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      More than 700 national security officials endorse Kamala Harris for president

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      More than 700 national security leaders and former military officials publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president in a letter released on Sunday, calling her a candidate who “defends America’s democratic ideals”.They also said her Republican rival, Donald Trump, was “unfit” for the job.The letter, signed by retired US navy R Adm Michael Smith and hundreds of others, criticized the former president’s remarks about “terminating” the US constitution over his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and his suggestion of becoming a “dictator” if re-elected.The group also condemned Trump’s lack of remorse for the January 6 Capitol attack.The letter is a further boost to the vice-president and her bid for the White House. Since Joe Biden dropped his bid for re-election in July, Harris has opened up a narrow lead over Trump and performed more strongly in the crucial swing states needed for victory. She has also secured the endorsement of some key anti-Trump Republicans.The security and military officials wrote in the latter that Harris “grasps the reality of American military deterrence, promising to preserve the American military’s status as the most ‘lethal’ force in the world”.“The contrast with Mr Trump is clear: where Vice President Harris is prepared and strategic, he is impulsive and ill-informed,” the letter reads.Among those signing the letter is the former secretary of state and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Jeff Bleich, who served as the US ambassador to Australia under Barack Obama, and the former CIA director John Deutch.In her new book, Clinton expressed her excitement of the prospect of a woman becoming president.“When I imagine Kamala standing before the Capitol next January, taking the oath of office as our first woman president, my heart leaps,” she said. “After hard years of division, it will prove that our best days are still ahead and that we are making progress on our long journey toward a more perfect union.”The letter made public also criticized Trump’s relationship with leaders overseas, including China’s president, Xi Jinping, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe national security leaders also slammed Trump’s decision to criticize leaders in the UK, Israel, Australia, Canada and Germany.“Mr Trump denigrates our great country and does not believe in the American ideal that our leaders should reflect the will of the people,” says the letter. “Mr Trump is the first president in American history to actively undermine the peaceful transfer of power, the bedrock of American democracy.”The pro-Harris letter comes on the heels of another endorsement earlier this month by a group of 10 retired top US military officials, including retired Gen Larry Ellis, condemning Trump’s comments disparaging members of the military.Last month, Trump was pictured giving a thumbs up with family members at a ceremony to mark the deaths of US soldiers in Afghanistan. The army accused two campaign officials of pushing aside a worker at the cemetery who told them that it was not permitted to take photographs at the graves of recently deceased soldiers. More

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      Hillary Clinton: ‘It would be exhilarating to see Kamala Harris achieve the breakthrough I didn’t’

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      On 21 July, when Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris, the dream of seeing a woman in the Oval Office was suddenly back within reach. It wouldn’t be me; but it could be Kamala. History beckoned. But a whole lot of bigotry, fear and disinformation, not to mention the electoral college, stood in the way. Could we do it? Could we finally shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling and prove that in America there is no limit to what is possible?When Bill and I heard the news that Biden was withdrawing and endorsing Kamala, we drafted a joint statement saluting him and endorsing her. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president, so it was an easy decision.After our statement went public, Kamala called us. She was remarkably calm for someone who had just been thrown into the deep end of a bottomless pool. She told us she wanted to earn the nomination. “I’m going to need your help,” she said. “We’ll do whatever you need,” I told her. Bill and I were both ready to do everything we could to help get her elected.History is full of cautionary tales, but 2024 is not 2016. Trump’s victory then, and the ugliness of his presidency, woke up a lot of people. There’s less complacency now about the strength of our democracy, and more consciousness of the threats posed by disinformation, demagoguery and implicit bias.Some people have asked how I feel about the prospect of another woman being poised to achieve the breakthrough I didn’t. If I’m being honest, in the years after 2016, I also wondered how I would feel if another woman ever took the torch, that I had carried so far, and ran on with it. Would some little voice deep down inside whisper: “That should have been me”?Now I know the answer. After I got off the phone with the vice-president, I looked at Bill with a huge smile and said: “This is exciting.” I felt promise. I felt possibility. It was exhilarating.When I imagine Kamala standing before the Capitol next January, taking the oath of office as our first woman president, my heart leaps. After hard years of division, it will prove that our best days are still ahead and that we are making progress on our long journey toward a more perfect union. And it will make such a difference in the lives of hard-working people everywhere.As Joni Mitchell sang all those years ago, something’s lost but something’s gained. Democrats have lost our standard-bearer, and we will miss Joe Biden’s steady leadership, deep empathy and fighting spirit. He is a wise and decent man who served our country well. Yet we have gained much, too: a new champion, an invigorated campaign and a renewed sense of purpose.

