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      How would a possible third indictment affect Trump’s 2024 run? – podcast

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      On Tuesday, Donald Trump said he had received a letter suggesting he was about to be indicted by special counsel Jack Smith in connection with the criminal investigation into the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021. It would be his third criminal indictment.
      Jonathan Freedland asks Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, if the pile of indictments could grow too large even for Trump – and his voters. Plus: who is Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia? If Republicans do decide Trump is too badly damaged, might they turn to him?

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      Jason Aldean’s Try That In a Small Town sums up the delusions of the right wing | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Jason Aldean is a country music star and a big fan of law and order. He loves the law so much, in fact, that he’s willing to take it into his own hands.If you come to his (imaginary) small town and disrespect a cop or engage in any sort of protest, you will regret it.Such is the theme of Aldean’s new song, Try That in a Small Town, which is all about how the singer and his pals will aggressively deal with unseemly behaviour on their turf. A sample extract: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face … Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road. / Around here, we take care of our own …”A little later in the song Aldean elaborates further on what might happen if lines are crossed. “Got a gun that my grandad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up. / Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck.” He is, it would appear, referencing a conspiracy theory that the government is going to confiscate Americans’ guns to impose martial law.Try That in a Small Town was released in May but when the music video came out last Friday it generated immediate controversy. The video leaves little doubt as to what Aldean is trying to communicate: it intersperses footage of him singing in front of Maury county courthouse in Tennessee – the site of the lynching of a Black man, Henry Choate, in 1927 – with footage from protests, looting and civil unrest. Small towns are wholesome, the message is. Full of “good ol’ boys” who were “raised up right”. Cities, meanwhile, are hotbeds of violence … and diversity.That last bit isn’t spelled out – it’s not like Aldean yells “I’m a massive racist!” in the middle of the track – but the dog whistles are difficult to ignore. The song has been called “a modern lynching song” by detractors and the video was pulled from Country Music Television (CMT) on Monday. (While CMT has confirmed the video was taken off rotation, it hasn’t put out a statement as to why.) Fellow country star Sheryl Crow has also voiced her disapproval. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence,” Crow tweeted on Tuesday. She further noted that Aldean should know better, “having survived a mass shooting”. Crow was referencing the shooting at Las Vegas’s Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017: the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in modern US history. Aldean was performing and got out unscathed. He was lucky. Sixty people were killed and 867 injured. Those people weren’t killed and injured by a Black Lives Matter protester. They were killed by Stephen Paddock, an angry white man from Iowa.Try That in a Small Town has generated a lot of criticism, but it also has fervent supporters. Including, of course, GOP lawmakers. “I am shocked by what I’m seeing in this country with people attempting to cancel this song and cancel Jason and his beliefs,” the South Dakota Republican governor, Kristi Noem, posted in a video on Twitter on Wednesday. The Tennessee house GOP leader, William Lamberth, similarly tweeted: “Loved this song since it was released and will continue to fight every day to spread small town values … Give it a listen. The woke mob will hate you for liking this song.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, also didn’t miss the chance to stoke a little culture war. “The Left is now more concerned about Jason Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals,” she tweeted.Aldean, for his part, is furious at insinuations there is anything racist in his song about shooting outsiders who come to his little country town.“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song,” Aldean tweeted on Wednesday, “and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage.”If Aldean isn’t trying to make a point about the Black Lives Matter protests, what is Try That in a Small Town about then? Community, apparently. “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other,’” Aldean wrote on Instagram when he launched the video. “It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost.”Perhaps you’re wondering which quaint small town Aldean grew up in. The answer is: he didn’t. Aldean is from Macon, Georgia – a city with a population of about 153,000 people. Now he lives in Nashville, a city with a population of approximately 700,000. The small town he’s singing about is a product of his imagination.But that’s conservatives for you. Last month Nikki Haley tweeted about how much better the US used to be back in the days before marginalized people had rights. “Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country,” she tweeted.Was the past really that easy for the former South Carolina governor? By her own admission things have got a hell of a lot better for people who, like her, aren’t 100% white. “Years ago I was disqualified from a pageant because they didn’t know whether to put me in the white category or the black,” she wrote on Facebook in 2012. “I was neither. Tonight I watched my daughter get first place in her school pageant. God has an amazing way of bringing things full circle.” God also has an amazing away of depriving people like Haley of self-awareness.Aldean’s song doesn’t just epitomize manufactured rightwing nostalgia, it also encapsulates rightwing paranoia. People on the right are obsessed with the idea that big cities are violent hotbeds of crime where you risk your life every time you nip out for a pint of milk. In reality, however, big cities tend to be safer than small towns. A 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania, for example, found the risk of death from an injury was more than 20% higher in rural small towns than in larger cities. “Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths in the US” one of the researchers told NBC News at the time.The pandemic, to be fair, saw a rise in violent crimes in cities. But even still, you’ve got a better chance of living a long, healthy life in a city. A 2021 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on mortality data from 1999 to 2019 found people living in rural areas die at higher rates than those living in urban areas. That’s because they have less access to healthcare and are more likely to live in poverty.So what’s next for Aldean? Well, I’ve got some good news for all the Republican lawmakers screeching about how unfair it is that Aldean has been cancelled by the woke mob: he’s going to be fine. Indeed, he’s going to be more than fine. Country music (and America) has a way of opening its arms to people accused of racism and making them feel right at home. Just look at Morgan Wallen, for example. In February 2021 TMZ published a video of the musician drunkenly yelling the N-word during a conversation with a friend. He was shunned from polite society for a few months but made a rapid comeback. He won album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2022. His song Last Night is currently in its 14th week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. If it sticks there a little longer he’ll beat the 19-week record currently held by Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, featuring Billy Ray Cyrus.While people on the right may be railing about Aldean being “cancelled”, the sad truth is that this will probably help his career. He’ll go on Fox News and yell about wokeness. He’ll wallow in his imagined victimhood. His song will probably be played in rallies for the next Republican nominee for president. Aldean hasn’t been cancelled or silenced – his message has been amplified. More

