More stories

  • in

    Should Biden be worried about losing Black voters to Trump? – podcast

    Several recent polls have suggested that Donald Trump may be on course to receive more support from Black voters than any Republican presidential nominee in history. Some have argued the polling isn’t representative enough.
    This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the historian and author Leah Wright Rigueur about whether or not Trump can really win over more Black voters than Joe Biden can afford to lose. Or should his main concern be those disaffected voters who don’t turn to Trump, but instead don’t turn out at all, choosing to stay home?

    How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

  • in

    Trump Media deal faces calls for inquiry over alleged ‘influence peddling’

    Democratic groups escalated calls on Thursday for Congress to investigate Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media after a report that it relied partly on emergency loans in 2022 traced back to a Russian-American under federal criminal investigation to make it to its stock market debut.The move increased political scrutiny into the merger between Trump Media Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition – which could net Trump about $4bn – as federal prosecutors secured guilty pleas from two investors who insider-traded on the deal.In a three-page letter on Thursday, the Democratic-aligned group Congressional Integrity Project pressed the Republican House oversight chair, James Comer, to launch a parallel congressional investigation into the Trump Media merger and hold hearings into the nature of the loans.“We are calling on you to investigate possible influence peddling and corruption involving a former president and current presidential candidate,” wrote the Congressional Integrity Project’s executive director, Kyle Herrig.The request came a day after the Guardian reported that Trump Media was kept afloat in 2022 with loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, when a securities investigation delayed the original merger date and imperiled its cash reserves.The delay led Trump Media to seek bridge financing, including from an entity called ES Family Trust, which operated through an account at Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.Leaked documents obtained by the Guardian made clear that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and became a subject of the criminal investigation into the Trump Media merger.The concern surrounding the loans to Trump Media is that ES Family Trust may have been used to complete a transaction that Paxum itself could not, as it did not offer loans in the US because it lacked a US banking license and is not regulated by the FDIC.“The American people deserve to know the circumstances around ES Family Trust’s loan to Trump,” Herrig wrote. “It is also imperative to determine whether there was any quid pro quo discussed.”There is no indication that Trump Media had any idea about the nature of the loans beyond the fact that they were opaque, nor has the company or its executives been accused of any wrongdoing. A lawyer for Trump Media called the story a “hoax” in a statement after it was published.Still, the Trump Media merger has drawn scrutiny because Trump’s stake in the company amounts to significant increase in his net value.Even if Trump sold only some of his position, he would probably gain a major windfall that could be used to pay about $500m in legal costs stemming from his various civil and criminal cases. That would ease the burden on his political action committees, which are now paying the bills.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn addition, Postolnikov’s connection to the loans raised new questions about the involvement of Michael Shvartsman, who pleaded guilty with his brother to securities fraud weeks before he was due to go to trial on charges of insider trading and money laundering over the Trump Media merger.The Guardian reported that the creation papers for ES Family Trust named Shvartsman as a successor trustee. ES Family Trust stands to gain from the Trump Media merger because the $8m was loaned in the form of convertible notes, meaning it converted to a stake in the post-merger company.While precise figures can only be known by Trump Media, ES Family Trust’s stake in Trump Media is now worth between $20m and $40m, even after the company’s share price plummeted after a poor earnings report.“The full extent of his involvement in the trust is unclear, and getting to the bottom of that fits within your mandate as chairman of the House oversight committee,” Herrig wrote of Shvartsman.Democratic activists have been eager to attack Trump’s business deals as a counterweight to Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, which has unsuccessfully tried to tie the president to business deals done by his son Hunter Biden, in an effort to show corruption or influence peddling.The Biden impeachment inquiry hit a major setback in February after the prosecutors charged an FBI informant with fabricating claims being used by Republicans for their allegations, that Biden and his son each sought $5m in bribes from a Ukrainian company. More

