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      Buttigieg defends Biden’s age: ‘What matters is the age of a leader’s ideas’

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      Top Democrats came to Joe Biden’s defense on Sunday, emphasizing the president’s viability for re-election amid his colleagues’ worries that voters see him as too old – concerns compounded by Donald Trump’s lead over him in recent polls.On ABC This Week, host George Stephanopoulos pointedly asked Biden’s transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg: “How can an 81-year-old incumbent be the candidate of change? It’s so critical in presidential elections.”Buttigieg replied that Biden’s administration had focused on “issues that matter most to newer generations”, including addressing the climate crisis, supporting LGBTQ+ rights and pushing to restore the federal abortion rights that Roe v Wade had established before the conservative-dominated US supreme court eliminated them in 2022.“What matters most is the age of a leaders’ ideas,” Buttigieg said.Buttigieg’s comments came as voters’ views on Biden’s age continue being a growing liability for his re-election campaign. A recent ABC/Ipsos poll found that 86% of Americans thought him too old to serve another term. Sixty-two percent thought the same about Trump, who is 77 – and 59% of voters think both are too old.Those numbers prompted Biden’s camp to kick off a $30m ad campaign in swing states with a spot directly addressing the president’s age. “Look, I’m not a young guy,” he says in the spot. “But I understand how to get things done for the American people.”Georgia’s Democratic US senator Raphael Warnock also defended Biden’s chances in the swing state despite signs that many voters there have turned away from him, saying, “It’s still early in this election season.”Warnock’s comments on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union referred to a Fox News poll showing Trump leading by eight percentage points in Georgia. The poll also showed that a quarter of Black voters there now favor the former president.“I can tell you, as somebody whose name has been on the ballot five times in three years, I know a little something about Georgia voters,” Warnock said. “We’ve seen both of these men serve in the White House. Their choice is clearly Joe Biden and Georgians get it right for Joe Biden, just as they got it right for me.”CNN host Jake Tapper suggested third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr could be a spoiler after he claims to have gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot in Georgia in November. Tapper said Biden defeated Trump in Georgia in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes. But Warnock argued there was still time for Biden to secure the state again.The Democratic House leader, Hakeem Jeffries, also addressed Black voters’ seemingly fading support of Biden. During Jeffries’s appearance on Face The Nation, host Margaret Brennan noted that Biden’s support among Black voters had fallen from 90% in 2020 to 76%.Nonetheless, Jeffries said Black voters would understand that Biden “has delivered over and over and over again on issues of concern”, including by helping bring on the lowest Black unemployment rate in decades as well as making historic investments in Black colleges and universities.“I’m confident at the end of the day … the overwhelming majority of African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Black voters throughout the country, will support president Biden,” Jeffries said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBrennan separately asked Senator Bernie Sanders whether he could good “in good conscience” ask fellow progressives who oppose Israel’s ongoing military strikes in Gaza to support the president.The US has provided billions of dollars in financial aid to Israel’s military as Biden has exalted the country’s right to defend itself after the 7 October attack by Hamas that reportedly killed more than 1,200 Israelis. But the president has condemned the humanitarian crisis set off by Israel’s subsequent military strikes in Gaza, which have reportedly killed more than 30,000.Sanders said the US “cannot be complicit in this mass slaughter” and called on Biden to withhold funds from Israel’s military if the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, continued exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But Sanders said voters must pick Biden if they favored protecting the climate, preserving bodily autonomy and eliminating income inequality.“So you’re asking voters to put [Gaza] aside?” Brennan said.Sanders responded: “Not put this aside – but fight continuously to change Biden’s policy on Gaza.” More

