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      Noem book contains threat against Biden dog: ‘Commander, say hello to Cricket’

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      The White House condemned as “disturbing” and “absurd” comments in which Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota and a potential running mate for Donald Trump, threatened to harm or kill Joe Biden’s dog.“We find her comments from yesterday disturbing,” Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, told a White House briefing. “We find them absurd. This is a country that loves dogs and you have a leader that talks about putting dogs down, killing them.”Noem’s bizarre threat is contained in No Going Back, a campaign book that generated unusual buzz after the Guardian revealed how Noem describes in detail the day she shot dead her dog, Cricket, which she deemed untrainable and dangerous, and an unnamed goat.The revelation sparked a political firestorm, widely held to have incinerated Noem’s chances of being named running mate to Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.But as the book neared publication on Tuesday, it became clear Noem was not done when she closed her chapter on killing Cricket, a 14-month-old female wirehaired pointer, and the unnamed male goat, which Noem says was smelly and aggressive and dangerous to her children.At the end of No Going Back, Noem asks: “What would I do if I was president on the first day in office in 2025?”Remarkably, she writes that “the first thing I’d do is make sure Joe Biden’s dog was nowhere on the grounds. (‘Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.’)”Noem adds that her own dog, Foster, “would sure be welcome” at the White House.“He comes with me to the [state] capitol all the time and loves everyone,” she writes.Regardless, a governor widely held to have designs on the presidency in 2028 has at least implied, in print, that she would have a predecessor’s dog killed – whether by herself with a shotgun, like Cricket and the goat, or not.Noem has defended her description of killing Cricket and the goat as evidence of her willingness to do unpleasant but necessary things in farm life as well as in politics.Commander, a German shepherd owned by Joe and Jill Biden, was removed from the White House after biting Secret Service agents.On Monday, Jean-Pierre said: “Commander’s living with family members.”The day before, Noem doubled down.Her host on CBS’s Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan, quoted Noem’s apparent threat to kill Commander and asked: “Are you doing this to try to look tough? Do you still think that you have a shot at being a VP?”Noem said: “Well, number one, Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people. So, how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog and what to do with it?”Brennan said: “Well, he’s not living at the White House any more.”Noem said: “That’s a question that the president should be held accountable to.”Brennan said: “You’re saying he [Commander] should be shot?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNoem said: “That what’s the president should be accountable to.”Noem tried to move on, to talk about Covid in South Dakota. But she also said she was “so proud” of a book that contained “a lot of truthful stories”.Elsewhere, though, Noem’s publisher, Center Street, said that at Noem’s request it was removing from her book “a passage regarding Kim Jong-un … upon a reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible on the audio and ebook editions”.In her book, Noem writes: “I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”As first reported by the Dakota Scout, no such meeting occurred.Noem told CBS: “What bothers me the most about politicians is when they’re fake.”Brennan said: “But if you have to retract … parts of [the book] …”Noem, whose publisher said it would retract part of her book, said: “I’m not retracting anything.”Brennan said: “OK.”On Saturday, Noem attended a Trump Florida fundraiser featuring a host of vice-presidential contenders.Noem was “somebody I love”, NBC reported Trump as saying, adding: “She’s been with me, and a supporter, and I’ve been a supporter of hers for a long time.”But unlike other hopefuls, among them the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Noem was not called to the stage.She reportedly left early. More

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      House set to vote on Marjorie Taylor Greene effort to remove Mike Johnson

