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      RNC plan for 2020 denialist to head ‘election integrity’ unit raises alarms

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      As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has cemented its hold on the Republican National Committee (RNC), alarms are being raised about the organisation’s tapping of the fervent election denialist Christina Bobb to run an “election integrity” unit.Bobb is a former Trump lawyer and ex-reporter for the far-right One America News Network, who gained prominence after Trump’s 2020 loss for promoting bogus fraud charges in Arizona, Wisconsin and elsewhere, and was part of Trump-backed efforts to substitute fake electors for ones that Joe Biden won in some states.Bobb helped spread phoney voting fraud claims with Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former campaign operative Mike Roman, both of whom along with Trump and others face charges in Fulton county, Georgia, of conspiring to overturn Biden’s win there; Bobb was not charged.Last year Bobb wrote Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024, a book that was chock full of baseless charges about 2020 election fraud.Former judges, ex-Republican congressmen and election watchdogs voice strong concerns about Bobb’s mission and the potential dangers posed by her flood of erroneous charges of voting fraud.“By designating Bobb to the RNC post, they’re beginning to promulgate the same false narrative of widespread election fraud that we saw in 2020 and 2021 but way earlier,” said John Jones, a former federal judge in Pennsylvania and now president of Dickinson College.“There’s a concept known as illusory truth,” he added. “If you keep saying these same falsehoods over and over, people begin to believe they’re true, and it has the potential to morph into violence. That puts judges, prosecutors and others at risk.”The RNC’s hiring of Bobb comes as Trump keeps falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and talks up new efforts this year to “guard the vote” to ferret out potential fraud. Experts have conclusively said fraud was not a factor in Trump’s loss by over 7 million votes, and stressed that historically voting fraud has been minimal.Bobb’s “election integrity” post at the RNC is expected to involve teams of poll workers, poll watchers and other efforts in swing states and she has begun talking with key Maga allies with similar missions. Bobb last month told the far-right reporter Breanna Morello that her top goal is “empowering the grassroots”.Bobb was on at least one conference call in March with a half-dozen Trump-allied groups including ones that echo her false claims about 2020 election fraud, according to a person on the call, who said: “We’re all going to coordinate.”Among the groups on the call, he added, was Arizona-based Turning Point Action, which has a track record of promoting falsehoods about 2020 election fraud.Many experts raise red flags about Bobb’s new RNC post.The former Republican congressman Charlie Dent said the RNC’s hiring of Bobb “is a further indication of how the RNC has not only become an arm of the Trump campaign, but an outlet for the most extreme elements of the election denial movement”.Likewise, the ex-Republican congressman Dave Trott predicted: “Bobb will be leading the charge and saying the election was rigged if Trump loses.”Some key Democrats are also alarmed by what Bobb’s RNC role may presage.“Putting Christina Bobb in charge of election integrity is like putting Donald Trump in charge of integrity,” the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin said. “They’re designing a platform for lies to wage the next insurrection.”Although Bobb’s “election integrity” slot is new and a work in progress, the RNC’s new leadership seems to be banking on her.Lara Trump, the new RNC vice-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on 12 March: “We have the first-ever election integrity division at the [RNC]. That means massive resources going to this one thing.”Lara Trump added: “We will have trained poll watchers, poll observers, poll workers, people in tabulation centers all across this