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    Bill Clinton grapples with his past in memoir – too much, too little, too late

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    In 1992, Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush, a sitting Republican president. In 1996, Clinton won re-election over Bob Dole. A former Democratic governor of Arkansas, Clinton had a flair for policy and retail politics. He felt your pain, garnering support from voters without a four-year degree and graduates alike. He played the saxophone, belting out Heartbreak Hotel on late-night TV. Redefining what it meant to be presidential, he told a studio audience he preferred briefs to boxers.He oozed charisma – and more. But his legacy remains deeply stained by allegations of predatory conduct and questionable judgment. He is one of three presidents to be impeached – in his case, for lying under oath about his extra-marital relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Before leaving office, to avoid professional discipline, Clinton surrendered his law license.Congress twice impeached Donald Trump. His legal problems range far wider than Clinton’s. Nonetheless, there are echoes. Back in the day, Clinton and Trump golfed together, each a tabloid fixture. Clinton crossed paths with Jeffrey Epstein too.View image in fullscreenClinton’s fame outstrips his popularity. Like an old-time vaudevillian, the 42nd president, now 78, finds it hard to leave the stage. His second memoir, subtitled My Life After the White House, is a stab at image rehabilitation and relevance.Densely written, the 464-page tome is a prolonged stroll down memory lane that never quite reaches a desired destination. It is too much, too little, too late – all at once.Clinton grapples with his past. In January 1998, news broke that the president, then in his 50s, had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, a 22-year-old intern. It gave a nascent internet culture – most of it following and shaped by Matt Drudge – plenty to talk about.Newt Gingrich, the soon-to-be disgraced speaker of the House, and Ken Starr, an independent counsel turned modern-day Torquemada, did their best to bring Clinton down. Lindsey Graham, then an eager young congressman, now the senior senator from South Carolina and a key Trump ally, dutifully fanned the flames.Fast forward 30 years. In 2018, Craig Melvin of NBC asked Clinton if he apologized to Lewinsky. Clinton did not take kindly to the question. He now admits the interview “was not my finest hour”.“I live with it all the time,” he writes, reflecting on the affair. “Monica’s done a lot of good and important work over the last few years in her campaign against bullying, earning her well-deserved recognition in the United States and abroad. I wish her nothing but the best.”Lewinsky is probably unimpressed. In 2021, NBC asked her if Clinton owed her an apology. “I don’t need it,” she said. “He should wanna apologize, in the same way that I wanna apologize any chance I get to people that I’ve hurt, and my actions have hurt.”In his new book, Clinton stays silent about other women who accused him of sexual misconduct – Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick – but gingerly rehashes Trump’s Access Hollywood moment and proliferating allegations of groping. As for Epstein, the financier and sex offender who killed himself in jail in New York in 2019, and whose links to Trump are perennially discussed, Clinton pleads ignorance.“I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing,” he writes. “He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him.”Clinton adds: “I’ve never visited his island.”Clinton does acknowledge two flights, in 2002 and 2003, on Epstein’s plane, luridly known as the “Lolita Express”: “The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him.”In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the White House. On the page, Bill Clinton burnishes the memory of his wife’s failed campaigns – though he is ever aware of her shortcomings. He recognizes the meaning of her Democratic primary defeat, by Barack Obama in 2008. Blaming the media, in part, Clinton implicitly acknowledges that Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, was a better candidate than Hillary, then a former first lady and junior senator from New York.“Obama’s best decision was to start his campaign early with a full 50-state strategy, something Hillary’s campaign had to develop after she strengthened her leadership team in February,” Bill laments. “But she never really caught up.”Said differently, 2008 was a change election. Obama stood atop history. Hillary was in over her head. She was also the status quo. As for 2016, Clinton pins his wife’s loss on James Comey, the FBI director who investigated her private email use; WikiLeaks, which released Democratic emails; and Vladimir Putin, who capitalized on such scandals in order to boost Trump.Elsewhere, Clinton revisits his last-minute pardon of Marc Rich – a scandal from the last day of the presidency, 20 January 2001. Denise Rich, the fugitive financier’s ex-wife, donated $450,000 to the Clinton library and wrote to him, seeking a pardon.“I wish Denise hadn’t written to me, for her sake and mine,” Clinton writes. “I knew she had made plenty of money on her own, did not get along with her ex-husband, and didn’t know he would apply for a pardon when she gave money to the library fund.”Again, parallels to Trump are apparent. At the end of his first term, the 45th president gave get-out-of-jail-free cards to cronies and the connected. Charlie Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, was one who benefited. So did Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. A robust pardon pipeline emerged with an ultimate audience of one. Trump will soon wield the pardon power again.On the whole, Bill Clinton’s latest book will be remembered for its omissions. It usually works out that way.

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      ‘There are images no leader ever wants to be seen’: 33 pivotal US presidential moments captured on camera

