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      The Guardian view on the UN security council’s ceasefire resolution: the US talks tougher on Israel | Editorial

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      The extent of the Biden administration’s shift at the United Nations security council on Monday should not be underestimated. The US is not only by far Israel’s most important ally and supplier of aid, but has provided it with stalwart diplomatic support. That it abstained instead of vetoing a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire – as it had previously done – was a major departure and leaves Israel looking extremely isolated, as Benjamin Netanyahu’s angry reaction showed.Yet the US has since done its best to talk down its decision, with officials insisting that there has been no change in policy and describing the resolution as non-binding. That is not the view of other security council members or the UN itself. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, wrote that it would be “unforgivable” to fail to implement the resolution, which also called for the unconditional release of hostages. But Israeli airstrikes have continued.The Biden administration is well aware that this war is ravaging its international standing: it is judged both complicit in the suffering in Gaza and ineffectual in its ability to restrain Israel’s conduct of the war. At home, it is costing the president vital Democratic support in an election year. But more Americans believe that Israel’s conduct of the war is acceptable than unacceptable, although there is a clear – and generational – divide.Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, has already said that he will invite Mr Netanyahu to speak before Congress. Though many in Israel fully understand the long-term damage the Israeli prime minister has done to his country’s interests as he fights for his own, there is no sign that US exasperation will speed his departure or moderate the conduct of this war.While the Biden administration treads gingerly, the humanitarian catastrophe gallops ahead in Gaza. The UN resolution stipulates a ceasefire for Ramadan – already half passed. More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health authorities. Disease and starvation are claiming more lives as the most intense famine since the second world war takes hold – a famine entirely human-made by the destruction of so much of Gaza and the reduction of aid to a trickle. Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees central to relief efforts, has said that Israel has banned it from making aid deliveries in northern Gaza.Mr Biden has described the placing of conditions on US military aid as a “worthwhile thought”, but it does not appear to be one that he intends to translate into reality, though past administrations have threatened or imposed them. Recipients of arms must now give assurances that they abide by international law, but the US says it has “no evidence” that Israel is not in compliance. Many Democrats disagree.Canada has already announced that it is suspending further sales. The UK shifted from abstaining to supporting the ceasefire resolution on Monday, and David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has urged the Foreign Office to publish its formal legal advice on whether Israel is breaching international law in Gaza. The reality is, however, that 99% of Israel’s arms imports come from the US and Germany. Hand-wringing over humanitarian suffering is pointless when you continue to supply the weapons creating the disaster. Monday’s abstention was an important symbolic moment, but it appears that little will alter unless the US makes a substantive change.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Can NBC News recover from its damaging decision to hire Ronna McDaniel? | Margaret Sullivan

