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      Biden hits out at Trump in Georgia rally: ‘He’s been sucking up to dictators all over the world’

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      The question isn’t whether Democrats in Georgia will vote for President Joe Biden, either on Tuesday or in November. It’s how many.Biden swung through Georgia on Saturday to collect the endorsements of political action committees representing Asian, Black and Latino voters, another stop on the march to the Democratic nomination.Biden opened with a swing at Donald Trump, using Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene as the bat, noting how he had kicked off his campaign here in her company, along with that of dictatorial Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán.“He called him a fantastic leader. Seriously,” Biden said. “He’s been sucking up to dictators all over the world.”Biden’s only meaningful competition in Georgia for the nomination is ennui and “no preference”. But Biden is likely to clinch the nomination not in Georgia, which holds its primary on Tuesday, but in states voting on 19 March. Nonetheless, the pivot to the general election has already begun.“He’s building on the momentum from the Thursday speech, which was a grand slam home run,” said David Brand, a Democratic operative and Atlanta political figure. “Republicans are in a pure panic. They can’t attack him on issues. So, they’re now making up lunacy about him being, you know, on Red Bull or something. That’s their best attack line: because he drinks a Red Bull. That puts him in line with every law school student in the country.”Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill and both of Georgia’s Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, held the rally at the trendy Pullman Yards facility on Atlanta’s east side before a crowd of about 500 people. The assembly was composed mostly of party insiders and Democratic elected officials. The location of the rally was closely held before the event, ostensibly to avoid disruptions by protesters. One man was escorted from the room as he shouted pro-Palestinian slogans.The president’s address continued themes raised in the State of the Union address, calling for reinstating Roe v Wade as the law of the land on abortion, increasing taxes on billionaires and a call for civic values.“We see a future where we define democracy and defend it, not diminish it,” Biden said. “We must remain the beacon of the world.”Biden said nothing about the war in Gaza, nor did he raise the question about funding for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia.His supporters and endorsers regularly juxtaposed the consequences of a Trump win in 2024, trying to evoke the political intensity that led to surprise wins in Georgia in 2020 and 2022.Ossoff regularly name-checked DeKalb County, the location of Pullman Yards and the locus for the political changes that swept him, Warnock and Biden into power. “The stakes could not be higher,” Ossoff said. “The future of voting rights, and civil rights and women’s rights is on the line.”Three political action committees offered their endorsement to Biden on Saturday: Collective PAC, which backs Black candidates; the Latino Victory Fund; and the AAPI Victory Fund, a political action committee for empowering Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.“They must be re-elected. Failure is not an option,” said Shekar Narasimhan, chairman and founder of the AAPI Victory Fund. “We will do everything in our power to make this happen.” More

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      Democrats are angry over media coverage of Biden. Is it a distraction?

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      When an opinion poll in the New York Times found that a majority of Joe Biden’s voters believe he is too old to be an effective US president, the call to action was swift. But it was not aimed at Joe Biden.“Amplifying flawed presidential polls, refusing to report on [Donald] Trump’s cognitive issues, the NYT is biased for Trump,” was a sample response on social media. “If you have a subscription to NYT, cancel it.”The irate chorus aimed at one of America’s most storied media institutions followed finger-pointing at the legal system for failing to stop Trump in his tracks. Despite much wishful thinking, primary election results this week made clear that the nation is hurtling towards a Biden v Trump rematch in November.That polling and media coverage are imperfect, and the wheels of justice of turn slowly, is beyond dispute. But whatever the merits of the arguments, critics argue that Democrats are at risk of playing a blame game that distracts them from the central mission: defeating Trump at the ballot box.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Commiseration is not a strategy and Democrats need to stop throwing political temper tantrums and do the work to unify and get Joe Biden re-elected. The courts, the media, late-night comedians are not going to save us. So this whining and complaining about these aspects being unfair is not a strategy for victory.”View image in fullscreenAmong some Democrats, there has long been a yearning for a saviour who will stop Trump in his tracks. Hopes were pinned on the special counsel Robert Mueller, but his Russia investigation lacked teeth and failed to bring the president down. Two impeachments came and went and the Senate missed a historic opportunity to bar from Trump running again.Now resentment is focused on the supreme court and the attorney general, Merrick Garland, for dragging their feet on holding Trump accountable for his role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The court issued a unanimous decision that Colorado and other states do not have the power to remove Trump from the ballot for engaging in an insurrection.A justice department case alleging that he sought to overturn the 2020 election, which had been due to begin this week, was postponed until the supreme court rules on whether he is immune from prosecution. And an election interference case in Georgia is also on hold because the prosecutor Fani Willis is dealing with allegations of a conflict of interest over a romantic relationship.In Florida, where Trump is charged over his mishandling of classified government documents, he managed to draw a friendly judge who has indicated the trial will not start soon. That means the case likely to start first is one in New York relating to Trump paying hush money to an adult film star during the 2016 election campaign, widely portrayed in the media as the weakest of the four.Yet such a case would have been devastating to any other candidate at any other moment in history. Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “He’s going to be on trial for 34 felony counts in less than three weeks and the mainstream media has barely indicated the importance of this.“‘Oh, it’s just a hush money trial.’ No it’s not. He’s not on trial for hush money. He’s on trial for election fraud, not just paying the hush money but deceiving the American people by concealing it as a business expense.”Lichtman added: “If this was anybody but Trump, any other presidential candidate on trial, it would be the trial of the century and the mainstream media would be screaming that, if the candidate got convicted, he should be bounced from from the campaign. Instead they’ve misrepresented and trivialised this case.”Trump has long challenged media orthodoxies. During the 2016 campaign, the New York Times used the word “lie” in a headline – a move that would have been seen as judgmental and editorialising in the pre-Trump era. In 2019, the paper changed a headline, “Trump urges unity vs racism”, after an outcry from readers and progressive politicians.Television has also struggled to find the right approach. There was much introspection over how saturation coverage of Trump’s 2016 campaign rallies and tweets gave him $5bn in free advertising, according to the media tracking firm mediaQuant. Cable news networks have drastically reduced their live coverage of Trump’s speeches, although some commentators warn that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, contending that voters need to see his unhinged antics, verbal gaffes and extremist agenda.With Super Tuesday’s primary elections clearing the way for another Biden v Trump clash, some accuse the media of focusing too much on polls and not enough on the stakes, treating Trump as just another political candidate rather than an existential threat. They say the intense focus on Biden’s age – he is 81 – is wildly disproportionate when set against Trump’s authoritarianism and 91 criminal charges.Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “The media has clearly not learned its lesson from 2016 or 2020 on how to cover Donald Trump. This is not a conventional horse race election. There’s nothing normal about any of this so, by covering Biden and Trump equally, it minimises Trump’s considerably disturbing behaviour, comments and plans for the future.“The Democrats do have a legitimate complaint with the way the media is bothsides-ing this. The media should not be under any obligation to tell both sides of a lie or conspiracy theory or leading presidential candidate’s desire to tear up the constitution and become a dictator on day one. All things Donald Trump has said he would do.”The New York Times/Siena College poll was made up of 980 registered voters across the country and conducted on mobile and landline phones. It found that 61% of people who supported Biden in 2020 thought he was “just too old” to be an effective president. An accompanying article in the Times was headlined: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to Be Effective.”Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, thinks it was a fair question. “The media’s not in this to help any candidate and Joe Biden is the incumbent and there are legitimate questions about an 81-year-old repeatedly struggling in public. To do a poll that asks questions about that is entirely fair.”View image in fullscreenOthers take a very different view. Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the CUNY Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, said: “The choice to ask the question and the way the question is asked and who the question is asked of and then how the result is played are agenda-filled. Polls become a self-fulfilling prophecy of: we’re going to set an agenda and say it all and then we’re going to do a poll and act as if that’s news when it’s just a reaction to what we’ve already done. This is the case with the age.”Jarvis added: “The New York Times – which has been our best and which I criticise because I want it to be better – is horribly frustrating because it does not know how to cover the rise of fascism, and that’s what this story really is. Neither does it know how to cover the essence of why this is happening, which is race.”Defenders of the New York Times point out that it has done extensive reporting on Trump’s plans for a second term and what it would mean for America and the world. Some commentators warn that Democrats’ attacks on the media are likely to backfire and lead to accusations that they are shooting the messenger.Not even comedians are immune. When Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Comedy Central, and skewered Biden and Trump as the two oldest presidential candidates in history, Mary Trump, a niece and fierce critic of the former president, wrote on X: “Not only is Stewart’s ‘both sides are the same’ rhetoric not funny, it’s a potential disaster for democracy.”Stewart responded on his next show: “I guess as the famous saying goes, ‘Democracy dies in discussion’ … It was never my intention to say out loud what I saw with my eyes and then brain. I can do better.”If history is any guide, there is no knight in shining armour coming to Democrats’ rescue. They have to win on the merits on 5 November. Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, observed: “The Democrats have wanted to use every trick in the book to defeat or unseat or stop Trump since 2016 and nothing has changed in that respect.“The fact is he is a leading candidate. He is supported by almost half the country. The idea that he poses a threat to democracy is not unfounded but is also wildly overblown. If the media did what many Democrats want, they would effectively be acting like media in Orbán’s Hungary, so the irony might be telling.” More

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      ‘Like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine’: US braces for presidential election no one wants

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      In past years, the first phase of the general election has involved at least one of the presidential nominees introducing themselves to the broader public and presenting their case for taking the country in a new direction. But that has been rendered unnecessary this year: former president Donald Trump and president Joe Biden are very familiar to the American electorate – and they are broadly unpopular.“I think this is the worst election in my lifetime,” said George Argodale, a Nikki Haley supporter from Gainesville, Virginia. “It’s just terrible that we don’t have better candidates.”“That’s a sad state of affairs for our country that those are the two best candidates that we can come up with,” agreed Peggy Hudson, a primary voter in Charleston, South Carolina.Judith Smith, from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, said of Biden and Trump: “That’s like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine.”As the primary season sputters to an expected ending, following Haley’s withdrawal from the Republican primary on Wednesday, voters’ frustration with their general election options is palpable.According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Biden’s approval rating now stands at 38.1%, and Trump’s rating rests at a nominally stronger 42.6%, meaning both men are disliked by a majority of Americans.Those low opinions have carried into voters’ views on the general election. A YouGov-University of Massachusetts Amherst poll conducted in January found that 45% of Americans believe a Biden-Trump rematch is bad for the country. Another 26% say the rematch is neither good nor bad, while just 29% view it as good for the nation.It’s not all for the same reason; the many voters lamenting their general election options represent a diverse array of ideological perspectives, ranging from anti-Trump Republicans to progressives outraged over Biden’s response to the war in Gaza.