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      Jimmy Kimmel on Trump campaign hacks: ‘Shows that his password is McNuggets123’

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      Late-night hosts talk the Trump campaign’s multiple campaign hacks, Kamala Harris’s lead among young voters and a dubious new Trump merchandise product.Jimmy KimmelThe Trump campaign has now been hacked twice in the last two months, “which is what happens when you store secret documents next to the urinal at a golf course”, said Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday evening.Intelligence officials suspect Iran is behind at least one attack, leading campaign spokesman Steven Cheung to claim that the attacks show how Iran is “terrified of the strength and resolve of Donald J Trump”.“And it also shows that his password is McNuggets123,” Kimmel joked.One of the journalists who received the leaked documents said the material may be “embarrassing or problematic” to members of the Trump campaign. “As if anyone who works for the Trump campaign is capable of embarrassment,” Kimmel noted.In other campaign news, Trump was in Georgia on Tuesday, “where they’re working very hard to fix the election for him”, and “once again, he had a lil McFit about whether or not Kamala Harris worked at McDonalds”. Trump repeatedly and falsely said Harris never worked for the fast-food chain, calling her past employment a “lie”.“He really should just be running for Mayor McCheese,” said Kimmel. “It’s so dumb, it’s so petty, but so is he.”Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers laughed at Trump’s campaign trail confession that his “personality defect” is wanting people to like him. “By his own confession, he likes people who like him, and that’s it,” said Meyers. “He doesn’t care about policy or character or integrity. He you like him, he likes you.”That’s why Trump endorsed Mark Robinson, the scandal-plagued Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. In multiple appearances, Trump praised Robinson, who is Black, saying: “I’ve gotten to know him so well.” He also described Robinson as a “fine wine”, “Martin Luther King on steroids” and “Martin Luther King times two”.“He’s really truly amazing,” said Meyers of Trump. “Everyone agrees Martin Luther King is a great person, but only Trump would say ‘I know someone twice as good! Every night he has two dreams!’”Among Robinson’s numerous scandals is a CNN report of his past racist comments on a pornographic website called Nude Africa, including calling himself a “black Nazi”. In another comment, Robinson, using his full name in his username, said slavery was “not bad” and that he wished it would come back.“First of all, who uses their full name on a porn website?” Meyers wondered. “I don’t even use my full name when I make a dinner reservation – I use Jimmy Fallon, because I want a table.”Despite his past support of Robinson, the Trump campaign is now pretending they don’t know him, and have removed joint events from their calendar. “A healthy, functional political party would do some introspection about how and why they keep attracting deranged extremists and anti-social weirdos like these guys,” Meyers concluded. “But the GOP would rather lie and pretend they have never had anything to do with Robinson in the first place.”Stephen ColbertAnd on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert cited a new Harvard youth voting poll that found Harris leads young female voters 70% to 23%. “Young women are going to save us all. And young men are going to play Xbox and see how high they can jump off a big rock,” Colbert joked.In an effort to attract young voters, the Harris campaign has committed to visiting over 150 college campuses. “Ooh, 150, she’s trying to break Matt Gaetz’s record,” Colbert quipped. “I’m kidding, obviously he’d never date a college girl. Or, as he calls them, mature honeys.”According to a polling director at Harvard, the results show “a significant shift in the overall vibe”.“Yeah the vibes are immaculate,” Colbert said. “The analysis shows that Harris ate and left no crumbs. Her campaign had a bussin’ glow-up. In conclusion, the children have broken my brain. Boots king!”In other news, “Trump may be busy campaigning, but he’ll never lose sight of his first love: selling garbage,” said Colbert. On Tuesday, the former president announced that he’d be selling silver Trump coins with his face on them. The coins are selling for $100 apiece, though the silver they’re made of only costs $30.“What a deal!” Colbert deadpanned, before imagining one man’s justification for buying the coins: “Honey, I know I bought a Trump coin at a 210% loss, but you can use the Trump coin to buy Truth Social stock, and once that eventually bounces back we’ll invest the profit in an NFT trading card of his gold sneakers, which is pegged to the price of the little pieces of his suit we got from when he got arrested, then convert it to Trump crypto, which we’ll use to buy Melania’s book, which, get this, is worth one Trump silver coin.” More

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      Lucky Loser review – how Donald Trump squandered his wealth

