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      US Democratic senator Joe Manchin will not seek re-election in 2024

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      West Virginia’s controversial Democratic US senator Joe Manchin has announced that he will not seek re-election in 2024 and will instead “fight to unite the middle”.The 76-year-old senator, who for years has held an outsized degree of power within the Democratic party and often defied its leadership, appeared in July at an event held by a political group exploring a third-party presidential bid.Manchin’s appearance with the centrist No Labels group fueled speculation that he was considering a run for the presidency, a scenario that alarmed Democrats as it could weaken Joe Biden’s candidacy for another term in the White House.On Thursday afternoon, Manchin put out a statement saying: “After months of deliberation and long conversations with my family, I believe in my heart of hearts that I have accomplished what I set out to do for West Virginia. I have made one of the toughest decisions of my life and decided that I will not be running for re-election to the United States Senate.”He added: “But what I will be doing is traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is an interest in creating a movement to mobilize the middle and bring Americans together.”No Labels sees Manchin as a potential candidate for its centrist platform. Although No Labels, which has been around since 2010, mostly behind the scenes, has stated it will not field a candidate if their platform does not gain traction or if it appears it would swing the vote in favor of one party, the group has been actively fundraising and is seeking to get on ballots across the country.Maryanne Martini, a spokesperson for No Labels, released a statement praising Manchin as “a longtime ally” but declining to comment on his potential to run for president.“Regarding our No Labels unity presidential ticket, we are gathering input from our members across the country to understand the kind of leaders they would like to see in the White House,” she said. “As we have said from the beginning, we will make a decision by early 2024 about whether we will nominate a unity presidential ticket and who will be on it.”Opinion polls show dissatisfaction with the current leading White House candidates, both the incumbent Biden and the Republican frontrunner Trump.Manchin’s decision to step down will also jeopardise Democrats’ narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate. Republicans hold the governor’s office and the rest of the congressional delegation in a state that Trump won by a wide margin over Biden in 2020. Manchin won his last election with just 49.6% of the vote, 0.3 percentage points ahead of his Republican rival, in 2018.The US senator Steve Daines, the head of Republican senators’ campaign arm, said in a brief statement: “We like our odds in West Virginia.”The state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, has already launched a campaign for his party’s nomination for Senate. Justice was a Democrat when he was first elected governor in 2016, but a year into office he switched parties and went on to cruise to re-election, winning 65% of the vote in 2020. Trump has endorsed Justice.Justice said on Thursday: “Senator Joe Manchin and I have not always agreed on policy and politics, but we’re both lifelong West Virginians who love this state beyond belief, and I respect and thank him for his many years of public service.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionManchin’s departure will raise the stakes for Democrats in several other Senate races including in Republican-leaning Montana and Ohio and highly competitive Pennsylvania and Arizona.Manchin, who took office in 2010, has been a key vote on every major piece of legislation of Biden’s tenure as a moderate representing an increasingly conservative state. His support was critical to the passage of Biden’s sweeping $1tn infrastructure law, one of the president’s key domestic accomplishments.Together with the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who switched her registration to independent from Democrat in December, Manchin has secured major concessions and the scaling back of his party’s legislative goals, winning him applause from conservatives and condemnations from many fellow Democrats.The pair stood together in protecting the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires that 60 of the chamber’s 100 members agree on most legislation, in the face of intense opposition from their own party.Manchin’s defence of the filibuster helped block Democrats’ hopes of passing bills to protect abortion rights after the supreme court last year overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that had established the right nationwide.Republican senators praised Manchin’s commitment to bipartisanship.The Utah senator Mitt Romney, who is also not seeking re-election, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter: “I will miss this American patriot in the Senate. But our friendship and our commitment to American values will not end.” More

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      The Republican presidential debate was a televised temper tantrum | Moira Donegan

