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      JD Vance writes glowing foreword to Project 2025 leader’s upcoming book

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      JD Vance endorses the ideas of Kevin Roberts, leader of Project 2025, as a “fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics” and a “surprising – even jarring” path forward for conservatives, the Republican vice-presidential nominee writes in the foreword of Roberts’ upcoming book.The foreword was obtained and published in full by the New Republic on Tuesday. Roberts’ book is out in September. Its title was watered down recently to remove references to “burning down” Washington.In the foreword, Vance finds parallels between his upbringing and that of Roberts, and between their visions for what the US needs. Both grew up in poor families in parts of the country “largely ignored by America’s elites”, with Roberts in Louisiana and Vance in Ohio and Kentucky. They’re both Catholic, with Vance as a convert in his adult life. Both had grandparents who played big roles in their upbringing.Now both are in DC, with Roberts “just a few steps” from Vance’s office.Vance praises Roberts for using his perch as the president of the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing DC thinktank, to advance a more radical conservative vision rather than resting on the foundation’s laurels.“The Heritage Foundation isn’t some random outpost on Capitol Hill; it is and has been the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump,” Vance writes. “Yet it is Heritage’s power and influence that makes it easy to avoid risks. Roberts could collect a nice salary, write decent books, and tell donors what they want to hear. But Roberts believes doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.”The Trump campaign has tried to distance the former president from Project 2025, a conservative roadmap for a second Trump term that includes policy ideas unpopular with the voters Trump needs to win. But Vance’s ties to Roberts, like the foreword, make it harder for Trump to make the case he doesn’t know what the project is.In the hours before the foreword was published by news outlets, Project 2025’s director, Paul Dans, said he was stepping down from his role and that some of the project’s work was winding down, though it’s not clear what that means. The project consists largely of a 900-plus-page policy manifesto and an effort to find potential staffers for a second Trump term. Roberts said the plan to create a “personnel apparatus” for all levels of government would continue.Roberts has faced scrutiny in recent weeks for comments that the US is “in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be”. His ties to a radical part of the Catholic church, Opus Dei, and belief that birth control should be outlawed were also revealed by the Guardian.Vance has previously said Roberts “is somebody I rely on a lot who has very good advice, very good political instincts”, he told news outlet Notus in January. He said that Heritage, under Roberts, went from a “relatively vanilla” thinktank to one willing to participate in the fights and debates on the right about where the party should head.On two subjects in particular, Vance praises the way Roberts lays out the stakes and his goals: reining in large tech companies and focusing on a Christian view of the family.He notes that Roberts argues the US founders would not have envisioned the way companies like Apple or Google would amass power to “censor speech, influence elections, and work seamlessly with intelligence services and other federal bureaucrats”, saying this “deserves the scrutiny of the right, not its support”.And Vance agrees with the way Roberts recognizes that “cultural norms and attitudes matter”.“We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids,” Vance writes. “We should teach them that marriage isn’t just a contract, but a sacred – and to the extent possible, lifelong – union. We should discourage them from behaviors that threaten the stability of their families.”This belief in the family also means that conservatives need to ensure that families aren’t just for people with wealth, which calls for creating better jobs and listening to young people when they say they can’t afford homes or families, he writes.“Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand,” Vance writes.In order to create the America Roberts and Vance envision, conservatives need to go on offense – not just remove policies they don’t like, but rebuild the country in what Roberts has referred to as a “second American Revolution”.“The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems – we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach,” Vance writes. “As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.” More

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump neck and neck in new poll – live

