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      Adelita Grijalva wins Arizona Democratic primary for House seat

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      Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic House primary in Arizona to succeed her father, beating a young social media activist in a closely watched election seen as a test of the party’s generational divide.Raúl Grijalva, a longtime congressman in southern Arizona, died from cancer earlier this year and left a vacancy in the state’s seventh district. The younger Grijalva, a 54-year-old who served for 20 years on a Tucson school board, has been a Pima county supervisor since 2020.Grijalva, a progressive, has said upholding democracy, standing up for immigrant rights and protecting access to Medicaid and Medicare are among her top priorities.“This is a victory not for me, but for our community and the progressive movement my dad started in Southern Arizona more than 50 years ago,” Grijalva said in a statement.She faced an insurgent challenger in Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old social media influencer and activist whose campaign focused on her personal story of using the kinds of government programs the Trump administration has attacked. Foxx also called out Grijalva for her “legacy last name” and said political roles shouldn’t be inherited.“I’m not using my dad’s last name,” Adelita Grijalva previously told the Guardian. “It’s mine, too. I’ve worked in this community for a very long time – 26 years at a nonprofit, 20 years on the school board, four years and four months on the board of supervisors. I’ve earned my last name too.”Grijalva won easily. She led her next closest rival, Foxx, by about 40 percentage points when the Associated Press declared her the winner. She had a large lead in all seven counties that are all or partially in the district, including the most populous, Pima County, which includes Tucson and its western suburbs.Grijalva also racked up a lengthy list of heavyweight endorsements – including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and several state and local officials.The district, which includes parts of Tucson and Arizona’s borderlands, is strongly blue, meaning the winner of the primary is the likely victor of the general. But three Republicans ran in their party’s primary; Daniel Butierez will face Adelita Grijalva in the general on 23 September.National Democratic infighting brought extra attention to the race, with Foxx bringing up questions of seniority and nepotism. Raúl Grijalva was one of three Democratic lawmakers to die in office this year. Foxx received backing from Leaders We Deserve, David Hogg’s Pac, which is challenging incumbents in Democratic primaries as it seeks to remake the party.The seat will not decide control of the US House, but it is one of three vacancies in heavily Democratic districts that, when filled in special elections this fall, will probably chip away at Republicans’ slender 220-212 majority in the chamber. More

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      ‘Political theatre’: key takeaways from US universities’ House antisemitism hearing

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      Lawmakers questioned the leaders of the University of California at Berkeley, Georgetown University and the City University of New York in the final antisemitism hearing the House of Representatives has held since the 7 October attacks and ensuing war in Gaza broke out in 2023.Georgetown University’s interim president Robert Groves, Cuny’s chancellor Félix V Matos Rodríguez and UC Berkeley’s chancellor Rich Lyons faced scrutiny from Republican representatives – who questioned the universities’ hiring practices, faculty unions, Middle East study centers, foreign funding and DEI initiatives.Congress’s preceding antisemitism hearings featured tense exchanges between Republican lawmakers such as representative Elise Stefanik, and precipitated the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Columbia.While denouncing antisemitism, Democratic lawmakers spoke out against the focus of the hearing, calling it “political theatre” and criticizing the Trump administration’s gutting of the government agencies that enforce civil rights protections.“I’d be remiss if I did not point out that this is our ninth hearing on antisemitism in 18 months,” said ranking member Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia. “I’ll also note that since this committee’s first antisemitism hearing in December 2023 we have not held a single hearing addressing racism, xenophobia, sexism, Islamophobia or other challenges affecting other student groups on American college campuses.”1. Campus leaders denounced antisemitismIn their opening statements, each of the university leaders present at Tuesday’s hearings began their remarks by condemning antisemitism, and in many cases listing actions their campuses had undertaken to prevent future antisemitism.Georgetown was one of the first campuses to condemn the 7 October attacks, Groves said, adding: that “Antisemitism is incompatible with living our mission; the same applies to Islamophobia and racism.”“Berkeley unequivocally condemns antisemitism,” Lyons echoed. He added: “I am the first to say we have more work to do. Berkeley, like our nation, has not been immune to the disturbing rise in antisemitism.”Matos Rodríguez shared a similar remark: “Our university has not been immune, but let me be clear: antisemitism has no place at Cuny.” He added that the university now has a zero-tolerance policy toward encampments, like those students established at City College and Brooklyn College in 2024.2. Democrats criticized the Trump administration’s approachDemocratic lawmakers and witnesses noted that the Trump administration’s decision to shutter federal agencies tasked with enforcing civil rights protections will not protect Jewish students on college campuses.