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      Trump makes case for ‘big, beautiful bill’ and cranks up pressure on Republicans

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      Donald Trump convened congressional leaders and cabinet secretaries at the White House on Thursday to make the case for passage of his marquee tax-and-spending bill, but it remains to be seen whether his pep talk will resolve a developing logjam that could threaten its passage through the Senate.The president’s intervention comes as the Senate majority leader, John Thune, mulls an initial vote on Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” on Friday, before a 4 July deadline Trump has imposed to have the legislation ready for his signature.But it is unclear whether Republicans have the votes to pass it through Congress’s upper chamber, and whether any changes the Senate makes will pass muster in the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority passed the bill last month by a single vote and which may have to vote again on a revised version of the bill.Trump stood before an assembly composed of police and fire officers, working parents and the mother and father of a woman he said died at the hands of an undocumented immigrant to argue that Americans like them would benefit from the bill, which includes new tax cuts and the extension of lower rates enacted during his first term, as well as an infusion of funds for immigration enforcement.“There are hundreds of things here. It’s so good,” he said. But he made no mention of his desire to sign the legislation by next Friday – the US Independence Day holiday – instead encouraging his audience to contact their lawmakers to get the bill over the finish line.“If you can, call your senators, call your congressmen. We have to get the vote,” he said.Democrats have dubbed the bill the “big, ugly betrayal”, and railed against its potential cut to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income and disabled people. The legislation would impose the biggest funding cut to Medicaid since it was created in 1965, and cost an estimated 16 million people their insurance.It would also slash funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), which helps Americans afford food.Republicans intend to circumvent the filibuster in the Senate by using the budget reconciliation procedure, under which they can pass legislation with just a majority vote, provided it only affects spending, revenue and the debt limit. But on Thursday, Democrats on the Senate budget committee announced that the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, had ruled that a change to taxes that states use to pay for Medicaid was not allowed under the rules of reconciliation.That could further raise the cost of the bill, which the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation recently estimated would add a massive $4.2tn to the US budget deficit over 10 years. Such a high cost may be unpalatable to rightwing lawmakers in the House, who are demanding aggressive spending cuts, but the more immediate concern for the GOP lies in the Senate, where several moderate lawmakers still have not said they are a yes vote on the bill.“I don’t think anybody believes the current text is final, so I don’t believe anybody would vote for it in it’s current form. We [have] got a lot of things that we’re working on,” the senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a top target of Democrats in next year’s midterm elections, told CNN on Wednesday.In an interview with the Guardian last week, the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski declined to say how she would vote on the bill, instead describing it as “a work in progress” and arguing that the Senate should “not necessarily tie ourselves to an arbitrary date to just get there as quickly as we can”.Democrats took credit for MacDonough’s ruling on the Medicaid tax, with the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, saying the party “successfully fought a noxious provision that would’ve decimated America’s healthcare system and hurt millions of Americans. This win saves hundreds of billions of dollars for Americans to get healthcare, rather than funding tax cuts to billionaires.” More

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      Senators to meet security officials amid questions over Trump’s decision to attack Iran – US politics live

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      Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines.Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as many question president Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.The classified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again, AP reported.Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who said Tuesday that it was “outrageous” that the Senate and House briefings were postponed. A similar briefing for House members was pushed to Friday.CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators on Thursday. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was scheduled to be at the Tuesday briefing, but will not be attending, according to a person familiar with the schedule.In other news:

      Trump weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic” and saying he and other progressive politicians were signs that “our Country is really SCREWED”.

      Trump has lit into journalists who are reporting on the doubts in the intelligence community that the US bombs actually decimated the Iranian nuclear sites. He has called for a CNN journalist to be fired over her reporting. CNN defended its journalist, Natasha Bertrand, and its stories on the matter.

      Emil Bove, a judicial nominee and justice department official, was grilled by a Senate committee and denied allegations in a whistleblower report about ignoring judicial orders and said claims of a quid pro quo for New York City mayor Eric Adams were false.

