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      ‘Like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine’: US braces for presidential election no one wants

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      In past years, the first phase of the general election has involved at least one of the presidential nominees introducing themselves to the broader public and presenting their case for taking the country in a new direction. But that has been rendered unnecessary this year: former president Donald Trump and president Joe Biden are very familiar to the American electorate – and they are broadly unpopular.“I think this is the worst election in my lifetime,” said George Argodale, a Nikki Haley supporter from Gainesville, Virginia. “It’s just terrible that we don’t have better candidates.”“That’s a sad state of affairs for our country that those are the two best candidates that we can come up with,” agreed Peggy Hudson, a primary voter in Charleston, South Carolina.Judith Smith, from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, said of Biden and Trump: “That’s like choosing between a hedgehog and a porcupine.”As the primary season sputters to an expected ending, following Haley’s withdrawal from the Republican primary on Wednesday, voters’ frustration with their general election options is palpable.According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Biden’s approval rating now stands at 38.1%, and Trump’s rating rests at a nominally stronger 42.6%, meaning both men are disliked by a majority of Americans.Those low opinions have carried into voters’ views on the general election. A YouGov-University of Massachusetts Amherst poll conducted in January found that 45% of Americans believe a Biden-Trump rematch is bad for the country. Another 26% say the rematch is neither good nor bad, while just 29% view it as good for the nation.It’s not all for the same reason; the many voters lamenting their general election options represent a diverse array of ideological perspectives, ranging from anti-Trump Republicans to progressives outraged over Biden’s response to the war in Gaza.“On the whole, there’s a lot of ambivalence and disappointment about the prospects of a rematch,” said Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “There’s a widespread perception among those individuals that the candidates are too old and that they tend to focus on issues that are issues of yesterday.”Conversations on the campaign trail reflect those commonly held beliefs, as a number of primary voters across multiple states said that they wished they had another option for November. Among anti-Trump Republicans, many of whom voted for Haley in their primaries, the potential re-election of the former president represents a return to the chaos that defined his first term. Echoing concerns shared by most Democrats, they predict that Trump would undermine the foundation of the US government if elected.Vincent DiMaro, an 80-year-old voter in Charleston who voted for Haley in the primary last month, cited Trump’s temperament and Biden’s age of 81 as significant liabilities for the nation’s future (Trump is 77).“I want to see the country survive, and I don’t think it will under Trump,” he said. But, he added: “I don’t think Biden is a particularly good president right now. I can’t be president. I know what my limitations are, and I’m in better shape than Biden.”Argodale voted early in the Virginia primary to cast a ballot for Haley, but he said he would have to support Biden in the general election if Trump won the Republican nomination.“I am on the conservative side of things, and [Haley] is the only viable candidate in my opinion,” he said. “[Trump] is just a terrible human being and doesn’t deserve any votes.”Although Democrats broadly agree with that assessment, some carry concerns about Biden, particularly regarding his age. Hudson acknowledged her politics lean to the left, as she previously worked for the late Democratic senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, but she cast a primary ballot for Haley in Charleston because she is “disgusted” by Trump. Hudson indicated she would support Biden in November, but she lamented the options available to voters in the general election.“Not that Joe Biden has not done a good job. He has done some very good things for this country,” Hudson said. “But I do think it is time for a new generation of leaders.”View image in fullscreenAn enthusiasm problemThe war in Gaza has presented a significant electoral vulnerability for Biden, as the president has faced intense criticism from progressives within his own party over his response to Israel’s airstrike campaign that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.Progressive leaders in multiple states have organized campaigns to urge supporters to vote “uncommitted” or “leave it blank” instead of casting a ballot for Biden as a means of protesting his handling of the war. In Michigan, uncommitted won 13% of the vote in last month’s primary, and uncommitted captured 19% of votes in the Minnesota Democratic primary on Tuesday.Hassan Jama, an imam in Minneapolis, Minnesota, campaigned for Biden in 2020 but has joined the uncommitted campaign. When asked about his options for November, he suggested he may vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump. Voters can cast ballots for the independent presidential candidate, Cornel West, or the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, both of whom have condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide”, or they could leave the top of the ticket blank.“We’re not voting for Trump, definitely no,” Jama said. “We have more than two choices.”Ruth Schultz, a Minnesota primary voter who has organized with MN Families for Palestine, similarly ruled out voting for Trump, but she would not yet commit to supporting Biden in the general election.“I know that I will never vote for Trump. That is a given,” Schultz said. “I want to see President Biden take a stronger stance for peace and how to get a ceasefire and to use all the tools at his disposal in order to do that. I am watching that as a voter in the general election.”The uproar among many left-leaning voters has created an enthusiasm gap between the two political parties that could pose a problem for Biden. Although many people who backed Biden in 2020 express concern about his re-election, Trump’s most loyal supporters remain as fervent as ever. According to the YouGov-UMass poll, 45% of Republicans believe the Biden-Trump rematch is good for the country, but only 21% of Democrats say the same.When speaking to Trump voters on the campaign trail, many are quick to praise him as the best president of their lifetimes, and they display no hesitation about supporting him again this fall.