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

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

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

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      What does JD Vance really believe? | Sidney Blumenthal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      New Trump January 6 court filing highlights perils of possible JD Vance vice-presidency

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      When the next electoral vote is certified on 6 January next year, Vice-President Kamala Harris will play a critical role – whether or not she’s the winner of the presidential contest. It’s a role that vice-presidents have routinely played throughout history: certifying the results of the election for a seamless transfer of power.The same might not be true for the election after that. In the most consequential line of the vice-presidential debate last week, the Republican nominee, JD Vance, refused to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and then pressed by moderators, declined to answer whether he would refuse to certify the vote this year if he had that power. (His opponent, Tim Walz, said in a clip that’s now been spliced for campaign ads: “That is a damning non-answer.”)The troubling nature of the answer was compounded less than 24 hours after the debate when the US district judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a redacted version of the special counsel Jack Smith’s brief against Trump in the federal election interference case laying out new evidence of how the former president attempted to steal the election.In striking detail, the brief laid out how Trump made Vice-President Mike Pence a target of his angry supporters on January 6, how the Secret Service was forced to whisk him away to a secure location, and how Pence went on to certify the election after the violence had subsided.Under the US constitution, the vice-president has few specific powers. Walz and Vance debated last week about foreign policy, reproductive rights, immigration and other policies that the next administration will influence, though their role in any of it will be limited. But the constitution does spell out that the vice-president is the president of the Senate and is in charge of certifying the election results, and Vance, unlike Pence, has said multiple times that he would not have certified the vote in 2020.“I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had,” Vance said on a venture capitalist’s podcast in September. He made similar comments before he was tapped by Trump to be on the ticket, saying during an ABC News interview that he would have liked to see the certification of the 2020 election handled differently.The contrast between Vance leaving the door open to question election results, and the depiction of Pence’s role on January 6 laid out in the Smith indictment, is stark.According to Smith, Pence stood strong despite Trump’s pressure and threats. He told Trump he had seen no evidence of election-determining fraud and repeatedly tried to convince Trump to accept the valid results. Trump’s pressure campaign did not let up – he and his co-conspirators used “deceit”, lying to Pence that there was evidence of significant fraud and lying to the public that Pence had the ability to reject electoral votes and send them back to the state legislatures.Even after Trump tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” supporters started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and the Secret Service had to evacuate the vice-president to a secure location, Pence maintained that the Electoral Count Act didn’t allow him to legally reject the valid electoral votes.Although the riots on January 6 delayed certification for approximately six hours, the House and Senate resumed their joint session at 11.35pm, according to the brief, and at 3.41am, Pence announced the certified results of the election in favor of Joe Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s not exaggeration to say that US democracy survived past January 2021 because of Pence. Had he refused to certify the vote, the peaceful transfer of power would not have occurred, and the chaos and violence probably would have continued.But Vance has already proved himself more eager to capitulate to Trump’s demands – despite previously condemning the former president, he’s transformed into a Maga acolyte who is in some ways “more Trump than Trump”, according to one retired Republican party operative. And he has explicitly said that he would have acted differently from Pence on the day Congress meets to certify the election.Trump is not currently president, so Vance won’t be able to refuse to certify and wreak havoc in January. But if Trump wins a second term, Vance will be in charge of certifying the vote after the 2028 election. Trump has now said multiple times that Americans “won’t have to vote any more” if he wins this year. It’s not far-fetched to think about what might happen if Trump and Vance refused to cede control of the White House in 2028. More

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      in US Politics

      John Oliver on VP debate’s ‘civility’: ‘Etiquette is kind of beside the point’

