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      ‘He can help Trump win’: US groups take on RFK Jr after No Labels stands down

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      Celebrating the demise of No Labels as a third-party presidential election threat, two advocacy groups who mobilised against it have said they would now turn their sights on Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent run for the White House.Though it is hard to make solid predictions, a high-profile third-party run in 2024 unnerves both Republicans and Democrats who fear it might siphon off their votes. But the nervousness is especially pronounced among supporters of Joe Biden, who worry such a campaign could split the center and left and allow Donald Trump and his highly motivated rightwing base to win a return to the Oval Office.“Just as we organised against No Labels we’re going to organise against Robert Kennedy Jr,” Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, told reporters a day after No Labels said it would not field a candidate against Biden and Trump in November.Kennedy – an environmental attorney, conspiracy theorist and member of a famous political family – is running as an independent, gaining ballot access and polling in double figures.“We’re going to let folks know he can’t win,” Epting said, “but he can help Trump win” by taking votes from Biden.“We’re going to let folks know that he said he supported abortion bans. We’re going to let folks know that his vice-presidential pick [Nicole Shanahan, an attorney] calls IVF ‘one of the biggest lies’ and we’re going to let folks know that his dark money Super Pac is being funded by Trump donors.“There’s a lot we’re gonna let folks know. This victory against No Labels is just the start. There is a lot of work that we have to do.”No Labels said on Thursday it had not been able to find a candidate to run against Biden and Trump.On Friday Matthew Bennett, of Third Way, said No Labels was helped on its way out by a coalition put together by his centre-left group and MoveOn, an effort “from the left all the way to the centre-right and the Never Trump movement”.But, Bennett said, “The challenges ahead of us are in some ways even tougher.“Kennedy cannot be talked out of this race. He is going to have a lot of money and he’s not subject to reason. So we’re going to have to make clear that voters understand who this guy is, and that is not his father.”Kennedy is the son of the former US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy and the nephew of the 35th president, John F Kennedy.But, Bennett said, the current Kennedy “is not a safe place to park your vote if you’re dissatisfied with something that [Biden] is doing. This guy’s dangerous and voting for him is tantamount to voting for Trump. It’s also true of the other third-party candidates, Jill Stein [the Green nominee] and anybody else who runs.”Bennett said No Labels had posed a danger by planning to attack Biden from the political centre, even though Biden, as a Washington dealmaker of 50 years standing, was “kind of the platonic ideal of a No Labels candidate”.Kennedy, Bennett said, “is coming from some kind of weirdo fringe … and so it is harder to understand who his coalition is. However, our view is that anyone who divides the anti-Trump coalition is dangerous.”The Biden campaign has set up a team to combat Kennedy. But, Epting said, “It is incredibly important that we get to work in campaigning against Robert Kennedy … and ensure that the choices in November are clear to voters. It is that whether we like it or not … we live in a two-party system and there’s only two candidates that can win this presidential election. Donald Trump or Joe Biden.“Our job is to make that very clear to voters and in terms of resources … to ensure that we re-elect President Biden and an usher in a Democratic House and Senate. We have a $32m program to do that and we will be driving … We’ve got a great team that we assigned to this No Labels work. We’re going to reassign them to our Robert Kennedy work.”Epting and Bennett were asked what they would do to woo “the Kennedy curious”, voters who might be won back, perhaps by less brusque tactics than those employed by Hillary Clinton, who said this week anyone dissatisfied with a Biden-Trump rematch should “get over yourself”.“We’re not going to shame people into voting for Joe Biden,” Epting said. “That is not the pathway to get us out of this quagmire.“Really, it’s making a strategic case to voters, [saying], ‘We understand your grievances, we hear them and yet we live in a two-party presidential system.’ So the impact of your vote … will result in one of two possible worlds. A world in which Donald Trump is president, and he is dismantling our democracy even further. He is instituting a national abortion ban. He is setting up migrant camps, etc.“Or a world in which Joe Biden continues to be in the Oval Office and we’re able to continue to campaign, to push him to enact all the policies that we have dreamed up to strengthen our democracy: to go further around gun violence prevention reform, to protect abortion rights, to continue to create green new jobs and invest in our economy, to continue to tax the rich.”Epting promised to ask “tough questions” of Kennedy on subjects such as abortion, on which he supported a 15-week ban before quickly reversing.“We need to get [his responses] on camera and we need to share what we get … with all the voters that we can, especially in battleground states and districts,” Epting said.Asked about previous Democratic defeats involving third-party candidates, Bennett said that as “a veteran of the [Al] Gore campaign” of 2000, “losing two elections in my professional life to third-party candidates is incredibly galling, and I have made it my mission that we won’t lose three.”That was also a reference to 2016, when Jill Stein took votes from Clinton as Trump won.Bennett said: “I think everybody in Democratic politics … ignored Jill Stein in 2016 because we did not think that she posed a threat, just as the Gore campaign didn’t think Ralph Nader posed a threat in 2000.“We’re simply not going to make that mistake again.” More

