that have been decided by tiny margins in recent elections.A group that had targeted independents and Democrats to vote for Haley over Trump in Republican primaries is now pushing those voters to back Biden in November.A group of House Democrats have warned Joe Biden that an anticipated Israeli invasion of Rafah could violate the US’s conditions on sending military aid to Israel.More than three dozen House Democrats have sent a letter to the White House writing that a Rafah invasion “would likely contravene” principles outlined in a memo Biden signed last month that US military aid be used in accordance with international law, Axios reported. The letter reads:
      While we continue to urge Israel to avoid an expanded operation in Rafah, we share your obvious concern about the absence of a credible plan for the safety and support of the more than one million civilians sheltering in Rafah.
      The Biden administration has faced growing calls from Democrats to push Israel to ease the devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with some saying they may try to stop military assistance if conditions for civilians do not improve, Reuters reported.The supreme court has scheduled argument hearings surrounding Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution in his involvement in the 2020 presidential overturn efforts.The supreme court has scheduled the hearing for 25 April, the last day of hearings for this court term.Last Wednesday, the supreme court agreed to hear the former president’s claims that he cannot be prosecuted for his efforts in attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The supreme court’s decision to hear his claims comes after a federal appeals court in February categorically rejected Trump’s claim that he is immune from criminal prosecution.The supreme court’s decision to hear Trump’s claims marks the court’s direct entry into the 2024 presidential election, and will potentially determine whether Trump will go to trial prior to election day on 5 November.CodePink, a feminist and anti-war advocacy organization, is urging voters to plan a “sit in” in Nancy Pelosi’s office on the eve of International Women’s Day to “expose her faux feminism”.In a statement released on Wednesday, the group, along with Mothers and Daughters Against Genocide, said that they are targeting the former House speaker because “she has the power and position to lead on women’s rights and be a true champion for reproductive justice; however, she instead chooses to support and fund the genocide in Gaza.”They went on to add:
      The group will be there to point out her blatant feminist hypocrisy and her silence and complicity regarding the US-supported genocide in Gaza. The group’s demands for the women of Congress to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, an end to US funding and military assistance to Israel, and to restore funding the UNRWA for the continuation of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
      Earlier this year, Pelosi, who has repeatedly expressed support for Israel, faced backlash after she condemned pro-ceasefire supporters by accusing them of having ties to Russia and spreading “Mr Putin’s message”.Since 7 October, Israel has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, the majority being women and children. Numerous UN agencies have warned of the increasing dangers faced by Palestinian women amid the humanitarian crisis, including malnutrition, lack of food security, and gender-based violence, among other risks.Grassroots organizations’ attempts to push for an “uncommitted” vote in Minnesota have manifested in the allocation of 11 national delegates to the Democratic National Convention.In a statement released on Wednesday, Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor Party (DFL) announced that Joe Biden won 64 of the 75 delegates that were at stake in the DFL presidential primary while uncommitted won 11 delegates.Since last October, grassroots organizations across the country have been urging voters to vote “uncommitted” in protest against Biden’s support for Israel.Last month, over 100,000 voters in Michigan voted “uncommitted”, marking 13.2% of the state’s Democratic primary.The increasing pushes for “uncommitted” votes come amid a horrifying humanitarian crisis in Gaza where Israeli forces have killed over 30,000 Palestinians since last October while forcibly displacing approximately 2 million survivors.Moreover, with the Biden administration repeatedly bypassing Congress to approve the sale of weapons to Israel, many young, Arab American and Muslim voters across the country have become disenchanted with the Democratic president and his “inept” outreach.Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman and fierce Donald Trump critic, is urging supporters to join The Great Task, a Super Pac she is sponsoring which is “focused on reverence for the rule of law [and] respect for our constitution”.In a tweet on Wednesday following Nikki Haley’s announcement of her 2024 presidential race dropout, Cheney wrote:
      The GOP has chosen. They will nominate a man who attempted to overturn an election and seize power. We have eight months to save our republic and ensure Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office again. Join me in the fight for our nation’s freedom.