country,” and signaled that volunteers for these slots and lawyers are needed.Bobb, whose official RNC title is senior counsel for election integrity, wrote on X: “I’m honored to be a part of the new team at the RNC.”Besides Bobb, the RNC in March tapped Charlie Spies, who had previously served as its election law counsel, to be its chief counsel.Further, the RNC also named William McGinley, a veteran election lawyer who worked in the Trump administration, as outside counsel for election integrity, a move that could presage more litigation.But Bobb’s litany of baseless fraud claims as she worked with key Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election results, shadow her new RNC role.For instance, Bobb used her perch at One America News Network (OAN) to spread bogus claims of fraud that led to a defamation lawsuit against her and OAN by the voting technology firm Dominion; Bobb and OAN have both denied any wrongdoing.Separately Bobb signed a letter falsely certifying to the justice department on Trump’s behalf in 2022 that after a “diligent search” he had returned all the classified documents the special counsel Jack Smith later charged the former president with illegally taking to Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.A subsequent FBI raid found about 100 classified documents; Bobb, who reportedly was interviewed by the FBI, indicated that another lawyer drafted the letter she signed.Given that Bobb was only tapped for her RNC post this month, it is unclear whether she has begun recruiting staff or taken other steps to develop the RNC’s election integrity program.But a source close to the Trump campaign stressed that “the key to election observing is redundancy”, meaning that it would involve multiple coordinated efforts, which suggests that the RNC program will be done in tandem with similar poll-watching and poll worker drives by Trump allied groups.The need for “redundancy” and Bobb’s early conference call with several outside groups are emerging as key strategies for Bobb, as she revealed in an interview on 15 March with Morello, a conservative journalist who used to be with Fox News.Bobb told Morello that her top goal at the RNC is “empowering the grassroots. This has to be a grassroots approach … We have to empower people in their communities.”The RNC press office did not reply to a request for comment.The RNC’s election integrity drive this year comes after a few decades when a moratorium was imposed on RNC poll-watching operations due to aggressive tactics it employed in 1981 that went beyond permissible programs.At some polling places in New Jersey in 1981, the GOP used off-duty police officers and provided rewards to some people who claimed they had evidence of voting fraud. After those incidents, the party agreed to halt poll-watching efforts until 2018, when the moratorium terminated.Still, some lawyers and election veterans are troubled by the RNC’s hiring of Bobb given her history of election denialism and Trump’s obsession with debunked claims of fraud in 2020.“I don’t think it’s a good thing when a major party hires fringe characters who don’t understand how elections work,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.Other lawyers express similar worries about Bobb’s background.“It’s unclear whether the RNC wants those who are not already loyalists to take its commitment to ‘election integrity’ seriously,” said the former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman.“But if it does, picking someone who, according to the Florida indictment against Trump, was the vehicle for certifying his false statements about returning all the classified documents in his possession, is an odd choice.”Looking ahead, Chioma Chukwu, the deputy executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, called Bobb’s hiring by the RNC “a dangerous sign of how entrenched the election denial movement has become on the right”.“Elevating Bobb – who continues to push baseless lies about voter fraud – to a top post focused on ‘election integrity’ serves no purpose other than to sow chaos and confusion in November, allowing partisan actors to cry ‘foul’ if their preferred candidate loses.” More

