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      Two more DeSantis events postponed amid Iowa storm; Trump weather could dent caucus turnout – as it happened

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      Never Back Down, the Super Pac supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, says it has had to postpone two more events with him in Iowa today over “unsafe weather conditions”.The Florida governor will not be making it to Pella or Coralville, the group said in a statement.Mother Nature weighed in ahead of Iowa’s presidential caucuses on Monday, and her decision is: no campaigning today, at least not in person. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley have both called off events in the Buckeye state as a blizzard renders travel perilous, though Haley has shifted to holding town halls via telephone. Donald Trump’s campaign is reportedly worried the significant snowfall may dent caucus turnout, as he hopes for a big win in the state to cement his status as the Republican frontrunner. Back in a comparatively warmer Washington DC, House Republicans announced they will vote to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress next week, while his attorney said the president’s son will show up for a deposition, if lawmakers issue new subpoenas.Here’s what else happened today:
      Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor whose presidential campaign is the among the longest of long shots, says he is still on the road in Iowa.
      The House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced his spending deal with Democrats is still on despite rightwing opposition, lowering the chances of a government shutdown.
      Oregon’s supreme court declined to toss Trump from the state’s primary ballot, at least not yet. The former president cheered the decision.
      Joe Biden acknowledged that defense secretary Lloyd Austin made a lapse in judgment when he waited days to inform the White House he had been hospitalized.
      Kyrsten Sinema, an independent senator from Arizona, said negotiations over changes to the immigration system were making progress.
      The Republican leaders of two House committees investigating Hunter Biden say the president’s son must schedule a behind-closed-doors deposition with them before they will call off their plan to hold him in contempt for defying a subpoena.The statement from the oversight committee chair, James Comer, and the judiciary committee chair, Jim Jordan, comes after Biden’s attorney earlier today notified them that his client would sit for a deposition with them, if they issued new subpoenas. The two committees ordered the president’s son in November to appear for an interview in private, but Biden defied the summons and gave only a brief statement to reporters at the Capitol on the day he was to appear. That has led Republicans to move to hold him in contempt.“House Republicans have been resolute in demanding Hunter Biden sit for a deposition in the ongoing impeachment inquiry. While we are heartened that Hunter Biden now says he will comply with a subpoena, make no mistake: Hunter Biden has already defied two valid, lawful subpoenas,” Comer and Jordan said.“For now, the House of Representatives will move forward with holding Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress until such time that Hunter Biden confirms a date to appear for a private deposition in accordance with his legal obligation. While we will work to schedule a deposition date, we will not tolerate any additional stunts or delay from Hunter Biden.”The stunt they referred to was likely Biden’s brief and unexpected appearance in the audience of the oversight committee on Wednesday, just as lawmakers were considering whether to hold him in contempt.It’s unclear if Comer and Jordan’s statement will meet the requirements set out by Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell, who said in his letter to them that new subpoenas were required because the House has now voted to authorize impeachment proceedings against Joe Biden. The GOP claims the younger Biden can prove allegations of corruption against the president.Here’s video of Joe Biden in Pennsylvania taking questions from a reporter about the news of the day, including the defense secretary’s Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization and the airstrikes ordered against the Houthis in Yemen:During a visit to Pennsylvania to highlight his administration’s efforts to help small businesses, Joe Biden replied “yes” when asked by a reporter if the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, made a lapse in judgment when he waited to tell him he had been hospitalized, Reuters reports.News broke a week ago that the defense secretary was in the hospital, and in the days since, it has been revealed that Austin waited days to inform the White House of his hospitalization resulting from complications related to prostate cancer treatment.While some Republican lawmakers and one Democrat have called on Austin to step down, noting that the secretary is supposed to be constantly available to respond to crises, the White House says Biden continues to have confidence in him:The Iowa caucuses are one of America’s more unique political rituals, since most other states hold the comparatively straightforward primaries to choose their candidates.Here’s the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly with an explainer demystifying the process that is a key part of the road to the presidency:Here’s the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly and Sam Levine with a rundown of all the ways in which Iowa’s blizzard has disrupted presidential campaigning ahead of the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses on Monday:Candidates and caucus-goers faced extra challenges in Iowa on Friday as a second major snow event in a week hit the state, three days before Republicans are due to kick off their presidential nomination process for the critical election year.According to the National Weather Service in Des Moines, most of Iowa could expect significant, possibly record snowfall, high winds stoking blizzard conditions.“Life-threatening winter weather is expected beginning tonight with heavy snow,” the NWS said on Thursday. “White-out conditions likely Friday into Friday night. To follow, extreme wind chills as low as -45F [-43C] possible through early next week. Plan ahead for this dangerous stretch of winter weather!”In Washington DC and New York, reporters packed thermal underwear and tried to find flights still scheduled. In Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, heavy snow covered streets overnight and continued to fall. Save for the occasional car, the streets were largely deserted as the temperature hovered at about 15F (-9C). At the local Target, students and other residents stocked up on supplies as snowplows worked outside.Schools and businesses closed. In the state capital, Des Moines Performing Arts announced the postponement of Civic Center shows by the percussion group Stomp.Joe Biden announced a new student loan forgiveness plan on Friday that will provide debt relief to some borrowers enrolled in the new Save plan.