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      Trump’s bizarre, vindictive incoherence has to be heard in full to be believed

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      Donald Trump’s speeches on the 2024 campaign trail so far have been focused on a laundry list of complaints, largely personal, and an increasingly menacing tone.He’s on the campaign trail less these days than he was in previous cycles – and less than you’d expect from a guy with dedicated superfans who brags about the size of his crowds every chance he gets. But when he has held rallies, he speaks in dark, dehumanizing terms about migrants, promising to vanquish people crossing the border. He rails about the legal battles he faces and how they’re a sign he’s winning, actually. He tells lies and invents fictions. He calls his opponent a threat to democracy and claims this election could be the last one.Trump’s tone, as many have noted, is decidedly more vengeful this time around, as he seeks to reclaim the White House after a bruising loss that he insists was a steal. This alone is a cause for concern, foreshadowing what the Trump presidency redux could look like. But he’s also, quite frequently, rambling and incoherent, running off on tangents that would grab headlines for their oddness should any other candidate say them.Journalists rightly chose not to broadcast Trump’s entire speeches after 2016, believing that the free coverage helped boost the former president and spread lies unchecked. But now there’s the possibility that stories about his speeches often make his ideas appear more cogent than they are – making the case that, this time around, people should hear the full speeches to understand how Trump would govern again.Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories.Curiously, Trump tucks the most tangible policy implications in at the end. His speeches often finish with a rundown of what his second term in office could bring, in a meditation-like recitation the New York Times recently compared to a sermon. Since these policies could become reality, here’s a few of those ideas:
      Instituting the death penalty for drug dealers.
      Creating the “Trump Reciprocal Trade Act”: “If China or any other country makes us pay 100% or 200% tariff, which they do, we will make them pay a reciprocal tariff of 100% or 200%. In other words, you screw us and we’ll screw you.”
      Indemnifying all police officers and law enforcement officials.
      Rebuilding cities and taking over Washington DC, where, he said in a recent speech, there are “beautiful columns” put together “through force of will” because there were no “Caterpillar tractors” and now those columns have graffiti on them.
      Issuing an executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.
      Moving to one-day voting with paper ballots and voter ID.
      This conclusion is the most straightforward part of a Trump speech and is typically the extent of what a candidate for office would say on the campaign trail, perhaps with some personal storytelling or mild joking added in.But it’s also often the shortest part.Trump’s tangents aren’t new, nor is Trump’s penchant for elevating baseless ideas that most other presidential candidates wouldn’t, like his promotion of injecting bleach during the pandemic.But in a presidential race among two old men that’s often focused on the age of the one who’s slightly older, these campaign trail antics shed light on Trump’s mental acuity, even if people tend to characterize them differently than Joe Biden’s. While Biden’s gaffes elicit serious scrutiny, as writers in the New Yorker and the New York Times recently noted, we’ve seemingly become inured to Trump’s brand of speaking, either skimming over it or giving him leeway because this has always been his shtick.Trump, like Biden, has confused names of world leaders (but then claims it’s on purpose). He has also stumbled and slurred his words. But beyond that, Trump’s can take a different turn. Trump has described using an “iron dome” missile defense system as “ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.”These tangents can be part of a tirade, or they can be what one can only describe as complete nonsense.During this week’s Wisconsin speech, which was more coherent than usual, Trump pulled out a few frequent refrains: comparing himself, incorrectly, to Al Capone, saying he was indicted more than the notorious gangster; making fun of the Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis’s first name (“It’s spelled fanny like your ass, right? Fanny. But when she became DA, she decided to add a little French, a little fancy”).View image in fullscreenHe made fun of Biden’s golfing game, miming how Biden golfs, perhaps a ding back at Biden for poking Trump about his golf game. Later, he called Biden a “lost soul” and lamented that he gets to sit at the president’s desk. “Can you imagine him sitting at the Resolute Desk? What a great desk,” Trump said.One muddled addition in Wisconsin involved squatters’ rights, a hot topic related to immigration now: “If you have illegal aliens invading your home, we will deport you,” presumably meaning the migrant would be deported instead of the homeowner. He wanted to create a federal taskforce to end squatting, he said.“Sounds like a little bit of a weird topic but it’s not, it’s a very bad thing,” he said.These half-cocked remarks aren’t new; they are a feature of who Trump is and how he communicates that to the public, and that’s key to understanding how he is as a leader.The New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie described it as “something akin to the soft bigotry of low expectations”, whereby no one expected him to behave in an orderly fashion or communicate well.Some of these bizarre asides are best seen in full, like this one about Biden at the beach in Trump’s Georgia response to the State of the Union:“Somebody said he looks great in a bathing suit, right? And you know, when he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know sand is heavy, they figured three solid ounces per foot, but sand is a little heavy, and he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like – Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that any more, but Cary Grant at 81 or 82, going on 100. This guy, he’s 81, going on 100. Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit, either. And he was pretty good-looking, right?”Or another Hollywood-related bop, inspired by a rant about Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s romantic relationship:“It’s a magnificent love story, like Gone With the Wind. You know Gone With the Wind, you’re not allowed to watch it any more. You know that, right? It’s politically incorrect to watch Gone With the Wind. They have a list. What were the greatest movies ever made? Well, Gone With the Wind is usually number one or two or three. And then they have another list you’re not allowed to watch any more, Gone With the Wind. You tell me, is our country screwed up?”He still claims to have “done more for Black people than any president other than Abraham Lincoln” and also now says he’s being persecuted more than Lincoln and Andrew Jackson:“All my life you’ve heard of Andrew Jackson, he was actually a great general and a very good president. They say that he was persecuted as president more than anybody else, second was Abraham Lincoln. This is just what they said. This is in the history books. They were brutal, Andrew Jackson’s wife actually died over it.”You not only see the truly bizarre nature of his speeches when viewing them in full, but you see the sheer breadth of his menace and animus toward those who disagree with him.His comments especially toward migrants have grown more dehumanizing. He has said they are “poisoning the blood” of the US – a nod at Great Replacement Theory, the far-right conspiracy that the left is orchestrating migration to replace white people. Trump claimed the people coming in were “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have”. He has repeatedly called migrants “animals”.View image in fullscreen“Democrats said please don’t call them ‘animals’. I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals,” he said during a speech in Michigan this week.“In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion,” he said during his March appearance in Ohio. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. “These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it,” he said.And he has turned more authoritarian in his language, saying he would be a “dictator on day one” but then later said it would only be for a day. He’s called his political enemies “vermin”: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he said in New Hampshire in late 2023.At a speech in March in Ohio about the US auto industry he claimed there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost, which some interpreted as him claiming there would be violence if he loses the election.Trump’s campaign said later that he meant the comment to be specific to the auto industry, but now the former president has started saying Biden created a “border bloodbath” and the Republican National Committee created a website to that effect as well.It’s tempting to find a coherent line of attack in Trump speeches to try to distill the meaning of a rambling story. And it’s sometimes hard to even figure out the full context of what he’s saying, either in text or subtext and perhaps by design, like the “bloodbath” comment or him saying there wouldn’t be another election if he doesn’t win this one.But it’s only in seeing the full breadth of the 2024 Trump speech that one can truly understand what kind of president he could become if he won the election.“It’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself,” Susan B Glasser wrote in the New Yorker. “Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times.”But if you ask Trump himself, these are just examples that Trump is smart, he says.“The fake news will say, ‘Oh, he goes from subject to subject.’ No, you have to be very smart to do that. You got to be very smart. You know what it is? It’s called spot-checking. You’re thinking about something when you’re talking about something else, and then you get back to the original. And they go, ‘Holy shit. Did you see what he did?’ It’s called intelligence.” More