“Antisemitism in America and on campuses is real” but “this administration’s approach is contradictory and counterproductive,” said Matt Nosanchuck, a former deputy assistant secretary for the education department’s office for civil rights under the Obama administration. He urged that “Congress must fulfill its core responsibilites” to give agencies appropriate resources, not conduct political theatre.In his opening remarks, Scott criticized his fellow committee members for saying “nothing about the firings attacking the office of civil rights” or the supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education. The Trump administration closed seven of the office of civil rights’ 12 regional offices in March.“If the majority wanted to fight antisemitism and protect Jewish students, they should condemn antisemitism in their own party and at the highest level of government,” said Democratic representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon. “They have failed to do so. Multiple White House officials have ties to antisemitic extremists.”3. Republicans questioned faculty hiring and union practicesTo begin the hearing, Walberg said that the committee would “be examining several factors that incite antisemitism on college campuses” including faculty unions and faculty membership in the group Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.He later questioned Matos-Rodríguez about a Hunter College faculty job posting looking for candidates who could “take a critical lense” to issues such as “settler colonialsm, genocide, human rights, apartheid” and others. Matos-Rodríguez called the listing “entirely inappropriate” and said he ordered it revised immediately upon learning about it.Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, focused her questioning on questions around faculty hiring and union practices. She questioned Matos-Rodríguez on the fact that the president of Cuny’s faculty union supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. She also questioned Lyons on Columbia’s hiring practices, which she said had allowed antisemitic faculty to join the staff.“We use academic standards to hire faculty. We don’t use ideological conditions to hire faculty,” Lyons said.4. Democrats called the hearings part of a greater move to defund higher education“I’m concerned by what I see happening here. Because instead of solving a problem, we’re watching some try to use antisemitism as a reason to go after higher education,” said representative Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina.“Let’s not forget as we sit here today, the Department of Education is withholding more than $6bn in congressionally mandated funding from our K-12 schools,” she added.During her questioning Bonamici also questioned whether the antisemitism hearings were motivated by “plans to defund colleges and universities”.5. Tensions ran high between Republican and Democratic committee membersFollowing an exchange between representative Elise Stefanik of New York and Cuny chancellor Matos Rodríguez, California representative Mark DeSaulnier yielded his time so Matos Rodríguez could “respond to that outrageous attack by my colleague”.Stefanik had denounced the university for having on its staff an attorney also leading the legal defense fund for Mahmoud Khalil, who she called “chief pro-Hamas agitator that led to the anti-semitic encampments at Columbia”.Earlier in the hearing, California representative Mark Takano called the committee’s hearing “a kangaroo court”. More

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      Democrats demand Pam Bondi and Kash Patel be summoned for Epstein hearing

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      Democratic members of the House judiciary committee on Thursday demanded that Republicans summon the attorney general, Pam Bondi, the FBI director, Kash Patel, and their deputies for a hearing into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death and the sex-trafficking case against him.The letter from all 19 Democratic members on the committee to its Republican chair, Jim Jordan, comes amid a rift between Donald Trump and some of his supporters over the justice department’s conclusion, announced last week, that Epstein’s death in federal custody six years ago was a suicide, and that there is no secret list of his clients to be made public.The US president, who knew Epstein personally, has long claimed that there is more to be made public about his death and involvement in running a sex-trafficking ring for global elites. Last week’s report, together with the justice department’s announcement that nothing further about his case would be made public, has sparked rare criticism of Trump among the rightwing influencers and commentators who are usually among his most ardent defenders.In their letter, Democrats argued that the matter can only be settled if Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, along with Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, appear before the judiciary committee.“The Trump DOJ and FBI’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, and president Trump’s suddenly shifting positions, have not restored anyone’s trust in the government but have rather raised profound new questions about their own conduct while increasing public paranoia related to the investigation,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote.“Only a bipartisan public hearing at which administration officials answer direct questions from elected representatives before the eyes of the American people can restore public trust on the matter.”A spokesperson for Jordan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Democrats have sought to capitalize on the questions raised by the justice department’s announcement, and earlier on Tuesday, House Republicans blocked an attempt by the minority to force release of documents related to the Epstein case.Last week, most Democrats on the judiciary committee signed a letter to Bondi that accused her of withholding some files related to the financier to protect Trump from any damaging disclosures. It went on to call for the release of any documents in the Epstein files that mention Trump, as well as the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified materials.In this week’s letter, Democrats argued that only a congressional hearing would resolve whether there is indeed a cover-up over Epstein’s death, or if Trump was just promoting conspiracy theories as he sought an advantage on the campaign trail.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We must submit to public scrutiny President Trump’s and MAGA’s longstanding claims about the ‘Epstein files,’ new questions as to whether President Trump himself has something to hide, whether he is keeping damaging information secret to protect other individuals or to maintain future blackmail leverage over public and private actors,” the lawmakers wrote, “or, perhaps the simplest explanation, whether President Trump and his Administration magnified and disseminated groundless Epstein conspiracy theories for purposes of political gain which they are now desperately trying to disavow and dispel.”The reignited turmoil over the Epstein case has sparked reports that Bongino, a former podcaster who has long promoted conspiracies about his death, clashed with Bondi and is considering resigning his position at the FBI.Over the weekend, Trump defended Bondi in a post on Truth Social and pleaded with his supporters. “One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he wrote. More

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      Arizona Democratic race for House seat highlights party’s internal debate – and previews the midterms

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      A gen Z influencer, a former state lawmaker and the daughter of a former representative are facing off in a special Democratic primary in Arizona on Tuesday that showcases the party’s internal debate in the run-up to the midterm elections.Longtime Arizona representative and progressive stalwart Raúl Grijalva died in office from complications of lung cancer treatment in March at age 77, leaving open a seat representing southern Arizona and its borderlands.His daughter, Adelita Grijalva, herself a longtime elected official in southern Arizona, is the frontrunner in the race and has a laundry list of endorsements. But Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old who’s made her name in viral moments standing up to politicians and who would become the youngest member of Congress, is surging in recent polls. Daniel Hernandez, a former state lawmaker who was at the 2011 shooting of then representative Gabby Giffords, is also pulling in significant support.“It’s a fascinating encapsulation of the different factions and factors that will define all Democratic primaries in 2026,” said Arizona progressive lobbyist Gaelle Esposito. “Adelita represents the progressive wing, Deja’s the blank-slate outsider, Daniel has that big donor lane locked down. Do people want a progressive leader, do they just want to shake up the system or do they want someone who knows how to navigate the DC backrooms?”The district is solidly blue, meaning that whoever wins the Democratic primary is the likely victor in the general election.National Democratic infighting has brought extra attention to the race, as the left wrangles over how to fight Donald Trump and win back voters while the Democratic party brand is flagging. It’s also the first time this seat has been open in more than two decades. Questions over seniority and age in the party have loomed over the race – three Democrats died in office this year, and Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” passed by only one vote. Grijalva’s opponents have attacked her “legacy” last name.“The thing that I need to push back on is this idea that the three members of Congress died because of age,” Grijalva, 54, said. “They died because of cancer. My dad lived in a Superfund site and drank poison water for two decades.”After Zohran Mamdani’s upset win in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, Democrats are looking across the country at how candidates who buck the status quo, and who communicate well to voters and on social media, will fare.Leaders We Deserve, David Hogg’s Pac, endorsed Foxx in the race, saying “she has translated her story to represent a new vision of generational change that speaks truth to Trump’s cruel policies”. His group is spending in Democratic primaries in safe blue districts to support younger progressive candidates and drive out Democrats who are “asleep at the wheel”.The candidates say voters are concerned about immigration, deportations and detentions – the district contains three major ports of entry on the US-Mexico border. The economy looms large, especially with Trump’s new bill that could devastate rural areas in particular, as does the dismantling of democracy.But the race hasn’t dwelled much on the issues; instead it’s zoomed in on an old-versus-new, established-versus-insurgent dynamic that’s played out across the country and will mark the midterms.The candidatesFoxx, a gen Z Filipino American from Tucson, got her start fighting for better sex education in Tucson schools. She has nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok and more than 240,000 on Instagram and has created viral political moments since she was a teenager. When she was 16, she pointedly confronted then US senator Jeff Flake at a town hall over defunding Planned Parenthood, calling him a “middle-aged man” who “[came] from privilege”. In the decade since, she has worked on political advocacy, including on Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign. She attended the Democratic national convention in 2024 as a content creator.Her personal story plays heavily into her campaign: her family relied on food stamps, Medicaid and section 8 housing, all targets for Republican budget-cutting. She experienced homelessness as a teenager. She has worked a “normal-person job” and cleaned toilets at a gas station for $10 an hour.