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      Trump plan for Madison Square Garden rally compared to infamous Nazi event

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      Donald Trump’s decision to hold a rally in the heart of Manhattan on 27 October, nine days before election day, has been slammed by New York Democrats, with one comparing the booking to an infamous Nazi rally held at the same venue in the lead-up to the second world war.But it has also triggered a backlash to such sentiments, with Republicans saying such rhetoric heightens tensions even more in a presidential election campaign which has already seen two attempts on Trump’s life.The Democratic state senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, whose district includes much of the west side of Manhattan where a date on Trump’s “arena tour” rally has been booked at Madison Square Garden, called on venue owners to cancel the event.“Let’s be clear,” Hoylman-Sigal wrote on X. “Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939.”Hoylman-Sigal was referring to a pro-Hitler rally, organized by the German American Bund, that was attended by more than 20,000 people and featured a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. Many attendees came from Yaphank, Long Island, where the Bund was headquartered and had a summer camp teaching Nazi ideology.In 2019, Hillary Clinton used a speech at the same venue to decry “an assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our democracy”, referring to the infamous Bund rally.But New York Republicans denounced the comparison.“Referring to a peaceful rally for the leading candidate for President of the United States as a ‘Nazi Rally’ is not only a disgusting comparison, it is a gross escalation of the dangerous rhetoric in the wake of two direct attempts on President Donald Trump’s life,” state senator Rob Ortt said in a statement.In his post, Hoylman-Sigal tried to downplay the comparison he had made. “I’m not calling anyone a Nazi,” he said. “I’m pointing out a historic similarity.”The state senator added: “I was talking about the venue and many of his followers who are white supremacists and have demonstrated hatred and vitriol toward minority groups, including Jews, people of color and the LGBTQ community.”Halie Soifer, the CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told Politico that Trump had refused to condemn white supremacy, incited rightwing extremists to engage in an insurrection, and aligned with and dined with Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis.“If ever there was a moment to make such a comparison, it’s now, which is why the vast majority of American voters are opposing Donald Trump in this election,” Soifer said.View image in fullscreenThe dispute comes as the major political parties are locked in an expensive battle for control of New York’s suburban districts that flipped Republican in 2022, depriving Democrats of a majority in Congress.But it also comes as Jewish voters in New York City weigh their traditional Democratic alignment over the widening Middle East conflict. Trump has said Jews who vote for Vice-President Kamala Harris “should have their head examined”.Members of Democrats’ progressive wing have been accused of antisemitism over their statements criticizing Israeli actions and for their support of pro-Palestinian protests at university campuses across the city.Earlier this week, Trump held a remembrance event to mark the first anniversary of the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israelis on 7 October 2023. He called the attack on Israel a “nightmare” and went on to say that the rise of antisemitism in the US was a result of Democratic leadership.Trump has previously said he had hoped to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden, home to sports teams such as the New York Knicks and the Rangers, and the most prestigious rock venue in the country.“We’re going to be doing a rally at Madison Square Garden, we believe,” Trump said in April. “We think we’re signing Madison Square Garden to do. We’re going to have a big rally honoring the police, and honoring the firemen, and everybody. Honoring a lot of people, including teachers by the way.”The dispute over a Trump rally at the venue comes as Democrats have broadly toned down their comparisons between Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement and Nazi ideology.In May, Joe Biden accused Trump of using “Hitler’s language” in May after the former president temporarily shared a video referencing a “unified reich” to Truth Social.The Trump campaign press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said comments by Hoylman-Sigal “is the same type of dangerous rhetoric that led to two assassination attempts on President Trump’s life and has divided our country” and called on the senator to resign.The Republican state senate candidate Vito LaBella said on X that Hoylman-Sigal’s comments would alienate voters. “All polls show about half this country supporting this man. It’s OK that you hate Trump. You just called 150 million voters Nazies [sic]. Shame on you.” More

