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      Media gave much less play to Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment than Clinton remark

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      Major US news outlets devoted significantly less time and space to covering Donald Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” this month than they did in a similar period in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s reference to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”, a new study has found.Findings by the progressive watchdog Media Matters included 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s remark than Trump’s by the “Big Three” broadcast networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) in the first week after the remark was made; and print reports among the top five circulating newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today) in which mention of Clinton’s remark outnumbered Trump’s 29-1 in the same period.“Coverage decisions like these … shape the political landscape during presidential election cycles,” wrote Matt Gertz, a Media Matters senior fellow.Media Matters describes itself as “a web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media”.It has recently made headlines by highlighting far-right content on X, prompting advertisers to withdraw, an effort now the subject of a lawsuit from Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter.Clinton’s “deplorables” remark was a famous feature of the 2016 presidential election, which she lost to Trump.In September that year, the Democrat told a New York audience: “To be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” Trump lost to Joe Biden four years later but is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee again in 2024, dominating polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.Earlier this month, in New Hampshire, he told supporters he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.Biden joined pundits and historians in pointing out how authoritarian leaders have called opponents “vermin”, Adolf Hitler prominently among them.Acknowledging such comparisons and warnings, Gertz wrote: “The former president … added that those forces want ‘to destroy America and to destroy the American dream’ and that ‘the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within’.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“By contrast, the right weaponised Clinton’s relatively mundane ‘basket of deplorables’ comment … [though] she went on to stress that attendees shouldn’t write off all of his backers because they also include ‘people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change’, adding: ‘Those are people we have to understand and empathise with as well.’”The new Media Matters research, Gertz said, illustrated how major news outlets responded to “weaponisation” of Clinton’s remark, “rewarding the right for its disingenuous act, showering Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ remark with coverage.“By contrast, the same outlets largely ignored Trump’s description of his political enemies as ‘vermin’, continuing a pattern of relatively muted coverage of Trump’s abhorrent and incoherent commentary.”According to the research, ABC, CBS and NBC spent 54 minutes on the “deplorables” remark in the first week after it was uttered (making 1,662 mentions of it) but only three minutes (through 191 mentions) on the “vermin” remark in the same period.The only print article in the five main papers to consider the “vermin” remark was published by the Washington Post. In 2016, it ran nine print articles on the “deplorables” comment in the first week after it was made, Media Matters said.Gertz said: “When experts are sounding the alarm about the similarities between a likely US presidential nominee’s rhetoric and that of genocidaires, it warrants much more significant attention from journalists at leading news outlets.” More

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      Hillary Clinton likens Trump to Hitler and warns he would end democracy

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      Hillary Clinton has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler as she offered a blunt warning about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.Trump back in the White House, Clinton said during an appearance on ABC’s daytime talkshow The View on Wednesday, “would be the end of our country as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly”.The former first lady, senator and secretary of state said: “When I was secretary of state, I used to talk about ‘one and done’. What I meant by that is that people would get legitimately elected and then they would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press.”Then Clinton added: “Hitler was duly elected. All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail.’ And they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do.”Clinton’s comments came days after a Washington Post report detailing how Trump is discussing how to use the justice department to investigate political rivals and former allies who have been critical of him should he return to the White House. He is also discussing invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to use the US military domestically to quell protests and dissent, something he was talked out of by military leaders during his one-term presidency.Trump’s team is also preparing to staff a potential administration with more radical rightwing lawyers who are less likely to stymie efforts to get in his way as he pushes the bounds of presidential power, the New York Times reported.A New York Times/Siena poll released on Sunday shows Trump leading Joe Biden in several key battleground states. Trump faces criminal charges in four different cases, set to go to trial next year. Winning the presidency is widely understood to be Trump’s best chance of escaping liability. And the poll shows that many voters who were asked would switch back to Biden if Trump is convicted.But Clinton gave a clear warning.“Trump is telling us what he intends to do,” Clinton said on The View. “Take him at his word.” More

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      Hillary Clinton says Trump supporters may need to be ‘deprogrammed’

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      Supporters of Donald Trump may need to be “deprogrammed” as if they were cult members, Hillary Clinton said.“Sadly, so many of those extremists … take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure,” the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president told CNN.“He’s only in it for himself. He’s now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? Because at some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members. But something needs to happen.”In 2016, in one of the most seismic shocks in US history, Clinton lost the presidential election to Trump.The billionaire spent four chaotic years in power before losing to Joe Biden in 2020. Refusing to accept that loss, Trump stoked the deadly January 6 attack on Congress. That brought his second impeachment, which, like the first, he survived. He now faces 91 criminal charges (17 related to election subversion) and assorted civil threats but is nonetheless the clear Republican frontrunner to face Biden again next year.Clinton said: “I think, sadly, he will be the nominee and we have to defeat them. And we have to defeat those who are the election deniers, as we did and 2020 and [in the midterms of] 2022. And we have to just be smarter about how we are trying to empower the right people inside the Republican party.”Clinton was speaking after the fall of Kevin McCarthy, who became first US House speaker ever ejected by his own party thanks to pro-Trump extremists.Clinton called Trump “an authoritarian populist who really has a grip on the emotional [and] psychological needs and desires of a portion of the population and the base of the Republican party, for whatever combination of reasons.”Republicans, she said, “see in him someone who speaks for them and they are determined they will continue to vote for him, attend his rallies and wear his merchandise, because for whatever reason he and his very negative, nasty form of politics resonates with them.“Maybe they don’t like migrants. Maybe they don’t like gay people or Black people or the woman who got the promotion at work they didn’t get. Whatever reason.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClinton said Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan, first in 2016, “was a bid for nostalgia, to return to a place where people could be in charge of their lives, feel empowered, say what they want and insult whoever came in their way.“And that was really attractive to a significant portion of the Republican base.“So it is like a cult and somebody has to break it, break that momentum. And that’s why I believe Joe Biden will defeat them and hopefully then that will be the end and the fever will break.” More

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      US presidents are a sum of their actions, not their years | Letters

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      Timothy Garton Ash’s plea for Joe Biden to step aside reveals the hollowness at the core of much of centrist ideology (Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0, 29 September).Garton Ash is wholly correct in pointing out that concerns about Biden’s age and fitness have played a meaningful role in his dismal approval ratings heading into next year’s presidential election. However, his emphasis on youth, absent anything of actual substance, betrays the centrist obsession with narratives and optics that artificially inflated the failed presidential primary campaigns of figures such as Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg.The three contenders that Garton Ash puts forward as potential replacements for Biden – governors Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom – are united only by their youth relative to Biden. While age certainly appears to be an issue to US voters, it is hard to see how simply having a younger Democratic candidate for president would have the impact that Garton Ash imagines. How would Shapiro, Whitmer or Newsom “rejuvenate the image of the US in the world”? Garton Ash doesn’t say. Public opinion of the US, especially in the global south, is based largely on what the country does, not the identity of the person occupying the Oval Office.Biden stepping down would probably be in the best interests of the Democratic party and the country. As a Canadian, I know all too well the global implications of who the US president is, but a candidate with little to offer beyond being younger than Biden is not the answer that the US or the world needs. David BeamishBonn, Germany Like Timothy Garton Ash, I spent two months this summer in the US, and sadly can echo most of what he writes about President Biden. I would add two points, however.First, Donald Trump’s support in the states I visited – Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas – is visceral and implacably opposed to liberal outreach. They will not be persuaded by better arguments. They cannot be swayed by a buoyant economy. They will vote for Trump and they must therefore be defeated. This reality has to be recognised if the Democratic candidate is to win in November 2024.Second, the possible Democratic candidates that Garton Ash mentions – Shapiro, Whitmer and Newsom – cannot defeat the Trump campaign: they have no national profile, they have no political base outside their states, and they show no stomach for the vicious fight that awaits them. No liberal does.There is a Democrat who can win, if she can be persuaded to run again: Hillary Clinton. She commands nationwide support, retains international recognition and won’t be cowed by Trump. But, most of all, Clinton will fight relentlessly. Consensus building can wait for 2028. Only political conflict will save us from Trump 2.0 in 2024.Dr Gareth JonesHong Kong Unusually, Timothy Garton Ash has gotten this completely wrong. Joe Biden stepping aside would start a frenzied fight within the party for the nomination for an election only a year away, generating hard feelings and attack lines for Republicans to use in the election. Taking Mr Garton Ash’s advice is the surest way for Donald Trump to win.Lee HartmannAnn Arbor, Michigan, US More

