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      Biden says ‘time to outlaw’ AR-15 rifle used in Trump assassination attempt – live

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      Joe Biden is commenting at length about the toll gun violence takes on American communities, and singled out the impact of assault weapons such as the AR-15.“An AR-15 was used in the shooting of Donald Trump. This was the assault weapon that killed so many others, including children. It’s time to outlaw them,” Biden said.In what was likely a reference to his involvement in passing the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired 10 years later, Biden said: “I did it once, and I will do it again.”As he closed his speech to the NAACP, Joe Biden defended his ability to continue serving as president, despite mounting worries among Democrats over his advanced age.“Hopefully, with age, I’ve demonstrated a little bit of wisdom. Here’s what I do know: I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job, and I know the good Lord hasn’t brought us this far to leave us now there’s more work to do,” Biden said.His comments came amid reports that the Democratic National Committee is moving to quickly nominate Biden, and quell a rebellion by lawmakers and others concerned about his ability to defeat Donald Trump:Joe Biden is warning the NAACP that a second Donald Trump administration would “undo everything” they stand for.The president said he has been “all about working people in this nation my whole career”, and: “That’s a stark contrast to my predecessor and his Maga visions. They’ll undo everything, undo everything the NAACP stands for. But now they’re trying to deny it. They’re lying about their Project 2025. They want to deny your freedom, the freedom to vote.”The crowd at the NAACP convention has started chanting “four more years!” after Joe Biden vowed to restore the constitutional right to abortion.“And, guess what, come hell or high water, we’re going to restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land,” the president said.In a sign that the detente between Joe Biden and Donald Trump will be brief, the president has attacked his predecessor for his comments about “Black jobs”.Biden was referencing a comment Trump made during their first debate, in which he claimed undocumented immigrants are “taking Black jobs now”.“Of course he thinks of Black jobs,” Biden told the crowd at the NAACP convention. “I love his phrase, ‘Black jobs’, tells a lot about the man and about his character. Folks, I know what a Black job is. It’s a vice-president of the United States.”“I know what a Black job is. The first Black president … Barack Obama,” Biden added.It was a reversion to form for the president, who had toned down his rhetoric over the past couple of days following the assassination attempt on Trump. Expect the former president to follow suit.Joe Biden is commenting at length about the toll gun violence takes on American communities, and singled out the impact of assault weapons such as the AR-15.“An AR-15 was used in the shooting of Donald Trump. This was the assault weapon that killed so many others, including children. It’s time to outlaw them,” Biden said.In what was likely a reference to his involvement in passing the 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired 10 years later, Biden said: “I did it once, and I will do it again.”Joe Biden appears to be making light of the efforts by his fellow Democrats to get him to step aside in favor of what they feel would be a more electable candidate.He related the adage, credited to former president Harry Truman, that “if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog”.“After the last couple weeks, I know what he means,” quipped Biden, who had earlier described Truman as someone who “was often counted out”.Joe Biden is now speaking to the NAACP convention.“My name is Joe Biden, and I’m a lifetime member of the NAACP,” the president began, speaking of the longstanding civil rights group.Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, is introducing Joe Biden, who will address the civil rights group’s convention in Las Vegas.He recounted how Black voters were crucial to determining the 2020 election, but noted, “not everyone shares the same investment in a progressive vision”.Johnson is singling out Project 2025, the rightwing plan to remake the US government that several officials tied to Donald Trump are involved in.“This is a 900-page manifesto that seeks to undermine progress, promote violence, inflict harm on our community. They must know that NAACP, we will be here for that fight,” Johnson said.At a lawmaker panel hosted by the rightwing organization Moms for Liberty – a group that has earned a reputation for advancing local book bans – the conversation, which was largely focused on the virtues of private education, shifted to teachers’ unions.“You have the teachers, and then you have the union,” said the Florida congressman Byron Donalds, to jeers from the crowd. “The Democrats can’t win elections without the power of unions.”Proponents of private education rarely speak so candidly about the political motives behind the push to defund public education. Donalds’ acknowledgment of the electoral power of unions offers a more complete picture of the conservative push to expand private schools, where union density is low.Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson has said he has “no doubt” that Donald Trump would continue supporting Ukraine, following a meeting with him.In a post on X, Johnson wrote: “We discussed Ukraine and I have no doubt that he will be strong and decisive in supporting that country and defending democracy.”The meeting comes amid growing concern that Trump could withdraw support for Ukraine and possibly seek a peace deal directly with the Kremlin that may involve territorial concessions.Boris Johnson met Trump on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee. He’s not the only former British prime minister to swing through:Kamala Harris has formally invited JD Vance, the Ohio senator who Donald Trump yesterday named as his running mate, to debate, the Biden-Harris campaign said.“Vice-President Harris reached out to Senator Vance and left a message to congratulate him on his selection, welcome him to the race and express her hope that the two can meet in the vice-presidential debate proposed by CBS News,” a campaign official said.It is unclear when the debate will happen. CBS News proposed 23 July or 13 August, which the Biden campaign has accepted.Joe Biden is expected to soon make his first speech in public since a gunman attempted to kill Donald Trump at a campaign rally over the weekend.In the aftermath of the failed assassination, in which a rallygoer and the gunman were killed, Biden and Trump have dialed back their relentless attacks on each others’ records ahead of the 5 November election.The president is scheduled to address the convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People civil rights group in Las Vegas, Nevada, a swing state that could prove crucial to both campaigns.Biden is once again late to begin his speech, but we’ll let you know he says when it starts.Sharon Yancey, 77, said she has been a Republican voter for 10 to 15 years.“He’s a patriot and I’m a patriot. I love America, and he does too. And he wants to make America the best for everyone, all people, that are here, including the minorities,” Yancey, who was wearing a red Make America great again hat, said of Trump.“Other groups of people, they vote their conscience and they’re not vilified for it, they’re not looked down on and told to feel like you’re less of a person if you don’t vote Democrat,” she said.“One of my son-in-laws is white; he votes the way he wants to vote. And I have another son-in-law who’s Asian; he votes the way he wants to vote. So why am I vilified and called you know, less than a human being, and all those other derogatory things they say about Black people who don’t follow the line?”Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator who was among the candidates to be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, stopped at an outreach event for Black voters in Milwaukee on Tuesday.Speaking at the Wisconsin GOP’s Black coalition headquarters, alongside four local politicians, Scott was more subdued than he had been on Monday night, when he literally roared into a microphone after dubbing Trump an “American lion”.As Scott entered the room there were 16 people seated, 10 of whom were Black, and they sat through a rather dry conversation about “opportunity zones”, a bipartisan 2017 program designed to boost investment in lower-income communities.There was no mention of Trump, and little mention of the Republican party as a whole, aside from Scott saying: “We have not been as good at marketing the success that’s come out of the conservative movement as we should be.”In a room which had portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump mounted along one wall, some people said they would vote for Trump in November.“I’ve just recently made the shift over to being a Republican. My family were Democrat, I think I was just born into it,” said Mario Dickens. A local business owner, he said he became a Republican about a year ago.“We just haven’t seen much benefit at all over last four years. And four years prior things were going great for us,” Dickens said.Donald Trump Jr joked with his father about hair in the aftermath of Saturday’s assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.Don Jr was out fishing with his daughter in Jupiter, Florida, when he received a call from his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, informing him that Donald Trump had been shot.“It was 90 minutes before I even knew he was alive,” Don Jr said at Axios House on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee.
      That was a tough moment and then finally, get hit him on the phone and honestly, considering the heaviness of that moment, sort of give me a window for some levity and I asked him, well, most importantly, how’s the hair?
      The audience laughed and Don Jr proceeded to imitate his father’s voice: “The hair’s fine, Don, the hair’s fine. A lot of blood in it but it’s fine.”Reverting to his normal voice, Don Jr added:
      To be shot and to stand up with that kind of resolve, I just felt like: you’re the biggest badass I know. That was my opening salvo and then we started joking hair and I said, can I call you Evander Holyfield because of the little missing chunk of ear?”