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      Trump and his allies are whipping up a whirlwind of lies about the hurricanes | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Whipping up hurricanes to merge with great replacement theory took hardly a week, about the time it takes for hurricanes themselves to form. The overheated atmosphere warmed the waters that were drawn up into the winds to churn them into a menacing storm.After Hurricane Helene hit, Donald Trump unleashed a whirlwind of humid lies: the federal government was deliberately preventing aid and even water from reaching areas that held Republican voters, “not getting anything”; Kamala Harris “spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants”; and Fema was offering only $750 in disaster relief – all false, all debunked by the Republican governors in the affected states. The Republican congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina felt compelled to issue a statement to his constituents not to listen to “untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts” and the “outrageous rumors spread online”.Undoubtedly, he had in mind Elon Musk, who accelerated the circulation of the lies on his platform X: Fema “actively blocked” aid and “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” The Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, called the calculated spread of disinformation “absolutely the worst I have ever seen”, and announced that Fema for the first time had established a webpage for “Hurricane Rumor Response”.“No money is being diverted from disaster response needs,” Fema stated. “Fema’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!” Musk tweeted.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, leaped in to tweet: “Yes they can control the weather.” She added: “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”In 2018, she infamously blamed a California wildfire on “space lasers” controlled by “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm”, a classic antisemitic trope. Now, on 5 October, following up on how “they can control the weather”, she tweeted: “CBS, 9 years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather.”Republican leaders instantly fell into line in a demonstration of Trump fealty. The congressman Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, the number two in the Republican leadership of the House, campaigning for Trump on 8 October, repeated his lie: “They use that money helping illegals here that they brought into America.”By now, Trump’s lies were a typhoon. JD Vance, his running mate, was sent out to stir it up further with an op-ed planted in the Wall Street Journal on 9 October – Rupert Murdoch again predictably handing over his paper to Trump – to echo that Fema funds were being diverted to help illegal immigrants. Vance added a new wrinkle to the conspiracy theory, suggesting that Fema was giving “special treatment” to gay and trans people over ordinary Americans because it held a seminar in 2023 on how those communities can prepare for disasters.As Hurricane Milton barreled down on Florida, Joe Biden, in a TV briefing on Wednesday afternoon, felt compelled to condemn Trump’s “onslaught of lies” that is “undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been undertaken and will continue to be undertaken”.View image in fullscreenThe political effect of the hurricanes on Trumpism has been to congeal free-floating elements into the racist replacement theory and Hitlerian rhetoric. Trump’s lies set in motion an antisemitic wave in North Carolina blaming Jewish local officials there and Fema administrators for taking the money for illegal immigrants. Of the falsehoods after Hurricane Helene, “30% of the posts on X contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the Fema director of public affairs; and the secretary of the department of homeland security. These collectively garnered 17.1m views as of October 7,” reported the non-profit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.Vance’s inclusion of gay and trans people into the overarching replacement theory fits the intensive Trump negative advertising campaign. Trump has spent more than $15.5m on TV commercials linking Harris to support for trans prison inmates – his most aired ad. In fact, in 2019 she stated she supported gender-affirming care for state prison inmates, according to the law, and responded similarly to an ACLU questionnaire about federal inmates. The Senate Republican political action committee has also invested tens of millions into anti-trans ads against Democratic candidates. Trump’s tagline: “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.”Now, Vance implies, “they/them”, presumably in league with Greene’s “they”, are stealing the funds from the rest of us folks as a nefarious subplot of the great replacement. Adherence to every aspect of the theory proves loyalty to Trump. Vance and Scalise showed how to bend the knee.Trump’s transition chief on 7 October insisted on this unquestioning fealty to the leader. The self-described adults in the room, or “normies”, of the first term, who saw their mission to be curbing Trump’s lunatic or criminal impulses, will not be tolerated in the second. “Those people were not pure to his vision,” Howard Lutnick, the head of the Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm and the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, recently told the Financial Times. He explained that the “establishment” did not understand Trump’s “objectives” or “intuition” and “thought they knew better”. In the second term, “loyalty” and “fealty” would be the first qualification for consideration.Both Trump and Vance have stated that the senior federal civil service will be fired for their disloyalty. Consistent with Trump’s “vision”, his appointees would be required to swear an oath of loyalty to the leader above the constitution and laws of the United States. This oath was known as the “Führereid” in Nazi Germany, where public servants had to pledge: “I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German reich and people, Adolf Hitler, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God!” All soldiers had to take a similar oath. Some of those who failed to swear the Hitler oath were executed.Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric and threats have ramped up with each passing day closer to the election that will decide whether he will be the president or perhaps a prisoner. When Harris appeared on The View, a daytime TV talkshow with an all-female panel, he demeaned her as a “dummy” and the other women as “dumb” and “degenerates”. Women should be subordinate and submissive. According to his running mate, Vance, women who do not have natural children are essentially worthless, not truly women, unqualified to be teachers, and women over 50 years old have value principally for childcare. “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – children, kitchen, church – was the policy slogan for the proper place of women in the Third Reich.The concept of “degenerate” – “entartete” – was a central category in Nazism. Modern art and music were deemed “Entartete Kunst”, or degenerate art, and banned. “Degenerates” constituted a broad swath of people, some of whom were infected with “poison in the blood”, as Hitler classified Jews and Trump counts certain types of immigrants, which is the basis of the replacement theory embraced by both Hitler and Trump. The degenerate also included disabled people, gay people (who wore pink triangles in concentration camps), Gypsies, psychiatric patients and the mentally ill (“behinderte”). Under the program beginning in 1939 of “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (“destruction of unworthy lives”), Aktion T4, the mass murder of “degenerates” was launched, officially called “Gnadentod”, or “mercy death”.Trump openly entertains fantasies of violence and vengeance. He called on 29 September for “one really violent day … One rough hour. And I mean real rough.” He was speaking about shoplifters. He promises the roundup of 11 million undocumented people and camps. In late August, he reposted under a headline “How To Really Fix The System” an image of his perceived enemies in orange prison jumpsuits – Harris, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Hunter Biden and Jack Smith. He called for the indictment of the congressional members of the January 6 select committee and military tribunals for Barack Obama and others.View image in fullscreenOn 5 June, the Fox News host Sean Hannity gave Trump an opportunity to soften his threat of retribution. “People believe that you want retribution and will use the system of justice to go after your political enemies,” said Hannity. Trump doubled down, saying: “I have every right to go after them.” On 7 October, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham tried again. “A lot of people will say: ‘Well, he’s just going to do to them what he – they did to him back at them.’” Trump replied: “A lot of people say that’s what should happen, right?” Or as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “We had declared one of our principles thus: ‘We shall meet violence with violence in our own defense.’”Trump’s rhetoric eerily continues to paraphrase Hitler’s, which eludes American audiences. His first wife, Ivana, claimed that a book of Hitler’s speeches was on his bedstand. Trump’s language just happens to be extraordinarily resonant.Campaigning on the debunked myth that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets”, Trump used unusual language for him to make his bogus point on 16 September. “Allowing millions of people, from places unknown, to INVADE and take over our Country, is an unpardonable sin,” he tweeted. His reference to “sin” in the context of his racist replacement theory, was, knowingly or not, an echo of Hitler, to convey exactly the same meaning. “The sin against blood and race is the hereditary sin in this world and it brings disaster on every nation that commits it,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.Lately, Trump has used over and over in speech after speech the same metaphor conflating personal and national humiliation. On 12 August, Trump tweeted: “Kamala has no ideas, and would be an absolutely horrible, RADICAL LEFT, President, laughed at all over the World. We’ve had enough of that!”On 22 August, Trump continued the “laughed at” meme: “She stands for Incompetence and Weakness – Our Country is being laughed at all over the World!” On 16 September, he tweeted: “THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER.” Trump has used variations of this “laugh” meme to highlight national dishonor dozens of time on his Truth Social account.On 30 September, at two rallies, one in New York City and the other in Walker, Michigan, Trump said: “Boy, what a group of people we have. It’s a joke. We’re laughed at all over the world for our leadership. Because this country has never been laughed at [like] a bunch of dopes. It’s never been laughed at like it is right now.”On 1 October, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump said: “What a miserable few years. It’s just been horrible. And people all over the world, especially the leaders, are laughing at how stupidly our country is run.”On 30 January 1939, Hitler delivered his notorious “prophecy” speech calling for “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. The most memorable image he evoked was of Jews laughing at him and at Germany. “During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the state, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face.”After Hitler ordered the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, he returned to the imagery of Jews laughing in a speech that referenced his “prophecy”. “In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies,” he said on 30 September 1942. “I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing.”The Nazis underscored Hitler’s speech by producing a propaganda poster depicting caricatures of laughing Jews surrounding Franklin D Roosevelt, with the slogan: “Das Lachen wird ihnen vergehen!!!” – “Their laughter will disappear!!!”On 7 October, Trump returned for a rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, to revisit the site of his near assassination. “And we want to get respect like we had it four years ago, the entire world respected us, they respected us,” he said. “They respected us more than they’ve ever respected us, and now they laugh at us. We can’t have them laugh at us, can we?”

