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      Former rivals Haley and DeSantis back Trump at Republican convention

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      Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, once Donald Trump’s biggest rivals in the Republican party, both gave full-throated endorsements to Trump’s presidential candidacy on Tuesday, a call for unity that served to underscore the former president’s control of the Republican party.On the second night of the Republican national convention, Haley and DeSantis, who both unsuccessfully sought the GOP nomination earlier this year, spoke back to back in the 8pm hour of the convention as Trump grinned and applauded from his box elevated above the floor of the Fiserv Forum, where the convention is taking place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.“I’ll start by making one thing perfectly clear: Donald Trump has my strong endorsement, period,” Haley said. She said her speech was aimed at those “who don’t agree with Donald Trump 100% of the time”.“You don’t have to agree with Trump 100% of the time to vote for him. Take it from me. I haven’t always agreed with President Trump. But we agree more often than we disagree,” she said.Haley, who served as the governor of South Carolina and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, rattled off what she saw as Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments.“When Donald Trump was president, Putin did nothing. No invasions. No wars. That was no accident. Putin didn’t attack Ukraine because he knew Donald Trump was tough. A strong president doesn’t start wars. A strong president prevents wars,” she said, receiving loud applause.DeSantis also immediately made it clear that he was backing Trump.“Let’s send Joe Biden back to his basement and let’s send Donald Trump back to the White House,” he said.Neither Haley nor DeSantis initially had speaking slots at the convention, but they were added after the attempt on Trump’s life on Saturday as Republicans sought to project unity.“President Trump asked me to speak to this convention in the name of unity. It was a gracious invitation and I was happy to accept,” Haley said.Trump could be seen on the Jumbotron grinning widely as both gave their speeches. And he had reason to do so: just months ago, Haley and DeSantis were the most prominent Republicans critical of Trump.“He’s made it chaotic. He’s made it self-absorbed. He’s made people dislike and judge each other. He’s left that a president should have moral clarity, and know the difference between right or wrong, and he’s just toxic,” Haley said of Trump during an interview on The Breakfast Club in January.Haley, who has also called Trump “thin-skinned and easily distracted”, didn’t say she was voting for Trump until May.Austin Weatherford, the Biden campaign’s national director for Republican engagement, highlighted Haley’s words in a statement after her speech Tuesday.“Ambassador Haley said it best herself: someone who doesn’t respect our military, doesn’t know right from wrong, and ‘surrounds himself in chaos’ can’t be president,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s why millions of Republicans cast their votes in protest of Donald Trump and his attacks on our institutions, our nation’s allies, and civility.”DeSantis endorsed Trump shortly after dropping out of the presidential race in January, but reportedly continued to privately criticize him. He needled him on the campaign trail, saying America didn’t need a president who had “lost the zip on their fastball”.DeSantis and Haley took slightly different tacks in their speeches on Tuesday, emphasizing their different approaches to campaigning.Haley spoke about the need to expand the Republican party in comments that were met with tepid applause from the delegates on the convention floor – many of whom represent some of the party’s most loyal base.“We must not only be a unified party, we must also expand our party,” she said. “We are so much better when we are bigger. We are stronger when we welcome people into our party who have different backgrounds and experiences.”DeSantis, by contrast, leaned into attacking Biden. “America cannot afford four more years of a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency,” he said. He touted the success that Republicans have had in recent years, saying “the woke mind virus is dead and Florida is a solid Republican state”.DeSantis went on to detail a rightwing policy wishlist, including severe restrictions on immigration and the destruction of the “administrative state”.Even though DeSantis’s Trump-like appeal was not enough to win him the Republican nomination, his hard-right talking points triggered a much more boisterous response from the delegates than Haley’s talk of unity and party outreach. More

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      Biden says ‘time to outlaw’ AR-15 rifle used in Trump assassination attempt – live

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      Joe Biden is commenting at length about the toll gun violence takes on American communities, and singled out the impact of assault weapons such as the AR-15.“An AR-15 was used in the shooting of Donald Trump. This was the assault weapon that killed so many others, including children. It’s time to outlaw them,” Biden said.In what was likely a reference to his involvement in passing the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired 10 years later, Biden said: “I did it once, and I will do it again.”As he closed his speech to the NAACP, Joe Biden defended his ability to continue serving as president, despite mounting worries among Democrats over his advanced age.“Hopefully, with age, I’ve demonstrated a little bit of wisdom. Here’s what I do know: I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job, and I know the good Lord hasn’t brought us this far to leave us now there’s more work to do,” Biden said.His comments came amid reports that the Democratic National Committee is moving to quickly nominate Biden, and quell a rebellion by lawmakers and others concerned about his ability to defeat Donald Trump:Joe Biden is warning the NAACP that a second Donald Trump administration would “undo everything” they stand for.The president said he has been “all about working people in this nation my whole career”, and: “That’s a stark contrast to my predecessor and his Maga visions. They’ll undo everything, undo everything the NAACP stands for. But now they’re trying to deny it. They’re lying about their Project 2025. They want to deny your freedom, the freedom to vote.”The crowd at the NAACP convention has started chanting “four more years!” after Joe Biden vowed to restore the constitutional right to abortion.“And, guess what, come hell or high water, we’re going to restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land,” the president said.In a sign that the detente between Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be brief, the president has attacked his predecessor for his comments about “Black jobs”.Biden was referencing a comment Trump made during their first debate, in which he claimed undocumented immigrants are “taking Black jobs now”.“Of course he thinks of Black jobs,” Biden told the crowd at the NAACP convention. “I love his phrase, ‘Black jobs’, tells a lot about the man and about his character. Folks, I know what a Black job is. It’s a vice-president of the United States.”“I know what a Black job is. The first Black president … Barack Obama,” Biden added.It was a reversion to form for the president, who had toned down his rhetoric over the past couple of days following the assassination attempt on Trump. Expect the former president to follow suit.Joe Biden is commenting at length about the toll gun violence takes on American communities, and singled out the impact of assault weapons such as the AR-15.“An AR-15 was used in the shooting of Donald Trump. This was the assault weapon that killed so many others, including children. It’s time to outlaw them,” Biden said.In what was likely a reference to his involvement in passing the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired 10 years later, Biden said: “I did it once, and I will do it again.”Joe Biden appears to be making light of the efforts by his fellow Democrats to get him to step aside in favor of what they feel would be a more electable candidate.He related the adage, credited to former president Harry Truman, that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog”.“After the last couple weeks, I know what he means,” quipped Biden, who had earlier described Truman as someone who “was often counted out”.Joe Biden is now speaking to the NAACP convention.“My name is Joe Biden, and I’m a lifetime member of the NAACP,” the president began, speaking of the longstanding civil rights group.Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, is introducing Joe Biden, who will address the civil rights group’s convention in Las Vegas.He recounted how Black voters were crucial to determining the 2020 election, but noted, “not everyone shares the same investment in a progressive vision”.Johnson is singling out Project 2025, the rightwing plan to remake the US government that several officials tied to Donald Trump are involved in.“This is a 900-page manifesto that seeks to undermine progress, promote violence, inflict harm on our community. They must know that NAACP, we will be here for that fight,” Johnson said.At a lawmaker panel hosted by the rightwing organization Moms for Liberty – a group that has earned a reputation for advancing local book bans – the conversation, which was largely focused on the virtues of private education, shifted to teachers’ unions.“You have the teachers, and then you have the union,” said the Florida congressman Byron Donalds, to jeers from the crowd. “The Democrats can’t win elections without the power of unions.”Proponents of private education rarely speak so candidly about the political motives behind the push to defund public education. Donalds’ acknowledgment of the electoral power of unions offers a more complete picture of the conservative push to expand private schools, where union density is low.Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson has said he has “no doubt” that Donald Trump would continue supporting Ukraine, following a meeting with him.In a post on X, Johnson wrote: “We discussed Ukraine and I have no doubt that he will be strong and decisive in supporting that country and defending democracy.”The meeting comes amid growing concern that Trump could withdraw support for Ukraine and possibly seek a peace deal directly with the Kremlin that may involve territorial concessions.Boris Johnson met Trump on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. He’s not the only former British prime minister to swing through:Kamala Harris has formally invited JD Vance, the Ohio senator who Donald Trump yesterday named as his running mate, to debate, the Biden-Harris campaign said.“Vice-President Harris reached out to Senator Vance and left a message to congratulate him on his selection, welcome him to the race and express her hope that the two can meet in the vice-presidential debate proposed by CBS News,” a campaign official said.It is unclear when the debate will happen. CBS News proposed 23 July or 13 August, which the Biden campaign has accepted.Joe Biden is expected to soon make his first speech in public since a gunman attempted to kill Donald Trump at a campaign rally over the weekend.In the aftermath of the failed assassination, in which a rallygoer and the gunman were killed, Biden and Trump have dialed back their relentless attacks on each others’ records ahead of the 5 November election.The president is scheduled to address the convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People civil rights group in Las Vegas, Nevada, a swing state that could prove crucial to both campaigns.Biden is once again late to begin his speech, but we’ll let you know he says when it starts.Sharon Yancey, 77, said she has been a Republican voter for 10 to 15 years.“He’s a patriot and I’m a patriot. I love America, and he does too. And he wants to make America the best for everyone, all people, that are here, including the minorities,” Yancey, who was wearing a red Make America great again hat, said of Trump.“Other groups of people, they vote their conscience and they’re not vilified for it, they’re not looked down on and told to feel like you’re less of a person if you don’t vote Democrat,” she said.“One of my son-in-laws is white; he votes the way he wants to vote. And I have another son-in-law who’s Asian; he votes the way he wants to vote. So why am I vilified and called you know, less than a human being, and all those other derogatory things they say about Black people who don’t follow the line?”Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator who was among the candidates to be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, stopped at an outreach event for Black voters in Milwaukee on Tuesday.Speaking at the Wisconsin GOP’s Black coalition headquarters, alongside four local politicians, Scott was more subdued than he had been on Monday night, when he literally roared into a microphone after dubbing Trump an “American lion”.As Scott entered the room there were 16 people seated, 10 of whom were Black, and they sat through a rather dry conversation about “opportunity zones”, a bipartisan 2017 program designed to boost investment in lower-income communities.There was no mention of Trump, and little mention of the Republican party as a whole, aside from Scott saying: “We have not been as good at marketing the success that’s come out of the conservative movement as we should be.”In a room which had portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump mounted along one wall, some people said they would vote for Trump in November.“I’ve just recently made the shift over to being a Republican. My family were Democrat, I think I was just born into it,” said Mario Dickens. A local business owner, he said he became a Republican about a year ago.“We just haven’t seen much benefit at all over last four years. And four years prior things were going great for us,” Dickens said.Donald Trump Jr joked with his father about hair in the aftermath of Saturday’s assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.Don Jr was out fishing with his daughter in Jupiter, Florida, when he received a call from his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, informing him that Donald Trump had been shot.“It was 90 minutes before I even knew he was alive,” Don Jr said at Axios House on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee.
      That was a tough moment and then finally, get hit him on the phone and honestly, considering the heaviness of that moment, sort of give me a window for some levity and I asked him, well, most importantly, how’s the hair?
      The audience laughed and Don Jr proceeded to imitate his father’s voice: “The hair’s fine, Don, the hair’s fine. A lot of blood in it but it’s fine.”Reverting to his normal voice, Don Jr added:
      To be shot and to stand up with that kind of resolve, I just felt like: you’re the biggest badass I know. That was my opening salvo and then we started joking hair and I said, can I call you Evander Holyfield because of the little missing chunk of ear?”
      [Heavyweight boxer Holyfield had a part of his ear bitten off by opponent Mike Tyson in 1997.]Don Jr claimed this is why the world was at peace during Trump’s presidency.
      Compare and contrast that honestly to just about any clip of Joe Biden these days.One exudes strength, the other exudes weakness. And when you exude weakness, it’s the nature of predation: predators prey on the weak. Our enemies will prey on us.
      Even so, Don Jr promised that Trump’s Thursday speech will be “toned down” and warned against complacency in the Republican ranks. “People are like, ‘Oh, after Saturday it’s over,’” he told the Axios gathering.
      Nothing is over. There’s no level the other side won’t go. There’s no nonsense they won’t play. This is not in the bag. We have to keep our foot on the gas every second of the day until November.
      Don Jr welcomed the idea of Robert Kennedy Jr serving under Trump in a second term – “Maybe there’s a great place for him somewhere in an administration” – and described his own potential role in a presidential transition.
      All I want to do is block the guys that would be a disaster. I want to block the liars. I want to block the guys that are pretending they’re with you … You guys pick the guy that’s right. I want the veto power to cut out each and every one of those people.
      Asked by interviewer Mike Allen for his “least Trumpy” quality, Don Jr replied: “I don’t play golf.”The Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, said the president will tout his record during remarks at the UnidosUs conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.Among Joe Biden’s accomplishments, she said, was being the steward of record low unemployment for Latinos. Latinos are also starting businesses at a record pace. Meanwhile, she added, crime is down and wages are up.But polls have shown Donald Trump making inroads with Hispanic voters, particularly men. Escobar said the Biden campaign was pouring resources into reaching Latino voters, but that more was needed before November.Referencing the Heritage Foundation’s radical plan to reshape the federal government, she said:
      We’ve been talking to Latino communities, I’ve traveled the country to meet with Latino groups, to hear them out, to talk to them about the president’s positive vision for America and contrast that with the incredibly dark, terrifying vision that the Trump-Vance campaign has laid out through Project 2025.
      “There’s a lot of work we still have to do to make sure that Latino voters feel heard and that we inspire them to get to the polls,” she continued. “That’s the work that we have been doing and will continue to do on the Biden-Harris campaign.”Immigration advocates are pre-empting what they anticipate will be a “dark and dystopian vision” on display during the second night of the Republican national convention, themed “Make America Safe Again.”The congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, said she wanted to “sound the alarm” on Republicans’ escalating attacks on immigrants.As the Democratic congresswoman from El Paso, Texas, where five years ago a white supremecist targeted Latino shoppers at a Walmart in the city, killing 23 people, Escobar said she knows first hand how dangerous rhetoric can have deadly consequences. She told reporters on a call Tuesday:
      The incredibly dark vision that Donald Trump and his running mate and the Republican GOP have in store for America is a throwback to very, very dark days that we have seen in American history.
      She added that Republicans “want the American public to fear and loathe immigrants”.On the call, advocates warned that Republicans would likely twist the facts and repeat many of their false claims about immigration and crime. “Here’s what they won’t tell you,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, said.
      They will not tell you about the essential role that immigrants play in the Wisconsin economy and across the country. They won’t tell you about the fact that there is no correlation between crime and immigration. And they also won’t tell you that despite their anti-immigration crusade and the millions of political ads being spent this cycle on immigration, the support for citizenship is durable and consistent.
      The quote by Vanessa Cárdenas was amended. More

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      Aileen Cannon has taken the sledgehammer to the rule of law | Laurence H Tribe and Dennis Aftergut

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      If Trump v United States, the US supreme court majority’s shocking immunity decision on 1 July, left anyone unconvinced that America’s courts are on the ballot, federal judge Aileen Cannon just sealed the deal, dropping a sledgehammer on the rule of law. Just two weeks after the disgraceful immunity decision, she tossed out Trump’s prosecution for stealing national security documents after losing re-election, smashing the longstanding and vital authority of special counsels in the bargain.This election, our constitutional republic is at stake, along with its first principle: no one, including the most powerful, is above the law. Only We, the People, can preserve the freedom and security our laws safeguard.Cannon’s opinion makes a mockery of justice under law. Reduced to its essentials, she accepted the complaint of Trump’s lawyers that special counsel Jack Smith wields power too independent of the president and attorney general to fit within the statutes Congress enacted to authorize appointment of special federal prosecutors – while Trump himself was publicly saying the very opposite: that Smith is persecuting him as Biden’s puppet.For over a year, Cannon slow-walked a grand jury’s meticulous indictment of the former president for criminally risking the free world’s safety by walking off with nuclear secrets and intelligence sources and methods, leaving them in places accessible to apparent foreign agents, and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them. Now she has toppled the whole case by shredding the long-established structure through which successive attorneys general have appointed special counsel to investigate and prosecute crimes against the nation too sensitive for the justice department to handle in the ordinary course.Cannon proceeds backwards from her desired result to its jerry-rigged justification: that the laws whose language plainly authorized special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment and oversight by the attorney general didn’t do that at all.Only someone determined to reach that conclusion could have written what Cannon concocted. To decide that Congress never gave the attorney general authority to appoint a special counsel, she first had to set aside the landmark holding underpinning the 1974 Nixon Tapes case. She wrongly dismissed as mere “dictum” – chatter she was free to ignore – its essential conclusion that the Watergate special prosecutor who demanded the tapes was lawfully appointed.She was wrong from the start. To get where she was determined to go, she had to set aside as irrelevant the flawless 2019 ruling of the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia which followed Nixon. That decision, the appellate court correctly concluded, had unanimously held that Congress, in enacting the very statutes Cannon found wanting here, had “vested in the Attorney General … the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties”.Cannon’s tortured reasoning fails throughout her 93-page opinion. She asserts, for example, that the congressional statute authorizing the attorney general to “appoint officials … to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States” cannot mean what it says because it is “housed within a chapter [largely] devoted to the FBI”. She never explains why, if Congress intended this statute to give attorneys general broad authority to appoint only FBI officials to “detect” crimes against the United States, Congress chose to include the words “and prosecute?”Her mental gymnastics boggle the mind. At one point, she insists that “whatever possible linguistic overlap might exist between the present-tense formulations of the verbs ‘appoint,’ ‘retain,’ or ‘commission,’ [the relevant statute …] us[es] instead the past participle adjective application.”Never mind that Cannon’s ruling flies in the face of all relevant precedents – including those upholding the appointment of the special counsel trying Lt Col Oliver North for his role in the Iran Contra scandal and the special counsel prosecuting Hunter Biden in Delaware and California. And never mind that Congress had acquiesced for half a century in the unbroken judicial interpretation of its statutes authorizing appointments like Smith’s.Judge Cannon’s opinion conspicuously echoes (and duly cites) Justice Clarence Thomas’s solo concurrence two weeks earlier in Trump v United States. Going beyond the immunity issue raised in that case, Thomas alone expressed doubt about the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment. As though coaching Cannon from the sidelines, he invited unnamed “lower courts” to answer what he called “essential questions concerning … Smith’s appointment”, venturing where no prior court (or fellow justice) dared to tread. Cannon happily took the hint.Smith is appealing the dismissal and may ask the court of appeals for the 11th circuit, if it reverses, to reassign the case to another judge. Twice in 2022, that court harshly rejected as utterly lawless Cannon’s appointment of a special master to review the classified documents seized at Mar-a-Lago in a judicially authorized search.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven if Smith’s appeal succeeds, as it should, the clock is ticking. With a supreme court Maga majority potentially ready to rescue Trump, no jury will decide this case before the election. And if Trump becomes president, his attorney general will drop this prosecution and the appeal of Cannon’s ruling faster than a radioactive hot potato.Should the government’s appeal be dismissed, her decision would remain on the books, providing precedent to unravel all the work of all the special counsels appointed over the years under the statutes she neutered.Inexperience alone cannot explain Cannon’s bizarre decision. Perhaps she is showing gratitude to the president who appointed her. Or perhaps, as a Maga-vetted judge of Hispanic heritage in her early 40s, she is vying, if Trump wins re-election, for a supreme court seat when an elderly justice retires. Might virtue, in Shakespeare’s words, have been “chok’d with foul ambition?”Whatever the case, November is what matters. It’s up to us to elect a president who will take care to appoint federal judges with the integrity to heed the rule of law and preserve intact the constitution it supports.

      Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor of constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University. Follow him on @tribelaw

      Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy More

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      JD Vance once worried Trump was ‘America’s Hitler’. Now his own authoritarian leanings come into view

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      JD Vance once feared Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler”. Last Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed Democrats calling Trump “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” caused the assassination attempt the former president survived.But on Monday, after Trump made Vance his vice-presidential pick, worries about Vance’s own authoritarian leanings came straight to the fore.“Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme Maga agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign chair, told reporters.Vance has indeed said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done as Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked certification of results in key states won by Biden during the election weeks earlier.Elsewhere on Monday, a profile of Vance was widely shared. Zack Beauchamp of Vox, author of new book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, outlined political views “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy”.Beauchamp described how Vance has repeated Trump’s stolen election lie; has called for a criminal investigation of a journalist he did not like; advocates politicising the federal bureaucracy; and believes presidents can simply ignore the law.“JD Vance,” Beauchamp wrote, “is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps are justified in response.“He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.”Trump’s lawyers recently presented that argument to the supreme court he stacked with rightwingers – and won. But Trump will be gone one day and as Vance told Politico recently, “There is a big question about what comes after him.”It looks like it’s Vance, now the leading elected exponent of “New Right” political thought, as championed by figures prominently including Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, tech billionaire and influential donor.The biographer Max Chafkin has described Thiel’s politics as “closer to authoritarianism” than typical Silicon Valley libertarianism, “super-nationalistic [and] longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive or … a dictator”.While Vance is a fan of writers who want “monarchist” government or “regime change”, Thiel himself once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He also played a key role in the making of Vance.Born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1984, Vance enlisted in the US marines, becoming a military journalist and going to Iraq. He graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School, becoming a venture capitalist, eventually for a Thiel firm in Silicon Valley.Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016. Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it was a huge bestseller, widely acclaimed for its portrait of a region where support for Trump is strong.Vance returned to Ohio and ran a non-profit as well as a venture capital fund. At first opposed to Trump, he switched sides and won his Senate seat in 2022, with Trump’s endorsement and Thiel’s financial support.During that campaign, the libertarian Reason magazine said Vance was “more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways”.The magazine noted Vance’s contention “that conservatives should employ the taxation power to ‘seize’ the assets of ‘woke, leftist’ nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has continued to target universities he says should be brought under state control. In May, speaking to Margaret Brennan of CBS, he said: “If they’re not educating our children well and they’re layering the next generation down in mountains of student debt, then they’re not meeting their end of the bargain.“I think it’s totally reasonable to say there needs to be a political solution to that problem.”Challenged about his admiration for how Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, took control of universities there, Vance said Orbán had “made some smart decisions … that we could learn from in the United States”.On Monday, responses to Trump’s selection of Vance noted his affinity for Orbán. Many also focused on Vance’s warm words for Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term coordinated by the Heritage Foundation and advocating radical rightwing reform to every facet of government.Trump has disavowed links to Project 2025, given the potency of Democratic attacks on the subject. But Vance has long advocated an assault on the federal government.As noted by Reason, Vance in 2021 told Jack Murphy, a controversial “manosphere” figure: “A lot of conservatives have said we should … basically eliminate the administrative state. And I’m sympathetic to that project.“But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I think Trump … [will] probably win again in 2024, and he’ll win by a margin such that he’ll be the president of the United States in January of 2025.“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: fire every single mid-level bureaucrat. Every civil servant in the administrative state.“Replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will get taken to court … stop you, stand before the country like [president] Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”As Beauchamp noted, the Jackson quote “is likely apocryphal, but the history is real”.An 1832 supreme court ruling said the government should respect Native American land rights. Jackson simply ignored it. The result was the forcible displacement of 60,000 people, an outrage known as the Trail of Tears. More

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      ‘Turning down the temperature’ shouldn’t mean silencing all criticism of Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      Since Donald Trump was injured on Saturday in the chilling assassination attempt at his Pennsylvania rally, the nation has been advised – including by Joe Biden – to reduce the political rhetoric that can lead to violence.“Turn down the temperature,” is the going phrase.That’s a fine idea.But it shouldn’t mean silencing criticism of Trump in this extremely consequential election season. It shouldn’t mean transforming him into some mythic combination of martyr and hero. And it certainly shouldn’t mean that he gets a pass – a literal get-out-of-jail-free card – for his innumerable past misdeeds.The assailant’s bullets didn’t destroy history, and they shouldn’t destroy the rule of law.But we’re already seeing evidence of that.Most notably, the Trump-appointed judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, on Monday issued a stunning ruling that is a huge, although legally questionable, win for the Republican presidential frontrunner. She dismissed the entire case about Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, citing violations of the constitution in the appointment of the special prosecutor Jack Smith.Cannon’s decision, fully in keeping with the way she has leaned hard right at almost every turn, may well be reversed on appeal – “it’s wrong six ways from Sunday,” opined the Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck. Nevertheless, the immediate effect is to delay any consequences for Trump’s apparent malfeasance until after November’s election.It’s likely, of course, that Cannon was headed this way long before the assassination effort this past weekend. But the good will that Trump is garnering makes her ruling much more acceptable, at least to the millions who buy the idea that he has been woefully mistreated by a rigged justice system. And perhaps by others, too.And her action fits perfectly with a broader movement to shut down criticism and accountability for Trump in the wake of the shooting. A lot of former critics are running scared, unwilling to be branded unpatriotic or insensitive in this fraught moment.Trump’s allies, both in politics and media (good luck trying to tell the difference), immediately blamed Democrats for the Pennsylvania attack. The gunman was motivated, they charge, by the left’s constant depictions of Trump as a would-be authoritarian, and therefore any such talk must stop.Not so fast.One, we still don’t know what motivated the 20-year-old assailant, though we do know he was a registered Republican who had ready access to an assault-style weapon; two, Trump himself has bragged that he wants to be a dictator on day one of a second term and his confederates have cooked up a detailed plan to help; and three, if anyone has inflamed the nation’s anger, sense of grievance and propensity for violence, it’s Trump himself with his threats of retribution and promises to persecute his political rivals.Somehow, however, we’re now supposed to believe he’s had a profound spiritual awakening and to forget all that divisiveness, including the Trump campaign email that called Joe Biden a “threat to democracy” just last week.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Can we wait to see some evidence before declaring that he is Mandela now?” suggested Tim Miller of the Bulwark, commenting on an Axios report that imagined a kinder, gentler Trump as well as the view from the former Fox News rabble-rouser Tucker Carlson that “getting shot in the face changes a man”.Perhaps, as many are predicting in lofty terms, this assassination attempt will change America forever. Maybe it should.But then again, the slaughter of innocent schoolchildren from Newtown, Connecticut, to Uvalde, Texas, should have done that, but apparently did not.As we wait for that wondrous change, it is more important than ever to hold fast to things that matter. That goes for the news media, for public officials and for American citizens.Let’s be steered not by political opportunism, delusion and blame-casting, but by a more constant north star: the rule of law and the truth.Sympathy for Trump is called for. A free pass is not.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Unfortunately, gun violence – against Trump or anyone else – is all too American | Rebecca Solnit

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      “Political violence is unacceptable and has no place in this country,” said Arizona’s governor, Katie Hobbs, and “political violence has absolutely no place in this country”, insisted California congresswoman Barbara Lee, while President Joe Biden stated, “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America.”“As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society,” affirmed Nancy Pelosi, referencing the attacker who broke into her home in 2022 to kidnap her and, in her absence, seriously injured her husband. “There is no place for political violence in this country, period,” said Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was the target of a kidnapping plot by far-right militiamen in 2020 who intended to make her the centerpiece of a show trial.Dozens of others reached for versions of this “no place in America” declaration, and I wondered if “no place” meant something like when Jesus was born in a stable because, according to the Gospel of Luke, “there was no place for them in the inn.” That is, the United States is full to overflowing of violence of many kinds and afflicted with many enthusiasts for violence and the weapons with which it is most often fatally inflicted.All this came in the wake of an event in Pennsylvania in which the ear of an elderly man was grazed by a bullet fired by a young man with a semi-automatic weapon. One bystander died of a bullet to the head and two others were seriously injured. Later that night four people were killed in a nightclub in Birmingham, Alabama, and nine others wounded by another gunman. Four more people were killed in a home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in yet another shooting Sunday, and three people were shot in Charleston, South Carolina, non-fatally. None of them were running for president, so these other stories weren’t major news.You could drop in dozens of local news stories of shootings like that any weekend in this country over the past decade years, if it wasn’t the kind of week in which the carnage was so immense it became a major news story, as when an 18-year-old gunman murdered 19 elementary-school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, in May of 2022, while heavily armed police stood by. Every day, on average, 327 Americans are shot and 117 die of the injuries, according to one gun-control-advocacy site.On Wednesday a white policeman shot and killed a Black shoplifter reportedly suffering from mental health issues in Charlotte, North Carolina. The United States is drenched in violence, riddled with violence, rotten with violence. There is room for violence in this country founded on slavery and the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans. There has always been epidemic violence against women in this country. But a lot of recent violence has been cultivated as an asset for rightwing politicians and a cash crop for gun manufacturers.The day the Black shoplifter died, I spoke at a campaign launch for a first time San Francisco candidate. So did the activist Cleve Jones, who talked about Harvey Milk. In the late 1970s Jones was a young intern for and friend of Milk, the out gay politician whose election to San Francisco’s board of supervisors was a watershed moment in queer history. On the morning of 27 November 1978, he heard that Milk’s ally, Mayor George Moscone, had been shot and rushed to City Hall, where he saw thensupervisor Dianne Feinstein rush past him, one sleeve and hand stained with blood. It was Milk’s blood from her attempt to take his pulse when she found him shot, and moments later he saw his friend lying dead of five bullets fired at close range. Along with the mayor, he had been assassinated by a disgruntled former supervisor, the rightwinger and ex-cop Dan White.Dianne Feinstein became mayor, then ran for the US senate, and after winning she introduced the 1994 federal assault rifle ban that passed but which Republicans allowed to lapse a decade later. Democrats have long tried to institute gun control laws; Republicans have largely tried to prevent or overturn them. In Pennsylvania, where a 20-year-old man climbed onto a roof Saturday, anyone over 18 can buy a semi-automatic like the one he wielded without a waiting period, and private sales don’t require background checks. It has in recent years become an open-carry state, as have the majority of states in this country.One person pulled the trigger; thousands of elected officials, lobbyists, and gun industry employees worked to make it possible for him to do so. To make more room for violence in America.The elderly man – and yeah, of course I’m talking about Donald Trump – whose ear was grazed had instigated a violent assault on Congress in which hundreds of defenders of the institution and process of democracy were injured, sprayed with bear mace, stabbed with American flags, crushed in a door, battered with barricades, and he has long encouraged political violence.His associate in trying to steal the 2020 election, Rudy Giuliani, was found liable for spreading lies that encouraged Trump supporters to target two Black women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who had been ordinary Georgia election workers. The resultant threats, racial slurs, and menacing appearances that forced Freeman to sell her home and both to go into hiding. A jury awarded them $148m in compensatory and punitive damages late last year.“How death threats get Republicans to fall in line behind Trump” was the headline of a report earlier this year, and a 2020 report by ABC News “identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.” There is room for violence in America. Some politicians have long tried to make more room for it. One of them escaped a bullet on Saturday. A lot of other Americans have not been so lucky.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates

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      Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.“A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.“By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk,” said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said. “It’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”But voters’ outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue – despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe – Vance has also tempered his public position.“We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year. “I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.”In 2022, Vance said he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. He also told NBC News that he wants mifepristone, a common abortion pill that was at the heart of a major supreme court case this year, to remain accessible.Even while supporting a national ban, Vance has said he would like abortion to be “primarily a state issue”.“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said. “I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions.”But, he added: “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”Much of Vance’s public persona, however, remains defined by his support of what he sees as the traditional nuclear family. He has backed policies that he says will increase birth rates, such as making childbirth free, and said that people who are childfree by choice “do not have any physical commitment to the future of this country”.“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” said Vance, a father of three. He then went on to suggest that several Democratic politicians, like Kamala Harris and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, should not have political power because they do not have children.“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” (The vice-president has two stepchildren.)“Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults,” he continued.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has also called people who fear having kids “cat ladies” who “must be stopped” and said that universal daycare is “class war against normal people”.Two days after the US supreme court overturned Roe, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”Shortly after Trump announced he had chosen Vance as his running mate, Joe Biden’s campaign started to circulate a clip of comments Vance made in 2021 about violence in marriages.“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. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said in response to a question on fatherlessness.Vance has said that he was not defending men who commit domestic abuse and that he himself is a victim of domestic abuse.Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, praised Vance on Monday.“His ability to compellingly share these stories on a national stage will surely be an asset,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.” More