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      Is it any surprise that “photo op” is a phrase imported into British English from the United States? Of course it came from there, the land where the visual image sits right at the centre of the culture, with politics no exception. It was the Nixon White House that came up with it, specifically a press aide by the name of Bruce Whelihan. According to Washington legend, whenever the president was meeting a visiting dignitary, Richard Nixon’s hardball press secretary, Ron Ziegler, would turn to his underling with an order to summon the snappers. “Get ’em in for a picture,” Ziegler would say. Too polite to put it that way himself, Whelihan would clear his throat and announce to the ladies and gentlemen of the Washington press corps: “There will be a photo opportunity in the Oval Office.” The photo op was born.But if the term was new, the thing itself had been a part of US politics almost from the start. Just as Roman emperors sought to cast themselves in stone and Tudor kings commissioned the finest artists to capture their likeness, so American presidents moved fast to harness the new technology of the age, in order that the nation might see the men who governed them. The selection of photographs assembled here is made up of a series of striking images, but a couple are extraordinary less for what they show than for the fact that they exist at all.Behold a portrait of John Quincy Adams, sixth US president and the son of its second. A daguerreotype, it dates to March 1843), when Adams had been out of office for well over a decade, but still: it is the earliest known photograph of a US president, its subject a man born in 1767 and whose father was the successor to George Washington himself. Seeing the face of Abraham Lincoln induces a similar feeling of historical vertigo. If there’s a tendency to divide human events into two broad categories – our own, modern era and everything that went before – then the invention of the photograph can often be the instinctive dividing line between the two. But here are Adams and Lincoln, jumping over the barrier and barging their way into our own times.As for Nixon himself, he appears in this collection twice. That’s fitting, and not only because of the origin story of the photo op. Nixon learned the hard way that in modern American politics, image is everything. Washington legend holds that in their 1960 presidential debate, Nixon comfortably beat the young Massachusetts senator John F Kennedy among voters who followed the contest on the radio – but, his face darkened by five o’clock shadow, he lost among those who watched on TV. After that, Nixon was ready to put himself in the hands of the image-makers.One result is the intriguing photograph of the president and the king, Nixon and Elvis, standing improbably together in the White House in 1970. Showing two men both then at the height of their powers, both to fall just a few years later, the picture was long the most requested of all those held by the US National Archives). It fascinates partly because the pair represent polar opposites – a rock legend and a man so uncool he wore a suit on the beach) – and partly because it invites you to guess at the men’s motives: Nixon surely wanted some of Presley’s stardust to land on him, while Elvis was in search of a federal agent’s badge and, it seems, a sense of purpose.The other Nixon shot is the one that etched his downfall into the public imagination. It shows his parting gesture – an oddly celebratory, double V-for-victory salute – from the presidential helicopter as he made his disgraced exit following the Watergate scandal). Nixon flew off to California and into the history books as the first US president ever to quit.Between them, Elvis and Watergate, those pictures represent the two categories of presidential photograph: the ones they wanted – the photo ops – and the ones they most emphatically did not. The first category brims with examples and they follow a pattern. They show the occupant of the White House as a heroic, even mythic figure. The exemplar is Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, a hunter and adventurer who engaged in photogenic displays of muscularity and machismo so overt, they’d make Vladimir Putin blush. But that tradition has endured. Indeed, it has turned into an expectation that a US president must not only be competent and wise, but also fit, strong and marked by conspicuous physical courage.Meeting that demand has been easy for some occupants of America’s highest office. Dwight Eisenhower didn’t have to pretend to be a warrior: he had been the supreme allied commander during the second world war. When he first campaigned for the presidency in 1952, there was no need to stage a photo op: there were images aplenty of him directing the D-day mission) that had turned the war around just eight years earlier. No wonder he won.But for others, producing images of strength and command has taken some doing. The group portrait of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Yalta ) had to have the so-called the Big Three seated because Roosevelt was paralysed from the waist down and required either a wheelchair or leg braces to get around. He and his aides went to great lengths to keep that fact from the US public and they mostly succeeded, thanks to a compliant press pack who obediently put away their cameras once the chosen image had been secured.That remained the custom for a while, the snappers keeping a discreet distance even after Eisenhower had both a heart attack and stroke in office, and as Kennedy battled crippling back pain. The images told a different story, including the silhouetted portrait of JFK standing alone at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, head bowed, a study in the loneliness of ultimate political authority). That photograph may lack the glamour or sparkle of other Camelot-era pictures, but it contributed to the Kennedy mystique – and the mythology of the presidency itself – every bit as much. This was the era of the cold war, of a nuclear standoff between the US and the USSR, and that desk was where the buck stopped. Here was where the button would be pressed – and here was the man who would press it.Naturally, this iconography of president-as-hero takes different forms, depending on who’s in the job. The image Jimmy Carter treasured from his single term in office cast him as successful peacemaker, bringing together Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the Camp David peace accords. For supporters of Donald Trump, the picture that renders him a hero is the one taken a second after a would-be assassin’s bullet had brushed his ear, when he raised his fistand, with bloodied face, urged them to “Fight, fight, fight!”.Sometimes, though, the man at the top has struggled to meet that deep public need for an alpha figure in the White House. Carter’s political prospects took a hit when he was photographed “wobbling, moaning and pale with exhaustion” during a six-mile run in 1979). But the most recent, and serious, example is Joe Biden, whose visible frailty drove him from this year’s presidential race. The pictures showing him apparently slack-jawed during a June TV debate with Trump were enough to persuade Democrats that he had to go.Which brings us to the images no leader ever wanted to be seen. Some were photo ops whose aim was to offer a heroic, presidential figure, which went badly wrong. Michael Dukakis’s handlers wanted to project him as a potential commander-in-chief when they put him in a tank during the 1988 campaign); instead he looked like a hopeless dweeb. George W Bush’s team doubtless thought a Mission Accomplished banner on an aircraft carrier conveyed victorious strength following the invasion of Iraq; instead it came to haunt him as an emblem of hubris and myopia.But other unwanted images from this collection capture not mistaken bits of stage management, but rather tragedy and disaster. George W Bush reading My Pet Goat to a group of Florida schoolkids as he gets word of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 distils the shock of 9/11, even now. The lifeless body of Robert F Kennedy evokes the turbulence and violence of 1968), a time when the US seemed about to tear itself apart.It’s all here: moments of hope – Barack Obama inspiring a young boy as America’s first Black president – and moments of despair – Lyndon Johnson taking the oath following JFK’s assassination while Jackie Kennedy, in blood-stained clothes, looks on. And yet, no matter how sweeping the range of these photographs, there is something missing from this selection. It would be lacking in any assembly of presidential pictures. Yes, there are Democratic presidents and Republican presidents. Yes, there are old presidents and young presidents. But there is no female president. We see Hillary Clinton, who got close. We see Shirley Chisholm, who was the first Black woman to try but never got near. Otherwise, there is an absence. On 5 November, Americans have a chance to fill that space – and to give the world a picture no one has ever seen before.Picture captions by Felix Bazalgette and Gabrielle SchwarzJimmy Carter collapses, 1979By Phil StewartView image in fullscreen“His face was ashen and his mouth hung open,” is how one reporter described Jimmy Carter in September 1979, when the president dropped out of a six-mile race four miles in. Though he swiftly recovered, this image – two months after his speech blaming US problems on a “crisis of confidence” – was seen as evidence of weakness. He lost to Ronald Reagan the following year. GSRichard Nixon bids goodbye, 1974Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“Once more, there was not a spark of contrition in the man,” commented the Guardian at the time. On 8 August 1974, Richard Nixon earned the dubious honour of being the first (and, to this day, only) president to resign from office.Two years earlier, five men were caught trying to burgle and bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington DC. The subsequent investigation implicated Nixon, who faced impeachment for his role in covering up the break-in. Yet – as seen in this image of him leaving the White House for the last time – he was never really repentant. As he told David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” One month after he resigned, his chosen successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. GSFDR at Yalta, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenFor eight days in February 1945, the “Big Three” – Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin – met in the Crimean city of Yalta to discuss allied strategy.“FDR’s position between the other leaders is significant,” Diana Preston, historian and author of Eight Days at Yalta. “It was appropriate for a man who hoped to reconcile conflicting interests and build a future peace.” The conference was at first deemed a success, but the Soviet leader soon broke his promises to allow free elections in eastern Europe, and the cold war began. GSTexts from Hillary Clinton, 2011By Kevin LamarqueView image in fullscreenIt was the photograph that launched a thousand memes before becoming a liability at election time. The image of Hillary Clinton texting in sunglasses aboard a military plane to Libya went viral, inspiring a popular blog called “Texts from Hillary”. CBS reported at the time: “Hillary Clinton brings the LOLZ” and Clinton even name-checked the authors of the blog in her first ever tweet, proudly setting the image as her avatar.By 2015, however, she would distance herself from it, dropping it from her Twitter profile when the FBI announced an investigation into her use of a private email address for government business. As the image became used in articles about the investigation, its meaning began to shift. Many people started to wonder what Clinton might have been writing on that Blackberry. The scandal came to a catastrophic peak just 11 days before the 2016 election, when FBI director James Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation after having closed it in July. FBTheodore Roosevelt, 1898Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of Roosevelt on a horse encapsulates the rugged masculinity the 26th president – in fact born into an aristocratic family in New York – strove to embody. Once a sickly child, he credited his recovery to exertion and hardship, and argued this approach would lead to triumph for both man and nation. Here he is in Cuba during the Spanish-American war, leading volunteer regiment the Rough Riders. Returning a war hero, he re-entered politics and became president after William McKinley’s assassination in 1901. GSHair Like Mine, 2009By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreenThe symbolic power of the first African American president was cemented in this image of Barack Obama leaning forward so a five-year-old boy could feel his hair. On 8 May 2009, Jacob’s dad, departing national security council staffer Carlton Philadelphia, took his family to the Oval Office for a farewell photo. This snap, by the then chief White House photographer Pete Souza, captures the moment Jacob asked, “Is your hair like mine?” Obama suggested he touch it and see. A framed print of the photo was hung in the White House for the rest of his presidency.