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      in US Politics

      The Lie Detectives: Trump, US politics and the disinformation damage done

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      Most of Joe Biden’s past supporters see him as too old. An 81-year-old president with an unsteady step is a turn-off. But Donald Trump, Biden’s malignant, 77-year-old predecessor, vows to be a dictator for “a day”, calls for suspending the constitution and threatens Nato. “Russia, if you’re listening”, his infamous 2016 shout-out to Vladimir Putin, still haunts us eight years on. Democracy is on the ballot again.Against this bleak backdrop, Sasha Issenberg delivers The Lie Detectives, an examination of disinformation in politics. It is a fitting follow-up to The Victory Lab, his look at GOTV (“getting out the vote”) which was published weeks before the 2012 US election.Issenberg lectures at UCLA and writes for Monocle. He has covered presidential campaigns for the Boston Globe and he co-founded Votecastr, a private venture designed to track, project and publish real-time results. Voting science, though, is nothing if not tricky. A little after 4pm on election day 2016, hours before polls closed, Votecastr calculations led Slate to pronounce: Hillary Clinton Has to Like Where She Stands in Florida.The Victory Lab and The Lie Detectives are of a piece, focused on the secret sauce of winning campaigns. More than a decade ago, Issenberg gave props to Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s successful election drives, and posited that micro-targeting voters had become key to finishing first. He also observed that ideological conflicts had become marbled through American politics. On that front, there has been an acceleration. These days, January 6 and its aftermath linger but much of the country has moved on, averting its gaze or embracing alternative facts.In 2016, Issenberg and Joshua Green of Businessweek spoke to Trump campaign digital gurus who bragged of using the internet to discourage prospective Clinton supporters.“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” Issenberg and Green quote a senior official as saying. “They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans.”It was micro-targeting on steroids.The exchange stuck with Issenberg. “I thought back often to that conversation with the Trump officials in the years that followed,” he writes now. “I observed so much else online that was manufactured and perpetuated with a similarly brazen impunity.”In The Lie Detectives, Issenberg pays particular attention and respect to Jiore Craig and her former colleagues at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, a leading Democratic polling and strategy firm founded by Stan Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s pollster. Issenberg also examines the broader liberal ecosystem and its members, including the billionaire Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn and PayPal. The far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his “office of hate” come under the microscope too.Craig’s experience included more than a dozen elections across six continents. But until Trump’s triumph, she had not worked on a domestic race. To her, to quote Issenberg, US politics was essentially “a foreign country”. Nonetheless, Craig emerged as the Democrats’ go-to for countering disinformation.“It was a unique moment in time where everybody who had looked for an answer up until that point had been abundantly wrong,” Craig says. “The fact that I had to start every race in a new country with the building blocks allowed me to see things that you couldn’t.”No party holds a monopoly on disinformation. In a 2017 special election for US Senate in Alabama, Democratic-aligned consultants launched Project Birmingham, a $100,000 disinformation campaign under which Republicans were urged to cast write-in ballots instead of voting for Roy Moore, the controversial GOP candidate.The project posed as a conservative operation. Eventually, Hoffman acknowledged funding it, but disavowed knowledge of disinformation and said sorry. Doug Jones, the Democrat, won by fewer than 22,000 votes. The write-in total was 22,819.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore recently, Steve Kramer, a campaign veteran working for Dean Phillips, a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination against Biden, launched an AI-generated robocall that impersonated the president.Comparing himself to Paul Revere and Thomas Paine, patriots who challenged the mother country, Kramer, who also commissioned a deepfake impersonation of Senator Lindsey Graham, said Phillips was not in on the effort. If the sorry little episode showed anything, it showed disinformation is here to stay.Under the headline Disinformation on steroids: is the US prepared for AI’s influence on the election?, a recent Guardian story said: “Without clear safeguards, the impact of AI on the election might come down to what voters can discern as real and not real.”Free speech is on the line. Last fall, the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – “the Trumpiest court in America”, as Vox put it – unanimously held that Biden, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the FBI violated the first amendment by seeking to tamp down on Covid-related misinformation.In the court’s view, social media platforms were impermissibly “coerced” or “significantly encouraged” to suppress speech government officials viewed as dangerously inaccurate or misleading. The matter remains on appeal, oral argument before the supreme court set for later this month.Issenberg reminds us that Trump’s current presidential campaign has pledged that a second Trump administration will bar government agencies from assisting any effort to “label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information”. A commitment to free speech? Not exactly. More like Putinism, US-style.According to Kash Patel, a Trump administration veteran and true believer, a second Trump administration will target journalists for prosecution.“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Patel told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you.”Welcome to the Trump Vengeance tour.
      The Lie Detectives is published in the US by Columbia University’s Columbia Global Reports More

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      in US Politics

      Biden’s State of the Union: raucous, strident and insistently optimistic | Moira Donegan