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      As boneheaded corporate decisions go, the one by NBC News to bring on Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor is right up there.Whatever twisted purpose hiring the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairperson was meant to accomplish has been lost. That may have been gaining access to Republican bigwigs, sending a cynical message of ideological diversity or boosting ratings.Instead, the network has badly damaged its reputation and credibility. The hire makes a statement that, for this major US news organization, there are no consequences – rather, a juicy reward – for public figures who continually lie to the press and citizens. Her contract is reportedly worth $300,000.Hiring McDaniel – a powerful election denialist who joined then president Donald Trump in pressuring voting officials not to certify the 2020 election – was like putting a standing chyron on the NBC Nightly News: “Lying is rewarded here.”Of course, some commentators defended it, like Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who praised McDaniel’s “insider’s perspective”. He was shot down on Twitter/X by the scholar Norman Ornstein: “This is not about somebody with alternative views. It’s about a serial liar who intimidated election workers, tried to alter the election results in 2020 and has behaved in an utterly despicable fashion.”Social media memes also rose to the moment: Ronna McDaniel as politics commentator? Why not bring in OJ Simpson to host a show on preventing domestic violence, or hire Vladimir Putin as a Ukraine war commentator? How about a regular show for Ginni Thomas, the insurrection cheerleader married to a corrupt US supreme court justice?After four days of embarrassing news stories about the hire and its backlash, and some feeble efforts at damage control, it’s clear that the network should reverse course and ditch McDaniel or – depending on the terms of her contract – keep her entirely off the air. And that goes not just for the left-leaning MSNBC cable channel, but for the mainstream NBC News shows as well.And that’s not enough.The brass at NBC News needs to take stronger action in a statement – and a brief televised appearance by a top network executive or news leader – that affirms the commitment to covering politics truthfully and rigorously. It could appear once at the top of the nightly news and once on, let’s say, Morning Joe and Meet the Press.Then, go further. Prove that commitment in the network’s presidential campaign coverage. How? By using extreme care in giving a platform and a megaphone to proven liars, including the former president, and by providing sustained coverage about the stakes of the election, not just the horserace.Kristen Welker made a good start on Sunday’s Meet the Press, which she hosts. In a news interview recorded weeks before McDaniels’ hire, Welker respectfully but tenaciously grilled the former RNC chair.Insisting that she hasn’t really changed, McDaniel told Welker that she now acknowledges that Joe Biden won the election fair and square. Welker – perhaps channelling one of her predecessors, Tim Russert – wisely went to the tape, specifically McDaniel’s words to Chris Wallace in 2023: “I don’t think he won it fair.”McDaniel infamously joined Trump in a phone call pressuring two Michigan canvassers not to certify the election results; and her RNC led the charge to censure Republican members of Congress Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House of Representatives January 6 investigation. All while disparaging the media.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Chuck Todd of NBC put it: “Many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”Todd, on Sunday’s Meet the Press, said he thought NBC owed Welker an apology for putting her in an impossible position. And Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, called in his newsletter, Stop the Presses, for the network to apologize to the public.These apologies would be welcome, but the main thing is to acknowledge the error in judgment and make sure that no habitual liars or enemies of democracy – whether paid or unpaid – get to blather their way to November’s election.Truth-telling in the media always matters. It matters intensely right now, as American democracy teeters on the brink.NBC should affirm that core mission. In so doing, the network could earn itself a lot of goodwill and recover from this blunder. All while doing the right thing.After all, it’s one thing to screw up. It’s another to dig your heels in.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘Pretty bad’: NBC condemned by top US historian over role for Ronna McDaniel

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “tried to disassemble our democracy” by supporting Donald Trump’s electoral fraud lies and should not be given such a media role, a leading historian said amid uproar over the appointment.“What NBC has done is they’ve invited into what should be a normal framework someone who doesn’t believe that framework should exist at all,” Timothy Snyder, a Yale professor and author of On Tyranny, told MSNBC, part of the network now employing McDaniel.On Friday, NBC announced it had hired the former RNC chair and the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.“What NBC has done of its own volition is bring into a very important conversation about democracy, one which is going to take place for the next seven months or so, someone who … tried to disassemble our democracy. Who personally took part in an attempt to undo the American system,” Synder said.“And so … what NBC is doing is saying, ‘Well, [it] could be that in ‘24 our entire system will break down. Could be we’ll have an authoritarian leader. Oh, but look, we’ve made this adjustment in advance because we’ve brought into the middle of NBC somebody who has already taken part in an attempt to take our system down.’“So, yeah, I think this is pretty bad.”On Sunday, days after joining the network, McDaniel said on the Meet the Press that Biden won “fair and square” and said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse”.But McDaniel also claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [elections in battleground states] in 2020” and said she had supported Trump’s election fraud lies as a way of “taking one for the whole team” .That stoked an on-air protest from Chuck Todd, a former Meet the Press host. On Monday, MSNBC hosts including Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Nicole Wallace, to whom Snyder spoke, also condemned the McDaniel hire. The day also saw a protest from a union group representing NBC News staff.McDaniel and NBC did not comment.Snyder, who has written for the Guardian, said: “If you are going to be on American media, you should be somebody who believes there is something called truth, there are things called facts and you can pursue them. You shouldn’t be someone who has over and over and over again pushed the idea of fake news, educated Americans away from the facts, away from belief in the facts.”Describing such work by McDaniel, the anti-Trump conservative ex-congresswoman Liz Cheney said that as RNC chair, McDaniel “facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel became RNC chair in January 2017. In that role, she defended Trump through his scandal-ridden presidency; his refusal to accept his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress; and through his surge to another presidential nomination despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties and regularly admitting to authoritarian ambitions.Despite such support, Trump last month pushed McDaniel out of the RNC, to be replaced by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.Snyder said: “If we’re going to be putting people on the news who have participated in an attempt to overthrow the system, then we have to ask at the very beginning, ‘Why did you do that? Why is that legitimate?’ And we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that we are taking this step to bring people into the middle of our discussion?’“So my two red lines are, you should be somebody who’s at least trying for the facts, and you shouldn’t be somebody who has taken part in an attempt to undo the system, which is what we’re talking about here. We shouldn’t mince words about it.” More