      Speaking of Eric Adams, he is expected to formally announce his mayoral run tomorrow. He is running as an independent. And he went on Fox and called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, a “snake oil salesman”.

      Mamdani, meanwhile, gathered congratulations (sometimes muted) from prominent Democrats after his upset win in the mayoral primary. On the right, Stephen Miller has cast Mamdani’s win as a symptom of “unchecked migration”.

      The Working Families Party called Mamdani’s win a “seismic shift” and shows that “voters are thoroughly fed up with the status quo”.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new vaccine advisory panel is meeting today for the first time. More

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      Usha Vance: husband’s pick as Trump running mate came ‘like a bolt of lightning’

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      Usha Vance learned her husband, JD, had been selected to be Donald Trump’s running mate “maybe five minutes” before the news was made public – and just about an hour before he was formally nominated.“It really was like a bolt of lightning,” Vance said during an interview on Meghan McCain’s podcast, Citizen McCain. Nearly a year later, seated in the vice-president’s residence on the grounds of the US naval observatory, Vance reflected on how significantly her life has changed in ways big and small. “People call you ma’am,” she said. “No one’s ever called me ma’am before this.”Until last summer, Vance, the daughter of immigrants and a one-time Democrat, worked as a lawyer at a progressive law firm, raising her three young children in Ohio. Now, as second lady, she is escorted by Secret Service and can’t leave a gym class without being recognized in Washington.During the nearly hour-long interview, Vance was not asked to weigh in on the political or policy agenda of the Trump administration – the president’s decision to strike Iran, the immigration raids that have roiled her native California or the crackdown on colleges and law firms.Instead, Vance spoke about how the second couple is working to create a sense of normalcy for their three young children, and how she hopes to use her role to “make things just a little bit better for other people”. She talked about missing Ohio, trying to keep her kids off screens, her husband’s love for baking, and losing “that sense of being anonymous in public”.Asked about being a first – Vance is the nation’s first south Asian and Hindu second lady – she said it has “not been something that people are hyper-focused on”.“Maybe we’ve just sort of moved beyond trying to count firsts of everything,” she said, while also noting that many people have told her “how proud they are and how excited they are for this”.“That does give me a little bit of a sense of purpose,” she said.At the end of the interview, McCain, a former host of The View and daughter of the late Republican senator John McCain, raised what she called the “elephant in the room” and asked whether Vance had considered the prospect “that you could be our first lady in a few years”.“I’m not plotting out next steps or really trying for anything after this,” Vance said. “In a dream world, eventually, I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things. And if that happens in four years, I understand. If that happens at some other point in the future, I understand. [I’m] just sort of along for the ride and enjoying it while I can.”Vance so far refrained from choosing a single social cause or project to champion, as her predecessors have done, worried that the response would be to “attribute some kind of political motive or start to polarize around it”. Still, she offered a glimpse of the issues that she may want to focus on in her role. Her office is hosting the “Second Lady’s 2025 Summer Reading Challenge”, which she described as “the first of many small attempts” to encourage reading and help draw “children into the world of things and not of devices”.At one point in the conversation, McCain revealed that she was expecting a third child – a boy – and asked Vance to “share with me and women in America why having three kids is good”. Vance congratulated McCain warmly, and described how her children operated as a “pack”, playing together and taking care of each other. She assured McCain that the transition from two to three children was “shockingly, the easiest of all”. More

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      Pam Bondi denies knowing Ice agents wore masks during raids despite video evidence

