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      in US Politics

      Tim Scott says ‘I’m running for president of the United States’ in announcement speech – as it happened

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      From 5h agoTim Scott has said the magic words.“Joe Biden and the radical left are attacking every single rung of the ladder that helped me climb and that’s why I’m announcing today I’m running for president of the United States of America,” the senator said to applause and cheers in his kick-off speech in North Charleston, South Carolina.He began the speech by recounting his upbringing from poverty and downplaying the impacts of racial disparities in the economy, saying “I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression.”When it comes to policy, the senator is outlining familiar conservative priorities.“On my first day as commander in chief, the strongest nation on earth will stop retreating from our southern border,” he said.He embraced the conservative demand to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and vowed to restart construction of the border wall pioneered by Donald Trump.“When I am president, the drug cartels using Chinese labs and Mexican factories to kill Americans will cease to exist. I will freeze their assets, I will build the wall and I will allow the world’s greatest military to fight these terrorists. Because that’s exactly what they are.”Republican senator Tim Scott threw his hat into the ring with a speech in South Carolina where he promised to pursue a more compassionate form of conservatism, while advocating for hardline border security policies and downplaying the effects of racial inequality on American society. The GOP’s presidential field is crowded and set to become more packed on Wednesday when Ron DeSantis makes his campaign official, but can anyone defeat the final boss of Republican politicians, Donald Trump? We’ll see.Here’s what else has happened today:
      Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy will meet at 5.30pm to (hopefully) resolve the debt ceiling standoff.
      The NAACP issued a travel advisory for Florida over policies DeSantis has pursued as governor, and which he will likely try to sell voters on in his presidential campaign.
      Mandatory water cuts were avoided in the west after the Biden administration and several states agreed to a deal regarding management of the Colorado river.
      Trump and fellow South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham both wished Scott well on his presidential bid.
      Speaking of Trump, federal prosecutors have evidence that he was warned he could not hold onto classified documents, the Guardian has confirmed.
      We’re 10 days away from 1 June, the estimated date when the US government, fresh out of cash and prohibited by the legal debt ceiling from borrowing more money, will default on its obligations for the first time in history.Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy are in the midst of negotiations over a deal to raise the limit, likely in exchange for spending cuts or the enactment of conservative priorities that the GOP has demanded. But it’s coming awfully close to the deadline, particularly since it takes several days for Congress to consider and vote on legislation, and there’s no telling who might object to whatever deal the Democratic president reaches with the Republican speaker of House.The Associated Press took a look at what might happen if Washington does the unthinkable and actually defaults, and reached a grim verdict:
      The repercussions of a first-ever default on the federal debt would quickly reverberate around the world. Orders for Chinese factories that sell electronics to the United States could dry up. Swiss investors who own U.S. Treasurys would suffer losses. Sri Lankan companies could no longer deploy dollars as an alternative to their own dodgy currency.
      “No corner of the global economy will be spared” if the U.S. government defaulted and the crisis weren’t resolved quickly, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
      Zandi and two colleagues at Moody’s have concluded that even if the debt limit were breached for no more than week, the U.S. economy would weaken so much, so fast, as to wipe out roughly1.5 million jobs.
      And if a government default were to last much longer — well into the summer — the consequences would be far more dire, Zandi and his colleagues found in their analysis: U.S. economic growth would sink, 7.8 million American jobs would vanish, borrowing rates would jump, the unemployment rate would soar from the current 3.4% to 8% and a stock-market plunge would erase $10 trillion in household wealth.
      Biden and McCarthy are set for a 5.30pm meeting at the White House for further talks on a debt limit agreement.In major news for western US states grappling with drought, the Guardian’s Oliver Milman reports that the Biden administration has agreed to a deal that will see them use less water from the Colorado river and ward off the prospect of mandatory water cuts:A deal has been struck by Joe Biden’s administration for California, Arizona and Nevada to take less water from the drought-stricken Colorado River, in a bid to prevent the river dwindling further and imperiling the water supplies for millions of people and vast swaths of agricultural land in the US west.The agreement, announced on Monday, will involve the three states, water districts, Native American tribes and farm operators cutting about 13% of the total water use in the lower Colorado basin, a historic reduction that will probably trigger significant water restrictions on the region’s residents and farmland.In all, 3m acre-feet of water is expected to be conserved over the next three years – an acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, or enough water to cover an acre of land, about the size of a football field, one foot deep. A single acre-foot is enough to sustain two average California households for a year.Of these savings, 2.3m acre-feet will be compensated by the federal government, with $1.2bn going to cities, tribes and water districts. The rest of the savings will be voluntary, uncompensated ones to be worked out between the states.The agreement averts, for now, the prospect of the Biden administration imposing unilateral water cuts upon the seven states – California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – that rely upon the river, a prospect that has loomed since last summer when the waterway’s two main reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, hit perilously low levels.In the run-up to the presidential campaign announcement he’s expected to make on Wednesday, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis has overseen an effort by the state government to restrict what students can learn about race and diversity. That has prompted one of the country’s best-known civil rights groups to issue an unusual warning against visiting the state, the Guardian’s Gloria Oladipo reports:The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has issued a travel advisory for the state of Florida, calling the state “actively hostile” to minorities as Florida’s conservative government limits diversity efforts in schools.In a Saturday press release, the civil rights organization better known as the NAACP said the travel warning comes as Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, “attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools”.“Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color,” the advisory said.While much of Monday’s political focus has been on the expanded field of 2024 Republican presidential candidates, Texas’s US senator Ted Cruz has drawn unflattering headlines from some quarters for announcing an investigation into the maker of Bud Light as his state is gripped by major crises.Cruz, along with fellow Republican US senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, on Wednesday sent a letter to the beer industry’s regulatory body questioning whether Anheuser-Busch violated guidelines “prohibiting marketing to underage individuals” when transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April posted a video of herself on Instagram holding a custom Bud Light can with her face on it.Rightwing media outlets and consumers reacted to Mulvaney’s video by calling for a boycott of Bud Light, which reported a 23% drop in sales for the final week of April as compared to the same period during the previous year, according to CBS News.Meanwhile, as Business Insider noted, Cruz’s home state has experienced five of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in recent US history but has offered little in the way of solutions to that. He’s also hardly weighed in as Covid asylum limits known as Title 42 recently expired, giving way to new, arguably tougher immigration policies.The rush to the US-Mexico border in Texas and other parts which preceded the expiration of Title 42 has brought extraordinary pressure to immigration officials, and politicos on both sides of the aisle have so far mostly just bused migrants to different cities rather than devise substantial solutions.“Beer marketing, however – thanks to Cruz – has all the attention of the state’s top leaders” on Capitol Hill, as Insider put it.Of Cruz’s latest culture war entry, Vanity Fair added: “No, he doesn’t have anything better to do.”Tim Scott was announcing his presidential campaign on Monday, when a technical glitch left the 57-year-old senator in silence.