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      in US Politics

      Ronna McDaniel mess shows problem of politics-to-pundit conveyor belt

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      It should have been a straightforward appointment in the often lucrative world of political punditry: a former high-ranking party official making the move from actual politics to America’s television screens with a mission to pontificate, opine and spin.US cable news is littered with such figures: ex-congresspeople, former presidential candidates, reformed spin doctors, one-time campaign leaders. All of them on fat contracts for sitting behind desks and arguing the political talking points of the day.So it was somewhat of a surprise when NBC’s hiring of former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel triggered a staff revolt, legal fights, endless inches of bad press and a stunning media conflagration that seemed set to burn down America’s premier liberal cable news network, MSNBC. It also ended in McDaniel being canned last week shortly after her appointment was announced.But in an American political landscape still being profoundly reshaped by Donald Trump and his conspiracy-laden rhetoric – especially when it comes to the big lie of a stolen 2020 election – more savvy network bosses should perhaps have expected the turmoil.McDaniel presented a conundrum. On one hand, she had served as Trump’s chosen RNC chair from early 2017, through the turbulence of January 6 Capitol riot, winning re-election to the post in unanimous elections in both 2019 and 2021. Her perspective could be a valuable resource.But along the way, she had participated in a 2020 phone call pressuring Michigan county officials not to certify the vote from the Detroit area. “Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” she had said. She has been far from dismissive when it comes to Trump’s promotion of the idea of widespread electoral fraud in the US. For many McDaniel was not just a career politico; she had sought to help a bid to subvert an election.For any network, but especially NBC and its liberal MSNBC sibling, McDaniel’s role in being a threat to American democracy could not be ignored. On her first appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press last Sunday McDaniel said that the Capitol riot “doesn’t represent our country. It certainly does not represent my party.”But she was immediately grilled as to why she hadn’t said that earlier. “When you’re the RNC chair, you … you kind of take one for the whole team right now. I get to be a little bit more myself, right?” she suggested.Apparently not. Her words were nowhere near enough to quell a rebellion within the broadcaster. The MSNBC anchors Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough condemned the move, along with Jen Psaki (herself fresh from serving as White House spokesperson), Mika Brzezinski and NBC’s Chuck Todd.Maddow said the choice to hire McDaniel was “inexplicable” and accused her employer of giving airtime to someone who is “about undermining elections and going after democracy”. Todd said that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”The rage continued for several days, and soon McDaniel was gone. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” Cesar Conde, NBCUniversal’s News Group chairman, wrote to staff. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”Previously it had been typical that the head of talent at a broadcaster made the hires, and newsroom employees went along with it, right or wrong. But these are no longer normal times in America: Trump is virtually certain to be the 2024 Republican nominee and frequently leads Joe Biden in the polls, despite continuing to voice his 2020 election fraud lies.“There are continuous arguments at the networks about how to give voice to the conservative side of the equation without giving voice to fringe elements,” said Rick Ellis, author of the Substack newsletter Too Much TV. “If NBC News had said, yeah, we’re going to have her on our shows to hear her point of view, there wouldn’t have been so much squawking. The tipping point was that she was going to be a paid analyst.”MSNBC already employs one former RNC chair. Michael Steele works as an on-air analyst and host of a weekend show. He, however, did not try to reverse the result of an election.McDaniel has yet to comment, but Politico reported she is considering legal options and expects to be paid out in full for her reported $600,000 two-year deal. A “person close to McDaniel” was quoted criticizing NBC for allowing its talent “to drag Ronna through the mud and make it seem like they were innocent bystanders”.The incident plays into a wider debate about partisanship in the US media. The McDaniel’s blowup follows well-publicized efforts by CNN owner Warner Bros Discovery to broaden its political perspective, an effort that led to the firing of the CNN chief executive, Chris Licht.In statement, the RNC hinted it could pull NBC’s credentials from its convention in Milwaukee this summer. “We are taking a hard look at what this means for NBC’s participation at the convention,” said Danielle Alvarez, a spokesperson for the RNC and the Trump campaign.But McDaniel and NBC’s predicament also speaks to a larger issue – that of a plush-carpeted corridor between political and media jobs that undermines the integrity of both. In many ways, the only people this system satisfied were the bosses and the pundits. At a time of an extraordinary American election McDaniel and NBC found out that was no longer enough.“There’s entirely too much of this highway between working in the White House or in Congress and ending up on cable news. I understand that its helpful because they know how government works, but the problem is they’re seen coastal or Beltway perspectives and they push out other voices that would be helpful to have in the mix,” said Ellis. More

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      Congressman rebuked for call to bomb Gaza ‘like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’

