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      I’m worried about Biden’s debate with Trump this week | Robert Reich

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      I just turned 78, and frankly I’m scared about what might come down on Thursday evening when the oldest candidates ever to compete in a presidential race debate each other.I’m less worried that Joe Biden will suffer a mental lapse or physically stumble than I am that Biden will look weak and Donald Trump appear strong.One of Trump’s most successful ploys has been to frame the upcoming election as a contest between strength and weakness, and to convince many Americans that stridency and pugnacity are signs of strength while truth and humility signal weakness.In 1960, when I watched John F Kennedy square off against Richard Nixon, character and temperament were the most important variables.According to the legend, most people who listened to the first debate on the radio called it a draw or thought Nixon had won, but Kennedy won handily among television viewers.Television hurt Nixon, and not just because of his paler complexion. Kennedy stared directly into the camera when he answered each question. But Nixon looked off to the side to address the various reporters who asked questions, which came across as shifting his gaze to avoid eye contact with the public – a move that seemed to show evasiveness, the character flaw that had earned Nixon the moniker “Tricky Dick”.I last watched a tape of the Kennedy-Nixon television debate in 1992, when sitting beside Bill Clinton, who used it to prepare for his debate with George HW Bush and Ross Perot. Clinton wanted to emulate Kennedy’s character – his confidence, humor and optimism.Perot’s whiny indignation turned viewers off. George HW seemed over the hill. Clinton was effusive and charming, and connected with viewers.Which brings me back to character. Over 78 years, I’ve met or observed a small number of people in American public life whom I’d characterize as vile. Senator Joseph McCarthy, Governor George Wallace and Speaker Newt Gingrich come immediately to mind, along with Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes.What made them vile to me was their cynical opportunism – the eagerness with which they exploited people’s fears to gain power or notoriety, or both. All had the character of barnyard bullies.Donald Trump is the vilest by far.Trump’s loathsomeness extends to every aspect of his being – his continuous stream of lies, the eagerness with which he seeks to turn Americans against each other, his scapegoating of immigrants, his demeaning of women and the disabled.And Trump’s utter disrespect for the office of the presidency – for the laws of the land, for the United States constitution, for the senators and members of Congress and staff and police whose lives he intentionally endangered on 6 January 2021, and for hundreds of thousands of election workers whose lives he directly or indirectly threatened with his baseless claims of election fraud.Character will not be debated on Thursday night, but I hope Americans who have not yet made up their minds or who are wavering in their support of Joe Biden will pay attention to it. Character is – must be – on the 2024 ballot.I remember debating Arizona’s former Republican governor Jan Brewer before the 2016 election. I asked her whether she thought Trump had the character and temperament to be president. When Brewer temporized, I asked again. Finally she said yes. Her answer may have been the most dishonest thing anyone said during that election season – other than Trump’s own rapacious lies.A few days ago, I was talking with a young conservative who admitted that Trump was an “odious thug”, in his words, but argued that the US and the world had become such a mess that we need an odious thug as president.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Think of Putin, Xi, Kim, Ali Khamenei, Netanyahu – they’re all odious thugs,” he said. “We need our own odious thug to stand up to them.”I demurred, saying that direct confrontation could lead to more bloodshed, even nuclear war.He continued: “We need an odious thug to shake up Washington, stir up all the ossified bureaucracies now destroying America, do all the things no one has had the balls to do.”When I looked skeptical, he charged: “We need someone to take control!”As soon as he uttered those last words, he and I both knew the conversation was over. He had spilled the beans. He was impatient with the messiness and slowness of democracy. He wanted a dictator.I’m not sure how many Americans attracted to Trump feel this way. It’s consistent with the strength-versus-weakness framework Trump is deploying.Trump may be loathsome, they tell themselves, but at least he’s strong, and we need strength over weakness.I was born 78 years ago. At that time, the world had just experienced what can occur when a loathsome person who exudes “strength” takes over a major nation and threatens the world. A number of my distant relatives died fighting Nazis or perished in Nazi concentration camps.I can’t help but wonder if the young conservative I spoke with would feel differently were he 78.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Judge partially lifts Trump gag order in hush-money case – as it happened

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      The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal case has modified a gag order, freeing the former president to comment publicly about witnesses and jurors in the trial until his sentencing date next month, Reuters reports.Judge Juan Merchan’s ruling allows Trump to go on the attack against his former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, the adult star Stormy Daniels, and other witnesses.But Merchan ruled that Trump is still bound by the order’s restrictions on speaking about lawyers and staff for the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the court, if those statements could interfere with the case.Voters in three states are casting ballots in primaries that could prove crucial to determining the party control, and the ideological bent, of the next Congress. In New York, progressive Democrat Jamaal Bowman is fighting for his seat against challenger George Latimer, amid a race where Bowman’s criticism of Israel has become a major issue. Over in Colorado, far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert is looking to overcome personal scandals and secure her place in the House by winning the GOP primary in a district that is even more friendly to Republicans than the one she presently represents. And in Utah, Republicans are deciding whether their next senator will be a moderate like the retiring senator Mitt Romney, or someone who vows to do what Donald Trump wants.Here’s what else happened today:
      Judge Juan Merchan modified the gag order imposed on Trump in his New York hush-money case and allowed him to attack jurors and witnesses.