“On the whole, there’s a lot of ambivalence and disappointment about the prospects of a rematch,” said Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “There’s a widespread perception among those individuals that the candidates are too old and that they tend to focus on issues that are issues of yesterday.”Conversations on the campaign trail reflect those commonly held beliefs, as a number of primary voters across multiple states said that they wished they had another option for November. Among anti-Trump Republicans, many of whom voted for Haley in their primaries, the potential re-election of the former president represents a return to the chaos that defined his first term. Echoing concerns shared by most Democrats, they predict that Trump would undermine the foundation of the US government if elected.Vincent DiMaro, an 80-year-old voter in Charleston who voted for Haley in the primary last month, cited Trump’s temperament and Biden’s age of 81 as significant liabilities for the nation’s future (Trump is 77).“I want to see the country survive, and I don’t think it will under Trump,” he said. But, he added: “I don’t think Biden is a particularly good president right now. I can’t be president. I know what my limitations are, and I’m in better shape than Biden.”Argodale voted early in the Virginia primary to cast a ballot for Haley, but he said he would have to support Biden in the general election if Trump won the Republican nomination.“I am on the conservative side of things, and [Haley] is the only viable candidate in my opinion,” he said. “[Trump] is just a terrible human being and doesn’t deserve any votes.”Although Democrats broadly agree with that assessment, some carry concerns about Biden, particularly regarding his age. Hudson acknowledged her politics lean to the left, as she previously worked for the late Democratic senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, but she cast a primary ballot for Haley in Charleston because she is “disgusted” by Trump. Hudson indicated she would support Biden in November, but she lamented the options available to voters in the general election.“Not that Joe Biden has not done a good job. He has done some very good things for this country,” Hudson said. “But I do think it is time for a new generation of leaders.”View image in fullscreenAn enthusiasm problemThe war in Gaza has presented a significant electoral vulnerability for Biden, as the president has faced intense criticism from progressives within his own party over his response to Israel’s airstrike campaign that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.Progressive leaders in multiple states have organized campaigns to urge supporters to vote “uncommitted” or “leave it blank” instead of casting a ballot for Biden as a means of protesting his handling of the war. In Michigan, uncommitted won 13% of the vote in last month’s primary, and uncommitted captured 19% of votes in the Minnesota Democratic primary on Tuesday.Hassan Jama, an imam in Minneapolis, Minnesota, campaigned for Biden in 2020 but has joined the uncommitted campaign. When asked about his options for November, he suggested he may vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Voters can cast ballots for the independent presidential candidate, Cornel West, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, both of whom have condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide”, or they could leave the top of the ticket blank.“We’re not voting for Trump, definitely no,” Jama said. “We have more than two choices.”Ruth Schultz, a Minnesota primary voter who has organized with MN Families for Palestine, similarly ruled out voting for Trump, but she would not yet commit to supporting Biden in the general election.“I know that I will never vote for Trump. That is a given,” Schultz said. “I want to see President Biden take a stronger stance for peace and how to get a ceasefire and to use all the tools at his disposal in order to do that. I am watching that as a voter in the general election.”The uproar among many left-leaning voters has created an enthusiasm gap between the two political parties that could pose a problem for Biden. Although many people who backed Biden in 2020 express concern about his re-election, Trump’s most loyal supporters remain as fervent as ever. According to the YouGov-UMass poll, 45% of Republicans believe the Biden-Trump rematch is good for the country, but only 21% of Democrats say the same.When speaking to Trump voters on the campaign trail, many are quick to praise him as the best president of their lifetimes, and they display no hesitation about supporting him again this fall.“I’ve been supporting him since he ran [in 2016], came down the escalator [at Trump Tower], ever since that,” said Chris Pennington, a voter from Johns Island, South Carolina. “I think he’s the best one to take on all the problems that we have.”Argodale does not support Trump, but he has seen firsthand how much devotion he can inspire. “In my social circle, there are Trumpers, so they’re diehard,” he said. “If he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, they’d still vote for him.”If Biden wants to win in November, he will have to work to narrow that enthusiasm gap or bring enough reluctant independents into his camp – or, most likely, do both.View image in fullscreenDire predictionsThe widespread disappointment among voters regarding the Biden-Trump rematch will have sweeping political consequences this fall, but their opinions on the election also offer startling revelations about Americans’ fears for the country’s future.The YouGov-UMass survey included open-ended questions that asked respondents what they believed would happen if the opposing party won the White House. The answers were both dire and specific, Rhodes said, with respondents predicting the end of democracy and a sharp rise in political persecution if their party were to lose.“The perception that victory by the other candidate would be dangerous and threatening has been rising pretty consistently for some time,” Rhodes said. “I think what’s distinctive in this election cycle is just how intense those feelings are and how personal they are.”Biden and Trump have both spoken in severe terms about what would happen if their opponent were to win, and those arguments appear to be sinking in for many voters.Nathan Richter, who voted for Biden in Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday, was concise when asked about the possibility of Trump’s return to the White House. “Please, God, no,” he said. “I question our country’s ability to withstand another four years of Trump.”John Schuster said he plans to vote for Biden in November, but he cast a primary ballot for Haley because of his overwhelming concern about a Trump victory.“There’s no greater imperative in the world than stopping Donald Trump,” Schuster said. “It’ll be the end of democracy and the world order if he becomes president.”Biden supporters tend to frame the stakes of the election in terms of democracy and political violence, Rhodes noted, while Trump supporters’ concerns are more often shaped around a perceived threat that Democrats pose to American values. Douglas Benton, a Trump supporter from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, warned that the US would become a “third-world country” if Biden were to win reelection.“Our business is broken,” Benton said. “That’s how we became the most profitable country on the planet, is through capitalism and democracy and laws. Right now all three of those are gone.”Past elections have proven just how motivating negative emotions can be in turning out voters, which is why Rhodes believes that participation will still be high in November despite the nominees’ unpopularity.“It’s not an election that is going to inspire people on the basis of positive sentiments,” Rhodes said. “But it is an election that I strongly suspect is going to ultimately mobilize a lot of people because they believe that their vote is important for protecting themselves.”The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino contributed reporting from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, and the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang contributed reporting from Minneapolis, Minnesota More

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      Harris is reaching Democrats where Biden isn’t – on abortion and Gaza

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      Standing on the arch of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Kamala Harris said she felt compelled to begin her remarks by addressing the deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act,” the vice-president said, then stated: “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire.” Loud, sustained applause followed, before she added, after a pause: “For at least six weeks.”The remarks, the White House was quick to note, echoed Joe Biden’s comments to a reporter days earlier and they reflected the administration’s current efforts to broker a temporary break in Israel’s offensive, to allow for the release of hostages and for desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter the besieged territory. Yet many Americans furious with Biden for his alliance with Israel heard from Harris what they felt has been lacking from the president.There was an urgency to her speech – delivered in the footsteps of civil rights marchers who were trampled, tear-gassed and beaten with whips and billy clubs as they attempted to cross the bridge – that resonated. The setting seemed to acknowledge the youth movement furious with the president that views Palestinian rights as an extension of the racial justice movement. She pointedly criticized Israel for restricting the flow of aid into Gaza and expressed compassion for the Palestinian civilians living amid the rubble on the brink of famine.As the 2024 general election contest begins, Harris has emerged as an emissary to the Democratic voters who have soured on Biden since propelling him to the White House in 2020. Over the last several months, she has embarked on a full-scale national tour to highlight the threats to reproductive rights posed by a second Donald Trump administration – an issue that Biden has been criticized for shying away from. Now, as Harris adopts a more forceful tone on Gaza, she is also becoming a leading voice on Middle East diplomacy.Both issues are poised to play a significant, if not decisive, role in the November general election. Polling shows an erosion of support among core Democratic constituencies amid widespread disillusionment with the economy, concern over Biden’s age and fury on the left at the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza.For Democrats, reminding voters about the threat Republicans still pose to abortion rights may be the best way to energize young people while winning over independents and suburban women. Outrage over Roe was credited with halting the promised “red wave” of Republican victories in the 2022 midterms; abortion-related ballot referendums have also repeatedly triumphed even in traditionally red states like Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio.But Harris has her work cut out for her. Like Biden, Harris has been viewed unfavorably throughout much of her tenure.Antonio Arellano, a spokesperson for NextGen, a national youth-focused nonpartisan voter registration and education program, called the 59-year-old Harris a “liaison” between the administration and the parts of the Democratic base that were critical to Biden’s 2020 victory but hold reservations about him now. With her college campus tour and her reproductive rights tour, he said, Harris has helped elevate issues that are top of mind for young progressives and multiracial voters.“She brings an energy of vigor and excitement to the election that I think young people can really gravitate to when perhaps enthusiasm lacks elsewhere,” Arellano said.Harris leapt into the US abortion wars within a day of the leak of the US supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade.At a May 2022 speech at a conference for Emilys List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, Harris gave a fiery speech where she repeatedly asked: “How dare they?”“How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body?” Harris asked. “How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?”Harris had spent the first several months of her vice-presidency frustrated by headlines about her apparent lack of direction, staff departures and unforced errors. Allies and experts have long seen sexism and racism in the public scrutiny of Harris, who is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold nationally elected office. The criticism seemed particularly unfair, they said, given that vice-presidents are historically overlooked.“I’m not saying that there shouldn’t have been any attention paid to management, especially when you see high-profile kinds of departures and hires,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory College. “But I think that there’s still also the question of whether or not people have paid more attention to her, and also whether or not the public has had a more visceral reaction to her because of her race and gender.”But when it came to the fight over reproductive rights, Harris’s gender, race and age and experience as a prosecutor combined to give her the edge of authenticity that Biden lacks on an issue that is increasingly critical to voters. Many of the 16 states that have enacted near-total post-Roe abortion bans do not have exceptions for rape or incest, a state of affairs that Harris has called “immoral”.“As a woman on the ticket and the first woman VP and a woman of color, and then secondly, as an AG, she is strongest when her profile is fighting and prosecuting the case. People really like her in that mode,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic Party strategist and a lead pollster on the 2020 Biden campaign. “She’s so comfortable saying the word ‘abortion’. She’s so comfortable leaning in and speaking to the repercussions.”Emilys List, which first endorsed Harris 20 years ago when she was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney, has previously committed to spending more than $10m on bolstering Harris in the 2024 elections, according to reporting from Politico; Jessica Mackler, the new president of Emilys List, said that nothing about their plan to support Harris has changed. “Supporting the vice-president is a huge part of our electoral priorities,” Mackler said.Compared to his running mate, Biden’s recent record on abortion is far more spotty. A devout Catholic, Biden has said that he is “not big” on abortion and, in Thursday’s State of the Union address, spoke at length about the procedure without ever referring to it by name. Instead, he talked of the importance of “reproductive freedom” and promised to “restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land”.When it comes to the Israel-Gaza war, Harris has begun to take a more visible role, and it appears that here, too, she may be pushing just beyond Biden’s comfort zone. NBC News reported that the National Security Council toned down parts of Harris’s Selma speech that were “harsher” on Israel. The vice-president’s office denied that her speech had been watered down.On the Monday after her remarks, Harris met with Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet who had traveled to Washington against the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As she walked into the meeting, Harris denied that there was any daylight between her and the president on the conflict.“The president and I have been aligned and consistent from the very beginning,” she said.Many anti-war activists said Harris’s remarks on Gaza were too little, too late. Yet others saw it as a sign of progress – that their pressure campaign was having an impact. Nearly 100,000 Democrats in Michigan voted uncommitted in the primary, which was held just days before her remarks.“They’re feeling the pressure, and we want them to feel that pressure,” said Khalid Omar, who organized on behalf of the “uncommitted” campaign in Minnesota. “We want them to know that this is unacceptable.”Biden and Harris’s first joint campaign event of 2024, a rally in Virginia, was meant to focus on reproductive rights – but it was instead derailed by anger over the conflict in Gaza. After Harris and a Texas woman who had been denied an abortion spoke about the importance of defending the procedure, Biden took the stage. He was almost immediately interrupted by a protester who yelled: “Genocide Joe, how many kids have you killed in Gaza? … Palestine is a feminist issue!”That protester was removed from the auditorium. Another soon cried out: “Israel kills two mothers every hour!”Observers of Harris’s vice-presidency say the recent attention is recognition of the work she has been doing for months – both on domestic and foreign policy issues.“To the extent that she has found her voice, it’s because people are finally listening,” said Donna Brazile, a Harris ally and veteran Democratic strategist who teaches women’s and gender studies at Georgetown University.Last month, Biden dispatched Harris again, this time to the Munich Security Conference, where her mission was to reassure American allies rattled by Trump’s attacks on Nato. There she met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and with Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, hours after news broke of her husband’s death in an arctic penal camp.Less than a week later, she was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a stop on her reproductive rights tour. While there, she made a surprise stop at the city’s first Black woman-owned vinyl record shop and purchased a Miles Davis album from the owner, who was thrilled by the visit.When the Tennessee legislature expelled two Black lawmakers, the White House sent Harris to Nashville, where she joined them in delivering an impassioned plea for gun control. In December, she traveled to Dubai for a UN climate summit, where she juggled wartime diplomacy – delivering at the time the sharpest commentary of any administration official on Israel’s war in Gaza – with climate policy.“Her vice-presidency has been significant both in terms of her spokesperson role and in terms of a number of significant and highly visible diplomatic assignments that President Biden has given her,” said Joel Goldstein, a historian of the US vice-presidency.There is, however, another reason why scrutiny of Harris may be intensifying: her running mate’s age.If he wins a second term, Biden would turn 86 before leaving office. A New York Times and Siena College survey found that 73% of registered voters believe Biden is “just too old” to be an effective president. The poll was conducted more than two weeks after a special counsel described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”“The age of both Biden and Trump will focus more attention on the vice-presidential candidates,” Goldstein said.Republicans have sought to leverage concerns about Biden’s mental and physical health against Harris, casting her as an unsteady lieutenant ill-prepared to assume the presidency. In the weeks before dropping out of the Republican presidential primary, Nikki Haley argued that if Trump were to win the party’s nomination, he would lose to Biden, who would be unable to finish a second term, leading to a Harris presidency. The prospect, Haley said, “should send a chill up everyone’s spine”.But Harris is leaning in to her leading role. After the State of the Union, she headed west to Arizona, the next stop on her reproductive rights tour. On Saturday she was scheduled to campaign with Latino organizers in battleground state Nevada.To those who doubt whether the vice-president could step into the presidency, she is blunt.“I’m ready, if necessary,” Harris told NBC News on Friday. “But it’s not going to be necessary.”Rachel Leingang contributed to this report from Minneapolis More

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      RNC: Trump coup complete with loyalist as chair and daughter-in-law as co-chair

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      The Republican National Committee voted on Friday to install Donald Trump’s handpicked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party as the former president closes in on a third straight presidential nomination.Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was elected as the party’s national chair in a vote Friday morning in Houston.Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, was voted in as co-chair.Trump’s team is promising not to use the RNC to pay his mounting personal legal bills. But Trump and his lieutenants will have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery with limited, if any, internal pushback.“The RNC is going to be the vanguard of a movement that will work tirelessly every single day to elect our nominee, Donald J Trump, as the 47th president of the United States,” Whatley told RNC members in a speech after being elected.Whatley will carry the top title, replacing the longtime chair Ronna McDaniel after she fell out of favor with key figures in the former president’s Make America Great Again movement. But he will be surrounded by people closer to Trump.Lara Trump is expected to focus largely on fundraising and media appearances, which she emphasized shortly after being voted in, taking time in her inaugural speech to hold up a check for $100,000 that she said had been contributed that day to the party. When asked by a reporter later, she declined to say who wrote the check.The functional head of the RNC will be Chris LaCivita, who will assume the committee’s chief of staff role while maintaining his job as one of the Trump campaign’s top two advisers.McDaniel had been handpicked by Trump to lead the committee seven years ago but was forced out after Trump’s Maga movement increasingly blamed