“Joe Biden and the radical left are attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb. And that is why I am announcing today that I am running for president of the United States of America,” Scott told a cheering crowd at Charleston Southern University in his home state of South Carolina. “Our nation, our values, and our people are strong, but our president is weak,” he added.At that point, the sound cut out. Here’s that moment, if you missed it earlier today:Now that Tim Scott has announced his run for the presidency, my colleague Nick Robins-Early has pulled together 10 things you need to know about the newest Republican hopeful.He writes:Scott is a 57-year-old senator from South CarolinaScott grew up in South Carolina, attending a Baptist university and owning an insurance company before becoming involved in politics. He entered politics in the mid-1990s as a Charleston, South Carolina, city council member before running for Congress.Scott was first elected to Congress in 2010Scott staked his political claim amid a wave of conservative opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency. As a member of the hardline conservative Tea Party movement, he was endorsed at the time by the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and became a rising star of the party. After two years as a congressman, he was chosen in 2012 to replace the Republican senator Jim DeMint and appointed to the Senate.Scott is the sole Black Republican senatorScott is the only Black Republican senator, and was the first Black Republican elected to the US House of Representatives from South Carolina in over a hundred years. He has previously talked about his unique role as a Black Republican and the discrimination he has faced from authorities, but has claimed that liberals use race as a way to divide voters. He faced heated criticism from Black activists in 2021 after declaring “America is not a racist country” in response to a speech from President Joe Biden that condemned racism following a white supremacist mass shooting.Here’s the full explainer:Politicos and voters of South Carolina who support both US senator Tim Scott and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley have been handed a dilemma now that they have both declared their candidacies for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.As the Associated Press pointed out Monday, Scott and Haley have a lengthy history and were even allies earlier in their careers. Both were members of South Carolina’s state House. And in 2012, while she was serving as governor of South Carolina, Haley appointed Scott to a state Senate seat in 2012.Scott, who is the US Senate’s only Black Republican and formally launched his presidential campaign Monday, told the AP that he doesn’t consider the situation a dilemma and expressed his belief that he and Haley would remain friends despite their competing interests.Meanwhile, the AP said Haley declined to comment when asked about Scott.Others in the Republican field who have already declared include Donald Trump – who appointed Haley to her UN role during his presidency – as well as former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and Woke, Inc author Vivek Ramaswamy. Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis is widely expected to formally announce his presidential campaign in the coming days.As for the Democrats, Joe Biden has announced that he will campaign for a second term in the Oval Office after defeating Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Biden’s declared Democratic challengers so far include self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr.Republican senator Tim Scott threw his hat into the ring with a speech in South Carolina where he promised to pursue a more compassionate form of conservatism, while advocating for hardline border security policies and downplaying the effects of racial inequality on American society. The GOP’s presidential field is crowded and set to become more packed on Wednesday when Ron DeSantis makes his campaign official, but can anyone defeat the final boss of Republican politicians, Donald Trump? We’ll see.Here’s what else has happened today:
      Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy will meet at 5.30pm to (hopefully) resolve the debt ceiling standoff, which, by all indications, remains ongoing.
      Trump and fellow South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham both wished Scott well on his presidential bid.
      Speaking of Trump, federal prosecutors have evidence that he was warned he could not hold onto classified documents, the Guardian has confirmed.
      And here’s what Donald Trump has to say about Tim Scott throwing his hat into the presidential ring:
      Good luck to Senator Tim Scott in entering the Republican Presidential Primary Race. It is rapidly loading up with lots of people, and Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable. I got Opportunity Zones done with Tim, a big deal that has been highly successful. Good luck Tim!
      For those unfamiliar with Trump’s latest batch of zingers: Ron DeSanctimonious is the ex-president’s erstwhile ally Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is expected to announce his presidential campaign on Wednesday.Senator Tim Scott is now the second South Carolinian vying for the Republican presidential nomination, after former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley.The state’s other senator, Republican Lindsey Graham, has already made public his endorsement of Donald Trump. He nonetheless reserved kind words for Scott in a statement released after his campaign’s official kick off:
      Congratulations to my good friend Senator Tim Scott on his announcement that he is running for President of the United States.
      Tim makes South Carolina proud, and he is one of the most talented and hard-working public servants I’ve ever known.
      He will have an optimistic vision for the future of conservatism and America, and I know he will acquit himself well.
      The anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America welcomed Senator Tim Scott’s formal entry into the 2024 Republican presidential primary today.“We are encouraged by his commitment to sign the strongest achievable protections for life should he be elected president,” said the group’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser. “We welcome Scott and all presidential contenders further outlining their pro-life vision and policy platform.”Scott has vowed to sign “the most conservative, pro-life legislation” that could pass Congress if he becomes president, but he has refused to specify his preferred time frame for a potential federal abortion ban.When asked about his preferred cut-off point for banning the procedure, Scott told NBC News last month: “I’m not going to talk about six or five or seven or 10 [weeks].”Dannenfelser said today, “The pro-life movement is seeking a national defender of life who will boldly advocate a minimum national standard to protect unborn children at least by 15 weeks when they can feel pain, and who will work tirelessly to build consensus and gather the votes necessary in Congress.”In his presidential campaign announcement speech, Tim Scott recounted his upbringing from poverty, discounted the impact of racial inequality on Americans’ lives and restated conservative policy goals, from cutting taxes to building a wall along the US border with Mexico.As he wrapped up his address, he vowed to promote on the campaign trail a friendlier form of conservatism.“This can’t be another presidential campaign. We don’t have time for that. We need a president who persuades not just our friends and our base,” he said. “We have to have a compassion for people who don’t agree with us.”He closed with these words: “I am living proof that God and a good family and the United States of America can do all things, if we believe. Will you believe it with me?”In the months to come, we’ll find out if Republican voters share his faith.Tim Scott has said the magic words.“Joe Biden and the radical left are attacking every single rung of the ladder that helped me climb and that’s why I’m announcing today I’m running for president of the United States of America,” the senator said to applause and cheers in his kick-off speech in North Charleston, South Carolina.He began the speech by recounting his upbringing from poverty and downplaying the impacts of racial disparities in the economy, saying “I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression.”When it comes to policy, the senator is outlining familiar conservative priorities.“On my first day as commander in chief, the strongest nation on earth will stop retreating from our southern border,” he said.He embraced the conservative demand to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and vowed to restart construction of the border wall pioneered by Donald Trump.“When I am president, the drug cartels using Chinese labs and Mexican factories to kill Americans will cease to exist. I will freeze their assets, I will build the wall and I will allow the world’s greatest military to fight these terrorists. Because that’s exactly what they are.”Tim Scott may be the lone Black Republican in the Senate, but his message to Republican voters downplays the impact of racial inequality in America.“For those of you who wonder if America is a racist country, take a look at how people come together,” Scott said. “We are not defined by the color of our skin. We are defined by the content of our character.” More