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are neck and neck in the presidential race, according to a new Reuters and Ipsos poll.The poll, which was completed on Sunday, showed that the vice-president was supported by 43% of registered voters while the former president was supported by 42%.Last week, a Reuters and Ipsos poll showed that Harris was leading by 44% to Trump’s 42%.Reuters and Ipsos’s latest poll was conducted among 1,025 adults, including 876 registered voters, from 26 to 28 July.Kamala Harris will announce her vice-presidential pick as early as Monday before embarking on a multi-state battleground tour with her new running mate later in the week, two sources familiar with the planning said on Tuesday, Reuters reports.The high-stakes decision on who will run with the current vice-president as the wingman on her presidential ticket has taken center stage since she became the Democratic frontrunner for the 5 November election.Kamala Harris is expected to announce who will be her running mate in her campaign for president as early as Monday, the Reuters news wire is reporting this evening, as an exclusive, citing sources but as yet giving no more detail.This echoes what Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, said yesterday, that Harris would choose and announce “in the next six, seven days”, as we blogged earlier.But anything that echoes or strengthens that prediction is fascinating, so we’ll watch closely.Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in this election, after Joe Biden withdrew from his re-election campaign nine days ago and anointed Harris as his chosen successor at the top of the ticket.At this rate, she can expect to be officially voted in as the nominee at the party’s national convention next month, in Chicago.Kamala Harris will not attend the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference in Chicago, according to a source familiar with her schedule, citing logistical challenges getting to Chicago days after launching her campaign.The vice-president is heading to Houston this week to attend the funeral of the late Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee as well as conducting a rapid search for her running mate.The source said Harris’s campaign offered to participate in a virtual fireside chat, or to host an in-person fireside chat with Harris at a later date, but the request was denied. The source said Harris’s team will continue to work toward a possible solution with the NABJ board.On the sidelines of the centrist WelcomeFest in Washington DC, Will Rollins, the Democratic nominee in a competitive California House district, said Republicans would have a “tricky” time trying to paint Kamala Harris as “dangerously liberal”.“Somebody who goes into law enforcement is not a leftwing ideologue,” said Rollins, a former prosecutor. Already he said she was having a positive impact on down-ballot races. His campaign alone raised a six-figure sum in the 48 hours after her ascent, he said.Rollins noted that when Harris came up in California politics, she was criticized by activists as too conservative, despite the image Republicans are portraying of her as far-left.“She in fact was branded as much too conservative for San Francisco. So I think as voters actually learned more about her actual record it’s going to work well for us,” he said.To underline the point, Rollins said he first met Harris when she was the state’s attorney general at an event with the then Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he worked for at the time.“That kind of proves or disproves their attempt to paint her as an extremist. Here you have this Democratic statewide attorney general, who was working with a Republican governor in California at the time,” he said. “I actually think that’s one of the more underreported parts of her background, what she was able to do across party lines.”He also weighed in on who Harris might choose as her running mate. His choice was for fellow millennial, transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who he called an “incredible communicator”.Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are neck and neck in the presidential race, according to a new Reuters and Ipsos poll.The poll, which was completed on Sunday, showed that the vice-president was supported by 43% of registered voters while the former president was supported by 42%.Last week, a Reuters and Ipsos poll showed that Harris was leading by 44% to Trump’s 42%.Reuters and Ipsos’s latest poll was conducted among 1,025 adults, including 876 registered voters, from 26 to 28 July.The departure of Paul Dans as the leader of Project 2025 could indicate the project’s work is winding down or at least will not be taking such a public role in the lead-up to the November election, though the policy ideas outlined in its extensive conservative roadmap remain public.Dans, a Donald Trump loyalist, worked in personnel-related roles in the first Trump administration, including as chief of staff at the office of personnel management.Although Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage Foundation, claimed the change was always intended and followed a set timeline, the move underscores the unpopularity of Project 2025 for Trump, who has for weeks attempted to distance himself from it.Earlier this month, Trump claimed to “know nothing about Project 2025” and have “no idea who is behind it”. The disavowal from Trump came after Roberts said:
      We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.
      At a recent rally in Michigan, Trump quipped about the project: “I don’t know what the hell it is” and “they’re seriously extreme.” But the project includes many former Trump administration officials and its aims often align with Trump’s policy ideas, albeit with far more detail.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said he has “total confidence” in Kamala Harris’s running mate choice.Asked whether he would support Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator, as Harris’s running mate, Schumer said:
      I have total confidence that Vice President Harris will choose a great vice-presidential candidate.
      Asked whether he was concerned about the prospect of a special election in Arizona, CNN reports that Schumer replied:
      I have complete faith in Vice President Harris’ choice.
      Not even a day after audio of JD Vance telling donors that Kamala Harris was a threat and a “sucker punch” was leaked to the Washington Post, Vance continued to make headlines on Tuesday, as a previously unseen video of Vance was published by the Harris 2024 campaign.In the video, Vance can be seen telling an interviewer that not having “kids in your life” makes “people more sociopathic” and makes the US a little bit “less mentally stable”.This comes as Vance continues to face backlash over comments he made in 2021 that recently resurfaced where he criticized the vice-president and other Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”.On Monday evening, Donald Trump sat down with Laura Ingraham of Fox News and defended Vance’s comments, telling the host that his vice-presidential candidate was simply trying to show how much he values family life.Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, made headlines again on Monday evening, after an audio recording of Vance speaking privately to donors on Saturday about Kamala Harris was leaked to the Washington Post.Vance reporedtly told donors that Harris was a threat and “a bit of a political sucker punch” to the Trump Vance campaign.Vance also reportedly said:
      The bad news is that Kamala Harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden, because whatever we might have to say, Kamala is a lot younger. And Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did.
      The comments contradict Donald Trump’s own statements on Harris since Biden withdrew from the race, as he has told reporters that he did not think switching out Biden for Harris “would make much difference”, adding: “I would define her in a very similar [way] that I define him.”Even Vance himself has told reporters that there was in effect no difference in running against Biden versus Harris.The Trump campaign has responded to the news of Project 2025 director Paul Dans’ departure. In a statement, it said:
      President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way.
      Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign — it will not end well for you.
      The work of Project 2025 will continue despite its director, Paul Dans, stepping down from his role, Politico reported, citing a source.The report adds that the source said “the goal of Project 2025 was always to have their work done by the time of the Republican National Convention which ended in late July”.Here’s more on the news that Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, has stepped down from his role at the Heritage Foundation.Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative thinktank, has confirmed that Dans is leaving his post.Dans “built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years” but is now “moving up to the front where the fight remains”, Roberts said in a statement.
      Under Paul Dans’ leadership, Project 2025 has completed exactly what it set out to do: bringing together over 110 leading conservative organizations to create a unified conservative vision, motivated to devolve power from the unelected administrative state, and returning it to the people.
      Dans informed staff at the thinktank this week of his decision to step down, the Wall Street Journal reported. More