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      The Guardian view on Robert F Kennedy Jr: from Camelot to conspiracy-mongering | Editorial

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency, likes to call himself a “Kennedy Democrat”. His own siblings disagree. His uncle’s presidency, like his namesake father’s career and presidential campaign, had an aura of hope and responsibility as well as glamour. RFK Jr talks vaguely of overcoming divisions, but in reality trades upon a peculiar blend of “cynicism and credulity”, as one commentator notes. Most recently he claimed that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” in comments reported by the New York Post.However jarring the remarks – he partially backtracked later – they sit comfortably with his long history of fomenting conspiracy theories and his nonsensical, anti-scientific views. He has falsely linked childhood immunisations to autism and wifi to cancer and “leaky brain”, claimed that HIV does not cause Aids, and suggested that chemicals in drinking water could make children transgender. One of his sisters warned that his latest comments put people’s lives in danger.So much for the Kennedy legacy. Nor does he look like much of a Democrat. He is being hyped by billionaires and rightwing broadcasters such as Sean Hannity, and has gained traction among Republicans rather than Democrats. Some see his campaign primarily as a vehicle for his ego and brand, which may be less damaging to President Biden’s chances than a possible third-party bid by Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Republican former governor Jon Huntsman’s No Labels group. A poll this month suggested that a “moderate, independent third-party candidate” could gain about 20% of the vote and result in a second term for Donald Trump. But talk up Mr Kennedy enough and he might have a marginal effect in denting President Biden. Others suspect that Mr Kennedy wants the Republican vice-presidential slot. Steve Bannon and Roger Stone have both floated the idea of a Trump-Kennedy ticket.None of this has prevented him finding up to 20% support among Democrats in polls. Camelot nostalgia and the celebrity factor have clearly played a large part in that. Mr Kennedy has never run for any public office, still less held it, but boasts that he’s “been around” politics since he was a little boy. The lack of enthusiasm for the sitting president is also potent: most Democrats do not want him to run again, although they indicate that they would vote for him over Mr Trump. Voters, including independents, are not giving Mr Biden credit for the improving the economy or other achievements. That may not be fair. But it’s a fact.Mr Kennedy’s appeal goes deeper, however. He has found a home in the world described by a new book, Conspirituality, where new age spirituality and the “wellness” industry overlap with the politics of paranoia, as well as alongside the Trumpian right. Distrust of institutions, suspicion at the marriage of state and corporate power, and fear and sadness at the despoliation of the environment are in themselves reasonable concerns. But the political ambition that feeds upon and mutates them into more poisonous beliefs is unpalatable.Mr Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracy-mongering has caused enough damage. His latest remarks show how easily conspiracy theories blur into bigotry and scapegoating. It may be farcical to hear a multimillionaire from the country’s most famous political dynasty railing against “elites”, but there is nothing funny about this campaign. More

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      Ron DeSantis says Trump January 6 charges would not be good for country

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      Ron DeSantis said charges against Donald Trump over his election subversion, culminating in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, would not be good for the country.“I hope he doesn’t get charged,” the Florida governor told CNN in a much-trailed interview on Tuesday. “I don’t think it’ll be good for the country.”Earlier in the day, Trump seized the news agenda when he said he had been told he was a target of the investigation by the special counsel Jack Smith into his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and had been told to appear before a federal grand jury in Washington DC on Thursday.Trump already faces 71 criminal charges, over hush-money payments and his retention of classified information.But he still leads DeSantis by around 30 points in polling regarding the Republican presidential primary while DeSantis reportedly experiences fundraising problems and staff changes.Still, when asked on CNN if Trump should be held accountable for his election subversion, culminating in the incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress, DeSantis declined a chance to hit out at his rival.“So here’s the problem,” he said. “This country is going down the road of criminalising political differences. And I think that’s wrong.”The Florida governor went on to repeatedly namecheck the state-level indictment of Trump in New York over his hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair, and the investigation of links between Trump and Russia during the 2016 election, which closed in 2019.“As president,” he said, reaching for a Republican talking point, “my job [will be] to restore a single standard of justice, to end weaponisation of these [federal] agencies.”He added: “This country needs to have a debate about the country’s future. If I’m the nominee I will be able to focus on President [Joe] Biden’s failures, then I’ll be able to articulate a positive vision for the future.“I don’t think it serves us good to have a presidential election focused on what happened four years ago in January and so I want to focus on looking forward. I don’t want to look back, I do not want to see [Trump charged], I hope he doesn’t get charged. I don’t think it’ll be good for the country. But at the same time, I’ve got to focus on looking forward and that’s what we’re going to do.”DeSantis did look backwards to Trump’s election subversion earlier in the day, at a press conference in West Columbia, South Carolina, that was meant to focus on his rollout of a policy regarding the US military but which featured repeated questions about Trump and his extreme legal predicament.DeSantis said then: “Look, there’s a difference between being brought up on criminal charges and doing things. Like for example, I think it was shown how [Trump] was in the White House [on January 6] and didn’t do anything while things were going on [at the Capitol]. He should have come out more forcefully, of course.”Nine deaths including law enforcement suicides are now linked to the Capitol riot, which Trump incited in an attempt to block certification of his defeat by Biden and which he did nothing to call off for some hours.