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      Trump and DeSantis Meet in Florida for First Time Since Bruising Primary

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      Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida met on Sunday morning, according to three people briefed on the meeting, the first time they’ve done so since the end of a bruising Republican presidential primary that Mr. Trump won while relentlessly attacking Mr. DeSantis.The meeting — which took place in Hollywood, Fla., according to one of the people briefed on the meeting — was the result of a weekslong effort by a longtime friend of Mr. Trump, the real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, who also has a relationship with Mr. DeSantis. The three men met alone in a private room at Shell Bay, Mr. Witkoff’s development and golf club, according to the person briefed on the meeting.Mr. Trump is looking to bolster his fund-raising, an ability Mr. DeSantis demonstrated during the primary by tapping into a network of well-funded donors. And Mr. DeSantis — who has made clear he is interested in running for president again in 2028 — is seeking to shed the negative weight of his disappointing campaign. The meeting was reported earlier by The Washington Post.A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment.Mr. DeSantis is not seen as a contender to join a Republican ticket with Mr. Trump, who is both the presumptive Republican nominee and on trial in Manhattan on charges he falsified business records to conceal hush-money payments to a porn star in the 2016 election. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have made clear that such a pairing doesn’t interest either of them, and they also live in the same state, which would make it an unconstitutional pairing unless one of them were to move out of Florida, which is unlikely to happen, especially since Mr. DeSantis is currently the governor.Mr. DeSantis had been seen as Mr. Trump’s chief intraparty competition, and he was the target the Trump team focused on for months. The tensions between the two men — and their aides — often boiled over during the primary race. Mr. Trump excoriated Mr. DeSantis during the campaign, nicknaming him “Ron DeSanctimonious,” and criticizing him as being disloyal. Mr. DeSantis also claimed that Mr. Trump was unelectable at various points during his primary campaign, which was plagued by missteps and accusations of mismanagement.Recently, Mr. DeSantis held a donor event the same weekend that Mr. Trump held a large fund-raiser for his campaign. During the fund-raiser, Mr. Trump revived the “DeSanctimonious” nickname, according to an attendee.Still, allies of both men say it is politically beneficial for them to come together for the 2024 campaign and beyond. More

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      Melania Trump to hit campaign trail for husband after early absence