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      Project 2025 director to step down after ‘pressure from Trump campaign’

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      The leader of Project 2025 is stepping down from his role amid a power struggle over potential government staffing if Donald Trump wins in November.Paul Dans, the director of the project housed at the Heritage Foundation, “will be departing the team”, according to a statement to the Guardian from Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage Foundation.The departure could indicate the project’s work is ending or at least will not be taking such a public role in the lead-up to the November election, though the policy ideas outlined in its extensive conservative roadmap remain public. “Project 2025” has become a shorthand term for its manifesto of conservative policies, but the project includes multiple pillars designed to influence a conservative president.Dans is leaving “after pressure from Trump campaign leadership” and an “ongoing power rift over staffing control” for a second Trump administration, Roger Sollenberger, a reporter for the Daily Beast, wrote on Twitter/X.Dans, a Trump loyalist, worked in personnel-related roles in the first Trump administration, including as chief of staff at the office of personnel management.In an internal email obtained by Semafor, Dans said the work of the project “was due to wrap” after the political parties’ nominating conventions, which for Republicans was earlier this month.“Our work is presently winding down, and I plan later in August to leave Heritage,” he wrote. “Electoral season is upon us, and I want to direct all my efforts to winning, bigly!”Roberts claims the change was always intended and followed a set timeline.“When we began Project 2025 in April 2022, we set a timeline for the project to conclude its policy drafting after the two party conventions this year, and we are sticking to that timeline,” Roberts said in the statement. “Paul, who built the project from scratch and bravely led this endeavor over the past two years, will be departing the team and moving up to the front where the fight remains. We are extremely grateful for his and everyone’s work on Project 2025 and dedication to saving America. Our collective efforts to build a personnel apparatus for policymakers of all levels – federal, state, and local – will continue.”It is not immediately clear what “winding down” its work entails, given that the policy playbook is already written and a personnel database already compiled.The departure underscores the unpopularity of Project 2025 for Trump, who has for weeks attempted to distance himself from it.Earlier this month, Trump claimed to “know nothing about Project 2025” and have “no idea who is behind it”. The disavowal from Trump came after Roberts said: “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”At a recent rally in Michigan, Trump quipped about the project, “I don’t know what the hell it is” and “they’re seriously extreme.” But the project includes many former Trump administration officials and its aims often align with Trump’s policy ideas, albeit with far more detail.Democrats have seized on the project as a stand-in for what Trump could do if he wins a second term, bringing it up at events, in interviews and in billboard ads around the country. They have called out some of the project’s provisions, like further restrictions to abortion and an end to policies that protect LGBTQ+ rights and diversity.Kamala Harris’s campaign said in a statement: “Project 2025 is on the ballot because Donald Trump is on the ballot. This is his agenda, written by his allies, for Donald Trump to inflict on our country. Hiding the 920-page blueprint from the American people doesn’t make it less real – in fact, it should make voters more concerned about what else Trump and his allies are hiding.”Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign leaders, have dinged the project publicly and noted how it doesn’t speak for Trump. LaCivita called the project “a pain in the ass”.“President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” Wiles and LaCivita said in a statement on Tuesday. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign – it will not end well for you.”Project 2025’s four pillars started with a lengthy roadmap. Alongside the document, the group is creating a database of potential personnel for an incoming Trump administration, as well as training them on how the government should work as part of a “Presidential Administration Academy”. The final step will be a presidential transition playbook that seeks to help the next president hit the ground running once he takes office.The personnel piece, in particular, has led to some infighting among Republicans, though so have policy ideas that are unpopular in a general election, like restricting abortions. Trump doesn’t want to be seen as outsourcing any element of his administration to an outside group. And the foundation’s bold, public move to do so may not have endeared the thinktank to Trumpworld.Hiring staff after winning the presidency is always a huge undertaking, but if Trump and Project 2025 get their way, it would be herculean. Both Trump and the project want to drastically expand the number of political appointees in the federal government, firing civil servants whose roles typically have remained nonpartisan regardless of who is in office. Doing so would require thousands, if not tens of thousands, more political hires who are beholden to the president. Despite the clash, it’s likely there’s some overlap between candidates the project has vetted and would recommend, and the Trump administration’s picks. Many of Trump’s allies, like Steve Bannon, have praised or supported the project.While the project skews Trumpian, its goals represent generational changes in policy and how the government works that would last far beyond the next presidency. Roberts said on Bannon’s show that the project was building “not just for 2025, but for the next century in the United States”. The project has the left so upset, he added, because “they’ve never seen the political right be this organized, this focused, this rational about taking power and actually using it appropriately, as the constitution says.”In a Guardian profile on Roberts earlier this month, sources noted his ability to grab attention for conservative causes – a skill that could lead to backlash. One critic of Heritage’s Trumpian turn warned: “It’s not at all clear to me that the bet that Kevin is making is going to pay off.”Dans has appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room show to boost the project and encourage War Room listeners to get involved as potential appointees in a second Trump administration. He called himself a “true-blooded deplorable” and explained how the project’s goal was about “infusing America First” in the conservative movement.“We need a new culture, we need this War Room audience to come to work in Washington,” he said in an appearance on the show last year.This week, he was back on the show, seeking to debunk the left’s narratives about the project and again imploring conservatives to help staff the government.“The swamp isn’t going to drain itself, we need outsiders coming in to do this,” he said, emphasizing that the project was not Trump’s, but had built a way to vet candidates for federal roles.In another video that resurfaced in recent weeks, Dans said that the project had a great relationship with Trump and that “Trump is very bought into this,” though emphasized that the project is intended to be “candidate-neutral”. More

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      ‘It puts everyone in a really bad position’: Black journalists react to Trump joining NABJ panel

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      On Monday night, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) announced that Donald Trump will participate in a panel discussion at the organization’s annual convention in Chicago, which starts on Wednesday.The announcement, which said that the Q&A would “concentrate on the most pressing issues facing the Black community”, was met with swift online backlash from some Black journalists. They decried the decision to invite a presidential candidate who has lambasted Black journalists, led a movement to squash diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and who is responsible for increased anti-journalistic sentiment, including the popularization of the term “fake news” to describe factual, but potentially unflattering, reporting.Tiffany Walden, a co-founder and editor-in-chief of The TRiiBE, a digital platform that focuses on Black Chicago, told the Guardian that NABJ’s decision was “irresponsible”.“We’ve watched Trump threaten to send the feds here when he was in office,” Walden said. “We’ve watched him use Chicago as a dog whistle in all of his campaign’s materials during his first run for office. He talked about Chicago having top gang thugs. So this puts the city of Chicago and its residents in a very vulnerable position. It also puts Black journalists in a very vulnerable position at a convention that’s supposed to be a safe space for them.”Ameshia Cross, a political analyst, echoed this sentiment on X: “The same Trump that attacked Black journalists from the stump. The same Trump who is attacking DEI, can’t get ahead of his own racism and sexism. And the guy who wants to dissolve journalism as we know it, that’s who is speaking at #NABJ24 w/ record attendance. C’mon yall.”Another journalist, Carron J Phillips, called the move “the single dumbest and worst decision in NABJ history”.The outcry led to the NABJ president, Ken Lemon, and others defending the decision, saying that Black reporters should have the opportunity to question a political candidate.“Every year, every presidential election cycle, we invite the presidential candidates to come,” Lemon said to NABJ student journalists on Tuesday. “We extend that to anyone who is a nominee and in this case we have two presumptive nominees. We invited both of them … This is an important hour. We have people whose lives are depending on what happens in November … This is a great opportunity for us to vet the candidate right here on our ground.”Kamala Harris is scheduled to speak elsewhere on Wednesday, when Trump will be at NABJ, but her confirmation to attend this year’s convention, which lasts through Sunday, is “pending”, according to NABJ.Tia Mitchell, the chair of NABJ’s political journalism taskforce and a Washington correspondent at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote on X: “I helped make this call. And it’s in line with invitations NABJ has sent to every presidential candidate for decades. But continue to go off on your feed. I’ll continue to work to create opportunities for journalists to interview the potential next President.” (Mitchell, NABJ and NABJ’s Chicago chapter did not respond to requests for comment.)Wednesday’s panel will be moderated by Rachel Scott, a senior congressional correspondent for ABC News; Harris Faulkner, who anchors The Faulkner Focus and Outnumbered for Fox News; and Kadia Goba, a politics reporter for Semafor.“As journalists, we can never be afraid to tackle someone like Trump,” Jemele Hill, a contributing reporter for the Atlantic, wrote on X. “The reality is that he is running for president and needs to be treated as such. Being questioned by journalists is part of the job, and especially important in the company of Black journalists. Mainstream media keeps trying to convince us that he actually is gaining support among Black people. Let’s see if it’s true.”But the journalist Matthew Wright pushed back on the notion that there was anything productive in questioning Trump.“What does that serve?” Wright said to the Guardian. “We literally just watched him talk to Laura Ingraham [who] was trying to get him to answer different questions, but he practically played evasive of action even then. If a super conservative white woman can’t get straight answers out of him, what makes you think that three black women are going to get them?”In a statement about the NABJ appearance, Trump’s campaign wrote: “President Trump accomplished more for Black Americans than any other president in recent history.” Some journalists used this statement as evidence that NABJ’s decision to platform the former president was harmful, and would lead to further perpetuation of falsehoods.“This is the way 45 is touting his appearance before @nabj this week. Was this what you wanted [Tia Mitchell]? He is already lying and he isn’t even in Chicago yet. This is your legacy,” April Reign, a media strategist, wrote on X.The timing of the panel announcement – less than 48 hours before the convention’s start – also drew concern from NABJ members.Shamira Ibrahim, a culture writer, told the Guardian that she was shocked by the decision.“It puts everyone in a really bad position,” Ibrahim said. “You already paid your convention fees, you already paid for a hotel that’s likely not refundable at this point, flights are likely difficult to get replaced. Even if you have a moral opposition to it or an ethical opposition to it, you’re kind of already stuck in whatever plan you made.”NABJ’s annual convention has allowed Black journalists a space to fellowship and gather safely since the organization’s founding in 1975, with some reporters likening it to a family reunion. Inviting Trump, Ibrahim said, undermined that sense of community.“NABJ is primarily not just a place for journalists to get opportunities to interview politicians, but also a place for Black journalists to network, to have open conversations about things that are happening in the industry, to attend panels, and really get a sense of how to shift in a very, very volatile, fragile space,” she continued.“Inviting someone who, one, has made targeted attacks on Black journalists, two, has actively been responsible in defunding programs that help build Black journalists, and three, has publicly attacked the Black press flies in the face of any sort of fidelity convention.”On Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of organizations, including Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression and Anti-War Committee Chicago, announced plans to rally outside the convention to “tell Trump he’s not welcome in Chicago”. More

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      Washington insiders simulated a second Trump presidency. Can a role-play save democracy?