  • in

    New book details Steve Bannon’s ‘Maga movement’ plan to rule for 100 years

    Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chair and White House strategist, believed before the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on Congress that a “Maga movement” of Trump supporters “could rule for a hundred years”.“Outside the uniparty,” the Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf writes in a new book, referring to Bannon’s term for the political establishment, “as Bannon saw it, there was the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which he considered a relatively small slice of the electorate. And the rest, the vast majority of the country, was Maga.“Bannon believed the Maga movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalised by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years.”Arnsdorf’s book, Finish What We Started: The Maga Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy, will be published next week. The Post published an excerpt on Thursday.A businessman who became a driver of far-right thought through his stewardship of Breitbart News, Bannon was Trump’s campaign chair in 2016 and his chief White House strategist in 2017, a post he lost after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville that summer.He remained close to Trump, however, particularly as Trump attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.That attempt culminated in the attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, when supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of Biden’s win attacked the US Capitol.Nine deaths have been linked to the attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,200 arrests have been made and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached for inciting the insurrection but acquitted by Senate Republicans.Notwithstanding 88 criminal charges for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments, and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil cases over fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape claim a judge called “substantially true”, Trump won the Republican nomination with ease this year.As a Trump-Biden rematch grinds into gear, Bannon remains an influential voice on the far right, particularly through his War Room podcast and despite his own legal problems over contempt of Congress and alleged fraud, both of which he denies.The “uniparty”, in Bannon’s view, as described by Arnsdorf, is “the establishment [Bannon] hungered to destroy. The neocons, neoliberals, big donors, globalists, Wall Street, corporatists, elites.”“Maga” stands for “Make America great again”, Trump’s political slogan.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArnsdorf writes: “In his confidence that there were secretly millions of Democrats who were yearning to be Maga followers and just didn’t know it yet, Bannon was again taking inspiration from Hoffer, who observed that true believers were prone to conversion from one cause to another since they were driven more by their need to identify with a mass movement than by any particular ideology.”Eric Hoffer, Arnsdorf writes, was “the ‘longshoreman philosopher’, so called because he had worked as a stevedore on the San Francisco docks while writing his first book, The True Believer [which] caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao”.Bannon, Arnsdorf writes, “was not, like a typical political strategist, trying to tinker around the edges of the existing party coalitions in the hope of eking out 50% plus one. Bannon already told you: he wanted to bring everything crashing down.“He wanted to completely dismantle and redefine the parties. He wanted a showdown between a globalist, elite party, called the Democrats, and a populist, Maga party, called the Republicans. In that match-up, he was sure, the Republicans would win every time.”Now, seven months out from election day and with Trump and Biden neck-and-neck in the polls, Bannon’s proposition stands to be tested again.
    Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 3pm EDT join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

  • in

    Trump documents case faces further delay due to special counsel confrontation with Florida judge – live

