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      Hunter Biden pleads guilty in tax case after day of back and forth

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      Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to tax charges in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a day of legal wrangling and in a dramatic move that will avoid a potentially embarrassing trial for Joe Biden’s son.Biden, 54, pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges on a day of courtroom twists and turns, after prosecutors earlier objected to his surprise intention to enter an “Alford” plea, an unusual legal maneuver where a defendant pleads guilty but does not acknowledge wrongdoing. Following prosecutors’ objections, lawyers said Biden was ready to change course and enter an “open” plea, where a defendant pleads guilty to the charges and leaves his sentencing fate in the hands of the judge.In court on Thursday afternoon, Abbe Lowell, Biden’s attorney, told Judge Mark Scarsi: “Mr Biden will agree that the elements of each offense have been satisfied.”Biden quickly responded “guilty” as the judge read out each of the nine counts. The charges carry up to 17 years in prison, but federal sentencing guidelines are likely to call for a much shorter sentence.A sentencing hearing has been set for 16 December.The president’s only surviving son had previously pleaded not guilty. The surprise back-and-forth unfolded on Thursday morning as Biden entered a Los Angeles courthouse for the start of his tax-avoidance trial.After learning of Biden’s earlier plan to enter an Alford plea, US justice department prosecutors said that would not be acceptable. Alford pleas are usually negotiated in advance, because prosecutors must get high-level approval before agreeing to them.“It’s not clear to us what they are trying to do,” one prosecutor told Scarsi, the judge overseeing the case.“[Hunter Biden] is not entitled to plead guilty on special terms that apply only to him,” said prosecutor Leo Wise. “Hunter Biden is not innocent. Hunter Biden is guilty.”A trial, in the run-up to the November presidential election, could air embarrassing details of the younger Biden’s life. A defense attorney for Biden, Abbe Lowell, told the judge that the evidence against his client is “overwhelming” and that he wanted to resolve the case.The son of the president stands accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, as well as two felony counts of filing a false return and an additional felony count of tax evasion.Hunter Biden walked into the courtroom for jury selection on Thursday morning holding hands with his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and flanked by Secret Service agents. Initially, he pleaded not guilty to the charges related to his taxes from 2016 to 2019 and his attorneys had indicated they would argue he did not act “willfully”, or with the intention to break the law, in part because of his well-documented struggles with alcohol and drug addiction.A guilty plea will head off a weeks-long trial that would mark the second time in three months that the younger Biden sits in a federal courtroom as a jury of his peers is assembled to assess whether he is guilty of a slew of criminal charges.Hunter Biden was found guilty in Delaware on three felony counts relating to his purchase of a handgun in 2018 because he wrote on his gun-purchase form, falsely, that he was not a user of illicit drugs. The new trial takes place in the city where Biden has lived for years and where, according to the prosecution, he spent extensively on “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature, in short, everything but his taxes”.The most serious charges relate to his 2018 return on which, according to the prosecution, he sought to claim his children’s college tuition fees and more than $27,000 in online pornography as business expenses.The tax charges and the gun charges carry maximum sentences of more than 20 years in prison, although legal experts say that, as a first-time offender, Biden is likely to be punished far less harshly even if he were to be found guilty a second time.It has been a whirlwind of a summer for Joe Biden’s son, one in which he was convicted of felonies, rushed to Washington as pressure mounted on his father not to run for re-election, raised eyebrows by dropping into White House meetings – and, according to one report, acting as his father’s “gatekeeper” – then appeared on stage at the Democratic national convention to bask in his father’s reflected glory.Now that Joe Biden has abandoned his re-election ambitions and thrown his support behind his vice-president, Kamala Harris, the political stakes of Hunter Biden’s latest trial will be lower. Still, his legal troubles will take some of the sting out of Donald Trump’s constant complaints that he is the target of a political witch-hunt and that the president has “weaponized” the justice system against him.After Hunter Biden’s June conviction, Joe and Jill Biden issued a statement saying they would respect the judicial process and not consider a pardon for their son. The first lady attended court in Delaware most days, but it is not clear whether she would do the same in California. More

