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    Joe Biden issues pardon for son Hunter as Trump rails against ‘miscarriage of justice’ – US politics live

    President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to pardon those convicted after storming the US Capitol in Washington on January 2021 and took the opportunity to raise the issue.“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?“Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social social media platform.A loving act of mercy by a father who has already known much sorrow? Or a hypocritical political manoeuvre reminiscent of his great foe? Maybe both can be true.Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he had pardoned his son Hunter, who is facing sentencing in two criminal cases, is likely to have been the product of a Shakespearean struggle between head and heart.On the one hand, Biden is one of the last great institutionalists in Washington. “From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making,” he said in an unusually direct and personal statement on Sunday. To undermine the separation of powers goes against every fibre of his political being.On the other hand, Biden is nothing without family. His speeches are peppered with references to his parents. As a senator, he once took a train from Washington to Wilmington, Delaware, so he could blow out the candles on a birthday cake for his eight-year-old daughter, Ashley, at the station, then cross the platform and take the next train back to work.Biden was profoundly shaped by the death of his first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, and 13-month-old daughter Naomi in a car accident and, much later, the death of his son Beau from brain cancer. In that context, Hunter’s status as the first child of a sitting president to face criminal charges will have pained his father in what Ernest Hemingway called “the broken places”.Read my full analysis below
    Today, I signed a pardon for my son Hunter. From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form. Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently.
    The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election. Then, a carefully negotiated plea deal, agreed to by the Department of Justice, unraveled in the court room – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process. Had the plea deal held, it would have been a fair, reasonable resolution of Hunter’s cases.
    No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.
    For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.
    Hunter Biden issued a statement following his father’s announcement“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter Biden said in a statement on Sunday, adding he had remained sober for more than five years.“In the throes of addiction, I squandered many opportunities and advantages … I will never take the clemency I have been given today for granted and will devote the life I have rebuilt to helping those who are still sick and suffering.”Hello and welcome to our live coverage of US politics.On Sunday night, before boarding a plane to Angola, US president Joe Biden issued a pardon to his son Hunter – something he had repeatedly said he would not do.Biden said he hoped the American people would understand his decision to issue the pardons over convictions on federal gun and tax charges.“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong,” he said.Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced for his conviction on federal gun charges on 12 December.He was scheduled to be sentenced in the tax case four days later. Joe Biden is just weeks away from leaving office. More

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    Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler joins race for Democratic National Committee chair

    Wisconsin Democratic leader Ben Wikler joined the race to lead the Democratic National Committee on Sunday, promising “to take on Trump, Republican extremists, and move our country forward”, as the party looks to rebuild from its losses in the November election.In a video posted on social networks, Wikler, 43, touted his state party’s success in organizing to flip 14 state legislative seats and send Senator Tammy Baldwin back to Washington DC in November, and in previously campaigns to win control of the state supreme court and re-elect governor Tony Evers. Wikler, a former podcaster, Air America radio producer and headline writer for The Onion, also stressed his new media expertise.Wikler who has been involved in Democratic party politics since age 11, previously served as a producer on comedian-turned-politician Al Franken’s radio show and as Washington director for the progressive action group MoveOn, where he played a role in the successful battle to save the Affordable Care Act.“Our values – the core belief that our economy should work for working people, and that every person has inherent dignity and deserves freedom and respect – are American values,” Willer wrote on Bluesky. “But they’re not MAGA values. The richest and most powerful people want to divide us and enrich themselves.”“We’ve got to make sure that we are reaching people with the message that we are on their side and fighting for them,” Wikler told Reuters in a telephone interview.Wikler, who has served as chair of the Democratic party of Wisconsin since 2019, is among several candidates looking to replace Jaime Harrison, the current chair who is not seeking re-election when the party votes early next year.Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, Minnesota Democratic chief Ken Martin and New York state senator James Skoufis also are vying to become the new Democratic chair.Democrats are trying to chart the way forward after losing the White House and control of the Senate, as well as failing to retake the House of Representatives.Wikler said the national party could learn from organizing efforts he has overseen in Wisconsin, even though Kamala Harris narrowly lost the state to Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWikler said Democrats also need to focus on the president-elect’s economic agenda, which he claimed will favor wealthy Americans rather than working families.“For Democrats, this is a critical time to unite and fight back against Trump’s plans,” Wikler said.Wikler’s entry into the race was welcomed by the teachers union leader Randi Weingarten, who wrote that he “understands how to organize and communicate”, and journalist Connie Schultz, who knows Wikler from his time as spokesperson for her husband, Senator Sherrod Brown. More