    A confrontation between special counsel Jack Smith and judge Aileen Cannon could further delay Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges related to unlawfully possessing classified documents, the Washington Post reports.At issue is the possibility that Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020 and who has been criticized for decisions that have slowed down the progress of the case, agrees that the former president is immune from prosecution, under a federal law dealing with presidential records.Late yesterday, Smith signaled in a filing his strong disagreement with the argument, and that he would appeal to a higher court if necessary. That could further delay the start of the trial, potentially pushing it past the November presidential election.Here’s more on that, from the Post:
    Special counsel Jack Smith warned the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case that she is pursuing a legal premise that “is wrong” and said he would probably appeal to a higher court if she rules that a federal records law can protect the former president from prosecution.
    In a near-midnight legal filing, Smith’s office pushed back hard against an unusual instruction from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — one that veteran national security lawyers and former judges have said badly misinterprets the Presidential Records Act and laws related to classified documents.
    Smith’s filing represents the most stark and high-stakes confrontation yet between the judge and the prosecutor, illustrating the extent to which a ruling by Cannon that legitimizes the PRA as a defense could eviscerate the historic case. It sets up the possibility that a government appeal of such a ruling could delay the trial well beyond November’s presidential election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
    Last month, Cannon ordered defense lawyers and prosecutors in the case to submit hypothetical jury instructions based on two different, and very much contested, readings of the PRA.
    In response, Smith said Cannon was pursuing a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” that the law somehow overrides Section 793 of the Espionage Act, which Trump is accused of violating by stashing hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, after his presidency ended.
    “That legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction for Section 793 that reflects that premise would distort the trial,” Smith wrote. The Presidential Records Act, he said, “should not play any role at trial at all.”
    Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as likely deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.Here’s what else happened:
    Jack Smith reportedly strongly objected to arguments judge Aileen Cannon is entertaining that Trump is immune from prosecution in the classified documents case, which potentially delay his trial.
    Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have talked to the former president.
    Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.
    Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story.
    Two brothers pleaded guilty to an insider trading charge connected to Trump’s media company.
    Donald Trump and the Republican Party say they raised more than $65.6m in March, the AP reports.Trump and the Republican National Committee closed out the month with $93.1m in their campaign accounts. That’s a significant increase as they try to catch up to the fundraising of Joe Biden and the Democrats.Biden and the Democratic National Committee haven’t released their fundraising numbers for March. But their political operation said they brought in $53m in February and closed that month with $155m cash on hand.Earlier today, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a press release: “Our campaign is making early investments to connect directly with voters on the issues that will define this election and to build the infrastructure we need to win.“The difference between our ground game and Donald Trump’s nonexistent presence in the battleground states couldn’t be more clear – and the failing Trump campaign and the RNC can’t get this time back.”A confrontation between special counsel Jack Smith and judge Aileen Cannon could further delay Donald Trump’s trial in Florida on charges related to unlawfully possessing classified documents, the Washington Post reports.At issue is the possibility that Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2020 and who has been criticized for decisions that have slowed down the progress of the case, agrees that the former president is immune from prosecution, under a federal law dealing with presidential records.Late yesterday, Smith signaled in a filing his strong disagreement with the argument, and that he would appeal to a higher court if necessary. That could further delay the start of the trial, potentially pushing it past the November presidential election.Here’s more on that, from the Post:
    Special counsel Jack Smith warned the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s classified documents case that she is pursuing a legal premise that “is wrong” and said he would probably appeal to a higher court if she rules that a federal records law can protect the former president from prosecution.
    In a near-midnight legal filing, Smith’s office pushed back hard against an unusual instruction from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — one that veteran national security lawyers and former judges have said badly misinterprets the Presidential Records Act and laws related to classified documents.
    Smith’s filing represents the most stark and high-stakes confrontation yet between the judge and the prosecutor, illustrating the extent to which a ruling by Cannon that legitimizes the PRA as a defense could eviscerate the historic case. It sets up the possibility that a government appeal of such a ruling could delay the trial well beyond November’s presidential election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
    Last month, Cannon ordered defense lawyers and prosecutors in the case to submit hypothetical jury instructions based on two different, and very much contested, readings of the PRA.
    In response, Smith said Cannon was pursuing a “fundamentally flawed legal premise” that the law somehow overrides Section 793 of the Espionage Act, which Trump is accused of violating by stashing hundreds of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home and private club, after his presidency ended.