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      Rather than provide humanitarian aid in Gaza, the US should ensure it is subjected to atomic bombing the way that “Nagasaki and Hiroshima” were at the end of the second world war, a Republican congressman said in shocking remarks that by all indications were recorded recently at a gathering with a relatively small group of his constituents.The comments by US House representative Tim Walberg of Michigan drew condemnation from progressive political quarters, including from some who expressed disbelief that a former Christian pastor would advocate for what they called the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.“A sitting US rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing privately about genocide,” said a user on X who circulated video of Walberg’s comments late Friday. A reply to that comment read: “Exactly what Jesus would do, right?”Entries on Walberg’s congressional calendar – along with videos on social media – establish that he met with members of the public in Dundee, Michigan, on 25 March. As Mediaite recounted Saturday, a clip of the session that was posted on YouTube and other sites, and recorded by an activist, showed Walberg telling his audience that the US should not spend a “dime” on humanitarian aid in Gaza, where Israel has been carrying out a military campaign for months.The aid would be better spent on supporting Israel, which Walberg labeled the US’s “greatest ally, arguably, anywhere in the world”.“It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” Walberg said, alluding to the Japanese cities where the US dropped atomic bombs at the end of the second world war, killing hundreds of thousands of people. “Get it over quick.”Walberg also spoke in favor of affording similar treatment to Ukraine, which has been defending itself from a Russian military invasion since 2022. But Walberg said the purpose there would be to topple Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s forces expeditiously rather than spend the bulk of US “funding for Ukraine … for humanitarian purposes” as the war there dragged out.“Defeat Putin quick,” Walberg said.Once video footage of Walberg’s pronouncements went viral, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement denouncing the congressman’s declarations as a “clear call to genocide”.“This … should be condemned by all Americans who value human life and international law,” Cair’s executive director, Dawud Walid, said in a statement.Walid, whose group is the US’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, added: “To so casually call for what would result in the killing of every human being in Gaza sends the chilling message that Palestinian lives have no value.”A spokesperson for Walberg’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.Israel began carrying out an air and ground onslaught in Gaza after Hamas attacked on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking hostages. The military strikes in Gaza have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, and the US said Friday that the Israeli campaign had probably already pushed the area into famine.Some of the Joe Biden White House’s fellow Democrats have been increasingly pressuring the president to cut off the almost $4bn in military aid that the US provides annually to Israel, which has persistently hindered the delivery of humanitarian relief in Gaza. On 26 March, the US abstained from a United Nations vote that saw 14 other members ratify a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, leaving Israel nearly isolated on the global political stage.Nonetheless, within days, Reuters reported that Biden’s administration had authorized the transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs and fighter jets to Israel, whom Republicans in the US like Walberg generally support steadfastly.“We should be resourcing Israel just like they want to – to kill Hamas on their own,” Walberg said at the meeting in Dundee.Walberg was first elected to Congress in 2007. He reportedly entered the year with more than $1.1m in campaign funds as he prepared to seek a ninth term in the US House. More