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    Trump defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s mother called him ‘an abuser of women’

    The family dynamics of Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, have burst out into the open after an email from his mother criticizing her son over his treatment of women and calling him an “abuser of women” was leaked to a newspaper.A 2018 email from Penelope Hegseth accused her son of routinely mistreating women and displaying a lack of character.“You are an abuser of women – that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego,” Penelope Hegseth wrote in the email obtained by the New York Times.“You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth,” she added, advising her son to “get some help and take an honest look at yourself”.Penelope Hegseth told the New York Times she had written the message “in anger, with emotion” while her son was going through an acrimonious divorce from his second wife, Samantha, the mother of three of his children, and had immediately apologized to her son in a second email.She rejected her earlier characterization of her son to the outlet. “It is not true. It has never been true,” she said. She added: “I know my son. He is a good father, husband.” She said that publishing the contents of the first email was “disgusting”.The release of the letter comes ahead of Hegseth’s confirmation hearings in the Senate after Trump takes office on 20 January, in which the veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will come under scrutiny.Hegseth, a former Fox & Friends host, is already facing questions over payments he reportedly made to a woman who accused him of sexual assault – an encounter that he insists was consensual.Hegseth’s attorney has said his client was “visibly intoxicated” at the time of the incident in a Monterey, California, hotel in 2017 and police who had looked into the woman’s claim had concluded that “the complainant had been the aggressor in the encounter”.In a statement, Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said his client had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the woman because he feared that revelation of the matter “would result in his immediate termination from Fox”.Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told the Times that the outlet was “despicable” for publishing “an out-of-context snippet” of Penelope Hegseth’s exchange with her son. More

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    Thanksgiving in America, when obsequious Trumpers genuflect to the president-elect | Arwa Mahdawi