      This is an edited extract from the epilogue to the audiobook Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty by Hillary Rodham Clinton, published by Simon & Schuster. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. More

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      ‘Looks like karma to me’: Hillary Clinton on Trump’s hush-money conviction

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      Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that her eyes welled with tears when Donald Trump was convicted of criminally falsifying business records to keep an alleged extramarital affair from becoming public ahead of the 2016 presidential election that she lost to him.“The case … was election interference,” Clinton said in a lengthy interview on CBS News Sunday Morning. “Looks like karma to me,” she added, referring to how Trump taunted her throughout the contest with chants of “lock her up” only to become a convicted felon while seeking a return to the White House.Clinton appeared on the news program in large part to promote her memoir Something Lost, Something Gained, which is scheduled for release on Tuesday. CBS recorded and aired her remarks before officials said US secret service agents fired at a person who pointed a rifle’s muzzle into Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, during what was described as an apparent assassination attempt while the former president was playing a round there Sunday afternoon.In Clinton’s book and in her interview with correspondent Erin Moriarty, the ex-US secretary of state acknowledged how she has wished – but struggled – to “move on” from her electoral defeat to Trump in 2016, especially as her Republican rival again prepares to face a Democratic woman, Vice-President Kamala Harris, in November’s race for the White House.The former first lady singled out Trump’s conviction in New York – the state she used to represent as a US senator – as a particularly bittersweet moment in the aftermath of her ill-fated presidential run.She suggested it was gratifying to see a guilty verdict delivered against the man who insulted her as “Crooked Hillary” – and lustily chanted alongside his supporters to “lock her up” over her use of a private email server as secretary of state – because he had falsified business records to cover up payments to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels.But Clinton also said the case was a stark reminder over how close she was to becoming the first woman to become US president. That is because the covered-up payments were delivered to Daniels during the 2016 election after she claimed to have had extramarital sex with Trump about a decade earlier.“I got tears in my eyes then,” Clinton said. “The case which was mistakenly called a ‘hush-money’ case was an election interference case.“Why did he do what he did? He did it to try to keep the information from the American public so that they wouldn’t turn away from him and vote for me. So it’s a pretty clear case of election interference.”Trump is awaiting sentencing on 34 felony counts in that case while also dealing with other criminal charges in connection with his retention of classified government documents as well as his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Moriarty asked Clinton whether at least a part of Clinton thought positively about the fact that Trump “is the person who’s actually facing time in jail”.“Looks like karma to me,” Clinton said.In other parts of her interview, Clinton said watching Harris debate Trump on 10 September reminded her how hard it was to keep one’s cool in verbal exchanges with him. She also described it as “difficult” yet “emotional” and rewarding to write and deliver a speech at the Democratic national convention in August supporting Harris as she pursued something voters denied Clinton.Clinton furthermore addressed other extramarital sexual encounters: those her husband, Bill Clinton, had during his political career, including amid his presidency. She laughed nervously as she said, “Oh, you know there was” a time when she was unsure whether her marriage would survive. But she said the couple went to counseling, and though “it was really hard”, they were now preparing to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary together.“One day, I’d wake up and say, ‘OK, no, I’m done.’ Another day, I’d wake up and I’d say, ‘… I gotta keep trying to see this through and figure out what is it I want?“Is it worth it? Is it something I want to invest in? And when I went through all of those questions, the answers were yes, yes and yes.”The FBI said authorities arrested a suspect after Sunday’s gunfire at Trump’s golf club.No injuries were reported in what was the second attempt on Trump’s life since 13 July, when a rifle-wielding attack who fired on a political rally struck the tip of the former president’s ear. The attacker also killed one spectator and wounded two more before a Secret Service sniper shot him dead.Prominent Democrats including Harris and US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer condemned violence Sunday. “The perpetrator must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Schumer said. More