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      Because I did something terrible in a past life and have to be punished for it in this one, on Wednesday night I watched the Republican presidential debate. It was the third in a series of televised temper tantrums by a dwindling field of eligible candidates, all pretending that there is a meaningful contest for the Republican presidential nomination and that any of them have the slightest chance of winning it.In the past, these events have ranged from the chaotic to the deranged, as characters like Tim Scott put a smiling, chipper, aw-shucks sheen on a lurid vision of enforced male supremacy, Ron DeSantis publicly indulges wild fantasies about sending American soldiers to conduct summary executions of Mexican drug cartel leaders on the soil of a sovereign foreign nation, and Chris Christie puts on a poor imitation of someone who believes in his own relevance.And like the past debates, there was plenty of rancor and personal barbs on Wednesday night, plenty of morbid daydreaming about future regimes of social control, and plenty of fact-free declarations about the supposed causes of America’s plights. There was yelling, and there were insults. Somehow, the whole thing still managed to be incredibly tedious.Donald Trump, the man who will be the Republican nominee unless he dies before next November, was not on stage. The candidates did their usual dance of trying not to attack Trump or alienate his base – which meant, in effect, that none of them could make much of a case for themselves. Nikki Haley, once a member of Trump’s cabinet, somewhat weakly suggested that Trump was not the right candidate “for now”. Even Chris Christie, whose candidacy is largely seen as a kamikaze mission meant to hurt Trump rather than a serious bid for office, could barely manage to point out that the frontrunner’s legal problems – he faces 91 felony charges – would probably distract him from the duties of office.For all of the five contenders on stage – Haley, Christie, DeSantis, Scott and Vivek Ramaswamy – their very candidacy suggests a discomfort with Trump: if they really thought he was the best guy for the job, they wouldn’t be running. But a taboo on criticizing Trump remains the one constant that unites the fractious, dysfunctional and internally chaotic Republican party, the one thing that all of them know it would end their political careers to do. They couldn’t go after Trump. So they went after each other.It would be wrong to say that the candidates’ attacks on one another were exactly ideologically driven. As they gave rambling, euphemism-laden, largely dishonest answers to a series of policy questions, it was hard to discern anything like a coherent policy orientation from any of them – save for Haley, who as in every debate emphasized her foreign policy credentials and seemed interested in reviving some early-century neoconservative positions about the efficacy and usefulness of American foreign intervention.Others wandered and waffled in their policy prescriptions: when they were asked a question that confused or frustrated them, as happened frequently, both the Florida governor DeSantis and South Carolina senator Tim Scott would pivot to bizarre non-sequiturs about closing the southern border. Ramaswamy pushed an isolationist, “America-first” approach, but nevertheless echoed calls by DeSantis to use the military to discipline southern border immigration. (Ramaswamy, it should be noted, did distinguish himself by also cautioning about crime and immigration at the Canadian border. “Build both walls,” he said.)Tim Scott, a Christian conservative pitching his candidacy as a return to traditional social hierarchies, “faith-based morals” and compassion, called for a military strike on Iran. They decried protests in support of Palestinian human rights as “pro-Hamas” and vowed to deport foreign students who participated, and to cut off the funding for any college or university that did not sufficiently suppress pro-Palestinian speech. They seemed united in encouraging Israel to take a genocidal, eliminationist approach to Palestinians in Gaza, with DeSantis telling Benjamin Netanyahu to “finish the job”, Haley instructing him to “finish them”, and Ramaswamy offering a disturbing fantasy about severed Palestinian heads being displayed on spikes. The candidates also largely agreed, as it happened, that they would cut Medicare and social security benefits. They set about arguing with each other about how much.The biggest rivalry of the night was between a pair who are emerging as recurring antagonists in these debates: Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. The pair have opposing visions of foreign policy, with Haley calling for greater engagement and intervention abroad and Ramaswamy serving as a conduit for the Republican party’s post-2016 return to nativist isolationism. But they also represent two distinct career paths for Republican politicians. Haley’s rabid, sadistic conservatism is the result of an old-fashioned kind of political vetting – a long career of political ascent, coupled with an affect of credentialed competence. Ramaswamy, by contrast, is a public buffoon, someone with no political experience who has gained his spot on the debate stage with provocative, hateful, algorithmically boosted social media content of outlandish public quackery.Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the two had their most pointed clash over TikTok. The pair had been fighting all night: Ramaswamy made a misogynist remark calling Haley “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels”. Haley shot back that her shoes were five-inch heels, and quipped, somewhat nonsensically, that she wore them “for ammunition”. But they fought most bitterly when moderators asked the candidates if they would ban TikTok, the social media app that has become a bete noire on the right. Ramaswamy jumped in to point out that Haley had criticized him for campaigning on TikTok, even though her adult daughter also used the app – he suggested that Haley was not exercising adequate control over her family. Haley told him to leave her daughter out of it, and called him scum.It was a mistake, and it was also, perhaps, one of the more relatable moments for Nikki Haley, a politician so stuffy and rehearsed that one wonders if she has ever had a thought that does not occur to her in a pollster’s voice. Ramaswamy is scum: he’s self-interested and cynical, indifferent to truth, with a black hole of ambition in the place where other people might have a soul. She was right to be angry. But public expressions of anger rarely serve women.But what might have been most conspicuous about the debate was what was largely absent from it: for more than an hour and a half, the moderators did not ask about abortion, even though the issue has dominated American electoral politics up and down the ballot for nearly a year and a half. Anger over the overturning of Roe v Wade