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      Kristi Noem pushes pardoning US Capitol attackers so ‘we don’t see another January 6’

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      Kristi Noem, once a contender to be the Republicans’ vice-presidential nominee, has argued that people facing charges over the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol should be individually evaluated for pardons – so as to minimize the chances of a repeat.“Each of those situations needs to be looked at separately,” Noem said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “What I have been very clear about is that we don’t want to see another January 6 again.“Nobody in this country wants to see another day like that again.”The South Dakota governor also offered Donald Trump her support on his promise to grant presidential pardons to those charged or convicted in the Capitol attack that was mounted by his supporters after his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.The former Republican president has said he is considering pardons for approximately 1,186 defendants if he wins a second term in November’s expected rematch with his Democratic rival Biden. He has said one of his first actions in office would be to free jailed or imprisoned January 6 participants, whom he has described as “hostages”.Noem said pardons should be “based on his prerogative and his decision when he looks at those cases”.“Each of those individuals needs to be looked at separately, as far as what their role was and what was happening in that situation,” Noem said.Some political pundits were unimpressed with the argument laid out by the winner of the 1990 South Dakota Snow Queen Festival pageant, including Public Notice’s Aaron Rupar, who wrote on X: “completely incoherent stuff from Kristi Noem on Meet the Press”.Noem has seen her favorability polling fall since she included a passage in her book No Going Back describing her decision to fatally shoot a hunting dog that she insisted did not hunt and was a danger to her family.The unpopularity of that admission virtually ruled her out as Trump’s vice-presidential pick, who he has claimed will be in attendance for his televised debate with Biden in Atlanta on Thursday.Trump’s promises to reveal his running mate for November’s election came despite the fact that the network CNN has agreed with both campaigns that there will be no studio audience.Noem said she had not received any paperwork from the Trump campaign that could indicate she is in contention for the job. But she said she had “conversations with the president, and I know that he is the only one who will be making the decisions on who will be his vice-president”, a role Mike Pence held when Trump was in the Oval Office from 2017 to early 2021.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAsked if it would be a mistake to not pick a woman, Noem added: “He needs to pick the best person for the job. He needs to pick someone that will help him win.”Noem also maintained that Trump would make an effective president despite his conviction in the criminal prosecution involving hush money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels – and despite the fact that he has pending criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election won by Biden.“I believe that Donald Trump, when he comes back to the White House and is in charge of this country, we’re going to have incredible opportunities to show that people in this country will be safer, that we’ll have law and order back in our streets,” Noem said.A slew of statistics have pointed to a significant decline in violent crime over the past year of Biden’s administration. More

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      Conservatives could accidentally help Biden win his debate with Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      If Joe Biden is to win November’s election, he must win this week’s televised debate. He must come off as energetic and competent. He must make the case, persuasively, that Donald Trump is a danger to the nation and the world. And, perhaps most of all, he must seem mentally sharp.That’s a lot to do in under 90 minutes, especially while sharing the stage with someone as unpredictable as Trump, whose dominant personality and in-your-face tactics can put him at an advantage.Luckily for Biden – and anyone who gives a damn about the future of America – the president already has some crucial advantages going into Thursday evening’s CNN debate.The format is good for him. First off, there is no studio audience to create a disruption or cheer Trump’s wild utterances; thus, the debate will not turn into one of those fake “town halls” packed with rightwing cult members posed as undecided voters. (Is there really an undecided voter left in the nation? If so, why?)Secondly – and crucially – each candidate’s microphone will be shut off when it’s not his turn to speak. This limits Trump’s habit of relentlessly interrupting, which dominated the first presidential debate in 2020.Given those ground rules, it’s surprising that Trump agreed to the debate at all – and it’s still possible that he’ll back out, no doubt citing how “rigged” the entire world is against his noble greatness.But even with these reasonable regulations in his favor, Biden must meet the challenge of convincing prospective voters that he’s capable of doing the job for another four years.Toward that end, he’s had some help from an unexpected quarter: the media, both mainstream and rightwing.In recent months – and especially in recent weeks – much of the media has been on a campaign to depict the 81-year-old Biden as nearly senile and certainly incapable of another term, while seldom focusing on 78-year-old Trump’s lunatic ravings on the campaign trail or his long list of other disqualifications.Recall what happened in February after special prosecutor Robert Hur’s report described Biden as an elderly man with a poor memory. An amazing barrage of coverage followed. For many days, it was as if there were no other subject. At one point, the New York Times opinion section offered a list of four pieces, lined up in a neat row, all on the same subject, while CNN gave us a chyron for the ages: “Is Biden’s age now a bigger problem than Trump’s indictments?”Once that frenzy settled down, another bombshell hit – a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal with a devastating headline: “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping.”The piece was much criticized, and not just by Democrats, some of whom complained that the only on-the-record source was Republican Kevin McCarthy; the former House speaker slammed Biden’s mental sharpness even though he reportedly has said quite the opposite in private.Media critics jumped in, too. Tom Jones of the Poynter Institute, no partisan, judged the Journal article “a pointed piece based pretty much on quotes and opinions from those who don’t want to see Biden elected to a second term”.Soon after, that report began to spread through the media ecosystem, most notably on dozens of TV stations around the country owned by right-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting, whose local anchors read from almost identical scripts. It was powerful anti-Biden coordination that must have delighted the Trump campaign.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough this is all bad for Biden, it comes with an upside for this debate.Many viewers are probably expecting him to be infirm and inarticulate. As one right-leaning acquaintance of mine put it: “If the choice is between the orange guy and a corpse, I’ll go with the orange guy.”The choice, of course, is not that at all. It’s between a traditional, pro-democracy president with a strong record of accomplishment versus a twice-impeached would-be autocrat with 34 felony convictions – and his own alarming set of gaffes, memory lapses and campaign-trail ravings about sharks. Only one of these candidates fomented an insurrection, or appointed three Supreme Court justices who seem hellbent on denying women’s bodily autonomy.Biden may make some missteps in the debate, but he’ll be well prepared and focused on appearing vigorous, as he was in his high-energy State of the Union address in March. He won’t become a compelling TV star or a great public speaker between now and Thursday, but he doesn’t need that.Thanks to the incessant media messaging, the bar for Biden is nowhere near that high. Those of us who care about democracy in America are hoping he clears it with ease.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Trump freewheels towards debate as Biden rehearses at Camp David

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      Presidential political surrogates fanned out across the Sunday talkshows to prepare the ground for next week’s televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which could help the Democratic incumbent and his Republican predecessor focus the minds of undecided or unengaged voters on November’s election.But the candidates themselves are taking strikingly different approaches. Biden is hunkered down at Camp David in debate preparation, reportedly with his personal attorney Bob Bauer standing in for Trump in mock exchanges.Bauer told Politico last week that his job was “to approximate as closely as you possibly can how it is that that individual, the opponent, is going to debate”.Trump, however, is not known to have a debate surrogate – or been in any debate practice. Instead, he has been out on the campaign trail. In Philadelphia on Saturday, he continued his rhetoric on immigration, at one point saying he would suggest to Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that the organization pit a league of fighters who are immigrants against the “regular” league fighters with the champion of each then squaring off.That left the talkshows to mull the impending clash with campaign surrogates talking up – or talking down – mounting expectations for a decisive exchange. However, there are also concerns that without a live TV audience to provide voter interaction, it could also fall flat.“I expect President Biden to do an excellent job just like he did the last few debates,” Biden’s campaign co-chairperson Mitch Landrieu told NBC’s Meet the Press.Referring in part to Trump’s conviction in the criminal prosecution involving hush-money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, Landrieu said: “It really doesn’t matter how Donald Trump shows up, if he comes in unhinged, like he has most of the time, or he sits there and is quiet, people are going to know that he’s a twice-impeached convicted felon who has been found to have defamed somebody, sexually abused somebody and going bankrupt six times.”Landrieu said that Biden was “really anxious to tell his story to the American people”, adding: “This race is going to be tight. Everybody knows that.”Trump, Landrieu said, “wakes up every day pretty much thinking about himself, thinking about his rich friends … really thinking about ways to hurt people with the power that he would have if he were the president of the United States again”.Biden, Landrieu added, “wants to be really clear about the difference between those two that everybody will see again on Thursday”.Also for the Democrats was the US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a member of the national advisory board for Biden’s re-election campaign. With the second anniversary of the elimination of federal abortion rights previously granted by Roe v Wade falling on Monday, Warren sought to bring reproductive rights to the forefront of the looming presidential race, a posture that let Democrats retain control of the Senate and blunted the Republican House majority in 2022.Warren said that if Biden is re-elected and Democrats are given a majority in Congress, her party would be able to defend and restore access to abortion, contraception and in vitro fertilization.“We’re going to make Roe v Wade [the] law of the land again,” Warren said. “Understand this. I want to say this as clearly as I can. If Donald Trump is elected to the presidency, he and the extremist Republicans are coming after abortion, contraception, and IVF in every single state in this country. Not just the [conservative] states.”Trump has said his VP pick will be in the audience in Atlanta on Thursday – a contest that is reported to have narrowed to the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, Florida senator Marco Rubio, and Ohio senator JD Vance.Trump told reporters on Saturday he had made a determination but has not let them know. “In my mind, yeah”, Trump told reporters at a cheesesteak restaurant in Philadelphia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who was once considered a strong contender to be Trump’s running mate, on Sunday continued trying to bounce back from a disastrous passage in her recently published book in which she recounted shooting a dog to death that she claimed had become dangerous to her family.Noem’s admission came after Biden’s German shepherd, Commander, was merely banished from the White House after biting three dozen Secret Service agents during an 18-month reign of terror.Noem said she thought Thursday’s clash would be “an important debate” and “a great opportunity for President Trump to talk about his policies and how his policies when he served as president of this country were good”.Nonetheless, Noem confirmed that she had not received paperwork from Trump relating to his vice-president pick that others reportedly had. “I’ve had conversations with the president, and I know that he is the only one who will be making the decisions on who will be his vice-president,” she said diplomatically.A strong contender for the role, Burgum told CNN’s State of the Union that Biden’s team had made a real effort to lower expectations. He challenged the network, which is the debate host, to ask tough questions, including over Biden’s assertion when he last debated Trump in 2020 that the furore around Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”.Though many claims about its contents have not been confirmed, the laptop was admitted as evidence in the recent trial which led to Hunter Biden’s conviction on three federal gun charges.“If he’s that good at lying about that four years ago, the question is what might he do this time,” Burgum added. More

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      Atlanta center of US political universe once again with Biden-Trump debate

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      Joe Biden will debate Donald Trump on Thursday night in an unnerving repeat of the 2020 election cycle, and once again Atlanta is the center of the political universe.The question is whether the two candidates can influence Atlanta, or if Atlanta, which influences everything in American politics, is beyond their influence.Elections in Georgia have been in a state of trench warfare since 2018, the rise of Stacey Abrams and election outcomes predicated more on supercharged turnout than convincing anyone of anything they didn’t already believe. Georgia’s 2020 election was decided by a figurative hair – the infamous 11,780 votes Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to find in a “perfect phone call” that led to his indictment here.Within the state, Atlanta has extra significance this year. The Biden administration has sent Kamala Harris to the city repeatedly this year, a sign of Democratic anxiety about losing Black voters in a historically Black city. Biden himself came last month to give the commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically Black college, to a generally positive reception.Trump also has a relationship with Atlanta, of course. It is markedly less positive.Whether Trump is returning to the scene of the crime is a matter to be decided, eventually, by a Fulton county jury. Trump had his notorious – and lucrative – mug shot taken at the Fulton county jail about two miles north-west of the empty studio he and Biden will debate in, across the street from Centennial Olympic Park downtown.“All I can see coming out of this is memes,” said Bem Joiner, an Atlanta cultural critic and creative consultant. Joiner doesn’t want to diminish the importance of a presidential debate, and knows there are issues for which the public craves substantive argument, but people have already picked a side, he said.“I think it is what it is with this race,” Joiner said. “I cannot see questions being answered in a way that changes the mind of anyone at this point, with these two people. You can only, maybe, do something to fuck it up more for you.”View image in fullscreenFor all the symbolism of a debate in the heart of Atlanta, the format is made largely for the national stage. The two men will be standing in an otherwise-empty room, interrogated by two CNN anchors – Jake Tapper and Dana Bash – who neither live nor work in the city.Perhaps the spare environment will limit casualties from collateral fire. In the 2016 debates, Trump lied repeatedly and floridly about his performance on the pandemic, race relations and the economy, while interrupting the moderators and Biden. We remember Trump telling Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” and Biden, exasperated by yet another interruption, asking Trump to just shut up for once.The vitriolic chaos effectively ended the Presidential Commission on Debates as a mechanism for administering the events. This time, Biden is the one defending a presidential record. Trump wants to focus on that record, looking for a wedge to separate Biden from what pliable voters remain in America. Biden is likely to be comfortable explaining the accomplishments of his administration, but will try to use the debate to remind America of the reasons they got rid of Trump in the first place.CNN’s studios in downtown Atlanta are mostly empty today. The network has been forsaking the CNN Center bit by bit for a decade, accelerating their shift to DC and New York after AT&T sold the building to developers in 2021. The halls are filled with echoes of Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer, abandoned set signs in the walkways and ghosts in the studios. The markers of life, such as the Cartoon Network store in the moribund food court, are gone.Workers carted away the CNN sign in March. They just call it “the Center” now.Atlanta itself is thriving, generally, despite the protestations of conservatives like Trump, who has repeatedly attacked its elected leaders and its people over the years. Atlanta also has a flair for expressing its displeasure at such things.Trump even unloaded on the Atlanta civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis in 2017 after the congressman skipped Trump’s lightly-attended inauguration. “Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the US. I can use all the help I can get,” he tweeted.Atlanta responded with a barrage of snark under the hashtag #defendthefifth, posting idyllic pictures of children playing in parks or strolling along the BeltLine. Those hashtags were still being used by people standing in line to vote in Atlanta in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump also showed up to the college football championship at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2018. But the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America projected the words “Fuck Trump” on to the side of the stadium while he was there, and not one soul did a thing to stop them.Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Trump had to cart in Black supporters for a publicity stunt presented as authentic community support for his campaign two months ago at a Chick-fil-A up the street from the stadium. Even so, Trump claims he’s winning Black voters in record numbers, which – if it were true – might represent the margin of victory in Georgia.“What is absolutely true is the Republicans cannot win the White House without Georgia,” said Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director for the New Georgia Project, a voter outreach organization. “Either way, Georgia is going to be critical this year for any side to perform well in.”“Georgia is also unique in being such a southern state with a large Black population, but also a growing Latino population and API [Asian/Pacific Islands] population. This perfect storm of reasons makes Georgia such a great place to come to, because you can talk to so many people from so many backgrounds, all in one place.”The New Georgia Project’s political action fund is hosting a watch party, “Vibe and Vote”, at a cigar bar on Peachtree Street on debate night, focusing on Black men and voter turnout. Trump’s reported gains with Black men have prompted a wave of outreach from progressive groups.Harris, meanwhile, may as well put down a deposit on a Buckhead condo considering all the time she spends in town. She has made a point of discussing the administration’s investments in the Black community generally and Atlanta specifically, like a $158m plan to use infrastructure dollars on a project to build a cap over Atlanta’s most traveled highway, the Downtown Connector.She again visited Atlanta on Tuesday – her fifth visit to Georgia this year – for a talk with Migos rapper Quavo to discuss gun violence.Biden and Trump are competing for a vanishingly small portion of the electorate – people who haven’t made up their mind about two people who have been in the public eye for much of the last two decades of American life. Neither is popular. But many people have simply tuned out politics, even here in the center of the political storm.The first debate is a warning bell for them, that election season is upon us more than ever and it is time to pay attention. More

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      Trump’s sledgehammer message to Philadelphia is light on facts, heavy on fear

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      Crooked Joe or Sleepy Joe? Donald Trump wanted to know which nickname his supporters prefer. “That’s the first time Sleepy Joe has ever beaten Crooked Joe!” he said with surprise, after asking the crowd to make noise for each contender.That, however, is not the branding exercise the former US president cares about most right now. On Saturday night he wanted his followers to go home with three words: Biden. Migrant. Crime.A month after his audacious campaign stop in the Bronx, New York, Trump held his first ever campaign rally in Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy and another Democratic stronghold where Joe Biden won 81.4% of the vote in 2020.He had come with a sledgehammer message: Biden’s open borders have allowed thousands of illegal immigrants to pour into America, leading to a surge of violent crime in its major cities, hurting Black and Hispanic populations the most. And in the grand tradition of “law and order” Republicans, only Trump could fix it.“Few communities have suffered more under the Biden regime than Philadelphia,” he told thousands of supporters, many wearing “Make America great again” caps, at the event in a sports arena. “Under Crooked Joe, the City of Brotherly Love is being ravaged by bloodshed and crime.”The rally was staged at Temple University, in a historically Black area. Trump won just 5% of the vote in precincts within a half-mile radius of Temple’s main campus in the last election, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper.But encouraged by opinion polls, his campaign has made wooing Black and Hispanic voters, who make up more than half of Philadelphia’s population, a priority this cycle. Even small gains could make all the difference in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.Several African American supporters were positioned behind Trump’s lectern in the Liacouras Center, against the backdrop of a gigantic Stars and Stripes. Attendees brandished signs with Trump’s police mug shot and the words “Never surrender”. An electronic sign flashed optimistically: “Philadelphia is Trump country.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenTrump painted a dystopian, often dishonest picture of “bedlam and death and terror”, a likely preview of his strategy for Thursday’s debate against Biden in Atlanta and the rest of his scorched earth campaign until November.“Murders in Philadelphia reached their highest level in six decades,” he said “Retail theft in Philly is up 135% since I left office. The convenience stores are closing down left and right. The pharmacies have to lock up the soap … You can’t buy toothpaste, you can’t buy a toothbrush, it takes you 45 minutes.” The crowd roared with laugher.In April the Pew Charitable Trusts’ annual “State of the City” report found that violent crime in Philadelphia is at its lowest level in a decade. The city’s homicide rate dropped six percentage points in 2023, in line with other cities of similar scale. But the number of property crimes did rise sharply over the same period.Crucial to Trump’s fear and fury election strategy is joining dots between crime and illegal immigration. It is a hot button issue after Republican governors in Texas and Florida chartered buses and planes to send thousands of migrants to Democratic-led cities. Mayors have felt a strain on their resources and growing backlash from voters.Trump said: “Unbelievably Crooked Joe Biden is going around trying to claim that crime is down. Crime is so much up. First of all, we have a new form of crime. It’s called the Biden Migrant Crime, right? And all these millions of people that have come in, they’re just getting warmed up.”In fact last year violent crime fell to one of its lowest levels in more than half a century. FBI statistics show steep drops in every category of violent crime in every region in the first three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier.But at Saturday’s rally Trump, himself a convicted criminal, sought to turn reality on its head.View image in fullscreen“The FBI crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake,” he said without evidence. “They’re fake just like everything else in this administration.”The former president went on to use lurid, apocalyptic language to describe the alleged threat posed by undocumented immigrants. Many studies have found that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than US-born citizens.“Day after day, week after week, Joe Biden is releasing illegal criminals into our communities to rape, pillage, plunder and to kill,” he said. “Just this week, a 12-year-old girl in Houston, Jocelyn Nungaray, was tied up, stripped, and strangled to death after walking to a 7-Eleven.”“… Charged with Jocelyn’s heinous murder are two illegal alien savages that Joe Biden recently set loose into our country. They came across our border claiming they feared for their lives in Venezuela.”At that a man in the crowd shouted: “Fuck Joe Biden!” – an ominous sign of how Trump’s rhetoric fires up his crowds. During his 85-minute speech, they shouted and shrieked and chanted “Build the wall!” and “USA! USA!”The Republican National Committee recently launched a website called “Biden Bloodbath” that highlights anecdotal incidents involving migrants in eight US states, including electoral battlegrounds such as Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.Trump went on to cite the case of Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother from Maryland allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant, and thanked members of her family for attending the rally. Telling another grim crime story in unsparing detail, he commented: “Like a scene from a horror movie.”Trump deployed a similar tactic in 2016 and believes it could resonate again. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in March found that only about three in 10 Americans approve of Biden’s handling of immigration. A similar share approved of his handling of border security.View image in fullscreenSix people interviewed by the Guardian inside the arena in Philadelphia – all of whom were attending a Trump rally for the first time – expressed support for his proposed crackdown on border security and illegal immigration.Jim Leedom, wearing a T-shirt bearing the words “We the people are pissed off”, said: “He’s definitely going to clean that up good. The atrocities that are going on down there, the little girls being raped, the women being raped, the drug cartel has control of the whole area – Biden doesn’t seem to give a shit.”“None of that shit went on when Trump was in..”Leedom, 55, who owns a small manufacturing shop, voiced support for Trump’s plan to carry out the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in history.In recent weeks Biden has imposed significant restrictions on immigrants seeking asylum in the US while also offering potential citizenship to hundreds of thousands of people without legal status already living in the country. But the measures cut little ice here.Leedom, accompanied by his son Joseph, a 21-year-old engineering student voting in his first presidential election (he too will vote for Trump), commented: “He’s playing games. That doesn’t surprise me. He’s evil. There’s not enough water for a shower to wash the filth of Biden off.”Michael Krug, 53, was sporting a red T-shirt that said “Keep America great” and “Trump” but had attached a piece of blue sticky tape to hide the word “Pence”. He also wore a badge that said, “God, guns and Trump”.Krug, who works for a paint company, endorsed the “great replacement” theory that describes a supposed elite conspiracy to change the demographics of America, replacing and disempowering white people in favour of people of color, immigrants and Muslims.“Why is it that we don’t have a border any more and people can come just right in and they can get benefits and they can take money and they can take social services away from our poor people or our people that maybe need it?” he asked. “They’re doing it for the Great Replacement. They’re doing it for voters. They’re also doing it to change our culture.”Krug cited the false notion that undocumented immigrants are given voter registration cards, adding: “They’re prosecuting people for walking into the Capitol on January 6th, but they won’t prosecute people coming across the border, which is illegal. There’s a two tiered system of justice, which is not the American way it’s supposed to be. It’s got to change.”Jair Moly, 27, an African American man wearing a Maga cap, said: “You ain’t from here, don’t come here. You ain’t allowed here, don’t come here. Make America great again ‘24. Let’s go!”Asked why he intends to vote for Trump, Moly replied: “He’s real, he keeps it real. He’s not fake. There’s nothing fake about him. He keep it real and he pull no no punches and that’s what we need, America, punch you right in the face.”But Erwin Bieber, 71, a retired car salesman, suggested that a Trump defeat could lead to at least one case of reverse migration. “Initially I didn’t like the way he spoke years ago but I voted for him in 2016. I feel that the country is completely gone if we don’t put him into office. I think I’m going to leave America. If we get stuck with Biden, I’ll go to Mexico.”Democrats set up posters, billboards and kiosks in Philadelphia and on the Temple campus to promote Biden’s policies, including his efforts to forgive student debt, as well as to criticise Trump’s record with the Black community.State representative Malcolm Kenyatta said: “I represent the community in Philly where Trump is currently ranting and raving. I can authoritatively say, my neighbors aren’t in that arena listening to his lies. But a bunch did show up to protest him, so I guess there’s that.” More

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      In Trump we trust: religious right on crusade to make their man president

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      God’s army is on the march. And many of its foot soldiers are wearing “Make America great again” regalia, sensing that their unlikely standard-bearer, former US president Donald Trump, is once again close to the promised land.“I do not believe that America can survive another four years of Joe Biden,” Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, told a gathering of the religious right in Washington on Friday. “I haven’t felt this way since Jimmy Carter was president.” The audience burst into knowing laughter.Reed promised they would knock on 10m doors of Christian and conservative voters in every battleground state, make 10m phone calls, send 25m text messages and put 30m voter guides in 113,000 churches, producing “the biggest turnout of Christian voters in American history”.The election result will be clear, he added. “This time there aren’t gonna need to be any lawsuits. We’re not going to have to go to court and we’re not going to have to wait until 2.30 in the morning for Donald Trump to declare victory. He’s going to do it at 9 o’clock at night!”With Trump running ahead of Biden in many swing state polls, religious right voters scent a historic opportunity to impose a radical agenda that could ban abortion nationwide, curb LGBTQ+ rights and blur the separation of church and state. At Friday’s conference, speaker after speaker framed it as righteous crusade and the only way to resist a tide of liberal secularism sweeping America.Ben Carson, a former housing secretary in Trump’s first term, praised Republican-dominated Louisiana for becoming the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every government school classroom.