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      Biden and Trump clinch Pennsylvania primaries shortly after polls close

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      Joe Biden and Donald Trump both won their primaries in Pennsylvania shortly after polls closed.Pennsylvanians had gone to the polls on Tuesday to cast ballots in the state’s primary races – the results provide a window into where voters in the crucial battleground stand roughly six months out from the general election.Biden and Trump had already locked up their parties’ nominations, but Pennsylvania voters still had other options in the presidential primaries.With nearly 50% of the votes counted, Biden got 491,892 votes, or 94.4%, according to state election data. Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman who dropped out of the race, got 29,333 votes, or 5.6%.Trump got 268,670 votes, or 79.4%, with 33% of the votes counted, while Nikki Haley, who dropped out the race, got 70,648 votes, or 20.6%, data shows.Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, remained on the Pennsylvania ballot after dropping out of the race in March. Primary voting in the state is confined to registered Republicans, locking out the independent voters who favored her.Her results show that a number of Republicans continue to be unhappy with Trump, who is on trial on 34 criminal counts in New York.Biden faced challenges of his own in Pennsylvania, which he won in 2020 by about 80,000 votes, or 1.2 points. A group of progressive activists had run a campaign to encourage Democrats to write in “uncommitted” on Tuesday to protest against Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza. The effort, based on the similar Listen to Michigan campaign, hopes to get at least 40,000 Democrats to write in “uncommitted”, but it may take weeks to get those ballots counted.On Tuesday, voters had the economy and foreign policy on their minds as they cast their ballots.Karen Lau, a 70-year-old retired educator in Kingston, said she would be voting for Trump. She said Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza was a top issue. “Biden’s destroying our country,” she said. “The hypocrisy with Israel of saying one thing and meaning another with Biden.”Even though Trump has been quiet on what exactly he would do in Israel, Lau said she was convinced he would handle it better. “He’s always been a supporter of Israel,” she said, citing the Abraham accords and Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. “I just have a lot more trust in what he will do.”Lau, who is Jewish, added that she was “very concerned” with pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. “The rise of antisemitism is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime,” she said.Richard K, a 69-year-old retired security guard in Kingston who declined to give his last name, also said he was unbothered that Trump was not that much younger than Biden.“Trump plays golf when he can, he has a lot more energy,” he said. “Biden walks like an old man.” He also dismissed the criminal cases against Trump, calling them “election interference”.“If he wasn’t ahead, they wouldn’t be going after him,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBiden and Trump recently held events in Pennsylvania before the primary, underscoring the state’s pivotal role in the election. At a campaign stop last week in Scranton, where Biden was born, the president used the setting to contrast his vision for the country’s future with Trump’s.“When I look at the economy, I don’t see it through the eyes of Mar-a-Lago, I see it through the eyes of Scranton,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s Florida resort home. “Scranton values or Mar-a-Lago values: these are the competing visions for our economy that raise fundamental questions of fairness at the heart of this campaign.”Farther down the ballot, Pennsylvanians will cast votes in congressional primaries that will help determine control of the Senate and the House in November. In the Senate race, incumbent Bob Casey ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, while Dave McCormick was the sole candidate in the Republican primary.McCormick ran for Pennsylvania’s other Senate seat in 2022, but he lost the primary to the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who was later defeated by the Democrat John Fetterman in the general election. The Pennsylvania Senate race will probably be one of the most expensive in the country, as Casey reported having nearly $12m in cash on hand earlier this month while McCormick’s campaign has more than $6m in the bank. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “lean Democrat”.Several House races will provide additional clues about Pennsylvania voters’ leanings ahead of the general election. In the Pittsburgh-based 12th district, the progressive congresswoman and “Squad” member Summer Lee faces a challenge from local council member Bhavini Patel, who has attacked the incumbent over her support for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Moderate Pac, a group that supports centrist Democrats and is largely funded by the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass, has spent more than $600,000 supporting Patel, and the race will be closely scrutinized as an early test for progressives facing primary challenges this year.In south-eastern Pennsylvania, the Republican representative Brian Fitzpatrick won his primary after attracting a threat from an anti-abortion activist, Mark Houck, who criticized the incumbent for being too centrist. In 2022, Fitzpatrick won re-election by 10 points in a district that Biden carried by 4.6 points two years earlier, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Cook rates the first district as “likely Republican” in the general election. Fitzpatrick will face Democrat Ashley Ehasz, who ran uncontested in the Democratic primary, in November.Elsewhere in the state, Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican state representative, won the seventh-district GOP primary, vying for the chance to face off against the Democratic incumbent Susan Wild. The Lehigh Valley district is considered a “toss-up” in the general election, per Cook’s ratings.In the 10th district, based around the city of Harrisburg, Democrat Janelle Stelson won the crowded Democratic primary. The former news anchor will face the Republican incumbent and former House freedom caucus chair Scott Perry. Cook rates Perry’s race as “lean Republican” in the general election.