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      Father of Ohio boy, 11, tells Trump and Vance to stop using son’s death for ‘political gain’

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      The father of an 11-year-old boy who was killed last year when a minivan driven by an immigrant from Haiti collided with his school bus has asked Donald Trump and JD Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.During a city commission meeting on Tuesday in Springfield, Ohio, Nathan Clark, the father of Aiden Clark, addressed the forum alongside his wife, Danielle. Speaking at the meeting, Clark said: “I wish that my son, Aiden Clark, was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone,” the Springfield News-Sun reports.Clark went on to list politicians including Trump and Vance, who he said have been using his son’s name for “political gain”.“Bernie Moreno [the Ohio Republican senate candidate], Chip Roy [the Texas Republican representative], JD Vance and Donald Trump … have spoken my son’s name and used his death for political gain. This needs to stop now. They can vomit all the hate they want about illegal immigrants, the border crisis and even untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members. However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio,” said Clark.“I will listen to them one more time to hear their apologies. To clear the air, my son, Aiden Clark, was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti. This tragedy has been all over this community, the state and even the nation. But don’t spin this towards hate,” he continued.Clark went on to say: “Did you know that one of the worst feelings in the world is to not be able to protect your child? Even worse, we can’t protect his memory when he’s gone. Please stop the hate.”Clark’s comments come after the Trump campaign and Vance mentioned Aiden Clark’s death earlier this week amid hateful and baseless rumors surrounding the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield.In a post on X on Tuesday, Vance alluded to Clark’s death by saying a “child was murdered by a Haitian migrant” on X. In the same post, Vance also repeated the falsehoods surrounding Haitian immigrants eating local pets – a rumor brought up again by Trump during Tuesday’s debate with Kamala Harris.Meanwhile, the Trump War Room, an X account used by the Trump campaign, also mentioned Aiden Clark, accusing Harris of refusing to say his name.Aiden Clark died last August when the school bus he was riding in collided with a minivan driven by 36-year old Hermanio Joseph, a Haitian father of four children. More than 20 other students were injured in the collision and Joseph was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide. In May, Joseph was sentenced to nine to 13.5 years in prison.In a statement to NBC on Clark’s remarks, a spokesperson for Vance said that people should hold Harris “and her open border policies accountable for the deaths of their children”, adding: “The Clark family is in senator Vance’s prayers.”The Guardian’s Julius Constantine Motal contributed reporting More

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      A coal plant bulldozed an Ohio town displacing residents. Now its owners include a big Trump donor

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      Nestled beneath two precipitous spires billowing smoke from what has been called the deadliest coal plant in the United States lies the husk of the small but once-thriving town of Cheshire, Ohio.When residents here were routinely shrouded in a toxic, blue-tinged fog of pollution from the plant two decades ago, a unique yet telling solution was settled upon: the company causing the pollution would purchase the entire town to move people en masse from their homes.For the several hundred people who lived here beside a nook of the Ohio River on the eastern border of the state, the wrenching dismemberment of their community in 2002 is still raw. Yet looming stubbornly over the remnants of this ghost town is the imposing Gavin coal plant, as its owners battle federal regulators who allege ongoing violations of clean air and water rules.“Rather than deal with the source of pollution they thought it better to buy out and bulldoze a whole town,” said Neil Waggoner, an Ohio-based campaigner at the Sierra Club, which estimates Gavin’s pollution causes about 244 premature deaths a year, making it America’s most lethal coal plant, it said in a report last year based on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and census data. “It’s extraordinary. In many ways, it’s dystopian.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThe tale of the Gavin power station, one of the largest coal complexes in the US and the country’s sixth highest such emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide, is one that illustrates deep seams of support for coal in this part of the midwest but also – with a looming presidential election – salient politics.Since 2017, the Gavin plant has been part-owned by Blackstone, a private equity firm whose billionaire chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, is one of the leading backers of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, having donated $3m to a Trump-aligned Super PAC in 2020. Individuals connected to Blackstone are also among the most generous financial supporters of JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate.Both Trump and Vance have lambasted moves by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and a catalyst of the climate crisis, with particular ire aimed at a recent EPA rule that requires coal-fired power plants to slash CO2 emissions by 90% within a decade or face closure.Trump has vowed to kill off the rule he’s called “a regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America” if he returns to the White House, while Vance has complained of “wanton harassment of fossil fuel companies” and joined with other Senate Republicans in attempts to block the regulation.The EPA edict poses an existential threat to the Gavin plant, which spews out 13m tons of carbon dioxide a year, along with a host of other toxins. Faced with the costly task of capturing the plant’s emissions, Lightstone Generation, the joint venture operator, is also wrestling with EPA allegations from this year that it violated clean air laws and failed to properly contain a vast nearby dump of coal ash – the leftover waste from burning coal that can leach arsenic, mercury and other cancer-causing toxins into rivers and streams – fed by a mile-long conveyor belt from the power plant.“Blackstone is used to playing that political game and it’s in their interest to keep the status quo so coal plants don’t face accountability,” said Alissa Jean Schafer, climate director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which outlined in a recent report that Gavin’s operators face upwards of $40m in costs to remedy its pollution issues, recommending it join a spate of coal plants that have closed in Ohio and nationwide.“There is a trend of private equity walking away from polluting assets without being liable for the environmental cleanup,” Schafer added. “They want to squeeze as much profit as possible while they can from this outdated, dangerous coal plant.”View image in fullscreenBlackstone’s Schwarzman, who has previously warned of energy shortages and “real unrest” around the world if fossil fuels are phased out too quickly, has allied with Trump, who weakened rules around coal ash disposal and coal plant emissions when he was president. “You can imagine folks at Blackstone want to see similar rollbacks under a second Trump presidency, and you can imagine Vance towing the line,” said Schafer.A Blackstone spokeswoman said the Gavin plant is a “legacy investment” that has spent more than $1bn to update its air quality control technology, complies with federal and state limits on emissions, and is in the process of closing a coal ash pond. “All political donations by our employees are strictly personal,” she added.The reach of the Gavin plant, built in 1974 and named after Gen James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, is prodigious. It chews through about 20,000 tons of coal a day, enough to electrify 2m homes. A pair of enormous 800ft-tall rust-colored smokestacks, jutting imperiously above the treeline on the approach to Cheshire, waft a cocktail of emissions for hundreds of miles, with environmentalists blaming it for causing hazy skies as far away as the Shenandoah national park, in Virginia.The immediate surroundings of the largest power plant in Ohio, however, are denuded. The blue plumes are gone but the plant itself still gives off a pungent sulphur smell, a violent whiff akin to rotting eggs that stings the nose. The small cluster of Cheshire streets at the foot of the plant contain patches of grass where homes once sat, like a mouth that’s had most of its teeth knocked out.View image in fullscreenA church, a school and even the traffic lights here have been removed, along with the houses that were torn down. Just a few scattered buildings remain. During the exodus, some people lifted their entire wood-paneled homes on to trailers and moved them away. In all, 221 residents, the vast majority of the population, departed in just six months in 2002.“I couldn’t even watch my house being torn down, it was terrible,” said Jennifer Harrison, who grew up near Cheshire and moved to the town with her now late husband in 1980. “We spent the first 23 years of our married life and raised our kids here. I just can’t think about it too much, it’s horrible.”Harrison, who served as Cheshire’s town clerk and lived a short distance from the Gavin plant, remembers getting blurry eyes and tasting sulphur in the air in the late 1990s – a problem that worsened to the extent that a blue-hued haze of pollution would settle upon the town, particularly on humid days. It became so bad that residents had to stay indoors, the miasma so strong it would eat the paint off cars.“We had what we called ‘touchdowns’, where this plume would come from the smokestack and touch down in town,” she said. “It was like clouds on the ground. People got sores on their mouths, they got breathing problems, it affected lives.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIronically, the problems worsened once the EPA, in 2000, cited the Gavin plant for violating the Clean Air Act for contributing to acid rain as far away as New York. In response, pollution controls installed by the plant triggered what American Electric Power (AEP), the plant’s owner until 2017, called a “totally unexpected” increase in sulphur trioxide that mixed with water vapor from scrubbers used to filter pollution from the smokestacks.This combination allowed a sulphuric acid mist to flood into Cheshire, causing what the EPA documented as “irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat; shortness of breath; and asthma-like symptoms” among residents in 2001. “We had to fight them continually,” Harrison said of the plant’s owner. “We had to become a pain in their ass just to finally get anything done.”AEP, facing mounting legal pressure over the toxic air, eventually offered a deal thought to be a US first: $20m to buy the town of Cheshire, with homeowners offered three times the asking price for their houses – around $150,000 each – in return for locals relocating and agreeing to not sue the company over any future adverse health impacts.Elderly residents who wished to stay in their homes were allowed to do so, with some holdouts remaining until they died, when their homes were bulldozed too. AEP, which had revenues of $14.5bn in 2002, was able to subsume a town founded in 1811, with lawyers taking around a quarter of the total buyout fund.Harrison, who was involved in the effort to pursue AEP through the courts, said she was initially “shocked” at the offer but came to realize it was the only viable choice. “We probably should’ve held out for more but the lawyers told us that was the final deal,” she said.“We felt if we didn’t take the deal we’d be stuck here forever and they wouldn’t fix the problem. Most of the people let them buy the property and got out of town because at that point our properties were worthless.”What was lost was a slice of Americana, a close-knit place of white picket fences, a church, village picnics and a trusted community. “Everyone knew everyone, you could hear your kids out playing on their bikes and know someone was looking out for them,” said Harrison. “It was very Norman Rockwell.”The grief of this loss stirred anger among some Cheshire residents, not so much at the coal plant in a stretch of Appalachia where the harms of coal have long been sold as a price worth enduring, but rather at town council leaders like Harrison who struck the buyout deal. Friendships were severed, angry words shouted and graffitied dollar signs were sprayed onto the Harrison family home.“It was really unsettling,” said Megan Lawhon, Harrison’s daughter who turned 18 the day before the buyout was agreed to. She’s now a high school teacher. “People blamed us for a lot of untrue things, said we were greedy for taking the buyout money. I find it really hard to even come back here.”Gesturing to the Gavin plant, Lawhon added: “The culprit is just still sitting here. It’s like a family member has been murdered and the killer was just allowed to pay out some money and that’s it. And everyone here accepts that’s just the price of living in Appalachia, that there is no other option. We just die with a smile on our faces.”Advocates for the Gavin plant point out that it generates about half of the economic activity in Gallia county, in which Cheshire sits. There remains a certain cynicism that anything, such as a clean energy boom that Biden has sought to spur, can replace the jobs and investment that coal has long conferred to the Ohio River valley.In 2020, Trump, who has offered unfulfilled promises to resurrect the ailing coal industry, amassed 77% of the vote in Gallia county. A barn sitting beside the Gavin plant features a large picture of the former president shaking his fist with the words: “The audits prove Trump won!”“I know if Kamala [Harris] and that other gentleman [Tim Walz] had their way this coal plant would be shut down right now and we’d be going back to the 1800s,” said Mark Coleman, who is mayor of Cheshire. Coleman lives on the outskirts of the town, which had its boundaries expanded to now cover a population of 124.“If that plant closed our area would be gone. I’ve lived here all my life, this has always been part of it, my dad was a coal miner. The problem was fixable and Gavin did fix it, we haven’t seen a blue plume in years. I was more frustrated with the people who sold out.”View image in fullscreenLightstone, Gavin’s operator, still owns the relic of Cheshire and has shown no willingness to sell the land to usher in new residents. Neither Blackstone nor ArcLight Capital, the two joint venture partners that form Lightstone, answered questions on Cheshire’s future.Coleman said attracting new businesses here is tough; a plan for a Dollar General was recently dashed, and even getting a street paved is difficult. Drug addiction, like in much of Appalachia, stalks this place. Cheshire’s future appears moribund, a marooned corner of a region where old certainties have evaporated.“Our town has lost its identity, it’s sad,” Coleman said. “It’s hard to get things started back up again. Time has healed wounds, but at the same time we don’t go out to dinner with everyone. People have drifted apart.”The mayor has not heard from Vance about Cheshire’s situation. The vice-presidential candidate didn’t respond to questions from the Guardian about his links to Blackstone and the Gavin plant, or what his plan is for communities exposed to coal-related pollution.“If JD Vance really feels a connection to Appalachia, which he has ridden hard, you’d think he’d at least ask some questions about all this,” said Lawhon.“But I’d be surprised if he even knew about us. I mean if it’s going to cut into profits, the environment won’t ever be a priority. Which means that this whole thing could happen again somewhere else in the United States, and somebody’s going to have to fight the exact same battle we did.” More

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      Republicans spread unsubstantiated slurs about Haitian migrants in Ohio city

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      Prominent Republicans including the Trump campaign and JD Vance are sharing false and unsubstantiated claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city are eating pets and local wildlife.The salacious and often racist social media posts claim, without evidence, that migrants from Haiti to Springfield, Ohio, are stealing pets and local wildlife such as ducks and geese and are butchering them for food. Many of the posts, including one shared by the X account for the Republicans on the House judiciary committee, use images generated by artificial intelligence to show Donald Trump holding and protecting cats and ducks, casting him as a savior to the town. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, shared a meme of two cats hugging one another that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.”The Springfield News-Sun reported on Monday that police have “received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten”.The claims appear to have originated from a commenter at a local city meeting, who said migrants were grabbing ducks from the park to kill and eat, and from local crime-watch Facebook groups. They were then shared on other social media platforms and made it into a headline in the Daily Mail.The misinformation about migrants in Springfield comes as the Trump campaign has sought to make immigration a key issue, tying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the towns unprepared for migrants arriving via the southern border. Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, went on Fox to say the Biden administration was to blame for “failing cities like ours and taxing us beyond our limit”.The city has seen a large number of migrants from Haiti, which has both helped the economy there with staffing concerns while also stretching the capacity of some services like clinics and schools, the New York Times reported. A Biden administration policy provided temporary protected status to hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants, who have left their home country because of ongoing violence. Some estimates say as many as 20,000 people from Haiti have come to the city, the Times said.Last year, a migrant driving a van outside Springfield crashed intoa school bus, killing one child, which added fuel to the concerns some residents have had with migration. Housing costs have also increased, which has led to fewer options for low-income residents of all backgrounds, the paper reported.Residents at recent council meetings have appealed to their elected officials to better manage the new stream of residents. In now viral testimony, one woman said she and her husband might need to move from their home because of ongoing problems with “men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me” and throwing items in her yard.Some have also tried to tie a woman who was charged recently in Canton, Ohio, for allegedly killing and then eating a cat to the influx of migrants in Springfield, a different city more than 150 miles (241km) away. She does not appear to be a Haitian migrant.Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, has spoken against Haitian migrants in Ohio for months and again posted about it on Monday. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?” he wrote, referring to Kamala Harris.The Trump campaign sent out an email on Monday blasting the vice-president for the unrest in Springfield, saying: “It’s all coming to your city if Kamala Harris is elected in November. It doesn’t have to be this way. Beginning on day one, President Trump will begin the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history – because he’ll always put America, and Americans, FIRST.”On Monday, the Ohio attorney general, Dave Yost, a Republican, announced he would use his office’s resources to “research legal avenues to stop the federal government from sending an unlimited number of migrants to Ohio communities”. He said his office would “exhaust all possibilities” to address the migrants. Among other complaints from residents, he said that the migrants were reportedly “killing wildlife for food”. More

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      ‘The chilling effect’: behind GOP-led states’ efforts to purge some voters from the rolls

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      Earlier this week, Texas governor Greg Abbott sent out a press release with an eye-popping headline: his state had removed more than 1 million people from its voter rolls since 2021. Among them were 6,500 non-citizens. A little under a third of those non-citizens had some sort of voting history in Texas, where there were nearly 18 million registered voters as of March, and were referred to the attorney general for further investigation.Two days later, the governor’s office quietly revised the statement posted online. Instead of saying 6,500 non-citizens had been removed, the updated version said 6,500 potential non-citizens had been removed. Renae Eze, an Abbott spokesperson, said that the statement sent out to an email list of reporters on Monday contained the phrasing “potential non-citizens”. She did not respond to a query on why the version that was publicly posted initially omitted the word “potential”.The statement was the latest example of how Republican-led states are touting aggressive efforts to remove people with early voting, scheduled to begin in weeks and less than 70 days until election day. Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Ohio have all made similar announcements recently.Voting rights groups are concerned these announcements are misleading, and that the efforts to purge are putting naturalized citizens – eligible voters – at risk for being removed. There is also concern that these efforts are running afoul of a federal law that prohibits systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election.Looking closer at the Texas announcement, there were other questions. The vast majority of people removed had been cancelled for routine reasons – they had either died or moved. The number of voters cancelled for these reasons is similar to totals from past years, according to a New York Times analysis.“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” said Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.“With the state having invented the fabricated issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from exercising their right to vote, we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”In Tennessee, state election officials sent out notices to more than 14,000 suspected non-citizens on the eve of early voting in June, warning them of the criminal penalty they could face for voting illegally. The effort immediately drew scrutiny because Tennessee was looking to see whether someone reported being a non-citizen at the DMV to flag them as a non-citizen. That kind of comparison has been shown to be unreliable in the past, because people may get a driver’s license and become naturalized citizens before they have to renew it.The state sent out 14,375 notices, and at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were in fact citizens. Election officials eventually admitted that those who didn’t respond would not be removed from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.In Alabama, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, announced that his office had identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security. While he acknowledged that some of those people may have since become naturalized citizens and eligible voters, he nonetheless designated all of them inactive voters and requested that they prove their citizenship. All 3,251 were also referred to the Alabama attorney general’s office for further investigation.A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls. Among other things it says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory”. The state also can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days.“We’re extremely concerned about the chilling effect this has on registered voters generally speaking, and particularly newly naturalized citizens,” said Kate Huddleston, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center, one of several groups that signed on to the letter warning Alabama that it may be running afoul of federal law.The Alabama secretary of state’s office did not say how many people had responded indicating they were citizens. In Jefferson county, one of the largest in the state, 557 were flagged as potential non-citizens, according to Barry Stephenson, the county’s registrar. Three people have responded to notices that went out so far, Stephenson said. Two people said they did not know how they had become registered voters. The third said they were a citizen.One Alabama voter, a Huntsville man named James Stroop, told the local news outlet WAFF 48 that he had been wrongly flagged. The Alabama department of labor had incorrectly noted he was a non-citizen on a form years ago. Even though he had corrected the issue with the department of labor, he was still marked as a non-citizen when the agency sent data to the Alabama secretary of state.“Imagine if Alabama’s DMV had different information about a different group of voters and they knew that some vanishingly small percentage of people with green eyes were ineligible to vote for some reason,” she added. “And then they pulled everyone with green eyes off the rolls. I think the problem would be obvious to everyone that you can’t just deregister voters because some vanishingly small percentage of them may be ineligible to vote.”In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, issued an executive order noting that his administration had removed 6,303 non-citizens from the rolls since taking office. That represents an incredibly small fraction of the more than 6.3 million people registered to vote in the state as of 1 July.Like Tennessee and Alabama, Virginia is flagging non-citizens on its rolls using both data from its DMV and the Department of Homeland Security to identify potential non-citizens. Anyone removed is given 14 days to indicate they are in fact citizens. It’s unclear how many of the people removed were actually non-citizens and how many simply didn’t respond.“We take seriously the potential for errors in database matching, the consequences for voters and the public at large of any erroneous removal of eligible voters from the voter registration rolls, and Virginia’s recent history of mistakes and errors with data sharing protocols in particular,” a group of civil rights groups wrote to Youngkin and Susan Beals, who runs the state’s department of elections.Ohio’s secretary of state Frank LaRose has promoted his office’s efforts to remove 137 suspected non-citizens from the voter rolls using DMV data. Several naturalized citizens have come forward to say they were wrongly flagged, including one man who said his voter registration was challenged months after he was naturalized.“We know that the number of non-citizens who vote is a vanishingly small number based on all available evidence,” Huddleston said. “By inflating the issue and sweeping in very predictably naturalized citizens, the Alabama secretary of state and others are preventing naturalized citizens from being able to vote and creating this chilling effect.” More

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      Midwestern guys: Vance and Walz’s opposing views of being from the US heartland

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      For 30 years, Michael Bailey worked at the former Armco steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, eventually becoming president of a union that represented thousands of workers. Among them was James Vance, grandfather and sometimes stand-in father of the Republican party’s current vice-presidential candidate, JD, who worked as a skilled tradesperson at the plant.So Bailey, today a 71-year-old pastor at the Faith United church in downtown Middletown, says he’s confused by claims from Donald Trump’s running mate that he “grew up as a poor kid” in Middletown.“As a rigger, [James Vance] made good money. Where he lived, on McKinley Street, he didn’t live in poverty,” he says. “JD came up in a middle-income family. He didn’t come up on the rough side of town.”Politicians assuming working-class identities to attract votes is nothing new. But this year’s election pits vice-presidential candidates against each other – ostensibly picked for their “real American” chops – who hold contrasting views of what it means to be a boots-on-the-ground midwesterner.Endless corn fields, small towns and wide-open highways are characteristics of life in the midwest that most can agree on. Beyond that, experts say the region is far more complex.Cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Cincinnati are home to millions of people that, for a time during the 20th century, were among the most innovative in the world.“Midwesterners have historically been on the frontlines of progressive politics and education. Midwesterners also have been innovators in both an economic and cultural sense,” says Diane Mutti Burke, the director of the Center for Midwestern Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.But many agree there are a few features that typically set midwesterners apart.“Midwesterners also are said to be ‘nice’,” says Mutti Burke. “The idea is that midwesterners are often friendly and gracious to a fault.”Perhaps that’s why Democratic party vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s characterization of Vance and Trump as “weird” last month has struck such a chord with voters in the midwest, propelling the Harris-Walz ticket to a four-point lead in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in a recent poll.As governor of Minnesota, Walz’s brand of “nice” saw him introduce universal free breakfast and lunch for K-12 students in the state last year. The move was informed by his previous firsthand experience as a high school teacher who saw that lower-income kids using different colored food tickets to others could end up being stigmatized.What’s more, Walz has asked to appear on Millennial Farmer, a popular YouTube channel run by a Minnesota crop farmer that depicts everyday, midwestern farm life, despite its host’s anti-Democrat leanings. That request has yet to be fulfilled.At his first rally with Kamala Harris in Philadelphia on 6 August, Walz went straight after Vance’s midwestern chops, saying sarcastically: “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires.”Vance has defended his upward mobility as illustrative of having succeeded in achieving the American dream.For his part, Vance has said he’d like to increase the child tax credit, currently at $2,000 per child, to $5,000, and eliminate the upper income threshold, which currently stands at $200,000 for single tax filers and $400,000 for couples.However, this month Vance failed to vote on a bill to increase the child tax credit program, claiming it would have failed regardless of whether he had taken part or not. The day of the vote, Vance was at the border in Arizona falsely claiming that the vice-president was the current administration’s “border czar”. (Harris aides have said that she was never given the responsibility of policing the border.)While Vance visited with picketing auto workers in Ohio last October, those who have closely watched his 18 months in office as a US senator say that, compared to Walz, he hasn’t achieved anything substantial for midwesterners.“Walz has been a teacher, a coach, a governor [and] a congressman,” said Charles “Rocky” Saxbe, a former senior member of Ohio’s Republican party who opposes the Maga movement. “I think when you look at vice-presidential contests – to the extent that they matter – you want someone who can step into the role of presidency, if it’s necessary and you want someone who has leadership experience, which JD Vance has never had.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnsurprisingly, Vance’s camp disagree, citing his working with Democrats to introduce rail safety and banking regulation bills as evidence of his political achievements.Politics aside, there’s an obvious financial gap dividing the two candidates. While in 2022 Walz earned $127,629 as governor of Minnesota, Vance raked in more than $1m the same year through a salary and company profits at a venture capital firm, a property rental, book royalties and from a host of investments. The Wall Street Journal suggests Vance’s net worth could be more than $10m.For some midwesterners, however, it’s the rhetoric that most keenly separates the two.Last year, Vance lobbied against, and failed to defeat, an amendment to the Ohio constitution to enshrine access to abortion. His “childless cat ladies” comments resurfaced last month were almost universally panned.But Bailey says his first opinions of Vance were formed several years ago, when the senator was in town publicizing his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy.As a pastor and former president of a major workers’ union at Armco Steel, Bailey figured that someone of Vance’s emerging public persona meant that the senator might want to speak with him and other Middletown community leaders, so he gave Vance his business card.“I said: ‘I’d like to talk to you and if you’re thinking about running for office, we’d like to have your ear,’” says Bailey.“We’ve never had a response.”Despite Vance being elected nearly two years ago, his Middletown constituency office has no external signs or obvious indications highlighting the location for locals seeking to meet with him. A recent visit by the Guardian found the office door locked and the only communication made available by a staffer was through an intercom.Bailey says he thinks that rather than running for the benefit of Middletown and midwesterners at large, Vance is being used as a political stooge by the Silicon Valley billionaires who bankrolled his successful 2020 senate campaign.“I think they looked at someone with JD’s background,” he says, “and said: ‘We can use him to take away our democracy.’” More

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      Key takeaways from day three of the Republican national convention

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      Republicans had a new chant on Wednesday night: not just “Trump! Trump!” but also “JD! JD! JD!” in honor of Trump’s new vice-presidential pick, Ohio senator JD Vance, who introduced himself to the country Wednesday night in a confident and personal primetime address.Also new: the professionally printed signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” a reference to Trump’s campaign pledge to engage in the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history.Here are five key takeaways from the night:1. Republicans are simply not talking about abortionDuring his race for the US senate in Ohio, Vance said that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. In 2022, he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally”, expressing sympathy for the view that a national abortion ban was necessary to stop women from traveling to different states in order to get abortions.A section on Vance’s Senate website, accessible as late as Monday, read, simply, “End abortion,” calling him “100% pro-life, a Huffington Post reporter noted. By Wednesday, that message had vanished, as Vance’s old website simply redirected to Trump’s presidential campaign site.Vance similarly erased his anti-abortion views from his primetime speech to the RNC on Wednesday, and as my colleagues have noted, he’s far from alone. There’s been a conspicuous silence on abortion throughout the Republican convention, as well as on other issues that Republicans appear to see as weaknesses, like Project 2025 and the future of American democracy.2. Warm reaction to Vance’s bestselling life story, as ‘hillbilly’ aims for White House The Republican national convention crowd was already eating out of Vance’s hand, as the charismatic 39-year-old Ohio senator talked them through the life story that made him into the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a 2016 memoir that became a 2020 feature film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close.Vance had described growing up “a working-class boy born far from the halls of power” in Middletown, Ohio, with a single mother who struggled with addiction, and a tough, loving grandmother who kept him from falling prey to a local drug dealer. He described his journey from the Marine Corps, to Yale, to working in venture capital, to being chosen as Trump’s vice-presidential pick.He neatly contrasted his youth to Biden’s age, noting policies Biden supported when he was in high school, and saying: “Joe Biden has been a politician in Washington for longer than I’ve been alive.” Then, talking about other single mothers like his, who had struggled with addiction but never given up, he revealed that his mother, Beverly Aikins, was in the RNC audience with him, and that she is “10 years clean and sober”.“I love you, mom,” he said, suggesting that she might he able to celebrate her full 10 years of sobriety next year in the White House.As the cameras panned to Vance’s smiling mother, she mouthed, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!” And the crowd started chanting, “JD’s mom! JD’s mom!”3. It’s clear that JD’s job is to woo the rust belt Vance shouted out to his home state of Ohio in his speech, but he quickly cut off the chants of “O-H-I-O,” quipping, “We gotta win Michigan too.”His speech was threaded with references to rust belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Kentucky, which he connected to the struggles of his Ohio hometown, and to the importance of restoring American factories and American manufacturing.Vance described a series of economic and foreign policy choices Biden made over his long career that, he argued, hurt American workers, particularly those in towns like he grew up in. Some observers saw the speech as a rewriting of Vance’s own life narrative, shifting from Hillbilly Elegy’s preoccupation with Appalachian poverty’s connection to cultural problems and personal responsibility, to instead blaming politician Joe Biden for creating the conditions that left the people he grew up with, impoverished.Strikingly, Vance came onstage to the country twang of Merle Haggard’s 2005 protest ballad, America First, which expressed the singer’s opposition to the Iraq war.4. Republicans highlighted grief and anger over the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021Some of the family members of the 13 soldiers killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack at Kabul airport during the “disastrous” US withdrawal from Afghanistan spoke at the RNC to criticize Biden.Alicia Lopez, whose son, Corporal Hunter Lopez, was killed on 26 August 2021, said: “Despite our pleas for answers and accountability, they have pushed us away and tried to silence us. The Biden administration has not owned up to the bad decisions, they have not been transparent about their failures and their so-called leaders work to protect themselves, rather than our sons and daughters who took the oath to defend our country.”A mother-in-law of a marine killed at Abbey Gate said that Trump, in contrast, had spent dedicated time with family members, offering them what she felt was genuine support in their grief. The family members were also featured in a video in which they said that when they met with Biden as their loved ones’ bodies arrived at a military base in Delaware, the president appeared to check his watch during the ceremony.Other pro-Trump veterans also spoke to the lasting sense of anger and betrayal they felt in witnessing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and in the struggles and fears of the Afghans they had worked with who were left behind as the Taliban seized control of the country.“Throughout our careers, we never had regrets about our service, but this moral injury caused many of us to ask: ‘Why did we serve, if this was the outcome?’” Scott Neil, a retired green beret, said.A scathing state department review of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan concluded that both the Trump and Biden administrations were to blame as “during both administrations there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow”.But the RNC’s focus on the withdrawal also took aim at one of Biden’s political strengths. As someone who has lost family members to a car accident and cancer, he has often been praised for his ability to grieve with people, and offer them support in moments of profound loss, even being referred to as “the designated mourner”. But on Wednesday, the RNC offered multiple speakers who portrayed Trump as the man who would comfort Americans in their grief and Biden as a self-involved politician.5. Chants of “Bring them home” as parents of 7 October hostage speak Orna and Ronen Neutra, whose son, Omer Neutra, was kidnapped during the 7 October attack in Israel, said Trump had supported them, asked the RNC for continued support in securing their son’s safe return. Omer is one of eight American hostages, Ronen Neutra said.“President Trump called us personally right after the attack, when Omer was taken captive,” Ronen Neutra said. “We know he stands with the American hostages. We need our beautiful son back and we need your support. We need your support to end this crisis and bring all the hostages back home.”Shabbos Kestenbaum, a recent Harvard Divinity School student who was part of a group of students who filed a lawsuit alleging that Harvard failed to address antisemitism on campus, also spoke, as did members of a University of North Carolina fraternity who held up an American flag during a pro-Palestine campus protest.Chris Stein and Carter Sherman contributed reporting More

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      Ohio voters hope son of soil JD Vance will ‘do something good for us’

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      For many in Middletown, Ohio, JD Vance is better-known as a bestselling author and hit Hollywood movie subject than a politician who on Monday was propelled into the political big time as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick.Amanda Bailey moved into Vance’s grandmother’s house, the home in which Vance was mostly raised, 18 months ago. Since then, she’s been dealing with a steady stream of curious passersby inspired by Vance’s 2016 autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy, and the 2020 film of the same name, driving by and taking photos of the house.Bailey, who works at a local hardware store, admits she’s not entirely up to speed with Vance’s policy positions.“I hope he’ll do something good for us, and I think he will,” she says.Her thoughts are echoed by Jerry Dobbins, who has lived three doors down the street for the past 31 years. Dobbins says his memories of Vance’s family are mainly of the vice-presidential candidate’s grandmother, Bonnie, who mostly raised JD and his sister, Lindsay.“Bonnie was a tough bird. She was just a strong woman from Kentucky,” he says.But there’s a reason Bailey, Dobbins and a number of other Middletown residents say they are not especially concerned by Vance being rocketed into the political mainstream without much in the way of experience – it’s because they have complete faith in the person who picked him: Donald Trump.“I like Trump,” says Bailey. “And I think they’ll do a lot of good work together.”“Trump’s not a politician. He’s a businessman,” says Dobbins, who worked as a fabricator at a nearby aerospace company before retiring. “When Trump got in [in 2016], things started looking better economy-wise, business-wise. I don’t think he can be beat [in November].”The Middletown Vance was raised in is not unlike the dozens of other left-behind communities in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and beyond, where Trump’s particular brand of politics and rhetoric has found favor. In Butler county, which encompasses most of Middletown and several satellite towns of Cincinnati, Trump beat Biden by 24 points in the 2020 election.Like thousands of others, Vance’s family were lured from Appalachia to Ohio by the promise of work at Middletown’s many paper and steel mills that for much of the 20th century dominated the region’s economy.And as with dozens of other rust belt towns, Middletown’s economy shrank due to industrial offshoring that began in the 1970s, giving rise to job losses and the ravages of the opioid epidemic that endure today.It’s these ills, which the 39-year-old Vance has blamed on Joe Biden, immigrants and China, that he has used to craft a so-far successful political career. Despite these claims, the Biden administration has invested billions of dollars in the midwest, while immigrants have helped stem population decline in many towns and cities.For longtime Middletown residents Bev and Tom Pressler, Vance’s lack of political experience may even be an advantage.“I think the young blood is good. We need some younger politicians running the country,” says Tom. “Obama got in and he wasn’t all that old, and he didn’t have all that experience. Trump didn’t have all that experience and I think he did excellent.”For Bev Pressler, a 62-year-old resident, Vance has worked hard to get where he is today.“If you saw the movie and read the book, he was trying to get into these schools, he was trying to pull his mom out of drug addiction, his family depended on him,” she says.But not everyone in Middletown thinks Vance’s meteoric rise to the forefront of US politics is a good thing.“He has a legislative legacy of zero achievements, especially lacking any meaningful support for Ohioans,” says Kathy Wyenandt, the chair of the Butler county Democratic party.“Vance is willing to change his beliefs at any time for the sake of amassing power … he is an out-of-touch millionaire and political shapeshifter who is wrong for Ohio, and wrong for our country.”Although Vance launched his political career in the US Senate with a campaign rally at a steel manufacturer in Middletown in July 2021, locals say they haven’t seen much of him since then.“What concerns me more than anything is that, at Senator Vance’s age, he is able to take the Maga agenda and to see it out far beyond even Trump’s time, if he were to get re-elected,” says Scotty Robertson, a pastor who has lived in Middletown for seven years.“Those policies are so destructive to our country and to Middletown. We’re talking about potentially ending social security and Medicare as we know it, continuing to roll back voting rights and ensuring that large segments of our population find it extremely hard to even vote. We’re talking about supporting policy that allows the president to essentially do whatever he or she chooses without any kind of accountability.”Still, for Debbie Dranschak, who with her husband runs the White Dog Distilling Company on Middletown’s Central Avenue, that’s not enough of a reason not to vote for his running mate in November.“I don’t know him, I don’t know his politics, but I’m glad Trump picked him,” she says. “Biden is just too old. He needs to get out. I grew up Democrat, but it’s about who is going to do the best for the country.”For Chad Sebald, an audio engineer, Vance has been unfairly labeled by some locally as a “class traitor” – someone who leaves behind the people they grew up with in search of better opportunities elsewhere.“Knowing his history, he came from nothing. He did what just about anybody in Middletown would do – he got out. I can’t blame the guy for getting out of here,” says Sebald, who also plans to vote for Trump in November.However, for a few minutes on the same street Vance was raised, the kind of dangerous, racist rhetoric that many say Trump has fueled over the years was in full view on Monday afternoon.As a local TV news car pulled up to interview residents, a man wearing a T-shirt with the word “freedom” written on it emerged from a nearby home angrily asking the car and its occupants to leave.“JD Vance is a race traitor,” he yells. Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of immigrants from India. “Fuck that motherfucker.” More