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      I remember the 1960s crackdowns against war protesters. This is a repeat | Robert Reich

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      I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests.I’ve met with students at Berkeley, where I teach. I’ve visited with faculty at Columbia University. I’ve spoken by phone with young people and professors at many other universities.My conclusion: while protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people – most of them women and children – in Gaza.To interpret these protests as anything else – as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian – is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been disproportionate.Some protesters focus their anger on Israel, some on the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, some on Joe Biden for failing to stand up to Netanyahu, for giving Israel additional armaments, and for what they perceive as Biden’s patronizing response to the protests.Like any protest movement, the actions have attracted a few on the fringe. I’ve heard scattered reports of antisemitism, although I haven’t witnessed or heard anything that might be interpreted as antisemitic. In fact, a significant number of the protesters are Jewish.To describe the protesters as “pro-Palestinian” is also inaccurate. Most do not support Palestine as such; they do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment.But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.Many tell me they are planning not to vote this coming November – a clear danger to Biden’s re-election campaign, which in turn increases the odds of a Trump presidency.When I tell them that a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump, they say they cannot in good conscience vote for either candidate.Quite a number tell me that “the lesser of two evils is still evil”. I tell them Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil. Many remain unconvinced.I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, in which I participated some 55 years ago.I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order”. The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching”, network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, the nation voted in Richard Nixon as president.History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Will the US campus protests harm Biden – and benefit Trump?

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      At the height of the tensions on US campuses this week, with Republicans gleefully seizing on student unrest as an election issue that could propel Donald Trump back into the White House, Joe Biden tried to steer a middle path.Weighing the democratic right to peaceful protest and the political necessity to stem disruption, Biden declared that “order must prevail”.“Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear – none of this is a peaceful protest,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday. “Dissent is essential for democracy … There’s the right to protest. But not the right to cause chaos.”His comments were his most notable intervention yet in the face of campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. The protests are a potential minefield for Biden.As his lead over Trump among younger voters continues to slip significantly from its 2020 levels and as he tries to fend off Republican attacks, he risks alienating young voters by siding with police.On the other hand, as riot police have moved against pro-Palestinian encampments and arrested thousands of people, senior Republican figures and Trump himself have been pushing hard to depict the US president as losing control and allowing America’s universities to slide into upheaval.Fox News has lavished round-the-clock coverage to what it has portrayed as a perfect storm of “Democrat chaos”, with riot police moving into occupied buildings on Columbia campus and open brawling at UCLA after a pro-Israel group attacked an encampment with sticks and fireworks.The events have diverted attention from the Trump trial in New York, where he is facing charges over a hush-money payment to an adult film star. That has confounded hopes among Democrat strategists that details from the trial would deal a blow to the Republican campaign.The focus of Fox and other conservative media on the pro-Palestinian protests marks a shift from other areas of supposed disorder allegedly caused by Biden administration incompetence – particularly the US-Mexico border, where there has been a continuous inflow of asylum seekers.Trump – posing, somewhat incongruously given his current legal predicament, as the law-and-order candidate – led the chorus on his Truth Social media platform. He called for a “COMPLETE LOCKDOWN” of Columbia and other universities similar to what he claimed had been imposed on the area outside the Manhattan court where he is on trial, supposedly to stop his supporters gathering.His pronouncement came after he had minimised a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – where a counter-protester was killed and after which he was condemned for saying there had been “fine people on both sides” – as a “peanut” compared with the current protests.View image in fullscreenTrump is attempting