has become an abiding motivator for voters, with the issue persisting in relevance long after most pundits thought it would fade from national attention, and it is driving unlikely wins for Democratic candidates and their priorities. Abortion had delivered electoral wins for Democrats just on Tuesday, when the issue drove voters to the polls nationwide. Abortion proved to be a decisive issue not only in Ohio, where an abortion rights amendment to the state constitution was ratified by a wide margin, but also played a pivotal role in races in Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.When the moderators finally asked about “the way forward” on abortion, in their last question of the night, the candidates mostly hemmed and hawed. Some backtracked or hedged their anti-choice stances; others doubled down. They could not deliver a real answer for the same reasons they could not attack Donald Trump: neither stating their real positions against abortion or admitting that the issue has become a political albatross for the Republican party would be viable paths for their continued careers. They’re not ready to make a real argument on the issue to the American people. Luckily for them, I suppose, none of them will have to.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Hillary Clinton likens Trump to Hitler and warns he would end democracy

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      Hillary Clinton has compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler as she offered a blunt warning about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.Trump back in the White House, Clinton said during an appearance on ABC’s daytime talkshow The View on Wednesday, “would be the end of our country as we know it, and I don’t say that lightly”.The former first lady, senator and secretary of state said: “When I was secretary of state, I used to talk about ‘one and done’. What I meant by that is that people would get legitimately elected and then they would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press.”Then Clinton added: “Hitler was duly elected. All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail.’ And they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do.”Clinton’s comments came days after a Washington Post report detailing how Trump is discussing how to use the justice department to investigate political rivals and former allies who have been critical of him should he return to the White House. He is also discussing invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to use the US military domestically to quell protests and dissent, something he was talked out of by military leaders during his one-term presidency.Trump’s team is also preparing to staff a potential administration with more radical rightwing lawyers who are less likely to stymie efforts to get in his way as he pushes the bounds of presidential power, the New York Times reported.A New York Times/Siena poll released on Sunday shows Trump leading Joe Biden in several key battleground states. Trump faces criminal charges in four different cases, set to go to trial next year. Winning the presidency is widely understood to be Trump’s best chance of escaping liability. And the poll shows that many voters who were asked would switch back to Biden if Trump is convicted.But Clinton gave a clear warning.“Trump is telling us what he intends to do,” Clinton said on The View. “Take him at his word.” More

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      The public doesn’t understand the risks of a Trump victory. That’s the media’s fault | Margaret Sullivan

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      Whatever doubts you may have about public-opinion polls, one recent example should not be dismissed.Yes, that poll – the one from Siena College and the New York Times that sent chills down many a spine. It showed Donald Trump winning the presidential election by significant margins over Joe Biden in several swing states, the places most likely to decide the presidential election next year.The poll, of course, is only one snapshot and it has been criticized, but it still tells a cautionary tale – especially when paired with the certainty that Trump, if elected, will quickly move toward making the United States an authoritarian regime.Add in Biden’s low approval ratings, despite his accomplishments, and you come to an unavoidable conclusion: the news media needs to do its job better.The press must get across to American citizens the crucial importance of this election and the dangers of a Trump win. They don’t need to surrender their journalistic independence to do so or be “in the tank” for Biden or anyone else.It’s now clearer than ever that Trump, if elected, will use the federal government to go after his political rivals and critics, even deploying the military toward that end. His allies are hatching plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on day one.The US then “would resemble a banana republic”, a University of Virginia law professor told the Washington Post when it revealed these schemes. Almost as troubling, two New York Times stories outlined Trump’s autocratic plans to put loyal lawyers in key posts and limit the independence of federal agencies.The press generally is not doing an adequate job of communicating those realities.Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s “freewheeling” style. They blame the public’s attitudes on “polarization”, as if they themselves have no role. And, of course, they make the election about the horse race – rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line.Here’s what must be hammered home: Trump cannot be re-elected if you want the United States to be a place where elections decide outcomes, where voting rights matter, and where politicians don’t baselessly prosecute their adversaries.When Americans do understand how politics affects their lives, they vote accordingly. We have seen that play out with respect to abortion rights in Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and beyond. On that issue, voters clearly get that well-established rights have been ripped away, and they have reacted with force.