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      Trump lobbying key Republicans over attempt to impeach Joe Biden

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      Donald Trump has been in discussions with influential House Republicans over the party’s long-shot attempt to impeach Joe Biden over unproven corruption allegations relating to his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.Trump was in contact with Elise Stefanik, the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, ahead of Tuesday’s announcement of an official impeachment inquiry by the speaker, Kevin McCarthy, Politico reported.The news outlet said Trump and Stefanik have been speaking weekly, and talked again shortly after the announcement was made.“I speak to President Trump a lot, I spoke to him today,” Stefanik, from New York, told reporters.Stefanik has been at the fore in Republican moves to push ahead with impeachment hearings despite the lack of evidence that Biden committed wrongdoing, let alone the “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” required under the US constitution.The New Yorker has been flagged as a possible vice-presidential running mate for Trump should he win the Republican nomination to face Biden next year.Trump has also been reaching out to the hard right of the party, which has been waging a fierce pressure campaign to force McCarthy into calling an impeachment inquiry by threatening a government shutdown over federal spending levels.Politico revealed that the former president dined with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extreme rightwing representative from Georgia, at his New Jersey golf club two nights before McCarthy’s announcement.Greene told the New York Times she briefed Trump on her vision for an impeachment inquiry. She said she told him she hoped it would be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden”.Trump’s behind-the-scenes lobbying of prominent House Republicans tallies with his increasingly shrill public calls for impeachment. The twice impeached former president posted on Truth Social last month: “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION. THEY DID IT TO US.”Trump was impeached first for seeking dirt on opponents in Ukraine, then for inciting the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021. Retaining sufficient Republican support in the Senate, he was acquitted both times.News of Trump’s interventions is likely to stoke White House complaints that the impeachment inquiry is merely designed to damage Biden’s approval ratings as the 2024 presidential election gets under way. A White House spokesperson denounced the investigation as “extreme politics at its worst”.McCarthy is also facing blowback over his decision to convene an inquiry without a vote of the full House, in a sharp reversal of his previous public statements.In 2019 he wrote to the then House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, arguing that if she went ahead with the impeachment inquiry that led to Trump’s first impeachment relating to Ukraine the process would be “completely devoid of any merit or legitimacy”.McCarthy repeated his pledge to hold a formal impeachment inquiry only in the outcome of a full House vote as recently as this month, in an interview with Breitbart.McCarthy’s U-turn in his decision to proceed with an investigation without a vote appears to have been motivated by the tight spot he finds himself in.On the one hand, he is facing an increasingly militant hard-right group including Greene that is holding him hostage over raising the debt ceiling to avoid a government shutdown.On the other, several House Republicans have spoken publicly about their skepticism over an impeachment inquiry, citing the absence of credible evidence of Biden’s wrongdoing. They include staunch conservatives such as Ken Buck of Colorado, who has called Greene’s intense desire to impeach Biden “absurd”.“The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden, if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor, that doesn’t exist right now,” Buck told MSNBC on Sunday. More

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      Democrats need to realize that there is no alternative to Biden – and buck up | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Now ends our summer of discontent. Nearly half of Democrats fretfully tell pollsters that President Biden is “too old”. Fifty-eight percent of all Americans, including 30% of Democrats, do not approve of his handling of the economy. Twenty-one percent of Democrats rate him unfavorably. If these discontented were to change their opinion, his favorability would be near or above 50%. Depressed Democrats hold down his standing.Biden returns from the G20 economic conference in India triumphant, conducting complex diplomacy edging out China, and heralding a host of deliverables, notably a deal to build a rail and shipping network from India to Europe and the Middle East, running through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, a “game-changing regional investment”, he declares. He follows with an unprecedented pact with Vietnam as a strategic partner. Then at his press conference he wanders into a monologue about a John Wayne western and one of Biden’s favored expressions, “a lying dog-faced pony soldier”, to refer to disbelievers in the climate crisis.Biden gets no credit for his accomplishments. The Axios newsletter reports that he and Trump “are running dueling basement campaigns that make them look like they are in the witness protection program”. Actual events and policies are dismissed. The formulaic repetition of false equivalence, put forward as “balance”, prevails as conventional wisdom.All summer, the Biden administration touts his extraordinary achievements – his infrastructure bill, his Inflation Reduction Act, his Chips and Science Act. Political action committees launch a $13m advertising campaign documenting the revival of manufacturing. Yet the poll numbers are unmoved. “These are DARK DAYS in the life of America!” posts Donald Trump on his Truth Social account. He is more or less even with Biden. With every indictment, he rises further above his inconsequential rivals for the Republican nomination.On their panoply of “weaponization” of committees of the House of Representatives, Republicans play Inspector Clouseau as Javert, pursuing Biden as the diabolic boss of a crime family, his son Hunter Biden and his peccadilloes an instrument for prying the door to reveal the hidden Godfather. The fantasy gangster, Trump’s doppelganger, distracts from the indicted one. On Fox News, Biden is also the enfeebled, doddering and senile fool on his last legs. Which is the ruse? Fifty-five percent of Republicans in swing House districts believe Biden should be impeached even if there is “no evidence”. The poll did not offer the category of spectral evidence that was accepted in the Salem witch trials. Under pressure from the far-right House caucus that holds the Sword of Damocles over his head, speaker Kevin McCarthy announced the opening of an impeachment panel to conjure the works of the devil’s magic.But it is the Democrats who pull Biden underwater. They see his physical faults and shudder at his political fall. He is 80, his hair thinned, his gait slower and more careful. He is not eloquent. The slight hesitation of the stutter he overcame as a child seems occasionally to return. He is not Mick Jagger strutting at 80. The intensity of concern among Democrats about Biden is in direct proportion to their panic about Trump. They see in his fragility their own predicament. He is the screen on which they project their anxiety, insecurity and fear. They suffer from a crisis of bad nerves.The Democrats’ withholding creates a self-fulfilling prophesy. Spooked by the shadow of Trump, they react with disapproval of Biden, whose numbers are stagnant, flashing the sign that makes them more frightened. They do not censure Biden or dislike him. But they hope for a counter-factual scenario. There is none.Asked to name a specific person they would prefer to Biden, 18% of Democrats replied with a scattering of names. Bernie Sanders, 82, received the highest support at 3%. Sanders, who has twice run for the nomination, this time has early endorsed Biden. It has taken the democratic socialist to remind that perfect should not be the enemy of the good.If Biden were not to run, the counter-factual dream of a Hollywood ending with Michael Douglas