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      Stormy Daniels’ husband says they’ll likely leave the US if Trump is acquitted

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      The husband of Stormy Daniels said there is a “good chance” that the couple will leave the US if Donald Trump is acquitted in his criminal trial over paying hush-money payments to the adult film star.“I think if it’s not guilty, we got to decide what to do. Good chance we’ll probably vacate this country,” Barrett Blade told CNN host Erin Burnett on Tuesday.“If he is found guilty, then she’s still got to deal with all the hate. I feel like she’s the reason that he’s guilty from all his followers, so I don’t see it as a win-win situation either way.”Blade’s comments come after Daniels appeared in court last week to deliver lurid and powerful testimony on her alleged sexual affair with Trump nearly 20 years ago.Among the questions she said Trump asked her was: “What about testing? Do you worry about STDs?”Daniels also said Trump compared her to his daughter Ivanka, saying: “You remind me of my daughter. She is smart and blonde and beautiful and people underestimate her as well.”She testified that upon returning from using the bathroom in Trump’s hotel room, she found him on the bed, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Daniels said she tried to leave but Trump stood between her and the door.“He said, ‘I thought we were getting somewhere. I thought you were serious about what you wanted,’” Daniels recalled.Daniels and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, are at the center of Trump’s historic criminal case. Prosecutors allege that Cohen allegedly worked alongside tabloid publisher David Pecker to bury unfavorable stories that would potentially affect Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, and that Cohen facilitated a $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels shortly before the election.Trump has since been charged with falsifying business records. Prosecutors allege that the former president falsely listed his repayments to Cohen as legal service fees.Trump’s defense team attempted to discredit Daniels, with lawyer Susan Necheles at one point saying: “You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s not how I would put it,” Daniels replied. “The sex in the films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”In a more pointed question, Necheles asked, “You were looking to extort money from president Trump, right?”, to which Daniels responded: “False.”Blade was asked on CNN about accusations that Daniels made up the affair. “I think she’s a brilliant writer,” Blade said. “So she would have written something way better than what she said about the Trump story.”He went on: “She wants to move past this. We just want to do what … normal people would get to do in some aspects, but I don’t know if that ever will be, and it breaks my heart.“Everybody has their agenda for her at this point, and I don’t see people fighting back for her.” More

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      Top House Democrat demands answers on Trump dinner with oil executives – as it happened

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      The top Democrat on the House oversight committee is demanding answers after a report emerged that Donald Trump promised oil executives he would repeal regulations intended to lower climate emissions if they each contributed $1bn to his campaign.In a letter to the executives of nine major petroleum companies, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, Jamie Raskin cited a Washington Post article from last week that said Trump promised to rescind a Biden administration moratorium on permits for liquified natural gas exports and allow more drillings in the Alaskan Arctic and Gulf of Mexico, among other policies.In response, Raskin wrote in letters to nine oil industry executives:
      I write to request any information you may have about quid pro quo financial agreements related to US energy policy that were reportedly proposed at a recent campaign fundraising dinner with ex-president Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club that you appear to have attended. Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions.
      House speaker Mike Johnson traveled to New York to appear alongside Donald Trump at his ongoing business fraud trial, which Johnson called a “disgrace” in a press conference outside the courthouse. An array of other Republican politicians were also on the scene, all of whom have one thing in common: they are said to be potential running mates for Trump or, as the Democrats have dubbed them, “emotional support”. Back in Washington DC, the Republican-led House oversight committee released a report saying that attorney general Merrick Garland should be held in contempt for not handing over recordings of interviews with Joe Biden and his ghostwriter conducted by a special counsel. The committee’s top Democrat, Jamie Raskin, was also busy, demanding answers from petroleum industry executives over Trump’s reported promise to roll back all sorts of environmental regulations if they each raise $1bn for his campaign.Here’s what else happened today:
      Johnson’s appearance in New York comes as the House GOP plans to shift into “campaign mode” before the 5 November election.
      Federal prosecutors asked a judge to send far-right strategist Steve Bannon to jail after an appeals court rejected overturning his conviction for contempt of Congress. Bannon has until Thursday to respond.
      Biden announced new tariffs against China, and took shots at Trump’s trade policies.
      Maryland is traditionally a Democratic stronghold, but this year’s Senate race is shaping up to be surprisingly competitive. The state’s voters are choosing their candidates in today’s primary.
      Why are Biden’s approval ratings so stubbornly low? Here’s what White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had to say, when asked at her briefing today.
      At her daily briefing today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, and why they have not moved much for years.The question from a Fox News reporter came a day after the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College released polling showing the president trailing Donald Trump in five of six key swing states. Here’s what Jean-Pierre had to say:The reporter who posed the question, Peter Doocy, is the conservative network’s main man in the White House, and something of a thorn in its side. Two years ago, Biden appeared to insult Doocy by name, then later reportedly called him to “clear the air”:Earlier today, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson condemned the prosecution of Donald Trump outside the New York courthouse where Trump’s business fraud trial is taking place.That drew a strong rebuke from Democratic representative and Trump foe Jamie Raskin, who aired his grievances in a statement to the Daily Beast:Federal judge Carl J Nichols has given far-right strategist Steve Bannon until Thursday to respond to a request by justice department prosecutors that he report to jail to serve his four-month sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress.Nichols’ order came after an appeals court rejected Bannon’s appeal of his July 2022 conviction for ignoring a subpoena and an order to appear for a deposition from the January 6 committee. Here’s more on that:The traditionally blue state of Maryland suddenly finds itself in an unfamiliar role: political battleground.Whoever wins the race for its open Senate seat, vacated by retiring Democrat Ben Cardin, could decide control of the chamber. On the Democratic side, representative David Trone is locked in a competitive primary with Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks. Whoever wins the primary will almost certainly face Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor whose high-profile clashes with Donald Trump made him a household name.The Democratic primary contest to succeed Trone features as many as a dozen candidates. The field is led by former Biden official April McClain Delaney and state delegate Joe Vogel.The Guardian caught up with Vogel shortly after he cast his ballot in Gaithersburg on Tuesday morning. At 27, Vogel is among a handful of gen Z candidates running for federal office this year.Vogel said he is appealing to voters of all ages by channeling his generation’s urgency to address the most pressing problems of our time.“The experience that I have is not only the experience as a legislator, but the lived experience of sitting in a classroom with the doors locked and the windows down in the dark in a school-shooting drill. I have the experience of fearing what the climate crisis is going to hold for our generation,” he said.“What we need are people with the lived experiences to bring urgency to all of these issues.”The sixth district, a seat that spans the diverse suburbs of Montgomery county to conservative western Maryland, is expected to remain in Democratic hands but is still the most competitive open House seat in the state.If elected, Vogel, born in Uruguay, would be the first Latino and first openly LGBTQ+ member of Congress from Maryland.An election to watch is taking place today in Maryland, where Democratic voters will select a candidate to face off against Republican former governor Larry Hogan for its open Senate seat. The Guardian’s Joan E Greve reports on how the race in the heavily Democratic state has become surprisingly competitive:Republicans have a rare opportunity to flip a Senate seat in Maryland in November, and the outcome of that race could determine control of the upper chamber. The high stakes of the Maryland Senate election have put intense scrutiny on the state’s primaries this Tuesday.Maryland primary voters will cast ballots in the presidential race as well as congressional elections, and leaders of both parties will be closely watching the results of the Senate contests. The retirement of Senator Ben Cardin has created an opening for Republicans to potentially capture a seat in a reliably Democratic state, thanks to former governor Larry Hogan’s late entry into the race. A Hogan victory would mark the first time that a Republican has won a Maryland Senate election since 1980, and it could erase Democrats’ narrow majority in the chamber.Ten Democrats will compete for the party’s Senate nomination, but two candidates have become the clear frontrunners: Congressman Dave Trone and the Prince George’s county executive Angela Alsobrooks. The race has historic implications, as Alsobrooks would become the first Black person elected to represent Maryland in the Senate and just the third Black woman to ever serve in the chamber.The battery of tariff increases on China Joe Biden announced is a symbolic move intended to head off the possibility that Beijing one day steps up its exports of vehicles and other technologies to stimulate its economy. The policy is also not quite as different from that of the Trump administration as the White House would have you think, the Guardian’s Larry Elliott reports:The US president, Joe Biden, has announced a 100% tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles as part of a package of measures designed to protect US manufacturers from cheap imports.In a move that is likely to inflame trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economies, the White House said it was imposing more stringent curbs on Chinese goods worth $18bn.Sources said the move followed a four-year review and was a preventive measure designed to stop cheap, subsidised Chinese goods flooding the US market and stifling the growth of the American green-technology sector.As well as a tariff increase from 25% to 100% on EVs, levies will rise from 7.5% to 25% on lithium batteries, from zero to 25% on critical minerals, from 25% to 50% on solar cells, and from 25% to 50% on semiconductors.Tariffs on steel, aluminium and personal protective equipment – which range from zero to 7.5% – will rise to 25%.Despite the risks of retaliation from Beijing, Biden said the increased levies were a proportionate response to China’s overcapacity in the EV sector. Sources said China was producing 30m EVs a year but could sell only 22m-23m domestically.Biden’s car tariffs are largely symbolic because Chinese EVs were virtually locked out of the US by tariffs imposed by Donald Trump during his presidency. However, lobby groups have suggested there is a future threat as Beijing seeks to use exports to compensate for the weakness of its domestic economy.Top Republicans traveled to New York to appear alongside Donald Trump at his ongoing business fraud trial, which House speaker Mike Johnson called a “disgrace”. Also on the scene were an array of politicians who share one thing in common: they are all said to be potential running mates for Trump, or, as the Democrats dubbed them “emotional support”. Back in Washington DC, the Republican-led House oversight committee released a report saying that attorney general Merrick Garland should be held in contempt for not handing over recordings of interviews conducted by a special counsel and Joe Biden. The committee’s top Democrat Jamie Raskin was also busy, demanding answers from petroleum industry executives over Trump’s reported promise to roll back all sorts of environmental regulations if they each raise $1bn for his campaign.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Johnson’s appearance in New York comes as the House GOP plans to shift into “campaign mode” as the 5 November election draws ever nearer.
      Federal prosecutors asked a judge to send far-right strategist Steve Bannon to jail after an appeals court rejected the appeal of his conviction for contempt of Congress.
      Biden announced new tariffs against China, and took shots at Trump’s own trade policies.
      The top Democrat on the House oversight committee is demanding answers after a report emerged that Donald Trump promised oil executives he would repeal regulations intended to lower climate emissions if they each contributed $1bn to his campaign.In a letter to the executives of nine major petroleum companies, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, Jamie Raskin cited a Washington Post article from last week that said Trump promised to rescind a Biden administration moratorium on permits for liquified natural gas exports and allow more drillings in the Alaskan Arctic and Gulf of Mexico, among other policies.In response, Raskin wrote in letters to nine oil industry executives:
      I write to request any information you may have about quid pro quo financial agreements related to US energy policy that were reportedly proposed at a recent campaign fundraising dinner with ex-president Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club that you appear to have attended. Media reports raise significant potential ethical, campaign finance, and legal issues that would flow from the effective sale of American energy and regulatory policy to commercial interests in return for large campaign contributions.
      In a White House address where he announced his administration’s moves to counter Chinese industries, including by imposing a 100% tariff on electric car imports, Joe Biden took a number of shots at Donald Trump and his policies.“My administration is combining investments in America with tariffs that are strategic and targeted,” Biden said. “Compare that to what the prior administration did. My predecessor promised to increase American exports and boost manufacturing. But he did neither, he failed. He signed a trade deal with China. They’re supposed to buy $200bn more in American goods. Instead, China imports from America barely budged.”He also said that Trump has proposed “across-the-board tariffs on all imports from all countries if re-elected”, and accused the former president of wanting to drive up prices. “He simply doesn’t get it,” Biden said.Asked later by a reporter about Trump’s comments that China has been eating America’s lunch, Biden responded, “He’s been feeding them a long time.” More

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      Mike Johnson skips vital US House session to support Trump in New York

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      The US House was in session on Tuesday with vital business to complete but its speaker, Mike Johnson, was 200 miles north, attending another day in the criminal trial of Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee charged over hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.“President Trump is innocent of these charges,” Johnson said outside court in Manhattan, where Trump faces the first 34 of 88 criminal counts.Michael Cohen, who as Trump’s lawyer and fixer made the payments to Stormy Daniels, was on the witness stand.Trump has used his trial as a loyalty test for supporters and vice-presidential hopefuls, both at the courthouse and on social media and TV. On Tuesday, Johnson was joined by the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, the Florida representatives Byron Donalds and Cory Mills, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who ran for the Republican presidential nomination.Before proceedings began, as Johnson and other supporters stood behind him, Trump spoke to reporters.“I do have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully,” he said. “They come from all over Washington, and they’re highly respected and they think this is the biggest scam they’ve ever seen.”Regarding such surrogates’ ability to comment on the trial unencumbered by a gag order over which Trump has been fined and threatened with incarceration, Trump told reporters: “You ask me questions that I’m not allowed to answer.”Complaining about the courtroom, Trump said: “I’ve been here for nearly four weeks in the ice box.”The charges against Trump cast the hush-money payments, made around the 2016 election, as a form of election subversion.Trump also faces four federal and 10 Georgia state charges arising from his attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, and 40 federal charges concerning his retention of classified information.He has also been hit with multimillion-dollar civil penalties, over his business practices and a defamation suit arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Nonetheless, the devoutly Christian (and porn-monitoring) Johnson rushed to Trump’s side as Trump’s affair with Daniels, the star of films including Dirty Deeds and Right Amount of Wrong, was once more examined in court.One of Johnson’s former Republican colleagues, the anti-Trump conservative Liz Cheney, jibed: “Have to admit I’m surprised that Speaker Johnson wants to be in the ‘I cheated on my wife with a porn star’ club. I guess he’s not that concerned with teaching morality to our young people after all.”Back on Capitol Hill, the House was due to consider final passage of the Federal Aviation Authority Reauthorization Act. House Democrats were also set to face a series of messaging bills, proposed legislation designed not to pass but to ensnare the other party in difficult political choices.“Otherwise,” Politico reported, “Speaker Mike Johnson is ready to move squarely into campaign mode.”View image in fullscreenIn Manhattan, Johnson – the only member of Trump’s cheer squad not to wear a distinctly Trumpian red tie – spoke to reporters. He said: “President Trump is innocent of these charges.“It’s impossible for anybody to deny, that looks at this objectively, that the judicial system in our country has been weaponised against President Trump. The system is using all the tools at its disposal right now to punish one president to provide cover for another.“These are politically motivated trials and they are a disgrace. It is election interference, and they show how desperate the opposition that President Trump is, how desperate they truly are.”Johnson said he was making the appearance “on my own, to support President Trump, because I am one of hundreds of millions of people and one citizen who is deeply concerned about this”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJohnson and his fellow visitors were not the first. On Monday the Ohio senator JD Vance gave his impressions of proceedings.Vance posted: “Michael Cohen admitting he secretly recorded his employer. Just totally normal conduct, right? The best part is he said he did it only once and only for Trump’s benefit. A stand-up guy!”Vance also called the trial “election interference”, because the gag order constrained Trump’s speech, representing “a violation of the constitution and an insult to the American people”.Before court on Tuesday, Ramaswamy claimed a “sham trial” and a “politically motivated assault on the leading candidate for US president, greenlit by his political opponent, Joe Biden, and carried out at the highest levels of the White House and Department of Justice”.Ramaswamy also attacked the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg; the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo; and the judge, Juan Merchan.“The American people will deliver the ultimate verdict in November,” Ramaswamy said. “Say NO to the weaponisation of justice.”Other surrogates also complained. Donalds, who as a young man had a marijuana charge dismissed and a bribery charge expunged, said proceedings against Trump represented “a tragedy for the American justice system”.For Johnson, staying close to Trump has paid off, particularly as the speaker has overseen passage of government funding and military aid to Ukraine, neither favoured by Trump and his supporters on the far right of a far-right Republican party.Last week, with support from Democrats, Johnson defeated an attempt to remove him mounted by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia extremist who has touted herself as a Trump running mate.In a statement on Tuesday, Alex Floyd, rapid response director for the Democratic National Committee, mocked Trump’s need for “emotional support” from Johnson and others, and took a shot at the speaker for absenting himself from the House.“Donald Trump is convening the saddest posse of Maga loyalists … desperate for emotional support and political cover as he spends another week tending to his personal affairs rather than talking to actual voters,” Floyd said.“Trump’s pathetic band … seemingly have nothing better to do than echo Trump’s lies and nod approvingly in the background – because they certainly aren’t doing their day jobs of serving their constituents or running a functional political operation.” More

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      Trump’s hush-money case has proven he’s a low-life. Can it prove he’s a criminal? | Margaret Sullivan

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      When you set out to explore Donald Trump’s personal life and business practices, you don’t expect to meet any paragons of virtue.Sleazy media figures who buy and “kill” damaging stories? Yes. An adult film actor ready to tell all to make a buck? Certainly. A parade of spokespeople and staffers who compromised their own integrity during his presidential administration? No doubt.A conman, philanderer and grifter himself, the ex-president always has surrounded himself with dicey characters. That’s how he rolls. So it’s hardly surprising that Michael Cohen, the star prosecution witness in the so-called “hush-money” case unfolding in New York City, fits right in.The former Trump lawyer and fixer pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign-finance violations, tax fraud and bank fraud. He pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. He went to jail. And he was disbarred.That’s why it would be funny – if it weren’t so cringe-inducing – to hear the way Cohen is being praised by some commentators in the endless talk loop of cable-news trial coverage.“Michael’s one of the good guys,” was the assessment of CNN guest-talker Anthony Scaramucci, who memorably lasted less than two weeks as Trump’s communications director and who is now vehemently opposed to Trump winning a second term.I’m all for redemption, but I wouldn’t go that far. I certainly wouldn’t hold up Michael Cohen as an example of a great American.But, against the odds, Cohen’s testimony does ring true. (Not that one can hear it directly; unfortunately, the trial is not being televised or even recorded for audio only.)His words, and the description of his demeanor from those inside the courtroom, make a kind of consistent and logical sense. What’s more, much of it has been “pre-corroborated” by testimony and evidence earlier in the trial.We’ve heard from people such as David Pecker, who ran the National Enquirer, where he caused damaging stories to be given the “catch-and-kill” treatment to help Trump gain the presidency in 2016. We’ve seen supporting text messages and emails and documents.On the stand on Monday, Cohen didn’t spare himself. He admits he lied and falsified in protecting his boss. He even admitted to secretly recording Trump during a one-on-one meeting and, because the audio has gone public, we can hear the two of them hashing out one of their seedy arrangements; respectable lawyers don’t do that to or with their clients.And he certainly didn’t spare Trump, instead portraying him as the equivalent of a mob boss, as well as someone intimately involved with every decision in keeping his tawdry relationships secret as he sought the presidency in 2016.What the New York district attorney must prove, though, is criminality, not low-life behavior.Will a jury decide that Trump’s behavior amounted to criminal election interference? That will require a lot of connecting the dots – that Stormy Daniels not only was paid off to keep quiet about the time she claims to have had sex with Trump, but that the payment was then recorded falsely in a way that violates campaign finance law.If those dots are going to be connected, it’s Cohen who must connect them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s not an airtight case. Rather, it is “the least muscular and existentially threatening of the four criminal prosecutions Trump faces”, wrote the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien this week.But it’s likely to be the only case that’s going to come to trial before the election. For those who want a shred of accountability for Trump’s endless misdeeds, this is the one they’ve got. And, given that, Cohen is essential.Can jurors find him credible, given his checkered past? Even if they do, is it possible to make the leap to criminal violations of campaign-finance law? And could every one of them then agree to convict?That’s an Everest-high mountain to climb. Trump’s lawyers are sure to bombard Cohen with his foibles during cross-examination later this week.My take is that Michael Cohen is – finally – telling the truth. He’ll hold up well under the hostile questioning. Jurors will believe him and will buy most of his story, given his consistency and the corroborating evidence and earlier testimony.Finally, Michael Cohen will come off like an honest broker.As for a jury then connecting that credibility to criminal election-law interference? And then, unanimously, deciding to convict the former president?That’s a big stretch.I can believe Michael Cohen’s testimony, but – at least right now – I can’t believe in that outcome.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Democratic pollster: too much ‘inconsistency’ to draw conclusions about Biden-Trump rematch – as it happened

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      Good morning, US politics blog readers. The Biden campaign woke up to some disquieting news this morning, when a major poll was released showing that Donald Trump still leads Joe Biden in five of the six swing states that will be crucial to deciding the November election. Perhaps the most concerning part about the poll from the New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer was that while it was news, it was not exactly new – surveys have for months found the president trailing his predecessor in states he carried four years ago. What’s notable about this one is that the presidential campaign is now well underway, with Biden campaigning across the country in recent weeks, and his allies spending millions on advertisements intended to rebuild the coalition that elected him to the White House in 2020. Yet despite all that effort, the poll does not show much of an increase in his support.Perhaps more worrying for Biden’s prospects is what the survey says about the voting groups that are turning against him. While Black voters have been a reliable Democratic voting bloc, Trump’s support among them is 20%, the highest for a Republican presidential candidate in decades. The two men are also tied in support among Hispanic voters and 18-29-year-olds, groups that Biden won majorities of in 2020. We’ll tell you more about what else this poll has to say – and how Biden’s supporters are taking it – later on.Here’s what else is going on:
      Trump’s trial on business fraud charges continues in Manhattan, with the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen expected to take the stand. Follow our live coverage here.
      Bob Menendez, New Jersey’s Democratic senator, goes on trial today on a raft of corruption charges connected to allegedly using his position to aid the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
      Despite Biden’s worrying poll numbers, the same survey finds Democratic candidates leading in races that will decide control of the Senate.
      Democrats have been rattled by new polling that shows Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump in five of six crucial swing states, with less than six months to go until election day. It was the latest disquieting opinion survey for the president, who has struggled with low approval ratings throughout most of his term. However, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin pointed out that polling is often unreliable this far out from an election, and the data also showed that Democratic Senate candidates were ahead of their Republican challengers in key races – though Biden will probably have to win re-election for his allies to keep their majority in Congress’s upper chamber.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Kamala Harris unexpectedly swore during an appearance at a Washington DC summit organized by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.
      It’s infrastructure week at the White House once again.
      Simon Rosenberg, a perennial Democratic optimist, is not too worried about the latest polling on Biden’s re-election chances.
      The poll, which was conducted by the New York Times, Philadelphia Enquirer and Siena College, found voters were not paying particularly close attention to Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City. The prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen took the stand today, and you can follow the latest developments here.
      Republican lawmakers turned up outside Trump’s trial in New York to show their solidarity. Among the group was Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, who lamented that the former president was not getting enough respect, and Ohio senator JD Vance, who is viewed as a potential running mate.
      At her daily press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gave no indication that the president was rattled by the poll released this morning showing him trailing Donald Trump in five crucial swing states.Instead, she endeavored to direct the press’s attention to the $1.2tn infrastructure bill Biden oversaw passage of three years ago that will overhaul the nation’s roads, bridges, rail and broadband:The legislation was indeed a major accomplishment for Joe Biden and Congress’s then-Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and one that had eluded Trump and Barack Obama. Whether voters will care is an open question. Biden’s approval ratings plunged into negative territory a few months before the bill’s November 2021 signing, and have not returned to positive territory since.Lately, Biden has been campaigning on using the funds to undo damage done to minority communities when the nation’s interstates highways were built. Here’s more on that:Perhaps the name Michael Cohen sounds familiar. Donald Trump’s personal lawyer was once his trusted fixer, but then publicly turned against him, and is now testifying against his one-time boss in court. Here’s more on the disaffected Trumpworld lieutenant, from the Guardian’s Edward Helmore:Michael Cohen is Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer who was for more than a decade his Mr Fix-It, but is now the prosecution’s star witness as it builds its case that the former US president sought to conceal hush-money payments to an adult film star.It is a classic story of two men who once worked hand-in-glove together, when Trump was a world-famous billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star, but now face each other across a Manhattan courtroom with the world’s attention fixed on them.Cohen served as Trump’s trusted adviser, personal attorney and self-described “attack dog with a law license”. But the relationship soured after Trump won the US presidential election in 2016 and did not offer Cohen a role in his administration.Cohen’s testimony could place Trump at the center of a scheme to meet Stormy Daniels’s demand for $130,000 in exchange for her silence. The payment, made from an account Cohen had set up, was allegedly repaid while Trump was president but disguised as “legal services”.The prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, is on the witness stand in Donald Trump’s trial on charges of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election. Here’s the Guardian’s Victoria Bekiempis with a rundown of what we have learned from his testimony so far today:Donald Trump told his one-time fixer Michael Cohen to bury Stormy Daniels’s account of an alleged sexual liaison weeks before the election, demanding that he “just take care of it”, according to trial testimony in Manhattan court on Monday.“This was a disaster, a fucking disaster,” Cohen, after he took the stand, recalled Trump saying. “Women will hate me.”Cohen described Trump as angry at the possibility that Daniels, an adult film star, might come forward surfaced shortly after the Washington Post published a hot-mic recording from an Access Hollywood taping in which Trump bragged about groping women “by the pussy” without their consent.Cohen is core to the case against Trump, because he is accused of shuttling $130,000 to Daniels days before the 2016 election – in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump 10 years earlier. Cohen told jurors that he had kept Daniels’s account under wraps in 2011, working with her then lawyer to remove a story about it that had been on a gossip site.“He was really angry with me,” Cohen recalled of Trump’s reaction after he informed him about Daniels. Trump, he said, remarked: “I thought you had this under control? I thought you took care of this.”A group of Republican lawmakers appeared outside the New York City courthouse where Donald Trump’s trial on charges of falsifying business records is taking place today.The group, which included Ohio senator JD Vance, who is thought to be a potential running mate for the former president, denounced the prosecution spearheaded by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. Here’s Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville:Beyond just winning the GOP’s presidential nomination, Donald Trump has moved to consolidate control over various parts of the Republican party, including its national committee. But as the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports, Trump has asserted himself in no other state like Florida:In practical terms, Barron Trump’s truncated stint on the political stage as a Florida delegate to the Republican party’s national convention was little more than symbolic. His father Donald Trump’s third successive presidential campaign as the Republican nominee was all but certain anyway, and the names of those who will confirm it are essentially inconsequential.It did affirm to many analysts, however, how the former president has maneuvered to seize almost total control of the party’s state apparatus nationwide. Nowhere is that more apparent than Florida, where the capitulation was completed by the choice of delegates for July’s convention in Milwaukee.Even though 18-year-old Barron Trump now stepped down, ostensibly after his mother, former first lady Melania Trump, discovered a pressing prior engagement, there will be plenty of other family members as representatives. Barron’s step-siblings Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany are named, along with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr’s fiancée.Tiffany’s husband, Michael Boulos, and an assorted slew of other notable Trump acolytes and loyalists, are also on the list.The parallels in Trump’s subjugation of the national Republican party, and the installation of Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, as its co-chair, are hard to miss – especially as it was Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, who was once seen as a potential “Trump killer” in the party’s nomination race until, of course, Trump quickly vanquished him.Polls routinely show immigration as one of the biggest issues on American voters’ minds ahead of the November elections – no matter how far from the Mexican border they may live. The Guardian’s Chris McGreal reported that the issue has become the talk of a town in a northern Wisconsin city, after its police chief appealed to the Biden administration for help with new arrivals:Rhinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than to Mexico, so it is no great surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin city have laid eyes on the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims are “invading” the country from across the US border 1,500 miles to the south.But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nonetheless sure they are a major problem and he’s voting accordingly.“We don’t see immigrants here but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s Biden. He’s responsible.”Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find as they eye cities such as Chicago and New York struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.Trump has been pushing fears over record levels of migration hard in Wisconsin where the past two presidential elections have been decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette law school poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country”.Democrats have been rattled by new polling that shows Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump in five of six crucial swing states, with less than six months to go until election day. It was the latest disquieting poll for the president, who has struggled with low approval ratings throughout most of his term. However, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin pointed out that polling is often unreliable this far out from an election, and the data also showed that Democratic Senate candidates were ahead of their Republican challengers in key races – though Biden will probably have to win re-election for his allies to keep their majority in Congress’s upper chamber.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Kamala Harris unexpectedly swore during an appearance at a Washington DC summit organized by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.
      Simon Rosenberg, a perennial Democratic optimist, is not too worried about the latest polling on Biden’s re-election chances.
      The poll, which was conducted by the New York Times, Philadelphia Enquirer and Siena College, found voters were not paying particularly close attention to Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City. The prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen took the stand today, and you can follow the latest developments here.
      In recent months, Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to Barack Obama, has become an influential voice for Democrats trying to gauge Joe Biden’s chances in his looming rematch with Donald Trump.From his newsletter, here’s what he had to say about this morning’s authoritative, and disquieting, polling for the president:
      My advice with this and all polls is to take it seriously, but not literally. No poll is flawless; even the most accurate one can’t predict the future. Instead, think of polls as snapshots of how voters feel right now. Focus on the overall trends and significant insights rather than getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations. Use the poll data strategically to understand what resonates with voters and how to communicate our message effectively.
      As the first woman and first person of African-American and South Asian heritage to serve as vice-president, Kamala Harris is a barrier breaker. During an appearance today at a Washington DC summit organized by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, Harris shared some advice for others looking to do the same, in notably strong language (well, she said fuck). See the moment here: More

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      Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five key battleground states, new polls show

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      Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five crucial battleground states less than six months out from election day, new polls showed.The surveys from the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College put the former president up in Pennsylvania (three points), Arizona (seven), Michigan (seven), Georgia (10) and Nevada (12). Biden led by two points in Wisconsin.All leads bar Trump’s in Georgia and Nevada were within the margin of error.As the poll resonated throughout the political scene, the Biden campaign issued a statement from Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.“The only consistency in recent public polls is inconsistency,” Garin said.“These results need to be weighed against the 30-plus polls that show Biden up and gaining – which is exactly why drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake.”Trump is currently on trial in New York City, on 34 criminal charges arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.That is effectively an election interference trial. The former president also faces four federal charges and 10 state charges, in Georgia, for attempted election subversion and 40 federal charges concerning his retention of classified information.Trump’s attempt to overturn Biden’s conclusive win in 2020 culminated in the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, by a mob he told to “fight like hell” in his cause.Nine deaths have been linked to the riot including law enforcement suicides and more than 1,200 people have been arrested, hundreds convicted and jailed, some for seditious conspiracy.And yet, amid much electorate concern that at 81 Biden is too old for a second term – though Trump is just four years younger – the Times said “a yearning for change and discontent over the economy and the war in Gaza among young, Black and Hispanic voters threaten to unravel the president’s Democratic coalition”.The polls showed 20% support for Trump among Black voters, which if it held in the election would be the highest level of such support for a Republican candidate since the civil rights era.There was better news for Biden in results culled from people who described themselves as likely to vote, with the current president leading in Michigan and narrowly behind in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Victories in those three states in November would probably be enough to keep Biden in the White House.Robert F Kennedy Jr, the third-party candidate seeking ballot access in all 50 states even while having said he once had a worm in his brain linked to cognitive problems, scored about 10% in the polls, drawing equally from both Trump and Biden.“The findings are mostly unchanged since the last series of Times/Siena polls in battleground states in November,” the Times said, listing factors that might be seen likely to aid Biden: the stock market gaining 25%, Trump’s criminal trials beginning and Biden’s campaign spending heavily in battleground states.But voters who spoke to the paper cited cost-of-living concerns and dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo as reasons to abandon Biden for Trump.Remarkably, the paper reported that “nearly 70% of voters say that the country’s political and economic systems need major changes – or even to be torn down entirely”.Abortion rights also looms as a key campaign issue.Trump has boasted of his role in appointing three rightwingers to the US supreme court, resulting in the removal of federal abortion rights in 2022 with the overturning of Roe v Wade, the ruling that guaranteed them.Democrats have focused on the issue, taking a string of wins when abortion rights have been on the ballot, even in Republican-run states.In the new polls, a familiar majority (64%) said abortion should be always or mostly legal (a stance shared by 44% of Trump voters). The polls also showed voters prefer Biden to handle abortion rights issues by 11 points.But nearly 20% of respondents blamed Biden more than Trump for the fall of Roe.Garin said: “The reality is that many voters are not paying close attention to the election and have not started making up their minds – a dynamic also reflected in today’s poll. These voters will decide this election and only the Biden campaign is doing the work to win them over.” More

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      Florida is a prime example of Trump’s vise grip on state Republican parties

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      In practical terms, Barron Trump’s truncated stint on the political stage as a Florida delegate to the Republican party’s national convention was little more than symbolic. His father Donald Trump’s third successive presidential campaign as the Republican nominee was all but certain anyway, and the names of those who will confirm it are essentially inconsequential.It did affirm to many analysts, however, how the former president has maneuvered to seize almost total control of the party’s state apparatus nationwide. Nowhere is that more apparent than Florida, where the capitulation was completed by the choice of delegates for July’s convention in Milwaukee.Even though 18-year-old Barron Trump has now stepped down, ostensibly after his mother, former first lady Melania Trump, discovered a pressing prior engagement, there will be plenty of other family members as representatives. Barron’s step-siblings Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany are named, along with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr’s fiancee.Tiffany’s husband, Michael Boulos, and an assorted slew of other notable Trump acolytes and loyalists, are also on the list.The parallels in Trump’s subjugation of the national Republican party, and the installation of Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, as its co-chair, are hard to miss – especially as it was Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, who was once seen as a potential “Trump killer” in the party’s nomination race until, of course, Trump quickly vanquished him.“The big, sort of under-the-radar story in American politics over the last couple of years was the way Trump and his people had taken over state parties across the country,” said Dan Judy, a senior analyst for North Star Opinion Research, a Republican guidance and consultancy company based in Virginia.“Even early in the primary process, a year and a half ago when Ron DeSantis was riding high and leading a lot of the polls, I was always thinking: Trump has control of the state parties, he’s got his people in, and they are, for lack of a better word, going to attempt to rig the process in favor of Donald Trump.“If you look at it, that’s exactly what happened. A lot of state parties changed their rules to make their primaries winner-takes-all, which absolutely helped Trump, especially as it came down to a one-on-one with Nikki Haley. It was clear that she was going to have to win some of these things outright to get any delegates at all, and she couldn’t do it.“The fact that the Florida GOP has also been completely taken over by Trump folks is really indicative of a trend that has happened everywhere.”Judy pointed to how easily Trump took down DeSantis in the primary race, humiliating the governor he disparaged as “Meatball Ron” in his own state. DeSantis’s efforts to cajole Florida’s congressional delegation were ultimately futile, and he dropped out in January to avoid a spanking in the state’s March primary.“As high as he was riding after his huge re-election victory, just any hope that he would have had of continuing to be top dog in the Florida GOP went out the window when he failed to get any traction at all in the presidential race,” said Judy, who has worked for the winning campaigns of several Republican politicians, including DeSantis and the Florida senator Marco Rubio.“He’s not the kind of person who cultivates relationships, who builds relationships, who builds a party, an organization, and an apparatus. He’s just not that guy, and if you’re going around Florida looking for Ron DeSantis people, there are shockingly few of them.“But if Donald Trump is re-elected, there might be a place in the administration for him. If he wants to have a future in the current Republican party, he cannot be an enemy of Donald Trump, and you’re seeing him do the things that he needs to do to remain in good standing.”Those actions include a full-throated endorsement of the man who repeatedly demeaned and insulted him, and cozying up to him at a breakfast meeting near Miami last month, in which Trump claimed DeSantis pledged total fealty.In a similar vein, a succession of other senior state Republicans have fallen in line. Junior senator Rick Scott, a former Florida governor who faces a potentially tricky re-election battle in November, appeared last week alongside Trump to support him at his hush-money trial in Manhattan.And an elected member of the Florida cabinet, the chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, seemingly cannot do enough to champion the twice-impeached former president currently facing dozens of criminal charges in cases around the country.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPatronis, who was thwarted by DeSantis in January when he floated a bill to hand $5m of Florida taxpayers’ money to Trump for his legal bills, returned last week with an alternative proposal: he wrote to Trump announcing he was due $54,000 in “unclaimed property” that Patronis hoped he would use to fight “some very, very nasty people coming after you”.To observers of Florida politics, all of this, and particularly the surfeit of Trumps among the slate of delegates, is telling.“It does illustrate in pretty stark terms how effectively the former president has his hand on the state Republican party, and his influence on what goes on,” said Kevin Wagner, associate dean of Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F Schmidt college of arts and letters.“It’s not unexpected that the likely presidential nominee has significant influence in his home state, but even by that standard there’s a level of control over the party that’s pretty distinctive.“As a practical matter, the party is going to be united behind a former president, at least through an election year. And I think you’ll see that in the way that political leaders on the Republican side are behaving in Florida.”Wagner said voters were unlikely to care about Trump’s children carrying the state party’s flag in Milwaukee, with or without Barron Trump.“Among the Republican base that is very supportive of the former president, I don’t think any of this matters. In fact, they probably would approve,” he said.“Some Republicans might be bothered, but there’s no evidence in Florida right now that this is a particularly close race so it probably doesn’t matter a whole lot. The caveat is we are in May and the election’s in November.“But right now, I’d say that Donald Trump has a very strong position in the state of Florida, and that’s reflected by how political leaders in the state are responding to him, and also by the amount of deference that the party gives.” More