US Politics

Everything is weird and everyone is wrecked. This is maybe the biggest and least acknowledged truth of life in the United States and a lot of places beyond right now. It’s the pandemic; the eight years of Trumpism; the distortions, disruptions and corruptions Silicon Valley has promulgated and other looming menaces, including climate chaos. We all know this, because we’re living it, but maybe we should talk more about the fact that our political catastrophes are inseparable from widespread psychic devastation, that the public and private, political and personal, are entangled – or rather that the former has wrought havoc on the latter.The wisest people I know are aware that the stresses, atrocities, divisions and divergences from norms of recent years have made them (and everyone else) exhausted and brittle. The less wise but no less brittle either lash out with the sense that what’s wrong is definitely someone else or take refuge in cults and oversimplified versions in which they are at least in control of what it all means.Public life has private impact; some of it breaks our brains, and some of it breaks our hearts. Not to leave our consciences out of this – to watch so much malice and willful destruction, to witness so much injustice, from genocides around the world to gross injustices at home, has an impact. That impact is probably best described as moral injury, which a veterans’ organization defines as “the psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal or transgression of one’s own deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in high stakes situations”.Most of us have a sense of what’s reasonable or possible based on what’s happened before; but we are now lost in a sea of unprecedenteds. We have not had authoritarian threats like this arise in all three branches of the federal government (if you count a former president aspiring to be a dictator as well as the supreme court and Congress). We have not previously had the wild corrosion of information and our ability to pay attention to it the way we do now, thanks to an internet dominated by corporations eager to offer us addictive social media and distorted search results and algorithms.For those paying attention, climate change is also an immense moral injury, a reminder that we are part of a system shredding the beautiful tapestry of life on earth and devastating beloved species. Although Covid was a scourge across the globe, far more people – about 8 million – die every year from breathing air polluted by burning fossil fuel, and that’s only one aspect of the devastation, and only to our species.Nevertheless the pandemic was devastating. I was surprised when the fourth anniversary of the global coronavirus pandemic was met largely with silence. Apparently almost no one wants to remember it, and of course it’s not exactly over, since people are still getting sick and dying of this new disease. Trauma, a term resorted to constantly these days, is an experience so devastating you cannot forget it; it dominates you. The opposite of trauma, in which you refuse to remember and process an experience, is also devastating, if not in the same way; you suppress an experience at the cost of operating with a reduced sense of self and reality.One of the positive aspects of many kinds of disaster is the sense of shared experience. But we had wildly different experiences of the pandemic: it killed some of us, bereaved some of us, bankrupted some of us, made some of us frontline workers facing danger and death, or unemployed, or suddenly isolated from the sociability of school or work and everyday life outside the home. The impact was profoundly different depending on your age, financial circumstances and domestic situation, among other factors. I hear a lot from teachers and professors about how their students have not recovered well from two years of isolation and online learning that often involved too little learning and too much being online.It is hard to imagine how different the Covid pandemic might have been had the country not been headed by someone who himself became a major source of divisive misinformation about Covid. In the US, a huge factor in the crisis in our psyches is four years of Trump in power, followed by nearly four more years of Trumpism. When the most powerful people in the country say and do whatever they want mostly without consequences, we are launched into incoherence and meaninglessness.A US flag flies upside-down in front of the supreme court justice Samuel Alito’s home for several days in early 2021, in seeming support of the January 6 insurrection, but he declines to recuse himself from matters concerning Trump. Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was an active part of that insurrection, also declines to recuse himself or account for the outrageous gifts he’s accepted from billionaires. The evangelical Christian who became the speaker of the House shows up to support Trump in his criminal election fraud trial due to hush money paid to a porn star and decries his guilty verdict and with it the justice system. The corruption is open and the loyalty to the ex-president rather than the rule of law is obvious.In any previous era, these outrages and dozens of others would have been treated as shocking scandals; now each outrage seems to crowd out the next so that, for example, Trump’s dinner with fossil fuel executives, in which he asked for a $1bn campaign contribution in return for slashing climate legislation, has been reported on almost with complacency. That a man who was