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      Al Sharpton on Joe Biden’s re-election bid: ‘Let him make up his mind’

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      When Al Sharpton recently hung up the phone with Joe Biden, a man he has known for more than 30 years, first as a senator, then as vice-president and now as president, the message was clear: “He assured me he wasn’t going anywhere.”In their conversation, Sharpton said he never asked Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race.“I said to him that I appreciated what he did and I want to see it continue,” the reverend told the Guardian in an interview. “And he said: ‘That’s why I’m running, Al.’”That was Monday. By the week’s end, the 81-year-old president, cloistered at his beach house in Delaware with Covid and besieged on all sides by dismal polling, voter concerns and a rebellion against his candidacy from members of his own party, was confronting the most consequential decision of his half-century in public life.A growing number of Democrats weren’t waiting for an answer. More than three dozen congressional Democrats as well as activist groups and donors have urged the president to end his re-election bid. A group called Pass the Torch, Joe was holding a rally at the White House on Saturday.The path Biden chooses could carry enormous consequences for his legacy, his party and his country as Americans approach the November election with a united Republican party determined to give Donald Trump a second term.“Let him make up his mind,” said Sharpton, the veteran civil rights leader. “If he decides to walk, let him walk with his dignity, and if he decides to stay in it, he’s earned that right.”In the weeks since Biden’s disastrous debate performance exacerbated longstanding concerns about his age, the president has appeared immune to his critics. And for a fleeting moment at the start of the week, after a would-be assassin opened fire on Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend, the prospect of Biden once again defying the political odds seemed, if not wholly probable, at least possible.In an Oval Office address on Sunday, the president launched into the familiar role of consoler-in-chief, demonstrating his compassion and empathy at a time of national trauma – the very traits that helped elevate him to the White House during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic four years ago.As Republicans greeted Trump with a hero’s welcome at their convention in Milwaukee this week, Biden returned to the campaign trail in pursuit of a political comeback. Sharpton spoke to the president on Monday, as Biden headed west, to Nevada, to appeal to the people who had salvaged his candidacy before: Black voters and leaders, including the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn.“He was as lucid as I’ve ever heard,” Sharpton recalled. “And I’ve known him for more than 30 years.”The following day, Biden was greeted with a standing ovation at the NAACP’s annual convention in Las Vegas. Online, the president’s every verbal miscue was clipped and shared. But in the room, his fiery speech was met with chants of “Four more years!” After the address, Biden held an event with Representative Steven Horsford, chair of the Congressional Black caucus, which has remained a pillar of support on Capitol Hill.View image in fullscreen“He was very energetic,” Sharpton said of the Las Vegas appearances. Biden had played his cards right, but it had done little to quell the rising tide of dissent still simmering in Washington.The shocking attempt on Trump’s life briefly froze the public debate over the president’s fitness for office. But Democrats privately traded calamitous polling data that showed Biden trailing in the battleground states and at risk of dragging his party down with him, and it soon broke into public view again.On Wednesday, Representative Adam Schiff, a prominent California Democrat who is running for Senate, shattered the silence with a statement calling on Biden to step aside. Behind Schiff’s announcement, some saw the hand of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, an ally known as her party’s most shrewd tactician who has reportedly grown pessimistic about Biden’s chances of defeating Trump in November.The news came amid the publication of a poll that found nearly two-thirds of Democrats said Biden should bow out, according to the AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research, a figure that sharply disputed the president’s claim that the campaign against his candidacy was being driven by a few “big names” and party “elites”.That afternoon, before Biden was scheduled to take the stage at the UnidosUS conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, he tested positive for Covid, forcing him from the campaign trail into self-isolation.Then came a rat-a-tat succession of leaks to the press that appeared coordinated to force his hand.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn separate meetings with the president, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, reportedly warned Biden that his continued candidacy threatened the party’s chances of controlling either chamber of Congress. Pelosi had provided a similarly dire assessment to the president, it emerged.By the day’s end, Biden was said to be “more receptive” to the case against his re-election campaign.By Thursday, reality was reportedly “setting in” as allies predicted Biden would “exit” the race, possibly as soon as this weekend. Barack Obama, meanwhile, had reportedly conveyed to allies that his former vice-president’s path to victory had all but evaporated. By Friday, Biden’s family – a close-knit clan that includes his wife, Jill, his son Hunter and his sister, Valerie – was reportedly discussing an exit strategy.Sharpton counts himself among the many Black leaders around the country, including some in Congress, uncomfortable with the rush to push out a president who he said had accomplished so much during his time in office.“On many of the things that we challenged him on, he has delivered on,” Sharpton said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”His hesitancy was an endorsement of Biden’s record, which includes landmark climate legislation, an infrastructure package, a pandemic relief package and a gun-reform bill, as well as his elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the supreme court, and Kamala Harris, the first woman and first Black and south Asian American to serve as vice-president.Of course, Sharpton has concerns.Like Biden, and most Democrats, Sharpton views the specter of a second Trump term as a serious threat to democracy and to the civil rights causes he has spent his career trying to advance. Moreover, he noted that the 78-year-old Trump had just delivered a rambling 92-minute acceptance speech at the party’s convention, and yet “not one Republican has asked him to step aside”.“We’re talking about two men three years apart. So what’s the standard?” Sharpton said. “Are we setting a precedent that could come back to haunt us?Sharpton was especially miffed by Democrats calling for an unprecedented overhaul of the party’s presidential ticket without providing a plan for what comes next.“What you’ve heard all of them say is: ‘Joe Biden ought to step out.’ They’ve not said: ‘And therefore I would support this route to continue to work,’” Sharpton said.On his call with the president, Sharpton did not raise the subject of a potential successor, but his preference was clear.“I’m not asking him to step aside, let me emphasize that,” Sharpton said. “But, if he did, the reason you choose a vice-presidential candidate is that that’s who is supposed to be able to step in in case of an emergency. I don’t even know why it would be a debate.” More

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      Republicans coalesce as Democrats flail: week that upended US presidential race

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      They browsed Trump bobbleheads, Trump mugs (“Make coffee great again!”) and Trump T-shirts, including a new line celebrating his defiance of an assassin’s bullet. They lined up at food stalls for beef sticks, gourmet popcorn, Puerto Rican roasted chicken and the local speciality, fried cheese curds. Beer was flowing, the sun was shining and Republicans were experiencing something they had not felt for a long time: joy.This year’s Republican national convention in Milwaukee had the swagger of a party that believes it is on a glide path to the White House. Entirely in thrall to Donald Trump, it was more united than it has been in decades. The former US president might offer a notoriously dark and divisive vision but his supporters exuded optimism in what one journalist dubbed “the happiest place on Earth”.That was based not only on 78-year-old Trump’s strength but the weakness of his opponent. Joe Biden, 81, reeling from a calamitous debate performance and now suffering from the coronavirus, was facing growing calls from his party to quit the race. In contrast with Republicans’ harmony, Democrats are locked in a circular firing squad and painful struggle over the best way forward.With just over a hundred days until the election, Republicans have the momentum. An Emerson College poll published on Thursday found 46% of registered voters said they support Trump, compared with 42% for Biden and 12% undecided. Crucially, Trump was ahead in all seven battleground states that will decide the all-important electoral college.“It’s very clear the path to the electoral college for Trump has widened and for Biden it’s narrowed,” Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Milwaukee convention. “Even before the debate, before the assassination attempt, Biden was trailing.View image in fullscreen“The fundamental challenge for Biden and his campaign is they’ve been on their heels for months. The debate was the opportunity to get back on offence; obviously, it’s not. You feel it while you’re here that Trump is ahead and it’s his race to lose and Biden is behind with a divided party and without an obvious path forward.”This week’s Republican convention set out to consolidate the lead by appealing to moderate voters. It proved to be a disciplined operation, mostly avoiding topics such as abortion rights and the January 6 insurrection while toning down attacks on the media. There was no repeat of the “Lock her up!” chants aimed at Hillary Clinton that filled the low-morale convention hall in 2016.Walter added: “In 2016, because the party was so divided, what was unifying Republicans was their disdain for Hillary Clinton – all of the chants of ‘Lock her up’, all of the signs and T-shirts to ‘put Hillary in jail’. There’s not a whole lot of anti-Biden or anti-Harris stuff here that I’ve seen. It’s all pro-Trump, we’re united, we believe we can do this and don’t give Democrats, don’t give Biden, don’t give Harris any opportunity to get back in this game.”Trump himself may have given Democrats at least a half-chance with a Thursday night speech that rambled for more than an hour and a half – the longest televised convention speech in history – and regressed into his characteristic divisive themes and lies.But whereas the 2016 convention was marred by boos and infighting as Trump seized control, this one was defined by overwhelming displays of solidarity and a full embrace of his Maga agenda. Delegates brandished signs that included “Make America great again”, “Trump = success, Biden = failure”, “Trump America First. Biden America Last”, “American oil from American soil” and “Mass deportation now!”View image in fullscreenThe cult of personality extended to a Trump bust made of Indiana limestone, a book of Trump poetry fashioned from his tweets and Trump’s shoe in an exhibition of presidential footwear.Danny Willis, 25, chair of Delaware Young Republicans, said: “Now we have people taking shots at him – attempted assassination. We’re all here even more engaged, more inspired, more proud to vote here and make sure we get Donald Trump back in the White House.”That the ex-president’s life had been spared by a quarter of an inch was widely seen as divine intervention, elevating him to the status of a martyr. Some delegates wore ear bandages on the convention floor to express their support. Trump’s erstwhile primary election foes, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, showed up with full-throated endorsements.Even Asa Hutchinson, a Trump critic who also contested the primary, acknowledged: “Confidence is the right word. I’ve been to six Republican conventions and I’ve never seen a higher level of confidence as they go into the fall election.”Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas, advised Democrats to replace Biden before it is too late: “You got to switch. You got to roll the dice. Take a chance on somebody else. It’s strength versus weakness. Strength wins every time.”Self-isolating at his Delaware beach house, after testing positive for Covid-19, Biden now faces the biggest decision of his political career. But the walls are closing in on the embattled Democrat.A stream of dismal polling has deepened Democrats’ pessimism about the president’s chances of winning re-election. A survey this week by AP-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research found that among his own supporters, two-thirds of Democrats now say Biden should not be the nominee.His latest bout of Covid-19 was terribly timed – interrupting a trip to battleground Nevada, a multi-day trip designed to confront a host of compounding weaknesses: the president’s poor standing on immigration and the economy as well as his sliding support among Latinos and Black voters.View image in fullscreenA fiery speech at the NAACP annual convention in Las Vegas, during which the president touted his accomplishments on behalf of “Black America” and declared that Kamala Harris, the 59-year-old vice-president, “could be president of the United States”, did little to quell widening dissent within the party. Online clips of his flubbed lines circulated, ensuring that even one of his most vigorous appearances since the debate came up short.Daniella Ballou-Aares, the chief executive of a coalition of business leaders called Leadership Now Project, which has urged the president to “pass the torch” to protect American democracy, acknowledged: “Every scenario is risky right now. There’s no risk-free scenario.“But there’s a very strong bench in the Democratic party so the feasibility of getting a good ticket is certainly there,” she added. “Of course it’s going to be a hard run to win, but that risk seems like a better bet than the current path that we’re on.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs of Friday, more than 30 congressional Democrats, including three US senators, had called on the president to step aside, while the party’s top leaders, including Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader; Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader; and Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, all reportedly telling the president in private that his path to victory is all but extinguished.In their pleas to the president, they praise his half-century of public service and his accomplishments in the White House, which included the passage of landmark climate legislation, an infrastructure package, a gun control measure and billions in dollars in aid to Ukraine. But they also appeal to his patriotism, saying he helped to “save” the country from Trump in 2020, but now risks handing the former president a second term.Some high-profile Democrats are rising to Biden’s defense, notably two progressive powerhouses, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York representative. In a 50-minute Instagram live stream, Ocasio-Cortez blamed Democratic “elites” for belatedly coming forward with their concerns about the president’s age without considering the amount of chaos replacing him would inject into the race.Biden ally Rev Al Sharpton, who spoke to the president on Monday before his NAACP speech, also cautioned against pressuring Biden to resign.“Let him make up his mind,” he said. “If he decides to walk, let him walk with his dignity, and if he decides to stay in it, he’s earned the right.”Sharpton was skeptical of certain members’ motivations for calling on Biden to drop out and said he was dismayed by the degree of “disrespect” being extended to a president with a lengthy record of legislative accomplishments. He said some of the calls appeared to be playing to a “centrist kind of voting base”as many progressive, Black and Hispanic leaders stand by the president.“If you want to talk about contrast, look at how incoherent Donald Trump was last night. He was all over the place,” Sharpton said, noting that “not one Republican has asked him to step aside, so what’s the standard?”Publicly, Biden has dug in. In recent media appearances, he’s said he was “1,000%” certain he would continue as the party’s nominee, unless he was “hit by a train” or diagnosed with a “medical condition”. But his campaign is struggling to break through, with every attempt to turn the attention back on Trump and his anti-democratic agenda swamped by questions about the president’s mental acuity and fitness for office.View image in fullscreen“They don’t know how to turn this around,” Frank Luntz, a pollster and consultant, said recently, warning that Biden risked suffering a “death of a thousands cuts”.An overwhelming majority of Democratic delegates are pledged to Biden, who was expected to be formally nominated as the party’s standard-bearer at the party’s convention in Chicago next month. But amid the turmoil, the thousands of delegates elected to decide the party’s nominee are suddenly unsure how to proceed and say they are being given little direction from the party.They are wrestling with technical questions – what would an open convention look like, how should they vote – but also how do they, as the rules state, “reflect the sentiments” of those who elected them if the candidate ends his campaign?Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Democratic national convention’s rules committee, said: “We’ve never had a situation quite like this where the primaries were over, very clearcut winner, and yet something was discovered, unclosed, whatever you want to call it, after the end of the primaries that caused people to severely doubt whether or not their nominee should proceed. We’ve never faced this.”Speaking on a briefing call organized by Delegates Are Democracy, a newly launched initiative intended to help educate delegates about the nomination process, Kamarck said Harris was the most likely replacement for Biden at this late stage in the election cycle – not because she is necessarily the best candidate but because she has major advantages, including that she has already been vetted at the national level and is privy to daily security briefings.“With every day, with every minute,” she said, “we’re running out of time.”Yet if the past month has proved anything, it is that there are more twists, turns and unknowns to come. John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “The editor of my book said to me yesterday: ‘Is it over?’ I said: ‘Absolutely not!’ Not only barring the unforeseen – we’ve already had the unforeseen a few times already.“Imagine what could happen over the next four months.” More

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      Pressure mounts on Biden as tally of Democrats urging withdrawal passes 30

