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    Kamala Harris still needs to define herself – but she is the ultimate anti-Trump candidate | Arwa Mahdawi

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    A week has always been a long time in politics, but this might have been the longest week in Kamala Harris’s life. While Joe Biden is still technically the US president, he already feels irrelevant. All eyes are on Harris now. The speed with which she has gone from being one of the most unpopular vice-presidents in modern history to sitting at the top of the Democratic ticket, with an army of enthusiastic fans behind her, is astounding. Biden’s trajectory has been widely compared to a Shakespearean tragedy; Harris’s sudden reversal of fortune, meanwhile, is like something out of a fairytale.A quick recap: Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on Sunday. The Democratic establishment then threw its weight behind her on Monday. So did hundreds of thousands of donors; Harris’s campaign raked in a record-breaking $81m in just 24 hours. By Tuesday, she had earned enough support from delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president next month. On Wednesday, Democrats approved rules meaning that any Democrat who wants to compete against Harris for the nomination only has days to do so. Then, on Friday, Barack Obama endorsed the vice-president. Her coronation is almost complete.Importantly, Harris doesn’t just have the consolidated support of party elites. She’s also got large swathes of social media cheering her on. The woman has undeniably mementum. “kamala IS brat,” the British pop star Charli xcx posted on X on Sunday. It may not be on the level of an Obama endorsement but Charli’s approval thrust Harris into the middle of the pop-cultural zeitgeist. Charli xcx’s new album, Brat, has undoubtedly been the meme of the summer – the album’s lime-green aesthetic plastered everywhere.In fact, soon after Charli’s approving tweet, @kamalahq changed its backdrop to brat green. Cue a lot of campaign staff trying to explain to high-ranking Democrats like Nancy Pelosi what on earth is going on. (“Well ma’am, Ms xcx, has defined a ‘brat’ as ‘just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it’. Yeah, I know that sounds confusing. But trust me when I say it’ll help us get out the youth vote.”)Harris’s campaign hasn’t just embraced the brats, it’s leaning hard into all the Kamala memes that have been flooding the internet over the past few weeks, including a lot of coconut-related content. That is not a racial slur, I should make clear to British readers, but rather a reference to a speech the vice-president gave in 2023.“My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes,” Harris said at a White House event about educational opportunity. “… and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’” She then paused for profundity before continuing with the philosophical bit. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”The coconut quote – which circulated online long before last week – is quintessential Harris: a bewildering series of words that sound like someone typed “come up with a profound sentence” into an early version of ChatGPT. Lines like this have been a liability in the past, used by her detractors to suggest she’s unserious. The internet, however, is now turning Harris’s unique rhetorical style into an asset. The TikTok mashups and coconut memes have helped inject some much-needed joy and levity into what until now has been an extremely depressing election cycle.At the moment, Harris seems unstoppable. A new Axios/Generation Lab poll shows she’s got a big edge with young voters and another poll has found she’s narrowed Donald Trump’s lead significantly. Nevertheless, it can’t be emphasised enough that we are still very much in the Harris honeymoon phase. People were desperate not to have another Trump-Biden matchup and eager to embrace change of any kind. The question is: can the momentum around Harris be sustained?There is certainly precedent in US elections when it comes to a woman being rapidly built up, only to be swiftly knocked down. And Republicans are already doing their best to knock Harris down with racist and misogynistic attacks. They’ve also attacked her record as vice-president, calling her the “border tsar” and blaming her for the migration crisis.Then there’s the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The internet may have positioned Harris as a lovable goofball now but that image will be hard to sustain among young people if she becomes the face of Biden’s horrific Gaza policy – which has been deeply unpopular with young people and lost the Democrats a lot of support in the important swing state of Michigan, where there is a large Arab American population.So far, Harris has been walking a careful tightrope when it comes to Gaza; trying not to alienate progressives while also making sure she isn’t branded “anti-Israel”. On Wednesday, the vice-president skipped Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress and met him privately instead. On Thursday, she said it was time for a ceasefire deal to be done, but also pledged “unwavering” support for Israel. There’s only so long she can play both sides, however. She will either continue Biden’s policy of letting Israel kill as many Palestinians as it wants, with only meek protestations, or she won’t.Harris will also have to define herself as a candidate more broadly. This has never been one of her strengths and a lack of substance was the undoing of her 2019 attempt to be the Democratic nominee. “She has proved to be an uneven campaigner who changes her message and tactics to little effect and has a staff torn into factions,” the New York Times decreed in a November 2019 piece about how her campaign unravelled.That said, running against her fellow Democrats is very different from running against Trump. While Harris didn’t fully shine as the primary candidate or the vice-president, she has the potential to come into her own now. She is the ultimate anti-Trump. She’s the prosecutor, he’s the felon. He’s the old guy, she’s the relatively young woman. He represents the US’s past, she represents its future. Just a few weeks ago, I was resigned to a Trump win. Now I think the US has a fighting chance of seeing a Madam President.Then again, a week is a long time in politics. And there are still 14 to go before the election.

    Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Conservatives’ racist and sexist attacks on Kamala Harris show exactly who they are | Judith Levine