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      Her biggest fashion statement as first lady was a green jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do u?” More recently, Melania Trump has given the impression that she doesn’t care whether her husband, Donald, returns to the White House. That is about to change.On Saturday Melania, 53, will appear at a fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, for the Log Cabin Republicans, the biggest Republican organisation dedicated to representing LGBT conservatives. It will be her first appearance at a political event since Trump, 77, launched his bid to regain the presidency.It comes at the end of a week that saw Melania’s husband become the first former US president in history to stand criminal trial. The case, involving a hush-money payment by Trump to an adult film performer, would be enough to test any marriage. Yet it seems that the former and possible future first lady is again prepared to campaign for her spouse – up to a point.“It’s not going to be in volume but you’ll see her at key moments,” said Mary Jordan, author of The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump. “She likes to heighten the interest in her appearances by being scarce. It’s very intentional, like a movie star who doesn’t want exposure. She’s hyper-aware of her persona and her celebrity. This is a model who learned to get covers of magazines so she wants to be in control.”The former Slovenian model, who married Trump in 2005, became only the second foreign-born first lady in US history. She delayed moving to the White House after Trump won the 2016 election because she was renegotiating their prenuptial agreement, according to Jordan’s book, and in one notorious incident was seen swatting his hand away. She had a rivalry with Trump’s daughter Ivanka. But she came to love the trappings and prestige of being first lady.Since Trump’s defeat in 2020 she has maintained a low profile. Her main public appearances have included a memorial service for former first lady Rosalynn Carter, a funeral for Trump’s older sister and the funeral for her mother, Amalija Knavs. Last year she addressed a naturalisation ceremony in Washington, telling new Americans that citizenship means “actively participating in the democratic process and guarding our freedom”.But her absence is often more notable than her presence. Melania has been missing from Trump’s run of campaign rallies and court appearances. When he celebrated Super Tuesday primary election victories with a party at Mar-a-Lago, his children Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany were there but his wife was not.It is a potentially worrying sign for Trump in a country that traditionally prizes political candidates with loyal spouses and wholesome families. The spouse is often a vital surrogate, able to step in at fundraisers or other events; few doubt the authenticity of the love affair between Joe and Jill Biden. But the Trumps, who typically sleep in separate rooms and lead separate lives, have never followed anyone else’s playbook.Just as in the 2016 campaign, Jordan believes that Melania will pick and choose her moments for maximum effect. “She doesn’t like being on the political road but she likes to be a celebrity and she will be out there,” she said. “There were parts of being first lady that she loved and so you’re just going to see her pick her shots. She’ll go to events that she can have maximum control over. She won’t do too many because she absolutely knows newspapers write about it and she’s on TV.View image in fullscreen“Everything she does is very thought out and calculated at. Yes, we’re going to be seeing her at key moments but we’re not going to be seeing her as other political spouses are. She never has and never will act like any other political spouse the country’s ever seen. When he started running the first time, people were like, wow, this is crazy, this is such a valuable asset staying at home. But she’s definitely doing it her way.”It might be assumed that this week would be an especially rough one for Melania. Jury selection has been under way for Trump’s trial in New York on charges of falsifying business records tied to a $130,000 hush-money payment made to buy Stormy Daniels’ silence about an alleged sexual encounter that took place not long after Melania gave birth to their son Barron.Melania, who rarely betrays emotion in public, is known to have been furious about reports of the affair when they first surfaced, flying off to Palm Beach and taking a separate car to his first State of the Union address. But she is now said to be more sympathetic to Trump, privately calling the proceedings “a disgrace”, the New York Times reported.Jordan, a reporter for the Washington Post newspaper, commented: “She was mortified at the time and furious at her husband when she found out originally. But now she thinks that this is being used as a political weapon against her husband and she’s focusing her anger on that.”Indeed, the New York trial is unlikely to deliver surprise revelations that Melania is not aware of already. Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “This is what she signed up for. She knows who this guy is. It’s no surprise that he’s a serial philanderer. Whatever trade-offs she has made to live the life that she wants to live, she is comfortable with them. She makes her own choices and I couldn’t care less.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBardella, a former senior adviser for Republicans on the House of Representatives oversight committee, added: “I do think that when you are auditioning to be the first family of America there is an expectation from the public that you are open and transparent about what your real family situation is and those who have fallen short of that have paid a political price over the years. For the party that wraps itself and this cloak of so-called family values all the time, it’s interesting that they seem to completely bypass that when it comes to their leader.”Melania’s current main focus has been preparing Barron for university after he graduates from a private high school in May (Trump complained on social media this week that he might miss his son’s graduation because of the New York trial). But Trump often brings up her name at rallies, sometimes with some rare self-deprecation, and has assured crowds that they will see her on the campaign trail.Melania is thought to be one of the few people that Trump trusts to be straight with him. The former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told a congressional panel investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol: “He listens to many of us, but he reserves fear for one person, Melania Trump.”Indeed, Melania helped persuade Trump to select Mike Pence, rather than Chris Christie or Newt Gingrich, as his vice-presidential candidate in 2016. She also encouraged him to support the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz’s losing effort in Pennsylvania’s Senate race in 2022. Melania is now said to be lobbying for Conway to return to the fold in an official capacity.She is also known to have admonished Trump on occasion for vulgar outbursts or mockery of people with disabilities. But there is no evidence that she intends to act as a brake on his radical rightwing policy agenda.Speaking last month at the Politics and Prose bookshop in Washington, Katie Rogers, author of American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, said: “There was this idea that she would be a secret resistance figure early on. First ladies channel and mirror their husbands, even in this case. She shares his grievances. She has the same anger over how her family is perceived and covered as he does. They’re more united in that dynamic than people think.”Rogers, a White House correspondent for the New York Times and former Guardian reporter, said she did not know if the couple would remain married through a second term. “I know they have an agreement in place in the event that they’re not. But she likes the role.”Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the worldOn Thursday 2 May, 3-4.15pm ET, join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