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      The US right keeps accusing Democrats of ‘communism’. What does that even mean? | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The Trump campaign, flanked by an army of online trolls commanded by Elon Musk, has been struggling to settle on an attack line against the Democratic ticket. Of course, a decade or so ago no one would have thought a candidate unable to think of nasty nicknames had a problem; but Donald Trump has made us all ask stupider questions and have stupider thoughts. If in doubt, though – and no matter what any Democrat actually does or says – the Republican party will level the charges of “socialism” and “communism” against them.To state the obvious: free lunches – ensuring that poor kids won’t go hungry – are not communism. The one time in recent history that the US clearly resembled the Soviet Union – empty shelves and long lines outside shops – was under Trump; to be sure, other countries also had supply chain problems during Covid-19, but the former president proved exceptionally irresponsible and incompetent. But there’s another, less obvious similarity with the late Soviet Union in particular: the experience of being at the mercy of bureaucrats. No, not the DMV, but vast private corporations with quasi-monopoly power, something with which Trump’s Republican party, unlike the Biden administration, is evidently fine.Ever since the New Deal, the US right has relied on an ideological mixture as incoherent as it is toxic, with charges of communism freely interspersed with accusations of fascism. Into that mixture, US reactionaries sprinkle what is politely called “anti-elitism” but often enough amounts to thinly disguised antisemitism. Musk and the Republican ideologues now regularly portray Kamala Harris as controlled by secret “puppetmasters”, the Soroses (son and father) in particular, bent on advancing a “globalist” or “cultural Marxist” agenda.Most rightwingers would struggle to explain what these terms really mean; but then again, for many of them politics is not a philosophy exam, but a contest over what can incite fear and hatred of dangerous Others threatening supposed “real Americans”. One fairly simple, almost intuitive throughline, however, is the notion that Real America wants individual freedom, while Real America’s enemies are collectivists bent on creating all-powerful bureaucracies whose business is not business, but telling people what to do. (That is also why, when pressed, rightwingers will inevitably identify “bureaucrats” and the “managerial class” as core members of the “liberal elite”.)The truth is that much of day-to-day life in the US is horrendously bureaucratic: filling out “paperwork”, spending hours on hold, being at the mercy of individuals who might be reasonable when they have a good day (and respond to the plea “Can I talk to you like a human being?”) or simply use discretion to say no when they happen to have a bad day. Europeans never believe this could be the reality in the land of the free, because European pro-business parties like to sell them the story that every day in the US, somebody starts the equivalent of Microsoft in their garage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, plenty of Americans do not see that US businesses can be bureaucratic nightmares because, to be blunt, they know nothing else. Often unable to travel for financial reasons, they accept red scare tales about countries they’ve never seen. Democrats are complicit in encouraging a nationalism that makes the case for reform unnecessarily difficult: if people are constantly told by both parties that theirs is the greatest country ever, why mobilize for fundamental change?Capitalist bureaucracies are maddening, but the madness has a method: it’s driven in part by fear of liability (something Democrats are reluctant to address properly) but above all by the hope that frustrated customers will eventually just give up and let the insurance claim go, rather than spend another two hours on the phone listening to the automated message: “Your call is important to us.” Corporate power has increased enormously in recent decades, partially based on the rightwing doctrine that monopolies are OK as long as they benefit consumers. Bureaucratization has also increased in areas where the state, driven by neoliberal ideology, has tried to engineer competition in public services – in the process creating ever-larger bureaucracies devoted to measuring and surveillance. George W Bush’s No Child Left Behind is a prime example.The Biden administration has at least tried to change course on monopoly power, under the leadership of Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whose career started with an attack on the mistaken pro-monopoly theory. The government has gone after “junk fees” such as exorbitant credit card late fees; most recently, with its Time is Money initiative, the White House is confronting predatory capitalists using red tape to extract time and, ultimately, money from powerless customers unable ever to “speak to a representative”. Meanwhile, just as with the upside-down reasoning about monopolies, distinguished defenders of the little guy such as Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina have twisted themselves into justifying junk fees.True, daily indignities and frustrations in dealing with private-sector bureaucrats are trivial compared with the horrors of 20th-century totalitarianism. But it’s not trivial to want to make life just a little fairer by reducing the power of private actors to behave like dictators.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      The strangest insult in US politics: why do Republicans call it ‘the Democrat party’?

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      The Democratic party? Robert F Kennedy Jr’s never heard of it.On Tuesday, the former presidential candidate issued his latest condemnation of the “Democrat party”, endorsing a bizarre linguistic tradition among haters of the institution. As Donald Trump told a rally in 2018: “I call it the Democrat party. It sounds better rhetorically.” By “better”, of course, he meant “worse”, as he explained the next year: he prefers to say “the ‘Democrat party’ because it doesn’t sound good”.In removing two letters from “Democratic”, the former president is adopting a jibe that’s been around since at least the 1940s. Opponents of the party long ago decided, for some reason, that this brutal act of syllabic denial would shame their opponents. Democrats don’t seem particularly devastated by the attack, but Republicans and those who love them have stuck with it. We hear it regularly from party luminaries such as JD Vance, Mike Johnson and Nikki Haley; pragmatic independents like RFK Jr; and media voices across the vast spectrum from Fox News to Infowars. Last week, even Tulsi Gabbard, once a Democratic presidential candidate herself, wrote an op-ed proudly describing her departure from the Democrat party and support for Trump.But even if the misnaming doesn’t exactly leave liberal snowflakes in tears, it does serve a purpose, says Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s a marker of affiliation – an indicator of the media a person consumes and the politicians they listen to. She recently heard a friend remark on “Democrat party” policies and asked why they used the term; the friend wasn’t even aware they had done it. “Language is contagious, especially emotionally charged political language,” Holliday says. “Most of the time, we don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to think very hard about every single word that we’re using. We just use it because it’s what other people do.”That lack of awareness “shows how normalized it’s become”, says Larry Glickman, Stephen and Evalyn Milman professor in American studies at Cornell University, who likens the term to a “schoolyard taunt”. It suggests the party is “outside the mainstream of American politics so much so that we’re not even going to call them by the name they prefer. We refuse to give them that amount of respect.”It’s part of a familiar pattern, as Holliday has written: “Intentionally calling a set of people by something other than their official and preferred form of reference is a common tactic of opposition that is designed to confer disrespect.” If someone named Christopher prefers not to be called Chris, and you do it anyway, it’s pretty clear you’re being rude – regardless of your politics, she says. And she and Glickman both point out that we’re seeing a new version of the same unpleasant phenomenon when it comes to the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name. Almost half the speakers at the Republican convention got it wrong, according to the Washington Post. At a July rally, Trump said he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounced the word. Eventually, Harris’s grandnieces, ages six and eight, felt compelled to offer a lesson at the Democratic convention this month.Such bullying may be a Trump trademark, but its origins are a bit fuzzy. According to Glickman, the term first came to prominence in 1946 thanks to a congressman named Brazilla Carroll Reece, who headed the Republican National Committee. Unlike Trump, Reece saw himself as a liberal – at least according to that era’s definition of the term; still, he wasn’t a fan of the New Deal or other recent developments. He used the term to indicate that what was once the Democratic party no longer existed: it had been commandeered by “radicals”. In 1948, the Republican party platform left off the “ic” in “Democratic”, and in 1952, a newspaper columnist asked: “Who has taken the ‘ic’ out of the party of our fathers?” Senator Joseph McCarthy, meanwhile, helped popularize the term.Over the decades, the Democratic party became associated with liberal policies, and eventually, “the ‘Democrat party’ slur became a condemnation of liberalism itself”, Glickman wrote. The phrase was a huge hit in the 90s and 2000s; Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and George W Bush played it on repeat. By the following decade, Trump was mandating the word: “The Democrat party. Not Democratic. It’s Democrat. We have to do that.”Removing the “ic” does seem to suggest the party isn’t about democracy. But if that’s the goal, Glickman wonders: “Why not call it the undemocratic party? Like Trump used to say the Department of Injustice.” And anyway, as they’ve proved since 2020, democracy isn’t high on the list of Republican values. Instead, Glickman suggests, it’s more about a “babyish” tendency to misname people. Also, as Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker in 2006, “it fairly screams ‘rat’.”So what should Democrats do? Is it time to start calling Republicans Republics? Licans? Relics? President Harry Truman tried “Publicans”, and it clearly didn’t take off. Perhaps it’s best, especially considering that many people don’t even know it’s an insult, to just keep ignoring it. Getting mad would be taking the bait. “This would be constructed as Democrats are weak pedants who can’t take a joke and they’re policing our language and see how they’re so heavy-handed with regulation?” Holliday says.So Democrats can let the attempts at bullying continue. Trump and his gang clearly need to blow off some steam; might as well be through the world’s tiniest, oddest insult. More