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      in Elections

      Republican faces questions over whether he lied under oath to key panel

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      A key Republican witness is facing questions over whether he lied under oath about receiving financial aid from an ally of former US president Donald Trump.Garret O’Boyle, a former FBI field agent turned purported whistleblower, testified last week to a congressional panel investigating what Republicans assert is the “weaponisation” of the federal government against conservatives.At one point, O’Boyle was asked by Democrat Dan Goldman whether Kash Patel, who held multiple roles in the Trump administration, is helping finance O’Boyle’s legal counsel. The witness replied: “Not that I’m aware of.”The answer has raised eyebrows because, during a previous interview with the House of Representatives’ weaponisation subcommittee in February, O’Boyle disclosed that his legal fees are being paid by a nonprofit organisation called Fight With Kash, also known as the Kash Foundation and run by Kash Patel.Furthermore, a Democratic staff report published in March notes that Patel arranged for Jesse Binnall, who served as Trump’s top “election fraud” lawyer in 2020, to serve as counsel for O’Boyle. Binnall sits on the Kash Foundation’s board of directors and has acknowledged working on past lawsuits funded by the foundation.In light of these details, Democrats are concerned that O’Boyle was not fully truthful before the committee chaired by Republican Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump backer. Lying to Congress carries a penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment.Goldman told the Guardian: “Mr O’Boyle’s answers in the subcommittee hearing on Thursday appear to contradict his previous testimony in the transcribed interview with subcommittee staff. In order to ensure witnesses are truthful when they come before the subcommittee, Chairman Jordan must determine whether or not Mr O’Boyle lied under oath on Thursday.”O’Boyle was an FBI special agent from 2018 until earlier this year. He was among several former FBI employees who accused the bureau of politicisation at the hearing, which took place a day after the FBI announced that two of them had their security clearances revoked after either attending the January 6 insurrection or espousing conspiracy theories about the attack.The Congressional Integrity Project, a watchdog monitoring the Republican investigations, had previously noted that the witnesses on Thursday included anti-vaxxers, election deniers and supporters of far-right groups.Jordan and other Republicans on the committee hailed the ex-FBI employees as patriots who were facing retribution for speaking out against government abuse. Democrats dismissed the testimony, calling the hearing another partisan attempt by Republicans on the committee to help Trump.Stacey Plaskett, who represents the US Virgin Islands, said: “This select committee is a clearinghouse for testing conspiracy theories for Donald Trump to use in his 2024 presidential campaign.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a series of contentious exchanges, Democrats complained that one of Thursday’s witnesses was only interviewed by Republican members of the committee. Many pointed to House rules that state minority and majority staff are required to have equal access to witness testimony, whether it is a whistleblower account or not.O’Boyle’s testimony could pile pressure on Jordan over the credibility of the weaponisation subcommittee, seen by critics as a brazen attempt to damage Joe Biden ahead of next year’s presidential election.Kyle Herrig, executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project, said: “Mr O’Boyle’s testimony in this week’s hearing should be investigated immediately by Chairman Jordan’s subcommittee. The fact that O’Boyle’s own lawyer has such deep ties to Kash Patel, a January 6 co-conspirator and close ally of Donald Trump, is already enough to call any of his testimony into question.”Jordan’s office denies that O’Boyle lied under oath. Russell Dye, a spokesperson for the chairman, said: “Yet again the Democrats distorted the facts in their report on our brave FBI whistleblowers. Jesse Binnall is representing Mr O’Boyle pro bono.”Dye pointed to a transcript of O’Boyle’s interview in which Binnall sought to explain his role. Binnall told the subcommittee that “although Mr O’Boyle was not aware of this directly, his representation by counsel is actually not being paid by anybody because it’s pro bono”.However, Democrats rejected this argument at the time. They wrote in their report that “O’Boyle’s own testimony concerning his interactions with Kash Patel undercuts Binnall’s apparent attempt to distance himself and his client from Patel.“Committee Democrats note further that as recently as February 12 – two days after O’Boyle testified – Patel praised Binnall on Truth Social, calling him ‘Americas lawyer.’ Binnall and Patel appear to operate out of the same Alexandria, VA, office building.” More

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      in US Politics

      Marianne Williamson: ‘You don’t even know what misogyny is until you’ve been a woman running for president’

