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      Michelle Obama introduces Harris at Michigan rally; across state, Trump joined by Arab and Muslim leaders

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      Senator Bob Casey attacked his Republican opponent, Dave McCormick, over allegations that he fostered a toxic work environment as CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater, describing the claims as “disqualifying”.“I’ve always placed a priority on combating sexual harassment in the workplace, and apparently at Bridgewater, it was just a whole different story,” Casey told reporters this morning.“So he’s being held accountable for that, and he should be held accountable. I think that alone is disqualfiying. If you’ve engaged in that kind of activity in the private sector, you should not be a public official at any level.”The Casey campaign released an ad this week highlighting claims that McCormick attempted to silence or retaliate against female employees of Bridgewater who came forward with harassment claims.Casey’s campaign manager also penned a letter calling on McCormick to demand that Bridgewater release employees who reported harassment from their non-disclosure agreements.“It is your responsibility to ensure the voters of Pennsylvania have complete information about your record before casting their votes,” Tiernan Donohue, Casey’s campaign manager, wrote in the letter. “They deserve the full story.”Speaking to reporters after his event with the Carpenters Union, Senator Bob Casey said he believes the momentum and enthusiasm on the ground in Pennsylvania will lift Democrats to victory in 10 days.“I think it is close. There’s no question about that,” Casey said. “That energy and intensity on the ground is starting to uplift our side. I’ve never seen the number of volunteers that we’ve seen in this state. Every weekend they’re breaking another record.”Asked specifically about whether young voters will turn out to vote for him and Kamala Harris, Casey expressed confidence that they would.“I think the turnout is going to be high,” Casey said. “Young voters might engage a little late, but I think they’re ready to vote.”Kamala Harris is drawing out the personal and political differences between her and Donald Trump.“I grew up in a middle class neighborhood with a working mother who kept a strict budget and did everything she could to make sure my sister and I had all that we needed. I come from the middle class, and I will never forget where I come from,” Harris said.Trump’s “agenda is all laid out in Project 2025, which I still must say, I cannot believe they put that in writing,” she added, before going on to talk about her plan for a child tax credit and to lower housing and healthcare costs.Senator Bob Casey addressed members of the Carpenters Union in Philadelphia this morning, as the three-term Democrat enters the final 10 days of his race against Republican Dave McCormick.Casey, whose race has grown increasingly close in recent weeks, again critcized McCormick over his leadership of the hedge fund Bridgewater and his recent residency in Connecticut.“He was investing in Chinese oil companies, investing in Chinese steel companies and betting against US Steel — hurting our workers, hurting our companies. That is his record as a hedge fund CEO,” Casey said.“I’ll put my record — fighting for families in this state, investing in communities in this state and fighting for working men and women — I’ll put that record up against his record any day of the week.”Thanking the union for its support throughout his political career, Casey added, “I’m going to work night and day for the next 10 days, like I’ve been working my whole life, to earn your votes and to earn your trust.”Protesters demonstrating against the war in Gaza briefly interrupted Kamala Harris’ rally in Kalamazoo.The crowd chanted over the protesters before Harris continued, “And listen on the topic of Gaza, we must end that war, and we must end the war and bring the hostages home, but now I am speaking about 2024″.”Michelle Obama has welcomed Kamala Harris to the stage in Kalamazoo.“The stakes are high, because, as [Michelle Obama] reminds us, as my mother taught me, don’t just complain about injustice, do something,” Harris said.Michelle Obama says Kamala Harris will defend reproductive freedom “not because she’s a woman, but because she’s a decent human being.”“She will usher in a new generation of American leadership and send the ugliness of Donald Trump and his politics, back where it belongs. The past,” Obama said, before encouraging the crowd in Kalamazoo to “do something” and talk to their family and community about voting.Michelle Obama is painting a picture of what restricted reproductive health care could look like across the United States if Donald Trump is re-elected.“We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing life saving treatments because they are worried about being arrested. More medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all. More OB-GYN clinics without enough doctors to meet demand, closing their doors, leaving untold numbers of women in communities throughout this country without a place to go for basic gynecological care, which in turn, will leave millions of us at risk of undiagnosed medical issues like cervical and uterine cancers,” Obama said.“To the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on Earth, keeps revoking the basic care from its women, and how it will affect every single woman in your life,” she continued.“I am asking y’all, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously,” she said. “Do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through.”Michelle Obama is asking the crowd at Kamala Harris’s rally in Kalamazoo to consider which presidential candidate they think will look out for their civil and reproductive rights.“If you’ve ever been out there marching and weeping for justice, who do you think is going to have your back? Is it Donald Trump, who once took out a full-page ad to demonize innocent young Black teenagers in New York City, who has dreamed openly about his own version of a purge, where, in his words, he has said for one day, one real rough, nasty day, he says he will allow cops to use violence indiscriminately?” Obama said.“There’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth, and sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work,” she added, describing the stigma many women feel discussing everything from menstruation to menopause.“And look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel, to understand the complexities of our reproductive health experiences. In all honesty, most of us as women don’t fully understand the breadth and depth of our own reproductive lives,” she said. “There’s a huge disparity in research funding for women’s health, and if you happen to look like me and report pain, you’re more likely to be ignored even by your own doctors,” she added, to a chorus of agreement.“If we keep dismantling parts of our reproductive care system piece by piece, as Trump intends to do, I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health.”Still speaking in Kalamazoo, Michelle Obama has criticized Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic and January 6 attack.“When the American people fired him from a job that was too big for him to begin with, he tried to steal it,” Obama said. Referencing the growing list of former Trump administration officials who have noted the ex-president’s authoritarian tendencies, Obama added, “These folks know that nothing this man says or does is funny in any way. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”“I hope that you will forgive me if I am worried that we will blow this opportunity to finally turn the page on the ugliness once and for all, because, believe me, if Donald Trump is president again at some point or another, that ugliness will touch all of our lives.”In an interview with Meet the Press, JD Vance has tried to explain Donald Trump’s comments on “the enemy from within.Vance told moderator Kristen Welker: “I think what Donald Trump said is that those folks pose a greater threat to United States’ peace and security because America is strong enough to stand up to any foreign adversary.” The full interview will air tomorrow.Although she says she hates politics, Michelle Obama says the stakes of this election were too high for her to sit it out.“I wanted to do everything in my power to remind the country that I love that there’s too much we stand to lose if we get this one wrong,” the former first lady said.Obama also called out the higher standards that Black women are held to as some have criticized Harris. “They accuse her of not providing enough policy detail. Some wonder, do we really know her? Is she too aggressive? Is she not aggressive enough? There are folks sowing seeds of doubt about whether she’s who she appears to be,” Obama said. “Now, don’t get me wrong, voters have every right to ask hard questions of any candidate seeking office, but can someone tell me why we are once again holding Kamala to a higher standard than her opponent?”“For Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals.”Speaking at the Harris campaign’s rally in Kalamazoo, Michelle Obama seeks to draw a stark comparison between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Kamala Harris is “showing us what a sane, stable leader looks like,” the former first lady said. “That’s because Kamala Harris is a grown-up. And Lord knows we need a grown-up in the White House.”“This is someone who understands you, all of you, someone from a middle class family raised mostly by her mom, like so many of us, leaning on her neighbors, like we all do, that’s what you want in a president,” Obama said.“With all that being said, I got to ask myself, well, why on earth is this race even close?” she added “It’s clear to me that the question isn’t whether Kamala is ready for this moment, because by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready. The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment.”Michelle Obama is speaking now at Kamala Harris’ rally in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The former first lady, who was welcomed onstage to uproarious applause, called the city “Kamala-zoo”. More