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      Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson says he will not repeat Joe Biden endorsement

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      The wrestler turned action star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson dealt a blow to Joe Biden, saying he would not repeat his endorsement of the president in his looming rematch with Donald Trump.Johnson endorsed Biden in his first contest with Trump four years ago, saluting the former vice-president and senator for his “compassion, heart, drive and soul”.But in an interview with Fox News on Friday, Johnson said: “Am I going to do that again this year? That answer’s no. I realise now going into this election, I will not do that.”Long the subject of rumours about his own political ambitions, Johnson reportedly fielded an approach from No Labels, the centrist group that now says it will not run a candidate against Biden and Trump.Johnson has not disavowed talk of running for office. In 2021, after a poll showed public support, he said: “I don’t think our Founding Fathers EVER envisioned a six-four, bald, tattooed, half-Black, half-Samoan, tequila drinking, pick-up truck driving, fanny pack-wearing guy joining their club – but if it ever happens it’d be my honour to serve you, the people.”Last year, he said the same poll led “the parties” to his door.“That was an interesting poll that happened and I was really moved by that,” Johnson told a podcast. “I was really blown away and I was really honoured. I’ll share this little bit with you: at the end of the year in 2022, I got a visit from the parties asking me if I was going to run, and if I could run.“It was a big deal, and it came out of the blue. It was one after the other, and they brought up that poll, and they also brought up their own deep-dive research that would prove that should I ever go down that road [I’d be a real contender]. It was all very surreal because that’s never been my goal. My goal has never been to be in politics. As a matter of fact, there’s a lot about politics that I hate.”Johnson overcame that hatred in September 2020, when he endorsed Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris.“You guys are both experienced to lead, you’ve done great things,” Johnson said.“Joe, you’ve had such an incredible career, and you’ve led with such great compassion, heart, drive, and soul … Kamala, you have been a district attorney, a state attorney, a US senator. You are smart and tough. I have seen you in those hearings.”Biden beat Trump convincingly but four years on, Johnson told Fox News: “Am I happy with the state of America right now? Well, that answer’s no. Do I believe we’re gonna get better? I believe in that – I’m an optimistic guy. And I believe we can do better.“The endorsement that I made years ago with Biden was what I thought was the best decision for me at that time. I thought back then, when we talked about, ‘Hey, you know, I’m in this position where I have some influence,’ and it was my job then … to exercise my influence and share … who I’m going to endorse.”Johnson also said his “goal is to bring this country together” but said he would “keep my politics to myself”.“It is between me and the ballot box,” he said. “Like a lot of us out there, not trusting of all politicians, I do trust the American people and whoever they vote for that is my president and who I will support 100%.” More