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      in US Politics

      Politician who attended Charlottesville white-supremacist rally faces recall

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      Voters in the north-west Oklahoma city of Enid are being asked to decide whether a councilmember who attended the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 should be removed from his post.Iraq war veteran Judd Blevins, 42, was elected to Enid’s city council to be the commissioner of its first ward last year. He soon faced an effort by the Enid social justice committee, which claimed Blevins “embraces the same Nazi ideology [the US] defeated almost 80 years ago” during the second world war.Accusations against Blevins levelled by the group are not limited to his attendance in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazi groups protested the removal of a Confederate monument in a demonstration that led to the murder of a counterprotester.He also has been linked to chatroom posts planning the march, and posted hate group propaganda and recruited members to Identity Evropa, a white-supremacist group that has been disbanded.In addition to the murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer, the Charlottesville rally was marked by a state police helicopter crash that killed two.Blevins’ election to office came after a local newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle, ran a story about his ties to white nationalism.“Our initial desire was for either Judd Blevins to address these questions and denounce any sense of neo-Nazism or white supremacy or for Enid’s leadership to step up and get those answers and demand those answers,” the committee’s James Neal said in a petition to remove Blevins.He added: “Neither of those things have occurred, and we are left to take it to the voters, to the people, to address the issue.”In his response, Blevins said: “Regrettably, this fringe group has chosen to continue a smear campaign against me.” He maintained that the effort to remove him would be an added cost to taxpayers.He invoked the wishes of his predecessor, Jerry Allen, who had said: “Mr Blevins deserves the respect of the office, and I hope you give him the opportunity that I was given many years ago.”Blevins noted his achievements, including voting for a movie theater in his ward, storm water drainage improvements and the opening of a branch of the Texas Roadhouse steak restaurant chain. Blevins added that voters had elected him “because they believed I was the best candidate who shared their values, their concerns and their hopes for the future of Enid”.In November, a resolution to censure Blevins for his failure to explain or apologize for aligning himself with white nationalists was brought before the city council. The measure was then dropped after a fellow commissioner, Derwin Norwood, the only Black member of the city governing body, said he accepted Blevins’ statement that he was opposed “to all forms of racial hatred, racial discrimination and any form of government that would suppress the rights that are enshrined in our constitution”.Blevins acknowledged in recent days that he participated in the Charlottesville rally, where white nationalists held a tiki torch-light parade across the University of Virginia campus chanting “Jews will not replace us” and said he had been connected to Identity Evropa.But he repeated that he is “opposed to all forms of racial hate and racial discrimination”.He told a community forum that his involvement in the rally and ties to Identity Evropa were to bring “attention to the same issues” that won Donald Trump the presidency in 2016.Those included, he said, “securing America’s borders, reforming our legal immigration system and, quite frankly, pushing back on … anti-white hatred”.When voters go to the polls on 2 April to decide whether Blevins should continue in office, they could opt to replace him with his opponent, Cheryl Patterson, a grandmother and longtime youth leader at an area church, who is also a Republican.One of the organizers of Blevins’ recall push, Democrat Nancy Presnall, told the Associated Press: “There are people on the opposite side of the political spectrum who are totally together with us on this. This isn’t a Republican-Democrat thing. It’s a Nazi and not-Nazi thing.”However the vote falls, some of the city’s 50,000 residents are concerned about lasting damage to Enid’s reputation. Some residents blamed a decline in newspaper readership and voter apathy, particularly in municipal elections, for allowing a small group of hard-core Blevins supporters to help him with the seat by a margin of 36 votes out of 808 cast.Neal, who is pastor of the Holy Cross Orthodox-Catholic church in Enid, agreed with that assessment, saying: “I think a lot of people in the community, myself included, thought that he had no chance of winning,” Neal said. “The people who support that ideology are very passionate and very dedicated, and up until this point we haven’t been.”The pastor added: “This has been galvanizing and helped us get off our asses, quite frankly, and fight back.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Feeble, desperate, mentally unfit’: Biden changes tack to mock Trump