“People are ready to question a political system that prioritizes legacy last names or big-dollar donors, and they’re looking for a candidate who reflects back their lived experiences,” Foxx said.When she filed paperwork to run in the special election in April, she was alone in her bedroom – and she said she did it wrong. She, like other young candidates jumping into primaries across the country, is showing her followers how you run for office in real time.“I am the only break from the status quo, the only change candidate that represents a difference in the tactics it’s going to take to stand up to this administration,” she said. “I would ask people to just imagine what we could do from the House floor. It’s going to take messengers like me who know how to reach the people we are losing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHernandez, who served three terms in the state legislature, has touted his ability to work with Republicans to pass legislation. He ran in a nearby congressional district in 2022, losing in the Democratic primary.He said voters have told him they’ve been without a voice in Congress since early 2024, when Raúl Grijalva got sick. They’re worried about losing access to Medicare, Medicaid and social security, and they want representation.“I’m the only one that actually has experience delivering results in a Republican environment,” he said. “That’s something that is really important right now, given the very broken and very divided Congress that we’re in.”Adelita Grijalva boasts a stack of endorsements from across the Democratic spectrum, including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Arizona’s two US senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly. She has a long résumé in local politics, serving on the Tucson unified school district governing board for 20 years and the Pima county board of supervisors since 2020.She hasn’t shied away from her father’s legacy. Her first campaign video leans into it. “When you grow up Grijalva, you learn how to fight and who you’re fighting for,” she says. “I know how to fight and win because I learned from the best.”She said she learned from her dad the importance of doing your homework and to not take politics personally – a lesson she admittedly has struggled with, especially in this race. “I anticipated low blows. I didn’t anticipate, like, six feet under,” she said.Foxx has called out Grijalva for having a “legacy last name” and inheriting her father’s donor and mailing lists. But, Grijalva notes, her dad was “not a prolific fundraiser”. He raised enough to hire staff and buy food, but wasn’t sending money back to the party. She said 94% of the people who donated to her primary campaign haven’t given to a Grijalva before.“I’m not using my dad’s last name,” she said. “It’s mine, too. I’ve worked in this community for a very long time – 26 years at a non-profit, 20 years on the school board, four years and four months on the board of supervisors. I’ve earned my last name, too.”While she’s been attacked as an establishment candidate, her record – and her father’s – are strongly progressive. If elected, she wants to push for Medicaid for all and the Green New Deal. But the race has focused mostly on identity, with attempts to discredit her contributions to the community. “Establishment” and “Grijalva” have previously not really been used in the same sentences, she said, until the last month.“I wonder if my dad were an older white man and I were a junior, if I would be getting the same kind of criticism that I’m getting now,” she said. “And I don’t think I would.” More

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      Blood and bravado: the Trump shooting upended an election and shook the US

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      Blake Marnell was standing in the front row, about 10 yards from Donald Trump, when the shots rang out. He watched the Secret Service pile on the former US president. “I was able to see him standing and I could see the blood on his ear,” Marnell recalls. “When he put his fist up, I remember yelling, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’”Sunday marks one year since the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a week that changed US politics. Eight days later then-president Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of the election race amid concerns over his mental and physical decline.The twin shocks to the system of July 2024 continue to echo. Trump’s supporters hailed his survival as proof of divine intervention. He declared in his inaugural address in January: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” He has governed with a zealous self-belief that earns comparisons with authoritarians from history.Democrats, meanwhile, continue to wrestle the fallout of Biden’s late withdrawal. Some argue that he could have pushed on and won; most believe that he left the race too late and paved the way for Trump’s return to the White House. Younger voters accuse the party establishment of betrayal and beat the drum of generational change.What few dispute is that the shooting of Trump was indicative of a culture of political violence that has taken hold over the past decade, with recent examples including the murder of a Minnesota politician and her husband. It also set in motion a news cycle that has barely drawn breath over the past year as the most unconventional president of modern times dominates the national consciousness.View image in fullscreenFor Marnell, who lives in San Diego, California, that hot summer’s day in Butler began like dozens of the other Trump rallies he has been to before and since. He was wearing a “brick suit” that symbolises the president’s border wall and looked up at a giant screen that displayed a chart detailing US-Mexico border crossings.Trump had his head turned to the right to review the graphic when the gunfire began and nicked his right ear. “I didn’t even recognise them as gunshots,” 60-year-old Marnell said in a phone interview. “I thought they might be firecrackers.”For several long seconds there was pandemonium. Firefighter Corey Comperatore was killed while David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both hospitalised with injuries. Secret Service agents killed the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, whose motives remain a mystery, and rushed on top of Trump, whose fate was initially uncertain.“There was every range of emotion in the crowd. There was anger. There were people who turned around and were yelling at the TV cameras. There were people who were in prayer. There were people crying. There were people who were in disbelief. It was just an incredible gamut and range of reactions.”But what happened next became the stuff of political legend. Trump rose, pumped his fist and beseeched his followers to “Fight! Fight! Fight” even as blood streaked his face. The resulting image flashed around the world and is still displayed in the West Wing and worn on T-shirts by his “Make America great again” (Maga) acolytes.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “He showed courage and determination when you’d think the first thing somebody wants to do is slink away and save themselves. His response was to be the medieval chieftain who was rallying his troops round the banner and showing that he was undeterred to fight, to use his word. It was incredibly moving.”Biden was quick to call Trump and express sympathy. On 17 July, Biden tested positive for Covid-19. On 19 July, Trump, wearing a patch on his ear, delivered a 90-minute address at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, where some delegates wore ear patches in solidarity.Then, on 21 July, Biden suddenly announced that he was stepping aside and would not be the Democratic nominee for president. The writing had been on the wall since his disastrous debate performance against Trump the previous month. Party leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer had urged him to withdraw. Finally, he yielded.View image in fullscreenEven by the standards of the Trump era, it had been a jaw-dropping eight days. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “There have been dramatic weeks and months but, in an election campaign, there’s just nothing like it in all of American history.”Journalist Chris Whipple was working on a different project when he heard the news of Biden’s exit, “realised this was the political story of the century”, and pivoted to writing a book that would become Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.“It created that devastating split screen between the strengths of Trump and the weakness of Biden,” Whipple said. “The image of Trump rising off that stage with blood on his cheeks and his fist in the air mouthing ‘fight, fight, fight’ was devastating in comparison to the image of Biden shortly thereafter climbing off Air Force One with Covid headed to his bunker in Rehoboth Beach, standing on those steps, looking lost and gripping the handrail.”In their new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf write how Trump’s future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told him after the assassination attempt: “You do know this is God.” At first Trump was silent, they write, but by the next day he was telling everyone: “If anyone ever doubted there was a God, that proved there was.”Numerous speakers at the Republican convention insisted that Trump had been spared by God so that he could pursue his mission. The Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell refers to it as a “millimetre miracle”.Whipple added: “To this day the true believers think this was God’s plan and maybe – without playing armchair psychologist – it’s contributed to a kind of fearlessness in Trump that I’m not sure we saw in the first term. Some might say recklessness. It changed Trump. It changed the country.”Conversely, the Democrats have still not recovered from the debacle of Biden’s late departure. His anointed successor, Kamala Harris, had only 107 days to campaign and ignited a burst of Democratic enthusiasm, notably at the party convention and when she debated Trump. But it was too little too late and she lost both the electoral college and the national popular vote.Whipple commented: “It was a seismic political event and the reverberations continue to this day. His 11th-hour abdication, leaving Kamala Harris with too short a runway to mount a winning campaign, obviously is historic and there is to this day a lot of anger among Democrats about the fact that Biden should have stepped away a year earlier or more.View image in fullscreen“That has real political ramifications. We’re seeing it in the popularity of ZohranMamdani in New York and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. It’s not just their message which is appealing to so many but also the fact that they’re anti-establishment. Biden and his gang have come to represent the corrupt Democratic establishment because of his last-minute abdication. You’re seeing an anti-establishment revolt.”Biden’s determination to cling on has been the subject of Democratic hand-wringing – and several books – though he insists he has no regrets. Many in the party wish he had stepped aside after the 2022 midterm elections so it could have held an open primary contest to find an heir apparent. Now Democrats find themselves leaderless and, according to a March poll, at a record low approval rating of 29%.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and political commentator, said: “The real fallout was the lack of a clear successor to President Biden.“Had there been a real primary process that would have been able to unfold over the course of a year and a half, it would have weeded out the contenders and pretenders and would have put forward a ticket that, even if they ended up losing, could still have been very much part of the conversation heading into 2028. Instead, we’re starting 2028 already behind.”How elections are won and lost is always complex. With inflation and immigration looming large, there is no guarantee that another Democratic candidate would have beaten Trump. Nor will it ever be known how determinative his made-for-TV response to the assassination attempt was. But it did have some important consequences.Within minutes of the shooting, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, announced his endorsement of the former president. Musk would go on to spend a record of about $280m in backing Trump and Republican candidates, then lead the president’s assault on the federal bureaucracy until their spectacular falling-out.The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, also praised Trump’s reaction, calling his raised fist “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”. Zuckerberg went on to attend Trump’s inauguration and make changes to Meta such as ending third-party fact-checking, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bringing political content back to users’ feeds.The events of one year ago may also have shaped Trump’s psychology, fuelling an impatient, seize-the-day approach to the presidency that sets the news agenda at breakneck speed, knocks opponents back on their heels and brooks no compromise.Olsen said: “Trump dialed it up to 11 on his inauguration. A lot of that is the indirect influence of his survival of the assassination attempt. This is a man who is going with his instincts and going to do what he’s going to do and not going to prioritise – he’s going to push everything everywhere all at once.”Trump has survived legal troubles and taken on the elites and won, at least in his own mind, Olsen added. “I don’t think he thinks he’s invincible but he feels vindicated. Coupled with a sense of vulnerability means this is a guy who knows that everything could end tomorrow and believes he’s been proven right, so he’s darn well going to use the time that he has left to him to move forward to do even more that he believes is right.” More

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      David Gergen, ex-adviser to Republican and Democratic presidents, dies aged 83

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      David Gergen, a veteran of Washington politics and an adviser to four presidents, Republican and Democrat, in a career spanning decades in government, academia and media, has died. He was 83.Gergen was perhaps best known for a line he summoned for then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan for a TV debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”The question hit a nerve in a nation wracked by inflation and a hostage crisis in Iran. The answer came back no, and Reagan won the White House.Gergen later reflected that “rhetorical questions have great power. It’s one of those things that you sometimes strike gold. When you’re out there panhandling in the river, occasionally you get a gold nugget.”Gergen served in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Reagan and Bill Clinton, racking up stints as speechwriter, communications director and counselor to the president, among other roles.He entered politics after serving in the US navy in the 1960s, taking a job as a speechwriting assistant for Nixon in 1971 and rising rapidly to become director of speechwriting two years later. He later served as director of communications for both Ford and Reagan, and as a senior adviser to Clinton and secretary of state Warren Christopher.Between stints in government, he managed a successful media career, working variously as an editor at US News & World Report, on the PBS show the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and with CNN and CBS.In 2000, he published Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership: Nixon to Clinton, a memoir of his time in government. Reflecting on his time in the White House, he wrote of several essential elements a leader should possess.They included inner mastery; a central, compelling purpose rooted in moral values; a capacity to persuade; an ability to work within the system; a sure, quick start; strong, prudent advisers; and a passion that inspires others to carry on the mission.In a second book, Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders are Made, published two years later, he wrote: “Our greatest leaders have emerged from both good times and, more often, challenging ones. … The very finest among them make the difficult calls, that can ultimately alter the course of history.”Gergen, a North Carolina native, was a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, and returned there after his political career to establish the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. He received 27 honorary degrees over the course of his career.After his passing was announced late Friday, former colleagues remarked on his capacity for bipartisanship and collaboration.Al Gore, who served as Clinton’s vice-president, posted on X: “Of the countless ways that David Gergen contributed to our great country, what I will remember him for most was his kindness to everyone he worked with, his sound judgment, and his devotion to doing good in the world.”Dean Jeremy Weinstein of the Harvard Kennedy School, said Gergen “devoted decades of his life to serving those who sought to serve”.Gergen reportedly told his daughter Katherine Gergen Barnett after the November 2024 election that “we are going through a period of fear. We have been tested, we are being tested now, but we must recognize that politics in our country is like a pendulum,” CNN said.A month later, when Gergen’s dementia diagnosis was disclosed, she penned his thoughts in a column for the Boston Globe.“‘As awful as life is currently in the public sphere, there is still reason to believe in our country and its leadership and to go into service,’” she quoted Gergen as saying. “‘Americans can endure any crisis, but they need to continue to take a sense of responsibility for their country.’” More

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      2024 book review: the what-ifs of an election that took US closer to autocracy

