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      Fired-up Biden shows gloves are off in January 6 anniversary speech

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      This time it’s personal. On Friday Joe Biden tore into his predecessor Donald Trump as never before. He brimmed with anger, disdain and contempt. He apparently had to stop himself from swearing. So much for “when they go low, we go high” – and plenty of Democrats will be just fine with that.If Biden was seeking to jolt his half-conscious 2024 re-election campaign into life, this may have done the trick. The palpable loathing of Trump took a good 10 or 20 years off him. Keep hating like this and he might do a Benjamin Button all the way to election day.There is no better illustration of Biden’s evolution than a speech he delivered on the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. On that occasion, he denounced a “web of lies” but never mentioned Trump by name, preferring to cite the “former president”. Those were still the days when he would talk about “the former guy” and get a laugh.Two years on, in an address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Biden spoke the name “Trump” more than 40 times in less than an hour as he warned that his likely 2024 opponent would sacrifice American democracy to put himself in power. The 81-year-old president generally seems like a grandfatherly figure predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt, which makes his detestation of Trump all the more striking.Trump’s failure to act as a violent mob stormed the US Capitol, despite the pleas of staff and family members, was “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history”, Biden said, noting that Trump went on to lose 60 court cases that took him back to the truth “that I had won the election and he was a loser”.It was a jab to the ribs, since Trump hates nothing more than being branded a “loser”.The president went on to recall how Trump has called the insurrectionists “patriots” and claimed there was a “lot of love” on January 6. At that, Biden shook his head, blinked and let out a gasp of disbelief, as if stunned anew by the assertion. “The rest of the nation, including law enforcement, saw a lot of hate and violence,” he said.Biden furiously denounced political violence and Trump’s habit of joking about the big lie-influenced intruder who attacked Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, with a hammer, saying: “And he thinks that’s funny. He laughed about it. What a sick – ”He halted. At the last moment, the president of the United States had saved himself from uttering a profanity. The urge coursed through his body and found relief in his hands, which clenched into fists, as the crowd filled in with laughter and whooping. “My God,” Biden said. “I think it’s despicable, seriously, not just for a president but for any person to say that.”Against a backdrop of 11 American flags and four faux Roman columns, Biden went on: “The guy who claims law and order sows lawlessness and disorder.” Trump is planning a full-scale campaign of revenge and retribution, he said, and promised to be a dictator on day one.Trump has threatened to terminate the US constitution, impose the death penalty on military leaders who defied him and referred to dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”. Biden looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth. He was worked up and had to steel himself.He mused: “Sometimes I’m really happy the Irish in me can’t be seen.”Earlier this week CNN reported that younger aides on Biden’s re-election campaign had been grimly joking about when to go “full Hitler” – making a direct comparison of Trump to the Nazi leader rather than merely saying Trump “parroted” him. Biden did not quite go full Hitler but he did observe: “He talks about the blood of Americans being poisoned, echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.”Democrats are often criticised for pulling their punches and refusing to fight dirty as Republicans do. For as long as Trump has been on the political scene, they have wrestled with the question of whether to rise above him or roll in the dirt with him. In 2018, the former attorney general Eric Holder declared: “When they go low, we kick ’em. That’s what this new Democratic party is about.”When the party’s nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton, referred to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”, it fed a narrative of liberal elitism but with Ordinary Joe/Dark Brandon, it is harder to make that charge stick. Years ago, responding to Trump’s misogyny, Biden said: “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”Tellingly, his aggressive tone on Friday was praised by Republican campaign veterans who are no strangers to politics as a bloodsport. Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, wrote on X: “Everyone on the pro-democracy side of this fight should amplify the hell out of this.”Biden held a private meeting with historians this week to discuss the state of democracy and framed his speech around George Washington, the founding president who willingly relinquished power rather than become a king. He said the things that need to be said about this election on the eve of another January 6 anniversary, an outrage that animates him just as the white nationalist march in Charlottesville did in 2020.There will be time enough to discuss the economy, border security, the climate crisis, reproductive freedom and foreign policy (his critics will ask why he cannot summon such righteous fury on behalf of Palestinian civilians). Voters will surely demand not only vivid Trump-bashing but a positive vision for a second term. Friday was hardly an optimistic start to the new year.But for now, one thing is clear. The gloves are off and, assuming Trump wins the Republican nomination, this will be an election between combatants with a mutual abhorrence like none that has gone before. More

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      US supreme court to hear appeal of Colorado ruling removing Trump from state ballot

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      The US supreme court will hear Donald Trump’s appeal of the Colorado ruling that he should be removed from the state ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, for inciting an insurrection.The court issued a brief order on Friday, setting up a dramatic moment in American history.The case will be argued on 8 February. As the Republican presidential primary will then be well under way, with Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada having voted – and as Trump has also been disqualified from the ballot in Maine, a ruling appealed in state court – a quick decision is expected.The Colorado primary is set for 5 March. The state government must begin mailing ballots to overseas voters on 20 January and to all others between 12 and 16 February. The ruling suspending Trump is stayed, however, as long as the supreme court appeal is ongoing.In the year of a high-stakes presidential election, the case is set to move rapidly, under a fierce spotlight. Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said that with “oral argument set for 8 February, the appeal will be extremely expedited … thus, briefs will probably be due as soon as possible, maybe [in] a week or 10 days for each side.”The 14th amendment was approved after the civil war, meant to bar from office supporters of the rebel Confederate states. But it has rarely been used. Cases against Trump were mounted after he was impeached but acquitted by the Senate over the attack on Congress by his supporters on 6 January 2021, then swiftly came to dominate the Republican presidential primary for 2024, all while maintaining the lie that his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 was the result of electoral fraud.Fourteenth-amendment challenges to Trump in other states have either failed or remain undecided.The Colorado supreme court ruled against Trump on 19 December but stayed the ruling until 4 January, pending appeal. That appeal came earlier this week, Trump’s lawyers arguing that only Congress could arbitrate such disputes and saying the relevant text in the 14th amendment – in section 3 – did not apply to the presidency or vice-presidency as they are not mentioned therein.ABC News has reported debates from the passage of the amendment, in 1866, in which the presidency was said to be covered.Prominent legal scholars including Laurence Tribe of Harvard and the retired conservative judge J Michael Luttig have said Trump should be disqualified from seeking the presidency under the 14th amendment.Luttig, who testified memorably before the House January 6 committee, called the Colorado ruling “historic … a monumental decision of constitutional law … masterful and … unassailable”. He has also said the US supreme court ruling will be “arguably … the single most important constitutional decision in all of our history”.Other voices, including conservative lawyers and professors and all Trump’s major opponents for the Republican nomination, have questioned whether section 3 applies to the presidency, or to someone not convicted of insurrection. Most (and some senior Democrats) have also said the Colorado ruling is anti-democratic, because only voters should decide Trump’s fitness for office.Luttig has countered such arguments, saying: “The 14th amendment itself, in section 3, answers the question whether disqualification is ‘anti-democratic’, declaring that it is not. Rather, it is the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that is anti-democratic, per the command of the constitution.”Trump also faces extensive legal jeopardy: he faces 91 criminal charges under four indictments, 17 concerning election subversion, and civil threats including cases over his business affairs and a defamation suit arising from an allegation of rape a judge said was “substantially true”.Nonetheless, he leads Republican polling by vast margins. Were the supreme court to rule against him in the Colorado case, the US would find itself in uncharted waters.On Friday, Steven Cheung, Trump’s spokesperson, said the campaign welcomed “a fair hearing at the supreme court to argue against the bad-faith, election-interfering, voter-suppressing, Democrat-backed and Biden-led, 14th amendment abusing decision” in Colorado.Cheung also claimed the Colorado case and others like it were “part of a well-funded effort by leftwing political activists hell-bent on stopping the lawful re-election of President Trump this November, even if it means disenfranchising voters”.Writing on his blog, Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of Los Angeles, California, pointed to uncertainties about how the supreme court case will unfold, given what he called a “blob” of a filing from Trump’s lawyers, while saying lawyers for Colorado “raised three questions, which somewhat overlap with Trump’s claims”.