from The American President materializing would be replaced with a ferocious primary of centrifugal force exposing the party’s fractured divides and the survivor most likely at no better rating than Biden at the current fraught moment. Biden’s presence leaves that bloodsport to another day.Rather than the counter-factual hypothesis, there are a number of factual realities. This older Biden, to those who have known him over the decades, is a more capable Biden than the younger Biden. That earlier incarnation was more impetuous, garrulous and conventional. He was always, though, a natural tactile politician, the senator from a state like a congressional district, with an open and caring touch, appearing at a 1001 gatherings.But he also carried a streak of insecurity, of being a son of the middle class, a middling student from the University of Delaware, and not from an Ivy League school. That self-doubt flared in self-undermining displays, abruptly ending his first campaign when he plagiarized speeches from Robert F Kennedy and British Labour leader Neil Kinnock.Biden’s judgment is not attributable to an abstract and amorphous category called “experience,” but rather particular concrete experiences, beyond bearing the weight of his unimaginable personal tragedies. His defeats and missteps, slights and belittlement, have accumulated onto the years of committee chairmanships, a lifetime in the Senate like no other president since Lyndon Johnson and the whole range of being vice-president involved in every major decision of the executive during the Obama administration.In the Senate, Biden surrounded himself with the most talented staff. He was not that insecure. As president, at the head of a vast government, his cabinet is an array of highly effective people. There has not been a single major scandal among them after the most corrupt administration in American history. The paradox of Biden’s poll numbers among Democrats is that there is no complaint about how he runs the government.The further paradox is that there is no movement to supplant Biden. There is no faction of the party that seeks to remove him. There is no group within the Congress that seeks to topple him. There is no credible person running against him or contemplating a campaign against him. There is no king across the sea. There is no Bonnie Prince Charlie ready to invade. There are no pretenders to the throne. There is none of that. The poll numbers as a party matter are hollow.And there is no rightful Kennedy succession to overthrow the second Irish Catholic president. After President John F Kennedy’s assassination, two Kennedys ran against incumbent Democratic presidents whom they somehow regarded as interlopers, Robert F Kennedy against Lyndon Johnson and Edward M Kennedy against Jimmy Carter. Robert F Kennedy Jr’s entry now is not a case of the first time as tragedy, the second as farce, but simply pathos.Of Robert F Kennedy Jr, a subject Democrats fervently do not want to discuss, in truth the feeling is the opposite of loathing for his spiraling descent into ever more baroque conspiracy theories, but instead profound sadness at the public display of his affliction. He rattles off barrages of science fiction and prejudice with an air of mastery of arcane knowledge that only persuades listeners that he is the sufferer of a disorder. For example, he offered, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”There are no actual Democrats who view Kennedy as a political figure, representing a valid position that must be heard within the party, but a collateral victim of the tragedy of his father and uncle. His shoulder-rubbing with the Trump scum, Bannon and Flynn and Stone, his pocketing of funds from the Silicon Valley PayPal Mafia that also finances Ron DeSantis, and his insults hurled at Biden arouse a mixture of horror and sorrow. He states his identity is that of a recovering addict, claiming, “I was born an addict,” but his “candidacy” is less a campaign than a breakout from recovery. His wretchedness is a continual sight of dreadful infirmity. He threatens only himself. He inspires dismay and grief. His family members are beside themselves. Democrats wish to avert their gaze.The counter-factual scenario the Republicans originally pressed about Biden is the return of a cycle of failure. Four months into his administration, Congressman Jim Jordan, the Republican from Ohio, tweeted, “Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page has periodically revived the trope, laying out its dream that another Ronald Reagan will appear as in 1980. “Will Mr. Biden suffer a similar fate?” wrote one of its columnists. “His agenda is creating a similar backlash. … The conservative movement has another chance to recapture the imagination of a malaise-beset public.”When Carter entered office in 1977, the inflation rate was 6.5%. Under the energy shocks of ruthless OPEC oil price rises and the Iranian revolution, from January 1979 to December 1980, inflation in that period spiked 23% to a 13.5% rate total. In the summer of 1979, a gasoline shortage caused long lines at the pumps. On 15 July, Carter delivered a speech proclaiming a “crisis of confidence”, the need for “sacrifice”, and a “rebirth” of “our common faith”. Two days later, he scuttled his message, firing five cabinet members, which appeared to prove the lack of confidence in the government. By October, his favorability fell to 29%.The Democratic leadership in the Congress disliked the cold technocrat in the White House. Their favorite son, Ted Kennedy, topped Carter by 59% to 19% in an October poll in New Hampshire, the first primary state. Kennedy declared his candidacy on 7 November, three days after US diplomats were seized as hostages in Tehran. Carter defeated Kennedy in New Hampshire by 11 points. The split party served the cause of Reagan and encouraged the entrance of a third candidate, liberal Republican John Anderson.The inflation that stoked those politics is not comparable to the inflation today. Driven largely by the distortions of supply and demand caused by the Covid crisis, recent inflation at its peak was less than half that of the Carter presidency. This year, from January to July, inflation went up only 1.9%, a greatly slowed rate, now hovering at around 3% total, and declining. Unlike in the 1970s, inflationary expectations are shifting strongly downward. Economic conditions that underlay the fall of Carter and rise of Reagan are fast receding. The analogy does not hold. Only a reflexively sado-monetarist Federal Reserve that insists on continuing to raise interest rates in order to slam the brakes on growth could create a moral hazard.Yet the political value of Biden’s successes remains diminished for another reason. His team attempts to persuade by operating on the tried-and-true premise that the election is a referendum on the incumbent. But in public perception Biden is not the only incumbent running. Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that Trump won the 2020 election and Biden is an illegitimate president, according to an August CNN poll. Trump will be the Republican candidate running as the true incumbent in the eyes of the majority of his party.The only previous cases of defeated presidents running again for the office were Grover Cleveland, who won in 1888, Martin Van Buren, losing in 1848 on the Free Soil Party, and Millard Fillmore, losing in 1856 on the Know Nothing or American Party. Cleveland never claimed to have really won when he was defeated in 1884; nor did Van Buren in 1840. Vice-president Fillmore had acceded to the presidency in 1850 after the death of Zachary Taylor. He was not his party’s nominee in 1852. Trump again has no precedent.The election of 2024 will be the second referendum on Trump, but the first held on the attempted coup of January 6t. Just as the 2004 election, which President George W Bush won, was in effect a referendum on the terrorist attack on September 11, the only election since 1988 in which the Republican won the popular vote, January 6 is the overwhelming political factor that establishes Trump’s assertion to his party’s nomination by means of incumbency. His forthcoming trials are not peripheral, but central to his claim.When the illusion of a counter-factual alternative fades, and the choice is between the incumbent and the false incumbent, then Democrats may consider something other than the age of Biden and whether they wish to contribute to a new political age of Trump.