“Women don’t want to die for Mike Johnson’s religious beliefs,” as Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast said on MSNBC, referring to the theocratic House speaker.Abortion rights is a visceral issue. It’s personal and immediate.Trump’s threats to democracy? That’s a harder story to tell. Harder than “Joe Biden is old”. Harder than: “Gosh, America is so polarized.”Journalists need to figure out a way to communicate it – clearly and memorably.It was great to see the digging that went into that Washington Post story about Trump and his allies plotting a post-election power grab. But it was all too telling to see this wording in its subhead: “Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.”So others think it’s fine, right? That suggests that both sides have a valid point of view on whether democracy matters.Deploying the military to crush protests is radical. So is putting your cronies and yes men in charge of justice. These moves would sound a death knell for American democracy. They are not just another illustration of Trump’s “brash” personality.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWe need a lot more stories like the ones the Post and the Times did – not just in these elite, paywalled outlets but on the nightly news, on cable TV, in local newspapers and on radio broadcasts. We need a lot less pussyfooting in the wording.Every news organization should be reporting on this with far more vigor – and repetition – than they do about Biden being 80 years old.It’s the media’s responsibility to grab American voters by the lapels, not just to nod to the topic politely from time to time.Polls can be wrong, and it’s foolish to overstate their importance, especially a year away from the election, but if more citizens truly understood the stakes, there would be no real contest between these candidates.The Guardian’s David Smith laid out the contrast: “Since Biden took office the US economy has added a record 14m jobs while his list of legislative accomplishments has earned comparisons with those of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson … Trump, meanwhile, is facing 91 criminal indictments in Atlanta, Miami, New York and Washington DC, some of which relate to an attempt to overthrow the US government.”So what can the press do differently? Here are a few suggestions.Report more – much more – about what Trump would do, post-election. Ask voters directly whether they are comfortable with those plans, and report on that. Display these stories prominently, and then do it again soon.Use direct language, not couched in scaredy-cat false equivalence, about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.Pin down Republicans about whether they support Trump’s lies and autocratic plans, as ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos did in grilling the House majority leader Steve Scalise about whether the 2020 election was stolen. He pushed relentlessly, finally saying: “I just want an answer to the question, yes or no?” When Scalise kept sidestepping, Stephanopoulos soon cut off the interview.Those ideas are just a start. Newsroom leaders should be getting their staffs together to brainstorm how to do it. Right now.With the election less than a year away, there’s no time to waste in getting the truth across. More

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      ‘You’re just scum’: Haley and Ramaswamy clash in fiery Republican debate – video

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      The Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and other foreign policy issues dominated Wednesday’s third debate of Republican presidential hopefuls in Miami. The debate – which was missing Donald Trump, the favorite for the party’s 2024 run who was hosting a private rally elsewhere in the area – was a more bitter affair than its predecessors in Wisconsin and California. Lively verbal sparring sometimes regressed into insults, with Nikki Haley calling Vivek Ramaswamy ‘scum’. The pair were, however, united in tearing into Trump, who they trail by a significant margin in the race More

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      Support for Israel and verbal sparring propel fiery third Republican debate

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      The Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and other foreign policy issues dominated Wednesday’s fiery third debate of Republican presidential hopefuls in Miami. Candidates pledged wholehearted support for Israel’s military response following last month’s Hamas attacks, and clashed over Ukraine, China and immigration.The debate, minus Donald Trump, the runaway favorite for the party’s 2024 nomination who was hosting his own private rally elsewhere in the area, was a more bitter affair than its predecessors in Wisconsin and California. Lively verbal sparring sometimes regressed into insults, with Nikki Haley at one point calling one of her rivals “scum”.The candidates also grappled over immigration, the devastatingly bad night for Republicans in Tuesday’s elections, and the party’s staunchly anti-abortion stance on abortion that analysts say was the reason.Discussion over Israel’s actions in Gaza were, however, most prominent.“I will be telling Bibi [Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu] to finish the job once and for all with these butchers Hamas. They’re terrorists. They’re massacring innocent people. They would wipe every Jew off the globe if they could,” Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, said.Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, was equally forthright. “The first thing I said to him when it happened was, ‘finish them’. They have to eliminate Hamas, [we have to] support Israel with whatever they need whenever they need it, and three, make sure we bring our hostages home.”DeSantis took credit for chartering flights to rescue stranded Americans in Israel, but overreached by claiming “there could have been more hostages, if we hadn’t acted”. The DeSantis flights, which some have criticized as a de facto foreign policy, took place after Hamas took about 240 hostages on 7 October.Haley and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been criticized for controversial racial comments, took potshots at each other. Haley’s policies, Ramaswamy said, fueled war, and in a reference to a former vice-president called her “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels”.