to capitalise on a febrile campus atmosphere in which Jewish and pro-Israel students have complained of antisemitism and being subjected to threats.So far, analysts say, there is scant evidence of the images of campus upheaval having a radical effect on voter attitudes – although some caution that this may change if protests continue into the autumn.Biden is conscious of parallels with previous instances of student protests sweeping through American campuses, and producing arguably decisive effects in presidential politics.In 1968, mass demonstrations against the Vietnam war spilled over into the Democratic national convention in Chicago – coincidentally, the city that will stage this year’s event, where Biden will be formally adopted as his party’s candidate – resulting in violent street clashes with police and punch-ups on the convention floor.The anarchic scenes were followed by the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, then the vice-president, to the Republican Richard Nixon.With polls showing the president running neck-and-neck with Trump, but behind in most battleground states, the Biden campaign could be forgiven for fearing that the current tumult might be instrumental in engineering a repetition.Analysts, however, point out that the Gaza war does not resonate with the American public in the same way as the war in Vietnam, where more than half a million US troops were deployed by 1968.“The raw numbers [of protesters] would have been a lot bigger in 1968,” said Kyle Kondik of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia.“The current protests are certainly large, but it does seem like Vietnam was fundamentally a lot different [from Gaza]. You had young people being drafted to fight overseas, America was engaged heavily in fighting a land war overseas.“The US has indirect involvement in Gaza in terms of funding. But it’s different and less impactful overall. I don’t think the race has changed in any kind of a significant way.”Other observers say that even for voters under 34, a cohort among which polls have shown Biden’s lead over Trump to be slipping significantly, Gaza plays a much smaller role than the passions emanating from college campuses would indicate.Amy Walter, of the Cook Political Report, told the Wall Street Journal’s free expression podcast: “What we see from the data is that for voters under 34, the top issues are the same as the top issues for folks over the age of 34, which the economy and the cost of living – they are concerned about issue of gun violence.”In a possible indicator that Gaza’s electoral impact even younger voters may be limited, an NBC focus group of college students opposed to US support for Israel’s military offensive revealed that few planned to vote based on the issue – although some said they would opt for third-party candidates such as Jill Stein of the Green party or Robert F Kennedy Jr.Yet for Biden, even that could have disproportionately negative effects. Walter said: “If you take just a small percentage of younger people who feel very strongly about this issue and say, ‘I cannot vote for Trump, but Biden is no good, I’m staying home’ … for Biden that might be a lot.“He has a coalition that’s dependent on voters who dislike Trump coming back to him.”What electoral bearing the protests have could be decided by the effectiveness of the very crackdowns Republicans have been calling for – especially when combined with the imminent end of the academic year, which will see most students leaving campus.JD Vance, the Republican senator and outspoken Trump ally, may have inadvertently highlighted a Republican dilemma when he posted on X: “No civilization should tolerate these encampments. Get rid of them.”With more than 2,000 protesters having been arrested, that process may already have begun, apparently with Biden’s blessing.If the college clampdowns successfully quell the protests, it would deprive Republicans of the images of chaos they crave – unless the war in Gaza continues to rage, fuelling future protests.Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait said it was in Trump’s interests for the protests to carry on – a development he connected to a continuation of the war in Gaza into the autumn, thus triggering a fresh round of unrest at the height of the election campaign.“In a recent social-media post, Trump demanded, ‘STOP THE PROTESTS NOW!!!’” Chait wrote. “If they are still going on during a prospective second Trump term, he will probably stop them with maximal violence. In the meantime, he fervently wishes them to continue through November.” More

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      South Dakota governor Kristi Noem continues to be plagued by book controversies