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      Like a budget, a State of the Union speech is a moral document: it reflects a president’s values and priorities, distilling his own view of his administration for the American people. On Thursday night, Joe Biden made his moral case for re-election: he views America as a besieged but worthy global leader, one whose tradition of democracy deserves to be defended and rebuilt. Referring to his opponent Donald Trump only as “my predecessor”, Biden repeatedly contrasted his own vision of a more equitable and prosperous nation with the Republican agenda. The point was to offer Americans an optimistic and inclusive vision – and to remind them of the cynicism, sadism and depravity of the Trump worldview, which threatens to undermine women’s freedoms, make interracial democracy impossible, and use the machinery of government for little else but to further Republicans own self regard and greed.The 90-minute speech was raucous, strident and insistently optimistic; it appeared designed to demonstrate Biden’s vitality, and to launch in earnest a presidential campaign that has previously been somewhat tepid and sluggish. “I’m here to wake up the Congress,” Biden said as he began, declaring the nation to be in “an unprecedented moment”. Maybe he was there to wake up his own campaign, too.Biden opened his speech outlining the three major issues which his campaign sees as the greatest emergencies: the foreign threat to Democracy, as represented by Vladimir Putin and Trump’s threat to Nato; the decline of democracy at home, as represented by January 6 and Republican lies about the 2020 election (“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden bellowed; an early applause line); and reproductive rights.It was the first time that Biden gave abortion pride of place in the speech, reflecting his campaign’s belated awareness, in the wake of the 2022 midterms, of the issue’s salience. The attention he paid to the issue reflected his ambivalence toward abortion and hostility toward the feminist case for it. The section began not with a question of abortion, but with IVF: an Alabama court’s decision to grant frozen embryos the status of legal persons, thus briefly banning the treatment in the state, seems to have opened a new avenue in the post-Dobbs debate that is more comfortable for Biden.He moved on to telling the story of Kate Cox, a Texas mother who was forced to flee the state for an abortion after the ban in place there put her at risk for catastrophic health complications. Republicans, he noted, were planning to impose a national ban on reproductive freedom. “My God,” he said, “What other freedoms would they take away?”It was not what reproductive rights advocates were hoping for: the speech made no mention of women’s right to abortion as a matter of equality and dignity, casting “reproductive rights”, as Biden exclusively referred to them, as matters of bare health and dutiful family building. Still, Biden is not making these more robust endorsements of women’s reproductive freedoms because he does not think he has to: his campaign is betting that voters are galvanized enough by the issue that half measures will deliver their votes.They might be right. Indeed, Biden’s pitch to Americans on Thursday night often seemed to have female voters in mind. His proposed tax increases for corporations and the wealthiest strata of Americans were pitched not as mere fairness, but as a means to generate investment in care infrastructure – childcare, paid family leave and eldercare – the neglect of which has led to a nationwide crisis of overburdened and economically straightjacketed women.Roe, too, was framed as an invitation for women to not just vote their interests but avenge their citizenship. “Those bragging about overturning Roe v Wade have no idea about the power of women,” said Biden, referring to a now famous line in Samuel Alito’s majority opinion on Dobbs saying that “women are not without political or electoral power”. “They’re about to find out just how powerful women are.”The main thrust of Biden’s speech was meant to flout his economic accomplishments, to reshape the popular story of the American economy – one where consumers are hampered by inflation and nobody can buy a house – into a story of a remarkable post-pandemic recovery. He flouted the growth of small businesses and the low unemployment rate; he tipped his hat to the economic “soft landing” engineered by Jerome Powell, which has kept the US out of a long-predicted recession. He made a mild dig at the media as he tried to rewrite their own story: “The American people are writing the greatest comeback story ever told.”The speech was strong; every position taken was not. Biden fell apart when he tried to talk about the border, touting his own sadistically cruel bill by way of bragging that Donald Trump had scared all the Republicans out of voting for it. His indifference to the human lives of migrants was at times chilling: he referred offhandedly to “illegals”, and engaged in a bizarre and unnecessary bit of theater with Marjorie Taylor Greene, decked out in garish Maga gear, who yelled at Biden about a woman murdered by an undocumented immigrant.He stumbled, too, when he spoke of Israel’s war on Gaza, dwelling in lurid detail on Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October and only offhandedly acknowledging that more than 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel in the past five months. The issue has proved an albatross for Biden, who is hemorrhaging support among young voters and voters of color over his support for Israel’s war. As he spoke about Gaza, Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, wept. But this, too, may be an issue on which Biden relies on the horror of his alternative: his campaign seems to be betting that these voters will return to Biden in spite of his stance on Gaza, because Trump, who spoke recently of a desire to “finish the problem” in Palestine, is so much worse.Democrats had reason to be nervous about Biden’s performance ahead of the speech. The past few weeks of the news cycle have been dominated by internal Democratic fears about Biden’s age, a worry that seems to stand in for all sorts of other, perhaps more pertinent, worries about his ability to hold together his massive and internally fractious coalition. But to the extent to which the claims of concern over Biden’s age were sincere, he seemed determined to put them to rest: he contrasted his own presidency with that of Donald Trump’s on every issue except his age.“I know I don’t look it,” Biden said towards the end of his speech, “but I’ve been around a while” – a joke reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “I refuse to exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” “It is not how old we are,” Biden said. “It’s the age of our ideas. It’s a line that seems certain to be repeated throughout the campaign, as the Democrats seek to make the presidential election less a referendum on Biden’s age than on Donald Trump’s intolerable proposed future.Indeed Biden did seem energized, enthused. His gait was stiffer than last year and his stutter persists, but he came alive, oddly enough, when he was being heckled. He retorted gamely and happily when Republicans screamed at him from the audience; he appeared most comfortable, most confident, when he was being yelled at. “Turning setback into comeback – that’s what America does,” he said at one point in his speech. He was talking about the post-Covid economy. But he could have been talking about his re-election bid.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      Biden calls on Congress to ‘guarantee the right to IVF’ in State of the Union address – video

