Donald Trump

Subterms

    More stories

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      As Harris soars, Trump sulks

      by

      Hello there,Who knew that all Democrats needed to do was kick their ailing incumbent president off the ticket? Well, plenty of people. But few could have predicted just how successfully Kamala Harris and Uncle Tim have been relentlessly saturating the key swing states, speaking to huge crowds and rising in the polls.Trump, for his part, is floundering, trapped somewhere between rage and inertia. The former president held just one campaign event in the last seven days, and seems to spend most of his time complaining on his Truth Social website, with a breather to repeat his talking points to a wealthy idiot on X. More about Trump’s bad week after the headlines.Here’s what you need to knowView image in fullscreen1. Conventional thinkingThousands of Democrats will sweep into Chicago next week for the party’s national convention, where Harris will be officially anointed as their nominee for president. Despite Democrats’ checkered history of holding conventions in Chicago, the event will probably have a celebratory feel as Harris lays out her vision for the US to what will be a very friendly crowd. Barack Obama will be among the speakers, and the Guardian will be there with live updates.2. Abortion on the ballotA constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion will be on the ballot in Arizona in November, something that could increase Democratic turnout in the swing state. “Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base,” my colleague Carter Sherman writes. In total, voters in at least seven states (also including Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada and South Dakota) will decide referendums on abortion rights this year.3. A Squad saveIlhan Omar, the Minnesota congresswoman and member of the progressive group “the Squad”, won her primary on Tuesday night, and will probably be re-elected to the House in November. Omar defeated Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis council member, and avoided the fate of fellow Squad members Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, both of whom lost their primaries this year. Pro-Israel lobbying groups spent millions to defeat Bush and Bowman after they criticized Israel’s war on Gaza, but despite Omar also being a critic of Israel’s actions, those groups stayed out of the Minnesota primary.The strategy of being angry on the internetView image in fullscreenHow about that Harralz momentum, huh? Kamala Harris and Tim Walz hit the ground running last week, and they’ve barely stopped since, holding events in five states, continuing to call people weird, and generally reinvigorating a previously weary Democratic base.There’s evidence that the Harris vibes tour is yielding results, because for the first time in absolutely ages, we’re seeing polling that shows Trump not winning the election. Before Biden dropped out, Trump was leading him by 3.1% nationally, and the Republican was ahead in every swing state. Harris now has a slight lead nationally, and has closed the gap on Trump in places like Michigan and Wisconsin. Each party typically experiences a popularity boost after their convention, so the momentum is likely to continue – for a little bit, anyway.
      Trump held just one campaign rally, in a state that will have no impact on the election
      Judging by how sulky Trump is being, it is clear he is worried. But it’s less clear what Trump is actually doing to combat the Harris surge. While Harris and Walz have been bounding across stages in front of thousands of people, Trump seems to have been mostly just sitting in the Florida private members’ club that he calls home.In the past week, the one-term former president has held a waffling conversation with Elon Musk on X, hosted a confusing press conference in Florida, ranted incessantly on Truth Social, and held just one campaign rally, in a state that will have no impact on the election. Oh, and it also emerged that Trump has been traveling around the country on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s former airplane, which if a Democratic candidate had done would be all the Republicans would talk about.Trump’s chat with Musk on Tuesday was supposed to give his campaign a shot in the arm – a cosy natter with a friendly ally. But once the conversation began – after a 40-minute delay due to technical difficulties – people’s main takeaways were a) this is very boring and b) why is Trump slurring his words? He did indeed seem to be struggling to pronounce the “s” in a number of words, with the term “groceries” proving particularly problematic. His campaign initially denied there was any problem – “must be your ears”, a spokesperson said – although Trump later blamed “modern day equipment, and cellphone technology”. Still, for a man who has a long history of mocking perceived physical weakness, the discussion will have been unwelcome.
      The strategy of being angry on the internet hasn’t typically proven to be a winner in elections
      Worse still, Trump’s admiring comments about Musk firing workers prompted the United Auto Workers labor union to file a federal labor charge. Trump didn’t address that in the more than 20 messages he posted to his own social media website on Tuesday, although he did describe Harris as “a joke”, complained about polling, and at one point declared: “I absolutely HATE the fake news media.” The strategy of being angry on the internet hasn’t typically proven to be a winner in elections, with the notable exception of 2016.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut Harris’s supporters will be aware that there is a long way to go until election day on 5 November (even if, in some states, people can begin voting in September). The momentum surely cannot last. She and Walz are fresh faces at the moment, but Republicans will spend hundreds of millions to attack them, and Trump will surely emerge from his bunker eventually.Harry Enten, a polling expert at CNN, pointed out on Tuesday that Trump was underestimated in surveys in 2016 and 2020, and said Trump’s favorability among Americans was higher than it was in those two elections. So nothing is decided yet – but Democrats at least have several reasons to be optimistic.Out and about: New OrleansView image in fullscreenThe Guardian joined Joe Biden on Air Force One on Tuesday en route to New Orleans, where the president doled out millions in new research grants for a policy program he created after the death of his eldest son, Beau, from brain cancer at age 46.“We know that all families touched by cancer are in a race against time,” Biden told a crowd at Tulane University.Now that Biden is no longer running for re-election, he seems to be devoting the final months of his presidency to his passion projects, including promoting his “moonshot” cancer-fighting initiative.Lie of the week: Sea level rise is fineView image in fullscreenThe sea will only “rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 400 years”, and in any case create “more oceanfront property”, Donald Trump claimed to Elon Musk on Tuesday.He was certainly wrong on the first count. According to Nasa the global average sea level has risen a total of about 4in in the past 30 years alone. And the rate of increase is accelerating.And while more oceanfront property may indeed by created, lots of current oceanfront property will not survive: rising sea levels hit low-lying coastal areas the hardest. More