“The whole thing happened so fast, I literally have this one picture,” Souza recalls. “My composition was not perfect, but I think it adds to the spontaneity of the moment.”Two years ago, Obama called Jacob to congratulate him on his high-school graduation. “Folks who maybe didn’t feel they belonged,” he said of the image, “they’d look at themselves differently – to see a person who looked like them in the Oval Office.”“That was a highlight of my life,” Jacob said. “If I get to see another Black man at the top, I want to follow that lead.” GSAssassination attempt on Donald Trump, 2024By Evan VucciView image in fullscreenThis photograph will be remembered as a pivotal moment in this year’s election. On 13 July, a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler County in Pennsylvania. The former president was only lightly wounded when a bullet grazed his right ear but one crowd member was killed and another two critically injured before the shooter was taken down by a Secret Service sniper. This remarkable image of Trump – his ear and face bloodied, and fist defiantly raised in the air as he is hurried off the stage, an American flag raised behind him – instantly went viral. In an interview soon after, AP photojournalist Evan Vucci recalled his thoughts as he was capturing the scene: “In my head, I just kept saying to myself, slow down, slow down. Compose, compose.” GSAbraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863By Mathew B BradyView image in fullscreenFor almost a century, it was thought that no photographs existed of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg on 19 November, the day he delivered his endlessly quoted address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. That is, until archivist Josephine Cobb undertook some detective work in 1952. Cobb, the first woman to be employed by the National Archives, picked through the work of the 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady, famous for his portraits of the great and good. She came upon a broken glass negative that showed a vast crowd at Gettysburg – she estimated the time to be about noon, a few hours before Lincoln would speak. After repeatedly enlarging, expanding and reprinting the image, she found his unmistakable face in the crowd (bare-headed, left of centre). FBRonald and Nancy Reagan kissing in Vanity Fair, 1985 By Harry Benson View image in fullscreen“There is in the West,” wrote William F Buckley in 1985, “a tradition against chiefs of state engaging in visible, let alone ostentatious, shows of biological informality.” Ronald and Nancy Reagan, both successful actors before going into politics, bucked tradition by using the White House as a setting for their love story. The media was happy to indulge them, with Buckley writing a fawning ode to the couple in Vanity Fair, to accompany a series of images by Harry Benson of them dancing to Sinatra and locking lips.Reagan, a year into his final term, could risk a little biological informality – the images were probably more consequential for Vanity Fair. Benson later said that the loss-making publication was facing closure until this issue. The editor Tina Brown, he said, convinced the owner to “wait until the June 1985 cover of the Reagans appeared. The magazine sold off the stands and the magazine was saved.” FBRichard Nixon with Elvis Presley, 1970By Oliver F AtkinsView image in fullscreenOne December morning in 1970, Elvis showed up at the White House with a handwritten letter for the president. He wanted to give him a gift (a Colt pistol with silver bullets) and discuss becoming a “federal agent at large”: “I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and communist brainwashing and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can do the most good,” he wrote.Nixon gave Presley a federal narcotics badge, but not an official role. The bizarre encounter was captured by White House photographer Oliver F Atkins, but the images weren’t made public until the 1980s, after Nixon’s resignation and Presley’s death. GSJohn F Kennedy: the loneliest job, 1961By George TamesView image in fullscreenA few weeks into his presidency, JFK stood at his desk before meeting the French ambassador, reading an official paper. Photographer George Tames, shadowing him for the New York Times, took this photograph, which became famous for its intimate portrayal of the pressures of holding office.It was later reproduced in the opening title of US political drama The West Wing. FBBill Clinton hugs Monica Lewinsky, 1996By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenIt was a moment captured by chance: a hug between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the crowd at a Democratic fundraiser in Washington in October 1996. But when news of the affair between the president and the former White House intern broke in 1998, photojournalist Dirck Halstead, then senior White House photographer at Time magazine, recognised her face. After searching through his archives, he located this image in a box of transparencies. The photo ran on Time’s cover that August, when Lewinsky agreed to testify before a grand jury investigating Clinton’s denials of the affair.Four months later, Clinton was impeached on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury, but he was eventually acquitted and left office after two terms in 2001 with the highest approval rating of any departing postwar president. Lewinsky, meanwhile, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, “mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracised back then”, the anti-bullying campaigner wrote in Vanity Fair in 2018. “There has been at least one significant reference in the press to that unfortunate spell in our history every day for the past 20 years.” GS‘Dewey defeats Truman’, 1948Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWith Harry Truman’s popularity waning, a win for his Republican opponent, Thomas E Dewey, in the 1948 election seemed certain. The Chicago Daily Tribune, forced to go to press early due to a printers’ strike, issued 150,000 copies of this 3 November edition – held up by a gleeful Truman en route to Washington – before it became clear its editors had backed the wrong horse. GSDwight D Eisenhower, 1944Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenThis image of General Dwight D Eisenhower addressing paratroopers at Greenham Common airfield on 5 June 1944, the day before they would parachute into France, became one of the most widely circulated of the war, durably linking him with D-day’s success and the eventual American victory. Despite the general’s authoritative pose, the soldier closest to him, Lieutenant Wallace Strobel, recalled a lighter conversation. “He asked my name and which state I was from … He then said, ‘Oh yes, Michigan, great fishing there. Been there several times and like it.’”After the war “Ike”, as he was popularly known, regularly topped polls as America’s most admired man. After years of claiming that it would be inappropriate for a military leader to run for president, he finally went for it in 1952, winning 55% of the popular vote for the Republicans. FBHarry S Truman and Lauren Bacall on the piano, 1945Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenWhile playing piano for photographers during a wartime variety show in 1945, vice-president Truman was joined by 20-year-old Lauren Bacall, with the famous actor perched awkwardly above him. “I was just a kid,” shrugged Bacall years later. “My press agent made me do it.”Truman had only been vice-president for a few weeks, plucked from relative obscurity by Franklin D Roosevelt. This photograph, considered risque at the time, made headlines all around the world and helped to establish his public image – even if they irritated his inner circle, including his wife, Bess. “I don’t think you should play piano in public again,” she said, according to Truman’s grandson. The New York Times recently dubbed it a viral image before its time – it inspired so many other women to climb up on the piano that it eventually broke. FBShirley Chisholm’s presidential bid, 1972By Don Hogan CharlesView image in fullscreenThis is Shirley Chisholm – who four years earlier had become the first Black woman elected to Congress – announcing her presidential bid at the Concord Baptist Church, Brooklyn. She knew that, with its “Unbought and Unbossed” slogan, the campaign was a long shot – she was also the first woman of colour from either major party to run for president. So it was a feat that, despite racism and sexism from her own party as well as the opposition, she made it to the Democratic national convention with the support of 152 delegates – and came fourth. When Kamala Harris launched her first presidential bid in 2020, she paid tribute with campaign colours based on the red and yellow pins Chisholm’s supporters wore. GSGeorge W Bush’s Mission Accomplished moment, 2003By Stephen JaffeView image in fullscreenDan Bartlett, George Bush’s communications director at the time, would later call this photo op “one of the big regrets of my life”. “It did seem premature,” remembers Stephen Jaffe, the press corp photographer covering Bush’s speech on the aircraft carrier that day. “The administration tried to stage everything perfectly – unfortunately it’s not a perfect world.”As the eight-year occupation of Iraq spiralled and weapons of mass destruction failed to appear, the image of Bush in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner, just six weeks into an invasion that would kill more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians, became a symbol of hubris.While Bartlett says the banner referred to the mission of the USS Abraham Lincoln, returning from its tour in the Gulf – the ship’s crew requested it, and he “didn’t think twice”– Jaffe is sceptical and thinks the intended meaning was plain to all on the day. “There was a lot of spin afterwards,” he says. “If the mission had been accomplished, they would have taken credit for it.” FBGeorge W Bush learns of 9/11, 2001By Win McNameeView image in fullscreenThis captures the moment on the morning of 11 September 2001 when George Bush, taking part in a reading session at a primary school in Florida, learned that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. (He’d been informed of the first plane, at the time thought to be an accident, before he entered the classroom.) When his chief of staff, Andy Card, whispered in his ear, “America is under attack,” he decided not to interrupt the reading, instead waiting around seven minutes before leaving.It would become one of the most scrutinised events of his presidency. In his scathing 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore said, “Not knowing what to do, with no one telling him what to do, and no Secret Service rushing in to take him to safety, Mr Bush just sat there.” But several people there that day have since spoken out in his defence. “It was nice he understood we were young kids and would probably have gone crazy if he had told us what had happened,” former student La’Damien Smith told an interviewer in 2011. GSSituation Room, 2011By Pete SouzaView image in fullscreen“It’s not a picture I have hanging on my wall,” Pete Souza says. “It’s not artistic – the lighting in that room sucked.” On 1 May 2011, the chief White House photographer was called to the situation room, a network of rooms below the White House. The atmosphere immediately felt unusual. “I had been there many, many times before to cover discussions about sensitive policy decisions,” Souza says. On this day, however, the decision had already been made: Souza was there to document Barack Obama and his senior team as they watched the operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden play out in real time.As everyone packed into a side room to watch a live feed from a drone, Souza squeezed himself in the corner. (Seated, from left to right, is then vice-president Biden, Obama, joint operations command Marshall B Webb, deputy national security adviser Denis McDonough, secretary of state Hillary Clinton and secretary of defense Robert Gates.) While the raid unfolded in Abbottabad, Pakistan, Souza took about 100 images. “It was as tense and anxious a situation as I had ever seen that whole team in,” he recalls. “You could see it on their faces.” He tried to focus on his composition, getting everyone in frame, and on timing his shutter clicks so as not to distract them. Later it was announced that Navy Seals had killed Bin Laden, along with his son, a courier and two of the courier’s relatives.Of nine pictures released that day, it was this one that went viral, exhaustively analysed and relentlessly memed. Souza, looking back today, believes this was because it occupied some part of the national psyche: “We had this guy that attacked our country, and it took us 10 years to find him, but we found him. It closed the chapter.” FBJohn