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      Black voters gather at DC hotspots to await results: ‘It’s a historic moment’

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      On Tuesday evening, Black voters milled about Washington DC as they awaited election results. Most voters had cast ballots for Kamala Harris and were excited that a Black woman might become president for the first time. It was a milestone that some didn’t believe that they would witness in their lifetimes.At a watch party at Busboys and Poets, a cultural hub and restaurant, the mood was similar to a New Year’s Eve celebration, with people listening to television pundits discuss the election and socializing with family and friends.View image in fullscreenFor Latoiya Bates, a 49-year-old Georgia resident, it was important to be among Black community on election night. Casting her ballot for Harris was an emotional moment for her. She voted with tears in her eyes and said she was excited due to Harris’s support of reproductive rights and democracy. “It’s a historic moment.”“There’s been so much change in the world,” Bates said, acknowledging the political power of Black women who she said had started a movement. “When she wins, part of her speech should be: ‘We did it. We made America great again.’”Others around the city said that they were concerned about the potential for political violence if Donald Trump loses the election, referencing the January 6 insurrection. “I don’t think that people are going quietly into the night and I also don’t think that it will be a smooth transition,” Dionna La’Fay said outside the White House at Lafayette Square. A 36-year-old Michigan resident who is moving to DC, La’Fay said that she went to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and tried to ground herself in the knowledge of Black resilience throughout the day. While she expects violence, she didn’t see it as any different than other tribulations that Black Americans have endured throughout history: “I am not afraid.”View image in fullscreenBlack voters, who account for 14% of the electorate, are expected to vote for Harris in droves. In a survey of Black Americans in all 50 states by the thinktank Black Futures Lab, 71% of respondents said that they trusted Harris and distrusted Trump, compared with 5% who said the opposite. According to a Black Voter Project survey of more than 1,000 Black Americans, Black support for Harris is at 84%, compared with 13% for Trump.The scene outside Lafayette Square in the early evening was cacophonous, with people blasting music and making speeches. One person strummed an acoustic guitar behind pro-Harris signs, while another person biked around blaring rock music as they hauled a small trailer with Trump signs behind them. Metal fencing surrounded the square in anticipation of post-election unrest.View image in fullscreenMamadou, a 31-year-old Washington DC resident from Guinea, walked around the square with friends. He said that he didn’t vote at all because “I don’t know much about that lady and I didn’t want to vote for someone I don’t know at all”. He also didn’t want to vote for Trump for fear of his draconian immigration policies. Otherwise, Mamadou said, he was supportive of Trump while he was in office, because he believes that Trump “loves the country”.Samson Meche, a 35-year-old biotech research associate, traveled to DC from San Diego to watch the election results. He had cast a mail-in ballot for Harris several weeks ago because he believes that she’s more empathetic than Trump, whom he called a “salesman”. Meche is hopeful that Harris will fight for Palestinian liberation in the future and will soon help end Israel’s war on Gaza, he said. “She’s looking out for me,” Meche said. “Since she is one of us, she’s more of the normal social status. She went from the middle class to a more educated person and she can relate to us better than someone who thinks of himself as an elite.”View image in fullscreenLater in the evening, at the Busboys and Poets watch party, Josh Johnson, a Howard alumnus, felt confident that Harris, a fellow alumna, would win. “It’s exciting to see how far she’s come,” Johnson said. He said that he cast a ballot for Harris because “I’m standing up for my rights as an American. It’s not just about me, it’s about the people I care about.”View image in fullscreenJohnson’s partner, Jackson Burnett, also voted for Harris because he supports her policies and is excited to see what she does for the country. “She’s very much for the people, and for the American population, no matter what race, gender,” Burnett said. He also wanted to be among community on election night to celebrate with everyone, Burnett added, “whether good or bad, just making sure that we come together … and figure out next steps”.“I really hope that after this election,” Johnson said, “that we can move forward to not have the same type of [hateful] rhetoric.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

      When will we know the result?

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      History in the making: is the US finally about to elect its first female president?