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      Trump said president under indictment would create ‘constitutional crisis’

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      The election of a president under indictment and facing criminal trial would “create an unprecedented constitutional crisis” and “cripple the operations of government”, Donald Trump said.But the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, who faces 71 criminal counts in state and federal cases and is expected to face more, was not speaking about himself – or speaking this year.As reported by CNN, which unearthed the comments, Trump was speaking on 3 November 2016, at a rally in North Carolina during his first presidential campaign, against Hillary Clinton.“She is likely to be under investigation for many years,” Trump said, “and also it will probably end up – in my opinion – in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way.”Clinton did not face indictment or a criminal trial over her use of a private email server while secretary of state to Barack Obama. An FBI investigation did prove politically damaging, in a campaign Trump won.Seven years later, Trump has become the first former president ever indicted – and he has been indicted twice.In New York, he faces 34 counts regarding hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during that 2016 race. In a federal investigation, he faces 37 counts relating to his retention of classified material after leaving the White House in 2021.In New York, his trial is set to begin in late March. In the federal case, a judge in Florida has said a trial could begin as soon as 14 August.Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges and continues to deny all accusations of wrongdoing.Further indictments are expected, not least in state and federal investigations of Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.Back before he became president, in Concord, North Carolina, in November 2016, Trump also said Clinton “has no right to be running, you know that. No right.”He returned to the subject two days later, CNN reported, telling a crowd in Reno, Nevada: “We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”The same day, CNN said, Trump told rally-goers in Denver, Colorado, that because Clinton was “the prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation”, it would be “virtually impossible for her to govern”.In 2023, Trump’s legal problems have not made his campaign grind to a halt, or even slow significantly.He dominates polling averages, leading his nearest challenger, Ron DeSantis, by about 30 points. The Florida governor is well clear of the rest of the field.Trump did not immediately respond to the CNN report about his comments about Clinton.He has continued to complain that Clinton was not indicted, alleging investigatory bias and a political witch hunt against him.Responding to such complaints, Joe Conason, a reporter, commentator and biographer of Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton, wrote: “Contrary to Trump’s lying mantra, Hillary Clinton kept no classified documents, defied no subpoenas, engaged in no conspiracies, and stole nothing. So unlike him she is innocent of wrongdoing.” More

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      ‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing Trump