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      As she entered a second consecutive weekend trying to manage fallout from revelations in her upcoming memoir that she shot her dog to death, South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, had conceded that she would need to correct multiple factual inaccuracies in other parts of the book.Meanwhile, a Republican fundraiser which Noem was supposed to headline had to be canceled after threats against the event staff, hotel venue and governor, according to organizers.And in one of the clearest signs yet that she has fallen out of contention to be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in November’s election, as she once was, Rolling Stone published a report quoting multiple sources close to the former president who assured he was “disgusted” by her dog-killing story.Noem has faced increasingly acrimonious backlash after the Guardian in late April reported on an excerpt from her new book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, in which she recounts fatally shooting both a 14-month-old dog, Cricket, along with an unnamed goat.She has defended her self-described actions as being typical of the unpleasant things people who live on farms and answer the call to politics must do.But her polling numbers have plummeted as her justifications for the animal killings have not landed with the public. And since then, Noem’s memoir has only drawn more scrutiny.Experts widely doubted the veracity of an anecdote which Noem included in the book about meeting the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and feeling underestimated by him. Her camp subsequently conceded she never met the North Korean leader.Additionally, a spokesperson for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley denied the book’s characterization of a conversation between Haley and Noem, who claimed Haley threatened her after she challenged Haley’s status as a leading woman in the Republican party.The book claims the conversation occurred when Noem first took office in 2019, but it was a year later.Whatever the case, Noem’s chief of communications, Ian Fury, told The New York Times that both errors would be corrected.“It was brought to our attention that the upcoming book No Going Back has two small errors,” Fury said to the Times. “This has been communicated to the ghostwriter and editor. Kim Jong-un was included in a list of world leaders and shouldn’t have been.”Separately on Friday, the chairperson of Colorado’s Jefferson county Republican party said the organization canceled its annual fundraiser because Noem’s planned headlining appearance had spurred multiple threats.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNoem was still set to headline Florida’s Brevard county Republican party fundraiser on 25 May. The county party’s chairperson defended Noem’s decision to kill Cricket, and the purchase of a ticket includes a copy of No Going Back.Rounding out the South Dakota governor’s Friday was the Rolling Stone report based on sources of the publication who recounted how Trump has expressed disgust with Noem’s killing of Cricket in closed-door meetings and telephone conversations.“Why would she do that?” Trump – who is grappling with nearly 90 felony criminal charges, among other legal problems – was quoted as saying. “What is wrong with her?”Rolling Stone added: “He has expressed bewilderment that she would have ever admitted to doing this, willingly and in her own writing, and has argued it demonstrates she has a poor grasp of ‘public relations’.”The publication also wrote that Trump’s responses were leaked to definitively eliminate Noem from vice-presidential contention.Noem is scheduled to appear on Sunday morning on CBS’s Face the Nation and is expected to be asked about the ongoing fallout from her new book. More

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      Wilmington: how a once-red district is a window on North Carolina politics

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      The area around Wilmington, North Carolina, was once rock-ribbed Republican red. No longer. It’s contested territory in what may be the most contested state in the country this year.Donald Trump had planned a rally in Wilmington earlier this month but was rained out at the last moment. Trump promised to return with a bigger and better rally later. Joe Biden visited Wilmington on Thursday, after a detour to Charlotte to meet with the families of four law enforcement officers killed on Monday while serving an arrest warrant. It was his second visit to North Carolina this year and is unlikely to be his last.“I want to get Joe Biden to Wilmington,” the state senator Natalie Murdock of Durham said last week, before Biden announced the trip. Murdock is helping coordinate the Biden-Harris campaign in North Carolina. She noted that Biden won New Hanover county in 2020 after Hillary Clinton lost it four years earlier. “We’re going to have a field office out there,” she added, explaining plans for “boots on the ground” to get out the vote.The outsized political attention on Wilmington reflects a granular effort to win voters in the persuadable places, the swing districts in swing states. Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by a margin of 1.3%, his narrowest state victory. The most recent Emerson College poll shows Biden running behind Trump by five points, with 10% undecided.But North Carolina’s political map is a pointillist portrait of post-pandemic population change, with cities such as Charlotte, Durham and Wilmington booming from domestic migration while other communities bleed residents to places with economic vibrancy. Two-thirds of North Carolina’s population growth between 2010 and 2020 was non-white. About 400,000 people have moved to North Carolina since 2020. Trump’s margin in 2020 was less than 75,000 votes.Growth is the story of Wilmington. The beach town vacation spot has expanded beyond Saturday farmers’ markets and upscale restaurants on the river for tourists, attracting pharmaceutical research, banking and logistics today.