      Starting next month, borrowers enrolled in Save who took out less than $12,000 in loans and have been in repayment for 10 years will get their remaining student debt canceled immediately.
      It’s part of our ongoing efforts to act quickly to give more borrowers breathing room,” Biden tweeted on Friday.
      In a separate statement released on Friday, the education department said that there are now 6.9 million borrowers enrolled in the Save plan as of early January, more than double the enrollment on the Revised Pay As You Earn (Repaye) plan that it replaced in August.Donald Trump’s campaign team has hailed the decision by the Oregon supreme court to turn down a petition to disqualify him from the state’s primary ballot over his involvement in the January 2021 Capitol insurrection.
      Today’s decision in Oregon was the correct one. President Trump urges the swift dismissal of all remaining, bad-faith, election interference 14th amendment ballot challenges as they are un-constitutional attempts by allies of Crooked Joe Biden to disenfranchise millions of American voters and deny them their right to vote for the candidate of their choice,” said a Trump spokesperson.
      He went on to add:
      President Trump will continue to fight these desperate shams, win in November and Make America Great Again.
      Equal Justice USA, a national criminal justice organization, has criticized federal prosecutors’ decision to seek the death penalty for the white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in May 2022.In a statement released on Friday, Jamila Hodge, the executive director of EJUSA, said:
      The government’s decision to pursue a death sentence will do nothing to address the racism and hatred that fueled the mass murder.
      Ultimately, this pursuit will inflict more pain and renewed trauma on the victims’ families and the larger Black community already shattered by loss and desperately in need of healing and solutions that truly build community safety. Imagine if we invested in that instead of more state violence.
      Friday’s decision by federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty is a first for the justice department under Joe Biden’s administration.The Independent Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema has refused to share “differences of opinion” surrounding negotiations of a potential bipartisan border security package.In an interview with ABC 15, Sinema, who is a key negotiator in the talks, said:
      We’re down to the last one or two differences of opinion and I’m confident we’ll be able to resolve those and move forward with this legislation.
      Upon being asked if she could share what the differences in opinions are, Sinema replied: “No.”Mother Nature has weighed in ahead of Iowa’s presidential caucuses on Monday, and her decision is: no campaigning today, at least not in person. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley have both called off events in the Buckeye state as a blizzard renders travel perilous, though Haley has shifted to holding town halls via telephone. Donald Trump’s campaign is reportedly worried the significant snowfall may dent caucus turnout, as he hopes for a big win in the state to cement his status as the Republican frontrunner. Back in a comparatively warmer Washington DC, House Republicans announced they will vote to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress next week, while his attorney said the president’s son will show up for a deposition, if lawmakers issue new subpoenas.Here’s what else is happening today:
      Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor whose presidential campaign is the among the longest of long shots, says he is still on the road in Iowa.
      The House speaker, Mike Johnson, announced his spending deal with Democrats is still on despite rightwing opposition, lowering the chances of a government shutdown.
      Oregon’s supreme court declined to toss Trump from the state’s primary ballot, at least not yet.
