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      Obama and Trump highlight two Americas as election draws nearer

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      Analysis: as the former president eulogized a civil rights hero, his beleaguered successor seemed intent on undermining faith in democracyJoin us for a live digital event with the former US attorney general Eric Holder to discuss voter suppression in the 2020 election, Thursday at 5pm ET. Register nowThey were six hours that defined two Americas as well as exposing the magnitude of the decision facing voters in November.At 8.30am on Thursday, the US government announced that gross domestic product had suffered the biggest decline on record because of a coronavirus-induced shutdown. Minutes later, Donald Trump warned on Twitter that “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history” – and suggested that it should be postponed. Continue reading… More

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      Obama, Bush and Clinton speak at funeral for congressman John Lewis – video

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      Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and House speaker Nancy Pelosi have delivered eulogies for congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. Hailing him as founding father for ‘a fuller, fairer, better’ America, Obama praised Lewis’s influence on his own path to the presidency. Clinton said Lewis believed ‘none of us will be free until all of us are equal’, while Bush said he lived in a better and nobler country because of the congressman

      Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy

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      Barack Obama: John Lewis fought for our highest ideals | Barack Obama

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      Barack Obama: John Lewis fought for our highest ideals

      Barack Obama

      In a transcript of his remarks at the congressman’s funeral, the former president calls on Americans to follow Lewis’s lead at a time of crisis

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      Obama attacks police brutality and voter suppression in powerful eulogy for John Lewis – video

      Representative John Lewis, a legendary civil rights leader and member of Congress, died of cancer on 17 July. In a eulogy at his memorial on Thursday, Barack Obama spoke about Lewis’s legacy, especially the importance of continuing his fight to protect voting rights. This is an abridged version of his remarks.
      James wrote to the believers: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.”
      It is a great honor to be back in Ebenezer Baptist church, in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple – an American whose faith was tested again and again to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance – John Robert Lewis.
      I’ve come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom.
      Now, this country is a constant work in progress. We were born with instructions: to form a more perfect union. Explicit in those words is the idea that we are imperfect; that what gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than anyone might have thought possible. More

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      Obama attacks police brutality and voter suppression in powerful eulogy for John Lewis – video

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      During the funeral of congressman John Lewis, former US president Barack Obama delivered a powerful eulogy in which he praised the late civil rights icon, saying Lewis ‘will be a founding father of a fuller, fairer, better America’. 
      In his speech, Obama also received standing ovations for his indirect criticism of the Trump administration’s decision to send federal agents to peaceful demonstrations in Portland, and his condemnation of voter suppression tactics in the US
      Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy
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      Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy

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      Civil rights movement

      Former president called for Americans to fight Trump’s effort to undermine the right to vote in eulogy at congressman’s funeral

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      Obama attacks police brutality and voter suppression in powerful eulogy for John Lewis – video

      Barack Obama inspired a standing ovation with his soaring eulogy at the funeral on Thursday of civil rights icon John Lewis, hailing the late congressman as afounding father of “a fuller, better America” yet to be realized, while forcefully calling Americans to fight the Trump administration’s effort to undermine a cause Lewis was willing to die for: the right to vote.
      From the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached, Obama traced the arch of Lewis’s life – a child born into the Jim Crow south, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, a leader of the civil rights marches in Selma, and a US congressman from Georgia – tying his legacy to the present-day civil rights protests ignited by the death of George Floyd, a black man under the knee of a white police officer. He then drew a line from the racist forces that opposed civil rights in the 1960s the policies and ideologies embraced by Donald Trump.
      “Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans,” Obama said, never mentioning his successor by name. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting.”
      In perhaps his most explicitly political speech since leaving office, Obama assailed Trump’s false attacks on voting by mail, which Democratic officials have pushed to expand in light of the coronavirus pandemic. He called the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring a supermajority of the chamber to pass legislation, which Republicans used to block his agenda, “another Jim Crow relic”.
      Singling out members of Congress who issued statements calling Lewis a “hero” but oppose legislation that would restore the protections afforded under the Voting Rights Act Lewis struggled for in the 1960s, a law then granted under Lyndon Johnson but since weakened by a supreme court ruling in 2013, Obama said: “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”
      “Preach,” a voice rang out from the pews, where mourners sat apart in observation of safety protocols during the coronavirus pandemic. All those attending the service wore masks. More