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      With November set to be one of the most consequential elections in US history, it would be understandable if Donald Trump and Joe Biden reached for soaring, lofty rhetoric: if they attempted to match the high-minded ideals of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the nation’s founding fathers.American voters, and the country’s political class, are long used to Trump’s insult-laden and often crude rhetoric. “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit,” Trump said in Georgia earlier this month, during a rally at which he also also mocked Biden’s stutter.But recently Biden and his campaign team appear to have decided to fight fire with fire, after previously seeking to stay above the fray. It’s a shift that seems to accept that Trump has moved the standards of US politics and that it’s more effective to embrace that notion than remain out of the fight.But it also probably reflects the unique threat that Trump’s bid to return to the White House for a second term represents to American democracy and that the time to sugarcoat the fight against that is long past. For many, Biden and his team’s insults aren’t just political hardball, they also smack of the truth.In recent months, Biden has dubbed Trump “mentally unfit”, while this week his campaign declared that the US “deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump”.The president’s campaign has dubbed Trump “weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate for president”. They’ve also taken to calling Trump, who says he is a multibillionaire but was recently unable to pay a court-ordered $454m bond, “Broke Don”.It’s a remarkable shift for Biden, who less than a month ago raised eyebrows for only referring to Trump as “my predecessor” during his State of the Union speech.Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, suggested to the Guardian Biden’s reason for this shift was “very straightforward.“What he was doing before obviously wasn’t working. Typically, we all learn from bad experience and Biden has been behind in the polls to a candidate who is quite frankly hated by almost half of the American electorate,” she said.“I think that Biden was under considerable pressure from his advisers, from activists, to do something different.”Notably, polling this week showed Biden gaining on Trump in six key states – after his supporters previously had a wake-up call when the incumbent reported dismal numbers.View image in fullscreenSo far, Biden seems to be fully embracing his new persona. On Wednesday, the president, not known for his comic timing, even cracked a joke at his rival’s expense.“Just the other day, this defeated-looking man came up to me and said: ‘Mr President, I need your help. I’m in crushing debt. I’m completely wiped out,’” Biden chortled.“I said, ‘Sorry, Donald, I can’t help you.’”While negative campaigning is not new, Trump took the practice to a new level almost from the moment he announced his run for president in June 2015. At the time, he claimed his rivals for the presidential nomination had “sweated like dogs” during their own campaign events, and said Mexico was sending “rapists” into the US.With Trump having spent the last four years peppering Biden with insults, it seems Biden and his team have decided they need to respond in kind.“We’ve learned that ignoring negative campaigning doesn’t work well,” Hershey said.“People are more likely to remember negative charges than positive statements. People are more likely to give negative statements greater weight than they do positive statements.“And so trying to take the high road and create a contrast between yourself and a negative opponent by not responding simply doesn’t work.”With Biden in the political ring throwing verbal punches back at Trump, he has hewn closer to the “Dark Brandon” meme that is popular among some of his supporters. That concept, which frequently sees Biden depicted with red laser eyes, imagines Biden as a sort of edgy hero or even antihero – the kind of person who wouldn’t think twice about sarcastically congratulating an opponent on a golf tournament win.If we rewind back to the 1980s, there were plenty of negative, and nasty, political campaigns afoot. The New York Times reported from the 1982 Tennessee Senate race that the Republican candidate Robin Beard hired an actor to dress up as Fidel Castro in an attempt to paint his opponent as soft on Cuban communism – but there is hard evidence that Trump dragged things to a new low.According to a study published in 2023, “the frequency of negative emotion words” used by American politicians “suddenly and lastingly increased” when Trump entered the 2016 presidential race.Researchers analyzed quotations from politicians from millions of news articles, and found that the use of negative language by politicians had begun to decrease during Barack Obama’s presidency.“Then in June 2015, precisely the month when Trump started his campaign, there was a massive jump in negativity,” said Robert West, a professor in the school of computer and communication sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and one of the co-authors of the study.View image in fullscreenIt wasn’t just Trump’s own language that accounted for the increase. When West and his colleagues removed all Trump quotations from the data, they found that the amount of negative language had still gone up: people had begun to copy Trump’s tone, just as Biden appears to have done.“It’s very sad that the other side is now starting to play the same game. This looks like we’ve lost as a society, because everyone plays that game now,” West said.For now, it is hard to tell whether Biden cracking jokes about Trump will be a winning strategy. There is evidence, however, that Republican and Democratic voters increasingly view members of the opposing party with contempt.In 2022, Pew Research found that 72% of Republicans consider Democrats to be “more immoral” than the average American, compared with just 47% who felt that way in 2016 (63% of Democrats thought Republicans were more immoral, up from 35% in 2016). In this climate, perhaps there is a real appetite among Biden supporters for him to swing for Trump’s kneecaps.While some say a negative campaigning strategy is effective, others point out – like Stephen Craig, a political science professor at the University of Florida who has studied political campaigns – that is not always the case.View image in fullscreen“There is a humongous amount of literature testing the effectiveness of negative ads, and negativity in other media as well – whether its speeches, radio or mail – and the bottom line is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” Craig said.“And no one can tell in advance when something is going to work and when it won’t.”In the modern era, it is only Trump who has fully embraced mockery and insults as presidential campaigning, although during the 1988 presidential election George HW Bush’s team got plenty of mileage from making fun of Michael Dukakis, his opponent, for trying to look tough in a military tank.But going back in time, it turns out the founding fathers weren’t really all that polite. The 1796 presidential election, in which John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson, saw Adams’s camp claim Jefferson would promote prostitution and incest, and suggest that Jefferson had an affair with an enslaved woman.Jefferson’s backers, meanwhile, claimed Adams was a hermaphrodite, and dubbed Adams, who they said was overweight, “His Rotundity”.Neither Biden nor Trump have gone quite that low yet – although there are still seven months to go until election day. More