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      Should Biden be worried about losing Black voters to Trump? – podcast

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      Several recent polls have suggested that Donald Trump may be on course to receive more support from Black voters than any Republican presidential nominee in history. Some have argued the polling isn’t representative enough.
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the historian and author Leah Wright Rigueur about whether or not Trump can really win over more Black voters than Joe Biden can afford to lose. Or should his main concern be those disaffected voters who don’t turn to Trump, but instead don’t turn out at all, choosing to stay home?

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      Almost 50,000 Wisconsin voters just told Biden to stop the Gaza war. Will he listen? | Malaika Jabali

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      This Tuesday, more than 48,000 people defied cold, rainy weather to register protest votes in the Wisconsin Democratic primary against the Biden administration’s unrelenting support for Israel’s war on Gaza.In 2020, Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin by an excruciatingly narrow margin of victory of about 21,000 votes. As of Wednesday afternoon, Wisconsin’s “uninstructed” vote tally – the equivalent of the “uncommitted” campaign that Arab Americans launched in Michigan – was 48,093 votes, more than twice Biden’s 2020 win margin.The protest vote in Wisconsin has made clear that this campaign is bigger than Biden. The many people calling for a ceasefire aren’t merely swing voters or bitter castoffs who have long left the party. Many involved in the uncommitted campaigns have, until now, been committed Democrats. But they fear a critical mass of voters may permanently leave the Democratic party if Biden and other leaders don’t implement a ceasefire in Gaza, and quickly. For some voters, even that may be too little, too late.Francesca Hong worked in hospitality before she became a Wisconsin state representative in 2020. “I’ve always voted for Democrats, since I was eligible to vote when I was 18,” she told me a day after the Wisconsin primary.Hong was one of the first elected officials to endorse the “uninstructed” campaign and has been critical of Biden financing the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians. Although the president has promised humanitarian aid to Gaza – including in a statement on Tuesday in the wake of an Israeli strike that killed seven aid workers – he continues to fund Israel’s weapons. At least twice, Biden has bypassed Congress to do so, while nearly 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in just six months in Israel’s relentless attacks.Hong, a woman of color from a working-class, immigrant family with no political background, rose through the ranks in the restaurant industry to become an executive chef. A materialized version of the American dream, she is precisely the sort of person that the Democratic party purports to represent. Yet she said she sometimes feels betrayed and “dismissed” by the party: “This administration is prioritizing some lives over others, and leaders of color are having to go back to their communities with the ‘lesser of two evils’, again.”People “seeing a genocide unfold on social media on their phones has made them even more disillusioned about the political process”, Hong said. “I think that in turn makes them less likely to vote for Democrats.” They feel “betrayed by a party and an administration that they thought was supposed to stand for something different, was supposed to stand for democracy and justice,” she added.Hong, the only Asian American in the Wisconsin state legislature, hopes that Tuesday’s results will get state Democratic leaders to listen to their party’s progressive faction, as party leaders throughout the country continue to appeal to conservatives.Wisconsin state representatives like Ryan Clancy expressed frustration that the party continues to “court imaginary voters”, referencing the conservative voters Democratic leaders believe they can win over.The party’s strategy seems to be that if it is “just moderate enough or timid enough, that somehow, magically, these largely nonexistent Republican [swing] voters will cross over the aisle and vote with them”, Clancy told me a day before the primary.While insurgent campaigns against the Democratic “establishment” are getting less attention this election season, a tectonic shift appears to be happening whether the party wants to acknowledge it or not. The anti-war vote, and an inadequate response to that movement at multiple levels of government beyond the White House, could permanently drive away some of the party’s base: progressive and younger voters. Many progressive voters have no interest in showing up purely to vote against Trump; unless they have a Democrat they really believe in, they’ll simply stay home.Clancy has been loyal to the Democratic party since 2011 when he got involved in politics as a Democratic delegate. He has noticed a shift in voters from younger generations, who largely voted for Biden in 2020 before becoming more repelled by the Democratic party’s politics. “I’m hearing [from] a ton of people, especially younger folks – I’m a father of five, three of my kids are now at voting age – [who] cannot imagine bringing themselves to vote for somebody who is complicit in genocide,” he said.Clancy thinks that Biden is “way out of step with both his own party and Americans generally”. Sixty-eight percent of likely voters under 45, regardless of party, said they support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, while 77% of Democrats support it, according to a February survey by Data for Progress. Even a majority of Republicans favor a ceasefire, according to an Institute for Social Policy and Understanding poll of religious groups in February.Democrats, according to Gallup, are “in a weaker position than they have been in any recent election year”, as independents continue to outnumber those who consider themselves either Democrats or Republicans. While the party may scoff at progressives, they can’t afford to lose any more of those votes, especially in critical swing states where victories can be decided by a fraction of a percent.“Nobody wants fascism in November,” Hong shared. And that’s precisely why Democrats in swing states urge Biden to shift course in Gaza if they want any chance to win the White House, this election season and beyond.
      Malaika Jabali is a 2024 New America fellow, journalist and author of It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: Why It’s Time to Break Up and How to Move On More