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      Chinese believed to have targeted Trump’s and Vance’s phones in US telecommunications breach

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      Chinese government-linked hackers are believed to have targeted phones used by Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, as part of a larger breach of US telecommunications networks, according to a New York Times report.The Trump campaign was informed this week that the phone numbers of the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominee were among those targeted during a breach of the Verizon network, the paper said, citing sources.Investigators are working to determine what data, if any, was accessed by the “sophisticated” hack, the sources said. Other current and former government officials were also targeted, according to the report.The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed an investigation was under way into the “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China”. It did not name the Trump campaign in the statement.“After the FBI identified specific malicious activity targeting the sector, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) immediately notified affected companies, rendered technical assistance, and rapidly shared information to assist other potential victims,” the agency said.The Trump campaign did not directly address whether the phones used by Trump and Vance had been targeted.In a statement, a Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, criticized the White House and Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, and sought to blame them for allowing a foreign adversary to target the campaign, the Times reported.A Wall Street Journal report last month said a cyber-attack linked to the Chinese government had infiltrated multiple US telecommunications firms and may have gained access to systems used by the federal government in court-approved wiretapping efforts.The hackers accessed at least three telecommunication companies – AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies – in what may have been an attempt to find sensitive information related to national security, according to the report.The Trump campaign earlier this year revealed it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US justice department unsealed criminal charges in September against three members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps suspected of hacking the Trump campaign.Justice department officials said hackers were trying to undermine Trump’s campaign and intended to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and potentially influence the outcome of the 5 November election.With the election under two weeks away, Trump and Kamala Harris are locked in a tight race. In both national head-to-head polls and surveys in the crucial swing states where the election will be decided, the pair seem almost deadlocked. More

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      Walz says Musk’s $1m voter giveaway reflects that Trump has ‘no plan’

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      Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice-presidential candidate, said Elon Musk’s plan to give away $1m a day in support of Donald Trump is a reflection of a ticket with “no plan”.Musk offered registered voters in swing states a chance to enter a $1m a day giveaway if they sign his Super Pac’s petitions, “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms”. Experts have questioned whether the plan is legal or, in effect, buying votes.“Well, I think that’s what you do when you have no plan for the public,” said Walz, when asked about the giveaway on ABC’s The View, a daytime talkshow.“When you have no economic plan that’s going to benefit the middle class, when you have no plan to protect reproductive rights, when you have no plan to address climate change and produce American energy – you go to these types of tactics,” said Walz.As to whether Musk’s strategy was legal, Walz said: “I’ll let the lawyers decide.”This is the second time the Democratic presidential ticket has appeared on The View talkshow in recent weeks. Kamala Harris announced a new “Medicare at home” plan on the show, which she said would help seniors pay for home health aides without driving themselves into destitution.Walz, known to be chatty in such interviews, also quipped that “one nice thing” about Trump is that “he will not be president again.” He advised JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, to “just go in and order the chocolate doughnut”, referring to an awkward campaign stop.This is one of several recent TV outings for Walz, including an upcoming appearance on The Daily Show and recent appearances on Fox News Sunday. The governor appeared ebullient on The View – akin to the television appearances that helped land him the job as second on the Harris ticket.In the abbreviated time that Harris had to pick a running mate, and in which Walz has had to introduce himself to the country, he briefly took a more conservative approach to campaigning. Most notably, Walz was panned during the vice-presidential debate.Walz appeared more confident on Monday, telling voters watching The View: “Choose a future where you’re the center of it not Donald Trump.”

