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      Sofa so bad for JD Vance as Trump’s VP pick faces swirling speculation

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      It all started with a tweet about a couch. Within hours of Donald Trump announcing the Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the presidential race, a rather lurid accusation cropped up on social media.The user of a since-deleted X account wrote last month, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”The fake page citation from Vance’s bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy lent credibility to what turned out to be a baseless claim, as detailed in a now-removed fact check from the Associated Press. Soon, the internet was awash in memes mocking Vance’s relationship with various pieces of furniture. “I did not have sectional relations,” one X user joked, paraphrasing Bill Clinton’s infamous quote about his extramarital affair. Another user added: “Who hasn’t been excited by the thrill of the chaise?”Even Kamala Harris’s newly launched presidential campaign appeared to get in on the fun, tweeting: “JD Vance does not couch his hatred for women.”The couch debacle only underscored Vance’s overall dismal introduction to the country after his somewhat forgettable speech at the Republican national convention last month, prompting some to wonder if Trump should make the historic decision to ditch his running mate just three months before election day. Vance enters the final 100-day stretch of the election season as one of the most unpopular running mates in recent history. According to a CNN analysis, Vance is the least liked non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee since 1980.And the backlash goes deeper than couch memes. Critics have dug up his past comments supporting a nationwide abortion ban and attacking women without children. In a clip from 2021 that has circulated widely over the past two weeks, Vance told the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was managed by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too”.That comment struck many Americans as so out of touch that it sparked censure from some surprising figures, including the generally apolitical celebrity Jennifer Aniston. “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day,” Aniston wrote in an Instagram post. “I hope she will not need to turn to [in vitro fertilization] as a second option. Because you are trying to take that away from her, too.”The Harris campaign cast an even brighter spotlight on the controversy with a statement titled, Happy World IVF Day To Everyone Except JD Vance.The turmoil has intensified questions over whether Trump might replace Vance as his running mate, a strategy that has not been pursued since 1972. One unnamed House Republican told the Hill last week: “I think if you were to ask many people around this building, 9 out of 10 on our side would say he’s the wrong pick … He’s the only person who can do serious damage.”View image in fullscreenBut many of Vance’s vulnerabilities were apparent well before he joined Trump’s ticket. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 after emerging victorious from a heated and closely contested Republican primary in Ohio. Vance only won the primary by eight points, even after securing Trump’s crucial endorsement. The endorsement surprised many, as Vance had sharply criticized Trump in the past. Vance’s primary opponents repeatedly attacked him as a fake Trump supporter, reminding voters that he once described the former president as “America’s Hitler”.After advancing from that ugly primary fight, Vance went on to defeat the Democrat Tim Ryan by six points, even though Trump had carried Ohio by eight points just two years earlier. (In comparison, Mike DeWine won re-election as Ohio’s governor by 25 points that same year.) Ryan was able to keep the race competitive enough to force outside Republican groups to spend tens of millions of dollars in Vance’s defense. The Senate Leadership Pac, which has close ties to the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, spent more than $32m in the race, according to OpenSecrets.Since joining the Senate last year, Vance has become one of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress and embraced the former president’s agenda on everything from foreign policy to election denialism. In one illuminating interview with CNN in May, Vance suggested pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses should face criminal charges.“So you agree that people who break in and vandalize a building should be prosecuted?” asked the CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins.“Exactly,” Vance said.Collins replied, “I’m just checking because you did help raise money for people who did so on January 6.”All of this baggage has come to the forefront right as Vance is trying to introduce himself to a much larger audience of voters, and the search for a Democratic vice-presidential nominee has only exacerbated his troubles. The Democrats vying to become Harris’s running mate have taken to publicly lambasting Vance at every turn, offering a preview of a potential vice-presidential debate.The Kentucky governor, Andy Beshear, who is reportedly on Harris’s shortlist of options, has accused Vance of caricaturing Appalachian residents in Hillbilly Elegy. In the book, Vance leaned into his family roots in eastern Kentucky, even though he was raised in an Ohio city near Cincinnati.“I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like, because let me just tell you that JD Vance ain’t from here,” Beshear told MSNBC last week.The governor added at a fundraiser in Des Moines, Iowa, last weekend: “This is somebody who exploited us – who used to come for weddings or funerals or a couple weeks in the summer to see his kin, and I respect that. But to claim that you know our culture and then to insult our people is just wrong.”Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, who is also on Harris’s shortlist, has mocked Trump and Vance as “weird”, an attack line now echoed by other prominent Democrats.“The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people,” Walz said last weekend at a Harris campaign event. “We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”View image in fullscreenAs of now, Trump has given no public indication that he intends to drop his running mate, and Vance is trying his hardest to shake off the damage of the past two weeks.“I knew that when I came out of the gate there was going to be a couple of days of positive media coverage and then immediately they would go and attack me over everything that I had ever said in my life,” Vance told NBC News on Tuesday. “The price of entry of being on the national ticket and giving me an opportunity to govern is you have to … take the shots, and so I sort of expected it.”But in a less than stellar review of Vance’s performance so far, Trump reminded voters that elections are not generally decided by the vice-presidential nominee.“This is well-documented, historically, the vice-president in terms of the election does not have any impact, virtually no impact,” Trump said on Wednesday during his contentious interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. “You can have a vice-president that is outstanding in every way, and I think JD is, I think all of them would have been, but you’re not voting that way. You’re voting for the president. You’re voting for me.”Trump’s best hope for the moment is that voters will start forgetting about Vance. And after the month he’s had, Vance might not mind some obscurity either. More

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      All in the Family by Fred Trump review – when dollars are thicker than blood

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      Forget about the sanctity of the human family or its sticky glue of love. If you’re a Trump, the institution is a convenient mechanism for ensuring inheritance, whether of gilded financial assets or brazen moral defects. Trumps are branded merchandise, and their dynastic DNA is a double helix of greed, graft and feuding malice.Since numbers on ledgers are what matter to this mercenary dynasty, they advance arithmetically. In All in the Family, the last in a series of Fred Trumps identifies his great-grandfather – who absconded from Germany to avoid military service and founded a property empire by establishing a chain of brothels in Canada – as Fred Zero. His son Fred I, a rack-renting landlord in the New York suburbs, then begat Fred II, who defied the family by preferring a career as an airline pilot; then, after being reduced to a “second-tier Trump”, he drank himself to an early death, which made his younger brother Donald the heir apparent. Fred III, the author of this memoir, aspires to be “a different kind of Trump” but coyly trades on his tainted surname, describing himself on LinkedIn as “a third-generation member of a prominent New York real estate family”.Trumpism consists, as Fred III puts it, of “name promotion”. Fred I advertised the homes he built by anchoring a yacht emblazoned with Trump signs off Coney Island on summer weekends. The logo has since been affixed to hotels, golf clubs, a failed airline, a dodgy university and several bankrupt casinos; it currently sells Bibles, high-top sneakers that yell “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” and a Victory cologne that purports to waft out the intimate essence of Donald.What Fred III calls the “T-word” – almost as odious as the forbidden N-word, which he remembers Donald using when enraged by vandals who damaged his car – undergoes some slick mutations in the course of this chronicle. Fred Zero was born Friedrich Drumpf, which sounds like a belch or sneeze. Anglicised, the surname evokes trump cards and trumped-up accusations, a better match for the family’s ruthlessly competitive creed. Fred I’s middle name was Christ, rhyming with mist, which he derived from his German mother. But he worried that this might repel the Jewish tenants in his New York apartment blocks, so he dropped the “h” and called himself Crist instead. Fred III adopted the new spelling when he bizarrely christened his first son Cristopher; there would be no Fred IV, he decided, because “it was time to stop counting”.The other Trumps remained at their adding machines, policing the succession. Donald’s sister, Maryanne – a judge who retired from the bench after a charge of misconduct, foiling his whimsical scheme to appoint her to the supreme court – complained because Fred III jumped the queue by producing Cristopher: according to her dotty theory of primogeniture, her own son, Fred I’s oldest grandchild, had the right to marry and procreate first. Then when Donald’s creditors threatened to foreclose on his debts during the 1990s, Maryanne and the other siblings produced a will altered by the already senile Fred I that disinherited Fred II’s offspring and cruelly cut off the medical insurance for Fred III’s severely disabled son William.View image in fullscreenFred III and his sister, Mary, sued to claw back a portion of the spoils to which they felt entitled. Mary, a trained psychologist, additionally declared war on the family in her book Too Much and Never Enough, published as a spoiler during Donald’s re-election campaign in 2020; in it, incensed by his mismanagement of the pandemic, she accuses him of “mass murder”. Her brother’s charges against their uncle are milder. Anxious to maintain a semblance of peace, Fred III reminiscences fondly about his access to the Oval Office and takes pride in his complimentary membership of a Trump golf club. The family’s handed-down anecdotes about Donald’s bratty behaviour amount, as Fred III sees it, to little more than “stupid kid stuff”: hyper-aggressive and liable to tantrums, he delighted in “the pain he hoped he had caused” by stealing toys from other children or hurling an eraser at a teacher he disliked. That might sound trivial, but these infantile urges still activate the old man who itches to regain power and they will be converted into vengeful authoritarian policies if he is re-elected.Despite a settlement, the financial dispute with the aunts and uncles continues to rankle. For the Trumps, Fred III realises: “Blood only went so far – as far as the dollar signs.” Arguing about his grandfather’s will, he defends the protocols of “multigenerational wealth”, but that very terminology splices together genetic and economic heritage. As he ought to know, families pass on congenital failings as well as stocks and shares. His father once told him that he had “inherited a bad gene” and warned him to be careful about drinking; Fred III admits to having had his own foreordained struggle with alcoholism.Donald, like Hitler, trusts in eugenics. At a recent rally in Minnesota, he promoted himself as a pure-bred product of “the racehorse theory”, and he fancies that his genes make him “a very stable genius”. His apostles agree. He recovered from Covid, according to the self-styled Maga life coach Brenden Dilley, because “he’s got God-tier genetics, top fucking one percentile genetics, right?” This insane conceit explains Donald’s spasm of disgust when Fred III tells him that William’s affliction is “some kind of genetic thing”. “Not in our family,” Donald replies with a snort, “there’s nothing wrong with our genes!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe most lethal moment in the book occurs when Donald helpfully suggests that Fred III, rather than spending money on William’s care, should “just let him die and move down to Florida”. The advice comes from a remote-control executioner: after the death of the Iraqi terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Fred III listens to Donald exultantly telling the king of Jordan on the phone: “I killed him, I killed him like a dog.” What shocks me most, reading the exchange about William, is the casual logic of the follow-up. Why Florida? It’s Donald’s home, now that he is such a pariah in New York, and he commends it to his nephew as a moral Bermuda Triangle, a swamp for human alligators.Fred III makes a final attempt to redeem his tarnished lineage by citing “something that William inherited from our family”. No, this is not a trust fund; it is the young man’s “heart-melting blue eyes”, his only means of communicating with the world. It’s a nice try, but a harsher truth is proclaimed by the book’s epigraph from The Godfather, which quotes Michael, soon to be installed as mob boss, when he shrugs that the gangsterism of the Corleones is “not personal, it’s strictly business”. Donald, who customarily deflects condemnation by projecting it on to others, used to rant about “the Biden crime family”; indirectly exposing the self-disgust that skulks behind his self-love, he was of course describing the vicious, venal conduct of his own clan. More

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      Donald Trump: judge rejects efforts to dismiss election subversion case against ex-president

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      A federal judge presiding over the election subversion case against Donald Trump has rejected efforts from his legal team to dismiss the indictment on grounds that the former president was prosecuted for vindictive and political purposes.The ruling from US district judge Tanya Chutkan is the first substantive order since the case was returned to her on Friday, following a landmark supreme court opinion last month that conferred broad immunity for former presidents and narrowed special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump.In their motion to dismiss the indictment, defence lawyers argued that Trump was mistreated because he was prosecuted even though others who have challenged election results have avoided criminal charges.Trump, the Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential race, also suggested that president Joe Biden and the Justice Department launched the prosecution to prevent him from winning reelection.But Chutkan rejected both arguments, saying Trump was not charged simply for challenging election results but instead for “knowingly making false statements in furtherance of criminal conspiracies and for obstruction of election certification proceedings.”She also said that his lawyers had misread news media articles that they had cited in arguing that the prosecution was political in nature.“After reviewing Defendant’s evidence and arguments, the court cannot conclude that he has carried his burden to establish either actual vindictiveness or the presumption of it, and so finds no basis for dismissing this case on those grounds,” Chutkan wrote in her order.Chutkan has scheduled a status conference for 16 August, to discuss the next steps in the case.The four-count indictment, brought in August 2023, accuses Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Biden through a variety of schemes, including by badgering his vice-president, Mike Pence, to block the formal certification of electoral votes.Trump’s lawyers argued that he was immune from prosecution as a former president, and the case has been on hold since December as his appeal worked its way through the courts.The supreme court, in a 6-3 opinion, held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for core constitutional duties and are presumptively immune from prosecution for all other official acts. The justices sent the case back to Chutkan to determine which acts alleged in the indictment can remain part of the prosecution and which must be discarded. More

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      Name-calling and hyperbole: Trump continues fear-mongering fest at Georgia rally

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      Donald Trump addressed a fully-packed venue in downtown Atlanta on Saturday, with thousands of people waiting in the Georgia heat outside to enter, or to protest his appearance in a city he has condemned repeatedly.His remarks were consistent with the tenor and comportment of restraint and probity Atlantans are used to hearing at this point.“She happens to be a really low IQ individual. We don’t need a low IQ individual,” Trump said of the vice-president Kamala Harris. “They love dealing with low IQ individuals … She’s Bernie Sanders but not as smart.”Trump highlighted a handful of recent murders in the city, saying “Atlanta is like a killing field, and your governor should get off his ass and do something about it.”Trump rattled off a set of crime statistics in Atlanta that bear no resemblance to the actual change in crime over the last two years. Crime spiked in Atlanta in the last year of Trump’s term and peaked in 2022. It has subsequently fallen back to 2019 levels.But crime – and particularly crime involving immigrants – has been central to his appeal to Republican voters. Trump invoked the murder of Laken Riley, a college student murdered on the campus of the University of Georgia. Police have charged an undocumented immigrant with her murder.“Laken’s blood is on Kamala Harris’s hands,” Trump said, “as though she was standing there watching it herself.” Trump is trying to tie this to Harris’s role as “border czar” early in the Biden administration. “Harris should not be asking for your votes. She should be begging Laken Riley’s family for forgiveness.”Trump made a point of highlighting the work of three Republican appointees to Georgia’s board of elections, who have been entertaining changes to election rules that critics say are setting the stage for a legal contest in case of a Trump loss in November.Of President Joe Biden and the debate that led to his withdrawal from the race, Trump said “He was choking like a dog! He was choking. And that was the end of him … they did a coup, but he doesn’t know it.”Trump said, without any evidence, that “40 or 50 million illegal aliens” will enter the United States if Harris wins, he said, claiming that suburbs will be overrun with “savage foreign gangs”. He also claimed, falsely, that Harris wants to replace all gas cars with electric cars, to ban meat, to increase taxes by 70 to 80% and more claims that can only be taken as hyperbole because they are so far divorced from fact. He also reiterated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Trump repeatedly called Harris a “lunatic”.Trump’s appearance in Atlanta is at the same venue Harris filled on Tuesday in her first Georgia rally since Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race and her ascension as the presumptive Democratic nominee.The contrast between Trump and Harris in the space was stark. Harris’s multiracial crowd Tuesday was peppered with the pink and green of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters. Red Maga hats and Trump mug shots – or the now-iconic shot of his fist in the air after the assassination attempt – dominated the mostly white sea of support for Trump.Trump opened up his appearance in Atlanta lying about the Harris event in the same place, falsely claiming that people left the event early and that there were empty seats. Both events packed the room.Notably, the upper stands began to empty out about an hour into Trump’s comments.The refrain, repeated by speaker after speaker at the rally, was that Trump took a bullet for Republican voters, and they should return the favor with powerful turnout in Georgia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He took a bullet for you, and in that moment, we found out who Donald Trump is,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, a representative, in a speech before 10,000 Trump supporters at the Georgia State Convocation Center. “He stood up, put his fist in the air and said ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ And that’s what we will do.”JD Vance, Republican vice-presidential nominee, took note of the emerging Democratic labeling of Republicans as “weird” as he warmed up the crowd.Weird is how “Kamala Harris comes to Atlanta and speaks with a fake southern accent even though she grew up in Canada”, Vance said. “Go watch the clips; she sounds like a southern belle.”Vance also linked the people who tried to “bankrupt” and “impeach” Trump to the attempted assassination.“America is never going to elect a San Francisco liberal who is so far out of the mainstream,” Vance said.Despite this assertion, polls increasingly suggest that Harris may be ahead of Trump today, with the Democratic national convention coming in two weeks. Before Biden’s withdrawal, Trump had been consistently ahead of Biden, so much so that political discussion here had been about whether the Biden campaign would capitulate in Georgia in order to focus its resources on Rust Belt races.Too few polls measuring Harris and Trump in Georgia have been conducted to read the race here, but both campaigns have begun treating Georgia as a battleground state once again.“The road to the White House runs through Georgia,” Greene said, almost word for word what Rev Raphael Warnock, a Georgia senator, told Harris supporters five days earlier.In long, rambling comments, Trump lambasted Brian Kemp, the governor, and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, for disloyalty: “In my opinion, they want us to lose. If we lose Georgia, we lose the whole thing and our country goes to hell.” More

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      Trump says he would debate on Fox News – but Harris insists on ABC

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      Donald Trump says he would be willing to debate Kamala Harris on the friendly environs of Fox News in September – but the vice-president has not signed on to what would be a switch-up.Trump had previously agreed to appear on ABC News and debate Joe Biden a second time this year before the president ended his re-election campaign.In a statement on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the debate would be held on 4 September in Pennsylvania. The former president said that there was a conflict of interest at play after filing a defamation lawsuit against ABC and network host George Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s assertion that Trump had been “found liable for rape” in the E Jean Carroll case.Trump earlier this year was ordered to pay $83m for defamatory statements he had made about the magazine columnist after an earlier case found him liable for defamation and sexual abuse.“The Debate was previously scheduled against … Biden on ABC, but has been terminated in that Biden will no longer be a participant, and I am in litigation against ABC Network and George Slopadopoulos, thereby creating a conflict of interest,” Trump wrote.The former Republican president added that the site of the debate on Fox News – which is generally welcoming to the GOP – had not been determined. But he said the moderators would be Fox News’ Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, and the rules would be similar to his 27 June debate with Biden – except that this time there would be a studio audience.But on Saturday, in a statement that invoked Trump’s previous challenge to debate Biden at any time or place, Harris’s campaign made clear she did not agree to the terms of the proposed Fox News debate. And she particularly rejected using that debate to replace the ABC one.“Donald Trump is running scared and trying to back out of the debate he already agreed to and running straight to Fox News to bail him out,” Harris campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler said in a statement shared on X by NBC News political correspondent Yamiche Alcindor.“He needs to stop playing games and show up to the debate he already committed to on [10 September]. The vice-president will be there one way or the other to take the opportunity to speak to a prime-time national audience. We’re happy to discuss further debates after the one both campaigns have already agreed to.“Mr Anytime, anywhere, any place should have no problem with that unless he’s too scared to show up on the 10th.”In a post on X, Harris herself added: “It’s interesting how any time, any place’ becomes ‘one specific time, one specific safe space.’”The vice-president said in July that she was “ready” to debate Trump and accused him of stepping back from the previous agreement involving ABC.In a post on Saturday, Trump alleged that Harris was “afraid” to “do a REAL debate” against him. He added: “I’ll see [Harris] on September 4th or I won’t see her at all.”Democratic party alarm at Biden’s June debate performance on CNN set in motion his dramatic withdrawal from the race, with polls indicating he was likely headed for a blowout electoral defeat.Trump and Harris are now polling neck-and-neck.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe political dance over presidential debates is now set to escalate. Earlier this year, Biden and Trump agreed to sidestep the typical arrangement of three debates, typically held in the fall and organized by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.Democrats said reducing the number to two and moving them up to June and September reflected changes in the “structure of our elections and the interests of voters”.Biden said he had won two debates with Trump in 2020 and challenged him to two this year. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays,” Biden said, referring to a weekly off-day during the New York criminal trial that saw Trump convicted of falsifying business records in connections with hush-money payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.But that decision ultimately backfired for Biden.The latest twist in the 2024 debate drama comes after Trump said he would not face Harris because she was not the party’s official candidate. On Friday, Harris secured enough Biden delegates to officially become her party’s nominee.At a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, Harris said she welcomed a debate against Trump, who days earlier had called her a “bum”.“As the saying goes, you got something to say, say it to my face,” Harris said. More

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      Kyle Rittenhouse reverses course on not endorsing Trump after online pile-on

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      Acquitted killer Kyle Rittenhouse announced he would not be supporting Donald Trump’s attempt to return to the White House – but ultimately ended up politically endorsing him anyway after being inundated with vitriolic messages from the former president’s followers.The flip-flop by Rittenhouse – who has fashioned himself as a gun rights activist after shooting two people to death in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during racial justice protests there in 2020 – followed an initial pledge to write in former congressman Ron Paul as his choice on November’s presidential election ballot.In a video posted on the social media platform X, Rittenhouse argued that Trump had a “bad” record with respect to gun rights and explained he would instead back Paul.The 21-year-old then spent the next several hours grappling with ire directed at him by proponents of Trump’s “Make America great again” (Maga) movement, who embraced Rittenhouse as a hero after the shootings in Kenosha and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his successful criminal defense. Among other insults, they taunted him with prison rape jokes and accused him of betraying Trump less than three years after the Republican met with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort and declared Rittenhouse “really a nice young man”.One of the more typical comments responding to Rittenhouse’s temporary endorsement of Paul was from political commentator Joey Mannarino, who wrote on X: “If not for Maga, you would be rotting in a prison bending over for Bubba … Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!”Another X user added: “I wish they would’ve let you go to prison so you could be the bitch you actually are.”By Friday afternoon, Rittenhouse had gone back on X and wrote that he was “100% behind Donald Trump and [would] encourage every gun owner to join me in helping send him back to the White House”.“Over the past 12 hours, I’ve had a series of productive conversations with members of the Trump’s team, and I am confident he will be the strong ally gun owners need to defend our … rights,” Rittenhouse also said. “My comments made last night were ill-informed and unproductive.”Some commentators met the quick about-face with equally swift mockery.“You stand for absolutely nothing and have zero backbone,” read one reply. Another said: “This time try not to murder anyone while you’re backpedaling.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRittenhouse was 17 when he traveled 20 miles from his home in Antioch, Illinois, as protests erupted after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, who is Black.Roaming Kenosha with other armed men claiming to be self-appointed security guards, Rittenhouse used a rifle to fatally shoot 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, then 26. He also injured Gage Grosskreutz, then 27, and was charged with five felonies, including first-degree intentional homicide.Rittenhouse contended to the jury which heard his case that he carried out the shootings in self-defense and had acted justifiably. At the end of a tumultuous trial, jurors found him not guilty of all charges against him, a verdict hailed by far-right politicians and pundits but decried by civil rights activists. More

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      Inside the Maga mind: Trump’s most dedicated fans explain their fervor

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      They are the Maga masses – ordinary people for whom Donald Trump represents hope, not fear, and whose lives have been changed by the Trump era.Some drive thousands of miles, seeing parts of the US they might never otherwise see, to attend the former US president’s campaign rallies, often camping outside for days to ensure they get a front-row seat. The rallies provide music, politics and a sense of belonging unlike anything else that society offers them.Others sell “Make America great again” merchandise. An entire cottage industry has grown up around quirky, witty or insulting bobbleheads, hats, mugs, T-shirts and other paraphernalia. Within hours of Trump surviving an attempted assassination at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the indelible image of him standing defiant, face bloodied and fist raised, was available on T-shirts.For these fans, Trump transcends politics: they are in love with his brand of television-induced celebrity, charismatic leadership and willingness to take on perceived elites. That Trump could survive a shooting now elevates him to a near divine status – a figure of destiny to whom their devotion is complete.He resents the same things they do. He is their hammer.Here are six of them in their own words. These interviews contain unfounded claims about voter fraud, the 6 January 2021 insurrection, immigration and the criminal cases against Trump.Antwon Williams, 42, owns mobile phone repair shops and lives in Columbia, South Carolina. His father is a bishop and school principal. A van he bought three years ago to sell merchandise at Trump rallies has now clocked 260,000 miles.View image in fullscreenWhat people have to understand is that Blacks are raised to learn about survival. We don’t know much about politics and that’s why I was so late to this game. I didn’t know anything about politics until [Barack] Obama. Obama gave us a reason to get out and care with the whole change message – it was beautiful. Until I found out what he stood for – and that’s a whole ’nother story.I was selling merch for the Obama campaign for a long time. Then I was doing Hillary merch but Hillary – I don’t know, for whatever reason – got hurt and stopped campaigning for a while so I ended up working Trump forever. My first Trump rally was back in 2015. I remember him saying at the end of his speech, to my Black community, “What do you have to lose? Give me a chance.” And dude, here I am. Yes, sir. I gave him a chance, man.Over the years, God has blessed us. The good thing is we get to employ about 10 people and we all go around the country and it’s beautiful, man. You’re not making millions but, hell, you’re making a living. The first piece of merch I sold was a Maga hat for $25. Now they are $30 each. The Maga hat will never be outsold.Everything comes from my brain; I make T-shirts on the fly now. What’s going to always be up next is when the Democratic side run their mouth and start calling us names and trying to bully us. They called us “ultra Maga” so we made the Ultra Maga thing and it became a symbol. Then they wanted to call us deplorables and then guess what? Proud deplorables was born.The more they talk, the more we’re going to keep creating things, so we love it. I mean, hell, they went in and gave him a mugshot and now it’s a symbol of America. It’s a symbol of the Black community. [He points to a T-shirt with Trump’s mugshot.] “Never surrender.” He’s definitely wanted – only for president.’View image in fullscreenIn the beginning it was purely business, but now it’s fully fledged. This is what I believe in and stand for. I think he gives a damn. He simply cares. Everyone wants to make him out to be a racist but man, the biggest thing I ask people is: show me one racist thing he’s done to us Blacks besides help us.I know that sounds very ignorant, but at the same time the guy helps us in every way he can, man. I mean, he brought jobs back to the Black community. Growing up, all my family was landscapers and painters and stuff like that. The Mexicans came in and took all the jobs away. The Black community couldn’t understand and see where he was helping us, but by removing just the illegals away it gave us an even playing field and that’s how he was able to get this economy back booming.I’ve met President Trump twice now. He’s freaking amazing and that’s why it’s so crazy for me to ever find out that he’s this “racist” guy that everyone wants to make him out. He put his hand out to shake my hand immediately. He told me thank you for what I do. It made chills run through me. It made me feel like he cares. It was important to me. It’s beautiful. He’s beautiful.A lot of politicians – 99% of the politicians – are going to blow smoke up your ass and lie to you to tell you whatever they want to tell you but this guy, he’s going to tell it exactly where it is. That’s why I call him the Blackest president we ever had.I am seeing more Black people attend the rallies. Especially with them bullying him through the streets these days with giving him all these fake charges. Trump gets to see how Black men live out here and now, right before every American eye, where they used to say that Black people are crying wolf, now they get to see exactly how the justice system does us as Blacks. They’re bullying him literally right before everyone’s eyes and it’s not fair.That’s why I call him the Blackest president ever alive.View image in fullscreenI go through racism every day, but where people misunderstand it is the racism that I go through is not from Blacks getting mad at me because I’m out here doing this; it’s from whites. They are always looking at me saying, “Black lives matter,” and I’m like, yes, my Black life matters but that doesn’t mean that I have to stand behind the things that they stand behind.They call me Uncle Tom, sellout, the whole nine, but I’m used to it, I’m used to the language, I’m used to the rhetoric. One thing it’s not going to do is turn me away from what I believe in at this point. It’s that simple.The 2020 election was stolen. I travelled this country day in, day out, rally to rally. I saw the tens of thousands of people in every county, and he would do two counties over and still 20 and 30,000 people would show up. I saw the numbers and there’s no way you going to tell me that loss. I saw it with my own eyes, so therefore we didn’t lose anything. It was taken away from us. It was stolen. The White House was definitely stolen.My prediction is that we’re going to have a landslide victory in November. They’re going to try and make a move but what I say to that is: just try it, buddy. Trump tried to warn us the first time but now the world is watching, so yeah, let ’em just try it.I’m into politics now. It’s not something I can turn a blind eye to. To watch the way he sacrificed everything just for us, the American people – people hate when I say this – it’s kind of like the way Jesus sacrificed everything for us, his children, as well. He’s literally sacrificing everything for us as American people.Sharon Anderson, 68, is retired from jobs in schools and law enforcement and lives in Etowah, Tennessee. She owns the Awesome Ass Acres farm and has five mules and a donkey. She has attended 53 Trump campaign rallies and is one of the “front row Joes”.View image in fullscreenI don’t want to sound corny but the night Donald Trump came down the escalator, it was almost a surreal feeling that came over me. My husband, Larry, was there watching it on TV and said, “Donald Trump’s running for president?” I said, “You know what, he’s my president, that’s my president.” I’ve never swayed, I’ve never wavered, not a breath, not a hair.Larry and I have been married 40 years. I’ve been divorced twice. If he wasn’t a Trump supporter, number three would have been through the process now.My first Trump rally was in North Carolina – it was 2015 or 16. It was kind of low-key. He didn’t have a lot of security with him. The crowd was real big. It was inside a coliseum and it was packed.I always get to the rallies several days in advance. I have something called a cot tent. It’s as wide as a camping tent, folds up about the size of a cart, but the tent is actually attached to the cot and you’re enclosed in there. I’ve got a little Trailblazer, a little SUV, I don’t even know what year model. It’s just big enough that if I sleep catty-corner I can sleep in the back if I don’t have my cot tent with me.Usually a person’s first question is of hygiene: where do you take your showers? Various ones of us have memberships at Planet Fitness and so you can find a Planet Fitness in every town just about. We’ll go there and take showers. Usually, if I get there five days ahead of time, I’m there three days at least by myself and I’ll stay on my phone, I’ll read a book, I’ll take a nap, I’ll just hang out.On March 2, 2020, right before Covid hit, I went to a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had gone and stayed five days before the rally. I slept on the sidewalk for five days. The night of the rally, I was right in the front of the rail, Lara and Eric Trump came out and spoke and when [Eric] finished he said, “My dad’ll be out here in about 45 minutes.”But he said, “We’re going to do something tonight that we’ve only done once before since my dad’s been in office,” and he said the Secret Service hates it – he said: “We’re going to recognise somebody in the audience.” I thought, Oh great, who’s that going to be? He looked at his hand and he said, where’s Jenny Anderson? My name’s not Jenny. I looked around, I thought, What Anderson’s here? I don’t know.Then he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve got the name wrong. Where’s Sharon Anderson?” He had me come up on stage and speak to 20,000 people. That was the last rally before the Covid shutdown. That particular video actually went viral. It was a special rally for me.A Trump rally is almost like a reunion. You’re in a crowd that varies from thousands to – well, the number in Wildwood, New Jersey, was listed as 107,000. You’re at a gathering of people that’s like-minded. They’re all there because they’re looking to make this country great again. They are sick of the current situation. They are sick of their budget not covering groceries every week, not covering their medical supplies, their prescriptions.[Trump’s] unusual. He’s a wonderful public speaker and I love him as a comedian too, because he’s very funny. I got to meet him two years ago. He is extremely personable. Even as a billionaire, I feel like I could invite him to my little meagre existence here in east Tennessee and I wouldn’t be nervous about it.View image in fullscreenTrump won the election in 2020. No one will ever convince me otherwise. I’m not a scholar. I’m not a political analyst. I’m not an attorney. I’m not anywhere even close to an expert. But when at three o’clock everybody goes to bed, you’re winning by landslide, and then it takes a week – first time in history – for the votes to be counted, something’s not right. Trump won the 2020 election.As for the Trump criminal trial and his conviction in New York, are we surprised? Was I wishing for a different outcome? Yes. Did I pray for a different outcome? Absolutely. But I’m not surprised because the district attorney was compromised. The jury from demographics alone was compromised and the judge was compromised. The entire case is built on false accusations and legal actions that had holes in them.The January 6 prosecutions is one of the biggest travesties in this country’s history. If there’s somebody that was guilty of violence and destruction, that’s one thing, but there are people being held in warlike conditions.I can’t say that I wouldn’t have walked in [to the US Capitol building]. Now, would I have gone in with violence and destruction on my mind? No, absolutely not, because I wasn’t there for that. But if people had opened doors – there’s videos of officials opening doors and having people come in – had I been there at the moment, I probably would have walked in and I’m a 68-year-old grandma. I could be in prison right now. Who knows, the FBI may come tomorrow.Trump gives me and millions of others hope and encouragement for the future of our country. I’m 68 years old and, if nature takes its course, I hope to have some future left. But my future is not as long as my grandchildren’s future. We’ve got to have hope. We have to have something to look forward to and Donald Trump gives that.Mike Boatman, 56, is an independent contractor living in Evansville, Indiana. This year he won election as a delegate and precinct committeeman for the state Republican convention.View image in fullscreenI voted Republican ever since I was 18. I never went to any kind of rally, any kind of political meeting or event, until Donald Trump.My first Trump rally was in Evansville in April 2016. I was a supporter of Trump before then because of his policies and everything he was saying he would do if he became president. Everything he was saying was what I was for. I voted Republican my whole life but the candidates wasn’t 100% what I believed in.I have been to 90 rallies and 15 other events that Trump spoke at. I’m part of the group of “front row Joes”. I’ve been to a couple of rallies six days early but now I’m more like I get there 24 hours early. I don’t have to be the first one in line because I know if I get there a day early I’ll still get a good seat and possibly the front row.A Trump rally is fun. There’s no violence. You’re there with like-minded people. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve been to one.I enjoy his speeches. A lot of things he’ll repeat because he’s given the same speech to different people in different states and towns. When he goes to a new city there’s a lot a first-timers – people who have never been to a rally. So he does give the same speech a lot, but he changes it up depending on what’s in the news cycle.I believe in Donald Trump’s policies and I believe that he is sincere and wants to help this country as much as he can. He’s proven himself when he was president for four years. Everything that he said he was going to do he did – or he tried to do. Some of it he got backlash [for] and some of it the Congress held him up from getting things done, especially the [border] wall.He almost had it completed and I believe when he gets back in he’ll finish the wall and we’ll get that border fixed. Are we going to fix it where not one person will illegally cross over? No, we’re still going to have illegals make it over. But it’s the amount of people. Right now so many people are crossing over we don’t know who’s crossing over. I have nothing against legal immigration but our country can’t sustain everybody that wants to come over.In my opinion, it’s the media and the liberal Democrats that were saying Republicans are not for Black people or poor people. Saying Donald Trump was a racist when he came down that escalator in 2015 was the biggest lie that was ever told.I knew who Donald Trump was back in the 80s. I knew he was this big real estate guy and I knew he owned casinos back then and owned the New Jersey Generals and he got Herschel Walker to play for him. But I never knew him being a racist.View image in fullscreenHe didn’t have to run for president. Everything he’s gone through in eight years, I don’t see how he does it. They’re coming after him left and right because they didn’t want him. They didn’t want him in 2016. I don’t know why.I sat there and watched the whole 2020 election. I didn’t go to sleep for 48 hours. Trump was winning so big and then it seemed like around 11 o’clock my time, central time, everybody shut down. I’ve never seen that before. Every presidential election I’ve watched, whether it was Obama, Bill Clinton or George Bush, I’ve never seen this. You knew who won that night.Eventually it’ll come out. Everything eventually comes out, just like when they accused Donald Trump of colluding with Russia. Adam Schiff said he’ll present all this evidence and we found out it was a big old lie.With the New York convictions, I’m still trying to figure out what Trump did wrong. Where’s the crime? You could tell the judge was biased. I believe most people can see what’s going on. It’s political persecution. If people believed that Donald Trump commits all these crimes at this time, he would resign because his poll numbers would drop.Every time they indicted him, he had more support. After 34 convictions he’s raised so much money. Most people see that it’s a witch-hunt, that they’re just trying to stop him any way they can from going back to the White House. It’s going to fail. Trump’s going to win in November.Donna Fitzsimons, 64, lives in Gladwin, Michigan. She spent years at home caring for her mother in her final years. She has since travelled the country with her sister Lori Levi selling Maga merchandise.View image in fullscreenIn 2020, when they cancelled the rallies, my sister called me and said, “If I buy a trailer, will you go on the road with me?” I had nothing holding me and I said yeah. We jumped in that trailer in May 2020 and we’ve been on the road pretty much ever since.We have gone everywhere. Two women in a trailer – they called us “the Trump girls”. We’re the Trump girls of Michigan. They call for “the trailer with the Trump girls”. It’s kind of funny: up in [Michigan’s Upper Peninsula], there was a bar and you walk in and they applaud you just for being out there spreading the word of Trump.All I have to do is grab my suitcase because I packed everything in it that I need. Oh my God, America is just so beautiful. It’s jaw-dropping. The best place was Alaska. I found out what the word “majesty” meant. That’s exactly how I felt.We carry American-made things. I’m not sure if anybody else does. I know we were the first to carry American-made hats because those are hard to get. We do American-made shirts. We do have to go to vendors just to compete because that’s the way the world is made up. You have to compete. We do USA shirts and things like that. We try to pull as much USA things as we possibly can, or homemade things. We try to use smaller printing shops to help – something to just get them on their way and help them on their feet.We never changed our prices because we know it’s hard for everybody out there. I know it hits us too but we still have to be fair with the people. We have a couple of items like “F*** Biden” but we keep that on the back shelf. That has to be personally asked for. We don’t think it’s something that should be down where the children will see.Finding the right area to put our trailer can sometimes be a little bit exhausting and getting permission from people can sometimes be tiring. You have to understand business people: there are some that don’t care and they’ll say, “Yes, set up,” because we’re Trump [supporters], and then there’s others. We find that auto part stores, muffler shops, are usually good about letting us set up. But then you go to the mom and pop stores and they’re like, “No, I don’t think so.”One time we were at a store way out by the water and a guy said, “You guys have to go! You have to go! Somebody said they are going to come by and shoot at you.” We’re not afraid. Everywhere we go, we take that chance. When the campaign takes over they use any trailer as first line of sight, so we’re always taking that chance. People don’t realise just being a vendor out there how dangerous that is just for us to be there and promote.If you look at pictures or speeches where he’s got people behind him that aren’t wearing any of his hats or anything that says “Trump”, it just doesn’t look right – it looks more like Biden. Biden’s never has anything. You look over where Trump’s got everybody with hats and shirts, it looks totally different. It brings up a whole different feeling in you when you take a look at the two side by side.View image in fullscreenA Trump rally is always exciting. When you get a group of like-minded people together you can feel it in the air, the energy that he’s bringing. People are happy. I’ve seen people stand in the rain all day long. I’ve seen them stand in snow and cold all day long just to see him. Cold that I couldn’t even stand in – I had to get in the car, I was freezing to death.They don’t care. They just have faith in him. They want to see him. He speaks clearly, he speaks firmly and he gives a sense of safety, like leadership, like everything’s going to be OK. Everybody’s just looking to hear that voice to calm that inner self, like everything’s OK. They get that when he speaks.I have never seen anybody have any problem. The only time they’ve ever stopped is when a Democrat slipped through. That’s when you get the anger and hatred: they start going crazy.Blake Marnell, 59, known as “Brick Suit”, lives in San Diego, California, and has attended many Trump campaign events, including the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on 13 July where the former president narrowly survived an assassination attempt.View image in fullscreenIt did not start with Donald Trump. I voted for Ronald Reagan for president in 1984 and then I never participated in any election at the state, local or federal level until 2020. Even when Donald Trump was running initially in 2016, I didn’t know he was going to be as effective as he turned out to be so I was not initially a supporter. I did not vote for him in 2016.Then when he got into office and one of the very first things he did was get the United States out of the Paris climate accord and cancel the Trans-Pacific partnership – two things that I thought would never happen – I started paying attention and so then I was following him.The first rally I went to was in 2018 in Las Vegas. I got there four hours before it was scheduled to start and ended up being very far back from the front row. It was a great time and I enjoyed talking with people in line. At the time it was kind of dicey to express support for conservatives – we were taking a bit of flak in the real world.They had already started taking people off the internet like Alex Jones and a lot of big profile accounts were being taken off of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. My reaction was, OK, if we can’t have first amendment rights online, because those are all private companies who had their own policies, my feeling was at least I can have it in real life.I started wearing a “Make America great again” hat in public and got many more positive reactions than negative ones. That emboldened me: there are a lot of people out there who support President Trump but for some reason are unwilling to generally acknowledge it in public in the way that I can by wearing a hat.Knowing that I was going to Washington DC, I was picking out a suit and thinking about which topic. You can’t wear something that’s like a tax cut – no one’s going to get it. So I latched on to my next favourite thing about President Trump’s policies at the time, which was border security. I said, what about a wall suit?I found the suit online. It is called a stag suit: essentially it is a costume suit for gentleman in England to buy so they can get into the good clubs and have a dress code for a suit while at the same time being able to enjoy the night in any way. If they actually destroy the suit in the process or rip the fabric, they don’t have to worry about it too much because it’s just a costume.I never thought the border issue would become as powerful as it is now. It shouldn’t have been. The border issue was taken care of as far as I thought. It was put to bed. Illegal immigration was under control. Unfortunately under Biden, who I think vindictively and spitefully has disabled all of President Trump’s beneficial border policies, it has become such a huge issue.President Trump announced a rally in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, in May 2019. I had the whole suit and knew what time to get there to be in the front and, sure enough, I was third in line and got a seat right in the front. Then he ended up calling me up on stage at the rally.At that time I didn’t have any conventional social media. I had a conundrum: do I just put the suit back in the closet and never wear it again? I decided to basically become a meme for the campaign in real life. What am I going call myself – Wall Man? Well, that’s not what I want to be. Why not just Brick Suit? Simple.View image in fullscreenThe reason I picked that is it helps people remember that moment when the president of the United States picked someone at random out of the crowd at a rally and brought them up on stage, and that is not something that you would see typically in any other western democracy. You’re not going to see Macron do that. You’re not going to see anybody in England do that. It’s not going to happen in Germany. It’s not going to happen in Italy. It speaks immensely to President Trump and the connection he has with his supporters, that he has that level of trust in them, that he would do something like that.You’re with a group of people that you know share similar politics to you and, for many people, it’s one of the few spaces that they can actually discuss their politics without fear of censure.I look at it as being a uniquely American crowd: the people who are there support the idea of America. The phrase “America first” is often used. Especially lately, there’s been a lot of coverage about President Trump’s increasing polling support in the Hispanic and Black community. I look at those and I toss those labels out the window and I say, for myself, that translates as President Trump’s increasing support among American voters because that’s all they are. I’m not looking at it in terms of demographics.I find him to be charismatic speaker. In contrast to other politicians, he is willing to call a spade a spade, to say it like it is and to not be afraid.Let’s face it: he’s funny. He has a sense of humour. He knows how to employ it. He can employ it surgically or broadly or in many different ways but there’s no denying that he has a sense of humour that Americans relate to.I have worn the brick suit in San Diego and I intend to wear it again. San Diego is not quite as liberal as some other California cities. But I can tell you this, as someone who’s been wearing a brick suit and a simple Trump hat since 2018, my perception is the level of animosity towards overt expression of support for President Trump is significantly lower now in 2024 than it was in the 2020 election.Ronald Solomon, 65, an investment banker, was born in New Rochelle, New York, and is now based in Palm Beach, Florida. In 2016 he founded the Maga Mall, “your one-stop shopping experience for Maga and patriotic products”.View image in fullscreenI’m an active Republican. Back in 2016 I was actually backing Ted Cruz, and when Trump won the Indiana primary the writing was on the wall. When I went from one campaign to the other, the first thing I did was order hats for my volunteers. It was a given in my mind.I had a whole crew of people who were knocking on doors. I needed 50 “Make America great again” hats for them. The hats out there were either very expensive or total crap – most hats are made out of acrylic and polyester.I had 144 hats made. The finest quality at that time that was ever made. It was made of premium cotton twill like all my hats are on the website; I don’t make acrylic or polyester hats. The hats back then had little letters; my letters were big in times roman with the finest embroidery and thread there was.A couple of months after making those hats, I gave 50 away and then I had them left and started selling them. Then before you know it people wanted white ones and blue ones and black ones and I started tons of those and then doing shirts and all this stuff. It just took off.I realised early on when he won that election the hat was a symbol that there were other people that thought like they did. I’m sure a lot of those people were apathetic. At the time I lived in Nevada and I was a precinct captain and I was at the caucuses. I would say about 30% to 40% of the Trump voters were either crossovers from Democrats and independents or had never voted in their lives.Think about that. If everyone’s wearing the hats and people see “they think like me”, in close races like in Michigan and in Pennsylvania in Wisconsin, those hats made a difference. If it was not for the hats, he maybe even wouldn’t have become president.The Maga Mall is a very successful business and I don’t even count the money. My main objective in this company is to make sure I have the products; when a person calls and places the order they get it. That’s a whole world in itself. And going around the country and showing the product line.Our hats are unbelievable. We destroy the competition. There’s no comparison. I’m on the cutting edge. I’m always making new designs and then one, two, three, four months down the road you see they’re knocked off.View image in fullscreenNinety-nine per cent of the stuff I sell is mostly positive while if you look at the left they’re walking down these marches with the most hideous signs and the most hideous outfits, doing things like throwing blood on effigies. The left is much more negative at marches while I would say at the Trump rally everyone will be positive.It’s a lot of camaraderie and diversity of people from all walks of life. It’s also family-oriented. You don’t see that on the left. A lot of it is very spiritual, religious and patriotic as far as the flag is concerned, “God bless America”. As a matter of fact, I had a whole line of patriotic hats: “God bless America”, “In God we trust”, “We the people 1776”, “America First” – and people love that. Those are big sellers.Trump has got charisma. He’s got guts. He says what he’s gonna do and he delivers. This guy, I’ve never seen anything like it. This sitting in courtrooms with these kangaroo courts and facing jail terms and I see him personally – I go to Mar-a-Lago – and you see the guy and you’d think he doesn’t have a care in the world.Even in the dark days after January 6 – that nonsense trying to make it look like it was some massive planned insurrection, a bunch of crap – I knew this guy would never stop. Two days after that whole action I put in an order to make 50,000 2024 hats and related hats, right then and there. People thought I was nuts.I know this man: he is never stopping and I believe, like he believes, that election was stolen. You see these people with these mail-out ballots, who knows who got them? Anybody who truly believes there wasn’t massive fraud there, it’s nuts, and these voting machines, it’s crazy.Let’s cut to the chase. [Trump’s enemies] are trying to do everything and anything – they use taxpayers’ money to do it; I believe these people are totally corrupt.This group of people, whoever they are, ensured this man will become the next president of the United States. If they think they’re going to put him in a prison, well, they’ll create a Nelson Mandela.Trump knows who I am. I know who he is. Have we ever had a palsy-walsy get-together? Not really, but it’s pretty cool. Actually the last time I had lunch with him was like – my goodness gracious – 30 years ago. It was at Mar-A-Lago on the terrace; there was like 10 people at the table and he was a great guy, a regular guy. We had a good time.Editorial note: the Guardian does not endorse the views expressed in this article. The false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen due to widespread voter fraud was rejected in more than 60 lawsuits and by Trump’s own attorney general. More than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes in the January 6 US Capitol riot, ranging from misdemeanor offences such as trespassing to felonies such as assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. There is no evidence that the criminal prosecution of Trump in New York was politically motivated. More