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      Trump documents case faces further delay due to special counsel confrontation with Florida judge – live

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      A confrontation between special counsel Jack Smith and judge Aileen Cannon could further delay Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges related to unlawfully possessing classified documents, the Washington Post reports.At issue is the possibility that Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020 and who has been criticized for decisions that have slowed down the progress of the case, agrees that the former president is immune from prosecution, under a federal law dealing with presidential records.Late yesterday, Smith signaled in a filing his strong disagreement with the argument, and that he would appeal to a higher court if necessary. That could further delay the start of the trial, potentially pushing it past the November presidential election.Here’s more on that, from the Post:
      Special counsel Jack Smith warned the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case that she is pursuing a legal premise that “is wrong” and said he would probably appeal to a higher court if she rules that a federal records law can protect the former president from prosecution.
      In a near-midnight legal filing, Smith’s office pushed back hard against an unusual instruction from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — one that veteran national security lawyers and former judges have said badly misinterprets the Presidential Records Act and laws related to classified documents.
      Smith’s filing represents the most stark and high-stakes confrontation yet between the judge and the prosecutor, illustrating the extent to which a ruling by Cannon that legitimizes the PRA as a defense could eviscerate the historic case. It sets up the possibility that a government appeal of such a ruling could delay the trial well beyond November’s presidential election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
      Last month, Cannon ordered defense lawyers and prosecutors in the case to submit hypothetical jury instructions based on two different, and very much contested, readings of the PRA.
      In response, Smith said Cannon was pursuing a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” that the law somehow overrides Section 793 of the Espionage Act, which Trump is accused of violating by stashing hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, after his presidency ended.
      “That legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction for Section 793 that reflects that premise would distort the trial,” Smith wrote. The Presidential Records Act, he said, “should not play any role at trial at all.”
      Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as likely deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.Here’s what else happened:
      Jack Smith reportedly strongly objected to arguments judge Aileen Cannon is entertaining that Trump is immune from prosecution in the classified documents case, which potentially delay his trial.
      Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have talked to the former president.
      Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.
      Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story.
      Two brothers pleaded guilty to an insider trading charge connected to Trump’s media company.
      Donald Trump and the Republican Party say they raised more than $65.6m in March, the AP reports.Trump and the Republican National Committee closed out the month with $93.1m in their campaign accounts. That’s a significant increase as they try to catch up to the fundraising of Joe Biden and the Democrats.Biden and the Democratic National Committee haven’t released their fundraising numbers for March. But their political operation said they brought in $53m in February and closed that month with $155m cash on hand.Earlier today, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a press release: “Our campaign is making early investments to connect directly with voters on the issues that will define this election and to build the infrastructure we need to win.“The difference between our ground game and Donald Trump’s nonexistent presence in the battleground states couldn’t be more clear – and the failing Trump campaign and the RNC can’t get this time back.”A confrontation between special counsel Jack Smith and judge Aileen Cannon could further delay Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges related to unlawfully possessing classified documents, the Washington Post reports.At issue is the possibility that Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020 and who has been criticized for decisions that have slowed down the progress of the case, agrees that the former president is immune from prosecution, under a federal law dealing with presidential records.Late yesterday, Smith signaled in a filing his strong disagreement with the argument, and that he would appeal to a higher court if necessary. That could further delay the start of the trial, potentially pushing it past the November presidential election.Here’s more on that, from the Post:
      Special counsel Jack Smith warned the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case that she is pursuing a legal premise that “is wrong” and said he would probably appeal to a higher court if she rules that a federal records law can protect the former president from prosecution.
      In a near-midnight legal filing, Smith’s office pushed back hard against an unusual instruction from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — one that veteran national security lawyers and former judges have said badly misinterprets the Presidential Records Act and laws related to classified documents.
      Smith’s filing represents the most stark and high-stakes confrontation yet between the judge and the prosecutor, illustrating the extent to which a ruling by Cannon that legitimizes the PRA as a defense could eviscerate the historic case. It sets up the possibility that a government appeal of such a ruling could delay the trial well beyond November’s presidential election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
