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      We should all be terrified of Trump’s Project 2025 | Robert Reich

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      “Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025.This is another in a long line of Trump lies.The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials whom Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform.Another Project 2025 leader is John McEntee, another of Trump’s top White House aides. (McEntee recently went viral in a video in which he claimed he gives counterfeit money to homeless people to get them arrested.)Even the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign appears in the Project 2025 recruitment video.Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.As the former chairman of the Republican party Michael Steele put it: “OK, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”Trump may also be worried that the Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, could alarm independents and moderates. On Wednesday, Roberts raised the prospect of political violence. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the War Room podcast, founded by the Trump adviser Steve Bannon.But let’s be clear. The Trump campaign platform is basically Project 2025. Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac is running ads calling it “Trump’s Project 2025”.The Make America Great Again Pac also created the website TrumpProject2025.com. In case there’s any doubt that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are working in close partnership, Trump can be seen in this video praising the Heritage Foundation and saying he “needs” them to “achieve” his goals.The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation goes back years. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation bragged that Trump had implemented two-thirds of their policy recommendations in his first year – more than any other president had done for them.The goals of Project 2025 are the same goals Trump tried to achieve in his first term or has been advocating in this campaign.One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump – a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.Project 2025 also calls for eliminating “woke propaganda” from all laws and federal regulations – including the terms “sexual orientation”, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “gender equality”, and “reproductive rights”.Other items in the Project 2025 blueprint are precisely what Trump has called for on the campaign trail, including mass arrests and deportations of undocumented people in the United States, ending many worker protections, dropping prosecutions of far-right militias like the Proud Boys, and giving additional tax cuts to big corporations and the rich.Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a “hoax”. Project 2025 calls for expanding oil drilling in the United States, shrinking the geographic footprint of national monuments, terminating clean energy incentives, and ending fossil fuel regulations.Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.Project 2025 is, in short, the plan to implement what Donald Trump has said he wants to do if he’s re-elected.Trump may want to distance himself from Project 2025 in order to come off less bonkers to independents and moderates, but he can’t escape it. The document embodies everything he stands for.
      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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      Stormy Daniels gets more than $900K from GoFundMe after alleged threats

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      Stormy Daniels’ supporters have raised more than $900,000 meant to help her move to a safe house and repay legal fees after testifying in the criminal trial that led to Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies.The money comes from an online GoFundMe campaign started by a friend and former manager of the adult film actor, who recently appeared on MSNBC and described how supporters of Trump have bombarded her with social media harassment as he seeks a second presidency, including threats to rape and murder her daughter and other family.“It’s become unsafe for her family and her pets,” the fundraiser’s organizer, Dwayne Crawford, wrote on the page for the campaign, which set a goal of $1m. “Stormy needs help to relocate her family to somewhere they can feel safe and live on their terms.“She needs assistance to be able to continue to pay the mounting fees so that Trump doesn’t just win because his pocketbook seems endless.”The so-called I Stand with Stormy Daniels campaign – which had raised more than $940,000 from about 17,600 donors as of Friday – follows her key role in getting Trump convicted in late May on charges of falsifying business records.Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about an extramarital sexual encounter that she has alleged to have had with Trump a decade prior to his 2016 presidential election victory. The payment to Daniels was falsely recorded as legal expenses, according to prosecutors, who ultimately won a conviction against Trump in a New York state courthouse with the help of testimony from Daniels.The US supreme court on Monday held that presidents enjoy broad immunity from prosecution in connection with their actions in office – which should aid Trump substantially as he tries to defeat criminal cases pending against him on charges of improperly retaining classified records and of trying to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden.One of the more immediate consequences of the supreme court’s ruling was for New York judge Juan Merchan to delay Trump’s sentencing in the case that ensnared Daniels. It had originally been scheduled for 11 July, but Merchan tentatively reset the proceeding for 18 September after the former president’s legal team asked him to delay it in light of the immunity decision.Meanwhile, Daniels told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Tuesday that she had been inundated with Facebook messages threatening “to rape everybody in my family, including my young daughter, before they killed them”.“I’ve lost … mostly my peace, mostly my daughter’s privacy, and time – time I’ll never get back with her,” Daniels said in reference to her participation in the prosecution against Trump.She also detailed how she owed $500,000 in attorneys’ fees – which she could not afford to pay – over a civil defamation lawsuit that she filed against Trump in 2018.Among those who expressed support for Daniels after her interview with Maddow was writer E Jean Carroll, who sued Trump over allegations of rape and defamation – and won nearly $90m in civil penalties from him. “I’d be happy to help!!” she wrote on X on Tuesday night.But one of the voices to come out against Daniels was her former attorney Michael Avenatti, who remained imprisoned for defrauding her and other clients.In a Wednesday post on X, he dismissed Daniels’ fundraising campaign as “GoFundMe grift” and “complete bullshit”, arguing that the alleged threats were not coming from Trump personally. Avenatti’s comments brought him his own detractors, with some X users accusing him of angling for a pardon from Trump in case he wins a return to the White House in November.Crawford, the Daniels fundraiser organizer, wrote that he had been motivated to get involved after he and his friends were given “front-row seats to the parts of this story that don’t fit neatly into click-bait headlines”.“If we allow Stormy, after choosing to stand up to the president of these United States, to lose her life, her liberty or her happiness, then we have failed at the very foundational core of what this nation was built upon,” Crawford added. More