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      The House is expected to vote this week on a motion to remove Republican Mike Johnson as speaker, but the effort, spearheaded by hard-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, faces virtually no chance of success.Greene announced on Wednesday she would move forward with forcing a vote on Johnson’s removal this week, following through on a threat she first issued in late March. Greene has consistently attacked Johnson for advancing bills that have attracted widespread bipartisan support, such as the government spending proposal approved in March and the foreign aid package signed into law last month.As she called for Johnson’s removal, Greene accused the speaker of abandoning his Republican principles in favor of Democratic priorities, such as Ukraine funding.“Mike Johnson is giving [Democrats] everything they want,” Greene said Wednesday. “I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may. And so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate.”But Greene’s proposal is widely expected to fail, as House Democratic leaders indicated last week that they would vote to table, or kill, the motion to vacate the chair. In a statement issued on Tuesday, the three leaders cited the passage of the foreign aid package, which included nearly $61bn in funding for Ukraine, to justify their stance.“At this moment, upon completion of our national security work, the time has come to turn the page on this chapter of pro-Putin Republican obstruction,” the leaders said. “We will vote to table Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate the chair. If she invokes the motion, it will not succeed.”Among House Republicans, Greene’s campaign has attracted little interest, as only two of her colleagues – Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul Gosar of Arizona – have expressed their support of the motion.Although the effort will almost certainly fail, Greene can still force a vote on her motion to vacate. Current House rules stipulate that a single member of the chamber may “offer a privileged resolution declaring the Office of Speaker vacant”. Greene introduced such a resolution in March, but she stopped short of calling for a vote on the matter.Greene plans to move forward with requesting a vote on the motion, which will force the House to take up the matter within two legislative days.Before voting on removing the speaker, one of Johnson’s allies is expected to introduce a motion to table the proposal. When then speaker Kevin McCarthy was facing the threat of removal in October, his allies tried the same tactic, but the motion to table failed in a vote of 208 to 218.This time around, the House will almost certainly be able to pass a motion to table Greene’s resolution. With House Democratic leadership signaling that they will support the motion to table and only two Republican colleagues joining Greene’s cause, she remains hundreds of votes short of the majority that she will need to remove the speaker. (However, Democrats are not expected to unanimously back the motion to table, as some have signaled they will oppose it or vote “present”.)Johnson himself has appeared largely unbothered by Greene’s threats, criticizing her motion as “wrong for the Republican conference, wrong for the institution and wrong for the country”. At a press conference on Tuesday, Johnson insisted that he remained laser-focused on advancing House Republicans’ legislative priorities.“I have to do my job. We have to do what we believe to be the right thing,” Johnson said. “We need people who are serious about the job here to continue to do that job and get it done.”If Johnson were ousted, he would become only the second House speaker in US history to be formally removed from the position – and yet he would also be the second speaker removed in less than a year. In October, a small group of Republicans joined Democrats in ousting McCarthy, making him the first House speaker to ever endure that humiliation.McCarthy’s departure set off weeks of chaos in the House, as Republicans repeatedly failed in their efforts to choose a new speaker. The House remained at a complete standstill for three weeks, unable to conduct any official business, until Johnson (the conference’s fourth speaker nominee) won election.Johnson has often referenced that embarrassing episode in recent weeks, as he has attempted to dissuade Republicans from joining Greene’s campaign.“We saw what happened with the motion to vacate the last time,” Johnson said on Tuesday. “Congress was closed for three weeks. No one can afford for that to happen.” More

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      Democrats rally to Biden’s defense over response to pro-Palestinian student protests

