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      ‘Stealing with both hands’: veteran reporter Joe Conason details the right wing’s graft

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      “Trump is the apotheosis of this moral degeneration of conservatism because he’s out there stealing with both hands and it’s right in your face.”So said Joe Conason, veteran reporter and author of a lacerating new book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.He spoke on Monday, the same day the US supreme court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts – even as Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican nominee, faces 44 federal and 10 state criminal charges to go with 34 guilty verdicts handed down in New York.“Nixon said, ‘I am not a crook.’ Could Trump really say ‘I’m not a crook’ and have anyone believe him? Nobody would believe that, including his own followers. They know that he’s out to scam money for himself, and they don’t seem to mind.“Take the grifting around ‘stop the steal’, post-election, 2020-21. Led by Trump’s son in law [Jared Kushner], they knew they were going to do it before the election was even over. ‘We’re going to keep our fundraising operation intact.’ And they booked a quarter of a billion dollars in a couple of months. It was amazing. One of the biggest rip-offs ever.”On the page, Conason charts 75 years of rightwing rip-off merchants attacking liberals and making money. Beginning with the supposedly anti-communist crusade of the lawyer Roy Cohn in the mid-1950s, proceeding through the rise of the Moral Majority, the attempt to bring down Bill Clinton and the brief age of the Tea Party, he ends with Cohn’s protege, Trump, poised to retake power.To Conason, the key to the story is not how much money such grifters raise but where that money comes from: those grifters’ own supporters.As Conason spoke, a prominent rightwing figure was reporting to a Connecticut prison.“The media will tell you over and over again, ‘Steve Bannon is going to jail,’ or he’s fighting to stay out of jail. And it has to do with the fact he defied a subpoena from Congress [over the January 6 Capitol attack].“But he’s also facing state charges. And the state charges are very similar to the charges for which he was pardoned by President Trump. And what the media don’t tell you, and they should be telling you, is that three other people have gone to prison for those same charges already.“Bannon’s three co-conspirators in the We Build the Wall scam” – keeping donations supposed to support Trump’s border policies – “two of them pleaded guilty and apologized to the court and begged the court for mercy, because they admitted they ripped off millions of dollars.“Not from liberals. They didn’t own the liberals. They owned the conservatives. They stole this money from their own constituency. And Bannon, having promised that he would not take any money, did the same thing. [He has pleaded not guilty.] The only reason he didn’t go to prison when the other three did was because Trump pardoned him.“It signifies the level of impunity that has developed. It’s not just that their movement is riddled with this kind of scam and cynicism. It’s that you can get away with it.”It’s fair to say Conason’s seventh book seems well timed. With a laugh, he said: “People who haven’t called me for years from MSNBC are clamoring to have me on their shows.”Now 70, he has been a leading liberal voice since his years at the Village Voice, long before MSNBC was born. Asked to name prominent conservatives unstained by grift and swindle, he points to the Never Trumpers, “a bunch who I was once very critical of and vice versa.“Bill Kristol is one. Stuart Stevens’ book, It Was All A Lie, is a brilliant distillation of what went wrong with the Republican party, in certain ways a good companion to my book.“And obviously there’s Liz Cheney, somebody who I did not agree with about pretty much anything, and there’s Adam Kinzinger, someone I admire very much.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBoth Republicans lost their seats in Congress.Conason said: “You know they’re good people because they’ve made really big sacrifices to take a stand against this dishonesty and this threat to constitutional order. They’ve lost friends, they’ve lost family. And they stand under threat …“There’s plenty of time to go back and have whatever recriminations or debates or disputes you want. But right now, we need everybody. And the other thing is, I find a lot of them quite likable. Like, Conway is a funny story.”George Conway, a lawyer turned Never Trump pundit, was until recently married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and White House aide.Conason “exposed Conway on the front page of the [New York] Observer when he was acting as a secret lawyer for [Clinton accuser] Paula Jones in 1998. And I believe I embarrassed him because he was a lawyer at a Democratic law firm in New York but they didn’t know he was secretly working to take down Bill Clinton.“And I put a story about that on the front page of the Observer, and it ended up becoming a story in the New York Times. And I pursued him, and finally got him to call me back, and he did so very forcefully, he was angry.“And then, flash forward 25 years and I’ve finished The Longest Con. And I’m thinking, ‘Well, I need a foreword and the best thing would be a Never Trump conservative,’ because the book rarely quotes liberals or Democrats. Mostly, I’m trying to get conservatives to talk about what’s wrong with conservatism.“And my wife said, ‘Well, why don’t you get George Conway? He’s so funny.’ And I said, ‘Don’t you remember? He hates me.’ So anyway, I finally got him to come and have a drink. And we got along famously, and … he’s been a great supporter of this project. It’s really been fun.”The Longest Con is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      Democrats in disarray as Trump immunity ruling raises stakes