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      ‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing TrumpRick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist, suggests the ex-president still holds sway despite multiple crises Donald Trump, the former US president, is all washed up. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is poised to dethrone him. This is the view currently in vogue among many in Washington.Not so fast, argues Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group that shot to prominence with go-for-the-jugular advertisements before becoming mired in scandals of its own.Who’s next? Republicans who might go up against Trump in 2024Read more“The greatest danger in American politics is not recognising that there are great dangers,” Wilson, who lives in Florida, says in a phone interview. “The same people in 2015 and 2016 were confidently asserting Donald Trump could never, ever under any circumstances win the Republican nomination, and there were never any circumstances where Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton, and then he could never have almost a million people die because of his mishandling of Covid and on and on and on and on.“I know that the Republicans who right now are acting very bold and the donors who are acting very frisky – as Trump starts winning primaries, they will bend the knee, they will break, they will fall, they will all come back into line.”When Trump scheduled his announcement of a third run for the White House this month, he had hoped to ride a “red wave” of midterm election successes and sweep aside potential rivals within the Republican party. But the red wave ebbed and his anticlimactic campaign launch had the opposite effect.With Trump at arguably his weakest point since last year’s January 6 insurrection, senior Republicans are criticising his losing habit, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is ridiculing him and big money donors such as Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman are deserting what they perceive as a sinking ship.The new conventional wisdom – or wishful thinking – among numerous pundits is that, after surviving crisis after crisis, Trump has finally met his Waterloo. A slew of federal, state and congressional investigations and opinion polls showing DeSantis ahead or level lend credence to this view.Some have noted, however, that Trump maintains an iron grip on his base and, just as in 2016, that might be enough to win a Republican primary race in which the anti-Trump vote is split among several candidates.Wilson, 59, author of the books Everything Trump Touches Dies and Running Against The Devil: A Plot To Save America from Trump and Democrats From Themselves, says: “He controls a quarter, at the minimum, of the Republican base. Even if it’s 15% and he goes into Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, and he wins primaries because he has 15% going in, that’s the ballgame. It’s over. It’s done. Everybody else, it’s all over bar the crying.”He adds: “Right now they’re all talking so much shit: ‘I’m not going to get with Trump. I’m going to be with the hot new number, DeSantis.’ When DeSantis gets his ass handed to him, when he gets his clock cleaned in a debate or forum or just by Trump grinding away at him, eating him alive mentally for weeks on end, and suddenly Donald Trump’s numbers start posting up again, all the conservative thinkers who are right now like, ‘We will never vote for Trump again, we have integrity!’ will find themselves some excuse. ‘Well, you know, we don’t like Trump’s tweets, but otherwise it’s pure communism!’“It’s all bullshit, it’s all a fucking game, and that game is going to play out in a way that does not result in the outcome that the donor class thinks they’re going to get.”Wilson, who began his career on the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush, worked as a consultant and political ad maker for numerous candidates and state parties. In December 2019 he and other Republican operatives founded the Lincoln Project, a political action committee that assailed Trump with a punch-in-the-mouth brio eschewed by “when they go low, we go high” Democrats.Some of the co-founders have acknowledged their part in the Republican party’s descent into bloodsport, hypocrisy and extremism. Wilson told an audience at the group’s launch event: “We have, as the great political philosopher Liam Neeson once said, a particular set of skills. Skills that make us a nightmare for people like Donald Trump.”He produced slick advertisements that got under the president’s skin and helped make the Lincoln Project the best known of the so-called Never Trump groups, raising tens of millions of dollars.But its meteoric rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. The group’s co-founder John Weaver was revealed to have sent sexually charged messages to multiple men, sometimes with offers of employment or advancement. There were allegations of opaque accounting and financial impropriety that Wilson and others adamantly deny. A glut of high-profile figures resigned.But the Lincoln Project has survived in slimmed down form and continued to wage war on Trump and Trumpism in the midterms. Paradoxically, its continued relevance partly depends on Trump’s own; without him, it loses the principal reason for its creation. It has already launched attacks on DeSantis as a “new ultra-Maga megastar” who poses his own threat to American democracy.Living in the Florida state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is ideally placed to take stock of the governor, a former US navy lawyer and congressman whose own brand of conservative populism and “anti-wokeness” helped him win re-election by nearly 20 percentage points over the Democrat Charlie Crist.He says: “Ron DeSantis won an election in Florida against a three-time loser, a campaign that was run by the best Republican party in the country, and I mean that because I’m a guy who helped over many years elect many people in the great state of Florida. The quality of our operation here made it look easy.“Has Ron DeSantis been to the rodeo? Has he been out there in the fight? Has he actually faced up against a full campaign of the brutality and the cruelty that Donald Trump will level against him? He has not. It’s like he’s walked on to the field on to third base and thought he hit a grand slam home run. It’s easy for Republicans to win in Florida. It’s how it’s supposed to be: we built it that way. In a Republican primary against Trump, even Trump in a weakened state still has an innate feral sense of cruelty and cunning that Ron DeSantis does not have. How does Trump know that? He watched the debate.”Wilson is referring to a gubernatorial debate in which Crist asked his opponent to commit to another full four-year term in the governor’s mansion; like a rabbit caught in headlights, DeSantis, 44, struggled to answer directly.“It was nine seconds of the gears moving in his head and you could see the agony on his face, like ‘I don’t know what to say.’ Trump never has a doubt. He may be an asshole but he never has a doubt. Ron is over-intellectualising it and I’m telling you: this guy has a glass jaw.”This, Wilson predicts, will become apparent on the debate stage, a setting where Florida Republicans such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio struggled against Trump in 2016. “All of a sudden, all that donor money is going to go, ‘Oh, fuck,’ and then they’re going to call Ron’s people and go, ‘Hey, listen, we love Ron but we’re worried. We’re gonna have to sit this one out for a little while. Let’s see what it looks like in a month.’“And then a month will pass and all of a sudden Donald Trump is the nominee. That’s how it’s going to go and I don’t say this out of any joy; I say this because I’ve just been to this fucking party too many times now.”Wilson also suggests that DeSantis may lack the personal touch and knack for retail politics that is crucial in a Republican primary. A recent New Yorker magazine profile noted several people describing “his lack of curiosity about others, his indifferent table manners, his aversion to the political rituals of dispensing handshakes and questions about the kids”.Wilson opines: “You’re telling me you’re going to send Ron DeSantis to New Hampshire where he has to go and sit in a diner with the Merrimack county GOP chairman and that 79-year-old codger is going to want to talk to Ron DeSantis about the gold standard or whatever and Ron DeSantis is going to sit there and get bored and restless and leave or be angry? I’m sorry. Sell me another fantasy of Ron DeSantis the perfect candidate.”TopicsRepublicansRon DeSantisDonald TrumpFloridaUS politicsHillary ClintonUS elections 2016featuresReuse this content More