“Aren’t you glad that yesterday the governor of Louisiana signed into law – put the Ten Commandments back in the schools?” he said to cheers and applause before warning of a 60-year communist project to change America by taking over schools, churches and Hollywood and removing God from the public square.Josh Hawley, a Republican senator for Missouri, warned of a “radical anti-faith agenda” gripping the country. He said: “Who’s dividing America is the radical left and that’s why I say to you we don’t need less Christian influence in our society, we don’t need less Christian witness in our society; we need more in every part of government, in every part of society.”To approving roars from the audience, Hawley added: “We ought to take the Pride flag out of schools and put the Bible back in. You know what? We ought to take the trans flag down from all of our federal buildings and over every federal building in America write the words: ‘In God we trust.’ In God we trust. Amen.”The couching of an Armageddon election, in which religious truth itself is at stake, with victory representing divine providence and defeat spelling total catastrophe, was crystallised by Monica Crowley, a rightwing political commentator and former assistant secretary of the treasury.She described the election as a “hinge moment” comparable to the American revolution, American civil war, second world war and September 11 terrorist attacks. She spoke of a “war” against “the enemy within” that has spent nearly half a century “infiltrating, undermining and destroying” America with “godless philosophies”.Crowley lamented that Hollywood no longer produces “patriotic films” like those of John Wayne and, extraordinarily, defended the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. “Senator Joe McCarthy was right, and he was trying to ring the bell in the 1950s about communist infiltration in our government and the same deep state that is now going after Donald Trump,” he said.“The same deep state that removed Richard Nixon, the same deep state that went after Ronald Reagan and anybody else who stood up to them. That deep state became very insidious and in the 1950s smeared and attacked Joe McCarthy for speaking the truth about godless communism in very halls of our government.”Notably, little was said by the dozen main stage speakers about abortion, a live political grenade for which Republicans have struggled find a coherent message since the supreme court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade precedent two years ago.Religious conservatives’ pact with Trump appears to be holding. Some were sceptical about the thrice-married reality TV star when he first ran for president in 2016 but the concerns were assuaged by his running mate, born-again evangelical Christian Mike Pence, and by a first term that saw him shift the judiciary to the right.Not even Trump’s conviction in New York last month on 34 felony counts in a trial involving hush-money payments to an adult film star has shaken his grip on this constituency. Many who complain that their faith is under siege regard him as a blunt instrument with which to fight back against the radical left.They often rationalise their vote by saying they are choosing a president, not a pastor. Some evangelicals have likened him to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who, according to the Bible, enabled Jews to return to Israel from their exile in Babylon.View image in fullscreenRobert P Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, wrote on Substack recently: “The transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the Maga movement and the internal logic of the upside-down world where a unanimous guilty verdict in a fair trial results in solidified support, record fundraising, and desperate Christian defenses of a convicted felon.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe presumptive Republican nominee has exploited this totemic status. Earlier this year, he launched his own brand of Bible, selling for $59.99 each. During the trial, he shared social media posts comparing himself to Jesus Christ.At Friday’s Road to Majority policy conference, it was not uncommon to hear of the Almighty and Trump spoken in the same breath. Crowley said: “We do have a fearless leader in Donald Trump, where they have thrown the kitchen sink at this man over nine years and they cannot believe that he is still standing. Hand of God!”Kari Lake, a senate candidate in Arizona, said: “We gotta bring Him back into our culture, into our lives, into our hearts and souls – and then also let’s work to bring Donald J Trump back on November 5.”Inside the upmarket Washington hotel hosting the conference, there were vendors selling Maga merchandise, lifesize cardboard cutouts of Trump and an area where attendees could pose with head shots of their choice for his running mate.Stephen Sandrelli, 60, posed with a picture of the US representative Elise Stefanik against an Oval Office backdrop. “First of all, we’ve got to deport millions – at least 15 million people,” he said of a second Trump term. “The Democrats are terrorists. They hate our nation. They hate humankind.“They’re trying to replace us – replacement theory, whatever you want to call it – and Trump cares about us. I believe he’s a man that God has touched and he’s doing the right thing. He’s only blessed our country. He’s only helped people.”Sandrelli, a former Democrat and federal government officer from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, added: “Anybody who supports abortion is supporting murder.”But sensing political danger, Trump has refused to endorse a national abortion ban. Some here felt let down. Wearing a red Maga cap, Thomas Dinkel, 16, who goes to a school in Morgantown, West Virginia, said: “I’m going to be honest with you: as a pro-life Christian, it hurts. I see why he and a lot of other national Republicans are doing it. They’re slowly backing away from the issue. It’s ruffled some feathers.“I do back an abortion ban. For right now, it’s at the state level, and I respect that, but if it ever went as a federal ban, I would back that. I understand why Trump is having a stance on that, just like some other stances he’s been taking lately. I pray that when he gets in, the least he can do for the pro-life communities is continue to back and appoint pro-life justices.”But Dinkel is supporting Trump and is willing to overlook his moral shortcomings, saying: “Listen, I’m a Christian. I mess up, you mess up. Everyone in this room messes up. We sin, we fall short, we turn away from God, and Trump has admitted to that. He’s not the best person. He’s not a perfect person. None of us are. He says that he’s repented of his sins, and I’m called to forgive Trump.”Dorothy Harpe, an African American woman who is retired from a church in Atlanta, Georgia, was wearing a Maga cap and badge that said: “Trump was right!” The 74-year-old said: “He tells the truth. People don’t want to believe him, they think he always doing something wrong, but he’s not. He’s innocent of all the bogus charges they brought against him. God knows every man’s heart, and I believe he is a Christian.” More

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      Both sides of gun issue seek to stir up US voters as NRA influence wanes

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      Anti-gun-control groups and gun-safety advocates are launching hefty voter-mobilization drives this year with the stakes high in the fall elections given the stark differences on gun violence policy between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.But the long-powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been beset with financial and legal headaches for several years, is not expected to be nearly as active as in 2016, when it spent more than $31m to back Trump’s victorious campaign by boosting his political fortunes in key states, say gun experts and ex-NRA insiders.Now, though, other anti-gun-control groups are trying to take up the slack.For instance, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), an influential firearms industry lobbying group, has begun an eight-figure voter-mobilization drive to help pro-gun interests defeat President Biden, whose strong support for gun-control measures it finds anathema.The NSSF’s general counsel, Larry Keane, said that the organization’s “GunVote” campaign will focus on seven to nine battleground states, where it will mount voter-registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts to help Trump win the presidency again.On the other side of this year’s election brawl over gun control, Everytown for Gun Safety is planning a large effort to get its millions of supporters to help re-elect Biden and defeat Trump, who has a record of siding firmly with pro-gun priorities.“We’re going to knock on doors, make calls, rally and campaign for President Biden,” said Nick Suplina, the senior vice-president for law and policy at Everytown, which claims nearly 10 million supporters including mayors, students, gun owners, teachers and others.The stakes seem higher than usual given Biden’s successes as president backing new gun-control measures such as the first new law in three decades boosting gun safety, and Biden’s talk of doing more if he’s re-elected, including fighting for an assault weapons ban, which would probably need Democratic control of Congress to enact.By contrast, Trump has often reiterated his fealty to the pro-gun lobby, which characterized his presidency. At last month’s NRA annual meeting, Trump earned a ringing endorsement and pledged that if he wins, “no one will lay a finger on your firearms”.But the once deep-pocketed and five-million-member NRA remains mired in internal and financial headaches: its annual revenues have dropped for several years while its legal expenses have risen.The NRA’s problems were underscored when its longtime top executive, Wayne LaPierre, resigned in January as he was about to go on trial in New York, where he was convicted of looting the organization to enjoy lavish personal perks including fancy vacations and expensive clothes.“The NRA is going to again be a peripheral player for lack of funding this election cycle, and that could hurt Trump in several battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” a former NRA board member said.“It’s a vacuum compared to 2016 when the NRA was robustly engaged,” the ex-board member added.Longtime observers of gun-control fights agree.Robert Spitzer, the author of several books on gun issues and an emeritus political science professor at Suny Cortland in New York, said the NRA was “as strongly behind [Trump] as they have been before”.“However, the organization simply does not possess the money or personnel to be as influential as they were in 2016, when they spent over $31m on his campaign, and over $70m on Republican efforts around the country. Still, the gun issue will continue to be salient to an important segment of the Trump base.”Spitzer added: “Other gun groups, such as the NSSF and state gun groups, will be working to supplant the NRA’s traditional dominance in national politics. They do not possess the degree of organization, experience and reach as the NRA of old, but they will ratchet up their efforts.”That’s what the NSSF, whose members include such gun giants as Sturm, Ruger & Co and Smith & Wesson, plus other anti-gun-control groups say they intend to do. “There’s a stark difference between Trump and Biden,” Keane said in explaining the NSSF’s hefty effort this year. “It’s clear there are ongoing challenges at the NRA.”Some ex-NRA leaders credit NSSF with trying to fill the NRA’s vacuum. “NSSF has attempted, and continues, to fill the gap left by a weakened NRA,” Jim Baker, the NRA’s former top lobbyist, said.The NRA did not respond to a call seeking comments.Further, the Trump campaign in tandem with the Republican National Committee has launched Gun Owners for Trump including firearms makers and gun-rights advocates such as Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation; Women for Gun Rights; and some NRA officials.To spur more pro-gun votes at the polls, Trump has spoken twice this year at NRA events. At their May meeting, Trump employed some incendiary conspiracy-mongering, telling the crowd that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGun-control advocates and the Biden campaign are using Trump’s own pro-gun pledges and cavalier attitude towards gun violence to rev up their backers, including younger voters and women.After an Iowa school shooting in January, for instance, Trump callously opined that “we have to get over it”, a clip of which is being circulated by Democrats and pro-gun-control advocates.Likewise, another clip in circulation shows Trump boasting to NRA members in May that he “did nothing” as president on guns. Actually, Trump signed a “bump stock” ban after the country’s largest gun massacre ever in Las Vegas, but the supreme court overturned it this month.Biden cemented his gun-control credentials in 2022 when, after the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre, he pushed hard for a gun-safety bill that passed on a bipartisan basis, becoming the first new gun-control law in almost three decades.To energize his supporters, Biden spoke to an Everytown training event for about 1,000 gun-safety volunteers including students on 12 June, where he cited several major achievements, including setting up a White House office focused on curbing gun violence and beefing up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Explosives and Firearms.Biden urged a ban on assault-style weapons and universal background checks for purchases of firearms, both goals he has stressed before.