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      JD Vance writes foreword for Project 2025 leader’s upcoming book

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      The Republican senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has written the foreword to a forthcoming book by the head of Project 2025, the vast rightwing plan for a second Trump administration Democrats say shows the authoritarian threat posed by the GOP – and which Donald Trump has tried to disavow.In publicity material for the book, Vance says of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation: “Never before has a figure with [his] depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism.”The same publicity material describes Roberts as “head” of Project 2025.Roberts’ book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, will be published in September.Orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation but featuring contributors from across the US right, Project 2025 is more than 900 pages long and includes proposals for radical reform to all corners of government and public life.Democrats have highlighted its threats to key freedoms including reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris, the vice-president and presumptive presidential nominee, discussed Project 2025 in Indianapolis.“We must … recognise there are those who are trying to take us backward,” Harris said.“Can you believe they put that in writing? This represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future. These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back.”Such attacks have proved effective. Concurrently, Trump and top aides have sought to distance themselves from Project 2025.Vance recently told NBC: “What the media and the Democrats are trying to do is attach its most unpopular elements to the Trump administration. It’s a 900-page document. I guarantee there are things that Trump likes and dislikes … but he is the person who will determine the agenda of the next administration.”Such protestations have been greeted with skepticism, particularly given extensive links between Trumpworld and Project 2025 authors.According to publicity material, Roberts’ book will cover similar ground to Project 2025, “outlin[ing] a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution’ for voters looking to shift the power back into the hands of the people”.But that only echoed controversial comments in which Roberts recently told the former Trump aide Steve Bannon: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”Furthermore, as reported by the New Republic, Roberts’ book was previously advertised under a more dramatic subtitle: “Burning Down Washington to Save America”.Such rhetoric is spreading. At a recent Trump-Vance rally in Ohio, a speaker warned of civil war if the Republican ticket is beaten. In promoting Roberts’ book, Vance uses violent imagery of his own.“We are now all realising that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” the senator says. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned director of JoinTheUnion.us, a “coalition of pro-democracy organisations”, told the Guardian: “Project 2025 is Maga’s endorsed blueprint for turning America into an authoritarian state.“That Trump’s running mate is introducing [Roberts’] book personally only proves that his protestations [of no links to Project 2025] are an indication of how unpopular they know the plan is.” More

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      Sundresses and rugged self-sufficiency: ‘tradwives’ tout a conservative American past … that didn’t exist