      Never Back Down, the Super Pac supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, says it has had to postpone two more events with him in Iowa today over “unsafe weather conditions”.The Florida governor will not be making it to Pella or Coralville, the group said in a statement.The long-shot Republican presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson says he is still campaigning, despite Iowa’s gnarly road conditions:The former Arkansas governor and avowed foe of Donald Trump is nowhere in the polls, yet has stayed in the race.Why Republican presidential candidates have called off campaigning today, from the Iowa State Patrol:With her schedule of campaign events in Iowa cancelled today due to the blizzard, Nikki Haley held a telephone town hall with voters in Fort Dodge.It was a fairly typical stump speech for the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, who took pains to point out the exceptionally bad snow storm, and the relief Iowans will feel in a few days, when politicians stop bugging them.“I definitely know I’m not in South Carolina anymore. It is beyond cold,” Haley began.Nodding to the fact that aspiring Republican presidential candidates have been criss-crossing the state for months, hoping to win its first-in-the-nation caucuses, Haley said:
      I know you are excited, because it is three days until the commercials stop, and the mail stops coming to you, and the text messages, everything else. And, so, I can tell you as a governor of the first in the south primary [state], we always loved to see presidential candidates come, and we always love to see them go, so I can appreciate where you’re coming from, and I appreciate you putting up with all of the activity that happens during this time. More

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      Malaria drug Trump touted as Covid cure increased chance of death – study

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      People who took an anti-malaria treatment that Donald Trump touted as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic and waning days of his presidency were 11% more likely to die from the virus, according to a new scientific study.The study’s authors – who published their findings in the peer-reviewed Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy journal – also estimated that nearly 17,000 people in six different countries, including the US, died after contracting Covid-19 and taking the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine.Doctors who prescribed hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 at the height of activity restrictions meant to slow the spread of the virus did so off-label and without evidence that there was any clinical benefit, as the authors of the new study noted. The study’s conclusions “illustrate the hazard of drug repurposing with low-level evidence for the management of future pandemics”, its authors added.A meta-analysis of randomized trials produced the findings in the study released by Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, a 67-year-old journal edited by DM Townsend of the Medical University of South Carolina.The study’s authors said they used public databases to establish the number of Covid-19 patients who were hospitalized during the early days of the pandemic. They said they then systematically reviewed 44 cohort studies to calculate that there was an 11% increase in mortality associated with cases involving the use of hydroxychloroquine, along with about 16,990 in-hospital deaths in the US, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey.Trump first hawked hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug that could cure Covid-19 in March 2020 as he railed against activity lockdowns, saying they would ruin the US economy.His remarks about anti-malaria medication led to a surge in prescriptions for the drug. The Food and Drug Administration – which didn’t approve the first Covid-19 vaccine until December 2020 – was forced to warn that hydroxychloroquine could cause irregular heartbeats and other cardiac trouble.And the regulatory agency also clarified that the medication had only been approved to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.The then-president later dismissed an early study which showed hydroxychloroquine was an ineffective Covid-19 treatment as a “Trump enemy statement”.“They were giving it to people that were … almost dead,” Trump said at one point as the White House claimed he himself was taking the medication prophylactically.Trump ultimately tested positive for Covid-19 on 26 September 2020 and was hospitalized within days. He recovered after doctors treated him with a new antibody cocktail that was nearly impossible for the general public to access.Weeks later, Trump lost his bid for a second term in the Oval Office to Joe Biden. He is now facing 91 pending criminal charges for attempting to subvert his electoral defeat, illegally retaining government secrets, and hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him.Trump nonetheless is leading the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and polls have suggested a rematch with Biden would be competitive.Before the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped keeping track in May, more than 1.1 million people had died from Covid-19 in the US, and nearly 105m cases had been reported, according to officials. More

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      Republicans make wild claims about the dangers of immigration. Here’s the truth | Robert Reich

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      Trumpist Republicans are using the surge of illegal immigration at the southern border of the US, as well as a surge of migrants seeking legal asylum, to threaten a government shutdown and no added funds for Ukraine.They’re using five lies to make their case.1. They claim Biden doesn’t want to stem illegal immigration and has created an “open border”.Rubbish. Since he took office, Biden has consistently asked for additional funding for border control.Republicans have just as consistently refused. They’re voting to cut Customs and Border Protection funding in spending bills and blocking passage of Biden’s $106bn national security supplemental that includes border funding.2. They blame the drug crisis on illegal immigration.Last Wednesday, at the southern border in Texas, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed that “America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration. We have lethal drugs that are pouring into our country at record levels.”Rubbish. While large amounts of fentanyl and other deadly drugs have been flowing into the United States from Mexico, 90% arrives