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      in US Politics

      Trump unable to make $454m bond in civil fraud case, say his lawyers – as it happened

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      Donald Trump has been unable to post a bond covering the full amount of his $454m New York civil fraud judgment against him, his lawyers said in a court filing.The filing on Monday states that obtaining a bond has proven to be “a practical impossibility”, adding that “diligent” efforts made to secure a bond have included “approaching about 30 surety companies through 4 separate brokers” and “countless hours negotiating with one of the largest insurance companies in the world.”These efforts have proven that “obtaining an appeal bond in the full amount” of the judgment “is not possible under the circumstances presented,” the filing states.With interest, Trump owes $456.8m. In all, he and co-defendants including his company and top executives owe $467.3m, according to AP. To obtain a bond, they would be required to post collateral worth $557m, Trump’s lawyers said.
      Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, told Joe Biden that he will send a team of Israeli officials to Washington to discuss a potential military operation in Rafah in southern Gaza, the White House said. Biden and Netanyahu spoke by phone on Monday in their first known interaction in more than a month, in which the US president questioned the Israeli leader about establishing a “coherent and sustainable strategy’ to defeat Hamas.
      Donald Trump’s lawyers told a New York appellate court that it’s impossible for him to post a bond covering the full amount of his $454m civil fraud judgment while he appeals.
      Trump’s claim to be immune from criminal prosecution for acts committed in office is rejected by 70% of American voters, and 48% of Republicans, according to a new poll.
      Trump is expected to enlist Paul Manafort, his former 2016 presidential campaign manager who he pardoned, to help with the Republican national convention, according to multiple reports.
      The supreme court heard oral arguments Monday in a case that could upend the federal government’s relationship with social media companies and with lies online. Plaintiffs in Murthy v Missouri argue that White House requests to take down coronavirus misinformation on Twitter and Facebook constitute illegal censorship in violation the first amendment.
      Congress is once again running up on yet another critical government funding deadline, with a dispute over border security funding threatening to force a shutdown of vast swaths of the federal government.
      Gavin Newsom, the Californian governor, has postponed his State of the State address while his signature mental health and homelessness initiative Prop 1 remains too close to call.
      The father of Laken Riley has objected to how he says his daughter’s death is “being used politically” ahead of the upcoming presidential and congressional elections.
      Geoff Duncan, the former Georgia lieutenant governor, said he is withdrawing his name from consideration for a third-party 2024 presidential ticket with the centrist group No Labels.
      Mike Johnson, the House speaker, asked fractious fellow Republicans to “cool it” and stop fighting each other during primary elections as he seeks to maintain some sort of control over a caucus at the mercy of the far right.
      The supreme court rejected an appeal from Couy Griffin, a former New Mexico county commissioner who was removed from office over his role in the January 6 insurrection.
      The son of the late supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a decision to give Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch an award named for his mother a “desecration” of her memory.
      Barack Obama has held talks with Rishi Sunak as the former US president paid a “courtesy visit” to Downing Street during a trip to London.The pair are understood to have discussed a range of subjects during an hour-long meeting, including one of the prime minister’s favourite topics, artificial intelligence.Obama, who served two terms in the White House from 2009 to 2017 before he was succeeded by Donald Trump, was in London as part of work with his Obama Foundation, which oversees a scholarship programme and other initiatives.The prime minister’s official spokesperson said Obama had made “an informal courtesy drop-in as part of his trip to London”. He added:
      I think President Obama’s team made contact and obviously the prime minister was very happy to meet with him and discuss the work of the Obama Foundation.
      The two held what were understood to be largely one-to-one discussions in the prime minister’s study. Obama briefly paused at the door of No 10 to wave to the cameras but no photos were released from what Downing Street said was a private meeting.A conservative social media influencer has been charged with storming the US Capitol and passing a stolen table out of a broken window, allowing other rioters to use it as a weapon against police, according to an AP report.Isabella Maria DeLuca, 24, was arrested last Friday in Irvine, California, on misdemeanor charges, including theft of government property, disorderly conduct and entering a restricted area.During the January 6 riot, DeLuca posted to social media, writing “Fight back or let politicians steal and election? Fight back!”Videos captured her entering a suite of conference rooms inside the Capitol through a broken window. She passed a table out of the window and then climbed back outside through the same window. A table that another rioter threw at police resembled the one that DeLuca passed out the window, according to court records unsealed on Monday.More than 1,300 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related crimes. More than 800 of them have been sentenced, with roughly two-thirds getting a term of imprisonment ranging from a few days to 22 years.The supreme court heard oral arguments Monday in a case that could upend the federal government’s relationship with social media companies and with lies online.Plaintiffs in Murthy v Missouri argue that White House requests to take down coronavirus misinformation on Twitter and Facebook constitute illegal censorship in violation the first amendment.The arguments began with Brian Fletcher, the principal deputy solicitor general of the justice department, making an argument that none of the government’s communications crossed the line from persuasion into coercion. He also pushed back against descriptions of events in lower court rulings, stating that they were misleading or included quotations taken out of context. Fletcher said:
      When the government persuades a private party not to distribute or promote someone else’s speech, that’s not censorship, that’s persuading a private party to do something that they’re lawfully entitled to do.
      The justices, most prominently conservatives Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, questioned Fletcher on where exactly the line is between threatening companies and persuading them. Fletcher defended the government’s actions as part of its broader ability to try and reduce public harm. Fletcher said:
      The government can encourage parents to monitor their children’s cell phone usage or internet companies to watch out for child pornography on their platforms, even if the fourth amendment would prevent the government from doing that directly.
      Joe Biden’s phone conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “businesslike”, the White House’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.During the call, the president warned Netanyahu that an Israeli military operation in Rafah would deepen anarchy in Gaza, Sullivan told reporters.Biden also questioned Netanyahu over a lack of a “coherent and sustainable strategy’ to defeat Hamas, “rather than Israel go smashing into Rafah,” he said.The two leaders agreed teams from each side would meet in Washington to discuss a prospective Rafah operation, Sullivan said. This meeting could take place this week or next, he said, adding that no Rafah operation would proceed before the talks.Donald Trump is expected to enlist Paul Manafort, his former 2016 presidential campaign manager who he pardoned, as a campaign adviser later this year, according to multiple reports.Manafort has been in discussions for several months with Trump’s team to help with the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, although his potential role at the party’s convention has not been decided, the Washington Post reported.Manafort was sentenced to more than seven years in prison as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation into Trump’s associates. Trump pardoned him in the final weeks of his presidency.Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has told Joe Biden that he will send a team of Israeli officials to Washington to discuss a potential military operation in Rafah in southern Gaza, the White House said.White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters:
      We’ve arrived at a point where each side has been making clear to the other its perspective.
      Biden and Netanyahu spoke by phone earlier on Monday, their first known interaction in more than a month as the rift deepens between the two leaders over the war in Gaza.The son of the late US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a decision to give Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch an award named for his mother a “desecration” of her memory.Discussing protests made to the Dwight D Opperman Foundation, which gives the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership award, James Ginsburg told CNN:
      I don’t want to speak to what our other plans might be if the foundation doesn’t see the wisdom of desisting and ending this desecration of my mother’s memory. But I will say that we will continue to fight this.
      The second woman appointed to the US supreme court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent 27 years as a justice, becoming a hero to American liberals. She died aged 87 in September 2020 and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, the third conservative justice installed by Donald Trump.Ginsburg helped establish the award colloquially known as the RBG, saying it would honour “women who have strived to make the world a better place for generations that follow their own, women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility, and who care about the dignity and well being of all who dwell on planet Earth”.Previous recipients have included Barbra Streisand and Queen Elizabeth II. Last week, the Dwight D Opperman Foundation announced a five-strong list it said was chosen from “a slate of dozens of diverse nominees” but which included just one woman.Former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan said he is withdrawing his name from consideration for a third-party 2024 presidential ticket with the centrist group No Labels.“After careful deliberation, I have withdrawn my name from consideration for the No Labels presidential ticket,” Duncan said in a statement on Monday.
      It was an honor to be approached, and I am grateful to all those who are engaged in good-faith efforts to offer Americans a better choice than the Trump vs. Biden re-match.
      No Labels has been struggling to field a so-called “unity ticket” to provide voters with an alternative to Donald Trump and Joe BidenDuncan becomes the latest lawmaker to turn down No Labels, a list that includes Republican former presidential candidate Nikki Haley, Republican former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema.California’s governor Gavin Newsom has postponed his State of the State address while his signature mental health and homelessness initiative Prop 1 remains too close to call.With more than 95% of votes counted, the statewide ballot measure that would restructure mental health funding in the state is slightly ahead – but still too close to call. The measure, which has faltered despite no funded opposition, is a key piece of the governor’s plan to address both the mental health and homelessness crises. It would redirect some of the state’s mental health funds toward housing and residential treatment facilities for severe mental health and substance use disorders, and raise billions via a bond.Fiscal conservatives have balked at the measure’s borrowing costs – but Prop 1 was also criticized by local officials, because it would defund community-based programs, and disability rights advocates, who object to its funding of locked-door psychiatric institutions and involuntary treatment.Still, while healthcare companies, and unions backing the state’s prison guards and construction workers, have funded a $14.3m campaign to sell the measure to voters, opponents had only raised $1,000. The “no” campaign conceded last week, but there’s still a chance the measure could fail.The governor was banking on Prop 1 to fund broader plans to combat homelessness, which include the Care court program, which will empower families, providers and outreach workers to ask state courts to compel people with certain severe mental disorders into treatment programs, and SB43, which expands the group of people who can be placed in involuntary psychiatric holds or forced to undergo medical treatment.Ahead of the election on 6 March, Newsom had been confident – telling the LA Times, “I think it’s going to win overwhelmingly.”Now, the governor’s federal PAC, Campaign for Democracy, is seeking volunteers to help Democrats who have had their ballots rejected, for reasons such as forgetting to include a signature, to help them correct issues and have votes counted.Donald Trump’s failure to secure a bond to cover a $454m judgment in his New York civil fraud case means he is inching closer to the possibility of having his properties seized, Reuters reports.The former president must either pay the sum out of his own pocket or post a bond to stave off the state’s seizure while he appeals the judgment against him last month for misstating property values to dupe lenders and insurers.Trump’s lawyers said on Monday that they’d approached 30 companies without success to make the bond.A bonding company would be on the hook for any payout if Trump loses his appeal and proves unable to pay.He must post cash or a bond within 30 days of the judge’s formal entry of the order on February 23 or risk the state seizing some of the Trump Organization’s assets to ensure New York attorney general Letitia James, who brought the civil case, can collect. Thirty days end on March 25.In a court filing, Trump’s lawyers urged a mid-level state appeals court to delay enforcement of the judgment, arguing the amount was excessive. It was unclear when the court, known as the appellate division, would rule.The Guardian adds that last month James said she will seize Trump’s assets if he doesn’t pay.US vice president Kamala Harris kicked off an event at the White House a little earlier to mark women’s history month.She was accompanied by Jill Biden and a dude who loves to describe himself as “Jill Biden’s husband”, as well as a dude who’s the Veep’s husband, and Maria Shriver, who is founder of the nonprofit organization the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement as well as the former first lady of California and a member of the Kennedy clan.Harris said that she’s visited 20 countries in her current position and firmly believes that the strength of a democracy is measured by how a nation values the women of its population, especially in the economy.She reminded those gathered, to huge cheers, that her scientist mother was in a tiny minority as a woman graduating in her day in such a discipline and yet her daughter is now the first female vice president of the US.Harris said that in the US, women carry around two thirds of student debt. She ran through a list of what the Biden administration is doing for women. But her key role in this election is to persuade voters to reelect the Biden-Harris team as the only path to protecting reproductive rights. She has been out on the trail railing against the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, which tilted far to the right under Donald Trump, overturning in the national right to abortion afforded under Roe v Wade and the ongoing hard right assault from many angles on reproductive choice.“In states across our nation we are witnessing a full on attack against hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights, including the right of women to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do,” she said at the White House a little earlier today.Reactions are bubbling up to the news that Donald Trump has been unable to obtain a bond to secure the $464m New York civil fraud judgment against him.Film producer and political commentator Keith Boykin metaphorically shakes his head at Republicans being prepared to nominate Trump for a second term when he can’t pay his fines.Actor Rob Reiner is even plainer.Various other reactions from the commentariat include “sad”, the “king of debt” may need to hold a fire sale, and a pic of Trump sweating.
      Donald Trump’s lawyers told a New York appellate court that it’s impossible for him to post a bond covering the full amount of his $454m civil fraud judgment while he appeals.
      Trump’s claim to be immune from criminal prosecution for acts committed in office is rejected by 70% of American voters, and 48% of Republicans, according to a new poll.
      The supreme court is hearing arguments in Murthy v Missouri, a case with the potential to radically redefine how the US government interacts with social media companies.
      Congress is once again running up on yet another critical government funding deadline, with a dispute over border security funding threatening to force a shutdown of vast swaths of the federal government.
      The father of Laken Riley has objected to how he says his daughter’s death is “being used politically” ahead of the upcoming presidential and congressional elections.
      Mike Johnson, the House speaker, asked fractious fellow Republicans to “cool it” and stop fighting each other during primary elections as he seeks to maintain some sort of control over a caucus at the mercy of the far right.
      The supreme court rejected an appeal from Couy Griffin, a former New Mexico county commissioner who was removed from office over his role in the January 6 insurrection.
      Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, accused the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, of treating his country like a “banana republic” after Schumer publicly broke with Netanyahu over his handling of the war and called for new elections in Israel.
      The father of Laken Riley, whom authorities suspect was murdered by an undocumented migrant in February, has objected to how he says his daughter’s death is “being used politically” ahead of the upcoming presidential and congressional elections.Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was beaten to death on the University of Georgia’s campus on 22 February. Republicans have claimed Riley’s slaying represents a failure of the Joe Biden White House’s border policies and have used the killing to push legislation which would make it easier for law enforcement to detain unauthorized migrants accused of theft.Jason Riley, Laken’s father, told NBC’s Today show:
      I’d rather her not be such a political – how you say – it started a storm in our country … It’s incited a lot of people.
      Jason Riley said that since his daughter was killed, “there’s people on both sides that have lashed out at [his and Laken’s mother’s] families”.Investigators have charged José Ibarra with Riley’s murder. The 26-year-old, who is originally from Venezuela, had previously been charged with two crimes in New York before being released, ​​US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement said, although officials in the state told the Associated Press they had no record of Ibarra being previously arrested.“I think it’s being used politically to get those votes,” Jason Riley said of his daughter’s death.
      It makes me angry. I feel like, you know, they’re just using my daughter’s name for that. And she was much better than that, and she should be raised up for the person that she is. She was an angel.
      Donald Trump is facing “insurmountable difficulties” in obtaining a bond to satisfy the $454m civil fraud judgment, his lawyers said in a court filing on Monday.In the filing, the former president’s lawyers wrote that Trump had “devoted a substantial amount of time, money, and effort” toward obtaining a bond but has “faced what have proven to be insurmountable difficulties in obtaining an appeal bond for the full $464 million.”Trump himself was ordered to pay $454m and with interest, owes $456.8m, according to AP. In all, he and co-defendants including his company and top executives owe $467.3m.They said Trump has approached 30 underwriters to back the bond, which is due by the end of this month, but that “very few bonding companies will consider a bond of anything approaching” the amount.The supreme court has rejected an appeal from a former New Mexico county commissioner who was removed from office over his role in the January 6 insurrection.Couy Griffin, a cowboy pastor and commissioner in Otero county in southern New Mexico, was kicked out of office in 2022 after he was sentenced to 14 days in jail and a $3,000 (£2,604) fine for misdemeanor trespassing during the Capitol attack. Griffin is the only elected official thus far to be banned from office in connection with the Capitol attack.The 14th amendment to the US constitution bars anyone who has participated in an insurrection from holding elected office.Though the supreme court ruled this month that states do not have the power to bar Donald Trump or other candidates for federal offices from the ballot, the justices said different rules apply to state and local candidates.House speaker Mike Johnson asked fractious fellow Republicans to “cool it” and stop fighting each other in displays of “member-on-member action” during primary elections as he seeks to maintain some sort of control over a caucus at the mercy of the far right, controlling the chamber by a mere two votes.“I’ve asked them all to cool it,” Johnson told CNN in remarks published Sunday.
      I am vehemently opposed to member-on-member action in primaries because it’s not productive. And it causes division for obvious reasons, and we should not be engaging in that. So I’m telling everyone who’s doing that to knock it off. And both sides, they’ll say, ‘Well, we didn’t start it, they started it.’
      Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, the far-right Trumpist firebrand pursuing such fights, effectively told the same outlet: “They started it.”“I would love nothing more than to just go after Democrats,” said Gaetz, who was last year the prime mover behind the historic ejection of Johnson’s predecessor as speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and who is now going after two more Republicans, Tony Gonzales of Texas and Mike Bost of Illinois.“If Republicans are going to dress up like Democrats in drag, I’m going to go after them too,” Gaetz said.
      Because at the end of the day, we’re not judged by how many Republicans we have in Congress. We’re judged on whether or not we save the country.
      Gonzales is under attack over a vote for gun safety reform, after the Uvalde elementary school massacre; over his positions on immigration reform; and for voting in favour of same-sex marriage. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump lawyers say he can’t post bond covering $454m civil fraud judgment

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      Lawyers for Donald Trump said on Monday he could not post a bond covering the full amount of the $454m civil fraud judgment against him while he appeals the New York ruling, because to do so was “a practical impossibility” after 30 surety companies turned him down.In a court filing seeking a stay on the payment, which is due on 25 March, lawyers for the former president and this fall’s presumptive Republican presidential nominee quoted Gary Giulietti, an executive with the insurance brokerage Lockton Companies, which Trump hired to help get a bond.The filing said: “Defendants’ ongoing diligent efforts have proven that a bond in the judgment’s full amount is ‘a practical impossibility’.”In an affidavit, Giulietti said few bonding companies would consider issuing a bond of the size required. The bonding companies that might issue such a huge bond would not “accept hard assets such as real estate as collateral” but “will only accept cash or cash equivalents (such as marketable securities)”, Giulietti wrote.“A bond of this size is rarely if ever seen. In the unusual circumstance that a bond of this size is issued, it is provided to the largest public companies in the world, not to individuals or privately held businesses.”Trump maintains he is worth several billion dollars and testified last year that he had about $400m in cash, in addition to properties and other investments.In January, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3m – on top of $5m awarded by a jury last year – to the writer E Jean Carroll, for defaming her after she accused him of sexual assault in a Manhattan department store in the mid-1990s, a claim a judge called “substantially true”. Trump posted a bond for that amount as he appeals.The civil fraud case against Trump was brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James.Trump also faces an unprecedented slate of criminal charges: 14 for subversion of the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden, 34 over hush-money payments and 40 regarding his retention of classified documents.Nonetheless, the 77-year-old dominated the Republican presidential primary and is poised to face Biden at the polls again in November, even as his legal problems deepen.In the New York civil fraud case, the judge, Arthur Engoron, ruled in February that Trump, his company and top executives – including his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr – schemed for years to deceive banks and insurers by inflating financial statements used to secure loans and make deals.Among other penalties, Engoron put strict limitations on the ability of the Trump Organization to do business.James, a Democrat, has said she will seek to seize assets if Trump is unable to pay the judgment.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWith interest, Trump and co-defendants including his company and top executives owe $467.3m. To obtain a bond, Trump lawyers said, they would be required to post collateral worth $557m.“A bond requirement of this enormous magnitude – effectively requiring cash reserves approaching $1bn – is unprecedented for a private company,” the Monday filing said.“Even when it comes to publicly traded companies, courts routinely waive or reduce the bond amount. Enforcing an impossible bond requirement as a condition of appeal would inflict manifest irreparable injury.”In February, a state appeals court judge ruled that Trump must post a bond covering the full amount to pause enforcement of the judgment. Trump is asking a full panel of the state’s intermediate appellate court to stay that judgment while he appeals. His lawyers previously proposed a $100m bond – an offer rejected by an appeals court judge, Anil Singh.Trump first appealed on 26 February, his lawyers asking the court to decide if Engoron “committed errors of law and/or fact” and if he abused his discretion or “acted in excess” of his jurisdiction.Trump was not required to pay his penalty or post a bond in order to appeal. Filing the appeal did not automatically halt enforcement of the judgment. Trump would receive an automatic stay if he were to put up money, assets or an appeal bond covering what he owes.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in Elections

      Trump calls for Liz Cheney to be jailed for investigating him over Capitol attack

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      Donald Trump has renewed calls for Liz Cheney – his most prominent Republican critic – to be jailed for her role in investigating his actions during the January 6 Capitol attack launched by his supporters in 2021, a move that is bound to raise further fears that the former president could persecute his political opponents if given another White House term.In posts on Sunday on his Truth Social platform, Trump said other members of the congressional committee that investigated the Capitol attack – and concluded he had plotted to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden – should be imprisoned.Those statements followed Trump’s previous comments that he would act like a “dictator” on the first day of a second presidency if given one by voters.Cheney, who served as vice-chair of the January 6 committee and was one of two Republicans on the panel, lost her seat in the House of Representatives to a Trump-backed challenger, Harriet Hageman, in 2022. She responded later on Sunday, saying her fellow Republican Trump was “afraid of the truth”.Trump has been charged with four felonies in relation to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. The US supreme court is considering Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity from prosecution in the case because he served as president from 2017 to 2021.Trump is also facing charges of 2020 election interference in Georgia, retention of government secrets after he left the Oval Office and hush-money payments that were illicitly covered up.On Sunday, Trump wrote that Cheney should “go to jail along with the rest” of the select January 6 House committee, which he sought to insult in his post on Truth Social by calling it the “unselect committee”.Trump founded Truth after he was temporarily banned from Twitter – now known as X – in the wake of the January 6 insurrection.In a separate Truth Social post, Trump linked to an article written by Kash Patel, a White House staffer in Trump’s administration. In the article, published on the rightwing website the Federalist, Patel claimed that Cheney and the committee “suppressed evidence” which “completely exonerates Trump” from charges that he had a hand in the January 6 insurrection.Patel, who was chief of staff in the defense department under Trump, said in December that if the former president was re-elected, his administration would “come after the people in the media” who had reported on Trump’s attempts to remain in power.Trump wrote: “She [Cheney] should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country! She illegally destroyed the evidence. Unreal!!!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe suggestions that Cheney and others should be targeted for their role in the January 6 investigation came after House Republicans released a report that they claim contradicts the testimony that Trump tried to grab the wheel of his presidential limousine on January 6 in his excitement to join his supporters attacking the Capitol.Cheney was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over the attack, which has been linked to nine deaths and sought to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.After a series of retirements and Trump-backed primary challenges, only two of those Republicans remain in office.Cheney’s father, former US vice-president Dick Cheney, released a video in 2022 urging Republicans to reject Trump.“He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big,” Dick Cheney, who served as George W Bush’s vice-president, said in the video. More

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      Trump predicts ‘bloodbath’ if he loses election and claims ‘Biden beat Obama’

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      Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump’s mental stability at a dinner in Washington DC on Saturday – just as the former president was making verbal gaffes at a campaign rally in Ohio as well as predicting a “bloodbath” if he met defeat in November’s election.Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, confused the crowd at an appearance in Vandalia by insisting that Biden had beaten “Barack Hussein Obama” in elections nationally that never took place.Freewheeling during a speech in which his teleprompters were seemingly disabled by high winds, Trump – a frequent critic of the 81-year-old Biden’s age and mental acuity – struggled to pronounce the words “bite” and “largest”. And he left the crowd scratching their heads over the reference to Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017 before taking the Oval Office from Trump in 2020.“You know what’s interesting? Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Every swing state, Biden beat Obama but in every other state, he got killed,” Trump said.Biden joked about Trump’s mental fitness at Saturday night’s Gridiron club dinner, a traditional “roast” attended by politicians and journalists dating to the 1880s.“One candidate is too old and mentally unfit to be president. The other one is me,” the president said.“Don’t tell him. He thinks he’s running against Barack Obama, that’s what he said,” Biden added, referring to several previous occasions when the 77-year-old Trump has confused the incumbent and presumptive 2024 opponent with his Democratic predecessor.Trump’s Ohio address, ostensibly in support of Bernie Moreno, his preferred candidate in the state’s Republican Senate primary Tuesday, also saw the former president returning to darker, more apocalyptic themes.The US, Trump insisted during comments about the auto workers and the car industry, was headed for “a bloodbath” if he was rejected again at the polls in favor of Biden.“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath. That’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” he said, without clarifying what he meant.Later, he added: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country, if we don’t win this election… certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”His comments prompted a statement from Biden’s re-election campaign that said “this is who Donald Trump is”.A Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said: “He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”Two Republicans who have been critical of Trump, however, came to his defense. Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday: “You could also look at the definition of bloodbath and it could be an economic disaster. And so if he’s speaking about the auto industry, in particular in Ohio, then you can take it a little bit more context.”Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice-president who this week refused to endorse his candidacy, made a similar argument. “[He] was clearly talking about the impact of imports devastating the American automotive industry,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation.Also during his speech, repeating unsubstantiated claims that foreign countries were “emptying” their prisons and mental institutions into the US, Trump took a familiar swipe at immigrants, calling some of them “animals”.“I don’t know if you call them people. They’re not people, in my opinion,” he said. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”Moreno, a Colombian immigrant who made a fortune from his car dealerships, joined in the nationalistic rhetoric, demanding that anybody who comes to the US learned to speak English.“We don’t need to vote in five different languages. We learn the language,” he said. “It means you assimilate. You become part of America – America doesn’t become part of you.”At other times during an often wild 90-minute address, Trump tossed out personal insults at political opponents. He called Biden “stupid” several times; made a vulgar reference to the first name of Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor in his criminal case for trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat; called Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom “new-scum”; and attacked the personal appearance of JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, the New York Times reported.He also attempted to blame the installation of the troublesome teleprompters on Biden, and he urged the event organizers not to pay the contractors.Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former US House speaker, condemned Trump’s comments during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s State of the Union.“You wouldn’t even allow him in your house, much less then the White House,” she said.“We just have to win this election, because he’s even predicting a bloodbath. What does that mean, he’s going to exact a bloodbath? There’s something wrong here. How respectful I am of the American people and their goodness, but how much more do they have to see from him to understand that this isn’t what our country is about?”Biden echoed the warnings during the non-comedic section of his address to the Gridiron dinner, attended by more than 650 guests, continuing to refuse to use Trump’s name, and calling him only “my predecessor”.“We live in an unprecedented moment in democracy,” Biden said. “An unprecedented moment for history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack. [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s on the march in Europe. My predecessor bows down to him and says to him, ‘do whatever the hell you want.’“Freedom is under assault. The freedom to vote, the freedom to choose and so much more. The lies about the 2020 election, the plot to overturn it, to embrace the January 6 insurrection, pose the greatest threat to our democracy since the civil war.“We live in an unprecedented moment of democracy, an unprecedented moment in history. Democracy and freedom are literally under attack.” More

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      in US Politics

      Mike Pence ‘respects the right’ of fellow Republicans who plan to vote for Trump

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      Two days after saying he would not endorse a second Donald Trump presidency, former vice-president Mike Pence on Sunday declared his esteem for fellow Republicans who plan to vote for his former boss anyway – and he declined to rule out eventually following suit.Pence reiterated on CBS’s Face the Nation that he “cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump” in November’s election for a number of policy-related decisions that he insisted were not personal between him and the former president whose supporters chanted for Pence to be hanged publicly as they attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.Yet Pence also told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, “I respect the right of Republican voters who have made it clear who they’re for, who they want to be our standard bearer” as Trump has dominated the GOP’s presidential preference primaries in various states to lock up the party’s nomination to challenge Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.He twice ignored Brennan when she asked Pence: “Would you vote for [Trump]?” And he explicitly said he did not want to suggest prominent Republicans such as Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and US House speaker Mike Johnson were walking away from their conservative principles by endorsing Trump, whose stance on abortion is less rightwing than that of his former vice-president.Trump “and I [just] have different styles”, Pence said as Brennan pressed him to elaborate on his disposition toward the man whom he served as vice-president after the 2016 election. “We’re different men. … And as I said before, it’s not personal.”Pence’s exchange with Brennan came after he confirmed to Fox News on Friday that he would refuse to lend his endorsement to Trump, though he also said he would not vote for Biden.Some pundits pointed to the statements as a potentially powerful if symbolic stand against the former president – at least until Pence clearly delineated their limits on Sunday.Friday’s remarks from Pence marked a reversal because last April he had promised to endorse Trump even if the former president was convicted in connection with any of the four criminal indictments pending against him for subversion of his 2020 defeat by Biden, retention of government secrets and hush-money payments.During his appearances on Fox News and CBS, Pence said he could not vouch for a second Trump presidency in small part because of the January 6 attack – though he avoided mentioning how Trump reportedly told aides that he agreed with his supporters who chanted for Pence to be hanged after refusing to block Congress’ certification of BIden’s electoral victory.Pence also alluded to the national debt – which ballooned during Trump’s presidency – and abortion rights. Trump has claimed credit for appointing three rightwingers to the US supreme court whose conservative majority eliminated federal abortion rights in 2022. But Trump has also warned that Republicans who support extreme state-level abortion bans have suffered a series of defeats against Democrats at the ballot box, a position that Pence on Sunday characterized as uncommitted to the “sanctity of life”.Furthermore, Pence criticized how Trump recently expressed his opposition to TikTok’s China-based parent company being forced by the US government to sell the platform.“The reason why I won’t endorse Donald Trump this year is because I see him departing from the mainstream conservative agenda that has defined the Republican party … and still has the best hope for the future of the country,” Pence said.Pence – Indiana’s former governor – at one point sought the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But the ex-congressman polled poorly and suspended his campaign in October, months before the first votes in the party’s primary were cast in the Iowa caucuses. More

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      ‘A campaign for vengeance’: critics warn of a radical second Trump term

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      The US election primary season is effectively over. Conventional wisdom holds that the two major candidates will now pivot towards the centre ground in search of moderate voters. But Donald Trump has never been one for conventional wisdom.Detention camps, mass deportations, capital punishment for drug smugglers, tariffs on imported goods, a purge of the justice department and potential withdrawal from Nato – the Trump policy agenda is radical by any standard including his own, pushing the boundaries set during his first presidential run eight years ago.“In 2016 he was still, in his own mind at least, positioning himself to be beloved by everybody,” said Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist. “That’s why ‘Drain the swamp’ was a more populist, appealing message to all sides of the aisle because everyone on some level felt like Washington’s broken, Washington’s left us behind.“Now you flash-forward to 2024 and we’re getting a much darker version of Donald Trump, one who seems to be driven by imaginary grievances from the 2020 election. There’s nothing unifying about that message in any way; it’s incredibly self-centred. This is a campaign for vengeance. In a lot of ways he is Ahab and Moby Dick is the United States of America.”Eight years ago Trump, seeking to become the first US president with no prior political or military experience, was running with a clean slate. If anything, there was a suspicion that his background as a thrice-married New York celebrity implied some ideological fluidity and latent liberal instincts.But he announced his candidacy in June 2015 by promising to build a wall on the southern border, using xenophobic language to portray Mexicans as “criminals” and “rapists” and promising to “make America great again”.During the campaign he described international trade deals as “a disaster” and called for increased tariffs on imports. He promised sweeping tax cuts and vowed to repeal Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations, describing climate change as “a total hoax”.Trump pledged to nominate supreme court justices opposed to abortion and, in one TV interview, suggested that women who have abortions should be punished. With backing from the National Rifle Association, he opposed gun safety reforms.Overseas, the Republican candidate deployed the slogan “America first”, questioning the Nato alliance while calling for improved relations with Russia. He vowed to destroy the Islamic State and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”.Trump did implement his first attempt at a Muslim ban almost immediately after taking the Oval Office in January 2017, prompting protests, airport chaos and a long legal battle in the courts. The supreme court ruled in June 2018 that the third iteration of the law could go into full effect, meaning considerable restrictions on Muslim travellers entering the country.Trump failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but his presidency was hugely consequential in other ways. His $1.5tn tax cut added to the national debt and, research has shown, helped billionaires more than the working class. The US pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump reshaped the federal judiciary and appointed three supreme court justices who would be instrumental in ending the constitutional right to abortion.He botched the response to a coronavirus pandemic that has now left more than a million Americans dead, initially underplaying the threat and later suggesting that patients might inject bleach as a cure. In the summer of 2020, Trump is said to have wanted the US military to shoot peaceful protesters in Washington during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations.In the aftermath of his 2020 election defeat, and dozens of criminal charges against him, Trump’s extremism has broadened and deepened as he heads into an electoral rematch with Joe Biden. He won the Republican primaries with ease, prompting commentators to warn of “collective amnesia” and “the banality of chaos” as many voters seemingly become numb to his demagoguery.However, an AP VoteCast poll found six in 10 moderate Republicans in New Hampshire and South Carolina were concerned that Trump was too extreme to win a general election.View image in fullscreenFor example, he now argues that presidents should have total immunity and openly threatens the guardrails of American democracy. “I only want to be a dictator for one day,” he told supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, earlier this year.He has said he would try to strip tens of thousands of career employees of their civil service protections as he seeks to “totally obliterate the deep state”. Given his rage at the FBI and federal prosecutors pursuing criminal cases against him, Trump may target people linked to those prosecutions for retribution.His signature issue, border security, is once again taking centre stage with record levels of migrants caught crossing into the US. In response, he has pledged to launch the biggest deportation effort in American history. This would involve far-reaching roundups and detention camps to hold people while they await removal, the New York Times reported. He has also refused to rule out reinstating a Muslim travel ban and a hugely controversial family separation policy.Trump further wants to build more of the border wall – his first administration built 450 miles (724km) of barriers across the 1,954-mile (3,144km) border, but much of that replaced existing structures. He also wants to end automatic citizenship for children born in the US to immigrants living in the country illegally, an idea he flirted with as president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFormer Republican congressman Joe Walsh said: “He’s even uglier in his language now. He’s even more cruel in his approach. He’s gotten much more extreme, which you would think means, oh my God, how stupid politically, because he needs people in the middle. But it is big issue and Democrats have never understood how important immigration and the border are and so Trump feels as if he can demagogue it in even more of an extreme fashion.”Trump has called for the death penalty for drug smugglers and those who traffic women and children. In a broader anti-crime push, he says he will require local law enforcement agencies to use divisive policing measures including stop-and-frisk. Last year, he told a rally in Anaheim, California: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”Under the mantra “Drill, baby, drill”, Trump says that he would increase oil drilling on public lands and offer tax breaks to oil, gas and coal producers. He would again exit the Paris climate accords, end wind subsidies and eliminate environmental regulations.Trump has suggested that he is open to making cuts to the social security and Medicare welfare programmes. But one area in which he has hinted at moderation is abortion, publicly acknowledging that the national ban favoured by some Republicans would be electoral kryptonite, although it was reported last month that he privately expressed support for a 16-week limit with exceptions.Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “His campaign has been smart to float the 16-week ban because I think most Americans fall somewhere between 16 and 20 weeks as something they can live with. If he basically says the federal government will not try to do a six-week ban, we’re not going to come after a foetal heartbeat bill – so if you live in a swing state like Michigan that has codified abortion, I’m not coming after you – that is strategically a smart position. But it would be considered a modification to the centre on abortion by Trump.”On foreign policy, Trump claims that even before he is inaugurated, he will have settled the war between Russia and Ukraine. Last week, after visiting the former president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Hungary’s autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said Trump promised him that he will end Russia’s war with Ukraine by not giving “a single penny” in aid.The Republican nominee also says he will continue to “fundamentally re-evaluate” Nato’s purpose and mission. At one recent rally, he said he would “encourage” Vladimir Putin’s Russia to attack Nato allies who do not pay their bills. And he says he will institute a system of tariffs of perhaps 10% on most foreign goods.Sometimes it can all seem like campaign bluster unlikely to survive the scrutiny of advisers, Congress or the courts. But whereas Trump’s 2016 win took everyone by surprise, perhaps including him, resulting in a first term marred by infighting and hastily written executive orders, this time there are allies who consider a second term is possible, or even probable, and are ready to hit the ground running.Trump’s campaign and groups such as the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute thinktanks are assembling Project 2025 policy books with detailed plans. Groups of conservative lawyers are sizing up what orders Trump might issue on a second presidency’s first day. With lessons learned, his administration could be even more ruthless and efficient.Lanhee Chen, a fellow in American public policy studies at the Hoover Institution thinktank in Stanford, California, said: “Some of the general framing and themes around what it is he wants to do are relatively consistent. What is different this time around is that there’s more of an architecture and infrastructure supporting a lot of these policy proposals.“If you look at the ecosystem of organisations that’s involved in helping him think through what a second term agenda would look like, it’s much more robust in 2024 than it was in 2016. So I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that the substance is all that different or somehow more extreme. It’s just there’s a lot more people who are thinking about it. Some of them are authorised; some of them are probably not authorised.”Critics of Trump warn that, while Trump himself has few core beliefs, he would effectively become a vehicle for extremists to push a far-right agenda wildly out of step with the majority of Americans. Reed Galen, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said: “He is an empty vessel for these other people around him who do have very specific policy ideas, most of them rooted in straight authoritarianism or some noxious mix of authoritarianism and Christian dominionism.“He doesn’t care. For all of it, it’s a means to an end. If I win do these people help me or do they hurt me? Do they give me more control? Do they give me less control? Do they give me more access to making sure I’m never going to go to jail, that I can persecute and prosecute my political enemies, that I can make life harder for the media?”Galen added: “In many ways, he is the leader of the torchlight parade but he’s being taken arm in arm and pushed from behind by a bunch of very noxious individuals with what I would call fundamentally anti-democratic and un-American ideology.” More

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      Among the exvangelicals: Sarah McCammon on faith, Trump and leaving the churches behind

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      For Sarah McCammon, “it was really January 6, watching people go into the Capitol with signs that said ‘Jesus saves’ and crosses and Christian symbols” that made her finally decide to write about her evangelical upbringing and her decision to leave it behind.“I wanted to tell my story,” she says.As a national political correspondent for NPR, McCammon tells many stories. Her first book, The Exvangelicals, is not just a work of autobiography. It is also a deeply reported study of an accelerating movement – of younger Americans leaving white evangelical churches.McCammon grew up in the 1980s and 90s in Kansas City, Missouri, then went to Trinity College, an evangelical university in Deerfield, Illinois. Now, she chronicles the development of her own doubts about her religion, its social strictures and political positions, while reporting similar processes experienced by others.For many such “exvangelicals”, things began to come to a head in 2016, when Donald Trump seized the Republican presidential nomination with a harsh message of hatred and division – and evangelical support.McCammon says: “When I was hired by NPR to cover the presidential campaign, I found myself pretty quickly at the intersection of my professional life and my personal background, because I was assigned to the Republican primary. I was happy about that, because I kind of knew that world.It made sense. I figured I’d be covering Jeb Bush, his waltz to the nomination. But it didn’t turn out that way.“So much of the story of the Republican primary became about Donald Trump and white evangelicals. What were they going to do? How were they going to square evangelical teachings with his history and his character?”As McCammon watched, those evangelicals embraced a three-times married icon of greed, a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women while demonising migrants, Muslims and more.For McCammon, evangelical support for Trump was then and is now a matter of simple power politics – about how he offers a way to maintain a position under fire in a changing world – buttressed by the appeal of Trumpian “alternative facts” familiar to churches that have long denied the science of evolution, ignored the role of racism in American history and taken myriad other positions at odds with mainstream thought.View image in fullscreenMcCammon had “this whole connection to this world”, having grown up “in a very evangelical, very conservative family, very politically active”. But “in a lot of ways, I think I got into journalism to get away from some of that. I didn’t want to work in an ideological space, theological or political. I didn’t want to be an advocate, I felt very uncomfortable with the pressure to make everybody believe what I believed. And I did not even feel sure.”Nonetheless, as Trump tightened his grip, McCammon was drawn back in, becoming “fascinated because I was in my mid-30s, I had some distance from my childhood and I felt I knew what questions to ask and anticipated some debates that would come up.“So after 2016, I spent a few years reflecting on where the country was and what had happened: on the evangelical embrace of Trump. And as I thought more about it, I thought maybe there’s something I want to say about this. I wanted to tell my story.”As it turned out, a lot of former evangelicals of McCammon’s generation were telling their stories too.Like other modern social and political labels – Black Lives Matter and MeToo, for example – the term “exvangelicals” first came to prominence as a hashtag around 2016, the year the writer Blake Chastain launched a podcast under the name. Much of McCammon’s research for her book duly took place on social media, tracking down exvangelicals using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share and connect.But McCammon’s own story forms the spine of her book. Her parents remain in the church. She and her first husband married in the church. It wasn’t easy to sit down and write.“When I was finishing the draft, I sent [my parents] several key sections,” she says. “Frankly, the sections I thought would be hardest for them. I wanted to do that both as their daughter and as a journalist, because in journalism, we usually give people a chance to respond. And so, they didn’t want to be quoted.”In the finished book, McCammon’s parents are quoted, one striking example a frank exchange of messages with her mother about LGBTQ+ rights.“They’re not thrilled,” she says. “But I did take their feedback into account. They didn’t fundamentally dispute anything, factually …skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I hope it comes through in the book that this is not an attack on my parents. I talk about my childhood because I want to illustrate what it was like to grow up inside the evangelical milieu of that time. And based on my conversations with lots of other people, I don’t think my experiences are unique.”McCammon’s grandfather was surely close to unique: a military veteran and a neurosurgeon who had three children before coming out as gay. At first largely excluded from McCammon’s life, later a central influence, he died as McCammon was writing.She says: “I make him such a central character because he was a central part of my experience of realising that there was a bigger world out there – when he was one of the only non-evangelical or non-Christian people I had any regular contact with, growing up. For my family he was always a source of concern and consternation and worry and prayer but also he was an incredibly accomplished individual, and he was somebody I think my whole family admired and was just proud of – at the same time that we prayed for his soul.“And so that was a crack for me in everything that I was being told.”View image in fullscreenMcCammon still believes, though she does not “use a lot of labels”. Her husband is Jewish. Shaped by her Christian upbringing, she has “slowly opened up my mind, as I’ve gotten older”, through talking to her husband and to people in “the progressive Christian space”. She can “read the Bible when I want to”, and does.Asked how she thinks The Exvangelicals will be received, she says “there are kind of three audiences for this book.“For exvangelicals, or people who have wrestled with their religious background, whatever it may be, I hope that they will feel seen and validated, and feel like there’s some resonance with their story, because I think there is kind of a common experience, even though the details are different.“For those like my husband, who when I met him had very little connection to the evangelical world, and are maybe a little confused by it, or maddened or frustrated by it, I hope the book will provide some insight and maybe even empathy, [helping] to understand how people think, why they think the way they think, and also the fact that evangelicalism is a massive movement and within it there are lots of different people with lots of different experiences.“The most difficult one is evangelicals. I hope those who are still firmly entrenched in the movement will read it with an open mind, and maybe some empathy. I think there are a lot of boomer parents out there, not just mine, who are trying to figure out why their kids have gone astray.“And I don’t think being an exvangelical is ‘going astray’. I think it’s about really trying to live with integrity. In some ways, it’s like: ‘You taught us to seek the truth. And so it’s what a lot of us are doing.’”
      The Exvangelicals is published in the US by St Martin’s Press More