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      The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.Civil rights campaigners and democracy experts have criticised the raids as evocative of entrenched dictatorships and police states, and say it is a warning sign that the US is descending into authoritarianism.Peters said he understood officers’ concerns at being doxxed but said the failure to wear identifying insignia endangered both themselves and detainees.“The public risk being harmed by individuals pretending to be immigration enforcement, which has already happened,” he told Bondi. “And these officers also risk being injured by individuals who think they’re basically being kidnapped or attacked by some unknown assailant.“People think: ‘Here’s a person coming up to me, not identified, covering themselves. They’re kidnapping.’ They’ll probably fight back. That endangers the officer as well, and that’s a serious situation. People need to know that they’re dealing with a federal law enforcement official.”Bondi reiterated her proclamation of ignorance, saying: “It sounds like you have a specific case and will be happy to talk to you about that at a later time, because I’m not aware of that happening.”She turned the tables later in the hearing after Bill Hagerty, a Republican from Tennessee, condemned Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and the Democratic vice presidential candidate in last year’s election, for comparing Ice agents with Nazi Gestapo officers.“This is dangerous for our agents, it’s wrong, and it cuts against and it undercuts the rule of law,” said Hagerty, who invited Bondi to explain how she intended to tackle “leftwing radicals” who he said were attacking Ice agents.In response, the attorney general said that it was protesters who were concealing their identities when assailing officers.“Those people are the ones who have really been wearing the mask and trying to cover their identities,” she said, citing the recent demonstrations in Los Angeles, against which Donald Trump deployed national guard units. “We’ve been finding them. We have been charging them with assault on a federal officer.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska who has some voiced criticism of the Trump administration, told Bondi that her constituents were worried that resources had been transferred to immigration crackdowns at the expense of tackling violent crime.“We don’t have much of an Ice presence in Alaska,” she said. “All of a sudden, we’re now on the map. We have those that are being detained in our local jail that were flown up to the state several weeks ago to be detained up there.”She also cited the case of a restaurant owner who had been detained by Ice agents after living in the Alaskan city of Soldotna for 20 years. “His children are all integrated into the community,” Murkowski said.“The specific ask is whether or not immigration enforcement is being prioritized over combatting violent crime. And senator, before you walked in, I think senators on both sides of the aisle shared that same concern.”Bondi replied: “It is not and it will not. A lot of it does go hand in hand though, getting the illegal aliens who are violent criminals out of our country.” More

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      House Democratic veterans back moves to limit Trump’s military authority

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      A group of 12 House Democratic military veterans have thrown their weight behind efforts to constrain Donald Trump’s military authority, announcing they will support a War Powers Act resolution in response to the US president’s go ahead for airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.The veterans – some of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan – were strongly critical of Trump’s decision to launch what they called “preventive air strikes” without US congressional approval, drawing explicit parallels to the run-up to some of America’s longest recent wars.“Twenty years ago, in their rush to appear strong and tough, politicians – from both parties – failed to ask the hard questions before starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” they wrote in a letter led by Representative Pat Ryan to Trump sent on Monday. “We refuse to make those same mistakes.”Their intervention comes as multiple war powers resolutions are gaining momentum on Capitol Hill, with the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, pushing for a vote as early as this week to rein in the president’s military actions. The veterans did not specify which measure they would support, as competing versions are being drafted by different Democratic factions alongside a bipartisan effort.The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was enacted to limit the US president’s ability to commit armed forces to fight abroad without congressional consent in the form of a vote.Representatives Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, have been championing one bipartisan resolution, while the ranking Democrats on the House foreign affairs, armed services and intelligence committees are preparing an alternative, according to Punchbowl News.Democratic aides described the latter to the outlet as providing cover for members uncomfortable with backing the Massie-Khanna approach, though lawmakers will not be discouraged from supporting both measures.The adamance against the legality of America’s involvement has only intensified since Trump’s Saturday night strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, and the line from centrist to progressive Democrats has been to charge the president with executive overreach.The New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Trump’s impeachment, describing the attacks as “a grave violation of the constitution and congressional war powers”, while the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, accused the president of misleading Americans and dramatically increasing the risk of war.For the 12 veteran House members, the issue cuts to the heart of their military oath.“We all swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Article 1 Section 8 explicitly requires a vote by Congress to declare war,” they wrote, demanding clear answers about military objectives, estimated costs and potential American casualties before any escalation.The signatories included representatives Gilbert Ray Cisneros Jr, Eugene Simon Vindman, Chris Deluzio, Jimmy Panetta and Ted Lieu.Still, their letter walked a careful line on the broader Middle East conflict, labeling Iran as “evil” and pledging continued support for Israel while warning against the strategic limitations of military action. “While destroying nuclear sites may achieve initial tactical success, it far from guarantees longterm strategic victory,” they argued.The dispute has built on uncomfortable divisions within Trump’s own party, most notably with conservative influencers and independent news media that lean to the right, with Massie and senator Rand Paul emerging as Congress’s most vocal Republican critics of the Iran strikes.But Trump has since escalated his rhetoric, posting on Truth Social about potential “regime change” in Iran and asking: “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”Congressional leaders have also expressed frustration over the administration’s failure to provide adequate consultation before the weekend operation.While Schumer received a call from Trump officials, he was reportedly not told which country would be targeted, and Jeffries “could not be reached until after” the strikes had begun, according to the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. More