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      It is the afternoon of 20 January 2025 and Donald Trump is in his White House dining room, glued to the same TV where he sat transfixed as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol unfolded four years ago. This morning, he completed one of the most spectacular political comebacks in US history, reciting the oath of office at the inauguration ceremony that returned him to the most powerful job on Earth.His political resurrection has caused turmoil in the transition period, and massive anti-Trump demonstrations have erupted in several big cities. In his inaugural address, the 47th president makes clear his intention to deal with his detractors: “They are rioting in the streets. We are not safe. Make our cities safe again!” he commands.The peaceful marches are portrayed on Fox News, the channel he is watching, as anarchic disorder. Trump grows increasingly incensed, and that evening calls his top team into the situation room with one purpose in mind: to end the demonstrations by any means necessary.“I need to make sure that our streets are safe from those who are running amok trying to overthrow our administration,” he tells the group of top law enforcement, national security and military officials. A flicker of alarm ripples through the room as the president cites the Insurrection Act, saying it allows him to call up the national guard in key states to suppress what he calls the “rebellion”.Discerning the concern among his top officials, Trump gives them an ultimatum. He is in no mood to compromise or stand down – he did that in his first term in the face of “deep state” opposition. “I have been charged by the American people to make this country great again,” he states, “and I need to know right now that everybody in this room is on board.”The scenario was imaginary, but the discussion around it was very real. Dozens of men and women in a Washington DC-area hotel conference center were seated at tables arranged to resemble the White House situation room, wearing name tags denoting their part in the role-play. Prominent people from both parties were in character as the president of the United States, AKA Trump; the joint chiefs of staff; Republican and Democratic governors; Congress members; federal prosecutors; religious and business leaders; and community organizers.About 175 people participated in five exercises, bringing to the process an extraordinary wealth of bipartisan institutional knowledge. Among the lineup were senior officials from successive administrations of both parties, including the Trump administration.They came with a mission: to wargame Trump acting out the most extreme authoritarian elements of his agenda and explore what could be done, should he win in November, to protect democracy in the face of possible abuses of power. What they discovered could be used to inform public debate and sound the alarm about what most participants agreed was a woeful lack of preparation.View image in fullscreenThe event was being held as part of the Democracy Futures Project, an ambitious series of nonpartisan tabletop exercises. Spearheaded by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, the role-playing games were staged in May and June amid tight security. A similar set of wargaming exercises, conducted under different leadership in 2020, pinpointed with uncanny precision Trump’s efforts to subvert that year’s presidential election.This year, the games included that imaginary scenario in which Trump, newly ensconced in the Oval Office, invokes the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces into American cities to fight supposed anarchy and crime.A second game looked at Trump’s threat to politicise federal agencies, including the justice department, and weaponise them against his political enemies. A third probed his immigration plans, which include dark warnings of mass roundups of undocumented immigrants and large-scale deportations.The Guardian attended two of the five exercises in the role of observers.The vocabulary of the exercises was that of the playground or sports field: the simulations were “games” revolving around “role-play”, with participants acting in the characters of Trump, his cabinet, military, law enforcement and congressional leaders, split into Trump’s “red” team and an oppositional “blue” team. Despite the linguistic levity, the purpose of the enactments could not have been more grave.“This is a pivotal moment for our democracy,” said Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who took part in the Insurrection Act simulation. “I believe very strongly that, should Trump be elected, we’re going to see a vast change and our democracy will not be what it looks like today.”The sense of urgency surrounding the gatherings has intensified dramatically as a result of recent events. Since the war games were staged, Trump has been emboldened by the attempt on his life at a Pennsylvania rally, Joe Biden has stepped out of the race, and Kamala Harris has shot up to become the presumptive Democratic candidate. The course of the election – and its outcome – is now deeply uncertain.Participants attended under the so-called Chatham House rule, meaning that what was said in the simulations could be reported publicly but not who said it. Some individuals agreed to be named, including Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee; Elizabeth Neumann, deputy chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Richard Danzig, the navy secretary under Bill Clinton.That so many prominent public figures were prepared to set aside entire days to delve deeply into a hypothetical was in itself a sign of these troubled and profoundly anxious times. “A lot of people are getting worried,” Whitman said, “and trying to figure out what guardrails are going to be left should Trump get in.”The danger with any attempt to role-play possible future scenarios is that it could sound paranoid or preposterous. Trump may say extreme things, but destroy democracy? Really? The co-founders of the project, who include Barton Gellman, the Brennan Center’s senior adviser and a former Atlantic journalist, and Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor, can point to two powerful arguments in support of the project. The first is the accuracy of the 2020 wargaming.The Transition Integrity Project imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.The second ballast for the Brennan Center’s exercises was provided by Trump himself. All of this year’s scenarios were based on explicit statements from Trump and his closest allies, laying out his intended executive actions during a second term.Take the scenario that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to go against street protests. The 1807 law gives presidents the power to deploy the US military to suppress insurrections and quell civil unrest. Trump already considered this in 2020, when White House aides drafted a proclamation order invoking the act in preparation for suppressing Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. According to the Washington Post, similar drafts have been drawn up recently by Trump associates. .