“I wear five-inch heels, and don’t wear them unless you can run on them,” she shot straight back. “I wear heels not for a fashion statement – they’re for ammunition.”A further unpleasant exchange between the two came in a discussion about the Chinese social media platform TikTok. “In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first,” Ramaswamy sniped.“Leave my daughter out of your mouth,” Haley interjected. “You are just scum.”Haley performed well in the first two debates, and has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity. She had painted DeSantis as an isolationist at a time when, she said, the US needed to work with global partners, and their feud continued Wednesday with bickering over China, each accusing the other of operating policies favorable to one of America’s foes.But the pair were united in tearing strategically into the absent the former president, who they trail by a significant margin in the race for the nomination. Trump, DeSantis said, “owes it to you to be on this stage”.“He said Republicans were gonna get tired of winning. Well, we saw it last night: I’m sick of Republicans losing,” DeSantis said, referring to Tuesday’s Democratic electoral successes in Kentucky and Virginia.Haley said: “I think he was the right president at the right time. I don’t think he’s the right president now. I think that he put us a trillion dollars in debt and our kids are never gonna forgive us for that. I think the fact that he used to be right on Ukraine and foreign issues – now he’s getting weak in the knees and trying to be friendly again.”The South Carolina senator Tim Scott, who is trailing in the polls, was asked how he would assist Ukraine in its battle against Russia, but pivoted to criticizing the Biden administration’s border policies. He warned that “terrorist cells” were entering the country from Mexico.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen he said: “The American people are frustrated that they do not have a president who reminds us and tells us where’s the accountability. Where are those dollars? How are those dollars being spent? We need those answers for us to continue to see the support for Ukraine.”Joe Biden has asked Congress for $106bn for Ukraine and Israel aid.Scott said he wanted to see the southern US border closed to immigrants, Ramaswamy said he would build a wall there and at the northern border with Canada, while DeSantis repeated his previous promise to send troops to the border and shoot drug smugglers “stone-cold dead”.Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, spoke of a need to deter China from invading Taiwan as the debate moved to other foreign policy topics. “We need to go straight to our nuclear submarine program, and we need to increase it drastically,” he said.Christie weighed in on the TikTok debate, saying the platform was “not only spyware – it is polluting the minds of American young people all throughout this country, and they’re doing it intentionally”. As president, he said, he would ban it.Regarding abortion, which was behind many of the Republican losses on Tuesday, Haley expounded a softer position than other candidates that might yet resonate with voters. “As much as I’m pro-life, I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice, and I don’t want them to judge me for being pro-life,” she said.Trump, meanwhile, says he is so far ahead in the race for the nomination, more than 44 points, according to Real Clear Politics (RCP), as to make debate meaningless. In campaign messaging on Tuesday, he called it “a battle of losers”.While Trump’s own candidacy is mired in legal troubles that could yet derail him, his remaining rivals are not even close. Scott, Christie and Ramaswamy are all polling in the low single digits, leaving DeSantis and Haley, themselves only at 13% and 9%, per RCP, as the most viable alternatives.There will be one more Republican debate, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on 6 December, before the 2024 primaries begin with the Iowa caucuses on 15 January.The field, already down to five in Miami after the withdrawal of former vice-president Mike Pence and non-qualification of North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, could be further reduced by then. And after Wednesday’s debate concluded, a campaign adviser said Trump would also not be present in Alabama. More

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      Anti-abortion views, name-calling and foreign policy cap wide-ranging third Republican debate – as it happened

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      It just gets worse and worse between Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. When it came the entrepreneur’s turn to talk about his policy on TikTok, Ramaswamy referred to Haley and said, “In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first.”Haley shot back. “Leave my daughter out of your voice,” she said. And as Ramaswamy went on, she dismissed him, saying “you are just scum.”In Miami, NBC News hosted the most sober and restrained of the three Republican presidential debates thus far. Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie feuded and found common ground over a variety of topics, including border security, abortion access and social security reforms. But there was drama nonetheless, particularly between Haley and Ramaswamy, who the former UN ambassador at one point called “scum”. Donald Trump, who has an overwhelming lead among polls for the nomination, once again skipped the get-together, and reportedly will not attend the fourth debate set for next month in Alabama.Here’s a recap of some of the biggest moments:
      DeSantis again called for gunning down drug traffickers who cross into the US over the southern border with Mexico.
      Christie accused TikTok of “polluting the minds of American young people all throughout this country”, and said he would ban it on his first day in the White House.
      Scott warned of “terrorist sleeper cells” in America, while demanding more accountability for aid to Ukraine.
      Ramaswamy called for Joe Biden to drop his re-election campaign, and accused him of not really being the president.
      Haley said Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping would love to see Ramaswamy in the White House. She did not mean it as a compliment.
      The manager of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign Julie Chavez Rodriguez released a statement lumping the five Republicans who participated in tonight’s debate with Donald Trump, saying there is no daylight between their policies:
      Normally, after you lose, you take a moment to reflect and course correct. But in Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican Party, apparently you double down on the same extreme agenda that was soundly rejected last night in elections across the country. That’s what we witnessed tonight: the entire Republican field once again embracing Donald Trump’s losing and extreme MAGA agenda of banning abortion, cutting Social Security and Medicare, and rigging the economy for the ultra-wealthy at the expense of working Americans. In fact, the only thing that the American people agree with these MAGA Republicans on is that their extreme agenda has left them reeling as ‘a party of losers.’A year from now, Americans will face a clear choice — between President Biden, who is focused on the issues impacting you, and MAGA Republicans, whose policy platform is to make things worse for you by taking away your freedoms. We’ll spend the next year making sure every American knows just that.
      Noted Republican pollster Frank Luntz complimented Nikki Haley’s stance on abortion.The GOP has been suffering at the ballot box ever since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year. Just yesterday, voters in Ohio, a state that has voted Republican in the last two presidential elections, approved a constitutional amendment to protect abortion, while in Virginia, Democrats took control of the general assembly, preventing Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s plan to pass an abortion plan.Here’s a recap of Haley’s remarks. We’ll see if the policy does her any good in her race for the nomination, or if other Republicans follow suit:Donald Trump did not attend tonight’s debate of Republican presidential candidates, nor the two that came before it, and CBS News reports he will not participate in the fourth debate set for next month:That debate is set for 6 December in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.Tonight was the first debate without Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor and presidential aspirant who is basically nowhere in the polls.Shortly after it wrapped up, he posted some sour grapes on X, formerly known as Twitter:Abortion bans that Republicans pushed for have become a liability for the party. As the candidates search for new ways to discuss the topic, they have been softening their tones and regurgitating anti-abortion myths.Ron DeSantis said he stands “culture of life” but noted that different states may want different things. He did not emphasize the six-week abortion ban he signed into law. Nikki Haley, who once touted her stanchly pro-life views and suggested federal action taken to limit abortions tonight said it’s unlikely that a federal ban would have support in Congress.She also brought back misinformation about “late term abortion”, which doctors emphasize is not a medical term, and does not carry medical relevance.Tim Scott also said that California and New York allow abortion “until the day of birth” which is false. Those states ban almost all abortions after fetal viability, around 24 weeks into pregnancy. Seven states and the District of Columbia have no restrictions on abortion. Nonetheless, less than 1% of abortions in the US are performed past 21 weeks.Here’s more context, from the Guardian’s Carter Sherman.As the debate concluded, Vivek Ramaswamy leveled an attack on Joe Biden, arguing he isn’t really the president and demanding he end his re-election campaign.“I also want to close with one message to the Democrat Party: End this farce that Joe Biden is going to be your nominee. We know he’s not even the president of the United States – he’s a puppet for the managerial class,” Ramaswamy said.“So have the guts to step up and be honest about who you’re actually going to put up, so we can have an honest debate. Biden should step aside and end his candidacy now, so we can see whether it’s Newsom or Michelle Obama or whoever else.”Tonight’s debate is taking place in the wake of yesterday’s election, where Republican attempts to curb abortion were turned down by voters in Ohio and Virginia. Indeed, the GOP has been on a losing streak at the ballot box on the issue ever since Roe v Wade was struck down in June 2022, and in response to a question on her abortion policy, Nikki Haley called for something of a ceasefire.“What I’ll tell you is, as much as I’m pro-life, I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice, and I don’t want them to judge me for being pro-life. So when we’re looking at this, there are some states that are going more on the pro-life side, I welcome that. There are some states that are going more on the pro-choice side. I wish that wasn’t the case, but the people decided,” Haley said.She also noted the long odds any nationwide abortion restriction would face getting through Congress and signed by the president, and concluded by appealing for politicians to back off the issue:
      So let’s find consensus. Let’s agree on … how we can ban late-term abortions. Let’s make sure we encourage adoptions and good quality adoptions. Let’s make sure we make contraception accessible. Let’s make sure that none of these state laws put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty for getting an abortion. Let’s focus on how to save as many babies as we can, and support as many moms as we can and stop judgment. We don’t need to divide America over this issue anymore.