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      Trump’s military attack on Iran reveals split among Maga diehards

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      Saturday’s US strikes on Iran provoked conflicting reactions from isolationist Republicans who support Donald Trump’s Make America great again (Maga) movement, catching them – like many Democrats – between supporting efforts against nuclear proliferation and opposing American intervention in foreign conflicts.The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a loyalist to the president – reacted to the strikes by urging those in the US to pray that terrorists do not attack “our homeland” in retaliation.“Let us join together and pray for the safety of our US troops and Americans in the Middle East,” Greene wrote on X.But Greene had not been so supportive in a message posted 30 minutes before Trump announced news of the surprise strikes on Saturday evening.In that message, Greene wrote: “Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war. There would not be bombs falling on the people of Israel if [its prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu had not dropped bombs on the people of Iran first. Israel is a nuclear armed nation. This is not our fight. Peace is the answer.”The former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, who has been an opponent of US military intervention in Iran, hit out at the president for thanking Netanyahu in a national address shortly after the strikes.Speaking on his War Room web show, Bannon said, “It hasn’t been lost … that he thanked Bibi Netanyahu, who I would think right now – at least the War Room’s position is – [is] the last guy on Earth you should thank.”That came amid ongoing speculation that Trump’s decision to attack Iran’s nuclear sites on Saturday stemmed from information that Iran was close to developing a weapon – as supplied by Israeli, and not US, intelligence sources. The issue created an apparent split between Trump and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.The president recently criticized Gabbard and the US intelligence community, saying they were “wrong” in assessing that Iran had not taken the political step of ordering a bomb. Gabbard has denied that she and Trump were not on the same page.Nonetheless, Bannon continued his criticism of the strikes, saying: “I don’t think we’ve been dealing from the top of the deck.”The former White House adviser also criticized Trump for leaving open the possibility of further US strikes if Iran fails to capitulate to US demands. “I’m not quite sure [it was] the talk that a lot of Maga wanted to hear,” he said. “It sounded … very open-ended.”Days earlier, amid signs of a Maga rebellion against the administration’s increasingly hawkish stance on Iran, Bannon told an audience in Washington that bitterness over the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a driving force for Trump’s first presidential victory. “One of the core tenets is no forever wars,” Bannon said.Bannon, though, said “the Maga movement will back Trump” despite its opposition to military interventions.But there are now signs that the Maga “America first” isolationist position may be more amenable to limited airstrikes. The administration has stressed that Saturday’s raids only targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment and not manufacturing locations, population centers or economic assets, including the oil terminal at Karg island.The far-right influencer Charlie Kirk had warned of a Maga divide over Iran, saying “Trump voters, especially young people, supported [him] because he was the first president in my lifetime to not start a new war.”Yet on Sunday, Kirk reposted a clip of an interview with JD Vance on Meet the Press in which the vice-president praised the B-2 pilots from Missouri who carried out the previous day’s bombing.“They dropped 30,000 pound bombs on a target the size of a washing machine, and then got back home safely without ever landing in the Middle East,” Vance said in the clip. “Whatever our politics, we should be proud of what these guys accomplished.”In that interview, Vance suggested Trump had “probably” decided by mid-May that the diplomatic process with Iran was “not going anywhere”. But Vance refused to be drawn on when precisely Trump approved the strike, saying it probably came “over time”. More