her for losses over the last few years.While she got a standing ovation after her goodbye, the new leadership appeared to eagerly embrace the change. Lara Trump, accompanied by her husband, Eric Trump, was greeted like a celebrity, with members lining up to take photos with her.With Trump’s blessing, LaCivita is promising to enact sweeping changes and staffing moves at every level of the RNC to ensure it runs seamlessly as an extension of the Trump campaign.In an interview on Thursday, LaCivita sought to tamp down concerns from some RNC members that the already cash-strapped committee would help pay Trump’s legal bills. Trump faces four criminal indictments and a total of 91 counts as well as a $355m civil fraud judgment, which he is appealing. His affiliated Save America political action committee has spent $76m over the last two years on lawyers.People speculating about the RNC paying for legal bills, LaCivita said, do so “purely on the basis of trying to hurt donors”. Trump’s legal bills are being covered largely by Save America, which is a separate political entity.The new leadership team is expected to more fully embrace Trump’s focus on voter fraud and his debunked claims about the election he lost to Joe Biden. Multiple court cases and Trump’s own justice department failed to reveal any evidence of significant voting irregularities.Whatley, an attorney, has largely avoided using Trump’s characterization of Biden’s victory and said in one 2021 interview that Biden “absolutely” had been legitimately elected and had won the majority of the electoral college votes. But he said in another interview in the weeks after the 2020 election that there had been “massive fraud”. He has also made focusing on “election integrity” a top priority for his state party in the years since. More

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      Joe Biden has come out fighting. But he’ll need more than grit to defeat Trump now | Jonathan Freedland

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      The president of the United States delivered his annual address to Congress on Thursday night – except what Americans and an increasingly nervous world wanted to assess was less the state of the union than the state of Joe Biden. I don’t mean politically, I mean physically.In the week that confirmed the November election will be a rematch of the 2020 contest – the current president against the former one – Biden needed to prove he was not the doddering, even senile figure of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and a thousand social media memes. In 68 combative minutes, he cleared that bar. He ad-libbed, he took on Republican hecklers and, often at high volume, jabbed at his opponent. The result: a performance that pundits described as “feisty” and “scrappy”, free of senior moments, and which prompted even Fox News to muse that Biden seemed “jacked-up” – which, from the network that likes to depict the president as a walking corpse, was a compliment.Projecting vigour was essential because the mountain Biden has to climb over the next eight months is getting steeper. For one thing, this week established that Trump is not only the certain nominee of his party – crushing his last remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, in all but one of the Super Tuesday primary contests and forcing her out of the race – he is in total control of it. Republicans in Congress are supine before him, whether it’s outgoing Senate leader Mitch McConnell endorsing him this week – even though Trump has repeatedly insulted McConnell’s Taiwan-born wife in nakedly racist terms and the two men have not spoken in three years – or the Republican refusal to pass a border deal they’d agreed with Democrats, because Trump wants the issue of immigration to remain unaddressed so that he can attack Biden for failing to address it come November. Some had hoped a primary season against Republican opponents would batter and bruise Trump, weakening him ahead of the presidential election. It has not worked out that way.Though that was not the only Democratic fantasy to be dented, if not dashed, this week. Many have hoped Trump’s undoing will come in the courts, where he faces a staggering 91 criminal charges. Indeed, judges in Colorado (and two other states) had removed Trump from the ballot, citing the constitution’s disqualification of anyone involved in insurrection, in Trump’s case the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. But on Monday, the supreme court ruled unanimously against Colorado, ensuring Trump’s place on the ballot in all 50 states.View image in fullscreenThe previous week, the same supreme court, now dominated by the right thanks to three Trump appointments, issued a timetable that effectively slows down the most potent of the cases against the former president: the charge that he sought to subvert the 2020 election. That makes it much less likely that there will be a conviction this side of polling day, a realisation that hits Democrats hard. For years, they’ve longed for this or that judicial authority to solve America’s Trump problem: special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into collusion between Trump and Moscow played that role for a while. Time and again, the dream evaporates. Democrats now face the awkward reality that, if they are to defeat Trump, they will surely have to do it the way they did it in 2020: with votes.And that task is looking ever harder. It’s not just the headline figures from national polls in which Trump is often ahead, or even Trump’s lead in the battleground states. It’s the change afoot in key voting groups that were crucial to Biden’s victory in the last election. Trump is gaining ground among Black and Hispanic voters, regularly picking up 20% to 25% of the former. To be sure, Biden is still ahead – but not by the massive margins he once enjoyed and which he needs to offset Trump’s advantage with white voters.Perhaps most alarming for Democrats is the defection of the young. Biden won voters under 30 by 25 points in 2020, now it’s neck and neck. A big part of that is the president’s support for Israel, with the appalling images coming out of Gaza outraging younger Americans especially. Mindful of them, and the disaffected Arab-American voters who could tip the balance in the critical swing state of Michigan, Biden announced a plan to create a floating pier off the Gazan coast, enabling maritime shipments of aid. Given that it will take weeks to build, and Gazans are desperate for food right now, and given too that there is obviously a simpler, swifter way to get aid in – by exerting full US pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, demanding he stops the delays – the Democrats’ progressive wing is unlikely to be placated. Taking all these developments together, it is not too strong to say the Biden coalition is fracturing.Many watching from afar are dumbfounded that Americans could be prepared once again, and despite everything, to make Donald Trump their president. How can that be? Surely they remember what it was like last time? To which the answer seems to be: actually, they don’t. This week, the New York Times wondered if Americans suffer from “collective amnesia” when it comes to Trump, pointing to polling data that suggests the years 2017 to 2021 have fallen into the