“I moved to Wilmington 22 years ago. And when I moved here, I didn’t even realize you were allowed to live here all year,” said David Hill, a pediatrician and the Democratic nominee for the North Carolina state senate. “I can say that if you drive down the street, you will see acres and acres of what was forest when we moved here just five years ago, that is now in part sand and in part foundations and newly built homes.”Many census tracts around Wilmington in Pender, Brunswick and New Hanover counties doubled in population between 2010 and 2020. During the pandemic, growth accelerated, with both Pender and Brunswick county’s population increasing by 15% since 2020.The seventh district is held by Michael Lee, a real estate attorney and a relative moderate in the Republican-led senate. The district, covering most of New Hanover county, has been targeted by national campaigners as one of North Carolina’s few legislative seats that can be flipped, despite a ruthless redistricting that moved much of downtown Wilmington into a neighboring district last year.“One of those precincts was the highest-turnout precinct for Black voters, and it has now been put into deep-red Brunswick county,” Murdock said. “It is one of those races that was still going to be competitive, but they did not do us any favors with that map. I mean, it is one of the most gerrymandered of this cycle.”Republicans have a 30 to 20 advantage over Democrats in the state senate and a 72 to 48 advantage in the state house; precisely the 60% margin needed in each chamber to override a veto by North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Cooper has blocked legislation restricting abortion access and expanding gun rights, but Republican lawmakers have overridden dozens of vetoes, from bills banning transgender hormone therapy for minors to changes in election laws.Cooper is term-limited and will be out of office in January. Republicans cannot afford to lose one seat in either chamber if they also lose the governor’s race, and the fate of the gubernatorial race is an open question given North Carolina’s history of ticket splitting and the nomination of the lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, who has a record of extreme, racist and homophobic comments and faces unpleasant revelations about his financial and business history.National Democratic campaigners are hoping that a backlash against restrictive abortion laws will fuel turnout statewide. But local contenders in closely divided districts have largely avoided the culture war rancor and are focusing on community concerns.Lee, for example, published a column this week taking issue with the New Hanover school system’s $20m shortfall, describing it as evidence of poor financial decisions made with short-term pandemic funding. Though the population around Wilmington has been exploding, public school enrollment has not: the local system has fewer students now than before the pandemic.Lee chairs the senate’s education committee, and has been leading the state senate’s efforts to expand North Carolina’s private school voucher program. The committee approved a bill on Wednesday to add $248m to the program next school year, on top of the $191m the program received this year. Applications for the vouchers, worth up to $7,468, outstripped funding after a surge of interest. (Lee did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.)Newcomers chasing Wilmington’s burgeoning film industry or simply looking for a better climate while working from home are wrestling with crowded roads, rising housing costs, access to healthcare and the other downsides of rapid growth, Hill said. Their interests do not easily map on to a highly partisan political framework.“Characterizing North Carolina in the same sentence as some of the more extremist states in the south fails to give the population of the state credit for really being quite centrist,” Hill said. “I think when you look at what our rightwing extremist supermajority has done, it would be easy to lump our state and with some states that are more extremist, but I don’t feel – and I think we have good evidence to tell us – that they don’t really represent the state as a whole.” More

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      The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington

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      Donald Trump decries the proverbial Washington swamp. Congress does next to nothing. The band plays on: lobbying remains big business. In 2023, the industry hit a $4.3bn payday. This year shows no end in sight to the trend. As the US gallops toward another election, The Wolves of K Street befits the season.Brody Mullins, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins, a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.“This is a book about men – for they were almost exclusively men – who built K Street,” Brody and Luke Mullins write.They have produced a tightly stitched, 600-plus-page tome that begins as a true-crime story. The suicide of Evan Morris, a lobbyist for big pharma, takes center stage. In the opening scene of the book, at a posh Virginia golf club on a balmy evening in July 2015, Morris, 38, turns a gun on himself.The seemingly almost idyllic backdrop to his death is actually a tableau of excess, complete with $150,000 initiation fees, an abandoned Porsche, an emptied bottle of $1,500 bordeaux and a scenic sunset.Millions of corporate dollars were missing and untaxed. An anonymous letter and an FBI investigation helped ignite Morris’s untimely and violent end.“The allegations would touch off a years-long case,” the brothers Mullins write.Morris’s wife and estate settled with Genentech, his employer, the Internal Revenue Service and the commonwealth of Virginia. The government never charged anyone with a crime. Death had taken its toll.The Wolves of K Street is about way more than just one man. It is an engrossing lesson in how lunch-bucket sensibilities and the accommodation between big business and the New Deal gave way to neoliberalism, corporate activism and the decline of industrial unions.The Democratic party, to name just one major part of American life, would never be the same again. The Mullins brothers are keenly aware of the social forces that buffet and drive US politics. They recall how Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980 left the party of FDR, Truman and JFK to wonder how it was no longer the political home of working-class America. Democrats wonder to this day.The Wolves of K Street traces how the US reached this point, and lobbying attained its present stature, by following “three lobbying dynasties – one Republican, two Democratic – over the critical period from the 1970s to today, when the modern lobbying industry was created, corporate interests came to power in Washington, and the nature of our economy was fundamentally changed”.The late Tommy Boggs, son of Hale Boggs, once a Democratic House majority leader, stands out as the patriarch and pioneer of Democratic lobbying. His name came to grace Patton, Boggs and Blow, a storied DC law firm now subsumed in Squire Patton Boggs, a sprawling global entity nominally based in Ohio. Evan Morris stood out as Boggs’s “prized pupil” – or apostle.Next came the Republicans: Charlie Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and the late Lee Atwater, who would manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George HW Bush.“[They] used their links to the Reagan revolution to erect Washington’s signature GOP house of lobbying,” the Mullins write. “Each member of the partnership had his own distinct role.”Together, they bridged the gap between corner offices and the universe of conservative activists. Furthermore, Donald Trump was a client of Black, Manafort and Stone. Stone helped boost Maryanne Trump Barry, the property magnate’s late sister, on to the federal bench.That history is why Manafort and Stone emerged as part of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016; why the pair were caught in the special counsel’s net when it came time to investigate Russia’s attempts to help Trump; why they received presidential pardons before Trump left office; and why they stand to be back for one more rodeo as Trump runs for the White House again.Tony Podesta, brother of the Democratic White House veteran John Podesta, is the keystone of the third lobbying dynasty examined by Brody and Luke Mullins, an “avant-garde political fixer [who] used his experience as a brass-knuckled liberal activist to advance the interests of Wall Street and Silicon Valley”.The paths taken by Manafort and Podesta would eventually entwine. Out of the limelight, Manafort came to represent the interests of Ukraine’s anti-Nato Party of Regions and its head, Viktor Yanukovych. In 2012, seeking to stave off sanctions, Manafort enlisted Podesta to his cause.“I used to call them the dynamic duo,” Rick Gates, Manafort’s convicted acolyte, tells the Mullins brothers.The Wolves of K Street is also newsy, disclosing for the first time Manafort’s attempt to have Yanukovych congratulate Joe Biden in summer 2012.“I am thinking of recommending a call from VY to Biden to congratulate Biden on his [re-]nomination” as vice-president to Barack Obama, Manafort emailed Gates, who forwarded the note to Podesta. The brother of Bill Clinton’s chief of staff cum Obama counselor approved.“‘Only downside is [if] biden [sic] presses him personally on politics of criminal prosecutions of his political’ opponents, Podesta responded. ‘I would say worth the risk.’”The Wolves of K Street ends on a weary note: “No matter what new obstacles have emerged, K Street has always managed to invent new ways to exercise its power over Washington,” the Mullins brothers conclude. “New fortunes to be made, new rules to be broken. New stories to be told.”One might well reach for Ecclesiastes, son of David: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
      The Wolves of K Street is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      Star Wars’ Mark Hamill hails ‘Joe-B-Wan Kenobi’ after White House meeting