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      Republican-led House panel subpoenas Tim Walz over $250m Covid relief fraud

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      A Republican-led US House committee sent a subpoena to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, seeking documents and communications related to a vast fraud scheme conducted by a non-profit that used pandemic relief funds meant for feeding kids.NBC News first reported the subpoenas, which were sent to Walz; Minnesota’s commissioner of education, Willie Jett; the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack; and the agriculture inspector general, Phyllis Fong.The US House committee on education and the workforce wrote to Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, to say it had been investigating the US Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota department of education’s oversight of federal child nutrition programs and Feeding Our Future, the group that is alleged to have stolen more than $250m in pandemic funds.The subpoena does not seek an in-person appearance from Walz before the committee. It sets an 18 September deadline for turning over documents.Five of the people involved in the scheme were convicted for their roles earlier this year in a trial that included an attempt to bribe a juror with a bag full of $120,000 in cash left at her home. In total, 70 people have been charged in relation to the scheme.Walz’s increased prominence in national politics has brought fresh scrutiny of his role as Minnesota’s top executive and whether the state education department, which is under his purview, should have caught the fraud.The committee’s Republican chairwoman, Virginia Foxx, wrote to Walz: “You are well aware of the multimillion-dollar fraud that has occurred under your tenure as governor.”A spokesperson for Walz said the Feeding our Future case was “an appalling abuse of a federal Covid-era program”.“The state department of education worked diligently to stop the fraud and we’re grateful to the FBI for working with the Department of Education to arrest and charge the individuals involved,” the spokesperson said.Walz has previously defended the department but acknowledged there were improvements to be made in oversight, after a state audit found the department’s lacking oversight “created opportunities for fraud”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There’s not a single state employee that was implicated in doing anything that was illegal. They simply didn’t do as much due diligence as they should’ve,” Walz said after the audit report.Foxx claimed the committee had made voluntary requests to Minnesota’s education department for documents but “has been unable to obtain substantive responsive materials”.Walz’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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      ‘We captured magic’: the telenovelas reaching Latino voters in swing states