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      “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” So wrote the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor in a minority opinion this week. She was far from alone in the view that, with Donald Trump threatening an “imperial presidency”, American democracy is at a moment of maximum peril.Millions are pinning their hopes on the Democratic party as the last wall of defence. Surely, they believed, Democrats would field their best and brightest led by a dynamic presidential candidate and demagogue slayer. Instead the party is offering 81-year-old Joe Biden and an internal civil war.Biden’s career-worst debate performance against Trump last month has triggered acrimony, angst and panic among Democrats just four months from election day. There are growing calls for oldest president in US history to step aside in favour of Vice-President Kamala Harris – or someone else. But Biden has so far dug in and vowed to fight on.It would be a hugely consequential decision for any party at any moment, but the one thing that Democrats agree on is the stakes are uniquely high. America’s highest court has shifted right, thanks to three Trump appointees, and could indulge his authoritarian impulses should he be elected. A Trump victory would also have dramatic implications for Ukraine and other US allies.“American democracy is facing a category 5 disaster here,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator and Trump critic. “Not just the election but the court. Unfortunately the Democratic party feels like it’s paralysed and refusing to acknowledge reality.”Debate viewers were shocked because Democrats had created an alternate reality bubble, Sykes added. “It reminds me a little bit of what what the Republican bubble felt like a few years ago where people will say one thing in private but they won’t say it in public. In private people know that they have a real problem with Joe Biden, that it was a disaster, that it might not get better, but they’re unwilling to say that in public and right now that’s an untenable solution.”America celebrated its 248th birthday this week with its customary barbecues, fireworks and flag-waving, but its democracy has been ailing for some time. The Watergate scandal, which led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the Ronald Reagan era helped sow distrust in government, while the the 2008 financial crisis fuelled a sense that the system was failing to deliver.View image in fullscreenThe supreme court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 opened the floodgates for special interests to pour money into elections. Republicans have mounted voter suppression efforts. Gerrymandering, the process whereby a party redraws district boundaries for electoral advantage, has fuelled polarisation and often means the loudest and most extreme voices are rewarded in party primaries.Structural flaws have been brutally exposed. The Senate, where states have an equal voice irrespective of their population size, has become unrepresentative and calcified by procedural rules such as the filibuster. Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the past 36 years, yet both George W Bush and Trump gained the White House via the electoral college.That means five of the nine supreme court justices were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote. Trust in the court is now an all-time low. Along with corruption scandals, the justices have defied public opinion with decisions such as the overturning of Roe v Wade, a precedented that enshrined the constitutional right to abortion.In the past two weeks, the court’s rightwing majority delivered a big blow to the regulatory powers of federal agencies and ruled that officials can accept cash or gifts from people they have assisted: they only count as bribes if given before the favour. Then, most consequentially of all, came its decision to expand presidential power.In a 6-3 decision, the court said former presidents have absolute immunity from investigation or prosecution for official acts that fall within their core functions. They are also presumptively entitled to immunity for all official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for private actions.The ruling was a major victory for Trump, who stands accused of orchestrating the deadly January 2021 insurrection but will now almost certainly not face trial in Washington ahead of the election in November. Sentencing for Trump’s hush money convictions was also postponed until at least September as the judge agreed to weigh the possible impact of the decision.The dissenting opinion, written by Sotomayor, was scathing as she considered what a president can now do. “Orders the navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold on to power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune … In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”There was condemnation of the ruling across the political spectrum. Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, warned: “The supreme court decision raises the stakes because just imagine unleashing an absolutely immune Donald Trump on the nation, knowing that he can break the law at least in some respects with impunity.