    “That legal premise is wrong, and a jury instruction for Section 793 that reflects that premise would distort the trial,” Smith wrote. The Presidential Records Act, he said, “should not play any role at trial at all.”
    Donald Trump is well on his way to winning the Republican presidential nomination, after last night’s victories in four states’ primaries. The same can be said for Joe Biden, though the president is also dealing with a rebellion from groups upset at his support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Here’s more about what yesterday’s primary results tell us about the contours of the presidential race, from the Guardian’s Joan E Greve and Léonie Chao-Fong:Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump won primary elections in four states, including the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.Hundreds of delegates were up for grabs in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin on Tuesday, and Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to win their respective nominations. But the turnout could provide more clues about the general election in November.Voters also had a chance to register their discontent with the nominees. Connecticut and Rhode Island gave voters the opportunity to vote “uncommitted” in the primary, while Wisconsin offered a similar option of “uninstructed delegation”. Wisconsin Democrats will be closely watching the turnout for “uninstructed delegation” after progressive activists launched a campaign encouraging voters to withhold support from the US president to protest against his handling of the war in Gaza.The Listen to Wisconsin campaign, based on similar efforts in states like Michigan and Minnesota, has attracted support from some rank-and-file union members as well as an influential group of low-wage and immigrant workers in the state.There’s quite the swirl of legal entanglements surrounding Donald Trump’s foray into the media world. The Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports that the former president has sued two former contestants from The Apprentice who became co-founders of Trump Media:Donald Trump sued two former contestants on The Apprentice, his hit NBC reality show, who became co-founders of Trump Media and Technology Group, claiming they failed to set up the venture properly and should not get promised stock worth more than $400m.Trump fronted The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a job at the Trump Organization, from 2004 to 2015. The show coined Trump’s catchphrase, “You’re fired!”, though he ended up fired himself, after entering Republican presidential politics and making racist comments about Mexicans.Wesley Moss and Andrew Litinsky met as Apprentice contestants in 2004. In 2021, after Trump was thrown off major social media platforms for inciting the January 6 Capitol attack, as he sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, the two men pitched Trump on starting his own platform, which became Truth Social.“This was a phenomenal opportunity for Moss and Litinsky,” said the suit filed by Trump in Florida in late March and first reported by Bloomberg News on Tuesday.Though the two men were “riding President Trump’s coattails”, the suit said, “all [they] needed to do was diligently, faithfully and loyally execute on a short-term plan: get TMTG’s corporate governance established, get Truth Social ready to launch, and find a suitable special purpose acquisition company to take the new company public and access capital to advance TMTG’s business plan”.Reuters reports that two men have entered guilty pleas today to an insider trading scheme connected to Donald Trump’s media company.Here’s more, from Reuters:
    Two men pleaded guilty on Wednesday to insider trading in securities in the company that ultimately took Donald Trump’s media business public.
    Michael Shvartsman, 53, head of Miami-based venture capital firm Rocket One Capital, and his brother Gerald Shvartsman, 46, each pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud before Lewis Liman, the US district judge, in Manhattan.
    Rocket One’s chief investment officer, Bruce Garelick, is scheduled to face trial on related charges on 29 April.
    Prosecutors charged the trio last year with illegally trading on inside information about Trump Media & Technology Group’s (TMTG) plan to go public through a merger with a blank-check company. TMTG operates Truth Social, Trump’s main social media platform.
    Prosecutors said the trio signed confidentiality agreements in June 2021 when they were approached to become early investors in Digital World Acquisition, the blank-check company. The agreements required them to keep information they learned confidential and not trade the company’s securities in the open market, prosecutors said.
    After hearing the company was in merger talks with TMTG, prosecutors said the trio tipped others and bought Digital World securities, selling them after the deal was announced on 20 October 2021, to make a total of $22m in illegal profit.
    Speaking of Democrats and the Senate, the party is already expected to have a difficult time keeping their majority in Congress’s upper chamber in the November elections.But one prominent political forecaster thinks the job is even more difficult than it appears. The Cook Political Report has moved the Nevada Senate seat represented by Jacky Rosen into its “toss up” column, from “lean Democratic”.“We are moving this race because of the unique forces at play in Nevada. A combination of a newer electorate that Rosen must win over, Biden’s lagging numbers and the unique post-COVID economic hangover in Nevada make this race a Toss Up,” said Jessica Taylor, Cook’s Senate and governors editor.Besides Nevada, which has voted Democratic in recent presidential elections but has seen the GOP make inroads lately, Democrats are defending Senate seats representing Ohio and Montana, both red states. The outcome of those races will likely decide Senate control, in addition to whether or not Joe Biden wins re-election.Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee, did not quite tell NBC they agreed with growing calls for the supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire, so Joe Biden can nominate a younger liberal replacement. But they nearly did.