through official ports of entry, not via immigrants illegally crossing the border. In fact, research by the Cato Institute found that more than 86% of the people convicted of trafficking fentanyl across the border in 2021 were US citizens.3. They claim that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.Johnson also charged that “312 suspects on the terrorist watch list that have been apprehended – we have no idea how many terrorists have come into the country and set up terrorism cells across the nation.”Baloney. America’s southern border has not been an entry point for terrorists. For almost a half century, no American has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who crossed the border illegally.Johnson’s number comes from government data showing that from October 2020 to November 2023, 312 migrants – out of more than 6.2 million who crossed the southern border during these years – matched names on the terrorist watch list.It’s unclear how many were actual matches and whether the FBI considered them national security threats (the watch list includes family relations of terrorist suspects, many of whom are not considered to be involved in terrorist activity).4. They say undocumented immigrants are stealing American jobs.Nonsense. Evidence shows immigrants are not taking jobs that American workers want.And the surge across the border is not increasing unemployment. Far from it: unemployment has been below 4% for roughly two years, far lower than the long-term average rate of 5.71%. It’s now at 3.7%.5. They claim undocumented immigrants are responsible for more crime in the US.More baloney. In fact, a 2020 study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cited by the Department of Justice, showed that undocumented immigrants have “substantially” lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants.Similarly, a recently published study in the American Economic Journal – analyzing official data from 2008 to 2017 on immigration, homicide and victimization surveys – found “null effects” on crime from immigration.Notwithstanding the recent surge in illegal immigration, the US homicide rate has fallen nearly 13% since 2022 – the largest decrease on record. Local law enforcement agencies are also reporting drops in violent crime.Who’s really behind these lies?Since he entered politics, Donald Trump has fanned nativist fears and bigotry.He’s now moving into full-throttled neofascism, using the actual rhetoric of Hitler to attack immigrants – charging that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and saying they’re “like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”He promises to use the US military to round up undocumented immigrants and put them into “camps”. That demagoguery is being echoed by Trump lackeys to generate fear and put Biden on the defensive.Does the US need to address the border situation? Yes – which Biden is trying to do. But we need to do so in a way that treats migrants as humans, not political pawns.Trump and his enablers want Americans to forget that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to the US under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Trump accuses judge and Letitia James of bias in surprise court address during fraud trial closing arguments – live

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      Prosecutors for the New York attorney general, Letitia James, have reiterated that they would like to see a $370m penalty and lifetime ban from the real estate business for Donald Trump in his civil fraud trial, the Messenger reports:They said the weighty penalty was necessary because Trump kept breaking the law even after authorities began investigating his business practices:Prosecutors with the New York attorney general’s office are delivering their closing arguments at Donald Trump’s New York fraud trial.Trump left the building after delivering a bizarre impromptu rant, which was cut off by the judge, who called for a lunch break.State attorney Kevin Wallace said that Trump’s lawyers relied on expert testimony, rather than witness testimony or documented evidence, to bolster their arguments. At one point, Wallace put up a presentation slide that showed the 11 expert witnesses the defense had called during the trial. He noted that many of the expert witnesses were purposely shown limited evidence, and a handful of them were close allies of Trump.“They cannot argue that Trump’s triplex was in fact 30,000 sq ft,” Wallace said. “Or that unsold units at Trump Park Avenue weren’t rent stabilized.”Wallace also argued that the loans the Trump Organization received with the inflated financial statements were “critical to the business” and the business was strapped for cash in the mid-2010s as the company pursued renovation of properties and Trump was running for president.“They could have cut costs or sell assets, but these interest rates were vital to the operation of the company,” Wallace said, adding that Trump was also able to run for president with the loans bolstering his company. “They didn’t have to choose between their priorities.”Arguments in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial have now resumed, MSNBC reports, and will probably conclude soon:Hunter Biden is being arraigned in Los Angeles today on federal tax charges recently filed against him. Expect to hear plenty about this from Republicans as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign continues:Hunter Biden is expected to be arraigned on Thursday on federal tax charges in a Los Angeles courthouse.Biden, who has a home in Malibu, is expected to plead not guilty to nine tax-related charges that were filed in December. Three of the charges faced by Joe Biden’s son are felony counts, and he could face up to 17 years in prison if found guilty.“The defendant engaged in a four-year scheme to not pay at least $1.4m in self-assessed federal taxes he owed for tax years 2016 through 2019,” the 56-page indictment said, adding that Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills”.Hunter Biden is expected to plead not guilty.Closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial are now paused while the court takes a brief recess, the Messenger reports.Here’s the Guardian’s Dominic Rushe and Lauren Aratani with a recap of what has happened so far today:Back at Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial, his attorney Chris Kise has repeatedly interrupted Kevin Wallace, who is delivering closing arguments on behalf of the New York attorney general, Letitia James.It appears to be a tactic on Kise’s part. From MSNBC:Donald Trump has been spending quite a bit of time in court lately, and plans to continue doing so, even though he is also campaigning for president.In remarks this afternoon, after going on a tirade against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, and Judge Arthur Engoron during the closing arguments of his civil fraud trial and then leaving the courtroom, Trump said he would attend all of his trials in person:That is potentially quite a lot of court proceedings. Trump has been indicted four times at the state and federal level, and is also embroiled in multiple civil suits. He will have to balance these legal matters with his quest to win the Republican presidential nomination – which polls show he is the favorite to do – and beat Joe Biden in the November general election.