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      Abortion and reproductive rights took centre stage at the 2024 State of the Union, as Joe Biden sought to overcome concerns about his re-election chances by emphasising an issue that has energised voters since the overturning of Roe v Wade.
      The president has largely pinned his re-election hopes on the passions stirred by threats to abortion rights. The demise of Roe v Wade, which was overturned with the help of three justices appointed by Trump, has led more than a dozen states to enact near-total abortion bans More

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      in US Politics

      State of the Union guest list shows reproductive rights in spotlight after Alabama IVF bill signed into law – live

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      Becerra’s comments come ahead of Joe Biden addressing the nation in the State of the Union on Thursday night. Although the White House has not released the speech, a large number of Democratic guests suggest reproductive rights may feature heavily.Among the guests of high-ranking Democrats are Elizabeth Carr, the first person in the US to be born via IVF; Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who nearly died of septic shock when she was denied a medically necessary abortion; and Kate Cox, who had to flee Texas for an abortion after she learned her fetus had a fatal chromosomal condition.More guests include reproductive endocrinologists, an Indiana doctor who provided an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim, and leaders of reproductive rights groups.Becerra’s comments emphasizing the importance of reproductive rights, Democrats’ guest list for the State of the Union and a recent administration officials’ trips to states with abortion restrictions are the most recent evidence of Democrat’s election bet: that when Republicans married the motivated minority of voters who support the anti-abortion movement, they also divorced themselves from the broader American public, broad margins of whom support IVF, contraception and legal abortion.My colleague Chris Stein will be covering Joe Biden’s State of the Union address this evening on our dedicated live blog. In the meantime, here’s a recap of today’s developments:
      LaTorya Beasley, an Alabama mother who saw a second round of IVF canceled after the state supreme court ruled that embryos were children, and Kate Cox, the Texas mother forced to travel outside her state for an abortion, are among those set to attend Joe Biden’s State of the Union address tonight, as guests of the first lady, Jill Biden.
      Joe Biden will announce in the State of the Union speech that US forces will build a temporary port on the Gaza shoreline in the next few weeks to allow delivery of humanitarian aid on a large scale.
      Biden welcomed Sweden into Nato in a statement after the country officially became the 32nd member of the western military alliance. The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, will be attending the State of the Union address tonight.
      Katie Boyd Britt, a first-term 42-year-old Republican senator from Alabama, will deliver the GOP’s official response to Biden’s State of the Union address tonight – a move likely designed to highlight the big age gap between the two.
      Byron Donalds, a Republican Florida congressman being floated as a possible vice presidential pick for Donald Trump, suggested he would be willing to decline to certify the 2028 election results if he was vice president.
      No Labels, the third-party presidential movement, will reportedly to announce on Friday that it will move forward with a presidential bid in the November election.
      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign described a new ad from a pro-Trump Super Pac questioning whether Biden can “even survive til 2029” as “a sick and deranged stunt”.
      Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland who is running for Senate, has said he would not vote for Donald Trump in the November election.
      Daniel Rodimer, a former pro wrestler who won a prominent endorsement from Donald Trump while unsuccessfully running for Congress in Nevada, surrendered to authorities on Wednesday on an arrest warrant for murder.
      Republican Florida congressman Byron Donalds became the latest vice-presidential contender to refuse to commit to certifying election results.Donalds, at an Axios event, suggested he would be willing to decline to certify the 2028 election results if he was vice president. He also did not clarify if he would have certified the 2020 election results.Donalds is one of the names being floated as a possible vice presidential pick for Donald Trump. When asked if he would certify the 2028 results as vice president, he replied:
      If you have state officials who are violating the election law in their states … then no, I would not.
      Asked if he agreed with former vice-president Mike Pence’s move to certify the results, Donalds said: “You can only ask that question of Mike Pence.”Republicans have chosen Katie Boyd Britt, a first-term senator from Alabama, to deliver the party’s official response to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address tonight – a move likely designed to highlight the big age gap between the two.Britt, 42, is one of nine women in the Senate Republican conference and the youngest female Republican elected to the Senate.In a statement announcing her speech, she said it was time for the next generation of American politicians “to step up”. She added:
      The Republican Party is the party of hardworking parents and families, and I’m looking forward to putting this critical perspective front and center.
