Democrats

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris campaign has enlivened voters, say Black organizers: ‘The energy is palpable’

      by

      Black grassroots organizers who played a critical role in mobilizing voters in the last presidential election say they are seeing an uptick in interest in their groups and a jolt of energy after Kamala Harris took Joe Biden’s place at the top of the Democratic ticket.“I hear nothing but enthusiasm,” said Helen Butler, a longtime voting rights organizer who runs the nonpartisan Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda. “More people are calling to volunteer. The young people are saying, ‘What can we do?’ All of our activities are nonpartisan. So we’re training them to just talk about civic engagement and why public policy matters.”The observations from organizers come as the Harris campaign has intensified its momentum in the race. It solidified the support of the Democratic party, earned enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee and has seen colossal fundraising numbers.Harris’s campaign says it has raised more than $100m, including a staggering $81m in the first 24 hours after Joe Biden left the race. That total was accrued from more than 500,000 grassroots donors who gave for the first time in the 2024 cycle, the campaign said.Grassroots groups played a critical role in 2020, mobilizing nonwhite voters – who tend to support Democrats – at record levels. Overall, turnout in the 2020 election was at its highest since 1900.Initial polls show Harris in a neck-and-neck race with Donald Trump, but there are indications of significant shifts in the race. A CNN poll released last week found that 50% of Harris backers said their support of her was more pro-Harris than anti-Trump. In a June CNN poll, just 37% of Biden’s supporters said their support was about backing the president rather than being against Trump.“It does change the energy, and to a certain extent, it changes the messages,” said Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, which is supportive of Harris’s candidacy. “The full toolbox is open. We can go anti-Trump, or we can go pro-Kamala, or we can talk about some aspects of her record more, and the administration more, so it just expands the tools that we have at our disposal.”The first week of Harris’s candidacy has been bolstered by a groundswell of support. 44,000 people joined a Zoom call led by Black women on Sunday evening in the first hours after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, which raised more than $1.5m. A call the next evening hosted by Black men reported 53,000 participants and raised more than $1.3m. A call hosted by white women Thursday evening had more than 160,000 people on it and reportedly raised $8.5m. A similar south Asian women call for Harris had more than 10,000 people and raised more than $300,000. A “white dudes for Harris” call on Monday raised around $4m.“I think the energy is palpable,” said Angela Lang, an organizer with Black Leaders Organizing Communities (Bloc) in Milwaukee. She said that many on her team had said they would support Harris, while others were waiting to see how she reconciled her record as a prosecutor.“I think folks understand that people are allowed to change and evolve. We’ve seen other presidential candidates change and evolve their stances on gay marriage, for example, so I think folks are curious to see how she reconciles that,” she said. “But I don’t know if [her record will] be that big of a factor in the grand scheme of things, because I think the urgency of a second Trump presidency outweighs it for some folks.”That’s not to say that it will be a cakewalk for Harris. Those who helped organize the “uncommitted” vote in the primary in protest of the Biden administration’s position on the war in Gaza have warned that the vice president needs to earn their vote.Albright predicted that this campaign would be much different for Harris than her presidential primary – when she entered the race as a top tier contender and then flamed out before the Iowa primary.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Some of it was just about the overall positioning that you had during the primary. You had the clearly progressive candidates talking about Medicare for All and other really progressive policies, and then you had those that were viewed as being more moderate, including Kamala Harris and Joe Biden,” he said. “I think what we’ve seen now over the past four years is that some of those concerns that we had about how progressive either one of them would have been were proven to not be valid.”Both Lang and Albright have gotten a chance to speak personally with Harris and see how she approaches issues.Albright has met with her several times to discuss the push for federal voting rights legislation – one of the key issues that was in Harris’s portfolio as vice-president.“We’ve obviously been impressed by her leadership and the sincerity that she [has], the dedication that she takes to some of these issues,” he said.Lang said that she briefly spoke to Harris in 2021 in Milwaukee when she had a chance to take a picture with her. She said she used the brief interaction to speak about the need to fix lead pipes in Milwaukee and emphasize that it was a social justice issue since exposure to lead has been linked to behavioral and emotional issues in children.“It didn’t feel like she was blowing me off or she was just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, to agree,” Lang said. “She immediately connected the dots and felt just as passionate as I did.” More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris needs to mobilise people around class not race | Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara

      by

      How things can change in a matter of weeks. In early July, populism seemed to rule the day in American politics.Donald Trump selected JD Vance, a figure who’s been trying on producerist rhetoric in recent years, as his pick for vice-president and invited the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, to speak at the Republican national convention. Joe Biden, facing a flagging campaign and internal pressure to step down, met with Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to lay out a pro-worker agenda for a potential new term.Everyone was trying to claim the mantle of an American working class once maligned as politically expendable or morally corrupt.It was a pivot to politics at its most basic: make promises to people, win, deliver on them and reap the rewards of their loyalty. Democrats, once the party of the working class, seemed in need of a reminder of who their base was. A recent study by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that less than 5% of TV ads by Democrats in competitive 2022 congressional races mentioned billionaires, the rich, Wall Street, big corporations or price gouging.Still, congressional progressives were getting concessions from an unpopular president who had little chance of winning re-election and Donald Trump remained committed to the Republican party’s traditional pro-corporate, pro-tax cut agenda. The populist moment seemed like it would stick around, but more in the realm of rhetoric than policy.Then came Kamala Harris’s rise as the presumptive Democratic nominee. The energy around the Harris for President campaign has put into doubt the inevitably of Trump’s election and given hope to millions. For leftwing populists, however, the problem might be less Harris and her most stalwart supporters.Economy or identityInstead of thinking that all politics is identity politics, many on the left have traditionally argued that the best appeals tap into universal concerns that all workers share. When Gallup regularly asks “what do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”, the responses are remarkably consistent across different ethnic groups. It’s the economy. It’s wages. It’s the rising cost of living. “Speaking to issues that people of color care about” generally means speaking to issues that all working-class people care about.The emerging Harris platform seems to have digested this idea. Her campaign promises aren’t too different than those pushed by Joe Biden. Her early ads highlight the need to bring down insulin prices, take on the power of the big banks, corporate price gouging and other concerns that most ordinary working Americans can relate to. That’s all for the good. It demonstrates that Harris has learned some of the lessons that prior generations of Democrats have long known: that speaking to workers’ economic interests is a path to the White House.But there is a danger that all of that political acumen could be drowned out by the hubris of her more well-to-do supporters. A number of grassroots efforts to rally Harris activists have caught fire. Among the most prominent of these efforts, White Women: Answer the Call demonstrates everything wrong with the political instincts of liberals today and it threatens to lead Harris’s campaign down the same path as Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 effort.Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with supporters gathering to support their candidate by forming some kind of affinity group to express their shared commitment. In fact, it’s often a mark of a successful campaign (think Veterans for Bernie Sanders). But when these groups are organized around the narrow, misguided, notion that racial affinity is paramount, the results will not be good. The star-studded “White Women for Kamala” call – which garnered more than 200,000 attenders and raised millions for the candidate – featured actors, social-media personalities, liberal philanthropists and activists for various causes. Also prominently featured was a strange, navel-gazing and antiquated version of identity politics.One call organizer counseled attenders: “If you find yourself talking over or speaking for Bipoc individuals or, God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat and instead we can put our listening ears on.” This kind of condescending racialism should raise red flags for Democrats. Is this what Kamala Harris is about? Does the campaign really think it’s good to head down the path of Clinton’s inscrutable summoning of “intersectionality”? It’s not just that these supporters use language that makes ordinary voters cringe, it’s also that they embrace an ideology predicated on the idea that we are each essentially different. Such a political theory can only result in more fractiousness amid our already roiling culture wars.Shortly after the White Women: Answer the Call there was a White Dudes for Harris follow-up featuring Pete Buttigieg, Josh Groban and Lance Bass (it’s good to see the voices of blue-collar America so well represented). While many of the “dudes” chuckled about the “rainbow of beige” represented on that call, few seemed to notice the strange spectacle of the call itself: liberals organizing people into groups on the basis of skin color and gender. After that, a South Asian Zoom was organized, later a Latina Zoom and most recently a call for Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders for Kamala (AANHPI for short), all also divided on the basis of gender.A subset of Harris’s supporters are doubling down on the idea that says we can only unite if we embrace our racial and gender differences.Instead, progressives should insist that working people have a lot at stake in this election regardless of their skin color, nationality or ethnic heritage and that our shared class interest ought to be the basis for our political appeals. The fact that this narrative – one the official Harris campaign seems at least slightly sympathetic to – was so quickly and enthusiastically overshadowed by an emphasis on identity politics says a lot about the Democratic party’s contemporary base.The Democratic party needs working-class voters more than ever, but unfortunately the party increasingly represents well-heeled white-collar professionals primarily concentrated in and around big cities. It’s these voters who crave appeals to identity over appeals to shared class grievances. Ironically, the wild popularity of the white affinity group fundraisers mentioned above demonstrates just who is most motivated by appeals to race and gender. While there were plenty of calls for various other race-based affinity groups, none came close to the attendance and fundraising power as the Zoom event mobilizing white female voters. Identity politics is, after all, a class politics. A political style embraced by the professional class.Then the question becomes, is that a set of political appeals that can win? The answer is: maybe.That should be worrying for those of us who care about working-class politics. On the one hand, Democrats ought to do what it takes to win the election. But, on the other hand, winning with a political ideology and program that largely appeals to six-figure-income deep-blue counties will be a pyrrhic victory. If Democrats win the election but again lose a majority of the working class, they will fail in one important part of their duty and they will have paved the way for the right to make deeper inroads into blue-collar communities. Further, if liberals continue to insist that workers ought to focus more on their race, gender, nationality, ethnic heritage or whatever else than on their shared class interests, they will have given the right wing all the ammo needed in the culture war while making it that much harder to unite workers across those cultural divides.In that sense, there may not be a right way to lose, but there could be a wrong way to win.

      Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Doctors told Pelosi of concern for Trump’s mental health, ex-speaker says in book

      by

      In early 2019, at a memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” told Nancy Pelosi they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong” with Donald Trump, “and that his mental and psychological health was in decline”.“I’m not a doctor,” the former speaker writes in an eagerly awaited memoir, “but I did find his behaviors difficult to understand.”Pelosi’s book, The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Pelosi was speaker between 2007 and 2011, and between 2019 and 2023, the latter spell coinciding with Trump’s chaotic presidency. Her memoir comes out amid a tumultuous 2024 presidential campaign, in which Trump is the Republican nominee for a third successive election.Questions about Trump’s fitness for office form a thread through the book. At 78, Trump is the oldest candidate ever, his campaign-trail utterances studied for frequent mistakes, his speeches are often rambling and marked by bizarre references.Trump’s volcanic behavior and disregard for societal norms also stoke such questions, not least because he left office having been impeached twice, the second time for inciting the deadly January 6 Capitol attack; has been convicted on 34 criminal charges and faces 54 more; has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil cases including one concerning a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”; and has promised if re-elected to govern as “a dictator” on “day one”.On the page, Pelosi says she did not solicit statements about Trump’s mental health from attendees at the memorial for Dr David Hamburg, “a distinguished psychiatrist who … served as the president of the Carnegie Corporation, where he had been a great voice for international peace”, and who died in April 2019.Elsewhere in The Art of Power, however, the former speaker is not shy of stating her views about Trump’s mental health, calling him “imbalanced” and “unhinged”.By 6 January 2021, Pelosi writes, “I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”She describes how subordinates including Mark Meadows, Trump’s final chief of staff, indulged improper behavior, allowing Trump to “surreptitiously listen” to private meetings with congressional leaders, eventually prompting Pelosi to ban all cellphones from her meeting rooms on Capitol Hill.Pelosi also describes getting calls from Trump, often late at night, including one in which she says Trump insisted missile strikes on Syria he had just ordered were Barack Obama’s fault, eventually prompting Pelosi to tell him: “It’s midnight. I think you should go to sleep.”Pelosi devotes attention to the events of 6 January 2021, when she and other congressional leaders were hurried from a mob who meant them harm, then spent hours trying to get Trump to call them off.Much of Pelosi’s account is familiar, thanks to the work of the House January 6 committee, which she created, and of her own daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, a documentarian who was filming her mother that day.“People still ask me how I remained so calm,” Pelosi writes, of the hours when Congress was under attack, she and other leaders were evacuated to Fort McNair, and Vice-President Mike Pence was in hiding as the mob chanted about hanging him.“My answer is that I was already deeply aware of how dangerous Donald Trump was.“He continues to be dangerous. If his family and staff truly understood his disregard for both the fundamentals of the law and for basic rules, and if they had reckoned with his personal instability over not winning the [2020] election, they should have staged an intervention. Whether because of willful blindness, money, prestige, or greed, they didn’t – and America has paid a steep price.”Saying she had quickly realised she had “more respect for the office of president of the United States than Trump”, Pelosi says “it was clear to me from the start that he was an imposter – and that on some level, he knew it”.Still she is not done. After describing how electoral college votes were eventually counted and Joe Biden’s victory confirmed, she says she “and many others wanted a consequence for the deranged, unhinged man who was still president of the United States”.That led to an impeachment and a second failed Senate trial, after the Republican leader there, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, made a historic miscalculation: that Trump did not require conviction and barring from office, as he was politically finished.Pelosi describes another failed effort to remove Trump from office, on grounds of being unfit.“Following January 6,” she writes, “the Democratic leadership discussed asking the vice-president to invoke the 25th amendment to the constitution, which allows for the vice-president and a majority of cabinet members to certify that a president is unable to discharge the duties of the office.”She and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, “placed a call to Vice-President Pence about this possibility”.Elsewhere, Pelosi writes that she admires Pence for his actions on January 6, when he refused to be spirited from the Capitol despite having to hide from a murderous mob sent by his own president, then ultimately presided over certification of election results.But when it came to the 25th amendment, Pence let Pelosi down.“The vice-president’s office kept us on hold for 20 minutes,” Pelosi writes, adding that “thankfully” she was at home at the time, “so I could also empty the dishwasher and put in a load of laundry.“Ultimately, Vice-President Pence never got on the phone with us or returned our call.” More