“But to try to criminalise that” inaction, DeSantis said, “that’s a different issue entirely.”With his announcement of developments in the Smith investigation, Trump had once again hijacked an attempt by DeSantis to reset his campaign make an impact on the campaign trail.In a statement, Jason Miller, a senior Trump advisor, called the CNN interview “an afternoon hit that nobody will watch” but said: “The real story here is that the DeSantis campaign doesn’t know how to turn things around with their current candidate.” More

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      I took RFK Jr’s phone call long ago. Now I regret it | Margaret Sullivan

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      My assistant in the New York Times public editor’s office said Robert F Kennedy was on the phone. Did I want to take the call?This was roughly a decade ago, but I still remember being momentarily confused. Assassinated in 1968, RFK was long gone, and though we did get some unusual calls in the public editor’s office, they tended to be from the living.I quickly realized, of course, that the caller was the former New York senator’s son, an environmental attorney then in his late 50s. And, given his prominence, I took the call, only to endure an unpleasant screed from this anti-vaccine crusader. Once Kennedy had my ear, he spun out his pseudo-scientific theories, mostly about the causal relationship between childhood vaccines and autism. Though these notions had been debunked, he was relentless in wanting the New York Times to give them more credence.My job as public editor was to represent the readers of the paper and take their complaints seriously, often writing columns about them, but I didn’t do so in this case. As I recall, I just shook off the conversation and got back to work.These days, I’m certainly glad I didn’t take up his cause. RFK Jr, now 69 and running for president as a Democrat, has proven himself to be even more divorced from reality.The most recent example came just last week, and it was appalling. At a dinner on New York City’s Upper East Side, Kennedy (foolishly) thought he was talking off the record and therefore could drop his guard.So he went full conspiracy theory – suggesting that Covid could have been a bioweapon intended to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people while targeting “Caucasians and Black people”. The remarks, heard on a widely circulated video published by the New York Post, “feeds into Sinophobic and antisemitic tropes”, an Anti-Defamation League spokesperson told the Washington Post. The director of the Stop Asian Hate Project called them irresponsible and hateful.Kennedy has denied any antisemitic sentiment, or even that he intended that the “ethnic effect was deliberately engineered”. But the recording tells a different tale.It’s not as if this latest chapter is an aberration. RFK Jr has consistently spread Covid conspiracy theories and even once compared US vaccine mandates – unfavorably! – to “Hitler’s Germany”. (He later apologized for that one.)The New York Times summed him up in a news story: “Mr Kennedy has made his political career on false conspiracy theories about not just Covid-19 and Covid vaccines but disproved links between common childhood vaccines and autism, mass surveillance and 5G cellular phone technology, ill health effects from wifi, and a ‘stolen’ election in 2004 that gave the presidency back to George W Bush.”Somehow, though, his presidential campaign has gained traction; although a long shot, he does have significant support among primary voters. (And we’ve seen what can happen with a supposed long shot, as Donald Trump was considered in 2015.)The reasons are obvious. His crazy ideas – like Trump’s – are catnip for the media. They make news and generate clicks. And social media amplifies him, too. Mark Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor, put it bluntly: “The bots and trolls love RFK Jr. Because the bots and trolls hate a fact-based humanitarian society.”All of this adds immeasurably to his prominence at a time when Democratic voters are looking for an alternative to Joe Biden, who they think is too old to endure a long campaign and a four-year presidency.Which brings me full circle to that decade-old phone call. I wonder now why I so readily took that call and gave him a half hour that rightfully belonged to the ordinary readers of the New York Times? Not every phone call got patched through to me, any more than I personally answered every one of the 500 or so emails that the public editor’s office received each week.And I know the answer: I did it because of his famous name. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s in the heavily Catholic steel city of Lackawanna, New York, any Kennedy was revered as something of a secular saint. And although we learned much more skepticism after Teddy Kennedy (RFK Jr’s uncle) drove a campaign worker to her watery death in 1969, the name still resonated decades later.With his ugly theories and dangerous denials of reality, RFK Jr long ago sullied the family name. And these days, I would ask my assistant to have him send us an email. We would read it with interest – just like every other complaint we got. This article was amended on 18 July 2023 to correct the spelling of Mark Jacob’s surname.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      White House condemns Robert Kennedy Jr’s Covid claims as ‘vile’ – live

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      From 2h agoWhite House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has taken the chance to condemn remarks made by presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups.Kennedy, the infamous conspiracy theorist, famous scion and rogue candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination hit the headlines at the weekend after it emerged that he said at a press event in New York City last week that the coronavirus is a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, the New York Post reported at the weekend.Kennedy is garnering loud and swift criticism, including from members of his own family. The White House was asked about it during the press briefing today and Jean-Pierry called Kennedy’s remarks not just “false” but also “vile”.The briefing is ongoing. Oh! It just wrapped up.Close Kennedy family members weighing in reflects the growing outrage at Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy Jr’s words, which he tried to disavow on Monday in a statement sent to the Guardian by his campaign staff.The statement reads:
      The New York Post story is mistaken. I have never, ever suggested that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to ‘spare Jews,’ and I unequivocally reject this disgusting and outlandish conspiracy theory.
