US Politics

Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five crucial battleground states less than six months out from election day, new polls showed.The surveys from the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College put the former president up in Pennsylvania (three points), Arizona (seven), Michigan (seven), Georgia (10) and Nevada (12). Biden led by two points in Wisconsin.All leads bar Trump’s in Georgia and Nevada were within the margin of error.As the poll resonated throughout the political scene, the Biden campaign issued a statement from Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.“The only consistency in recent public polls is inconsistency,” Garin said.“These results need to be weighed against the 30-plus polls that show Biden up and gaining – which is exactly why drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake.”Trump is currently on trial in New York City, on 34 criminal charges arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.That is effectively an election interference trial. The former president also faces four federal charges and 10 state charges, in Georgia, for attempted election subversion and 40 federal charges concerning his retention of classified information.Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s conclusive win in 2020 culminated in the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, by a mob he told to “fight like hell” in his cause.Nine deaths have been linked to the riot including law enforcement suicides and more than 1,200 people have been arrested, hundreds convicted and jailed, some for seditious conspiracy.And yet, amid much electorate concern that at 81 Biden is too old for a second term – though Trump is just four years younger – the Times said “a yearning for change and discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza among young, Black and Hispanic voters threaten to unravel the president’s Democratic coalition”.The polls showed 20% support for Trump among Black voters, which if it held in the election would be the highest level of such support for a Republican candidate since the civil rights era.There was better news for Biden in results culled from people who described themselves as likely to vote, with the current president leading in Michigan and narrowly behind in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Victories in those three states in November would probably be enough to keep Biden in the White House.Robert F Kennedy Jr, the third-party candidate seeking ballot access in all 50 states even while having said he once had a worm in his brain linked to cognitive problems, scored about 10% in the polls, drawing equally from both Trump and Biden.“The findings are mostly unchanged since the last series of Times/Siena polls in battleground states in November,” the Times said, listing factors that might be seen likely to aid Biden: the stock market gaining 25%, Trump’s criminal trials beginning and Biden’s campaign spending heavily in battleground states.But voters who spoke to the paper cited cost-of-living concerns and dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo as reasons to abandon Biden for Trump.Remarkably, the paper reported that “nearly 70% of voters say that the country’s political and economic systems need major changes – or even to be torn down entirely”.Abortion rights also looms as a key campaign issue.Trump has boasted of his role in appointing three rightwingers to the US supreme court, resulting in the removal of federal abortion rights in 2022 with the overturning of Roe v Wade, the ruling that guaranteed them.Democrats have focused on the issue, taking a string of wins when abortion rights have been on the ballot, even in Republican-run states.In the new polls, a familiar majority (64%) said abortion should be always or mostly legal (a stance shared by 44% of Trump voters). The polls also showed voters prefer Biden to handle abortion rights issues by 11 points.But nearly 20% of respondents blamed Biden more than Trump for the fall of Roe.Garin said: “The reality is that many voters are not paying close attention to the election and have not started making up their minds – a dynamic also reflected in today’s poll. These voters will decide this election and only the Biden campaign is doing the work to win them over.” More

Republicans have identified recent college protests against Israel’s war in Gaza as the core of an election campaign narrative of chaos that they hope can be used to sink Joe Biden’s presidency.The approach was bluntly crystallised by Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, in a recent television interview when he mocked the encampments that have sprung up in recent weeks as “little Gazas” and lambasted the president for a perceived failure to unequivocally denounce instances of antisemitism.