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      On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver ripped into those praising the “civility” of last week’s vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. “Etiquette is kind of beside the point” when the stakes include immigrant rights and women’s bodily autonomy, he contended.“It’s like reading a ransom note and going, ‘This cursive is just so lovely. Look at the capital Y in ‘You have 24 hours before he dies.’ There are still some people who were raised right,’” he quipped.Oliver tore into Vance’s refusal to say, when asked directly, that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In what Walz called “a damning non-answer”, Vance deflected with: “I’m focused on the future.”“‘I’m focused on the future’ is one of the most generic store-brand fuckboy deflections there is,” Oliver fumed. “It’s no wonder Tim Walz broke the fourth wall there like he was in Abbott Elementary. Because ‘I’m focused on the future’ is what you say when you want to change the subject. If not, you just answer the question.”Oliver also touched on special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page report detailing the ways Trump and his cohort attempted to overturn the 2020 election, “reminding us yet again of the ridiculous steps he took to avoid leaving office”. According to the document, Trump allegedly told people in the White House he knew he had lost but that he would “fight like hell” anyway.“But it super matters if you lost,” Oliver countered. “It’s kind of the main thing that matters. That is the most unsettling thing you could possibly overhear if you work at the White House.”The report also notes that Trump muted his lawyer Sidney Powell during a phone call “when she was outlining her bogus fraud claims” and called her ideas crazy.“If I ever found out that I lied so badly that Donald Trump muted the call to say this is some crazy shit, you would never see me again,” Oliver laughed. “I would walk directly into the ocean.”Jokes aside, Oliver reminded: “None of this is theoretical. If he loses next month, there is every reason to believe Trump will dispute the results again and Vance has made it clear he’s got no problem with that. And that alone should be disqualifying.“For all the talk this week about his civility at the debate, let’s not forget: deep down [Vance] is the same colossal dipshit who spews rightwing hate with distressing ease and continues to defend the ‘big lie’ that the last election was stolen,” he continued. “It is all tremendously bleak, which is why – to borrow a phrase I heard recently – I’m focused on the future, specifically one in which in four weeks’ time, Trump hopefully loses this fucking election.”In his main segment, Oliver looked into how a routine traffic stop for “non-safety violations” can become a terror, with law enforcement disproportionately targeting people of color. Traffic stops are “the most common law enforcement interaction in America”, with police pulling over an average of 50,000 people in a day in the US.Those interactions can turn deadly: since 2017, armed police have killed at least 813 people in routine traffic stops, the vast majority of them Black. “We’ve all seen the videos of high-profile killings,” said Oliver, referring to the police shootings of Philando Castile, Daunte Wright and others, recorded by bystanders or police body-cams. “The horror of those videos should be seared into our collective consciouses by now.”Because of this pattern, for Black motorists, “driving comes with a constant undercurrent of fear”, said Oliver.He noted that there are legitimate safety reasons to pull over some drivers – someone driving too fast or recklessly, for instance, but no driver should worry about a traffic stop and “also have to worry about being harassed or potentially killed”.Such risks are not the product of a few bad apples in law enforcement, said Oliver; it’s “the inevitable result of deliberate decisions that have turned traffic stops into a systemic issue”.Oliver ticked through documentation of how police departments incentivize traffic stops as a means of funding, and encourage officers to apply deeply subjective criteria to pulling people over. Such “pretextual stops” basically equate to “shaking people down to see what crimes fall out”, he said.As an aside, he played an old PSA featuring characters from the musical Cats encouraging people to drive safely, lest their children become nothing but “memories”. “Let me just say this,” said Oliver. “That musical is an abomination. If there is ever a day that Andrew Lloyd Webber has no haters, that means that I am dead and so, by the way, is Patti LuPone.”On a more serious note, Oliver encouraged a full-stop end to pretextual stops and eliminating non-safety-related traffic stops. Such measures have already been adopted at the local level in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Philadelphia – where, after eight months, traffic stops were cut in half, meaning 12,000 fewer Black drivers were pulled over. He also advocated for decriminalizing minor traffic offenses (such as broken tail lights) and making data on traffic stops public, including the race of those pulled over – “frankly fucking incredible that it’s not already happening”, he noted.While some of these measures may be politically difficult, when it comes to non-safety-related traffic stops, “doing fewer of them for bullshit reasons should be a pretty easy sell”. More

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      ‘Slick talker’ v ‘sincere and truthful’: swing-state voters respond to VP debate

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      ‘Walz came across as passionate, sincere and truthful’Walz was rushing and appeared to want to discuss complex issues with depth but didn’t have enough time to delve into some of the points. He had more substance and came across as more sincere than Vance, who was slick, polished and said little of consequence.I would have liked to hear more about how, exactly, Trump and Vance want to build on federal land. For example, if they plan to use land in Montana or Michigan for housing, and I have family in North Carolina and Alabama, how would that be useful to me? I would also like to have heard Vance [being] questioned about how tax breaks for the rich are going to help people on a fixed income like me, or middle-class families like those of my grown children.My favorite moment was when Walz directly addressed the audience in his closing remarks. It came across as passionate, sincere and truthful. I voted for Biden last time and this time I will vote for the Harris-Walz ticket with enthusiasm.– Catherine, 76, part-time consultant in international aid and development, North Carolina‘Vance presented himself to be a slick talker’I voted for Biden-Harris in the last election and will vote for Harris-Walz this year. Vance presented himself to be a slick talker – which I was very apprehensive about because it allowed him to chameleon his way throughout the debate and he did on many instances, making Trumpism seem palatable and humane.Walz was more grounded and refused to display any outrage at what Vance said and this I think was his strong point. Instead, Walz was more polite and sometimes to a fault because he could have pounced on Vance during those instances. Walz talked more about his plans and accomplishments as Minnesota governor to solve the country’s domestic problems, something I wish voters paid attention to – especially healthcare.The final question regarding whether Trump-Vance would accept the results of the upcoming election, I believe, was the moment that had the most tension. It presented the starkest difference between the two. Vance still refuses to accept Trump’s defeat in 2020 and did not express his thoughts if the upcoming election does not go their way.
      – Wilfredo Lukban, 59, retired physician, Doylestown, Pennsylvania‘Vance and Walz were better than the presidential candidates in the last debate’It was a very civil policy-driven debate. I voted for Trump in the last election, would have voted for RFK before he dropped out but now am planning on voting for Trump. Vance and Walz both presented themselves better than the presidential candidates did in the last debate. Vance, especially, impressed with his speaking ability. It was the first time I’d heard him speak for so long. Came away feeling like Vance had a slight edge over Walz. Possibly his youth biased me towards him as well.Wish the discussion on energy had gone on longer. Vance briefly mentioned nuclear power but Walz didn’t engage with it. Vance addressing abortion was what I wish Republicans in government and Trump had been saying all along. Just because we care about the unborn doesn’t mean we’re unsympathetic to women in difficult situations. There’s room for compromise. – IT worker in his mid-20s, Arizona‘How can anyone say that Vance won the debate?’How can anyone say that Vance won the debate when he out and out lied numerous times? A smooth but completely gaslit answer is just appalling. Not to mention the times he just flat out didn’t answer the questions, just came up with gobbledy-gook.And how in the name of all that’s holy can you win a vice-presidential debate if you can’t admit that Trump lost the 2020 election? Why are you even allowed to run for office if you’re so completely out of touch with reality?
      – David, 70, photographer, North Carolina‘Vance showed his gentle side, was polished and sharp’View image in fullscreenVance did a great job of showing the public his gentle side, was polished and sharp on the subject matter. Walz was too folksy, didn’t admit to not being in China when he said he was. Too fumbly and forever taking notes.[I would have liked] specifics on how both parties will grow the economy. Especially considering the almost four years of restricting inflation. I really liked the civility throughout the debate.I almost kicked over the TV when the moderators started factchecking Vance. I thought that wasn’t allowed in this debate. Three against one, just like in the presidential debate. I voted for Donald Trump in the last two elections. Will vote for him in this one, simply because four more years of Democratic policy will do even more harm. – Rod, 70s, Wisconsin‘Neither candidate had specific answers as to how to fix some problems’No doubt Vance was a slick debater, showing his previous debate skills. Neither candidate had much substance or specific answers as to how to fix some of the problems. I wanted to see more about social security and how to keep the country from going bankrupt. Generations after mine will find it difficult to live on social security, let alone have benefits. I don’t want to see social security go bankrupt in my lifetime and possibly see benefits decrease. Everyone knows there is an issue, but neither party has a plan they are willing to discuss.In 2020 I was a staunch Republican worried about what Biden would do and believed the hype from Trump, which is why I voted for him. Little did we know how badly Trump would mangle the Covid epidemic and give tax cuts to the wealthy. He has yet to admit how bad his Covid was. I’m tired of all the lies Trump and Vance spread that cause the discourse in this country. Neither party has all the answers, but we need the Republican party to allow bipartisan solutions. I blame the rightwing facet of the party for much of the division in our country, and I never thought I would say that. I will vote for Harris this year. – Annette, retired, Arizona‘I’d have liked to know how both candidates propose to fund their programs’I was impressed at how well both candidates held their composure. They both appear like they could truly work in a bipartisan atmosphere. I do wish that Walz would have answered the few questions he danced around but all in all I think the debate was on point and informative. Both candidates proposed their plans yet did so with very little detail. With a budget deficit of $35tn I would like to know how they propose to fund these programs.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI was sharing this experience with my father-in-law, a retired master carpenter who worked many hard and long hours to live the American dream. We both have a great love for our country and the constitution. In short, watching this debate were two blue-collar, working-class men concerned about the future of our country.I voted for Trump in the past. I felt we needed someone who wasn’t a career politician. Electing the same old political leaders has given us root rot. The effects one day may be devastating. I will vote for Trump again this year. Under his presidency our economy was in recovery and there were unprecedented steps taken towards peace in other hostile countries. – Britton Ramsey, 54, welder, Wisconsin‘I wanted to see Walz be more aggressive towards Vance’The debate overall was incredibly boring. I wanted to see Walz be more aggressive towards Vance. It was obvious from the beginning that the Harris campaign had leashed Walz because the only times he came alive were when he got to speak about progressive initiatives in Minnesota.I think that’s a sign the Harris campaign should move more to the left. I’ve begrudgingly voted for the Democratic candidate for president in every presidential election since I could start voting in 2012. They frequently disappoint me by capitulating to the right too often but there are no other viable options yet.– Devon, 31, web developer, Lansing, Michigan‘Both candidates addressed the big issue of this country: division’I thought Vance killed it. On issues besides 6 January, he effectively dismantled Walz’s arguments – while not being a huge jerk about it. I think that he clarified the Trump campaign’s plans on everything much better than Trump ever can. Walz did the same. He really clarified the ticket’s ideas in a respectful manner. If only these two guys were running for president!I think both candidates addressed the big issue of this country: division. The people who watched that debate saw Vance and Walz shake hands and talk to each other after the debate. They didn’t scream at each other.We all have the same problems – just different ways of solving them. Your Republican neighbor does not want the rights of women and democracy as a principle to burn, and your Democrat cousin does not want communism installed, and doesn’t want to kill all the babies in utero. This debate proved that.There were some bad parts to the debate, like Vance dodging January 6, and Walz saying the Trump campaign was going to go with Project 2025; but for the most part, it was very constructive.I wish there [had been] a longer segment on abortion rights. Both sides need to explain their stance more clearly. As a Catholic, I am pro-life; I’m trending towards Vance’s position and understand Walz’s objections.I’m currently undecided on who to vote for. I am a registered Republican, but I don’t exactly like Trump. We were relatively prosperous [under him], but I think he causes scandal. A clarification of what the Harris campaign plans to do on abortion may make me consider Harris if her position is close to the Trump ticket, or even more pro-life. However, given that she seems to be much more radical than she says she is, I would not vote for her. – William, 19, student, Pennsylvania‘Complaints about against-the-rules factchecking highlight how reliant the Trump campaign is on misinformation’I voted for Joe Biden in the last election and will be voting for Harris this year.I think it was great to have the debate to get to know the candidates better, and I appreciated how respectful they both were to each other. I think it highlights how unmanageable Donald Trump actually is, and it makes me wonder why Republican party leadership has allowed him to continue to be the face of the party.Walz was calm, clear and definitely was able to talk about his experience leading a government. JD Vance came off as all rhetoric, and he looked foolish for having been so against Trump in the past and now [being] his running mate.They actually covered the issues I wanted to hear about: energy, healthcare and foreign policy. I wish they had spent less time on immigration.My favorite moment was when JD Vance got fact-checked about the Haitian immigrant comments and the moderators said they are here legally, and JD Vance claimed that the rules were that they weren’t going to be fact-checked. I think it highlights how reliant the Trump campaign is on misinformation, and when you take that away, what are they left with? – Emma, 26, Wisconsin More

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      in US Politics

      Trump falsely claims Helene victims had no federal help despite Biden-Harris sending $20m in aid – live

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      As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.Donald Trump repeated lies about the Biden administration’s hurricane response, going so far as to claim that the president and vice-president were “stealing” Fema funds to give to immigrants.“They stole the Fema money like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” he said.Trump and his allies have been repeatedly claiming that Fema is out of money because it allocated funds to help communities receiving an influx of immigrants at the border.Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, did warn that Fema is underfunded for the remainder of hurricane season. That’s in part because the stop-gap government funding bill did not contain enough funding for Fema, which is facing a $2bn deficit.Fema’s Shelter and Services Program allocated $300m during the 2024 fiscal year to help communities “offset the costs of providing food, shelter and other supportive services after receiving an influx of migrants”. That’s a small fraction of the agency’s overall budget. For 2025, it has requested a total of $33.1bn.At his rally, Trump also claimed he “had the best four years with hurricanes”.During his tenure …

      Trump imposed a hiring freeze at the National Weather Service, resulting in more than 200 of vacancies within the agency that predicts and oversees extreme weather warnings. The Washington Post reported in 2017: “Some of those Weather Service vacancies listed in the document, obtained by the Sierra Club through a Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Washington Post, were in locations that would be hit by the major hurricanes that barreled through the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.”

      Trump falsely claimed that Hurricane Maria’s death toll was being inflated by his Democratic rivals. In fact, studies suggest that far more people died than the official death toll suggested at the time. A report by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health estimates up to 4,600 people were killed.

      In 2021, a report by the housing department’s office of the inspector general found that Trump administration delayed more than $20bn in hurricane relief aid for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

      An internal report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency also found that it failed to properly prepare for hurricane season.
      In a review of Trump’s record responding to natural disasters, E&E also found a discrepency in aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which primarily affected Florida; and Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
      On March 9, 2019, Trump signed an order directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of most disaster costs in Florida. As a result, FEMA paid roughly $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s intervention, according to an E&E News analysis.
      But less than two months earlier, Trump threatened to veto a disaster-aid measure in Congress that would have FEMA pay 100 percent of all disaster costs in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria killed more than 3,000 people.
      According to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s book, Trump said: “They love me in the Panhandle … I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”The voting habits of residents did play into Donald Trump’s decision-making about disaster relief when he was president, reports E&E News.The outlet interviewed Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, who revealed that the former president refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018.From E&E:
      But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
      ‘We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,’ said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
      California’s governor Gavin Newsom, reacted to the report on Twitter/X, calling it a “glimpse into the future” if Trump is re-elected.Joe Biden, meanwhile, wrote: “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you. It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”As Joe Biden visits the wreckage of Hurricane Helene, Donald Trump has been baselessly suggesting that the administration has ignored Republican victims and that federal aid is scarce because funds are being given to immigrants.“They’re dying, and they’re getting no help from our federal government because their money has been spent on people that should not be in our country,” Trump told his supporters.The Biden-Harris administration said that the government has provided $20m in “flexible, upfront funding” and deployed 5,000 federal personnel to aid in recovery.“His competition that night? He cannot be president. He cannot be president of the United States,” Donald Trump said of JD Vance’s vice-presidential opponent, Tim Walz.“How good did JD Vance do the other night?” Trump added, praising his running mate as the crowd descended into a cheers of “JD! JD!”“I drafted the best athlete,” Trump continued.Donald Trump pledged to bring back drilling in the Alaska arctic wildlife refuge if he becomes president.Trump said:
      We would have supplied the entire Asian continent. We would have supplied Asia. We would have supplied everybody. But we’ll have it redone very quickly … I actually got it approved in Congress as part of …the biggest tax cuts in history for this country. I got that approved in Congress. We got ANWR [Alaska National Wildlife Refuge] so they didn’t kill it in Congress, and I don’t think they ever could. So we’ll get it back very quickly. It’s going to be back very fast.
      Trump added:
      And it would have been great for Alaska but it would have also … been great for our country but we’ll have it approved very quickly.
      In 2021, Trump’s administration auctioned off portions of ANWR to oil drillers but failed to attract much bidders.Donald Trump has switched his attacks on Joe Biden, calling him “the worst foreign policy president”.The former president then went on to say: “We have to be too big to rig” before going on to repeat the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.The crowd, highly energized, descended into a chant of “Trump! Trump! Trump!”Donald Trump has walked on stage to Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA.“We’re going to make America great again,” Trump said in his opening remarks before launching into a tirade against Kamala Harris, calling her a slew of names including “Lying Kamala”.Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally shortly in Saginaw, Michigan.Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates.Here are some images coming through the news wires of Hurricane Helene and its aftermath across the country:The Biden administration has provided nearly $4m directly to individuals and families in need of critical financial assistance, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said onboard an Air Force One gaggle as the president was en route to Tallahassee, Florida.She went on to add:
      Yesterday, we announced that the president approved 100% federal cost share for emergency response activities in Florida and Georgia, as well as Tallahassee [Tennessee] and North Carolina. This means that the federal government will cover 100% of the costs associated with things like debris removal, first responders, search and rescue, shelters, and mass feeding.
      This latest announcement builds the president’s previously approved requests for major disaster declarations from the governors of Florida and Georgia, which unlocked additional assistance for residents on their road to recovery. More