      New York Post reporter Jon Levine exploited this off-the-record conversation to smear me as an antisemite. This cynical maneuver is consistent with the mainstream media playbook to discredit me as a crank – and by association, to discredit revelations of genuine corruption and collusion.
      Separate messages sent to the Guardian purportedly from Kennedy’s personal email address cite Wikipedia links to press articles about the plausibility of ethnically-targeted bioweapons.“The study is solid, and not at all controversial,” one of the messages says of a research paper by the British Medical Association, reported by the Guardian in 2004, that “rogue scientists” could develop bioweapons designed to target certain ethnic groups based on their genetic differences.An Iowa judge has temporarily blocked the state’s new abortion ban from taking effect on Monday, just days after Governor Kim Reynolds signed the measure into law.Polk County District Court Judge Joseph Seidlin ruled that a lawsuit by abortion providers is likely to succeed, and the temporary injunction will remain in place for the duration of the lawsuit.The move restores access to abortion in Iowa for up to 20 weeks of pregnancy while the courts assess the new law’s constitutionality.Last week, Iowa lawmakers passed a six-week ban on abortion in a rare special legislative session, called by Governor Reynolds, who signed the bill on Friday afternoon.The law would ban almost all abortions once cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually six weeks into a pregnancy and before many women know they are pregnant. Prior to the law, abortion was legal in the state up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin is speaking at an event hosted by the moderate group No Labels, fueling speculation that he could run on a third-party ticket for the presidency.Manchin has not declared whether he will run, but it’s difficult to see how his flirtation with No Labels would amount to a serious candidacy, according to a Vox report.
      It’s true that many Democrats don’t want Biden to run again, and many Republicans say the same of Trump, who is the current GOP frontrunner. But while 2024 may shape up to be the rematch no one asked for, third-party candidates don’t have a successful track record in the US, and there’s no indication a third-party candidate would be able to launch a credible challenge to either party’s nominee this time. If Manchin or another third-party candidate runs, they would probably lose badly.
      They might, however, get enough support among moderates to derail Biden in states that he narrowly won in 2020, despite No Labels co-chair Joe Lieberman’s assurances that his group is not looking to get in the race for a “spoiler.”
      The White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, described Robert F Kennedy’s comments that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people as false” and “vile”.“The claims made on that tape is false,” she said during a press briefing earlier this afternoon.
      It is vile, and they put our fellow Americans in danger.
      She declined to discuss Kennedy directly, citing the legal constraints on the administration’s ability to address campaign matters. But she warned that the presidential candidate’s remarks amounted to encouraging racist theories around the virus.
      If you think about the racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories that come out of saying those type of things, it’s an attack on our fellow citizens.
      And so it’s important that we essentially speak out when we hear those claims more broadly.
      She also cited a statement from the American Jewish Committee that called Kennedy’s claims “deeply offensive” and reflective of “some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history.” Jean-Pierre added:
      This is something that this president, and this whole administration, is going to stand against.
      Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who is due to speak at this evening’s No Labels event in New Hampshire, has insisted it is “not a campaign”.Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds dodged a question about whether she would be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s running mate if he won the Republican presidential primary.DeSantis, at a fundraising event on Saturday, told reporters that he would consider Reynolds as a pick for vice president if he won the GOP nomination.Asked about DeSantis’s comments, Reynolds told Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt:
      I appreciate the comments. But look, I’m so focused. We are implementing a boldest universal school choice plan in the country. I just called a special session last week. This last week we passed the fetal heartbeat bill, and I actually cut state government and I cut 21 agencies from my Cabinet and we’re implementing our alignment bill.
      She added:
      So I’m busy working on being governor of the great state of Iowa and I’m already working on cutting taxes again next year. So that’s my focus right now.
      Donald Trump last week expressed his frustration with Reynolds for declining to endorse a candidate early in the race. In a post to Truth Social, Trump wrote:
      I opened up the Governor position for Kim Reynolds, & when she fell behind, I ENDORSED her, did big Rallies, & she won. Now, she wants to remain ‘NEUTRAL.’ I don’t invite her to events! DeSanctus down 45 points!
      DeSantis, speaking on Saturday, also dismissed Trump’s criticism of Reynolds, saying:
      I thought the attacks on her were totally, totally out of hand and totally unnecessary.