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      Donald Trump started his career at the end of the 1970s, financed by his father Fred Trump. Over the years this transfer of wealth added up to around $500m in today’s money in gifts. My rough calculations say that, had he simply taken the money, leveraged it not imprudently, and passively invested it in Manhattan real estate – gone to parties, womanised, played golf, collected his rent cheques and reinvested them – his fortune could have amounted to more than $80bn by the time he ascended to the presidency in 2017.And yet Trump was not worth $80bn in 2017. Instead, Forbes pegged him at $2.5bn – which, given the difficulties of valuing and accounting for real estate, is really anything between $5bn (£4bn) and zero (or less). It is in this sense that Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig call Trump a “loser”. He is indeed one of the world’s biggest losers. By trying to run a business, rather than just kicking back and letting the rising tide of his chosen sector lift his wealth beyond the moon, he managed to destroy the vast majority of his potential net worth.How he did that is what Buettner and Craig chronicle in a book dense with facts and figures, but punctuated with moments of irony and dark humour – particularly when contrasting Trump’s public bravado with the often pathetic reality of his money management. The combination turns what might have been a rather boring tome, of interest only to trained financial professionals like me, into something of a page turner. Buettner and Craig paint a picture of Trump’s businesses as “mirage[s], built on inherited wealth, shady deals, and a relentless pursuit of appearances over substance”. And yet, Road Runner-like, he runs off the edge of the cliff, looks down, shrugs – and keeps going until his feet touch the ground again on the other side.Buettner and Craig delve more deeply into this story than anyone I have encountered. They have done their interview and newspaper-morgue homework, checked it against tax information and business records spanning three decades, and so gained an unprecedented look into the real workings of Trump’s financial empire. They uncover, I think as much as we can get at it, the truth behind the narrative of his wealth and its indispensable support: the myth of a genius businessman that he has spun and that, deplorably, much of the press and his supporters have bought, hook, line and sinker. Their conclusion? He was always exaggerating how rich he was, and always skating remarkably close to the edge of financial disaster.But though he squandered a great deal, it’s also true that he was extremely lucky. First, and most importantly, he was a beneficiary of the absolutely spectacular Manhattan real-estate boom. Second, he had things break his way at many crucial junctures that ought to have sunk him into total and irrevocable bankruptcy. Third, he was able to use his celebrity developer-mogul image to attract new business partners after his old ones had washed their hands of him. He was also lucky in the complacency of many of them with respect to his shenanigans: their willingness to play along and not find a judge to pull the plug.What sort of psychology produces this kind of behaviour? Buettner and Craig psychoanalyse Trump as unable to take the hit of recognising his relative incompetence. A deep need for public validation as the master of the Art of the Deal led him, over and over again, to make increasingly risky decisions. The illusion of success had to be maintained at all costs, which meant that a loss had to be followed by an even bigger bet.And so there Trump was at the start of 2017, in spite of everything, stunningly successful. Buettner and Craig call this an “illusion”. I profoundly disagree. To repeatedly save yourself from bankruptcy – to somehow manage to hand responsibility off to the people you do business with while you hotfoot it out of the picture – demonstrates considerable skill and ingenuity of some sort. Trump has exhibited great (if low) cunning and resilience when faced with what often appeared to be near-certain financial, entrepreneurial and business doom. It is, Buettner and Craig say, a combination of “bravado [and] branding” that allowed him to always “walk away with something – usually at the expense of others”.Many of us hope that Trump’s story will end with a proper comeuppance, restoring the appropriate and just moral order of the universe, in which his galaxy-scale hubris does indeed ultimately call forth a satisfying nemesis. Until then, we must regard him as a remarkable success – although few philosophers would judge Trump’s brand of success as the kind worth having.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion More

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      Chappell Roan isn’t endorsing Kamala Harris. She’s taking a stand for critical thinking instead

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      ‘No, I’m not voting for Trump and yes, I will always question those in power,” Chappell Roan said in a recent TikTok video clarifying why she is not stumping for Kamala Harris in the forthcoming US presidential election. As she had explained to the Guardian last week, she doesn’t “feel pressured to endorse anyone” – having previously denounced the Biden-Harris administration’s failure to robustly defend queer rights against hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills tabled by Republicans, and their ongoing support for Israel during the assault on Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.She followed up with another video on Wednesday: “Obviously fuck the policies of the right,” she said, while also castigating what she called “some of the left’s completely transphobic and completely genocidal views”. She said she was voting for Harris, “but I’m not settling for what has been offered … this is not me playing both sides. This is me questioning both sides.”It’s refreshing to hear a pop star talk about politics with conviction and nuance. If only her recent comments had been received that way online. The year’s breakout pop star went viral this weekend when a popular X account that aggregates pop culture titbits cherrypicked a quote from Roan’s Guardian interview in which she said of Democrats and Republicans: “there’s problems on both sides”.While some users supported Roan’s stance, many others called her “cowardly”, criticised her supposedly “neutral” stance, and accused her of being “uneducated”. The backlash suggests that the majority of those pillorying Roan never read the full interview (which wasn’t linked in the original X post), hence Roan hitting out about “being completely taken out of context”.What happened to Roan is emblematic of two things. The first is the parasitic, reductive way that Pop Crave-style news aggregation accounts on X extract quotes from articles in a way that prioritises engagement over substance. Would the outcry have been the same if the account published Roan’s full quote, in which she encourages people to use “critical thinking skills” and “vote for what’s going on in [their] city”, along with her vociferous support for trans rights? I doubt it.The second is that many musicians’ fanbases are now often admirably politically conscious and demand stars speak out against injustice, meaning they will make it known if they are unhappy with an artist’s position. The difficulty comes when those fans expect stars to fit a particular way of performing their politics.Pop stars weren’t always expected to be as politically literate as they are today. The worst of 80s pop was well meaning but wince-inducingly shallow. Later, being political could often be detrimental to mainstream success: in 2003, the Chicks were blacklisted from the country music industry after Natalie Maines said she was ashamed that then-US president George W Bush was from their home state of Texas.But the rise of social media in the early 2010s created an ecosystem of liking, following and sharing, where a user’s tastes reflected back on them and could be used to signal their own political morality. The Tumblr blog “your fave is problematic” documented celebrities’ perceived moral transgressions. Celebrities, particularly pop stars, quickly adapted accordingly.Then came 2016. Hillary Clinton had everyone from LeBron James and Bruce Springsteen to Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian helping her try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president – everyone except Taylor Swift. Swift’s political silence was heavily criticised and conspiracies swirled that she was a Republican. She would later tell the Guardian the pressure she felt “making statements that go out to hundreds of millions of people” and that she worried that her then-maligned reputation (in the wake of beef with Kardashian and Kanye West) might have been “a hindrance” to Clinton.View image in fullscreenShe endorsed Biden in 2020, but more recently, fans have questioned why she has hung out with Brittany Mahomes, a Trump supporter (and wife of a teammate of Swift’s football player boyfriend). Swift backed Harris and Tim Waltz earlier this month – though she explicitly framed her decision to back Harris as triggered by a personal crisis of Trump using AI-falsified images of her appearing to endorse him, rather than leading with a broader social conscience.The furore around both Roan and Swift speaks to the febrile environment dominating US politics. Poll after poll has shown this could be the closest presidential race this century. Women’s right to bodily autonomy is at stake – which is partly why there’s so much more scrutiny on female musicians. The threat of a second Trump presidency, coupled with fears of the far-right activating Project 2025, have made this election feel like a battle for the soul of American democracy. With the race on a knife-edge, leftwing pop fans are grasping at any positive endorsement that might help Harris. It’s not without precedent. Back in 2008, it was estimated that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama translated into one million votes. Swift’s post endorsing Harris led to more than 400,000 people going to voter registration sites. The potential power of these endorsements is also evident from rightwing attempts to debunk them: after Paramore singer Hayley Williams spoke out against a potential Trump “dictatorship” at a festival last week, Elon Musk called her a “puppet of the machine”.But there’s an argument that we shouldn’t look to them for political guidance, given that wealthy musicians live in a world mostly unburdened by the hardships and struggles faced by everyday people and marginalised communities, and they seem as prone as anyone to accepting disinformation. Many fans of Janet Jackson – the artist behind the radical, progressive politics of 1989 album Rhythm Nation 1814 – were crushed this weekend when in a Guardian interview she parroted Trump-propagated misinformation that Harris is “not Black”. Pharrell Williams is also currently in hot water with fans for saying that he doesn’t “really do politics” and gets “annoyed” when celebrities tell people who to vote for.I would argue it’s fair to want celebrity musicians to be politically astute, particularly if, like Jackson, they’re willing to comment on politics in interviews. The key thing is not to simplify complex political stances to fit the narrow bounds of what a hive mind on social media has deemed acceptable. Think of the way Nick Cave has been accused of being “conservative” – though it’s fine to question his beliefs about religion, boycotts and dogma, those beliefs do not neatly map on to that term and it diminishes the debate to suggest they do.What separates Roan’s political interventions from her peers is the way she wants to empower her young fanbase to think smarter and harder about how they can actively engage in politics. She had asked for critical thinking, but the kind of narrow, hardline stance her comments were met with is the antithesis of the tolerance, empathy and self-reflection that should be part of leftwing thought. Roan is right not to tell fans what to do this election. Instead she’s a valuable demonstration of what it means to live your politics. As she clarified on TikTok: “Actions speak louder than words and actions speak louder than an endorsement.” More

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      ‘We had no political agenda’: the White House hosts a West Wing TV reunion

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      The marine band struck up a familiar theme. The door of the Oval Office swung open. Out strode the president and first lady to address an expectant crowd – that is, the real first lady, Jill Biden, and the president that fans of the TV show The West Wing used to secretly crave: Jed Bartlet, alias actor Martin Sheen.After a decade in which US politics has often felt like the work of a hyper-imaginative screenwriter, with ever more unlikely plot twists including the election of a reality TV star, it felt strangely natural to see Sheen stepping into the shoes of Joe Biden as his show’s theme music filled the Rose Garden.“We just came from the Oval,” said Jill Biden. “But even though Joe is away hosting leaders of Australia and India and Japan in Delaware, he wanted to make sure that President Bartlet and his staff had a chance to see the Oval Office again.”Sheen and fellow cast members had come to the White House to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first episode of The West Wing, the seven-season drama about an idealist liberal president and his fast-talking staff.On Friday, in warm sunshine, there were references to “big blocks of cheese” – a tradition on the show of requiring presidential staffers to meet with eccentric or offbeat constituents – and the walk-and-talk dialogues in which characters moved through the halls at high speed. Waiters passed out bourbon-and-ginger ale cocktails called the Jackal, a reference to press secretary CJ Cregg’s dance and lip-sync routine in one episode.Sheen – who has said his character was a conglomeration of Democrats John F Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton – rolled back the years. In classic Bartlet mode, he exhorted the crowd to find something worth fighting for, “something deeply personal and uncompromising, something that can unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh”.View image in fullscreenThen Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, declared: “Our cast will live on as one of the best in the history of television,” and recognised those in attendance. Among them were Richard Schiff, who played communications director Toby Ziegler; Janel Moloney, who played assistant Donna Moss; and Dulé Hill, who played the president’s body man, Charlie Young.Sorkin also noted the absence of a few high-profile actors – Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford and Rob Lowe, better known to fans as Cregg, Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn – who he said were on set elsewhere. “The rest of us are apparently unemployed,” he joked.After the crowd laughed, a voice chimed in from Sorkin’s right. “Not yet!” Jill Biden said. It was a nod to the fact that her husband still has four months left in office – and a quick retort worthy of Bartlet’s exchanges with wife Abbey Bartlet, played by Stockard Channing.The West Wing remains a favourite of many who now work in Washington. Among those spotted in the Rose Garden were the House foreign affairs chair, Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas, and Joe Walsh, once a Tea Party-aligned Illinois representative who is now a fierce critic of former president Donald Trump.Sorkin reflected: “We had no political agenda. We were trying to do a good show every week. But the greatest delivery system ever invented for an idea is a story and, once in a while, we’ll hear from someone who was inspired to go into public service because of our show. And that’s something that 25 years ago this week, none of us could have foreseen or even dared to hope for.”Born in the last year of the 20th century, the show illustrates that there is nothing so remote as the recent past. Its run coincided with the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was off the air by the time Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were elected and long gone when the Covid-19 pandemic and January 6 insurrection unfolded.Sorkin continued: “The show was idealistic, aspirational and romantic. Over the years, I’ve noticed that during times of peak political tension, pundits will warn us not to expect ‘a West Wing moment’.View image in fullscreen“They mean not to expect a selfless act of statesmanship. Not to expect anyone to put country first. Don’t expect anyone to swing for the fences or reach for the stars. But the fact is, West Wing moments do happen and Dr Biden, we saw proof of that on the morning of July 21.”That was the day Joe Biden announced he would not seek re-election after a disastrous debate performance and growing concerns over the 81-year-old’s mental and physical condition. For months, however, Biden had been in denial. If anyone wants to look for an on-screen parallel, it might be Bartlet hiding a multiple sclerosis diagnosis while running for president.The final season of The West Wing saw Bartlet passing on the torch to fellow Democrat Matthew Santos, played by Jimmy Smits. He becomes America’s first Latino president after defeating Senator Arnold Vinick of California, portrayed by Alan Alda as the kind of old school Republican who is now an endangered species in the Trump era.Nothing, perhaps, dates The West Wing more than that. More

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      Hillary Clinton: ‘It would be exhilarating to see Kamala Harris achieve the breakthrough I didn’t’

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      On 21 July, when Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris, the dream of seeing a woman in the Oval Office was suddenly back within reach. It wouldn’t be me; but it could be Kamala. History beckoned. But a whole lot of bigotry, fear and disinformation, not to mention the electoral college, stood in the way. Could we do it? Could we finally shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling and prove that in America there is no limit to what is possible?When Bill and I heard the news that Biden was withdrawing and endorsing Kamala, we drafted a joint statement saluting him and endorsing her. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president, so it was an easy decision.After our statement went public, Kamala called us. She was remarkably calm for someone who had just been thrown into the deep end of a bottomless pool. She told us she wanted to earn the nomination. “I’m going to need your help,” she said. “We’ll do whatever you need,” I told her. Bill and I were both ready to do everything we could to help get her elected.History is full of cautionary tales, but 2024 is not 2016. Trump’s victory then, and the ugliness of his presidency, woke up a lot of people. There’s less complacency now about the strength of our democracy, and more consciousness of the threats posed by disinformation, demagoguery and implicit bias.Some people have asked how I feel about the prospect of another woman being poised to achieve the breakthrough I didn’t. If I’m being honest, in the years after 2016, I also wondered how I would feel if another woman ever took the torch, that I had carried so far, and ran on with it. Would some little voice deep down inside whisper: “That should have been me”?Now I know the answer. After I got off the phone with the vice-president, I looked at Bill with a huge smile and said: “This is exciting.” I felt promise. I felt possibility. It was exhilarating.When I imagine Kamala standing before the Capitol next January, taking the oath of office as our first woman president, my heart leaps. After hard years of division, it will prove that our best days are still ahead and that we are making progress on our long journey toward a more perfect union. And it will make such a difference in the lives of hard-working people everywhere.As Joni Mitchell sang all those years ago, something’s lost but something’s gained. Democrats have lost our standard-bearer, and we will miss Joe Biden’s steady leadership, deep empathy and fighting spirit. He is a wise and decent man who served our country well. Yet we have gained much, too: a new champion, an invigorated campaign and a renewed sense of purpose.