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      “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” But enough about Washington. The Star Wars actor Mark Hamill, who once saw off gangsters at a fictional spaceport, came to the US capital on Friday for a meeting with Joe Biden.Quite why he was in the Oval Office, and what was talked about, remained something of a mystery. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Biden was riding high in the opinion polls but now, perhaps, he is in need of added star power.The surprise appearance by the man who played Luke Skywalker thrilled Star Wars geeks among the White House press corps while leaving non-fans somewhat bemused or baffled.“How many of you had ‘Mark Hamill will lead the press briefing’ on your bingo card – hands?” the actor, wearing dark suit, blue tie and sunglasses, asked reporters at the start of a media briefing. “Yeah, me neither. I just got to meet the president and he gave me these aviator glasses.”Hamill, 72, then put the glasses in his pocket, quipping: “I love the merch.”Hamill, who has more than 5 million followers on X, where he is a trenchant critic of Biden’s election rival Donald Trump, said he was “honoured” to be invited to meet “the most legislatively successful president in my lifetime”, and reeled off a list of Biden’s accomplishments.The actor told reporters that “it just shows you that just one person can be so influential and so positive in our lives” and said he would take questions, “although no Star Wars questions, please”.Asked about the Oval Office meeting, Hamill said: “I only expected to be there for five minutes. He showed us all his photographs.“It was really amazing to me because I was invited to the Carter White House and I came. And then I came to the Obama White House but I never was invited into the Oval Office, and it was a large gathering. So this one was really extra special.”In the original blockbuster Star Wars: A New Hope (1977), Hamill played farm boy Luke learning Jedi mind tricks from Obi-Wan Kenobi, an elderly Jedi master who has seen better days. On Friday, it seems, he again took the role of young apprentice to the 81-year-old Biden.“I called him ‘Mr President’. He said, ‘You can call me Joe.’ I said, ‘Can I call you Joe-B-Wan Kenobi?’ He liked that.”Hamill left the podium to whoops and applause from a few starstruck reporters. The first question to the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, began: “May the Force be with you.” She replied: “May the Force be with you or, tomorrow, the 4th be with you, however you want to look at it.”A journalist said: “Let’s hope we’ve killed off the Star Wars jokes for the rest of the briefing.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJean-Pierre: “I doubt it. I feel like there’s more coming.”And later she was challenged as to why Hamill, who has never held elected office, was in the Oval Office at all. Weijia Jiang of CBS News asked pointedly: “What was Mark Hamill doing here today?”Laughing, Jean-Pierre replied: “Did you not like having him here? … Mark Hamill was in town. They met. I think it was important as someone – you all know Mark Hamill. He is someone who is very much invested in our country, very much invested in the direction of this country.”As Jiang confessed a lack of familiarity with the films, Jean-Pierre wondered: “Do you not like Star Wars? You’ve not seen Star Wars?”Jiang promised “I will now!” as some in the room groaned.Hamill is one of numerous Hollywood stars that the Biden campaign may seek to deploy ahead of a presidential election now six months away. On Thursday, the actor and director Robert De Niro spoke out against Trump, urging Biden to “keep up the fight” against him and “go at him hard”.Interviewed by Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC’s The 11th Hour, De Niro warned: “The guy’s a monster. He is beyond wrong. It’s almost like he wants to do the most horrible things that he can think of in order to get a rise out of us. I don’t know what it is but he’s been doing it and doing it, and it’s fucking scary.” More

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      Experts dismiss Kristi Noem’s ‘dubious’ claim to have met Kim Jong-un

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      The South Dakota governor, Republican vice-presidential hopeful and self-confessed dog-killer Kristi Noem’s bizarre claim in a new book to have met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has been dismissed by experts as “dubious” and not “conceivable”.The Dakota Scout first reported Noem’s claim, which is in her forthcoming book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.The book will be published next week. Last week, the Guardian obtained a copy and reported how Noem describes killing Cricket – a 14-month-old dog she said she “hated” – after deeming her uncontrollable and a danger to people, and a goat she said was “nasty and mean”, smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid”, and bothered her children.Noem has repeatedly defended the story as illustrative of the harsh realities of farm life. But it set off a political firestorm, by most assessments dynamiting the governor’s chance of being named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.The Scout reported that Noem’s book also contains “at least two instances in which she recounts meetings with world leaders that are in dispute”.In one, Noem writes: “Through my tenure on the House armed services committee, I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders.“I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”But the Scout quoted one “longtime, high-level Capitol Hill staffer” who worked on the armed services committee when Noem was on it, between 2013 and 2015, as saying: “It’s bullshit.”“That staffer was among a dozen staffers … who said they had no knowledge of the meeting, or who said Noem had never mentioned it before,” the paper said.It quoted experts saying Noem’s claim to have met with Kim, the autocratic leader of a pariah state who did not even meet with Barack Obama – the US president for the first five years of Noem’s time in the US House – was unlikely.“I don’t see any conceivable way that a single junior member of Congress without explicit escort from the US state department and military would be meeting with a leader from North Korea,” George Lopez of Notre Dame University, an expert on North Korea, told the Scout.“What would have been so critical in his bag of tricks that he would have met with an American lawmaker, this one distinctively?”Another North Korea expert, Benjamin Young of Virginia Commonwealth University, called Noem’s account of meeting Kim “dubious”.“There’s no way,” Young told the Scout. “There’s no way.”Noem also claims to have canceled a meeting with Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. She writes of being in Paris, “slated to meet” the French president.“However, the day before we were to meet he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So, I decided to cancel. There is no place for pro-Hamas rhetoric.”Macron’s office told the Scout no direct invitation to Noem was issued, though it did say Noem and Macron might have been scheduled to attend the same event last 10 November.Noem spoke at a conference in Paris that day, the same day Macron called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.Noem’s spokesperson did not comment to the Scout before it published its story.After the story went live, the paper said, it was told: “The publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.”Trump did meet Kim: in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019, and in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea later the same year. No lasting diplomatic progress was made.
      This article was amended on 3 May 2024 to correct the title of the newspaper cited. It is the Dakota Scout, not the South Dakota Scout as first reported. More

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      Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the street: Trump spells out migrant plan

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      Donald Trump is planning to unleash the biggest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in US history should he win re-election in November, involving legally questionable deployments of military and police units and the creation of vast detention camps along the southern border.Trump has laid out his vision for a “record-setting deportation operation” in a series of rally speeches, newspaper articles and social media posts. He intends to move swiftly after inauguration day next January to stage mass roundups of immigrants across the country, conducting raids inside big cities where he would face certain Democratic opposition.“On day one, we will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday. He told his adoring supporters that immigrants were coming in by the millions from foreign prisons and “insane asylums” leading to the “plunder, rape, slaughter and destruction of the American suburbs, cities and towns”.Immigration experts say that the deportation plans for a Trump White House 2.0 dwarf anything previously seen – both in scale and in the intensity of the former president’s determination to run roughshod over legal guardrails. He attempted workplace raids during his 2016 presidential term, but they were largely stymied in the courts.“This time we need to take Trump at his word,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “When he talks about mass deportation – in boxcars, or bus loads, or planes, or whatever – that’s what he’s going to do.”Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior White House policy adviser and hardline immigration guru who is likely to be central in a second term, told the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in a podcast interview that the plans were going to be pushed through. “I want everybody to understand this is going to happen. If President Trump is back in the Oval Office in January, this is going to commence immediately.”In an interview with Time magazine this week, Trump emphasized that speed was critical to his strategy for removing many of the at least 11 million people without legal status living in the US today.“We’re going to be moving them out as soon as we get to it,” he said.To skirt around due process laws protecting asylum seekers,Trump has said he will invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act which allows for summary deportation of any non-citizen from a foreign enemy country. He says he will apply the provision in the first instance against “known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members”.Immigration experts fear that such summary removals could ensnare US citizens in the dragnet.