      Last month, Cannon ordered defense lawyers and prosecutors in the case to submit hypothetical jury instructions based on two different, and very much contested, readings of the PRA.
      In response, Smith said Cannon was pursuing a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” that the law somehow overrides Section 793 of the Espionage Act, which Trump is accused of violating by stashing hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, after his presidency ended.
      “That legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction for Section 793 that reflects that premise would distort the trial,” Smith wrote. The Presidential Records Act, he said, “should not play any role at trial at all.”
      Donald Trump is well on his way to winning the Republican presidential nomination, after last night’s victories in four states’ primaries. The same can be said for Joe Biden, though the president is also dealing with a rebellion from groups upset at his support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Here’s more about what yesterday’s primary results tell us about the contours of the presidential race, from the Guardian’s Joan E Greve and Léonie Chao-Fong:Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump won primary elections in four states, including the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.Hundreds of delegates were up for grabs in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin on Tuesday, and Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to win their respective nominations. But the turnout could provide more clues about the general election in November.Voters also had a chance to register their discontent with the nominees. Connecticut and Rhode Island gave voters the opportunity to vote “uncommitted” in the primary, while Wisconsin offered a similar option of “uninstructed delegation”. Wisconsin Democrats will be closely watching the turnout for “uninstructed delegation” after progressive activists launched a campaign encouraging voters to withhold support from the US president to protest against his handling of the war in Gaza.The Listen to Wisconsin campaign, based on similar efforts in states like Michigan and Minnesota, has attracted support from some rank-and-file union members as well as an influential group of low-wage and immigrant workers in the state.There’s quite the swirl of legal entanglements surrounding Donald Trump’s foray into the media world. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that the former president has sued two former contestants from The Apprentice who became co-founders of Trump Media:Donald Trump sued two former contestants on The Apprentice, his hit NBC reality show, who became co-founders of Trump Media and Technology Group, claiming they failed to set up the venture properly and should not get promised stock worth more than $400m.Trump fronted The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a job at the Trump Organization, from 2004 to 2015. The show coined Trump’s catchphrase, “You’re fired!”, though he ended up fired himself, after entering Republican presidential politics and making racist comments about Mexicans.Wesley Moss and Andrew Litinsky met as Apprentice contestants in 2004. In 2021, after Trump was thrown off major social media platforms for inciting the January 6 Capitol attack, as he sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, the two men pitched Trump on starting his own platform, which became Truth Social.“This was a phenomenal opportunity for Moss and Litinsky,” said the suit filed by Trump in Florida in late March and first reported by Bloomberg News on Tuesday.Though the two men were “riding President Trump’s coattails”, the suit said, “all [they] needed to do was diligently, faithfully and loyally execute on a short-term plan: get TMTG’s corporate governance established, get Truth Social ready to launch, and find a suitable special purpose acquisition company to take the new company public and access capital to advance TMTG’s business plan”.Reuters reports that two men have entered guilty pleas today to an insider trading scheme connected to Donald Trump’s media company.Here’s more, from Reuters:
      Two men pleaded guilty on Wednesday to insider trading in securities in the company that ultimately took Donald Trump’s media business public.
      Michael Shvartsman, 53, head of Miami-based venture capital firm Rocket One Capital, and his brother Gerald Shvartsman, 46, each pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud before Lewis Liman, the US district judge, in Manhattan.
      Rocket One’s chief investment officer, Bruce Garelick, is scheduled to face trial on related charges on 29 April.
      Prosecutors charged the trio last year with illegally trading on inside information about Trump Media & Technology Group’s (TMTG) plan to go public through a merger with a blank-check company. TMTG operates Truth Social, Trump’s main social media platform.
      Prosecutors said the trio signed confidentiality agreements in June 2021 when they were approached to become early investors in Digital World Acquisition, the blank-check company. The agreements required them to keep information they learned confidential and not trade the company’s securities in the open market, prosecutors said.
      After hearing the company was in merger talks with TMTG, prosecutors said the trio tipped others and bought Digital World securities, selling them after the deal was announced on 20 October 2021, to make a total of $22m in illegal profit.