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      Trump lauds House speaker as a ‘good person’ after Ukraine aid bill passage

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      Mike Johnson is a “good person” and is “trying very hard”, Donald Trump said, after the US House speaker oversaw passage of military aid to Ukraine, long opposed by Trump, in the face of fierce opposition from the right of the Republican party.“Well, look, we have a majority of one, OK?” Trump said in a radio interview on Monday night, after a day in court in his New York hush-money trial.“It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do,” Trump said of Johnson. “I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on Nato when I said Nato has to pay up … I think he’s a very good man. I think he’s trying very hard. And again, we’ve got to have a big election.”Johnson faces opposition from rightwingers in his party, in particular from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fervent Trump ally who has threatened to trigger a motion to vacate, the mechanism by which a speaker can be removed, and called for Johnson to quit.No less than 112 House Republicans voted against Ukraine aid, leaving Johnson reliant on Democratic support. A similar scenario saw his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, removed last year, but with an election looming, many see Johnson as safe for now.Trump’s distaste for Nato was often on show when he was president and has been prominent in his campaign to return to the White House despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties.Trump recently said he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies he deemed financially delinquent: remarks Joe Biden condemned as “dumb, shameful, dangerous [and] un-American”.Trump’s apparent fondness for Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader who ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has also been a constant of his time in politics.Most observers thought Trump would therefore continue to back Republicans who blocked Ukraine aid for months. But as Johnson manoeuvred towards passing a bill and then did so last Saturday, Trump declined to shoot down the effort.In his Monday interview with John Fredericks, a rightwing radio host, Trump praised Johnson for converting $9bn of Ukraine aid into a “forgivable loan” – a proposal some Republicans wanted to apply to the whole package.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFocusing on avoiding chaos in Congress in an election year, Trump said: “We’ve got to election [sic] some people in Congress, much more than we have right now. We have to elect some good senators. Get rid of some of the ones we have now, like [Mitt] Romney [of Utah] and others.”Romney, who as the Republican presidential nominee in 2012 picked Russia as the “number one geopolitical foe” of the US, was also the only GOP senator to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial, for seeking to blackmail Ukraine by withholding military aid in return for dirt on his rivals.Focusing on his own political prospects, in a rematch with Biden in which polling his been slowly tilting towards the incumbent, Trump said: “We have to have a big day, and we have to win the presidency. If we don’t win the presidency, I’m telling you I think our country could be finished … We are absolutely a country in decline.”Trump spent much of the interview complaining about his various prosecutions, which have reduced his ability to campaign. Teeing Trump up, Fredericks called the hush-money case, concerning payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair, “this scam, communist, Soviet manifesto trial that is going on in New York City”. More

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      On trial, Trump is a shadow of the superhero his supporters crave | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump is already in jail. He is pressed into confinement every weekday, except Wednesdays, beginning bright and early, no excuses, at 9.30 in the morning, in the dreary courtroom in Manhattan, where his impulse to mouth off wearies and worries his lawyers, and he must listen, for the first time since his father slapped him down, to an authority telling him to gag himself. He had more leeway when Fred Trump shipped the problem child to the New York military academy where Donald bullied his classmates.Trump’s required attendance in the courtroom as a criminal defendant is his first loss of liberty.His image there is raw, uncut and unfiltered, like Andy Warhol’s film Sleep,in which Warhol fixed a camera on his slumbering lover for six hours. It’s not a Trump rally. The withering focus – without the introduction of the thumping music, his emergence from a dry ice-generated cloud of fog and the predictably orgasmic reception of frenzied minions – reveals