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      Donald Trump is on a roll. The “big, beautiful bill” is law. Ice, his paramilitary immigration force, rivals foreign armies for size and funding. Democrats stand demoralized and divided. 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, is a book for these times: aptly named, deeply sourced.Kamala Harris declined to speak. Joe Biden criticized his successor in a brief phone call, then balked. Trump talked, of course.“If that didn’t happen … I think I would’ve won, but it might have been a little bit closer,” he says of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which set the race alight.Yet 2024 is about more than the horse race. It also chronicles how the elites unintentionally made Trump’s restoration possible, despite a torrent of criminal charges against him, 34 resulting in convictions, and civil lawsuits that saw him fined hundreds of millions of dollars.“Trump always drew his strength from decades of pent-up frustration with the American democratic system’s failures to address the hardships and problems the people experienced in their daily lives,” Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf write.“In 2024, [Trump’s] supporters saw institutions stacked against them … leading them to identify viscerally with his legal ordeal, even though they had not experienced anything like it before.”Dawsey is a Pulitzer prize winner, working political investigations and enterprise for the Wall Street Journal. Pager covers the White House for the New York Times. Arnsdorf was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the assassination attempt.Dawsey and Pager are Post alumni. With Arnsdorf, they capture the aspirations and delusions of Trump and the pretenders to his Republican throne, of Biden and Harris too.“In the weeks after the election, Biden repeatedly told allies that he could have won if he’d stayed in the race,” 2024 reports, “even as he publicly questioned whether he could have served another four years.”Really? Biden’s approval rating fell below 50% in August 2021 and never recovered. From October 2023, he trailed Trump. A year out, the authors reveal, Barack Obama warned his former vice-president’s staff: “Your campaign is a mess.”Biden’s aides privately derided Obama as “a prick”.“They thought he and his inner circle had constantly disrespected and mistreated Biden, despite his loyal service as vice-president.”As for Harris, Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf report that she “knew that the race would be close, but she really thought she would win”.Despite that, David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser, admitted post-election that internal polls never showed her leading.“I think it surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” he said. Harris’s debate win never moved the needle.Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf contend that the outcome was not foreordained. Rather, they raise a series of plausible-enough “what-ifs”. One is: “If the Democrats got clobbered, as expected, in the 2022 midterms, and Joe Biden never ran for re-election.”Except, by early 2022, according to This Shall Not Pass, a campaign book published that year, Biden saw himself as a cross between FDR and Obama.A telephone conversation between Biden and Abigail Spanberger, a moderate congresswoman now the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia, captures Biden’s self-perception.“This is President Roosevelt,” Biden begins, before thanking Spanberger for her sense of humor.She replies: “I’m glad you have a sense of humor, Mr President.”Back to 2024. Biden bristled at being challenged. Pushback risked being equated with disloyalty. His closest advisers were either family members or dependent on him for their livelihoods. He lacked social peers with incomes and personages of their own.Mike Donilon, a longtime aide, tells the authors: “It was an act of insanity by the Democratic leadership to have forced Biden out.“Tell me why you walked away from a guy with 81m votes … A native of [swing-state] Pennsylvania. Why do that?”Because Biden’s debate performance was a gobsmacking disaster. He also found navigating the stairs of Air Force One difficult and needed prompts to find the podium. In May 2025, Biden announced that he had been diagnosed with stage-four prostate cancer – a disclosure that came after 2024 went to press.The authors of 2024 pose Republican hypotheticals too. One: “If Trump never got indicted, or if Republicans didn’t respond by rallying to him, or if the prosecutions were more successful.”Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, demonstrated a lack of nerve. Glaringly, he failed to use the initial E Jean Carroll trial, over the writer’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her, to bolster his presidential ambitions. DeSantis didn’t dispatch his wife, Casey DeSantis, to Manhattan to offer daily thoughts and prayers for the plaintiff, or for Melania Trump. If you want to be the man, first you’ve got to beat the man.Another hypothetical: “If Trump and Biden didn’t agree to an early debate …”That question hangs over everything.Trump’s pronouncements leave Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf anxious. After the 2022 midterms, he mused about terminating the constitution. Later, on the campaign trail, he spoke openly of being a “dictator for a day”. When he was back in the West Wing, reporters asked: “Are you a dictator on day one?” “No,” he replied. “I can’t imagine even being called that.”Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf then catalog Trump’s unilateral actions on that first day, including stripping political opponents of security clearances. Later that month, he commenced his vendetta against law firms he deemed to be enemies. In February, Trump barred the Associated Press from the White House press pool unless the news agency referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.2024 contains no mention of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Perhaps it should have made space. Hungary’s leader is an autocrat in all but name, an elected leader who has removed freedoms regardless. Republicans adore him.