      Joe Biden’s approval ticked up slightly in June, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found, but Trump maintained the edge when it came to handling of the economy.
      Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge handling Trump’s classified documents case, is on her third day of hearing arguments on motions that could decide the trajectory of the closely watched case.
      Last week’s primary in Virginia between Republican congressman Bob Good and challenger John McGuire remains too close to call, but Trump knows who he wants to win.
      Who will Trump pick as his running mate? We take a look at what clues have emerged.
      Federal prosecutors have released new photos of the classified documents they discovered two years ago at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, in a filing that rejects an attempt by the former president’s lawyers to get the case against him thrown out.The photos reveal that top secret documents were mixed in with keepsakes like copies of the New York Times, Maga hats and cases of Diet Coke:Here’s more, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell, on the latest revelations from prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith in the long-running case:Hillary Clinton has, interestingly enough, debated both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, though it is of course her general election loss to the former for which she is best remembered. Ahead of the Trump-Biden debate scheduled for Thursday, she offered some thoughts on what debating the ex-president is like, the Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports:Hillary Clinton has said it would be a “waste of time” for Joe Biden to attempt to refute Donald Trump’s contentions in Thursday’s presidential debate because “it’s nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are”.The former secretary of state wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that Trump “starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather”.“This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated,” she said.Clinton debated Trump while unsuccessfully running for the White House against him in 2016 – and she had also debated Biden during a presidential primary eight years earlier.Trump was later accused of speaking over Clinton and looming over her in a way that she later described as “really weird”.Clinton predicted in her op-ed that Trump’s strategies would “fall flat” if Biden “is as direct and forceful as he was” during his State of the Union address in March.Referring to Trump, she added: “Expectations for him are so low that if he doesn’t literally light himself on fire on Thursday evening, some will say he was downright presidential.”Reuters and Ipsos just dropped a new poll ahead of Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s Thursday’s debate face-off, which shows the former president has the edge among voters when it comes to concerns about the economy, while the current White House occupant is more trusted to preserve America’s democracy.It also found a slight bump in Biden’s approval rating, from a not-great 36% in May to a still-not-great 37% this month.The survey does not tell us much we do not know, since previous polls have shown Trump with the edge on economic matters, though it does underscore the validity of the Biden campaign’s strategy of characterizing Trump as a threat to democracy.The survey found Trump was viewed as the better choice for the economy, the top concern of voters, by 43% of respondents, against Biden’s 37%. He was also the preferred pick of respondents when it came to handling foreign policy and terrorism, with 40% support against Biden’s 35%.The second-biggest concern for respondents was the state of the country’s democracy, and when it came to that, Biden was the pick of 39% of those polled, while Trump picked up 33% support.Speaking of attacks, a CNN presenter’s interview with Donald Trump’s spokesperson went awry yesterday, when she began criticizing the moderators of the ex-president’s upcoming debate against Joe Biden, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports:CNN abruptly terminated a live interview with Donald Trump’s spokesperson on Monday after she criticised the two journalists whom the network chose to moderate the much anticipated upcoming debate between the former president and Joe Biden.Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign national press secretary, became embroiled in a heated exchange with Kasie Hunt, the presenter of CNN This Morning, after saying Trump would be entering a “hostile environment on this very network” when he debates the incumbent president in Atlanta on Thursday.Asked what strategy Trump would pursue on the debate stage, she said he would be contending “with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known … and their biased coverage of him”.Leavitt’s comments were aimed, without initially naming them, at the moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. They triggered an immediate reaction from Hunt, who defended her colleagues.“So I’ll just say, my colleagues, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, have acquitted themselves as professionals as they have covered campaigns and interviewed candidates from all sides of the aisle,” Hunt said. Citing analysts of previous debates, she added: “If you’re attacking the moderators, you’re usually losing.”Donald Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, who appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the criminal trial that resulted in the former president’s conviction in New York City on charges related to hush-money payments, told CNN he won’t be intimidated by Trump’s attacks.His comment came after Judge Juan Merchan modified the gag order on Trump, and allowed him to make statements about witnesses in the case – such as Cohen.Here’s what he told CNN:And now we wait to see if Donald Trump unleashes a new volley of insults against those involved in his criminal conviction last month in New York City.The place to watch is his Truth Social account, which the former president has used in place of his account on X (formerly Twitter) to comment on a variety of subjects, his criminal trials included. He has left his account on X dormant since owner Elon Musk allowed him back on to the site two years ago, with the sole exception of tweeting out the mug shot taken in Georgia, when charges were brought against him in the election subversion case.Before its modification, Judge Juan Merchan fined Trump for repeatedly violating the gag order imposed against him in his hush money case. Here’s more on that:The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal case has modified a gag order, freeing the former president to comment publicly about witnesses and jurors in the trial until his sentencing date next month, Reuters reports.Judge Juan Merchan’s ruling allows Trump to go on the attack against his former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen, the adult star Stormy Daniels, and other witnesses.But Merchan ruled that Trump is still bound by the order’s restrictions on speaking about lawyers and staff for the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the court, if those statements could interfere with the case.More than a dozen Nobel prize-winning economists have warned that inflation will soar once again if Donald Trump takes back the White House in November.In a letter obtained by Axios, 16 Nobel laureates wrote that the presumptive Republican nominee’s plans would reignite inflation and cause lasting harm to the global economy.
