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      Netanyahu is presiding over a sharp decline in the US’s pro-Israel consensus

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      Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of the House and Senate may look like a political victory: the prime minister of a foreign country speaking before Congress, only interrupted by multiple standing ovations. But the political events serving as a backdrop for the speech reveal Netanyahu’s political career, and the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus in the US, in sharp decline.At home in Israel, it’s virtually unthinkable that Netanyahu could have found such a supportive audience. A staggering 72% of Israelis want him to resign over failures that permitted the 7 October attacks by Hamas to succeed.And 72% of Israelis also support a deal to release hostages over the destruction of Hamas. Despite saying he is doing everything he can to “bring all our hostages home”, Netanyahu appeared to outright reject a hostage deal in his speech to Congress, declaring Israel “must retain overriding security control [in Gaza] to prevent the resurgence of terror, to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel”, a war goal the Israeli military says is unachievable and terms to which Hamas will not agree.Indeed, blatant falsehoods were scattered throughout his speech. He claimed “practically no civilians were killed in Rafah” (daily reporting shows women and children dead from Israeli air strikes on Rafah and surrounding areas), downplayed the role of Israel in creating famine conditions for much of Gaza’s population, and claimed that Israel helps “keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East”, conveniently omitting the 4,492 US service members who died in the Iraq war, a war Netanyahu lobbied Congress to undertake in 2002.While the speech was Netanyahu’s fourth address to Congress, the political landscape in Washington has shifted beneath his feet, creating a far less welcoming American public than the applause might suggest. Around half of House and Senate Democrats boycotted the speech while thousands of protesters demonstrated outside the Capitol building, revealing the steep drop in support for Israel’s war on Gaza over the past nine months.Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, 38% of voters said they were less likely to vote for him due to his handling of the war on Gaza. “Many core constituencies – including independents, swing state likely voters, and Democratic party activists – are angry at Biden’s unqualified support for the Israeli assault on Gaza,” said a report from the Century Foundation, the thinktank that commissioned the poll.While sentiments towards Israel are warmer within the Republican party – Israeli flags were visible on the floor of the Republican convention last week and Republican members of Congress led many of the standing ovations for Netanyahu’s speech – that support has increasingly coincided with hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to Republicans by the world’s richest Israeli, Israeli-US dual national Miriam Adelson, who alongside her late husband, Sheldon Adelson, topped the list of Republican donors since the late 2000s, raising questions about whether support for Israel is an issue of deep concern to the Republican base or simply a transaction required for campaign contributions.The election wins of Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky and Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from West Virginia (both Republican critics of US aid to Israel), suggest an appetite, or at least an acceptance, of a more balanced US-Israel relationship within Republican voters.Netanyahu’s trip to Washington, planned before Biden ended his campaign for re-election, is now set against the political uncertainty of how Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, will approach the relationship with Israel. The administration of which she is still a part of bled dangerous levels of support from its own base, particularly in vital swing states like Michigan, where 100,000 Arab and Muslim voters expressed their dissatisfaction with Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza by submitting “uncommitted” ballots in their Democratic primary.Pressure is building on the vice-president to distance herself from Biden’s “bearhug” strategy of Netanyahu and utilize the leverage the US holds over Israel: threatening to turn off the spigot of munitions necessary for Israel’s war to drag on.The speech may have looked like a victory for an embattled Israeli prime minister but the real test of Netanyahu’s political gambit will only become clear as Harris sets the foreign policy agenda for her presidential campaign.If the boycott of the speech by Democrats, polling showing dissatisfaction with ongoing support for the war on Gaza, and protesters outside the Capitol were any sign of the political tides within the Democratic party, Harris may conclude that the time has come for greater daylight between the US and Netanyahu, distancing the US from the nearly 40,000 casualties suffered by Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli military, and a conditioning of US military aid to Israel on an end to the war on Gaza and Israeli participation in a deal to release hostages held by Hamas. Such a move would cast Netanyahu’s speech as a symbolic, and highly visible, breaking point in the bipartisan US support he has enjoyed for his entire political career.