      Senate Republicans say she will offer a split screen of sorts when she delivers the party’s rebuttal to the State of the Union address by Biden, 81.“She’s young, female and full of energy – opposite of everything Joe Biden is,” senator Markwayne Mullin told the Hill. “The contrast between the two, it’s so different.”The third-party presidential movement No Labels is expected to announce it will move forward with a presidential bid in the November election, according to multiple reports.About 800 No Labels delegates are expected to meet virtually in a private meeting and vote on Friday in favor of launching a presidential campaign for this fall’s election, sources told AP and Reuters.The group will not name its presidential and vice presidential picks on Friday, but instead it is expected to roll out a formal selection process late next week for potential candidates who would be selected in the coming weeks, the people said.The House passed a bill that would require federal authorities to detain any migrant charged with theft or burglary, named after a Georgia nursing student police have said was killed by a man who entered the US illegally.The measure, called the Laken Riley Act, requires immigrations and customs enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants accused by local authorities of theft, burglary, larceny or shoplifting.The bill would also allow states and individuals to sue the federal government for crimes committed by immigrants who enter the country illegally.The bill was named after 22-year-old Laken Riley, who was killed on the campus of the University of Georgia while on a morning run last month. Riley’s death has become a rallying point for Donald Trump, after authorities arrested a Venezuelan man who entered the US illegally and was allowed to stay to pursue his immigration case.The House approved the legislation hours before Joe Biden is set to deliver his State of the Union address. Republicans have seized on Riley’s death to hammer the Biden administration’s border policies.“Republicans will not stand for the release of dangerous criminals into our communities, and that’s exactly what the Biden administration has done,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News.
      Laken is just one of the tragic examples of innocent American citizens who have lost their lives, been brutally and violently attacked by illegal criminals who are roaming our streets.
      Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has responded to a new ad from a pro-Trump Super Pac questioning Biden’s ability to serve a second term in a new TV ad and whether the president can “even survive til 2029.”The ad, by Make America Great Again Inc, shows a clip from Biden’s press conference after the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.During the briefing, Biden spoke about comments by Donald Trump about letting Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato allies. Pausing for dramatic effect, Biden then says he should clear his mind “and not say what I’m really thinking.”In the Maga Inc ad, a narrator says: “We can all see Joe Biden’s weakness. If Biden wins, can he even survive to 2029. The real question is, can we?”Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa told NBC News that the ad is “a sick and deranged stunt from a broke and struggling campaign”, adding:
      Trump tried this strategy four years ago and got his ass kicked by Joe Biden – he should tune in tonight alongside tens of millions of Americans to see why President Biden will beat him again this November.
      A former congressional candidate backed by Donald Trump has been arrested for murder. The Guardian’s Ramon Antonio Vargas reports:A former pro wrestler who won a prominent endorsement from Donald Trump while unsuccessfully running for Congress in Nevada surrendered to authorities on Wednesday on an arrest warrant for murder.Daniel Rodimer, 45, was booked in connection with the slaying of 47-year-old Christopher Tapp, who was reportedly beaten to death in Resorts World Las Vegas on 29 October.Rodimer met Tapp – who was once charged with murder himself – “through the classic car and racing circuit”, according to the local television news station KLAS, which reviewed police documents.Investigators allege that Rodimer fatally attacked Tapp after he offered Rodimer’s stepdaughter cocaine during a hotel room party.Initially, authorities believed Tapp’s death stemmed from a drug overdose and a fall, after an autopsy found evidence of blunt trauma and cocaine use. But detectives later determined Tapp had been in a fight inside the hotel room where he was found injured. He died later at a hospital.For the full story, click here:Here is a video of Maryland’s former Republican governor Larry Hogan – who we reported about earlier – saying that he will not vote for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump:Hogan, who recently stepped down from his third-party movement No Labels, said: “I think we’ll hopefully have some ability to vote for someone that these people actually want to vote for rather than just voting against.”In a tweet on Thursday, Joe Biden urged Americans to tune into his State of the Union address in which he plans to address “how far we’ve come in building the economy from the middle out and the bottom up …”He went on to add that he plans to address “the work we have left to lower costs and protect our freedoms against MAGA attacks”.An Alabama mother who saw a second round of IVF canceled after the state supreme court ruled that embryos were children will attend Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, as guests of the first lady, Jill Biden.LaTorya Beasley of Birmingham, Alabama, is among the first lady’s 20 invited guests who “personify issues or themes to be addressed by the president in his speech,” the White House said in a statement.Beasley and her husband had their first child, via IVF, in 2022. They were trying to have another child through IVF but Beasley’s embryo transfer was suddenly canceled because of the Alabama court decision.Also on the guest list is Kate Cox, the Texas mother forced to travel outside her state for an abortion. The White House said the cases of Beasley and Cox, showed “how the overturning of Roe v Wade has disrupted access to reproductive healthcare for women and families across the country”. In a statement, the White House said:
      Stories like Kate’s and LaTorya’s should never happen in America. But Republican elected officials want to impose this reality on women nationwide.
      Joe Biden has welcomed Sweden into Nato in a statement after the country officially became the 32nd member of the western military alliance.Stockholm’s ratification process was finally completed in Washington on Thursday, as Sweden and Hungary – the last country to ratify Sweden’s membership – submitted the necessary documents after a drawn-out process that has taken nearly two years.The ratification marked the end of a 20-month-long wait that started in May 2022 when it submitted its application to join alongside Finland, prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February that year.In a statement, Biden said he was “honored” to welcome Sweden as Nato’s newest ally, and that the alliance was “stronger than ever” with its addition. He added:
      Today, we once more reaffirm that our shared democratic values – and our willingness to stand up for them – is what makes Nato the greatest military alliance in the history of the world. It is what draws nations to our cause. It is what underpins our unity. And together with our newest Ally Sweden – NATO will continue to stand for freedom and democracy for generations to come.
      The Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, will be attending Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as a guest of the first lady, the White House has confirmed.Larry Hogan, the Republican former governor of Maryland who is running for Senate, has said he would not vote for Donald Trump in the November election.Hogan, at an Axios event, said he will vote for neither Trump nor Joe Biden and would instead seek out a third-party candidate. He said:
      I’m like 70% of the rest of people in America who do not want Joe Biden or Donald Trump to be president, and I’m hoping that there potentially is another alternative.
      He added that he didn’t know yet who that candidate will be. Hogan, one of the most outspoken and only Trump critics in the Republican party, last year said he would support the party’s nominee for president, but at the time said he did not think Trump would be that candidate.Joe Biden will announce in the State of the Union speech that US forces will build a temporary port on the Gaza shoreline in the next few weeks to allow delivery of humanitarian aid on a large scale.“We are not waiting on the Israelis. This is a moment for American leadership,” a senior US official said on Thursday, reflecting growing frustration of what is seen in Washington as Israeli obstruction of road deliveries on a substantial scale.The port will be built by US military engineers operating from ships off the Gaza coast, who will not need to step ashore, US officials said. The aid deliveries will be shipped from the port of Larnaca in Cyprus, which will become the main relief hub. The official said:
      Tonight, the president will announce in his State of the Union address that he has directed the US military to undertake an emergency mission to establish a port in Gaza, working in partnership with like minded countries and humanitarian partners. This port, the main feature of which is a temporary pier, will provide the capacity for hundreds of additional truckloads of assistance each day.
      Biden will also announce the opening of a new land crossing into the occupied and devastated coastal strip. Biden has been fiercely criticised within his own party for the failure to open up Gaza to humanitarian aid, with a famine looming and 30,000 Palestinians dead already since the start of war on 7 October.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said Joe Biden’s State of the Union address tonight will highlight Democratic successes and show the chaos in the House Republican party in stark relief.During his floor remarks reported by CNN, Schumer said Biden will make it clear that “after so much adversity, America’s economy is growing, inflation is slowing, and Democrats’ agenda is delivering.” He said:
      The difference between the parties will be as clear as night and day. Democrats are focused on lowering costs, creating jobs, putting money in people’s pockets. But the hard right, which too often runs the Republican party in the House and now increasingly in the Senate, is consumed by chaos, bullying, and attacking things like women’s freedom of choice.
      Meanwhile, the Republican front-runner for president, Donald Trump, has “made it abundantly clear that he’s not running to make people’s lives better, but rather on airing his personal political grievances,” Schumer added.Joe Biden will deliver the final State of the Union address of his presidential term this evening, giving him an opportunity to tout his accomplishments and pitch his re-election campaign as he prepares for a rematch against Donald Trump in November.Previewing Biden’s State of the Union speech, his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said his remarks would focus on the president’s vision for the nation’s future and his legislative accomplishments.“You’re going to hear the president address how democracy is under attack, how freedoms are certainly under attack,” including women’s reproductive rights and voting rights, Jean-Pierre told MSNBC.Biden’s speech will also highlight his agenda for a potential second term, the White House chief of staff Jeff Zients told NPR. Those include “lowering costs, continuing to make people’s lives better by investing in childcare, eldercare, paid family and medical leave, continued progress on student debt”, he said, adding:
      The president is also going to call for restoring Roe v. Wade and giving women freedom over their healthcare. And he’ll talk about protecting, not taking away, freedoms in other areas, as well as voting rights.
      Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, reportedly pleaded with his party to show “decorum” on Thursday, when Joe Biden comes to the chamber to deliver his State of the Union address.“Decorum is the order of the day,” Johnson said, according to an unnamed Republican who attended a closed-door event on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and was quoted by the Hill.The same site said another unnamed member of Congress said Johnson asked his party to “carry ourselves with good decorum”. A third Republican was quoted as saying:
      He said, ‘Let’s have the appropriate decorum. We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations.
      Last year’s State of the Union saw outbursts from Republicans and responses from Biden that made headlines, most awarding the president the win. Kevin McCarthy, then speaker, also asked his Republican members not to breach decorum. But in a sign of his limited authority, months before he became the first speaker ejected by his own party, such pleas fell on deaf ears. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden’s State of the Union guests include mother whose IVF was canceled and Kate Cox