something less than the conquering hero in a “Make America Great Again” red baseball cap clapping his hands.Day after day, Trump slumps in his chair, his eyes narrowing and closing, his facial features sagging, until he suddenly jerks to life, once muttering a seemingly veiled threat to a potential juror that earned him a rebuke from Judge Juan Merchan that if he persisted he would be in contempt for witness intimidation. Without self-discipline, Trump invites being disciplined. Lacking control, he fails to control himself. Time and again, he falls asleep, “appeared to nod off a few times, his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest”, Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times.He appears to pass through the seven ages of man in a blink of the eye without having gone through those of adulthood, leaping from caterwauling infant to angry curmudgeon, the stages from napping to napping.Trump clearly prefers to be where he is when his eyes are closed rather than when they are open. His sleeping might be a form of passive aggression, showing his hostility, and at the same time willful avoidance and denial. Railing on his Truth Social account, while minute by minute the price of the market-listed “DJT” dives, he wails in capital letters against the trial – “THIS SCAM ‘RUSHED’ TRIAL TAKING PLACE IN A 95% DEMOCRAT AREA IS A PLANNED AND COORDINATED WITCH HUNT” – and the judge – “POSSIBLY THE MOST CONFLICTED JUDGE IN JUDICIAL HISTORY, WHO MUST BE REMOVED FROM THIS HOAX IMMEDIATELY.”For Trump, the trial is an ordeal – literally an ordeal, in the sense of a medieval trial in which the offender is subjected to torture to determine guilt or innocence. Documents and witnesses did not figure into those trials in the Middle Ages. The verdict was procured by ordeals of walking on fire or boiling in water. Trump, for his part, flips the historical script. He is out to discredit the documents and witnesses. He acts as if the only truth appears when he speaks outside the courtroom. He wants his devotees to see the trial as an ancient ordeal by combat in which he is warrior, not the offender.In a waking moment, Trump’s promise that he will testify shows his understanding of the trial as more than a matter of the law, but a spectacle that raises the central issue at stake in his cult of personality. Of course, if he were to take the stand, inevitably to allegedly lie, as he has in past depositions, and inescapably to present himself to the jury as an unsympathetic narcissist, he would undermine his case, and possibly face additional severe penalties for obstruction of justice and perjury up to a separate sentence of seven years in jail.But it is likely that Trump will not take the witness chair to subject himself to the prosecutor’s cross-examination. Trump’s dissembling is a gesture of false bravado showing that he intuitively grasps that for his followers his image as a strongman is on trial. He needs to tell them he fears nothing. He’ll think of an excuse later. He is on trial because he has been accused of bribing people not to tell the truth, but he has to lie to maintain his myth.The trial is a morality play that has also become a mortality play. His elemental appeal is that he can do whatever he wants, that his power derives from making a mockery of the rules. He wants more than presidential immunity for anything he has done, from the attempted coup of January 6 to stealing national security secrets. He demands absolute immunity from social norms and conventions. His defiance, so far without consequences, is essential to demonstrating his strength. He appears immune to ordinary strictures. But strongmen can’t exist within someone else’s regime. The trial is a prequel of Trump caged. He doesn’t play by the rules, but now he has to obey them.Trump has strategized that he could use the trial as his platform to depict himself as the superhero against the system. He would invert the terms of the prosecution to persecution and convert the trial into his campaign trail. As a victim of the forces of evil elites, he would inflate himself into a larger fighter for his followers. “I am your retribution!”But the action hero can’t move without permission. “Sir, would you please have a seat,” the judge ordered when he stood up to walk out before adjournment. Superman can’t fly. He may dream of racing like Batman through Gotham, but he is facing the judge on the high bench issue a ruling about his contempt for violating the gag order.He has lost more than his ability to articulate; he is becoming disarticulated as a figure. “It is a shame,” he whined. “I am sitting here for days now, from morning until night in that freezing room. Everybody was freezing in there! And all for this. This is your result. It is very unfair.” Under the weight of the trial, he is decaying, “haggard and rumpled, his gait off-center, his eyes blank”, according to the Times.Trump is widely seen as obnoxious, vile and no model for children, even by some who support him, but he retains one great political asset that has allowed him to transcend his toxicity. He is perceived as a “strong and decisive leader”, according to the Gallup Poll. For his followers his strength has been immutable. This image is at the heart of his cult of personality, the center of his political theology and the core of his authoritarianism.The trial is about facts, fiction and putrefaction. The prosecution will present its facts to strip Trump of his lies, his fiction. That regular and expected process has surprisingly but naturally disclosed his physical deterioration, which is hardly incidental but critical to his projection, which is another fiction.