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      Donald Trump claims to ‘know nothing’ about Project 2025

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      Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.Economist and Guardian columnist Robert Reich wrote: “Don’t be fooled. The playbook is written by more than 20 officials Trump appointed in his first term. It is the clearest vision we have of a 2nd Trump presidency.”The Trump campaign has previously pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Heritage Foundation also created the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981.The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan. More

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      Joe Biden tells rally ‘I am going to beat’ Trump amid reports of new effort to get president to quit race – live

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      Addressing a crowd of whooping supporters, Joe Biden delivered an energetic rally speech in Madison, Wisconsin – a major swing state.Biden opened up his remarks by taking a jab at a Fourth of July comment made by Donald Trump in 2019 when Trump said that revolutionary war troops “took over the airports” from the British.“He’s a stable genius,” Biden said mockingly.He went on to vow to beat Trump but not before accidentally slipping up with his words.“I’m staying in the race … I will beat him again in 2020,” said Biden, before correcting himself a few seconds later by saying: “And by the way, we’re going to do it again in 2024.”Biden went on to address criticisms about his age, with the 81-year old president saying: “I keep seeing all those stories about being too old … You think I’m too old to restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land? Too old to ban assault weapons again? To protect social security and Medicare? … Too old to beat Donald Trump?”He then cited Trump’s criminal record, calling him a convicted felon with the “morals of an alley cat” and pointing to Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots in 2021.“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American at the same time,” he said, adding: “This is so damn serious. You can’t love your country only when you win.”Biden’s demeanor throughout his nearly 20-minute address on Friday was energetic and forceful, marking a stark shift away from his performance during last week’s debate, which saw him struggle to articulate his thoughts.With one campaign event out of the way, Biden has several more tests facing him amid these make-or-break days, with a crucial ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos set to air tonight at 8pm.Another Democrat in Congress has expressed doubts about Joe Biden’s viability: Brad Sherman, from California, posted that he was looking forward to the president’s upcoming interview on ABC, but also said it was “important” that Biden conduct an “extended LIVE interview” as soon as possible.His statement further suggested that party rules do not mandate that Biden remain on the ticket:
      Counter to popular belief, the rules of the Democratic Party do NOT require that pledged delegates vote for Biden at the convention. Party rules require delegates’ votes, “reflect the sentiments of those who elected them,” at the time the delegates cast their ballots.
      Democratic Congressmembers Raúl Grijalva and Lloyd Doggett have publicly called on Biden to withdraw his candidacy. In another defiant speech, Biden told supporters in Wisconsin earlier today that he would not be quitting the race.The Biden campaign has responded to Donald Trump’s attempt to distance himself from Project 2025, a rightwing effort to aggressively roll back civil rights and other liberal policies. After Trump on Friday claimed, “I know nothing about Project 2025,” and “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying,” the Biden campaign pointed out the former president’s many connections to the initiative:The Make America Great Again Super Pac supporting Trump has run ads promoting the effort and calling it, “Trump’s Project 2025.” John McEntee, who served as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Trump, was brought on last year as a senior adviser for Project 2025 via the Heritage Foundation, an influential rightwing conservative thinktank that has drafted the plans to dismantle and reorganize US government.Led by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 is a manifesto that calls for a crackdown on immigration, the reversal of LGBTQ+ rights, further erosion of reproductive rights, the undoing of environmental protections and the implementation of other rightwing policy goals. Trump allies and former appointees have been involved in the effort.The Trump campaign previously said Project 2025 was not its own initiative, but that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from other groups. Trump has also directly praised the Heritage Foundation and said “we need the help” from the group, as Biden’s campaign pointed out. And the Heritage Foundation has also previously claimed credit for Trump administration policies.More here from our past coverage of Project 2025:Joe Biden will reportedly hold a solo press conference next Thursday, according to journalist Jacob Gardenswartz, citing senior administration officials on a call with reporters.Officials have not publicly confirmed the event, but news of a potential media conference led by Biden comes as the president has faced increasing pressure to speak with reporters and do interviews in the wake of his poor debate performance.Biden has done fewer press conferences and media interviews than any of his past seven predecessors at this point in his term, according to a report this week in Axios. His first post-debate interview will air this evening on ABC.Some key events and links from the day so far, as we prepare for Joe Biden’s major ABC interview to air this evening:
      Biden delivered an energetic campaign speech in Madison, Wisconsin, saying: “I am running and going to win again.”
      The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, broke from other Democratic governors supporting Biden’s campaign and issued a statement urging him to “listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump”.
      The White House said Biden was seen by his doctor after the debate and that the physician found he was fine and “recovering well” after reports he was suffering from a cold.
      Donald Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, an agenda of rightwing activists to erode civil rights and other progressive policies under a second Trump term. But key figures involved in Project 2025 are closely linked to Trump.
      Several powerful Democratic backers have said they will pause donations until Biden steps aside.
      Robert F Kennedy Jr made a startling pledge to not “take sides” with respect to the September 11 terrorist attacks if his long-shot presidential campaign vaults him to the White House.
      Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, is organizing a group of senators to urge Joe Biden to exit the race, according to a new report in the Washington Post, based on accounts of “two people with direct knowledge of the effort”.The Post reports:
      Warner is telling Democratic senators that President Biden can no longer remain in the election in the wake of his faltering debate performance, according to the people familiar with private conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely. The Virginia senator has told others that he is deeply concerned Biden is not able to run a campaign that could beat former president Donald Trump.
      The senator’s spokesperson did not confirm or deny the report to the Post, saying in a statement: “Like many other people in Washington and across the country, Senator Warner believes these are critical days for the president’s campaign, and he has made that clear to the White House.”The report was published as Biden delivered an energetic campaign speech in Wisconsin reiterating that he was not ending his campaign. But he continues to face pressure and scrutiny. The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, who has been a Biden campaign surrogate, issued a statement earlier today urging the president to “listen to the American people and carefully evaluate whether he remains our best hope to defeat Donald Trump”.Addressing a crowd of whooping supporters, Joe Biden delivered an energetic rally speech in Madison, Wisconsin – a major swing state.Biden opened up his remarks by taking a jab at a Fourth of July comment made by Donald Trump in 2019 when Trump said that revolutionary war troops “took over the airports” from the British.“He’s a stable genius,” Biden said mockingly.He went on to vow to beat Trump but not before accidentally slipping up with his words.“I’m staying in the race … I will beat him again in 2020,” said Biden, before correcting himself a few seconds later by saying: “And by the way, we’re going to do it again in 2024.”Biden went on to address criticisms about his age, with the 81-year old president saying: “I keep seeing all those stories about being too old … You think I’m too old to restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land? Too old to ban assault weapons again? To protect social security and Medicare? … Too old to beat Donald Trump?”He then cited Trump’s criminal record, calling him a convicted felon with the “morals of an alley cat” and pointing to Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots in 2021.“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American at the same time,” he said, adding: “This is so damn serious. You can’t love your country only when you win.”Biden’s demeanor throughout his nearly 20-minute address on Friday was energetic and forceful, marking a stark shift away from his performance during last week’s debate, which saw him struggle to articulate his thoughts.With one campaign event out of the way, Biden has several more tests facing him amid these make-or-break days, with a crucial ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos set to air tonight at 8pm.In his closing remarks, Joe Biden said:“I have never been more optimistic about America’s future because the American people are decent, good, honorable. Just remember who in God’s name we are. We’re the United States of America …“So let’s stand together, win this election and exile Donald Trump.”“You can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American at the same time,” Joe Biden said.“This is so damn serious. You can’t love your country only when you win,” he added.“Ultimately, the American presidency is about character … It’s about the president’s decency, integrity. Do they respect people or do they incite violence and hate? … And what’s worse, the supreme court has just ruled … for virtually no limits on the power of the presidency …“We just celebrated the Fourth of July saying we will not be ruled by a king.”“Trump’s biggest lie of all is he had nothing to do with the insurrection of January 6,” said Joe Biden.He went on to say:“We all saw with our own eyes. We saw he sent thousands to attack the Capitol. We saw police being attacked, the Capitol being ransacked, mob hunting for Nancy Pelosi, gallows set up to hang Mike Pence.“Let me ask you something, after what Trump did on January 6, why would anyone ever let him be near the Oval Office again?”Joe Biden repeated his popular line from last week’s debate, saying that Donald Trump “has the morals of an alley cat”.The crowd whooped in response as Biden went on to forcefully say: “Trump is a convicted felon … Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted criminal – he’s a one-man crime wave.” More

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      Trump asks judge to gut classified documents case after immunity ruling

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      Donald Trump moved on Friday to capitalize on the US supreme court’s decision to confer broad immunity to former presidents, asking the federal judge overseeing his criminal case for retaining classified documents to take a scalpel to any charges that were “official” acts that could not be prosecuted.The supreme court this week held that former presidents enjoyed some immunity from criminal prosecution for certain conduct they undertook in office, which also meant evidence of immune acts could not be introduced as evidence at any trial even if they did not form part of the charges.The framework of criminal accountability for former presidents, as laid out by the ruling, has three categories: core presidential functions that carry absolute immunity, official acts of the presidency that carry presumptive immunity, and unofficial acts that carry no immunity.The request from Trump’s lawyers did not say which parts of the indictment they considered to be official conduct that was immune. But if the US district judge Aileen Cannon agrees to go through the charges, it would almost certainly further delay the case by months.The filing not only showed the far-reaching ramifications of the immunity decision, which is now affecting Trump’s documents case in Florida even though the ruling originated from a pre-trial appeal in the former president’s 2020 election subversion case in Washington; it also demonstrated Trump’s intent to use it to destroy the substance of the cases.The 10-page filing from Trump’s lawyers asked Cannon for permission to file new briefs, arguing the immunity decision gutted prosecutors’ position that he had no immunity and “further demonstrates the politically-motivated nature of their contention that the motion is ‘frivolous’”.But Trump’s filing was doubly notable as it asked Cannon to pause all other proceedings in the case until she decided whether the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his prosecution team were authorized to bring the case in the first place.In a recent motion to dismiss the case, Trump’s lawyers argued that Smith had been improperly appointed since he was not named to the role by the president or approved by the Senate like other federal officers are – and that the attorney general, Merrick Garland, had no legal power to do so by himself.The motion appeared destined for denial after a recent hearing in federal district court in Fort Pierce, Florida, when prosecutors countered that Garland – under the appointments clause of the US constitution – had authority to name “inferior officers” like special counsels to act as subordinates.But as part of the supreme court’s decision, Justice Clarence Thomas gave the notion new momentum. “If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, the lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the special counsel’s appointment,” Thomas wrote, albeit with respect to the 2020 election case. More

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      The US supreme court utterly distorted the true threat to American democracy | Lawrence Douglas

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      In its extraordinarily disturbing decision earlier this week granting presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution, the US supreme court dramatically mis-weighed a competing set of risks to our constitutional democracy.On the one side of the scale, the court placed the possibility that a future rogue prosecutor will seek to settle political scores by indicting a former president for “insufficiently enforcing … environmental laws”.On the other side of the scale, we can place the possibility that a former president, having previously been charged with subverting the peaceful succession of power, returns to the White House, where he demands the prosecution of all those who tried to hold him to account.Or consider a related set of risks. On one side, the court imagines a president who is so fearful of the theoretical prospect of being prosecuted after leaving office that he fails to perform his duties in a “vigorous” and “energetic” manner. “Enfeebled” by the threat of future prosecution, the president is “chilled from taking the ‘bold and unhesitating action’ required of an independent Executive”.On the other side, we can imagine that a former president, having already successfully dodged any legal reckoning for his attempt to subvert the results of fair democratic election, now finds himself back in the White House and, cloaked with a blanket of immunity for all his “official actions”, grossly abuses that power.What are we to make of the fact that the court has clearly perceived the risks posed by a rogue prosecutor to far outweigh those posed by a rogue president – this notwithstanding the fact the dangers posed by the former are entirely speculative while those posed by the latter are all too real? In defense of the six-person majority one might argue that the court must fashion principles that apply generally to future cases – it cannot shape a remedy to address the particular threat posed by Donald Trump.Only that’s not true. The court could have limited itself to the matter at hand – whether Trump enjoyed immunity for his alleged acts of election interference as charged in the federal indictment. It could have held off to another day the larger question or scope of presidential immunity. And it could have reached this narrow decision months ago, thus affording the American people a trial court’s judgment concerning Trump’s most serious attack on American constitutional democracy, prior to the 2024 election.A simpler, and less savory, explanation of the court’s decision is that it’s stocked with Trump supporters. Three members of the six-person majority owe their positions on the court directly to Trump and they are not even the justices most obviously sympathetic to the former president. (That would be Clarence Thomas, the rigid ideologue with a Maga wife, and Samuel Alito, whose understanding of the Constitution seems driven by a prickly sense of grievance – who also evidently has a Maga wife.)And while I have a hard time believing – call me naive – that Chief Justice Roberts isn’t keenly aware of the dangers posed by Trump, his majority opinion is astonishingly purblind to those dangers. Take, for example, the court’s conclusion that because the constitution vests the president with the “core” duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”, Trump enjoys absolute immunity for his dealings with the justice department – including his appeal to justice department officials, after Biden’s 2020 victory, to “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me … ”The court’s logic is oxymoronic: because the constitution demands the president faithfully execute the law, he is immunized for his attempt to corrupt and subvert that very law.Let’s also bear in mind that hours before the court handed down its tardy decision, Trump reposted messages on Truth Social, his personal social media platform, calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of his declared political enemies. Among those targeted were the former representative Liz Cheney (“guilty of treason” – a capital offense), the former vice-president Mike Pence, senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, representatives Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, the vice-president Kamala Harris, and president Joe Biden.In his presidential campaign, Trump has been remarkably vague about his policy goals, but has openly and repeatedly declared his intention to use the justice department as a tool of personal vengeance. Now he can do so with impunity. At the very least, the court’s decision might shield Biden from Trump’s wrath – the others are all fair game.By way of trying to settle the nation’s nerves, the court reminds us that presidential immunity does not extend to private acts. Never mind that the court fails to offer a bright-line test between official and private acts while embracing a capacious understanding of the “official”. Still, we may rightfully ask what worries us more: the prospect that the president will rob a convenience store or that he will grossly abuse the very office that makes him the most powerful human on the planet?Back in the day of George W Bush’s misbegotten “war on terror”, John Yoo, at the time a lawyer in the office of legal counsel, wrote a notorious memo opining that the federal law criminalizing torture would be unconstitutional if applied to the president in times of war. This ominous claim led the senator Patrick Leahy to ask the then attorney teneral Alberto Gonzales, during a congressional hearing, whether the president could legally order genocide. At the time, Gonzales refused to answer, dismissing the question as hypothetical. Now the supreme court has offered a clear and shocking answer to the senator’s question.
      Lawrence Douglas is the author, most recently, of Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. He is a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian US and teaches at Amherst College More

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      Trump calls Biden ‘broken-down’ and claims he quit 2024 race in leaked video

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      “A broken-down pile of crap” on the verge of “quitting the race” was Donald Trump’s summation of Joe Biden in a surreptitiously filmed video leaked on Wednesday.The clip, obtained by the Daily Beast, shows the 78-year-old former president sitting in a golf cart, holding a pile of cash, and with son Barron alongside, as he offers an analysis of the 2024 presidential campaign.Trump asked a group off-camera: “How did I do with the debate the other night?” before predicting that Biden would not seek re-election.“He just quit, you know – he’s quitting the race”, Trump said. “I got him out of the – and that means we have Kamala.”The White House and most Democrats maintain Biden will remain the party nominee, though voter polls suggest that he has slipped six points behind Trump and that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, could be a stronger Democrat candidate in November.“I think she’s gonna be better” as an opponent, Trump continued in the video, but added: “She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic” and appeared to say: “She’s so fucking bad.”Biden’s campaign has denied he is stepping down. “Absolutely not,” said the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, on Wednesday. Several Democratic governors repeated the phrase “in it to win it” after meeting with Biden.The Trump campaign has not commented directly on the video but on Wednesday predicted the “total collapse” of the Democratic party following Biden’s poor debate performance and mounting calls for him to step aside.The Biden-Harris campaign responded to the video in a statement: “The American people have already seen low after low from Donald Trump,” it said, described the video as a “new rock bottom” for him.The clip was leaked hours after the Trump campaign released its first attack ads against Harris, who is the most likely candidate to replace Biden if he decides to quit the race.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLeaked video and audio clips have previously been a source of embarrassment for Trump, including in 2016 with the notorious Access Hollywood tape in which he described women in vulgar terms and bragged about sexually harassing them.In the latest video Trump expressed disdain for Biden’s ability to deal with foreign adversaries, including Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and China’s president, Xi Jinping.“Can you imagine that guy dealing with Putin?” Trump asked. “And the president of China – who’s a fierce person. He’s a fierce man, very tough guy. And they see him.” More

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      This Fourth of July, it’s hard to feel optimistic about the US. But I have hope | Margaret Sullivan

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      If you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention, you know that the American Experiment took some gut punches over the last week.Joe Biden – long considered the best hope for preventing another disastrous Donald Trump term – had a shockingly bad debate performance, looking and sounding every minute of his 81 years.The tainted supreme court then declared, in essence, that a president is above the law, at least when acting in an official capacity. And that came on top of other high court decisions that have blasted away at the foundations of democracy in the United States.And much of the mainstream news media continued their campaign of false equivalency – treating the president’s age as a worse problem than Trump’s criminality and authoritarian intentions.But on this Fourth of July, I haven’t given up hope that we will right ourselves. And I’m far from alone.There is encouraging news in every one of these troubled spheres – politics, justice and media.I asked one of my favorite thinkers, the author and scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in how democracies can wither under authoritarian rule, for some help. I talked to others, too, especially those who are protecting the vote, fostering good journalism and working for justice.Here’s what Ben-Ghiat told me: “Part of the reason for so much aggression from the GOP and the courts to take away our rights, including the right to free and fair elections, is because America is becoming more progressive, and Republicans cannot win without lies, threats and election interference, including assistance in that area from foreign powers.”She sees the US participating in “the global renaissance of mass nonviolent protest against authoritarianism” and notes that, in 2017, we saw the biggest protest in the nation’s history – the Women’s March against Trump, which was then surpassed in 2020 by the Black Lives Matter protests, which involved more than 20 million people in multigenerational and multiracial demonstrations.“These mass protest movements had electoral consequences in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections,” she added, as many women, non-white and LGBTQ+ people were elected to office.Ben-Ghiat is convinced that we are ripe for another round – and the stakes are higher than ever.On the justice front, I’m not suggesting that we somehow set aside the terrible and hugely consequential decision that gives a president – guess who in particular? – immunity for his official acts.But at the same time, the courts, including the jury system, are often functioning admirably, if not flawlessly. Just over a month ago, Trump became the first former US president convicted of felonies. Trump allies who wanted to charge that the courts have been weaponized found it harder to make that argument less than two weeks later when Hunter Biden, too, was convicted in a jury trial.Mainstream journalism, as noted, often disappoints. The moderators of the CNN debate clearly should have been empowered by their network bosses to challenge Trump’s barrage of lies in real time. The stunning New York Times editorial calling for Biden to set aside his campaign for the good of the nation may have been well-reasoned, but it struck me as another example of targeting the president and letting Trump off the hook. To my knowledge, only the scrappy Philadelphia Inquirer has written a similar editorial about Trump.Too much of the politics coverage is out of whack with reality. The media is baying for Biden’s head, but – with some exceptions – seems mostly bemused by Trump or at least habituated to how dangerous he is.But there’s good news in journalism, too. Consider ProPublica’s essential reporting on Justice Clarence Thomas’s rotten ethics. Or the way many news outlets have revealed the threats of Project 2025 – the alarming and detailed plan by Trump allies to dismantle democratic norms should their leader win a second term.I’m also heartened by young journalists who are making their way in a difficult career field.“No matter what problem we’re talking about, good journalism is part of the solution,” said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School (where I run a journalism ethics center). “The young journalists whom we have the privilege to work with here are some of the sharpest, most committed and talented that I’ve ever seen.”Their work “will be a ballast for democracy”, Cobb told me, “even amid the giant challenges in front of us right now”.Most of all, I’m moved by the valiant efforts of many ordinary citizens. One friend, active in voter protection efforts, praised “all of the grassroots volunteers working to preserve democracy who I am sure will continue in all the ways possible if Trump wins”. She mentioned the flood of small-dollar donations that followed Biden’s debate debacle, and credited “the courageous judges, court personnel, jurors et al who are working, despite the risks to themselves, to see that justice is served in the cases against Trump”.Will any of this matter when so much is going wrong and when the threats are so great? The screenwriter and former journalist David Simon offered a dour view this week: “Our American experiment is so over.”More aligned with Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s big-picture view and the others quoted here, I remain hopeful, if not optimistic about the future of the United States.On 4 July, at least, let’s remember that we’ve come a long way, and the journey isn’t yet complete.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More