      Speaking of Democrats and the Senate, the party is already expected to have a difficult time keeping their majority in Congress’s upper chamber in the November elections.But one prominent political forecaster thinks the job is even more difficult than it appears. The Cook Political Report has moved the Nevada Senate seat represented by Jacky Rosen into its “toss up” column, from “lean Democratic”.“We are moving this race because of the unique forces at play in Nevada. A combination of a newer electorate that Rosen must win over, Biden’s lagging numbers and the unique post-COVID economic hangover in Nevada make this race a Toss Up,” said Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate and governors editor.Besides Nevada, which has voted Democratic in recent presidential elections but has seen the GOP make inroads lately, Democrats are defending Senate seats representing Ohio and Montana, both red states. The outcome of those races will likely decide Senate control, in addition to whether or not Joe Biden wins re-election.Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee, did not quite tell NBC they agreed with growing calls for the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire, so Joe Biden can nominate a younger liberal replacement. But they nearly did.“I’m very respectful of Justice Sotomayor,” Blumenthal said. “I have great admiration for her. But I think she really has to weigh the competing factors. We should learn a lesson. And it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying – graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included.”That lesson – a harsh one for anyone to contemplate – springs from the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the great liberal justice who declined to retire in 2014, when she was 81 and when Democrats held the White House and the Senate, then died in September 2020, at 87 and with Republicans in control.That allowed Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell to ram through a hardline replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, and tilt the court firmly right, 6-3.That court has issued major rulings including removing the federal right to abortion, striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions and loosening gun rights. Progressives fear more such rulings to come.Sotomayor is 69 and suffers from diabetes. She recently remarked on feeling “tired” while “working harder than I ever had”.Blumenthal said Sotomayor was “a highly accomplished and, obviously, fully functioning justice right now. Justices have to make their personal decisions about their health, and their level of energy, but also to keep in mind the larger national and public interest in making sure that the court looks and thinks like America.”Whitehouse said he was “not joining any calls” for Sotomayor to step down. But he also offered a stark warning: “Run it to 7-2 and you go from a captured court to a full Maga court. Certainly I think if Justice Ginsburg had it to do over again, she might have re-thought her confidence in her own health.”Sotomayor did not comment. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, told NBC: “President Biden believes that decisions to retire from the supreme court should be made by the justices themselves and no one else.”Voters in Oklahoma have kicked out a local official who has ties to white nationalist groups.The Guardian’s Ed Helmore reports:Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, have decisively kicked out a city council member with a history of ties to white nationalist groups from the elected body almost a year after he was admitted.Judd Blevins lost his position as Enid’s ward 1 council member, according to Oklahoma’s state election board. The move comes months after Blevin was shown to have attended a deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and was later shown to have led an Oklahoma chapter of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.Blevins denied he was or ever had been a white supremacist, and said he was motivated by “the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016”.A small group of 36 Blevins supporters had won him election last year, but he lost Tuesday’s vote to fellow Republican candidate Cheryl Patterson who had campaigned on a platform of returning Enid to “normalcy” and appears to have defeated Blevins by a 20-point margin, or 268 votes.For the full story, click here:In a new interview on Jimmy Fallon, Hillary Clinton told voters who are upset over Joe Biden and Donald Trump being the two presidential choices to “get over yourself”.Clinton, who ran against Trump in 2016, said:
      “It’s kind of like, one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people. And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.”
      She went on to add:
      “I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice. Really, I don’t understand it … Hopefully, people will realize what’s at stake because it’s an existential question. What kind of country we’re going to have? What kind of democracy we’re going to have. People who blow that off are not paying attention because it’s not like Trump, his enablers, his empowerers, his allies are not telling us what they want to do. I mean, they’re pretty clear about what kind of country they want.”
      Sherrod Brown’s campaign is celebrating a strong fundraising display, as the leftwing Democrat gears up for his Ohio re-election fight with the Trump-endorsed Republican Bernie Moreno, one of a number of contests expected to decide control of the Senate later this year.Friends of Sherrod Brown, the three-term senator’s principal campaign committee, says it raised more than $12m in the first quarter of the year.Rachel Petri, campaign manager for the group, said: “While Sherrod’s opponent makes it clear he’s only out for himself and is using his millions to try to buy Ohio’s Senate seat, Sherrod has unprecedented grassroots support behind his reelection campaign.“Sherrod and Connie [Schultz, the senator’s wife] are thankful to every member of this movement working to send Sherrod back to the Senate to continue fighting for Ohioans and the dignity of work.”Moreno made his millions in cars, then made his bones in Donald Trump’s Republican party by moving from the establishment to the populist right. His victory in the primary was not without its surprises. His campaign trail rhetoric is not without its questionable claims. Some further reading follows…Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.Here’s what else is going on:
      Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have spoken to the former president.
      Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.
      Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story. More