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      ‘This is a violent attack against women’: Florida Senate candidate seeks to channel abortion outrage

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      A round table on abortion rights, hosted by Florida’s Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, has only just begun, and already she finds herself comforting a woman in tears with a very personal story to tell.The woman is from Colombia, and speaks softly in Spanish as she tells the intimate gathering of the Miami-Dade Hispanic Democratic Caucus about the distressing decision her daughter had to make to terminate a pregnancy after learning the fetus was not developing.“In Colombia, which tends to be a very conservative country, she was glad supportive medical professionals were there for her daughter in the decision, and grateful she had access to good-quality healthcare for it,” said Mucarsel-Powell.“It was traumatic and painful, but at least they could rely on that healthcare. I’m just seeing outrage, from men and women, that here, families are faced with having to live in a state where you will not be able to get that care, because most women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks.”She was referring to the ruling by Florida’s supreme court earlier this month that will allow a six-week abortion ban, with few exceptions for rape or incest, to take effect on 1 May. It will end the state’s position as a bulwark of access to the procedure in the south-eastern US.Yet it has also acted as rocket fuel to the campaign of Mucarsel-Powell, an Ecuador-born former congresswoman and mother of two daughters. She seized on the issue to launch a statewide Freedom Tour championing the protection of abortion rights and exposing the “unapologetic and proud” support for the ban on the part of her opponent in November, the incumbent Republican senator Rick Scott.View image in fullscreenThe Hispanic Caucus event in Coral Gables was only the third of the tour, but Mucarsel-Powell said it was already clear that abortion is a “top-of-mind” issue galvanizing voters, as it is in other Republican-controlled states that have curtailed reproductive rights since the US supreme court ended almost 50 years of federal protections with its 2022 reversal of Roe v Wade.On Monday, her campaign announced it had raised over $3.5m in the first quarter of the year, with more than 5,300 new donors since the supreme court ruling. And Democrats across Florida are also sensing wind in their sails as opposition to the ban, as well as support for a court-approved ballot initiative that could enshrine access to the procedure in the state’s constitution, hardens.“This is a violent attack against women, because it is fundamental for us to make that decision on our own, with our healthcare provider, with our families, with our faith,” Mucarsel-Powell told the Guardian in an interview following the round table.“This is about protecting privacy, protecting healthcare for women, making sure that there’s no government interference, especially from extreme politicians like Rick Scott. I can tell you what people are thinking about this, and that it’s affecting women living in the state of Florida that were sent home when they thought they were having a miscarriage, and they weren’t able to get that healthcare.“And then they got very ill, and almost died because they didn’t receive that healthcare. So this is a top-of-mind issue, like so many other issues, but we’ll see in November how voters decide what are going to be their priorities. I think they’re going to make things very clear.”View image in fullscreenAlso clear is Mucarsel-Powell’s disdain for Scott, who she believes is vulnerable in November as he defends the seat he narrowly won from the incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson in 2018 by only 10,000 votes from 8.2m cast.“If he goes back to the Senate, he will push for a national abortion ban,” she said. “His true agenda includes signing away women’s reproductive rights and trying to control their bodies.“And he knows he will have to answer for his support of Florida’s ban in November. The choice is going to be very clear for voters, they know who I am, they know what I stand for, and who and what Rick Scott isn’t.An Emerson College poll this week showed that 42% of Florida voters planned to vote for the constitutional amendment that would overturn the Florida ban, far short of the 60% it would need to pass.Yet Mucarsel-Powell sees hope in the 32% who say they are still unsure. “A lot of people don’t know that this amendment is on the ballot, so the movement that has been created and has built this infrastructure on the ground is ready to make sure that everyone knows this is an issue,” she said.“The work is happening, it will continue to happen, and I think in November, the majority of Floridians will know that they have a choice. I believe they’re going to come out and vote for freedom.” More

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      Bob Graham, former US senator and Florida governor who opposed Iraq war, dies at 87

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      Former US senator and two-term Florida governor Bob Graham, who gained national prominence as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks and as an early critic of the Iraq war, has died aged 87.Graham’s family announced the death in a statement posted on X by his daughter Gwen Graham on Tuesday.“We are deeply saddened to report the passing of a visionary leader, dedicated public servant, and even more importantly, a loving husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather,” the family’s statement said.Graham, who served three terms in the Senate, made an unsuccessful bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, emphasising his opposition to the Iraq invasion.But his bid was delayed by heart surgery in January 2003, and he was never able to gain enough traction with voters to catch up, bowing out that October. He didn’t seek reelection in 2004 and was replaced by Republican Mel Martinez.Graham was a man of many quirks. He perfected the “workdays” political gimmick of spending a day doing various jobs from horse stall mucker to FBI agent and kept a meticulous diary, noting almost everyone he spoke with, everything he ate, the TV shows he watched and even his golf scores.Graham said the notebooks were a working tool for him and he was reluctant to describe his emotions or personal feelings in them. “I review them for calls to be made, memos to be dictated, meetings I want to follow up on and things people promise to do,” he said.Graham was among the earliest opponents of the Iraq war, saying President George W Bush distorted intelligence data and argued it was more serious than the sexual misconduct issues that led the House to impeach President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. It led Graham to launch his short, abortive presidential bid.“The quagmire in Iraq is a distraction that the Bush administration, and the Bush administration alone, has created,” Graham said in 2003.During his 18 years in Washington, Graham worked well with colleagues from both parties, particularly Florida Republican Connie Mack during their dozen years together in the Senate.As a politician, few were better. Florida voters hardly considered him the wealthy, Harvard-educated attorney that he was.Graham’s political career spanned five decades, beginning with his election to the Florida House of Representatives in 1966. He won a state Senate seat in 1970 and then was elected governor in 1978. He was re-elected in 1982. Four years later, he won the first of three terms in the US Senate when he ousted incumbent Republican Paula Hawkins.View image in fullscreenGraham remained widely popular with Florida voters, winning reelection by wide margins in 1992 and 1998 when he carried 63 of 67 counties. In that latter election, he defeated Charlie Crist, who later served as a Republican governor from 2007 to 2011. Crist said on Tuesday that he came to “love him for the good, decent man that he was”.House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi called Graham “a patriotic American” who “brought his love for his family and for his state of Florida to the Senate, where he served with immense dignity and courage”.Daniel Robert Graham was born 9 November 1936 in Coral Gables, where his father, Ernest “Cap” Graham, had moved from South Dakota and established a large dairy operation. Young Bob milked cows, built fences and scooped manure as a teenager. One of his half-brothers, Phillip Graham, was publisher of the Washington Post and Newsweek until he took his own life in 1963, just a year after Bob Graham’s graduation from Harvard law.In 1966 he was elected to the Florida legislature, where he focused largely on education and health care issues. He got off to a shaky start and was dubbed “Governor Jello” for some early indecisiveness, but he shook that label through his handling of several serious crises.As governor he also signed numerous death warrants, founded the Save the Manatee Club with entertainer Jimmy Buffett and led efforts to establish several environmental programs. Graham was also known for his 408 “workdays”, including stints as a housewife, boxing ring announcer, flight attendant and arson investigator. They grew out of a teaching stint as a member of the Florida Senate’s education committee and then morphed into the campaign gimmick that helped him relate to the average voter.“This has been a very important part of my development as a public official, my learning at a very human level what the people of Florida expect, what they want, what their aspirations are and then trying to interpret that and make it policy that will improve their lives,” Graham said in 2004 as he completed his final job as a Christmas gift wrapper.After leaving public life in 2005, Graham spent much of his time at a public policy centre named after him at the University of Florida and pushing the legislature to require more civics classes in the state’s public schools.Graham was one of five members selected for an independent commission by President Barack Obama in June 2010 to investigate a huge BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that threatened sea life and beaches along several south-eastern Gulf states. 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      Democrats bank on abortion in 2024 as Arizona and Florida push stakes higher