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      Trump ‘likelier winner’ unless Harris tackles two failings, says ex-ambassador

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      Donald Trump will remain the “likelier winner” of the US presidential election on 5 November unless the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, addresses key failings in her campaign, a former British ambassador to Washington says on Sunday.Kim Darroch says that despite clearly getting the better of Trump in last week’s televised head-to-head debate, Harris risks making two crucial mistakes in the final weeks of campaigning, which mean the former Republican president is still the favourite.View image in fullscreenWith a Trump return to the White House on the cards, Lord Darroch says it is important that the prime minister, Keir Starmer, who met US president Joe Biden and other leading Democrats in Washington on Thursday, should also now be seeking a meeting with Trump and his team before polling day, so he has built links with both sides.“It is important that if Starmer meets one, he meets both,” Darroch says in an article for the Observer. “It will be noticed and resented by the Trump team if he doesn’t.”Darroch was UK ambassador to the US from 2016 to 2019, when he resigned in a row over leaked confidential emails in which he criticised Trump’s administration as “clumsy and inept”. Darroch’s position became untenable after Boris Johnson, then involved in the Tory leadership contest to succeed Theresa May, failed to give the ambassador his unequivocal backing.Darroch, who remains a respected figure in diplomatic circles on both sides of the Atlantic, says Trump is now “a less formidable campaigner” than in 2016, “down on energy, more liable to become confused, with a mind cluttered with grievances. And he remains a policy-free zone.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But,” he adds, “he is still capable of connecting with the ‘left behind’ to a level few others can match, a talent which ensures a devoted and enduring support base in a country where one in three workers say they live paycheck to paycheck.”Darroch argues that the Democratic campaign is at risk of making two hugely important errors. Urging Harris to be “laser-focused” on voters in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin won by Biden in 2020, Darroch warns that they may drift back to Trump unless Harris is able to offer “some crisply worded, specific, targeted policies to bring jobs and hope back to these blighted neighbourhoods”.The second error is that Harris appears to be hiding from the media, repeating a mistake made by Hillary Clinton. “Back in 2016, Trump was ever-present. He would accept any and every invitation. He would even, unbidden, phone the morning news shows to offer his views on the day’s issues. By contrast, Hillary Clinton locked the media out – and lost.”Harris, he claims “seems to have adopted the Clinton playbook”.View image in fullscreenDarroch says the UK embassy in Washington will no doubt be advising Starmer to try to meet Trump, perhaps taking time out from a meeting of the UN general assembly this week to do so.“There is a lot to discuss with him, starting with his views on Ukraine. And however badly Trump performed in the debate, however visible his personal decline, he remains for many of us the likelier winner.” Last week, Starmer’s former pollster Deborah Mattinson met Harris’s campaign team in Washington to share details of how Labour pulled off its stunning election win by targeting key groups of “squeezed working-class voters who wanted change”, further strengthening contacts with the Democratic side. More

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      Election outcome may depend on whether Harris or Trump can rebrand themselves as ‘new’