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      Cheering support and instant condemnation: US lawmakers respond to attack on Iran

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      American politicians reacted to the news of the US bombing of nuclear targets in Iran with a mix of cheering support and instant condemnation, reflecting deep divisions in the country that cross party lines as Washington grapples with yet another military intervention overseas.Donald Trump announced on Saturday night that the US had completed strikes on three nuclear sites in Iran, directly joining Israel’s effort this month to destroy the country’s nuclear program.Earlier this week, the US president had signaled that Iran would get two weeks before he would make a decision about joining Israel’s military effort or steering clear – a timeline that evidently was shattered this weekend as the waiting posture was quickly reversed.The US attack came after more than a week of missile, drone and airstrikes by Israel on Iran’s air defences and offensive missile capabilities and its nuclear enrichment facilities. But it was widely held that only the US had the offensive firepower to reach a core part of Iran’s nuclear operations that were buried deep underground – an attack that has now taken place.The move sparked condemnation from Democratic California congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive in the party who has been critical of any US military action against Iran. Khanna and hard-right Republican congressman Thomas Massie were planning to introduce a measure that would force Trump to get congressional approval to enter Israel’s conflict with Iran.Khanna posted on X that Congress needed to vote on such action.“Trump struck Iran without any authorization of Congress. We need to immediately return to DC and vote on @RepThomasMassie and my War Powers Resolution to prevent America from being dragged into another endless Middle East war,” he said.Massie himself tweeted on X: “This is not Constitutional.”Massie and Khanna represent a rare moment of cross party cooperation in the deeply divided US political landscape, though some other Republicans also expressed doubt. Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – a stalwart of Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) politics – has been critical of any US attack on Iran and posted simply on X: “Let us all join together and pray for peace.”US Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, demanded of Senate majority leader and South Dakota Republican John Thune that he should immediately call a vote on the matter.Schumer said the US Congress must enforce the War Powers Act “and I’m urging leader Thune to put it on the Senate floor immediately”. The law is also known as the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and is intended as a check on the US president’s power to devote the United States to armed conflict without the consent of the US Congress.Meanwhile, at a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Saturday, on his “fighting oligarchy” tour, leftist Vermont senator Bernie Sanders read out Trump’s statement announcing the attack, prompting boos and rapid, loud chanting of “no more war” from the crowd. Sanders said: “I agree.”He then called the attack “alarming” and added: “It is so grossly unconstitutional”.New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went further and called for Trump’s impeachment – something that has been tried twice before. “The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment,” she said on X.Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, said Trump had “misled” Americans. “The risk of war has now dramatically increased, and I pray for the safety of our troops in the region who have been put in harm’s way,” he said in a statement.He added: “Trump misled the country about his intentions, failed to seek congressional authorization for the use of military force and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East.”The US vice-president, JD Vance, reposted Trump’s post on X announcing the US strikes, where the president had said: “We have completed our very successful attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran … There is not another military in the world that could have done this … Now is the time for peace!” Vance did not add any comment when he reposted. Both he, particularly, and Trump campaigned in the presidential election against US involvement in foreign wars.Other Democrats also came out strongly against the attack, echoing Khanna’s stance. “President Trump has no constitutional authority to take us to war with Iran without authorization from Congress, and Congress has not authorized it,” said Virginia congressman Don Beyer.Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi told the Guardian: “If Iran was not fully committed to building a nuclear bomb in an accelerated timeframe I’d be shocked if they are not now – have we just unleashed something that’s worse than what was happening before?”However, the strike on Iran also had support among some Democrats, notably Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman, who has been a hawkish supporter of Israel and advocated for the US to join Israel’s assault on Iran.“This was the correct move by @POTUS. Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and cannot have nuclear capabilities,” Fetterman posted.More predictably, hawks among Republican ranks reacted to the attack with congratulations to Trump for making the decision to intervene.“This was the right call. The regime deserves it. Well done, President @realDonaldTrump. To my fellow citizens: We have the best Air Force in the world. It makes me so proud. Fly, Fight, Win,” said Iran hawk South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who has long advocated for taking a hard line in support of Israel’s attack on Iran, on X.Former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz likened the attack to the US killing of the powerful Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in 2020 as he was being driven away from Baghdad international airport. “President Trump basically wants this to be like the Solimani strike – one and done. No regime change war. Trump the Peacemaker!” Gaetz said on X.Thune earlier in the evening, prior to Schumer’s comments, had said: “The regime in Iran, which has committed itself to bringing ‘death to America’ and wiping Israel off the map, has rejected all diplomatic pathways to peace. The mullahs’ misguided pursuit of nuclear weapons must be stopped. As we take action tonight to ensure a nuclear weapon remains out of reach for Iran, I stand with President Trump and pray for the American troops and personnel in harm’s way.”Oklahoma senator and Republican Trump loyalist Markwayne Mullin posted on X: “America first, always.”Reuters contributed reporting More