      With Haley’s dropout and Trump’s numerous victories on Super Tuesday, the rematch between Trump and Joe Biden in the upcoming general election is now set.In California, several key races remain undecided.Prop 1, a statewide ballot measure that California’s governor Gavin Newsom pushed as a way to tackle the mental health and homelessness crises, has a very slight lead with about 50% of votes counted. The measure, which would reallocate some of the state’s mental health funds toward housing and treatment centers for severe mental illness and substance abuse disorders, has been slammed by disability advocates because it could facilitate involuntary institutionalization. Local governments have also opposed the measure because it would effectively defund community-based preventive treatment programs.In Los Angeles county, a highly contested district attorney race remains up in the air. The current progressive DA, George Gascón, was leading – followed closely by a slew of opponents looking to undo his reforms. They including Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor and deputy district attorney Jonathan Hatami. The top two vote getters will advance to the November election.LA’s city council races will also be interesting to watch. Kevin De León, an incumbent who along with two other council members was secretly recorded making racist and disparaging remarks about constituents and colleagues, was leading ahead of seven opponents. After the scandal broke in 2022, even Joe Biden had called for León and two others to step down from the city council.Several key House races remain unclear. In California’s 22nd district, in the state’s Central Valley, incumbent Republican David Valdado has the lead followed by Democrat Rudy Salas. But Republican Chris Mathys is in third place. The top two vote-getters will advance – and Democrats are worried that state senator Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat trailing in fourth, would split voters, leading to two Republicans advancing to the general.In southern California’s 47th district, Republican Scott Baugh and Democratic state senator Dave Min were leading in early returns to fill the seat being vacated by Katie Porter (who lost her bid for the US senate).And in the coastal 49th district, incumbent Democrat Mike Levin has advanced to the November ballot, but it’s unclear who he’ll face. This is a district that Republicans are hoping to flip, and Republican Matt Gunderson, an auto dealer, appeared to be leading among the challengers.Dean Phillips has suspended his campaign for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, ending his long-shot primary challenge against Joe Biden.Phillips, in a radio interview on Wednesday, said:
      I’m going to suspend my campaign and I will be, right now, endorsing President Biden because the choices are so clear.
      In a social media post, the Minnesota congressman said it was “clear that Joe Biden is OUR candidate”, adding:
      I ask you join me in mobilizing, energizing, and doing everything you can to help keep a man of decency and integrity in the White House. That’s Joe Biden.
      Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
      Nikki Haley ended her presidential campaign after being soundly defeated in coast-to-coast Super Tuesday contests, in effect ceding the 2024 Republican nomination to Donald Trump. Haley declined to immediately endorse the former president as nearly all of his other Republican rivals did, instead she challenged Trump to earn the support of her voters.
      Joe Biden praised the “courage” he said Haley displayed in seeking the Republican nomination despite knowing it was likely to provoke the wrath of Trump and his most loyal supporters. By contrast, Donald Trump attacked her in a social media post, accusing his rival of drawing support from “Radical Left Democrats” and downplaying her sole win in Vermont.
      Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, endorsed Donald Trump for president despite years of acrimony between the pair including Trump calling McConnell a “piece of shit” and using racist invective in attacks against his wife.
      Joe Biden and Donald Trump largely cruised to easy victories on Super Tuesday. Biden won every contest except American Samoa, while Trump won everything except Vermont, where Haley scored a close surprise victory.
      Biden faced his biggest challenge so far from an ongoing protest vote against his stance on the Israel-Gaza war. The uncommitted campaign is moving nationally to push Biden on the issue, calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
      Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest people, said he will not donate money to either Biden or Trump. His statement came after reports that Musk met with Trump in Florida over the weekend. Musk’s announcement does not rule out his support for either Trump or Biden in ways other than a direct donation, as he could donate to a Super Pac or group that benefits either candidate.
      Adam Schiff, the centrist Democratic congressman and longtime Trump antagonist, was declared the first-place winner to fill the California seat held by the late US senator Dianne Feinstein. He will face off with Republican Steve Garvey, a former professional baseball player, in November. It means that for the first time in more than three decades, California won’t have a woman in the Senate.
      Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Republican congresswoman, Trump ally and potential vice-presidential pick told a British interviewer to “Fuck off”, when asked about her frequent repetition of conspiracy theories. More