    • 213 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump is desperate to land a punch on Kamala Harris. But he fails | Sidney Blumenthal

      by

      The madness of King George III was never diagnosed. He likely suffered from bipolarity. One of his uncontrollable bouts of madness was triggered by his reading of Shakespeare’s play of a mad king, King Lear. “This morning he is … more agitated and confused, perhaps from having been permitted to read King Lear,” wrote his doctor, in papers released only six years ago. The story upset King George, his equerry recounted: “His Majesty became so ungovernable that recourse was had to the strait waistcoat.”King George’s straitjacketing occurred in 1788, a year after the constitutional convention created the United States government to prevent the rise of any king – mad or not. The American revolution, waged against the absolute sovereignty of a monarch, had the madness of King George in mind as the office of president of the United States was being framed. The president, wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No 69, would be subject to impeachment and removal, and “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.”About the difference between the American president and the English king, Hamilton stated: “What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other? The same that ought to be given to those who tell us that a government, the whole power of which would be in the hands of the elective and periodical servants of the people, is an aristocracy, a monarchy, and a despotism.”When the US supreme court ruled on 1 July that Donald Trump as a former president had “absolute” immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as “official acts”, Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented that “the President is now a king above the law.” As Shakespeare wrote in King John: “Mad world, mad kings, mad composition!”King George swooned reading King Lear. Trump has become delirious at the sight of Kamala Harris. The king’s courtiers succeeded in restraining him, while Trump’s cannot control him. He rages, curses and shouts to the heavens of the unfairness of fate. His aides attempt to calm and steady him about Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race. “It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her, too,” he cries.Trump’s years-long industrial-level production of “Crooked Joe” and the “Biden Crime Family”, amplified as regular programming on Fox News, is now toxic waste. These crude projections were fabricated out of the materials of Trump’s own vices, flaws and offenses. If Biden could be tarred with false charges, his shadow would blot out Trump’s true crimes. Trump’s initial effort against Biden – to blackmail Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in an exchange of weapons for dirt on Biden – constituted the articles of Trump’s first impeachment.The House Republicans, led by the January 6 co-conspirator Jim Jordan, set up a “weaponization committee” that, along with the oversight committee, spent millions of dollars and consumed thousands of staff hours to discover, after parading one false witness after another, that Biden had done absolutely nothing wrong. Their impeachment farce of Biden collapsed from its own weightlessness. Despite their contrivances, they found Biden blameless. The entire Hunter Biden saga, which has breathlessly riveted the Wall Street Journal editorial board, meanwhile drifts into a trivial pursuit.Always just a series of distorted projections, the campaign against Biden is missing its object. The screen has suddenly gone blank. Trump is exposed standing naked on the stage. His negative campaign is self-indicting. Everything he accused Biden of being, he manifestly embodies. His malicious characterizations describe only himself. He is the crook, the cheat, the liar; he is the worst president in history. Biden is gone, but Trump can’t escape him. Biden haunts him as a ghost. Trump is left as the oldest man ever to run for the office, whose babbling incapacity is on display.Trump frantically attempts to find the key to a negative campaign against Harris. He stumblingly flickers his projection of Biden. She’s the crook, the cheat, the liar. She’s not really Black, or she is Black but only lately. He mispronounces her name in a variety of deliberately mangled ways to make her seem strange, but in doing so he appears stranger. She’s “dumb”, “incompetent” and a “bitch”. He states that Biden is plotting to stage a coup at the Democratic convention to overthrow her. His dream for restoration requires his animadversion of Biden’s ghost. He can’t stop talking about the man who isn’t there. He complains to Elon Musk, playing the role of his straight-man second banana, that Biden is “close to a vegetable”. But insults can’t make Biden come back to political life. Trump’s bitter nostalgia for Biden stokes his anger at Harris.Since Trump can’t change, Harris must be an illusion. He says the packed crowds at her rallies are “fake”, created by AI. “She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!” Of course, his 34 felonies for business fraud were for the purpose of election interference in 2016. His instinctive reflex for projection boomerangs. He