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      “This is monumental,” said 19-year-old Kai Carter as she stood in line behind the White House where Kamala Harris was about to take the stage a week before the 5 November election.Carter was ecstatic at the prospect of Harris making history as the first Black female president of the United States. She attended the event with a group of fellow students from Howard University, the historically Black college in Washington DC, which is also the vice-president’s alma mater.Born in the United States of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris, the first female vice-president, is also potentially on the verge of becoming the first Asian American president, as well the country’s first female president. Yet she is not making a big deal about it.In her closing argument in Washington DC before one of the most consequential elections in the country’s history, Harris did not refer to her gender or her race or how she may be breaking a glass ceiling. It’s not something she brings up often on the campaign trail, choosing instead to focus on her middle-class upbringing and how she hopes to be a president for “all Americans”.Her central message that night was about Donald Trump as a threat to democracy. “This election is more than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American. Or one ruled by chaos and division.”Unlike Hillary Clinton, who made gender a central part of her 2016 run for office, at a time of historic polarization Harris chose to focus on issues over identity. That is also how she chose to run her unusually short campaign of 13 weeks after an ageing Biden finally passed her the mantle on 21 July.Laurie Pohutsky, a Democratic state representative in Michigan, decided to run in 2018 after witnessing Trump’s misogynistic campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Since then, she has introduced two key pieces of state legislation that lifted restrictions on abortion. In a phone interview from the swing state governed by the Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, she said: “You know, we weren’t elected because we were women. And I think that when we frame it that way, we do a disservice to ourselves.”She said she agreed with Harris’s choice not to focus on gender: “While it’s historic, it’s not what would make her a good president.”“We’re long overdue for a female president,” she added. “But that’s not why I think people are voting for her. They’re voting for her because of her record and the work that she’s done and the things that she believes, versus what we know Donald Trump believes.”Identity politicsIn the face of misogyny and racism, it is Harris’s detractors who have attempted to use her identity against her. Republicans regularly mispronounce her name or call her a “DEI hire”.At the beginning of her campaign, Trump sought to steer the conversation towards race in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, questioning whether Harris is indeed Black. Many recognize these personal attacks as Trump’s hallmark. Their purpose is to undermine debate, take his opponent off script, stoke division and ultimately attract media attention.Christina Reynolds, senior vice-president for communications for Emily’s List, a political action committee that backs pro-choice Democratic female candidates, including Harris, explains that women are often the butt of personal attacks whereas men are attacked for their policies. Reynolds has witnessed this first-hand after working on five presidential campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s.This is just one example of the double standards women and particularly women of color face to get to the top. Another is the pressure on women to be both likable and competent, whereas a man can be one or the other. Research by UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business also shows that women in positions of power lose likability. This is particularly true of successful middle-aged women.In 2016, Trump accused Clinton of being a “nasty woman” while male pundits told her to “smile” more. When Harris, a former prosecutor, successfully grilled Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing for the supreme court, Trump accused her too of being “nasty”.A champion of women’s rightsDespite Harris’s attempts to detract attention from her gender and race, she has campaigned heavily on the issue of women’s rights. “She may not frame things in terms of her gender, but the first president or vice-president to invite abortion providers to the White House and to visit an abortion provider – both of those firsts were Kamala Harris,” Reynolds said.The overturning of Roe v Wade by three Trump-appointed supreme court justices in 2022 placed women’s rights at the forefront of voters’ concerns. The right to abortion was a hard-fought battle that was won in 1973. A poll from May 2024 from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center suggested that 63% of Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases.In perhaps one of the most moving moments of the Democratic national convention, three women told their harrowing personal stories of being denied medical care in states where abortions are restricted.At the closing rally in Washington DC, Harris suggested Trump could take things even further: “He would ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control and put IVF at risk and force states to monitor women’s pregnancies,” she said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris has also proposed policies to appeal to people – especially women – who need to care for parents and young children at the same time, known as the sandwich generation. She talks about how she had to care for her mother before she died of cancer in 2009, and she has talked about her plan to have Medicare pay for home healthcare.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage:

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      Trump v Harris on key issues

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      Signs of progressHarris is running for office in a divided country, with Trump threatening violence against his political opponents. “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list,” she said in DC last week to a crowd of more than 75,000 people.And while in her closing argument the Democratic nominee made clear that she pledged to be a “president for all Americans” and “to always put country above party and above self”, at the same time Reynolds noted that “she has taken the communities that she has been a part of” and ensured that they “have a voice” and “that they are included in conversations”.As Americans watched Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House and Harris as vice-president sitting behind Biden as he gave his first address to Congress in April 2021, they were reminded of how women are increasingly occupying positions of power. The numbers tell a similar story. According to data provided by the Center for American Women and Politics, in 2017 the US had 105 female members of Congress out of 535. Today the number has reached 150, including rising stars such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett.“We still have a long way to go,” said Reynolds. But people no longer hear the word “candidate” “with the assumption that a candidate is a man”.“And that’s progress,” she added.At Harris’s closing address in Washington DC, Elaine Callahan, a self-described independent voter, felt compelled to back Harris in 2024: “It is historic. Yes!”But as polls show Harris and Trump neck and neck in many swing states, she remembers what happened to Clinton back in 2016 and is prompted to “pray to God there will be a shift”. More

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      When Trump says he’s going to ‘protect’ women, he means ‘control’ them | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Could Republicans take away a woman’s right to a credit card?“Hello, I’d like a line of credit, please.”“Well, before we can even consider that, are you married? Are you taking a contraceptive pill? And can your husband co-sign all the paperwork so we know you have a man’s permission?”That may not be an exact rendition of an actual conversation between a woman and a US bank manager in 1970, but it’s close enough. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, it was considered good business practice for banks to discriminate against women. It didn’t matter how much money she had – a woman applying for a credit card or loan could expect to be asked invasive questions by a lender and told she needed a male co-signer before getting credit. All of which severely limited a woman’s ability to build a business, buy a house or leave an abusive relationship.Then came the ECOA, which was signed into law 50 years ago on Monday. Banking didn’t magically become egalitarian after that – discriminatory lending practices are still very much an issue – but important protections were enshrined in law. A woman finally had a right to get a credit card in her own name, without a man’s signature.When things feel bleak – and things feel incredibly bleak at the moment – it is important to remember how much social progress has been made in the last few decades. Many of us take having access to a credit card for granted, but it’s a right that women had to fight long and hard for. Indeed, the ECOA was passed five years after the Apollo 11 mission. “Women literally helped put a man on the moon before they could get their own credit cards,” the fashion mogul Tory Burch wrote for Time on the 50th anniversary of the ECOA being signed.If feels fitting that such an important anniversary is so close to such an important election. While we must celebrate how far we’ve come, it’s also important to remember that progress isn’t always linear. Rights that we have taken for granted for decades can, as we saw with the overturning of Roe v Wade, be suddenly yanked away.Is there any chance that, if Donald Trump gets into power again, we might see Republicans take away a woman’s right to her own credit card? It’s certainly not impossible. Trump’s entire campaign is, after all, about taking America back. The former president has also cast himself as a paternalistic protector of women.“I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday. “I’m going to protect them.”Of course, we all know what “protect” really means in this context: it means “control”. Should he become president again, Trump and his allies seem intent on massively expanding the power of the president and eliminating hard-won freedoms. Conservative lawmakers and influencers want to control a woman’s access to reproductive healthcare. They want to control the sorts of books that get read and the type of history that gets taught. They want to control how women vote. They want to control whether a woman can get a no-fault divorce. They might not take away women’s access to credit, but they will almost certainly try to chip away at a woman’s path to financial independence.Elon Musk denies offering sperm to random acquaintancesA recent report from the New York Times alleges that he wants to build a compound to house his many children and some of their mothers. “Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr Musk seems to want to make even bigger,” the Times notes. Apparently, in an effort to do this, he has been offering his sperm to friends and acquaintances. Musk has denied all this. This joins a growing list of sperm-based denials. Over the summer, he denied claims in the New York Times that he’d volunteered his sperm to help populate a colony on Mars.Martha Stewart criticises Netflix film that ‘makes me look like a lonely old lady’The businesswoman was also upset that director RJ Cutler didn’t put Snoop Dogg on the soundtrack: “He [got] some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”JD Vance thinks white kids are pretending to be trans so they can get into collegeLike pretty much everything the vice-presidential candidate says, this is insulting and nonsensical. Rather than having advantages conferred on them, trans people in the US are subject to dehumanizing rhetoric and laws that want to outlaw their existence. Meanwhile, it is well-documented that there are plenty of privileged children whose parents spent a lot of money so their kids could pretend to be athletes to get into college.What happened to the young girl captured in a photograph of Gaza detainees?The BBC tells the story of a young girl photographed among a group of men rounded up by Israeli forces. In her short life, Julia Abu Warda, aged three, has endured more horror than most of us could imagine.Pregnant Texas teen died after three ER visits due to medical impact of abortion banNevaeh Crain, 18, is one of at least two Texas women who have died under the state’s abortion ban.Sudan militia accused of mass killings and sexual violence as attacks escalateThe war in Sudan, which has displaced more than 14 million people, is catastrophic – particularly for girls and women. In a new report, a UN agency said that paramilitaries are preying on women and sexual violence is “rampant”. And this violence is being enabled by outside interests: many experts believe that, if it weren’t for the United Arab Emirates’ alleged involvement in the war, the crisis would already be over. The UAE, you see, is interested in Sudan’s resources. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported back in June that UK government officials have attempted to suppress criticism of the UAE for months.The week in pawtriarchyYou’ve almost certainly heard of the infinite monkey theorem: the idea that, given all the time in the world, a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, two Australian mathematicians have declared the notion im-paw-ssible. Indeed, they only found a 5% chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “bananas” in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the Guardian notes that Shakespeare’s canon includes 884,647 words – none of them “banana”. More