“That to me is the breathtaking part of it. It’s not some abstract where you’re talking about Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or George HW Bush. It’s Donald fucking Trump that you are basically saying should be above the law.”Paul Begala, a scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics and former adviser to Bill Clinton, told the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast: “We had a good run. We go back to June 15, 1215: your country creates the Magna Carta. So we had 809 years of believing that no king, no president was above the law and that’s come to an end.“I’m sorry to sound cynical about it but it’s that dire because we’re about to put that power, potentially, in the hands of someone who we know from past experience will blow through any guideline, regulation and now he’s been given carte blanche by the supreme court.”View image in fullscreenTrump, 78, who is running a vengance-driven campaign and has expressed admiration for strongmen, has already quipped that he would be dictator on “day one” as president. His agenda for a second term is more extreme than the first – and better organised. The cabinet, congress and courts are likely to be more loyal and compliant, with fewer guardrails in place and fewer dissenters mounting resistance.Informed by policy documents such as the conservative thinktank Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025”, Trump has made no secret of his plans to purge the federal government of thousands of civil servants deemed disloyal, weaponise the justice department against perceived political foes, slap 10% tariffs on thousands of imported goods and open detention camps to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn this context, Biden is carrying the weight of the world on his frail shoulders: the 2024 election is a must win. But his raspy-voiced debate performance in Atlanta – losing his train of thought, stumbling over words, failing to combat Trump’s lies – revived anxieties over his fitness of office. Having identified him as the right man at the right time for the pandemic election of 2020, Democrats are now tormented by the possibility that they chose the wrong candidate for 2024.Questions swirled over whether Biden’s inner circle had been concealing his weaknesses from public scrutiny for some time. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, 84, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, wondered on the MSNBC network: “Is this an episode, or is this a condition? It’s legitimate – of both candidates.”After huddling with advisers and family members, Biden acknowledged that he nearly “fell asleep on the stage” during his poor debate showing, blaming it on a cold and jetlag, even though he had returned from Europe 12 days earlier. He told an all-staff campaign call: “I am running. I’m the nominee of the Democratic party. No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving.”The Biden campaign dug in its heels and dismissed the critics as “bed-wetters”, a dismissive attitude that disgusted some senior Democrats and made the situation worse. There was also frustration that Biden waited several days to do direct damage control with senior members of his own party. Some said the response had been worse than the debate performance itself.Two Democratic members of Congress called for Biden to quit the race and discontent on Capitol Hill is said to run much deeper, with many Democrats fearing that Biden could also cost the party the House and Senate. A major Democratic donor, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, also called on the president to step aside.Norman Solomon, national director of RootsAction.org, sponsor of the Step Aside Joe! campaign, said: “The train wreck around the bend is clear if he’s still the nominee, if he’s still the candidate. There’s an emergency cord that can be pulled.”View image in fullscreenSolomon warned: “The last days have brought powerful signs that the threat to democracy has become greater than ever. It’s a one-two punch. The obvious, clear evidence that Biden isn’t up to the job either to defeat Trump or to be president if he were to be re-elected.“Then this supreme court decision and it all underscores that the rather solipsistic fixations of the top of the Biden clan jeopardise democracy in a way that is a dream for the extreme right wing in the United States. The Biden performance was a gift-wrapped present to the Maga Republicans. It was everything but unwrapping the bow and taking off the wrapping paper.”The latest polls are fuelling alarm. A New York Times / Siena College survey found Trump leading Biden 49% to 43% among likely voters nationally, a three-point swing toward the Republican from before the debate. A Wall Street Journal poll found that 80% of voters think Biden is too old to run for a second term. A survey by Our Revolution, a political organising group, found that two in three progressives want Biden to suspend his campaign.But time is short to make a change. The Democratic National Committee announced weeks ago that it would hold a virtual roll call for a formal nomination before the party’s national convention, which begins on 19 August. Harris is emerging as the favourite to replace Biden if he were to withdraw, although governors Gavin Newsom of California and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan remain viable alternatives.A messy, divisive convention – where protests over the war in Gaza are already expected – would only reinforce the suspicion that, with American democracy hanging by a thread, the Democratic party is failing to meet the moment.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “American democracy and the force of the conservative movement that we’re seeing in the supreme court lacks a coherent, energetic counterpoint. The Democratic party is simply not up for the fight. The conservatives are marching ahead and the Democrats are flailing.”Jacobs added: “It’s reasonable to ask, why did it come to this with regards to Biden? Why weren’t party leaders intervening a year and a half ago to to usher off Biden to bring in genuine competition? Instead they leave it for a debate which realistic leaders could anticipate how it was going to turn out.“The fact that Trump was lying and bullying was known going in and Biden seemed so incapable of responding and so surprised by it. It was a very powerful signal of his infirmity but also of the infirmity party in moving past him. Joe Biden almost certainly can’t win, and the party seems incapable of processing that and taking action.” More

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      We should all be terrified of Trump’s Project 2025 | Robert Reich

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      “Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.This is another in a long line of Trump lies.The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials whom Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform.Another Project 2025 leader is John McEntee, another of Trump’s top White House aides. (McEntee recently went viral in a video in which he claimed he gives counterfeit money to homeless people to get them arrested.)Even the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign appears in the Project 2025 recruitment video.Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.As the former chairman of the Republican party Michael Steele put it: “OK, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”Trump may also be worried that the Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, could alarm independents and moderates. On Wednesday, Roberts raised the prospect of political violence. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the War Room podcast, founded by the Trump adviser Steve Bannon.But let’s be clear. The Trump campaign platform is basically Project 2025. Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac is running ads calling it “Trump’s Project 2025”.The Make America Great Again Pac also created the website TrumpProject2025.com. In case there’s any doubt that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are working in close partnership, Trump can be seen in this video praising the Heritage Foundation and saying he “needs” them to “achieve” his goals.The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation goes back years. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation bragged that Trump had implemented two-thirds of their policy recommendations in his first year – more than any other president had done for them.The goals of Project 2025 are the same goals Trump tried to achieve in his first term or has been advocating in this campaign.One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump – a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.Project 2025 also calls for eliminating “woke propaganda” from all laws and federal regulations – including the terms “sexual orientation”, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “gender equality”, and “reproductive rights”.Other items in the Project 2025 blueprint are precisely what Trump has called for on the campaign trail, including mass arrests and deportations of undocumented people in the United States, ending many worker protections, dropping prosecutions of far-right militias like the Proud Boys, and giving additional tax cuts to big corporations and the rich.Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a “hoax”. Project 2025 calls for expanding oil drilling in the United States, shrinking the geographic footprint of national monuments, terminating clean energy incentives, and ending fossil fuel regulations.Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s re-elected.Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to come off less bonkers to independents and moderates, but he can’t escape it. The document embodies everything he stands for.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Stormy Daniels gets more than $900K from GoFundMe after alleged threats

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      Stormy Daniels’ supporters have raised more than $900,000 meant to help her move to a safe house and repay legal fees after testifying in the criminal trial that led to Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies.The money comes from an online GoFundMe campaign started by a friend and former manager of the adult film actor, who recently appeared on MSNBC and described how supporters of Trump have bombarded her with social media harassment as he seeks a second presidency, including threats to rape and murder her daughter and other family.“It’s become unsafe for her family and her pets,” the fundraiser’s organizer, Dwayne Crawford, wrote on the page for the campaign, which set a goal of $1m. “Stormy needs help to relocate her family to somewhere they can feel safe and live on their terms.“She needs assistance to be able to continue to pay the mounting fees so that Trump doesn’t just win because his pocketbook seems endless.”The so-called I Stand with Stormy Daniels campaign – which had raised more than $940,000 from about 17,600 donors as of Friday – follows her key role in getting Trump convicted in late May on charges of falsifying business records.Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about an extramarital sexual encounter that she has alleged to have had with Trump a decade prior to his 2016 presidential election victory. The payment to Daniels was falsely recorded as legal expenses, according to prosecutors, who ultimately won a conviction against Trump in a New York state courthouse with the help of testimony from Daniels.The US supreme court on Monday held that presidents enjoy broad immunity from prosecution in connection with their actions in office – which should aid Trump substantially as he tries to defeat criminal cases pending against him on charges of improperly retaining classified records and of trying to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden.One of the more immediate consequences of the supreme court’s ruling was for New York judge Juan Merchan to delay Trump’s sentencing in the case that ensnared Daniels. It had originally been scheduled for 11 July, but Merchan tentatively reset the proceeding for 18 September after the former president’s legal team asked him to delay it in light of the immunity decision.Meanwhile, Daniels told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Tuesday that she had been inundated with Facebook messages threatening “to rape everybody in my family, including my young daughter, before they killed them”.“I’ve lost … mostly my peace, mostly my daughter’s privacy, and time – time I’ll never get back with her,” Daniels said in reference to her participation in the prosecution against Trump.She also detailed how she owed $500,000 in attorneys’ fees – which she could not afford to pay – over a civil defamation lawsuit that she filed against Trump in 2018.Among those who expressed support for Daniels after her interview with Maddow was writer E Jean Carroll, who sued Trump over allegations of rape and defamation – and won nearly $90m in civil penalties from him. “I’d be happy to help!!” she wrote on X on Tuesday night.But one of the voices to come out against Daniels was her former attorney Michael Avenatti, who remained imprisoned for defrauding her and other clients.In a Wednesday post on X, he dismissed Daniels’ fundraising campaign as “GoFundMe grift” and “complete bullshit”, arguing that the alleged threats were not coming from Trump personally. Avenatti’s comments brought him his own detractors, with some X users accusing him of angling for a pardon from Trump in case he wins a return to the White House in November.Crawford, the Daniels fundraiser organizer, wrote that he had been motivated to get involved after he and his friends were given “front-row seats to the parts of this story that don’t fit neatly into click-bait headlines”.“If we allow Stormy, after choosing to stand up to the president of these United States, to lose her life, her liberty or her happiness, then we have failed at the very foundational core of what this nation was built upon,” Crawford added. More

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      Donald Trump claims to ‘know nothing’ about Project 2025

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      Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.Economist and Guardian columnist Robert Reich wrote: “Don’t be fooled. The playbook is written by more than 20 officials Trump appointed in his first term. It is the clearest vision we have of a 2nd Trump presidency.”The Trump campaign has previously pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Heritage Foundation also created the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981.The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan. More

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      Joe Biden tells rally ‘I am going to beat’ Trump amid reports of new effort to get president to quit race – live

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      Addressing a crowd of whooping supporters, Joe Biden delivered an energetic rally speech in Madison, Wisconsin – a major swing state.Biden opened up his remarks by taking a jab at a Fourth of July comment made by Donald Trump in 2019 when Trump said that revolutionary war troops “took over the airports” from the British.“He’s a stable genius,” Biden said mockingly.He went on to vow to beat Trump but not before accidentally slipping up with his words.“I’m staying in the race … I will beat him again in 2020,” said Biden, before correcting himself a few seconds later by saying: “And by the way, we’re going to do it again in 2024.”Biden went on to address criticisms about his age, with the 81-year old president saying: “I keep seeing all those stories about being too old … You think I’m too old to restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land? Too old to ban assault weapons again? To protect social security and Medicare? … Too old to beat Donald Trump?”He then cited Trump’s criminal record, calling him a convicted felon with the “morals of an alley cat” and pointing to Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots in 2021.“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American at the same time,” he said, adding: “This is so damn serious. You can’t love your country only when you win.”Biden’s demeanor throughout his nearly 20-minute address on Friday was energetic and forceful, marking a stark shift away from his performance during last week’s debate, which saw him struggle to articulate his thoughts.With one campaign event out of the way, Biden has several more tests facing him amid these make-or-break days, with a crucial ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos set to air tonight at 8pm.Another Democrat in Congress has expressed doubts about Joe Biden’s viability: Brad Sherman, from California, posted that he was looking forward to the president’s upcoming interview on ABC, but also said it was “important” that Biden conduct an “extended LIVE interview” as soon as possible.His statement further suggested that party rules do not mandate that Biden remain on the ticket:
      Counter to popular belief, the rules of the Democratic Party do NOT require that pledged delegates vote for Biden at the convention. Party rules require delegates’ votes, “reflect the sentiments of those who elected them,” at the time the delegates cast their ballots.
      Democratic Congressmembers Raúl Grijalva and Lloyd Doggett have publicly called on Biden to withdraw his candidacy. In another defiant speech, Biden told supporters in Wisconsin earlier today that he would not be quitting the race.The Biden campaign has responded to Donald Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025, a rightwing effort to aggressively roll back civil rights and other liberal policies. After Trump on Friday claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” and “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying,” the Biden campaign pointed out the former president’s many connections to the initiative:The Make America Great Again Super Pac supporting Trump has run ads promoting the effort and calling it, “Trump’s Project 2025.” John McEntee, who served as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, was brought on last year as a senior adviser for Project 2025 via the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing conservative thinktank that has drafted the plans to dismantle and reorganize US government.Led by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a manifesto that calls for a crackdown on immigration, the reversal of LGBTQ+ rights, further erosion of reproductive rights, the undoing of environmental protections and the implementation of other rightwing policy goals. Trump allies and former appointees have been involved in the effort.The Trump campaign previously said Project 2025 was not its own initiative, but that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from other groups. Trump has also directly praised the Heritage Foundation and said “we need the help” from the group, as Biden’s campaign pointed out. And the Heritage Foundation has also previously claimed credit for Trump administration policies.More here from our past coverage of Project 2025:Joe Biden will reportedly hold a solo press conference next Thursday, according to journalist Jacob Gardenswartz, citing senior administration officials on a call with reporters.Officials have not publicly confirmed the event, but news of a potential media conference led by Biden comes as the president has faced increasing pressure to speak with reporters and do interviews in the wake of his poor debate performance.Biden has done fewer press conferences and media interviews than any of his past seven predecessors at this point in his term, according to a report this week in Axios. His first post-debate interview will air this evening on ABC.Some key events and links from the day so far, as we prepare for Joe Biden’s major ABC interview to air this evening:
      Biden delivered an energetic campaign speech in Madison, Wisconsin, saying: “I am running and going to win again.”
      The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, broke from other Democratic governors supporting Biden’s campaign and issued a statement urging him to “listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump”.
      The White House said Biden was seen by his doctor after the debate and that the physician found he was fine and “recovering well” after reports he was suffering from a cold.
      Donald Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, an agenda of rightwing activists to erode civil rights and other progressive policies under a second Trump term. But key figures involved in Project 2025 are closely linked to Trump.
      Several powerful Democratic backers have said they will pause donations until Biden steps aside.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr made a startling pledge to not “take sides” with respect to the September 11 terrorist attacks if his long-shot presidential campaign vaults him to the White House.
      Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, is organizing a group of senators to urge Joe Biden to exit the race, according to a new report in the Washington Post, based on accounts of “two people with direct knowledge of the effort”.The Post reports:
      Warner is telling Democratic senators that President Biden can no longer remain in the election in the wake of his faltering debate performance, according to the people familiar with private conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely. The Virginia senator has told others that he is deeply concerned Biden is not able to run a campaign that could beat former president Donald Trump.
      The senator’s spokesperson did not confirm or deny the report to the Post, saying in a statement: “Like many other people in Washington and across the country, Senator Warner believes these are critical days for the president’s campaign, and he has made that clear to the White House.”The report was published as Biden delivered an energetic campaign speech in Wisconsin reiterating that he was not ending his campaign. But he continues to face pressure and scrutiny. The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, who has been a Biden campaign surrogate, issued a statement earlier today urging the president to “listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump”.Addressing a crowd of whooping supporters, Joe Biden delivered an energetic rally speech in Madison, Wisconsin – a major swing state.Biden opened up his remarks by taking a jab at a Fourth of July comment made by Donald Trump in 2019 when Trump said that revolutionary war troops “took over the airports” from the British.“He’s a stable genius,” Biden said mockingly.He went on to vow to beat Trump but not before accidentally slipping up with his words.“I’m staying in the race … I will beat him again in 2020,” said Biden, before correcting himself a few seconds later by saying: “And by the way, we’re going to do it again in 2024.”Biden went on to address criticisms about his age, with the 81-year old president saying: “I keep seeing all those stories about being too old … You think I’m too old to restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land? Too old to ban assault weapons again? To protect social security and Medicare? … Too old to beat Donald Trump?”He then cited Trump’s criminal record, calling him a convicted felon with the “morals of an alley cat” and pointing to Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots in 2021.“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American at the same time,” he said, adding: “This is so damn serious. You can’t love your country only when you win.”Biden’s demeanor throughout his nearly 20-minute address on Friday was energetic and forceful, marking a stark shift away from his performance during last week’s debate, which saw him struggle to articulate his thoughts.With one campaign event out of the way, Biden has several more tests facing him amid these make-or-break days, with a crucial ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos set to air tonight at 8pm.In his closing remarks, Joe Biden said:“I have never been more optimistic about America’s future because the American people are decent, good, honorable. Just remember who in God’s name we are. We’re the United States of America …“So let’s stand together, win this election and exile Donald Trump.”“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American at the same time,” Joe Biden said.“This is so damn serious. You can’t love your country only when you win,” he added.“Ultimately, the American presidency is about character … It’s about the president’s decency, integrity. Do they respect people or do they incite violence and hate? … And what’s worse, the supreme court has just ruled … for virtually no limits on the power of the presidency …“We just celebrated the Fourth of July saying we will not be ruled by a king.”“Trump’s biggest lie of all is he had nothing to do with the insurrection of January 6,” said Joe Biden.He went on to say:“We all saw with our own eyes. We saw he sent thousands to attack the Capitol. We saw police being attacked, the Capitol being ransacked, mob hunting for Nancy Pelosi, gallows set up to hang Mike Pence.“Let me ask you something, after what Trump did on January 6, why would anyone ever let him be near the Oval Office again?”Joe Biden repeated his popular line from last week’s debate, saying that Donald Trump “has the morals of an alley cat”.The crowd whooped in response as Biden went on to forcefully say: “Trump is a convicted felon … Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted criminal – he’s a one-man crime wave.” More

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      Trump asks judge to gut classified documents case after immunity ruling

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      Donald Trump moved on Friday to capitalize on the US supreme court’s decision to confer broad immunity to former presidents, asking the federal judge overseeing his criminal case for retaining classified documents to take a scalpel to any charges that were “official” acts that could not be prosecuted.The supreme court this week held that former presidents enjoyed some immunity from criminal prosecution for certain conduct they undertook in office, which also meant evidence of immune acts could not be introduced as evidence at any trial even if they did not form part of the charges.The framework of criminal accountability for former presidents, as laid out by the ruling, has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The request from Trump’s lawyers did not say which parts of the indictment they considered to be official conduct that was immune. But if the US district judge Aileen Cannon agrees to go through the charges, it would almost certainly further delay the case by months.The filing not only showed the far-reaching ramifications of the immunity decision, which is now affecting Trump’s documents case in Florida even though the ruling originated from a pre-trial appeal in the former president’s 2020 election subversion case in Washington; it also demonstrated Trump’s intent to use it to destroy the substance of the cases.The 10-page filing from Trump’s lawyers asked Cannon for permission to file new briefs, arguing the immunity decision gutted prosecutors’ position that he had no immunity and “further demonstrates the politically-motivated nature of their contention that the motion is ‘frivolous’”.But Trump’s filing was doubly notable as it asked Cannon to pause all other proceedings in the case until she decided whether the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his prosecution team were authorized to bring the case in the first place.In a recent motion to dismiss the case, Trump’s lawyers argued that Smith had been improperly appointed since he was not named to the role by the president or approved by the Senate like other federal officers are – and that the attorney general, Merrick Garland, had no legal power to do so by himself.The motion appeared destined for denial after a recent hearing in federal district court in Fort Pierce, Florida, when prosecutors countered that Garland – under the appointments clause of the US constitution – had authority to name “inferior officers” like special counsels to act as subordinates.But as part of the supreme court’s decision, Justice Clarence Thomas gave the notion new momentum. “If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, the lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the special counsel’s appointment,” Thomas wrote, albeit with respect to the 2020 election case. More

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      The US supreme court utterly distorted the true threat to American democracy | Lawrence Douglas

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      In its extraordinarily disturbing decision earlier this week granting presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution, the US supreme court dramatically mis-weighed a competing set of risks to our constitutional democracy.On the one side of the scale, the court placed the possibility that a future rogue prosecutor will seek to settle political scores by indicting a former president for “insufficiently enforcing … environmental laws”.On the other side of the scale, we can place the possibility that a former president, having previously been charged with subverting the peaceful succession of power, returns to the White House, where he demands the prosecution of all those who tried to hold him to account.Or consider a related set of risks. On one side, the court imagines a president who is so fearful of the theoretical prospect of being prosecuted after leaving office that he fails to perform his duties in a “vigorous” and “energetic” manner. “Enfeebled” by the threat of future prosecution, the president is “chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive”.On the other side, we can imagine that a former president, having already successfully dodged any legal reckoning for his attempt to subvert the results of fair democratic election, now finds himself back in the White House and, cloaked with a blanket of immunity for all his “official actions”, grossly abuses that power.What are we to make of the fact that the court has clearly perceived the risks posed by a rogue prosecutor to far outweigh those posed by a rogue president – this notwithstanding the fact the dangers posed by the former are entirely speculative while those posed by the latter are all too real? In defense of the six-person majority one might argue that the court must fashion principles that apply generally to future cases – it cannot shape a remedy to address the particular threat posed by Donald Trump.Only that’s not true. The court could have limited itself to the matter at hand – whether Trump enjoyed immunity for his alleged acts of election interference as charged in the federal indictment. It could have held off to another day the larger question or scope of presidential immunity. And it could have reached this narrow decision months ago, thus affording the American people a trial court’s judgment concerning Trump’s most serious attack on American constitutional democracy, prior to the 2024 election.A simpler, and less savory, explanation of the court’s decision is that it’s stocked with Trump supporters. Three members of the six-person majority owe their positions on the court directly to Trump and they are not even the justices most obviously sympathetic to the former president. (That would be Clarence Thomas, the rigid ideologue with a Maga wife, and Samuel Alito, whose understanding of the Constitution seems driven by a prickly sense of grievance – who also evidently has a Maga wife.)And while I have a hard time believing – call me naive – that Chief Justice Roberts isn’t keenly aware of the dangers posed by Trump, his majority opinion is astonishingly purblind to those dangers. Take, for example, the court’s conclusion that because the constitution vests the president with the “core” duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”, Trump enjoys absolute immunity for his dealings with the justice department – including his appeal to justice department officials, after Biden’s 2020 victory, to “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me … ”The court’s logic is oxymoronic: because the constitution demands the president faithfully execute the law, he is immunized for his attempt to corrupt and subvert that very law.Let’s also bear in mind that hours before the court handed down its tardy decision, Trump reposted messages on Truth Social, his personal social media platform, calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of his declared political enemies. Among those targeted were the former representative Liz Cheney (“guilty of treason” – a capital offense), the former vice-president Mike Pence, senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, representatives Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, the vice-president Kamala Harris, and president Joe Biden.In his presidential campaign, Trump has been remarkably vague about his policy goals, but has openly and repeatedly declared his intention to use the justice department as a tool of personal vengeance. Now he can do so with impunity. At the very least, the court’s decision might shield Biden from Trump’s wrath – the others are all fair game.By way of trying to settle the nation’s nerves, the court reminds us that presidential immunity does not extend to private acts. Never mind that the court fails to offer a bright-line test between official and private acts while embracing a capacious understanding of the “official”. Still, we may rightfully ask what worries us more: the prospect that the president will rob a convenience store or that he will grossly abuse the very office that makes him the most powerful human on the planet?Back in the day of George W Bush’s misbegotten “war on terror”, John Yoo, at the time a lawyer in the office of legal counsel, wrote a notorious memo opining that the federal law criminalizing torture would be unconstitutional if applied to the president in times of war. This ominous claim led the senator Patrick Leahy to ask the then attorney teneral Alberto Gonzales, during a congressional hearing, whether the president could legally order genocide. At the time, Gonzales refused to answer, dismissing the question as hypothetical. Now the supreme court has offered a clear and shocking answer to the senator’s question.
      Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College More