constantly reveals his pattern of guilt through his accusations.Lost in the illogic of his conspiracy theories he wanders back and forth from higher realms of incoherence to lower depths of innuendo. His tale of his near-death experience in a diving helicopter with Willie Brown encapsulates more than his careening method of demeaning insinuation. It is his unconscious metaphor of his current plight crashing to earth.Willie Brown, the former speaker of the California assembly, once dated the young Harris. Trump explained: “But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he – he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he – he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.”But Willie Brown is not a fictitious character. “I don’t think I’d want to ride on the same helicopter with him,” he said. Willie Brown never flew in a ’copter with Trump. Willie Brown admires Harris – “absolutely beautiful woman, smart as all hell, very successful” – and he supports her “religiously”. Willie Brown, clever, funny and canny as ever, says he can’t wait to watch Harris whip Trump in the debate. “I would think it would probably be unfair for her to debate inept Donald Trump with his appalling lack of knowledge. The absence of knowledge is appalling. I would put every nickel I have on the results of the debate and it will all be on Kamala Harris.”Trump appeared to confuse Willie Brown with the former California governor Jerry Brown, who did fly once in a ’copter with Trump – though it was never in difficulty. Then another Black politician – not Willie Brown – stepped forward to state that he was in a ’copter in trouble with Trump, Nate Holden, the former Los Angeles city council member and California state senator. “I guess we all look alike,” he told the Guardian.Trump’s near-death by helicopter is the latest flight of his freakish fantasies – this week’s favorite instead of electrocution from the battery of an electric boat or being eaten by sharks. Whatever convoluted smear Trump was attempting to spread about Harris, it wound up sliced in the propellers. It was Black Hawk Down for Trump’s slander.Though his lie was shredded, he feverishly tried to reassemble its pieces. He insisted to Maggie Haberman of the New York Times that he has the records to prove that it was really Willie Brown in the ’copter. “When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice,” she reported.Trump responded with a slur: “Maggot Hagermann should apologize for her Fake & Fraudulent writing on the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, along with many other of her poorly written and badly researched stories.”Trump had previously spoken of Haberman as his “psychiatrist”. His anger reveals his deep desire for approbation from the Times, a sign of his acceptance in Manhattan, which rejected him decades ago. His resentment erupts from his unfulfilled yearning. In lashing out at Haberman, she serves as an available surrogate woman for his frustration over Harris.Trump’s projection has become blowback. He can’t run a negative campaign to belittle Harris because his negative campaign engulfs and defines himself. He rages at being neutered and neutralized. His trials have also had their effect. Highlighting his abuses in courts of law as a sexual predator with E Jean Carroll and his history with Stormy Daniels has tainted his ability to sell his misogyny. His frustration, however, stokes more verbal abuse.Trump has descended to attacking Tim Walz, the avuncular Minnesota governor who is Harris’s running mate, for wanting “tampons to be put in boys’ bathrooms”. Apparently, Trump thinks tampon by association is an astute tactic. Scrounging around in the school toilets, he can only remind women of his lifetime of physical and verbal abuse, and that he claims credit for outlawing abortion rights. Trump is lost in the stalls. Grab ’em by the tampon.Trump targets Republican women who appear within his range of vision, too. He has gone to war against Marty Kemp, the wife of Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, who had refused to support Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump laced into Marty Kemp: “Now she says she won’t Endorse me, and is going to ‘write in Brian Kemp’s name.’ Well, I don’t want her Endorsement, and I don’t want his.” He slammed Governor Kemp: “He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average governor.” “Leave my family out of it,” replied Kemp. After Trump’s rain of insults, a poll showed Harris tied with Trump in Georgia.At a tentful of Republican billionaire donors in the Hamptons on 2 August, Trump resisted their gentle admonitions to tamp himself down. Many of them want a more muffled, dignified candidate talking about the federal deficit, curbing entitlements and the capital gains tax rate. These are the masters of the universe of carried interest. Their strategy would be for Trump not to be Trump. Let Trump be Paul Ryan. They want him to stick to the standard Republican playbook he discarded when he first starting remaking the party in his own image. The disoriented donors still can’t grasp that Trump’s depravity is the source of his appeal.“’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind,” wrote Shakespeare in King Lear.