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      Kamala Harris’s Friday visit to Arizona was planned before the state’s top court upheld a 160-year-old law that bans almost all abortions. But the news galvanized the vice-president’s message, one that has already yielded stunning victories for liberals since Roe v Wade fell nearly two years ago.That message is simple: abortion bans happen when Republicans are in charge.“Women here live under one of the most extreme abortion bans in our nation. … The overturning of Roe was without any question a seismic event, and this ban here in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet,” Harris said at the Tucson event. “Overturning Roe was just the opening act of a larger strategy to take women’s rights and freedoms … We all must understand who is to blame. Former president Donald Trump did this.”The ruling from the Arizona supreme court arrived on Tuesday, just days after a Florida supreme court ruling cleared the way for a six-week abortion ban, a decision that will cut off access to the procedure before many women even know they are pregnant. These back-to-back rulings roiled the United States, raising the already high stakes of the 2024 elections to towering new heights. Activists in both states are now at work on ballot measures that would ask voters to enshrine abortion rights in their states’ constitutions in November.Democrats are hopeful these efforts – and the potential threat of more bans under a Trump administration – will mobilize voters in their favor, because abortion rights are popular among Americans, and Republicans have spent years pushing restrictions. Democrats have made abortion rights a central issue of their campaigns in Arizona, which was already expected to be a major battleground, and Florida, a longtime election bellwether that has swung further to the right in recent years.For Joe Biden, who is struggling to generate enthusiasm among voters, turning 2024 into a referendum on abortion may be his best shot at defeating Donald Trump. But it remains an open question whether the backlash to Roe’s overturning will continue to drive voters in a presidential election year, when they may be more swayed by concern over the economy and immigration.“In public polls that might just ask: ‘What’s your most important issue?’ You’re going to see abortion in the middle, maybe even towards the bottom,” said Tresa Undem, a co-founder of the polling firm PerryUndem who has studied public opinion on abortion for two decades. “But when you talk to core groups that Democrats need to turn out, it’s front and center.”A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump held double-digit leads when swing state voters were asked who would best handle the economy, inflation and immigration, but they trusted Biden more on abortion. A Fox News poll in March found that most voters in Arizona believe Biden will do a better job handling the issue of abortion, but it was less of a priority than the economy, election integrity and foreign policy.For Biden, abortion is “the best issue for him right now”, Undem said. “All of the data I’ve seen on this upcoming election, young people are not nearly as motivated to vote as they were in 2020. And so in places like Arizona, the total ban – and I don’t make predictions ever – I do think it is going to turn out young people, especially young women.”The Biden campaign has released two abortion-focused ads this week, including one that features a Texas woman who was denied an abortion after her water broke too early in pregnancy. (She ended up in the ICU.) Indivisible, a national grassroots organization with a local presence in states across the country, said volunteer sign-ups to knock on doors in Arizona spiked 50% following the state supreme court’s ruling. Its members in Arizona are helping to organize rallies in support of reproductive rights as well as events to collect signatures for the ballot measure.When Roe fell, abortion rights’ grip on voters was far from guaranteed. Mitch McConnell, Senate Republicans’ longtime leader and an architect of the conservative supreme court majority that overturned Roe, brushed off outrage over its demise as “a wash” in federal elections. Although most Americans support some degree of access to the procedure, anti-abortion voters were more likely to say the issue was important to their vote than pro-abortion rights voters.The fall of Roe changed that. Anger over Roe was credited with halting Republicans’ much-promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections, while pro-abortion rights ballot measures triumphed, even in crimson states such as Kansas and Kentucky. Last year, when Virginia Republicans tried retake control of the state legislature by championing a “compromise” 15 week-ban, they failed. Democrats now control both chambers in the state.“When Republicans offer compromises, I think a lot of voters are inclined not to see those as what the Republican party really wants long-term but what the Republican party thinks is necessary to settle for in the short term,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California at Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. “They know that Republicans are aligned with the pro-life movement and the pro-life movement wants fetal personhood and a ban at fertilization.”In the hours after the Arizona decision, several Republican state lawmakers and candidates with long records of opposing abortion rushed to denounce the near-total ban (which has not yet taken effect). The Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, who once called abortion the “ultimate sin” and said Arizona’s impending near-total abortion ban was “a great law”, attempted to clarify her position on the issue in a meandering, five-minute-plus video. The ban she once favored – which passed in 1864, before Arizona even became a state or women gained the right to vote – is now “out of line with where the people of this state are”, Lake said.“The issue is less about banning abortion and more about saving babies,” she said, as instrumental music swelled against images of pregnant women and pregnancy tests. She repeatedly stressed the importance of “choice” – language associated with people who support abortion rights – while simultaneously invoking the value of “life”.Lake also emphasized that she “agrees with President Trump” on abortion. Over the course of his campaign, Trump has alternated between taking credit for overturning Roe – since he appointed three of the justices who ruled to do so – toying with the idea of a national ban, and insisting that states can decide their own abortion laws, as he did in a video this week.In that video, released on Monday, Trump declined to endorse a federal ban on the procedure, after months of teasing his support. On Wednesday, Trump criticized the Arizona law and predicted that state lawmakers would “bring it back into reason”. Florida’s six-week ban, he suggested, was “probably, maybe going to change”. He reiterated his criticism on Friday, posting on his social media platform that the Arizona supreme court went “too far” in upholding an “inappropriate law from 1864” and calling on the Republican-led state legislature to “ACT IMMEDIATELY” to remedy the decision. “We must ideally have the three Exceptions for Rape, Incest, and Life of the Mother,” he wrote. (The 1864 ban only includes an exception to save the life of the pregnant person.)“He’s simply trying to have it, I think, both ways,” Ziegler said of Trump.Come November, Democrats are counting on the real-world consequences of the bans overriding other concerns. “The economy is still important. Immigration is still important, but this is immediate,” said Stacy Pearson, an Arizona-based Democratic strategist.“A woman just wants to be in her OB-GYN’s office, having a conversation with her doctor about her medical care without concerns about whether or not old white men in cowboy hats were right in 1864,” Pearson added. “It’s nuts.” More

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      Trump bemoans lack of immigrants from majority-white countries to the US

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      Donald Trump bemoaned a lack of immigrants to the US from “nice” countries “like Denmark [or] Switzerland”, offering millionaire donors at a Florida fundraiser a reprise of infamous racist Oval Office remarks about people coming to America from “shithole countries”.Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president again, despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.According to the New York Times, which cited an unnamed attendee at the Saturday event in Palm Beach, Trump told his audience: “These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster.“And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”The millionaires in the crowd “chuckled”, the Times said.Trump made his “shithole countries” remark in January 2018, in a White House meeting on immigration reform.“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to the Washington Post, which cited aides briefed on the meeting.Trump then “suggested that the US should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway [and] suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the US economically”.That kicked off a storm over Trump’s racism. Six years later, the remarks about “nice countries” reported by the Times landed in a country well used to the 45th president’s vulgarity, racism and lying.Trump is using so-called chaos at the southern US border as a central campaign issue, to the extent of directing Republicans to block bipartisan reform.On Saturday, the Times said, Trump complained of criticism over his “shithole countries” comment: “And you know, they took that as a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.”He also complained that migrants were coming to the US from Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place”, and said migrants from Latin America “make the Hells Angels look like extremely nice people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They’ve been shipped in, brought in, deposited in our country, and they’re with us tonight. In fact, I don’t think they’re on this island, but I know they’re on that island right there. That’s West Palm. Congratulations over there. But they’ll be here. Eventually, they’ll be here.”Palm Beach, where Trump spoke at the home of a billionaire, is 93.8% white. West Palm Beach, across a waterway, is nearly a third people of color.The Times also reported that Trump claimed Joe Biden had “soiled” the Resolute desk in the Oval Office at the White House.“The attendee who witnessed the moment said that dinner guests laughed and that Mr Trump’s remark was interpreted as the former president saying that Mr Biden had defecated on the desk,” the paper said.
      Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 8-9.15pm GMT, join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