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      A penthouse-gym in north-west Washington DC served as a campaign stage for the long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson last week. Athleisure-clad political consultants came and went, as if typecast from a political TV drama. The Washington monument poked between buildings in the distance.Williamson is far from an average political candidate, even in the modern era of American politics where it often feels much of what was once unthinkable has become a scary new normal. She is not a politician, but instead an author and wellness guru, whose quixotic first tilt at the White House four years ago was far from successful but saw her grace the Democratic debates and score a viral hit with her message to Donald Trump that she would “harness love” to defeat him.This time around, Williamson is running a tougher, more grounded campaign – treading the turf as a political outsider appalled at how America’s political elites have ignored the needs of its ordinary people.The chances that Williamson will become Democratic nominee for president next year are very slim. But there’s no doubt that her message has the power to resonate, particularly among the young and with women, and with those who feel America’s current travails cut deep and are being ignored.“I’ve had a 40-year-career working with people whose lives are in trouble. When I started that was the exception, not the rule. The work I did then was an adequate response to the suffering I saw in front of me, but now there seems to be a ubiquitous wave of people’s lives falling apart.”Williamson is also increasingly clear on some of the traditional barriers she faces. Williamson, 70, is just the second woman – the first being Republican Nikki Haley – to have thrown her name into the 2024 presidential nomination contest ring. Both have received a seemingly reflexive push-back from their respective parties and some quarters of the media.Sexist? Quite possibly.“An obelisk is much more than a phallus,” Williamson said at her event, observing the monument beyond. And then more directly: “You don’t even know what misogyny is until you’ve been a woman running for president.”But Williamson was less interested in symbols of power than her political agenda. She’s never held public office, though she ran unsuccessfully for California’s 33rd congressional district in 2014, and for the Democratic party nomination in 2019, endorsing Bernie Sanders after dropping out the following year.Among her platform positions is an increase in the minimum wage, reparations for racial injustice, a more muscular response to climate change, comprehensive educational reforms and the creation of a US Department of Peace. She talks of “soulless hyper-capitalism” which she sees as the fundamental affliction of an America run by a government “of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations”.Now she’s doggedly upgrading her old messaging about personal growth and universal love, attempting to dig a channel from new age enlightenment to political power, and to turn around what she sees as an economic, environmental and social crisis engulfing America.“I’m socio-economically well-travelled,” she said. “And my experience has had to do with the endurance and transformation of chaos. I’m interested in the principles of truth, and the realization that America is out of control. America is in chaos.”The liberal, Jewish ex-lounge singer from Texas arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s and began to gather the stars – Madonna, Michael, Liz and Warren – and Hollywood power brokers of the era around self-healing psychotherapy and applied her energy to the Aids crisis.She set up in New York, giving a talk once a month on a Course of Miracles. Her career took off via Oprah Winfrey, and she became known as the TV star’s “spiritual adviser”. A book publishing empire followed. Almost all her titles applied “love” to whatever the title subject at hand.After her first run for the party nomination in 2020 she moved to Washington, which she describes as a walled city, not a bubble. She’d recently gotten out to visit East Palestine, Ohio, after the toxic train derailment turned the sleepy burgh into a byword for chemical disaster at the hands of a big corporation.“The economically oppressed in this country are being oppressed by the same forces, whether on the left or the right. The real divide is not left and right, that’s a veil of illusion, it’s between those who are suffering and those who don’t seem to have a clue. It’s about millions of people living with chronic economic insecurity,” she said.There’s little sign that those actually arranging Democrat political power have much time for Williamson, and they have fenced her out. But she is not put off, touring the country and doing campaign stops.“Why would I capitulate? I’m a 70-year-old woman. I’m not part of that system. I’m not coming from that place of do what they tell you and you might get on that committee or get to run in 2028,” she said.“There’s such a fear of Donald Trump, they assume the best way to go is with Joe Biden. I disagree. You have to be in complete denial to think that status quo, transactional politics are going to be enough to defeat the energy that he [Trump] represents.“People are blinded by their fear of him,” Williamson continued. “They think if they attack him enough people will change their minds. But this a man who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and supporters wouldn’t care, and I think that’s probably true.“You’ll beat him by offering the American people a better deal, and agenda for genuine economic reform, an economic U-turn.”Integral to that, she said, would be a 21st-century economic bill of rights – universal healthcare, free tuition, free childcare, paid family leave, guaranteed housing, a livable wage and sick pay.Last week, Williamson also announced plans for a Department of Children and Youth, arguing that children, because they have no economic agency and no vote, are “systematically neglected”.“Public policy in America sets children up to fail. Our children are the biggest collateral damage from hyper-capitalism. So I would place a tremendous focus on children, and create a massive transformation of resources. I want every school to be a center of learning, culture and arts.”Students go to school in fear of gun violence, a situation she says that will exacerbate mental health issues in the future. The current debate, she says, doesn’t begin to address the issue. “It’s a sophomoric question, is it cultural or is it guns? It’s both. It’s gun safety laws and the glamorization of violence that people make money off.“Our food policies are violent, our climate policies are violent, our justice policies are violent, our economic policies are violent. The violence perpetrated against women on TV blows my mind – and the emotional violence on social media. We’ve sexualized violence, and we will have a violent society until we chose to become non-violent.”But her message of love and equity could be marred by other reports of the author behind the scenes. Shortly after she announced her run, Politico ran an article claiming she had episodes of “foaming, spitting, uncontrollable rage” during her 2020 White House run. Williamson later called the accusations a “hit piece”.“I raised my voice in the office. They said I threw a phone but I’ve never thrown a phone at anyone. If people feel I’ve been disrespectful to them, of course, I’m very sorry,” she says.Some also detect a political hand. Williamson has claimed the Democratic National Committee is “rigging” the party’s primaries in favor of Biden by ruling out a debate – “candidate suppression if a form of voter suppression,” she says – and the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, responded to questions about Williamson’s candidacy with jokes about auras and crystal balls.“Of course they call me an unserious candidate because they don’t want to be called to the carpet for being so unserious about the things that matter most,” she hit back.“Of course they would see me and those like me as dangerous, because from the perch they’re on I am dangerous.”Politicians love to talk, but none possibly as much as Oprah-trained spiritual gurus turned politicians. And Williamson is now on a tear. Over the past month, 38 videos have gleaned 4m views and more than 600,000 “likes” on Gen-Z popular TikTok.But this may be where Williamson likes to be – firing salvoes, getting her voice out there, offering the damned salvation, slipping on occasion into what sounds like life-coaching.And after the traumatic four-year experiment of allowing a political outsider from the far right to enter the walled city of US politics without knowledge of or care to learn how the levers of political power operate, resistance to another outsider on a political quest is unquestionably elevated.“I can see that it would be an extremely difficult job, and I can’t imagine that it would be fun every day,” Williamson says of the prospect of the presidency.“I would simply try to be as good a person as I can be. I’m not claiming to be what I’m not. I’m running for president, not sainthood. I am a decent woman who has, I feel, some insights about this country and some insights about what is happening that could be of value.” More

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      in US Politics

      Republican senator: Trump will lose 2024 presidential race if nominated

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      Republican US senator Bill Cassidy predicted on Sunday that Donald Trump would fail to win the 2024 presidential race if his party nominates him to run again, citing the poor performance of his endorsed candidates during last year’s midterms.“We saw in all the swing states, almost all – Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona – the candidates for Senate that Trump endorsed all lost,” Cassidy said of the former president on CNN’s State of the Union. “If past is prologue, that means President Trump is going to have a hard time in the swing states, which means he cannot win a general election.”The Louisiana Republican delivered those remarks after network host Jake Tapper asked him for his thoughts on comments that Florida’s conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, made on a recent call with donors about his chances of winning the White House.DeSantis – who has not formally announced himself as a candidate but is widely expected to do so – argued on the private call that he, Trump and Democratic incumbent Joe Biden were the only credible contenders for the presidency in 2024, according to the New York Times.“And I think of those three, two have a chance to get elected president – Biden and me,” DeSantis reportedly added.Cassidy said on Sunday that DeSantis’s comments were “a nice way” for the governor to cast aspersions on another “pretty formidable candidate”: the Republican US senator Tim Scott. Scott, of South Carolina, the only Black Republican serving in the Senate, filed paperwork on Friday to run for the presidency ahead of a formal campaign launch on Monday.“You just have to take this as a competitor trying to diss others,” said Cassidy, whom Louisiana first elected to the Senate in 2014.However, Cassidy added, DeSantis did have a point in arguing that Trump would be quite beatable in a rematch with Biden, to whom he lost when he ran for re-election in 2020.Cassidy alluded to how Trump threw his support behind Senate candidates Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, Adam Laxalt and Blake Masters in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, respectively, during last year’s midterm elections. And they respectively lost to Raphael Warnock, John Fetterman, Catherine Cortez Masto and Mark Kelly as the Democrats seized a two-seat majority in the upper congressional chamber.Cassidy also alluded to how other Republicans in those states performed well in political contests that didn’t draw Trump’s attention, leading the Louisianan to conclude that the former president’s “kind of high-profile endorsement of those candidates actually hurt those candidates” in the doomed Senate campaigns that he backed.Cassidy’s comments on Sunday were not the first time he has spoken out against Trump, whom polling has shown to be the leading contender for the Republicans’ 2024 presidential nomination.Trump maintains that lead despite unprecedented legal jeopardy, including over a hush money payment to an adult film actor, his retention of classified materials and 2020 election subversion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCassidy, along with six other Republicans in the Senate, voted to convict the former president after Trump was impeached over his role in the deadly attack that his supporters staged at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Trump, nonetheless, had more than enough votes to be acquitted at his impeachment trial.When Cassidy later said that he would not support Trump if he ran for the White House again, he prompted the ex-president to call him a “Rino”, which is an acronym meaning “Republican in name only”.Cassidy has been able to carve out a seat for himself at the negotiating table for some of the most prominent issues discussed on Capitol Hill by presenting himself as being willing to engage in bipartisan talks with Democrats and the Biden administration.He was one of the federal lawmakers who successfully pushed for the gun control bill that Biden signed into law last year, which expanded background checks for the youngest gun buyers while funding mental health and violence intervention programs amid a spate of deadly mass shootings across the US.Despite that legislation, the nation is on track to have its deadliest year in terms of mass shootings in recent memory, leading many to call for more substantial gun control measures. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Trump’s not a good sport’: Chris Cillizza on presidents at play

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      From The Big Lebowski to Alice on The Brady Bunch, depictions of bowling abound in American pop culture. The sport’s real-life adherents included Richard Nixon, who installed bowling lanes in the White House and was known to play between seven to 12 games late at night. Characteristically, he played alone. This is one of many athletic accounts from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a new book, Power Players: Sports, Politics, and the American Presidency, by the longtime political journalist Chris Cillizza.Bowling solo personified “Nixon the loner”, Cillizza says. “He didn’t play tennis or golf with friends. He did enjoy bowling by himself. It’s a powerful image, a telling image.”Tricky Dick’s love of bowling also helped with a crucial voting bloc: “Nixon viewed it as the sport of the Silent Majority – white, blue-collar men who sort of made up his base. He was very aware of this.”A Washington journalist for four decades, most recently for CNN, Cillizza pitched the book as about “the sports presidents play, love, spectate, and what it tells us about who they are and how they govern. That was the germ of the idea, the seed going in.”Power Players surveys 13 presidents of the modern era, from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. Some of its narratives are well-known – think Ike’s extensive golf-playing, John F Kennedy’s touch football games or Barack Obama’s pickup basketball on the campaign trail. The book explores less-remembered sides of these stories, including a scary moment on the links for Eisenhower.While golfing in Colorado in 1955, he fielded multiple stressful phone calls from his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. After eating a hamburger with onions and getting yet another call from Dulles, Ike felt too angry to keep playing. Chest pains followed that night. The White House initially claimed indigestion but an electrocardiogram found something more serious – a heart attack. At the time, there was no 25th amendment specifying the chain of command if a president became incapacitated. Fortunately, Ike never lost consciousness during the episode.Golf was a popular sport for many presidents, as reflected in a previous book about White House athletics, First Off the Tee by Don Van Natta Jr, whom Cillizza interviewed. Yet the list of presidential pastimes is long and diverse, from Nixon’s bowling to Jimmy Carter’s fly fishing to George HW Bush’s horseshoes. Yes, horseshoes. In addition to Bush’s well-known prowess on the Yale University baseball team, he was a pretty good horseshoes player who established his own league in the White House, with a commissioner and tournaments. The White House permanent staff fielded teams; Queen Elizabeth II even gifted Bush a quartet of silver horseshoes.In the greatest-presidential-athlete discussion, Cillizza lands in Gerald Ford’s corner.“No debate, he’s the best athlete ever, I think, with [George HW] Bush a distant second, among modern presidents.”Ford sometimes lived up to the bumbling stereotypes made famous by Chevy Chase and Bob Hope – including when he accidentally hit people with golf balls. Yet he was an All-American center on the national-champion University of Michigan football team and received contract offers from two NFL squads, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers.In addition to the sports presidents play, Cillizza’s book examines how presidents use sports to connect to the public.Calling sports “a common language that lots and lots and lots of Americans speak”, Cillizza says: “I think politicians are forever trying to identify with the average person … I think sports is a way into that world for a lot of presidents.”There’s the practice of inviting championship teams to the White House, which Cillizza traces to Ronald Reagan, although instances date back decades. While not much of a sports fan, Reagan came from a sports radio background, played the legendary Gipper in the film Knute Rockne, All American and understood the importance of proximity to winners, Cillizza says.There’s also the tradition of presidential first pitches at baseball games, arguably the most iconic thrown by George W Bush at Yankee Stadium during the 2001 World Series, in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Cillizza notes Dubya’s baseball pedigree as president of the Texas Rangers, and that he reportedly contemplated becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball.Of the presidents surveyed, Cillizza says George HW Bush had the most sportsmanship, thanks to early lessons about fair play from his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, a strong tennis player herself. The least sportsmanlike, according to the author? Lyndon Johnson and Donald Trump. Cillizza cites an account of Trump’s time on the Fordham University squash team. After a loss to the Naval Academy, he drove to a department store and bought golf equipment. He and his teammates vented their frustration by hitting golf balls off a bluff into the Chesapeake Bay, then drove away, sans clubs.“That’s Trump, in a lot of ways,” Cillizza says. “He’s not a good sport who’s going to be genteel.”The author notes similar behavior throughout Trump’s career, including bombastic performances in World Wrestling Entertainment storylines and a whole recent book about his alleged cheating at golf, as well as a recent news item about the former president going to Ireland to visit one of his courses.“He hit a drive, and said Joe Biden could never do this,” Cillizza recalls. “It went 280ft right down the middle of the fairway. He talks about his virility, his health, through the lens of sports.”Not too long ago, two ex-presidents from rival parties teamed up as part of a golf foursome. George HW Bush joined the man who beat him in 1992 – Bill Clinton – en route to an unlikely friendship. Rounding out the foursome were the broadcasting legend Jim Nantz and NFL superstar Tom Brady.“It’s remarkable what sports can do to bring presidents together,” Cillizza says. “This day and age, it’s hard to consider … I don’t think Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be playing golf together anytime soon.”
      Power Players is published in the US by Twelve More