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      Like a warm compress drawing pus from a wound, the Democratic presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris immediately brought out the misogyny and racism of the Maga Republican party.Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican representative, called Harris, the child of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) hire – picked, that is, because she is Black, not because she’s qualified. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, insinuated that Harris is a welfare queen. “What the hell have you done other than collect a check?” he asked at a Michigan rally of Harris, a former state attorney general, US senator and now the vice-president. At the same time, social media posts showing Harris with her parents falsely claim she’s not really Black, because her father is light-skinned.Popping up again are rumors circulated in 2020 by Trump lawyer John Eastman that Harris is ineligible to run for office because she might not be a citizen. Like Barack Obama, about whom Trump stirred the same “birther” calumny, Harris was born in the US.Far-right blogger Matt Walsh and former Fox host Megyn Kelly suggested Harris slept her way to the top. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer went further, alleging that the veep was “once an escort” who started out by “giving blow jobs to successful, rich, Black men”. The founder of Pastors for Trump tweeted: “Both Joe + the Ho gotta go!”While allegedly copulating with all comers, Harris is slammed for failing in her womanly duty to reproduce. In a video that recently turned up, Vance, the father of three, told Tucker Carlson in 2021 that the US was being run by “childless cat ladies” – Harris among them – who don’t “have a direct stake” in the country’s future. Will Chamberlain, a lawyer who worked on Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, proclaimed that “people without kids … are highly susceptible to corruption and perversion. They have no care for the future and live in the present.”Being a step-parent – as Harris is to her husband’s biological children – doesn’t count, Chamberlain added. This criticism has never been leveled against the childless George Washington – although, to be fair, he was the Father of Our Country.And if misogyny and racism are not sufficient, the right keeps searching for plain weirdness to use against the Democratic candidate. All they’ve come up with, though, is one of her more charming characteristics, her laugh, from which Trump derives his lamest-yet political nickname: “Laughing Kamala”.This stuff is vile to watch. But as with drained pus, it’s got to be exposed to the air. Because it’s not just talk. It reveals what a Trump presidency would mean. By exposing what’s festering barely under the skin of Trumpism, the Republican party is telling us to vote against him.While in office, Trump’s ignorance and incompetence prevented him from accomplishing – or, often, knowing – what he wanted to do. In his madder moments, some of his advisers pulled him back from the edge. But this time, he’s got a team of smart, loyal experts and a detailed plan, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to get it done.In 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s murder spread across the country, Trump gunned to gun down the protesters – literally. “Can’t you just shoot them?” he asked Mark Esper, according to the then defense secretary’s memoir. In another memoir, then Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender quotes the apoplectic president calling on police and the military to “crack [protesters’] skulls” and “beat the fuck” out of them. For the most part, this didn’t happen.Should Project 2025 become reality, however, the commander-in-chief would be freer to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which authorizes him to direct the military to put down domestic unrest. The blueprint also advises the administration to revoke all consent decrees imposing federal oversight on police departments with records of brutality and murder of civilians, particularly civilians of color.The 2024 Republican national convention, featuring Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock and another straight white man on the ticket, was practically a parody of the white hypermasculinity animating the party. But the Republican party promises to force its gender ideology on the rest of us. “Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” reads the platform. Project 2025 proposes that “the redefinition of sex to cover gender identity and sexual orientation … be reversed” and the phrase “sexual orientation and gender identity” be eliminated from anti-discrimination policies across federal agencies. In fact, its aim is to eliminate anti-discrimination policies altogether.And, of course, there’s abortion. In 2016, Trump opined that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Then he walked the statement back. This April, he told a reporter that states should be allowed to punish doctors. “Everything we’re doing now is states and states’ rights,” he elaborated, using the historical code words for legislated racial segregation – now updated to gender oppression. And while he’s distanced himself from a federal abortion ban, Project 2025 is riddled with pledges to protect the safety, dignity and humanity of the unborn.Clueless as he was, Trump attained the right’s holy grail: a supreme court majority that will decimate the civil and human rights of people of color, pregnant people, the poor, immigrants and the marginalized long into the future. The Trump court is already punishing people who seek abortions. Even if Congress founders, this court will realize every racist and misogynist dream.It’s hard to say whether this bigotry will sway voters. A month before the 2016 election, after a campaign of one racist, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic outburst after another, Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” tape was leaked and a dozen women accused the candidate of sexual misconduct. Hillary Clinton surged to a lead of as much as 11 points. Then, FBI director James Comey released a letter equivocating on the extent or importance of those official emails on her private server, and Trump won. It’s still unclear whether the Comey report turned the election. But the pussy-grabbing tape did not.Still, in 2016, Trump was a pig but an untested pig. A lot has happened since then. His presidency was bookended by the Women’s March and the Black Lives Matter protests. In 2017, Tarana Burke’s #MeToo hashtag went viral and rage over sexual harassment exploded. Five years later, Pew Research found that the majority of Americans, including Republicans, felt the #MeToo movement had a positive impact. BLM engaged protesters of every age and race, and antiracist movements continue to. Trump has been convicted of sexual abuse. Now, if anything, Maga is focusing the anger of women and people of color.Republican leaders sense these changes, and they’re worried – worried enough that Richard Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, called a closed-door meeting to tell the caucus to cut the slime and focus on the issues.Maybe they will. But Trump and his nastier champions will not: hatred will continue to ooze from their mouths. Disgusting as it, pay attention. Because sexism and racism are not just talk. They’re policies – the calamitous policies a Trump presidency augurs.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More

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      Fines for child labor violations would increase under new Democratic bill

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      Democrats introduced a bill Friday proposing increased penalties for employers found guilty of child labor violations and toughening rules around minimum wage, overtime violations and breaches of health and safety rules.The Let’s Protect Workers act would also set new penalties for retaliating against workers who exercise their right to take family and medical leave, toughen oversight of workplace injury records, improve mine safety and ensure funding for workers affected by black lung.The bill comes as child labor violations have surged in the US. The Department of Labor reported an increase of 88% in such violations between 2019 and 2023 as Republican states have moved to relax child labor rules. Eight states have passed legislation to roll back child labor protections so far this year.For child labor violations, the US Department of Labor can currently fine employers up to $11,000 per employee who is the subject of a child labor violation and up to $50,000 for each violation that causes injury or death of a minor. The fines can be doubled if the violation is determined to be willful or repeated. The new bill would increase fines up to $150,000 per employee subject to a child labor violation and up to $700,000 for a violation that causes the death or injury of a minor, which still could be doubled for willful or repetitive violations.Wage and hour violations would increase from up to $1,100 per violation to $25,000 per violation, which may be doubled for willful or repetitive violations.“Every American should be fairly compensated and be able to return home safely at the end of the day,” said Robert “Bobby” Scott, Virginia representative and ranking Democratic member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce.“Unfortunately, shortcomings in our labor laws enable unethical employers to exploit workers, endanger children and suppress the right to organize – with little accountability,” Scott said. “That’s why I’m proud to introduce the Let’s Protect Workers act, which will hold bad actors accountable and strengthen penalties for labor law violations. This bill will help level the playing field and, once again, restore the balance of power between workers and their employers.”The bill would also introduce civil monetary penalties for unfair labor practices committed by employers, up to $50,000 per violation. Currently, employers do not face any civil monetary penalties aside from back pay and reinstatement of workers for unfair labor practice charges.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe legislation comes in the wake of a report published by Scott in April 2024 that outlined the ineffectiveness of low or non-existent civil monetary penalties for labor violations committed by employers. The report outlines how current fines and penalties are merely “a slap on the wrist”, with employers facing little to no deterrents to breaking labor laws.“Unfortunately, unscrupulous employers are emboldened to violate these foundational worker rights and protections because of the weak civil monetary penalties assessed in response,” the report noted. “Under some labor and employment laws, workers are worse off as employers face no monetary penalty and can break the law cost-free.” More

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      New York prosecutors urge judge to uphold Trump hush-money conviction – live

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      Prosecutors have asked a judge to reject Donald Trump’s appeal of his conviction in New York on charges related to falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments, the Associated Press reports.Lawyers for the former president earlier this month appealed his conviction, saying a recent supreme court decision shielding presidents from prosecution for official acts applies to his conviction in the case brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.In a response filed today, prosecutors said that was not the case. Here’s more, from the AP:
      The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing that the high court’s opinion “has no bearing” on the hush money case and does not support vacating the jury’s unanimous verdict or dismissing the case.
      Prosecutors said Trump’s lawyers failed to raise the immunity issue in a timely fashion and that, even so, the case involved unofficial acts — many pertaining to events prior to his election — that are not subject to immunity.
      Lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee are trying to get the verdict — and even the indictment — tossed out because of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision. It gave presidents considerable protection from prosecution.
      The ruling came about a month after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records to conceal a deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. At the time, she was considering going public with a story of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, who says no such thing happened. He has denied any wrongdoing.
      Here’s more on what the former president’s lawyers are arguing:Kamala Harris is now meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the vice president’s ceremonial office.Harris did not take questions from reporters ahead of their meeting, but told Netanyahu:
      I look forward to our conversation. We have a lot to talk about.
      “We do indeed,” Netanyahu replied.Family members of American hostages being held captive in Gaza said they held “productive and honest” discussions with Joe Biden and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the White House today.Relatives said they “came today with a sense of urgency” and emphasized the need to reach a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas that could result in the release of their loved ones, AP reported. They said:
      We got absolute commitment from the Biden administration and from prime minister Netanyahu that they understand the urgency of this moment.
      They added that they were more optimistic about a deal than they have been in months.Nikki Haley, in the CNN interview, criticized Republicans who have referred to Kamala Harris as a “DEI” candidate. “It’s not helpful,” the former South Carolina governor said.
      There’s so many issues we can talk about when it comes to Kamala Harris that it doesn’t matter what she looks like. It matters what she’s said, what she’s fought for, and the lack of results that she’s had because of it.
      Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, offered no apologies for the “tough things” she said about Donald Trump during the Republican primary race, but said she did not doubt her decision to support the former president in the November election.Haley, in her first interview since endorsing Trump, told CNN that she was not surprised by Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race. “I didn’t take happiness in it,” Haley said.
      There is an issue we have in DC, where people will go into office and they won’t let go. And then their staffers and their family keep propping them up, and it’s a problem for the American people.
      She argued that the Democrats’ decision to put forward Kamala Harris as their nominee would give them “the weakest candidate they could put in”.Harris “is much more progressive than Joe Biden ever was”, Haley said, adding:
      The fact they put in Kamala Harris – kudos for putting in someone younger – the fact that you put in one of the most liberal politicians you probably could have put in, it’s going to be an issue.
      Elena Kagan, a member of the three-justice liberal minority on the supreme court, said she would support creating an enforcement mechanism for its recently adopted code of ethics, Bloomberg Law reports.The nation’s highest court last year adopted a code setting out “rules and principles that guide the conduct of members of the court” following media reports of connections between conservative justices and parties with cases before the judges. However, the code was criticized for having no enforcement mechanism, leaving the judges to essentially enforce it on themselves.According to Bloomberg Law, Kagan told a judicial conference in California that if chief justice John Roberts creates “some sort of committee of highly respected judges with a great deal of experience and a reputation for fairness” to enforce the code, she would approve.In the months since the code was adopted, conservative justice Samuel Alito was reported to have flown flags connected to rightwing causes at his property, sparking further uproar over the court’s impartiality.Here’s a look back at when the ethics code was originally created:Joe Biden greeted Benjamin Netanyahu this afternoon at the White House, the day after the Israeli prime minister addressed Congress in a speech boycotted and criticized by many of the president’s fellow Democrats:“We’ve known each other for 40 years, and you’ve known every Israeli prime minister for 50 years. So, from a proud Zionist Jew to a proud Zionist Irish American I want to thank you for 50 years of public service and 50 years of support for the State of Israel. I look forward to discussing with you today thank you,” Netanyahu told Biden in the Oval Office.He was the first foreign leader to meet the US president since he abandoned his bid for a second term.The two leaders then met in private with the families of Americans taken hostage by Hamas in the 7 October attack. Kamala Harris is scheduled to meet separately with Netanyahu this afternoon.In addition to catching up to Donald Trump in polls of voters nationwide, the Guardian’s Melissa Hellmann reports that Kamala Harris is much more trusted than the former president among African Americans:A vast majority of Black Americans trust Kamala Harris and distrust Donald Trump – 71% compared to 5% – according to the largest-known survey of Black Americans since the Reconstruction era. The survey of 211,219 Black people across all 50 states showed that the presumptive Democratic nominee may have a higher chance of winning over Black voters than the Republican candidate.At a virtual press conference on Thursday afternoon, the Black-led innovation thinktank Black Futures Lab, revealed findings from its 2023 Black Census, which was conducted with the help of 50 Black-led grassroots organizations and national partners across the country from February 2022 to October 2023. The latest survey garnered seven times the respondents from the first census in 2018, which received 30,000 responses. Two-thirds of the respondents were women, a majority were from the south, and nearly half were from 45 to 64 years old. Black Futures Lab believes that the census results will help inform voter mobilization efforts ahead of presidential and local elections.“For us to be powerful in politics, we must control the agenda,” said Black Futures Lab’s field director Natishia June at the press conference. “This is why the Black Census is crucial.”Prosecutors have asked a judge to reject Donald Trump’s appeal of his conviction in New York on charges related to falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments, the Associated Press reports.Lawyers for the former president earlier this month appealed his conviction, saying a recent supreme court decision shielding presidents from prosecution for official acts applies to his conviction in the case brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.In a response filed today, prosecutors said that was not the case. Here’s more, from the AP:
      The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing that the high court’s opinion “has no bearing” on the hush money case and does not support vacating the jury’s unanimous verdict or dismissing the case.
      Prosecutors said Trump’s lawyers failed to raise the immunity issue in a timely fashion and that, even so, the case involved unofficial acts — many pertaining to events prior to his election — that are not subject to immunity.
      Lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee are trying to get the verdict — and even the indictment — tossed out because of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision. It gave presidents considerable protection from prosecution.
      The ruling came about a month after a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty of falsifying business records to conceal a deal to pay off porn actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election. At the time, she was considering going public with a story of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, who says no such thing happened. He has denied any wrongdoing.
      Here’s more on what the former president’s lawyers are arguing:In remarks to reporters as she deplaned after returning to Washington DC, Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of trying to cancel the second presidential debate, which is scheduled for 10 September.“I’m ready to debate Donald Trump. I have agreed to the previously agreed upon September 10 debate. He agreed to that previously,” the vice-president said.“Now, here he is backpedaling and I’m ready and I think the voters deserve to see the split screen that exists in this race on a debate stage. And so, I’m ready to go.”The polls published by the New York Times and Siena College over the past year have been among the most talked about surveys in US politics – perhaps because they have typically shown Joe Biden struggling to match Donald Trump’s support.In an analysis of their latest batch of data, which is the first with Kamala Harris as the Democratic contender, Nate Cohn, the Times’s chief political analyst, writes that this poll is much different than those that came before it. Here’s why:
      Mr. Trump hits a high in popularity. Overall, 48 percent of registered voters say they have a favorable view of him, up from 42 percent in our last poll (taken after the debate but before the convention and assassination attempt). It’s his highest favorable number in a Times/Siena poll, which previously always found his favorable ratings between 39 percent and 45 percent.
      Ms. Harris is surging. In fact, her ratings have increased even more than Mr. Trump’s. Overall, 46 percent of registered voters have a favorable view of her, up from 36 percent when we last asked about her in February. Only 49 percent have an unfavorable view, down from 54 percent in our last measure. As important, her favorable rating is higher than Mr. Biden’s. In fact, it’s higher than his standing in any Times/Siena poll since September 2022, which so happens to be the last time Mr. Biden led a Times/Siena national poll of registered voters.
      The national political environment is a little brighter. The share of voters who say the country is on the “right track” is up to 27 percent – hardly a bright and smiley public, but still the highest since the midterm elections in 2022. Mr. Biden’s approval and favorable ratings are up as well. The ranks of the double haters have dwindled: With both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump riding high, the number of voters who dislike both candidates has plunged to 8 percent, down from 20 percent in Times/Siena polls so far this year.
      He concludes with:
      With all of these underlying changes in the attitudes about the candidates, there’s no reason to assume that this familiar Trump +1 result means that the race has simply returned to where it stood before the debate. For now, these developments have mostly canceled out, but whether that will still be true in a few weeks is much harder to say.
      New polling indicates Kamala Harris has re-engaged voters turned off by Joe Biden’s candidacy, and is vying closely against Donald Trump in crucial swing states.While it’s unclear if the vice-president has the overall advantage, the data is a reversal of fortune for the Democrats, who had grown nervous after months of polling had showed Biden at best tied, or at worst trailing, Trump nationally and in the states along the Great Lakes and in the southern Sun belt whose voters are set to decide the election.The closely watched New York Times/Siena College poll found that among likely voters nationwide, Trump has only a one-point lead. In their previous survey following the Trump-Biden debate, the former president led by six points:Emerson College found that Trump leads in most swing states, albeit narrowly and with Wisconsin tied:However, that data was far better than Biden’s numbers in those states the last time Emerson polled voters on his candidacy.“Harris has recovered a portion of the vote for the Democrats on the presidential ticket since the fallout after the June 27 debate,” said executive director of Emerson College Polling Spencer Kimball. “Harris’ numbers now reflect similar support levels to those of Biden back in March.”Some Democratic and labor leaders from battleground states joined the DNC press call today, and reported genuine and widespread enthusiasm for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.“There’s a lot of excitement on the ground,” said Yolanda Bejarano, chair of the Arizona Democratic party. “We are seeing just a lot of folks coming out, trying to find out what they can do to volunteer, to help get Vice-President Harris elected.”Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, described the environment in the battleground state as “electric” and echoed Harris’s message that Americans “won’t go back” to a time of fewer rights.“Trump was devastating to the auto industry and auto workers here in Michigan. They are not going to go backwards. We’re moving forward,” Bieber said.“President Biden and Vice-President Harris have been the biggest supporters of union workers and the auto industry here in Michigan, and people are fired up. I’ve been doing this stuff a long time now, and I’ve never seen the energy and excitement as I am right now.”The Democratic national committee held a press call today to attack Donald Trump and JD Vance for their “anti-worker” agenda, after Republicans spent much of their convention pitching themselves as economic populists.“It’s more of that trickle-down economic fairytale that has never worked. It has gutted so much of our economy. It’s hurt working people; it’s hurt the labor movement,” said Congressman Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania.“It’s been great for big corporations and billionaires and Wall Street. It is fiscally irresponsible, and we can’t let it happen again.”Touting the legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, Deluzio argued Kamala Harris would continue the president’s pro-labor record if she wins in November.“We’re going to take more strong action to bring home offshore jobs, to bring home more manufacturing, to defend the ability and the freedom for folks to form and join the union,” Deluzio said. “That’s the backbone of the union way of life.”Republican congressman and former White House doctor Ronny Jackson accused the FBI director, Christopher Wray, of making a “politically motived move” when he told Congress that it was not yet clear if the former president was hit by a bullet or shrapnel after a gunman opened fire at his rally in Pennsylvania.Following the assassination attempt, Jackson issued a memo offering some details of the wound Trump suffered. Before we get into what he said about the FBI director, it’s worth noting that Jackson denied that Trump had contracted Covid-19 back in 2020, before being refuted by an official in the then-president’s administration.Anyway, here’s the tweet: More

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      The Republican party remains the party of denying women human rights | Rebecca Solnit

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      The Republican party of the United States remains the party of denying women fundamental human rights. The US press as a whole remains the instrument of softening up or ignoring this reality.“Trump has long been criticized for his public treatment of women,” ran a CNN headline. “The ones in his life argue he’s different in private.” What follows is a puff piece in which prominent Republican women say nice things about him, and his history of alleged sexual assault is mentioned several paragraphs down.The first Mrs Trump is no longer in his life, though she’s buried on his New Jersey golf course, but she charged him with raping her – at home, in private – in her 1990 sworn divorce testimony. E Jean Carroll is only casually in his life, but she won a civil lawsuit against him for sexual assault in the privacy of a department store dressing room and a second one for public defamation, and he owes her tens of millions of dollars for these cases. CNN does get around to mentioning Carroll in passing, but praise from Trump’s protege Sarah Huckabee Sanders and his lawyer and daughter-in-law get the lionesses’ share of attention, and headlines are often all viewers read.Rape is an assault on the victim’s body but also on her (or his or their) agency and right to bodily autonomy, though the assault on agency and autonomy can and does take many forms – and the Republican party and its candidates for president and vice-president support many of them. The Republican party has uncomplainingly offered up an adjudicated rapist as their presidential candidate and rallied behind a vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, who has shown great enthusiasm for denying women basic rights and safety and sometimes survival.One of the crucial ways Vance has sought to deny women basic rights is by what has been dubbed menstrual surveillance. In 2023, the federal Department of Health and Human Services proposed a revision to medical privacy regulations “to shield the protected health information of patients seeking lawful reproductive health care from disclosure for the purpose of criminal, civil, and administrative investigations”. Vance was one of the eight Republican senators who filed a letter of protest declaring: “Under the Proposed Rule, however, States would be forced to cede their powers to investigate criminal abortion-related activity.”In other words, the revision would protect women’s right to privacy around pregnancy and birth control-related healthcare, and Vance was having none of it. As Talking Points Memo put it: “The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. But to enforce these laws or know when there’s something to enforce you really need access to medical records. You need to know and be able to prove when a woman was pregnant and then, before the end of normal gestation, stopped being pregnant.”In other words, to carry out these laws, the state needs to criminalize being female and fertile and put those who are under surveillance. Vance is an anti-abortion hardliner who supports a national abortion ban with no exceptions. He’s also taken to sneering at women who don’t have children, which is, I suppose, consistent with his attacks on reproductive rights and advocacy of regressive gender roles.Another way Vance supported violence against women is with his infamous 2022 declaration that women should stay in violent marriages for the sake of the kids. “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,” but ending them “didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages”.It’s an astonishing statement if an insufficiently unusual one, the idea that the heterosexual two-parent household is somehow so magically beneficent that even if the dad is beating the mom, it’s better for the kids than having an unbattered mom and a peaceful home.Vance defended his statement by saying: “In fact, modern society’s war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse,” which is outrageously untrue. The feminist movement brought attention to domestic violence, created domestic violence shelters, put pressure on law enforcement to address that violence, and worked to give women the economic equality and rights that give them more power to leave abusers. The cumulative effect of these measures has, along with a new ethos recognizing that women are possessed of certain inalienable rights, reduced the incidence of this often-hidden crime.What breaks up families in which there is violence is the violence, not the victims’ ability to escape that violence. The man who is beating his wife is often also beating his children, and intimate-partner violence all too often ends in the victim’s death, especially if there are guns on hand. One parent killing the other is bad for the kids, too, and male partners are the leading cause of death for pregnant women and women who have recently given birth in the USA, which the right-to-life advocates should show an interest in – but don’t.This is why coercive control, including intimate-partner violence (IPV), and abortion are not separate issues. The man who is beating his wife may also be raping her or engaging in sexual and reproductive coercion, in this country where feminists first made marital rape a concept and then got it recognized by the law (only in 1993 did all US states recognize marital rape, but there are still many loopholes, including states that don’t recognize marital rape in cases when the partner was unconscious or incapacitated). And that brings us back to reproductive rights.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that reproductive coercion includes “explicit attempts to impregnate a partner against her will, control outcomes of a pregnancy, coerce a partner to have unprotected sex, and interfere with contraceptive methods”.The college’s website adds: “One quarter of adolescent females reported that their abusive male partners were trying to get them pregnant through interference with planned contraception, forcing the female partners to hide their contraceptive methods,” and: “One study found that women with unintended pregnancies were four times more likely to experience IPV than women whose pregnancies were intended.”In other words, a lot of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies are the result of male coercion, not, as the right would have you believe, female carelessness. Which is why abortion is a crucial part of reproductive rights; a person whose pregnancy was the result of the violation of her rights needs to retain the right to terminate it. Pregnancy, as many women who have borne children have reminded us recently, is a life-changing experience that can result in incapacitation, lasting injury, economic hardship including the inability to work and care for other children, and sometimes death, especially in the absence of adequate medical care.The denial of access to abortion is bringing women in states such as Texas and Idaho to the brink of death – as the journalist Jessica Valenti recently reported.Idaho women are weekly being airlifted to states where they can receive life-saving healthcare and doctors are sometimes recommending they buy evacuation insurance. Valenti also reports: “Rape victims are being denied emergency contraception in medical centers and hospital emergency rooms” because the war against reproductive rights is expanding to go after in-vitro fertilization and birth control, two more ways women can choose whether and how to have children.In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes of his grandfather: “I couldn’t believe that mild-mannered Papaw, who I adored as a child, was such a violent drunk.” In the next sentence, he blames his grandmother: “His behavior was due at least partly to Mamaw’s disposition,” adding: “she’d fight back. In short, she devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell,” itemizing more of her violence than his, though he does mention in passing the grandfather also gave his own daughter a black eye when she tried to break up a fight between the couple. It’s not hard to imagine this poor woman first impregnated by this man when she was 13 stayed with him for lack of better options; it’s clear Vance approves of her staying.The November election is a referendum on major issues – the climate, the economy, the survival of democracy in America, the makeup of the supreme court – other than the personalities of the candidates on the top of the ticket. The horse-race journalism and its relentless focus on Biden’s age and oratorical shortcomings obscured that. But those personalities connect to the issues, and while perhaps Biden’s decades of leadership on legislation on violence against women is no longer relevant, the bill itself is.It was reauthorized and expanded in 2022 to add protections for Native American, trans and immigrant women, and to address cyberstalking and cyberporn. The majority of Republicans in the House and Senate voted against it. On the other hand, we now have a race for the presidency between a prosecutor and a man convicted of 34 felonies, with a Yale law school graduate on the ticket with Trump: the JD Vance of 2016 tweeted: “What percentage of the American population has @realDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” but the JD Vance of 2024 has made it clear he doesn’t care. More

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      Republican attacks on Kamala Harris to get ‘as ugly and bigoted as they can’

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      For Barack Obama there was “birtherism” and a name they said sounded like a specific Middle East terrorist. For Hillary Clinton there was “Lock her up” and merchandise that said, “Trump that bitch”, “Hillary sucks but not like Monica” and “Life’s a bitch: don’t vote for one.”Rightwing playbooks deployed in past election campaigns are being dusted off for an all-out assault against Vice-President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee aiming to become the first Black woman and first person of south Asian descent to be US president.“It’s obvious that the Republicans are going to play the race and gender card, which we’ve seen already in some of the attacks on social media,” said Tara Setmayer, a Black woman who is co-founder and chief executive of the Seneca Project, a women-led super political action committee. “It may be catnip for their Maga base but it will be a turnoff for the moderate voters in the battleground states that will determine this election.”Harris’s sudden ascent after 81-year-old Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election has upended the race for the White House, giving Democrats a much-needed jolt of energy and instantly turned the tables on Republicans on the question of age: Donald Trump, 78, is now the oldest presidential nominee in history.Having built a campaign against Biden, Republicans are hastily recalibrating and racing to define Harris, 59, before she can define herself. They intend to tie her to Biden’s immigration policy, which they say is to blame for a sharp increase last year in the number of people crossing the southern border with Mexico illegally.The Trump campaign has been quick to brand her Kamala “Border Czar” Harris because, in March 2021, she was put in charge of the administration’s diplomatic campaign to address the “root causes” of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.Trump also regularly blames migrants who are in the US illegally for fuelling violent crime, even though studies show that immigrants are not more likely to engage in criminality. His oft-repeated phrase “Biden Migrant Crime” is now defunct.A second line of attack will revolve around the economy. Public opinion polls consistently show Americans are unhappy with high food and fuel costs as well as interest rates that have made buying a home less affordable.Make America Great Again, a Super Pac backing Trump, has run an ad accusing Harris of hiding Biden’s infirmity from the public, and it seeks to pin the administration’s record solely on her. “Kamala knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it. Look what she got done: a border invasion, runaway inflation, the American Dream dead,” the narrator says.Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant and pollster, said: “It’s difficult to identify a state that Kamala Harris will carry that Joe Biden wouldn’t. She inherits many of the negative attitudes about the Biden-Harris administration from criticisms of their handling of the economy and inflation to her primary responsibility: illegal immigration.”Harris had one of the most liberal voting records during her time in the Senate and ran to the left of Biden on some issues in the 2020 Democratic primary election. She also hails from California, a state constantly demonised as elitist and “woke” in Republican rhetoric. This opens her to criticism to which Biden, a moderate from Delaware with a history of bipartisanship, was immune.In a phone call with reporters on Tuesday, Trump said: “She’s the same as Biden but much more radical. She’s a radical left person and this country doesn’t want a radical left person to destroy it. She’s far more radical than he is. She wants open borders. She wants things that nobody wants. You take a look at the electric car mandate – everything.”The former president added: “If she becomes president, Kamala Harris will make the invasion exponentially worse, and just like she did with San Francisco, just like she did with the border, our whole country will be permanently destroyed.”Trump is willing to go lower. Known for using offensive language to attack his opponents, he gave supporters at a rally in Michigan on Saturday a taste of the insults he is likely to fling at Harris in the coming days. “I call her Laffin’ Kamala,” he said. “You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She’s crazy. She’s nuts.”View image in fullscreenAmerica has been here before. Obama faced hostile scrutiny over his origins and name. The conspiracy theory that he was born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible for the US presidency, was promoted by Trump as he began his foray into national politics. In 2020 Trump claimed that he had “heard” that Harris – born in Oakland, California to an Indian mother and Jamaican father – “doesn’t qualify” to serve as vice-president.This week, the spectre of birtherism has returned. Tom Fitton, president of the rightwing activist group Judicial Watch, asked his 2.6 million followers on the X social media platform: “Is Kamala Harris eligible to be president under the US Constitution’s ‘Citizenship Clause?’” He was far from alone in pushing such arguments.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarris’s racial identity is already being questioned. Erick Erickson, an influential conservative radio host in Atlanta, Georgia, tweeted: “Kamala Harris is the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants who married a Jewish man. Her experience is the American dream and melting pot, but not really the black experience, particularly that in southern swing states like Georgia and North Carolina.”When Clinton ran for president in 2016, she received sexist comments “on a constant basis”, her former aide Huma Abedin later recalled. Trump himself remarked: “I just don’t think she has a presidential look. And you need a presidential look. You have to get the job done.”Republicans’ focus on Harris is proving no less personal, from mispronouncing her name and mocking her laugh (“Cackling Kamala”) to invoking diversity, equity and inclusion programmes by suggesting that she would be the “first DEI president”. At a campaign rally Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, compared his service in the Marine Corps and small business ownership to Harris “collecting a government paycheque for the last 20 years”.And Megyn Kelly, a rightwing podcaster, tweeted without evidence: “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics and most women (and men) may learn that and see it for what it is: evidence of an unqualified political aspirant getting ahead based on smthg other than merit.”Kelly was referring to the claim that Harris got a career boost by having an affair with a married man, the California politician Willie Brown. In fact Brown was separated from his wife during the relationship, which was not a secret. He wrote an article in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper in 2020 under the headline: “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?”David Brock, founder and chairman of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, said attacks “emerging right out of the box are that she is unqualified, that she was a diversity hire pick in the first place and the only reason the party is sticking with her is because of her race and gender. That’s a way of trying to undermine her and her qualifications for the office.“The second thing is the idea that she was actually the power behind the throne and part of an effort to cover up Biden’s actual condition and was pulling the strings all along, which is obviously not the case and is a sexist trope too.”Brock, a former conservative journalist turned Democratic operative, predicted: “The sex attacks will probably be more insidious because they have a racial subtext to them. The same playbook that we saw in 16 we’ll see again and probably even more eagerly because the right wing has gotten more Maga, more extreme in the years since Hillary ran.”Blatant misogyny and racism could alienate the very swing state voters that Trump needs for victory. But even if he is advised to tone down such rhetoric, an entire army of influencers and pundits are ready to flood the zone on his behalf.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman and Tea Party activist turned Trump critic, said: “Trump himself is going to have a hard time running against her because he doesn’t know how to deal with someone like her. But Trump’s cheerleaders in the media know exactly what to do and they’ll go down this ugly, sexist, racist road.“They’ll make up stuff about how Kamala Harris rose in her career. Their key to winning – and I know this because I used to do some of this – is to get as ugly and bigoted as they can to implicitly and explicitly get people pissed off about who she is.” More