memory hole. It’s partly that Trump’s outrages came so often, they created a kind of numbness: people became inured. And it’s partly that, thanks to a US media polarised on tribally partisan lines, there is no agreed, collective memory of what happened during those four turbulent years, even on 6 January. Add to that the inflation and border pressures of the Biden years and, as Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican consultant and convenor of focus groups, puts it: “They know what they don’t like about Biden, and they have forgotten what they don’t like about Trump.”How can Biden hope to scale the daunting peak that confronts him? Plenty say the answer is a two-pronged message, “democracy and Dobbs”: focus on Trump’s dictatorial aspirations and his role in appointing the supreme court, whose decision, known as Dobbs, ended the constitutional right to an abortion. But there’s good evidence that that formula, which paid dividends in 2022’s midterm elections, is no longer enough, especially among the young.Biden needs to do more. He can’t urge Americans to be grateful for what he’s achieved these last three years: they’re not feeling better off and, besides, voters are rarely grateful. Nor can he rely on memories of Trump, because those are fading. The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein is surely right when he says Biden has to let go of the past and focus on the future, framing the coming contest as “a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House”. Biden’s speech on Thursday nodded to that, vowing to defend social security and Medicare, while Trump eyes up a juicy tax cut for his super-rich pals – and casting himself as a decent man up against a would-be dictator.It was a good start but, my word, it is a marathon climb that lies ahead. Joe Biden has lived a long life, punctuated by the severest challenges, but the one he faces now could hardly be tougher. And yet he cannot afford to fail. The world depends on it.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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      Biden’s State of the Union: raucous, strident and insistently optimistic | Moira Donegan

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      Like a budget, a State of the Union speech is a moral document: it reflects a president’s values and priorities, distilling his own view of his administration for the American people. On Thursday night, Joe Biden made his moral case for re-election: he views America as a besieged but worthy global leader, one whose tradition of democracy deserves to be defended and rebuilt. Referring to his opponent Donald Trump only as “my predecessor”, Biden repeatedly contrasted his own vision of a more equitable and prosperous nation with the Republican agenda. The point was to offer Americans an optimistic and inclusive vision – and to remind them of the cynicism, sadism and depravity of the Trump worldview, which threatens to undermine women’s freedoms, make interracial democracy impossible, and use the machinery of government for little else but to further Republicans own self regard and greed.The 90-minute speech was raucous, strident and insistently optimistic; it appeared designed to demonstrate Biden’s vitality, and to launch in earnest a presidential campaign that has previously been somewhat tepid and sluggish. “I’m here to wake up the Congress,” Biden said as he began, declaring the nation to be in “an unprecedented moment”. Maybe he was there to wake up his own campaign, too.Biden opened his speech outlining the three major issues which his campaign sees as the greatest emergencies: the foreign threat to Democracy, as represented by Vladimir Putin and Trump’s threat to Nato; the decline of democracy at home, as represented by January 6 and Republican lies about the 2020 election (“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden bellowed; an early applause line); and reproductive rights.It was the first time that Biden gave abortion pride of place in the speech, reflecting his campaign’s belated awareness, in the wake of the 2022 midterms, of the issue’s salience. The attention he paid to the issue reflected his ambivalence toward abortion and hostility toward the feminist case for it. The section began not with a question of abortion, but with IVF: an Alabama court’s decision to grant frozen embryos the status of legal persons, thus briefly banning the treatment in the state, seems to have opened a new avenue in the post-Dobbs debate that is more comfortable for Biden.He moved on to telling the story of Kate Cox, a Texas mother who was forced to flee the state for an abortion after the ban in place there put her at risk for catastrophic health complications. Republicans, he noted, were planning to impose a national ban on reproductive freedom. “My God,” he said, “What other freedoms would they take away?”It was not what reproductive rights advocates were hoping for: the speech made no mention of women’s right to abortion as a matter of equality and dignity, casting “reproductive rights”, as Biden exclusively referred to them, as matters of bare health and dutiful family building. Still, Biden is not making these more robust endorsements of women’s reproductive freedoms because he does not think he has to: his campaign is betting that voters are galvanized enough by the issue that half measures will deliver their votes.They might be right. Indeed, Biden’s pitch to Americans on Thursday night often seemed to have female voters in mind. His proposed tax increases for corporations and the wealthiest strata of Americans were pitched not as mere fairness, but as a means to generate investment in care infrastructure – childcare, paid family leave and eldercare – the neglect of which has led to a nationwide crisis of overburdened and economically straightjacketed women.Roe, too, was framed as an invitation for women to not just vote their interests but avenge their citizenship. “Those bragging about overturning Roe v Wade have no idea about the power of women,” said Biden, referring to a now famous line in Samuel Alito’s majority opinion on Dobbs saying that “women are not without political or electoral power”. “They’re about to find out just how powerful women are.”The main thrust of Biden’s speech was meant to flout his economic accomplishments, to reshape the popular story of the American economy – one where consumers are hampered by inflation and nobody can buy a house – into a story of a remarkable post-pandemic recovery. He flouted the growth of small businesses and the low unemployment rate; he tipped his hat to the economic “soft landing” engineered by Jerome Powell, which has kept the US out of a long-predicted recession. He made a mild dig at the media as he tried to rewrite their own story: “The American people are writing the greatest comeback story ever told.”The speech was strong; every position taken was not. Biden fell apart when he tried to talk about the border, touting his own sadistically cruel bill by way of bragging that Donald Trump had scared all the Republicans out of voting for it. His indifference to the human lives of migrants was at times chilling: he referred offhandedly to “illegals”, and engaged in a bizarre and unnecessary bit of theater with Marjorie Taylor Greene, decked out in garish Maga gear, who yelled at