“I’m very respectful of Justice Sotomayor,” Blumenthal said. “I have great admiration for her. But I think she really has to weigh the competing factors. We should learn a lesson. And it’s not like there’s any mystery here about what the lesson should be. The old saying – graveyards are full of indispensable people, ourselves in this body included.”That lesson – a harsh one for anyone to contemplate – springs from the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the great liberal justice who declined to retire in 2014, when she was 81 and when Democrats held the White House and the Senate, then died in September 2020, at 87 and with Republicans in control.That allowed Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell to ram through a hardline replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, and tilt the court firmly right, 6-3.That court has issued major rulings including removing the federal right to abortion, striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions and loosening gun rights. Progressives fear more such rulings to come.Sotomayor is 69 and suffers from diabetes. She recently remarked on feeling “tired” while “working harder than I ever had”.Blumenthal said Sotomayor was “a highly accomplished and, obviously, fully functioning justice right now. Justices have to make their personal decisions about their health, and their level of energy, but also to keep in mind the larger national and public interest in making sure that the court looks and thinks like America.”Whitehouse said he was “not joining any calls” for Sotomayor to step down. But he also offered a stark warning: “Run it to 7-2 and you go from a captured court to a full Maga court. Certainly I think if Justice Ginsburg had it to do over again, she might have re-thought her confidence in her own health.”Sotomayor did not comment. Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, told NBC: “President Biden believes that decisions to retire from the supreme court should be made by the justices themselves and no one else.”Voters in Oklahoma have kicked out a local official who has ties to white nationalist groups.The Guardian’s Ed Helmore reports:Voters in Enid, Oklahoma, have decisively kicked out a city council member with a history of ties to white nationalist groups from the elected body almost a year after he was admitted.Judd Blevins lost his position as Enid’s ward 1 council member, according to Oklahoma’s state election board. The move comes months after Blevin was shown to have attended a deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and was later shown to have led an Oklahoma chapter of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.Blevins denied he was or ever had been a white supremacist, and said he was motivated by “the same issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016”.A small group of 36 Blevins supporters had won him election last year, but he lost Tuesday’s vote to fellow Republican candidate Cheryl Patterson who had campaigned on a platform of returning Enid to “normalcy” and appears to have defeated Blevins by a 20-point margin, or 268 votes.For the full story, click here:In a new interview on Jimmy Fallon, Hillary Clinton told voters who are upset over Joe Biden and Donald Trump being the two presidential choices to “get over yourself”.Clinton, who ran against Trump in 2016, said:
    “It’s kind of like, one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people. And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.”
    She went on to add:
    “I don’t understand why this is even a hard choice. Really, I don’t understand it … Hopefully, people will realize what’s at stake because it’s an existential question. What kind of country we’re going to have? What kind of democracy we’re going to have. People who blow that off are not paying attention because it’s not like Trump, his enablers, his empowerers, his allies are not telling us what they want to do. I mean, they’re pretty clear about what kind of country they want.”
    Sherrod Brown’s campaign is celebrating a strong fundraising display, as the leftwing Democrat gears up for his Ohio re-election fight with the Trump-endorsed Republican Bernie Moreno, one of a number of contests expected to decide control of the Senate later this year.Friends of Sherrod Brown, the three-term senator’s principal campaign committee, says it raised more than $12m in the first quarter of the year.Rachel Petri, campaign manager for the group, said: “While Sherrod’s opponent makes it clear he’s only out for himself and is using his millions to try to buy Ohio’s Senate seat, Sherrod has unprecedented grassroots support behind his reelection campaign.“Sherrod and Connie [Schultz, the senator’s wife] are thankful to every member of this movement working to send Sherrod back to the Senate to continue fighting for Ohioans and the dignity of work.”Moreno made his millions in cars, then made his bones in Donald Trump’s Republican party by moving from the establishment to the populist right. His victory in the primary was not without its surprises. His campaign trail rhetoric is not without its questionable claims. Some further reading follows…Joe Biden spent the past month barnstorming swing states, while his campaign was busy staffing up, opening offices and reaching out to voters. Was it enough to boost his stubbornly low approval ratings, or help him overtake Donald Trump in the polls? A Wall Street Journal survey released today indicates it is not, with the president trailing his Republican challenger in six of the seven states seen as deciding the election – similar to other surveys taken in recent months showing Biden faring poorly against the candidate he bested in 2020. Perhaps more interesting is the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today, which finds Americans largely agree on values, even if they are deeply divided over who they want as their leader.Here’s what else is going on:
    Trump held a rally in Michigan yesterday, where he told the crowd he had spoken to the family of a woman allegedly murdered by a man in the US illegally. But her relatives reportedly say none of them have spoken to the former president.
    Robert F Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate, walked back a recent comment, where he said Biden was more of a threat to democracy than Trump.
    Taiwan is recovering from the strongest earthquake to strike the island in 25 years, with the death toll climbing to nine. Follow our live blog for more on this developing story. More