      Eli Clifton is a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute and investigative journalist at large at Responsible Statecraft More

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      FBI director questions whether Trump was hit by bullet or shrapnel in shooting

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      Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has raised questions about whether Donald Trump was actually shot by a bullet during the assassination attempt against the former president earlier this month or whether he was instead struck by shrapnel.During a hearing on Wednesday in Washington, before the House judiciary committee, Wray told lawmakers that it was not clear what precisely caused the injury to Trump’s ear during the shooting at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month.The burst of gunfire from a shooter on a roof with a sightline to the stage and crowd killed one rally-goer and left others wounded.“There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray testified. “As I sit here right now, I don’t know whether that bullet, in addition to causing the grazing, could have also landed somewhere else.”Shortly after the shooting, Trump said in a statement on Truth Social that he had been shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of his right ear.“I knew immediately that something was wrong in that I heard a whizzing sound, shots, and immediately felt the bullet ripping through the skin,” the former president wrote. “Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.”After the shooting, Trump released a memo about his recovery from Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor and current Republican representative, but the former president has not allowed the medical professionals who treated him to talk publicly about his condition.On Thursday, Jackson responded to Wray’s testimony in a post on X, calling Wray’s comments to lawmakers “absolutely irresponsible” and “politically motivated” against Trump.“What little credibility he may have left is GONE after recklessly suggesting Trump might not have been hit from a bullet,” Jackson said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It was a bullet,” he added. “I’ve seen the wound!”Wray also testified to lawmakers on Wednesday that the shooter who had attempted to assassinate Trump, and was then shot dead himself by government snipers, had searched online for information about the 1963 assassination of former president John F Kennedy. More

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      Kamala Harris memes are all over the internet. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?

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      In a series of events over 24 hours that would have been unimaginable a week ago, Kamala Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, secured the backing of Joe Biden and key leaders, brought in a record-breaking $81m, and became the face of brat summer.“kamala IS brat,” pop star Charli xcx declared on Sunday, a reference to her new album released last month that has launched countless memes declaring it the season of the brat. A brat, in the British singer’s own words, is “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.Brat was having a moment, Kamala was having hers, and the two came together in cultural union via a tidal wave of posts – largely from younger Americans – like videos with the pop star’s music over clips of the vice-president’s frequently shared coconut tree remarks.Harris’s campaign quickly embraced the memes, adopting a lime green Twitter/X background in the same aesthetic of the Brat album. The internet went wild.Now the question is what it might mean for Harris’s chances come November. Will tweets and TikToks turn into votes?While this year’s election drew plenty of memes and online engagement, there was little excitement about the rematch of Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 78, and instead a pervasive sense of cynicism.Young people had reported feeling disengaged and apathetic about the upcoming elections, and US politics in general. In a US News-Generation Lab poll of voters 18-34 from early July, 61% of respondents agreed that the upcoming election would be among the most important in history, but nearly a third said they would probably not or definitely not vote.Of those who said would not or were unlikely to vote, 40% said it was because they didn’t like any of the candidates, and 15% said they were turned off by politics.After Biden’s widely criticized debate performance, and amid growing calls for him to bow out of the election, there was a flurry of Harris-related memes. The KHive, as Harris fans have been called, seemed rejuvenated by the renewed interest around her.The memes and posts surged after Biden announced that he would step aside, and that he was endorsing Harris, including videos of her with music from Chappell Roan and Kendrick Lamar, and along the way the tone of the content shifted from oftentimes just ironic and silly to something more earnest.“It went from being just shitposting to shitposting into reality and as it became more and more real people also understood what power this could actually hold and what this could actually mean,” said Annie Wu Henry, a digital and political strategist who has worked with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman.She views the furor around Harris among younger voters as both about Harris but also something larger. “It’s about the potential for something new, it’s about a political party that can be agile and make adjustments based on what they are hearing from the people.”“I think it is really exciting and bringing a lot of energy and hope to folks that haven’t felt this way in some time and for young people that maybe haven’t had a moment of hope like this in politics before.”The buzz online is bringing results, said Marianna Pecora, the communications director for Voters of Tomorrow. The gen-Z led liberal advocacy organization had its best fundraising day in history, Pecora said, and saw more apply to join a chapter or start a chapter in two days than in the last month combined.Priorities USA, one of the largest liberal Super Pacs, told the Guardian on Tuesday that after Biden endorsed Harris, it saw a notable increase in the share of young people who said they plan to vote in the upcoming election.It’s also brought a sense of joy and excitement not often seen in politics, Pecora said, particularly for a generation that came of age during one of the most difficult periods in recent history from growing political turmoil and the rise of far-right extremism in the US to Covid-19.“We’ve had this history as young people not seeing a system that really works for us and not having too many figureheads that are really fighting for us,” said Pecora, who was 13 when Donald Trump was elected.While polls show that Harris – like Biden and Trump – has struggled with favorability ratings, she has helped elevate issues that are important to younger voters, including abortion rights and Israel’s war on Gaza.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris, a biracial woman who is set to be the first Asian American and black woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, is an appealing candidate to gen Z voters, who are among the most diverse generation in US history, said Yalda T Uhls with the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at the University of California, Los Angeles.This year 41 million members of gen Z will be eligible to vote, and nearly half of them are people of color.A report from the center published last year that surveyed people from ages 10 to 24 found that adolescents are most interested in hopeful uplifting content of people beating the odds. “I feel like that’s the Kamala story,” Uhls said. That same study also found that in their entertainment, older teens were most interested in seeing a Black woman as the hero of a story.“Maybe young people have been waiting for this. They have been waiting for a candidate they feel is representative of them,” said Uhls, who co-authored the report and also grew up with Harris.But while Harris’s entry into the race has energized young voters, they also want to see real policy proposals that align with the issues most important to them, experts say.“Whether this translates to a large surge in youth voter turnout in November may come down to whether the new Democratic nominee also can convince young voters of a credible plan to address the existential threats they see in their everyday lives,” said Sarah Swanbeck, the executive director of the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, pointing to the climate crisis, protections for democratic institutions, and economic policy that will improve social mobility.The events of this week have marked a special moment for young women, said Pecora. Young women for decades have been the arbiters of culture, she said, and this moment is tying the culture of young women to the vice-president.“We know we’re the margin of victory and that is translating into how this is happening online. It’s no coincidence to me that young women who have become the base of the Democratic party, who are fighting for reproductive freedom, their culture is the culture that is becoming mainstream with this movement,” she said. (Conservatives have frequently railed against the growing number of unmarried women supporting Democrats.)“It’s showing that we have power and sway in this world where young women are typically told wait your turn or let a man do it.”Uhls, the UCLA scholar who has studied gen Z, said she predicts the enthusiasm of the last few days will make a difference in November.“I think it’s going to translate to votes,” Uhls said. “Young people get most of their news and political information from social media. Some of them have written about this but they are thrilled that someone is actually marketing to them.”Still, Harris’s path to the White House is tough. The latest poll from PBS News/NPR/Marist found that if the election were today, 46% of voters would support Trump and 45% would vote for Harris, a close race though within the margin of error. The outcome of November’s election is expected to be decided by a few thousand voters in a handful of swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.But, Pecora said, the discourse about the election that is unfolding online is also happening elsewhere between friends and family at dinner tables and in classrooms, Pecora said.“That engagement is taking itself into people’s conversations, into their homes, into their communities. That’s where voters are turned out,” she said. “The energy that’s happening online is not siloed to the internet. It translated to dollars, and those dollars are translating to real organizing capacity and an ability to turn out young voters in November.”And so, Democrats say, there’s hope. More

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      The Republican party remains the party of denying women human rights | Rebecca Solnit

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      The Republican party of the United States remains the party of denying women fundamental human rights. The US press as a whole remains the instrument of softening up or ignoring this reality.“Trump has long been criticized for his public treatment of women,” ran a CNN headline. “The ones in his life argue he’s different in private.” What follows is a puff piece in which prominent Republican women say nice things about him, and his history of alleged sexual assault is mentioned several paragraphs down.The first Mrs Trump is no longer in his life, though she’s buried on his New Jersey golf course, but she charged him with raping her – at home, in private – in her 1990 sworn divorce testimony. E Jean Carroll is only casually in his life, but she won a civil lawsuit against him for sexual assault in the privacy of a department store dressing room and a second one for public defamation, and he owes her tens of millions of dollars for these cases. CNN does get around to mentioning Carroll in passing, but praise from Trump’s protege Sarah Huckabee Sanders and his lawyer and daughter-in-law get the lionesses’ share of attention, and headlines are often all viewers read.Rape is an assault on the victim’s body but also on her (or his or their) agency and right to bodily autonomy, though the assault on agency and autonomy can and does take many forms – and the Republican party and its candidates for president and vice-president support many of them. The Republican party has uncomplainingly offered up an adjudicated rapist as their presidential candidate and rallied behind a vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, who has shown great enthusiasm for denying women basic rights and safety and sometimes survival.One of the crucial ways Vance has sought to deny women basic rights is by what has been dubbed menstrual surveillance. In 2023, the federal Department of Health and Human Services proposed a revision to medical privacy regulations “to shield the protected health information of patients seeking lawful reproductive health care from disclosure for the purpose of criminal, civil, and administrative investigations”. Vance was one of the eight Republican senators who filed a letter of protest declaring: “Under the Proposed Rule, however, States would be forced to cede their powers to investigate criminal abortion-related activity.”In other words, the revision would protect women’s right to privacy around pregnancy and birth control-related healthcare, and Vance was having none of it. As Talking Points Memo put it: “The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. But to enforce these laws or know when there’s something to enforce you really need access to medical records. You need to know and be able to prove when a woman was pregnant and then, before the end of normal gestation, stopped being pregnant.”In other words, to carry out these laws, the state needs to criminalize being female and fertile and put those who are under surveillance. Vance is an anti-abortion hardliner who supports a national abortion ban with no exceptions. He’s also taken to sneering at women who don’t have children, which is, I suppose, consistent with his attacks on reproductive rights and advocacy of regressive gender roles.Another way Vance supported violence against women is with his infamous 2022 declaration that women should stay in violent marriages for the sake of the kids. “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,” but ending them “didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages”.It’s an astonishing statement if an insufficiently unusual one, the idea that the heterosexual two-parent household is somehow so magically beneficent that even if the dad is beating the mom, it’s better for the kids than having an unbattered mom and a peaceful home.Vance defended his statement by saying: “In fact, modern society’s war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse,” which is outrageously untrue. The feminist movement brought attention to domestic violence, created domestic violence shelters, put pressure on law enforcement to address that violence, and worked to give women the economic equality and rights that give them more power to leave abusers. The cumulative effect of these measures has, along with a new ethos recognizing that women are possessed of certain inalienable rights, reduced the incidence of this often-hidden crime.What breaks up families in which there is violence is the violence, not the victims’ ability to escape that violence. The man who is beating his wife is often also beating his children, and intimate-partner violence all too often ends in the victim’s death, especially if there are guns on hand. One parent killing the other is bad for the kids, too, and male partners are the leading cause of death for pregnant women and women who have recently given birth in the USA, which the right-to-life advocates should show an interest in – but don’t.This is why coercive control, including intimate-partner violence (IPV), and abortion are not separate issues. The man who is beating his wife may also be raping her or engaging in sexual and reproductive coercion, in this country where feminists first made marital rape a concept and then got it recognized by the law (only in 1993 did all US states recognize marital rape, but there are still many loopholes, including states that don’t recognize marital rape in cases when the partner was unconscious or incapacitated). And that brings us back to reproductive rights.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that reproductive coercion includes “explicit attempts to impregnate a partner against her will, control outcomes of a pregnancy, coerce a partner to have unprotected sex, and interfere with contraceptive methods”.The college’s website adds: “One quarter of adolescent females reported that their abusive male partners were trying to get them pregnant through interference with planned contraception, forcing the female partners to hide their contraceptive methods,” and: “One study found that women with unintended pregnancies were four times more likely to experience IPV than women whose pregnancies were intended.”In other words, a lot of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies are the result of male coercion, not, as the right would have you believe, female carelessness. Which is why abortion is a crucial part of reproductive rights; a person whose pregnancy was the result of the violation of her rights needs to retain the right to terminate it. Pregnancy, as many women who have borne children have reminded us recently, is a life-changing experience that can result in incapacitation, lasting injury, economic hardship including the inability to work and care for other children, and sometimes death, especially in the absence of adequate medical care.The denial of access to abortion is bringing women in states such as Texas and Idaho to the brink of death – as the journalist Jessica Valenti recently reported.Idaho women are weekly being airlifted to states where they can receive life-saving healthcare and doctors are sometimes recommending they buy evacuation insurance. Valenti also reports: “Rape victims are being denied emergency contraception in medical centers and hospital emergency rooms” because the war against reproductive rights is expanding to go after in-vitro fertilization and birth control, two more ways women can choose whether and how to have children.In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes of his grandfather: “I couldn’t believe that mild-mannered Papaw, who I adored as a child, was such a violent drunk.” In the next sentence, he blames his grandmother: “His behavior was due at least partly to Mamaw’s disposition,” adding: “she’d fight back. In short, she devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell,” itemizing more of her violence than his, though he does mention in passing the grandfather also gave his own daughter a black eye when she tried to break up a fight between the couple. It’s not hard to imagine this poor woman first impregnated by this man when she was 13 stayed with him for lack of better options; it’s clear Vance approves of her staying.The November election is a referendum on major issues – the climate, the economy, the survival of democracy in America, the makeup of the supreme court – other than the personalities of the candidates on the top of the ticket. The horse-race journalism and its relentless focus on Biden’s age and oratorical shortcomings obscured that. But those personalities connect to the issues, and while perhaps Biden’s decades of leadership on legislation on violence against women is no longer relevant, the bill itself is.It was reauthorized and expanded in 2022 to add protections for Native American, trans and immigrant women, and to address cyberstalking and cyberporn. The majority of Republicans in the House and Senate voted against it. On the other hand, we now have a race for the presidency between a prosecutor and a man convicted of 34 felonies, with a Yale law school graduate on the ticket with Trump: the JD Vance of 2016 tweeted: “What percentage of the American population has @realDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” but the JD Vance of 2024 has made it clear he doesn’t care. More

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      Republican attacks on Kamala Harris to get ‘as ugly and bigoted as they can’

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      For Barack Obama there was “birtherism” and a name they said sounded like a specific Middle East terrorist. For Hillary Clinton there was “Lock her up” and merchandise that said, “Trump that bitch”, “Hillary sucks but not like Monica” and “Life’s a bitch: don’t vote for one.”Rightwing playbooks deployed in past election campaigns are being dusted off for an all-out assault against Vice-President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee aiming to become the first Black woman and first person of south Asian descent to be US president.“It’s obvious that the Republicans are going to play the race and gender card, which we’ve seen already in some of the attacks on social media,” said Tara Setmayer, a Black woman who is co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee. “It may be catnip for their Maga base but it will be a turnoff for the moderate voters in the battleground states that will determine this election.”Harris’s sudden ascent after 81-year-old Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election has upended the race for the White House, giving Democrats a much-needed jolt of energy and instantly turned the tables on Republicans on the question of age: Donald Trump, 78, is now the oldest presidential nominee in history.Having built a campaign against Biden, Republicans are hastily recalibrating and racing to define Harris, 59, before she can define herself. They intend to tie her to Biden’s immigration policy, which they say is to blame for a sharp increase last year in the number of people crossing the southern border with Mexico illegally.The Trump campaign has been quick to brand her Kamala “Border Czar” Harris because, in March 2021, she was put in charge of the administration’s diplomatic campaign to address the “root causes” of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.Trump also regularly blames migrants who are in the US illegally for fuelling violent crime, even though studies show that immigrants are not more likely to engage in criminality. His oft-repeated phrase “Biden Migrant Crime” is now defunct.A second line of attack will revolve around the economy. Public opinion polls consistently show Americans are unhappy with high food and fuel costs as well as interest rates that have made buying a home less affordable.Make America Great Again, a Super Pac backing Trump, has run an ad accusing Harris of hiding Biden’s infirmity from the public, and it seeks to pin the administration’s record solely on her. “Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead,” the narrator says.Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant and pollster, said: “It’s difficult to identify a state that Kamala Harris will carry that Joe Biden wouldn’t. She inherits many of the negative attitudes about the Biden-Harris administration from criticisms of their handling of the economy and inflation to her primary responsibility: illegal immigration.”Harris had one of the most liberal voting records during her time in the Senate and ran to the left of Biden on some issues in the 2020 Democratic primary election. She also hails from California, a state constantly demonised as elitist and “woke” in Republican rhetoric. This opens her to criticism to which Biden, a moderate from Delaware with a history of bipartisanship, was immune.In a phone call with reporters on Tuesday, Trump said: “She’s the same as Biden but much more radical. She’s a radical left person and this country doesn’t want a radical left person to destroy it. She’s far more radical than he is. She wants open borders. She wants things that nobody wants. You take a look at the electric car mandate – everything.”The former president added: “If she becomes president, Kamala Harris will make the invasion exponentially worse, and just like she did with San Francisco, just like she did with the border, our whole country will be permanently destroyed.”Trump is willing to go lower. Known for using offensive language to attack his opponents, he gave supporters at a rally in Michigan on Saturday a taste of the insults he is likely to fling at Harris in the coming days. “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” he said. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”View image in fullscreenAmerica has been here before. Obama faced hostile scrutiny over his origins and name. The conspiracy theory that he was born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible for the US presidency, was promoted by Trump as he began his foray into national politics. In 2020 Trump claimed that he had “heard” that Harris – born in Oakland, California to an Indian mother and Jamaican father – “doesn’t qualify” to serve as vice-president.This week, the spectre of birtherism has returned. Tom Fitton, president of the rightwing activist group Judicial Watch, asked his 2.6 million followers on the X social media platform: “Is Kamala Harris eligible to be president under the US Constitution’s ‘Citizenship Clause?’” He was far from alone in pushing such arguments.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris’s racial identity is already being questioned. Erick Erickson, an influential conservative radio host in Atlanta, Georgia, tweeted: “Kamala Harris is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who married a Jewish man. Her experience is the American dream and melting pot, but not really the black experience, particularly that in southern swing states like Georgia and North Carolina.”When Clinton ran for president in 2016, she received sexist comments “on a constant basis”, her former aide Huma Abedin later recalled. Trump himself remarked: “I just don’t think she has a presidential look. And you need a presidential look. You have to get the job done.”Republicans’ focus on Harris is proving no less personal, from mispronouncing her name and mocking her laugh (“Cackling Kamala”) to invoking diversity, equity and inclusion programmes by suggesting that she would be the “first DEI president”. At a campaign rally Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, compared his service in the Marine Corps and small business ownership to Harris “collecting a government paycheque for the last 20 years”.And Megyn Kelly, a rightwing podcaster, tweeted without evidence: “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics and most women (and men) may learn that and see it for what it is: evidence of an unqualified political aspirant getting ahead based on smthg other than merit.”Kelly was referring to the claim that Harris got a career boost by having an affair with a married man, the California politician Willie Brown. In fact Brown was separated from his wife during the relationship, which was not a secret. He wrote an article in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in 2020 under the headline: “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?”David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said attacks “emerging right out of the box are that she is unqualified, that she was a diversity hire pick in the first place and the only reason the party is sticking with her is because of her race and gender. That’s a way of trying to undermine her and her qualifications for the office.“The second thing is the idea that she was actually the power behind the throne and part of an effort to cover up Biden’s actual condition and was pulling the strings all along, which is obviously not the case and is a sexist trope too.”Brock, a former conservative journalist turned Democratic operative, predicted: “The sex attacks will probably be more insidious because they have a racial subtext to them. The same playbook that we saw in 16 we’ll see again and probably even more eagerly because the right wing has gotten more Maga, more extreme in the years since Hillary ran.”Blatant misogyny and racism could alienate the very swing state voters that Trump needs for victory. But even if he is advised to tone down such rhetoric, an entire army of influencers and pundits are ready to flood the zone on his behalf.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and Tea Party activist turned Trump critic, said: “Trump himself is going to have a hard time running against her because he doesn’t know how to deal with someone like her. But Trump’s cheerleaders in the media know exactly what to do and they’ll go down this ugly, sexist, racist road.“They’ll make up stuff about how Kamala Harris rose in her career. Their key to winning – and I know this because I used to do some of this – is to get as ugly and bigoted as they can to implicitly and explicitly get people pissed off about who she is.” More

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      Biden’s address was a moving piece of political theatre and a rebuke of Trump

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      There was 6 January 2021, and a violent coup attempt by a president desperately trying to cling to power. Then there was 24 July 2024, and a president explaining why he was giving up the most powerful job in the world.Joe Biden’s address on Wednesday night was a moving piece of political theatre, the start of a farewell tour by “a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings” who entered politics in 1972 and made it all the way to the Oval Office. For diehard Democrats it was a case of: if you have tears, prepare to shed them now.The speech was also a rebuke of his predecessor Donald Trump’s authoritarian impulses in both word and deed. Although he never mentioned his predecessor by name, Biden laid out two radically different visions of the US presidency set to clash again in November.Last Sunday the 46th president bowed to a chorus of fellow Democrats questioning his age and mental acuity and announced that he would drop out of the presidential election. On Wednesday, recovered from the coronavirus, the 81-year-old made his first public remarks to explain why.Speaking against the backdrop of window, two flags, gold curtains and family photos including his late son Beau, Biden began by citing the Oval Office portraits of former presidents Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.“I revere this office but I love my country more,” he said. “It’s been the honour of my life to serve as your president. But in the defence of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title.”It was a definitive rebuke of Trump, a man who has slapped his name on countless buildings and for whom the title is everything. Backed by the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, the Republican nominee is intent on an expansion of presidential power. But by giving power away – in what Hillary Clinton described “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime” – Biden demonstrated he will always be the bigger man.Indeed, despite having months to prepare for this contingency, the Trump campaign has been struggling to find a strategy to take on the new Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. Perhaps they were not quite able to believe that Biden would step aside because they know Trump never would.Biden wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, blue tie and US flag pin. There were no major gaffes but there were slight stumbles over certain words. Sitting off-camera to his left were his son Hunter and other family members. According to a pool reporter in the Oval Office, at one point Biden’s daughter Ashley reached for the hand of her mother, Jill Biden, who was sitting next to her.(Trump, who claims he recently “took a bullet for democracy”, watched the address on his plane after a characteristically mendacious and narcissistic campaign rally in North Carolina.)Biden is the first incumbent to announce he would not seek re-election since Lyndon Johnson in 1968, although some historians argue that Johnson secretly hoped for a breakthrough in the Vietnam war and for his party to come begging for him to make a comeback.Still, some of the parallels are irresistible. For Johnson, coming after the younger, more glamorous John F Kennedy, remarkable legislative achievements at home were clouded by the war in Vietnam. For Biden, coming after the younger, more glamorous Barack Obama, remarkable legislative achievements at home have been clouded by the war on Gaza. Just as in 1968, expect protests at next month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago.But whereas Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election at the end of a long and winding 40-minute speech, Biden, recovering from Covid-19, first did so via Twitter/X. And he quickly anointed a successor in Harris.Biden reportedly has mixed feelings about being pushed aside by some of those same Democrats now singing his praises. The presidency had been his lifelong ambition – he first ran in 1988 – and his victory in 2020 was a vindication of everyman strivers everywhere. On top of that, he did the job rather well. Yet now they were telling him enough. In his Oval Office address, he buried those resentments deep in his soul, though he could not resist a pointed comment about his qualifications.“I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future, all merited a second term,” he said. “But nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy. That includes personal ambition.”He made a call for generational change in a country facing its first presidential election without a Bush, Clinton or Biden on the ticket since 1976. “I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.“It’s the best way to unite our nation. I know there was a time and a place for long years of experience in public life. There’s also a time and a place for new voices, fresh voices, yes, younger voices. And that time and place is now.”That may seem to leave Biden a lame duck for his final six months. But he vowed to continue to pursue his agenda and slipped in an important line about calling for reform of the supreme court – a court that became embroiled in ethics scandals, overturned the constitutional right to abortion and declared presidents immune from prosecution for official acts.“The great thing about America is, here kings and dictators do not rule – the people do,” Biden concluded. “History is in your hands. The power’s in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. You just have to keep faith – keep the faith – and remember who we are.”In 2020, the year of a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and Trump trauma, Biden’s signature empathy born of personal tragedies made him the right man at the right time to heal hearts and defend democracy. In 2024, his time has passed. That he came to recognise it reluctantly, and decided to pass the baton, taught a lesson about the presidency that Trump will never learn. More

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      Netanyahu says Israel aiming for ‘total victory’ in Gaza as number of protesters arrested in Congress – live

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      Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel will achieve “total victory” and that it will settle for “nothing less”.Total victory, he says, means that Israel will fight until it destroys Hamas’s military capability, end its rule in Gaza and bring all the hostages home.The Israeli prime minister moves on to talk about a post-war Gaza, and says that “a new Gaza could emerge” the day after Hamas is defeated.He says that his vision for a post-war Gaza is of a “demilitarized and de-radicalized Gaza”, adding:
      Israel does not seek to settle Gaza. But for the foreseeable future, we must retain overriding security control there to prevent the resurgence of terror, to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.
      Netanyahu says that Gaza should have a civilian administration “run by Palestinians who do not seek to destroy Israel” and that a new generation of Palestinians “must no longer be taught to hate Jews”.He notes that the terms “demilitarization” and “deradicalization” were applied to Germany and Japan after the second world war, and that applied to Gaza “can also lead to a future of security, prosperity and peace”. “That’s my vision for Gaza,” Netanyahu says.Connecticut senator Chris Murphy reacted to Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, asserting that it’s out of bounds to suggest that anyone who objects to the war in Gaza is a “Hamas sympathizer.”“That speech was, as I expected, a setback for both the U.S.-Israel relationship and the fight against Hamas” Murphy said on X.During his address, Netanyahu likened that the thousands of protestors demonstrating at capitol hill as Hamas sympathizers. “Many anti-Israel protesters choose to stand with evil,” he said. “Many stand with Hamas.As Netanyahu address Congress today, demonstrators marched in Washington DC, calling on the US to end arms sales to Israel and to implement an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.Our video editors have this report of Netanyahu’s visit to DC:Here are images from around Capitol Hill today, where thousands gathered to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza ahead of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress.The Democratic party has announced the rules for the nomination of its presidential candidate, setting the stage for Kamala Harris to be officially chosen as the party’s standard bearer in early August before the party’s convention in Chicago begins later that month.According to rules adopted today by the convention’s rules committee, candidates will declare their intention to stand by 27 July, and then voting can begin virtually by 1 August at the earliest. Delegates will convene in Chicago beginning 19 August “to approve the Democratic Party platform, have ceremonial and celebratory votes on the nominees, and host historic acceptance speeches from the new Democratic ticket and voices throughout the Party”, the Democrats said in a statement.Harris, who announced her candidacy on Sunday, has said she has enough delegates to win the party’s presidential nomination, and no other major candidate has come forward to challenge her.Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian American in Congress, held up a sign accusing Benjamin Netanyahu of genocide during his speech today.She had this to say about it:Separately, Axios reports that about half of the Democrats elected to the House and Senate opted to skip the Israeli prime minister’s speech:Jean-Pierre also elaborated on Joe Biden’s timeline for revealing his decision to end his bid for a second term.The president, who had been recovering from Covid-19 at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, announced the decision with a post made on X, without warning, on Sunday afternoon. Jean-Pierre shed a little bit more light on the lead-up to that:
      He met with a small group of advisers on Saturday evening and with his family, and was thinking through how to move forward. Sunday afternoon, he made that decision. It was in a very short period of time, as you can imagine. And then at 1.45 [pm], he got on the phone with some of his assistants, assistant to the president, some advisers. He let them know, and then minutes later, a letter went out.
      So, it was in a very short period of time that the president was able to think about this and make a decision.
      Over at the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is holding the first briefing with reporters since Joe Biden announced he would end his bid for a second term.Besides a letter he released on social media, the president has not elaborated on his decision, but plans to do so when he addresses the nation from the Oval Office at 8pm ET, Jean-Pierre said.“The decision that he made on Sunday was about putting country first, was about his party and was about the American people,” Jean-Pierre said.“He’s going to be on camera later today, obviously, to address the American people from the Oval Office, because of this moment and how big this moment is. He wants to do that. He wants to make sure that Americans hear directly from him.”Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that every man, woman and child in Gaza is receiving more than enough food.“The prosecutor of the international criminal court has shamefully accused Israel of deliberately starving the people of Gaza: This is utter, complete nonsense. It’s a complete fabrication. Israel has enabled more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. That’s half a million tons of food!” he said, wagging his finger.According to data released by the United Nations, a total of 25,183 trucks entered Gaza before Israeli forces stormed the Rafah crossing in May, which affected both crossing points in the southern part of the enclave. The same UN data says a total of just 2,835 have entered Gaza through Kerem Shalom and Erez in the north in the months since, a fraction of the need.In total, per UN data, 28,018 aid trucks have entered Gaza since the war began. A little more relief entered via the US-built pier, but this has not been seen as a successful effort to boost the supply of aid.The US pier was also intended to overcome what the relief organisation Oxfam called, in a report earlier this year, Israel’s deliberate blocking of aid.Sally Abi Khalil, the organisation’s Middle East and north Africa director, added: “Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort but are actively hindering it.”Earlier this year, the world’s leading authority on famine, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, warned that Gaza was on the brink of famine if no action were taken.In a report in June, the organisation’s famine review committee said that as there had been some increase in goods allowed into northern Gaza, that “the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring”.However, they added that the risk of famine remains. They added: “The situation in Gaza remains catastrophic and there is a high and sustained risk of Famine across the whole Gaza Strip. It is important to note that the probable improvement in nutrition status noted in April and May should not allow room for complacency about the risk of Famine in the coming weeks and months. The prolonged nature of the crisis means that this risk remains at least as high as at any time during the past few months.”The US Capitol Police now say six people were arrested for disrupting Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in the House chamber:The US Capitol Police said five people who disrupted Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech from a gallery in the House chamber were arrested, while officers deployed pepper spray on protesters outside the Capitol:Photographers on the scene caught images of Capitol police deploying pepper spay:Benjamin Netanyahu also uses his address to praise Donald Trump, and says he wants to thank the former president “for his leadership in brokering the historic Abraham accords”.He thanks Trump for “recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights”, for “confronting Iran’s aggression” and for “recognizing Jerusalem as our capital and moving the American embassy there”.The status of both Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are disputed under international law.Israelis were “relieved” when Trump “emerged safe and sound from the dastardly” assassination attempt on him, Netanyahu says.Benjamin Netanyahu says that he is “confident” that the US and Israel will “vanquish the tyrants and terrorists” that threaten both countries.He says that as Israel’s prime minister, he vows that Israel “will not relent” or bend, no matter “how difficult the road ahead”.He says that Israel will continue to work with the US and its Arab partners on the “noble mission” to “transform a troubled region” full of “repression, poverty and war” into an “oasis of dignity, prosperity and peace”.Israel will always remain the US’s “indispensable” ally, “loyal friend” and “steadfast partner” through thick and thin, Netanyahu says.
      Thank you America. Thank you for your support and solidarity. Thank you for standing with Israel in our hour of need. Together, we shall defend our common civilization together, we shall secure a brilliant future for both our nations. More