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      When Kamala Harris sat down for her first interview as the Democratic presidential nominee, she praised Joe Biden for his intelligence, commitment, judgment and disposition. But twice she used the phrase “turn the page”. And twice she used the phrase “a new way forward”.This was no accident. US voters are yearning for a shift in direction, with two in three saying the next president should represent a major change from Joe Biden, according to a national poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College. Yet in November they face a choice between two known quantities: Harris, the sitting vice-president, and Donald Trump, a former president with an inescapable four-year record.Just 25% of voters think Harris signifies a major change, the poll found, while 56% believe she represents “more of the same”. When it comes to Trump, 51% think he would offer major change, whereas 35% consider him more of the same. Victory in the race for the White House might be decided by which of these quasi-incumbents can rebrand themselves as a breath of fresh air for a weary, divided nation.Despite the polling, Democrats are convinced that Harris has the momentum. “The American people are looking for not just new faces but a new message,” said Donna Brazile, a former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee. “They’re looking for somebody who can heal our divisions and close our partisan divides. To the extent she’s running on a message of bringing the American people together, it helps her become a change agent.”Since 1836, just one sitting vice-president, George HW Bush in 1988, has been elected to the White House. Those who tried and failed include Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000. Gore’s decision to distance himself from his popular but scandal-plagued boss, Bill Clinton, may have proved costly in his narrow defeat by George W Bush.Harris, a former senator, California attorney general and local prosecutor, became the first woman and person of colour to serve as vice-president after Biden selected her as his running mate in the 2020 election. Like most vice-presidents, she gained relatively little public attention for three and a half years.And when she did, some of the headlines were negative, for example those regarding her role in tackling the root causes of immigration and apparent discontent in her office. Axios reports that of the 47 Harris staff publicly disclosed to the Senate in 2021, only five still worked for her as of this spring.But after the president’s feeble debate performance against Trump on 27 June, everything changed. Biden bowed to pressure, dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris. The Democratic party quickly rallied around her with a combination of relief and energy bordering on ecstasy.Speakers at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago dutifully paid tribute to Biden’s service but then pivoted to looking forward to a new era under Harris. Her acceptance speech, and a biographical video, did not dwell on her vice-presidency but rather introduced her life story as if for the first time.Brazile, a Democratic strategist, said: “People see don’t see her as vice-president in large part because they rarely see the vice-president as leading the country. But she’s campaigning on a platform that includes bringing people together, ensuring that most Americans can make ends meet.“Donald Trump is a prisoner of the past. She’s a pioneer of a future. That’s the message that brings people in line with her values versus what he campaigns on every day, which is all about attacks, insults and derogatory statements.”On the campaign trail, Harris has been walking a political tightrope, embracing her boss’s achievements while keeping his unpopular baggage at arm’s length. Whereas Biden touted jobs and growth numbers, Harris has acknowledged the rising cost of living and proposed a federal ban on grocery price-gouging.Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “She wants it both ways. She wants to take credit for the improvement in the economy, the number of jobs, the successes of bringing inflation down. But she doesn’t want to be blamed for voters’ continuing frustration that they’ve been hurt because of inflation.He added: “She’s been trying to run as the change candidate, which is very strange because the change motif is for the challenger, not the incumbent party.”The switch from Biden, 81, to 59-year-old Harris instantly removed the Democrats’ biggest vulnerability – age – and weaponised it against Trump who, at 78, is the oldest major party nominee in US history.At the first debate in June, he came over as more engaged and vital than Biden, who stumbled over answers and stared into the distance with mouth agape. At the next debate on Tuesday, it is Trump whose age will be thrown into sharp relief by a rival nearly two decades younger – who would become the first female president in the country’s 248-year history if she wins.