      Joe Kennedy III, a former congressman from Massachusetts and nephew of Robert F Kennedy Jr, has publicly distanced himself from his uncle’s latest comments.Robert F Kennedy’s sister, Kerry Kennedy, has also sharply criticised his remarks about Covid.A leading environmental group has hit out at US climate envoy John Kerry over comments he made rejecting calls for the US to pay climate reparations to developing countries affected by climate-change fueled disasters.On Friday, at a congressional hearing on the state department’s climate agenda, Kerry said that “under no circumstances” would the US meet reparations demands. However, the US has previously committed to contributing to a “loss and damages” fund for developing countries that does not involve statements of liability.“We are disappointed and angered by this news, but not surprised, because John Kerry’s words are just the latest example of Kerry and the US refusing to back up their vague claims for US support in global climate progress with real, substantive action,” said Jeff Ordower, North America director of the climate advocacy group 350.0rg.Ordower added that Kerry and president Biden “have tried to walk a tightrope of limited culpability: they talk a big game about “interconnected nations” and “the need for a fossil fuel phasedown,” but shied away “when it comes to “put their words into practice.”The criticism comes as Kerry met with Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in Beijing to urge joint action to cut methane emissions and coal-fired power.“In the next three days we hope we can begin taking some big steps that will send a signal to the world about the serious purpose of China and the United States to address a common risk, threat, challenge to all of humanity created by humans themselves,” Kerry said, according to Reuters.“It is toxic for both Chinese and for Americans and for people in every country on the planet.”The US climate envoy’s comments came as temperature records in the US, Europe and China are coming close to being broken this week, alongside intense rain and flooding in other areas that are collectively pushing climate change issue to the top of the global political agenda.White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has taken the chance to condemn remarks made by presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups.Kennedy, the infamous conspiracy theorist, famous scion and rogue candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination hit the headlines at the weekend after it emerged that he said at a press event in New York City last week that the coronavirus is a genetically engineered bioweapon that may have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, the New York Post reported at the weekend.Kennedy is garnering loud and swift criticism, including from members of his own family. The White House was asked about it during the press briefing today and Jean-Pierry called Kennedy’s remarks not just “false” but also “vile”.The briefing is ongoing. Oh! It just wrapped up.The US is not in a position to attribute the overnight attack that damaged the road bridge linking Crimea to southern Russia, the White House has stated on Monday.The White House daily media briefing is still underway and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is taking questions now. But a little earlier, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was at the podium and his part of the briefing mainly focused on foreign policy and overseas news.Kirby was not prepared to commit to naming the perpetrator of the attack on the bridge. We’ve been covering this topic in our Ukraine war live blog, but that is closing now. It will be back on Tuesday.Russian president Vladimir Putin has attributed the overnight attack to Ukraine and said that his forces are preparing a response.You can read the Guardian’s full report on this topic here.Robert F Kennedy’s sister is among those who have sharply criticised his remarks about Covid.Kerry Kennedy wrote on Twitter: “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting.”Democrats were quick to distance themselves from presidential hopeful Robert F Kennedy Jr after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups.Kennedy’s comments included “reprehensible anti-semitic and anti-Asian comments aimed at perpetuating harmful and debunked racist tropes, the Democratic congressional campaign committee said in a statement. The Democratic presidential candidate’s attempt to repurpose fringe-right conspiracy theories is not new for his candidacy, the Washington Post reported. The paper compares Kennedy’s remarks to how Donald Trump offered a conspiratorial right-wing worldview to Republican primary voters in 2015.
      It’s not surprising that the party’s institutions and leaders would take this tack; the Democratic Party is keenly attuned to racist stereotypes and antisemitism. But it is also not much of a burden. Kennedy’s support in the primary is not particularly robust relative to the incumbent president, and his long-standing conspiratorial rhetoric has not been effective at building a constituency. The party is certainly eager that it doesn’t.
      Compare the response here with the Republican Party’s response to Donald Trump in 2015. The chairman of the party then, Reince Priebus, didn’t excoriate Trump’s repeated rhetoric about criminal immigrants on social media. The party doesn’t appear to have done so either […] For the GOP, Trump’s controversial comments were already accepted by a large segment of its base, which is why his candidacy quickly gained traction.
      There is an interesting question inherent to the Kennedy situation for the Democratic Party: How accountable is it for the espoused views of one of its candidates for the presidential nomination? What is it about Kennedy that demands a response at all? Is it his name? Because he’s getting more than zero percent in polls? Is it simply that Kennedy affords Democrats an opportunity to reinforce who they are relative to what he presents?
      West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who is set to headline the No Labels event in New Hampshire later today, is arguably the most conservative Democratic senator.Manchin has not declared yet whether he will run for reelection to his Senate seat. He has told reporters that he will wait until late this year before announcing whether he will run.Should Manchin seek another term, he would face a serious challenge from Governor Jim Justice, who is seeking the Republican nomination in the Senate race. West Virginia has been leaning heavily Republican, having overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.Manchin has at times complicated legislative initiatives being pushed by his party leaders, Reuters reported. But Democratic leaders have treaded softly as Manchin also has been key to the party holding on to its Senate majority.Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr faced widespread criticism over the weekend after a video surfaced of him making false claims that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.The New York Post on Saturday originally published a clip of Kennedy’s conspiracy theory comments, made during a recent dinner in New York City. In the recording, Kennedy can be heard making a series of false and misleading claims, including saying:
      Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
      Kennedy is also heard saying:
      We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.
      Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, said Kennedy’s comments are “deeply offensive and incredibly dangerous” in a tweet on Saturday.The Anti-Defamation League told multiple outlets that Kennedy’s comment “feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about Covid-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”Democratic national committee chair Jaime Harrison condemned Kennedy’s remarks and said they do not reflect the views of the party.Joe Biden has invited Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Washington for an official visit, according to a statement from Netanyahu’s office.The two leaders shared a “long and warm” conversation where they discussed curbing threats from Iran and its proxies and strengthening the alliance between the two countries, the Israeli statement said.The invitation comes more than seven months after Netanyahu was sworn in as prime minister. The delay was viewed as a major snub from Biden, as most Israeli prime ministers had already received an invitation to the White House this far into their terms.The phone call between the two leaders took place as Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, is traveling to Washington for meetings with Biden and to address a joint address to Congress.Ohio secretary of state Frank LaRose formally announced his candidacy for US Senate today, becoming the third prominent Republican hoping to challenge Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown in 2024.“It’s official: I’m running,” LaRose said on Twitter.
      I’m on a mission to give back to the state that has given me so much. To continue to serve the country I love and fight to protect the values we share. That’s why I’m running to serve as your next United States senator.
      LaRose, Ohio’s secretary of state since 2019, is the third major candidate to jump into the primary to take on Brown. He follows Bernie Moreno, a businessman running with Donald Trump’s encouragement, and state senator Matt Dolan, whose family owns the Cleveland Guardians baseball team.Ohio’s Senate race looks to be one of the most competitive in the country next year, alongside races in Arizona, Montana and West Virginia. The state backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.New York mayor Eric Adams has appointed Edward Caban as the first Hispanic officer to lead the city’s police department in its 178-year history.Adams announced the appointment of Caban, 55, in a morning news conference outside the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx, where Caban began his career as an officer in 1991.Caban had been instrumental to the NYPD’s efforts to decrease crime after the Covid-19 pandemic, Mayor Adams said, noting that major crimes are down across the city this summer. He added:
      Commissioner Caban is truly one of New York’s finest, a leader who understands the importance of both safety and justice.
      Caban stepped in as acting police chief after the surprise resignation of Keechant Sewell, the first woman to lead the department, last month.Florida governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has reduced campaign staff as his campaign has struggled to meet fundraising goals.Fewer than 10 staffers were laid off, according to an anonymous staffer, reported Politico. The staffers were involved in event planning and may be picked up by the pro-DeSantis super Pac Never Back Down. Two senior campaign advisers, Dave Abrams and Tucker Obenshain, left the campaign this past week to assist a pro-DeSantis nonprofit group.Sources within the campaign reported an internal assessment that the campaign hired too many staffers too early.“They never should have brought so many people on; the burn rate was way too high,” said one Republican source familiar with the campaign’s thought process to NBC News. “People warned the campaign manager but she wanted to hear none of it.”More shake-ups within the campaign are expected in the coming weeks after two months on the presidential campaign, with DeSantis still lagging substantially in second place behind former president Donald Trump.Even in DeSantis’s home state of Florida, Trump still has a 20-point lead over the governor, according to a recent Florida Atlantic University poll. More

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      Republicans have their most diverse primary slate ever – yet they’re still denying racism exists

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      An African American man whose grandfather dropped out of school to pick cotton. A daughter of Indian immigrants raised in the Sikh faith. A son of Cuban immigrants, an Indian-American entrepreneur, a Black talk radio host and a former undercover CIA officer who is mixed race.A casual observer might assume that these candidates for the White House in 2024 must be from the same Democratic party that produced Barack Obama. In fact, they are all contenders in the Republican presidential primary field – the most diverse in the party’s history.But what should be an important breakthrough for a party long criticised for racist dog-whistling is overshadowed by some significant caveats. First, the opinion polls are dominated by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, two white men whose words and deeds have alienated many Black voters.Second, they are, critics say, seeking to benefit from identity politics and deny the existence of racism at the same time. Senator Tim Scott, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, Miami mayor Francis Suarez, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, conservative radio host Larry Elder and ex-congressman Will Hurd refer to their own struggles but are reluctant to acknowledge a wider social and historical context.“It’s great to see the quality and diversity of the candidates who have emerged and are emerging,” said Michael Steele, who was the first Black chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). “It does matter what they say and how they sound and how they represent not just Republican values but the values of the communities they come from, and that’s always been where the wheels start to come off. You can’t be authentically you if you’re parroting what white Republicanism is.”Steele’s elevation to RNC chairman after the 2008 election of Obama, America’s first Black president, implied that the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had finally recognised the need to broaden its appeal. There was early vindication in 2010 when Steele successfully backed Haley for governor of South Carolina, Scott for Congress in the same state and Susana Martinez for governor of New Mexico.But the following year, Steele lost his re-election bid to Reince Priebus, a white man from Wisconsin who would later become Trump’s White House chief of staff. When Republicans were defeated by Obama again, the RNC produced an “autopsy report” that urged them to diversify or die. Yet in 2016 Trump effectively tore that up with attacks on immigrants and Muslims that were cheered by white nationalists. He lost the popular vote but won the electoral college.There have been gains and setbacks since then. In last year’s midterm