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      Digested week: the nice blond lady from England delivers | Emma Brockes

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      MondayTo the Republican national convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, where a longstanding tradition of British journalists interviewing Americans in a style euphemistically known as “irreverent” continues to deliver results.A recent hit in this particular genre: Andrew Neil interviewing Ben Shapiro, the rightwing American commentator, by repeatedly barking: “What’s your answer?”, giving him withering looks over his specs, and parrying Shapiro’s incredulous meltdown – “I frankly don’t give a damn what you think of me given I’ve never heard of you” – with the cheerful retort: “I’d never heard of you!”The latest addition to the canon comes this week from the RNC in Wisconsin courtesy of Kari Lake, a former TV anchor and Republican candidate for senator in Arizona, who sat down with Emily Maitlis with the innocence of a babysitter in the opening scenes of a horror movie. Lake, who has previously identified as a Democrat and an independent and now supports Trump, starts to twig something is wrong at around the 40-second mark, and truly, it’s a beautiful thing to see.“The tone [of political discourse] is really disturbing when the media is calling a man like Donald Trump ‘Hitler’,” says Lake, deftly deflecting a softball opener from Maitlis and seemingly unaware of the house about to fall on her head.“Like JD Vance did, you mean,” says Maitlis, leaning slightly forward and wearing her guileless-as-a-fawn face, at which British viewers jump behind the sofa and Lake looks momentarily confused. It’s all downhill from there as the slow, terrible realisation dawns on Lake that this nice blond lady from England, despite all her encouraging nods and “yeps”, is in fact her worst nightmare.By the end of the interview, Maitlis is asking: “Do Republicans need to lie … because you don’t believe you can win at the ballot box?” and Lake has been transported to a place of such incandescent rage she can only respond: “You’re just a sad case of a human being and I feel sorry for you,” and: “I actually think you need your head examined.” To which, smooth as oil and in the best Paxonian tradition, Maitlis replies: “Kari Lake: thank you very much.”View image in fullscreenTuesdayNot enough sympathy has been extended to the real victim of JD Vance’s ascent to public life, Amy Adams, whose career took a meteor-sized hit in 2020 thanks to her appearance in Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy, the movie adaptation of Vance’s bestselling memoir of 2016.As Vance’s voice rings across the US this week after becoming Trump’s pick to be vice-president, spare a thought for Adams, who can never shake off the visual memory many of us have of her as Bev, Vance’s rackety mother, chain-smoking in dungarees while Glenn Close staggers about in the background like a cross between Catherine Tate’s Nan and an Appalachian Deirdre Barlow.Hillbilly Elegy, and Vance himself, unpacking his backstory at the RNC this week, tell the heartwarming tale of a boy’s rise from poverty and despair to the world of Yale law school, a job in venture capital, and eventually the sunny uplands of radicalised ultra-right opinion, including the one Vance shared in 2021 – that staying in a violent marriage is a better option than divorce. That we must suffer Vance daily in the news is bad enough. That America’s sweetheart has somehow been dragged into all this is, on top of everything else, frankly intolerable.WednesdayA politician who puts her money where her mouth is: Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, who alongside the president of the Paris Olympic committee and several unhappy-looking political aides who’ve been vacuum-packed into wetsuits, jumped in the Seine this week to prove to dithering Olympians that it’s not full of poo.Observing the scene from the river bank, ranks of Parisiens milled about using various Gallic expressions to communicate scepticism. “I don’t like the colour of the water,” remarked one woman to the New York Times, triggering a response in the mayor’s office that can only be guessed at. Helpfully, she added: “I hope she doesn’t get spots tomorrow.”Nine days before the Olympics opens, Hidalgo’s press stunt was an effort to calm fears among international athletes that the river is too polluted for use during outdoor swimming events and, to that end, she laughed and joked, open-mouthed, in the water. Although, notably, I see she took care to get in rather carefully feet first.ThursdayBillie Eilish is rapidly losing goodwill among young fans by sticking exorbitant ticket prices on her six-night gig at the O2 in London. According to the Daily Mail this week, sales of seats starting at £250, or £145 for standing, have been so sluggish that much of the arena’s 20,000 capacity remains empty.This is, surely, the inflationary ripple effect of Taylor Swift and Madonna’s recent world tours, for which tickets exchanged hands for thousands of dollars and fans flew around the world to attend multiple dates. Earlier this year, in an apparent reference to the Swift’s Eras tour, Eilish referred to the notion of doing a three-hour show as “literally psychotic” and now faces the experience of playing to a semi-full stadium.View image in fullscreenFridayIn a straight contest between the summer heat of New York and the (usual) summer rain of the UK, there are years when I’d have taken the heat every time. This year is different. After weeks of temperatures feeling as though they are pushing up towards 100F (37.7C), a cold summer sounds like heaven. At 7.45am, I left my house to run a 10-minute errand and by the time I got back, I looked as if I’d been through a car wash. Shivering around the barbecue has never sounded so good. More