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      An Alabama mother who saw a second round of IVF canceled after the state supreme court ruled that embryos were children and a Texas mother forced to travel outside her state for a doctor-recommended abortion were due to attend Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday, as guests of the first lady, Jill Biden.The White House said the cases of LaTorya Beasley of Birmingham, Alabama, and Kate Cox, from Dallas, Texas, showed “how the overturning of Roe v Wade has disrupted access to reproductive healthcare for women and families across the country”.Roe v Wade, the US supreme court ruling that guaranteed federal abortion rights, was overturned by the rightwing-dominated court in June 2022.Last month, the Alabama IVF decision caused national uproar. As Democrats seized on a rightwing threat to reproductive rights of the kind that has fueled a string of successful election campaigns, Republicans scrambled to say they supported IVF. On Wednesday the Republican Alabama governor, Kay Ivey, signed a law protecting IVF providers.In a statement, the White House said: “Stories like Kate’s and LaTorya’s should never happen in America. But Republican elected officials want to impose this reality on women nationwide.”Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who nearly died of septic shock when she was denied a medically necessary abortion, is also due to attend.Republicans are on the defensive. At an event hosted by Axios in Washington on Thursday, Byron Donalds, a far-right Florida congressman touted as a vice-presidential pick for Donald Trump, parried repeated questions about whether federal protection was needed but said: “IVF is a procedure many couples use throughout our country.” Donalds also said he supported six-week abortion bans.The head of Donalds’ caucus, Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, also used his State of the Union guest list to highlight reproductive rights as an political issue, inviting Janet Durig, executive director of the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center in Washington DC, described as “one of the hundreds of pro-life centers or churches targeted and vandalised” after the fall of Roe v Wade.State of the Union guest lists are political by definition. Johnson’s list reflected the Republican agenda, highlighting crime (which is down nationwide), the fallout from the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and support for Israel in its war with Hamas.Among Johnson’s guests were two parents of US service members killed in the evacuation of Kabul in 2021; the mother and son of a US-Israeli soldier held hostage by Hamas; and a French-Israeli hostage released by Hamas.Johnson also invited the parents of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter held in Russia; two New York police officers “attacked in January by a mob of illegal immigrants in Times Square”; parents of people killed by a person who is undocumented and by fentanyl poisoning; the widow of Mike Gill, a former Trump administration official killed by a carjacker in Washington; campaigners against trans participation in women’s sports; the Turkish basketball star and campaigner Enes Freedom; and the pastor of Johnson’s Louisiana church.Announcing its own list, the White House said guests were picked “because they personify issues or themes to be addressed by the president in his speech, or they embody the Biden-Harris administration’s policies at work for the American people”.Other guests set to sit with Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff, husband of the vice-president, Kamala Harris, included an oncology nurse and a cancer patient; a gun control advocate from Uvalde, Texas, the scene of an elementary school massacre; the president of the United Auto Workers and a member of that union; and a veteran of Bloody Sunday, the historic civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.The governor of the Gilar River Indian Community in Arizona, a naval commander back from protecting Red Sea shipping against attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen, the women’s health advocate Maria Shriver, and a military spouse were also set to attend.Ulf Kristersson, the prime minister of Sweden, a new Nato ally, accepted an invitation. But two other high-profile international figures turned the Bidens down: Yulia Navalnya, widow of the deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and Olena Zelenska, first lady of Ukraine.Thanks to opposition from Johnson (and Trump), Congress is gridlocked on new aid for Ukraine in its war with Russia. The Washington Post also reported that Zelenska did not want to be associated with Navalnya because her husband once said Crimea was part of Russia, which annexed it from Ukraine in 2014. More