“The Democrats have deep philosophical divisions on Israel,” Cotton told ABC’s This Week programme. “That’s why you see all those little Gazas out there on campuses where you see people chanting vile antisemitic slogans … For two weeks, Joe Biden refused to come out and denounce it. That is the 2024 election.”In fact, Biden did condemn antisemitism in a White House statement criticising the protests on 1 May, but also spoke out against Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice.Cotton’s comments followed weeks of turbulence on university campuses across the US that have seen riot police forcibly dismantle pro-Palestinian encampments in widely televised scenes reminiscent of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the 1960s.His labelling of the encampments as “little Gazas” was denounced as dehumanising by some who lauded the protesters for drawing attention to the death toll of Israel’s continuing military offensive in Gaza. While relatively few Americans identify the war in Gaza as a vote-influencer, Republicans are seeking to capitalise on the vocal minority who are expressing discontent over it.The conservative activist Christopher Rufo spelt out the approach in a recent article on Substack.“This encampment escalation divides the Left, alienates influential supporters, and creates a sense of chaos that will move people against it,” he wrote. “The correct response … is to create the conditions for these protests to flourish in blue [Democratic-run] cities and campuses, while preventing them in red [Republican] cities and campuses.”GOP intent was signalled by the visits of delegations, including Mike Johnson, speaker of the House of Representatives, to Columbia University – centre of the recent protests – and to George Washington University (GWU) in Washington DC, where protesters spray-painted graffiti and draped a Palestinian flag on a statue of the US’s eponymous founding father.“It’s what the protests say about American political society and culture that the Republicans are trying to pick up on,” said Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute at Monmouth University.“Biden has tried to make this election a referendum on what happened during the Trump administration, with his focus being ‘we don’t want to go back to the chaos of the Trump years.’ That argument can be undercut if people are seeing chaos from college campuses on their TV screens – Republicans are trying to say it’s no more stable and calm under Biden than it was under Trump.”Republicans are also expanding congressional investigations into antisemitism allegations in the protests, an approach that has already reaped political dividends after the presidents of two elite colleges, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, were forced to resign following criticism of their testimony in previous hearings.Besides the House’s education and workforce committee – whose hearings led to the resignations, and which has now invited three more university heads to testify – three other GOP-led committees have announced proceedings to scrutinise the protests.The House energy and commerce committee is set to investigate universities for possible breaches of the Civil Rights Act, a supposed protection against discrimination, while the oversight committee has called hearings on Democratic-run Washington’s response to the GWU protests.Meanwhile, Jim Jordan, chairman of the House judiciary committee, has asked Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, if the visas of any foreign students have been revoked for participating in pro-Palestinian protests.The message is clear: even as the imminent college summer recess ushers in a likely period of campus calm, Republicans will strive to keep the issue in the public eye.The historical template is 1968, when mass protests against the Vietnam war fed bitter Democratic divisions, fuelled violent clashes with police at the party’s convention in Chicago (coincidentally the venue of this year’s convention) and ultimately led to the GOP candidate Richard Nixon winning that year’s presidential election.“I think the Republicans can make an issue of this and I don’t think they need to do very much to be successful,” said Alvin Felzenberg, a veteran former Republican operative and historian who served in both Bush administrations.“Just like in 1968, there’s not a Republican in this play. The Democratic coalition seems under threat and possibly out of control. I see a lot of parallels, and I think the Trump campaign is paying a lot of attention to what Nixon did then.”The deciding factor of whether history repeats may be Biden, who Felzenberg says has given the impression of “being blown about by events” as he has sought a balance between supporting Israel and pacifying progressive, pro-Democratic voters alienated by the soaring Palestinian casualties in Gaza.With nearly six months until election day, Biden has time to assert control.Working in his favour is that the current unrest is so far less violent than in 1968, a year scarred by political assassinations and race riots. While police action to dismantle the recent protests produced negative headlines and more than 2,000 arrests, it resulted in no serious casualties – an outcome Felzenberg said Biden should have publicly celebrated.“Biden gave a speech last week that was the perfect opportunity for him to say the police did a great job – and he didn’t do it, which made it look like he wasn’t in charge and is scared of all the people on his own side yelling at him,” Felzenberg said. “If I were one of the people around Joe Biden, I would spend the next few months showing that he can lead.” More

In practical terms, Barron Trump’s truncated stint on the political stage as a Florida delegate to the Republican party’s national convention was little more than symbolic. His father Donald Trump’s third successive presidential campaign as the Republican nominee was all but certain anyway, and the names of those who will confirm it are essentially inconsequential.It did affirm to many analysts, however, how the former president has maneuvered to seize almost total control of the party’s state apparatus nationwide. Nowhere is that more apparent than Florida, where the capitulation was completed by the choice of delegates for July’s convention in Milwaukee.Even though 18-year-old Barron Trump has now stepped down, ostensibly after his mother, former first lady Melania Trump, discovered a pressing prior engagement, there will be plenty of other family members as representatives. Barron’s step-siblings Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany are named, along with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr’s fiancee.Tiffany’s husband, Michael Boulos, and an assorted slew of other notable Trump acolytes and loyalists, are also on the list.The parallels in Trump’s subjugation of the national Republican party, and the installation of Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, as its co-chair, are hard to miss – especially as it was Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, who was once seen as a potential “Trump killer” in the party’s nomination race until, of course, Trump quickly vanquished him.“The big, sort of under-the-radar story in American politics over the last couple of years was the way Trump and his people had taken over state parties across the country,” said Dan Judy, a senior analyst for North Star Opinion Research, a Republican guidance and consultancy company based in Virginia.“Even early in the primary process, a year and a half ago when Ron DeSantis was riding high and leading a lot of the polls, I was always thinking: Trump has control of the state parties, he’s got his people in, and they are, for lack of a better word, going to attempt to rig the process in favor of Donald Trump.“If you look at it, that’s exactly what happened. A lot of state parties changed their rules to make their primaries winner-takes-all, which absolutely helped Trump, especially as it came down to a one-on-one with Nikki Haley. It was clear that she was going to have to win some of these things outright to get any delegates at all, and she couldn’t do it.“The fact that the Florida GOP has also been completely taken over by Trump folks is really indicative of a trend that has happened everywhere.”Judy pointed to how easily Trump took down DeSantis in the primary race, humiliating the governor he disparaged as “Meatball Ron” in his own state. DeSantis’s efforts to cajole Florida’s congressional delegation were ultimately futile, and he dropped out in January to avoid a spanking in the state’s March primary.“As high as he was riding after his huge re-election victory, just any hope that he would have had of continuing to be top dog in the Florida GOP went out the window when he failed to get any traction at all in the presidential race,” said Judy, who has worked for the winning campaigns of several Republican politicians, including DeSantis and the Florida senator Marco Rubio.“He’s not the kind of person who cultivates relationships, who builds relationships, who builds a party, an organization, and an apparatus. He’s just not that guy, and if you’re going around Florida looking for Ron DeSantis people, there are shockingly few of them.“But if Donald Trump is re-elected, there might be a place in the administration for him. If he wants to have a future in the current Republican party, he cannot be an enemy of Donald Trump, and you’re seeing him do the things that he needs to do to remain in good standing.”Those actions include a full-throated endorsement of the man who repeatedly demeaned and insulted him, and cozying up to him at a breakfast meeting near Miami last month, in which Trump claimed DeSantis pledged total fealty.In a similar vein, a succession of other senior state Republicans have fallen in line. Junior senator Rick Scott, a former Florida governor who faces a potentially tricky re-election battle in November, appeared last week alongside Trump to support him at his hush-money trial in Manhattan.And an elected member of the Florida cabinet, the chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, seemingly cannot do enough to champion the twice-impeached former president currently facing dozens of criminal charges in cases around the country.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatronis, who was thwarted by DeSantis in January when he floated a bill to hand $5m of Florida taxpayers’ money to Trump for his legal bills, returned last week with an alternative proposal: he wrote to Trump announcing he was due $54,000 in “unclaimed property” that Patronis hoped he would use to fight “some very, very nasty people coming after you”.To observers of Florida politics, all of this, and particularly the surfeit of Trumps among the slate of delegates, is telling.“It does illustrate in pretty stark terms how effectively the former president has his hand on the state Republican party, and his influence on what goes on,” said Kevin Wagner, associate dean of Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F Schmidt college of arts and letters.“It’s not unexpected that the likely presidential nominee has significant influence in his home state, but even by that standard there’s a level of control over the party that’s pretty distinctive.“As a practical matter, the party is going to be united behind a former president, at least through an election year. And I think you’ll see that in the way that political leaders on the Republican side are behaving in Florida.”Wagner said voters were unlikely to care about Trump’s children carrying the state party’s flag in Milwaukee, with or without Barron Trump.“Among the Republican base that is very supportive of the former president, I don’t think any of this matters. In fact, they probably would approve,” he said.“Some Republicans might be bothered, but there’s no evidence in Florida right now that this is a particularly close race so it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot. The caveat is we are in May and the election’s in November.“But right now, I’d say that Donald Trump has a very strong position in the state of Florida, and that’s reflected by how political leaders in the state are responding to him, and also by the amount of deference that the party gives.” More

The criminal corruption trial of Democratic US senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey is scheduled to get under way in a Manhattan federal court Monday, with prosecutors preparing a colorful tale of a greedy politician with a fondness for gold bullion, fast cars, and almost half a million dollars in cash found hidden around his home.Menendez, 70, insists he is innocent of the 16 felony charges brought against him by the US attorney’s office of the southern district of New York, including bribery, extortion, obstruction, and acting as a foreign agent.But prosecutors allege he used his considerable power and influence as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee to illegally smooth over lucrative business deals for several associates with the governments of Egypt and Qatar.And they say the 13 gold bars – and money found stuffed into jacket pockets, closets and a safe during a summer 2022 raid on his house in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, as well as a gleaming new Mercedes-Benz in the garage – were his rewards.Menendez resigned his committee post but refused to stand down as a senator, even after a superseding indictment in January leveled new allegations, including that he took gifts of more cash and gold, as well as Formula 1 tickets and high-end wristwatches, for promoting Qatari interests.The charges are wide-ranging. Prosecutors say he also divulged secret information to Egyptian officials about the number and nationalities of US embassy staff in Cairo – and that he tried to disrupt a New Jersey criminal case against another businessman friend.“What the government really has going for it in this case is the picture of a powerful senator renting his office to a foreign power,” Daniel Richman, an expert on federal bribery law at Columbia Law School, told the Washington Post.Politicians in his own party have been critical of Menendez, who will stand trial alongside his wife Nadine and three New Jersey businessmen, including Wael Hana, an Egyptian government representative alleged to have set up shell companies to transfer the money and some of the gifts.The Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman is among those demanding Menendez’s resignation and has repeatedly called the New Jersey senator “a sleazebag”. Fetterman told CNN last week: “He won’t be around much longer – that would be my bet.”Menendez has declared he will not be running as a Democrat in November for re-election to the New Jersey Senate seat he has held since 2006. But he has not ruled out a campaign as an independent.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt a press conference last September, Menendez remained defiant, claiming the $480,000 found in the raid was for his personal use and insisting that he would not quit. Asked last week by CNN if he would resign from the senate if convicted, he replied: “I am looking forward to proving my innocence”.The trial, to begin Monday with jury selection, is expected to last several weeks.It is the second time in a decade that Menendez has faced bribery charges after a 2017 mistrial into separate corruption claims, including that he misused campaign donations from a Florida eye doctor and cavorted with prostitutes at the doctor’s home in the Dominican Republic.A jury was unable to reach a verdict after an 11-week trial, and prosecutors announced in February 2018 that they would not seek to retry him. Menendez was elected to the Senate for his fourth term later that year. More

Donald Trump on Saturday praised fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter “as a wonderful man” before segueing into comments disparaging people who have immigrated into the US without permission.The former president’s remarks to political rally-goers in Wildwood, New Jersey, as he challenges Joe Biden’s re-election in November were a not-so-subtle rhetorical bridge exalting Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter in Silence of the Lambs as “late [and] great” while simultaneously condemning “people who are being released into our country that we don’t want”.Trump delivered his address to a crowd of about 80,000 supporters – according to one estimate from a Wildwood city spokesperson – under the shadow of the Great White roller coaster in the 1950s-kitsch seaside resort 90 miles (145km) south of Philadelphia. The crowd began thinning considerably as Trump spoke, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote on X in a post that contained video of people leaving the site of the rally.The occasion served for Trump to renew his stated admiration for Lecter, as he’s done before, after the actor Mads Mikkelsen – who previously portrayed Lecter in a television series – once described Trump as “a fresh wind for some people”.Among other comments, Trump on Sunday also repeated exaggerations about having “been indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone”, the violent Prohibition-era Chicago mob boss.Trump since the spring of 2023 has grappled with four indictments attributing more than 80 criminal charges to him for attempts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election he lost to Biden, retaining classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments to an adult film actor which prosecutors maintain were illicitly covered up.The trial over the hush money is set to enter its fourth week Monday.Yet Capone was indicted at least six times before his famous 1931 tax evasion conviction.Trump nonetheless used the occasion to call the charges against him “bullshit”, with spectators then chanting the word back at him.The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the former president’s supporters had poured into Wildwood in “pickup trucks decked out in Trump flags” from up and down the east coast.According to the outlet, hundreds of people set up camp overnight on the boardwalk to get into the event.“The country is headed in the wrong direction,” Kelly Carter-Currier, a 62-year-old retired teacher from New Hampshire, told the Inquirer. “So, hopefully, people will get their shit together and vote the right person in. And if they don’t, I don’t know. World War III?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn the other hand, New Jersey Democrats dismissed the significance of the event.Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill said many of the Trump supporters expected would be from out of state. “Jersey is not going to be a welcoming place for Trump,” Sherrill said.Sherrill’s fellow New Jersey Democrat Andy Kim, a congressman running for the US Senate, said that generalized apathy toward government helped Trump’s support.“I hope people recognize that he is not somebody that has an agenda that’s going to lead to a better type of politics,” Kim said. More

Politicians in the US on Sunday stepped up their denunciation of Israel over its conduct in Gaza, with a leading Democratic senator accusing the key American ally of “strategic and moral mistakes” – and secretary of state, Antony Blinken, saying it was testing the boundaries of international law.In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, the Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate foreign relations committee, warned that Hamas was likely to become stronger if Israel waged an all-out assault in Rafah.“I want Hamas gone,” Murphy said. “I don’t want them to ever have the ability to hit Israel again. [But] I worry that the number of civilians that are dying are ultimately going to provide permanent recruiting material to Hamas, and it will be a threat for years to come.“We cannot have an invasion of Rafah that ends up in tens of thousands of additional civilians dying. That will be bad for Israel from a moral and strategic standpoint.”He continued: “So I am certainly willing to call out Israel when I think that they have made strategic and moral mistakes in this war. We should [also] be calling out Hamas for the attacks that began this war, the way in which they have violated the rules of engagement, and the fact that the quickest route to end this war is for Hamas to surrender and protect the people of Gaza.”Murphy’s comments amounted to some of the strongest criticism yet by a centrist US politician against Israel, which the Gaza health ministry said on Sunday had now killed more than 35,000 people in strikes since the 7 October attacks by Hamas.Stronger condemnation came from Vermont Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, a member of the party’s progressive wing.“Any objective observer knows Israel has broken international law … has broken American law – and in my view, Israel should not be receiving another nickel in US military aid,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press, adding that Hamas was “a terrible, disgusting terrorist organization that began this war”.Meanwhile, Blinken’s commentary was considerably more measured. In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, the Joe Biden White House’s top diplomat said it is “reasonable to assess that in certain instances Israel acted in ways that are not consistent” with international humanitarian laws.Blinken’s comments on Sunday came after Biden threatened to stop supplying Israel with weapons if it invaded Rafah. That came as the White House said the US had stopped the transfer of 3,500 high payload “dumb” bombs over concerns of the growing number of civilian casualties in Gaza.Blinken stopped short of explicitly accusing Israel of violating international law as it pursued its offensive against the Palestinian militant group Hamas. He said it was “critical” to note that Israel itself has accountability processes – and there were hundreds of active inquiries as well as criminal investigations into different incidents, showing Israel had “the ability, means and the actions to self-correct.“It had been very difficult to determine, particularly in the midst of war, exactly what happened and to draw final conclusions from any one incident,” he said, adding that the US was avoiding any firm assessment over a potential breach because Hamas “hides behind as well as underneath civilian populations, in schools and hospitals”.Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas later dismissed Blinken’s “reasonable to assess” rhetoric as “some magic talisman” to help Democrats walk a political line within the party. He criticized the Biden administration as having imposed a “de facto arms embargo” on Israel.The administration’s national security policy, Cotton continued, “sounds like a bunch of weaselly, mealy-mouthed politics”.The US last week released a 46-page unclassified report concluding that – despite American concerns – Israel had offered credible assurances that it was not violating US or intentional law.That report’s findings were starkly at odds with assessments by the UN and major international aid groups. The UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs last week placed the Gaza strikes’ casualty toll at 34,844, with 7,797 (32%) being children and 4,959 (20%) being women.Israel attacked Gaza in response to the 7 October attack that killed 1,100 mostly civilians while also taking hostages.Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reacted defiantly, saying his country’s military would press on with its plan to go into Rafah.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Sunday, Blinken reiterated that the US had made clear to the Israeli government that it would not support a major operation in Rafah, where 1.4 million people are sheltering, in the absence of a credible plan to protect civilians.The secretary of state said that the US was not pausing the transfer of US weapons to Israel beyond the 3,500 bombs that had already been withheld.“We’ve been clear that if Israel launches this major military operation into Rafah, there are certain systems we’re not going to be supporting and supplying for that operation,” Blinken said.But Blinken said the Biden administration had not ruled out supplying the high-payload munitions, including 1,800 bombs each weighing 2,000 pounds and 1,700 bombs each weighing 500lbs. “We’re in an active conversation with Israel about that,” he said. “We have real concerns about the way they are used.”Murphy insisted Biden was “being a good leader” by withholding the earlier weapons.“The broad middle of the country wants to support Israel’s ability to destroy Hamas but is very concerned about the fact that there are so many kids dying – that for the last week there’s been no humanitarian assistance getting into the country,” he said.He said Israel would be better served embracing Palestinian Authority leadership to build a “transitional government structure” inside Gaza, given the conclusion of intelligence agencies that it would be all but impossible to totally eradicate Hamas.“There’s going to continue to be a resistance movement to the state of Israel, and the question is, is it going to be weaker or stronger after 13,000 to 15,000 kids are killed inside Gaza?” he said.“My argument is that right now the prospects are that they are just going to be stronger.”Blinken appeared to share those concerns, saying: “There has to be a clear, credible plan to protect civilians, which we haven’t seen. And we have to see a plan for what happens after this conflict in Gaza is over, and we still haven’t seen that.” More

The French government has joined the chorus of detractors taking aim at South Dakota governor Kristi Noem’s political autobiography No Going Back, which many now see as having eliminated her chances of being Donald Trump’s vice-presidential selection.Days after Noem removed a passage claiming she had met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, officials at the Élysée Palace in Paris are questioning a passage that describes a cancelled meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron.According to NBC News, Noem claims in her book that she cancelled a planned meeting between her and Macron in November after she accused him of making “pro-Hamas” comments.“While in Paris, I was slated to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron,” Noem wrote. “However, the day before we were to meet, he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So I decided to cancel.”Yet a French official told the outlet there is no record of a scheduled meeting with Noem – nor had they invited her.“Following his anti-Israel comments, she chose to cancel,” Noem spokesperson Ian Fury told NBC. Fury added that “the governor was invited to sit in President Macron’s box for the Armistice Day parade at Arc de Triomphe” – a ceremony that took place on 16 November.Fury said that Macron had not attended, though Associated Press news video suggests he did. Noem had been in Paris in November 2023 to speak at the Worldwide Freedom Initiative conference.While Noem does not describe what Macron’s comments were that she objected to, her office pointed to his remarks urging Israel to stop bombing Gaza while also acknowledging “the right of Israel to protect itself and react”.The Guardian has reached out to Noem’s office for clarification.Last week, Noem acknowledged that she “should not have put [an] anecdote in the book” in which she described meeting Kim Jong-un – and feeling underestimated by him – because that purported encounter with the North Korean dictator never happened.Nonetheless, she later insisted she had “met with many, many world leaders” and had “travelled around the world”.An excerpt from the book lists a number of world leaders whom Noem had met with while serving in Congress, including Chinese president Xi Jinping, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former UK prime minister Boris Johnson.Damaging embellishments are hardly unusual to the political class. Hillary Clinton came out on the wrong side of a fact-checking drama in 2008 when she was unsuccessfully running for the Democratic presidential nomination and claimed she arrived in Bosnia “under sniper fire” and had to run with her head down.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Noem may have done more damage to her standing by repeating a 20-year-old story about shooting dead a working dog on her ranch. She explained that the 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, Cricket, did not point out game on animal hunts, killed a neighbor’s chickens, and acted aggressively toward her family.Noem also described shooting dead the family’s billy goat, which the governor said “loved to chase” her children and would “knock them down and butt them”, leaving them “terrified”.It took Noem two shots to kill off the goat, which also had a “wretched smell”, Noem wrote.Criticism has been heaped on Noem from both sides of the political spectrum over the dog, but less so the goat.It was reported last weekend that Noem left a political fundraiser lunch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort early last weekend as the former president offered on-stage introductions of various contenders to be his running mate in November’s rematch with Joe Biden, who is seeking re-election.“She had a rough couple of days,” Trump told Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin last week. “I will say that.” More

They have broken with Donald Trump. They have gone public with their concerns about the threat that he poses to democracy and the rule of law. But vote for Joe Biden? That is a bridge too far.A split has emerged in the “Never Trump” movement in the Republican party. There are some who denounce the former US president and contend that, in what is essentially a two-party system, there is a moral imperative to vote for his Democratic opponent in November.Then there are the Republicans who forcefully disparage Trump but stop short of endorsing Biden, suggesting that both choices are unpalatable, forcing them to consider another option such as writing in a different name on the ballot.This category includes Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president, who said in March he would not be backing his former boss but also made clear: “I would never vote for Joe Biden. I’m a Republican.”There is also Chris Christie, an ex-governor of New Jersey who ran against Trump in the Republican primary elections. He told a recent event at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics that he would never support Trump but nor could he bring himself to vote for the current president. “President Biden, in my view, is past the sell-by date,” Christie said.He was joined this week by Paul Ryan, a former speaker of the House of Representatives. He told Yahoo Finance: “Character is too important to me and it’s a job that requires the kind of character that he [Trump] just doesn’t have. Having said that, I really disagree with [Biden] on policy. I wrote in a Republican the last time, I’m gonna write in a Republican this time.”While such dissent from Trump and his authoritarian ambitions is welcome, critics say, refusing to support his opponent because of policy differences draws a false equivalence between them. If a significant number of Republican voters do likewise, not voting or writing in a name such as “Ronald Reagan”, it could prove costly to Biden in a close election.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and Tea Party activist turned Trump foe, said: “I have zero respect for guys like Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan who come out and say. ‘I’m not gonna vote for Trump but I won’t vote for the only guy who can beat the guy who’s unfit.’ To me, that’s cowardly. What they’re doing is staying relevant as Republicans. They want to run again as Republicans.”Walsh, who challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican primary, added: “Here’s the deal. If, as a Republican, you say I’m voting for Joe Biden because Trump is unfit, you end your career as a Republican. I did that five years ago. [Former congressman] Adam Kinzinger did that this past year. Then you end your relevance as a Republican. Guys like Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence don’t want to give that up. It’s purely a political decision.”Kinzinger broke from his party after the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and was later one of two Republicans, along with Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who joined the House committee to investigate the attack. He did not seek re-election in the 2022 midterms.Kinzinger said this week: “While I don’t agree with all of Joe Biden’s policies, he’s not out to get democracy so I intend to vote for him. Even if he was like Elizabeth Warren, a little further left, he would not be a threat to democracy, but he’s probably fairly moderate in Democratic terms lately. I certainly don’t think he’s as big of a threat as Trump is.”Despite 88 criminal charges against him, Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination in March. But his support remains soft around the edges. This week, two months after exiting the race, Nikki Haley secured more than 21% of the vote in Indiana’s primary election, held on a day when TV news was dominated by the Trump trial and adult film performer Stormy Daniels.Last month, in another sign of persistent discontent with Trump among the party faithful, Haley received nearly 17% of the primary vote in Pennsylvania. Biden has launched an advertising campaign to target Haley voters in predominantly suburban areas in swing states. A number of anti-Trump Republicans have been willing to aid the effort despite the risk of blowback from their own party.This week Geoff Duncan, a former lieutenant governor of Georgia who has spoken out against Trump’s election lies, endorsed the president and urged fellow Republicans do likewise. He wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper: “I am voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”The former Reagan administration official Bill Kristol has also made peace with casting his vote for Biden, describing him as a “conventional Democrat” and “better than I expected on some things, especially foreign policy”.But Kristol said he respects Pence, Ryan and Christie’s unwillingness to take the extra step by voting Democratic. “It’s not a crazy decision. It’s fair enough. They can’t abide Trump, they’re not going to vote for him, but it’s in a way not their responsibility that the other party hasn’t provided them with an acceptable alternative.”Kristol, director of the Defending Democracy Together advocacy organisation, hopes that line of thinking will appeal to Republicans who backed Trump twice and might resent being told to defect to the Democrats. “As a practical matter, it’s worth it to get some of those voters just to not vote for Trump,” he said.Kinzinger, the ex-congressman, agreed: “For some people I do think there has to be permission to write-in somebody or vote against the two just because, if they’re never going to vote for Joe Biden, I’d much rather them just skip the ballot line. But those that can stomach it should certainly consider voting for Joe Biden.”View image in fullscreenThere are prominent figures still sitting on the fence. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who twice voted to convict Trump at his impeachment trials, has not yet made clear whether he will back Biden. He told NBC’s Meet the Press last December: “If I endorsed them, it would be the kiss of death – I’m not going to do that.”Cheney, who lost her seat in Congress to a Trump-backed rival, told the Washington Post newspaper in March that she was still undecided about whether to formally endorse Biden. She does intend to “educate” Americans about how dangerous Trump is in the lead-up to election day.But another group of Trump sceptics in the Republican party have gone in a different direction, portraying Biden as a “woke” radical outside the political mainstream and Trump as therefore the lesser or two evils.Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, eviscerated Trump after the January 6 insurrection; Trump routinely bashed McConnell as an “Old Crow” and hurled racist insults at his wife, Elaine Chao. Yet once Trump secured the Republican nomination in March, McConnell endorsed him for president.Bill Barr, a former attorney general who said last year that Trump “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office”, has now declared that he wants to see Trump back inside it. He told CNN: “I think Trump would do less damage than Biden, and I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy – I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire, backed Haley during the Republican primaries but now supports Trump in the general election. He explained in an interview with the Guardian: “Look, I worked hard for Trump not to be the nominee but he is the nominee of the party and, while I don’t care for Trump, I’ll take a Republican administration over this progressive, leftwing socialist administration any day of the week.”The governor said of Biden: “He’s created a culture here that America doesn’t want to see. A culture of not dealing with the border. A culture of lying about inflation – inflation is crushing families. Depending on how families feel their financial pressures in November will determine who wins the election.”To seasoned observers of the Republican party’s surrender to Trump, such sentiments come as little surprise. Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “You cannot make the case credibly that you are concerned for the health of democracy and then lend your support and, more importantly, your vote to the architect of the undoing of democracy. You own that. You’re not just a bystander at this point; you are an accomplice.”Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, was also scathing in his verdict on those who announce they will not vote for Trump only to present Biden as equally intolerable.“Talk about a lack of intestinal fortitude. Anyone who wants to try to put Joe Biden on the same plane as Donald Trump should have their mental health checked because that is just an absurd false equivalency. This is a very black and white issue here. You’re either pro-democracy or you’re not. All the other issues that we disagree about – and there are many – don’t matter if we don’t have a functioning democracy.” More