      This is an edited extract from the epilogue to the audiobook Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty by Hillary Rodham Clinton, published by Simon & Schuster. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. More

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      Oprah hosts star-studded sit-down with Kamala Harris: ‘Hope is making a comeback’

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      Kamala Harris sat down with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday for a “virtual rally” that included a wide-ranging sit-down interview, during which Harris attacked her opponent’s stance on reproductive rights and pledged to sign a border security bill thwarted by Senate Republicans, but largely kept her guard up with the legendary television interviewer.The event, helmed by one of the all-time masters of the television talkshow, was filled with celebrity cameos and heart-wrenching personal stories. It was live-streamed from Michigan, a key battleground state.“There’s a real feeling of optimism and hope making a comeback … for this new day that is no longer on the horizon but is here. We’re living it,” Oprah told the audience of 400 in-person attendees and the more than 200,000 others who tuned in virtually.The star-studded list of remote attendees included Tracee Ellis Ross, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Chris Rock and Ben Stiller, who tuned in from their living rooms to express their enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz ticket.“​I wanna bring my daughters to White House to meet this Black woman president,” Rock said. “I think she will make a great president and I’m ready to turn the page. All the hate and negativity, it’s gotta stop.”“Hello, President Harris,” Meryl Streep greeted her, then covered her mouth. “Oop!”“Forty-seven days,” Harris responded, laughing.Oprah faced a challenge in sitting down across from Harris, who has been known among journalists since the beginning of her career as a rigidly controlled, repetitive interviewee.Harris did not open up much, even when Oprah asked her about her sudden transformation after Biden endorsed her to take over the presidential campaign.View image in fullscreenBut Oprah did provoke one moment of unexpected candor, when she noted her surprise at learning that Harris has long been a gun owner.“If somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said. She laughed, sounding surprised at herself. “Sorry. Probably shouldn’t have said that. But my staff will deal with that later.”“I’m not trying to take everyone’s guns away,” Harris added.During the nearly 90-minute conversation, Harris spoke directly with members of the audience, who raised their concerns about immigration, the cost of living and the crackdown on reproductive rights.Oprah said Americans were grieving with Haitians and people mistaken for Haitians, who were now living in fear because the Trump campaign had spread lurid, false claims about them. But she added that many Americans on the left, the right and in the middle did have genuine concerns about immigration into the US.In response to an audience member’s question about what she would do to promote border security, Harris blamed Donald Trump for killing legislation that would have provided more funding for law enforcement at the border.“The bill would have allowed us to have more resources to prosecute transnational criminal organizations,” Harris said. “Donald Trump called up his folks and said, ‘Don’t put that bill on the floor for a vote.’ He preferred to run on a problem instead of addressing the problem. And he put his personal political security before border security.”Also in attendance were the mother and sisters of Amber Nicole Thurman, a woman who died after failing to receive prompt medical care in 2022 when she experienced complications from taking abortion pills, just weeks after Georgia’s abortion ban went into effect. A recent report deemed her the first “preventable” death to be confirmed as a result of Georgia’s ban.Her family blamed Donald Trump and his supreme court picks for her death. “They just let her die because of some stupid abortion ban. They treated her like she was just another number,” Thurman’s older sister said of the medical professionals she had turned to for help.“You’re looking at a mother who is broken,” Thurman’s mother said, through tears. “It’s the worst pain that a parent could ever feel. I want you all to know that Amber was not a statistic. She was loved by a strong family and we would have done whatever to get our baby the help that she needed. Women around the world need to know that this was preventable.”View image in fullscreenHarris gave her condolences to the family and reiterated that Trump chose his three supreme court justices with the intention of getting abortion bans to spread across states. “They did as he intended,” Harris said.Thursday evening’s Unite for America live-streamed rally brought together 400 groups that have held virtual rallies for the Harris-Walz ticket.The first virtual rally was organized by Win with Black Women, the group that, within hours of Joe Biden dropping out of the race, brought 44,000 Black women on to a Zoom call to strategize and raise money for the Harris campaign.“We knew that we needed to get to work,” Jotaka Eaddy, founder of Win with Black Women, said during the event. “It was a moment in our country to show what Black women have always done.”Despite big bumps following the Democratic national convention and the 10 September presidential debate, the race between Harris and Donald Trump remains tight, with both candidates polling at 47%, according to the most recent poll from the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College. More

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      ‘His ego will not accept defeat’: the story behind Trump’s attempt to steal an election

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      By now, 6 January 2021 has so thoroughly saturated the American political consciousness – a single date conjuring up images of the once unthinkable, mentioned every day in news about criminal court cases, the future of democracy and Donald Trump’s ongoing presidential campaign – that you could argue we are used to it. Election denialism has become a feature, not a bug, of a major political party for nearly four years. The fact that Trump, when given the opportunity by ABC moderators to distance himself from efforts to discredit the 2020 election during this month’s presidential debate, still refused to acknowledge Joe Biden’s legitimate victory is no longer surprising, though we are also inured to shock.But a new HBO documentary argues, through forensic chronological detail and, perhaps ironically, the testimony of Republican election officials and former members of Trump’s administration, for remembering just how beyond the pale attempts to subvert the 2020 election were. As recounted in Stopping the Steal, a new film from the Leaving Neverland director, Dan Reed, the period between election night 2020 and 6 January 2021 was a series of genuinely shocking, potentially devastating opportunities for democratic disaster that often came down to clashes between obscure, local Republican officials and the president of the United States. January 6, in fact, “isn’t the scary bit”, Reed said. “The really scary bit is all the machinations that happened before. Because had they succeeded, the knock-on effect would have been to just gum up the system.“Step by step, you can see that enough uncertainty was being injected into the system, and enough small gains were being made, to result in potentially a cataclysmic outcome.”Though Trump may deny any responsibility for January 6, his efforts to undermine the American electoral process and discredit the result in 2020 began the night of the election, before any network had even called it for Biden. At 2.30am, after news networks projected a Biden win in the crucial swing state of Arizona, Trump held an impromptu press conference in which he falsely claimed: “Frankly, we did win this election.” What happened next is a matter of real-time journalistic record, playing out over several weeks and relived in Stopping the Steal by the people who were there: administration pressure on election officials in Arizona and Georgia to support evidence-free claims of fraud or, in one infamous Trump phone call, to find him “11,780 votes”; activation of misinformation channels and true believers, who latched on to claims of fraud, harassed election officials and showed up outside county offices armed with AR-15s; a media campaign by Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and others bringing fringe legal “theories” into the mainstream; and finally the legitimization of crackpot legal theories to hijack the arcane electoral college, culminating in Trump’s January 6 rally.Stopping the Steal synthesizes these many episodes, through the perspectives of the officials – the then attorney general, Bill Barr; the Maricopa county supervisor, Clint Hickman; the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger; the Georgia election operations manager, Gabriel Sterling – who worked to prevent the steal by simply doing their jobs. The framing offers “a story told by people who love Trump, but who love democracy more, who love the institution more”, said Reed – mostly, Republicans who “held the line and who came under extraordinary pressure”.By their own admission in Stopping the Steal, these officials would have entertained evidence of voter fraud, even celebrated it, had there been any. “I had every motivation,” says Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s former speaker of the house, in the film. But there wasn’t – and Trump knew it. “He knows he lost,” says Stephanie Grisham, a Trump campaign and White House official for six years. “But he’s a narcissist and his ego will not accept defeat. And when you have people who will so willingly come around you and tell you you didn’t lose and the things you want to hear … that enables him to double down and triple down.”So he tripled down, with the help of (seemingly) true believers, some of whom also appear in the film – Jacob Chansley, also known as the QAnon Shaman, and Marko Trickovic, who spread numerous conspiracy theories about votes being stolen or discounted. “The guys on the grassroots level, I think they really believe,” said Reed. “I don’t think they have any doubt that the election was stolen, because they inhabit a universe in which that is a given.”Reed, who also recently performed a similar forensic analysis on January 6 called Four Hours at the Capitol, maintains that including the perspective of the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement does not platform its beliefs; if anything, it puts the alternate universe of the “stolen” 2020 election in starker relief to the facts. “Whether you think they’re sincere or insincere, they’re protagonists in this drama,” he said. “It’s always good and fair to hear from them, and give them a chance to express what they have to say in a coherent way.View image in fullscreen“I presume my audience is intelligent,” he added. “I presume that they’re smart enough to know the difference between someone who’s indulging wish fulfillment or embracing a fantasy, and other people who are doing it for more cynical reasons.”Stopping the Steal ends with January 6, and makes no presumptions about what will happen in November if Trump wins or, perhaps just as distressingly, if he refuses to lose again, which some Republicans are already preparing for. “I’m not a political pundit,” said Reed. “I made the film because I want it to be a timeless film, because it marks a turning point in the way that we do elections. Now we have an option of: the Republicans won, the Democrats won, or someone stole it. We never had that option. That narrative didn’t exist before.“The blueprint is there, the playbook is there – why would it be different this time, if Kamala Harris wins?”The day-by-day recounting of how the votes in 2020 were counted, and then protected – in nondescript county buildings, secretary of state offices, board meetings and eventually the US Congress – only underscores that a democracy is only as strong as its most obscure, smallest offices, whose character can make the difference between business as usual and a steal. “The functioning of democracy depends on people who buy into the idea that it should be fair,” said Reed. “If the system isn’t populated with people who embrace the basic idea of it, that it should be fair and everyone gets their fair shot, then the system no longer works.”Stopping the Steal, in revisiting the timeline largely through Republicans’ first-person narratives – it was not Democratic officials that Trump personally called – acts as a “non-partisan” review of the facts, “the look back that we can all share”, said Reed. The election in November will come down to how many people vote, where they vote, and for whom. But it will also be determined by “the remote gearboxes and the little bits of democracy you can’t see”, he said. “And that’s what we need to look out for. That’s what we need to shine a light on this time.”

      Stopping the Steal is now available on Max in the US. In the UK, Trump’s Heist: The President Who Wouldn’t Lose is on Channel 4 on 17 September and 18 September at 9pm. More

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      ‘Do you have contempt for my views?’ How a leftwing film-maker and a Republican came together

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      “Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show but there is no real strength there.”It was no surprise to hear such rhetoric cheered to the rafters at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago. But the words were not spoken by a Democrat. They came from the mouth of a stranger in a strange land: the former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger.It was the latest example of how the Trump era has created strange bedfellows. The former first lady Michelle Obama hugging ex-president George W Bush. Liberal audiences in Washington DC standing to applaud the arch conservative Liz Cheney. Even Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has earned grudging praise for defying his boss when it mattered most.But there are few odder couples than Kinzinger and Steve Pink, a leftwing Hollywood film director who aligns himself with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. They came together to make The Last Republican, a debut documentary by Pink that follows Kinzinger’s year of living dangerously as a Never Trumper on Capitol Hill. It premiered at the Toronto film festival last week.The film opens with Kinzinger expressing his and his wife’s doubts about the project and telling Pink: “I recognise that you have contempt for what I believe, like, in terms of my political viewpoints. I think in any other situation you probably would be protesting my office. You’re just so far left.”Pink objects that is kind of mean. Kinzinger asks: “Do you have contempt for my views, Steve?”We do not hear Pink’s reply. But in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles, the 58-year-old elaborates: “When it comes to strictly politics, I wouldn’t say I hold them in contempt although, when I’m feeling belligerent, I do hold them in contempt because I have very deeply opposing views.“It was kind of extraordinary he took a risk with me as a film-maker because he says in the film I could make him look stupid and I could just do a hit piece. I was surprised by that and I was like, OK, I realise that, but who we are to each other despite our opposing political views is maybe more important than our political views themselves.”So why did Kinzinger agree to the project? The answer is as simple as it is unexpected. His favourite film, the 2010 sci-fi comedy Hot Tub Time Machine, was directed by Pink. They also both hail from Illinois.Pink adds: “I’m like, if you think I have contempt for your views, why did you choose me as a film-maker? He’s like, Hot Tub Time Machine is what sold me, and I was like, well, that’s good logic. I don’t know if I would have done that if I were you but we had common ground. Having a shared sense of humour is a great foundation to have more difficult conversations down the road, for sure.”Kinzinger grew up with cultural touchstones such as Ronald Reagan, Rocky and Red Dawn. The former air force pilot, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was first elected to Congress in 2010. At first he was a loyal Republican; later Kevin McCarthy, destined to be speaker of the House of Representatives, offered to officiate Kinzinger’s wedding.View image in fullscreenBut Kinzinger broke from McCarthy, and the party, after the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and was among 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. He and Cheney were then the only two Republicans who joined the House committee to investigate the January 6 attack.Both paid a price for refusing to submit to the cult of Trump and Maga (Make America great again). Kinzinger lost friends, was turned into a pariah by his own party and targeted by extremists and trolls with death threats. He did not seek re-election and formed a political organisation, Country First, to back anti-Trump candidates.Pink, whose documentary follows Kinzinger during his final year in office, comments: “That was my initial reason for wanting to make the film: here’s a guy whose political views I oppose who stood up against his party and Donald Trump in the wake of January 6 to take a principled stand in defence of our democracy in the defence of our constitution.“I thought that was a very brave thing to do. He sacrificed a lot. He had a pregnant wife at the time. He himself will tell you that he was shocked that he lost all of his friends and his family and the fact that he got thrown out of his own political party.”He adds: “He felt like part of your job description as a legislator, as a congressperson in our country is to uphold and defend the constitution. That’s the oath you take and so when he saw everyone around him being absolutely comfortable with violating that oath, it was absolutely shocking to him and kind of devastating and he was very isolated very quickly.”Perhaps the truly shocking thing is not that Kinzinger and a handful of others have dared to make a stand, but that so many members of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Reagan have sold their political souls and capitulated? When the chronicles of the Trump era are written there will be a special place in infamy for enablers such as Pence, McCarthy, Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, Elise Stefanik, Sean Spicer and many others.Pink observes: “It is more shocking and it’s more infuriating and Adam talks about that as well. He’s actually more furious with the people who remain silent and have just gone along with this thing. He finds that deeply shocking and deeply troubling. There’s no question about it.”The film-maker himself was taken aback by the high stakes when Kinzinger sat with his congressional staff mapping out his final 14 months in office. He could have pursued all kinds of legislation but said instead his priority was the preservation of democracy – and that the history books would look kindly on that.“I found that to be a very shocking thing to say. Wait, so your legislative agenda is democracy preservation? I didn’t think that was on the table. I thought it was about safer streets, less government regulation, something legislative? But his focus was going to be democracy preservation. That was a terrifying moment for me that it was even a question in a staff meeting.”Pink gained access to the January 6 committee hearings on Capitol Hill and chronicles how they faced much scepticism at first. The headline of a David Brooks column in the New York Times declared: “The Jan 6 Committee Has Already Blown It,” before the first gavel had been wielded. In fact the sessions made riveting theatre for those in the room and compelling television for those at home.Kinzinger offers an inside track on how it all came together, what he thought of his colleagues on the panel and how a text message from his wife informed his public remarks, bringing him close to tears. Pink says: “It was quite a moment for Adam and all the committee members to have worked as hard as they did and to be able to successfully get the message out, which clearly helped speed up the justice department’s investigation into the matter.”But there was backlash. The Last Republican plays some of the chilling and ugly voicemails that Kinzinger received because of the stand he made. One says: “You little cocksucker. Are you Liz Cheney’s fag-hag? You two cock-sucking little bitches. We’re gonna get ya. Coming to your house, son. Ha ha ha ha!” Others describe Kinzinger as “a piece of shit” and a “traitor”.A company provides 24-hour security at Kinzinger’s family home. He explains to Pink with a rueful laugh: “People wanna kill me so, you know, it sucks, right?It is a stark reminder of the incentive structure that Trump has built inside the Republican party: kiss the ring and you will be rewarded with endorsements and Maga stardom; cross him and you will be ostracised, challenged in a party primary and subjected to vile abuse and death threats.View image in fullscreenPink says: “At first when I talked to him about it, it hadn’t left the confines of the congressional office. When the death threats were coming in, weirdly they became commonplace. They had an increased Capitol police and even FBI interest in what was happening. Obviously, there’s a lot of protection around you in that context.“Whereas when the death threats started expanding to his family, to his wife, at his home, it was very stressful and it took a toll on him. There was almost a level of disbelief that there was so much hatred and that people took the time to actually express their hatred. It was shocking to him and it was very hard on Sofia and Adam for sure.”During the film Kinzinger also talks movingly about an incident in his past that seems unrelated but actually explains much about his political decision-making. One night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2006 he encountered a young woman holding her throat, which was bleeding profusely, and her boyfriend intent on killing her with a knife.Kinzinger recalls: “If somebody would have whispered ‘run’ to me I would have run. But there are two immediate thoughts that went through my head. The first one was like, if I act, I’m gonna die. The second one was, if I watch this lady die and I did nothing, I can’t live with myself the rest of my life.”The assailant was bigger and Kinzinger can still remember feeling the knife hand trying to stab him. But he wrestled the man to the ground and held him there until police arrived. The 46-year-old says that moment in Milwaukee utterly changed his life.Pink comments: “Here again was an example where he stepped into a situation without thinking of the consequences, purely on the basis that he thought it was the right thing to do. I was interested in the kind of person who actually does that. To me the film became less a story about a guy who sacrifices for his country and more about what he wouldn’t sacrifice.“Despite the apparent danger, he didn’t want to give up his willingness to serve and lose that desire to do that and fall prey to cynicism. It’s one thing to say that you’re courageous to sacrifice. It’s a different kind of courage to say what I don’t want to lose are these things that are important to me. Despite everything against me, I don’t want to lose these things that I believe in because those are the things that keep me going.”The anti-Trump coalition has been described as the biggest political force in America today. It has scrambled old alliances and thrown together progressives, independents and groups such as the Lincoln Project, conceived largely by old-school Bush and McCain Republicans – often middle-aged white men – who now find themselves rooting for a liberal woman of colour from California to win the presidency.Pink is still ready for an argument about policy but acknowledges that, for now, there is a higher priority. “I remain deeply conflicted in terms of my political views but we are in a crisis moment in our country and there’s no way to avoid the fact that the more important value right now is the thing that we agree on: that everyone should have a vote and that vote should count and we need to ensure, in order to preserve our democracy, a peaceful transfer of power. Those two things are fundamental.”He says of Republicans: “It’s not whether they’re heroes. I even say to him in the movie a courageous Republican is still a Republican. You don’t have to be a Republican to believe in the peaceful transfer of power and believe that everyone’s vote should count.“It is shocking that one of our two major political parties don’t hold those as essential values. It’s terrifying and we’re going to need to do the work to lessen the influence and power of people who don’t believe in those two fundamental values.”Kinzinger received a warm reception on the final night of the Democratic convention, not long before Kamala Harris took the stage to accept the party nomination. Her speech, and a subsequent CNN interview, indicate that she is tilting towards the centre on climate, healthcare and immigration. But when the alternative is Trump, even an old lefty like Pink believes the choice is clear.“Because I’m a political junkie, you see how politicians move to different spaces as part of a campaign and then their political philosophy is revealed when they are in power. I don’t take that much stock in if someone says to me, oh, Kamala’s position on X or Y is this, it should be that.“Do we believe in her political philosophy broadly speaking? I do. She would make a great leader of our country. The kind of president she will be remains to be seen and I look forward to seeing the kind of president she will be. I’m not troubled by any particular political position she holds in this time when she’s campaigning for president.”Harris would be the first woman and first woman of colour to serve as president, dealing perhaps the final symbolic blow to Maga: the result would show that it was Trump, not Barack Obama, who was the historic aberration.Pink describes himself as “bullish” about her chances. “The hypocrisy and narcissism and bullying and madness of Donald Trump have been exposed over and over and over and over and over again and yet he’s somehow managed to survive, being a formidable person in American politics. One of these days he’s not going to be and I hope that moment is upon us.”

      The Last Republican is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date More