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      Republicans say Trump call for Russia to attack Nato allies was just fine, actually

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      A leading Republican senator said Donald Trump was “simply ringing the warning bell” when he caused global alarm by declaring he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who did not pay enough to maintain the alliance, as Trump’s party closed ranks behind its presumptive presidential nominee.“Nato countries that don’t spend enough on defense, like Germany, are already encouraging Russian aggression and President Trump is simply ringing the warning bell,” Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a former soldier, told the New York Times.“Strength, not weakness, deters aggression. Russia invaded Ukraine twice under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but not under Donald Trump.”Cotton was referring to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.As president between 2017 and 2021, Trump was widely held to have shown alarming favour, and arguably subservience, to Vladimir Putin.Trump made the controversial remarks at a rally in South Carolina on Saturday.View image in fullscreenIn remarks the Times said were not part of Trump’s planned speech but which did repeat a story he has often told, the former president said: “One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’“I said, ‘You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want. You’ve got to pay. You’ve got to pay your bills. And the money came flowing in.”Amid fierce controversy over remarks the Biden White House called “appalling and unhinged”, another Republican hawk in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told the Times: “Give me a break – I mean, it’s Trump.”Graham, who has vacillated from warning that Trump will “destroy” the Republican party to full-throated support, added: “All I can say is while Trump was president nobody invaded anybody. I think the point here is to, in his way, to get people to pay.”Last year, Marco Rubio co-sponsored a law preventing presidents unilaterally withdrawing from Nato. On Sunday the Florida senator, whom Trump ridiculed and defeated in the 2016 primary, also dismissed Trump’s remarks about Russia.“Donald Trump is not a member of the Council on Foreign Relations,” Rubio told CNN, referring to a Washington thinktank. “He doesn’t talk like a traditional politician, and we’ve already been through this. You would think people would’ve figured it out by now.”Among other Senate Republicans there was some rather muted pushback. Thom Tillis of North Carolina reportedly blamed Trump’s aides for failing to explain to him how Nato works, while Rand Paul of Kentucky was quoted by Politico as saying Trump’s remarks represented “a stupid thing to say”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s last rival for the presidential nomination, which he is all but certain to secure, is Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Trump. Asked about his remarks, Haley told CBS: “Nato has been a success story for the last 75 years. But what bothers me about this is, don’t take the side of a thug [Vladimir Putin], who kills his opponents. Don’t take the side of someone who has gone in and invaded a country [Ukraine] and half a million people have died or been wounded because of Putin.“Now, we do want Nato allies to pull their weight. But there are ways you can do that without sitting there and telling Russia, have your way with these countries. That’s not what we want.”A former candidate for the nomination, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, told NBC the Nato remark was “absolutely inappropriate” and “consistent with his love for dictators”.Among former Trump aides, John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, told MSNBC: “When he says he wants to get out of Nato, I think it’s a very real threat, and it will have dramatically negative implications for the United States, not just in the North Atlantic but worldwide.”HR McMaster, Bolton’s predecessor, who was a serving army general when Trump picked him, said Trump’s Nato comment was “irresponsible”.Another former general and former Trump adviser, Keith Kellogg, told the Times he thought Trump was “on to something” with his remarks, which Kellogg said were meant to prompt member nations to bolster their own defences.“I don’t think it’s encouragement at all,” Kellogg said of Trump’s apparent message to Russia. “We know what he means when he says it.”But Liz Cheney, the former Republican Wyoming congresswoman who became a Trump opponent after the January 6 attack on Congress, called Nato “the most successful military alliance in history … essential to deterring war and defending American security”. She added: “No sane American president would encourage Putin to attack our Nato allies. No honorable American leaders would excuse or endorse this.” More

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      Supine Republicans don’t just dance to Trump’s tune – they amplify his racism

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      “I just love you!” Tim Scott bleated at Donald Trump.The South Carolina senator, who three months earlier had said Trump could not beat Joe Biden in the presidential election, was speaking on stage at a rally in New Hampshire.Criticism of Scott, who ended his own presidential campaign in November and later endorsed Trump, was swift.