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has condemned a recent wave of threats targeting elected officials and judges.Her comments at the daily White House press briefing came after a bomb squad was dispatched to the home of judge Arthur Engoron this morning, ahead of the start of the closing arguments in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial.“We condemn any violence or threats against any judges … or anyone. … We are going to continue to be steadfast about that,” Jean-Pierre said.Lawyer for the former president have spent today making Trump’s case before Engoron, who will decide whether Trump will be fined as much as $370m for falsifying financial statements to inflate his net worth.Ahead of the hearing, police in Nassau county on Long Island said they responded to a security incident at Engoron’s residence at 5.30am. Engoron and his staff have been frequent targets of vitriolic criticism from Trump throughout the case, and his office has been bombarded with death threats.More on that here:New York attorney general Letitia James’s prosecutors have now started delivering their closing arguments in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial, the Messenger reports:Lawyer Kevin Wallace is telling the court that the former president’s arguments in his defense were based on facts already known to be invalid. Trump is not in the room, the Messenger says, having left after his unexpected tirade at the conclusion of his side’s closing arguments:John Kirby was also questioned on the hospitalization of the US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and why the White House was not informed in a timely manner that the Pentagon chief transferred his authority to his deputy.On Thursday, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog said a review will be conducted surrounding the secrecy of Austin’s health condition and why the defense department waited days to inform the White House about the transfer of authority.Austin is still hospitalized. He is being treated for complications from prostate cancer surgery.Kirby said the lack of communication was a learning opportunity and that it shouldn’t have happened.Meanwhile, as South Africa formally accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the United Nations’ top court, John Kirby, spokesperson for the US national security council, answered questions about the war in Gaza in a White House press briefing.When asked if the US will accept any penalties or punishments handed down by the international court, Kirby said: “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals here. We’ve made our position clear.” He said the Biden administration sees “no indication Israel is violating laws surrounding armed conflict”.He was also asked about the timeline of the US’s pleas to Israel to de-escalate the violence in Gaza, to which he responded: “You’ll have to talk to the IDF.”The Guardian is also running a global live blog on Israel’s war in Gaza and the wider situation in the Middle East, which you can follow here.After hours of closing arguments by his attorneys, Donald Trump went on a surprise tirade in the Manhattan courtroom where his civil fraud trial is being held, accusing Judge Arthur Engoron and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, of bias against him. He then left the courtroom, and prosecutors now are expected to deliver their final statements in the case that could see Engoron impose severe penalties on the former president and his co-defendants.Here’s a look back at the day so far:Donald Trump walked out of the courtroom after excoriating both New York attorney general Letitia James and Judge Arthur Engoron for the civil fraud accusations against him, MSNBC reports: More

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      Wisconsin: far-right group bids to recall speaker for resisting Trump’s big lie

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      A far-right group in Wisconsin has launched a long-shot bid to oust the Wisconsin assembly speaker, Robin Vos – the latest salvo in a running feud between the powerful Republican lawmaker and conspiracy-minded hardliners.The recall campaign is the newest attempt by election-denying activists to punish politicians and state officials whom they view as insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Vos has become a particular target for refusing to accept their claims that the election was rigged.Jay Schroeder, a conservative activist who has promoted election misinformation online and ran a failed campaign for Wisconsin secretary of state in 2022, is leading the effort.“The whole system has been putting doubt in people’s minds,” said Schroeder, who pointed to Vos’s refusal to aggressively pursue impeaching Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election official, as a primary motivation for the recall campaign.The recall announcement was received with fanfare by Wisconsin conspiracy theory groups on the messaging app Telegram, some of whom used the language of the QAnon conspiracy community to promote its efforts. One post included the phrase “WWG1WGALL”, shorthand for “Where we go one, we go all”, the slogan of the movement.Vos fired back at the recall attempt, calling it “a waste of time, resources and effort” in a statement on Wednesday.“The effort today is no surprise since the people involved cannot seem to get over any election in which their preferred candidate doesn’t win,” he said.The push also marks the latest mobilization by the conspiracy theory-fueled far-right movement in Wisconsin which is animated by Christian nationalism, misinformation about elections administration and unwavering support for Trump. Vos barely survived a primary challenge after Trump endorsed his primary opponent in the 2022 elections.Since then, Wisconsin’s far right has mobilized frequently against Vos. Its fury was triggered most recently by Vos’s decision not to push hard to impeach Wolfe, the state’s nonpartisan elections administrator who has been the target of harassment and a failed legislative effort to oust her.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVos has tried to tread an impossible path between appeasing the state’s election-denying activists and defending his own conviction that trying to overturn the 2020 election – a proposition Trump pushed on him personally – would be illegal and unconstitutional.In a bid for rightwing support, Vos called for an investigation into the 2020 election, appointing former Wisconsin supreme court justice Michael Gableman, a Stop the Steal promoter, to lead it. The investigation routinely generated scandals and produced no evidence of widespread fraud in the Wisconsin presidential election. Vos eventually fired Gableman, said he regrets the effort and has been increasingly critical of Trump over the past year.“Donald Trump’s unhealthy obsession with 2020 is not what Americans want to hear about in 2024,” Vos told the Guardian in December. More