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      “Una chingona always knows when to use her own voice.”So begins the first installment of a telenovela geared toward young Latina voters. Chingonas, which means empowered women in Mexican Spanish, are the target audience for the non-profit Poder NC Action – a Latino North Carolina-based voter engagement group. This year, the largest ever cohort of young North Carolina-born Latinos will be eligible to vote in a presidential election.The unique eight-part series released last month on YouTube was created to close the gap between registration and turnout for Latino voters, who have historically voted less than some other groups, in the key battleground state. In the short films, the main character Alexia is a young Latina who goes from struggling to voice her opinions with her community and family to encouraging strangers to turn out to vote.“We captured magic somehow,” Irene Godinez, the executive director of Poder NC Action, said about the telenovelas. “The fact that 18-year-old boys to a 70-something-year-old woman feel seen in this and are excited about it is unheard of.”Now, the films’ reach has extended beyond North Carolina, with voter engagement organizations in California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Colorado featuring them on social media platforms. The videos appear in Hulu and YouTube TV ads; the non-profit Voto Latino will use them in a digital public service announcement ahead of the election, and in the fall, Latino fraternal chapters, such as Lambda Upsilon Lambda Fraternity, Inc and Lambda Theta Alpha Latin Sorority, Inc, will screen the telenovelas on campuses around the country.Nationwide, an estimated 36.2 million Latino voters will be eligible to vote this year, nearly 15% of the electorate, according to Pew Research Center. Godinez foresaw the large swath of eligible voters coming to age when she launched the non-profit in 2020: “My calculation was, if we start talking to them right now that they’re in high school and we can get them in as volunteers,” said Godinez. “Then by the time that they become actual voting age, they’ll be not only informed, but they’ll be willing to inform their peers.”Before Poder NC Action’s inception in 2020, political parties and advocacy groups did not invest in voter engagement efforts for Latino voters in North Carolina, said Godinez. She sought to create culturally relevant voter engagement initiatives that spoke directly to young Latino voters.“The people who absolutely are being neglected, it doesn’t mean that they’re not interested,” Godinez said. “It just means that no one has made an effort to reach out to them.”The organization’s strategy has been to focus on courting around 150,000 Latino voters who have voted twice or less since registering to vote in 2016. Their outreach consists of political mailers, phonebanking, canvassing, and monthly social hours where voters meet local politicians.In 2020, Poder NC Action hand delivered 4,000 voter information cards throughout the state, made over 1m calls, delivered over 1m mailers, and worked with 130 young Latino volunteers. Godinez said that their efforts helped North Carolina Latino voters become 40% of the overall Latino voter turnout in 2020.And in 2022, a quarter of the organization’s targeted voters voted in the midterm election. The organization is taking cue from its members on whether they will endorse a presidential candidate. “It’s even likely that we would endorse Kamala Harris,” Godinez said, “but it will boil down to what our membership determines”.In February, Poder NC Action hosted a Barbie movie-themed event where volunteers escorted the 50 attendees down a pink carpet that led to a barbie photo booth so they could post photos on social media. It was the second time that the organization hosted the voter registration event called Ballots y Belleza, where attendees get free beauty services including makeup and waxing as they study sample ballots and volunteers inform them about voting issues. In September, the group will host another Ballots y Belleza event for Latinx Heritage Month that focuses on the theme “Poder (Power) is our Heritage, too,” said Godinez.View image in fullscreenThe event was inspired by a 15-year-old who begrudgingly attended one of the group’s social hour events with an older sibling last summer. The teen told Godinez that she would willingly sit through a daylong civic engagement meeting if she could simultaneously get her nails done. “We wanted to create a space where folks could come and learn and build community with each other,” Godinez said, “and then create some sort of connection with us as well”.Following Poder NC Action’s events, attenders have told Godinez that they feel “seen” in her programming. “Organizations create different types of programming tailored to voters, but they do it as if voters are different from their loved ones. They don’t look at voters particularly as an extension of themselves,” Godinez said. “We see our families in our voters. We see ourselves in our voters.”The work that Poder NC Action is doing to engage Latino voters could serve as a model for organizations in other states throughout the nation, said Chuck Rocha, a Democratic party strategist and president of consulting firm Solidarity Strategies. As a consultant to the organization for the past six years, Rocha said that Poder NC Action’s work stood out because it was rooted in the Latino community: Poder NC Action is run by a Latina woman, while the staff, consultants and artists that work on products are also Latino.“There’s lots of Spanish ads made by congressional candidates or governors candidates, but it’s just made by their same white consultants, normally translated from English,” Rocha said. “They’re all well-meaning, but it just doesn’t have the same look and feel when it’s made from the community, by the community, for the community.”At the end of September, Poder NC Action will launch another telenovela series that focuses on reproductive justice. Starting in mid-October, the organization will host a mobile Ballots y Belleza on a party bus where young voters will receive beauty services at historically Black colleges and universities, as well as public universities around North Carolina.Ultimately, Godinez hopes that Poder NC’s initiatives will help inspire a new generation of voters to become civically engaged. “We’re creating a paper trail of everything so that we can share it with organizations that our values align no matter where they are, so that way, if something is working well here, there’s no reason that we would hold on to it and not share it.” More

