Republicans

Subterms

    More stories

    • 238 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      More Democrats call for Biden to exit 2024 race as president vows to return to campaign trail – live

      by

      Political publication Punchbowl is reporting that Gabe Vasquez, a New Mexico representative, has joined the ranks of Democratic party members calling on Biden to step aside for the November election.As of 1:51pm PT, Reuters counted that 32 of the 264 Democrats in Congress had openly called for Biden to end his campaign, while others continue to pressure the president behind the scenes.In an op-ed published by the Boston Globe on Friday, Seth Moulton, a Democratic representative, explains how he came to the “crushing” realization that Biden should not be the Democratic candidate facing Trump in November.Moulton had already expressed his opinion that Biden should step aside. But in the article, he recounts seeing Biden, whom he described as a treasured friend and mentor, at a recent event in Normandy observing the 80th anniversary of D-Day. He claims the president, with whom he had spent time with frequently since winning his House seat in 2014, seemed not to recognize him.“Of course, that can happen as anyone ages, but as I watched the disastrous debate a few weeks ago, I have to admit that what I saw in Normandy was part of a deeper problem,” Moulton said.Given Biden’s apparent state of health and the recent assassination attempt on Trump, Moulton said he is “no longer confident” Biden can win re-election. “The president should bow out of the race,” he said.“The harsh reality is that all the characteristics that have made Biden an irrepressible force – the energy, the vitality, the sharp, scrappy wit – are flickering,” Moulton added.Moulton is part of a growing group of Democratic lawmakers urging the president to exit. He urged more members of his party to come forward and “speak the truth about President Biden before it’s too late”.“We have a choice to make,” he said. “To my colleagues who are deeply concerned but who haven’t said so publicly: Let’s demonstrate the courageous, forward-looking leadership that Americans tell us they want in their politics and rob the Trump-Vance ticket of the opponent they want.”The White House has issued a statement on nationwide technology disruptions Friday due to outages of Microsoft devices caused by an update to security software CrowdStrike.Joe Biden will “continue to receive updates on the CrowdStrike global tech outage”, a senior administration official said, adding the White House is “in regular contact with CrowdStrike’s executive leadership and tracking progress on remediating affected systems”.“We have offered US government support. Our understanding is that this is not a cyber attack, but rather a faulty technical update,” the statement said. More below:
      The White House has been convening agencies to assess impacts to the US government’s operations and entities around the country. At this time, our understanding is that flight operations have resumed across the country, although some congestion remains, and 911 centers are able to receive and process calls. We are assessing impact to local hospitals, surface transportation systems, and law enforcement closely and will provide further updates as we learn more. We stand ready to provide assistance as needed.
      Joining the growing chorus of Democratic members urging Biden to take a backseat in the upcoming election, Morgan McGarvey, a representative of Kentucky, said in a post to X Friday that “the stakes are too high” for Biden to remain in the race.“There is no joy in the recognition that [Biden] should not be our nominee in November,” he said. “But the stakes are too high and we can’t risk the focus of the campaign being anything other than Donald Trump, his Maga extremists, and the mega-wealthy dark money donors who are prepared to destroy our path toward a more perfect union with Trump’s Project 2025.”Earlier on Friday, Kamarck, a member of the DNC’s rules committee, told delegates and reporters that the move to hold a virtual roll call was not an effort to “rubber stamp” Biden’s nomination but “born out of just paranoia about the Republicans in Ohio”.If the party were to formally nominate Biden and then he chose to drop out, she said they would simply adopt a new rule and hold a new roll call vote.“In other words, this doesn’t mean we’re stuck with one person if that person isn’t willing to run,” she said, adding that a misunderstanding of the process had “turned into sort of a mountain and a molehill” among anxious Democrats.Democratic officials pressed members of the Democratic national convention’s rules committee to move ahead with a virtual roll call vote ahead of the party’s August convention.The meeting took place on Friday, as the walls appeared to be closing in on Biden.The move to nominate Biden virtually sparked a backlash among Democrats who saw it as a way to jam through the president’s nomination before he could be pushed out. Responding to the outrage, the co-chairs of the rules committee said the vote would not take place before 1 August and would be completed by 7 August, previously the deadline for presidential candidates to qualify for the ballot in Ohio. Though the Ohio legislature has since changed the law, extending the deadline to accommodate the DNC’s mid-August convention, some Democratic officials say it would be foolhardy to take the risk, given that Ohio Republicans control the legislature and had to be arm-twisted by the state’s governor to address the issue in the first place.Dana Remus, an outside legal counsel for the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee, encouraged the convention to proceed with a virtual nomination in advance to avoid the possibility of a legal challenge by Ohio Republicans, according to the New York Times.“Unfortunately, at this moment in time, we have to assume that everything about the election process that Republicans and affiliated groups can challenge, they will challenge,” she said, according to the newspaper. “No matter the strength of their arguments.”The rules committee would hold another meeting later this month to decide on whether to adopt a virtual roll call vote.The webinar was hosted by Delegates Are Democracy and Welcome Party, organizations which are working to inform confused delegates about their options, said host Chris Dempsey. He has been speaking with dozens of delegates who say the process is opaque and that party leaders have been gatekeeping information. He stressed that Delegates for Democracy was not advocating for Biden to withdraw, but was instead trying to guide delegates who are often local volunteers without deep legal training about the rules.“We think that conventions are essential at putting forward strong nominees,” Dempsey said. “We can beat Donald Trump in November. But we know that we need credible sources of information to share with delegates. We want to be a place that delegates, the public, the media can come and get good information about how the process works.”A Biden withdrawal would set of a mad dash for delegates, Karmack said. A process would start on the floor, with potential candidates soliciting signatures on a petition to get on a nomination ballot – no more than 50 from any one state from 300 to 600 delegates. “They can’t sign every petition,” she said.