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      Biden calls for supreme court reforms including 18-year justice term limits

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      Joe Biden has called for a series of reforms to the US supreme court, including the introduction of term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment to remove immunity for crimes committed by a president while in office.In an op-ed published on Monday morning, the president said justices should be limited to a maximum of 18 years’ service on the court rather than the current lifetime appointment, and also said ethics rules should be strengthened to regulate justices’ behavior.The call for reform comes after the supreme court ruled in early July that former presidents have some degree of immunity from prosecution, a decision that served as a major victory for Donald Trump amid his legal travails.“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States,” Biden wrote.“I served as a US senator for 36 years, including as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today.“I have great respect for our institutions and separation of powers. What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”Biden called for a “no one is above the law” amendment to the constitution, which would make clear that no president is entitled to immunity from prosecution by virtue of having served in the White House. Biden also said justices’ terms should be limited to 18 years, under a system where a new justice would be appointed to the supreme court by the serving president every two years.The president also called for stricter, enforceable rules on conduct which would require justices to disclose gifts, refrain from political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial interest.Last week Justice Elena Kagan called for the court to strengthen the ethics code it introduced in 2023 by adding a way to enforce it. That code was introduced after a spate of scandals involving rightwing justices on the court: Clarence Thomas was found to have accepted vacations and travel from a Republican mega-donor, while Samuel Alito flew on a private jet owned by an influential billionaire on the way to a fishing trip.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLegislation would be required to impose term limits and an ethics code on the Supreme Court, but it is unlikely to pass the current divided Congress.The constitutional amendment on presidential immunity would be even more difficult to enact, requiring two-thirds support from both chambers of Congress or a convention called by two-thirds of the states, and then ratification by 38 of the 50 state legislatures.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Bitcoin price hits six-week high after Trump backs cryptocurrency

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      Bitcoin has hit its highest level in more than six weeks after Donald Trump said at the weekend he would end the “persecution” of the crypto industry if he wins the US presidential election.The cryptocurrency’s price rose by more than 3% on Monday to peak at about $69,745, the highest since 12 June when the currency changed hands at more than $69,800.The increase comes after supportive comments from Trump at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said on Saturday he would make the US the world’s cryptocurrency leader and embrace a more pro-bitcoin stance than his rival, Kamala Harris.The former president said: “I pledge to the bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over … If we don’t embrace crypto and bitcoin technology, China will, other countries will. They’ll dominate, and we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is.”He also said he would sack the chair of the US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on the first day of his presidency if he won the election. “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler,” Trump said, to cheers of approval from the audience.Gensler is a noted sceptic about cryptocurrencies, despite aiding them in January by approving exchange-traded funds (ETFs) – a basket of assets that can be bought and sold like shares on an exchange – that track the price of bitcoin.The SEC chair said in a statement approving the ETFs that bitcoin was a “speculative, volatile” asset used for illegal activities including ransomware and terrorist financing. Since 2023 the SEC has launched more than 40 crypto-related enforcement actions.Speaking at the bitcoin convention, Trump said he would establish a crypto presidential advisory council and create a national “stockpile” of bitcoin using cryptocurrency the US government held that was largely seized in law enforcement actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Never sell your bitcoin,” Trump said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future.”The Financial Times also reported on Saturday that Harris’s advisers had approached top crypto companies to try to “reset” the relationship between the Democratic party and the sector. Approaches had been made to the Coinbase crypto exchange, the stablecoin company Circle and the blockchain payments group Ripple Labs, the FT said. More

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      Kamala Harris allies deploy new Trump attack line: he is ‘just plain weird’