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      TikTok may be on borrowed time in the US, but it still holds a Trump card | John Naughton

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      Last week, the US House of Representatives, a dysfunctional body that hitherto could not agree on anything, suddenly converged on a common project: a bipartisan bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app to an owner of another nationality, or else face a ban in the US, TikTok’s largest market.American legislators’ concerns about the social media app have been simmering for years, mostly focused on worries that the Chinese government could compel ByteDance (and therefore TikTok) to hand over data on TikTok users or manipulate content on the platform. A year ago, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, told Congress that TikTok “is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government – and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns”.These fears were amplified by the raging popularity of TikTok among US users. It has upwards of 170 million of them and their addiction to it has bothered Mark Zuckerberg and his empire for the very good reason that TikTok is the only other social media game in town. Six of the world’s 10 most downloaded apps last year were owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent. But TikTok, beat all of them except Instagram to the top spot.TikTok is ferociously addictive, at least for people under 30. What bothers Meta most is that TikTok extracts far more granular data from its users than any other platform. “The average session lasts 11 minutes,” writes blogger Scott Galloway, “and the video length is around 25 seconds. That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session, with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.”To date, public discourse about the platform has been pretty incoherent – as one critic pointed out: “From policymakers completely talking past each other to the media falling into false binaries when discussing TikTok and a possible ban, too many narratives on the issue have been contradictory, full of logical leaps, or incredibly reductive.” But two main themes stand out from the hubbub. One is that TikTok gathers incredibly detailed personal data on its users (data that may find its way to the platform’s Chinese parent); the other is that it may be a propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist party (CCP).The first is plausible but overegged. As the Economist puts it: “If Chinese spies want to find out about Americans, the country’s lax data protection laws allow them to buy such information from third parties.” The second proposition – that TikTok may be an efficient conduit for propaganda and misinformation – looks spot-on, though. After all, about a third of under-30s in the US regularly get news on TikTok and a recent study has found grounds for thinking that the platform already systematically promotes or demotes content on the basis of whether it is respectively aligned with or opposed to the interests of the CCP.And here’s where the question of what happens to TikTok takes on geopolitical and domestic political dimensions. On the former, it’s highly likely that the prospect of TikTok separating from ByteDance and thereby slipping out of the control of the CCP does not appeal to Beijing. So this congressional bill (which passed overwhelmingly in a floor vote on Wednesday) looks like bad news.On the other hand, there was some good news last week for Beijing. First, Donald Trump became the Republican party’s nominee for the presidency. And second, he announced that he was against the bill. “If you get rid of TikTok,” he posted on his Truth Social platform, “Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”For those who appreciate hypocrisy, this was a collector’s item. Is this not the same Trump who in 2020 tried (but failed) to get rid of TikTok? What lies behind this change of heart? Who can say: trying to read what is loosely called Trump’s mind is a fool’s errand. Still, it was interesting to learn that recently Trump reportedly had a “cordial” meeting in his Mar-a-Lago lair with a guy called Jeff Yass. Who’s he? Oh, just someone whose business happens to have a $30bn-plus stake in ByteDance. Sometimes you couldn’t make this stuff up.What I’ve been readingMatter of InterestViewing the Ob-scene is David Hering’s terrific review of Jonathan Glazer’s great movie The Zone of Interest.Machine learningRead Of Top-Notch Algorithms and Zoned-Out Humans, a sobering essay by Tim Harford about the downsides of becoming dependent on smart machines.Science fiction Superconductivity Scandal: The Inside Story of a Scientific Deception in a Rising Star’s Physics Lab recounts a gripping investigation by Nature magazine’s news team. More