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      Trump has helped the US to see its dark side. It will still be there when he goes | Nesrine Malik

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      If Donald Trump loses in November – and it’s a very big if, of course – then under Joe Biden, it will be hard for the United States not to be seduced into collective amnesia. The Trump presidency has represented such a thorough subversion of political norms that, with a Biden victory, the temptation to move on from it as swiftly as possible will be strong.Already the signs are beginning to appear. The polls look encouraging for the Democrats, coronavirus is ravaging the country and Trump is unravelling a little more every day as he tries, and fails, to prove that he is “cognitively there” in TV interviews. The temptation is to indulge in a sort of fast-forwarding to the future, where Trump is a blip, the first and last of his kind. In a town hall meeting last week, Biden said: “We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, they’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”But 12 presidents, among them George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson, owned slaves. Others presided over segregation. Biden’s disavowal of racism in the most powerful office of the land is a piece of ahistoricism brought on by the need to believe that Trump is a singular monstrosity. The idea is that his toxicity can be cleansed with his ejection from the White House.This reassurance is, after all, what Biden is there for. His weakness as a Democratic candidate has turned into a strength in a period of heightened uncertainty. Here is a pastoral, non-controversial figure, who will not subject a traumatised country to any more sudden shocks. The purpose of his presidency would be restorative, the idea to return the US back to “normal”. Trump was just a long, vivid nightmare. Chroniclers of the US’s journey are already preparing to write this account of a country that can be managed back to health. The Johns Hopkins University professor Yascha Mounk tweeted that if the current polls holds and “Biden crushes Trump”, then “a lot of people are gonna have to change their narrative about America quite a lot”. He concluded that they probably wouldn’t, all the same.Nor should they. The conditions that brought Trump to power and kept his poll ratings pretty much level throughout allegations of sexual assault, impeachment and indulgence of white supremacy will not have disappeared overnight. And even though Trump’s departure, whenever it happens, will be enormously welcome, he did at least force a moment of national self-confrontation. He revealed that white supremacy is always waiting in the wings, ready to be emboldened. He revealed the extent to which many Americans don’t care about morality in foreign policy. He took Russia’s word about its interference over that of his own intelligence agencies – and in getting away with it, showed that his supporters’ xenophobia was more powerful than their patriotism.As long as he was dogwhistling against black people, Mexicans and Muslims, his betrayals would be forgiven. These are painful things to acknowledge. They run so contrary to the foundational myth of America, to its comforting rhetoric and its political sacraments, that the business of trivialising them must begin at once if the country is to heal after Trump goes.Getting back to normal after periods of abject moral failure is one of the US’s strengths. When the Senate select committee on intelligence released its damning report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” programme, concluding that the CIA avoided oversight and lied about the efficacy of torture, there was no punishment for anyone involved. The programme, during which one detainee died of hypothermia and another lost an eye, was “troubling” according to Barack Obama. The report was even presented as evidence that the US’s ideals were intact. “No nation is perfect,” Obama said, “but one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better.”The same will happen if Trump loses later this year. An image-laundering exercise, where the US will appoint itself as judge and jury, but no sentence will be meted out. It will investigate his time in office, soberly declare that failures happen, then pat itself on the back for rejecting him.In 2016, it was a challenge to accept that Trump won for any reason other than the economic disaffection of rust-belt voters. Just as this “calamity thesis” dominated the aftermath of Trump’s victory, the idea that he is simply an anomaly will carry the day if he loses. But Trump is a culmination, not an aberration. The point in hoping the US doesn’t move on too quickly isn’t to self-flagellate. If there is no reckoning with what this presidency says about the country, another version of him, and all the dark forces he unleashed, will be back in short order.• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      John Lewis: Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey lead tributes to civil rights hero