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      House to form taskforce to investigate Trump assassination attempt

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      The House voted on Wednesday to form a taskforce to investigate the security failures surrounding the assassination attempt against Donald Trump earlier this month.The vote underscores the bipartisan outrage over the shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump came within inches of losing his life. One rally-goer was killed and two others severely injured. Lawmakers have responded quickly with hearings and widespread calls for accountability.The legislation passed by a vote of 416-0.The taskforce will be composed of 13 members and is expected to include seven Republicans and six Democrats. It will be tasked with determining what went wrong on the day of the attempted assassination and will make recommendations to prevent future security lapses. It will issue a final report before 13 December and has the authority to issue subpoenas.The bill is sponsored by Republican congressman Mike Kelly, whose home town of Butler was the site of the shooting. Kelly was at the rally with his wife and other family members.“I can tell you that my community is grieving,” Kelly said. “They are shocked by what happened in our backyard. The people of Butler and the people of the United States deserve answers.”He said he was concerned when the site of the rally was picked because he thought it would be “a difficult place to have a rally of that size.” He called the taskforce a chance to build trust with Americans that lawmakers can work together to tackle a crisis.House committees have already held three hearings focusing on the shooting. The Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday, one day after she appeared before a congressional committee and was berated for hours by Democrats and Republicans for the security failures.She called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades, but she angered lawmakers by failing to answer specific questions about the investigation.Democrats also voiced support for the taskforce, saying what happened in Butler was a despicable attack that never should have happened.“We need to know what happened. We need to get to the truth. We need to prevent this from ever, ever happening again,” said Congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat. More

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      Netanyahu says Israel aiming for ‘total victory’ in Gaza as number of protesters arrested in Congress – live