    JD Vance is being weird againMelania Trump has made it clear that her second stint at being first lady will be conducted entirely on her own terms. It’s been reported that she’s unlikely to move back to the White House and will spend a lot of the next four years flitting between New York and Florida. Maybe she’ll write another coffee table book. Maybe she’ll develop another caviar-infused skincare line. Who knows. But whatever she does, it’ll be in the service of her own interest, rather than the country’s.With Melania not particularly interested in being by Donald’s side, there’s a void to be filled. And it looks like JD Vance and Elon Musk are furiously competing to win the incoming president’s affections. Musk has basically been camping out at Mar-a-Lago since the election, and has earned “uncle status” according to Trump’s granddaughter Kai.The tech billionaire also had a seat at the Trump family table for Thanksgiving dinner, where he bopped to YMCA and presumably had a little giggle over a bizarre AI-generated video Trump tweeted which showed Donald popping out of a turkey Joe Biden was about to carve and gyrating. It’s not clear if Musk, who spent the rest of the day tweeting self-aggrandizing videos of himself, had any quality time with his children over the holiday but that seems to be his MO: urging people to have multiple kids while ignoring his own.JD Vance may be the next vice-president but from the looks of it, Musk very much seems to be Trump’s number two. Vance looks keen to change that, however, and celebrated Thanksgiving with a weird tweet of his own. The vice-president-elect posted an edited image of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Thanksgiving painting Freedom from Want with Trump’s face Photoshopped on the patriarch and Vance Photoshopped over the wife. (To be clear: it’s not explicitly stated who the matriarch figure is in the painting but, while Rockwell’s cook is the model, the woman is often interpreted as being the wife of the man she’s standing next to.) In the original painting, the matriarch is holding up a turkey. In Vance’s version he – clad in an apron and blue dress – is holding up a very red map of America. Once upon a time Vance compared Trump to Hitler; now he’s eagerly doctoring pictures so he can depict himself as Trump’s trad wife.Why would Vance embarrass himself like this? Former Kamala Harris adviser Mike Nellis reckons “Vance is worried about Elon having more influence than him, so he thought posting this weird ass meme would win him favor again.” I’m not sure anyone should listen to a Democratic strategist about anything ever again but this interpretation does seem about right.While I couldn’t tell you exactly what went through Vance’s head when he posted an image of himself as an aproned matriarch, I can very confidently say that we have (at the very least) four more years of these sorts of posts. Forget the banality of evil, the Trump administration represents the inanity of evil: we’re going to see the passing of inhumane policies, the rollback of reproductive rights, and the gutting of public services alongside idiotic memes designed to “own the libs”. The online trolls have crawled out from below the bridge and now advise the president; the shitposters are in charge now.I guess it’s totally fine to threaten Muslim congresswomen in the US nowSpeaking of trolls, Trump-endorsed congressional candidate and Florida state senator Randy Fine tweeted a casual death threat to Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar – the only Muslim women in Congress – this week. “The Hebrew Hammer is coming,” Fine tweeted. “[Rashida Tlaib] and [Ilhan Omar] might consider leaving before I get there. #BombsAway.” Can you imagine if Tlaib or Omar had delivered a similar message to Fine? It would be front-page news and Biden would have made an outraged statement. This was barely covered. Fine is the same guy, by the way, who cheered the murder of 26-year-old American citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, an activist reportedly killed by the Israeli forces while peacefully protesting illegal settlements in the West Bank.Blue Origin deletes video of female astronaut after sexist commentsAstronaut and MIT-trained engineer Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman in space when she joined six space tourists in a Blue Origin launch. An Instagram video of her excited reaction to being in space was inundated with misogynistic comments, which led to Blue Origin taking it down. Being a woman in the public eye is a real barrel of laughs!A fifth woman has died as a likely result of abortion bansAccording to ProPublica, Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old Texas woman, is the fifth woman who is known to have died because their medical care was delayed after miscarriages or because they couldn’t undergo legal abortions.Fox News’ Jesse Watters: ‘Trump’s going to treat Denver like a woman. He’s going to protect the city whether they like it or not’Poor Denver.Brazilian congressional committee votes for bill to ban abortion in all casesThat includes in cases of fetal deformation, rape or when the mother’s health is in danger. The proposed bill has to go to a special committee before it can advance further but the fact it has got this far is alarming.Walmart is the latest company to abandon its DEI initiativesThe right has declared war on DEI and it looks as if they’re winning. Not a good time for my (satirical) company Rent-a-Minority, I’ve got to say.Gen Z isn’t a big fan of dating apps“There is a growing romanticisation of in-person meeting and interaction,” one expert told the Guardian.Former ICC chief prosecutor says she faced threats and ‘thug-style tactics’Fatou Bensouda has said she experienced direct threats to herself and her family just for doing her job. Meanwhile, the US government and its allies continue to undermine the ICC and international law.Israel’s finance minister proposes ‘thinning out’ Gaza’s population“It is possible to create a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years,” the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on Monday. (While these remarks were covered by the Israeli press, they strangely didn’t seem to be deemed newsworthy by a lot of the US press.) Israeli settlers are already preparing to occupy the strip and build new houses next to mass graves.The week in pawtriarchyWould you like to see a picture of a poorly penguin named Flop who learned to walk again because zoo staff made her a bespoke baby bouncer and treadmill? Of course you do. This Guardian piece is guaranteed to make you pen-grin. More

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    Trump cabinet criticized as hodgepodge team unified only by ‘absolute fealty’ to him

    During Donald Trump’s first administration, his vice-president became the target of an angry mob amid calls for him to be hanged. His top diplomat was fired via Twitter and branded “dumb as a rock”. His first attorney general was given his marching orders and called “very weak” and “disgraceful”.Despite it all, Trump has had no trouble recruiting a team eager to serve when he returns to the White House in January, even if his initial pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was forced to back out amid allegations of sexual misconduct.Trump’s cabinet for his second term is nearly complete just three weeks after his stunning election victory over Kamala Harris. To his Maga (Make America great again) followers it is a team of all the talents, poised to enforce an agenda of mass deportations, gutting the federal bureaucracy and “America first” isolationism.To critics with memories of Trump’s first cabinet, however, it is an ideological hodgepodge glued together only by unquestioning fealty to the incoming 78-year-old commander-in-chief. Some have compared it to the gathering of exotic aliens in the Star Wars cantina. Others predict they will soon be fighting like rats in a sack as different factions compete for Trump’s attention.“The same thing that happened last time will happen this time,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. “He cannot resist chaos. It is his drug. He will eventually start doing what he always does and turn on different people and start sandbagging his own choices for these various jobs.“It’s that pattern he has. He comes out one day and says, ‘I love so and so,’ and then the next he’s talking to his friends saying, ‘Hey, you think Tillerson’s doing a good job or is he screwing me over?’ Those things are patterns we’ve seen in Trump’s personal life, his business life and his prior administration. An 80-year-old man is not going to be a changed person.”Eight years ago, Trump arrived in Washington as a political neophyte in need of a helping hand. He appointed a cabinet that included traditional conservatives of whom he knew little. This time, he returns as a former president who has transformed the Republican party and prioritises unwavering loyalty and adherence to his agenda over qualifications and experience.This was most obvious sign of this was the selection of Gaetz for attorney general, a position key to Trump’s plans to deport undocumented immigrants, pardon January 6 rioters and seek retribution against those who prosecuted him over the past four years. Gaetz’s replacement, Pam Bondi, is a longtime ally who declared after Trump was criminally charged that the “investigators will be investigated”.View image in fullscreenThere was a similar motivation behind the choice of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, for defence secretary despite him having no track record in government. Hegseth fits with a drive to purge perceived “woke” policies from the military. He has denied allegations made in a police report that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017 at a conference in California.Trump’s selections are sending mixed economic signals. The nomination of the Wall Street billionaire Scott Bessent to head the treasury implies an attempt to reassure markets (it is also notable because Bessent used to work for George Soros, the target of countless rightwing conspiracy theories). But Howard Lutnick, nominated for commerce secretary, has praised the president-elect’s proposed use of tariffs. Vice-president-elect JD Vance is also among those pushing a more protectionist agenda on trade.And Trump’s pick of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a congresswoman from Oregon, as labor secretary could be one of the rare selections that draws bipartisan support. She is considered one of the most union-friendly Republicans in Congress, and her selection was viewed as a way for Trump to reward union members who voted for him.On foreign policy, Trump made a relatively conventional choice in Marco Rubio for secretary of state. The Florida senator has advocated in the past for a muscular foreign policy with respect to foes including China, Iran and Cuba. But the president-elect also intends to put Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat who has previously made statements sympathetic to Russia, as director of national intelligence.Other picks include Brooke Rollins, president of the America First Policy Institute thinktank, as agriculture secretary; Doug Burgum, a wealthy former software company executive, as interior secretary; and Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, as education secretary – overseeing an agency that Trump pledged to eliminate.Then there is Robert Kennedy Jr, an anti-vaccine activist and sceptic of established science. Kennedy’s career as an environmental lawyer could put him at odds with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” philosophy and figures such as Lee Zeldin, set to lead the Environmental Protection Agency with a mandate to slash environmental regulation. Kennedy has also been condemned by Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and other social conservatives for supporting abortion rights.Outside the cabinet, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, while lacking official authority, signals a strong push for drastic budget cuts and deregulation. And despite campaign trail denials, Trump has embraced Project 2025, a controversial plan from the Heritage Foundation thinktank, by appointing figures such as Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe person who will have to make sense of it all is Susie Wiles, a longtime Florida political operative who will become the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff. She will hope to avoid the fate of chiefs of staff who failed to last the course of Trump’s first term as, like a sports coach, she seeks to make disparate players gel into a cohesive whole.In an analysis for the New York Times, David Sanger, who has covered five US presidents, identified “a revenge team”, “a calm-the-markets team” and “a government shrinkage team”, commenting: “How these missions will mesh and where they will collide is one of the biggest unknowns of the incoming administration.”But others argue that the cabinet’s range of experiences and worldviews will pale into insignificance when set against their devotion to the Trump cult. Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, said: “Regardless of whatever individual ideological leanings these people have had at varying points in their adult lives, it’s largely irrelevant because the only litmus test we have seen put forward is absolute fealty to Donald Trump.“As we have seen in the Republican party overall, absolute fealty to Donald Trump overshadows any ideological belief. We could take almost every issue that used to be a part of the Republican party and show how the party has moved to a diametrically opposite position. This is not a party governed by ideology any more. It is governed by personality. It is governed by loyalty to Donald Trump.”Bardella, a former Republican congressional aide, added: “They’re all going to get in a room and they’re just going to go: ‘Here’s what we think. What do you think, boss? Oh, OK, well, that’s what we’re all going to do.’ The idea that there’s going to be ideologically rooted debate, vigorous debate happening in the Trump administration is absurd. It’s laughable.”Notably, Trump’s cabinet is more diverse than in his first term, although it again has only three people of colour in secretary positions. Rubio would be the first Latino to serve as America’s top diplomat; Bessent could become the first openly gay Republican cabinet member confirmed by the Senate; Gabbard would be the first director of national intelligence from the Pacific Islander community.But seasoned Trump watchers detect no method in the madness and suspect that the former reality TV star will once again act on impulse and thrive on conflict. Chris Whipple, the author of The Gatekeepers, a book about White House chiefs of staff, said: “I don’t think there’s any evidence that Trump has learned anything about governing since his first term.“There’s a lot of wishful thinking among a lot of commentators that OK, he’s had four years in office, he learned a lot, he’s had all this time to plan with Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute and he’s got his act together. I just don’t think that’s true. I don’t see any evidence that there’s any sort of plan here other than ‘this guy looks good for that job, and Robert F Kennedy Jr has got a cool last name’.” More