“This seems like it could be a free-for-all in arguments and briefing,” Hasen wrote, adding: “Buckle up; it’s going to be a wild ride from here on out.”That seems assured. The supreme court is not just dominated 6-3 by rightwingers who have delivered historic rulings including removing the federal right to abortion. It includes three justices installed when Trump was president.On Thursday, a Trump lawyer, Alina Habba, caused controversy when she told Fox News one such appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, would now “step up” for the man who put him on the court.Controversy also surrounds Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving justice whose wife, the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas, was involved in Trump’s election subversion.On Friday, Christina Harvey, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, said Thomas should not take part in the Colorado case.“The American people deserve a fair and impartial review … free from any conflicts of interest,” Harvey said. “Justice Thomas’s continued refusal to recuse himself from this case and others related to the efforts to overthrow the 2020 election … raises questions about the integrity of the judicial process and the influence of political bias.“As trust in the supreme court reaches new lows, decisions like these only reinforce Americans’ belief that supreme court justices are politicians in robes. To begin to restore public confidence in our nation’s highest court, Thomas must recuse himself.” More

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      Biden attacks Trump as grave threat to democracy in rousing 2024 speech

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      A day before the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Joe Biden delivered a pointed speech to warn voters against re-electing Donald Trump, criticizing the likely Republican presidential nominee as a fundamental threat to democracy in an attempt to shape the dynamics of the 2024 election.“Today we’re here to answer the most important of questions: is democracy still America’s sacred cause?” Biden said. “Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: the defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.“America, as we began this election year, we must be clear: democracy is on the ballot.”Sharply contrasting himself with his opponent, Biden accused Trump of attempting to undermine America’s system of government, painting the Republican leader as a would-be autocrat hellbent on revenge. Biden noted that Trump had vowed “retribution” against his political enemies if he is elected, and had indicated he would act as a dictator on the first day of his second term.“Donald Trump’s campaign is about him – not America, not you. Donald Trump’s campaign is obsessed with the past, not the future,” Biden said. “Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future.”The speech came a day before the anniversary of the January 6 attack in 2021, when a group of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in a violent effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. A bipartisan Senate report found that seven people died as a result of the insurrection, and Trump now faces four felony counts over his role in the attack and his broader campaign to overturn the election results.But Trump has continued to defend those who carried out the attack as “patriots”, promising to issue pardons to them if he is elected.“In trying to rewrite the facts of January 6, Trump was trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election. But we knew the truth because we saw with our own eyes,” Biden said.“Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault. They were insurrectionists, not patriots. They weren’t there to uphold the constitution. They were there to destroy the constitution.”Trump, who spoke to hundreds of supporters in Iowa Friday night in his first campaign visit of 2024, shot back at Biden’s speech, painting a dark portrait of the US. He called it a “failing” nation, beset by “terrorists” and immigrants from “mental asylums” pouring over the US-Mexico border.Biden highlighted the setting of his speech, which took place roughly 10 miles from Valley Forge national historical park in Pennsylvania, to underscore the high stakes of the presidential race. During America’s fight for independence in the revolutionary war, George Washington and his Continental army troops camped at Valley Forge during a difficult winter.“After all we’ve been through in our history – from independence to civil war to two world wars to a pandemic to insurrection – I refuse to believe that in 2024 we Americans would choose to walk away from what’s made us the greatest nation in the history of the world: freedom, liberty,” Biden said.The speech came at a particularly vulnerable moment for Biden. Polls show Biden’s approval rating mired in the high 30s with Americans expressing concerns about the state of the economy, despite strong job creation and the easing of inflation. A Gallup poll conducted last month found that only 22% of Americans view economic conditions as “good” or “excellent”, while 78% consider current conditions to be “fair” or “poor”. National polls show Biden and Trump running neck and neck in a hypothetical general election.Biden is holding a series of events to reframe the 2024 election as a fight for democracy and fundamental freedoms. In addition to the Valley Forge speech, Biden will speak on Monday at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine African Americans were fatally shot by a white supremacist in 2015.Biden’s campaign has said the president will also hold events later this month to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a federal right to abortion access. That ruling was overturned by the conservative-leaning supreme court in 2022, resulting in abortion bans in more than a dozen states.