“Humiliating,” said Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader and news host. “A deeply, deeply pathetic moment,” said a fellow MSNBC host. “Cringe-y and painful,” was the opinion of The View.It was all of those things, but the self-abasement of Scott, who harbors ambitions of being Trump’s vice-president, was more importantly an illustration of how Trump remains the master puppeteer of the Republican party.The vice-presidential race – playing out in real time despite the presidential election being nine months away – is serving as a microcosm of what it means to be a success in the modern-day Republican party.In the current environment, anyone wishing to remain relevant in the GOP has to dance to Trump’s tune and kiss his big ring, surrendering any self-respect along the way.View image in fullscreenKristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, and Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman from New York, are both seen as potential picks for vice-president. They have each campaigned with Trump and adopted Trump’s racially charged language, in Noem’s case, to the extent that she has been banned from tribal lands in her own state.Marjorie Taylor Greene, a longstanding Trump champion and bizarro star of the rightwing world, is a long-shot candidate, as the race to get Trump’s attention seems set to intensify.“Allies also say that while loyalty – and having a dependable attack dog who can effectively defend him – is paramount,” Associated Press reported, in a piece about the audition to become Trump’s vice-president.Beyond the vice-presidential race, it’s clear that Trump continues to embody the GOP. In the Senate and in the House, Republicans are forced to do his bidding or suffer the consequences.“I think the Republican party believes that he can deliver the voters and the party believes he is the best way to deliver the voters. He wields a tremendous amount of control over the party’s decision-making capacities,” said Shannon Bow O’Brien, a professor in the department of government at the University of Texas at Austin.“He does a lot of obedience through fear. He does have a very committed base who he says: ‘Jump’ and they say: ‘How high?’ He posts inflammatory things online and people respond and do what he asks essentially.”After Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman, voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, Trump successfully backed a rival candidate against her in her state primary – a tactic he has deployed against other Republicans who aren’t sufficiently obsequious.“The people who vote in primaries are typically the most ardent and the most faithful,” O’Brien said.“And so if you have a candidate who Donald Trump has attacked, and has said: ‘This person needs to go,’ they run a serious risk, particularly in those primaries, of having that committed core coming out voting against them.”The bending of the knee to Trump is everywhere you look.During a bitter presidential primary campaign, Donald Trump dubbed Ron DeSantis “DeSanctimonious” and suggested he might be a pedophile, while a Trump campaign spokesperson said DeSantis walked “like a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mom’s closet and discovered heels for the first time”.DeSantis set all that aside when he dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump in January.View image in fullscreenIf Trump’s influence only extended to demanding that people praise him, it would be easier to write off. But the former president has essentially forced people to amplify his inflammatory rhetoric about immigration and race, with increasingly overt racist language becoming the messaging of the Republican party.“I have been to the southern border many times. Some of you have, too. I have witnessed first-hand the invasion taking place. What shocks me is that every time I go, it is more of a war zone than the time before,” Noem said in an address in South Dakota at the end of January.“The sheer number of illegal migrants coming into the country has made it so that every state is now a border state.”Noem added: “This issue is about preserving this great nation for our kids and our grandkids.”The comments didn’t come out of nowhere. Despite his mother, like two of his wives, being an immigrant, Trump has long demonized and dehumanized people seeking refuge in the US. Notably, he did so in December when he claimed people entering the US across the southern border were “destroying the blood of our country”.And Noem’s invective seems to have worked. Four days after her speech, Trump praised Noem – along with Scott – in a Fox News interview, when asked about who he might choose as his running mate.“Kristi Noem has been incredible fighting for me. She said, ‘I’d never run against him because I can’t beat him.’ That was a very nice thing to say,” Trump said.Others are circling too. Stefanik was once seen as a sober Republican thinker, a moderate who was one of the most bipartisan members of the House. She isn’t seen as that any more.When Trump began calling the people jailed for their part in the January 6 insurrection “hostages” earlier this year, Stefanik immediately jumped on board.“I have concerns about the treatment of Jan 6 hostages,” Stefanik said in an NBC News interview, a day after Trump had started using the term. In the same interview, Stefanik also refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election – something which no doubt would delight Trump, with whom she has appeared on his primary campaign trail.Stefanik stayed silent after Trump’s “poisoning the blood” claim, and in January seemed to adopt Trump’s dehumanizing tone when she claimed immigrants were set to “cross our borders and bleed into New York”.View image in fullscreen“When we look at Trump’s message around immigration, his message around the border, conversations around banning critical race theory, talking about crime in inner cities, he understands that America is at a very interesting point with respect to race relations. And so one way to keep the divisions alive is to talk about immigrants as if they are the problem,” said Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African and African American studies at Sewanee University and the chair of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.“What we see happening with Republicans is that they now understand that Trump has spoken a message to the base of the Republican party and so if anyone disagrees with Trump, they’re vilified, they’re not likely to be successful when it comes to politics.”With the back and forth over how to address the number of people seeking to cross the US-Mexico border, Trump is unlikely to tone down his incendiary rhetoric on immigrants and foreigners – invective that Riley says “threatens the very fabric of American democracy”.And given Trump’s enduring influence and control, the chorus of similar Republican attacks is only likely to grow.“What’s different about Donald Trump is he’s emerged as a leader of the party, primarily because of voters seeing him as the face of the movement,” Riley said.“We haven’t really seen a candidate who has been able to exert such powerful influence over almost everything within the Republican party in this way.“And I think that that is also what makes him a little more dangerous.” More