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “We went from a generic where we had two candidates who were pushing 80, so anytime that you add in a new element and someone who is generationally younger, that’s a change without even having to say a word. The fact that we are going from two old white men to a woman of colour – that screams change. It creates the tangible illustration of past versus future.”Trump has been wrongfooted by the Democrats’ abrupt change of nominee and still complains bitterly about it. Nicknames such as “Crooked Joe” and “Sleepy Joe”, as well as criticism of alleged Biden family corruption, now ring hollow. He has continued to repeat his false claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election as he makes his third bid for the White House. Still promising to “Make America great again”, he has lost the mantle of a disrupter taking on the status quo.Bardella, a former spokesperson and senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Any time that you’re the candidate whose slogan uses the word ‘again’, that doesn’t scream change. That screams going backwards. Clearly voters want something that’s more forward-facing and, frankly, more optimistic as well. I don’t think we can overestimate the tone difference.“One campaign is saying, it’s a disaster, everything is terrible, America will be destroyed if Kamala Harris is president. The other campaign is saying we can do better, we can be better, our best days lie ahead. It’s much more optimistic and for voters coming out of Covid, January 6, the sense of weariness they have with both Biden and with Trump, that idea of turning the page and having a fresh start is a very appealing sentiment.”The Trump campaign has unleashed countless attacks tying Harris to Biden’s record on immigration, inflation and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan but with little tangible effect, at least so far. Instead, Harris continues to wear her vice-presidency lightly and cast herself as the candidate of the future.Whit Ayres, a political consultant and pollster, said: “She’s not pulling it off because of particular policy positions, but her race and gender create an image of change without ever stressing it or mentioning it.“The idea that a Black, Asian American woman could be president of the United States says change all by itself. That’s how she has created this impression that she is the change candidate in a change election, even though she’s the incumbent vice-president.”Trump would be wise to contrast his White House record with that of the Biden-Harris administration, Ayres argues. “Emphasising the economy and immigration is an obvious place for him to go. And then painting Harris as a San Francisco liberal – and there are plenty of issue positions that she has taken, in the past at any rate, that allow him to do that. If he could actually focus on that rather than using schoolyard bullying name-calling, he could win the thing.”Trump represented the shock of the new in 2016, running as an anti-establishment outsider, rattling the foundations of the Republican party and defeating the Democratic stalwart Hillary Clinton. But eight years, four criminal cases and two impeachments later, many Americans say the act has gone stale and the novelty has worn off.Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “He feels diminished to me. He feels smaller, less relevant, he’s not breaking through. In part it’s because she’s rising above and talking about where she wants to take the country; she’s not engaging him. He’s using this old formula of creating chaos and fighting with his opponents and she’s not playing, and it’s hurting him.”He added: “There’s only one Trump. This Trump isn’t working the way it used to and they don’t have a plan B, and the Trump campaign’s in trouble. He’s singing the same songs and they’re not connecting the way they used to. It’s a real problem for him.”But the latest New York Times and Siena College poll – in which Trump is up by one percentage point at 48% to Harris’s 47% – makes Republicans sceptical of the notion that she has become synonymous with change in the minds of the electorate.Lanhee Chen, who was the policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, said: “There’s no question that if you look at the media narrative, that’s how she’s been framed. But with voters it could be a very different picture. As we get a little bit more data, we’ll be able to get a firmer sense of whether this framing is one that’s taken hold or if it’s just an inside-the-Beltway creation. Hard to say at this point.” More