“The people, these 4000-plus delegates, would have a lot of phone calls,” she said. “I suspect that somebody the DNC or the state parties would organize delegate meetings that would be open to the public – because all DNC meetings are open to the public – for the candidates to come and talk to the delegates, because they’d have to win over the delegates.”She likened the process to a mini-primary, with delegates as the voting audience, “scrunched into three weeks or something. It’d be incredibly tight.” The question at the convention would then become whether a consensus had formed on a new nominee.The nomination for vice president would be held on a separate vote, she said. “I imagine what would happen is that whoever emerged as the front runner – and maybe there’d be two or three of them – would all name their vice-presidential candidates. But then we’d have an open vote for vice president. It could get quite confusing. But this assumes all of this assumes that there’s a contest. And I for one am very skeptical that there’ll be much of a contest.”Ohio may still present a problem for any new candidate, because Ohio state law requires notice by August 9. Ohio lawmakers changed the law in July but it’s unclear if that change legally goes into effect in time for it to assist.Delegates to the Democratic national convention can more or less do whatever they want in a floor vote, rules experts said in a webinar about the process Friday morning.Elaine Karmack, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, founding director of Center for Effective Public Management, and a member of the DNC’s rules committee, discussed concerns delegates have been raising about a process that seems opaque, largely because it hasn’t been employed at all since 1980 and never under these conditions.Delegates are expected to vote for the person they’re pledged to. But the convention rules contain a loophole, she said. “The loophole ‘is in all good conscience’. That was added after the very, very difficult and bitter 1980 convention.”At that convention, Senator Ted Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter in primaries and then a floor fight. At the time, delegates could be removed by state leaders if they changed their vote. The conscience clause emerged after that, to prevent delegates from acting like robots, Karmack said.“On the Democratic side, there is no such thing as Joe Biden releasing his delegates,” Karmack said. “And Joe Biden gets this. I don’t know why the rest of the press doesn’t get it. Joe Biden said in his Nato press conference, he said, quote, the delegates can do whatever the hell they want to do. And that is basically true.”The delegate rules require their vote to “reflect the sentiments” of those who elected them. That phrase has never really been tested, Karmack said.Kamala Harris will participate in a call with major Democratic donors this afternoon at the request of senior advisors to the president, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to the Guardian.The New York Times first reported the vice-president will speak on a call “endorsed by Reid Hoffman”, a co-founder of LinkedIn who is one of the party’s biggest donors.“We continue to find ourselves in a rapidly evolving environment,” Hoffman wrote in an email obtained by the Times. “With the stakes as high as they are this cycle, we have to remain focused on the critical work that needs to be done to protect our democracy.”Her comments were expected to reflect comments made recently during a campaign stop in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Thursday, during which she called the looming contest against Donald Trump the “most existential, consequential and important election of our lifetime”.Two more House Democrats have called on the president to “pass the torch” and “release his delegates” as the president signals a defiant return to the campaign trail next week.The message is clear: the calls will not stop, despite Biden’s insistence he’s not going anywhere. Even if the president doesn’t believe he should step down, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how he can continue without the support of so many in his own party.Minnesota representative Betty McCollum, said Biden should “release his delegates and empower Vice President Harris to step forward to become the Democratic nominee for president,” in a statement provided to the Star Tribune.Meanwhile, Kathy Castor, a Florida representative, told an NBC affiliate in Tampa that now was an “exciting time to possibly pass the torch”, during an interview with a Tampa-based news channel.“Kamala Harris is a fighter and I have full confidence in her,” she said.Joe Biden’s coronavirus symptoms are easing. He’s taking the anti-viral drug Paxlovid, as he isolates in Delaware after flying back early from events in Nevada on Wednesday, when he tested positive for Covid-19.He’s suffering from a non-productive cough and hoarseness, primarily, the White House said.It issued a statement, which you can read here. The variant of the virus that the president caught has not yet been identified.There is someone important hanging out in Washington, DC today though – US vice-president Kamala Harris.She didn’t have anything on her official White House schedule today but she’s materialized at the opening of a pop-up ice-cream shop owned by Tyra Banks.According to the pool report, Harris ordered the “Cap Hill Crunch” flavor. She was accompanied by her grandnieces, one of whom ordered the Chocolate GooGoo cake flavor.Not surprisingly, the vice president did not answer questions about Biden’s political future or her own.It comes to something when a president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the US armed forces makes news because someone said he asked pointed questions and “made decisions”, but, as Joe Biden would say, “Anyway…”Here’s the latest from Reuters:Joe Biden has been engaged and asked pointed questions, the top US general said on Friday, amid questions about the president’s health since he appeared frail and at times lost his train of thought in a recent debate against Republican Donald Trump.
      On all the times I’ve engaged with the president, he’s been engaged. He’s asked very pointed questions, and made decisions,” said Gen CQ Brown, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.
      Hello US politics blog readers, it’s been another extraordinary morning in political news even if Washington DC is a bit of a ghost town, with Joe Biden bunkering in Delaware, Congress on recess and Republicans wandering home from their convention in Milwaukee.But there couldn’t be more drama and the day feels young so stick with Guardian US and we’ll bring you the developments as they happen.Incidentally, we hope you can read this because you dodged the global IT failure, and you can also read all the developments in that story, live, here.Here’s where things stand in US politics:

      High profile Democratic congresswoman Zoe Lofgren of California and Ohio freshman representative Greg Landsman brought the number of members of Congress who have called on Joe Biden to get out of his re-election race to 30.