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      Kenneth Starr obituary

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      Kenneth Starr obituaryAmerican lawyer whose 1998 Starr report led to the impeachment of Bill Clinton Kenneth Starr, who has died aged 76 after complications from surgery, was the independent prosecutor whose investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s investment in a real-estate project called Whitewater began in somewhat pious partisanship and descended into prurience. It led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury based on his lying about his relationship with a White House aide, Monica Lewinsky.The Clinton impeachment was an American watershed. Following the OJ Simpson trial of the mid-1990s, it established scandal as the fuel that powered television news, but more importantly it pointed the way to use congressional investigation in order to disrupt a presidency, a tactic followed repeatedly against the Barack Obama administration, including six House investigations, lasting more than two years, of the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, over the assault on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya.His proteges, including the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, and justice Brett Kavanaugh, Starr’s key Whitewater aide, spoke highly of him following his death. His career was inexorably bound to sex scandals, starting with his 1993 review of the Republican Senator Bob Packwood’s diaries in Senate ethics committee hearings over accusations of sexual abuse and assault.As part of Jeffrey Epstein’s legal team, Starr crucially lobbied federal authorities to drop their sex-trafficking prosecution and allow Epstein to plead guilty, in 2008, to lesser state charges with a far lighter sentence in Florida.Towards the end of his career, in 2016, Starr was forced to step down as president of Baylor University over that institution’s failure to pursue rape charges against football players.And while supporters rejected accusations of partisan hypocrisy, the man whose Whitewater mantra was “there’s no excuse for perjury – never, never, never. There is truth and the truth demands respect,” wound up defending the then president Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial, in 2020, having already, as an analyst on Fox News, advised that Trump’s impeachment would be “bad for the country”.Starr’s Washington career had its roots in his religious upbringing. Born in Vernon, Texas, he grew up in small towns in the state’s panhandle where his father, Willie D Starr, was a barber and sometime minister in the Churches of Christ; his mother, Vannie (nee Trimble), was a homemaker. They moved to San Antonio, where Kenneth was voted “most likely to succeed” in his high school.Following two years at what is now Harding University in Arkansas, he transferred to George Washington University in DC, graduating in 1968 with a BA in history. In 1970 he took a master’s in political science at Brown University, Rhode Island, and married Alice Mendell, who worked in public relations, before getting his law degree from Duke University, North Carolina, in 1973.After working as a clerk for the supreme court chief justice Warren Burger, in 1977 Starr joined the law firm Gibson Dunn. He went on in 1981 to become chief of staff to William French Smith, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general; two years later Reagan appointed Starr to the US court of appeals for the district of Columbia.In 1989 Starr left the bench to become George HW Bush’s solicitor general; Roberts was his assistant. The following year Bush considered Starr for a place on the supreme court, but Republicans in Congress feared Starr was not conservative enough. Ironically, Bush’s appointee, David Souter, turned out to be far less conservative than they had hoped. Two years later, Starr’s review of Packwood’s diaries convinced the ethics committee chair, Mitch McConnell, of Starr’s deft conservativism.So, when the original Whitewater independent counsel, Robert B Fiske, issued his interim report clearing the Clintons of fraud and of any involvement in the suicide of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, Fiske was ousted and, in August 1994, Starr appointed.By 1997, despite plea bargains and imprisoning witnesses who refused to implicate the Clintons, Starr had done little but endorse Fiske’s findings about Foster. He wanted to leave and become dean of public policy at Pepperdine College, but was convinced to stay until the 1998 elections.In January 1998, Clinton gave a deposition in a civil suit for sexual harassment filed by Paula Jones, saying he had never had a workplace affair; one of the women included in his denial was a White House staffer named Monica Lewinsky.Ken Starr: ‘There are eerie echoes of the past’Read moreTwo days later, Starr, who had advised Jones’s lawyers, was given tapes made secretly of Lewinsky admitting her affair with Clinton. This led to the orgy of coverage about semen-stained dresses and inserted cigars, as Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony set up a perjury trap for Clinton sprung by Kavanaugh, who aimed “to make his pattern of revolting behaviour clear, piece by painful piece”.As the case grew steamier, Kenneth Starr was rebranded “Ken” in the media, in an effort to make his shock more like an average Joe’s. Clinton was forced to answer a series of graphically explicit questions about the details of his relationship with Lewinsky. The House duly impeached, but the Senate acquitted Clinton. Starr rejoined the corporate law firm Kirkwood and Ellis, best known for defending the tobacco group Brown & Williamson.In 2004 he finally went to Pepperdine, as dean of the law school. In later cases he argued for Blackwater mercenaries accused of murdering civilians in Iraq, claiming they had “constitutional immunity”, and against California’s legalisation of gay marriage.He became president of Baylor, in Waco, Texas, in 2010, and chancellor in 2013. Although at least 17 women had accused football players of rape since he became president, he claimed during an investigation that “never was it brought to my attention there were issues”.He was found to have mishandled the accusations of sexual assault against members of the football team and removed as president in 2016; he then resigned as chancellor and as a professor of law.In his 2018 memoir, Contempt, Starr wrote: “I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation, but there was no practical alternative.”He is survived by Alice, their son, Randall, and two daughters, Carolyn and Cynthia, and by a sister, Billie Jeayne, and a brother, Jerry.TopicsUS newsBill ClintonHillary ClintonMonica LewinskyOJ SimpsonBrett KavanaughJeffrey EpsteinobituariesReuse this content More

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      Hillary Clinton laments US extremism and calls for unity on 9/11 anniversary