found liable in civil court for rape is a leading candidate for the presidency has been likewise normalized.The examples are well-known – but perhaps more should be said about the impact. Trumpism has inspired Trump’s followers with the transgressive boldness he demonstrated first and best: that actually you can say anything you want, truth be damned, deny you said it, or contradict it. And with enough accrued power, you can break the law with impunity.Authoritarians want control not only over the economy, military, courts and media, but also fact, science, history – over meaning itself. To violate the independence of truth and fact, to insist they are whatever you want them to be, is to enter the realms of meaninglessness. Authoritarianism is nihilism. As Hannah Arendt said, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.”Another crisis of our times is that the internet has isolated us, shattered our capacity to concentrate, undermined existing news media and created fertile ground for the spread of hate, misinformation and propaganda. The internet has isolated us from more face-to-face forms of contact and put us in spaces where combative shouting is normal and emotional honesty risky and rare, where in-group performativity is everywhere and dissent is dangerous. The loneliness epidemic Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, has talked about has everything to do with the internet and how it’s sucked us in in ways that have made other forms of contact wither away.That’s my diagnosis. My prescription might be simple: be kind to each other, remembering the distress we’ve all lived through; defend the facts with ardor; fight fascism and climate chaos in the ways you’re best equipped to (and if you’re lucky, that will connect you to other good people doing that crucial work). And if you’re lonely know that even in that you’re not alone; millions are, in large part because of how our world got rearranged. But diagnosis is the first step of treatment or cure, and just talking about how personal the impact is of this chaotic new era matters.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

In the opening scene of Stormy, the documentary about Stormy Daniels’ life, she says: “I have just been tormented for the last five years or so. And here I am, I’m still here.” Probably the worst of the torment has been from Donald Trump’s supporters, though they’ve never got together to explain what they’re angry about. Is it that Daniels claims she had sex with Trump, in 2006? That she accepted $130,000 to keep quiet about it? Surely, if he’s the richest and most virile man America ever produced, you’d think that was no big deal for him, and nice for her?Instead, as she described on the stand, giving evidence against Trump, the Maga lot have made her life a misery. Death threats layered with lurid threats of sexual violence, enough that she was constantly worried for the safety of her family, have poured in since 2018, when the Wall Street Journal first broke the story.Most likely, they are angered at Daniels’ failure to take Trump seriously. Was it the closely observed descriptions of his penis, in her memoir, or her Make America Horny Again strip club tour? Whatever you make of her, she has never seemed cowed; and in the peculiar cross-hatch of prurience and misogyny through which the hard right sees the world, a porn star is golden while she agrees with you, and contemptible once she doesn’t.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAll that virulent hatred alone would be enough to sink a regular person, but Daniels has also spent the past six years in court, on and off, asking Trump to stop lying about her. She lost her defamation case, then lost again on appeal, leaving her owing Trump hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. She came out pretty gung-ho on this debt, vowing not to pay it, but that’s not really how courts work. It’s not a game of chicken.And now, finally, she is not just vindicated but at the white-hot centre of Donald Trump’s 34 felony convictions, which is 34 more than any former president in the country’s history. Other former members of his team who have been convicted in court include his campaign chairman (Paul Manafort Jr), his deputy campaign manager (Rick Gates), one of his lawyers (Michael Cohen), his chief strategist (Steve Bannon), several advisers (Peter Navarro, Roger Stone and George Papadopoulos) and his company CFO (Allen Weisselberg). I just couldn’t be more thrilled for Ms Daniels – that she’s one of very few people to cross paths with Trump and not end up with a criminal record. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More

Benjamin Netanyahu is set to become the first foreign leader to address a joint session of the US Congress four times, despite deep differences with the Biden administration.The Israeli prime minister’s office said in a statement that a date for his address to Congress had yet to be set, but that it would not take place on 13 June as had been reported, due to a Jewish holiday.The formal invitation came from congressional leaders of both parties within hours of Joe Biden’s disclosure of the terms of a new peace proposal for Gaza endorsed by Israel. Over the weekend, however, Netanyahu played down the significance of any Israeli concessions in the new plan, and insisted that any proposal for a lasting ceasefire without the destruction of Hamas as a military and governing force would be a “non-starter”.He also has suggested that Israel was under obligation only to carry out the first of the peace