      Joe Biden remained defiant, despite isolating out of the public eye in Rehoboth because he caught Covid, saying he’ll be back on the campaign trail next week. This despite pressure mounting for him to step aside from the top of the Democrats’ Biden-Harris 2024 ticket.

      Mark Heinrich of New Mexico became the third sitting US Senator to call for Biden to quit the race, urging the president to step aside for the good of the country and pass the torch, saying the party needs a candidate who can defeat Donald Trump in November, for the sake of US democracy.

      Biden also issued a statement condemning Russia for sentencing a Wall Street Journal reporter to 16 years for, as the US government and media continue to assert, simply doing his job. “Journalism is not a crime,” Biden said, as a Russian court found Evan Gershkovich guilty of espionage and sentenced him to 16 years in prison. The trial was widely viewed as a sham. Biden is pushing for his release.

      Congressmen Jared Huffman of California, Marc Veasey of Texas, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Marc Pocan of Wisconsin wrote a letter addressed to the US president calling on him to step aside from the reelection race.

      Before Joe Biden said he’s be back on the campaign trail next week, yet another media report bubbled up saying that members of Biden’s family has begun discussing an “exit” plan, citing “two people familiar” with the situation. The report suggests Biden has yet to make a final decision, but that his closest allies believe he is likely to step aside.

      Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s reelection campaign chair, said he is the “leader of our campaign and the country” during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the president’s favorite show. “He is the best person to take on Donald Trump and prosecute that case,” she said.

      Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in which he declined to make an endorsement in the 2024 election, but called Donald Trump’s reaction – raising a fist and mouthing fight, after his ear was bloodied by a bullet during an assassination attempt at one of his rallies, in Pennsylvania last weekend, “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”.
      Ohio representative Greg Landsman is a freshmen congressman, representing the state’s first district, which includes Cincinnati.He took office in January 2023 after being elected in the midterms and previously serving as a city councillor for almost five years until December 2022, so spanning the coronavirus pandemic.In a statement this afternoon he followed, in what is becoming almost protocol, showering Joe Biden with praise: “It is time for President Biden to step aside and allow us to nominate a new leader who can reliably and consistently make the case against Donald Trump and make the case for the future of America.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Convicted criminals take Republican stage despite focus on ‘law and order’

      by

      The Republican party that promised in its 2024 policy platform to restore “law and order” as a “pillar” of “American civilisation” packed up and left Milwaukee on Friday after a convention featuring numerous felons.The most prominent was the keynote speaker: Donald Trump, the former president turned nominee who in May was convicted in New York on 34 criminal charges of falsifying business records arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star.Trump also awaits trial on at least 14 and as many as 54 other criminal charges, and in addition has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars in civil cases for business fraud and defamation arising from a rape claim a judge said was “substantially true”.But there was also Peter Navarro, once Trump’s trade adviser, who addressed the convention on Wednesday fresh out of a Florida jail where he served four months for criminal contempt of Congress.“I went to prison so you won’t have to,” declared Navarro – who was convicted for refusing to comply with subpoenas from the House January 6 committee – to a jubilant crowd that responded with a standing ovation.Another former Trump aide turned convicted criminal in attendance was Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. Three years later he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison on charges including bank fraud, tax fraud, money laundering and witness tampering, arising from the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.In 2020 Trump pardoned Manafort, who later wrote a memoir called Political Prisoner. At the convention, Manafort was briefly linked with an organising role before backing off, though he was still in Milwaukee to tell Fox News: “I’ve done 10 conventions. This is the best.”Roger Stone, who like Manafort is a longtime operative convicted on charges arising from the Russia investigation, was also at the convention in Milwaukee.Stone was sentenced to more than three years in prison after being convicted of criminal charges including witness tampering and obstructing Congress. He never set foot in jail, as Trump commuted his sentence.Rod Blagojevich attended as well. In July 2011, the former Democratic governor of Illinois was convicted on 17 criminal charges, including bribery, fraud and extortion, arising from an attempt to sell Barack Obama’s US Senate seat.Blagojevich was jailed for 14 years. In 2020, Trump commuted his sentence. This week, Blagojevich told NBC: “I think President Trump is the most demonised political figure in American history, and I know something about being demonised.”Another former Trump aide jailed for criminal contempt of Congress over January 6 did not make it to the convention hall, but Steve Bannon was getting updates via phone from his daughter in Wisconsin to his federal prison in Connecticut.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He’s doing good,” Maureen Bannon told Politico. “He’s able to see the news in there. Read. We can email him articles. So he’s still getting a sense of what’s going on while he’s a political prisoner.”The irony of “the party of law and order” being led by one criminal and welcoming other criminals was not lost on many observers.One of the defining elements of authoritarianism is selective application of the law,” wrote Will Saletan in the Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative publication.“In fascist movements, ‘law and order’ is invoked against scapegoats and political enemies, while the leader and his allies are exempt from legal accountability.“This distinction has become central to Donald Trump’s Republican party.” More