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      Far-right podcaster prompts Nebraska move to change electoral system

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      The power of the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk was illustrated when his tweet prompted the governor of Nebraska to support a bill to change the state’s system for presidential elections in order to deny Democrats a single electoral vote that could decide the presidency later this year.“Nebraskans should call their legislators and their governor to demand their state stop pointlessly giving strength to their political enemies,” Kirk wrote.Jim Pillen acted soon after.Nebraska has five electoral college votes. Since 1991, it has split them. Two go to the candidate with most votes statewide, the others to the winners of three electoral districts. Though the state skews heavily Republican, it gave Democrats one electoral vote in 2008 and 2020.This year, Joe Biden could lose Arizona, Georgia and Nevada to Donald Trump but win the electoral college 270-268 if he won Nebraska’s second district again. All five Nebraska votes going to Trump would produce a 269-269 tie, throwing the election to the US House, where Republicans control more state delegations and would thus pick the winner.On Tuesday, Kirk posited that scenario and said: “Despite [Nebraska] being one of the most Republican states … thanks to this system, Omaha’s electoral vote leans blue … [and Biden is] likely to win it again this year.“California would never do this. New York would never do this. And as long as that’s the case, neither should we. This is completely fixable. Nebraska’s legislature can act to make sure their state’s electoral votes go towards electing the candidate the VAST majority of Nebraskans prefer.“There’s already a bill ready to go – LB764. All Nebraska has to do is put it up for a vote. As I write this, the Nebraska legislature is still in session … call @TeamPillen and let him know you want this fixed.”Kirk included a phone number. As noted by Semafor, a little over five hours later the Nebraska governor issued a statement “in response to a callout for his support”.“I am a strong supporter of Senator [Loren] Lippincott’s winner-takes-all bill and have been from the start,” Pillen said. “It would bring Nebraska into line with 48 of our fellow states, better reflect the founders’ intent, and ensure our state speaks with one unified voice in presidential elections.”The only other state to allow for split electoral college votes is Maine.Pillen said: “I call upon fellow Republicans in the legislature to pass this bill to my desk so I can sign it into law.”Not long after that, Donald Trump saluted what he called “a very smart letter”.The Nebraska legislative session ends this month. Democrats said they were ready to block attempts to pass LB764.“The Nebraska Democratic party is watching this bill closely and still believes we have the votes to stop the Republicans from removing a fair electoral system that represents voters,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state chair, told Semafor.“The only reason Governor Pillen sent a release today is the extremist Charlie Kirk sent a tweet that, of course, our governor jumped up to respond to.”Kirk, 30, is a co-founder of Turning Point USA, a youth-oriented fundraising juggernaut, and an influential rightwing podcaster. A dedicated controversialist, he recently made waves by claiming “birth control really screws up female brains”.On Wednesday, Kirk tweeted footage of pundits discussing his Nebraska gambit, writing: “MSNBC is panicking about Nebraska. BOOM!” More

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      Biden and Trump sweep four primaries including battleground state Wisconsin

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      Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump won primary elections in four states, including the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.Hundreds of delegates were up for grabs in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin on Tuesday, and Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to win their respective nominations. But the turnout could provide more clues about the general election in November.Voters also had a chance to register their discontent with the nominees. Connecticut and Rhode Island gave voters the opportunity to vote “uncommitted” in the primary, while Wisconsin offered a similar option of “uninstructed delegation”. Wisconsin Democrats will be closely watching the turnout for “uninstructed delegation” after progressive activists launched a campaign encouraging voters to withhold support from the US president to protest his handling of the war in Gaza.The Listen to Wisconsin campaign, based on similar efforts in states like Michigan and Minnesota, has attracted support from some rank-and-file union members as well as an influential group of low-wage and immigrant workers in the state.Those voters represent key constituencies whose support Biden will need to win in November, and even a small erosion in support could spell trouble for him in Wisconsin, where he defeated Trump by just 0.6 points in 2020. In 2016, the former president defeated Hillary Clinton by roughly 0.8 points in Wisconsin, and he hopes to repeat that performance this fall.Polls closed at 8pm ET in Connecticut and Rhode Island and at 9pm ET in New York and Wisconsin, with results coming in shortly afterwards, and Biden will soon have a better sense of his standing in the battleground state.With the presidential nominees already decided, Wisconsin Republicans are more closely focused on two ballot measures related to election management in the state. The first measure raises the question of abolishing the use of private funds in election administration, and the second asks whether “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums”.Republicans have encouraged supporters to vote “yes” on both measures, after their legislative efforts to change election rules were repeatedly blocked by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers. Republican leaders have expressed pointed criticism of the grant money that Wisconsin election officials received from the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020 to address the challenges of navigating the coronavirus pandemic.Those leaders have derided the grant money as “Zuckerbucks”, a reference to the $350m that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave to the non-profit to help election offices across the country in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans argue that such funding must be abolished to ensure voters’ trust in election results, but Democrats warn that the approval of such a measure could drain resources from government offices already stretched too thin from budget cuts. On the second ballot question, Democrats have criticized its wording as vague and accused Republicans of attempting to intimidate nonpartisan voting rights groups from their usual registration and turnout efforts in the state.“Rather than work to make sure our clerks have the resources they need to run elections, Republicans are pushing a nonsense amendment to satisfy Donald Trump,” Ben Wickler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said in a statement last month.“Thanks to long-standing Wisconsin law and the dedicated service of thousands of elections officials in municipalities across the state, our elections are safe and secure. Donald Trump’s lies about his 2020 loss shouldn’t dictate what’s written in our state constitution.” More