Biden about a woman murdered by an undocumented immigrant.He stumbled, too, when he spoke of Israel’s war on Gaza, dwelling in lurid detail on Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October and only offhandedly acknowledging that more than 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel in the past five months. The issue has proved an albatross for Biden, who is hemorrhaging support among young voters and voters of color over his support for Israel’s war. As he spoke about Gaza, Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, wept. But this, too, may be an issue on which Biden relies on the horror of his alternative: his campaign seems to be betting that these voters will return to Biden in spite of his stance on Gaza, because Trump, who spoke recently of a desire to “finish the problem” in Palestine, is so much worse.Democrats had reason to be nervous about Biden’s performance ahead of the speech. The past few weeks of the news cycle have been dominated by internal Democratic fears about Biden’s age, a worry that seems to stand in for all sorts of other, perhaps more pertinent, worries about his ability to hold together his massive and internally fractious coalition. But to the extent to which the claims of concern over Biden’s age were sincere, he seemed determined to put them to rest: he contrasted his own presidency with that of Donald Trump’s on every issue except his age.“I know I don’t look it,” Biden said towards the end of his speech, “but I’ve been around a while” – a joke reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “I refuse to exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” “It is not how old we are,” Biden said. “It’s the age of our ideas. It’s a line that seems certain to be repeated throughout the campaign, as the Democrats seek to make the presidential election less a referendum on Biden’s age than on Donald Trump’s intolerable proposed future.Indeed Biden did seem energized, enthused. His gait was stiffer than last year and his stutter persists, but he came alive, oddly enough, when he was being heckled. He retorted gamely and happily when Republicans screamed at him from the audience; he appeared most comfortable, most confident, when he was being yelled at. “Turning setback into comeback – that’s what America does,” he said at one point in his speech. He was talking about the post-Covid economy. But he could have been talking about his re-election bid.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      State of the Union address 2024: Donald Trump labels Joe Biden’s speech ‘angry, polarizing and hate-filled’ – US politics live

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      Former President Donald Trump, during Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, sent a steady stream of messages blasting Biden on Truth Social.“He looks so angry when hes talking, which is a trait of people who know they are ‘losing it,’” Trump wrote. “The anger and shouting is not helpful to bringing our Country back together!”He added: “This was an angry, polarizing, and hate-filled Speech. He barely mentioned Immigration, or the Worst Border in the History of the World.“He will never fix Immigration, nor does he want to. He wants our Country to be flooded with Migrants. Crime will raise to levels never seen before, and it is happening very quickly!”Would it be a withered old man or a human dynamo? Would it be a rambling, gaffe-prone politician or an inspiring leader touched with fire? Would it be Geriatric Joe or Dark Brandon?Within the first few minutes of Thursday’s State of the Union address in Washington, millions of Americans had their answer. Joe Biden, 81, had brought the fight. But will it be enough?Read our US Politics Sketch here:U.S. Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, who delivered Republicans’ formal response to Biden, attacked him over immigration and the economy.The true, unvarnished State of our Union begins and ends with this: Our families are hurting. Our country can do better, she said.At 42, Britt is the youngest Republican woman ever to serve in the Senate and she attacked Biden over his age, telling viewers: “What we saw was the performance of a permanent politician who has actually been in office for longer than I’ve been alive.”The first-term Alabama senator was speaking on the heels of her state’s supreme court ruling that frozen embryos are ‘children’.Former President Donald Trump, during Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, sent a steady stream of messages blasting Biden on Truth Social.“He looks so angry when hes talking, which is a trait of people who know they are ‘losing it,’” Trump wrote. “The anger and shouting is not helpful to bringing our Country back together!”He added: “This was an angry, polarizing, and hate-filled Speech. He barely mentioned Immigration, or the Worst Border in the History of the World.“He will never fix Immigration, nor does he want to. He wants our Country to be flooded with Migrants. Crime will raise to levels never seen before, and it is happening very quickly!”As he spoke, the president was heckled by far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. She demanded he say the name of Laken Riley, who is suspected to have been killed by an undocumented migrant.Biden, who usually wants nothing to do with Greene, took her up on the offer. Biden acknowledged Riley – and then, in a reference to efforts to reduce gun violence, referred to greater numbers of people killed in incidents unrelated to migrants in the country.President Joe Biden accused Donald Trump of trying to “bury the truth about January 6” in a fiery State of the Union speech.The Democrat leader accused Trump and Republicans of trying to rewrite history about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by the former president’s supporters seeking to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory.“My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth about January 6. I will not do that,” Biden said, a signal that he will emphasize the issue during his re-election campaign. “You can’t love your country only when you win.”Here are other key moments from Biden’s speech:
      He opened by declaring democracy under threat at home and abroad and criticizing Trump, who he did not mention by name, for inviting Putin to invade NATO nations if they did not spend more on defense.
      The president said efforts to restrict abortion were an “assault on freedom”, and he derided the supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade, with members of that court seated just feet away.
      Biden knocked Republicans for seeking to roll back healthcare provisions under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, and driving up deficits, and jibed them for taking money from legislation they had opposed.
      He proposed new measures to lower housing costs, including a $10,000 (£7,807) tax credit for first-time homebuyers while boasting of U.S economic progress under his tenure.
      In a nod to Republican attacks over his age, Biden mentioned he was born during the second world war, but defended his vision for the country as fresh. “You can’t lead America with ancient ideas that only take us back.”
      Good morning, I will be bringing you all the most important US politics news as it happens today. More