“This wasn’t a fanciful or unrealistic scenario,” said Peter Keisler, former acting US attorney general under George W Bush, who participated in the simulation. “We know people associated with Trump have been looking into how to use the Insurrection Act to deploy military force domestically against protests.”Keisler said that taking part in the exercise brought home to him how hard it would be to stop such a move: “It confirmed for me that for an authoritarian-minded president, deploying the military domestically could be one of the easiest and fastest levers of power that could be pulled, given how vaguely written the statute is.”View image in fullscreenIn the course of the Insurrection Act tabletop exercise, the person role-playing Trump initially met resistance from senior military figures who tried to cling to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. As the scenario unfolded, Trump grew impatient and ended up firing the joint chiefs of staff, replacing them with military officers who would do his bidding and federalise the national guard.The way the exercise played out jibed with the fears of another of its participants, Paul Eaton, a former major general in the US army. “I’m not sure we can count on the military in a Trump world,” he said.Eaton pointed to a letter from May 2021 signed by 124 retired generals and admirals that propagated the lie that Biden stole the 2020 election from Trump. He added that studies had shown that almost one in seven of those prosecuted for storming the Capitol on January 6 had a military background.“When you have an armed force of 2 million-plus men and women who get a steady diet of lies from Fox News and social media, then you risk ending up with a military that’s going to question what is really true,” Eaton said.The second war game observed by the Guardian involved the scenario in which Trump, on day one, sets out to drain the swamp, free the January 6 “patriots”, and lock up his political enemies. “Let’s be an intelligent authoritarian,” the participant playing Trump told his red team allies, telling them to push the boundaries of what a president can do.Over the next few hours, the president sat on his phone firing off social media posts, while his cabinet executed his agenda. The justice department announced the investigation of Biden and others in his circle, and instructed the FBI to be very aggressive, to the extent of looking for even minor crimes.By the end of the day, they had arrested three of Biden’s grandchildren and, for good measure, Mike Pence’s daughter, “just to make sure Pence keeps his mouth shut”. They also withdrew all pending criminal charges against Trump.Trump’s team also prioritised schedule F: an effort to purge the civil service of people disloyal to the president. And they instructed the treasury department to look at tools at its disposal to withhold federal funding from top US universities under the guise that they were “harboring antisemitism”In response, the blue oppositional team called congressional hearings, tried to mobilize people across the country to protest against the president’s actions, staged acts of civil disobedience, and threatened lawsuits.At the end of the simulation, the consensus among many policy experts was that the blue team’s response felt weak and inadequate, with little agreement over message. “Blue has a catch-22 because they’re forces of normality, but all of this is not normal,” one participant said.Meanwhile, the red team’s efforts may have been alarming, but they didn’t get to even a fraction of what Trump has said he wants to accomplish in his first 90 days. “That is just the tip of the iceberg,” another participant said.As the Brennan Center has highlighted in its initial findings from the war games, participants came away from the simulations sobered by the experience. Above all, they discovered that there were far fewer effective restraints at their disposal than they had expected.Asked to identify the biggest lesson she had learned, Whitman said: “How little there is we can do.”Many of the attendees concluded that this time around, the courts cannot be relied upon as the primary means of staving off Trump’s attacks. In the thick of his 2020 “stop the steal” conspiracy to overturn the election results, courts did play a critical role, rejecting Trump’s claims of illegal voting in almost all cases.Trump’s many appointments to the federal judicial bench during his term, including his game-changing three appointments to the supreme court, have dented the hope that the judiciary will be a bastion against an authoritarian president.Participants also came away rattled by the thought that Trump and his associates are now much more experienced and adept at working the federal apparatus. As one of the Trump role-players put it: “This time around, they’re going to know where the door handles are.”Such apprehensions are disturbing. Yet the intention of the exercises was not to stun pro-democracy activists into depressed paralysis.Rather, it was, as Brennan put it, to show that “time is short, and the work of preparation demands more ambition and more hands on deck”.The exercises pointed to some positive guardrails that might still hold. State governors have their own reserves of independent authority, which, if combined with the capabilities of state attorneys general, could block, or at least slow down, federal abuses.Federal officials, who are in Trump’s sights as he threatens to politicise the top of the civil service in his attack on the “deep state”, also have the ability to safeguard the workings of democratic government. It may be easier said than done in the face of mass firings, but the Brennan Center is calling for a “well-resourced campaign” to persuade civil servants to stay the course and not resign, and provide them with legal support in case of retaliation.The last resort when all else fails, many participants suggested, would probably be the power of public protest. “Public opinion, mobilized by a powerful communications strategy, can help set boundaries on authoritarian behavior,” Brennan said in its initial findings.Keisler, the former acting US attorney general, said that the war game he attended shook him more than he had expected: “Do I think there’s a genuine jeopardy to our democracy? Absolutely. Do I think the country is ready for it? No. Do I think it’s guaranteed to end well? No.”He added: “And this was just a game. Then there’s real life, and that’s ahead of us.” More