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      Donald Trump is deeply threatened by Kamala Harris – and desperately flailing | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “Kamala, you’re fired!” shouted Donald Trump. Then he pleaded: “You’re fired. Get out. Get out. Get out, Kamala!” The crowd cheered at his rally on 26 August in Glendale, Arizona, as though approving his order. But the invocation of the magic words he recited at the climax of every episode of The Apprentice failed to make her phantom disappear.Trump’s advisers sneak policy material into his stump speech that he must read as it scrolls on his teleprompter. They want to channel him into speaking about “the issues”. But he has revolted against them and “the issues”. “They always say, ‘Sir, please stick to policy, don’t get personal,” he complained to a rally. He turned to his Maga masses to give him license. “Should I get personal, or should I not get personal?” The crowd cheered as he knew it would. It was the poll result he wanted. “My advisers are fired!”Trump’s narcissism is his grand strategy. No adviser trying to calibrate him to polls can dislodge it. Both Kamala Harris and his advisers constrain and threaten him. He views the vice-president’s presence as an injustice. He had beaten Joe Biden. His withdrawal and her emergence were the implementation of the far-right replacement theory. The entire scenario has left Trump on the stage in a play for which his only new lines added to the script are that he is transparently faking it to be sort of for abortion before he is against it as he always was. He announced he will vote to uphold a ban after six weeks in Florida and against the state’s abortion referendum to overturn it. He cries that he is the victim, as he is always the victim when he does not get his way. His irrepressible impulse is to trash the woman. The advisers who seek to tamp him down are his adversaries.Trump believes in the marrow of his bones that his intuition, his sixth sense, is his secret power. Acting out has been his winning ticket. He is certain that is why his moment came and why it must come again. He gives no credence to circumstances or any other person, which would diminish him. He has achieved godlike status by being true to himself. It’s not just that he’s incapable of being other than himself, but that he feels it is the only way he’s won. He’s extinguished self-doubt, if he ever entertained it. He can’t be anything else. At his core, he believes idolatry of his personality is the key to his success. Without it, he is obliterated. He can never accept losing, being the loser.“We will never give up, we will never concede,” he told the crowd assembled on January 6. “It doesn’t happen.”Now against a candidate of change (a woman), his resistance to change (attacking the woman) is his only way to cling to his authenticity. Above all, he fears self-neutralization. If he cannot act out, he’s a nullity to himself, his most terrifying prospect. Anything that could be construed as criticism threatens his manhood, his mental equilibrium and evokes a reflexively hostile response. It is an impossible task to pry him away from his impulses, especially when it’s a survival instinct.His advisers’ version of “the issues” is a straight and narrow negative campaign to stain his opponents, combined with deceptive flip-flops to smudge Trump’s position on abortion. They want clean distortions and falsehoods without Trump’s accompanying mess. The architect of his ratfucking operation, Chris LaCivita, was behind the Swift Boat lies about war hero John Kerry in 2004, funded by the far-right billionaire Harlan Crow, who happens to be the big-hearted benefactor of Clarence Thomas. LaCivita has hoped to repeat his mudslinging triumph now against Tim Walz in order to undermine an alternative example of masculinity. Trump, however, keeps stumbling over his campaign’s well-laid smears.The more his advisers attempt to curb him, the more he acts out to reassert his essential nature under pressure from within his campaign. His discontent has led him to bring back his oft-disgraced goon, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly physically assaulted a female reporter during the 2016 campaign and sexually molested the wife of a major Republican donor in 2021, among other lowlights. (Prosecutors ultimately declined to charge Lewandowski in the first case; in the second he was fined and sentenced to community service and “impulse control training” after accepting a plea deal without admitting guilt.) Lewandowski claims to be the genius who invented the slogan “Let Trump Be Trump.” Trump has brought him back from his political planet Pluto as an enabler to help him avoid impulse control.Trump is on the horns of a dilemma. If he is advised that to save himself he must deny himself, he will feel that he must deny the advice to save himself. He can’t respond to a different world. His “greatness” is to reject the modern and now normal world to be led by a mixed-race woman who is also a relentless prosecutor bringing the political case against him. He’s increasingly deviant. His campaign must be to define Trump down. He must force her into subservience.Harris is an exponentially greater threat to Trump than E Jean Carroll. The Carroll defamation judgment didn’t strip him of his manhood, but could be interpreted as an affirmation: the adjudicated rapist as alpha dog. Losing to Harris would be the extinction of his virility. She compounds his existential crisis. If he loses, he will not be able to use presidential powers to be a criminal on the loose. The federal cases against him will proceed, even if the US supreme court has eviscerated the constitution in granting him “absolute” official immunity for attempting to overthrow the government.A defeated Trump will face years of trials, undoubtedly receive guilty verdicts and likely jail time. He will be a depleted convict. His fear of his fate accelerates his impulses to lie, smear and violate all norms to an uncontrollably frantic level. An aide of Trump’s, or possibly two, even allegedly physically assaulted a female employee to get the photo-op of him giving a thumbs-up over a grave in a forbidden section at Arlington National Cemetery. Trump’s spokesman smeared her as “clearly suffering from a mental health episode”, while LaCivita, drawing on his Swift Boat playbook, dubbed her “despicable”. The woman declined to file charges, reportedly out of fear of retaliation.Harris has become the personification of “nasty” women to Trump. She encompasses the women beyond his decayed appeal who do not aspire to be his ornaments and are therefore his tormentors. He naturally wants to reduce all women to vulnerable and undefended figures he can subjugate at will in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, or leap on by surprise in a Bel Air hotel suite. His explanation of his charm in the Hollywood Access tape was that as a star he was irresistible to women who allowed him to “grab ’em by the pussy”. But the Carroll and Stormy Daniels cases have exposed his methods, punished and humiliated him. As Daniels testified in the trial for which he was convicted for 34 felonies: “Was it brief?” “Yes.” For Trump, that was a worse judgment than the convictions for business fraud. The thrill is gone.Trump’s need to assault Harris is even more intense than it was toward Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Trump hadn’t been president before. He launched his bid as a branding exercise that went haywire. Now, he’s desperate to claw back his lost status, not least to gain the pardon power to remove the extensive federal charges against him. His restoration, which he thought was a snap until 21 July, when Biden withdrew, has been interrupted by a dangerous woman he can’t subdue and an allure he can’t fathom.Harris is a mystery woman to him. The campaign is astoundingly abbreviated. He lacks time to rehearse a degrading story to drag her down. The media, despite frequently leaning on the mindless formula of false equivalence, doesn’t seem in the same gleeful mood to join in his rampant cruelty that it was in 2016. Yet even the fair-minded Dana Bash of CNN in her interview of Harris felt compelled to earnestly ask her reaction to Trump’s racist claim that she had “turned Black” for political purposes as if it were a legitimate question. “Same old tired playbook,” Harris replied. “Next question.” Her succinct dismissal instantly reduced Trump to an exhausted, sputtering blowhard past his sell date. The younger woman swipes left.Trump has a preternatural sense it’s slipping away. The gift of the demagogue is to grasp the currents of the masses that he can exploit for his self-aggrandizement. His compulsion to attack Harris increases every day his invective falls flat.He began with a twisted pronunciation of her name, then called her “Kamabla” and moved to “Comrade Kamala”. Baffled by her self-assurance, he did not rely on his usual stable of insults hurled at those women who had testified to his sexual assaults: “horseface”, “face of a pig”, “crazed, crying lowlife”, “dog”.Trump could not surprise her as he did the young women in the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants he owned when he barged into the dressing rooms. “You know, they’re standing there with no clothes,” he told Howard Stern in 2005. “‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”But what can the predatory voyeur now “get away with”? Before the Democratic convention, Trump began bargaining with his Maga masses about the terms on which he should assault Harris. He warily circled her. “Don’t ever call a woman beautiful, because that’ll be the end of your political career, please,” he said mockingly.Trump started to circulate debasing sexual innuendo about Harris on 18 August with a retweet of a video consisting of a warped version of Alanis Morissette’s song Ironic to suggest that Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee through oral sex: “She spent her whole damn life / Down on her knees / To be commander in chief / That’s how you say please / Isn’t it moronic …”The video depicts Harris holding a sign reading, “I Am A Moron.” Then the face of Willie Brown, the former speaker of the California assembly, whom she once dated, pops up behind a sofa on which she is sitting with her husband, Doug Emhoff.Trump continued his obsessive theme on 29 August, retweeting a picture of Harris and Hillary Clinton with the caption: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently.”Trump’s campaign of sexual insinuation that launched with the phony Morissette song has been reliant on a far-right, mainly anonymous social media group called the Dilley Meme Team, which advertises itself as producing “the dankest memes and original content for Maga brands and campaigns”. During the Republican primaries, the group made crude videos of Nikki Haley as a prostitute and Casey DeSantis, the wife of Ron DeSantis, as a pornographic actor. It also created a video of Biden as a pedophile. The group was behind a video that Trump retweeted in May hailing his return to power with a mock newspaper headline proclaiming the “Creation of a Unified Reich”.Trump has worked closely on these productions, “privately communicated with members of the meme team, giving them access and making specific requests for content”, according to the New York Times.Trump’s quandary is that in trying to demean Harris, his old techniques have lost their fascination. Now he perceives himself as the nervous contestant in a beauty pageant. “But I say that I am much better-looking. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.” “They said, ‘No, her biggest advantage is that she’s a beautiful woman.’ I’m going, huh? I never thought of that. I’m better-looking than she is.”If this is a fairytale, he’s the jealous evil witch from Snow White. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?After Harris strode on to the stage of the Democratic national convention in a navy blue suit radiating confidence and expressing command, he fretted about his waning attractiveness. “I was sort of like a hot guy. I was hot as a pistol. I think I was hotter than I am now, and I became president. OK. I don’t know. I said to somebody, was I hotter before or hotter now? I don’t know. Who the hell knows?”Time and again, Trump repeats that Harris is “not smart” and “not very smart”, which only reveals his insecurity about facing her in a debate he has variously refused and accepted. His campaign’s insistence that his microphone be shut off only underscores his advisers’ dread of his unmonitored mouth. After her CNN interview, he accused her both of being “boring” – that is, he couldn’t figure out a point of criticism – and of “rambling incoherence”, his obvious projection.“I think I am entitled to personal attacks,” he says. “I do not have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president … And whether the personal attacks are good, bad – I mean, she certainly attacks me personally. She actually called me weird. ‘He’s weird.’ She’s not smart. I don’t believe she loves our country. Some people say, ‘Oh, why don’t you be nice?’ But they’re not nice to me. They want to put me in prison. They don’t want me to be a little bit nasty. They want to put me in prison. Me!”