elections, the RNC said its lineup of candidates was more diverse than ever: 32 Latinos, 22 Black candidates, 11 Asian Americans and two Native Americans. Among them was Herschel Walker, who denied the existence of racism and lost a Senate race in Georgia to Raphael Warnock, a Democrat steeped in the civil rights legacy of Martin Luther King.Now the presidential primary candidates vying to take on Joe Biden, an 80-year-old white man, seem unwilling to discuss racial politics, except in the past tense or with an individual anecdote rather than a societal diagnosis. Haley, the first Asian American woman to compete for the Republican nomination, has described the discrimination that she and her family suffered as immigrants in the south while rejecting the idea of systemic racism.Launching his presidential campaign, Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, spoke of feeling angry and disillusioned until a mentor “told me in the most loving way possible to look in the mirror and to blame myself”, leading Scott to choose “personal responsibility over resentment. I became the master of my fate.”It was a message that implied: if Scott could live the American dream, any Black person can. He accordingly likes to frequently swipe at the left with lines such as, “My life disrupts their narrative. The truth of my life disrupts their lies,” – even though has in in the past described incidents in which he was racially profiled by police, including US Capitol police.Steele, for one, is not impressed. He said: “Tim knows me, he knows I’m not going to sugarcoat shit; I’m going to be straight up. That’s just playing to a white audience because that’s not his own experience. He’s the one who told us of the time he was profiled as a member of Congress. So what are you talking about?“You can be aspirational about your own story and your own future while at the same time being honest and recognising the history of your story as it’s related through your parents, grandparents, neighbours, friends, who I would probably argue with Tim would not necessarily view their experience with America as exclusively, ‘I did all this by pulling myself up by my bootstraps and white America appreciated me as an American’. That’s just not how that narrative plays out.”Republicans have taken pains to reject the New York Times’s 1619 Project and the concept of slavery being part of America’s origin story. A fashionable reflex is to selectively quote King’s “I have a dream” speech about a nation where children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” in an effort to justify colour blindness. This is seen by critics as disingenuous cherry picking from a civil rights leader who also highlighted police brutality and systemic poverty.Like previous Black Republican candidates, such as Herman Cain and Ben Carson, this year’s field has little incentive to dwell on the party’s divisive past and risk being accused of going “woke”. Leah Wright Rigueur, a political historian at Johns Hopkins University, told the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America podcast: “There is no reward for calling the party out on racism or bigotry. There’s none for Black Republicans.“In fact, we have documented evidence that the Black Republicans who get support from within the party … are the ones who either support the party uncritically, who echo whatever the party’s standard bearer is saying, or who find this space to carve out where they don’t alienate their audience while also adhering to certain conservative principles.”Rigueur, author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican, added: “The latter is where Tim Scott is, and so that’s why you hear him say things like, ‘I have experienced racism on an individual level but I don’t believe America is a racist place.’ And so it becomes something which alleviates the conscience of the base, where they can say, well, it doesn’t affect me, that’s something he experienced, that’s his individual experience. That can be true, but it has nothing to do with me, and I can feel OK in this moment.”Although the current Congress has more Black Republicans than at any point since 1877, the number is still only five. Efforts to recruit diverse candidates and appeal to voters of colour have been repeatedly undermined by party leaders and allies. Trump, the runaway leader in primary polls so far, dined last year with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist.Last month, the former president’s appointees to the supreme court were instrumental in ruling against affirmative action in colleges and universities. Scott told Fox News that it was “a good day for America”; Haley tweeted, “Picking winners & losers based on race is fundamentally wrong”; Ramaswamy told Politico: “Affirmative action is the single greatest form of institutional racism in America today.”This week Tommy Tuberville, a senator for Alabama, gave several media interviews in which he repeatedly declined to describe white nationalists as racist before finally backing down. And Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, said teachers should tell students that the Tulsa race massacre was not racially motivated.Tara Setmayer, a political commentator who received a torrent of online racist abuse following a recent TV interview, argues that the diversity of the Republican primary slate will not address the deeper malaise. “The irony in this is that the diversity is on paper and the party that claims that they’re so against affirmative action is seemingly intent on putting up racial numbers to show, look, we’re not racist, we have diversity. You can’t have it both ways.“Taking away the rights of women, the rights of minorities – these are all issues that are being advocated by a Republican party that wants to laud itself for ‘diversity’? They’re perfectly OK with a governor of a major state like Ron DeSantis banning diversity and inclusion programmes. They’re OK with book-banning on Black history. It doesn’t make sense.Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, criticised Haley, Scott and others for denying that systemic racism has an impact on Black communities.“To try to whitewash that, I’m embarrassed for them, because you cannot tell me that they don’t go home at night and watch the news, read the newspaper, look at the bills and the laws that are being passed in their own states and the experiences of people of colour in this country and not acknowledge privately that, guess what, racism still exists in America.“It’s so disingenuous for them to say that, and Tim Scott more infuriatingly, given that he’s a Black man in the south, who himself claims he was racially profiled as a senator, but turns around and denies that there is still a problem with race in this country when he’s speaking in front of predominantly white audiences. He’s not going to go to the NAACP convention or the Urban League convention or speak in front of the Congressional Black Caucus saying those things.”The Democratic party remains more diverse by every measure. Some 80% of racial and ethnic minority members in the current Congress are Democrats. A new Pew Research Center analysis of last year’s midterm elections shows that 93% of Black voters supported Democrats while just 5% backed Republicans.Hispanic voters favoured Democratic candidates by a 21-point margin in 2022 – but that was a sharp drop from the 47-point margin they enjoyed in 2018. Such shifts give Republicans hope that they will continue to make inroads next year – with or without a Black nominee.Antjuan Seawright, a party strategist based in Columbia, South Carolina, said: “That word diversity means different things to different people and for us as Democrats, not only have we talked the talk when it comes to diversity, but we walk the walk with age, race, gender, geographics and demographics.“The browning of America is happening right before all of our eyes and, truth be told, is that Republicans have not given any voters of colour a reason to even think about joining their chorus.” More