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      in Elections

      Melania Trump to Attend Fund-Raiser for the Log Cabin Republicans

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      Melania Trump, who has been mostly absent from public view while her husband, Donald J. Trump, campaigns for president this year, will appear at a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago on April 20 for the Log Cabin Republicans, the group’s president said.The event, which was first reported by Politico, is a return of sorts to the political arena for Mrs. Trump, who has consistently stayed away from campaign events.Mr. Trump has insisted for months that Mrs. Trump would join him on the trail. He invokes her often during his rallies, to cheers from the crowd, even as she has not traveled with him. And she did not join him at a Super Tuesday party at Mar-a-Lago, the couple’s home in Palm Beach, Fla.Last month, Mrs. Trump made a rare public appearance with Mr. Trump, accompanying him when he cast his ballot during Florida’s primary. When asked if she would appear more regularly this year, Mrs. Trump replied, “Stay tuned.”Mrs. Trump remains a popular surrogate for the former president, but she has shown little interest in hitting the campaign trail.The fund-raiser for the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of L.G.B.T. conservatives, will still keep her largely out of the public eye. The group’s president, Charles T. Moran, said that Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to Germany, was also set to appear.Mrs. Trump has maintained ties to the Log Cabin Republicans for years. In a financial disclosure last year, she reported receiving a $250,000 payment from the group in December 2022. On Twitter that month, the group posted a photo saying she was the special guest at a “private dinner” and thanking her for “continuing the projects she worked on while in the White House.”Mrs. Trump’s few public appearances over the last year have been largely disconnected to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Last month, she joined Mr. Trump as he hosted Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, at Mar-a-Lago.In January, she delivered a eulogy at the funeral for her mother, Amalija Knavs. And she gave a speech last December at a naturalization ceremony in Washington, where she told new American citizens that citizenship meant “actively participating in the democratic process and guarding our freedom.”In November, she joined Mr. Trump at a funeral for his older sister. And she attended a memorial service for Rosalynn Carter with other first ladies from both parties. It was the first occasion that all of the living first ladies had been in one place since George H.W. Bush’s funeral in 2018. More

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      Florida just crushed abortion rights. But it also created a tool to fight back | Moira Donegan