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      John McCain’s son says he will vote Democrat as he slams Trump Arlington visit

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      The son of the late Republican senator John McCain – whose war record was disparaged by Donald Trump – has added his voice to criticism of the former president’s controversial Arlington cemetery visit, accusing him of violating a sacred burial site for political purposes.First Lieutenant Jimmy McCain, an intelligence officer in the 158th infantry regiment of the national guard, said Trump’s behaviour at the cemetery – America’s most revered burial ground for fallen military personnel and military heroes – was in line with previous acts of disrespect.He told CNN that Trump’s attitude to military service has driven him away from the Republican party of his father, adding that he had changed his registered voter affiliation to Democrat and planned to vote for Kamala Harris in the forthcoming presidential election.Trump’s reputation for disdaining military personnel is rooted in his first presidential run in 2016, when he said McCain Sr, who died in 2018, did not deserve the war hero status accorded to him because he had been captured during the Vietnam war.He has since been reported to have called US soldiers buried at a first world war cemetery in France “suckers” and “losers” and questioned the value of the Congressional Medal of Honor, generally given for acts of military heroism.McCain said the shift in his political affiliation had been party influenced by Trump’s comments about his father. “Hearing things [from Trump] like, he was a loser because he was captured – I don’t think I could ever overlook that,” he said.But he also suggested Trump had effectively violated the service of fallen soldiers in last week’s episode. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice,” said McCain, whose grandfather and great-grandfather are buried at Arlington.The Republican presidential nominee has drawn broad condemnation and a rebuke from the US army after a visit to the cemetery ostensibly to mark the third anniversary of a suicide bombing that killed 13 American servicemen during the US pullout from Afghanistan in 2021 devolved into a campaign photo opportunity.Members of Trump’s campaign staff reportedly pushed aside a female cemetery worker when she tried to enforce federal regulations prohibiting taking camera and film equipment into section 60, the facility area reserved for those killed in the Afghan and Iraq campaigns.Pictures and footage were subsequently published of a smiling Trump giving the thumbs up while posing alongside some of the fallen servicemen’s family members, who had invited him. The graves of other personnel – whose families did not give permission – can be clearly seen in the background. Some of them have condemned the visit.Trump has defended it and released supportive statements from relatives of six of the armed forces members killed in the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing.On a statement on his Truth Social site on Wednesday, he went further, accusing Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, of making up the story and claiming there had been no altercation.“There was no conflict or ‘fighting’ at Arlington National Cemetery last week,” he wrote. “It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad. She made it all up to make up for the fact that she and Sleepy Joe [Biden] have BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS for the INCOMPETENT AFGHANISTAN Withdrawal.”But speaking to CNN, McCain suggested his actions were driven by feelings of insecurity about his own lack of military service experience.“It was a violation,” he said. “I just think that for anyone who’s done a lot of time in their uniform, they just understand that inherently – that it’s not about you there. It’s about these people who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the name of their country.”“Many of these men and women who served their country chose to do something greater than themselves. They woke up one morning, they signed on the dotted line, they put their right hand up and they chose to serve their country. And that’s an experience that Donald Trump has not had. And I think that might be something that he thinks about a lot.” More