“Trump will have his agents remove people, then ask questions later. If somebody looks like they’re undocumented, meaning they have brown or black skin, or speak with an accent, they could be included irrespective of their citizenship,” Leopold warned.Mass deportation would form the centerpiece of a Trump second term. It aligns with other aspects of his vision for the 47th presidency, which promises to be more ruthless, radical and revenge-laden than any administration in modern times.The former president will be counting on the rightward shift in the federal judiciary, which he effected when he was last in the White House. Over the four years of his presidential term, he placed more than 200 judges on the bench, and succeeded in transforming the US supreme court into a rightwing bastion.View image in fullscreenWith Trump and his team setting their sights on deporting more than a million people each year, the operation would inevitably require major infrastructure including new detention camps. Miller said that “large-scale staging grounds” would be constructed near the border, probably in Texas.“You create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft,” Miller told Kirk.Flesh has been placed on the bones of Trump’s immigration plans by Project 2025, a presidential transition operation spearheaded by the rightwing Heritage Foundation that has compiled a 920-page policy review aiming to “institutionalize Trumpism”. By its calculations, the daily number of beds in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centers would need to rise from the current 34,000 to more than 100,000.Ice itself should be given free rein to carry out “civil arrest, detention, and removal of immigration violators anywhere in the United States, without warrant where appropriate”, Project 2025 says (emphasis in the original). The Trump campaign has stressed that outside groups like Heritage do not speak for the former president, but the policies contained in the review hew closely to his intentions and are likely to provide foundations for administration policy.Even with its 21,000 employees, Ice would be overwhelmed by the task of rounding up millions of people without the involvement of other entities. Trump told Time magazine that he would turn initially to the national guard, and then to the US military.“If I thought things were getting out of control, I would have no problem using the military,” he said.When Time pointed out that under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the military is prohibited in most circumstances from acting domestically against civilians, Trump replied: “Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”In fact, undocumented immigrants are civilians (though not citizens). As such, they enjoy equal protection rights under the US constitution.Trump likens his immigration plans to the mass deportation of some 300,000 Mexicans by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1955. Though Trump is contemplating massively greater numbers, the two plans bear striking similarities.Both schemes were justified using racist stereotypes of immigrants. Eisenhower’s was called “Operation Wetback” and portrayed Mexicans as dirty and dangerous.Trump repeatedly talks about “migrant crime” at his rallies, telling Wednesday’s crowd in Michigan that prisons and mental institutions all around the world were being “emptied into the United States like we are a dumping ground”. Notably, criminologists report that immigrants – whether they have legal status or not – are more law-abiding than US-born citizens.Mass roundups are likely to threaten the “Dreamers”, the more than half a million immigrants who came to the US as undocumented children and who have been granted partial rights to remain under the deferred action program known as Daca. Trump has indicated he intends to tear up the Daca scheme, which he tried and failed to do in his first term.View image in fullscreenTrump also plans to use state and local police forces to assist Ice in roundups. That would be embraced with alacrity by Republican-controlled states like Texas where the governor, Greg Abbott, is already striving to give state police the power to arrest undocumented migrants.But it would be fiercely opposed in Democratic states which have tended to place a firewall between their law enforcement officers and federal immigration activities. Undocumented people are concentrated in big cities under Democratic control, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, raising the specter under Trump’s plans of open confrontation between law enforcement agencies receiving conflicting orders from authorities led by the two main parties.Miller said that Republican governors would be encouraged to deploy their national guard over the border into Democratic-controlled states where undocumented migrants enjoy so-called “sanctuary city” protections. Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, could send troops into Maryland which has a Democratic governor, Wes Moore.“If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, there would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland, right, very close,” he told Kirk’s podcast.Leopold predicted that pitching one state against another would quickly deteriorate into a “police state mentality”.“Are we going to see a complete breakdown of the unity of the American state?” he said. “It’s possible.” More