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      Republican choice for vacated US House seat is surprise boon for Lauren Boebert

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      A Colorado Republican panel made the surprising decision on Thursday night to choose a former mayor, Greg Lopez, to be congressman Ken Buck’s likely replacement until the November general election, a saving grace for Lauren Boebert’s bid for another term in Congress.Lopez will now run as the Republican candidate in the 25 June special election after Buck’s resignation at the same time GOP primary candidates are vying to be the congressman’s successor.The stakes, however, were far higher than keeping Buck’s seat in the US House warmed by a Republican.Of the nine competitors who jostled for the special election nomination, seven also are running in the primary race against Boebert. The far-right representative jumped into the race after a near loss in the seat she now holds.While Lopez is likely to win in the dark red district, he will be a placeholder and plans to step down after the general election winner is sworn into office in January. For two of Boebert’s primary opponents who came in second and third, the special election candidacy would have been a boon.They would have run in two different elections for the same seat, garnering more attention, media coverage and fundraising opportunities. That would have boosted their odds in the primary race where they are otherwise eclipsed by Boebert’s near household name and hefty campaign chest.That tension was palpable throughout the six-hour meeting with six votes on Thursday, which winnowed the field in the special election for Buck’s seat to two options, Lopez and former state senator Jerry Sonnenberg, one of Boebert’s stiffest primary competitors.View image in fullscreenThroughout the evening, there were accusations Buck had intended to kneecap Boebert’s campaign by stepping down early and giving one of her opponents a potential leg up. Boebert pushed the claim, saying in a previous statement: “The establishment concocted a swampy backroom deal to try to rig an election.”Buck denied that was his intention.Boebert sent a letter to delegates before the meeting encouraging them to choose a placeholder, so as not to “influence the regular primary election in a way that would taint the entire process and give this candidate an unfair leg up”.That riled her primary opponents, including the former state senator Ted Harvey.On stage, Harvey lashed back at those who had voted for Lopez after landing the third-most votes.“They didn’t do it to support the candidate Greg Lopez, they did it to support their own candidates who weren’t here tonight. That’s not just putting us at risk, but it’s putting our nation at risk,” Harvey said.Harvey then asked his supporters to throw their weight behind Sonnenberg, one of Harvey’s primary opponents. Sonnenberg barely lost to Lopez in the final vote and seemed to shrug off the loss.“This is not a game for the weak. I understand completely, they made a decision,” he said, gesturing toward the mingling crowd.Lopez is a former mayor of Parker, Colorado, who ran two unsuccessful bids for governor and said he would “do the best job that I can and represent this state to the best of my ability”.This helps keep the field clear for Boebert, who has built a far-right name with a ferocious political style and remains a known, if divisive, quantity among conservatives nationwide.While Boebert has made headlines with scandals, including a tape of her groping and vaping with a date in a Denver theater, she also has garnered endorsements from Donald Trump and a key supporter of the former president, the House speaker, Mike Johnson.Those votes of confidence will probably go far for Boebert in the new district, an expansive sweep of Colorado’s plains where voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2020 and her opponents are lesser-known, local Republicans.Boebert moved east to join the race in this district at the end of last year, after she nearly lost her previous, Republican-leaning seat to a Democratic candidate in 2022.The option to district-hop was opened to Boebert after Buck announced last year he would not run for re-election, citing his party’s handling of Trump.Buck abruptly left Congress on 22 March, pointing to the “bickering and nonsense” he said now pervades the US Capitol. More

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      ‘Join us’: Biden campaign urges Haley supporters to turn against Trump