    • 263 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump’s run of good luck could end this weekend – if Joe Biden does the right thing | Jonathan Freedland

      by

      You can see why they think he’s God’s anointed one. You can understand why Republicans cheered when Donald Trump repeatedly claimed the divine as his number one supporter, declaring with certainty that he had God on his side. To the faithful gathered at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee on Thursday night, none of that would have sounded like exaggeration – and not only because their nominee for the US presidency had survived an assassin’s bullet. It’s also because Trump has been on a run of extraordinary good fortune – one that might be just about to end.Of course, it was that brush with death at a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend that the former and would-be future president had in mind when he spoke of “a providential moment”. The shooting, and Trump’s ability to shrug off injury, raising his fist in bloodied defiance, has prompted his most fervent believers to cast him as a living martyr to their cause. The Republican party had already transformed itself into a cult of personality. But to see delegates wearing bandages on their right ears as a mark of love for, and identification with, their leader is to realise that that cult has become messianic.Still, even the most godless Republican may have found themselves wondering if Trump does indeed have a friend upstairs. For three straight weeks, everything has gone his way.Trump’s hot streak began with the TV debate against Joe Biden at the end of June – a debate that, it’s worth remembering, would typically have taken place in the autumn had not the Biden team insisted it must happen sooner. That was a 90-minute disaster for the president who, when he wasn’t struggling to complete sentences, stared vacantly into space, looking every one of his 81 years.That triggered a panic among Democrats, three long weeks of internal agonising as elders and bigwigs sought to navigate between the pride, and stubbornness, of a president who they believe deserves respect for a consequential term in office, and a party ever-more convinced that he will not only lose the White House, but will take Democratic candidates for the House and Senate down with him. That process may reach its climax this weekend, but not before it has handed Trump a delicious contrast: Democrats divided and distracted, Republicans unified and focused.Meanwhile, the courts have been smiling on Trump, whether it’s six judges of the supreme court, three of whom were appointed by him, granting presidents near total immunity for their official acts, or a Trump-appointed judge throwing out what most agreed was the strongest of all the legal cases against him, relating to his alleged retention of classified documents.That’s allowed him to sit back and enjoy the show. He’s watched as, to take one example, Biden gave a decent performance at a post-Nato summit press conference, giving detailed answers on foreign policy – while all anyone remembers is that he introduced Volodymyr Zelenskiy as “President Putin” and referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice-President Trump”.View image in fullscreenBut it’s the assassination attempt and the TV debate that are the bookend events of these remarkable few weeks, reinforcing what was already Trump’s chosen frame for the campaign: strong v weak. As one senior Democrat put it to me: “The Republicans have a guy who bullets bounce off of. We have a guy who can’t handle a flight of stairs.” The polls are bleakness itself for Democrats, with Trump leading Biden not only in all the key swing states, but even in once solidly Democratic terrain – with Virginia and even, incredibly, New York now deemed “battleground” states. No wonder Republicans were talking this week of a November landslide.Then, just in case any part of the narrative was insufficiently vivid, while Trump was being hailed as a messiah in Milwaukee, Biden contracted Covid. Now he is isolated, in every possible sense.Except maybe it’s possible to be too lucky. Trump is so far ahead, his numbers so strong, that Democrats have stepped up their post-debate push to get Biden to withdraw from the race. Privately at first and then, when Biden refused to budge, publicly via well-placed leaks, congressional leaders, big league donors and arguably the party’s sharpest political brain, the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have spelled it out for the president, telling him he cannot win. “It’s over,” one party veteran tells me. “He’ll be gone by Monday.”If that’s right, then Trump’s lucky streak will surely be at an end. His entire campaign has been predicated on Biden being his opponent. Facing someone else means three fundamentals of the race would be altered. First, media attention will shift away from him to the shiny object of a new Democratic nominee. Second, he, not his opponent, will be the oldest person in the race. And third, Trump should no longer have the “change” message – so potent in this age of anti-incumbency – all to himself.That last element depends on whom Democrats choose and how they do it. If Biden stands aside and there is a quick coronation of his deputy, Harris, then Trump will cast her as the status quo. There will be a cacophony of racist and misogynist dog whistles, along with a related effort to present her as lacking a democratic mandate and dangerously leftwing.But there is another way to do it. Even some of Harris’s backers favour a mini-primary, which could amount to a fortnight or so of TV debates before the 4,000 or so Democratic delegates cast their votes. Not enough, to be sure, but that would bestow some democratic legitimacy on the eventual winner and offer at least a glimpse of who flourishes and who wilts under national scrutiny. The ballot itself should happen before the party convention in Chicago on 19 August, so that that gathering can be a showcase rather than a floor fight.I know – we’re getting ahead of ourselves. But as Democrats head into a fateful weekend, they should know they have little to fear from what may lie ahead. A contest could demonstrate the party’s energy and vigour, its deep bench of new talent, drawing the contrast with the creepy cult it opposes. Given the number of Americans who have been saying for a year or more that they want a choice other than Trump v Biden, there is every chance the election could be upended, with the polls looking radically different almost straight away.And Trump showed again on Thursday night how eminently beatable he is. His speechwriters wanted him to adopt a kinder, gentler tone – a man chastened by his brush with death, bent on healing and national unity. He managed it for a while. But soon he was veering away from the teleprompter, with rambling diversions into all the old, dark greatest hits: “crazy” Pelosi, migrants as an “invasion” of killers and criminals, the election that was stolen from him.The stakes are too high, for the US and the world, to let Democrats cede the 2024 contest to Trump, which is what a continued Biden candidacy would do. The hope is that Biden himself reaches that conclusion in the next day or two, and performs what will be his last great act of public service. Because whatever the Republican faithful may say, this decision is not in the hands of the Almighty – it is in the hands of human beings who, whatever their fears and frailties, need to act and act now.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Is there anything that JD Vance actually believes? | Moira Donegan