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      Ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel: Biden won 2020 election ‘fair and square’

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      A little more than two weeks after resigning as the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel admitted Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election over her party’s candidate “fair and square”.But the newly hired NBC News contributor maintained it was acceptable to also say there were “problems” in the manner that the US president defeated Donald Trump – even after the former president’s supporters translated such sentiments into the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021 that has been linked to nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides.McDaniel delivered her contradictory remarks Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press in what was her debut on the network as a paid pundit. Show moderator Kristen Welker spent much of the session pushing McDaniel to address why she had waited until now to concede that Biden justly defeated Trump in 2020 – and to express disapproval over Trump’s promise to free those who were convicted or still facing charges in connection with the Capitol attack if he returned to the White House.“When you’re the RNC chair, you – you kind of take one for the whole team,” McDaniel said.And while she said: “I don’t think violence should be in our political discourse,” she also contended that it was acceptable for Republicans to continue to question certain aspects of the 2020 election.Though nonpartisan voting integrity experts consider that race to be the most secure election ever, McDaniel said it remained “a concern” for her that Pennsylvania could go from recording 260,000 mail-in ballots for Trump’s Oval Office victory in 2016 to 2.6m in 2020.McDaniel omitted mentioning that mail ballots heavily favored Biden after Trump discouraged his supporters from using mail ballots and instead urged them to vote in person.Democrats who generally obeyed measures to limit the spread of Covid-19 during that relatively early phase of the pandemic, on the other hand, availed themselves of mail ballots. Trump and his Republican allies then used the disparity in mail ballots to fuel lies about how electoral fraudsters had vaulted Biden to the presidency.Welker at one point asked whether McDaniel regretted getting on a phone call with Trump in which they apparently sought to pressure two local-level election officials in Wayne county, Michigan, to refuse to certify the state vote that Biden won. On the call, which the Detroit News reviewed late last year, McDaniel promised the officials “we will get you attorneys” as long as they declined to certify the vote.McDaniel stood by her actions on the call, saying the discussion wasn’t for the officials to decline to certify the outcome of the election in the state – but rather to demand an audit of the vote. She said what concerned her was that the officials reported being called “vile names” as well as “being threatened” when they went public with their wishes for an audit.Ultimately, McDaniel said, while she believes Biden won and is “the legitimate president”, she insisted “there were issues in 2020”.“I believe that both can be true,” McDaniel said.McDaniel’s performance did not impress former Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, who was on a panel of commentators for Sunday’s episode. He questioned the wisdom of NBC’s decision to hire McDaniel, saying to Welker: “I think our bosses owe you an apology for putting you in this situation … She has credibility issues that she still has to deal with.”Todd said many NBC journalists are uncomfortable with the hiring because some of their professional dealings with the RNC during McDaniel’s tenure “have been met with gaslighting, [and] have been met with character assassination”.The Wall Street Journal reported on the “internal backlash” happening within the NBC family of networks because of McDaniel’s hiring.Citing “people familiar” with the controversy, the Journal reported that the president of NBC’s sister network MSNBC, Rashida Jones, said McDaniel would not be welcome to appear on air there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMSNBC would not comment on that report on Sunday. But two of its star hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, said on Monday on their Morning Joe show that they hoped NBC “reconsiders its decision” to bring McDaniel aboard.Meanwhile, an MSNBC executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person would not publicly discuss internal matters, told the Associated Press it would be up to individual network shows to decide whether or not the bring McDaniel on – not that there is a channel-wide ban.NBC had no comment on Todd’s statement. In announcing McDaniel’s hiring on Friday, the network’s senior vice-president for politics, Carrie Budoff Brown, said that McDaniel would contribute her analysis “across all NBC News platforms”.A niece of US senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who is the only Republican to twice vote to convict Trump at his impeachment trials, McDaniel became the first woman to serve as RNC chairperson in 2017.But she resigned on 8 March, saying in part that she was stepping down to afford Trump the opportunity to select a chair of his choosing as he attempts to take back the presidency in November.The RNC subsequently installed as its chair Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who has echoed Trumpists’ claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump was voted in as co-chair.Trump has claimed he does not intend to use the RNC to pay off the legal bills that he has run up while facing more than 80 criminal charges for election interference, retaining classified materials after leaving the Oval Office and hush-money payments. He has also been grappling with multimillion-dollar civil penalties handed to him over lawsuits centering on some of his business practices that were deemed to be fraudulent as well as a rape allegation that a judge has found to substantially true.But as the Associated Press has reported, the Trump loyalists in command of McDaniel’s former organization are in firm control of the Republican party’s political and fundraising levers without facing much – if any – internal oversight.Asked why NBC viewers should trust her voice after her RNC tenure, McDaniel said a substantial number of Americans shared her viewpoints. “I think,” she told Welker, “you should be able to hear from different voices.” More

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      Liz Cheney says ex-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel ‘enabled’ Trump’s ‘criminality’

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      The Republican National Committee chair turned NBC politics analyst Ronna McDaniel “enabled criminality and depravity” with her support for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the former congresswoman Liz Cheney said as controversy swirled over McDaniel’s new career in media.“Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot and his effort to pressure Michigan officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome,” Cheney, a Republican who was vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, wrote on social media.“She spread his lies and called January 6 ‘legitimate political discourse’. That’s not ‘taking one for the team’. It’s enabling criminality and depravity.”McDaniel – a member of the powerful Republican Romney family who reportedly dropped the name at Trump’s behest – became RNC chair in 2017.In February 2022, the RNC said Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other anti-Trump Republican on the committee that investigated the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021, were engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”.Cheney lost her seat in Congress later that year. Kinzinger chose to retire.McDaniel was eased out of the RNC last month, to be replaced in part by Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law.McDaniel’s move to NBC was announced last week. On Sunday, she appeared on Meet the Press, the flagship politics show.Characterising her support for Trump’s election fraud lies as “taking one for the whole team”, she said she did “not think violence should be in our political discourse” and that Biden won “fair and square” – but still claimed it was “fair to say there were problems [with battleground state elections] in 2020”.A former Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, issued an on-air protest.“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this,” he told the current host, Kristin Welker, “because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination”.Monday brought more reports of staff discontent – and its open expression by two of the network’s biggest names.On Morning Joe, the MSNBC show that often sets the Washington agenda, co-host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, said: “We’ve been inundated with calls this weekend, as have most people connected with this network, about NBC’s decision to hire” McDaniel.“We learned about the hiring when we read about it in the press on Friday. We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring but if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons including, but not limited to, as lawyers might say, Miss McDaniel’s role in Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme and her pressuring election officials to not certify election results while Donald Trump was on the phone.”Scarborough’s wife and co-host, Mika Brzezinski, said: “To be clear, we believe NBC news should seek out conservative Republican voices to provide balance in their election coverage.“But it should be conservative Republicans, not a person who used her position of power to be an anti-democracy election denier. And we hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on Morning Joe in her capacity as a paid contributor. Here’s why.”There followed a compilation of McDaniel’s comments about the 2020 election, which Brzezinski called “exhausting”.Disquiet was also reported over McDaniel reportedly being paid $300,000.“Across MSNBC they have been cutting contributors,” an unnamed host told Politico. “So everyone’s like, what the fuck? You found 300 for her?” More

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      Linda L Bean, LL Bean heiress who backed Trump, dies aged 82

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      Linda L Bean – a granddaughter of the famed outdoor retailer LL Bean who became an entrepreneur, philanthropist and Republican activist – has died. She was 82.Bean died on Saturday, her business manager, Veronika Carlson, confirmed in a written statement on Sunday. No cause was given.Her support for Donald Trump when he won the presidency in 2016 prompted some on the political left to call for a boycott of her family’s clothing company. But a statement from Carlson said Bean also “was known for her amazing work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit as well as her pride and dedication to her home state of Maine and LL Bean, the company her grandfather founded”.“Our hearts go out to her family and friends,” Carlson’s statement said.Bean’s grandfather, Leon Leonwood Bean, founded the company in 1912. It grew through its popular catalogue, offering durable products such as rubber-bottomed boots that came with a lifetime guarantee.Linda Bean served on the company’s board for nearly half a century. She also bought lobster dealerships, founded the Perfect Maine Lobster brand in 2007, and owned general stores, inns and vacation rentals on Maine’s central coast, where she lived in Port Clyde.She helped lead the effort to have Maine’s lobster industry certified as sustainable in 2013 by a London-based non-profit, the Marine Stewardship Council – a certification that was pulled in 2022 over concern about harm to whales.Her philanthropic efforts included supporting LifeFlight of Maine medical helicopters and the Maine Botanical Gardens at Boothbay, as well as promoting the life of the early 20th-century illustrator and artist NC Wyeth – the father of the famous painter Andrew Wyeth – and preserving the family’s properties.“Linda Bean loved the state of Maine. Its coastal communities, islands, and art, particularly by the Wyeths, had a special place in her heart,” the Republican US senator Susan Collins said in a written statement on Sunday. “Linda also was an astute businesswoman who promoted Maine lobster through her restaurants. Many a time while waiting for my plane in Portland, I had a cup of her famous lobster stew at her airport restaurant.”Bean was also a big donor to Republican causes and twice campaigned unsuccessfully for Congress, in 1988 and 1992. She ran as an opponent of abortion rights, gay rights legislation and gun control, and she believed in cutting taxes to spur the economy.She also supported efforts to repeal a Maine law outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation, and she urged the Department of Defense to overturn Obama-era policies allowing transgender individuals to serve in the military.In 2017, the Federal Election Commission said Bean made excessive contributions to a political action committee she bankrolled to support Trump’s presidential campaign. That prompted some liberal groups to call for a boycott of LL Bean – which she described as harassment by “a small kernel of hardcore bullies out on the left coast, west coast, in California, trying to control what we do, what we buy, what we sell in Maine”.Trump came to her defense – the Republican urged his supporters to buy the company’s products.“While her politics did not align with mine, Linda and I found common ground in our mutual love of our home state, of the coast of Maine and our working waterfronts, of Maine inspired art and of the perfect Maine lobster roll,” the state’s governor, Janet Mills, a Democrat, said in a written statement. “I enjoyed her company and admired her business acumen.”No information about survivors was immediately available. More

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      Ousted House speaker McCarthy says Johnson shouldn’t fear losing job: ‘I don’t think they could do it again’

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      The embattled speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, should not be “fearful” of the motion to remove him filed by the far-right extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene, said Kevin McCarthy – who last year became the first speaker ejected by his own party when another extremist, Matt Gaetz, moved against him in the same way.“Speaker Johnson is doing the very best job he can,” McCarthy told CBS on Sunday, two days after Greene filed her motion. “It’s a difficult situation, but the one [piece of] advice I would give to the conference and to the speaker is: do not be fearful of a motion to vacate. I do not think they could do it again.”“They” – the Trumpist far-right of a far-right party – did it to McCarthy in October. Gaetz, from Florida, filed a motion to vacate the speakership – a move made possible by concessions won when the right put McCarthy through 15 votes to secure the speaker’s gavel nine months before.McCarthy, from California, told CBS Gaetz had been “trying to stop an ethics complaint”.“It was purely Matt coming to me trying [to get] me to do something illegal to stop the ethics committee from moving forward in an investigation that was started long before I became a speaker.”Gaetz was investigated by the House ethics committee over allegations of sexual misconduct also subject to investigation by the US Department of Justice. The congressman denies wrongdoing.Gaetz’s motion to eject McCarthy was supported by seven other Republicans and succeeded when Democrats declined to vote to keep the speaker in place.Johnson succeeded McCarthy after three Republican leadership figures – Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan and Tom Emmer – failed to gain sufficient support, in a more-than-three-week process that left the House leaderless.Johnson has now passed two spending bills with Democratic support, keeping the federal government open but committing what was McCarthy’s chief sin in the eyes of the right.Greene was not among the Republicans who moved against McCarthy but on Friday she moved against Johnson. Rightwing Republicans expressed frustration with Johnson but many also reproved Greene. Congress left Washington for a two-week recess without Greene bringing the motion up for a vote.Republicans have a two-vote majority, soon to dwindle to one. Democrats are seen as likely to support Johnson should Greene press ahead and try to remove him but also likely to extract concessions for doing so, most prominently including Johnson allowing a vote on new funding for Ukraine in its war with Russia.In line with Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president seeking a second term in the White House, Johnson has refused to bring to the floor a Ukraine aid package which passed the Senate with bipartisan support.McCarthy, who left Congress last year, told CBS: “I don’t think the Democrats will go along with [Greene’s motion]. Focus on the country. Focus on the job you’re supposed to do, and actually do it fearlessly. Just move forward.“We watched what transpired the last time. You went three weeks without Congress being able to act. You can’t do anything if you don’t have a speaker. I think we’ve moved past that. We’ve got a lot of challenges.“Those are the issues the country is actually looking [at], on the economy and others. If we focus on the country and what the country desires, I think the personalities can solve their own problems.” More

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      Headache for campaign team as Trump gets the band back together

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      Donald Trump’s getting the band back together. But this time they come with political baggage, conspiracy theories and, in some instances, criminal convictions.The former US president’s old acolytes are returning to the fold, eager to exert influence on his bid for the White House and have their say in a potential second administration. That poses a headache for his election campaign team, whose efforts to run a disciplined operation can be upended at any moment by the mercurial Trump.“Trump always wants to feel comfortable about the people who surround him and what better way to do that than to get the band back together?” said Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington DC. “We could look forward to the greatest hits ad nauseam.”If a man is judged by the company he keeps, Trump’s speaks volumes. There was uproar in 2022 when when the rapper Kanye West brought the white supremacist Nick Fuentes to dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.Trump’s inner circle includes the far-right representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat turned rightwing media personality and outspoken critic of aid to Ukraine; and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who has pushed the “great replacement” theory and claimed that the 6 January 2021 insurrection was an inside job.Since Trump secured the Republican nomination for president earlier this month, several “Make America great again” (Maga) alumni have sought to regain his patronage or rejoin his team. It is a cast of characters with a chequered history.Paul Manafort, a veteran political consultant, could return as a campaign adviser later this year, according to the Washington Post newspaper. The job discussions have largely centred around the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July and could include Manafort playing a role in fundraising for Trump’s campaign, the report said.Trump pardoned Manafort in 2020, seven months after he was released to home confinement, sparing the Republican operative from serving the bulk of his seven-and-a-half-year prison term for federal tax evasion and bank fraud.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile the New York Times reported that Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager in 2016, could also play a role at the convention. Lewandowski was ousted from a pro-Trump political action committee in 2021 after a major donor’s wife accused him of inappropriate behaviour.Michael Steele, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the MSNBC network: “Manafort coming back in is to set up control of the convention so that there are no slippages. You’ve got Lewandowski and others who are keen political operatives for Trump that will be out and about enforcing a strategy that will take no prisoners.“I don’t think people appreciate exactly what we’re going to be in for. This campaign is going to be very difficult on the country because these folks are all about one thing and one thing only: Donald Trump’s absolute return to power.”Meanwhile Roger Stone, a self-proclaimed dirty trickster who has been a friend and ally of Trump for 30 years, still speaks to him occasionally and was spotted at the Super Tuesday victory party at Mar-a-Lago. Stone was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and sentenced to 40 months in prison before the then president commuted the sentence.The rapper Kurt Jantz, professionally known as Forgiato Blow, was also at the Super Tuesday event. His Maga songs have been criticised for homophobia and glorifying violence and he has suffered social media bans. Blow said: “He’s the American dream. I supported Trump since 2015. I was one of the people early about it. At first it was just about Trump being a boss but he’s a rapper’s dream: beautiful wife, amazing mansion that we’re in right now. At the end of the day, that’s what everybody wants.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThe rush of would-be influencers eager to whisper unsolicited advice into Trump’s ear is making life difficult for his otherwise unexpectedly professional campaign led by the longtime political operatives Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who find themselves attempting to play gatekeeper.Christina Bobb, a lawyer and former One America News Network (OAN) host who amplified Trump’s false claims of election fraud, faced questions over her competence at the campaign. She has been diverted to the RNC as senior counsel for “election integrity”.Trump reportedly wanted to hire the far-right activist Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist, Islamophobe and former Republican candidate for Congress, but Wiles managed to block the move, according to the Axios website.Charlie Sykes, a conservative columnist and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “In a normal world, a presidential candidate would not get within a zip code of Laura Loomer. Now she’s showing up at Mar-a-Lago. And, of course, they can be relied upon to attack any other conservative that does not engage in the kind of rhetoric that Trump engages in.”But Trump continues to speak by phone to some without the knowledge of his campaign. Their indulgence is seen by critics as an ominous indicator that, should he return to the White House, Trump would make appointments based only on loyalty and Maga credentials, a break from his first term when figures such as the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, and defence secretary, Jim Mattis, sought to rein him in.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: Trump has made it clear that he was disappointed and fed up with the Washington establishment, as he calls it, and so he’s got a group of henchmen and women who will do his bidding, who don’t feel bound by the law or being liked and respected outside their core.“These are the foot soldiers in Trump’s authoritarian army. They will do whatever it takes to win and we’ve seen it; this is not speculation. They put out the playbook in 2020 and we’d be foolish not to expect that playbook to be used in 2024.” More