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      US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird. The tactic is almost certainly calibrated to resonate with young and independent voters who, polls show, are moving from marked disinterest in the now-dropped matchup between Joe Biden and his presidential predecessor to engagement in the 100-day contest between Trump and Kamala Harris.In a press release Thursday, vice-president and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris issued a list of the main takeaways of what Trump had given the American people. “Is Donald Trump OK?” the X message said. The seventh of nine entries was: “Trump is old and quite weird?”At a fundraising event in Massachusetts on Saturday, Harris tried out the line again, describing what Trump and running mate JD Vance had been saying about her as “just plain weird”.“I mean that’s the box you put that in,” Harris said after Trump had called her “a bum” the previous day and Vance disparaged her in 2021 as a “childless cat (lady)”.The Harris campaign, working to redefine the race with particular attention to the youth vote, including colorizing online HarrisHQ banners lime green after Charli xcx’s “brat” endorsement, has sought to draw attention to Trump’s rally storytelling. Particularly, they have highlighted his frequent but references to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs fame as well as the choice between being shocked by a sinking electric boat or being eaten by a shark.But “weird” is what seems to be sticking, in part as an apparent simplification of warnings about the threat to democracy that Trump poses – which dominated 15 months of Biden’s re-election campaign.Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz appears to have started the “weird” political trendline. He posted on X, “Say it with me: Weird,” in response to a video of Trump speaking about Lecter. Walz later followed up with “these guys are weird” to describe Trump and Vance.During a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Walz was asked if “weird” had replaced existential threat to democracy as a more effective attack strategy. The retired high school educator and football coach replied: “It’s an observation because being a schoolteacher I see a lot of things.”Walz added that a second Trump presidency could indeed put women’s lives at risk over reproductive rights after three of his US supreme court appointees helped eliminate federal abortion rights in 2022. He also said Trump could end other constitutional liberties – but musing about his embodiment of a threat to democracy “gives him way too much power,” Walz argued.“Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said.“I think we give him way too much credit. If you just ratchet down some of the scariness and just name it what it is. Have you seen the guy laugh? It seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six-and-a-half years of being in the public eye and when he laughs it’s at someone – not with them.”“That’s very weird behavior,” Walz explained on State of the Union. “I don’t think you call it anything else. It’s simply what we’re observing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, also an outside contender for Harris’ vice president pick, tried a slightly amended line, telling Fox News that Trump is “clearly older and stranger than when America first got to know him”.The 78-year-old Trump’s campaign, he added, has maintained its candidate “is strong as an ox, leaps tall buildings in … bounds, but we don’t have that kind of warped reality on our side”.“I’m pretty sure voters are worried about the age and acuity of president Trump compared to Kamala Harris, who represents being a generation younger,” Buttigieg said. “And how could anybody not watch the stuff he’s saying, the rambling on the trail, and not be just a little bit concerned?”The new Democratic line on Trump comes after several days of criticism aimed at Vance not only about the “childless cat” lady comment – but also because of reportedly resurfaced comments calling Trump “morally reprehensible” and expressing his hatred for police officers, who generally enjoy the support of Republicans.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer described Vance’s selection as an “incredibly bad choice” to CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, adding that the Ohio Republican senator “seems to be more erratic and more extreme than President Trump”.“I’ll bet President Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering, why did I pick this guy? The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats,” Schumer said.The discursions come as a new ABC News/Ipsos poll on Sunday found that Harris’ favorability rating had jumped to 43% from 35% a week earlier. It found a major jump in her favorability rating among electorally crucial independent voters, with 44% saying they viewed her favorably compared to 28% the previous week.Also significant is the 59-year-old Harris’s numbers within the swing group of “double haters” – voters who liked neither Biden nor Trump. Within that group, the number who liked neither candidate has dropped from 15% to 7%. More

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      Top Republicans call Kamala Harris a ‘dangerous liberal’ as attacks ramp up