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      ‘Take these attacks seriously’: journalist Imara Jones on the dangerous rise of anti-trans political ads

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      Imara Jones was filming a documentary on a road trip in California when she took a break to scroll the news. A story about state lawmakers in Idaho banning transgender girls from playing on female sports teams at public schools caught her attention; it was the second anti-trans legislation that Jones had seen passed in 2020. She turned to her producer and told her that they needed to look into “this anti-trans stuff”. Dozens of similar bills were introduced in statehouses throughout the nation soon after.A year later, Jones launched her podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality to look into the religious extremists, conservative political groups and billionaires pushing an anti-trans agenda.Since then, the urgency of her work has only grown. Republicans have spent more than $65m on anti-trans television ads in recent months, according to the New York Times, despite the negative impact that they have on trans people’s safety and wellbeing, and scant evidence of its effectiveness in swaying voters. And in 2023 and 2024, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced each year.On her podcast, Jones – a Black trans journalist and founder of the platform TransLash Media – investigates the anti-trans industry with a conversational tone, all while centering the voices and experiences of trans people. “I have a belief that when you see the same thing happening in different parts of the country at the same time, that that’s something to look into,” Jones said. “I think that coincidence is always great as a fertile ground for journalism and for looking under the hood about what’s going on.”In the first episode of this year’s season, Jones looks at how the paramilitary group Proud Boys uses anti-trans rhetoric to stoke political upheaval. Far-right militia groups have grown at unprecedented numbers in recent years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), while political violence in general has also increased.For trans people, such rhetoric can lead to increased violence against them, as well as suicidal ideation. A recent report from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group The Trevor Project found that suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary youth increased by up to 72% in states that enacted anti-trans laws.“We know that trans people overall have been facing more violence since there’s been an uptick in anti-trans rhetoric in terms of hate crimes,” Jones said. “So we know that there is an impact on people’s safety and wellbeing solely because of the [public] conversation.”Jones hopes that through her work, that the press and political leaders will begin to see anti-trans rhetoric as a serious threat to democracy and community safety.“The biggest solution is to take these attacks seriously,” Jones said, “to understand the way in which they are being deployed for paramilitary violence, for political violence, to destabilize communities, to undermine democratic conversations politically, to take votes away”.A ‘trans moral panic’Anti-trans ads are being deployed by the Republican party now due to the tightness of the presidential election, according to Jones. During their September debate, for instance, Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s 2019 comments about her support of gender-affirming surgery for imcarcerated trans people. “Anti-trans issues work the best in really tight elections where the margins are really close and you’re just trying to convert one or two votes per precinct, and that’s enough to help you win,” Jones said.Another reason why anti-trans ads are particularly salient now is because the GOP is using them to court voters who supported the Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who ran on an anti-trans platform, she added. Many of those voters are suburban women who lean Republican, but sometimes vote Democrat in local elections. Both parties are now vying for their votes. “Harris is making a play for the Nikki Haley voter, and there’s some indication that she is gaining enough ground to maybe get her over the top,” said Jones. “That’s exactly the type of population that would be receptive to anti-trans messages.”Christian nationalists and rightwing politicians view trans people as collateral damage as they strive for political wins, according to Jones. And bundled in with anti-trans rhetoric is opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. A “trans moral panic” among the far-right has led to an uptick in legislation that bans both DEI policies and trans protections, said Emerson Hodges, a research analyst for the intelligence project at the SPLC. At the Intelligence Project, Hodges tracks hate and extremism through in-person and online monitoring.“Anti-LGBT groups that are in alliances with trans-exclusionary groups also push what they call ‘viewpoint diversity’ to roll back DEI protections in state houses and in corporations,” said Hodges. Billed as the inclusion of various perspectives in an argument, viewpoint diversity is problematic because it promotes this false narrative that DEI is a threat to white Christian men,” he said, “and they utilize that to push these anti-trans, anti-LGBT bills”.Along with an increase in suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary people, anti-trans legislation can lead to violence against trans people of color, said Hodges. Twenty-seven trans people have been killed this year, according to HRC, with 74% of them being people of color and 48% being Black. “When we look at these trends of violence towards trans people,” Hodges said, “it’s important to remember that those trends of violence are affected by legislation and the politicization of trans affirmation.”While Jones began her podcast in 2019 to highlight the dangers of anti-trans legislation, she hopes to one day celebrate the lives of trans people. But first, political leaders must work toward creating a society where trans and gender nonconforming people can live without the fear of violence.“We would love to focus on telling all of the good news and the positive stories that surround trans people from all walks of life and all backgrounds,” Jones said. “But the world’s gonna have to cooperate a little bit to allow us to do that.” More