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      ‘Make Trump Human Again’ seems to emerge as Republicans’ new theme

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      Even before Donald Trump takes the stage at the Republican national convention on Thursday night, promising a speech on national unity rather than the usual partisan rancour, his team has laboured hard in the wake of the rally shooting to give the impression that he is a changed man.Gone was the Trump of “this American carnage”, the victim of witch-hunts who, if returned to the White House, would unleash a whirlwind of retribution on his enemies and be a dictator on day one. In its place was Trump the candy-peddling grandfather, the kiss-me-goodnight father, the comforting mentor and patriotic healer.It was as if the official theme of the week, Make America Great Again, had been hurriedly replaced by a new slogan: Make Trump Human Again.Kai Trump, the former US president’s 17-year-old granddaughter, helped set the tone. In a convention address on Wednesday she shared her big secret about the 78-year-old Republican nominee.“To me, he’s just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents are not looking.”The theme of a “caring and loving” Trump – Kai’s words – was reminiscent of the narrative that has long been projected by Joe Biden, who presents his candidacy as a choice for dignity, respect and civility. It was as if the Trump team had adopted Biden’s playbook as empathiser-in-chief.The approach was picked up by Trump’s newly-enshrined vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance. The Ohio senator and author of Hillbilly Elegy told the convention audience that he had recently witnessed Trump tell his elder sons Don Jr and Eric that he loved them, kissing them both on the cheek as he said goodnight.His boys “squirmed the same way my four-year-old does when his daddy tries to give him a kiss on the cheek”, Vance said.Outside the immediate family, Trump’s political family passed the baton around in earlier speeches at the convention. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Republican governor of Arkansas, not only portrayed Trump’s close shave in Pennsylvania on Saturday as an intervention from “God Almighty”, she also portrayed him as a champion of women’s rights as though E Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels had never existed.Sanders went on to laud Trump as an avuncular mentor, comforting her when she was his much-maligned White House press secretary. She recalled harsh criticism she had endured from members of the public and from journalists, especially at MSNBC.The then sitting president pulled her aside, she said, “looked me in the eye, and said: ‘Sarah, you’re smart, you’re beautiful, you’re tough, and they attack you because you’re good at your job’”.“That’s the Donald Trump I know,” Sanders added.Whether Trump can sustain the new soft-soap image presented of him in Milwaukee this week remains to be seen. He is certainly trying to cement the Maga makeover.According to Axios, he specifically instructed aides to direct prime-time convention speakers to avoid expressions of outrage in their response to Saturday’s shooting. Instead, national unity has been the name of the game.Numerous speakers linked Trump’s fist-raised pose having survived the gunman’s bullet to his newly cast image as a unifier. “He can stand defiant against an assassin one moment and call for national healing the next,” the vice-presidential nominee said glowingly.In the past eight years, America has become accustomed to various adjectives attached to Trump. They include “strong”, “patriotic” and “great”; and “incompetent”, “racist” and “narcissistic” – take your pick.What neither supporters nor detractors have tended up until now to connect to him is the word “moral”.And yet Elise Stefanik, the fourth-ranking Republican in the US House, chose just that word on the convention stage to describe a convicted felon. “President Trump will bring back moral leadership to the White House,” she said.The new look Trump, and the political strategy that appears to undergird it, has required considerable sacrifice on the part of some of his peers. We will probably have to await Ron DeSantis’s memoir to know the emotional price paid by the Florida governor when he praised the man who had derided him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and a “disloyal dog”.We can similarly only conjecture what paroxysms Nikki Haley went through to give her “strong endorsement” to the man who mocked her husband for being absent while deployed to Africa with the national guard, and who butchered her birth name Nimarata, scathingly calling her “Nimbra”. More

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      Trump’s pick of JD Vance is a clear signal: this is a fight over America’s identity | Steve Phillips

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      Donald Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate is a clear and unmistakable message that Republicans are waging a holy war over the very identity of this nation. In choosing the Ohio senator, the former US president has selected and elevated a person who is one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders and whose primary qualification for national leadership is articulating the grievances of white people unhappy with the country’s changing racial composition.Rather than even pretend to reach out to the less rabid Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the primaries or attempt to win greater support among Latinos by choosing Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, Trump has simply doubled down on his crusade to make America white again.Traditionally, vice-presidential selections aim to broaden the party’s appeal by signaling a commitment to a specific constituency or sector of the electorate. Barack Obama selected Joe Biden in 2008 to racially balance the ticket and reassure white voters that he’d have a veteran, moderate, white male political leader at his side. Biden, in turn, chose a younger woman of color to run with him to inspire and acknowledge the critical importance of women and people of color to the Democratic coalition.Trump had the opportunity to make a similar, more traditional, move. In many ways, Rubio would have been the smart pick; he’d have been the first person of color on a Republican ticket, and could plausibly have tried to appeal to Latinos and peel off some support from that cornerstone of the Democratic coalition. Others in the Republican party wanted Trump to calm the fears of the more moderate voters who had backed Haley over Trump’s bombast and division.But, true to form, Trump rejected all that counsel and went with the cultural warrior, Trump critic turned sycophant Vance.By any measure, Vance – who has no prior political experience and has only been a senator for 17 months – is grossly unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, but that is not surprising given that Trump himself is arguably the least qualified person to ever occupy the Oval Office. Vance’s primary qualification is his ability to articulate the anguish of white working-class Americans. Through his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy and his rhetoric as a candidate and now senator, Vance has done little else of note in his life than complain about how America is no longer a white-dominated country, a fact that has been painful and disorienting and hard to accept for a considerable number of white people.What perhaps poses one of the greatest dangers to this country is that Vance, like Trump, has already proven that he is committed to aggressively hacking away at the fraying social fabric that binds this nation together. Most alarmingly, Vance has said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done what Trump wanted and blocked electors from states that voted for Biden. Vance has raised money for insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the elected government of the United States and who sought to block the certification of an election in which all 50 governors – Republican and Democratic alike – certified results that showed Biden won the presidency.Vance’s contempt for democracy and democratic institutions was on full display as well in the immediate hours after the Trump rally shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, last Saturday. Before anyone even knew who the shooter was, Vance was tweeting that Biden was to blame.Electorally, the implication of Vance’s selection is that it locks into place the contours, dynamics and stakes of the election.The journalist and analyst Ron Brownstein presaged this reality 12 years ago when he described modern American politics as a battle between two constellations of people, which he called the Coalition of Restoration and the Coalition of Transformation.Democrats, he observed, “are now operating with a largely coherent Coalition of Transformation that will allow (and even pressure) them to align more unreservedly with the big cultural and demographic forces remaking America”. Conversely, Obama’s 2012 re-election “clearly stamped the Republicans as a Coalition of Restoration, overwhelmingly dependent on the votes of whites unsettled by those changes”.In my books, I describe these groupings as the New American Majority and the Modern-Day Confederates, but the concepts are the same, and the implications for contemporary elections are far-reaching and under-appreciated.In each successive presidential election since Obama was elected, all that has really mattered is which coalition of voters the nominee is championing, AKA What Side Are You On?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat dynamic will play out again this fall, as Trump has simply doubled down on trying to rally his Coalition of Restoration to turn out in large numbers. The good news for Democrats is that the Coalition of Transformation is larger than the Coalition of Restoration. Republicans know this in their bones and in their spreadsheets, and that is why they are relentlessly focused on voter suppression, introducing nearly 800 different pieces of legislation designed to make it harder to vote, according to Ari Berman’s book Give Us the Ballot and the Brennan Center’s 2021 analysis.Census data and election results over the past 40 years further affirm the fact that the Coalition of Transformation is larger. With the sole exception of 2004, the Democratic nominee for president has won the popular vote in every single presidential election since 1992. The logical result of one party rooting its politics in appeals to white racial fears and resentment is that the other party gets the majority of support from people of color.In a country where nearly half of the residents are people of color (41%) the Republican party remains overwhelmingly monochromatic; according to a Pew Research analysis, 83% of Republican voters are white. Conversely, 72% of people of color supported Biden in 2020, and no Democratic nominee has ever received less than 83% of the African American vote since the advent of exit polling in 1976.By picking Vance, the Republicans show they are not going to try to broaden their coalition: they’re just going to go harder with their shrinking coalition and focus on getting their supporters to the polls. Democrats need to have similar clarity and focus, and devote their resources and energy to maximizing voter turnout from now until election day. If they can do that, they will win – and JD Vance’s voice, and Trump’s, will remain far from the White House.

      Steve Phillips is the founder of Democracy in Color, and author of Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority and How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good More

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      Trump’s Republican convention speech: how to watch and what’s at stake

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      The biggest event of the Republican convention kicks off Thursday night, with Donald Trump’s address to thousands of party loyalists in attendance.Trump appeared at the opening night of the Republican national convention on Monday, when he was greeted with thunderous applause, marking his first public appearance since surviving an assassination attempt at his campaign rally. Earlier in the day, Trump announced JD Vance, the Ohio senator and once vocal critic of Trump, as his running mate.Vance formally accepted the Republican vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday, with a speech that presented the Republican party as a champion of working-class Americans while denouncing Democrats as out of touch and ineffective.Other speakers on the third day of the convention included Matt Gaetz, Newt Gingrich, Peter Navarro, Greg Abbott, Kellyanne Conway, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr.Notable speakers at the convention so far have also included Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who both challenged Trump for the GOP nomination but backed him at the convention. Sean O’Brien, Ted Cruz, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Ben Carson, Kristi Noem, Rick Scott, Tim Scott and Tom Cotton also spoke at the convention.When is Trump’s convention speech?Trump is expected to deliver remarks on Thursday evening, the final day of the Republican convention, as delegates officially vote to nominate him as the party’s presidential candidate. His speech is scheduled to begin at 9p.m.Earlier this week, Trump told the Washington Examiner that he rewrote his convention speech to focus on calls for national unity. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now,” he told the paper.“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” he said, adding that the speech will be “a lot different” from the original draft.What else to know?After surviving Saturday’s assassination attempt, Trump suggested he had been changed by the experience and wanted to project a message of unity during his convention speech. In an interview Sunday, Trump said he is reworking his remarks with speechwriter Ross Worthington. He had intended to deliver biting remarks against Joe Biden until the shooting at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, prompted him to throw it out.The test of whether Trump will lead the effort to promote a spirit of unity, or whether it was more of a directive aimed at his surrogates, will probably come when he delivers his speech on Thursday.Where can I watch it?The Guardian will have live coverage of the speech. All major networks will carry convention coverage, including CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News and C-SPAN. PBS said it will begin broadcasting each night at 6pm ET.A livestream of the convention is also available on the GOP Convention website.Will Melania be in the audience for Trump’s speech?Former first lady Melania Trump has made very few public appearances or statements since Trump left the White House. She did not attend the 27 June debate against Joe Biden, nor did she appear at any of Trump’s court appearances during the hush-money trial.Following Saturday’s assassination attempt against Trump, Melania released a statement condemning the man who authorities say tried to assassinate her husband. She described the shooter as “a monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine”.Melania will attend the convention, according to Eric Trump, but she is not confirmed as a speaker.What about Ivanka Trump?Ivanka Trump has spent the last several years distancing herself from politics, having served as an advisor in her father’s White House. She and her husband Jared Kushner testified before the House committee investigating the January 6 attack.The eldest daughter of the former president was absent in November, 2022 as Trump announced his bid for re-election. “I do not plan to be involved in politics,” she said in a statement at the time.Eric Trump confirmed Ivanka will attend the convention; however unlike in 2016, she’s not confirmed as a speaker.Tiffany Trump is not on the list of confirmed speakers but was in the crowd Monday night. Barron Trump was invited, but will not attend “due to prior commitments”, according to a statement released by his mother, Melania.Trump’s eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump; Eric’s wife, Lara Trump; and Guilfoyle (Donald Jr’s finance) are listed as speakers. More

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      Key takeaways from day three of the Republican national convention

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      Republicans had a new chant on Wednesday night: not just “Trump! Trump!” but also “JD! JD! JD!” in honor of Trump’s new vice-presidential pick, Ohio senator JD Vance, who introduced himself to the country Wednesday night in a confident and personal primetime address.Also new: the professionally printed signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” a reference to Trump’s campaign pledge to engage in the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history.Here are five key takeaways from the night:1. Republicans are simply not talking about abortionDuring his race for the US senate in Ohio, Vance said that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. In 2022, he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”, expressing sympathy for the view that a national abortion ban was necessary to stop women from traveling to different states in order to get abortions.A section on Vance’s Senate website, accessible as late as Monday, read, simply, “End abortion,” calling him “100% pro-life, a Huffington Post reporter noted. By Wednesday, that message had vanished, as Vance’s old website simply redirected to Trump’s presidential campaign site.Vance similarly erased his anti-abortion views from his primetime speech to the RNC on Wednesday, and as my colleagues have noted, he’s far from alone. There’s been a conspicuous silence on abortion throughout the Republican convention, as well as on other issues that Republicans appear to see as weaknesses, like Project 2025 and the future of American democracy.2. Warm reaction to Vance’s bestselling life story, as ‘hillbilly’ aims for White House The Republican national convention crowd was already eating out of Vance’s hand, as the charismatic 39-year-old Ohio senator talked them through the life story that made him into the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 memoir that became a 2020 feature film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.Vance had described growing up “a working-class boy born far from the halls of power” in Middletown, Ohio, with a single mother who struggled with addiction, and a tough, loving grandmother who kept him from falling prey to a local drug dealer. He described his journey from the Marine Corps, to Yale, to working in venture capital, to being chosen as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.He neatly contrasted his youth to Biden’s age, noting policies Biden supported when he was in high school, and saying: “Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive.” Then, talking about other single mothers like his, who had struggled with addiction but never given up, he revealed that his mother, Beverly Aikins, was in the RNC audience with him, and that she is “10 years clean and sober”.“I love you, mom,” he said, suggesting that she might he able to celebrate her full 10 years of sobriety next year in the White House.As the cameras panned to Vance’s smiling mother, she mouthed, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!” And the crowd started chanting, “JD’s mom! JD’s mom!”3. It’s clear that JD’s job is to woo the rust belt Vance shouted out to his home state of Ohio in his speech, but he quickly cut off the chants of “O-H-I-O,” quipping, “We gotta win Michigan too.”His speech was threaded with references to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky, which he connected to the struggles of his Ohio hometown, and to the importance of restoring American factories and American manufacturing.Vance described a series of economic and foreign policy choices Biden made over his long career that, he argued, hurt American workers, particularly those in towns like he grew up in. Some observers saw the speech as a rewriting of Vance’s own life narrative, shifting from Hillbilly Elegy’s preoccupation with Appalachian poverty’s connection to cultural problems and personal responsibility, to instead blaming politician Joe Biden for creating the conditions that left the people he grew up with, impoverished.Strikingly, Vance came onstage to the country twang of Merle Haggard’s 2005 protest ballad, America First, which expressed the singer’s opposition to the Iraq war.4. Republicans highlighted grief and anger over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021Some of the family members of the 13 soldiers killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack at Kabul airport during the “disastrous” US withdrawal from Afghanistan spoke at the RNC to criticize Biden.Alicia Lopez, whose son, Corporal Hunter Lopez, was killed on 26 August 2021, said: “Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us. The Biden administration has not owned up to the bad decisions, they have not been transparent about their failures and their so-called leaders work to protect themselves, rather than our sons and daughters who took the oath to defend our country.”A mother-in-law of a marine killed at Abbey Gate said that Trump, in contrast, had spent dedicated time with family members, offering them what she felt was genuine support in their grief. The family members were also featured in a video in which they said that when they met with Biden as their loved ones’ bodies arrived at a military base in Delaware, the president appeared to check his watch during the ceremony.Other pro-Trump veterans also spoke to the lasting sense of anger and betrayal they felt in witnessing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the struggles and fears of the Afghans they had worked with who were left behind as the Taliban seized control of the country.“Throughout our careers, we never had regrets about our service, but this moral injury caused many of us to ask: ‘Why did we serve, if this was the outcome?’” Scott Neil, a retired green beret, said.A scathing state department review of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan concluded that both the Trump and Biden administrations were to blame as “during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow”.But the RNC’s focus on the withdrawal also took aim at one of Biden’s political strengths. As someone who has lost family members to a car accident and cancer, he has often been praised for his ability to grieve with people, and offer them support in moments of profound loss, even being referred to as “the designated mourner”. But on Wednesday, the RNC offered multiple speakers who portrayed Trump as the man who would comfort Americans in their grief and Biden as a self-involved politician.5. Chants of “Bring them home” as parents of 7 October hostage speak Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped during the 7 October attack in Israel, said Trump had supported them, asked the RNC for continued support in securing their son’s safe return. Omer is one of eight American hostages, Ronen Neutra said.“President Trump called us personally right after the attack, when Omer was taken captive,” Ronen Neutra said. “We know he stands with the American hostages. We need our beautiful son back and we need your support. We need your support to end this crisis and bring all the hostages back home.”Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School student who was part of a group of students who filed a lawsuit alleging that Harvard failed to address antisemitism on campus, also spoke, as did members of a University of North Carolina fraternity who held up an American flag during a pro-Palestine campus protest.Chris Stein and Carter Sherman contributed reporting More

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      Biden hasn’t done enough to ease age concerns, former top Obama adviser says – live

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      David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, warns that Joe Biden has not done enough to relieve voters’ concern about his age since last month’s hapless debate performance.“I’ve felt for a long time, and I’ve said for a long time, it’s not in any way a commentary on his record, which I think will be honoured more by history than it is by voters right now,” Axelrod told the Guardian in Milwaukee on Wednesday.“But it’s a very hard case to make that anyone should be elected president in the United States at the age of 82, not for political reasons but for actuarial reasons. This is the hardest job on the planet. It takes a lot out of you. It’s a legitimate concern that people have and that concern has been intensified by what happened at the debate. I don’t think anything that’s happened has relieved that concern.”Axelrod, chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, was speaking after an event organised by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the Republican national convention.Asked whether he thinks Biden can survive, Axelrod replied: “That’s entirely in his hands and that’s been the case. This whole race has been in his hands, his decision to run and now his decision to stay.“There’s a lot to think about because I know he’s laid out the stakes in this election. The question he has to answer is, what are the odds of his winning? Would the odds be better with another candidate? I’m sure there’s a lot of discussion about that.”The president’s re-election campaign has ended the pause on advertising it imposed following the Saturday assassination attempt against Donald Trump, a Biden-Harris campaign official told the Guardian’s US politics live blog.The first new ad features abortion-rights activist Hadley Duvall, and in addition to attacking Trump singles out JD Vance, Trump’s newly announced running mate. See it here:Jack Smith, the justice department special counsel, has filed an appeal of judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling earlier this week dismissing Donald Trump’s indictment on charges of illegally possessing classified documents.Here’s the latest on this long-running legal saga:The Trump campaign has announced that it will not yet schedule a debate between JD Vance and Kamala Harris, citing uncertainty over who will be the Democratic nominee for vice-president.The decision is a reference to continued tension among Democrats over whether Joe Biden should seek re-election, after his poor showing at his first debate with Donald Trump. The president insists he has no plans to step aside, but if he did, the new nominee would have to find their own running mate.“We don’t know who the Democrat nominee for vice-president is going to be, so we can’t lock in a date before their convention. To do so would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement.The Biden-Harris campaign had previously proposed three possible dates for the vice-presidential debate, all before the beginning of the Democratic convention on 19 August, where the party will formalize the presidential ticket.Donald Trump’s campaign has encouraged speakers at the Republican national convention to stay away from extreme rhetoric, and in some cases directly edited their speeches, NBC News reports.At the convention thus far, there have been few to no mentions of topics liked the January 6 insurrection, or Trump’s baseless claims that he lost the 2020 election unfairly. That’s a deliberate strategy his campaign shifted to following the assassination attempt on Saturday, as it now looks to project an image of unity.Here’s more on that, from NBC:
      Trump said that he had rewritten his own speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination ahead of Thursday night after surviving an assassination attempt. The Trump campaign has said that now he intends to home in on the theme of unifying America.
      Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga, said Wednesday before delivering his convention address, ‘Frankly, they sent the same message to those of us giving speeches.’
      ‘We always planned to be a reflection of our party’s unity and remind the American people of the difference between President Trump’s success and Crooked Joe Biden’s failure,’ Brian Hughes, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said in a statement. ‘The convention messages from everyday Americans and policymakers have met that goal. This convention is one of the greatest ever held and will launch us forward to victory in November.’
      While convention speakers this week have served up plenty of red meat to the thousands of delegates in attendance, particularly on the issues of immigration and crime, they have steered away from some of the party’s more divisive topics and talk of seeking retribution.
      Through the convention’s first two nights, speakers have not mentioned the following issues: unfounded claims of stolen elections; the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; investigating Trump’s political opponents, including Biden; and investigating the prosecutors who have sought indictments against him, like Special Counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
      A video where Trump mentions the unsubstantiated threat of Democrats ‘cheating’ in the upcoming election was played during the first two nights of the convention.
      Asked if the toned-down theme would continue through the week, Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., said, ‘I do.’
      ‘I mean, it starts with Trump,’ he continued. ‘Hopefully, JD [Vance] picks that up. And others. Trump said he didn’t want people to change their speeches, but I think that they will.’
      Anyone attending the Republican national convention could be forgiven for thinking they have stepped into a mirror world where Donald Trump is a saint, not a twice-impeached former president convicted of 34 felonies.On Wednesday, Brenna Bird, the attorney general of Iowa, was asked why she travelled to New York to support the former US president during his hush-money trial.“I was glad to go out to New York to support him during that trial because I’m a prosecutor and I have prosecuted many criminal defendants, but I’ve never seen anything like that,” Bird told international reporters at a Foreign Press Centers briefing.“It’s a travesty. It’s not how the legal process is supposed to work. As a prosecutor, I’ve never taken someone’s politics into account when deciding whether to charge a crime. That is just wrong and, if it’s allowed to happen, it breaks down the rule of law and the constitutional order.”Bird added: “I went there specifically as a prosecutor to support President Trump because what was happening was an injustice and I wanted to be there and stand up for what was right and support President Trump. I think we saw his character during that trial. He doesn’t give up and he keeps on moving forward and that’s exactly what our country needs right now.”In May, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records alleging he was involved in a scheme that sought to cover up extramarital affairs in advance of the 2016 presidential election. The New York state prosecution had no connection to Biden and there was no evidence of jury bias against Trump.Here’s where the day stands:

      Joe Biden said he would consider dropping out of the presidential race if a “medical condition” emerged, the New York Times reports, citing an excerpt released from Biden’s interview with Ed Gordon of BET News. According to the Times, Biden was asked if there was any reason that would make him reconsider staying in the presidential race. In response, Biden said: “If I had some medical condition that emerged, if somebody, if doctors came to me and said, you got this problem and that problem.”

      John Hinckley, the man who shot and wounded president Ronald Reagan in 1981, has released his own statement following Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on Saturday. In a tweet on Wednesday, Hinckley, who was released in 2022 after spending 41 years under federal oversight, wrote: “Violence is not the way to go. Give peace a chance.”

      Kamala Harris has accepted a third possible date to hold a CBS-hosted vice-presidential debate against Trump’s newly announced running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance. The Biden-Harris campaign said it was open to a showdown with Vance on Monday, 12 August, as well. Harris had previously agreed to participate in the debate on either Tuesday, 23 July, or Tuesday, 13 August.

      The high-profile California Democrat Adam Schiff has called on Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. Schiff, in a statement to the Los Angeles Times, said that Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, and his lifetime of service as a Senator, a vice president, and now as president has made our country better” adding: “But our nation is at a crossroads.”

      Joe Biden lashed out at a “tense” meeting with dozens of House Democrats who bluntly questioned his viability as their party’s presidential nominee, according to reports. During the Saturday Zoom call, Colorado representative Jason Crow told Biden that voters are concerned about his vigor and strength, and noted the importance of national security in the November election, the reports say.

      Lloyd Doggett, the Texas representative who became the first House Democrat to publicly call on Joe Biden to step aside, has doubled down and urged the president to withdraw from the ticket in the face of “the reality of steadily, worsening poll numbers”. “My call for President Biden to step aside remains even more urgent,” Doggett said in a statement on Wednesday.

      During the Democratic press conference in Milwaukee, the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, was pressed on the party’s plans to nominate Joe Biden via a roll call vote in the coming days. Walz, who co-chairs the Democratic national convention’s rules committee, confirmed that delegates would not begin voting before 1 August, and the governor’s spokesperson confirmed that the process should wrap up by 7 August.

      Donald Trump does not have stitches but has a “nice flesh wound”, his son Eric Trump said following his father’s assassination attempt. In an interview with CBS, Eric said: “You know, he was millimeters away from having his life expunged … I’m sure the ear doesn’t feel well.”

      Nearly two-thirds of Democrats want Joe Biden to withdraw his re-election bid, a new AP-NORC poll has found. According to the poll, which was mostly conducted before Donald Trump’s assassination attempt on Saturday, 65% of Democrats say that Biden should withdraw. Overall, seven in 10 American adults say that Biden should drop out of the race.

      The Democratic National Committee said that its virtual roll call to officially nominate Joe Biden as its party’s presidential nominee will happen in August, CBS reports. In a letter obtained and reported by CBS on Wednesday, the chairs of the Democratic national convention’s rules committee, Leah Daughtry and Tim Walz, wrote: “We have confirmed with the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic National Convention that no virtual voting will begin before August 1 … .”
      David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, warns that Joe Biden has not done enough to relieve voters’ concern about his age since last month’s hapless debate performance.“I’ve felt for a long time, and I’ve said for a long time, it’s not in any way a commentary on his record, which I think will be honoured more by history than it is by voters right now,” Axelrod told the Guardian in Milwaukee on Wednesday.“But it’s a very hard case to make that anyone should be elected president in the United States at the age of 82, not for political reasons but for actuarial reasons. This is the hardest job on the planet. It takes a lot out of you. It’s a legitimate concern that people have and that concern has been intensified by what happened at the debate. I don’t think anything that’s happened has relieved that concern.”Axelrod, chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns, was speaking after an event organised by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report on the sidelines of the Republican national convention.Asked whether he thinks Biden can survive, Axelrod replied: “That’s entirely in his hands and that’s been the case. This whole race has been in his hands, his decision to run and now his decision to stay.“There’s a lot to think about because I know he’s laid out the stakes in this election. The question he has to answer is, what are the odds of his winning? Would the odds be better with another candidate? I’m sure there’s a lot of discussion about that.”Following Rudy Giuliani’s fall at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee on Tuesday, the 80-year-old disbarred lawyer’s spokesperson Ted Goodman released the following statement on Wednesday:
      Mayor Rudy Giuliani appreciates everyone’s concern after tripping over a dip in the walkway on the convention floor of the convention.
      The mayor and I were both filming footage for his social media and livestream programs on the floor of the convention, when he turned to set some equipment on a chair and tripped over a dip between the walkway and chairs.
      Those falsely suggesting anything else are misleading the public for their own agendas.
      The rift among Democrats is deepening over Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy despite party leaders saying Biden is the nominee.Joan E Greve and Martin Pengelly report for the Guardian:Demands for Joe Biden to step aside as the Democrats’ presidential pick to face Donald Trump have slowed since the Republican survived an assassination attempt last weekend, to the extent that on Wednesday one “prominent strategist” was moved to say of the rebellion: “It’s over.”The strategist spoke anonymously to the Hill – and before the influential California congressman Adam Schiff said publicly that Biden should quit.Nonetheless, in Milwaukee, at a press conference during the Republican national convention, Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and a party grandee, said Biden would be confirmed as the Democratic nominee by virtual vote between 1 and 7 August, before the Chicago convention.For the full story, click here:Joe Biden’s campaign team released a new ad on Wednesday featuring Hadley Duvall, a 22-year-old abortion-rights activist from Owensboro, Kentucky.In the ad, Duvall, who was in an emotional ad last year during governor Andy Beshear’s re-election campaign, describes her experience of being impregnated by her stepfather, who raped her when she was 12 years old.She said:
      I’m from Kentucky where, because of Donald Trump, an extreme abortion ban is now in place, with no exceptions for rape or incest. During the overturn [of Roe v Wade], I went back to the time I was 12 years old and I was holding my first pregnancy test in my hand …
      Trump brags about overturning Roe v Wade. He is ‘proudly responsible’ for each and every abortion ban across the country. And he calls them a ‘beautiful thing to watch.’ What is so beautiful about telling a 12-year-old girl that she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her? The stakes of this election could not be higher for our choices. More

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      Ohio voters hope son of soil JD Vance will ‘do something good for us’

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      For many in Middletown, Ohio, JD Vance is better-known as a bestselling author and hit Hollywood movie subject than a politician who on Monday was propelled into the political big time as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick.Amanda Bailey moved into Vance’s grandmother’s house, the home in which Vance was mostly raised, 18 months ago. Since then, she’s been dealing with a steady stream of curious passersby inspired by Vance’s 2016 autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, and the 2020 film of the same name, driving by and taking photos of the house.Bailey, who works at a local hardware store, admits she’s not entirely up to speed with Vance’s policy positions.“I hope he’ll do something good for us, and I think he will,” she says.Her thoughts are echoed by Jerry Dobbins, who has lived three doors down the street for the past 31 years. Dobbins says his memories of Vance’s family are mainly of the vice-presidential candidate’s grandmother, Bonnie, who mostly raised JD and his sister, Lindsay.“Bonnie was a tough bird. She was just a strong woman from Kentucky,” he says.But there’s a reason Bailey, Dobbins and a number of other Middletown residents say they are not especially concerned by Vance being rocketed into the political mainstream without much in the way of experience – it’s because they have complete faith in the person who picked him: Donald Trump.“I like Trump,” says Bailey. “And I think they’ll do a lot of good work together.”“Trump’s not a politician. He’s a businessman,” says Dobbins, who worked as a fabricator at a nearby aerospace company before retiring. “When Trump got in [in 2016], things started looking better economy-wise, business-wise. I don’t think he can be beat [in November].”The Middletown Vance was raised in is not unlike the dozens of other left-behind communities in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and beyond, where Trump’s particular brand of politics and rhetoric has found favor. In Butler county, which encompasses most of Middletown and several satellite towns of Cincinnati, Trump beat Biden by 24 points in the 2020 election.Like thousands of others, Vance’s family were lured from Appalachia to Ohio by the promise of work at Middletown’s many paper and steel mills that for much of the 20th century dominated the region’s economy.And as with dozens of other rust belt towns, Middletown’s economy shrank due to industrial offshoring that began in the 1970s, giving rise to job losses and the ravages of the opioid epidemic that endure today.It’s these ills, which the 39-year-old Vance has blamed on Joe Biden, immigrants and China, that he has used to craft a so-far successful political career. Despite these claims, the Biden administration has invested billions of dollars in the midwest, while immigrants have helped stem population decline in many towns and cities.For longtime Middletown residents Bev and Tom Pressler, Vance’s lack of political experience may even be an advantage.“I think the young blood is good. We need some younger politicians running the country,” says Tom. “Obama got in and he wasn’t all that old, and he didn’t have all that experience. Trump didn’t have all that experience and I think he did excellent.”For Bev Pressler, a 62-year-old resident, Vance has worked hard to get where he is today.“If you saw the movie and read the book, he was trying to get into these schools, he was trying to pull his mom out of drug addiction, his family depended on him,” she says.But not everyone in Middletown thinks Vance’s meteoric rise to the forefront of US politics is a good thing.“He has a legislative legacy of zero achievements, especially lacking any meaningful support for Ohioans,” says Kathy Wyenandt, the chair of the Butler county Democratic party.“Vance is willing to change his beliefs at any time for the sake of amassing power … he is an out-of-touch millionaire and political shapeshifter who is wrong for Ohio, and wrong for our country.”Although Vance launched his political career in the US Senate with a campaign rally at a steel manufacturer in Middletown in July 2021, locals say they haven’t seen much of him since then.“What concerns me more than anything is that, at Senator Vance’s age, he is able to take the Maga agenda and to see it out far beyond even Trump’s time, if he were to get re-elected,” says Scotty Robertson, a pastor who has lived in Middletown for seven years.“Those policies are so destructive to our country and to Middletown. We’re talking about potentially ending social security and Medicare as we know it, continuing to roll back voting rights and ensuring that large segments of our population find it extremely hard to even vote. We’re talking about supporting policy that allows the president to essentially do whatever he or she chooses without any kind of accountability.”Still, for Debbie Dranschak, who with her husband runs the White Dog Distilling Company on Middletown’s Central Avenue, that’s not enough of a reason not to vote for his running mate in November.“I don’t know him, I don’t know his politics, but I’m glad Trump picked him,” she says. “Biden is just too old. He needs to get out. I grew up Democrat, but it’s about who is going to do the best for the country.”For Chad Sebald, an audio engineer, Vance has been unfairly labeled by some locally as a “class traitor” – someone who leaves behind the people they grew up with in search of better opportunities elsewhere.“Knowing his history, he came from nothing. He did what just about anybody in Middletown would do – he got out. I can’t blame the guy for getting out of here,” says Sebald, who also plans to vote for Trump in November.However, for a few minutes on the same street Vance was raised, the kind of dangerous, racist rhetoric that many say Trump has fueled over the years was in full view on Monday afternoon.As a local TV news car pulled up to interview residents, a man wearing a T-shirt with the word “freedom” written on it emerged from a nearby home angrily asking the car and its occupants to leave.“JD Vance is a race traitor,” he yells. Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of immigrants from India. “Fuck that motherfucker.” More