      Ron DeSantis said he wants to impose sanctions on Mexican cartels, a move that the Biden administration made yesterday.The Biden administration imposed sanctions on 13 members of the Sinaloa cartel, and four of the Sonora cartel, accusing them of trafficking fentanyl.The sanctions cut them off from the US banking system, and blocked their US assets.Like many Republicans, Vivek Ramaswamy said he wanted to build a wall on the southern border. But he didn’t stop there.Ramaswamy says he also wants to build a wall on the northern border with Canada, arguing it’s also a source of fentanyl trafficking. From his remarks:
      What we need to do is stop using our military to protect somebody else’s border halfway around the world, when we’re short right here at home.
      Get serious about protecting this border and then the other thing that hasn’t been discussed as the northern border, I’m the only candidate on this stage, as far as I’m aware, who has actually visited the northern border. There was enough fentanyl that was captured just on the northern border last year to kill 3 million Americans. So we got to just skate to where the puck is going, not just where the puck is. Don’t just build the wall, build both walls.
      Ron DeSantis once again proposed hardline, legally dubious methods to improve security on the US border with Mexico, including shooting drug smugglers “stone cold dead”.He had made a similar remark at a previous debate, and repeated it just now:
      I’ll build a wall, but we’re going to designate the cartels to be foreign terrorist organizations or something similar to that. And we’re going to authorize the use of deadly force. We’re going to have maritime operations to interdict precursor chemicals going into Mexico, but I’ll tell you this, if someone in the drug cartels is sneaking fentanyl across the border, when I’m president, that’s going to be the last thing they do. We’re going to shoot him stone cold dead.
      The debaters are debating again, and one thing’s for sure: the salvoes between Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley notwithstanding, this faceoff is a much more sober affair than the previous two.The candidates were asked how they would handle border security and fentanyl smuggled across the border. Tim Scott responded first, and called for deploying technology to secure the border.
      We should close our southern border. For $10 billion, we can close our southern border. For an additional $5 billion, we could use the currently available military technology to surveil our southern border to stop fentanyl from crossing our border.
      The debate is now taking another commercial break!Shortly before it did so, Ron DeSantis earned himself some chuckles by making light of his state’s place as a destination for many retirees.“Well, look, as governor of Florida, I know a few people on Social Security and I know it’s important,” DeSantis remarked.The debate has entered wonky territory, as the candidates weigh in on whether they would reform the Social Security old-age benefit.Reforming the program is considered one of the most perilous topics in Washington, so much so that it’s often referred to as the “third rail” of US politics. But Social Security is projected to be heading towards insolvency, and Chris Christie proposed raising the retirement age and cutting off high-earners from accessing it:
      The fact is on Social Security, remember why it was established. It was established as a safety net program to make sure that no one would grow old in this country in poverty. That’s what we got to get back to – rich people should not be collecting Social Security.