      [Heavyweight boxer Holyfield had a part of his ear bitten off by opponent Mike Tyson in 1997.]Don Jr claimed this is why the world was at peace during Trump’s presidency.
      Compare and contrast that honestly to just about any clip of Joe Biden these days.One exudes strength, the other exudes weakness. And when you exude weakness, it’s the nature of predation: predators prey on the weak. Our enemies will prey on us.
      Even so, Don Jr promised that Trump’s Thursday speech will be “toned down” and warned against complacency in the Republican ranks. “People are like, ‘Oh, after Saturday it’s over,’” he told the Axios gathering.
      Nothing is over. There’s no level the other side won’t go. There’s no nonsense they won’t play. This is not in the bag. We have to keep our foot on the gas every second of the day until November.
      Don Jr welcomed the idea of Robert Kennedy Jr serving under Trump in a second term – “Maybe there’s a great place for him somewhere in an administration” – and described his own potential role in a presidential transition.
      All I want to do is block the guys that would be a disaster. I want to block the liars. I want to block the guys that are pretending they’re with you … You guys pick the guy that’s right. I want the veto power to cut out each and every one of those people.
      Asked by interviewer Mike Allen for his “least Trumpy” quality, Don Jr replied: “I don’t play golf.”The Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, said the president will tout his record during remarks at the UnidosUs conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.Among Joe Biden’s accomplishments, she said, was being the steward of record low unemployment for Latinos. Latinos are also starting businesses at a record pace. Meanwhile, she added, crime is down and wages are up.But polls have shown Donald Trump making inroads with Hispanic voters, particularly men. Escobar said the Biden campaign was pouring resources into reaching Latino voters, but that more was needed before November.Referencing the Heritage Foundation’s radical plan to reshape the federal government, she said:
      We’ve been talking to Latino communities, I’ve traveled the country to meet with Latino groups, to hear them out, to talk to them about the president’s positive vision for America and contrast that with the incredibly dark, terrifying vision that the Trump-Vance campaign has laid out through Project 2025.
      “There’s a lot of work we still have to do to make sure that Latino voters feel heard and that we inspire them to get to the polls,” she continued. “That’s the work that we have been doing and will continue to do on the Biden-Harris campaign.”Immigration advocates are pre-empting what they anticipate will be a “dark and dystopian vision” on display during the second night of the Republican national convention, themed “Make America Safe Again.”The congresswoman Veronica Escobar, a co-chair of Biden’s re-election campaign, said she wanted to “sound the alarm” on Republicans’ escalating attacks on immigrants.As the Democratic congresswoman from El Paso, Texas, where five years ago a white supremecist targeted Latino shoppers at a Walmart in the city, killing 23 people, Escobar said she knows first hand how dangerous rhetoric can have deadly consequences. She told reporters on a call Tuesday:
      The incredibly dark vision that Donald Trump and his running mate and the Republican GOP have in store for America is a throwback to very, very dark days that we have seen in American history.
      She added that Republicans “want the American public to fear and loathe immigrants”.On the call, advocates warned that Republicans would likely twist the facts and repeat many of their false claims about immigration and crime. “Here’s what they won’t tell you,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, said.
      They will not tell you about the essential role that immigrants play in the Wisconsin economy and across the country. They won’t tell you about the fact that there is no correlation between crime and immigration. And they also won’t tell you that despite their anti-immigration crusade and the millions of political ads being spent this cycle on immigration, the support for citizenship is durable and consistent.