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      It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the Florida state supreme court would not have allowed Governor Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban to go into effect. In a challenge to a previous 15-week ban, the court’s seven judges, all of whom were appointed by DeSantis, overturned 35 years of precedent this week in order to find that the right to privacy enshrined in the state constitution does not protect the right to an abortion, as Florida state law has acknowledged it does since 1989.The court’s approval of the 15-week ban will allow a stricter, previously stayed six-week ban to go into effect on 1 May. Justice Charles Canady did not recuse himself from the case, despite calls for him do so from no less an authority than the Florida supreme court’s former chief justice, Barbara Pariente. Justice Canady’s wife, the state representative Jennifer Canady, is a legislative co-sponsor of the newly approved six-week ban. There is no rape or incest exception.The harm this decision will do to women across the American south is immeasurable. Like many states, Florida dramatically restricted access to abortion in 2022, in the wake of the US supreme court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade. Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, signed into law by DeSantis in April 2022, went into effect just days after the ruling. Despite those new restrictions, however, abortion remained much more available in Florida than it did elsewhere in the south.The south-east corner of the continental United States is home to some of the most restrictive abortion bans. A woman living in Florida finds herself without a right to an abortion at any stage of pregnancy as far west as Texas and Oklahoma and as far north as Missouri, Indiana and West Virginia. Abortion is also banned outright in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee; it is banned after six weeks in Georgia and South Carolina. Florida’s 15-week ban was a dramatic reduction of women’s healthcare rights from the pre-Dobbs status quo. But due to the even more sadistic anti-choice zealotry of its neighbors, it was among the most permissive states in the region.Under these circumstances, Florida became a haven for abortion seekers. Despite the new 15-week ban, abortions soared in Florida in the year after Dobbs, as women from across the south fled their homes in search of the care that was still legal in the Sunshine state. According to the abortion and contraception data project #WeCount, the number of abortions in Florida increased by a total of 20,460 in the 12 months following the Dobbs decision. Now, both Floridian women and those who traveled from out of state for care will be forced to look further afield, to more distant and more expensive locations, in search of legal abortions. Many will not be able to get them.View image in fullscreenBut in addition to this catastrophe for women’s rights, the Florida court also upended this fall’s election in the state. That’s because, in a narrow vote, the justices allowed a ballot measure to appear before voters this fall that would enshrine abortion rights explicitly in the state constitution.The proposed constitutional amendment would declare Floridians have a right to an abortion before “viability”, the medically imprecise but politically palatable standard that governed the Roe v Wade legal regime for 30 years and is usually interpreted to allow abortion until about 24 weeks of pregnancy. After that, women whose medical providers declare their pregnancies a danger to their health would also be able to receive abortions.The ballot measure would need to receive approval from at least 60% of Florida voters in order to be enshrined in the state constitution. But if the measure is successful, it would invalidate both the six- and 15-week bans, and could theoretically be used to expand abortion access even beyond pre-Dobbs levels.The addition of the abortion rights ballot measure to the November election has dramatically changed the political calculus in Florida overnight. Long the home of a growing sunbelt Republican base and an uncommonly weak state Democratic party, Florida has been considered a shoo-in for Donald Trump, who won the state by three points in 2020. But abortion ballot measures have proven a persistent electoral winner, with measures to preserve or expand access to the procedure winning every time they have been put to voters since Dobbs – including in heavily Republican districts such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, as well as in swing states like Michigan.And the salience of abortion to an election has been an excellent predictor of Democratic success since Dobbs, with the 2022 midterms and subsequent special elections all delivering Democratic victories whenever the abortion question is at the front of voters’ minds.In Florida, the new ballot measure may not just influence the presidential election, but the re-election bid of the Republican senator Rick Scott – a one-time governor and fierce abortion rights opponent who has said that he would have signed the six-week ban if he were still in the governor’s mansion. That stance has come under harsh criticism in Florida, where even the comparatively less strict 15-week ban has had horrible human costs.Anya Cook, a Florida woman whose water broke too early in her pregnancy, almost died from blood loss after the 15-week ban prevented her doctors from administering miscarriage care. Deborah Dorbert was forced to remain pregnant for months after her fetus was given a fatal diagnosis; she delivered an infant who died in her arms. These stories have made an indelible impression on the public. In Florida, more than 60% of voters say that they oppose the six-week ban. Now that it is slated to actually go into effect, that opposition is likely to grow.If the post-Dobbs era has shown us anything, it is that abortion is controversial only in theory. When faced with the material consequences of banning it, Americans find themselves unequivocally on freedom’s side.Democrats, then, may find that they have an unusual asset in the Republican opposition to abortion. The bans are consistently unpopular, and the issue has proved persistently salient, moving voters to the polls even two years after the Dobbs decision. But this political boon for the Democrats has come at an unbearable cost: women’s health, happiness and freedom.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More