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      Republicans took to the airwaves Sunday to criticize a surging Kamala Harris, calling the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee a “dangerous liberal” as US conservatives’ lines of attack on the vice-president began to solidify.In appearances across CNN and Fox News, senior Republican figures Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham and former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis each attempted to paint Harris – who is typically seen as a centrist Democrat – as having far-left politics.Those remarks came after Trump sought to insult Harris at a rally on Friday night. The ex-president appeared to deliberately mispronounce Harris’s first name, claimed she is “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history” and stated: “She was a bum three weeks ago.”Speaking to CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, Cotton, the US senator from Arkansas, said: “For four years things were good” during Trump’s presidency. He argued that after Joe Biden took the White House in 2020 with Harris as his running mate, “everything has gone to hell”.“And it will be much worse under Kamala Harris,” Cotton said. “Just look at her record. She wants to ban private health insurance, she wants to ban fossil fuel production, she wants to ban guns.”In 2019, Harris did propose a universal healthcare plan during her run for president. But the plan did not propose eliminating private health insurance. Harris has not said that she wants to ban fossil fuel production. And it is untrue that Harris wants to ban all guns, although she has said high-capacity rifles – used in many US mass shootings – should be banned.Cotton added: “Kamala Harris is a dangerous liberal. She makes Joe Biden look competent and moderate by contrast.”In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation show, the South Carolina US senator Graham also attacked Harris as being too liberal.“If you expect vice-president Harris to change the course we’re on as a nation, you’re going to be sadly disappointed,” Graham said of the candidate endorsed by Biden after he halted his re-election campaign on 21 July.“She is the most liberal senator in the United States senate. There is no liberal horse that she has chosen not to ride. She sponsored the Green new deal and medicare for all. At the end of the day recasting her as something she’s not – she’s a nice person but she’s incredibly liberal. I mean, major league liberal,” Graham said.A noted military hawk, Graham attempted to tie Harris to Biden’s policies in the Middle East.“When it comes to Iran, Biden and Harris have been a colossal failure in terms of controlling the Ayatollah. They’ve enriched him and Israel is paying the price,” Graham said. He suggested that Iran could “sprint to a nuclear weapon” in the four months leading up to the US election.Graham was asked about JD Vance’s characterization of Harris and others as “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives”.“This idea of trying to marginalize JD and make him some kind of bad person is not going to work, because he’s not a bad person – he’s a good person,” Graham said. The scrutiny over Vance comes as some Republicans are said to be concerned about Trump having selected him to be his running mate.DeSantis, the Florida governor who became locked in a fierce battle with Trump as the pair ran for the Republican presidential nomination, claimed that “the entrenched corporate media” will attempt to “rewrite history” regarding Harris.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They’re going to try to present her as something she’s just not,” DeSantis told Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures.“She owns all the policies. She’s not going to be able to distance herself from them, and most Americans think that this country’s going in the wrong direction.”DeSantis did concede that Republicans would have preferred to run against Biden, who had generally fallen several points behind Trump in opinion polls before Harris’s introduction into the race essentially reset it.“You take somebody like Harris, who’s not exactly lighting the world on fire – but Biden makes her look like Socrates just because we’re so used to him not even being able to do anything,” DeSantis said.Byron Donalds, the Republican congressman for Florida who had been rumored to be a potential Trump running mate, joined in the criticism of Harris on Sunday as Republicans appeared to solidify around the idea of painting her as an extreme liberal.“She wanted Medicaid for all, which would have cost our country easily $100tn. She wanted the Green New Deal, the massive old Green New Deal, not the scaled down version they were able to get through Congress,” Donalds told Sunday Morning Futures.Donalds, who has previously stressed the need to “unite this country”, also took aim at Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina, and Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona. Both men are rumored to be potential Harris running mates.“Knowing both of those gentlemen, they’re both boring and nobody’s really going to care. But at the end of the day, this is about Kamala Harris’s terrible record versus a record of success from Donald Trump,” Donalds said. More

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      ‘Good for Joe’: Scranton residents back Biden’s decision to quit race