Quincy Adams, 1843By Philip HaasView image in fullscreenThough Adams was not the first president to be photographed (an 1841 picture of William Henry Harrison is now lost), this is the oldest surviving portrait of a US president. Adams had a familiarly vexed relationship with the medium. “All hideous,” he wrote in his diary, after posing for daguerreotypes in the early 1840s. “Too true to the original.” This image of Adams – who served as president in the 1820s – surfaced in 2017, found by the great-great-grandson of a congressman who had received it as a gift from Adams. FBMichael Dukakis and the tank, 1988By Michael E SamojedenView image in fullscreenMeant to project strength, this unfortunate photo-call crystallised, for critics and voters, something mediocre and uncertain about the Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. The Republicans used it relentlessly in attack ads.Politicians are drawn to tanks: Churchill, Putin, Blair, Hugo Chavez, Liz Truss and Nigel Farage have all been snapped on or in one. Dukakis’s efforts came only a couple of years after Thatcher’s influential contribution to the genre; while she loomed out of the turret with uncanny poise, dressed in her own clothes, he seemed shrunken and overwhelmed, in a helmet that didn’t belong to him.Widely recognised as one of the most disastrous campaign photos in history, the image would haunt future presidencies. “I sat in countless meetings in which some smartass warned that a stop on the president’s schedule had the makings of a ‘Dukakis in the tank moment,’” recalled former Clinton aide John King to Politico. In 2013, after being handed a naval football helmet, Obama declined to try it on. “You do not put stuff on your head if you’re president,” he joked. FBJFK in the motorcade, 1963Photographer unknownView image in fullscreen“It was a watershed moment that changed America,” says Fredrik Logevall, historian and biographer of John F Kennedy. “I think there’s something to the notion that America lost its innocence after 22 November 1963.”More than other images from Kennedy’s assassination – grainy TV coverage of the immediate aftermath, or Lyndon B Johnson being sworn in – this long lens shot of Kennedy smiling just moments before his assassination has come to signify what was lost that day. “In this photograph he’s for ever frozen in our minds,” Logevall says, “the picture of youthful vitality and glamour.”For Logevall, it captures an era not only less haunted by political violence – open-top motorcades, beloved by Kennedy because he could get “closer to the people”, are a thing of the past – but also less riven by polarisation. “This was a conservative city,” he notes, and yet “hundreds of thousands of people turned up to cheer him on”.Kennedy was on his way to deliver a speech on political extremism, with lines Logevall believes to be prescient. “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy, with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” FBLBJ being sworn in, 1963By Cecil W StoughtonView image in fullscreenOn 22 November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F Kennedy, vice-president Lyndon B Johnson took the oath to become the 36th president of the US, inside a cramped compartment aboard Air Force One, on the runway of Dallas airport. Kennedy’s body had been loaded on to the plane 15 minutes before, and as the compartment filled with people, White House photographer Cecil Stoughton stood on top of a sofa, crammed himself against the curved ceiling and asked everyone to step back.When Jackie Kennedy arrived, still in her blood- stained suit, she was positioned to LBJ’s left – her haunting, dazed expression lends the image its emotional force. In less than a minute, as Stoughton snapped eight pictures, the ceremony was over. As Air Force One continued on to Washington, Stoughton left the plane to ensure his film was swiftly developed and transmitted to the world’s press, to authenticate the transfer of power to a new president. FBDonald Trump mugshot, 2023By Fulton County Sheriff’s OfficeView image in fullscreenEven before Trump arrived at the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia, last August, people were anticipating the release of his mugshot, with fakes spreading around the internet. It was his fourth arrest that year, but the first time he had had a picture taken.Mugshots are often used to shame public figures who have run-ins with the law. But for Trump, ever the self-publicist, the image became a golden opportunity, adorning mugs, T-shirts and stickers, with the mottos “Never Surrender” or “Not Guilty”. Trump, not long reinstated on X by Elon Musk, tweeted the image himself, raising more than $7m in just a few days. FBJimmy Carter at Camp David, 1978By Karl SchumacherView image in fullscreenIn September 1978, Jimmy Carter convened a secret 12-day summit with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat at Camp David. The main focus was a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel after 30 years of intermittent war. The resulting accords led to Israel agreeing to withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for its first official recognition by an Arab state and an end to the state of war. A plan was also laid out for Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza, but it was never implemented.Here Begin and Sadat are shown smiling and shaking hands at the presidential retreat in Maryland, as Carter looks on. “The picture makes it look as if the three leaders all got along very well at the summit. That was not at all the case,” recalls William B Quandt, a former national security council staffer who was involved in the negotiations. “The adversaries were very hostile, and on the third day Carter decided not to have any more three-way meetings. We were not at all sure we would get an agreement until the last day.”Begin and Sadat won the Nobel Peace prize that year, while Carter was awarded it in 2002 for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts”. While the Camp David accords are recognised as his greatest presidential achievement, they left crucial issues unresolved and, some argue, helped prevent Palestianian statehood. GSGeorge HW Bush in bed, 1987By David ValdezView image in fullscreenThis photograph, taken in 1987 for Life ­magazine, captured the then vice- president with his ­family on holiday in Maine. David Valdez – personal photographer to Bush at the time – was invited by Barbara Bush to come by the house at 6am. “I poked my head in the bedroom door and there were George and Barbara Bush in bed,” he later told NPR. “Then the ­grandchildren started coming in and I took that snap, and that wound up running two full pages, and it’s taken on a life of its own.” The Washington Post credited the image with launching Bush’s successful campaign for the presidency; Valdez became his official White House ­photographer. FBLyndon B Johnson watches war protests, 1968By Yoichi OkamotoView image in fullscreenThis strikingly intimate shot shows LBJ and his family at his ranch in Texas, watching TV coverage of Vietnam war protests outside the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago. This level of access was remarkable: Yoichi Okamoto was the first civilian to be appointed chief photographer for the White House.Here we can also see a turning point in LBJ’s presidency. Since taking over in 1963, he had sent more than 500,000 troops to what the public increasingly saw as an unjustifiable, unwinnable war. “I know we oughtn’t to be there,” Johnson admitted to a colleague in 1966, “but I can’t get out.” He withdrew from the 1968 election, and Nixon won. GSCalvin Coolidge as a cowboy, 1927Photographer unknownView image in fullscreenDuring his tenure in the 1920s, Calvin Coolidge held the greatest number of press conferences of any president (521 over six years), delivered the first State of the Union address on the radio and was the first to appear in a sound film. The media-savvy president appeared in photos dressed up in workers’ overalls, pitching hay and – as here – wearing a cowboy’s chaps and hat, on a trip to South Dakota. This image caused a stir: while the New York Times claimed “Coolidge as Cowboy Wins West’s Heart”, others called him “a pitiful puppet of publicity”, the first president to make himself a laughing stock. He would not be the last. FBBill Clinton on Arsenio Hall, 1992By Reed SaxonView image in fullscreenThis may well be what clinched the 1992 election for Bill Clinton. In June, weeks before accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, he appeared on Arsenio Hall’s late-night talkshow and played Heartbreak Hotel on the saxophone. It was a bold move at the time and the image of a cool, confident Clinton on stage with his sax and dark shades is credited with helping him secure the youth vote especially. “It’s nice to see a Democrat blow something besides the election,” Hall quipped on the show. The success of the appearance, the Los Angeles Times wrote, “changed presidential politics – turning pop culture’s hippest TV shows into the contemporary equivalent of campaign whistle-stops”. GSLyndon B Johnson with Martin Luther King Jr, 1965Photographer unknown View image in fullscreen“I want to tell you how grateful I am,” Johnson told King on the phone, after becoming president in 1963, “and how worthy I’m going to try to be of all your hopes.” The cautious collaboration between the two reached its peak on 6 August 1965, with the signing of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting. Johnson is pictured that day, reaching out to pass a smiling King the pen used to sign the act, as Rosa Parks looks on.How strong this much mythologised moment of unity really was has remained the subject of fierce debate. Mutual distrust haunted their interactions and King faced relentless pressure from J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, with Johnson’s knowledge. King split with the government over Vietnam, and today, voting rights have been rolled back. FBRonald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, 1987By Dirck HalsteadView image in fullscreenOn 12 June 1987, Ronald Reagan delivered probably the most famous sentence of his presidency: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” He was standing in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, 24 years after JFK gave his famous speech in the city. It was a risky move: the previous day, thousands had gathered to protest against his visit. Even his own advisers had been unsure whether the public address to the Soviet leader was too provocative. But the fall of the Wall two years later, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, seemed to vindicate the decision – though there is debate over whether its importance has been overplayed. Over time, Gorbachev and Reagan, both keen to end the cold war, formed a productive alliance. GSJoe Biden at the debate, 2024By Justin SullivanView image in fullscreen“I’ve done 31 debates since I’ve been at Getty,” says photographer Justin Sullivan, “and I’ve never seen anything like that.” The Biden-Trump debate of June 2024 had felt unusual even before it started: press were allowed in only moments before it began and the room was eerily empty. As a “pale and very unstable” Biden gave “incoherent” answers, Sullivan focused on the “strange facial expressions” that damned him as much as his nonsensical responses did. Within weeks, he’d dropped out of the race.“It was a sad ending to a strong presidency that history will look upon more favourably,” says David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief. “He inherited four major crises – the pandemic, the economy, racial justice and climate – and made significant progress on all of them.” FBRobert F Kennedy’s assassination, 1968By Bill EppridgeView image in fullscreenOn 5 June 1968, Robert F Kennedy was in the ballroom of the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles, giving a victory speech after winning the Democratic California presidential primary – he was shaping up to be the nominee to run against Richard Nixon in the general election. As he exited through the hotel kitchen after midnight, shaking hands with staff, shots rang out. In this photograph by Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge, Kennedy lies on the floor while a busboy, Juan Romero, crouches down to comfort him. Kennedy died the next day. The gunman was Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man who said he felt betrayed by Kennedy’s support for Israel in the six-day war.Letters addressed to “the busboy” soon arrived at the hotel. “One even went so far as to say that if he hadn’t stopped to shake my hand, the senator would be alive, so I should be ashamed of myself for being so selfish,” Romero told NPR in 2018. “It’s been a long 50 years.” He visited Kennedy’s grave in 2010, buying his first suit for the occasion.Alternative accounts of the assassination have since emerged. His son, Robert F Kennedy Jr – a conspiracy theorist who recently suspended his own presidential campaign – is among those who believe there was a second gunman. GS More