      Sidney Blumenthal is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump loses third bid for judge to step aside in hush-money case

      by

      A New York judge declined for a third time to step aside from the case in which Donald Trump was convicted of charges involving hush money paid to an adult film star, dismissing the former US president’s claim of conflict of interest related to political consultancy work by the judge’s daughter.As he did last April and in August 2023, Juan Merchan in a decision released on Wednesday denied a request by Trump’s lawyers that the acting justice of the New York supreme court recuse himself from the first case involving criminal charges against a former US president. Merchan is scheduled to sentence Trump on 18 September.“Defendant has provided nothing new for this Court to consider. Counsel has merely repeated arguments that have already been denied by this and higher courts” and were “rife with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims”, Merchan wrote in the ruling dated 13 August.Trump was found guilty by a jury on 30 May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for having covered up his former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to avert a sex scandal before the 2016 US election.Two months later, his lawyers made their third request that Merchan step aside, arguing that his daughter’s work for a political consultancy that has counted Democratic campaigns among its clients – including the unsuccessful bid by Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination – posed a conflict of interest.Harris, now vice-president, is the Democratic presidential candidate facing the Republican nominee Trump in the 5 November US election.Falsifying business records is a crime punishable by up to four years in prison, though sentences such as fines or probation have been more common for others convicted of that crime.Prosecutors with Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which brought the charges, had called Trump’s recusal request a “frivolous” attempt to relitigate an issue that was resolved twice before.“No amount of overheated, hyperbolic rhetoric can cure the fatal defects in defendant’s ongoing effort to impugn the fairness of these proceedings,” prosecutors wrote in an 1 August court filing.The payment to Daniels was made in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election about a sexual encounter she has said she had with Trump a decade earlier, which the former president denied. Trump went on to win the presidency by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMerchan rejected a recusal request in April before jury selection in the trial and last year after an ethics panel found that his daughter’s work did not pose reasonable questions about the judge’s impartiality.During the trial, Trump took to his social media platform to deride Merchan as a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court”. Ahead of the trial, Trump wrote on social media that Merchan’s daughter “makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’” comments that in part contributed to Merchan’s decision to expand a gag order to bar the former president from commenting publicly about family members of court staff or prosecutors.Trump’s lawyers separately have asked the judge to throw out his conviction in light of the US supreme court’s July ruling giving former presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts taken in office. Merchan has said he will decide on Trump’s arguments by 16 September. More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We know who built this country’: Walz courts union workers in first solo event