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      Civil rights movement

      Winfrey releases footage of recent interview
      View from Washington: the legacy of John Lewis
      Obituary: John Lewis, 1940-2020

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      John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report

      Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey have led tributes from across US society to the civil rights leader and Georgia congressman John Lewis, who died on Friday evening at the age of 80.
      Lewis, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, dedicated his life to the fight for racial equality and justice and worked closely with Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s, the high water mark of the civil rights movement in the US. He became a congressman in 1987.
      “He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” Obama wrote in a Medium post. “And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.”
      Winfrey released footage of Lewis speaking during a recorded conversation between the two last week. Posting the footage, Winfrey wrote: “He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. I had a final chance to tell him what I’ve said every time I’ve been in his presence: ‘Thank you for your courage leading the fight for freedom. My life as it is would not have been possible without you.’
      “I know for sure he heard me. I felt good about that. He understood and was so gracious.”
      In the interview, shot to mark a CNN documentary entitled John Lewis: Good Trouble, the congressman said: “I tried to do what was right, fair and just. When I was growing up in rural Alabama, my mother always said, ‘Boy, don’t get in trouble … but I saw those signs that said ‘white’, ‘colored’, and I would say, ‘Why?’
      “And she would say again, ‘Don’t get in trouble. You will be beaten. You will go to jail. You may not live. But … the words of Dr King and the actions of Rosa Parks inspired me to get in trouble. And I’ve been getting in trouble ever since. Good trouble. Necessary trouble.”

      Oprah Winfrey
      (@Oprah)
      Last week when there were false rumors of Congressman John Lewis’ passing, Gayle and I called and were able to speak with him. He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. pic.twitter.com/8kRRDMTvFm

      July 18, 2020

      Lewis was a prominent figure in many key events of the civil rights era, prominent among them the March on Washington in 1963 and a voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 on what would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.
      State troopers attacked peaceful protesters with clubs and tear gas. A police officer knocked Lewis to the ground and hit him in the head with a nightstick, then struck him again as he tried to get up, he would later testify in court.
      Images of Lewis being beaten are some of the most enduring of the era. Film of events in Selma was shown on national television, galvanizing support for the Voting Rights Act.
      Pettus, for whom the bridge is named, was a slaveholding member of the Confederate army, a leader in the Klu Klux Klan and a man “bent on preserving slavery and segregation”, Smithsonian Magazine wrote.
      A petition to change the name of the bridge to memorialize Lewis now has more than 400,000 signatures.
      Lewis was the son of sharecroppers in Alabama but represented a Georgia district for 33 years in the US House of Representatives. In one of his last public appearances, he walked a street in front of the White House in Washington painted with a Black Lives Matter mural, a tribute to a movement he saw as a continuation of his fight for racial equality.
      Politicians paid tribute on Saturday, among them former presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and, with a tweet and an order for flags to fly at half-staff, Donald Trump.
      Ava DuVernay, the academy award-nominated director of the historical drama film Selma, a retelling of the 1965 march, wrote that she would “never forget what you taught me and what you challenged me to be”.
      “Better. Stronger. Bolder. Braver. God bless you, Ancestor John Robert Lewis of Troy, Alabama. Run into His arms.”
      Viola Davis, the first black actress to win a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar, thanked Lewis for his “commitment to change” and “courage”. In one of Davis’s most famous roles, in the 2011 film The Help, she portrayed a maid in the Jim Crow south, a role she has since said catered to a white audience not “ready for the truth” about the black experience.
      Stacey Abrams, who lost a race to become Georgia’s first black female governor after voting rolls were purged by her Republican opponent, called Lewis “a griot of this modern age”. Abrams’ organization Fair Fight continues to work to secure voting rights, a central demand of marchers in Selma.
      Minister Bernice A King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, said Lewis “did, indeed, fight the good fight and get into a lot of good trouble”, thereby ensuring he “served God and humanity well”.

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