  • in

    Far-right podcaster prompts Nebraska move to change electoral system

    The power of the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk was illustrated when his tweet prompted the governor of Nebraska to support a bill to change the state’s system for presidential elections in order to deny Democrats a single electoral vote that could decide the presidency later this year.“Nebraskans should call their legislators and their governor to demand their state stop pointlessly giving strength to their political enemies,” Kirk wrote.Jim Pillen acted soon after.Nebraska has five electoral college votes. Since 1991, it has split them. Two go to the candidate with most votes statewide, the others to the winners of three electoral districts. Though the state skews heavily Republican, it gave Democrats one electoral vote in 2008 and 2020.This year, Joe Biden could lose Arizona, Georgia and Nevada to Donald Trump but win the electoral college 270-268 if he won Nebraska’s second district again. All five Nebraska votes going to Trump would produce a 269-269 tie, throwing the election to the US House, where Republicans control more state delegations and would thus pick the winner.On Tuesday, Kirk posited that scenario and said: “Despite [Nebraska] being one of the most Republican states … thanks to this system, Omaha’s electoral vote leans blue … [and Biden is] likely to win it again this year.“California would never do this. New York would never do this. And as long as that’s the case, neither should we. This is completely fixable. Nebraska’s legislature can act to make sure their state’s electoral votes go towards electing the candidate the VAST majority of Nebraskans prefer.“There’s already a bill ready to go – LB764. All Nebraska has to do is put it up for a vote. As I write this, the Nebraska legislature is still in session … call @TeamPillen and let him know you want this fixed.”Kirk included a phone number. As noted by Semafor, a little over five hours later the Nebraska governor issued a statement “in response to a callout for his support”.“I am a strong supporter of Senator [Loren] Lippincott’s winner-takes-all bill and have been from the start,” Pillen said. “It would bring Nebraska into line with 48 of our fellow states, better reflect the founders’ intent, and ensure our state speaks with one unified voice in presidential elections.”The only other state to allow for split electoral college votes is Maine.Pillen said: “I call upon fellow Republicans in the legislature to pass this bill to my desk so I can sign it into law.”Not long after that, Donald Trump saluted what he called “a very smart letter”.The Nebraska legislative session ends this month. Democrats said they were ready to block attempts to pass LB764.“The Nebraska Democratic party is watching this bill closely and still believes we have the votes to stop the Republicans from removing a fair electoral system that represents voters,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state chair, told Semafor.“The only reason Governor Pillen sent a release today is the extremist Charlie Kirk sent a tweet that, of course, our governor jumped up to respond to.”Kirk, 30, is a co-founder of Turning Point USA, a youth-oriented fundraising juggernaut, and an influential rightwing podcaster. A dedicated controversialist, he recently made waves by claiming “birth control really screws up female brains”.On Wednesday, Kirk tweeted footage of pundits discussing his Nebraska gambit, writing: “MSNBC is panicking about Nebraska. BOOM!” More

  • in

    Murder victim’s sister says Trump didn’t speak to family despite his claim he did

    Donald Trump used a campaign stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to describe meeting the family of a woman killed by an immigrant in order to spin a narrative about what he calls “Biden’s border bloodbath” – except Ruby Garcia’s family now say he never did.Garcia, 25, was found shot to death on highway US-131 on 22 March of this year. Court records later showed that her boyfriend confessed to killing her and dumping her body.The man, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, had come to the US as a child and was allowed to stay as a so-called “Dreamer”. He was deported in 2020 before re-entering again without documents.Many have read Garcia’s murder not as an illegal immigration issue but one of domestic violence, given authorities said Garcia and Ortiz-Vite were dating.Trump tells the story differently. “She lit up that room, and I’ve heard that from so many people,” Trump said about Garcia. “I spoke to some of her family.”But according to her sister, Mavi Garcia, who is acting as a family spokesperson, neither Trump nor his campaign had reached out to her or her relatives.She said Trump’s comments were intended merely to blame immigrants for crime in order to justify a border crackdown.“It’s always been about illegal immigrants,” Garcia told the local news station Target 8. “Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he would just bring up illegals. What about Americans who do heinous crimes like that?”The Trump campaign has yet to comment on the former president’s claim, but the Washington Post reported he did not mention Garcia again at a stop in Wisconsin later on Tuesday.On Monday Trump had called into a Michigan radio show before heading to Michigan and Wisconsin, two crucial battleground states, to highlight the immigration theme, which he has called the top issue in the 2024 election.“This is a horrible incident with Ruby,” Trump told the conservative host Justin Barclay. “Let Ruby’s relatives and everybody know that we’d love to say hello to them.”Last month, Trump did meet with family and friends of Laken Riley, a nursing student who became a potent symbol for the border issue after an undocumented person from Venezuela was charged with her murder.But Mavi Garcia told Target 8 that Trump was misleading people.“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Mavi Garcia said. More