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      Nikki Haley emerges from TV debate as Trump’s nearest rival as Iowa vote looms

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      The former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley emerged from the last televised debate before the Iowa caucuses clearly Donald Trump’s strongest challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, boosted by the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate to register significantly with voters.Voting begins in Iowa on Monday, before New Hampshire stages its primary a week on Tuesday. Haley has closed on Trump in New Hampshire and has hopes of seizing second place in Iowa at the expense of the rightwing Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.Nonetheless, the Trump camp remains bullish as the Iowa vote looms after having maintained hefty leads in the polls for months. On Wednesday night, one senior aide said the campaign “couldn’t have scripted any better ourselves” events in the Des Moines debate, delighting in the spectacle of the former US president’s rivals slogging it out on the CNN stage while Trump – who continues to refuse to debate – took an easy ride at a Fox News town hall.“If you watched any part of the ‘JV’ debate this evening, you see two campaigns that are beating the living hell out of each other,” Chris LaCivita told reporters after Haley fiercely debated DeSantis, while Trump performed on his own elsewhere.“Then you have a Donald Trump commercial that shows up and he’s talking about Joe Biden … we couldn’t have scripted any better ourselves.”“JV” stands for “junior varsity” – a designation for college athletes below first-team standard. At Drake University, Haley said, “I wish Donald Trump was up on this stage” but spent most of her evening fighting DeSantis, regardless of Trump’s whopping Iowa lead.Fox gave Trump an easy ride. On a network which has paid $787.5m to settle one lawsuit arising from his stolen election lie and faces other such threats, the subject never came up. Nor did Trump’s legal problems arising from that lie, including 17 criminal charges regarding election subversion. Nor were Trump’s other 74 criminal charges, for retention of classified information and hush-money payments, high on Fox’s agenda.Tim Miller, a Republican operative turned anti-Trump activist and writer for the Bulwark, a conservative Never-Trump website, delivered a withering assessment of the Fox News town hall.Describing “one big primetime infomercial for the frontrunner”, Miller described Trump’s hosts, the “‘straight news’ reporters Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum”, sitting “beside the disgraced former president listening to his Catskills stand-up bit and giggling like a couple of undergrads after a 5mg weed gummy”.Trump did not avoid every pitfall. Seeking to thread a particularly tricky needle, he questioned the harshness of abortion bans supported by Haley and DeSantis. But he also crowed that “for 54 years, [conservatives] were trying to get Roe v Wade terminated, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it”.The remark drew applause from the Fox audience but delight from Democrats, given how the supreme court’s removal of the federal right to abortion last year (actually 49 years after Roe, the ruling which guaranteed the right) and other attacks on healthcare rights have fueled Democratic wins at the polls. Up and down the ballot, abortion is set to be a key election issue this year.Tommy Vietor, a former staffer to Barack Obama, posted Trump’s remark to social media and said: “Biden campaign is going to feature this in about a billion dollars’ worth of ads.”DeSantis, meanwhile, has spent hundreds of millions on his campaign but is widely seen to be in deep trouble, needing a strong second in Iowa to avoid having to drop out. He also stood to lose more than Haley from Christie’s decision earlier on Wednesday to bring an end to his own campaign.The former New Jersey governor was the only candidate to run on an explicitly anti-Trump platform, regardless of Trump’s hold on Republican voters.Ending his campaign in New Hampshire, the libertarian-minded state on which he pinned his hopes, Christie said: “Anyone who is unwilling to say that [Trump] is unfit to be president of the United States is unfit themselves to be president of the United States.”Haley and DeSantis have begun to attack Trump as caucus day looms but not in strong terms and while still reserving their harshest fire for each other. Christie also had harsh if unscripted words for both his rivals, in comments apparently picked up by accident on a hot mic before his speech was streamed.“She’s gonna get smoked and you and I both know it,” Christie said, presumably referring to Haley. “She’s not up to this.”He also said: “DeSantis called me, petrified that I would –” before the audio cut out.The remarks, which CNN confirmed were directed at Wayne MacDonald, Christie’s New Hampshire campaign chair, pointed to harsh political realities.Haley is clear in second in New Hampshire and has been reducing Trump’s lead. Most polling indicates Christie supporters will now turn her way. But Haley remains well behind Trump, particularly in her own state, South Carolina, which will be third to vote. Campaign wisdom says candidates who cannot win their home state cannot hope to win over their whole party.DeSantis is well behind Trump in Florida and everywhere else. He would certainly have reason to be “petrified” that Christie’s withdrawal will ensure Haley becomes the only competitor to Trump with any notion of viability at all.The DeSantis and Haley campaigns did not immediately comment. More

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      Nikki Haley’s pretend slavery ‘gaffe’ told us what this election is about | Steve Phillips