      by

      How many faces does JD Vance have? For one thing, he looks a lot different these days. Around the time the election denier first ran for Senate in Ohio, in 2022, he grew a beard, perhaps to cover up his decidedly childlike countenance. As rumors swirled this summer that Donald Trump would choose Vance as his running mate – replacing Mike Pence, who left the vice-presidency after a mob of angry Trump supporters tried to hang him – some wondered if maybe Vance would shave. Trump, it seems, doesn’t like beards, and prefers his underlings clean-shaven. And JD Vance is – has always been – willing to do just about anything to secure the approval of the powerful.According to historian Gabriel Winant, Vance has spent much of his life clinging to a series of mentors, whom he has used for professional advancement before moving on from – and, ultimately, betraying. There was his grandmother, or “Meemaw”, the hardscrabble woman who raised him in rural Ohio – but whom he depicted as ignorant and ultimately culturally pathological in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. There was his Yale Law School mentor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and wife of Jed Rubenfeld, who was suspended from Yale Law after an investigation found that he sexually harassed his students. (Chua also mentored Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, whom she helped secure a clerkship with Brett Kavanaugh.) But Vance left this center-right Yale Law milieu for Silicon Valley, where he made his fortune as a venture capitalist under the tutelage (and with the funding) of the far-right techo-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who would later go on to bankroll Vance’s Senate campaign. Thiel seems to have introduced Vance to his other mentor, the reactionary “neo-monarchist” and favorite intellectual of the Silicon Valley right, Curtis Yarvin.But he pushed aside these old mentors for Donald Trump, whose endorsement he sought with near-slavish sycophancy in his 2022 race. He did this despite having once characterized Trump as “cultural heroin”, “a total fraud”, “reprehensible”, “a moral disaster” and “America’s Hitler”. Vance made those statements back when it suited his ambitions to be critical of Trump: after the release of his book, just before the election in 2016, Vance had been hailed as a “Trump whisperer”, translating the then candidate’s supporters in terms that were palatable for coastal liberal elites. But it does not suit him to be anti-Trump anymore. Now it suits him to be the running mate for “America’s Hitler”.Is there anything JD Vance really believes? He is not a consistent man, but he has embraced a virulent, creepy and inventive sexism that appears too irrepressible to be insincere. Vance is a prolific demeaner of women. He supports a national abortion ban and has opposed rape and incest exceptions, calling rape “an inconvenience” and insisting that abortions should not be allowed in such circumstances because “two wrongs don’t make a right”. In a bizarre episode, he characterized a national abortion ban as necessary to prevent “George Soros” from flying “Black women” to California for abortions.The VP pick of the twice-divorced Trump also opposes no-fault divorce, which allows women to leave unhappy marriages without having to prove abuse in court. Though to be clear, he doesn’t think women should leave abusive men, either. He characterized the ending of marriages that were “maybe even violent” as selfish frivolity: “This is one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” Vance said. “Making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”An adamant “pro-natalist”, Vance has an abiding and obsessive contempt for childless adults, especially women. Blaming the “childless left” for a host of political and cultural problems, Vance has proposed extending extra votes to people with children, so as to dilute the political representation of those without them. He has demeaned non-breeding women as “childless cat ladies”.For those women who do have children, Vance seems to think that they should be confined to the home: he has characterized childcare subsidies – which allow mothers of young children to earn money, obtain professional experience or education, and preserve their independence – as “class war against normal people”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNormal, I guess, is relative. Who counts? Certainly not everyone. Vance’s droolingly misogynist pro-natalism has shaded, as such positions always do, into an endorsement of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that the “elites” Vance so often rails against are trying to replace white “real” Americans with a compliant underclass of immigrants. “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves,” Vance told the 2019 National Conservatism Conference. “That should bother us.” He did not define “us” or “our people”, and he did not elaborate on what he meant by “replacement”. But Vance, though he is craven and dishonest, is not a dumb guy. He did not use those words by accident.Does Vance really believe in the passionately, obsessively sexist things he says? I think he probably does. But it might not matter: what will matter – what has always mattered to Vance – is not what he believes, but what he finds expedient. Vance has already tried to distance himself from his extreme position on abortion, wiping his call to “End Abortion” from his website and delivering mealy-mouthed statements to reporters about his desire for a “national standard” – a phrase that is meant to confuse, since he doesn’t specify what he wants a national standard of. To ask what JD Vance really believes is a bit like staring into a black hole: there is an unknowable blankness behind his tiny, tight blue eyes. What it is certain that Vance has is ambition – ruthless, insatiable and unburdened by principle. Other people believe in ideals, moral principles, right and wrong. The only thing we can say for sure that JD Vance believes is that he, personally, should have as much power as possible.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump speech mixes unity and hate as he caps off Republican convention