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      Harris urges Americans to vote after six-week abortion ban takes effect in Iowa

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      Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, urged Americans to vote after a six-week abortion ban took effect in Iowa on Monday.“This ban is going to take effect before many women even know they’re pregnant,” Harris said in a video posted to YouTube. “What this means is that one in three women of reproductive age in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban.”During the 33-second clip, Harris used the phrase “Trump abortion ban” three times – part of a wider effort by her campaign to blame her rival Donald Trump, who appointed three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe v Wade and enabled states to outlaw abortion, for the spate of unpopular bans that now blanket the south and midwest.The Republican-dominated Iowa state legislature passed the ban last year, but a lengthy court battle initially stopped it from taking effect. Last month, the Iowa supreme court ruled that the ban could be enforced, leading a lower-court judge to rule it could take effect on Monday morning at 8am local time.“The upholding of this abortion ban in Iowa is an absolute devastation and violation of human rights, depriving Iowans of their bodily autonomy,” Leah Vanden Bosch, development and outreach director of the Iowa Abortion Access Fund, said in a statement. “We know a ban will not stop the need for abortions.”Up until Sunday, abortion had been legal in Iowa up to roughly 22 weeks of pregnancy. Now, abortion clinics in the state have indicated that they will continue offering the procedure to the legal limit. The closest options for Iowans who want abortions after six weeks of pregnancy will probably be Minnesota and Illinois, Democratic-run states that border Iowa and that have become abortion havens since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022.The Iowa ban permits abortions past six weeks in cases of rape or incest, or in medical emergencies.Fourteen other states enacted near-total bans on abortion since the US supreme court overturned Roe. Three other states – Georgia, South Carolina and Florida – have banned abortion past about six weeks of pregnancy.Roe’s demise led to surge in support for abortion rights, even in red states. Sixty-one per cent of Iowans, including 70% of women, say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll found last year.The end of Roe has made abortion rights one of the top issues in the 2024 election. Harris, the face of the issue for Democrats, has said that she would sign a bill codifying Roe’s protections into law. On the other side of the aisle, Trump, the Republican nominee has tried to downplay the issue as it has become a liability for Republicans.Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, celebrated the ban, calling it a “victory for life”. In a statement, she added: “There is nothing more sacred and no cause more worthy than protecting innocent unborn lives.” More

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      The Republican party’s obsession with families has taken a fanatical turn | Moira Donegan