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      Nikki Haley’s difficulty articulating the cause of the civil war – the war that began in her home state of South Carolina – has put that issue in the headlines just days before the first votes are cast in the Republican nomination contest. While Haley was caught trying to be too clever by half in refusing to name slavery as the cause of the nation’s bloodiest conflict, the controversy has had the unintended effect of framing what is facing the country’s voters in 2024.This year’s election is, in fact, a continuation of the unresolved question of the civil war era: will the country continue to move towards fostering a multiracial democracy, or will it aggressively reject its growing diversity and attempt to make America white again?Haley’s entire career has consisted of trying to walk the tightest of tightropes. She is a woman of color operating in a political party whose driving forces are white racial resentment and misogyny (and, increasingly, homophobia and transphobia). On the one hand, she is eagerly embraced as a high-profile party symbol who serves as a strong rebuttal to accusations of racism and sexism (“See, we’re not racist and sexist, we have a woman of color as our governor!”). On the other hand, white racial resentment serves as fuel for the Trump movement to the extent that no presidential candidate can hope to win the nomination without bending a knee to the Confederate cause.This high-wire act was most prominently on display in 2015, when a white man who had proudly posed with pictures of the Confederate flag walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in South Carolina, declared, “You rape our women. And you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” and proceeded to murder nine Black people. That tragedy was too much even for most defenders of the Confederate flag, and Haley and the state’s political leadership begrudgingly capitulated to years-long demands to stop flying that flag over the state capitol.The current conundrum is important not just because of Haley, who is emerging as Trump’s strongest competitor in the Republican field, but because of what it reveals about politics in this country in general and in the Republican party in particular.Boiled down to its essence, much of the country – and most of the Republican voters – are still fighting the cause of the civil war in ways both literal and figurative. The active and organized resistance to removing Confederate statues led a mob of white nationalists to march through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us”; one Hitler-loving member of the crowd gunned his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman, Heather Heyer, who had come to stand for racial tolerance and peace. That was the protest of which then president Trump observed: “There are good people on both sides.”While it is fairly widely accepted now that Trump has a stranglehold on the Republican party, many have forgotten what propelled him to his current position of seemingly unshakable dominance. In the month before launching his presidential bid in June of 2015, Trump was largely seen as a joke and languished in the polls with support from just 4% of his party. After he staked out his position as defender of white people and demonizer of Mexican immigrants (“they’re rapists, they’re murderers”), he zoomed to the top of the polls and has never looked back.For all the talk of the Trump phenomenon being unprecedented, the truth is that he is not the first political leader to ride a wave of white racial resentment to high levels of political influence and power. In the 1960s, when Trump was in his 20s, the nation watched the Alabama governor, George Wallace, proudly proclaim “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his 1963 inauguration speech (delivered from the same spot where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, took office).Six months later, Wallace physically stood at the door of the University of Alabama auditorium to block the desegregation of Alabama’s colleges and universities. That defiant embrace of white supremacy boosted Wallace’s national standing to the extent that he launched a presidential campaign in 1968 that attracted millions of voters.Wallace’s presidential bid was preceded by that of Strom Thurmond, who held the same office that Haley later did – governor of South Carolina. In 1948, after President Harry Truman had the temerity to urge Congress to outlaw lynching Black people, Thurmond joined forces with his fellow southern governors to create the Dixiecrat party and ran for president on a platform unapologetically stating that “We stand for the segregation of the races.” Thurmond’s third-party bid won four states outright: Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and, oh look!, South Carolina.The centrality of white racial resentment to American politics is longstanding and explains the panic that caused Haley to become so tongue-tied. As the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, until Wednesday Haley’s competitor for the anti-Trump mantle, explained in the wake of Haley’s comments: “If she is unwilling to stand up and say that slavery is what caused the civil war … what’s going to happen when she has to stand up against forces in our own party who want to drag this country deeper and deeper into anger and division?”If the size and power of the constituency that will brook no retreat on the cause of the Confederacy is so large that a leading presidential candidate can’t even state the simple fact that the civil war was about slavery, then the stakes in 2024 should be crystal clear. One party is propelled and dominated by voters who, essentially, want America to be a white country. On the other side is an incumbent president who just last week specifically namechecked and denounced “the poison of white supremacy” in a speech delivered from the pulpit of the same church where parishioners were murdered in 2015.The good news is that the portion of the population that wants America to be a white nation is not the majority of people. (That’s why the Confederates had to secede in the first place, after failing to win popular support at the polls.) The challenge for those who know why the civil war started and who want to continue the journey towards multiracial democracy is to organize, inspire and galvanize that majority in the upcoming elections.To do that, we need to do what Nikki Haley can’t or won’t – state clearly why the civil war started, declare our determination to finish the job of reconstructing this nation and do everything we can to ensure massive voter turnout in November.