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      The Minnesota shootings illuminate the character of the Trump era | Sidney Blumenthal

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      In the early morning of 14 June, according to authorities, Vance Luther Boelter, disguised as a police officer and wearing body armor and a face mask, drove his black Ford Explorer SUV, equipped with flashing lights, to the home of the Minnesota state senator John Hoffman. There, he shot Hoffman nine times, critically wounding him, and shot his wife eight times as, relatives say, she threw her body over her daughter to shield her. He next drove to the home of the former house speaker Melissa Hortman, forced his way in, and killed her and her husband, officials say.The police arrived and Boelter fled, abandoning his car. In it they allegedly discovered a “kill list” of dozens of federal and state Democratic officials, mostly from Minnesota but also prominent Democrats in other midwestern states, and the sites of women’s healthcare centers and Planned Parenthood donors. He left behind notebooks with detailed descriptions of his target locations. On the lam, Boelter sent a text message to his family: “Dad went to war last night.”As soon as the earliest reports of the murders were published, with the sketchy information that Boelter had been appointed by Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, to one of many state boards, on which there are currently more than 342 vacancies, the rightwing swarm began spreading the falsehood that he was Walz’s hitman. Mike Cernovich, a notorious conspiracy-monger with a large following on X, tweeted: “Did Tim Walz have her executed to send a message?”Elon Musk jumped in, writing on X: “The far left is murderously violent.” The far-right activist Laura Loomer, who occasionally surfaces as an intimate of Donald Trump, tweeted that Boelter and Walz were “friends” and that Walz should be “detained” by the FBI.Within hours, Mike Lee, a Republican senator for Utah, used the platform of his office to push the disinformation. Over eerie night-time photos of Boelter in his mask and police outfit standing at Hortman’s door seconds before he opened fire, Lee tweeted, first at 9.50am on 15 June: “This is what happens. When Marxists don’t get their way.” At 10.15am, he tweeted, “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” misspelling Walz’s name.Lee expressed no sympathy or shock over the assassinations. He assumed the distance of the online tormentor gave him license. Like the mask-wearer, both were disinhibited by their contrived personas. Anything goes. Lee was doing more than blaming Walz for carrying out a bloody vendetta that conspiracy theorists had conjured. Lee created a cartoon. The killer was enlisted by the evil liberal governor to rub out someone who was in reality one of his closest allies. Like Boelter, Lee felt a compulsion to push himself in. The clamor of the far right pre-empted the emergence of the facts for Lee and served as his incitement.But, of course, Lee is a learned man who knew that what he was doing was malicious. The facts were always irrelevant. He trivialized a tragedy in order to implicate Walz as the villain commissioning the hit. Lee’s tone was one of mocking derision to belittle and distort. The killer, Walz and the victims were all tiny, dehumanized figures he arranged to illustrate his tweets. His manipulation was more than a maneuver. It was a revelation of Lee’s own mentality and political imagination he believed would be embraced to his advantage. His depraved humor was designed to cement fellow feeling between the jokester and his intended audience. He was playing to the gallery that he knew how to own the libs. He would gain approval and acceptance. In the hothouse in which he operates, he thought his mindless cruelty passed as wit.Soon enough it was reported that Boelter was not a Marxist or for that matter a hitman hired by Marxists. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Walz “did not know him” and Walz was on his “kill list”. Boelter was reportedly an abortion opponent, an evangelical Christian and a registered Republican who attended Trump rallies.Mike Lee is also a man in a mask. He altered his identity, discarding the veneer of a statesman for the Maga mask. Both Boelter and Lee profess to be men of faith, draping themselves in the authority of the law as one allegedly committed murder and the other hooted at it. They have both posed as heroic avengers and truth-tellers as they target victims. While speaking of God, the law and a higher calling, they worship at the shrine of Trump. The alleged assassin and the character assassin embody parallel lives that have intersected at the tragedy under the influence of Trump.One grew up in a traditional middle-class family; the other is a privileged son. Each of their fathers were prominent in their communities – one a high school coach, the other solicitor general of the United States. One graduated from St Cloud State University, the other from Brigham Young and its law school. One appeared susceptible to the latest conspiracy theories; the other knows these are lies but amplifies them anyway for personal aggrandizement to win the approval of the mob and its boss. One is a true believer; the other is a cynical opportunist. One is a “loser” in the Trump parlance. The other is a winner in the Trump galaxy. Both put their enemies in their crosshairs. One has been booked for homicide; the other is disgraced as a moral reprobate. One is indicted for his alleged crimes; the other has indicted himself. Both spiraled under Trump and both became lost souls, though Boelter would believe that he was found at last.Vance Luther Boelter grew up in the town of Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, one of five siblings, living in a large house, the captain of the high school basketball team, voted “most courteous” and “most friendly”, according to the Washington Post, and his father acclaimed in the Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame. But when he was 17, the mainstream Lutheran young man became a born-again Christian, living in a tent in the local park and shouting sermons to passersby.After he received a degree from a state university, he wound up at the Christ for the Nations Institute, a Texas Bible school that emerged in 1970 from a faith healing group founded by Gordon Lindsay. On the lobby wall of the school is a Lindsay saying: “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day.”Lindsay was also an organizer for the Anglo-Saxon World Federation, an antisemitic organization in the 1930s and 1940s that spread the doctrine of what was called British Israelism, that Anglo-Saxons, not the Jews, were the chosen people of God. The group distributed Henry Ford’s antisemitic tract, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, as well as Nazi propaganda, and preached that God would punish Franklin D Roosevelt. Lindsay was a close associate of Gerald Winrod, a pro-Nazi demagogue, who ran a group called Defenders of the Faith and was indicted for seditious conspiracy in 1944. After the war, British Israelism was rebranded as Christian Identity, a theocratic doctrine based in part on racist distinctions between superior and inferior races. Lindsay preached “spiritual war” against the satanic demons of secular culture.Boelter graduated in 1990 from the Christ for the Nations Institute with a degree in practical theology. He wandered as a missionary spreading his gospel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In one sermon, he said: “There’s people, especially in America, they don’t know what sex they are. They don’t know their sexual orientation. They’re confused. The enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul.”Boelter claimed he was the CEO of the Red Lion security group. He continued his soul-saving. “In the Middle East, I went to the West Bank, the Gaza strip, southern Lebanon, and I would give pamphlets to everybody I could,” he said in one sermon. He created a website for a religious group he called Revoformation. He managed a 7-Eleven store, a gas station, and after taking courses in mortuary science worked transporting bodies to a funeral home. He listened to Alex Jones’s stream of conspiracy-mongering, Infowars.Boelter created a website for a security firm called Praetorian Guard for which his wife was listed as the CEO and he was the head of security. He bought two cars that he fitted out to look like police cars, stockpiled weapons and uniforms, but had no known business. On 14 June, with his “kill list” in hand, he sent a message to a longtime friend: “I made some choices, and you guys don’t know