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      Trump gets access to sealed documents on witness threats in Mar-a-Lago case

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      Special counsel prosecutors have produced to Donald Trump a sealed exhibit about threats to a potential trial witness after the federal judge overseeing his prosecution for retaining classified documents ordered the exhibit turned over despite the prosecutors’ objections, people familiar with the matter said.The exhibit was a point of contention because it detailed a series of threats made against a witness who could testify against the former president at trial, and the matter is the subject of a criminal investigation by a US attorney’s office. Prosecutors had wanted to withhold it from Trump’s lawyers.But the presiding US district judge Aileen Cannon ordered the exhibit that prosecutors in the office of special counsel, Jack Smith, had submitted “ex parte” – or without showing it to the defense – to be transmitted to Trump’s lawyers after reviewing its contents and deciding it did not warrant that protection.The prosecutors complied with the order before a Saturday deadline without seeking a challenge – though the justice department would typically be loath to disclose details of an ongoing investigation, especially as it relates to the primary defendant in this case, legal experts said.The justice department may have decided it was not appealing the order because the exhibit itself is part of a motion from prosecutors asking the judge to reconsider two earlier rulings that would have the effect of making public the identities of dozens of other witnesses who could testify against Trump.At issue is a complicated legal battle that started in January when Trump filed a motion to compel discovery, a request asking the judge to force prosecutors to turn over reams of additional information they believe could help them fight the charges.The motion to compel was partially redacted and submitted with 70 accompanying exhibits, many of which were sealed and redacted. But Trump’s lawyers asked that those sealed filings be made public because many of the names included in the exhibits were people already known to have worked on the documents investigation.Prosecutors asked the judge to deny Trump’s request to unseal his exhibits, using broad arguments that they would reveal the identity of potential witnesses, two sub-compartments of what is described as “Signals” intelligence, and details about a separate probe run by the FBI.The special counsel’s team also asked to submit their own set of sealed exhibits when they filed their formal response to Trump’s motion to compel. The government’s exhibits involved memos of interviews with witnesses and likely testimony from witnesses, according to the three-page filing.Cannon in February issued two rulings: one on Trump’s request and one on prosecutors’ request.With Trump, the judge found that personal identifying information of witnesses and the information about “Signals” intelligence should remain under seal, but everything else could be public. And with prosecutors, she granted their request to file their own exhibits under seal.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe twin rulings appear to have caught prosecutors by surprise. They have previously been successful in keeping materials that could reveal witness identities confidential, and they formally asked Cannon to reconsider those orders.A motion for reconsideration is significant because if Cannon denies the challenge, it could pave the way for prosecutors to seek an injunctive appeal at the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit using a writ of mandamus – essentially, an order commanding Cannon to reverse her decision.Cannon has previously drawn scrutiny from the 11th circuit. Before Trump was indicted, she upended the underlying criminal investigation by issuing a series of favorable rulings to Trump before the appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.As part of prosecutors’ motion for reconsideration, they asked to submit alongside their court filings a third set of exhibits under seal and ex parte. Cannon agreed, pending her personal review of their contents. On Friday, she ruled they should not be ex parte – and should be turned over to Trump, as well. More

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      How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat

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      Lawrence Lessig has a message for America: Donald Trump’s assault on democracy in 2020, with his stolen-election lie and refusal to concede the White House, may have been shocking, but wait till you see what’s coming next.“We are in a profoundly dangerous moment,” the Harvard law professor says. “This is a catastrophic year, and the odds are not in our favor.”Such a blunt warning carries the gravitas of its source. Lessig is a leading thinker on how public institutions can be corrupted, and has probed deeply into vulnerabilities that leave US democracy undefended against authoritarian attack.Lessig has teamed up with Matthew Seligman of the constitutional law center at Stanford. Their new book, How to Steal a Presidential Election, asks whether a second Trump attempt to subvert democracy could succeed. Their answer makes for uncomfortable reading.“We are convinced,” they write, “that an informed and intelligent effort to undermine the results of a close, free and fair election could work in America – if the rules governing our presidential elections are not changed.”It is a sign of troubled times that prominent scholars are wargaming the next election. A country that has long prided itself as an exemplar of constitutional democracy finds itself under surgical lights.Nor is this Lessig’s first such thought experiment. Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020. They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet.“We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done,” Lessig says. “There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.”The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the “dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.”Having repeated the wargaming exercise for the new book, Lessig is far less confident that another assault on democracy would end so positively. With the former president almost certain to secure the Republican nomination, having won in Iowa and New Hampshire, Lessig has no doubt about how far Trump is prepared to go.“We’ve seen that he’s willing to do much, more more than we expected back in 2020,” he says.Another reason for people to be “very anxious” is that Trump and his inner circle have had four years to conduct their own wargames and are likely to be far more sophisticated: “Trump didn’t understand how to undo the structures of government. Now he’s well-trained, he knows exactly what he needs to do.”For their 2024 wargame, Lessig and Seligman assume the November election will be nail-bitingly close, both nationally and in at least one battleground state. That is not an outlandish precondition – you only have to think about the 537 votes that gifted Florida and the presidency to George W Bush in 2000.Given a close election, there are factors that could help stave off disaster. With the vice-presidency in the hands of Kamala Harris, there is no chance of Trump or his supporters unleashing the kind of pressure to which they subjected Mike Pence in 2020, trying to get him to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory.In the wake of January 6, Congress also moved to close several loopholes by clarifying some of the most ambiguous wording of the 1887 Electoral Count Act. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act makes it harder for Congress to object to the counting of votes under the electoral college, and gives the courts a greater role in adjudicating the proper slate of electors to be returned from individual states should disputes arise.But in the Lessig-Seligman analysis, inevitable congressional compromises have left some loopholes in place, opening up opportunities for an unscrupulous, now battle-hardened candidate.Three scenarios stand out. The first relates to so-called “faithless electors”: delegates chosen by parties to represent the winning candidate in each state under the arcane terms of the electoral college who decide to go against their pledge and back the loser.During Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, 10 electors switched their votes. The ruse was a creative, albeit vain attempt to stave off a Trump presidency.Lessig argued on behalf of the 2016 faithless electors before the US supreme court, in a case known as Chiafolo v Washington. The court ruled against the faithless electors, ordering that states have the right to compel them to back the winners of the popular vote.The authors’ concern is that the supreme court left it up to each state to decide whether or not to take up that power. Several states have yet to spell out in law that electors must abide by their pledge to vote for the victor. That leaves the door open to electors coming under massive, even violent pressure from Trump’s army of Make America Great Again warriors.“Imagine an elector had Maga Republicans surrounding their house carrying torches and demanding they vote for Donald Trump. Who knows what the electors would do in those circumstances,” Lessig says.The second scenario involves what Lessig and Seligman call a “rogue governor”: the governor of a state who decides to flip the results of the presidential election. This route poses the greatest long-term threat of US democracy imploding, Lessig believes.Paradoxically, post-January 6 reforms in the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act heightened the danger by increasing the powers of governors to certify slates of electors sent to Congress. Both houses of Congress can vote to overrule a rogue governor, and count the correct slate representing the winner of the popular vote, but only if the House and Senate agree.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGiven a divided Congress, a rogue governor and rogue House working together could steal the state’s electoral votes, and with it potentially the presidency.The risk of this scenario in this election cycle is minimal, Lessig concedes. Many of the highly sensitive battleground states – Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin – have Democratic governors.That leaves Georgia, which Biden won by just 11,779 votes. It has a Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but he resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the result in 2020 and so is arguably less likely to go rogue this year.View image in fullscreenThe third wargaming scenario is the one that really keeps Lessig up at night: what if an entire state legislature decided to go rogue?Again, the idea is not fanciful. Several legislatures in the most hotly contested states have Republican majorities firmly under Trump’s sway – Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, to name just three – and conspiracy theories about rampant electoral fraud continue to circulate within them.Lessig worries that the supreme court ruling in Chiafolo, by giving state legislatures the power to tell electors how to cast their electoral votes, heightens the risk of a Maga-dominated legislature going rogue. He envisages state lawmakers claiming massive fraud in a close race and using that to justify switching its result to Trump.“That’s a kind of opened hole that is going to be very hard to close in time,” he says.The Harvard professor has emerged from this journey into the dark arts of election subversion in a bleak mood. The book finishes with a raft of proposed changes to federal and state laws that the authors argue would close the loopholes they uncovered in their travels. Will those changes happen in time to prevent a second Trump blitzkrieg?“I’m not optimistic,” Lessig says. “I’m not optimistic that Congress will be able to do anything in time, so the most we can hope for is that the infrastructure resists as it did last time.”When he was researching the book, Lessig says he had the voice of his 13-year-old daughter ringing in his head: “Just chill,” as she would say. But in the event of an extremely close result, he feels he can’t just chill.He stresses that none of this is partisan. He began life as a Republican and had the distinction in 1980, aged 19, of being the youngest delegate from Pennsylvania to Ronald Reagan’s nominating convention.“Neither of us have anything against the conservative movement in the United States, as expressed in the traditional Republican party,” he says.But he looks at how the party has become “disengaged from the basic premise of democratic politics – if you win, you win, if you lose, you go home”. And he sees that the number of Americans who still believe the 2020 election was stolen, against all evidence, remains steady. That scares him.“Many Trump supporters have the sense that anything is justified, and that’s terrifying,” he says. “Trump is denying every single core democratic norm, and yet his support continues to grow. That too is astonishing and terrifying.”
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Donald Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who pay too little

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      Seeking a second presidency as the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 White House nominee, Donald Trump has said he would “encourage” Russia to attack any of the US’s Nato allies whom he considers to have not met their financial obligations.The White House described the remarks as “appalling and unhinged”. Trump made the statement on Saturday during a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina, ahead of the state’s Republican presidential preference primary on 24 February.The former president has voiced misgivings about aid to Ukraine as it defends itself from the invasion launched by Russia in February 2022 – as well as to the existence of Nato, the 31-nation alliance which the US has committed to defending when necessary.On Saturday, Trump claimed that during an unspecified Nato meeting he told a fellow head of state that the US under his leadership would not defend any countries who were “delinquent”.“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’” Trump said, adding “I said, ‘You didn’t pay, you’re delinquent?’”“No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, asked about Trump’s comments, said, “encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes is appalling and unhinged – and it endangers American national security, global stability and our economy at home.”Nato countries agreed in 2014, after Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, to halt the spending cuts they had made after the cold war and move toward spending 2% of their GDPs on defense by 2024.During his 2016 campaign, Trump alarmed western allies by warning that the United States, under his leadership, might abandon its Nato treaty commitments and only come to the defence of countries that meet the alliance’s 2% target.As of 2022, Nato reported that seven of what are now 31 Nato member countries were meeting that obligation – up from three in 2014. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has spurred additional military spending by some Nato members.Trump’s comments come as Ukraine remains mired in its efforts to stave off Russia’s 2022 invasion and as Republicans in Congress have become increasingly skeptical of providing additional aid to the country as it struggles with stalled counteroffensives and weapons shortfalls.Trump’s remarks on Saturday quickly raised alarm among many political pundits in the US.“Sounds as if Trump is kind of encouraging Russia to attack our Nato allies,” David Corn – an MSNBC analyst and the Washington DC bureau chief of Mother Jones – said on X.Meanwhile, conservative political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said Trump’s comments were “music” to the ears of Russian leader Vladimir PutinOn Saturday, the former president also celebrated the recent collapse of congressional legislation aiming to address the migration crisis on the US-Mexico border. The legislation was supported by Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, and Trump vowed that – if elected again – he would carry out “a massive deporation operation” on his first day back in the Oval Office.Trump has been performing strongly in public opinion polls against Biden, who defeated the ex-president in the 2020 election. Nonetheless, he is grappling with more than 90 criminal charges.The charges contained in four separate indictments across various jurisdictions allege that he tried to subvert the result of the election he lost, illegally retained government secrets after his presidency, and made illicit hush-money payments to a porn actor who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump.Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report More

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      Haley hopes to boost election bid with attacks on Trump’s and Biden’s ages

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      Nikki Haley’s Republican presidential nomination campaign in South Carolina is set to parade a mobile billboard drawing attention to rival Donald Trump’s age on Saturday, as ageing and mental acuity issues continue to dominate the United States’ political discourse.The stunt, which was scheduled to pass through Myrtle Beach, comes as Trump begins campaigning in Haley’s home state before the primary there on 24 February. It is scheduled to make stops outside a rally for the former president, according to the Hill, and show both Trump as well as Democratic incumbent Joe Biden appearing to fall into moments of confusion during public remarks.At 52, Haley is about three decades younger than the two leading candidates for November’s election. The video is part of a series her campaign calls Grumpy Old Men.While the 81-year-old Biden has received more attention for public mental blanks that have put Democrats on edge and prompted the president on Thursday to declare “my memory is fine”, Haley’s video highlights Trump’s mental miscues. Those include Trump’s confusing Haley with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi – a Democrat – and mixing up Sioux City, Iowa, with Sioux Falls, South Dakota.Kicking off her presidential campaign a year ago, Haley called for mandatory “mental competency tests” for politicians older than 75 and has since called for a “new generational leader” of her party.Last month, Trump, 77, boasted that he could beat Haley – whom he appointed to serve as his United Nations ambassador – in a cognitive test.“Well, I think I’m a lot sharper than her. I would do this: I would sit down right now and take an aptitude test and it would be my result against her result, and she’s not going to win, not gonna even come close to winning,” he said.On Friday, the former South Carolina governor, who trails Trump by double digits in her state, said both her ex-boss and Biden would use a second turn in the Oval Office as a “taxpayer-subsidized nursing home”.That came as an interview with the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton – recorded before Biden’s fiery remarks about his memory – drew further attention to the age issue.Clinton told MSNBC that while Biden’s age is a “legitimate issue”, she advised him to “lean in” to his years of experience.“I talk to people in the White House all the time, and you know, they know it’s an issue, but as I like to say, look, it’s a legitimate issue,” said Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016. “It’s a legitimate issue for Trump who’s only three years younger. So, it’s an issue.”The focus on Biden and Trump’s mental acuity has prompted a debate on what makes a natural verbal stumble and what marks a sign of cognitive decline.“When I see somebody make a flub on TV, I’m really not all that concerned,” S Jay Olshansky, a researcher on ageing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told the Associated Press on Saturday. “What science will tell you about flubs is that they’re perfectly normal, and they are exacerbated by stress.”Some studies suggest that “misnaming” may occur when the brain has names stored by category – including family – or may be phonetic, as when Biden confused France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, with the late French leader François Mitterrand.“To easily recall names, right in the moment, is the hardest thing for us to do accurately,” Eric Lenze of Washington University in St Louis, who focuses on geriatric psychiatry, told the AP.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA poll by NBC News last month found that 76% of voters had major or moderate concerns when asked whether Biden has “the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term”. Posed the same question about Trump, 48% said they had major or moderate concerns.Biden’s personal lawyer, Richard Sauber, addressed the concerns in the classified documents report that triggered the current round of debate about mental competence, arguing: “We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.”Sauber accused the special counsel, Robert Hur, of using “highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events”.Former attorney general Eric Holder, who served during the Obama administration, posted on X that the commentary in the special counsel’s report on Biden’s document retentions contained “way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing [justice department] traditions”.“Had this report been been [sic] subject to a normal [justice department] review these remarks would undoubtedly have been excised,” Holder added.While Trump may have an edge on Biden in terms of voter confidence in mental acuity, Biden retains a lead in other areas. According to NBC, close to half of voters – 51% – said they had major concerns, and 10% moderate concerns, about Trump’s legal issues.Topping Trump’s list of legal issues are more than 90 pending criminal charges, including for trying to subvert his 2020 electoral defeat.Recent Bloomberg polling found that a majority of voters in seven key swing states would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime (53%) or sentenced to prison (55%) in one of the four criminal cases against him. More

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      AI firm considers banning creation of political images for 2024 elections

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      The groundbreaking artificial intelligence image-generating company Midjourney is considering banning people from using its software to make political images of Joe Biden and Donald Trump as part of an effort to avoid being used to distract from or misinform about the 2024 US presidential election.“I don’t know how much I care about political speech for the next year for our platform,” Midjourney’s CEO, David Holz, said last week, adding that the company is close to “hammering” – or banning – political images, including those of the leading presidential candidates, “for the next 12 months”.In a conversation with Midjourney users in a chatroom on Discord, as reported by Bloomberg, Holz went on to say: “I know it’s fun to make Trump pictures – I make Trump pictures. Trump is aesthetically really interesting. However, probably better to just not, better to pull out a little bit during this election. We’ll see.”AI-generated imagery has recently become a concern. Two weeks ago, pornographic imagery featuring the likeness of Taylor Swift triggered lawmakers and the so-called Swifties who support the singer to demand stronger protections against AI-generated images.The Swift images were traced back to 4chan, a community message board often linked to the sharing of sexual, racist, conspiratorial, violent or otherwise antisocial material with or without the use of AI.Holz’s comments come as safeguards created by image-generator operators are playing a game of cat-and-mouse with users to prevent the creation of questionable content.AI in the political realm is causing increasing concern, though the MIT Technology Review recently noted that discussion about how AI may threaten democracy “lacks imagination”.