      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

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      Elise Stefanik wants to be Trump’s running mate. That’s unfortunate | Margaret Sullivan

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      Elise Stefanik is having a moment. If she were a song on the Billboard chart, she’d have a bullet next to her name to show the speed of her trajectory.In recent weeks, the New York congresswoman has claimed credit for the demise of two major university presidents (those at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania), after she led the bullying about campus antisemitism during a congressional hearing.“Two down,” she gloated on X, formerly Twitter, after Harvard’s Claudine Gay stepped down.Last weekend, Stefanik had a star turn on NBC’s Meet the Press, in which she provided one of those quotes that goes ‘round the world for its sheer outrageousness. She echoed Donald Trump’s sympathetic characterization of those who are being prosecuted for storming the US Capitol, in some cases assaulting police officers.“I have concerns about the treatment of the January 6 hostages,” she told Kristen Welker.And when asked whether she’d like to be Donald Trump’s running mate – and potentially the next vice-president of the United States – Stefanik didn’t exactly turn away in disgust.“I’ve said for a year now I’d be honored to serve in the next Trump administration,” was her less-than-coy response.The conservative Washington Examiner found all of this a winning formula.“Elise Stefanik is running for VP and she’s winning,” read its recent headline. The writer enthused: “She was poised, confident and well-prepared. Most importantly, she didn’t give an inch when defending Trump on any issue.”And that quality is what really wins points with the former president, as with every mob boss: vociferous, unquestioning loyalty. Being willing to do what’s necessary.Compare Stefanik’s situation to that of former Republican congresswoman: Liz Cheney of Wyoming – not long ago a leading figure in the House of Representatives. In fact, she was the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, succeeded by none other than Stefanik.Defeated in her 2022 primary by a Trump-endorsed candidate, Cheney has left politics for now, though she hasn’t ruled out a third-party bid for president this year.For the past few years, Cheney has made it her business to try to hold Trump accountable. As the vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, she told the hard truths about how he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election and encouraged the Capitol insurrection. In doing so, she alienated most of her party – and earned the eternal hatred of its de facto leader.Whatever one may think of her staunchly conservative positions on important issues, including abortion rights (she celebrated the US supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade), it’s hard not to respect Cheney when it comes to Trump. She’s been brave, dignified and relentless in standing up for American democracy and for the foundational idea of governmental checks and balances.Most recently, Cheney has been clear in public statements that she thinks the former president – whom she says she voted for twice – should be barred from the ballot in November.“There’s no question in my mind that his action clearly constituted an offense that is within the language of the 14th amendment,” she said at a recent event at Dartmouth College.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNo surprise that Cheney’s words and actions have earned Trump’s ire, and brought out the nastiness that’s never far from the surface.“I mean, Liz Cheney’s a sick person,” Trump has said, calling her and former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger “far worse than any Democrat that ever lived”. A Trump spokesman told the New York Times she is “a loser”, interested only in promoting her book, which he said “should be repurposed as toilet paper”.Yes, it sure is a classy gang that Stefanik hopes to help lead. Is she up to the task?It looks that way.“Can anyone name a more noxious politician?” asked Columbia University journalism professor Bill Grueskin, after Stefanik’s all-caps “two down” tweet about the college presidents.There are a couple of contenders for the title, but she may have it nailed.That Stefanik is a rising star – and Liz Cheney a pariah – says it all about Republican politics today.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More