plan’s three phases, which may increase Hamas’s reservations of a deal. The White House says it is waiting for an official response from Hamas on the proposal.Netanyahu had earlier defied Biden by adamantly opposing any steps towards the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and by pressing ahead with an offensive on the southernmost Gazan city of Rafah, despite repeated appeals not to from the Biden administration.Before this month’s scheduled appearance, Netanyahu was the only foreign leader apart from Winston Churchill to be accorded the honour of an address to a joint sitting of Congress three times. With his fourth address, he will outdo even Churchill in the record books.The invitation to Congress is a reminder than while Biden is seeking to influence Israeli politics to forge a peace agreement for Gaza and a broader long-term settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu also has the means to sway US politics – and possibly hurt Biden’s re-election chances if he were to accuse the president of being insufficiently supportive.Netanyahu used an address to Congress in 2015 to speak out against the efforts of then President Barack Obama to reach an agreement with Tehran on Iran’s nuclear programme. The Israeli prime minister was highly critical of Biden last month when the president stopped a delivery of heavy bombs to Israel forces. More

Republican governors gathered in the fossil-fuel rich state of Louisiana on Monday to rail against the Biden administration’s climate agenda and lay out plans to “unleash American energy”, alarming community advocates and climate experts.“President Biden has done nothing but attack American energy,” said the Louisiana governor Jeff Landry, who led the Wednesday press conference.Landry was joined by by Republican governors from Alaska, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Virginia.Hours before the presser, the group sent a joint letter to Biden requesting pro fossil-fuel rules and regulations, including an “end [to] regulatory overreach that unnecessarily restricts domestic energy production”, speeding the approval of federal drilling permits, and ending the pause on new liquefied natural gas export licenses. The letter does not mention that US oil and gas production has soared under President Biden, reaching record levels in 2023.The meeting was held at the Chalmette oil refinery, which a September Environmental Protection Agency report found was out of compliance with federal benzene regulations. In 2020, fires at the facility caused releases of sulphur dioxide, sending foul odors across the region.The event was convened by the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee, which, documents show, has accepted funding from the US’s largest fossil-fuel trade organization, the American Petroleum Institute.The group is the policy arm of the corporate-backed Republican Governors Association (RGA), the main campaign arm tasked with electing Republican executives across the country, which has taken funding from Chevron, Exxon, Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies, and also has financial links to Leonard Leo, a key figure behind the conservative effort to move the judiciary to the right.At the press conference, the governors said pro-fossil fuel policies would benefit ordinary Americans. Governor Mike Dunleavy of Alaska said: “What we’re talking about here is … developing an energy policy for the single mom with three kids.”And Louisiana’s Landry said that “if the federal government took its foot off of the neck of American energy, we could absolutely lower the costs of everyday goods” – suggesting boosting oil and gas would lower inflation.But experts say boosting extraction in the US would not depress gas prices because fuel prices are set globally.Fossil fuel expansion would also be a “death sentence” for frontline communities worst affected by toxic industrial pollution, said the environmental justice activist Sharon Lavigne.“He is not for human lives,” Lavigne, who founded the local grassroots organization Rise St James, said of Landry.Since taking office earlier this year, Landry has appointed oil, gas and coal executives to Louisiana’s environmental posts, while targeting the state’s climate taskforce for possible elimination as part of a broader reorganization plan. He has repeatedly claimed to be fighting for “energy independence” – a term he repeated on Monday. Yet the US remains net exporter of oil and gas, meaning the nation already produces more energy than it consumes.Jackson Voss, who works on climate policy for the Louisiana-based environmental group Alliance for Affordable Energy, also noted the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries contribute more to toxic air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions than any other industry in Louisiana. The state also brings in less than 10% of its revenue from oil and gas.“Oil and gas benefits a great deal from Louisiana, through subsidies, through deregulation, through its attorney general challenging national policy,” he said. “But in terms of the benefits of getting back to Louisiana? I’d say they’re fairly minimal.” More

Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and required to do community service after he was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.Daniels, in her first interview since the conviction, told the Daily Mirror:
I think he should be sentenced to jail and some community service — working for the less fortunate or being the volunteer punching bag at a women’s shelter.
