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      Leading neurosurgeon calls on Biden to undergo testing and release results

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      Fallout from Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week continues to draw calls for health exams and clinical testing for the US president, and speculation.High-profile neurosurgeon Dr Sanjay Gupta called on Biden Friday to undergo neurological testing and release the results to the public, saying he and other brain specialists believe a detailed cognitive exam is warranted.“From a neurological standpoint, we were concerned with his confused rambling; sudden loss of concentration in the middle of a sentence; halting speech and absence of facial animation, resulting at times in a flat, open-mouthed expression,” Gupta wrote for CNN.Gupta qualified that his suggestion was based on “only observations, not in any way diagnostic of something deeper”. He continued that “the president should be encouraged to undergo detailed cognitive and movement disorder testing, and those results should be made available to the public”.Gupta’s article followed a recent New York Times story, based largely on anonymous sources, that people in contact with Biden reportedly had recently noticed the president making more factual errors and losing concentration.The same story raised the specter of Parkinson’s disease, although publicly available medical records show no evidence that the president has the disease. Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative disease associated with a stiff gait, changes in motor skills and lack of facial expression. Some people also experience cognitive decline.The president’s primary care physician, Dr Kevin C O’Connor, told the New York Times that he observed “no findings which would be consistent with” Parkinson’s disease in his most recent physical of the president.The president’s most recent physician’s examination, from February, attributed his stiff gait to a healed foot fracture and peripheral neuropathy. Peripheral neuropathy is nerve damage that, in the president, resulted in a deficit in sensing hot and cold in his feet. O’Connor reported the president “continues to be fit for duty” with “no new concerns”.Biden’s age, 81, has been a locus of concern for voters. Those concerns were piqued by a debate performance that was widely considered jumbled and disjointed. Trump is only three years Biden’s junior, at 78.Notably, voters don’t particularly like either candidate. In a survey released by the Wall Street Journal two days after the debate, about half of voters said they were not enthusiastic about either candidate on the ticket and would like to replace them both.Biden and his team have defended his debate performance and batted back calls to step aside by saying the president had a cold and was tired after international travel. Biden told Democratic governors that he needed to listen to his team’s warnings about his schedule, and get more sleep.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGupta’s warning also draws on a tension in medicine that has been especially animated in the last two presidential administrations: between professionals’ “duty to warn” Americans about the fitness of their leaders and the potentially high degree of error inherent in “armchair” medicine.During the Trump administration, a group of psychiatrists authored a book warning that the former president could be perhaps dangerously mad and a narcissist. The warning prompted the American Psychological Association to reiterate its commitment to the “Goldwater rule” against “armchair psychiatry”.Cardiologists also questioned whether the former president was at risk of a heart attack because of high cholesterol levels reported by the White House physician, Dr Ronny L Jackson. At that time, Jackson reported the former president was in “excellent” cardiac health.Amid pronounced concerns about Biden’s age, Trump’s rally speeches have been criticized as rambling, bizarre, incoherent and fascistic. For instance, Trump once described Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system as: “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Whoosh. Boom.” Trump, like Biden, has lapsed when trying to recall specific facts. More

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      From a calamitous debate to calls to drop out: the week that left Biden’s re-election bid hanging by a thread

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      History may record them as eight days that sunk a presidency, or at least the rockiest road to a convention in living memory – a week that has left Joe Biden’s re-election bid hanging by a thread.Day one – 27 JuneBiden and Donald Trump face off in an historically early yet eagerly awaited presidential debate, hosted by CNN. In a performance that leaves viewers startled and supporters horrified, the president speaks in a hoarse voice, mangles his syntax and repeatedly loses his train of thought, while abjectly failing to mount an effective argument against a gleeful Trump.At a post-debate event, the president’s wife, Jill Biden, puts on a brave face: “Joe, you did a great job,” she said. “You answered all the questions.” Her words and her husband’s frail demeanor only compound negative impressions of the debate display, as panic sets in among Democratic supporters who were shocked by Biden’s apparent frailty.Day two – 28 JuneAmid a chorus of Democratic doubts about his candidacy, the 81-year-old president attempts an immediate fightback at a campaign event in North Carolina. “I know I’m not a young man,” he tells a crowd cheering supporters. “I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know … when you get knocked down, you get back up!” Observers wonder where this vigorous Biden had been the night before, though others noted he was speaking from an autocue.The New York Times editorial board calls for Biden to end his candidacy, describing it as a “reckless gamble” that risks a second Trump presidency.Day three – 29 JuneBiden holds fundraising events aimed at calming worried donors. Not all are convinced. One placard held by supporters turned protesters outside a fundraiser in East Hampton reads: “We love you, but it’s time.”The New Yorker magazine, another weighty, previously friendly publication, calls on Biden to drop his re-election campaign.Day four – 30 JuneBiden hunkers down with his family at Camp David for a gathering originally organised as a photo shoot with veteran celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. His closest relatives tell him to stay the course, with his son Hunter Biden, recently convicted on gun-related felony charges, reportedly the most vocal.Day five – 1 JulyA far-reaching US supreme court ruling grants Donald Trump – and all future presidents – broad immunity from prosecution for their actions in office, making the likelihood that the case against Trump for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election would reach trial before the race ends. Observers note that the ruling – which one of the dissenting justices said would give Trump the powers of a “king” – makes the stakes of Biden’s poor performance even higher. Biden denounces the ruling in a short statement but does not answer questions from watching reporters.Day six – 2 JulyLloyd Doggett of Texas becomes the first sitting Democratic congressmen, to break ranks publicly tells the president to end his candidacy.Day seven – 3 JulyAnother congressman follows Doggett’s lead by telling Biden to step aside. Biden, responding to accusations of failing to reach out to party figures, meets Democratic state governors at the White House and admits that he needs to get more sleep. They emerge from the meeting reasserting their support for Biden.Day eight – 4 JulyFresh polls show Biden’s support eroding since the debate, with a New York Times/Siena survey shows him trailing Trump by 49% to 43%.Abigail Disney – the heir to the Disney family fortune and a major party donor – says she will withhold donations unless Biden dropped out of the race, following screenwriter Damon Lindelof, philanthropist Gideon Stein, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. “This is realism, not disrespect,” Disney told CNBC, adding “if Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”Biden tries to recover lost ground with a couple of radio interviews, recorded the day before, in which he admits “I screwed up”, but vows to a supporter at a Fourth of July barbecue at the White House that he isn’t “going anywhere”. More

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      #KHive: Kamala Harris memes abound after Joe Biden’s debate disaster

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      In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, left-leaning Americans can’t stop talking about the vice-president online. Memes about Kamala Harris are spreading with a speed and enthusiasm previously unseen on X and Instagram.Supercuts of her set to RuPaul’s Call Me Mother. Threads of her “funniest Veep moments”. Collages of jokes about her over a green album cover a la Charli xcx’s Brat. Numerous riffs on a comment she made about a coconut tree. Previous progressive snark about Harris has cast her either as an incompetent sidekick a la HBO’s Veep or as an anti-progressive cop, a reference to her years as California’s top law enforcement official. But as rumors circle about discussions of Biden dropping out of the presidential race, social media commentary on the nation’s second-in-command has grown more positive – even if ironically so.The Veep clips describing Harris now show Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) becoming president despite her years of ineptitude. The cop jokes come with side-by-sides of the vice-president and Donald Trump’s mugshot. Witness the rise of the “KHive”, a term coined by MSNBC’s Joy Reid for fans of the vice-president in the style of Beyonce’s Beyhive. And as the memes take a turn, so too have the polls. Recent numbers indicate Harris is having a “surprise resurgence”, polling more positively against Trump than Biden and all other rumored Democratic candidates, including Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg.The bleak wake of the debate is not the first time the vice-president has inspired jokes on social media, though it is the loudest. A video of Harris informing Joe Biden the two had won the 2020 election – most of all her “we did it, Joe” remark – has been a popular meme since the start of the administration.Conservatives have also made jokes at the vice-president’s expense for years now. In a January 2022 interview about the administration’s Covid policies, she gave the tautological answer: “It’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.” Fox News said she had been “crushed for non-answer”. The Daily Wire said she “incoherently babbles”. Ben Shapiro said on TikTok: “Every day, there is a new all-time Kamala Harris clip.”The recent meme cycle, whether joking or authentic, celebrates these kinds of verbal gymnastics, which are characteristic of Harris’s speeches – sometimes profound, sometimes nonsensical. Her most popular quip involves her mother and a coconut tree. In May 2023, she said, “My mother used to – she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The story was part of a speech on educational economic opportunity for Latino Americans; you can read the full transcript on the White House’s website.A simple coconut emoji has become shorthand for the vice president. Mashups of her coconut tree anecdote have become punchlines in videos, images, and text on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok, racking up tens of thousands of likes and retweets. Several of her other trademark remarks have enjoyed a similar resurgence.The Biden-Harris campaign seems to have taken notice and intends to ride the virtual wave of support, even if it did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The president and vice-president posted a job ad on 3 July in search of a social media strategist for Harris specifically. The aide will write posts for Harris every day in an effort to “expand the vice-president’s voice online”, per Politico.The explosion of Harris content mirrors how Donald Trump’s speeches and tweets spread as memes. His bizarre, idiosyncratic way of talking and tweeting makes for funny reference points on both right and left, insertable into unrelated jokes for the pastiche effect of the best absurd online humor. Outlandish rhetoric that stands out for its flourishes – whether putatively weighty like Harris or unapologetically pugnacious like Trump – makes for good punchlines.Another of Harris’ aphorisms appears with almost comic frequency and has made its way into the online frenzy over her: “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” A supercut of her making the remark in dozens of different public appearances, nearly four minutes of the same phrase repeated over and over again, has been retweeted nearly 9,000 times.A video of her dancing alongside a drum line has also resurfaced, remixed to showcase her ascendancy as Biden’s star fades. As one tweet of the video reads: “Kamala seeing the CNN polls this morning.” Her distinctive laugh, which makes an appearance in the coconut tree tale before her demeanor and tone turn inexplicably somber, has long inspired posts remarking on her willingness to display emotion in public. Biden, by contrast, spoke in a feeble monotone during the debate. Against Trump’s gesticulation and rancor, Biden appeared gray and weak. Observers online wonder: could Kamala stand up to Trump, as she once did to Biden himself?Why the enthusiasm for Harris now? Perhaps despair over the other two options. One tweet crystalizes the reason for the quick shift in the vibes online: “Who cares if she’s weird? At least she’s not a felon or 80.”And is the turn to Harris genuine or just a nihilistic joke in the face of an uninspiring election? The same tweet winks with absurd maximalism of internet speech: “We need a Gemini Rising woman President from California who is on pills+wine, is campy, and didn’t get married until she was middle aged because she was too busy being a 365 party girlboss.”Parts of the tweet are true – Harris’ ascendant astrological sign is indeed Gemini – but “365 party girlboss” is a reference to Charli xcx’s album Brat, another meme of the moment. There’s also no evidence she’s on pills.With the Democratic machine in disarray as rumors of Biden’s resignation swirl, it’s not clear what comes next for the vice-president – or the US. As one tweet blending multiple Harris quips stated, in an attitude of throwing exasperated hands to the sky: “God grant me the serenity to be unburdened by what has been, the courage to see what can be, and the wisdom to live in the context.” More

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      Disney heir joins other Democrat backers to pause donations until Joe Biden steps aside

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      In the minutes after Joe Biden and Donald Trump stepped on to the stage for the first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, the grand narrative of this election year shifted off its axis and, in the words of CNN’s veteran broadcaster John King, “a deep, wide and aggressive” panic set in among Democrats.A week on, and Biden has said he isn’t going anywhere, but a trickle of major Democratic donors speaking out against the president has grown into a stream.On Thursday, Abigail Disney – the heir to the Disney family fortune and a major party donor – announced she would withhold donations unless Biden dropped out of the race.“This is realism, not disrespect,” Disney told CNBC, adding “if Biden does not step down the Democrats will lose. Of that I am absolutely certain. The consequences for the loss will be genuinely dire.”In her statement, Disney said vice-president Kamala Harris could be an alternative candidate to beat Trump. “If Democrats would tolerate any of her perceived shortcomings even one tenth as much as they have tolerated Biden’s … we can win this election by a lot,” she said.For now, Disney represents a minority of donors, but within Biden’s campaign, a clear and concerted effort to tamp down panic among campaign funders is under way.On Monday, the campaign held a hastily scheduled call with hundreds of top Democratic donors, according to the Reuters news agency. On the call, Biden’s team reportedly promised to make the president more visible at town halls and through interviews to reassure the public.Despite their reassurances, the campaign was reportedly forced to field “pointed” questions from donors, including “can the president make it through a campaign and another term?”According to Reuters and the Associated Press, another call with about 40 top donors over the weekend turned tense after Biden’s campaign manager was asked whether the campaign would offer a refund if Biden doesn’t run.In the days that followed, one major fundraiser for the Biden campaign said some donors were learning fast how little influence they had in this situation. “There are a lot of people who think they are more important than they actually are,” the fundraiser said.Some donors have taken the same path as Disney; to halt funding unless the Democratic candidate changes.Screenwriter Damon Lindelof who has been a significant contributor to the party proposed on Wednesday a “DEMbargo”, withholding funding until Biden stands aside.“When a country is not behaving how we want them to, we apply harsh economic sanctions. It’s a give and take – short term hurt for long term healing,” Lindelof wrote in Deadline.According to CNBC, philanthropist Gideon Stein will pause almost all of a planned $3m in planned donations. “Virtually every major donor I’ve talked to believes that we need a new candidate in order to defeat Donald Trump,” Stein said.On Wednesday, Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix and a Democratic party megadonor, joined calls for Biden to take himself out of the presidential race.Hastings and his wife, Patty Quillin, have been prolific supporters of the Democratic party, donating more than $20m in recent years, including roughly $1.5m to Biden during his 2020 campaign, according to the New York Times.The Biden campaign is eager to show its fundraising strength is holding up after the debate and have highlighted record “grassroots” fundraising in the days that followed the event. The day of the debate and the Friday after were best days for fundraising from small-dollar donors to date, with more than $27m raised across both days.But Biden’s standing in opinion polls has taken a hit, with 59% of Democrats responding to a Reuters/Ipsos poll saying that the president of their own party was too old to work in government and 32% saying he should give up his reelection bid.Biden held a $100m funding advantage over Trump just a few months ago, but his campaign and the Democratic National Committee entered June with $212m in the bank, compared with $235m for the Trump operation and the Republican National Committee.However, analysts predict that if Biden can continue to attract donations in the weeks leading up to the Democratic convention, he will be able to offer party strategist and fellow congressional colleagues a reason to stay on as the candidate.Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and an influential donor, has continued to throw his weight behind Biden, telling his donor network in an email that he felt it was counterproductive to be “musing on Biden’s flaws” and that they should be “organising around Trump’s flaws”.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Biden says he ‘screwed up’ but vows to continue as polls show six-point lead for Trump

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      Joe Biden has told a radio show he “screwed up” and made a “mistake” in last week’s debate against Donald Trump, but vowed to stay in the election race, even as a series of polls show him now trailing the ex-president by about six points.In two interviews conducted Wednesday and aired Thursday with local radio stations in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where he will also hold events this weekend, the president urged voters to judge him on his time in the White House.“I had a bad night,” Biden told Milwaukee radio host Earl Ingram. “And the fact of the matter is that I screwed up. I made a mistake. That’s 90 minutes on stage – look at what I’ve done in three and a half years.”To Ingram’s largely Black audience, Biden pointed to achievements during his presidency that increased representation.“I picked a Black woman to be my vice-president. I’ve appointed the first Black woman to be a supreme court justice,” Biden said. “I’ve appointed more Black judges, more Black women judges, than every other president in American history combined.”Biden also attacked Trump for comments the former president made about Black workers during their TV debate a week ago, when Trump said migrant workers could be taking as many as 20m Black jobs.“He’s done terrible things in the community, and he has about as much interest and concern for Black, minority communities as the man on the moon does,” Biden said.The interviews are part of a blitz of public appearances over the next few days that the president himself reportedly told a key ally were critical for whether he could successfully make a case for his re-election to the public, following a debate performance in which he appeared at times to lose his train of thought or blank out entirely.Although he secured the continuing support of Democratic governors in a meeting on Wednesday evening, the New York Times also cited two people in that meeting who said Biden admitted to the governors he had been feeling the effects of fatigue, needed to work less and get more sleep, and was aiming to reduce his number of engagements after 8pm.As well as the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania rallies, Biden will also give an another interview on Friday to ABC News, then to Good Morning America over the weekend.Clips of the ABC interview were originally scheduled to be aired on Friday night in the news time slot, with the full interview in two parts on Sunday and Monday, but the network announced on Thursday that it would now run the interview in its entirety on Friday.On Thursday, the White House told CNN that Biden had been examined by his doctor after the debate, during which he reportedly had a cold. The statement appeared to contradict the press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s assertion a day earlier that Biden had had no medical exams since his February physical.The White House spokesman Andrew Bates told CNN “the president was seen to check on his cold and was recovering well”.A gathering number of opinion polls conducted after the debate appear to show that his worrying performance, including an inability to successfully argue against Trump’s stream of unchecked lies, has hurt Biden with voters.According to a Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday, on Trump has opened a six-point lead nationally, at 48% to 42%, with 80% of respondents saying the president is too old to run for a second term – an increase of seven points since February.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt also found that Biden is viewed favorably by 34% of voters, and unfavorably by 63%. Less than 40% approved of his handling of the economy, immigration or his time in office overall.Another poll, from the New York Times/Siena, released on Wednesday also showed a six-point advantage to Trump, up from three a week earlier. Among registered voters, Trump led by eight points.According to the Journal poll, one-third of respondents, including 31% of independents – a key bloc of US voters on whom the election may turn – said the debate made them more likely to vote for Trump, while just 10% said Biden.A similar percentage of Democrats and Republicans – roughly three-quarters – said they considered Biden too old to run. Two-thirds of Democrats said they would replace Biden with another candidate.Meanwhile, a Fourth of July campaign message from the president also attacked the recent supreme court ruling that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for an acts deemed “official”, saying it paved the way for the presidency to become a de facto monarchy.“Our nation waged a war based on the revolutionary idea that everyday people ought to govern themselves,” Biden said in the message, quoting the US constitutional principle “that we will swear fealty to no king” and that everyone is equal under the law – a founding principle that Biden said “conservatives on the court have decided presidents are free to break”.Speculation has been intensifying about whether more elected Democrats will call for Biden to step aside: only two congressmen have so far done so. Potential replacement candidates, including Kamala Harris, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and California governor Gavin Newsom, have strongly stated their support for Biden’s re-election.In a call to campaign workers on Wednesday, he is reported to have said: “I’m the nominee of the Democratic party. No one’s pushing me out. I’m not leaving.” In a fundraising email after the call, Biden said: “Let me say this as clearly and simply as I can: I’m running.”Trump had been running a roughly two-point lead in the polls earlier in the year, though his lead appeared to narrow and the candidates seemed to be running neck-and-neck before the debate. More

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      Trump calls Biden ‘broken-down’ and claims he quit 2024 race in leaked video

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      “A broken-down pile of crap” on the verge of “quitting the race” was Donald Trump’s summation of Joe Biden in a surreptitiously filmed video leaked on Wednesday.The clip, obtained by the Daily Beast, shows the 78-year-old former president sitting in a golf cart, holding a pile of cash, and with son Barron alongside, as he offers an analysis of the 2024 presidential campaign.Trump asked a group off-camera: “How did I do with the debate the other night?” before predicting that Biden would not seek re-election.“He just quit, you know – he’s quitting the race”, Trump said. “I got him out of the – and that means we have Kamala.”The White House and most Democrats maintain Biden will remain the party nominee, though voter polls suggest that he has slipped six points behind Trump and that the vice-president, Kamala Harris, could be a stronger Democrat candidate in November.“I think she’s gonna be better” as an opponent, Trump continued in the video, but added: “She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic” and appeared to say: “She’s so fucking bad.”Biden’s campaign has denied he is stepping down. “Absolutely not,” said the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, on Wednesday. Several Democratic governors repeated the phrase “in it to win it” after meeting with Biden.The Trump campaign has not commented directly on the video but on Wednesday predicted the “total collapse” of the Democratic party following Biden’s poor debate performance and mounting calls for him to step aside.The Biden-Harris campaign responded to the video in a statement: “The American people have already seen low after low from Donald Trump,” it said, described the video as a “new rock bottom” for him.The clip was leaked hours after the Trump campaign released its first attack ads against Harris, who is the most likely candidate to replace Biden if he decides to quit the race.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLeaked video and audio clips have previously been a source of embarrassment for Trump, including in 2016 with the notorious Access Hollywood tape in which he described women in vulgar terms and bragged about sexually harassing them.In the latest video Trump expressed disdain for Biden’s ability to deal with foreign adversaries, including Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and China’s president, Xi Jinping.“Can you imagine that guy dealing with Putin?” Trump asked. “And the president of China – who’s a fierce person. He’s a fierce man, very tough guy. And they see him.” More

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      This Fourth of July, it’s hard to feel optimistic about the US. But I have hope | Margaret Sullivan

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      If you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention, you know that the American Experiment took some gut punches over the last week.Joe Biden – long considered the best hope for preventing another disastrous Donald Trump term – had a shockingly bad debate performance, looking and sounding every minute of his 81 years.The tainted supreme court then declared, in essence, that a president is above the law, at least when acting in an official capacity. And that came on top of other high court decisions that have blasted away at the foundations of democracy in the United States.And much of the mainstream news media continued their campaign of false equivalency – treating the president’s age as a worse problem than Trump’s criminality and authoritarian intentions.But on this Fourth of July, I haven’t given up hope that we will right ourselves. And I’m far from alone.There is encouraging news in every one of these troubled spheres – politics, justice and media.I asked one of my favorite thinkers, the author and scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in how democracies can wither under authoritarian rule, for some help. I talked to others, too, especially those who are protecting the vote, fostering good journalism and working for justice.Here’s what Ben-Ghiat told me: “Part of the reason for so much aggression from the GOP and the courts to take away our rights, including the right to free and fair elections, is because America is becoming more progressive, and Republicans cannot win without lies, threats and election interference, including assistance in that area from foreign powers.”She sees the US participating in “the global renaissance of mass nonviolent protest against authoritarianism” and notes that, in 2017, we saw the biggest protest in the nation’s history – the Women’s March against Trump, which was then surpassed in 2020 by the Black Lives Matter protests, which involved more than 20 million people in multigenerational and multiracial demonstrations.“These mass protest movements had electoral consequences in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections,” she added, as many women, non-white and LGBTQ+ people were elected to office.Ben-Ghiat is convinced that we are ripe for another round – and the stakes are higher than ever.On the justice front, I’m not suggesting that we somehow set aside the terrible and hugely consequential decision that gives a president – guess who in particular? – immunity for his official acts.But at the same time, the courts, including the jury system, are often functioning admirably, if not flawlessly. Just over a month ago, Trump became the first former US president convicted of felonies. Trump allies who wanted to charge that the courts have been weaponized found it harder to make that argument less than two weeks later when Hunter Biden, too, was convicted in a jury trial.Mainstream journalism, as noted, often disappoints. The moderators of the CNN debate clearly should have been empowered by their network bosses to challenge Trump’s barrage of lies in real time. The stunning New York Times editorial calling for Biden to set aside his campaign for the good of the nation may have been well-reasoned, but it struck me as another example of targeting the president and letting Trump off the hook. To my knowledge, only the scrappy Philadelphia Inquirer has written a similar editorial about Trump.Too much of the politics coverage is out of whack with reality. The media is baying for Biden’s head, but – with some exceptions – seems mostly bemused by Trump or at least habituated to how dangerous he is.But there’s good news in journalism, too. Consider ProPublica’s essential reporting on Justice Clarence Thomas’s rotten ethics. Or the way many news outlets have revealed the threats of Project 2025 – the alarming and detailed plan by Trump allies to dismantle democratic norms should their leader win a second term.I’m also heartened by young journalists who are making their way in a difficult career field.“No matter what problem we’re talking about, good journalism is part of the solution,” said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School (where I run a journalism ethics center). “The young journalists whom we have the privilege to work with here are some of the sharpest, most committed and talented that I’ve ever seen.”Their work “will be a ballast for democracy”, Cobb told me, “even amid the giant challenges in front of us right now”.Most of all, I’m moved by the valiant efforts of many ordinary citizens. One friend, active in voter protection efforts, praised “all of the grassroots volunteers working to preserve democracy who I am sure will continue in all the ways possible if Trump wins”. She mentioned the flood of small-dollar donations that followed Biden’s debate debacle, and credited “the courageous judges, court personnel, jurors et al who are working, despite the risks to themselves, to see that justice is served in the cases against Trump”.Will any of this matter when so much is going wrong and when the threats are so great? The screenwriter and former journalist David Simon offered a dour view this week: “Our American experiment is so over.”More aligned with Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s big-picture view and the others quoted here, I remain hopeful, if not optimistic about the future of the United States.On 4 July, at least, let’s remember that we’ve come a long way, and the journey isn’t yet complete.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More