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      Kamala Harris says she is ‘honored’ after earning enough votes to become Democratic presidential nominee – live

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      Kamala Harris has won enough votes from Democratic delegates to win the party’s nomination for president.The announcement was made by Jamie Harrison, the chair of the Democratic national committee, during a call with supporters.The online voting process ends on Monday, but Harris has crossed the threshold to have the majority of delegates’ votes.The vice president, in a Harris for President campaign call, said:
      I am honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
      Speculation about the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro has been whipped into a frenzy after Cherelle Parker, the mayor of Philadelphia, tweeted a video in support of “@KamalaHarris for president and @JoshShapiroPA for VP!”Some have argued that the video was created to celebrate a yet-to-be-made announcement that Shapiro, an early frontrunner to be Harris’s running mate, has been formally invited to complete the Democratic ticket.But a member of Parker’s staff told the New York Times that the video was released as a show of support for Shapiro, who the mayor hopes will be chosen, not as a celebration.Elon Musk’s political action committee has been using user data to help Donald Trump win the presidential election in November, according to a CNBC investigation published on 2 August.According to reporter Brian Schwartz, ads from the America Pac, a group co-founded by Musk in spring, show a young man lying in bed, getting a text with a video of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. When the young man replies asking how he can help he’s met with a link to the America Pac.If the person who visits the Pac’s site is from a battleground state like Michigan, Arizona or Nevada, instead of being directed to a voter registration page for their state, they are directed to a page where they fill in personal information like their address and phone number.
      So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation,” Schwartz writes. “The combination of owning a social media company that gives him an enormous platform to push his political views, and creating a PAC with effectively unlimited resources, has made Musk, for the first time, a major force in an American presidential election.
      Read the entirety of Schwartz’s article here.Here’s more from Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, who described Donald Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris’s racial identity as “shameful”.Shapiro, speaking after an event in Cheney, said:
      I think it’s offensive. And it is more of the same from Donald Trump. He attacks other people based on what they look like, or who they pray to, who they love, the way they were raised. He tries to divide Americans, because quite frankly, he struggles with uplifting all Americans.
      The criminal case charging Donald Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 election defeat resumed after a nearly eight-month pause on Friday, after a supreme court opinion last month narrowed the scope of the prosecution.The case has been formally sent back to the US district judge, Tanya Chutkan, who is expected to decide in the coming weeks which aspects of the indictment constitute official acts and which do not.Last month in a significant victory for Trump, the court ruled that former presidents are entitled to broad immunity for official actions taken as president.Judge Chutkan will have to decide how to apply the high court’s opinion to the remainder of the case.That includes whether key allegations in the case – including that Trump badgered his vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject the official counting of electoral votes showing that he had lost the election – can remain part of the prosecution or must be discarded, according to AP.The Secret Service takes “full responsibility” for the events that led up to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last month, the acting director of the agency said on Friday.In a press conference in Washington, Ronald Rowe, who replaced Kimberly Cheatle after she stood down from her position as director of the service after Trump was shot, said: “This was a failure.”He said agents should have had better cover of the vantage points, from where a 20-year-old gunman ended up firing shots at the former president while he spoke at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last month.The gunman, Thomas Crooks, fired several shots from a rifle after positioning himself on a warehouse roof that Rowe admitted “was not far” from the stage where Trump was speaking. Crooks was killed by government counter-snipers. Rowe said agents should have had “eyes” on that position beforehand.“We should have had better coverage on that roof line,” he said.The agency is conducting an internal investigation and Rowe said disciplinary action would be taken if necessary, and procedures will be changed.The sentencing for Hunter Biden’s firearms case, in which he was found guilty of three felonies, has been set for 13 November – just eight days after the November election.Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, is the first child of a sitting president to be convicted of a felony. He was found guilty by a jury in Wilmington, Delaware of lying on a gun application form when buying a Colt Cobra 38 Special revolver in 2018 by not disclosing his drug addiction, and then illegally owning the gun for 11 days, before his then girlfriend, the widow of his late brother Beau, threw it in a garbage bin.The charges carry a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and fines of $750,000, although such punishments are rare for first time offenders.Kamala Harris’s campaign has described the moment she secured enough votes from Democratic delegates to win the party’s nomination for president as “historic” in a “critical” election year with “sky-high stakes”.Harris has unified the party and generated “unprecedented enthusiasm from across the broad and diverse coalition that sent her and President Biden to the White House,” a statement from the campaign said, adding:
      Today’s milestone comes on the heels of a groundbreaking $310 million July fundraising haul – the best grassroots fundraising month in presidential history, with two-thirds coming from first-time donors.
      Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison has released the following statement after Kamala Harris secured enough votes to win the Democratic presidential nomination:
      In the span of just a few weeks, Vice-President Kamala Harris continues to break records – and today is no different. With historic momentum and a groundswell of support, Vice-President Harris has officially met the threshold, securing a majority of the delegates she needs to receive the Democratic nomination on Monday.
      With the support of more than 50% of all delegates just one day into voting, vice president Harris has the overwhelming backing of the Democratic party and will lead us united in our mission to defeat Donald Trump in November.
      But I want to be clear – there is still time for delegates to cast their ballots. I encourage every single delegate across the country to meet this moment and cast their ballot so that we head into our convention in Chicago with a show of force as a united Democratic party.”
      Upon being asked for his reaction to JD Vance comparing him to a “really bad impression of [Barack] Obama”, Pennsylvania’s governor Josh Shapiro, who is reported to be one of Kamala Harris’s top contenders for vice-president, said:
      Barack Obama was probably our most gifted orator of my time, so that’s kind of a weird insult …
      I’ll say this about JD Vance: it’s really hard being honest with the American people when you’re not being honest with yourself. He is the most inorganic candidate I think I have ever seen …
      This guy is not exactly off to a good start. It is clear that Trump really has buyer’s remorse. So, if he wants to sling insults in my direction, which I’m not even sure is an insult, let him do it. Bring it on. I’ll be ready for whatever JD Vance throws my direction.”
      After securing enough votes to win the Democratic presidential nomination, Kamala Harris took to X, saying: “This campaign is about people coming together.”
      I am honored to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. I will officially accept the nomination next week.
      This campaign is about people coming together, fueled by love of country, to fight for the best of who we are.
      Kamala Harris’s campaign has accused Donald Trump of being “too scared to debate” after the former president questioned why he should participate in a debate.Trump, in an interview with Fox Business, was asked if he regretted debating Joe Biden in June. Trump replied:
      If I didn’t do the debate, they’d say, ‘Oh, Trump’s you know, not doing the debate.’ It’s the same thing they’ll say now. I mean, right now I say, why should I do a debate? I’m leading in the polls, and everybody knows her. Everybody knows me.
      In response, the Harris campaign’s co-chair, Cedric Richmond, said:
      Donald Trump needs to man up. He’s got no problem spreading lies and hateful garbage at his rallies or in interviews with right-wing commentators. But he’s apparently too scared to do it standing across the stage from the Vice President of the United States.
      He added:
      Since he talks the talk, he should walk the walk and – as Vice President Harris said earlier this week – say it to her face on September 10. She’ll be there waiting to see if he’ll show up.
      Kamala Harris told supporters that “we are going to win this election” and that it will “take all of us”.“We believe in the promise of America, the promise of freedom, opportunity and justice, not just for some, but for all,” she said.
      We each face the question: what kind of country do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion and rule of law, or a country of chaos, fear and hate? The beauty of our democracy is that we each, every one of us has the power to answer that question.
      Kamala Harris noted that it was the “tireless” work of the Democratic party’s delegates, state leaders and staff that was “pivotal in making this moment possible”.“Your dedication cannot be overstated,” she said.
      We love our country, we believe in the promise of America, and that’s what this campaign is about.
      Harris said she would officially accept the party’s nomination next week once the voting process ends, but that she was “happy” that she has enough delegates to secure it.
      Later this month, we will gather in Chicago, united as one party, where we’re going to have an opportunity to celebrate this historic moment together.
      Kamala Harris thanked the Democratic National Committee chair, Jaime Harrison, after he announced that she had secure enough votes from delegates to become the party’s nominee for president.Harris said she was “excited” for the future, but that the party has got “a lot of work to get there”. “It’s good work, we like hard work,” she told supporters in a call.This is a “people-powered campaign”, Harris said, as she acknowledged that she would not have reached this point without the party’s support and trust, for which she said she was “deeply grateful”.Kamala Harris has won enough votes from Democratic delegates to win the party’s nomination for president.The announcement was made by Jamie Harrison, the chair of the Democratic national committee, during a call with supporters.The online voting process ends on Monday, but Harris has crossed the threshold to have the majority of delegates’ votes.The vice president, in a Harris for President campaign call, said:
      I am honored to be the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States.
      The mayor of a Louisiana city near the state’s border with Texas abruptly resigned from her post days before authorities jailed her on suspicion of raping a boy while she served in office.Misty Roberts became the first woman to be elected as mayor of DeRidder in 2018, and she was well into her second term in the position when she handed in her resignation – with immediate effect – to the local city council on Saturday.The letter did not provide a reason for Roberts’s decision. But the day before, Louisiana state police had begun investigating an allegation that Roberts engaged in “sexual relations” with a minor who was too young to be able to legally provide consent, according to a news release from the agency.Investigators said they interviewed the alleged victim as well as one other child. Both confirmed Roberts “had sexual intercourse with one juvenile victim while employed as mayor”, the state police statement said.Read the full story here: Louisiana mayor arrested on child rape accusations after abrupt resignationThe Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, in the Punchbowl News interview, was asked whether he was disappointed in the selection of the Ohio senator JD Vance as the Republican party’s vice-presidential nominee.“It’s not my job to tell the president who he ought to run,” McConnell replied, adding:
      With regard to Sen. Vance … yeah, we have a different point of view.
      Without directly criticizing Donald Trump or Vance, McConnell said the foreign policy doctrine Vance and others in his party believe in is “nonsense”, adding:
      I mean, even the slogans are what they were in the 30s – ‘America First’.
      Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has compared Joe Biden’s proposed supreme court reforms to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.McConnell, in an interview with Punchbowl News published this morning, accused Biden of trying to undermine the high court.
      That’s what some people were trying to do January 6 – to break the system of handing an administration from one to the next. We can have our arguments, but we ought to not try to break the rules.
      Biden earlier this week unveiled a series of sweeping changes to the supreme court, including the introduction of term limits for justices and a constitutional amendment to remove immunity for crimes committed by a president while in office.In response, McConnell said the term limits proposed will end up “dead on arrival” in Congress.Kamala Harris’s campaign said that they will be hosting a call with “some special guests” at 12.34pm ET.The call will be livestreamed on the Democratic National Committee’s YouTube page.It remains to be seen if Harris herself will tune into the call, as well as who the special guests will be. More