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      in US Politics

      Nikki Haley has one last card to play: will she eventually endorse Trump?

      by

      Nikki Haley’s withdrawal from the Republican presidential primary on Wednesday was “not a shocker”, a leading anti-Trump conservative said, in a contender for understatement of the political year.“As we’ve said for months,” Tara Setmayer added, “she has no path and [Donald] Trump will be the GOP nominee.”But Setmayer also pointed to the impact Haley did make in the Republican primary, what it means for Trump, and the choice now facing the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador as she seeks to retain political relevance.“Now let the over/under begin for when Haley endorses Trump,” Setmayer, a Republican operative turned member of the anti-Trump Lincoln project, said on social media.On Super Tuesday, Haley added Vermont to her weekend win in Washington DC but otherwise suffered a wipeout. Though Trump has not yet mathematically secured the nomination, Haley bowed to the inevitable the following morning.There was consolation for Haley. Across the slate of states which voted on Tuesday, she once again finished closer to Trump than expected, her vote shares above those predicted by polling.Tellingly, that illustrated sizable opposition to Trump among some Republicans and conservative independents.“Nikki Haley’s performance across the board is a warning signal for … Trump’s lieutenants,” Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist and ad maker turned Lincoln Project co-founder, wrote on Substack.“Trump’s senior strategist, Chris LaCivita, saw the results in key states late last night, read the exit poll data, scanned the turnout areas, and knew within hours that Trump’s party isn’t unified.“It’s smaller, darker, and more passionately devoted to the dear leader, but depending on the state, between 25% and 40% of Republican and conservative independents just aren’t into Donald Trump.”If most of those voters do not come back, Trump will face a near-impossible task in November against Joe Biden.The question for Trump and his aides, therefore, is how to get Haley onside and win back as many of her supporters as possible, as quickly as possible, while keeping them out of Biden’s camp.Whether Haley will endorse Trump, it follows, is now a central campaign question.In Charleston on Wednesday, announcing her withdrawal, Haley said that in campaigning against Trump for so long, with so little chance of success, she had “wanted Americans to have their voices heard”.“I have done that,” she said. “I have no regrets.”But having recently avoided re-committing to supporting the Republican nominee – which she previously pledged to do – she did not go on to endorse him.Having ruled out a third-party bid, an endorsement is Haley’s last card to play. Endorsements are often bartered for plum jobs (if not in this case vice-president, which Haley has said she does not want). Endorsements, and campaign-trail efforts on behalf of the nominee, can also be used to win support for candidacies yet to come, in Haley’s case after Trump finally leaves the stage.It is fair to say Haley has earned her position of relative influence in a party controlled by Trump. A rare Republican woman of colour in a primary dominated by white men, she vastly outperformed expectations.Though she started out with single-figure polling numbers, confident debate-stage displays saw her eclipse rivals including the former vice-president Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis, the hardline Florida governor who was initially expected to be Trump’s leading challenger, perhaps even his conqueror.Trump skipped every debate. Tellingly, though, he did not need to be onstage to dominate his opponents who were. Before the field began to shrink, all candidates other than Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, two doomed anti-Trumpers, fought shy of attacking him, aware of his grip on the base.When DeSantis quit, before the New Hampshire primary, Haley finally had a clear field to take the fight to Trump. She began to turn fire his way. But however strongly she spoke – calling the 77-year-old former president “unhinged” and diminished”, doubting he would adhere to the constitution – it was clearly too little, too late.Haley has disappointed Trump’s opponents too.She has said she will vote for Trump over Joe Biden. She also said that if she was elected, and if Trump was convicted on any of the 91 criminal charges he faces, she would give him a pardon.Though Haley has “earned the votes and support of millions of Republican and conservative independent voters in her brief time in the spotlight”, Wilson said, she will soon “break their hearts for nothing.“Reality has now set in for millions of Republican voters. They must choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. In all likelihood, Nikki Haley will make the wrong choice and back Trump.”That endorsement, Wilson said, “will prove it was all for nothing. The abyss is calling, and she’s peering down into the darkness.” More

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      in US Politics

      Who is running for president in 2024? Biden, Trump and the full list of candidates

      by

      The 2024 election season is under way, with Donald Trump the lone Republican candidate left seeking to unseat the sitting president, Joe Biden. After the pandemic changed the way Americans campaigned and voted four years ago, and three years after thousands of rioters waged violent protest at the nation’s Capitol to upend the last election’s results, the US will face new obstacles in carrying out the democratic process.Here is the list of candidates in the primary elections as of Super Tuesday.@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline 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      Republicans