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      “It’s possible,” writes Jessica Winter in the New Yorker, “that if JD Vance had his way, citizenship in the United States would be conferred not solely by birthright but by marriage and children.” This is no exaggeration. In a now viral 2021 clip, JD Vance said: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children. When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power – you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic – than people who don’t have kids. Let’s face the consequences and the reality: If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”This position now represents large swaths of the Republican party, which has taken on an angry and aggressively prescriptive approach to family life.If you’re a woman in America, Republicans want you to be a mother whether you care to or not. They want you to risk your health to give them more babies. Then, when those babies get bigger, they want to make sure that those children’s fathers – or, excuse me, “parents” – have a near-total control over both them and you.They don’t want you to be able to get a divorce if your marriage turns unhappy or even abusive. They don’t want your daughter to be able to get birth control if her father doesn’t approve of it; they don’t want your other daughter to be able to get the hormone treatment she needs to thrive as her truest self. They want to inspect your kids’ genitals before they let them play on the high school softball team. They want to ban books, and decide what your kids can and can’t read.They want to bar the medical treatments that allow you to plan your family and have children on your own terms – things like egg freezing and IVF. They want to make you have your children young, and they want to stigmatize those of us women who pursue our own careers, interests and ambitions instead of popping out as many children as they deem appropriate.If you say no – if you resist their prescription for marriage, motherhood and perpetual feminine self-sacrifice – they want to let you know, in sneeringly condescending terms, that you’re “childless cat ladies”, that you’re not as good as them, that step-parents are not real parents, blended families are not real families, that women who don’t have children are disgusting, worthless and deserving of contempt. If you say no, they want to denigrate you in public, punish you financially, dilute your vote and lessen your citizenship.As the 2024 presidential election heats up following Trump’s selection of JD Vance as his running mate and Kamala Harris’s emergence as the new Democratic standard-bearer, it is becoming clear that much of the stakes of the November contest will revolve around questions of gender – and specifically, questions of family. And the view of the family that is emerging from the Republicans is a dark one indeed.Because the version of “family” that the Republicans are putting forward is one that can only look a very particular way. In their eyes, family is a compulsory relation of domination, an institution in which marriage and parenthood function to grant men near-total private control over women and children. Women, meanwhile, face a grim fate in the Republicans’ preferred vision of family: they are forced into motherhood, trapped into marriage, and punished for resistance.It’s not just that Vance, the VP pick and heir presumptive to the post-Trump Republican party, has made repeated, creepy remarks disparaging childless women and suggesting that adults without children should pay higher taxes and receive fewer votes. It’s that Vance’s obsessive, invasive and prurient investment in other people’s sexual and reproductive lives is the logical conclusion of the Republican party’s gender politics.Vance’s belief that women must be either compelled into childbirth or denied full citizenship is obviously of a piece with his party’s ambition to impose a national abortion ban. But it also flows from their opposition to no-fault divorce rights; their insistence that teens must not be able to access sexual, reproductive or transition-related healthcare without the approval of their parents; their rejection of IVF, diversity initiatives, and anti-discrimination protections; and their opposition to myriad other public policy initiatives that have helped advance women’s health, protect their safety, and allow them full access to work, education and the public sphere.The Republican plan, in short, is to sabotage or revoke any cultural or policy change that allows women to live as men’s equals. They instead aim to reshape policy, culture and the law to keep women in the home, dependent, without control over their own bodies and at the mercy of men.They aim, that is, to advance so-called “family values” in which birth is mandatory, marriage is inescapable, children are property rather than persons with rights of their own, and men are in charge. There’s a word for this dark vision of a world in which the private sphere is wholly controlled by husbands and fathers. That word is “patriarchy”.But the creepy and unsubtle patriarchal vision of gender and the family that is being advanced by the Trump-Vance Republican party may also present an opportunity for Harris and the Democrats to reclaim the mantle of “family”, and to redefine it for a better future. Rather than a compulsory, inescapable and unequal institution based on sexist domination, a “family” might instead be an alliance of equality, mutuality and care – one in which sovereign individuals can choose one another, and come together in an effort to love one another, respect one another, and help one another to thrive.These are, after all, the kinds of families that many Americans find themselves inhabiting: ones in which romantic partners might be gay or straight, married or not, but view themselves as equal partners; ones in which ties of blood, marriage, love, history and affinity all blend together in layers of connection and mutuality, ones in which children are wholly voluntary, chosen and loved, and in which women are sovereigns over their own bodies and lives, whose ambitions in the public world are neither impeded nor resented in the private one.These non-hierarchical, non-domineering, voluntary families can be encouraged through policy: through free, safe and legal abortion access, through free childcare, through paid family leave, affordable healthcare, high-quality care for seniors, insurance coverage for assisted reproductive technology, access to the full range of healthcare services for children and teens, and a thriving public school system. Such investments would help the sorts of families that most people want to build: ones that honor the dignity and worth of everyone in them.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The Guardian view on female political leaders: new strains of misogyny fuel old battles | Editorial

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      In 1989, a schoolgirl asked Gerald Ford what advice he had for a young lady wanting to become US president, as he had been. “It won’t happen in the normal course of events,” he predicted. Instead, a man would win the presidency with a female running mate, and the woman would take over because the man would die in office. After that, he suggested, men would have to fight hard to even become the nominee.Video of that encounter went viral after Joe Biden quit his re-election bid and Democrats rallied behind Kamala Harris. Ford’s prediction and his acknowledgment that female politicians are unfairly dismissed had new resonance, though of course Mr Biden is alive and it is still a matter of hope, not fact, that the US will see its first female president. Any Democratic nominee would face a difficult race. But even after Barack Obama became the first black president, and after female leaders such as Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern have commanded international respect and admiration, some fear that the racism and misogyny Ms Harris faces could prove insurmountable, though she inspires and energises other voters.Four years ago, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud, remarking of her that “we’re not going to have a socialist president. Especially any female.” JD Vance, his running mate, described Ms Harris and others as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”. Online attacks from their supporters have been even more vicious, bigoted and graphic – and may well alienate moderate voters. For many, however, the prejudice is unconscious. Research has repeatedly shown that in politics, as in other walks of life, “women leaders are perceived as competent or liked, but rarely both”.Macho attitudes and patriarchal values have been fostered and legitimised by strongmen worldwide in recent years. Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen are ample proof that women can also be prominent in far-right movements and do little for other women. But a marked political gender gap has emerged in many places in the last few years. In the US, polling suggests women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than men of that age.Similar gaps are evident in countries from the UK and Poland to Tunisia and South Korea – where a backlash against demands for women’s rights was central to the 2022 election. The country has the highest gender pay gap of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nation, yet President Yoon Suk Yeol claims structural discrimination does not exist, and won over angry young men by vowing to abolish the ministry of gender equality. The contest was an alarming harbinger of how not just regressive but explicitly anti-feminist attitudes can be politically weaponised. In Argentina, Javier Milei followed suit and won the presidency.Ford predicted that the 1990s would see a female president; the US had already seen a vice-presidential nominee (and in the UK, of course, Margaret Thatcher was then prime minister). But it took until 2008 before there was another, Sarah Palin, and 2016 before Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential nominee of a major party. Now Ms Harris has her shot. Like women around the world, she faces not only old stumbling blocks, but new strains of misogyny. The unfairness and extremity of attacks upon her, however, could yet help to fuel a groundswell of support.

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