anything about this, but I’m going to be gone for a while. May be dead shortly …”Boelter’s apparent disguise as a law enforcement officer was an expedient that tricked his victims into opening their doors. Pretending to be a police officer, he traduced the law to impose his idea of order.Christ for the Nations Institute issued a statement renouncing Boelter: “Christ For The Nations does not believe in, defend or support violence against human beings in any form.” It added that the school “continues Gordon Lindsay’s slogan of encouraging our students to incorporate passion in their prayers as they contend for what God has for them and push back against evil spiritual forces in our world”.Mike Lee took the news of the assassinations as the signal for him to tweet. Lee was born to Mormon royalty in Utah. His father, Rex Lee, was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, a principled conservative with an independent streak. He resisted pressure to argue cases on behalf of the administration against separation of church and state that would endorse government-sponsored prayer and religious symbols. He resigned in 1985, stating: “There has been a notion that my job is to press the Administration’s policies at every turn and announce true conservative principles through the pages of my briefs. It is not. I’m the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general.” Rex Lee became the president of Brigham Young University and dean of its law school, both of which his son attended.Lee was elected to the Senate in great part on the strength of the family name. In 2016, Lee endorsed Ted Cruz for the Republican nomination for president. When Trump wrapped up the nomination, Lee refused to endorse him. “I mean we can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK,” Lee said. “We can go through the fact that he has made some statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant.” Lee demanded: “I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender of the US constitution. That he is not going to be an autocrat. That he is not going to be an authoritarian.” Lee remained a holdout at the convention until the very end.By 2020, Lee touted Trump as a virtuous figure, comparing him to the self-sacrificing leader in the Book of Mormon. “To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” a hero in the Book of Mormon, Lee told a rally, with Trump standing beside him. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the wellbeing and the peace of the American people.”After Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Lee sent John Eastman, a law professor with a scheme to have the vice-president throw out the votes of the electoral college on January 6, to the Trump White House. While Trump focused on the insurrection, Lee strategized with the chief of staff, Mark Meadows – “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend”, Lee texted Meadows. Lee diligently worked to realize the coup plan using fraudulent electors. “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow,” Lee wrote Meadows.The journalist Tim Alberta, writing in the Atlantic, described a conversation Lee recounted with one of his staffers about Trump that went far to explain his motive for switching from a critic of Trump’s authoritarianism to a defender. “Donald Trump walks up to the bar,” said the staffer, “and he’s got a beer bottle in his hand, and he breaks the beer bottle in half over the counter and brandishes it.” Lee said he replied: “Immediately, a bunch of people in the room get behind him. Because he’s being assertive. And odds are lower, as they perceive it, that they’ll be hurt if they get behind him.”As Vance Boelter’s life unraveled, perhaps he imagined himself risen into a spirit warrior.Mike Lee knows better. To know better, but not to be better, is his peculiar disgrace. He lacks introspection into the source of his hateful behavior, except to offer the excuse that he won’t “be hurt” by Trump. Not to feel any ordinary emotion for the victims of a terrible and unprovoked crime and instead to engage in taunts betrays his father’s legacy and the shining figure of Captain Moroni, whom Lee has upheld. His fall from grace is one of the incidents that illuminates not only his but also the true character of the Trump era.

      Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast More