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      Trump is wrong about crime – but right about the fear of it | Austin Sarat

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      In most of America’s largest cities, crime, especially violent crime, is down. But the fear of crime is increasing.Donald Trump has made a career out of ignoring the reality of crime rates and of stoking that fear. Well before he entered politics and throughout his political career, he has talked about city life as life in a proverbial jungle.In 2022, he talked frequently about the “ blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities” and said: “Cities are rotting, and they are indeed cesspools of blood.” And he never strays far from that playbook.On 11 August, the president returned to his demagogic characterizations of America’s urban areas when he deployed national guard and federal law enforcement agents to the streets of Washington DC. He said the city was awash in “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor”.He claimed that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia”. In fact, violent crime in the District of Columbia is the lowest it has been in more than three decades.But Trump didn’t just ignore the data. He leaned into a different problem in Washington: fear of crime.Referring to Washingtonians who like to jog, the president said: “People tell me they can’t run any more. They’re just afraid.”And he was not content to target just the nation’s capital. “You look at Chicago,” he said, “how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities in a very bad – New York is a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that any more. They’re so far gone. We’re not going to let it happen.”Never mind that, like Washington, as CNN reports, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities also have had “substantial declines in 2024, 2025 or both”.So far, Democratic political leaders have repeated those statistics as if that in itself will carry the day. In so doing, they are repeating a mistake made by Joe Biden when he asked people to focus on economic statistics that showed declines in the rate of inflation rather than their lived reality.Unfortunately, the statistics matter much less than the fear of crime. That fear is a real problem, and Democrats need to acknowledge and respond to it.Let’s start with the District of Columbia. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted in mid-August found that 31% of Washingtonians said crime was an “‘extremely serious’ or a ‘very serious’” problem in the District. Last year, the same poll found that number to be 65%. Some of this decline can be attributed to the fact that residents of the city overwhelmingly oppose what the president has done and don’t want to be seen as lending it legitimacy.But however you measure it, fear of crime is not just a District of Columbia problem.In New York City, 75% of residents say that crime is a serious problem. As an essay posted on Vital City puts it: “Whatever crime statistics show, most of us are worried that it could happen to us. That feeling is nebulous and hard to overcome … We the people say crime is a serious problem, and most of us will continue, for now, to look over our shoulders and worry when someone we love leaves home.”National surveys suggest that “Americans’ fear of crime is at a 30-year high”. Other survey evidence highlights the fact that “73% say crime has ‘some’ or ‘major’ impact on how they live their lives”. Among Black and Hispanic Americans, that number is even higher.Not surprisingly, many Americans now favor long prison sentences for convicted criminals.Explanations vary for the paradox that as crime rates fall, fear of crime persists.Crime stories often dominate local news coverage, and the more gruesome the crime, the greater the coverage. That is why fear of crime is driven not by a dispassionate examination of data but by the power of individual stories of victimization.That pattern is intensified by social media. Studies have shown that social media usage stokes crime fear.Demographics also matter. Crime fears are greater among older people, and, as the population ages, those fears increase.Fear of crime is also associated with a generalized sense of disorderliness in our communities and the world. And, as the economist and criminal justice scholar John Roman argues, because “our collective tolerance for disorder is declining”, our fear of crime is increasing.Of course, it doesn’t help that Trump uses the bully pulpit and his public visibility to emphasize and exaggerate the crime problem as part of his authoritarian project. But blaming Trump for the fear of crime problem is not any more of a winning political strategy than reciting the latest data on falling crime rates.Democrats can’t and shouldn’t run away from either the crime problem or the fear of crime problem. They will have no credibility in offering responses to the former until they establish credibility on the latter.They would be well-advised to tackle the fear problem openly and to embrace responses, like investing in programs that repair public spaces and revitalize neighborhoods, while also being clear that people who fear crime have reason to want to see more police on the street.Trump knows the potency of the fear of the crime problem. That’s why he boasted that after his deployment of national guard in Washington, DC, “People are feeling safe already … They’re not afraid any more.”But we don’t need the national guard to do what local police can do when they are well-trained, responsive to the needs of all communities and well-resourced. The best long-term response to the president’s agenda for American cities is to make sure that the people who live there have more confidence in their safety and less fear of crime.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      The Democrats are in deep trouble in the US – and Labour is on the way to joining them | Nesrine Malik

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      The measure of a political party’s failure lies not in how many agnostics and opponents it fails to convert, but in how many loyalists it fails to preserve. The endorsement of new, unnatural voters – Latinos in the US for Donald Trump, or Tories voting for Labour for the first time – might deliver big electoral swings but is ultimately not sticky. And these votes are only meaningful if the bedrock is solid. That bedrock is the people who consistently show up, no matter what, from generation to generation, for a party. And the Democrats are losing them.In extensive research published last week tracking voter registration, the New York Times identified an alarming pattern. The Democratic party has been “haemorrhaging” voters since way before election day. In the states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost to Republicans in all of them in the years between 2020 and 2024. By the time Kamala Harris took over from Joe Biden, the party had already shed more than 2m votes in those states, and Republicans had gained 2.4m. This is part of a “four-year swing” that amounts to 4.5m votes. In a chilling conclusion, the report states that “few measurements reflect the luster of a political party’s brand more clearly than the choice by voters to identify with it”.The signs get worse the more closely you look. It’s not just a decline in new registered voters, but a hacking away of those natural voters who parties can easily rely on. Some of the sharpest declines were among young voters who came out emphatically for Joe Biden in 2020, then swung towards Trump in 2024. An assumption that voters who are young, Black or Latino would register mostly in the Democrats’ favour was no longer safe.The most striking thing about these revelations is how long and consistent the turn-off has been: “There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill,” said one voter registration analyst, “this is month after month, year after year.” They show how during the last election, when the Democrats were battling with the damage of a belated handover from Biden to Harris, and a swirl of other challenges, the party was already on the back foot, hostage to a years-long disillusionment. And if you look at some of the reasoning for Democrat abandonment from last year, the same conclusion heaves into view – the Democrats rested on their laurels, and Trump attacked. The vibe contest was between business as usual, and the promise of something different.The result is a cratering of Democrat support that cannot be filled in overnight, or even over the next three years, especially with the party seemingly in disarray, and with a lo-fi leadership in Chuck Schumer accused of being “unwilling and unable to meet the moment”. It’s not about the unique, mendacious bewitching of voters by Trump, but something broader. Centre-left parties seem trapped by their inability and unwillingness to articulate values in ways that go beyond just saying the other guys are bad for democracy, by identifying a vision of what and who they are for.They are operating in a world where traditional coalitions around class, labour and identity are dissolving, where high barriers to home ownership, social mobility and job stability have been erected, and the relationship between hard work and prosperity, or even viability, has been severed. Combine that with an online and media ecosystem that trades in attention and feeling, and you have a political climate that requires policy intervention and campaigning edge.Instead, as summed up by Gabriel Winant after Trump’s victory, Kamala Harris had “stretched her coalition into incoherence” in a “grab bag” of policies “sharing no clear thematic unity or coherence”. This is the result of both a lack of direction, and of a party that now houses both the powerful and those at the losing end of that power, which can only mean a lop-sided capture by the former. Or, as chillingly observed by Anton Jäger: “Bankers and warmongers predominate in Democrat ruling circles, the indebted and the marginalised among its rank-and-file.” This reminds me of Keir Starmer’s drive to cast Labour as “pro-business, pro-worker and pro-wealth creation”. You cannot have coherence when the interests you represent, or claim to represent, are by definition antagonistic.This brand tension has an analogue in a smaller but no less revealing way in the UK, where students are abandoning Labour. University Labour clubs are disaffiliating from the party, Labour’s youth membership has collapsed, the tail of a longer falling out with Labour leadership over Gaza. But this is a broader confrontation between young voters and a party that has failed to stand for any clear moral principles that appeal to the idealism so necessary to create not only future voters, but activists and campaigners. On Gaza, Labour is anti-starvation, but also anti-protest.And both the Democrats and Labour are positioning themselves antagonistically to those whose sharper expressions of political vision are hugely popular with those who are abandoning them. Senior Democrats might still not endorse New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who is posting stunning polling leads. Labour disciplines MPs for rebelling against benefit cuts, even as hundreds of thousands of people register their support for a new party.But as new and future voters are lost, the lion’s share of the windfall goes to those on the right and extreme right who have already mastered the gamification of politics, and the ability to summon fever dreams of threats that must be dealt with and prosperity that is just around the corner. “Elections are won from the centre” goes the old adage, but increasingly the centre itself has changed as the world becomes not a place of wide-tent compromise, but of irreconcilable differences. And I would venture another formulation – elections are won in the past. By the time it becomes apparent that remote and complacent centrist politics is not even managing to convince its own tribes, it will be too late. Some would argue it already is.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump ‘manufactured crisis’ to justify plan to send national guard to Chicago, leading Democrat says

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      Donald Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify the notion of sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders, a leading Democrat said on Sunday, as the White House advanced plans to militarize more US cities.Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a New York Democratic congressman, accused the US president of “playing games with the lives of Americans” with his unprecedented domestic deployment of the military, which has escalated to include the arming of troops currently patrolling Washington, DC – after sending troops into Los Angeles in June.The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, said any such plan from Trump was perpetrating “the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century”.Late on Friday, Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News that up to 1,700 men and women of the national guard were poised to mobilize in 19 mostly Republican states to support Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown by assisting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) with “logistical support and clerical functions”.Jeffries said he supported a statement issued by the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, that Trump was “abusing his power” in talking about sending the national guard to Chicago, and distracting from the pain he said the president was causing American families.The national guard is normally under the authority of the individual states, deployed at the request of the state governor and only federalized – or deployed by the federal government – in a national emergency and at the request of a governor.Jeffries said in an interview with CNN on Sunday morning: “We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular.”He continued: “I strongly support the statement that was issued by Governor Pritzker making clear that there’s no basis, no authority for Donald Trump to potentially try to drop federal troops into the city of Chicago.”The White House has been working on plans to send national guard to Chicago, the third largest US city, dominated by Democratic voters in a Democratic state, to take a hard line on crime, homelessness and immigrants, the Washington Post reported.View image in fullscreenPritzker issued a statement on Saturday night that began: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”Trump has argued that a military crackdown was necessary in the nation’s capital, and elsewhere, to quell what he said were out of control levels of crime, even though statistics show that serious and violent crime in Washington, and many other American cities, has actually plummeted.Talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday the president insisted that “the people in Chicago are screaming for us to come” as he laid out his plan to send troops there, and that they would later “help with New York”.“When ready, we will start in Chicago … Chicago is a mess,” Trump said.Johnson, in an appearance on Sunday on MSNBC, said shootings had dropped by almost 40% in his city in the last year alone, and he and Pritzker said any plan by the White House to override local authority and deploy troops would be illegal.“The president has repeated this petulant presentation since he assumed office. What he is proposing at this point would be the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century,” Johnson said.California sued the federal government when it deployed national guard and US marines to parts of Los Angeles in June over protests against Ice raids, but a court refused to block the troops.Main target cities mentioned by Trump are not only majority Democratic in their voting but also run by Black mayors, including Washington, DC, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Oakland.Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic former Illinois congressman, chief of staff to former president Barack Obama, and a former mayor of Chicago, also appeared on CNN on Sunday urging people to reflect that Trump, in two terms of office, had only ever deployed US troops in American cities, never overseas.Emanuel said if he was still mayor he would call on the president to act like a partner and, although crime was coming down, to “work with us on public safety” to combat carjackings, gun crime and gangs and not “come in and act like we can be an occupied city”.He added about Trump’s agenda: “He gave his speech in Iowa, he said ‘I hate’ Democrats, and this may be a reflection of that.” The speech was in July, when Trump excoriated Democrats in Congress who refused to vote for his One Big Beautiful Bill, the flagship legislation of the second Trump administration so far that focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy, massive boosts for the anti-immigration agenda and benefits cuts to programs such as Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor Americans. 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      Zohran Mamdani leads in fundraising for New York City mayoral contest

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      Zohran Mamdani pulled in almost double the funds of his nearest rivals for New York City mayor between early July and mid-August, as the candidates prepare for the crucial post Labor Day push to the November poll.New York’s City’s campaign finance board said on Saturday that the democratic socialist, who won the Democratic party nomination in June against former state governor Andrew Cuomo, raised $1,051,200, with an average donation of $121 recorded equally from donors in and outside the state.Cuomo raised $541,301, with an contribution size of $646. The incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, running as an independent, raised $425,181, with an average donation of $770. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa brought in $407, 332.Mamdani’s fundraising dominance is mirrored in a polling advantage. Last week, a Siena poll placed him at 19 points ahead of Cuomo, his nearest rival, who is also running as an independent. A 12-poll average from Decision Desk HQ puts Mamdani ahead of Cuomo by 13 points.Mamdani, who has proposed rent freezes on almost a million rent-stabilized apartments in the city, free buses and childcare, city-run grocery stores, and elevated taxes on Columbia and New York University to subsidize city colleges and trade schools, has been consistently ahead in fundraising over rivals.In March, he asked his campaign’s grassroots supporters to stop donating, and directed his primary campaign staff to encourage supporters’ focus to volunteering efforts. His campaign funds on hand are put at $4.4m, and his campaign is eligible for $2.2m more in matching public funds.Last week, it was revealed that the anti-billionaire candidate had received a donation of $250,000 to a political action committee from Elizabeth Simons, the daughter of late hedge fund billionaire Jamie Simons.Adams is barred from receiving matching campaign funds, the city campaign finance board having found he had violated related laws. Cuomo has begun transferring money from a $7.5m state campaign account to his city campaign account and has $1.2m on hand. Cuomo is in line for a payout of about $400,000 from public funds.Pressure on the two trailing candidates, Adams and Sliwa, to step out of the race is likely to increase next month, but both have said they are unwilling to do so.Last week, Adams repeated his resistance to dropping out after a close adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, was indicted for allegedly running a political-favors scheme that included receiving seafood and an acting role opposite Forest Whitaker.Politco reported last week that Cuomo told supporters at a fundraiser he expects Republican leaders, including Donald Trump, to urge Republican voters to switch from Sliwa to stop Mamdani, whom Trump has branded “a 100% Communist Lunatic”. Mamdani has said he is “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare”.Cuomo said on Friday that “a lot is going to happen” between now and the November vote. “I don’t think the public even knows who the assemblyman is, what he represents, what his positions are. So I think the more they find out about him, the less they’re going to like him, and … his appeal is going to drop dramatically.”Mamdani, meanwhile, has accused Cuomo of lying about his coordination with Trump and says the former governor, who bitterly clashed with Trump while in office, is now seeking the president’s help.“It’s par for the course for Andrew Cuomo,” Mamdani said on Tuesday. More

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      ‘A new political era’: fresh Democratic faces seek office to prevent their party from ‘sleepwalking into dystopia’

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      Earlier this year, Liam Elkind seized an opportunity to ask his longtime congressman, Jerry Nadler, what everyday New Yorkers like himself could do to help Democrats stand up to Donald Trump. Nadler’s response, according to Elkind, was to “donate to the DCCC” – the group that helps House Democrats keep their seats. Deeply unsatisfied, the 26-year-old decided to run for office against the 17-term incumbent.In Georgia, Everton Blair also sought answers from his long-serving congressman, David Scott, at a panel event earlier this year. When Blair asked him about Democrats’ legislative strategy, the 80-year-old lawmaker was dismissive. “I don’t know who sent y’all,” he said. Blair, 34, is now making a bid for Scott’s seat.Jake Rakov began to worry when he noticed his former boss, 70-year-old California congressman Brad Sherman, repeating the same anti-Trump talking points he’d deployed eight years prior. To Rakov, 37, it was a sign that the Democratic party’s ageing establishment “wasn’t going to learn”. He is now one of two millennial-aged Jakes challenging Sherman.View image in fullscreenA year after Joe Biden’s age and fitness for office emerged as a major liability in the 2024 presidential election, followed by Trump’s return to power , demand for generational change has reached a fever pitch. A wave of younger, social-media savvy candidates, frustrated by what they see as an ossifying, out-of-touch Democratic establishment, is launching primary challenges against some of their party’s most senior incumbents.The insurgents charge that party elders have failed to act with urgency as Trump targets Democratic cities, voters and values, and they say they’re no longer willing to wait their turn.“If what happened last year was not a wake up call for the Democratic party that we need to do things differently and that we need to let some new voices in, then we should all be deeply worried about the future of the Democratic party,” said Luke Bronin, a 46-year-old who is running against Connecticut congressman John Larson, 77.The 119th Congress is the third oldest in US history, and three members – all Democrats – have died in office this year. More than a dozen House Democrats who will be 70 or older by election day 2026 are facing challengers, according to an analysis by Axios, though not all have said whether they plan to seek re-election.But the push to replace longtime incumbents isn’t just about age, says Saikat Chakrabarti, 39, a former chief of staff to New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is running for the San Francisco congressional seat long held by the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi.They say it’s about energy, vision and, crucially, how hard they’re willing to fight – which could explain why octogenarian brawlers like Maxine Waters haven’t faced calls to step aside while some relatively younger members, such as 50-year-old André Carson, have drawn challengers.“It’s being a part of a system for so long you just don’t actually think it’s your job to renew it,” Chakrabarti said.View image in fullscreenPelosi, 85, who stepped down from her leadership position to make room for a new generation in 2022, has not yet said whether she plans to seek re-election. ​A spokesperson for Pelosi declined to comment.While their campaigns are ​​textured by local​ issues and cultural references – Elkind touts his go-to bagel order (un-toasted everything with whitefish salad) and Chakrabarti pitches a publicly owned utility for San Francisco​ – their broader ​messages chime: Democratic elders have grown complacent, clinging to a broken status quo​ – with devastating consequences.Democrats’ popularity has cratered to record lows and the party has bled voters – especially young people, first-timers, and Black and Latino Americans.But the incumbents are pushing back. They argue their years of experience have delivered tangible results. “These guys would start off with zero seniority, just when the district needs the most help,” Sherman, the California congressman, said in an interview. He dismissed claims he’s been timid on Trump, noting he introduced articles of impeachment against him in 2017 and, earlier this year, confronted the president at an in-person briefing on the Palisades fire that devastated parts of his district.“The key to fighting Donald Trump is beating him in the 2026 election,” Sherman said. “If we don’t take the House back in 2026 we may not have elections in 2028.”Many challengers align politically with the incumbents they’re trying to unseat – several have voted for their opponent in the past. They argue the intraparty divide is not left-versus-center but a clash between “the fighters and the folders” – those who see the Trump era as a troubling but passing chapter and those who see it as a constitutional emergency that will determine the survival of American democracy.The younger candidates say the party needs to “meet voters where they are” – on social media, on podcasts, at red county diners and rambunctious town halls. They want leaders who can speak plainly about the ways the Trump administration is hurting working-class Americans – and how Democrats would help.But they also say it can’t only be about Trump. The party needs a full-scale reimagining of what Democrats stand for and how they communicate that to voters – a type of messaging they’ve struggled to articulate in the Trump era.Democrats haven’t always embraced primaries. They can be costly and time-consuming, and create headaches for general election races. But in the midst of deep party introspection and generational friction, more are embracing the contests as a way forward.Groups such as Leaders We Deserve, led by former Democratic national committee vice-chair David Hogg, are actively backing young candidates challenging “asleep-at-the-wheel” incumbents. The effort sparked an internal firestorm and ultimately led Hogg to step down from his role at the DNC.Republicans are watching the primary battles unfold with glee. “Democrats are engaged in a battle between the socialists and the party dinosaurs – and it’s only getting uglier,” Mike Marinella, spokesperson for the national Republican congressional committee, said.Next year’s elections will test Democrats’ desire for generational change but it may not resolve their identity crisis. Some districts will elevate centrist candidates, while others might embrace a democratic socialist. Some crave an anti-establishment streak, ideology aside.And some veteran lawmakers have already chosen to relinquish power. In May, Democratic congresswoman Jan Schakowsky announced that her 14th term representing Illinois’s ninth district would be her last, saying in a statement: “It is now time for me to pass the baton.” Before she made the decision public, Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old progressive political influencer, had already launched a campaign for the seat, asking Democrats: “What if we didn’t suck?”Primed for Congress, but not waiting for an openingAmong the contenders in Democratic primaries are local and state political leaders for whom Congress makes sense as a next logical step. In years past, they might have opted to wait for a retirement and then seek an endorsement from the outgoing congressman. Not any more.View image in fullscreenAt 46, Luke Bronin has a lengthy résumé of service: a lawyer, former Obama administration official, navy reserve intelligence officer and, most recently, mayor of Hartford, Connecticut. But he stresses that he’d also bring “an outsider’s commitment to making some bigger changes”.Bronin has spoken with Larson, the longtime incumbent in Connecticut’s first district, including an hourlong conversation in recent months. What was missing, he said, was any recognition that the job has fundamentally changed since Larson arrived in Washington in 1999.“I didn’t hear a sense of urgency that we need to hear from every single member of Congress,” Bronin said.Bronin thinks Democrats need to be “relentless and clear” about the ways Trump is making life worse for Americans, and “equally relentless and clear” about the Democratic party’s vision for improving their daily lives. He wants to see “an intense focus on issues like housing and healthcare and childcare”, and for Democrats to spread these messages in friendly and unfriendly forums.In a statement, the Larson campaign said the district needs a “proven fighter” to protect against Trump’s attacks on social security and Medicare.“That’s Congressman Larson. That’s why he’s backed by progressive groups, labor, and working people alike,” the campaign said. “What they don’t need is someone pretending to be a new voice who’s actually been in politics [for] decades that’s always been more focused on running for higher office than delivering results.”Chakrabarti, who has spend much of his political career working to elect progressives to Congress, said he began to seriously consider a run himself after listening to a New York Times podcast interview with Pelosi just days after the November election. He had expected Democrats’ crushing defeat to trigger a reckoning – but instead heard a defense of the status quo.It confirmed for Chakrabarti what he had long feared: the Democratic party was “sort of sleepwalking into this dystopia”.But progressives like Chakrabarti take hope from the success of state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary this summer.“When I look at the moment today, the appetite for change, it completely dwarfs what I saw in 2018,” Chakrabarti said, referring to the election year in which Ocasio-Cortez toppled one of the most senior House Democrats as a political unknown.“We’re at the point of a dawn of a new political era.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe crowded primariesSeveral candidates have filed to run in Georgia’s 13th district, a solidly blue area in the Atlanta suburbs, a sign of the vulnerabilities among older members and the enthusiasm to replace them. Scott, who has served in Congress since 2003, has not yet announced whether he will run again. Questions over his health and fitness for office have become public fodder – he lambasted a photographer for taking a photo of him in a wheelchair last year.Some are younger than the average age in Congress (58.9); all are younger than Scott, 80. One contender, state senator Emanuel Jones, is 66. In 2024, Scott fended off a crowded field of primary challengers to keep his seat.Jasmine Clark, 42, was first elected to the state house in Georgia in 2018. She has a PhD in microbiology, an expertise that has served her well in analyzing bills and communicating during the pandemic. If elected, would be the first woman with a science PhD in Congress.View image in fullscreenShe wants the district to have a fighter who can call out the rampant misinformation and disinformation coming out of the Trump administration. The Atlanta area is feeling the consequences of this information environment, she said, pointing to a shooting earlier this month at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by a man alleged to be fixated on the Covid-19 vaccine.“When you have the same people in the same place for a really long time, that stagnation leads to stagnation of ideas as well,” she said. “There should be a healthy turnover, where you still have institutional knowledge while ushering in new ideas. But for whatever reason, we don’t really see that in Congress.”View image in fullscreenEverton Blair, who served on the Gwinnett county board of education, is touting his deep ties to the district where he was born and raised. He sees a lot of opportunities left on the table because of inactive representation.“There’s a general sense of despondency and just apathy right now that we address and we combat by bringing those very voices and people back into the conversation and making sure that they feel represented well,” Blair said.“The leaders who got us into this mess are not the leaders who can get us out of it,” he added.Scott did not respond to a request for comment.In California, Jake Rakov, who served as a deputy communications director for Brad Sherman, the 15-term incumbent he’s challenging, is making a similar case. He hasn’t spoken to his old boss in years, but he has been talking to the congressman’s constituents. Many, he said, are shocked that any member – let alone their own – has been in Congress for nearly 30 years.“We’ve got people in office who’ve been there since the 1990s and are still legislating like it’s the 1990s,” he said, adding: “It is so antithetical to our idea of a representative democracy that it just is immediately offensive to people when they hear about it.”Sherman has also drawn a challenge from Jake Levine, a veteran of the Biden and Obama administrations whose mother lost her home in the January fires. “It’s time for something new,” Levine says in his campaign launch video.Sherman argued that calls for generational change aren’t new. Estimating that he’s taken about 5,000 votes in Congress over the past decade, the overwhelming majority of which his challengers would agree with, Sherman asked: “If you did something right 5,000 times in a row – 100% of the time – is there any chance that you should get fired?”The upstartsUpstart candidates traditionally face steeper challenges against incumbents, but, with the help of slick online content, they’re finding new ways to gain traction. In an Arizona special election earlier this year, Deja Foxx, a 25-year-old influencer and activist, came in a distant second behind a longtime Democratic official whose father held the seat until his death – but she still managed to win more than 22% of votes.Katie Bansil, a 34-year-old political newcomer who works in finance, is challenging congressman Frank Pallone, 73, in New Jersey’s sixth congressional district over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Since launching her campaign, Bansil, who immigrated to the US from the Philippines and grew up in New Jersey, says she’s seen a growing desire for new leadership.View image in fullscreen“I started calling him ‘the asterisk’, because a lot of people have told me, ‘Oh, I just vote for the guy that is labeled as the incumbent,’” she said. “But I think people are actually waking up to the truth about what’s going on.”A spokesperson for Pallone said the congressman has “proven himself to be an effective champion of progressive causes”.“With daily assaults from the Trump administration on our democracy and institutions, Pallone will continue to use every tool to stop the Republican authoritarian agenda of stealing from the poor to give to the rich,” the spokesperson said.Liam Elkind, the challenger to Jerry Nadler, announced his campaign with a splashy video that opened with dirt being shoveled into a grave and his voiceover: “The Democratic party is dying.”“Our system often tells people to wait their turn,” Elkind said. “And look where we are.”A Rhodes scholar, Elkind founded the non-profit food delivery service Invisible Hands during the pandemic. He says that work – along with own experiences as a young person living in one of the most expensive cities in the world – would shape his approach to the job.Like many his age, Elkind doesn’t have health insurance. When he recently went to get a vaccine and was told it would cost $500, “I turned my ass around,” he quipped. “But look, that’s the day-to-day lived reality of a whole lot of people in this country.”View image in fullscreenA spokesperson for Nadler emphasized the congressman’s political strength, noting that he won his most recent election with 80% of the vote.“But this is the great thing about America, it’s a democracy – hopefully still – and anybody can run,” Robert Gottheim, the spokesperson, said, adding that Nadler would “put his over-30-year record of accomplishments against anyone including someone who appears to have no record of accomplishment to speak of”.Elkind said he voted for Nadler and respected his long record as a progressive voice for New York. But, he argued, the moment demands new energy and a break from the past.“The house is on fire, and we need leaders who can meet this moment,” he said. “We deserve to know that the next time a child is kidnapped off of our streets, that our congressman will be on that street in the next hour with a megaphone demanding that child’s release and then will travel to whatever foreign gulag the president has decided to stash that kid in.” More

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      Schwarzenegger’s mission: terminate partisan rigging of California’s electoral maps

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      Arnold Schwarzenegger brags in his X profile that “I killed the Predator”, but even he was shocked when, as the freshly elected governor of California more than 20 years ago, he saw how unfairly the state’s electoral boundaries were carved up.One district in the eastern part of the state had such a long, thin middle section it was nicknamed the “swan”. Another was known as the “Jesus district” because you had to walk on water to get from one side to the other. Yet another, in LA’s San Fernando Valley, was memorably described by the Stanford law professor Pam Karlan as “a ghastly-looking, multi-headed, insect-like polygon with 385 sides”.This was the time-honored dark art of gerrymandering, practiced in state after state by whichever party happened to have a majority in the state legislature and wanted to keep things that way. To Schwarzenegger, though, a political neophyte after his long career as a Hollywood action hero, it looked a lot like election-rigging.“For a long time I thought that was something that happened way back in the 1800s,” Schwarzenegger said in a 2005 address to the state, “but the practice is still alive and well today.”What shocked Schwarzenegger was not that Democrats, then as now in control of the state legislature, were stealing seats from Republicans. (Decades earlier, Republicans had done much the same in the opposite direction.) It was, rather, that gerrymandering neutered the power of people’s votes. The year before his speech, in 2004, not a single one of California’s 153 congressional and state legislative seats changed party hands.“What kind of democracy is that?” he asked.It was an unusual question for any US politician to ask – most elected officials, of both parties, accepted gerrymandering back then as part of the price of doing business – and it set Schwarzenegger on a reformist path he has never relinquished.First, he proposed appointing a panel of judges to take over from the state legislature in redrawing district lines. When that was rejected by voters, he advocated instead for an independent redistricting commission, which began redrawing state legislative lines in 2008 and congressional district lines in 2010 – a reform that has proved enduringly popular with voters and has made California one of the most competitive states in the union for seats in the US House of Representatives.It’s a legacy Schwarzenegger has no intention of relinquishing, not even now that Texas Republicans, acting on the orders of Donald Trump, have redrawn their state maps to add another five Republican-leaning congressional districts, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has vowed to “fight fire with fire” with an initiative to suspend California’s independent commission and add five Democrat-leaning districts in the Golden state.“I’m not going to go back on my promise,” Schwarzenegger told the New York Times last week. “I’m going to fight for my promise.”Schwarzenegger, a rare moderate Republican in an increasingly radical party, is an outspoken Trump critic and said he hated what the president had asked the Texas Republicans to do.But, he said, sinking to the same level in California was no answer, and it made no difference to him that Newsom was pitching his plan as a temporary arrangement. “We are not going to go into a stinking contest with a skunk,” he said. “We are moving forward.”To underline that he meant business, Schwarzenegger appeared for the interview – and later in a post on X – in a T-shirt that read: “F*** the politicians, terminate gerrymandering.”Thus the stage is set for a showdown between the current California governor, who will take his emergency redistricting proposal to voters in November, and the formidable former holder of the same office.Already, Schwarzenegger has started tapping into his old political networks to set up a campaign and fundraising machine to thwart Newsom, and according to his staff he is planning a major policy address – in effect, a campaign launch – sometime in September.The issue is energizing Republicans across California. Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker, has ambitions to raise more than $100m to defeat Newsom’s Proposition 50, also known as the Election Rigging Response Act. Charles Munger Jr, the billionaire son of Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner Charles Munger Sr, is reported to have pledged $30m towards the same effort.The California Young Republican Federation has described Newsom’s initiative as a “dangerous power grab” – echoing almost exactly Democratic rhetoric about the Trump-inspired gerrymander in Texas – and Steve Hilton, the leading Republican candidate running to succeed Newsom next year, is helping to spearhead a legal challenge.Hilton argues that the independent redistricting commission was already skewed unfairly in favour of the Democrats, since Republicans won a little under 40% of vote in California last November but hold just 17% of California’s 52 House seats.“If we had truly independent districting and fair representation, Republicans would have an extra 12 House seats today,” Hilton says, rounding the number in his party’s favour. (Commissioners would counter that he is overlooking a handful of highly competitive races in Republican-leaning districts that Democrats won by narrow margins.)View image in fullscreenThe first polls on Newsom’s initiative are inconclusive, with voters seemingly split between liking independently drawn districts and a narrow plurality – especially Democrats – understanding the desire to counter what the Republicans are doing in Texas. Independents and Republicans are far more skeptical, if not outright hostile.Still, the campaign to stop Newsom will start at an inherent disadvantage, since Democrats have not lost a statewide election since 2006 and California voters, while not as liberal as Republican politicians sometimes like to portray them, have consistently shown a visceral dislike of all things Trump.Schwarzenegger is likely to be the most powerful weapon in the anti-Newsom arsenal, because he has no fondness for Trump and because his embrace of independently drawn electoral boundaries transcends any partisan allegiance. Since leaving office in 2010 he has campaigned in favour of independent commissions around the country – in states that lean both blue and red – and has spoken outside the supreme court when the justices have considered gerrymandering cases.He is also likely to serve as a bridge between Republican partisans and civic groups like the League of Women Voters of California, which views Newsom’s initiative as a slippery slope from which there may be no easy recovery.“Temporary exceptions rarely stay temporary,” the League warned in a statement. “Once you break a safeguard, you don’t just risk one or two or three elections, you set a precedent that future politicians can and will use again … Long-term damage to democratic norms will outlast any short-term gain.”California’s state legislature voted on Thursday to put Newsom’s initiative on the ballot but, after Texas voted to finalize its own maps, stripped out language that would have automatically abandoned California’s proposed partisan gerrymander if Texas chose to reverse course. Democratic lawmakers argued the escape clause was unnecessary because the Texas legislature had already acted. But scrapping it may also create the perception that Democrats, who enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature, have lost interest in playing fair – exactly the scenario Schwarzenegger warned against back in 2005.“The system is rigged to benefit the interests of those in office … not the interests of those who put them there,” he said then. “And we must reform it.” More

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      Ghislaine Maxwell transcripts: Epstein associate says she ‘never’ saw Trump receive a massage – live

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      The transcripts are more than 300 pages, but here it goes …

      Blanche said, on record, that their conversation wasn’t “promising to do anything” for Maxwell. But that anything she said couldn’t be used against her, unless she provided false statements or there was a retrial in her case.

      According to Maxwell, Epstein didn’t have any video or photographic evidence of any high-profile individuals committing sexual offences. And to that point, Maxwell said she didn’t hear or witness any instances of Epstein blackmailing powerful people.

      Maxwell recruited a number of masseuses for Epstein but “never checked their age or credentials”. She added that, throughout her time with Epstein, she never heard any examples of “sexually inappropriate contact” between Epstein’s guests and in-house masseuses.

      Despite her claims that Epstein didn’t extort anyone, Maxwell does not believe that Epstein died by suicide. She chalked that up to “mismanagement” at the bureau of prisons.

      In the interview Maxwell said she does believe that Epstein “did a lot of, not all, but some of what he’s accused of”. But she maintains that “he became that man over a period of time”.

      Maxwell said that she “never” saw Donald Trump receive a massage. She also said that she “never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way,” adding that he was “a gentleman in all respects” whenever she saw the president.

      Maxwell also didn’t recall former president Bill Clinton receiving a massage while travelling with Epstein.

      One notable point is that Maxwell denied ever recruiting masseuses from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. “I’ve never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago for that, as far as I remember. I can’t ever recollect doing that,” she told Todd Blanche. A reminder that Trump claimed his falling out with Jeffrey Epstein stemmed from the convicted sex offender’s efforts to hire workers away from Trump’s Florida club.

      Maxwell did not remember whether Trump submitted a letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday album, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. She also couldn’t remember asking Trump to contribute.
      Donald Trump announced that he named Sergio Gor to be the next US ambassador to India and special envoy for South and Central Asian affairs, according to a post on Truth Social.Gor is currently the director of the White House presidential personnel office, and is slated to remain in that position until his confirmation.“For the most populous Region in the World, it is important that I have someone I can fully trust to deliver on my Agenda and help us, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote on Friday.Carol Alvarado, a Texas Democratic senator from Houston, says she intends to filibuster tonight in the Texas senate to delay Republicans from passing a redrawn congressional map.“Republicans think they can walk all over us. Today I’m going to kick back.I’ve submitted my intention to filibuster the new congressional maps. Going to be a long night,” she wrote in a post on X, accompanied by a picture of sneakers.Democrats have gone back and forth with Phil King, the bill’s GOP sponsor, since this morning, trying to get him to admit that he considered race in drawing the maps.The local television station KVUE has more on the rules Alvarado will have to follow as she filibusters the new congressional map.Alvarado will not be able to eat or drink and must stand at her desk the whole time without breaks for the bathroom, the outlet reported.The national guard personnel deployed on the streets of Washington DC will now be armed, a defense official confirmed to The Guardian.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the nearly 2,000 of the national guard members to carry “service-issued weapons,” the official said.“The Interim Commanding General of the D.C. National Guard retains the authority to make any necessary force posture adjustments in coordination with the D.C. Metropolitan Police and Federal law enforcement partners,” said the defense official.The Pentagon and the US army had said last week that troops would not carry weapons.In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump announced that his administration is undergoing a “major tariff investigation” into imported furniture and is expected to release its findings within 50 days.Trump said the US will impose tariffs (at a rate still to be determined) on foreign-made furniture, in efforts to revive the industry in states including North Carolina, South Carolina, and Michigan.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth fired ​​Lt Gen Jeffrey A Kruse​, the military’s top intelligence officer. The Washington Post first reported the story.Kruse, who served as Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) director, is the second senior Air Force general in a week to be forced out or retire unexpectedly. On Monday, Air Force chief of staff Gen David Allvin announced he was stepping down after just two years in the role, a position typically held for four years.A spokesperson for the DIA told CBS News that deputy director Christine Bordine will assume the role of acting director “effective immediately.”“The firing of yet another senior national security official underscores the Trump administration’s dangerous habit of treating intelligence as a loyalty test rather than a safeguard for our country,” said senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in a statement.The firing comes a few months after details of the agency’s preliminary assessment of damage to Iranian nuclear sites from US strikes leaked to the media. It found that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back only a few months by the US strikes, contradicting assertions from Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.The transcripts are more than 300 pages, but here it goes …

      Blanche said, on record, that their conversation wasn’t “promising to do anything” for Maxwell. But that anything she said couldn’t be used against her, unless she provided false statements or there was a retrial in her case.