      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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      Fulton county brawl with Georgia state election board escalates as election approaches

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      The legal brawl between Georgia’s Donald Trump-oriented state board of elections and Fulton county’s election office continues to intensify, a warm-up for the post-election cavalcade of 2020 redux lawsuits expected in November.Fulton county filed a lawsuit on Monday to prevent the board from placing 2020 election denialists on a monitoring team for the November election. In response, state board members voted to subpoena a wide range of records from the 2020 election in Fulton county.The lawsuit asks for a judgment establishing that the state board of elections does not have the authority to force the county to accept appointments to their monitoring team. Fulton county and the state board came to a voluntary agreement in May to hire a monitoring team for the 2024 election after the state board found that it may have double-scanned as many as 3,000 ballots in a recount of the 2020 election. The state board reprimanded the county for the mistake in May.Fulton county then agreed to implement a third-party monitoring system, in part to assuage critics like those on the board of elections. The monitors would observe election processes for training, ballot preparation, programming voting machines and other processes.“Since that time, the SEB has repeatedly provided conflicting information and failed to take action related to monitors,” said Sherri Allen, the Fulton county board of registration and elections chair.“State Election Board members have stated in meetings with Fulton County BRE members that the State Election Board would ‘disavow’ the Fulton County BRE if the Fulton County BRE did not accept the monitors proposed by the State Election Board,” the lawsuit states. “Any such adverse action would directly conflict with multiple provisions of the Election Code.”An advisory letter sent to the state board last month by Georgia’s attorney general, Christopher Carr, also told the board that it did not have the authority to force Fulton county to accept its monitors.“Let’s make it clear that this is a closed case under the law, as determined by the attorney general’s office,” said Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democratic appointee to the state election board, in dissent. Ghazal noted that the county was only legally obligated to retain the 2020 documents – volumes of absentee ballot data, scanner tapes, poll pad data, ballot images and other information – for two years.But Janice Johnston, a Republican member of the state board praised by Trump as a “pit bull”, said she had been assured that the documents were available because of pending litigation. “If Fulton county cannot or does not have the documents, then the place to go is to the clerk of the court where they should be … available for completion of the investigation of Mr Rossi and Mr Moncla’s complaint.”Joe Rossi, a teacher at a technical college in Macon, and Kevin Moncla, a Texan and the director of the Election Oversight Group, are prominent activists who have continued to press a case in court and before the state elections board over the 2020 election.The county appointed a monitoring team led by Ryan Germany, former general counsel for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. But Trump-aligned members of the state board, at odds with Raffensperger over his handling of the 2020 election, want to add their own members to Germany’s team.Those members include Heather Honey, who worked on the Maricopa county, Arizona, audit of the 2020 election with the Trump-campaign funded Cyber Ninjas investigation, and Frank Ryan, a former US representative who as a state senator in Pennsylvania made false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and rejected the state’s electoral count.At the rancorous board meeting on Tuesday, the Georgia state representative Saira Draper, a litigant in a suit to block recent changes to election rules, sparred with Janelle King and Johnston, two Republican members of the state board, over the board’s investigation of some county election boards’ decision to reject voter challenges.“What we’ve seen since 2021 is a targeting of certain counties,” Draper said, responding to a report from Mike Coan, the board’s executive director who investigated how elections offices around Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus, Athens and other large counties had responded to voter challenges.“We haven’t seen the mass voter challenges across Georgia any more. We have seen them against Democratic centers … counties with large numbers of Democratic voters, and that’s a nakedly partisan ploy,” she said. “There are people who are sore losers, who have brought frivolous voter challenges targeting Democratic counties, and those challenges have been appropriately dismissed. And now they want a second bite at the apple, both in the courts and here at the state elections board one week before early voting starts.”“Was Stacey Abrams a sore loser?” King asked Draper. Abrams never conceded her 2018 loss to the governor, Brian Kemp, and suggested that Kemp as secretary of state had manipulated the election apparatus to his advantage.“I wish she had conceded,” Draper replied.Fulton county is also contending with a lawsuit from the Georgia Republican party, alleging that the county’s election office hasn’t hired enough Republicans as poll workers for the 2024 election.The suit states that Georgia law requires counties to hire poll workers from a list parties provide in equal measure. Republicans submitted the names of 74 workers to Fulton county elections director Nadine Williams to hire, but out of the 800 or more elections hires, only nine have been hired for early voting and six for election day, according to the suit. Williams has instead given hiring authority to temporary staffing agencies and precinct managers, who have not given preference to names on the Republican list, it states.Williams’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the hiring of poll workers.The Fulton county board of registration and elections will meet on Thursday at 11am. Among the items on the agenda are an update on the monitoring team and the terms of the proposal, a review of the state board’s new rules and the impact to operations, and an executive session to discuss litigation and personnel matters. More

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      Why are Democrats tarred as elites when the world’s richest man funds Trump? | Robert Reich

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      On 5 October, at Donald Trump’s second rally of the 2024 election in Butler, Pennsylvania, he enthusiastically introduced Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, who is plunking down millions of dollars to help the former president.Musk urged the crowd to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” – echoing words Trump uttered after the attack on his life there. Musk then shouted: “President Trump must win to preserve the constitution!” and he “must win to preserve democracy in America!” Musk ended his rant with the dark prediction: “If they don’t [vote], this will be the last election.”Musk has established himself as the quintessential robber baron of the United States’s second Gilded Age.In mid-August, during a conversation between Musk and Trump on Twitter/X, Trump praised Musk for firing workers who went on strike. “You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump said. “You walk in and say: ‘You want to quit?’ … They go on strike and you say: ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’” Musk responded, “Yeah,” and laughed.More than a century ago, in the US’s first Gilded Age, the idea that someone running for president would feature at a rally the richest person in the country, let alone the world, would have been absurd. At that time, even Republican candidates sought to distance themselves from the robber barons.Kamala Harris is waging a strong campaign but it could be even stronger if she wielded more anti-corporate and more anti-robber-baron economic populism.As in the first Gilded Age, the most powerful force in US politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system.But because Democrats – with the notable exceptions of Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Bob Casey, and Sherrod Brown – have not embraced economic populism, the only version of populism available to angry voters has been the Republican’s cultural one, which is utterly fake.During the first Gilded Age, economic populism predominated because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power concentrated at the top was undermining US democracy and stacking the economic deck.In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt thundered his warning that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy US democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was eventually enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.In the 1912 presidential campaign, Woodrow Wilson promised “a crusade against powers that have governed us … that have limited our development … that have determined our lives … that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please”. The struggle to break up the giant trusts would be, in Wilson’s words, a “second struggle for emancipation”.Wilson signed into law the Clayton Antitrust Act, which strengthened antitrust laws and protected unions. He also established the Federal Trade Commission to root out “unfair acts and practices in commerce”, and created the first permanent national income tax.Years later, Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth-cousin, Franklin D Roosevelt, attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and social security. FDR instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy – those making more than $5m a year were taxed up to 75% – and he regulated finance.Accepting renomination for president in 1936, FDR spoke of the need to redeem US democracy from the despotism of concentrated economic power. He warned the nation against the “economic royalists” who had pressed the whole of society into service.On the eve of his 1936 re-election, he told the American people that big business and finance were determined to unseat him: “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.”But by the 1950s, the Democratic party had given up on economic populism. Gone from their presidential campaigns were tales of greedy businessmen, unscrupulous financiers and monopolistic corporations.There no longer seemed any need. Postwar prosperity had created the largest middle class in the history of the world and reduced the gap between rich and poor. By the mid-1950s, a third of all private-sector employees were unionized, and blue-collar workers were receiving generous wage and benefit increases regularly.Keynesianism had become a widely accepted antidote to economic downturns – substituting the management of aggregate demand for class antagonism. Even Richard Nixon purportedly claimed: “We’re all Keynesians now.”There was a second reason for the Democrats’ increasing unease with populism. The civil rights struggle and the Vietnam war had spawned an anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian New Left that distrusted government as much if not more than it distrusted Wall Street and big business.The New Left viewed the war as a symbol of all that was rotten in the US, including the Democratic establishment that waged it. The Democratic establishment viewed the anti-war New Left as entitled children, who focused on personal expression and idealism rather than labor activism and the alleviation of poverty.That split was dramatically revealed during the violent protests at the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago. It lived on: a half-century later, it could be seen in Bernie Sanders’ candidacy in the 2016 primaries and the struggle within the Democratic party between his populists and Hillary Clinton’s mainstream Democrats.The Republican party, meanwhile, embraced cultural populism. In Ronald Reagan’s view, Washington insiders and arrogant bureaucrats stifled the economy and hobbled individual achievement. Cultural elites coddled the poor, including “welfare queens”, Reagan’s racist dog-whistle.Reagan’s cultural critique took hold of the Republican party. In the 2004 presidential election, Republicans framed Democrats as an effete group of “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing [and] Hollywood-loving” people out of touch with the real America.By the 2020s, Republicans saw the culture wars as the central struggle of American public life. Trump has blamed the country’s problems on immigrants, Democrats, socialists, the mainstream media, the “deep state” (including the FBI, justice department, prosecutors, and unfriendly judges), “coastal elites”, and, wherever possible (and usually indirectly), women and people of color.Republican cultural populism is bogus. The biggest change over the last four decades – the change lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of the working middle class, the change that animates America’s second Gilded Age – has had nothing to do with identity politics, “woke”-ism, critical race theory, transgender kids, immigration, or any other Republican cultural bogeymen.It’s the giant upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth; in the power and status that accompany it; and the injuries to pride, status, and self-esteem suffered by those who have lost it.The Democrats’ failure to critique this shift and adapt economic populism has made the Republicans’ fake cultural populism dominant by default.Why haven’t Democrats embraced economic populism? Because for too long they’ve drunk from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.“Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed the Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years.Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but it proved a Faustian bargain.Now, Trump boasts the support of the richest man in the world, who’s viciously anti-union, even as Trump pretends to be the “voice” of working America – and the Democrats don’t even challenge the hypocrisy.As I said, Harris is waging a good campaign. But she and many of her fellow Democrats could be more vocal about how ultra-wealthy individuals and giant corporations are undermining and corrupting America.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Will a disturbing scoop about Trump and Putin affect Trump’s electoral chances? | Margaret Sullivan

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      The news from Bob Woodward’s latest book is startling.The legendary Washington Post journalist has reported that as the Covid pandemic raged in 2020, with supplies of tests scarce in the United States, Donald Trump, then president, secretly sent test equipment to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for his personal use. Meanwhile, in his own country, Trump downplayed – even mocked – the need for Americans to test.Even Putin thought this would be damaging if it got out. “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” he reportedly told Trump.Since then, Woodward reports, Trump has kept in touch with the Russian autocrat. Trump may have spoken to Putin as often as seven times since he left office in 2021.Will it matter? Certainly not to the Trump faithful.They have stood resolutely by their man, no matter what. Trump has known this for years, reflecting in early 2016 that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”.When, shortly before the 2016 election, NBC’s Access Hollywood tape surfaced and Trump could be heard bragging that he was such a star that he could get away with grabbing women’s private parts, his campaign took it as a death knell.But it wasn’t. He got away with that, too.Why does this keep happening, through every scandal and misdeed, through two impeachments, 34 felony convictions, innumerable insults and lies? Why the Teflon?Perhaps it’s simply that Trump’s appeal to his voters is not about ethics, character or patriotism. Rather, it stands apart from the world of facts and accountability. In many ways, it’s not about behavior at all, at least not in the traditional candidate mold.It’s about who he hates, and who his followers hate.“He’s a character, he’s an avatar for a certain set of grievances,” a Princeton professor, Eddie S Glaude Jr, recently observed on MSNBC. The grievances are fear-based: suspicion of the “other”, portrayed as the killer-immigrant, the outsider who will take your job and your safety and your daughter’s spot on a sports team.United in grievance, the voter and the candidate cannot be separated by something as comparatively powerless as betrayal of country or lack of humanity.Still, for those not in the cult, each new offense seems like the end.How could this one – for instance, the debate-stage rant that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” – not have been the end?Yet the end never comes.“Imagine if we learned today that Kamala Harris was having regular conversations with Vladimir Putin, had sent him a special Covid testing kit, falsely claimed to have visited Gaza, was repeatedly lying about the federal hurricane response and said that the country had bad genes,” wrote the anti-Trump lawyer George Conway.The media would be in a frenzy, the negative attention would be unrelenting, and all of that would capsize her campaign.But Trump sails on. Imagine if Kamala Harris had first agreed to, then backed out of, an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes, as Trump did – at least in part because he didn’t want to be fact-checked or subjected to tough questions.By now, eight years past the Access Hollywood tape, the different sets of standards are baked in. One candidate – whether Biden or Harris – has been held to old-style judgments, with every word parsed and criticized.The other is held to almost no standards, because his base simply refuses to care.And the scandals build on each other. They pile up, intertwined.Thus, the report that Trump and Putin remained in contact gives a whole new dimension to knowing that the former president had a trove of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and did not willingly turn them over.It gives a whole new dimension to Trump’s pressuring Republicans to block military aid to Ukraine.It brings deeper understanding to how Trump says the conflict between Ukraine and Russia would never have started under him and that it will be immediately over if he wins another term. We know what this really means; Putin would simply have his way.Former Trump officials, right up to former vice-president Mike Pence, and some conscientious Republicans, have denounced the former president or even endorsed Harris. They know.But Trump’s poll numbers and approval ratings don’t seem to budge. The faithful remain faithful, unperturbed – couched in their indifference, as a Paul Simon lyric put it.Trump doesn’t often tell the truth. But when it came to his observation about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, he got something very right.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Is Donald Trump the greatest grifter of them all? Melania is giving him a run for his money | Emma Brockes

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      There was something almost poignant about Donald Trump’s tweets in support of his wife, Melania, on the occasion of her memoir being published this week. On Tuesday, the former president posted on X that he was “very proud of Melania!”, who is characterised in the book’s publicity material as Trump’s “rock and foundation”. It’s wrong, I know, to ascribe regular human responses to either of the Trumps, but watching activity around the book this week, it was hard not to wonder whether the pair’s pantomime uxoriousness caused either one of them the tiniest pang of regret for faking a loving relationship.I mean, no, right? Then again, who knows? The comedy and drama of the rollout of Melania are not the revelations – there are none, aside from Melania’s presumably calculated reveal about her position on abortion – but rather the spectacle of watching the former first lady answer questions about a man we must assume she can’t stand. While US reviewers mocked the book’s focus on Melania’s various business ventures – the Washington Post pulled out “the Fluid Day Serum, the Luxe Night with Vitamins A and E, cleansing balm, and an exfoliating peel, all priced between $50 and $150” for particular mockery – and bitterness about her treatment by the “news media”, the author herself appeared on a series of Fox News shows to publicly support her husband’s bid for re-election.It was, it should be said, a very particular form of support, delivered in Melania’s stilted, blank-faced style, which only softened when she talked about her son Barron. When asked if she was worried about her husband’s safety, on the Fox panel show The Five, Melania said, “Of course I do”, with no further elaboration. This was before saying that one of her husband’s strengths is the fact that “he took care of the military and I loved visiting them around the world, even when I went to Iraq. And also when I visited the aircraft in the middle of the ocean.”Talking to Maria Bartiromo on a separate Fox show, Melania said, “It’s important to have a great success”, and referred viewers to her website, where you can buy, among other things, a lovely “Vote Freedom” necklace “which features the iconic Lady Liberty” for $175, or something from her Limited Edition Ornament series emblazoned with “Merry Christmas, AMERICA!” This sounds like the title of an episode of South Park but is in fact a series of Christmas decorations and “digital collectibles” that shine very brightly against the backdrop of Melania’s remark of 2019, when she was secretly recorded by an aide saying: “Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration? But I have to do it.”It was, however, Melania’s interview on yet another Fox show with host Ainsley Earhardt that offered the most revealing insight into just how hard this publicity tour has been on her. Dutifully, Melania worked through her talking points about how her husband is “passionate to make America great again”. She complained about the “misinformation” around her and urged viewers to buy the book so they “can learn some things that were never discussed”. And she referred to the press release she issued shortly before the Republican national convention this year as the time “I wrote a beautiful letter to America”. (In it, she urged unity because “our gentle nation is tattered”.)It was when Earhardt asked Melania about the 13 July attempt on her husband’s life, however, that the former first lady appeared to suffer a serious malfunction. Questioned about how she responded to being informed that her husband had apparently been shot, Melania said: “I ran to the TV, and I rewind it, and … something I guess look over me so I didn’t really see ‘live, live’ but maybe a few minutes later. But when I saw it, it was only, nobody really knew yet. Because when you see him on the floor and you don’t know what really happened.”There was a pause while Earhardt tried to process these remarks and wait to see if there were more, which there weren’t. So after an even less satisfying back and forth about the second failed attempt on Trump’s life, she asked: “Does this make you more believe in a higher power?” To which Melania replied that the “country really needs him”, to which a by now thoroughly downcast-looking Earhardt mumbled: “Maybe God’s sparing his life.” Samuel Beckett himself could not have come up with a finer absurdist exchange.The effect of watching these interviews, meanwhile, was quietly chilling. Asked by a Fox interviewer what she wished Trump’s detractors knew about him, she said, bald-faced, smiling slightly, bold as brass in the prosecution of her naked self-interest, “that he is really a family man, he loves his family”.It was a spine-tingling moment that brings you to an interesting conclusion. If you watch enough Melania content you start to believe that she is, perhaps, even more of a grifter than her husband.

      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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      This is the future for Kamala Harris: unless she solves this economic mystery, Trump wins | Aditya Chakrabortty

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      The defining question in US politics was asked 44 years ago this month. One week before the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter squared up to each other for a televised debate. A former Hollywood actor, Reagan was also proving a lethal Washington aphorist. At the close, he spoke into the camera: “Next Tuesday, all of you will go to the polls. You’ll stand there in the polling place and make a decision.” Watching at home were more than 80 million Americans. “When you make that decision … ask yourself: are you better off than you were four years ago?” Is it easier to buy things, he asked, is unemployment lower?A few days later, voters gave their answer, handing Reagan a 44-state landslide. Every presidential contest since has been framed in large part by his simple, deadly question. Ask it in the final stretch of this election and you get to the great mystery of why the race remains so close.Are Americans better off than they were four years ago? Pretty much every mainstream economist would say: you bet. Many go further. “I’ve hesitated to say this at the risk of sounding hyperbolic,” wrote Mark Zandi, the respected chief economist at Moodys, just a few days ago. “But … there is no denying it: this is among the best performing economies in my 35+ years as an economist.” Growth: up. Jobs: up. Wages: rising. The value of your home: up. Share prices: booming. Inflation: falling. Borrowing rates: dropping.In 2020, Donald Trump warned that his defeat would produce “a depression”. Today, even while Germany and Japan face recession, magazines toast the US economy’s “superstar status”. Yet ask Americans if they feel better off, and many answer: no.Under Reagan’s law, this election ought to be in the bag for Kamala Harris. As Joe Biden’s number two, she can claim co-authorship for this boom. Instead, she is neck and neck with a convicted criminal (never forget: three weeks after polling day, a judge will decide if Donald Trump should be jailed over the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels). On the economy, Trump regularly polls ahead of Harris. The issue that ought to be winning for her is instead losing.How come? It ranks among the most consequential questions of our time, yet, however hard they scratch their heads Washington’s finest can’t give a good answer. Many on the centre left paint it as a PR problem: that Biden has failed to claim the credit or that voters are too dumb to realise how good things are. But another suggestion emerges in a new report from a progressive thinktank, the Democracy Collaborative. And its argument should be heeded by Keir Starmer and the European left.The authors examine much the same economic dashboard as everyone else – growth, jobs, wages – but over a far longer timeframe. Behind each graph lies the implicit question: are you, your family, your community better off than you were not four years ago, but two, three, four decades ago? And for many people the numbers say: no.Take the biggest one: pay. For teachers, clerical workers, sales reps and the great bulk of US employees, whether white or blue collar, wages have flatlined – not for four or even 20 years – but for most of the past half century. Strip out inflation and average hourly earnings for seven out of 10 US employees have barely risen since Richard Nixon was in the White House.For the average US employee, and their families and their towns, the economy has kept on tanking whoever wins the White House, whichever judges make it to the supreme court, whether the analysts decree it to be boom or bust.Biden has spent trillions on boosting the economy and adapting to the climate crisis. He has bolstered unions and intervened in strikes. The graphs show it has had an impact – but it is a tiny uptick at the end of a line that otherwise points remorselessly down. Americans are better off than they were four years ago, it’s just that many were in distress in 2020.Reagan destroyed their unions, Bill Clinton threw open their trade barriers, George Bush Jr dispatched their kids to fight and die abroad, Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street and Trump ran a glorified protection racket. Only in 2020 did real wages for “production and non-supervisory employees” rise above where they were in 1973. This was not because they were unproductive: the US economy continues to do more with less almost every year. It’s just that most of the gains from that have gone to the top.“Even if Trump loses, America remains very vulnerable to a far nastier imitation winning next time,” says Joe Guinan, president of the Democracy Collaborative. The only way to see off Trump, JD Vance and the pluto-populists is to make the economy more equal, to give workers more of a stake in the riches they produce.To see how that plays out, I checked in on Mike Stout. We first talked in a diner in Pittsburgh in 2012, the year Obama won re-election. Mike and his wife, Steffi, had worked in Pennsylvania’s steel industry, with good union pay and pensions. They’d gone to Washington for the first inauguration of Obama, and stood in the freezing January cold. They had hopes.The Stouts did everything right. Worked hard and saved, and spent $50,000 to get their kids through university. In 2012, their daughter Maura was working in a downtown hotel for $14 an hour, the same as her father had earned in 1978. Even then she doubted whether she and her husband would ever enjoy the same standard of living as her parents.She’d lost that hotel job during the pandemic, said Mike, and was working from her one-bedroom flat. Her job was chasing people for their debts, even though at $18 an hour she was only just keeping her head above water. Now in her 30s, she’d split from her husband, and Mike thought much of the blame lay in money problems. As for his son, Mike, he was looking after his wife, who has stage 4 cancer, and their kids. Mike has health insurance, which counts as good fortune in the US, but the top-up fees are eye-watering, and now he works two jobs.“They are teetering on a ledge 60 floors up,” said Stout. “The slightest nuance – a recession or prices going up again – and they’re pushed out of the window.”Life for the Stouts has been frozen for years. At the root of democratic capitalism is an old promise: tomorrow will be better than today. But that promise was broken long ago for Mike’s family and many of his friends’ households, too. He knew plenty of former steelworkers in this swing state who next month would vote Trump. Sure he was a liar, “but at least he lies to their faces, rather than ignoring them”.And what about Mike? “Trump or Harris: it’s just one big uni-party,” he said. “It’s Wall Street that runs this country.”

      Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist More