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      US farmers turn towards Biden over Trump’s past agricultural policies

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      For two decades, Christopher Gibbs, a row crop and cattle farmer in Shelby county, Ohio, was an ardent Republican party member.He served as chair of his county’s Republican party branch for seven years and when Donald Trump became the party’s presidential candidate in 2016, Gibbs, like more than 80% of Shelby county voters, fell in line.But in 2018, everything changed.Watching Trump stand alongside Vladimir Putin at a summit in Helsinki, in which the president sided with his Russian counterpart against US law enforcement agencies that had indicted Russian intelligence officers for interfering in the US election in 2016, Gibbs was aghast.Then, not long after, Trump began trade tariffs against many of the US’s international allies.“Our allies retaliated by going after our soft underbelly: our agriculture,” Gibbs says. “When China retaliated by no longer taking our soybeans, I lost 20% of the value of my crop overnight.”Gibbs is among a small but perhaps growing group of US farmers who fear that Trump’s threats of renewed trade wars and immigrant deportations could ruin their businesses should he prevail in the November presidential election.Today, Gibbs is a fervent member of the Democratic party and last year went as far as becoming the chair of his county’s branch.“In the Democratic party, not everybody gets their way, but everybody gets a voice,” says Gibbs. “In the Republican party, there’s just one voice.”In important farming states such as Iowa, debates have raged over how another Trump presidency could cost farmers dearly. During Trump’s previous tariff campaign that began in 2018, many farmers in Michigan, an election swing state, railed against the former president’s actions.View image in fullscreenBack then, the Trump administration attempted to ease the financial pain it inflicted upon the agriculture community and ensure farmers continue to vote for him by paying out $52bn in subsidies in 2020 alone.On the campaign trail this year, Trump falsely claimed $28bn was extracted from China, when, in fact, the direct payments to farmers came from the US government via taxpayer money.While Joe Biden remains unpopular with farmers – Gibbs is among only 12% of US farmers who typically vote for candidates of the Democratic party – results from a host of 2022 midterm races suggest that at the state and local level, support for Democratic party candidates in rural America may be rebounding.Moderate Democrats in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, as well as Gibbs’ Ohio outperformed Biden’s 2020 presidential election figures by as much as 15%, according to analysis by Third Way, a pro-Democratic party thinktank.Research shows that under the Biden administration, farming incomes have increased significantly, in large part due to government assistance and a post-pandemic bump in demand for agricultural products. What’s more, polls suggest a large number of rural Americans may vote for third-party or write-in candidates in November, a prospect that would hurt Trump more than Biden.Gibbs isn’t alone.Steve Held, whose family has ranched in eastern Montana since the 1800s, says he’s always considered himself an independent, voting for Republican and Democrat candidates in state and presidential elections all his life.In recent years, however, his worldview has changed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“There was only one tornado [in Montana] that I was ever aware of growing up. Recently there was several in one day,” he says. “[Climate change] is real, and people see it, but the propaganda has them not wanting to admit the truth.”This year, Held ran as a Democrat for a seat in eastern Montana, finishing second in a primary held on 4 June.“The dysfunction in the Republican party now has gone beyond the pale. Our current representative [Republican Matt Rosendale] wouldn’t sign the proposed farm bill, which … supports programs so that families can make a living on the farms and ranches in Montana.”A former actor, Held entered politics in large part because of the climate crisis. “I sat in roomfuls of people who said they voted Republican their whole lives but that they were going to vote for me,” says Held.Still, Trump and other Republican candidates are expected to win rural counties handily across a slate of elections in November, and the challenges facing Democrats in rural America remain large.View image in fullscreen“Farmers and rural Americans are values voters,” says Gibbs, who recalls losing around 80% of his friends and colleagues after he spoke out against Trump. “They will continue to vote against their own interests, particularly in agriculture, because it’s the Republicans who speak to their value systems.”He says that Democrats have let themselves be reframed as something that doesn’t match the midwestern value set, such as universally supporting abortion, when “that’s never what they are for”.For Gibbs, the Democratic party could forge inroads with farmers and rural Americans, but to do so would require a recalculation. “The progressive left has had the microphone for too long,” he says.He says he doesn’t expect to see much change in terms of who farmers and rural Americans vote for in November’s election, but that’s not his main focus. He sees a chance of change further in the future.“What we’re doing here now,” he adds, “is building for [elections in] 2028, 2032.” More

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      Supreme court to release more decisions Friday after upholding Trump-era tax rule on foreign income – as it happened

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      The first case is Moore v United States, which deals with whether a one-time tax on Americans who hold shares in foreign corporations is legal.The tax was created under the 2017 tax code overhaul enacted under Donald Trump. In a 7-2 vote, the court held that it is legal.The supreme court put out a batch of new opinions this morning, none of which dealt with hotly anticipated cases on emergency abortions, Donald Trump’s immunity petition, or federal regulations that the conservative-dominated body has pending before it, though the justices did allow a Trump-era tax provision on foreign investments to stand. However, we’re not done hearing from the court this week: the justices will release more opinions on Friday. Meanwhile, the contours of next Thursday’s presidential debate are shaping up, with Trump opting to get the last word, and Biden the podium of his choosing. Robert F Kennedy Jr won’t be on the debate stage, and is not happy about it.Here’s what else happened today:
      Trump has the edge over Biden in several swing states, and is tied with him in Democratic stronghold Minnesota, a new poll found. However, the results are in the margin of error, and the survey also found support slipping for the former president among crucial independents.
      Democrats are seeking to focus the public’s attention on the consequences of Roe v Wade’s downfall, two years after the supreme court’s conservatives overturned the precedent and allowed states to ban abortion.
      Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will make a joint address to Congress on 24 July at 2pm, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson announced.
      Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, signed legislation mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms.
      Two colleagues of Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge handling Trump’s classified documents case, privately suggested she step aside, the New York Times reported. Cannon refused.
      The Senate has left town until 8 July, with only pro forma sessions scheduled until then:The Democratic-led body will be back and confirming judges by the second week of July.Lauren Ventrella, a state lawmaker in Louisiana who co-authored the bill mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms, gave a combative interview to CNN, where she defended the legislation.She starts off by squabbling with anchor Boris Sanchez:Then blows off public school students who do not adhere to her religious views:Hot on the heels of another worrying poll for Joe Biden’s re-election aspirations, Axios reports some Democrats in contact with his campaign worry about its strategy.“It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it. That is scary,” a Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign tells the outlet.From a person Axios describes as “in Biden’s orbit”:
      Even for those close to the center, there is a hesitance to raise skepticism or doubt about the current path, for fear of being viewed as disloyal.
      The person added: “There is not a discussion that a change of course is needed.”Make of that what you will.Democratic senator Tina Smith will seek passage of a bill to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that Democrats fear could be utilized by a second Trump administration to ban abortions nationwide, the Guardian’s Carter Sherman reports:Democrats will introduce legislation on Thursday to repeal a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans mailing abortion-related materials, amid growing worries that anti-abortion activists will use the law to implement a federal abortion ban.The bill to repeal the Comstock Act is set to be introduced by the Minnesota Democratic senator Tina Smith, whose office provided a draft copy of the legislation to the Guardian. The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto will also back the bill, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the news of Smith’s plans. Companion legislation will be introduced in the House.“We have to see that these anti-choice extremists are intending to misapply the Comstock Act,” Smith said in an interview. “And so our job is to draw attention to that, and to do everything that we can to stop them.”Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act is named after the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock and, in its original iteration, broadly banned people from using the mail to send anything “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, including “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion”. In the 151 years since its enactment, legal rulings and congressional action narrowed the scope of the Comstock Act. For years, legal experts regarded it as a dead letter, especially when Roe v Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion.Melinda Gates, the billionaire co-founder of the Gates Foundation nonprofit, announced she has endorsed Joe Biden’s re-election:Gates was formerly married to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and has in the past been critical of Donald Trump.The judge handling Donald Trump’s classified documents case rejected suggestions from two more experienced colleagues to step aside from the case, according to a report.Florida federal district judge Aileen M Cannon, a Trump appointee, was approached by two federal judges in Florida, including Cecilia M Altonaga, the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, the New York Times reported.Each asked her “to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge,” the report said, citing sources. Cannon “wanted to keep the case and refused the judges’ entreaties”, it said.Since taking on Trump’s classified documents case last year, Cannon has repeatedly issued rulings that have reduced the chance of the case coming to trial before November’s presidential election, in which he is the Republicans’ presumptive nominee.Congresswoman Suzan DelBene of Washington, who chairs House Democrats’ campaign arm, pointed to the party’s strong performance in recent special elections as evidence of how their stance on abortion is resonating with voters.“The public knows only Democrats are standing up for women and standing up to protect access to safe, critical reproductive care,” DelBene said on a press call today.
      This election is fundamentally about our rights, our freedoms, our democracy, and our future. House Republicans have made it clear they’re willing to do anything to take those away.
      Democrats have failed to pass a federal bill protecting abortion access, as Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House, but they have vowed to do so if they regain control of Congress in November.Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters:
      We can’t risk another four years of Donald Trump in the White House. And that’s why we will campaign on this issue and we will win on this issue. And when Democrats win, we will restore access to safe, legal abortion nationwide.
      On Monday, the US will mark two years since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, and Democrats plan to make their support for abortion access a central focus of their pitch to voters in November.“When Dobbs overturned Roe, millions of women across the country lost their right to have a choice in their healthcare, a say in their safety and a voice in their own destiny,” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said on a press call ahead of the anniversary.
      And Trump and his extreme MAGA [’Make America Great Again’] Republicans, regardless if they’re in Washington or statehouses, will not stop until they institute a national abortion ban.
      Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, the vice chair of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, described abortion access as “a defining issue in the 2024 Senate elections”. She said:
      It shows so clearly the contrast between Democrats and Republicans on this fundamental and core issue of whether or not people in this country can have the freedom to control their own bodies and their own lives. That is what is at stake in this election.
      US civil liberties groups have sued Louisiana for what they called its “blatantly unconstitutional” new law requiring all state-funded schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.The state’s rightwing Republican governor, Jeff Landry, who succeeded the former Democratic governor John Bel Edwards in January, provocatively declared after signing the statute on Wednesday: “I can’t wait to be sued.”The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined with its Louisiana affiliate and two other bodies – Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom of Religion Foundation – to immediately take him up on his challenge by announcing they were doing precisely that.In a joint statement, the ACLU and its allies said the law, HB 71, amounted to religious coercion. They also said it violated Louisiana state law, longstanding precedent established by the US supreme court and the first amendment of the US constitution, which guarantees separation of church and state.The White House has hit back again against accusations by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the US is holding back weapons and ammunition from Israel in its war in Gaza.The Israeli leader made the claims of a supposedly deliberate weapons delay in a video posted on social media in which he implied that Israel’s ability to prevail in the nine-month war with Hamas was being hampered as a result. Netanyahu said:
      I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel – Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.
      The White House’s spokesperson John Kirby, speaking to reporters today, said he had “no idea” what Netanyahu’s motivation was in making the statement.
      We didn’t know that video was coming. It was perplexing to say the least.
      Kirby described Netanyahu’s comments as “deeply disappointing and vexing”, adding:
      [There’s] no other country that’s done more or will continue to do more than the United States to help Israel defend itself.
      The supreme court put out a batch of new opinions this morning, none of which dealt with hotly anticipated cases on emergency abortions, Donald Trump’s immunity petition, or federal regulations that the conservative-dominated body has pending before it, though the justices did allow a Trump-era tax provision on foreign investments to stand. However, we’re not done hearing from the court this week: the justices will release more opinions on Friday. Meanwhile, the contours of next Thursday’s presidential debate are shaping up, with Trump opting to get the last word, and Biden the podium of his choosing. Robert F Kennedy Jr won’t be on the debate stage, and is not happy about it.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Trump has the edge over Biden in several swing states, and is tied with him in Democratic stronghold Minnesota, a new poll found. However, the results are in the margin of error, and the survey also found support slipping for the former president among crucial independents.
      Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will make a joint address to Congress on 24 July at 2pm, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson announced.
      Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, signed legislation mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in public classrooms.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr has hit out at both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, after the independent presidential candidate failed to qualify for the first presidential debate, to be hosted by CNN next Thursday.The network said only Trump and Biden met their criteria for the debate. But in a statement, Kennedy blamed the two leading presidential contenders for keeping him off the debate stage:
      Presidents Biden and Trump do not want me on the debate stage and CNN illegally agreed to their demand. My exclusion by Presidents Biden and Trump from the debate is undemocratic, un-American, and cowardly. Americans want an independent leader who will break apart the two-party duopoly. They want a President who will heal the divide, restore the middle class, unwind the war machine, and end the chronic disease epidemic.
      Here’s what CNN said about their qualifications to make the debate:
      In order to qualify for participation, candidates had to satisfy the requirements outlined in Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution to serve as president, as well as file a formal statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission.
      According to parameters set by CNN in May, all participating debaters had to appear on a sufficient number of state ballots to reach the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the presidency and receive at least 15% in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters that meet CNN’s standards for reporting.
      Polls that meet those standards are those sponsored by CNN, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, Marquette University Law School, Monmouth University, NBC News, The New York Times/Siena College, NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College, Quinnipiac University, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
      Biden and Trump were the only candidates to meet those requirements.
      A new poll of swing states shows Donald Trump with the edge over Joe Biden, and tied with the president in Minnesota, which has not supported a Republican presidential candidate in 52 years.The poll was conducted by Emerson College, and lines up with other surveys that have indicated Biden faces uphill battle for re-election in November:Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling, said the data indicates little movement in overall support for the two candidates since Trump was convicted of felony business fraud last month.However, Kimball noted that “results fall within the poll’s margin of error,” and that there have been signs of Trump’s support declining with independent voters, who may play the deciding role in this election:
      In Arizona, Trump’s support among independents dropped five points, from 48% to 43%. In Michigan, Trump’s support dropped three, from 44% to 41%, and in Pennsylvania, Trump dropped eight points, from 49% to 41%. Biden lost support among independents in Georgia, by six points, 42% to 36% and Nevada, by five, 37% to 32%.
      The Trump and Biden campaigns flipped a coin to sort out some of the lingering issues ahead of next Thursday’s first presidential debate, and CNN has announced the results.Joe Biden won the coin flip, and opted to choose a specific podium. That left Donald Trump to specify if he would have the last word of the debate, or leave that to Biden.Here’s what the two candidates chose, from CNN:
      The coin landed on the Biden campaign’s pick – tails – which meant his campaign got to choose whether it wanted to select the president’s podium position or the order of closing statements.
      Biden’s campaign chose to select the right podium position, which means the Democratic president will be on the right side of television viewers’ screens and his Republican rival will be on viewers’ left.
      Trump’s campaign then chose for the former president to deliver the last closing statement, which means Biden will go first at the conclusion of the debate.
      Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson has announced that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint session of Congress on 24 July.Netanyahu’s 2pm address will take place in the House chamber, and comes amid tensions with the Biden administration and some Democrats over the Israeli leader’s handling of the invasion of Gaza. Earlier this year, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, called for Israel to hold new elections, and said Netanyahu “has lost his way”.Here’s more on Netanyahu’s planned speech: More

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      Trump’s dangerous attacks on rule of law have US historical precedents | Corey Brettschneider

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      Donald Trump’s threats to democracy – including his promise to govern as a dictator on “day one” and his refusal to abide by the norm of a peaceful transition of power – are often called unprecedented. While commentators and journalists are rightly focused on the danger of the moment, there are precedents for what we face today. Three examples, far from minimizing the current danger, show both how fragile American democracy has always been and how American citizens can fight successfully to save it.The first example of a presidential threat to democracy came close to the founding. The second US president, John Adams, criminalized dissent and sought to prosecute his critics. The number of these prosecutions was vast. The most recent research on the subject identifies 126 individuals who were prosecuted. These cases were not just based on the hurt feelings of a thin-skinned president (although they were partly that). They came in response to reports that Adams’s party was attempting a kind of self-coup, not unlike the events of January 6.Specifically, when a newspaper editor published a plan that Adams’s Federalist party had developed to refuse to certify electoral votes for their opponents, Adams signed a retaliatory law that allowed for the punishment of critics of the president. The law was drafted with its targets in mind. It made criticism of the president a crime but held no such penalty for critics of the vice-president, Thomas Jefferson, a leader of the opposition party. And the prosecutions were swift and harsh. Newspaper editors found themselves facing prison for their words.The second example came after the civil war. Andrew Johnson’s presidency was devoted to defending white supremacy and ensuring that the end of slavery did not mean equality for Black Americans. It was also marked by threats against his perceived enemies, including a notorious speech in which he called for violence against his pro-Reconstruction opponents in Congress.The third example came more recently. Like Adams, Richard Nixon sought to silence his enemies, but not by signing a questionable law – by engaging in a criminal conspiracy. We know now that his plans included crimes well beyond those of Watergate, even potentially firebombing the Brookings Institution. Nixon believed that a safe at Brookings held documents damaging to him. When his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, told him that such documents should be retrieved by a legal process, he retorted: “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”One major target of Nixon’s criminal schemes was Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. In an an interview shortly before his death, Ellsberg told me that, as recently released evidence suggests, Nixon sought to “incapacitate” him.The danger of presidencies like Adams’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s consisted not just of their attacks on legal and democratic norms. It also lay in the way they read the constitution to support an authoritarian vision of the presidency. Adams saw analogies between monarchs and presidents. Johnson compared himself to Moses. Nixon spoke of his vast domestic powers that were the result of what he saw as an ongoing civil war with student protesters – a view that led him to famously proclaim, in his interview with David Frost, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal”.In each of these three dangerous moments, however, American democracy fought back. During the Adams administration, the newspaper editors standing trial published stories about their own prosecutions to highlight Adams’s authoritarianism and to demand a right to dissent under the first amendment. They also turned the outrage at Adams into a major issue in the 1800 election, resulting in the election of Jefferson. When Jefferson proclaimed in his first inaugural “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he sent a clear signal that the Sedition Act, the Adams administration’s tool for prosecuting opponents, would be allowed to expire.As for Johnson, the House impeached him, and though he survived his Senate trial, he was so discredited that he failed to receive his own party’s presidential nomination in 1868. The general election in that year saw pro-Reconstruction citizens elect Ulysses S Grant with the aim of putting down Klan violence and protecting equal citizenship, promises partially realized with the passage of the Ku Klux Klan Act and the indictments of more than 3,000 white supremacist terrorists. Pro-Reconstruction Americans rallied around the cause of equal citizenship championed by Frederick Douglass, who opposed Johnson in a White House confrontation and in his public speeches.In the case of Nixon, Ellsberg, rather than allowing himself to be silenced, only grew bolder in criticizing the president. In fact, he used his own trial to expose Nixon’s abuses, just as newspaper editors had done under Adams. Ultimately the judge in his trial dismissed the case. Finally, the unknown citizens of Grand Jury One, convened in the Watergate trial, fought to gather the evidence of Nixon crimes, handing over information to Congress that led to his resignation.In stark contrast to Nixon’s authoritarian understanding of the constitution, these citizens emphasized the idea that no person, not even a president, was above the law.These three examples demonstrate that the danger to American democracy has always lain partly in the power of the presidency itself. At the founding, Anti-Federalists argued against ratifying the constitution on the grounds that presidential power was too vast and dangerous. The behavior of Adams, Johnson and Nixon shows clearly that the Anti-Federalists’ worries were well founded – and that presidential threats to democracy are not unique to today’s moment.Despite these precedents, however, there is one sense in which the current moment is uniquely dangerous. In these past examples, authoritarian presidents were cast into the dustbin of history, lacking the political power to continue their constitutional abuses. This time, a president who threatened democracy is doubling down, and we risk seeing him take office once again.The current threat is also unique in that Trump has learned from his previous term where the choke points of American democracy lie. Unlike Adams, Johnson and Nixon, he threatens to recapture the presidency with a clear roadmap for toppling the traditional checks on the office.Trump understands, for instance, that with a loyalist attorney general, he might never face accountability for his crimes. He would certainly see to it that such an AG fired special prosecutor Jack Smith, currently pursuing two cases against him. Thanks in part to sympathetic justices he appointed, he might also be immunized by the supreme court for any future crimes committed in office as long as these crimes are construed as “official acts”. While Nixon eventually resigned under threat of impeachment and indictment, Trump withstood two impeachments with no hint of even remotely backing down. Unlike Nixon, Trump not only shamelessly refused to resign but has continued his assault on democracy.So, what can we learn about the threat of the moment from these historical examples? One lesson is clear: we the people are ultimately responsible for rescuing democracy and our democratic constitution. We should find inspiration from those figures who opposed Adams, Johnson and Nixon as we demand accountability in two senses.First, we should demand the legal accountability Nixon escaped. The jury in Trump’s New York case has made the first step here. And that legal accountability should continue in the other cases against the president.Second, and most importantly, the American people need to seek accountability at the ballot box. This election, just like the elections in 1800 and 1868, is a referendum on the future of self-government. In those past moments, the American people rejected authoritarianism and voted for presidents who sought to restore fundamental pillars of American democracy that were under threat.Today, we must persuade our fellow Americans to do the same.
      Corey Brettschneider is professor of political science at Brown University and the author of The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It More

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      In South Carolina, Black voters are split on immigration

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      Republicans claim that their election-year rhetoric about immigration has a new audience in Black communities. North Charleston’s newfound racial complexity tests that claim.The working-class city of about 120,000 people is one of the most strongly Democratic in South Carolina, more so even than Charleston, its larger, storied neighbor to its south. It has also long been split almost evenly between Black and white residents. Immigration has been adding a third dimension to what was a two-way relationship.In the “neck” of the barbell-shaped city, between the primarily white northern neighborhoods and the primarily Black southern neighborhoods, are stretches where the shops advertise in Spanish and almost all the children getting off the school bus are Latino.About 2.5% of North Charlestonians identified as Hispanic in the 1990 census. That rose to 4% in 2000, 10% in 2010 and, on paper, about 12% today, with 8% “other”. But the current census figures are questionable, said Enrique “Henry” Grace, CFO of the Charleston Hispanic Association: “Forget about it. Because Hispanics don’t do the census. Whatever the census says, double it.”Immigration can be a tough topic to discuss in South Carolina’s Black community, which isn’t keen on offering white conservatives who regularly attack cities as “crime-infested” yet another reason to snipe at North Charleston, especially in an election year when immigration rhetoric on the right has become increasingly toxic.But it doesn’t mean they aren’t asking more from Democratic leaders. In early June, Joe Biden announced changes to border policy, significantly curtailing asylum claims in a bid for bold executive action on a campaign issue.The US president’s border order came with political pressure mounting on the president and Congress to resolve negotiations on a bill to change America’s immigration policies and stem undocumented migration. Some of that political pressure comes from big-city leaders like the mayors of New York and Chicago, after border state governors began shipping people who had crossed the border to them last year, straining the social services infrastructure.But the border action has an audience among Democrats in South Carolina, too.Biden was serving red meat to Democratic party loyalists at a January campaign speech in Columbia, South Carolina, talking about his appointment of Black judges and lowering Black unemployment rates, when he threw them one nugget of red-state steak. He complained that Republicans in Congress were thwarting legislation on the border – despite getting almost everything they wanted in the bill – at the bidding of Donald Trump in order to preserve it for him as a political issue.View image in fullscreen“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said, to applause.As attendees awaited the president before the speech, Michael Butler, mayor of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a Democrat, expressed sympathy with this idea. “I would expect the president, if he’s elected a second time, to close the border,” Butler said.The population of both the city and county of Orangeburg, about 45 minutes north of North Charleston, is mostly Black, poor, rural and Democratic. Biden won 70% of Orangeburg in the 2020 primary – his best showing statewide – and two-thirds of votes in the November election.Without a careful message, this time could be different. Shipping border crossers to big cities seemed like a publicity stunt, but it was one that worked, in Butler’s view, to highlight how problems at the border are problems everywhere, including Democratic strongholds.“I empathize with those mayors,” Butler said. “They have to deal with the expectations of migrants, and the security of them. You know we’re the land of the free and the brave, and we believe in taking care of all citizens. But those borders need to be secured to protect the citizens.”Butler’s take on immigration isn’t uniformly held across the state.Some Black political leaders in North Charleston beam about how immigration has changed their communities. State representative JA Moore, a North Charleston Democrat, boasts of having the most diverse district in the state. “I’m proud of that,” he said. Moore pushes back, hard, against the suggestion that there’s tension between Black and Latino people about housing or jobs where he lives.North Charleston presents a more nuanced test of the Black electorate’s reaction to immigration, because the growth of its immigrant community has come with booming economic growth and overall population increases. Even so, Moore admits that some could conflate something like the rapid increase in housing prices with the rapid increase in immigration.“The housing market in general and in Charleston is higher than it was 10, 15 years ago,” Moore said. “And also the amount of Hispanics that are moving in has increased tremendously in the past 15 years. They see a Hispanic person move into their neighborhood, and they’re seeing the prices of the houses going up … People may be correlating the two.”Donald Trump is counting on those kind of inferences.Biden’s Republican challenger, known for his increasingly strident immigration rhetoric, responded to the border closure at a rally in the Las Vegas heat after Biden’s announcement, describing it as insufficient while arguing that the president is “waging all-out war” on Black and Latino workers. He falsely claimed that the wages of Black workers had fallen 6% since 2021.The international manufacturers that have driven growth aren’t hiring undocumented labor, said Eduardo Curry, president of the North Charleston chapter of the Young Democrats of South Carolina. “A lot of jobs here in Charleston are skilled labor jobs,” he said. “It’s not just … walk off the street and let me hire you.”The problem, Curry said, is that too few Black workers in North Charleston have the training to take those jobs, even as those employers are yearning for more labor. Working-class Black laborers instead compete with recent immigrants for jobs that require less formal education.Tension between Black and Latino people in North Charleston has been relatively low, but may be rising because of job competition, said Ruby Wallace, a job recruiter at a staffing agency in North Charleston that serves warehouses and distribution centers – working-class employers. “Hispanics are working for whatever they can get at this point,” she said. “And they’re doing a lot of work.”The North Charleston native said her staffing agency has lost 40% of its business year over year after some clients found it less expensive to hire undocumented labor through shady organizations.The neighborhood around the staffing agency has become populated primarily with immigrants, and the office, which has historically employed working-class and poor Black people, turns away undocumented applicants every day.A cottage industry of undocumented labor has emerged, undercutting legal operators by skirting federal E-Verify laws and omitting payments into workers’ compensation and unemployment taxes.Wallace has been reporting the violations she sees to the US Department of Labor, to no avail. “I’m trying to figure out, how is it possible for them to load people up and bring them, working here in South Carolina? Is it not illegal for them to do that?” she said.Republican messaging aimed at Black voters mixes threats about job losses with invective about immigration, crime and cities.Black voters are expected to ignore the racial undercurrent of attacks on cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia or most recently Milwaukee – a “horrible city” in Trump’s most recent tirade – while being receptive to the idea that undocumented people from Central and South America make those cities more unsafe.That hasn’t happened in North Charleston.North Charleston began assessing the city’s racial disparity in arrests and victimization in 2020. A majority of North Charleston’s immigrants are Latino. According to a report released in 2021, Hispanic suspects represented about 7.5% of arrests, while Hispanic residents comprised 10% of the city’s population that year.Violent crime increased during the pandemic in North Charleston, as it did in most cities with more than 100,000 residents. It has fallen since. But it is among the higher-crime cities in the state, with a murder rate about five times the national average.Keeping the peace in North Charleston has meant navigating racial tension in a city experiencing poverty and crime. Immigration adds a new element to that challenge.Reggie Burgess, 58, grew up in North Charleston and served on its police force for more than 30 years – five as its chief – before winning election as the city’s first Black mayor in 2023. He said he contends with a common trope: that undocumented immigrants bring with them an uptick in crime.But that depiction of immigrants as criminals is false; they are measurably less likely to commit crimes than the US-born. Burgess, who has witnessed the changes in his community first-hand, said he has had to meet with immigrants to discuss how they are too often victimized by other poor people who look like him.Back when Burgess was still chief of police in 2017, he found himself conducting role-playing exercises with Latino immigrants about identifying Black people, trying to build some trust with the community.“We would actually turn them backwards, and we’d turn them around real quick and say: ‘Look at this person,’ and turn ’em back around,” Burgess said. “I’d ask, can you give me a description of the person? We were trying to teach them to understand that a Black male was more than this Afro. You’ve got to [describe] a shirt, or this lanyard.”It became evident to Burgess 20 years ago that undocumented individuals were being targeted for robberies because they tended to work in cash trades, he said. That revelation led the city to start pushing the financial-services industry to provide banking services, and was the start of relationship-building exercises between civic leaders and immigrants.But the federal government doesn’t do enough to keep victims from being deported long enough to sustain prosecutions, he said, leaving undocumented individuals as easy targets for crime and exploitation.“The U visa is supposedly supposed to help us lock in the witness for a period of time,” Burgess said, describing a victim witness visa program. “And Hispanics and Latinos would fill out the form, and I’m thinking: ‘OK, we’re good.’ The next thing you know, they tell me the prime witness has to go back or got caught up at a traffic stop and is being deported.”Underlying this issue is unstable housing and endemic poverty.“There’s a lot of need in Charleston in the Hispanic community. Need for everything, housing, jobs, everything,” said Grace of the Charleston Hispanic Association.The undocumented community in North Charleston tends to be concentrated in an area of the city with trailer parks and affordable housing. They are too often living in substandard or overcrowded conditions, said Annette Glover, who operates an immigrant-oriented community ministry in North Charleston.North Charleston is part of a three-county metropolitan area of about 830,000 residents. Glover’s organization, Community Impact, assisted 86,387 people within that area last year, she said, with food, language training, housing assistance and other help. Most were immigrants. About 75% – to 80% were undocumented, she said. With that has come a fear of appearing on the government’s radar, even while applying for help from nongovernmental organizations like hers, she said.“We have found a way to actually get them to fill out applications, by allowing them to understand that we’re not going to be giving it to Ice or to anything like that,” she said.Burgess said economic conditions and education are stress points. “I mean, some of these neighborhoods, the [adjusted median income] is $29,000. And then you can go a little further up, and AMI is probably is $101,000,” he said. “And without education, there’s no options. You have to settle for whatever you get.”The gridlock in Washington DC on immigration has an impact on places like North Charleston.Biden’s move to close the border to asylum seekers is a short-term approach to a long-term problem, Burgess said.Without actual reform to the immigration system, undocumented immigrants will remain in the shadows.“We have to step back and push aside these little personal vendettas and squabbles in these parties, and think as Americans,” Burgess said. “My people came here in chains 400 years ago. We’re free now, right? Why? We’re free because the country said enough is enough. And they fought, brothers and sisters, fought each other, and they said: ‘OK, everybody’s free.’ They could do that in 1865. They can do the same thing in 2024.” More

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      Videos of Biden looking lost are a viral political tactic: ‘low-level manipulation’

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      Joe Biden wandered off.Standing among the west’s major leaders in Italy last week, the US president turned away, seemingly in confusion, and had to be alerted back to the group to take a photo – at least, that’s what rightwing media showed.“WHAT IS BIDEN DOING?” the Republican National Committee’s research Twitter account wrote.In actuality, it was nothing strange at all. Biden had turned toward skydivers and given them a thumbs up, a broader view of the video showed.It happened again at a fundraiser with former president Barack Obama. Biden “appears to freeze up” on stage, the New York Post wrote, saying Obama had to lead Biden off the stage in the latest example of the president being “dazed or confused”.A zoomed-out video of the incident showed Biden waving and taking in the applause from the crowd after a lengthy discussion moderated by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.For viewers of rightwing media or social media feeds tailored toward conservatives, these videos of Biden surface near-daily in an attempt to underscore one of the president’s key liabilities, his age.They’re often selectively edited to make Biden look, well, old. They kick off a series of headlines about how his age or senility is showing, then another series of headlines about how the videos are created to mislead.The videos, and the subsequent hand-wringing over them, show how bifurcated today’s political and social media ecosystems are. Few watch a full speech or a full newscast, instead getting a quick example of what they missed from an account they align with. Your view of a given event – of a speech by a president, or a campaign rally – is colored first, and often predominantly, by the way it’s presented by the people you follow.An NBC News editor referred to these video news cycles as a reflection of the online media ecosystem this election, calling them “a bizarre Rorschach test in which some people see one thing and most everyone else sees something else”.They also show that the looming threat of deepfakes – AI-generated content that makes people say or do things they haven’t actually done – doesn’t hold a candle to the much more common, and easier to create, cheap fakes – videos edited specifically to mislead.“This old-fashioned, sort of low-level kind of manipulation has been perfectly capable of misleading and manipulating people for quite a long time,” said Bret Schafer, a senior fellow for media and digital disinformation for the Alliance for Securing Democracy.While deepfakes or other AI-generated content would likely be flagged and potentially removed from social media channels for going against their policies, these selectively edited videos typically don’t break rules because, to some degree, all content is edited in some way, Schafer said.The Biden administration derided the videos as cheap fakes made in bad faith and defended the president’s mental fitness, though at one point Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, called the videos “deepfakes”, which they are not. That kicked off another round of criticism on the right, with people claiming Jean-Pierre was spreading misinformation herself.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe left isn’t immune from posting misleading images about Trump, either. One photo showing Trump holding his son’s hand claims the former president needed help walking off a stage, while a video showed he was actually shaking his son’s hand.There are often similar videos of Trump posted either separately or in response to a Biden video news cycle – of the former president waxing on about sharks and electricity, or wandering away, or holding someone’s hand while walking. He notably got the name of his own doctor wrong in a speech over the weekend while challenging Biden to take a cognitive test.In reality, both presidential candidates are old, a fact that doesn’t change. Trump is 78; Biden is 81. Whether you view them as prone to senior moments, incoherent and rambling, or slow on their feet relates mostly to your views on who they are – and the content you’re seeing about it.The two candidates’ ages may create more of these gaffes, and the coverage of these gaffes gets extended because voters are concerned about the age of the next president. There seems to be a “little bit of a ping pong game of who has the senior moment du jour”, Schafer said. Endless repetition of age-related criticisms can influence voters and reinforce concerns they have over fitness for office, which is why these news cycles, and promotion by both campaigns, continue.These separate media ecosystems aren’t new this election cycle, though they create alternate realities for their viewers. It’s not just how something is covered, but whether it’s covered at all, Schafer noted. A viewer of some rightwing media could be served coverage of a story incessantly while it doesn’t make headlines in the broader press.“It is highly problematic when we talk about having a shared sense of reality because that’s what the real function of democracy should be,” he said. “We have an agreed-upon set of facts, and then there’s a lot of interpretation of those facts.” More

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      Ethics committee investigating Matt Gaetz over alleged sexual misconduct

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      A bipartisan Capitol Hill committee is investigating Matt Gaetz, the far-right Republican congressman and vocal Donald Trump supporter, over longstanding allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use and other alleged ethical breaches, it said on Tuesday.The announcement by the House ethics committee – which contains an equal number of Democrats and Republicans – reignited a swirl of scandal surrounding the outspoken Trump ally that had abated somewhat after an earlier criminal investigation into allegations against him was dropped.In a statement, the committee said it had spoken to dozens of witnesses, issued 25 subpoenas, and reviewed thousands of pages of documents as part of its long-running investigation into Gaetz’s conduct, which was initially opened in April 2021.As a result of that review, the committee said, certain allegations deserved further examination.“The committee is reviewing allegations … that Representative Gaetz may have: engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts, dispensed special privileges and favours to individuals with whom he had a personal relationship, and sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct,” it said.The committee said other allegations made against Gaetz – specifically those of sharing inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misusing state identification records, improper personal use of campaign funds and accepting a bribe – were no longer being investigated.The committee’s statement came a day after Gaetz issued what appeared to be a pre-emptive post on X in which he accused it of pursuing “frivolous investigations” into him and compared its tactics to the Soviet Union.“The House ethics committee has closed four probes into me, which emerged from lies intended solely to smear me,” he wrote. “Instead of working with me to ban congressional stock trading, the ethics committee is now opening new frivolous investigations. They are doing this to avoid the obvious fact that every investigation into me ends the same way: my exoneration.”He added: “This is Soviet. Kevin McCarthy showed them the man, and they are now trying to find the crime. I work for north-west Floridians who won’t be swayed by this nonsense, and McCarthy and his goons know it.”The latter comment referred to his antagonistic relationship with McCarthy, the former Republican House speaker who was toppled last October in an internal party coup that Gaetz spearheaded.McCarthy said Gaetz’s enmity towards him was fuelled by his refusal to shut down the House ethics committee inquiry. However, the inquiry has continued under McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, who has forged a close alliance with Trump.In its statement, the committee acknowledged Gaetz’s denial of the allegations against him but suggested he had given less full cooperation, complaining of “difficulty in obtaining relevant information” from him and others.It added: “The committee notes that the mere fact of an investigation into these allegations does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred.”The committee’s investigation was opened after the New York Times reported in March 2021 Gaetz was being investigated by the Department of Justice over whether he had sex with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, thus violating federal sex-trafficking laws. The investigation had been opened in the latter stages of Trump’s presidency, under the then attorney general William Barr.It was eventually closed in 2023 without any charges being brought, enabling the committee – which had earlier stalled its inquiry in response to a request the DoJ – to reauthorise its investigation. More

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      The Guardian view on the US and vaccine disinformation: a stupid, shocking and deadly game | Editorial

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      In July 2021, Joe Biden rightly inveighed against social media companies failing to tackle vaccine disinformation: “They’re killing people,” the US president said. Despite their pledges to take action, lies and sensationalised accounts were still spreading on platforms. Most of those dying in the US were unvaccinated. An additional source of frustration for the US was the fact that Russia and China were encouraging mistrust of western vaccines, questioning their efficacy, exaggerating side-effects and sensationalising the deaths of people who had been inoculated.How, then, would the US describe the effects of its own disinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic? A shocking new report has revealed that its military ran a secret campaign to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine with Filipinos – when nothing else was available to the Philippines. The Reuters investigation found that this spread to audiences in central Asia and the Middle East, with fake social media accounts not only questioning Sinovac’s efficacy and safety but also claiming it used pork gelatine, to discourage Muslims from receiving it. In the case of the Philippines, the poor take-up of vaccines contributed to one of the highest death rates in the region. Undermining confidence in a specific vaccine can also contribute to broader vaccine hesitancy.The campaign, conducted via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and other platforms, was launched under the Trump administration despite the objections of multiple state department officials. The Biden administration ended it after the national security council was alerted to the issue in spring 2021. The drive seems to have been retaliation for Chinese claims – without any evidence – that Covid had been brought to Wuhan by a US soldier. It was also driven by military concerns that the Philippines was growing closer to Beijing.It is all the more disturbing because the US has seen what happens when it plays strategic games with vaccination. In 2011, in preparation for the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the CIA tried to confirm that it had located him by gathering the DNA of relatives through a staged hepatitis B vaccination campaign. The backlash was entirely predictable, especially in an area that had already seen claims that the west was using polio vaccines to sterilise Pakistani Muslim girls. NGOs were vilified and polio vaccinators were murdered. Polio resurged in Pakistan; Islamist militants in Nigeria killed vaccinators subsequently.The report said that the Pentagon has now rescinded parts of the 2019 order that allowed the military to sidestep the state department when running psychological operations. But while the prospect of a second Trump administration resuming such tactics is alarming, the attitude that bred them goes deeper. Reuters pointed to a strategy document from last year in which generals noted that the US could weaponise information, adding: “Disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”The US is right to challenge the Kremlin’s troll farms, Beijing’s propaganda and the irresponsibility of social media companies. But it’s hard to take the moral high ground when you’ve been pumping out lies. The repercussions in this case were particularly predictable, clear and horrifying. It was indefensible to pursue a project with such obvious potential to cause unnecessary deaths. It must not be repeated. More

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      Biden surges in the 2024 race … for celebrity support

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      Hello!We’re sending the newsletter out slightly early this week, as Wednesday is Juneteenth. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free – more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Juneteenth has been celebrated by Black Americans since the late 1800s and was made a federal holiday in 2021.While the day will be marked by parades and events across the US, the Biden and Trump campaigns are continuing their sprint to November.In the past week Joe Biden raised more than $30m at a star-studded fundraising event in Los Angeles. Jack Black, George Clooney, Julia Roberts and Barbra Streisand were among the big name acts, and Biden is certainly leading the race for celebrity endorsements: Donald Trump can only offer the musician Kid Rock, the British actor turned strange man Laurence Fox, and the guy who played Superman on TV in the 1990s.But does it matter? Should we care whether or not Taylor Swift endorses Biden? (His campaign has been courting her for months.) We’ll take a look after the headlines.Here’s what you need to know1. A silent debate?The debate between Biden and Trump later this month will feature muted microphones, CNN announced on Sunday: meaning neither man will be able to talk over the other during the 90-minute event. The first Biden-Trump debate in 2020 was one of the great farces of our time, with Trump continually interrupting and heckling Biden, before telling a white supremacist group to “stand by”.2. Trump can’t remember his doctor’s nameTrump was in Michigan on Saturday, bragging about his mental acuity and demanding Biden take a cognitive test. Trump said he had “aced” a cognitive test administered by his presidential doctor, whom he identified as “Ronny Johnson”. “[Ronny Johnson] was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history. So I liked him very much,” Trump said. The only problem was that Trump was thinking of Ronny Jackson. The Biden campaign was quick to point out the error.3. Biden acts on immigrationBiden is set to announce a new executive action that will allow some undocumented immigrants who are spouses and children of US citizens to become American citizens themselves. The action will help about 500,000 American families, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and 50,000 children. Politically it could help insulate Biden somewhat from accusations from the left that he has given in to hard-right Republican demands on border immigration, while potentially shoring up his support with minority communities, which has slipped slightly since the last election.George Clooney and Julia Roberts v Phil Robertson and Randy QuaidView image in fullscreenIn the celebrity endorsement race – if such a race exists – Biden is defeating Trump comfortably.Saturday night was the perfect illustration. Biden flew west, to Los Angeles, for a campaign fundraiser with a who’s who of Hollywood names, including Clooney, Roberts, Black, Streisand, Jason Bateman, the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel – who compered proceedings – and Barack Obama, appearing alongside his former vice-president. The celebs coughed up $30m, a significant boost to the Biden campaign coffers.In May, Robert De Niro popped up to criticize Trump outside court in Manhattan, while Queen Latifah and Lizzo were featured at a fundraiser in New York in March. Michael Douglas hosted Biden for a campaign event at his home earlier this year.Trump, the former TV host and celebrity builder who has a long-running obsession with the rich and famous (he sent invitations for his third wedding to various stars including Billy Joel, who attended but later said he wasn’t sure why he was invited), has a less deep bench.Dean Cain, a former actor who played Superman in the 1990s TV series Lois and Clark, backed Trump in April – “I’m endorsing President Trump 100%. No question about it,” Cain told Fox News – but hardly anyone noticed because, well, very few people know who Dean Cain is.Kid Rock, the country singer and cowboy-hat wearer, has been a long-term Trump backer (“Many close to him wonder what the hell happened,” Rolling Stone reported last month.) There’s also Randy Quaid, best known for playing a booze-addled, alien-obsessed, ex-pilot in Independence Day, and Dennis Quaid, Randy’s brother. There’s the actor Jon Voight, who these days is perhaps most known for being Angelina Jolie’s dad. Phil Robertson, who invented a sort of pipe thing that replicates the quack of a duck and was a reality TV star before voicing his homophobia, is also keen.But that’s about it. If this was a celebrity-gathering competition, Biden would definitely win.But it isn’t. It’s an election. So does it matter?Kind of. Sometimes. Although not always.Hillary Clinton had the backing of all the hip-ish A-listers in 2016 – I remember listening to Demi Lovato belting out her hits at a Clinton event in Iowa one evening – and still lost. But studies have found that Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008 did make an impact: it boosted Obama’s vote and increased contributions.There is a difference between then and now, however. In May 2007 the future president was a relative unknown: Winfrey was introducing him to some people for the first time. Few Americans alive haven’t heard of Biden and Trump, so the effect of an endorsement from, say, a duck-noise inventor is debatable.What some politicos believe really could make a difference is the backing of Taylor Swift. In 2023, one fairly innocuous Instagram post from Swift – “I’ve heard you raise your voices, and I know how powerful they are. Make sure you’re ready to use them in our elections this year!” – inspired tens of thousands of people to register to vote.It’s safe to assume plenty of those new voters were young people – exactly the kind of voter Biden needs in November. No wonder that the Biden campaign is eagerly pursuing Swift, who backed Biden in 2020: the New York Times reports that Swift is “the biggest and most influential endorsement target” for the president.Swift is clearly on Trump’s mind, too. He brought her up at a meeting with Republican lawmakers in DC last week, spoke about Swift at length – “She probably doesn’t like Trump” – in an interview for a new book.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOf course, Swift hasn’t actually endorsed anyone yet. In 2020 she announced her support for Biden just one month before the election, so we could be waiting a while yet.Out and about: DetroitView image in fullscreenIf Trump had been hoping that the 80-minute headline speech at the Turning Point USA convention would improve his standing with Black voters, he would have been disappointed. The crowd before him on Saturday night in Detroit – which is 77% African American, and overwhelmingly Democratic – was almost exclusively white.The former president has been attempting in recent campaign appearances to present himself as popular with Black and Latino voters, as polls show his support among these demographic groups edging upwards. Michigan is also one of a handful of critical battleground states that are likely to determine the outcome of this year’s presidential race.Earlier on Saturday Trump visited a Black church in Detroit for an event billed as a “community roundtable” – but there was little audience crossover into the Turning Point event. Those attending were able to hear speeches from a range of Trump luminaries, including his former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. Supporters could also pose for selfies in front of a gold-plated Mercedes bearing Trump’s image on the hood.– Ed Pilkington, chief US reporter, Detroit, MichiganBiggest lie: the vice-presidential hopefulsView image in fullscreenTim Scott, the South Carolina senator, and Byron Donalds, a Florida congressman, who are both auditioning to be Trump’s vice-president, each made similar claims during TV appearances this weekend – namely, that Biden is responsible for rampant violent crime.Scott said communities have been “ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we haven’t seen in five decades”, while Donalds claimed that while the murder rate might be down, it doesn’t mean violent crime overall is.Both are actually down. Recently released data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed big declines in violent crimes, including murder, and in property crimes in 2024 compared to 2023. Nor is it just a one-year drop. Violent crime is now at a nearly 50-year record low, Biden has said – and FBI crime data backs this up: it peaked in 1991, then has largely fallen, with occasional upward ticks such as 2020, which is often attributed to pandemic stresses.Unfortunately, while crime may be down, the public’s perception of crime is different. A Gallup poll in October found that 77% of Americans believe there is more crime in the US than a year ago, and Republicans seem to be happy to stoke those fears.– Rachel Leingang, misinformation reporterWho had the worst week: Republicans who like to smoke cigarsView image in fullscreenPity Tom Cole, the Republican congressman from Oklahoma, and his cigar-smoking pals, who have been left without a place to suck on their stogies after Cole left his position as chairman of the House rules committee.Cole spent 15 months as the Rules head honcho, and he allowed colleagues to puff on cigars in the rules office in the Capitol building. But it seems the new chair clamped down.“We desperately need a place to smoke cigars,” Cole told Business Insider this week.Smoking is banned in many public places in the US – including in Washington DC – but members of Congress can smoke all they like in their offices … which does little to counter the notion that politics is an elite little club, with its own little rules. More