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      Benjamin Netanyahu says that Israel will achieve “total victory” and that it will settle for “nothing less”.Total victory, he says, means that Israel will fight until it destroys Hamas’s military capability, end its rule in Gaza and bring all the hostages home.The Israeli prime minister moves on to talk about a post-war Gaza, and says that “a new Gaza could emerge” the day after Hamas is defeated.He says that his vision for a post-war Gaza is of a “demilitarized and de-radicalized Gaza”, adding:
      Israel does not seek to settle Gaza. But for the foreseeable future, we must retain overriding security control there to prevent the resurgence of terror, to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.
      Netanyahu says that Gaza should have a civilian administration “run by Palestinians who do not seek to destroy Israel” and that a new generation of Palestinians “must no longer be taught to hate Jews”.He notes that the terms “demilitarization” and “deradicalization” were applied to Germany and Japan after the second world war, and that applied to Gaza “can also lead to a future of security, prosperity and peace”. “That’s my vision for Gaza,” Netanyahu says.Connecticut senator Chris Murphy reacted to Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, asserting that it’s out of bounds to suggest that anyone who objects to the war in Gaza is a “Hamas sympathizer.”“That speech was, as I expected, a setback for both the U.S.-Israel relationship and the fight against Hamas” Murphy said on X.During his address, Netanyahu likened that the thousands of protestors demonstrating at capitol hill as Hamas sympathizers. “Many anti-Israel protesters choose to stand with evil,” he said. “Many stand with Hamas.As Netanyahu address Congress today, demonstrators marched in Washington DC, calling on the US to end arms sales to Israel and to implement an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.Our video editors have this report of Netanyahu’s visit to DC:Here are images from around Capitol Hill today, where thousands gathered to protest Israel’s bombardment of Gaza ahead of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress.The Democratic party has announced the rules for the nomination of its presidential candidate, setting the stage for Kamala Harris to be officially chosen as the party’s standard bearer in early August before the party’s convention in Chicago begins later that month.According to rules adopted today by the convention’s rules committee, candidates will declare their intention to stand by 27 July, and then voting can begin virtually by 1 August at the earliest. Delegates will convene in Chicago beginning 19 August “to approve the Democratic Party platform, have ceremonial and celebratory votes on the nominees, and host historic acceptance speeches from the new Democratic ticket and voices throughout the Party”, the Democrats said in a statement.Harris, who announced her candidacy on Sunday, has said she has enough delegates to win the party’s presidential nomination, and no other major candidate has come forward to challenge her.Democratic representative Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian American in Congress, held up a sign accusing Benjamin Netanyahu of genocide during his speech today.She had this to say about it:Separately, Axios reports that about half of the Democrats elected to the House and Senate opted to skip the Israeli prime minister’s speech:Jean-Pierre also elaborated on Joe Biden’s timeline for revealing his decision to end his bid for a second term.The president, who had been recovering from Covid-19 at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, announced the decision with a post made on X, without warning, on Sunday afternoon. Jean-Pierre shed a little bit more light on the lead-up to that:
      He met with a small group of advisers on Saturday evening and with his family, and was thinking through how to move forward. Sunday afternoon, he made that decision. It was in a very short period of time, as you can imagine. And then at 1.45 [pm], he got on the phone with some of his assistants, assistant to the president, some advisers. He let them know, and then minutes later, a letter went out.
      So, it was in a very short period of time that the president was able to think about this and make a decision.
      Over at the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is holding the first briefing with reporters since Joe Biden announced he would end his bid for a second term.Besides a letter he released on social media, the president has not elaborated on his decision, but plans to do so when he addresses the nation from the Oval Office at 8pm ET, Jean-Pierre said.“The decision that he made on Sunday was about putting country first, was about his party and was about the American people,” Jean-Pierre said.“He’s going to be on camera later today, obviously, to address the American people from the Oval Office, because of this moment and how big this moment is. He wants to do that. He wants to make sure that Americans hear directly from him.”Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that every man, woman and child in Gaza is receiving more than enough food.“The prosecutor of the international criminal court has shamefully accused Israel of deliberately starving the people of Gaza: This is utter, complete nonsense. It’s a complete fabrication. Israel has enabled more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. That’s half a million tons of food!” he said, wagging his finger.According to data released by the United Nations, a total of 25,183 trucks entered Gaza before Israeli forces stormed the Rafah crossing in May, which affected both crossing points in the southern part of the enclave. The same UN data says a total of just 2,835 have entered Gaza through Kerem Shalom and Erez in the north in the months since, a fraction of the need.In total, per UN data, 28,018 aid trucks have entered Gaza since the war began. A little more relief entered via the US-built pier, but this has not been seen as a successful effort to boost the supply of aid.The US pier was also intended to overcome what the relief organisation Oxfam called, in a report earlier this year, Israel’s deliberate blocking of aid.Sally Abi Khalil, the organisation’s Middle East and north Africa director, added: “Israeli authorities are not only failing to facilitate the international aid effort but are actively hindering it.”Earlier this year, the world’s leading authority on famine, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, warned that Gaza was on the brink of famine if no action were taken.In a report in June, the organisation’s famine review committee said that as there had been some increase in goods allowed into northern Gaza, that “the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring”.However, they added that the risk of famine remains. They added: “The situation in Gaza remains catastrophic and there is a high and sustained risk of Famine across the whole Gaza Strip. It is important to note that the probable improvement in nutrition status noted in April and May should not allow room for complacency about the risk of Famine in the coming weeks and months. The prolonged nature of the crisis means that this risk remains at least as high as at any time during the past few months.”The US Capitol Police now say six people were arrested for disrupting Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech in the House chamber:The US Capitol Police said five people who disrupted Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech from a gallery in the House chamber were arrested, while officers deployed pepper spray on protesters outside the Capitol:Photographers on the scene caught images of Capitol police deploying pepper spay:Benjamin Netanyahu also uses his address to praise Donald Trump, and says he wants to thank the former president “for his leadership in brokering the historic Abraham accords”.He thanks Trump for “recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights”, for “confronting Iran’s aggression” and for “recognizing Jerusalem as our capital and moving the American embassy there”.The status of both Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are disputed under international law.Israelis were “relieved” when Trump “emerged safe and sound from the dastardly” assassination attempt on him, Netanyahu says.Benjamin Netanyahu says that he is “confident” that the US and Israel will “vanquish the tyrants and terrorists” that threaten both countries.He says that as Israel’s prime minister, he vows that Israel “will not relent” or bend, no matter “how difficult the road ahead”.He says that Israel will continue to work with the US and its Arab partners on the “noble mission” to “transform a troubled region” full of “repression, poverty and war” into an “oasis of dignity, prosperity and peace”.Israel will always remain the US’s “indispensable” ally, “loyal friend” and “steadfast partner” through thick and thin, Netanyahu says.
      Thank you America. Thank you for your support and solidarity. Thank you for standing with Israel in our hour of need. Together, we shall defend our common civilization together, we shall secure a brilliant future for both our nations. More

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      JD Vance writes foreword for Project 2025 leader’s upcoming book

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      The Republican senator and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has written the foreword to a forthcoming book by the head of Project 2025, the vast rightwing plan for a second Trump administration Democrats say shows the authoritarian threat posed by the GOP – and which Donald Trump has tried to disavow.In publicity material for the book, Vance says of Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation: “Never before has a figure with [his] depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism.”The same publicity material describes Roberts as “head” of Project 2025.Roberts’ book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, will be published in September.Orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation but featuring contributors from across the US right, Project 2025 is more than 900 pages long and includes proposals for radical reform to all corners of government and public life.Democrats have highlighted its threats to key freedoms including reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights. On Wednesday, Kamala Harris, the vice-president and presumptive presidential nominee, discussed Project 2025 in Indianapolis.“We must … recognise there are those who are trying to take us backward,” Harris said.“Can you believe they put that in writing? This represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future. These extremists want to take us back, but we are not going back.”Such attacks have proved effective. Concurrently, Trump and top aides have sought to distance themselves from Project 2025.Vance recently told NBC: “What the media and the Democrats are trying to do is attach its most unpopular elements to the Trump administration. It’s a 900-page document. I guarantee there are things that Trump likes and dislikes … but he is the person who will determine the agenda of the next administration.”Such protestations have been greeted with skepticism, particularly given extensive links between Trumpworld and Project 2025 authors.According to publicity material, Roberts’ book will cover similar ground to Project 2025, “outlin[ing] a peaceful ‘Second American Revolution’ for voters looking to shift the power back into the hands of the people”.But that only echoed controversial comments in which Roberts recently told the former Trump aide Steve Bannon: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”Furthermore, as reported by the New Republic, Roberts’ book was previously advertised under a more dramatic subtitle: “Burning Down Washington to Save America”.Such rhetoric is spreading. At a recent Trump-Vance rally in Ohio, a speaker warned of civil war if the Republican ticket is beaten. In promoting Roberts’ book, Vance uses violent imagery of his own.“We are now all realising that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets,” the senator says. “In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned director of JoinTheUnion.us, a “coalition of pro-democracy organisations”, told the Guardian: “Project 2025 is Maga’s endorsed blueprint for turning America into an authoritarian state.“That Trump’s running mate is introducing [Roberts’] book personally only proves that his protestations [of no links to Project 2025] are an indication of how unpopular they know the plan is.” More