      Sidney Blumenthal is the author of The Permanent Campaign, published in 1980, and All the Power of the Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln 1856-1860, the third of a projected five volumes. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton More

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      House speaker Kevin McCarthy announces impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden

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      The speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, on Tuesday announced that Republicans would open an impeachment investigation into Joe Biden over unproven allegations of corruption in his family’s business dealings.The announcement by McCarthy kicks off what are expected to be weeks of Republican-led hearings intended to convince Americans that the president profited from the business dealings of his son Hunter Biden and other family members, but it is unclear if the GOP has the evidence to substantiate the long-running claims, or even the votes for impeachment.The campaign comes as McCarthy tries to hang on to his position as leader of Congress’s lower chamber, despite a mere four-seat Republican majority and rising discontent among its most extreme conservative lawmakers, who are upset over a deal McCarthy reached with Biden to raise the debt ceiling while cutting some government spending, and have demanded recompense in the form of an impeachment inquiry.“House Republicans have uncovered serious and credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct. Taken together, these allegations paint a picture of a culture of corruption,” McCarthy announced as lawmakers in Congress’s lower chamber resumed work following a month-long recess in August.“I am directing our House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This logical next step will give our committees the full power to gather all the facts and answers for the American public. That’s exactly what we want to know – the answers. I believe the president would want to answer these questions and allegations as well,” McCarthy said.While impeachment can be the first step to removing a president from office, that appears unlikely to happen. If the House impeaches Biden, the matter would then go to the Senate, which would have to support his conviction with a two-thirds majority – a high bar to clear in a chamber currently controlled by Democrats. The White House spokesman Ian Sams called McCarthy’s announcement “extreme politics at its worst”.“House Republicans have been investigating the President for 9 months, and they’ve turned up no evidence of wrongdoing[.] His own GOP members have said so[.] He vowed to hold a vote to open impeachment, now he flip flopped because he doesn’t have support,” Sams wrote on Twitter.The impeachment inquiry will be handled by the oversight, judiciary and ways and means committees, all of which are controlled by McCarthy allies and since the start of the year have spent much of their time trying to make corruption allegations against the president stick.In a sign of the paucity of the results of their efforts, reports indicate McCarthy does not yet have enough votes in support of impeaching Biden. Earlier this month, the speaker told Breitbart News, “If we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person,” but backtracked on Tuesday, making no mention of holding a vote to start the investigation.The corruption allegations against the president have generally focused on his son Hunter, who has been under federal investigation since 2018. In July, the collapse of a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors to resolve charges related to failing to pay his income taxes for two years and lying about using drugs when buying a gun. Last week, prosecutors said Hunter Biden could be indicted on the gun charge by the end of the month.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans insist that Joe Biden illicitly profited from his son’s business dealings overseas, but have yet to turn up proof. In July, Hunter Biden’s former business partner Devon Archer spoke behind closed doors to the House oversight committee, and said the younger Biden would sometimes put his father on speakerphone during meetings.But the former vice-president “never once spoke about any business dealings”, Archer said, adding that he felt Hunter was trying to create an “illusion of access” to his father as he pursued deals in Ukraine.
      This article was amended on 12 September 2023 to correct the number of seats that make up the Republican majority in the US House. More

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      Trump files for judge in federal election interference trial to be taken off case – live

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      From 53m agoIn a court filing on Monday, former president Donald Trump moved to recuse federal judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the 2020 election subversion case, citing her previous comments about his culpability.“Judge Chutkan has, in connection with other cases, suggested that President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned,” the motion for recusal reads. “Such statements, made before this case began and without due process, are inherently disqualifying.”The filing includes a reference to a statement Chutkan made during cases in 2022 before the special counsel issued findings:
      This was nothing less than an attempt to violently overthrow the government, the legally, lawfully, peacefully elected government by individuals who were mad that their guy lost. I see the videotapes. I see the footage of the flags and the signs that people were carrying and the hats they were wearing and the garb. And the people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man – not to the constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this country; and not to the principles of democracy. It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
      “Fairness and impartiality are the central tenets of our criminal justice system,” Trump’s legal team wrote in the filing. “Both a defendant and the public are entitled to a full hearing, on all relevant issues, by a Court that has not prejudged the guilt of the defendant, and whose neutrality cannot be reasonably questioned.”Though the filing only surfaced Monday, conservative calls for Chutkan to step down have been mounting in recent weeks. Republican congressman and Trump-loyalist Matt Gaetz filed a resolution to condemn and censure the federal judge for her comments in recent weeks.Just last night, Mark Levin, a conservative pundit and Fox News show host, took aim at Judge Chutkan on his program.Making the case that she is “unqualified” to preside over the case against Trump, Levin cited an investigation on Real Clear Politics, a right-leaning website largely funded by pro-Trump conservatives, that outlines many of the arguments used by the former president’s legal team to call for Chutkan’s recusal.But for all the crying-foul coming from conservatives, it will be difficult for the Trump legal team to succeed in getting her off the case. As New York University professor of law Stephen Gillers told Real Clear Politics: “Almost never will a judge be recused for opinions she forms as a judge – in hearing cases and motions. Judges are expected to form opinions based on these ‘intrajudicial’ sources. It’s what judges do.”Ultimately, Chutkan will be the one to rule on whether she is too biased to preside over the case. If she denies the recusal, Trump’s lawyers could petition an appeals court, but it’s still a long shot.This also isn’t the first time Trump has tried to get a new judge. He previously failed to get a new judge to preside over his New York State court case and also attempted to get the case moved to federal court.Trump has challenged the judge or jurisdiction in three of his four criminal cases this year, CBS News reports, excluding only Aileen Cannon – presiding over the 40 felony counts charged for “willful retention of national security information” – who he appointed.In a court filing on Monday, former president Donald Trump moved to recuse federal judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the 2020 election subversion case, citing her previous comments about his culpability.“Judge Chutkan has, in connection with other cases, suggested that President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned,” the motion for recusal reads. “Such statements, made before this case began and without due process, are inherently disqualifying.”The filing includes a reference to a statement Chutkan made during cases in 2022 before the special counsel issued findings:
      This was nothing less than an attempt to violently overthrow the government, the legally, lawfully, peacefully elected government by individuals who were mad that their guy lost. I see the videotapes. I see the footage of the flags and the signs that people were carrying and the hats they were wearing and the garb. And the people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man – not to the constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this country; and not to the principles of democracy. It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