“People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images (or fake audio or video) because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images,” the review noted. It added: “We’re unlikely to be able to attribute a surprising electoral outcome to any particular AI intervention.”Still, the image-generation company Inflection AI said in October that the company’s chatbot, Pi, would not be allowed to advocate for any political candidate. Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman told a Wall Street Journal conference that chatbots “probably [have] to remain a human part of the process” even if they function perfectly.Meta’s Facebook said last week that it plans to label posts created using AI tools as part of a broader effort to combat election-year misinformation. Microsoft-affiliated OpenAI has said it will add watermarks to images made with its platforms to combat political deepfakes produced by AI.“Protecting the integrity of elections requires collaboration from every corner of the democratic process, and we want to make sure our technology is not used in a way that could undermine this process,” the company said in a blog post last month.OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said at an event recently: “The thing that I’m most concerned about is that with new capabilities with AI … there will be better deepfakes than in 2020.”In January, a faked audio call purporting to be Joe Biden telling New Hampshire voters to stay home illustrated the potential of AI political manipulation. The FCC later announced a ban on AI-generated voices in robocalls.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What we’re really realizing is that the gulf between innovation, which is rapidly increasing, and our consideration – our ability as a society to come together to understand best practices, norms of behavior, what we should do, what should be new legislation – that’s still moving painfully slow,” David Ryan Polgar, the president of the non-profit All Tech Is Human, previously told the Guardian.Midjourney software was responsible for a fake image of Trump being handcuffed by agents. Others that have appeared online include Biden and Trump as elderly men knitting sweaters co-operatively, Biden grinning while firing a machine gun and Trump meeting Pope Francis in the White House.The software already has a number of safeguards in place. Midjourney’s community standards guidelines prohibit images that are “disrespectful, harmful, misleading public figures/events portrayals or potential to mislead”.Bloomberg noted that what is permitted or not permitted varies according to the software version used. An older version of Midjourney produced an image of Trump covered in spaghetti, but a newer version did not.But if Midjourney bans the generation of AI-generated political images, consumers – among them voters – will probably be unaware.“We’ll probably just hammer it and not say anything,” Holz said. More

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      Trump campaign sees boost after boost amid bad week for Biden

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      For those campaigning to bring Donald Trump back to the White House, the past week has seen much to celebrate. For those concerned for the health of American democracy, it felt like a disaster.Joe Biden was hit by a brutal special counsel report that painted him as elderly with a failing memory, fans of Trump eager to see him on the 2024 ballot appeared set for victory at the US supreme court, and Trump’s only remaining serious challenger in the Republican primary race suffered humiliation at the polls.Trump could even draw satisfaction from Biden’s decision to turn down an hour on national television before Sunday’s Super Bowl, continuing a theme of Biden largely shunning one-on-one major press interviews.Biden said he wanted to save millions of people, about to enjoy one of the biggest spectacles in American sport, from a lengthy dose of politics even if plenty of other presidents before him have shown no such consideration.But few believed that was the real motive during a week in which, to Trump’s evident glee, Biden was officially and devastatingly painted as too old and forgetful to know if he was committing a crime.Biden’s decision to refuse the pre-Super Bowl interview had already been made before Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents while out of office, released a report clearing but damning the president.Hur put his finger on Biden’s open electoral wound when he described the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” after a series of gaffs that have increasingly alarmed Americans who worry over the 81-year-old Biden’s health and age but also dread the prospect of 77-year-old Trump’s return to the White House with his raft of criminal prosecutions and two impeachments.But, increasingly, a Biden vs Trump rematch seems the inevitable choice for American voters come November. And with polls showing a close race – and often Trump ahead – Hur’s report was a huge win for Trump magnified on social media and trumpeted on Fox News and other rightwing media.View image in fullscreenThe former US president could not help himself from painting the decision not to prosecute Biden as further evidence of his own victimisation as he faces legal troubles from his own retention of classified