      by

      Tim Walz held his first solo campaign event since being selected as Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential nominee on Tuesday, rallying union members in Los Angeles and denouncing Donald Trump’s record on labor rights.The Minnesota governor’s appearance, at an event hosted by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was the first in a five-state fundraising campaign as Walz ramps up support for the still-young Democratic ticket.Speaking to thousands of union members in a darkened auditorium, Walz said he and Harris will support workers by bringing collective bargaining and other protections to “every state in the union”. The 1.4-million-member union has endorsed Harris.“We know exactly who built this country,” Walz said. “People in this room built the middle class.”He emphasized his and Harris’s history of supporting worker protections, including appearances that both candidates have made on picket lines and the ban Minnesota passed on captive audience meetings during his tenure as governor. Walz said that he was the “first union member on a presidential ticket since Ronald Regan”, but promised: “I won’t lose my way.” (Trump was a member of the Screen Actors Guild before resigning in 2021.)Walz then pivoted to warn them of what the future might look like for workers if the former president and his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, are elected, saying: “They see the world very differently then we do.”“The only thing those two guys know about working people is how to work to take advantage of them,” Walz said. “Every single chance they’ve gotten they’ve waged war on workers.”He described a future where bargaining rights, overtime pay and other protections would be cut, referencing steps that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 outlines for restricting worker rights under a second Trump presidency.The Trump campaign has also courted union support. When Trump accepted the Republican nomination last month, he said he would rescue the auto industry from “complete obliteration”.However, this morning the United Auto Workers union also filed federal unfair labor practice charges against Trump and Elon Musk over comments the two made during a live stream on X, which included threats to fire workers for going on strike.“You’re the greatest cutter,” Trump told Musk. “I mean, I look at what you do,” Trump said. “You walk in, you say, you want to quit? They go on strike, I won’t mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that’s OK, you’re all gone. You’re all gone. So, every one of you is gone.”Walz concluded by referencing his own record of service, and attacks Republicans have made on his military service. “I’m proud to have served my country and I always will be,” he said.On Tuesday Walz also addressed a fundraiser in Newport Beach, and plans to speak in Denver and Boston tomorrow, before heading to Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York, on Thursday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt a fundraiser at the Balboa Bay Resort in Newport Beach on Tuesday, the Orange County Register reported, Walz peppered his 30-minute appearance “with Midwest jokes and self-deprecating quips”.“I couldn’t be more surprised if I woke up with my head stapled to the carpet,” he told an attendee who asked whether he was surprised to be selected as the vice-presidential nominee, before refocusing on his running mate.“You know better than anybody in this state what we’ve got in the vice-president. She’s found her voice,” Walz saidWalz also noted that his daughter, Hope, was in attendance at the Orange county event, before sharing his family’s story of conceiving Hope through IVF treatments.Also in attendance were multiple California Democratic house members, including representatives Nanette Barragán of South Gate, Mike Levin of San Juan Capistrano and Katie Porter of Irvine. Levin, who had been one of the first to call on President Joe Biden to abandon his re-election campaign, told the Register: “I want to win the election in November and defeat Donald Trump. Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz give us a great chance to do just that.”Donors in Newport Beach, one of California’s wealthier and more conservative regions, have contributed $770,000 to Trump’s campaign this election cycle; compared with $145,000 for the Democratic campaigns, the Register reports, citing Federal Election Commission reports.Walz’s fundraising tour will continue in Denver and Boston tomorrow, before heading to Newport, Rhode Island, and Southampton, New York, on Thursday. More

    • 263 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      FBI told Harris campaign it was targeted by foreign hackers; Walz defends military service in first solo campaign event – live