She said she didn’t know what the sentencing could be, but compared Trump to a child that needed a punishment “that not just matches the crime”.Daniels also urged Melania Trump to leave her husband “not because of what he did with me or other women but because he is a convicted felon”. She added:
It’s been proven he is abusive; he was found liable for sexual assault and tax fraud and is now a criminal.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the face of the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, took questions from a Republican-led congressional committee about the origins of the virus and whether US-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started.Meanwhile, jury selection continues in Hunter Biden’s trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on three firearms-related charges brought by special counsel David Weiss, a Trump appointee. Joe Biden released a statement saying that he has “boundless love for my son, confidence in him, and respect for his strength”. Also:
Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and urged Melania Trump to leave her husband, in her first interview after Trump was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.
Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order allowing him to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.
Kevin McCarthy, former Republican House speaker, said Americans should accept the results of November’s presidential race amid rising political tensions in the aftermath of Trump’s campaign finance violation conviction.
Trump called on the supreme court to step in and annul his guilty verdict in a hush-money trial that left him with the unwanted distinction of being the first former US president to be a convicted felon.
Biden has congratulated Claudia Sheinbaum for her historic win after she was elected Mexico’s first female president on Sunday.
Bob Menendez, the embattled Democratic senator charged with bribery, will reportedly enter the race today to seek re-election in New Jersey as an independent. Andy Kim, the Democratic congressman running to replace Menendez’s Senate seat, said Menendez “isn’t running for the people of New Jersey, he’s doing it for himself.”
Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee revealed that she has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and said her treatment may require her to be “occasionally absent” from Capitol Hill.
Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. Joe Biden’s expected executive order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.Biden initially rolled back Donald Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying:
This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.
A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border.An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening US border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Donald Trump, who did not want Joe Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.Biden’s executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims, according to CBS.Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trump’s presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.Like Trump’s restrictions, Biden’s order is likely to face legal challenges.Here’s more on the executive order that Joe Biden plans to sign to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers.Biden is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500. Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Biden’s announcement.Biden’s move marks a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year. The order echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses Biden’s one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessor’s hostility to migrants.When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trump’s policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law. He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.Andy Kim, the Democratic congressman running to replace Bob Menendez’s Senate seat said the embattled New Jersey senator “isn’t running for the people of New Jersey, he’s doing it for himself.”As we reported earlier, Menendez is reportedly entering the race as an independent while he is on trial for allegedly accepting bribes.In a statement to the New Jersey Globe, Kim said:
Americans are fed up with politicians putting their own personal benefit ahead of what’s right for the country. Everyone knows Bob Menendez isn’t running for the people of New Jersey, he’s doing it for himself. It’s beyond time for change, and I’m stepping up to restore integrity back into the U.S. Senate
Donald Trump’s brazen pitch to 20 fossil-fuel heads for $1bn to aid his presidential campaign in return for promises of lucrative tax and regulatory favors is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat investigating the issue has said.“It certainly meets the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have used the term,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview about Trump’s audacious $1bn request for big checks to top fossil-fuel executives that took place in April at his Mar-a-Lago club. He added:
The quid pro quo – so called – is so very evident … I can’t think of anything that matches this either in terms of the size of the bribe requested, or the brazenness of the linkages.
Whitehouse and his fellow Democrat Ron Wyden have launched a joint inquiry, as chairs of the Senate budget and finance panels respectively, into Trump’s quid-pro-quo-style fundraising, which already seems to have helped spur tens of millions in checks for a Trump Super Pac from oil and gas leaders at a 22 May Houston event.The two senators have written to eight big-oil chief executives and the head of the industry’s lobbying group seeking details about the Mar-a- Lago meeting, as has representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the oversight and accountability committee, who has begun a parallel investigation into the pay-to-play schemes that Trump touted to big oil leaders.Talking of lock him/her/them up, as Stormy Daniels would like the New York judge, Juan Merchan, to do with Donald Trump when he’s sentenced next month…There were chants of “lock him up, lock him up” at the annual convention of Massachusetts Democrats at the weekend, before attendees got down to the official business of nominating Elizabeth Warren to return to Washington as a US Senator for a third six-year term, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported.Warren said of Trump’s conviction: “The legal system worked. Donald Trump and his supporters were on attack against the courts, the judges, the juries, the witnesses. But the process worked as it is supposed to. The jurors listened to the evidence and they found him guilty; now he is a convicted felon.”She added that Trump can “cry, whine and lie, but he is a convicted felon.”Warren is also speaking out on X about reproductive rights.Meanwhile, Keith Boykin, film producer, political commentator and former aid in the Bill Clinton White House decided to fact check Trump on his past urging of the US justice system to lock up Hillary Clinton, and a few other things.How Trump’s deny-everything strategy could hurt him at sentencing is how the Associated Press headlines its latest analysis now that we’re in the sentencing phase following Donald Trump’s criminal conviction last Thursday.The news wire has a piece describing how the former US president and now felon has been on a rant and doesn’t seem any closer to taking responsibility for his actions in falsifying business records to cover up a fraud against the US electorate.The AP writes that he has not uttered any variation of the words that might benefit him most come sentencing time next month: “I’m sorry.”
The fact, I think, that he has no remorse – quite the opposite, he continues to deny is guilt – is going to hurt him at sentencing. It’s one of the things that the judge can really point to that everybody is aware of — that he just denies this — and can use that as a strong basis for his sentence,” said Jeffrey Cohen, an associate professor at Boston College Law School and a former federal prosecutor in Massachusetts.
Jeremy Saland, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, weighed in.
If he turns around and blames the court, attacks prosecutors, decries this as a witch hunt, lies — you should have no misgiving: There will be consequences and there should be consequences.”
Trump’s constant attacks on the prosecutors, judge and court system and his aggressive trial strategy — outright denying both claims of an extramarital affair by porn actor StormyDaniels and involvement in the subsequent scheme to buy her silence — would make any change of tune at his sentencing seem disingenuous.Stormy Daniels is warming up on X in the wake of her post-Trump-conviction interview calling for him to be jailed.Daniels gets a lot of flak from MAGA world and she chooses to engage with some of it, while also flagging her interview in the Daily Mirror.Daniels, proud porn star.Life choices.A fan from the weekend.Dr Anthony Fauci, the face of the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, took questions from a Republican-led congressional committee about the origins of the virus and whether US-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started.Meanwhile, jury selection continues in Hunter Biden’s trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on three firearms-related charges brought by special counsel David Weiss, a Trump appointee. Joe Biden released a statement saying that he has “boundless love for my son, confidence in him, and respect for his strength”. Also:
Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and urged Melania Trump to leave her husband, in her first interview after Trump was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.
Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order as early as Tuesday allowing him to effectively shut down the US border with Mexico to asylum-seekers crossing illegally when a daily threshold of crossings is exceeded, according to multiple reports.
Kevin McCarthy, former Republican House speaker, said Americans should accept the results of November’s presidential race amid rising political tensions in the aftermath of Trump’s campaign finance violation conviction.
Biden has congratulated Claudia Sheinbaum for her historic win after she was elected Mexico’s first female president on Sunday.
Bob Menendez, the embattled Democratic senator charged with bribery, will reportedly enter the race today to seek re-election in New Jersey as an independent.
Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee revealed that she has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and said her treatment may require her to be “occasionally absent” from Capitol Hill.
Stormy Daniels said she believes Donald Trump should be jailed and required to do community service after he was convicted last week on 34 felony charges in a hush-money case aimed at influencing the 2016 election.Daniels, in her first interview since the conviction, told the Daily Mirror:
I think he should be sentenced to jail and some community service — working for the less fortunate or being the volunteer punching bag at a women’s shelter.
She said she didn’t know what the sentencing could be, but compared Trump to a child that needed a punishment “that not just matches the crime”.Daniels also urged Melania Trump to leave her husband “not because of what he did with me or other women but because he is a convicted felon”. She added:
It’s been proven he is abusive; he was found liable for sexual assault and tax fraud and is now a criminal.
Democratic congressman Robert Garcia followed up his comments in the House hearing with a social media post criticizing Marjorie Taylor Greene for refusing to refer to Anthony Fauci as Dr Fauci.Greene is “totally insane” and a “national embarrassment”, Garcia posted to X. More

The US Department of Justice is making a novel legal argument to keep a recording of an interview with Joe Biden from becoming public. In a filing late last week, the bureau cited the risk of AI-generated deepfakes as one of the reasons it refuses to release audio of the president’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. The conversation about Biden’s handling of classified documents is a source of heated political contention, with Republicans pushing for release of the recordings and the White House moving to block them.The justice department’s filing, which it released late on Friday night, argues that the recording should not be released on a variety of grounds including privacy interests and executive privilege. One section of the filing, however, is specifically dedicated to the threat of deepfakes and disinformation, stating that there is substantial risk people could maliciously manipulate the audio if it were to be made public.“The passage of time and advancements in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deep fake’ technologies only amplify concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files,” the justice department stated. “If the audio recording is released here, it is easy to foresee that it could be improperly altered, and that the altered file could be passed off as an authentic recording and widely distributed.”The filing presents a novel argument about the threat of AI-generated disinformation from the release of government materials, potentially setting up future legal battles over the balance between transparency and preventing the spread of misinformation.“A malicious actor could slow down the speed of the recording or insert words that President Biden did not say or delete words that he did say,” the filing argues. “That problem is exacerbated by the fact that there is now widely available technology that can be used to create entirely different audio ‘deepfakes’ based on a recording.”Biden’s interview with Hur reignited a longstanding conservative campaign of questioning Biden’s mental faculties and drawing attention to his age, which critics claim make him unfit to be president. While Hur’s report into classified documents found at Biden’s private residence did not result in charges against him, the special counsel’s description of him as an “elderly man with poor memory” became ammunition for Republicans and prompted Biden to defend his mental fitness.Although transcripts of Hur’s interview with Biden are public, conservative groups and House Republicans have taken legal action, filed Freedom of Information Act requests and demanded the release of recorded audio from the conversation as he campaigns against Donald Trump. Biden has asserted executive privilege to prevent the release of the audio, while the latest justice department filing pushes back against many of the conservative claims about the recording.The justice department’s filing argues that releasing the recording would create increased public awareness that audio of the interview is circulating, making it more believable when people encounter doctored versions of it.A number of politicians have become the target of deepfakes created in attempts to swing political opinion, including Biden. A robocall earlier this year that mimicked Biden’s voice and told people not to vote in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary was sent to thousands of people. The political consultant allegedly behind the disinformation campaign is now facing criminal charges and a potential $6m fine. More

Joe Biden will this week sign an executive order to temporarily close the southern US border to asylum seekers in a sharp political U-turn aimed at winning support on a key voter concern in a presidential election year.The US president is expected to sign the order as early as Tuesday to seal the border with Mexico to migrants when numbers of asylum claimants rise above a daily threshold of 2,500.Mayors of several US border cities are expected to be present in the White House for Biden’s announcement.Biden’s move echoes a similar approach adopted by Donald Trump in 2018 when he was president and reverses his one-time philosophical opposition to his predecessor’s hostility to migrants. When he was a presidential candidate, Biden denounced Trump’s policy, saying it upended decades of US asylum law.He has been forced to change course as the number of asylum seekers coming through the US-Mexico border has surged during his presidency, with opinion polls consistently showing immigration to be at or near the top of voters’ concerns, ahead of inflation and the economy.An attempt by the White House to cobble together legislation tightening border restrictions by tying it to aid to Ukraine and Israel failed earlier this year after Republican lawmakers withdrew support, apparently at the urging of Trump, who did not want Biden to claim credit for resolving an issue he has attempted to make his own.According to CBS, which broke the story, Biden’s executive order will enable US immigration officials to quickly deport migrants who enter the country illegally without processing their asylum claims.Controversially, it will rely on a presidential authority known as 212 (f) which became infamous during Trump’s presidency because of its use to enforce certain immigration restrictions, including travel bans from Muslim countries.Like Trump’s restrictions, Biden’s order is likely to face legal challenges.Migration at the southern border surged to record numbers at the end of last year. Buthe order comes at a moment when the number of migrants crossing from Mexico is down in the past six months, a trend attributed to stronger enforcement on the part of the Mexican authorities but which is not expected to sustain itself.An estimated 179,000 “border encounters” were recorded in April, according to US Customs and Border Protection figures, compared with a record high of 302,000 last December. More than 3,500 migrants were said to have crossed various points along the 2,000-mile border illegally on Sunday alone.Biden initially rolled back Trump’s restrictive border policies after taking office in January 2021, issuing orders to freeze his predecessor’s border wall construction and reissuing protections set up under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) scheme originally adopted by the Barack Obama White House.Biden suspended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy – whereby asylum seekers were forced to wait in Mexico while their US immigration claims were being considered – on the first day of his administration before the homeland security department formally cancelled it months later. The US supreme court subsequently upheld Biden’s approach following a lower court ruling against it.When Trump’s policy was in operation, Biden denounced it, saying: “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America [under whom] anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country. That’s never happened before.”A recent Associated Press poll showed about two-thirds of voters, including 40% of Democrats, disapproved of Biden’s handling of the southern border. More

Donald Trump’s brazen pitch to 20 fossil-fuel heads for $1bn to aid his presidential campaign in return for promises of lucrative tax and regulatory favors is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat investigating the issue has said.“It certainly meets the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have used the term,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview about Trump’s audacious $1bn request for big checks to top fossil-fuel executives that took place in April at his Mar-a-Lago club.Whitehouse added: “The quid pro quo – so called – is so very evident … I can’t think of anything that matches this either in terms of the size of the bribe requested, or the brazenness of the linkages.”Whitehouse and his fellow Democrat Ron Wyden have launched a joint inquiry, as chairs of the Senate budget and finance panels respectively, into Trump’s quid-pro-quo-style fundraising, which already seems to have helped spur tens of millions in checks for a Trump Super Pac from oil and gas leaders at a 22 May Houston event.The two senators have written to eight big-oil chief executives and the head of the industry’s lobbying group seeking details about the Mar-a- Lago meeting, as has representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the oversight and accountability committee, who has begun a parallel investigation into the pay-to-play schemes that Trump touted to big oil leaders.Amplifying those concerns, former Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble said that Trump’s unusually aggressive money pitch “violates the letter and spirit” of campaign-finance laws, and a veteran Republican consultant called it “blatant pay to play”.In a separate fossil-fuel inquiry, Raskin and Whitehouse released a joint report in April into long-running big-oil disinformation campaigns to undercut the enormous threats posed by global warming, which Trump has falsely labelled a “hoax”, and last week urged the justice department to investigate big-oil tactics to deceive the public.Trump boasts a lengthy record of rejecting scientific evidence about the links between fossil-fuel usage and climate change: he has pushed a litany of bogus climate claims, including that windmills cause cancer and that electric cars are “bad” for the environment, while promising to end tax breaks for EVs if he wins this fall.Further, in a major rebuke to environmental advocates and international efforts to curb global warming, Trump in 2017 announced the US was pulling out of the Paris agreement to limit climate change, a much-criticized move that Joe Biden reversed.Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra and his deep animosity toward alternative energy sources have been part of his fundraising pitches to oil and gas moguls, triggering alarm about the dangers of another Trump presidency.“The totality of … Trump, the fossil-fuel industry and a [conservative thinktank] Heritage Foundation blueprint advocate will put a dagger through efforts to avoid catastrophic warming,” said Joe Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.“Trump promises to undo every constraint on global warming. Trump has pushed more lies and disinformation about climate change than anyone ever has.”Other climate scholars say Trump’s climate denialism is the culmination of years of fossil-fuel propaganda.“Trump is an apotheosis of decades of denial, not only on the part of the fossil-fuel industry, but also by other industry allies, including now-certain billionaires, to deny the reality of the harms of unregulated, or very poorly regulated, capitalism,” said Naomi Oreskes, the co-author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard historian of science. “Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of this rewriting of history, culminating in the big lie that he won the 2020 election.”Trump’s strong embrace of climate-change denialism and his pro-big-oil policies were underscored by his aggressive $1bn pitch at Mar-a-Lago, which drew CEOs from giants such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, and the fracking multibillionaire Harold Hamm, the founder of Continental Resources, as the Washington Post first reported.Hamm, an early Trump backer in 2016 and 2020 who took months before helping Trump’s current presidential bid, joined with two other industry CEOs to host a Super Pac bash in Houston that reportedly raised $40m on 22 May from attendees who paid at least $250,000 each to hear Trump promise more fracking and more pipelines if he wins.Trump’s full-court press for fossil-fuel funds and political backing was palpable at an industry conference in North Dakota earlier in May, where Hamm surprised attendees by announcing Trump would join them via a video which featured bogus claims about the health of energy companies and the economy.“Under ‘Crooked Joe Biden’, the American energy industry is under siege, it’s under crisis. [Biden] has made clear that he wants to abolish your industry and, with it, destroy our economy and send us into a new dark age of blackouts, poverty and de-industrialization,” said Trump.View image in fullscreenThe spotlight on Trump’s ardent pursuit of oil and gas donations comes after Biden championed major new regulatory, tax and spending measures to reduce global warming in a sharp break with Trump policies past and present.Ironically, even as Biden succeeded in accelerating spending for green energy, and imposed new regulations on fracking on US lands and a moratorium on natural gas exports, oil and gas production in the US reached new highs in 2023 and major companies notched healthy profits.Still, the oil and gas industry has been ponying up funds for Trump’s campaign faster than it did in 2020, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets group, which tracks money in politics.The oil and gas industry has donated $7.3m to Trump’s campaign thus far, or more than three times the amount it gave at this point in 2020, OpenSecrets data shows.Further, some industry titans have donated six- and seven-figure checks to a Trump Super Pac. Texas oilman and multibillionaire Tim Dunn gave $5m to Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac this year, and Hamm kicked in at least $200,000 last fall.Campaign-finance watchdogs and some Republican veterans are dismayed by Trump’s fundraising tactics.“Trump views everything as a transaction, so I’m not surprised,” said ex-GOP representative Dave Trott. “Any other politician who made these statements would be deemed dead on arrival because they’d be viewed as corrupt.”Campaign-finance experts see other dangers in Trump’s heavy-handed fundraising appeals, which he links to favors.“When wealthy special interests, like the oil and gas industry, have special access to candidates, and mechanisms to give them enough money to control their policy choices, everyday voters suffer,” said Shanna Ports, the Campaign Legal Center’s senior legal counsel for campaign finance.“Trump’s request to oil executives is a troubling illustration of the quid pro quo corruption and pay-to-play-style politics that federal campaign laws are meant to prevent. Federal law includes strict contribution limits and bans corporate contributions precisely so candidates do not trade policy favors for campaign cash.”Ports stressed that “candidates are forbidden from soliciting contributions that would break these laws – a prohibition that Trump may have violated”.Likewise, Noble, the former Federal Election Commission general counsel, said Trump’s appeals for massive donations from oil and gas bigwigs [are] “pretty blatantly offering policy favors in exchange for large contributions”.Little wonder, then, that top Senate and House Democrats are inquiring into whether Trump’s bald $1bn ask of big oil moguls broke campaign finance laws, as well as big oil’s long track record of spreading disinformation about global warming.In Whitehouse and Raskin’s joint letter to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, urging the DoJ to investigate big oil’s history of climate change disinformation, they drew parallels with the tobacco industry’s years of disinformation about the dangers smoking poses to human health.“The DoJ is well situated to pursue further investigation and take any appropriate legal action, as it has in similar cases involving the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries,” they wrote.Looking ahead to the November election, climate change experts predict another Trump presidency would decimate efforts to curb global warming.“If Trump is elected and does what he has been saying and the fossil fuel industry wants, that would be the ruin of the United States and the world,” Romm, of the University of Pennsylvania, warned.“Trump wants to roll back” the ambitious climate change steps and spending that the Biden administration has initiated, Romm added, saying: “We have dawdled a very long time on climate change. We need very sharp reductions. We can’t afford four years focused on raising emissions.” More