      According to Maxwell, Epstein didn’t have any video or photographic evidence of any high-profile individuals committing sexual offences. And to that point, Maxwell said she didn’t hear or witness any instances of Epstein blackmailing powerful people.

      Maxwell recruited a number of masseuses for Epstein but “never checked their age or credentials”. She added that, throughout her time with Epstein, she never heard any examples of “sexually inappropriate contact” between Epstein’s guests and in-house masseuses.

      Despite her claims that Epstein didn’t extort anyone, Maxwell does not believe that Epstein died by suicide. She chalked that up to “mismanagement” at the bureau of prisons.

      In the interview Maxwell said she does believe that Epstein “did a lot of, not all, but some of what he’s accused of”. But she maintains that “he became that man over a period of time”.

      Maxwell said that she “never” saw Donald Trump receive a massage. She also said that she “never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way,” adding that he was “a gentleman in all respects” whenever she saw the president.

      Maxwell also didn’t recall former president Bill Clinton receiving a massage while travelling with Epstein.

      One notable point is that Maxwell denied ever recruiting masseuses from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. “I’ve never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago for that, as far as I remember. I can’t ever recollect doing that,” she told Todd Blanche. A reminder that Trump claimed his falling out with Jeffrey Epstein stemmed from the convicted sex offender’s efforts to hire workers away from Trump’s Florida club.

      Maxwell did not remember whether Trump submitted a letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday album, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. She also couldn’t remember asking Trump to contribute.
      In Ghislaine Maxwell’s first interview with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, on 24 July, she said that she “may have met” Donald Trump in 1990, before meeting Jeffrey Epstein.Maxwell went on to describe the relationship between the president and Epstein as “friendly”, although she didn’t know how the two men met or how they became friends.She added that she “never” saw the president receive a massage:
      I actually never saw the president in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.
      Maxwell also contested Trump’s claims she recruited masseuses from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. “I’ve never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago for that, as far as I remember. I can’t ever recollect doing that,” she said in the interview with Blanche.A reminder that the president said in July that his falling out with Jeffrey Epstein stemmed from the convicted sex offender’s efforts to hire workers away from Trump’s Florida club. “People were taken out of the spa, hired by him, in other words, gone,” the president said.The Department of Justice has released the transcripts and audio recordings of the interviews between Ghislaine Maxwell, the former girlfriend of child sex-offender Jefrrey Epstein, and the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche.The interviews between Blanche and Maxwell took place on 24 and 25 July 2025, with her legal representatives present. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking.The justice department will also send the first tranche of records from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation to the House oversight committee, after receiving a subpoena for the files. Earlier this week, the committee chair, Representative James Comer, a Republican, said that his aim is to make the files public – while protecting the safety and identities of the victims.A court has ordered the release of Kilmar Ábrego García from criminal custody in Tennessee.On Friday, magistrate judge Barbara Holmes issued an order allowing the Maryland father of two to leave custody for the first time since his return to the US in June, after his wrongful deportation to El Salvador earlier this year.The 30-year-old was initially wrongfully deported by federal immigration officials in March. According to the Trump administration, Ábrego was affiliated with the MS-13 gang, a claim Ábrego and his family vehemently deny.During his detention at El Salvador’s so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), Ábrego was physically and psychologically tortured, according to court documents filed by his lawyers in July.Following Ábrego’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration faced widespread pressure to return him back to the US, including from a supreme court order that directed federal officials to “facilitate” his return.In June, the Trump administration returned Ábrego from El Salvador, only to hit him with a slew of human smuggling charges, which his lawyers have rejected as “preposterous”. His criminal trial is expected to begin in January.An update from the Texas senate, where Molly Cook, a Democratic lawmaker from Houston, is now questioning Phil King about the new Texas map.Her line of questioning appears designed to highlight that the senator is not completely blind to race in Texas. She points out that he’s likely done polling in his own races that breaks down results by race and has analysed other statewide racial data as part of his job as a legislator.“I have not drilled into racial data with regard to redistricting,” King says.When asked about the ongoing discussions about a possible bilateral meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president said it will be “interesting to see” whether that goes ahead.Earlier he explained his decision to let the two leaders have a meeting together: “I could have been at the meeting, but a lot of people think that nothing’s going to come out of that meeting.”Trump went on to say that he’ll know “one way or the other” about his next steps in two weeks. “It’s going to be a very important decision. And that’s whether or not it’s massive sanctions or massive tariffs, or both, or do we do nothing and say ‘it’s your fight,’” he said.Earlier the president said he was “not happy” when asked about a US factory being hit during a Russian strike in Ukraine.The president just confirmed that he has spoken with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, about a plan to raise $2bn from Congress to help fund his ‘beautification’ plans for DC.“I think it’s going to be very easy to get it’s going to be not a lot of money. I wouldn’t even know where to spend the number that you mentioned, but it’s going to be money to beautify the city,” he said in response to a reporter’s question in the Oval Office.“I’m not a fan of John Bolton. I thought it was a sleazebag, actually, and he suffers major Trump derangement syndrome,” the president said, speaking about the raid on his former national security adviser’s home.Trump repeated that he tries to “stay out of that stuff”, and that when it came to the search of Bolton’s home, he “purposefully” didn’t want to get involved. “I saw that just like everybody else,” he added.The president then spent time talking about how he too was subjected to a raid, referring to the FBI search of the his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 during an investigation into the handling of presidential and classified documents.“They went through everything you can imagine,” Trump said. More