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      The Central Scranton Expressway, the road which leads into Scranton from the I-81 highway, was renamed in 2021 as the President Joseph R Biden Jr Expressway.The road drops down into the center of Scranton, the Pennsylvania city where the president was born, where it meets up with Biden Street – renamed in the same 2021 city council vote.There is no indication yet that Scranton, a former coal and manufacturing hub home to about 80,000 people, intends to change its name to Bidenton, but the message here is clear: this is Joe Biden country.“​​Let me start off with: we’re very proud of Joe Biden. We love Joe Biden. The fact that he’s a local guy, and all that,” said James Ferguson, 81.Ferguson was sitting with his brother, John Ferguson, 77, on a bench on Biden Street on Thursday afternoon. It was a blow for both when the president, who moved to Delaware from Scranton aged seven but who speaks often of his Scranton upbringing, decided to drop out of the race in mid-July, but the fondness for Biden remains.“I think Joe Biden showed the character that he is. He is a very good man, and he put the country first. It’s not how good he is, or whether he is smart or not. It was perception. The perception was bad for Joe, and he knew it and he dropped out. Good for Joe,” the elder Ferguson said.But with Trump leading Biden in the polls and posing an existential threat to the US, there is an acceptance that Biden had to go.“We can’t afford to lose this election, I think. So yeah, we were disappointed. We voted for him, we would vote for him again. But I think this is better for the party, better for the country,” John Ferguson said.“He’s a realist. I think he finally was convinced that he couldn’t take the risk. We’ve got to stop Trump from winning. We can’t let Trump get in. That is a terrible man. He’s an insult to the human race, that man.”Biden dropped out on Sunday, bringing to an end a painful, weeks-long pressure campaign that began with a dreadful debate performance and saw an ever-increasing number of Democratic politicians call for him to resign.Behind the scenes senior party figures, including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, had also made the case to Biden that he couldn’t win, despite the president comfortably – albeit in the face of very little opposition – clinching the Democratic primary earlier this year.“His age was a concern for a lot of voters and he was slipping in the polls. And I was very worried about that. So I mean, I’m thankful of all he’s done, I think he’s done good work, and I think he did the honorable thing that really should be valued,” said Angela Miller, a civil engineer.“I never wanted him to run again. He never said he was going to, do you know what I mean? From the beginning he said he was going to be a transitional president. I felt like he kind of went back on that.”Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2020, defeating Trump by 80,000 votes. He comfortably won Lackawanna county, the north-east Pennsylvania district where Scranton is based, but not everyone in the city is an admirer.View image in fullscreen“He wasn’t really on the ball I don’t think. It was kind of like having the senile grandpa in the White House office,” said Phil Fleming, 61, as he watching his friend unpack a guitar at a bandshell in downtown Scranton.Fleming had the opposite geographic journey to Biden. He grew up in Delaware, where Biden moved with his family aged 10, and then moved to the Scranton area later in life. But Fleming has no particular affection for the president.“I always said Joe would do for the country what he did for Delaware: nothing,” he said.Biden endorsed Kamala Harris for president within minutes of pulling out of the race on Sunday. Harris has since all but secured the Democratic nomination, and if she wins in November she would become the country’s first woman president.“I’m excited about it. I think it would be awesome to have a female run the country, to see what she could bring and try to unite the country a little bit more,” said Kelly, 34.Kelly, who asked not to use her last name, was walking her dog through the Green Ridge area of Scranton, where Biden’s three-storey childhood home is now marked by a small plaque.“It’s definitely a cool thing to say that the President of the United States grew up in your neighborhood, you can’t really say that too often. So it’s a little fun fact that we have here,” she said.Few cities can claim to have a president on their books – Quincy, in Massachusetts, can lay claim to two: father and son duo John Adams and John Quincy Adams. For Scranton, Biden may no longer be in the race, but he will remain a presence.“I think he really put all his heart and soul into this country, and I just feel like maybe now it’s time to step out, and let the next generation come in and serve the same way he did,” Kelly said. More

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      Voters to choose between two starkly different candidates in US ‘Armageddon election’

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      A man convicted of dozens of felonies versus a criminal prosecutor. An architect of abortion bans versus a champion of reproductive freedom. An elderly white man fixated on the past versus a mixed-race daughter of immigrants leaning into the future.One hundred days from the US presidential election, the choice for voters has never been so clear cut. Kamala Harris, 59, the de facto Democratic nominee after the dramatic withdrawal of Joe Biden, is a progressive person of colour bidding to become the first female president in America’s 248-year history.Donald Trump, at 78 the oldest nominee in history, is a populist-nationalist who has demonised immigrants, gained backing from far-right extremists and tapped into white Christian nostalgia by promising to “make America great again”.“In this moment, I believe we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future, the other focused on the past,” Harris told members of the historically Black sorority Zeta Phi Beta in Indianapolis on Wednesday. “And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”Biden has previously spoken of a “battle for the soul of the nation” and Trump has described this election as “the final battle”. But the nomination of Harris will be clarifying about the culmination of a tumultuous decade and a collision of two Americas: one liberal, diverse and optimistic, the other conservative, nativist and, in Trump’s telling, driven by grievance and vengeance.Halifu Osumare, professor emerita in the department of African American and African studies at the University of California, Davis, said: “The difference between the candidates couldn’t be any starker. To me it represents this country and its schizophrenia. This country is both racist to its core yet the leader of the world in the rights of the individual and democracy.“This election is going to play out that schizophrenia because you’ve got a good deal of the nation who wants to take us back to those days where white supremacy was absolutely dominant, and those who want us to evolve as a human species. We need somebody who has humanity at her core in order to do that.”The road that led here began with the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black president, in 2008. For millions of Americans, Obama represented hope; for millions of other Americans, he represented fear that the country they grew up in was disappearing. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the US population in 2008, they have now slipped into the minority and make up only 44%.Racially motivated backlash against Obama was evident in the stirrings of the populist Tea Party movement. Then came Trump’s entry into politics as a “birther”, questioning whether Obama had in fact been born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible for the presidency.Again, Trump offered hope to one America and fear to the other. He embodied a rage against change, political correctness and liberal elites, gaining traction in small towns and rural areas that felt left behind. He scapegoated immigrants as the source of blame, creating an us-versus-them dynamic, and promised to build a border wall to keep them out.The country faced a clear choice in 2016 and handed Trump victory over Hillary Clinton in the electoral college, though there were complicating variables such as her status as a former first lady and the FBI reopening an investigation into her handling of classified information.Four years and one global pandemic later, Trump, a white man who was the oldest president ever, was defeated by Joe Biden, a white man who was even older and a moderate who won back white working-class votes that Clinton had lost in the rust belt. In 2024, the world was braced, somewhat wearily, for a rematch.Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, said: “When it was Biden and Trump, you had two septuagenarians that created a battle of senior citizens. Now you have not only gender, not only the past versus the future, not only a difference in heritage – you have also the stark contrast in hope versus hate.”In the past month, American politics has moved at incredible speed, upending all certainties. Biden flopped at a presidential debate in Atlanta, Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania and, as a chorus of Democrats questioned his age and mental acuity, Biden became the first incumbent since 1968 to announce he would not seek re-election.The party quickly rallied around Harris, a former US senator, prosecutor and California attorney general, with an avalanche of endorsements, fundraising and memes. She hit the campaign trail with electrifying speeches and Beyoncé tracks, providing a shot of adrenaline that flipped Democrats from doom and gloom to giddy optimism. Opinion polls show Harris outperforming Biden among Black, Latino and young voters, and running more or less even with Trump.Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, said: “There’s a hundred days to go to the election and, in a year where everything has pretty much happened, it’s hard to tell how this all plays out. But I don’t think there’s any question that the Democrats are very much back in this race and are looking a hell of a lot better than they did a few weeks ago.”Panetta, who served in various capacities under nine US presidents, has witnessed growing polarisation and a coarsening of political discourse. “It’s obvious that America in these last number of years has become more divided, more partisan, and our democracy in many ways has become much more dysfunctional as a result of those divisions,” he added. “Kamala Harris presents a message that we could have a better America in the future, and we need that message of hope.“The message of Trump, whether he wanted to change it or not, still gets trapped by his own sense of retribution, vengeance and going after people. That’s not what Kamala Harris is about and so the American people are going to have a real choice here in November to decide what kind of direction we want for our country. The more defined that difference is, the better the chances are that the Democrats can win.