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      The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset | Rebecca Solnit

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      The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Trump takes sexist Harris attacks to ‘whole other level’ on Truth Social

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      Donald Trump has reposted a crudely misogynistic comment about Kamala Harris on Truth Social in a move that reprised his past record of sexist behaviour and brazenly flouted pleas from members of his own party to emphasize issues over personal attacks.With fresh polls showing Harris further improving her standing – and widening the gap with her opponent among women voters – Trump drew online opprobrium by sharing a vulgar post on his social media site implying that the Democratic nominee owed her political rise to sexual favours.The post – originally posted by another user – featured photos of Harris and Hillary Clinton alongside the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”The comment was an oblique reference to innuendo surrounding Harris’s former relationship with Willie Brown, the San Francisco mayor. The mention of Clinton – Trump’s defeated opponent in the 2016 presidential election – alluded to the affair between Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, and her husband Bill Clinton in the 1990s, which came close to ending his presidency.It was not the first time Trump had made lewd references to Harris. On 18 August, he shared a video by the Dilley Meme Team, a group of rightwing content creators, to the soundtrack of a parody of the Alanis Morrisette song Ironic that contained the lines, “She spent her whole damn life down on her knees”, as an image of Brown appeared behind a picture of the US vice-president and her husband, Doug Emhoff.But the latest post appeared among a flurry of other extreme posts on Wednesday that also included tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory that holds that Trump is waging war against an elite network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government, business and the media.He reposted: “WWG1WGA! RETRUTH IF YOU AGREE.” The acronym is short for the QAnon slogan: “where we go one, we go all.” He similarly reposted another QAnon phrase: “nothing can stop what is coming.”The FBI has previously identified fringe theories like QAnon – which Trump has stopped short of endorsing while praising its supporters – as likely to fuel domestic terrorism.In yet another incendiary communication, Trump posted manipulated images of some of his favourite targets – including the entrepreneur Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, who spearheaded the US vaccine effort against Covid-19, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi – imprisoned and wearing orange jumpsuits.The Harris campaign made no immediate response to Trump’s latest burst of social media activity, which followed disclosures of an altercation between his campaign team and staff at Arlington national cemetery, the resting place of fallen US military heroes, during a visit on Monday.However, the CNN host Anderson Cooper – in a lengthy segment – said the posts took Trump’s previous campaigning to a “whole other level”.“This is the Republican candidate for president and the 45th president of the United States, talking about two women who, no matter what you think of their politics, are two of the most accomplished women in American political history,” Cooper said.Wednesday’s online outbursts came as a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Harris with a four-point nationwide lead, 45% to 41%, over Trump. Among women, the survey showed the vice-president increasing her lead to 13%, compared with an average of 9% in polls for July.A separate Fox News survey showed Harris leading or increasing her support in four southern Sun belt states, all considered vital battlegrounds in November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a two-way race, Harris was up by one point in Arizona and by two points in Georgia and Nevada, while Trump is ahead by one point in North Carolina, according to the poll.Beyond the polls, there was irritation among Republicans strategists who had previously urged Trump to desist from attacking Harris personally and focus on issues of concern to voters, such as the economy, inflation and immigration.“I think people are incredibly frustrated,” Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican party, told the Washington Post.He said Harris’s campaign and policy stances gave “opportunities for the Trump campaign to talk about issues that actually will matter to swing voters. And rather than doing that, he’s delving into this nonsense.”Stuart Stevens, a member of the anti-Trump Republican group, the Lincoln Project, and a strategist for Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid, challenged widespread predictions of a close election by suggesting that Trump’s approach would eventually alienate voters and enable Harris to win convincingly.“There’s been a lot of talk – it’s sort of a universal truth – that this election is going to be close,” he told CNN. “I have a different opinion. I think it’ll be close till about October 20th, and then I think it’s going to be like Carter versus Reagan [in 1980, when Reagan won in a landslide], that the bottom is going to start to drop out [of Trump’s campaign].“I think this is going to be a race that Democrats are going to win by more than Biden did,” he added. More

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      Why is alleged predator Bill Clinton still welcome in the Democratic party? | Moira Donegan