      Nikki Haley made a similar argument, while saying the retirement age, currently 65, should be recalibrated to “reflect more of life expectancy. It doesn’t do that now.”Most candidates seemed to agree that TikTok is bad, and they all want to ban it. Both Republicans and Democrats in the Capitol seem to agree on this as well.Montana became the first state in the US to completely ban the app in May, based on the argument that the Chinese government could gain access to user information from TikTok. But in legal proceedings challenging the ban, a federal judge expressed skepticism, saying that Montana had not provided evidence to debunk TikTok’s assertion that it does not share US user data.More than half of US states and the federal government have banned the app on official devices.Content creators have said that total bans would harm businesses and violate free speech rights.The snit between Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy is better watched than read. Thus, you can see the exchange, and hear the audience’s gasps, below:Tim Scott said that Biden had sent ‘billions to Iran’, which is misleading.Scott appears to be referring to a prisoner swap, wherein the Biden administration $6bn (£4.8bn) of Iranian oil money in exchange for the release of five American detainees. The money was not US money, but rather money owed to Iran and frozen by the Trump administration in 2018 when the US left the Iran nuclear deal.It just gets worse and worse between Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. When it came the entrepreneur’s turn to talk about his policy on TikTok, Ramaswamy referred to Haley and said, “In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first.”Haley shot back. “Leave my daughter out of your voice,” she said. And as Ramaswamy went on, she dismissed him, saying “you are just scum.”The debate has resumed with the first question about TikTok, the much-maligned social media network that’s owned by a Chinese firm and beloved by many young people.“Let me say this: TikTok is not only spyware, it is polluting the minds of American young people all throughout this country, and they’re doing it intentionally,” Chris Christie said. “In my first week as president, we would ban TikTok.” More

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      Calls to ‘finish’ Hamas and ‘you’re just scum’: key Republican debate takeaways

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      The third Republican debate was held in Miami on Wednesday, with frontrunner Donald Trump once again foregoing the debate for his own rally nearby.The pool has dwindled since the last debate, and Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Chris Christie seemed to be more serious and focused this time around as they answered questions on the Israel-Hamas war, immigration, abortion and the federal budget. Even so, the debate had moments where it devolved into a shouting match, with petty barbs and personal attacks.Here are the main things to know about the debate.1. The Israel-Hamas war was top of mind – and the rhetoric turned uglyThe candidates largely tried to one-up each other on their unequivocal support for Israel and its military response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, with the exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, who said the US should not be as actively involved in regional wars.“The first thing I said when it happened was, I said, finish them. Finish them,” Haley said about Hamas, touting her former position as special envoy to the United Nations under Donald Trump. DeSantis, meanwhile, focused on the flights he chartered for Floridians in Israel before overstating his aid to the Israeli government.When asked about how the impact of the war was playing out on college campuses in the US, however, DeSantis seemingly denied the existence of Islamophobia, and said he would quash some pro-Palestine student groups.The candidates did not address the estimated 10,000 Palestinian civilians killed by Israel’s strikes and its ground invasion in Gaza.2. After Republican election losses, candidates tried to regain ground, especially on abortionThe day before the debate, the Republican party saw major losses across the country, from the Virginia state legislature to Kentucky’s governorship. The candidates addressed that head on.“We’ve become a party of losers,” Ramaswamy said in his opening statements. “We got trounced last night in 2023. And I think that we have to have accountability in our party.”Many of the election losses were in states where Republicans were trying to enact stricter abortion laws after Roe v Wade was overturned last year. DeSantis, Christie and Haley tried to address that issue by backing away from rightwing anti-abortion rhetoric and focusing on states’ rights to choose.Haley, in particular, took the most measured stance, saying she did not judge those who support abortion and that a federal abortion ban was politically untenable.3. Haley and DeSantis continued to battle for second placeWhile neither Haley nor DeSantis are polling anywhere close to Trump, they stood out in the pack throughout the debate.Haley focused on her experience in the UN and on foreign policy issues, and DeSantis on his tenure as Florida governor. Both seemed to try to remain more composed than usual, with Haley only reacting to barbs from Ramaswamy.“Our world is on fire,” Haley said in her closing remarks. “We can’t win the fights of the 21st century with politicians from the 20th century.”Not far from the debate hall, Trump held a campaign rally. But fellow Florida man DeSantis avoided many direct attacks on the former president.“This is not about me, this is about you,” he said in his opening and closing remarks.4. There were personal attacks – particularly involving RamaswamyRamaswamy started his debate by attacking the media, the RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and even the NBC moderators, seemingly as part of his attempt to portray himself as the anti-establishment candidate.He then turned his focus to Haley. “Do you want a leader from a different generation who is going to put this country first, or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?” he said, criticizing her hawkish foreign policy positions.And when it came the entrepreneur’s turn to talk about his policy on TikTok, Ramaswamy referred to Haley and said: “In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok while her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time. So you might want to take care of your family first.”“Leave my daughter out of your voice,” Haley shot back. When Ramaswamy went on, she dismissed him, saying: “You are just scum.”5. Candidates were more serious and focused than in past debatesThe earlier debates, with larger candidate pools, have tended to be circus-like in their atmosphere, with more riffs and off-topic detours. From the opening statements, the debate seemed to be more focused on the issues Americans are grappling with, from war in the Middle East and in Ukraine, and kitchen-table issues such as social security.The seriousness of the candidates seemed to reflect that the primary season was just around the corner, and that positioning themselves strategically around Trump would mean building more trust with American voters. More