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    Trump cabinet picks shaped by new power centers in his orbit

    Donald Trump’s picks for the incoming administration are being shaped by a combination of different power centers including one-man influences like top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and combined groups led by chief of staff Susie Wiles and vice-president-elect JD Vance.The president-elect appears to have settled on a number of cabinet nominees himself without being aggressively pushed by advisers, including Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Russ Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget.But for other cabinet roles or major White House positions for which Trump did not have a clear preference or a frontrunner in mind, a handful of individuals with outsized influence have come to dominate the decision-making in meetings and interviews being held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.There are still factions, according to half a dozen people involved in transition planning, though they have been nowhere near as concrete as they were in 2017, when there were clear demarcations between Trump’s family, the Republican National Committee, establishment Republicans and people allied with Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon.And in recent months, the previously distinct camp informally led by Wiles, who has had influence over West Wing picks and some cabinet roles, and the other camp led by Vance have combined and engulfed the wider Trump orbit, the people said.“It’s ever-shifting sands of allegiance. The people who you think are your friends may not be the case in 24 hours. We’re all friends but none of us are friends,” said one person adjacent to the Trump team.Although there are people in Trump’s orbit who disagree with Epshteyn, there is universal acknowledgment that he has had significant influence in the first weeks of the presidential transition, a reflection of Trump’s appreciation for his help in coordinating the defeat of the criminal cases against him.When Trump floated the idea of having the congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, Epshteyn was supportive of him during a round-trip flight from Palm Beach, Florida, to Washington when the president-elect announced he was nominating Gaetz.View image in fullscreenAfter the Gaetz nomination sank in the face of holdout Senate Republicans refusing to confirm him over sexual misconduct allegations, Trump nominated as a replacement former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi – who has been friendly over the years with Epshteyn.Epshteyn has also played key roles in finalizing the leadership at the justice department, recommending that Trump keep his personal lawyers in key jobs: Todd Blanche for deputy attorney general, Emil Bove for the principal deputy position and John Sauer for solicitor general.One through-line about those lawyers was that they were successful in delaying until after the election the federal criminal cases against Trump, which were dismissed on Monday. But the other was that they were all recruited by Epshteyn.Epshteyn, whose physically imposing presence is regularly fitted into a navy three-piece suit, has flexed his power away from the department as well, recommending Bill McGinley to be the next White House counsel.Epshteyn has told associates that the choices are for Trump to make. Some of the picks he has suggested have been names endorsed by other allies or people who have appeared on his longtime friends Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.From the outside, Bannon pushed for McGinley to be White House counsel and may yet get another victory if Trump picks Kash Patel, a regular guest on War Room, for the FBI director or the deputy FBI director roles for which he remains in the running, the Guardian has reported.Bannon lobbied for Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget and, in a particularly audacious play, managed to get Sebastian Gorka, the deeply polarizing national security aide from the first Trump administration, into the incoming team as the senior counter-terrorism director.He also played an instrumental role in bringing Scott Bessent to the fore, according to a person directly familiar with the matter. Bannon made the first introduction to Trump years ago, while his allies have advocated for him at Mar-a-Lago and pushed his agenda.View image in fullscreenBut a main power center for cabinet picks is widely seen to rest with JD Vance’s crew, which pushed for Bessent to be named as treasury secretary and Brendan Carr to lead the Federal Communications Commission, among others.The Vance crew is informally said to involve Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr – who pushed for Vance to be his father’s running mate – and Don Jr’s close advisers including Arthur Schwartz and Andrew Surabian, as well as former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.In addition to being seen as getting Bessent the nod when Trump still had his doubts, the Vance crew have earned additional juice with Trump in probably securing enough Republican votes for Hegseth to be confirmed as defense secretary, despite another set of sexual misconduct allegations.For West Wing picks, the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, has extended her personal influence with Trump. Wiles has mostly been able to get the staff of her choosing without having to fight against competing interests.Wiles’s top aides have landed in deputy chief of staff roles, including James Blair for legislative policy, Taylor Budowich for presidential personnel and Steven Cheung as communications director – although the factions are amorphous and Budowich and Cheung are also close to the Vance crew.Then there are individuals – relative newcomers to the Trump orbit – who have been in transition meetings at Mar-a-Lago as a result of their unique situations: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is also the co-chair of the Trump transition team.By weighing in on major cabinet picks, Musk has gotten on the nerves of some Trump loyalists, including Epshteyn, who have complained that the billionaire knows little of the Trump agenda they are trying to bring about and has little idea about who would be best placed to enact it.Lutnick has retained his authority through his transition co-chair role, although he recently engaged in some accidental self-sabotage by pushing too hard to be treasury secretary and appeared to have been caught in a leak investigation over the nominee for secretary of agriculture.Trump was irritated by Musk’s post on X pushing Lutnick for treasury secretary, which gave an opening for his main rival Bessent to secure the job instead. Still, Lutnick has continued to be close to Trump and last week was named commerce secretary.Musk, who is staying off-site in Palm Beach, has become more judicious with his interactions with Trump since that episode and after he secured himself his own role to lead the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”. More