      by

      As Donald Trump recounted the terrifying moment when a would-be assassin attempted to kill him on Saturday, the adoring audience at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee hung on his every word. Trump then accepted the Republican presidential nomination for the third time with a momentary message of unity, calling on the country to come together in the wake of the violent attack.“As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny,” Trump said on Thursday night. “We rise together or we fall apart. I am running to be president for all of America.”Then Trump, as he so often does, stepped on his own message. Often veering away from his prepared remarks displayed on a teleprompter, Trump peppered his speech with interjections about the former Democratic House speaker (“crazy Nancy Pelosi”) or a hated news program (“De-Face the Nation”).While promising to “make America great once again”, he painted a picture of an American hellscape under Joe Biden’s leadership, torn apart by “a devastating inflation crisis” and “a massive invasion on our southern border”. And even though past convention speakers largely avoided litigating the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump couldn’t help himself, accusing Democrats of having “used Covid to cheat”.The speech reflected a pattern that played out again and again over the course of the week in Milwaukee, as Republicans tried to project a message of unity with decidedly mixed success. Trump’s newly minted running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, preached a message of economic opportunity for all as convention attendees waved signs reading: “Mass deportation now!” Nikki Haley emphasized the need for Republicans to build a big-tent party based on decency just before Ron DeSantis stepped up to sneer at Biden’s “Weekend at Bernie’s” presidency.The conflicting messages foreshadowed the weighty task that Republicans face looking ahead to November, even with an edge in the polls; they must reach out to independent voters, many of whom disapprove of both the major presidential candidates, without alienating the hard-right loyalists who elevated Trump to his third nomination.In an implicit acknowledgment of that dual task, many of Trump’s most controversial opinions received little air time over the first three days of the convention. Mentions of election denialism, pardons for January 6 insurrectionists and Trump’s criminal cases were few and far between – even as the nominee himself could not resist attacking the “fake documents case” and the “partisan witch-hunts”. They also avoided mentions of pressing issues like abortion access, the climate crisis and gun safety, all of which are sure to be a primary focus at the Democratic convention in Chicago next month.Instead, many speakers attempted to paint a softer picture of Trump. Family members, friends and former colleagues described Trump, who was recently convicted on charges related to paying hush money to his alleged mistress, as a devoted family man. They praised the former president, who infamously boasted about his tendency to “grab ‘em by the pussy,” as a champion of women in the workplace.The message was clear: forget what those awful Democrats have told you, the speakers said. This benevolent, innocent and powerful man is a paragon of good virtue who absolutely can – and should – be trusted with another four years in the White House, they argued.The argument relies on a certain amount of amnesia of Trump’s chaotic first term, which often saw the then president firing members of his cabinet by tweet or musing about buying Greenland. But it would seem that a sort of national forgetfulness has already started falling over Trump’s years in office; a growing number of Americans now say that he left the nation better off, even though his presidency ended when the country was still in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic.Somehow – after four criminal indictments, two impeachments and one failed assassination attempt – Trump is not only still standing but is now the favorite to win the presidential election in November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe attendees of the Republican convention this week appeared optimistic and even relaxed, a mood that may reflect their confidence heading into the final stretch of election season. As “everyday American” speakers praised Trump’s policies on everything from the economy to foreign policy, convention-goers seemed secure in the knowledge that the man they view as a savior would soon return to the nation’s highest office.Democrats have spent recent months trying to remind voters of the chaos that defined Trump’s presidency, but that argument has been somewhat undermined by the drama now encircling Biden’s campaign. Since Biden’s disastrous debate performance last month, more than 20 Democratic members of Congress have called on him to withdraw from the presidential race, with the Montana senator Jon Tester joining their ranks just moments before Trump took the stage on Thursday.As Biden quarantines in his home state of Delaware after testing positive for Covid (again), it remains deeply unclear whether he will be the Democrat facing off against Trump in November. Those questions overshadowed much of the Republican convention this week, and they bolstered Republicans’ efforts to present themselves as the more unified and organized party.If Republicans can maintain that image through the next four months, they might see an overwhelming victory in November. But if the past week has taught Americans anything, it’s that much can change in just a short time. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’: Trump emerges as an American messiah with swagger