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      View image in fullscreen“Hey guys, and welcome back to my channel! Today, I’m going to be giving some tips for the ladies on how to attract a masculine man – a provider man,” the perky blonde woman tells the camera. Beaming and dressed in a pink dress complete with matching sweater, her swoop of blonde hair pinned back with a pearly headband, the woman rattles off her tips.“You want to look feminine, you want to be fit and take care of yourself and you want to be friendly,” the twentysomething woman continues. “I feel like the most feminine women I’ve come into encounter with are very peaceful. So have a sense of peace about you. Be content in your life without a man and pray for the right one to come your way.”She added: “You should be smiling a lot.”Meet Estee Williams. With more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, another 200,000 on TikTok and a history of appearances on shows like Dr Phil and Piers Morgan, Williams is one of the most prominent faces of an internet phenomenon-slash-controversy: the traditional wife, or “tradwife”.Tradwives first began trending online in 2020, when people were looking to wring excitement and comfort out of the smallest household tasks. Although there’s no single definition of “tradwife” – and many female influencers who’ve been decorated with the label don’t use it or even reject it – you know the tradwife when you see her. She is probably baking sourdough in an immaculate outfit, has a gaggle of kids (or wants them), and suggests – either silently or very loudly, like Williams – that life is better when women adhere to “traditional” gender roles and perfect at-home domesticity and nurturing.With the selection of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate, the values that undergird the tradwife lifestyle are taking center stage at the highest levels of politics. Vance has fashioned himself as a champion of the so-called nuclear family, disparaging “the sexual revolution” and divorce. Days after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”He has also suggested that Kamala Harris, who is likely to become the Democratic nominee for president after Joe Biden ended his presidential campaign on Sunday, should not have political power because she does not have biological children.“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked during a 2021 Virginia talk. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” Harris has two step-children.Vance’s own wife, Usha Vance, earned a law degree from Yale Law School as well as a master’s from Cambridge University. She clerked for Brett Kavanaugh before he joined the supreme court, and, up until JD Vance’s nomination for the vice-presidency, worked at a law firm that describes itself as “radically progressive”. Usha Vance resigned from the firm last week to focus on supporting her family.Tradwives are trending – and Vance is rising – as the United States is being roiled by fights over gender rights, which are only set to intensify if Trump and Harris go head to head. American women are grappling with a backlash against abortion rights, their economic mobility and feminism itself. They are also dealing with the failure of US social programs to keep up with the rising cost of living or to provide meaningful support for working moms. As of 2023, the United States was one of only six countries on the planet – as well as the only rich country – not to offer any kind of national paid leave.Tradwives portray a fundamentally conservative and individual solution to that societal failure: retreat not only into the home, but also into history. Using the iconography of an idealized past, they evoke the economic and emotional fantasy that families, and especially women, can opt out of the complexity of modern society. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose to live on one income? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose to stay home and raise children, rather than be forced into it because childcare is so damn expensive?In reality, that past was only made possible through extensive government intervention – the kind to which modern Republicans are fiercely opposed.A softer lifeFor the internet to dub you a tradwife, you typically have to be more than a homemaker. You must swath yourself in an aesthetic that draws from a vast and varied array of historical reference points.The account of Gwen the Milkmaid, a blonde who boasts about 70,000 TikTok followers and a backstory as a former OnlyFans worker turned God-fearing tradwife, lives at the center of a Venn diagram of common tradwife inspirations: the nuclear family of the 1950s, Little House on the Prairie, and a 19th-century belief in “separate spheres”, when men went out to Do Industry while women upheld a cult of domesticity. Gwen likes to frolic in sundresses, “homestead” in the Canadian suburbs, and glory in “the feminine urge to take care of your husband and make him food all the time”. (Gwen also throws in a distinctly modern set of pseudoscientific beliefs, like “the sun doesn’t cause cancer”.) Above all, tradwives like Gwen preach self-sufficiency.But 19th-century homesteading, the source of so much inspiration for both tradwives and the GOP – was not a private endeavor undertaken by hardy men and their supportive wives. It was the result of the huge government subsidy program known as the Homestead Act. The 1950s, another conservative inspiration, were also shaped by government subsidies for housing and education – as well as a post-second world war movement to pressure women out of the workforce – that briefly made it economically possible for vast numbers of white American women to live as housewives. (These subsidies were nowhere near as available to people of color.)The women of the 19th century and 1950s also lived without the right to birth control or, after they were invented, credit cards. (Gwen the Milkmaid is skeptical of the former.) Domestic violence was not taken seriously. Rape victims’ sexual history could be brought up in trials, while marital rape was not even a crime. There’s a reason that the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique, a book about the widespread unhappiness of white middle-class housewives – written by a white middle-class housewife – triggered the advent of second-wave feminism.View image in fullscreen“None of these people would seriously want to go back to a period when a man had a right to rape his wife,” said Stephanie Coontz, the author of six acclaimed books about the history of marriage and families, including her forthcoming book For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and the Challenging Future of Marriage. Tradwives are nostalgic for the 1950s because, she said, “they’re looking back at a time when it was economically possible for a woman who didn’t want to work out of the home to stay home.”The social and economic conditions that made the nuclear family structure so dominant in the 1950s were also exceedingly unique. Except for this post-war period, it has been far from traditional for US families to be made up of a breadwinner husband, a wife who stays home to do unpaid cooking and cleaning as well as 2.5 kids who get to enjoy an extended childhood.“The tradwives misrepresent what they are doing as what everybody used to do,” Coontz said.Many so-called tradwives do openly work for money – often through home-based small businesses, influencing or a combination of the two, such as selling courses on how to be a stay-at-home influencer. Like all influencers, their product is their own lifestyle.‘A sneaky little bit of prosperity gospel’Tradwifery is not a monolith, and some of the most popular women who have been labeled “tradwives” by the internet don’t talk about politics or gender roles. But social media algorithms and chatter can co-opt them into conservative projects about femininity and families that these women may not personally support.The internet has crowned @Ballerinafarm, whose real name is Hannah Neeleman, the queen of tradwifery. Neeleman, who told the New York Times that she was unfamiliar with the term “tradwife”, has 9 million followers on Instagram, eight children, and a husband whose father has founded airlines, among them JetBlue. They all live on a working farm in Utah, where Neeleman – who has a mane of blond hair that would make Cinderella jealous – helps run the farm, cooks meals from scratch and competes in beauty pageants. Neeleman has been doing this since before the Covid pandemic struck, but after being literally crowned Mrs American, Neeleman competed in Mrs World this year days after giving birth and rocketed to mainstream fame.Neeleman leans into the homesteading aesthetic, framing herself as a “city folk” Juilliard-trained ballerina who chose to go back to the land. But, unlike Estee Williams (who supports Donald Trump) and Gwen the Milkmaid (who doesn’t seem to like Justin Trudeau), Neeleman does not talk about her politics. Same goes for the model Nara Smith, a mother of three with 8 million followers on TikTok. Although Smith is open about her work as a model, describes herself as a “working mom” and is more likely to cook in a slinky slip than gingham, she has also been labeled a tradwife.She’s known for videos where she’ll whisper things like: “My husband has been loving Snickers bars and when he was craving one, I just decided to make him a batch myself.” Other recent productions include homemade Cheez-Its and cough drops, because Smith “doesn’t usually keep cough drops or traditional medicine in the house”. She cooks the messy cough drops while wearing a (white!) dress that retails for $2,990. Her motherhood and marriage look effortless – which may be the source of the tradwife label.“The sort of totalizing world of the tradwife – she’s in control of her home, she’s in her home, she’s controlling the food that comes in, controlling the media that comes in – there’s a real appeal to purity,” said Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, an adjunct professor at Iowa’s Grand View University. “There is a sneaky little bit of prosperity gospel thinking in here. ‘If you live this lifestyle, if you do this thing that God is calling you to [do] as a woman, he will provide. And not only will he provide, he will provide beautifully. He will provide a beautiful family, a beautiful home, beautiful surroundings, a beautiful body.’”McGinnis first encountered tradwives because, as she researched Christian influencers for her forthcoming book on Christian parenting, her social media algorithm presumed she’d be interested in tradwives, too.“I really quickly started to realize that there was a ton of overlap. Not just among the people making it but among the audience,” said McGinnis, who has written about tradwives for Christianity Today.View image in fullscreenAfter I watched several Williams videos on YouTube, the platform started serving me ads for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerhouse Christian law firm that masterminded the overturning of Roe and continues to chip away at abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. In May, Media Matters for America found that watching tradwife content on TikTok led its “For You” Page to be flooded with far-right conspiracy theory content “within an afternoon”.Estee Williams, Gwen, Neeleman and Smith did not respond to detailed lists of questions from the Guardian for this story through their email addresses and social media accounts. Smith did also not immediately reply to a request for comment through her representation at IMG Models.‘Starting with the American family’Despite the tradwives’ popularity, it’s not financially feasible for many women to quit their jobs. It’s not even clear that women want to. Almost 80% of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are now part of the US workforce.While Maga Republicans like Vance have a lot to say about the “traditional” family, they don’t seem interested in reviving the kind of widespread social programs that enabled it. Vance has called universal childcare “a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class”.Project 2025, a policy playbook written by the influential conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, has a litany of proposals aimed at the intersection of labor and family life that stop well short of a full-spectrum social safety net. The playbook suggests improving retirement savings for families where only one spouse works, allowing workers to accumulate time off and incentivizing employers to provide on-site childcare.“We must replace ‘woke’ nonsense with a healthy vision of the role of labor policy in our society, starting with the American family,” Project 2025 adds. To that end, its architects propose that the Department of Labor to “commit to honest study of the challenges for women in the world of professional work”.Inadvertently or not, tradwives are already supplying an answer to this study, and it’s one that conservatives may like: what if women just stayed home? More

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      US election live updates: top Democrats back Kamala Harris as donations surge after Biden steps aside

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      All 50 state Democratic party chairs have endorsed Harris to be the party’s new presidential nominee to run against Republican nominee and former president, Donald Trump, Reuters reports.The chairs held a conference call after President Joe Biden announced he was stepping aside as the party’s candidate.“Following President Biden’s announcement, our members immediately assembled to unite behind the candidate who has a track record of winning tough elections, and who is a proven leader on the issues that matter to Americans: reproductive freedom, gun violence prevention, climate protection, justice reform, and rebuilding the economy,” said Ken Martin, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees, in a statement.When the Democratic National Convention meets in Chicago on 17 August, any nominee for president needs to secure the votes of 1,986 delegates. Joe Biden had more than 3,800 delegate pledged to vote for him after the primary season, but those people are now released from that obligation.Kamala Harris has, according to the latest count by website The Hill, already secured votes from 531 delegates, with the states of Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Florida and Louisiana all offering support.Deborah Cole is a Berlin correspondent for the GuardianGermany’s mainstream political class expressed respect and a degree of relief over president Joe Biden stepping aside in the race given deep-seated fears for Europe about a win by Donald Trump in November.The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who had only recently expressed strong support for Biden’s bid for a second term, praised Biden’s tough call, posting to social media to say “My friend Joe Biden has achieved a lot: for his country, for Europe, for the world. Thanks to him, transatlantic cooperation is close, Nato is strong and the US is a good and reliable partner for us. His decision not to run again deserves respect.”The vice-chancellor and economy minister, Robert Habeck, echoed the remarks, voicing “great esteem” for Biden and his choice to stand down. Conservative opposition leader Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), who opposes a second Trump term, also said he had “great respect” for Biden’s decision to end his lifetime of political service in January.However the CDU’s deputy parliamentary group leader Thorsten Frei warned against “euphoria” about a potential run by Kamala Harris. He told public broadcaster RBB she had “failed” to develop her own strong profile in office, meaning the switch of candidate might fail to materialise as an “act of liberation” for the Democrats.Thomas Jäger, a political scientist at the University of Cologne, criticised the chaotic way Biden made the bombshell announcement, catching his party on the backfoot. “He let them run into an open knife … it almost seemed like an act of revenge” on those he felt had betrayed him, he said.Jäger told rolling news channel NTV he expected the “voices to grow louder” for Biden to step down immediately as president, with scrutiny of his fitness growing even stronger now that he’s tried to hand the baton to Harris.He said it was “very very optimistic” to believe that Harris as nominee would mark a “breakthrough” for the Democrats, given her weak profile and short time left to campaign.Our picture desk has put together this gallery of Joe Biden’s political career from when he first became a senator in 1972 to the present day.Reuters is reporting that US stock index futures climbed on Monday on the news that president Joe Biden was withdrawing from the election.The news agency quotes Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics saying “Donald Trump is still the solid favorite to win the presidential election, but betting markets suggest he has a slightly lower probability of beating Harris rather than Biden.“Harris will have a real chance to sell herself to the American public in the second presidential debate, currently scheduled for 10 September, although the Trump campaign could withdraw, not wanting to go toe-to-toe with the ex-attorney.”Reuters states that investers are braced for high volatility this week, and notes that shares of Trump-linked stocks such as Trump Media & Technology Group and software firm Phunware were up.CNN senior political analyst Ron Brownstein has said he thinks the Democratic party is likely to pick Kamala Harris, as “it’s just hard to imagine there is the stomach for a full-fledged second fight to bypass her”.He told the news network:
      The Democratic party has just gone through a very traumatic episode of nudging aside a president who they respect, who they think has been more successful than many expected, but whom the vast majority of them had come to believe cannot win and did not feel comfortable about re-nominating him for four more years.
      After going through all of that, it’s just hard to imagine there is the stomach for a full-fledged second fight to bypass her. Especially with the candidates who might have the best chance – like Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom – already indicating they won’t run against Harris.
      My colleague Joan E Greve has this explainer of what happens next in the nomination process now that Joe Biden has stepped aside …German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has said Joe Biden’s decision to step aside showed he was willing to put his country’s interests above his own, Reuters reports.It quotes her saying “I have great respect for the US president’s decision. Biden has also done an incredible amount for transatlantic relations, and not just during his term as president.”Hugo Lowell reports for the Guardian on what the latest developments mean for the Donald Trump campaignDonald Trump is scrambling to pivot his campaign against Kamala Harris, with attack ads hitting her current record in office and her past in California, according to two sources familiar with the matter.The Trump campaign is viewing Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee, especially after Biden gave his endorsement, and started preparing opposition research dossiers against her in recent weeks. But as much as Biden’s withdrawal has left Democrats floundering ahead of its nominating convention next month, it has in many ways also flummoxed the Trump campaign.Trump-aligned political action committees such as MAGA Inc will unleash a wave of attacks against Harris, including a $5m television ad in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona, casting her as the puppet master in the Biden administration.The Trump campaign was always set up to defeat one person – Biden – and Trump’s allies in recent weeks even pulled punches to keep the president viable as a candidate because they were so keen to run against him.The problem for the Trump campaign is that their best attack lines against Biden, on age and mental acuity, cannot be used and, if anything, they might be reprised by Democrats against Trump given he now will be the oldest candidate.And the millions of dollars that the Trump-aligned Pacs spent creating attack ads against Biden, including one as recently as last week that was centered around Biden’s slip-up at the presidential debate last month about military deaths, have gone to waste.Read more from Hugo Lowell here: Trump scrambles to pivot campaign to attack Kamala HarrisIsrael will be the strongest US ally in the Middle East regardless of who is elected president in November, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.Reuters reports that Netanyahu, speaking to reporters before flying to Washington, said that he would thank president Joe Biden for all he has done for Israel.The Biden administration’s continued provision of resources for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has caused the president to lose some support on the left of his party.If you would like something to listen to about the news that Joe Biden is to step aside from his re-election campaign and has instead endorsed vice-president Kamala Harris to challenge Donald Trump in November, then our Politics Weekly America have a podcast on the topic recorded overnight. Jonathan Freedland is joined by politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez to discuss what happens next. You can listen to it here.

      Joe Biden has withdrawn from his presidential re-election race and endorsed vice-president Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of their party’s ticket. The extraordinary decision upends American politics and plunges the Democratic nomination into uncertainty just months before the November election against Donald Trump – a candidate Biden has warned is an existential threat to US democracy. Biden said he planned to speak to the nation in more detail later this week

      Harris said she would run for president, and she was “honored” by Biden’s decision to endorse her. “I am honored to have the president’s endorsement and my intention is to earn and win this nomination,” Harris said. “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic party – and unite our nation – to defeat Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.”

      It is still unclear whether the party will coalesce around Harris, or whether the Democratic national convention will have a floor fight for the nomination. However, all 50 state Democratic party chairs have already endorsed Harris to be the party’s new presidential nominee. Senators Mark Warner, Tammy Baldwin and others quickly offered their support for Harris in messages on Sunday, as did Bill and Hillary Clinton.

      Two of the most likely alternatives to Harris, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom, appear to have ruled themselves out of the running

      Democratic leaders quickly heaped praise on the president for his lifetime of service. “Joe understands better than anyone the stakes in this election” wrote Barack Obama. Nancy Pelosi, who reportedly was one of several lawmakers nudging Biden to withdraw, spoke of her “love and gratitude” in a message after the announcement

      Trump, with typical grace, reacted to the news with a vicious attack on Biden and his legacy. “Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for president, and is certainly not fit to serve – and never was!” the Republican nominee said in a post to his own Truth Social network. The former president rehashed a familiar litany of unsubstantiated grievances in his message. JD Vance, Trump’s newly installed running mate, called Biden “the worst president of my lifetime”
      In today’s First Edition newsletter, my colleague Archie Bland sets out what happens now:While Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries at a canter, his status as the party’s nominee had not yet been officially confirmed. As Joan E Greve sets out in this useful explainer, the delegates who are pledged to vote for Biden at the party’s convention next month will now be released from their obligation.In theory, that could mean an open “floor fight” in which candidates vie for the delegates’ votes. The Democratic National Committee chair, Jaime Harrison, said yesterday that the process would be “transparent and orderly”. The DNC’s rules committee said last night that it would meet on Wednesday to settle on the process.Kamala Harris has no automatic right to Biden’s delegates as his vice-president, but his endorsement plus the explicit support of many prominent figures in the party mean there is a very good chance she will run unopposed, or be a strong favourite even if someone stands against her.In her favour is wariness among the Democratic establishment of a chaotic display to the public in an open battle at the convention – alongside worries that Black and female voters could turn away from the party if Harris were to be denied the nomination that some feel she has already earned.Tat theory will only be tested if a serious rival emerges, which looks increasingly unlikely. One potential candidate, Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, quickly said yesterday that she would not stand; another governor, Gavin Newsom of California, has repeatedly said that he would not stand against Harris. Both endorsed her last night, along with more than 100 other elected Democrats.Read more here: Monday briefing – Joe Biden passes the torch – and transforms the race for the presidencyThe Kremlin has responded to Biden stepping aside, saying “a lot can change” in the next four months.“The elections are still four months away, and that is a long period of time in which a lot can change,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the SHOT news outlet.“We need to be patient and carefully monitor what happens. The priority for us is the special military operation,” Peskov said, using the euphemism for the Ukraine war that President Vladimir Putin prefers.Putin had said several times said that he felt Biden was preferable as the future US president to Trump for Russia, even after Biden cast the Kremlin chief as a “crazy SOB”.Russian state television led news bulletins with the news of Biden leaving the election race and Biden’s support for Harris, though it said it was unclear if Harris would earn the Democratic nomination.Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on the Telegram messaging app that he wished Biden good health and added that the goals of the special military operation would be achieved.If Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, then, as said in a 2020 Harris campaign ad shared widely after Biden resigned, Trump will be up against “The Anti-Trump”.Here is a reminder of some of the ways they differ: A prosecutor versus a felon. The first Black person, the first person of South Asian descent, and the first female Vice President in US history, versus a white man. The oldest Presidential candidate in US history versus someone almost 20 years younger than him. The US property mogul who inherited a fortune from his father versus the daughter of a biologist and a university Professor in economics, both of whom are immigrants.On that note, this is Helen Sullivan handing over to my colleague Martin Belam in London.Here is a roundup of this morning’s front pages: More

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      Trump’s return to rally stage met with prayers, excitement and confusion over JD Vance

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      “He was spared by the hand of God!” a man wrapped in a flag chanted as he walked past a line of people snaking outside the 12,000-seat Van Andel Arena in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan.The display prompted a smattering of loud cries of “USA! USA!” but the general tone of the packed-in crowd who had gathered to see Donald Trump’s first rally since a would-be assassin opened fire on him at a campaign event in Pennsylvania a week ago was more laid-back.Indeed, despite the roiling impact of the shooting on US politics over the past week, it felt like back to business-as-usual for the Trump campaign road show.Joe Attard, a worker at a factory that makes sheds, made the drive from Southgate, Michigan, to Grand Rapids hoping to catch a glimpse of Trump, who was appearing in the crucial battleground state after being formally anointed as the Republican presidential candidate and hitting the campaign trail with his new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance.“There’s a real feeling of community here, everybody in the same mind,” Attard said. “It’s a great feeling.” Other than a lone man across the barricades holding a “Deport Trump” sign, Attard seemed to be right. There were few people around without some kind of Trump-branded apparel.Perhaps in keeping with a party that has fully unified around Trump after the shocking attempt on his life, most people seemed excited to be at the rally. A man in an army baseball cap pointed people towards the ADA-accessible line. People waved and cheered for the Secret Service officers and mounted police patrolling the street.Standing in line, Isaiah White, a 25-year-old from Hudsonville, Michigan, said he was “very excited” for another chance to see Trump. The last time Trump came to Van Andel Arena, White got in line too late and had to watch on the Jumbotron outside the venue.Betsy Gatchell Goff, who came to Van Andel Arena from her hometown of Benton Harbor, Michigan, said she thought Trump was “a unifying figure for our country”. Gatchell Goff hoped that with Trump back in office, “we’ll have a president who does more than sleep all day”, a disparaging reference to Joe Biden.But there was also a strain of bitter sentiment among the crowd. “Trump won” and “Unvaxxed and Proud” were two of the most common slogans on T-shirts, hats and flags.The mood around last Saturday’s assassination attempt was surprisingly nonchalant among attendees. Indeed, as has happened with Trump’s campaign, the imagery and fact of the attack had been exploited for gain. A vendor on the corner sold shirts sporting a bloodstained Trump, fist raised, with the caption: “Missed me, motherfucker.”Attard was glad to see Trump back on the campaign trail so soon after an attempt on his life. “It shows the world that he’s strong,” Attard said.Among the elected officials present, the tone was more reverent. As the event opener, a local Michigan representative gave a prayer that thanked God for “graciously sparing President Trump”.Security, on the other hand, was fully alert. Secret Service and TSA agents, including at least one K-9 unit, motioned people through metal detectors, while legions of staffers in crisp polos emblazoned with “Team Trump” ushered people to their seats.There was serious political red meat from some speakers. Michigan Republican party chair Pete Hoekstra took the stage to open the event and called governor Gretchen Whitmer the “worst governor in the United States”. Anti-Whitmer sentiment was widespread, with people throughout the event calling her “Witless”, “Witchmer” or “Whitler”.The state of Michigan politics was a prominent theme. Bill Huizenga, the US representative for Michigan’s fourth district, said Trump was in Grand Rapids to show the world how “the blue wall” of midwestern states was “going to crumble like a cookie”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Grand Rapids rally was the first since JD Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate. The Ohio senator seemed to be a bit of an unknown quantity among rally attendees.“I’ll support him because Trump supports him,” Betsy Gatchell Goff said. Isaiah White admitted: “Honestly, I had to Wikipedia him, but he seems all right.”The tone shifted once Vance appeared. The new vice-presidential candidate opened with a joke about the Ohio-Michigan football rivalry and followed it up with challenging Vice-President Kamala Harris’s record, saying: “What the hell have you got?,” prompting the loudest cheers of the afternoon.But much of the tone was the usual politics-as-entertainment fare that is a hallmark of Trump rallies. Even in the wake of an attempted assassination, Trump’s rally struck a celebratory tone in this extraordinary American election.As the crowd filtered in, Macho Man by the Village People and Born Free by Kid Rock alternated with La Vie enRose by Édith Piaf. A sizzle reel from the Trump campaign lit up the arena, then launched straight into a dramatized victimhood narrative.“The only crime I’ve committed is to fiercely defend this country,” Trump’s voice boomed in the accompanying voiceover. At the line: “When I’m re-elected, I will obliterate the deep state!,” the crowd erupted into cheers and whistles. In a later promotional video, a union worker said: “Fuck you” to a reporter when asked about Joe Biden’s policies.At this, people throughout the crowd broke into laughter. More

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      Trump to hold first public campaign event since assassination attempt

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      Republican nominee Donald Trump will hold his first public campaign rally since a shocking assassination attempt a week ago by appearing in a crucial rust belt battleground state alongside his new running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance.The return to the campaign trail by Trump comes after the attempted killing of the former US president at a Pennsylvania rally last Saturday when a 20-year-old gunman opened fire, injuring Trump and others and killing one rally-goer.The shooting roiled American politics, ratcheting up the tension in a race already fueled by fears over rising political violence and the prospect of civil unrest. It also dominated the past week’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee from which Trump emerged at the head of a remarkably unified and energized campaign.Tonight’s joint rally with Vance is the first for the pair since they officially became the nominees. Trump kicked off the gathering of Republicans by naming Vance as his vice-presidential pick.Michigan is one of the crucial swing states expected to determine the outcome of the presidential election. Trump narrowly won the state by just more than 10,000 votes in 2016, but Democrat Joe Biden flipped it back in 2020, winning by a margin of 154,000 votes on his way to the presidency.“Welcome to Michigan, Donald Trump and JD Vance,” the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, said in an Instagram post on Saturday, and outlined “three things you should know about our great state.“Here, we protect reproductive freedom. We’re not interested in your national abortion ban. Two, we find ways to put money back in Michiganders pockets … and three, we’re a proud union state and UAW workers still remember when Donald Trump broke his promises to Michigan workers … and Michigan is going to reject your extreme Project 2025 agenda.”With Vance by his side, Trump will deliver remarks in Grand Rapids, a historically Republican stronghold that has trended increasingly blue in recent elections.Whitmer’s caustic welcome was seen as polling indicates she would beat Trump by 1% in the key swing state if she were to become the Democratic presidential nominee, but trails the former president by almost 4% nationally in a hypothetical general election matchup.Trump’s choice of Vance was seen as a move to gain support among so-called rust belt voters in places such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio who helped Trump notch his surprise 2016 victory.Vance specifically mentioned those places during his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention, stressing his roots growing up poor in small-town Ohio and pledging not to forget working-class people whose “jobs were sent overseas and children were sent to war”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats have dominated recent elections in Michigan, but Republicans now see an opening in the state as Democrats are increasingly divided about whether Biden should drop out of the race.Biden has insisted he is not dropping out, and has attempted to turn the focus back towards Trump, saying on Friday that Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican national convention showcased a “dark vision for the future”.In polls over the last week, Trump has often extended his narrow lead over Biden, though the race overall remains close. Trump, however, is continuing to perform strongly in the crucial battleground states that are vital for victory. His campaign also insists that the contest is broadening to bring in some states – such as Virginia – that Democrats previously considered safe.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Pity US voters their choice of leaders. Surely democracy is better than this? | Simon Tisdall

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      What a shambles! What a shame! With less than four months to go, America’s presidential race, global democracy’s showpiece event, has boiled down to a choice between a crook, a codger, a cheerleader and a charlatan. Four folks who, for varying reasons, are barely fit.Voters deserve better. Or perhaps, by applauding and rewarding bad behaviour, they really don’t. Friends and allies look on aghast. Chinese and Russian online election trolls sneer with delight. No worries, guys. The US is busy screwing itself.First, the psychopath mansplaining atop the Republican ticket. The word, by definition, denotes a personality characterised by impaired empathy and remorse, narcissism, superficial charm, manipulativeness, dishonesty and an outward appearance of normality. Sound about right? Yup. Except it’s worse than ever. At 78, his chronic condition is deteriorating rapidly.Sanctimonious, sentimental, self-pitying, vicious, ignorant – addressing the Republican convention, Donald Trump showed he hasn’t changed a bit. Yet now, unbelievably, this sleazy liar, convicted felon and wannabe dictator, this serial sexual abuser, faux-Christian and closet racist reckons he holds the moral high ground. And all because some poor fool took a shot, elevating him to martyr status.The Pennsylvania assassination attempt was the perfect advertisement for Trump’s favourite role of victim-saviour. He is persecuted. He suffers for you. Now he’s born again. Trump likened his recent New York court tribulations to Jesus in the wilderness. And he claimed God helped him dodge the killer bullet. Joe Biden’s earlier, inept appeal to place “a bull’s eye” on Trump’s back inadvertently fortified the fable.Trump’s disciples raised their arms in salute. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back on his feet and he roared!” proclaimed lackey senator Tim Scott, mangling metaphors. Divine intervention had saved Trump – in order that he save America.Trump’s unprepossessing son, Donald Jr, claims the near-death experience has fundamentally altered his pa. Baloney. American lions don’t change their spots, as Scott might say.Trump, sensing electoral advantage in a new, insincere guise of national unifier, will exploit the notion ruthlessly. Yet, if re-elected, all bets are off. Revenge and score-settling will be prioritised as before, alongside the hard-right, democracy-shattering Project 2025 agenda.Trump is sick. But so too, sadly, is America’s other main presidential contender, in different ways. Biden has an illness to which those exercising great power often succumb: a delusional belief in his own indispensability. Only he can beat Trump, he insists. It’s nonsense, of course. Biden may be the only Democrat who can’t beat him. Reports suggest the old stager may be finally recognising that reality.Hubris, vanity, pride and a first lady living life vicariously: all influenced Biden’s stubborn hanging on. Now he has Covid again. Of all these ills, old age is the most unforgiving. There’s no fighting the clock. And politically, at 81, Biden’s game is up. Latest polling suggests two-thirds of Democrats think he should quit. About 70% of all voters doubt his mental capacity to lead for another four years. Time to go, Joe.Panicky squawking in the Democratic henhouse is barely contained at this point. There is no agreed party mechanism to remove an incumbent, nor for replacing one. Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have mostly kept their heads down, muttering off-mike. They never really rated Biden. Yet he turned out a better president than either. Do they secretly hope he crashes and burns? Like age and pride, envy and legacy also poison the well.The unfitness of Trump and Biden throws a sharper spotlight on their understudies. So who’s next in line? Kamala Harris, vice-president since 2021, is on Democratic pole. But familiarity has not translated into popularity. Her favourability rating averages minus 15 points. While she notionally fares better than Biden against Trump in some swing states, her claim to the crown is unpersuasive.Harris, 59, is unfairly criticised, perhaps because she is the first female vice-president – a California liberal with black and Asian American roots. She’s led on issues such as abortion, climate, education and voting rights. But opponents dismiss her as a lightweight White House cheerleader who failed in her main task of repelling border illegals.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAttacks on Harris notably increased at the Republican convention – a pre-emptive strike strategy, hedging against a Biden departure. But it’s unclear who among more than half a dozen potential Democratic candidates might get the nod. Names like California’s Gavin Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and former transport secretary Pete Buttigieg are tossed around like racecourse betting tickets. If the call comes, Harris will need to toughen up and wise up fast – or risk being shouldered aside.Intriguingly, the same fate could befall Trump one day, given his telling choice of the unpleasantly hard-right, white nationalist-populist senator JD Vance as running mate. Despite his privileged background and wealth, Trump portrays himself, against all evidence, as a champion of the working man. Vance, in contrast, is arguably the real thing, warts and all – a self-styled hillbilly throwback with a chip on his shoulder the size of Ohio.Vance, 39, is the least-known member of 2024’s electoral quadrumvirate. A shameless opportunist, his fiercely stated loyalty to Trump, whom he once compared to Hitler, looks confected and expedient. He’s already casting himself as the Maga heir apparent. How long before he usurps the throne? No one knows what he truly believes, except perhaps his wife, Usha, the brains behind the drone.Vance’s extremist, intolerant views on abortion, immigration, isolationism and protectionism, plus his inflammatory, divisive rhetoric, typify America’s hugely self-destructive 2024 election. The choice on offer ranges from the sick and dangerous to the crudely rabid or banal. Democracy is better than this. Four months remain to rescue America – or else it ends in tears. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs CommentatorDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

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      Is there anything that JD Vance actually believes? | Moira Donegan

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      How many faces does JD Vance have? For one thing, he looks a lot different these days. Around the time the election denier first ran for Senate in Ohio, in 2022, he grew a beard, perhaps to cover up his decidedly childlike countenance. As rumors swirled this summer that Donald Trump would choose Vance as his running mate – replacing Mike Pence, who left the vice-presidency after a mob of angry Trump supporters tried to hang him – some wondered if maybe Vance would shave. Trump, it seems, doesn’t like beards, and prefers his underlings clean-shaven. And JD Vance is – has always been – willing to do just about anything to secure the approval of the powerful.According to historian Gabriel Winant, Vance has spent much of his life clinging to a series of mentors, whom he has used for professional advancement before moving on from – and, ultimately, betraying. There was his grandmother, or “Meemaw”, the hardscrabble woman who raised him in rural Ohio – but whom he depicted as ignorant and ultimately culturally pathological in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. There was his Yale Law School mentor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and wife of Jed Rubenfeld, who was suspended from Yale Law after an investigation found that he sexually harassed his students. (Chua also mentored Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, whom she helped secure a clerkship with Brett Kavanaugh.) But Vance left this center-right Yale Law milieu for Silicon Valley, where he made his fortune as a venture capitalist under the tutelage (and with the funding) of the far-right techo-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who would later go on to bankroll Vance’s Senate campaign. Thiel seems to have introduced Vance to his other mentor, the reactionary “neo-monarchist” and favorite intellectual of the Silicon Valley right, Curtis Yarvin.But he pushed aside these old mentors for Donald Trump, whose endorsement he sought with near-slavish sycophancy in his 2022 race. He did this despite having once characterized Trump as “cultural heroin”, “a total fraud”, “reprehensible”, “a moral disaster” and “America’s Hitler”. Vance made those statements back when it suited his ambitions to be critical of Trump: after the release of his book, just before the election in 2016, Vance had been hailed as a “Trump whisperer”, translating the then candidate’s supporters in terms that were palatable for coastal liberal elites. But it does not suit him to be anti-Trump anymore. Now it suits him to be the running mate for “America’s Hitler”.Is there anything JD Vance really believes? He is not a consistent man, but he has embraced a virulent, creepy and inventive sexism that appears too irrepressible to be insincere. Vance is a prolific demeaner of women. He supports a national abortion ban and has opposed rape and incest exceptions, calling rape “an inconvenience” and insisting that abortions should not be allowed in such circumstances because “two wrongs don’t make a right”. In a bizarre episode, he characterized a national abortion ban as necessary to prevent “George Soros” from flying “Black women” to California for abortions.The VP pick of the twice-divorced Trump also opposes no-fault divorce, which allows women to leave unhappy marriages without having to prove abuse in court. Though to be clear, he doesn’t think women should leave abusive men, either. He characterized the ending of marriages that were “maybe even violent” as selfish frivolity: “This is one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” Vance said. “Making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”An adamant “pro-natalist”, Vance has an abiding and obsessive contempt for childless adults, especially women. Blaming the “childless left” for a host of political and cultural problems, Vance has proposed extending extra votes to people with children, so as to dilute the political representation of those without them. He has demeaned non-breeding women as “childless cat ladies”.For those women who do have children, Vance seems to think that they should be confined to the home: he has characterized childcare subsidies – which allow mothers of young children to earn money, obtain professional experience or education, and preserve their independence – as “class war against normal people”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNormal, I guess, is relative. Who counts? Certainly not everyone. Vance’s droolingly misogynist pro-natalism has shaded, as such positions always do, into an endorsement of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that the “elites” Vance so often rails against are trying to replace white “real” Americans with a compliant underclass of immigrants. “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves,” Vance told the 2019 National Conservatism Conference. “That should bother us.” He did not define “us” or “our people”, and he did not elaborate on what he meant by “replacement”. But Vance, though he is craven and dishonest, is not a dumb guy. He did not use those words by accident.Does Vance really believe in the passionately, obsessively sexist things he says? I think he probably does. But it might not matter: what will matter – what has always mattered to Vance – is not what he believes, but what he finds expedient. Vance has already tried to distance himself from his extreme position on abortion, wiping his call to “End Abortion” from his website and delivering mealy-mouthed statements to reporters about his desire for a “national standard” – a phrase that is meant to confuse, since he doesn’t specify what he wants a national standard of. To ask what JD Vance really believes is a bit like staring into a black hole: there is an unknowable blankness behind his tiny, tight blue eyes. What it is certain that Vance has is ambition – ruthless, insatiable and unburdened by principle. Other people believe in ideals, moral principles, right and wrong. The only thing we can say for sure that JD Vance believes is that he, personally, should have as much power as possible.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More