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      Progressives denounce FBI attacks by right wing but push for agency reforms

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      Christopher Wray appeared stupefied. As the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified on Wednesday before the House judiciary committee, Republicans on the panel painted him as a liberal stooge abusing his power to punish Joe Biden’s political enemies.The accusations stunned Wray, a registered Republican who was appointed by Donald Trump and previously served in George W Bush’s administration.“The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray told the committee.Some progressives share Wray’s disbelief. The two indictments of Donald Trump, as well as Hunter Biden’s plea deal with federal prosecutors and conspiracy theories about the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, have fueled Republicans’ accusations that the FBI and the justice department are unjustly targeting rightwing groups.Those allegations have somewhat complicated progressives’ longstanding criticism of the FBI over the bureau’s documented surveillance of liberal activists. Even as progressives denounce rightwing conspiracy theories about the FBI, they continue to push for an overhaul of the bureau’s surveillance and data collection methods.“If Republicans really care about FBI overreach of civil liberties, then they will get serious about the real reforms,” Representative Cori Bush, a Democrat from Missouri, said. “But that’s not really what they’re pushing right now. Instead, they’re still amplifying those conspiracy theories and trying to distract the public, to gaslight the country and distract us from Trump’s criminality.”Progressives’ skepticism of the FBI long predates Trump’s presidency. In 1956, the FBI launched its domestic counterintelligence program (Cointelpro) to infiltrate and discredit political organizations that the bureau considered suspicious. The program, which shuttered in 1971, resulted in the surveillance of many leaders in the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements, including Dr Martin Luther King Jr.Progressive activists’ concerns about FBI surveillance stretch into the present day. According to a 2022 memo declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in May, the FBI violated its own guidelines in running so-called “batch queries” related to 133 people “arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests” after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The memo found that the FBI conducted similarly inappropriate inquiries of more than a dozen people suspected of participating in the January 6 Capitol attack.“The FBI for many decades – almost a century – has been sort of the chief secret police entity against the left and progressives,” said Vince Warren, executive director of the progressive Center for Constitutional Rights. “During that time, the right wing and Republicans have been the biggest cheerleaders of this illegal activity when aimed at communists, civil rights advocates, anti-war advocates, all the way up to [Black Lives Matter] protesters. That seemed to change in 2016, when they backed a lawless president who didn’t like that his illegal activities were being investigated.”Republicans’ sentiments toward the FBI have indeed shifted as Trump has come under increasing legal scrutiny, marking a notable sea change for a party that long claimed the mantle of law and order. When Trump was indicted on 37 federal charges last month for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, the former president’s congressional allies jumped to his defense, accusing the FBI and the justice department of exploiting its powers to target Republicans.Opening the hearing with Wray on Wednesday, Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the judiciary committee, bemoaned the “weaponization of the government against the American people” and “this double standard that exists now in our justice system”.Jordan repeatedly suggested that Republicans and Democrats could work together on reforming the FBI’s data collection methods, specifically in the form of overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa). That law, which is currently set to expire at the end of the year, has long been a source of outrage on the left. One particularly controversial provision of Fisa, section 702, allows the FBI to carry out warrantless surveillance of targeted foreigners overseas, and the personal data of many Americans – including Black Lives Matter protesters – have been swept up in the expansive searches made possible by the law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, questioned Wray on Wednesday, she focused her queries on the FBI’s data collection methods and warned that Fisa would face “a very difficult reauthorization process”.During a press call on Wednesday, Jayapal expressed dissatisfaction with “the vagueness of the director’s answers” and suggested Democrats and Republicans could indeed work together to ensure a significant overhaul of Fisa.“I think that this is actually a bipartisan area of concern,” Jayapal said. “We have an opportunity here to ensure that any [Fisa] reauthorization that we pass contains some significant reforms that protect the privacy and the personal information of people across the country.”On the possibility of bipartisan Fisa reform efforts, Bush said she was “open to working with anyone who cares about real people and bringing about real change”, although she remained skeptical of Republicans’ commitment to the cause.“If that’s what they actually want to see, then yes, I’m open to working with them,” she said.Warren was even more dubious about bipartisan efforts to overhaul the FBI’s surveillance methods. Given Republicans’ decades-long history of endorsing the FBI despite its controversial tactics, he considered it unlikely that the party’s leaders would now embrace reform.“While the right and left may both see a problem with the FBI, I don’t see them agreeing on a reform solution,” Warren said. “The foundational challenge with federal law enforcement is that it broadly criminalizes communities of color and activists, and I think that, so long as those activists are environmental or [Black Lives Matter] ones, the right wing will be perfectly happy with the way things are going.” More