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    Trump victory not a mandate for radical change, top election forecaster says

    Despite Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the presidential election, a political scientist who developed a model that correctly predicted his sweep of battleground states warns that voters have not necessarily given the president-elect a mandate to make radical changes.In a paper released with little fanfare three weeks before the vote, Cornell University professor of government Peter Enns and his co-authors accurately forecast that Trump would win all seven swing states, based on a model they built that uses state-level presidential approval ratings and indicators of economic health.In an interview with the Guardian, Enns said his model’s conclusions suggest voters chose Trump not because they want to see his divisive policies implemented, but rather because they were frustrated with the state of the economy during Joe Biden’s presidency, an obstacle Kamala Harris was not popular enough to overcome.“If this election can be explained by what voters thought of Biden and Harris and economic conditions, it really goes against the notion of a mandate for major change from Trump,” said Enns.“If Trump was looking to maximize support, being cautious about changes that are massive changes would be what the model suggests is the optimal strategy.”On the campaign trail, Trump promised norm-shattering measures to accomplish his objectives, ranging from deploying the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants to levying trade tariffs against allies that do not cooperate with his administration.On 5 November, voters responded by giving Trump an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, and also by making him the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.Both outcomes were predicted in the paper released on 15 October by Enns, Jonathan Colner of New York University, Anusha Kumar of Yale University School of Medicine and Julius Lagodny of German media firm El Pato. At the time, polls of the seven swing states showed Trump and Harris tied, usually within their margin of error, signaling that the election was either’s to win.Rather than focusing on the candidates’ support nationwide or in the swing states, Enns and his co-authors built a model that combines two types of data: presidential approval ratings from all 50 states using data from Verasight, the survey firm he co-founded, among others, and a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia index measuring state-level real income, manufacturing and labor market conditions. Both sets of data were compiled more than 100 days before the vote.Enns first deployed the model in the 2020 presidential election, where it correctly predicted the outcome in 49 states, with the exception of Georgia. This year, Enns and his co-authors wrote that Harris, who took over as the Democratic nominee for Biden in late July, was on track to lose both the popular vote and the electoral college, including battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia.“If Harris wins the election, we will not know exactly why, but we will know her victory surmounted conditions so disadvantageous to the Democratic party that the incumbent president dropped out of the race. She will have added major momentum to the Democratic campaign and/or Trump and the Republican party will have squandered a sizable advantage,” Enns and his co-authors wrote.The forecast wound up being accurate, though, with ballot counting continuing in a few states, Trump seems set for a plurality victory in the popular vote, not the 50.3% majority they predicted.Then there’s the question of whether Biden would have done better if he had stayed in the race. The 82-year-old president has been unpopular through most of his term as Americans weathered the highest inflation rate since the 1980s, even as the labor market recovered strongly from the Covid pandemic. Biden was also dogged by concerns about his age and fitness for office, which culminated in a terrible debate performance against Trump in June that led him to drop out of the race weeks later.“Given Biden’s low approval ratings and economic conditions, our model forecasted less than a one in 10 chance of a Biden victory if he had stayed in the race. Even after accounting for Harris’s approval ratings, which are notably higher than Biden’s, the Democrats face an uphill battle,” the authors wrote.If Harris had a chance to overcome the disadvantages she entered the race with, Enns said it would have required convincing voters she would be a very different president than her boss – which it appears she failed to do.“There’s some economic headwinds, there’s the Biden incumbency headwinds. And what I think that suggests is, given these headwinds that Harris faced, the optimal strategy would have been to differentiate herself more from Biden,” Enns said.But the vice-president’s fate may have been sealed in the years that preceded her bid for the White House, when she failed to build the sort of public profile that would have pushed her approval ratings up to the level that she needed them to be.“If she had been more popular, you can think about what could have happened to make our forecast wrong. So the fact that 100 days out, our forecast was so accurate, that really enhanced the campaign, had minimal effect on the outcome,” Enns said.“The task at hand was to outperform the forecast, and her campaign wasn’t able to do that.” More

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    Trump Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth’s books foreground anti-Muslim rhetoric

    Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, who has the crusader motto “deus vult” tattooed on his arm, has put bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric at the center of several of his published books, according to a Guardian review of the materials.Hegseth, especially in 2020’s American Crusade, depicts Islam as a natural, historic enemy of the west; presents distorted versions of Muslim doctrine in “great replacement”-style racist conspiracy theories; treats leftists and Muslims as bound together in their efforts to subvert the US; and idolises medieval crusaders.Experts say that Hegseth’s view of Islam is riven with falsehoods, misconceptions and far-right conspiracy theories. Yet Hegseth, if his nomination is successful, will head the world’s largest military force at a time of conflict and instability in the Middle East.The Guardian emailed Hegseth and the Trump transition team for comment and received no response.The Guardian has previously reported that in his 2020 book Hegseth calls for an “American Crusade”, targeting both “internal” or “domestic enemies” and the enemies of Israel. Hegseth also connected the two, writing: “We have domestic enemies, and we have international allies … it’s time to reach out to people who value the same principles, relearn lessons from them, and form stronger bonds.”‘False, totally wrong’In American Crusade, Hegseth presents the medieval crusades as a model for Christian-Muslim relations, but one historian of the period says his presentation of the history of that period is “just totally wrong”.In a chapter entitled Make the Crusade Great Again, Hegseth writes: “By the eleventh century, Christianity in the Mediterranean region, including the holy sites in Jerusalem, was so besieged by Islam that Christians had a stark choice: to wage defensive war or continue to allow Islam’s expansion and face existential war at home in Europe,” adding: “The leftists of today would have argued for ‘diplomacy’ … We know how that would have turned out.”Hegseth continues: “The pope, the Catholic Church, and European Christians chose to fight – and the crusades were born,” and “Pope Urban II urged the faithful to fight the Muslims with his famous battle cry on their lips: ‘Deus vult!,’ or ‘God wills it!’”Hegseth has a tattoo of the same crusader slogan, which is also associated with Christian nationalism, white supremacist and other far-right tendencies.For Hegseth, the crusaders’ short-lived victories in the Holy Land means they can be credited with safeguarding modern values. “Enjoy Western civilization? Freedom? Equal justice under the law? Thank a crusader,” having written the same thing again earlier in the chapter.Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and the author, with David Perry, of Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.In a telephone conversation, he said that Hegseth’s picture of Muslim encroachment in the 11th century was misplaced.“There were absolutely no incursions into mainland Europe,” he said, adding “If anything, Islam was kind of on the retreat in Iberia and other places as well. So there was no large geopolitical shift or any kind of immediate threat of Islam taking over Europe.”On Hegseth’s presentation of the crusades as a victory for the west against Islam, Gabriele said: “The Crusaders lost. They lost everything.“The idea that they kind of like emerged victorious is absolutely false.“This narrative of the crusades as a defensive war, where if the Christians didn’t launch this offensive towards Jerusalem that Europe would be overrun has been a bog-standard narrative on the right: it’s something that was espoused by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, in 2011 and by the Christchurch shooter a few years ago.”On Hegseth drawing a direct line between the crusaders and the modern west, Gabriele said: “It’s the worst kind of simplistic thinking,” adding: “Anybody who tells you these simple stories is selling something.”“The British were invaded, and they didn’t even know it”Elsewhere in American Crusade, Hegseth repeatedly characterizes Muslim immigration to Europe as an “invasion” in a way that mimics racist “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories about immigrants displacing white populations.At one point he tries to connect – an expert says falsely – an aspect of Islamic history with the purported “capture” of Europe.Hegseth writes: “In Islamist circles, there’s a principle known as hegira,” and then claims: “This term refers to the nonviolent capture of a non-Muslim country.”Hegseth writes: “Hegira is a cultural, physical, psychological, political, and eventually religious takeover. History is replete with examples of this; and because history is not over, it’s happening in the most inconceivable places right now.”Hegseth posits the US as an example where, he claims: “Radical mosques and schools are allowed to operate. Religious police control certain sections of many towns. Sharia councils dot the underground landscape. Pervasive political correctness prevents dissent against disastrous policies such as open borders and nonassimilation.”Adducing proof, Hegseth bizarrely writes: “Take the British cities of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Blackburn, Sheffield, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale. What do they all have in common? They have all had Muslim mayors.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor Hegseth, this shows: “The British were invaded, and they didn’t even know it. In one generation – absent radical policy change – the United Kingdom will be neither united nor a Western kingdom. The United Kingdom is done for.”He adds: “The same can be said across Europe, especially following the disastrous open-borders, pro-migrant policies of the past few decades. Countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands threw open their doors to Muslim ‘refugees’ and will never be the same because of it.”According to Hegseth, countries that do not restrict Muslim immigration ignore that “Islam itself is not compatible with Western forms of government. On the other hand, countries that want to stay free … are fighting like hell to block Islam’s spread.”Jasmin Zine is professor of Sociology and Muslim Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the author of a book-length report, The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North.Zine said Hegseth’s narrative appeared to be an “Islamophobic conspiracy theory distorting the practice of ‘hijra’ or the migration of the Prophet Muhammad and early Muslims from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD looking for safety from persecution”, which “is now being used to promote the xenophobic idea of a Muslim ‘takeover’ of the west”.Zine added: “These ideas are also linked to white nationalist demographic replacement conspiracies about Muslim birth rates in the west (AKA ‘demographic jihad’) and scare stories about ‘creeping shariah’, which have spawned retaliatory ‘crusader’ narratives in far-right subcultures.”‘Hard-core leftism provides the best gateway for Islamism’At other points in American Crusade, Hegseth appears to try to scapegoat Muslims for familiar conservative grievances, in narratives that suggest Muslims and leftists are colluding to undermine the US.In case of a Biden victory in 2020, Hegseth predicted that an “anti-Israel and pro-Islamist foreign policy” would be introduced along with “speech codes instead of free speech, bye-bye Second Amendment” and “naked socialism, government-run everything, Common Core education for everyone, a tiny military, and abortion on demand – even postbirth”.Hegseth also tries to connect his narrative with gripes about supposed censorship on social media platforms. “Who are the first people being banned on social media?” he asks, answering: “Not intolerant jihadists or filthy leftists but outspoken conservatives.”At times he seems to admire what he imagines to be the thoroughgoing religious zealotry of Muslims compared with an increasingly secular west.“Almost every single Muslim child grows up listening to, and learning to read from, the Quran,” Hegseth writes. “Contrast this with our secular American schools – in which the Bible is nowhere to be found – and you’ll understand why Muslims’ worldview is more coherent than ours.”At another point in the book he engages in a lengthy diatribe about the Council for American Islamic Relations (Cair), which has been a bugbear for US conservatives since the “war on terror”, and claims Democrats are helping the organization cement a radical “Islamist” agenda.“Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and [Cair] have advanced the radical mission of Islamism for decades,” Hegseth claims, adding: “In the past two years alone, more than one hundred members of Congress – including Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, Rashida Tlaib, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar – have signed letters endorsing CAIR.”Hegseth then singles out “Socialist Bernie Sanders”, who he claims is “a favorite among Muslim Americans due to his support for Palestinian causes and distaste for Israel”.Sanders has repeatedly publicly supported Israel’s right to defend itself, even after the commencement of the current war in Gaza, while also saying: “Innocent Palestinians also have a right to life and security,” and calling for humanitarian pauses and ceasefires, and last week leading efforts to restrict the sale of offensive weapons to Israel on the grounds that it was in violation of the international laws of war.Some of Sanders’s positions since 7 October 2023 have drawn criticism from the left, who have seen them as insufficiently critical of Israel and insufficiently supportive of Palestine.Hegseth meanwhile, as previously reported in the Guardian, is unconditionally supportive of Israel, and has appeared to argue that the US military should ignore the Geneva conventions in favor of “winning our wars according to our own rules”.According to Hegseth in American Crusade, though: “Leaders of CAIR speak very highly of Bernie because his hard-core leftism provides the best gateway for their Islamism.” More