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      Joe Biden’s presidential campaign released an ad targeting Republicans who supported Nikki Haley in her losing primary against Donald Trump.“If you voted for Nikki Haley, Donald Trump doesn’t want your vote,” the president’s campaign ad says. “Save America. Join us.”The ad shows clips of Trump disparaging Haley, the former South Carolina governor who was ambassador to the United Nations when Trump was president but fought on the longest of his opponents for the Republican nomination this year.Insults quoted include “birdbrain”, “Rino” (Republican in name only), “she’s gone crazy”, “a very angry person”, “not presidential timber” and “she’s gone haywire”.“I don’t need votes” from Haley’s supporters, Trump is shown to say, adding: “I have all the votes we need.”Michael Tyler, communications director for Biden’s campaign, said: “Donald Trump has made it crystal clear he doesn’t want support from voters who cast their ballot for Nikki Haley so let us be equally clear: there is a home for everyone on this campaign who knows Donald Trump cannot be back in the White House.“Joe Biden is building a broad and diverse coalition of voters who want more freedoms not less, who want to protect our democracy, and who want to live in a country that is safe from the chaos, division, and violence that another Donald Trump presidency would bring.”The Biden campaign said it planned to spend more than $1m to air the ad on digital platforms in battleground states, “targeting Nikki Haley voters in predominantly suburban zip codes where she performed well against Trump”.The Biden campaign this week saw encouraging results in many states likely to decide the election, gains that led Simon Rosenberg, an influential Democratic operative, to say the “Biden bump is real”.Biden has also vastly out-raised Trump, including through a high-profile fundraiser in New York City on Thursday, at which the president appeared with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, his most recent Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office.Unnamed Biden officials told the Washington Post senior figures including Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul and campaign co-chair, had spoken to “people in Haley’s orbit”.The question of outreach to anti-Trump Republicans is a perennial one. The new Biden ad landed on the same day as a Politico column in which the influential Washington reporter Jonathan Martin chastised as “political malpractice” a failure to reach out to influential anti-Trump Republicans.Figures cited as ripe for wooing included Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who has ended his flirtation with a third-party run; the former president George W Bush; the former House speaker and vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan; and Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president whose run for the nomination failed but who sensationally said he would not endorse Trump this year.Another anti-Trump Republican, the Utah senator and 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, told Martin: “Biden has not asked for my support. I’m pretty critical of his mess at the border – that should have cooled his jets!”Haley dropped out of the Republican primary after Super Tuesday, 5 March, having won only the minor prizes of Washington DC and Vermont.In her concession speech, she said: “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond who did not support him and I hope he does that.”Haley’s brother, Mitti Randhawa, recently said Trump had not answered his sister’s “plea”, adding: “Shame on you. You will need them.”Haley has not endorsed Trump and has said she no longer feels bound by a pledge to support the Republican nominee. Her supporters remain a prized commodity. Polling shows them roughly equally split when it comes to choosing Trump or Biden.Haley has won a little more than 21% of votes in the Republican primary so far, with a high point in losing contests of more than 43% in New Hampshire. She fared less well where Democrats and independents could not vote but still highlighted Trump’s vulnerability in his own party.Legally, the former president faces unprecedented jeopardy, including 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar penalties in civil suits. Political donations have been funneled into paying legal bills now topping $100m.Politically, Trump must repel Democratic efforts to attract independents and moderates, particularly women opposed to Republican attacks on reproductive rights.After Haley dropped out, Biden said: “Nikki Haley was willing to speak the truth about Trump: about the chaos that always follows him, about his inability to see right from wrong, about his cowering before Vladimir Putin. Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign.”That campaign now hopes enough of Haley’s supporters will follow Michael Burgess, a South Carolina teacher who recently told the Associated Press: “I will reluctantly vote Biden.“We can survive bad policy, but we cannot survive the destruction of the constitution at the hands of a morally bankrupt dictator lover in Trump who, supported by his congressional Maga minions, would do just that.” More

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      Can Bibles, sneakers and social media save Trump from financial ruin? – podcast

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      Donald Trump is embroiled in a balancing act between several criminal and civil trials, which could cost him millions of dollars and potentially even put him behind bars. On top of that, there’s the small issue of a presidential campaign. So the question is: can he afford to do it all?
      This week Jonathan Freedland speaks to Erica Orden, of Politico, to discuss the highs and lows Trump experienced this week, and whether or not he can raise the money to save himself from bankruptcy

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