“We need you to overcome the unrelenting opposition of the gun lobby,” Biden said.Suplina said Everytown’s plans for targeting states to help Biden and how much they intend to spend overall this election cycle were not ready to be announced, but he did reveal that Everytown intends to support 465 of its volunteers who are running for office this year. The majority of these races are state and local.Further, Everytown will be backing Senate and House candidates who support gun-safety measures, Suplina said.Overall, Everytown spent about $55m on 2020 election efforts.Other gun-control advocates have broad election plans“This cycle, GIiffords will use its unique identity as a gun owner and survivor-led organization to reach a broad gun safety coalition in battlegrounds – including Democrats, Republicans, young voters, gun owners, and people of color,” Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, said in a statementThe group plans on “supporting gun safety champions in key House and Senate races, [and] communicating the Biden-Harris administration’s historic gun safety accomplishments in states across the map,” she added.Looking ahead, Spitzer stressed that Biden “has continued to speak out on gun safety, and gun-safety groups will surely redouble their efforts on his behalf, not only to help him get re-elected, but to advance the cause of down-ballot Democrats running for Congress and state offices, where the fate of many gun laws lie”. 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      No props, no notes, no audience – but Trump-Biden debate will have ad breaks

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      “Will you shut up, man?” It was hardly oratory worthy of Abraham Lincoln, but Joe Biden’s primal plea in the face of relentless interruptions and heckling from Donald Trump provided a defining soundbite of the 2020 presidential debates.The two will face each other again on Thursday for the first of two head-to-head debates for the 2024 campaign, under new rules designed to prevent matters degenerating as they did four years ago. The US president and the former president will meet in a TV studio without the presence of a partisan audience, which some saw as an essential ingredient of Trump’s rabble-rousing approach. And to counteract the repeated butting-in that so irked Biden, the candidates will have their microphones muted when they are not speaking.But the debates are also the first in decades to be held entirely by commercial TV networks – including two advertising breaks – and without the oversight of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the long-established, independent, non-partisan body that has long governed the debate rules. Some critics say they fear that commercialising the process could lead to less substantive, shorter answers, geared more to generating conflict and soundbites than enlightening voters.The verbal volleys in 2020 between Biden and Trump, under the Fox News moderator Chris Wallace, became so vitriolic that the CNN presenter Dana Bash was prompted, live on air, to describe the event as “a shitshow”. Earlier this year, both campaigns chose to circumvent the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had overseen presidential debates since 1988, and on 27 June, Bash and her CNN co-presenter, Jake Tapper, will have a chance to improve on Fox’s effort when they preside over the first debate in Atlanta. A second debate will take place on 10 September, to be hosted by ABC.No props or prewritten notes will be allowed on stage. Candidates will be given a pen, a notepad and a bottle of water.The decisions to switch off a candidate’s microphone when it is the opponent’s turn to speak, and to exclude a partisan audience, have been taken in an effort to reduce the theatrical gladiatorial bloodsport element that has threatened to overwhelm recent debates.Some critics said the lack of oversight from the CPD, as well as the inclusion of two commercial breaks during the 90-minute event, undermined the nature of the debate.“The introduction of commercial breaks will fundamentally change what makes a debate a debate, since the candidates will constantly be able to stop and regroup,” Clea Conner, chief executive of Open to Debate, a research group that has tracked presidential debates over recent decades, told Politico.“Even though there will be only two commercial breaks this time, once we deem them acceptable it’s a classic slippery slope; how many will there be next time, and the time after that?“[Candidates’] arguments will have to be shorter, truncated for the commercial clock, and will result in more outrageous interactions to bump ratings.” Without the presence of an independent broker such as the CPD, she argued, it would lead to “pure political theatre”.Open to Debate’s report into the deterioration of debate quality attested to the need for drastic format changes from 2020, in order to arrest a decline in moderator control and candidate decorum.While there were just three interruptions across three debates in the 2004 election between George W Bush and John Kerry – administered by the CPD – the first 2020 Trump-Biden encounter witnessed 76, the group noted. However, the second debate saw just four interruptions, after non-speakers’ microphones were muted following criticism of the chaos three weeks earlier.Steven Fein, a professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts, who has studied the psychological dimension of presidential debates, said excluding a loudly cheering live audience was “rational” and “good for democracy”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“[It] will reduce significantly the chances that the focus of the debate will be not on what is actually said, but on all this stuff around it – the reaction of the audience and playing to the audience,” he said. “I think that changes what the candidates are likely to do.“It also changes what the audience at home takes away from the debate, what they remember, what plays the news the next day – all based on the audience reaction. Because the audience reaction may or may not be valid.”He warned, however, that the commercial TV networks may jettison the new approach “because it makes for less exciting television”.The candidate with more to lose in the controlled, low-key environment is probably Trump, according to Tammy Vigil, associate professor of communications at Boston University.“He tends to feed off of the energy of a crowd,” she said. “He’ll lose some of his energy by not having a crowd to feed off. The other part that’ll probably change is that the candidates will be more apt to speak to the cameras directly.“I think that will improve the overall feel of the debate for television viewers because it’ll feel like the candidates are speaking more directly to them.” More