      by

      Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:In the further annals of Republicans who broke with Donald Trump returning to the fold, former North Carolina senator Richard Burr said he will vote for the ex-president in November.Burr, who declined to seek re-election and left the Senate in 2022, was one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Trump after he was impeached by the House of Representatives in response to the January 6 insurrection.The conviction ultimately failed to receive the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate required to be approved, and North Carolina’s GOP censured Burr for his vote.In an interview with Spectrum News, Burr said:
      Maybe someone will have a hard time squaring with it. I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I voted for impeachment. And l like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.
      Donald Trump’s campaign is facing accusations of racism over this post on Twitter/X earlier today:It appears to be in line with the former president’s messaging around undocumented people, who he has baselessly blamed for causing crime, and sparked a wave of condemnation from users of X:Tim Walz is set to become one of the most prominent Democrats in the country – at least for the next three months, as he campaigns alongside Kamala Harris. Here’s a look at his record in Minnesota, from the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang:Tim Walz must be having the wildest month of his life.After the Minnesota governor was announced as Kamala Harris’s pick for running mate, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and independent senator Joe Manchin both put out statements praising him, an indication of his appeal across Democratic constituencies.“Dems in disconcerting levels of array,” Ocasio-Cortez joked on X.In the week since his name catapulted from relative obscurity – Walz flew up the shortlist of second-in-command possibles in a matter of two weeks, buoyed by clips of his TV appearances and memes about his dadliness – camo caps with orange writing have flown off the campaign merch shelves, a nod to Walz’s dressed-down midwestern attire.But beyond the appearances, his record in politics shows an evolution – a shift from a moderate Democrat winning over a Republican-leaning district to a governor who delivered a laundry list of progressive policy wins that has his critics fuming.Is he a progressive darling? Is he a moderate in progressive clothing? A centrist? Is this a bait-and-switch?Well, he’s Tim Walz.When you talk to people who know Walz, they all call him real, genuine, authentic, an everyman. There’s no reason to believe he’s putting on an act.Speaking of the Harris campaign, the vice-president’s newly minted running mate, Tim Walz, today made his first solo campaign appearance at a convention of union members.The Minnesota governor gave a wide-ranging speech in which he attacked Donald Trump and cheered the power of organized labor, while also taking time to respond to attacks from the former president and his supporters, who say Walz has exaggerated his military service.Here’s what he said in response, at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees’s annual convention:The attacks on Walz’s military service, from Trump allies including his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, have centered on the timing of his decision to retire after 24 years of army national guard service. Here’s more on that:Kamala Harris’s campaign said it has received a warning from the FBI that it had been targeted by foreign hackers, but they have not detected any breaches of their systems.“In July, the campaign legal and security teams were notified by the FBI that we were targeted by a foreign actor influence operation. We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts. We remain in communication with appropriate law enforcement authorities,” a campaign official said.Earlier this week, the FBI said it was investigating a leak of documents from the Trump campaign that is being blamed on hackers tied to Iran. Here’s more on that:Democrats in Arizona received some good news yesterday, when the secretary of state approved a ballot measure that would protect abortion rights, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports. The party hopes the initiative will bring out voters who will also cast ballots for Kamala Harris in a state that could prove decisive to her hopes to winning the White House:Arizona voters will decide this November whether to add abortion rights into their state constitution, a prospect that could turbocharge voter turnout in a critical battleground state in the 2024 election.Late Monday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office announced that it had validated an estimated 577,971 signatures in support of a ballot measure, the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, to establish a constitutional right to abortion in the state.On X, the office called the measure “the largest petition effort in Arizona history”. The measure will be listed on the ballot as Proposition 139.Arizona is not the only state to face the prospect of an abortion-related ballot measure this November. So far, states including Colorado, Florida and Nevada – another key battleground state – are also set to hold similar ballot measures. Tuesday also marks the deadline for the state of Missouri to determine whether to add its own abortion-related measure to its ballots.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ballot measures that protect or preserve abortion rights have successfully passed even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. However, they have never been tested during a presidential election. Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base, especially since the vice-president, Kamala Harris, one of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on abortion rights, became the party’s nominee.Arizona’s Republican former governor Doug Ducey has endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election bid, after he was censured by the state GOP near the end of his term for not being sufficiently loyal to the former president.Ducey cited his support for tougher immigration policies and a continuation of Trump-era tax cuts in his endorsement:Three years ago, the state Republican party reprimanded Ducey after it was taken over by rightwing officials who retaliated against politicians from the state that had clashed with Trump:Donald Trump’s campaign is out with a new statement claiming that the former president’s interview with Elon Musk last night “breaks the internet”.It says 25 million users on X have listened to the entire two-hour-plus interview as of noon today, and that the conversation generated 9.6m posts, among other statistics. It also hit out at Kamala Harris for not having done any interviews since launching her campaign.“While weak, failed, and dangerously liberal Kamala Harris has avoided answering questions for 23 days, President Trump delivered his message directly to the people in a historic, two-hour interview that generated millions of posts and impressions related to President Trump and Elon Musk’s unfiltered conversation,” the statement reads.Here’s more, from the Trump campaign communications director, Steven Cheung:
      President Trump will do everything he can to bring his unscripted message directly to the people, something the fake news media refuses to do. While Kamala Harris enjoys the luxury of hiding from the press, President Trump accepted Elon’s invitation to have an unfiltered conversation about his America First policies with voters and people around the world. The media can lie, but the numbers don’t: Americans are eager to hear from President Trump and his momentum is only growing as we get closer to November 5.
      The prominent progressive senator Bernie Sanders has warned that Donald Trump is preparing to once again dispute the results of the 2024 election, should he lose.Trump has never publicly conceded his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, and engaged in a months-long effort to prevent the Democrat from taking office that culminated in the violent January 6 insurrection.In a just-released statement, Sanders cites the former president’s recent language to argue that he is preparing to do the same this year:
      Donald Trump may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. When he claims that “nobody” showed up at a 10,000-person Harris-Walz rally in Michigan that was live-streamed and widely covered by the media, that it was all AI, and that Democrats cheat all of the time, there is a method to his madness. Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses. If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are “fake” and “fraudulent”.
      This is what destroying faith in institutions is about. This is what undermining democracy is about. This is what fascism is about.
      The former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the first local election official to be charged with a security breach after the 2020 election as unfounded conspiracy theories swirled, was found guilty by a jury on most charges last night.Peters, a one-time hero to those denying that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with the My Pillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, access to the Mesa county election system and deceiving other officials about that person’s identity, the Associated Press reports.Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to “steal” the election from Trump. His online broadcasting site has been showing a livestream of Peters’ trial. Prosecutors said Peters was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.The breach Peters was charged of orchestrating heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state. She was found not guilty of identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and one count of criminal impersonation.She will be sentenced on 3 October.Sea level rise will help create “more oceanfront property”, carbon pollution is only a problem once it starts causing “headaches and nausea” and we should be more worried about “nuclear warming” than global warming.Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s conversation on X, which Musk owns, last night featured several incoherent and baseless statements on the climate crisis, prompting both confusion and derision among environmental advocates.Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate group 350.org, labeled it the “dumbest climate conversation of all time.”Trump, the Republican presidential nominee in this election, said that rising seas will help create “more oceanfront property” and complained that “people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” in reference to potential nuclear war.During the often disjointed exchange, Trump also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration hadn’t opened up the Arctic to oil drilling and baselessly claimed that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle” because of climate edicts.Musk, meanwhile, said that he is “helping the environment” by making electric cars via Tesla but said that he didn’t want people to “vilify” the oil and gas industry that is driving the climate crisis and that the real dangers were, he felt, an increase in CO2 that will cause “headaches and nausea” and the world potentially running out of oil.“We don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that,” Musk said about the urgency of climate change. “Like leave the farmers alone.”Scientists are clear that the world needs to rapidly move away from fossil fuels to avoid worsening and disastrous climate impacts such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts.The exchange did little to assuage concerns that a second Trump term will only help accelerate dangerous global heating. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      FBI told Harris campaign it was target of ‘foreign actor influence operation’ – report

      by

      Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign said it was notified by the FBI last month that it was “targeted by a foreign actor influence operation”, a NBC News reporter said on Tuesday.“We have robust cybersecurity measures in place, and are not aware of any security breaches of our systems resulting from those efforts,” the campaign said, according to the reporter.The FBI said on Monday that it was investigating after Harris’s Republican rival Donald Trump’s presidential campaign said it was hacked.More details soon … More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Exonerated Central Park Five councillor to speak at Democratic convention – report

      by

      Yusef Salaam, a New York City councillor who was wrongly jailed for a notorious rape in the city’s Central Park, has reportedly been invited to address next week’s Democratic national convention in Chicago in a move that could highlight Donald Trump’s key role in the case and history of racially charged rhetoric.Salaam was one of the “Central Park Five”, a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers who were convicted of attacking and raping Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old investment banker, while she was jogging in April 1989.He could be joined at the convention by other members of the group, according to Semafor, which broke the story but said Salaam’s appearance had yet to be confirmed.Salaam served seven years but was later exonerated and released along with the other four after a convicted serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime, a confession confirmed by DNA evidence.The case became a major cause célèbre, largely due to an intervention by Trump, then an up-and-coming property magnate, who took out full-page adverts in four New York papers calling for the return of the death penalty at a time when the crime had captured media attention.The five defendants, who were all minors, had already been arrested, paraded in public and had their names and addresses published when Trump took out the advert.In a style that was to become familiar in his social media posts of a later era, the advert – carrying Trump’s signature – blared in block capitals: “Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!”Trump, who did not specifically call for the execution of the five defendants, wrote: “I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”In a 2016 interview with the Guardian, Salaam said Trump’s high-profile intervention had been a major factor in the teens’ wrongful convictions.“He was the fire starter,” Salaam said. “Common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty.”Trump has declined to apologise for his perceived role in the wrongful convictions. After the men were awarded $41m in damages in a civil case in 2014, Trump wrote an article for the New York Daily News calling the award “the heist of the century”.He took a similarly hard line while he was president, telling journalists at the White House in 2019 that “you have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt.”He added: “If you look at some of the prosecutors, they think that the city never should have settled that case, so we’ll leave it at that.”His comments were triggered by the release of a four-part Netflix dramatisation of the case, When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay, which Kamala Harris – then a Democratic senator and presidential hopeful, and now vice-president and Trump’s opponent in the forthcoming presidential election – urged him to watch.Salaam won election as a Democrat representing New York’s Harlem district in November last year.Months before, Salaam trolled Trump after the former president was indicted by a Manhattan court on 34 felony charges – on which he was subsequently convicted – for document falsification relating to the payment of hush money to an adult film actor.“For those asking about my statement on the indictment of Donald Trump – who never said sorry for calling for my execution – here it is: Karma,” Salaam posted on X, then known as Twitter, in February 2023.Salaam’s proposed convention appearance follows attempts by Trump to focus on Harris’s racial identity. Two weeks ago, Trump falsely told the National Association of Black Journalists that the vice-president, who has mixed heritage, had only recently identified as Black after previously emphasising her Indian ethnicity.It also comes after the Republican nominee has been making efforts to woo Black voters. Mike Tyson, the former world heavyweight boxing champion and a prominent Trump supporter, told Semafor that the Central Park Five case played to an image of the former president as racist among Black celebrities.“The only thing they can say is that he’s a racist. Central Park Five,” he said. “Other than that, they can’t bring up anything else.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The dumbest climate conversation of all time’: experts on the Musk-Trump interview

      by

      Donald Trump and Elon Musk both made discursive, often fact-free assertions about global heating, including that rising sea levels would create “more oceanfront property” and that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions, during an event labeled “the dumbest climate conversation of all time” by one prominent activist.Trump, the Republican US presidential nominee, and Musk, the world’s richest person, dwelled on the problem of the climate crisis during their much-hyped conversation on X, formerly known as Twitter and owned by Musk, on Monday, agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels, if at all.“You sort of can’t get away from it at this moment,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows.” The former US president added that rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers, would have the benefit of creating “more oceanfront property”.Trump, who famously once called the climate crisis a “hoax”, also said it is a “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed baselessly that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate edicts and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war.“The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming,” Trump pondered during the exchange.Musk, meanwhile, said it was wrong to “vilify” the oil and gas industry, the key driver of planet-heating pollution, and that the only imperative to ditch fossil fuels was that they will one day run dry.“If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas.“We still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”Musk said the main danger of allowing carbon dioxide to build up in the atmosphere was that at some point it will become difficult to breathe, causing “headaches and nausea” to people. This would occur with CO2 at about 1,000 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere, more than double the current record-breaking concentrations.Scientists have been clear that current global temperatures are hotter than at any point in human civilization, and probably long before this time too, which is causing mounting disastrous impacts in terms of heatwaves, droughts, floods and the destruction of the natural world.Governments have agreed to restrain the global temperatures rise to 1.5C above the preindustrial era, with researchers warning of cascading catastrophes beyond this point. The world faces the steep task of rapidly cutting emissions in half this decade, and then to net zero by 2050, to avoid these worst impacts.Despite Trump’s claims of new beaches, sea levels are rising faster along the US coastline than the global average, with up to 1ft of sea level rise expected in the next 30 years – an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century, US government scientists have found.Instances of significant flooding have risen by 50% since the 1990s, with millions of Americans set to be affected as homes, highways and other infrastructure are inundated. In Florida, where Trump has his own coastal property at Mar-a-Lago, several insurers have decided to exit the state due to the increasing costs of flooding from the rising seas and fiercer storms.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and Musk’s discussion on the climate crisis, therefore, “spelunked down into entirely new levels of stupidity”, according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote it was “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.“The damaging impacts of climate change, and in particular from more extreme weather events, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many respects exceeding the predictions made just a decade ago,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and author. “It is sad that Elon Musk has become a climate change denier, but that’s what he is. He’s literally denying what the science has to say here.”Mann said that if CO2 levels get so high breathing becomes difficult, then the impacts of the climate crisis “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse. It’s actually Elon’s ill-informed and ill-premised statements that are causing headaches and nausea.”Mann added that Trump’s statement that sea level rise will lead to more oceanfront property “does not betray a lack of understanding of climate physics. It betrays a lack of understanding of grade school geometry.”During his election campaigning, Trump has routinely denigrated electric vehicles but has recently changed his stance towards them after an endorsement from Musk, who previously described himself as a moderate Democrat.Trump, the former president convicted of 34 felonies, has vowed to undo the “lunacy” of Biden’s climate policies should he return to the White House, with his presidency expected to unleash a glut of new oil and gas drilling, accelerate gas exports and remove the US, once again, from the Paris climate agreement. More