      “Fairness and impartiality are the central tenets of our criminal justice system,” Trump’s legal team wrote in the filing. “Both a defendant and the public are entitled to a full hearing, on all relevant issues, by a Court that has not prejudged the guilt of the defendant, and whose neutrality cannot be reasonably questioned.”President Biden marked the anniversary of 9/11 by speaking to service members, first responders, and their families in Anchorage, Alaska.Standing before an enormous American flag the president recounted memories of that tragic day while championing the acts of patriotism and courage performed in response.“Those terrorists could never touch the soul of America,” the President said resolutely. “Heroes, like all of you,” he added, “never faltered to defend our nation, our people an dour values in times of trial”.He used the speech to tell the gathered troops that his administration is working to ensure broader support for service members when they return home. Outlining the ways in which the US has fought terrorist foes over the last two decades, and noting that Osama Bin Laden was sent “to the gates of hell,” Biden turned toward the battles the country is still fighting – the deep-seated divisions that continue to threaten its future.To drive home the point, the President ended with an anecdote about his late friend, Senator John McCain.“John and I were friends. Like a lot of us we had differences,” he said, adding that the two, “disagreed like hell,” on the Senate floor but would always find time to lunch afterward.On their last meeting, Biden shared, McCain pulled him close, said he loved him, and asked Biden to perform his eulogy.“He put duty to country first,” Biden said. “Above party, above politics, above his own person.” The president invoked the American people, including the military members in attendance, to reflect on that during this day of remembrance.“We must never lose that sense of national unity,” he said. “Let that be the common cause of our time.”Five American prisoners being detained in Iran could soon be freed, thanks to a new deal the countries reached today. In exchange for the 5 US citizens, 5 Iranians held in the US will be released and the US will allow the transfer of $6bn in frozen Iranian funds from South Korea to Qatar without sanctions, the Associated Press reports.Congress was notified of the deal today, after it was signed off by the Biden Administration late last week. AP reports that significant sum cleared for use by Iran was a key aspect to the deal, encouraging foreign banks to perform the transfer intended to be used to purchase humanitarian supplies. The cnetral bank of Qatar will hold the funds, which will be controlled by Qatar’s government, to ensure its use is dedicated to aid, including medicine and food for the people of Iran.The American prisoners have also been transferred out of Iranian jails and are now in house arrest.The deal is the result of more than two years of negotiations between the two countries, according to the The New York Times, which reported on the tentative agreement in August.“This is just the beginning of a process that I hope and expect will lead to their return home to the United States,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told reporters at the time. “There’s more work to be done to actually bring them home. My belief is that this is the beginning of the end of their nightmare.”The Biden administration is close to approving the shipment of longer-range missiles packed with cluster bombs to Ukraine, Reuters is reporting, citing four US officials.The US is considering shipping either or both Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that can fly up to 190 miles (306 km), or Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles with a 45-mile range packed with cluster bombs, the report says.If approved, either option would be available for rapid shipment to Kyiv, giving Ukraine the ability to cause significant damage deeper within Russian-occupied territory.The decision to send ATACMS or GMLRS, or both, is not final and could still fall through, according to the sources.The US has approved a series of Covid-19 booster vaccines amid rising cases of coronavirus around the country, the Food and Drug Administration said.The FDA said it had approved Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, which can be administered even to people who never previously received a Covid-19 vaccination.As with earlier vaccinations, the new round of shots are cleared for adults and children as young as age 6 months.Starting at age five, most people can get a single dose even if they have never had a prior Covid-19 shot, per the FDA. Younger children might need additional doses depending on their history of Covid-19 infections and vaccinations.Hospitalizations from Covid-19 have crept up in recent weeks, although the rise is lower than the same time last year. In the week ending 26 August just over 17,400 people were hospitalized from Covid-19, NBC reported, up 16% from the week before.In August, two hospitals in New York state re-introduced mandatory masking after an increase in Covid-19 cases, while the Lionsgate film studio reinstated a mask mandate for half its employees in its flagship Los Angeles offices.That same month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that it had discovered a new Covid-19 variant and warned high-risk individuals to resume wearing masks.The variant, BA 2.86, was detected during monitoring of wastewater, the CDC said. It said it was too soon to tell if BA 2.86 could lead to more severe illness than other variants, but reported “reassuring” results of early research which showed that existing antibodies work against the BA 2.86 variant.Donald Trump urged supporters they need to “fight like hell” or risk losing their country during a speech at a South Dakota rally in which the former president used language resonant of the run-up to the January 6 US Capitol attack, according to a CNN report. “I don’t think there’s ever been a darkness around our nation like there is now,” Trump said on Friday, as he accused Democrats of allowing an “invasion” of migrants over the southern border and of trying to restart Covid “hysteria”, the report says.
      The Republican front-runner’s stark speech raised the prospect of a second presidency that would be even more extreme and challenging to the rule of law than his first. His view that the Oval Office confers unfettered powers suggests Trump would indulge in similar conduct as that for which he is awaiting trial, including intimidating local officials in an alleged bid to overturn his 2020 defeat.
      Here are some images from the news wires of how the US has been marking the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, which took the lives of nearly 3,000 people.Several people were arrested after entering the office of Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House, during a protest for HIV/Aids funding on Monday.The US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar), a widely bipartisan program, has since been reauthorized three times, and Joe Biden earlier this year indicated that he would work with Congress to extend it a fourth.But the program’s latest extension has been caught up in a partisan fight over abortion and is under threat amid Congress’s negotiations over a government shutdown.Some Republicans are opposing Pepfar’s reauthorization, arguing that current restrictions do not sufficiently prevent the funds from being used to support abortions, according to an August report by the Federation of American Scientists.New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith, who chairs the House foreign affairs subcommittee, in a letter to colleagues in June:
      Any multi-year PEPFAR reauthorizing legislation must ensure that Biden’s hijacking of PEPFAR to promote abortion be halted.
      The program was first established in 2003 by President George W Bush to prevent and treat HIV/Aids in developing countries worldwide, and it is overseen by the US Department of State.About 20 million people depend on the program globally, according to a White House statement in January.Smith was a co-sponsor of the 2018 bill extending Pepfar for five years but is now seeking to block its renewal after Biden in 2021 lifted Trump-era restrictions that barred Pepfar and other global programs receiving US funding from performing or promoting abortions.The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the green light to updated Covid-19 vaccine shots from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, but it is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that recommends who should get the shot, according to a Washington Post report. The CDC is leaning toward a broad recommendation that covers almost all ages, mirroring the FDA approach, the paper writes, citing federal officials.
      But it is possible that some on the agency’s panel of outside experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, will push for a targeted recommendation focused on those at greatest risk — older Americans or people with weakened immune systems or other illnesses.
      Experts interviewed by the paper said they would get the coronavirus shot as soon as possible amid a late-summer uptick in Covid cases across the USUpdated Covid-19 vaccinations could begin later this week, and the US hopes to ramp up protection against the latest coronavirus strains amid steadily increasing cases.The newest shots target an omicron variant named XBB.1.5, replacing combination vaccines that mixed protection against the original coronavirus strain and even older omicron variants.“Vaccination remains critical to public health and continued protection against serious consequences of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s center for biologics evaluation and research.
      The public can be assured that these updated vaccines have met the agency’s rigorous scientific standards for safety, effectiveness, and manufacturing quality. We very much encourage those who are eligible to consider getting vaccinated.
      There has been a late-summer uptick in Covid cases across the US.Experts are closely watching two new variants, EG.5, now the dominant strain, and BA.2.86, which has attracted attention from scientists because of its high number of mutations.Experts have said that the US is not facing a threat like it did in 2020 and 2021. “We’re in a different place,” Mandy Cohen, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told NBC News last month.
      I think we’re the most prepared that we’ve ever been.
      Updated Covid-19 vaccine shots made by Pfizer and Moderna are expected to be available in the coming days, according to Moderna. A third shot, by the vaccine maker Novavax, is still under review by the FDA, according to the company.Advisers from the US centers for disease and protection (CDC) are due to meet on Tuesday to recommend who should receive the shot. An endorsement by the CDC’s director should clear the way for millions of doses to be shipped nationwide within days.As part of the FDA’s update, the original Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines are no longer authorized for use in the US.The US health regulator on Monday authorized updated Covid-19 vaccines that closely match the Omicron variants that are circulating, starting the process to deploy the shots this month, Reuters reports.The Food and Drug Administration authorized the shots, which target the XBB.1.5 subvariant, from manufacturers Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech SE, and US pharma company Moderna.More details to follow.A trial began Monday over a sweeping Texas voting law that sparked a 38-day walkout by Democrats in 2021 and were among the strictest changes passed by Republicans nationwide following former US president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, the Associated Press reports.The AP further notes:
      The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of voting rights groups after Republican governor Greg Abbott signed the changes into law. The trial in San Antonio federal court could last weeks and it is unclear when US district judge Xavier Rodriguez might rule. Potentially at stake are voting rules Texas will use for the 2024 elections, although any decision is likely to be appealed.
      The challenge, from the American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund and others, has not stopped the measures from taking effect, including a ban on 24-hour polling places and drive-thru voting.
      Many changes targeted Harris county, which includes Houston and is where a slate of Republican candidates are challenging their defeats last year.
      During the hurried rollout of the law last year, more than 23,000 mail ballots in Texas were rejected during the March 2022 primary elections as voters struggled to navigate the new rules. By November’s general election, the rejection rate fell significantly, but was still higher than what experts consider normal.
      In August, Rodriguez separately struck down a requirement that mail voters provide the same identification number they used when they registered to vote.”
      Joe Biden is up in the air literally and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s future as House Speaker is likewise, but metaphorically. It’s been a busy day in Vietnam for the US president post-G20, but he’s now on his way back to the US and is due to address the public during a stopover in Alaska en route to Washington, DC.Here’s where things stand:
      Mark Meadows, the former Trump White House chief of staff, appealed a judge’s ruling last Friday denying his bid to transfer his Georgia 2020 election interference case from state to federal court.
      Jury deliberations for the impeachment trial of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, could start late Thursday or Friday, according to the presiding officer Dan Patrick.
      Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House, reportedly doesn’t have the votes to move forward with an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden being clamored for by the right wing of his House caucus.
      Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican congressman, said that there was a “perfect storm” brewing in the House over government spending and on impeachment of the president that could pose a threat to Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. More on this by Politico.
      Joe Biden will address the nation late on Monday afternoon on the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. On Monday morning, US vice president Kamala Harris attended the annual memorial ceremony in New York at the spot where the al-Qaeda hijackers destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
      In the months before the supreme court handed down Citizens United, the 2010 ruling which unleashed a flood of dark money into American politics, the wife of a conservative justice worked with a prominent rightwing activist and a mega-donor closely linked to her husband to form a group to exploit the decision.So said a blockbuster report from Politico, detailing moves by Ginni Thomas – wife of Justice Clarence Thomas – and Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society chief who has worked to stock the court with rightwingers, leading to a series of epochal decisions, including the removal of the federal right to abortion.Half a million dollars in seed money, Politico said, came from Harlan Crow, the Nazi memorabilia-collecting billionaire whose extensive and mostly undeclared gifts to Clarence Thomas have fueled a spiraling supreme court ethics scandal.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island and champion of ethics reform, said the report laid out “the creepy intermingling of dark billionaire money, phoney front groups, far-right extremists and the United States supreme court”.Politico noted that the ruling in Citizens United was widely expected after justices “took the unusual step of asking for re-arguments based on a sweeping question – whether they should overrule prior decisions approving laws that limited spending on political campaigns”.Noting that conservative groups moved to capitalise faster than others, the site quoted an anonymous source as saying Ginni Thomas “really wanted to build an organisation and be a movement leader. Leonard was going to be the conduit of that.”The justice department has dropped its five-year-old criminal case against Bijan Rafiekian, a one-time business partner of the former national security adviser Michael Flynn who had been charged with illegally lobbying for Turkey during the 2016 US presidential election.Rafiekian, who also goes by the name Bijan Kian, was indicted in 2018 on charges including failing to register as a foreign agent. Prosecutors had accused Rafiekian of illegally lobbying to have the cleric Fethullah Gülen extradited from the US to Turkey.The move wraps up a long-running tangent of the Mueller-era Russia investigation that originally had been used as leverage to pressure Flynn, CNN reported. Prosecutors had planned on calling Flynn to testify against Rafiekian at his trial to solidify their evidence of a connection between Flynn’s lobbying group and the government of Turkey.In 2019, a jury convicted Rafiekian on charges of conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent. But the judge who presided over the trial later set aside the verdicts, citing insufficient evidence. The case then went into appeals, hanging in the criminal justice system for years.In a court filing on Monday, the justice department said it sought to dismiss the charges against Rafiekian. Prosecutors wrote:
      After carefully considering the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in this case and the principles of federal prosecution, the United States believes it is not in the public interest to pursue the case against defendant Bijan Rafiekian further.
      After defending the integrity of US elections from an onslaught of threats over the last several years, secretaries of state across the US are now turning to a new high-stakes question: is Donald Trump eligible to run for president?Several secretaries are already working with attorneys general in their states and studying whether Trump is disqualified under a provision of the 14th amendment that bars anyone from holding public office if they have previously taken an oath to the United States and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”.That language clearly disqualifies Trump from running in 2024, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, two prominent conservative scholars, concluded in a lengthy forthcoming law review article. They write in the article:
      If the public record is accurate, the case is not even close. He is no longer eligible to the office of Presidency, or any other state or federal office covered by the Constitution. All who are committed to the Constitution should take note and say so.
      A flurry of challenges to Trump’s candidacy are expected – one was filed in Colorado on Wednesday – but the legal issues at play are largely untested. Never before has the provision been used to try to disqualify a presidential candidate from office and the issue is likely to quickly come to a head as soon as officials make their official certifications about who can appear on primary ballots.Secretaries are studying who has the authority to remove Trump from the ballot and what process needs to occur before they do so. They also recognize that the issue is likely to be ultimately settled by the courts, including the US supreme court.Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat in her second term as Michigan’s secretary of state, said she had spoken with another secretary of state about the 14th amendment issue “nearly every day”.
      The north star for me is always: ‘What is the law? What does the constitution require?’ To keep politics and partisan considerations out of it. And simply just look at this from a sense of ‘what does the 14th amendment say?’ We’re in unprecedented, uncharted territory.
      Read my colleague Sam Levin’s full report. More

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      Joe Biden calls for stable US-China relationship during south-east Asia tour

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      Joe Biden’s national security tour of south-east Asia reached Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, where the president called for stability in the US-China relationship against an increasingly complex diplomatic picture in the region for his country.“I don’t want to contain China,” Biden said. “I just want to make sure that we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it’s all about.”Biden also said that China’s recent economic downturn may limit any inclination to invade Taiwan.“I don’t think it’s going to cause China to invade Taiwan – matter of fact the opposite, probably doesn’t have the same capacity as it had before,” he said on Sunday during a press conference in Hanoi.He added that the country’s economic woes had left President Xi Jinping with “his hands full right now”.The president’s remarks came after a meeting with Nguyen Phu Trong, the general secretary of Vietnam’s ruling Communist party, in the nation’s capital designed to secure global supply chains of semiconductors and critical minerals, which would offer a strategic alternative to China.“I think we have an enormous opportunity,” Biden said of the visit. “Vietnam and the United States are critical partners at what I would argue is a very critical time.”The meeting came during a multi-front diplomatic push to shore up international support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion and enunciate a policy toward China that both encourages trade and reduces the potential for US-Chinese conflict.The complexities of the administration’s approach were illustrated on Saturday, a day before Biden landed in Hanoi, when the New York Times reported that Vietnam is in talks with Russia over a new arms supply deal that could trigger US sanctions.Reuters said it had seen – but could not authenticate – documents describing talks for a credit facility that Russia would extend to Vietnam to buy heavy weaponry, including anti-ship missiles, anti-submarine aircraft and helicopters, anti-aircraft missile systems and fighter jets.Earlier, at the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, western leaders failed to reiterate an explicit condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The summit declaration referred only to the “war in Ukraine” and lamented the “suffering” of the Ukrainian people – an equivocation that indicates a growing lack of international consensus.Less than a year ago, G20 leaders still issued a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion and called on Moscow to withdraw its forces.Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, attempted to smooth over the disparity, telling ABC’s This Week that world leaders meeting in New Delhi had “stood up very clearly, including in the statement, for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.Blinken said that virtually every meeting participant “is intent on making sure there is a just and durable end to this Russian aggression”.It was clear in the room, he said, that “countries are feeling the consequences and want the Russian aggression to stop”.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “The vast majority of G20 countries have supported multiple UN resolutions that call out Russia’s illegal aggression.”Jean-Pierre said the New Delhi communique “builds on that, to send an unprecedented, unified statement on the imperative that Russia refrain from using force for territorial acquisition, abide by its obligations in the UN charter, and cease attacks on civilians and infrastructure”.The comments came as a CBS News poll found only 1 in 4 Americans think Biden is improving the US’s global position. According to the survey, 24% thought Biden was making the US stronger, 50% said weaker and 26% that he was not having much effect.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust 29% said they were optimistic for the prospects of world peace and stability in the world, and 71% said they were increasingly pessimistic. Asked if the Biden administration was being “too easy” on China, 57% agreed.On CNN, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley slammed the Biden administration’s policy toward China, describing the country as an “enemy”.“China has practically been preparing for war with us for years,” Haley said. “Yes, I view China as an enemy.”Haley said China had bought 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) of US soil and the largest pork producer in the country, and continues to steal $600bn a year in intellectual property while spreading propaganda. She pointed to Chinese drones used by US law enforcement and to the crisis caused by Chinese-sourced fentanyl that “had killed more Americans than the Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam war combined”.“How much more has to happen for Biden to realize you don’t send cabinet members over to China to appease them?” she said, referring to the recent visit of the US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, to Beijing.The administration’s effort to present a coherent picture of US foreign policy toward its two most vexing issues – China and Russia – continued Sunday with vice-president Kamala Harris telling CBS News that a planned meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “would be a huge mistake”.“When you look at Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, and the idea that they would supply ammunition to Russia – well, it’s predictable where that ends up,” Harris said. “I also believe very strongly that for both Russia and North Korea, this will further isolate them.”Harris also spoke to an emerging concern that China’s president, Xi Jinping, who skipped the G20, may decline to attend the Asia-Pacific economic cooperation leaders’ meeting in San Francisco, California, in November.Last week, China’s security agency hinted that a meeting between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden in San Francisco will depend on the US “showing sufficient sincerity”.China’s ministry of state security said that the country “will never let its guard down”.The comments came after Raimondo said the US did not want to decouple from China but that American companies had complained to her that China had become “uninvestible”.Asked how important it is for Xi Jinping to come to America, Harris remarked that “it is important to the … stability of things that we keep open lines of communication”. More

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      Kamala Harris says she’s prepared to serve as president ‘if necessary’

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      Kamala Harris on Sunday declared herself ready to assume the presidency if it ever behooved her to do so – but she also made it a point to dismiss opponents’ political attacks that Joe Biden is too old to seek out a second term in the Oval Office.Asked on CBS’s Face the Nation whether she was prepared to serve as commander-in-chief in case Biden became unable to carry out his duties, Harris said: “Yes, I am, if necessary.”“But Joe Biden is going to be fine,” Harris said. “And let me tell you something: I work with Joe Biden every day.”Harris, who would become the first woman to serve as US president if Biden could not complete an elected term, went on to tell Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan that it would not be a novel experience for her to make history in such a fashion.She alluded to how she was the first woman elected as district attorney of San Francisco and as attorney general of California. As a US senator for California, “I represented one in eight Americans,” before becoming the country’s first ever female vice-president.“Listen, this is not new,” Harris said. “There’s nothing new about that.”Harris’s defense of her qualifications and of Biden’s vitality come as Republicans attack the incumbent 80-year-old Democratic president’s age. If he wins another term during the 2024 election, Biden – already the oldest president ever – would be 86 upon leaving office.Public opinion polling shows that more than two-thirds of the American public think Biden is too old to effectively serve a second term. And, seizing on those findings, Republicans have sought to portray the prospect of Harris being one heartbeat away from the presidency as a scary prospect.“I pray every night for Joe Biden’s good health – not only because he’s our president, but because of who our vice-president is,” Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie said on a clip played by Brennan on Sunday.Brennan played another clip in which Christie’s fellow Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis insulted Harris as Biden’s “impeachment insurance”.“People know if she were president – Katy, bar the door,” DeSantis said on the clip, invoking an American colloquialism meaning that there’s trouble incoming. “As bad as Biden did, it would get worse.”Both Christie and DeSantis substantially trail the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination: Biden’s White House predecessor, Donald Trump. Trump maintains his polling edge over his Republican competition despite facing 91 pending criminal charges across four separate indictments for his 2020 election subversion, his retention of classified documents after his defeat to Biden forced him out of the Oval Office and hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels.Harris on Sunday parried the Republican verbal volleys against the Biden administration by referring to lower crime rates, falling inflation and relatively quieter times at the US-Mexico border more than halfway through the Democratic incumbents’ third year in office.“They feel the need to attack because they’re scared that we will win based on the merit of the work that Joe Biden and I, and our administration, has done,” Harris said.In her interview with Brennan, Harris also said that Congress needed to strive to restore the federal abortion rights which had been established by Roe v Wade but then repealed last year by the US supreme court’s conservatives. Most Americans believe abortion should be legal to some degree, particularly in the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling.Harris dismissed Republican claims that Democrats support abortion up until birth as “ridiculous” and a “mischaracterization”. More

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      The Last Politician review: the case for Joe Biden, polling be damned

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      By the polling, Joe Biden is stuck in a footrace with Donald Trump, his 91-times criminally charged predecessor as president. More than three-quarters of voters say Biden is too old to govern effectively. Two-thirds of Democrats wish he would throw in the towel.The intersection of Biden’s work as vice-president to Barack Obama and what Franklin Foer calls the “dodgy business dealings of son Hunter” haunts the father still. More than three fifths of Americans now believe Joe Biden was involved in Hunter’s business. The impeachment specter hovers.Kamala Harris poses a further problem. The polls, again: 53% of independents disapprove of the vice-president, two in five strongly. Were Biden to leave the stage, few would be reassured.Under the subtitle “Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future”, Foer dives into our political morass. He emerges with a well-sourced look at Biden and his time in power. A staff writer at the Atlantic and former editor of the New Republic, Foer acknowledges his own doubts about Biden but also voices his admiration for the back-slapping politician from Scranton. Foer’s title, The Last Politician, points to his thesis: that Biden’s old-fashioned approach to politics drives and shapes all he does.Foer captures Biden’s successes and his cock-ups, his abilities and insecurities. At times, Biden is portrayed as overly confident. He is also caught wondering why John F Kennedy was not so tightly handled by his aides – or “babied”, as Foer reports it. Youth, vigor and acuity are all parts of the answer.The Last Politician is definitely news-laden, a must-read for political junkies. Biden’s staff finally spoke. Foer lays out how Biden’s age shapes his first term and his re-election odds; Harris’s shortcomings as vice-president; and Biden’s relationships with Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Complications dominate.Biden’s “advanced years were a hindrance, depriving him of the energy to cast a robust public presence or the ability to easily conjure a name”, Foer writes. “His public persona reflected physical decline and time’s dulling of mental faculties that no pill or exercise regime can resist.”Biden was gaffe-prone as a younger politician. Now, his verbal and physical stumbles lead news cycles.Decades ago, Ronald Reagan’s typical day began with his arrival in the West Wing at 9am. Biden starts about an hour later. That’s an hour earlier than Trump, sure. But Foer writes: “It was striking that [Biden] took so few morning meetings or presided over so few public events before 10am.” Plenty has been written about Reagan’s capacity by the end of his term. When Reagan left the White House, after eight years, he was nearly 78. Today, Biden is nearly 81.“In private,” Foer writes, Biden “would occasionally admit that he felt tired.” Unstated is this: the cumulative effect of such realities of age leaves Biden on the cusp of being ignored, unable to woo swaths of the American public or drive his message and numbers. In the 2022 midterms, his popularity deficit kept him sidelined. For a politician, a shrug or a yawn can be more damning than disdain.Expect Republicans to quote Foer as they bash Harris. “Rabbit Ears” is the chapter title of Foer’s examination of the former California senator, a moniker bestowed by Biden’s inner circle. As they saw it, Foer writes, Harris was sensitive to “any hint of criticism … instantly aware” of the slightest dissatisfaction.She projected clinginess and uncertainty. “Instead of carving out an independent role, she stuck to the president’s side – an omnipresence at every Oval Office meeting.” Harris’s “piercing questions” impressed Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, but lunches with Biden gradually fell “off the schedule”.Then again, Biden owed Harris little. She brutalized him in a debate, intimating he was a bigot. Then she dropped out of the Democratic primary before a vote was cast, the political equivalent of a face-plant.The relationship between Biden and Zelenskiy also had its ups-and-downs, Foer says. He lauds Biden for “quietly arming the Ukrainians”, helping them “fend off invasion” by Russia. He also describes tensions between the two leaders.Biden and Zelenskiy failed to establish swift rapport. Zelenskiy demanded Nato membership and offered “absurd analysis” of alliance dynamics, leaving Biden “pissed off”. In Foer’s telling, “even Zelenskiy’s most ardent sympathizers in the [Biden] administration agreed that he had bombed”, while Zelenskiy “at least subconsciously … seemed to blame” Biden “for the humiliation he suffered, for the political awkwardness he endured” at the hands of Trump.“Where Biden tended to expect Zelenskiy to open with expressions of gratitude for American support, Zelenskiy crammed his conversations with a long list of demands.” Sucking up to Ted Cruz didn’t help either.In the end, Foer is a Biden fan. He gives the Inflation Reduction Act, in his view the crowning achievement of the first term, an unqualified endorsement. Homing in on provisions that aim to “stall climate change”, Foer says the law stands as “an investment in moral authority”, enabling the US to “prod” other countries on environmental issues.Watching the latest spate of environmental cataclysms, it is hard to dispute that the climate crisis is real – all while Republican presidential aspirants continue their denials. But there is something amiss in Foer’s enthusiasm and the administration’s posture. For now, inflation holds more public attention. Nearly three-quarters of Americans see inflation as a “very important” issue. Climate crisis and the environment? Forty-four per cent.A hunch: voters are less worried about moral authority and more about grocery bills and prices at the pump. According to the polls, the Democrats have lost their grip on voters without a four-year college degree, regardless of race. A priorities gap is on display again.Issues that speak loudest to white progressives lack broad resonance. The faculty lounge makes a lousy focus group. Foer’s enthusiasm is premature.
      The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future is published in the US by Penguin More

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      ‘We have to come to grips with history’: Robert P Jones on The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy

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      How did Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election despite the Access Hollywood tape? How did he gain even more votes in 2020 despite an administration of chaos, lies and pandemic blunders? How can he be running neck and neck with Joe Biden for 2024 despite four indictments and 91 criminal charges?Future historians will surely debate such questions and why so many Americans saw themselves in a tawdry tycoon and carnival barker. One of the most persuasive theories is captured in a single word: race.Trump won white voters without a college degree by 32 points in 2020. A glance at his rallies shows the lack of diversity in his notorious “base”. His signature slogan, “Make America great again”, is a thinly disguised appeal to nostalgia for postwar suburbia.In his books The End of White Christian America and White Too Long, Robert P Jones has steadily built the argument that this movement is animated by shifting demographics. He points out that in 2008, when Barack Obama, the first Black president, was elected, 54% of Americans identified as white and Christian. By the end of Obama’s second term, that share had fallen to 47%. Today it is 42%.“It’s just a continued slide,” says Jones, 55, sitting at his desk at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), where he is founder and president, in downtown Washington. “Most importantly, moving from majority to decisively non-majority white and Christian has set off a kind of ‘freak out’ moment among many white Christians.”In The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, effectively the third book in an unofficial trilogy, Jones traces the roots of Trumpism back more than 500 years.He explains: “Go back and understand they really do believe that this country was divinely ordained to be a promised land for European Christians.“That idea is so old and so deep it explains in many ways the visceral reactivity. Why are we fighting today about AP African American history? Arkansas’s banned it, Florida’s been fighting it, and it’s because it tells this alternative story about the country that’s not just settlers, pioneers – a naive mythology of innocence.”Jones examines that mythological origin story and its promised land. He spotlights the “Doctrine of Discovery”, a little-known or understood series of 15th-century papal edicts asserting that European civilisation and western Christianity are superior to all other cultures, races and religions. For Jones, it is “a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding the deep structure of the European political and religious worldviews we have inherited in this country”.The initial edict, issued by Nicholas V in 1452, granted the Portuguese king Alfonso V the right to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens [Muslims] and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery”.Jones says: “Then there’s a series of these documents that get issued between 1452 and 1493, each of which build on this idea but essentially all say the same thing: that if the land is not occupied by Christian people – and that Christian identity is the thing that determines whether you have your own human rights or not – then the Christian kings and queens have the right to conquer those lands and take possession of everything that they can in the name of the state and the church.”This provided convenient theological justification for the first European powers that came into contact with Native Americans to seize lands and exploit resources. Spreading the gospel by the sword was married with huge economic incentives.From this perspective, the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin but a continuation of genocide and dispossession justified by papal doctrine. The New York Times’s 1619 Project was a long-overdue corrective to established narratives but it was not the final word.Jones reflects: “The 1619 Project was very important culturally in the US because it at least did move us out of this room with white people gathered around a table like you see on the postage stamp or the paintings of the beginning of the country and took us back to a different story: the story of enslaved people in the country.“But if we really want to understand our present we have to go back and tell the whole story and that’s European contact with Indigenous people before it is enslavement and the transatlantic slave trade. That all comes from the same source. It is this cultural idea that there is a kind of superiority to European culture that’s justified by Christianity that sets up, in the Doctrine of Discovery, this entire project.”Jones sees connections between the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 and the killing and expulsion of Choctaws forced to walk the Trail of Tears, starting in 1831; between the lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth in 1920 and the mass execution of 38 Dakota men in Minnesota in 1862.When history is put in silos, he contends, such threads are missed. “You don’t get a society that tortures and kills a 14-year-old boy in Mississippi on the basis of whistling at a white woman without this sense of entitlement, of superiority and permissive violence stemming from the Doctrine of Discovery. That was the thing that pushed people into the Mississippi territory, forcibly removing Choctaw Creek Native Americans from their lands, killing many, forcibly removing the others.“If you don’t understand that history, you end up with this shocking, ‘Well, how could a society be this way that this would happen, and then they [Roy Bryant and JW Milam, the white men who killed Till] would get acquitted by their peers, who deliberated for only an hour after the trial?’ But when you understand this longer history, that becomes a little bit less of a mystery.”When Jones visited these sites of trauma, he found communities working across racial lines to seek the truth, build memorials and museums and commemorate their histories in ways unthinkable in the last century. The US is currently in a great “Age of Re-evaluation”, according to Scott Ellsworth, a scholar of the Tulsa race massacre.Jones comments: “For all of these what I thought was fairly remarkable is how recent these moves are in the US to try to tell a different story, a more inclusive story about what happened. In none of these cases do they predate 2000. It’s all in the last 20 years that any of these movements have happened.“If you had driven down through the Delta in Mississippi in 2000, you would not have come across any signs or anything. Even though the whole world knows the story of Emmett Till, you would not have known that it happened in Tallahatchie county, in the Delta. There was nothing there on the ground. A group of citizens about 20 years ago got together and said, ‘No, we should change this, and we should try to tell the truth about the story.’”Till’s casket is displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; his story was told in the 2022 film Till; and in July, Joe Biden signed a proclamation designating an Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley national monument in Illinois and Mississippi.The 46th president urged America to face its history with all its peaks and troughs, blessings and blemishes. He told an audience in the White House grounds: “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation.”Biden added, a little bleakly: “We got a hell of a long way to go.”Jones believes that Biden gets it. “He’s been fairly remarkable on these issues of racial justice. He, for example, has been one of the only presidents who has used the words ‘white supremacy’ consistently in addresses – and not just before Black audiences. If you look at Biden’s speeches and you search for ‘white supremacy’, he’s not just talking about that in Tulsa during the commemoration speech.“He’s using it, and understands it as one of the deep problems of American history that we currently have to wrestle with. He’s been very clear and seems very genuine about that being something that he’s leaving as part of his legacy. It’s also part of why he made the pronouncement about the Emmett Till national monument, so this becomes a permanent part of the story that we tell about ourselves.”Trump, however, has a polar opposite worldview that Jones says explains why history has become the new frontline in the culture wars. Just over a third of self-identified Democrats are white and Christian; about 70% of self-identified Republicans are. PRRI polling finds that two-thirds of Democrats say America’s culture and way of life has changed for the better since the 1950s; two-thirds of Republicans believe it has changed for the worse.Jones writes how white Christians can “sense the tectonic plates moving” in the demographics of their neighbourhoods, the food in their grocery store, the appearance of Spanish-language local radio and roadside billboards, and the class photos on the walls of their public schools.He says: “I’ve always thought that, in Trump’s Maga slogan, the most powerful word is not about America being great; it’s the ‘again’ part. It’s this nostalgia tinged with loss. What have we lost and who’s the ‘we’ that have lost something? If you just ask those questions, it’s pretty clear. It’s the formerly dominant white Christians who were culturally dominant, demographically dominant, politically dominant and are no longer.“It’s that sense of loss and grievance that Trump has been so homed in on and so astute at fuelling and setting himself up. You hear him say things like, ‘I am your voice’, ‘I alone can fix it’, ‘If you don’t elect somebody like me, we’re not going to have a country any more’. Those kinds of phrases tell you what he’s appealing to.“If we look at the insurrection at the Capitol, it’s so chilling the last frame that the January 6 House select committee showed in their video has two people – it looks like something out of Les Mis – up on a barricade and they’ve got two flags. One is a Trump flag and the other is a Christian flag that they’re flying on the barricades.”Jones has skin in the game. Growing up a Southern Baptist in Jackson, Mississippi, he went to church five times a week and earned a divinity degree. His family Bible, printed in 1815, has generations of births and deaths and marriages handwritten between the Old and New Testaments. Some online genealogical research revealed slave-owners among his ancestors.“My grandfather was a deacon at a church in Macon, Georgia, and one of his jobs on Sunday morning was to make sure no Black people entered the sanctuary. He was literally a bouncer on the outside of the church to keep non-white people out. That was an official role as a deacon in the church. It wasn’t like some wink, wink, nod, nod – that was his assignment for Sunday morning.“It’s been tough, but, on the other hand, one of the things you hear often with these anti- so-called critical race theory bills and with ‘woke’ is ‘not making white people uncomfortable’. But I would rather know the truth, even if it’s an uncomfortable truth, then be ignorant and comfortable.”He quotes James Baldwin, the transcendent and trenchant African American writer: “All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history … which is not your past, but your present. Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.”Jones comments: “There’s a kind of liberation, freedom and growth that can come from facing this history and moving somewhere better together. That’s the invitation, and the reason for doing the work isn’t at all just to feel bad or beat yourself up over what your family did or whatever.“If we really want to live up to this promise of being a truly pluralistic, multi-religious, multiracial democracy, it’s going to take us coming to terms with that history and putting into place something different than we’ve had in the past. There’s no way we can do that if we don’t even understand why we’re in the dilemmas we’re currently in.”Another of his favourite Baldwin quotations describes “white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing”.Jones continues: “Such a great line, and if you think about this impossibly innocent history that we have told ourselves, that we were always upstanding, that we always treated other peoples with dignity and respect, it just isn’t true. In order, again, to right the ship and come to a new place together, we have to have to come to grips with that history.”Only then, Jones says, can America, a nation that likes to claim exceptionalism, be sincere about its unique experiment.“Our current generation is the first that has been asked whether we truly believe what we often claim: that we are a pluralistic democracy.“Before, many white Christian Americans who are part of the dominant culture could pay lip service to that, knowing that they had enough numbers at the ballot box, knowing that they had enough control on business, enough control of local institutions, that they still had a lock on power. This is the first generation where that’s not true.“The question is called in a way that’s new and that’s why there’s so much visceral reaction, because there’s a way in which we’ve never honestly had to answer the question. But now it’s being put in a way that we’re going to have to answer it.”
      The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy: And the Path to a Shared American Future is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More