“I’ve been supporting him since he ran [in 2016], came down the escalator [at Trump Tower], ever since that,” said Chris Pennington, a voter from Johns Island, South Carolina. “I think he’s the best one to take on all the problems that we have.”Argodale does not support Trump, but he has seen firsthand how much devotion he can inspire. “In my social circle, there are Trumpers, so they’re diehard,” he said. “If he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, they’d still vote for him.”If Biden wants to win in November, he will have to work to narrow that enthusiasm gap or bring enough reluctant independents into his camp – or, most likely, do both.View image in fullscreenDire predictionsThe widespread disappointment among voters regarding the Biden-Trump rematch will have sweeping political consequences this fall, but their opinions on the election also offer startling revelations about Americans’ fears for the country’s future.The YouGov-UMass survey included open-ended questions that asked respondents what they believed would happen if the opposing party won the White House. The answers were both dire and specific, Rhodes said, with respondents predicting the end of democracy and a sharp rise in political persecution if their party were to lose.“The perception that victory by the other candidate would be dangerous and threatening has been rising pretty consistently for some time,” Rhodes said. “I think what’s distinctive in this election cycle is just how intense those feelings are and how personal they are.”Biden and Trump have both spoken in severe terms about what would happen if their opponent were to win, and those arguments appear to be sinking in for many voters.Nathan Richter, who voted for Biden in Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday, was concise when asked about the possibility of Trump’s return to the White House. “Please, God, no,” he said. “I question our country’s ability to withstand another four years of Trump.”John Schuster said he plans to vote for Biden in November, but he cast a primary ballot for Haley because of his overwhelming concern about a Trump victory.“There’s no greater imperative in the world than stopping Donald Trump,” Schuster said. “It’ll be the end of democracy and the world order if he becomes president.”Biden supporters tend to frame the stakes of the election in terms of democracy and political violence, Rhodes noted, while Trump supporters’ concerns are more often shaped around a perceived threat that Democrats pose to American values. Douglas Benton, a Trump supporter from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, warned that the US would become a “third-world country” if Biden were to win reelection.“Our business is broken,” Benton said. “That’s how we became the most profitable country on the planet, is through capitalism and democracy and laws. Right now all three of those are gone.”Past elections have proven just how motivating negative emotions can be in turning out voters, which is why Rhodes believes that participation will still be high in November despite the nominees’ unpopularity.“It’s not an election that is going to inspire people on the basis of positive sentiments,” Rhodes said. “But it is an election that I strongly suspect is going to ultimately mobilize a lot of people because they believe that their vote is important for protecting themselves.”The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino contributed reporting from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, and the Guardian’s Rachel Leingang contributed reporting from Minneapolis, Minnesota More

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      Harris is reaching Democrats where Biden isn’t – on abortion and Gaza

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      Standing on the arch of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Kamala Harris said she felt compelled to begin her remarks by addressing the deteriorating humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.“People in Gaza are starving. The conditions are inhumane. And our common humanity compels us to act,” the vice-president said, then stated: “Given the immense scale of suffering in Gaza, there must be an immediate ceasefire.” Loud, sustained applause followed, before she added, after a pause: “For at least six weeks.”The remarks, the White House was quick to note, echoed Joe Biden’s comments to a reporter days earlier and they reflected the administration’s current efforts to broker a temporary break in Israel’s offensive, to allow for the release of hostages and for desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter the besieged territory. Yet many Americans furious with Biden for his alliance with Israel heard from Harris what they felt has been lacking from the president.There was an urgency to her speech – delivered in the footsteps of civil rights marchers who were trampled, tear-gassed and beaten with whips and billy clubs as they attempted to cross the bridge – that resonated. The setting seemed to acknowledge the youth movement furious with the president that views Palestinian rights as an extension of the racial justice movement. She pointedly criticized Israel for restricting the flow of aid into Gaza and expressed compassion for the Palestinian civilians living amid the rubble on the brink of famine.As the 2024 general election contest begins, Harris has emerged as an emissary to the Democratic voters who have soured on Biden since propelling him to the White House in 2020. Over the last several months, she has embarked on a full-scale national tour to highlight the threats to reproductive rights posed by a second Donald Trump administration – an issue that Biden has been criticized for shying away from. Now, as Harris adopts a more forceful tone on Gaza, she is also becoming a leading voice on Middle East diplomacy.Both issues are poised to play a significant, if not decisive, role in the November general election. Polling shows an erosion of support among core Democratic constituencies amid widespread disillusionment with the economy, concern over Biden’s age and fury on the left at the administration’s handling of the war in Gaza.For Democrats, reminding voters about the threat Republicans still pose to abortion rights may be the best way to energize young people while winning over independents and suburban women. Outrage over Roe was credited with halting the promised “red wave” of Republican victories in the 2022 midterms; abortion-related ballot referendums have also repeatedly triumphed even in traditionally red states like Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio.But Harris has her work cut out for her. Like Biden, Harris has been viewed unfavorably throughout much of her tenure.Antonio Arellano, a spokesperson for NextGen, a national youth-focused nonpartisan voter registration and education program, called the 59-year-old Harris a “liaison” between the administration and the parts of the Democratic base that were critical to Biden’s 2020 victory but hold reservations about him now. With her college campus tour and her reproductive rights tour, he said, Harris has helped elevate issues that are top of mind for young progressives and multiracial voters.“She brings an energy of vigor and excitement to the election that I think young people can really gravitate to when perhaps enthusiasm lacks elsewhere,” Arellano said.Harris leapt into the US abortion wars within a day of the leak of the US supreme court decision overturning Roe v Wade.At a May 2022 speech at a conference for Emilys List, which works to elect Democratic women who support abortion rights, Harris gave a fiery speech where she repeatedly asked: “How dare they?”“How dare they tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body?” Harris asked. “How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?”Harris had spent the first several months of her vice-presidency frustrated by headlines about her apparent lack of direction, staff departures and unforced errors. Allies and experts have long seen sexism and racism in the public scrutiny of Harris, who is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold nationally elected office. The criticism seemed particularly unfair, they said, given that vice-presidents are historically overlooked.“I’m not saying that there shouldn’t have been any attention paid to management, especially when you see high-profile kinds of departures and hires,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory College. “But I think that there’s still also the question of whether or not people have paid more attention to her, and also whether or not the public has had a more visceral reaction to her because of her race and gender.”But when it came to the fight over reproductive rights, Harris’s gender, race and age and experience as a prosecutor combined to give her the edge of authenticity that Biden lacks on an issue that is increasingly critical to voters. Many of the 16 states that have enacted near-total post-Roe abortion bans do not have exceptions for rape or incest, a state of affairs that Harris has called “immoral”.“As a woman on the ticket and the first woman VP and a woman of color, and then secondly, as an AG, she is strongest when her profile is fighting and prosecuting the case. People really like her in that mode,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic Party strategist and a lead pollster on the 2020 Biden campaign. “She’s so comfortable saying the word ‘abortion’. She’s so comfortable leaning in and speaking to the repercussions.”Emilys List, which first endorsed Harris 20 years ago when she was elected as San Francisco’s district attorney, has previously committed to spending more than $10m on bolstering Harris in the 2024 elections, according to reporting from Politico; Jessica Mackler, the new president of Emilys List, said that nothing about their plan to support Harris has changed. “Supporting the vice-president is a huge part of our electoral priorities,” Mackler said.Compared to his running mate, Biden’s recent record on abortion is far more spotty. A devout Catholic, Biden has said that he is “not big” on abortion and, in Thursday’s State of the Union address, spoke at length about the procedure without ever referring to it by name. Instead, he talked of the importance of “reproductive freedom” and promised to “restore Roe v Wade as the law of the land”.When it comes to the Israel-Gaza war, Harris has begun to take a more visible role, and it appears that here, too, she may be pushing just beyond Biden’s comfort zone. NBC News reported that the National Security Council toned down parts of Harris’s Selma speech that were “harsher” on Israel. The vice-president’s office denied that her speech had been watered down.On the Monday after her remarks, Harris met with Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet who had traveled to Washington against the wishes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As she walked into the meeting, Harris denied that there was any daylight between her and the president on the conflict.“The president and I have been aligned and consistent from the very beginning,” she said.Many anti-war activists said Harris’s remarks on Gaza were too little, too late. Yet others saw it as a sign of progress – that their pressure campaign was having an impact. Nearly 100,000 Democrats in Michigan voted uncommitted in the primary, which was held just days before her remarks.“They’re feeling the pressure, and we want them to feel that pressure,” said Khalid Omar, who organized on behalf of the “uncommitted” campaign in Minnesota. “We want them to know that this is unacceptable.”Biden and Harris’s first joint campaign event of 2024, a rally in Virginia, was meant to focus on reproductive rights – but it was instead derailed by anger over the conflict in Gaza. After Harris and a Texas woman who had been denied an abortion spoke about the importance of defending the procedure, Biden took the stage. He was almost immediately interrupted by a protester who yelled: “Genocide Joe, how many kids have you killed in Gaza? … Palestine is a feminist issue!”That protester was removed from the auditorium. Another soon cried out: “Israel kills two mothers every hour!”Observers of Harris’s vice-presidency say the recent attention is recognition of the work she has been doing for months – both on domestic and foreign policy issues.“To the extent that she has found her voice, it’s because people are finally listening,” said Donna Brazile, a Harris ally and veteran Democratic strategist who teaches women’s and gender studies at Georgetown University.Last month, Biden dispatched Harris again, this time to the Munich Security Conference, where her mission was to reassure American allies rattled by Trump’s attacks on Nato. There she met with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and with Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, hours after news broke of her husband’s death in an arctic penal camp.Less than a week later, she was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a stop on her reproductive rights tour. While there, she made a surprise stop at the city’s first Black woman-owned vinyl record shop and purchased a Miles Davis album from the owner, who was thrilled by the visit.When the Tennessee legislature expelled two Black lawmakers, the White House sent Harris to Nashville, where she joined them in delivering an impassioned plea for gun control. In December, she traveled to Dubai for a UN climate summit, where she juggled wartime diplomacy – delivering at the time the sharpest commentary of any administration official on Israel’s war in Gaza – with climate policy.“Her vice-presidency has been significant both in terms of her spokesperson role and in terms of a number of significant and highly visible diplomatic assignments that President Biden has given her,” said Joel Goldstein, a historian of the US vice-presidency.There is, however, another reason why scrutiny of Harris may be intensifying: her running mate’s age.If he wins a second term, Biden would turn 86 before leaving office. A New York Times and Siena College survey found that 73% of registered voters believe Biden is “just too old” to be an effective president. The poll was conducted more than two weeks after a special counsel described him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.”“The age of both Biden and Trump will focus more attention on the vice-presidential candidates,” Goldstein said.Republicans have sought to leverage concerns about Biden’s mental and physical health against Harris, casting her as an unsteady lieutenant ill-prepared to assume the presidency. In the weeks before dropping out of the Republican presidential primary, Nikki Haley argued that if Trump were to win the party’s nomination, he would lose to Biden, who would be unable to finish a second term, leading to a Harris presidency. The prospect, Haley said, “should send a chill up everyone’s spine”.But Harris is leaning in to her leading role. After the State of the Union, she headed west to Arizona, the next stop on her reproductive rights tour. On Saturday she was scheduled to campaign with Latino organizers in battleground state Nevada.To those who doubt whether the vice-president could step into the presidency, she is blunt.“I’m ready, if necessary,” Harris told NBC News on Friday. “But it’s not going to be necessary.”Rachel Leingang contributed to this report from Minneapolis More

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      Biden hits campaign trail riding train of positive State of the Union reviews

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      Reveling in warm reviews for a fiery State of the Union speech, Joe Biden was set to hit the campaign trail on Friday, heading for Philadelphia as his re-election rematch with Donald Trump finally began in earnest.Three days after the former president dominated the Super Tuesday primaries and saw off the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his last rival for the Republican nomination, Biden was set to speak at a middle school in Wallingford, the sort of suburb that has trended Democratic as Republicans have marched to the right.Pennsylvania is also a battleground state, won by Biden in 2020 but targeted by Republicans not only as they seek to take back the White House but as a step towards regaining the Senate majority.Public opinion that Biden is too old for a second term persists but the 81-year-old president was on his way to Philadelphia with a spring in his step.Heralding a pugilistic speech in which Biden attacked Trump without uttering his name, championed Democratic policies and parried Republican catcalls, the president’s campaign said he had “laid out his unifying vision for the nation”.That vision, the campaign said, meant “building an economy that gives everyone a fair shot, protecting reproductive freedom, standing with our allies, and defending democracy.“It’s a vision that could not be more different than Donald Trump’s plans to enact revenge and retribution, strip Americans of their fundamental rights, and spread hate and division.”The campaign also said voters watching the speech “overwhelmingly approved of the ‘fiery’, ‘strong’ and ‘powerful’ vision from President Biden”.Republicans naturally disagreed.The far-right Virginia congressman Bob Good attempted to keep a spotlight on Biden’s age, calling his delivery on Thursday night less presidential and more “like an angry old man with a poor memory shouting at people to get off his lawn”.But such complaints were undermined by two factors. First, the 42-year-old senator chosen to reply to Biden, Katie Britt of Alabama, delivered a bizarre and poorly received speech of her own. Second, at 77, Trump is just three and a half years younger than Biden and frequently muddles words and mixes up names.In his own response, Trump – who left office with the economy cratered by Covid, Congress reeling from an insurrection linked to nine deaths and more than 1,200 arrests, and who faces 91 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties – accused Biden of being “on the run from his record”.Biden, Trump said, was “lying like crazy to try and escape accountability for the horrific devastation he and his party have created, all the while they continue the very policies that are causing this horror show to go [on]. We cannot take it any longer as a country”.On Friday, though, that “horror show” administration welcomed 275,000 jobs added in February and unemployment at 3.9%.“Job gains remain solid,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, a payrolls firm. “Pay gains are trending lower but are still above inflation. The labor market is dynamic.”Even Stephen Moore, an economist Trump tried to appoint to the Federal Reserve board and who is now part of Project 2025, a plan for a rightwing takeover of the federal government, celebrated economic conditions.“One thing Biden said last night was true,” Moore told Fox Business. “It is true that the United States today has the strongest economy. There is no question about it.”Contacted for comment, Moore said: “No I don’t credit Biden for the economy. It IS true that we have the strongest economy but as I said, we are the least rotten apple in the cart. Most of the rest of the world is in recession.”Asked who he credited for the strong economy, if not the man who has presided over it for three years, Moore did not immediately reply.As Biden headed for Pennsylvania, his campaign parried criticisms that did arise from his State of the Union address.Asked about Biden’s use of the word “illegal” to describe an undocumented migrant, which angered progressives, Michael Tyler, the communications director, turned the question back on Trump.“I know it may have been difficult to hear over the incessant heckling of Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Tyler told reporters, referring to the extremist Georgia Republican who prompted Biden’s remark, “but we should be very clear about what the president was saying when it comes to fixing our broken [immigration] system and to rejecting the cruelty in the hateful extremism being pushed by” Trump and Republicans.Biden was working to pass bipartisan reform, Tyler said, while Trump used migrants as a “political punching bag” and “peddl[ed] Nazi rhetoric”.Asked if Biden’s remark might hurt outreach efforts with Latino voters, Tyler said the campaign would “demonstrate the clear contrast” with Trump.“We are running against a man who was promising to rip kids away from their mothers again, who’s promising to erect mass deportation camps, who is promising to end birthright citizenship and is using hate as one of its chief political currencies,” Tyler said.Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager and the granddaughter of the great labor leader Cesar Chavez, said: “Our community knows Joe. They know who is fighting for our community.”Sources outside the campaign praised Biden too. Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, saluted “a muscular speech”. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, hailed “a home run”.Rick Wilson, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said Biden’s performance “should settle this crapulous conventional wisdom media trope of ‘he’s too old’ once and for damn all”.Democrats, Wilson said, now have “a perfect way to shut this garbage talking point down: ‘You saw that State of the Union speech. Joe Biden is sharper than Donald Trump and ready for the fight.’” More

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      Dehumanizing, inaccurate and outdated: why did Biden say ‘illegals’ in his State of the Union address?

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      Joe Biden’s seemingly off-the-cuff use of “illegal” to describe people who are undocumented during his State of the Union address drew disappointed reaction from experts who have long argued the term is inaccurate and outdated.Responding to heckling from conservative congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who demanded Biden mention the name of Laken Riley – a Georgia nursing student who was allegedly killed by a person who is undocumented – Biden held up a button of Riley’s face and said she was an “innocent, young woman who was killed by an illegal”.He added: “But how many thousands of people being killed by legals? To the parents, I say, my heart goes out to you, having lost children myself. I understand.”Democrats and immigrant rights organizations said Biden’s use of “illegal” as dehumanizing. The Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez said she was “disappointed” in Biden’s use of what she called “dehumanizing right wing rhetoric” to describe immigrants. “No human being is illegal,” Ramirez said. Another Illinois representative, Chuy García, added: “As a proud immigrant, I’m extremely disappointed to hear President Biden use the world “illegal”.The National Immigrant Justice Center called the term “words [from] anti-immigrant extremists”, adding: “Manipulating a personal tragedy for political gain in this way is dangerous. Conflating immigration status with criminality is racist and dehumanizing.”Immigration advocates have long argued that the term “illegals” is an inaccurate term, as entering the US without documents is not a criminal offense. It is also a racially charged term that can promote violence and discrimination, according to the Drop the I-Word campaign, which advocates for media organizations not to use it when describing immigrants.The Biden administration itself ordered US immigration enforcement agencies to stop using the terms “illegal alien” and “assimilation” in 2021, guidelines meant to encourage more inclusive language.“We enforce our nation’s laws while also maintaining the dignity of every individual with whom we interact. The words we use matter and will serve to further confer that dignity to those in our custody,” said Troy Miller, a senior official at Customs and Border Protection, in the 2021 memo.On Friday, addressing reporters after the speech Michael Tyler, Biden’s campaign communications director, did not directly comment on the term but instead pointed to Trump’s previous comments on immigrants and extremist policies.“I know it may have been difficult to hear over the incessant heckling of Marjorie Taylor Greene last night, but we should be very clear about what the president was saying when it comes to fixing our broken system and to rejecting the cruelty in the hateful extremism that’s being pushed by people like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who were actually just trying to demonize immigrants in an attempt to score political points.“We are running this campaign against a man who was promising to rip kids away from their mothers again, who’s promising to erect mass deportation camps, who is promising to end birthright citizenship and is using hate as one of its chief political currencies,” Tyler added.Biden’s remarks come after a bipartisan bill to introduce stricter immigration measures was rejected by Republicans. The president has reportedly said he is considering unilateral action that would sharply restrict the ability of people to claim asylum at the US-Mexico border.Progressive lawmakers said such a move would compare to the hardline strategy of Donald Trump when he was president, but Biden defended his handling of the migrant crisis in the State of the Union address, criticizing Trump’s actions.“Unlike my predecessor, on my first day in office I introduced a comprehensive plan to fix our immigration system, secure the border, and provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and so much more,” he said.In his speech he pushed Republicans to back the border bill they themselves had helped negotiate. “Conservatives got together and said [it] was a good bill,” he said, speaking directly to Republicans present for the speech. “That bipartisan bill would hire 1,500 more security agents and officers, 100 more immigration judges to help tackle the backload of 2 million cases. 4,300 more asylum officers and new policy so they can resolve cases in six months instead of six years.“What are you against?”The Republican senator James Lankford seemed to agree with Biden’s characterization of the bill, mouthing “that’s true” and nodding. More

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      ‘Israel in his heart’: why Biden ignores growing anger over the Gaza offensive

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      Anyone attempting to understand why Joe Biden is so unswerving in support of Israel’s right to attack Gaza might look back four decades to a meeting between the then US senator and the Jewish state’s rightwing prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin.It was 1982, and Begin began an official visit to Washington days after Israel invaded Lebanon after cross-border attacks by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that when Begin addressed the Senate foreign relations committee no one was more enthusiastic than Biden in support of the Israeli attack.“If attacks were launched from Canada into the US everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed,’” Biden told the meeting, according to a quote uncovered by Jacobin magazine.Begin later expressed surprise at the vehemence of Biden’s support, particularly the senator’s attempts to justify the killing of women and children.“I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin told Israeli reporters. “I said to him: ‘No, sir, attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war’.”As president, Biden has been no less determined in his backing for the latest assault on Gaza in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and hundreds of others abducted.Even as the number of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel in its retaliatory assault on Gaza rose into the thousands, the president justified the human cost.“I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” Biden said two weeks into the Israeli bombardment.The president added that Israel “should be incredibly careful” to target the armed groups responsible for the October 7 attack but he also questioned whether as many civilians were dying as the Palestinian health ministry claimed.On a visit to Israel a few days before, Biden warned Israel not to be “consumed” by rage in its response to the Hamas attack and to avoid the “mistakes” the US made in lashing out after 9/11. But the president also endorsed Israel’s right to hit back militarily as he proclaimed himself “a Zionist” and attended a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet.One interpretation of the president’s actions is that he believes a very public embrace of Israel and backing for Netanyahu gives him greater leverage over the Israeli prime minister in private. If so, there is not much evidence it has worked.In his State of the Union address on Thursday, Biden reiterated that “Israel has a right to go after Hamas” while adding that it has “a fundamental responsibility” to protect innocent civilians in Gaza. The Israeli attack has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children.Biden then announced that the US will build a temporary pier in Gaza to deliver aid by sea and he warned Israel’s leaders that “humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip”.But building a pier and getting the aid flowing is likely to take weeks at best and, for some, the plan only emphasised Biden’s unwillingness to use his power to pressure Israel, including to immediately allow food and other necessities into Gaza on the scale required to combat widening malnutrition and starvation.More than half of Americans say Washington should halt weapons shipments to Israel until it stops the assault on Gaza, according to a YouGov poll this week, and many in the Democratic party want Biden to use some of the US’s considerable military aid to Israel as a lever.That would be out of character for a president who remains wedded to a view shaped by his first visit to Israel in 1973, just before its Arab neighbours attacked in the Yom Kippur war, of a plucky little country surrounded by enemies and fighting for its survival.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShortly after Biden won the 2020 election, the former Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Times of Israel that the then president-elect “gets” his country. Oren often clashed with the Obama administration, when Biden was vice-president, over its policies on Iran and White House pressure on Israel to stop settlement construction. But he described Biden as having “a deep feeling for Israel”.“Biden is from a generation that remembers 1967 [the six-day war] and 1973,” he told the Times of Israel. “He has Israel in his heart. He actually gets it.”But the world has changed in the past half a century and that perspective is not shared by younger generations, who see a strong and oppressive Israel imposing a brutal occupation in the West Bank interspersed by periodic wars on Gaza in which thousands of Palestinians have been killed.Biden did once threaten to cut off US aid to Israel. Begin recalled that at the same meeting at which the senator offered his support for the invasion of Lebanon, Biden warned the Israeli prime minister that settlement construction was costing his country support in the US and even threatened to cut American financial assistance.But nothing came of it, and four years later Biden told the Senate that it was time for Israel’s supporters to stop apologising for sending billions of dollars a year to the Jewish state.“There’s no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3bn investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” he said.Four decades later, Biden’s core belief has not changed. He told the New Yorker this week that he doesn’t want to see more Palestinian civilians killed because “it’s contrary to what we believe as Americans”.But the president fell back on his old analogy as he said that Arab Americans and young Democratic voters angered by his unwillingness to use US power to rein in Netanyahu should ask themselves what they would do if their communities came under attack.“I think they have to give this just a little bit of time, understanding what would happen if they came into their state or their neighbourhood and saw what happened with Hamas,” he said. More

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      Joe Biden has come out fighting. But he’ll need more than grit to defeat Trump now | Jonathan Freedland

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      The president of the United States delivered his annual address to Congress on Thursday night – except what Americans and an increasingly nervous world wanted to assess was less the state of the union than the state of Joe Biden. I don’t mean politically, I mean physically.In the week that confirmed the November election will be a rematch of the 2020 contest – the current president against the former one – Biden needed to prove he was not the doddering, even senile figure of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and a thousand social media memes. In 68 combative minutes, he cleared that bar. He ad-libbed, he took on Republican hecklers and, often at high volume, jabbed at his opponent. The result: a performance that pundits described as “feisty” and “scrappy”, free of senior moments, and which prompted even Fox News to muse that Biden seemed “jacked-up” – which, from the network that likes to depict the president as a walking corpse, was a compliment.Projecting vigour was essential because the mountain Biden has to climb over the next eight months is getting steeper. For one thing, this week established that Trump is not only the certain nominee of his party – crushing his last remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, in all but one of the Super Tuesday primary contests and forcing her out of the race – he is in total control of it. Republicans in Congress are supine before him, whether it’s outgoing Senate leader Mitch McConnell endorsing him this week – even though Trump has repeatedly insulted McConnell’s Taiwan-born wife in nakedly racist terms and the two men have not spoken in three years – or the Republican refusal to pass a border deal they’d agreed with Democrats, because Trump wants the issue of immigration to remain unaddressed so that he can attack Biden for failing to address it come November. Some had hoped a primary season against Republican opponents would batter and bruise Trump, weakening him ahead of the presidential election. It has not worked out that way.Though that was not the only Democratic fantasy to be dented, if not dashed, this week. Many have hoped Trump’s undoing will come in the courts, where he faces a staggering 91 criminal charges. Indeed, judges in Colorado (and two other states) had removed Trump from the ballot, citing the constitution’s disqualification of anyone involved in insurrection, in Trump’s case the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. But on Monday, the supreme court ruled unanimously against Colorado, ensuring Trump’s place on the ballot in all 50 states.View image in fullscreenThe previous week, the same supreme court, now dominated by the right thanks to three Trump appointments, issued a timetable that effectively slows down the most potent of the cases against the former president: the charge that he sought to subvert the 2020 election. That makes it much less likely that there will be a conviction this side of polling day, a realisation that hits Democrats hard. For years, they’ve longed for this or that judicial authority to solve America’s Trump problem: special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into collusion between Trump and Moscow played that role for a while. Time and again, the dream evaporates. Democrats now face the awkward reality that, if they are to defeat Trump, they will surely have to do it the way they did it in 2020: with votes.And that task is looking ever harder. It’s not just the headline figures from national polls in which Trump is often ahead, or even Trump’s lead in the battleground states. It’s the change afoot in key voting groups that were crucial to Biden’s victory in the last election. Trump is gaining ground among Black and Hispanic voters, regularly picking up 20% to 25% of the former. To be sure, Biden is still ahead – but not by the massive margins he once enjoyed and which he needs to offset Trump’s advantage with white voters.Perhaps most alarming for Democrats is the defection of the young. Biden won voters under 30 by 25 points in 2020, now it’s neck and neck. A big part of that is the president’s support for Israel, with the appalling images coming out of Gaza outraging younger Americans especially. Mindful of them, and the disaffected Arab-American voters who could tip the balance in the critical swing state of Michigan, Biden announced a plan to create a floating pier off the Gazan coast, enabling maritime shipments of aid. Given that it will take weeks to build, and Gazans are desperate for food right now, and given too that there is obviously a simpler, swifter way to get aid in – by exerting full US pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu, demanding he stops the delays – the Democrats’ progressive wing is unlikely to be placated. Taking all these developments together, it is not too strong to say the Biden coalition is fracturing.Many watching from afar are dumbfounded that Americans could be prepared once again, and despite everything, to make Donald Trump their president. How can that be? Surely they remember what it was like last time? To which the answer seems to be: actually, they don’t. This week, the New York Times wondered if Americans suffer from “collective amnesia” when it comes to Trump, pointing to polling data that suggests the years 2017 to 2021 have fallen into the memory hole. It’s partly that Trump’s outrages came so often, they created a kind of numbness: people became inured. And it’s partly that, thanks to a US media polarised on tribally partisan lines, there is no agreed, collective memory of what happened during those four turbulent years, even on 6 January. Add to that the inflation and border pressures of the Biden years and, as Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican consultant and convenor of focus groups, puts it: “They know what they don’t like about Biden, and they have forgotten what they don’t like about Trump.”How can Biden hope to scale the daunting peak that confronts him? Plenty say the answer is a two-pronged message, “democracy and Dobbs”: focus on Trump’s dictatorial aspirations and his role in appointing the supreme court, whose decision, known as Dobbs, ended the constitutional right to an abortion. But there’s good evidence that that formula, which paid dividends in 2022’s midterm elections, is no longer enough, especially among the young.Biden needs to do more. He can’t urge Americans to be grateful for what he’s achieved these last three years: they’re not feeling better off and, besides, voters are rarely grateful. Nor can he rely on memories of Trump, because those are fading. The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein is surely right when he says Biden has to let go of the past and focus on the future, framing the coming contest as “a choice between what he and Trump would do over the next four years in the White House”. Biden’s speech on Thursday nodded to that, vowing to defend social security and Medicare, while Trump eyes up a juicy tax cut for his super-rich pals – and casting himself as a decent man up against a would-be dictator.It was a good start but, my word, it is a marathon climb that lies ahead. Joe Biden has lived a long life, punctuated by the severest challenges, but the one he faces now could hardly be tougher. And yet he cannot afford to fail. The world depends on it.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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      Biden’s State of the Union: raucous, strident and insistently optimistic | Moira Donegan

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      Like a budget, a State of the Union speech is a moral document: it reflects a president’s values and priorities, distilling his own view of his administration for the American people. On Thursday night, Joe Biden made his moral case for re-election: he views America as a besieged but worthy global leader, one whose tradition of democracy deserves to be defended and rebuilt. Referring to his opponent Donald Trump only as “my predecessor”, Biden repeatedly contrasted his own vision of a more equitable and prosperous nation with the Republican agenda. The point was to offer Americans an optimistic and inclusive vision – and to remind them of the cynicism, sadism and depravity of the Trump worldview, which threatens to undermine women’s freedoms, make interracial democracy impossible, and use the machinery of government for little else but to further Republicans own self regard and greed.The 90-minute speech was raucous, strident and insistently optimistic; it appeared designed to demonstrate Biden’s vitality, and to launch in earnest a presidential campaign that has previously been somewhat tepid and sluggish. “I’m here to wake up the Congress,” Biden said as he began, declaring the nation to be in “an unprecedented moment”. Maybe he was there to wake up his own campaign, too.Biden opened his speech outlining the three major issues which his campaign sees as the greatest emergencies: the foreign threat to Democracy, as represented by Vladimir Putin and Trump’s threat to Nato; the decline of democracy at home, as represented by January 6 and Republican lies about the 2020 election (“You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden bellowed; an early applause line); and reproductive rights.It was the first time that Biden gave abortion pride of place in the speech, reflecting his campaign’s belated awareness, in the wake of the 2022 midterms, of the issue’s salience. The attention he paid to the issue reflected his ambivalence toward abortion and hostility toward the feminist case for it. The section began not with a question of abortion, but with IVF: an Alabama court’s decision to grant frozen embryos the status of legal persons, thus briefly banning the treatment in the state, seems to have opened a new avenue in the post-Dobbs debate that is more comfortable for Biden.He moved on to telling the story of Kate Cox, a Texas mother who was forced to flee the state for an abortion after the ban in place there put her at risk for catastrophic health complications. Republicans, he noted, were planning to impose a national ban on reproductive freedom. “My God,” he said, “What other freedoms would they take away?”It was not what reproductive rights advocates were hoping for: the speech made no mention of women’s right to abortion as a matter of equality and dignity, casting “reproductive rights”, as Biden exclusively referred to them, as matters of bare health and dutiful family building. Still, Biden is not making these more robust endorsements of women’s reproductive freedoms because he does not think he has to: his campaign is betting that voters are galvanized enough by the issue that half measures will deliver their votes.They might be right. Indeed, Biden’s pitch to Americans on Thursday night often seemed to have female voters in mind. His proposed tax increases for corporations and the wealthiest strata of Americans were pitched not as mere fairness, but as a means to generate investment in care infrastructure – childcare, paid family leave and eldercare – the neglect of which has led to a nationwide crisis of overburdened and economically straightjacketed women.Roe, too, was framed as an invitation for women to not just vote their interests but avenge their citizenship. “Those bragging about overturning Roe v Wade have no idea about the power of women,” said Biden, referring to a now famous line in Samuel Alito’s majority opinion on Dobbs saying that “women are not without political or electoral power”. “They’re about to find out just how powerful women are.”The main thrust of Biden’s speech was meant to flout his economic accomplishments, to reshape the popular story of the American economy – one where consumers are hampered by inflation and nobody can buy a house – into a story of a remarkable post-pandemic recovery. He flouted the growth of small businesses and the low unemployment rate; he tipped his hat to the economic “soft landing” engineered by Jerome Powell, which has kept the US out of a long-predicted recession. He made a mild dig at the media as he tried to rewrite their own story: “The American people are writing the greatest comeback story ever told.”The speech was strong; every position taken was not. Biden fell apart when he tried to talk about the border, touting his own sadistically cruel bill by way of bragging that Donald Trump had scared all the Republicans out of voting for it. His indifference to the human lives of migrants was at times chilling: he referred offhandedly to “illegals”, and engaged in a bizarre and unnecessary bit of theater with Marjorie Taylor Greene, decked out in garish Maga gear, who yelled at Biden about a woman murdered by an undocumented immigrant.He stumbled, too, when he spoke of Israel’s war on Gaza, dwelling in lurid detail on Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October and only offhandedly acknowledging that more than 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel in the past five months. The issue has proved an albatross for Biden, who is hemorrhaging support among young voters and voters of color over his support for Israel’s war. As he spoke about Gaza, Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, wept. But this, too, may be an issue on which Biden relies on the horror of his alternative: his campaign seems to be betting that these voters will return to Biden in spite of his stance on Gaza, because Trump, who spoke recently of a desire to “finish the problem” in Palestine, is so much worse.Democrats had reason to be nervous about Biden’s performance ahead of the speech. The past few weeks of the news cycle have been dominated by internal Democratic fears about Biden’s age, a worry that seems to stand in for all sorts of other, perhaps more pertinent, worries about his ability to hold together his massive and internally fractious coalition. But to the extent to which the claims of concern over Biden’s age were sincere, he seemed determined to put them to rest: he contrasted his own presidency with that of Donald Trump’s on every issue except his age.“I know I don’t look it,” Biden said towards the end of his speech, “but I’ve been around a while” – a joke reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, “I refuse to exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” “It is not how old we are,” Biden said. “It’s the age of our ideas. It’s a line that seems certain to be repeated throughout the campaign, as the Democrats seek to make the presidential election less a referendum on Biden’s age than on Donald Trump’s intolerable proposed future.Indeed Biden did seem energized, enthused. His gait was stiffer than last year and his stutter persists, but he came alive, oddly enough, when he was being heckled. He retorted gamely and happily when Republicans screamed at him from the audience; he appeared most comfortable, most confident, when he was being yelled at. “Turning setback into comeback – that’s what America does,” he said at one point in his speech. He was talking about the post-Covid economy. But he could have been talking about his re-election bid.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      Biden calls on Congress to ‘guarantee the right to IVF’ in State of the Union address – video

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      Abortion and reproductive rights took centre stage at the 2024 State of the Union, as Joe Biden sought to overcome concerns about his re-election chances by emphasising an issue that has energised voters since the overturning of Roe v Wade.
      The president has largely pinned his re-election hopes on the passions stirred by threats to abortion rights. The demise of Roe v Wade, which was overturned with the help of three justices appointed by Trump, has led more than a dozen states to enact near-total abortion bans More