    • 213 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Harris campaign calls Trump’s heated interview with Black journalists ‘a taste of chaos and division’ – live

      by

      Kamala Harris’s campaign team has released the following statement in response to Donald Trump’s combative NABJ interview:
      The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people.
      Trump lobbed personal attacks and insults at Black journalists the same way he did throughout his presidency – while he failed Black families and left the entire country digging out of the ditch he left us in. Donald Trump has already proven he cannot unite America, so he attempts to divide us.
      Today’s tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s Maga rallies this entire campaign. It’s also exactly what the American people will see from across the debate stage as vice-president Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans. All Donald Trump needs to do is stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10.
      The US was not aware of or involved in the apparent killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the US representative to the UN says.He calls UN security council members with direct influence over Iran to increase pressure on it to “stop escalating its proxy conflict against Israel”.
      Every member of this council should call on Iran to stop arming, advising and financing terrorist groups and to rein in the actions of proxies and partners who threaten regional peace and security.
      He warns that it is a “dangerous” moment, and that it is “imperative” for members to work together to reduce tensions in the region.Follow more live updates on the situation here:JD Vance has responded to Donald Trump’s chaotic NABJ interview…The United Auto Workers union has endorsed Kamala Harris for president.In a statement released on Wednesday, UAW president Shawn Fain said:
      Our job in this election is to defeat Donald Trump and elect Kamala Harris to build on her proven track record of delivering for the working class …
      We stand at a crossroads in this country. We can put a billionaire back in office who stands against everything our union stands for, or we can elect Kamala Harris who will stand shoulder to shoulder with us in our war on corporate greed.
      This campaign is bringing together people from all walks of life, building a movement that can defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box. For our one million active and retired members, the choice is clear: We will elect Kamala Harris to be our next President this November.”
      Here is video of Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s ethnicity during his interview at the NABJ conference in Chicago:Throughout the years, Trump has also questioned the birth origins of Barack Obama, Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley.Kamala Harris’s campaign team has released the following statement in response to Donald Trump’s combative NABJ interview:
      The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people.
      Trump lobbed personal attacks and insults at Black journalists the same way he did throughout his presidency – while he failed Black families and left the entire country digging out of the ditch he left us in. Donald Trump has already proven he cannot unite America, so he attempts to divide us.
      Today’s tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump’s Maga rallies this entire campaign. It’s also exactly what the American people will see from across the debate stage as vice-president Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans. All Donald Trump needs to do is stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10.
      When asked by Fox News journalist Harris Faulkner whether JD Vance would be ready for day one, Donald Trump said:
      I’ve always had great respect for him … but I will say this, and I think this is well-documented historically, the vice-president in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact.
      You’re voting for the president, and you can have a vice-president who’s outstanding in every way. And I think JD is, I think that all of them would have been but, but you’re not voting that way. You’re voting for the president. You’re voting for me.
      Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, responded while at the podium in the daily media briefing to Donald Trump’s comments about Kamala Harris’s identity at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention.Jean-Pierre, speaking in real time in the west wing in Washington DC while Trump was being quizzed by three political journalists in Chicago, called his words “repulsive”.The former president said that he didn’t know Harris was Black until a few years ago when she “happened to turn Black”.Jean-Pierre said: “It’s insulting, and no one has any right to tell someone who they are, how they identify.” Jean-Pierre is the first Black and first openly LGBTQ+ American to serve as White House press secretary.She continued, of Harris: “Only she can speak to her experience.”Harris grew up in Berkeley, California, near San Francisco; her mother was an immigrant from India and her father immigrated to the US from Jamaica.“I think it’s insulting for anybody, it doesn’t matter if it’s a former leader, a former president, it is insulting,” Jean-Pierre said, adding: “She is the vice-president of the United States. Kamala Harris. We have to put some respect on her name. Period.”Donald Trump’s NABJ interview shocked the audience and ended up being cut short, apparently by his team. Here are some of the things the former president claimed in the heated Q&A:

      He claimed that he has been the “best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln”, adding that a “Black job” is “anybody that has a job”.

      He questioned Kamala Harris’s ethnicity, saying: “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”

      He refused to condemn the white police officer who shot and killed 36-year-old Sonya Massey, a Black woman, in her home in Illinois, saying: “Sometimes very bad decisions are made. They’re not made from an evil standpoint.”

      He repeated the abortion lie that Democrats are allowing abortions in the ninth month, saying: “They’re allowing the death of the baby after the baby is born.”

      In response to what he would do on his first day in office, he said that he would “close the border” and “drill, baby, drill”.

      Throughout the interview, which appeared to have been ended by his team after 40 minutes, Trump’s responses drew multiple gasps and shouts from the crowd.
      The interview with Donald Trump at the NABJ conference is now over, with Trump giving a few fist pumps and shaking hands with the interviewers before walking off stage.The interview, which lasted around 40 minutes, got off to a rocky start, with Trump accusing interviewers of asking “rude” questions and calling their networks “fake news” before blaming the conference’s speakers for his lateness.In addition to multiple tangents on how he is allegedly persecuted by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and a supposedly “weaponized” justice system, Trump refused to condemn the January 6 insurrectionists, continued to espouse the lie that Democrats are “executing” babies after birth, and vowed to close the borders on his first day in office if he becomes president.Throughout the interview, Trump’s responses drew multiple gasps and shouts from the crowd.He also defended JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” said he “didn’t know [Harris] was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black,” and described a “Black job” as “anybody that has a job”.The interview was cut short after Trump’s team apparently asked interviewers to end the Q&A. ABC’s Rachel Scott told the audience: “I think we have to leave it there, by the Trump team. That is the last word.” Trump reacted with a bemused expression before getting off the stage.In response to a question on what he would do on his first day as president if he wins, Donald Trump responded:
      I close the border. And I do two things, because I can do a lot of things. I close the border. And we don’t want people coming. We want people to come in … but they have to be vetted. They have to be checked. They have to come in legally …
      And I drill. Drill, baby, drill. I bring energy way down. I bring interest rates down. I bring inflation way down. So people can buy bacon again, so people can buy a ham sandwich again, so that people can go to a restaurant and afford it because right now people can’t buy food.
      One of the next questions asked of Donald Trump is whether he believes the Republican party is getting “too judgy about people’s lives”.In response, Trump touted several false statements, saying that Democrats are “radical on abortion because they’re allowing abortion in the ninth month. They’re allowing the death of the baby after the baby is born.”Trump’s lie was swiftly fact-checked on the spot, with the interviewers saying: “That’s illegal in all 50 states.”He nevertheless continued with the false statement about abortions, saying: “Most Republicans believe in the exception, but they don’t want to see an abortion in the ninth month or the eighth month.”We are more than 15 minutes into the NABJ interview with Donald Trump, and the former president has already butted heads multiple times with the interviewers.In addition to frequently interrupting them, Trump has blamed the conferences’s speakers for his lateness, accused the interviewers’ questions of being “rude” and their networks, including ABC, of being “fake news”.At one point, when one of the interviewers told Trump she would like to move on to other questions following his tangent on his alleged political persecution, Trump replied: “You’re the one that held me up 35 minutes.”Donald Trump was asked about Sonya Massey, the 36-year-old Black woman who was shot and killed in her home by a white police officer in Illinois on 6 July.Specifically, the question was about Trump’s previous comments on police officers needing to have immunity and why someone like the officer, who has been charged with murder in the case of Sonya Massey’s killing, should get immunity.Trump responded:
      I don’t know the exact case, but I saw something, and it didn’t look, it didn’t look good to me. It didn’t look good to me …
      I’m saying if I felt, or if a group of people would feel, that somebody was being unfairly prosecuted because the person did a good job … or made a mistake, an innocent mistake, there’s a big difference between being a bad person and making an innocent mistake. But if somebody made an innocent mistake, I would want to help that person …
      Sometimes very bad decisions are made. They’re not made from an evil standpoint.
      Trump then went on a tangent of being “prosecuted because I’m a political opponent of two people that have weaponized our justice system”.In response to what Donald Trump’s message is today and why he chose to appear at the conference, Trump touted his typical anti-immigration rhetoric, saying:
      My message is to stop people from invading our country that are taking, frankly, a lot of problems with it. But one of the big problems, and a lot of the journalists in this room, I know, and I have great respect for a lot of the journalists in this room are Black … They’re coming in, and they’re coming in, they’re invading. It’s an invasion of millions of people … The first group of people, the Black population, is affected most by that and Kamala is allowing it to happen.
      Trump was also asked what a “Black job” is, to which he said:
      A Black job is anybody that has a job. That’s what it is.
      In response to a question on whether he believes Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a Black woman, Donald Trump said:
      So I’ve known her a long time indirectly and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?
      In response to a question on why Black voters should trust Donald Trump following his track record of inappropriate comments towards Black communities, Trump said:
      First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question so horrible manner. First question, you don’t even say hello. How are you? Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network, and I think it’s disgraceful that I came here in history. I love the Black population of this country …
      I think it’s a very rude introduction. I don’t know exactly why you would do something like that.
      I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.
      Donald Trump has just walked on stage.The interviewers also said that the interview will be live-fact-checked live.The NABJ interview with Donald Trump is about to begin.Interviewers Kadia Goba of Semafor, Rachel Scott of ABC News and Harris Faulkner of Fox News have just walked on stage.Donald Trump has fired off another post on Truth Social, blaming the conference’s speakers for his lateness:
      I’ve been waiting for a half hour. The speaker equipment at the NABJ is not working properly. Don’t blame me for being late. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      United Auto Workers union endorses Kamala Harris for president