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn the kitsch art of Trumpism, a cross between Stalinist socialist realism and comic books, his true believers always, without exception, portray him as a physical strongman. In popular versions, there is Trump in leather jacket on a Harley, Trump on a galloping horse holding a flag, and Trump in fatigues holding an AR-15 rifle standing next to Lincoln and Washington, also in fatigues.Trump, used to living the life of a sloth of the leisure class, actively encourages and profits from these images of virility. When he announced his re-election campaign for president in December 2022, he sold a deck of digital cards for $99 showing himself as Superman (with a “T” on his muscled chest), a Star Wars-like hero, and another holding a lightning bolt in his hand with jet planes in the background and the logo: “Superhero.”His obsession with cultivating the strongman image, like that of Vladimir Putin posing shirtless on a horse, reached an apogee in October 2020, when he was released from the Walter Reed medical center for treatment of Covid, and planned to rip open his shirt to reveal a Superman’s letter “S”. Instead, he stood on the White House balcony and tore off his mask.Trump now aspires to be a dictator “only on day one”. His desire to be an absolute despot is another of his wishful medieval anachronisms. “Be a king, be a killer,” Fred Trump told him. If he is the personification of the Leviathan, the state itself, a divine monarch above the law, his corporeal body merges with that of the body politic. His followers already accept implicitly that tenet of his myth, whether they know it or are Know Nothings. It is vital to his cult.But, if true, the physical decline of his body must be reflected in the decline of his body politics, his kingdom of Maga, which is not the state, at least yet, unless there is a new law of succession, not yet introduced by the Freedom Caucus. Trump’s putrefaction in the courtroom is refutation of his pretension to royalty apart from any legal argument that might be considered by the conservatives on the supreme court to grant his plea of immunity as if he were king.Being tried on the evidence trail of his pathetic old affairs is a cruel irony for the lumpish former man-about-town forced to sit today in the courtroom. He is being visited by the ghost of Playboy Mansion past.“I am supposed to be in Georgia; in North Carolina, South Carolina. I’m supposed to be in a lot of different places campaigning, but I’ve been here all day,” Trump complained. “It’s a whopping outrage and it is an outrage. Everybody is outraged by it.”
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Tulsi Gabbard repeats false Hillary Clinton ‘grooming’ claim in new book

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      Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman, has repeated a discredited claim about Hillary Clinton that previously saw Gabbard lodge then drop a $50m defamation suit in a new book published as she seeks to be named Donald Trump’s running mate for US president.Accusing Democrats of making up “a conspiracy theory that [Trump] was ‘colluding’ with the Russians to win the election” in 2016, Gabbard claims: “Hillary Clinton used a similar tactic against me when I ran for president in 2020, accusing me of being ‘groomed by the Russians’.”Gabbard ran for the Democratic nomination. Clinton did not accuse her of being “groomed by the Russians”.What Clinton said, in October 2019 and on a podcast hosted by the former Barack Obama adviser David Plouffe, was that she thought Republicans would encourage a third-party bid in 2020, aiming to syphon votes from the Democratic candidate in key states as Jill Stein, the Green candidate, and the Libertarian, Gary Johnson, did four years before.“They are also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said, “and I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”Gabbard was then in the Democratic primary, though she never made any impact.Clinton continued: “She is a favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. And, that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset. Yeah, she’s a Russian asset. Totally. And so they know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee they’ll have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most need it.”Amid uproar, a spokesperson for Clinton said she had been referring to Gabbard and the Russians – saying “If the nesting doll fits”, thereby stoking media coverage in which Clinton’s remarks about “grooming” and “assets” were conflated.Clinton’s meaning was soon cleared up, but Gabbard seized on the “grooming” remark. She penned an op ed in the Wall Street Journal under a headline, I Can Defeat Trump and the Clinton Doctrine, that might now prove an awkward fit with her political ambitions.Later, after dropping out of the Democratic primary and endorsing Joe Biden, who she said had “a good heart” and would “help heal” a badly divided country, Gabbard sued Clinton for $50m over the “Russian asset” comment, rather than the remark about “grooming”. That lawsuit was dropped in May 2020.Four years on, Gabbard has completed a remarkable journey across the political aisle, from being seen as a rising Democratic star in the US House to hosting on Fox News and speaking at events including CPAC, a hard-right annual conference. Her book – For Love of Country: Why I Left the Democratic Party – will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.On the page, Gabbard presents a mix of memoir – from growing up in Hawaii to service in Iraq, from entering Congress to her failed presidential run – and pro-Trump screed. Light on detail and heavy on invective, the book includes excoriations of US support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. It will hit shops, however, in the aftermath of the passage in Congress of billions of dollars in new Ukraine aid.Gabbard is widely reported to be a contender for Trump’s running mate in his rematch with Biden. In her book, she defends the 88-times criminally charged former president on many legal fronts.Her complaint about Clinton’s remarks about Russia seems designed to stir up familiar Trump campaign furies over Clinton and the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016, which US intelligence agreed was carried out in his support but which prompts Gabbard to write: “None of it was true.”She also accuses Democrats of planting evidence and stories with a compliant press, aided by a “deep state” consisting of “active and retired officials from within the justice department and other national security agencies”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deep state conspiracy theory, which holds that a permanent government of operatives and bureaucrats exists to thwart populist leaders, is popular with Trump and followers notably including Liz Truss, a former UK prime minister. However, one of its chief creators and propagators, the Trump aide and ally Steve Bannon, has said it is “for nut cases”.Gabbard does not only repeat conspiracy theories in her book, but also makes elementary mistakes. In rehashing her inaccurate complaint about Clinton saying she was being “groomed” by Russia, she writes that Clinton was speaking to David Axelrod, also a former Obama advisor but the host of a separate podcast to Plouffe’s.Gabbard also claims that “the propaganda media repeated Clinton’s lies over and over, without ever asking for evidence or fact-checking her themselves”.In fact, Gabbard’s claims against Clinton were widely fact-checked or made the subject of article corrections.In October 2019 – months before Gabbard filed suit – the Washington Post, a leading exponent of the fact-checking form, said: “The initial news reports got it wrong, perhaps fueled by the ‘nesting doll’ comment, with many saying Clinton said the Russians were grooming Gabbard for a third-party bid.”Clinton, the paper added, “certainly said Gabbard was backed by Russian bots and even suggested she was a Russian asset”. But “within a 24-hour news cycle, Clinton’s staff made it clear she was talking about the GOP, not the Russians, eyeing Gabbard as a possible third-party candidate. A simple listen to the podcast confirmed that.“In other words, this was all cleared up 12 days before Gabbard published her [Wall Street Journal] article, making the inaccurate version of [the] ‘grooming’ statement the very first sentence. So there’s little excuse for getting this wrong.”The paper therefore awarded Gabbard three Pinocchios – denoting “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” – out of a possible four. More

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      The Guardian view on arming Ukraine: US Congress votes against appeasement | Editorial

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      In chaos theory, the flapping of butterfly wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. This weekend, Ukraine experienced a butterfly moment. Donald Trump’s efforts to conceal the fact that he bought the silence of a porn star before the 2016 election landed him in court, facing charges that preoccupy him enough for congressional Republicans to reject his policy of prematurely ceding territory to Russia in return for peace in Ukraine. Kyiv will now get billions of dollars to buy the weapons crucial for it to defend against, and push back, the Russian advance. It is fitting that Mr Trump’s divisive appeasement has been defeated – for now – by a bipartisan defence of democracy.The presumptive Republican nominee had, in an election year, counted on using his mendacious, inflammatory rhetoric to further convert his party into a truth-denying sect prepared to abandon the rule of law for the rule of revenge. Instead, he is required to attend every day that the Manhattan court is in session, for a trial expected to last at least six weeks. The proceedings will be closely followed around the world. But they will not be televised. It will be a circus, but without its ringmaster. Deprived of the camera’s attention, the former president won’t be able to bully Republican lawmakers or rally his followers so effectively.Mr Trump’s diminished status was not lost on many Republicans in Congress. President Joe Biden had first called on them to back Ukraine with arms and cash last October. However, it was not until Mr Trump’s attention was elsewhere that the House on Saturday passed the $61bn aid bill for Ukraine. The vote was 311 for and 112 against, with all the Democrats and 101 Republicans voting in favour of the bill and 112 Republicans voting against. It can only be good news that there are still Republicans who want America to be governed effectively. It also signals that Ukraine should deal with Russia from a position of strength not weakness.In the last two months, most Democrats and a sizeable number of Republicans have voted to pass bills to avoid government shutdowns and commit to traditional national security priorities. This governing coalition is on the right side of history. But it may not last. Mr Trump faces four separate indictments. The current case is about sex, money, deception and blackmail. It’s more tawdry than the other, weightier trials about alleged election interference and the mishandling of classified documents. However, only the jury in New York is likely to produce a verdict before the election in November.Mr Trump is an unscrupulous demagogue without the slightest qualification to be president. The US, under his presidency, was maintained at the edge of chaos, between too much and too little control. The long-festering problems in the GOP gave rise to a leader only nominally affiliated with it.By being the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term, Mr Trump has gained a reputation for being a loser. But the billionaire is not interested in restoring Republican dominance, only shaping it into a cult of personality. He will only fail if he faces active, sustained opposition. Mr Biden has done that by highlighting the choices that divide congressional Republicans. But challenging Mr Trump also means challenging the system that produced him. Mr Biden still has work to do on that score.