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      JD Vance falsely claims Donald Trump didn’t lose 2020 election

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      The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, told a reporter on Wednesday that there were “serious problems” in the 2020 election and suggested for the first time that the then president Donald Trump did not actually lose the race.“Did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance said in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “But look, I really couldn’t care less if you agree with me or disagree with me on this issue.”He was pressed on his response by a reporter later in the day on another campaign stop in Wilmington, North Carolina, saying: “I think that big tech rigged the election in 2020. That’s my view. And if you disagree with me, that’s fine.”The response comes in the wake of a non-response earlier this month, when during an interview with the New York Times, Vance was given five opportunities to “acknowledge that Trump did not win in 2020” and he “refused to say so”.Trump notably lost the 2020 election and currently faces numerous charges related to election interference after being found guilty in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a New York hush-money trial.The Harris campaign criticized Vance’s responses to the question about the 2020 election.“There we have it – JD Vance finally admitted he denies the 2020 election results,” a Harris campaign spokesperson, Matt Corridoni, said in a statement. “As Governor Walz said on the debate stage weeks ago, Donald Trump selected Vance for this exact reason – he knows Vance will be a loyal soldier in Trump’s pursuit for absolute, unchecked, limitless power.”Previously, Vance has sidestepped answering the question directly, deflecting when pressed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, during a debate if Trump lost the 2020 election. He also downplayed the insurrection on 6 January, 2021.

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      “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Vance said.In September 2024, during a podcast interview, Vance responded to a question on what he would have done differently than the former vice-president Mike Pence in January 2021: “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”Vance was once a critic of Trump, comparing him to Hitler ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He shifted toward backing Trump’s election denial claims as he vied to be his running mate.Shortly before joining the Trump campaign, Vance claimed in an interview with the ABC News This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos: “Mike Pence could have done more, whether you agree or disagree, Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some of the problems in the 2020 election.”Trump has claimed there will be a “bloodbath” if he does not win the 2024 election. He also claimed his supporters will not have to vote any more if he wins as Trump and his allies have laid the foundation to contest the 2024 election results. More

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      Project 2025 ex-director denounces Heritage president’s ‘violent rhetoric’

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      The former director of Project 2025, a conservative plan to overhaul the US government, has blamed “violent rhetoric” from his former boss Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation thinktank, for the blueprint’s downgrading as Donald Trump has sought to publicly distance himself from it.Paul Dans, who resigned as head of the project in July after it threatened to become an electoral liability for Trump, said it was damaged after Roberts made inflammatory comments in a podcast that were widely interpreted as a veiled threat against leftwingers if they resisted an envisioned conservative takeover.In an interview with the Washington Post, Dans also called on Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, to withdraw a foreword he wrote for Roberts’s forthcoming book, which has been criticised for perceived violent undercurrents, partly due to its appeal to rightwingers to “load the muskets”.“If we’re going to ask the left to tone it down, we have to do our part as well,” Dans told the newspaper. “There’s no place for this sort of violent rhetoric and bellicose taunting, especially in light of the fact that President Trump has now been subject to not one but two assassination attempts.”Roberts made headlines in July when he told Dave Brat, a former Republican congressman who was presenting Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”The comments intensified scrutiny on Project 2025, a 922-page policy document detailing plans for – among other things – the mass firing of thousands of civil servants and a drastic curtailment of reproductive rights. The project had been run, in collaboration with other thinktanks, under the Heritage Foundation’s auspices and the ultimate authority of Roberts.Trump subsequently sought to disown the project – in public at least – as the Democrats seized on Roberts’s remarks to highlight its most radical provisions and depict it as a roadmap for a second Trump presidency. The Republican nominee falsely claimed that he did not know its architects, even though many of them – including Dans – had served under him when he was US president.Dans said he warned Roberts against media interviews and provocative language and squarely blamed his comments for damaging the project and those who had worked on it.“There’s really no place for this level of rhetoric, let alone from the head of an august thinktank,” Dans said. “And by doing that, he’s essentially besmirched the professional reputations of everyone involved in Project 2025.”

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      Roberts has been criticised for using similarly strident terms in promoting his book, Dawn’s Early Light, whose original September publication date has been postponed until after next month’s presidential election.Its original subtitle, Burning Down Washington To Save America, has been watered down and its cover illustration of a lit match has been removed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDans has also urged Vance – whose relationship with Roberts has undermined Trump’s efforts to dissociate himself from Project 2025 – to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation president by retracting the foreword he has written for his book.In it, Vance calls for a more aggressive conservative line of action, writing: “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’A foundation spokesman, Noah Weinrich, dismissed Dans’ criticism and said Roberts’s podcast comments had been referring to the threat of leftwing violence.“Any attempt to mischaracterize Dr Roberts’s comments as supportive of violence is grotesque and completely contrary to the observation he was making,” he told the Post.Vance, whose links to the thinktank long predate his support for Trump, has not commented.Dans previously blamed Trump campaign officials for the downgrading of Project 2025’s status in the Republican nominee’s priority list. He singled out the campaign aides Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita for publicly denigrating the project in a September interview with the New York Times and said they had jeopardised Trump’s chances of beating Kamala Harris. More

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      What does JD Vance really believe? | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The world is on fire, but in Washington DC topic A is Olivia Nuzzi. Her suspension as a writer for New York Magazine for sharing “demure” nude photographs of herself and other indiscreet communications with Robert F Kennedy Jr has engendered gales of hilarity to relieve the tension of the razor-thin close campaign.Nuzzi’s relationship in journalistic terms fits the supreme court’s ruling on presidential immunity of the distinction between Donald Trump’s “private” and “official” acts involving the January 6 insurrection. In the spirit of the court and The Scarlet Letter, the blond bombshell has received more punishment for sexting than the blond bomber has for attempting a coup.In the hurricane of gossip the most notable public discussion of the Nuzzi affair was an exchange of two buddies giggling at their lowbrow humor. “There’s this weird sex scandal story going on right now,” says the first. “The media is obsessed with – I don’t think there was any actual sex in the sex scandal.” Hahaha. His pal snickers, “That’s how I’m sure it is.” They guffaw. “I think that’s right,” replies the first. They laugh together in a communion of their misplaced coolness, unclever witticisms and pubescent misogyny.This is not dialogue from an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head. It is not a cartoon. It is not a satire. The first jokester is the Republican candidate for vice-president, Senator JD Vance of Ohio. His interlocutor is Tucker Carlson, the erstwhile No 1 Fox News host, fired as a liability, financial and personal, and left to roam untethered in the social media wasteland.Vance appeared on stage with Carlson on his tour on 22 September, undeterred after Carlson had recently featured a Hitler apologist and Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. Vance preferred to talk about Nuzzi rather than the Nazis. After raising the kerfuffle unprompted, he swiveled without a skip to lay out a cascading conspiracy theory pinging from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to the entire press corps with an inference to Nuzzi. Biden is “sleepwalking into world war three”, he declared, then jumping to “the reason why we have Joe Biden is because Kamala Harris lied about his mental fitness in office. If you actually care about the truth, ask those questions and leave this salacious bullshit to the tabloids. But they can’t do that. And if they did, Tucker, again, if they did, a lot of them would lose their jobs.”So, in translation, the Nuzzi affair is really the media’s way to avoid confirming Vance’s conspiracy theory. The third world war weighs on Vance’s mind. It is a meme, like the “cat meme” about the Haitians, as he called it. In the mode of Butt-Head impersonating a serious person, Vance told Tucker: “We’re worried about getting involved in world war three because we should be, because we have nuclear weapons now, and you have to be cautious about that stuff.” Tucker was gravely silent.Without missing a beat, Vance offered a new wrinkle in the great replacement theory. “If you look at the Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney view, their basic argument is, let’s flood the United States with millions upon millions of foreign laborers because that’s good for business.” Now it was the conservative endorsers of Harris who were to blame for the bogeyman of immigration. Vance was unconcerned that Liz Cheney had been ousted as chair of the House Republican conference for investigating January 6 and defeated in a primary for her seat, and that Dick Cheney had ceased serving as vice-president more than 15 years ago. It was their fault.“The third thing,” said Vance, “that I think really divides the parties, and it’s like me, Bobby Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump, we’re all on the same page on this is, do you think that the United States should ship its entire industrial base to foreign countries, some of which hate us?”First of all, “the third thing” wasn’t the third thing, but more about the second thing. Second, by embracing Bobby Kennedy, Vance didn’t seem aware he was back to another thing – “this weird sex scandal story”. Then, he returned to the subject of Springfield, Ohio, which is his warped example to prove the replacement theory, his first, second and third thing. “Amen,” said Tucker.Vance is Trump’s running mate in large part because of the influence of Carlson. For the past couple of years, he has been escorting Vance to introduce him to people hostile to Nato. At least one of them was nonplussed when, rather than sticking to the menace of Nato expansion, he expatiated on his many pathological stepfathers. Carlson notoriously appeared in Budapest under the auspices of the pro-Putin Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán. Vance has been uniformly opposed to support for Ukraine. On the eve of Russia’s invasion, he said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”In the battle over who Trump would chose as his running mate, Carlson was pitted against Rupert Murdoch, who had fired him from his perch at Fox. Murdoch favored the wealthy businessman and North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum. “When your enemies are pushing a running mate on you,” Carlson told Trump about Murdoch, according to the New York Times, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”Trump had to overcome his aversion to Vance for his remarks that he was an “idiot”, “unfit for our nation’s highest office” and a looming “American Hitler”. On 4 January 2021, two days before the assault on the US Capitol, Carlson wrote in a private text about Trump, “I hate him passionately,” but subsequently ingratiated himself back into his good graces. Now he played on Trump’s deepest fear. If Trump picked a “neocon”, a pro-Nato Republican like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the Times reported, “then the US intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr Trump in order to get their preferred president”. Carlson was buttressed in waging his paranoid campaign to eliminate competitors to Vance by Donald Trump Jr, whom Carlson had recruited into the Vance inner circle.Trump put Carlson on the platform at the Republican convention in order to have Tucker hail him as the “kindest”, “bravest” man of “empathy” who “actually cares”, and most “wonderful person”. Carlson delivered his tribute seemingly unaware, or perhaps completely aware, that his speech was almost word for word a copy from the film The Manchurian Candidate of the brainwashed description of Raymond Shaw, the phoney Medal of Honor winner himself conditioned into becoming an assassin in a communist conspiracy to kill the party’s nominee for president and turn the country over to the Russians under a rightwing puppet. Maj Ben Marco, played by Frank Sinatra, who served with Shaw in Korea, breaks the code of the brainwashed idealization: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”Carlson and Vance have curiously parallel lives. One born to wealth, the other in poverty, both were partly abandoned children. Vance and Tucker are Lost Boys in their own Neverland who have signed up with Captain Hook.Carlson’s mother, heiress to one of California’s oldest and greatest fortunes, left Tucker at the age of six for life in a hippy commune, never seeing him again. After his father remarried to the heiress of the Swanson frozen food fortune, Tucker was sent off to boarding school.As Vance chronicled in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, his mother was suicidal and addicted to alcohol and heroin. “Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures,” he wrote. He was abandoned to be more or less raised by his grandmother, who from the age of 13 had four children and eight miscarriages, possibly some of them abortions. She once tried to set her drunken abusive husband, Vance’s grandfather, on fire while he slept.Vance is a construct. The man known as “JD Vance” has existed for three years. His various name changes tell only a superficial part of his story. James Donald Bowman carried his father’s middle and last name. When his parents divorced he dropped the middle name “Donald” for “David”. He took his stepfather’s last name when he became James David Hamel. In high school he called himself “JD”. He graduated from Ohio State University and served in the military as James D Hamel. He was accepted to Yale Law School under that name. While at Yale, in 2010-2011, he blogged for David Frum’s FrumForum as JD Hamel.He implied in his 2016 memoir that he took the name of JD Vance upon his wedding in 2014, but in fact he assumed the name “Vance”, after his grandmother’s name, just before his graduation from Yale Law in 2013. Then, when he announced his candidacy for the Senate from Ohio in 2021, he removed the periods from his initials to become simply “JD”. which is how he is listed in his US Senate biography.Vance has had more mentors than name changes. One of them explained to me that his technique is to mirror them, one after another, to win approval and get ahead. His greatest skill is advancement through mimicry. A ruthless instinct for survival drives his hollow striving. He demonstrated his method in justifying Trump’s fabrication about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs. “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it,” he told Dana Bash on CNN. His own self-creation involves a lot of creativity.From mentor to mentor, too numerous to mention without writing a small treatise, Vance has shape-shifted. Under the tutelage of the Yale Law professor Amy Chua, author of the terrifyingly strict parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, he framed his story. She threw out his first draft of a memoir, then directed and edited the writing and its promotion. Chua had been the making of Brett Kavanaugh’s career, helping to place him in a clerkship on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, and she became a pipeline of clerks to him when he ascended to the US supreme court, advising her proteges that he preferred women who “looked like models”. She advanced Usha Vance, whose match to JD she encouraged, to become a Kavanaugh clerk, while telling Vance not to apply for the post but to stick to composing the book.Vance met Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, at a Yale event. Thiel inducted him into his network, hiring him after graduation for his venture capital firm. In the 2016 campaign cycle, Thiel became the single largest donor to the Republican party. He was drawn to Trump’s darkness. Thiel is an anti-democratic, illiberal dystopian for whom Trump is a mere agent. When Vance ran for the Senate from Ohio in 2022, Thiel bankrolled him with $15m, a pittance for the potential investment.Thiel and his venture capital network are heavily sunk into cryptocurrency. On the day before Trump anointed Vance as his VP, he endorsed a federal strategic bitcoin reserve that would put the US government behind the essentially worthless commodity. That would trigger an explosion of cryptocurrency products. Vance as vice-president would be a guarantor of an unregulated market that would almost certainly lead to financial chaos, the fleecing of small investors and new avenues for international crime.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2019, Vance converted to Catholicism, embracing a particular strand of anti-liberal traditionalism. As a boy he had been a Pentecostal. At Yale, he was an avowed atheist. Through Thiel, he met a number of profoundly reactionary Catholic ideologues, including Patrick Deneen, author in 2023 of Regime Change, a manifesto for the “Party of Order” to defeat the “Party of Progress” to install “the post-liberal order”. At a panel about the book at the Heritage Foundation, Vance appeared with Deneen and Kevin Roberts, the rightwing thinktank’s president and an adherent of Opus Dei, a reactionary Catholic sect developed in Franco’s Spain that is at war with Pope Francis’s liberal openings. Vance proclaimed himself there a cadre of the “postliberal right” and “explicitly anti-regime”, a further confession of faith.At the time, Roberts was overseeing the publication of Project 2025, a far-right wish book of draconian policies for a second Trump term. Roberts wrote an accompanying book, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, for which Vance wrote the introduction. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” he wrote. But when Trump tried to distance himself from the controversial Project 2025, the book’s publication was stopped, retitled – “Burning Down” scrapped for “Taking Back” – and pushed back until after the election.Vance had also become close to another radical rightwing theocrat, Rod Dreher, a columnist for The American Conservative, a magazine founded by Patrick Buchanan, avatar of the America First movement. Dreher was present at Vance’s Catholic conversion ceremony. Yet Dreher had already left the Catholic church for Eastern Orthodoxy because, among other things, he felt Catholicism was controlled by a “Lavender Mafia” of gay priests. In 2022, he went into voluntary exile in Hungary, where he became the director of Orbán’s Danube Foundation “network project”, for which he facilitated the trip of Carlson while he maintained his close relationship with Vance.When Vance wants to impress the theoreticians of the quasi- and neo-fascist right, he mirrors by echoing their special language, showing he is one of them. But when he wants to prove himself to Trump, he no longer poses as the intellectual manqué but instead a standup insult comic.His awkward jocularity and lame jokes, if they are jokes, almost always bomb. Notoriously, there’s the sophomoric snark of “childless cat ladies”. There are his put-downs, such as: “I’ve actually got thoughts in my head – unlike Kamala Harris.” There was Vance’s misfired tweet intended to mock Harris by posting a 2007 video clip of Miss South Carolina Teen Caitlin Upton freezing in her answer to a question about finding the United States on a map – only to have it revealed that Donald Trump subsequently offered her a job and that she had been a Trump supporter. She condemned Vance for “online bullying”.Vance wore a different persona than the apprentice name-caller in his debate with Tim Walz. Now he was the trained attorney smoothly spreading an oil slick of falsehoods to defend his guilty client. Vance lied that he never supported a national abortion ban; that Trump saved the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – instead of trying to destroy it at every turn; and that “illegal immigrants” in Springfield, Ohio, had “overwhelmed” the community. When Margaret Brennan of CBS News corrected him that the Haitians there are legal immigrants, Vance revealed a glint of anger. “Margaret, the rules were that you guys weren’t going to factcheck,” he complained. Facts are not his friend. Then, Vance closed with his most breathtaking lie, that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January 20”, eliding January 6. With that, Vance could breathe easy that he had jumped the hurdle of the big lie.JD obviously feels most comfortable bantering with Tucker. Together on stage, on 22 September, they jammed to stroke Trump’s narcissism as a true man of the people. Tucker kicked it off. “It’s impossible,” he said, “to imagine Carmela, or whatever she’s calling herself, Harris, talk to the lady behind the counter about the differences in quality and weight and price between the quarter pounder and the Big Mac. He has such strong feelings about it. He’s really thought about it a lot.”JD chimed in. “Well, and again, this goes to his leadership style,” he said. “Donald Trump actually really cares of what people think. So, he has absolutely thought to himself, what is the better value between the quarter pounder and the Big Mac? He actually wants to know what the people who work there think about this question. And by the way, I have views about this. Obviously, the quarter pounder is a better deal.”“That’s absurd,” replied Tucker. “Without secret sauce, it’s not even worth going there. But whatever. Honest people disagree.”“You’ve allowed yourself to be manipulated by the elites,” JD ribbed him. “The secret sauce is not the thing that matters. It’s the amount of meat. You get way more meat with a quarter pounder.”Vance clinched his point with an anecdote about being interviewed by Trump at Mar-a-Lago to be his running mate. Trump told him he had asked the gardener whom he should pick. “I’m sitting there, sweating bullets like, ‘Well, sir, what did the gardener at Mar-a-Lago have to say about who should be the VP?’” Trump did not tell him. But, according to Vance, it proved “he actually likes to know what people think about things. That’s one of his secrets of success as a political leader.” Vance did not interpret the incident as Trump toying with him in a humiliating little game in which he dangled the gardener as a determining factor in his fate.Then Tucker and JD riffed about what JD called “the Kamala switcheroo” in full Beavis and Butt-Head style. “The switch-up, the disappearance of the president of the United States. Biden is still president, technically, correct?” says Tucker. “I don’t know,” answers JD. “I don’t either. I really don’t know. I don’t know what happened to him. He was pretty famous at one point, and then he’s just gone.” “I saw some clip on social media that Jill Biden was running a cabinet meeting,” says JD. “Was that real or was that – for sure.” “She’s a doctor, JD. Settle down. She’s got this. Anyone who hasn’t read her dissertation on community colleges in the state of Delaware really should see where the doctorate comes from. She literally is a part of it where she’s breaking down the proportion of bi-ethnicity of students … I’m like, I’m not good at math.” “Wait a second.” “No,” says Tucker, “you should read Dr Jill’s dissertation. It’s unbelievable. Anyway, she’s running the government, just so you know.” Hahaha.In an earlier conversation for Tucker’s podcast, on 18 September, Tucker and JD blithely talked about the agenda of a coming Trump administration. “If you guys win,” says Tucker, “and you start firing people who are acting against orders of their commander-in-chief and against the expressed will of voters, the New York Times will call it a fascist takeover.” “That’s exactly right,” replied JD. “The question is, do you care?” “Well,” JD answered, “I think we have to not care.” He wasn’t joking.

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘He gives them the green light’: Trump’s rhetoric revives hate groups across US

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      For Denise Williams, the 70-year-old head of Springfield’s NAACP chapter, the past several weeks have been testing to say the least.Last month, flyers calling for mass deportations of immigrants were distributed by the so-called Trinity White Knights, a group associated with the Ku Klux Klan, in Black-majority neighborhoods in south Springfield.“I’m telling people: do nothing – don’t approach them. But it’s not easy for people to see this,” she said.“I think that is what a lot of folks cannot understand – why do we have so much hate?”About 22% of Springfield residents are African American, according to the US Census Bureau.“People are mad. African Americans here don’t understand how this is allowed. We just have to take this for a minute. I know it’s hard.”Trinity White Knights is headquartered in Kentucky, where flyers were also seen by residents of the Cincinnati suburb of Covington in July as part of an apparent recruitment effort. The flyers included a PO box address in Maysville, Kentucky, and a phone number.Ever since Donald Trump claimed during a 10 September televised debate watched by 67 million people that immigrants in Springfield were eating people’s pets – a claim that has been found to be baseless – Springfield has seen a groundswell in far-right extremism.On a recent weekend, several people affiliated with Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group founded in 2020, stood in front of the home of the mayor of Springfield holding flags bearing swastikas. The same weekend, individuals holding signs that said: “Haitians Have No Home Here” in English and Haitian Creole were seen outside Springfield’s city hall offices.And in another incident, a volunteer with the Clark county Democratic party was verbally threatened by a group of Proud Boys members last month, according to a report by the Dayton Daily News.Proud Boys is a far-right group that, according to Reuters, has re-emerged in recent months as “unofficial protectors of ex-president Donald Trump”.That followed a group called the Israel United in Christ, a hate group as designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, holding a large public gathering in south Springfield on 21 September.Though Israel United in Christ says it does not “advocate or condone any acts of violence against any race, ethnicity or gender”, the Anti-Defamation League has accused it of antisemitism.During the vice-presidential debate, the Republican party candidate, JD Vance, repeated the false claim that Springfield’s Haitian community were “illegal immigrants”. The vast majority of Haitians in Springfield have legally entered the US through the temporary protected status program, a status that is provided to nationals of certain countries experiencing significant security challenges.“They feel emboldened by the former president. They feel like it’s OK to do this,” said Williams.“He gives them the green light. By him saying hateful things and falsehoods, they feel comfortable in speaking the way they are speaking [and] coming in here doing what they are doing.”But the rise in hate group activity in recent weeks hasn’t been confined to Springfield.In Charleroi, a town of about 4,000 people in western Pennsylvania, a digital flyer was this week distributed on Facebook by or on behalf of the Trinity White Knights.It read, in part: “Do not let the government destroy your town. These 3rd world immigrants are destroying every single city they arrive in. The government is pushing these 3rd world immigrants into every single town across America.”Joe Manning, the Charleroi town borough manager, said there were about 700 Haitian immigrants living in Charleroi, with many working at a local food processing plant.“They’ve been here for five, maybe six, years and nobody really paid attention to them,” he says.That was before 15 September, when Trump said at a rally in Tucson, Arizona, that Charleroi “isn’t so beautiful any more” and that the town had become “composed of lawless gangs”, comments aimed at the town’s growing immigrant population.“We’re a pretty small community here in western Pennsylvania, and to be identified by name [by Trump], that sort of set off this whole firestorm,” said Manning, who believed the appearance of the KKK-linked flyer after Trump’s comments wasn’t coincidental.“Before this, no one really paid attention to the immigrant community here but now, all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re being invaded.’ They say it’s a crisis. Well if it is, it’s the slowest goddamn crisis I ever saw.”In Wyoming, graffiti in clear view of a major interstate supporting Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, appeared on a bridge last week, while a banner promoting the same group and calling for the “recaiming” (sic) of America was removed from a bridge in downtown Winston-Salem in North Carolina days after Trump’s debate comments. A student event held at the University of South Carolina featuring the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, on 18 September is believed to have attracted about 150 attendees.“Springfield is not happening in isolation. We have tracked four other incidents, such as targeting the Haitian community in Alabama,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks incidents of hate across the US.“We’ve also seen the sharing and pushing of the racist and antisemitic great replacement theory in various campaign and hate group messaging in the last few weeks.”For Williams, who finds herself managing growing community outrage at the rise in KKK and other hate group activity in Springfield, recent events have come at a personal cost.She said she had received text messages from someone claiming to represent Blood Tribe and had increased her security in recent weeks. Last weekend, when members of the same group appeared at the mayor of Springfield’s home, the chief of police sent a security detail to her home.“I’m looking over my shoulder,” she says.“You would think that this would be over – I don’t get it, in 2024.” More

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      Trump and his allies are whipping up a whirlwind of lies about the hurricanes | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Whipping up hurricanes to merge with great replacement theory took hardly a week, about the time it takes for hurricanes themselves to form. The overheated atmosphere warmed the waters that were drawn up into the winds to churn them into a menacing storm.After Hurricane Helene hit, Donald Trump unleashed a whirlwind of humid lies: the federal government was deliberately preventing aid and even water from reaching areas that held Republican voters, “not getting anything”; Kamala Harris “spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants”; and Fema was offering only $750 in disaster relief – all false, all debunked by the Republican governors in the affected states. The Republican congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina felt compelled to issue a statement to his constituents not to listen to “untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts” and the “outrageous rumors spread online”.Undoubtedly, he had in mind Elon Musk, who accelerated the circulation of the lies on his platform X: Fema “actively blocked” aid and “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” The Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, called the calculated spread of disinformation “absolutely the worst I have ever seen”, and announced that Fema for the first time had established a webpage for “Hurricane Rumor Response”.“No money is being diverted from disaster response needs,” Fema stated. “Fema’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!” Musk tweeted.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, leaped in to tweet: “Yes they can control the weather.” She added: “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”In 2018, she infamously blamed a California wildfire on “space lasers” controlled by “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm”, a classic antisemitic trope. Now, on 5 October, following up on how “they can control the weather”, she tweeted: “CBS, 9 years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather.”Republican leaders instantly fell into line in a demonstration of Trump fealty. The congressman Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, the number two in the Republican leadership of the House, campaigning for Trump on 8 October, repeated his lie: “They use that money helping illegals here that they brought into America.”By now, Trump’s lies were a typhoon. JD Vance, his running mate, was sent out to stir it up further with an op-ed planted in the Wall Street Journal on 9 October – Rupert Murdoch again predictably handing over his paper to Trump – to echo that Fema funds were being diverted to help illegal immigrants. Vance added a new wrinkle to the conspiracy theory, suggesting that Fema was giving “special treatment” to gay and trans people over ordinary Americans because it held a seminar in 2023 on how those communities can prepare for disasters.As Hurricane Milton barreled down on Florida, Joe Biden, in a TV briefing on Wednesday afternoon, felt compelled to condemn Trump’s “onslaught of lies” that is “undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been undertaken and will continue to be undertaken”.View image in fullscreenThe political effect of the hurricanes on Trumpism has been to congeal free-floating elements into the racist replacement theory and Hitlerian rhetoric. Trump’s lies set in motion an antisemitic wave in North Carolina blaming Jewish local officials there and Fema administrators for taking the money for illegal immigrants. Of the falsehoods after Hurricane Helene, “30% of the posts on X contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the Fema director of public affairs; and the secretary of the department of homeland security. These collectively garnered 17.1m views as of October 7,” reported the non-profit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.Vance’s inclusion of gay and trans people into the overarching replacement theory fits the intensive Trump negative advertising campaign. Trump has spent more than $15.5m on TV commercials linking Harris to support for trans prison inmates – his most aired ad. In fact, in 2019 she stated she supported gender-affirming care for state prison inmates, according to the law, and responded similarly to an ACLU questionnaire about federal inmates. The Senate Republican political action committee has also invested tens of millions into anti-trans ads against Democratic candidates. Trump’s tagline: “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.”Now, Vance implies, “they/them”, presumably in league with Greene’s “they”, are stealing the funds from the rest of us folks as a nefarious subplot of the great replacement. Adherence to every aspect of the theory proves loyalty to Trump. Vance and Scalise showed how to bend the knee.Trump’s transition chief on 7 October insisted on this unquestioning fealty to the leader. The self-described adults in the room, or “normies”, of the first term, who saw their mission to be curbing Trump’s lunatic or criminal impulses, will not be tolerated in the second. “Those people were not pure to his vision,” Howard Lutnick, the head of the Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm and the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, recently told the Financial Times. He explained that the “establishment” did not understand Trump’s “objectives” or “intuition” and “thought they knew better”. In the second term, “loyalty” and “fealty” would be the first qualification for consideration.Both Trump and Vance have stated that the senior federal civil service will be fired for their disloyalty. Consistent with Trump’s “vision”, his appointees would be required to swear an oath of loyalty to the leader above the constitution and laws of the United States. This oath was known as the “Führereid” in Nazi Germany, where public servants had to pledge: “I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German reich and people, Adolf Hitler, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God!” All soldiers had to take a similar oath. Some of those who failed to swear the Hitler oath were executed.Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric and threats have ramped up with each passing day closer to the election that will decide whether he will be the president or perhaps a prisoner. When Harris appeared on The View, a daytime TV talkshow with an all-female panel, he demeaned her as a “dummy” and the other women as “dumb” and “degenerates”. Women should be subordinate and submissive. According to his running mate, Vance, women who do not have natural children are essentially worthless, not truly women, unqualified to be teachers, and women over 50 years old have value principally for childcare. “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – children, kitchen, church – was the policy slogan for the proper place of women in the Third Reich.The concept of “degenerate” – “entartete” – was a central category in Nazism. Modern art and music were deemed “Entartete Kunst”, or degenerate art, and banned. “Degenerates” constituted a broad swath of people, some of whom were infected with “poison in the blood”, as Hitler classified Jews and Trump counts certain types of immigrants, which is the basis of the replacement theory embraced by both Hitler and Trump. The degenerate also included disabled people, gay people (who wore pink triangles in concentration camps), Gypsies, psychiatric patients and the mentally ill (“behinderte”). Under the program beginning in 1939 of “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (“destruction of unworthy lives”), Aktion T4, the mass murder of “degenerates” was launched, officially called “Gnadentod”, or “mercy death”.Trump openly entertains fantasies of violence and vengeance. He called on 29 September for “one really violent day … One rough hour. And I mean real rough.” He was speaking about shoplifters. He promises the roundup of 11 million undocumented people and camps. In late August, he reposted under a headline “How To Really Fix The System” an image of his perceived enemies in orange prison jumpsuits – Harris, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Hunter Biden and Jack Smith. He called for the indictment of the congressional members of the January 6 select committee and military tribunals for Barack Obama and others.View image in fullscreenOn 5 June, the Fox News host Sean Hannity gave Trump an opportunity to soften his threat of retribution. “People believe that you want retribution and will use the system of justice to go after your political enemies,” said Hannity. Trump doubled down, saying: “I have every right to go after them.” On 7 October, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham tried again. “A lot of people will say: ‘Well, he’s just going to do to them what he – they did to him back at them.’” Trump replied: “A lot of people say that’s what should happen, right?” Or as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “We had declared one of our principles thus: ‘We shall meet violence with violence in our own defense.’”Trump’s rhetoric eerily continues to paraphrase Hitler’s, which eludes American audiences. His first wife, Ivana, claimed that a book of Hitler’s speeches was on his bedstand. Trump’s language just happens to be extraordinarily resonant.Campaigning on the debunked myth that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets”, Trump used unusual language for him to make his bogus point on 16 September. “Allowing millions of people, from places unknown, to INVADE and take over our Country, is an unpardonable sin,” he tweeted. His reference to “sin” in the context of his racist replacement theory, was, knowingly or not, an echo of Hitler, to convey exactly the same meaning. “The sin against blood and race is the hereditary sin in this world and it brings disaster on every nation that commits it,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.Lately, Trump has used over and over in speech after speech the same metaphor conflating personal and national humiliation. On 12 August, Trump tweeted: “Kamala has no ideas, and would be an absolutely horrible, RADICAL LEFT, President, laughed at all over the World. We’ve had enough of that!”On 22 August, Trump continued the “laughed at” meme: “She stands for Incompetence and Weakness – Our Country is being laughed at all over the World!” On 16 September, he tweeted: “THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER.” Trump has used variations of this “laugh” meme to highlight national dishonor dozens of time on his Truth Social account.On 30 September, at two rallies, one in New York City and the other in Walker, Michigan, Trump said: “Boy, what a group of people we have. It’s a joke. We’re laughed at all over the world for our leadership. Because this country has never been laughed at [like] a bunch of dopes. It’s never been laughed at like it is right now.”On 1 October, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump said: “What a miserable few years. It’s just been horrible. And people all over the world, especially the leaders, are laughing at how stupidly our country is run.”On 30 January 1939, Hitler delivered his notorious “prophecy” speech calling for “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. The most memorable image he evoked was of Jews laughing at him and at Germany. “During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the state, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face.”After Hitler ordered the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, he returned to the imagery of Jews laughing in a speech that referenced his “prophecy”. “In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies,” he said on 30 September 1942. “I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing.”The Nazis underscored Hitler’s speech by producing a propaganda poster depicting caricatures of laughing Jews surrounding Franklin D Roosevelt, with the slogan: “Das Lachen wird ihnen vergehen!!!” – “Their laughter will disappear!!!”On 7 October, Trump returned for a rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, to revisit the site of his near assassination. “And we want to get respect like we had it four years ago, the entire world respected us, they respected us,” he said. “They respected us more than they’ve ever respected us, and now they laugh at us. We can’t have them laugh at us, can we?”

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More