      by

      The United Auto Workers (UAW) union endorsed Kamala Harris for US president on Wednesday, boosting the vice-president in the swing state of Michigan as her recently launched campaign ramps up.UAW president Shawn Fain, who spoke by phone last week with Harris, praised her record “of delivering for the working class” and said she “will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in our war on corporate greed”.The 370,000-member UAW said its executive board voted to endorse her after endorsing Joe Biden’s re-election bid in January. The US president withdrew from the race on 21 July.Many UAW members live and work in Michigan, where the union is based. Biden and Donald Trump have made campaign appearances there.Prior to Biden ending his re-election bid, Reuters reported that the UAW’s executive board met to discuss concerns about his ability to beat the former president.Fain has criticized Trump for months, telling a conference in Baltimore earlier this month: “It’s clear that Donald Trump in the White House would be a complete disaster for the working class.”Trump returned barbs at Fain at this month’s Republican national convention, calling for the union chief to be “fired immediately”. Trump said the auto union failed to prevent Chinese automakers from building large auto factories in Mexico to ship products to the US.While the UAW has traditionally endorsed Democratic candidates, it forged an even deeper relationship with Biden when he became the first sitting president to walk a picket line in Detroit last September during a six-week strike against Ford Motor, General Motors and Jeep maker Stellantis.The UAW won record deals after the walkout, including a 25% wage increase over the life of the contract and the return of cost-of-living adjustments.Other prominent unions have switched their endorsements from Biden to Harris, but some have been slower to do so. The Teamsters, which represents 1.3 million workers in several industries, including packing and shipping, has not made an endorsement.Teamsters president Sean O’Brien spoke at the Republican convention but offered no endorsement of Trump. A Teamsters spokesperson said this week the union has invited Harris to meet with the union but received no response. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Venture capitalists including Mark Cuban back Kamala Harris’s campaign