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      One of the grim lessons of the #MeToo movement and its long backlash is this: whether someone finds a sexual abuse allegation credible largely depends on their pre-existing opinion of the man accused. When a woman comes forward with an account of a man’s mistreatment of her – be it humiliating boorishness, violent rape or any of the range of degradations and hurts that fall along the wide spectrum between – the listener’s response is fairly predictable. If they hate the accused man, they’ll believe his accuser. If they like him, they’ll say it’s bullshit.This rule holds, I am sorry to say, even for women who identify themselves as feminists. It held for Gloria Steinem, the famed feminist now in her 90s, who in 1998 defended Clinton amid his slew of sex scandals and abuse allegations in the pages of the New York Times, dismissing the allegations against him as trivial and making an unconvincing case that the offense she took at similar allegations against Clarence Thomas was different. It held true, most famously, for Bill Clinton’s wife, the liberal feminist icon Hillary Clinton, who has remained silently beside her husband throughout each of the allegations against him – and retained her feminist credibility despite her loyalty to an allegedly abusive man that I can only describe as canine.People who like Bill Clinton, or who find him convenient for their own goals, have a long history of underplaying the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and violence that he faces from at least four women. They say that Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment after the then governor brought her to his hotel room, propositioned her and exposed himself, is lying – even though Jones has multiple corroborating witnesses, and even though her story has not changed in more than 30 years.They say that Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says that Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general, is lying, too – even though Broaddrick, like Jones, told multiple people of Clinton’s attack at the time.They say that Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old unpaid intern whom Clinton carried on an affair with in the White House when he was 49 and the most powerful person in the world, technically consented to the sex acts that Clinton asked her to do – an insistence that betrays a startlingly simple-minded and willfully obtuse understanding of sexual ethics.They echo Clinton’s denials of wrongdoing in all these cases, against all these women. That is, at least, what they say when they acknowledge the allegations about Bill Clinton’s conduct at all. Mostly, they ignore them – as Bill Clinton has, as his wife, Hillary Clinton has, and as Bill Clinton’s popular legacy seems to do.Bill Clinton’s supporters ignore his accusers because they can. These women’s dignity, their equality and their right to control their own bodies matter less to them than their esteem for Bill Clinton – less than whether he can deliver a few votes, make a zinger on television or look nice in a suit.On Wednesday night, the third night of the Democratic national convention, the whole party ignored these women when they gave Bill Clinton, a multiply accused alleged sexual harasser and rapist, a rousing welcome at Chicago’s United Center. The former president was given a prime-time speaking spot, trotted out like a prize and applauded like a hero.Are these people not embarrassed? Do they not, at least, take note of the hypocrisy involved? After all, the 2024 election is quickly shaping up to be about gender, with the boorish Trump, creepy, sex-obsessed JD Vance and the radically anti-choice Republican party turning the contest into a referendum on the status of women in American society. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will seek to become the nation’s first female president on election day, has taken on the mantle of the women’s struggle – not only in the symbolism of her candidacy, but in the tenor of her advocacy, in which she has championed the “freedom” of women to control their own bodies and lives.These are noble goals, ones that the Democrats can be proud of pursuing; but they are not commensurate with celebrations of an alleged rapist, with pomp and obsequiousness trotted out for a man who allegedly habitually sexually harassed women who worked for him and carried on an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter. Sexual abuse, too, is hostile to women’s freedom – the freedom of women to live, work and participate in public without the threat of sexual force. This is a kind of gendered freedom that Bill Clinton has made it abundantly clear that he does not respect.The call for women’s freedom from rape, abuse and harassment has always been the least popular and most politically fraught feminist cause. Abortion has always had more appeal to male voters as a political issue. Misogynist men – in a tradition that extends from the Playboy founder (and alleged rapist) Hugh Hefner to Barstool Sports founder (and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault) Dave Portnoy to former president (and alleged rapist) Bill Clinton – have long supported abortion rights, in part because they understand abortion not as a matter of women’s fundamental freedom and dignity but as a matter of men’s increased sexual access to women and decreased responsibility for the resulting pregnancies.These prurient, sexually entitled misogynists are not all Republicans – rape, and its apologism, have always been bipartisan endeavors – but they are not the kind of voters that Democrats should be courting. A bargain in which women’s right to end a pregnancy is made in exchange for men’s right to rape, harass and abuse women is not an acceptable one. We can do better: we can reach for a version of America in which women are truly free and equal, endowed with all the bodily sovereignty, self-determination and sexual autonomy that men are. That’s not the world that Bill Clinton represents, and it’s not a world that a party that insists on celebrating him can deliver.Bill Clinton has been out of office for nearly three decades. In that time, his once-rosy status as a liberal hero has thankfully dimmed, even if his alleged history of sexual abuse has not played a sufficient role in the reassessment of his reputation. Liberals now rightly look back at Clinton’s crime bill with horror; his devastating cuts to the welfare system were punitive and cruel, hurting women and children the most. He modeled a vision of a conservative Democratic party, one less committed to its principles than in cynically trading them away for a chance at power.His vision of change has failed, and his political project has been revealed as morally bankrupt. It’s not clear that he can even deliver many votes; a large swath of the American electorate is now too young to remember much of his presidency, aside from the sex scandals. It’s time for Democrats to send the old man home. And to tell him to keep his hands to himself.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More