“When Joe Biden ran for president four years ago, he said, ‘We are in the battle for the soul of America,’” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters on Tuesday. “As we look towards November 2024, we still are. The threat Donald Trump posed in 2020 to American democracy has only grown more dire in the years since.”Despite that grim outlook, Biden expressed his trademark optimism as he spoke to supporters in Pennsylvania, reiterating his message of American exceptionalism and urging voters to embrace hope.“None of you believe America is failing. We know America is winning. That’s American patriotism,” Biden said. “We all know who Donald Trump is. The question we have to answer is: who are we?”Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Kavanaugh will ‘step up’ to keep Trump on ballots, ex-president’s lawyer says

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      Brett Kavanaugh, the US supreme court justice, will “step up” for Donald Trump and help defeat attempts to remove the former president from the ballot in Colorado and Maine for inciting an insurrection, a Trump lawyer said.“I think it should be a slam dunk in the supreme court,” Alina Habba told Fox News on Thursday night. “I have faith in them.“You know, people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up. Those people will step up. Not because they’re pro-Trump but because they’re pro-law, because they’re pro-fairness. And the law on this is very clear.”Kavanaugh was the second of three justices appointed by Trump, creating a 6-3 rightwing majority that has delivered major Republican victories including removing the federal right to abortion and loosening gun control laws.Habba’s reference to Trump “going through hell” was to a stormy confirmation during which Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, which he angrily denied. Trump reportedly wavered on Kavanaugh, only for senior Republicans to persuade him to stay strong.Observers were quick to notice Habba’s apparent invitation to corruption.Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said: “Legal ethics alert. If … Kavanaugh feels in any way that he owes Trump and will ‘step up’, then [Habba] should be sanctioned by the bar for saying this on TV and thus trying to prejudice a proceeding.”Last month, the Colorado supreme court and the Maine secretary of state ruled that Trump should be removed from the ballot under the 14th amendment to the US constitution, passed after the civil war to stop insurrectionists holding office.Trump incited the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in 2021, an attempt to stop certification of his defeat by Joe Biden. Impeached but acquitted, he is now the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination this year.Trump has appealed both state rulings. In a supreme court filing in the Colorado case, lawyers argued that only Congress could resolve such a dispute and that the presidency was not an office of state as defined in the 14th amendment.The relevant text does not mention the presidency or vice-presidency. ABC News has reported exchanges in debate in 1866 in which those positions are covered.The supreme court has not yet said if it will consider the matter.Norm Eisen, a White House ethics tsar turned CNN legal analyst, said: “It’s likely … the supreme court will move to resolve this. They may do it quickly. They may not do it quickly because by filing this petition … Trump has stayed the Colorado proceedings. So at the moment he remains on the ballot. The supreme court does have to speak to it.”Habba said:“[Trump] has not been charged with insurrection. He has not been prosecuted for it. He has not been found guilty of it.”She then made her prediction about Kavanaugh and other justices “stepping up”. More

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      Storm Trump is brewing – and the whole world needs to brace itself | Jonathan Freedland

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      It is not a prediction, but it is a possibility – and a growing one. Barring a major upset, Donald Trump is on course to be the Republican nominee for US president. If he wins that contest, which begins in earnest in Iowa on 15 January, then polling in the handful of must-win, battleground states suggests he has a better than even chance of beating Joe Biden in November. Of course, much can change between now and then: once voters’ minds are concentrated on the looming prospect of a Trump return, many might recoil. All the same, Americans need to prepare themselves now for a second Trump presidency – and so does the rest of the world.A good first step will be shedding any illusions that the sequel would simply be a repeat of the original. Trump 2.0 will be more focused and more capable than the initial iteration. In January 2017, he was a novice, new to Washington, new to political office and clueless as to the machinery of government. He relied on appointees who could, and often did, thwart his crazier, darker impulses – even if that meant swiping key documents from his desk before he had a