      While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump.
      They go on to write that a second Trump term would have “a negative impact on the US’s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the US’s domestic economy.”
      Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.
      Hunter Biden’s license to practice law in Washington DC has been suspended after he was convicted earlier this month of three federal gun charges.The filing on Tuesday by the DC court of appeals states that Hunter Biden, the president’s eldest living son, is “suspended immediately” from practicing law in the city.The appeals court also directs the DC board on professional responsibility to to hold additional proceedings to “determine the nature of the offense and whether it involves moral turpitude.”Hunter Biden was found guilty earlier this month on three felony counts related to a handgun purchase while he was a user of crack cocaine.US senator Rand Paul celebrated Julian Assange’s freedom, but criticized the US plea deal as harmful.In a post to X, Paul said that he was “relieved” Assange was being reunited with his family, but argued that Assange’s plea deal was dangerous for first amendment rights and criminalizing to journalism.
      I’m relieved Assange is finally free and reuniting with his family after years of wrongful persecution. Yet, this plea deal sets a dangerous precedent, criminalizing journalism and damaging our First Amendment rights. The “Land of the Free” can and must do better.
      Follow the Guardian’s coverage of Julian Assange’s plea deal here.Voters in three states are casting ballots in primaries that could prove crucial to determining the party control, and the ideological bent, of the next Congress. In New York, progressive Democrat Jamaal Bowman is fighting for his seat against challenger George Latimer, in a race where Bowman’s criticism of Israel has become a major issue. Over in Colorado, far-right congresswoman Lauren Boebert is looking to overcome personal scandals and secure her place in the House by winning the GOP primary in a district that is even more friendly to Republicans than the one she presently represents. And in Utah, Republicans are deciding whether their next senator will be a moderate like the retiring senator Mitt Romney, or someone who vows to do what Donald Trump wants.Here’s what else has been happening today:
      Aileen Cannon, the Florida judge handling Trump’s classified documents case, is on her third day of hearing arguments on motions that could decide the trajectory of the closely watched case.
      Last week’s primary in Virginia between Republican congressman Bob Good and challenger John McGuire remains too close to call, but Trump knows who he wants to win.
      Who will Trump pick as his running mate? We take a look at what clues have emerged.
      Voting is ongoing in New York, where progressive congressman Jamaal Bowman is facing a tough challenge in the Democratic primary from George Latimer, the executive of Westchester county.On X, Bowman posted a video encouraging volunteers to come to his district and knock on doors to rally voter support, or to work phone banks:Latimer has meanwhile been calling attention to his endorsements. Here’s Ken Jenkins, the deputy executive of Westchester county, in New York City’s suburbs: More

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      Hunter Biden law licence suspended after conviction in gun case

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      Hunter Biden’s right to practice law in Washington DC has been suspended following his recent conviction on federal gun charges, with the possibility that he could be permanently disbarred.The District of Columbia court of appeals issued an order on Tuesday suspending Biden’s licence, citing the guilty verdict on three felony charges following this month’s trial in Wilmington, Delaware, which it said were defined as “serious crimes” under the district’s bar rule.The court order also hinted at more severe repercussions by instituting formal proceedings to determine the nature of the offences and whether they amount to “moral turpitude”. DC law requires that lawyers be disbarred if they are found guilty of such crimes.Biden, the son of Joe Biden, the US president, was found guilty by a jury of lying on a gun application form when buying a Colt Cobra 38 Special revolver in 2018 by not disclosing his drug addiction, and then illegally owning the gun for 11 days, before his then girlfriend, the widow of his late brother Beau, threw it in a garbage bin.The trial, which featured testimony from several family members, was dominated by descriptions of Hunter Biden’s addiction to crack cocaine, and was attended by the president’s wife, Jill Biden. Joe Biden did not attend.Hunter Biden, who described his struggles with addiction in a personal memoir and says he is now clean, has not yet been sentenced. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and fines of $750,000, although such punishments are rare for first time offenders.Biden denied the charges against him and his lawyer, Abbe Lowell has requested a new trial, citing procedural matters.He face another trial in Los Angeles in September on charges of tax evasion. Republicans have sought to tie his legal travails to his father, setting in train a stalled impeachment process in the House of Representatives based on unproven allegations that the president profited from his son’s business deals. More

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      Hillary Clinton: waste of Biden’s debate time to rebut Trump ‘nonsense’

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      Hillary Clinton has said it would be a “waste of time” for Joe Biden to attempt to refute Donald Trump’s contentions in Thursday’s presidential debate because “it’s nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are”.The former secretary of state wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that Trump “starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather”.“This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated,” she said.Clinton debated Trump while unsuccessfully running for the White House against him in 2016 – and she had also debated Biden during a presidential primary eight years earlier.Trump was later accused of speaking over Clinton and looming over her in a way that she later described as “really weird”.Clinton predicted in her op-ed that Trump’s strategies would “fall flat” if Biden “is as direct and forceful as he was” during his State of the Union address in March.Referring to Trump, she added: “Expectations for him are so low that if he doesn’t literally light himself on fire on Thursday evening, some will say he was downright presidential.”Clinton advised debate-watchers to focus on three things: how each candidate talks about people, whether they “focus on the fundamentals”, and on the choice between “chaos and competence”.Referring to Trump’s recent conviction in the New York criminal prosecution involving hush money paid to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, Clinton said the choice between “a convicted criminal out for revenge and a president who delivers results” was “easy” regardless of the debate’s outcome.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClinton’s comments come as both main political parties are attempting to talk down expectations of a decisive political clash. They also arrived on the same day that she announced a new memoir – Something Lost, Something Gained – set to be published seven weeks ahead of November’s vote.Clinton said she will offer a “warning to all American voters”, along with “her unvarnished views on politics, democracy, the threats we face, and the future within our reach”.Subjects the 76-year-old former US secretary of state is said to address include her reflections on marriage, friendships with other former first ladies, and, according to the publisher Simon & Schuster’s editor-in-chief, Priscilla Painton, moving “past her dream of being president”. More