      by

      “Fight! Fight! Fight!”The crowd had thought he was dead, Donald Trump recalled on Thursday night, and he wanted to let them know he was OK. “So I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’”The sublime image of Trump at last Saturday’s rally, face bloodied, fist raised, with Secret Service agents and the Stars and Stripes completing the tableau, flashed up on giant TV screens. Delegates at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee responded as one.“Fight! Fight! Fight!” they chanted, punching their own fists in the air in unison. Trump had taken a bullet for them. Their fervour suggested they would be willing to take a bullet for him. A Maga army on the march. A frightening spectacle for American democracy.In that moment it was clear that Trump’s survival of an attempted assassination had turned him into a figure that transcends politics, an American messiah with swagger. His power over the crowd, summoning anger and sympathy and ecstasy with a flick of a switch, evoked dark chapters in Europe in the 20th century.Like demagogues of the past, Trump understands spectacle. His instinctive response to a bullet shaving his ear, sparing his life by a quarter of an inch, was a masterpiece of self-mythology. At the convention on Thursday, in an arena that normally hosts the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, he delivered raw political entertainment.Big screens showed Trump doing his awkward, fist-pumping, flat-footed dance to the sound of Village People’s Y.M.C.A. To Democrats, comedians and much of the world, it is a preposterous sight. To the Trump faithful, it makes him human and lovable.His wife, Melania – rarely seen these days – walked out to the strains of Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 in D minor, joining Trump children Don Jr, Eric, Ivanka and Tiffany in the stand. Musician Kid Rock, wearing black hat, dark glasses and shiny cross, sang: “Say fight fight, say fight fight! Say Trump, say Trump!” The crowd repeated the lines in response.Then came Lee Greenwood singing God Bless the USA, in effect the Trump theme song. Again the crowd joined in. Bright lights began flashing on stage. A white panel slid upwards like a curtain for the big reveal. There stood Donald J Trump, 78, former US president and Man of the Ear, against the backdrop of five giant letters: “TRUMP.”It was camp and gaudy and kitsch and very Trumpy. Soon after, the entire stage set was transformed into a digital image of the White House – four years after Trump broke protocol by addressing the Republican convention from the actual White House. “USA! USA!” chanted a crowd that held “Make America great again!” and “Fire Joe Biden!” signs. Some shouted: “We love you!”Then, in a hushed arena, came Trump’s retelling of the attempted assassination and warning that he may never tell it again “because it’s too painful to tell”. He delivered it in a cadence that, as one former Barack Obama aide noted, was like a bedtime story for kids when the goal is to lull them to sleep.“I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God,” he said, wearing dark suit, red tie and ear bandage. “In watching the reports over the last several days, many people say it was a providential moment. Probably was.”Indeed, numerous convention speakers at the convention have suggested that Trump was saved by divine providence. Ben Carson, his former housing secretary, suggested that God “lowered a shield of protection” over Trump. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, quoted Benjamin Franklin: “God governs in the affairs of men.” Trump’s son Eric offered: “By divine intervention and the angels above, you survived.”For nine years Trump had tapped into the great American trauma of race and made it about him. Now he has turned religion into a personality cult.He recounted: “Once my clenched fist went up, high into the air – you’ve all seen that – the crowd realised I was OK and roared with pride for our country, like no crowd I have ever heard before. Never heard anything like it.”This was the man who once inspired a crowd to storm the US Capitol in an attempted coup. Now the scene in Milwaukee recalled Eleanor Roosevelt’s account of her husband Franklin’s inauguration as US president in 1933: “The crowds were so tremendous. And you felt that they would do anything – if only someone would tell them what to do.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere was more theatre from the greatest showman. Paying tribute to Corey Comperatore, who died at the Pennsylvania rally, Trump walked over to Comperatore’s fire jacket and helmet, which were hanging on a stand behind him. He leaned over and kissed the helmet and asked for a moment of silence in honour of the former fire chief.It was so far, so good for “New Trump”, the man who had supposedly been changed forever by a near-death experience. He would now be “contemplative” and “softer” and “unifying”, we were told. And he began promisingly enough, telling the convention: “I am running to be president for all America, not half of America because there is no victory in winning for half of America.”But it did not take long for the old unhinged demagogue to come roaring back. In a 90-minute speech cribbed from his rallies, he vowed to “drill baby drill” and “close those borders” on his first day in office. He baselessly accused Democrats of “cheating” in elections , denounced Washington DC as “a horrible killing field” and warned of a planet “teetering on edge of world war three”.Trump also spoke of a “massive invasion at our southern border” and claimed immigrants were flooding in from prisons, mental institutions and insane asylums. Cue his now familiar and dated Hollywood film reference: “The late great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner.” Having promised to mention Joe Biden by name, he did so 40 minutes in with scathing criticism.David Axelrod, a former Obama strategist, told CNN: “This is the first good thing that’s happened to Democrats in the last three weeks. This really reminded everyone why Donald Trump is fundamentally unpopular outside this room.”The long, rambling speech was at odds with an otherwise disciplined convention that, while shocking by the conservative standards of Ronald Reagan or George W Bush, felt less raucous and extreme than the “Lock her up!” chants of 2016. The red meat came with a hint of pink and garnish of moderation.There were few references to “stop the steal” or January 6 insurrectionists being “hostages”. There was little boasting about the overturning of Roe v Wade, the constitutional right to abortion. There was no real effort to blame Democrats for the attempt on Trump’s life. Even the vendors were selling mostly pro-Trump products rather than anti-Biden gear.In short, it was a do-no-harm convention for a party feeling confident but cautious as Democrats implode over whether to ditch Biden. But Trump, of course, blew all that up with his grievances and lies. When the divine demagogue finally wrapped, his family joined him on stage as thousands of gold, red, white and blue balloons descended. A singer performed Nessun dorma from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot. None shall sleep indeed. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s divisive speech and a rightwing mirror world: key takeaways from RNC day four

      by

      For all the claims from his supporters that surviving an assassination attempt had left Donald Trump a “changed” man, one more softened and spiritual, the Trump who accepted his party’s nomination on Thursday night was deeply familiar: same divisive rhetoric, same divisive policies.But the Republican crowd that surrounded Trump was certainly cheerful and energized. “I have never been to a more fun convention, or a convention with better vibes,” the ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson told them, and his unscripted comments seemed to capture a real mood. Biden and the Democrats are foundering, Trump narrowly survived a terrifying attack, and Republicans appear to believe that Trump has already won the election.Here are five takeaways from the night:1. Trump talked about his assassination attempt for the first, and he said, final timeLike many his supporters, Trump said he believed he had been protected by God last weekend, but he also emphasized how moved he had been by the behavior of his supporters when he was shot. When faced with a hail of bullets, he said, most crowds would have panicked and tried to flee, but his did not.After the Secret Service members “pounced” on him to protect him from the gunfire, Trump said: “There was blood pouring everywhere, yet, in a certain way, I felt very safe, because I had God on my side, I felt that.”“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” Trump said later, and when the crowd began to chant: “Yes you are! Yes you are!” he responded, “But I’m not – and I’ll tell you. I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.”Trump also said he could see a look of sorrow on the faces of his supporters, who watched him go down and assumed that he had been shot in the head and was dead. When he stood up again and lifted his fist, he said, the crowd responded in a way that he had never heard before.“This massive crowd of tens of thousands of people stood by and didn’t move an inch,” Trump said. In fact, he said, many of them stood and started looking for the sniper and pointing at him. “Nobody ran, and by not stampeding, many lives were saved,” Trump said, saying he believed “the reason is that they knew I was in very serious trouble”.“For the rest of my life,” Trump said, “I will be grateful for the love shown by that giant audience of patriots that stood bravely on the fateful evening in Pennsylvania.”2. Trump may be ‘changed’ after the assassination attempt, but he didn’t sound that changed In the early minutes of his speech, Trump delivered some of the “unity” rhetoric that he told journalists he had planned.“The discord and division in our society must be healed,” Trump said. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.”But soon after the somber beginning to his “unity” speech, Trump turned cheerful and chatty, first praising his friends, and then, soon enough, railing in a familiar way against “crazy Nancy Pelosi”, calling Biden one of America’s worst presidents, and then, to cheers, referring to Covid once again as the “China virus”.“I hope you will remember this in November and give us your vote. I am trying to buy your vote. I’ll be honest about that,” Trump later quipped to the voters of Wisconsin, talking about the $250m the Republican national convention is supposed to bring to the Wisconsin economy.“We’re never going to let it happen again. They used Covid to cheat,” Trump said, continuing to deny he lost the 2020 election to Biden.Though sources said Trump would simply not use Biden’s name in his speech, he did, saying: “If you took the 10 worst presidents in the history of the United States – think of it, the 10 worst – added them up, they will not have done the damage that Biden has done.”3. The Republican convention is a mirror world: ‘I am the one saving democracy,’ Trump saysThroughout their convention, Republicans have taken key Democratic lines of attack and claimed them for themselves. In the world of the Republican national convention, the Democrats are the ones who are undermining US democracy, not the party whose supporters stormed the US Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “Biden is acting like a dictator,” the North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum, said in a speech on Wednesday.Republican politicians kept reciting the names of women who have been raped or sexually assaulted by immigrants, while blaming the Democratic party’s immigration policies for putting them at risk. They didn’t talk about Trump being found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial brought by the magazine writer E Jean Carroll, or the allegations of sexual misconduct he has faced from more than two dozen women. Biden and Harris were called criminals, rather than the candidate who has been convicted on 34 felony charges, and whose convention featured a Trump ally who had just been released from federal prison.“The Democrat party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labelling their political opponents as an enemy of democracy, especially since that is not true,” Trump said on Thursday. “In fact, I am the one saving democracy for the  people of our country.”4. Trump again pledges to carry out the largest deportation in US history Before Trump spoke, other Republican politicians devoted large swathes of time during their convention to demonizing undocumented migrants, blaming them for a host of social ills, and advocating not just for a border wall but also “Mass deportations now.”Trump’s speech mirrored the convention as a whole, with a major focus on attacking migrants as criminals and rapists, and claiming, without evidence, that countries like El Salvador had seen decreases in crime because they were shipping all of their murders to the US. (Human rights organizations continue to speak out about the effects of mass arrests in El Salvador.)Trump again promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” and pledged that his deportations would be “even larger than that of president Dwight D Eisenhower from many years ago. You know, he was a moderate but he believed very strongly in borders. He had the largest deportation operation we’ve ever had.”5. Trump promises ‘two things on day one’ … ‘Close our borders’ and ‘drill, baby, drill!’Trump also joined other Republicans throughout the week in touting the GOP as the party of fossil fuel, as Republicans repeatedly chanted: “Drill, baby, drill!”Climate change experts and activists have said that both Trump and his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, are likely to pursue a “methodical” climate crisis denial presidency that would include increasing production of fossil fuel, ignoring mainstream climate science and undermining or overturning rules to reduce emissions.One of the everyday Americans invited to speak at the convention earlier in the week was the petroleum engineer Sarah Phillips, who criticized Biden and the Green New Deal. “The hydrocarbons that are being extracted are a true gift,” Phillips said. “Our society and our standard of living could not exist without fossil fuels.”“These liberal senators shut down the Keystone Pipeline,” the Montana senator Steve Daines said earlier on Thursday. “An America First majority – we’re going to drill, baby, drill!” More