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      Some Democrats rallied to the defense of Joe Biden on Sunday as the president came under increased criticism over his response to pro-Palestinian student protests and his handling of Israel’s war on Gaza.Republicans have seized on Biden’s response to the protests, which have seen more than2,000 people arrested around the country, accusing him of a weak response. But prominent Democrats, including Biden re-election campaign co-chairperson Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, claimed the president “has been very strong about this from the beginning”.Their support came as campus protests have seen an increasingly aggressive police response. An encampment at the University of Southern California was cleared by police in riot gear on Sunday morning, and a similar effort at the University of California, Los Angeles was shut down by police who reportedly used rubber bullets on Thursday. Scores of protesters were arrested at Columbia University on Tuesday night – a move which New York City’s mayor defended in an interview on Sunday.Asked on CNN’s State of the Union if Biden could have reacted differently to the protests, which have seen clashes between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protesters as well as dueling accusations of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Landrieu said: “The president’s been very clear about this. He’s also been very strong about the need to stamp out antisemitism and Islamophobia. It’s a very difficult time, [there are] very passionate opinions on both sides of this issue.“The president has been handling it I think very, very well and I think he will continue to do so.”Thousands of young people have protested at university campuses across the country in recent weeks, criticizing the Biden administration’s continued support of Israel. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and 2 million displaced, since Israel attacked the enclosed strip in response to Hamas terrorist attacks which killed more than 1,100 Israelis.Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mark Kelly, the Arizona senator, added his voice to Democrats who have voiced approval for police crackdowns on campus sit-ins, saying it is “appropriate for police to step in” when protests turn into “unlawful acts”.“When they cross a line and when they commit crimes, they should be arrested,” Kelly said.“That’s the appropriate thing to do.”Kelly said some of the university protests had “become very violent, and students – especially Jewish students – have the right to feel safe on a campus, and they’ve gotten out of control”.“Everybody has the right to protest peacefully. But when it turns into unlawful acts – and we’ve seen this in a number of colleges and universities including here in Arizona – it’s appropriate for the police to step in,” he said.Biden had mostly stayed silent on the unrest at university campuses until he addressed the issue on Thursday.“Dissent is essential for democracy,” Biden said in an address at the White House. “But dissent must never lead to disorder.”Biden said some protesters had used “violent” methods.“Violent protests are not protected. Peaceful protest is,” he said. “There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.”The president added: “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campus, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduation … none of this is a peaceful protest.”On Sunday, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, defended how the police have handled protests in the city. About 280 people were arrested at Columbia University and the City University of New York last week.“When those protests reach the point of violence, we have to ensure that we use a minimum amount of force to terminate what is perceived to be a threat,” Adams told ABC News This Week.John Fetterman, the Democratic Pennsylvania US senator who is a vocal supporter of Israel, said the protests were “working against peace in the Middle East” and reiterated his backing for the US sending aid to the country.“I will never support any kind of conditions on Israel during this. And again, I would, I am going to continue to center – Hamas is responsible for all of that again, then,” Fetterman said.“And now if you’re going to protest on these campuses, or now what, they’re going all across America as well, too. I really want to, can’t forget, that the situation right now could end right now, if Hamas just surrendered.”Hours after calling in state troopers to break up a quiet, rain-soaked encampment of anti-war protesters, the University of Virginia president, Jim Ryan, issued a public statement calling the episode “upsetting, frightening and sad”.Ryan had been noticeably absent from the episode itself. His public statement Saturday evening, his first on the matter, came well after the encampment had been raided and the 25 demonstrators who had pitched tents on the patch of grass by the university’s chapel were arrested.Ryan called it unfortunate that a small group had chosen to break university rules after receiving repeated warnings.“I sincerely wish it were otherwise, but this repeated and intentional refusal to comply with reasonable rules intended to secure the safety, operations, and rights of the entire university community left us with no other choice than to uphold the neutral application and enforcement of those rules,” he wrote.Nonetheless, the arrests were criticized by Jamaal Bowman, the New York progressive Democratic congressman who has been critical of Israel.“I am outraged by the level of police presence called upon nonviolent student protestors on Columbia and CCNY’s campuses. As an educator who has first hand experience with the over-policing of our schools, this is personal to me,” Bowman wrote on X.“The militarization of college campuses, extensive police presence, and arrest of hundreds of students are in direct opposition to the role of education as a cornerstone of our democracy.” More

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      Kristi Noem defends killing dog: ‘I’m tired of politicians pretending to be what they’re not’

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      The South Dakota governor and Republican vice-presidential hopeful Kristi Noem asked the American public to consider having to “make a choice between your children or a dangerous animal”, as she again defended her killing of a 14-month-old dog.“I would ask everybody in the country to put themselves in that situation,” Noem told CBS’s Face the Nation about her decision to shoot the dog, named Cricket, after the animal ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbor’s chickens.“Because that’s what I faced, and I talked about it because what I’m tired of in this country is politicians who pretend to be something that they’re not.”Asked why she did not surrender Cricket to an animal shelter before killing the dog, about 20 years ago, Noem repeated her prior claims that the creature was simply untrainable, had tried to bite her, and might have bitten others.“I had put months and months of training into this dog – the dog had gone to other trainers as well,” Noem said. “When you put someone in a position where … they want to protect their family and protect children and other people from getting attacked, … that’s the choice I made.“And … I didn’t ask anybody to take that responsibility for me.”Noem’s latest justification for fatally shooting Cricket at her farm – an act chronicled in her upcoming memoir No Going Back and first reported by the Guardian – comes as fellow Republicans have all but written off her chances of being chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate in November’s presidential election.A Guardian review of South Dakota state law found Noem may have committed misdemeanors by failing to control Cricket and by killing the animal on her own property. A spokesperson has not responded to inquiries on that point, which many advocates against animal cruelty have also raised.Remarkably, Cricket was only one of two animals Noem says she shot on the same day. On Sunday, the CBS host Margaret Brennan asked Noem to address her admission that, after Cricket, she also shot dead an un-castrated goat, which “smelled” and chased children around Noem’s farm. In No Going Back, the chapter that recounts the episode is entitled “Bad Day to be a Goat”.Brennan noted that Noem’s book also contains the phrase, “Commander, say hello to Cricket” – a reference to Joe Biden’s dog, who was removed from the White House after biting or otherwise assailing Secret Service agents.“How do you justify that?” Brennan said to Noem of her decision to kill the goat. “How was the goat a threat? And I’m asking you this because it seems like you’re celebrating the killing of the animals?”Noem replied that political opponents know the story of the goat’s killing well and have tried to leverage it against her, so she simply wanted “the truth to be out there”.“These animals were attacking,” Noem said. “We live on a farm and a ranch and … tough decisions are made many times, and it is – it is to protect people.”Noem obliquely acknowledged that – ahead of her book’s release Tuesday – she had to retract an anecdote about meeting the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un because the encounter never happened.In her book, Noem claims she was “underestimated” by Kim, but trumpets her experience of “staring down little tyrants”, from her work as a religious pastor ministering to children.The Dakota Scout newspaper reported how Noem’s account of meeting Kim was unlikely, and her spokesperson subsequently told journalists a correction was forthcoming. On Sunday, Noem said “this anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book, and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When the book is released, we’ll do all that we can to see that – that that is reflected,” Noem said.Pressed on the retraction, Noem suggested that she could no longer hear the host.“Hello? I’m sorry, I … ” the former congresswoman said, as Brennan asked why she had not caught the error as she recorded the audio book of the memoir.Yet Noem answered seamlessly when Brennan finished the question, saying: “As soon as it was brought to my attention, I took action to make sure that it was reflected.”Noem insisted: “I’ve met with many, many world leaders – I’ve traveled around the world.”But she also said she was no longer interested in delving into details about such audiences.“I’m not going to talk to you about those personal meetings,” Noem said. “OK? I’m just not going to have that conversation.”Sunday’s interview occurred after Trump called some of those on his VP shortlist to the stage at a private donor retreat in Florida over the weekend, NBC reported. Noem left early and was not included.Edward Helmore contributed reporting More

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      Minority Rule review: rich history of America’s undemocratic democracy

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      Ari Berman’s new book is a rich history of America’s ambivalent attitude toward majority rule. The founding document declared “all men are created equal”, but by the time a constitution was drafted 11 years later, there was already a severe backlash to that revolutionary assertion.To prevent the union from disintegrating, free states and big states repeatedly gave in to slave states and small states, producing a constitution that would be adopted by the majority.The first and worst decision was to give each state two senators regardless of population. Virginia had 12 times the population of Delaware. Today, the situation is vastly worse: California is 63 times bigger than Wyoming. By 2040, Berman writes, “roughly 70% of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30%, who are whiter, older and more rural … will elect 70 senators”.The filibuster, a delaying tactic that led to most legislation requiring 60 votes to pass the Senate – but which has no basis in the constitution – makes the country even more undemocratic. Forty Republican senators representing just 21% of the population have blocked bills on abortion rights, voting rights and gun control supported by big majorities.The House of Representatives was supposed to be closer to the people than the Senate, which wasn’t even elected by voters when first created. But when the free states placated the slave states by allowing them to count every enslaved Black person as three-fifths of a human being, for the purposes of representation, that increased how many representatives slave states sent to the House.To Berman, it was “a fundamental contradiction that the nation’s most important democratic document was intended to make the country less democratic”. As the New Yorker Melancton Smith noted at the time, the constitution represented a “transfer of power from the many to the few”.The national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, Berman also offers a horrific description of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by modern-day oligarchs to make America even more undemocratic. In just six years, the Federalist Society raised an astonishing $580m “through a shadowy network of a dozen dark money nonprofit groups” to put its “preferred judges on the bench”. The society has gotten a huge bang for its buck – more than 500 judges appointed by both Bushes and 226 appointed by Donald Trump were endorsed by the Federalists.The worst results of this hammerlock on judicial appointments are at the very top of the pyramid: “For the first time in US history, five of six conservative justices on the supreme court have been appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans.”And what is the “signature project” of these justices? The dismantling of the civil rights laws that are the greatest legacy of the 1960s.Federalist Society judges worked in lockstep with the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, whose priority has been to put an end to all effective limits on who can spend how much in every election.“I never would have been able to win my race if there had been a limit on the amount of money I could raise and spend,” McConnell wrote of his first race, in 1984. Eighteen years later, the Republican John McCain and Democrat Russ Feingold managed to ban unlimited donations. Their law survived McConnell’s first lawsuit to undo it, on a 5-4 supreme court vote. But four years later, after the extremist Samuel Alito replaced the moderate Sandra Day O’Connor, the court gutted the law, allowing unlimited corporate expenditure as long as ads “didn’t explicitly” endorse a candidate.“Thus began a trend,” Berman explains. “GOP-appointed judges reliably supported Republican efforts to tilt the rules and institutions of democracy in their favor … which in turn helped Republicans win more elections and appoint more judges, with one undemocratic feature of the system augmenting the other.”As the country’s founders adopted a constitution that disenfranchised all Black people and all women, modern conservatives do all they can to keep the voting rolls as unrepresentative as possible, particularly as people of color become the majority in the US. Racism remains the strongest fuel for efforts to make it as hard as possible for Black and younger voters to exercise their franchise.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe worst recent example of this was the failure of a narrowly Democratic Senate to adopt a voting rights act in 2021. It failed when Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, both Democrats then, refused to alter the filibuster rule. Manchin supported the bill, then reversed with a specious explanation: while the right to vote was “fundamental to American democracy … protecting that right … should never be done in a partisan manner”Berman’s book ends on a more hopeful note, with descriptions of Democratic victories in Michigan and Wisconsin.In Michigan, a 29-year-old activist, Katie Fahey, figured out she could end the gerrymandering which had let the Republicans dominate her state by putting a ballot initiative before the voters. She needed 315,000 signatures. In one of the few good news stories about social media, she was able to use Facebook to gather 410,000 signatures in 110 days without any paid staff. In 2018, the reform won with an amazing 61% of the vote. Another initiative that dramatically expanded voter access through automatic and election-day access passed by 66%.The end of gerrymandering enabled Democrats to flip both houses in Michigan in 2022, “giving them control of state politics for the first time in 40 years”. And in Wisconsin, the election of an additional liberal justice to the state supreme court finally ended Republicans’ domination of the state government.The hopeful message is clear: despite massive Republican efforts to suppress liberal votes, it is still possible for a well-organized grassroots campaign to overcome the millions of dollars spent every year to prevent the triumph of true democracy.
      Minority Rule is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

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      I remember the 1960s crackdowns against war protesters. This is a repeat | Robert Reich

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      I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests.I’ve met with students at Berkeley, where I teach. I’ve visited with faculty at Columbia University. I’ve spoken by phone with young people and professors at many other universities.My conclusion: while protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people – most of them women and children – in Gaza.To interpret these protests as anything else – as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian – is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been disproportionate.Some protesters focus their anger on Israel, some on the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, some on Joe Biden for failing to stand up to Netanyahu, for giving Israel additional armaments, and for what they perceive as Biden’s patronizing response to the protests.Like any protest movement, the actions have attracted a few on the fringe. I’ve heard scattered reports of antisemitism, although I haven’t witnessed or heard anything that might be interpreted as antisemitic. In fact, a significant number of the protesters are Jewish.To describe the protesters as “pro-Palestinian” is also inaccurate. Most do not support Palestine as such; they do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment.But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.Many tell me they are planning not to vote this coming November – a clear danger to Biden’s re-election campaign, which in turn increases the odds of a Trump presidency.When I tell them that a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump, they say they cannot in good conscience vote for either candidate.Quite a number tell me that “the lesser of two evils is still evil”. I tell them Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil. Many remain unconvinced.I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, in which I participated some 55 years ago.I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order”. The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching”, network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, the nation voted in Richard Nixon as president.History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Will the US campus protests harm Biden – and benefit Trump?

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      At the height of the tensions on US campuses this week, with Republicans gleefully seizing on student unrest as an election issue that could propel Donald Trump back into the White House, Joe Biden tried to steer a middle path.Weighing the democratic right to peaceful protest and the political necessity to stem disruption, Biden declared that “order must prevail”.“Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear – none of this is a peaceful protest,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday. “Dissent is essential for democracy … There’s the right to protest. But not the right to cause chaos.”His comments were his most notable intervention yet in the face of campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. The protests are a potential minefield for Biden.As his lead over Trump among younger voters continues to slip significantly from its 2020 levels and as he tries to fend off Republican attacks, he risks alienating young voters by siding with police.On the other hand, as riot police have moved against pro-Palestinian encampments and arrested thousands of people, senior Republican figures and Trump himself have been pushing hard to depict the US president as losing control and allowing America’s universities to slide into upheaval.Fox News has lavished round-the-clock coverage to what it has portrayed as a perfect storm of “Democrat chaos”, with riot police moving into occupied buildings on Columbia campus and open brawling at UCLA after a pro-Israel group attacked an encampment with sticks and fireworks.The events have diverted attention from the Trump trial in New York, where he is facing charges over a hush-money payment to an adult film star. That has confounded hopes among Democrat strategists that details from the trial would deal a blow to the Republican campaign.The focus of Fox and other conservative media on the pro-Palestinian protests marks a shift from other areas of supposed disorder allegedly caused by Biden administration incompetence – particularly the US-Mexico border, where there has been a continuous inflow of asylum seekers.Trump – posing, somewhat incongruously given his current legal predicament, as the law-and-order candidate – led the chorus on his Truth Social media platform. He called for a “COMPLETE LOCKDOWN” of Columbia and other universities similar to what he claimed had been imposed on the area outside the Manhattan court where he is on trial, supposedly to stop his supporters gathering.His pronouncement came after he had minimised a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia – where a counter-protester was killed and after which he was condemned for saying there had been “fine people on both sides” – as a “peanut” compared with the current protests.View image in fullscreenTrump is attempting to capitalise on a febrile campus atmosphere in which Jewish and pro-Israel students have complained of antisemitism and being subjected to threats.So far, analysts say, there is scant evidence of the images of campus upheaval having a radical effect on voter attitudes – although some caution that this may change if protests continue into the autumn.Biden is conscious of parallels with previous instances of student protests sweeping through American campuses, and producing arguably decisive effects in presidential politics.In 1968, mass demonstrations against the Vietnam war spilled over into the Democratic national convention in Chicago – coincidentally, the city that will stage this year’s event, where Biden will be formally adopted as his party’s candidate – resulting in violent street clashes with police and punch-ups on the convention floor.The anarchic scenes were followed by the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, then the vice-president, to the Republican Richard Nixon.With polls showing the president running neck-and-neck with Trump, but behind in most battleground states, the Biden campaign could be forgiven for fearing that the current tumult might be instrumental in engineering a repetition.Analysts, however, point out that the Gaza war does not resonate with the American public in the same way as the war in Vietnam, where more than half a million US troops were deployed by 1968.“The raw numbers [of protesters] would have been a lot bigger in 1968,” said Kyle Kondik of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia.“The current protests are certainly large, but it does seem like Vietnam was fundamentally a lot different [from Gaza]. You had young people being drafted to fight overseas, America was engaged heavily in fighting a land war overseas.“The US has indirect involvement in Gaza in terms of funding. But it’s different and less impactful overall. I don’t think the race has changed in any kind of a significant way.”Other observers say that even for voters under 34, a cohort among which polls have shown Biden’s lead over Trump to be slipping significantly, Gaza plays a much smaller role than the passions emanating from college campuses would indicate.Amy Walter, of the Cook Political Report, told the Wall Street Journal’s free expression podcast: “What we see from the data is that for voters under 34, the top issues are the same as the top issues for folks over the age of 34, which the economy and the cost of living – they are concerned about issue of gun violence.”In a possible indicator that Gaza’s electoral impact even younger voters may be limited, an NBC focus group of college students opposed to US support for Israel’s military offensive revealed that few planned to vote based on the issue – although some said they would opt for third-party candidates such as Jill Stein of the Green party or Robert F Kennedy Jr.Yet for Biden, even that could have disproportionately negative effects. Walter said: “If you take just a small percentage of younger people who feel very strongly about this issue and say, ‘I cannot vote for Trump, but Biden is no good, I’m staying home’ … for Biden that might be a lot.“He has a coalition that’s dependent on voters who dislike Trump coming back to him.”What electoral bearing the protests have could be decided by the effectiveness of the very crackdowns Republicans have been calling for – especially when combined with the imminent end of the academic year, which will see most students leaving campus.JD Vance, the Republican senator and outspoken Trump ally, may have inadvertently highlighted a Republican dilemma when he posted on X: “No civilization should tolerate these encampments. Get rid of them.”With more than 2,000 protesters having been arrested, that process may already have begun, apparently with Biden’s blessing.If the college clampdowns successfully quell the protests, it would deprive Republicans of the images of chaos they crave – unless the war in Gaza continues to rage, fuelling future protests.Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait said it was in Trump’s interests for the protests to carry on – a development he connected to a continuation of the war in Gaza into the autumn, thus triggering a fresh round of unrest at the height of the election campaign.“In a recent social-media post, Trump demanded, ‘STOP THE PROTESTS NOW!!!’” Chait wrote. “If they are still going on during a prospective second Trump term, he will probably stop them with maximal violence. In the meantime, he fervently wishes them to continue through November.” More

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      South Dakota governor Kristi Noem continues to be plagued by book controversies

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      As she entered a second consecutive weekend trying to manage fallout from revelations in her upcoming memoir that she shot her dog to death, South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, had conceded that she would need to correct multiple factual inaccuracies in other parts of the book.Meanwhile, a Republican fundraiser which Noem was supposed to headline had to be canceled after threats against the event staff, hotel venue and governor, according to organizers.And in one of the clearest signs yet that she has fallen out of contention to be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in November’s election, as she once was, Rolling Stone published a report quoting multiple sources close to the former president who assured he was “disgusted” by her dog-killing story.Noem has faced increasingly acrimonious backlash after the Guardian in late April reported on an excerpt from her new book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward, in which she recounts fatally shooting both a 14-month-old dog, Cricket, along with an unnamed goat.She has defended her self-described actions as being typical of the unpleasant things people who live on farms and answer the call to politics must do.But her polling numbers have plummeted as her justifications for the animal killings have not landed with the public. And since then, Noem’s memoir has only drawn more scrutiny.Experts widely doubted the veracity of an anecdote which Noem included in the book about meeting the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and feeling underestimated by him. Her camp subsequently conceded she never met the North Korean leader.Additionally, a spokesperson for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley denied the book’s characterization of a conversation between Haley and Noem, who claimed Haley threatened her after she challenged Haley’s status as a leading woman in the Republican party.The book claims the conversation occurred when Noem first took office in 2019, but it was a year later.Whatever the case, Noem’s chief of communications, Ian Fury, told The New York Times that both errors would be corrected.“It was brought to our attention that the upcoming book No Going Back has two small errors,” Fury said to the Times. “This has been communicated to the ghostwriter and editor. Kim Jong-un was included in a list of world leaders and shouldn’t have been.”Separately on Friday, the chairperson of Colorado’s Jefferson county Republican party said the organization canceled its annual fundraiser because Noem’s planned headlining appearance had spurred multiple threats.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNoem was still set to headline Florida’s Brevard county Republican party fundraiser on 25 May. The county party’s chairperson defended Noem’s decision to kill Cricket, and the purchase of a ticket includes a copy of No Going Back.Rounding out the South Dakota governor’s Friday was the Rolling Stone report based on sources of the publication who recounted how Trump has expressed disgust with Noem’s killing of Cricket in closed-door meetings and telephone conversations.“Why would she do that?” Trump – who is grappling with nearly 90 felony criminal charges, among other legal problems – was quoted as saying. “What is wrong with her?”Rolling Stone added: “He has expressed bewilderment that she would have ever admitted to doing this, willingly and in her own writing, and has argued it demonstrates she has a poor grasp of ‘public relations’.”The publication also wrote that Trump’s responses were leaked to definitively eliminate Noem from vice-presidential contention.Noem is scheduled to appear on Sunday morning on CBS’s Face the Nation and is expected to be asked about the ongoing fallout from her new book. More