      The quote by Vanessa Cárdenas was amended. More

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      I’m from Appalachia. JD Vance doesn’t represent us – he only represents himself

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      Back in 2016, I was an Appalachian expat living in Boston, feeling homesick and displaced like I do most of the time up here. I saw a book in the Harvard Coop with the word Hillbilly on the cover and jumped at it. No one up here knew that word, or if they did, they understood it as derogatory, while I understood it as home. Here home was, I thought, staring me in the face from the front table at a major bookstore.View image in fullscreenI barely read 30 pages before I saw the book Hillbilly Elegy for what it was: a political platform masquerading as memoir. Before I saw JD Vance for what he was: an opportunist. One willing to double down on stereotypes, to paint the people of Appalachia with a culture of poverty brush, rather than be honest about the ways in which both electoral politics and industry have failed our region.Here’s the thing: JD Vance doesn’t represent Appalachia. JD Vance only represents himself.To the outside world, Vance is sure to appear far more Appalachian than I do. He is white, Christian, and has longstanding generational ties to the region. I, on the other hand, am south Asian, the child of Indian immigrants who settled in Appalachia in the 1970s, because work in the chemical industry brought them there, and left in the early 2000s, because work disappeared.We do have this in common, though: both of us left Appalachia in pursuit of higher education, and have lived away for as long as we lived within the region. But while Vance uses the story of his upbringing to perpetuate a flat, stereotyped representation of Appalachia, my identity, that of my family and community, complicates the narrative in ways that are politically inconvenient.My friends with generational ties to Appalachia experienced the book much as I did. They felt misrepresented. Misunderstood. Scapegoated for the result of the 2016 election. Many wrote pieces in direct response. Elizabeth Catte’s What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia is an absolute must-read in this regard.But up here in Boston? People were lapping up Hillbilly Elegy. Theoretically liberal, educated people brought the book up in conversation, claiming his story helped them understand more about where I was from.It absolutely didn’t.People like me and my family – immigrants who neighbor and labor alongside white working-class Appalachians – don’t exist in Vance’s narrative. Black folks don’t exist in his narrative. Queer folks don’t exist in his narrative. And in his campaign rhetoric, we only exist as the root of Appalachia’s problems; never as one of its sources of strength.View image in fullscreenFolks outside Appalachia devoured Hillbilly Elegy because it reinforced what they already believed about us: that we were lazy, homogenous, and to blame for the unemployment, addiction and environmental disasters that plagued us. Vance’s description of a Jackson, Kentucky, where “people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work”, allowed liberals and conservatives alike to write Appalachia off as beyond saving, and its problems as self-created, and thus, deserved.Harper gladly published, and continues to profit off, his memoir. Major publishing outlets issued rave reviews. The book sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for 54 weeks and Ron Howard subsequently made it into a Netflix movie. (More profits, in case you missed them.) Vance quickly became a go-to for legacy media, appearing on CNN as the Rust belt explainer, and talking on NPR as the Appalachian expert, when in fact he was in no position to do either.Vance’s narrative, and the people and institutions who championed it, who profited off it, are why he is Trump’s pick for vice-president. His candidacy rests on the platform that they created for him.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has only been in office since 2023. He’s not being chosen because of his legislative acumen. He’s got none to speak of.He’s also not being chosen because of his ardent support of Trump. He didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 and went so far as to write an op-ed for the New York Times in which he said “Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office”.So what then, is the basis for Trump’s choice of Vance? Is it to court Appalachian votes? Or to court voters who believe the stereotypes about Appalachians? Or to appease those who profit off Appalachia’s resources while exploiting its people (looking at you, extractive industries and big pharma)?View image in fullscreenA person who truly represented Appalachian people wouldn’t take money from the same big pharma lobby that left West Virginia with the highest opioid overdose rate in the country. They wouldn’t deny climate change in the face of catastrophic flooding that eastern Kentucky still hasn’t recovered from two years out. They wouldn’t stoke fear of immigrants, who provide essential labor in Appalachia in healthcare, agriculture and service industries. They wouldn’t sow division through culture wars in a region where solidarity is desperately needed.My Appalachian friends and I are tired of being reduced to stereotypes. We are tired of the single-source, corporate-funded narrative that is propagated about us. Appalachia deserves a more complicated narrative, and better representation, than a Trump-Vance presidency offers us.Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press.

      This article was amended on 16 July 2024 to correct that Vance has been in office since 2023, not 2022. He was elected in 2022 and sworn into office in 2023. More

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      JD Vance once worried Trump was ‘America’s Hitler’. Now his own authoritarian leanings come into view

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      JD Vance once feared Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler”. Last Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed Democrats calling Trump “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” caused the assassination attempt the former president survived.But on Monday, after Trump made Vance his vice-presidential pick, worries about Vance’s own authoritarian leanings came straight to the fore.“Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme Maga agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign chair, told reporters.Vance has indeed said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done as Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked certification of results in key states won by Biden during the election weeks earlier.Elsewhere on Monday, a profile of Vance was widely shared. Zack Beauchamp of Vox, author of new book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, outlined political views “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy”.Beauchamp described how Vance has repeated Trump’s stolen election lie; has called for a criminal investigation of a journalist he did not like; advocates politicising the federal bureaucracy; and believes presidents can simply ignore the law.“JD Vance,” Beauchamp wrote, “is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps are justified in response.“He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.”Trump’s lawyers recently presented that argument to the supreme court he stacked with rightwingers – and won. But Trump will be gone one day and as Vance told Politico recently, “There is a big question about what comes after him.”It looks like it’s Vance, now the leading elected exponent of “New Right” political thought, as championed by figures prominently including Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, tech billionaire and influential donor.The biographer Max Chafkin has described Thiel’s politics as “closer to authoritarianism” than typical Silicon Valley libertarianism, “super-nationalistic [and] longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive or … a dictator”.While Vance is a fan of writers who want “monarchist” government or “regime change”, Thiel himself once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He also played a key role in the making of Vance.Born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1984, Vance enlisted in the US marines, becoming a military journalist and going to Iraq. He graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School, becoming a venture capitalist, eventually for a Thiel firm in Silicon Valley.Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016. Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it was a huge bestseller, widely acclaimed for its portrait of a region where support for Trump is strong.Vance returned to Ohio and ran a non-profit as well as a venture capital fund. At first opposed to Trump, he switched sides and won his Senate seat in 2022, with Trump’s endorsement and Thiel’s financial support.During that campaign, the libertarian Reason magazine said Vance was “more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways”.The magazine noted Vance’s contention “that conservatives should employ the taxation power to ‘seize’ the assets of ‘woke, leftist’ nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has continued to target universities he says should be brought under state control. In May, speaking to Margaret Brennan of CBS, he said: “If they’re not educating our children well and they’re layering the next generation down in mountains of student debt, then they’re not meeting their end of the bargain.“I think it’s totally reasonable to say there needs to be a political solution to that problem.”Challenged about his admiration for how Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, took control of universities there, Vance said Orbán had “made some smart decisions … that we could learn from in the United States”.On Monday, responses to Trump’s selection of Vance noted his affinity for Orbán. Many also focused on Vance’s warm words for Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term coordinated by the Heritage Foundation and advocating radical rightwing reform to every facet of government.Trump has disavowed links to Project 2025, given the potency of Democratic attacks on the subject. But Vance has long advocated an assault on the federal government.As noted by Reason, Vance in 2021 told Jack Murphy, a controversial “manosphere” figure: “A lot of conservatives have said we should … basically eliminate the administrative state. And I’m sympathetic to that project.“But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I think Trump … [will] probably win again in 2024, and he’ll win by a margin such that he’ll be the president of the United States in January of 2025.“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: fire every single mid-level bureaucrat. Every civil servant in the administrative state.“Replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will get taken to court … stop you, stand before the country like [president] Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”As Beauchamp noted, the Jackson quote “is likely apocryphal, but the history is real”.An 1832 supreme court ruling said the government should respect Native American land rights. Jackson simply ignored it. The result was the forcible displacement of 60,000 people, an outrage known as the Trail of Tears. More

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      A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates

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      Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.“A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.“By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk,” said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said. “It’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”But voters’ outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue – despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe – Vance has also tempered his public position.“We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year. “I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.”In 2022, Vance said he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. He also told NBC News that he wants mifepristone, a common abortion pill that was at the heart of a major supreme court case this year, to remain accessible.Even while supporting a national ban, Vance has said he would like abortion to be “primarily a state issue”.“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said. “I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions.”But, he added: “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”Much of Vance’s public persona, however, remains defined by his support of what he sees as the traditional nuclear family. He has backed policies that he says will increase birth rates, such as making childbirth free, and said that people who are childfree by choice “do not have any physical commitment to the future of this country”.“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” said Vance, a father of three. He then went on to suggest that several Democratic politicians, like Kamala Harris and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, should not have political power because they do not have 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. “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?” (The vice-president has two stepchildren.)“Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults,” he continued.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has also called people who fear having kids “cat ladies” who “must be stopped” and said that universal daycare is “class war against normal people”.Two days after the US supreme court overturned Roe, 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.”Shortly after Trump announced he had chosen Vance as his running mate, Joe Biden’s campaign started to circulate a clip of comments Vance made in 2021 about violence in marriages.“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said in response to a question on fatherlessness.Vance has said that he was not defending men who commit domestic abuse and that he himself is a victim of domestic abuse.Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, praised Vance on Monday.“His ability to compellingly share these stories on a national stage will surely be an asset,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.” More

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      RNC day two to focus on crime and immigration after energetic first day

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      Republicans could not have asked for a more eventful day to kick off their nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and they will be looking to keep party members’ energy high on Tuesday.Donald Trump opened the convention on Monday with the announcement that Ohio senator JD Vance would serve as his running mate, ending months of heated speculation over who would join the former president at the top of the ticket. After formally winning the nomination in the afternoon, Trump brought convention-goers to their feet when he made a surprise appearance at Fiserv Forum on Monday evening.In his first public appearance since the assassination attempt against him on Saturday, Trump appeared at the convention with a bandage over his ear, which was injured in the attack. Multiple speakers who addressed the convention on Monday expressed deep gratitude that Trump survived the shooting, which left one rally attendee and the suspected gunman dead.“Two days ago, evil came for the man we admire and love so much,” hard-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told convention attendees. “I thank God that his hand was on President Trump.”On Tuesday, Republicans are expected to focus their attention on crime and immigration, as the theme of the day will be “Make America Safe Once Again”. Immigration has become a rallying cry for Republicans, as Trump and his allies have repeatedly and falsely accused Joe Biden of supporting “open borders”.Trump has previously called for the deportation of 15 to 20 million undocumented immigrants if he wins re-election, and Vance voiced his own support for mass deportation in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday.“We have to deport people,” Vance told Hannity. “We have to deport people who broke our laws who came in here. And I think we need to start with the violent criminals.”The speaker schedule for Tuesday remains unclear, as Republicans have not yet specified who will next be addressing the convention. But a number of Republican lawmakers and members of Trump’s family, including his sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, have been named as speakers and have not yet addressed the convention crowd.While Republicans rally in Milwaukee, Biden and his Democratic allies are resuming some campaign communications after suspending their planned anti-Trump ads in response to the assassination attempt. In an NBC News interview with Lester Holt that aired Monday evening, the president made a case for his re-election while acknowledging it was a “mistake” to say during a recent donor call that Trump should be Democrats’ “bullseye” right now.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I meant focus on him. Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on – on his – on his policies. Focus on the number of lies he told in the debate,” Biden said. “I’m not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on day one. I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election. I’m not the guy who said that I wouldn’t accept the outcome of this election automatically. You can’t only love your country when you win.”As of now, it seems like Biden still needs to sell more voters on that message. National polls show a neck-and-neck race between Biden and Trump, and Biden appears to be in trouble in several states he won in 2020. A pair of New York Times/Siena College polls conducted last week found the two candidates virtually tied in both Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Biden, and Virginia, which he won by 10 points in 2020.If Virginia is indeed competitive, Biden’s chances of re-election appear bleak. And Republicans will be looking to further damage those chances on Tuesday. More

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      Trump’s arrival and ‘our God saves’: key takeaways from day one of the RNC

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      Just two days after a gunman targeted a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, leaving the candidate grazed by a bullet and one of his supporters dead, the Republican national convention kicked off in Milwaukee in a strikingly normal fashion.Donald Trump, who made his first public appearance but did not yet address the convention, has now been officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Here are key takeaways from the day:1. As VP, Trump picks JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy author who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’ For his vice-president, Trump chose 39-year-old JD Vance, a bestselling author who swiftly transformed himself from a self-described “never Trumper” to a Trump loyalist.Now an Ohio senator, Vance first took public office 18 months ago, when he won a race for Senate after being backed by more than $10m in support from tech mogul Peter Thiel. Vance had previously worked as a venture capitalist, and lived for several years in the Bay Area before moving back to Ohio.Vance, who gained a national profile for a much-praised 2016 memoir about white family dysfunction in Appalachia and how he made it to Yale Law School, once publicly called Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot”, and said he was a dangerous figure who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place”. But Vance worked hard to walk back these criticisms and gain Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate race.Vance has endorsed a ban on abortion, continued to falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, said that the US should conduct “large-scale deportations”, and claimed the Democratic party is trying to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”, which Democrats have said is an endorsement of the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Vance was praised today by Donald Trump Jr for being a powerful surrogate for Trump on television.2. Trump makes his first public appearance since surviving a shooting attack in Pennsylvania Donald Trump looked unusually somber as he emerged from backstage and joined his sons, and his new vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, in a VIP section of the convention hall audience.There was a stiff white bandage covering his ear, which had been grazed by a bullet on Saturday when the former president narrowly avoided an assasination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally that left one of his supporters dead.Trump waved to his supporters and occasionally held his fist in the air as he walked through the crowd. But he looked more moved than defiant in his first public appearance, mouthing “thank you”, to his supporters, and once gesturing to his ear and to the camera filming him backstage as if to suggest that he could still hear them despite the bandage.After Trump shook hands with other supporters, he joined Tucker Carlson, his sons, and Vance, to listen to the speakers, he appeared to relax somewhat, and began to smile more in response to the crowd.3. Post-shooting speeches focus on Trump’s relationship with God, not blaming Biden Amid multiple media reports that Trump wanted to strike a note of unity after what he saw as his own miraculous escape from death, Axios reported that “Trump ordered aides not to allow the convention’s prime-time speakers to update their remarks to dial up outrage over the shooting.”Many of the speeches on Monday appeared to reflect a more restrained approach to talking about the shooting, with Republicans focusing on Trump’s personal strength and framing the event in Christian terms.“Our God still saves, he still delivers, and he still sets free, because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet, and he roared!” South Carolina senator Tim Scott said.4. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien praises Trump’s toughness in defiant pro-labor speech One of the most prominent labor union leaders in the US brought a fiercely anti-corporate message into the heart of the GOP convention, where he wove together a denunciation of corporate power with praise of Trump’s willingness to hear from alternate voices.Teamsters president Sean O’Brien faced sharp criticism for within his own union for what some called his “unconscionable” decision to speak at the RNC.In his speech, O’Brien pushed back at that response, saying: “The left called me a traitor,” but that “today, the teamsters are here to say, we are not beholden to anyone or to any party.”“The teamsters are doing something correct if the extremes of both parties think I shouldn’t be on this stage,” he added.O’Brien used the platform to argue for changes in labor laws to protect US workers and for “corporate welfare reform”.He received some cheers from the Republican audience when he said: “Elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock prices at the expense of the American worker.”But his praise of Trump prompted an even more enthusiastic responses from the crowd, particularly his comment that, whatever else people might think of Trump, after the shooting on Saturday: “He has proven to be one tough SOB.”5. Elon Musk is reportedly discussing major donations to a pro-Trump Super PacTrump’s choice of former venture capitalist and Peter Thiel protege JD Vance as his vice-presidential nominee already strengthened the link between the 2024 Trump campaign and Silicon Valley.But a report from the Wall Street Journal today suggested that one of the biggest and most volatile tech titans is now considering pouring a record-breaking amount of cash into a Super Pac designed to boost Republican turnout.The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk is discussing donating $45m a month, starting in July, to a pro-Trump Pac reportedly created by members of his tech executive inner circle. How much Musk has actually given so far is unclear, and may not be made public until the next round of campaign filings are made public on 15 July, but Bloomberg reported he had already given “a sizable amount”. More