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      ‘Zombie-like’: the US trade agreement that still haunts Democrats

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      More than 30 years have passed since President Bill Clinton persuaded Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and yet the trade agreement still infuriates many voters and hangs over Kamala Harris’s – and the Democrats’ – chances in this year’s elections.Zombie-like, Nafta just keeps coming back, decades after many Democrats believe it should have died. At the Republican convention, Donald Trump attacked Nafta, calling it “the worst trade agreement ever”. In speech after speech, Nafta is a topic Trump turns to as he seeks to woo the voters in the pivotal blue-collar communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – many of whom remain angry about the job losses it caused.There were early warning signs. “A lot of people were saying Nafta was going to be a disaster economically,” said David Bonior, a former Democratic congressman from Michigan who led the congressional fight to defeat Clinton’s push for Nafta. “I could see it was going to be a disaster politically, too.”Nafta acted like a slow-motion poison for Democrats. After Congress ratified it in 1993, year by year more factories closed and more jobs disappeared as manufacturers moved operations to Mexico to take advantage of that country’s lower wages. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, estimates that the US lost 682,000 jobs due to Nafta, which largely eliminated tariffs between the US, Mexico and Canada.“It’s a lingering issue in Michigan,” said Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, the US’s largest federation of unions. “Everyone knows someone here in Michigan who lost their job due to Nafta. The door was cracked open to outsourcing before Nafta, but Nafta threw the door open after it was passed.”JJ Jewell, who works at a Ford axle plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, was born two years before Nafta was ratified. The trade pact has been part of the background of his life, he says. Jewell said he often discussed trade problems with other auto workers, even when they didn’t directly discuss Nafta. “It’s an issue,” he said. “Nafta helped expedite the loss of jobs from our country to a country where wages are cheaper. I have friends, family members, neighbors who lost their jobs as a direct result of Nafta. It still affects things decades later.”While Trump talks tough on trade and protecting factory jobs, Jewell said that Trump, while president, fell badly short in his vows to bring back manufacturing jobs. “It’s empty promises,” he said.Liz Shuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the country’s main labor federation, agreed, saying that Trump’s tough words on trade have done little for workers. “This is an example of Trump’s rhetoric not matching reality,” Shuler said. “He talks a good game, but there’s no action to back it up. When he had the ability to make a difference, when he was president, he went to different places and pretended to be a savior, and you followed up and you saw that those plants closed and jobs were moved to Mexico. He did nothing to fix it.”Seeing all the lingering discontent about Nafta, many Democrats say it’s unfair for Trump and others to blame their party for the agreement. The idea for Nafta arose under Ronald Reagan, they say, and George HW Bush negotiated the deal, both Republicans. More Republicans in Congress voted to ratify Nafta than Democrats. The vast majority of Senate Republicans also voted for it, while most Democratic senators voted against ratification.Still, Bonior said that Clinton and his administration “get the blame because their top guy was for it”, he said. “Clinton was instrumental in making it happen.”Many workers who lost jobs due to Nafta were able to find other jobs, said Bonior, but their pay was 20% less on average. “Lifestyles were enormously downgraded in my district,” said Bonior, who served as House majority whip. “Clinton bought into Nafta, but a lot of working-class people saw that as a betrayal.”On Nafta, Clinton won strong backing from economists and corporate America. Brushing aside labor’s warnings that Nafta would speed the loss of jobs to Mexico, nearly 300 economists on the right and the left, including several Nobel Prize winners, signed a pro-Nafta letter, saying: “The assertions that Nafta will spur an exodus of US jobs to Mexico are without basis.”Many economists argued that Nafta would increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the US because the nation had a higher-skilled, more productive workforce than Mexico and would thus, in theory, gain factory jobs in an expanded free-trade zone. Pro-Nafta forces also argued that the closer economic integration of the US, Mexico and Canada would create a North American powerhouse to counter China’s fast-growing economic power.Jeff Faux, a former president of the Economic Policy Institute, said many economists failed to realize something important that was happening when Nafta was negotiated: “The US was losing its manufacturing base. It was deindustrializing.”Faux, one of the most outspoken economists against Nafta, said Clinton embraced Nafta because he was eager to present himself as a different type of Democrat and “was trying to ingratiate himself with the business community”. “Clinton saw Nafta as an opportunity to present himself as not just another liberal Democrat,” Faux said. “It was the beginning of the notion that came to dominate the Democratic party that its future is not in working people, that it’s in professionals, in women, in minorities and various ethnic groups. They wanted to put together a new coalition, and labor would be a thing of the past.”Michael Podhorzer, a former AFL-CIO political director, said many blue-collar workers remain angry about Nafta because it was such a departure from President Franklin Roosevelt’s emphatically pro-worker Democratic party. Podhorzer said: “Nafta is the catchall for a series of things that Democrats did that showed they had a greater concern for business interests and a kind of insensitivity to the consequences that accelerating deindustrialization would have on people’s lives.”Trump was shrewd to seize on Nafta, he said: “It’s a way for him to sort of wave a flag, but it doesn’t actually mean he’s on the workers’ side. It channels pretty effectively the frustration that many Americans feel in seeing their jobs go offshore or to Mexico or seeing their communities hollowed out or seeing fewer economics prospects for their kids.”In the view of many labor leaders and workers, the Democrats doubled down on misguided trade policy when Clinton successfully pushed Congress in 2000 to approve normal trade relations with China. That move encouraged many US corporations to outsource operations to lower-wage China, with one study finding that the country lost 2m jobs, including 985,000 factory jobs, because of the normalized trade relations with China. The number of factories in the US also declined by 45,000 from 1997 to 2008, with many workers blaming Nafta and the China trade deal.What’s more, many unions faulted Barack Obama for pushing for another free trade agreement: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a pact with 12 Pacific Rim countries. TPP’s supporters said the deal would increase US exports and build a powerful economic bloc to counter China. TPP was signed in 2016 under Obama’s presidency, but soon after Trump became president, he withdrew the US from TPP, preventing it from taking force.“Obama wasn’t great shakes on trade either,” Bonior said. “A lot of working people said they had enough. They decided we’re not going to be with the Democrats any more, and Trump came along and filled the void. That was very smart for Trump to do.”In a 2016 campaign appearance in Pittsburgh, Trump made a major speech on trade that denounced Nafta and cited several Economic Policy Institute studies that criticized the trade pact. Lawrence Mishel, who was the institute’s president at the time, said: “Trump never really explained what he would do about Nafta or trade. He ended his speech with a call for deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, which was far more pro-Chamber of Commerce than pro-worker.”While Joe Biden voted to ratify Nafta when he was a senator, labor leaders say the president’s current pro-worker stance on trade shows that he recognizes his Nafta vote was a mistake. For Bonior, it might be too little too late.“Biden has been very good on working-class issues. Biden is trying to make up for his vote on Nafta,” Bonior said. “But a lot of working-class people are turned off so much to the Democrats that they’re not hearing of the things Biden and Harris have done for them. They’re not listening. They’re gone. I don’t know if we’ll ever get them back.“They’re to some degree mesmerized by Trump even though Trump has never been for working people,” Bonior continued. “Those plants he said he would restore – he never did any of that.”Many union leaders slam Trump for a speech he gave in Youngstown in which he told thousands of workers that he would bring back all the factory jobs that Ohio had lost. “They’re all coming back,” he said. They didn’t. And when General Motors closed its huge assembly plant in nearby Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, Trump did little to stop the plant closing or bring back the lost jobs.“He said all those jobs would be coming back, and then he did nothing,” said Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers (UAW). “The auto industry abandoned Lordstown, and Trump did nothing.”When Trump was running for president in 2016, he vowed to renegotiate Nafta, and he followed through, reaching a new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2018. Labor leaders had attacked Nafta not only for encouraging companies to move factory jobs to Mexico and but also for failing to effectively protect Mexican workers whose employers had violated their right to unionize or other rights.Union leaders agree that USMCA created a stronger mechanism to crack down on labor violations by Mexican companies, although the Trump administration negotiated that improved enforcement mechanism only after the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and House Democrats demanded that Trump go further in the negotiations. But under USMCA, often called “Nafta 2.0”, US companies have continued moving manufacturing operations to Mexico.Even though USMCA made only minor changes to Nafta, Trump called it, “the best trade deal ever made”. For her part, Harris was one of 10 senators to vote against USMCA, saying it didn’t improve Nafta sufficiently.Faux said many workers applaud Trump on trade because “he did something” about it by renegotiating Nafta, while “the Democrats did nothing”.Labor leaders have differing views of USMCA. David McCall, president of the Pittsburgh-based United Steelworkers, said: “I think Nafta 2.0 was helpful. It’s gotten some better labor protections.”But the UAW’s Fain was merciless in attacking USMCA. “I like to call it Trump’s Nafta,” Fain said. “Trump’s Nafta only made problems worse. Trump’s Nafta only gave the billionaires more profits. Trump’s Nafta only killed more American jobs. Trump’s Nafta only shipped more work to Mexico.”Both Harris and Trump say they will renegotiate USMCA if elected. Trump also says he will protect factory jobs by imposing a 20% tariff on all imports, but the Steelworkers’ McCall says that’s a terrible idea. “I don’t think the solution to the problem is to have tariffs for the sake of having tariffs,” McCall said. “That’s protection. I think trade is a good thing. It’s an economic stimulator.” He said the US should use tariffs not in a blunderbuss way, but to “punish cheaters or countries that dump their various products”.McCall said the Biden-Harris administration had had a far better strategy for protecting factory jobs. “It’s the first time in generations that we’ve had an industrial policy in this country,” he said, praising three important laws passed under Biden: the infrastructure law, the green energy law and the Chips Act to encourage semiconductor production. McCall said those laws, along with Biden’s targeted tariffs “against countries that cheat”, give the US “an opportunity to be the most productive producers of many products”.While many blue-collar workers like Trump’s views on trade, McCall said: “He’s not a friend of unions or labor. For Trump it’s all about him, not about the person that’s working on the job: the steelworker, the electrical worker, the teamster or the UAW member.” More