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Rightwing media mock Marjorie Taylor Greene after Ukraine aid bill passes

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      A New York Post front page on Monday blaring “Nyet, Moscow Marjorie”, its mocked-up picture showing Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a Soviet cap, was the latest sign of sections of the US right turning on the extremist, pro-Trump Georgia congresswoman over her opposition to military aid for Ukraine.“The score in Congress is now ‘Jewish space lasers lady 0, common sense 1’,” the Murdoch-owned tabloid said, celebrating the fact that Greene and other “Republican renegades” failed to stop passage of the Ukraine aid on Saturday, though they long delayed it.“Jewish space lasers” refers to one of the many conspiracy theories Greene has spread since entering national politics, in that case concerning a supposed cause of wildfires.The aid bill that passed the Republican-led House on Saturday despite opposition from Greene and other GOP rightwingers also funnels military support to Israel and Taiwan.Greene was defiant, telling Fox News Mike Johnson’s “speakership is over” after he oversaw passage of the aid bill, and calling for the Louisiana Republican, a stringent rightwinger himself, “to do the right thing to resign and allow us to move forward in a controlled process”.She again threatened to trigger the motion to remove the speaker that she filed last month – a move that also generated significant criticism in rightwing media circles.But though 112 members of the House voted no on Ukraine aid, and though Johnson must lead the chamber with only a tiny majority, Greene faces an uphill path to remove him, should Democrats who supported the military aid bill stay ranged on his side in an unusual bipartisan coalition that has emerged in recent weeks after legislative paralysis overcame the House.On Saturday, Johnson told reporters: “Three of our primary adversaries, Russia, Iran and China, are working together … and they’re a global threat to our prosperity and our security. Their advance threatens the free world, and it demands American leadership.“If we turn our backs right now the consequences could be devastating. It’s an old military adage, but we would rather send bullets to the conflict overseas than our own boys, our troops.”In opposing such aid, Greene has widely been seen to be doing the bidding of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president who had strongly opposed more aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders. However he appeared to soften last week after having dinner with Andrzej Duda, Poland’s far-right president, in New York after Trump had spent the day in court for jury selection at his criminal trial, with a post on social media that did not directly oppose more US aid for Ukraine.Poland is very wary about the power of an emboldened neighbor, Russia, to threaten eastern Europe.Meanwhile, Greene has said she has hopes of being named Trump’s running mate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut rightwing criticism of Greene and her cohorts in opposing Ukraine aid has been gathering nonetheless.Last week, before Ukraine aid passed, Fox News itself posted an op-ed column with the stark headline: “Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot. She is trying to wreck the GOP.”On Friday, Ken Buck – a recently retired conservative congressman who did much to name Greene “Moscow Marjorie” – spoke to CNN.“Moscow Marjorie has reached a new low,” he said. “You know, during the Russian Revolution, [Vladimir] Lenin talked about American journalists who were writing glowing reports about Russia at the time as ‘useful idiots’.“And I don’t even think that Marjorie reaches that level of being a useful idiot here. She is just mouthing the Russian propaganda, and really hurting American foreign policy in the process.” More

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      Liz Cheney urges US supreme court to rule quickly on Trump’s immunity claim

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      The former congresswoman and co-chair of the House January 6 committee Liz Cheney is urging the US supreme court to rule quickly on Donald Trump’s claim that he has immunity from prosecution for acts he committed while president – so that his 2020 election interference trial can begin before the 2024 election this November.“If delay prevents this Trump case from being tried this year, the public may never hear critical and historic evidence developed before the grand jury, and our system may never hold the man most responsible for January 6 to account,” Cheney wrote in an opinion article for the New York Times, published on Monday.Trump faces four federal election subversion charges, arising from his attempt to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, fueled by his lie about electoral fraud and culminating in the deadly attack on Congress by extremist supporters, urged on by the then president, on 6 January 2021.Cheney warned: “I know how Mr Trump’s delay tactics work,” adding: “Mr Trump believes he can threaten and intimidate judges and their families, assert baseless legal defenses and thereby avoid accountability altogether.”The special counsel Jack Smith, prosecuting the case against Trump, has urged the court to reject Trump’s immunity claim as “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government”.Cheney, a Republican and the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, was ousted from her congressional seat, representing Wyoming, after she became one of the strongest voices from the GOP demanding Trump be held accountable for inciting and failing to stop the January 6 insurrection.She has since said she would prefer Democrats to win in the 2024 elections over members of her own party as it has become more extreme, because she feared the US was “sleepwalking into dictatorship” and that another Trump White House presented a tangible “threat” to American democracy.Cheney said in her New York Times article: “The special counsel’s indictment lays out Mr Trump’s detailed plan to overturn the 2020 election … [and that] senior advisers in the White House, Justice Department and elsewhere repeatedly warned that Mr Trump’s claims of election fraud were false and that his plans for January 6 were illegal.”She added: “If Mr Trump’s tactics prevent his January 6 trial from proceeding in the ordinary course, he will also have succeeded in concealing critical evidence from the American people – evidence demonstrating his disregard for the rule of law, his cruelty on January 6 and the deep flaws in character that make him unfit to serve as president. The Supreme Court should understand this reality and conclude without delay that no immunity applies here.”The court’s nine-member bench leans very conservative, especially after Trump nominated three rightwing justices while he was president. The court hears oral arguments in the immunity case on Thursday.Trump and his team urged the court to find that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts they take in office and therefore dismiss the federal criminal case. More

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      The pro-Israel groups planning to spend millions in US elections

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      A handful of pro-Israel groups fund political campaigns in support of individual candidates in US elections, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), a powerful force in American politics. Before the 2024 election, Aipac plans to spend tens of millions of dollars against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, whom it deems insufficiently supportive of Israel.Aipac and other pro-Israel lobby groups have recruited and supported challengers to a number of lawmakers and candidates – most notably members of the Squad, the group of progressive representatives who are particularly vocal in their criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza.The 2024 election will be bellwether of the enduring impact of these groups on US politics amid shifting US public opinion on Israel.What is Aipac?Aipac has its roots in the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs, which was founded by a lobbyist for the Israeli government in an attempt to manage the political fallout the Israeli army’s 1953 massacre of dozens of Palestinians, most of them children and women, in the West Bank village of Qibya.The organisation was renamed Aipac in 1959. It was not until financial support surged after the 1973 Yom Kippur war that it began to grow into the powerful Washington lobbyist group it is today.For many years, Aipac’s influence went largely unchallenged on Capitol Hill. The pressure group claimed to voice bipartisan support for Israel in Congress and worked to marginalise the relatively small number of critics there.Aipac’s annual conference typically involved a long rollcall of members of Congress who support the group. It has regularly galvanised almost every member of the US Senate to sign letters in support of Israeli policies, including several wars in Gaza.But the group’s once unchallenged influence in Washington has been diminished by its unwavering backing for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the past 15 years. It sided with him against President Barack Obama’s opposition to settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories and his nuclear deal with Iran.The liberal Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz has described Aipac as “the pro-Netanyahu, anti-Israel lobby”.“Effectively, the organization has become an operational wing of Netanyahu’s far-right government, one that peddles a false image of a liberal Israel in the United States and sells illusions to members of Congress,” it said.What has changed?Aipac traditionally endorsed candidates sympathetic to Israel as a signal for others to fund their campaigns. But in December 2021, the group for the first time in its 70-year history moved into direct financial support for individual political campaigns by launching a super political action committee, the United Democracy Project (UDP). A Super Pac is permitted to spend without restriction for or against candidates but cannot make direct donations to their campaigns.The move was prompted by alarm at the erosion of longstanding bipartisan support for Israel in the US. Opinion polls show younger Democrats have grown more critical of the deepening oppression of the Palestinians, including Jewish Americans, a trend that has only strengthened with the present war in Gaza.Aipac has grown increasingly concerned that the election of candidates critical of Israel could open the door to the conditioning of the US’s considerable military aid, erosion of Washington’s diplomatic protection on the international stage, and political pressure to establish a Palestinian state.So the UDP is working to block Democratic candidates critical of Israel at the first hurdle – the primaries – in an effort to shore up the claim that there is unswerving support for the Jewish state across Congress. It is also targeting progressive Democratic members of Congress who have pressed for a ceasefire in Gaza.What about other lobby groups?A number of smaller groups are working to the same end, principally the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI). It was founded five years ago by Mark Mellman, a Democratic political consultant. The DMFI’s board of directors includes Archie Gottesman, who also co-founded JewBelong, a group that has posted pink billboards in US cities in support of Israel including one that declared: ‘Trust Me. If Israel Wanted to Commit Genocide in Gaza, It Could’.Notably, the UDP has so far not waded into the campaign against Summer Lee in this year’s primary, despite spending more than $3m to defeat her in 2022. Instead the Republican mega-donor Jeffrey Yass has stepped up as the largest funder of a Pac called Moderate Pac to support Lee’s primary opponent, Bhavini Patel. It is running ads saying that Lee’s criticisms of Biden amount to support for Donald Trump even though Yass himself is a Trump supporter.A more moderate pro-Israel group, J Street, was founded in 2007 to counter Aipac’s unflinching support for rightwing governments. J Street established a Pac to support candidates who back a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. But it has raised only about $4m so far this election cycle.Who are they targeting and how?Aipac plans to spend $100m this year against congressional candidates, primarily Democrats, and members of Congress critical of Israel. So far the UDP has raised more than $49m, according to its most recent Federal Election Commission filings.The bulk of that money has yet to be spent but the UDP has already thrown millions of dollars into political advertising targeted against candidates critical of Israel, but which focuses on other issues and fails to make clear that it is funded by a pro-Israel group. Critics have accused Aipac of attempting to intimidate candidates into avoiding criticism of Israel by implicitly threatening to fund campaigns against them.Among those expected to be targeted by pro-Israel groups are members of the the Squad, including Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who are thought to be vulnerable to political attacks over issues unrelated to their criticisms of the war in Gaza.Who is funding these campaigns?The leading donors to the UDP are Republicans seeking to influence Democratic primaries.The single largest donor is the conservative Ukrainian American billionaire co-founder of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, who gave $5m. Koum also donated to the Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s Super Pac.Other donors include the financier, Jonathan Jacobson, who gave $2.5m to the UDP toward the end of last year although for many years his political donations were directed to the Republican National Committee and the party’s US Senate campaigns. The Israeli-born entrepreneur David Zalik gave the UDP $2m. He has also donated to Republican campaigns in Georgia.The Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus, who was one of the largest donors to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and who continues to back him financially, gave $1m to the UDP, as did the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who has given millions of dollars to Republican political causes over the years.Donations to the UDP are separate from tens of millions of dollars in pledges made directly to Aipac in the wake of the 7 October attacks by Hamas as the public relations battle intensified over Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza and a surging number of Palestinian civilian deaths.Top donors to the DMFI include Deborah Simon, the daughter of the billionaire businessman and movie producer Mel Simon, who gave $1m. She regularly donates to Democratic causes and Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League.Sam Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency billionaire who is serving 25 years for fraud, gave $250,000 to DMFI during the 2022 midterm elections. The group has been forced to return the money.Other major DMFI donors are closely tied to Aipac such as Stacy Schusterman, who has given more than $1m, and the venture capitalist Gary Lauder.How has the present war in Gaza changed the equation?The conflict has strengthened the hand of Israel’s critics within the Democratic party as polls show rising sympathy for the Palestinians. That in turn has made Aipac’s financial backing a potential liability for some Israel-supporting Democratic candidates.Aipac was already on the defensive after endorsing the 2022 campaigns of dozens of Republican members of Congress who tried to block President Biden’s presidential victory.Aipac defended the move by claiming that backing for the Jewish state overrides other issues and that it was “no moment for the pro-Israel movement to become selective about its friends”.“When we launched our political action committee last year, we decided that we would base decisions about political contributions on only one thing: whether a political candidate supports the US-Israel relationship,” it said. More