      2024 is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Zohran Mamdani’s videos are a masterclass. Eric Adams’ posts are getting more bizarre | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Eric Adams, possible resident of New Jersey and mayor of New York City, is a man of many talents. He is the city’s “most famous vegan”, albeit one who eats fish. He has a knack for scoring freebies from foreign governments. He managed the great feat of being the first mayor in the city’s history to be indicted while in office. And, on top of all that, he may well be the most unintentionally hilarious man on the internet.Please see, as exhibit one, a classic piece of Adams surrealism from 2011, shot when the mayor was just a humble state senator. Dressed like an undertaker, Adams instructs viewers to search their child’s room for contraband. Per Adams, a jewelry box may have a gun in it, and the bullets may be behind a picture frame. Unappreciated for many years, the video finally found an audience when it went viral during Adams’s indictment.More recently, the mayor posted a very weird Instagram video of him listening to Katy Perry, and another one captioned, “Make an important call with me,” in which he fake chats to Usher to announce a free concert series in New York City. And, of course, there was his famous “trash revolution” press conference where he helpfully demonstrated how to use a wheelie bin. You open the lid and then you close it: magic!In another Instagram video, Adam shares his morning routine. The mayor once told an audience: “I get out of the shower sometimes and I say: ‘Damn!’” This little bit of the routine, alas, did not make it into the cut. Instead he irons a shirt, munches a carrot stick in his bizarre industrial kitchen, and rants about how he is being guided by his GPS (“God positioning satellite”). The video was posted a month ago but it really took off this week after internet detectives pointed out that a clock in the footage tells a completely different time than the purported time on the screen. In other words, the whole “routine” was about as natural as a ski slope in Dubai.One glaring reason for Adams suddenly trying to up his Instagram game is the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the Queens assemblyman whose socialist ideas and (admittedly elite) TikTok strategy recently propelled him to victory in New York City’s mayoral primary. Adams is currently slated to run as an independent in the general election against Mamdani, and he’s clearly running scared.Adams is not the only Democrat making headlines this week for attempting to make waves on the internet. There’s an influential web series called Subway Takes in which the New York-based comedian Kareem Rahma solicits hot takes from strangers, and the occasional celebrity, on the train. Kamala Harris was on it last year, but you wouldn’t have seen the segment because it was reportedly so bad that it didn’t run. “Her take was really confusing and weird, not good, and so [we] mutually agreed we shouldn’t publish it,” Rahma told Forbes. One day it may fall out of a coconut tree, but right now it is hidden from scrutiny.Then there’s the Democratic house minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who was recently mocked for posting what appeared to be a badly photoshopped picture of himself, altered to make his waist thinner, on Instagram. (He seems to have deleted the photo on Thursday.)Jeffries was also just ridiculed (mainly by conservatives) for an Instagram photo in which he holds a baseball bat in metaphoric opposition to Donald Trump’s “One Big Ugly Bill”. The 82-year-old congresswoman Virginia Foxx was not impressed by this; Foxx tweeted the photo with the caption “low energy”.Jeffries certainly does seem to have a few energy issues. He can give record-breaking long speeches but he, along with other senior Democratic figures, can’t seem to summon up the energy to endorse Mamdani. Democrats love saying “vote blue no matter who” – except in situations where they have got a charismatic candidate who resonates with ordinary people.Meanwhile, Mamdani has no trouble with social media: his TikTok videos are one of the reasons the Queens assemblyman has surged from relative obscurity to mayoral frontrunner. Some of his rivals seem to think they are the cause for his success. “I regret not running for mayor in 2021,” state senator Jessica Ramos said during the mayoral primary debate. “I had been in the senate for two years. I’d already passed over a dozen bills. I thought I needed more experience. But turns out you just need to make good videos.”Of course, Mamdani doesn’t resonate with so many people because he’s studied vertical videos strategies. He’s successful because his core messaging connects with the needs of normal New Yorkers rather than the 1%. He’s been successful because he seems to genuinely want to fight for people rather than just collect a paycheck and then head off for a cushy job at whatever lobbying company donates the most to him. He’s relatable and authentic and those are two things that are very hard to manufacture. Although that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from trying: they have discussed throwing millions of dollars into creating a “Joe Rogan of the left”.This isn’t to say that you can’t buy yourself a great social media strategy. John Fetterman, the soulless ghoul who is senator of Pennsylvania, certainly did. He made some brilliant hires, who ran a very entertaining campaign against Dr Oz in 2022. Now that Fetterman seems more obsessed with bombing Gaza than serving his constituents, many of those staffers have left, however. I doubt he’ll be able to pull off another campaign like his first.Speaking of pulling things off, now that Adams has posted his morning routine I wouldn’t mind seeing other politicians post theirs. Please Cuomo, and every other establishment politician: stream the 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People over TikTok. I can’t wait to see Cuomo walk to a bagel shop and order an English muffin before telling passersby “I’m not perverted, I’m just Italian.” Surely that will convince New Yorkers to Pokémon Go to the polls. More