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      US debt ceiling talks hit bump as White House says ‘real differences’ remain – as it happened

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      From 5h ago“Real differences” exist between the two sides in the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, a White House official told the Guardian after Republican lawmakers said they were pausing their participation in the ongoing talks.“There are real differences between the parties on budget issues and talks will be difficult. The President’s team is working hard towards a reasonable bipartisan solution that can pass the House and the Senate,” the official said.Talks between negotiators appointed by Joe Biden and House speaker Kevin McCarthy over raising the debt ceiling suddenly veered off course, with Republicans saying the discussions are “not productive” and the White House acknowledging “real differences” between the two sides. There is still time for a deal to be reached, but not a lot of it: the best estimate of when the US government will run out of cash and potentially default on its bond payments and other obligations remains 1 June.Here’s a look back at the day’s news:
      Just before the impasse became public, Donald Trump said the GOP should take a hardline position in the debt limit talks.
      A top House Democrat threatened to stop the reauthorization of a foreign spying program after reports emerged that the FBI queried its database for information about the January 6 insurrection and Black Lives Matter protests.
      Tim Scott filed paperwork to officially launch his presidential bid, but the Republican senator from South Carolina is only expected to make the run public in a Monday speech.
      Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly pressuring ex-Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg to testify against the former president.
      Biden’s decision to cancel his trip to Australia may prove very costly for some in the White House press corps.
      After reports emerged that the FBI broke its own rules by using a repository of foreign intelligence to search for information about the January 6 insurrection and the protests following George Floyd’s death, a top Democrat is threatening not to support the reauthorization of a contentious surveillance program.At issue is section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows US authorities to surveil the communications of foreigners outside the country and expires at the end of the year unless renewed. The information is not meant to be used for domestic purposes, but according to a court order released today the FBI did just that.The Biden administration says it supports reauthorizing section 702, but it looks like it will have to win over skeptics in its own party. Here’s what the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee Jerry Nadler had to say about today’s revelations:So what’s the hangup in the debt ceiling talks?Based on comments from Republicans, it appears they’re far apart with Joe Biden’s team over total government spending. Last month, House Republicans approved a bill to increase the debt limit while also capping government spending in the next fiscal year at its levels from the 2021-2022 fiscal year. That amounts to a spending cut, since spending on government often increases from year to year.Biden and the Democrats have opposed this outright, arguing it would harm the economy and the government’s ability to provide services. But in comments to reporters, GOP speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy indicated the party was sticking to its guns:CNN spoke to Republican representative Dusty Johnson, who confirmed the spending issue was a top sticking point, but not the only one:Here’s a different sort of American media story. The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington spoke to disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, who is pursuing a lawsuit against Fox News – which she fears presents a threat to US democracy:The woman suing Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News for defamation in the wake of the $787m settlement with the voting machine company Dominion has accused the media giant of waging a campaign of “vitriolic lies” against her that amounts to a threat to democracy.Nina Jankowicz sued Fox News and its parent company Fox Corporation for allegedly damaging her reputation as a specialist in conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. The lawsuit was lodged in a Delaware state court exactly a year after she resigned as executive director of a new Department of Homeland Security unit combatting online disinformation.The Disinformation Governance Board was abruptly shut down in the wake of a storm of virulent rightwing criticism, allegedly fueled by Fox News. Jankowicz and the new DHS division she led were attacked as being part of a conspiracy to censor rightwing comment spearheaded by Joe Biden.It became clear how serious the debt limit situation was earlier this week, when Joe Biden cut short his planned trip to Asia in order to be back in Washington DC on Sunday, saying he needed to ensure that the US government is able to avoid a default.The president kept his travel plans to Japan, but nixed stops in Australia and the first-ever presidential visit to Papua New Guinea, a decision critics say harmed Washington’s efforts to build alliances against China.It also proved to be a very expensive decision for the media organizations who place their reporters in the White House press corps and task them with following the president’s every move. The Washington Post reports that the White House Travel Office had booked a charter flight to Australia for the dozens of journalists that were planning to come along with Biden, while their employers were also planning to shell out thousands for their hotels, transportation and logistics.All of that had to be canceled, but according to the Post, news outlets are now on the hook for as much as $25,000 per person in the form of sunk costs for charter flights and other travel arrangements. While the country’s biggest news outlets all have reporters at the White House, the news industry has been financially tumultuous for the better part of 15 years, and the Post says some reporters fear the debacle will make their bosses cut back on travel with the president – which could mean less scrutiny of what Biden and his successors actually do with their time.Here’s more from the Post:
      The now-canceled charter flight, organized by the White House Travel Office, cost $760,000, or about $14,000 for each of the 55 journalists who’d booked seats on it. Journalists will immediately lose their deposits, about $7,700 each, and may be on the hook for the rest, according to a memo sent to reporters on Wednesday by Tamara Keith, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
      But a lengthy list of other costs — hotel reservations, ground transportation, a shared press-filing center, among them — may also be unrecoverable. And journalists will lose some or all of the cost of their return flights from Sydney to Washington, as they scramble for last-minute flights from Hiroshima to Washington.
      Bottom line: The bill for not going to Australia could run upward of $25,000 per person before any refunds kick in, according to several people involved in efforts to recover the money. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of negotiations over the funds.
      In an interview, Keith said her organization is seeking to recover as much of the travel money as possible, though it wasn’t clear how much was possible.
      “When the president travels amid a budget crisis or a debt ceiling crisis, his [travel] plans can change,” she said, noting that presidents Obama and Trump also canceled trips during their terms. “These are the risks we undertake with our eyes open. We hope it never happens. But it just did.”
      Speaking of pandemic emergency measures, Reuters reports that migrant encounters at the US southern border continue to plunge after last week’s expiration of Title 42.The rule, imposed by Donald Trump’s administration as Covid-19 spread in March 2020, allowed the US to turn away most asylum seekers, and its expiration at midnight last Friday raised fears of a surge in new border crossers. But that hasn’t materialized, and top homeland security official Blas Nunez-Neto said border authorities are seeing 70% less encounters since it ended. That may be because Joe Biden unveiled a slew of new restrictions to replace Title 42, leading to accusations by immigration rights groups that he is imitating his predecessor’s policies.Here’s more from Reuters:
      Speaking in a call with reporters, Nunez-Neto said the number had continued to tick down after an average 4,000 encounters a day as of May 12.“In the last 48 hours there were 3,000 encounters a day on the border, this is a more than 70% reduction,” he said.Nunez-Neto also said about 11,000 people were removed from the U.S. in the last week and sent to more than 30 countries, including more than 1,100 people from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba returned to Mexico.
      Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch says emergency measures taken during the Covid-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans were perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”The Associated Press reports:
      The 55-year-old conservative justice points to orders closing schools, restricting church services, mandating vaccines and prohibiting evictions.
      Gorsuch’s broadside is aimed at local, state and federal officials, and even his own colleagues.
      He says officials issued emergency decrees “on a breathtaking scale.”
      His comments came in an eight-page statement that accompanied an order formally dismissing a case involving the use of the Title 42 policy to prevent asylum seekers from entering the United States.
      The policy was ended last week with the expiration of the public health emergency first declared more than three years ago because of the coronavirus pandemic.
      The emergency orders about which Gorsuch complained were first announced in the early days of the pandemic, when Trump was president, and months before the virus was well understood and a vaccine was developed.
      WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court got rid of a pandemic-related immigration case with a single sentence.
      Justice Neil Gorsuch had a lot more to say, leveling harsh criticism of how governments, from small towns to the nation’s capital, responded to the gravest public health threat in a century.
      The justice, a 55-year-old conservative who was President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, called emergency measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis that killed more than 1 million Americans perhaps “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.”
      He pointed to orders closing schools, restricting church services, mandating vaccines and prohibiting evictions. His broadside was aimed at local, state and federal officials — even his colleagues.
      “Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale,” Gorsuch wrote in an eight-page statement Thursday that accompanied an expected Supreme Court order formally dismissing a case involving the use of the Title 42 policy to prevent asylum seekers from entering the United States.
      The policy was ended last week with the expiration of the public health emergency first declared more than three years ago because of the coronavirus pandemic.
      FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when they searched a vast repository of foreign intelligence for information related to the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and racial justice protests in 2020, according to a heavily blacked-out court order released on Friday.The Associated Press reports:
      FBI officials said the violations predated a series of corrective measures that started in the summer of 2021 and continued last year. But the problems could nonetheless complicate FBI and Justice Department efforts to receive congressional reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program that law enforcement officials say is needed to counter terrorism, espionage and international cybercrime.
      The violations were detailed in a secret court order issued last year by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has legal oversight of the U.S. government’s spy powers. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence released a redacted version on Friday in what officials said was the interest of transparency. Members of Congress received the order when it was issued last year.
      At issue are thousands of improper queries of foreign intelligence information collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the government to gather the communications of targeted foreigners outside the US. That program expires at the end of the year unless it is renewed.
      In repeated episodes disclosed Friday, the FBI’s own standards were not followed.
      The full AP report is here.A Washington DC police officer was arrested on Friday on charges that he lied about leaking confidential information to the Proud Boys extremist group leader Enrique Tarrio and obstructed an investigation after group members destroyed a Black Lives Matter banner in the nation’s capital.The Associated Press reports:
      An indictment alleges that Metropolitan Police Department Lt Shane Lamond, 47, of Stafford, Virginia, warned Tarrio, then national chairman of the far-right group, that law enforcement had an arrest warrant for him related to the banner’s destruction.
      Tarrio was arrested in Washington two days before Proud Boys members joined the mob in storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Earlier this month, Tarrio and three other leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy charges.
      A federal grand jury in Washington indicted Lamond on one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements.
      The indictment accuses Lamond of lying to and misleading federal investigators when they questioned him in June 2021 about his contacts with Tarrio.
      Lamond is scheduled to make his initial court appearance on Friday. He was placed on administrative leave by the police force in February 2022.
      Lamond, who supervised the intelligence branch of the police department’s Homeland Security Bureau, was responsible for monitoring groups like the Proud Boys when they came to Washington.
      Lamond’s name repeatedly came up in the Capitol riot trial of Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders.
      Talks between negotiators appointed by Joe Biden and House speaker Kevin McCarthy over raising the debt ceiling suddenly veered off course, with Republicans saying the discussions are “not productive” and the White House acknowledging “real differences” between the two sides. There’s time for a deal to be reached, but not a lot of it: the best estimate of when the US government will run out of cash and potentially default on its bond payments and other obligations remains 1 June. We’ll see if the GOP and Democrats find cause to sit down again before today is through.Here’s a look back at what else has happened today so far:
      Just before the impasse became public, Donald Trump said the GOP should take a hardline position in the debt limit talks.
      Tim Scott filed paperwork to officially launch his presidential bid, but the Republican senator from South Carolina is only expected to make the run public in a Monday speech.
      Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is reportedly pressuring ex-Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg to testify against the former president.
      CNN has more downbeat comments from Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy on the status of the debt limit talks, which indeed appear to be paused:That’s a reversal from yesterday, when McCarthy sounded optimistic about the chances a deal is reached before the default deadline, which is estimated as 1 June.“Real differences” exist between the two sides in the negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, a White House official told the Guardian after Republican lawmakers said they were pausing their participation in the ongoing talks.“There are real differences between the parties on budget issues and talks will be difficult. The President’s team is working hard towards a reasonable bipartisan solution that can pass the House and the Senate,” the official said.About an hour ago, and just a few minutes before reports emerged that the debt limit talks had broken down, Donald Trump called for the GOP to demand, well, “everything” in the negotiations.Here’s what he wrote on Truth social:
      REPUBLICANS SHOULD NOT MAKE A DEAL ON THE DEBT CEILING UNLESS THEY GET EVERYTHING THEY WANT (Including the “kitchen sink”). THAT’S THE WAY THE DEMOCRATS HAVE ALWAYS DEALT WITH US. DO NOT FOLD!!!
      Here’s more of the grim assessment of the debt ceiling talks given by Garret Graves, the House Republican appointed by Kevin McCarthy to negotiate with the White House.“We’re not there,” he told reporters as he departed a meeting with Joe Biden’s officials, the Wall Street Journal said. “We’ve decided to press pause because it’s just not productive.”He said he was not sure if the two sides would be getting together over the weekend. “Until people are willing to have reasonable conversations about how you can actually move forward and do the right thing, then we’re not going to sit here and talk to ourselves,” he added.The Journal also saw Biden’s negotiators, director of the White House office of management and budget Shalanda Young and adviser Steve Ricchetti, leaving the meeting. Asked if the two sides would meet again today, Ricchetti replied, “playing by ear.”Amid reports that negotiations over raising the debt ceiling have broken down, the top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell is out with a tweet blaming Joe Biden for the impasse:Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans have taken the lead on negotiating with the White House on a deal, but the Senate will eventually have to vote on whatever bill emerges from the talks – assuming that happens. More

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      in US Politics

      DeSantis says only he can beat Biden in 2024 presidential election

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      The rightwing governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, reportedly told top donors only he, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are “credible” candidates for president in 2024 – and he is the only Republican who can beat the incumbent Democrat.“You have basically three people at this point that are credible in this whole thing,” DeSantis said during a call on Thursday run by a fundraising committee, the New York Times said, adding that a reporter was listening.“Biden, Trump and me. And I think of those three, two have a chance to get elected president – Biden and me, based on all the data in the swing states, which is not great for the former president and probably insurmountable because people aren’t going to change their view of him,” DeSantis said.DeSantis has long been expected to run but reports indicate he will make it official on Wednesday, filing documents with the Federal Election Commission and releasing an announcement video.A meeting of donors is reportedly scheduled for Miami the same day, with a rally to follow in DeSantis’s home town, Dunedin, between 30 May and 1 June, according to Bloomberg and the Miami Herald.Trump faces unprecedented legal jeopardy, from criminal and civil cases arising from his treatment of women to investigations of his business affairs, his retention of classified documents and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6 attack on Congress.A decision on indictments in the investigation of election subversion in Georgia is expected in August, sources told the Guardian and other outlets.Nonetheless, by presenting himself as the victim of political witch-hunts, Trump has established big polling leads.DeSantis lags by more than 30 points in polling averages but is way ahead of other candidates, declared or not, the former vice-president Mike Pence and the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley chief among them. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott is expected to announce his campaign on Monday.Polling pitting DeSantis against Biden produces narrow wins for either man.DeSantis’s bold words on Thursday also reflected his formidable fundraising. Groups including the Super Pac Never Back Down, which organised the call, and Empower Parents (previously Friends of Ron DeSantis) have amassed big war chests.The name change of the latter group indicates DeSantis’s pitch to voters: as the champion of culture-war attacks on progressive values, including restrictions on the teaching of LGBTQ+ issues and a six-week abortion ban, one of the toughest in any state.But a battle the Times said DeSantis did not mention on his call could cast a pall over his campaign.On Thursday, Disney, one of the biggest employers in Florida, pulled out of a $1bn office development in Orlando. DeSantis is battling the entertainment giant over its opposition to his so-called “don’t say gay” public education law, a fight that has cost him donor support.Progressives, Democrats and many observers think DeSantis may have marched too far right to win a general election.On the Thursday call, the Times said, DeSantis said many Republicans thought “We’ve got to win this time”, a veiled jab at Trump’s defeat in 2020 and bad results in midterm elections either side of that contest.He also claimed: “The corporate media wants Trump to be the nominee.”Quoting a voter he said he spoke to in Iowa, he said: “You know, Trump was somebody, we liked his policies but we didn’t like his values. And with you, we like your policies but also know that you share our values.”Of his hardline legislative record, DeSantis said: “When we say we’re going to do something, we … get it done.”The governor also boasted about sales of his book, The Courage to be Free, which he said outpaced similar volumes by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Times said that claim was “roughly in line with the true totals”.DeSantis said: “I think the voters want to move on from Biden. They just want a vehicle they can get behind [but] there’s just too many voters that don’t view Trump as that vehicle.” More

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      in Elections

      Georgia prosecutor signals charges in 2020 election inquiry may come end of July

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      The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia signalled Thursday that charging decisions in the case may come starting the final week of July, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.The indication from the prosecutor, Fani Willis, first came during a meeting with her full team where she told them to make preparations to work remotely during the final week of July and through the first weeks of August, the people said.Willis made no explicit mention of Trump during the meeting, but the specific timing is understood to reflect the expected window for indictments after previous indications suggested charging decisions would come during the court term that runs July to September.The district attorney’s office hours later told the county superior court chief judge Ural Glanville asking judges not to schedule trials and in-person hearings from 31 July to 18 August because most of her staff would be remote in a letter seen by the Guardian and first reported by the New York Times.A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to a request for comment.The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, while prosecutors at the federal level are scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack.A special grand jury in Atlanta that heard evidence for roughly seven months recommended charges for more than a dozen people including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews, though Willis will have to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.Willis originally suggested charging decisions were “imminent” in January, but the timetable has been repeatedly delayed after a number of Republicans who sought to help Trump stay in power as so-called fake electors accepted immunity deals as the investigation neared its end.Prosecutors then also spent several weeks on a potential conflict issue resulting from the fact that not all of the fake electors defended by lawyer Kimberly Debrow were offered immunity deals. The dispute resolved itself last week after the fake elector without a deal found a new lawyer.The meeting on Thursday afternoon appears to have been convened in part to give staff a more specific window for when indictments could arrive after Willis outlined her prosecutorial intentions in the case in a letter to the Fulton county sheriff Patrick Labat last month.“In the near future, I will announce charging decisions,” Willis wrote in the letter. “I am providing this letter to bring to your attention the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.”Trump is understood to have two main areas of legal jeopardy in Georgia: the calls he made to officials like the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in an effort to reverse his election defeat in the weeks after the 2020 election, as well as his role in assembling the fake electors.But at the heart of the investigation are the steps that Trump and his campaign aides took – knowing it was probably illegal – in assembling 16 pro-Trump electors to surreptitiously gain entry to the Georgia state capitol and submit unauthorized electoral college votes for Trump to Congress. More