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      Republicans have a ghoulish tactic for distracting from Trump’s criminality | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump is already showcasing the big surprise he will spring on Joe Biden at their debate. It’s not a surprise; it’s his most morbid, ghastly and predictable trick.On Friday, his campaign arranged and publicized a telephone call to the mother of a young woman who had been murdered by an undocumented immigrant to express his heartfelt sympathy. That day, the former president posted three similar stories of gruesome murders on his Truth Social account. “We have a new Biden Migrant Killing – It’s only going to get worse, and it’s all Crooked Joe Biden’s fault. He’s a disgrace to the Office of President, he’s a disgrace to America. I look forward to seeing him at the Fake Debate on Thursday. Let him explain why he has allowed MILLIONS of people to come into our Country illegally!”In the debate, Trump will cast the president as responsible for those who stalk, rape and kill innocent young women. He will accuse Biden and his policies on the border of being the source of vicious crimes. Biden will be the villain. He will be shown to have no empathy. He will be exposed as secretly conspiring to unleash a reign of terror. He will be unveiled as the criminal. The chivalrous Trump will ride as the white knight to rescue vulnerable women from swarthy rapists and killers. The original scenario of this plot was The Birth of a Nation.Trump’s planned attack in the debate is pulled from his repertoire of ploys like a hack comedian on the Strip drawing from a roomful of old joke files. For years he has exploited these tragedies as set-ups and the anguished parents as props. According to Fox News, “he has lent hope and compassion to those who have lost family members or other loved ones in recent years due to heinous acts committed by individuals who had come to the US illegally”. Alongside its portrayal of Trump as the sincere consoler of the grieving, truly a minister of souls, Fox News helpfully highlighted a story headlined: Illegals Charged with Murder, Rape and Kidnapping in a Week of Shocking Crimes Across the US. (Hyped after that, the next story: Transgender Utah Woman Shot Parents Dead.)Trump has been deploying this gambit since his first campaign in 2016, which featured a cavalcade of members of stricken “angel families”. Most recently, in February, before Biden’s State of the Union Address, he called the parents of a young woman allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant and afterward described how the “beautiful young woman” was “barbarically attacked”.When one of the people he had accused was later acquitted, Trump stated that the verdict was the reason there was “no wonder” why Americans are “so angry with illegal immigration”. Trump ghoulishly trolls for this specific and unusual type of murder, and when the details don’t match his grisly story, it doesn’t matter because there’s still a dead woman he can pretend to mourn.Trump’s call last week to another devastated family was a revival of his failed effort to disrupt Biden’s State of the Union. His Maga zealot, House member Marjorie Taylor Greene, elbowed her way to the aisle of the House chamber as Biden entered. Wearing a red “Make America Great Again” cap and a T-shirt reading “Say Her Name”, a slogan appropriated from the Black Lives Matter movement to protest against the police killings of Black women, she thrust a button with a victim’s name into Biden’s hand.In his speech, Biden lamented that the Republicans in the Senate had killed a border security bill, chiefly crafted by the very conservative senator James Lankford, Republican from Oklahoma, and initially backed by the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Biden had exerted considerable political capital to get the Democrats to agree to the bill, which many, if not most, found distastefully draconian. But it was not the Democrats who killed the conservative bill. Trump opposed it. Instead, he wanted the festering problem for his campaign. Under Trump’s pressure, the Republicans caved and even Lankford voted against his own bill.When Biden mentioned the demise of the bipartisan border bill at the hands of cowed Republicans, some Maga members began to jeer him. “Oh, you don’t like that bill, huh?” Biden replied. “That conservatives got together and said it was a good bill? I’ll be darned. That’s amazing.” Lankford was caught on camera muttering: “That’s true.”“Say her name!” shouted Greene. Biden held up the button she had given him, naming Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant. “Laken Riley,” said Biden, “an innocent woman who was killed by an illegal,” and added: “To her parents I say my heart goes out to you, having lost children myself.”Biden’s forthrightness deflated the intent of Greene’s stunt. In the face of the calculated effort to rattle him and make him lose his composure, he sidetracked his hecklers.After Biden spoke, the Alabama senator Katie Britt delivered the Republican response. As part of the overarching plan to pin murders by undocumented immigrants on Biden, she raised the murder of Laken Riley but created a weird dissonance speaking in her strange sing-song “fundie baby” voice. “This could have been my daughter. This could have been yours … From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders, there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables just like this one because of Biden’s senseless border policies.”The orchestrated razzing at the State of the Union was the warm-up for the same tactic that Trump will undoubtedly use in the debate. Trump will make another attempt. Now that he is a convicted felon, he is more desperate than ever to shift the taint of criminality on to Biden.The Republicans following his playbook are seeking every opportunity to label Biden the true “criminal” and suppress mention of Trump’s conviction. “What he’s doing to the country is criminal,” the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham parroted on Fox News on 19 June. “His border policies are allowing people to be raped and murdered on the street.”That Trump was adjudicated a rapist in his E Jean Carroll defamation case and has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than a dozen women only makes the stories about the murders of innocent women by undocumented immigrants that much more politically necessary.To protect Trump’s reputation, House Republicans have banned any reference to Trump as a convicted felon from congressional speeches as a supposed violation of the rules, a suppression of members’ speech not seen since the Gag Rule of the 1840s forbidding antislavery statements. Then the Republicans pivot to the stories of murders by undocumented immigrants. The Republican National Committee – under its co-chair, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump – has created a website called “Biden Bloodbath”. In bold red letters, it screams: “Migrant Crime: There Is Blood on Biden’s Hands”.If the facts matter, a definitive study in 2020 conducted by a team of academic researchers from the University of Wisconsin for the libertarian Cato Institute showed: “Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.”The researchers concluded from data collected in Texas: “The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45% below that of native‐​born Americans in Texas. The general pattern [is] of native‐​born Americans having the highest criminal conviction rates followed by illegal immigrants and then with legal immigrants having the lowest holds for all of other specific types of crimes such as violent crimes, property crimes, homicide, and sex crimes.”A new study published in 2024 by Stanford University experts for the National Bureau of Economic Research stated: “We find that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history. The differences in incarceration have become more pronounced starting in 1960, with recent waves of immigrants being 50–60% less likely to be incarcerated than US-born men (30% when compared to US-born white men). This relative decline in incarceration has occurred among immigrants from all major countries of origin, and it cannot be explained by changes in immigrants’ observable characteristics or in immigration policies.”The reality, moreover, is that crime, which shot up during and immediately after Trump’s incompetent and malignant handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, is now plummeting under Biden, mainly as a result of steadily improving economic conditions. Based on FBI statistics gathered from more than 11,000 police agencies across the country, Biden has noted: “In the first quarter of this year, murders decreased by 26%, robberies by almost 18%, and violent crime overall by 15%.”Since the Republicans under the influence of Trump voted down their own border bill, Biden has issued a series of executive actions. They include suspending entry into the US of those unlawfully crossing into the US, granting citizenship to those legally married to an American and resident in the country for 10 years, and giving quick access to work visas to qualified Daca recipients (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Dreamers) who have graduated college and have jobs.Biden’s actions have been taken on his own because he has no Republican partners. His Republican critics, who made his unilateral actions necessary, pretend he has not done anything at all.Despite what Biden has tried and effected, Trump’s enduring contempt for facts extends not least to the question of murders by undocumented immigrants. His ability to continue manipulating the calamities of “angel families” for his own ambition has depended upon his wrecking a Republican-written border security bill, his defiance of the facts that undocumented immigrants are the least likely group to commit crimes, and his enlistment and intimidation of Republicans to do his bidding and echo his demagogy.Trump, however, can’t help himself from undermining the frenetic Republican attempts to protect him and the party from his criminality. He just keeps raising it. At every rally, he promises that he will pardon the violent criminals imprisoned as a result of their participation in the January 6 insurrection. He calls them “hostages” and “warriors”.The news is awash in stories of Trump’s filings and motions to delay his trials for his alleged coup attempt and alleged stealing of national security documents. Present and former associates constantly surface to the top of the crime news.Fifty-two people involved in Trump’s fake electors scheme have been indicted in four states. He is under indictment himself in Georgia and an unindicted co-conspirator in Michigan. His personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has been indicted in three states. Another of his attorneys, Boris Epshteyn – who pleaded guilty in 2021 to disorderly conduct after being accused of groping women in a nightclub (the sexual assault charges were dropped) – has been indicted in Arizona. A third Trump attorney, Jenna Ellis, has been indicted and says she regrets ever representing Trump. Another attorney, Kenneth Chesebro, also indicted, has flipped and turned state’s evidence. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been indicted in three states.His former campaign manager and senior White House adviser, Steve Bannon, has been sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress for failing to honor a subpoena from the January 6 committee. Bannon also faces an October trial in New York state for an alleged scheme to fleece Trump supporters in a “Build the Wall” fraud, another money-making opportunity after Mexico declined to pay for Trump’s empty promise to Americans that our friendly neighbor to the south would pony up after Trump called immigrants “Mexican rapists”. Trump had pardoned Bannon from federal prosecution for that same charge.For Trump, the emotional manipulation of the compelling anecdotal fallacy is all that matters. New “angel families” are ordered up and brought to his attention to be used and discarded one after another. He will always find the next terrible tragedy involving some immigrant somewhere to illustrate his false narrative to sustain the problem whose solution he has thwarted in order to be able to inflame it in his interest. Then, wet with crocodile tears, he can stage lachrymose scenes of people’s genuine affliction by which to demonize Biden.Demonstrating his piety and virtue, while showing no remorse for his felonies as he awaits sentencing, Trump endorsed the state of Louisiana’s edict to post a copy of the Ten Commandments in every schoolroom. “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.” Trump did not specify those “many other places”. He made no announcement about posting the Ten Commandments at Mar-a-Lago or any other Trump golf club.“READ IT – HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024” Give me that old time Maga TTC.Trump endlessly cavorts before a credulous audience that either swallows his routine as they did the fakery of Trump as master of the universe in The Apprentice or else don’t care any more than Trump does so long as his pantomime advances him. As Trump said in his Access Hollywood tape, laying out the only commandment he has ever upheld: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Hunter Biden requests new trial after conviction in gun case

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      Lawyers for Hunter Biden have filed a motion requesting a new trial, arguing that a Delaware court did not have jurisdiction over the case when it proceeded to trial.Biden, the eldest living son of the US president, was found guilty earlier this month on three felony counts related to a handgun purchase while he was a user of crack cocaine.Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell, in a court filing on Monday, argued that his client’s “convictions should be vacated” because the judge overseeing the case lacked jurisdiction to hold a trial because of pending rulings in his appeals case.A federal appeals court had rejected two attempts by Biden’s lawyers to dismiss the gun charges, but Lowell said that the court had not yet issued a formal mandate denying one of those appeals.“Naturally, any district court action taken after it has been divested of jurisdiction by an appeal must be vacated,” he wrote in the Monday filing. “Mr Biden’s convictions should be vacated because the court lacked jurisdiction to proceed to trial.”In a separate filing, Biden’s lawyers argued that a recent supreme court ruling, which upheld a federal ban on a firearms for people under domestic violence restraining orders, supported their motion for an acquittal in the case, or “at a minimum” a new trial.Biden faces a maximum of 25 years in prison, though first-time offenders are rarely given the maximum penalty. No sentencing date has been set.The president has said he will not use his power to pardon or commute his son’s sentence. More

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      ‘A healthcare crisis’: Harris takes aim at Trump on anniversary of Roe’s fall

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris marked the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade with forceful campaign statements that laid the blame squarely on Donald Trump for ending the national right to abortion.In a video released on Monday, Biden pledged to restore the right to an abortion and “protect American freedom” if he is re-elected.The video, along with a campaign event headlined by the vice-president, came two years to the day since the court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed nearly half a century of guaranteed federal abortion rights, and reflect the centrality of abortion in Biden’s presidential campaign.In College Park, Maryland, Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years”. In her remarks, Harris laid out what she said were the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term would be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state – in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”Nodding to her background as a prosecutor, Harris called Trump’s attack on women’s reproductive rights “premeditated” and said he has “not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions”.“In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty,” she said.Harris called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices” and warned that he would go even further by curtailing access to contraception and IVF.Pointing to the statistic that one in three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year despite a fatal fetal anomaly, introduced Harris in Maryland.“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said. “I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it.”Cox ultimately left Texas to receive care. Growing emotional from the stage on Monday, she shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause. “I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.In Biden’s video, the president, too, placed the responsibility for reversing abortion rights on Trump, quoting him boasting about the decision and taking credit for putting three conservative justices on the court.“Here’s what Donald Trump says about your freedom: ‘After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,’” Biden says, quoting a Trump statement last year.“Two years ago, the supreme court justices that Trump handpicked helped overturn Roe v Wade,” Biden continues. “Decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the White House.”“We’re up against extremism. Send me back to the White House and I’ll fight like hell to restore Roe v Wade and protect American freedom.”The offensive comes amid polling evidence that with consistently weak approval ratings for Biden, concerns over reproductive rights represent Democrats’ best hope of retaining the White House in November.Since Roe v Wade was overthrown in 2022, ballot measures in several states – including ones that tend to vote Republican – have upheld or enshrined abortion rights locally, signalling that the issue has popular resonance particularly among female voters.On Friday, a group of Montana abortion rights supporters became the latest to announce that they had secured enough signatures to hold a November ballot measure asking voters to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. Although that measure has not yet been confirmed by state officials, voters in roughly a dozen states are expected to weigh in directly on abortion rights this year, including in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona.Democrats are hoping that these measures will boost turnout in their favor.Several groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Freedom for All – announced on Monday a $100m Abortion Access Now campaign across several states.Since Roe fell, Biden has frequently promised to “codify” Roe’s protections into law. Although his administration has issued executive orders aimed at boosting access to reproductive healthcare, including contraception, as well as defended abortion access in two supreme court cases this year, Biden cannot re-establish a federal right to abortion without congressional support. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that blocks states from totally banning abortion before fetal viability, or the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.In a call with reporters on Monday, White House officials declined to reveal any plans for future abortion-related executive actions. Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the Gender Policy Council, also acknowledged that, if the supreme court rules against the Biden administration in a highly anticipated case over emergency abortions, “our options on emergency medical care are likely to be limited”.Trump has sought to backpedal on his stance in recent months, telling congressional Republicans in a meeting on Capitol Hill this month that the matter should be left to the states and warning them against pursuing a national ban. More

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      Kamala Harris says Trump ‘guilty’ of ‘stealing’ abortion rights at rally – as it happened

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      Harris emphasized the importance of turning out to vote in November to protect abortion access so that places like Maryland remain havens for reproductive healthcare.Pointing to the statistic that one-in-three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Making her case that Trump was “guilty” of stripping abortion access, which was previewed by the campaign before her appearance, Harris said Trump appointed three supreme court justices with the intention of overturning Roe v Wade.“It was premeditated,” Harris said from a stage, where a sign that said “Trust Women” hung behind her.“Trump has not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions,” she added.Later this afternoon, Harris will go to battleground state Arizona for a second event marking the Dobbs anniversary.Democrats went on the attack as they marked the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the supreme court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional protections on abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade. At a speech near Washington DC, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was “guilty” of “stealing” reproductive rights from American women with his appointment of three of the justices who supported doing away with the precedent. Joe Biden, who is days away from his Thursday presidential debate with Trump, called his predecessor the “sole person responsible for this nightmare”. Meanwhile, neither Trump nor any top Republicans in Congress said anything about the anniversary of the court’s decision.Here’s what else happened today:
      Trump plans to rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, the day after his debate with Biden. His campaign believes the state is winnable in November, even though it voted overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020.
      The supreme court will hear a challenge brought by the Biden administration against state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors …
      … but first it will release decisions on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, almost certainly on at least some of the high-profile cases the justices have yet to decide.
      The fall of Roe upended life for aspiring doctors who hoped to provide abortions.
      A top White House official signaled that Biden supports an effort by Senate Democrats to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that a second Trump administration might use to ban abortion nationwide.
      Meanwhile, in Florida, the judge handling Donald Trump’s stalled prosecution over the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort is in the midst of a major hearing that could determing the case’s trajectory. Here’s the latest on what the two sides are arguing, from the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell: The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s prosecution for retaining classified documents is expected on Monday to consider modifying his conditions of release to include a prohibition on making statements that could endanger the safety of FBI agents involved in the case.The request to the US district judge, Aileen Cannon – the first time prosecutors have sought to limit Trump’ public remarks in this case – raises the stakes for Trump. Unlike in his other cases, where prosecutors sought gag orders, a violation of release conditions carries a risk of jail.The latest dispute over Trump’s inflammatory statements stems from his blatantly false characterization of the FBI’s use-of-deadly force policy when they executed a search warrant at the Mar-a-Lago club in August 2022 and retrieved more than 100 classified documents.The order, which limits FBI agents to use deadly force only if they face extreme danger and became public after the FBI’s operational plan for the search was unsealed, used standard language that is routinely used in hundreds of warrants executed across the country.But Trump and some allies twisted the limiting language to claim the FBI was authorized by the Biden administration to shoot him when they searched Mar-a-Lago, even though Trump was not there during the search and the language is standard US justice department policy.The supreme court has indicated that the justices may release more decisions on Thursday and Friday, as several politically weighty cases await rulings.The justices were already expected to issue decisions on Wednesday, thus bringing to three the number of days this week that we can expect to hear from the court. The conservative-dominated body has a bunch of matters outstanding, which touch on everything from Donald Trump’s legal fate, to the scope of government regulation. Here are a few:
      Trump’s petition for immunity from the federal charges brought against him by special prosecutor Jack Smith for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
      Where the Biden administration can require federally funded hospitals to perform emergency abortions, even in states like Idaho, which the case centers on, that have strict abortion bans.
      A challenge to a longstanding doctrine underpinning many federal regulatory decisions.
      Whether municipalities can make it illegal for people to sleep outside, even when there is insufficient shelter space, in a case that could upend homeless policies nationwide.
      Decisions on some, all, or theoretically none of these cases could come before the end of the week.Donald Trump and Joe Biden will hold the first of two debates they have scheduled on Thursday.The day after, the former president is scheduled to hold a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, a state that Biden won overwhelmingly in 2020, but which Trump’s campaign argues is within his grasp this year.Trump will “speak with the people of Virginia about how he will reverse the devastating effects of Joe Biden’s failed presidency,” his campaign announced.“President Trump will ease the financial pressures placed on households and re-establish law and order in this country! We can Make America Great Again by tackling lawlessness head-on, ceasing the endless flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border, and reversing the detrimental effects of inflation by restoring people’s wealth.”Polls have lately showed a close, perhaps tied, race between Trump and Biden in Virginia, though there have been none released so far showing the former president with the advantage.Democrats are continuing to press their message against Republicans over their support for the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v Wade, and allowed states to ban abortions.“Two years ago, the extreme right-wing Supreme Court majority issued one of the most egregious rulings in our nation’s history,” the Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said.Here’s more:
      The Dobbs decision undermined reproductive freedom for women all across America as part of the extreme MAGA Republican plan to criminalize reproductive health care, outlaw contraception and march us toward a nationwide abortion ban. The decision by the out of control Supreme Court majority to take away the long-held right to an abortion represents an assault on freedom, the Constitution and the values shared by a majority of Americans. House Democrats will continue to fight until reproductive freedom is the law of the land and the extreme MAGA Republican effort to impose a nationwide abortion ban is crushed.
      Still not a peep from Donald Trump and most leading Republicans on the second anniversary of Roe v Wade’s overturning, but that’s not stopping the Biden campaign.Their official account has spent the day tweeting out past instances where Trump has taken credit for orchestrating the downfall of the precedent, which prevented the sorts of abortion restrictions now commonplace in Republican-controlled states.From his town hall in Iowa earlier this year:And what appears to be one of the many videos Trump has posted on his Truth Social account:Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, the GOP nominee for a Senate seat in the state, was one of the few Republicans to mark the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade.Hogan, in a statement shared by the Washington Post, said that if elected, he would work on bipartisan legislation to “codify Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.”He noted that as governor, he “reaffirmed my commitment to uphold Maryland law protecting access to abortion,” adding that he was “proud to make Maryland the first state in America to provide over-the-counter birth control covered by insurance.”Hogan, who last week tried to reject Donald Trump’s endorsement in his Senate race, also promised to protect women’s reproductive rights.“A woman’s health care decisions are her own,” he said.
      Whether it be the decision to start a family with the help of IVF, or exercise her reproductive rights, nothing and no one — especially partisan politics — should come between a woman and her doctor.
      Planned Parenthood will spend $40m ahead of November’s elections to bolster Joe Biden and leading congressional Democrats.The group will initially target eight states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, where Biden is seeking to defend 2020 victories, as well as North Carolina, which the Biden campaign to flip, and Montana, New Hampshire and New York, which have races that could help determine control of the Senate and House, it told Associated Press.Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said:
      Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be how we energize voters. It will be what enables us to win.
      A six-week abortion ban in Texas was linked to a 13% increase in the number of infants who died in their first year of life, a new study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics suggests.The study, published two years to the day since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and permitted more than a dozen states across the country to outlaw almost all abortions, is one of the first glimpses into how strict abortion bans impact babies’ health.The study also estimated that the ban may have led the number of infants in Texas who died within their first month of life to rise more than 10%.Because Texas enacted its six-week abortion ban in September 2021, months before Roe’s demise, scholars have studied what has happened in Texas for clues about how post-Roe abortion bans are now affecting the rest of the nation. Some of the researchers involved in the Monday study have previously concluded that the Texas ban also led to 10,000 additional births.The study found a 23% jump in infant deaths due to congenital anomalies – the kind of conditions that are often identified in utero and lead to abortions in states where the procedure is legal, since they can be incompatible with life. But that choice is no longer available to pregnant Texans.Two hundred and sixteen more infant deaths occurred due to the Texas six-week abortion ban, the researchers estimated.Kamala Harris has warned that abortion bans in states across the country are cutting women off from essential reproductive care and causing a “health care crisis”,In an interview with MSNBC aired today alongside reproductive rights advocate Hadley Duvall, Harris reflected on her experience visiting a reproductive care clinic in Minnesota in March.
      In those clinics that are trusted in the community, there is — you can get a Pap [smear] … breast cancer screening, HIV screening, the things that where people want to be able to walk into a health care facility and be treated with dignity and without judgment so they can address their health care concerns.
      She continued:
      That’s what these clinics do. And in states where they have passed these Trump abortion bans, these clinics are closing, which means that there is a reduction of very essential health care across the board for a lot of people.
      Democrats are on the attack as they mark the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in which the supreme court’s conservative justices overturned the constitutional protections on abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade. At a speech outside Washington DC, Kamala Harris said Donald Trump was “guilty” of “stealing” reproductive rights from American women with his appointment of three of the justices who supported doing away with the precedent. Joe Biden, who is three days away from his Thursday presidential debate with Trump, called his predecessor the “sole person responsible for this nightmare”. Meanwhile, neither Trump nor any top Republicans in Congress have said anything about the anniversary of the court’s decision.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      The supreme court will hear a challenge brought by the Biden administration against state-level bans on gender-affirming care for minors.
      The fall of Roe upended life for aspiring doctors who hoped to provide abortions.
      A top White House official signaled that Biden supports an effort by Senate Democrats to repeal the Comstock Act, a 19th-century law that a second Trump administration might use to ban abortion nationwide.
      Kate Cox, the Texas mother who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year, introduced Kamala Harris at her speech in Maryland.“Every minute that I stayed pregnant, the risk to my health and to a future pregnancy were growing,” Cox said.“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said, adding: “I never imagined having to fight for something so basic as a procedure to save my health.”As a young student and mother “just trying to stay afloat,” Cox said she didn’t always make time to vote.“I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it,” Cox said.Growing emotional, Cox then shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause, as many stood to cheer for her.“And I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.She then welcomed Harris on to the stage as a “champion of the cause” for reproductive freedom.“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.Harris emphasized the importance of turning out to vote in November to protect abortion access so that places like Maryland remain havens for reproductive healthcare.Pointing to the statistic that one-in-three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Making her case that Trump was “guilty” of stripping abortion access, which was previewed by the campaign before her appearance, Harris said Trump appointed three supreme court justices with the intention of overturning Roe v Wade.“It was premeditated,” Harris said from a stage, where a sign that said “Trust Women” hung behind her.“Trump has not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions,” she added.Later this afternoon, Harris will go to battleground state Arizona for a second event marking the Dobbs anniversary.Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years.”She then said Trump was “guilty” in “the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America”, and went on to lay out what she said are the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term will be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”She called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices”, and said voters shouldn’t be fooled by Trump’s wavering on abortion, but should focus on what he has said. And she warned that he would go even further, curtailing access to contraception and IVF.“If there were a second Trump term, he has admitted that he is ‘looking at restrictions on contraception,’” she said. “And pay close attention to how his friends in the United States Senate obstructed a bill to protect the right to contraception, not once, not twice, but three times.” More