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      Polling has turned the US election into a game. We need to take a reality check | Peter Pomerantsev

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      In Washington DC, I measure out my life in polls and heart palpitations. The polls are relentless, nail-biting, maddeningly contradictory. There are national polls, swing state polls, polls from tiny counties that predict a whole election, partisan polls designed to demoralise the other side.There are polls on whether a candidate inspires confidence, compassion, leadership. I’ve noticed how, after a bad poll, I start looking for another that tells me numbers I like. I’ve also noticed how, after a good one, I will look for a bad poll to bring me down, as if I’m trying to prick the balloon of self-confidence and remind myself of “reality”.But the polls never do quite take you to reality. Instead, they shape it. It’s not just what the polls are saying, or even how they were put together, that’s the great problem here – it’s how the obsessive focus on polls is symptomatic of how we view politics.Polls make politics feel like a race, a game, a sport of feuding personalities. Who’s up? Who’s down? What tactics have they used to get one over on each other? What does it say about their personality? Words are seen as weapons with which politicians show off their ability to subvert or scare the opposition – not as substantive statements about what they intend to do.And what sort of politician will thrive in this world where political speech is just a game? A candidate such as Donald Trump.It was the communications professors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella who first noticed the connection between describing politics as a series of strategies and a growing cynicism among voters.This was back in the mid-1990s, when the media was constantly analysing the rivalry between US president Bill Clinton and speaker of the house Newt Gingrich, the early iteration of today’s identity-based partisanship. Jamieson and Cappella found the media was focusing less on the issues the two were debating – often around health reform – and more on how they were competing.The coverage fixated on who was winning, utilised the language of games and war, emphasised the performance and perception of politicians, put a new weight on polls.This sort of coverage activated people’s cynicism about politics – the sense that it’s just a game between self-serving schemers – and then made them more cynical about the media.Decades later, this “spiral of cynicism” is all around us: from the exploding popcorn of polls to the headlines. After Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly compared him to a fascist last week, the Wall Street Journal wrote: “Harris uses ex-Trump chief of staff’s remarks to paint him as unfit for office”.The question of whether Trump is a fascist or not was reduced to highlighting a rhetorical tactic. The idea that all politics is just a cynical game, and that the “mainstream media” is not really looking out for the cares of the voter, has become so pervasive it has helped pave the way for politicians who stand on sweeping away the whole edifice of democracy as we know it.It’s no coincidence that this turn began in the 1990s, when the cold war had finished and the big philosophical debates about policy seemed to be over. Instead, politics became about entertaining performance – the era of Blair, Clinton, Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin. And the media began overgenerating coverage that replaced ideological debate with personality and tactics.The 1990s were also when the reality show emerged as the dominant entertainment format. It initially grew out of observational documentaries seeking to understand society better by ceaselessly filming ordinary people in their homes in such a way that they would forget about the cameras and be more themselves.It quickly became the opposite: a circus where all behaviour was for the cameras. Contestants learned to say and do the most vile things just to engineer scandal and generate attention for themselves.American political TV debates started to imitate the same logic. In a busy primary debate, candidates only get a little sliver of airtime. The way to get more is to attack another candidate in the meanest and most personal way possible, and thus provoke them to attack you back. If you are attacked, then you are allowed more time to respond.So you quickly got debates where supremely clever candidates sling personal abuse at each other to get more attention. The debate stage was set for reality show host Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe design of most social media has followed the same incentives: rewarding taking the most extreme and often nasty statements to generate attention. And Trump has flourished on that as well.The 1990s is when World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) boomed, with its cabaret wrestlers pulling obviously fake fighting moves, where violence is theatre. Trump was always an aficionado of WWE, even taking part in mock fights, and a member of its hall of fame.This year the 1990s wrestling star Hulk Hogan spoke at the Republican National Convention; Trump enters his own rallies to the theme tune of the Undertaker, who, at the height of WWE, was the “evil” foil to Hogan’s all-American “goodie”. Many of Trump’s followers apply the cultural logic of WWE to his statements. Sure, the argument goes, Trump might say some very authoritarian-sounding things – but it’s just a game.So can we ever find a way back to reality? To issues rather than strategies? We can, and we can even use polling to do so. When pollsters recently gave voters a choice of policies, rather than personalities, to choose from in this election, the majority, including Trump supporters, preferred Kamala Harris’s.Partisan polarisation dissolves when we change how we cover politics. We can also develop different TV political debates, which preserve the excitement of competition but repurpose them to reward collaboration instead of abuse.Imagine a debate format where candidates had to solve a real policy problem, and show how they would work with each other and with the opposition party to achieve it. We could also scale social media platforms that algorithmically detect the commonalities in political disagreements to generate common policy solutions. Such platforms are already being used in Taiwan.Of course, there’s appeal in fleeing from reality to the grotesque circus of politics. But if we can’t face facts, others will force us. This month, at the Wilson Center in DC, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute and Sam Cranny-Evans of the Open Source Centre presented a chilling analysis of Russian weapons manufacturing and supply chains.The slideshow featured satellite photos of munitions factories where freshly cleared tracts of land are being readied to produce more weapons. Vladimir Putin is preparing for a vast war. China’s arms production is on a wartime footing. They are not playing. More

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      US election briefing: Polls show election tightening as Trump and Harris seek to shore up support

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      Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, spent Sunday trying to shore up political support in battleground states across the country, with polls showing them locked in a tightening race.In North Carolina, Harris attacked her rival for spreading misinformation related to hurricanes Helene and Milton. The vice-president attended a Black church in Greenville, telling the assembled crowd “there are some who are not acting in the spirit of community … lying about people who are working hard to help the folks in need, spreading disinformation when the truth and facts are required.”From Arizona, Trump spoke to Fox News, telling them he could impose tariffs higher than 200% on vehicles imported from Mexico. The former president said his aim would be to prevent the selling of cars from Mexico into the US. “All I’m doing is saying ‘I’ll put 200 or 500, I don’t care.’ I’ll put a number where they can’t sell one car,” he said.Here’s what else happened on Sunday:

      At his rally in Arizona, Donald Trump proposed hiring 10,000 additional Border Patrol agents and giving them a $10,000 retention and signing bonus, after he derailed a bipartisan bill earlier this year that included funding for more border personnel. In Prescott Valley, roughly 260 miles north of the state’s border with Mexico, he accepted an endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council.

      A New York Times poll published on Sunday found that Harris is underperforming among Latino voters, when compared with the past three Democratic candidates for the White House. An NBC News poll showed the candidates in a “dead heat” nationally at 48% support.

      A man armed with guns and false press and VIP passes was apprehended near a Trump campaign rally in California on Saturday, authorities have said. “The incident did not impact the safety of former president Trump or attendees of the event,” the Riverside county sheriff’s office said. Police said the suspect, Las Vegas resident Vem Miller was carrying a loaded shotgun, handgun and high-capacity magazine and is believed to be a member of a rightwing anti-government organization. He was released after posting $5,000 bail.

      President Joe Biden surveyed battered communities and debris-filled streets in Florida, vowing to continue supporting the state’s recovery from Hurricane Milton. The president reiterated his call for US lawmakers – who are on recess until after the 5 November presidential election – to return to Washington to approve more disaster funding.

      Republican House speaker Mike Johnson resisted White House and state lawmakers appeals to approve more disaster assistance, telling NBC News, “the states have to go and calculate and assess the need and then they submit that to Congress, and that takes some time.”

      Trump said he spoke to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “like two days ago”. Trump was asked when last he spoke to the Israeli leader during a Fox News interview. Joe Biden also spoke to Netanyahu last week, in what was the first known conversation between the two leaders since August. Trump called the lack of conversation between Biden and Netanyahu in nearly two months “pathetic”.

      Former president Bill Clinton urged churchgoers in Albany, Georgia, to rally behind Harris’ campaign. “Uniting people and building, being repairers of the breach, as Isaiah says, those are the things that work,” Clinton said. “Blaming, dividing, demeaning – they get you a bunch of votes at election time, but they don’t work.” Georgia is one of seven states seen as pivotal in this year’s presidential race, and turnout among Black voters could hold the key for Democrats to winning the state’s 16 electoral votes. More

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      Why is alleged predator Bill Clinton still welcome in the Democratic party? | Moira Donegan

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      One of the grim lessons of the #MeToo movement and its long backlash is this: whether someone finds a sexual abuse allegation credible largely depends on their pre-existing opinion of the man accused. When a woman comes forward with an account of a man’s mistreatment of her – be it humiliating boorishness, violent rape or any of the range of degradations and hurts that fall along the wide spectrum between – the listener’s response is fairly predictable. If they hate the accused man, they’ll believe his accuser. If they like him, they’ll say it’s bullshit.This rule holds, I am sorry to say, even for women who identify themselves as feminists. It held for Gloria Steinem, the famed feminist now in her 90s, who in 1998 defended Clinton amid his slew of sex scandals and abuse allegations in the pages of the New York Times, dismissing the allegations against him as trivial and making an unconvincing case that the offense she took at similar allegations against Clarence Thomas was different. It held true, most famously, for Bill Clinton’s wife, the liberal feminist icon Hillary Clinton, who has remained silently beside her husband throughout each of the allegations against him – and retained her feminist credibility despite her loyalty to an allegedly abusive man that I can only describe as canine.People who like Bill Clinton, or who find him convenient for their own goals, have a long history of underplaying the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and violence that he faces from at least four women. They say that Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment after the then governor brought her to his hotel room, propositioned her and exposed himself, is lying – even though Jones has multiple corroborating witnesses, and even though her story has not changed in more than 30 years.They say that Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says that Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general, is lying, too – even though Broaddrick, like Jones, told multiple people of Clinton’s attack at the time.They say that Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old unpaid intern whom Clinton carried on an affair with in the White House when he was 49 and the most powerful person in the world, technically consented to the sex acts that Clinton asked her to do – an insistence that betrays a startlingly simple-minded and willfully obtuse understanding of sexual ethics.They echo Clinton’s denials of wrongdoing in all these cases, against all these women. That is, at least, what they say when they acknowledge the allegations about Bill Clinton’s conduct at all. Mostly, they ignore them – as Bill Clinton has, as his wife, Hillary Clinton has, and as Bill Clinton’s popular legacy seems to do.Bill Clinton’s supporters ignore his accusers because they can. These women’s dignity, their equality and their right to control their own bodies matter less to them than their esteem for Bill Clinton – less than whether he can deliver a few votes, make a zinger on television or look nice in a suit.On Wednesday night, the third night of the Democratic national convention, the whole party ignored these women when they gave Bill Clinton, a multiply accused alleged sexual harasser and rapist, a rousing welcome at Chicago’s United Center. The former president was given a prime-time speaking spot, trotted out like a prize and applauded like a hero.Are these people not embarrassed? Do they not, at least, take note of the hypocrisy involved? After all, the 2024 election is quickly shaping up to be about gender, with the boorish Trump, creepy, sex-obsessed JD Vance and the radically anti-choice Republican party turning the contest into a referendum on the status of women in American society. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will seek to become the nation’s first female president on election day, has taken on the mantle of the women’s struggle – not only in the symbolism of her candidacy, but in the tenor of her advocacy, in which she has championed the “freedom” of women to control their own bodies and lives.These are noble goals, ones that the Democrats can be proud of pursuing; but they are not commensurate with celebrations of an alleged rapist, with pomp and obsequiousness trotted out for a man who allegedly habitually sexually harassed women who worked for him and carried on an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter. Sexual abuse, too, is hostile to women’s freedom – the freedom of women to live, work and participate in public without the threat of sexual force. This is a kind of gendered freedom that Bill Clinton has made it abundantly clear that he does not respect.The call for women’s freedom from rape, abuse and harassment has always been the least popular and most politically fraught feminist cause. Abortion has always had more appeal to male voters as a political issue. Misogynist men – in a tradition that extends from the Playboy founder (and alleged rapist) Hugh Hefner to Barstool Sports founder (and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault) Dave Portnoy to former president (and alleged rapist) Bill Clinton – have long supported abortion rights, in part because they understand abortion not as a matter of women’s fundamental freedom and dignity but as a matter of men’s increased sexual access to women and decreased responsibility for the resulting pregnancies.These prurient, sexually entitled misogynists are not all Republicans – rape, and its apologism, have always been bipartisan endeavors – but they are not the kind of voters that Democrats should be courting. A bargain in which women’s right to end a pregnancy is made in exchange for men’s right to rape, harass and abuse women is not an acceptable one. We can do better: we can reach for a version of America in which women are truly free and equal, endowed with all the bodily sovereignty, self-determination and sexual autonomy that men are. That’s not the world that Bill Clinton represents, and it’s not a world that a party that insists on celebrating him can deliver.Bill Clinton has been out of office for nearly three decades. In that time, his once-rosy status as a liberal hero has thankfully dimmed, even if his alleged history of sexual abuse has not played a sufficient role in the reassessment of his reputation. Liberals now rightly look back at Clinton’s crime bill with horror; his devastating cuts to the welfare system were punitive and cruel, hurting women and children the most. He modeled a vision of a conservative Democratic party, one less committed to its principles than in cynically trading them away for a chance at power.His vision of change has failed, and his political project has been revealed as morally bankrupt. It’s not clear that he can even deliver many votes; a large swath of the American electorate is now too young to remember much of his presidency, aside from the sex scandals. It’s time for Democrats to send the old man home. And to tell him to keep his hands to himself.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Walz, Bill Clinton and surprise Oprah: Democratic convention day three key takeaways

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      The third night of the Democratic national convention featured a surprise speech from Oprah Winfrey, along with scheduled remarks from Bill Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz and other major party figures, many emphasizing the “joy” of Kamala Harris’s campaign.Here are some key takeaways:1. Tim Walz’s pitch to voters: ‘We’ll turn the page on Donald Trump’Kamala Harris’s running mate gave his keynote pitch to supporters at the end of the third night of the convention, talking about his military service, coaching and teaching days, and his family’s fertility journey. He leaned into his humble roots and deployed repeated football metaphors: “I haven’t given a lot of big speeches like this, but I have given a lot of pep talks … It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal, but we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field, and boy do we have the right team.”He called on his supporters to step up with urgency: “We got 76 days. That’s nothing. There’ll be time to sleep when you’re dead. We’re going to leave it on the field. That’s how we’ll keep moving forward. That’s how we’ll turn the page on Donald Trump. That’s how we’ll build a country where workers come first, healthcare and housing are human rights, and the government stays the hell out of your bedroom. That’s how we make America a place where no child is left hungry, where no community is left behind, where nobody gets told they don’t belong.”2. Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, Kenan Thompson and other celebrities invigorate the crowdThe convention continued with a packed celebrity lineup. Oprah Winfrey earned huge cheers when she made an unannounced appearance. She denounced “people who would have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe” and took a swipe at JD Vance’s “childless cat lady” comment. She put Harris’s candidacy into the historical context of other trailblazing Black women, including Tessie Prevost Williams, one of the “New Orleans Four” who helped integrate public schools. And she roused the audience with her call to action, singing the word “joy”.Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson had a lively appearance, entering with a large Project 2025 book and virtually interviewing Americans who would be harmed by the rightwing agenda: “You ever see a document that can kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”Musician Stevie Wonder urged the crowd to choose “joy over anger”. Actor Mindy Kaling gave a personal account of cooking with Harris. And musicians John Legend and Sheila E performed at the end of the night.3. Bill Clinton: ‘We need Kamala Harris, the president of joy’Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, addressed his 12th Democratic convention, reading off written notes, not the teleprompter, suggesting the speech was edited last-minute. He warned Democrats against complacency: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phoney issues. This is a brutal business.” He mocked Trump for his narcissism and obsession with crowd sizes, following Barack Obama’s widely cited joke on Tuesday: “[Trump] mostly talks about himself … his vendettas, vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.”Clinton preached a message of unity, echoing Obama’s comments, encouraging supporters not to demean or disrespect neighbors they disagree with. He praised Joe Biden for “voluntarily” giving up power and celebrated the hope Harris has injected into the race: “If you vote for this team … you will be proud of it for the rest of your life.”4. Parents of a Hamas hostage were featured while protesters and AOC pushed for a Palestinian speakerJon Polin and Rachel Goldberg gave emotional remarks about their son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who is held hostage by Hamas. Polin praised the White House and said they had met with Harris and Biden: “They’re both working tirelessly for a hostage and ceasefire deal that will bring our precious children, mothers, fathers, spouses, grandparents and grandchildren home, and will stop the despair in Gaza.”Members of the uncommitted movement, who have been advocating for a ceasefire and arms embargo on Israel, said they welcomed the speech, but continued to advocate that a Palestinian leader get an opportunity to address the crowd. Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who has treated patients in Gaza, spoke on a Democratic convention panel centered on Palestinian human rights, but there hasn’t been a Palestinian American on the main stage. Gaza solidarity protesters staged a sit-in outside the convention, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on the convention to “center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment”, posting: “To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.”5. Pete Buttigieg went hard after JD Vance: ‘Doubling down on negativity’Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportation, went hard after Donald Trump’s running mate: “JD Vance is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life that he has in mind for you, then you don’t count, someone who said that if you don’t have kids, you have ‘no physical commitment to the future of this country’ … When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids … but our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical. Choosing a guy like JD Vance to be America’s next vice president sends a message … They are doubling down on negativity and grievance, committing to a concept of campaigning best summed up in one word: darkness.”6. Prominent Republicans again rallied for Harris: ‘Our party acts more like a cult’Prominent Republicans and former Donald Trump supporters continued to earn loud applause at the convention, arguing that GOP voters should reject the former president, even if they don’t agree with all of Harris’s positions. “If Republicans are being intellectually honest with ourselves, our party is not civil or conservative, it’s chaotic and crazy, and the only thing left to do is dump Trump. These days, our party acts more like a cult, a cult worshiping a felonious thug,” said Geoff Duncan, former lieutenant governor of Georgia.Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to then vice-president Mike Pence also spoke, saying: “Being inside Trump’s White House was terrifying. But what keeps me up at night is what will happen if he gets back there.”7. Speakers uplifted LGBTQ+ rights: ‘Trump wants to erase us’Speakers repeatedly promoted LGBTQ+ rights, offering a sharp contrast to the Republican national convention which continually featured extremist, anti-trans rhetoric. Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ+ organization, warned: “Trump wants to erase us … He would ban our healthcare, belittle our marriages, bury our stories. But we are not going anywhere. We are not going back.”Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor and the first gay man to serve as a US state governor, highlighted the anti-LGBTQ+ agenda of Project 2025: “Democrats welcome ‘weird’, but we’re not weirdos telling families who can and can’t have kids, who to marry or how to live our lives.” Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said LGBTQ+ Floridians were enduring “endless state-sponsored hate”. And Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, earned loud applause when she said: “I got a message for the Republicans and the justices of the United States supreme court: you can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead gay hand.”Democratic convention highlights:skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