chance to see or sign them.Trump is different now. Four years in the White House taught him where the levers of power are and who he needs to push aside to reach them. Next time, he won’t allow himself to be babysat or reined in by assorted appropriate adults: there will be no Rex Tillerson at the state department or James Mattis at the Pentagon. Instead, he will populate his administration with loyalists undistracted by any duty to democratic norms and conventions, committed solely to ensuring Trump’s will is done. Once those informal, unwritten constraints are off, there is little that will stand in his way.He has been shockingly upfront about this. As early as last summer, Trump aides were briefing their plans for a massive presidential power grab should their boss be re-elected. They promise to bring independent agencies, including those that oversee the media and the internet, or trade and industry, under the direct control of the Oval Office. They will hand themselves the power to fire tens of thousands of civil servants, replacing them with yet more loyalists – eyeing up especially the intelligence and security agencies, rooting out anyone deemed unreliable. In the words of Russell Vought, who served in the first Trump term and is now involved in drawing up plans for a second: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”Team Trump makes no secret of its particular interest in the justice department, ditching the convention that the executive stay out of decisions over who does, and does not, get prosecuted. With judicial independence cast aside, Trump would be able not only to pardon himself and his pals, but to order investigations into his enemies, starting with the Biden family and all those who, he believes, have wronged him – including, no doubt, those state election officials who refused to fiddle the numbers and declare him the winner of the 2020 contest. If that sounds hyperbolic, remember Trump’s stated promise to his supporters: “I am your warrior. I am your justice … I am your retribution.”Not for nothing is there serious concern in the US that January 2025 could open a new chapter of US authoritarianism, even an American dictatorship – with Trump bent on filling the judiciary and the upper reaches of the military with those whose first loyalty will be not to the US constitution but to him. Perhaps the most telling moment of the primary season so far came last month when Trump was interviewed by major league sycophant Sean Hannity of Fox News. Clearly trying to help, Hannity invited Trump to quash the rumours that he planned to rule as a dictator, abusing power and seeking revenge against his political rivals. “Except for day one,” came the reply. “After that, I’m not a dictator.So Americans have much to brace for: a Trump presidency with all the darkness, bigotry and corruption of the first, only this time more determined, efficient and ruthless. But it is not only those inside the country who need to gird themselves. The rest of the world must prepare too.Among the more startling pieces in a collection compiled by the Atlantic magazine under the heading “If Trump wins”, was one by the analyst Anne Applebaum. Her stark prediction: “Trump will abandon Nato.” She makes the persuasive case that even if he does not formally withdraw from the alliance, Trump can render it defunct simply by shaking confidence in its central commitment: that each member come to the defence of any other if attacked. Once the likes of Vladimir Putin conclude that Trump no longer believes in that creed of collective defence, the game will be up.The immediate casualty of such a shift will be Ukraine. Kyiv has relied on US arms and aid since Russia’s invasion nearly two years ago, an act of aggression whose initial stages were praised by Trump as “genius”. A re-elected Joe Biden would keep that support for Ukraine coming. Under Trump, it would dry up.Orysia Lutsevych of Chatham House told me that, in that scenario, Kyiv would have to pursue a “totally different war strategy, lowering its ambition from retaking territory seized by Russia to denying Russia the opportunity to take more”. One former high-ranking figure in the US military reckons that “the best we can hope for is that Europe pressures [Volodymyr] Zelenskiy into accepting some form of armistice with Russia that concedes Donbas and Crimea”, along with international security guarantees. He offers that verdict with no enthusiasm: “This is exactly the outcome Putin desires.”It’s worth spelling out what that means: a Moscow no longer deterred by the threat of Nato, rewarded for its aggression and free to pursue more elsewhere, eyeing up its neighbours and licking its lips. If the US is led by a man who, we already know, grovels to dictators and disdains the US’s allies, other nations will start to recalculate: watch smaller, more vulnerable countries in Asia cosy up to Beijing, as a matter of self-preservation. Some might welcome a Trump-led retreat as the end of US imperialism; in reality, it would merely advance the day when Chinese and Russian imperialism take its place.None of this can wait. The US’s allies need to prepare now for a change that could well be just a year away. To defend Ukraine without US help will take money and hardware on a scale dwarfing anything Europe has come up with so far. But no less important, the return of Trump will also require deep cooperation, whether on security or the climate emergency, especially among the nations of Europe – and that includes Britain.The go-it-alone fantasies of the Brexit era were always delusional. In a second Trump era, they would be downright dangerous. An orange storm could be coming – and we need to be ready.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
      Join Jonathan Freedland at 8pm GMT on Tuesday 16 January for a Guardian Live online event. He will be talking to Julian Borger, whose new memoir, I Seek a Kind Person, reveals the story of his father’s escape from the Nazis via an ad placed in the Guardian. Tickets available here More

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      US ‘won’t survive’ four more years of Trump ‘chaos’, Nikki Haley says

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      The re-election of Donald Trump would bring “four more years of chaos” the US “won’t survive”, the former president’s closest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, told an Iowa audience, turning her fire on the frontrunner as the first vote of the 2024 primary looms.The former South Carolina governor has caught up with Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, in the battle for second place in Republican presidential polling. The gap between Haley and Trump is also closing, particularly in New Hampshire, the second state to vote when it holds its primary on 23 January.Trump faces a slate of criminal and civil trials as well as attempts to keep him off the ballot, for inciting the 6 January 2021 insurrection.Nonetheless, he remains formidably popular with the Republican base and Haley, who as UN ambassador under Trump was often touted as a potential vice-president, must perform a balancing act on the campaign trail.In Iowa, she said Trump had been “the right president at the right time”. But she added: “The reality is, rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him, and we all know that’s true … and we can’t have a country in disarray and a world on fire and go through four more years of chaos. We won’t survive it.”Saying she used to tell Trump he was “his own worst enemy”, Haley added: “We have a country to save, and that means no more drama. No more taking things personally.”Haley was speaking in Des Moines, as CNN hosted town hall events for her and DeSantis, rivals who will also meet on the debate stage next week, as Trump continues to avoid such traditional forums. DeSantis also used his airtime to attack Trump, but Haley is widely seen to have acquired greater momentum and therefore attracted greater attention.A confident performer and stump speaker, she is not immune to gaffes. On stage at Grand View University, she addressed her controversial failure last week in New Hampshire to say slavery caused the civil war.Saying she “had Black friends growing up”, and that slavery was “a very talked-about thing” in her state (the first to secede in 1860, its declaration of secession citing slavery as the cause), Haley said: “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have said slavery. But in my mind that’s a given, that everybody associates the civil war with slavery.”She was also forced to deal with a remark in New Hampshire only the day before, when she appeared to dismiss the importance of Iowa, telling voters: “You know how to do this. You know Iowa starts it. You know that you correct it.”DeSantis is Trump’s closest challenger in Iowa, Haley closest in New Hampshire. In Iowa, Haley claimed she had been joking.“You are going to see me fight until the very end, on the last day in Iowa,” she said. “And I’m not playing in one state. I’m fighting in every state. Because I think everybody’s worth fighting for.”Trump’s campaign has switched to a fighting stance, airing its first attack ad against Haley in New Hampshire this week, portraying her as soft on immigration.That offensive coincided with Haley securing the endorsement of Don Bolduc, a far-right former special forces general who ran for US Senate with Trump’s backing but now says: “With Trump, there’s too many distractions. There’s too much risk of losing.”Still, any Trump opponent faces an uphill fight: Haley’s state, South Carolina, will vote in February and she trails Trump there by about 30 points. There are also other candidates still in the race.On Thursday, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the only explicitly anti-Trump candidate, pinning his hopes on New Hampshire, angrily rejected calls to drop out and throw his weight behind Haley.“The fact is that I’m running for president of the United States and no one’s voted yet,” Christie told Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio host, in an interview that started awkwardly and went downhill from there. “And I don’t have an obligation to do anything other than to answer questions, tell the truth, run a good campaign, and try to win. And so, you know, where this has become Nikki Haley’s campaign when no one’s voted yet is kind of a mystery to me.”The biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are also still in the race. But their odds are even longer than Christie’s.On Friday, writing on Substack, the Republican operative turned anti-Trump crusader Steve Schmidt said: “Nikki Haley is an imitation of Trump, a hollow woman … firmly on Trump’s side of the field. She is an acolyte who has strayed, probably much to Trump’s amusement because he knows she will be back in the menagerie more loyal than ever.“It is Chris Christie who stands alone against Trump. He is … the only moral choice.”Christie, however, told Hewitt that if he did not win the nomination, and even if Trump did, he would not vote for Joe Biden. More

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      Biden to start election year with speech on third anniversary of Capitol attack

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      Joe Biden will on Friday mark the third anniversary of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, delivering his first presidential election campaign speech of 2024 at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania – a site replete with historical meaning.A day before the anniversary, due to forecast bad weather, Biden will speak where George Washington’s army endured another dark moment: the bitter winter of 1777-78, an ordeal key to winning American independence from Britain.Biden will also speak about January 6 on Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where in June 2015 a gunman shot dead nine Black people in an attempt to start a race war.Donald Trump’s nearest challenger for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, was governor of South Carolina at the time and subsequently oversaw the removal of the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds.Haley has since struggled to define her position on the flag and the interests it represented, last week in New Hampshire failing to say slavery caused the civil war.But the Biden campaign is focusing on Trump, who refused to accept his conclusive defeat in 2020, spreading the lie that he was denied by electoral fraud and ultimately encouraging supporters to attempt to stop certification of Biden’s win by Congress.The attack on the Capitol delayed certification but the process was completed in the early hours of 7 January. Biden was inaugurated two weeks later.On Thursday, the Biden campaign previewed his Valley Forge speech and released Cause, an ad one adviser said would “set the stakes” for this year’s election.“I’ve made the preservation of American democracy the central issue of my presidency,” Biden says in the ad, over footage of Americans voting.But, he adds, over shots of white supremacists marching in Virginia in 2017 and the attack on Congress, “There’s something dangerous happening in America. There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy.”Wes Moore, the first Black governor of Maryland, widely seen as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2028 but now a Biden campaign adviser, told MSNBC: “The president is really setting the stakes and really hoping to set the platform for what people are going to hear.“From him, it is a vision for their future. From Donald Trump, they’re going to hear a vision about his future. That’s the difference.”Less than two weeks from the Iowa caucuses, Trump dominates Republican polling, regardless of 91 criminal charges – 17 concerning election subversion – in four cases, civil trials over his business affairs and a rape allegation and attempts to bar him from the ballot in Colorado and Maine under the 14th amendment, introduced after the civil war to stop insurrectionists running for office.Trump has called January 6 “a beautiful day” and supporters imprisoned because of it “great, great patriots” and “hostages”. At rallies he has played Justice for All, The Star-Spangled Banner sung by jailed rioters, interspersed with his own recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. On Saturday, he will stage a rally in Iowa, less than five days before caucuses in the midwestern state kick off the 2024 election.Republicans in Congress continue to range themselves behind Trump, the majority whip Tom Emmer’s endorsement this week completing the set of GOP House leaders. Among the rank and file, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right representative from Georgia who has touted herself as Trump’s running mate, was due to host a January 6 commemoration in Florida, until the venue canceled it.Many observers see winning the White House as Trump’s best hope of staying out of prison. Some polling suggests a criminal conviction (also possible over retention of classified information and hush-money payments) would reduce support but for now he is competitive with Biden or leads him in surveys regarding a notional general election.Furthermore, polling shows more Americans accepting Trump’s stolen election lie.This week, the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that only 62% of respondents said Biden’s 2020 win was legitimate, down from 69% two years ago. On the question of blame for January 6, meanwhile, the same pollsters found that 25% of Americans (and 34% of Republicans) thought it was probably or definitely true that the FBI, not Trump, was responsible for inciting the riot.Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, referred to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan when she said: “Led by Donald Trump, Maga Republicans are running on an extreme platform of undermining the will of the American people who vote in free and fair elections, weaponising the government against their political opponents, and parroting the rhetoric of dictators.”Biden’s new ad and January 6 speeches, Chavez Rodriguez said, would “serve as a very real reminder that this election could very well determine the very fate of American democracy”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump allies behind January 6 also leading Biden impeachment, says watchdog

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      The attempted US coup of 6 January 2021, never ended, according to a watchdog report, since the same Donald Trump allies behind that insurrection are now leading a sham impeachment effort against Joe Biden.The report, marking three years since a mob of Trump supporters ransacked the US Capitol in a bid to overturn his election defeat, was produced by the Congressional Integrity Project and obtained by the Guardian.It argues that scores of Trump loyalists in the House of Representatives have continued to push the former president’s election lies and are ready to go further in a bid to put him back in the White House.“In fact, the key players involved in Trump’s scheme to overturn the election in 2020 are the very same Republicans leading the bogus impeachment effort against President Biden,” it says.These include Mike Johnson, the House speaker; Jim Jordan, the chair of the House judiciary committee; and James Comer, the chair of the House oversight committee, all of whom continue to push Trump’s debunked conspiracy theories and wage a crusade to impeach Biden.Last month, the House voted along party lines to officially authorise an impeachment inquiry into Biden after months of claiming that he and his son, Hunter, engaged in an influence-peddling scheme. Even some Republicans, such as Utah senator Mitt Romney, pointed out that there is no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden himself.The project’s report describes the Biden impeachment inquiry as “a partisan political stunt” designed to hurt Biden and help Trump return to the White House in 2024, and says it is “an extension of, not separate from, the events of January 6, 2021”.It quotes Jim McGovern, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, as saying: “They still want to overturn the election. What they couldn’t do on January 6th they’re trying to do with this process.”The report highlights the role of Johnson, who was elected speaker in October to replace the ousted Kevin McCarthy and has supported an impeachment inquiry for months. After the 2020 election, he said the outcome had been “rigged” and amplified Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines.Johnson stayed in close contact with Trump and publicly encouraged him to “stay strong and keep fighting”. He pressured Republican colleagues to support a Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the election on the unconstitutional premise that the expansion of vote by mail during the pandemic had been illegal, and he managed to collect signatures from more than 60% of House Republicans.On the morning of 6 January 2021, Johnson tweeted: “We MUST fight for election integrity, the Constitution, and the preservation of our republic!” Later that day he voted to overturn the 2020 election, refusing to certify the results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. In all, eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives voted to overturn the result.Johnson also voted against bipartisan legislation that would create a September 11-style commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol. He refused to hold people accountable for the violence that day, voting against holding Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee.He has attacked investigations into January 6 as a “third impeachment” and “pure political theatre”. More recently, Johnson alleged that the FBI director Christopher Wray was “hiding something” about the FBI’s presence in the Capitol on 6 January 2021, echoing a conspiracy theory spread by rightwing extremists implying that federal agents had a role in orchestrating the insurrection.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen asked in October whether he believed the 2020 election was stolen, Johnson refused to comment: “We’re not talking about any issues today … My position is very well-known.”Jordan, meanwhile, was a key figure in the attempt to subvert US democracy who pushed the Trump administration to “unilaterally reject certain states’ electors” the day before January 6. He opposed the creation of a January 6 committee and has refused to cooperate with any investigative efforts into the violence of that day.Before the 2022 midterm elections, Jordan stated that his investigations into Biden “will help frame up the 2024 race … We need to make sure that [Donald Trump] wins.” Last month he boasted that the impeachment inquiry against Biden was influencing polling numbers for the 2024 presidential election: “I think all that together is why you see the [polling] numbers where they are at.”The report names other key “election deniers and insurrection apologists” in Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, Pete Sessions of Texas, Byron Donalds of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Troy Nehls of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Greg Steube of Florida, Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin, Scott Fitzgerald of Wisconsin and Cliff Bentz of Oregon.Kyle Herrig, the executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, said: “The attempted impeachment of President Biden isn’t merely a political stunt: it’s an attempt to finish the job Jordan, Trump, Greene and Johnson started long before January 6, 2021, culminating in the violent attack on the Capitol.“They are willing to trash the institution of the House, its role in legitimate oversight, the constitution and our democracy. At the Congressional Integrity Project, the gloves are off, and protection of our democracy is on.” More