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      A beleaguered Joe Biden entered potentially the most decisive weekend of his 50-year political career on Friday as the growing list of Democratic members of Congress calling on him to step aside surpassed 30.Biden is recovering from Covid-19 in self-isolation at his home in Delaware and reportedly feeling “angry and betrayed” by allies and speculation mounted that he might be preparing to announce his withdrawal from the race.Advisers were reported to be discussing the details, timing and setting of a possible withdrawal announcement, and a mood of resignation before Biden’s departure was said to be rampant among his campaign staff.With six in 10 Democratic voters telling an AP-Norc Centre for Public Affairs Research poll released on Friday that Kamala Harris would make a good president, allies of the vice-president were making discreet preparations for her to assume the top of the presidential ticket, courting donors and crafting a new message to be used in the event she becomes the candidate.A rare glimmer of light for Biden came in a letter on Thursday signed by more than 1,400 Black female supporters, who argued that he should remain the candidate, and that any attempt to change the ticket would “circumvent the will of millions of voters who participated in a democratic process” in the primaries. Another public statement of support on Thursday came from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, who during an Instagram live stream on Thursday urged Democrats to reconsider their efforts to push Biden out.On Friday, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who has become one of the Biden’s most vocal progressive supporters since the debate fiasco, also urged support for Biden.The Congressional Hispanic caucus’s campaign arm also announced on Friday that it was endorsing Biden, which is no surprise given the group’s opposition to Trump but noteworthy at a moment when the president is fighting for his political life. “Another Trump presidency would be disastrous to the Latino community across the country. Make no mistake, Latinos nationwide will bear the brunt of the consequences of a second Trump presidency,” the group’s chairwoman, Linda Sánchez, said.But with more than 30 Democrats in Congress, including the leading California representative Adam Schiff, having now called on Biden to step down, the president was said to be angry at senior figures in the party for encouraging the discontent. Chief among them is Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who has tried to persuade Biden of his declining poll numbers, as well as Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, who Biden reportedly feels have undermined him through their conspicuous silence.After weeks of defiantly stating that he will remain the Democratic nominee, despite concerns about his age and mental acuity in the wake of last month’s disastrous debate against Donald Trump, some media outlets were reporting that Biden was reconsidering his position. “Reality is setting in,” a source close to Biden told the New York Times, adding that it would not be surprising if Biden announced his withdrawal soon to allow Harris to take the nomination.“I don’t see how [Biden] can outmanoeuvre the sustained attacks,” Politico quoted a Democratic figure close to the White House as saying. “It feels like the ending is near.”Biden’s resolve had reportedly been shaken by a combination of the intensive machinations of Pelosi, fresh poll data from swing states showing his path to an electoral college victory narrowing, and a boycott by key donors, the latest of whom reportedly was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire Michael Moritz.Pelosi, long one of his most important allies, is said to have used her knowledge of polling data and the political map to persuade him that his position is weak.Biden has repeatedly insisted that he has polling evidence showing he could win, relying on data from his aide Mike Donilon. But when he made the argument to Pelosi in a recent phone call, she told him to “put Donilon on the phone” so she could counter it with her own polling and implying that the president was not being kept informed, the New York Times reported.Public pressure intensified further on Thursday when the Senate Democrats Jon Tester of Montana and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico became the second and third to publicly urge Biden to step aside. Many more than the 30-plus congressional Democrats who have publicly called for his withdrawal have done so in private.Four House members – Jared Huffman of California, Marc Veasey of Texas, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin – issued the plea jointly Friday.“We believe the most responsible and patriotic thing you can do in this moment is to step aside as our nominee while continuing to lead our party from the White House,” they wrote to Biden. “Mr President, you have always put our country and our values first. We call on you to do it once again, so that we can come together and save the country we love.”Three further separate calls were made by Zoe Lofgren of California, a close Pelosi ally, Sean Casten of Illinois, and Greg Landsman of Ohio, whose seat is one of the Republicans’ top targets in November’s election.Allies of Pelosi depicted her as exercising sensitivity towards Biden – by recognising his achievements as president, long record of political service and the fact that he has Covid – while subtly using gentle persuasion.“She’s like a magician,” one source told the Hill. “She’s extraordinarily intentional. She’s trying hard to keep the balance and helping him reach a decision by gently pulling, never pushing.”That cut little ice with Biden’s allies, one of whom compared his fate to Julius Caesar.“People who have known this man for 30, 40 years are stabbing this man in the front and the back,” a senior campaign and administration aide told Politico. “They are JULIUS CAESAR-ing this man.”Biden himself was reported to share such sentiments, telling aides that he feels “hurt and betrayed” at how the party’s leading figures – who he has previously derided as “elites” – have tried to push him out.One Biden ally told NBC News that the party leaders now trying to force him from the ticket were to blame for Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.“Can we all just remember for a minute that these same people who are trying to push Joe Biden out are the same people who literally gave us all Donald Trump? In 2015, Obama, Pelosi, [Chuck] Schumer [the Democratic Senate majority leader] pushed Biden aside in favour of Hillary; they were wrong then, and they are wrong now,” the source said.“Perhaps we should learn a few lessons from 2016; one of them is polls are BS. And two, maybe, just maybe, Joe Biden is more in touch with actual Americans than Obama-Pelosi-Schumer?”Biden’s campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, continued to stress that Biden had “work to do” but said the campaign did not have its “head in the sand”.“For every person that has said that they are concerned, we’ve had another person that’s seen him and they’ve said you are our guy and we want to be with you,” she said, emphasizing that Biden’s campaign trail appearances have been reassuring to the campaign. “The more and more people that see Joe Biden out there post-debate they are reassured.”Such defiance seemed increasingly rare inside the Biden campaign, however, with CNN reporting that some staff had undergone a “quiet quit” process. “I don’t think you can find a person who is off the record saying he should stay in,” one told the network. “There’s a growing sense that it’s game over.”

      Lauren Gambino contributed reporting More

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      Republicans ramp up attacks on Kamala Harris amid swirl over Biden future

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      With the state of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign in turmoil, Donald Trump and his Republican allies are stepping up attacks on a familiar and, some say, possibly more threatening, political foe: his vice-president, Kamala Harris.In the weeks since Biden’s stumbling debate performance, Republicans have intensified what many call racist and misogynistic criticism. They have questioned Harris’s competency, mocked her demeanor, and accused her of concealing concerns about the president’s health. Trump unveiled a new, derisive nickname for the vice-president, “Laffin’ Kamala”, which he tested at a campaign rally in Florida this week.In the rambling, falsehood-filled speech, Trump dedicated several minutes to assailing Harris, whose shortcomings as vice-president, he said, were in effect an “insurance policy” for the embattled incumbent.“If Joe had picked someone even halfway competent, they would’ve bounced him from office years ago, but they can’t because she’s got to be their second choice,” he said.While the Trump team insists they are not intimidated by Harris, supporters say the pre-emptive strikes against the vice-president – the highest ranking woman in American politics and the first Black and Asian American vice-president – are a reflection of her strength at a moment when concerns about Biden’s fitness to serve have thrust her into the spotlight. In response, a group of Democratic strategists and donors are amplifying their defense of the vice-president, an effort they say is necessary to win in November.“We need to have a surround sound around Kamala that promotes the best of her strength – that she fights for our freedoms, that she works for a better life for all Americans, that she is ready to challenge Trump,” said Tory Gavito, the president and co-founder of Way to Win, a Democratic donor network.Though the group has not weighed in on whether Biden should remain the nominee, Gavito said Harris is a major asset to the party – whether as his running mate or his replacement. New battleground state polling released this week by her group found Harris running strong with the parts of the Democratic coalition Biden is struggling to energize: young people and Black and Latino voters.“She brings in factions of that coalition that, right now, are a little concerned,” Gavito said. “So it’s an important moment to lift up the full ticket.”For much of Biden’s presidency, Republicans have warned that a vote to re-elect the 81-year-old president was really a vote for Harris. Nikki Haley, in her unsuccessful run against Trump for the Republican nomination, once told voters that the possibility of a Harris presidency should “send a chill up every person’s spine”.In the presently unlikely scenario Harris becomes the Democratic nominee, Republicans say they have plenty of material ready to deploy against her from her years as a vice-president and her short-lived run for president against Biden in 2020. As the other half of the Biden-Harris administration, her record is tied to the president’s, Republicans argue, which means she is equally to blame for Americans’ frustration over the economy and the border.Republicans have sought to make Harris the face of the administration’s response to record migration at the US southern border, casting her as its absentee “border tsar”. But she was never charged with overseeing US border policy; rather, she was tasked, as was Biden during his vice-presidency, with a diplomatic mission to address the root causes of migration.In a preview of what Trump’s strategy against Harris might look like, his campaign released an online ad alleging a “Great Kamala Cover-Up”. The video overlays images of Biden looking lost and disorientated with comments from Harris defending his fitness for office. “Kamala lied to us for years about Biden,” it says. Trump’s campaign also referred to the vice-president as “Low IQ Kamala” this week.View image in fullscreen“No one has lied about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and supported his disastrous policies over the past four years more than Cackling Co-pilot Kamala Harris,” Caroline Sunshine, deputy director of communications for the Trump campaign, said in a statement to the Guardian. She also assailed the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the economy and immigration, among Biden’s most vulnerable issues with voters.Karen Finney, a Democratic strategist who was a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the attacks by Trump and his campaign were part of an old political “playbook” used to undermine women in positions of power.“It’s things like attacking her intelligence, attacking the tone of her voice, her laugh, the othering language,” Finney said. Those are pretty common tropes that we see used against women.”Several Democratically aligned women’s organizations, including UltraViolet and Emily’s List, have joined forces to combat what they described as the “racist and sexist disinformation campaigns” against the vice-president that are proliferating online and on the campaign trail, sometimes with the explicit endorsement of Republican officials.“There’s always legitimate reasons to critique any public figure, especially politicians,” said Jenna Sherman, campaign director at UltraViolet Action. But she said many of the rightwing attacks on Harris mix personal insults with myths and falsehoods about Democrats’ positions on issues such as abortion and immigration.“This is about misogyny,” she said. “This is about the society that we live in trying to normalize, essentially, the berating of women.”Since the presidential debate last month, some surveys have found Harris performing as well as or marginally than better than Biden in a hypothetical contest against Trump, which some suspect have prompted the new wave of attacks.“Vice-President Harris is proud to be President Biden’s running mate,” Brian Fallon, Harris’s campaign communications director said in a statement to the Guardian.“As a former district attorney and attorney general, she has stood up to fraudsters and felons like Donald Trump her entire career. Trump is lying about the vice-president because she has been prosecuting the case against him on the biggest issues in the race.”The former California attorney general, elected as a senator in 2017, had a rocky start to the vice-presidency, stumbling in media appearances and struggling to stand out as Republicans relentlessly attacked her performance. But since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Harris has become the administration’s lead messenger on reproductive rights, by far Democrats’ strongest issue.On the anniversary of Roe’s fall last month, Harris declared Trump “guilty” in the “case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America”. She has also been at the forefront of democracy protection efforts, rushing to Tennessee last year to stand beside Black lawmakers expelled from the state legislature for protesting against gun violence.“She is qualified to be president,” Biden said at his Nato press conference on Thursday night. “That’s why I picked her.”He praised Harris as a “hell of a prosecutor” and a “first-rate person”, casting her as fighter for reproductive rights and an agile lieutenant who has effectively managed a wide portfolio. But even as Biden promoted Harris, he mistakenly referred to her as “Vice-President Trump”, the exact type of verbal gaffe that has unnerved Democrats in recent weeks. Trump immediately seized on the misstep.“By the way: yes, I know the difference,” the president’s campaign replied later on X. “One’s a prosecutor, and the other’s a felon.”Earlier on Thursday, Harris rallied supporters in North Carolina, delivering the kind of fiery denunciations of Trump that many Democrats long for in their nominee. Ticking through the Biden administration’s legislative and foreign policy achievements, Harris warned that a second Trump term would hurt the country’s standing in the world and make Americans less safe.“As Trump bows down to dictators, he makes America weak,” Harris said, a reference to the former president’s flattery of Vladimir Putin. “And that is disqualifying for someone who wants to be commander-in-chief.”Sharing a clip from her campaign stop in North Carolina, Representative Jared Huffman, a California Democrat, said on X: “VP Harris is on fire. She’s vetted, tested, and has been Democrats’ strongest messenger throughout this campaign. She’s next up if we need her, and we might.”Biden’s insistence that he is the candidate best positioned to defeat Trump has not quelled dissent within his party. A growing number of elected Democrats have called on the president to step aside, while speculation mounts over whether Harris could realistically replace him atop the ticket.Amid the uncertainty, the New York Times reported that the Biden campaign has commissioned a survey to measure how Harris would fare in a head-to-head matchup against Trump. It comes amid a series of media reports that advisers close to the president have lost confidence in his ability to beat Trump in November, which the White House and the president’s campaign have denied.In a memo outlining the “path ahead”, Biden’s re-election campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and his campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said there was no indication that any other candidate would fare better than Biden against Trump. It noted that an alternative Democratic nominee would face an onslaught of negative media, which is already “baked in” to his candidacy.Yet a separate memo circulating among Democrats makes a counter-argument. Titled “The case for Kamala”, the document, written anonymously by Democratic strategists, argues that making Harris the party’s nominee is the “one realistic path out of this mess”.It argues that her weaknesses are “real but addressable” and that she enjoys structural advantages over other potential alternatives: she has already been vetted on the national stage, has the highest name recognition and would have immediate access to the re-election campaign’s war chest.With just little over a month left before Democrats meet in Chicago for their convention, Harris remains the most obvious and, for now, the most popular choice to replace Biden in the apparently unlikely event he ends his run for a second term.But regardless of what happens with the ticket, attention will remain fixed on Harris as the next-in-line to a president who has raised public concern about his ability to serve another four years. That is why Democrats such as Gavito of Way to Win say it is important to defend her aggressively across all media platforms.“The anti-Maga coalition is bigger than Maga,” she said, referring to Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. “We have proven that for the last three cycles. They have lost consistently. We can prove it again. But that requires a full-throated response on every platform available that shuts down people who are afraid of strong women.” More

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      ‘What we’ve been saying all along’: where do critical voters stand on Biden dropping out?

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      Concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness for re-election on the left may have been muted over the last year. But they were not absent.“There’s a lot of people, especially on the left, that have been talking about this,” said Alex Johnson, an IT worker in Atlanta.Democrats in the center of the party would chastise critics on the left as ageist or radical when bringing up the president’s age before the disastrous debate, he said. “They’re telling everybody that they were crazy. And then one thing happened, and all of a sudden, all of the people who have been calling progressives crazy, they’re like: ‘You know, maybe they were right.’”Biden has repeatedly reiterated that he will not withdraw from the race. Democratic party leaders are locking arms behind the president, instructing their ranks to be circumspect in conversation with news reporters and are strategizing ahead of the Democratic national convention.The conversation about Biden’s fitness ratcheted up after his debate performance last month. But they did not begin then, even among Democrats. Editorials from David Ignatius at the Washington Post and Mark Leibovich at the Atlantic last year called for Biden to refrain from running. Cenk Uygur, progressive co-creator of The Young Turks program, wanted Biden to give up re-election for more than a year and has been more than vocal about it, describing Biden’s supporters on the left as dead-enders.“At this point, eight out of 10 Americans think that Joe Biden’s mental health is not sufficient to be president,” Uygur said. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along. That number was already sky high before the debate.”Uygur has been arguing that it’s more than Biden’s age; no president with poll numbers in the 30s at this point in the election cycle has won re-election. Uygur tried to run as a candidate himself, despite being born in Istanbul – a constitutional disqualification for the office – simply to make the point.Karl Olson in St Louis Park, Minnesota, generally votes for Republican candidates. In 2020, “to save democracy”, Olson made the maximum possible legal contribution to the Biden campaign, he said. He voted for Biden in 2020, but has been calling for Biden not to run for re-election for years.He voted for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he is considering a vote for Trump.“I have long held that [Biden] should quit while he’s ahead,” Olson said. “I have concluded that if the Democrats insist on renominating Biden and Harris, they deserve to lose.”“Here’s the thing,” he added. “If Donald Trump is a political antichrist who will destroy democracy, then why are Democrats insisting on renominating Biden-Harris when he’s too old and she’s not enough of a leader to win?”Much of the anger today is being directed at the media, both for ignoring the substance of concerns about Biden’s age before the debate, and now the seeming pile-on after it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe headlines may be overdue, said Blue Tannery, a radio engineer in Atlanta. But they are not helpful.“The age thing in particular; yes, it’s an important problem. I’m really, really, really sick of seeing headlines about it,” Tannery said. The one thing that Biden said that makes any sense: you should all shut up about how old that I am and start talking about what I’ve done over the last four years.”Tannery said he had wanted Biden not to run, but also said the standard the media applies to Biden is unfair. “This is eight years of being in this country, watching Trump just open his mouth onstage and exhale a horde of locusts and the headline is about Biden,” Tannery said. “Because that’s what Trump does every time. That’s not news anymore. It is exhausting.”Samantha Ruddy, a comedy writer in Philadelphia, may be typical of reluctant Biden voters. She’s still voting for Biden. But now she also thinks he’s going to lose.“I have wanted Democratic candidates more politically aligned to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders during the past two election cycles,” Ruddy said. “In 2020, I felt Biden was better than Trump. I still feel he’s better than Trump. However, I don’t think he can win in 2024. I believe the best move is to replace him on the ticket. That being said – much like Donald Trump – I’m an entertainer who looked at the eclipse, so what do I know?” More

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      Trump airs list of false grievances at Florida rally: ‘We don’t eat bacon any more’

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      Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in Florida on Tuesday night, hurling insults at Joe Biden and airing a litany of familiar grievances, but declining to name a running mate for November’s general election.The former president and presumptive Republican nominee was speaking to a crowd of several hundred supporters at his golf club in Doral, a western suburb of Miami, keeping them waiting in 90F heat for a freewheeling monologue that began more than an hour later than scheduled.There was speculation that he might use his first public appearance since last month’s debate with the president to announce Florida senator Marco Rubio, who was present, as his vice-presidential pick, six days ahead of the Republican national convention (RNC) in Milwaukee.Instead, Trump delivered a rambling 75-minute speech that included a succession of attacks on Biden and his faltering debate performance, which has raised questions among Democrats on whether the 81-year-old president was robust enough for a second term of office.He seized on the post-debate turbulence that has prompted calls from some senior Democrats for Biden to step down and nominate Kamala Harris.“The radical left Democratic party is divided in chaos, and having a full scale breakdown all because they can’t decide which of their candidates is more unfit to be president, sleepy, crooked Joe Biden or laughing Kamala,” he said, repeating previous derogatory terms for the pair.“Despite all the Democrat panic this week, the truth is it doesn’t matter who they nominate because we are going to beat any one of them in a thundering landslide.”Trump has kept a lower than usual profile in the days since the debate, a strategy an aide described as designed to allow Democrats to tear into each other following Biden’s dismal debate performance.His remarks on Tuesday were notable for adding the vice-president’s name to numerous attacks on Biden policies, and sprinkling in mentions of both Rubio and Byron Donalds, a Republican Florida congressman also believed to be on Trump’s shortlist for vice-president.Otherwise, it was a standard Trump stump speech, full of evidence-free claims that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent; baseless accusations that overseas nations were sending to the US “most of their prisoners”; and a laughable assertion that a gathering of supporters numbering in the hundreds was really a crowd of 45,000.It also touched on the surreal. Biden, he insisted, had raised the price of bacon four-fold.“We don’t eat bacon any more,” Trump said.Electric cars, he said, “cheated” the US public because drivers had to stop for three hours to recharge their vehicles after every 45 minutes of driving. And, in an echo of one of the more bizarre debate exchanges with Biden over who was the better golfer, he challenged his White House successor to 18 holes over the Doral course while granting a 10-stroke concession.“It will be among the most watched sporting events in history, maybe bigger than the Ryder Cup or even the Masters,” Trump said, pledging $1m to a charity of Biden’s choosing if he lost.Returning to politics, Trump assailed Democrats for tax rises he said they wanted to impose; criticized Biden for the US military’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan; and promised to build an “iron dome” missile defense system for the US, if he was elected in November.Perhaps worn down by the energy-sapping humidity, the crowd appeared mostly subdued, including yawns in the bleachers behind him as Trump drew to a close with slow music playing, and others tapping disinterestedly on their phones.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis campaign had touted the possibility of Trump announcing a vice-presidential pick on Tuesday, but in the end his only reference to the post was suggesting that Rubio might or might not still be in the Senate to vote to allow Nevada waitresses to keep their tips untaxed.There was no mention of Ohio senator JD Vance, or North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, other Republicans said to be on the shortlist. Trump will rally again on Saturday in Pennsylvania, close to the Ohio border, with Vance expected to be a speaker.Earlier on Tuesday, Democrats, on a Biden campaign call featuring first lady Jill Biden, and previewing Trump’s Doral rally, mocked him for his low-key approach since the debate.“I hope he hasn’t exhausted himself with all the golf that he’s been playing,” Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar said.“Speaking of staying off the campaign trail, Trump has been hiding a lot recently, not just from voters and from the press, but from Project 2025.“Donald Trump tried to pretend that he had nothing to do with Project 2025 despite the fact that it was written for him by the people who know him best. And yesterday, his campaign preview of the RNC platform, was just as unhinged and extreme as Trump himself. They left out some of the most unpopular specifics that we know they support.“As usual, they’re trying to hide the ball from the American public.”Trump, in his speech Tuesday, avoided mention of Project 2025 or his policy on abortion. More

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      Kamala Harris underscores support for Biden at Las Vegas rally: ‘He is a fighter’

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      Kamala Harris doubled down on her support of Joe Biden on Tuesday, describing the embattled president as a “fighter” as she warned Donald Trump would turn the country from a democracy into a dictatorship if he is re-elected to the White House in November.The vice-president, speaking at a campaign event in Nevada, alluded to Biden’s struggles since his calamitous debate performance last month. “We always knew this election would be tough, and the past few days have been a reminder that running for president of the United States is never easy,” Harris said.“But the one thing we know about our president, Joe Biden, is that he is a fighter. He is a fighter, and he is the first to say, when you get knocked down, you get back up.” An audience member shouted back: “Yes, we all know.”Harris spoke shortly after a seventh House Democrat, Mikie Sherrill, publicly called on Biden to step aside. “I realize this is hard, but we have done hard things in pursuit of democracy since the founding of this nation. It is time to do so again,” Sherrill posted on Twitter/X.Voters face the “most existential, consequential and important election of our lifetime”, Harris warned during her speech at the Las Vegas event focused on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) communities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe first person of south Asian descent to serve as vice-president, Harris noted that Trump “consistently incites hate”, including towards the AANHPI communities. “Someone who vilifies immigrants, who promotes xenophobia, someone who stokes hate, should never again have the chance to stand behind a microphone,” she added.Harris is at the forefront of the Biden-Harris campaign’s effort to reach out to Asian American voters, and on Tuesday spoke about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer research scientist who left India at age 19 to study in California. “My mother had two goals in her life: to raise her two daughters and to end breast cancer,” Harris said. “My mother never asked anyone’s permission to pursue her dreams.”Harris is scheduled to address a town hall in Philadelphia on Saturday hosted by an advocacy group focused on mobilizing Asian American voters. “We need to make sure that AA and NHPI voices are heard at the ballot boxes around our country, just as we need to make sure that those voices are represented in all levels of government,” Harris said in a video released by the campaign on Tuesday. “Asian Americans must be in the rooms where the decisions are being made.” More