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      Hillary Clinton laments US extremism and calls for unity on 9/11 anniversaryFormer US secretary of state makes an impassioned attack on turn towards extremism and divisiveness in American politics Hillary Clinton seized the opportunity presented by Sunday’s 21st anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington to make a thinly-veiled attack on the extremism and divisiveness stoked by Donald Trump, as she called for a return to national unity.The former US secretary of state and first lady invoked the bipartisan mood of the country in the wake of the 9/11 attack in which almost 3,000 people were killed.“We were able to come together as a country at that terrible time, we put aside differences. I wish we could find ways of doing that again,” she told CNN in and interview for the State of the Union politics show on Sunday morning.It was recalled how, as a Democratic US Senator for New York, in 2001 she flew over the burning wreckage of the World Trade Center at the disaster zone known as Ground Zero, in lower Manhattan, and went on air to pledge her unswerving support for Republican president George W Bush’s efforts to lead the US response.Clinton noted that she met with Bush and asked for $20bn in federal funds to rebuild. “And he said ‘You got it’,” she told CNN anchor Dana Bash.Clinton’s lament for the passing of such national togetherness then led her to make an impassioned attack on the turn towards extremism in American politics, albeit without mentioning Trump, the former Republican president who may yet run again in 2024, by name.She said that 9/11 reminded Americans “about how impossible it is to try and deal with extremism of any kind, especially when it uses violence to try to achieve political and ideological goals”.In another implicit reference to Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) rightwing movement, she went on to say that a “very vocal, very powerful, very determined minority wants to impose their views on the rest of us. It’s time for everybody, regardless of party, to say no, that’s not who we are as America.”Clinton’s remarks came on the morning that the US marked 21 years of the al-Qaida attacks on the twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, as well as Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Joe Biden laid a wreath at the Pentagon, where he recalled that “terror struck us on that brilliant blue morning” but did not destroy “the character of this nation that terrorists sought to wound”.Biden, who lost his first wife and their daughter to a car crash that also injured their two sons, then later lost one of those sons, Beau, to cancer, said: “I know for all of you who lost someone that 21 years is a lifetime and no time at all.”The US president was joined in the pouring rain by General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and defense secretary Lloyd Austin, who spoke about “a day of horror and loss” as 2,977 people were killed by the impact of the four passenger jets hijacked by the terrorists.First lady Jill Biden led commemorations at the memorial site in Shanksville, accompanied by her sister Bonny Roberts, whom Biden initially feared she might have lost that day as she was a flight attendant for United Airlines, which suffered two of the hijackings, but, it turned out, was not flying that morning.Kamala Harris and the second gentleman, her husband Doug Emhoff, joined the observance at the National September 11 Memorial in New York.The vice-president did not speak, as per tradition, allowing the commemoration to be led by the reading of the names of those who died and moments of silence to mark the points when the hijacked planes struck each of the towers.But in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, aired on Sunday, she spoke of America’s reputation as a world role model for democracy being under threat.She cited challenges from the right wing to election integrity, including the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a bid to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, and extremist Republicans’ unwillingness to condemn it, while also fielding many candidates in current elections who still refuse to accept the true result.“I think it is a threat…it is very dangerous and I think it is very harmful. And it makes us weaker,” she said.She added that when meeting foreign leaders, the US “had the honor and privilege historically of holding our head up as a defender and an example of a great democracy. And that then gives us the legitimacy and the standing to talk about the importance of democratic principles, rule of law, human rights….through the process of what we’ve been through, we’re starting to allow people to call into question our commitment to those principles. And that’s a shame.”On Sunday, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the US House of Representatives, slammed the Biden administration.“Twenty one years ago, we had a commander-in-chief [George W Bush] who united the country rather than divided the country,” McCarthy told Fox News. He said were the Republicans to take back control of the House in November’s midterm elections, “we would build a nation that is safe. We have watched Democratic policies make it the deadliest of America (sic) in the last 20 years.”TopicsSeptember 11 2001Hillary ClintonUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansnewsReuse this content More