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBorn in Oakland, California, to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Harris is the anti-Trump in myriad ways. She is 19 years younger, instantly neutralising the age argument and turning it against her opponent, whose ramblings and name confusions will be under special scrutiny.She has been the face of the Biden campaign on the issue of abortion as reproductive rights became an animating issue after the supreme court in 2022 overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade decision. She is expected to stick largely to Biden’s foreign policy playbook on Ukraine, China and Iran but could strike a tougher tone with Israel over the war in Gaza.Her sudden ascent punctured Republican balloons after a successful party convention in Milwaukee, where Trump was almost deified after his defiant response – “Fight! Fight! Fight” – to a near-death experience. His entrance to the sound of It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, and speeches by the likes of wrestler Hulk Hogan, underlined an image of old-school machismo.The Trump campaign, which relished a contest with the ailing Biden, is now having to rapidly adapt to the new challenge of Harris. It has begun casting her as a leftwing radical from California who was the “co-pilot” of what they say are the Biden administration’s failed policies on immigration and inflation.Trump told a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week: “For three and a half years, Lyin’ Kamala Harris has been the ultra-liberal driving force behind every single Biden catastrophe … As border czar, Kamala threw open our borders and allowed 20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world.”Republican representative and rightwing media have mispronounced her name, mocked her laugh (“Cackling Kamala”), and invoked diversity, equity and inclusion programmes to brand her potentially the “first DEI president”. Commentators predict a torrent of bigotry, racism and misogyny reminiscent of the playbooks deployed against Obama and Clinton. The tone of the two campaigns could not be more different.Tara Setmayer, co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led Super Pac, said: “That’s the decision. It’s between democracy versus autocracy, and progression versus regression. Usually a future-forward vision wins out. But we’ll see. It’s going to be a hell of a battle. When you think we were battling for the soul of America in 2020, this is the battle for the soul of America on steroids.”The clarity of the choice raises the temperature in an already febrile atmosphere. The attempt on Trump’s life came after years of political violence that included the shooting of representative Steve Scalise, a hammer attack on former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.Both parties now head into an “Armageddon election” in which they say the American way of life is on the line. Winning will signify total vindication; losing will signify total catastrophe. How would Trump’s fervent base react to defeat by a Black woman? At a rally for Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, in Middletown, Ohio, this week, state senator George Lang warned: “I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved.”Differences personified by Harris and Trump appear irreconcilable. David Blight, a professor of American history at Yale University, said: “It’s about crushing the other side. There’s no bipartisanship about this election except for the ‘never Trumpers’ [traditional Republicans who oppose Trump], who have seen a light and don’t want to live in a country with that kind of authoritarianism.“We’re on the brink of something here.” More

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      Kamala Harris switch scrambles Republicans as Trump resorts to insults

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      Donald Trump capped a tough week in which his Democratic opponents turned the tables, replacing aging Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as their top choice for president, by resorting to insults and extremism on the campaign trail.A week ago, Trump was riding high on the iconic moment when he rose bloodied and with a defiantly raised fist from an assassination attempt, pulling away in the polls. Biden, meanwhile, was struggling to recover from his dire late June debate against the Republican nominee and an unconvincing performance in the days since.Now, with the former president suddenly facing a vibrant, younger rival in Harris, who hit the ground running after Biden quit his re-election campaign last Sunday and quickly endorsed her for the top of the ticket, Trump called her “a bum” and said he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounced her name.At a rally in Florida on Friday night organized by the far-right Christian advocacy group Turning Point Action, Trump not only went personal against the US vice-president, but once again appeared to threaten American democracy.“Christians, get out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it anymore. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said at the event in West Palm Beach, not far from his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence.Trump has been adopted by much of the US evangelical Christian right as a flawed champion, besmirched by losing in sexual misconduct and business fraud civil cases and convicted on criminal counts for election-related fraud in a case involving an adult film actor who alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him. With other criminal cases ongoing, he is nevertheless the one-term president who tilted the US supreme court against abortion, gun control, government experts, voting rights and diversity efforts in higher education, delighting his white, ultra-conservative base.At Friday’s rally, he also lit into Harris. She won the support not only of Biden but of the Obamas, the Clintons and the Democratic leaders in Congress last week, and if she is officially anointed at the party’s convention next month, she will be the first Black female nominee, the first south Asian nominee, and, if she beats Trump in November, America’s first female president.On Friday, Trump called her “the most incompetent, unpopular and far-left vice-president in American history”. And in a seeming nod to how the campaign has been upended, he said: “She was a bum three weeks ago.”He also pronounced her name Ka-MAH-la Harris, whereas the vice-president pronounces her name KAHM-a-la.He insisted that he had been told there are numerous ways to say her name and added: “I said: ‘Don’t worry about it, doesn’t matter what I say, I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it or not.’ Some people think I mispronounce it on purpose but actually I’ve heard it said about seven different ways.”He has variously called Harris “crazy”, “nuts” and “dumb as a rock”. Some Republicans in Congress disparage her as a “diversity hire”, even though in her career before she became the first female US vice-president she had been elected as the district attorney of San Francisco, the attorney general of California and a US senator. Rightwing activists and trolls have smeared her online with racist, sexist and sexualized barbs, Reuters reported.But opinion polls show that in just a few days, Harris, 59, has closed to within a point or two of Trump, whereas Biden had fallen around six points behind and was losing support in vital swing states.Trump, 78, is now the oldest nominee to run for president. Earlier in the week, Trump also said Harris “doesn’t like Jewish people” after she did not attend Benjamin Netanyahu’s in-person visit and address to a joint session of Congress in Washington where the Israeli prime minister defended Israel’s war in Gaza. Harris spoke out strongly against the suffering of Palestinian civilians.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis despite her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, being Jewish and being involved in an antisemitism taskforce for the White House.In the last week, Trump also experienced another wobble in his trajectory. After introducing his choice of running mate at the Republican national convention as young gun and US senator for Ohio JD Vance to great fanfare, some within Republican circles began to lament Vance as a liability rather than a boon to the Trump ticket, following awkward performances on the campaign trail.Then, Jennifer Aniston went viral criticizing Vance’s past comments disparaging the likes of Harris, who is a stepmother but has not given birth, as unhappy “childless cat ladies”..And on Saturday, the New York Times published excerpts from communications between Vance and a peer from Yale Law School who said their close friendship broke down in 2021 when Vance supported a ban by Arkansas on gender-affirming care for transgender minors. It was the first such ban in the country – later struck down in court.Former friend Sofia Nelson is transgender and told the publication that the public should know what Vance has said, including more about his pivot from being a Trump opponent to an acolyte. This included Vance writing “I hate the police” after white officers killed a Black 18-year-old, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and calling Trump a demagogue, a disaster and “morally reprehensible” while saying the greater his appeal to the white electorate, the worse it would be for Black voters. The Vance campaign called Nelson’s decision to disclose private conversations unfortunate.On Saturday night, Trump and Vance are due to appear at a rally in Minnesota, hoping to get their campaign off the back foot. More

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      From rising star to potential liability: how JD Vance’s fortunes have turned

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      He was supposed to be his master’s mini-me, his elevation as Republican vice-presidential nominee hailed as a virile celebration of Donald Trump’s near-total conquest of the GOP.Now – days after receiving a rapturous response at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee – JD Vance is being lamented within party circles as a potentially fatal liability in Trump’s quest to recapture the White House.Affirming the maxim – coined by the late British Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson – that a week is a long time in politics, Vance’s poll ratings have been dragged to record lows by a combination of his own past statements resurfacing on social media and embarrassingly awkward performances on the campaign trail.The danger that Vance’s baggage will drag Trump down with him may already be giving the former president buyer’s remorse, commentators believe.Far from being a yin-and-yang pick chosen to counter-balance the senior candidate’s weaknesses, Vance – the first-term senator for Ohio, a state already firmly in the Republican camp – was selected because he faithfully reflected the ideological gut instincts of Trump, despite having previously called him “America’s Hitler” and “cultural opioid”.But there is ample reason to believe the choice was driven by a euphoric belief on Trump’s part that November’s election against an ageing, ailing and unpopular Joe Biden would be a shoo-in.With Biden’s withdrawal – and almost certain replacement as Democratic nominee by the vice-president, Kamala Harris – a very different electoral landscape looms. And Vance, with his hardline anti-abortion stance and sneering contempt for childless women, may be entirely the wrong partner to help Trump traverse it.