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      Trump claims ‘no conflict’ during Arlington national cemetery visit despite US army statements – live

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      Donald Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that “there was no conflict” during his visit to Arlington national cemetery last week, calling it “a made up story” by his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Trump wrote:
      There was no conflict or “fighting” at Arlington National Cemetery last week. It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.
      The US army accused the Trump campaign of turning a wreath-laying ceremony on 26 August to mark the deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan into a photo opportunity.The army also accused two campaign workers representing Trump of pushing aside an official who told them it was forbidden to take pictures at the graves of military members who had recently died.An army spokesperson said a female Arlington national cemetery official was “abruptly pushed aside” during an argument with Trump aides over photos and filming on the grounds for partisan, political or fundraising purposes. A spokesperson for the military said the episode was “unfortunate”, and it was “also unfortunate” that the cemetery “employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked”. The employee is not pressing charges.This blog is pausing coverage. We’ll be back soon.

      Kamala Harris will travel to Pittsburgh on Thursday and will remain there while she prepares for next Tuesday’s presidential debate with Donald Trump, according to reports. The Harris campaign is still negotiating with ABC News about rules for the 10 September debate, a Harris campaign official said.

      Kamala Harris is expected to announce new proposals meant to boost small businesses and entrepreneurs ahead of a campaign speech on Wednesday in New Hampshire, according to a report.

      The Harris campaign launched the “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour aimed at advocating for women’s reproductive rights starting today in Palm Beach, Florida. The second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, the Minnesota first lady, Gwen Walz, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and the Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez are among those who will be on the tour.

      The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee announced it will transfer $25m to support down-ballot candidates.

      Donald Trump claimed that “there was no conflict” during his visit to Arlington national cemetery last week, calling it “a made-up story” by his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. The US army accused two campaign workers representing Trump of pushing aside an official who told them it was forbidden to take pictures at the graves of military members who had recently died.

      Jimmy McCain, the son of the late Republican senator John McCain, condemned Trump’s visit to the Arlington national cemetery last week as a “violation”. “These men and women that are lying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be a backdrop for a political campaign, he told CNN.

      Fred Trump III, the nephew of Donald Trump, said the Republican presidential nominee “just doesn’t give a shit” about members of the US military. “He just doesn’t. Donald believes in Donald,” he told MSNBC.

      The offices of Donald Trump’s campaign and Republican National Committee were briefly evacuated last week after staff thought they discovered listening devices under a desk, according to a local police report.

      A federal judge ordered Donald Trump and his campaign to stop using the song Hold On, I’m Coming co-written by the late R&B artist and songwriter Isaac Hayes, after Hayes’s estate sought an emergency injunction to stop the Trump campaign from using the song at campaign events.

      The Manhattan district attorney’s office urged the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal case to rule on his motion to vacate his conviction, and not wait until a federal judge considers a separate motion filed by Trump last week to move the case into federal court.

      Pat Toomey, the former Republican senator for Pennsylvania, said he will not be voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the November election. Toomey said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but that he could not bring himself to support the Republican presidential candidate, citing Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

      A rightwing thinktank report proposing sweeping restrictions to abortions and fertility treatments was endorsed by JD Vance years before he became a fervent backer of Donald Trump and – eventually – his vice-presidential running mate known for his derisive views on childless women.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr was asked if he would be vice-president under Donald Trump hours after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, it has been revealed. Kennedy reportedly rejected the suggestion from Calley Means, an entrepreneur who sometimes advised him on chronic diseases and was acting as an intermediary, according to the New York Times.

      Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, warned his opposite number, the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that history will judge him “poorly” because he paved the way to rightwing policies out of touch with the American people.
      Seven Republican states sue over Biden administration’s new student debt relief planRepublican-led states are again attempting to halt the Biden administration’s plans to implement a student debt forgiveness program.Seven states have filed a lawsuit challenging a new debt relief plan and said efforts were under way at the US Department of Education to start canceling loans as soon as this week, Reuters reported. That news came after the supreme court last week rejected the Biden administration’s bid to revive a different student debt relief plan.“We successfully halted their first two illegal student loan cancellation schemes; I have no doubt we will secure yet another win to block the third one,” Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, said in a statement.Kamala Harris will travel to Pittsburgh on Thursday to prepare for next Tuesday’s presidential debate with Donald Trump, according to reports.Harris will remain in Pittsburgh until the debate takes place on 10 September, CNN reported, citing sources familiar with the planning.In Pittsburgh, Harris will participate in intensive debate prep, informally known as “debate camp” led by Karen Dunn, a Washington-based lawyer who helped prepare Harris for her 2020 vice-presidential debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, a longtime Harris policy aide, the Washington Post reported.Harris is expected to meet voters in Pittsburgh and stay on the campaign trail in the key battleground state while also preparing for the debate, according to CNN.In recent weeks, Harris has held at least one debate prep session at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington, according to the Post.The Harris campaign is still negotiating with ABC News about rules for the 10 September debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, NBC News reported, citing a Harris campaign official.No agreement has been reached on the final rules, the official said.The offices of Donald Trump’s campaign and Republican National Committee were briefly evacuated last week after staff thought they discovered listening devices under a desk, according to a local police report.About 50 employees were evacuated on Thursday afternoon after people heard beeping under a staff member’s desk at the Trump campaign offices in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to the local police department.Three devices were found by police and security, who subsequently swept the floors of the building, the Washington Post reported. Employees returned to the building later that afternoon. The devices were identified as “a cricket noisemaker prank” that can be bought on Amazon, it said.A security official who worked in the building told the police he believed “the devices were part of a prank. The suites were canvassed for any additional devices and evidence yielding negative results”, the New York Times reported.The Philadelphia Eagles said it is aware of “counterfeit ads being circulated” that claim the American football team has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.Posters appeared on the streets of Philadelphia showing Harris wearing an Eagles helmet and holding an American football, with “KAMALA” in large bold letters and the tagline “Official candidate of the Philadelphia Eagles”.NBC Philadelphia reported spotting at least six of the counterfeit ads around the city before they were taken down on Monday. It is unclear who was responsible for them, it said.A rightwing thinktank report proposing sweeping restrictions to abortions and fertility treatments was endorsed by JD Vance years before he became a fervent backer of Donald Trump and – eventually – his vice-presidential running mate known for his derisive views on childless women.In 2017, months into Trump’s presidency, Vance wrote the foreword to the Index of Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays by conservative authors for the Heritage Foundation that included ideas for encouraging women to have children earlier and promoting a resurgence of “traditional” family structure. The essays lauded the increase in state laws restricting abortion rights and included arguments that the practice should become “unthinkable” in the US, a hardline posture the Democrats now say is the agenda of Trump and Vance, who they accuse of harbouring the intent to impose a national ban following a 2022 supreme court ruling overturning Roe v Wade and annulling the federal right to terminate a pregnancy.The report also includes an essay lamenting the spread of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments, with the author attributing them as reasons for women delaying having children and prioritising higher education rather than starting families.IVF has emerged as an issue in November’s presidential race after Trump said last week that he favoured it being covered by government funding or private health insurance companies – a stance seeming at odds with many Republicans, including Vance, who was one of 47 GOP senators to vote against a bill in June intended to expand access to the treatment.Donald Trump has a knack for rallying a remarkable range of political opinion around a common goal: preventing his return to the White House.That now includes prominent names from his own Republican party and top aides who worked under him as president. From former White House officials and national security staff to a once-worshipful press secretary, a host of one-time Trump fans are now lining up to join Democrats in declaring him unfit for another term in office.White House lawyers who served Republican presidents going back to Ronald Reagan and retired senior military officers have also denounced Trump as a danger to democracy.Adding to Trump’s humiliation, even members of his own cabinet – who once pledged their fealty with a subservience that would not displease Vladimir Putin – are declining to endorse him for re-election in November.Read the full story: Republicans are lining up to oppose Trump. Will it make a difference?A federal judge ordered Donald Trump and his campaign to stop using the song Hold On, I’m Coming by the late R&B artist and songwriter Issac Hayes.The decision came after Hayes’s estate sought an emergency injunction to stop the Trump campaign from using the song at campaign events, alleging the campaign does not have approval.Judge Thomas Thrash Jr ruled Trump and his campaign not to use the song “without proper license”, but he did not grant the estate’s request to order the campaign to take down recordings of past events in which it had used the song.Trump regularly used the song as his exit music for much of the past year, including at the Republican National Convention in July, according to the New York Times.

      Donald Trump claimed that “there was no conflict” during his visit to Arlington national cemetery last week, calling it “a made up story” by his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. The US army accused two campaign workers representing Trump of pushing aside an official who told them it was forbidden to take pictures at the graves of military members who had recently died.

      Jimmy McCain, the son of the late Republican senator John McCain, condemned Trump’s visit to the Arlington national cemetery last week as a “violation”. “These men and women that are laying in the ground there have no choice” of whether to be a backdrop for a political campaign, he told CNN.

      Fred Trump III, the nephew of Donald Trump, said the Republican presidential nominee “just doesn’t give a shit” about members of the US military. “He just doesn’t. Donald believes in Donald,” he told MSNBC.

      Donald Trump said he had “every right” to interfere with the results of the 2020 presidential election in a Fox News interview that aired on Sunday. The Harris campaign said Trump’s comments “makes it clear that he believes he is above the law”.

      The Harris campaign launched the “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour aimed at advocating for women’s reproductive rights starting today in Palm Beach, Florida. The second gentleman, Douglas Emhoff, the Minnesota first lady, Gwen Walz, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar and the Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez are among those who will be on the tour.

      The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee will transfer $25m to support down-ballot candidates.

      Kamala Harris is expected to announce new proposals meant to boost small businesses and entrepreneurs ahead of a campaign speech on Wednesday in New Hampshire, according to a report.

      The Manhattan district attorney’s office urged the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal case to rule on his motion to vacate his conviction, and not wait until a federal judge considers a separate motion filed by Trump last week to move the case into federal court.

      Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, warned his opposite number, the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, that history will judge him “poorly” because he paved the way to rightwing policies out of touch with the American people.

      Pat Toomey, the former Republican senator for Pennsylvania, said he will not be voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the November election. Toomey said he voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but that he could not bring himself to support the Republican presidential candidate, citing Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

      Robert F Kennedy Jr was asked if he would be vice-president under Donald Trump hours after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, it has been revealed. Kennedy reportedly rejected the suggestion from Calley Means, an entrepreneur who sometimes advised him on chronic diseases and was acting as an intermediary, according to the New York Times. More