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      ‘Political theatre’: key takeaways from US universities’ House antisemitism hearing

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      Lawmakers questioned the leaders of the University of California at Berkeley, Georgetown University and the City University of New York in the final antisemitism hearing the House of Representatives has held since the 7 October attacks and ensuing war in Gaza broke out in 2023.Georgetown University’s interim president Robert Groves, Cuny’s chancellor Félix V Matos Rodríguez and UC Berkeley’s chancellor Rich Lyons faced scrutiny from Republican representatives – who questioned the universities’ hiring practices, faculty unions, Middle East study centers, foreign funding and DEI initiatives.Congress’s preceding antisemitism hearings featured tense exchanges between Republican lawmakers such as representative Elise Stefanik, and precipitated the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and Columbia.While denouncing antisemitism, Democratic lawmakers spoke out against the focus of the hearing, calling it “political theatre” and criticizing the Trump administration’s gutting of the government agencies that enforce civil rights protections.“I’d be remiss if I did not point out that this is our ninth hearing on antisemitism in 18 months,” said ranking member Bobby Scott, a Democrat from Virginia. “I’ll also note that since this committee’s first antisemitism hearing in December 2023 we have not held a single hearing addressing racism, xenophobia, sexism, Islamophobia or other challenges affecting other student groups on American college campuses.”1. Campus leaders denounced antisemitismIn their opening statements, each of the university leaders present at Tuesday’s hearings began their remarks by condemning antisemitism, and in many cases listing actions their campuses had undertaken to prevent future antisemitism.Georgetown was one of the first campuses to condemn the 7 October attacks, Groves said, adding: that “Antisemitism is incompatible with living our mission; the same applies to Islamophobia and racism.”“Berkeley unequivocally condemns antisemitism,” Lyons echoed. He added: “I am the first to say we have more work to do. Berkeley, like our nation, has not been immune to the disturbing rise in antisemitism.”Matos Rodríguez shared a similar remark: “Our university has not been immune, but let me be clear: antisemitism has no place at Cuny.” He added that the university now has a zero-tolerance policy toward encampments, like those students established at City College and Brooklyn College in 2024.2. Democrats criticized the Trump administration’s approachDemocratic lawmakers and witnesses noted that the Trump administration’s decision to shutter federal agencies tasked with enforcing civil rights protections will not protect Jewish students on college campuses.“Antisemitism in America and on campuses is real” but “this administration’s approach is contradictory and counterproductive,” said Matt Nosanchuck, a former deputy assistant secretary for the education department’s office for civil rights under the Obama administration. He urged that “Congress must fulfill its core responsibilites” to give agencies appropriate resources, not conduct political theatre.In his opening remarks, Scott criticized his fellow committee members for saying “nothing about the firings attacking the office of civil rights” or the supreme court decision allowing the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education. The Trump administration closed seven of the office of civil rights’ 12 regional offices in March.“If the majority wanted to fight antisemitism and protect Jewish students, they should condemn antisemitism in their own party and at the highest level of government,” said Democratic representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon. “They have failed to do so. Multiple White House officials have ties to antisemitic extremists.”3. Republicans questioned faculty hiring and union practicesTo begin the hearing, Walberg said that the committee would “be examining several factors that incite antisemitism on college campuses” including faculty unions and faculty membership in the group Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.He later questioned Matos-Rodríguez about a Hunter College faculty job posting looking for candidates who could “take a critical lense” to issues such as “settler colonialsm, genocide, human rights, apartheid” and others. Matos-Rodríguez called the listing “entirely inappropriate” and said he ordered it revised immediately upon learning about it.Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, focused her questioning on questions around faculty hiring and union practices. She questioned Matos-Rodríguez on the fact that the president of Cuny’s faculty union supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. She also questioned Lyons on Columbia’s hiring practices, which she said had allowed antisemitic faculty to join the staff.“We use academic standards to hire faculty. We don’t use ideological conditions to hire faculty,” Lyons said.4. Democrats called the hearings part of a greater move to defund higher education“I’m concerned by what I see happening here. Because instead of solving a problem, we’re watching some try to use antisemitism as a reason to go after higher education,” said representative Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina.“Let’s not forget as we sit here today, the Department of Education is withholding more than $6bn in congressionally mandated funding from our K-12 schools,” she added.During her questioning Bonamici also questioned whether the antisemitism hearings were motivated by “plans to defund colleges and universities”.5. Tensions ran high between Republican and Democratic committee membersFollowing an exchange between representative Elise Stefanik of New York and Cuny chancellor Matos Rodríguez, California representative Mark DeSaulnier yielded his time so Matos Rodríguez could “respond to that outrageous attack by my colleague”.Stefanik had denounced the university for having on its staff an attorney also leading the legal defense fund for Mahmoud Khalil, who she called “chief pro-Hamas agitator that led to the anti-semitic encampments at Columbia”.Earlier in the hearing, California representative Mark Takano called the committee’s hearing “a kangaroo court”. More

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      Republicans may slash $9bn for public broadcasting and foreign aid in days

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      Senate Republicans may as soon as Tuesday move to pass legislation slashing up to $9bn in funds Congress had earlier approved for foreign aid programs and public broadcasting, as part of Donald Trump’s campaign of dramatic government spending cuts.The GOP is racing to meet a Friday deadline mandated by law for the bill, known as a rescissions package, to pass Congress, otherwise the Trump administration will be forced to spend the money. The House of Representatives approved the legislation last month by a narrow majority.The package will cancel $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, and about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs. But some Republicans have blanched at those cuts, and the Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he had agreed with demands to preserve $400m in funding for Pepfar, a program credited with saving millions of people from infection or death from HIV that was created under the Republican president George W Bush in 2003.“There was a lot of interest among our members in doing something on the Pepfar issue,” Thune told reporters. He added that he hoped for procedural votes on the bill to begin on Tuesday and “we’ll see how those come out”.Changing the bill will require it to again be voted on by the House, and earlier in the day, the speaker, Mike Johnson, urged Senate Republicans to pass the version his lawmakers sent them.“We’re encouraging our Senate partners over there to get the job done and to pass it as is,” he said at a press conference.Thune has described the rescissions package as “commonsense legislation” that will target “waste, fraud and abuse” in government spending, a term Republicans have deployed repeatedly since Trump took office to criticize programs they seek to cut. Some cuts, he said, were recommended by the so-called “department of government efficiency” downsizing initiative that was previously led by Elon Musk.“My Democrat colleagues may not want to acknowledge it, but we have a serious spending problem in this country,” Thune said during a floor speech on Tuesday. “And the very least we can do in response is to target some of the egregious misuses of taxpayer dollars that we are addressing today in this bill.”While Democrats can use the Senate’s filibuster to stop the chamber from considering most legislation they oppose, a rescissions package can be passed with a simple majority. The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has warned that the bill is the beginning of a push by the Trump administration to reshape government services.“This package, as bad as it is, is a piece of a larger puzzle for Republicans. Their goal is to use rescissions, impoundment and pocket rescissions to eradicate any bit of bipartisanship out of appropriations, and that will pave the way for deeper and more serious spending cuts on things like healthcare, food assistance, energy and so many other areas,” he said.It remains unclear if the bill has the support it needs among Republican senators. Susan Collins, who represents blue state Maine and is expected to face a fierce re-election challenge next year, has criticized the package for slashing funds for important programs, rather than those identified as wasteful by the Trump administration.“This rescissions package, for the most part, has nothing to do with the lengthy list of questionable activities identified by the administration that were paid for with prior year funds,” she said late last month, as she chaired a Senate appropriations committee hearing into the request.In addition to opposing cuts to Pepfar, she signaled wariness to defunding public broadcasters.While Collins said she agreed with her fellow Republicans that programing on PBS and NPR had had “a discernibly partisan bent”, she believed there were “more targeted approaches to addressing that bias at NPR than rescinding all of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting”.Other Republicans from rural states, including Lisa Murkowski, a moderate representing Alaska, have expressed skepticism over targeting public broadcasters, arguing they provide an important source of information in the countryside. On Tuesday, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota announced his support for the bill after assurances that broadcasters in Indian reservations would continue receiving funds.“We wanted to make sure tribal broadcast services in South Dakota continued to operate which provide potentially lifesaving emergency alerts. We worked with the Trump administration to find Green New Deal money that could be reallocated to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption,” he wrote on social media.Butall four Democrats in North Carolina’s congressional delegation have signed a letter to Senate leaders warning of the consequences of cutting public broadcasting, which they said provides “trusted, accessible, and crucial communication tools during natural disasters” such as last year’s Hurricane Helene. More

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      Democrats demand Pam Bondi and Kash Patel be summoned for Epstein hearing

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      Democratic members of the House judiciary committee on Thursday demanded that Republicans summon the attorney general, Pam Bondi, the FBI director, Kash Patel, and their deputies for a hearing into the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death and the sex-trafficking case against him.The letter from all 19 Democratic members on the committee to its Republican chair, Jim Jordan, comes amid a rift between Donald Trump and some of his supporters over the justice department’s conclusion, announced last week, that Epstein’s death in federal custody six years ago was a suicide, and that there is no secret list of his clients to be made public.The US president, who knew Epstein personally, has long claimed that there is more to be made public about his death and involvement in running a sex-trafficking ring for global elites. Last week’s report, together with the justice department’s announcement that nothing further about his case would be made public, has sparked rare criticism of Trump among the rightwing influencers and commentators who are usually among his most ardent defenders.In their letter, Democrats argued that the matter can only be settled if Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, along with Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, appear before the judiciary committee.“The Trump DOJ and FBI’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, and president Trump’s suddenly shifting positions, have not restored anyone’s trust in the government but have rather raised profound new questions about their own conduct while increasing public paranoia related to the investigation,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote.“Only a bipartisan public hearing at which administration officials answer direct questions from elected representatives before the eyes of the American people can restore public trust on the matter.”A spokesperson for Jordan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Democrats have sought to capitalize on the questions raised by the justice department’s announcement, and earlier on Tuesday, House Republicans blocked an attempt by the minority to force release of documents related to the Epstein case.Last week, most Democrats on the judiciary committee signed a letter to Bondi that accused her of withholding some files related to the financier to protect Trump from any damaging disclosures. It went on to call for the release of any documents in the Epstein files that mention Trump, as well as the second volume of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified materials.In this week’s letter, Democrats argued that only a congressional hearing would resolve whether there is indeed a cover-up over Epstein’s death, or if Trump was just promoting conspiracy theories as he sought an advantage on the campaign trail.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We must submit to public scrutiny President Trump’s and MAGA’s longstanding claims about the ‘Epstein files,’ new questions as to whether President Trump himself has something to hide, whether he is keeping damaging information secret to protect other individuals or to maintain future blackmail leverage over public and private actors,” the lawmakers wrote, “or, perhaps the simplest explanation, whether President Trump and his Administration magnified and disseminated groundless Epstein conspiracy theories for purposes of political gain which they are now desperately trying to disavow and dispel.”The reignited turmoil over the Epstein case has sparked reports that Bongino, a former podcaster who has long promoted conspiracies about his death, clashed with Bondi and is considering resigning his position at the FBI.Over the weekend, Trump defended Bondi in a post on Truth Social and pleaded with his supporters. “One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about,” he wrote. More

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      How the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files became a vehicle for QAnon

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      The release of the “Epstein client list” has long been the holy grail for the Maga movement. Supposedly, this list, once released, would incriminate a veritable who’s who of liberal elites complicit in Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking operation and expose the moral rot at the heart of the Democratic establishment.The mystery surrounding the Epstein files also became a vehicle for QAnon conspiracy theorists to push their ideas about a “deep state” cover-up of a network of global pedophiles into the broader tent of the Maga movement.During his campaign, Donald Trump promised on several occasions to declassify the Epstein files, which would include the “list”. Before they joined the government, Trump’s FBI chief, Kash Patel, and deputy FBI chief, Dan Bongino, spent years on podcasts and TV appearances winking at QAnon and Epstein conspiracy theorists and demanding the files’ release, even suggesting that the Biden administration was withholding them to protect its own.Then, on the heels of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, the justice department quietly dropped a bombshell in the form of a memo. A “systematic review” of the Epstein files by justice department officials “revealed no incriminating ‘client list’,” the memo stated, nor did they find evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful figures. The memo also affirmed that Epstein died by suicide in his Brooklyn jail cell while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019.Since the memo’s release, Maga has been in turmoil – and some of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers have been in open revolt against his administration, accusing it of now being part of a cover-up and calling for the resignation of the attorney general, Pam Bondi, over her handling of the Epstein files.On Truth Social, Trump offered a stern rebuke to his detractors, claiming that the Epstein files were actually a hoax, because they were written by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration”.But not everyone’s buying it.“This is the worst response I’ve ever seen from President Trump,” said the rightwing commentator Benny Johnson. The disgraced former general Michael Flynn, considered a hero by the QAnon movement, wrote: “@realdonaldtrump please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR IS NOT GOING AWAY.” The rightwing commentator Matt Walsh called Trump’s statement “extremely obtuse”, adding: “We don’t accept obvious bullshit from our political leaders.”Maga’s obsession with the Epstein files is an indication of how the core ideas associated with the fringe QAnon conspiracy – that a shadowy cabal of government elites is working to cover up a global child sex-trafficking operation – have taken root in the broader pro-Trump movement.QAnon took a long tradition of antisemitic, “deep state” and “satanic panic” conspiracy theories, put them on steroids with a pro-Trump flavor, and assigned the enigmatic Q, supposedly a government official with top secret clearance and a penchant for posting on 8chan, at the helm of the movement.“The unique thing about QAnon is that you had an anonymous poster on an anonymous chatroom putting out clues for people to try to solve,” said Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami specializing in the study of conspiracy theories.When QAnon emerged in 2017, allegations against Epstein had been swirling for over a decade.Epstein’s arrest in 2019 on federal charges was a boon for QAnon. The movement quickly sought to incorporate information about the case into their propaganda. The case also surfaced a trove of digital media that QAnon sleuths could pore over looking for “clues” – such as photographs of Epstein with various public figures (including many with Trump), Epstein’s flight logs and aerial images of his private island.“Epstein engaged in crimes, but I think there’s a whole fantasy lore surrounding it that goes far beyond any available evidence,” said Uscinski.Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism, told the Guardian that as “QAnon and Maga have become increasingly intertwined in recent years, we have seen the embrace of increasingly fringe conspiracies and extremist narratives like ‘Pizzagate’ and ‘Save the Children’ by mainstream political figures.”These narratives turned out to be useful for Trump and his allies, who harnessed simmering suspicion of establishment figures and cast the former reality star as the only person brave enough to take on “the deep state”.“As Trump and other prominent Republican figures amplified QAnon content and used it as a political cudgel against Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, they were providing legitimacy and approval to the very same conspiracy theorists who are now decrying Pam Bondi and the justice department,” said Lewis.Tensions over the Epstein files have been building since February, when Bondi went on Fox News and said Epstein’s client list was sitting on her desk “right now for review.” A week later, at a press event at the White House, Bondi handed out binders that she promised contained “declassified” Epstein records to two dozen Maga influencers. The influencers quickly realized there was basically no new information in them. In response to the ensuing backlash, Bondi said that the FBI had failed to disclose a tranche of Epstein files, and that she had ordered Patel to compile them.Months later, in June, Elon Musk – amid the dramatic feud with his former friend Trump – claimed without evidence that the reason the Epstein files hadn’t been released in full was because the president was implicated in them. (Musk has since deleted the post.)The scale of the current Maga meltdown “certainly shows the significance of Epstein conspiracies within the broader QAnon pantheon”, said Lewis, and “should lay bare just how deeply the disease of the QAnon movement has seeped into a Republican party which has welcomed its most conspiratorial, antisemitic, reactionary fringe into Congress and the executive branch with open arms”.The backlash Trump is facing is a leopards-eating-faces moment for the administration.“This was a conspiracy that Donald Trump, Pam Bondi and these Maga extremists have been fanning the flames of for the last several years, and now the chickens are coming home to roost,” the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, told reporters Monday.Uscinski noted that’s “the interesting thing that happens when you use conspiracy theories to get into power”.“Because conspiracy theories should be aimed at the people in power, right? They accuse powerful people of doing something wicked behind the scenes,” he added.In Trump’s case, he “spent the last 10 years building a coalition of largely conspiracy-minded people in the US”, said Uscinski. “So in order for him to keep these people engaged and donating and going to his speeches, and voting for him and voting for Republicans, he has to keep pressing the conspiracy theories.”But experts are skeptical that this current Maga meltdown will have any lasting impact.Trump’s overall approval rating hasn’t fluctuated dramatically over the past week. In fact, it’s almost at exactly the same place it was at the same point in his first administration.“[Trump’s supporters] are disgruntled, they’re upset and they’re going to express that on social media. But they’re not going to abandon him, because he’s the only game in town for them,” said Uscinski.He compared the current moment to the backlash Trump faced back in 2021. After courting favor from anti-vaxxers, Trump was booed when he announced during a live Bill O’Reilly interview that he had received his Covid-19 booster shot and urged Americans to get theirs.Despite the importance of the Epstein files to the Maga and QAnon movements, Lewis thinks that “it’s unlikely this outrage will last”.“The culture war will move on to its next target … and the rage machine will follow with conspiracies and vitriol,” said Lewis. “It’s much easier to be angry at an immigrant than to wonder whether you’ve been lied to for the last eight years.” More

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      Blood and bravado: the Trump shooting upended an election and shook the US

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      Blake Marnell was standing in the front row, about 10 yards from Donald Trump, when the shots rang out. He watched the Secret Service pile on the former US president. “I was able to see him standing and I could see the blood on his ear,” Marnell recalls. “When he put his fist up, I remember yelling, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’”Sunday marks one year since the assassination attempt on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a week that changed US politics. Eight days later then-president Joe Biden, 81, dropped out of the election race amid concerns over his mental and physical decline.The twin shocks to the system of July 2024 continue to echo. Trump’s supporters hailed his survival as proof of divine intervention. He declared in his inaugural address in January: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” He has governed with a zealous self-belief that earns comparisons with authoritarians from history.Democrats, meanwhile, continue to wrestle the fallout of Biden’s late withdrawal. Some argue that he could have pushed on and won; most believe that he left the race too late and paved the way for Trump’s return to the White House. Younger voters accuse the party establishment of betrayal and beat the drum of generational change.What few dispute is that the shooting of Trump was indicative of a culture of political violence that has taken hold over the past decade, with recent examples including the murder of a Minnesota politician and her husband. It also set in motion a news cycle that has barely drawn breath over the past year as the most unconventional president of modern times dominates the national consciousness.View image in fullscreenFor Marnell, who lives in San Diego, California, that hot summer’s day in Butler began like dozens of the other Trump rallies he has been to before and since. He was wearing a “brick suit” that symbolises the president’s border wall and looked up at a giant screen that displayed a chart detailing US-Mexico border crossings.Trump had his head turned to the right to review the graphic when the gunfire began and nicked his right ear. “I didn’t even recognise them as gunshots,” 60-year-old Marnell said in a phone interview. “I thought they might be firecrackers.”For several long seconds there was pandemonium. Firefighter Corey Comperatore was killed while David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both hospitalised with injuries. Secret Service agents killed the gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks, whose motives remain a mystery, and rushed on top of Trump, whose fate was initially uncertain.“There was every range of emotion in the crowd. There was anger. There were people who turned around and were yelling at the TV cameras. There were people who were in prayer. There were people crying. There were people who were in disbelief. It was just an incredible gamut and range of reactions.”But what happened next became the stuff of political legend. Trump rose, pumped his fist and beseeched his followers to “Fight! Fight! Fight” even as blood streaked his face. The resulting image flashed around the world and is still displayed in the West Wing and worn on T-shirts by his “Make America great again” (Maga) acolytes.Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinktank in Washington, said: “He showed courage and determination when you’d think the first thing somebody wants to do is slink away and save themselves. His response was to be the medieval chieftain who was rallying his troops round the banner and showing that he was undeterred to fight, to use his word. It was incredibly moving.”Biden was quick to call Trump and express sympathy. On 17 July, Biden tested positive for Covid-19. On 19 July, Trump, wearing a patch on his ear, delivered a 90-minute address at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee, where some delegates wore ear patches in solidarity.Then, on 21 July, Biden suddenly announced that he was stepping aside and would not be the Democratic nominee for president. The writing had been on the wall since his disastrous debate performance against Trump the previous month. Party leaders such as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer had urged him to withdraw. Finally, he yielded.View image in fullscreenEven by the standards of the Trump era, it had been a jaw-dropping eight days. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “There have been dramatic weeks and months but, in an election campaign, there’s just nothing like it in all of American history.”Journalist Chris Whipple was working on a different project when he heard the news of Biden’s exit, “realised this was the political story of the century”, and pivoted to writing a book that would become Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.“It created that devastating split screen between the strengths of Trump and the weakness of Biden,” Whipple said. “The image of Trump rising off that stage with blood on his cheeks and his fist in the air mouthing ‘fight, fight, fight’ was devastating in comparison to the image of Biden shortly thereafter climbing off Air Force One with Covid headed to his bunker in Rehoboth Beach, standing on those steps, looking lost and gripping the handrail.”In their new book 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf write how Trump’s future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told him after the assassination attempt: “You do know this is God.” At first Trump was silent, they write, but by the next day he was telling everyone: “If anyone ever doubted there was a God, that proved there was.”Numerous speakers at the Republican convention insisted that Trump had been spared by God so that he could pursue his mission. The Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell refers to it as a “millimetre miracle”.Whipple added: “To this day the true believers think this was God’s plan and maybe – without playing armchair psychologist – it’s contributed to a kind of fearlessness in Trump that I’m not sure we saw in the first term. Some might say recklessness. It changed Trump. It changed the country.”Conversely, the Democrats have still not recovered from the debacle of Biden’s late departure. His anointed successor, Kamala Harris, had only 107 days to campaign and ignited a burst of Democratic enthusiasm, notably at the party convention and when she debated Trump. But it was too little too late and she lost both the electoral college and the national popular vote.Whipple commented: “It was a seismic political event and the reverberations continue to this day. His 11th-hour abdication, leaving Kamala Harris with too short a runway to mount a winning campaign, obviously is historic and there is to this day a lot of anger among Democrats about the fact that Biden should have stepped away a year earlier or more.View image in fullscreen“That has real political ramifications. We’re seeing it in the popularity of ZohranMamdani in New York and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. It’s not just their message which is appealing to so many but also the fact that they’re anti-establishment. Biden and his gang have come to represent the corrupt Democratic establishment because of his last-minute abdication. You’re seeing an anti-establishment revolt.”Biden’s determination to cling on has been the subject of Democratic hand-wringing – and several books – though he insists he has no regrets. Many in the party wish he had stepped aside after the 2022 midterm elections so it could have held an open primary contest to find an heir apparent. Now Democrats find themselves leaderless and, according to a March poll, at a record low approval rating of 29%.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and political commentator, said: “The real fallout was the lack of a clear successor to President Biden.“Had there been a real primary process that would have been able to unfold over the course of a year and a half, it would have weeded out the contenders and pretenders and would have put forward a ticket that, even if they ended up losing, could still have been very much part of the conversation heading into 2028. Instead, we’re starting 2028 already behind.”How elections are won and lost is always complex. With inflation and immigration looming large, there is no guarantee that another Democratic candidate would have beaten Trump. Nor will it ever be known how determinative his made-for-TV response to the assassination attempt was. But it did have some important consequences.Within minutes of the shooting, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, announced his endorsement of the former president. Musk would go on to spend a record of about $280m in backing Trump and Republican candidates, then lead the president’s assault on the federal bureaucracy until their spectacular falling-out.The Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, also praised Trump’s reaction, calling his raised fist “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life”. Zuckerberg went on to attend Trump’s inauguration and make changes to Meta such as ending third-party fact-checking, removing restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bringing political content back to users’ feeds.The events of one year ago may also have shaped Trump’s psychology, fuelling an impatient, seize-the-day approach to the presidency that sets the news agenda at breakneck speed, knocks opponents back on their heels and brooks no compromise.Olsen said: “Trump dialed it up to 11 on his inauguration. A lot of that is the indirect influence of his survival of the assassination attempt. This is a man who is going with his instincts and going to do what he’s going to do and not going to prioritise – he’s going to push everything everywhere all at once.”Trump has survived legal troubles and taken on the elites and won, at least in his own mind, Olsen added. “I don’t think he thinks he’s invincible but he feels vindicated. Coupled with a sense of vulnerability means this is a guy who knows that everything could end tomorrow and believes he’s been proven right, so he’s darn well going to use the time that he has left to him to move forward to do even more that he believes is right.” More

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      David Gergen, ex-adviser to Republican and Democratic presidents, dies aged 83

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      David Gergen, a veteran of Washington politics and an adviser to four presidents, Republican and Democrat, in a career spanning decades in government, academia and media, has died. He was 83.Gergen was perhaps best known for a line he summoned for then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan for a TV debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”The question hit a nerve in a nation wracked by inflation and a hostage crisis in Iran. The answer came back no, and Reagan won the White House.Gergen later reflected that “rhetorical questions have great power. It’s one of those things that you sometimes strike gold. When you’re out there panhandling in the river, occasionally you get a gold nugget.”Gergen served in the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Reagan and Bill Clinton, racking up stints as speechwriter, communications director and counselor to the president, among other roles.He entered politics after serving in the US navy in the 1960s, taking a job as a speechwriting assistant for Nixon in 1971 and rising rapidly to become director of speechwriting two years later. He later served as director of communications for both Ford and Reagan, and as a senior adviser to Clinton and secretary of state Warren Christopher.Between stints in government, he managed a successful media career, working variously as an editor at US News & World Report, on the PBS show the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and with CNN and CBS.In 2000, he published Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership: Nixon to Clinton, a memoir of his time in government. Reflecting on his time in the White House, he wrote of several essential elements a leader should possess.They included inner mastery; a central, compelling purpose rooted in moral values; a capacity to persuade; an ability to work within the system; a sure, quick start; strong, prudent advisers; and a passion that inspires others to carry on the mission.In a second book, Hearts Touched With Fire: How Great Leaders are Made, published two years later, he wrote: “Our greatest leaders have emerged from both good times and, more often, challenging ones. … The very finest among them make the difficult calls, that can ultimately alter the course of history.”Gergen, a North Carolina native, was a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, and returned there after his political career to establish the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. He received 27 honorary degrees over the course of his career.After his passing was announced late Friday, former colleagues remarked on his capacity for bipartisanship and collaboration.Al Gore, who served as Clinton’s vice-president, posted on X: “Of the countless ways that David Gergen contributed to our great country, what I will remember him for most was his kindness to everyone he worked with, his sound judgment, and his devotion to doing good in the world.”Dean Jeremy Weinstein of the Harvard Kennedy School, said Gergen “devoted decades of his life to serving those who sought to serve”.Gergen reportedly told his daughter Katherine Gergen Barnett after the November 2024 election that “we are going through a period of fear. We have been tested, we are being tested now, but we must recognize that politics in our country is like a pendulum,” CNN said.A month later, when Gergen’s dementia diagnosis was disclosed, she penned his thoughts in a column for the Boston Globe.“‘As awful as life is currently in the public sphere, there is still reason to believe in our country and its leadership and to go into service,’” she quoted Gergen as saying. “‘Americans can endure any crisis, but they need to continue to take a sense of responsibility for their country.’” More

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      2024 book review: the what-ifs of an election that took US closer to autocracy

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      Donald Trump is on a roll. The “big, beautiful bill” is law. Ice, his paramilitary immigration force, rivals foreign armies for size and funding. Democrats stand demoralized and divided. 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, is a book for these times: aptly named, deeply sourced.Kamala Harris declined to speak. Joe Biden criticized his successor in a brief phone call, then balked. Trump talked, of course.“If that didn’t happen … I think I would’ve won, but it might have been a little bit closer,” he says of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, which set the race alight.Yet 2024 is about more than the horse race. It also chronicles how the elites unintentionally made Trump’s restoration possible, despite a torrent of criminal charges against him, 34 resulting in convictions, and civil lawsuits that saw him fined hundreds of millions of dollars.“Trump always drew his strength from decades of pent-up frustration with the American democratic system’s failures to address the hardships and problems the people experienced in their daily lives,” Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf write.“In 2024, [Trump’s] supporters saw institutions stacked against them … leading them to identify viscerally with his legal ordeal, even though they had not experienced anything like it before.”Dawsey is a Pulitzer prize winner, working political investigations and enterprise for the Wall Street Journal. Pager covers the White House for the New York Times. Arnsdorf was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the assassination attempt.Dawsey and Pager are Post alumni. With Arnsdorf, they capture the aspirations and delusions of Trump and the pretenders to his Republican throne, of Biden and Harris too.“In the weeks after the election, Biden repeatedly told allies that he could have won if he’d stayed in the race,” 2024 reports, “even as he publicly questioned whether he could have served another four years.”Really? Biden’s approval rating fell below 50% in August 2021 and never recovered. From October 2023, he trailed Trump. A year out, the authors reveal, Barack Obama warned his former vice-president’s staff: “Your campaign is a mess.”Biden’s aides privately derided Obama as “a prick”.“They thought he and his inner circle had constantly disrespected and mistreated Biden, despite his loyal service as vice-president.”As for Harris, Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf report that she “knew that the race would be close, but she really thought she would win”.Despite that, David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser, admitted post-election that internal polls never showed her leading.“I think it surprised people because there were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” he said. Harris’s debate win never moved the needle.Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf contend that the outcome was not foreordained. Rather, they raise a series of plausible-enough “what-ifs”. One is: “If the Democrats got clobbered, as expected, in the 2022 midterms, and Joe Biden never ran for re-election.”Except, by early 2022, according to This Shall Not Pass, a campaign book published that year, Biden saw himself as a cross between FDR and Obama.A telephone conversation between Biden and Abigail Spanberger, a moderate congresswoman now the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia, captures Biden’s self-perception.“This is President Roosevelt,” Biden begins, before thanking Spanberger for her sense of humor.She replies: “I’m glad you have a sense of humor, Mr President.”Back to 2024. Biden bristled at being challenged. Pushback risked being equated with disloyalty. His closest advisers were either family members or dependent on him for their livelihoods. He lacked social peers with incomes and personages of their own.Mike Donilon, a longtime aide, tells the authors: “It was an act of insanity by the Democratic leadership to have forced Biden out.“Tell me why you walked away from a guy with 81m votes … A native of [swing-state] Pennsylvania. Why do that?”Because Biden’s debate performance was a gobsmacking disaster. He also found navigating the stairs of Air Force One difficult and needed prompts to find the podium. In May 2025, Biden announced that he had been diagnosed with stage-four prostate cancer – a disclosure that came after 2024 went to press.The authors of 2024 pose Republican hypotheticals too. One: “If Trump never got indicted, or if Republicans didn’t respond by rallying to him, or if the prosecutions were more successful.”Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, demonstrated a lack of nerve. Glaringly, he failed to use the initial E Jean Carroll trial, over the writer’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her, to bolster his presidential ambitions. DeSantis didn’t dispatch his wife, Casey DeSantis, to Manhattan to offer daily thoughts and prayers for the plaintiff, or for Melania Trump. If you want to be the man, first you’ve got to beat the man.Another hypothetical: “If Trump and Biden didn’t agree to an early debate …”That question hangs over everything.Trump’s pronouncements leave Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf anxious. After the 2022 midterms, he mused about terminating the constitution. Later, on the campaign trail, he spoke openly of being a “dictator for a day”. When he was back in the West Wing, reporters asked: “Are you a dictator on day one?” “No,” he replied. “I can’t imagine even being called that.”Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf then catalog Trump’s unilateral actions on that first day, including stripping political opponents of security clearances. Later that month, he commenced his vendetta against law firms he deemed to be enemies. In February, Trump barred the Associated Press from the White House press pool unless the news agency referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.2024 contains no mention of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Perhaps it should have made space. Hungary’s leader is an autocrat in all but name, an elected leader who has removed freedoms regardless. Republicans adore him.

      2024 is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Georgia Republican’s Ponzi scheme defrauded people of $140m, say officials

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      A prominent Georgia Republican was running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded 300 investors of at least $140m, federal officials alleged in a complaint filed on Thursday.The civil lawsuit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said First Liberty Building and Loan, controlled by Brant Frost IV, lied to investors about its business of making high-interest loans to companies. Instead, investigators said, it raised more money to repay earlier investors.Frost is alleged to have taken more than $19m of investor funds for himself, his family and affiliated companies even as the business was going broke, spending $160,000 on jewelry and $335,000 with a rare coin dealer. Frost is also said to have spent $320,000 to rent a vacation home over multiple years in Kennebunkport, Maine, the town where the family of late president George HW Bush spent summers.The SEC said Frost kept writing checks even after the commission began its investigation.First Liberty said in June that it would stop making loans and paying interest and principal to investors in those loans. The company said it was not answering phone calls or emails.First Liberty has not responded to an email seeking comment, and no one was present at its office on Thursday evening in Newnan, a suburb south-west of Atlanta. A lawyer who acts as the company’s registered agent for corporate purposes said earlier that he had no information.The collapse rocked the religious and political networks that the business drew investors from. It also could have ramifications in state Republican politics, cutting off funding to the far-right candidates that Frost and his family have favored. Investigators said Frost spent $570,000 from investor funds on political contributions.The SEC said the business had only $2.67m in cash as of 30 May, although regulators are also seeking to claw back money from Frost and associated companies. With 300 investors out $140m, that means the average investor put in nearly $500,000.First Liberty said it made loans to companies that needed cash while they waited for more conventional loans from the US Small Business Administration (SBA). It charged high rates of interest – 18% on some loans, according to a document obtained by the Associated Press. First Liberty promised investors equally high rates of return – 16% on the 18% loans.In recent months, the business advertised heavily on conservative radio shows promising “Wall Street returns for Main Street investors”.“The promise of a high rate of return on an investment is a red flag that should make all potential investors think twice or maybe even three times before investing their money,” Justin C Jeffries, associate director of enforcement for the SEC’s Atlanta regional office, said in a statement.The company has represented that it is “cooperating with federal authorities as part of an effort to accomplish an orderly wind-up of the business”. The SEC said Frost and his companies agreed to the SEC’s enforcement actions “with monetary remedies to be determined by the court at a later date”.While the SEC says there were loans to companies, as many as 90% of those companies have defaulted. By 2021, the company was running as a Ponzi scheme, the complaint said, even as Frost withdrew increasing amounts of money.The business is being investigated by the Georgia secretary of state for possible violations of securities law, said Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for the office.A 2023 document obtained by the AP is titled as a “promissory note”, and Sinners said anyone issuing promissory notes is supposed to be registered with Georgia securities officials.Sinners encouraged any victims to contact the state securities division.Federal prosecutors have declined to comment on whether they are considering criminal charges. Sometimes both an SEC civil case and a federal criminal case are filed over investment frauds.Frost has been an important player in Georgia politics since 1988, when he coordinated televangelist Pat Robertson’s Republican presidential bid in the state. His son, Brant Frost V, is chairperson of the Coweta county Republican party, where the company is based – and is a former second vice-chairperson of the state Republican party. Daughter Katie Frost is Republican chairperson of the third congressional district, which includes Coweta county and other areas south-west of Atlanta.At June’s state Republican convention, Katie chaired a nominating committee that recommended delegates re-elect state party chairperson Josh McKoon. Delegates followed that recommendation, rejecting a number of insurgent candidates. More