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      Johnson pleads for decorum from Republicans at Biden State of the Union

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      Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House, reportedly pleaded with his party to show “decorum” on Thursday, when Joe Biden comes to the chamber to deliver his State of the Union address.“Decorum is the order of the day,” Johnson said, according to an unnamed Republican who attended a closed-door event on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and was quoted by the Hill.The same site said another unnamed member of Congress said Johnson asked his party to “carry ourselves with good decorum”.A third Republican was quoted as saying, “He said, ‘Let’s have the appropriate decorum. We don’t need to be shrill, you know, we got to avoid that. We need to base things upon policy, upon facts, upon reality of situations.”Last year’s State of the Union saw outbursts from Republicans and responses from Biden that made headlines, most awarding the president the win.Kevin McCarthy, then speaker, also asked his Republican members not to breach decorum. But in a sign of his limited authority, months before he became the first speaker ejected by his own party, such pleas fell on deaf ears.When Biden said Republicans wanted to cut social security and Medicare, many Republicans shouted: “No!”Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – apparently dressed as a Chinese spy balloon – yelled: “You lie! You lie! Liar!”Responding to widespread applause, Biden said: “As we all apparently agree, social security and Medicare are apparently off the books now … We’ve got unanimity!”Greene has form. In March 2022, she and Lauren Boebert, a fellow extremist from Colorado, repeatedly interrupted Biden’s first State of the Union.The two congresswomen tried to start a chant of “Build the wall”, referring to the southern border. Boebert shouted about the deaths of 13 US service members in Afghanistan. She was booed in return.Biden will give his third State of the Union at a key point in an election year, his rematch with Donald Trump all but confirmed, polling showing Trump in the lead.The third Republican who spoke to the Hill said Republicans attending Biden’s speech should let Democrats “do the gaslighting, let them do the blaming. I think the American people know who is responsible for the many worldwide crises that we have.”But a named Republican, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, said decorum would most likely not be maintained.“Will they do it?” Burchett said, of likely boos and catcalls at Biden. “Somebody asked me that earlier and I said, ‘Does the Baptist church got a bus?’ Of course they will because he’s gonna say some very offensive things, he’s gonna attack us.“I think we just need to try to be a little classy. Consider where we’re at, let the other side do that. You know, they did it to Trump, and nobody said boo, but when we do it we’re gonna get made an example of it.”Democrats did boo Trump. The most memorable State of the Union moment from his presidency, though, came in 2020, another election year, and was expressed in actions rather than words.After Trump finished speaking, Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, stood behind him and theatrically ripped up his speech. More

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      ‘Cult of authoritarian personality’: Jamie Raskin excoriates Republican party

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      The Republican party under Donald Trump has become “a cult of authoritarian personality in league with autocrats and kleptocrats and dictators”, the prominent Democrat Jamie Raskin said, as the former US president saw off Nikki Haley, his last rival for the presidential nomination, and finally won the support of Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate.Raskin was a House manager in Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting the attack on Congress on 6 January 2021. After Senate Republicans ensured Trump escaped conviction, Raskin sat on the House committee that investigated January 6.“The next election wasn’t much on my mind when we were reeling from the violence and the catastrophe of January 6,” Raskin told MSNBC, referring to the deadly riot Trump stoked in an attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.“But I think my assumption was that of the constitution itself, which is that someone who participates in an insurrection against the union should never be allowed to hold office again.“It is disgraceful that a great political party, much less Abraham Lincoln’s [Republican] party, a party of liberty and union, should be reduced to a cult of authoritarian personality in league with autocrats and kleptocrats and dictators all over the world.”Of 91 criminal charges now faced by Trump, four federal and 13 state charges concern attempted election subversion. The others arise from retention of classified information (40, federal) and for hush-money payments to an adult film star (34, state).Trump has also been handed multimillion-dollar fines in civil cases over his businesses and a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”, and subjected to attempts to remove him from the ballot for inciting an insurrection. Regardless, he has dominated the Republican primary.This week, the US supreme court rejected attempts to keep Trump off the ballot. In criminal court, meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are playing for time, seeking to fend off judgment until Trump can return to power and have cases dismissed.On Wednesday, Haley, the former South Carolina governor, bowed to the inevitable and ended her presidential campaign, if without endorsing Trump.Raskin said: “What we’ve seen in this election, and we’ll have to follow what happens with Nikki Haley, is the Republicans break but they can’t bend. In other words, there’s no ability to accommodate other views because everybody has to follow Donald Trump, like a monarch.”The Marylander also saluted “Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, the Lincoln Project and all of the Republicans who are standing up for the constitution” by opposing Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCheney, from Wyoming, and Kinzinger, from Illinois, were the only Republicans on the January 6 committee. Kinzinger retired. Cheney lost her seat.The daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney and a stringent conservative, Liz Cheney has resisted calls to run against Trump as a Republican or on a third-party ticket. On Wednesday, she announced a new political action committee, The Great Task.Named for a phrase in the Gettysburg Address, the 1863 Lincoln speech that became a foundational American text, the group said it would support candidates for office “focused on reverence for the rule of law, respect for our constitution, and a recognition that all citizens have a responsibility to put their duty to the country above partisanship”.“The GOP has chosen,” Cheney said. “They will nominate a man who attempted to overturn an election and seize power. We have eight months to save our republic and ensure Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office again. Join me in the fight for our nation’s freedom.” More