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      Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden: the ultimate daddy projection screen | V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      I went to the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Or I tried to. I wanted to see it, to feel it, to know it. I spent two hours smushed in a crowd of thousands, waiting in the cold, unable to move, in the midst of belligerent conversations, alcohol consumption, rantings and racist posturings. There were older Jewish men, Black families, Asian couples and young Latina women. I heard south Asian men calling Kamala Harris hateful slurs, others saying women needed to just shut up and listen to men. I saw working men showing off their jackets with artistic renderings of Trump as bullfighter slaying the deep state dragon. What I mainly heard and felt was grievance.I’ve always thought America was a mean place. And what I mean by that is that it’s structured for meanness. It’s a place of winners and losers, people who matter and those who can be disposed of, a country built on violent theft of Indigenous lands and hundreds of years of enslavement of millions of Black people. It’s a place where when a person rises in status, they show it off to those who have less, rather than bringing them along. Where the rich and famous flaunt their wealth and clothes and fabulous lives every single day, and watching is a national past time. A place where most people get lost or abandoned, forgotten or judged. Where an ambitious few can turn that suffering into gold, but most get swallowed in self-hatred and despair.We’re almost 250 years into this American experience and I would say the one common thing that this patriarchal racist capitalism has wrought is a primal insecurity that what you have can easily be taken away and who you are can be suddenly and forever erased.And that insecurity is the rub.For when fascists come, when those narcissistic tyrannical daddy figures arrive looking bigger than life, they instinctively know how to manipulate that insecurity. They usually do it by creating a class of people or a group of people who are less, who are othered, making the majority feel special, superior and safe. It’s the oldest, but most effective trick in the fascist handbook. Externalize the abstract self-hatred and insecurity, turn it into a real enemy and blame everything on them.This demonization was over the top at Madison Square Garden. Whether it was a comedian talking about Puerto Rico “as a floating island of garbage” or suggesting Jews were cheap and Palestinians were rock throwers, or Tucker Carlson deriding Harris – the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father – with a made-up identity saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor to ever be elected president”. Or for that matter almost every speaker mispronouncing Kamala’s name.Then there was Trump rambling on and on for almost an hour, calling those seeking refuge and survival savages, animals, horrible people occupying America, invading it, as if he’d forgotten that except for the Indigenous people who were here and the African Americans who were dragged here in chains, every single other person is an immigrant who came in search of survival, safety and a new life.I’ve always somehow understood the banal evil of Donald Trump. It goes back as far as 1989. That was around the time he was turning a 14-story apartment building in New York City into luxury condos for the rich, attempting to force tenants out of the building by turning off hot water and heat in the middle of winter. We organized an event called Brunch at the Plaza and invited Trump, who at the time owned the hotel. We bussed in hundreds of homeless people and served them brunch on the Plaza lawn. The demand was simple. Give 1.3% of your net income to specific organizations developing housing for the poor. Trump did not attend. Cut to 2015. Months before he declared he was running for office, with a few activists, we invited people to my apartment to see if we could launch Stop Hate Dump Trump. A campaign to stop him from getting traction running for president. Many told us we were crazy and extreme, they told us that no one would ever take that buffoon seriously.Perhaps my own childhood with that same kind of narcissistic, abusive, seductive father was what gave me eyes to see Donald Trump, to understand that he was not necessarily dangerous in what he was (if you emptied that piggy bank nothing would be inside), he was dangerous for what he wasn’t – a shiny American hologram, an all too familiar dream or daddy just out of reach, totally disassociated except when he suddenly exploded with disappointment and rage. This daddy has come home indeed, home to roost, home to turn the house into chaos and terror, home to compare his children with one another so there’s always someone on top and someone stuck on the bottom, creating violent competition and hatred among his children so they never learn cooperation and solidarity, but fight instead with each other for his approval.All night long Trump’s surrogates spun us into an opposite world. They spoke of Trump as a man of peace and love, you know, one of the flawed ordinary people like most of us, an endless victim who has survived lawsuits and impeachment, being thrown off Twitter with no mention of a reason why any of this might have happened. Truth that night was as dispensable as the lives of immigrants, pregnant women, trans kids, critical race theory and our nation’s history. There’s plenty of blame to go around for how we got here. A racist colonialist history that has never been reckoned with, the Democrats settling for the most rudimentary approach to identity politics rather than seeing it as an entryway to an intersectional analysis of race and class. The list goes on.We are a nation of the lonely and abandoned, desperate for belonging and worth. Many have been seduced by Trump. They can’t believe this rich mogul and TV celebrity would actually care about them. And they’re right because there is absolutely no indication that he would ever invite most of the people in the New York crowd to his mansion or golf club. Remember reports of him talking of his followers as “basement dwellers”. He told the packed house on Sunday night that he could be sunning himself on the beach or playing golf at Turnberry in Scotland, but he chose to be there with them as if the act of running for president was the highest form of altruism and not a total power grab. Oh dear generous daddy.But there’s always the real story lurking on the edges, always the corruption and theft and dirty deals, always the sexual violence. A man told a woman I was with that she didn’t look like a typical Trump type. She was an older woman, he said, and most older women don’t like Trump. My friend asked him why he thought that was and he said something about it having to do with sexuality and my friend asked: “You mean because Trump’s a rapist?”But in a land of mirages and heroin dreams, he’s the daddy projection screen. Terror and protector. Killer and fixer. Longed-for object and rapist. In the end thousands of us didn’t get into the Garden. In hindsight I realize I wouldn’t have lasted a minute before getting found out. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the metastasized energy of a nationalistic, racist, misogynist mob in service of its daddy lord.As we walked away, Rudy Giuliani, a major felon and disgrace, barking madness on the jumbotron, a young woman doing an enthusiastic cheerleading act for “daddy Don” with red pompoms, I know more deeply than ever that it’s not enough to get rid of Trump, although that will be a very good thing. We have to devote ourselves to changing the conditions that gave birth to him.

      V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls More

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      Trump ‘roundtable’ in Miami packed with pre-screened ultra-loyalist Latinos

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      It was billed as a roundtable discussion with Latino leaders, but the reality of Donald Trump’s appearance at his Doral golf club in Miami on Tuesday was a succession of adulatory monologues from his most loyal Latino supporters, interspersed with familiar, lengthy rants from the former president laden with grievances and insults.Little of the conversation, such as it was, related to issues directly affecting Latino voters, with whom Trump falsely claimed he was leading in the polls despite significant evidence to the contrary.His remarks about immigration, for example, were largely limited to baseless and often-aired claims that foreign countries, especially Venezuela, were opening their prisons to send “violent gang members” and drug dealers into the US with military weapons.And, his comments addressed to the many business owners and leaders present were distinctly light on policy, apart from a promise to maintain the generous tax cuts from his first term in office.“We gave you the biggest cut in taxes in the history of the country,” he said. “We have a great foundation to build on so we have a lot of companies coming in very fast.”Trump trails Harris in all battleground states among Latinos, a poll for Voto Latino published Monday and cited by the Hill, found, while the most recent AS/COA poll tracker shows a 56-31 preference for Harris nationally among the 36 million eligible Latino voters.Still, there is evidence Trump has been gaining ground, with the Democratic edge among Latino voters at its lowest level in four presidential election cycles, according to NBC News polling.Perhaps with this in mind, Trump was directly appealing to the Latino bloc for the second time in less than a week at Tuesday’s roundtable.“We’re going to talk about what’s happening with the election. We’ll take some questions from the fake news,” he said after a raucous welcome to the stage.Ultimately, he took none, ensuring he would avoid a repeat of his misfire at a town hall hosted by Univision, the largest US Spanish-language network, in Miami last Thursday when he mostly dodged awkward questions about immigration from undecided voters. At that event, he repeated debunked claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets and “other things too that they’re not supposed to”.Tuesday’s audience, a gallery of pre-screened ultra-loyalists at Trump National Doral, appeared unconcerned by the lack of a dialogue, cheering loudly at every insult. Trump called Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the 5 November election, “a stupid person” as he falsely labeled her Joe Biden’s “border tsar” during a brief section on immigration.His remarks segued quickly into an attack on Democrats for allegedly allowing transgender athletes to play women’s sports, and he told a somewhat fanciful tale of “a man who transitioned into, congratulations, a woman” smashing a baseball so hard it hit a female player on the head and “these young ladies said they’d never seen anything like it”.Calling Harris a “radical-left lunatic”, he added: “There’s a sickness going on in our country. We have to end the sickness.”Perhaps sensing things were going off-topic, event host Jennifer Korn, a former White House aide and executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, attempted to interrupt with a: “Mr President … ”“I just want to leave it at that,” Trump said. “Would anybody else like to say anything?”Robert Unanue, the president of Goya Foods, the largest Latino-owned food company in the US, and a longtime vocal cheerleader of the former president and his lies that the 2020 election was stolen, stepped up to take the microphone and deliver a lengthy speech praising Trump.“I can’t believe your courage, your fight, and I know why you’re doing this. You’re not doing it for anything, but because you love this country. You love us, and we love you,” he said.“The other side of loving and building and creating is hating and destroying and dividing, and that’s what’s happened. We have become from the land of opportunity the land of exploitation, and the exploiter-in-chief is Kamala Harris and this administration.”Unanue was not the only Latino business figure heaping praise. Joel Garza, owner of multiple Sonic fast-food franchises and another veteran of the Trump podium, said the former president needed to be re-elected to “help us with banks [and] stop regulations”.“The last three-and-a-half years, the worst years for businesses, inflation, interest rates, with banks, prices, everything, is nothing compared to 2017 to 2020 when you were at the White House,” Garza said.The ultimate adulation, however, came at the conclusion of the roundtable when a group of religious leaders stood around Trump, who was seated at the table, eyes closed, with their hands on his shoulders.“We lift up the man that we believe you’ve put your hand upon to help restore America and bring America back to the place that honors you,” Ramiro Peña, one of Trump’s most influential Latino evangelists, said in a direct appeal to the heavens.Honduran televangelist Guillermo Maldonado, founder of Miami megachurch the King Jesus International Ministry, closed out the event with a prediction Trump would defeat Harris because “there’s a higher assignment for him to finish with this nation”.“This is a war between good and evil,” he insisted. “God sets up kings. He removes kings. We’re going to pray for the will of God to make [Trump] the 47th president.” More

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      Harris maintains lead over Trump among Black swing state voters – poll

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      A new poll has revealed that Kamala Harris continues to lead Donald Trump among Black likely voters in battleground states.The poll, conducted by Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion from 2 October to 8 October, surveyed 981 Black likely voters in the states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The results show that 84% of respondents said they planned to vote for the vice-president, while only 8% said they would support Trump for president in November, and another 8% remained undecided.The survey also identified the most important issues for the respondents, with “democracy/voting rights/elections’” ranked as a top priority, followed by the economy and abortion rights.About 63% of respondents indicated that were “very excited” about voting in November.When asked their opinion of Harris, 61% of respondents expressed a “very favorable” opinion of the vice-president, while only 14% held a “very unfavorable” opinion of her.In contrast, 10% of respondents viewed Trump as “very favorable” and 74% reported a “very unfavorable” opinion of the former president.The margin of error in this poll is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.Harris’s support among Black likely voters in this poll is two percentage points higher than her support in a similar survey conducted in September by Howard University. In that poll, Harris received support among 82% of the respondents.

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      Trump received more support among Black likely voters in that September poll than in the new October poll. In September, 12% of the respondents indicated they would vote for him, compared with 8% this time. That poll also noted that Trump garnered support among Black men in battleground states under the age of 50, with one in five indicating at that time that they would vote for him (though Harris still leads that the group).A recent New York Times/Siena College poll also found that Trump had made gains among young Black and Hispanic male voters.The new poll from Howard University comes as Harris announced a plan this week to enhance economic opportunities for Black men.The plan includes offering forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs, creating more apprenticeships and mentorship programs, and more. More