“Most striking thing I heard from Trump allies yesterday was the second-guessing of JD Vance – a selection, they acknowledged, that was borne of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter,” wrote Tim Alberta, a journalist with the Atlantic who has covered the Trump campaign, the day after Biden’s withdrawal last Sunday.  Putting Vance on the ticket defies the basic laws of vice-presidential picks, experienced pollsters say.“The first rule of choosing a running mate is to do no harm, because there’s very little gain that you will get from a running mate, but there’s a lot of harm that can be done,” said Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute at Monmouth University. “In effect, the JD Vance pick may be shaping up to possibly be that kind of harmful pick.“He helps to focus much more on the negative aspects of Trump that turned voters off.“One of the things that gets overstated by journalists is the appeal of a running mate to a bloc of voters – that you think, for example, of the JD Vance idea that he’s going to appeal to white working-class voters outside of his home state of Ohio. That never happens … because voters are looking at the top of the ticket for that kind of message. What it does say is what kind of balance you’re going to bring to your office, what kind of strengths you’re looking for.”What those might be have been scrutinised by a nascent Harris campaign eager to turn the spotlight on the very issues Trump wants to neutralise – namely, abortion and women’s rights, and the threat to general freedoms believed to be represented by Project 2025, a radical blueprint drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank.Exhibit A on Vance is a 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he derided women without children as “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives” – a designation he accorded to Harris and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary. Their supposedly childless status means they have a lesser stake in America’s wellbeing, he added.In fact, Harris is mother to two stepchildren, while Buttigieg, who is gay and married, has two adopted children.Critics say the comments betray a retrograde misogyny and a zealous intent to pursue an abortion ban, which Vance and other rightwing Republicans favour, despite Trump’s insistence that it should be left to the states.Perhaps equally significant for the celebrity-sensitive Trump is a rare political rebuke the comments drew from the actor Jennifer Aniston, who is childless but has publicised her unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a procedure Vance opposed in a recent Senate vote.Also inconvenient for Trump is Vance’s link to Project 2025, the controversial conservative governing model the former president has lately tried to disavow as he seeks to build electoral support. That attempt has been undermined by Vance having written a foreword for an upcoming book by the project’s author, Kevin Roberts.On the campaign trail, the Yale-educated Vance – despite being heralded, partly thanks to his acclaimed 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, for a supposedly umbilical connection to white working-classes voters – has proven to be no rabble-rousing orator of the Trump school.An incident at a rally in Ohio last Sunday resembled an excruciating study in social gaucheness, when Vance suggested Democrats might think drinking Diet Mountain Dew, a popular soft drink, was racist, before laughing at his own lame joke; as the audience remained largely silent, Vance laughed awkwardly, saying: “I love you guys.”In another sign that his assent to running-mate status is going less than smoothly, Vance has been beset by bizarre rumours that he once had sex with a couch in his youth, an outlandish suggestion that even prompted an Associated Press fact-check.The unverified claim may pale in comparison with evidence – accepted as fact in court – that Trump had sex with an adult porn actor, leading to his conviction on 34 felony charges of document falsification to cover up hush-money payments. But its very presence illustrates and adds to the difficulty Vance is having gaining traction as a positive addition to the Republican ticket.Exposure to the spotlight seems to be damaging Vance’s poll ratings.“JD Vance is making history as the least liked VP nominee (non-incumbent) since 1980 following his/her party’s convention,” posted CNN polling expert Harry Enten, noting that the candidate had recorded a favourability rating of -6 within a week of his nomination.Vance’s tanking numbers were no real surprise, Enten told the network. “There’s this idea that JD Vance is going to help out in Ohio, those rust belt battleground states,” he said. “He was the worst-performing candidate among Republicans in 2022 up and down the ballot in Ohio. He adds nothing there … JD Vance makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”A reckoning may come whenever Trump, facing a resurgent Democrat opposition, reaches the same conclusion. More