      by

      A group of more than 100 Silicon Valley investors, including Mark Cuban, the TV host and NBA owner, and Reed Hastings, a co-founder of LinkedIn, launched a website in support of Kamala Harris.A statement said vcsforkamala.org expressed support for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee from “venture capital investors, founders and tech leaders who pledge to vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election”.It added: “We spend our days looking for, investing in and supporting entrepreneurs who are building the future. We are pro-business, pro-American dream, pro-entrepreneurship, and pro-technological progress.”The statement did not name the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, or running mate JD Vance.But it pointed to Democratic concerns about the former US president’s and the Ohio senator’s authoritarian impulses on issues including immigration, crime and reproductive rights, and what a second Trump presidency might do to the US’s standing in the world.“We also believe in democracy as the backbone of our nation,” the investors said.“We believe that strong, trustworthy institutions are a feature, not a bug, and that our industry – and every other industry – would collapse without them.“That is what’s at stake in this election. Everything else, we can solve through constructive dialogue with political leaders and institutions willing to talk to us.”It is a little more than a week since Joe Biden withdrew from his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate against Trump fueled concerns that at 81, he was too old to effectively run and serve.Since then Harris, 59, has transformed the presidential race, driving $200m in fundraising with eye-catching big name endorsements including those of Mark Hamill, best known as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars movie saga, and Jeff Bridges, aka Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski.The arrival of VCs for Kamala also pointed to growing rifts among the giants of Silicon Valley, where Vance worked for Peter Thiel, a leading donor to Republicans and propagator of “new right” political thought notable for its authoritarian bent.VCs for Kamala followed Tech for Kamala, an open letter seeking contributions and orchestrated by “technology leaders and innovators”.The Tech for Kamala letter said: “We acknowledge there are a few people in tech with very loud microphones who support a very different vision of the future. But as the names on this letter show, they do not at all represent the entire tech community.“In Vice-President Harris, we choose the future over the past, stability over chaos, a hopeful America with expanded opportunity over an extreme agenda that drags us backward.”On Wednesday, Leslie Feinzaig, founder of the venture capital firm Graham & Walker and a lead organiser of VCs for Kamala, told the New York Times that rightwing, pro-Trump tech moguls such as Thiel, David Sacks and Elon Musk “don’t speak for me”.“They don’t speak for most of us,” she added. “And they don’t speak for the founders.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Hundreds join golf cart rally for Harris in conservative Florida community

      by

      Hundreds of supporters of presidential candidate Kamala Harris turned out this weekend to rally for Harris’s campaign at the Villages retirement community in central Florida – a traditionally conservative stronghold.In videos posted online, hundreds of golf carts, decorated with “Harris for President” posters and American flags, can be seen flooding a parking lot in the retirement community and driving around the area.The event, organized primarily by the Sumter county Democratic party, garnered more than 500 decorated golf carts, the Villages’ Democratic Club wrote on its website. The video of the event, posted on YouTube by the Villages Democratic Club, has garnered almost 400,000 views since the weekend.“Let’s give it all we’ve got for the next 100 days,” the Villages’ Democratic Club wrote on the website.The Villages – which is a 55-plus community that had a population of about 79,000 in 2020, of which 97.4% were white according to census data – has not voted for a Democratic candidate since 2000, according to Vanity Fair.State voting records show that in 2020, Sumter county, one of the three counties that incorporates the Villages, voted 67.7% in favor of Donald Trump. And in 2016, Trump carried the three counties that the Villages incorporate by more than 115,000 votes. In 2020, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by a margin of more than two to one.Dennis Foley, the vice-president of the Villages Democratic Club, told the Washington Post that Saturday’s rally for Harris likely marked the largest golf caravan in the district for a Democratic candidate in nearly a decade.Foley added that there was a mix of enthusiasm for Harris as well as a “sense of significance to this election and that there’s a lot at stake” among the supporters on Saturday.“The combination,” he said, “has boosted everyone that was a little bit depressed.”The Florida Democratic party announced on Sunday that nearly 10,000 new Florida volunteers had signed up to help the Harris campaign last week, with many from “traditionally conservative places like the Villages”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’re going to get out the vote from Pensacola to Key West and prove to the critics and the trolls that Democrats are alive and well in Florida – and our state is worth fighting for,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, in a statement.In response to the rally on Saturday, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, minimized the turnout and enthusiasm, saying on X that the several hundred golf carts were just a “small fraction of the golf carts that descend on the various Villages courses for ‘dew sweeper’ tee times every morning”.Since Saturday’s parade for Harris, the Villages Maga Club has organized its own golf cart rally scheduled for 3 August in support of the Trump-Vance campaign, according to its Facebook page. More