documents. “I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more,” Trump claimed in a message to supporters.In fact, Biden was cleared in part because – unlike Trump – he immediately returned the classified documents found in his garage and cooperated with the special counsel.The special counsel in Trump’s case, Jack Smith, is prosecuting him not only for storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence but for making false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice and hiding documents from investigators.But, despite those facts, the past week has undoubtedly been a good one for the Trump campaign and its quest to put Trump back in power, despite widespread fears that a second Trump term would see him undermine US democracy and is motivated mostly by a desire to stay out of jail.Trump heralded a series of other wins which also provided more fodder for his perpetual claim to be a victim of one conspiracy or another.At the US supreme court, justices – three of them appointed by Trump – appeared deeply sceptical of attempts by some states to keep Trump off the ballot in November under a constitutional amendment that bars candidates who, as former officials, participated in insurrection or rebellion. Colorado disqualified Trump for instigating the January 6 storming of Congress and riot by supporters who did not accept his defeat to Biden. The justices signaled that Colorado overstepped its authority and that it was for Congress to bar Trump if it wanted to.This gave Trump another opportunity to paint himself as the target of a conspiracy, calling attempts to remove him from the ballot “election interference by the Democrats”.Even as the court was hearing the case, Trump’s campaign blasted supporters with a fundraising email in his name: “THEY WANT TO ERASE YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE FOR ME!”.Trump could also take satisfaction in the humiliation of his last remaining rival in the Republican presidential race, Nikki Haley, who lost the Nevada primary when she was the only name on the ballot. Nearly twice as many people voted for “none of these candidates” as for Trump’s former ambassador to the UN. Trump wasn’t on the ballot because of a peculiarity of the Nevada process which saw him participating in a parallel caucus, which he won handily.For all that, the political earthquake of the week was Hur’s report given that 76% of voters already say Biden’s mental and physical health is a significant concern whereas only 48% have a similar worry about Trump even though he is just four years younger.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden’s lawyers wrote to the special counsel calling references to the president’s memory lapses “gratuitous” and “prejudicial and inflammatory”. Biden himself, at a press conference intended to prove his mental alertness, was incredulous at Hur’s claim that the president was unaware of the death of his own son: “How in the hell dare he raise that?”.The press conference might have gone a long way to offset the damage of the special counsel’s report had Biden not realised his campaign team’s fears at the end by referring to the Egyptian leader, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, as the “president of Mexico”. It didn’t help that just days earlier Biden twice confused European leaders with long dead predecessors, muddling up President Emmanuel Macron of France with Francois Mitterrand and the former German chancellor Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl.Trump made a similar gaff last month in confusing Haley with the former Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi. But such mistakes are not as damaging to him because the former president’s most ardent supporters evidently forgive him anything and his opponents have far worse criticisms.View image in fullscreenBiden could claim his own win from the political fiasco which saw Senate Republicans block a bill to address the growing migration crisis championed by their own leadership when Trump objected to the law because it might help resolve an issue that is electorally damaging to the president. That served as a reminder of the chaos Trump brings to politics that helped cost him the last election.But, for now at least, opinion polls show Trump continues to make ground against a president whose ratings have slumped ever lower in the wake of his handling of Israel’s latest war on Gaza and the surging migrant crisis. A Morning Consult poll on Thursday gave Trump a five-point lead over Biden nationally. Other polls put the race closer but for a candidate facing more than 90 criminal charges to still be in the running is, at least in part, a reflection of Biden’s weaknesses.An NBC News poll shows Trump significantly ahead of Biden on all the major issues, including the economy, the migrant crisis on the border and general competence.There is even better news for Trump in local polls which show him ahead in key swing states. They include Michigan where Biden’s campaign team has scrambled to quell the anger within the US’s largest Arab American population at the president’s largely unswerving support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The Arab American vote in Michigan is larger than Biden’s majority in the state at the last election of about 154,000 votes.Even among the broader Democratic vote there is no great enthusiasm for the current president. The NBC poll showed that 62% of those planning to vote for him would do so principally as a means to keep Trump out of the White House.Democratic strategists see that as a strength not a weakness. The Biden campaign is focused on telling voters that they must reelect the president in order to save American democracy from a Trump second term.The president’s strategists are hoping that at least one of Trump’s looming criminal trials for his part in the January 6 insurrection and trying to overturn the 2020 election comes to court before November to remind voters of the threat from another Trump presidency.But all the while, they will be living in fear of Biden opening his mouth. More