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      RFK Jr to reportedly drop out of race by end of week – live

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      We reported earlier that independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr’s campaign announced that he will make an address to the nation on Friday about “his path forward”.ABC News is now reporting that Kennedy plans to drop out of the race by the end of the week.It comes after Kennedy’s running mate, the Silicon Valley attorney Nicole Shanahan, said the pair were considering abandoning their campaign in order to help the election of Donald Trump.Kennedy was a member of the Democratic party and attempted to run as its nominee before choosing to stand as an independent.At an event hosted by Politico, Kamala Harris’s campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon was asked about how Robert F Kennedy’s reported intention to end his presidential bid would affect the race.One of the biggest questions of this year’s election is whether Kennedy is syphoning support from voters who would otherwise back Harris, or Donald Trump, and we may get a better idea of the answer to that if he ends his campaign.Either way, O’Malley Dillon told Politico she did not think it would be a big deal:
      We are very confident that the vice president is going to win whether she’s running against one candidate or multiple candidates. I don’t think it’s really going to interfere with the race too much.
      Nancy Pelosi delighted a well-heeled crowd at the University Club of Chicago on Wednesday afternoon, sharing anecdotes about her extraordinary career arc that she described as “housewife, House member, House Speaker.”Now considered one of the most powerful House speakers in modern political history, Pelosi said she faced doubts as she climbed the ranks in Congress from male colleagues who admonished her to wait her turn.“I became interested in running [for leadership] because we kept losing the elections, 94, 96, 98 and then it was 2000 I thought, ‘I’m so tired of losing … for the children,’” she said, using a Pelosism, that everything she does is “for the children.”When she made her decision to run for Democratic leadership known, Pelosi said she was immediately met with skepticism, especially among her male colleagues. “Who said she could run?” Pelosi recalled them saying. Their incredulity only encouraged her further.“Light my fire, why don’t you, poor babies?” Pelosi said, drawing laughs. In an aside to the audience, she emphasized that she was telling a story that occured “this century.”Pelosi continued, saying she was told there was a “pecking order” and she wasn’t in it.“They said, ‘these people have been waiting a long time,” Pelosi recounted. “So I said: ‘Was it over 200 years?’”The Uncommitted movement continues to press for the Democratic convention to allow a Palestinian to address delegates.Earlier in the day, the movement said it approved of a reported decision to allow the family of an Israeli hostage to address the convention, but said a Palestinian voice should also be heard:Here’s more about their quest to get Democratic leaders to allow them to speak from the convention stage:Two of Donald Trump’s surrogates will hold a press conference tomorrow in Chicago to criticize Kamala Harris’s record on handling immigration and other issues, hours before she is to deliver the closing address at the Democratic national convention.The Trump campaign has not had much of a presence in the city as Democrats have gathered to celebrate Harris’s entry into the race. That will change tomorrow when Vivek Ramaswamy and Carlos Trujillo, a former Trump administration official, address reporters from the Trump Hotel & Tower downtown.Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, is tonight’s keynote speaker, and will deliver a speech focused on telling American voters about his life and career, the Biden-Harris campaign said.“In his remarks at the Democratic national convention, Governor Tim Walz will introduce himself to the American people. He will highlight the values that he learned growing up in a small town in Nebraska, which shaped his service in the national guard, as a teacher, football coach, member of Congress, and governor, and that he will bring to the White House. Governor Walz will lay out what Vice-President Harris will do for working families and call on the American people to work together to elect Kamala Harris president,” according to the campaign.Musicians John Legend and Sheila E will introduce Walz, who will be nominated by Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ingman, a former student of the governor.Gaza solidarity protesters interrupted an environment and climate crisis council meeting at the convention on Wednesday, chanting “free, free Palestine”.“If you want to show some political courage, go and interrupt one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” responded Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, who was speaking. “We’re organizing against Trump, we’re organizing against the reactionary autocrats, plutocrats and kleptocrats.”“Anybody who interferes with that is objectively helping Donald Trump and Tim Walz,” Raskin continued, mistakenly naming Harris’s vice-presidential pick instead of Trump’s. “So cut it out,” he added before the protestors were escorted away.Some climate groups, however, are pushing for the Harris campaign to stop supporting Israel’s deadly war in Gaza by backing an arms embargo. Among them is the Sunrise Movement, the influential youth-led environmental justice group who spearheaded the push for a Green New Deal.“Young people want a livable world for our generation and generations. We want everyone to have clean air and water and safe homes,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, a Sunrise Movement spokesperson. “Everyone must have those rights and freedoms, including Palestinians.”Those of us who have shown up early to the United Center in Chicago (such as your live blogger) are getting a sneak peek at one of the night’s musical guests: Stevie Wonder.He’s sound-checking his 1972 hit Higher Ground, and was earlier at the podium rehearsing some remarks. Wonder has with him backing dancers, as well as a bassist, guitar player and someone who looks to be playing turntables. He is, of course, playing piano.Robert F Kennedy Jr, who is reportedly planning to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and considering throwing his support behind Donald Trump, was asked by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl about Trump calling the climate crisis “a hoax”.Here’s how Kennedy responded:Kennedy spent decades working as an environmental lawyer who sued polluters and founded a large non-profit focused on protecting clean water. Trump has long questioned human-made global warming, including calling it “mythical”, “nonexistent” or “an expensive hoax”, or suggesting that the climate could “change back again”.Pink is expected to take to the stage on Thursday for a closing-night performance at the Democratic national convention, CNN is reporting.The award-winning singer-songwriter will perform on Thursday evening before Kamala Harris’s speech, according to the outlet.As we reported earlier, John Legend will be performing tonight before Tim Walz’s remarks.Donald Trump Jr said he “loved the idea” of having Robert F Kennedy Jr appointed to a role in a potential Trump administration so that he can take a government agency and “blow it up”.The Republican presidential candidate’s son, in an interview with conservative radio host Glenn Beck reported by the Hill, said:
      I loved the idea, love the idea of giving him some sort of role in some sort of major three-letter entity or whatever it may be and let him blow it up.
      He added that he believes Kennedy is “a smart guy” and that “he’s actually got very good views on certain things”. Trump said:
      I think that’s what we need. And so, I think that kind of unity, even where there may be certain disagreements on certain things, I think he could be a really great asset for that.
      The former House speaker Nancy Pelosi demurred and deflected when asked by the Democratic strategist David Axelrod to share how difficult it was to have “that conversation” with the president.Pelosi, who pushed subtly but forcefully in public and private for the president to step aside, said it was ultimately Joe Biden’s decision to make but one that ultimately set the party on a path to winning that they had not been on when he led the ticket.“A great sacrifice was made here,” she said. But the rupture between Biden and Pelosi, two devout Catholics who have known each other for decades has been hard on her, she said. “I’ve cried over this. I’m sad about this,” she said.Her highest priority then and now was to win – and not just the White House, but the House and the Senate. She said the prospect of a second Trump term was too dangerous.“Thank God I was the speaker on January 6, last time,” she said, suggesting the assault on the US Capitol would have been far worse if Republicans had been in charge that day. She said:
      You have to make the decision to win, and you have to make every decision in favor of winning.
      Donald Trump, in an interview yesterday, said he would “certainly” be open to appointing Robert F Kennedy Jr to a role in his administration, if the independent presidential candidate drops out of the race and backs him.“I like him, and I respect him,” Trump told CNN after a campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday.
      He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy. I’ve known him for a very long time. I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it.
      Trump said he would “love that endorsement, because I’ve always liked” Kennedy.Asked if he would consider appointing Kennedy to a role in his administration if he wins in November, Trump replied:
      I probably would, if something like that would happen. He’s a very different kind of a guy – a very smart guy. And, yeah, I would be honored by that endorsement, certainly.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr is leaning toward endorsing Donald Trump but the decision is not yet finalized and could still change, ABC News is reporting, citing sources.Kennedy’s hope is in part to finalize things quickly in order to try to blunt momentum from the DNC, one source told the outlet.Kennedy told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl that he would not confirm or deny reports that he is endorsing Trump, adding: “We are not talking about any of that.”Robert F Kennedy Jr, who will address the nation about “his path forward” on Friday, has held “advanced discussions” with Donald Trump and his campaign team about dropping out of the race and endorsing the Republican presidential nominee, the Washington Post is reporting, citing multiple sources. More