  • in

    Biden and Trump sweep four primaries including battleground state Wisconsin

    Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump won primary elections in four states, including the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin.Hundreds of delegates were up for grabs in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin on Tuesday, and Biden and Trump have already amassed enough delegates to win their respective nominations. But the turnout could provide more clues about the general election in November.Voters also had a chance to register their discontent with the nominees. Connecticut and Rhode Island gave voters the opportunity to vote “uncommitted” in the primary, while Wisconsin offered a similar option of “uninstructed delegation”. Wisconsin Democrats will be closely watching the turnout for “uninstructed delegation” after progressive activists launched a campaign encouraging voters to withhold support from the US president to protest his handling of the war in Gaza.The Listen to Wisconsin campaign, based on similar efforts in states like Michigan and Minnesota, has attracted support from some rank-and-file union members as well as an influential group of low-wage and immigrant workers in the state.Those voters represent key constituencies whose support Biden will need to win in November, and even a small erosion in support could spell trouble for him in Wisconsin, where he defeated Trump by just 0.6 points in 2020. In 2016, the former president defeated Hillary Clinton by roughly 0.8 points in Wisconsin, and he hopes to repeat that performance this fall.Polls closed at 8pm ET in Connecticut and Rhode Island and at 9pm ET in New York and Wisconsin, with results coming in shortly afterwards, and Biden will soon have a better sense of his standing in the battleground state.With the presidential nominees already decided, Wisconsin Republicans are more closely focused on two ballot measures related to election management in the state. The first measure raises the question of abolishing the use of private funds in election administration, and the second asks whether “only election officials designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections, and referendums”.Republicans have encouraged supporters to vote “yes” on both measures, after their legislative efforts to change election rules were repeatedly blocked by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers. Republican leaders have expressed pointed criticism of the grant money that Wisconsin election officials received from the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020 to address the challenges of navigating the coronavirus pandemic.Those leaders have derided the grant money as “Zuckerbucks”, a reference to the $350m that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave to the non-profit to help election offices across the country in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans argue that such funding must be abolished to ensure voters’ trust in election results, but Democrats warn that the approval of such a measure could drain resources from government offices already stretched too thin from budget cuts. On the second ballot question, Democrats have criticized its wording as vague and accused Republicans of attempting to intimidate nonpartisan voting rights groups from their usual registration and turnout efforts in the state.“Rather than work to make sure our clerks have the resources they need to run elections, Republicans are pushing a nonsense amendment to satisfy Donald Trump,” Ben Wickler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said in a statement last month.“Thanks to long-standing Wisconsin law and the dedicated service of thousands of elections officials in municipalities across the state, our elections are safe and secure. Donald Trump’s lies about his 2020 loss shouldn’t dictate what’s written in our state constitution.” More

  • in

    Wisconsin, New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut primaries: follow live results

    View image in fullscreenVoters in Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island and Wisconsin cast ballots in the presidential primaries on Tuesday. Much attention will be paid to Wisconsin, where voters will signal strength and weaknesses in the critical swing state for Joe Biden and Donald Trump.There are also options in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Wisconsin for voters to choose “uncommitted” in a show of protest against Biden’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza.Here are the results.Republican delegatesDemocratic delegatesRepublican resultsDemocratic resultsWho’s runningView image in fullscreenDonald TrumpThe former US president’s campaign to retake the White House and once again grab his party’s nomination got off to a slow start that was widely mocked. But after decisive wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, his campaign has steadily moved into a position of dominance.Trump declined to attend any of the Republican debates, has used his court appearances and many legal woes as a rallying cry to mobilize his base, and has run a surprisingly well-organized campaign. His extremist rhetoric, especially around his plans for a second term and the targeting of his political enemies, has sparked widespread fears over the threat to American democracy that his candidacy represents.His political style during the campaign has not shifted from his previous runs in 2016 and 2020 and, if anything, has become more extreme. Many see this as a result of his political and legal fates becoming entwined, with a return to the Oval Office seen as Trump’s best chance of nixing his legal problems.View image in fullscreenJoe BidenBiden is the likely Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election. He announced his campaign for re-election on 25 April 2023, exactly four years after he announced his previous, successful presidential campaign. While approval for the president remains low, hovering just above 40%, political experts say he is the most likely candidate to defeat Trump. Biden has served in politics for more than five decades and is running on a platform that includes abortion rights, gun reform and healthcare. At 81, he is the oldest president in US history.View image in fullscreenMarianne WilliamsonThe failed 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson dropped out of the race in February before then resurrecting her long-shot campaign after the Michigan primary. Williamson, an author of self-help books, launched her bid with campaign promises to address the climate crisis and student loan debt. She previously worked as “spiritual leader” of a Michigan Unity church.View image in fullscreenJason PalmerJason Palmer is a Democratic candidate who was only on the ballot in American Samoa and some other US territories. He won the primary in America Samoa after donating $500,000 to his own campaign. Palmer is a Baltimore resident who has worked for various businesses and non-profits, often on issues involving technology and education. More