      Democrats

      Third party

      Dropped out

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      Donald Trump
      Former president of the United States

      Former president Donald Trump is the top contender for the Republican party nomination, even as he faces several legal hurdles, including federal charges over obstructing justice and violating the Espionage Act. Trump, a longtime businessman, unsuccessfully ran for re-election as president in 2020, and refused to accept the outcome of the results. Trump most recently said he is pro-life, and would continue his hardline immigration stance in a second term if elected. He has also renewed attacks on trans people, especially athletes, and his anti-China agenda.
      Trump won big in Iowa, with 51% of votes – full Republican results
      In New Hampshire, Trump beat Haley by 10 points – full New Hampshire primary results
      Trump wins Nevada caucuses in effective one-horse race – Nevada primary results in full
      Trump beat Haley in her home state – full South Carolina primary results
      Trump defeats Haley in Michigan – full Michigan primary results
      Trump swept to victory in states across the US on Super Tuesday – full primary results
      Back to topDemocrats@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.ttf) 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      Joe Biden
      President of the United States

      Joe Biden is the likely Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election. He announced his campaign for re-election on 25 April 2023, exactly four years after he announced his previous, successful presidential campaign. While approval for Biden remains low, hovering just above 40%, political experts say he is the most likely candidate to defeat Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Biden has served in politics for over five decades and is running on a platform that includes abortion rights, gun reform and healthcare. At 81, he is the oldest president in US history.
      Biden took 96.2% of the vote in a write-in campaign in New Hampshire – full primary results
      Biden easily won first Democratic contest in South Carolina – full primary results
      Biden won the Democratic vote – full Nevada primary results
      Biden won but sheds support over Gaza – full Michigan primary results
      Biden swept to victory in states across the US on Super Tuesday – full primary results
      Back to top@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.ttf) 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      Cenk Uygur
      Political commentator and media host

      Cenk Uygur announced the longest of long-shot campaigns in October. Now 53, the outspoken host of the progressive Young Turks TV show has no experience in elected office – though he did run for Congress in California in 2020 – but perhaps more importantly he was born in Istanbul, Turkey. Most legal scholars would say that makes him ineligible to be president, under article II, section I, clause 5 of the US constitution, which says only “natural born citizens” can hold the office. Uygur says otherwise, and promises to prove it in court. 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      Marianne Williamson
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      Biden challenger Dean Phillips drops out of US presidential race

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      The Minnesota congressman running against Joe Biden in the Democratic primary dropped out of the race on Wednesday, ending a long-shot bid to stop the US president from winning the nomination. He endorsed the president.Dean Phillips, who represents a wealthier suburban area outside Minneapolis, entered the Democratic race seemingly against his will and against the advice of most of his Democratic colleagues. The congressman, who first took office in 2019, first tried to recruit more prominent Democrats to challenge Biden, publicly saying Biden needed to let the next generation lead the party.The announcement comes after he lost his home state of Minnesota, where he gave up a seat he flipped from Republicans in order to enter the presidential race.“I ran for Congress in 2018 to resist Donald Trump, I was trapped in the Capitol in 2021 because of Donald Trump, and I ran for President in 2024 to resist Donald Trump again – because Americans were demanding an alternative, and democracy demands options. But it is clear that alternative is not me,” he said on Twitter/X.“And it is clear that Joe Biden is OUR candidate and OUR opportunity to demonstrate what type of country America is and intends to be.”In his first election test, Phillips nabbed about 20% of the vote in New Hampshire, losing to Biden, whose name was not actually on the ballot.His campaign in New Hampshire was not without controversy: a former political consultant affiliated with Phillips’s campaign claimed responsibility for a now-infamous robocall in New Hampshire that urged voters not to show up to the polls; Phillips has denounced the robocall.Since then, Phillips’s momentum has fallen off, but he has stayed in the race – despite having no listed events and little, if any, campaigning happening in the field in any state. Even in his home state of Minnesota, there was no semblance of a campaign – no stops at local diners, no field office, no ground work.In Michigan, he lost to both an “uncommitted” vote that sought to protest against Biden’s inaction on a ceasefire in Gaza and to Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who had previously suspended her campaign. Williamson, buoyed by the results, made the unusual move to “un-suspend” her campaign.In mid-February, Phillips announced he had to lay off “a lot” of his staff because he had found it so hard to fundraise with an incumbent in the race. Phillips, the heir to a liquor empire, had previously given his campaign several million dollars to get up and running.“We can do it,” he said in a video announcing the layoffs. “We can do better. I love you all and thank you for keeping the faith. And join me, the Dean team, we can do it.”Phillips managed to strike both a self-deprecating earnestness about his own campaign while continually sounding an alarm that Biden cannot win and someone should do something about it – but maybe not him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“If you resent me for the audacity to challenge Joe Biden, at least you’ll appreciate how relatively strong I’m making him look among primary voters!” Phillips wrote on X, adding a biceps emoji.He shared an opinion piece endorsing him the headline of which said: Vote for whatshisname. He made a meme of a Dean shoe, a Technicolor joke poking at Trump’s new sneaker. He played the guitar.He floated the idea of a “unity ticket” with the Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who has stuck in the GOP race despite repeated losses to Trump. He is still trying to goad other Democrats into the race, specifically calling on Democratic governors such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and JB Pritzker to run.And he has complimented Biden, in a strange way: when a New York Times poll showed Biden trailing Trump and losing support from people who previously voted for him, Phillips cast doubt on the poll.“When the NYT/Siena poll shows me at 12%, you better believe it is flawed,” he wrote on X. “Only 5% even know who I am.” More

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      Far-right candidates see Super Tuesday wins at traditional Republicans’ expense

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      Far-right candidates took notable wins in state elections on Super Tuesday, further confirming the Republican ascendancy of supporters of Donald Trump, the probable GOP nominee for president, at the expense of more traditional conservatives.The highest-profile victory went to Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina who will now run for governor.The Democratic candidate, Josh Stein, would be the first Jewish governor of North Carolina should he win in November.In opposition to Stein, Robinson is a Hitler-quoting anti-abortion extremist, a dedicated controversialist who once said the superhero movie Black Panther was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by [a] satanic marxist … to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets”.But the candidate may find recent remarks about his views on abortion harder to brush off, as Democrats seek to continue a string of wins in campaigns focused on rightwing attacks on reproductive rights.Robinson has supported total abortion bans, calling abortion “murder” and “genocide” and, as reported by CNN, calling the founders of the women’s health organisation Planned Parenthood satanists who practiced witchcraft.The spokesperson for Robinson also called Stein an extremist.Elsewhere in North Carolina, a 21-year-old college student affiliated with the extremist Turning Point USA youth group scored a notable victory when he defeated an 84-year-old state representative who has served for 20 years.Wyatt Gable beat George Cleveland in a close primary race. Earlier this year, the Jacksonville Daily News, a local paper, asked both men what experience they had to recommend themselves to voters.Cleveland said: “I have served as a budget writer since 2010 and have chaired various House committees over the past 14 years in veterans and homeland security, general government, marine resources, and aquaculture.”Gable said: “Currently in the university system and only a few years removed from the public education system, I have an up-close look at our education system …“I am also the Turning Point USA president at East Carolina. As president, I have stopped the school from changing the bathrooms to allow men in the women’s room and vice versa. I have also been able to sign up almost 1,000 new members.”Further west, in Texas, a Republican civil war between Trump-aligned hardliners and establishment figures saw hardliners gain the edge in elections on Tuesday.In a US House primary, Tony Gonzales, a Republican congressman from San Antonio, was headed for a runoff election against Brandon Herrera, a social media personality and gun salesman.Last year, Gonzales was censured by his own state party, for voting in favour of same-sex marriage and gun safety reform (the latter after the massacre of 19 young children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas) and for being seen as soft on immigration and border policy.In the Texas state house, the speaker, Dade Phelan, will contest a runoff with David Covey, a challenger endorsed by Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor, and Trump himself.Phelan supported Paxton’s impeachment, a failed attempt to remove the attorney general over allegations of bribery, dereliction of duty and disregard for official duty.Paxton, who faces a securities fraud trial next month, also took aim on Tuesday at three judges on the highest criminal court in Texas. All Republicans, the three judges were part of a ruling that stopped Paxton fast-tracking cases of supposed voter fraud.All three judges were beaten by candidates Paxton endorsed. More

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      The not-so-Super Tuesday is over. America has two clear choices ahead | Cas Mudde

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      Not-so-Super Tuesday has made an end to two faux primaries, confirming what everyone has known for month: the presidential elections will be a repetition of those four years ago. Despite thousands of columns and hundreds of millions of campaign money, Donald Trump was unapproachable in the Republican primaries, while Joe Biden faced no real opponent and won without ever really campaigning. So, where does that leave the US?In many ways, the upcoming elections will be the same as most of the US presidential elections this century. The race will be between two unpopular candidates, who are mostly mobilizing an “anti-vote” based on a broadly shared narrative that this could be the last election to “save America”. But the situation is even worse than four years ago, because both the electoral context and political climate have worsened.US presidential elections have always been fundamentally undemocratic, because of the electoral college, an elitist safety-valve the Founding Fathers put in between the popular vote and the actual election of the president. Moreover, the voting process is extremely decentralized, which has facilitated voter intimidation and suppression, particularly targeting African Americans – but also, increasingly, Hispanics and college students.Ironically, given that one-third of Americans who believe Biden’s election was illegitimate, the 2020 presidential elections were the most “free and fair” in US history. While offering extensive new opportunities for absentee/mail voting, partly a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, experts declared the elections “the most secure in history”. Still, Republicans have weaponized their unfounded “stolen election” claim to limit the possibility to vote, mostly by passing restrictive voter ID and absentee/mail voting laws at the state level, and retake control of the election process.Today, more than 80% of Americans are worried about democracy in the US and about political violence in the future. In fact, this is one of the few things Democrats and Republicans (as well as independents) agree upon! Of course, they sharply disagree what is at stake and who is the main threat. Ironically, both are mostly right, largely because they stand for fundamentally contradictory Americas.The Republican claim that Democrats want to “destroy America” is based on Christian nationalism, which considers the US to be a “Christian nation”, based on the foundations of biblical values and the “traditional” (implicitly white) family. And it is true that most Democrats want to destroy this America, which might have been the reality of the country’s history, but is in clear opposition to its own (revered) constitution.In sharp contrast, most Democrats worry that another Trump presidency would mean the end of US liberal democracy, that is, the system enshrined in the constitution. And they are right too. Decades of radicalization have made the Republican party one of the most extreme far-right parties in the world, catering to an illiberal popular and media base that is largely in line with its paranoid and unhinged leader.It is too early to say which America will win in November. For now, ignore the polls, at least until October, as the key factor will be turnout, which will be largely determined by circumstances very close to election day. Like all but one presidential elections in the 21st century, the Democratic candidate will win the popular vote. But in an undemocratic regime like the US, this is no guarantee to also win the election. Given how close the results will probably be in several key states, we are in for a protracted legal battle should Trump lose, in which the increasingly partisan supreme court might have the final say.To prevent such an outcome, and ensure that US democracy prevails, at least for another four years, Democrats face a lot of challenges in the coming six months. While the Republican base is fired up, many (potential) Democrats are either “uncommitted” or weakly committed to Biden. At the same time, some liberal media, the New York Times in particular, seem determined to make the same mistake as with the “Clinton emails” in 2016, obsessing over Biden’s age and health.Let’s be clear, the age and health of both Biden and Trump are problematic for such a demanding and powerful position, but this is the choice the parties and primaries have given the US voter. Suggestions that the Democrats can still replace Biden and win against Trump are completely delusional. Not only are the Democratic electorate and politicians much more diverse and divided than the Republicans, but there is also no clear candidate who can unite them better than Biden or who has a name recognition that comes even close to that of Biden and Trump. Moreover, this new candidate would have to build their campaign and name in the shadow of a Democratic president, who has already won a significant number of delegates in the primaries.So, whether we like it or not, American voters have a choice between two very clear and different Americas, represented by two old and unpopular candidates. If Biden wins, not too much will change – except for an even more brazen insurgence from Republican-led states against the federal government. But should Trump return to the White House, the US will change fundamentally, and not for the better. Whatever (legitimate) issues potential Democratic voters have with Biden, let’s hope that they can get over them by 5 November. The fate of both the US and the world depends on it.
      Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today More